Witte, who spontaneously brings forward this word of insight into national character, is delightfully frank about it. “Only in one place,” he says, “does he accuse us of a weakness which we would fain repudiate, but it has been laid to the charge of Germany down even to our own day, on so many hands, that we cannot escape the fear that our forefathers at least must have given grounds for the accusation.” ...
This is a poor note on which to end our study of Witte. Yet it is one on which recent events have thrown a portentous illumination. The tendency which we are combating together, Italians and English, with the haughty spirit of Dante on our side, is one which begins in grossness of bodily appetite, and goes all lengths of cruel and brutalising bestiality.
It is a relief to turn one’s back on this sordid atmosphere and launch out once more into the “better waters”[27] of Italian Patriotism.
I have by me a book which corroborates very strongly—for the sixties at least—Witte’s contention that Young Italy consciously draws her patriotic inspiration from Dante. Some few years ago I picked up in Venice a bound copy of the Giornale del Centenario di Dante Allighieri, of which the first number was published in Florence on February 10th, 1864, and the 48th on May 31st, 1865. There should by rights have been two more numbers, published after an interval, with Index and Frontispiece. Whether these ever appeared in fact, I have not been able to discover. My copy concludes with Number 48, which describes the Festival, to which the year’s publication was planned to lead up—the Feste Dantesche held in Piazza Sta Croce, in May, 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the Poet’s birth. In that year Florence became the temporary capital of an Italy free and united, but still barred out from Rome by French bayonets; and she signalised the occasion by welcoming back in spirit her exiled Son to the “Bello ovile,” where as a lamb he had slept,[28] when the Re Galantuomo himself unveiled the Poet’s statue in the Piazza. A quaint woodcut of the ceremony adorns the volume.[29]
The successive numbers of this Giornale, with their varied contributions to the study and appreciation of the Poet—contributions drawn from every part of the Peninsula—bear eloquent testimony to the widespread feeling among the Italian patriots of that epoch, that Dante was rightly to be acclaimed Pater Patriae.
The articles are of all sorts, from chronological and etymological notes to formal and discursive interpretations and illustrations of Dante’s writings and his life, and studies of contemporary political and social problems in the light of his dicta. They would probably repay a fuller investigation than the present writer has had opportunity to apply to them. We will take one or two typical utterances to indicate something of the general tone of the contributors.
“Dante was the first among his contemporaries,” says Prof. A. Zoncada,[30] “to rise to the conception of a United Italy”—an Italy united in powers, in purpose, in language, and that in spite of the manifold disuniting influences at work in his day. “Fatto è che Dante primo ne’ suoi tempi seppe levarsi al concetto d’un Italia unita e concorde d’ intenti, di forze, di favella: primo abbraciò nel suo amore tutta intera l’ Italia, senza divario di cielo, di usi, di memorie, di legge, di stato, donde appunto risulta il sentimento di nazionalità.” Dante’s desire for the establishment of an Imperial Court in Italy was, he says, a desire for national and linguistic unity. “Non può essere nazione senza una comune favella, nè comune favella dove nazione non sia. Il perchè voleva Dante stabilito in Italia la sede degli imperatori, unico mezzo, a suo credere, di conseguire l’ una e l’ altra unità, della lingua, cioè, e della nazione.” There may perhaps be a little exaggeration in this statement of the reciprocal relations of nationality and vernacular, but at any rate it fastens on facts. Dante, as we have seen, visualised Italy as one, sighed for her divisions, expostulated with her on her undisciplined factiousness; longed, hoped, and prayed for the speedy advent of a strong unifying force. He also devised for her and bequeathed to her the noble instrument of a classical vernacular; and if it be not strictly true that a nation cannot exist save where there is one national language spoken, yet it is more than half true. Dante doubtless did more in the end for the cause of Italian nationality by his bequest of that splendid vehicle of thought and feeling which the mother-tongue became in his hands, and by his initiation of a glorious literary tradition, than he or any other man could have done by actual utterances, however inspired. The importance of his work for the vernacular is recognised again and again by the epigraphists who in the Giornale del Centenario have taken Dante as their theme. “The mother-tongue supplies a bond of nationality which cannot be broken,” exclaims Prof. Lorenzo Berardi in his epigraph,[31] “and that bond we owe to Dante.”
DANTE ALLIGHIERI
FU IL PADRE IMMORTALE
DI NOSTRA LINGUA
QUESTA
FU IL VINCOLO NAZIONALE
CHE MAI SI RUPPE.