DANTE

AND "THE DIVINE COMEDY"

ONCE upon a time, as the story-books would say, or, to speak more historically and exactly, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighty-six, and in the month of August, a little company of fairly intelligent people determined to put their vacation to use. The scene and the surroundings were propitious. We were upon the banks of Canandaigua Lake, the loveliest of those parallel sheets of water which so diversify the landscape of Central and Western New York. From the veranda where we assembled after breakfast, Bear Hill loomed up across the lake, like Vesuvius over the Bay of Naples. The quiet summer mornings, the shade of the great elms, and the deep blue sky invited us to something more serious than vers de société.

Some one spoke of "The Divine Comedy," and wondered if anybody had ever read it through. It was a revelation, a challenge, and an admonition. Most of us

had read the "Inferno," but had been so ill-pleased with Dante's Hell, that we had never cared to try his Purgatory, or even his Paradise. But a new resolve was taken. We would begin and finish. Forthwith were produced the translations of Cary, Wright, and Longfellow. Two of us knew something of Italian, and had with us the original poem. We brought to our help the

English version of Dr. Carlyle and Mr. Butler, with the Italian original on the same page. Best of all, we read by way of introduction and of comment, "The Shadow of Dante," by Maria Francesca Rossetti, from which I take much of value in the composition of this paper.

An hour and a half each morning for four weeks sufficed to accomplish our task. Indeed it was no task; the pauses for discussion were numberless; its beauty grew upon us; when we finally closed our books, the four weeks seemed four days for the love we bore the poet and the poem. I have since read the essays of James Russell Lowell and of Dean Church-the former very learned and thoughtful, though conceived from a literary point of view; the latter strong and eloquent, the work of a moralist and a preacher. I undertake now to give the condensed result in my own mind of this bit of summer study-not however without the expectation and acknowledgment that pieces of others' learning will here and there shine through my writing, as through a palimpsest. I have let my reader into the secret of its origin, if by any means I may tempt him to go and do likewise.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in the year 1265, so that my story takes us back more than six hundred years. The Middle Ages were coming to their end. The Crusades had wakened Europe from the sleep of centuries; the classic literature had begun to attract its devotees; the free cities had established themselves; there was everywhere the stir of new politi cal and religious life. But it was a time of strife. The Guelphs, the party of the popes, and the Ghibellines, the party of the emperors, were hotly contesting every

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point of vantage in city and country; although in Italy the Ghibellines were strong in the provincial districts, while the Guelphs were strong in the towns. To the Guelph party Dante's family belonged. He does not appear to have been of noble birth, for he afterward held office; and the constitution of Florence at the time forbade this to nobles. But he does appear to have been born to wealth; he certainly possessed the means of the highest education the age could give; he was ever in the front rank of his contemporaries, both in society and in politics. Of his youth we have but a single incident -fortunately that was the most important incident of his life. It was his meeting with Beatrice.

At the age of nine years he first saw the lady of his dreams. It was at a festival at the house of her father, Falco Portinari. She was but a little damsel, no older than himself, but she was habited in crimson, and the sight of her was the awakening of his spirit. The next meeting of which we have record was nine years after, and that seems to have been a casual encounter on the street, leaving only a glance and a gentle word to be remembered. We do not know that Dante ever sought Beatrice in marriage; she was a star apart, to be looked at from afar; she married another, and she died at twenty-four; she probably never knew of the influence she exerted; and yet, from the day of that festival at her father's house, she was the ruler of Dante's soul.

Sense did not mingle with his passion. Beatrice became to him the symbol of all spiritual beauty. When he reaches paradise, he is lifted from each lower sphere of heaven to the next higher simply by gazing into the transparent depths of Beatrice's eyes. "The thoughts

of youth are long, long thoughts," and the resolves then formed prove often the strongest resolves of a lifetime. So the loves of youth may be long, long loves. A true affection never dies, and the psalmist never spoke more truly than when he said, "Your heart shall live forever." That meeting at the festival was not the first time, nor the last time, that the sight of a little damsel in pink or blue has turned the head of some great man, and so has changed the face of the world.

I wish we could say that Dante was absolutely faithful to the memory of Beatrice. But history and his own acknowledgments are too much for us. There was a little time when, possibly to distract his mind after her death, he plunged into a skeptical philosophy and yielded to the attractions of sense. A rival, whom he calls the adversary of Reason, and whom he pictures as a woman at a window, temporarily absorbed his thoughts. But the spell could not last. Let us adapt and use the lines of Tennyson:

Faith in womankind

Beat with his blood, and trust in all things high
Came easy to him, and though he tripped and fell
He could not blind his soul with clay.

How noble a lesson there is in the fact that the breaking of the evil spell is coincident with a second vision of Beatrice! As there rises before his imagination the fair form of his lost love, still habited in crimson as he had seen her so long ago, yet now invested with a purity and glory that belonged to heaven rather than to earth, the chains of sense and of unbelief seem to fall away from Dante's soul.