Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/678

 674 DANTE perience of the poet. In the Vita nuova he recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Por- tinari, showing how his grief for her loss turned his thoughts first inward upon his own con- sciousness, and, failing all help there, gradually upward through philosophy to religion, and so from a world of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces with exquisite uncon- sciousness the gradual but certain steps by which memory and imagination transubstanti- ated the woman of flesh and blood into a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sor- row and hope the faith which is the instinc- tive refuge of unavailing regret, the grace of God which higher natures learn to find in the trial which passeth all understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and the memory of maturity, which beckons to- ward the for ever unattainable. As a contri- bution to the physiology of genius, no other book is to be compared with the Vita nuova. It is more important to the understanding of Dante as a poet than any other of his works. It enables us to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self- culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. We comprehend the Commedia better when we know that Dante could be an active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. Various dates have been as- signed to the composition of the Vita nuova. The earliest limit is fixed by the death of Bea- trice in 1290 (though some of the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed to have been finished by 1295 ; but Witte extends the term as far as 1300. The title of the book also, Vita nuova, has been diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who pub- lished an English version of it at Florence in 1846, entitles it " The Early Life of Dante." Balbo understands it in the same way. But we are of the opinion that "New Life " is the interpretation sustained by the entire signifi- cance of the book itself. It has been generally taken for granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up to the time of his banishment, and that out of resentment he then became a vio- lent Ghibelline. Not to speak of the con- sideration that there is no author whose life and works present so remarkable a unity and logical sequence as those of Dante, Prof. Witte has drawn attention to a fact which alone is enough to demonstrate that the De Monarchia was written before 1300. That and the Vita nuova are the only works of Dante in which no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That bitter thought was continually present to him. In the Conmto it betrays itself often, and with touching unexpectedness. Even in the treatise De Vulgari Eloquio, he takes as one of his examples of style, " I have most pity for those, whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their country only in dreams." We have seen that the one decisive act of Dante's priorate was to expel from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the sowers of strife, and he tells us that he had formed a party by himself. The king of Saxony has well defined his political theory as being "an ideal Ghibellinism." Dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same kind with Milton's refusing to confound license with liberty. The argument of the De Monarchia is briefly this : As the object of the individual man is the highest development of his faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. But the in- dividual can only attain that highest develop- ment when all his powers are in absolute sub- jection to the intellect, and society only when it subjects its individual caprices to an intelli- gent head. This is the order of nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the or- ganization of villages, towns, cities. Again, since God made man in his own image, men and societies most nearly resemble him in pro- portion as they approach unity. But as in all societies questions must arise, so there is need of a monarch for supreme arbiter. And only a universal monarch can be impartial enough for this, since kings of limited territo- ries would always be liable to the temptation of private ends. With the internal policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only interfering when there was danger of an in- fraction of the general peace. This is the doc- trine of the first book, enforced sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with great fertility of illustration. It is an enlargement of some of the obiter dicta of the Conmto. The earnestness with which peace is insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well-being, shows what the experience had been out of which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to be looked on as a purely scholastic demon- stration of a speculative thesis, in which the manifold exceptions and modifications essen- tial in practical application are necessarily left aside. Dante almost forestalls the famous proposition of Calvin, "that it is possible to conceive a people without a prince, but not a prince without a people," when he says : Non enim gens propter regem, sed e confer so rex propter gentem. And in his letter to the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of Henry VII. he bids them " obey their prince, but so as freemen preserving their own con- stitutional forms." He says also expressly: Animadvertendum sane, quod cum dicitur hu- manum genus potest regi per unum supremum principem, non sic intelligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et leges mu- nicipales. Hdbent namque nationes, regna, et cimtates inter se proprietates quas legibus dif- ferentibus regulari oportet. Schlosser com- pares Dante's system with that of the United States. In some respects it resembles more the constitution of the Netherlands under the supreme stadholder, but parallels between ideal and actual institutions are always unsatisfac- tory. The second book is very curious. In it Dante endeavors to demonstrate the divine