Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in the year 1265, and received in baptism the name of Durante, which was shortened to that of Dante. Early in his youth an event happened which determined his life, and to which posterity is indebted for his great work. In the year 1274, in the ninth year of his age, Dante saw, at a church festival, the daughter of Falco Portinari, Beatrice, a child eight years old, whom he says, in one of his poems, no one could see without crying out, "This is not a woman, but one of the most beautiful of the heavenly angels!" He conceived for her, on the spot, the most violent passion, but, at the same time, one so pure and holy that Beatrice, even on earth and wedded to another, became for him and his muse a perfect ideal that inspired all his first and tenderest poems, and moved him to high and holy thoughts. But after Beatrice's untimely death, she became, in the imagination of the poet, a holy spirit, whose glory he undertook to exalt after a wonderful vision which he had, and who became, in all the sorrows of his life, a star of hope and anchor of safety to him. A few years after the decease of his beloved, Dante espoused Gemma di Donati, a lady of a noble family in Florence, and through this marriage, as well as by his profound theological and philosophical studies, he was drawn into the vortex of the politics of his native city, in which, after many struggles, the Guelph party gained the ascendency, toward the end of the thirteenth century.
Sprung from a Guelph family and surrounded by Guelph influences, and prominent by his genius in the party, although keeping clear of its excesses, Dante, from 1293 to 1299, filled many posts of honor, especially many places of ambassador, and was elected, with five others, in the year 1300, to the priorate, the highest office in the republic. But soon after his prosperous career was changed to one of misfortune. In 1292 a division was made in the Guelph party, when, under the tribune Giano della Bella, the constitution of the state was changed, the nobles driven from the magistracy, and the government of the city given entirely into the hands of the plebeians; and this division led gradually to an open rupture between the parties called the Blacks and the Whites "Neri" and "Bianchi." The latter were by far the more moderate, and the Ghibellines, both nobles and plebeians, joined them. Dante belonged to the Whites, who stood at the head of affairs. But by the interference of Charles of Valois, whom the Blacks called to Florence in order to seize the government with his aid, the Whites lost their power, and Dante, who was then on an embassy to Rome, together with the other chiefs of the party, was exiled by a decree, which was repealed in the year 1302.
This trial was important in two ways to our poet. It excited his hatred against one party of the Guelphs, and then against them all; and evoked his inclination for the Ghibellines and his dislike toward the popes, who gave assistance to the Guelph party, and finally made him a strong partisan of the Ghibellines and their operations against Florence, and of the empire against the papacy. On the other hand, he became, by his misfortunes, more devoted to virtue, his studies, and his poem, from the prosecution of which he had been distracted by political cares; so that the whole history of his exile is nothing else than the history of his scientific life and the execution of the Divine Comedy. After having wandered from city to city, from country to country, to Verona, Bologna, Padua, Paris, and England, and dwelt for a time in Pisa, and in [{277}] Lucca at the monastery of Fonteavelluna and in Udine, and after having finished his great works—"The Banquet," "De Vulgari Eloquio," "De Monarchia"—and the three parts of his great poem, he rested at last in Ravenna, where, in the year 1321, he fell sick and died, in the 56th year of his age, after having received, as Boccacio tells us, the last sacraments with humility and piety, and become reconciled to God by true repentance for all he had done contrary to his holy will. The poet was buried in the Franciscan church, where his ashes still repose.
This sketch of his life and fortunes gives us the key to the solution of many peculiarities of the Divine Comedy. We can now understand why politics play so conspicuous a rôle in the great poem, in spite of its higher philosophico-theological and ethical scope; and why some should have considered the work as of a purely political character. This sketch of his life also shows the partial truth contained in the assertion of Wegele, a German commentator on Dante. This writer says the leading thought of the poet was to work out his own salvation by considering the state of the world at his time; and in fact Dante found consolation and strength against earthly misfortune, found the way of virtue and eternal salvation, in the execution of his poem. For similar reasons, others considered the poem as purely didactic, and this view has a foundation in the confession of the poet himself.
But above all, the life of Dante explains his ideas about the relations between the papacy and the empire, expressed not only in his book on monarchy, but also in the Divine Comedy; and his strange judgments about persons and circumstances, especially of his own age. It is true Dante never for a moment disputes the primacy and divine appointment of the popes in the Church; and even in hell he describes those pontiffs whom he condemns to it as having certain distinctions. He maintains in the clearest manner the freedom and independence of the divine power in regard to the secular, and acknowledges a certain superiority in the former, for he requires that Caesar should have that reverence for Peter which the first-born son should have to his father, so that Caesar, illuminated by the light of paternal grace, might shine more brilliantly over the earth. But as Dante was possessed with the Ghibelline idea, and as he saw in the temporal power of the popes, who were the head of the Guelph party, the greatest obstacle to the success of his principles, we must not be surprised to find him the enemy of the pope's temporal power, and, in his judgment of men and things, to see him frequently led away by party rage and revenge for injuries received.
Dante, however, was noble and Christian enough to keep his eyes open even to the faults of his own party, and he spared not even the heads of the Ghibellines, as Frederic II. and other noble and popular persons, if they seemed to him deserving of blame. Nor must we imagine that Dante really thought all those were in hell whom he places there, any more than he thought the real pains of hell were such as he described them: only the vulgar could believe this. Those persons were only such as in his eyes were guilty of mortal sins; and the punishments inflicted were such as his fancy conceived to be adequate to the guilt. But we must bear in mind that his judgments must always be received with caution when there is question of facts, persons, and circumstances connected with the opposite party; and we have the right to examine and correct the criticisms of Dante by the light of history. Dante, for instance, goes so far as to put in hell even Pope Celestine, who, after governing the Church for six months, tired of the tiara, went into solitude; because, in the opinion of the poet, Celestine renounced the pontificate through timidity and weakness, and made way [{278}] for the hated Boniface, VIII. The Church, on the contrary, puts Celestine among the saints on account of his extraordinary virtues.
But let us now turn from the dark side of the picture, and from the weakness of the great man, to take a view of the fortunes of the Commedia in the course of six centuries. We have already in the beginning of this essay spoken of the great number of editions, translations, and commentaries on the great work, and in this respect no other work can compare with it except the Holy Scripture and the Following of Christ. But these proofs of admiration and study of the Divine Comedy are not equally divided among the centuries, and the recent and renowned writer of Dante's life, Count Caesar Balbo, justly remarks that, at those periods in which an earnest religious and truly patriotic feeling pervaded the fatherland of the poet and Christian Europe in general, those proofs are to be found in greater number than when the knowledge and study of supreme truth had grown less, love of religion and country had died or gone astray, and the minds of men sunk in the earthly and the sensible. Thus, in the fifteenth century, after the invention of the art of printing, nineteen or twenty editions of Dante appeared; in the sixteenth century, forty; in the seventeenth, only three; in the eighteenth, thirty-four; in the nineteenth, up to 1839, over seventy, and perhaps up to the present year one hundred. This is a striking proof of the increasing love of the spiritual in our century, in spite of the great influence of materialism.
But in this age of surprises and contradictions, a new glory of which he had never dreamt has been added to Dante's name. For some time in Italy that political party which aims at the subversion of the existing order of things, and the establishment of a single republic or monarchy, and which finds in the papacy or States of the Church the principal obstacle to the carrying out of its plans, has made use of commentaries on the Divine Comedy, among other means, to spread its principles among the people. Hence, two Italian refugees, Ugo Foscolo and Rosetti, during their sojourn in England, undertook the dreary task of explaining Dante's poem in a purely political point of view, and with learning and wit they have attempted to prove that the poet was opposed to the temporal power of the pope, and the head, or at least a member, of a secret society.
In Italy, however, and in Germany, especially by the great critic, Schlegel, this theory has been refuted. It falls to the ground by the simple consideration of the fact, that if the Divine Comedy was as clear in every point as where he speaks against the popes of his time and their earthly possessions, no commentary on the poem would be necessary. Yet, no sooner was war against Rome proclaimed at Paris and Turin, than recourse was had to Dante, and an attempt made to conjure up his spirit as a partisan in the fight. Rosetti already occupies a chair in the Sardinian capital, from which he expounds Dante in the interest of Italian unity, and in Germany the secret societies applaud his course; so that, if in 1865 there be in Italy a celebration of Dante's six hundredth birthday, as in Germany there is of Schiller, we may expect to find the politicians make use of it to further their ends.
So then we have lived to see the day when Dante, the Ghibelline and fanatical adherent of the German empire; who was opposed to the temporal power of the pope only because it stood in the way of a universal secular monarchy; who invoked the wrath of heaven on the German Albert because he delayed coming to subjugate Italy; and who wrote the famous letter to the Emperor Henry VII., inviting him to come and chastise his native city; when that Dante, I say, has become the herald and standard-bearer of a party which calls itself the old national Guelph party, whose [{279}] watch-word is "Death to the Germans and foreign rulers," and which, like the ancient Guelphs, is aided by French soldiers in its struggle against the German emperors.