Opening material · Part 1

DANTE

AND

DE MONARCHIA.

[Illustration]

DANTE.

_An Essay._

BY

R. W. CHURCH, M. A., D. C. L.

DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

_To which is added_

A TRANSLATION OF

DE MONARCHIA.

BY F. J. CHURCH.

_London:_ MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879.

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.

CONTENTS

NOTICE DANTE DE MONARCHIA CONTENTS OF DE MONARCHIA PUBLISHER'S CATALOGUE

NOTICE.

The following Essay first appeared in the "Christian Remembrancer" of January, 1850, and it was reprinted in a volume of "Essays and Reviews," published in 1854.

It was written before the appearance in Germany and England of the abundant recent literature on the subject. With the exception of a few trifling corrections, it is republished without change.

By the desire of Mr. Macmillan, a translation of the _De Monarchia_ is subjoined. I am indebted for it to my son, Mr. F. J. Church, late Scholar of New College. It is made from the text of Witte's second edition of the _De Monarchia_, 1874. The _De Monarchia_ has been more than once translated into Italian and German, in earlier or later times. But I do not know that any English translation has yet appeared. It is analysed in the fifteenth chapter of Mr. Bryce's "Holy Roman Empire."

Witte, with much probability, I think, places the composition of the work in the first part of Dante's life, before his exile in 1301, while the pretensions and arguments of Boniface VIII. (1294-1303) were being discussed by Guelf and Ghibelline partisans, but before they were formally embodied in the famous Bull _Unam Sanctam_, 1302. The character of the composition, for the most part, formal, general, and scholastic, sanguine in tone and with little personal allusion, is in strong contrast with the passionate and despairing language of resentment and disappointment which marks his later writings. As an example of the political speculation of the time, it should be compared with the "_De Regimine Principum_," ascribed to Thomas Aquinas. The whole subject of the mediæval idea of the Empire is admirably discussed in Mr. Bryce's book referred to above.

R. W. C.

ST. PAUL'S, _November_, 1878.

DANTE.[1]

[JAN. 1850.]

[Footnote 1: _Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno; a literal Prose Translation, with the Text of the Original._ By J. A. CARLYLE, M. D., London: 1849. I have never quite forgiven myself for not having said more of the unpretending but honest and most useful volume which stood at the head of this essay when it first appeared as an article. It was placed there, according to what was then a custom of article writers, as a peg to hang remarks upon which might or might not be criticisms of the particular book so noticed. It did not offer itself specially to my use, and my attention was busy with my own work. But this was no excuse for availing myself of a good book, and not giving it the notice which it deserved. To an English student beginning Dante, and wishing to study him in a scholarly manner, it is really more useful than a verse translation can be; and I have always greatly regretted that the plan of translating the whole work was dropped for want of the appreciation which the first instalment ought to have had. (1878.)]

The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and Shakspere's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the _Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's _Code_, with the Parthenon and S. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.

We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit, with a kind of awe. The beginnings of all things, their bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind, by which he has added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of the reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the solemn recollection supervenes, that powers were formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, that thus it should be: and the work which man has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing all things."

It does not abate these feelings, that we can follow in some cases and to a certain extent, the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps to a heterogeneous and widely discordant order of things, which are out of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it, which have, as it may seem to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment, to which we feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy, yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its chance incidents.

The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and colouring, are determined by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes, of the poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself.

And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the deliberate design of its author. History indeed here, as generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among which he worked: but how that current of purpose threaded its way among them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened, by them, we cannot learn from history. It presents but a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a Saint in Paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling.

It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic change seems to come over this half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student--the student of the 13th century--struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premiss and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste, and the mannerisms of the Provençals. Boethius and Cicero, and the mass of mixed learning within his reach, are accepted as the consolation of his human griefs: he is filled with the passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it. Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems in her honour, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her.

Further, he marries; it is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day. At length we see him, at once an exile, and the poet of the _Commedia_. Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and natural feeling to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and brooded once more on that Saint in Paradise, whose presence and memory had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him and that stable country, "where the angels are in peace."

Round her image, the reflection of purity, and truth, and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by study and business, and revived in memory by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of the "Sacred poem of earth and heaven."

And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this passage of a soft and dreamy boy, into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration,--the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet. But for them, he might have been a modern critic and essayist born before his time, and have held a high place among the writers of fugitive verses; in Italy, a graceful but trifling and idle tribe, often casting a deep and beautiful thought into a mould of expressive diction, but oftener toying with a foolish and glittering conceit, and whose languid genius was exhausted by a sonnet. He might have thrown into the shade the Guidos and Cinos of his day, to be eclipsed by Petrarch.

But he learned in the bitter feuds of Italy not to trifle; they opened to his view, and he had an eye to see, the true springs and abysses of this mortal life--motives and passions stronger than lovers' sentiments, evils beyond the consolations of Boethius and Cicero; and from that fiery trial which without searing his heart, annealed his strength and purpose, he drew that great gift and power, by which he stands pre-eminent even among his high compeers, the gift of being real. And the idea of the _Commedia_ took shape, and expanded into its endless forms of terror and beauty, not under the roof-tree of the literary citizen, but when the exile had been driven out to the highways of the world, to study nature on the sea or by the river or on the mountain track, and to study men in the courts of Verona and Ravenna, and in the schools of Bologna and Paris--perhaps of Oxford.

The connexion of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the middle age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more felicitous in issue, of the other western nations. It is remarkable for keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilisation and empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded, by numbers larger than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire indeed aimed at being one in its administration and law; but it was not a nation, nor were its provinces nations. Yet everywhere but in Italy, it prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and union was becoming organisation--and neither geographical remoteness, nor unwieldiness of numbers, nor local interests and differences, were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity.

The history of Southern Italy indeed is mainly a foreign one, the history of modern Rome merges in that of the Papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the minuteness of private life.

Two cities were the centres of ancient history in its most interesting time. And two cities of modern Italy represent, with entirely undesigned but curiously exact coincidence, the parts of Athens and Rome. Venice, superficially so unlike, is yet in many of its accidental features, and still more in its spirit, the counterpart of Rome, in its obscure and mixed origin, in its steady growth, in its quick sense of order and early settlement of its polity, in its grand and serious public spirit, in its subordination of the individual to the family, and the family to the state, in its combination of remote dominion with the liberty of a solitary and sovereign city. And though the associations and the scale of the two were so different--though Rome had its hills and its legions, and Venice its lagunes and galleys--the long empire of Venice, the heir of Carthage and predecessor of England on the seas, the great aristocratic republic of 1000 years, is the only empire that has yet matched Rome in length and steadiness of tenure. Brennus and Hannibal were not resisted with greater constancy than Doria and Louis XII.; and that great aristocracy, long so proud, so high-spirited, so intelligent, so practical, who combined the enterprise and wealth of merchants, the self-devotion of soldiers and gravity of senators, with the uniformity and obedience of a religious order, may compare without shame its Giustiniani, and Zenos, and Morosini, with Roman Fabii and Claudii.

And Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens than Venice with Italian and contemporary Florence--stability with fitfulness, independence impregnable and secure, with a short-lived and troubled liberty, empire meditated and achieved, with a course of barren intrigues and quarrels. Florence, gay, capricious, turbulent, the city of party, the head and busy patroness of democracy in the cities round her--Florence, where popular government was inaugurated with its utmost exclusiveness and most pompous ceremonial; waging her little summer wars against Ghibelline tyrants, revolted democracies, and her own exiles; and further, so rich in intellectual gifts, in variety of individual character, in poets, artists, wits, historians--Florence in its brilliant days recalled the image of ancient Athens, and did not depart from its prototype in the beauty of its natural site, in its noble public buildings, in the size and nature of its territory. And the course of its history is similar and the result of similar causes--a traditional spirit of freedom, with its accesses of fitful energy, its periods of grand display and moments of glorious achievement, but producing nothing politically great or durable, and sinking at length into a resigned servitude.

It had its Peisistratidæ more successful than those of Athens; it had, too, its Harmodius and Aristogeiton; it had its great orator of liberty, as potent and as unfortunate as the antagonist of Philip. And finally, like Athens, it became content with the remembrance of its former glory, with being the fashionable and acknowledged seat of refinement and taste, with being a favoured dependency on the modern heir of the Cæsars. But if to Venice belongs a grander public history, Florentine names and works, like Athenian, will be living among men, when the Brenta shall have been left unchecked to turn the Lagunes into ploughland, and when Rome herself may no longer be the seat of the Popes.

The year of Dante's birth was a memorable one in the annals of Florence, of Italy, and of Christendom.[2] The year 1265 was the year of that great victory of Benevento, where Charles of Anjou overthrew Manfred of Naples, and destroyed at one blow the power of the house of Swabia. From that time till the time of Charles V., the emperors had no footing in Italy. Further, that victory set up the French influence in Italy, which, transient in itself, produced such strange and momentous consequences, by the intimate connexion to which it led between the French kings and the Popes. The protection of France was dearly bought by the captivity of Avignon, the great western schism, and the consequent secularisation of the Papacy, which lasted on uninterrupted till the Council of Trent. Nearly three centuries of degradation and scandal, unrelieved by one heroic effort among the successors of Gregory VII., connected the Reformation with the triumph of Charles and the Pope at Benevento. Finally, by it the Guelf party was restored for good in Florence; the Guelf democracy, which had been trampled down by the Uberti and Manfred's chivalry at Monteaperti, once more raised its head; and fortune, which had long wavered between the rival lilies, finally turned against the white one, till the name of Ghibelline became a proscribed one in Florence, as Jacobite was once in Scotland, or Papist in England, or Royalist in France.

[Footnote 2: May, 1265. (Pelli.) Benevento: Feb. 26, 1265/6. The Florentine year began March 25.]

The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the inheritance of a contest which, in its original meaning, had been long over. The old struggle between the priesthood and the empire was still kept up traditionally, but its ideas and interests were changed: they were still great and important ones, but not those of Gregory VII. It had passed over from the mixed region of the spiritual and temporal into the purely political. The cause of the popes was that of the independence of Italy--the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north, and the dependence of the centre and south on the Roman See. To keep the Emperor out of Italy--to create a barrier of powerful cities against him south of the Alps--to form behind themselves a compact territory, rich, removed from the first burst of invasion, and maintaining a strong body of interested feudatories, had now become the great object of the popes. It may have been a wise policy on their part, for the maintenance of their spiritual influence, to attempt to connect their own independence with the political freedom of the Italian communities; but certain it is that the ideas and the characters which gave a religious interest and grandeur to the earlier part of the contest, appear but sparingly, if at all, in its later forms.

The two parties did not care to keep in view principles which their chiefs had lost sight of. The Emperor and the Pope were both real powers, able to protect and assist; and they divided between them those who required protection and assistance. Geographical position, the rivalry of neighbourhood, family tradition, private feuds, and above all private interest, were the main causes which assigned cities, families, and individuals to the Ghibelline or Guelf party. One party called themselves the Emperor's liegemen, and their watchword was authority and law; the other side were the liegemen of Holy Church, and their cry was liberty; and the distinction as a broad one is true. But a democracy would become Ghibelline, without scruple, if its neighbour town was Guelf; and among the Guelf liegemen of the Church and liberty the pride of blood and love of power were not a whit inferior to that of their opponents. Yet, though the original principle of the contest was lost, and the political distinctions of parties were often interfered with by interest or accident, it is not impossible to trace in the two factions differences of temper, of moral and political inclinations, which though visible only on a large scale and in the mass, were quite sufficient to give meaning and reality to their mutual opposition.

These differences had come down, greatly altered of course, from the quarrel in which the parties took their rise. The Ghibellines as a body reflected the worldliness, the licence, the irreligion, the reckless selfishness, the daring insolence, and at the same time the gaiety and pomp, the princely magnificence and generosity and largeness of mind of the house of Swabia; they were the men of the court and camp, imperious and haughty from ancient lineage or the Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the frankness and courtesy of nobility; careless of public opinion and public rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public objects and public services. Among them were found, or to them inclined, all who, whether from a base or a lofty ambition, desired to place their will above law[3]--the lord of the feudal castle, the robber-knight of the Apennine pass, the magnificent but terrible tyrants of the cities, the pride and shame of Italy, the Visconti and Scaligers. That renowned Ghibelline chief, whom the poet finds in the fiery sepulchres of the unbelievers with the great Ghibelline emperor and the princely Ghibelline cardinal--the disdainful and bitter but lofty spirit of Farinata degli Uberti, the conqueror, and then singly and at his own risk, the saviour of his country which had wronged him, represents the good as well as the bad side of his party.

[Footnote 3: "Maghinardo da Susinana (_il Demonio_, Purg. 14) fu uno grande e savio tiranno ... gran castellano, e con molti fedeli: savio fu di guerra e bene avventuroso in più battaglie, e al suo tempo fece gran cose. Ghibellino era di sua nazione e in sue opere; ma co' Fiorentini era Guelfo e nimico di tutti i loro nimici, o Guelfi o Ghibellini che fossono."--G. Vill. vii. 149. A Ghibelline by birth and disposition; yet, from circumstances, a close ally of the Guelfs of Florence.]

The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of the middle classes; they rose out of and held to the people; they were strong by their compactness, their organisation in cities, their commercial relations and interests, their command of money. Further, they were professedly the party of strictness and religion, a profession which fettered them as little as their opponents were fettered by the respect they claimed for imperial law. But though by personal unscrupulousness and selfishness, and in instances of public vengeance, they sinned as deeply as the Ghibellines, they stood far more committed as a party to a public meaning and purpose--to improvement in law and the condition of the poor, to a protest against the insolence of the strong, to the encouragement of industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was austere, frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its home and Church, and of those celebrations which bound together Church and home; but withal very proud, very intolerant; in its higher form intolerant of evil, but intolerant always to whatever displeased it. Yet there was a grave and noble manliness about it which long kept it alive in Florence. It had not as yet turned itself against the practical corruptions of the Church, which was its ally; but this also it was to do, when the popes had forsaken the cause of liberty, and leagued themselves with the brilliant tyranny of the Medici. Then Savonarola invoked, and not in vain, the stern old Guelf spirit of resistance, of domestic purity and severity, and of domestic religion, against unbelief and licentiousness even in the Church; and the Guelf "_Piagnoni_" presented, in a more simple and generous shape, a resemblance to our own Puritans, as the Ghibellines often recall the coarser and worse features of our own Cavaliers.

In Florence, these distinctions had become mere nominal ones, confined to the great families who carried on their private feuds under the old party names, when Frederick II. once more gave them their meaning. "Although the accursed Guelf and Ghibelline factions lasted amongst the nobles of Florence, and they often waged war among themselves out of private grudges, and took sides for the said factions, and held one with another, and those who called themselves Guelfs desired the establishment of the Pope and Holy Church, and those who called themselves Ghibellines favoured the Emperor and his adherents, yet withal the people and commonalty of Florence maintained itself in unity, to the well-being and honour and establishment of the commonwealth."[4] But the appearance on the scene of an emperor of such talent and bold designs revived the languid contest, and gave to party a cause, and to individual passions and ambition an impulse and pretext. The division between Guelf and Ghibelline again became serious, involved all Florence, armed house against house, and neighbourhood against neighbourhood, issued in merciless and vindictive warfare, grew on into a hopeless and deadly breach, and finally lost to Florence, without remedy or repair, half her noble houses and the love of the greatest of her sons. The old badge of their common country became to the two factions the sign of their implacable hatred; the white lily of Florence, borne by the Ghibellines, was turned to red by the Guelfs, and the flower of two colours marked a civil strife as cruel and as fatal, if on a smaller scale, as that of the English roses.[5]

[Footnote 4: G. Villani, vi. 33.]

[Footnote 5: G. Villani, vi. 33, 43; _Parad._ 19.]

It was waged with the peculiar characteristics of Italian civil war. There the city itself was the scene of battle. A thirteenth century city in Italy bore on its face the evidence that it was built and arranged for such emergencies. Its crowded and narrow streets were a collection of rival castles, whose tall towers, rising thick and close over its roofs, or hanging perilously over its close courts, attested the emulous pride and the insecurity of Italian civic life. There, within a separate precinct, flanked and faced by jealous friends or deadly enemies, were clustered together the dwellings of the various members of each great house--their common home and the monument of their magnificence and pride, and capable of being, as was so often necessary, their common refuge. In these fortresses of the leading families, scattered about the city, were the various points of onset and recovery in civic battle; in the streets barricades were raised, mangonels and crossbows were plied from the towers, a series of separate combats raged through the city, till chance at length connected the attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the resistance of the other, or a conflagration interposed itself between the combatants, burning out at once Guelf and Ghibelline, and laying half Florence in ashes.

Each party had their turn of victory; each, when vanquished, went into exile, and carried on the war outside the walls; each had their opportunity of remodelling the orders and framework of government, and each did so relentlessly at the cost of their opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed families, they confiscated property, they sacked and burned warehouses, they levelled the palaces, and outraged the pride of their antagonists. To destroy was not enough, without adding to it the keenest and newest refinement of insult. Two buildings in Florence were peculiarly dear--among their "_cari luoghi_"--to the popular feeling and the Guelf party: the Baptistery of St. John, "il mio bel S. Giovanni," "to which all the good people resorted on Sundays,"[6] where they had all received baptism, where they had been married, where families were solemnly reconciled; and a tall and beautiful tower close by it, called the "Torre del Guardamorto," where the bodies of the "good people," who of old were all buried at S. Giovanni, rested on their way to the grave. The victorious Ghibellines, when they levelled the Guelf towers, overthrew this one, and endeavoured to make it crush in its fall the sacred church, "which," says the old chronicler, "was prevented by a miracle."

The Guelfs, when their day came, built the walls of Florence with the stones of Ghibelline palaces.[7] One great family stands out pre-eminent in this fierce conflict as the victim and monument of party war. The head of the Ghibellines was the proud and powerful house of the Uberti, who shared with another great Ghibelline family, the Pazzi, the valley of the upper Arno. They lighted up the war in the Emperor's cause. They supported its weight and guided it. In time of peace they were foremost and unrestrained in defiance of law and in scorn of the people--in war, the people's fiercest and most active enemies. Heavy sufferers, in their property, and by the sword and axe, yet untamed and incorrigible, they led the van in that battle, so long remembered to their cost by the Guelfs, the battle of Monteaperti (1260)--

Lo strazio, e 'l gran scempio Che fece l'Arbia colorata in rossa.--_Inf._ 10.

[Footnote 6: G. Villani, vi. 33, iv. 10; _Inf._ 19; _Parad._ 25.]

[Footnote 7: G. Villani, vi. 39, 65.]

That the head of their house, Farinata, saved Florence from the vengeance of his meaner associates, was not enough to atone for the unpardonable wrongs which they had done to the Guelfs and the democracy. When the red lily of the Guelfs finally supplanted the white one as the arms of Florence, and the badge of Guelph triumph, they were proscribed for ever, like the Peisistratidæ and the Tarquins. In every amnesty their names were excepted. The site on which their houses had stood was never again to be built upon, and remains the Great Square of Florence; the architect of the Palace of the People was obliged to sacrifice its symmetry, and to place it awry, that its walls might not encroach on the accursed ground.[8] "They had been," says a writer, contemporary with Dante, speaking of the time when he also became an exile; "they had been for more than forty years outlaws from their country, nor ever found mercy nor pity, remaining always abroad in great state, nor ever abased their honour, seeing that they ever abode with kings and lords, and to great things applied themselves."[9] They were loved as they were hated. When under the protection of a cardinal one of them visited the city, and the chequered blue and gold blazon of their house was, after an interval of half a century, again seen in the streets of Florence; "many ancient Ghibelline men and women pressed to kiss the arms,"[10] and even the common people did him honour.

[Footnote 8: G. Villani, vi. 33, viii. 26; Vasari, _Arnolfo di Lapo_, i. 255 (Fir. 1846).]

[Footnote 9: _Dino Compagni_, p. 88.]

[Footnote 10: _Dino Compagni_, p. 107.]

But the fortunes of Florentine factions depended on other causes than merely the address or vigour of their leaders. From the year of Dante's birth and Charles's victory, Florence, as far as we shall have to do with it, became irrevocably Guelf. Not that the whole commonalty of Florence formally called itself Guelf, or that the Guelf party was co-extensive with it; but the city was controlled by Guelf councils, devoted to the objects of the great Guelf party, and received in return the support of that party in curbing the pride of the nobles, and maintaining democratic forms. The Guelf party of Florence, though it was the life and soul of the republic, and irresistible in its disposal of the influence and arms of Florence, and though it embraced a large number of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as something distinct from, and external to, the governing powers, and the whole body of the people. It was a body with a separate and self-constituted existence;--in the state and allied to it, but an independent element, holding on to a large and comprehensive union without the state.

Its organisation in Florence is one of the most curious among the many curious combinations which meet us in Italian history. After the final expulsion of the Ghibellines, the Guelf party took form as an institution, with definite powers, and a local existence. It appears with as distinct a shape as the Jacobin Club or the Orange Lodges, side by side with the government. It was a corporate body with a common seal, common property, not only in funds but lands--officers, archives, a common palace,[11] a great council, a secret committee, and last of all, a public accuser of the Ghibellines; of the confiscated Ghibelline estates one-third went to the republic, another third to compensate individual Guelfs, the rest was assigned to the Guelf party.[12] A pope, (Clement IV., 1265-68) had granted them his own arms[13]; and their device, a red eagle clutching a serpent, may be yet seen, with the red lily, and the party-coloured banner of the commonalty, on the battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio.

[Footnote 11: Giotto painted in it: Vasari, _Vit. di Giotto_, p. 314.]

[Footnote 12: G. Villani, vii. 2, 17.]

[Footnote 13: _Ibid._ vii. 2.]

But the expulsion of the Ghibellines did but little to restore peace. The great Guelf families, as old as many of the Ghibellines, had as little reverence as they for law or civic rights. Below these, the acknowledged nobility of Florence, were the leading families of the "people," houses created by successful industry or commerce, and pushing up into that privileged order, which, however ignored and even discredited by the laws, was fully recognised by feeling and opinion in the most democratic times of the republic. Rivalries and feuds, street broils and conspiracies, high-handed insolence from the great men, rough vengeance from the populace, still continued to vex jealous and changeful Florence. The popes sought in vain to keep in order their quarrelsome liegemen; to reconcile Guelf with Guelf, and even Guelf with Ghibelline. Embassies went and came, to ask for mediation and to proffer it; to apply the healing paternal hand; to present an obsequious and ostentatious submission. Cardinal legates came in state, and were received with reverential pomp; they formed private committees, and held assemblies, and made marriages; they harangued in honeyed words, and gained the largest promises; on one occasion the Great Square was turned into a vast theatre, and on this stage one hundred and fifty dissidents on each side came forward, and in the presence and with the benediction of the cardinal kissed each other on the mouth.[14] And if persuasion failed, the pope's representative hesitated not to excommunicate and interdict the faithful but obdurate city.

But whether excommunicated or blessed, Florence could not be at peace; however wise and subtle had been the peace-maker's arrangements, his departing _cortège_ was hardly out of sight of the city before they were blown to the winds. Not more successful were the efforts of the sensible and moderate citizens who sighed for tranquillity within its walls. Dino Compagni's interesting though not very orderly narrative describes with great frankness, and with the perplexity of a simple-hearted man puzzled by the continual triumph of clever wickedness, the variety and the fruitlessness of the expedients devised by him and other good citizens against the resolute and incorrigible selfishness of the great Guelfs--ever, when checked in one form, breaking out in another; proof against all persuasion, all benefits; not to be bound by law, or compact, or oath; eluding or turning to its own account the deepest and sagest contrivances of constitutional wisdom.

[Footnote 14: G. Villani, vii. 56.]

A great battle won against Ghibelline Arezzo[15] raised the renown and the military spirit of the Guelf party, for the fame of the battle was very great; the hosts contained the choicest chivalry of either side, armed and appointed with emulous splendour. The fighting was hard, there was brilliant and conspicuous gallantry, and the victory was complete. It sealed Guelf ascendancy. The Ghibelline warrior-bishop of Arezzo fell, with three of the Uberti, and other Ghibelline chiefs. It was a day of trial. "Many that day who had been thought of great prowess were found dastards, and many who had never been spoken of were held in high esteem." It repaired the honour of Florence, and the citizens showed their feeling of its importance by mixing up the marvellous with its story. Its tidings came to Florence--so runs the tale in Villani, who declares what he "heard and saw" himself--at the very hour in which it was won. The Priors of the republic were resting in their palace during the noonday heat; suddenly the chamber door was shaken, and the cry heard: "Rise up!

the Aretini are defeated." The door was opened, but there was no one; their servants had seen no one enter the palace, and no one came from the army till the hour of vespers, on a long summer's day. In this battle the Guelf leaders had won great glory. The hero of the day was the proudest, handsomest, craftiest, most winning, most ambitious, most unscrupulous Guelf noble in Florence--one of a family who inherited the spirit and recklessness of the proscribed Uberti, and did not refuse the popular epithet of "_Malefami_"--Corso Donati. He did not come back from the field of Campaldino, where he had won the battle by disobeying orders with any increased disposition to yield to rivals, or court the populace, or respect other men's rights. Those rivals, too--and they also had fought gallantly in the post of honour at Campaldino--were such as he hated from his soul--rivals whom he despised, and who yet were too strong for him. His blood was ancient, they were upstarts; he was a soldier, they were traders; he was poor, they the richest men in Florence.

They had come to live close to the Donati, they had bought the palace of an old Ghibelline family, they had enlarged, adorned, and fortified it, and kept great state there. They had crossed him in marriages, bargains, inheritances. They had won popularity, honour, influence; and yet they were but men of business, while he had a part in all the political movements of the day. He was the friend and intimate of lords and noblemen, with great connexions and famous through all Italy; they were the favourites of the common people for their kindness and good nature; they even showed consideration for Ghibellines. He was an accomplished man of the world, keen and subtle, "full of malicious thoughts, mischievous and crafty;" they were inexperienced in intrigue, and had the reputation of being clumsy and stupid. He was the most graceful and engaging of courtiers; they were not even gentlemen. Lastly, in the debates of that excitable republic he was the most eloquent speaker, and they were tongue-tied.[16]

[Footnote 15: _Campaldino_, in 1289. G. Vill. vii. 131; _Dino Comp._ p. 14.]

[Footnote 16: _Dino Comp._ pp. 32, 75, 94, 133.]

"There was a family," writes Dino Compagni, "who called themselves the Cerchi, men of low estate, but good merchants and very rich; and they dressed richly, and maintained many servants and horses, and made a brave show; and some of them bought the palace of the Conti Guidi, which was near the houses of the Pazzi and Donati, who were more ancient of blood but not so rich; therefore, seeing the Cerchi rise to great dignity, and that they had walled and enlarged the palace, and kept great state, the Donati began to have a great hatred against them." Villani gives the same account of the feud.[17] "It began in that quarter of scandal the Sesta of Porta S. Piero, between the Cerchi and Donati, on the one side through jealousy, on the other through churlish rudeness. Of the house of the Cerchi was head Messer Vieri de' Cerchi, and he and those of his house were people of great business, and powerful, and of great relationships, and most wealthy traders, so that their company was one of the greatest in the world; men they were of soft life, and who meant no harm; boorish and ill-mannered, like people who had come in a short time to great state and power.

The Donati were gentlemen and warriors, and of no excessive wealth.... They were neighbours in Florence and in the country, and by the conversation of their jealousy with the peevish boorishness of the others, arose the proud scorn that there was between them." The glories of Campaldino were not as oil on these troubled waters. The conquerors flouted each other all the more fiercely in the streets on their return, and ill-treated the lower people with less scruple. No gathering for festive or serious purposes could be held without tempting strife. A marriage, a funeral, a ball, a gay procession of cavaliers and ladies--any meeting where one stood while another sat, where horse or man might jostle another, where pride might be nettled or temper shown, was in danger of ending in blood. The lesser quarrels meanwhile ranged themselves under the greater ones; and these, especially that between the Cerchi and Donati, took more and more a political character. The Cerchi inclined more and more to the trading classes and the lower people; they threw themselves on their popularity, and began to hold aloof from the meetings of the "Parte Guelfa," while this organised body became an instrument in the hands of their opponents, a club of the nobles. Corso Donati, besides mischief of a more substantial kind, turned his ridicule on their solemn dulness and awkward speech, and his friends the jesters, one Scampolino in particular, carried his gibes and nicknames all over Florence. The Cerchi received all in sullen and clogged indifference. They were satisfied with repelling attacks, and nursed their hatred.[18]

[Footnote 17: G. Vill. viii. 39.]

[Footnote 18: _Dino Compagni_, pp. 32, 34, 38.]

Thus the city was divided, and the attempts to check the factions only exasperated them. It was in vain that, when at times the government and the populace lost patience, severe measures were taken. It was in vain that the reformer, Gian della Bella, carried for a time his harsh "orders of justice" against the nobles, and invested popular vengeance with the solemnity of law and with the pomp and ceremony of a public act--that when a noble had been convicted of killing a citizen, the great officer, "Standard-bearer," as he was called, "of justice," issued forth in state and procession, with the banner of justice borne before him, with all his train, and at the head of the armed citizens, to the house of the criminal, and razed it to the ground. An eyewitness describes the effect of such chastisement:--"I, Dino Compagni, being Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293, went to their houses, and to those of their relations, and these I caused to be pulled down according to the laws. This beginning in the case of the other Gonfaloniers came to an evil effect; because, if they demolished the houses according to the laws, the people said that they were cruel; and if they did not demolish them completely, they said that they were cowards; and many distorted justice for fear of the people." Gian della Bella was overthrown with few regrets even on the part of the people. Equally vain was the attempt to keep the peace by separating the leaders of the disturbances. They were banished by a kind of ostracism; they departed in ostentatious meekness, Corso Donato to plot at Rome, Vieri de' Cerchi to return immediately to Florence. Anarchy had got too fast a hold on the city, and it required a stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory of the republic, to keep it down.

Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew richer, more intellectual, more refined, more beautiful, more gay. With its anarchy there was no stagnation. Torn and divided as it was, its energy did not slacken, its busy and creative spirit was not deadened, its hopefulness not abated. The factions, fierce and personal as they were, did not hinder that interest in political ideas, that active and subtle study of the questions of civil government, that passion and ingenuity displayed in political contrivance, which now pervaded Northern Italy, everywhere marvellously patient and hopeful, though far from being equally successful. In Venice at the close of the thirteenth century, that polity was finally settled and consolidated, by which she was great as long as cities could be imperial, and which even in its decay survived the monarchy of Louis XIV. and existed within the memory of living men. In Florence, the constructive spirit of law and order only resisted, but never triumphed. Yet it was at this time resolute and sanguine, ready with experiment and change, and not yet dispirited by continual failure.

Political interest, however, and party contests were not sufficient to absorb and employ the citizens of Florence. Their genial and versatile spirit, so keen, so inventive, so elastic, which made them such hot and impetuous partisans, kept them from being only this. The time was one of growth; new knowledge, new powers, new tastes were opening to men--new pursuits attracted them. There was commerce, there was the school philosophy, there was the science of nature, there was ancient learning, there was the civil law, there were the arts, there was poetry, all rude as yet, and unformed, but full of hope--the living parents of mightier offspring. Frederick II. had once more opened Aristotle to the Latin world; he had given an impulse to the study of the great monuments of Roman legislation which was responded to through Italy; himself a poet, his example and his splendid court had made poetry fashionable. In the end of the thirteenth century a great stride was made at Florence. While her great poet was growing up to manhood, as rapid a change went on in her streets, her social customs, the wealth of her citizens, their ideas of magnificence and beauty, their appreciation of literature.

It was the age of growing commerce and travel; Franciscan missionaries had reached China, and settled there;[19] in 1294, Marco Polo returned to Venice, the first successful explorer of the East. The merchants of Florence lagged not; their field of operation was Italy and the West; they had their correspondents in London, Paris, and Bruges; they were the bankers of popes and kings.[20] And their city shows to this day the wealth and magnificence of the last years of the thirteenth century. The ancient buildings, consecrated in the memory of the Florentine people, were repaired, enlarged, adorned with marble and bronze--Or San Michele, the Badia, the Baptistery; and new buildings rose on a grander scale. In 1294 was begun the Mausoleum of the great Florentine dead, the Church of S. Croce. In the same year, a few months later, Arnolfo laid the deep foundations which were afterwards to bear up Brunelleschi's dome, and traced the plan of the magnificent cathedral. In 1298 he began to raise a Town-hall worthy of the Republic, and of being the habitation of its magistrates, the frowning mass of the Palazzo Vecchio.

In 1299, the third circle of the walls was commenced, with the benediction of bishops, and the concourse of all the "lords and orders" of Florence. And Giotto was now beginning to throw Cimabue into the shade--Giotto, the shepherd's boy, painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer at once, who a few years later was to complete and crown the architectural glories of Florence by that masterpiece of grace, his marble Campanile.

[Footnote 19: See the curious letters of _John de Monte Corvino_, about his mission in Cathay, 1289-1305, in Wadding, vi. 69.]

[Footnote 20: _E.g._ the _Mozzi_, of Greg. X.; _Peruzzi_, of Philip le Bel; _Spini_, of Boniface VIII.; _Cerchi del Garbo_, of Benedict XI. (G. Vill. vii. 42, viii. 63, 71; _Dino Comp._ p. 35).]

Fifty years made then all that striking difference in domestic habits, in the materials of dress, in the value of money, which they have usually made in later centuries. The poet of the fourteenth century describes the proudest nobleman of a hundred years before "with his leathern girdle and clasp of bone;" and in one of the most beautiful of all poetic celebrations of the good old time, draws the domestic life of ancient Florence in the household where his ancestor was born:

A così riposato, a così bello Viver di cittadini, a così fida Cittadinanza, a così dolce ostello Maria mi diè, chiamata in alte grida.--_Par._ c. 15.[21]

[Footnote 21:

Florence, confined within that ancient wall, Whence still the chimes at noon and evening sound, Was sober, modest, and at peace with all. Myself have seen Bellincion Berti pace The street in leathern belt; his lady come Forth from her toilet with unpainted face. * * * * Oh happy wives! each soon to lay her head In her own tomb; and no one yet compelled To weep deserted in a lonely bed. * * * * To such pure life of beauty and repose-- Such faithful citizens--such happy men-- The virgin gave me, when my mother's throes Forced her with cries to call on Mary's name.--WRIGHT.]

There high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff and the loom; still rocked the cradle with the words which their own mothers had used; or working with their maidens, told them old tales of the forefathers of the city, "of the Trojans, of Fiesole, and of Rome." Villani still finds this rudeness within forty years of the end of the century, almost within the limits of his own and Dante's life; and speaks of that "old first people," _il primo Popolo Vecchio_, with their coarse food and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain close gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, as if they were the first founders of the city, and not a generation which had lasted on into his own.[22] Twenty years later, his story is of the gaiety, the riches, the profuse munificence, the brilliant festivities, the careless and joyous life, which attracted foreigners to Florence as the city of pleasure; of companies of a thousand or more, all clad in white robes, under a lord, styled "of Love," passing their time in sports and dances; of ladies and knights, "going through the city with trumpets and other instruments, with joy and gladness," and meeting together in banquets evening and morning; entertaining illustrious strangers, and honourably escorting them on horseback in their passage through the city; tempting by their liberality, courtiers, and wits, and minstrels, and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence.[23] Nor were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined and coarse merriment. How variety of character was drawn out, how its more delicate elements were elicited and tempered, how nicely it was observed, and how finely drawn, let the racy and open-eyed story-tellers of Florence testify.

[Footnote 22: G. Vill. vi. 69 (1259).]

[Footnote 23: G. Vill. vii. 89 (1283).]

Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid music and song, and in the pleasant places of social and private life, belonging to the Florence of arts and poetry, not to the Florence of factions and strife, should we expect to find the friend of the sweet singer, Casella, and of the reserved and bold speculator, Guido Cavalcanti; the mystic poet of the _Vita Nuova_, so sensitive and delicate, trembling at a gaze or a touch, recording visions, painting angels, composing Canzoni and commenting on them; finally devoting himself to the austere consolations of deep study. To superadd to such a character that of a democratic politician of the middle ages, seems an incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it was a real one in this instance. The scholar's life is, in our idea of it, far separated from the practical and the political; we have been taught by our experience to disjoin enthusiasm in love, in art, in what is abstract or imaginative, from keen interest and successful interference in the affairs and conflicts of life. The practical man may sometimes be also a _dilettante_; but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently, keeps out of the rough ways where real passions and characters meet and jostle, or if he ventures, seldom gains honour there.

The separation, though a natural one, grows wider as society becomes more vast and manifold, as its ends, functions, and pursuits are disentangled, while they multiply. But in Dante's time, and in an Italian city, it was not such a strange thing that the most refined and tender interpreter of feeling, the popular poet, whose verses touched all hearts, and were in every mouth, should be also at once the ardent follower of all abstruse and difficult learning, and a prominent character among those who administered the State. In that narrow sphere of action, in that period of dawning powers and circumscribed knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope or unwise ambition to attempt the compassing of all science, and to make it subserve and illustrate the praise of active citizenship.[24] Dante, like other literary celebrities of the time, was not less from the custom of the day, than from his own purpose, a public man. He took his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory of Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the "Art" of the Apothecaries; he served the State as its agent abroad; he went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy--according to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France.

In the memorable year of Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co-operation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such feeling--no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.

[Footnote 24: _Vide_ the opening of the _De Monarchia_.]

In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podestà[25] at Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of his contemporary Giotto. It was discovered in 1841 under the whitewash, and a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced in fac-simile by the Arundel Society. The fresco was afterwards restored or repainted with no happy success. He is represented as he might have been in the year of Campaldino (1289). The countenance is youthful yet manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings of the picture; but it only suggests the strong deep features of the well-known traditional face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something also of the quaint stiffness of the _Vita Nuova_--with his flower and his book. With him is drawn his master, Brunetto Latini,[26] and Corso Donati. We do not know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the great "Baron." Dante was, indeed, closely connected with the Donati. The dwelling of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of Scandal," the Ward of the Porta S. Piero. He married a daughter of their house, Madonna Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more affection than the companion of his light and wayward days, remembered not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with love and hope, Corso's brother, Forese.[27] No sweeter spirit sings and smiles in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom Forese remembers as on earth one,

Che tra bella e buona Non so qual fosse più--[28]

and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches the poet that in the lowest place among the blessed there can be no envy[29]--the sister of Forese and Corso, Piccarda. The _Commedia_, though it speaks, as if in prophecy, of Corso's miserable death, avoids the mention of his name.[30] Its silence is so remarkable as to seem significant. But though history does not group together Corso and Dante, the picture represents the truth--their fortunes were linked together. They were actors in the same scene--at this distance of time two of the most prominent; though a scene very different from that calm and grave assembly, which Giotto's placid pencil has drawn on the old chapel wall.

[Footnote 25: The Bargello, a prison (1850); a museum (1878). _V._ Vasari, p. 311.]

[Footnote 26: He died in 1294. G. Vill. viii. 10.]

[Footnote 27: _Purgat._ c. 23.]

[Footnote 28: _Ibid._ c. 24.

My sister, good and beautiful--which most I know not.--WRIGHT.]

[Footnote 29: _Parad._ c. 3.]

[Footnote 30: _Purg._ c. 24, 82-87.]

The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a neighbouring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led by the Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with the Cerchi.[31] It still professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it grew evident that one party must crush the other, and become dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause.

The Cerchi with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the "Parte Guelfa;" and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well. Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think that they might have been the governors and guides of the Republic--if they had chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the two parties equally, seemed to have thought that this would have been the best result for the State. But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their adversaries."[32] Boniface VIII.

had no prepossessions in Florence, except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he would have accepted and backed; but "he would not lose," he said, "the men for the women." "_Io non voglio perdere gli uomini per le femminelle._"[33] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's Hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "_were for themselves_;" and whoever it may be who is singled out in the "setta dei cattivi," for deeper and special scorn--he,

Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto--[34]

the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.

[Footnote 31: In 1300. G. Villani, viii. 38, 39.]

[Footnote 32: _Dino Comp._ p. 45.]

[Footnote 33: _Ibid._ p. 62.]

[Footnote 34: _Inf._ c. 3, 60.]

A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso Donati came with him. The magistrates were overawed and perplexed. The White party were, step by step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in the elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery, of Italian intrigue--finally chased out of their houses and from the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in name and property, by the Pope's French mediator. With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold the balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two extant lists of the proscribed--condemned by default, for corruption and various crimes, especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment--then, two months after, for contumacy, to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the Republic--appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and more than this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we know not.[35]

[Footnote 35: Pelli, _Memorie per servire alla vita di Dante._ Fir. 1823, pp. 105, 106.]

Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair: but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi and the White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent.

In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for awhile, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little certain can be made out about the places where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones; but rightly asked in vain.[36] His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the assembled dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnificence of S. Maria del Fiore.[37]

[Footnote 36: See Dr. Barlow's _Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante_. (1866.)]

[Footnote 37: These notices have been carefully collected by _Pelli_, who seems to have left little to glean (_Memorie_, &c. Ed. 2da, 1823). A few additions have been made by _Gerini_ (_Mem. Stor. della Lunigiana_), and _Troya_ (_Veltro Allegorico_), but they are not of much importance. _Arrivabene_ (_Secolo di Dante_) has brought together a mass of illustration which is very useful, and would be more so, if he were more careful, and quoted his authorities. _Balbo_ arranges these materials with sense and good feeling; though, as a writer, he is below his subject. A few traits and anecdotes may be found in the novelists--as Sacchetti.]

The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the middle ages, in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and "_viator_" meant man in his state of trial, as "_comprehensor_" meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The writer's mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes--one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound:--the severed rocks of the Adige Valley--the waterfall of S. Benedetto--the crags of Pietra-pana and S. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna--the "fair river" that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri--the marble quarries of Carrara--the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia," and those towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveller caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapours grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:

Ai raggi, morti già nei bassi lidi:--_Purg._ 17.

or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the Alpine fir--

Un'ombra smorta Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta:--_Purg._ 33.[38]

or of the large snow-flakes falling without wind, among the mountains--

d'un cader lento Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.--_Inferno_, 14.[39]

[Footnote 38:

A death-like shade-- Like that beneath black boughs and foliage green O'er the cool streams in Alpine glens display'd.--WRIGHT.]

[Footnote 39:

O'er all the sandy desert falling slow, Were shower'd dilated flakes of fire, like snow On Alpine summits, when the wind is low.--IBID.]

He delights in a local name and local image--the boiling pitch, and the clang of the shipwrights in the arsenal of Venice--the sepulchral fields of Arles and Pola--the hot-spring of Viterbo--the hooded monks of Cologne--the dykes of Flanders and Padua--the Maremma, with its rough brushwood, its wild boars, its snakes, and fevers. He had listened to the south wind among the pine tops, in the forest by the sea, at Ravenna. He had watched under the Carisenda tower at Bologna, and seen the driving clouds "give away their motion" to it, and make it seem to be falling; and had noticed how at Rome the October sun sets between Corsica and Sardinia.[40] His images of the sea are numerous and definite--the ship backing out of the tier in harbour, the diver plunging after the fouled anchor, the mast rising, the ship going fast before the wind, the water closing in its wake, the arched backs of the porpoises the forerunners of a gale, the admiral watching everything from poop to prow, the oars stopping altogether at the sound of the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when the mast snaps and falls.[41] Nowhere could we find so many of the most characteristic and strange sensations of the traveller touched with such truth. Everyone knows the lines which speak of the voyager's sinking of heart on the first evening at sea, and of the longings wakened in the traveller at the beginning of his journey by the distant evening bell[42]; the traveller's _morning_ feelings are not less delicately noted--the strangeness on first waking in the open air with the sun high; morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes nearer home; the morning sight of the sea-beach quivering in the early light; the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the morning[43]--

Noi eravam lunghesso 'l mare ancora, Come gente che pensa al suo cammino, Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora.[44]

[Footnote 40: _Inf._ 31, 18.]

[Footnote 41: _Ibid._ 17, 16, 31; _Purg._ 24; _Par._ 2; _Inf._ 22; _Purg._ 30; _Par._ 25; _Inf._ 7.]

[Footnote 42: _Purg._ 8. "Era già l'ora," &c.]

[Footnote 43: _Purg._ 19, 27, 1, 2.]

[Footnote 44:

By ocean's shore we still prolonged our stay Like men, who, thinking of a journey near, Advance in thought, while yet their limbs delay.--WRIGHT.]

He has recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, the suspicion with which, in those times, stranger met and eyed stranger on the road; and a still more characteristic trait is to be found in those lines where he describes the pilgrim gazing around in the church of his vow, and thinking how he shall tell of it:

E quasi peregrin che si ricrea Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando, E spera già ridir com'ello stea:--_Parad._ 31.[45]

or again, in that description, so simple and touching, of his thoughts while waiting to see the relic for which he left his home:

Quale è colui che forse di Croazia Viene a veder la Veronica nostra, Che per l'antica fama non si sazia, Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra; Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Dio verace, Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?--_Parad._ 31.[46]

[Footnote 45:

And like a pilgrim who with fond delight Surveys the temple he has vow'd to see, And hopes one day its wonders to recite.--IBID.]

[Footnote 46:

Like one who, from Croatia come to see Our Veronica (image long adored), Gazes, as though content he ne'er could be-- Thus musing, while the relic is pourtray'd-- "Jesus my God, my Saviour and my Lord, O were thy features these I see display'd?"--WRIGHT.

Quella imagine benedetta la quale Gesù Cristo lasciò a noi per esempio della sua bellissima figura.--_Vita Nuova_, p. 353.

He speaks of the pilgrims going to Rome to see it; compare also the sonnet to the pilgrims, p. 355:

Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate Forse di cosa, che non v'è presente, Venite voi di sì lontana gente, Com'alla vista voi ne dimostrate.]

Of these years then of disappointment and exile the _Divina Commedia_ was the labour and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies indeed that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence--begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it--continued afterwards in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed the germ and presage of it may be traced in the _Vita Nuova_. The idealised saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the queen of angels. She already beholds the face of the Everblessed. And the _envoye_ of the _Vita Nuova_ is the promise of the _Commedia_. "After this sonnet," (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honour, and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)--"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one, until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her.

And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that, if it shall be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life continue for some years, I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of any woman. And afterwards, may it please Him, who is the Lord of kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him, _qui est per omnia secula benedictus_."[47] It would be wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life, to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not indeed what he was promising, what he was pledging himself to--through what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his high venture should be realised. But the _Commedia_ is the work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life.

We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the _Vita Nuova_. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume various changes--an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy--but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught--to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand though barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the literature of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the _Commedia_. That belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had become the poet's daily portion, and the condition of his life.

[Footnote 47: _Vita Nuova_, last paragraph. See _Purg._ 30; _Parad._ 30, 6, 28-33.]

The _Commedia_ is a novel and startling apparition in literature. Probably it has been felt by some, who have approached it with the reverence due to a work of such renown, that the world has been generous in placing it so high. It seems so abnormal, so lawless, so reckless of all ordinary proprieties and canons of feeling, taste, and composition. It is rough and abrupt; obscure in phrase and allusion, doubly obscure in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually kept distinct: scandal of the day and transcendental science, politics and confessions, coarse satire and angelic joy, private wrongs, with the mysteries of the faith, local names and habitations of earth, with visions of hell and heaven. It is hard to keep up with the ever-changing current of feeling, to pass as the poet passes, without effort or scruple, from tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter scorn or querulous complaint, from high-raised devotion to the calmness of prosaic subtleties or grotesque detail. Each separate element and vein of thought has its precedent, but not their amalgamation.

Many had written visions of the unseen world, but they had not blended with them their personal fortunes. S. Augustine had taught the soul to contemplate its own history, and had traced its progress from darkness to light;[48] but he had not interwoven with it the history of Italy, and the consummation of all earthly destinies. Satire was no new thing; Juvenal had given it a moral, some of the Provençal poets a political turn; S. Jerome had kindled into it fiercely and bitterly even while expounding the Prophets; but here it streams forth in all its violence, within the precincts of the eternal world, and alternates with the hymns of the blessed. Lucretius had drawn forth the poetry of nature and its laws; Virgil and Livy had unfolded the poetry of the Roman empire; S. Augustine, the still grander poetry of the history of the City of God; but none had yet ventured to weave into one the three wonderful threads. And yet the scope of the Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue of all things, universal as the government which directs nature and intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to the lowest caitiff he has ever despised, the minutest fact in nature that has ever struck his eye, the merest personal association which hangs pleasantly in his memory.

Writing for all time, he scruples not to mix with all that is august and permanent in history and prophecy, incidents the most transient, and names the most obscure; to waste an immortality of shame or praise on those about whom his own generation were to inquire in vain. Scripture history runs into profane; Pagan legends teach their lesson side by side with Scripture scenes and miracles; heroes and poets of heathenism, separated from their old classic world, have their place in the world of faith, discourse with Christians of Christian dogmas, and even mingle with the Saints; Virgil guides the poet through his fear and his penitence to the gates of Paradise.

[Footnote 48: See _Convito_, 1, 2.]