Karl Witte, who was born in 1800 and died in 1883, represents the old vigorous and admirable type of German scholarship which was in very truth “Stupor Mundi”: a blend of genius and conscientious painstaking on the reputation of which the Prussianised Kultur of to-day bases a claim to deference which Europe will more and more hesitate to accord.
How far, for instance, Germany has fallen from her former position as regards Dante Scholarship may be gauged from E. Benvenuti’s slashing article in the Bullettino della Società dantesca italiana of June, 1914, of which a summary appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on March 4th. The article is the first instalment of a review of Dante studies in Germany for the years 1908-1913. It is a record, as the Times reviewer remarks, of “monumental ignorance, inaccuracy, arrogance, bad taste, and sheer stupidity ... hailed with salvoes of approbation by the majority of German critics.”
But Karl Witte is a man of other build than these modern Pan-Germanisers who are patriotic enough to attribute to Dante pure German ancestry, and too patriotic by far to soil their hands with the recent works of sound Italian critics, or their minds with the elements of Italian grammar and idiom.
Karl Witte, on the contrary—though he began life as an Infant Prodigy, matriculating at Leipsic when only nine and a half years old, and reading his Doctor’s thesis before he was fourteen—won recognition in Italy and England as well as in Germany as a real force in Dante scholarship: a great pioneer, who made his mistakes, as all pioneers will, but has won the gratitude of all subsequent Dantists.
In the Essay of which I have spoken, written and delivered as a lecture in 1861, Witte notes the fact and investigates the grounds of the constant association of Dante’s name with the patriotic aspirations of Young Italy. “It is a fact,” he says, “that, during the last half century, a great number of those who aimed at transforming Italy—and not only men of such moderation as Cesare Balbo, Gino Capponi, or Carlo Troya, but also the democratic revolutionaries who would take the world by storm—have hung, and still hang, upon Dante’s Divine Comedy, with passionate enthusiasm. Ugo Foscolo, who preferred poverty and exile to place and honour under the rule of Austria, devoted the last years of his life exclusively to a great work on the poem; and after Foscolo’s death, this new edition of the ‘Prophecy of Italy’s Future,’ as he called the Comedy, was published by no other than Giuseppe Mazzini himself....” If the Italian of the Sixties “were asked whence his countrymen drew their inspiration, he would scarcely hesitate,” says Witte, “to name the greatest poet of his fatherland.” And again, “the fact that in the days of foreign oppression patriots recognised each other by their love of the immortal poet, and greeted one another, as by a secret password, with the inspiring lines of the Divine Poem, is a symbol of the fact that the roots of this temper of mind”—the temper of national “self-reliance and self-renouncing enthusiasm”—“are to be sought in Dante.”
There are three passions, according to Witte, which are (rightly or wrongly) traced back to Dante: (1) a glowing love for Italy, (2) a hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke, and (3) a hatred of the temporal power of the Pope.
In the first case—and this is the point that more immediately concerns us—Witte holds that the contention is justified. “In hope, in sorrow, in reproof, we see Dante filled,” he says, “with the same glowing love for the Fatherland of Italy, a love which he is the first to put into words.”
Before Dante, at any rate, Italy was, in Metternich’s famous phrase, “nothing but a geographical expression.” The Roman poets of the Empire praise her scenery, but their devotion as patriots is to Rome itself. When the Empire broke up, Italy lost her one bond of superficial cohesion, though a shadowy unity emerged now and again under Visigothic and Longobardic domination, and the pressure now of Gothic Arianism, now of Byzantine Iconoclasm, drew Italy’s various groups in self defence closer to Papal Rome.
The phenomenon of an apparently independent and united “Kingdom of Italy” (888-961) after the fall of the House of Charlemagne, is, from this point of view, as illusory as those of Odoacer and Theodoric, effecting little or nothing towards the evolution of a national spirit or a national self-consciousness. Dante is, it would seem, the first to see Italy with a patriot’s eyes, as being, and as having been for countless ages, a fatherland for whom one might sing—
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.