In one point of view, Dante’s figure is the most imposing of any poet’s; for, intensely local as he is, he yet interprets all mediæval Europe. When, however, he is compared with his closest analogue, Milton, simply as a poet, it is not so clear that the comparison is to his advantage. The great characteristics which chiefly discriminate him from all other poets are an ineffable purity, such as we see in the early Italian painters, and an intensity of minute description which surpasses the similar performances of others, except England may say with pride, Robert Browning’s, as the work of the etching tool surpasses the work of the pen. These gifts are best displayed upon a small scale, and hence Dante’s cabinet pieces are more successful than his vast pictures. They depend, too, in the last resort upon the poet’s own fidelity of observation, and hence his best delineations retrace what he has actually seen. His general description of theInferno is more impressive from its unflinching realism than from its imaginative sublimity. There is no grandeur in his picture of Lucifer, though much quaint ingenuity, Milton’s “not less than archangel ruined” tells us more and affects us more profoundly than all Dante’s elaborate word-painting. If Milton has nothing so beautiful as the exquisite comparison of Beatrice to a bird awaiting the dawn that she may gather food for her young, neither has Dante anything so sublime as Milton’s comparison of the flying fiend to a fleet discerned afar off as hanging in the clouds, or of Satan equipped for battle to the comet “that fires the length of Ophiuchus huge.” The magnificent lines in which Tennyson has celebrated the might and music of Milton would seem inappropriate to Dante. In an age when minute description is in fashion, Dante’s virtuoso-like skill in graphic delineation has been favourable to his renown; but a reaction must ensue when a bolder and ampler style of handling is again appreciated at its worth.
If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure and simple, he is more important as a representative of a great era of mankind. In him the Middle Age lives as it does in its cathedrals; and when the cathedrals have crumbled, theDivine Comedy will be as fresh as it is now. Nor is this significance merely historical or antiquarian. From the very first it was appreciated by contemporaries. Repentant Florence endowed lectures upon theDivine Comedy, and Boccaccio was the first lecturer. In the next century Frezzi tries to transpose it into another key; and Attavanti cites from the pulpit Dantes ille noster as copiously and reverentially as any of the Fathers. Even in the age of the Renaissance, Pius the Fourth’s cardinals cap quotations from Dante as the last notes of Palestrina’s Mass of Pope Marcellus die down the aisles of St Peter’s. If he afterwards fell into comparative abeyance for a time, it must be remembered that Italy lay prostrate in the seventeenth century, and that his genius did not sort well with the especial mission assigned to her in the eighteenth.
There can be no surer proof of Dante’s eternal vitality than that the revival of his fame coincided with the manifestation of ideas apparently the reverse of his own. The French Revolution brought the mediæval poet into fashion; and although his best expositors, whom it is upon the whole most profitable to study, have been those so nearly at his own intellectual standpoint as Dean Church and Maria Rossetti, his most eloquent champions have been those who, on a superficial view, might seem to have least in common with him—Lamennais, Shelley, Carlyle, Symonds, Mazzini, Leopardi. The feelings of the man of the nineteenth century, attracted by the divine and eternal elements in Dante with a vehemence proportioned to his repulsion by the transient and accidental, are thus powerfully expressed by the greatest of living Italian poets:
Dante, how is it that my vows I bear,
Submitted at thy shrine to bend and pray,
To Night alone relinquishing thy lay,
And with returning sun returning there?
Never for me hath Lucy breathed a prayer,
Matilde with lustral fount washed sin away,
Or Beatrice on celestial way
Led up her mortal love by starry stair.
Thy Holy Empire I abhor, the head
Of thy great Frederick in Olona’s vale
Most joyfully had cloven, crown and brains.
Empire and Church in crumbling ruin fail:
Above, thy ringing song from heaven is sped:
The Gods depart, the poet’s hymn remains.
—CARDUCCI.
CHAPTER V
PETRARCH AS MAN OF LETTERS
Although, hardly less than Shakespeare, born not for an age but for all time, Dante was nevertheless in an especial sense the poet of the mediæval period. The vast advance which he effected in the poetic art had no counterpart in a corresponding progress in the world of intellect. Powerful as his mind was, it seemed as an organ of thought rather architectural than creative; more intent on combining the materials it found into the most august edifice which their constitution admitted, than on gaining new channels for feeling and intelligence. This was to be the work of a mind far less original than Dante’s, but happily placed at the confluence of mediæval ideas with an element by which they were destined to be submerged and transformed. In the year 1304, on the very day when Dante and his exiled companions were making their desperate attempt to fight their way back into Florence, FRANCESCO PETRARCA, the child of one of their number, was born a humanist by the grace of God in the Tuscan town of Arezzo. Six years after Dante’s death a casual encounter with a lady who awoke the faculty of song within him made the scholar the first poet of his age. But neither the innate love of letters nor the awakened faculty of poetry would have exalted Petrarch to the literary supremacy he attained if he had not lived at the very juncture when literature, hitherto cultivated in some of its branches for mere utility, in others as an ornament of courtly life, was beginning to revive as a profession. Dante, a statesman, a philosopher, a prophet, was not in a true sense a man of letters, and neither his ideals nor his contemporary influence extended beyond the limits of Italy. Petrarch was the first modern literary dictator, the first author to receive the unanimous homage of a world of culture. Such a world had not existed since the decay of antique civilisation, and he may be said to have been in a manner both its cause and its effect. As the Erasmus, the Voltaire, the Goethe of his age, he claims a more distinguished place in literary history than even his exquisite poetry, much less his but relatively ample erudition, could have secured for him.
Seven months after Petrarch’s birth his mother was allowed to return to her patrimonial estate near Florence, where she was sometimes secretly visited by her husband. The elder Petrarca (or, as the name was then spelt, Petracco) might have returned to his native city on the same dishonourable terms as those offered to Dante, but, like Dante, spurned them. Despairing of repatriation, he betook himself to Avignon, then the seat of the Papal Court, where he followed the profession of the law.
Petrarch was successively educated at Carpentras, at Montpellier, and at the University of Bologna, where his father’s commands compelled him to the study of jurisprudence. The death of his parent in 1326 recalled him to Avignon, and restored him to letters. To qualify himself for ecclesiastical preferment he received the tonsure without taking orders, a step not unusual in those days, and devoted himself entirely to literature. The “Babylonish captivity” of the Church at Avignon, violently as he denounces it in his writings, was highly favourable to his interests, for it helped him to the patronage of Cardinal Colonna, whose brother, afterwards Bishop of Lombès, he had known intimately at the University of Bologna. It was probably from this source that he derived means to mingle with gay society and indulge in the fashionable follies of eccentric costume, which he ridicules in his later writings; for letters as yet afforded him no sure subsistence, and his scanty patrimony had been embezzled or wasted by his guardians. On April 6, 1327[4], occurred the most momentous event of his life, his vision of Laura in church “at the hour of prime,” which made him a poet. But for this, he might never have written in the vernacular. Cicero and Virgil, his literary idols, enjoined Latin composition, to which in all probability he would have exclusively addicted himself but for the need of celebrating Laura in a language which she understood.