VI.
History never abhors a vacuum so much as when she has to deal with the life of a great man, and for those who must have details of Dante’s career during the nineteen years which elapsed between his banishment and his death, the industry of his biographers has exhausted every available hint, while some of them press into their service much that has only the remotest bearing on their hero. If even one-half of their suppositions were adopted, we should be forced to the conclusion that the Comedy and all the other works of his exile were composed in the intervals of a very busy life. We have his own word for this much, (Convito i. 3,) that since he was cast forth out of Florence—in which he would ‘fain rest his wearied soul and fulfil his appointed time’—he had been ‘a pilgrim, nay, even a mendicant,’ in every quarter of Italy,[101] and had ‘been held cheap by many who, because of his fame, had looked to find him come in another guise.’ But he gives no journal of his wanderings, and, as will have been observed, says no word of any country but Italy. Keeping close to well-ascertained facts, it seems established that in the earlier period of his exile he sojourned with members of the great family of the Counts Guidi,[102] and that he also found hospitality with the Malaspini,[103] lords of the Val di Magra, between Genoa and Lucca. At a still earlier date (August 1306) he is found witnessing a deed in Padua. It was most probably in the same year that Dante found Giotto there, painting the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, and was courteously welcomed by the artist, and taken to his house.[104] At some time of his life he studied at Bologna: John Villani says, during his exile.[105] Of his supposed residence in Paris, though it is highly probable, there is a want of proof; of a visit to England, none at all that is worth a moment’s consideration. Some of his commentators and biographers seem to think he was so short-witted that he must have been in a place before it could occur to him to name it in his verse.
We have Dante’s own word for it that he found his exile almost intolerable. Besides the bitter resentment which he felt at the injustice of it, he probably cherished the conviction that his career had been cut short when he was on the point of acquiring great influence in affairs. The illusion may have been his—one not uncommon among men of a powerful imagination—that, given only due opportunity, he could mould the active life of his time as easily as he moulded and fashioned the creations of his fancy. It was, perhaps, owing to no fault of his own that when a partial opportunity had offered itself, he failed to get his views adopted in Florence; indeed, to judge from the kind of employment in which he was more than once engaged for his patrons, he must have been possessed of no little business tact. Yet, as when his feelings were deeply concerned his words knew no restraint, so his hopes would partake of the largeness of his genius. In the restored Empire, which he was almost alone in longing for as he conceived of it, he may have imagined for himself a place beside Henry like what in Frederick’s court had been filled by Pier delle Vigne—the man who held both keys to the Emperor’s heart, and opened and shut it as he would.[106]
Thus, as his exile ran on it would grow sadder with the accumulating memories of hopes deferred and then destroyed, and of dreams which had faded away in the light of a cheerless reality. But some consolations he must have found even in the conditions of his exile. He had leisure for meditation, and time enough to spend in that other world which was all his own. With the miseries of a wanderer’s life would come not a few of its sweets—freedom from routine, and the intellectual stimulus supplied by change of place. Here and there he would find society such as he cared for—that of scholars, theologians, and men familiar with every court and school of Christendom. And, beyond all, he would get access to books that at home he might never have seen. It was no spare diet that would serve his mind while he was making such ample calls on it for his great work. As it proceeds we seem to detect a growing fulness of knowledge, and it is by reason of the more learned treatment, as well as the loftier theme of the Third Cantica, that so many readers, when once well at sea in the Paradiso, recognise the force of the warning with which it begins.[107]
What amount of intercourse he was able to maintain with Florence during his wanderings is a matter of mere speculation, although of a more interesting kind than that concerned with the chronology of his uneasy travels. That he kept up at least some correspondence with his friends is proved by the letter regarding the terms of his pardon. There is also the well-known anecdote told by Boccaccio as to the discovery and despatch to him of the opening Cantos of the Inferno—an anecdote we may safely accept as founded on fact, although Boccaccio’s informants may have failed to note at the time what the manuscript consisted of, and in the course of years may have magnified the importance of their discovery. With his wife he would naturally communicate on subjects of common interest—as, for instance, that of how best to save or recover part of his property—and especially regarding the welfare of his sons, of whom two are found to be with him when he acquires something like a settlement in Verona.
It is quite credible that, as Boccaccio asserts, he would never after his exile was once begun ‘go to his wife or suffer her to join him where he was;’ although the statement is probably an extension of the fact that she never did join him. In any case it is to make too large a use of the words to find in them evidence, as has frequently been done, of the unhappiness of all his married life, and of his utter estrangement from Gemma during his banishment. The union—marriage of convenience though it was—might be harmonious enough as long as things went moderately well with the pair. Dante was never wealthy, but he seems to have had his own house in Florence and small landed possessions in its neighbourhood.[108] That before his banishment he was considerably in debt appears to be ascertained;[109] but, without knowing the circumstances in which he borrowed, it is impossible to be sure whether he may not only have been making use of his credit in order to put out part of his means to advantage in some of the numerous commercial enterprises in which his neighbours were engaged. In any case his career must have seemed full of promise till he was driven into banishment. When that blow had fallen, it is easy to conceive how what if it was not mutual affection had come to serve instead of it—esteem and forbearance—would be changed into indifference with the lapse of months and years of enforced separation, embittered and filled on both sides with the mean cares of indigence, and, it may be, on Gemma’s side with the conviction that her husband had brought her with himself into disgrace. If all that is said by Boccaccio and some of Dante’s enemies as to his temperament and behaviour were true, we could only hope that Gemma’s indifference was deep enough to save her from the pangs of jealousy. And on the other hand, if we are to push suspicion to its utmost length, we may find an allusion to his own experience in the lines where Dante complains of how soon a widow forgets her husband.[110] But this is all matter of the merest speculation. Gemma is known to have been alive in 1314.[111] She brought up her children, says Boccaccio, upon a trifling part of her husband’s confiscated estate, recovered on the plea that it was a portion of her dowry. There may have been difficulties of a material kind, insuperable save to an ardent love that was not theirs, in the way of Gemma’s joining her husband in any of his cities of refuge.
Complete evidence exists of Dante’s having in his later years lived for a longer or shorter time in the three cities of Lucca, Verona, and Ravenna. In Purgatory he meets a shade from Lucca, in the murmur of whose words he catches he ‘knows not what of Gentucca;’[112] and when he charges the Lucchese to speak plainly out, he is told that Lucca shall yet be found pleasant by him because of a girl not yet grown to womanhood. Uguccione, acting in the interest of Pisa, took possession of Lucca in 1314, and Dante is supposed to have taken up his residence there for some considerable time. What we may certainly infer from his own words in the Purgatorio is that they were written after a stay in Lucca had been sweetened to him by the society of a lady named Gentucca. He cannot well have found shelter there before the city was held by Uguccione; and research has established that at least two ladies of the uncommon name of Gentucca were resident there in 1314. From the whole tone of his allusion—the mention of her very name and of her innocent girlhood—we may gather that there was nothing in his liking for her of which he had any reason to feel ashamed. In the Inferno he had covered the whole people of Lucca with his scorn.[113] By the time he got thus far with the Purgatorio his thoughts of the place were all softened by his memory of one fair face—or shall we rather say, of one compassionate and womanly soul? That Dante was more than susceptible to feminine charms is coarsely asserted by Boccaccio.[114] But on such a matter Boccaccio is a prejudiced witness, and, in the absence of sufficient proof to the contrary, justice requires us to assume that the tenor of Dante’s life was not at variance with that of his writings. He who was so severe a judge of others was not, as we can infer from more than one passage of the Comedy, a lenient judge when his own failings were concerned.[115] That his conduct never fell short of his standard no one will venture to maintain. But what should have hindered him, in his hours of weariness and when even his hold on the future seemed to slacken, in lonely castle or strange town, to seek sympathy from some fair woman who might remind him in something of Beatrice?[116]
When, in 1316, Uguccione was driven out of Lucca and Pisa, that great partisan took military service with Can Grande. It has been disputed whether Dante had earlier enjoyed the hospitality of the Scaligers, or was indebted for his first reception in Verona to the good offices of Uguccione. It is barely credible that by this time in his life he stood in need of any one to answer for him in the court of Can Grande. His fame as a political writer must have preceded him; and it was of a character to commend him to the good graces of the great Imperialist. In his De Monarchia he had, by an exhaustive treatment of propositions which now seem childish or else the mere commonplaces of everyday political argument, established the right of the civil power to independence of Church authority; and though to the Scaliger who aimed at becoming Imperial lieutenant for all the North of Italy he might seem needlessly tender to the spiritual lordship of the Holy Father, yet the drift of his reasoning was all in favour of the Ghibeline position.[117] Besides this he had written on the need of refining the dialects of Italian, and reducing them to a language fit for general use in the whole of the Peninsula; and this with a novelty of treatment and wealth of illustration unequalled before or since in any first work on such a subject.[118] And, what would recommend him still more to a youthful prince of lofty taste, he was the poet of the ‘sweet new style’ of the Vita Nuova, and of sonnets, ballads, and canzoni rich in language and thought beyond the works of all previous poets in the vulgar tongues. Add to this that the Comedy was already written, and published up, perhaps, to the close of the Purgatorio, and that all Italy was eager to find who had a place, and what kind of place, in the strange new world from which the veil was being withdrawn; and it is easy to imagine that Dante’s reception at Can Grande’s court was rather that of a man both admired and feared for his great genius, than that of a wandering scholar and grumbling exile.
At what time Dante came to Verona, and for how long he stayed, we have no means of fixing with certainty. He himself mentions being there in 1320,[119] and it is usually supposed that his residence covered three years previous to that date; as also that it was shared by his two sons, Piero and Jacopo. One of these was afterwards to find a settlement at Verona in a high legal post. Except some frivolous legends, there is no evidence that Dante met with anything but generous treatment from Can Grande. A passage of the Paradiso, written either towards the close of the poet’s residence at Verona, or after he had left it, is full of a praise of the great Scaliger so magnificent[120] as fully to make amends for the contemptuous mention in the Purgatorio of his father and brother.[121] To Can Grande the Paradiso was dedicated by the author in a long epistle containing an exposition of how the first Canto of that Cantica, and, by implication, the whole of the poem, is to be interpreted. The letter is full of gratitude for favours already received, and of expectation of others yet to come. From the terms of the dedication it has been assumed that ere it was made the whole of the Paradiso was written, and that Dante praises the lord of Verona after a long experience of his bounty.[122]
Whether owing to the restlessness of an exile, or to some prospect of attaining a state of greater ease or of having the command of more congenial society, we cannot tell; but from the splendid court of Can Grande he moved down into Romagna, to Ravenna, the city which of all in Italy would now be fixed upon by the traveller as the fittest place for a man of genius, weighed down by infinite sorrows, to close his days in and find a tomb. Some writers on the life of Dante will have it that in Ravenna he spent the greater part of his exile, and that when he is found elsewhere—in Lucca or Verona—he is only on a temporary absence from his permanent home.[123] But this conclusion requires some facts to be ignored, and others unduly dwelt on. In any case his patron there, during at least the last year or two of his life, was Guido Novello of Polenta, lord of Ravenna, the nephew of her who above all the persons of the Comedy lives in the hearts of its readers.
Bernardino, the brother of Francesca and uncle of Guido, had fought on the side of Florence at the battle of Campaldino, and Dante may then have become acquainted with him. The family had the reputation of being moderate Guelfs; but ere this the exile, with his ripe experience of men, had doubtless learned, while retaining intact his own opinions as to what was the true theory of government, to set good-heartedness and a noble aim in life above political orthodoxy. This Guido Novello—the younger Guido—bears the reputation of having been well-informed, of gentle manners, and fond of gathering around him men accomplished in literature and the fine arts. On the death of Dante he made a formal oration in honour of the poet. If his welcome of Dante was as cordial as is generally supposed, and as there is no reason to doubt that it was, it proved his magnanimity; for in the Purgatorio a family specially hostile to the Polentas had been mentioned with honour,[124] while that to which his wife belonged had been lightly spoken of. How he got over the condemnation of his kinswoman to Inferno—even under such gentle conditions—it would be more difficult to understand were there not reason to believe that ere Dante went to Ravenna it had come to be a matter of pride in Italy for a family to have any of its members placed anywhere in that other world of which Dante held the key.
It seems as if we might assume that the poet’s last months or years were soothed by the society of his daughter—the child whom he had named after the object of his first and most enduring love.[125] Whether or not he was acting as Ambassador for Guido to Venice when he caught his last illness, it appears to be pretty well established that he was held in honour by his patron and all around him.[126] For his hours of meditation he had the solemn churches of Ravenna with their storied walls,[127] and the still more solemn pine forest of Classis, by him first annexed to the world of Romance.[128] For hours of relaxation, when they came, he had neighbours who dabbled in letters and who could at any rate sympathise with him in his love of study. He maintained correspondence with poets and scholars in other cities. In at least one instance this was conducted in the bitter fashion with which the humanists of a century or two later were to make the world familiar;[129] but with the Bolognese scholar, Giovanni del Virgilio, he engaged in a good-humoured, half-bantering exchange of Latin pastoral poems, through the artificial imagery of which there sometimes breaks a natural thought, as when in answer to the pedant’s counsel to renounce the vulgar tongue and produce in Latin something that will entitle him to receive the laurel crown in Bologna, he declares that if ever he is crowned as a poet it will be on the banks of the Arno.
Most of the material for forming a judgment of how Dante stood affected to the religious beliefs of his time is to be gathered from the Comedy, and the place for considering it would rather be in an essay on that work than in a sketch of his life which necessity compels to be swift. A few words may however be here devoted to the subject, as it is one with some bearing on the manner in which he would be regarded by those around him, and through that on the tenor of his life. That Dante conformed to Church observances, and, except with a few malevolent critics, bore the reputation of a good Catholic, there can be no doubt. It was as a politician and not as a heretic that he suffered persecution; and when he died he was buried in great honour within the Franciscan Church at Ravenna. Some few years after his death, it is true, his De Monarchia was burned as heretical by orders of the Papal Legate in Lombardy, who would gladly, if he could, have had the bones of the author exhumed to share the fate of his book. But all this was only because the partisans of Lewis of Bavaria were making political capital out of the treatise.
Attempts have been made to demonstrate that in spite of his outward conformity Dante was an unbeliever at heart, and that the Comedy is devoted to the promulgation of a Ghibeline heresy—of which, we may be sure, no Ghibeline ever heard—and to the overthrow of all that the author professed most devoutly to believe.[130] Other critics of a more sober temper in speculation would find in him a Catholic who held the Catholic beliefs with the same slack grasp as the teaching of Luther was held by Lessing or Goethe.[131] But this is surely to misread the Comedy, which is steeped from beginning to end in a spirit of the warmest faith in the great Christian doctrines. It was no mere intellectual perception of these that Dante had—or professed to have—for when in Paradise he has satisfied Saint Peter of his being possessed of a just conception of the nature of faith, and is next asked if, besides knowing what is the alloy of the coin and the weight of it, he has it in his own purse, he answers boldly, ‘Yea, and so shining and round that of a surety it has the lawful stamp.’[132] And further on, when required to declare in what he believes, nothing against the fulness of his creed is to be inferred from the fact that he stops short after pronouncing his belief in the existence of God and in the Trinity. This article he gives as implying all the others; it is ‘the spark which spreads out into a vivid flame.’[133]
Yet if the inquiry were to be pushed further, and it were sought to find how much of free thought he allowed himself in matters of religion, Dante might be discovered to have reached his orthodox position by ways hateful to the bigots who then took order for preserving the purity of the faith. The office of the Pope he deeply revered, but the Papal absolution avails nothing in his eyes compared with one tear of heartfelt repentance.[134] It is not on the word of Pope or Council that he rests his faith, but on the Scriptures, and on the evidences of the truth of Christianity, freely examined and weighed.[135] Chief among these evidences, it must however be noted, he esteemed the fact of the existence of the Church as he found it;[136] and in his inquiries he accepted as guides the Scholastic Doctors on whose reasonings the Church had set its seal of approbation. It was a foregone conclusion he reached by stages of his own. Yet that he sympathised at least as much with the honest search for truth as with the arrogant profession of orthodoxy, is shown by his treatment of heretics. He could not condemn severely such as erred only because their reason would not consent to rest like his in the prevalent dogmatic system; and so we find that he makes heresy consist less in intellectual error than in beliefs that tend to vitiate conduct, or to cause schism in societies divinely constituted.[137] For his own part, orthodox although he was, or believed himself to be—which is all that needs to be contended for,—in no sense was he priest-ridden. It was liberty that he went seeking on his great journey;[138] and he gives no hint that it is to be gained by the observance of forms or in submission to sacerdotal authority. He knows it is in his reach only when he has been crowned, and mitred too, lord of himself[139]—subject to Him alone of whom even Popes were servants.[140]
Although in what were to prove his last months Dante might amuse himself with the composition of learned trifles, and in the society and correspondence of men who along with him, if on lines apart from his, were preparing the way for the revival of classical studies, the best part of his mind, then as for long before, was devoted to the Comedy; and he was counting on the suffrages of a wider audience than courts and universities could supply.
Here there is no room to treat at length of that work, to which when we turn our thoughts all else he wrote—though that was enough to secure him fame—seems to fall into the background as if unworthy of his genius. What can hardly be passed over in silence is that in the Comedy, once it was begun, he must have found a refuge for his soul from all petty cares, and a shield against all adverse fortune. We must search its pages, and not the meagre records of his biographers, to find what was the life he lived during the years of his exile; for, in a sense, it contains the true journal of his thoughts, of his hopes, and of his sorrows. The plan was laid wide enough to embrace the observations he made of nature and of man, the fruits of his painful studies, and the intelligence he gathered from those experienced in travel, politics, and war. It was not only his imagination and artistic skill that were spent upon the poem: he gave his life to it. The future reward he knew was sure—an immortal fame; but he hoped for a nearer profit on his venture. Florence might at last relent, if not because of his innocence and at the spectacle of his inconsolable exile, at least on hearing the rumour of his genius borne to her from every corner of Italy:—
If e’er it comes that this my sacred Lay,
To which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand—
Through which these many years I waste away—
Shall quell the cruelty that keeps me banned
From the fair fold where I, a lamb, was found
Hostile to wolves who ’gainst it violence planned;
With other fleece and voice of other sound,
Poet will I return, and at the font
Where I was christened be with laurel crowned.[141]
But with the completion of the Comedy Dante’s life too came to a close. He died at Ravenna in the month of September 1321.