PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 
 From Vita Nuova to Paradiso
 
 Published by the University of Manchester at 
 
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 From 
 
 Vita Nuova to Paradise 
 
 TWO ESSAYS 
 
 on the vital relations between Dante 's successive 
 works 
 
 By 
 
 PHILIP H. WICKSTEED, M.A., Litt.D. 
 
 1922 
 
 Manchester ' ' * At the University Press 
 London, New York, &c. : Longmans, Green & Co.
 
 PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 No. CLI 
 
 (All rights reserved)
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 And this is what Rabbi Hanina said : "I have 
 learned much from my teachers ; and from my com- 
 panions more than from my teachers ; and from my 
 -pupils more than from all"
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 I suppose it is still true (as it certainly was not long 
 ago) that the successive Cantiche of Dante's Comedy 
 appeal to successively narrowing circles of readers. 
 Many who are fairly acquainted with representative 
 portions at least of the Inferno^ and in whose minds 
 Dante ranks high as a poet on the strength of them, 
 have but the vaguest conception even of the Pur- 
 gatorio. Many readers of the Purgatorio, to whom 
 Dante is a prophet and teacher as well as a poet, find 
 their high anticipations perplexed and perhaps chilled 
 when they come to the Paradiso. Many of those to 
 whom parts of the Paradiso itself make a direct 
 appeal of transmuting power, on the mystic and 
 experiential side, are baffled by the intricacies of its 
 scholastic theology and philosophy. 
 
 But to Dante himself the movement of the whole 
 Comedy, from the first Canto to the last, was deter- 
 mined and controlled by the central thought of the 
 Paradiso. He spoke as one whom a vision of the 
 ultimate goal and the inmost meaning of life was 
 drawing, as with some spiritual magnetism or force 
 of gravitation, to the conclusive and all-fulfilling 
 consummation, with a trend so overmastering as to 
 assimilate to itself all experiences of life and all 
 records of history, and set them in living relations 
 with each other and with itself. 
 
 In the Comedy Dante strove to set time in the 
 light of eternity, fully convinced that so far as he 
 could do this he would turn " folk living in this mortal 
 life from misery and bring them to the state of bliss." 
 
 vii
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 He was well aware that many who started with 
 him on what he loves to think of as his " voyage " 
 would be more interested in the incidents of the 
 passage than in the " desired haven " which it 
 sought ; and he is even content that relatively few 
 should follow his special guidance to the end. But 
 he could at least reckon on all his serious readers so 
 far understanding his purpose as to share with him 
 the clear intellectual conception, if not the mystic 
 realization, of the nature of the haven itself. Heaven 
 and the beatific vision meant something perfectly 
 definite and intelligible to Dante's contemporaries ; 
 and, however much or little it might be to the heart 
 or soul, it was firmly enough held in the brain to 
 enable them to understand how the successive 
 portions of the Comedy were related to it, and 
 how they took their direction and movement 
 from it. 
 
 It is the object of the first of the two essays in this 
 volume to help the modern reader to place himself 
 approximately at this point of vantage ; for if the 
 study of the Inferno and the Purgatorio is often found 
 to be a disappointingly inadequate preparation for 
 reading and feeling the Paradiso^ on the other hand 
 the comprehension of the central theme of the 
 Paradise^ even though it be only on its intellectual 
 side, and though the crowning Cantica itself should 
 never fully assert its power, will be found the best 
 of all preparations for apprehending the deeper 
 meaning and the deeper beauties of Dante's con- 
 ception and treatment of hell and purgatory. 
 
 viii
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 The second essay is concerned with kindred but 
 far more intricate and difficult matter ; for it deals 
 no longer with the organism of the Comedy and the 
 mutual relations of its parts, but with the relation of 
 Dante's Minor Works to the conception and pur- 
 pose of the Comedy itself. To accomplish the one 
 task we have only to place the poet's own avowed 
 and conscious purpose in the light of the current 
 theological conceptions of his day ; whereas to 
 succeed in the other we must trace the sometimes 
 devious steps that led the traveller from the beginning 
 to the end of his journey even when he himself but 
 dimly realised whither they were taking him. Look- 
 ing back from the end to the beginning we must 
 survey and relate to each other all the intermediate 
 stretches of the path. 
 
 Fortunately the chronological succession of the 
 works that directly concern our inquiry may be taken 
 as established with an adequate approximation to 
 general assent. The Vita Nuova is followed by the 
 main body of the Canzoni, so far as they are not 
 contemporary with it and immediately related to its 
 subject matter. Then follow the Convivio, the 
 Monarchia, and the Commedia. Carefully read in 
 their order these works reveal one line at least of 
 steady advance from the starting point to the goal. 
 They show us the unbroken development of Dante's 
 attitude towards Christian theology. In the Vita 
 Nuova we are in an atmosphere of naive and un- 
 questioning devoutness, in which the teaching of the 
 Church is taken for granted. In this phase of thought, 
 
 ix
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 the religion of ideal love, can breathe an atmosphere 
 kindred to its own. In the Canzoni and the Convivio 
 we find (with other matter) widening intellectual 
 interests, strengthening powers of observation and 
 reflection, and a missionary ardour to enrich the 
 minds and direct the ideals of starved or misled 
 humanity. Here Dante not only remains a devout 
 believer but is becoming an ardent and systematic 
 student of theology. As yet, however, his interest 
 in the divine science is stimulated chiefly by its 
 reaction upon secular ideals. For these ideals, when 
 reverently contemplated in the light of their analogies 
 with the spiritual order of things, gain a depth and a 
 consecration that bring out their own highest beauty. 
 To refute materialistic conceptions of True Nobility 
 is a task akin to that of S. Thomas Aquinas when 
 he undertook to refute the Heathen. To carry the 
 truths of philosophy out of the cloister and the 
 schools into the busy and preoccupied world is to 
 imitate the Divine mercy which condescends to give 
 to the common man, by revelation, assurance not 
 only of truths inaccessible to reason, but also of much 
 that it is indeed within the range of the human 
 faculties to compass, but which only a chosen few 
 would have time or opportunity or power to secure, 
 or even to test, for themselves. And indeed what is 
 philosophy, either to the learned or to the simple, 
 save the love of Wisdom ? And was it not Wisdom's 
 self that came down to earth and assumed our nature, 
 to teach us the truth ? The consecration of the 
 Divine example then shines upon the teacher's task.
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 These thoughts permeate the Convivio. But in 
 that work Dante's mind is still dominated by the 
 Ethnic sages, though touched with the glow of 
 Christian devotion. He still thinks in terms of the 
 Aristotelian distinction between the practical or civic 
 and the speculative or theoretical life, and he has not 
 yet grasped its relations to the ecclesiastical and 
 mystic distinction between the active life of good 
 works and the contemplative life of communion with 
 the Deity. 
 
 In the last book of the Convivio, however, there 
 emerges a conception of the Roman Empire as 
 divinely guided and inspired which must be regarded 
 as the last and most significant of the reactions of 
 theology upon secular ideals which we have to 
 examine. And this implicit parallel between the 
 temporal and the spiritual order is explicitly de- 
 veloped in the Monarchia and pervades the Comedy. 
 In the Monarchia the recognition of a Divine 
 guidance of secular forces in the history of Rome, 
 analogous to that of spiritual forces in the history of 
 Palestine and the Church, is already so far advanced 
 that the exposition by Aquinas of the need of a 
 supreme authority in matters of faith, represented by 
 the office of the Pope, can be elaborated by Dante to 
 support the authority of the Emperor as the supreme 
 administrator of Roman Law. The parallelism 
 between temporal and spiritual things is now fully 
 worked out and systematized ; the Ethnic distinction 
 between the practical and the theoretical intelligence 
 falls into the background, while that between Reason 
 
 xi
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 and Revelation comes to the front ; and the spiritual 
 order having standardized and illuminated the poet's 
 conception of the temporal order is now drawing his 
 mind more and more directly to itself for his own sake. 
 The Monarchia sets forth the whole framework and 
 scaffolding of the Comedy so completely that it 
 may safely be trusted as the " key " to the sym- 
 bolism and the main allegory of every part of the 
 Poem. 
 
 This clear and unbroken line of progress when 
 once distinctly recognized can never be lost sight of 
 or obscured ; and it leaves no room to doubt that 
 the Comedy as we now know it could not have been 
 conceived in its general outline and structure until 
 Dante's mind had definitely moved away from the 
 stage of development represented by the Convivio, 
 and had reached the equilibrium of a fuller and firmer 
 synthesis and a deeper spiritual insight. 
 
 But the recognition of this unbroken line of pro- 
 gress does not furnish us with a complete solution 
 of the complex and entangling problems presented 
 by the Convivio, from which I have provisionally dis- 
 engaged it. In the Canzoni that lie outside the cycle 
 of the Vita Nuova, and in the Convivio, there is a 
 distinct movement away from Dante's self-dedica- 
 tion to the task of raising a monument to Beatrice ; 
 and moreover there are sometimes clear and some- 
 times half-obliterated traces of what is openly con- 
 fessed in the Comedy, namely a period in Dante's 
 life during which he had not cared to dwell upon his 
 
 xii
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 memories of Beatrice and the hopes and purposes 
 associated with them, because his current interests 
 and standards had seemed even at the time to be 
 alien from such memories. In the retrospect they 
 seemed deeply unworthy of them. 
 
 All these and other aspects of the Convivio have 
 been subjected to examination in the second essay in 
 this book ; and the attempt has been made, by first 
 disentangling and then recombining them, to arrive 
 at a psychologically intelligible account of how that 
 early purpose of writing of Beatrice " what ne'er was 
 writ of woman," after seeming to fall into the back- 
 ground and almost into oblivion for twenty years, 
 finds its transfigured fulfilment at last in the poem 
 which seeks to rescue " those living in this mortal 
 life from the state of misery and to bring them to the 
 state of bliss." 
 
 It is almost exactly a hundred years since the 
 serious attempt to present Dante's work from first 
 to last as an intelligible whole was initiated by the 
 German Dantist, Witte (then some twenty-two or 
 twenty-three years of age), in the first of the brilliant 
 series of essays which may be said to have dominated 
 the Dante studies of the last century. Those who 
 have any acquaintance with Witte's work will see that 
 it is impossible for me to exaggerate the extent of 
 my indirect obligation to the stimulus he gave to 
 Dante scholarship. At the same time they will under- 
 stand that his placing the composition of the 
 Monarchia in the early years, before Dante's exile, led 
 
 xiii
 
 PREFATORY SYNOPSIS 
 
 to what I cannot but regard as a fatal misconception 
 of the Convivio. 
 
 And what is worse, it consequentially led Witte 
 and his followers to an allegorizing interpretation of 
 the Thirtieth and Thirty-first Cantos of the Pur- 
 gatorio which would altogether mar the directness 
 and universality of their appeal and would persuade 
 us that the great majority of readers are so deeply 
 moved by them only because they misunderstand 
 them. These mists and obfuscations of the most 
 intensely personal utterances of the poet would be 
 finally dispelled if the attempt here made to recover 
 the links between the Vita Nuova and the Comedy 
 were to approve itself, in the main, to students of 
 Dante. 
 
 * . * I have not wished to interrupt the reading of the 
 essays by frequent indices, but have given continu- 
 ously, at the foot of the pages, what I hope will be 
 found sufficiently full references to enable students 
 readily to verify or check the translations and para- 
 phrases in the text. In the prose works the lines re- 
 ferred to are those of the Oxford Dante, and [in 
 square brackets] the sections of the Florentine Testo 
 Critico, 1921, are added. 
 
 I am indebted to the Rev. R. Travers Herford 
 for the correct form of Rabbi Hanina's words cited 
 on p. v, and for the reference to Talmud Babli, 
 Taanith y a ., where they are recorded. 
 
 P H. W 
 
 CHILDREY, May 1922 
 
 XIV
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefatory Synopsis vii 
 
 Part I. THE COMEDY 
 
 The Inferno and the Purgatorio in the light 
 
 of the Paradiso 3 
 
 The Beatific Vision 4 
 
 The Life of Innocence and the Fall 25 
 
 Hell 34 
 
 Purgatory and the Recovered Eden 42 
 
 Epilogue 52 
 
 Part II. THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 The Vita Nuova 59 
 
 The Canzoni 70 
 
 The Convivio in its Apologetic Aspect 80 
 
 The Convtvio in its Positive Content 93 
 
 The Monarchia and the Comedy 122 
 
 Appendix: Chronology of Dante's Works 145 
 
 xv
 
 THE COMEDY
 
 EDMVNDO GARRATT GARDNER 
 
 qvo svperstite 
 non omnis moriar
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 (The Inferno and the Purgatorlo in the light 
 of the Paradiso] 
 
 The poetic splendour of the Inferno breaks upon the 
 reader as soon as he opens the first pages of the 
 Comedy ; but it is often obscured by historical 
 allusions, astronomical circumlocutions, and terms 
 of mediaeval science or philosophy, which darken 
 and at times quench its light. These obstacles, how- 
 ever, soon begin to yield to patient study, and what 
 threatened to choke the flame catches fire from it 
 and in its turn flings light into every corner of the 
 world in which Dante lived and thought. 
 
 Meanwhile, earlier or later as the case may be, 
 the reader becomes aware of an underlying purpose 
 and significance, seldom obtruded but always pre- 
 sent, that gives unity and direction to the movement 
 of the whole poem, breathing into it a vital spirit 
 of its own and appealing for its interpretation to no 
 other lore than such as knowledge of ourselves and 
 observation of life can give us. 
 
 Presently, when we grow familiar with the Purga- 
 torio and the Paradiso^ the Inferno, in spite of its 
 direct and arresting grip upon our imagination, 
 reveals itself as a beginning that must be read in the 
 light of the middle and the end if we are to under- 
 stand it truly ; and we begin to feel, perhaps 
 gropingly, for the organic relation of the parts to the 
 
 3
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 whole. The misleading suggestion will probably 
 present itself to us, at this point, that the first 
 Cantica of the Comedy is the foundation on which 
 the whole structure stands, and that the way to 
 heaven lies through hell. There is indeed a sense 
 in which this is true, but we can never rightly grasp 
 it till we have realized the far deeper sense in which 
 it is false. This is the first point to which we must 
 turn our attention. 
 
 I. THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 In the heaven of the primum mobile Dante sees a 
 single point of intensest light, and since its spaceless 
 glory represents God himself Beatrice tells him 
 that " from that point all Heaven and Nature 
 hang."* 
 
 It is the purpose of this essay to show how the 
 Comedy itself, in its animating spirit and its intimate 
 structure, " depends from that point." 
 
 In the mediaeval belief both angels and men were 
 created by the divine will to be recipients of the 
 divine goodness ; and the life of heaven consisted 
 in the contemplation by these recipient spirits of 
 the primal Goodness that created them. As to 
 the difference between the angelic and the human 
 nature there will be something to say presently 
 (p. 26), but we must note at once that, for man, 
 
 Da quel punto 
 depende il cielo e tutta la natura. 
 
 Paradiso xxviii : 41 sq. 
 
 4
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 the life of Eden as a stage was a no less essential 
 part of the divine purpose than the life of Heaven 
 as the goal. Further, the whole material creation, 
 including the revolving heavens, and even time and 
 space themselves, were designed with reference to 
 this earthly life of man. 
 
 The Paradiso deals with the life of Heaven and 
 the last six Cantos of the Purgatorio with the life of 
 Eden. And these two, with all that they involve, 
 not only " depend " directly from God, but embody 
 the whole of the primary and essential purpose of 
 the Creator for his creatures. 
 
 But the Fall brought with it a warping and dis- 
 tortion of the divine pattern, and since violent dis- 
 turbances of order are to be understood only by 
 reference to the order they have disturbed it is but 
 natural that the most intimately characteristic features 
 of Dante's representations alike of Hell and Purga- 
 tory should depend upon his conception of the state 
 of unfallen man and of his heavenly destiny. The 
 fixed and firm attachment therefore is from above 
 and not from below, and the structure of the Comedy 
 as a whole " depends from the Paradiso " rather than 
 " rests on the Inferno" Unless we have formed a 
 clear conception of what Dante meant by Heaven 
 we shall only dimly understand what he meant by 
 Hell and Purgatory. 
 
 There is much less that divides Dante's intellectual 
 conception of Heaven from the received teaching of 
 his time than there is with respect to the correspond- 
 ing conceptions of hell and purgatory ; and conse- 
 
 5
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 quently Dante was able to assume that his readers 
 would start with the same presuppositions as to the 
 ultimate goal of humanity that he himself accepted. 
 However much deeper his realization of divine and 
 spiritual things might be than that of the average 
 believer, and however much the readers of the 
 Paradiso might deepen their own spiritual experience 
 and realization by studying it, yet their intellectual 
 belief as to what constitutes the heavenly life itself 
 would need no change. They began their reading 
 of the Comedy, as we do not, with a precisely 
 formulated belief as to Heaven that agreed with that 
 of their author. 
 
 But, on the other hand, hell and purgatory had a 
 different meaning to Dante from that which they 
 bore to his contemporaries, and this precisely because 
 he saw them in closer relation to heaven than they 
 did. Hell, as a fact, he accepted (not without inward 
 protest) from authoritative tradition ; but what he 
 read into it could only be seen in the light of heaven, 
 and therefore could not be seen at all by the world- 
 ling, or by the damned themselves. And purgatory 
 was not to Dante, as it was to others, a painful price 
 paid by man for permission to enter heaven, but a 
 blessed opportunity allowed him of bringing himself 
 into tune with heaven. These modifications of the 
 current conceptions were forced upon him as neces- 
 sarily involved in that very conception of heaven 
 which was accepted by his contemporaries with as 
 little question as by himself; and it is under this 
 light that we must consider them. 
 
 6
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 " Seeing God in his essence " is what Dante and 
 his contemporaries meant by " heaven." Our im- 
 mediate task, then, is to arrive, if we can, at an exact 
 conception of what these words conveyed to the 
 mind, and a sympathetic insight into the feelings 
 with which they were associated on the lips of the 
 first readers of the Comedy. We must be content to 
 advance slowly, step by step, and the first and easiest 
 step is to realize that " seeing " is to be understood 
 very definitely and strictly in the metaphorical sense 
 in which we say that we " see " a truth, or that we 
 " see " a friend's thought, purpose, line of argument, 
 or unacknowledged affections or aversions. We 
 must check not only our thought, but our imagina- 
 tion, by constantly reminding ourselves that in this 
 sense, even when we are concerned with material 
 things, a blind man can see what he sees as well and 
 as truly as we can, though he cannot see all the things 
 that we see. He cannot see that one colour is deeper 
 than another, but he can " see " that one object is 
 harder than another ; and he can see a truth or an 
 argument or a kind or hostile intention in exactly the 
 same sense in which we can see them. To " see " 
 anything, then, in our sense of the word, is to have a 
 direct, full, and clear consciousness of it. And it is 
 in this sense that we are to understand the expression 
 " seeing God." 
 
 The next step is to consider the difference between 
 thus " seeing " anything " in its essence," and 
 seeing or knowing it only through its effect upon us. 
 To know a thing in its essence meant so to under- 
 
 7
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 stand its inmost being as to see how all its manifesta- 
 tions and effects must necessarily flow from it be- 
 cause they are involved in it ; and the question arises 
 whether we can in this sense see, or know, anything 
 whatever " in its essence." 
 
 Now, on this subject Dante and the teachers he 
 followed 1 deliberately held a philosophy concerning 
 the nature and limits of human knowledge, apart 
 from revelation, which easily approves itself to the 
 average common sense of mankind, though by no 
 means unchallenged by metaphysicians. According 
 to this philosophy our senses give us notice of a 
 material world that actually exists outside our con- 
 sciousness and independently of it, but of which we 
 can have no kind of knowledge except in and 
 through its effects upon our consciousness through 
 our senses. Of what it is " in itself" or " in its 
 essence " we can have no knowledge or even con- 
 ception. 
 
 Neither can we have any knowledge of what our 
 
 1 S. Thomas Aquinas (j~i274) is the teacher from whom we can 
 best gather the philosophical and theological system which Dante 
 presupposes everywhere, and expressly sets forth and expounds as 
 occasion rises. On its purely philosophical side this system is based 
 on Aristotle's teaching developed, however, in directions of which 
 Aristotle knew nothing; and brought into relation with the mystic 
 and dogmatic inheritance of the Church. And this ecclesiastical 
 tradition, in its turn, was saturated with Platonic influences. Dante 
 studied Aristotle at first hand, though (in common with Aquinas 
 himself and his teacher Albertus Magnus) he read him in Latin 
 translations only. He looks at Aristotle essentially from the point of 
 view of Aquinas, but he is not a slavish disciple.
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 consciousness is "in itself," apart from its content ; 
 apart, that is, from the impressions received from the 
 external world and the processes in our minds that 
 they provoke. As soon as the sense images fall upon 
 the mind its latent powers are awakened into actuality 
 and we enjoy or fear, remember or desire, as many of 
 the higher animals do also. But what is this mind or 
 consciousness " in itself" before it is conscious of 
 anything ? In itself, and before it comes into action, 
 how does the naked capacity for abstracting, 
 generalizing, reasoning, and inferring, which is 
 specific to man, differ from the naked capacity for 
 receiving sense impressions and being attracted or 
 repelled, pleased or displeased, which is shared by 
 other animals ? We cannot answer these questions, 
 and therefore we can understand neither external 
 things nor the organ of consciousness " in them- 
 selves." And neither can we understand the con- 
 nection between our consciousness and the bodily 
 organs through which we receive our impressions of 
 the external world, of which they themselves are a 
 part. We can know none of these things therefore 
 in their essential being. God only, the Creator and 
 first cause of all things, can so know what these 
 things are in their inmost nature as to see how their 
 relations to each other and reactions with each other 
 follow from and are involved in what they are " in 
 themselves." We can know things only by their 
 effects, as apprehended in our conscious experiences. 
 But now if we take all these fundamental connec- 
 tions and relations as we find them, not in themselves, 
 
 9
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 but in their united and reciprocal action, not asking 
 what mind, matter, and sense organs are in them- 
 selves or how their relations rise out of their essence, 
 but simply examining the resultant impressions and 
 processes or goings on in our own minds, we are on 
 very different ground. We find, for instance, that 
 out of the data supplied us by the senses we are 
 capable of forming certain general conceptions, such 
 as the ideas of " whole " and " part." We find 
 special instances of a whole, with its parts, in the 
 external world ; but the generalized conception of 
 " whole " or " part " as such is something in the 
 mind or consciousness 1 itself. Moreover, we no 
 sooner form these general conceptions of " whole " 
 and " part " than we are compelled to admit, as a 
 general self-evident proposition or axiom, that the 
 whole is greater than its part : that is to say, em- 
 braces the part and something more. There are 
 other logical and mathematical axioms that assert 
 themselves inevitably as soon as we have formed 
 
 1 The terms consciousness, mind, and soul are used in this essay 
 as the convenience of the context suggests without any careful or 
 significant distinction. Strictly, consciousness is the widest and most 
 comprehensive term. Mind suggests a special region or aspect of 
 consciousness. Soul suggests to us a conscious entity that has, or may 
 have, an independent existence of its own ; but the mediaeval 
 thinker would speak of the animal or vegetable soul with no such 
 implication or even suggestion, using the term as the mere equivalent 
 of " life " or " vitality." Thus for him to speak of the " human 
 soul " did not in itself imply the existence of a psychic entity, though 
 as a matter of fact he believed (if a Christian) the human soul to be 
 such an entity. 
 
 10
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 certain elementary generalizations or abstract ideas. 
 Then, further, we find that these axioms involve 
 many unsuspected consequences which we may be 
 slow to perceive, but which when once perceived 
 assert themselves as inevitably involved in the 
 axioms themselves, and as necessarily flowing from 
 them. Thus the whole body of logical truth (in- 
 cluding mathematics, that marvellous erection of 
 specialized logic with its intense intellectual interest 
 and its innumerable practical applications) has all 
 been evolved in the progress of the ages out of the 
 little stock of axioms that everyone capable of under- 
 standing their terms must inevitably accept. Any 
 mathematical or logical conclusion that cannot be 
 shown to be involved in the axioms is unstable and 
 liable to challenge. 
 
 Now, of all these processes, so far as our own minds 
 are capable of them, we have direct knowledge " as 
 they are in themselves." We see how one follows 
 upon another because it is already virtually contained 
 in it. In a word, we can find their source and germ 
 and can trace their movement " from inside " as a 
 development and unfolding of their own inmost 
 nature. 
 
 Note here that in these general or abstract con- 
 ceptions our minds transcend the data of the senses 
 that set them at work. For we can neither touch nor 
 smell nor see a mathematical line that has no 
 breadth. Nor can any such conception as " necessary 
 sequence " or " truth " be the object of sense per- 
 ception. Of these abstractions or conceptions in our 
 
 ii
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 own minds we have direct consciousness (whether 
 vague or precise) " as they are." But what is the 
 relation in this matter of one mind to another ? 
 To begin with, since I have no direct access to the 
 processes of any mind but my own, I can only receive 
 communications from another mind, or even know 
 that it exists, in virtue of its expressing itself through 
 some medium that can act upon the senses. 1 Such ex- 
 pression I interpret on the analogy of my own in- 
 ward experience. The whole process of teaching and 
 learning in the region of pure thought consists in 
 enabling the less developed mind to climb back 
 through the expressions of the more developed mind 
 to an understanding of the actual processes internal 
 to that mind itself. 
 
 How different it would be if we had some " sense " 
 by which we could, up to the measure of our inherent 
 capacity, actually " see " the processes themselves 
 of the more developed mind with the same direct 
 consciousness with which we " see " our own 1 The 
 teacher would always know exactly where the pupil's 
 mind was and what next step would be clear to it ; 
 and the pupil would see the very process which he 
 was invited to follow in the mind of the teacher, not 
 
 1 We need not enter upon the question whether any approxima- 
 tion to such direct " thought reading " is, in fact, possible to us ; for 
 Dante and his contemporaries, with whose philosophy we are here 
 concerned, had no doubt on the subject. They held quite firmly 
 that so long as our souls remain in organic relation with our mortal 
 bodies we can have no direct perception of the contents of another's 
 mind, but must depend upon our interpretation of such indications 
 as can reach the senses. 
 
 12
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 a confused and distorted image of it crossed by his 
 own preconceived ideas and blurred by finding sand 
 instead of wax in his mind to receive its impress. 
 
 But as things are, since we have no direct insight 
 into the processes of another mind, we are in one 
 respect worse off, but in another better, with regard 
 to another mind than we are with regard to material 
 objects. We are worse off, because the impress of 
 mind upon mind can never be direct as it is in the 
 case of the impressions made on the senses ; but we 
 are better off, because as far as we can indirectly get 
 at the processes of another mind we may hope, by 
 the analogy of our own mind, to understand them 
 from the inside and as they are " in themselves," 
 whereas our perception of external things, however 
 direct, can never be intimate. 
 
 We have been dealing with general ideas and the 
 propositions that concern them : that is to say, with 
 the purely intellectual aspect of our consciousness. 
 But we are directly conscious of many other things 
 than these. We have desires and impulses, pleasant 
 and unpleasant sensations and experiences, hopes, 
 fears, and purposes, that are not purely intellectual. 
 At the root of all this is the fact that some things 
 attract us when we are aware of them and rejoice or 
 satisfy us when we possess or experience them, while 
 others repel, terrify, or distress us. From the ex- 
 perience that things of very different kinds have the 
 power of attracting us we form the general concep- 
 tion of attractiveness. 
 
 13
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 Now, some of the things that attract us, such as 
 food for example, appeal to what we commonly 
 mean by appetites ; but in Italian and in late or 
 scholastic Latin a thing is appetibile, or ' : the object 
 of appetite," if it is anything that we " go for " for 
 any reason or with any part of our nature. Thus, to 
 desire and seek (appetere) truth is as much an 
 " appetite " as if truth were food. If a man " hungers 
 and thirsts after righteousness " that, too, is " appe- 
 tite " ; and here also we generalize and learn to 
 recognize something that all the objects of our desire 
 have in common and which is some form of" good." 
 It is by a correct instinct that we call both things to 
 eat and virtuous dispositions by the same name of 
 "good." 1 They both have the same quality of 
 " appetibility." To the normal mind they are all of 
 them " things to be sought " in due time and 
 measure. When we choose one thing in preference 
 to another we are comparing them sub specie boni : 
 that is to say, we pronounce this as more to be desired 
 than that because it is " better." So this act of 
 choice is an expression of appetite, but appetite that 
 has an intellectual element in it inasmuch as it is 
 influenced by the generalized conception of good 
 and by the comparison of things, otherwise unlike 
 each other, in respect of their " goodness." So 
 the mediaeval thinkers tell us that the act of choice 
 
 1 Therefore, whether we are considering material or immaterial 
 things we must be jealously on our guard against the exclusively 
 ethical connotation which is apt, in so many connections, to attach 
 itself to the word " good."
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 or election is the act of an " intellectual appetite." 
 It is only when the passion or impulse on which we 
 act is so overpowering as to obliterate the conscious- 
 ness of any alternative that our action ceases to be 
 voluntary and to obey our choice. 
 
 But we all know too well that the things that 
 present themselves as desirable, or good, do not 
 always turn out to be so ; and therefore it is only 
 good for us to get what we want when what we want 
 is really good. Hence there are two branches of 
 wisdom in this matter. The one consists in having 
 what would now be called a true scale of values : 
 that is to say, in recognizing what are the truly good 
 and best objects of desire, and in what proportions, 
 and what are the true relations of secondary and 
 subordinate to primary and supreme objects of 
 desire. The other consists in having sound judge- 
 ment as to the means of getting the things that we 
 desire, whatever they may be. 
 
 Returning now to the question of the nature of 
 our knowledge or understanding of another man's 
 mind, we may repeat that with our present powers 
 such knowledge or understanding can never be 
 direct, but it may be in various degrees intimate ; for 
 we understand a man's reasoning in so far as we 
 understand his axioms and the processes (sound or 
 fallacious) by which he deduces his conclusions from 
 them. And we understand his actions and his feel- 
 ings so far as we understand his scale of values, his 
 physical capacities and sensations, the degree of his 
 insight into the relation of means to ends, and the 
 
 1 5
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 extent to which his intelligence is clouded by his 
 passions. Note, too, that both as to action and as to 
 thought we may learn by observation to expect and 
 reckon upon conduct and mental processes in an- 
 other which, in the sense explained, we cannot 
 be said to " understand," because we cannot 
 find the key to them in our own experience or 
 feelings. Of such we have a scientific knowledge 
 from the outside, but no " understanding " from 
 within. 
 
 To sum up, then, the whole course both of direct 
 instruction and of what we call the " influence of a 
 personality," consists in one soul being brought, 
 by impressions made upon the senses, to an (indirect 
 and imperfect) insight into the processes within 
 another soul. 
 
 But how if, instead of having to rely upon in- 
 ference (however certain, spontaneous, and even 
 unconscious it may in some cases be), we really had 
 the power, about which we so often speculate, of 
 direct vision of another's thoughts and emotions 
 and the whole sum of the processes in his conscious- 
 ness ! How if we could really " see " another soul 
 in all its vital movements and experiences 1 Now, 
 this is exactly the power which, according to the 
 mediaeval belief, the disembodied souls of the blessed 
 will actually acquire (and retain when reunited to the 
 glorified body of the resurrection) and which the 
 angels enjoyed, by their very nature, from the first. 
 Each such soul or angelic spirit can, up to the 
 measure of its primal and inherent endowment, read 
 
 16
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 the consciousness of every other as directly as it can 
 read its own. 
 
 But there is more than this. We have seen that 
 we do not know or understand even our own souls 
 " in themselves " (p. 9). If we really knew them 
 in their essential being how could philosophers have 
 discussed for ages whether the soul is material or 
 immaterial in its nature, whether or not any of its 
 functions are independent of bodily organs, whether 
 by its nature it is mortal or immortal ? But according 
 to Dante's teachers, angels, unlike men, do actually 
 " know themselves," and therefore by their very 
 nature know God, not indeed in himself, but through 
 his highest and noblest effects. For they have direct 
 knowledge not only of themselves in their inmost 
 essence and constitution, but of each other also. 
 And a like knowledge of themselves, of each other, 
 and of the angelic spirits will be conferred upon the 
 souls of the blessed. 
 
 Let us try to realize something of what this would 
 mean. Not only would our initiation into the 
 processes of another's mind become swift and secure 
 and be freed from all obscurities and misconceptions 
 of expression, but there would be a complete re- 
 moval of all possibility of confusion between the 
 limitations imposed upon our own thoughts by the 
 constitution of our minds and those imposed by their 
 present state. There are, as we have seen, certain 
 axioms or propositions that we cannot conceive as 
 being other than true. But a proposition may be 
 axiomatic to one mind which to another mind is 
 
 17 B
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 manifestly untrue. Thus (to borrow and elaborate 
 an illustration from Aristotle), to the mind of a 
 mathematically uneducated person the proposition 
 that the side and the diagonal of a square are in- 
 commensurable conveys at first no meaning and then 
 becomes so astonishing that it seems impossible to 
 understand how it can possibly be true. That it is 
 in some sense true can only be uncomprehendingly 
 accepted on authority. To the mathematically 
 educated mind, on the other hand, it would involve a 
 flat contradiction to suppose that the two lines are 
 commensurable. Thus, what one mind cannot con- 
 ceive as being so another cannot conceive as being 
 other than so. 
 
 And this need not be a difference of constitution 
 between the two minds, for the one may well 
 be capable of being brought to the fuller insight 
 of the other. Thus Aristotle himself took it as 
 axiomatic that if one body were twice as heavy as 
 another it would fall through space twice as fast. 
 But afterwards Galileo first saw that this could not 
 be true and then demonstrated to the incredulous that 
 it was not. And this not because his mind was 
 differently constituted from Aristotle's, for Aristotle 
 would have reached Galileo's position in a moment 
 had anyone been at hand to direct his mind to 
 certain obvious facts and principles. Thus, if we had 
 direct access to our own souls and to other and higher 
 souls than our own we could never fall into that 
 " illusion of incapacity " which so often paralyzes 
 effort and checks progress. We should never think 
 
 18
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 ourselves constitutionally incapable of learning things 
 when all that was really wanting was to see our 
 teacher's thought behind his words or even without 
 words, and to be willing to try to follow it. We 
 might indeed see in spirits of greater power than 
 our own processes that we could not follow, but 
 within the range of our actual capacity it would be 
 impossible for us to cling hopelessly and helplessly 
 to false axioms or false deductions which we were, 
 in fact, constitutionally capable of seeing through, if 
 once we had seen the truth in another's mind. Our 
 minds might grow, and until they had reached the 
 limit of their capacity they would grow ; but though 
 there would be teaching there would be no perplexed 
 and bewildered learners and no vexed or baffled or 
 disappointed teachers. Seeing a mind at work on a 
 level too high for our comprehension would provoke 
 wonder and admiration, but could never create 
 confusion. 
 
 And the analogue of all this in matters of emo- 
 tion and choice, or in the grading of values, 
 would be equally true. ' We needs must love 
 the highest when we see it," and if we saw 
 another's soul we should see all things under its 
 scale of values ; and so far as our souls were 
 capable of right estimates we could not love the 
 lower better than the higher when the higher had 
 once been seen. 
 
 As we are now constituted every process of in- 
 fluencing or training of one mind by another must 
 consist in getting the one mind, indirectly and im- 
 
 19
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 perfectly, through media and by inference, into 
 some kind of understanding of what is in the other; 
 and under such influencing and training we make 
 our way to such truth of insight and feeling as we 
 attain ; but what if we could really " see " the 
 thoughts and feelings of a Shakespeare or a Newton, 
 and lay their insight and their scheme of values side 
 by side with our own ! Could we ever live and think 
 on the old levels again ? And in matters of right 
 and wrong, or of noble and ignoble motive, if a word 
 from a friend or even the thought of him or a chance- 
 struck sentence or line in a book can often startle us 
 into a sudden insight and a rectification of moral 
 values, what if we could actually " see " the higher 
 scheme that we can only feel after in semi-darkness ! 
 Surely, even though our lives under stress of passion 
 should fail to conform themselves to the higher 
 insight (even as they fail to conform themselves to 
 such ideals as we have actually won through to), 
 yet their compelling and persuasive force could 
 never be escaped nor could we ever find refuge from 
 them in the belief that we were constitutionally in- 
 capable of seeing and feeling what we had actually 
 seen and felt. 
 
 So much for conceivable insight into created 
 spirits. But what if we could " see " God himself? 
 Should we not then see things in their absolute 
 truth and in their absolute values ? And would 
 it not be impossible to be drawn aside from 
 that vision of the perfect whole to any frag- 
 mentary object of bewildered and distorting 
 
 20
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 " appetite " P 1 That surely were Heaven. But may 
 such a thing be ? 
 
 A recapitulation at this point will show us at once 
 what progress we have made and how far we still are 
 from the goal. We can indirectly infer from outward 
 signs the inward processes of other minds because 
 we believe them to be analogous to those we are 
 directly conscious of in ourselves. We can attach 
 some meaning to the idea of having a direct per- 
 ception of those processes in another mind because 
 we actually have direct perception of things analo- 
 gous to them in our own. We can perhaps in some 
 sort imagine new powers which would enable us to 
 know our own souls in their intimate and essential 
 being, and if we could do that might we not be able 
 to have a direct knowledge of other souls like our 
 own ? Nay, if there are angelic spirits whose intelli- 
 gence is that of a created and limited consciousness, 
 and is so far analogous to our own, might we not 
 conceive it possible that we should have some direct 
 knowledge of them too, which, in spite of their 
 loftier and intenser insight, should be true up to the 
 limit of our powers of comprehension ? 
 
 But why have I constantly introduced the qualifi- 
 
 1 A quella luce tal si diventa, 
 
 che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto 
 e impossibil che mai si consenta ; 
 Pero che il ben, ch' e del volere objetto, 
 tutto s' accoglie in lei ; e fuor di quella 
 & defettivo cio ch' e li perfetto. 
 
 ParaJiso xxxiii : I oo 105. 
 21
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 cation " up to the measure of our inherent capacity " 
 in expounding Dante's philosophy ? What exactly 
 does it mean and what does it involve ? It was the 
 firm belief both of Dante and his teachers that 
 whereas every human soul had certain faculties 
 (whether in realized or only in potential activity), 
 such as the power of making comparisons and 
 generalizations, grasping axiomatic truths, deducing 
 consequences from them, experiencing and com- 
 paring attractions and repulsions, conceiving desires 
 and selecting means by which to fulfil them, yet in 
 different individuals these powers were possessed in 
 different degrees of sensitiveness and strength. 
 Though of the same essential quality and character 
 in all, these powers were inherently and ultimately 
 capable of higher development in one than in an- 
 other. Thus, though an axiom might be equally 
 obvious and certain to two minds it might be in- 
 definitely richer in its implied content and so more 
 fertile to one of them than to the other. And this 
 not only by circumstance, but by inherent capacity. 
 
 So, too, if new powers should be conferred on the 
 soul after death, such as the power of direct vision of 
 spiritual essences, these powers also would be as- 
 signed in different degree to different individuals. 
 And in either case, as there are limits of degree for 
 the individual so there are limits of quality proper 
 to the race of men, and to the nature of each angelic 
 being, or common to all the created intelligence as 
 such. 
 
 It is with the limitations of created intelligence 
 22
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION 
 
 as such that we are now concerned ; for all the pro- 
 cesses and all the creatures which we have even 
 imagined ourselves to know by direct access to their 
 essential being lie within the limits of created con- 
 sciousness. Of matter "in itself" we cannot even 
 conceive ourselves as having intimate knowledge, 
 because it is not consciousness ; nor of God " in 
 himself," because he is not created. To the supreme, 
 the unconditioned, the self-sustained, the eternal 
 first cause, as he exists essentially in and to himself, 
 our own created intelligence gives us no access by 
 any kind of analogy. To " see God " would be not 
 to receive some new power in expansion of our 
 human nature, but to break out beyond the bounds of 
 " created consciousness " itself, whether human or 
 angelic. It would make us partakers of the divine crea- 
 tive Life itself: for God alone can know himself. 
 
 " Can this be ? " And if so, "how can it be ? " and 
 "what must it be?" To these questions I must sim- 
 ply try to give the answers expressly elaborated by 
 Aquinas and everywhere assumed by Dante. My 
 task as an expounder extends no further. 
 
 Can it be ? It must be. Philosophy and natural 
 religion, confirmed by revelation, tell us that the 
 Creator will not thwart the essential nature of his 
 creature. Now, the longing for conclusive blessed- 
 ness and the unquenchable sense that such blessed- 
 ness is not a mere dream, but an actual possibility, 
 belong to the essential nature of man. Man there- 
 fore is destined to attain it ; and nothing short of 
 " deiformity," or likeness to God in our own inward 
 
 23
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 being, will give it. It must be God's will, therefore, 
 that man should share his essential being. 
 
 " How " then can it be ? To human or angelic 
 nature it is, in itself, impossible to be or to become 
 deiform, but to God all things are possible ; and by 
 impressing his very self, essentially, upon the created 
 spirit he can so transfuse it with the " light of glory " 
 (lumen gloriti) that " in that light it can see the light." 
 For when assimilated to the essential being of God 
 it can, up to the measure of the initial capacity 
 divinely bestowed, see God as he sees himself. 
 ;< Up to its measure." For the infinite must remain 
 in infinite excess of the finite. But the assimilation 
 within that measure may be perfect and may con- 
 stitute, to that spirit, the absolute fulfilment of its 
 longing for perfect vision and for perfect blessedness. 
 
 " What " will it be ? The direct vision of perfect 
 power, wisdom, love ; of perfect goodness, truth, 
 beauty ; not as abstractions or ideals of our minds, 
 but as the very being of God, who is Being's self. 
 
 By assimilation to the divine being and participa- 
 tion therein the blessed spirit sees God as he sees 
 himself, and sees all things and all beings as God 
 sees them : in their perfect and untarnished truth 
 and beauty. There is no room here for accepting or 
 rejecting. Seeing God, the spirit sees all things 
 under God's own values, and is caught into the glory 
 of his ineffable love and bliss. Standing thus at the 
 fontal source of all being, the blessed spirit sees the 
 material as well as the spiritual side of creation in its 
 Psalm xxxv : 10 [A.V. xxxvi : 9]. 
 2 4
 
 EDEN AND THE FALL 
 
 intrinsic nature, even as the Creator sees it. Time, 
 space, and causation are no longer conditions that 
 bind the thought and experience upon which they 
 are imposed, but acts of the Creative Mind itself, 
 above which that mind, with all that it has called 
 into fellowship with itself, stands supreme. God and 
 his elect see the universe and love it not in fragments 
 but as a whole, not as a stream of effects which they 
 must stem in order to reach up towards the first 
 cause, but as an utterance flowing, as by force of its 
 intrinsic and divine fitness and glory, from the 
 central Consciousness itself within which they stand 
 and by which they are compassed. 
 
 II. THE LIFE OF INNOCENCE AND 
 THE FALL 
 
 Our next step must be to try to understand the 
 mediaeval conception of the life of man on earth as it 
 was before the Fall, and would have remained had 
 Adam not fallen. Dante tells us that collective 
 humanity is not only a whole consisting of parts, 
 but also a part of a greater whole. And this is 
 equally true of each individual. It follows that a 
 twofold harmony is needed if man's life is to conform 
 in all respects to the purpose of his Creator. Not only 
 must the varied appetites, faculties, and desires upon 
 which man's life is built work in perfect harmony 
 and balance with each other, so that there may be no 
 internal warp or discord within him, but also he 
 
 Monarchic I. vii. 
 
 2 5
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 must duly relate this internally harmonious life of his 
 to the greater whole of which it is a part. As to this 
 latter harmony the scholastic philosophy and theo- 
 logy start from the assumption that the goodness of 
 God, the infinite and absolute Perfection, must flow 
 out 'in some form of self-expression or self-utterance 
 in and to beings that can share the joy of conscious 
 existence. But since a complete expression of the 
 Infinite is impossible (except as expressed by and to 
 itself) variety of expression must compensate, as best 
 may be, for the inherent limitations of receptive 
 susceptibility on the part of the created intelligences 
 to whom the revelation is to be conveyed. So when 
 God uttered himself in creation he called into being 
 countless hosts of angels, all pure spirit like him- 
 self, and all endowed with direct spiritual vision 
 enabling them to see themselves and each other in 
 their essence, and thus to see in themselves their 
 Creator as manifested in his highest effects. So far 
 their own nature went, but (as we have seen) it was 
 only by a miraculous act from outside their nature 
 that they could be brought to and sustained in the 
 direct " vision of God " ; and Satan and the rebel 
 angels, not brooking even an instantaneous proba- 
 tion, fell in their pride " unripe ": that is to say, 
 without ever reaching the consummation to which 
 the faithful angels were instantaneously and irre- 
 vocably called. Of these immaterial beings, con- 
 firmed in bliss, every single one had his own proper 
 vision of God and therefore his own quality of 
 knowledge, of love, and of joy so distinctive as to 
 
 26
 
 EDEN AND THE FALL 
 
 make him not only a different individual, but of a 
 different species from all the rest. Yet each saw God 
 truly as he is : in his essence, not merely in his effects. 
 Even this unimaginable variety of self-com- 
 munication, however, did not exhaust God's self- 
 utterance in calling conscious beings into participa- 
 tion of his joy. He willed further to create an order 
 of beings who, unlike the angels, should grow 
 through a succession of experiences and a continuous 
 development to the full realization of their natural 
 powers instead of reaching them at a bound in 
 accomplished fullness ; and this order of beings was 
 not all to be created simultaneously, as the angels 
 were, but was to spring from a single pair and was 
 to multiply through the ages. Moreover, the suc- 
 cessions and limitations of their development were 
 to be controlled by the conditions of time and space 
 in contradistinction from the timeless and spaceless 
 existence of pure spirit. So man was to be a material 
 as well as a spiritual being. His soul was to be so 
 associated with a physical body as to receive all the 
 materials for its full development through the gates 
 of the senses. This human soul or vital principle 
 had, indeed, as we have already seen (p. 1 1), latent 
 powers which could ultimately transcend the limits 
 of the material organs with which it was associated 
 and reach by abstraction to a realm of immaterial 
 truth, though not to the direct perception of im- 
 material beings ; and these powers may be thought 
 of as constituting a " mind " or " spirit " which is 
 the highest aspect of the human " life " or " soul," 
 
 27
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 and which differentiates it from the life or soul of the 
 plants and lower animals. But the matter on which 
 these higher powers were to exercise themselves, 
 and above which they were to rise, must all be sup- 
 plied by the senses. It was from sense data that all 
 else must be developed. 
 
 Adam himself received his natural powers and 
 his full stores of knowledge instantaneously at his 
 creation ; but this was a personal gift, not a part of 
 the human nature he was to transmit to his posterity. 
 Moreover, though he received his knowledge miracu- 
 lously it was natural, not miraculous, knowledge 
 that he received : just as in the Gospel though the 
 man born blind received his sight miraculously it 
 was natural sight that he so received. 
 
 We must not, however, judge of human nature as 
 it was created in Eden altogether from human nature 
 even at its best and inmost as we know it now. 
 Adam had, and his descendants would have had, not 
 only (as we shall see) a more harmonious nature, 
 but quicker spiritual perceptions and a more direct 
 knowledge both of self, of fellow-man, and of God 
 (though not in his essence) than we can now have on 
 earth. Had Adam not fallen the normal education 
 and development of man from infancy to maturity 
 would have had that sweet and frictionless move- 
 ment, without wavering or error in its progress, that 
 we have imagined as flowing from a power of direct 
 vision of the processes of another mind (p. 12). 
 Moreover, man would normally have inherited in 
 the earthly life certain revealed truths inaccessible 
 
 28
 
 EDEN AND THE FALL 
 
 to the human faculties even in their unfallen state ; 
 and then, after the fullest fruition of the perfect 
 earthly life, man, without the death of the body or the 
 provisional isolation of the soul, would have passed 
 from the earthly to the heavenly life. His soul trans- 
 muted by the " light of glory " and his body trans- 
 formed into a perfect and unresisting instrument of 
 his soul, he would have " seen God," seen the uni- 
 verse as God sees it, and entered the eternal life. 
 
 Man, then, has his own proper place in the divine 
 scheme, and the fall of the angels, even if it was the 
 occasion, was not the deepest cause or reason of his 
 creation, for he was an integral part of the divine 
 self-utterance, which would not have been complete 
 without him. The whole order of the material 
 creation exists for the sake of man, and for his sake 
 only. Its function is threefold : to sustain his body, 
 to educate and develop his spirit, and to give him 
 the material for that moulding and artistic self- 
 utterance which is his nearest analogue to the divine 
 privilege of creation. 
 
 Now that we see how far the whole scheme of 
 God's self-revelation extends beyond humanity we 
 can understand more clearly what is meant by the 
 distinction between the inward order of man's 
 powers and appetites among themselves and his 
 conformity to the greater order of which his whole 
 being is in its turn a part. 
 
 Now, since man, even in his first perfection, could 
 not grasp the whole purpose of God, there was this 
 difference between his ordering of his life in itself 
 
 29
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 and his ordering of it with reference to the whole 
 creative plan, namely, that whereas all the elements 
 of the one order were within the range of his own 
 direct perception he had to take those of the other 
 on trust. So when God made Adam and Eve and set 
 them in Eden they realized the perfect balance of 
 their powers, as applied to the totality of their own 
 fruition of life ; but their relation to God's wider 
 plan was beyond their ken, and with respect to this 
 conformity a command must take the place of the 
 spontaneous following of unerring impulse. 
 
 Dante's own account of the spontaneous internal 
 harmony of the life of unfallen man is placed by him 
 on the lips of Virgil when the pilgrims have actually 
 reached the Garden of Eden, or Earthly Paradise, 
 itself, at the summit of the Purgatorial Mount in 
 the southern hemisphere. ' Thy will," he says to 
 Dante, " is free, upright, and sound. It were a fault 
 not to act according to its prompting." 1 This is the 
 state described by Wordsworth : 
 
 When love is an unerring light 
 And joy its own security. 
 
 Aquinas gives a more elaborate and analytical ac- 
 count of this primal state of man, but it is in complete 
 accord with the utterances of the poets. He tells us 
 that Adam and Eve had all the natural appetites and 
 desires both of the senses and of the mind, and that 
 
 1 Libero, dritto e sano e tuo arbitrio, 
 e fallo fora non fare a suo senno. 
 
 Purgatorio xxvii : 140 sq. 
 
 3
 
 EDEN AND THE FALL 
 
 the fineness of their spiritual and material percep- 
 tions made their enjoyment far keener than ours 
 can be, but that all impulses were so controlled by 
 reason as never to press for any gratification which 
 would disturb the full harmony and balance of their 
 being. In this description we must not be misled by 
 the associations of the word "reason," for with the 
 Schoolmen it does not stand merely for the cold 
 ratiocinative faculty as opposed to emotion. Here 
 again Wordsworth comes to our aid, with his phrase : 
 
 Yea, all the adamantine holds of truth 
 By reason built, or passion, which itself 
 Is highest reason in a soul sublime. 
 
 We are to imagine the appetites, then, not as con- 
 trolled by something outside themselves that re- 
 strains them, so much as inspired by an inward sense 
 of the harmony in which, and in which alone, each 
 finds its full self-realization. 
 
 So Adam and Eve were incapable by their very 
 constitution of sinning against their own higher 
 nature, considered in itself, or of allowing any im- 
 pulse to demand independent play in defiance of the 
 rest. It was only in the collective rhythm of all that 
 each could find full scope for the combined self- 
 abandonment and self-expression which is its life 
 and fulfilment. When our first parents desired to 
 eat of the forbidden fruit that very desire is the 
 proof that what they sought was neither evil in itself 
 nor intrinsically evil for them. But to desire it now 
 and thus was a breach of that subordination of their
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 life in its fullness to the total order to which they 
 were bidden to adjust themselves by obedience and 
 not by sight. It was because Adam, tempted by Eve, 
 could not rest content under the provisional veiling 
 of this wider purpose from human sight that man 
 fell. Had man been obedient this larger relation in 
 which he stood would have been revealed to him in 
 due course, for it was good for him to have it, 
 though not to have it thus and now. 
 
 The punishment was in exact accord with the 
 offence. As man had refused to seek the fulfilment 
 of his desire in due subordination to the whole of 
 which he was a part, so now his several passions, 
 impulses, and desires imitated his own insubordina- 
 tion and no longer conspired to make perfect the 
 whole of which they were parts, but each asserted 
 itself in reckless isolation, and destructively invaded 
 that harmony which it had before supported. Thus 
 reason (the perception of the true harmonies of 
 human nature) was no more the concordant and 
 spontaneous self-weaving of the varied impulses and 
 faculties of man into the pattern that gave each its 
 full interpretation and glory ; for reason had now to 
 hold a precarious and tottering seat above a host of 
 seething and rebellious passions and desires that 
 recognized neither its authority nor each other's 
 rights. Man still retained so much of the divine 
 light as to see dimly that there must be some con- 
 clusive and all-embracing bliss behind and beyond 
 these blind and mutually-destructive, or even self- 
 destructive, pretenders to the throne, no one of which 
 
 32
 
 EDEN AND THE FALL 
 
 kept, or could keep, its promises. But though the 
 love of beauty, of goodness, and of truth were still 
 innate to man, yet every gleam of random and partial 
 good might henceforth claim to direct his steps, and 
 the very innocence of the young soul, instead of 
 being its guarantee of safety, might betray it to its 
 corruption. 1 
 
 Such, then, is the state of fallen man, and such was 
 his original nature and destiny. The whole history of 
 man since the Fall is the history, on the one hand, of 
 human aberration, and, on the other, of the means 
 of escape and recovery vouchsafed by the divine 
 mercy. Not only were the life and death upon earth 
 of the Incarnate Word and the healing power of the 
 Church and her administrations means and channels 
 of this grace, but so, too, were the civil ordinances 
 and studies that regulate the mundane affairs, 
 relations, thoughts, and imaginings of men ; for 
 they, too, though on a lower plane, are a part of the 
 divine provision for the rescue of fallen humanity. 
 Secular as well as sacred learning has its sanction 
 as a means of " repairing the ravage of the Fall." 
 
 1 L' anima simplicetta, che sa nulla, 
 salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, 
 volentier torna a cio che la trastulla, 
 
 Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore ; 
 quivi s' inganna, e dietro ad essa corre, 
 se guida o fren non torce suo amore. 
 
 Purgatorio xvi : 88 sqq. 
 
 33
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 III. HELL 
 
 And now at length we have reached a point at which 
 we can trace the precise bearing of these fundamental 
 beliefs in Dante's mind upon his treatment of hell 
 and purgatory in the Comedy. His essential or 
 positive theme is found in his delineations of the 
 Earthly Paradise and Heaven, for it is here that the 
 true nature of human life and the true destiny of 
 man are portrayed. But in order to regain the lost 
 position from which the realization of this true life 
 and destiny is possible we must first understand the 
 nature of our aberrations, and in the second place 
 must not only turn away from them but must so 
 reverse and cancel them that it shall be as though 
 they had never been. Only when we have unlived 
 our evil lives shall we be able to enter upon our true 
 life with no uncancelled record of perversity to mar 
 its purity. 
 
 The first step is to realize what we have fallen to. 
 The second step is to cancel the fall by an ascent. 
 Hell is the disordered life into which we have 
 fallen. Purgatory is the cancelling penitence by 
 which we regain the estate from which we have 
 lapsed. 
 
 Dante's vision of Hell, therefore, is not so much 
 a warning or a threat as to the consequence of sin as 
 a revelation of its inmost nature ; and to reveal the 
 true nature of sin is to reveal the true state of fallen 
 and sinful man. As a presentation of an awful fate 
 
 34
 
 HELL 
 
 that will catch the impenitent sinner hereafter 
 Dante's Inferno must rank with other descriptions 
 of hell. As a revelation of what the evil choice is in 
 itself, wherever and whenever made, here or here- 
 after, it stands alone. 
 
 And in like manner Dante's Purgatorio reveals not 
 the painful condition on compliance with which 
 heaven is offered to the repentant sinner, but a 
 blessed opportunity of cancelling from within his 
 own evil past. The man who sees where his choice 
 has so identified him with things evil, and so alienated 
 him from things good, that his own record would 
 make a discord with heaven in his soul, is now 
 allowed to build up for himself a new record 
 of passionate self-identification with good which 
 shall utterly annul the record of his former self- 
 surrender to evil and shall construct a record 
 through which " the stream of memory can flow 
 unstained." 1 
 
 In other words, Dante's Inferno is a revelation of 
 the falseness of the values by which we live when we 
 sin. And his Purgatorio tells how a new life, lived in 
 tune with a new sense of values, may make our whole 
 consciousness, not only our aspirations and desires, 
 harmonious with the experiences of Eden and of 
 Heaven. 
 
 But here (to borrow a technical term from Dante's 
 
 1 Se tosto grazia risolva le schiume 
 di vostra conscienza, si che chiaro 
 per essa scenda della mente il fiume. 
 
 Purgatorio xiii : 88 sqq. 
 
 35
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 vocabulary) we must be careful to " distinguish." 
 On its own denizens hell has no remedial effect 
 whatever, for it brings no revelation to them. It is 
 the place in which " there is no returning to a right 
 state of will," x and to say that there is no possibility 
 of repentance in Hell is to say that there can be no 
 changed sense of values, and so no revelation of the 
 true meaning of sin to those who are there. So far 
 Dante was in close accord with the received teaching 
 of his time, and, indeed, with the professed creed of 
 the vast majority of Christians in almost every age. 
 Hell, to Dante as to others, was eternal not, indeed, 
 in the primary sense of being altogether out of rela- 
 tion to time, without beginning or end, and without 
 any conscious successions, but in the secondary 
 sense of " ever-enduring " and " not subject to 
 essential change." Hell therefore is the place of 
 impenitent sin, in which the sinners, though 
 raging against their accomplices, accusing their 
 ill-luck, or cursing God, their parents, and their 
 kin 
 
 The human race, the seed from which they grew, 
 The hour and place they were begotten in 2 
 
 (MUSGRAVE) 
 
 1 U' non si riede 
 giammai a buon voler. 
 
 Paradiso xx : 106 sq. 
 
 2 Bestemmiavano Iddio e lor parenti, 
 
 1' umana specie, il luogo, il tempo e il seme 
 di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti. 
 
 Inferno iii : 103 sqq. 
 
 36
 
 HELL 
 
 yet never essentially change their ideals. However 
 well they see the folly of what they did, they no more 
 feel the vileness or vanity of what they aimed at than 
 they did on earth. But the very consistency and force 
 with which Dante holds this belief transforms his 
 vision of Hell into a revelation of the nature of the 
 evil choice itself and of the state of mind that it 
 expresses. And it is this that distinguishes, from the 
 moral and spiritual point of view, Dante's descrip- 
 tions from those, for instance, of Aquinas or of 
 Bunyan. While they in their delineations of Hell 
 exhaust their genius in the attempt to impress upon 
 us the frightful consequences we shall incur by sin, 
 Dante reveals to us the inherent evilness of the evil 
 choice itself, and turns not only our deliberate will, 
 but our affections and our very passions clean away 
 from it. 
 
 The manner in which Dante accomplishes his 
 purpose can be brought under no formula. It is true, 
 in general, to say that in reading the Inferno we realize 
 how the man who makes an evil choice has simply 
 to have rope enough, and to get, without qualifica- 
 tion or relief, exactly what he seeks, in order therein 
 and thereby to be utterly damned. Thus we see the 
 misers rolling huge stones with ceaseless strain and 
 toil, but accomplishing nothing, and getting no- 
 where, for ever and ever. But this is just what the 
 miser is doing now. He is courting toil and weariness 
 and depriving himself of all their fruits. To do this 
 always and only is his constant endeavour, and to 
 succeed in doing it is Hell. Or we may listen to the 
 
 37
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 confession of the sullen souls sunken in the mire of 
 the river Styx : 
 
 Sullen we were 
 
 Once in the sweet air where the Sun makes glee, 
 And sluggish vapours then within us bare ; 
 Now in these bitter dregs sullen are we ! x 
 
 (MuSGRAVE.) 
 
 This is what sulking is. If we choose by a deliberate 
 exercise of will to shut out the sunshine and air of 
 converse with those around us, and to nurse a venge- 
 ful sense of grievance in the sodden blackness of our 
 minds, and if we are strong enough to persist and 
 to succeed, then we have achieved Hell. 
 
 The attempt has sometimes been made to work 
 out this idea, and this alone, through every circle 
 and into every detail. But this is to reduce the free 
 play of Dante's splendid and appalling imagination 
 to the artificiality of an ingenious but frigid allegory ; 
 and, as a fact, his method varies. Sometimes the 
 punishment of the sin is represented under the 
 more obvious and familiar type of the sinner re- 
 ceiving the same measure which he had himself 
 meted. Thus, the sowers of schism, who have dis- 
 severed those who belong to each other and who 
 must ever yearn for reunion, are themselves cleft 
 and mangled to reunite and be cleft again by 
 the scimitar of a fiend. In other cases the form 
 
 Tristi fummo 
 
 nell' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra, 
 portando dentro accidioso fummo : 
 Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra. 
 
 Inferno vii : 121 sq q. 
 
 38
 
 HELL 
 
 of punishment is, in the first instance at least, sug- 
 gested, for example, by a current etymology that 
 connected the word " hypocrite " with the Greek 
 word for " gold," or by the scriptural association of 
 the punishment of unnatural vice with the fiery rain 
 that fell upon the Cities of the Plain. But whenceso- 
 ever Dante derives his materials and whatever the 
 particular relation between sin and punishment into 
 which he works them, the whole atmospheric im- 
 pression is uniform and is irresistibl- . Every reader 
 who is not paralyzed by mere horrors, or carried 
 away by isolated splendours of poetry, feels, vaguely 
 perhaps at first, but with inevitable cumulative effect 
 [~as he reads on and as he reads again, that a great seer 
 is unfolding to him the Vision of Sin, and this as the 
 first step in his task of striving " to rescue those who 
 are yet living from the state of misery and lead them 
 to the state of bliss."] 
 
 In his dogmatic conception of hell, then, as a 
 place of eternal and hopeless misery Dante stands 
 where his contemporaries stood, but under this 
 aspect he does not make the least attempt to explain 
 it, or bring it into relation with our human sense of 
 justice. He simply accepts it as a part of the divine 
 scheme. It wakes pity and horror in the poet's own 
 heart. The enlightened eyes of Beatrice seeing it as 
 God sees it can look upon it unmoved. 1 But it is in 
 
 Epistola ad Kanem Grandem (15) : 268 sqq. [39]. 
 
 1 lo son fatto da Dio, sua merce, tale, 
 che la vostra miseria non mi tange. 
 
 Inferno ii : 91 sq. 
 
 39
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 the strength of faith, not of sight, that Dante calls it 
 the work of " the Divine Power, the Supreme 
 Wisdom, and the Primal Love." He cannot look 
 upon it without being caught by swirls of uncon- 
 trollable anguish or having to wrestle with a passion- 
 ate inward protest. 
 
 It is by thus abstaining from all attempts to ex- 
 plain Hell, or to "justify the ways of God" in 
 creating it, that Dante gives it the impersonality 
 which alone makes it tolerable. It fixes the reader's 
 mind upon Hell not as a material fact (which 
 however it scared could hardly convert or enlighten 
 him), but as a symbol of impenitent sin a symbol 
 which can never lose its significance or its redeeming 
 power so long as men are capable of erring and of 
 recognizing that they have erred. 
 
 It remains, in this connection, to note that it was 
 in relation to the dogma of an eternal Hell that 
 Dante's faith found its hardest and perhaps its only 
 trial. That a Virgil or an Aristotle, for no defect in 
 their own lives or conduct, and for no neglected 
 opportunity that had ever been presented to them, 
 should be eternally barred from conclusive bliss, and 
 should be condemned for ever to live in longing that 
 knew no hope, appeared so cruelly unjust that we 
 feel the strain upon his faith almost reaching the 
 breaking-point. The thought of Virgil's exile gives 
 to Dante's portraiture of him a pathos that has no 
 parallel in literature ; and the " thirst of many 
 years" with which it parched his soul, though it 
 prompted one of the sublimest songs of faith ever 
 
 40
 
 HELL 
 
 uttered by man, was carried back from heaven to 
 earth unslaked, however soothed. 
 
 The hell of Dante's creed, then, is an unexplained 
 and unintelligible place of torture ; but the Hell of 
 his vision is the revelation of the nature of impenitent 
 sin. And it follows, on either count, thaf the vision 
 of Hell vouchsafed to the pilgrims can never be 
 shared by the Denizens of hell itself; for sin, so 
 long as it is impenitent, cannot see itself as it is. 
 The message that the souls in hell have for Dante, 
 and through him for us, they can never receive them- 
 selves. Trajan, it is true, had been in hell, and at 
 the prayer of Gregory had been released from 
 bondage, so that Dante saw his soul in the heaven 
 of the just. But even he had not repented, or rather 
 had not come to the right view of truth, in hell, but 
 had been restored miraculously to the earthly life 
 in order that he might be capable of the enlighten- 
 ment which it was unthinkable that he should receive 
 in hell. 
 
 It is possible to initiate on earth the process which, 
 continued in Purgatory, shall lead to the Terrestrial 
 Paradise and ultimately to Heaven. But it is not 
 possible for that process to be initiated in hell. 
 Hence there is an absolute and final discontinuity 
 between hell and purgatory, objectively and for 
 their denizens. The departing soul takes its journey 
 either to the bank of Acheron to find its eternal 
 place in hell, or else to the mouth of Tiber to gain 
 the shore of the purifying mount, the Garden of 
 
 Paradiso xix, xx. 
 41
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 Eden, and then Heaven, in its continuous progress 
 towards its eternal place of fruition in God. But these 
 are alternatives, and there is no passing through Hell 
 to Purgatory. 
 
 Nevertheless, so completely does Dante's vision 
 dominate his dogma in the resultant impression left 
 on the reader's mind that nothing is more common 
 than to find the subjective continuity of the pilgrim's 
 experience translated into terms of an objective con- 
 tinuity of function in the regions he traverses. 
 Hence, such assertions as that, " according to Dante, 
 Hell is the first step towards Heaven." How en- 
 tirely this contradicts Dante's conception we have 
 clearly seen, for Hell is the evil choice stereotyped 
 and irrevocable. It is a false scheme of values 
 arrested, ingrained, and become indelible. But 
 whereas the damned for ever see sin as it is not, they 
 reveal it as it is, and therefore the vision of Hell is 
 indeed what Hell itself is not the first step to 
 Heaven. To have " seen " what the fallen state is 
 fills us with heimweh for the Paradise we have lost 
 and sets our will to regain it. 
 
 IV. PURGATORY AND THE RECOVERED 
 
 EDEN 
 
 Dante uniformly represents his vision as the record 
 of an actual experience which had been granted to 
 him by a miraculous intervention wholly outside the 
 ordinary course of nature. He was called to this 
 experience by the divine mercy as the sole means of 
 
 42
 
 PURGATORY AND EDEN 
 
 breaking down the obduracy of his own sinful heart 
 which had resisted even the exceptional means of 
 grace already vouchsafed to him. But the facts which 
 he represents as brought home to him with over- 
 whelming force and directness by miraculous means, 
 are accessible enough to all of us on earth if we 
 would but see them. Dante saw the evil choice as it 
 really is because he saw it stripped of all disguise, 
 freed from all admixture, and robbed of the glamour 
 with which false imaginations and associations in- 
 vest it. But we, too, may see it as it is if we will but 
 open our eyes. Nor does Dante conceive that God 
 has left us, even in our fallen state, altogether with- 
 out succour. Reason, it is true, was weakened and 
 confused by the Fall, and the passions now no longer 
 spontaneously acknowledge her sway. But it is still 
 her function to emancipate all our natural impulses 
 and appetites, both of sense and soul, from the im- 
 potence and thwartings of isolated self-assertion and 
 to bring them back to the freedom and harmony of 
 mutual support and order. Under her control the 
 earthly life, even of fallen man, may approximate 
 ever more closely to the life of Eden. And so even 
 as the divine grace condescended to prepare through 
 long ages the redemptive plan which, in its last 
 great act on the Mount of Calvary, should cancel 
 the " long prohibition " that had barred man out of 
 his forfeited heaven, so, too, by a contemporaneous 
 evolution on the secular side this same grace had 
 elaborated a system for the regulation of the affairs 
 
 Purgatorio xxx : 133-138. 
 
 43
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 of this world which should enable man in large 
 measure to " repair the ravage of the Fall " on its 
 temporal and earthly side. 
 
 Nothing is more essential for the right under- 
 standing of Dante than a clear conception of this two- 
 fold work of restoration as he conceives it. In Eden 
 Reason spontaneously secured man in the enjoyment 
 of terrestrial felicity, and Revelation would have led 
 him, in due course, first to a knowledge of the con- 
 ditions of celestial bliss and then to its fruition. 
 Nor did either Reason or Revelation abdicate its 
 function at the Fall. It is still Reason's business to 
 lead man to a life as of Eden ; and that is why Virgil 
 is Dante's guide not only in Hell, but right up into 
 the very Garden of Eden itself at the summit of the 
 Mount of Purgatory. And it is still the function of 
 Revelation to declare to man the nature of heavenly 
 bliss and to direct him to its attainment. Reason has 
 spoken through the great philosophers and poets, 
 and has organized her counsels for the regulation of 
 social life in that august instrument of administrative 
 justice the Roman Law, called by Dante scritta 
 ragione " Reason codified." And in like manner 
 Revelation has been embodied in the Scriptures of 
 the Old and New Testaments. 
 
 Nor did the divinely granted succour to fallen 
 man arrest itself here : for Scripture and Roman 
 Law were each of them committed to the authorized 
 guardianship and interpretative administration of a 
 great institution which had been elaborated pari 
 passu with them; the institutions, namely, of the 
 
 44
 
 PURGATORY AND EDEN 
 
 Empire and the Church, the " spouse and secretary 
 of God " who " cannot lie." 
 
 It is with the former of these two institutions that 
 we are immediately concerned. Had the Empire 
 performed its duties, and had Roman Law been 
 duly enforced, there would have been a standing 
 vindication of justice upon earth and a perpetual 
 setting forth of the true scheme of moral values. 
 Greed, the greatest foe of justice, would have been 
 held in check ; with justice assured peace would 
 have been firmly established ; in relations of mutual 
 helpfulness the nations of the earth would have 
 supplemented and aided each the other's progress, 
 and the goal of human civilization would have been 
 reached in a life of earthly felicity reflecting, at least, 
 though not fully realizing, the original design of the 
 Creator for the earthly stage of man's existence. But 
 the Empire, internally false to its mission and ex- 
 ternally thwarted by the secular usurpations of the 
 Church, had failed to give the needed guidance and 
 support to frail and hesitating human virtue, and man 
 had gone farther and farther astray for lack of true 
 leaders. Nevertheless, in the heart of man the light 
 of Reason still shone, though with dimmed lustre, 
 and was still shed abroad by the writings of poets 
 and philosophers, while the protest of the Roman 
 Law against every form of injustice still stood. 
 
 Convivio II. vi : 33 sq. [v : 5], iv : 32 sq. [iii : 10]. Cf. IV. rv : 
 
 49 '? [5l- 
 
 Monarchia I. iii syy., III. rvi, and passim. Purgatorio xvi : 97 sq q ., 
 xixii : 94 j^.,and many other passages in the Comedy and elsewhere. 
 
 45
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 Men therefore were not without means of ethical 
 grace, and only the most hardened could fail to see, 
 at least in their better moments, the true nature of 
 good and evil and to turn from the evil that had 
 stained their own lives. Such repentance when deep 
 and sincere would not be a mere intellectual per- 
 ception, however vivid, of the right values and of the 
 reasonableness of a life regulated by them. It would 
 be a definite act of the will and of the affections, 
 going out in passionate love to the virtues erst 
 neglected, and actively repelling and abominating 
 the evil once embraced. To the truly penitent 
 an evil choice is not something that, though still 
 attractive, must be resisted. For true repentance is a 
 turning away of the whole heart and the whole will 
 and inclination from evil ways. To the truly penitent 
 such ways have become hateful. 
 
 Yet here on earth this true repentance may be 
 short-lived. It is, indeed, easy to imagine one who 
 has practised, let us say, wanton cruelty to man or 
 beast seeing at a flash the true nature of his action 
 and by a definitive revulsion of feeling becoming in- 
 capable of ever again committing such acts or taking 
 pleasure in them. Such a one would be seized by an 
 almost intolerable sense of compunction and by a 
 longing to do and to bear in the cause of mercy and 
 tenderness, and to cancel the self-identification with 
 a hateful thing which stained the record of his life. 
 Such a repentance, in the case supposed, would be 
 conclusive and final. But it is only too familiar to 
 human experience that a repentance equally pas- 
 
 46
 
 PURGATORY AND EDEN 
 
 sionate and sincere and perhaps equally secure of its 
 own permanence nevertheless may break down 
 under stress of temptation. The thing that had be- 
 come hateful has resumed its power of attraction, 
 and the false values again blur the true. Thus, on 
 earth the glimpses of the Hell of evil choice and will, 
 conclusive as they seem to us at the time, may yet 
 pass away. But as long as true penitence lasts it is no 
 determination to abandon a course that still attracts 
 (for this at best is only a desire to repent, and not 
 repentance), but an actual "conversion," a "turning 
 round " of our affections themselves. 
 
 On earth, then, impulses to good and evil may 
 chase each other across our hearts, and even whilst 
 we are definitely overcoming our evil ways we may 
 constantly have to fortify our will against unregener- 
 ate impulses that refuse to be silenced even when 
 controlled. But according to Dante's view this is 
 not so either in Hell or in Purgatory. For in the one 
 realm penitence is impossible and in the other it has 
 been, so to say, " lock-stitched " and is irreversible. 
 
 Dante believed that genuine and passionate con- 
 version or repentance is in any case necessary to 
 salvation. If a man is not so repentant at the moment 
 of death his way lies to Acheron, and repentance is 
 for ever impossible. But if, at that moment of death, 
 not only his aspirations and resolves but his affec- 
 tions and impulses are directed aright, then there 
 is no going back for him, and his dispositions, 
 secure from all change or slackening, become ir- 
 revocable as he passes into the world of spirits. 
 
 47
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 When Dante had seen Hell he felt that whatever 
 weakness or fluctuation there might still be in his 
 life the vision itself could never wax dim. Hence- 
 forth he would always know sin for what it was ; 
 and when the decisive moment came the rush of his 
 affections would inevitably sweep him towards that 
 which is good ; just as when we are most chilled or 
 even embittered in our feelings towards those we 
 love, we know in our heart that if, at that instant, our 
 whole relation to them were collectively and con- 
 clusively at stake our trivial sense of alienation would 
 be utterly consumed in the flame of all-embracing 
 love ; and this very knowledge makes us ashamed of 
 the momentary disproportions which our distorted 
 vision has imposed upon the things that matter and 
 the things that do not. It was to secure men to this 
 condition of underlying certainty of affection, even 
 amid the rise and fall of random impulses not yet 
 under full control, that Dante delivered his message 
 to " remove those living in this life from the state 
 of misery and bring them to the state of bliss." 
 Thus, if the Inferno is a study of unrepentant sin, 
 the Purgatorfo is a study of the state of true penitence 
 wherever and whenever it may exist. 
 
 It was a part of the general belief and tradition of 
 Dante's day that though the act of repentance fol- 
 lowed by confession and absolution obliterates the 
 guilt of sin, yet unperformed penances and the per- 
 petual accretion, at the very least, of venial sin will 
 in all cases, save that of saints and martyrs, leave a 
 surplus to be expiated in dire pain of the senses after 
 
 48
 
 PURGATORY AND EDEN 
 
 death. Here as elsewhere we read Dante's mind in 
 his distribution of stresses more than in the articles 
 of his creed. He accepted indeed the penal and 
 expiatory function of Purgatory, but his stress is 
 laid on a conception of it that the official repre- 
 sentatives of the Church overlooked if they did not 
 deny. For to him not even the most efficacious 
 sacrament, not the atoning death on the cross, not 
 even the sense of the divine forgiveness can super- 
 sede the need of the self-expression of penitence 
 following on the act of repentance : and it is to 
 this essential quality of penitence that he directs 
 our minds. For he regards the pains of the souls in 
 Purgatory not as a price they have to pay for entry 
 into Heaven, but as a medium through which they 
 can vitally utter their repudiation of their own past 
 and assert their loyalty to the things they had once 
 denied and betrayed. Thus, the pains of Purgatory 
 are not endured, but are welcomed and embraced as 
 a solace and support which relieves the else in- 
 tolerable sense of discord in the soul between the 
 things it loves and the things it has actively stood for. 
 So whether the avaricious, for example, who had 
 turned away from the stars of heaven and fixed their 
 gaze upon the dust of earth, in sordid preference for 
 low and cramping aims, still lie prone and bound, 
 testifying to their unworthiness to look upon the 
 heaven they love or away from the earth that bears 
 witness against them ; or whether the gluttons so 
 famished that their sunken eye-sockets are " like 
 Purgatorio xxvi : 13-15, uiii : 70-75, 85 Sf., xxi : 64-66. 
 
 49 D
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 rings from which the jewel has been thrust out " 
 who pass by the delicious fruit-trees feeling and 
 mastering the tug, in its full organic strength, of that 
 appetite which in its mere languor of self-cultivation 
 had once enslaved them ; in every case the sufferings 
 are no mere passive endurance. In every case they 
 are an active self-expression, a reversing and un- 
 living of the past life, a countering of its evil record; 
 a thing positive, not negative, a self-identification 
 with the values of Eden ; an act, not a mere acquies- 
 cence, of the will. 
 
 The souls of the repentant do indeed desire so to 
 complete their repudiation of the past that it shall 
 once for all be cast off and done with, so that they 
 shall no longer feel that it belongs to them or they in 
 any sense to it. Then they will be able to enter the 
 life of Innocence in the Garden of Eden without 
 feeling that they themselves make a discord with it 
 and are a blot upon its beauty and its sweetness. 
 When that time conies the spontaneous impulse to 
 rise into the unreproved fruition of their inheritance 
 of delight will " surprise " them, and at the same 
 moment the whole mountain will shake with a cry 
 of sympathetic triumph rising from the souls that 
 still have to dree their weird. But, until that moment 
 comes for it, each soul flings itself upon its pain, not 
 so much because it is incidentally painful as because 
 it is essentially expressive of its present passion. 
 
 To sum up, then, the Inferno shows us what the 
 
 Purgatorio xviii : 115-117, xx : 127-138, with xxi : 58-66. 
 Cf. xix : 139-141. 
 
 50
 
 PURGATORY AND EDEN 
 
 loss of Eden means. To have seen Hell is to hate 
 evil and to turn with strong rebound to the blurred 
 and desecrated ideals of that better self which still 
 preserves the impress of the life of Innocence. To 
 go through Purgatory is to undo the past, and, at 
 last, to resolve the discord between what we love 
 and what we have been ; so the Purgatorio teaches 
 us that Eden may be and must be regained, and 
 shows us the way. But there is yet another step. 
 On the terraces of purgation on the Mount the 
 souls contemplate evil as the foul thing they have 
 embraced and good as the loveliness they have cast 
 away. Must not the very passion of concentrated 
 repudiation stamp the memory, at any rate, of evil, 
 all the more indelibly upon the consciousness ? 
 Perhaps. But it is not so in Eden itself. Actually to 
 live the life of Innocence, with the sense of utterly 
 belonging to it, makes past evil so unreal and un- 
 believable that it is as though it had not been. It has 
 no hold upon mind or memory. And so Dante tells 
 us of the stream of Lethe that springs, not on the 
 purgatorial sides of the Mount, but in the Garden 
 of Eden itself. When he has drunk of that stream 
 and stands unreproved by Beatrice's side the whole 
 history of his aberrations and his recovery drops 
 clean out of his mind. His present innocence links 
 itself directly to the innocence of those early days 
 when Beatrice still led his willing feet " upon the 
 true path," and he is conscious of no alien wander- 
 ings ever having intervened. To have seen Hell, to 
 have gone through Purgatory, to have lived the life 
 
 5 1
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 of Innocence and drunk the waters of Lethe, is to 
 stand where our first parents stood or would have 
 stood had they persevered under their first trial 
 with young-eyed wonder and delight, in a world 
 whose beauty cannot ensnare nor its loves betray. 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 A right understanding of the relation of Purgatory 
 to the Earthly Paradise and of the Earthly Paradise 
 to Heaven as Dante conceived them will bring out 
 the profound significance of a special feature in his 
 representation of the site of purgatory that everyone 
 has noticed but not everyone has understood. He 
 departs from the uniform assumption of his con- 
 temporaries that purgatory lay in the subterranean 
 purlieus of hell ; and he locates it on the sides of a 
 great mountain at the antipodes of Jerusalem. The 
 full meaning of this will be grasped when we note 
 that, according to Dante, this mountain originally 
 rose, not as a place of purgation, but as what we may 
 call the pedestal of the Garden of Eden. It was only 
 when man had fallen from his high estate and must 
 toilsomely regain what had originally been his birth- 
 right that he had to " climb " that mount to the 
 summit of which he was by rights native. To Dante 
 it was an inevitable dictate of symbolical logic that 
 the process of vital recovery of the state of Innocence 
 should be worked out in process of the physical 
 ascent to the actual Eden. 
 
 And note, above all, that to Dante Eden is still
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 the appointed vestibule of Heaven. He had no con- 
 ception of the ideal earthly life being a non-essential 
 part of the experience of man that had been per- 
 manently lost by the Fall. The earthly life existed 
 of its own right, and not only as a prelude to the 
 heavenly life. He would have endorsed with all his 
 heart the opinion of Aquinas previously expounded 
 (p. 27), that the human experience of a mind de- 
 veloping under the stimulus of the senses and up- 
 building itself on the materials supplied by them 
 in perfect balance and spontaneous symmetry, 
 abandoning itself with entire confidence to the 
 guidance of its own impulses and never betrayed by 
 them was needed not only for the replacing of the 
 fallen angels, and not only for the training of man 
 for Heaven, but also on its own account as a phase 
 of the creative joy of God and the perfection of the 
 universe. The belief that some approach to this 
 ideal life on earth was still possible inspired Dante 
 with his profound reverence for all the instruments 
 of good government and for every artistic expression 
 of beauty ; and it fed that native optimism as to the 
 future possibilities of the human race which is con- 
 stantly cropping up through the surface of his official 
 pessimism and triumphing over the darkness of his 
 personal experience. Yet the life we now live could 
 at best render but an imperfect and distorted image 
 of the life of Eden, as it stood at the beginning in the 
 creative plan. And to Dante therefore it was a 
 spiritual necessity to think of the ideal state of Eden 
 itself being actually experienced on this earth, if not 
 
 53
 
 THE COMEDY 
 
 in this life ; that there might be no hiatus or defect 
 in the full realization of the earthly and the heavenly 
 joy of the elect. 
 
 One more subject must be touched upon. The 
 purpose of this essay was to set forth the essential 
 thought of Heaven to which the thought of Hell 
 and of Purgatory is related in Dante's mind. To 
 enter upon his actual treatment of the transcen- 
 dent theme of Heaven is beyond its scope. But 
 there is one point at which the Paradiso is so linked 
 to the representation of the Terrestrial Paradise that 
 a few supplementary words must be added to what 
 can be read in the Purgatorio. We have seen that 
 Dante, when he has drunk of Lethe, forgets all that 
 intervened since he strayed from the ideals associated 
 with Beatrice, so that not only all the beautiful com- 
 panionship and care of Virgil, but the pleadings 
 with him, " in dream and otherwise," of Beatrice 
 herself, and her journey to hell to secure Virgil's 
 guidance for him, have passed out of his mind be- 
 cause the meaning and the occasion of them have 
 become unrealizable to him inasmuch as they 
 rested on errors of which there is now no record or 
 trace in his mind. 
 
 But surely these things in themselves were good, 
 though the occasion that called them forth was evil, 
 and, as good, they will enter into the consciousness 
 of his soul in heaven though they have vanished 
 from it on earth. Yes, for there is another stream be- 
 sides Lethe in the Earthly Paradise. It is the stream 
 Purgatorio xxx: 133-141. 
 
 54
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 of Eunoe, or fair memory; and a little after Dante 
 has drunk of Lethe he drinks of Eunoe also. To live 
 the life of Innocence not only detaches the soul from 
 all sense of fellowship with evil, but quickens in it 
 all memories of good and brings them back from 
 oblivion with all their deep significance revealed. 
 This is the last and most perfect gift of the recovered 
 Eden to Dante's pilgrim soul and to all others who 
 pass that way. And so we find that the once sinful 
 souls that Dante meets in heaven have indeed re- 
 covered the memory of their sins, but remember 
 them not with any lingering sense that they belong 
 to them, but only as the occasions that prompted the 
 redeeming grace that now has undisputed sway in 
 their triumphant sense of fruition. Rejoicing in the 
 perfect will of God, and finding therein their peace, 
 they find their own forgiveness there and they forgive 
 themselves. 
 
 Paradiso ix : 3436, 103108. 
 
 55
 
 // 
 
 THE MINOR WORKS
 
 In honorem 
 
 KAROLI WITTE
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 (In the light of the Comedy) 
 
 Dante's life, and the record of it contained in his 
 works, culminate in the Comedy ; and just as the 
 earlier parts of the Comedy reveal their full meaning 
 only when related to the Earthly Paradise and to 
 Heaven, so Dante's Minor Works, in their turn, 
 only acquire their true significance when we regard 
 them as the preparation for the Comedy, fore- 
 shadowing it half-consciously, or unconsciously 
 leading up to it. I assume a general acquaintance 
 with these Minor Works themselves, especially the 
 Vita Nuova, the Canzoni or Odes, the Convivio, and 
 the Monarchia ; and, taking them severally, I shall 
 first offer some comments and reflections upon them 
 on their own merits, and then try in each case to re- 
 late them to their final outcome in the Comedy. We 
 must begin, of course, with the Vita Nuova. 
 
 i. THE "VITA NUOVA" 
 
 When Dante, in his eighteenth year, wrote the first 
 poem that we possess from him, or that he himself 
 acknowledges, there was nothing to distinguish his 
 general conception of Italian poetry from that of his 
 fellow-citizens. Other young Florentines of birth 
 and position were writing love-poems in the verna- 
 cular ; and their vocabulary, verse-forms, and tradi- 
 tional images had already been highly elaborated, 
 
 59
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 and, in the artistic sense of the term, convention- 
 alized. The personification of Love, the potency of 
 the loved one's salutation, the regenerative influence 
 of enamourment, conferring, as it were, a patent of 
 nobility on the true lover and raising the whole tone 
 of his life, are common form with this group of poets. 
 But in no other field had the Tuscan vernacular re- 
 ceived so high a degree of elaboration as a literary 
 instrument. Italian was indeed already used in Italy 
 for many purposes of instruction, but the Tuscan 
 tradition confined its artistic scope to love-lyrics 
 only ; and Dante and his elder friend Guido Caval- 
 canti evidently thought it would be a startling im- 
 propriety to cultivate in the vulgar tongue any other 
 branch of literature proper. Dante finds the justifica- 
 tion of withdrawing this one branch of literature 
 from the domain of Latin and transferring it to the 
 common speech, in the necessity of writing love- 
 poetry in a language which could be generally under- 
 stood and even critically appreciated, by women ; 
 and it would appear that the Florentine ladies, at any 
 rate, were in fact keenly interested in this nascent 
 poetry and that the references to their incisive 
 judgements and appreciations which we meet in 
 extant poems or in the traditions that surround them 
 were far from being mere formal compliments. 
 
 Thus, when Dante felt the " new life " of the 
 higher sensibilities and perceptions awakened in him 
 by his early meeting with Beatrice ; when this life 
 was nurtured and matured by his bashful contem- 
 plation of the opening beauty of soul that revealed 
 
 60
 
 THE "VITA NUOVA" 
 
 itself in her gracious ways ; when he was thrilled by 
 a casual interchange of civilities or deeply troubled 
 by real or fancied slights ; and, finally, when he 
 reached the unassailable security of a devotion that 
 demanded neither graceful acknowledgement nor 
 even bare comprehension in return, he inevitably be- 
 came Beatrice's poet ; and then, after death had 
 removed her visible presence and other interests or 
 passions began to dispute the unique place she had 
 occupied in his heart, he regarded them, for a time, 
 as temptations to take up life on a lower plane instead 
 of allowing it to be further refined and ennobled by 
 yet deeper devotion to his now glorified lady. At the 
 end of his own idealized record, in which he weaves 
 selected poems, on a ground of a continuous prose 
 narrative, into the ethereal texture known as the 
 Vita Nuova, he closes on the note suggested by a 
 wondrous vision which rebaptized his early manhood 
 in the waters that had consecrated his childish soul 
 to the service of beauty, truth, and goodness : and he 
 aspires if his life endures to write of Beatrice " what 
 ne'er was writ of woman." 
 
 It was on the eighth day of June in 1290 that 
 Beatrice died. Dante was twenty-four or possibly 
 just twenty-five years old, and the Vita Nuova must 
 have been completed, in the form in which we now 
 have it, within one or two years of this time. 
 
 How large a place in the young citizen and 
 soldier's life was actually occupied by his ideal pas- 
 
 Fita Nuova xxv, especially 435 1 [6 sf.]. Cf. xxxi : 1 3-24 [xxx : 
 2 Sf.], for the obverse principle. 
 
 61
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 sion it is impossible to say. It is certain that he 
 entered eagerly into many phases of the rich and 
 varied life of Florence in that marvellous period of 
 its history. He was well read in the Latin poets and 
 in the current Latin translations of Aristotle, and he 
 had a good knowledge of astronomy ; but he did 
 not regard himself as a student, and had apparently 
 acquired his knowledge and formed his taste for 
 literature, much as an Athenian of the age of Pericles 
 might have done, under the reaction to his environ- 
 ment as a well-born citizen of " the Great City " on 
 the Arno. 
 
 The external means of gratifying and developing 
 his powers would come of themselves, and would 
 hardly need to be sought by one who lived in the 
 fellowship of the minds and in practice of the affairs 
 which made that city great. We know, too, that he 
 was amongst the fore fighters in the battle of Cam- 
 paldino in the year before Beatrice's death ; and 
 his extant poems, outside the canon of the Vita 
 Nuova but belonging to the period covered by its 
 composition, show that without passing beyond the 
 limits of the recognized love-theme and without de- 
 flection to any of its baser suggestions he had already 
 found room for a wider and lighter play of fancy and 
 emotion than could harbour in the cloistral atmo- 
 sphere of the monument of his early idealism. 
 
 On the other hand, it would surely be a profound 
 misconception to regard the Vita Nuova as some- 
 thing apart that had no vital connection or " ex- 
 change of pulses " with the full-blooded life of this 
 
 62
 
 THE "VITA NUOVA" 
 
 Florentine soldier and man of society and affairs. 
 At its core it asserts itself as a genuine account of the 
 birth in his soul of the love of beauty, goodness, and 
 truth ; the conviction that these are realities and 
 not mere dreams ; and the consciousness of a mission 
 to make them real to others. This mission in its suc- 
 cessive transformations was the inspiration of his 
 life, and it led him at last to the Beatific Vision. 
 In the first chapters of the Vita Nuova y therefore, 
 we read the beginnings of the life-history which 
 culminates in the final cantos of the Paradiso ; but 
 it is no light task to trace the links between the be- 
 ginning and the end ; and as the initial step in any 
 such attempt we must note with closer attention 
 certain details in the Vita Nuova the full significance 
 of which might well escape our notice. 
 
 The first point to observe concerns those elaborate 
 love-guiles which probably cause a vague uneasiness 
 to many ingenuous readers who perhaps hardly like 
 to recognize it even to themselves. No doubt it is 
 natural for any sensitive soul to wish to shield its 
 inmost life from the intrusions of curiosity. But here, 
 in Dante's case, the influence of the Provencal 
 Troubadours is clearly discernible in the light under 
 which he places the events he narrates. Unmarried 
 women were almost inaccessible in Provencal society, 
 whereas young married ladies were the centres of 
 brilliant circles of admiration, compliment, and 
 chivalrous service. It was to them that the Trou- 
 badours paid their court, and as the singer always 
 professed to be very seriously in love with his lady 
 
 63
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 secrecy became a fixed convention in their poetic 
 tradition. The Troubadour's lady must never be 
 addressed in his poems under her own name. 
 
 Should her identity be suspected means must be 
 taken to mislead the " busy-bodies," for whom, in 
 Troubadour literature, there is a special technical 
 term. They are sometimes spoken of almost as if 
 they were an organized body of malignant perse- 
 cutors of all true lovers, like " the Jews " who lower 
 as a dark background in the Fourth Gospel. The 
 whole scheme was obviously in many cases a mere 
 traditional form. The great lady no doubt would 
 take the homage of her minstrel for the most part in 
 perfect innocence, just for what it was worth ; and 
 the supposed secrecy would conceal nothing and 
 would have nothing to conceal. An enlightening 
 though obviously imperfect parallel may be found in 
 the poetic worship of Gloriana by the Elizabethan 
 poets. Nevertheless, the convention had its ultimate 
 ground in the actual social conditions of the Trou- 
 badour environment. There were certainly cases in 
 which it closely corresponded with the fact ; and in 
 such cases it became a matter of consequence to 
 maintain a real secrecy. 
 
 In Dante's Florence, on the contrary, there was 
 no vital sap in this convention ; for the social con- 
 ditions and customs were not such as to support it 
 in any way. So when we find the Vita Nuova follow- 
 ing the almost stereotyped course of enamourment, 
 concealment by love-guiles, misunderstandings, 
 scandalous imputations, exculpation, and explana-
 
 THE "VITA NUOVA" 
 
 tion it is impossible not to recognize the force of the 
 Troubadour tradition which may well have reacted 
 unconsciously upon Dante's real conduct and feelings 
 at the time, and more consciously perhaps upon his 
 subsequent interpretation and record of them. 
 Again, when we read his extant poems of this period 
 (some of which have been recovered quite recently), 
 and see that the " feigned " poetic addresses were 
 occasionally carried further than the narrative of the 
 Vita Nuova would suggest, the suspicion may well 
 rise in our minds that the passing susceptibilities of 
 a young man's heart gave a greater sincerity to some 
 of his poems to his " screen " ladies than he after- 
 wards chose to admit. Such speculations, however, 
 must in any case be left as mere conjectures. What 
 is certain is that not until the traditional cycle has 
 been completed, and not till the memorable rebuke 
 administered to the poet by a lady belonging to 
 Beatrice's circle has shaken him out of his self- 
 consciousness and artificiality, does the pure stream 
 of lyric rapture by which the Vita Nuova lives begin 
 to flow. It is in the first seventeen sections that the 
 Troubadour scaffoldage is clearly apparent to the 
 practised eye ; and it is after this that all the poems 
 occur which either Dante himself or any of his 
 admirers quote for their own sake. 
 
 It is here that the baldanza d 1 amore the triumph 
 and exultation of Dante's love pours out its rich, 
 undying utterance. 
 
 And again, if the earlier chapters of the Vita 
 Vita Nuova xviii. 
 
 65 E
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Nuova echo the scheme of the Troubadour "pro- 
 gress of love " the prose poem in its entirety may be 
 said to foreshadow in a certain sense the entire 
 scheme of the Comedy, and therefore to become a 
 kind of symbolic epitome of the whole history of man 
 as conceived and set forth by the Church. For in the 
 Vita Nuova, too, as in the Comedy, there is an 
 Earthly Paradise and a Fall, and there is a recovery 
 that reopens the gate of Heaven. The whole tale of 
 Dante's early love is surrounded by the breath of 
 Eden. The shadowy suggestion of a Fall appears 
 when in the later portion of the Vita Nuova Dante 
 admits a temporary fluctuation in his heart's devo- 
 tion ; and, whatever may have been the case with the 
 earlier "screen" maidens, we are now, at the close, 
 in presence of a veritable conflict of emotions. 
 The story of the Pitiful Lady, towards love of whom 
 Dante was swayed in his affliction, is a touching re- 
 cord of a human experience fully intelligible to every 
 human soul and reflecting not the smallest discredit 
 upon its hero. Yet it is treated by Dante as though 
 it were a kind of lapse from grace that banished him 
 from his Eden. The episode stands quite outside the 
 traditional framework, and the very fact that, as every 
 reader feels, it perplexes the artistic symmetry and 
 beauty of the work, is a pledge of its sincerity as a record. 
 This, then, is the story : A little more than a year 
 after Beatrice's death Dante noticed that a certain 
 Gentle Lady, who could see him from her window, 
 appeared to regard his forlorn and desolate state with 
 compassion ; and he found a strange comfort in the 
 
 66
 
 THE "VITA NUOVA" 
 
 flow of tears which her sympathy drew from his eyes. 
 Gradually he began to suspect that it was more her 
 own presence and tenderness than any quickening 
 of his thoughts of Beatrice that moved him, and he 
 was shocked to think that he was already half-faith- 
 less to the memory that was the consecration of his 
 life. Then he began to ask himself whether this 
 gracious presence was not really a message from 
 Love himself : a message of comfort and of renewed 
 life ; an invitation to come back from brooding over 
 the darkness of his loss into the light of present 
 beauty and joy ? For a moment the new emotion 
 triumphed, but only to reveal its own inadequacy. 
 It was the desolate cry for consolation that had 
 thrown him upon a " second best " when his only 
 manly course was to endure and to work through 
 his affliction to a yet higher life of realization. A 
 vision of Beatrice, the red-robed child of eight years, 
 as he had first seen her, brought back his wandering 
 heart from this unworthy yearning, and in " grievous 
 penitence " he fixed all his thoughts once more upon 
 Beatrice. Not long afterwards he wrote the final 
 sonnet of the Vita Nuova, wherein he tells us (the 
 translation is Rossetti's) how : 
 
 Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space 
 Now soars the sigh that my heart sends above : 
 A new perception born of grieving Love 
 
 Guiding it upward the untrodden ways. 
 
 When it hath reached unto the end, and stays, 
 It sees a lady round whom splendours move 
 In homage : till, by the great light thereof 
 
 Abashed, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze. 
 
 6?
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 It sees her such that when it tells me this 
 Which it hath seen I understand it not 
 
 It hath a speech so subtle and so fine. 
 And yet I know its voice within my thought 
 Often remembereth me of Beatrice : 
 So that I understand it, ladies mine. 
 
 Compare this with the lines in the first Canto of the 
 Paradiso : 
 
 In that heaven which most receiveth of his light have I been ; and 
 have seen things which whoso thence descends hath nor know- 
 ledge nor power to retell : 
 
 For, as it draws anigh to its desire our intellect plunges so deep that 
 memory cannot follow in the track. 
 
 Nathless, whatever of the holy realm I could up-treasure in my 
 memory shall now be matter of my poesy. 1 
 
 Thus does the Vita Nuova already faintly fore- 
 shadow the Paradise, and with it the essential sub- 
 jects of the Comedy as a whole. 
 
 But we have not yet read quite the last word of the 
 Vita Nuova ; and that last word is the most signi- 
 ficant of all from our present point of inquiry. 
 " After this sonnet," Dante says, " there appeared 
 to me a wondrous vision which made me purpose to 
 
 1 Nel ciel che piu della sua luce prende 
 
 fu' io, e vidi cose che ridire 
 
 n& sa ne pu6 chi di lassu discende ; 
 Perche, appressando s& al suo desire, 
 
 nostro intelletto si profonda tanto, 
 
 che retro la memoria non puo ire. 
 Veramente quant' io del regno santo 
 
 nella mia mente potei far tesoro, 
 
 sara ora materia del mio canto. 
 
 Paradiso i: 4-12. 
 
 68
 
 THE "VITA N u o v A " 
 
 write no more of this blessed one until such time as I 
 might treat of her more worthily. And to come at 
 this I study all I may, as she knoweth verily. So that, 
 if it be His pleasure by whom all things live that 
 my life endure some few years, I hope to write of her 
 what ne'er was writ of woman." Then follows the 
 concluding prayer that when this task shall be ac- 
 complished he may behold the glory of his lady " as 
 she looks upon the face of Him who is blessed for 
 evermore." 
 
 This would seem to lead straight to the Paradiso ; 
 but we have only to study the Comedy in its entirety 
 to see that there lies much between this early vow 
 and its fulfilment, and that before it was finally ac- 
 complished it had already been broken, and that 
 more than once. In the Purgatorio we read of Dante's 
 meeting with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, and 
 we find that not only does she charge him with 
 persistent, nay stubborn, faithlessness to the life and 
 ideals to which she had raised him, but she also de- 
 clares explicitly that, through dreams and what 
 pleadings else, she herself had called him back from 
 his wanderings on the false path and had called 
 in vain, " so little did he heed her." It is quite im- 
 possible to take this as referring to the innocent 
 yearning during " certain days " for human comfort 
 and affection after Beatrice's death, as recounted in 
 the Vita Nuova. There had evidently been some far 
 more real and deeper Fall between the Eden of the 
 
 Vita Nuova xliii [xlii] . Purgatorio xxx, xxxi, especially xxx : 
 133-135. Vita Nuova xl : 13 [xxxix : 2]. 
 
 6 9
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Vita Nuova and the journey of recovery recorded in 
 the Inferno and the Purgatorio. The " wondrous 
 vision " at the close of the Vita Nuova cannot there- 
 fore be the great revelation that was afterwards dis- 
 tilled, line by line, into the terzine of the Comedy. 
 It must be one of those fruitlessly tender attempts to 
 arrest the wayward steps of the poet on his down- 
 ward path to which Beatrice alludes as preceding her 
 appeal to Virgil for help. 
 
 We saw from the first that it might prove a diffi- 
 cult task to trace the promise of the Vita Nuova up to 
 its fulfilment in the Comedy, and now we need not 
 be surprised if the first steps seem rather to recede 
 from the goal than to approach it. With this secure 
 knowledge, then, of the starting-point and the end, 
 with this anticipation of the intervening obstacles 
 and vacillations, and with this warning that Dante 
 himself may not always have wished to leave his 
 actual footprints clear for us to trace, we may now 
 go forward with the task of following the succession 
 of the poet's works and gaining what light we can 
 from them as to the antecedents of his supreme 
 achievement. 
 
 II. THE "CANZONI* 
 
 Dante's banishment from Florence took place 
 about eleven and a half years after Beatrice's death, 
 say ten years after the completion of the Vita Nuova. 
 
 Purgatorio ixx : 136-141. 
 70
 
 THE '' C A N Z O N I 
 
 What can we know of his life during these years ? 
 There are records, too scanty but authentic as far as 
 they go, of political and official activities, on which 
 we shall touch in connection with a later period. 
 There are certified copies of legal instruments which 
 show that, in partnership with his brother or on his 
 sole responsibility, he contracted very considerable 
 debts during these years, debts which were not 
 liquidated till after his death. We know that he was 
 married to Gemma, of the great house of the Donati, 
 and that he had at least four children by her. Of his 
 domestic life before his exile we know nothing. 
 The later tradition that he and Gemma lived un- 
 happily together is without any substantive founda- 
 tion. The very little we know of Gemma herself, 
 who survived her husband for many years, is entirely 
 to her credit. For anything beyond these bare facts 
 we must rely upon Dante's own works and an am- 
 biguous reference to him, here and there, by his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 In the Purgatorio there is, in addition to the re- 
 proaches of Beatrice and the answering confession 
 of the poet, a remarkable passage that has specific 
 reference to the years now under consideration. It 
 is where Dante meets his friend Forese Donati, who 
 was a relative of his wife's, and who died in 1296. 
 Dante says to him that the way they spent their lives 
 in the years of their companionship must be of 
 grievous memory to both of them ; and declares, as 
 from the fictitious or ideal date of Easter 1 300, that 
 he himself is only now being rescued from that kind 
 
 71
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 of life by Virgil. There still survives an exchange of 
 Sonnets between the two friends Dante and Forese. 
 They are on a distinctly lower level than anything 
 else that we have from Dante's hand, but there is 
 nothing in them seriously to tarnish his good name. 
 
 There is better material for the reconstruction of 
 Dante's intellectual life and development during this 
 decade in the series of Canzoni, or Odes, which have 
 come down to us. The Canzone is a beautiful form 
 of verse which the Italians had elaborated and 
 systematized, from the practice of the Troubadours, 
 till it became an instrument of unrivalled power for 
 the expression of varied emotions. Dante could 
 work with supreme effectiveness under the combined 
 severity and elasticity of this exquisite species of 
 composition, of which he was truly enamoured. 
 And to the end of his days, though he had poured out 
 his whole soul in his own Terza Rima, he doubtless 
 regarded the Canzonets the most exalted and majestic 
 form of Italian poetry. 
 
 The decade on which we are now engaged is pre- 
 eminently the period of the Canzone in Dante's poetic 
 career, though he had done great things with it be- 
 fore and was to do great things with it again. 
 
 Now, some of these Odes repeat or echo the motives 
 of the Vita Nuova itself, but others are the direct ex- 
 pression of the poet's passion for study. They link 
 themselves to that resolve to dedicate years of 
 strenuous toil to the task of making himself more 
 worthy to write of Beatrice with which the Vita 
 
 Purgatorio niii : 76-84,115-126. 
 72
 
 THE "CANZONI 
 
 Nuova closes; and they seem therefore to follow on 
 from that work rather than to repeat its notes. 
 But what was animating Dante at the inception of 
 these systematic studies was surely no prevision of 
 the Comedy, but rather, we may suppose, a concep- 
 tion that Beatrice, in her own right, ought to be to 
 others to all, indeed, who were worthy what she 
 had been to the poet himself. If he could show her to 
 others as she truly was, and as she had been seen by 
 him, then she would wake them also to the meaning 
 of life, and to them, too, she would reveal goodness, 
 beauty, and truth as present realities and powers. 
 But in order thus to reveal her he must pass beyond 
 the stage of instinctive perception, and must analyze, 
 evolve, and develop all the implications of that 
 higher life to which he had himself been called and 
 to which he in turn would fain call others. He must 
 not only feel the soul, but must understand the 
 instruments and appliances of that higher wisdom 
 of which he was to be the apostle. Hence his new- 
 born zeal for the deepened study of all branches of 
 truth, including science, theology, and, more especi- 
 ally, philosophy. Such study was now something 
 more than a spontaneous expression of his intellec- 
 tual alertness and enjoyment of life. It had been 
 drawn into his mission and had become an inspira- 
 tion and a passion a passion, as we shall see, that 
 soon acquired independent strength and, forgetting 
 itself as a means, became an end. 
 
 But how could this zeal for study express itself 
 in poetry ? Here we may detect the first workings 
 
 73
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 of an impulse, that runs through Dante's whole 
 career, to widen the scope of Italian literature and to 
 annex one after another the provinces over which 
 Latin had hitherto reigned undisputed. It is true 
 that he still does full homage to the Tuscan tradition, 
 but he is already stretching it to cover more than ever 
 it was made for ! What he is impelled to express 
 concerns the hopes and fears of the student : his self- 
 distrust battling with his fervour and his ambition, 
 his fits of despair, and the rare moments of triumph 
 when it seemed as though Philosophy herself were 
 smiling upon her devoted servant and opening to 
 him her inmost secrets. But is not this the very 
 theme of love ? Surely he who woos Philosophy may 
 best tell of his passion in the consecrated forms of 
 the love lyric. Hence comes the series of " alle- 
 gorical " poems in which the lady of the poet's vows 
 is none other than my Lady Philosophy herself; 
 and the passion that now sighs and pleads, and now 
 rises to awe-struck and half-tremulous exultation, is 
 the intellectual love that woos that exalted mistress. 
 
 To the sympathetic reader there should be no 
 difficulty in determining which of Dante's poems 
 belong to this allegorizing group. The test is a 
 simple one. Does the " allegorical," that is, the 
 philosophical, interpretation of the poem make it 
 more, or does it make it less, psychologically con- 
 vincing ? If what seem like mere elegances or con- 
 ceits when literally interpreted begin to glow when 
 referred to the experiences of the baffled but in- 
 domitable student, then Philosophy is the lady of the 
 
 74
 
 THE -'CANZONI 
 
 poet's love. If the passion becomes pale, the images 
 less vivid, and the expression strained when Philo- 
 sophy is substituted for a human personality, then 
 it would be wronging Dante's genius to take the 
 poems on any other footing than as love-poems in the 
 primary sense. And this wrong we must not do him 
 even though it should be at his own bidding ! 
 
 It is indeed obvious that the application of this 
 canon must be purely subjective ; yet it seems safe 
 to say that students who frankly accept it will not 
 differ very materially in the conclusions to which it 
 leads them. 
 
 We must follow a little further yet this widening 
 of the domain of love-rhymes, and therefore of 
 Italian literature. Dante was stirred during this 
 period by many other thoughts besides those of the 
 purely speculative student. He was a keen observer 
 of the social conditions and manners around him, 
 and his wrath or contempt was moved by the vulgar 
 pretender to grace and elegance, the selfish and 
 sordid man of wealth, or the soulless herd whose 
 only conception of" nobility " was a combination of 
 distinguished birth with riches, or at best with the 
 conventional tone of good society. In short, as he 
 studied Aristotle's Ethics, let us say, he not only 
 speculated on moral problems, but felt the " tearing 
 indignation " of the Roman satirist raging within 
 him and forcing him to utterance. Despite all his 
 theories, impassioned speech on such subjects must 
 shape itself for him in that vernacular to which 
 (notwithstanding his reverence for Latin and his 
 
 75
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 easy, forceful handling of it) he felt a connatural 
 affinity that would not be denied. 
 
 But how were such themes to be brought within 
 the Tuscan tradition as to Italian poetry ? Dante had 
 already prepared the way for himself unconsciously. 
 In the Vita Nuova Beatrice is never an isolated figure. 
 She is at a wedding party, or in church, or she is 
 weeping at the bedside of a lost friend, or walking 
 between two companions. The poet delights to sur- 
 round the central figure of his lady-love with little 
 insets and medallions representing the gracious com- 
 pany of maidens amongst whom she moved, and 
 with whom he might hold converse concerning her 
 even when she herself withheld her salutation. 1 
 Now, to the mediaeval student, and pre-eminently to 
 Dante, abstract study was conceived not only as 
 having in itself an elevating effect upon the mind, 
 but as closely allied to all the virtues. Should 
 Philosophy be Dante's mistress, then Generosity, 
 true Nobility, Graciousness, Justice, and all their 
 train are, to him, his Lady's court ; and these may be 
 celebrated by her poet if he dare not, or may not, 
 come into her immediate presence, or if he cannot 
 rise to the full height of his central theme. Thus, if 
 he writes of true Nobility he expressly explains that 
 
 Cf. Convivio I. xii, xiii. 
 
 1 This feature of the Vita Nuova is the more significant inasmuch 
 as, so far as I remember, no Troubadour ever represents his lady as 
 in any such personal relations or concrete environment. She is always 
 the isolated object of his devotion, and is never seen in the ordinary 
 occupations or associations of life. It is only what directly concerns 
 her relations to him or his to her that receives any notice. 
 
 76
 
 THE 'CANZONI 
 
 it is because his Lady is unpropitious, and he must 
 for a time drop those sweet rhymes of which she is 
 the object, hoping to return to them when she 
 smiles upon him once more ; and meanwhile he 
 will at least sing of her friends and so keep near her 
 presence. In the prose commentary which he after- 
 wards composed he explains this to mean that once, 
 when a particularly intricate problem of abstract 
 philosophy baffled him, he turned aside for relief to 
 a question concerning one of the virtues, so as still 
 to keep himself within the environment of his Lady 
 even when she herself rejected his homage. In 
 Dante's Odes, or Canzoni, then, we have abundant 
 evidence of his devotion to study, of his broadening 
 social and moral observation, and of the pressure 
 which his artistic genius was already bringing to 
 bear upon conventional limitations of vernacular 
 poetry. 
 
 But this is not all. Amongst the poems assigned 
 by common consent to this same decade some of the 
 most splendid breathe a mundane passion " a 
 terrible and tormenting love," as it has been called, 
 equally remote from the atmosphere of the Vita 
 Nuova, of the Philosophical love-poems, and of the 
 Paradiso. Here for the first time we come upon 
 manifestations of Dante's genius which seem not 
 so much to lie outside as to cut clean across the line 
 of progress from the Vita Nuova to the Paradiso. 
 
 Convivio IV, lines 1-20 of the Canzone, and chapter i. Cf. Can- 
 zone xix [Rim. Ixxxiii], Poscia ch' Amor : 119. 
 
 77
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 That he actually met such " cross ditches " l on his 
 path we already know from the whole structure of 
 the Comedy, and more especially from Beatrice's 
 reproaches and Dante's confession in the Earthly 
 Paradise. We shall in due course see reason to con- 
 nect these said " cross ditches " with the poems we 
 are now considering. They are known as the 
 " Pietra " group, because the constant play upon 
 the word " pietra " stone or jewel suggests that 
 Pietra was the name of the lady whom they concern. 
 
 If we now put together all that we have gathered 
 of Dante's life during this period and survey it in 
 the light of Beatrice's reproachful declaration that 
 she had in spirit again and again called him, but 
 called in vain, back to the nobler life to which she 
 had for a time uplifted him, we can no longer doubt 
 that what Dante ultimately regarded as his real Fall 
 was subsequent to the compilation of the Vita Nuova. 
 If he continued to think at all of the episode of the 
 Gentle Lady in whose sympathy he had once sought 
 comfort the impression might almost merge itself in 
 later experiences as a mere foreshadowing of them ; 
 but in itself it cannot form the ground of the burning 
 shame he feels when standing face to face with 
 Beatrice. 
 
 We need not attempt to give precision to the 
 
 1 PurgatoriovLii: 25-27. 
 
 Quai fossi attraversati o quai catene 
 trovasti, per che del passare innanzi 
 douesti cosi spogliar la spene ? 
 
 Vide more especially Canzone xii [Rim. ciii]. 
 78
 
 THE ''CANZONI 
 
 grounds of Dante's confession in the Earthly Para- 
 dise. It is easy to see that there were breaches of 
 what he himself sincerely regarded as divine ordin- 
 ances which nevertheless woke no spontaneous re- 
 pugnance in his own mind and carried no implication 
 of baseness when he contemplated them in others, 
 which yet might become the cause of keen self- 
 reproach if he had himself fallen into them. His 
 deepening sense of a moral and religious mission 
 may have held up a standard ever more and more 
 exacting, and may have thrown back upon his past 
 life a more and more searching light, casting an ever 
 darkening shadow upon some of its episodes. Or he 
 may for a time have actually exhibited that combina- 
 tion, not rare in natures of exceptional energy, of high 
 devotion to intellectual pursuits with an addiction to 
 mundane pleasures and indulgences, felt even at the 
 time to be unworthy, and crossed by haunting 
 memories of purer ideals ideals sometimes clung 
 to for support and sometimes evaded to escape their 
 rebuke. 
 
 All we know (and we need not care to know more) 
 is, on the one hand, that to Dante's sensitive con- 
 science there came a time when the contrast between 
 what he had loved and what he had been, caused the 
 bitter shame which stands confessed in the Purgatorio ; 
 and, on the other hand, that the terzine of the 
 Paradiso bear their own witness that they flow from a 
 heart no longer at war with itself, no longer oscil- 
 lating between renewed and broken vows, no longer 
 seeking compromises or evasions between the ideals 
 
 79
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 of the saint and the accepted standards of the man 
 of the world. The flame of the Paradiso is smokeless. 
 We have this foreknowledge of the end, but mean- 
 while it seems impossible not to recognize certain in- 
 directions and mental evasions in which for a time 
 Dante's progress was entangled. 
 
 III. THE "CONVIVIO" IN ITS APOLOGETIC 
 ASPECT 
 
 In the early years of his exile Dante began a 
 treatise (which remained incomplete) on the Italian 
 language in its relation both to other vernaculars, and 
 to Latin. He dealt with the dialectical varieties of 
 Italian and, above all, with the structure of its 
 recognized metrical forms and the possibility of 
 fixing a standard literary Italian which every in- 
 habitant of Italy should recognize as his language 
 but none should be able to claim as his dialect. The 
 chief biographical and personal interest of this 
 treatise is to be found in the evidence it furnishes on 
 three points : (i) On Dante's continued concern 
 with literature, and specifically with Italian poetry, 
 at a period when his own poetic inspiration appears 
 to have been staunched for the time by the up- 
 heavals of his life ; (2) on his sense of Italy as a 
 social and historical unit with a common heritage of 
 civilization and literature rather than as a single 
 political or administrative area; and (3) on the still 
 narrow limits of his conception of the scope and 
 character of Italian poetry. 
 
 80
 
 THE "CONVIVIO APOLOGETIC 
 
 It is this last point that interests our present in- 
 quiry. The only verse-forms which Dante allows as 
 legitimate are the Canzone, the Ballata, and the 
 Sonetto. All others are " irregular and illegitimate." 
 They would have been relegated to the last place in 
 his treatise had it ever been completed ; and even 
 there, we may suppose, would have been dismissed 
 with a brief and disparaging notice. This is weighty 
 though indirect evidence against the accuracy of the 
 contemporary tradition (which is nevertheless too 
 well authenticated to be simply brushed aside) that 
 at the time of his exile Dante had already drafted the 
 first seven Cantos of the Inferno. Can it be possible 
 that this early draft is identical with the recorded 
 experiments in a Latin poem on the theme of the 
 Comedy which Dante subsequently abandoned when 
 his conception of the scope of Italian poetry had so 
 notably expanded ? It should be observed, however, 
 that he already admits the subjects of War and 
 Virtue, side by side with Love, within the legitimate 
 range of vernacular poetry. So there is already some 
 progress towards a wider conception of its function. 
 
 Of more direct and varied interest to us is another 
 treatise, also a fragment, that occupied Dante during 
 these earlier years of exile (13021308). The 
 CtxvivtO) or Banquet, is the monument of what 
 Dante himself calls his " second love " in contra- 
 distinction to his love of Beatrice. 
 
 De Fulgari Eloquentia II. iii : 8-n [2], ii : 41-83 [5-9]. 
 Cf. Appendix, p. 152. 
 
 8l F
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 At the end of the Vita Nuova it is for the sake 
 of making himself more worthy to commemorate 
 Beatrice that Dante dedicates himself to study. But 
 when in the Convivio he presents us with the record 
 of the fruits of that study we notice a subtle but 
 significant change in his phraseology, for he tells 
 us that he took to study in hope of consolation 
 under his loss, and no longer represents it as a 
 "preparation." Have we then in the Vita Nuova 
 the register of a resolve and in the Convivio the 
 record of a result which did not quite conform to it ? 
 So it would seem ; for in the later work Dante shows 
 us very clearly that whatever it was that he sought 
 in his ardent application to study, what he actually 
 found was not only consolation, but something more: 
 a new mission, namely, a new inspiration, and even 
 a new " enamourment," in the ardour of which his 
 conception of a work to commemorate Beatrice sank 
 into the background of his mind and was indefinitely 
 postponed though not formally abandoned. As to 
 this there is no room for doubt, for he tells us how 
 when he sought consolation in Cicero and Boetius, 
 " as it may chance that a man goes in search of silver 
 and beyond his purpose findeth gold, the which 
 some hidden cause brings to view, not peradventure 
 without divine command : so I, who was seeking to 
 console myself, found not only a remedy for my 
 tears, but terms of authors and of sciences and 
 of books, pondering upon which I judged that 
 Philosophy was a thing supreme." And even more 
 explicitly he declares, in relation to his self-abandon- 
 
 82
 
 THE "CONVIVIO APOLOGETIC 
 
 ment to this " second love," and its victory over his 
 absorption in memories of Beatrice, that " a man 
 ought not, on account of a greater friend, to forget 
 the services received from a lesser ; but, if it be right 
 to follow the one and leave the other, the better 
 should indeed be followed but the other not aban- 
 doned without some fitting lamentation ; wherein 
 the man gives cause to the one he follows to love 
 him the more." 
 
 It is easy to reconstruct the story so far. And the 
 fragment of the large design of the Convivio that 
 was actually executed leaves us in little doubt on the 
 main point. It may often happen that a task under- 
 taken in the first instance for a specific purpose 
 beyond itself presently gains a hold in the strength 
 of its own fascination, thrusts itself in front of that 
 for the sake of which it was originally sought, and 
 becomes an avowed end instead of a means. So it 
 was with Dante. He became enamoured of Philo- 
 sophy for her own sake and was inspired with a 
 passion to reveal her beauty and sing her praises to 
 all who would hear. As for Beatrice, he retracts no 
 word he has spoken in the Vita Nuova. He affirms 
 that she still " lives in heaven with the angels," in 
 that better life to which he himself looks forward 
 after this, and " on earth with his soul." But he 
 means to speak of her no more in " this book " 
 (the Convivio] on which he is now engaged. Did he 
 still mean ultimately to write of her " what had 
 
 Vita Nuova xliii [xlii]. Convivio\\,-i\\\\ 3-40 [xii : 1-5], xvi : 
 50-58, 98-105 [xv : 6, 12] ; III. i : 2 [i]. 
 
 83
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 never been written else of woman " ? Perhaps. But 
 the Lady of his present love is one greater than 
 woman, for she is " the daughter of God," nay, the 
 Divine Wisdom's self 1 
 
 The splendid eloquence of the opening passage of 
 the Convivio is sufficient evidence that the main im- 
 pulse that urged its author forward was a missionary 
 ardour for bringing the feeding truths of philosophy 
 and perhaps yet more the pure intellectual joy of 
 study within the reach of busy men and women who 
 had no opportunity to embrace the life of the pro- 
 fessed student. But combined with this primary 
 object were others hardly less near to Dante's heart. 
 It will be remembered that he had already begun his 
 lover-like service of my Lady Philosophy in a series 
 of Canzont, or Odes, directly or indirectly conse- 
 crated to her ; and so it seemed natural enough, not 
 only to Dante but to his contemporaries also (for 
 not one of them hints that there was anything strange 
 about it), that his encyclopaedia of popular science and 
 theology should take the shape of a commentary or 
 exposition based on the Odes which had already 
 made him famous throughout Italy as a poet. The 
 idea was, of course, suggested by the fact that some 
 of the Odes in question were in truth a glorification 
 of Philosophy, or of her " friends," and would 
 naturally take their place in the elaborated expres- 
 sion of his devotion to her service. But others, as 
 
 Convivio I. i : 111-115 [16]; II. ii : 6-8 [i], ii : 132-137, 
 49-55 [viii : 16, 7], ilii : 71 [xii : 9]; III. xiv : 51-60 [6 /f.] 
 Cf. p. 96 sg. 
 
 84
 
 THE ''CONVIVIO APOLOGETIC 
 
 we have seen, were quite alien in their origin from 
 the praise of Philosophy. To represent them also as 
 hymns to Philosophy, and so to bring them into rela- 
 tion with the scheme, would require amazing tours 
 de force of allegorical interpretation, such as could 
 only have been contemplated in an age accustomed 
 to all manner of fantastic feats in this direction. 
 But Dante's age was such. Not only the Scriptures 
 and the works of the Latin poets, but the works of 
 God and Nature too, and even the lives or actions of 
 men, might be taken to owe their significance not 
 to what they were, but to what they meant as 
 symbolical expressions of the divine purpose. More- 
 over, it did not at all follow that the poets or heroes 
 themselves were always conscious of the inner 
 meaning of their utterances or actions. Virgil, for 
 instance, did not know that he was prophesying of 
 Christ in his Fourth Eclogue, nor, I suppose, did 
 Jacob's wives, Leah and Rachel, know that they 
 were types of Martha and Mary to come, and that 
 they represented the Practical and the Contemplative 
 life respectively. Nor was consistency demanded of 
 the allegorist. The same symbol might stand for 
 different or opposite things in different connections, 
 perhaps might even bear contradictory significances 
 in the same passage according to the scheme of inter- 
 pretation that was being applied to it at the moment. 
 Dante had already explained in the Vita Nuova 
 that passages in his poems which he meant to be 
 taken as applying to another lady when he wrote 
 them he wishes to be understood now as applying 
 
 85
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 to Beatrice. Might not the process be reversed ? 
 Might not a poem which was originally written in 
 connection with Dante's first love be interpreted in 
 relation to the second ? By such shifts as this the 
 whole body of the Canzoni of which he desired to 
 speak might be included in his work. This form of 
 presentation, besides maintaining continuity (by 
 linking his past to his future tribute to my Lady 
 Philosophy), and besides following the model of the 
 Vita Nuova (by making a prose framework for a 
 collection of poems), would have the additional 
 advantage of giving him a good excuse for an at- 
 tempt which he longed to make on its own merits 
 the attempt, namely, to extend the range and raise 
 the dignity of Italian Prose as he had already helped 
 to raise Italian Verse. 
 
 His cyclopaedia must be written in the vernacular 
 for many good reasons, but, if it was to aim at being 
 at once severe in its argument and of cultured beauty 
 in its form, prejudice would be against the verna- 
 cular. Some excuse for this new advance, to protect 
 the underlying reasons for it, would be welcome ; 
 and if the work 'was presented as a commentary 
 on an Italian text the excuse might be found in the 
 congruity between the requirements of the " master " 
 text and the powers of the " servant " commentary. 
 Now, some of Dante's poems, already famous, fell 
 in quite easily with his central purpose in writing 
 the Convivio. Such were the genuinely philosophical 
 and quasi-philosophical Odes, including the noble 
 Cf. p. 90. Convivio I. x : 74-102 [11-13], *" ' I-1 7 [ l *?] 
 
 86
 
 THE "CONVIVIO APOLOGETIC 
 
 poem (one of the few that we may be sure were 
 written during his exile) that begins : 
 
 Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute, 
 
 which would give him occasion to treat of Justice 
 and incidentally to deliver his own apologia for his 
 political life and to protest against his unjust exile. 
 
 But there were also Odes and amongst them 
 those that threatened to be the most recalcitrant 
 to the allegorical treatment which Dante had special 
 reasons for bringing under it, because he wished to 
 remove the impression they gave (or, at least, to 
 dissociate himself from it) when taken in their 
 natural and obvious sense. This is the next point 
 that we must examine. 
 
 In the introductory Treatise of the Convivio 
 Dante apologizes on two grounds for speaking of 
 himself. One of them is that it is legitimate for a 
 man to speak of himself if thereby he can clear him- 
 self " of some great disgrace." And he goes on to 
 say, " I myself fear the disgrace of having succumbed 
 to so great a passion as he who reads the aforenamed 
 Odes must conceive to have had mastery over me. 
 Which disgrace is entirely quenched by this present 
 discourse concerning myself, which shows that not 
 passion, but virtue, was the moving cause." Now, 
 amongst the fourteen Odes that seem to have been 
 embraced in the scheme of the Convivio those that 
 belong to the Pietra group are the only ones which 
 even the most sensitive conscience could regard as 
 Convivio IV. xxvii : 100-103 [ii]; I. ii : 114-130 [15-17]. 
 
 8?
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 reflecting disgrace upon their author. And since we 
 have sufficiently clear indications that these parti- 
 cular Odes were actually to find a place in the work 
 we may take it as certain that the whole elaborate 
 scheme of a twofold interpretation, literal and alle- 
 gorical, which is laid down in the second Treatise of 
 the Convivio, was primarily designed for application 
 to them, and is only consequentially attempted, or is 
 even abandoned, in other cases. 
 
 Thus the second Treatise, commenting on the 
 Ode 
 
 Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete, 
 
 is, as we shall see, an unsuccessful attempt to explain 
 away the natural and very innocent meaning of the 
 poem and to force an allegorical interpretation upon 
 it. In the next commentary, contained in the third 
 Treatise, the poem to be dealt with, 
 
 Amor che nella mente mi raggiona, 
 
 was really written in praise of Philosophy, and 
 accordingly the case is here reversed and extreme 
 difficulty arises in keeping up any semblance of a 
 literal interpretation as distinct from the allegory. 
 The fourth and last Treatise, commenting on the Ode 
 
 Le dolci rime d'amor ch'io solea, 
 
 deals with the nature of true Nobility, and does not 
 lend itself in any kind of way to the twofold inter- 
 
 Convivio IV. xrvi : 64-70 [8]. Cf. "Cosl nel mio parlar voglio 
 esser aspro," line 36. (The mention of Dido is the more significant 
 as it is the only instance of a proper name occurring in a Canzone of 
 Dante's.) Convivio II. ii : 52-57 [6]. 
 
 88
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" APOLOGETIC 
 
 pretation. Here the author is obliged frankly to 
 abandon his method. Fortunately the Pietra poems 
 were never reached ; but anyone who reads them 
 will agree that the attempt to allegorize the finest of 
 them would have proved still more unconvincing 
 than it is in the case of the Canzone 
 
 Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete, 
 
 commented on in the second Treatise, to an examina- 
 tion of which we must now turn. 
 
 This beautiful and touching poem rose out of the 
 episode of the Gentle Lady in whose sympathy 
 Dante had found a brief solace in the hour of his 
 deepest affliction. Was she not (we have already 
 supposed Dante might ask himself) a kind of fore- 
 shadowing or anti-type of the more exalted Lady 
 in whom he was indeed to find comfort, not for 
 " certain days " only, but through many a year of 
 trouble and of exile ? Might not the song once 
 sung to her in the moment of her passing triumph be 
 fitly adopted as a sister by the philosophic Canzoni ? 
 And might not the transient events that gave rise 
 to it be read and explained in the light of their after- 
 revealed significance ? 
 
 There might be some subjective truth in such a re- 
 reading of the past. But the objective record stub- 
 bornly opposed itself to any attempt to show that the 
 meaning now imported into the poem was that which 
 it was originally intended to convey, or even cryptic- 
 ally to hint at. In the Vita Nuova Dante not only 
 
 Convhio IV. i : 83-92 [10 sq?\. 
 8 9
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 confesses to love-guiles, involving intentional mystifi- 
 cation, but also declares that certain passages in his 
 poems were intended to be understood one way 
 when they were written, but are to be understood 
 now, and were secretly meant from the first, in an- 
 other way. In these cases he perhaps leaves us in 
 doubt which of the two meanings was really his when 
 he wrote the lines in question. But there is no room 
 even for doubt in the case of the poem we are now 
 considering. For not only is the allegorical meaning 
 forced and unnatural, but the objective facts give a 
 conclusive verdict against it. 
 
 In the Vita Nuova the Gentle Lady appears when 
 " a certain space " has elapsed since the first anni- 
 versary of Beatrice's death and tries the poet's 
 constancy for " certain days," during which she 
 enjoys a brief triumph. Then the memory of Beatrice 
 victoriously reasserts itself. Dante's thought of the 
 other lady was, he declares, " most base " in itself 
 and " gentle " only in so far as its object was a 
 " Gentle Lady." He " repents grievously " of it, 
 and with his " whole heart shame-laden " turns back 
 to Beatrice. In the still extant sonnet, 
 
 Parole mie, che per lo mondo siete 
 
 Vita Nuovav: 22-32 [3, 4], vi : 1-12 [i s<?.]. Cf. Sonnet xxxii 
 [Rim. lii] : Guido, i vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, in which lines 9, 10 
 should read : 
 
 E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi 
 con quella ch' e sul numer de le trenta, 
 
 as in the new Off re di D ante (Firenze, 1921); also Vita Nuova 
 vii-x (especially vii : 44-47 [7]), viii : 70-72 [12]. 
 
 90
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" APOLOGETIC 
 
 (not included in the Vita Nuova), he expressly de- 
 clares that this very poem Voi che intendendo^ etc., 
 was addressed to the Lady in whom his heart " went 
 astray," and that no members of the group to which 
 it belongs are any longer to abide with her, " for 
 Love is not there." 
 
 In the Convivio the Lady of the second love first 
 appears to him considerably more than three years 
 after Beatrice's death. It is some thirty months after 
 this before he had sufficiently overcome the first 
 difficulties of study to feel the full power of his 
 enamourment. Some fifteen years, say, after 
 Beatrice's death, when he writes the Convivio^ the 
 Second Love still holds him in its full strength, and 
 he means to speak of Beatrice no more in the work 
 that is devoted to its expression. Instead of being 
 ashamed of it he glories in it as in the better treasure 
 he has now found. 
 
 And again, in commenting on one of the poems 
 addressed to the Gentle Lady in the Vita Nuova, he 
 had expressly said that " heart " was to be taken to 
 mean " appetite " as opposed to reason. Now, the 
 careful reader may note that if this meaning were 
 assigned to the word in the present connection it 
 would make the poem harmonize completely with 
 
 Vita Nuova xxxv : 16, xxxvi : 113 [xxxiv : i, xxxv : I sy.], 
 xl : 1-23 [xxxix : 1-3], xxxix : 28-32 [xxxviii : 4]. Convivio II. 
 ii : I sqq. [for the " period " of Venus referred to vide Lubin's 
 Dante e gli astronomi Italiani (Trieste, 1895). Cf. "Temple 
 Classics" Convivio, p. 433], Convivio II. xiii : 49-52 [xii : 7], 
 ix : 49-55 [viii : 7], and (as already cited) xvi : 50 sqq. [xv : 6]. 
 
 91
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 the literal story as told and regarded in the Vita 
 Nuova, but would ruin the whole allegorical interpre- 
 tation offered in the Convivio ; and it is evidently 
 with this in his mind that Dante now warns his 
 readers against taking the word in this poem to 
 mean " any special part of the soul or body," and 
 bids them understand it simply as the inner man. 
 Surely all this amounts to a scarcely veiled acknow- 
 ledgement that we are to take the assertion as to the 
 meaning of the poem rather as defining his present 
 attitude of mind than as faithfully interpreting its 
 original meaning. Can Dante really have expected 
 or, in spite of his protestations, intended that they 
 should be understood in any other way ? 
 
 It is now perhaps sufficiently clear that the 
 allegorizing of this particular poem can hardly have 
 been undertaken on its own merits, and that it is but 
 a part of a general scheme which was conceived with 
 special relation to the Pietra group of poems, from 
 the implications of which Dante was seriously 
 anxious to dissociate himself. 
 
 As to these magnificent poems themselves I can- 
 not believe that if they had been written by any other 
 poet they would have been felt by Dante to throw 
 " disgrace " upon their author, or would have 
 alienated his heart from him. But it is equally certain 
 that the passion which breathes through them would 
 
 Vita Nuova xxxix : 3337, 55 sq. [rxxviii : 5, 7]. Convivio II. 
 vii : 17-22 [vi : 2]. As to the allegory, vide passages already 
 cited: Convivio II. ii : 52-57 [6]; I. ii : 114-123 [15,16]. Cf. 
 Purgatorio xxxi : 3436. 
 
 9 2
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" APOLOGETIC 
 
 have called for the cancelling penitence of Purgatory 
 and was alien from the note of the Convivio. 
 
 But, whatever importance may be attached to this 
 attempt to find in the Convivio the half-obliterated 
 traces of the false paths on which Dante declares in 
 the PurgatoriOy with agonized self-reproaches, that 
 he had trodden since the days of the Vita Nuova, 
 our estimate of his actual interests, convictions, and 
 enthusiasms when writing the Convivio itself is quite 
 independent of this speculative element. As a 
 veritable document of the stage in Dante's mental 
 history at which it was composed as distinct from a 
 somewhat blurred record of experiences that had 
 preceded it it presents its own problems, the solu- 
 tion of which is unaffected by the success or failure of 
 the interpretation that has now been given of some 
 of its incidental features. Bearing this in mind, and 
 welcoming the relief of treading on firmer ground 
 and finding less uneasy footing, we may now turn to 
 these fresh problems. 
 
 IV. THE "CONVIVIO" IN ITS POSITIVE 
 CONTENT 
 
 As to the sincerity and the exalted character of 
 Dante's second enamourment there can be no doubt, 
 and we must now turn to the prose text of the 
 Convivio in order to form a clearer conception of its 
 significance. In doing so we must look both back- 
 ward and forward to the Vita Nuova and to the 
 Comedy. Dante's first love, the Beatrice of the 
 
 93
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Vita Nuova, is the impersonation of goodness, 
 beauty, and truth. His second love, my Lady 
 Philosophy, impersonates nothing, for she is not a 
 person at all, but only a personification, which may 
 be, and in this case is, a very different thing. A 
 personification is primarily a figure of speech or of 
 rhetoric, and it does not necessarily demand any 
 greater effort of the imagination or expenditure of 
 feeling than is involved in an initial letter or a vocative 
 case. The object of Dante's second love does indeed 
 represent more, and far more, than this, for she 
 inspires a genuine passion of devotion. But she 
 remains a personification, and never becomes a per- 
 son. Even the evanescent personality which she 
 borrows from her (fictitious, as we have seen) identi- 
 fication with the Gentle Lady of the Vita Nuova and 
 the Canzone is virtually repudiated in the Convivio. 
 This lack of personality becomes all the clearer if we 
 compare her with impersonations of human and divine 
 wisdom in the Virgil and the Beatrice of the Comedy. 
 As to the vividness of Virgil's personality there 
 can be no difference of feeling. The very passages 
 that are framed to fit his allegorical significance most 
 closely are sometimes the most poignant in the well- 
 nigh intolerable pressure of their appeal on behalf 
 of the Exile from heaven as, for instance, in his 
 words to Dante : 
 
 For as I lived a rebel to His sway, 
 The Emperor, Who Governeth On High, 
 Doth all approach through me unto His Courts deny 
 
 (MUSGRAVE), 
 
 94
 
 THE "CONVIVIO DIDACTIC 
 
 or to Statius: " May the true court which bindeth me 
 in eternal exile bring thee in peace to the council of 
 the blessed." Or where Statius tells him, " 'Twas 
 thou didst light my way to God. Thou didst as he 
 who, stepping through the night, beareth the light 
 behind him, to himself of no avail, but making clear 
 the path to them that follow." Or in the last scene, 
 when he vanishes before the presence of Beatrice. 
 
 Beatrice is generally less vividly felt by the reader 
 as a personality than Virgil is. Nor is the fusion of 
 the biographical and the allegorical elements that 
 combine in her portrayal so complete as in his case. 
 But at least there can be no doubt of the sense of 
 her personality in Dante's own mind, and her 
 allegorical significance even at its highest never 
 empties her of individuality. Thus, while nothing 
 but the thought that she represents Revelation 
 could make it natural, or even tolerable, to introduce 
 her as riding in a chariot (the Church) drawn by 
 Christ himself in the form of a griffon ; yet it is in 
 this very scene that her personal appeal to Dante 
 breaks through all allegorical swathings, and every 
 unsophisticated reader feels that two human per- 
 sonalities stand face to face. 
 
 But in the Convivio Philosophy has no personality. 
 The lady of the Ode 
 
 Amor che nella mente mi raggiona, 
 or the Ballade 
 
 Voi chi sapete raggionar d' amore, 
 
 Inferno i: 124-126. Purgatorio xxi : 16-18, xxii : 67-69, 
 IXX 43-54 
 
 95
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 may smile or frown as she will, but we never see 
 either smile or frown pass over a human countenance. 
 The Odes that were truly addressed to Philosophy 
 are neither allegorical nor literal in any vital sense ; 
 for they are merely figurative, and Augustine has 
 taught us to distinguish between figure and allegory. 
 Thus, when Scripture speaks of the divine power as 
 " the arm of God " the phrase does not even literally 
 refer to any bodily organ. It is a figure for " effec- 
 tive power," and that is what it directly suggests. 
 And so it is with the smile and frown of the Lady 
 of Dante's second love. They are just as purely 
 figurative as the smile on the face of Wordsworth's 
 " Duty." 
 
 Indeed, this could not be otherwise, for no human 
 personality, not even that of a Beatrice, could bear 
 the strain of intimate assimilation to the exalted Lady 
 of the Convivio. It is only by virtue of vagueness and 
 indefiniteness of outline that she can cover the whole 
 range of the poet's imperfectly co-ordinated beliefs 
 and feelings. 
 
 For since Dante is a devout Christian believer and 
 the Lady of his second love is no other than Wisdom 
 herself, it follows that she is that very Wisdom cele- 
 brated in the Book of Proverbs and in the Apocry- 
 phal Book of Wisdom. Thus, it is of her that it was 
 written " From the beginning, before the ages, was 
 I created." She is " The glow of the Eternal Light, 
 the spotless mirror of the majesty of God." She is 
 * The spouse of the Emperor of Heaven . . . and 
 not his spouse only, but his sister and his beloved 
 
 96
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 daughter/' It was with her that God began the 
 universe and, in particular, the movement of the 
 heavens. The angels gaze upon her continuously 
 though we mortals can hold but intermittent converse 
 with her. And finally (since the " Wisdom " of Pro- 
 verbs is no other than the " Word " of the proem of S. 
 John's Gospel), it was she that so loved the world that 
 she came in our likeness to direct our course aright. 
 
 The Beatrice of the Comedy, in her " allegorical " 
 capacity of Revelation, may be drawn by Christ 
 himself in the chariot of the Church, may be sur- 
 rounded by prophets and evangelists and angels, 
 may have been attended by the moral and theological 
 virtues " before she descended to earth," but she 
 could not have been identified even allegorically 
 with the Second Person of the Trinity ; and, as we 
 have seen, it is in the very passage in which her 
 allegorical character reaches its highest point of 
 exaltation that our sense of her human personality 
 becomes most vivid. 
 
 Beatrice, then, even in the Comedy, always re- 
 mains a personality. The Lady of Dante's second 
 love neither is nor can be anything more than a 
 personification. But what does she personify ? 
 
 To answer this question fully we must consult not 
 
 Convivio III. xiv : 58-64 [7], xv : 54 sq, [5], lii : 115-118 
 
 [14], zv: i57-i59[ T 5] *i : 46-55 7-75 [5 ?] : l8o ~ 
 184 [17]. Cf. II. and III. passim. It must be a strong faith in 
 their allegorizing theory that has enabled some commentators to 
 find a reference to this august Lady in the "pargoletta, o altra 
 vanita " of Purgatorio xxxi : 59 sj. 
 
 97 G
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 only the selected passages in which she is approxi- 
 mated to, or identified with, the " Word " that was 
 made flesh, but the great body of the prose of the 
 Convivio. We shall there find that the Philosophy 
 of whom Dante is enamoured includes not only 
 theology, but all the humbler branches of study, 
 down to arithmetic, logic, and grammar (that is to 
 say, the Latin language and literature). She is, in 
 short, the comprehensive and necessarily vague and 
 many-coloured symbol of all wisdom, human and 
 divine ; and no one who neglects or depreciates any 
 branch of knowledge is worthy to be regarded as her 
 lover. The differentiation, then, between secular and 
 sacred learning that is so prominent in the sym- 
 bolism of the Comedy finds no expression at all in 
 that of the Convivio. 
 
 It is true, as we shall see, that the fact and the 
 importance of Revelation as part, and that the 
 highest part, of Wisdom are already recognized in the 
 Convtvio ; but Beatrice is not yet brought into any 
 special relation with it, as she is in the Comedy. 
 On the contrary, in the conflict between the new 
 love and the old, Beatrice is not a symbol of Revela- 
 tion or of anything else. She is just the Florentine 
 maiden who lives in heaven with the angels and in 
 Dante's memory on earth. The great scheme of 
 study which was undertaken for her glorification has 
 now passed, in its own strength, out of her domain. 
 Her victorious rival, under whose inspiration Dante 
 enters on the high emprise of the Convivio, is the 
 Convtvio II. xiv, xv ; III. xi : 94-129 [9-12].
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 collective symbol of Wisdom under all her aspects, 
 including the revealed truths of Theology. 
 
 It is to a due appreciation of these facts that we 
 must look for a solution of the problem that has so 
 long exercised the minds of Dantists as to the exact 
 place and meaning that must be assigned to the 
 Convivio in relation to Dante's other works and to 
 his mental and spiritual history in general. 
 
 The conception of personified Wisdom did not 
 originate with Dante. Tradition assigned to Solo- 
 mon all the most important utterances of the Hebrew 
 sages. And so the Wisdom that is so splendidly 
 personified in the Book of Proverbs and in the 
 Wisdom of Solomon might be regarded as at one 
 moment inspiring her royal pupil with homely 
 proverbial truths, at another teaching him to speak 
 " of trees from the cedar which is in Lebanon even 
 unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall," or 
 " of beasts and of fowls and of creeping things and 
 of fishes," and at yet another inviting him to hold 
 intercourse with her because she was " privy to the 
 mysteries of the knowledge of God." 
 
 The more immediate source of Dante's concep- 
 tion of personified Philosophy, however, is to be 
 found not so much in the Old Testament as in one 
 of the very books by which, as he tells us, he sought 
 consolation after the death of Beatrice. For to 
 
 Proverbs viii : i ix : 6. i Kings iv : 33. Wisdom of Solomon 
 viii : 4. [In the Vulgate, however, somewhat less emphatically 
 than in the Greek and the A.V., doctrix enim est disciplines Dei. 
 
 Convivio II. xiii : 14-16 [xii : 2]. 
 
 99
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Boetius in his captivity and despondence Philosophy 
 appeared in person to minister consolation. Her 
 " undivided robe," representing the practical and 
 theoretic sciences in their continuous unity, was 
 woven by her own hands and " at one moment she 
 confined herself within the wonted stature of a 
 mortal and at another her towering height seemed to 
 strike against heaven, nay, when she fully raised her 
 head she even pierced into heaven itself and drew up 
 the gaze of man in the vain attempt to follow." 1 
 
 This figure of the Boetian Wisdom with cloud- 
 girt brow was known to mediaeval art, and the con- 
 ception would be familiar to Dante's readers. But 
 the interesting point is that, at bottom, it is not a 
 specifically Christian but a characteristically Ethnic 
 conception. It is important to realize this, and to do 
 so we must dwell for a moment upon the interesting 
 personality of Boetius himself. 
 
 The writings of Boetius (475-525 A.D.) long pre- 
 sented a curious problem to the historians and 
 critics. His great prison book, the Consolatio 
 Philosophic^ remains throughout on the plane of 
 Ethnic philosophy and religion. There is nothing in 
 
 1 Boetius : Consolatio Philosophic, Lib. I, Prosa i. The transla- 
 tion in the text is free. The original runs : " Nam nunc quidem ad 
 communem sese hominum mensuram cohibebat, nunc vero pulsare 
 caclum summi verticis cacumine videbatur : quas cum caput altius 
 eitulisset, ipsum etiam caelum penetrabat, respicientiumque homi- 
 num frustrabatur intuitum." Her robes were " indissolubili materia 
 perfectae," and the Delphin editor, I think rightly, explains in- 
 diisolubilis as individua, which reminds us of the seamless garment 
 in John xix : 23. 
 
 100
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 it to indicate that the author is a Christian. There is 
 no reference to the Christian Scriptures, no recogni- 
 tion of Revelation as distinct from philosophic 
 reasoning, no trace of any specific Christian doctrine 
 or article of faith, and no appeal to rewards or 
 punishments in a future life. It is throughout a 
 noble plea for the thesis that if we take life as we 
 find it and rightly weigh its values we shall see that 
 the good man is never to be pitied and the bad man 
 never to be envied. It was in these thoughts that 
 Boetius found consolation in his hour of need. 
 
 But, nevertheless, several theological tracts on the 
 doctrine of the Trinity and on the two natures in 
 the person of Christ are extant bearing his name ; 
 and on the strength of them he received unsuspecting 
 hospitality amongst the Christians for many cen- 
 turies. His teaching was a counterpoise, assimilated 
 without any sense of opposition, to excessive 
 scripturalism of argument and other-worldliness of 
 appeal, and as such had undoubted spiritual value. 
 He has been happily described as " the light of 
 a thousand years," and it has been said that from 
 his own day to the time of the Renaissance there was 
 probably no book outside the canon that administered 
 strength and consolation to so many Christian souls. 
 
 No wonder that in the more critical days that 
 followed the revival of letters the authenticity of the 
 theological treatises was assailed and, indeed, found 
 few competent defenders. On the other hand, more 
 recent researches have placed the Boetian authorship 
 of these essays beyond the reach of cavil. It had 
 
 101
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 always been well known that Boetius was the intimate 
 friend and associate of the leading Christian scholars 
 of his day, and it now seems obvious that whereas he 
 accepted Christianity sincerely and unquestioningly, 
 yet his active interests were those of a secular or de- 
 tached student. He wrote standard treatises on 
 arithmetic and music, for instance, translated logical 
 treatises of Aristotle, and intended to carry out a vast 
 scheme of work on similar lines. He was an ac- 
 complished Platonist, too ; and thus it was with the 
 great Ethnic thinkers, saints, and seers that he spent 
 his days, from them that he drew his spiritual 
 nourishment, and upon their support that he fell 
 back in his misfortunes. But he was quite willing, 
 we may suppose, to lend a hand to his ecclesiastical 
 friends by throwing into " elegant " philosophical form 
 the more recondite articles of the creed which he and 
 they alike professed. 1 And the character of the tracts 
 themselves is in full harmony with this hypothesis. 
 
 I have dwelt at length on the position of Boetius 
 because it is so singularly helpful to us in appreciat- 
 ing that of Dante at the Convivio stage of his evolu- 
 tion. The philosophy personified in the Consolatio 
 covers the whole system of studies of which Dante 
 
 1 On Boetius vide " Temple Classics " Paradiso note on x : 1 24 
 1 29,Wicksteed's Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy (London, 
 1920), pp. 42-45, 89 sqq., and (for the authenticity of the Theo- 
 logical tracts) Anecdoton Holderi, Hermann Usener (Leipzig, 1877). 
 Even in the Middle Ages some few readers noted the unorthodox or 
 non-Christian tone of the Consolatio. Fide Nietzsch : Das System 
 des Boethius (Berlin, 1 860), pp. 27 sqq., and Migne : Pat. Lat. kiv : 
 col. 1239^. 
 
 IO2
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 was at this time really enamoured ; but she does not 
 cover all he believed. Like Boetius, only more so, 
 he accepted and reverenced as true the whole scheme 
 of Christian doctrines, though his mind was not 
 habitually engaged on it for its own sake. Specific- 
 ally Christian subjects of speculation had not yet 
 wound themselves into his inmost affections. They 
 had made as yet no large contribution to the gathered 
 stores of his mind, nor did they spontaneously pre- 
 sent him with the examples and illustrations he 
 needed in his discourse. But on the other hand they 
 had already fired his imagination as they never did 
 that of Boetius. And therefore the Lady of his second 
 love is constantly addressed in terms and endowed 
 with attributes alien to the Philosophia Consolatrix of 
 Boetius, on which she is modelled. To borrow the 
 imagery of the Gospels, Dante's " Philosophy," in 
 the Convivio, has a net which will hold all the great 
 fishes of Boetius without breaking, but we see that 
 the yet greater draft of fishes which this same net is 
 already opening itself to receive will inevitably burst 
 it in the end. 
 
 Thus Dante recognizes, as we have seen, the dis- 
 tinction between Revelation and Reason and the 
 supremacy of the latter. But the distinction finds no 
 recognition in the symbolism of the Convivio and 
 makes no contribution to its store of examples. In 
 like manner the Christian contrast between the 
 practical and the contemplative life is expressed in 
 no such symbolism as that of Leah and Rachel in the 
 John zxi : II. Luke v : 6. 
 103
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Comedy, and has not worked itself into conscious 
 separation from the Aristotelian contrast between 
 the practical or civic and the theoretical or speculative 
 life. But, on the other hand, the whole range of 
 earthly activities and speculations already catch a 
 glow from their association with their heavenly 
 analogues, are uplifted into a region of intenser 
 spiritual fervour, and are inspired with a deeper 
 significance by the reaction upon them of the theo- 
 logical studies which have not yet asserted their 
 direct ascendency in the student's mind. In all this 
 the Convivio represents an advance towards some- 
 thing not yet fully apprehended. It is expectant and 
 transitional. It does not reveal, as has sometimes 
 been supposed, a lapse from a more advanced posi- 
 tion once held, but a reaching forth towards one yet 
 to be taken. 
 
 These characteristics of the Convivio we must now 
 bring out in detail. To begin with, Dante accepts the 
 distinction between Reason and Revelation and the 
 more exalted claims of the latter without qualification. 
 This could hardly be otherwise, for at this time he 
 was a diligent student of the Contra Gentiles of S. 
 Thomas, and this very distinction and gradation is 
 the vertebral column to which all the members of 
 that treatise are articulated. ' ' The Emperor of the 
 Universe," Dante declares, being " the light which 
 illuminates us in the darkness," told us the truth 
 about the angels, " which we could not know, 
 neither truly see, without him." There are truths 
 II. vi : 8-20 [v : 2, 3]. 
 104
 
 THE "CONVIVIO DIDACTIC 
 
 concerning our immortality which " we see perfectly 
 by Faith, but see by Reason with a certain darkening 
 shadow." He who created our reason expressly 
 willed that it should not cover the whole range of 
 his power, and established upon the miracles that 
 transcend reason's grasp that faith which matters 
 more to the human race than anything else what- 
 ever, since by it we escape eternal death and gain 
 eternal life. Where the teaching of the philosophers 
 and of Christian doctrine coincide, " the Christian 
 doctrine is of greater force, and shatters all cavil in 
 virtue of the supreme light of heaven that illuminates 
 it." For holy Church is the " spouse and secretary " 
 of Christ, " who cannot lie." And so in the Song 
 of Songs " all the sciences are called queens and con- 
 cubines and handmaidens," but Theology "is called 
 the dove, because she is subject to no aspersions 
 of contention ; and she is called perfect, because she 
 gives us perfect vision of the Truth in which our 
 soul finds rest." So far all is in very near conformity 
 with the teaching of the Contra Gentiles. 
 
 Yet it was from Boetius and Cicero, as he tells us, 
 and not from the Bible or Aquinas, that Dante had 
 learned to regard my Lady Philosophy as " a thing 
 supreme " and to hail her as " The daughter of God, 
 the Queen of all." And even where he expressly 
 contrasts the Natural and the Theological ap- 
 
 II. ii : 127 sq. [viii 115]; III. vii : 157 sqq, [i 5 s<?.] ; IV. iv : 
 90-96 [9]; II. vi : 33 Jf., iv : 31 sq. [v : 5, iii : 10], rv: 179- 
 184 [xiv: 20], Cf. Song of Songs vi : 8, 9 \Vulg. 7, 8]; xiii : 
 14-74 [iii: 2-9].
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 preaches to truth he seems insensible to any real 
 difference between them; for when after treating of 
 the divine seed of Nobility in man by " the natural 
 way " he turns to the consideration of the same sub- 
 ject " by the theological way " he quotes Isaiah, 
 indeed, on the seven Gifts of the Spirit, but the only 
 conclusion he reaches is the very " natural " one 
 that man should exercise himself in right conduct 
 and the restraint of his passions " as Augustine, and 
 also Aristotle, would have him do." And yet it is on 
 this very passage in Isaiah that Aquinas founds his 
 doctrine of the difference between the " natural " 
 and the " infused " virtues, and erects his whole 
 theory of the higher Christian Ethic which (rising 
 far above the natural ethic of Aristotle) expresses 
 itself in the Sermon on the Mount and specifically 
 in the Beatitudes. No clearer proof could be needed 
 that at this time, though Dante had accepted the 
 conception of Christian faith and experience which 
 afterwards found its symbol in Beatrice, he had not 
 yet assimilated it. And again, in the very sentence in 
 which he identifies his Lady with the Logos of the 
 Gospel of John, he goes on to illustrate the all- 
 absorbing devotion with which she inspires her 
 lovers by citing the examples of Democritus, Plato, 
 Aristotle, Zeno, Socrates, and Seneca without ad- 
 ducing a single instance from the Old or New 
 Testament or from the lives of Christian saints or 
 heroes. 
 
 IV. xii : 100-133 [11-14]. 
 
 III. liv : 62-100 [7-10]. 
 
 106
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 It need not surprise us after this to find that on 
 Dante's lips the " Celestial Athens " is as natural an 
 expression for Heaven as the " Celestial Jerusalem " 
 would be, and in a beautiful symbolic passage we 
 actually find him saying of the virtues of Faith, 
 Hope, and Charity that " it is by these virtues that 
 we rise to that celestial Athens where Stoics, Peri- 
 patetics, and Epicureans, in the light of the eternal 
 Truth, harmoniously unite in one will." Though in 
 another place, with closer approach to Christian pro- 
 priety, he takes the three Marys at the tomb of 
 Christ as symbols of the " three sects of the active 
 (as distinguished from the contemplative) life to 
 wit, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics," 
 who seek the true blessedness where it is not to be 
 found, namely, " in the tomb, which is to say in this 
 present world." Dante is rightly admired for his con- 
 sistency, but it is not to the Convivio that his 
 admirers must appeal when they wish to illustrate 
 this characteristic. The Boetian net is not yet broken, 
 but it is under a strain that it cannot long bear ; 
 and it is worth noting that the passage last cited 
 the nearest to the doctrine of the Comedy that we 
 have yet noticed occurs in the last Treatise of the 
 Convivio^ the one in which the allegorical system of 
 interpretation of the Odes is abandoned. We shall 
 presently see (p. 115 sqq^) that in another respect also 
 this same Book, or Treatise, betrays the ripening of 
 Dante's mind towards its full maturity ; but mean- 
 Ill, xiv: 136-141 [15]; IV. nii : 149-174 [14, 15] (reading 
 of the Florentine Testo Critico). 
 
 IO7
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 while this wavering treatment of the Ethnic schools 
 of philosophy challenges attention to the unstable 
 equilibrium of the teaching of the Convivio on the 
 subject of the relation of earthly to heavenly fruition. 
 And this brings us to the next point. The Aristo- 
 telian distinction between the Practical or Civic 
 and the Theoretic or Speculative life is in a measure 
 parallel to the Christian distinction between the 
 Active and the Contemplative life. But the two 
 systems are far from completely coinciding. The 
 Practical life, as conceived by Aristotle, is concerned 
 with those activities which make a man a good 
 citizen, alike in the offices of peace and of war, while 
 the Christian writers generally mean by the Active 
 life devotion to " good works " ; and again, on 
 Aristotle's lips the Speculative life covers every form 
 of the pursuit and enjoyment of truth, which is the 
 proper business of the philosopher or student. It 
 includes, no doubt, that intense but effortless con- 
 templation and enjoyment of truth possessed which 
 is the highest self-realization, and which is the only 
 life that we can reasonably think of as lived by the 
 Divine being or beings ; but it includes also every 
 humbler branch of the pursuit of truth, whereas 
 the Christian " contemplation " is of divine things 
 alone. And seeing that in this life we can only know 
 God by his effects and never in his essence, con- 
 templation can never be perfect here. Only the 
 blessed spirits, whether angels or men, who " see 
 God " can live this life at its highest ; though 
 pondering on the truths of revealed religion and on 
 
 108
 
 THE "CONVIVIO DIDACTIC 
 
 the confident expectation of the ultimate vision may 
 already give us a foretaste of heavenly bliss even on 
 earth, and may raise us almost above the limits of our 
 human nature. Such, at least, was the Christian 
 doctrine dominant in Dante's day, and it is from this 
 doctrine that the Comedy, as a living and organic 
 whole, draws its vital breath. Thus Dante's illus- 
 trations of contemplation, not only in heaven, but on 
 earth, are drawn in the Comedy from the ranks of the 
 Christian mystics : a Richard of S. Victor who 
 " was more than man " in his concentration of 
 thought on divine things, a Bernard " who in this 
 life, by contemplation, tasted of the peace " of 
 heaven, or a Dionysius " who saw deepest into the 
 nature and the ministrations " of the angels, in virtue 
 of " the great passion with which he set himself to 
 the contemplation of their orders." But in the 
 Convivio it is otherwise. Dante does indeed re- 
 peatedly and clearly announce the principle that the 
 full felicity of contemplation, which consists in seeing 
 God, cannot be attained in this life. This same 
 article of faith is developed with extreme beauty and 
 eloquence by S. Thomas in the Contra Gentiles, and 
 Dante had accepted it as true. But, for all that, 
 throughout the Convivio he habitually speaks of the 
 Active and the Practical life or the Contemplative 
 and the Speculative life as if the two phrases were 
 
 Paradiso iv : 124-129, vi : 19-21, xix : 1 5, xxii : 61-69, xxxiii : 
 139-141 and passim, x: 131 sq., xxxi : 109-111, x: 115-117. 
 Cf. Epist. x: sec. 28 [xiii : 77-82]. Convivio III. xiii : 90-101 [9]^; 
 IV. xxii : 140 sqq., 194^. [13 sq., 17 s$.] (Moore's reading). 
 
 109
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 synonymous ; and he generally keeps well within 
 the range of Aristotle when speaking of the latter. 
 The " works of God and of Nature " (rather than 
 God himself) are described in one passage as the 
 proper objects of *' contemplation " or " specula- 
 tion " ; and in another, when speaking of the happy 
 end of an old man whose " good works and con- 
 templations " have already " severed him from all 
 mundane affairs and cogitations, and surrendered 
 him to God," he takes as his first example the aged 
 Cato as portrayed in the De Senectute. Lancelot and 
 Guido Montefeltrano follow later on ! But Dante 
 seems to half-grudge the admission (explicitly as he 
 makes it) that the perfection of bliss is not to be 
 attained in this life by the lover of philosophy, for he 
 declares that whereas the active life and the exercise 
 of the moral virtues can give us only an imperfect 
 felicity, yet we may attain it " almost in perfection " 
 by the exercise of the intellectual virtues. Indeed, 
 this intellectual vision is so perfect, when in its per- 
 fection, that it may not improperly be called perfect, 
 even in its imperfect state. And, again, he tells 
 us that the sage is not insatiable, like the miser, 
 because human desires " in this life " should be 
 regulated by the possibilities of our human faculties, 
 so that it is not natural to us even to desire to know 
 what God really is. And in yet another passage the 
 qualification is still further reduced, and we learn 
 that the eyes (demonstrations) and the smile (per- 
 suasions) of Philosophy confer " the loftiest joy of 
 IV. ixii : 1 13 /f. [i i], ixviii : 39-65 [5-8]. 
 110
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 blessedness, which is the supreme good of Paradise," 
 and that while " all else here below " leaves an 
 unsated longing, yet in this intercourse with Philo- 
 sophy " man, as man, feels his every desire fulfilled 
 and so is blessed." This (in spite of the qualification 
 " as man ") runs quite counter to the teaching of 
 Aquinas, who would have the intelligence always 
 straining against its earthly limitations, seeking ana- 
 logies, within its own range, for truths that lie be- 
 yond it, and consciously yearning for the satisfaction 
 that will at last come to it in heaven. This attitude 
 of mind, which, as we have seen, is Dante's in the 
 Comedy, is essentially foreign to his feelings and 
 dispositions in the Convivio. 
 
 All this, if pressed, would amount to a definite 
 renunciation of the longings of the Christian mystics 
 afterwards glorified in the Comedy. But nothing in 
 the Convivio must be pressed. It is the work of a 
 thinker in the making, and its inconsistencies, 
 whether real or apparent, are those of an enthusiast 
 who believes without question much that has not yet 
 come under assimilating contact with his personal 
 experience and feeling or been submitted to the 
 pressure of his systematic thought. 
 
 But Dante has already felt and experienced more 
 than he can contain, and he overflows with the long- 
 ing to share his treasures before he has rightly 
 counted them. The Arabian interpreters of Aristotle 
 never drew the sharp line between powers natural to 
 man and powers above his human nature, to be con- 
 Ill, xiii: 101-107 [10], xv : 12-55, 76-110 [2-5, 8-10]. 
 ill
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 ferred upon him in heaven ; and consequently they 
 believed that in this life the highest mystic insight 
 was ideally attainable. This was contrary to the 
 teaching of Aquinas, but while Dante believed with 
 him he felt with the Arabians. This was the cause of 
 some uncertainty or even contradiction in expression, 
 but not of any strain or conflict in feeling. For the 
 things Dante was actually thinking about were well 
 within the limits of Aristotelian, to say nothing of 
 Arabian, " speculation," and even when his matter 
 was most specifically Christian he was never con- 
 scious of needing any direct support that could not 
 be found in Aristotelian principles. Thus, in con- 
 nection with the long disquisition on the different 
 aspects under which the several orders of the 
 angels contemplate the Persons of the Trinity 
 and their relations to each other he argues that 
 the contemplating angels must be indefinitely 
 more numerous than the active ones (though, 
 indeed, the activity of these latter is itself of the 
 nature of " speculation "), and in discussing a point 
 of difficulty he refers to no other authority than 
 that of Aristotle, with his doctrine of the Practical 
 and the Speculative life and his contention that the 
 latter alone is fully consonant with the nature of 
 the immaterial beings who preside over the circula- 
 tion of the heavens. 
 
 So far we have met with little or nothing to 
 indicate any closer connection than that of juxta- 
 position between Dante's obviously sincere and even 
 Convivio II. v : 89 sqq. [iv : 13]. 
 112
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 glowing professions of Christian conviction in the 
 Convivio and the almost exclusively Ethnic or secular 
 character of his whole store of illustrations, his 
 gallery of worthies, and the range of subjects on 
 which his mind has been exercised and to which he 
 longs to introduce his readers. Even where he does 
 use Christian illustrations it is for the sake of secular 
 applications. 
 
 This last remark brings us incidentally to the real 
 heart of this branch of our investigation. The centre 
 of gravity of Dante's interest, it is true, still lies well 
 within the scope of secular studies and ideals ; but, 
 nevertheless, a vivid belief that the personified 
 Philosophy which consoled Boetius, and first con- 
 soled and then inspired Dante himself, is in truth 
 no other than that very Wisdom of God which 
 brought salvation to the world gives to the teacher 
 of secular wisdom a sense of consecration, a mission- 
 ary ardour, and a reverence for his task which 
 catches its tone from the preachers of the sacred and 
 unfailing truths of Revelation. And so the im- 
 mediate effect of Dante's theological studies is to be 
 found less in any quickened interest in theology itself 
 than in their reaction upon his intellectual, moral, 
 social, and political ideals and impulses. 
 
 It is especially the Contra Gentiles, which we can 
 trace in its formative reaction and its warming effect 
 upon the spirit of the Convivio. 
 
 Thus the noble exordium of the Convivio is closely 
 modelled on a corresponding utterance in the Contra 
 Gentiles. S. Thomas is arguing that it was fitting 
 
 113 H
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 for Revelation not only to give assurance concerning 
 mysteries that transcend the scope of human powers, 
 but also to confirm many truths that are not really 
 past finding out by philosophy, because otherwise 
 very few indeed would gain even a relatively firm 
 grasp of them. Amongst the reasons for this 
 Thomas enumerates the lack of time and opportunity 
 which bars out most men from the long and severe 
 studies requisite for mastering philosophic truth, 
 the pressure of practical business, and the intellec- 
 tual sluggishness which makes many men compara- 
 tively indifferent to intellectual truth. Dante adopts 
 and adapts this argument with passionate conviction 
 and enthusiasm, but he employs it not to show the 
 necessity of Revelation but to demonstrate the duty 
 and the privilege of the Student to propagate be- 
 yond the academic walls the whole range of philo- 
 sophic and scientific truth. " University Extension " 
 (if an emeritus Extensioner may be allowed to put it 
 so) received a consecration from its analogy with the 
 outflowing of Revelation beyond its exclusive 
 domain ; nay, Dante can appropriate to his own 
 mission, in teaching philosophy to the laity who are 
 ignorant of Latin, the glowing phrases uttered by 
 prophet and evangelist in relation to the shining of 
 the light of Christ and of his Gospel upon the 
 Heathen and Jewish darkness ; or can compare his 
 projected popularizing of Philosophy with Christ's 
 miraculous feeding of the multitude. 
 
 Contra Gentiles I. iv. Convivio I. i, xiii : 82-89 [12]. Cf. John 
 vi : 10-13; Isaiah ix : 2; Matthew iv : 16, etc.
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 Again, in his Contra Gentiles Aquinas contrasts 
 certain false or imperfect views held by Jewish, 
 Saracen, or Pagan sages with the rounded and per- 
 fect teaching of Christian scholarship ; and when 
 Dante took up arms against false and unworthy con- 
 ceptions of what constitutes true Nobility views 
 which had gained wide currency, or could appeal to 
 high authority he felt that, in his mission of de- 
 fending lofty ideals of human excellence and social 
 distinction against vulgar or haughty pretensions, he 
 was engaged in a work that might well rank with 
 S. Thomas's defence of Christian truth. And so he 
 desired to call his Ode on true Nobility Contra gli 
 erranti^ in avowed imitation of what Aquinas wrote 
 " to the confusion of all who swerve from our faith." 
 
 But far the most important of the reactions of 
 Theology upon the secular thought of Dante, and the 
 one that points us forward most distinctly to the 
 Monarchia and the Comedy, is to be found in its 
 influence upon his conception of the significance of 
 the Roman Empire and Roman Law. 
 
 I suppose it is generally recognized that Roman 
 Law had reacted upon the regulation of ecclesiastical 
 institutions, and even upon Christian dogma. The 
 Decretals were modelled upon the Corpus Juris ; 
 and forensic theory and practice had defined the 
 conception of the Atonement. The Decretalists 
 would study Roman Law less for its own sake than 
 as a guide and standard by means of which they 
 might bring method and system into their own 
 Convivio IV. xxx : 23-30 [3],
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 ecclesiastical legislation. As they read and admired 
 the Justinian Code their constant preoccupation 
 would be with the concerns of the Church and the 
 application of standardized legal principles to her 
 requirements. My suggestion is that during the 
 Convivio period, and to some extent afterwards, 
 Dante was reversing the same process on another 
 field, and that whereas the Decretalists brought 
 system from Civil into Ecclesiastical Law, Dante 
 brought system from his belief in the providential 
 guidance of sacred history into his conception of the 
 development of law and order in the regulation of 
 the temporal affairs of men, from its first beginning 
 to its final embodiment in Roman Law and the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 The significance of the reclaiming of the waste of 
 secular history and bringing it into parallelism with 
 its spiritual analogue in the history of Revelation 
 and the Church can only be appreciated fully by 
 reference to its perfected outcome in the Monarchia 
 and the Comedy ; but it is already in an advanced 
 stage of embryonic development in the Convivio, 
 and its revolutionary character is already plain 
 enough. 
 
 The textbook of Roman and universal history 
 from which Dante and his contemporaries drew their 
 first impressions on these subjects was written by 
 Orosius at the request of Augustine for the express 
 purpose of contrasting the orderly guidance of 
 sacred history by Divine Providence with the welter 
 of chaotic passions presented by the blood-stained 
 
 116
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 annals of the world in which violence perpetually 
 reigned in the place of law. 
 
 Dante, as he expressly tells us, at one time ac- 
 cepted this reading of secular history, and in dealing 
 with the Monarchia I shall try to trace the steps by 
 which his practical acquaintance with the civilizing 
 power of Roman Law, his study of Virgil, his inborn 
 sense of the beauty and the divine sanctions of 
 human relationships and emotions, his vision of 
 Eden, and his studies of theology led him at last to 
 exalt the ideal Roman Empire into an analogue on 
 the temporal side of life with the Church on its 
 spiritual side. All this is worked out in the Monarchia 
 and intimately assimilated and illustrated in the 
 Comedy. It is far from having taken its final form 
 in the Convivio, but it is there in more than germ. 
 For Dante already argues that it is essential to the 
 wellbeing of the human race that its unity and har- 
 mony should be secured by a central authority 
 capable of controlling the ambitions of the several 
 states and removing the occasions of war between 
 them. It is from this supreme authority that all 
 subordinate commands derive their force. And 
 history, enforced by the sanction of miracles, shows 
 that the Roman People was the divinely appointed 
 instrument of this supreme control. The Roman 
 Emperor, then, as the representative of the Roman 
 People, is still the fountain and guardian of Universal 
 Law. The exposition of this doctrine comes in quite 
 incidentally in the Convivio^ but the eloquence and 
 enthusiasm by which it is animated give unmis- 
 
 117
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 takable proof that it is already an essential factor in 
 Dante's philosophy of life. The conception of 
 sacred history as providentially guided and miracu- 
 lously sanctioned has already reacted upon his con- 
 ception of the meaning of Roman history, and he 
 already lays stress on what he regards as a supremely 
 significant chronological coincidence between the 
 birth of David (the ancestor of the Virgin) and the 
 foundation of Rome. These two events mark the 
 origin of two streams the confluence of which 
 determined the culminating event of history ; for it 
 was when Rome had, for the moment, fulfilled her 
 mission of bringing the world to universal peace 
 that the Son of God descended to earth to resolve 
 the discord that the sin of the first man had brought 
 into human life. And so, too, it must be under 
 Roman Law that human affairs shall be so regulated 
 at last as to assimilate human society to ".an all- 
 embracing religious order." 
 
 Yet here again the implications so clearly indicated 
 remain undeveloped. There is not a word in the 
 Convivio as to the contrast and co-ordination of 
 the Empire and the Church as the two ruling powers 
 in the world of man (for even when humanity is 
 ideally contemplated as one united " religious order " 
 it is to the ideal Emperor that it owes its allegiance, 
 as to its head), and therefore there can as yet be 
 no special association of Reason with the Empire 
 and Revelation with the Church. Nor can the dis- 
 cord of these two powers be alleged, as it is in the 
 Convivio IV. iv : 59-81 [6]. 
 118
 
 THE "CONVIVIO DIDACTIC 
 
 Comedy, as the cause of the evil estate of the world. 
 In the Convivio, in spite of the foreshadowing of 
 later developments, we are still in the simpler world 
 of the Aristotelian partition between the practical 
 and the speculative spheres. There is Imperial and 
 there is Philosophical authority, and the only pity 
 is that the rulers of the world neither by their own 
 study nor by taking counsel with others add the 
 weight of philosophical authority to the acts of their 
 government. 
 
 The general outcome of this long examination 
 may now be briefly summarized. The Convivio re- 
 veals, even while it conceals, traces of those de- 
 flections and aberrations from high ideals and high 
 endeavour for which Beatrice rebukes Dante in the 
 Earthly Paradise. But these delinquencies are al- 
 ready things of the past. They haunt Dante with a 
 sense of uneasiness and incongruity, for his face is 
 now steadily turned to the light and he is conscious 
 of a mission that seems to him still higher than the 
 one to which he devoted himself in the last words of 
 the Vita Nuova. But there is something gone that 
 has not been recaptured. A certain bloom has been 
 brushed away. An aroma has vanished. But if grace 
 and charm have been lost, strength has been gained. 
 In intellectual range, in robustness of mind, in 
 knowledge of men and things the Convivio fully 
 justifies Dante's own estimate of it when he con- 
 
 Purgatorio xvi : 94112; xxx, xxxi. Paradise**.'. 5560. 
 119
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 trasts its " temperate and virile " note with the 
 " fervid and impassioned " utterances of the Vita 
 Nuova, and when he pleads that each should be 
 regarded as consonant with the period of life at 
 which it was written. The frequency with which 
 commentators find their best illustrations of the 
 Comedy in passages from the Convivio is evidence 
 of the vast stores of material ultimately to be ab- 
 sorbed into the Comedy which Dante had gathered 
 and partly systematized in the great prose fragment 
 that preceded it. It is already clear that in many 
 respects the Convivio stands between the Beatrice of 
 the Vita Nuova, from whom it seems to be moving 
 away, and the Beatrice of the Comedy, to whom in so 
 many respects it seems to be approaching. 
 
 Gratuitous confusion is introduced into our pro- 
 blem if we read the Beatrice of the Comedy into her 
 of the Vita Nuova. But if we take each of them quite 
 simply as we find them we can at least lay firm hold 
 of this clue. Whatever else is doubtful it is certain 
 that, whereas Dante's Christian faith never, so far 
 as we have evidence, for a moment wavered, his 
 interest in theological studies and his intellectual 
 grasp of them show a steady progress in a uniform 
 direction from the Vita Nuova, through the Convivio 
 (and we may already add by anticipation the Monar- 
 chia\ to the Comedy. 
 
 But we have not yet found all the unifying 
 
 formulae that give cohesion to the Comedy. The 
 
 memory of Beatrice has made way for a successful 
 
 Convivio Li: 1 1 1-127 [16 J f ] 
 
 I2O
 
 THE "CONVIVIO" DIDACTIC 
 
 rival, and the two loves have not found their har- 
 mony. The authority of the Church is recognized, 
 but she is not yet raised to her position as a ruling 
 power over the lives of men, regulating their relations 
 to things eternal as the Empire regulates their rela- 
 tion to the things of time. The distinctions between 
 Reason and Revelation, between Study and Contem- 
 plation, between Pagan and Christian philosophy, 
 though recognized, have not been inwardly assimi- 
 lated. But in all these respects the Convivio repre- 
 sents an advance towards the thoughts that are to 
 dominate the Comedy, not a recession from them ; 
 and meanwhile Dante's sincere conviction that in 
 studying any branch whatever of philosophy or 
 science he is indeed holding converse with the 
 Divine " Wisdom " herself, hymned in the lyrics 
 of the Old Testament and incarnate in the central 
 figure of the New, gives a warmth and a glow to his 
 devotion to his Lady which raise it almost to the 
 quality of a mystic experience. 
 
 The beliefs of the Convivto already hold in solution 
 the Vision of the Comedy. When and how shall its 
 tense but undifferentiated emotion thrill to the 
 breath of heaven, impregnated with the ecstasies of 
 the Saints and of hell laden with the sighs of the 
 exiled Sages and the tumult of the citta dolente ? 
 
 121
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 v. THE "MONARCHIA' AND THE 
 
 COMEDY 
 
 The development of Dante's theory of the Roman 
 Empire will furnish us with the clue we need. But 
 in order to follow it intelligently we must glance at 
 the political side of Dante's life, which we have so 
 far left untouched. 
 
 It is essential to the proper understanding of 
 Dante's political career to throw into the back of our 
 minds the names of Guelf and Ghibelline and to 
 relinquish all attempt to express the facts under these 
 misleading denominations. The Florentine and 
 other Italian factions had their origin, and must find 
 their explanation, in conditions that long preceded 
 the rise of these names and that often cut across the 
 associations which they carry. The loose impression 
 that the Guelfs were the party of the Pope and the 
 Ghibellines the party of the Emperor is particularly 
 misleading when applied as a key to Dante's political 
 aims and principles, and we shall do best to put it 
 altogether out of our thought. 
 
 Florence, 1 in the thirteenth century, was nominally 
 governed under a modified system of Roman Law. 
 But a great number of her most powerful citizens, 
 while quite willing to administer that (or any other) 
 
 1 It will be obvious to the instructed reader that in setting forth 
 a general theory as to the racial and historical origins of the Italian 
 factions I am a grateful disciple of Professor Villari and others, and 
 make no claim to speak with any kind of independent authority. 
 
 122
 
 THE "MONARCHIA & THE COMEDY 
 
 law, were singularly unwilling to obey it themselves. 
 This state of things had its roots far down in the 
 conditions resulting from the invasions of the 
 Barbarians in the earlier Middle Ages. The con- 
 querors found in the Italian cities a matured tradi- 
 tion of Law and probably an organized system of 
 industrial guilds, both of which were alien to their 
 own system of unwritten " customs " and clan 
 organization for military purposes. Thus the con- 
 quering and dominant classes, standing on a lower 
 level of civilization than their subjects and at the 
 same time despising their weakness and degradation, 
 arrogated to themselves all administrative functions. 
 In their capacity as rulers they recognized the law 
 they found established and were influenced by it in 
 many ways, but they never recognized its authority 
 over themselves. Such authority as they did allow 
 belonged to their own family councils, acting in 
 closer or looser conformity with custom ; or else, in 
 case of military necessity, to the authority of a feudal 
 chief. The history of the rise of the Italian Republics 
 is the history of the great industrial organizations re- 
 emerging from the waves of Teutonic invasion and 
 asserting their right not only to administer and 
 develop the Roman Law themselves, but also to im- 
 pose it upon all citizens, breaking down the clan 
 organizations that proclaimed themselves superior 
 to it. The representatives of the military aristocracy, 
 on the other hand, whenever they were hard pressed 
 by the Popolo, were apt to seek support from their 
 natural feudal chief, or any other potentate that 
 
 123
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 would assume his functions on terms that gave 
 mutual satisfaction. Hence Roman Law became to 
 Dante and to others the symbol of civic freedom, 
 industrial progress, and the impartial administration 
 of justice. Any power that attempted to interfere 
 with this order of things was their foe, and any fac- 
 tion or party that lent itself to such hostile machina- 
 tions must be resisted to the last. 
 
 Now, though the " Emperor " had often in earlier 
 times been the power to be thus guarded against, it 
 happened when Dante was entering upon his political 
 life in Florence that the Emperors had recently been 
 concerning themselves very little with Italian affairs, 
 and the danger now lay in the pretensions of the 
 secularly-minded and ambitious Pope Boniface the 
 Eighth. It was his intrigues that threatened the 
 liberty and independence of Florence, and it was 
 against them that Dante's efforts were consistently 
 directed, especially when he became a member of the 
 Priorate, or chief magistracy, from June 15 to 
 August 15 in 1300. His active, and for the time 
 successful, opposition to Boniface brought upon 
 him the Pontiff's relentless hostility ; and when the 
 French Prince Charles of Valois (who was the mere 
 tool of Boniface) had raised himself to power in 
 Florence under pretence of " pacifying " the 
 "Black" and "White" factions, the blow fell. 
 Early in 1302 Dante was exiled. On his temporary 
 alliance with the other exiled " Whites " of his party, 
 and with some of the old Ghibelline families banished 
 many years before, on the brief duration of this 
 
 124
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 alliance, and on its questionable significance we need 
 not here dilate. It is only necessary to note that 
 Dante had not been long an exile before he had 
 learned that party names had very little to do with 
 principles, and that he could find no true fellowship 
 under any of the partizan flags. 
 
 Our examination of the Convivio has already 
 shown us the line along which Dante's mind travelled 
 during the years that immediately succeeded. And 
 in the Monarchia, the work to which we must now 
 turn our attention, he throws a retrospective glance 
 on the process by which he reached his exalted con- 
 ception of the Roman Empire. Roman Law, we 
 know, had long been the palladium of freedom and 
 good government to the progressive elements in the 
 Italian Republics. But Dante tells us that the im- 
 pression produced upon his mind by his first ac- 
 quaintance with Roman history had been that of the 
 triumph of mere brute force. So it was represented 
 by Orosius, and it must have seemed a strange 
 paradox to Dante, as soon as he began to reflect on it, 
 that such a bulwark of civic order and progress 
 should have been built up by such an agent. But in 
 course of time, he tells us, he came to see that in fact 
 force was only the instrument of Roman progress 
 and dominion, and that not Force, but Justice, was 
 its vital principle. 
 
 It is easy to see that it was Virgil who thus taught 
 
 his faithful disciple to adjust his conception of 
 
 Roman history to his knowledge and experience of 
 
 Paradiso rvii : 6169. 
 
 125
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Roman Law. For Virgil was Dante's most loved and 
 venerated author ; and of all Roman writers it is he 
 who has the clearest insight into the mission of 
 Rome as the organizer and pacifier of the world. 
 He regards her political genius as something more 
 august than even the artistic and scientific genius of 
 Greece ; and he holds that on her was divinely laid 
 the task of inuring the nations to the " habit of 
 peace." 
 
 It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of 
 this change of conception, brought about in Dante's 
 mind by the teaching of Virgil. At a single stroke it 
 redeemed the whole field of secular history from 
 chaos. Henceforth there were for Dante two conver- 
 gent streams of providentially guided history ; and 
 the potentate who in Dante's day bore the name of 
 Emperor, who was crowned at Rome, and who 
 claimed succession from Augustus and Justinian, 
 was called by his office to the lofty function of curb- 
 ing reckless ambition, whether factious or national, 
 and asserting everywhere the majesty of Law. If the 
 Emperor should forget his high calling and become 
 the mere feudal chief of a turbulent and lawless 
 aristocracy this shameful betrayal of a trust could no 
 more rob the office of its ideal lustre than the infamy 
 of a simoniacal Pope could cancel the divine com- 
 mission to S. Peter's successor. 
 
 Unfortunately this ideal conception of the Empire 
 had little to support it in the facts, or even (as we 
 shall see) in the latent possibilities of the actual 
 848-854. Monarchia II. i. 
 126
 
 THE "MONARCHIA & THE COMEDY 
 
 situation ; yet Italy had never lost consciousness of 
 belonging to a European confederation, represented 
 by the tradition of the Empire ; and there was 
 nothing inconsistent in a man like Dante, who was 
 proud of his descent from ancestors who had once 
 resisted Imperial aggression on Florentine civic 
 independence, nevertheless regarding the Roman 
 Emperor, in principle, as the God-commissioned 
 guardian of civic law and arbitrator between con- 
 tending factions or peoples. 
 
 All these ideas we have seen at work in the 
 Cotruroie, but they were brought to sudden maturity 
 by the events of the very year in which that work 
 was abandoned. 
 
 In 1308 Henry of Luxemburg was elected to the 
 Imperial throne. He was a man of noble character 
 and great enthusiasm, and he took exactly the same 
 ideal view of his office that Dante did. He hated the 
 very names of Guelf and Ghibelline, and would not 
 allow them to be uttered in his presence. His duty, 
 he would often declare, was not to Italian or French- 
 man or German, but to his Brother-Man ; and it 
 was well known that he cherished exalted hopes of 
 ending the prolonged agony of Italy's internecine 
 feuds, of restoring exiles, of reconciling factions, and 
 of establishing the reign of peace and law. If the 
 contemporary tradition is to be trusted it was in con- 
 nection with Henry's election and his subsequent 
 expedition into Italy that Dante wrote the Monarchia, 
 and it was certainly then that he wrote the great 
 
 Inferno x : 40 sqq. 
 127
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 Epistles which embody the same political creed as 
 that treatise. 
 
 We can trace the effect of these events upon 
 Dante's mind in the opening words of the Monarchia. 
 All that had hitherto enlisted his enthusiasm seems 
 to have shrivelled into insignificance in his mind ex- 
 cept in so far as it was connected with the healing 
 mission of the Empire, or with the spiritual life 
 which the Empire should always reverence and pro- 
 tect. For it is a noteworthy fact that it was just at 
 this moment when he felt himself to be greeting the 
 political Messiah, in the person of Henry VII, that 
 Dante seems suddenly to have realized not only the 
 scope, but the limitations, of the secular power 
 not only what the Empire could do, but also what 
 lay beyond its reach. Can it have been the friendly 
 attitude at first assumed towards Henry's purposes 
 by the reigning Pope Clement V that fired in the 
 poet's imagination the Vision of a Rome shone upon 
 by its two great luminaries ? Be that as it may, we 
 find that whereas Dante, in the Monarchia, is still 
 mainly concerned with the secular power and makes 
 it one of his chief concerns to vindicate the deriva- 
 tion of its authority, not through the mediation of 
 the Church, but direct from God himself, we 
 nevertheless encounter in this treatise a quite new 
 development of the conception of a twofold govern- 
 ment of the world, corresponding to the twofold 
 nature of man and his twofold destiny for earthly 
 and for heavenly bliss. 
 
 Monarchic I. i and passim. Epistol<e v, vii. 
 128
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 Full stress now falls upon the distinction between 
 Reason and Revelation, which we have seen theoreti- 
 cally recognized but practically ignored in the 
 Convivio. We are now told that the one is our 
 guide to the earthly blessedness, in the exercise of 
 the moral virtues, which is typified by the Terrestrial 
 Paradise ; and that the other is appointed to lead us 
 to the supernal bliss of Heaven itself. And further, 
 that these two principles, Reason and Revelation, 
 would have sufficed in their own strength to lead us 
 to the respective goals had not man fallen. But for 
 fallen man two organized regimens, the Empire and 
 the Church, are necessary to keep his recalcitrant 
 will upon the track. The ideal Empire and Church 
 therefore are no more than the instruments or em- 
 bodiments respectively of Reason and Revelation. 
 In the Convivio Dante had already employed the 
 phrase ragione scritta^ or " reason reduced to 
 writing," as a synonym for Roman Law. He now 
 develops the implications of the Empire's function 
 as guardian of that Law, and teaches us that its 
 specific business is to quell the spirit of greed, secure 
 justice (and with justice peace), and so to enable 
 human civilization to advance towards its goal. 
 And this goal is nothing less than the realization or 
 " actualizing " of all the possibilities of human 
 character and intelligence ; that is to say, the 
 approximate realization, even under present earthly 
 conditions, of that life of Reason which man would 
 have lived in the Garden of Eden had he never fallen. 
 Convivio IV. ix: 81 [8]. 
 
 129 I
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 At the same time the function of the Church is 
 recognized as something still higher, for it bears 
 the same relation to man's eternal blessedness that 
 the Empire does to his earthly welfare, and is the 
 organ of Revelation as the Empire is of Reason. As 
 the Emperor is the supreme civic magistrate so the 
 Pope is the paramount spiritual authority, and on 
 the harmony and faithfulness of these two the weal 
 of the world depends. 
 
 It may be noticed too, in passing, that we now 
 encounter for the first time the problem of the ex- 
 clusion of the Heathen from salvation. Dante men- 
 tions it incidentally as a matter which unaided reason 
 cannot fathom, but it appears to cause him no acute 
 uneasiness as yet, and he is quite content to receive 
 it on the authority of Revelation. 
 
 And again, the tentative linking up of the sacred 
 and secular histories which we noted in the syn- 
 chronisms of the Convivto is now developed into an 
 elaborate and startlingly bold theory as to the part 
 played by the Roman Empire in the drama of re- 
 demption itself; for it is in the Monarchia that 
 Dante first advances the doctrine, familiar to readers 
 of the Paradiso, that it was in its capacity of divinely 
 appointed ruler of the world that the Roman Power 
 executed judgement on peccant human nature, col- 
 lectively " assumed " in the person of Christ. 
 
 The advance in Dante's systematic thinking which 
 the Monarchia registers must now be evident. But 
 
 Monarchia I. iii, iv; III. xvi and passim ; II. viii : 23-35 [vii : 
 4 sq .] ; II. xii, xiii [xi, xiij. Cf. Paradise vii. 
 
 130
 
 THE "MONARCHIA & THE COMEDY 
 
 it is only after long and close study that its full 
 significance can be felt. Augustine somewhere lays 
 down the golden rule (would that he had himself 
 observed it better !) that no cardinal point of doc- 
 trine is ever to be sought in the allegory of Scripture 
 unless it is to be found clearly set forth somewhere 
 in its letter. With the Monarchia in our hands we 
 may apply this wholesome doctrine, with little if any 
 qualification, to Dante's works. The Convivio does 
 indeed furnish us with a rich field on which to collect 
 illustrations of innumerable points of detail that meet 
 us in the Comedy, but it is to the Monarchia that we 
 must look for the systematic setting forth of the 
 poet's organic thought on the meaning of life and 
 history, and on the destiny of man here and here- 
 after ; and it is in this same work that we find the 
 key to the allegory and the symbolism of the 
 Comedy. The elaborated conception of the Roman 
 Empire as the restraining power that must banish 
 the spirit of greed from earth and establish a life of 
 well-ordered human relations akin to that of Eden 
 interprets the Sunlit Hill, the insatiable Wolf and 
 the noble Hound of the first Canto of the Inferno. 
 The vindication of the independent significance and 
 authority of the Empire illuminates the insistence 
 on the life of Eden as an essential part of the ex- 
 perience of the saved which underlies the concluding 
 cantos of the Purgatorio. The parallelism of Empire 
 and Church, and the significance of their close re- 
 lations, as expounded in the Monarchia^ but in no 
 earlier work of Dante's, gives its meaning to in-
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 numerable passages in the Comedy, from the juxta- 
 position of the visits of ^Eneas and of Paul to the 
 unseen world right on through the elaborated 
 warnings and examples on the terraces of Purgatory. 
 It interprets Marco Lombardo's diagnosis of the 
 evil estate of the world and the pageant of the 
 confusion of the Powers which tells the Pilgrim 
 through the Terrestrial Paradise why so scanty a 
 stream of the Redeemed finds a way back to the 
 natural abode of man. The great discourses of 
 Justinian and of Beatrice on the history of Rome, 
 on the wickedness of those who make its authority a 
 cloak for faction, and on its intimate connection with 
 the scheme of salvation itself are all in perfect 
 harmony with the corresponding chapters of the 
 Monarchia are, in fact, sometimes an elaboration 
 and sometimes a condensation of them, but never 
 a departure from them. And not further to 
 elaborate the obvious though the Monarchia has no 
 symbolism of its own, yet its scheme of thought 
 tacitly draws the sponge across the symbolism of the 
 Convivio while it arranges the material in perfect 
 order for that of the Comedy. 
 
 The Lady of Dante's second love was a vague 
 symbol of the Greek Speculative or Theoretical Life, 
 wearing (loosely enough) the garments of the Divine 
 Wisdom, and therefore claiming to represent both 
 human and divine science. The proper contrast to 
 her is the Practical or Civic Life. Accordingly, in 
 
 Inferno ii : 10-33. Purgatorio-zv\'. 64 sqq. Paradisov'i: 1-108, 
 vii : 19-120. 
 
 132
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 the Convivio Dante has already found his contrast 
 to Philosophy, not on the higher plane of Revelation 
 (which she theoretically includes, though she has not 
 really assimilated it), but in the form of Civic Life 
 presented by the Roman institutions, with their 
 supreme guardian in the person of the Roman 
 Emperor. Thus, in the fourth treatise of the 
 Convivio he delimits the contrasted spheres over 
 which the Empire and philosophy (represented in 
 this case by Frederick II and Aristotle) respectively 
 exercise authority. But in the Monarchia the Em- 
 peror and the Philosopher cannot be contrasted at all, 
 for the Empire itself rests upon (human) philosophy, 
 or Reason, and the natural balance to their joint 
 authority is found in that of the Church, resting upon 
 Revelation. And in this, too, the Monarchia explains 
 the Comedy. 
 
 The all-comprehending Philosophy of the Con- 
 vivioy then, falls into two divisions in the Monarchia 
 and in the Comedy. So far as human reason can 
 carry it philosophy is no longer contrasted with 
 Empire, but is regarded as its naturally guiding 
 principle, and in its higher reaches Revelation re- 
 places Reason and inspires the Church as the organ 
 of the divine science. 
 
 The Empire, or temporal Monarchy, is carefully 
 defined as supreme over the things and relations of 
 Time, with tacit reference to the Spiritual power 
 which is concerned with the things of Eternity. 
 
 Convivio IV. vi. Monarchia III. xvi. Purgatorio xvi : 106-1 14 ; 
 the Comedy passim. 
 
 133
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 The Emperor is the unique umpire in temporal 
 affairs, just as Aquinas had said (though Dante does 
 not refer to him in this connection) that it belonged 
 to the Pope's office to interpret authoritatively the 
 voice of the Church. And though the Emperor de- 
 rives his authority direct from God he should, 
 nevertheless, look upon the Pontiff with the filial 
 reverence that is his due. And he will irradiate the 
 world the better if he is himself shone upon by the 
 paternal grace of the successor of Peter. 
 
 And, finally, the claim to miraculous sanction 
 already made for Rome in the Convivio is now 
 strengthened by citation of the definition of a 
 miracle given by S. Thomas and the demonstration 
 that the miracles of Roman history conformed 
 thereto. 
 
 All is ready, then, for the parallelisms that run 
 through the Comedy, for Reason finding its highest 
 function as the ally and emissary of Revelation, 
 and for the two guides who are to lead the pilgrim 
 to Earthly and Heavenly bliss. 
 
 The closeness of the connection between Reason 
 and the Roman Empire and the decisive part that 
 Virgil actually played in Dante's mind in bringing 
 secular into vitalizing connection with sacred history, 
 and so embracing both in the same providential 
 scheme, explains why, in the Comedy, Reason, as 
 the emissary of Revelation, should be represented by 
 
 Monarchic I. ii : 3-15 [2 /f.]. Sum. Theol. II 8 -!!" 6 , i: roc. 
 Monarchic I. x; II. passim, especially iv ; III. xvi : 129140 
 [17 'f-J- 
 
 134
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 Virgil. It was indeed Aristotle who had enriched 
 Dante's mind with the material of scientific know- 
 ledge and the instruments of philosophic thought ; 
 but it was Virgil who had taught him to bring the 
 whole range of human thought and activity within 
 the light of providential guidance by revealing to 
 him the meaning of Roman history. And since it 
 was the specific business of the Roman Empire 
 inspired by Reason to bring men to the earthly 
 happiness and health typified by the Terrestrial 
 Paradise, we can see why Virgil must be the guide 
 not only through Hell, but to Eden. 
 
 And Beatrice ? There is not a word about her in 
 the Monarchic though it is full of Virgil ; but, never- 
 theless, it prepares for her the place that she occupies 
 in the Paradiso no less than for Virgil his place in the 
 Inferno and the Purgatorio. Can we find, at least by 
 conjecture, as firm a link between the Beatrice of the 
 Vita Nuova and of the Paradiso as we have found be- 
 tween the Virgil of the Monarchia and of the Comedy ? 
 
 Let us once more summarize and define the 
 materials at our command and the problem we have 
 to solve. Dante tells (i) that he entered on his 
 serious studies as a preparation for his task of com- 
 memorating Beatrice more worthily. Here Philo- 
 sophy is an auxiliary to the memory of Beatrice (Vita 
 Nuova). He tells us afterwards (2) that it was con- 
 solation for the loss of Beatrice that he sought in the 
 study of Philosophy (Convivto) ; and further (3) 
 that the actual study so enamoured him of his new 
 mistress as to draw his heart away from the memory 
 
 135
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 of Beatrice and postpone, at least, if it did not super- 
 sede, his purpose of writing "more worthily" of her. 
 Yet further we find evidence, hard to resist, to the 
 effect that (4) this avowed eclipsing of the memory 
 of Beatrice by the love of Philosophy was made into 
 a literary veil wherewith to cover up the record of 
 some actual unfaithfulness to the ideals for which 
 Beatrice had once stood ; and this at a time when 
 these ideals were reasserting their supremacy and 
 seeking to dissociate themselves from all jarring 
 elements in the poet's past life or utterances (Can- 
 zoni Convivio Purgatorio). And finally we witness 
 (5) the resolution of the undifferentiated conception 
 of Philosophy into its two constituents of Reason and 
 Revelation (Monarchic?) ; and (6) we meet Beatrice 
 herself as the impersonated Revelation and learn that 
 Reason, in the person of Virgil, was her emissary, 
 and so far from having led Dante away from her 
 had been the means of bringing him back to her 
 from that unfaithfulness over which he had once 
 attempted to throw a veil of allegory. Our problem 
 is to find further light on the last step in this pro- 
 gression I mean the progression from Philosophy 
 as an instrument, through Philosophy as a consola- 
 tion, Philosophy as an enlargement of life interests 
 and purposes, and Philosophy as a screen, back to 
 Philosophy both as an instrument and as a goal, 
 though not the supreme and ultimate goal ; and 
 further to connect this same progress with the note- 
 worthy fact that it begins by receding from Beatrice 
 and ends by finding her. 
 
 136
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 To help us in this task we note (i) that Dante's 
 apparently independent reflections had brought him 
 to convictions which constitute an intellectual frame- 
 work into which the symbolism of his final synthesis 
 fits with perfect symmetry (Monarchia) ; and (2) 
 that this final movement of his mind was accom- 
 panied by a quickening of moral perceptions and 
 deepening of his spiritual insight which have lifted 
 him into his place as the supreme prophet-poet of all 
 the ages. 
 
 ' The Spirit bloweth where it listeth," and in 
 seeking to track its workings we may often mistake 
 the nature of the fuel that chances to be at hand for 
 the source of the divine and consuming flash that 
 enkindles it. But we can only work within the limits 
 of our own powers, and we must often, as here, be 
 content to seek in outward events the occasion of 
 that which must ever conceal its deeper causes from 
 our eyes. 
 
 Once again it is in the events of 1 308 to 1313 that 
 we find our best clue. Henry was elected Emperor 
 in 1308, he was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in the 
 June of 1309, and in that year or in 1310 before the 
 autumn we may suppose the Monarchia to have 
 been written. In the autumn of 1 3 1 o Henry crossed 
 the Alps and entered Turin; in the January of 1311 
 he was crowned in Milan; and in that same year 
 Dante wrote the three letters, glowing with prophetic 
 fervour and exaltation, to the Princes of Italy, to 
 Henry himself, and to the " Florentines within " 
 (as opposed to the Florentines in exile). Then the 
 
 137
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 impossibilities of Henry's undertaking relentlessly 
 developed themselves, and in the August of 1313 
 he died near Sienna, a saint and hero who had only 
 wrought destruction where he had willed salvation, 
 baffled by a world he loved but did not understand. 
 Dante had felt the most assured confidence in the 
 success of the Emperor's expedition, and had been 
 unable to regard the resistance of Florence as any- 
 thing but an act of blind defiance of the will of God 
 and the authority of his vicegerent on earth. It is 
 one of our most precious evidences of the nobility 
 of his character that in the moment of his utmost 
 confidence in immediate and conclusive victory his 
 voice was raised to urge his fellow-exiles not to re- 
 turn as conquerors seeking vengeance and making 
 reprisals, but in the spirit of reconciled brethren 
 setting behind them for ever the weary record of 
 sufferings and injustices. When Henry was en- 
 camped before the walls of Florence, Dante, " in 
 reverence for his native land," refused to accompany 
 him in the triumphal entry to which he looked 
 forward. But in actual fact neither Henry's nor 
 Dante's expectations were fulfilled. Henry's project 
 had from the first been impossible of execution, for 
 though he came as a deliverer and pacifier he could 
 have no executive power except either as a foreign 
 conqueror or as a faction leader. Had he proved 
 victorious he would perhaps have failed in his real 
 purpose even more disastrously than he did under 
 
 Epist. v: 6993 [15-17]- Leonardo Bruni: Vita di Dante 
 Alighieri. 
 
 138
 
 THE "MONARCHIA" & THE COMEDY 
 
 his defeat. His army had to withdraw from Florence, 
 and with his death some months later all Dante's 
 hopes perished. 
 
 Such an experience may shrivel or poison a man's 
 moral nature, or it may throw him upon the deeper 
 life which no " happenings " can blight. The 
 Comedy is there to tell us how Dante faced his 
 altered world. In such a crisis there is no proportion 
 between time and mental or spiritual growth and 
 change. Days may do the work of years. Henry 
 died in 1313, and it is impossible to put the con- 
 ception and initial execution of the Comedy, as an 
 ordered whole, much later than 1314. What has the 
 poet of the Comedy held fast, what has he cast away, 
 and what has he gained ? He still holds fast by his 
 lofty conception of the possibilities of this earthly 
 life as an " all-embracing religious order " ; but the 
 glow of prophetic rapture and the anticipation of the 
 immediate redemption of human society have passed 
 away. He can no longer cry " For a new day be- 
 ginneth to glow, showing forth the dawn which is 
 even now dissipating the darkness of our long 
 calamity ; and already the breezes of the east begin 
 to blow, the lips of heaven glow red and confirm the 
 auspices of the nations with a caressing calm." No. 
 The vision is now " for many days to come." The 
 world must wait in patience for the noble " hound " 
 of Empire who is to " harry " the wolf of Greed 
 " through every city," and who at last " will hunt 
 her back to Hell." Meanwhile she, with the other 
 Convivio IV. iv : 59-81 [6 jf.]. Epistolav: 1-8 [r], 
 139
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 beasts, holds the mountain-side. The sunlit height 
 of a well-ordered life on earth, reflecting the happy 
 state of Eden, cannot as yet be scaled, and he who 
 would even now find inward peace for himself and 
 strive to " remove the dwellers in this life from the 
 state of misery and bring them to the state of bliss " 
 must not look for the triumphant banner of a 
 political Messiah to lead him. " Needs must he take 
 another way," for he must see Hell and Purgatory 
 and Heaven, and must recognize what he himself 
 has been and what he was called to be. 
 
 Through such a furnace only the pure ore of 
 truth can pass. When with his deepened spiritual 
 insight and his quickened moral perceptions Dante 
 looked back upon his own past he found in it not 
 only much to deplore, but much also that he had 
 himself misread but could now read aright. Now 
 that speculations on divine things had passed from a 
 branch of philosophical study into an experience 
 that uplifted the soul above the warfare of time into 
 the peace of eternity there came back, as from the 
 far-off memory of a childish dream, the sense of one 
 who had for a time made this earth bear the fruits 
 of Eden for him, and afterwards, from her seat in 
 heaven, had drawn his pilgrim soul upward into a 
 glory that the illuminated intelligence could catch 
 for a moment but could not retain in the memory 
 or bring back with it to earth. But now " the sweet- 
 ness that was born " of that far-off vision once again 
 "dropped within his heart," and he recognized the 
 beginning in the end, the end in the beginning. 
 
 140
 
 THE "MONARCHIA & THE COMEDY 
 
 Beatrice had been, and was, to him " Revelation " in 
 a sense even deeper than that in which Virgil was 
 " Reason." Why did he only know it now ? Why 
 had he stubbornly turned away from the thought of 
 her ? Only because the " false-seeming pleasure " of 
 unworthy things had so seduced him that nothing 
 short of a veritable journey through Hell itself could 
 flash upon his soul the conviction of the true worth 
 of that which he had chosen and of that which he had 
 rejected. The vain pretences of the Convivio were a 
 mockery. Repudiation and evasion are not repent- 
 ance and confession, and they cannot do their work. 
 If there be that in a man's past life from which he 
 would fain dissociate himself he cannot explain it 
 away. He must purge it by action and endurance 
 that outwork and only so outwash its stains. As long 
 as Dante had sought in his studies mainly a consola- 
 tion for Beatrice's death, or had found in them escape 
 into opening life and broadening horizons, and yet 
 more when he had flung them as a screen between 
 himself or the world and a past that grieved 
 and embarrassed him, so long could he in one 
 way or another represent Philosophy as having 
 drawn him away from Beatrice. But when he under- 
 stood that through his studies there had run a golden 
 thread linking his earliest lessons in grammar and 
 logic and his highest efforts of constructive social 
 and political idealism with his deepest assimilation 
 of the thought and experience of saintly theologians 
 
 Paradiso xxxiii : 58-63. Vita Nuova xlii. Purgatorio ixx : 133- 
 138. Inferno i, ii.
 
 THE MINOR WORKS 
 
 and mystics, then he knew how far from this noble 
 path that by-way stretched on which he had 
 wandered from Beatrice ; and he recognized in 
 Virgil, the personified Reason, the emissary, rather 
 than the rival of Beatrice. Philosophy had led him 
 back to her, not away from her, and she herself stood 
 behind the flame that girt the Terrestrial Paradise 
 with a welcome that was itself the bitterest of re- 
 proaches ; and yet a reproach that opened the way 
 through repentance to salvation. 
 
 Thus, with eyes unsealed Dante saw Hell, with 
 humbled heart he climbed the Mount of Purgatory. 
 Virgil had led him into the presence of Beatrice. 
 His eye fell before her and his heart cried in anguish, 
 " That is what I love and this is what I am ! " 
 And then the draught of Lethe, the recovered 
 Eden, the opened heavens, and the Beatific Vision. 
 
 142
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF 
 DANTE'S WORKS
 
 ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF 
 DANTE'S WORKS 
 
 It would be foreign to my purpose to enter upon 
 any detailed discussion of the chronology of Dante's 
 writings, but the reader may reasonably expect a 
 brief statement of the grounds on which the order 
 of composition assumed throughout this essay has 
 been determined, and the degree to which the re- 
 construction it attempts is dependent upon the 
 chronological scheme adopted. 
 
 As to the FitaNuova there is happily no need of dis- 
 cussion. The old idea that it was not completed till the 
 year 1 300 rests on a false reading (andava for vain xli : 
 2 [i]), and it is now generally admitted that the work 
 must have been finished within the second year after 
 Beatrice's death, that is to say, not later than in 1292. 
 
 The Odes were composed at various times. Two 
 of them seem to belong to the cycle of the Vita 
 Nuova, and must have been written before its poems 
 were collected and enshrined in their prose frame- 
 work. Two others contain explicit references to the 
 poet's exile ; one of them (Amor^ dacchd convien 
 pur ch* to mi doglia), lying altogether outside the 
 scheme of the Convivio, appears to be the latest of all. 
 There remain eleven Odes, most if not all of which 
 we may suppose to belong to the years between 
 1292 and 1302. Some scholars, however, would 
 assign one or two of these also to a later date. 
 
 The First Book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia con- 
 tains references to contemporary rulers which fix 
 
 145 K
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 the date of 1 304 for its composition ; and there is no 
 sufficient reason to suppose, as some have done, that 
 any considerable interval passed between the writing 
 of the First Book and the Second. 
 
 The Convivio was undertaken when Dante had 
 long been an exile (I. iii : 15-43 [3-5], iv : 94- 
 105 [13]). An allusion in the Fourth Book (xxix : 
 1 6 sq. [2]) fixes 1308, with high probability, as the 
 date of its composition, and there is no good reason 
 for supposing that the four Books were written in any 
 other order than that in which they now stand. In 
 particular the form which the Fourth Book takes, 
 breaking away as it does from the general scheme 
 laid down in the Second Book, seems to indicate that 
 this Fourth Book is the later (Convivio II. i : 119- 
 126 [15]; IV. i: 89-92 [n]). This would make 
 the Convivto follow the De Vulgari Eloquentia. 
 
 An objection may be based on a passage in the 
 Convivio (I. v : 6169 [9 sq.]) in which Dante speaks 
 of the De Vulgari Eloquentia as a work which he 
 " intends to write," not as one that he has written. 
 As to this it may be noted that as both the treatises 
 in question were left incomplete by their author he 
 must in any case have been engaged upon one of 
 them while the other was still unfinished and might 
 be spoken of as projected rather than executed. It 
 may be freely admitted that there is some appearance 
 of violence in this interpretation of the words, but 
 the positive data as to the years 1304 for the one 
 treatise and 1308 for the other must be taken to out- 
 weigh any objection on that score. The chronological 
 relations of the De Vulgari Eloquentia and the Con- 
 
 146
 
 CHRONOLOGY OF DANTE'S WORKS 
 
 vivio have, however, little or no bearing on the 
 mental history of their author. 
 
 When we come to the Monarchia we are in real 
 difficulties. Since it contains no reference to the 
 author's exile it used to be supposed by some 
 scholars to be earlier than 1302 and to follow next 
 after the Vita Nuova in the succession of Dante's 
 principal works. But it is so obviously maturer than 
 the Convivio that it cannot be supposed to precede 
 it in time. Others have placed it near the close of 
 Dante's life, for it offers many parallels in thought 
 and in expression to the Paradiso. Indeed, the text, 
 as given in the MSS., contains a direct reference to 
 the Paradiso as a work already in the reader's hands. 
 In the passage in question (Monarchia I. xii : 39 sqq. 
 [6]) we read " Hec libertas [sc. arbitrii] sive princi- 
 pium hoc totius libertatis nostre, est maximum 
 donum humane nature a deo collatum " ; and the 
 MSS. add " sicut in paradiso comedie iam dixi," 
 which must be understood as a reference to Para- 
 diso v : 19-24. But the strangeness of such a form 
 of reference must strike any reader whom long study 
 has made sensitive to Dante's modes of expression. 
 And since the words that open this same chapter are 
 " Et humanum genus potissime liberum optime se 
 habet. Hoc erit manifestum si principium pateat 
 libertatis. Propter quod sciendum quod principium 
 primum nostre libertatis est libertas arbitrii," it 
 seemed obvious to take the sicut iam dixi as a reference 
 back to this passage, and to regard the in paradiso 
 comedie as a marginal reference (by a reader who had 
 missed the point) that came to be incorporated in the 
 
 147
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 text. As Dante repeatedly speaks of himself in the 
 first person in the Monarchia (cf. I. i : 14 sqq. [3 
 sqq.] ; II. i : II sqq. [i]), there is no insurmountable 
 difficulty in this hypothesis, and it has been adopted 
 by Witte and Moore. Of the two latest editors, 
 however, Bertalot accepts and Rostagno rejects the 
 whole of the passage (cf. y further, note i on next 
 page). For myself I cannot doubt that the reference 
 to the Paradiso is spurious. Surely it is inconceiv- 
 able that Dante, after speaking of the Paradiso as he 
 does in Canto xxv of the poem itself, and in his 
 correspondence with Del Virgilio, could have written 
 of himself, as he does in the first words of the 
 Monarchia, as one who had been enriched from the 
 open fountains of wisdom but had himself made no 
 contribution to the common store. Whereas it is 
 conceivable enough that when the Messianic vision 
 of a regenerated Italy broke upon him with Henry's 
 election he might regard the literary and academic 
 activities that had hitherto so largely engrossed his en- 
 ergies as but a trivial contribution to the reorganiza- 
 tion of human society if measured against the debt due 
 from the heir of Justinian's Law and Virgil's Gospel. 
 Moreover, the great Political Letters, which quite 
 certainly date from the first years of Henry's expedi- 
 tion, 1310 and 1311, and the Letter to the Italian 
 cardinals, written soon after Henry's death in 1313, 
 correspond exactly in their political, ecclesiastical, 
 and philosophical conceptions (though not in their 
 tone) with the Monarchia?- 
 
 1 The solitary exception to the harmony between the Letters and 
 the Monarchia is found in the fact that in the sixth Epistle (lines 53- 
 
 148
 
 CHRONOLOGY OF DANTE S WORKS 
 
 On the balance of evidence, then, the tradition 
 that connects the composition of the Monarchia with 
 the expedition of Henry seems to be justified, but in 
 any case the Letters show that in the years 1311 
 1314 Dante had risen above the cruder system of the 
 Convivio and had definitely reached those views 
 which find their complete expression in the Monar- 
 chia (whenever it was written) and underlie the 
 structure of the Comedy as an organic whole. This 
 is beyond dispute, and happily it is all that is needed 
 to justify the use that has been made of the Monarchia 
 in my attempted reconstruction of the movement of 
 Dante's mind from the days of the Vita Nuova to 
 those of the Comedy. 1 
 
 5 5 [8]) the author incidentally adopts, as a figure, the current sym- 
 bolism in which the sun and moon represent respectively the Papacy 
 and the Empire, though he will not allow it as the basis of a serious 
 argument in the Monarchia. 
 
 1 Professor Foligno, in the volume of Commemorative Essays 
 issued from the London University Press in 1921, pp. 143-156, 
 argues, with abundant references to recent discussions, for a date 
 between April 1313 and March 1314, chiefly on the strength of 
 relations which certain scholars find between the Monarchia and the 
 papal bull Pastoralis Cura, together with a Letter subsequently 
 issued by King Robert of Sicily. Professor Foligno accepts the sicut 
 in paradiso passage in its entirety, but regards it as a later 
 addition from Dante's own hand. " It seems scarcely credible," he 
 well remarks, " that Dante should have written any considerable part 
 of the treatise and far less initiated such a work after Henry's death " 
 (p. 153). My own impression is strong that the Monarchia was 
 written before the Letters. The restraint of the former contrasted 
 with the tone of exaltation and passion of the latter argues that the 
 Treatise was written in the hope of convincing, before the crisis, 
 when men's minds were expectant ; and the Letters later on, when, 
 at the crisis itself, men were swept off their feet by hopes and fears. 
 
 I 49
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 And now, lastly, as to the Comedy itself. Almost 
 the only certain datum we have is derived from 
 Dante's correspondence with Del Virgilio. From 
 this it appears that in the year 1319 the Purgatorio 
 was already completed and the Paradiso was in pro- 
 gress. An intimate friend like Del Virgilio had as 
 yet seen little or nothing of it, but was looking for- 
 ward to its appearance with eager expectation. 
 
 It is further obvious that the general framework 
 and underlying conceptions of the Comedy repre- 
 sent a later stage than that of the Convivio, written 
 about 1308, just before Henry's expedition. And 
 the amazing development from the mentality of this 
 work revealed in the Monarchia, and presupposed in 
 the essential conceptions and the artistic form and 
 scope of the Comedy, must be supposed to have 
 taken place in close connection with Henry's expedi- 
 tion itself; so that the date of the Comedy as a 
 whole would be subsequent to Henry's death in 
 1313. In full accord with all this is the evidence of 
 a passage in the nineteenth Canto of the Inferno 
 (lines 7984), in which reference is made, under the 
 form of a veiled prophecy, to the death of Clement V, 
 which took place in 1314. 
 
 But if these considerations indicate that the 
 Comedy, as an organized whole, dates from the 
 last seven years of Dante's life that does not in itself 
 preclude the hypothesis that earlier work may have 
 been incorporated into the design. The great passage 
 in the sixth Canto of the Purgatorio on the factions of 
 Italy almost forces us to ask whether it was not 
 written while Albert was still on the throne, or 
 
 150
 
 CHRONOLOGY OF DANTE S WORKS 
 
 had only just fallen (May 1308). And the close 
 analogy of the imagery in that Canto and in two 
 passages of the Convivio (IV. ix : 100 sqq. [10], and 
 xxvi : 43 sqq. [6]) written in 1308 has suggested, 
 in spite of a wide divergence of tone, a coincident 
 date. I have sometimes wondered whether the great 
 hymn to Francis (Paradiso xi), with or without its 
 companion in Praise of Dominic, was originally an 
 independent composition. The words "la cui mirabil 
 vita meglio in gloria del ciel si canterebbe" have 
 puzzled the commentators, for the encomium is 
 being " sung in heaven." Has it been transplanted 
 there, and is this a trace of the soil in which it grew 
 that has escaped the gardener's notice ? Speculation 
 is rife in regard to the actual date of composition 
 of other portions of the Comedy ; and, above all, 
 there is the tradition, already referred to (p. 81), 
 that the earlier Cantos of the Inferno were composed 
 before Dante's banishment. 1 These speculations, 
 however, should be kept within modest limits by 
 the cardinal fact that in 1304, or later, Dante re- 
 garded all Italian forms of verse outside the Canzone, 
 the Ballata, and the Sonetto as " irregular and ille- 
 gitimate." When he so wrote he can hardly have 
 had in his mind the concept of a great synthetic 
 
 1 In an article on the ethical system of the Inferno printed in 
 Modern Language Review, vol. xvi, No. 4, October 1921,! have tried 
 to show how my (somewhat hazardous) suggestion that the pre- 
 exilian draft of the early Cantos of the Inferno was written in Latin 
 would fall in with the indirect evidence of the De Fulgari Eloquentia 
 and with the manifest transformation and expansion of the original 
 plan of the Inferno which may be detected in the want of continuity 
 and symmetry in its ethical system.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Italian poem on the scale of an epic and aspiring 
 to the position of a classic. So it would seem that 
 whatever instinctive premonitions may have shaped 
 Dante's earlier experiments, and whatever material 
 he may have found ready to his hand, our conclusion 
 holds that the Comedy, as we know it, took shape 
 after the failure of Henry's expedition in 1313. 
 Its whole scheme, as foreshadowed in the opening 
 Cantos of the Inferno, cannot have been firmly laid 
 down and held at any earlier period. 
 
 The outcome of our examination of Dante's 
 Minor Works is the conviction that whereas there 
 is a real breach in some respects between the Vita 
 Nuova and the Convivio, nevertheless, in the purely 
 mental development the progress is steady and con- 
 tinuous, in a uniform direction, from the Vita Nuova, 
 through the Canzoni^ the Convivio, and the Monar- 
 chia^ to the Comedy. And at the end of this progress 
 we find ourselves brought back to Beatrice, from 
 whom at first it seemed to be leading us away. 
 
 The De Vulgari Eloquentia^ theEpisto!<e,the Eclog<e, 
 and the De Aqua et Terra fall easily into their places 
 in the scheme. The points of the greatest importance 
 are just the ones most securely established ; and it 
 would need external or internal evidence of a very 
 different order to any that has yet been urged to 
 shake their stability. 
 
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