Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/849

DANTE 813 was to be won on the Arno rather than on the Po, and urged the tarrying emperor to hew the rebellious Florentines like Agag in pieces before the Lord. Henry was as deaf to this exhortation as the Florentines themselves. After reducing Lombardy he passed from Genoa to Pisa, and on June 29, 1312, was crowned in Rome. Then at length he moved towards Tuscany by way of Umbria. Leaving Cortona and Arezzo, he reached Florence on September 19. He did not dare to attack it, but returned in November to Pisa. In the summer of the following year he prepared to invade the kingdom of Naples ; but in the neighbourhood of Siena he caught a fever and died at the monastery of Buonconvento, August 24, 1313. The hopes of Dante and his party were buried in his grave. After the death of the emperor Henry (Bruni tells us) Dante passed the rest of his life in great poverty, sojourning in various places throughout Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Romagna, under the protection of various lords, until at length he retired to Ravenna, where he ended his life. Very little can be added to this meagre story. There is reason for supposing that he stayed at Gubbio with Bosone dei Rafaelli, and tradition assigns him a cell in the monastery of St Croce di Fonte Avellana in the same district, situated on the slopes of Catria, one of the highest of the Apennines. After the death of Pope Clement V. he addressed a letter, dated July 14, 1314, to the cardinals in conclave, urging them to elect an Italian Pope. About this time he came to Lucca, then lately conquered by his friend Uguccione, completed the last cantos of the Purgatory, and became enamoured of the courteous Gentucca, whose name had been whispered to him by her countryman on the slopes of the Mountain of Purification. In August 1315 was fought the battle of Monte Catini, a day of humiliation and mourning for the Guelfs. Uguccione made but little use of his victory ; and the Florentines marked their vengeance on his adviser by con demning Dante yet once again to death if he ever should come into their power. In the beginning of the following year Uguccione lost both his cities of Pisa and Lucca. At this time Dante was offered an opportunity of returning to Florence. The conditions given to the exiles were that they should pay a fine and walk in the dress of humiliation to the church of St John, and there do penance for thsir offences. Dante refused to tolerate this shame ; and the letter is still extant in which he declines to enter Florence except with honour, secure that the means of life will not fail him, and that in any corner of the world he will be able to gaze at the sun and the stars, and meditate on the sweetest truths of philosophy. He preferred to take refuge with his most illustrious protector Can Grande della Scala of Verona, then a young man of twenty-five, rich, liberal, and the favoured head of the Ghibelline party. His name has been immortalized by an. eloquent panegyric in the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso. Whilst at the court of Verona he maintained in the neighbouring city of Mantua the philosophical thesis DC Aqua et Terra, which is included in his minor works. The last two years of his life were spent at Ravenna, under the protection of Guido da Polenta. In his service Dante undertook an embassy to the Venetians. He failed in the object of his mission, and, returning disheartened and broken in spirit through the unhealthy lagoons, caught a fever and died in Ravenna, September 14, 1321. His bones still repose there. His doom of exile has been reversed by the union of Italy, which has made the city of his birth and the various cities of his wanderings component members of a common country. His sou Piero, who wrote a commentary on the Divina Commedia, settled in Verona. His daughter Beatrice lived as a nun in Ravenna. His direct line became extinct in 1509 ; but the blood still runs in the veins of the Marches! Serego Alighieri, a noble family of the city of the Scaligers. Dante may be said to have concentrated in himself the Character spirit of the middle age. Whatever there was of piety, of Dante s of philosophy, of poetry, of love of nature, and of love of geniu8 knowledge in those times is drawn to a focus in his writings. He is the first great name in literature after the night of the dark ages. The Italian language in all its purity and sweetness, in its aptitude for the tenderness of love and the violence of passion, or the clearness of philosophical argu ment, sprang fully grown and fully armed from his brain. The Vita Nuova is still the best introduction to the study of the Tuscan tongue ; the astronomy and science of the Divine Comedy are obscure only in a translation. Dante s reputation has passed through many vicissitudes, and much trouble has been spent by critics in comparing him with other poets of established fame. Read and commented upon in the Italian universities in the generation immedi ately succeeding his death, his name became obscured as the sun of the renaissance rose higher towards its meridian. In the 17th century he was less read than Petrarch, Tasso, or Ariosto ; in the 18th he was almost universally neglected. His fame is now fully vindicated. Translations and com mentaries issue from every press in Europe and America. Dante societies are formed to investigate the difficulties of his works. He occupies in the lecture-rooms of regenerated Italy a place by the side of those great masters whose humble disciple he avowed himself to be. The Divine Comedy is indeed as true an epic as the jEneid, and Dante is as real a classic as Virgil. His metre is as pliable and flexible to every mood of emotion, his diction as plaintive and as sonorous. Like him he can immortalize, by a simple expression, a person, a place, or a phase of nature. Dante is even truer in description than Virgil, whether he paints the snow falling in the Alps, or the homeward flight of birds, or the swelling of an angry torrent. But under this gorgeous pageantry of poetry there lies a unity of con ception, a power of philosophic grasp, an earnestness of religion which to the Roman poet were entirely unknown. Still more striking is the similarity between Dante and Milton. This may be said to lie rather in the kindred nature of their subjects, and in the parallel development of their minds, than in any mere external resemblance. In both the man was greater than the poet, the souls of both were "like a star and dwelt apart." Both were academi cally trained in the deepest studies of their age ; the labour which made Dante lean made Milton blind. The " Doricke sw r eetnesse" of the English poet is not absent from the tender pages of the Vita Niiova. The middle life of each was spent in active controversy ; each lent his services to the state ; each felt the quarrels of his age to be the " business of posterity," and left his warnings to ring in the ears of a later time. The lives of both were failures. " On evil days though fallen and evil tongues," they gathered the concen trated experience of their lives into one immortal work, the quintessence of their hopes, their knowledge, and their sufferings. But Dante is something more than this. Milton s voice is grown faint to us we have passed into other modes of expression and of thought. But if we had to select two names in literature who are still exercising their full influence on mankind, and whose teaching is still developing new sides to the coining generations, we should choose the names of Dante and Goethe. Goethe preached a new gospel to the world, the pagan virtue of self-culture, a sympathy which almost passed into indiffer ence. There is no department of modern literature or thought which does not bear upon it the traces of the sage of Weimar. But if we rebel against this teaching, and yearn once more for the ardour of belief, the fervour of self-

sacrifice, the scorn of scorn and the hate of hate which is