Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

All scholars are agreed as to the classes of men who build the State. There are the soldiers who keep the State in liberty, the physicians who keep the State in health, the teachers who sow the land with wisdom and knowledge, the farmers and merchants who feed and clothe the people, the prophets who keep the visions burning, and the poets who inspire and fertilize the soul of the race. But in every age and clime, the poet has been the real builder of his city and country. The only kind of work that lives forever is the work of the poet. Parthenons and cathedrals crumble, tools rust, bridges decay, bronzes melt, but the truth, put in artistic work, survives war, flood, fire, and the tooth of time itself. "The poet's power," said George William Curtis, "is not dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like that of the statesman, the warrior and the inventor. But it is as deep and as strong and abiding. The soldier fights for his native land, but the poet makes it worth fighting for. The statesman enlarges liberty, but the poet fosters that love in the heart of the citizen. The inventor multiplies the conveniences of life, but the poet makes the life itself worth living. We cannot find out the secret of his power. Until we know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity. But we know that the poet is the harmonizer, strengthener and consoler, and that the inexpressible mystery of Divine Love and purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem."

By common consent the three great poets of the world are Homer, Dante and Shakespeare; and of the three, the two supreme names are Dante and Shakespeare. After six centuries, what Hallam said nearly a hundred years ago still holds true: "Dante's orbit is his own, and the track of his wheels can never be confounded with that of any rival." Dante was the greatest man of his country, he wrote the greatest book of his era, he started the greatest intellectual movement of any age or time. The influence of his thinking upon the people of Italy, the Italy of his own day and of succeeding generations, is one of the marvels of history. He was the interpreter of his age to itself; but he was also the interpreter of man to all ages. Some names there are whose light shines brightly for a brief time, after the fashion of the falling stars, but Dante's emblem is the sun, whose going forth is unto the ends of the earth, and whose shining brings universal summer.

Dante has been well-called the "Morning Star of the Renaissance." He was born at the end of, perhaps, the darkest period in history,--the five black centuries succeeding the fall of Rome; he lived to see the first fruits of his own sowing--that wonderful rebirth of art and culture which was to culminate, two hundred years later, in the canvases of Raphael and the sculptures of Michael Angelo. It has been beautifully said that before singing his song Dante had to invent his harp. No graceful phrase ever had a sounder kernel of truth. Great poets are more than great artists in language; they create languages, and Dante, like his two great compeers, Homer and Shakespeare, moulded and shaped the tongue for future generations. He began his career at a moment when the Latin tongue was dying and the Italian language was still waiting to be born. He took the vulgar speech of his own day and gave it colour and richness, form and substance, eternal dignity and beauty. What Homer did for the Greek language, what King Alfred's Bible did for English literature, that, and more, did Dante for the Italian tongue. The influence of his thinking upon the people of Italy is indicated by the fact that The Divine Comedy was printed three times in the one year of 1472, nine times before the fifteenth century ended, and, to-day, there are literally thousands of volumes in the libraries of the world upon Dante and his poems. With loving extravagance d'Annunzio said at the great celebration held last year in Italy: "Single-handed Dante created Italy, as Michael Angelo by sheer force of genius created his Moses, and made it the supreme marble in history."

No one has ever been able to define genius, though many scholars have told us what genius is not. Many men in the English lecture halls and universities had talent, but that stablekeeper's son, John Keats, had genius. More than one of the four hundred members of the House of Lords during Charles the Second's reign had talent, but a poor tinker, John Bunyan, had genius, that blazed like the sun. There were multitudes of men living in the Thirteen Colonies, and many of them rich, but that poor boy flying a kite, Benjamin Franklin, had the divine gift. Not otherwise, many men living in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century had talent, but Dante Alighieri had the gift, and he towered above his fellows as Monte Rosa towers above the burning plains of Italy. Strictly speaking, Dante's gift was not that of the poet alone. He was a moralist as well as a poet--above all others, the singer of man's soul. He believed himself to be ordained of God to explain the moral order of the universe, man's share in that order, his duty and his destiny. Blind Homer gave us the immortal Iliad and Odyssey, but Homer was a poet, not a teacher, and if there are lessons in the story of Achilles and Ulysses we have to learn those lessons for ourselves. Shakespeare, the organ-voice of England, gave us Lear and Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, but Shakespeare was a poet, not a teacher, and Macbeth's sin, written though it is in letters of fire, is nevertheless accompanied by no comments of the author. Not so with the immortal Comedy of Dante. For Dante was a teacher first, and a poet afterward. Without the brilliancy of intellect or the compass of achievements that were Shakespeare's, without the directness or the simplicity of Homer, he was more serious than either. He had the passion of a reformer, the fiery courage of a prophet. He poured his very heart's blood into his pages. Hating oppression, he was like one specially raised up to point the path to peace, and to vindicate the ways of God to man.

The great thinker was born in Florence in the year 1265. His era was the era of the Dark Ages; his century one of the submerged centuries. For five hundred years black darkness had lain upon the world. It was an era of war, when barons were constantly at strife. Feudalism was entrenched behind stone walls, the landowners were masters, and the serfs were slaves. Every road was infested with bandits. There was no shipping upon the Mediterranean. The mariner's compass had not yet been invented. Commerce was scant and factories almost unknown. Men lived, for the most part, on coarse bread and vegetables, without luxuries, and without what we call the simplest necessities. The common people were huddled in miserable villages, behind stone walls, with unpaved streets and windowless houses, in which ignorance, filth, squalor, and bestiality prevailed. Peasants wore the same leather garments for a lifetime. The dead were buried under the churches. Prisoners rotted in dungeons under the banqueting hall of the castle. Two hundred years were to pass before Columbus set foot upon the deck of the Santa Maria. Two hundred and fifty years were to pass before Michael Angelo could lift the dome above St. Peter's. But if the peasant was ignorant, and the poor man wretched, the nobleman and courtier was the child of luxury and gilded vice. It was an age of contrasts so violent as to be all but incredible to the modern reader. There were no books, for the art of printing was still to be invented, yet in an age of parchment manuscripts young noblemen were taught to speak in verse and to write in rhymed pentameters. There was no science of geography and the world was believed to be a flat board with a fence around it. Yet in this era, when few men could spell and fewer read, the very monks in the monasteries were writing theses on problems so abstract as to weary the modern scholar. For five hundred years the world had looked to the Church, but the Church had descended to the perpetration of crimes so terrible, that their mere chronicle sickens the heart and chills the blood.

Into this world of paradox and contradiction--a world of gloom, shot through with fitful gleams of superstition--was born Dante, the poet of love and hope and divine regeneration. We know little of Dante's parentage, as we know all too little of his life, but this much we do know--the family was the noble family of the Alighieri, followers and supporters of the party then in power in Florence. Dante was educated by his mother, and by his mother's relative, the scholar-poet Brunetto Latini. Like John Stuart Mill he was a mental prodigy from infancy. Like Milton he was trained in the strictest academical education which the age afforded. Like Bacon he was a universal scholar before he passed out of his teens. Like Pope he thought and wrote in verse before he could write in prose. Among his friends and intimates were the poets Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoria, Dino Frescobaldi and Lapo Guianni, the musician Casella and the artist Giotto. With such companions and under such guidance, Dante mastered all the sciences of the day at a time when it was not impossible to know all that could be known.

But dreamer and student though he was, he early insisted upon sharing the burdens of the State. On two occasions he bore arms for his country. While still in his twenties he was offered the post of ambassador to Rome; before he was thirty he had represented his native city at foreign courts, and from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth year his voice was heard with growing frequency in municipal affairs. In the summer of the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years of age, he was chosen as one of the Priors, or magistrates, of Florence.

The opening year of the new century--the year in which Giotto was meditating his immortal Duomo, with its famous tower--was ushered in by a civic revolution in Florence. Dante, with other innocent citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. A statesman, he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a man of property, he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of men, he was forced to humble himself and live on foreign alms. Inspired by the noblest intentions, the world gave him no thanks, but drove him forth like a wild beast, branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to wander over the hills of Italy till death at last gave him release. He never saw Florence again. For years he knew poverty, neglect and hatred. Sick with the noise of political dissension, he strained his eyes toward the hills for the appearance of a universal monarch; but the vision was never realized. We know but little of his wanderings. Many cities and castles have claimed the honour of giving him shelter; we know only that in old age he was compelled to "climb the stranger's toilsome stairs, and eat the bitter bread of others."