Attempts have been made to demonstrate that in spite of his outward conformity Dante was an unbeliever at heart, and that the Comedy is devoted to the promulgation of a Ghibeline heresy—of which, we may be sure, no Ghibeline ever heard—and to the overthrow of all that the author professed most devoutly to believe.[130] Other critics of a more sober temper in speculation would find in him a Catholic who held the Catholic beliefs with the same slack grasp as the teaching of Luther was held by Lessing or Goethe.[131] But this is surely to misread the Comedy, which is steeped from beginning to end in a spirit of the warmest faith in the great Christian doctrines. It was no mere intellectual perception of these that Dante had—or professed to have—for when in Paradise he has satisfied Saint Peter of his being possessed of a just conception of the nature of faith, and is next asked if, besides knowing what is the alloy of the coin and the weight of it, he has it in his own purse, he answers boldly, ‘Yea, and so shining and round that of a surety it has the lawful stamp.’[132] And further on, when required to declare in what he believes, nothing against the fulness of his creed is to be inferred from the fact that he stops short after pronouncing his belief in the existence of God and in the Trinity. This article he gives as implying all the others; it is ‘the spark which spreads out into a vivid flame.’[133]
Yet if the inquiry were to be pushed further, and it were sought to find how much of free thought he allowed himself in matters of religion, Dante might be discovered to have reached his orthodox position by ways hateful to the bigots who then took order for preserving the purity of the faith. The office of the Pope he deeply revered, but the Papal absolution avails nothing in his eyes compared with one tear of heartfelt repentance.[134] It is not on the word of Pope or Council that he rests his faith, but on the Scriptures, and on the evidences of the truth of Christianity, freely examined and weighed.[135] Chief among these evidences, it must however be noted, he esteemed the fact of the existence of the Church as he found it;[136] and in his inquiries he accepted as guides the Scholastic Doctors on whose reasonings the Church had set its seal of approbation. It was a foregone conclusion he reached by stages of his own. Yet that he sympathised at least as much with the honest search for truth as with the arrogant profession of orthodoxy, is shown by his treatment of heretics. He could not condemn severely such as erred only because their reason would not consent to rest like his in the prevalent dogmatic system; and so we find that he makes heresy consist less in intellectual error than in beliefs that tend to vitiate conduct, or to cause schism in societies divinely constituted.[137] For his own part, orthodox although he was, or believed himself to be—which is all that needs to be contended for,—in no sense was he priest-ridden. It was liberty that he went seeking on his great journey;[138] and he gives no hint that it is to be gained by the observance of forms or in submission to sacerdotal authority. He knows it is in his reach only when he has been crowned, and mitred too, lord of himself[139]—subject to Him alone of whom even Popes were servants.[140]
Although in what were to prove his last months Dante might amuse himself with the composition of learned trifles, and in the society and correspondence of men who along with him, if on lines apart from his, were preparing the way for the revival of classical studies, the best part of his mind, then as for long before, was devoted to the Comedy; and he was counting on the suffrages of a wider audience than courts and universities could supply.
Here there is no room to treat at length of that work, to which when we turn our thoughts all else he wrote—though that was enough to secure him fame—seems to fall into the background as if unworthy of his genius. What can hardly be passed over in silence is that in the Comedy, once it was begun, he must have found a refuge for his soul from all petty cares, and a shield against all adverse fortune. We must search its pages, and not the meagre records of his biographers, to find what was the life he lived during the years of his exile; for, in a sense, it contains the true journal of his thoughts, of his hopes, and of his sorrows. The plan was laid wide enough to embrace the observations he made of nature and of man, the fruits of his painful studies, and the intelligence he gathered from those experienced in travel, politics, and war. It was not only his imagination and artistic skill that were spent upon the poem: he gave his life to it. The future reward he knew was sure—an immortal fame; but he hoped for a nearer profit on his venture. Florence might at last relent, if not because of his innocence and at the spectacle of his inconsolable exile, at least on hearing the rumour of his genius borne to her from every corner of Italy:—
To which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand—
Through which these many years I waste away—
Shall quell the cruelty that keeps me banned
From the fair fold where I, a lamb, was found
Hostile to wolves who ’gainst it violence planned;
With other fleece and voice of other sound,
Poet will I return, and at the font
Where I was christened be with laurel crowned.[141]
But with the completion of the Comedy Dante’s life too came to a close. He died at Ravenna in the month of September 1321.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Matilda died in 1115. The name Tessa, the contraction of Contessa, was still, long after her time, sometimes given to Florentine girls. See Perrens, Histoire de Florence, vol. i. p. 126.
[2] Whether by Matilda the great Countess is meant has been eagerly disputed, and many of the best critics—such as Witte and Scartazzini—prefer to find in her one of the ladies of the Vita Nuova. In spite of their pains it seems as if more can be said for the great Matilda than for any other. The one strong argument against her is, that while she died old, in the poem she appears as young.
[3] See note on Inferno xxx. 73.
[4] It might, perhaps, be more correct to say that to some offices the nobles were eligible, but did not elect.
[5] Inf. xiii. 75.
[6] Inf. x. 119.
[7] Inf. xxiii. 66.
[8] Inf. x. 51.
[9] Purg. vi. 144.
[10] Dante sets the Abbot among the traitors in Inferno, and says scornfully of him that his throat was cut at Florence (Inf. xxxii. 119).
[11] Villani throws doubt on the guilt of the Abbot. There were some cases of churchmen being Ghibelines, as for instance that of the Cardinal Ubaldini (Inf. x. 120). Twenty years before the Abbot’s death the General of the Franciscans had been jeered at in the streets of Florence for turning his coat and joining the Emperor. On the other hand, many civilians were to be found among the Guelfs.
[12] Manfred, says John Villani (Cronica, vi. 74 and 75), at first sent only a hundred men. Having by Farinata’s advice been filled with wine before a skirmish in which they were induced to engage, they were easily cut in pieces by the Florentines; and the royal standard was dragged in the dust. The truth of the story matters less than that it was believed in Florence.
[13] Provenzano is found by Dante in Purgatory, which he has been admitted to, in spite of his sins, because of his self-sacrificing devotion to a friend (Purg. xi. 121).
[14] For this good advice he gets a word of praise in Inferno (Inf. xvi. 42).
[15] These mercenaries, though called Germans, were of various races. There were even Greeks and Saracens among them. The mixture corresponded with the motley civilisation of Manfred’s court.
[16] Inf. xxxii. 79.
[17] Inf. x. 93.
[18] Lucera was a fortress which had been peopled with Saracens by Frederick.
[19] Manfred, Purg. iii. 112; Charles, Purg. vii. 113.
[20] Purg. xx. 67.
[21] Purg. iii. 122.
[22] For an account of the constitution and activity of the Parte Guelfa at a later period, see Perrens, Hist. de Florence, vol. iv. p. 482.
[23] Purg. xx. 68.
[24] Parad. xi. 89.
[25] Parad. xvi. 40, etc.
[26] Inf. xxix. 31.
[27] Inf. x. 42. Though Dante was descended from nobles, his rank in Florence was not that of a noble or magnate, but of a commoner.
[28] The month is indicated by Dante himself, Parad. xxii. 110. The year has recently been disputed. For 1265 we have J. Villani and the earliest biographers; and Dante’s own expression at the beginning of the Comedy is in favour of it.
[29] Inf. xxiii. 95.
[30] Inf. xix. 17; Parad. xxv. 9.
[31] Purg. xxx. 55.
[32] Inf. viii. 45, where Virgil says of Dante that blessed was she that bore him, can scarcely be regarded as an exception to this statement.
[33] In 1326, out of a population of ninety thousand, from eight to ten thousand children were being taught to read; and from five to six hundred were being taught grammar and logic in four high schools. There was not in Dante’s time, or till much later, a University in Florence. See J. Villani, xi. 94, and Burckhardt, Cultur der Renaissance, vol. i. p. 76.
[34] For an interesting account of Heresy in Florence from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, see Perrens, Hist. de Florence, vol. i. livre ii. chap. iii.
[35] It opens with Brunetto’s being lost in the forest of Roncesvalles, and there are some other features of resemblance—all on the surface—between his experience and Dante’s.
[36] G. Villani, viii. 10. Latini died in 1294. Villani gives the old scholar a very bad moral character.
[37] Inf. xv. 84.
[38] We may, I think, assume the Vita Nuova to have been published some time between 1291 and 1300; but the dates of Dante’s works are far from being ascertained.
[39] So long as even Italian critics are not agreed as to whether the title means New Life, or Youth, I suppose one is free to take his choice; and it seems most natural to regard it as referring to the new world into which the lover is transported by his passion.
[40] As, indeed, Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, expressly says was the case.
[41] In this adopting a device frequently used by the love-poets of the period.—Witte, Dante-Forschungen, vol. ii. p. 312.
[42] The Vita Nuova contains some thirty poems.
[43] See Sir Theodore Martin’s Introduction to his Translation of Vita Nuova, page xxi.
[44] In this matter we must not judge the conduct of Dante by English customs.
[45] Donne, ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore: Ladies that are acquainted well with love. Quoted in Purg. xxiv. 51.
[46] Beatrice died in June 1290, having been born in April 1266.
[47] Purg. xi. 98.
[48] Purg. xxiv. 52.
[49] The date of the Convito is still the subject of controversy, as is that of most of Dante’s works. But it certainly was composed between the Vita Nuova and the Comedy.
There is a remarkable sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti addressed to Dante, reproaching him for the deterioration in his thoughts and habits, and urging him to rid himself of the woman who has bred the trouble. This may refer to the time after the death of Beatrice. See also Purg. xxx. 124.
[50] Convito ii. 13.
[51] Some recent writers set his marriage five years later, and reduce the number of his children to three.
[52] His sister is probably meant by the ‘young and gentle lady, most nearly related to him by blood’ mentioned in the Vita Nuova.
[53] The difference between the Teutonic and Southern conception of marriage must be kept in mind.
[54] He describes the weather on the day of the battle with the exactness of one who had been there (Purg. v. 155).
[55] Leonardo Bruni.
[56] Inf. xxii. 4.
[57] Inf. xxi. 95.
[58] Conv. iii. 9, where he illustrates what he has to say about the nature of vision, by telling that for some time the stars, when he looked at them, seemed lost in a pearly haze.
[59] The Convito was to have consisted of fifteen books. Only four were written.
[60] Wife of Bath’s Tale. In the context he quotes Purg. vii. 121, and takes ideas from the Convito.
[61] Dies to sensual pleasure and is abstracted from all worldly affairs and interests. See Convito iv. 28.
[62] From the last canzone of the Convito.
[63] In the Vita Nuova.
[64] Purg. xxiii. 115, xxiv. 75; Parad. iii. 49.
[65] Purg. xi. 95.
[66] Purg. ii. 91.
[67] Purg. iv. 123.
[68] Sacchetti’s stories of how Dante showed displeasure with the blacksmith and the donkey-driver who murdered his canzoni are interesting only as showing what kind of legends about him were current in the streets of Florence.—Sacchetti, Novelle, cxiv, cxv.
[69] Purg. xii. 101.
[70] Purg. xi. 94:—
His own, but now on Giotto goes the cry,
Till by his fame the other’s is concealed.’
[71] Giotto is often said to have drawn inspiration from the Comedy; but that Dante, on his side, was indebted to the new school of painting and sculpture appears from many a passage of the Purgatorio.
[72] Serfage had been abolished in 1289. But doubt has been thrown on the authenticity of the deed of abolition. See Perrens, Hist. de Florence, vol. ii. p. 349.
[73] No unusual provision in the industrious Italian cities. Harsh though it may seem, it was probably regarded as a valuable concession to the nobles, for their disaffection appears to have been greatly caused by their uneasiness under disabilities. There is much obscurity on several points. How, for example, came the nobles to be allowed to retain the command of the vast resources of the Parte Guelfa? This made them almost independent of the Commonwealth.
[74] At a later period the Priors were known as the Signory.
[75] Fraticelli, Storia della Vita di Dante, page 112 and note.
[76] It is to be regretted that Ampère in his charming Voyage Dantesque devoted no chapter to San Gemigniano, than which no Tuscan city has more thoroughly preserved its mediæval character. There is no authority for the assertion that Dante was employed on several Florentine embassies. The tendency of his early biographers is to exaggerate his political importance and activity.
[77] Under the date of April 1301 Dante is deputed by the Road Committee to see to the widening, levelling, and general improvement of a street in the suburbs.—Witte, Dante-Forschungen, vol. ii. p. 279.
[78] Dante has a word of praise for Giano, at Parad. xvi. 127.
[79] At which Dante fought. See page lxii.
[80] Vieri was called Messer, a title reserved for magnates, knights, and lawyers of a certain rank—notaries and jurisconsults; Dante, for example, never gets it.
[81] Villani acted for some time as an agent abroad of the great business house of Peruzzi.
[82] Inf. iii. 60.
[83] He is ‘the Prince of the modern Pharisees’ (Inf. xxvii. 85); his place is ready for him in hell (Inf. xix. 53); and he is elsewhere frequently referred to. In one great passage Dante seems to relent towards him (Purg. xx. 86).
[84] Albert of Hapsburg was chosen Emperor in 1298, but was never crowned at Rome.
[85] As in the days of Guelf and Ghibeline, so now in those of Blacks and Whites, the common multitude of townsmen belonged to neither party.
[86] An interdict means that priests are to refuse sacred offices to all in the community, who are thus virtually subjected to the minor excommunication.
[87] Guido died soon after his return in 1301. He had suffered in health during his exile. See Inf. x. 63.
[88] Charles of Anjou had lost Sicily at the Sicilian Vespers, 1282.
[89] Purg. xx. 76.
[90] Witte attributes the composition of the De Monarchia to a period before 1301 (Dante-Forschungen, vol. i. Fourth Art.), but the general opinion of critics sets it much later.
[91] Inf. vi. 66, where their expulsion is prophesied.
[92] Dante’s authorship of the letter is now much questioned. The drift of recent inquiries has been rather to lessen than to swell the bulk of materials for his biography.
[93] Parad. xvii. 61.
[94] Purg. xxiv. 82.
[95] See at Purg. xx. 43 Dante’s invective against Philip and the Capets in general.
[96] Henry had come to Italy with the Pope’s approval. He was crowned by the Cardinals who were in Rome as Legates.
[97] Parad. xxx. 136. High in Heaven Dante sees an ample chair with a crown on it, and is told it is reserved for Henry. He is to sit among those who are clothed in white. The date assigned to the action of the Comedy, it will be remembered, is the year 1300.
[98] Inf. xix. 82, where the Gascon Clement is described as a ‘Lawless Pastor from the West.’
[99] The ingenious speculations of Troya (Del Veltro Allegorico di Dante) will always mark a stage in the history of the study of Dante, but as is often the case with books on the subject, his shows a considerable gap between the evidence adduced and the conclusions drawn from it. He would make Dante to have been for many years a satellite of the great Ghibeline chief. Dante’s temper or pride, however we call it, seems to have been such as to preserve him from ever remaining attached for long to any patron.
[100] Inf. x. 81.
[101] The Convito is in Italian, and his words are: ‘wherever this language is spoken.’
[102] His letter to the Florentines and that to the Emperor are dated in 1311, from ‘Near the sources of the Arno’—that is, from the Casentino, where the Guidi of Romena dwelt. If the letter of condolence with the Counts Oberto and Guido of Romena on the death of their uncle is genuine, it has great value for the passage in which he excuses himself for not having come to the funeral:—‘It was not negligence or ingratitude, but the poverty into which I am fallen by reason of my exile. This, like a cruel persecutor, holds me as in a prison-house where I have neither horse nor arms; and though I do all I can to free myself, I have failed as yet.’ The letter has no date. Like the other ten or twelve epistles attributed to Dante, it is in Latin.
[103] There is a splendid passage in praise of this family, Purg. viii. 121. A treaty is on record in which Dante acts as representative of the Malaspini in settling the terms of a peace between them and the Bishop of Luni in October 1306.
[104] The authority for this is Benvenuto of Imola in his comment on the Comedy (Purg. xi.). The portrait of Dante by Giotto, still in Florence, but ruined by modern bungling restoration, is usually believed to have been executed in 1301 or 1302. But with regard to this, see the note at the end of this essay.
[105] It is true that Villani not only says that ‘he went to study at Bologna,’ but also that ‘he went to Paris and many parts of the world’ (Cronica, ix. 136), and that Villani, of all contemporary or nearly contemporary writers, is by far the most worthy of credence. But he proves to be more than once in error regarding Dante; making him, e.g., die in a wrong month and be buried in a wrong church at Ravenna. And the ‘many parts of the world’ shows that here he is dealing in hearsay of the vaguest sort. Nor can much weight be given to Boccaccio when he sends Dante to Bologna and Paris. But Benvenuto of Imola, who lectured on the Comedy at Bologna within fifty years of Dante’s death, says that Dante studied there. It would indeed be strange if he did not, and at more than one period, Bologna being the University nearest Florence. Proof of Dante’s residence in Paris has been found in his familiar reference to the Rue du Fouarre (Parad. x. 137). His graphic description of the coast between Lerici and Turbia (Purg. iii. 49, iv. 25) certainly seems to show a familiarity with the Western as well as the Eastern Rivieras of Genoa. But it scarcely follows that he was on his way to Paris when he visited them.
[106] Inf. xiii. 58.
[107] ‘O ye, who have hitherto been following me in some small craft, ... put not further to sea, lest, losing sight of me, you lose yourselves’ (Parad. ii. 1). But, to tell the truth, Dante is never so weak as a poet as when he is most the philosopher or the theologian. The following list of books more or less known to him is not given as complete:—The Vulgate, beginning with St. Jerome’s Prologue; Aristotle, through the Latin translation then in vogue; Averroes, etc.; Thomas Aquinas and the other Schoolmen; much of the Civil and Canon law; Boethius; Homer only in scraps, through Aristotle, etc.; Virgil, Cicero in part, Livy, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Lucan, and Statius; the works of Brunetto Latini; the poetical literature of Provence, France, and Italy, including the Arthurian Romances—the favourite reading of the Italian nobles, and the tales of Charlemagne and his Peers—equally in favour with the common people. There is little reason to suppose that among the treatises of a scientific and quasi-scientific kind that he fell in with, and of which he was an eager student, were included the works of Roger Bacon. These there was a conspiracy among priests and schoolmen to keep buried. Dante seems to have set little store on ecclesiastical legends of wonder; at least he gives them a wide berth in his works.
[108] In the notes to Fraticelli’s Vita di Dante (Florence 1861) are given copies of documents relating to the property of the Alighieri, and of Dante in particular. In 1343 his son Jacopo, by payment of a small fine, recovered vineyards and farms that had been his father’s.—Notes to Chap. iii. Fraticelli’s admirable Life is now in many respects out of date. He accepts, e.g., Dino Compagni as an authority, and believes in the romantic story of the letter of Fra Ilario.
[109] The details are given by Witte, Dante-Forschungen, vol ii. p. 61. The amount borrowed by Dante and his brother (and a friend) comes to nearly a thousand gold florins. Witte takes this as equivalent to 37,000 francs, i.e. nearly £1500. But the florin being the eighth of an ounce, or about ten shillings’ worth of gold, a thousand florins would be equal only to £500—representing, of course, an immensely greater sum now-a-days.
[110] Purg. viii. 76.
[111] See in Scartazzini, Dante Alighieri, 1879, page 552, extract from the will of her mother Maria Donati, dated February 1314. Many of these Florentine dates are subject to correction, the year being usually counted from Lady-Day. ‘In 1880 a document was discovered which proves Gemma to have been engaged in a law-suit in 1332.—Il Propugnatore, xiii^a. 156,’—Scheffer-Boichorst, Aus Dantes Verbannung, page 213.
[112] Purg. xxiv. 37.
[113] Inf. xxi. 40.
[114] In questo mirifico poeta trovò ampissimo luego la lussuria; e non solamente ne’ giovanili anni, ma ancora ne’ maturi.—Boccaccio, La Vita di Dante. After mentioning that Dante was married, he indulges in a long invective against marriage; confessing, however, that he is ignorant of whether Dante experienced the miseries he describes. His conclusion on the subject is that philosophers should leave marriage to rich fools, to nobles, and to handicraftsmen.
[115] In Purgatory his conscience accuses him of pride, and he already seems to feel the weight of the grievous burden beneath which the proud bend as they purge themselves of their sin (Purg. xiii. 136). Some amount of self-accusation seems to be implied in such passages as Inf., v. 142 and Purg. xxvii. 15, etc.; but too much must not be made of it.
[116] In a letter of a few lines to one of the Marquises Malaspina, written probably in the earlier years of his exile, he tells how his purpose of renouncing ladies’ society and the writing of love-songs had been upset by the view of a lady of marvellous beauty who ‘in all respects answered to his tastes, habits, and circumstances.’ He says he sends with the letter a poem containing a fuller account of his subjection to this new passion. The poem is not found attached to the copy of the letter, but with good reason it is guessed to be the Canzone beginning Amor, dacchè convien, which describes how he was overmastered by a passion born ‘in the heart of the mountains in the valley of that river beside which he had always been the victim of love.’ This points to the Casentino as the scene. He also calls the Canzone his ‘mountain song.’ The passion it expresses may be real, but that he makes the most of it appears from the close, which is occupied by the thought of how the verses will be taken in Florence.
[117] However early the De Monarchia may have been written, it is difficult to think that it can be of a later date than the death of Henry.
[118] The De Vulgari Eloquio is in Latin. Dante’s own Italian is richer and more elastic than that of contemporary writers. Its base is the Tuscan dialect, as refined by the example of the Sicilian poets. His Latin, on the contrary, is I believe regarded as being somewhat barbarous, even for the period.
[119] In his Quæstio de Aqua et Terra. In it he speaks of having been in Mantua. The thesis was maintained in Verona, but of course he may, after a prolonged absence, have returned to that city.
[120] Parad. xvii. 70.
[121] Purg. xviii. 121.
[122] But in urgent need of more of it.—He says of ‘the sublime Cantica, adorned with the title of the Paradiso’, that ‘illam sub præsenti epistola, tamquam sub epigrammate proprio dedicatam, vobis adscribo, vobis offero, vobis denique recommendo.’ But it may be questioned if this involves that the Cantica was already finished.
[123] As, for instance, Herr Scheffer-Boichorst in his Aus Dantes Verbannung, 1882.
[124] The Traversari (Purg. xiv. 107). Guido’s wife was of the Bagnacavalli (Purg. xiv. 115). The only mention of the Polenta family, apart from that of Francesca, is at Inf. xxvii. 41.
[125] In 1350 a sum of ten gold florins was sent from Florence by the hands of Boccaccio to Beatrice, daughter of Dante; she being then a nun at Ravenna.
[126] The embassy to Venice is mentioned by Villani, and there was a treaty concluded in 1321 between the Republic and Guido. But Dante’s name does not appear in it among those of the envoys from Ravenna. A letter, probably apocryphal, to Guido from Dante in Venice is dated 1314. If Dante, as is maintained by some writers, was engaged in tuition while in Ravenna, it is to be feared that his pupils would find in him an impatient master.
[127] Not that Dante ever mentions these any more than a hundred other churches in which he must have spent thoughtful hours.
[128] Purg. xxviii. 20.
[129] A certain Cecco d’Ascoli stuck to him like a bur, charging him, among other things, with lust, and a want of religious faith which would one day secure him a place in his own Inferno. Cecco was himself burned in Florence, in 1327, for making too much of evil spirits, and holding that human actions are necessarily affected by the position of the stars. He had been at one time a professor of astronomy.
[130] Gabriel Rossetti, Comment on the Divina Commedia, 1826, and Aroux, Dante, Hérétique, Révolutionnaire et Socialiste, 1854.
[131] Scartazzini, Dante Alighieri, Seine Zeit, etc., 1879, page 268.
[132] Parad. xxiv. 86.
[133] Parad. xxiv. 145.
[134] Inf. xxvii. 101; Purg. iii. 118.
[135] Parad. xxiv. 91.
[136] Parad. xxiv. 106.
[137] Inf. x. and xxviii. There is no place in Purgatory where those who in their lives had once held heretical opinions are purified of the sin; leaving us to infer that it could be repented of in the world so as to obliterate the stain. See also Parad. iv. 67.
[138] Purg. i. 71.
[139] Purg. xxvii. 139.
[140] Purg. xix. 134.
[141] Parad. xxv. 1.