Dante: Six Sermons. Philip Henry Wicksteed

The five Sermons which form the body of this little book on Dante were delivered in the ordinary course of my ministry at Little Portland Street Chapel, in the autumn of 1878, and subsequently at the Free Christian Church, Croydon, in a slightly altered form.

They are now printed, at the request of many of my hearers, almost exactly as delivered at Croydon.

The substance of a sixth Sermon has been thrown into an Appendix.

In allowing the publication of this little volume, my only thought is to let it take its chance with other fugitive productions of the Pulpit that appeal to the Press as a means of widening the possible area rather than extending the period over which the preacher's voice may extend; and my only justification is the hope that it may here and there reach hands to which no more adequate treatment of the subject was likely to find its way.

The translations I have given are sometimes paraphrastic, and virtually contain glosses or interpretations which make it necessary to warn the reader against regarding them as in every case Dante's ipsissima verba. For the most part the renderings are substantially my own; but I have freely availed myself of numerous translations, without special acknowledgment, whenever they supplied me with suitable phrases.

I have only to add the acknowledgment of my obligations to Fraticelli's edition of Dante's works (whose numbering of the minor poems and the letters I have adopted for reference), to the same writer's 'Life of Dante,' and to Mr. Symonds' 'Introduction to the Study of Dante.'

P. H. W.

June 1879.

I
DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES
I. AS A CITIZEN OF FLORENCE

Table of Contents

There are probably few competent judges who would hesitate to give Dante a place of honour in the triad of the world's greatest poets; and amongst these three Dante occupies a position wholly his own, peerless and unapproached in history.

For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies. They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and nature they so faithfully reflect.

With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's passionate conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and delineations of character unsurpassed in delicacy, yet with all the depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself or forgets his purpose.

As a philosopher and statesman, he had analysed with keen precision the social institutions, the political forces, and the historical antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the passionate energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and crushing the powers and institutions which he regarded as hostile to the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision of God hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with a noble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri.

It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic sympathy, and substitute hard and angular contrasts for the melting grace of those curved lines of beauty which pass one into the other. Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist, guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest philosophical analysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love, a poet's might and subtlety of imagination—Philosopher, Prophet, Poet, supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all—such was Dante Alighieri! And his voice will never be drowned or forgotten as long as man is dragged downward by passion and struggles upward towards God, as long as he that sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, and he that sows to the spirit reaps of the spirit life everlasting, as long as the heart of man can glow responsive to a holy indignation with wrong, or can feel the sweetness of the harmonies of peace.

It is little that

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