Dante: Six Sermons. Philip Henry Wicksteed
hope to do, and yet I would fain do something, towards opening to one here and there some glimpse into that mighty temple, instinct with the very presence of the Eternal, raised by the master hand, nay rather wrought out of the mighty heart of Dante; but before we can even attempt to gather up a few fragments of the 'Divine Comedy,' as landmarks to guide us, in our turn, through Hell and Purgatory up to Heaven, it is needful for us to have some conception who Dante Alighieri was, and what were his fortunes in this mortal life.
And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life. The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity, incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity of some of the minor documents upon which the poet's biographers generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a literature of its own.
Now into this mass of controversial and speculative writings on Dante, I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to speak by half a life of study.
With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles. The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but, on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by the experts.
Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an ancient and noble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superstitions! We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a contemporary of some of the noblest representatives of the feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediæval philosophy, theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving friendship with the first supremely great mediæval artist, and before he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of mediæval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante, in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediæval discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result.
In the year 1265, then, Dante was born in Florence, then one of the most powerful and flourishing, but also, alas! one of the most factious and turbulent of the cities of Europe. He was but nine years old when he first met that Beatrice Portinari who became thenceforth the loadstar of his life. As to this lady we have little to say. The details which Dante's early biographers give us add but little to our knowledge of her, and so far as they are not drawn from the poet's own words, are merely such graceful commonplaces of laudatory description as any imagination of ordinary capacity would spontaneously supply for itself. When we have said that Beatrice was a beautiful, sweet, and virtuous girl, we have said all that we know, and all that we need care to know, of the daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived, was married, and died in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. All that she is to us more than other Florentine maidens, she is to us through that poet who, as he wept her untimely death, hoped with no vain hope 'to write of her, what ne'er was writ of woman.'[1]
It puts no great strain on our powers of credence, to accept Dante's own statement of the rush of almost stupefying emotions which overwhelmed his childish heart when at the age of nine he went with his father to Portinari's house, and was sent to play with other children, amongst them the little Beatrice, a child of eight years old. The 'New Life' waked within him from that moment, and its strength and purity made him strong and pure.[2]
Nine more years have passed. Dante is now eighteen. He has made rapid progress in all the intellectual and personal accomplishments which are held to adorn the position of a Florentine gentleman. His teachers have in some cases already discerned the greatness of his powers, and he has become aware, probably by essays which never saw the light, that he has not only a poet's passions and aspirations, but a poet's power of moulding language into oneness with his thought. He and Beatrice know each other by sight, as neighbours or fellow-citizens, but Dante has never heard her voice address a word to him. Yet she is still the centre of all his thoughts. She has never ceased to be to him the perfect ideal of growing womanhood, and to his devout and fervid imagination, just because she is the very flower of womanly courtesy, grace, and virtue, she is an angel upon earth. Not in the hackneyed phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life, Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and claims kindred with God's more perfect family.
Beatrice is now seventeen, she is walking with two companions in a public place, she meets Dante and allows herself to utter a few words of graceful greeting. It is the first time she has spoken to him, and Dante's soul is thrilled and fired to its very depths. Not many hours afterwards, the poet began the first of his sonnets that we still possess, perhaps the first he ever wrote.[3]
Let us pass over eight or nine years more. Dante, now about twenty-six, is the very flower of chivalry and poetry. The foremost men of his own and other cities—artists, musicians, poets, scholars, and statesmen—are his friends. Somewhat hard of access and reserved, but the most fascinating of companions and the faithfulest of friends to those who have found a real place in his heart, Dante takes a rank of acknowledged eminence amongst the poets of his day. His verses, chiefly in praise of Beatrice, are written in a strain of tender sentiment, that gives little sign of what is ultimately to come out of him, but there is a nervous and concentrated power of diction, a purity and elevation of conception in them, which may not have been obvious to his companions as separating him from them, but which to eyes