Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/680

 676 DANTE author's death. The question depends some- what on the meaning we attach to the word published. In an age of manuscript, the wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single one of the three divisions of the Commedia would be accomplished very slowly. But it is difficult to account for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts at least of his greatest work had been read or heard by a large number of persons. This, however, need not imply publication ; and Witte supposes even the Inferno not to have been finished be- fore 1314 or 1315. In a matter where cer- tainty is impossible, it is useless to reproduce conjectural dates. In the letter to Can Grande before alluded to, Dante himself has stated the theme of his song. He says that " the literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice." He tells us that the work is to be interpreted in a literal, allegori- cal, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly employed with the Scriptures, and of which he gives the following- example : " To make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied in the following verses: In exitu Israel de ^Egypto, domus Jacob de populo T)arbaro,facta est Judcea sanctificatio ejus, Israel potestas ejus. For if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses ; if at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through Christ ; if at the moral, it signifies the conver- sion .of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace ; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the freedom .of eternal glory." Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title thus: "Here begins the comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in morals." The poem con- sists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Para- dise. Each part is divided into 33 cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour's life, for though the Hell contains 34, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the three- fold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture of the middle ages. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, Dante is the first Christian poet whose whole system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian theology. Lapse through sin, medi- ation, and redemption are the subjects of the three parts of the poem ; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typ- ified in Virgil; moral conversion after repen- tance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual blinding vision of him ("the pure in heart shall see God "). The model of the poem is that of the Christian basilica : the ethnic forecourt of those who know not God ; the purgatorial middle space of repentance, confession, and absolution ; the altar of reconciliation, beyond and over which hangs the emblem of the Mediator, of the divine made human, that the human might learn how to become divine. Here are general rules which any Christian man may accept and find comfort in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul ; it teaches the be- nign ministry of sorrow, and that the ladder of that faith by which man climbs to the ac- tual fruition of things not seen ex quoms ligno nonfit, but only of the cross manfully borne. The poem is also an apotheosis of woman. In the Commedia the image of the middle ages, and the sentimental woman-worship of chivalry, which was at best skin-deep, is lifted in Bea- trice to an ideal and universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, with imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy ; and nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was and re- produce it with such cosmopolitan truth to hu- man nature, and to his own individuality, as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere com- ment on his vision. Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative, and, com- ing upon the stage of action precisely in that period of transition when church and empire were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve both by present- ing the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection. The whole nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission. Like the Hebrew prophets, it was back to the old worship and the God of the fathers that he called his people. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred charac- ter; the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of supernatural powers. It was with the next generation, with the ele- gant Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely literary life, and that dilettantism which is the twin sister of skepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position of Dante is remarkable. Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics also, his great poem stands a monument on the boundary line between the ancient and mod- ern. He not only marks, but is in himself, the transition. Arma mrumque cano, that is the motto of classic song ; the things of this world and great men. Dante says, sutyectum est homo, not mr ; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama was in this world, and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He makes himself the