A rapid sketch of the most decisive events and the leading motives of the life of Dante Alighieri has brought us to the eventful period of his Priorate in 1300 and his banishment in 1302. His unsuccessful efforts to carry out a firm and statesmanlike policy in Florence, with the wreck of his own fortunes consequent upon their failure, may be regarded as the occasion if not the cause of his conceiving his greatest work, the 'Divine Comedy.'

Nineteen years elapsed between Dante's exile and his death, and both tradition and internal evidence indicate that the main strength of his life was poured during the whole of this period into the channels already laid down in its opening years. 'Forging on the anvil of incessant toil' the several parts of his great work, and 'welding them into imperishable symmetry,'[14] the might of his intellect and the passion of his heart grappled for nineteen years with the task of giving worthy utterance to his vast idea. Line by line, canto by canto, the victory was won. Dante had shown that his mother tongue could rise to loftier themes than Greek or Roman had ever touched, and had wrought out the fitting garb of a poem that stands alone in the literature of the world in the scope and sublimity of its conception.

Barely to realise what it was that Dante attempted, wakes feelings in our hearts akin to awe. When we think of that work and of the man who, knowing what it was, deliberately set himself to do it, an appalling sense of the presence of overwhelming grandeur falls upon us, as when a great wall of rocky precipice rises sheer at our side, a thousand and yet a thousand feet towards heaven. Our heads swim as we gaze up to the sky-line of such a precipice, the ground seems to drop from beneath our feet, all our past and present becomes a dream, and our very hold of life seems to slip away from us. But the next moment a great exultation comes rushing upon our hearts, with quickened pulses and drawing deeper breath we rise to the sublimity of the scene around us, and our whole being is expanded and exalted by it. After holding converse with such grandeur our lives can never be so small again. And so it is when the meaning of Dante's Comedy breaks upon us. When we follow the poet step by step as he beats or pours his thought into language, when we note the firmness of his pace, the mastery with which he handles and commands his infinite theme, the unflinching directness, the godlike self-reliance, with which he lays bare the hearts of his fellow-men and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Eternal, when we gaze upon his finished work and the despair of Hell, the yearning of Purgatory, the peace of Heaven, sweep over our hearts, we are ready to whisper in awe-struck exultation:

The allegory with which the 'Divine Comedy' opens, shadows forth the meaning and the purpose of the whole poem. In interpreting it we may at first give prominence to its political signification, not because its main intention is certainly or probably political, but because we shall thus be enabled to pass in due order from the outer to the inner circle of the poet's beliefs and purposes.

In the year 1300, then, Dante Alighieri found that he had wandered, he knew not how, from the true path of life, and was plunged into the deadly forest of political, social, and moral disorder which darkened with terrific shade the fair soil of Italy. Deep horror settled upon the recesses of his heart during the awful night, but at last he saw the fair light of the morning sun brightening the shoulders of a hill that stretched above: this was the peaceful land of moral and political order, which seemed to offer an escape from the bitterness of that ghastly forest. Gathering heart at this sweet sight, Dante set himself manfully to work, with the nether foot ever planted firmly on the soil, to scale that glorious height. But full soon his toilsome path would be disputed with him. The dire powers of Guelfism would not allow the restoration of peace and order to Italy. His first foe was the incurable factiousness and lightness of his own fair Florence. Like a lithe and speckled panther it glided before him to oppose his upward progress, and forced him once and again to turn back upon his steps towards that dread forest he had left. But though forced back, Dante could not lose hope. Might he not tame this wild but beauteous beast? Yes; he might have coped with the fickle, lustful, factious, envious but lovely Florence, had not haughty France rushed on him like a lion, at whose voice the air must tremble, had not lean and hungry Rome, laden with insatiable greed, skulked wolf-like in his path. It was the wolf above all that forced him back into the sunless depths of that forest of dismay, and dashed to the ground his hopes of gaining the fair height. When could he, when could his Italy, rise from this chaos and be at peace? Not till some great political Messiah should draw his sword. With no base love of pelf or thirst for land, but fed with wisdom, love, and virtue, he should exalt the humbled Italy and drive away her foes. Like a noble hound, he should chase the insatiable wolf of Roman greed from city to city back to the Hell from which it came.[15]

Dante's hope in this political Messiah rose and fell, but never died in his heart. Now with the gospel of Messianic peace, now with the denunciation of Messianic judgment on his lips, he poured out his lofty enthusiasm in those apostolic and prophetic letters, some few of which survive amidst the wrecks of time as records of his changing moods and his unchanging purposes.

Now one and now another of the Ghibelline leaders may have seemed to Dante from time to time to be the hero, the Messiah, for whom he waited. But again and yet again his hopes were crushed and blighted, and the panther, the lion, and the wolf still cut off the approach to that fair land.

More than once the poet's hopes must have hung upon the fortunes of the mighty warrior Uguccione, whose prodigies of valour rivalled the fabled deeds of the knights of story. To this man Dante was bound by ties of closest friendship; to him he dedicated the Inferno, the first cantica of his Comedy, and he may possibly have been that hero ''twixt the two Feltros born'[16] to whom Dante first looked to slay the wolf of Rome.

Far higher probably, and certainly far better grounded, were the poet's hopes when Henry VII. of Germany descended into Italy to bring order into her troubled states. To Dante, as we have seen, the Emperor was Emperor of Rome and not of Germany. He was CÆsar's successor, the natural representative of Italian unity, the Divinely appointed guardian of civil order. With what passionate yearning Dante looked across the Alps for a deliverer, how large a part of the woes of Italy he laid at the feet of Imperial neglect, may be gathered from many passages in his several works; but nowhere do these thoughts find stronger utterance than in the sixth canto of the Purgatory. The poet sees the shades of Virgil and the troubadour Sordello join in a loving embrace at the bare mention of the name of Mantua, where both of them were born. 'O Italy!' he cries, 'thou slave! thou hostelry of woe! Ship without helmsman, in the tempest rude! No queen of provinces, but house of shame! See how that gentle soul, e'en at the sweet sound of his country's name, was prompt to greet his fellow-citizen. Then see thy living sons, how one with other ever is at war, and whom the self-same wall and moat begird, gnaw at each other's lives. Search, wretched one, along thy sea-bound coasts, then inward turn to thine own breast, and see if any part of thee rejoice in peace. Of what avail Justinian's curb of law, with none to stride the saddle of command, except to shame thee more? Alas! ye priests, who should be at your prayers, leaving to CÆsar the high seat of rule, did ye read well the word of God to you, see ye not how the steed grows wild and fell by long exemption from the chastening spur, since that ye placed your hands upon the rein? O German Albert! who abandonest, wild and untamed, the steed thou should'st bestride, may the just sentence from the stars above fall on thy race in dire and open guise, that he who follows thee may see and fear. For, drawn by lust of conquest otherwhere, thou and thy sire, the garden of the empire have ye left a prey to desolation. Come, thou insensate one, and see the Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi, Philippeschi, for all whom the past has sadness or the future fear. Come, come, thou cruel one, and see oppression trampling on thy faithful ones, and heal their ills.... Come thou, and see thy Rome, who weeps for thee, a lonely widow crying day and night, "My CÆsar, wherefore hast thou left me thus?" Come, see how love here governs every heart! Or if our sorrows move thee not at all, blush for thine own fair fame.—Nay, let me say it: O Thou God Most High, Thou Who wast crucified for us on earth, are Thy just eyes turned otherwhither now? Or in the depth of counsel dost Thou work for some good end, clean cut off from our ken? For all Italia's lands are full of tyrants, and every hind—so he be factious—grows Marcellus-high.'[17]

Such was the cry for deliverance which went up from Dante's heart to the Emperor. Picture his hopes when Henry VII. came with the blessing of the Pope, who had had more than his fill of French influence at last, to bring peace and order into Italy; picture the exultation with which he learnt alike from Henry's deeds and words that he was just, impartial, generous, and came not as a tyrant, not as a party leader, but as a firm and upright ruler to restore prosperity and peace; picture his indignation when the incurable factiousness and jealousies of the Italian cities, and of Florence most of all, thwarted the Emperor at every step; picture the bitterness of his grief when, after struggling nigh three years in vain, Henry fell sick, and died at Buonconvento. In Paradise the poet saw the place assigned to 'Henry's lofty soul—his 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 to return to his beloved Florence, but upon disgraceful conditions which he could not accept. The offer came when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Henry VII. was dead, Uguccione had lost his power. All hope of the exile's returning in triumph seemed at an end. Then came the offer of a pardon and recall, for which he had longed with all the passionate intensity of his nature. And yet it was but a mockery. It was a custom in Florence upon the Day of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the city, to release certain malefactors from the public gaols on their performing set acts of contrition; and a decree was passed that all the political exiles might return to their home on St. John's Day in 1317 if they would pay a sum of money, walk in procession, with tapers in their hands and with other tokens of guilt and penitence, to the church, and there offer themselves as ransomed malefactors to the saint.

Many of the exiles accepted the terms, but Dante's proud and indignant refusal shows us a spirit unbroken by disappointment and disaster, scorning to purchase ease by degradation. 'Is this,' he cries to the friend who communicated to him the conditions upon which he might return, 'is this the glorious recall by which Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after well-nigh fifteen years of exile? Is this what innocence well known to all, is this what the heavy toil of unbroken study, has deserved? Far be it from him who walks as her familiar with Philosophy to stoop to the base grovelling of a soul of clay and suffer himself thus to be treated like a vile malefactor. Far be it from the preacher of justice, when suffering outrage, to pay the acknowledgment of fair desert to the outrageous.

'Not by this path can I return. But let a way be found that hurts not Dante's honour and fair fame, and I will tread it with no tardy feet. If no such road leads back to Florence, then will I never enter Florence more. What! can I not gaze, wherever I may be, upon the spectacle of sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths in any region under heaven, but I must first make myself base and vile before the people of the State of Florence?'[25]

Such was the answer of Dante Alighieri to that cruel insult which makes our cheeks glow even now with indignation. Such was the temper of the man who had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, and who shrank not from the utterance of all that he had seen.

Dante must now have been engaged in writing the Paradise. Amongst the sufferings and burdens which were fast drawing him to the grave, amongst the agonies of indignation, of regret, of hope, of disappointment which still wracked his soul, the deep peace of God had come upon him; beneath a storm of passion at which our hearts quail was a calm of trustful self-surrender which no earthly power could disturb; for the harmonies of Paradise swelled in the poet's heart and sought for utterance in these last years.

But though his spirit was thus rapt to Heaven, he never lost his hold upon the earth; never disdained to toil as best he might for the immediate instruction or well-being of his kind. More than once his eloquence and skill enabled him to render signal service to his protectors in conducting delicate negotiations, and at the same time to further that cause of Italian unity which was ever near his heart. Nor did the progress of his great work, the Comedy, withhold him from a varied subsidiary activity as a poet, a moralist, and a student of language and science.

One characteristic example of this by-work must suffice. In the last year but one of his life when he must have been meditating the last, perhaps the sublimest, cantos of the Paradise, when he might well have been excused if he had ceased to concern himself with any of the lower grades of truth, he heard a certain question of physics discussed and re-discussed, and never decided because of the specious but sophistical arguments which were allowed to veil it in doubt. The question was whether some portions of the sea are or are not at a higher level than some portions of the land; and Dante, 'nursed from his boyhood in the love of truth,' as he says, 'could not endure to leave the question unresolved, and determined to demonstrate the facts and to refute the arguments alleged against them.'[26] Accordingly he defended his thesis on a Sunday in one of the churches of Verona under the presidency of Can Grande.

This essay is a model of close reasoning and sound scientific method, and the average nineteenth century reader, with the average contempt for fourteenth century science, would find much to reflect upon should he read and understand it. The vague and inconclusive style of reasoning against which Dante contends is still rampant everywhere, though its forms have changed; while the firm grasp of scientific method and the incisive reasoning of Dante himself are still the exception in spite of all our modern training in research.

Thus Dante was engaged to the last upon the whole field of human thought. Such was the scope and power of his mind that he could embrace at the same moment the very opposite poles of speculation; and such was his passion for truth that, when gazing upon the very presence of God, he could not bear to leave men in error when he could set them right, though it were but as to the level of the land and sea.

But we must hasten to a close. Let us turn from the consideration of Dante's work to a picture of personal character drawn by his own hand. It is his ideal of a life inspired by that 'gentleness' for which, since the days of chivalry, we have had no precise equivalent in language, and which is itself too rare in every age.

Cherishing such an ideal, Dante wandered from court to court of Italy, finding here and there a heart of gold, but for the most part moving amongst those to whom grace and purity and justice were but names. Can we wonder that sometimes the lonely exile felt as if his own sorrow-laden heart were the sole refuge upon earth of love and temperance?

Three noble dames, he tells us—noble in themselves but in nought else, for their garments were tattered, their feet unshod, their hair dishevelled, and their faces stained with tears—came and flung themselves at the portal of his heart, for they knew that Love was there. Moved with deep pity, Love came forth to ask them of their state. They were Rectitude, Temperance, and Generosity, once honoured by the world, now driven out in want and shame, and they came there for refuge in their woe. Then Love, with moistened eyes, bade them lift up their heads. If they were driven begging through the world, it was for men to weep and wail whose lives had fallen in such evil times; but not for them, hewn from the eternal rock—it was not for them to grieve. A race of men would surely rise at last whose hearts would turn to them again. And hearing thus how exiles great as these were grieved and comforted, the lonely poet thought his banishment his glory.

Yet when he looked for his sweet home and found it not, the agony that could not break his spirit fast destroyed his flesh, and he knew that death had laid the key upon his bosom.[28]

When this sublime and touching poem was composed we have no means of knowing, but it can hardly have been long before the end. When that end came, Dante can barely have completed his great life work, he can barely have written the last lines of the 'Divine Comedy.' He had been on an unsuccessful mission in the service of his last protector, Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. On his return he was seized with a fatal illness, and died at Ravenna in 1321, at the age of fifty-six.

Who can grudge him his rest? As we read the four tracts of the 'Convito,' which were to have been the first of fourteen, but must now remain alone, as we are brought to a sudden stand at the abrupt termination of his unfinished work on the dialects and poetry of Italy,[29] as we ponder on the unexhausted treasures that still lay in the soul of him who could write as Dante wrote even to the end, we can hardly suppress a sigh to think that our loss purchased his rest so soon. But his great work was done; he had told his vision, that men might go with him to Hell, to Purgatory, and to Heaven, and be saved from all things base. Then his weary head was laid down in peace, and his exile was at an end. 'That fair fold in which, a lamb, he lay'[30] was never opened to him again, but he went home, and the blessings of the pure in heart and strong in love go with him.

The thoughts with which we turn from the contemplation of Dante's life and work find utterance in the lines of Michael Angelo. 'The works of Dante were unrecognised, and his high purpose, by the ungrateful folk whose blessing rests on all—except the just. Yet would his fate were mine! For his drear exile, with his virtue linked, glad would I change the fairest state on earth.'