It will be noted that Dante has nothing to say of the personal appearance of his beloved. This is true, however, of the whole series of poems to and about her. He never seems to have thought for a moment of her physical qualities. What he finds worthy to praise is her goodness which shines out from her features so that everyone rejoices in it, while a sweetness fills the heart as if a heavenly visitor had come. For him her supreme quality is that, with all her beauty, envy finds no place in others' hearts because she is so clothed around with love and faith and courteous gentleness. It has often been said that Shakespeare did not describe the physical appearances of his heroines because he realized that this meant very little, but then Shakespeare had to write for the stage and realized that blondes and brunettes, especially in the olden time, could not be made to order and that it was better to leave the heroine's physical appearance rather vague. It would be expected, however, that Dante, with his Southern temperament, would have dwelt on the physical perfections of his fair. The next [{303}] sonnet, however, of the best known group emphasizes his abstraction of all physical influence in the matter and insists on her goodness and the womanly beauty of her character. It will be found in our chapter on Women of the Century.
In his earlier years Dante considered himself one of the Troubadours, and there can be no doubt that if he had never written the Divine Comedy, he still would have been remembered as one of the great poets who wrote of love in this Thirteenth Century. Not only does he deserve a place among the greatest of the Minnesingers, the Trouvères, and the Troubadours, but he is perhaps the greatest of them. That he should have sung as he did at the end of the century only shows that he was in the stream of literary evolution and not being merely carried idly along, but helping to guide it into ever fairer channels. Dante's minor poems would have made enduring fame for any poet of less genius than himself. His prose works deserve to be read by anyone who wishes to know the character of this greatest of poets, and also to appreciate what the educational environment of the Thirteenth Century succeeded in making out of good intellectual material when presented to it. Dante's works are the real treasury of information of the most precious kind with regard to the century, since they provide the proper standpoint from which to view all that it accomplished.
While Dante was a supreme singer among the poets of a great song time, it was only natural, in the light of what we know about the literary product of the rest of this century, that he should have put into epic form the supreme product of his genius. With the great national epics in every country of Europe—the Cid, the Arthur Legends, and the Nibelungen, at the beginning of this century, and the epical poems of the Meistersingers during its first half, it is not surprising, but on the contrary rather what might have been confidently looked for, that there should have arisen a great national epic in Italy before the end of the century. The Gothic art movement spread through all these countries, and so did the wind of the spirit of esthetic accomplishment which blew the flame of national literature in each country into a mighty blaze, that not only was [{304}] never to be extinguished, but was to be a beacon light in the realm of national literatures forever after.
We have already said a word of the well-known contemporary admiration for the poet but it should be realized that due appreciation of Dante continued in Italy during all the time when Italian art and literature was at its highest. It dwindled only at periods of decadence and lack of taste. Cornelius' law with regard to Dante's influence on art is very well known, Italian art according to him, has been strong and vigorous just in proportion as it has worked under Dante's influence, while it became weak and sensuous as that influence declined. This has held true from the very beginning and has been as true for literature as for art. When the Italians became interested in trivialities and gave themselves up to weak imitations of the classics, or to pastoral poetry that was not a real expression of feeling but a passing fancy of literary folk, then Dante was for a time in obscurity. Even at the height of the Renaissance, however, when Greek was at the acme of its interest and the classics occupied so much attention that Dante might be expected to be eclipsed, the great thinkers and critics of the time still worshipped at the shrine of their great master of Italian verse. The best proof of this is to be found in Michael Angelo's famous sonnets in praise of Dante, the second of which would seem to exhaust all that can be said in praise of a brother poet.
Into the dark abyss he made his way;
Both nether worlds he saw, and in the might
Of his great soul beheld God's splendour bright.
And gave to us on earth true light of day:
Star of supremest worth with its clear ray.
Heaven's secrets he revealed to us through our dim sight.
And had for guerdon what the base world's spite
Oft gives to souls that noblest grace display,
Full ill was Dante's life-work understood,
His purpose high, by that ungrateful state.
That welcomed all with kindness but the good.
Would I were such, to bear like evil fate,
To taste his exile, share his lofty mood.
For this I'd gladly give all earth calls great.
In the first of this pair of sonnets, however, Michael Angelo gave if possible even higher praise than this. It will be recalled that he himself, besides being the greatest of sculptors and one of the greatest of painters and architects in a wonderfully productive period, was also a very great poet. These sonnets to Dante, the one to his crucifix, and one to Vittoria Colonna, are the best proof of this. He knew how to chisel thoughts into wonderfully suitable words quite as well as marble into the beautiful forms that grew under his hands. With all his greatness, and he must have been conscious of it, he thinks that he would be perfectly willing to give up all that earth calls great, simply to share Dante's lofty mood even in his exile. No greater tribute has ever been paid by one poet to another than this, and Michael Angelo's genius was above all critical, never thoughtlessly laudatory. As emphasizing the highest enlightened taste of a great epoch this has seemed to deserve a place here also.
What should be said of him speech may not tell;
His splendor is too great for men's dim sight;
And easier 'twere to blame his foes aright
Than for his poorest gifts to praise him well.
He tracked the path that leads to depths of Hell
To teach us wisdom, scaled the eternal height.
And heaven with open gates did him invite.
Who in his own loved city might not dwell.
Ungrateful country step-dame of his fate.
To her own loss: full proof we have in this
That souls most perfect bear the greatest woe.
Of thousand things suffice in this to state:
No exile ever was unjust as his,
Nor did the world his equal ever know.
In England, in spite of distance of country, race and language, the appreciation of Dante began very early. Readers of Chaucer know the great Italian as the favorite poet of the Father of English poetry, and over and over again he has expressed the feeling of how much greater than anything he could hope to do was Dante's accomplishment. Readers will remember how Chaucer feels unable to tell the story of [{306}] Ugolino and his starving sons in the Hunger Tower, and refers those interested in the conclusion of the tale to Dante. After the religious revolt of the early Sixteenth Century Dante was lost sight of to a great extent. His temper was too Catholic to be appreciated by Puritan England, and the Elizabethans were too much occupied with their own creation of a great national literature, to have any time for appreciation of a foreigner so different in spirit from their times. With the coming of the Oxford Movement, however, Dante at once sprang into favor, and a number of important critical appreciations of him reintroduced him to a wide reading public in England, most of whom were among the most cultured of the island. This renewed interest in Dante gave rise to some of the best critical appreciations in any language. Dean Church's famous essay is the classic English monograph on Dante, and its opening paragraph sounds the keynote of critical opinion among English speaking people.
"The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and Shakespeare's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian Poem, and it opens European literature as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began."