Dante Part 1

Dante.

by Philip H. Wicksteed.

_PREFACE._

The five Sermons which form the body of this little book on Dante were delivered in the ordinary course of my ministry at Little Portland Street Chapel, in the autumn of 1878, and subsequently at the Free Christian Church, Croydon, in a slightly altered form.

They are now printed, at the request of many of my hearers, almost exactly as delivered at Croydon.

The substance of a sixth Sermon has been thrown into an Appendix.

In allowing the publication of this little volume, my only thought is to let it take its chance with other fugitive productions of the Pulpit that appeal to the Press as a means of widening the possible area rather than extending the period over which the preacher's voice may extend; and my only justification is the hope that it may here and there reach hands to which no more adequate treatment of the subject was likely to find its way.

The translations I have given are sometimes paraphrastic, and virtually contain glosses or interpretations which make it necessary to warn the reader against regarding them as in every case Dante's _ipsissima verba_. For the most part the renderings are substantially my own; but I have freely availed myself of numerous translations, without special acknowledgment, whenever they supplied me with suitable phrases.

I have only to add the acknowledgment of my obligations to Fraticelli's edition of Dante's works (whose numbering of the minor poems and the letters I have adopted for reference), to the same writer's 'Life of Dante,' and to Mr. Symonds' 'Introduction to the Study of Dante.'

P. H. W.

_June 1879._

I

DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES

_I. AS A CITIZEN OF FLORENCE_

There are probably few competent judges who would hesitate to give Dante a place of honour in the triad of the world's greatest poets; and amongst these three Dante occupies a position wholly his own, peerless and unapproached in history.

For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies.

They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and nature they so faithfully reflect.

With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's pa.s.sionate conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and delineations of character unsurpa.s.sed in delicacy, yet with all the depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself or forgets his purpose.

As a philosopher and statesman, he had a.n.a.lysed with keen precision the social inst.i.tutions, the political forces, and the historical antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the pa.s.sionate energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and crushing the powers and inst.i.tutions which he regarded as hostile to the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision of G.o.d hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with a n.o.ble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri.

It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic sympathy, and subst.i.tute hard and angular contrasts for the melting grace of those curved lines of beauty which pa.s.s one into the other.

Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist, guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest philosophical a.n.a.lysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love, a poet's might and subtlety of imagination--Philosopher, Prophet, Poet, supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all--such was Dante Alighieri! And his voice will never be drowned or forgotten as long as man is dragged downward by pa.s.sion and struggles upward towards G.o.d, as long as he that sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, and he that sows to the spirit reaps of the spirit life everlasting, as long as the heart of man can glow responsive to a holy indignation with wrong, or can feel the sweetness of the harmonies of peace.

It is little that I can hope to do, and yet I would fain do something, towards opening to one here and there some glimpse into that mighty temple, instinct with the very presence of the Eternal, raised by the master hand, nay rather wrought out of the mighty heart of Dante; but before we can even attempt to gather up a few fragments of the 'Divine Comedy,' as landmarks to guide us, in our turn, through h.e.l.l and Purgatory up to Heaven, it is needful for us to have some conception who Dante Alighieri was, and what were his fortunes in this mortal life.

And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life.

The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity, incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity of some of the minor doc.u.ments upon which the poet's biographers generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a literature of its own.

Now into this ma.s.s of controversial and speculative writings on Dante, I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to speak by half a life of study.

With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles.

The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but, on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by the experts.

Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an ancient and n.o.ble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superst.i.tions!

We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a contemporary of some of the n.o.blest representatives of the feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediaeval philosophy, theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving friendship with the first supremely great mediaeval artist, and before he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of mediaeval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante, in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediaeval discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result.

In the year 1265, then, Dante was born in Florence, then one of the most powerful and flourishing, but also, alas! one of the most factious and turbulent of the cities of Europe. He was but nine years old when he first met that Beatrice Portinari who became thenceforth the loadstar of his life. As to this lady we have little to say. The details which Dante's early biographers give us add but little to our knowledge of her, and so far as they are not drawn from the poet's own words, are merely such graceful commonplaces of laudatory description as any imagination of ordinary capacity would spontaneously supply for itself. When we have said that Beatrice was a beautiful, sweet, and virtuous girl, we have said all that we know, and all that we need care to know, of the daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived, was married, and died in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. All that she is to us more than other Florentine maidens, she is to us through that poet who, as he wept her untimely death, hoped with no vain hope 'to write of her, what ne'er was writ of woman.'[1]

It puts no great strain on our powers of credence, to accept Dante's own statement of the rush of almost stupefying emotions which overwhelmed his childish heart when at the age of nine he went with his father to Portinari's house, and was sent to play with other children, amongst them the little Beatrice, a child of eight years old. The 'New Life' waked within him from that moment, and its strength and purity made him strong and pure.[2]

Nine more years have pa.s.sed. Dante is now eighteen. He has made rapid progress in all the intellectual and personal accomplishments which are held to adorn the position of a Florentine gentleman. His teachers have in some cases already discerned the greatness of his powers, and he has become aware, probably by essays which never saw the light, that he has not only a poet's pa.s.sions and aspirations, but a poet's power of moulding language into oneness with his thought. He and Beatrice know each other by sight, as neighbours or fellow-citizens, but Dante has never heard her voice address a word to him. Yet she is still the centre of all his thoughts. She has never ceased to be to him the perfect ideal of growing womanhood, and to his devout and fervid imagination, just because she is the very flower of womanly courtesy, grace, and virtue, she is an angel upon earth. Not in the hackneyed phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life, Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and claims kindred with G.o.d's more perfect family.

Beatrice is now seventeen, she is walking with two companions in a public place, she meets Dante and allows herself to utter a few words of graceful greeting. It is the first time she has spoken to him, and Dante's soul is thrilled and fired to its very depths. Not many hours afterwards, the poet began the first of his sonnets that we still possess, perhaps the first he ever wrote.[3]

Let us pa.s.s over eight or nine years more. Dante, now about twenty-six, is the very flower of chivalry and poetry. The foremost men of his own and other cities--artists, musicians, poets, scholars, and statesmen--are his friends. Somewhat hard of access and reserved, but the most fascinating of companions and the faithfulest of friends to those who have found a real place in his heart, Dante takes a rank of acknowledged eminence amongst the poets of his day. His verses, chiefly in praise of Beatrice, are written in a strain of tender sentiment, that gives little sign of what is ultimately to come out of him, but there is a nervous and concentrated power of diction, a purity and elevation of conception in them, which may not have been obvious to his companions as separating him from them, but which to eyes instructed by the result is full of deepest meaning.

And what of Beatrice? She is dead. It was never given to Dante to call her his. We know not so much as whether he even aspired to more than that gracious salutation in which, to use his own expression, he seemed to touch 'the very limits of beat.i.tude.'[4]

Be this as it may, it is certain that Beatrice married a powerful citizen of Florence several years before her death. But she was still the guardian angel of the poet's life, she was still the very type of womanhood to him; and there was not a word or thought of his towards her but was full of utter courtesy and purity. And now, in the flower of her loveliness she is cut down by death, and to Dante life has become a wilderness.[5]

Yet eight or nine years more. Dante is now in what his philosophical system regards as the very prime of life.[6] He is thirty-five. The date is 1300. Since we left him weeping for the death of Beatrice, the unity of his life has been shattered and he has lost his way, but only for a time. Now his powers and purposes are richer, stronger, more concentrated than ever.

In his first pa.s.sion of grief for Beatrice's death he had been profoundly touched by the pity of a gentle-eyed damsel whom a far from groundless conjecture identifies with Gemma Donati, the lady whom he married not long afterwards. With this Gemma he lived till his banishment, and they had a numerous family. The internal evidence of Dante's works, and the few circ.u.mstances really known to us, give little support to the tradition that their marriage was an unhappy one.

Dante's friends had hoped that domestic peace might console him for his irreparable loss, but he himself had rather sought for consolation in the study of philosophy and theology; and it befell him, he tells us, as one who in seeking silver strikes on gold--not, haply, without guidance from on high;--for he began to see many things as in a dream, and deemed that Dame Philosophy must needs be supreme![7]

But neither domestic nor literary cares and duties absorbed his energies. In late years he had begun to take an active part in the politics of his city, and was now fast rising to his true position as the foremost man of Florence and of Italy.

Thus, we see new interests and new powers rising in his life, but for a time the unity of that life was gone. While Beatrice lived Dante's whole being was centred in her, and she was to him the visible token of G.o.d's presence upon earth, the living proof of the reality and the beauty of things Divine, born to fill the world with faith and gentleness. But when she was gone, when other pa.s.sions and pursuits disputed with her memory the foremost place in Dante's heart, it was as though he had lost the secret and the meaning of life, as though he had lost the guidance of Heaven, and was whirled helplessly in the vortex of moral, social, and political disorder which swept over his country.

For Italian politics at this period form a veritable chaos of shifting combinations and entanglements, of plots and counterplots, of intrigue and treachery and vacillation, though lightened ever and again by gleams of n.o.blest patriotism and devotion.

Yet Dante's soul was far too strong to be permanently overwhelmed.

Gradually his philosophical reflections began to take definite shape.

He felt the wants of his own life and of his country's life. He pierced down to the fundamental conditions of political and social welfare; and when human philosophy had begun to restore unity and concentration to his powers, then the sweet image of the pure maiden who had first waked his soul to love returned glorified and transfigured to guide him into the very presence of G.o.d. She was the symbol of Divine philosophy. She, and she only, could restore his shattered life to unity and strength, and the love she never gave him as a woman, she could give him as the protecting guardian of his life, as the vehicle of G.o.d's highest revelation.[8]