THE MASTER POET, AND HIS THEME
No poet, however, had yet arisen, gifted with absolute power over the empire of the soul; no philosopher had yet pierced into the depths of feeling and of thought, when Dante, the greatest name of Italy, and the father of her poetry, appeared, and demonstrated the mightiness of his genius by availing himself of the rude and imperfect materials within his reach, to construct an edifice resembling, in magnificence, that universe whose image it reflects. Instead of amatory effusions addressed to an imaginary beauty, instead of madrigals full of sprightly insipidity, sonnets laboured into harmony, and strained or discordant allegories, the only models, in any modern language, which presented themselves to the notice of Dante, that great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world.
In the century immediately preceding, the energy of some bold and enthusiastic minds had been directed to religious objects. A new spiritual force, surpassing in activity and fanaticism all monastic institutions before established, was organised by St. Francis and St. Dominic, whose furious harangues and bloody persecutions revived that zeal which, for several centuries past, had appeared to slumber. In the cells of the monks, nevertheless, the first symptoms of reviving literature were seen. Their studies had now assumed a scholastic character. To the imagination of the zealot, the different conditions of a future state were continually present; and the spiritual objects which he saw with the eyes of faith were invested with all the reality of material forms, by the force with which they were presented to his view in detailed descriptions and in dissertations displaying a scientific acquaintance with the exact limit of every torment, and the graduated rewards of glorification.
A very singular instance of the manner in which these ideas were impressed upon the people is afforded by the native city of Dante, in which the celebration of a festival was graced by a public representation of the infernal tortures; and it is not unlikely that the first circulation of the work of that poet gave occasion to this frightful exhibition. The bed of the Arno was converted into the gulf of perdition, where all the horrors coined by the prolific fancy of the monks were concentrated. Nothing was wanting to make the illusion complete; and the spectators shuddered at the shrieks and groans of real persons, apparently exposed to the alternate extremes of fire and frost, to waves of boiling pitch, and to serpents. This scene occurred at Florence on the 1st of May, 1304.
It appears, then, that when Dante adopted, as the subject of his immortal poem, the secrets of the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, he could not possibly have selected a more popular theme. It had the advantage of combining the most profound feelings of religion with those vivid recollections of patriotic glory and party contentions which were necessarily suggested by the reappearance of the illustrious dead on this novel theatre.
At the close of the century, in the year 1300, and in the week of Easter, Dante supposes himself to be wandering in the deserts near Jerusalem, and to be favoured with the means of access to the realm of shadows. He is there met by Virgil, the object of his incessant study and admiration, who takes upon himself the office of guide, and who, by his own admirable description of the heathen hell, seems to have acquired a kind of right to reveal the mysteries of these forbidden regions. The two bards arrive at a gate, on which are inscribed these terrific words:[e]
“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me, among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”[o]
The theme of the poem is too familiar to need further exposition here. It may be interesting to note, however, that the sequence of regions through which the poet journeys in witnessing the rewards of paradise is suggested by the ideas of cosmology that were prevalent in Dante’s time. The poem thus has interest from a scientific as well as from an artistic standpoint—an interest that is enhanced by the reflection that the time was almost at hand when a new system of cosmology would supplant the Ptolemaic one here suggested, and in so doing usher in a new scientific era, somewhat as the poem itself ushered in a new era of literature.[a]
The power of the human mind was never more forcibly demonstrated, in its most exquisite masterpieces, than in the poem of Dante. Without a prototype in any existing language, equally novel in its various parts and in the combination of the whole, it stands alone as the first monument of modern genius, the first great work which appeared in the reviving literature of Europe. In its composition, it is strictly conformable to the essential and invariable principles of the poetical art. It possesses unity of design and of execution; and bears the visible impress of a mighty genius, capable of embracing, at once, the parts and the whole of its scheme; of employing, with facility, the most stupendous materials, and of observing all the required niceties of proportion, without experiencing any difficulty from the constraint. In all other respects, the poem of Dante is not within the jurisdiction of established rules. It cannot with propriety be referred to any particular class of composition, and its author is only to be judged by those laws which he thought fit to impose upon himself. His modesty induced him to give his work the title of a comedy, in order to place it in a rank inferior to the epic, to which he conceived that Virgil had exclusive claims. Dante had not the slightest acquaintance with the dramatic art, of which he had, in all probability, never met with a single specimen; and from this ignorance proceeded that use of the word which now appears to us to be so extraordinary. In his native country, the title which he gave to his work was always preserved, and it is still known as The Divine Comedy. A name so totally different from every other seems to be happily bestowed upon a production which stands without a rival.
Dante the Man
The glory which Dante acquired, which commenced during his lifetime, and which raised him, in a little time, above the greatest names of Italy, contributed but little to his happiness. He was born in Florence in 1265, of the noble and distinguished family of the Alighieri, which was attached, in politics, to the party of the Guelfs.
Whilst yet very young, he formed a strong attachment to Beatrice, the daughter of Folco de’ Portinari, whom he lost at the age of twenty-five years. Throughout his future life, he preserved a faithful recollection of the passion which, during fifteen years, had essentially contributed to the happy development of his feelings, and which was thus associated with all his noblest sentiments and his most elevated thoughts. It was probably about ten years after the death of Beatrice when Dante commenced his great work, which occupied him during the remainder of his life, and in which he assigned the most conspicuous station to the woman he had so tenderly loved. In this object of his adoration, he found a common point of union for images both human and divine; and the Beatrice of his paradise appears to us sometimes in the character of the most beloved of her sex, and sometimes as an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. Far from considering the passion of love in the same light as the ancients, the father of modern poetry recognises it as a pure, elevated, and sacred sentiment, calculated to ennoble and to sanctify the soul; and he has never been surpassed, by any who have succeeded him, in his entire and affecting devotion to the object of his attachment. Dante was, however, induced by considerations of family convenience to enter into a new engagement. In 1291, a year after the death of Beatrice, he married Gemma de’ Donati, whose obstinate and violent disposition embittered his domestic life. It is remarkable that, in the whole course of his work, into which he introduces the whole universe, he makes no personal allusion to his wife; and he was actuated, no doubt, by motives of delicacy towards her and her family, when he passed over, in similar silence, Corso Donati, the leader of the faction of his enemies, and his own most formidable adversary.
Torch Holder, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
In the battle of Campaldino, in 1289, Dante bore arms for his country against the Aretini, and also against the Pisans in the campaign of 1290—the year subsequent to that in which the catastrophe of Count Ugolino occurred. He subsequently assumed the magisterial functions, at the period so fatal to the happiness of his country, when the civil wars between the Bianchi and the Neri broke out. He was accused of a criminal partiality to the interest of the former faction, during the time when he was a member of the supreme council; and when Charles de Valois, the father of Philip VI, proceeded to Florence, to appease the dissensions of the two parties, Dante was sentenced, in the year 1302, to the payment of an oppressive fine and to exile. By the subsequent sentence of a revolutionary tribunal, he was condemned, during his absence, to be burned alive, with all his partisans.
From that period, Dante was compelled to seek an asylum at such of the Italian courts as were attached to the Ghibelline interest, and were not unwilling to extend their protection to their ancient enemies. To that party, which he had opposed in the outset of his career, his perpetual exile and his misfortune compelled him, ultimately, to become a convert. He resided, for a considerable time, with the marquis Malaspina, in the Lunigiana, with the count Busone da Gubbio, and with the two brothers Della Scala, lords of Verona. But, in every quarter, the haughty obstinacy of his character, which became more inflexible in proportion to the difficulties with which he was surrounded, and the bitterness of his wit, which frequently broke out in caustic sarcasms, raised up against him new enemies. His attempts to re-enter Florence with his party, by force of arms, were successively foiled; his petitions to the people were rejected; and his last hope, in the emperor Henry VII, vanished on the death of that monarch. His decease took place at Ravenna, on the 14th of September, 1321, whilst he was enjoying the hospitable protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of that city, who had always treated him rather as a friend than as a dependant, and who, a short time before, had bestowed upon him an honourable mark of his confidence by charging him with an embassy to the republic of Venice.
On the death of her great poet, all Italy appeared to go into mourning. On every side copies of his work were multiplied, and enriched with numerous commentaries. In the year 1350, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and prince of Milan, engaged a number of learned men in the laborious task of illustrating and explaining the obscure passages of the Divina Commedia. Six distinguished scholars, two theologians, two men of science, and two Florentine antiquaries united their talents in this undertaking. Two professorships were instituted for the purpose of expounding the works of Dante. One of these, founded at Florence, in the year 1373, was filled by the celebrated Boccaccio. The duties of the other, at Bologna, were no less worthily discharged by Benvenuto d’Imola, a scholar of eminence. It is questionable whether any other man ever exercised so undisputed an authority and so direct an influence over the age immediately succeeding his own.
An additional proof of the superiority of this great genius may be drawn from the commentaries upon his works. We are there surprised to see his most enthusiastic admirers incapable of appreciating his real grandeur. Dante himself, in his Latin treatise entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, appears to be quite unconscious of the extent of his services to the literature of his country. Like his commentators, he principally values himself upon the purity and correctness of his style. Yet he is neither pure nor correct; but, what is far superior to either, he had the powers of creative invention. For the sake of the rhyme, we find him employing a great number of barbarous words, which do not occur a second time in his verses. But, when he is himself affected, and wishes to communicate his emotions, the Italian language of the thirteenth century, in his powerful hands, displays a richness of expression, a purity, and an elegance which he was the first to elicit, and by which it has ever since been distinguished. The personages whom he introduces are moving and breathing beings; his pictures are nature itself; his language speaks at once to the imagination and to the judgment; and it would be difficult to point out a passage in his poem which would not form a subject for the pencil. The admiration of his commentators has also been abundantly bestowed upon the profound learning of Dante, who, it must be allowed, appears to have been master of all the knowledge and accomplishments of the age in which he lived. Of these various attainments, his poem is the faithful depository, from which we may infer, with great precision, the progress which science had at that time made, and the advances which were yet necessary to afford full satisfaction to the mind.[e]
The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope—all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the Commedia where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.
“This Dante,” continues Villani, “from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless his noble works left to us in writing bear true testimony of him and honourable fame to our city.”[f]