Dante: Six Sermons. Philip Henry Wicksteed
who should come to make the crooked straight, ere Italy was ready for his hand;' but the dream of his throne on earth was broken for ever.[18]
Henry died in 1313. This blow was followed by the fall of Uguccione when he seemed almost on the point of realising some of Dante's dearest hopes. The poet and the warrior alike found refuge at Verona now, with Can Grande della Scala, to whom Dante dedicated the third cantica of his Comedy, the Paradise.[19] Did the exile's hopes revive again at the Court of Verona? Did the gallant and generous young soldier whose gracious and delicate hospitality called out such warm affection from his heart,[20] seem worthy to accomplish that great mission in which Uguccione and Henry had failed? It is more than probable that such thoughts found room in Dante's sorrow-laden heart. And yet we cannot but suppose that while his certainty remained unshaken that in God's good time the deliverer would come, yet the hopes which centred in any single man must have had less and less assurance in them as disappointment after disappointment came.
Be this as it may, near the close of his life Dante was still able to make Beatrice testify of him in the courts of Heaven: 'Church militant has not a son stronger in hope than he. God knows it.'[21] Simple as these words are, yet by him who has scanned Dante's features and pondered on his life, they may well be numbered amongst those moving and strengthening human utterances that ring like a trumpet through the ages and call the soul to arms.
But were Dante's hopes all concentrated on the advent of that political Messiah who was not to come in truth till our own day? Had it been so, the 'Divine Comedy' would never have been born.
When Dante realised his own helplessness in the struggle against the panther of Florence, the lion of France, and the wolf of Rome, when he saw that to reorganise his country and remodel the social and political conditions of life would need the strong hand and the keen sword of some great hero raised by God, he also saw that for himself another way was opened, an escape from that wild forest into which his feet had strayed, an escape which it must be the task of his life to point out to others, without which the very work of the hero for whom he looked would be in vain.
The deadly forest represented moral as well as political confusion; the sunlit mountain, moral as well as political order; and the beasts that cut off the ascent, moral as well as political foes to human progress.
From this moral chaos there was deliverance for every faithful soul, despite the lion and the wolf; and though the noble hound came not to chase the foul beasts back to Hell, yet was Dante led from the forest gloom even to the light of Heaven.
And how was he delivered? By Divine grace he saw Hell and Purgatory and Heaven—so was he delivered. He saw the souls of men stripped of every disguise, he saw their secret deeds of good or ill laid bare. He saw Popes and Emperors, ancient heroes and modern sages, the rich, the valiant, the noble, the fair of face, the sweet of voice; and no longer dazzled, no longer overawed, he saw them as they were, he saw their deeds, he saw the fruits of them. So was he delivered from the entanglements and perplexities, from the delusions and seductions of the world, so were his feet set upon the rock, so did he learn to sift the true from the false, to rise above all things base, and set his soul at peace, even when sorrow was gnawing his heart to death. He, while yet clothed in flesh and blood, went amongst the souls of the departed, 'heard the despairing shrieks of spirits long immersed in woe, who wept each one the second death; saw suffering souls contented in the flames, for each one looked to reach the realms of bliss, though long should be the time,' and lastly he saw the souls in Heaven, and gazed upon the very light of God.[22]
All this he saw and heard under the guidance of human and Divine philosophy, symbolised, or rather concentrated and personified, in Virgil and Beatrice.
Of Virgil, and the unique position assigned to him in the Middle Ages, it is impossible here to speak at length. Almost from the first publication of the Æneid, and down to the time when the revival of learning reopened the treasures of Greek literature to Western Europe, Virgil reigned in the Latin countries supreme and unchallenged over the domain of poetry and scholarship. Within two generations of his own lifetime, altars were raised to him, by enthusiastic disciples, as to a deity. When Christianity spread, his supposed prediction of Christ in one of the Eclogues endowed him with the character of a prophet; and a magic efficacy had already been attributed to verses taken from his works. Throughout the Middle Ages, his fame still grew as the supreme arbiter in every field of literature, and as the repositary of more than human knowledge, while fantastic legends clustered round his name as the great magician and necromancer. To Dante there must also have been a special fascination in the Imperial scope and sympathies of the Æneid; for Virgil is pre-eminently the poet of the Roman Empire. But we must not pause to follow out this subject here. Suffice it that Dante felt for Virgil a reverence so deep, an admiration so boundless, and an affection so glowing, that he became to him the very type of human wisdom and excellence, the first agent of his rescue from the maze of passion and error in which his life had been entangled.
But Beatrice, the loved and lost, was the symbol and the channel of a higher wisdom, a diviner grace. She it was round whose sweet memory gathered the noblest purposes and truest wisdom of the poet's life. If ever he suffered the intensity of his devotion to truth and virtue for a moment to relax; if ever, as he passed amongst luxurious courts, some siren voice soothed his cares with a moment of unworthy forgetfulness and ignoble ease; if ever he suffered meaner cares or projects to draw him aside so much as in thought from his great mission, then it was Beatrice's glorified image that recalled him in tears of bitter shame and penitence to the path of pain, of effort, and of glory. It was her love that had rescued him from the fatal path; Virgil was but her agent and emissary, and his mission was complete when he had led him to her. Human wisdom and virtue could guide him through Hell and Purgatory, could show him the misery of sin, and the need of purifying pain and fire, but it was only in Beatrice's presence that he could feel the utter hatefulness and shame of an unworthy life, could feel the blessedness of Heaven.[23]
Under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice, then, Dante had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. This had snatched his soul from death, had taught him, even in the midst of the moral and political chaos of his age, how to live and after what to strive. Could he show others what he himself had seen? Could he save them, as he was saved, from the meanness, from the blindness, from the delusions of the life they led? He could. Though it should be the toil of long and painful years, yet in the passionate conviction of his own experience he felt the power in him of making real to others what was so intensely real to him. But what did this involve? The truth if wholesome was yet hard. He had dear and honoured friends whose lives had been stained by unrepented sin, and whose souls he had seen in Hell. Was he to cry aloud to all the world that these loved ones were amongst the damned, instead of tenderly hiding their infirmities? Again, he was poor and an exile, he had lost 'all things most dear,' and was dependent for his very bread on the grace and favour of the great; yet if he told the world what he had seen, a storm of resentful hatred would crash upon him from every region of Italy. How would proud dames and lords brook to be told of their dead associates in sin and shame cursing their names from the very depths of Hell, and looking for their speedy advent there? How would pope and cardinal and monarch brook to be told by the powerless exile what he had heard from souls in Heaven, in Purgatory, and in Hell? E'en let them brook it as they might. His cry should be like the tempest that sweeps down upon the loftiest forest trees, but leaves the brushwood undisturbed. The mightiest in the land should hear his voice, and henceforth none should think that loftiness of place or birth could shield the criminal. He would tell in utter truth what he had seen. He knew that power was in him to brand the infamous with infamy that none could wash away, to rescue the fair memory of those the world had wrongfully condemned, to say what none but he dare say, in verse which none but he could forge, and bring all those who hearkened through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven.[24]
To deliver this message was the work of his life, the end to which all his studies were directed, from the time of his exile to that of his death. Hence his studious labours came to have a representative and vicarious character in his mind. He was proudly conscious that he lived and worked for mankind, and that his toil deserved the grateful recognition of his city and his country.
This trait of his character comes out with striking force in the noble letter which he wrote in answer to the proffered permission