“Up in fair Italy there lies a lake afoot the Alp that bars out Germany above Tyrol, that bears the name Benaco:” he seems to include not only the whole of Lake Garda but the Trentino too, “barring out Germany” beyond the great watershed.
At Ravenna, in 1908, one might have been led to suppose that these two passages summed up the main interest of the Divina Commedia; but though the utterances are, as a matter of fact incidental, they do point to the fact that the Italy which Dante so passionately loved, and which consciously or unconsciously he did so much to bring into being, was a definite “geographical expression” if it was also something more.
If with Witte we go on to enquire how far Young Italy is justified in fathering upon Dante the passion of “hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke,” the question is at once confused by the fact that in Dante’s day the authority and prestige of that Holy Roman Empire, of which the Poet was so convinced and so enthusiastic an advocate, was associated with a succession of German princes. Teutons of the Swabian House of Hohenstaufen, albeit Italian born, were “the illustrious heroes Frederic the Caesar and his well-begotten Manfred” whom in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (I. xii. 20; Bemp. p. 330) he extols for their nurture, in the Sicilian Court, of the beginnings of Italian vernacular poetry; Teutons the Rudolf and Albert of Hapsburg, to whom the poet of the Divine Comedy looks in vain for the liberation of Italy from its overwhelming ills; Teuton also Henry of Luxemburg, on whom his hopes were finally fixed, the “Alto Arrigo” of the Paradiso—
... Ch’ a drizzare Italia
Verrà in prima ch’ ella sia disposta,
for whom he sees a vacant throne prepared in the White Rose of heaven.[25]
These heroes are not for him, however, Germans, Tedeschi, but Roman Caesars; and had the sceptre of Empire chanced, then, as afterwards, to have been wielded by other hands, we cannot doubt that a non-Teutonic line of monarchs would have drawn from him a like reverence, a like expectation and a like passionate appeal. Similarly, had the House of Swabia been dissociated from the Roman Imperial tradition and played a rôle of overweening and unscrupulous self-aggrandisement like that actually played by Philippe le Bel, Hugh Capet’s words in the fifth Cornice of Purgatory—so well applied by a recent writer in the Times to the Hohenzollern—would have been put into the mouth of an ancestor of the two Frederics, and applied to the House of Hohenstaufen. “I was the root,” he says, “of the evil plant whose shadow blights the whole land of Christendom”—[26]
Io fui radice de la mala pianta,
Che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia.
There is indeed one passage at least where Dante mentions the German people in a non-political context (Inf. xvii. 21), and designates them from the point of view of their national or racial habits. Tedeschi lurchi—“Guzzling Germans”—he calls them. How one’s heart goes out to him, as one recalls memories of sojourns in Swiss hotels! Had poor Dante like experiences or worse to put up with in the days of his wanderings?