THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S ON DANTE.* To Dante students

of the present day, Dean Church's noble and scholarlike essay on the great Florentine poet will be no less welcome than it was to their predecessors of some forty years ago. Though Dante himself spoke of the great work of his life as a- • Dante, and other Essays. By B. W. Chunk Dean of S. Paul's. London: Macmillan. 1888. • " Poema sacro Al quale ha posto mane cielo e terra," it is even yet too often regarded as a political epic. Against this most erroneous and ignoble view, it is well that the Dean of St. Paul's indignant and eloquent protest should become as familiar to the present generation as it was to the last. The secret of the Divina Commedia is the trinity in unity of the universe, the bond, known even to the cold philosophy of far Cathay, that binds heaven, earth, and man into one mighty whole. And the purpose that rims through and connects the three cantiche is the manifestation, in the grandest vision the brain of man ever conceived, of the necessity and beauty of this sublime faith.

To show that such was Dante's true aim, was the task Dean Church undertook. It was not sufficient to examine the poem itself. The greatest of the three great epics is "singular," as the Dean well says, "for its strong stamp of personal character and history." Nevertheless, it is no personal record; its per- sonality is the manifestation of its occasion, not of its essence. What that occasion was, we must seek in the pages of the annalists of the City of Flowers, G. Villani and Dino Com- pagni. The wild anarchy they portray, *in language whose simplicity and directness testify to the truthfulness of the terrible picture, is unexampled in history. There had been a time when, in Dante's words,— " In sul passe, ch' A disce e Po rigs, Solea vaiore e cortesia trovarsi Prima che Federigo avesse briga."

But long before the grandson of Barbarossa aided the Ghibellines to establish their supremacy in Florence, the fend had broken out between the Buondelmonti and the Uberti, to which M. Taine's forcible description so well applies of a June insurrection protracted over thirty-six years. The anni- hilation of the Ghibelline power by Charles of Anjou at Benevento, in the year of Dante's birth, brought no peace to the Tuscan city. The victorious Guelfs quarrelled among themselves, and the Neri and Bianchi outdid their foregoers in the bitterness of their strife, while the struggle had no end in view beyond that of mere domination, itself sought mainly to glut revenge. Aimless murder stalked the streets. The palaces of the nobles were fortresses under constant siege.

Great signori, such as Corso Donati and Dante's bosom-friend, Guido Cavalcanti, hunted each other round street-corners like wild beasts. The first act of Romeo and Juliet, as M. Taine has remarked, well depicts the senseless fury of the time; and in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio, Dante, in a tone of pro- found sadness, contrasts the misery of his native city with its former gay and happy life :— " Quell' anima gentil fu cosi presta, Sol per lo dole° anon della sun terra, Di fare al cittadin suo quivi festa ; Ed ora in te non stanno senza guerra Li vivi tuoi, e Fun l'altro si rode Di quei, ch' un muro ed una fossa Berra."

The wild confusion within the walls was a concentrated picture of the disorder of the world without,—the cities of Northern Italy, raging within, raged in like manner with each other; the monarchies of the West were engaged in ceaseless dynastic wars, or intrigues ever verging on war; and the struggle between Pope and Emperor, between the eccle- siastical and the political powers, permeated all Latin Christendom with the ferment of discord. It was to such a world, a dark and confused scene of inarticulate misery and mere vengeful strife, unillumined by a ray of moral light, that the great poet brought his sublime message. Desperate as the times were, desperate his own lot in life, he yet did not despair : to high genius, despair is never other than a passing mood. His poem, full of personality as it is, if we would apprehend its purport rightly, must in no wise, as already observed, be viewed as a personal record, Dante was no egoist. The eager, sensitive, studious but genial youth, to whom one vision of beauty was a lifelong joy, whose mind was attuned by the severest mental labour to the profoundest thought of the theologian and the loftiest imagination of the poet, never dreamed of standing aloof from humanity. He called his great work a Commedia expressly, because its end was man's happiness, happiness to be attained by conformity of man's free-will with the will of God, and in no other way —with the will of God who is Love, Love the climax of the hundred cantos, as we see in the last line of the Paradiso,— "L'Amor che mnove '1 Sol e raltre stalk." With the word stelle, as has often been remarked, each cantica ends, doubtless designedly, that the reader, at each great pause in the poem, may be led to contemplate the starry frontier-sphere of the true Heaven. Thus, the last line of the Inferno strikes a note of warning to the unrepentant,— " E quindi uscimmo a riveder le steno," which the denizens of Hell, victims of their own will, would never again behold; and the Purgatorio concludes with an assertion of the poet's condition, as that of one who, under the guidance of Beatrice standing on the top of the Holy Hill, full of hope for those who may be weak, but are not per- sistently wicked, was- " Puro e disposto a salire alle steno."

Neither is the Comraedia an allegory, though it has allegori- cal, just as it has personal and historical passages. It is a

system of philosophy, built up by one filled with all the science of the time, thought out by a theologian, and sung by a poet.

Dante was not merely a student and a thinker; he took an active, even a prominent part in the affairs of his native city, and his exile was a lifelong grief to him ; fortunately so for the world, for otherwise the Ccrownedia would never have been written. He was unhappy, not discontented, unhappy as he contemplated the misery of his native State, imbedded, so to speak, in the misery of Christendom, and saw that men would not seek the only sure way out of it,—con- formity with the will of God. The wretchedness of the world was typified in that of Florence, and the folly of mankind in the folly of his fellow-citizens, who had exiled and twice con- demned to death one whose clear vision and uprightness of soul might well have helped them to retrieve their condition.

His message was to all the world, but particularly to Italy, and most particularly to Florence. The way was open, but men would not walk in it ; it was the way of obedience to God's will, and it was God's will that the Kaiser should be the Cmsar, in reality as well as in name, of the modern world :— " Ahi gente, che dovresti esser devota, E lasciar seder Cesar nella sells, Se bene intendi cio che Dio ti nota !"—(Purg.) This was the political remedy, and it was natural that Dante, though no Ghibelline at heart or by education, should become one in fact. What other way was there of composing the infinite discord of the times, save by bringing back in some shape the pax Ramona and the power to enforce it? Ulti- mately, indeed, that was the kind of remedy applied by every State to itself. Everywhere the monarch became supreme, and the nations were at peace within their borders, and this mergence of partisanship in monocracy prepared the way for modern liberty. But the revival of the Augustan Empire was the dream of the politician ; it was to establish the kingdom of God upon earth by bringing men to a sense of the necessity and beauty of the divine government, that the theologian affronted the horrors of Hell, and clomb the difficult Hill whence, under the guidance of the beatified spirit of human love, he dared to gaze upon the effulgence of Heaven and the glory of the Trinity :— "Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza tre gin Di tre colon e d' una contenenza."

Such is the substance of the message Dante announced to men, at a moment when men stood in sore need of it. In this profound study of the great Italian poet, who to the majesty of Homer joined the sweetness of Virgil and the faith and fervour of St. Augustine, Dante's fitness for the task of con- structing so all-embracing a poetic edifice as the Commedda, is set forth by Dean Church with such fullness of knowledge and keenness of insight into the nature of the man and the character of his circumstance, that we cannot forbear from quoting the passage in full :— "As a man of society, his memory is full of its usages, formali- ties, graces, follies, fashions—of expressive motions, postures, gestures, looks—of music, of handicrafts, of the conversation of friends or associates—of all that passes, so transient, yet so keenly pleasant or distasteful, between man and man. As a traveller, he recalls continually the names and scenes of the world; as a man of speculation, the secrets of Nature,—the phenomena of light, the theory of the planets' motions, the idea and laws of physiology. As a man of learning, he is filled with the thoughts and recol- lections of ancient fable and history; as a politician, with the thoughts, prognostications, and hopes of the history of the day ; as a moral philosopher, he has watched himself, —he has far and wide noted character, discriminated motives, classed good and evil deeds. All that the man of society, of travel, of science, of learning, the politician, the moralist, could gather, is used at will

in the great poetic structure all converges to the purpose directed by the intense feeling of the theologian who sees the difficult but sure progress of the manifold remedies of the Divine government to their predestined issue ; and over all, God and His saints."

Dante can never be a popular poet. His thought is too deep, his theme too high. He is probably less read now than in the century following his death. Of the three ccmtiche, the Inferno, in accordance with man's curious love of the repulsive, has proved the most attractive to men. It is in the vision, too, of the sad traveller through the descending and contracting circles of Hell, described with such unapproachable power, that men seem to find the assurance of due punishment to be awarded to wrong-doers,—always an agreeable conviction. It is a mistake, almost an unpardonable one, to regard the dreadful torments of the Inferno as mere vendette. Not that Dante was exempt from human weaknesses ; but his high, strong, sweet, and genial nature saved him from trivial and ignoble thoughts. It is clear in almost every instance, even when the crime punished is an offence against himself, that it was the moral character, not the personal aspect of the offence, that moved him to pronounce not his own, but God's sentence. To our mind, Dante seems to rise in grandeur as, under the guidance of Wisdom personified in Virgil, and Love in Beatrice, he climbs the Hill and soars aloft into the very presence of God. His earthliness falls from him more and more as he leaves behind him in turn the vices of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, self-indulgence ; hope broadens out, the denunciation of sin and the harrowing record of its punishment give place to the glowing eulogiura of faith and virtue, and the ecstatic portrayal of the final happiness of the just, until at last language fails even him :— " Oh quanto e corto 'I dire, e come fioco Al mio conc,etto ! e quests a quel, ch' io vidi, E tanto, che non basta a dicer poco."

It is, indeed, in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso that the full measure of Dante's poetic genius is shown, and in the Paradiso more amply than in the second cantica. The literary blemishes that the Dean of St. Paul sees in the Inferno—forgetting, perhaps, that Dante deliberately chose the common Tuscan speech that he might the better make known his vision to men, to all men, learned and unlearned alike—are absent from the other portions of the poem. What can be more exquisite than his pictures of Nature—especially of animate nature— of the water-birds rising from the shore :— " Come augelli snrti di riviera,

Quasi congratulando a lor pasture, Fenno di se or fond.% or lunge schiera;"

of the lark seeking repose from its own tumultuous happi- ness :— " Qual lodoletta, che 'n aere si spazia

Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta Dell' ultima dolcesza che is seem;"

of the mated doves :— " SI come quando '1 colombo si pone Presso al compagno, l'uno e l'altro pande

Girando e snerinorando l'affezione."

The italics are the Dean's, in whose essay the above passages are cited. Many others of equal and of greater beauty are there collected, and nearly all are quoted from the second and third cantiche. As Dean Church well remarks, light in general is Dante's special and chosen source of poetic beauty. Each cantica, as we have already seen, closes with the world sidle; towards the light, Dante's face and soul are, indeed, ever turned, and his poem is a long exhortation to men to turn their souls towards that highest Light which is beyond and sustains the starry sphere and all the spheres within it. Thus, to quote but one of the examples given by Dean Church, as the poet passes from the moon's orbit to the circle of Mercury, the glad- ness of his fair guide at meeting him once more is described as giving a new brightness to the star :— " Quivi In donna mia vid' is si Hata, Come nel lume di quel del si raise Che pii lucente se ne fe' il Pianeta, E se In stella si cambib, e rise In the Purgatorio and Paradiso, this joy in light is, indeed, everywhere manifest, and is a proof, if one were wanting, that Dante's was no gloomy, revengeful, or ascetic nature, but a warm human soul, filled with a sense of delight in the world around him, and with hopeful sympathy with his kind, merciless only, under the theology of his day, towards the wilful and unrepentant worker of woe to men and contemner of God. In the splendid passage in the last canto of the Purgatorio, quoted by Dean Church, where Dante after years of forgetfulness and sin, sees Beatrice in glory, and hears his name, never but once pronounced during the vision, from her lips," we have, perhaps, the fullest revelation of his deep sense of the beauty of light; but the passage is too long for quotation. Upon the gradual heightening of the moral grandeur and beauty of the vision as the poet mounts heavenwards, Dean Church hardly, perhaps, lays sufficient stress. It was part of Dante's purpose to lead from the horror of sin to the glory of righteousness, and it is in the Paradiso alone that the real unity of his conception is unfolded. Until the Paradiso has been studied, the full force and truth cannot be perceived of the Dean's eloquent words : —" No one ever measured the greatness of man in all its forms with so true and yet with so admiring an eye, and with such glowing hope, as he who also portrayed so awfully man's littleness and vileness."

Dante's ample nature had a stern side, and for human folly and error he had little tenderness. But is it not too harsh a view of the worst extravagances of the Inferno to say, as the Dean does, that no parallel could be found to them except among the lowest order of poets ? Dante never lost sight of his great end, the reformation of Man ; and the blemishes of the Commedia, which must be considered from the point of view of his intention, are but the shadows of the darkness out of which this supreme genius emerged, like the morning sun, to bring new light and life to men.