Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 4

Chivalrous Poetry--Ideal of Chivalrous Love--Bolognese Erudition--New Meaning given to the Ideal--Metaphysics of the Florentine School of Lyrists--Guido Cavalcanti--Philosophical Poems--Popular Songs--Cino of Pistoja--Dante's _Vita Nuova_--Beatrice in the _Convito_ and the _Paradiso_--The Preparation for the _Divine Comedy_ in Literature--Allegory--The _Divine Comedy_--Petrarch's Position in Life--His Conception of Humanism--Conception of Italy--His Treatment of Chivalrous Love--Beatrice and Laura--The _Canzoniere_--Boccaccio, the Florentine Bourgeois--His Point of View--His Abandonment of the Chivalrous Standpoint--His Devotion to Art--Antic.i.p.ates the Renaissance--The _Decameron_--_Commedia Umana_--Precursors of Boccaccio--Novels--_Carmina Vagorum_--Plan of the Book--Its Moral Character--The _Visione Amorosa_--Boccaccio's Descriptions--The _Teseide_--The _Rime_--The _Filocopo_--The _Filostrato_--The _Ameto_, _Fiammetta_, _Ninfale_, _Corbaccio_--Prose before Boccaccio--_Fioretti di San Francesco_ and _Decameron_ compared--Influence of Boccaccio over the Prose Style of the Renaissance--His Death--Close of the Fourteenth Century--Sacchetti's Lament.

The Sicilians followed closely in the track of the Provencal poets.

After, or contemporaneously with them, the same Italo-Provencal literature was cultivated in the cities of central Italy. The subject-matter of this imitative poetry was love--but love that bore a peculiar relation to ordinary human feeling. Woman was regarded as an ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration. The lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy, from his enthusiastic pa.s.sion. Honor, justice, courage, self-sacrifice, contempt of worldly goods, flowed from that one sentiment; and love united two wills in a single ecstasy. Love was the consummation of spiritual felicity, which surpa.s.sed all other modes of happiness in its beat.i.tude.

Thus Bernard de Ventadour and Jacopo da Lentino were ready to forego Paradise unless they might behold their lady's face before the throne of G.o.d. For a certain period in modern history, this mysticism of the amorous emotion was no affectation. It formulated a genuine impulse of manly hearts, inflamed by beauty, and touched with the sense of moral superiority in woman, perfected through weakness and demanding physical protection. By bringing the cruder pa.s.sions into accord with gentle manners and unselfish aspirations, it served to temper the rudeness of primitive society; and no little of its attraction was due to the conviction that only refined natures could experience it. This new aspect of love was due to chivalry, to Christianity, to the Teutonic reverence for women, in which religious awe seems to have blended with the service of the weaker by the stronger.

Sincere and beautiful as the ideal of chivalrous love may have been, it speedily degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism, existed, even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration than a reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the imagination of the people. For the Italo-Provencal poets that code of love was almost wholly formal. They found it ready made. They used it because the culture of a Court, in sympathy with feudal Europe, left them no other choice. Not Arthur, but the Virgilian aeneas, was still the Italian hero; and instead of S. Louis, the nations of the South could only boast of a crusading Frederick II. Frederick the troubadour was a no less anomalous being than Frederick the crusader. He conformed to contemporary fashion, but his spirit ran counter to the age. Curiosity, incipient humanism, audacious doubt, the toleration which inclined him to fraternize with Saracens and seek the learning of the Arabs, placed him outside the sphere of thirteenth century conceptions. His expedition to the East appears a mere parade excursion, hypocritical, political, ironical. In like manner his love-poetry and that of his courtiers rings hollow in our ears.

It harmonized with the Italian genius, when Guido Guinicelli treated chivalrous love from the standpoint of Bolognese learning. He altered none of the forms; he used the conventional phraseology. But he infused a new spirit into the subject-matter. His poetry ceased to be formal; the phrases were no longer verbiage. The epicureanism of Frederick's life clashed with the mystic exaltation of knighthood. There was no discord between Guido's scientific habit of mind and his expression of a philosophical idea conveyed in terms of amorous enthusiasm. Upon his lips the words:

Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore, Come l'augello in selva alla verdura; Ne fe' Amore anti che gentil core, Ne gentil cor anti che Amor, Natura:

acquire reality--not the reality of pa.s.sion, but of sincere thought.

They do not convey the spontaneity of feeling, but a philosopher's contemplation of love and beauty in their influence on human character.

Guido's mood might be compared with that of the Greek sage, when he exclaimed that neither the morning nor the evening star is so wonderful as Justice, or when he thus apostrophized Virtue:

Virtue, to men thou bringest care and toil; Yet art thou life's best, fairest spoil!

O virgin G.o.ddess, for thy beauty's sake To die is delicate in this our Greece, Or to endure of pain the stern, strong ache.

For the chivalrous races, Love had been an enthusiastic ideal. For the Italo-Provencal euphuists it supplied an artificial inspiration. At Bologna it became the form of transcendental science; and here the Italian intellect touched, by accident or instinct, the same note that had been struck by Plato in the "Phaedrus" and "Symposium."

A public trained in legal and scholastic studies, whose mental furniture was drawn from S. Thomas and Accursius, hailed their poet in Guido Guinicelli. For them it was natural that poetry should veil philosophy with verse; that love should be confounded with the movement of the soul toward truth; that beauty should be treated as the manifestation of a spiritual good. Dante in his Canzone, _Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore_, appeals, not to emotion, but to intelligence. He tells us that _understanding_ was the ancient name of _love_, and describes the effect of pa.s.sion in a young man's heart as a revelation raising him above the level of common experience. Thus the trans.m.u.tation of the simpler elements of the chivalrous code into philosophical doctrine, where the form of the worshiped lady transcends the sphere of sense, and her spirit is identified with the lover's deepest thought and loftiest aspiration, was sincere in medieval Florence. The Tuscan intellect was too virile and sternly strung to be satisfied with amorous rhymes. The contemporary theory of aesthetics demanded allegory, and imposed upon the poet erudition; nor was it easy for the singer of that epoch to command his own immediate emotions, or to use them for the purposes of a direct and plastic art. Enjoying neither the freedom of the Greek nor the disengagement of the modern spirit, he found it more proper to clothe a scientific content with the veil of pa.s.sion, than to paint the personality of the woman he loved with natural precision. Between the mysticism of a sublime but visionary adoration on the one side, and the sensualities of vulgar appet.i.te or the decencies of married life on the other, there lay for him no intermediate artistic region. He understood the love of the imagination and the love of the senses; but the love of the heart, familiar to the Northern races, hardly existed for him.

And here it may be parenthetically noticed that the Italians, in the middle ages, created no feminine ideal a.n.a.logous to Gudrun or Chriemhild, Iseult or Guinevere. When they left the high region of symbolism, they descended almost without modulation to the prose of common life. Thus the Selvaggia of Cino, the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of Petrarch, made way for the Fiammetta of Boccaccio and the women of the Decameron, when that ecstasy of earlier enthusiasm exhausted. For a while, however, the Florentines were well prepared to give an intellectual significance, and with it a new life, to the outworn conventions of the Italo-Provencal lyrists. Nor must it be thought that the emotions thus philosophized were unreal. Dante loved Beatrice, though she became for him an allegory. The splendid vision of her beauty and goodness attended him through life, a.s.suming the guidance of his soul in all its stages. Difficult as it may be to comprehend this blending of the real and transcendental, we must grasp it if we desire to penetrate the spirit of the fourteenth century in Italy.

The human heart remains unchanged. No metaphysical sophistication, no allegory, no scholastic mysticism, can destroy the spontaneity of instinct in a man who loves, or cloud a poet's vision. Love does not cease to be love because it is sublimed to the quintessence of a self-denying pa.s.sion. It still retains its life in feeling, and its root in sense. Beauty does not cease to be beautiful because it has been moralized and identified with the attraction that lifts men upward to the sphere of the eternal truths. Nor is poetry extinguished because the singer deems it his vocation to utter genuine thought, and scorns the rhyming pastimes of the simple amorist. The Florentine school presents us with a poetry which aimed at being philosophical, but which at the same time vibrated with life and delineated moods of delicate emotion.

To effect a flawless fusion between these two strains in the new style, was infinitely difficult; nor were the poets of that epoch equally successful. Guido Cavalcanti, the leader of the group which culminates in Dante, won his fame by verse that savors more of the dialectician than the singer. Ranking science above poetry, he is said to have disdained even Virgil. His odes are dryly scholastic--especially that famous _Donna mi priega_, which contemporaries studied clause by clause, and which, after two centuries, served Dino del Garbo for the text of a metaphysical discourse.[62] At the same time, certain lyrics, composed in a lighter mood by the same poet, have in them the essence of spontaneous and natural inspiration. His Ballate were probably regarded by himself and his friends as playthings, thrown off in idle moments to distract a mind engaged in th.o.r.n.y speculations. Yet we find here the first full blossom of genuine Italian verse. Their beauty is that of popular song, starting flowerlike from the soil, and fragrant in its first expansion beneath the sun of courtesy and culture. Nothing remained, in this kind, for Boccaccio and Poliziano, but to echo the Ballata of the country maidens, and to complete the welcome to the May.[63]

Two currents of verse, the one rising from the senses, the other from the brain, the one deriving force and fullness from the people, the other nourished by the schools, flowed apart in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry. They were combined into a single stream by Cino da Pistoja.[64]

Cino was a jurist of encyclopaedic erudition, as well as a sweet and fluent singer.[65] His verses have the polish and something of the chill of marble. His Selvaggia deserves a place with Beatrice and Laura. From Cino Petrarch derived his mastery of limpid diction. In Cino the artistic sense of the Italians awoke. He produced something distinct both from the scientific style of Guido Guinicelli, and also from the wilding song which Guido Cavalcanti's Ballate echoed. He seems to have applied himself to the main object of polishing poetical diction, and rendering expression at once musical and lucid.[66] Though his hold upon ideas was not so firm as Cavalcanti's, nor his pa.s.sion so intense, he achieved a fusion of thought and feeling in an artistic whole of sympathetic suavity. We instinctively compare his work with that of Mino da Fiesole in ba.s.s-relief.

Dante was five years older than Cino. To him belongs the glory of having effected the same fusion in a lyric poetry at once more comprehensive and more lofty. Dante yields no point as a dialectician and subtle thinker to Guido Cavalcanti. He surpa.s.ses Cino da Pistoja as an artist.

His pa.s.sion and imagination are more fiery than Guido's. His tenderness is deeper and more touching than Cino's. Even in those minor works with which he preluded the Divine Comedy, Dante soars above all compet.i.tion, taking rank among the few poets born to represent an age and be the everlasting teachers of the human soul. Yet even Dante, though knowing that he was destined to eclipse both the Guidi, though claiming Love alone for his inspirer, was not wholly free from the scholasticism of his century. In the earlier lyrics of the _Vita Nuova_ and in the Canzoni of the _Convito_, he allows his feeling to be over-weighted by the scientific content. Between his emotion and our sympathy there rises, now and again, the mist of metaphysic. While giving them intenser meaning, he still plays upon the commonplaces of his predecessors. Thus in the sonnet _Amor e 'l cor gentil son una cosa_ he rehandles Guinicelli's theme; while the following stanza repeats the well-worn doctrine that Love should be the union of beauty and of excellence[67]:

Che la belta che Amore in voi consente, A virtu solamente Formata fu dal suo decreto antico, Contro lo qual fallate.

Io dico a voi che siete innamorate, Che se beltate a voi Fu data, e virtu a noi, Ed a costui di due potere un fare, Voi non dovreste amare, Ma coprir quanto di belta vi e dato, Poiche non e virtu, ch'era suo segno.

Dante's concessions to the mannerism of the school weigh as nothing in the scales against the beauty and the truth of that most spiritual of romances, to which the _Vita Nuova_ gives melodic utterance. Within the compa.s.s of one little book is bound up all that Florence in the thirteenth century contributed to the refinement of medieval manners, together with all that the new school of poets had imagined of highest in their philosophical conception. The harmony of life and science attains completion in the real but idealized experience, which transcends and combines both motives in a personality uniquely const.i.tuted for this blending. It is enough for the young Dante to meet Beatrice, to pa.s.s her among her maidens in the city-ways, to receive her salute, to admire her moving through the many-colored crowd, to meditate upon her apparition, as of one of G.o.d's angels, in the solitude of his chamber. She is a dream, a vision. But it is the dream of his existence, the vision that unfolds for him the universe--more actual, more steeped in emotion, more stimulative of sublime aspiration and virile purpose than many loves which find fruition in long years of intercourse. We feel that the man's true self has been revealed to him; that he has given his life-blood to the ideal which, without this nourishment, would have ranked among phantoms, but is now reality. Students who have not followed the stages through which the doctrine of chivalrous love reached Dante, and the process whereby it was trans.m.u.ted into science for the guidance of the soul, will regard the records of the _Vita Nuova_ as shadowy or sentimental. Or if they only dwell upon the philosophical aspect of Dante's work, if they do not make allowance for the natural stirring of a heart that throbbed with liveliest feeling, they will fail to comprehend this book, at once so complex and so simple. The point lies exactly in the fusion of two elements--in the truth of the pa.s.sion, the truth of the idealization, and the spontaneity of the artistic form combining them. What is most intelligible, because most common to all phases of profound emotion, in the _Vita Nuova_, is its grief--the poet's sympathy with Beatrice in the house of mourning for her father's death, the vision of her own pa.s.sage from earth to heaven, and the apostrophe to the pilgrims who thread the city clothed with mourning for her loss.[68] No one, reading these poems, will doubt that, though Beatrice did but cross the path of Dante's life and shed her brightness on it for a season from afar, the thought of her had penetrated heart and fiber, making him a man new-born through love, and striking in his soul a note that should resound through all his years, through all the centuries which grow to understand him.

Dante was born in 1265 of poor but n.o.ble parents, who reconciled themselves to the Guelf party. He first saw Beatrice in his ninth year; and, when a man, he well remembered how her beauty dawned upon him.[69]

"Her dress, on that day, was of a most n.o.ble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: _Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens dominabitur mihi_." Beatrice died in 1290, and Dante closed the _Vita Nuova_ with these words[70]: "It was given unto me to behold a very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things which determined me that I would say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labor all I can; as she well knoweth. Wherefore if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto Him who is the Master of Grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady: to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on His countenance _qui est per omnia saecula, benedictus.

Laus Deo_."

This pa.s.sage was written possibly in Dante's twenty-eighth year. The consecration of his younger manhood was the love of Beatrice. She made him a poet. Through her came to him the "sweet new style," which shone with purest l.u.s.ter in his verse; and the songs he made of Beatrice were known through all the City of the Flower. Yet love had not absorbed his energies. He studied under Brunetto Latini, and qualified himself for the career of a Florentine citizen by entering the Guild of Speziali.

After Beatrice's death a great and numbing sorrow fell upon him. From this eclipse he recovered by the help of reading, and also by the distractions of public life. He fought in the battle of Campaldino, and married his wife Gemma Donati. He went as amba.s.sador to San Gemignano in 1299; and in the year 1300, when Florence was divided by the parties of Cerchi and Donati, he fulfilled the functions of the Priorate. These ten years between Beatrice's death and Dante's election as Prior were a period of hesitation and transition. He was no longer the poet of Divine Love, inspired by spontaneous emotion, mastering and glorifying the form which tradition imposed on verse. He had become a student of philosophy; and this change makes itself felt in the more abstruse and abstract odes of the _Convito_. Yet he was still attended, through those years of study, civic engagements and domestic duties, by the vision of Beatrice.

This is how he speaks of science in the second part of the _Convito_: "After some time my mind, which strove to regain strength, bethought itself (since neither my own consolations nor those of friends availed me aught) of having recourse to the method which had helped to comfort other spirits in distress. I took to reading the book, not known to many students, of Boethius, wherewith, unhappy and in exile, he had comforted himself. And hearing also that Tully had written another book in which, while treating of friendship, he had used words of consolation to Laelius in the death of his friend Scipio, I read that also, and as it happens that a man goes seeking silver, and far from his design finds gold, which hidden causes yield him, not perchance without G.o.d's guidance, so I who sought for consolation found not only comfort for my tears, but also words of authors and of sciences and of books, weighing the which, I judged well that philosophy, the lady of these authors, of these sciences and of these books, was a thing supreme. And I imagined her in fashion like a gentle lady, nor could I fancy her otherwise than piteous; wherefore so truly did I gaze upon her with adoring eyes that scarcely could I turn myself away. And having thus imagined her I began to go where she displayed her very self, that is, in the schools of the religious, and the disputations of philosophers; so that in short time, about thirty months, I began so much to feel her sweetness that her love chased away and destroyed all other thought in me."

Beatrice, who in her lifetime had been the revelation of beauty and all good, lifting her lover above the region of sordid thoughts, and opening a sphere of spiritual intelligence, now accompanied him through the labyrinths of speculation. She was still the form, the essence, of all he learned; and the vow which closes the _Vita Nuova_ had not been forgotten.

Through the transition period, marked by the _Convito_, we are led to the third stage of Dante's life--those twenty-one years, during which he roamed in exile over Italy, and wrote the poem of medieval Christianity.

The studies of which the _Convito_ forms a fragment, and the political career which ended in the emba.s.sy to Boniface, were both necessary for the _Divine Comedy_. Had it not been for Dante's exile, the modern world might have lacked its first and greatest epic; Beatrice might have missed her promised apotheosis. As her hand had guided him through the paths of love and the labyrinths of science, so now the brightness of her glorified face lifted him from sphere to sphere of Paradise. By gazing on her eyes, he rose through heaven, and stood with her before the splendor of the Beatific Vision. To identify Beatrice with Theology in this last stage of Dante's spiritual life is a facile but inadequate expedient of criticism. From the earliest she had been for him the light and guidance of his soul; and at the last he ascribed to her the best and the sublimest of his inspirations.

Since its origin Italian poetry had pursued one line of evolution, first following and then trans.m.u.ting the traditions of Provence. In the _Divine Comedy_ it took a new direction. Chivalry, insufficient for the nation and ill-adapted to its temper, yielded to a motive force derived from the religious sentiment. The Bible history, the Lives of the Saints, and the doctrine of the Church concerning the future of mankind, together with the emotions of piety, had hitherto received but partial exposition at the hands of a few poets of the people. S. Francis struck the keynote of popular Italian poetry in his _Cantico del Sole_, which can be accepted as the first specimen of composition in the vulgar tongue. Guittone of Arezzo, already mentioned as the earliest learned poet who attempted to nationalize his style, acquired fame as the writer of one sublime sonnet to Madonna and two Canzoni to the Mother and her Son.[71] But the most decisive impulse toward religious poetry was given by the Flagellants, who, starting from the Umbrian highlands in 1290, diffused their peculiar devotion over Italy. I shall have occasion to return in a future chapter to the history of this movement and to trace its influence over popular Italian literature. It is enough, at present, to have mentioned it among the forces tending toward religious poetry upon the close of the thirteenth century.

The spirit of the epoch inclined to Allegory and Vision. When we remember the prestige of Virgil in the middle ages, both as a philosopher and also as the precursor of Christianity, it will be understood how his descent into Hades fascinated the imagination, and prepared the mind to accept the Vision as a proper form for conveying theological doctrine.[72] The Journey of S. Brandan, the Purgatory of S.

Patrick, and the Visions of Tundalus and Alberic pretended to communicate information concerning the soul's state after death, the places of punishment, and the method of salvation. In course of time the Vision was used for political or ecclesiastical purposes by preachers who averred that they had seen the souls of eminent sinners in torment.

It became an engine of terrorism, a.s.sumed satiric tone, and finally fell into the hands of didactic or merely fanciful poets.[73]

The chief preoccupation of the medieval mind was with the future destiny of man. This life came to be regarded as a preparation for eternity.

Like a foreground, the actual world served to relieve the picture of the world beyond the grave. Therefore popular literature abounded in manuals of devotion and discipline, some of which set forth the history of the soul in allegorical form. Among other examples may be cited three stories of the spiritual life, corresponding to its three stages of Nature, Purification, and Restoration, conveyed under the t.i.tles of _Umano_, _Spoglia_, _Rinuova_. Many prelusions of this cla.s.s were combined in one religious drama called _Commedia dell'Anima_, the substance of which is certainly old, though the form yields evidence of sixteenth-century _rifacimento_.[74]

The object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show that the popular intellect was well prepared for religious poetry, and had appropriated the forms of Allegory and Vision. Not in order to depreciate the originality of Dante, but to prove in how vital a relation he stood toward his age, I have here insisted on those formless preludes to his work of art. In the Epistle to Can Grande he thus explains the theme of the _Commedia_: "The subject of the whole work, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, regarded as fact; for the action deals with this, and is about this. But if the work be taken allegorically, its subject is man, in so far as by merit or demerit in the exercise of free will he is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice." Attending to the letter, we find in the _Commedia_ a vision of that life beyond the tomb, in relation to which alone our life on earth has value. It presents a picture of the everlasting destiny of souls, so firmly apprehended and vividly imagined by the medieval fancy. But since this picture has to set forth mysteries seen and heard by none, the revelation itself, like S. John's Apocalypse, is conveyed in symbols fashioned to adumbrate the truths perceived by faith. The same symbols portray another reality, not apprehended merely by faith, but brought home to the heart by experience. Attending to the allegory, we find in the _Commedia_ a history of the soul in this life--an ethical a.n.a.lysis of sin, purgation and salvation through grace. The poem is a narrative of Dante's journey through the region into which all pa.s.s after death; but at the same time it describes the h.e.l.l and heaven and the transition through repentance from sin to grace, which are the actual conditions of the soul in this life. The _Inferno_ depicts unmitigated evil. The _Paradiso_ exhibits goodness, absolute and free from stain. In the one there is no relief, in the other no alloy; the one is darkness, the other light. The intermediate region of the _Purgatorio_ is a realm of expectation and conversion, where sin is no longer possible, but where the fruition of goodness is delayed by the necessity of purification.

Here then are the natural alternations of day and night, the relative twilight of a world where all is yet transition rather than fulfillment. It may be observed that Purgatory belongs to the order of things which by their nature pa.s.s away; while h.e.l.l and Heaven are both eternal. Therefore the _Commedia_, considered as an apocalypse of the undying soul, reveals absolute d.a.m.nation and absolute salvation, both states being destined to endure so long as G.o.d's justice and love exist; but it also reveals a state of purifying pain, which ceases when the men who need it have been numbered. Considered as an allegory of the spiritual life on earth, it describes the process of escape from eternal condemnation through grace into eternal happiness.

A theme so vast and all-embracing enabled Dante to inform the whole knowledge of his epoch. The _Commedia_ is the poem of that scholastic theology which absorbed every branch of science and brought the world within the scope of one thought, G.o.d. As the _Summa_ of S. Thomas combined philosophy and revelation, so Dante included both the Pagan and Christian dispensations in his scheme. He starts from the wood of terror, where men are a.s.sailed by the wild beasts of their pa.s.sions; and two guides lead him, by the light of knowledge, up to G.o.d. The one is Virgil, the other Beatrice--Virgil, who stands for human reason, science, the four cardinal virtues; Beatrice, who symbolizes divine grace, faith formulated in theology, the virtues bestowed on man through Christ for his salvation. Virgil cannot lead the poet beyond Purgatory; because thus far only is human knowledge of avail to elevate and guide the soul. Beatrice lifts him through the spheres of Paradise by contemplation; because the highest summit attained by reason and natural virtue is but the starting point of the true Christian's journey.

The _Commedia_ is thus the drama or the epos of the soul. It condenses all that man has thought or done, can think or do; all that he knows about the universe around him, all that he hopes or fears from the future; his intuition of an incorruptible and ideal order, underlying and controlling the phenomenal world. G.o.d, the world and man are brought into one focus; and the interest of the poem is the relation of the individual soul to them, the partic.i.p.ation of each human personality in the dramatic action. It need hardly be observed that Dante's solutions of the problems which arise in the development of this theme, are medieval. His physical science has been superseded. His theology is far from approving itself to the general consciousness of Christians in our age. Yet while all must recognize this obvious truth, the essence of the _Commedia_ is indestructible because of its humanity, because of the personality which animates it. Men change far less than the hypotheses of religion and philosophy, which take form from experience as shadows fly before the sun. However these may alter, man remains substantially the same; and Dante penetrated human nature as few have done--was such a man as few have been. The unity and permanence of his poem are in himself. Never was a plan so vast and various permeated so completely with a single self. At once creator and spectator of his vision, neophyte and hierophant, arraigned and judge, he has not only seen h.e.l.l as the local prison-house of pain, but has felt it as the state of sin within his heart. He has pa.s.sed through purifying fires; and the songs of Paradise have sounded by antic.i.p.ation in his ears. Dante is both the singer and the hero of his epic. In him the universal idea of mankind becomes concrete. The continuous experience of this living person who is at one and the same time a figure of each and every soul that ever breathed, and also the real Dante Alighieri, exile from Florence without blame, sustains as on one thread the medley of successive motives which else might lack poetic unity, gives life to a scheme which else might be too abstract. Expanding to embrace the universe, contracting to a point within one breast, the _Commedia_ combines the general and the particular in an individual commensurate with man.

It may be conjectured that Dante, obeying the scholastic impulse of his age, started from the abstract or universal. Therein lay the reality of things, not in the particular. What has been already quoted from the letter to Can Grande justifies this supposition. He meant to lay bare the scheme of the universe, as understood by medieval Christianity, and viewed from the standpoint of the human agent. That scheme presented itself in a series of propositions, a logic or a metaphysic apprehended as truth. Each portion of the poem was mapped out with rigorous accuracy. Each section ill.u.s.trated a thought, an argument, a position.

The whole might be surveyed as a structure of connected syllogisms. To this scientific articulation of its leading motives corresponds the architectural symmetry, the simple outlines and severe ma.s.ses of the _Commedia_. The plan, however minute in detail, is comprehended at a glance. The harmonies of the design are as geometrical as some colossal church imagined by Bramante. But Dante had no intention of re-writing the _Summa_ in verse. He meant to be a poet, using the vulgar speech of "that low Italy" in the production of an epic which should rank on equal terms with the _aeneid_, and be for modern Christendom what that had been for sacred Rome. Furthermore he had it in his heart to yield such honor to Virgil, "leader, lord, and master," as none had ever paid, and to write concerning Beatrice "what had not before been written of any woman." His poem was to be the storehouse of his personal experience.

His love and hatred, his admiration of greatness and his scorn for cowardice, his resentment of injury, his grat.i.tude for service rendered, his political creed and critical opinions, the joy he had of nature, and the pain he suffered when he walked with men: all this was to find expression at right seasons and in seemly order. Upon the severe framework of abstract truth, which forms the skeleton of the _Commedia_ and is the final end of its existence, Dante felt free to superimpose materials of inexhaustible variety. Following the metaphor of building more exactly, we may say that he employed these materials as the stones whereby he brought his architectural design to view. The abstract thought of the _Commedia_, tyrannous and all-controlling as it is, could not lay claim to reality but for the dramatic episodes which present it to the intellect through the imagination.

Some such clothing of abstractions with concrete images was intended in the medieval theory of allegory. The Church proscribed the poets of antiquity; and it had become an axiom that poetry was the art of lies.[75] Poetry was hardly suffered to exist except as a veil to cloak some hidden doctrine; and allegory presented a middle way of escape, whereby the pleasure of art could be enjoyed with a safe conscience.

Virgil, whom the middle ages would not have relinquished, though a General Council had condemned him, received the absolution of allegorical interpretation. Dante, who defined poetry as the art "which publishes the truth concealed beneath a veil of fable," frequently interrupts the story to bid his readers note the meaning underneath the figures of his verse. In composing the _Commedia_, he had moral edification and scientific truth for his end. The dramatic, narrative, descriptive, and lyrical beauties of his poem served to bring into relief or to shroud in appropriate mystery--since allegory both elucidates and obscures the matter it conveys--the doctrines he designed to inculcate. Still Dante stood, as a poet, at a height so far above his age and his own theories, that the cold and numbing touch of symbolism rarely mars the interest of his work. We may, perhaps, feel a certain confusion between the personalities of Virgil and Beatrice and the thoughts they represent, which chills our sympathy, raising a feeling of indignation when Virgil returns unwept to h.e.l.l, and removing Beatrice into a world of intangible ideas. We may find the pageant at the close of the "Purgatory" unattractive; nor will the sublimity of the "Paradiso" save the figures by which spiritual meanings are here suggested, from occasional grotesqueness. Thus much can be conceded.

Dante, though born to be the poet of all time, was still a scion of his epoch. He could not altogether escape the influences of a misleading conception. But, apart from allegory, apart from didactic purpose, the _Commedia_ takes highest rank for the episodes, the action, the personal interest which never flags. No poet ever had a finer sense of reality, and none commanded the means of expressing it in all its forms more fully. Dante's own theory of symbolism offered an illimitable sphere for the exercise of his imagination, since it led him to give visible and palpable shape to the thoughts of his brain. And here it may be noted that the allegorical heresy proved less pernicious than another form of false opinion based upon an ideal of cla.s.sical purity might have been.

Since the poem was to present truth under a cloak of metaphor, it did not signify what figures were used. The purpose they served, justified them. Therefore Dante found himself at liberty to mingle satire with the hymns of angels; to seek ill.u.s.trations from vulgar life no less than from nature in her sublimest moods; to delineate the horrible, the painful, the grotesque, and the improbable with the same sincerity as the beautiful, the charming, and the familiar. His dramatic faculty was exercised on themes so varied that to cla.s.sify them is impossible--on the pathos of Francesca and the terror of Ugolino; the skirmish of the fiends in Malebolge and the meeting of Statius with Virgil; the pride of Farinata and the penitence of Manfred; the agonies of Adamo da Brescia and the calm delights of Piccarda dei Donati. He tells the stories of Ulysses and S. Francis, describes the flight of the Roman eagle and Cacciaguida's manhood, with equal energy of brief but ineffaceably impressive narration. This license inherent in the use of allegory justified his cla.s.sing the fameless folk of his own days with the heroes of Biblical and cla.s.sical antiquity, and permitted him to mingle ancient history with his censure of contemporary politics. All times, ages, countries, races of men are alike before the tribunal of G.o.d's justice.

Accordingly, the poet who had taken man's moral nature for his theme, and was bound by his theory to present this theme symbolically, could bring to view a mult.i.tude of concrete persons, arranged (whatever else may issue from their converse with the protagonist) according to gradations of merit or demerit. Thus the _Divine Comedy_, though written with a didactic object and under the influence of allegory, surpa.s.ses every other epic in the distinctness of its motives and the realism of their presentation. The brief and pregnant style which scorns rhetorical adornment, the accurate picture-painting which aims at vivid delineation of the thing to be discerned, harmonize with its inflexible ethics, its uncompromising sincerity, its intense human feeling.

The _Commedia_ is too widely commensurate with its theme, the Human Soul, to be described or cla.s.sified. The men of its era called it the _Divine_; and this t.i.tle it has preserved, in spite of the fierce censures of the Church which it contains. They called it _La Divina_ because of its material doubtless, but also, we may dare to think, because of its unfathomable depth and height and breadth of thought. In course of time chairs were established at Florence, Padua, and in other cities, for its explanation; and the labor of the commentator was applied to it. That labor has been continued from Boccaccio's down to our own day; yet the dark places of the _Commedia_ have not been illuminated, nor is learning likely to solve some problems which perplex a careful student of its cantos. That matters, indeed, but little; for the main scope and purpose of the poem are plain, and its spirit is such that none who read can fail to recognize it.

Before Dante the Christian world had no poet, and Italy had no voice.

The gift of Dante to Europe was an Epic on the one subject which united the modern nations in community of interest. The gift of Dante to his country was a masterpiece which placed her on a par with Homer's h.e.l.las and with Virgil's Rome. If the first century of Italian literature could have produced three men of the caliber of Dante, Italy would have run her future course, as she began, abreast with ancient Greece. That was not, however, destined to be. The very conditions of the mission she had to fulfill in the fourteenth and two following centuries, rendered the emergence of a race of heroes impossible. Italy was about to recover the past. Her energies could not be concentrated on the evolution of herself in a new literature. To Dante succeeded Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Petrarch was born at Arezzo in the year 1304, when his father, like Dante, and in the same cause, had been expelled from Florence. His youth, pa.s.sed partly in Tuscany and partly at Avignon, coincided with the years spent by Dante in the composition of the _Commedia_. He was a student at Montpellier, neglecting his law-books for Cicero and Virgil, when Dante died at Ravenna in 1321. During those seventeen years of Dante's exile and Petrarch's boyhood, a change had pa.s.sed over the political scene. The Papacy was transferred from Rome to France. The last attempts of the German Emperors to vindicate their authority below the Alps had failed. The Communes were yielding to anarchy and party feuds, or fast becoming the prey of despots. A new age had begun; and of this new age Petrarch was the representative, as Dante had been the poet of the ages which had pa.s.sed away. Petrarch's inauguration of the cla.s.sical Revival has been already described in this work; nor is it necessary to repeat the services he rendered to the cause of humanism.[76] In a volume dealing with Italian literature the poet of the _Canzoniere_ must engage attention rather than the resuscitator of antique learning. It is Petrarch's peculiar glory to have held two equally ill.u.s.trious places in the history of modern civilization, as the final lyrist of chivalrous love and as the founder of the Renaissance.

Yet this double att.i.tude, when we compare him with Dante, const.i.tutes the chief cause of his manifest inferiority.

The differences between Dante's and Petrarch's education were marked, and tended to accentuate the divergence of their intellectual and moral qualities. Dante, who lived until maturity within sight of his _bel San Giovanni_, grew up a Florentine in core and fiber. In his earliest work, the _Vita Nuova_, there is a home-bred purity of style, as of something which could only have been perfected in Florence; a beauty akin to that of Giotto's tower; a perfume as of some flower peculiar to a district whence it will not bear transplanting. In his latest, the _Paradiso_, he devotes one golden canto to the past prosperity of Florence, another to her decadence through the corruption of her citizens. While wandering like "the world's rejected guest" away from that fair city of his birth, the unrest of his pilgrimage, contrasted with the peace of earlier manhood, only strengthened the Florentine within him. Though he traversed Italy in length and breadth, though the _Commedia_ furnishes an epitome of her landscapes and her local customs, describes her cities and resumes her history, the thought of national unity was not present to his mind. Italy remained for him the garden of the empire, the unruly colt whom Caesar should bestride and curb. Elsewhere than in Florence Dante felt himself an alien. He refused the poet's crown unless it could be taken by the font of baptism upon the square of Florence. He chose banishment with honor and the stars of heaven, rather than ignominious entrance through the gates he loved so well; and yet from the highest sphere of Paradise he turned his eyes down to Florence and her erring folk:

Io, ched era al divino dall'umano, Ed all'eterno dal tempo venuto, E di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano.

Petrarch, called to perform another mission, had a different training.

Brought up from earliest infancy in exile, transferred from Tuscany to France, deprived of civic rights and disengaged from the duties of a burgher in those troublous times, he surveyed the world from his study and judged its affairs with the impartiality of a philosopher. Without a city, without a home, without a family, consecrated to the priesthood and absorbed in literary interests, he spent his life in musings at Vaucluse or in the splendid hospitalities of the Lombard Courts. Through all his wanderings he was a visitor, the citizen of no republic, but the freeman of the City of the Spirit. Without exaggeration he might have chosen for his motto the phrase of Marcus Aurelius: "I will not say dear city of Cecrops but dear city of G.o.d!" Avignon, where his intellect was formed in youth, had become through the residence of the Popes the capital of Christendom, the only center of political and ecclesiastical activity where an ideal of universal culture could arise. Itself in exile, the Papacy still united the modern nations by a common bond; but its banishment from Rome was the sign of a new epoch, when the hegemony of civilization should be transferred from the Church to secular control. In this way Petrarch was enabled to shape a conception of humanism which left the middle age behind; and when his mind dwelt on Italy at a distance, he could think of her as the great Italic land, inheritor of Rome, mother of a people destined to be one, born to rule, or if not rule, at least to regenerate the world through wisdom. From his lips we hear of Florence nothing; but for the first time the pa.s.sionate cry of _Italia mia_ the appeal of an Italian who recognized his race, yet had no local habitation on the sacred soil, vibrates in his oratorical _canzoni_. Petrarch's dreams of a united Italy and a resuscitated Roman republic were hardly less visionary than Dante's ideal of universal monarchy with Rome for the seat of empire. Yet in his lyrics the true conception of Italy, one intellectually in spite of political discord and foreign oppression, the real and indestructible unity of the nation in a spirit destined to control the future of the human race, came suddenly to consciousness. There was an out-cry in their pa.s.sion-laden strophes which gathered volume as the years rolled over Italy, until at last, in her final prostration beneath Spanish Austria, they seemed less poems than authentic prophecies.

Thus while Dante remained a Florentine, Petrarch was the first Italian.

Nor is it insignificant that whereas Dante refused the poet's crown unless he could place the laurels on his head in Florence, Petrarch ascended the Capitol among the plaudits of the Romans, and, in the absence of Pope and Emperor, received his wreath from the Senator Roma.n.u.s. Dante's renunciation and Petrarch's acceptance of this honor were equally appropriate. Dante, as was fitting for a man of his era, looked still to the Commune. Petrarch's coronation on the Capitol was the outward sign that the age of the Communes was over, that culture was destined to be cosmopolitan, and that the Eternal City, symbolizing the imperishable empire of the intellect, was now the proper throne of men marked out to sway the world by thoughts and written words.

In Petrarch the particular is superseded by the universal. The citizen is sunk in the man. The political prejudices of the partisan are conspicuous by absence. His language has lost all trace of dialect. He writes Italian, special to no district, though Tuscan in its source; and his verse fixes the standard of poetic diction for all time in Italy.

These changes mark an important stage in literature emerging from its origins, and account for Petrarch's unequaled authority during the next three centuries. Dante's Epic is cla.s.sical because of its vivid humanity and indestructible material; but its spirit is medieval and its details are strictly localized. Petrarch's outlook over the world and life is, in form at least, less confined to the limitations of his age.

Consequently the students of a period pa.s.sing rapidly beyond the medieval cycle of ideas, found no bar between his nature and their sympathies.