"I carry them out with me when I go fowling, and read them beside the snares."
"I have little time for such pleasures, alas!" said Cromwell. "Yet I, too, have great need of the poets, sometimes. I have read the Commedia closely. Tell me, Messer, since you have spoken of Dante's political principles as enunciated in the De Monarchia, did not they suffer a change in the Commedia?"
"Man's ideals are broken as he hath greater experience of life. Dante, like all enthusiasts, fashioned to his own mind a picture of the ideal state, upon the hypothesis, as I have said before, that all men are naturally good. But if you consider his poem you will find that it is nothing but a record of crimes and their punishment, while even the crystal air of heaven is disturbed by denunciations of evil. His notion that the civil power is of God, and that the Church should be subject to it, is expressed later with even a more vehement conviction in the Paradiso, by Justinian, the supreme legist. In the De Monarchia he says: 'Si romanum imperium de jure non fuit, peccatum Adae in Christo non fuit punitum'; and in the Commedia for having withstood the Empire, Brutus with Cassius still howls in Hell, and 'Piangene ancor la trista Cleopatra.' But, after his years of exile and wandering, he seems to have surrendered his faith in a kingdom, which should be of this world, and sought for justice and the triumph of the good beyond the grave, as so many others have, likewise; for in the next world we shall all be justified. Dante's poem is not like the Æneid, an epic: it is an Apocalypse. The companion of his voyage is less the gentle Virgil, the maiden of the maiden city, than some later St John, continuing his fulminations from Patmos, judging all nations and condemning them. It is only in rare moments that he can speak a tender language as he does of the Florence of an earlier day, standing in peace, sober, chaste, with no houses void of a family; with her nobles in leather jerkins, and their ladies at the cradle, or the distaff, telling their handmaidens the tales of Troy, and Rome, and Fiesole. Such is the manner of poets: to praise times past in preference to the present, and usually without reason. A little later, you will hear Peter condemning his successors, who imitate him in that calling which he followed before he followed the call of Christ, rather than in his later life:
"'Non fu nostra intenzion, ch'a destra mano
Dei nostri successor parte sedesse,
Parte dall' altra del popol cristiano:
Nè che le chiavi, che mi fur concesse
Divenisser segnacolo in vessillo,
Che contra i battezzati combattessi:
Nè ch' io fossi figura di sigillo