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He considered her as one of those delusions of fancy, one of those women above mortal height, like Tasso's Eleanora, Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, or Vittoria Colonna, the lover, the poet, and the heroine at once, forms that flit across the earth, scarcely touching it, and without tarrying, only to fascinate the eyes of some men, the privileged few of love, to lead on their souls to immortal aspirations, and to be the sursum corda of superior imaginations.
Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.
For Maleotti was among the hearers when Dante, yielding to Messer Guide's insistence, consented to read the verses of the unknown poet, and his quick eyes had been as keen as Messer Guido's to understand the meaning of Dante's change of voice and color when Madonna Beatrice came into the room.
Such was the state of affairs in Dante's time, and it is important to remember this, because the quarrels of these different factions had a great effect upon his life. Particularly long and bloody in Florence and other cities had been the strife between two families and factions who called themselves respectively the Guelfs and the Ghibellines.
Dante's "natural spirit" was but the sensual nature, and well might it cry out when the "spirit of life" began to feel the secret commotion of the "spirit of the soul": "Woe is me, wretched! Because often from this time forth shall I be hindered in my work." And so it was.
You ought to have heard Jim Plaskett crack up Garth's pluck and Jim knows! "We reached the canyon about half-past six in the morning. I'd heard of that place from the Indians. Say, it was a fearsome spot! a kind of crooked, gaping split in the prairie like the pictures in Dante's Inferno.
It is the spirit that lives and makes alive. And Dante's spirit seems more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco than beside his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen, 'Lo, I am with you alway' these are the words that ought to haunt us in a burying-ground. There is something affected and self-conscious in overpowering grief or enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb.
There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary.
In this paper I will give a rapid sketch of Dante's life, and then will try to point to some of the features of a poem which must ever take its place among the supremest efforts of the human intellect, side by side with Homer's "Iliad," and Virgil's "Æneid," and Milton's "Paradise Lost," and the plays of Shakespeare; and which is not less great than any of these in its immortal and epoch-making significance.
But his enemies got the upper hand, and he was finally driven from the city in exile. Another sorrow had befallen him. But Dante's love for Beatrice had not interfered in his relations with his wife. It was not an earthly love. He had not wanted Beatrice as his wife, but rather as an ideal that he could worship. And after her death he became both gloomy and unhappy.
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