Dante, like Shakespere, speaks to every age, and has a word for every crisis in the life of men and nations. Perhaps at no time since he passed into the other world has his spirit been so potent as in these last years, when his Italy has been putting the last touches to the redemption of that territory whose boundaries he sketched in famous phrase.[1]

Scarce were his ashes cold, ere Boccaccio began to expound, from the professorial chair founded by a repentant Florence, the mysteries of his great Poem. Scarcely had Italy awaked from her long sleep of slavery to the foreigner ere she erected in Florence, in the very year in which it became temporary capital of a free nation,[2] a statue of the prophet of Italian liberty and unity.

Some forty-three years later, on the anniversary of the Poet’s death, September 14th, 1908, Ravenna was en fÊte with a gathering in which the “Unredeemed” Brethren from Pola, Fiume, Trieste, and the Trentino mingled their vows and gifts with those of the City that was his last refuge and the City that bore him and cast him out. All along, and especially in the crises of her fate, his great spirit has brooded over the Italy he loved, the Italy to whom he bequeathed the splendid instrument of a classical language. To-day, perchance he “sees of the travail of his soul, and is satisfied.”

His many-sided genius reveals new splendours when viewed from fresh angles; and the following Essays, which make no claim to special learning or originality, attempt to approach him from different sides, and so to bring out varied aspects of his greatness. But they all, or nearly all, have one point in common: each sets him forth as an Apostle of Liberty.

Freedom political, intellectual, spiritual—all these ideals are wrought into the “Sacred poem to which Heaven and Earth have set their hand,”[3] and that Poem enshrines, as we have endeavoured to shew, principles of liberty in the Educational Sphere,[4] which our present age is apt to hug to itself as its own discovery. The Essays, in their present form, are all coloured by the atmosphere of the world’s great fight for freedom. From some of them, written at the very height of the conflict, a few of the fiercer touches have been removed as “out of tune” in these critical years of would-be reconciliation and reconstruction, when old rancours must perforce be exorcised if we would save civilisation from its post-War perils. If any undue traces of bitterness remain, may Dante shelter them under the ample cloak of his righteous indignation. He, too, spoke hotly—of a Florence and of an Italy whose highest good was ever in his heart.

The problems and ideals of the Great War are still with us in a new shape, and man’s greatest need is individual and corporate “freedom of soul.” If these Essays be recognised as reflecting to any extent Dante’s great mind on such problems and ideals, the Author will be more than satisfied.

Two of these Essays had been published some years ago in the Modern Language Review,[5] and have been slightly retouched: four appeared during the course of the War, in a somewhat briefer form, in the Anglo-Italian Review[6]; while the Prologue, product of the so-called days of Peace, was published in the Guardian of August 19th, 1921. To the Editors and Publishers concerned the writer hereby accords his acknowledgements and thanks; as also to his friend, Professor Cesare Foligno,[7] for a kindly glance at the MS., and for the suggestion that the critical text of 1921 should be cited.[8] Two of the Essays now see the light for the first time.[9] The longer of these, “Dante and Educational Principles,” a paper delivered at University College, London, in the Sexcentenary Series of lectures last year, may perhaps, with the reprinted articles on “Wit and Humour in Dante,” and “Dante and Islam,” claim, in a manner, to break new ground. But all alike are humbly commended to the patient indulgence of the Dante-reading public.

Lonsdale Ragg.

Holy Cross Day, 1921.

DANTE ALIGHIERI