Dante: His Times and His Work. Arthur John Butler

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or attempted only in the most perfunctory way. For generation after generation readers have gone on accepting received interpretations which only tell them what their own wits could divine without any other assistance than the text itself gives. No commentator seems yet to have realised that, in order to understand Dante thoroughly, he must put himself on Dante’s level so far as regards a knowledge of all the available literature. The more obvious quarries from which Dante obtained the materials for his mighty structure – the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle – have no doubt been pretty thoroughly examined, and many obscurities which the comments of Landino and others only left more obscure have thus been cleared up; but a great deal remains to be done. Look where one may in the literature which was open to Dante, one finds evidence of his universal reading. We take up such a book as Otto of Freising’s Annals (to which, with his Acts of Frederick I., we shall have to refer again), and find the good bishop moralising thus on the mutability of human affairs, with especial reference to the break-up of the Empire in the middle of the ninth century: —

      “Does not worldly honour seem to turn round and round after the fashion of one stricken with fever? For such place their hope of rest in a change of posture, and so, when they are in pain, throw themselves from side to side, turning over continually.”1

      It is hard not to suppose that Dante had this passage in his mind when he wrote that bitter apostrophe to his own city with which the sixth canto of the Purgatory ends: —

      “E se ben ti ricorda, e vedi lume,

      Vedrai te somigliante a quella inferma,

      Che non può trovar posa in su le piume,

      Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma.”

      It is hardly too much to say that one cannot turn over a couple of pages of any book which Dante may conceivably have read without coming on some passage which one feels certain he had read, or at the very least containing some information which one feels certain he possessed. A real “Dante’s library”2 would comprise pretty well every book in Latin, Italian, French, or Provençal, “published,” if we may use the term, up to the year 1300. Of course a good many Latin books were (may one say fortunately?) in temporary retirement at that time; but even of these, whether, as has been suggested, through volumes, now lost, of “Elegant Extracts,” or by whatever other means, more was evidently known than is always realised.

      We must, however, beware of treating Dante merely as a repertory of curious lore or museum of literary bric-à-brac– a danger almost as great as that of looking at him from a purely æsthetic point of view. He had no doubt read more widely than any man of his age, and he is one of the half-dozen greatest poets of all time. But his claim on our attention rests on even a wider basis than these two qualities would afford. He represents as it were the re-opening of the lips of the human race: “While I was musing, the fire kindled, and at last I spake with my tongue.” The old classical literature had said its last word when Claudian died; and though men continued to compose, often with ability and intelligence, the histories and chronicles which practically formed the only non-theological writings of the so-called “Dark Ages,” letters in the full sense of the term lay dormant for centuries. Not till the twelfth century was far advanced did any signs of a re-awakening appear. Then, to use a phrase of Dante’s, the dead poetry arose, and a burst of song came almost simultaneously from all Western Europe. To this period belong the Minnesingers of Germany, the Troubadours of Provence, the unknown authors of the lovely romance – poetical in feeling, though cast chiefly in a prose form —Aucassin et Nicolete, and of several not less lovely English ballads and lyrics. Even the heavy rhymed chronicles begin to be replaced by romances in which the true poetic fire breaks out, such as the Nibelungen Lied (in its definitive form) and the Chronicle of the Cid.

In the new poetry two features strike us at once. The sentiment of love between man and woman, which with the ancients and even with early Christian writers scarcely ever rises beyond the level of a sensual passion,3 becomes transfigured into a profound emotion touching the deepest roots of a man’s nature, and acting as an incentive to noble conduct; and, closely connected with this, the influence of external nature upon the observer begins for the first time to be recognised and to form a subject for poetical treatment.4 Horace has several charming descriptions of the sights and sounds of spring; but they suggest to him merely that life is short, or that he is thirsty, and in either case he cannot do better than have another drink in company with a friend. So with Homer and Virgil. External nature and its beauty are often touched off in two or three lines which, once read, are never forgotten; but it is always as ornament to a picture, not auxiliary to the expression of a mood. You may search classical literature in vain for such passages as Walther von der Vogelweide’s: —

      “Dô der sumer komen was

      Und die bluomen durch daz gras

      Wünneclîche ensprungen,

      Aldā die vogele sungen,

      Dâr kom ich gegangen

      An einer anger langen,

      Dâ ein lûter brunne entspranc;

      Vor dem walde was sī ganc,

      Dâ diu nahtegale sanc;”5

      or the unknown Frenchman’s: —

      “Ce fu el tans d’esté, el mois de mai, que li jor sont caut, lonc, et cler, et les nuits coies et series. Nicolete jut une nuit en son lit, et vit la lune cler par une fenestre, et si oi le lorseilnol center en garding, se li sovint d’Aucassin sen ami qu’ele tant aimoit;”6

      or the equally unknown Englishman’s: —

      “Bytuene Mershe and Averil,

      When spray biginneth to springe,

      The lutel foul hath hire wyl

      On hyre lud to synge;

      Ich libbe in love-longinge

      For semlokest of alle thinge,

      He may me blisse bringe,

      Icham in hire baundoun.”7

      But it is hardly necessary to multiply instances. By the middle of the thirteenth century the spring, and the nightingales, and the flowering meadows had become a commonplace of amatory and emotional poetry.

      So far, however, poetry was exclusively lyrical. The average standard of versifying was higher, perhaps, than it has ever been before or since. Every man of education seems to have been able to turn a sonnet or ode. Men of religion, like St. Francis or Brother Jacopone of Todi; statesmen, like Frederick II. and his confidant, Peter de Vineis; professional or official persons, like Jacopo the notary of Lentino, or Guido dalle Colonne the judge of Messina; fighting men, like several of the Troubadours; political intriguers, like Bertrand del Born – all have left verses which, for beauty of thought and melody of rhythm, have seldom been matched. But the great poem was yet to come, which was to give to the age a voice worthy of its brilliant performance. It is not only in literature that it displays renewed vitality. Turn where we will, in every department of human energy it must have been brilliant beyond any that the world has ever seen. It stood between two worlds, but we cannot say of them that they were

      “One dead,

      The other powerless to be born.”

      The old monarchy was dying, had indeed, as Dante regretfully perceived, died before he was born, and the trumpet-call of the De Monarchia, wherewith he sought to revive it, was addressed to a generation which had other ideals of government; but it had set in a blaze of splendour, and its last wielder, Frederick II., was, not unfitly, known as the Wonder of the World. The mediæval Papacy, though about to undergo a loss of prestige which it never retrieved, outlived its rival, and had seldom been a greater force in the political world than it was in the

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