and the dawn after the dark ages

all scholars are agreed as to the classes of men who build the state. there are the soldiers who keep the state in liberty, the physicians who keep the state in health, the teachers who sow the land with wisdom and knowledge, the farmers and merchants who feed and clothe the people, the prophets who keep the visions burning, and the poets who inspire and fertilize the soul of the race. but in every age and clime, the poet has been the real builder of his city and country. the only kind of work that lives forever is the work of the poet. parthenons and cathedrals crumble, tools rust, bridges decay, bronzes melt, but the truth, put in artistic work, survives war, flood, fire, and the tooth of time itself. "the poet's power," said george william curtis, "is not dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like that of the statesman, the warrior and the inventor. but it is as deep and as strong and abiding. the soldier fights for his native land, but the poet[pg 10] makes it worth fighting for. the statesman enlarges liberty, but the poet fosters that love in the heart of the citizen. the inventor multiplies the conveniences of life, but the poet makes the life itself worth living. we cannot find out the secret of his power. until we know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity. but we know that the poet is the harmonizer, strengthener and consoler, and that the inexpressible mystery of divine love and purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem."

by common consent the three great poets of the world are homer, dante and shakespeare; and of the three, the two supreme names are dante and shakespeare. after six centuries, what hallam said nearly a hundred years ago still holds true: "dante's orbit is his own, and the track of his wheels can never be confounded with that of any rival." dante was the greatest man of his country, he wrote the greatest book of his era, he started the greatest intellectual movement of any age or time. the influence of his thinking upon the people of italy, the italy of his own day and of succeeding generations, is one of the marvels of history. he was the interpreter[pg 11] of his age to itself; but he was also the interpreter of man to all ages. some names there are whose light shines brightly for a brief time, after the fashion of the falling stars, but dante's emblem is the sun, whose going forth is unto the ends of the earth, and whose shining brings universal summer.

dante has been well-called the "morning star of the renaissance." he was born at the end of, perhaps, the darkest period in history,—the five black centuries succeeding the fall of rome; he lived to see the first fruits of his own sowing—that wonderful rebirth of art and culture which was to culminate, two hundred years later, in the canvases of raphael and the sculptures of michael angelo. it has been beautifully said that before singing his song dante had to invent his harp. no graceful phrase ever had a sounder kernel of truth. great poets are more than great artists in language; they create languages, and dante, like his two great compeers, homer and shakespeare, moulded and shaped the tongue for future generations. he began his career at a moment when the latin tongue was dying and the italian language was still waiting to be born. he took the vulgar speech of his own day and gave it colour and richness, form and substance, eternal dignity and beauty.[pg 12] what homer did for the greek language, what king alfred's bible did for english literature, that, and more, did dante for the italian tongue. the influence of his thinking upon the people of italy is indicated by the fact that the divine comedy was printed three times in the one year of 1472, nine times before the fifteenth century ended, and, to-day, there are literally thousands of volumes in the libraries of the world upon dante and his poems. with loving extravagance d'annunzio said at the great celebration held last year in italy: "single-handed dante created italy, as michael angelo by sheer force of genius created his moses, and made it the supreme marble in history."

no one has ever been able to define genius, though many scholars have told us what genius is not. many men in the english lecture halls and universities had talent, but that stablekeeper's son, john keats, had genius. more than one of the four hundred members of the house of lords during charles the second's reign had talent, but a poor tinker, john bunyan, had genius, that blazed like the sun. there were multitudes of men living in the thirteen colonies, and many of them rich, but that poor boy flying a kite, benjamin franklin, had the divine gift. not otherwise,[pg 13] many men living in florence at the end of the thirteenth century had talent, but dante alighieri had the gift, and he towered above his fellows as monte rosa towers above the burning plains of italy. strictly speaking, dante's gift was not that of the poet alone. he was a moralist as well as a poet—above all others, the singer of man's soul. he believed himself to be ordained of god to explain the moral order of the universe, man's share in that order, his duty and his destiny. blind homer gave us the immortal iliad and odyssey, but homer was a poet, not a teacher, and if there are lessons in the story of achilles and ulysses we have to learn those lessons for ourselves. shakespeare, the organ-voice of england, gave us lear and hamlet, othello and macbeth, but shakespeare was a poet, not a teacher, and macbeth's sin, written though it is in letters of fire, is nevertheless accompanied by no comments of the author. not so with the immortal comedy of dante. for dante was a teacher first, and a poet afterward. without the brilliancy of intellect or the compass of achievements that were shakespeare's, without the directness or the simplicity of homer, he was more serious than either. he had the passion of a reformer, the fiery courage of a prophet. he poured his[pg 14] very heart's blood into his pages. hating oppression, he was like one specially raised up to point the path to peace, and to vindicate the ways of god to man.

the great thinker was born in florence in the year 1265. his era was the era of the dark ages; his century one of the submerged centuries. for five hundred years black darkness had lain upon the world. it was an era of war, when barons were constantly at strife. feudalism was entrenched behind stone walls, the landowners were masters, and the serfs were slaves. every road was infested with bandits. there was no shipping upon the mediterranean. the mariner's compass had not yet been invented. commerce was scant and factories almost unknown. men lived, for the most part, on coarse bread and vegetables, without luxuries, and without what we call the simplest necessities. the common people were huddled in miserable villages, behind stone walls, with unpaved streets and windowless houses, in which ignorance, filth, squalor, and bestiality prevailed. peasants wore the same leather garments for a lifetime. the dead were buried under the churches. prisoners rotted in dungeons under the banqueting hall of the castle. two hundred years were to pass before columbus set foot[pg 15] upon the deck of the santa maria. two hundred and fifty years were to pass before michael angelo could lift the dome above st. peter's. but if the peasant was ignorant, and the poor man wretched, the nobleman and courtier was the child of luxury and gilded vice. it was an age of contrasts so violent as to be all but incredible to the modern reader. there were no books, for the art of printing was still to be invented, yet in an age of parchment manuscripts young noblemen were taught to speak in verse and to write in rhymed pentameters. there was no science of geography and the world was believed to be a flat board with a fence around it. yet in this era, when few men could spell and fewer read, the very monks in the monasteries were writing theses on problems so abstract as to weary the modern scholar. for five hundred years the world had looked to the church, but the church had descended to the perpetration of crimes so terrible, that their mere chronicle sickens the heart and chills the blood.

into this world of paradox and contradiction—a world of gloom, shot through with fitful gleams of superstition—was born dante, the poet of love and hope and divine regeneration. we know little of dante's parentage, as we know all too little of his life, but this much[pg 16] we do know—the family was the noble family of the alighieri, followers and supporters of the party then in power in florence. dante was educated by his mother, and by his mother's relative, the scholar-poet brunetto latini. like john stuart mill he was a mental prodigy from infancy. like milton he was trained in the strictest academical education which the age afforded. like bacon he was a universal scholar before he passed out of his teens. like pope he thought and wrote in verse before he could write in prose. among his friends and intimates were the poets guido cavalcanti and cino da pistoria, dino frescobaldi and lapo guianni, the musician casella and the artist giotto. with such companions and under such guidance, dante mastered all the sciences of the day at a time when it was not impossible to know all that could be known.

but dreamer and student though he was, he early insisted upon sharing the burdens of the state. on two occasions he bore arms for his country. while still in his twenties he was offered the post of ambassador to rome; before he was thirty he had represented his native city at foreign courts, and from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth year his voice was heard with growing frequency in municipal[pg 17] affairs. in the summer of the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years of age, he was chosen as one of the priors, or magistrates, of florence.

the opening year of the new century—the year in which giotto was meditating his immortal duomo, with its famous tower—was ushered in by a civic revolution in florence. dante, with other innocent citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. a statesman, he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a man of property, he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of men, he was forced to humble himself and live on foreign alms. inspired by the noblest intentions, the world gave him no thanks, but drove him forth like a wild beast, branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to wander over the hills of italy till death at last gave him release. he never saw florence again. for years he knew poverty, neglect and hatred. sick with the noise of political dissension, he strained his eyes toward the hills for the appearance of a universal monarch; but the vision was never realized. we know but little of his wanderings. many cities and castles have claimed the honour of giving him shelter; we know only that in old age he was compelled to "climb the stranger's[pg 18] toilsome stairs, and eat the bitter bread of others."

such, briefly sketched, is the life-history of this man who has been called "the voice of ten silent centuries." in an era of luxury he had lived simply and frugally; in an era of debate and publicity, he had preferred seclusion; drawn at last into public life by his own sense of duty, he had been driven forth into exile, to die alone in a foreign city. it is the greatness of dante that, in spite of defeat and disappointment, in spite of every form of hardship, in the face of every conceivable form of adversity, he went on with his work and completed his masterpiece, the greatest achievement in the whole history of italian literature. out of his own heart-break he distilled hope and encouragement for others and from the broken harmonies of his own life he created a world-symphony.

the best-loved books in our libraries are books of heroism, books of eloquence, books of success, and books of love. it is a matter of misfortune that no history of human love has ever been written. scholars have set forth the history of wars, the history of engines and ships, the history of laws and reforms, but no library holds a history of the greatest gift of man, the gift of love. that is the one creative[pg 19] gift that belongs to his soul. beyond all other writers, the author of the divine comedy is the poet of love. love was the inspiration of his youth, the beacon of his middle life and the transfiguring glory of his old age. all his poems are monuments to the abiding and ennobling power of a pure passion. his love for beatrice has fascinated the generations, and remains to-day one of the few immortal love stories of the world, as moving as the romance of abelard and héloise, and infinitely more exalting. no understanding of his poems is possible without a knowledge of that love and its tremendous influence upon his life and work.

beatrice portinari, the object of dante's devotion, was the daughter of a merchant, living in a street not far from his father's house. dante saw her but a few times, and she died when he was twenty-seven, but from the moment when, on that bright spring morning, he first viewed her lovely face, his whole heart and mind were kindled. "she appeared to me," he writes, "at a festival, dressed in that most noble and honourable colour, scarlet—girden and ornamented in a manner suitable to her age, and from that moment love ruled my soul. after many days had passed, it happened that passing through the streets,[pg 20] she turned her eyes to the spot where i stood, and with ineffable courtesy, she greeted me, and this had such an effect on me that it seemed i had reached the furthest limit of blessedness." he describes but three other meetings. while he was absent from the city—probably during one of the two campaigns in which he fought—her father gave her in marriage to another man. she was only twenty-four when she died.

no one will ever know whether beatrice was indeed the loveliest girl in italy; whether she really was the daughter of intellect, or whether the greatness was in dante, who projected the image of beauty, created by his imagination and superimposed upon beatrice. we all know that it is within the power of the sun in the late afternoon to cast the brilliant hues of gold and purple upon the vine and transform slender tendrils into purest gold. dante had a powerful intellect, the finest imagination of any known artist, vast moral endowments—gifts, however, that in themselves are impotent. the sailing vessel, no matter how large the sails, is helpless until the winds fill the canvas, and hurl the cargo toward some far-off port. just as abelard waited for the coming of héloise; just as robert browning's soul was never properly[pg 21] enkindled before the coming of elizabeth barrett, so the intellect of dante waited for beatrice. the quality and quantity of flame in the fireplace is not determined by the size of the match that kindles the fire, but by the quality of fuel that waits for the spark. the strength and power of dante's attachment was in the vast endowments of his soul, and not in beatrice. it may well be that thirty years later, dante, who realized that he was the strongest man then living in the world and who was at once a scholar, a statesman and a soldier, during the solitude of his exile in a distant city turned his mind backward and broke the alabaster box of genius upon the head of a commonplace girl, just as raphael lent the beauty of st. cecilia to the face and figure of a flower-woman, a girl whose face and figure furnished the outlines for his drawing, but held no part of the divine, ineffable and dazzling loveliness of an angel.

whatever the truth—and there is little chance that we shall ever know the truth—this much is certain: dante's earliest long poem, the famous "vita nuova" (new life) celebrates his love for beatrice, and is nothing more than a journal of the heart, a secret diary of his emotions. the vita nuova is as far removed from the modern sentimental love[pg 22] tale as june is removed from some almanac prepared a year in advance of the weather changes predicted. it records dante's first glimpse of beatrice, the adoration she awakened in him, and the fervour of devotion to which she lifted him; it describes his premonition of her death, and it ends with his resolve to devote his remaining years to her memory. the last chapter of the book looks forward to the divine comedy. about a year after beatrice's death, he writes: "it was given me to behold a wonderful vision, wherein i saw things which determined me to say nothing further of this blessed one unto such time as i could discourse more worthily concerning her. and to this end i labour all i can, as she in truth knoweth. therefore if it be his pleasure through whom is the life of all things that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that i shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman." completed years later, the immortal comedy exists to-day as the most wonderful tribute to a woman ever penned by any poet.

in a mood of lofty pride, dante placed himself among the six great poets of all time. to-day, all scholars applaud the accuracy and humility of his judgment. every strong man[pg 23] knows what he can do. he is conscious of his own vast reserves. so often has he measured himself with his fellow-men that he realizes the number, the magnitude and relative strength of his divine endowments. all men of the first order of genius have realized the endowment they have received from god and their fathers. and the divine comedy justifies dante's pride in his own powers. it cannot be classified with a phrase nor dismissed with a label. it is not a poem, like one of tennyson's idylls of the king; it is rather an encyclopedia upon italy. it is at one and the same moment an autobiography, a series of personal reminiscences, a philosophy, an oration and the spiritual pilgrimage of a thirteenth century childe harold, with here and there a lyric poem. the motive which inspired dante was his sense of the wretchedness of man in this mortal life. the only means of rescue from this wretchedness he conceived to be the exercise of reason, enlightened by god. to convince man of this truth, to bring home to him the conviction of the eternal consequences of his conduct in this world, to show him the path of salvation, was dante's aim. to lend force and beauty to such a design he conceived the poem as an allegory, and made himself to be its protagonist. he depicts a vision, in[pg 24] which the poet is conducted first by virgil, as the representative of human reason, through hell and purgatory, and then by beatrice, as the representative of divine revelation, through paradise to the heaven, where at last he beholds the triune god.

the action of the divine comedy opens in the early morning of the thursday before easter in the year 1300. dante dreams that he had "reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an obscure forest." he would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of the world—cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. then the shade of virgil appears, representing the intellect and conscience, glorified—to serve as his guide in the long wanderings through the inferno. virgil tells him he can accompany him only through hell and purgatory, but that beatrice shall conduct him through those happy spheres, the portals of which a pagan may not enter. so begins that wondrous journey through the regions of the damned, over the entrance of which is written the awful words: "all hope abandon ye who enter here." the world through which the two poets journey is peopled, not with characters of heroic story, but with men[pg 25] and women known personally or by repute to dante. popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors, florentine citizens of all degrees are there, "some doomed to hopeless punishment, others expiating their offenses in milder torments and looking forward to deliverance in due time." hell is conceived as a vast conical hollow, reaching to the center of the earth. it has three great divisions, corresponding to aristotle's three classes of vice, incontinence, brutishness and malice. the sinners, by malice, are divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. they lie at the bottom of a pit, with vertical sides, and accessible only by supernatural means; a monster named geryon bears the poets down on his back. at the very bottom of the pit is lucifer, immovably fixed in ice. and climbing down his limbs, the travellers reach the center of the earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, which they reach as easter day is dawning.

purgatory is conceived as a mountain, rising solitary from the ocean on that side of the earth that is opposite to ours. it is divided into terraces and its top is the terrestrial paradise, the first abode of man. the seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, which encircle the mountain and are reached[pg 26] by a series of steep climbs, compared by dante to the path from florence to samminiato. the penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or endurance; and in several cases dante has to bear a share in them as he passes. at one point, the poet hesitates when he comes to a path filled with a sheet of flame; but virgil speaks: "between beatrice and thee there is but that wall." dante at once plunges into the heart of the flames. on the summit of the mountain is the earthly paradise, "a scene of unsurpassed magnificence," where beatrice, representing divine knowledge, divine love and purity, is waiting to lead the wanderer through the nine spheres of the old ptolemaic system to the very throne of god.

such is the general scheme of the poem, in which dante's conception of the universe is depicted in scenes of intense vividness and dramatic force. it embraces the whole field of human experience. its aim is "not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, to form men's characters" by teaching them what courses of life will meet reward, what with penalty hereafter; to "put into verse," as the poet says, "things difficult to think." the title given it is often misunderstood. the men of the middle ages gave the name[pg 27] "tragedy" to every poem that ended sadly, and the name "comedy" to every tale that ended happily. there are no traces of wit and humour in this book with its descriptions of the cleansing pains of purgatory and the highest reaches of paradise. men who have little imagination seem quite unable to transport themselves back into the life and thought of the thirteenth century. even voltaire calls dante a savage, and goethe, who blundered often in his judgments of men and books, and often had to reverse himself, thought dante's work "dull and unreadable." but that reader who supposes that dante is giving a literal description of the physical torments of hell, or imagines that michael angelo, in his last judgment, was portraying his own literal belief, will find nothing inspiring in this wonderful book.

during the last six centuries the thinking of the world has changed. physical pain has assumed new importance. no man living to-day has ever witnessed a brother man sentenced by a court to be burned alive, or later on, has been tried himself, and upon a false charge sentenced to death by flame. we stand aghast at dante's miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, lakes of pitch and pools of blood, a physical hell of utter and[pg 28] unspeakable dreariness and despair. but dante's was an era of outbreaking and almost universal physical cruelty; sinners and criminals could not be reached by argument, for they could not think; there was but one way to approach animal man, and that was from the animal side. through fear, dante endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. he appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience, sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. for their allurement also he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers blooming in the fields of paradise. he used his unrivalled genius to make vice and sin revolting and infinitely repulsive, just as he tried to make truth, kindness and justice alluring.

this volume, therefore, represents "the life history of a human soul redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and mammon, and restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable him to see things as they are." dante's conception is that "penalty is the same thing as sin, only it is sin taken at a later period of its history and a little lower down the stream." it is in life, here and now, that men's hands are fouled[pg 29] with the pits of greed; their tongues tipped with envenomed hate; their hearts steeped in crimson ooze. it is here and now that materialists "load themselves down with sacks of yellow clay," that misers plunge into "the boiling pitch of avarice." the genius of the inferno is that sins are seeds, big with the harvest of their own penalty.

our age makes little of the purgatory itself—this realm which dante describes as the place where the human soul is cleansed and made worthy to ascend to heaven. it is described as a kind of vestibule of paradise, where the soul fronts the results of wrong-doing, through the debt of penalty and the evil inclination of the will, and the instincts that have been perverted. the sins of which men are cleansed are the sins against love and pride, envy and anger; the sins of the body, avarice and gluttony and passion. the angels that cleanse are the angels of forgiveness and peace. on that island of cleansing virgil and dante land, and place their hands upon the ground and bathe in dew their tear-stained cheeks. but climbing up the steep way of penitence is like climbing up a craggy mountainside, toiling on hands and knees, with tire that almost brings despair; and yet the higher dante climbs the easier the task. just as in[pg 30] the inferno, dante placed certain well-known figures—judas iscariot, who for avarice betrayed his lord, and alberigo who with horrible treachery murdered his own guests at a banquet, and that "youth who made the great refusal"; so in the purgatory he shows us many men known to history who have stumbled here and there and are breast-buried in the rubbish of the world, to whom comes some angel bringing release, and whispering "loose him, and let him go."

when he approaches the confines of paradise and sees from afar the glorified form of beatrice, dante asks that god may become to his soul like a refiner's fire and cleanse away any stain or dross of sin. gladly he enters that healing flame, guided by a sweet voice, which sang, "come, ye blessed of my father;" but, says dante, "when i was within i would have flung myself into molten glass to cool myself, so immeasurable was the burning there." then, broken down with utter remorse, he falls in a swoon; but he is plunged in the waters of forgetfulness and refreshed, like young plants; re-clad as if by the angel of spring, he issues from the wave, pure and true, ready to mount to the stars beyond.

strangely enough, this book, the inferno, is the most widely read. the purgatory is less[pg 31] frequently opened, while men value least of all the paradise of dante. doubtless the reason is that experience has brought familiarity with sin, so that all men understand its penalties, and at the selfsame time know something of penitence and of pardon, while the nature of that realm of perfect happiness, righteousness and peace is beyond human experience. but if any man was ever purified by suffering and earned the right to trust his visions and surrender himself to the pictures that noble imagination painted, that man was dante. on the side of culture the measure of education of any man is his knowledge of shakespeare. on the side of imagination and of pure and tender goodness, a man is a man just in proportion as he knows his dante. james russell lowell's supreme essay was his essay on dante, and he tells us that the great italian "wrote with his heart's blood, like an inspired prophet of old." 'midst all his poverty, exile and grief, he rose triumphant over sorrow and neglect. he never lost his confidence in the ultimate victory of right and truth. hating oppression, he struggled as a prophet of liberty. offered an invitation to return to his native city, on the condition that he would humiliate himself by confessing that he had done a wrong, he accepted an exile's[pg 32] death rather than be faithless to his great convictions. climbing the stairs of other men's houses, he salted his bread with his own tears.

an old man at fifty-six, his last days were spent in ravenna, in the house of a noble duke, who recognized in dante the greatest man of his time. long afterward, byron sought out the house where dante died, and falling upon his knees, beat upon his breast and wept, at the recollection of the sorrows that overwhelmed the master of them all. just as bunyan was rewarded for the second book in english literature by twelve years in bedford jail, so dante, as a reward for writing the greatest book in italian literature, was exiled from his home and city, pursued by spies, hunted over the hills with hounds, made to conceal himself in dens and caves of the earth, and brought to an untimely death. dying, dante might have used the words which, later, fell from the lips of bacon, "i leave my name and fame to foreign lands, and to my own country when long time has passed." let us believe that after having lived for fifty-six years in at once an inferno and a purgatory, at last dante, the prisoner, was redeemed out of his dungeon, the exile out of his loneliness, the fugitive out of his rags and crusts, and the cave wherein he was hiding[pg 33] from his pursuers; that the man who for years held heart-break at bay at last was brought in out of the night, the fire-mist and the hail, into the imperial palaces of god, where one word of welcome repaid him ten thousand times for the bitter, grievous years, and where one word of love leaped forth from the ineffable light—and in a moment, his every wound was healed!