"There are three works which always seem to me to form a triad of Dogma, of Poetry, and of Devotion,--The Summa of St. Thomas, The Divina Commedia, and the Paradisus Animae (a manual of devotional exercises by Horstius). All three contain the same outline of Faith.
St. Thomas traces it on the intellect, Dante upon the imagination, and the Paradisus Animae upon the heart. The poem unites the book of Dogma and the book of Devotion, clothed in conceptions of intensity and of beauty which have never been surpa.s.sed nor equalled. No uninspired hand has ever written thoughts so high in words, so resplendent as the last stanza of the Divina Commedia. It was said of St. Thomas, _"Post Summan Thomae nihil restat nisi lumen gloriae_"--After the Summa of Thomas nothing is left except the light of glory. It may be said of Dante, _"Post Dantis Paradisum nihil restat nisi visio Dei_,"--After Dante"s Paradise nothing is left except the vision of G.o.d."
Of course John Ruskin had a thorough-going admiration for so great a spiritual thinker as Dante and expressed it in no {309} uncertain terms. With his wonderful power to point out the significance of unexpected manifestations of human genius, Ruskin has even succeeded in minimizing one of the great objections urged against Dante, better perhaps than could be done by anyone else, for English speaking people at least. For many readers Dante is almost unbearable, because of certain grotesque elements they find in him. This has been the source and cause of more unfavorable criticism than anything else in the great Florentine"s writings. Ruskin of course saw it but appreciated it at its proper significance, and has made clear in a pa.s.sage that every Dante reader needs to go over occasionally, in order to a.s.sure himself that certain unusual things in Dante"s att.i.tude towards life are an expression rather of the highest human genius and its outlook on life, than some narrow limitation of medievalism. Ruskin said:--
"I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods, nor men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a n.o.ble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most n.o.ble development to which it was ever brought in the human mind. Of the grotesqueness in our own Shakespeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of AEschylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order."
Great reverence for Dante might have been expected in Italy but the colder Northern nations shared it.
In Germany modern admiration for Dante began with that great wave of critical appreciation which entered into German literature with the end of the Eighteenth and the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. As might almost have been expected, Frederick Schlegel was one of the first modern German admirers of Dante, though his brother August, whose translations of Shakespeare began that series of German studies of {310} Shakespeare which has been so fruitful during the past century, was also an open admirer of the medieval poet. Since then there has practically been no time when Germany has not had some distinguished Dante scholar, and when it has not been supplying the world with the products of profound study and deep scholarship with regard to him. The modern educational world has come to look so confidently toward Germany for the note of its critical appreciation, that the Dante devotion of the Germans will be the best possible encouragement for those who need to have the feeling, that their own liking is shared by good authorities, before they are quite satisfied with their appreciation. Dean Plumptre has summed up the Dante movement in Germany in a compendious paragraph that must find a place here.
"In the year 1824, Scartazzini, the great Dante scholar of the Nineteenth Century, recognizes a new starting point. The period of neglect of supercilious criticism comes to an end, and one of reverence, admiration and exhaustive study begins. His account of the labors of German scholars during the sixty years that have followed fills a large part of his volume. Translations of the Commedia by Kopisch, Kannegiesser, Witte, Philalethes (the nom de plume of John, King of Saxony), Josefa Von Hoffinger, of the Minor Poems by Witte and Krafft, endless volumes and articles on all points connected with Dante"s life and character, the publications of the Deutsche Dante-Gesellschaft from 1867 to 1877, present a body of literature which has scarcely a parallel in history. It is no exaggeration to say that the Germans have taught Italians to understand and appreciate their own poet, just as they have at least helped to teach Englishmen to understand Shakespeare."
Nor must it be thought that only the literary lights of Germany thoroughly appreciated the great Florentine. The greater the genius of the man the more his admiration for Dante if he but once becomes interested in him. A noteworthy example of this is Alexander Von Humboldt the distinguished German scientist, who was generally looked upon as perhaps the greatest thinker in European science during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. He is said to have been very faithful in his study of Dante and has expressed his admiration in no {311} uncertain terms. Curiously enough he found much to admire him for in matters scientific, for while it is not generally realized, Dante was an acute observer of Nature and has given expression in his works to many observations with regard to subjects that would now be considered within the scope of natural science, in a way to antic.i.p.ate many supposedly modern bits of information. With regard to this Humboldt said in his Cosmos:--
"When the glory of the Aramaic Greek and Roman dominion--or I might almost say, when the ancient world had pa.s.sed away,--we find in the great and inspired founder of a new era, Dante Alighieri, occasional manifestations of the deepest sensibility to the charms of the terrestrial life of Nature, whenever he abstracts himself from the pa.s.sionate and subjective control of that despondent mysticism which const.i.tuted the general circle of his ideas." How little Humboldt seems to have realized in his own absorption in external nature, that the qualities he blames in Dante are of the very essence of his genius, rounding out his humanity to an interest in all man"s relations, supernatural as well as natural, and that without them he would not be the world poet for all time that he is.
In America Dante came to his own almost as soon as literature obtained her proper place in our new country. The first generation of distinctly literary men comprise the group at Cambridge including Longfellow, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, and others of minor importance. It soon became a favorite occupation among these men to give certain leisure hours to Dante. The Cambridge Dante society added not a little to the world"s knowledge of the poet. Longfellow"s translation and edition of Dante"s works was a monumental achievement, for which its author is likely to be remembered better by future generations than perhaps for any of his original work. Future generations are likely to remember James Russell Lowell for his essays on Dante and Shakespeare better than for anything else. His Dante monograph is as magnificently illuminating as that of Dean Church"s and perhaps even more satisfying to critical readers. That these men should have been content to give so much of their time to the study of the Thirteenth {312} Century poet shows in what appreciation he must be held by the rest of us if we would give him his due place in literature.
There are many misunderstandings with regard to Dante which apparently only some serious study of the poet serves to remove satisfactorily.
Most people consider that he was a distant, prophetic, religious genius, and that his poetry has in it very little of sympathy for humanity. While it is generally conceded that he saw man projected on the curtain of eternity, and realized all his relationships to the universe and to his Creator better than perhaps any other poet of all time, it is usually thought that one must have something of the medieval frame of mind in order to read him with interest and admiration. Such impressions are largely the result of reading only a few lines of Dante, and, finding them difficult of thorough comprehension, allowing one"s self to be forced to the conclusion that he is not of interest to the modern reader. The Inferno being the first part of Dante"s great poem is the one oftenest read in this pa.s.sing fashion and so many ideas with regard to Dante are derived from this portion, which is not only not the masterpiece of the work but, if taken alone, sadly misrepresents the genius of the poet. His is no morbid sentimentality and does not need the advent.i.tious interest of supreme suffering.
As a matter of fact the Purgatorio is a much better introduction to Dante"s real greatness, and is considered by the generality of Dante scholars as the more humanly sympathetic if not really the supreme expression of his creative faculty. The ascent of the Mount of Expiation with its constant note of hope and the gradually increasing facility of the ascent as the summit is approached, touches condolent cords in the human heart and arouses feelings that are close to what is best in human aspiration in spite of its consciousness of defect.
Over and over again in the Purgatorio one finds evidence of Dante"s wonderful powers of observation. The poet is first of all according to the etymology of the word a creator, one who gives life to the figments of his imagination so that we recognize them as vital manifestations of human genius, but is also the seer, the man who sees deeper into things and sees more of them than anyone else. Ordinarily Dante is considered by those who do not know him as not having been an observer of things human and around him in life. There are pa.s.sages in his works, however, that entirely refute this.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
ANGEL (RHEIMS)
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The story that he went about the cities of North Italy during his exile, with countenance so gloomy and stare so fixed that men pointed to him and spoke of him as one who had visited h.e.l.l, and the other tradition, however well it may be founded, that the women sometimes pointed him out to their children and then used the memory of him as a bogy man to scare them into doing unpleasant things afterwards, would seem to indicate that he had occupied himself very little with the things around him, and that above all he had paid very little attention to the ways of childhood. He has shown over and over again, especially in the Purgatorio, that the simplest and most natural actions of child-life had been engraved upon his heart for he uses them with supreme truth in his figures. He knows how
"An infant seeks his mother"s breast When fear or anguish vex his troubled heart,"--
but he knows too, how the child who has done wrong, confesses its faults.
"As little children, dumb with shame"s keen smart.
Will listening stand with eyes upon the ground.
Owning their faults with penitential heart, So then stood I."
There is a pa.s.sage in the Inferno in which he describes so vividly the rescue of a child from the flames by its mother that Plumptre has even ventured to suggest that Dante himself may have been the actual subject of the rescue. Because it helps to an appreciation of Dante"s intensity of expression and poignancy of vision the pa.s.sage itself, with Plumptre"s comment, seems deserving of quotation:
"Then suddenly my Guide his arms did fling Around me, as a mother, roused by cries, Sees the fierce flames around her gathering And takes her boy, nor ever halts but flies.
Caring for him than for herself far more, Though one scant shift her only robe supplies."
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It must not be thought, however, that Dante"s quality as an observer was limited to the actions of human beings. His capacity to see many other things is amply manifested in his great poem. Even the smallest of living things, that would surely be thought beneath his notice, became the subject of similies that show how much everything in nature interested the spirit of genius. The pa.s.sage with regard to the ants has often been quoted, and is indeed a surprising manifestation of nature study at an unexpected time and from an entirely unantic.i.p.ated quarter. Dante saw the souls of those who were so soon to enter into the realm of blessedness, and who were already in the last circle of purgatory, greeting each other with the kiss of peace and his picturesque simile for it is:--
"So oft, within their dusk brown host, proceed This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet; Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."
As for the birds his pages are full of references to them and all of his bird similies are couched in terms that show how sympathetically observant he was of their habits and ways. He knows their different methods of flying in groups and singly, he has observed them on their nests and knows their wonderful maternal anxiety for their young, and describes it with a vividness that would do credit to a naturalist of the modern time who had made his home in the woods. Indeed some of his figures taken from birds const.i.tute examples of the finest pa.s.sages of poetic description of living nature that have ever been written. The domestic animals, moreover, especially the cat and the dog, come in for their share of this sympathetic observance, and he is able to add greatly to the vividness of the pictures he paints by his references to the well-known habits of these animals. It is no wonder that the tradition has grown up that he was fond of such pets and possessed several of them that were well-known to the early commentators on his poems, and the subject of no little erudition.
Nothing escaped the attention of this acute observer in the world around him, and over and over again one finds surprising bits of observation with regard to natural phenomena usually supposed to be quite out of the range of the interest of {315} medieval students generally, and above all of literary men of this Middle Age. Alexander Von Humboldt calls attention in a well-known pa.s.sage in his Cosmos to the wonderful description of the River of Light in the Thirtieth Canto of the Paradiso.
"I saw a glory like a stream flow by.
In brightness rushing and on either sh.o.r.e Were banks that with spring"s wondrous hues might vie.
And from that river living sparks did soar, And sank on all sides in the flow"rets" bloom, Like precious rubies set in golden ore.
Then, as if drunk with all the rich perfume, Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll, And as one sank another filled its room."
Humboldt explains this as follows, with a suggestion that deserves to be remembered.
"It would almost seem as if this picture had its origin in the poet"s recollection of that peculiar and rare phosph.o.r.escent condition of the ocean in which luminous points appear to rise from the breaking waves, and, spreading themselves over the surface of the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of sparkling stars."
Probably the best way for a modern to realize how much of interest there may be for him in Dante is to consider the great Italian epic poet in comparison with our greatest of English epic poets, Milton.
While any such comparison in the expressive Latin phrase is sure to walk lame, it serves to give an excellent idea of the methods of the two men in the ill.u.s.tration of their ideas. We venture therefore to quote a comparison between these two poets from a distinguished critic who knows both of them well, and whose modern training in English methods of thought, would seem to make him likely to be partial to the more modern poet though as a matter of fact he constantly leans toward the great medieval bard.
"The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante as the hieroglyphics of Egypt differ from the picture-writing of Mexico.
The images which Dante employs speak for themselves; they stand simply for what they are. Those of Milton have a {316} signification which is often discernible only to the initiated... . However strange, however grotesque, he never shrinks from describing it. He gives us the shape, the color, the sound, the smell, the taste; he counts the numbers; he measures the size. His similies are the ill.u.s.trations of a traveler. Unlike those of other poets, and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain business-like manner, not for the sake of any of the beauty in the objects from which they are drawn; not for the sake of any ornament they may impart to the poem; but simply in order to make the meaning of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself."
"Still more striking is the similarity between Dante and Milton.
This may be said to lie rather in the kindred nature of their subjects, and in the parallel development of their minds, than in any mere external resemblance. In both the man was greater than the poet, the souls of both were "like a star and dwelt apart." Both were academically trained in the deepest studies of their age; the labour which made Dante lean made Milton blind. The "Doricke sweetnesse" of the English poet is not absent from the tender pages of the Vita Nuova. The middle life of each was spent in active controversy; each lent his services to the state; each felt the quarrels of his age to be the "business of posterity," and left his warnings to ring in the ears of a later time. The lives of both were failures. "On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues," they gathered the concentrated experience of their lives into one immortal work, the quintessence of their hopes, their knowledge, and their sufferings. But Dante is something more than this. Milton"s voice is grown faint to us--we have pa.s.sed into other modes of expression and of thought."
The comparison with Vergil is still more striking and more favorable to the Italian poet. "Dante"s reputation has pa.s.sed through many vicissitudes, and much trouble has been spent by critics in comparing him with other poets of established fame. Read and commented upon in the Italian universities in the generation immediately succeeding his death, his name bcame obscured as the sun of the Renaissance rose higher towards its meridian. In the Seventeenth Century he was less read than Petrarch, Ta.s.so, or Ariosto; in the Eighteenth he was {317} almost universally neglected. His fame is now fully vindicated.
Translations and commentaries issue from every press in Europe and America. Dante Societies are formed to investigate the difficulties of his works. He occupies in the lecture-rooms of regenerated Italy a place by the side of those great masters whose humble disciple he avowed himself to be. The Divine Comedy is indeed as true an epic as the AEneid, and Dante is as real a cla.s.sic as Vergil. His metre is as pliable and flexible to every mood of emotion, his diction as plaintive and as sonorous. Like him he can immortalize by a simple expression, a person, a place, or a phase of nature. Dante is even truer in description than Vergil, whether he paints the snow falling in the Alps, or the homeward flight of birds, or the swelling of an angry torrent. But under this gorgeous pageantry of poetry there lies a unity of conception, a power of philosophic grasp, an earnestness of religion, which to the Roman poet were entirely unknown."
If we would have a very recent opinion as to the position of Dante as a literary man and as a great intellectual force, perhaps no better can be obtained than from some recent expressions of Mr. Michael Rossetti, whose Italian descent, English training, and literary and artistic heredity, seem to place him in an ideal position for writing this generation"s ultimate judgment with regard to the great poet of the Thirteenth Century. In his Literature of Italy he said:--
"One has to recur time after time, to that astounding protagonist, phenomenon and hero, Dante Alighieri. If one were to say that Italian literature consists of Dante, it would, no doubt, be an exaggeration, and a gross one, and yet it would contain a certain ultimate nucleus of truth."
"Dante fixed the Italian language, and everyone had to tread in his vestiges. He embodied all the learning and thought of his age and transcended them. He went far ahead of all his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors; he wrote the first remarkable book in Italian prose, La Vita Nuova; and a critical exposition of it in the Convito; in Latin, a linguistic treatise, the De Vulgari Eloquio, which upholds the Vulgare Ill.u.s.tre, or speech of the best cultivated cla.s.ses, markedly in Tuscany and Bologna, against the common dialects; and a {318} political study, De Monarchia, of the most fundamental quality, which even to us moderns continues to be sane and convincing in its essence, though its direct line of argument has collapsed; and finally, and most important by far, he produced in La Commedia Divina the one poem of modern Europe that counter-balances Shakespeare and challenges antiquity. This is the sole book which makes it a real pity for anyone to be ignorant of Italian. Regarded singly, it is much the most astonishing poem in the world, dwarfing all others by its theme, pulverizing most of them by its majesty and sustainment, unique in the force of its paraded personality and the thunderous reverberation of its judgments on the living and the dead."
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XX
THE WOMEN OF THE CENTURY.
In generations whose men proved so unending in initiative and so forceful in accomplishment, so commanding in intelligence, so persistent in their purposes, so acute in their searching, so successful in their endeavors, the women of the time could not have been unworthy of them. Some hints of this have been already given, in what has been said about the making of furnishings for the church, especially in the matter of needlework and the handpainting of various forms of ornaments. There are further intimations in the histories of the time, though unfortunately not very definite information, with regard to even more ambitious accomplishments by the women of the period. There are, for instance, traditions that the designs for some of the Cathedrals and certainly for portions of many of them came from women"s hands. It is in the ethical sphere, however, that women accomplished great things during the Thirteenth Century. Their influence stood for what was best and highest in the life of the time and their example encouraged not only their own generation, but many people in many subsequent generations "to look up, not down, to look within, not without" for happiness, and to trust that "G.o.d"s in his heaven and all"s well with the world."
There are a number of women of the time whose names the race will not let die. While if the ordinary person were asked to enumerate the great women of the Thirteenth Century it would be rare to find one able properly to place them, as soon as their names are mentioned, it will be recognized that they succeeded in accomplishing work of such significance that the world is not likely to let the reputation of it perish. Some of these names are household words. The bearers of them have been written of at length in quite recent years in English as well as in other languages. Their work was of the kind that ordinarily stands quite apart from the course of history and {320} so dates are usually not attached to it. It is thought of as a portion of the precious heritage of mankind rather than as belonging to any particular period. Three names occur at once. They are St. Clare of a.s.sisi, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Queen Blanche of Castile, the mother of St. Louis. To these should be added Queen Berengaria, the sister of Blanche, and the mother of Ferdinand of Castile; Mabel Rich, the London tradesman"s wife, the mother of St. Edmund of Canterbury; and Isabella, the famous Countess of Arundel.
The present day interest in St. Francis of a.s.sisi, has brought St.
Clare under the lime-light of publicity. There is no doubt at all that her name is well worthy to be mentioned along with his and that she, like him, must be considered one of the strongest and most beautiful characters of all time. She was the daughter of a n.o.ble family at a.s.sisi, who, having heard St. Francis preach, became impressed with the idea that she too should have the opportunity to live the simple life that St. Francis pictured. Of course her family opposed her in any such notion. That a daughter of theirs should take up with a wandering preacher, who at that time was looked on not a little askance by the regular religious authorities, and whose rags, and poverty made him anything but a proper a.s.sociate for a young lady of n.o.ble birth, could not but seem an impossible idea. Accordingly Clare ran away from home and told Francis that she would never go back and that he must help her to live her life in poverty just as he was doing himself. He sent her to a neighboring convent to be cared for, and also very probably so as to be a.s.sured of her vocation.
After a time a special convent home for Clare and some other young women, who had become enamored with the life of poverty and simplicity was established, and to this Clare"s sister Agnes came as a postulant.