m^^^^^^i^m 737 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY Date Due -^^^^^' UM- ^-^^Hfiff^ m^-,-^^ XXKUilMMDORl ^''l«iimiiMmi°' ''''"■«"<=e:Dante, Giotto, Sa 3 1924 014 198 661 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO r= HIERONYMI-FERRARIENSIS^AJDEO ' ifMISSI* PROPHETS' EFFIGIES5?c- iiTmpmMi|t?ig ^^ Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014198661 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE DANTE GIOTTO SAVONAROLA AND THEIR CITY ^- C»\ o^C(£A by MRS. OLIPHANT AUTHOR OF "THE MAKERS OF VENICE," "THE MAKERS OF ROME," ETC. WITH PORTRAIT OF SAVONAROLA ENGRAVED BY C. H. JEENS AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY PROFESSOR DELAMOTTE MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1908 Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, bread street hill, e.c, and bungay, suffolk. First Printed {Mediuin 87/ijJJ 1876. Reprinted^ 1877. Neiu Edition {prown Sw^?), 1881. Reprintedy 1883, TZZe^^ January and November 1^%% 1889, 1892, 1897, igoi, 1903, 1908. Extra Ilhistrated Edition {Medium Zvo\ 1891. THE MAl&ERS OF FLOREIS^CE. ' Ditemi dell' ovil di San Giovaimi, Quant' era allora, e chi eran le genti, Tra esso degne di pu\ alti scanni. ***** Con queste genti e con altre con esse, Vid* io Fiorenza in si fatto riposo, Chenon avea cagione onde piangesse." Paradiso, Canto XVI. CONTENTS. THK POET:— DANTE. CHAPTER I. PAGE HIS YOUTH ... . . .... ... . 1 CHAPTER II. HIS PUBLIC LIFE ... . 33 CHAPTER III. IN EXILE .... ... 65 THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS. CHAPTER IV. GKOtrP I. — ARNOLFO — GIOTTO . .... 98 CHAPTER V. GKOUP II. — GHIBBKTI, DONATELLO, BRUNBLLESOHI 132 CHAPTER VI. A PEACEFUL CITIZEN .... ..... o 164 CONTENTS. THE MONKS OF SAN MARCO. CHAPTER VII PAGE I. — THE ANGELICAL PAINTKR . . 194 CHAPTER YIII. II. — THE GOOD AEOHBISHOP . . . . . 222 CHAPTER IX. III. — GIROLAMO SAVONAKOLA : HIS PKOBATTON . . . 238 CHAPTER X. IV. — GIKOLAMO SAVONAKOLA — THE PKKACHER . 255 CHAPTER XI. V. SAVONAKOLA AS A POLITICIAN . 277 CHAPTER XIl. THE SPERIMENTO . ... 305 CHAPTER Xlll. THE prophet's END . . ... 331 CHAPTER XIV. THE PIAGNONI PAINTER.S 350 CHAPTER XV. MICHEL ANGELO . . , . , 376 INDEX . , , . .417 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE SAVONABOLA. Engraved by C. H. Jee-ns Front. ■PORTEAIT OF FAKINATA UBBIiTI . . ... .... 7 DOORWAY OF DANTE's HOUSE . . . ... . . 11 PORTRAIT OF DANTE .... . . . . . . 34 SASSO Dl DANTE . . 54 GIULIANO DE' MEDICI, CALLED " IL I'ENSIEKO : " MICHEL AN- GELO TofaG. Wl PALAZZO PUBBLICO, OR DELLA SIGNORIA ; WITH THE TOWER 01' THE VACCA . . 104 THE BARGELLO, ANCIENT PALACE OF THE I'ODESTA .... 1G9 .STAIRCASE IN THE COETILE OF BARGELLO Ill PORTRAIT OF GIOTTO ... 116 CATHEDRAL AND CAMPANILE FltO.M THE PALAZZO PITTI . . . 125 INTERIOR OP CATHEDRAL . . . 137 THE CENTRE OF FLORENCE 145 HEAD OP ANGEL: AFTER DONATELLO 149 LORENZO DB' MEDIOI . MICHEL ANGELO . . . Tv face 154 JblST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGR FIGUKBS FEOM ORSAN-SOEEEN. LUCA BELLA KOBBIA . . . 156 DITTO . ... ... 167 DITTO . . ■ . 159 DITTO ..;... 162 I'IPNTE VEOCHIO . 170 THE AKNO, LOOKINe EAST FROM THE PONTE VECOHIO . . . 176 THE AENO, LOOKING WEST EKOM THE PONTE VECOHIO . 183 LANTERN : PALAZZO STEOZZI . . . . . . . 187 TORCH-HOLDER FOR EXTERNAL ILLUMINATIONS . . ... 189 FIGURES FROM ORGAN-SCREEN. LUCA BELLA ROBBIA .... 192 ERA ANGELICO ... ... ... 199 FLORENCE, FROM FIESOLE .... . 201 ANNUNCIATION; FIIA ANGELICO, SAN MARCO. . . To face 204 CRUCIFIXION : OUTER CLOISTER : SAN MARCO .... . 205 HOSPITALITY : FROM THE CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO .... 209 SILENCE — ST. PETER MARTYR : IN THE CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO 211 COSMVS MEDICI ST. DECRETO PVELR-OPE . . . 215 SANT' ANTONINO, ARCHBISHOP OF FLOIIENCE . . 223 THE BIGALLO . .... 229 BROTHERS OP THE MISERICOEDIA CARRYING A PATIENT . . 231 BALLOT-BOX FOR MEMBERS OF THE MISERICORDIA 233 MONEY-BOX OF BUONUOMINI DE SAN JIARTINO 236 CRUCIFIXION : FRA ANGELICO, CHAPTER HOUSE, SAN MARCO To face 238 LORENZO DE' MEDICI . . 248 CORRIDOR IX SAN MARCO , 253 SAVONAROLA ; FROM THE (RECENT) BUST IN SAN MARCO . 258 PAGE savonaeola's cell . . 269 DAY ; MICHEL AKGELO. FliOM TOMB OF LOKENZO DE' JIEDICI Tofacr. 272 NIGHT: MICHELANGELO. TOMli OF LOUENZO DE' MEBICI To faca 307 TWILIGHT : MICHEL ANGELO. TOMB OF OIULIANO DE' MEDICI Tofaco 341 MARTYRDOM OF SAVONAItOLA (FROM AN OLD PICTURE) . . . 347 SANTA MARIA NOVELLA . . . . 358 "devil" IX MEUOALO VEOOHIO 366 DAWN : MICHEL AXGELO. FROM TOMB OF OIULIANO DE' MEDICI To face 375 M. ANGELO'S SWORD ... 381 M. ANGELO'S STUDY, FLORENCE 388 HOLY FAMILY, BY M. ANGELO, IN THU BAEGELLO {unfinished) . 398 HOLY FAMILY, BY M. ANGELO 404 INTRODUCTION. The history of Florence has been often written, and in many ways. In the life-like annals of the old chroniclers, who set down with vigorous simplicity, what they them- selves did and heard and saw ; and in the more philoso- phical narratives, compilations, and collections, made with elaborate care and judgment, which make the study of Italian history more grateful than most researches of the kind ; the tale of her greatness and of her weakness has been told over and over again, from each man's different point of view. Some have occupied themselves with the art-story of the city — an aspect of her life which is full of the deepest interest ; others have devoted themselves to the varied strifes which have rent her in pieces — chroni- cling the casting out and taking back of her successive exiles, and her own often blind and foolish struggle against supposed tyrannical attempts, and confused mis- apprehension of her true safety and interest. Others, again, have treated Florence as but one actor in the great drama of Italian history. There is enough material for all ; and even the fragmentary efforts contained in this volume — " short swallow flights " of biographical essay — do not, I hope, require apology, so rich is the ground in all directions, so tempting to the writer, so full of pleasant illustration of the life and meaning of the great past. I do not promise the reader that he will find any consecutive xiv INTRODUCTION. history of Florence in the following pages ; for new his- ' tories are scarcely needed, nor is the present writer qualified to undertake such a task. The biographical chapters which follow, however, cannot but touch upon and indicate a certain portion of the greater story ; and involuntarily I have been obliged to trace the progress, to some extent, of the struggle which was always going on, surging and storming in the public palazzo and narrow streets around, and in the wider, but more passive country which was fuori, outside, the significant word employed to indicate everything that was not Florence — all Europe, and all that the world contained of good and lovely, being but a desert to those unhappy ones who were on the wrong side of the walls ; and at the same time to show how, in the midst of this struggle, in every interval, and even through the conflict of arms, the din of internal fighting over a fierce barricade, or the wild clamour with which one party after another was driven fuori — there still went on, in strange serenity, another life in the very heart of the warlike city. How the chippings of the mason's chisel, and the finer tools of the wood-carver, and the noiseless craft of brush and pigment, could keep going on through all the din, is as curious a problem of Florentine life as any the imagination can grasp. Yet they did so. One of the most costly, splendid, and elaborate structures in the world — at that time the most elaborate and costly — got itself built and garnished while still the tocsins of im- memorial strife were sounding all about, the fierce old beU pealing out its periodical summons from the airy heights of the Palazzo Vecchio, and armed men, fierce and furious, swarming about the streets. Giotto,- tranquil and silent in the heart of Florence, was working out the plans for his campanile with pencil and compasses, while Dante, in all the bitter wrath of exile, roamed to and fro outside, calling upon heaven and earth to avenge his wrongs, and INTRODUCTION. xv appealing alike to emperors and Condottieri to fall upon Florence and open the gates to him — most wonderful and instructive contrast. And Fra Angelico, on his knees in his cell, was painting those heavenly angels who got him his name, while the struggle had begun with the Medici, which made them, after much resistance, masters of the city. Did those painters, those builders, those busy crafts- men, powdered with the marble-dust of the rising Duomo, take no notice of the fighting? or did not, rather, the strokes of the chisel fall fast and furious in the early morning to let the bold mason off, his day's bread earned, to cut ofE some other craftsman's living in the afternoon, when " the old cow," the big hoarse Vacca of the city bell, lowed out her summons ? In this strange way the peaceful work and the strife went on side by side, all the convul- sions of the city offering little or no hindrance to the adornment of the city in which the antagonists were equally interested ; nor, more strangely still, to the grow- ing wealth of Florence, where trade flourished and bankers multiplied, notwithstanding that every other year there was a revolution. "We do not pretend to explain how this could be ; but that it was so is very apparent. The sight of Florence as she still is, is proof enough of the prosperity which accompanied her struggles ; for none of all those glorious churches and decorations with which she is adorned like a bride, and few of the pictures that fill her galleries, have come into being during the years of deadly quiet in which she has languished under native and foreign masters, fighting no longer. Did not Michel Angelo, with whom her glory came to a culmination, build rough walls of defence, trenches, and battlements, with the same master- ful hand which carved the lovely anguish of the Dawn and the half-accomplished" passion of the Day in San Lorenzo? And after that last conjunction of War and Peace, the apotheosis of the great art-workman, who wrought so xvi INTRODUCTION. fiercely at his forlorn hope on the slope of San Miniato, and made the record of his despair so glorious in the sacristy sacred to the Medici, what has Florence done more in Art? Benvenuto Cellini, with the Pegasus of his geniiis put in toy harness and yoked to toy chariots of gold and silver ; and a school of painters who died slowly out after the great Buonarotti; but except efiefce Dukes and Eenaissanoe Cupids entangled in chains of roses, and a people without life and hope — nothing more. We do not pretend, however, to follow out, even by secondary means, all the lines of the story which is con- centrated into epic force and distinctness by the limited space in which it is enacted. But the great figure of the Poet, which stands near the beginning of the most articu- late and important period of Florentine history, and the equally remarkable Preacher, who holds a similar position towards its end, give a certain historical and epical form to the narrative; and it is scarcely possible to indicate them distinctly without embracing much of the general tenor of the larger tale. In both lives the central interest is in the struggle which we find going on violently in Dante's time, and which, greatly changed, yet the same, reaches a kind of climax in Savonarola's — a struggle which kept on raging with more or less force through the two intervening centuries, never wholly extinguished, changing in form, but scarcely in character, from one generation to another. It is not within our range to search into the very beginnings of the city for the begin- ning of the quarrel. It is enough to find it in full force, in absolute height of unreason, in the end of the thirteenth century ; a quarrel which we have not even the satisfaction of being able to regard as a struggle between good and evil, the natural conflict of opposing principles. There is no doubt a certain formal meaning attached by the historian to the titles Guelf and Ghibelline, words which INTRODUCTION. xvii liave wearied the mind of the world ever since, as they distracted it in the day of their power ; and we suppose there can be no doubt that the feudal party, the nobles who would fain have held rich Florence in bondage, main- tained a vague allegiance to the alien ruler, the German emperor, under the shield of whose distant power they might oppress and overrun their neighbours ; and that the burghers, who had gradually pushed ofE their yoke and risen into freedom of trade and prosperity, felt themselves better able to hold their own with the support and patron- age of the great Popes, who were the arbitrators and judges of Christendom, than in their isolated position as an independent city. Thus a vague general meaning was in the party names which rent Florence asunder while yet it was the straitest of walled cities within its cerohia antica ; but hundreds suffered for their cause on both sides, to whom that cause meant nothing more than a dear and cherished hostility against their neighbours over the way — a true civic grudge, deep and bitter with constant encounter, and a hundred daily pricks of insult or injury ; and to the majority of the factions, which apparently bore exile and misery for their political creed, that creed repre- sented only the well-known but never exhausted principle that every Bianco had a right to hate every Nero — to kill or banish him, and rob his house or burn the goods he left behind. We cannot even make sure that the reign of the Guelf faction, though under its sway Florence began to put on her glorious apparel and to make herself notable and renowned over all the earth, was any better than that of the GhibeUines, or bore any rich fruit of national happiness and prosperity which might not have been attained under their rivails ; for the balance of good sways throughout the story like Fortune herself, some- times remaining with one party, sometimes with the other, and having little or nothing to say to the continuance of xviii INTRODUCTION. the perennial struggle whicli raged between one citizen and another, one family and another, one side of a street against the dwellers opposite, without rhyme or reason, or thought of any loftier meaning. It is difficult to say which side, when in power, ruled best. Both sides had a certain dogged regard for the city, and desire to enrich and adorn and make her great ; but neither would seem to have had that moral pre-eminence which satisfies the looker-on, or warrants him in giving his adherence to one of two contending parties. Naturally the wish of the reader who does not pretend to know much about it would be to take Dante's side in a question with which the poet was so greatly involved ; but even that strong inducement to partizanship fails us, and we find it impossible to be altogether on Dante's side — the other, in its time of ascen- dency, being more patriotic, more truly Florentine than Dante, as he himself was intensely patriotic and Florentine when in power. Thus the struggle surges on through centuries, always confused, gloomy and hopeless in its de- stitution of any great principle or leading idea ; a warfare taken up by one family after another, the Donati against the Cerchi, the Medici against the Albizzi ; a vague, end- less, bitter personal quarrel, which having no real or worthy motive in its beginning, might have gone on, as long as mean motives and personal hostilities lasted, to the end of time. The struggle changed, however, when it entered into the wise heads of those Medici who were the last on the field, and who overcame all resistance in the end, to frame a determined scheme of conquest, and apply themselves to the setting up of a hereditary despotism in the free and turbulent city. Such a design had been imputed before to almost every party leader, but never before had Florence met with any but a momentary master, or felt herself cowed, and unable by a sudden rising to snatch the reins INTRODUCTION. six out of the usurper's hands. "When, however, Cosimo had founded, and Lorenzo confirmed, this complete though un- acknowledged supremacy, there arose to dignify the struggle the moral principle which all this time it had wanted. "When the question became one between Florence and the Medici, between a nascent tyranny and the free institutions of the city, the principle of resistance changed from the mere enmity of faction- into the old zeal of jealous patriotism, which is the highest of classic virtues. Curiously enough it was no classic Brutus, no citizen Rienzi, no indignant and outraged Florentine, who took the leader's part in this renewed and nobler warfare, but a monk, a stranger, a man of another city, Girolamo Savon- arola, of the Preachers, whose championship added at once another element to the struggle, and made it one, not only of civic freedom and law against tyranny and abso- lute personal rule, but also of Christianity against Pagan- ism, of moral purity against vice. We would fain have done more justice than space has permitted to what we may be permitted to call the devil's side in the quarrel as thus developed ; for the wise Cosimo, the brilliant and magnificent Lorenzo, and such a strange and mysterious genius as that of Machiavelli, are well worthy of con- sideration. But the limits of time and space have balked intention so far as these eminent personages are concerned. Lorenzo de' Medici has had full justice in the world of letters ; his qualities are such as to make him a favourite figure with all to whom love of the arts, a magnificent disposition, a heart not without noble and generous im- pulses, and a touch of genius, are greater recommendations than such less brilliant qualities as truth, mercy, and patriotism. And in the whole course of Florentine story there is perhaps no individual more intellectually interest- ing than Machiavelli, the clearest and coolest of observers, curious, unimpassioned spectator of the conflicts and XX INTRODUCTION. abuses around him, perhaps not even ironical at all in his profound seriousness, yet conscious of the grave and deep irony involved, and as capable of discriminating between good and evil as he was of tracing out with tremendous impartiality the best way to be politically wicked. The workings of such a mind are so full of interest that it is difficult, however, to realize how small an immediate share this great intelligence had in the guidance of his age ; smaller than that of many a much inferior mind, less important for the moment than such a bold citizen, for example, as Piero Capponi — brave Capon crowing lustily over all the shrill trumpeting of the Gallic cocks, as Machiavelli himself said. This side of the subject, how- ever, we must leave with regret, under pressure of necessity ; the best that we can hope to do, is to indi- cate, in a fragmentary way, to the reader who loves Florence how the great city fought her special battle, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind, wearing her soul out by factious struggles, yet at last making one great stand for life and freedom, and losing the cast, but not without honour. Long and deep has been her slumber, brooding over the recollection of her greatness, or bitterly expounding her own beauty for the advantage of the stranger. Now let us hope a greater career is again before Florence — a life renewed and strengthened by steadfast law and solid freedom. THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE THE POET:— DANTE CHAPTEE I. HIS YOUTH. ris a peculiarity of the great cities of Italy, that none of them are capitals in the ordinary sense of the word — types and representatives of the country, such as Paris is of France, or London of England. The great centres of old Italian life, Rome and Venice and Florence, are aU as distinct as individuals, incapable on the spur of the moment — as has been demonstrated by recent experience — of being trimmed into any breadth of nationality, or made to represent more than themselves — the one strongly-marked and individual phase of character which their municipal separateness and independent history have impressed upon them. The action of time may fit Rome — once the mistress, and still accustomed to feel herself in one sense the capital, of the world — for becoming the capital of Italy ; but it is scarcely possible to conceive a combination of circumstances which could B 2 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. have detached Florence from her grandiose and austere personality and made of her a national centre. So long as her dark palaces cat their stern outline against the sky, and her warlike tower lifts itself high over the housetops, and the hills stand round her in embattled lines, must the great city remain herself — the city of Dante and Michael Angelo, sternest of poets and of painters — a grave, serious, almost solemn presence, full of passion too pro- found and thought too vast to be capable of light utterance, amid all the sunshine and the songs, the gaiety and levity of the south. The distinctness of her character could scarcely show itself more completely than by the close unity which exists between her and her great poet. Even to those who have never been personally impressed by the lofty, almost melancholy, seriousness of her aspect, the two images are one. Dante is the very embodiment, the living soul of Florence, living and full of the most vivid reality though six centuries have passed since his eyes beheld " lo dolce Lome " — the sweet light of mortal day. Genius has never proved its potency so mightily as by the way in which so many petty tumults and factionaries of the thirteenth century, so many trifling incidents and local circumstances, passed out of all human importance for the last six hundred years, have been held suspended in a iierce light of life and reality, unable to perish and get themselves safe into oblivion up to this very day, in consequence of their connection with this one man. Even now critics discuss them hotly, and students rake into the dust of old histories for further particulars of those street riots and rough jests, six hundred years old, which led to so much blood . and mischief ; not that they were of themselves more important than other local mediaeval tumults, but because the hand of the poet has touched them, or his shadow somewhere fixed them for ever on the common recollection, as daylight now fixes so many vulgar portraits. The men who injured Florence, I.] THE POET :— DANTE. 3 and those who tried to save her in that day, were of themselves no more interesting than the generations of succeeding plotters and local heroes who came after them in a perpetual succession of struggles, down to the time when anarchy and the ceaseless changes of an unsettled government found their natural quietus in the calm of absolute tyranny. But the names of the older generations are writ in brass on the glowing walls of the Inferno, or in softer lines across the hopeful glades of the Purgatorio ; while toiling historians have but succeeded in inscribing a record of the others in the undisturbed dust of here and there a library shelf. This is what the poet has done for his generation ; and it is more than Shakespeare has done for his — a difference which it is not difficult, however, to account for by the different characters of the men and the scenes in which they lived. To one poet his England was the world, full of every possible type of humanity, affording him sugges- tions for his Moor, his Jew, his Venetian, as well as for his Falstaff and his Prince Hal. But to the Florentine Florence in all her straitness, shut in by the walls of that Seconda Gerchia which antiquaries can still trace for us, was the actual universe. No Othello, no Shylock, strange to the soil, ever dawned upon his intense concentrated vision ; but he saw with tremendous vividness and reality the people around him, the greatness of them and the pettiness of their sycophants — Filippo Argenti in the mud, as well as Brunetto Latini on those burning sands where fall like snow the " dilated " flakes of fire. Dante was bom, lived, loved, and struggled for all the momentous part of his life not only in that small old Florence, but in a corner of it, knowing from his childhood every individual of the vicini, and loving and hating them as only people so closely shut up together could love and hate ; while Shakespeare had the freedom of the country to range through — a little youthful vagabondism at merry Stratford B 2 4 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. -^a taste of the great life of his noble patrons, and of the Bohemian life of his players, and of everything that was going in the fresh island air crisped by the sea. The cir- cumstances are as different as the minds of the two poets, if anything tangible can ever be so different as the genius of Dante from • that of Shakespeare. Accordingly the Italian has lifted his entire generation with him into the skies, and by so doing has not only secured for us an acquaintance with the time which is unparalleled in minute- ness and vivid force, but has hampered us with a literature of commentary which we suppose no other writer of the modern world has ever called forth. We will not attempt to follow the crowd of learned Italians who live and breathe and have their being in Dante through the many convolutions of history, which sometimes bid fair to strangle, like the Laocoon, the poet himself and his great poem in their multiplied and intricate folds. Indeed we think the time has come when, in as far as the Divina Commedia is concerned, a reverse treatment would be advantageous, and those parts of the poem which belong to humanity, and are everywhere comprehensible, might be separated from those which are woven into the tangled web of Tuscan history. However, our present occupation is with the man rather than the poem, so far as the great, impassioned, intense spirit who wrote it can ever be de- tached from that memorable record of himself and his age, in which all the lofty but fierce passions, all the exquisite softenings of feeling, all the strange exalted thoughts, rigid opinions, antiquated learning, a,nd profound humanity of the man are and continue as if he still lived among us, What Dante is in the Divine Comedy, we know- — how Dante grew to be what he is, and among what surround- ings, he himself has left us the means of finding out, aided by a band of patriotic biographers, such as dc honour to the unswerving faithfulness of Italian enthusiasm for the greatest poet of the race. 1.] THE POET;— DANTE. 5 The little Florence in which Dante was born was very much unlike the noble and beautiful Florence which is now, like Jerusalem, a joy of the whole earth, and whose splendour and serious beauty seem to justify the wonderful adoration of her which her children have always shown, and which this her greatest son made into a kind of worship. The high houses that rose in narrow lines closely approaching each other, with a continual menace, across the strait thread of street, had not yet attained to the characteristic individuality of Tuscan architecture. The beautiful cathedral, which so many a traveller, thoughtless of dates, has contemplated from the Sasso di Dante, with a dim notion that Dante himself must have sat there many a summer evening watching the glorious walls rise and the great noble fabric come into being, had not, even in the lower altitude given to it by Amolfo, begun to be when the poet was born. The old Bargello and the Palazzo Vecchio were still in process of building. Santa Crocej Santa Maria Novella, and Giotto's lovely Campanile were all in the future with all their riches. The ancient Badia, or Abbey of Florence, still struck the hour, as the poet records, to all the listening city ; and though the bridges, curiously enough, had all been built, there was scarcely as yet any Oltr' Arno, only a very small scrap of that side of the river being inclosed within the second circle of walls, which extended from the Ponte della Grazie, or Rubaconte, newly built, to the Ponte alia Carraja, also new, and so round by San Lorenzo and the Square of the Cathedral, then cumbered by houses and occupied only by the ancient little church of Santa Reparata, facing the Baptistery, the only one of the great group which existed in Dante's day. Very different then must have been that double square. The Baptistery had not even got its coating of marbles, but was still in flint, grey and homely, when the child of the Alighieri was christened there ; and little Santa Reparata, with its grave-yard round it, lay deep down as 6 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. in a well in the heart of the tall houses. The Baptistery, too, was surrounded by graves, its square being filled up by sarcophagi of. a still older date, in which — a curious fancy — many of the greater families of Florence buried their dead. The tower of one of the great houses in the square was called Gua/rda-morte, " watcher of the dead," so closely round that little centre of the buried clustered the houses of the living. But to the old church of the Baptist, the "bel San Giovanni" of the poet, every child of Florence was carried, then, as now, to be made a Christian. That great solemn interior, still and cool and calm amid the blazing sunshine, remains alone unchanged amid all the alterations around. The graves have been cleared away, the great Duomo has been built, the tower of Giotto, airy fabric of genius, defying all its tons of marble to make it less like a lily born of dew and sunshine, has sprung up into the heavens ; but San Giovanni is still the same, and still the new Florentines are carried into its serene solemnity of gloom to be enrolled at once in the Church and in the world by names which may be heard of here- after — as was the infant Durante, Dante, prince of poets and everlasting ruler of Florence, in the year 1265, in that month of May which, under Tuscan skies, is the true May after which in our northern latitudes we sigh in vain. Only fi.ve years before, Florence herself, with all her fame and promise unfulfilled, was as near destruction as ever city was — not by her enemies, but by her own sons born in her bosom. The ceaseless and sickening struggles of the Guelfs and Ghibellines had begun some time before, and once all the Guelfs and once all the Ghibellines had been banished from the city, when the victory of Monta- perti made the Ghibellines masters for the second time of the town. It seems incredible, after all we have heard and said of the intense devotion of Italian citizens of those times to their city, that there actually was a discussion Deiween the victors whether or not they should destroy "•] THE POET:— DANTE, altogether the home out of which, as the most dreadful of punishments, each faction in its turn drove its opponents ; but such was the case. After this victory of Montaperti, a general meeting of the Ghibelline party was held at Empoli, where this proposal was made, and, supported JMIOM/ieUSa Portrait of Farinata Uberti. warmly by the delegates of all other Ghibelline cities, would certainly have been carried out, save for the resist- ance of Farinata degli TJberti, a member of a family so thoroughly detested in Florence that their palace had been quite recently destroyed, as Jericho was, under penalties against any one who should attempt to rebuild it. Farinata 8 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. was the sole Florentine bold enough to stand up for the city in which his paternal home had been razed to the ground. The reader of the Inferno will remember the fine passage in which his great deed has been made immortal. It is one of the most remarkable in the whole poem. The great Ghibelline, raising himself from the sepulchre in which he is imprisoned, lifting up breast and brow "as if he held hell in scorn," and the old Cavalcanti beside him, who, hearing the name of the mortal visitor, immediately rises too, to look if his Guido, Dante's friend, is with him, are among the most impressive figures in all that gloomy landscape. " I was not alone," says Farinata, " in the deeds which moved the wrath of Florence against my race ; but alone I stood when all around me would have destroyed Florence, and defended her with open face." ' This ' Those to whom this beautiful passage is familiar will bear us no malice for repeating it here, and those who have forgotten it will, wq trust, be pleased to have it recalled to them. Dante has penetrated into the city of Dis, and, traversing the ring of burning sepulchres which surround the walls, talking with Virgil, is suddenly addressed by one of the' sufferers. " ' Tuscan, thus with open mortal speech. That by the burning city living goes, Please you to pause a while when hero you reach ; To me the language of your utterance shows That from that noble land you take your birth To which perchance I brought too many woes.' Suddenly came this voice, that issued forth From out a tomb : at which I faltering drew A little closer to my leader's worth. He said to me : ' Turn ; know you what you do ! 'Tis Farinata who, thus raised upright. From brow to girdle shows himself to you. ' I had already fixed on him my sight. Proudly his brow and breast upward he swayed, As one who held this hell in high despite. "With eager hand and quick my leader made Between him and the sepulchre a way, And thrust me there. ' Thy time is brief,' he said. "When to the tomb's foot I had made my way, He looked at me ; then, with a half-disdain, Questioned me thus : ' Thy fathers ? who were they ? I.] THE POET:— DANTE. 9 extraordinary risk, from which, the city, rising into so much importance, escaped only by the patriotism of one of those party leaders who were her ruin, is as notable as anything in the exciting record of her tumultuous history. When Dante, however, grew old enough to mark the world about him the days of Ghibelline triumph were over, and the Guelfs had again got the upper hand. They, too, had banished and confiscated, right and left, as soon as their turn came, as indeed all parties continued to do in Florence, whatever they called themselves — the Guelfs and the Ghibellines to-day, the Neri and the Bianchi to-morrow ; after a while, the AJbizzi and the Medici, the Arrabiati and the Piagnoni : the name mattered little, the thing existed through century after century. When it was not two parties which contended for the mastery, it was two families, a still worse kind of faction. The reader will not expect, nor we trust desire, a recapitulation and description for the hundredth time of the political faith of the Guelfs and the To do his will eager I was and fain. And all recounted to Mm, hiding nought. A little rose his eyebrows proud : again He spoke : Fiercely adverse were they, in thought And deed, to me, my party, and my race ; So were they twice to flight and exile brought.' ' If they were exiled, driven from place to place,' Quickly I said, ' yet home they found their way ; Your faction never learned that happy grace.' Then rose there suddenly from where it lay Unseen, another shade, the face alone O'er the tomb's edge raised, as one kneeling may, And round me looked, gazing, as if for one Who might perchance be following after me ; When it was clearly seen that there was none : Weeping — ' If these blind prisons thus you see,' He said, ' and thread by loftiness of mind. Where is my son ? why is he not with thee ? ' I said : ' Not by myself my way I iind ; And unto him who leads and makes it plain Thy Guido's soul perchance was ne'er inclined.' Thus by his words and manner of his pain Guided I was to answer full and right, So clear I read his meaning and his name. 10 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. Ghibellines. Probably at tbeir beginning, as we have already said, the former were supposed to be on the side of the Church as the grand arbitrator of all national concerns in Europe, and the latter to look to the Emperor as holding that supreme position; but it would be rash to conclude from this that either Church or Empire had much share in the thoughts of these pugnacious Florentines, whose personal feuds and hatreds, one neighbour against another, were infinitely more real and vivid than anything so far of£ as Pope or Emperor. Between the two central points of the city — the great public square surrounding the Pallazzo Vecchio, the seat of Government so to speak, where all public business was transacted, and the other square in which now rises the cathedral — lies an obscure little opening among the thronging houses, in which the little old homely church of San Martino still stands, and where in the thirteenth century the houses of the Alighieri stood. ' How saidst thou ? — was ? Ah, lives he then no more ? Strikes his dear eyes no more the blessed light ? ' When he perceived me pause, and I forebore TJnto this question any quick reply. Prostrate he dropped, and thence appeared no more. But that heroic shade whose prison I Had first approached and by whom still remained. Unchanged in aspect and in gesture high, Moved not, but the first argument maintained. 'If,' said he, 'they have badly learned that art. By that, more than this bed, my soul is pained. But ere the queen who rules this gloomy part Shall fifty times uplift her gleaming face, That lesson, hard to learn, shall crush thy heart. If in the sweet world thou wouldst e'er find grace, Tell me why thus 'gainst all who bear my name The people rage, and hard laws curse and chase.' I answered him ; ' The bitter strife and shame That dyed the flowing Arbia crims5n-red Has in our temple raised such height of blame.' Sighing, he said and, shook his mournful head : ' In these things was not I alone, nor could, Without grave reason, be by others led. But I stood sole, when all consenting would Have swept off Florence from the earth ; alone And openly in her defence I stood.' " !•] THE POET:— DANTE. 11 An old doorway opposite, almost the only remnant of the original house, which is still used for homely, every day purposes, shows where the "Divino Poeta" was born. Between this church and the old walls of the second circle was the scene of his life — not Florence, but his street and Doorway of Dante's House. quarter of Morence, among the neighbours who, closely packed together, made part of each other's lives as only in the tiniest and most primitive of villages neighbours can do nowadays. Each family held together in its cluster of houses, building on new stories, thrusting forth new 12 THE MAKBES OF FLOEENCE. [chap chambers as the branches of the trbe grew, and the name increased in number and strength. The Portinari, the Donati, the Cerchi, inhabited each their palace-colony, their homely fortress, side by side with the Alighieri. They were neighbours in the most absolute form of the word. Impossible to know each other more closely, to be more completely aware of each others' defects and weak- nesses, of each others' virtues and good qualities, than were the generations which succeeded each other in the same hates and friendships as in the same names and houses. Thus the boy Durante, Alighieri's son, no doubt knew from his cradle not only Folco Portinari's little Beatrice, but also the young Donati, Forese, and Piccarda, and probably that Gemma of whom he leaves no record though she was his wife. That little corner of the closely- inhabited mediaeval city was in itself an imperium in imperio. "In war,'' says Balbo, "every sestiere formed a distinct company with its own officers and ensigns; in peace, they assembled together for the elections. . . . All this drew close the private relations between the inhabitants. The festivities of any one house were for all the neighbour- hood, like that which was made in the Casa Portinari in May ; and among the neighbours were those meetings, those talks seated at the door of the house, and all those details of social life which we find in Boccaccio." This kind of familiar, homely, common life has fallen nowadays to the poorer classes alone. No noble matron, no cavalier bearing arms and authority, can now be found seated at the " uscio di casa " in kindly talk with the passing neigh- bours, as they cross the street in the cool of the evening from vespers at San Martino, or, fresh from politics and business, from the Palace of the Priors : such close and friendly intercourse exists no longer. But the very sight of the narrow old streets conjures up the scene. The evening so cool and sweet after the hot day ; the heavy cornices of the old houses marking out that strip of intense I.] THE POET:— DANTE. 18 celestial blue above ; here and there over a garden wall the early summer betraying itself in breath of abundant roses, in the scarlet glow of a pomegranate blossom ; the high tower of the Badia pealing the hour, no nobler belfry yet existing in the city ; somewhere from the end of a street a glimpse visible beyond the walls of the terraced cone of Fiesole, with the darker hills behind ; and low down at the doorways, on the projecting stairs in the cortile, upon which in dangerous times gates of defence can close, what talk of the advance of trade, of the glorious buildings about to be begun which will make the world wonder, of those drivelling Ghibellines, crushed in every foolish town about which had thought to rival Florence ! or perhaps, in lower tones, Madonna Bella, Alighieri's young wife, half happy, half afraid, whispering to some young mother of the Portinari that dream she had before her child was born, Cheerful, narrow, yet kindly burgher life ; narrow, knowing no friendship out of the vicinato, yet broader by the very limits of that vicinato than our shut- up evenings indoors ; and how they could hate each other, those neighbours, when occasion served, more passionately still than they could love 1 One day in Folco Portinari's great house round the corner there was a friendly gathering. It was in the year 1275, just six centuries ago, and all the neighbours were invited, as was natural and seemly, parents and children. It was to celebrate the coming of May. The sweet delusion of the May — to which, deceived by our poets, themselves led into the error by southern troubadours, we cling with a fond and foolish faith which is always disappointed but never shaken even in these colder regions — is no delusion in Italy. The Tuscan May is something like, we should suppose, what weather is in heaven ; and, frankly, given that exemption from grief and evil which is the first condition of heaven, it is scarcely possible to fancy that any one could desire more for simple blessedness. The 14 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [ohap. Florentines had tile habit in those early days of going about the streets in bands, the vicinato now assembled by one neighbour, now by another, "with dancing and delight" — di festeggiar I'entrante primavera. Upon this special May that good and rich Folco who afterwards bmlt the great hospital gave the feast to his neighbours. The story of it is told by two rare historians — Dante himself in the curious exaltation of his Vita Numa, and Boccaccio. We will let the old story-teller, unrivalled in his craft, give his less impassioned description first : — " It happened that Folco Portinari, a man of great honour in those times among the citizens, had assembled the neighbours in his house to entertain them (festeggiare), among whom was the young man called AUghieri, whom (since little children, • especially in places of merry- making, are accustomed to go with their parents) Dante, not having yet completed his ninth year, had accompanied. And it happened that, with the others of his age, of whom both boys and girls there were many in the house, after he had served at the first tables as much as his tender age permitted, childishly with the others he began to play. There was among this crowd of children a daughter of the above-named Folco, whose name was Bice (though he always named her Beatrice, her formal name), who was about eight years old, gay and beautiful in her childish fashion, and in her behaviour very gentle and agreeable ; with habits and language more serious and modest than her age warranted ; and besides this with features so delicate and so beautifully formed, and fuU, besides mere beauty, of so much candid loveliness, that many thought her almost an angel. This girl then, such as I describe her, and perhaps even more beautiful, appeared at the festa — not I suppose for the first time, but for the first time in power to create love — before the eyes of Dante, who, though still a child, received her image into his heart with so much affection that from that day henceforward, as long as he lived, it never again departed from him." The Vita Nuova of Dante is the story told, in detail, of the love which thus began — a love which has been perhaps more questioned, criticized, and commented upon than any other which the world has known of since then. It is diflS- cult to give any just description of this book to those who are unacquainted with it without something which may look to his adorers like irreverence towards the great poet. The student of the Divine Comedy can scarcely fail to I.] THE POET :— DANTE. 16 experience a slight shock -when he leaves the great and serious Florentine, most solemn of all travellers between life and death, and finds himself suddenly transplanted into the unreal and dazzling dimness of that curious fan- tastical world of mediaeval youth, with its one sentiment upon which are rung perpetual changes, its elaborate and sophistical refinements yet childlike simpleness — a picture most artificial yet most real — fantastic as a dream, yet penetrated, by the intense verity of the dreamer, with a life which is beyond question. When, however, the strange atmosphere has become a little more familiar to the eye, the reader begins to find again, by help of this intensity, the same vivid and extraordinary individual whom under another guise he has accompanied in all his different moods — stern, tender, indignant, always himself — through the shadows and torments of the Inferno. The strange youth- ful figure of the poet, so bizarre yet so true, possessed by a love so intense and passionate, which yet is expressed with all the artificial cadences and elaborate harp-twang- ing of a troubadour, is one of the most wonderful things in literature : only youth could be at once so real and so unreal, so occupied by the manner of expressing its emotions and yet so genuine in feeling the emotion itself. The form of the strange romance is fictitious to the last degree. The elaborate sonnet put forth avowedly to a little quaint, old-world company of answering sonneteers, the fantastic explanations of every bit of verse, analysis and risumi done by rigidest rule of those impassioned utterances of love, the sole reason and excuse for which is their spontaneous outburst straight from the heart — are all strangely out of harmony with what seems to us now- adays the straightforwardness of passion. And whether it was the passion of love, commonly so-called, which moved Dante towards Beatrice is a question now never to be solved by the most curious inquiry. It would seem at least to have been not only one of those " loves which 16 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap.~ never knew an earthly close," but never to have looked for or even dreamed of one — rather a passion of sublimated admiration, that high worship of chivalry for the supremely fair and distant which elevated and inspired the worshipper without suggesting any meaner desires than that more hot and fleshly passion which generally bears the name. To look at Dante, highest prophet and poet of his country, and already full of all the awakening thoughts and blossom of his greatness, thus wandering through the old-world fields, in which flowers do not grow but are embroidered in quaint over-richness and imitation of the natural growth ; in which there is no stir of common life or purpose, but only one overpowering sentiment which fills all hearts ; in which only the " Bonne che hanno intelletto d'amore," and fair sympathising youths, each with a love like his own, live, and wander with him through a magical radiance of light which is neither of the night nor of the day ; himself clad in quaintly imagined garments of the troubadour, passing the hours in song, occupied with nothing but Beatrice, except (and with this perhaps even more than with Beatrice) how to set the young lovely verses in which he celebrates her — is the strangest sight. This moonstruck, mystical young lover, is this he who out of the confusion and dark problems of life could find no nearer way than that tremendous round he made through hell and heaven ? He had leisure enough in those " beaux jowrs quand il etait si malhev/reux ; " leisure to weep his young eyes dim, and fill his listening world with echoes of his lady's name, or rather of her sweetness and beauty and excellence above all praise ; how to look at her made a man good and pure, how shame and evil fled before her mild eyes, how her gesture of salutation was enough to transport a soul to paradise, and how heaven and earth grew dim with sympathy when she shed a tear. Not Laura herself was worshipped in such superlative sort, for Petrarch was not young, nor had he that superb simplicity of self-consciousness, that I.] THE POET:— DANTE. ] intense individuality, which could thus make itself tl: centre of a whole world, colouring and shaping it inl accord with his ruling mood. The whole phantasmagoria is at the same time so tri; that Florence herself, in that ancient form she then won rises before us, not like any city the world ever saw, y( with a dream-reality which no one can doubt ; and w become spectators at those strange assemblies whei Beatrice's lover went to have sight of her, and seeing he afar off, amid the circle of ladies round, was rapt into mystic heaven of delight, or even swooned with longing t approach her or fear of her displeasure, yet never venture upon a word to her so far as he dares say ; or stand wit him by the doors, and hear the ladies speak who come an go from visiting her in her sorrow, till our hearts are wrun like his by the thought that even peerless Beatrice, lik others, must sometimes weep. Yet this intense truth o feeling, and the strange reality of the picture at once s dim and so dazzling, never make us forget the fantasti unreality of the whole, and the strange artificial f ramewor] of it, conventional to the fullest limits of mediaeval con ventionality though so fiery-true. The sonnets, with thei explanations, throw the most curious light upon the whol mental existence of the time. How elaborate they are, mad- a solemn business of in all the fantastical sublimation o their sentiments; mapped out line by line, lest any om should miss the meaning, with transparent pretences a obscurity, which give the young poet an excuse for lingering over and interpreting and caressing his own verse. Thii was his Vita Nuova the new sweet life which love revealec to him apart from the common existence which he had bj nature. No doubt the dream-world in which Beatrice was queen, and through which moved very softly with sympa thetic looks and low- voiced questions, the "ladies who have intelligence in love," was jostled by a rude enough rea world, a life which looked old and stale and common in th( o 18 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [chap. young man's glowing eyes. He ignores that life ■which to later spectators appears the best and most important ; puts out of sight his studies, his preparations for the public service, his sharp taste of the excitement of war at Camp- aldino and elsewhere, and all the trade and wealth, the broils and commotions that were going on in Florence. Historians would have preferred that existence of fact ; and a great many even who are not historians would rather have known how Guido Cavalcanti got drawn to the side of the Cerchi, and whether Forese Donati and the gentle Piccarda were ashamed of that arrogant brother Corso, whom popular wit called Baron Do-me-harm. But no — it is the Vita A^uova that entrances the young poet into its charmed circle. There the ladies stand about in groups, and talk of him and his devotion, and speak softly to him, turning gentle eyes upon the love-sick youth ; and his friends answer him in sympathetic sonnets, and all the world breathes a melancholy melodious echo of the names of Love and Beatrice. Not a harsh thought, not an evil impulse, not a stir of jealousy nor look of envy — nothing that is not as pure and sweet as it is visionary ,.is in the fantastic-delicious record. , Every woman in it, and women are its chief inhabitants, is a gentil donna, stately and spotless and pitiful ; every man is chivalrous and pure. It is all of love ; but the love is of angelic purity, elevated above all alloy of fleshly passion. It is fantastic as a novel of Boccaccio, but spotless as a dream of heaven. ^ And now to return to the story. Here is Dante's own description of the first meeting with Beatrice recorded above : — ■ " Her dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a, subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with ^ The English reader who does not know Italian enough to read this wonderful book in the original, will find a very good trans- lation by Mr. Dante Rossetti in the volume entitled The Circle of Dante. I.] THE POET:-DANTE. 19 her very tender age. At that moment I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith ; and in trembling it said these words— '^cce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi.' . . . From that time Love ruled my soul, which was so early espoused to him, and began to take such security of sway over me by the strength which was given to him by my imagination that it was necessary for me to do completely all his pleasure. He commanded me often that I should endeavour to see this so youthful angel, and I saw in her such noble arid praise- worthy deportment that truly of her might be said these words of the poet Homer — 'She appeared to be bom not of mortal man but of God.' " After nine years (which mystic number, magical combi- nation of threes, has much to do with the pathetical- fantastic narrative) the boy-lover once more saw that youngest of angels. It is not to be supposed that they had not met many a time between, at kirk and market, or that he had not watched her from that corner long called the Nicchia, or niche of Dante, in some massive angle of the thick walls of the Portinari's house, flitting across the courtyard, or through the narrow street. But it suits the romancer to leap over this mystical interval of nine years, during which it would appear no words but only looks had passed between the lad and his goddess ; and the next point in the tale is that miraculous moment in which she first spoke to him. The description of " questa gentilissima " has here as always the same mingling of intense reality and dreamlike, glorifi.ed dimness, the minutely recorded circum- stances aiding somehow to perfect the shadowy character of the vision. "When so many days had passed that nine years were exactly fulfilled . . this wonderful creature appeared to me, in white robes, between two gentle ladies who were older than, she ; and passing by the street, she turned her eyes towards that place where I stood very timidly, and in her ineffable courtesy saluted me so graciously that I seemed then to see the heights of all blessedness. And because this was the first time that her words came to my ears, it was so sweet to me that, like one intoxicated, I left all my companions, and, retiring to the solitary refuge of my chamber, 1 set myself to think of that most courteous one {questa cortesissima), and thinking of her C 2 20 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. there fell upon me a sweet sleep, in which a marvellous vision appeared to me." The dream wliicli he had is thus described : — he saw Love, carrying in one arm a sleeping lady, in the other hand a burning heart, with which when he had wakened the sleeper he fed her, notwithstanding her terror — then vanished so weeping that the dreamer too woke. The lady was Beatrice, the flaming heart was that of Dante. When the youth woke, what should he do but put the vision into verse, a manner of speech which already his glowing soul had learned ? This was irresistible ; but the manner in which he did it was of his time and not of ours ; it belongs to the age of the troubadours, to that early singing time of new-born poetry, when there went on a sweet commerce and rivalry between the professors of the young art, most delicious of all the inventions of man. Here is how Dante himself describes his next step in the new life :— " Thinking of this which had appeared to me, I proposed to make it' known to many who were famous trovatori in that time ; and because it happened that I had already found out for myself the art oi telling my meaning in verse, I proposed to make a sonnet, in which I should salute all the faithful followers of love, and praying them to give their opinion of my vision, write to them an account of that which in my sleep I had seen This sonnet was answered by many, and in different ways, among whom one replied whom I call the first of my friends, in a sonnet which begins ' Videste al mio parere ogni valore.' And this was the beginning of the friendship between him and me when he knew that it was 1 who had sent that first sonnet to him." The other troubadour, who answered the boy's sonnet and became the first of Dante's friends,- was Guido Cavalcanti, of whom mention has already been made, and whose name is associated with that beautiful passage in the Inferno which we have quoted. He was one of the best endowed of those singers who preceded Dante, and to the son of the burgher Alighieri, who belonged at best to the petite noblesse, and besides was but a boy eighteen years old, the I.J THE POET:— DANTE. 21 notice and friendship of this splendid cavalier, knight, and minstrel, a mature man and recognised poet, must have been very important, as well as very sweet and flattering. They were friends henceforward as long as Guide's life lasted — friends so close and intimate that the poet felt himself entitled to make old Cavalcanti start from his burning tomb at the sound of his name, looking for the inseparable companion who on that great journey was not with him. It is but little more that we know of this noble Guido. He appears in the traditions and histories of his time always in an interesting and attractive light, but with few details. He was " a gentle, courteous, and ardent youth," says Dino Compagni, " but disdainful (sdegnosd) and solitary, and intent on study." " Besides thiSj he was one of the best lawyers in the world," adds Boccaccio, " and an excellent natural philosopher ; he was lively and gracious, and loved to talk {pa/rlcmte huomo) ; and everything that he wished to do which was becoming to a gentleman he could do better than any other man ; and besides this he was very rich But because Guido sometimes in his speculations became very abstracted among men, and because he to some degree held the doctrines of the Epi- cureans, it was said by the vulgar that his speculations were all made with the hope of finding that there was no God. Whether this reproach was true or not cannot now be' decided ; but the animo sdegnoso appears in some of the stories told of him, and specially in that one of Boccac- cio's novels where he is represented as leaping scornfully over one of the sarcophagi which surrounded San Giovanni, in order to escape from a band of revellers who pursued him with their importunities, entreating him to' join them ; whom he answered by telling them that they in their uselessness and folly were at home there among the dead, while he, ' solitary and intent on study,' belonged to the living." Guido was married to the daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, the great Ghibelline chief, whom Dante 22 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [oHAr. associates with the elder Cavalcanti in the Inferno — one of those marriages so continually recurring in mediseval times by which wisdom laboured, for the most part in- effectually, to make an end of, or at least soften, the virulency of faction. Either for this reason, or because his " disdainful " mind got weary of unswerving adherence to the party in which he had been born, Guido, Guelf by origin, joined that party of Bianchi who inclined towards the almost extinct doctrines of GhibeUinism, and drew Dante with him into it — a very momentous result of their friendship. Perhaps also because of this state-marriage the gallant Guido seems to have been somewhat light of love, the names of two ladies, Giovanna and Mandetta, being associated with his, neither of them, it is to be sup- posed, his Ghibelline wife. Giovanna, however, at least must have been a gentU donna, and object of pure and chivalrous adoration, since we find her in the society of the spotless Beatrice in those lovely visionary groups of the Vita Nuova, which was composed especially, as the poet afterwards informs us, for the ear of Guido, the first of his friends. Others of the best-known trovatori of the time — those poets whose songs were sung about the streets when all Florence danced and sung the sweet May in, and nothing but delights were heard of — replied to the young Alighieri's verses, some of them in lighter mood, laughing at him and his vision ; but from this period it is evident the popular knowledge of him as a poet began. "We can trace him only through a few of the transports, now joyful, now melancholy, of his love-life. One scene, all thrilling with sensations ineffable, love-agonies and languishments beyond the reach of words, shows the young poet to us, faint and trembling, leaning against a painting which went round the walls of the house, so confused by the sudden sight of his lady among the other gentili donne present that he had no longer any strength in him. He had been brought 1.1 THE POET .-—DANTE. 2.S to this assembly, whatever its purpose was — a marriage feast apparently — by one of his friends. " To what end are we come among these ladies?" he had said. "To the end that they may be worthily served," said the other, Guido perhaps, for the words are full of chivalrous grace It is supposed by many commentators that this was one of the feastings which celebrated the marriage of Beatrice herself, and that this fact accounts for Dante's extraordi- nary emotion, his confusion of mind, and the tears which he was unable to conceal. But if it is so it is the only reference in the whole mystical record to that event which, had his love been an ordinary love, would have involved the very bitterness of death to so true a lover. But while this is passed over, the fact that Beatrice, hearing, it is supposed, evil tales of him, withdrew from her habit of recognising Dante when she met him, is fully recorded, with all the grievous solemnity which befits such an event. Here is a curious little scene displaying the disconsolate lover among his sympathisers, which is fiill of the characteristic atmosphere of the story : — " As by the mere sight of me many persons had understood my secret, certain ladies who were in the habit of meeting, in consequence of the great delight they took in each other's society, knew well my heart, for some of them had been present at my misfortunes. And I, musing near them (for so fortune arranged it), was called by one of these gentle ladies. The lady who called me was very animated in conversa- tion ; so that when I came to this group and. perceived that my own most gentle lady was not among them, I was emboldened, and, saluting her, asked, ' What is your pleasure ? ' There were many ladies present, and some of them laughed among themselves ; but others looked at me, waiting for what I should say, and others again talked with each other. Then one, turning her eyes towards me, called me by name and said these words : ' To what end lovest thou this thy lady, since thou canst not endure her presence ? for certainly the end of such a love must be a great novelty. ' And when she had said this, not only she but all the others began to look at me, waiting for my answer. Then I said, ' Madonna, the end of my love was heretofore the greeting of that lady, perhaps, of whom you speak ; and in this was aU my happiness, the object of all my good desires. But since it pleases her to deny me this greeting, my lord Love, in his mercy, has placed all my happiness in that which cannot be taken from me.' Then these ladies began to talk together among themselves ; and as one sees rain 24 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. falling mingled witL beautiful snow, thus I seem to see their words mingled with sighs. And when they had thus talked among them- selves, the lady who first spoke to me said these words: 'We pray thee tell us in what thy happiness -now stands?' And I replied, 'In the words that praise my lady ; ' to which she replied, ' If thou sayest what is true, thou shouldst have acted differently.' And I, musing on these words, abashed went away from them, saying to myself, ' Since there is so much blessedness in the words which celebrate my lady, why should other talk be mine ? ' And thus I made up my mind to take for the subject of my words always that which should be to the praise of this very gentle one. " The image of the " rain mingled with beautiful snow," which he compares to the words and sighs of these gentili donne, is thoroughly Dantesque, and will remind the reader of many a similar similitude. He went away with his heart full, and breathed forth his address to the " Donme cK avete intdletto d' amore "■ — after his fashion. He has always a cluster of these gentle ladies (a phrase which, however, does not express all the sweetness of the gentil donna) about biTn in the soft radiance of this strange love-tale. We may pause here, however, and turn a little to the ruder life outside of the Vita Nuova, yet going on all the same, without interruption, though without any such mystic record. Young Dante, though he would fain make us believe it, did not spend all his days singing nothing but the praises of Beatrice, speaking to none but those who had understanding in love, breaking his heart over the thought that his lady no longer recognised him when they met. Other incidents were in his life, rapt as it would seem in that sad ecstatic vision. While Beatrice was still living, at the very time perhaps when his heart was wrung to see her pass without sign or word, there occurred the battle of Campaldino, in which he was one of the/fiiitoW or wounders, i.e., one of the band of volunteers who, according to the fashion of warfare common in Italy, made the assault upon the enemy, thus turning every battle into a kind of deadly tournament, where the I.] THE POET :— DANTE. % knights fought out the quarrel in presence of the humble army which backed them on either side, but perhaps wa not personally engaged at all. The fight in this case wa between Arezzo and the combination of Ghibelline foyce which had possession of that city, and Florence with he allies from all the Guelfic cities near. In this battle where young Dante, at twenty-four, a,ppears in the crowi only, we find all at once in full disclosure the tvb head of the parties, not yet formed in Florence, which were ti affect so fatally the poet's life — Vieri dei Cerchi, th future leader of the Bianchi, and Corso Donati, hereafte at the head of the Neri. At this moment, while neithe Bianchi nor Neri yet existed, these two were both strenu ously Guelf, like all their city. Donati was a hot an( arrogant noble, Cerchi a man of the people, risen inti wealth and greatness, and making a house and name fo: his descendants. They were neighbours in that ^estiere near St. Martin's little church, near the house of thi Alighieri, where Dante had grown under ^heir shadow They were great people, distinguished, one for nobility, thi other for wealth, towering in public importance and gran deur far above the youth who roamed through the neigh bouring streets thinking of Beatrice ; but how entirely they owe their recollection now to such entanglement ai good fortune permitted them, with the poet's name ! Th( feditori were selected by the captains of each district fron the volunteers who presented themselves. Vieri dei Cerch was captain of his eesto, and had hurt his leg, and hac therefore a complete excuse for exemption ; but, instead o: taking advantage of this, he at once placed himself, hii son, and his nephews at the head of the list, which gained him great reputation, " grande pregio," says the old chroni- cler. He was at the head of the assailing knights or the Florentine side, and with his son made great proof ol valour. His rival, Corso Donati, who was at the time podestA of Pistoia, was at the head of the reserve, undej 26 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. orders to hold apart and refrain from fighting at the peril of their heads. " But," says old Villani, more moved by the valour than by the disobedience to orders, " when he saw the battle begin, he said, like a valiant knight, ' If we lose, I will die in the fight with my fellow-citizens ; and if we win, whosoever would condemn me, let him come to Pistoia and do it ; ' and frankly set himself in motion with his band, and fell upon the enemy's flank, and was greatly the occasion of their rout." Dante was too young and too unimportant as yet to take any leading part where all were brave, but he has left a record of the fight not less graphic. "At the battle of Oampaldino," he says, " when the GhibelUne party were almost all killed and destroyed, I was present, not a novice in arms ; and there had much fear, and afterwards very great delight in the various occurrences of the battle." A man who confesses to having had temenza tuoUo did his part like a man, we may be sure, among the feditori under the leadership of Messer Vieri, the advanced guard and first rank in the fight. Dante was also present, as he proves by using it as an illustration of his great poem, at the siege of Oaprona, the only other incident in this brief campaign. The world outside the Vita Nuova was indeed a troublous world, out of which a young lover might well be fain to take refuge among the gentili donne and the trovatores of mystical romance. In this same year when Beatrice's sad adorer proved his manhood, and felt at once both fear and the fierce delight of battle at Oampaldino, the key was turned in the door of that " horrible tower " at Pisa, where Count Ugolino and his children perished so miserably. The story was in all men's mouths, and no doubt inspired the arms of the conquering Guelfs against the Ghibellines who had done it, when, a month or two afterwards, Florence met Arezzo in the field. Another tragedy, with which politics had nothing to do, the pitiful story of Francesca of Rimini, came to its conclusion a little later. r.] THE POET •—DANTE. 27 Thus the wildest of passions were raging, the most terrible events happening. But there is no trace of them in the dream-world to which the young poet returned after these scenes of blood and fierce excitement. Not a sign of Campaldino, or of the previous events which had left him "not a novice in arms," appears in the record of his other existence. There no factions or fightings enter, but Love is lord of all, and Beatrice exercises a gentle sway which even the people in the streets acknowledge. " This most gentle lady was in so great favour with all, that when she passed in the streets every one ran to see her. And when she approached any one, so much was his heart touched that he did not dare to raise his eyes nor to answer her greeting. And she, crowned and clothed with humility, went on her way, showing no pride in that which she saw and heard. And many said when she had passed, ' This is not a woman, but one of the most beautiful angels of heaven.' " The air is still as in a vision ; the common mortals stand and gaze with bated breath while stately stepping through the old-world streets that most gentle one, qitesta gentilissima, " crowned and clothed with humility," goes upon her way. Strange haven of poetic rest among the fierce contentions of the time, magical heart-existence, abstract and wonderful, in the midst of the tumultuous and cruel day ! But, alas ! ere now it had come into the poet's mind, amid deepest thoughts of life's burdens and miseries, that one time or other even the gentilissima Beatrice must die. He had even written in a sonnet, with more than usual trembling of heart, how the angels had asked God for her, but how the Almighty had pitifully left her for a little "there, where one is who expects to lose her." The anti- cipated blow fell in the summer of the year 1290, the year after Campaldino. Suddenly the lingering record of the ViiM Nuova interrupts itself. There is a pause — a broken line ; and then comes a sudden change of style and language. 28 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [chap. The poet, at an end of all his sonnets, finds in an older tribulation than his own the sublime words that fit best his sudden desolation : — " How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people ! How is she become as a widow, sh^ that was great among the nations ! " It is thus that he heads the later part of the record after the death of Beatrice. He heard of the event in the middle of one of those tender compositions which were all in her honour. " I was still in the making of this can- zone, and had completed only the above verse, when the Lord of that most gentle one, the Lord of justice, called that noble lady to be glorified under the banner of that blessed queen the Virgin Mary, whose name was ever held in the highest reverence by this blessed Beatrice." Strength and words fail him to add anything to this sad statement. The sudden tottering of reason which is natural to a man dazed and bewildered by such a calamity seems to come over him, and he falls to babbling, yet with all the in- ten.sity of his ardent soul, about the number nine which regulated that lovely concluded life — the perfect number, conjunct of threes, which signified " that at her birth all the nine heavens were at perfect unity with each other." In their ninth year the two had met, nine years after, they had spoken ; she died on the ninth day of the month, and the ninetieth year of the century. " This number was her own self, that is to say, by similitude." Most strange mixture of the truest genuine sentiment with the passing follies of an artificial age ; and yet the one as characteristic of the great poet as was the other — a truly human jumble, pathetic in its foolishness as in its woe. The Vita Nuova all but ends here, but does not quite end, for there is a curious little postscriptal episode de- scribing how near he was to finding consolation in the sweet sympathetic looks of " wrw, geniil donna, giovane e molto hdla" who -looked at him from her window, and gave 1.] THE POET:— DANTE. 29 Mm unconscious comfort. This was two years and a half after Beatrice's death, but he blames himself for having permitted those sweet looks to become too dear to him, and has much discussion with himself on the subject, which ends, ho.wever, in a dream, in which Beatrice appears to him calling back to herself all his thoughts. Then he seeks consolation in philosophy and religion, and finally the record ends as follows : — "Then there appeared to me a wonderful vision ; in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one, until the time should come when I could speak of her more worthily. And to ai-rive at this 1 study, as much as I can, as she truly knows ; so that if it pleascth Him by whom all things live that my life should continue for a time, I hope to say of her that which has not yet been spoken of any one. And after, may it please Him who is the Lord of courtesy that my soul may see the glory of my lady, that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously beholds His face qui est per omnia scecula ienedictus. Laus Deo." This is the conclusion of the most wonderful picture of a young man's love and dreamy experience of youth which the world has ever seen. We do not know where to lay our hand upon anything at all resembling it. Shakespeare's sonnets have no such unity of meaning, even could the critics manage to settle at all what their meaning is ; and there is nothing in them but poetical beauty which suggests the comparison. Dante stands by himself in the passionate, elaborate tale, so subtle in transparent artifices, so full of the self-preoccupation of youth, so taken up with that fose of passion of which the young trovatore was proud, yet at the same time so full of genuine devotion and fantastical visionary love. If there is some alloy in the adoration of Beatrice consequent on the elevation thereby of Beatrice's lover, it is at least alloy of a noble kind, the pride that soars with its goddess, not that which essays to pluck her down. And with all his mediaeval affectations — those affectations so threaded through with the intense reality of the man that they look more genuine than the deepest 30 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [chap. sincerity of many another— the Vita Nuova will always be dear to those who love Dante, and interesting far above the interest of many a more reliable production to the students of literature and of his time. Many commentators have benevolently hoped, perhaps on slender grounds, that the gentU donna, whom he saw at her window, and whose pitiful looks so consoled him, was Gemma Donati whom he married. There is no evidence for this, nor any evidence against it, so that the reader if he pleases may indulge in the thought. For as the other life outside had gone on roughly all the time, through - boyish studies and youthful dissipations, and gay company and sharp fighting, alongside of the mystic poetic exist- ence of the Vita Nuova, so it continued when that sweet chapter was closed ; and some time in 1293, about the time when the record ends with his resolution to abandon all thoughts of the gentU donna consolatrice, and to give him- self up to the memory of Beatrice and to the " wondrous vision " in which he should speak of her, as no one else had ever been spoken of — ^he was married to poor Gemma, whom no one has ever celebrated, but who seems to have been a faithful wife to him, in the little church of St. Martin opposite. At the very time of the marriage his mind must have been already full of those first cantos of his great poem in which Beatrice is the inspiring centre, the more than goddess ; and it is to be hoped, for her own sake, that Madonna Gemma — if it was she who looked at him so tenderly from her window and almost charmed away his grief — was one of those simple souls so absorbed in unselfish affection as to make no attempt to judge its object or inquire into the return he makes. She has had the usual share of posthumous abuse which is the common fate of a great man's silent wife, and is quite gratuitously classed with that Xantippe who probably was as innocent as she. No contemporary historian says a word either for or against her ; and the instinctive impulse to blame the wife for I.] THE POET:— DANTE. 31 much tliat happens to the man is so strong, that we are bound in fairness to conclude that there was nothing to say. Boccaccio objects to marriage at all for such a man. " Let philosophers leave marriage to rich fools, to noble- men, and to labourers," says the old novel-writer, "and let them delight themselves with Philosophy, who is a much better bride than any other ; " but he says not a word against the voiceless Gemma. She was of a family much more elevated than Dante's, and one which he was evidently proud to be connected with ; and two of her near relations figure in his great poem ; one of them, Forese, is in the Pwrgatory, where he is expiating his love of good cheer — an innocent vice among so many worse — and the other, Piccarda, is found in the Paradise itself. " Oh dolce/rate," Forese says to Dante, " what wouldst thou that I should tell thee ? " — therefore it is evident that this could not be the Forese Donati resurrected and torn above ground by some of the darkling moles who are for ever at work upon Dante, as an enemy of the poet, the author of some halting and virulent verses addressed to him. We are not even told what was the relationship between Gemma and these two, but probably it was not distant ; and as all the members of a family lived together in and about the central palace of the head of the house, there can be little doubt that the young Donati had known the poet from his cradle, neighbours as they were. Very likely they were all together at that May-day feast in Folco Portinari's house, when the child Dante first loved the child Beatrice, and had known her also, and been aware of that wonderful innocent Platonic and poetic devotion of his. If Gemma was the lady of the window, no doubt her soft eyes had followed him, in the fanciful, tender sympathy of youth, while still Beatrice lived, and the glory of the young irovatore's exalted passion filled all the mcinato, where the old people would smile at him, but all the young understand and envy and revere. Perhaps oven, being younger, she too shared 32 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. in Lis adoration for their beautiful neighbour, witb that enthusiasm of girlish worship which is so often bestowed first upon an elder woman before it becomes love and finds its natural end. When we hear that one of Gemma's children was called Beatrice, we find this hypothesis doubly probable. She had seven children — poor soul! — in the seven years of her marriage ; and after that saw her illustrious exile no more. Such is the little record of Gemma, for whom nobody had a word to say until all personal recollection of her had departed from the world — when, and not till then, wanton biographists assailed her with those unprovoked and unfounded slanders which so often are the fate of faithful women. There is no evidence whatever that she deserved any one of them. To Dante probably she was but the useful housewife, for whom quite a secondary tame affection suffices ; but even this cannot be affirmed, since if she was the gentil donna of the Vita Nuova there are as beautiful things said of her, of her sweet looks and tender pity, as any woman could desire. But the dream-world was at an end when the young Ali- ghieri led his bride across the stony street from little St. Martin opposite, and no more knowledge of his love, save in the sanctified, celestial way of poetry, is given to us. His spiritual life was to stray henceforward through regions more wondrous than those dazzling dream-streets of the old city ; and the stronger life, with its deeper problems, surged in and swallowed up the delicate strain which had made the charm of his youth. CHAPTER II. HIS PUBLIC LIFE. IN the year of Dante's marriage a very strange political event took place in Florence. The GueM party was absolute in the city, so much so that no basis of familiar enmity, no good cry for a faction fight, was to be had on that argument. History does not inform us whether any special manifestation of oppressive predominance on the part of the nobles — a predolninance always jealously re- sisted by the mass of Florentine citizens, who regarded with perpetual suspicion everything that could be con- strued into an attempt upon their liberties — had preceded this curious outbreak of rampant democracy. The tendency of the Guelf party had always been more or less demo- cratical, and it was a necessity of existence to the great towns, as they struggled into independence, to subdue, and indeed crush, if possible, the feudal power of the great nobles near them, who ruled as princes within their little territories, and were the natural enemies of trade and municipal freedom. The same strong impulse, at once of prejudice and policy, had, though acting in a less open manner, virtually closed to the noble families residing within Florence the highest rank among the rulers of the state. In the year 1282 this position at the head of the civic hierarchy had been appropriated to the Priors, or heads of the different crafts and arts, workers in wool and silk, traders in money, &c., among whom a noble could 34 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chai gain admittance only by enrolling himself in the trade an winning for himself the position of its head. This la^\ however, could not take from the nobles the natural powe Portait of Dante. which rank always retains to some extent, especially whe supported by wealth ; and to expect from them an absc lute self-restraint and abstinence from all reprisals wouL II.] THE POET :— DANTE. 35 have been, we fear, to expect more than humanity has ever shown itself capable of. " Oppressed in public " they were " oppressors in private," as was but too natural ; and in the year 1293 there was a great rising against them, under the leadership of Giano della Bella, who himself had noble blood in his veins. What special wrongs the people had to avenge it is diificult to find out, except indeed the insolence of patrician manners, and those petty insults which often give a sharper sting than more serious in- juries. The revenge taken, however, was tremendous. It was no less than the complete disfranchisement of the Florentine nobility. Already shut out from the highest offices in the state, they were now deprived even of the humbler privilege of a vote, and condemned, great and small, to political annihilation. This harsh and extreme measure was not confined to the greater families, who might have abused their power, but extended to every race which counted a knight among its ancestors. No despot, no oligarchy, could have enacted a law more tyrannical and unjust. No doubt it carried its punishment within it, as all such oppressive legislation does ; and Machiavelli attributes to it the failure of Florence in arms and her incapacity for conquest, even indeed for self-defence ; the classes who naturally bear arms, and whose spirit and training qualify them best for the arts of war, being thus deprived of their just share of power, which was left entirely in the hands of those whose excellence was in the arts x)f peace — a short-sighted policy at the best. There was, however, still a sideway left by which those members of the aristocratic party who love their country better than their caste, or who preferred active life and power to the sullen seclusion of the oppressed, could still seize upon the birthright thus unjustly taken from them. They were permitted to enrol themselves in any guild or art, without more than a nominal adoption of the craft in D 2 36 THE MAKEES OF FLORENCE. [chap. question, by way of retaining their political rights, and by this means the petite noblesse at least found a way out of the difficulty. Corso Donati and such great persons held apart as a matter of course, and confined themselves to conspiracy and an eager watch for every opportunity of troubling the public peace, and perhaps procuring another revolution, the results of which might be more favourable ; but Villani informs us that "Many houses, of those who were neither tyrants nor very powerful, withdrew them- selves from the ranks of the nobles and joined those of the people." Such was the state of affairs when Dante emerged out of the dreamy beginning of his life, out of the Vita Nuova and the lingering sorrow that followed it. His fitful studies, and the various fancies that pas.sed through his mind in that disturbed interval, have already been indi- cated. There is even some reason to suppose that, in his despair, he entered the Pjranciscan order, then in all the freshness of its beginning, as a novice. Various mysteri- ous references to a cord in his great poem strengthen this conjecture, and it was a likely enough step for him to take in his great despondency. But he was not of the stuff of which monks were made even in the thirteenth century. He was too vehement in life, too independent in mind, to bear the coercion of such vows, and, im- patient and restless, must soon have rushed into the world again, feeling the excitement of the Piazza and the stir of politics to be, after all, necessary to the mature existence, which could no longer be fed, as in youth, with love alone. He was twenty-eight at the time of his marriage, in the very prime and force of early manhood, and of a spirit very little likely to accept any disability. That he was deeply and bitterly sensible of the injustice and tyranny of the popular movement, no reader of his great poem can doubt; but the indignation which he expressed so warmly was not inconsistent with a determination not to permit II.] THE POET .—DANTE. 37 himself to be shelved and put aside. Neither was his house great enough to bind him. inalienably to the aristocratic party. He belonged evidently to one of those families die non erano tiranni nl di gran potere, with no traditions of splendour or dignity to ' prevent him from taking advantage of the expedient provided. His name is found in a register of the art or profession of doctors and apothecaries — one of the great guilds of Florence, and that which, later, produced its rulers, the Medici — about the year 1297. "Dante d'Aldighiero degli Aldighieri, poeta fiorentino," is the entry. It is not at all likely that it meant anything more than conformity to a rule which required every citizen possessing the franchise to be a member of a trade. This was Dante's entry into public life. Boccaccio, without troubling himself about the details of how it came about, thus describes, with whimsical peevishness, this further step away from poetry and philosophy of his hero : — ■ " The care of a family drew Dante to that of the Eepublio, in which he was so soon enveloped by the vain honours which are conjoined with public office, that, without perceiving whence he came or whither he went, he abandoned himself almost entirely to the occupations of government. And in this fortune so favoured him that no embassy was heard or answered, no law was framed or abrogated, neither peace nor war made — and in short no discussion of any importance took place, in which he had not a part." The condition of Florence, notwithstanding the revolu- tionary proceedings which had just taken place in it, seems to have been extremely prosperous at this period. Everything was going well with the proud republic, which, after all, was indebted to its guilds and arts, its bankers and burghers, not its nobility, for its wealth and greatness. The revolution by which all nobles were placed under a ban occurred in the year 1293. In 1294 the foundation was laid of the great church of Santa Croce, that magni- 38 TPIE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. ficent temple of fame which still exists, enshrining the greatest names of Italy. In the same year, "the city of Florence being in good and tranquil condition, the Florentines permitted themselves the pleasure of renewing the chief church of Florence, which was then of rude form, and small in comparison with such a city, and ordained that it should be increased and extended, and made all in marble, with sculptured figures. And it was founded with great solemnity, on the day of Santa Maria, in September, by the Cardinal Legate of the Pope, with many bishops and prelates, and called Santa Maria del Fiore." Two years later "the commune and people of Florence began to found the Palazzo of the Priors," the noble palace and tower which is now known as the Palazzo Vecchio. Again, in 1299, " the new and third walls of the city were founded in the Prato of Ogni-santi, the bishops of Florence, Fiesole, and Pistoia giving their benediction to the first stone." When the reader recollects that this new wall is, or rather was a dozen years ago, the existing wall of the city, he will be able to form some idea of the wonderful thrill of new life and prosperity which must have moved the narrow mediaeval city to such an outburst of great works. It was during this high tide of prosperity that Dante began to take the active part indicated by Boccaccio in the government of the city. His first great occupation in the public service seems to have been that of Ambassador Filelfo, one of his biographers, gives details of these missions which are quite uncontradicted at least, if there is not much confirmatory evidence. He was sent, according to this authority (a century later in date than Dante, but with all the public documents and traditions to guide him), to the various cities about, to arrange various grounds of quarrel, to the Venetian Republic, the alliance of which was so valuable to all the independent cities of Italy ; to Naples, to King Charles of Anjou, and to his son, Carlo 11.] THE POET:— DANTE. 39 Martello of Hungary, between whom and Dante there had sprung up a sudden but warm friendship on the occasion of that prince's visit to Florence ; and also to the Pope, more than once ; and to King Philippe le Bel of France, from whence, says Filelfo, he brought back, " an everlasting chain of friendship, which continues till the present day ; for he spoke not without grace (savore) in the French lan- guage, and it is said even wrote something in that tongue." With these embassies so quickly succeeding each other, the days of the poet must have been full of business ; his life spent in journeys, his faculties taxed sometimes perhaps to make the worse appear the better cause, and to promote in every way the prosperity of his city. In the meantime, while Dante himself was kept out of mischief by his much occupation, trouble was brewing in that turbulent town. The feud of populace against nobility had recommenced the old round of warfare, and now the two great families, near neighbours to each other, who had long indulged a private quarrel, began to exceed those decent limits of neighbourly hostility which are everywhere allowed. The rich and vulgar Cerchi had grown too great for the taste of the very noble but not very rich Donati, who with fierce displeasure watched their plebeian splendour and strength growing. Corso Donati, the head of that house, was a type of all that was worst and finest in the mediseval noble. He was handsome, of a commanding person, eloquent, splendid, and wicked. It was he who abducted by violence his own sister, Piccarda, from her convent, in order to marry the shrinking nun to one of his friends and consorti. He was so proud in his deportment that he was called the Baron by his admirers and followers — the Baron Malefammi, or Do-me-harm, by the populace ; and he had some justification for his bitter wit and intense enmity to his more popular neighbour, iii the fact that he was one of the chief of those utterly silenced and set aside by the last change of law ; for 40 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. Corso was too great a noble to give up his own side as Dante had done, and become a tradesman in order to be a ruler. Vieri of the Cerchi, on the other hand, though good and brave, was heavy and unmannerly, with no command of speech nor of ideas. "When his neighbour called him the Ass of the Gate, he could find nothing malicious to say in reply, save to echo the Malefammi, which was Oorso's nickname among the populace. No encounter of wits was possible to him, but only sharp blows from stalwart young Cerchi, in reply to the cutting gibes of the other party. The existence of these two families so near each other — one on the popular side, yet feeling their inferiority to the noble race all the more on that account, the other inheriting the old potency of a great house, but embittered by present helplessness and want of power — was in itself a standing menace to the peace of the city. Why it was that Guido Gavalcanti, himself among the noblest in Florence, should have been on the side of the Cerchi, we have no means of knowing. Possibly enough it may have been because of some private feud with the haughty Donati. Anyhow, this noble trovatore, the first of friends to Dante, belonged to the party headed by the honest but heavy man of the people. Guido was a thinker as well as a troubadour — a philosopher in his way, possibly a Free-thinker, Epicurean, contemner of authority ; and it is likely enough that his contempt for the useless young gallants who roamed about the city in search of gaiety, quarrels, or mischief, extended theoretically to all those possessors of hereditary authority who were great without any virtue of her own, and believed them- selves better than their neighbours without doing anything to deserve that distinction. It would not seem that he drew Dante with him further than friendly sympathy required ; for throughout all this quarrel and tumult the poet keeps his independent position — an arbitrator, not a combatant ; but the step he had himself taken in enrolling II.] THE POET :— DANTE. 41 his name on the popular, side, and accepting employment from the revolutionary state, must have separated him from the noble party and from the family to which his wife belonged, to whom, like enough, this descent in the social scale, even though it brought public distinction, was little agreeable. While the feud thus smouldered, ever ready to break out, an event happened which gave the pretence of a public quarrel to the hostile neighbours. A large and powerful family of Pistoia called Oancellieri — divided by its descent from two wives of its founder, one of whom bore the name of Bianca — had lately carried its intestine tumults so far that Florence had stepped in as suzerain of the lesser city, and sentenced both parties to banishment. They obeyed, but only by carrying their feud into Florence itself, where the two smouldering animosities already existing leaped with delight at this good occasion of declared and open strife. The Cerchi adopted the cause of the Bianchi, the Donati of the Neri. It was but another chapter of the conflict between the noble and the plebeian, the Guelfs and Ghibellines. To say what was the question between the original Bianchi and Neri is beyond our power, as we have already said it is difficult to decide what at any given period was the precise question between the Guelfs and GhibelHnes ; but whatever the pretence might be, the real occasion of the continually renewed and varying quarrel was that overwhelming impulse of the mediaeval mind to warfare which took advantage of every chance of conflict. One party got the upper hand, and banished with fierce jubilee its opponents ; then the balance swung round, and the victors became exiles in their turn, accepting the in- evitable vicissitude : thus the story goes on. Churches had been founded and walls built and trade had flourished, and the proud city had begun to adorn herself during her short period of peace. But what was trade and wealth, or even the splendour of their Florence, to the Donati and Cerchi, 42 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. thirsting from the opposite sides of the street to be at each 'other's throats, and drawing their swords upon each other in the very heart of the festa, amid the rejoicing of the crowd ? We may quote one incident which shows how suddenly a brawl might rise. The time was early in May, when Florence was full of wandering bands, dancing and singing in every square in honour of the spring ; the scene occurred in the Piazza Santa Trinity, the little square close to the bridge of the same name, which every one knows who has seen Florence. That corner of the old town is probably but little changed since then. The merry-makers were dancing on the rough pavement as best they might, in the shadow of the tall houses, a lightsome crowd, with garlands and greenery, with songs of trovatori and improvi- satori, while the people stood by looking on, not bewildered as we should be by so strange a spectacle. Florence was used to them. "In those times the Florentines abounded in delights and pleasures, ever feasting together ; for every year at the calends of May almost the whole city went about in bands and companies of men and women, with dances and many delights." So says the historian Villani ; and this was what they were doing in the Piazza Santa Trinity on that May-day in the year 1 300, as their neigh- bours had done in Folco Portinari's vicinato twenty-five years before. "While the usual amnsements were going on, with merry dances of men and of women in the Piazza, a number of the young gallants of the Cerchi party arrived ou horseback, being armed because of the Douati, and going about Florence to see all that was going on. And as they stood by looking on, there appeared also a party of the Donati, who, either not recognising the Cerchi, or perhaps because they recognised them, spurred on them with their horses. Then the Cerchi turned round, and a tumult arose and swords were drawn and several persons were wounded, among whom were Eicoverino di Jlessev Ricovero de' Cerchi, wounded in the nose, no one knew by whom, tho Cerchi themselves saying little about it, in order to have more secure revenge." This brawl, adds an ancient historian, was preceded by a ii.l THE POET:-DANTK, 43 public misadventure quite enough to account for it. " The year before this the Palace of the Commune was built, which began at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio over Arno, towards the castle Altafronte ; and in order to build this, a pillar was made at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, and the statue of Mars was removed there ; and whereas first it looked towards the east, it was turned towards the north, upon which, according to an ancient prophecy, the people said, " Please God that there be not great changes in our city." Other events, however, which were of greater individual importance in the poet's life occurred in the same spring, which so threatened the peace of Florence. By this time he was one of the best known among the poets of his time — known by the sonnets and canzoni of the Vita Nuova, and most likely by many fugitive compositions which have not lasted to our day ; but he was not as yet the poet of heaven and hell, the greatest singer of Italy. The popular knowledge of his productions is shown by various quaint stories still preserved in the records of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. The following taken from Sacchetti gives us a glimpse of the poet's impatient temper as well as his popular fame ;— "When Dante had dined he went out, and passing by the Porta Sau Pictro heard a blacksmith beating iron upon the anvil and singing some of his verses like a son», jumbling the lines together, mutilating and confusing them, so that it seemed to Dante that he was receiving a great injuiy. He said nothing, but going into the blacksmith's shop, where there were many articles made in iron, he took up his hammer and pincers and scales, and many other things, and threw them out into the road. The blacksmith, turning round upon him, cried out, ' What the devil are you doing !— are you mad ? ' ' What arc you doing ?' said Dante. ' 1 am working at my proper business,' said the blacksmith, 'and you are spoiling my work, throwing it out into the road.' Said Dante; 'If you do not like me to spoil your things, do not spoil mine. ' ' What thing of yours am I spoiling ? ' said the man. And Dante replied: 'You are singing something of mine, but not as I made it. I have no other trade but this, and you spoil it for me.' The blacksmith, too proud to acknowledge his fault, but not knowing how to reply, gathered up his things and returned to his work ; and 44 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. when he sang again, sang Tristram and Launcelot, and left Dante alone." It is odd to think of Dante's delicate canzones, even if smozzicato and tra/mestato, in the mouth of the rude worker in iron, keeping time to the beating of the hammer. An- other anecdote of the same kind follows, in Sacchetti's simple record : — "This stoiy moves me to tell another of the same poet, which is short and veiy good. As Dante was going one day about his own affairs in the city of Florence, wearing armour as was the custom, he met an ass-driyer, who walked behind his asses, which were laden with the refuse and sweepings of the streets, singing as he went out of Dante's book ; and when he had sung a verse he struck his ass and cried 'Arrhi J ' When Dante heard this he gave the fellow a blow on the shoulder with his gauntlet, and said, ' I did not put in that Arrhi,' The man, not knowing who Dante was, nor what this meant, when he was out of reach put out his tongue at him, with other rude gestures, saying, ' Take that ! ' 'I would not give one of mine for a hundred of thine,' said the poet. Oh gentle words full of philosophy ! Many would have pursued the fellow and made an end of him, others would have thrown stones at him ; but the wise poet confounded the wretch, and had praise of all who heard these wise words." The old story-teller's enthusiasm here may seem a little misplaced, but yet the poet's quaint reprisals show a certain genial sense of humour scarcely to be expected from the man. Another curious trait, less amiable but still more striking, is linked by Sacchetti to his story of the blacksmith. Dante was on his way, when he heard the grimy artisan singing at his work, to speak a good word to the " Esecutore " of the district for a certain young cavalier of the Adimari, his neighbours, who had got into trouble for unruly behaviour, and who was awaiting the sentence which his friends hoped might be lightened by the intercession of so important a public man as the poet- ambassador. Dante, having dined with the Adimari, set out on his mission with goodwill enough, it would appear ; but as he went he began to think : — ■ " As he approacJied the house of the Esecutore, he reflected that this cavalier was a haughty young man, ungracious and proud, who when II.] THE POET :— DANTE. 45 he went about the city, especially when on horseback, so spread himself over the street, which was not wide {andava si con le gambe aperte), that the toes of his boots rubbed against the p.tssers by ; and such behaviour was very displeasing to Dante, who observed everything. Accordingly he said to the Ksecutore, ' You have before your court a certain cavalier, for such and such offences. I recommend him to you ; his behaviour is such that he deserves great punishment ; for I think that to usurp the rights of the Commonwealth is one of the f-eatest of offences. Dante did not say this to deaf ears. The secutore asked what rights of the Commonwealth were those which he usurped. Dante answered, ' When he rides about the city ho rides in such a manner that those who meet him have to turn back and cannot pass upon their way.' 'Does this seem a joke to you?' said the Esecutore ; 'it is a gi'eater fault than that with which he is charged.' ' JSwo /' said Dante. ' I am his neighbour. I recommend him to you.' " This curious mode of intercession was, as may be sup- posed, little appreciated by the Adimari, though it affords us a very curious picture of the man, more just than pitiful, himself so arrogant, yet remorseless to the arrogance of others, waking up from his abstraction after he had undertaken to plead the young man's cause, finding him unworthy, and winding up his description of the young braggart's public sins by the fine irony of that recommen- dation " as a neighbour." No wonder the Adimari did not like it. It was "the principal reason," Sacchetti tells us, of Dante's exile. And no doubt so keen a personal injury would not be forgotten. These glimpses of him are very valuable through the dimness of the time. How he appeared in his greater occupations as Ambassador and as one of the Magnificent Signoria, an honour to which he came shortly after, we cannot tell ; but he is very clear to us making his way about the streets in his gorget and gauntlets, "observing everything" — the arrogant young horsemati with his toes stuck out to make the narrow path impassable, the black- smith at his work, the dustman putting in his rude "Gee up ! " as a refrain to those exquisite sonnets which were dearest to the poet. We have other passing glimpses of him of a similar kind to those already recorded, for 46 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. which, however, we can scarcely find room here. But there is one which we .must not leave out, which shows another aspect of the poet who observed everything. This took place away from home, in the streets of Sienna, where, having received a book which had been promised to him, he fell to reading it on the bench outside the door of an apothecary, leaning his breast against the bench with his back to the street, and there he stood all day, from early mass to vespers, unconscious of the great fesia which was going on behind him. There were " dances of pretty maidens," Boccaccio tells us, and " games of well-disposed and gallant youths," and various instruments, and applauses, which made grandissimi romori. "How could you keep yourself from looking at so fine a festa ?" some one asked the poet, who lifted wondering eyes from his book, and declared, "I heard nothing." This is how Dante appears to us in his early manhood, when every glimpse of him about the streets is precious, short as was to be his sojourn there. For, alas, we have no longer a Vita Nuova to guide us ; to show us how the thoughts arose in his mind, and where he went, and how his musings shaped themselves into immortal verse. Failing all clearer indications, however, the theory of his biographer, Balbo, as to the immediate beginning of the Divina Gominedia is interesting, and possesses much appearance of reality. The opening pages of this great work point, as the reader will recollect, to a distinct crisis — a moment when suddenly arrested in his progress " half- way upon the road of life," he finds himself to have lost the right path. Such a discovery might indeed have been made in the stillness of his chamber in the midst of his ordinary existence ; but the period indicated corresponds entirely with a great public event, of a character most likely to awaken serious thoughts, and bring back past resolutions and purposes to the mind of the poet. It was ii.J THE POET. -DANTE, 47 the tradition of the Church that the last year of each century should be made the occasion of special religious solemnities, bearing, but on a greater scale, the character which all churches have thought suitable to the end of a year, or any marked and noteworthy period. The Jubilee was no farce or empty ceremonial at a time when faith was absolute and heresy almost unknown. Accordingly in the Easter of that year 1300, all the world thronged to the centre of Ghri.stendom. Rome was so crowded by pilgrims, earning the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Boniface by fifteen days of devotion at the shrines of St. Peter and Paul, that the old bridge of St. Angelo was divided by a barrier, . so that the throng which went towards St Peter's should not interfere with the other crowd who were on their way to St. Paul's outside the gates, the ancient Byzantine temple which .still existed in comparatively recent days. Dante proves to us his own presence at the Jubilee in the most characteristic way by quoting this example to show how the throngs of tortured sinners came and went across the ponticelli into Malebolge in his Inferno, And the poet was no sceptical bystander looking on at the devout crowds, hot and eager and weary, but a pious Catholic of the middle ages, no doubt thankful enough for the indulgence which gave him a tremulous sense of forgiveness and amnesty for all his errors, and humbly earning the same by the fifteen days of devotion prescribed, making his weary way from San Pietro across the bridge to San Paolo on the other side of the river. Many thoughts were in his mind, no doubt, among his Aves and Paternosters, as he made the daily pilgrimage. His fellow-pilgrim, Giovanni Villani, was so touched and stimulated by the unusual scene, finding him- self "in that blessed pilgrimage, in that holy city of Rome, seeing all the great and ancient things, and reading the histories and great deeds of the Romans," that he made up his mind to begin his history of Florence " the daughter and creation of Rome," as soon as he returned home. The 48 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. poet's thoughts might well have received a similar yet still higher impulse. A great purpose had risen in his mind years before when the world had been made dim to him by the loss of Beatrice, and he had vowed in a passion of love and grief, " to say of her that which never yet was said of any woman." What had become of this high hope and resolution t Years had passed since then, and the commoner life had seized upon Dante, and his force of manhood and vitality had carried him into many busy scenes, and passions far removed from that sacred circle in which Beatrice dwelt. He had lived in a vulgar, every -day region far out of the Vita Nuova ; he had fought, argued, ruled, contended with, and persuaded his fellow-creatures, and had 'found solace and enjoyment in the ringhiera and the council- chamber and before foreign kings and poten- tates ; and he had loved — perhaps coarsely, vulgarly — tasting those grosser sweetnesses which are as apples of Gomorrah, full of ashes and bitterness. Storming through this mid-career of his life, the vehement, ardent, impassioned man had done perhaps — who has not ? — things which filled him with bitter shame when he turned towards the pure and lofty ideal of his youth ; but what time was there for thought or consideration amid the journeys, the high audiences, the discussions and debates of which a politician and ambassador's life was full in those stirring days ? But now at last a moment had come for thought, a religious pause in the common affairs of life. It is natural at such moments that everything that is purest and loftiest in the past should be recalled to the touched and softened soul ; and what so likely to return to him as the exaltation of that great visionary love and grief which had been the inspiration of his youth ? How far he had strayed from the purity, the high thoughts, the holy and lofty sorrow of those days ! He had lost his way in the midday of his life ; now waking up suddenly to a sense of all the time he had squandered and all the energies he had 11.] THE POET :— DANTE. 49 employed in less worthy ways, where was it that he found himself 1 — " Mi ritrovai per una selva oscuva Che la diritta via era smarrita," This is the hypothesis of Balbo, and it seems, in the absence of other evidence, a reasonable suggestion. Any- how, whether at Rome during these pilgrimages or at home in some moment of quiet, it is apparent that about this time Dante did arrest himself in his career, and finding himself astray from the verace via, set out boldly to find it again on that marvellous round through hell and heaven. For the moment, however, we hear nothing of the Divina Commedia. The tumults of life which swallowed up the poet on his return from Rome were too noisy and crowded to leave room for the lower and sweeter notes of poetry. It becomes apparent afterwards that the work was begun in Latin, which all the world then supposed to be the only language worthy of a great subject ; and that in the intervals of his state labours, and while he and his colleagues in office were struggling with the Neri and Bianchi and doing their best to keep peace in the disturbed city, Dante employed his moments of leisure in the com- position of those first cantos which will always remain the most interesting part of the great poem to most readers. All the lofty poetry of that beginning — the heavenly lady roused out of her celestial seat by the pity of human love, the poet-guide chosen for the wandering poet, high Paradise resplendent with power and universal oversig^ht, dim Limbo in its wistful calm, obedient and dutiful, though without hope — glimmered before his eyes as he trod the often riotous streets between San Martino and the Piazza, where the other anxious Magnificos, not knowing how to hold the balance straight between Messer Corse and Messer Vieri and all their habitual following, took counsel with him and E 50 THE MAKERS OP FLORENCE. [chap. witli each otlier, not without a leaning in their disturbed bosoms to Vieri and the Bianchi, though, so far as good behaviour went, there >v^as not piuoh to choose. In the month of June of this same year 1300 Dante became' one of the Priors, or Signoria, of Florence, and it is believed to have been during his term of office that the feuds of the two parties becoming insupportable, the Signoria took the bold step of banishing the heads of both factions. So decisive a measure does credit to the impartiality of the authorities, a virtue very rare and hard to cultivate in such an age, and it may be easily supposed that its exercise cost the poet no small struggle with himself, since his beloved friend Guido Cavalcanti was one of the exiled leaders. It was apparently almost the first attempt ever made in Florence at an impartial punishment of both sides, and, honest endeavour to secure the public advantage solely. How far Dante deserves the credit of this attempt to put down the rising feuds of the city it is impossible to tell, but as there can be little doubt of his leaning towards the Biancjii party, and none of his warm devotion to Cavalcanti, the effort at public virtue was worthy of the highest praise. Unfortunately it did not last so long as might have been desired ; the fortitude of the rulers of Florence, not used to such impartiality, wavered after a time. " Envy and evil speaking grew," says Leonardo Aretino in his biography of the poet, " because those of the citizens who were banished to Serazzana (the White party) soon returned to Florence, while the others remained in exile.'' Dante, however, defends himself from this accu- sation in a letter now lost, asserting that the return of the Bianchi was after the conclusion of his priorship. Its immediate cause was the sickness of Guido Cavalcanti, who had fallen ill in his banishment, and who died not long after his return to Florence, in the beginning of the ensuing year. No one will doubt that a friend so warm and vehement as the pOet must have exerted all his II ] THE POET :— DANTE. 51 influence to procure the recall of the exiles as soon as he knew that his beloved Guido was sufferiAg and in danger, and their return while their rivals remained in banishment no doubt impairs the splendour of this first attempt at impartial justice ; but at the same time it was an effort in the right way, and the poet merits his full share of the credit, imperfect as it was. Dante's prioraio lasted, as was usual, only two months, but during the ensuing year his influence and power were great. Boccaccio's testimony on this point is very strong : — " In him all public trust, all hope, all excellence, human and divine, seemed to be concentrated. But Fortune, the enemy of all wisdom and destroyer of all human wellbeing, as she had held him gloriously at the top of her wheel for some years, now turned it to other purpose. In his day the citizens of Florence were furiously divided into two factions. Dante applied all his genius and every act and thought to bring back unity to the republic, demonstrating to the wiser citizens how even the great are destroyed by discord, while the small grow and increase infinitely when at peace. But seeing tliat all his trouble was in vain, and knowing the souls of hisi hearers to be obstinate (fearing the judgment of God), he at first proposed to give up all public office and return to private life ; but afterwards, drawn by the sweetness of glory and of vain popular favour, and also by the persuasions of the greatest citizens, and believing besides that he might in time to come be better able to serve the city if he was known in public business than. if he remained in private life ... he continued to follow the fading honours and vain pomp of public office, and perceiving that of himself he could not establish a third party, which should overthrow the injustice of the other two and turn the city to unity, he united himself to those who according to his judgment.had most justice and reason on their side, and continually used his influence for that which he knew to bo best for his country and for his fellow-citizens, " This very high character, however, had its darker side, which is given as follows : — " He had a great opinion of himself, nor did he ever underrate his own public importance, as appears very notably in this incident among others. When he and his party were at the head of the republic, those who were on the losing side made an appeal to Pope Boniface to send a brother or cousin of King Philip of France, whose name was Charles, to regulate the state of the city. In order to consider, this, a council was called of the chief members of the ruling party and E 2 52 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. Dante witli them. And, among other tilings, they resolved to send an embassy to the Pope to oppose the coming of the said Charles, or to arrange that he should come vdth a friendly meaning towards their party. And when they came to deliberate who should be the head of tliis embassy, it was proposed by all that it should be Dante. When he heard this, Dante, almost beside himself, said : ' If I go who will stay ? — ^if I stay who will go ? ' as if he alone were the man of worth among them who gave weight to the others. These words were heard and remembered." The reader will scarcely be surprised that a saying such as this should rankle in the mind of the proud Flo- rentines, and work disastrous consequences to the speaker. The embassy was sent, with Dante at its head, bent upon opposing the mission of the Frenchman, Charles of Valois, whose intervention had been called for by the other party. This was in the autumn of the year 1301. The Pope received the ambassadors graciously, and sent back two of them to persuade the city to yield to the paciero, keeping the others with him. Among those who remained was Dante, for what reason no one seems to know. Perhaps the Pope felt that so strong a personality was safer kept out of the way ; perhaps — for no force seems to have been exercised, and Bonifazio appears to have acted in good faith — Dante himself had become disgusted with the tumults and the struggle, or had seen by the aspect of his companions that his influence was waning. But whatever was the cause the poet did not take advantage of the opportunity to return along with his colleagues. He stayed behind in Rome, abandoning suddenly the public duties which he had fulfilled with so much fervour. He allowed events to take their course in Florence, though he had so lately said, " If 1 go, who will stay? " and suffered Charles of Yalois to enter the city, with all the overturns and commotions that followed, without attempting to go back to the help of his struggling fellow-citizens or his forsaken family. This strange proceeding on Dante's part is not explained by any of his biographers. Perhaps he felt that the tide had turned beyond his power to arrest it, u.] THE POET ;— DANTE. 53 and that his wife and children were safer without him, as she was a Donati, and had a right to the protection of her family and of Messer Corso, now once more the most powerful man in Florence. Anyhow the poet let a year pass over amid all kinds of revolutions and disturbances ; he suffered the Bianchi and his moderate and patriotic friends to go to the wall, and the enemies of order and of his party to come in triumphant, and all that he had done to be overturned ; he let anarchy, misery, killings, and burnings, and destruction resume their sway in the city, without rush- ing to its aid. A contrast more striking than that which is suggested by this strange inaction, and his previous over- weening opinion of his own importance, could scarcely be found. This makes it less wonderful, perhaps, and less cruel that the revolution banished him, and that, as it happened, he never in the many years of life that yet remained to him entered Florence again. In this strange way ends the first part of the poet's great career. Out of the soft poetic vapours, lovely extravagances, foolishness, and reality of the Vita Nuova, the young man burst forth splendid into full potency of life, a power among his fellows, a princely ambassador to princes, a patriot ruler among his own people, aiming with genuine force and truth at something better than the past, at generous and honest public service distinct from party. Then of a sudden, midway in the path of life, something arrested the vehement and splendid traveller. He who was going, to all appearance, so straight and true on his way to honour, stopped short. Some unseen hand caught at him, some voice unheard by others called him in the midst of the crowd. He found himself in a bewildering wood, where he had lost the 'true way. This was the great spiritual event which happened to him before Fate came in to arrest his steps in earnest. Ere ever Guido Cavalcanfci sickened in Serezzana, this sudden pause had occurred in his existence. Another Vita N'uova, but this time a life 54 THE MAKERS OF PLOEENCE. [chap. as23ra e forte, had begun. The sudden revolution in Florence was but a formal carrying out by circumstances of tie separation already efiected in his heart, the divorce between him and fortune, between him and power, and his reawakening to that deeper and grander inspiration that had hovered over him for years, before absolute misfortune marked his path. Beatrice had already moved from her place in heaven, where she sat by the side of the ancient Rachel, and had roused out of dim Limbo, where those great souls dwell who live without hope, in desire of God and goodness — ^the courteous Mantuan spirit, with his ' ornate words, who was the most suitable guide for her wandered but faithful lover. The gates of Florence, when they were shut against him, did no more than formalize that sentence of banishment which had already been pro- nounced in his own breast. His city cast him away, to her everlasting shame ; but already he had ceased to be Dante the magnificent Signore, the ambassador of an arrogant Republic, the representative of a crowd of turbu- lent burghers. He had turned back to the life to which he vowed himself in his dreaming youth ; he had taken his first steps on that mystic giro through hell and heaven ; and become the Dante of all Italy and of all poetry, representative of his age and of his race — the Dante of the world. hg^>3.^^^<^^^^ mui i mvj\\\-\ CHAPTER III. IN EXILE. THE feelings with which Dante in Rome, awaiting the news of all that was passing in Florence, heard of the rain and exile- of his party and the complete victory and ascendency of its enemies, it is needless to attempt to realize. The state of feeling altogether, the habits and modes of thinking of the time, are too different from our own to make such an effort easily practicable. Did we not know how rapidly rumour leaps over hills and plains, and flies, especially in Italy, without any apparent means of communication, on some kind of spiritual telegraph invented long before the other, we might suppose that information of such a change in the city got but sjowly and in a fragmentary way to the ears of the belated ambassador, thus superseded in his office while in the very act of exercising it. But the first hint of what had happened no doubt presented at once a suggestion, of the last detail of the overturn to the citizen envoy, who knew exactly what happened at such a crisis. No nee(l of d^ily or hourly telegrams to tell him how the familiar revplutjon was going on. The ringing of the great bell, .the thronging of armed men through the streets, the agitated meetings of the threatened faction in San Giovanni or elsewhere, swearing to stand by each other ,and guard the city ;, the boisterous bands, elated with the knowledge that the tide 56 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. L"HAP. had turned in their favour, who began suddenly to appear on the other side ; all these steps in the drama were as well known to Dante as are the steps by which one ministry succeeds another to ourselves. The known is less exciting, or at least less disturbing in its excitement, than the unknown ; and the poet, whose grandfather at furthest had borne the same fate, and who had himself helped to mete it out to others, could have been in no doubt as to the fact of his own banishment and all its consequences. He had left Madonna Gemma and her seven small children in the house behind San Martino ; and all his possessions besides, including, to our eyes, the most precious of all, a certain ahozzo, Sbauche, scrawl so to speak, of seven cantos of a poem, often interrupted by public business, and which perhaps he had begun to think was but badly done in stilted Latin. If a sigh for this rose in his mind, there is no record of it. No doubt he took its loss for granted, as a natural consequence among so many others of his banish- ment. His wife and children would be safe, thanks to the Donati; but his goods were lost beyond redemption. Of this there could be no doubt in the mind of any Florentine who knew his city and his time. In the meantime, however, Madonna Gemma — a sensible woman, it is evident, whether or not a much-beloved wife — had taken her precautions. When she saw how things were turning, and that the Bianchi had ceased to be masters of the city, and confiscation and fire might be ex- pected any day, she put the household valuables together, packing them in the strongest chests she possessed, and had them at once removed to the houses of neutral friends, or other safe places, as possibly the women of Florence, used to keeping their wits about them, were in the habit of doing when emergencies arose. And thus the ahozzo was kept safe, though probably in bad Latin, through tire and tumult and all the anarchy of the transition. Evidently the seven little frightened Florentines behind their barred Ill,] THE POET:— DANTE. 67 windows, of whom she was left the sole protector, got through that interval of danger in safety too. The state of Italy at this time, and indeed not only at this time but for centuries after, was very peculiar and characteristic. The country was studded with great independent cities, within which, .masterful and imperious, reigned the dominant party for the time being, safe within their walls, and in command of all the wealth and forces of their respective towns ; while without those walls, in the nameless country, possessing otherwise no individuality of its own, and peopled in its own right only by peaceful peasants, cultivating their fields under the sway of here and there a feudal lord — were bands of exiles— ^uorusciti, the issued-forth, or turned -out, of the cities — every party of them, and every man of them, thinking of nothing else but how, by hook or crook, to be "in" again, and turn out the others in their turn. One of the strangest peculiarities in this strange surging sea of conspiracy and plot " out- side," was that the fuor-usciti of different cities thus inevitably shaken together, were by no means necessarily of the same party. The exiles from Florence might be Ghibelline, but the exiles from Arezzo were Guelf ; and from the jumbLLng up of various factions, united in the same personal wrong, arose alliances of the most extra- ordinary kind, the White of one town coalescing with the Black of another town in order to get the better of the Black of their own, and giving their aid in return to abolish the White sway over their neighbours. What could these turned-out ones do but conspire ? Their living, their homes, their associations, and their hopes for the future were all within the walls of the town from which they yreve/uor-usciti. Every other town had its ranks filled, and citizens enough of its own to provide for ; therefore to plot, to scheme, to stir up old enemies or make new alliances against the city they loved most in the world — to take advantage of all grudges against it, of all foreign 58 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. cupidities, of every alien sentiment — wasi the natural occupation of the exiles. Let Florence perish, so long as they got back to Florence ; let her streets run with blood, her treasures be exhausted, her foes victorious until the fuor-usciti were once within the walls again ; when they turned to bay on the instant, and repaid the allies who had helped them back with defiance, as no longer their allies, but the enemies of then- city. Such was the natural course of events. It brought with it naturally many modifications of sentiment, especially in the minds of reasonable men, who perhaps never in their lives before had been brought in contact with the opposite party except in the arena of a faction-fight. This, no doubt, was one of the ways in which Dante's mind was worked upon, and his feelings changed. He was by birth a Guelf, and the son of fathers exiled in their day for their party ; but these hereditary politics had been softened in him by his own clear judgment we may hope, as well as by his friendship with the moderate Bianchi, with whom he had become identified during his last years in Florence. At his exile he was naturally thrown not only into the arms of the Bianchi party, exiled along with him, but into the next circle of opinion, that of the moderate Neri on the other side, which fraternized with the mild Bianchi, as the Right-dentre sympathises with the Left-Centre — -one set of moderate men drawing closer to each other in a forlorn attempt to compass something like unity and peace. Then, in the jumble and excitement of exile, what more natural than that, with a soul too ardent for mode- ration of any kind, the fiery and indignant poet should come to find somefhihg congenial to himself in other sublimated and fiery souls, who were not moderate, but of the fullest blood of the Ghibellines 1 and that some of their political doctrines took hold of him perhaps almost without his knowledge, twisting themselves into the other strain , of Guel:^ belief with that eclecticism which, comes m-] THE POET .-—DANTE. 59 natural to the thoughtful mind? This complication of influences no doubt worked secretly, moulding him in private to changed thoughts ; but he was not without other and more strenuous reasons for his political change. The primary article of the Guelf tradition was adherence to the Pope in distinction to the Emperor ; i.e. to what was in reality a certain theory of Italian unity, vaguely conceived — an arbitrator on Italian soil of all the differences that might arise between Italians. Pope Bonifazio, however — he who had detained Dante in Borne while his ruin was accomplished — had but poorly carried out this great idea. It is true that he had sent from time to time certain ineffectual pacieri to Florence, men who had made pro- cessions and negotiations, but never peace. But it was Bonifazio also who had sent the stranger, Charles of Anjou, to Florence, as completely an alien as any German Em- peror, to turn everything into confusion. The employment of this ignorant and insolent Frenchman was against all the traditions of the Guelf party, though its more ex- aggerated faction took advantage of him to gain the upper hand, as it was the fashion in Italy to take advantage of anything which would give a chance of getting hold of the reins of government. To the exile, however, the employ- ment' of this foreign emissary added a new bitterness to downfall. Better an Emperor with a great name and great responsibilities, and that Divine Right which as yet no rebel had thrown any doubt upon, than a lay emissary from the Pope, not clothed with any sacred responsibility of office, though intrusted by the natural arbitrator of Italian quarrels, with power over Italians. When the Pope had thus deserted one of the leading ideas of the Guelf party, what so natural as that a sufferer from this desertion should be moved in his turn to desert the party altogether, and try what the new rallying-point of the Emperor, possibly a noble and impartial monarch, great enough to act uppn ideal principles and ig^ore self-interest, 60 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. might do? And this sharp revulsion of feeling, from a mere political point of view, no doubt was strongly enforced by the new associations into which the fuor-uscito was suddenly thrown. These new associations procured for Dante various friendships which lasted all his life. Not only with the noble brothers Soaligeri of Verona, but with other leaders of the Ghibelline party, he formed ties which, sometimes relaxed and sometimes dropped, yet were never quite thrown aside. We are not exactly informed when he left Rome ; probably the sting of his own public condemnation and outlawry roused him into activity and drove him back to his party ; but one of his first places of refuge after leaving E,ome, when it was known for certain that the gates of Florence were shut against him, was Arezzo, a city steadfastly Ghibelline, and against which he had fought on the field of Campaldino. The Podestk for the moment was Uguccione della Paggiola, a man whose membra vastusime and straordinaria robustezza del corpo seem to have made a great impression on the chroniclers, and to whom the poet became bound in such warm alliance of affection, that the first part of the Divina Commedia was, on it^ completion, dedicated to this gigantic soldier of fortune. The chronology of the first three years of the poet's exile is vague, but not the general scope of them. Like all the exiles, his companions in misery, he seems to have roamed up and down the world in a passion of wild endeavour, — to get allies, to get help, to get back again to Florence, the one aim to which all others were given up. Like children shut out of their father's house, restlessly promenading up and down within sight of the windows, trying every mode of entrance, every side door and postern, every passing servant who might be cajoled into opening, every intercessor who might work for them within, this hapless band of grave and desperate men seem to have haunted the neighbourhood of their city, neglecting all III.] THE POET ■ -DANTE. 61 other objects in life, plotting, conspiring, fighting, catching at every hope, hanging on to every possible enterprise, however hostile to Florence, which could by force or fraud, or any how, push open an unguarded door. It is strange and pitiful, and at the same time repulsive, to note the passion and unscrupulousness of their struggle, their carelessness as to who or what it was that should carry them back. Love and longing, and a strange bitter patriotism, extraordinary as the word sounds in such a connection, were at the bottom of it all ; but the patriotism carried them into alliance with their country's enemies, and the love prompted reprisals of wrong and cruelty which it is difficult for the calm spectator, so many gene- rations off, to forgive. Dante's first piece of apparent work after the conclusion of his ambassadorship for Florence, was an embassy of a very different description, across the hills to Verona to persuade Bartolommeo della Scala to send a little army against Florence, four thousand foot-soldiers and seven hundred cavalry, who came from the banks of the Adige to help the /uor-usciti to ravage the Mugello, but not to get back to their city. Another armed attempt of the same kind was made a little later, in a still less justifiable way. Pope Bonifazio died, and was succeeded by Pope Benedetto who, after making the usual ineffectual attempt to pacify the factions by means of a Cardinal-Legate, called Corso Donati and his friends before him to try what his personal intercession could do for the new set of exiles. While the good Pope was arguing at Perugia with the Florentine leaders, thus taking them out of the way, the exiles attempted to break into Florence, as thieves break into a house from which the master is absent. But, like all other attempts of these conspirators, this too failed, and though they actually got within the gates, they were driven back again, partly by their own folly, partly by the inactivity of the members of their party still left in Florence. This was their second attempt by arms, within 62 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. tkree years, to get themselves back to their city ; and these armed failures were preceded by how many missions, con- spiracies, combinations of all kinds, and fiery labours on the part of their leaders, among whom Dante was still foremost. Everything else — -poetry and useful work, and everything that is good for man — was postponed to this one object. The time came when the poet asked indignantly whether he could not see the sweet stars and ponder upon heavenly truth elsewhere than in Florence ; but no such enlightenment had come to him in the earlier part of his exile. To get back, was to him, as to the rest, the one aim and passion of a stormy and wasted life. This tempestuous period, which in itself is too painful for detailed description even were that practicable, offers few incidents to attract the attention of any but the sternest of historical students. Nevertheless on the eve of that last attempt upon Florence, the wife of one of the exiled assailants brought into the world, in that blazing July weather, when " the heat was so great that the very air seemed to burn," a child, born on the 19th or 20th of the month, in the year 1304, who was afterwards known to the world as Petrarch. And we have one glimpse into the city itself which is very curious if not very attractive. Pope Benedetto's messenger, the Oardinal^aciero, entered Florence in the spring of 1304 to do what he could for the exiled Bianchi, as his predecessor not long before had tried his best for the exiled Neri. He was received with the most gracious welcome, with the waving of olive-branches, symbolic decorations, and every appearance of probable success ; and among the other entertainments provided for his Eminence was one in which we seem to see a reflection out of the very soul of the fuor-uscito, then wistfully from a tower in the Apennines gazing towards Florence, waiting for the news of deliverance. It was May once more, the festive time of Florence, when all kinds of out-door revels were common, and the city was roused by the announcement of III.] THE POET: -DANTE , Sti a new and remarkable spectacle. " The Borgo San Friano " (San Frediano, the old suburb, still bearing the same name, with its gaunt church on the other side of Arno) " sent out messengers to say that whosoever would have news of the other world was to go on the kalends of May to the Ponte alia Carraja and to; the banks of the river. And upon Arno they placed boats and rafts of wood, and showed upon them the simUitlide and figures of the infernal regions, with fires and tortures, misshapen nien and demons horrible to see, and others which had the appearance of naked souls ; and put them to divers torments with great cries and groaning which were terrible to hear and to see. This new play drew many citizens to see it ; and the bridge, which was then m:ade of wood, being full and thronged with people, fell by their weight, so that many were drowned and died in Arno, and many were injured ; so that the comedy was turned into truth, and, according to the invitation, many by dying acquired news of the other world, with great weeping and dolour to all the city," Was this strange scene an unconscious reflection from Dante's abozzo then reposing somewhere in darkness and secrecy in one of Madonna Gemma's strong boxes ? or is it merely an indication how the mind of the time was turning, occupying itself with such dramatic guesses at the darker side of the future existence as grew into a vivid revelation under the poet's touch 1 Between the blue skies of May and the glimmering Ai'no, overshadowed by its bridges, what strange phantasmagoria it was which bewildered the crowded spectators on the banks 1 the red gleams of the fires floating on the dark river, the cries of the fictitious victims, the shouts of the demon actors, the smoke and burning that figured hell ; and then all at once a real hell of terror and suffering — the crash, the plunge, the wild dismay, the fantastic horror come true. Must not the exile, straining his eager ears outside, have heard some echo of the great outcry ? and felt with characteristic- 64 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. pride and scorn that nothing less than some unconscious reverberation from the visionary world which he alone had revealed could have conjured up this extraordinary scene ? Pope Benedetto and his paciero failed, as all popes and peacemakers had failed before them ; and so did every other effort made by the exiles.. For three years from the date of his banishment Dante struggled with and for his party in the attempt to get back again to his home, in vain ; but he was not the man to fall hopelessly into that miserable role of conspirator, which is the very curse of political exile ; and by this time it is evident he had begun to feel the disgust of a higher nature for the crowd of common factionists with whom he found himself mixed up. He had already learned by experience how difficult was the art of getting back from banishment — " quanta quest^ a/rte pesa," as Farinata had warned him in the Inferno — and now his mind seems to have been brought to the point indicated in the indignant outburst which he puts by way of prophecy into the mouth of his own ancestor Cacciaguida : — " That which shall hardest weigh upon thy mind Shall he the hateful company and vile With which confounded thou thyself shalt find. Which all, ungrateful, empty, vain, with guile, Shall turn against thee, though not thou hut they Ruined their ark of refuge ; rude and vile The actions of theb baseness shall convey Proof to thy mind, that of thyself to make Thy only party is the better way." It was after the failure of the first three attempts, by warlike and by peaceful means, to return to Florence, that this disgust seems to have seized upon him. The squabbles, the vanities, the jealousies and grudgings, of his exiled companions, revolted his loftier and more impetuous soul. He had done what was in him to secure success to their efforts, and for the third time they had failed miserably in.] THE POET:-DANTE. 65 from their own weakness and infirmity of purpose. Perhaps the turning against him of his party described aljove had to do with some reluctiinoe on the part of the Scaligeri, his friends, to renew the aid which they had formerly sent ; but anyhow after this last failure the party of fuor-uaciti seems to have tumbled to pieces, and Dante, indignant and wounded, forsook them and politics together, and turned back to the pursuits which he had abandoned for that thankless path of public life. He went to Bologna, no doubt with much despiteful melancholy mingling in his nobler desire for a practicable life, and resumed his long- interrupted studies, giving himself over to Philosophy, and such comfort as she could bestow. He would seem to have spent about two years in the learned city. His eldest child, Pietro, a boy now about thirteen, came to him from Florence, probably beginning his studies when his grave father recommenced his ; but we know nothing of the poet's intercourse with his children, nor can we guess what share this little Florentine, fresh from his mother's care, had in the life or the thoughts of the iinperious and melancholy exile, embittered by the privations of his life and the contradictions of men, who thus turned back to his books in his moment of need, spurning, one cannot but feel, with something of the scorn of wounded pride, the world and the party which had not done justice to him. During the following years of tranquillity and solitude, Dante wrote the Convito and his Essay on Eloquence, two works more valuable for the indications of himself to be found in them tlian for their own excellence. The latter work, the Volga/re Moquio, was, though composed in Latin, specially designed to prove and illustrate the fitness of the lingua isolga/re, the vulgar tongue, to be adopted as the medium of literature — • a curiously appropriate preface to his own suspended work,, the ahozzo which he supposed to be lost, and with which in its first disguise of clumsy Latin he may well have grown disgusted, but which was yet to rise out of its ashes like p 66 THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE. [chap. the phoenix, new-made and transformed, creating and forming