THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI. TRANSLATED BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY, LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL NEW YORK: 9 LAFAYETTE PLACE 1886 INTRODUCTION. DANTE ALIGHIERI, the great Patriarch of Modern Literature in Europe, was born at Florence in May, 1265, and lived in Florence until he had reached the age of thirty-one. He died in exile at Ravenna in his fifty-seventh year, on the hof September, 1321. rive years before Dante's birth the Florentine Guelfs had suffered disastrous defeat in battle with the Ghibellines of Sienna and Pisa. Ghibellines who before had fled from Florence, including seventeen of the principal families of the town, then returned, and the chief families of the Guelfs, the lawyer Alighieri, Dante's father, among the number, in their turn departed into exile. But when Charles of Anjou came as the Pope's ally, the banished Guelfs of Florence, now taking a red lily for badge, were the first to join his standard. The Guelfs returned to Florence and made transient peace with the Ghibellines. As for the long habitual state of armed rivalry between noble and noble, it had led to the keeping of serragli or moveable barricades, that were set up when a street quarrel had bred tumult in the street occupied by nobles of a particular faction. These barricades were besieged and defended until nightfall, after which each side gathered its dead, and next day peacefully apportioned honours of the fight. And still, through all the violence of faction, the independent energies of her people, claiming part in the predominance of the Guelfs, kept pace with the commercial growth of Florence. The year of the Sicilian Vespers was the year of the Constitution that expressed the political mind of this Athens of the Middle Ages. By the Constitution of 1282, established when the poet Dante was among the youth of Florence, supreme power was given to the Priores, first three in number, afterwards six. The Priors held office only for two months, and elected their successors from among the rich and noble of the city. There was retained also the year-long magistracy of the Podesta, and that of the Captain of the People. But none of these magistrates could enact laws without the assent of the Parliament or Chief Council, while, even before a law reached this assembly, there was the Council of the Priors, to which the suggestions of the Priors had to be submitted; there were also two Councils to assist the Captain of the People and deliberate on his suggestions; and there were two Councils to assist the Podesta. All these bodies debated in accordance with fixed Parliamentary forms, which forbade interruption of a speaker, but also limited the duration of debate. When a law proposed by the Priors or by the Captain of the People had passed the Council of the Priors or that of the Captain, it was required that it should pass also through the Councils of the Podesta before it was submitted to the General Parliament, formed by the union of all the lesser councils, with the Podesta for a President. Such was the spirit of liberty that lay at the roots, and has ever made the sap of modern literature. The army provided by this free Constitution was a militia of all men between the ages of fifteen and seventy, organized into bodies of fifty, under twenty-four captains of war ; a system of service by proxy was established by division of the army into a stationary corps for defence of the city, and a marching combatant corps, which was maintained in time of war at the expense of those who stayed at home. The CaptainGeneral, or Commander-in-Chief, obtained his office, like the Podesta, by election, and was sometimes one of the civil magistrates, sometimes, for reasons of domestic policy, a brave or noble stranger, who had a few troops of his own to bring with him into the service of the city. The thriving traders of Florence were resolved not to leave room for the growth of a military tyrant from among themselves, How the commercial town throve while thus guarding so jealously its liberties is shown by the fact that within thirty years before the birth of Dante the streets had been paved with stone instead of brick, an invention of the famous architect Arnolfo di Lapo; the Palace of Justice, the prisons, and the Bridge of the Trinity had been built. Greek painters had also been brought to Florence, whom young Cimabue saw at work in the chapel, and whose art was transcended by the genius of that Florentine. In the year of Dante's birth Cimabue, first of the great line of Italian painters, was twenty-five years old. Cimabue died when Dante's age was thirty-seven; and while the poet attained mastery in song, the painter broke free from the traditional formalities of his Greek teachers, painted visions of the Virgin among angels, and of apostles, and of saints, with life in the limbs and flow in the draperies. His great picture of the Virgin, for the church of Santa Maria Novella, was carried in Dante's time, with sound of trumpet and rejoicing of the people, from the painter's house to its place in the church. In that house, after Cimabue's death, his art survived him; for there lived his pupil Giotto. Giotto was but eleven years younger than his friend Dante. From the hand of Giotto was the portrait of Dante, at the age of thirty, which was discovered in the Bargello of Fiorence some forty years ago. "In painting Cimabue thought that he Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other's fame is growing dim,"- wrote Dante in the 11th canto of his "Purgatory," and added, of himself, with a strong sense of power, referring to his friend Guido Cavalcanti as a poet who had surpassed Guido Guinicelli "So has one Guido from the other taken The glory of our tongue, and he perchance Is born who from their nest shall chase them both." The Palazzo Vecchio was built when Dante was twenty-four years old. Five years later the builders were at work on the Baptistery and Cathedral; and Dante was but in his thirty-fifth year when there were cast for the Baptistery those brazen gates which Michael Angelo declared "worthy to be the gates of heaven." Then also to these works the building of the city walls was added; and for the towers and barricades of factious chiefs within the town, which were ordered to be reduced or abolished, there were set up fortress-walls for the shelter of a working commonwealth. Outside the walls an active race of husbandmen, fearless possessors of the goods they earned, tilled the ground, formed canals, and raised embankments against floods, with capital borrowed from the townspeople, who shared the harvests and paid all the land-tax. It was in the year 1265, when Roger Bacon taught in England, being then fifty years old, that Alighieri, the jurisconsult, became, by his second wife, Donna Bella, father of that son Durante (enduring) whose name lives in its shortened form of Dante to the end of time. Although the child was born in Florence, his father, as it has been said, was among the Guelfs who had gone out after the battle of Monte Aperto. Very soon after his birth the Guelf party was again in power, but the lawyer returned to die, and the young Dante was left to the care of an affluent mother, who caused him to be liberally trained. An early friend was the daring and high-spirited poet Guido Cavalcanti, who was of a good old Florentine family, and by about fifteen years older than Dante. Dear friend of Dante's also was Casella the musician, whom he found among the spirits that sang of Israel's deliverance, as they came towards him in the angelic pinnace. An early teacher of Dante was Brunetto Latini, a noble Florentine Guelf, who wrote in Norman French a metrical abridgment of the learning of his time, called the "Tresor," and in Italian verse a “Tesoretto" of philosophy, after the plan of a dream, then fashionable in courtly poetry. Brunetto dreamt that he had lost his way in a forest, where he met with Nature, by whom he was instructed concerning God and man, the five senses, the elements, the planets, the variety of animals, and navigation beyond Spain. Nature then bade him search the forest for Philosophy, the Four Virtues, the God of Love, Fortune and Fraud. He took some lessons of the Virtues, and at the abode of Love he met with Ovid, who became his guide. Brunetto then went to confession, received absolution, said that he would not visit Fortune, returned to the forest, saw the world and the four elements, and questioned Ptolemy. It may have been especially through this poem that a common fashion in the courtly poetry of his day determined the form also of the "Divine Comedy as an allegorical vision, and caused Dante to represent himself as taking Virgil for his guide. Lombardy was without a written language, and the choice of language for the poets of North Italy was between Provençal and Sicilian. Dante adopted the Sicilian, or, as he called it, the court language; but Ugo Catola sang liberty, and Sordello had earned as a Mantuan, in Dante's " Purgatory," the embrace of Virgil by songs in the Provençal. Dante wrote in his early manhood the "Vita Nuova -the New or the Early Life-connecting, with a narrative of aspiration towards Beatrice, as the occasion of them, sonnets and canzoni, representing, artificially, according to the manner of that time, various moods of love. Fifty yards from the house in which Dante lived was the house of Folco Portinari, father of the little Beatrice or Bice, on whom Dante founded, not a set of personal love sonnets, but his ideal of a dawn of life and love, distinguished by the chastest purity. He was in the mystical ninth year when he met her, a child of eight in a crimson dress. From that time Love held sovereign empire over his soul. After the exact measure of another mystical nine years he saw her, arrayed in the purest white, between two noble ladies older than herself. She saluted him; "and the hour," he says, at which her sweet salutation reached me was exactly the ninth hour of the day.' Then follows the mystical vision expressed in the first sonnet. The narrative describes phases of a love so pure that the highest happiness it seeks is the gracious salutation of its object. But there is always the design of connecting together sonnets describing different shades of feeling, until the grief for his loss of Beatrice in that year of the calendar “in which the perfect number was nine nines completed within the century in which she was born into the world," she being herself a Nine, in other words a miracle whose only root is the adorable Trinity." After the grief follows the faithful recollection that withstands temptation of new beauty, strengthened by a vision of Beatrice as first seen in the crimson robe of her innocent child-beauty. When the actual Beatrice died, in the year 1290, she was the young wife of Simon dei Bardi; but this fact nearly concerned neither Dante nor the poem. Her place in the "Vita Nuova " is that of a sublimely pure ideal, which runs through the whole inner life of the first mighty poet of the moderns. At the very outset of this work he describes his ideal as "the glorious lady of my mind;" and says, "she was called Beatrice by many who knew not how she was called." Had the lady to whom Dante's unstaining homage was in its material sense dedicated, like the lady of the verse of Dante da Maiano, borne the name of Nina, she could not by that, or any other merely individual_name, have appeared in the verse of Dante Alighieri. The glorious lady of this Dante's mind was the pure spirit of Love, Beatrice, the Blesser; earthly love in the "Vita Nuova,' heavenly love in the "Divine Comedy." On earth, "when she drew near unto any, so much truth and simpleness entered into his heart, that he dared neither to lift his eyes nor to return her salutation. She went along crowned and clothed with humility, showing no whit of pride in all that she heard and saw; and when she had gone by it was said of many, 'This is not a woman, but one of the beautiful angels of heaven;' and there were some that said, 'This is surely a miracle ; blessed be the Lord, who hath power to work thus marvellously.' There is the most careful exclusion of all fleshly longing from Dante's picture of the Spirit of Love, that walks abroad on the same earth with us, while yet, to our hearts, the world is young. When by the spiritual eye she is seen no more in the street, but is removed to heaven, Dante's small treason to her memory is checked by a dream of her, not, be it observed, as the lost object of a fleshly love, but as the nine-year old child in the crimson dress, who represented the warm glow of love in the heart blessed with a child-like innocence. Dante's last prayer in the "Vita Nuova" is that, when his work is done, his spirit "may go hence to behold the glory of its |