The great thinker was born in Florence in the year 1265. His era was the era of the Dark Ages; his century one of the submerged centuries. For five hundred years black darkness had lain upon the world. It was an era of war, when barons were constantly at strife. Feudalism was entrenched behind stone walls, the landowners were masters, and the serfs were slaves. Every road was infested with bandits. There was no shipping upon the Mediterranean. The mariner's compass had not yet been invented. Commerce was scant and factories almost unknown. Men lived, for the most part, on coarse bread and vegetables, without luxuries, and without what we call the simplest necessities. The common people were huddled in miserable villages, behind stone walls, with unpaved streets and windowless houses, in which ignorance, filth, squalor, and bestiality prevailed. Peasants wore the same leather garments for a lifetime. The dead were buried under the churches. Prisoners rotted in dungeons under the banqueting hall of the castle. Two hundred years were to pass before Columbus set foot upon the deck of the Santa Maria. Two hundred and fifty years were to pass before Michael Angelo could lift the dome above St. Peter's. But if the peasant was ignorant, and the poor man wretched, the nobleman and courtier was the child of luxury and gilded vice. It was an age of contrasts so violent as to be all but incredible to the modern reader. There were no books, for the art of printing was still to be invented, yet in an age of parchment manuscripts young noblemen were taught to speak in verse and to write in rhymed pentameters. There was no science of geography and the world was believed to be a flat board with a fence around it. Yet in this era, when few men could spell and fewer read, the very monks in the monasteries were writing theses on problems so abstract as to weary the modern scholar. For five hundred years the world had looked to the Church, but the Church had descended to the perpetration of crimes so terrible, that their mere chronicle sickens the heart and chills the blood.
Into this world of paradox and contradiction—a world of gloom, shot through with fitful gleams of superstition—was born Dante, the poet of love and hope and divine regeneration. We know little of Dante's parentage, as we know all too little of his life, but this much we do know—the family was the noble family of the Alighieri, followers and supporters of the party then in power in Florence. Dante was educated by his mother, and by his mother's relative, the scholar-poet Brunetto Latini. Like John Stuart Mill he was a mental prodigy from infancy. Like Milton he was trained in the strictest academical education which the age afforded. Like Bacon he was a universal scholar before he passed out of his teens. Like Pope he thought and wrote in verse before he could write in prose. Among his friends and intimates were the poets Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoria, Dino Frescobaldi and Lapo Guianni, the musician Casella and the artist Giotto. With such companions and under such guidance, Dante mastered all the sciences of the day at a time when it was not impossible to know all that could be known.
But dreamer and student though he was, he early insisted upon sharing the burdens of the State. On two occasions he bore arms for his country. While still in his twenties he was offered the post of ambassador to Rome; before he was thirty he had represented his native city at foreign courts, and from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth year his voice was heard with growing frequency in municipal affairs. In the summer of the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years of age, he was chosen as one of the Priors, or magistrates, of Florence.
The opening year of the new century—the year in which Giotto was meditating his immortal Duomo, with its famous tower—was ushered in by a civic revolution in Florence. Dante, with other innocent citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. A statesman, he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a man of property, he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of men, he was forced to humble himself and live on foreign alms. Inspired by the noblest intentions, the world gave him no thanks, but drove him forth like a wild beast, branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to wander over the hills of Italy till death at last gave him release. He never saw Florence again. For years he knew poverty, neglect and hatred. Sick with the noise of political dissension, he strained his eyes toward the hills for the appearance of a universal monarch; but the vision was never realized. We know but little of his wanderings. Many cities and castles have claimed the honour of giving him shelter; we know only that in old age he was compelled to "climb the stranger's toilsome stairs, and eat the bitter bread of others."
Such, briefly sketched, is the life-history of this man who has been called "the voice of ten silent centuries." In an era of luxury he had lived simply and frugally; in an era of debate and publicity, he had preferred seclusion; drawn at last into public life by his own sense of duty, he had been driven forth into exile, to die alone in a foreign city. It is the greatness of Dante that, in spite of defeat and disappointment, in spite of every form of hardship, in the face of every conceivable form of adversity, he went on with his work and completed his masterpiece, the greatest achievement in the whole history of Italian literature. Out of his own heart-break he distilled hope and encouragement for others and from the broken harmonies of his own life he created a world-symphony.
The best-loved books in our libraries are books of heroism, books of eloquence, books of success, and books of love. It is a matter of misfortune that no history of human love has ever been written. Scholars have set forth the history of wars, the history of engines and ships, the history of laws and reforms, but no library holds a history of the greatest gift of man, the gift of love. That is the one creative gift that belongs to his soul. Beyond all other writers, the author of the Divine Comedy is the poet of love. Love was the inspiration of his youth, the beacon of his middle life and the transfiguring glory of his old age. All his poems are monuments to the abiding and ennobling power of a pure passion. His love for Beatrice has fascinated the generations, and remains to-day one of the few immortal love stories of the world, as moving as the romance of Abelard and Héloise, and infinitely more exalting. No understanding of his poems is possible without a knowledge of that love and its tremendous influence upon his life and work.
Beatrice Portinari, the object of Dante's devotion, was the daughter of a merchant, living in a street not far from his father's house. Dante saw her but a few times, and she died when he was twenty-seven, but from the moment when, on that bright spring morning, he first viewed her lovely face, his whole heart and mind were kindled. "She appeared to me," he writes, "at a festival, dressed in that most noble and honourable colour, scarlet—girden and ornamented in a manner suitable to her age, and from that moment love ruled my soul. After many days had passed, it happened that passing through the streets, she turned her eyes to the spot where I stood, and with ineffable courtesy, she greeted me, and this had such an effect on me that it seemed I had reached the furthest limit of blessedness." He describes but three other meetings. While he was absent from the city—probably during one of the two campaigns in which he fought—her father gave her in marriage to another man. She was only twenty-four when she died.
No one will ever know whether Beatrice was indeed the loveliest girl in Italy; whether she really was the daughter of intellect, or whether the greatness was in Dante, who projected the image of beauty, created by his imagination and superimposed upon Beatrice. We all know that it is within the power of the sun in the late afternoon to cast the brilliant hues of gold and purple upon the vine and transform slender tendrils into purest gold. Dante had a powerful intellect, the finest imagination of any known artist, vast moral endowments—gifts, however, that in themselves are impotent. The sailing vessel, no matter how large the sails, is helpless until the winds fill the canvas, and hurl the cargo toward some far-off port. Just as Abelard waited for the coming of Héloise;