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DAN to the pale stranger asked—"What seek you here?" Dante gazed around with one of those looks in which the soul speaks from within, and slowly answered—"Pacem." "There is in this scene," says Joseph Mazzini, "something suggestive of thoughts that lead up to the eternal type of all martyrs of genius and love, praying to his Father, to the Father of all, upon the mount of Olives, for peace of soul and strength for the sacrifice." We last hear of the wanderer at Ravenna, at the house of Guido Novello da Polenta, father of the unhappy Francesca da Rimini. Guido, being at that time at war with Venice, sent Dante as ambassador to the republic. The Venetian senate refused him an audience, and he returned to Ravenna, where he died soon after at the age of fifty-six, and was buried with every mark of honour and affection by Guido Novello.

Numerous as have been the biographies of Dante, his life has never been—perhaps can never now be—adequately written. Alike as a man, as a religious thinker, and as a politician, he has been misunderstood by his biographers. Most of them have given themselves infinite trouble to prove him an orthodox catholic, and upon this subject the reader unacquainted with Dante's own writings may consult with advantage Ugo Foscolo's admirable Discorso sul Testo of the Commedia. Foscolo proves what may be fully deduced from the "Convito," and the eleventh canto of the "Paradiso," that "Dante's religion was derived directly from the first fathers of the church, whose enlarged views had already been departed from by the Roman papacy of the thirteenth century. His views of the progressive perfecting of the principle of human nature in a future life, and of the participation of all men in the spirit of God, open the way for the still further development of christian truth itself. To him the papacy was nothing more than the instrument of spiritual organization." To judge this great poet as a man, a study of his minor works—the "Vita Nuova" especially, which is an account of his love for Beatrice, written after her death—is necessary. This exquisite little book is the outpouring of the incense of Dante's soul in gratitude to God for the joy of loving. It is full of purity, gentleness, and delicacy; the prose of much of it has been declared by the greatest of Italian critics to be a finished model of language and style, surpassing the best pages of Boccacio, while many of the sonnets are, far beyond the most admired of Petrarch's, almost untranslatable, so exquisite are they in their construction, and so purely Italian in their harmony. The once vexed question as to the real existence of Beatrice has long been settled. It is difficult to understand how, in the face of the internal evidence of the book itself, to say nothing of historical dates and facts, learned men should so long have persisted, first, in making of Beatrice an abstraction, then in admitting in her two distinct beings, the Beatrice of the poet and the Beatrice of the theologian; thus destroying, as Mazzini justly observes, the progressive continuity which constitutes the peculiar genius of the love of Dante: for "it is precisely this endeavour to place a link between the real and the ideal, between the symbol and the invisible, between earth and heaven, which converts the love of Dante into something that has no analogy upon earth that we know of—a work of purification and idealization that stands by itself, pointing out the mission of woman and of love. She who inspired Dante here below, became his angel, his guardian angel in heaven. Death itself disappeared before the mighty love that was kindled in the heart of the poet; it transformed, it purified all things." Deeply tender and self-forgetting, the love of Dante is from the first mournful and resigned to sorrow. At an age when other men think only of hope and pleasure, his first dream is of death—the death of Beatrice. Love leads him to duty and to charity. "Whenever and wherever she appeared before me, I had no longer an enemy in the world; such a flame of charity was kindled in my heart, causing me to forgive everyone who had offended me." He tells us that, after the death of Beatrice, he felt that fresh duties were imposed upon him; he resolved to render himself even more worthy of her, to keep his love for her to the last day of his life, and to bestow upon her an immortality on earth by "saying of her that which had never yet been said of mortal woman." He kept his vow. "His union with Gemma Donati, in spite of the assertions of some who believe it to have been unhappy, appears to have been calm and cold; rather the accomplishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible impulse of the heart. He inspired himself by her memory, not only in the magnificent pages which he consecrated to her towards the close of his life in his poem, but in the worship for woman which pervades it from one end to the other. Beatrice was the muse of his understanding, the angel of his soul, the consoling spirit which sustained him in exile, in poverty—under a cheerless, wandering, denuded existence, if ever there was one."

Another consequence of the neglect into which the minor, and especially the prose writings of Dante have been suffered to fall, is the narrow and mistaken view generally entertained of his political character and life. The right understanding of that character can only be attained by seeking to penetrate and comprehend the inner life of his soul, the Titanic idea that governed his every act and inspired his every word. This cannot be done by consulting the old biographers and annotators, but only by a careful study of the medium in which Dante lived, and of his works, "the minor works especially, which more distinctly reveal to us the man and the Italian, and were evidently designed by him as a preparation for the great poem itself, which is the crown of the edifice he erected." Most of his biogaphers have been at infinite labour and trouble to excuse and explain to us how he was "sometimes a Guelph and sometimes a Ghibelline, owing to the violence of party, the influence of great and extreme passions," &c., thereby revealing not only their misconception of Dante, but of the true meaning of the struggle between Guelphism and Ghibellinism itself. The names of Guelph and Ghibelline, which in Germany only conveyed the idea of a family quarrel, signified far more in Italy. "There Ghibellinism was feudality, the noblesse—Guelphism was the community, the people. If it supported the pope, it was because the pope supported it." The people triumphed, the community established itself irrevocably free and equal; and although, from wealth or military skill, certain noble families might still obtain supreme power in some of the towns, "the nobility, as a caste, was completely effaced. . . . The people, the conquerors, stood embarrassed with their victory. . . . The dawning of the day for the gathering together in one all the people whose different races had crossed and mingled together in Italy, had not yet arisen. A kind of anarchy, therefore, began, in the absence of one governing principle single and strong enough to bear down all fractional and personal aims, all local egotisms." This state of things was complicated by the interference of the French, who were called in by the popes, "whose fatal policy it was always to keep one foreign power in check by means of another, without ever appealing to the Italian nation." When Urban IV. called Charles of Anjou into Italy, the patricians—Ghibellines—were averse to him. After the Bianchi and Neri parties were formed, Boniface VIII. called in Charles de Valois; the Bianchi, who were plebeians, were persecuted, and the Neri, the patricians, then made themselves Guelphs, because they sympathized with Charles, the envoy of Boniface. The Bianchi then allied themselves to the Ghibellines, whose ancient principle of feudalism had been irrevocably crushed. "Dante, who in early life had been a Guelph, was thenceforth a Ghibelline; that is to say, he was always on the side of the people, he always belonged to the element of Italian futurity." He speaks in the "Paradiso" of being a party in himself. Both parties endeavoured to enlist him in their ranks, but in vain. He viewed both from the height of a superior aim, an idea which, perhaps, he alone in all Italy at that day had conceived. Beyond all the narrow factions of the period, beyond the emperor, beyond the pope, he saw the future Italian nation, and the divine mission he believed ordained by God for the "holy Roman people." This idea of national greatness and Italian supremacy is "philosophically expressed in the 'Convito,' politically in the 'Monarchia,' in its literary aspect in the treatise 'De Vulgari Eloquio,' and poetically and religiously in the 'Commedia.' It is as we see him in the minor works that the man can best be comprehended, and his leading thoughts grasped and understood." Never man loved his country with a more elevated or fervent love, never man had such projects of magnificent and exalted destinies for her. Relying on the "Convito" and the treatise "De Monarchia" for our authority, the following is a summary of what, in the thirteenth century, Dante believed:—"God is one; the universe is one thought of God; the universe, therefore, is one. All things come from God; they all participate more or less in the divine nature, according to the end for which they are created. Flowers in the garden of God, all merit our love according to the degree of excellence he has bestowed upon each; of these man is the most eminent, and on