‘After losing the earliest joy of my life, I was so smitten with sorrow that in nothing could I find any comfort. Yet after some time my mind, eager to recover its tone, since nought that I or others could do availed to restore me, directed itself to find how people, being disconsolate, had been comforted. And so I took to reading that little-known book by Boethius, by writing which he, captive and in exile, had obtained relief. Next, hearing that Tully as well had written a book in which, treating of friendship, he had consoled the worthy Laelius on the occasion of the loss of his friend Scipio, I read that too. And though at the first I found their meaning hard, at last I comprehended it as far as my knowledge of the language and some little command of mother-wit enabled me to do: which same mother-wit had already helped me to much, as may be seen by theVita Nuova. And as it often happens that a man goes seeking silver, and lights on gold he is not looking for—the result of chance, or of some divine provision; so I, besides finding the consolation I was in search of to dry my tears, became possessed of wisdom from authors and sciences and books. Weighing this well, I deemed that philosophy, the mistress of these authors, sciences, and books, must be the best of all things. And imagining her to myself fashioned like a great lady, rich in compassion, my admiration of her was so unbounded that I was always delighting myself in her image. And from thus beholding her in fancy I went on to frequent the places where she is to be found in very deed—in the schools of theology, to wit, and the debates of philosophers. So that in a little time, thirty months or so, I began to taste so much of her sweetness that the love I bore to her effaced or banished every other thought.’[50]No one would guess from this description of how he grew enamoured of philosophy, that at the beginning of his arduous studies Dante took a wife. She was Gemma, the daughter of Manetto Donati, but related only distantly, if at all, to the great Corso Donati. They were married in 1292, he being twenty-seven; and in the course of the nine years that elapsed till his exile she bore him five sons and two daughters.[51]From his silence regarding her in his works, and from some words of Boccaccio’s which apply only to the period of his exile, it has been inferred that the union was unhappy. But Dante makes no mention in his writings of his parents or childrenany more than of Gemma.[52]And why should not his wife be included among the things dearest to him which, he tells us, he had to leave behind him on his banishment? For anything we know to the contrary, their wedded life up to the time of his exile may have been happy enough; although most probably the marriage was one of convenience, and almost certainly Dante found little in Gemma’s mind that answered to his own.[53]In any case it is not safe to lay stress upon his silence. During the period covered by theVita Nuovahe served more than once in the field, and to this none of his earlier works make any reference. In 1289, Arezzo having warmly espoused the Ghibeline cause, the Florentines, led by Corso Donati and the great merchant Vieri dei Cerchi, took up arms and met the foe in the field of Campaldino, on the edge of the upland region of the Casentino. Dante, as a young man of means and family, fought in the vanguard;[54]and in a letter partly preserved by one of his early biographers[55]he describes himself as being then no tiro in arms, and as having with varying emotions watched the fortunes of the day. From this it is clear that he had served before, probably in an expedition into the Aretine territory made in the previous year, and referred to in theInferno.[56]In the same year as Campaldino was won he was present at the surrender of Caprona, a fortress belonging to Pisa.[57]But of all this he is silent in his works, or only makes casual mention of it by way of illustration. It is, therefore, a waste of time trying to prove his domestic misery from his silence about his marriage.IV.So hard a student was Dante that he now for a time nearly lost the use of his eyes.[58]But he was cured by regimen, and came to see as well as ever, he tells us; which we can easily believe was very well indeed. For his work, as he planned it out, he needed all his powers. TheConvito, for example, was designed to admit of a full treatment of all that concerns philosophy. It marks an earlier stage of his intellectual and spiritual life than does the opening of theInferno. In it we have the fruit of the years during which he was wandering astray from his early ideal, misled by what he afterwards came to count as a vain and profitless curiosity. Most of its contents, as we have it,[59]are only indirectly interesting. It is impossible for most people to care for discussions, conducted with all the nicety of scholastic definition, on such subjects as the system of the universe as it was evolved out of the brains of philosophers; the subject-matter of knowledge; and how we know. But there is one section of it possessed of a very special interest,the Fourth, in which he treats of the nature of nobility. This he affirms to be independent of wealth or ancestry, and he finds every one to be noble who practises the virtues proper to his time of life. ‘None of the Uberti of Florence or the Visconti of Milan can say he is noble because belonging to such or such a race; for the Divine seed is sown not in a family but in the individual man.’ This amounts, it must be admitted, to no more than saying that high birth is one thing, and nobility of character another; but it is significant of what were the current opinions, that Dante should be at such pains to distinguish between the two qualities. The canzone which supplies the text for the treatise closes with a picture of the noble soul at every stage of life, to which Chaucer may well have been indebted for his description of the true gentleman:[60]—‘The soul that is adorned by this grace does not keep it hid, but from the day when soul is wed to body shows it forth even until death. In early life she is modest, obedient, and gentle, investing the outward form and all its members with a gracious beauty: in youth she is temperate and strong, full of love and courteous ways, delighting in loyal deeds: in mature age she is prudent, and just, and apt to liberality, rejoicing to hear of others’ good. Then in the fourth stage of life she is married again to God,[61]and contemplates her approaching end with thankfulness for all the past.’[62]In this passage it is less the poet that is heard than the sober moralist, one with a ripe experience of life, and contemptuous of the vulgar objects of ambition. The calm is on the surface. As has been said above, he was proud of his own birth, the more proud perhaps that his station was but a middling one; and to the close of his life he hated upstarts with their sudden riches, while the Philip Argenti on whom in theInfernohe takes what has much the air of a private revenge may have been only a specimen of the violent and haughty nobles with whom he stood on an uneasy footing.Yet the impression we get of Dante’s surroundings in Florence from theVita Nuovaand other poems, from references in theComedy, and from some anecdotes more or less true which survive in the pages of Boccaccio and elsewhere, is on the whole a pleasant one. We should mistake did we think of him as always in the guise of absorbed student or tearful lover. Friends he had, and society of various kinds. He tells how in a severe illness he was nursed by a young and noble lady, nearly related to him by blood—his sister most probably; and other ladies are mentioned as watching in his sick-chamber.[63]With Forese and Piccarda Donati, brother and sister of the great Corso Donati, he was on terms of the warmest friendship.[64]From theVita Nuovawe can gather that, even when his whole heart fainted and failed at the mere sight of Beatrice, he was a favourite with other ladies and conversed familiarly with them. The brother ofBeatrice was his dear friend; while among those of the elder generation he could reckon on the friendship of such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Brunetto Latini. Through Latini he would, even as a young man, get the entry of the most lettered and intellectually active society of Florence. The tradition of his intimacy with Giotto is supported by the mention he makes of the painter,[65]and by the fact, referred to in theVita Nuova, that he was himself a draughtsman. It is to be regretted there are not more anecdotes of him on record like that which tells how one day as he drew an angel on his tablets he was broken in upon by ‘certain people of importance.’ The musician Casella, whom he ‘woes to sing in Purgatory’[66]and Belacqua, the indolent good-humoured lutemaker,[67]are greeted by him in a tone of friendly warmth in the one case and of easy familiarity in the other, which help us to know the terms on which he stood with the quick-witted artist class in Florence.[68]Already he was in the enjoyment of a high reputation as a poet and scholar, and there seemed no limit to the greatness he might attain to in his native town as a man of action as well as a man of thought.In most respects the Florence of that day was as fitting a home for a man of genius as could well be imagined. It was full of a life which seemed restless only because the possibilities of improvement for theindividual and the community seemed infinite. A true measure of its political progress and of the activity of men’s minds is supplied by the changes then being made in the outward aspect of the city. The duties of the Government were as much municipal as political, and it would have surprised a Florentine to be told that the one kind of service was of less dignity than the other. The population grew apace, and, to provide the means for extending the city walls, every citizen, on pain of his testament being found invalid, was required to bequeath a part of his estate to the public. Already the banks of the Arno were joined by three bridges of stone, and the main streets were paved with the irregularly-shaped blocks of lava still familiar to the sojourner in Florence. But between the time of Dante’s boyhood and the close of the century the other outstanding features of the city were greatly altered, or were in the course of change. The most important churches of Florence, as he first knew it, were the Baptistery and the neighbouring small cathedral church of Santa Reparata; after these ranked the church of the Trinity, Santo Stefano, and some other churches which are now replaced by larger ones, or of which the site alone can be discovered. On the other side of the river, Samminiato with its elegant façade rose as now upon its hill.[69]The only great civic building was the Palace of the Podesta. The Old Market was and had long been the true centre of the city’s life.At the time Dante went into exile Arnolfo was already working on the great new cathedral of St. Maryof the Flowers, the spacious Santa Croce, and the graceful Badia; and Santa Maria Novella was slowly assuming the perfection of form that was later to make it the favourite of Michel Angelo. The Palace of the Signory was already planned, though half a century was to elapse before its tower soared aloft to daunt the private strongholds which bristled, fierce and threatening, all over the city. The bell-tower of Giotto, too, was of later erection—the only pile we can almost regret that Dante never saw. The architect of it was however already adorning the walls of palace and cloister with paintings whose inspiration was no longer, like that of the works they overshadowed, drawn from the outworn motives of Byzantine art, but from the faithful observation of nature.[70]He in painting and the Pisan school in sculpture were furnishing the world with novel types of beauty in the plastic arts, answering to the ‘sweet new style’ in verse of which it was Dante that discovered the secret.[71]Florence was now by far the leading city in Tuscany. Its merchants and money-dealers were in correspondence with every Mediterranean port and with every country of the West. Along with bales of goods and letters of exchange new ideas and fresh intelligence were always on the road to Florence. The knowledge of what was going on in the world, and of what men were thinking,was part of the stock-in-trade of the quick-witted citizens, and they were beginning to be employed throughout Europe in diplomatic work, till then almost a monopoly of churchmen. ‘These Florentines seem to me to form a fifth element,’ said Boniface, who had ample experience of how accomplished they were.At home they had full employment for their political genius; and still upon the old problem, of how to curb the arrogance of the class that, in place of being satisfied to share in the general prosperity, sought its profit in the maintenance of privilege. It is necessary, at the cost of what may look like repetition, to revert to the presence and activity of this class in Florence, if we are to form a true idea of the circumstances of Dante’s life, and enter into the spirit with which much of theComedyis informed. Though many of the nobles were now engaged in commerce and figured among the popular leaders, most of the greater houses stood proudly aloof from everything that might corrupt their gentility. These were styled the magnates: they found, as it were, a vocation for themselves in being nobles. Among them the true distinctive spirit of Ghibelinism survived, although none of them would now have dared to describe himself as a Ghibeline. Their strength lay partly in the unlimited control they retained over the serfs on their landward estates; in the loyalty with which the members of a family held by one another; in their great command of resources as the administrators of theParte Guelfa; and in the popularity they enjoyed with the smaller people in consequence of their lavish expenditure, and frank if insolent manners. By lawscarcely the equals of the full citizens, in point of fact they tyrannised over them. Their houses, set like fortresses in the crowded streets, frequently served as prisons and torture-chambers for the low-born traders or artisans who might offend them.Measures enough had been passed towards the close of the century with a view to curb the insolence of the magnates; but the difficulty was to get them put in force. At length, in 1294, they, with many additional reforms, were embodied in the celebrated Ordinances of Justice. These for long were counted back to as the Great Charter of Florence—a Great Charter defining the popular rights and the disabilities of the baronage. Punishments of special severity were enacted for nobles who should wrong a plebeian, and the whole of a family or clan was made responsible for the crimes and liabilities of its several members. The smaller tradesmen were conciliated by being admitted to a share in political influence. If serfage was already abolished in the State of Florence, it was the Ordinances which made it possible for the serf to use his liberty.[72]But the greatest blow dealt to the nobles by the new laws was their exclusion, as nobles, from all civil and political offices. These they could hold only by becoming members of one of the trade guilds.[73]Andto deprive a citizen of his rights it was enough to inscribe his name in the list of magnates.It is not known in what year Dante became a member of the Guild of Apothecaries. Without much reason it has been assumed that he was one of the nobles who took advantage of the law of 1294. But there is no evidence that in his time the Alighieri ranked as magnates, and much ground for believing that for some considerable time past they had belonged to the order of full citizens.It was not necessary for every guildsman to practise the art or engage in the business to which his guild was devoted, and we are not required to imagine Dante as having anything to do with medicine or with the spices and precious stones in which the apothecaries traded. The guilds were political as much as industrial associations, and of the public duties of his membership he took his full share. The constitution of the Republic, jealously careful to limit the power of the individual citizen, provided that the two chief executive officers, the Podesta and the Captain of the People, should always be foreigners. They held office only for six months. To each of them was assigned a numerous Council, and before a law could be abrogated or a new one passed it needed the approval of both these Councils, as well as that of the Priors, and of the heads of the principal guilds. The Priors were six in number, one for each district of the city. With them lay the administration in general of the laws, and the conductof foreign affairs. Their office was elective, and held for two months.[74]Of one or other of the Councils Dante is known to have been a member in 1295, 1296, 1300, and 1301.[75]In 1299 he is found engaged on a political mission to the little hill-city of San Gemigniano, where in the town-house they still show the pulpit from which he addressed the local senate.[76]From the middle of June till the middle of August 1300 he served as one of the Priors.[77]At the time when Dante entered on this office, Florence was distracted by the feud of Blacks and Whites, names borrowed from the factions of Pistoia, but fated to become best known from their use in the city which adopted them. The strength of the Blacks lay in the nobles whom the Ordinances of Justice had been designed to depress; both such of them as had retained their standing as magnates, and such as, under the new law, had unwillingly entered the ranks of the citizens. Already they had succeeded in driving into exile Giano della Bella,[78]the chief author of the Ordinances; and their efforts—and those of the citizens who,fearing the growing power of the lesser guilds, were in sympathy with them—were steadily directed to upset the reforms. An obvious means to this end was to lower in popular esteem the public men whose policy it was to govern firmly on the new lines. The leader of the discontented party was Corso Donati, a man of small fortune, but of high birth; of splendid personal appearance, open-handed, and of popular manners. He and they who went with him affected a violent Guelfism, their chance of recovering the control of domestic affairs being the better the more they could frighten the Florentines with threats of evils like those incurred by the Aretines and Pisans from Ghibeline oppression. It may be imagined what meaning the cry of Ghibeline possessed in days when there was still a class of beggars in Florence—men of good names—whose eyes had been torn out by Farinata and his kind.One strong claim which Corso Donati had on the goodwill of his fellow-townsmen was that by his ready courage in pushing on the reserves, against superior orders, at the battle of Campaldino,[79]the day had been won to Florence and her allies. As he rode gallantly through the streets he was hailed as the Baron (il Barone), much as in the last generation the victor of Waterloo was sufficiently distinguished as the Duke. At the same battle, Vieri dei Cerchi, the leader of the opposite party of the Whites, had shown no less bravery, but he was ignorant of the art, or despised it, of making political capital out of the performance of his duty. In almost every respect he offered a contrast to Donati.He was of a new family, and his influence depended not on landed possessions, though he had these too, but on wealth derived from commerce.[80]According to John Villani, a competent authority on such a point,[81]he was at the head of one of the greatest trading houses in the world. The same crowds that cheered Corso as the great Baron sneered at the reticent and cold-tempered merchant as the Ghibeline. It was a strange perversion of ideas, and yet had this of justification, that all the nobles of Ghibeline tendency and all the citizens who, on account of their birth, were suspected of leaning that way were driven into the party of the Whites by the mere fact of the Blacks hoisting so defiantly the Guelf flag, and commanding the resources of theParte Guelfa. But if Ghibelinism meant, as fifty years previously it did mean, a tendency to exalt privilege as against the general liberties and to court foreign interference in the affairs of Florence, it was the Blacks and not the Whites who had served themselves heirs to Ghibelinism. That the appeal was now taken to the Pope instead of to the Emperor did not matter; or that French soldiers in place of German were called in to settle domestic differences.The Roman See was at this time filled by BonifaceVIII., who six years previously, by violence and fraud, had procured the resignation of CelestineV.—him who made the great refusal.[82]Boniface was at once arrogantand subtle, wholly faithless, and hampered by no scruple either of religion or humanity. But these qualities were too common among those who before and after him filled the Papal throne, to secure him in a special infamy. That he has won from the ruthless hatred which blazes out against him in many a verse of Dante’s,[83]and for this hatred he is indebted to his interference in the affairs of Florence, and what came as one of the fruits of it—the poet’s exile.And yet, from the point of view not only of the interest of Rome but also of Italy, there is much to be said for the policy of Boniface. German domination was a just subject of fear, and the Imperialist element was still so strong in Northern and Central Italy, that if the Emperor Albert[84]had been a man of a more resolute ambition, he might—so contemporaries deemed—have conquered Italy at the cost of a march through it. The cities of Romagna were already in Ghibeline revolt, and it was natural that the Pope should seek to secure Florence on the Papal side. It was for the Florentines rather than for him to judge what they would lose or gain by being dragged into the current of general politics. He made a fair beginning with an attempt to reconcile the two parties. The Whites were then the dominant faction, and to them reconciliation meant that their foes would at once divide the government with them, and at the long-run sap the popular liberties, while the Pope’s hand would soon be allowed to dip freely into the communal purse. The policy of the Whites was therefore one of steady opposition to all foreign meddling with Florence. But it failed to secure general support, for without being Ghibeline in fact it had the air of being so; and the name of Ghibeline was one that no reasoning could rob of its terrors.[85]As was usual in Florence when political feeling ran high, the hotter partisans came to blows, and the streets were more than once disturbed by violence and bloodshed. To an onlooker it must have seemed as if the interposition of some external authority was desirable; and almost on the same day as the new Priors, of whom Dante was one and who were all Whites, took office in the June of 1300, the Cardinal Acquasparta entered the city, deputed by the Pope to establish peace. His proposals were declined by the party in power, and having failed in his mission he left the city, and took the priestly revenge upon it of placing it under interdict.[86]Ere many months were passed, the Blacks, at a meeting of the heads of the party, resolved to open negotiations anew with Boniface. For this illegal step some of them, including Corso Donati, were ordered into exile by the authorities, who, to give an appearance of impartiality to their proceedings, at the same time banished some of the Whites, and among them Guido Cavalcanti. It was afterwards made a charge against Dante that he had procured the recall of his friend Guido and the other Whites from exile; but to this he could answer that he was not then in office.[87]Corso in the meantime was using his enforced absence from Florence to treat freely with the Pope.Boniface had already entered into correspondence with Charles of Valois, brother of Philip, the reigning King of France, with the view of securing the services of a strongly-connected champion. It was the game that had been played before by the Roman Court when Charles of Anjou was called to Italy to crush the Hohenstaufens. This second Charles was a man of ability of a sort, as he had given cruel proof in his brother’s Flemish wars. By the death of his wife, daughter of his kinsman CharlesII.of Naples and so grand-daughter of Charles of Anjou, he had lost the dominions of Maine and Anjou, and had got the nickname of Lackland from his want of a kingdom. He lent a willing ear to Boniface, who presented him with the crown of Sicily on condition that he first wrested it from the Spaniard who wore it.[88]All the Papal influence was exerted to get money for the expenses of the descent on Sicily. Even churchmen were required to contribute, for it was a holy war, and the hope was that when Charles, the champion of the Church, had reducedItaly to obedience, won Sicily for himself by arms, and perhaps the Eastern Empire by marriage, he would win the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom.Charles crossed the Alps in August 1301, with five hundred men-at-arms, and, avoiding Florence on his southward march, found Boniface at his favourite residence of Anagni. He was created Pacificator of Tuscany, and loaded with other honours. What better served the purpose of his ambition, he was urged to retrace his steps and justify his new title by restoring peace to Florence. There the Whites were still in power, but they dared not declare themselves openly hostile to the Papal and Guelf interest by refusing him admission to the city. He came with gentle words, and ready to take the most stringent oaths not to tamper with the liberties of the Commonwealth; but once he had gained an entrance (November 1301) and secured his hold on Florence, he threw off every disguise, gave full play to his avarice, and amused himself with looking on at the pillage of the dwellings and warehouses of the Whites by the party of Corso Donati. By all this, says Dante, Charles ‘gained no land,’ Lackland as he was, ‘but only sin and shame.’[89]There is a want of precise information as to the events of this time. But it seems probable that Dante formed one of an embassy sent by the rulers of Florence to the Pope in the autumn of this year; and that on the occasion of the entrance of Charles he was absent from Florence. What the embassy had to propose which Boniface could be expected to be satisfied with, shortof complete submission, is not known and is not easy to guess. It seems clear at least that Dante cannot have been chosen as a person likely to be specially pleasing to the Roman Court. Within the two years preceding he had made himself prominent in the various Councils of which he was a member, by his sturdy opposition to affording aid to the Pope in his Romagnese wars. It is even possible that his theory of the Empire was already more or less known to Boniface, and as that Pontiff claimed Imperial authority over such states as Florence, this would be sufficient to secure him a rough reception.[90]Where he was when the terrible news came to him that for some days there had been no law in Florence, and that Corso Donati was sharing in the triumph of Charles, we do not know. Presageful of worse things to come, he did not seek to return, and is said to have been in Siena when he heard that, on the 27th January 1302, he had been sentenced to a heavy fine and political disabilities for having been guilty of extortion while a Prior, of opposing the coming of Charles, and of crimes against the peace of Florence and the interest of theParte Guelfa. If the fine was not paid within three days his goods and property were to be confiscated. This condemnation he shared with three others. In the following March he was one of twelve condemned, for contumacy, to be burned alive if ever they fell into the hands of the Florentine authorities. We may perhaps assume thatthe cruel sentence, as well as the charge of peculation, was uttered only in order to conform to some respectable precedents.V.Besides Dante many other Whites had been expelled from Florence.[91]Whether they liked it or not, they were forced to seek aid from the Ghibelines of Arezzo and Romagna. This led naturally to a change of political views, and though at the time of their banishment all of them were Guelfs in various degrees, as months and years went on they developed into Ghibelines, more or less declared. Dissensions, too, would be bred among them out of recriminations touching the past, and charges of deserting the general interest for the sake of securing private advantage in the way of making peace with the Republic. For a time, however, the common desire of gaining a return to Florence held them together. Of the Council constituted to bring this about, Dante was a member. Once only with his associates does he appear to have come the length of formal negotiations with a view to getting back. Charles of Valois had passed away from the temporary scene of his extortions and treachery, upon the futile quest of a crown. Boniface, ere being persecuted to death by his old ally, Philip of France (1303), had vainly attempted to check the cruelty of the Blacks; and Benedict, his successor, sent the Cardinal of Ostia to Florence with powers to reconcile the two parties.Dante is usually credited with the composition of the letter in which Vieri dei Cerchi and his fellow-exiles answered the call of the Cardinal to discuss the conditions of their return home. All that had been done by the banished party, said the letter, had been done for the public good.[92]The negotiations came to nothing; nor were the exiles more fortunate in arms. Along with their allies they did once succeed by a sudden dash in penetrating to the market-place, and Florence lay within their grasp when, seized with panic, they turned and fled from the city, which many of them were never to see again.Almost certainly Dante took no active part in this attempt, and indeed there is little to show that he was ever heartily associated with the exiles. In his own words, he was compelled to break with his companions owing to their imbecility and wickedness, and to form a party by himself.[93]With the Whites, then, he had little more to do; and the story of their fortunes need not longer detain us. It is enough to say that while, like Dante, the chief men among them were for ever excluded from Florence, the principles for which they had contended survived, and even obtained something like a triumph within its walls. The success of Donati and his party, though won with the help of the people, was too clearly opposed to the popular interest to be permanent. Ere long the inveterate contradiction between magnate and merchant was again to change thecourse of Florentine politics; the disabilities against lawless nobles were again to be enforced; and Corso Donati himself was to be crushed in the collision of passions he had evoked but could not control (1308). Though tenderly attached to members of his family, Dante bore Corso a grudge as having been the chief agent in procuring his exile—a grudge which years could do nothing to wipe out. He places in the mouth of Forese Donati a prophecy of the great Baron’s shameful death, expressed in curt and scornful words, terrible from a brother.[94]It is no figure of speech to say that Dante nursed revenge.For some few years his hopes were set on Henry of Luxemburg, elected Emperor in 1308. A Ghibeline, in the ordinary sense of the term, Dante never was. We have in hisDe Monarchiaa full account of the conception he had formed of the Empire—that of authority in temporal affairs embodied in a just ruler, who, being already supreme, would be delivered from all personal ambition; who should decree justice and be a refuge for all that were oppressed. He was to be the captain of Christian society and the guardian of civil right; as in another sphere the Pope was to be the shepherd of souls and the guardian of the deposit of Divine truth. In Dante’s eyes the one great officer was as much God’s vicegerent as the other. While the most that a Ghibeline or a moderate Guelf would concede was that there should be a division of power between Pope and Emperor—the Ghibeline leaving it to the Emperor and the Guelf to the Pope to definetheir provinces—Dante held, and in this he stood almost alone among politicians, that they ought to be concerned with wholly different kingdoms, and that Christendom was wronged by the trespass of either upon the other’s domain. An equal wrong was done by the neglect by either of his duty, and both, as Dante judged, had been shamefully neglecting it. For more than half a century no Emperor had set foot in Italy; and since the Papal Court had under ClementV.been removed to Avignon (1305), the Pope had ceased to be a free agent, owing to his neighbourhood to France and the unscrupulous Philip.[95]Dante trusted that the virtuous single-minded HenryVII.would prove a monarch round whom all the best in Italy might gather to make him Emperor in deed as well as in name. His judgment took the colour of his hopes, for under the awful shadow of the Emperor he trusted to enter Florence. Although no Ghibeline or Imperialist in the vulgar sense, he constituted himself Henry’s apologist and herald; and in letters addressed to the ‘wicked Florentines,’ to the Emperor, and to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, he blew as it were a trumpet-blast of triumph over the Emperor’s enemies and his own. Henry had crossed the Alps, and was tarrying in the north of Italy, when Dante, with a keen eye for where the key of the situation lay, sharpened by his own wishes, urged him to lose no more time in reducing the Lombard cities to obedience, but to descend on Florence, the rotten sheep which wascorrupting all the Italian flock. The men of Florence he bids prepare to receive the just reward of their crimes.The Florentines answered Dante’s bitter invective and the Emperor’s milder promises by an unwearied opposition with the arms which their increasing command of all that tends to soften life made them now less willing to take up, and by the diplomacy in which they were supreme The exiles were recalled, always excepting the more stubborn or dangerous; and among these was reckoned Dante. Alliances were made on all hands, an art which Henry was notably wanting in the trick of. Wherever he turned he was met and checkmated by the Florentines, who, wise by experience, were set on retaining control of their own affairs. After his coronation at Rome (1312),[96]he marched northwards, and with his Pisan and Aretine allies for six weeks laid fruitless siege to Florence. King Robert of Naples, whose aid he had hoped to gain by means of a family alliance, was joined to the league of Guelfs, and Henry passed away from Florence to engage in an enterprise against the Southern Kingdom, a design cut short by his death (1313). He was the last Emperor that ever sought to take the part in Italian affairs which on Dante’s theory belonged to the Imperial office. Well-meaning but weak, he was not the man to succeed in reducing to practice a scheme of government which had broken down even in the strong hands of the two Fredericks, and ere the Commonwealths of Italy had become eachas powerful as a Northern kingdom. To explain his failure, Dante finds that his descent into Italy was unseasonable: he came too soon. Rather, it may be said, he came far too late.[97]When, on the death of Henry, Dante was disappointed in his hopes of a true revival of the Empire, he devoted himself for a time to urging the restoration of the Papal Court to Rome, so that Italy might at least not be left without some centre of authority. In a letter addressed to the Italian Cardinals, he besought them to replace ClementV., who died in 1314,[98]by an Italian Pope. Why should they, he asked, resign this great office into Gascon hands? Why should Rome, the true centre of Christendom, be left deserted and despised? His appeal was fruitless, as indeed it could not fail to be with only six Italian Cardinals in a College of twenty-four; and after a vacancy of two years the Gascon Clement was succeeded by another Gascon. Although Dante’s motives in making this attempt were doubtless as purely patriotic as those which inspired Catherine of Siena to similar action a century later, he met, we may be sure, with but little sympathy from his former fellow-citizens. They were intent upon the interests of Florence alone, and even of these they may sometimes have taken a narrow view. His was the wider patriotism of the Italian, and it was the whole Peninsula that he longed to see delivered from French influence and once more provided with a seat of authority in its midst, even if it were only that of spiritual power. The Florentines for their part, desirous of security against the incursions of the northern horde, were rather set on retaining the goodwill of France than on enjoying the neighbourhood of the Pope. In this they were guilty of no desertion of their principles. Their Guelfism had never been more than a mode of minding themselves.For about three years (1313-1316) the most dangerous foe of Florence was Uguccione de la Faggiuola, a partisan Ghibeline chief, sprung from the mountain-land of Urbino, which lies between Tuscany and Romagna. He made himself lord of Pisa and Lucca, and defeated the Florentines and their allies in the great battle of Montecatini (1315). To him Dante is believed to have attached himself.[99]It would be easy for the Republic to form an exaggerated idea of the part which the exile had in shaping the policy or contributing to the success of his patron; and we are not surprised to find that, although Dante’s fighting days were done, he was after the defeat subjected to a third condemnation(November 1315). If caught, he was to lose his head; and his sons, or some of them, were threatened with the same fate. The terms of the sentence may again have been more severe than the intentions of those who uttered it. However this may be, an amnesty was passed in the course of the following year, and Dante was urged to take advantage of it. He found the conditions of pardon too humiliating. Like a malefactor he would require to walk, taper in hand and a shameful mitre on his head, to the church of St John, and there make an oblation for his crimes. It was not in this fashion that in his more hopeful hours the exile had imagined his restoration. If ever he trod again the pavement of his beautiful St John’s, it was to be proudly, as a patriot touching whom his country had confessed her sins; or, with a poet’s more bashful pride, to receive the laurel crown beside the font in which he was baptized. But as he would not enter his well beloved, well hated Florence on the terms imposed by his enemies, so he never had the chance of entering it on his own. The spirit in which he, as it were, turned from the open gates of his native town is well expressed in a letter to a friend, who would seem to have been a churchman who had tried to win his compliance with the terms of the pardon. After thanking his correspondent for his kindly eagerness to recover him, and referring to the submission required, he says:—‘And is it in this glorious fashion that Dante Alighieri, wearied with an almost trilustral exile, is recalled to his country? Is this the desert of an innocence known to all, and of laborious studywhich for long has kept him asweat?... But, Father, this is no way for me to return to my country by; though if by you or others one can be hit upon through which the honour and fame of Dante will take no hurt, it shall be followed by me with no tardy steps. If by none such Florence is to be entered, I will never enter Florence. What then! Can I not, wherever I may be, behold the sun and stars? Is not meditation upon the sweetness of truth as free to me in one place as another? To enjoy this, no need to submit myself ingloriously and with ignominy to the State and People of Florence! And wherever I may be thrown, in any case I trust at least to find daily bread.’The cruelty and injustice of Florence to her greatest son have been the subject of much eloquent blame. But, in justice to his contemporaries, we must try to see Dante as they saw him, and bear in mind that the very qualities fame makes so much of—his fervent temper and devotion to great ideas—placed him out of the reach of common sympathy. Others besides him had been banished from Florence, with as much or as little reason, and had known the saltness of bread which has been begged, and the steepness of strange stairs. The pains of banishment made them the more eager to have it brought to a close. With Dante all that he suffered went to swell the count of grievances for which a reckoning was some day to be exacted. The art of returning was, as he himself knew well, one he was slow to learn.[100]His noble obstinacy, which would stoop to no loss of dignity or sacrifice of principle, must exciteour admiration; it also goes far to account for his difficulty in getting back. We can even imagine that in Florence his refusal to abate one tittle of what was due to him in the way of apology was, for a time, the subject of wondering speculation to the citizens, ere they turned again to their everyday affairs of politics and merchandise. Had they been more used to deal with men in whom a great genius was allied to a stubborn sense of honour, they would certainly have left less room in their treatment of Dante for happier ages to cavil at.How did the case stand? In the letter above quoted from, Dante says that his innocence was known to all. As far as the charge of corruption in his office-bearing went, his banishment—no one can doubt it for a moment—was certainly unjust; and the political changes in Florence since the death of Corso Donati had taken all the life out of the other charges. But by his eager appeals to the Emperor to chastise the Florentines he had raised fresh barriers against his return. The governors of the Republic could not be expected to adopt his theory of the Empire and share his views of the Imperial claims; and to them Dante must have seemed as much guilty of disloyalty to the Commonwealth in inviting the presence of Henry, as Corso Donati had been in Dante’s eyes for his share in bringing Charles of Valois to harry Florence. His political writings since his exile—and all his writings were more or less political—had been such as might well confirm or create an opinion of him as a man difficult to live with, as one whose intellectual arrogance had a readyorgan in his unsparing tongue or pen. Rumour would most willingly dwell upon and distort the features of his character and conduct that separated him from the common herd. And to add to all this, even after he had deserted the party of the Whites in exile, and had become a party to himself, he found his friends and patrons—for where else could he find them?—among the foes of Florence.VI.History never abhors a vacuum so much as when she has to deal with the life of a great man, and for those who must have details of Dante’s career during the nineteen years which elapsed between his banishment and his death, the industry of his biographers has exhausted every available hint, while some of them press into their service much that has only the remotest bearing on their hero. If even one-half of their suppositions were adopted, we should be forced to the conclusion that theComedyand all the other works of his exile were composed in the intervals of a very busy life. We have his own word for this much, (Convitoi. 3,) that since he was cast forth out of Florence—in which he would ‘fain rest his wearied soul and fulfil his appointed time’—he had been ‘a pilgrim, nay, even a mendicant,’ in every quarter of Italy,[101]and had ‘been held cheap by many who, because of his fame, hadlooked to find him come in another guise.’ But he gives no journal of his wanderings, and, as will have been observed, says no word of any country but Italy. Keeping close to well-ascertained facts, it seems established that in the earlier period of his exile he sojourned with members of the great family of the Counts Guidi,[102]and that he also found hospitality with the Malaspini,[103]lords of the Val di Magra, between Genoa and Lucca. At a still earlier date (August 1306) he is found witnessing a deed in Padua. It was most probably in the same year that Dante found Giotto there, painting the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, and was courteously welcomed by the artist, and taken to his house.[104]At some time of his life he studied at Bologna: John Villani says, during hisexile.[105]Of his supposed residence in Paris, though it is highly probable, there is a want of proof; of a visit to England, none at all that is worth a moment’s consideration. Some of his commentators and biographers seem to think he was so short-witted that he must have been in a place before it could occur to him to name it in his verse.We have Dante’s own word for it that he found his exile almost intolerable. Besides the bitter resentment which he felt at the injustice of it, he probably cherished the conviction that his career had been cut short when he was on the point of acquiring great influence in affairs. The illusion may have been his—one not uncommon among men of a powerful imagination—that, given only due opportunity, he could mould the active life of his time as easily as he moulded andfashioned the creations of his fancy. It was, perhaps, owing to no fault of his own that when a partial opportunity had offered itself, he failed to get his views adopted in Florence; indeed, to judge from the kind of employment in which he was more than once engaged for his patrons, he must have been possessed of no little business tact. Yet, as when his feelings were deeply concerned his words knew no restraint, so his hopes would partake of the largeness of his genius. In the restored Empire, which he was almost alone in longing for as he conceived of it, he may have imagined for himself a place beside Henry like what in Frederick’s court had been filled by Pier delle Vigne—the man who held both keys to the Emperor’s heart, and opened and shut it as he would.[106]Thus, as his exile ran on it would grow sadder with the accumulating memories of hopes deferred and then destroyed, and of dreams which had faded away in the light of a cheerless reality. But some consolations he must have found even in the conditions of his exile. He had leisure for meditation, and time enough to spend in that other world which was all his own. With the miseries of a wanderer’s life would come not a few of its sweets—freedom from routine, and the intellectual stimulus supplied by change of place. Here and there he would find society such as he cared for—that of scholars, theologians, and men familiar with every court and school of Christendom. And, beyond all, he would get access to books that at home he might never have seen. It was no spare diet that wouldserve his mind while he was making such ample calls on it for his great work. As it proceeds we seem to detect a growing fulness of knowledge, and it is by reason of the more learned treatment, as well as the loftier theme of the Third Cantica, that so many readers, when once well at sea in theParadiso, recognise the force of the warning with which it begins.[107]What amount of intercourse he was able to maintain with Florence during his wanderings is a matter of mere speculation, although of a more interesting kind than that concerned with the chronology of his uneasy travels. That he kept up at least some correspondence with his friends is proved by the letter regarding the terms of his pardon. There is also the well-known anecdote told by Boccaccio as to the discovery and despatch tohim of the opening Cantos of theInferno—an anecdote we may safely accept as founded on fact, although Boccaccio’s informants may have failed to note at the time what the manuscript consisted of, and in the course of years may have magnified the importance of their discovery. With his wife he would naturally communicate on subjects of common interest—as, for instance, that of how best to save or recover part of his property—and especially regarding the welfare of his sons, of whom two are found to be with him when he acquires something like a settlement in Verona.It is quite credible that, as Boccaccio asserts, he would never after his exile was once begun ‘go to his wife or suffer her to join him where he was;’ although the statement is probably an extension of the fact that she never did join him. In any case it is to make too large a use of the words to find in them evidence, as has frequently been done, of the unhappiness of all his married life, and of his utter estrangement from Gemma during his banishment. The union—marriage of convenience though it was—might be harmonious enough as long as things went moderately well with the pair. Dante was never wealthy, but he seems to have had his own house in Florence and small landed possessions in its neighbourhood.[108]That before hisbanishment he was considerably in debt appears to be ascertained;[109]but, without knowing the circumstances in which he borrowed, it is impossible to be sure whether he may not only have been making use of his credit in order to put out part of his means to advantage in some of the numerous commercial enterprises in which his neighbours were engaged. In any case his career must have seemed full of promise till he was driven into banishment. When that blow had fallen, it is easy to conceive how what if it was not mutual affection had come to serve instead of it—esteem and forbearance—would be changed into indifference with the lapse of months and years of enforced separation, embittered and filled on both sides with the mean cares of indigence, and, it may be, on Gemma’s side with the conviction that her husband had brought her with himself into disgrace. If all that is said by Boccaccio and some of Dante’s enemies as to his temperament and behaviour were true, we could only hope that Gemma’s indifference was deep enough to save her from the pangs of jealousy. And on the other hand, if we are to push suspicion to its utmost length, we may find an allusion to his own experience in the lines where Dante complains of how soon a widow forgets her husband.[110]But this is all matter of the merest speculation. Gemmais known to have been alive in 1314.[111]She brought up her children, says Boccaccio, upon a trifling part of her husband’s confiscated estate, recovered on the plea that it was a portion of her dowry. There may have been difficulties of a material kind, insuperable save to an ardent love that was not theirs, in the way of Gemma’s joining her husband in any of his cities of refuge.Complete evidence exists of Dante’s having in his later years lived for a longer or shorter time in the three cities of Lucca, Verona, and Ravenna. In Purgatory he meets a shade from Lucca, in the murmur of whose words he catches he ‘knows not what of Gentucca;’[112]and when he charges the Lucchese to speak plainly out, he is told that Lucca shall yet be found pleasant by him because of a girl not yet grown to womanhood. Uguccione, acting in the interest of Pisa, took possession of Lucca in 1314, and Dante is supposed to have taken up his residence there for some considerable time. What we may certainly infer from his own words in thePurgatoriois that they were written after a stay in Lucca had been sweetened to him by the society of a lady named Gentucca. He cannot well have found shelter there before the city was held by Uguccione; and research has established that at least two ladies of the uncommon name of Gentuccawere resident there in 1314. From the whole tone of his allusion—the mention of her very name and of her innocent girlhood—we may gather that there was nothing in his liking for her of which he had any reason to feel ashamed. In theInfernohe had covered the whole people of Lucca with his scorn.[113]By the time he got thus far with thePurgatoriohis thoughts of the place were all softened by his memory of one fair face—or shall we rather say, of one compassionate and womanly soul? That Dante was more than susceptible to feminine charms is coarsely asserted by Boccaccio.[114]But on such a matter Boccaccio is a prejudiced witness, and, in the absence of sufficient proof to the contrary, justice requires us to assume that the tenor of Dante’s life was not at variance with that of his writings. He who was so severe a judge of others was not, as we can infer from more than one passage of theComedy, a lenient judge when his own failings were concerned.[115]That hisconduct never fell short of his standard no one will venture to maintain. But what should have hindered him, in his hours of weariness and when even his hold on the future seemed to slacken, in lonely castle or strange town, to seek sympathy from some fair woman who might remind him in something of Beatrice?[116]When, in 1316, Uguccione was driven out of Lucca and Pisa, that great partisan took military service with Can Grande. It has been disputed whether Dante had earlier enjoyed the hospitality of the Scaligers, or was indebted for his first reception in Verona to the good offices of Uguccione. It is barely credible that by this time in his life he stood in need of any one to answer for him in the court of Can Grande. His fame as a political writer must have preceded him; and it was of a character to commend him to the good graces of the great Imperialist. In hisDe Monarchiahe had, by an exhaustive treatment of propositions which now seemchildish or else the mere commonplaces of everyday political argument, established the right of the civil power to independence of Church authority; and though to the Scaliger who aimed at becoming Imperial lieutenant for all the North of Italy he might seem needlessly tender to the spiritual lordship of the Holy Father, yet the drift of his reasoning was all in favour of the Ghibeline position.[117]Besides this he had written on the need of refining the dialects of Italian, and reducing them to a language fit for general use in the whole of the Peninsula; and this with a novelty of treatment and wealth of illustration unequalled before or since in any first work on such a subject.[118]And, what would recommend him still more to a youthful prince of lofty taste, he was the poet of the ‘sweet new style’ of theVita Nuova, and of sonnets, ballads, and canzoni rich in language and thought beyond the works of all previous poets in the vulgar tongues. Add to this that theComedywas already written, and published up, perhaps, to the close of thePurgatorio, and that all Italy was eager to find who had a place, and what kind of place, in the strange new world from which the veil was being withdrawn; and it is easy to imagine that Dante’s reception at Can Grande’s court was rather that of a man both admired and feared forhis great genius, than that of a wandering scholar and grumbling exile.At what time Dante came to Verona, and for how long he stayed, we have no means of fixing with certainty. He himself mentions being there in 1320,[119]and it is usually supposed that his residence covered three years previous to that date; as also that it was shared by his two sons, Piero and Jacopo. One of these was afterwards to find a settlement at Verona in a high legal post. Except some frivolous legends, there is no evidence that Dante met with anything but generous treatment from Can Grande. A passage of theParadiso, written either towards the close of the poet’s residence at Verona, or after he had left it, is full of a praise of the great Scaliger so magnificent[120]as fully to make amends for the contemptuous mention in thePurgatorioof his father and brother.[121]To Can Grande theParadisowas dedicated by the author in a long epistle containing an exposition of how the first Canto of that Cantica, and, by implication, the whole of the poem, is to be interpreted. The letter is full of gratitude for favours already received, and of expectation of others yet to come. From the terms of the dedication it has been assumed that ere it was made the whole of theParadisowas written, and that Dante praises the lord of Verona after a long experience of his bounty.[122]Whether owing to the restlessness of an exile, or to some prospect of attaining a state of greater ease or of having the command of more congenial society, we cannot tell; but from the splendid court of Can Grande he moved down into Romagna, to Ravenna, the city which of all in Italy would now be fixed upon by the traveller as the fittest place for a man of genius, weighed down by infinite sorrows, to close his days in and find a tomb. Some writers on the life of Dante will have it that in Ravenna he spent the greater part of his exile, and that when he is found elsewhere—in Lucca or Verona—he is only on a temporary absence from his permanent home.[123]But this conclusion requires some facts to be ignored, and others unduly dwelt on. In any case his patron there, during at least the last year or two of his life, was Guido Novello of Polenta, lord of Ravenna, the nephew of her who above all the persons of theComedylives in the hearts of its readers.Bernardino, the brother of Francesca and uncle of Guido, had fought on the side of Florence at the battle of Campaldino, and Dante may then have become acquainted with him. The family had the reputation of being moderate Guelfs; but ere this the exile, with his ripe experience of men, had doubtless learned, while retaining intact his own opinions as to what was the true theory of government, to set good-heartedness and anoble aim in life above political orthodoxy. This Guido Novello—the younger Guido—bears the reputation of having been well-informed, of gentle manners, and fond of gathering around him men accomplished in literature and the fine arts. On the death of Dante he made a formal oration in honour of the poet. If his welcome of Dante was as cordial as is generally supposed, and as there is no reason to doubt that it was, it proved his magnanimity; for in thePurgatorioa family specially hostile to the Polentas had been mentioned with honour,[124]while that to which his wife belonged had been lightly spoken of. How he got over the condemnation of his kinswoman to Inferno—even under such gentle conditions—it would be more difficult to understand were there not reason to believe that ere Dante went to Ravenna it had come to be a matter of pride in Italy for a family to have any of its members placed anywhere in that other world of which Dante held the key.It seems as if we might assume that the poet’s last months or years were soothed by the society of his daughter—the child whom he had named after the object of his first and most enduring love.[125]Whether or not he was acting as Ambassador for Guido to Venice when he caught his last illness, it appears to be pretty well established that he was held in honour by hispatron and all around him.[126]For his hours of meditation he had the solemn churches of Ravenna with their storied walls,[127]and the still more solemn pine forest of Classis, by him first annexed to the world of Romance.[128]For hours of relaxation, when they came, he had neighbours who dabbled in letters and who could at any rate sympathise with him in his love of study. He maintained correspondence with poets and scholars in other cities. In at least one instance this was conducted in the bitter fashion with which the humanists of a century or two later were to make the world familiar;[129]but with the Bolognese scholar, Giovanni del Virgilio, he engaged in a good-humoured, half-bantering exchange of Latin pastoral poems, through the artificial imagery of which there sometimes breaks a natural thought, as when in answer to the pedant’s counsel to renounce the vulgar tongue and produce in Latin something that will entitle him to receive thelaurel crown in Bologna, he declares that if ever he is crowned as a poet it will be on the banks of the Arno.Most of the material for forming a judgment of how Dante stood affected to the religious beliefs of his time is to be gathered from theComedy, and the place for considering it would rather be in an essay on that work than in a sketch of his life which necessity compels to be swift. A few words may however be here devoted to the subject, as it is one with some bearing on the manner in which he would be regarded by those around him, and through that on the tenor of his life. That Dante conformed to Church observances, and, except with a few malevolent critics, bore the reputation of a good Catholic, there can be no doubt. It was as a politician and not as a heretic that he suffered persecution; and when he died he was buried in great honour within the Franciscan Church at Ravenna. Some few years after his death, it is true, hisDe Monarchiawas burned as heretical by orders of the Papal Legate in Lombardy, who would gladly, if he could, have had the bones of the author exhumed to share the fate of his book. But all this was only because the partisans of Lewis of Bavaria were making political capital out of the treatise.
‘After losing the earliest joy of my life, I was so smitten with sorrow that in nothing could I find any comfort. Yet after some time my mind, eager to recover its tone, since nought that I or others could do availed to restore me, directed itself to find how people, being disconsolate, had been comforted. And so I took to reading that little-known book by Boethius, by writing which he, captive and in exile, had obtained relief. Next, hearing that Tully as well had written a book in which, treating of friendship, he had consoled the worthy Laelius on the occasion of the loss of his friend Scipio, I read that too. And though at the first I found their meaning hard, at last I comprehended it as far as my knowledge of the language and some little command of mother-wit enabled me to do: which same mother-wit had already helped me to much, as may be seen by theVita Nuova. And as it often happens that a man goes seeking silver, and lights on gold he is not looking for—the result of chance, or of some divine provision; so I, besides finding the consolation I was in search of to dry my tears, became possessed of wisdom from authors and sciences and books. Weighing this well, I deemed that philosophy, the mistress of these authors, sciences, and books, must be the best of all things. And imagining her to myself fashioned like a great lady, rich in compassion, my admiration of her was so unbounded that I was always delighting myself in her image. And from thus beholding her in fancy I went on to frequent the places where she is to be found in very deed—in the schools of theology, to wit, and the debates of philosophers. So that in a little time, thirty months or so, I began to taste so much of her sweetness that the love I bore to her effaced or banished every other thought.’[50]
‘After losing the earliest joy of my life, I was so smitten with sorrow that in nothing could I find any comfort. Yet after some time my mind, eager to recover its tone, since nought that I or others could do availed to restore me, directed itself to find how people, being disconsolate, had been comforted. And so I took to reading that little-known book by Boethius, by writing which he, captive and in exile, had obtained relief. Next, hearing that Tully as well had written a book in which, treating of friendship, he had consoled the worthy Laelius on the occasion of the loss of his friend Scipio, I read that too. And though at the first I found their meaning hard, at last I comprehended it as far as my knowledge of the language and some little command of mother-wit enabled me to do: which same mother-wit had already helped me to much, as may be seen by theVita Nuova. And as it often happens that a man goes seeking silver, and lights on gold he is not looking for—the result of chance, or of some divine provision; so I, besides finding the consolation I was in search of to dry my tears, became possessed of wisdom from authors and sciences and books. Weighing this well, I deemed that philosophy, the mistress of these authors, sciences, and books, must be the best of all things. And imagining her to myself fashioned like a great lady, rich in compassion, my admiration of her was so unbounded that I was always delighting myself in her image. And from thus beholding her in fancy I went on to frequent the places where she is to be found in very deed—in the schools of theology, to wit, and the debates of philosophers. So that in a little time, thirty months or so, I began to taste so much of her sweetness that the love I bore to her effaced or banished every other thought.’[50]
No one would guess from this description of how he grew enamoured of philosophy, that at the beginning of his arduous studies Dante took a wife. She was Gemma, the daughter of Manetto Donati, but related only distantly, if at all, to the great Corso Donati. They were married in 1292, he being twenty-seven; and in the course of the nine years that elapsed till his exile she bore him five sons and two daughters.[51]From his silence regarding her in his works, and from some words of Boccaccio’s which apply only to the period of his exile, it has been inferred that the union was unhappy. But Dante makes no mention in his writings of his parents or childrenany more than of Gemma.[52]And why should not his wife be included among the things dearest to him which, he tells us, he had to leave behind him on his banishment? For anything we know to the contrary, their wedded life up to the time of his exile may have been happy enough; although most probably the marriage was one of convenience, and almost certainly Dante found little in Gemma’s mind that answered to his own.[53]In any case it is not safe to lay stress upon his silence. During the period covered by theVita Nuovahe served more than once in the field, and to this none of his earlier works make any reference. In 1289, Arezzo having warmly espoused the Ghibeline cause, the Florentines, led by Corso Donati and the great merchant Vieri dei Cerchi, took up arms and met the foe in the field of Campaldino, on the edge of the upland region of the Casentino. Dante, as a young man of means and family, fought in the vanguard;[54]and in a letter partly preserved by one of his early biographers[55]he describes himself as being then no tiro in arms, and as having with varying emotions watched the fortunes of the day. From this it is clear that he had served before, probably in an expedition into the Aretine territory made in the previous year, and referred to in theInferno.[56]In the same year as Campaldino was won he was present at the surrender of Caprona, a fortress belonging to Pisa.[57]But of all this he is silent in his works, or only makes casual mention of it by way of illustration. It is, therefore, a waste of time trying to prove his domestic misery from his silence about his marriage.
So hard a student was Dante that he now for a time nearly lost the use of his eyes.[58]But he was cured by regimen, and came to see as well as ever, he tells us; which we can easily believe was very well indeed. For his work, as he planned it out, he needed all his powers. TheConvito, for example, was designed to admit of a full treatment of all that concerns philosophy. It marks an earlier stage of his intellectual and spiritual life than does the opening of theInferno. In it we have the fruit of the years during which he was wandering astray from his early ideal, misled by what he afterwards came to count as a vain and profitless curiosity. Most of its contents, as we have it,[59]are only indirectly interesting. It is impossible for most people to care for discussions, conducted with all the nicety of scholastic definition, on such subjects as the system of the universe as it was evolved out of the brains of philosophers; the subject-matter of knowledge; and how we know. But there is one section of it possessed of a very special interest,the Fourth, in which he treats of the nature of nobility. This he affirms to be independent of wealth or ancestry, and he finds every one to be noble who practises the virtues proper to his time of life. ‘None of the Uberti of Florence or the Visconti of Milan can say he is noble because belonging to such or such a race; for the Divine seed is sown not in a family but in the individual man.’ This amounts, it must be admitted, to no more than saying that high birth is one thing, and nobility of character another; but it is significant of what were the current opinions, that Dante should be at such pains to distinguish between the two qualities. The canzone which supplies the text for the treatise closes with a picture of the noble soul at every stage of life, to which Chaucer may well have been indebted for his description of the true gentleman:[60]—‘The soul that is adorned by this grace does not keep it hid, but from the day when soul is wed to body shows it forth even until death. In early life she is modest, obedient, and gentle, investing the outward form and all its members with a gracious beauty: in youth she is temperate and strong, full of love and courteous ways, delighting in loyal deeds: in mature age she is prudent, and just, and apt to liberality, rejoicing to hear of others’ good. Then in the fourth stage of life she is married again to God,[61]and contemplates her approaching end with thankfulness for all the past.’[62]
In this passage it is less the poet that is heard than the sober moralist, one with a ripe experience of life, and contemptuous of the vulgar objects of ambition. The calm is on the surface. As has been said above, he was proud of his own birth, the more proud perhaps that his station was but a middling one; and to the close of his life he hated upstarts with their sudden riches, while the Philip Argenti on whom in theInfernohe takes what has much the air of a private revenge may have been only a specimen of the violent and haughty nobles with whom he stood on an uneasy footing.
Yet the impression we get of Dante’s surroundings in Florence from theVita Nuovaand other poems, from references in theComedy, and from some anecdotes more or less true which survive in the pages of Boccaccio and elsewhere, is on the whole a pleasant one. We should mistake did we think of him as always in the guise of absorbed student or tearful lover. Friends he had, and society of various kinds. He tells how in a severe illness he was nursed by a young and noble lady, nearly related to him by blood—his sister most probably; and other ladies are mentioned as watching in his sick-chamber.[63]With Forese and Piccarda Donati, brother and sister of the great Corso Donati, he was on terms of the warmest friendship.[64]From theVita Nuovawe can gather that, even when his whole heart fainted and failed at the mere sight of Beatrice, he was a favourite with other ladies and conversed familiarly with them. The brother ofBeatrice was his dear friend; while among those of the elder generation he could reckon on the friendship of such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Brunetto Latini. Through Latini he would, even as a young man, get the entry of the most lettered and intellectually active society of Florence. The tradition of his intimacy with Giotto is supported by the mention he makes of the painter,[65]and by the fact, referred to in theVita Nuova, that he was himself a draughtsman. It is to be regretted there are not more anecdotes of him on record like that which tells how one day as he drew an angel on his tablets he was broken in upon by ‘certain people of importance.’ The musician Casella, whom he ‘woes to sing in Purgatory’[66]and Belacqua, the indolent good-humoured lutemaker,[67]are greeted by him in a tone of friendly warmth in the one case and of easy familiarity in the other, which help us to know the terms on which he stood with the quick-witted artist class in Florence.[68]Already he was in the enjoyment of a high reputation as a poet and scholar, and there seemed no limit to the greatness he might attain to in his native town as a man of action as well as a man of thought.
In most respects the Florence of that day was as fitting a home for a man of genius as could well be imagined. It was full of a life which seemed restless only because the possibilities of improvement for theindividual and the community seemed infinite. A true measure of its political progress and of the activity of men’s minds is supplied by the changes then being made in the outward aspect of the city. The duties of the Government were as much municipal as political, and it would have surprised a Florentine to be told that the one kind of service was of less dignity than the other. The population grew apace, and, to provide the means for extending the city walls, every citizen, on pain of his testament being found invalid, was required to bequeath a part of his estate to the public. Already the banks of the Arno were joined by three bridges of stone, and the main streets were paved with the irregularly-shaped blocks of lava still familiar to the sojourner in Florence. But between the time of Dante’s boyhood and the close of the century the other outstanding features of the city were greatly altered, or were in the course of change. The most important churches of Florence, as he first knew it, were the Baptistery and the neighbouring small cathedral church of Santa Reparata; after these ranked the church of the Trinity, Santo Stefano, and some other churches which are now replaced by larger ones, or of which the site alone can be discovered. On the other side of the river, Samminiato with its elegant façade rose as now upon its hill.[69]The only great civic building was the Palace of the Podesta. The Old Market was and had long been the true centre of the city’s life.
At the time Dante went into exile Arnolfo was already working on the great new cathedral of St. Maryof the Flowers, the spacious Santa Croce, and the graceful Badia; and Santa Maria Novella was slowly assuming the perfection of form that was later to make it the favourite of Michel Angelo. The Palace of the Signory was already planned, though half a century was to elapse before its tower soared aloft to daunt the private strongholds which bristled, fierce and threatening, all over the city. The bell-tower of Giotto, too, was of later erection—the only pile we can almost regret that Dante never saw. The architect of it was however already adorning the walls of palace and cloister with paintings whose inspiration was no longer, like that of the works they overshadowed, drawn from the outworn motives of Byzantine art, but from the faithful observation of nature.[70]He in painting and the Pisan school in sculpture were furnishing the world with novel types of beauty in the plastic arts, answering to the ‘sweet new style’ in verse of which it was Dante that discovered the secret.[71]
Florence was now by far the leading city in Tuscany. Its merchants and money-dealers were in correspondence with every Mediterranean port and with every country of the West. Along with bales of goods and letters of exchange new ideas and fresh intelligence were always on the road to Florence. The knowledge of what was going on in the world, and of what men were thinking,was part of the stock-in-trade of the quick-witted citizens, and they were beginning to be employed throughout Europe in diplomatic work, till then almost a monopoly of churchmen. ‘These Florentines seem to me to form a fifth element,’ said Boniface, who had ample experience of how accomplished they were.
At home they had full employment for their political genius; and still upon the old problem, of how to curb the arrogance of the class that, in place of being satisfied to share in the general prosperity, sought its profit in the maintenance of privilege. It is necessary, at the cost of what may look like repetition, to revert to the presence and activity of this class in Florence, if we are to form a true idea of the circumstances of Dante’s life, and enter into the spirit with which much of theComedyis informed. Though many of the nobles were now engaged in commerce and figured among the popular leaders, most of the greater houses stood proudly aloof from everything that might corrupt their gentility. These were styled the magnates: they found, as it were, a vocation for themselves in being nobles. Among them the true distinctive spirit of Ghibelinism survived, although none of them would now have dared to describe himself as a Ghibeline. Their strength lay partly in the unlimited control they retained over the serfs on their landward estates; in the loyalty with which the members of a family held by one another; in their great command of resources as the administrators of theParte Guelfa; and in the popularity they enjoyed with the smaller people in consequence of their lavish expenditure, and frank if insolent manners. By lawscarcely the equals of the full citizens, in point of fact they tyrannised over them. Their houses, set like fortresses in the crowded streets, frequently served as prisons and torture-chambers for the low-born traders or artisans who might offend them.
Measures enough had been passed towards the close of the century with a view to curb the insolence of the magnates; but the difficulty was to get them put in force. At length, in 1294, they, with many additional reforms, were embodied in the celebrated Ordinances of Justice. These for long were counted back to as the Great Charter of Florence—a Great Charter defining the popular rights and the disabilities of the baronage. Punishments of special severity were enacted for nobles who should wrong a plebeian, and the whole of a family or clan was made responsible for the crimes and liabilities of its several members. The smaller tradesmen were conciliated by being admitted to a share in political influence. If serfage was already abolished in the State of Florence, it was the Ordinances which made it possible for the serf to use his liberty.[72]But the greatest blow dealt to the nobles by the new laws was their exclusion, as nobles, from all civil and political offices. These they could hold only by becoming members of one of the trade guilds.[73]Andto deprive a citizen of his rights it was enough to inscribe his name in the list of magnates.
It is not known in what year Dante became a member of the Guild of Apothecaries. Without much reason it has been assumed that he was one of the nobles who took advantage of the law of 1294. But there is no evidence that in his time the Alighieri ranked as magnates, and much ground for believing that for some considerable time past they had belonged to the order of full citizens.
It was not necessary for every guildsman to practise the art or engage in the business to which his guild was devoted, and we are not required to imagine Dante as having anything to do with medicine or with the spices and precious stones in which the apothecaries traded. The guilds were political as much as industrial associations, and of the public duties of his membership he took his full share. The constitution of the Republic, jealously careful to limit the power of the individual citizen, provided that the two chief executive officers, the Podesta and the Captain of the People, should always be foreigners. They held office only for six months. To each of them was assigned a numerous Council, and before a law could be abrogated or a new one passed it needed the approval of both these Councils, as well as that of the Priors, and of the heads of the principal guilds. The Priors were six in number, one for each district of the city. With them lay the administration in general of the laws, and the conductof foreign affairs. Their office was elective, and held for two months.[74]Of one or other of the Councils Dante is known to have been a member in 1295, 1296, 1300, and 1301.[75]In 1299 he is found engaged on a political mission to the little hill-city of San Gemigniano, where in the town-house they still show the pulpit from which he addressed the local senate.[76]From the middle of June till the middle of August 1300 he served as one of the Priors.[77]
At the time when Dante entered on this office, Florence was distracted by the feud of Blacks and Whites, names borrowed from the factions of Pistoia, but fated to become best known from their use in the city which adopted them. The strength of the Blacks lay in the nobles whom the Ordinances of Justice had been designed to depress; both such of them as had retained their standing as magnates, and such as, under the new law, had unwillingly entered the ranks of the citizens. Already they had succeeded in driving into exile Giano della Bella,[78]the chief author of the Ordinances; and their efforts—and those of the citizens who,fearing the growing power of the lesser guilds, were in sympathy with them—were steadily directed to upset the reforms. An obvious means to this end was to lower in popular esteem the public men whose policy it was to govern firmly on the new lines. The leader of the discontented party was Corso Donati, a man of small fortune, but of high birth; of splendid personal appearance, open-handed, and of popular manners. He and they who went with him affected a violent Guelfism, their chance of recovering the control of domestic affairs being the better the more they could frighten the Florentines with threats of evils like those incurred by the Aretines and Pisans from Ghibeline oppression. It may be imagined what meaning the cry of Ghibeline possessed in days when there was still a class of beggars in Florence—men of good names—whose eyes had been torn out by Farinata and his kind.
One strong claim which Corso Donati had on the goodwill of his fellow-townsmen was that by his ready courage in pushing on the reserves, against superior orders, at the battle of Campaldino,[79]the day had been won to Florence and her allies. As he rode gallantly through the streets he was hailed as the Baron (il Barone), much as in the last generation the victor of Waterloo was sufficiently distinguished as the Duke. At the same battle, Vieri dei Cerchi, the leader of the opposite party of the Whites, had shown no less bravery, but he was ignorant of the art, or despised it, of making political capital out of the performance of his duty. In almost every respect he offered a contrast to Donati.He was of a new family, and his influence depended not on landed possessions, though he had these too, but on wealth derived from commerce.[80]According to John Villani, a competent authority on such a point,[81]he was at the head of one of the greatest trading houses in the world. The same crowds that cheered Corso as the great Baron sneered at the reticent and cold-tempered merchant as the Ghibeline. It was a strange perversion of ideas, and yet had this of justification, that all the nobles of Ghibeline tendency and all the citizens who, on account of their birth, were suspected of leaning that way were driven into the party of the Whites by the mere fact of the Blacks hoisting so defiantly the Guelf flag, and commanding the resources of theParte Guelfa. But if Ghibelinism meant, as fifty years previously it did mean, a tendency to exalt privilege as against the general liberties and to court foreign interference in the affairs of Florence, it was the Blacks and not the Whites who had served themselves heirs to Ghibelinism. That the appeal was now taken to the Pope instead of to the Emperor did not matter; or that French soldiers in place of German were called in to settle domestic differences.
The Roman See was at this time filled by BonifaceVIII., who six years previously, by violence and fraud, had procured the resignation of CelestineV.—him who made the great refusal.[82]Boniface was at once arrogantand subtle, wholly faithless, and hampered by no scruple either of religion or humanity. But these qualities were too common among those who before and after him filled the Papal throne, to secure him in a special infamy. That he has won from the ruthless hatred which blazes out against him in many a verse of Dante’s,[83]and for this hatred he is indebted to his interference in the affairs of Florence, and what came as one of the fruits of it—the poet’s exile.
And yet, from the point of view not only of the interest of Rome but also of Italy, there is much to be said for the policy of Boniface. German domination was a just subject of fear, and the Imperialist element was still so strong in Northern and Central Italy, that if the Emperor Albert[84]had been a man of a more resolute ambition, he might—so contemporaries deemed—have conquered Italy at the cost of a march through it. The cities of Romagna were already in Ghibeline revolt, and it was natural that the Pope should seek to secure Florence on the Papal side. It was for the Florentines rather than for him to judge what they would lose or gain by being dragged into the current of general politics. He made a fair beginning with an attempt to reconcile the two parties. The Whites were then the dominant faction, and to them reconciliation meant that their foes would at once divide the government with them, and at the long-run sap the popular liberties, while the Pope’s hand would soon be allowed to dip freely into the communal purse. The policy of the Whites was therefore one of steady opposition to all foreign meddling with Florence. But it failed to secure general support, for without being Ghibeline in fact it had the air of being so; and the name of Ghibeline was one that no reasoning could rob of its terrors.[85]
As was usual in Florence when political feeling ran high, the hotter partisans came to blows, and the streets were more than once disturbed by violence and bloodshed. To an onlooker it must have seemed as if the interposition of some external authority was desirable; and almost on the same day as the new Priors, of whom Dante was one and who were all Whites, took office in the June of 1300, the Cardinal Acquasparta entered the city, deputed by the Pope to establish peace. His proposals were declined by the party in power, and having failed in his mission he left the city, and took the priestly revenge upon it of placing it under interdict.[86]Ere many months were passed, the Blacks, at a meeting of the heads of the party, resolved to open negotiations anew with Boniface. For this illegal step some of them, including Corso Donati, were ordered into exile by the authorities, who, to give an appearance of impartiality to their proceedings, at the same time banished some of the Whites, and among them Guido Cavalcanti. It was afterwards made a charge against Dante that he had procured the recall of his friend Guido and the other Whites from exile; but to this he could answer that he was not then in office.[87]Corso in the meantime was using his enforced absence from Florence to treat freely with the Pope.
Boniface had already entered into correspondence with Charles of Valois, brother of Philip, the reigning King of France, with the view of securing the services of a strongly-connected champion. It was the game that had been played before by the Roman Court when Charles of Anjou was called to Italy to crush the Hohenstaufens. This second Charles was a man of ability of a sort, as he had given cruel proof in his brother’s Flemish wars. By the death of his wife, daughter of his kinsman CharlesII.of Naples and so grand-daughter of Charles of Anjou, he had lost the dominions of Maine and Anjou, and had got the nickname of Lackland from his want of a kingdom. He lent a willing ear to Boniface, who presented him with the crown of Sicily on condition that he first wrested it from the Spaniard who wore it.[88]All the Papal influence was exerted to get money for the expenses of the descent on Sicily. Even churchmen were required to contribute, for it was a holy war, and the hope was that when Charles, the champion of the Church, had reducedItaly to obedience, won Sicily for himself by arms, and perhaps the Eastern Empire by marriage, he would win the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom.
Charles crossed the Alps in August 1301, with five hundred men-at-arms, and, avoiding Florence on his southward march, found Boniface at his favourite residence of Anagni. He was created Pacificator of Tuscany, and loaded with other honours. What better served the purpose of his ambition, he was urged to retrace his steps and justify his new title by restoring peace to Florence. There the Whites were still in power, but they dared not declare themselves openly hostile to the Papal and Guelf interest by refusing him admission to the city. He came with gentle words, and ready to take the most stringent oaths not to tamper with the liberties of the Commonwealth; but once he had gained an entrance (November 1301) and secured his hold on Florence, he threw off every disguise, gave full play to his avarice, and amused himself with looking on at the pillage of the dwellings and warehouses of the Whites by the party of Corso Donati. By all this, says Dante, Charles ‘gained no land,’ Lackland as he was, ‘but only sin and shame.’[89]
There is a want of precise information as to the events of this time. But it seems probable that Dante formed one of an embassy sent by the rulers of Florence to the Pope in the autumn of this year; and that on the occasion of the entrance of Charles he was absent from Florence. What the embassy had to propose which Boniface could be expected to be satisfied with, shortof complete submission, is not known and is not easy to guess. It seems clear at least that Dante cannot have been chosen as a person likely to be specially pleasing to the Roman Court. Within the two years preceding he had made himself prominent in the various Councils of which he was a member, by his sturdy opposition to affording aid to the Pope in his Romagnese wars. It is even possible that his theory of the Empire was already more or less known to Boniface, and as that Pontiff claimed Imperial authority over such states as Florence, this would be sufficient to secure him a rough reception.[90]Where he was when the terrible news came to him that for some days there had been no law in Florence, and that Corso Donati was sharing in the triumph of Charles, we do not know. Presageful of worse things to come, he did not seek to return, and is said to have been in Siena when he heard that, on the 27th January 1302, he had been sentenced to a heavy fine and political disabilities for having been guilty of extortion while a Prior, of opposing the coming of Charles, and of crimes against the peace of Florence and the interest of theParte Guelfa. If the fine was not paid within three days his goods and property were to be confiscated. This condemnation he shared with three others. In the following March he was one of twelve condemned, for contumacy, to be burned alive if ever they fell into the hands of the Florentine authorities. We may perhaps assume thatthe cruel sentence, as well as the charge of peculation, was uttered only in order to conform to some respectable precedents.
Besides Dante many other Whites had been expelled from Florence.[91]Whether they liked it or not, they were forced to seek aid from the Ghibelines of Arezzo and Romagna. This led naturally to a change of political views, and though at the time of their banishment all of them were Guelfs in various degrees, as months and years went on they developed into Ghibelines, more or less declared. Dissensions, too, would be bred among them out of recriminations touching the past, and charges of deserting the general interest for the sake of securing private advantage in the way of making peace with the Republic. For a time, however, the common desire of gaining a return to Florence held them together. Of the Council constituted to bring this about, Dante was a member. Once only with his associates does he appear to have come the length of formal negotiations with a view to getting back. Charles of Valois had passed away from the temporary scene of his extortions and treachery, upon the futile quest of a crown. Boniface, ere being persecuted to death by his old ally, Philip of France (1303), had vainly attempted to check the cruelty of the Blacks; and Benedict, his successor, sent the Cardinal of Ostia to Florence with powers to reconcile the two parties.Dante is usually credited with the composition of the letter in which Vieri dei Cerchi and his fellow-exiles answered the call of the Cardinal to discuss the conditions of their return home. All that had been done by the banished party, said the letter, had been done for the public good.[92]The negotiations came to nothing; nor were the exiles more fortunate in arms. Along with their allies they did once succeed by a sudden dash in penetrating to the market-place, and Florence lay within their grasp when, seized with panic, they turned and fled from the city, which many of them were never to see again.
Almost certainly Dante took no active part in this attempt, and indeed there is little to show that he was ever heartily associated with the exiles. In his own words, he was compelled to break with his companions owing to their imbecility and wickedness, and to form a party by himself.[93]With the Whites, then, he had little more to do; and the story of their fortunes need not longer detain us. It is enough to say that while, like Dante, the chief men among them were for ever excluded from Florence, the principles for which they had contended survived, and even obtained something like a triumph within its walls. The success of Donati and his party, though won with the help of the people, was too clearly opposed to the popular interest to be permanent. Ere long the inveterate contradiction between magnate and merchant was again to change thecourse of Florentine politics; the disabilities against lawless nobles were again to be enforced; and Corso Donati himself was to be crushed in the collision of passions he had evoked but could not control (1308). Though tenderly attached to members of his family, Dante bore Corso a grudge as having been the chief agent in procuring his exile—a grudge which years could do nothing to wipe out. He places in the mouth of Forese Donati a prophecy of the great Baron’s shameful death, expressed in curt and scornful words, terrible from a brother.[94]It is no figure of speech to say that Dante nursed revenge.
For some few years his hopes were set on Henry of Luxemburg, elected Emperor in 1308. A Ghibeline, in the ordinary sense of the term, Dante never was. We have in hisDe Monarchiaa full account of the conception he had formed of the Empire—that of authority in temporal affairs embodied in a just ruler, who, being already supreme, would be delivered from all personal ambition; who should decree justice and be a refuge for all that were oppressed. He was to be the captain of Christian society and the guardian of civil right; as in another sphere the Pope was to be the shepherd of souls and the guardian of the deposit of Divine truth. In Dante’s eyes the one great officer was as much God’s vicegerent as the other. While the most that a Ghibeline or a moderate Guelf would concede was that there should be a division of power between Pope and Emperor—the Ghibeline leaving it to the Emperor and the Guelf to the Pope to definetheir provinces—Dante held, and in this he stood almost alone among politicians, that they ought to be concerned with wholly different kingdoms, and that Christendom was wronged by the trespass of either upon the other’s domain. An equal wrong was done by the neglect by either of his duty, and both, as Dante judged, had been shamefully neglecting it. For more than half a century no Emperor had set foot in Italy; and since the Papal Court had under ClementV.been removed to Avignon (1305), the Pope had ceased to be a free agent, owing to his neighbourhood to France and the unscrupulous Philip.[95]
Dante trusted that the virtuous single-minded HenryVII.would prove a monarch round whom all the best in Italy might gather to make him Emperor in deed as well as in name. His judgment took the colour of his hopes, for under the awful shadow of the Emperor he trusted to enter Florence. Although no Ghibeline or Imperialist in the vulgar sense, he constituted himself Henry’s apologist and herald; and in letters addressed to the ‘wicked Florentines,’ to the Emperor, and to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, he blew as it were a trumpet-blast of triumph over the Emperor’s enemies and his own. Henry had crossed the Alps, and was tarrying in the north of Italy, when Dante, with a keen eye for where the key of the situation lay, sharpened by his own wishes, urged him to lose no more time in reducing the Lombard cities to obedience, but to descend on Florence, the rotten sheep which wascorrupting all the Italian flock. The men of Florence he bids prepare to receive the just reward of their crimes.
The Florentines answered Dante’s bitter invective and the Emperor’s milder promises by an unwearied opposition with the arms which their increasing command of all that tends to soften life made them now less willing to take up, and by the diplomacy in which they were supreme The exiles were recalled, always excepting the more stubborn or dangerous; and among these was reckoned Dante. Alliances were made on all hands, an art which Henry was notably wanting in the trick of. Wherever he turned he was met and checkmated by the Florentines, who, wise by experience, were set on retaining control of their own affairs. After his coronation at Rome (1312),[96]he marched northwards, and with his Pisan and Aretine allies for six weeks laid fruitless siege to Florence. King Robert of Naples, whose aid he had hoped to gain by means of a family alliance, was joined to the league of Guelfs, and Henry passed away from Florence to engage in an enterprise against the Southern Kingdom, a design cut short by his death (1313). He was the last Emperor that ever sought to take the part in Italian affairs which on Dante’s theory belonged to the Imperial office. Well-meaning but weak, he was not the man to succeed in reducing to practice a scheme of government which had broken down even in the strong hands of the two Fredericks, and ere the Commonwealths of Italy had become eachas powerful as a Northern kingdom. To explain his failure, Dante finds that his descent into Italy was unseasonable: he came too soon. Rather, it may be said, he came far too late.[97]
When, on the death of Henry, Dante was disappointed in his hopes of a true revival of the Empire, he devoted himself for a time to urging the restoration of the Papal Court to Rome, so that Italy might at least not be left without some centre of authority. In a letter addressed to the Italian Cardinals, he besought them to replace ClementV., who died in 1314,[98]by an Italian Pope. Why should they, he asked, resign this great office into Gascon hands? Why should Rome, the true centre of Christendom, be left deserted and despised? His appeal was fruitless, as indeed it could not fail to be with only six Italian Cardinals in a College of twenty-four; and after a vacancy of two years the Gascon Clement was succeeded by another Gascon. Although Dante’s motives in making this attempt were doubtless as purely patriotic as those which inspired Catherine of Siena to similar action a century later, he met, we may be sure, with but little sympathy from his former fellow-citizens. They were intent upon the interests of Florence alone, and even of these they may sometimes have taken a narrow view. His was the wider patriotism of the Italian, and it was the whole Peninsula that he longed to see delivered from French influence and once more provided with a seat of authority in its midst, even if it were only that of spiritual power. The Florentines for their part, desirous of security against the incursions of the northern horde, were rather set on retaining the goodwill of France than on enjoying the neighbourhood of the Pope. In this they were guilty of no desertion of their principles. Their Guelfism had never been more than a mode of minding themselves.
For about three years (1313-1316) the most dangerous foe of Florence was Uguccione de la Faggiuola, a partisan Ghibeline chief, sprung from the mountain-land of Urbino, which lies between Tuscany and Romagna. He made himself lord of Pisa and Lucca, and defeated the Florentines and their allies in the great battle of Montecatini (1315). To him Dante is believed to have attached himself.[99]It would be easy for the Republic to form an exaggerated idea of the part which the exile had in shaping the policy or contributing to the success of his patron; and we are not surprised to find that, although Dante’s fighting days were done, he was after the defeat subjected to a third condemnation(November 1315). If caught, he was to lose his head; and his sons, or some of them, were threatened with the same fate. The terms of the sentence may again have been more severe than the intentions of those who uttered it. However this may be, an amnesty was passed in the course of the following year, and Dante was urged to take advantage of it. He found the conditions of pardon too humiliating. Like a malefactor he would require to walk, taper in hand and a shameful mitre on his head, to the church of St John, and there make an oblation for his crimes. It was not in this fashion that in his more hopeful hours the exile had imagined his restoration. If ever he trod again the pavement of his beautiful St John’s, it was to be proudly, as a patriot touching whom his country had confessed her sins; or, with a poet’s more bashful pride, to receive the laurel crown beside the font in which he was baptized. But as he would not enter his well beloved, well hated Florence on the terms imposed by his enemies, so he never had the chance of entering it on his own. The spirit in which he, as it were, turned from the open gates of his native town is well expressed in a letter to a friend, who would seem to have been a churchman who had tried to win his compliance with the terms of the pardon. After thanking his correspondent for his kindly eagerness to recover him, and referring to the submission required, he says:—‘And is it in this glorious fashion that Dante Alighieri, wearied with an almost trilustral exile, is recalled to his country? Is this the desert of an innocence known to all, and of laborious studywhich for long has kept him asweat?... But, Father, this is no way for me to return to my country by; though if by you or others one can be hit upon through which the honour and fame of Dante will take no hurt, it shall be followed by me with no tardy steps. If by none such Florence is to be entered, I will never enter Florence. What then! Can I not, wherever I may be, behold the sun and stars? Is not meditation upon the sweetness of truth as free to me in one place as another? To enjoy this, no need to submit myself ingloriously and with ignominy to the State and People of Florence! And wherever I may be thrown, in any case I trust at least to find daily bread.’
The cruelty and injustice of Florence to her greatest son have been the subject of much eloquent blame. But, in justice to his contemporaries, we must try to see Dante as they saw him, and bear in mind that the very qualities fame makes so much of—his fervent temper and devotion to great ideas—placed him out of the reach of common sympathy. Others besides him had been banished from Florence, with as much or as little reason, and had known the saltness of bread which has been begged, and the steepness of strange stairs. The pains of banishment made them the more eager to have it brought to a close. With Dante all that he suffered went to swell the count of grievances for which a reckoning was some day to be exacted. The art of returning was, as he himself knew well, one he was slow to learn.[100]His noble obstinacy, which would stoop to no loss of dignity or sacrifice of principle, must exciteour admiration; it also goes far to account for his difficulty in getting back. We can even imagine that in Florence his refusal to abate one tittle of what was due to him in the way of apology was, for a time, the subject of wondering speculation to the citizens, ere they turned again to their everyday affairs of politics and merchandise. Had they been more used to deal with men in whom a great genius was allied to a stubborn sense of honour, they would certainly have left less room in their treatment of Dante for happier ages to cavil at.
How did the case stand? In the letter above quoted from, Dante says that his innocence was known to all. As far as the charge of corruption in his office-bearing went, his banishment—no one can doubt it for a moment—was certainly unjust; and the political changes in Florence since the death of Corso Donati had taken all the life out of the other charges. But by his eager appeals to the Emperor to chastise the Florentines he had raised fresh barriers against his return. The governors of the Republic could not be expected to adopt his theory of the Empire and share his views of the Imperial claims; and to them Dante must have seemed as much guilty of disloyalty to the Commonwealth in inviting the presence of Henry, as Corso Donati had been in Dante’s eyes for his share in bringing Charles of Valois to harry Florence. His political writings since his exile—and all his writings were more or less political—had been such as might well confirm or create an opinion of him as a man difficult to live with, as one whose intellectual arrogance had a readyorgan in his unsparing tongue or pen. Rumour would most willingly dwell upon and distort the features of his character and conduct that separated him from the common herd. And to add to all this, even after he had deserted the party of the Whites in exile, and had become a party to himself, he found his friends and patrons—for where else could he find them?—among the foes of Florence.
History never abhors a vacuum so much as when she has to deal with the life of a great man, and for those who must have details of Dante’s career during the nineteen years which elapsed between his banishment and his death, the industry of his biographers has exhausted every available hint, while some of them press into their service much that has only the remotest bearing on their hero. If even one-half of their suppositions were adopted, we should be forced to the conclusion that theComedyand all the other works of his exile were composed in the intervals of a very busy life. We have his own word for this much, (Convitoi. 3,) that since he was cast forth out of Florence—in which he would ‘fain rest his wearied soul and fulfil his appointed time’—he had been ‘a pilgrim, nay, even a mendicant,’ in every quarter of Italy,[101]and had ‘been held cheap by many who, because of his fame, hadlooked to find him come in another guise.’ But he gives no journal of his wanderings, and, as will have been observed, says no word of any country but Italy. Keeping close to well-ascertained facts, it seems established that in the earlier period of his exile he sojourned with members of the great family of the Counts Guidi,[102]and that he also found hospitality with the Malaspini,[103]lords of the Val di Magra, between Genoa and Lucca. At a still earlier date (August 1306) he is found witnessing a deed in Padua. It was most probably in the same year that Dante found Giotto there, painting the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, and was courteously welcomed by the artist, and taken to his house.[104]At some time of his life he studied at Bologna: John Villani says, during hisexile.[105]Of his supposed residence in Paris, though it is highly probable, there is a want of proof; of a visit to England, none at all that is worth a moment’s consideration. Some of his commentators and biographers seem to think he was so short-witted that he must have been in a place before it could occur to him to name it in his verse.
We have Dante’s own word for it that he found his exile almost intolerable. Besides the bitter resentment which he felt at the injustice of it, he probably cherished the conviction that his career had been cut short when he was on the point of acquiring great influence in affairs. The illusion may have been his—one not uncommon among men of a powerful imagination—that, given only due opportunity, he could mould the active life of his time as easily as he moulded andfashioned the creations of his fancy. It was, perhaps, owing to no fault of his own that when a partial opportunity had offered itself, he failed to get his views adopted in Florence; indeed, to judge from the kind of employment in which he was more than once engaged for his patrons, he must have been possessed of no little business tact. Yet, as when his feelings were deeply concerned his words knew no restraint, so his hopes would partake of the largeness of his genius. In the restored Empire, which he was almost alone in longing for as he conceived of it, he may have imagined for himself a place beside Henry like what in Frederick’s court had been filled by Pier delle Vigne—the man who held both keys to the Emperor’s heart, and opened and shut it as he would.[106]
Thus, as his exile ran on it would grow sadder with the accumulating memories of hopes deferred and then destroyed, and of dreams which had faded away in the light of a cheerless reality. But some consolations he must have found even in the conditions of his exile. He had leisure for meditation, and time enough to spend in that other world which was all his own. With the miseries of a wanderer’s life would come not a few of its sweets—freedom from routine, and the intellectual stimulus supplied by change of place. Here and there he would find society such as he cared for—that of scholars, theologians, and men familiar with every court and school of Christendom. And, beyond all, he would get access to books that at home he might never have seen. It was no spare diet that wouldserve his mind while he was making such ample calls on it for his great work. As it proceeds we seem to detect a growing fulness of knowledge, and it is by reason of the more learned treatment, as well as the loftier theme of the Third Cantica, that so many readers, when once well at sea in theParadiso, recognise the force of the warning with which it begins.[107]
What amount of intercourse he was able to maintain with Florence during his wanderings is a matter of mere speculation, although of a more interesting kind than that concerned with the chronology of his uneasy travels. That he kept up at least some correspondence with his friends is proved by the letter regarding the terms of his pardon. There is also the well-known anecdote told by Boccaccio as to the discovery and despatch tohim of the opening Cantos of theInferno—an anecdote we may safely accept as founded on fact, although Boccaccio’s informants may have failed to note at the time what the manuscript consisted of, and in the course of years may have magnified the importance of their discovery. With his wife he would naturally communicate on subjects of common interest—as, for instance, that of how best to save or recover part of his property—and especially regarding the welfare of his sons, of whom two are found to be with him when he acquires something like a settlement in Verona.
It is quite credible that, as Boccaccio asserts, he would never after his exile was once begun ‘go to his wife or suffer her to join him where he was;’ although the statement is probably an extension of the fact that she never did join him. In any case it is to make too large a use of the words to find in them evidence, as has frequently been done, of the unhappiness of all his married life, and of his utter estrangement from Gemma during his banishment. The union—marriage of convenience though it was—might be harmonious enough as long as things went moderately well with the pair. Dante was never wealthy, but he seems to have had his own house in Florence and small landed possessions in its neighbourhood.[108]That before hisbanishment he was considerably in debt appears to be ascertained;[109]but, without knowing the circumstances in which he borrowed, it is impossible to be sure whether he may not only have been making use of his credit in order to put out part of his means to advantage in some of the numerous commercial enterprises in which his neighbours were engaged. In any case his career must have seemed full of promise till he was driven into banishment. When that blow had fallen, it is easy to conceive how what if it was not mutual affection had come to serve instead of it—esteem and forbearance—would be changed into indifference with the lapse of months and years of enforced separation, embittered and filled on both sides with the mean cares of indigence, and, it may be, on Gemma’s side with the conviction that her husband had brought her with himself into disgrace. If all that is said by Boccaccio and some of Dante’s enemies as to his temperament and behaviour were true, we could only hope that Gemma’s indifference was deep enough to save her from the pangs of jealousy. And on the other hand, if we are to push suspicion to its utmost length, we may find an allusion to his own experience in the lines where Dante complains of how soon a widow forgets her husband.[110]But this is all matter of the merest speculation. Gemmais known to have been alive in 1314.[111]She brought up her children, says Boccaccio, upon a trifling part of her husband’s confiscated estate, recovered on the plea that it was a portion of her dowry. There may have been difficulties of a material kind, insuperable save to an ardent love that was not theirs, in the way of Gemma’s joining her husband in any of his cities of refuge.
Complete evidence exists of Dante’s having in his later years lived for a longer or shorter time in the three cities of Lucca, Verona, and Ravenna. In Purgatory he meets a shade from Lucca, in the murmur of whose words he catches he ‘knows not what of Gentucca;’[112]and when he charges the Lucchese to speak plainly out, he is told that Lucca shall yet be found pleasant by him because of a girl not yet grown to womanhood. Uguccione, acting in the interest of Pisa, took possession of Lucca in 1314, and Dante is supposed to have taken up his residence there for some considerable time. What we may certainly infer from his own words in thePurgatoriois that they were written after a stay in Lucca had been sweetened to him by the society of a lady named Gentucca. He cannot well have found shelter there before the city was held by Uguccione; and research has established that at least two ladies of the uncommon name of Gentuccawere resident there in 1314. From the whole tone of his allusion—the mention of her very name and of her innocent girlhood—we may gather that there was nothing in his liking for her of which he had any reason to feel ashamed. In theInfernohe had covered the whole people of Lucca with his scorn.[113]By the time he got thus far with thePurgatoriohis thoughts of the place were all softened by his memory of one fair face—or shall we rather say, of one compassionate and womanly soul? That Dante was more than susceptible to feminine charms is coarsely asserted by Boccaccio.[114]But on such a matter Boccaccio is a prejudiced witness, and, in the absence of sufficient proof to the contrary, justice requires us to assume that the tenor of Dante’s life was not at variance with that of his writings. He who was so severe a judge of others was not, as we can infer from more than one passage of theComedy, a lenient judge when his own failings were concerned.[115]That hisconduct never fell short of his standard no one will venture to maintain. But what should have hindered him, in his hours of weariness and when even his hold on the future seemed to slacken, in lonely castle or strange town, to seek sympathy from some fair woman who might remind him in something of Beatrice?[116]
When, in 1316, Uguccione was driven out of Lucca and Pisa, that great partisan took military service with Can Grande. It has been disputed whether Dante had earlier enjoyed the hospitality of the Scaligers, or was indebted for his first reception in Verona to the good offices of Uguccione. It is barely credible that by this time in his life he stood in need of any one to answer for him in the court of Can Grande. His fame as a political writer must have preceded him; and it was of a character to commend him to the good graces of the great Imperialist. In hisDe Monarchiahe had, by an exhaustive treatment of propositions which now seemchildish or else the mere commonplaces of everyday political argument, established the right of the civil power to independence of Church authority; and though to the Scaliger who aimed at becoming Imperial lieutenant for all the North of Italy he might seem needlessly tender to the spiritual lordship of the Holy Father, yet the drift of his reasoning was all in favour of the Ghibeline position.[117]Besides this he had written on the need of refining the dialects of Italian, and reducing them to a language fit for general use in the whole of the Peninsula; and this with a novelty of treatment and wealth of illustration unequalled before or since in any first work on such a subject.[118]And, what would recommend him still more to a youthful prince of lofty taste, he was the poet of the ‘sweet new style’ of theVita Nuova, and of sonnets, ballads, and canzoni rich in language and thought beyond the works of all previous poets in the vulgar tongues. Add to this that theComedywas already written, and published up, perhaps, to the close of thePurgatorio, and that all Italy was eager to find who had a place, and what kind of place, in the strange new world from which the veil was being withdrawn; and it is easy to imagine that Dante’s reception at Can Grande’s court was rather that of a man both admired and feared forhis great genius, than that of a wandering scholar and grumbling exile.
At what time Dante came to Verona, and for how long he stayed, we have no means of fixing with certainty. He himself mentions being there in 1320,[119]and it is usually supposed that his residence covered three years previous to that date; as also that it was shared by his two sons, Piero and Jacopo. One of these was afterwards to find a settlement at Verona in a high legal post. Except some frivolous legends, there is no evidence that Dante met with anything but generous treatment from Can Grande. A passage of theParadiso, written either towards the close of the poet’s residence at Verona, or after he had left it, is full of a praise of the great Scaliger so magnificent[120]as fully to make amends for the contemptuous mention in thePurgatorioof his father and brother.[121]To Can Grande theParadisowas dedicated by the author in a long epistle containing an exposition of how the first Canto of that Cantica, and, by implication, the whole of the poem, is to be interpreted. The letter is full of gratitude for favours already received, and of expectation of others yet to come. From the terms of the dedication it has been assumed that ere it was made the whole of theParadisowas written, and that Dante praises the lord of Verona after a long experience of his bounty.[122]
Whether owing to the restlessness of an exile, or to some prospect of attaining a state of greater ease or of having the command of more congenial society, we cannot tell; but from the splendid court of Can Grande he moved down into Romagna, to Ravenna, the city which of all in Italy would now be fixed upon by the traveller as the fittest place for a man of genius, weighed down by infinite sorrows, to close his days in and find a tomb. Some writers on the life of Dante will have it that in Ravenna he spent the greater part of his exile, and that when he is found elsewhere—in Lucca or Verona—he is only on a temporary absence from his permanent home.[123]But this conclusion requires some facts to be ignored, and others unduly dwelt on. In any case his patron there, during at least the last year or two of his life, was Guido Novello of Polenta, lord of Ravenna, the nephew of her who above all the persons of theComedylives in the hearts of its readers.
Bernardino, the brother of Francesca and uncle of Guido, had fought on the side of Florence at the battle of Campaldino, and Dante may then have become acquainted with him. The family had the reputation of being moderate Guelfs; but ere this the exile, with his ripe experience of men, had doubtless learned, while retaining intact his own opinions as to what was the true theory of government, to set good-heartedness and anoble aim in life above political orthodoxy. This Guido Novello—the younger Guido—bears the reputation of having been well-informed, of gentle manners, and fond of gathering around him men accomplished in literature and the fine arts. On the death of Dante he made a formal oration in honour of the poet. If his welcome of Dante was as cordial as is generally supposed, and as there is no reason to doubt that it was, it proved his magnanimity; for in thePurgatorioa family specially hostile to the Polentas had been mentioned with honour,[124]while that to which his wife belonged had been lightly spoken of. How he got over the condemnation of his kinswoman to Inferno—even under such gentle conditions—it would be more difficult to understand were there not reason to believe that ere Dante went to Ravenna it had come to be a matter of pride in Italy for a family to have any of its members placed anywhere in that other world of which Dante held the key.
It seems as if we might assume that the poet’s last months or years were soothed by the society of his daughter—the child whom he had named after the object of his first and most enduring love.[125]Whether or not he was acting as Ambassador for Guido to Venice when he caught his last illness, it appears to be pretty well established that he was held in honour by hispatron and all around him.[126]For his hours of meditation he had the solemn churches of Ravenna with their storied walls,[127]and the still more solemn pine forest of Classis, by him first annexed to the world of Romance.[128]For hours of relaxation, when they came, he had neighbours who dabbled in letters and who could at any rate sympathise with him in his love of study. He maintained correspondence with poets and scholars in other cities. In at least one instance this was conducted in the bitter fashion with which the humanists of a century or two later were to make the world familiar;[129]but with the Bolognese scholar, Giovanni del Virgilio, he engaged in a good-humoured, half-bantering exchange of Latin pastoral poems, through the artificial imagery of which there sometimes breaks a natural thought, as when in answer to the pedant’s counsel to renounce the vulgar tongue and produce in Latin something that will entitle him to receive thelaurel crown in Bologna, he declares that if ever he is crowned as a poet it will be on the banks of the Arno.
Most of the material for forming a judgment of how Dante stood affected to the religious beliefs of his time is to be gathered from theComedy, and the place for considering it would rather be in an essay on that work than in a sketch of his life which necessity compels to be swift. A few words may however be here devoted to the subject, as it is one with some bearing on the manner in which he would be regarded by those around him, and through that on the tenor of his life. That Dante conformed to Church observances, and, except with a few malevolent critics, bore the reputation of a good Catholic, there can be no doubt. It was as a politician and not as a heretic that he suffered persecution; and when he died he was buried in great honour within the Franciscan Church at Ravenna. Some few years after his death, it is true, hisDe Monarchiawas burned as heretical by orders of the Papal Legate in Lombardy, who would gladly, if he could, have had the bones of the author exhumed to share the fate of his book. But all this was only because the partisans of Lewis of Bavaria were making political capital out of the treatise.