Part 2

The action of the _Divine Comedy_ opens in the early morning of the Thursday before Easter in the year 1300. Dante dreams that he had "reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an obscure forest." He would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of the world--cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. Then the shade of Virgil appears, representing the intellect and conscience, glorified--to serve as his guide in the long wanderings through the Inferno. Virgil tells him he can accompany him only through Hell and Purgatory, but that Beatrice shall conduct him through those happy spheres, the portals of which a pagan may not enter. So begins that wondrous journey through the regions of the damned, over the entrance of which is written the awful words: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." The world through which the two poets journey is peopled, not with characters of heroic story, but with men and women known personally or by repute to Dante. Popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors, Florentine citizens of all degrees are there, "some doomed to hopeless punishment, others expiating their offenses in milder torments and looking forward to deliverance in due time." Hell is conceived as a vast conical hollow, reaching to the center of the earth. It has three great divisions, corresponding to Aristotle's three classes of vice, incontinence, brutishness and malice. The sinners, by malice, are divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. They lie at the bottom of a pit, with vertical sides, and accessible only by supernatural means; a monster named Geryon bears the poets down on his back. At the very bottom of the pit is Lucifer, immovably fixed in ice. And climbing down his limbs, the travellers reach the center of the earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, which they reach as Easter Day is dawning.

Purgatory is conceived as a mountain, rising solitary from the ocean on that side of the earth that is opposite to ours. It is divided into terraces and its top is the terrestrial Paradise, the first abode of man. The seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, which encircle the mountain and are reached by a series of steep climbs, compared by Dante to the path from Florence to Samminiato. The penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or endurance; and in several cases Dante has to bear a share in them as he passes. At one point, the poet hesitates when he comes to a path filled with a sheet of flame; but Virgil speaks: "Between Beatrice and thee there is but that wall." Dante at once plunges into the heart of the flames. On the summit of the mountain is the Earthly Paradise, "a scene of unsurpassed magnificence," where Beatrice, representing divine knowledge, divine love and purity, is waiting to lead the wanderer through the nine spheres of the old Ptolemaic system to the very throne of God.

Such is the general scheme of the poem, in which Dante's conception of the universe is depicted in scenes of intense vividness and dramatic force. It embraces the whole field of human experience. Its aim is "not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, to form men's characters" by teaching them what courses of life will meet reward, what with penalty hereafter; to "put into verse," as the poet says, "things difficult to think." The title given it is often misunderstood. The men of the Middle Ages gave the name "Tragedy" to every poem that ended sadly, and the name "Comedy" to every tale that ended happily. There are no traces of wit and humour in this book with its descriptions of the cleansing pains of Purgatory and the highest reaches of Paradise. Men who have little imagination seem quite unable to transport themselves back into the life and thought of the thirteenth century. Even Voltaire calls Dante a savage, and Goethe, who blundered often in his judgments of men and books, and often had to reverse himself, thought Dante's work "dull and unreadable." But that reader who supposes that Dante is giving a literal description of the physical torments of hell, or imagines that Michael Angelo, in his _Last Judgment_, was portraying his own literal belief, will find nothing inspiring in this wonderful book.

During the last six centuries the thinking of the world has changed. Physical pain has assumed new importance. No man living to-day has ever witnessed a brother man sentenced by a court to be burned alive, or later on, has been tried himself, and upon a false charge sentenced to death by flame. We stand aghast at Dante's miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, lakes of pitch and pools of blood, a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair. But Dante's was an era of outbreaking and almost universal physical cruelty; sinners and criminals could not be reached by argument, for they could not think; there was but one way to approach animal man, and that was from the animal side. Through fear, Dante endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. He appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience, sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. For their allurement also he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers blooming in the fields of Paradise. He used his unrivalled genius to make vice and sin revolting and infinitely repulsive, just as he tried to make truth, kindness and justice alluring.

This volume, therefore, represents "the life history of a human soul redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and mammon, and restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable him to see things as they are." Dante's conception is that "penalty is the same thing as sin, only it is sin taken at a later period of its history and a little lower down the stream." It is in life, here and now, that men's hands are fouled with the pits of greed; their tongues tipped with envenomed hate; their hearts steeped in crimson ooze. It is here and now that materialists "load themselves down with sacks of yellow clay," that misers plunge into "the boiling pitch of avarice." The genius of the _Inferno_ is that sins are seeds, big with the harvest of their own penalty.

Our age makes little of the _Purgatory_ itself--this realm which Dante describes as the place where the human soul is cleansed and made worthy to ascend to heaven. It is described as a kind of vestibule of Paradise, where the soul fronts the results of wrong-doing, through the debt of penalty and the evil inclination of the will, and the instincts that have been perverted. The sins of which men are cleansed are the sins against love and pride, envy and anger; the sins of the body, avarice and gluttony and passion. The angels that cleanse are the angels of forgiveness and peace. On that island of cleansing Virgil and Dante land, and place their hands upon the ground and bathe in dew their tear-stained cheeks. But climbing up the steep way of penitence is like climbing up a craggy mountainside, toiling on hands and knees, with tire that almost brings despair; and yet the higher Dante climbs the easier the task. Just as in the _Inferno_, Dante placed certain well-known figures--Judas Iscariot, who for avarice betrayed his Lord, and Alberigo who with horrible treachery murdered his own guests at a banquet, and that "youth who made the Great Refusal"; so in the _Purgatory_ he shows us many men known to history who have stumbled here and there and are breast-buried in the rubbish of the world, to whom comes some angel bringing release, and whispering "Loose him, and let him go."

When he approaches the confines of Paradise and sees from afar the glorified form of Beatrice, Dante asks that God may become to his soul like a refiner's fire and cleanse away any stain or dross of sin. Gladly he enters that healing flame, guided by a sweet voice, which sang, "Come, ye blessed of my Father;" but, says Dante, "When I was within I would have flung myself into molten glass to cool myself, so immeasurable was the burning there." Then, broken down with utter remorse, he falls in a swoon; but he is plunged in the waters of forgetfulness and refreshed, like young plants; re-clad as if by the angel of spring, he issues from the wave, pure and true, ready to mount to the stars beyond.

Strangely enough, this book, the _Inferno_, is the most widely read. The _Purgatory_ is less frequently opened, while men value least of all the _Paradise_ of Dante. Doubtless the reason is that experience has brought familiarity with sin, so that all men understand its penalties, and at the selfsame time know something of penitence and of pardon, while the nature of that realm of perfect happiness, righteousness and peace is beyond human experience. But if any man was ever purified by suffering and earned the right to trust his visions and surrender himself to the pictures that noble imagination painted, that man was Dante. On the side of culture the measure of education of any man is his knowledge of Shakespeare. On the side of imagination and of pure and tender goodness, a man is a man just in proportion as he knows his Dante. James Russell Lowell's supreme essay was his essay on Dante, and he tells us that the great Italian "wrote with his heart's blood, like an inspired prophet of old." 'Midst all his poverty, exile and grief, he rose triumphant over sorrow and neglect. He never lost his confidence in the ultimate victory of right and truth. Hating oppression, he struggled as a prophet of liberty. Offered an invitation to return to his native city, on the condition that he would humiliate himself by confessing that he had done a wrong, he accepted an exile's death rather than be faithless to his great convictions. Climbing the stairs of other men's houses, he salted his bread with his own tears.

An old man at fifty-six, his last days were spent in Ravenna, in the house of a noble duke, who recognized in Dante the greatest man of his time. Long afterward, Byron sought out the house where Dante died, and falling upon his knees, beat upon his breast and wept, at the recollection of the sorrows that overwhelmed the master of them all. Just as Bunyan was rewarded for the second book in English literature by twelve years in Bedford Jail, so Dante, as a reward for writing the greatest book in Italian literature, was exiled from his home and city, pursued by spies, hunted over the hills with hounds, made to conceal himself in dens and caves of the earth, and brought to an untimely death. Dying, Dante might have used the words which, later, fell from the lips of Bacon, "I leave my name and fame to foreign lands, and to my own country when long time has passed." Let us believe that after having lived for fifty-six years in at once an _Inferno_ and a _Purgatory_, at last Dante, the prisoner, was redeemed out of his dungeon, the exile out of his loneliness, the fugitive out of his rags and crusts, and the cave wherein he was hiding from his pursuers; that the man who for years held heart-break at bay at last was brought in out of the night, the fire-mist and the hail, into the imperial palaces of God, where one word of welcome repaid him ten thousand times for the bitter, grievous years, and where one word of love leaped forth from the ineffable light--and in a moment, his every wound was healed!

II

SAVONAROLA

(1452-1498)

_And the Renaissance of Conscience_

When the first warm days of May come to a land chilled through with the frosts of winter, all pastures and meadows, all vineyards and orchards, even the desert and the mountain rift awake to a new bloom and beauty. The revival of learning which culminated in that golden age known as the Renaissance was ushered in by the poet Dante, with his love for Beatrice and his immortal poem called the _Divine Comedy_. Dante has been likened unto that angel who descended from Heaven and, standing with one foot on the sea and one on the land, lifted the trumpet to his lips, and wakened the whole world. To Dante belongs the double glory "of immortalizing in verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated a new age and created a new language." But if Dante's face was turned upward and backward, his work was taken up by the great humanist, Petrarch, whose face was toward the future. Soon the whole land was awake, and while other countries were held in the grip of ice and winter, full summer burst upon Italy.

Scholars have interpreted the Renaissance from many different angles. Students of literature identify it with the discovery and reproduction of the manuscripts of the Greek and Latin authors. Artists associate it with Giotto's paintings and tower, with Michael Angelo's _Moses and Last Judgment_, and with the names of Alberti and Leonardo. Scientists point toward the discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus, just as jurists think of the rise of popular freedom and the overthrow of tyranny. Practical men associate the new era with the art of printing and the manufacture of paper and gunpowder, with the use of the compass by mariners, and the telescope by astronomers. But none of these interpretations fully suffice to explain the new era, with its new energy of the intellect and its outburst of unrivalled genius.

The mental and emotional condition of Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century may be likened to the vague longings in the heart of that child, who, legend hath it, was carried away from his father's castle by a band of gipsies. The gipsies carried the boy to Spain, and there they taught him to ride and hunt and steal after the gipsy fashion. But he had the blood of his ancestors within him, and there was something burning and throbbing within. Sometimes in his dreams he saw a beautiful face leaning over him, and heard the bosom pressure words of his mother, who could not be forgotten. Not otherwise was it with society at the beginning of the fifteenth century. For centuries the books, the arts, the tools, once so familiar to Virgil and Horace, to Mæcenas and Cæsar Augustus had lain neglected on the shores of that Dead Sea called the Dark Ages. Vague and uneasy memories haunted Europe. Imagination increased the value of the lost treasure. Looking backward through an atmosphere roseate through fancy, Helen's face took on new loveliness. Achilles became the ideal knight, Ulysses a divine hero, and Penelope the sum of all the gifts distributed among ideal women.

But in the middle of the fifteenth century occurred the fall of Constantinople, that Saragossa sea into which had been drawn the literary treasures of the preceding centuries. Constantinople had become a treasure-house in which were assembled the manuscripts that had been carried away by the citizens of Rome fleeing from the Huns. As the centuries came and went, merchants, bankers, rich men from far-off provinces had taken their jewels, carved furniture, ivories, paintings, bronzes, marbles, rugs, silks, laces, and housed their treasure in palaces, looking out upon the Bosphorus. So that in 1452, when the advancing Saracens approached the city, the scholars and rich men of Constantinople fled to their boats, and spreading canvas sailed into the western sun. Months passed before these fugitives dropped anchor at the mouth of the Po. One morning, an old man, wrapped in a cloak stained with the salt seawater, stepped from a little boat to the wharf of Florence. Being poor and also hungry he made his way to a bread-shop. Having no money, he drew from beneath his cloak a parchment. When the bread-shop was filled with listeners he began to read the story of Helen's beauty and Achilles' courage; the story of Ulysses' wanderings and Penelope's fidelity; the tale of blind Oedipus, and of his daughter's loving care. He recited the oration of Pericles after the plague in Athens, and told the story of the wanderings of Æneas. With ever-increasing excitement the men of Florence listened. At last, waking from the spell, they lifted the stranger upon their shoulders and carried him to the palace of a merchant prince, and bade him tell the story, and soon the merchant's house was crowded with young men preparing pages of vellum and sheets of leather, while writers copied the poems and the dramas of the old manuscript, and artists turned the vellum pages into illuminated missals. The spark became a flame. Learning became a glorious contagion. The fires spread from village to village, and city to city. The dawn of the modern world had come.

In the city of Florence, circumstances and climate were singularly favourable to the new movement. Florence was the city of flowers; it lay upon the banks of the Arno, set amidst orange groves, and its palaces, art galleries, and churches, when the vineyards were in full bloom, looked like a string of pearls lying in a cup of emeralds. All that Athens had been to the age of Pericles, Florence was to be to the era of Savonarola. Neither time nor events have availed to lessen the hold of Florence upon the great men of earth. Because of her rich associations with genius and beauty, the greatest souls of the earth have often turned feet toward Florence, as the birds of paradise leave the desert to seek out the oasis with its fountain and flowers. Florence was the city of Dante with his _Divine Comedy_, the city of Giotto, with his tower, of Gioberti, with the gates of wrought iron that are so beautiful that Michael Angelo said they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. To Florence in after years went Robert Browning, to write _The Ring and the Book_, and Elizabeth Barrett, with the finest love sonnets in literature. To Florence centuries later went George Eliot, to write her _Romola_, and in Florence, Keats and Shelley dreamed their dreams of song and verse. To Florence came Cavour, the statesman, and Mazzini, the reformer, Garibaldi, the soldier, to build the new Italy. Many the scholar and patriot who has said with Robert Browning, "Italy is a word graven on my heart." And it was to Florence that there came in the year 1490 Savonarola, the greatest moral force the city ever knew.

Savonarola was a man of almost universal genius. He was an orator, and the fire of his eloquence still burns in the sermons he has left the world. He was a reformer, and descended upon the sins of his age like a flame of fire, shaking Italy like the stroke of an earthquake. He was a prophet, and he dreamed dreams of a new Italy and of a golden age in morals. He was a statesman and he was created a preacher, and he fulfilled the dreams of a divine Orpheus, who drew all things to him by the mystery and magic of his speech. He was a martyr, and wore, not the red hat of the cardinal, but the fire that belonged to the chariot of flame, in which his soul rode up to Heaven to meet his God. Like all men of the first order of genius he was great on many sides. It was his glory that he awakened the moral sense and brought the life of God into the soul of man. Savonarola was like the Matterhorn or the Breithorn that lift their peaks so high that they look out upon the Rhine of the north and the Po of the south, upon the vineyards of France and the valleys of Austria.

In the very year that Constantinople fell, and the scholars fled, carrying their manuscripts--as sparks fly from the hammer falling upon an anvil--Savonarola entered into being in the beautiful little city of Ferrara. His grandfather was a physician, a teacher of the youth of his town, and a member of the council. He had achieved some honour as a scholar, and won much gold and favour as a skillful surgeon. To his father's house came a few leading men of the villages round about to read the pages of Dante and to talk about the manuscripts that had thrown all Italy into a fever of excitement. The boy had a hungry mind, and rose early and sat up late to read the copies of the few books that his father had in the little library. His native town was the capital of the little state, and the Duke of Este was his father's friend. When the boy was six years of age, Pope Pius II passed through Ferrara on his way to a celebration in Venice, and in preparation for his coming a crimson canopy was stretched above the street, while in the public square a throne was erected, and when the Pope had taken his seat therein a procession of children passed by, strewing flowers at the feet of the Pope. Young men and women sang songs in his honour, and chanted hymns of his praise, midst clouds of golden incense filling all the air. On the outskirts of the crowd stood the miserable poor, the half-starved peasants, the ragged children, the miserable lepers. Their faces were gaunt, their eyes hollow, their bread, crusts, their garments, rags, and the spectacle of gluttony, drunkenness and luxury, in contrast with the vast multitude of starving poor, created such a revulsion in the mind of the boy that from that hour all should have known that it was only a question of time when this gifted youth would become an ascetic and a reformer.

The revulsion in the heart of Savonarola was inevitably deepened by the lust and cruelty laid to the door of the Church itself. That was a dark hour for the Papacy and Italy. Paul II was a Venetian merchant, greedy, ambitious, who, in middle age, saw that the Pope was incidentally an ecclesiastic, but essentially an emperor, a statesman and a banker. Everything he touched in business turned to gold. He had agents out in all the world buying diamonds, pearls, rubies and emeralds. He hired architects, sculptors and painters, and made the church an art gallery. "Once the church had wooden cups and plates for the communion, but golden priests. Now," wrote Savonarola, "the church has golden cups and plates, but wooden-headed priests." The Rome of that time was a Rome of art and vice, gold and blood, cathedrals and mud huts. The least shocking page in the papal history of the time describes Alexander VI, and his son Cæsare and his daughter Lucretia, standing in the open window of the papal palace, looking down into the courtyard, filled with unlucky criminals. These prisoners, sentenced to death, ran round and round the court, while Cæsare let fly his arrows, and the Pope and Lucretia applauded each lucky hit. The scene is one of many, and the knowledge of such scenes inevitably brought about rebellion in the soul of Savonarola.

At the beginning of his career, the young reformer attracted but little attention. He entered a monastery and became a monk, and his novitiate was chiefly marked by a fervour of humilities. He sought the most menial offices, and did penance for his sins by the severest austerities. He was soon worn to a shadow, but his gaunt features were beautified by an expression of singular force and benevolence. Luminous dark eyes sparkled and flamed beneath his thick brows and his large mouth was as capable of gentle sweetness as of power and set resolve. But the spectacle of the sensualism, drunkenness, cruelty, theft, ignorance and wretchedness of Florence, that had a handful of aristocrats at one extreme and thousands of paupers at the other, gradually filled his soul with burning indignation. He began to see visions and to make prophecies which afterward were mysteriously fulfilled. His first success as a preacher came when he was thirty-one and the following year at Brescia, in a sermon on the Apocalypse, he shook men's souls by his terrible picture of the wrath to come. A halo of light was reported to have been seen about his head, and when, six years later, he returned to Florence, to preach in the cathedral, his fame as an orator had gone before him and the cloister gardens were too small to contain the crowds that flocked to hear him.