John T. Slattery - Dante: The Central Man of All the World

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"And when we consider that not only in the great cities alone, but in
every convent and in every parish, thoughtful men were trying to excel
what had been done and was doing by their predecessors and their
fellows, we shall understand what an amount of thought is built into the
walls of our churches, castles, colleges and dwelling houses. My own
impression is that not one-tenth part of it has been reproduced in all
the works written on the subject up to this day and much of it is
probably lost never again to be recovered for the instruction and
delight of future ages."

The irreparable shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the
past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning
perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the
brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which
had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered
kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and
today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its
ruin it shows infinite majesty and if it is left as it is,--and may that
be so--for restoration would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims
will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made
it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and
to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence and
a protest.

The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which
placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In
literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted
conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The
troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk,
meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by
the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination
of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante
rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the
moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells."

Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him
even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It
is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or
richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a _gentleman_
but he must be a _gentle man_, loving not by genteel code of caste
but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.)

Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are
one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes:

"Let no man predicate
That aught the name of gentleman should have
Even in a king's estate
Except the heart there be a gentle man's."

Love, Then, Became In Literature Such A Refined Emotion That To Quote
Dante: "It Makes Ill Thought To Perish, It Drives Into Foul Hearts A
Deadly Chill" And On The Other Hand It Fills Indeed The Lover With Such
Delicacy Of Sentiment For His Beloved That She Is His Inspiration To
Virtue And The Muse Who Directs His Pen. In Harmony With "The Sweet New
Style" Of Sincerity With Which Dante Treats Of Love, Thomas Bernart De
Ventadorn Sings:

"It is no wonder if I sing better than any other singer, for my heart
draws near to Love and I am a better man for Love's command."

Not in literature alone but in actual life did chivalry exalt "the
eternal womanly." In Dante's age, to quote the author of Phases of
Thought and Criticism, "Knights passed from land to land in search of
adventure, vowed to protect and defend the widow and the orphan and the
lonely woman at the hazard of their lives: they went about with a prayer
on their lips and in their hearts the image of the lady-love whom they
had chosen to serve and to whom they had pledged loyalty and fidelity:
they strove to be chaste in body and soul and as a tower of strength for
the protection of this spirit of chastity, they were taught to venerate
the Virgin Mother Mary and cultivate toward her a tender devotion as the
purest and holiest ideal of womanhood. This spirit of chivalry is the
ruling spirit of Dante's life and the inspiration of some of his
sublimest flights."

All these high achievements of Dante's century are all the more notable
in view of the fact that war with its horror and destruction was never
absent from those times. Every European country was involved often in
war and Asia and Africa were not free from its devastation.

In such stirring times, Dante was born at Florence. A city of flowers
and gay festivities, the home of a cultured pleasure-loving people, it
was the frequent scene of feuds and factions handed down from sire to
son. The hatred they engendered and the desolation they caused may be
understood from the reading of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy whose scene
is laid in Verona in the year 1303 and to the families concerned in
which Dante makes allusion in the sixth canto of his Purgatorio. But
Verona and Florence were not the only cities involved by the militarism
of the age. Especially in northern Italy were strife and bloodshed
common. Province, city, town, hamlet and even households were torn by
internal dissensions, which only complicated the main conflict of that
day, viz., the world struggle for supremacy of pope and emperor.

The imperial party called Ghibellines, composed mainly of aristocrats
and their followers, aimed to break down the barriers which kept the
German Emperor out of Italy, their object being to have him subjugate
the whole country, even the states of the Pope. The papal or popular
party, known as Guelfs, had as its purpose the independence of
Italy--the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north of
Italy and dependence of the center and southern parts on the Roman See.
A few months after Dante's death, the Ghibellines, the imperial party,
suffered a defeat by the overthrow of King Manfred from which they never
recovered. But in Florence for many years they maintained their
struggle.

To add to the confusion of the Florentines whose sympathy was mostly
Guelf--i.e. favorable to the papal or popular cause--the Guelf party of
Florence was divided into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, the
history of whose tumults often leading to blood and mischief may be
known by the frequent allusions of our poet. Embroiled by those feuds,
Dante is found not only as a prior among the ruling Bianchi but as a
soldier under arms at the battle of Campaldino and at the siege of
Caprona. Later when the Neri were restored to power, Dante was banished
and never again beheld his beloved city. In exile Dante transferred his
allegiance to the Ghibellines though he upheld the Guelf view as to the
primacy of the Church. Subsequently he tried, but in vain, to form a
party independent of Guelf, Ghibelline, Bianchi or Neri.

May I conclude this chapter by giving you another view of Dante's
environment? To point out the degeneracy of Florence, Dante becomes a
_laudator acti temporis_ in a picture of the earlier Florence that
has never been equalled.

"Florence was abiding in peace, sober and modest. She had not necklace
or coronal or women with ornamented shoes or girdle which was more to be
looked at than the person. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth give
fear to her father, for the time and dowry did not outrun measure on
this or that side. She had not houses empty of families. I saw
Bellencion Berti go girt with leather and bone and his lady come from
the mirror with unpainted face. I saw him of the Nerlo and him of the
Vecchio satisfied with unlined skin and their ladies with the spindle
and the distaff. O! fortunate women, each was sure of her burial place"
(Paradiso IV, 97).

But time changed all that. With her population vastly increased in
Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her
banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence
had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the
Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take part in the Jubilee of 1300:
"Florence is the greatest of cities. She feeds, clothes, governs us all.
Indeed she appears to rule the world. She and her people are, in truth,
the fifth element of the universe." (The Guilds of Florence, p. 562.)

Such greatness was attained according to Dante only at the loss of
pristine simplicity and virtue. So he apostrophizes his native city:
"Rejoice O Florence, since thou art so mighty that thou canst spread
thy wings over sea and land and thy name is known throughout Hell."
Notorious for crime Florence still kept a big place in her life for
religion. There "religion was abused but its beneficial effects
continued to be manifest--vice was flagrant but it never lost the sense
of shame--men were cruel but their cruelty was followed by sincere
regrets--misfortunes were frequent and signal but they were accepted
with resignation or with the hope of retrieval or men gloried in them
on account of the cause in which they suffered." (Brother Azarias.)

And, meanwhile, side by side with fierce and bloody struggles the
creative forces of art and architecture were making marvelous progress
before the very eyes of Dante. Niccolo Pisano had finished his Sienna
pulpit and with his son was engaged on his immortal works of sculpture.
Orcagna had made a wonderful tabernacle for the Florentine church of San
Michele, Cimabue had painted the Madonna which is now in the Rucellai
chapel. Giotto had completed his work at Assisi and Rome and would soon
give to the world the Florentine Campanile. Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro
had built the church Santa Maria Novella at Florence and Arnolfo di
Cambio, while Dante was writing sonnets, had begun the duomo or
cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The stout walls and lofty tower of
the Bargello had sprung into beauteous being. Santa Croce destined to
be the burial place of illustrious Italians, had been built and remains
today one of Florence's greatest churches. St. John's Baptistry, _il
mio bel Giovanni_, had received its external facing of marble, and in
ten years after Dante's death would get its massive bronze doors which
are unparalleled in the world.

The century closed with the opening of the great Jubilee at Rome. March
twenty-fifth of the following year, 1300, Dante places as the time for
his journey through the realms of the unseen--the story of which is told
in the Divina Commedia. If sympathy with Dante and his work is not
aroused already, perhaps these two quotations may quicken your interest.

Charles Elliot Norton writes: "There are few other works of man, perhaps
there is no other, which affords such evidence as the Divine Comedy, of
uninterrupted consistency of purpose, of sustained vigor of imagination,
and of steady force of character controlling alike the vagaries of the
poetic temperament, the wavering of human purpose, the fluctuation of
human powers, the untowardness of circumstances. From the beginning to
the end of his work of many years there is no flagging of energy, no
indication of weakness. The shoulders burdened by a task almost too
great for mortal strength, never tremble under their load."

And Dr. Frank Crane, a foremost writer of the syndicate press, says "I
have put a good deal of hard labor digging into Dante and while I cannot
say that I ever got from him any direct usable material, yet I no more
regret my hours spent with him than I regret the beautiful landscapes I
have seen, the great music I have heard, the wise and noble souls I have
met, the wondrous dreams I have had. These are all a part of one's
education, of one's equipment for life and perhaps the best part."

DANTE THE MAN

DANTE THE MAN

Fifty-five years ago when called on for a poem to celebrate the sixth
hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth, Tennyson, feeling his own
littleness before "this central man of all the world," wrote:

"King, that has reigned six hundred years and grown
In power and ever growest
I, wearing but the garland of a day,
Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away."

New tributes to the genius of Dante will be offered by our generation,
for already great preparations are under way in all parts of Italy and
the literary world to commemorate in 1921, the six hundredth anniversary
of the death of the author of the greatest of all Christian poems. The
question naturally suggests itself: Has not the world moved forward many
centuries from Dante's viewpoint and lost interest in many things
regarded as truths or at least as burning issues by Dante? Who is now
concerned with the Ptolomaic system of astronomy, which is so often the
subject of Dante's thought? Who is now interested in the tragic
jealousies and injustices suffered by the people of Florence which led
to the bitter feuds that helped to make Dante the great poet? Who, in
this twentieth century so intent upon making the world safe for
democracy, has sympathy with Dante's advocated scheme of a world-wide
absolute monarchy as the cure for the ills of the society of his day?
Is this generation which sees Italy united as a result of the overthrow
of the Papal states, so universally concerned with Papal claims which
were matters of vital importance to Dante and his generation? Is our
era, which unfortunately looks upon religion as a negligible factor and
not as the animating principle of life, interested in the golden age of
faith of which Dante is the embodiment, and his message in which the
eternal is the object?

Yet, Dante's following is today larger than ever before; his empire over
minds and hearts is more extensive. The moving pictures feature his
Inferno; the press issues, even in languages not his own, such a mass of
books and articles concerning him that a specialist can hardly keep
track of the output. In the universities, especially of Harvard, Cornell
and Columbia, not to speak of those in other lands, the courses on Dante
attract an unusually large number of students. Outside of the academic
atmosphere there are thousands of readers who still find in his
writings, a solace in grief, a strength in temptation, a deep sense of
reality, permanent though unseen, of the love of God and of His justice.
The reasons are not far away.

"Our poet," says Grandgent "was a many sided genius who has a message
for nearly everyone."

Dante's compelling renown among us, is due says Dr. Frank Crane both "to
the intrinsic greatness of the man's personality and to the sheer beauty
of his craftsmanship."

"The secret of Dante's power" writes James Russell Lowell "is not far
to seek. Whoever can express _himself_ with the full force of
unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal
and universal."

Whether one or all these reasons are the true explanation of the
twentieth century's great interest in Dante, the fact remains, as
Tennyson said, that far from being a waning classic, Dante "in power
ever grows," and the interest he calls forth constitutes, as James Bryce
observed in his Lowell Institute lectures "the literary phenomenon of
England and America."

Now to Dante as the man let us turn. To know the fibre of his manhood
will help us to appreciate the genius of his art. "It is needful to know
Dante as man" wrote Charles Elliot Norton, "in order fully to
appreciate him as poet." The thought is expressed in another way by
James Russell Lowell: "The man behind the verse is far greater than the
verse itself and Dante is not merely a great poet but an influence, part
of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him the soul learns
that 'married to the truth she is a mistress but otherwise a slave shut
out of all liberty'" (The Banquet). But that knowledge is dependent upon
our intimacy with the life and spirit of Dante. In many other cases the
knowledge of the life and personality of an author may not be essential
to either our enjoyment or our understanding of his work. In the case of
Dante "he faces his own mirror and so appears in the mid-foreground of
his reflected word." Before looking into that mirror for Dante's
picture, let us first recall some of the established facts in his life
and then see what manner of man he appeared to those who were his
contemporaries or who lived chronologically near him.

Dante was born in Florence in the year 1265. His father was a notary
belonging to an old but decadent Guelph family, his mother, named Bella,
was a daughter of Durante Abati, a Ghibelline noble. Whether his own
family was regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is
certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his
forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the
Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with
faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year,
while attending a festal party, he fell in love with a little girl named
Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still a child" to quote
Boccaccio his earliest biographer "he received her image into his heart
with such affection that from that day forward never so long as he
lived, did it depart therefrom." She became the wife of Simone dei
Bardi, and died in her twenty-fourth year, the subject of many sonnets
from her mystic lover who, if he had never written anything else, would
have been entitled, by his book of sonnets, his New Life, to rank as a
poet of the first class.

Two years after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati, a
member of an old aristocratic family of Florence and by her had four
children. In the period between the death of Beatrice and his marriage
he had seen military service, having borne arms as a Guelph at the
battle of Campaldino (Purg. V, 91-129) in which the Florentines defeated
the Ghibelline league of Arezzo and he took part at the siege of Caprona
and was present at its surrender by the Pisans (Inf., XXI, 95.) When he
was thirty years old he became a member of the Special Council of the
Republic, consisting of eight of the best and most influential citizens
and in 1300, at the age of thirty-five, midway in the journey of his
life, he was elected one of the six Priors (chief magistrates of his
city) for the months of June and July. Shortly after this Dante with
three others went to Rome on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII to get
that pontiff's veto to the intervention of Charles de Valois, brother
of Philip IV of France, in the affairs of Florence. But there was delay
in the transaction of the business and that gave the stranger time to
win the city by treachery. When the news reached Dante, he hurried
homeward. At Sienna he learned that his house had been pillaged and
burned and he himself had been accused of malfeasance in office. Without
a trial he was condemned to a heavy fine and to perpetual banishment
under penalty that if he returned he would be burned alive. Then began
his twenty years' exile--years in which he went sometimes almost begging
and at all times even when he was an honored guest in the home of
nobility--knowing as only an exile can know "how bitter is the bread of
dependence and how steep the stranger's stairs." It was during his exile
that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his
thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence
for which he yearned with all the intensity of the Hebrew captives weeping
on the rivers of Babylon for a sight of Jerusalem. Death came to free his
undaunted soul in the year 1321 while he was a guest at Ravenna of Guido
Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. At Ravenna the last
seat of Roman arts and letters, in a sepulchre attached to the convent
of the Franciscan monks, he was buried with the honors due to a saint
and a sage. The inscription on his epitaph said to have been composed by
him on his deathbed, is paraphrased by Lowell in the following words:

"The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of Fire, the Pit
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit.
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,
And happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker with the stars,
Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore
Whom Florence, the fairest of all-least-loving mothers, bore."

Such is the brief outline of the outward life of him of whom
Michelangelo declared:

"Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he."

It will help us to a better understanding of that man if his likeness is
impressed upon our memory. The portrait made by his friend Giotto, shows
him as a young man perhaps of twenty to twenty-five years, with a face
noble, beardless, strong, intelligent and pensive--a face which would
not lead one to suspect an appreciation of humor. Yet writers find two
distinct forms of that quality--a playfulness in his eclogues and a
grotesqueness in certain of his assignments to punishments in Hell.
Contrasting with this picture of his early life is the face of his death
mask and of the Naples bust, suggesting the lines

"How stern of lineament, how grim
The father was of Tuscan song."

Here we see him mature with strength of character in every feature and a
seriousness of mien which shows a man with whom one might not take
liberties. It was of Dante in mature life that Boccaccio wrote: "Our
poet was of moderate height and after reaching maturity was accustomed
to walk somewhat bowed with a slow and gentle pace, clad always in such
sober dress as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose
aquiline and his eyes rather large than small. His jaws were large and
his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark and
his expression very melancholy and thoughtful. His manners, whether in
public or at home, were wonderful, composed and restrained, and in all
ways he was more courteous and civil than any one else."

Bruni, on the other hand, who wrote a century later describes Dante as
if he had in mind Giotto's fresco of the poet. This is Bruni's
word-picture: "He was a man of great refinement, of medium height and
a pleasant but deeply serious face. It was remarkable that although he
studied incessantly, none would have supposed from his happy manner and
youthful way of speaking that he had studied at all." However well these
pictures may visualize the poet for us, I cannot help thinking that
Dante himself, after the manner of great artists who paint their own
pictures, gives us a far better portrait of himself. What we know of him
from others is as nothing compared to the revelation he has made of
himself in his writings. For, as Dr. Zahm, in his Great Inspirers, has
said: "Dante, although the most concealing of men was, paradoxical as it
may seem, the most self-revealing." The indirect recorder of his own
life, he discloses to us an intimate view of his spiritual struggles, of
the motives which actuated him, of the passions he experienced, not to
speak of the judgments he formed upon all great questions. "So true is
this that if it were possible to meet him, we should feel that he was
an intimate friend who had never concealed anything from us--who had
discoursed with us on all subjects; science, literature, philosophy,
theology, love, poetry, happiness, the world to come and all that of
which it most imports us to have accurate knowledge." Let us then see
the man as reflected in his writings.

First of all he reveals himself as a man profoundly animated by
religion. He is not a Huysmanns or a Francois Coppee, a Brunetiere,
a Paul Bourget, forsaking the religious teachings of his youth only to
embrace them in mature life. Never for a moment did he deflect from the
Catholic doctrine, though his studies led him to the consideration of
the most subtle arguments raised against it. He was indeed the defender
and champion of faith, having no sympathy for a mind which would lose
itself in seeking the solution of the incomprehensible mysteries of
religion. So he has Virgil say:

"Insensate he who thinks with mortal ken
To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold
Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then,
O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe
And be content, for had all been seen
No need there was for Mary to conceive.
Men have ye known who thus desired in vain
And whose desires, that might at rest have been,
Now constitute a source of endless pain.
Plato, the Stagerite, and many more
I here allude to. Then his head he bent,
Was silent and a troubled aspect wore."
(Purg., III, 34.)

Guided by the wisdom he thus enunciated Dante from youth to death
maintained a child-like faith that satisfied his intellect and animated
his sentiments. His faith really grew into a passion. His fidelity to
the truth of the doctrines of the Church or to the sacred offices of the
papacy was never shaken either by the scandals of clerical life or the
opposition of different popes to his political ideals. Frequently he
raised his voice in protest yet, notwithstanding his censures against
what he considered abuses in the external administration of the Church
and the policy of her popes, on his part there was not the least
suspicion of unsettled faith or revolutionary design. Strongly convinced
of the divinity of the Church, his passionate nature could not help
execrating the human element that would weaken her influence. "He
teaches that the mystical Vine of the Church still grows and Peter and
Paul who died for it, still live. He holds by that Church. He begs
Christians not to be moved feather-like by every wind of doctrine. 'You
have' he tells them 'the Old Testament and the New. The Pastor of the
Church guides you, let this suffice for your salvation'" (Brother
Azarias). In his devotional life Dante is just as ardent as he is firm
in his adherence to dogma. While all Catholics are held to profess a
common creed, each may follow the bent of his disposition and sympathy
in pious practices, theologically called devotions. It seems to me that
Dante had three such devotions which he practised intensely in his inner
life.

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