DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63447#0545
DANTE.
529
factions then bathing the streets of Italy with blood, and
giving over to flame and pillage her exuberant harvests
and her flowery valleys.
In magnanimity to an ungrateful country, Dante was
unquestionably far inferior to the Grecian heroes he
admired in theory so much ; we cannot lay to his charge
the sweet weakness of forgiveness; it is happy, per-
haps, we cannot. A purely ideal mind never could have
given us the “ Divina Commedia.” To the bitterness of
an insulted patriot, who held the jewel “ purity ” in his
heart, we owe too many touches of nature, and too many
eloquent and graphic passages for us to wish the author
had been otherwise than human like ourselves.
We have before remarked that whilst Dante soared
poetically, and in intellectual knowledge far beyond his
age, yet in all that concerned the dealings between man
and man, we do not see a shadow of any soft prophetic
gleam of that future age of mercy which was to recognise
the right of free thought, and of open, fair discussion.
Savage and sanguinary was the code of the age and of
the Church, and the genius of our great poet prompted
no mercy to his opponents ; but it is unjust and untrue
to call him a “ traitor ” because he ardently appealed to
the high Henry of Luxembourg, the Ghibelline Lord
of Italy, to allay the factions of Florence with a strong
and equal hand. To the well-being of his native city he
was most passionately attached to the latest hour of his
existence, and when he expired, worn out with grief, at
Eavenna, at an age relatively early, all surviving docu-
ments prove the sad, regretful thoughts of his “ ungrate-
ful Florence ” which embittered his last days.
All the thirteenth century was represented in Dante
Alighieri, and he was a shining light of the very best
points of its “ Guelphic civilization.” There, as in the
United States of our own time, the first duties of a
citizen were “ labour ” and “ public service.” Idleness
was proscribed and held in the highest disrepute; even
the severest intellectual study did not make it the less
incumbent on the citizen to enrol himself in one of the
M M
529
factions then bathing the streets of Italy with blood, and
giving over to flame and pillage her exuberant harvests
and her flowery valleys.
In magnanimity to an ungrateful country, Dante was
unquestionably far inferior to the Grecian heroes he
admired in theory so much ; we cannot lay to his charge
the sweet weakness of forgiveness; it is happy, per-
haps, we cannot. A purely ideal mind never could have
given us the “ Divina Commedia.” To the bitterness of
an insulted patriot, who held the jewel “ purity ” in his
heart, we owe too many touches of nature, and too many
eloquent and graphic passages for us to wish the author
had been otherwise than human like ourselves.
We have before remarked that whilst Dante soared
poetically, and in intellectual knowledge far beyond his
age, yet in all that concerned the dealings between man
and man, we do not see a shadow of any soft prophetic
gleam of that future age of mercy which was to recognise
the right of free thought, and of open, fair discussion.
Savage and sanguinary was the code of the age and of
the Church, and the genius of our great poet prompted
no mercy to his opponents ; but it is unjust and untrue
to call him a “ traitor ” because he ardently appealed to
the high Henry of Luxembourg, the Ghibelline Lord
of Italy, to allay the factions of Florence with a strong
and equal hand. To the well-being of his native city he
was most passionately attached to the latest hour of his
existence, and when he expired, worn out with grief, at
Eavenna, at an age relatively early, all surviving docu-
ments prove the sad, regretful thoughts of his “ ungrate-
ful Florence ” which embittered his last days.
All the thirteenth century was represented in Dante
Alighieri, and he was a shining light of the very best
points of its “ Guelphic civilization.” There, as in the
United States of our own time, the first duties of a
citizen were “ labour ” and “ public service.” Idleness
was proscribed and held in the highest disrepute; even
the severest intellectual study did not make it the less
incumbent on the citizen to enrol himself in one of the
M M