In like fashion, a mystery is played before the singer of the Divina Commedia in this ode. To him, too, in his banishment, three mystical dames appear: Justice takes visible form to greet her preacher, even as Poverty had come to meet her spouse nearly a hundred years before. While anarchy claims the Tuscan cities for her own, while Rome lies desolate, and, away beyond the Alps, Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V. are drinking the blood of the Church, plotting the ruin of the Empire, Justice and her spiritual offspring, Divine Law and Human Law, hunted out from their natural homes, appear to the solitary soul of the exiled Florentine, since all others have forgotten or hate them :

"Three ladies have gathered round my heart and seat themselves without, for within sits Love who holds the lordship of my

life.

"So beauteous are they and of such power, that the mighty Lord—him I say who is in my heart-can scarcely dare to speak of them.

"Each seems grieving and dismayed, like one hunted out and wearied whom all folk fail, and whom neither beauty nor wisdom avails. There was once a time in which, according to their speech, they were beloved; now are they held in wrath and neglect by all. Thus solitary are these come as to the house of a friend; for they know well that within is he of whom I speak." 1

Mysterious and full of obscure symbolism are the stanzas that follow. Justice, ungirt, barefooted and in torn raiment, holds converse with the Lord of Dante's heart, who, at the end, takes his darts, rusted for lack of use, and proclaims the ultimate triumph of Righteousness and Love. "We are of the eternal rock. Even though we be now assailed, we shall endure, and there shall yet return a people who shall make this dart shine bright." As one of Dante's earliest commentators, Ser Graziolo de' Bambaglioli, did not fail to note, this is nothing else than a first hint of the prophecy, to be repeated again and again throughout the Commedia, of the Imperial Redeemer who shall be sustained by wisdom and love and power alone, who shall heal the wounds of Italy

1 Cans., xx. 1-18. In quoting from this canzone, I occasionally adopt the readings of the earlier MSS. in preference to those of the Oxford Dante.

and renovate the world. And, then, Dante himself takes up the word:

"And I who mark, in divine discourse, comfort and dole bestowed upon such lofty exiles, count as my glory the banishment wreaked on me :

"And if judgment and force of destiny will have the world convert white flowers into dark, falling among the good is yet worthy of praise.

or!

"But because the fair signal of my eyes is reft by distance from my sight, were it not which has set me in flame, light should I count that which is heavy unto me. But this flame has already so consumed my bone and flesh that death has put his key unto my breast; for which if I had fault, many a moon has the sun revolved since it was quenched-if a fault dies because a man repents.'

It is thus, as one who has lost the world and gained his own soul, that Dante, after the complete revulsion of his being in the alternation of impassioned hope, bitter disillusion, temporary despair during the abortive enterprise of Henry of Luxemburg, turns to the completion of the Divina Commedia.

The self-annihilation that he found in love, the ideal political creed that he set forth later, these things make the very life-blood of his work.

St Francis had striven to reform the medieval world by his example of perfect renunciation; he had been crucified again with Christ to inflame men's hearts with the fire of Divine love when the world had grown cold in forgetfulness of the Sacrifice of Calvary. Dante, in his own way, would immolate himself on the altar of wisdom, delivering himself up as an instrument through which the tremendous trump of Divine Justice may blow what blast it will. Not a mere figure of speech is it when he declares that the Sacred Poem, "to which both Heaven and Earth have set hand," has made him lean for many a year; nor was it only an idle fancy that = made the woman of Verona bid her gossips mark how the 2 heat and smoke of Hell had crisped his beard and darkened his skin. Like all the noblest spirits of his epoch, Dante does not shrink from the most sacred comparisons. He is again the one man who must die for the people that the whole nation perish not. Thus in a sonnet, an allegorical love-poem,

1 Canz., xx. 73-90 (Mr Wicksteed's translation).

giving lyrical utterance to his agonising attempts to penetrate the unfathomable depths of philosophic truth:

"Who shall ever gaze without fear into the eyes of this fair maiden, that have used me so, that I expect nought else save bitter death?

"See how hard is my lot, that amongst all the rest my life was chosen to give an example to others that man should not yield himself to the peril of gazing on her form.

"Destined to me was this end, because it was meet that one man should be undone, in order that others should be drawn from peril :

"And, therefore, alas, was I so swift in drawing unto me the contrary of life, as a pearl the virtue of the star."1

Perch' altri fosse di pericol tratto “that others might be drawn from peril"! The supreme motive of Dante's life-work is here already as clearly expressed as in the famous letter to Can Grande, many years later, where he tells us that the end of his Commedia is to bring man from misery to felicity: “removere viventes in hac vita de statu miseria, et perducere ad statum felicitatis." But there remained one thing still to combine this with the fulfilment of the promise he had made at the end of the Vita Nuova, that he would write more worthily of Beatrice: "So that if it be the pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life endure for some years, I hope to say of her what hath never been said of any woman"-quello che mai non fu detto d'alcuna.

Gradually, during those long, weary years of exile, wandering in poverty from city to city throughout Italy, and perchance beyond its confines, showing against his will the wounds that Fortune had dealt him, the poet's own life-story had become merged into that of humanity, and the mightiest of poems-embracing all that the mind of man could reach, penetrating in its height and depth to the supreme Heaven from the bottom of the abyss-had shaped itself.

Before his eyes, as from some celestial watch-tower of contemplation, the world lies outspread-a prey to anarchy and tyranny, abandoned to lust, pride, and greed. Man's two divinely-appointed guides are at strife: "On earth is none 1 Sonnet xxvi. (Oxford Dante). 2 Epist., x. 15.

to govern; for which the human family goes astray." The Papacy has quenched the light of the Empire, only to subject itself to the usurping sway of France. A mean-spirited, craven Bavarian sits on the throne of Cæsar; an unworthy, avaricious Cahorsine profanes the chair of Peter. Enough has the Emperor-elect to do with his German affairs to keep him away from the Garden of the Empire, which has become a desert; the Popes remember Italy only as an accumulation of rich and goodly provinces, to be absorbed into the Temporal Dominions of the Holy See. "The Church of Rome, by confounding in itself the two governments, falls into the mire, and defiles itself and its burden."2 The Giant of France and the Harlot of Avignon are fornicating together, drunk with the blood of the Church which is the treasury of the poor.

3

Ah! is not the time come for a mere layman, the least of the sheep of Christ's pasture, one who has no pastoral authority to abuse, for riches are not with him, to come forward? Shall he not strive, though Roman Prince and Roman Pontiff fall back, to point out to the human race the way to temporal and eternal felicity? And how shall he do it, he who knows that the divine madness of poetry has touched his lips and fired his brain, save in a mighty work of art, a supreme poem in the vernacular that all may understand —in that maligned, sweet mother-tongue that he loves with so fierce and burning a love that all who traduce it and hold it cheap are for him nought but "abominable wretches," "adulterers with prostituted lips"?"

But a very real and tangible fear haunts him. No close and reverent student of the letter to Can Grande can fail to perceive that Dante claims for the Divina Commedia an inspiration which is much more than that of a mere poem, however great its theme; he writes as one who, like St Paul, knew a man who "was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter."

He is a man with a mission, one who has a message to reveal to startle his fellows from their slumber in the selva oscura of ignorance and sin. But who is he to do this thing? "Nor I nor others believe me worthy of it." He has been for a while a votary of the world and the flesh-in that epoch when the light of his "new life" grew dim in the hard glare of reality --and men know this. Who now will believe his report? This conviction of personal unworthiness-peccatum loquentis— is always with him, a dread lest the message with which he is entrusted for the salvation of his fellow-men may fall to the ground, because of the ill reputation of the man who bears it :

"But if they bark against the disposition of so great an elevation because of the sin of the speaker, let them read Daniel, where they will find that even Nabuchodonosor by divine inspiration had a vision against sinners, which he forgot. For He who 'maketh His sun to rise on the good and on the evil, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,' reveals His glory more or less, as He wills, sometimes in mercy for conversion, sometimes in severity for chastisement, to those who live however ill," 1

He fears, then, because of his own infirmities, of which the confession henceforth will be frank, no longer, even in part, covered up by a veil of allegory; but not at all for any possible consequence to himself by reason of his steadfastly assailing the highest in Church and State. In the Heaven of Fortitude, the fifth sphere in which the souls of warriors of God appear, he asks counsel of his ancestor, the crusader Cacciaguida, and receives the uncompromising answer: Tutta tua vision fa manifesta. Let him make manifest all his vision, and it will prove vital nourishment when digested.

"This

cry of thine will do as the wind that striketh most the loftiest summits." For he is one to whom Truth appeals from its changeless throne. Putting on the breastplate of faith, "in the heat of that coal which one of the Seraphim had taken off the altar and laid on the lips of Isaiah, I will enter on the present contest, and, by the arm of Him who delivered us by His blood from the powers of darkness, drive out from the lists the wicked and the liar in the sight of all the world." "

1 Epist., x. 28.

2 Par., xvii. 124-135; Mon., iii. 1.