of Charles of Valois, or shortly before, Dante is said, on good authority, to have been absent on a mission to Rome. On trumpedup charges he was condemned, first to fine and exclusion, later to death by fire; subsequently, perhaps in 1315, he refused to purchase pardon by submission. For a little while after his banishment, in 1302, he conspired with his fellow-exiles; then, disgusted with their policy, perhaps in danger of his life from their violence, he turned his back on them and 'formed a party by himself.' The story of his wanderings is fragmentary. His first refuge was with the Scala family in Verona. On the death of his generous patron, Bartolommeo, in 1304, he is supposed to have visited the university at Bologna; he may even have given private instruction there. There is reason to believe that he travelled widely in Italy, especially in the North. In 1306 he was in Lunigiana with the Malaspina, for whom, on October 6, he acted as attorney in concluding a peace with the bishop of Luni. Thence he probably went to the mountains of the Casentino, on the upper Arno; and it is believed, on the authority of Boccaccio and Villani, that he journeyed between 1307 and 1309 to Paris. In 1308 Henry of Luxembourg, a noble idealist, was elected Emperor; crowned the next year at Aix as Henry VII, he descended in 1310 into Italy, to reunite Church and State, restore order, and reduce rebellious cities to submission. His coming aroused wild excitement and conflicting passions. Florence from the first offered sturdy and successful opposition. Dante, who firmly believed that the woes of Florence and all Italy — in fact, most of the evils in the world were due to lack of Imperial guidance, greeted Henry as a saviour and hastened to pay him homage. Four letters written in 1310 and 1311 show him in a state of feverish exaltation. He was probably in Pisa in 1312. Henry's invasion, however, was fruitless: he was involved in a turmoil of party strife; the Pope who had summoned him turned against him; and just as his prospects were brightening he died ingloriously near Siena in 1313. With him perished Dante's immediate hopes of peace, the regeneration of his country, and his own restoration. Possibly he took refuge with the Imperial champion Can Grande della Scala in

Verona in 1314. If, as we may infer from a passage in the Commedia, Dante went to Lucca, this visit may well have occurred shortly after Henry's death, possibly in 1315; in that year or the next he doubtless returned to Verona. Later, we do not know when, the poet, already famous through his lyrics, his Convivio, Inferno, and Purgatorio, was offered an asylum in Ravenna by Guido Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. His daughter Beatrice was a nun in that city; his son Pietro held a benefice there. This was his home until his death on September 13 or 14, 1321. Shortly before the end he was sent on a mission to Venice. His last years seem to have been peaceful and happy. In Ravenna, where he was greatly esteemed, he had congenial society and eager pupils. He maintained friendly relations with Can Grande della Scala, captain of the Ghibelline league, on whom he built great hopes. Though Florence still repudiated him, Bologna desired his presence.1

The foregoing biography of Dante omits the most significant feature of his life, the love for Beatrice. The chivalric amorous service of ladies, which had sprung up among the poets of southern France, developed with some of the later troubadours, under the influence of the growing cult of Mary in the 13th century, into an idealization of woman and a spiritual devotion. But it remained for the school of Bologna and its Florentine disciples to transform this sentiment into a transcendental passion, a combination of religious mysticism and instinctive desire with the Averrhoistic doctrine of a passive individual soul and an active oversoul. In the verse of Guido Guinizelli, who lived just before Dante, woman becomes the visible symbol of the angelic nature; the lover worships in his lady the Heavenly Intelligence which reveals itself in her; only the noble heart is capable of love, and without a fitting object to arouse its inborn love to activity even such a heart is powerless to manifest its latent goodness. These ideas are set forth in a beau

1 See P. Toynbee, Dante Alighieri, 1901; D. G. Rossetti, Dante and his Circle, 1874; N. Zingarelli, Dante, 1900 (in the Storia letteraria d'Italia, III), and La vita di Dante in compendio, 1905; G. Salvadori, Sulla vita giovanile di Dante, 1907; M. Scherillo, Alcuni capitoli della biografia di Dante, 1896; P. Gauthiez, Dante: essai sur sa vie, 1908.

tiful canzone beginning 'Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,' to which Dante continually reverts. Guinizelli he calls his master, and master of all those who write sweet rhymes of love. Dante, dreamer that he was, and profoundly religious, naturally fell under the sway of this teaching. Critics have hotly debated the question whether his Beatrice was a real woman. Boccaccio asserts that she was Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy and public-spirited Florentine who died in 1289; before that date she was married to a rich banker of good family, Simone dei Bardi. There is no valid ground for rejecting this statement. But after all it makes little difference who she was: the living woman merely furnished the impression that aroused the poet's creative fancy. All imaginative lovers idealize their mistresses beyond recognition. The Beatrice that Dante presents to us, real as she was to him, is almost wholly the product of his own mind. With the flesh-and-blood Beatrice he seems to have had little more than a bowing acquaintance, and there is no reason to believe that she returned or even understood his affection. He first met her when he was nine and she was eight, and even then at least so it seemed when he looked back upon the episode - she appeared to him as a revelation of the heavenly. Nine years later they exchanged a greeting. When, led to think ill of him by his excessive attentions to another lady, she refused to recognize him, he was profoundly hurt; and his pain was redoubled on one occasion when, with other ladies, she laughed at his show of emotion. He grieved with her sorrow at the loss of a friend, and again when her father was taken from her; he was tormented by a foreboding of her death. Stirred by feminine criticism, he determined to exclude supplication from his verse and make all his lovepoetry a hymn of praise. So much he tells us, in the Vita Nuova, of his relations with the living Beatrice. After her death, in 1290, her image seems to have become clearer and more fixed; but her influence could not preserve him from morbid dejection and unworthy pursuits. Book-learning and worldliness engrossed him for a while, in spite of the recurring prick of conscience. Even in early youth his fancy had strayed to other women, and his comradeship with

the disreputable Forese Donati is perhaps to be ascribed to a boyish period. After the passing of Beatrice he was, as he thought, unduly moved by the pity of an unnamed lady, who soon, however, became in his mind a mere visible picture of the object of his great passion, Philosophy. Later, in the Casentino, he apparently became violently enamored of a young woman to whom he addressed the most wildly beautiful lyrics in all amatory literature; but even these poems are not beyond the suspicion of allegorical intent.1

When we ask ourselves why we are so strangely stirred by the words of a man of whom we know so little, one so remote in date and in thought, we find that it is because, on the one hand, he knew how to present universal emotions, stripping his experiences of all that is peculiar to time or place; and, secondly, because he felt more intensely than other men: his joy, his anguish, his love, his hate, his hope, his faith, were so keen that they come quivering down through the ages and set our hearts in responsive vibration. This intensity seems to distinguish him from other poets of the Middle Ages, perhaps, in part, because he alone had the art to express it. His mastery of language far transcends that of any other mediæval poet, and surpasses that of all but the few very foremost in the world's history. In his close observation and apparent enjoyment of the varying, even the sternest aspects of nature, he seems nearer to our generation than to his own. His study of human nature is no less close. Though the title Commedia contained, in its author's mind, no suggestion of the stage, the poem exhibits a command of dramatic situation, a skill in characterization by means of dialogue, not to be found in any

1 See V. Cian, I contatti letterari italo-provenzali e la prima rivoluzione poetica della letteratura italiana, 1900; K. Vossler, Die philosophischen Grundlagen zum "süssen neuen Stil," 1904; L. Azzolina, Il “dolce stil nuovo," 1903; P. Savj-Lopez, Trovatori e poeti, 1906, pp. 9 ff.; Moore, II, 79; E. V. Zappia, Studi sulla Vita Nuova di Dante. Della questione di Beatrice, 1904; I. Del Lungo, Beatrice nella vita e nella poesia del secolo XIII, 1891; G. Carducci, Delle rime di Dante, in his Studi letterari, viii, 1 ff.; A. Zenatti, Le rime di Dante per la Pargoletta, in the Rivista d' Italia, Jan. 15, 1899; V. Imbriani, Sulle canzoni pietrose di Dante, in his Studi danteschi, 1891, pp. 427 ff.; A. Abbruzzese, Su le "Rime Pietrose" di Dante, in the Giorn. dant., XI, 97 ff.; A. Santi, Il Canzoniere di Dante, vol. II, 1906 (vol. I has not yet appeared).

playwright from Euripides to Shakespeare. One other gift he possessed that belongs to no period, but is bestowed upon the greatest artists of all times the power of visualization, the ability to see distinctly in his mind's eye and to place before the mental vision of the reader not only such things as men have seen, but also the creations of a grandiose imagination, and even bodiless abstractions. In most other respects he belonged to his age: in his submission to authority in all matters of science and philosophy, his unquestioning acceptance of Christian dogma; in his subordination of beauty to truth and his relegation of it to the position of handmaid to utility; in his conception of the individual, not as an independent unit, but as a part of humanity, and his consequent desire to suppress all reference to the events and characteristics that differentiate himself from other men. Mediæval, too, was his mysticism: in him we see a man with the most acute perception of reality, the most eager interest in the doings of his fellows, yet imbued with the idea that the world of fact is all a shadowy image of the world of spirit; his feet were firmly planted on earth, while his head was in the clouds.'

Visionary as he was, saddened by his own misfortunes, and exasperated by human wickedness, he had a fundamentally healthy disposition. In his character fierce passion was mated with equally vigorous self-control; vehemence was balanced by introspection and self-judgment; imagination was yoked with logic. He admired simplicity, even asceticism, but he was far from being a foe to culture or to the usages of polite society. He was fond of courtly pursuits, and erudite even to pedantry. In the great writings of pagan times he found a source of endless delight, and he did not hesitate to put them on a par with his Christian authorities. His admiration was less excited by Christian martyrs than by heroic pagan suicides. His Christ is always sublime, a part of the triune God, never the meek lamb nor the humble preacher of Galilee. His outlook upon life was persistently hopeful. Bad as the world was, there could be no doubt of ultimate reform. The Lord, in his unfathomable wisdom, might allow evil to triumph for a while, but his kingdom was 1 See J. R. Lowell, Dante, in his Literary Essays, 1897.