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Sol nel tuo verbo è per noi la luce, o Rivelatore,

Sol nel tuo canto è per noi la forza, o Liberatore,

Sol nella tua melodia è la molt’ anni lagrimata pace, o Consolatore.

—D’ Annunzio.

La severa immagine del poeta governa tuttavia i fati delle generazioni d’ Italia.—Mazzini.

Dante stands forth as the Apostle of Freedom in many spheres—that Freedom for which all the world is now longing: freedom for unhindered self-development of men and nations, freedom of spirit—the true atmosphere of all education. The Monarchia, the Epistles, and, most of all, the Divina Commedia—that “mystical epos of Man’s Free Will”—bear witness to the truth of the word which Virgil speaks of him at the foot of the Mount of Purgation—

Libertà va cercando ...

This all-pervading spirit of his teaching might perhaps of itself have been sufficient to make his name an inspiration to the heroes and martyrs who struggled for Italy’s liberation in the nineteenth century; but it may be worth while to draw attention to certain aspects of his work, which give him a more definite and specific claim to be the Father of Free Italy.

The other day I turned up, after many years of neglect, Karl Witte’s Essay on Dante and United Italy. For this suspicious intercourse with “enemy alien literature” I can plead two extenuating circumstances: first, the absorbing nature of the topic at this moment, and secondly that I approached Witte in an English translation. Another point which might count in my favour is the fact that this particular Essay was written before 1870. That certainly lends to it a special interest; and the interest is rather enhanced than otherwise by the circumstance that Witte prefixed a Prefatory note and added a peroration in 1878.

Karl Witte, who was born in 1800 and died in 1883, represents the old vigorous and admirable type of German scholarship which was in very truth “Stupor Mundi”: a blend of genius and conscientious painstaking on the reputation of which the Prussianised Kultur of to-day bases a claim to deference which Europe will more and more hesitate to accord.

How far, for instance, Germany has fallen from her former position as regards Dante Scholarship may be gauged from E. Benvenuti’s slashing article in the Bullettino della Società dantesca italiana of June, 1914, of which a summary appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on March 4th. The article is the first instalment of a review of Dante studies in Germany for the years 1908-1913. It is a record, as the Times reviewer remarks, of “monumental ignorance, inaccuracy, arrogance, bad taste, and sheer stupidity ... hailed with salvoes of approbation by the majority of German critics.”

But Karl Witte is a man of other build than these modern Pan-Germanisers who are patriotic enough to attribute to Dante pure German ancestry, and too patriotic by far to soil their hands with the recent works of sound Italian critics, or their minds with the elements of Italian grammar and idiom.

Karl Witte, on the contrary—though he began life as an Infant Prodigy, matriculating at Leipsic when only nine and a half years old, and reading his Doctor’s thesis before he was fourteen—won recognition in Italy and England as well as in Germany as a real force in Dante scholarship: a great pioneer, who made his mistakes, as all pioneers will, but has won the gratitude of all subsequent Dantists.

In the Essay of which I have spoken, written and delivered as a lecture in 1861, Witte notes the fact and investigates the grounds of the constant association of Dante’s name with the patriotic aspirations of Young Italy. “It is a fact,” he says, “that, during the last half century, a great number of those who aimed at transforming Italy—and not only men of such moderation as Cesare Balbo, Gino Capponi, or Carlo Troya, but also the democratic revolutionaries who would take the world by storm—have hung, and still hang, upon Dante’s Divine Comedy, with passionate enthusiasm. Ugo Foscolo, who preferred poverty and exile to place and honour under the rule of Austria, devoted the last years of his life exclusively to a great work on the poem; and after Foscolo’s death, this new edition of the ‘Prophecy of Italy’s Future,’ as he called the Comedy, was published by no other than Giuseppe Mazzini himself....” If the Italian of the Sixties “were asked whence his countrymen drew their inspiration, he would scarcely hesitate,” says Witte, “to name the greatest poet of his fatherland.” And again, “the fact that in the days of foreign oppression patriots recognised each other by their love of the immortal poet, and greeted one another, as by a secret password, with the inspiring lines of the Divine Poem, is a symbol of the fact that the roots of this temper of mind”—the temper of national “self-reliance and self-renouncing enthusiasm”—“are to be sought in Dante.”

There are three passions, according to Witte, which are (rightly or wrongly) traced back to Dante: (1) a glowing love for Italy, (2) a hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke, and (3) a hatred of the temporal power of the Pope.

In the first case—and this is the point that more immediately concerns us—Witte holds that the contention is justified. “In hope, in sorrow, in reproof, we see Dante filled,” he says, “with the same glowing love for the Fatherland of Italy, a love which he is the first to put into words.”

Before Dante, at any rate, Italy was, in Metternich’s famous phrase, “nothing but a geographical expression.” The Roman poets of the Empire praise her scenery, but their devotion as patriots is to Rome itself. When the Empire broke up, Italy lost her one bond of superficial cohesion, though a shadowy unity emerged now and again under Visigothic and Longobardic domination, and the pressure now of Gothic Arianism, now of Byzantine Iconoclasm, drew Italy’s various groups in self defence closer to Papal Rome.

The phenomenon of an apparently independent and united “Kingdom of Italy” (888-961) after the fall of the House of Charlemagne, is, from this point of view, as illusory as those of Odoacer and Theodoric, effecting little or nothing towards the evolution of a national spirit or a national self-consciousness. Dante is, it would seem, the first to see Italy with a patriot’s eyes, as being, and as having been for countless ages, a fatherland for whom one might sing—

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

She is “that lowlying Italy” on whose behalf the heroes and heroines of the Aeneid shed their blood so freely:

... Quell’ umile Italia....

Per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,

Eurialo, e Turno, e Niso di ferute.

He loves her passionately, torn as she is by faction, her own worst enemy; and he calls on the representative of the Holy Roman Empire to control her madness and to bring her peace.

The close association of Italian aspiration with the name of Dante which Witte observed in 1861, came forcibly under my own notice nearly fifty years later, when I made a pilgrimage to Ravenna to take part in the “Feste dantesche,” on September 13th, 1908. Isidoro del Lungo, perhaps the greatest of Italy’s modern Dantists, was to inaugurate the opening of a special Dante wing in the Ravenna library, and to dedicate a beautiful silver lamp—an expiatory offering from the Commune of Florence—to adorn his tomb.

The occasion was nominally a Dantist celebration; but it might with equal truth have been described as an “Irredentist Orgy.” For one of the great features of the festival was the arrival of a pilgrim-ship, flying the Italian tricolour, from Trieste, bearing some hundreds of Italian-speaking devotees from “Italia Irredenta”—the “unredeemed” cities which remained under Austrian rule when the rest of Italy threw off the yoke of the foreigner—Trieste itself, and Pola, and Fiume. The people of Ravenna and the visitors to the Festival, spurred on by eloquent “posters” exhibited in the streets at the instance of clubs and societies of every description, and by the proclamation of the Municipality itself, to give the “Fratelli irredenti” a fraternal welcome, poured out towards the quay in their thousands, and escorted the pilgrims through the streets with flags flying and bands playing patriotic airs. Conspicuous in the procession were half a dozen Garibaldini, veterans of the War of Liberation, clad in their red shirts; and emotion rose to a high point when the monument was reached which commemorates those who fell in the struggle for a free and united Italy. Laughter, tears, embraces and echoing Evvivas proclaimed the arrival of the cortège at the Municipal Buildings.... It was a scene which one will never forget, as the Italians from across the water flung themselves upon their fellow-disciples of Dante, with the romping and vociferous enthusiasm of children just let out of school!

There were, so far as one could judge, from the floods of printed and of spoken eloquence which marked that day, two prominent thoughts in people’s minds: two prominent points of contact and association between the thought of the Divino Poeta and the aspirations of Italian patriotism. The first of these is more general, the second more specific. In general, Dante is rightly held to be the true Father of the Italian language and literature—that “bond which unites us to our native place.” “Love for our native tongue,” says Witte—and he has in mind a passage of Dante’s Convivio—“is the expression of our love of our native land.” For Dante Italy is—

Il bel paese dove il Si suona.

“The beauteous land where si is uttered”; and to that land the work of his mind and of his pen lent an added beauty, and wove a spell which should draw together all her scattered elements in the enthusiasm of a common speech and a common literary heritage. That is Dante’s first claim to supply the inspiration of a “United Italy.”

The second claim is, as we have said, more specific. It is claimed for him that he described, as it were prophetically, the future boundaries of Italy.

In the ninth Canto of the Inferno (113-114) he includes the whole of the Istrian peninsula in Italy, describing the broad inlet to the east of it—the bay which stretches northward up to Fiume—as “The Quarnaro which shuts in Italy and bathes her boundaries”—

Sì come a Pola presso del Carnaro,

Che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna....

Again, in his words about the Lago di Garda in the Twentieth Canto of the Inferno (61-63)—

Suso in Italia bella giace un laco

A piè dell’ alpe che serra Lamagna

Sovra Tiralli, ch’ ha nome Benaco.

“Up in fair Italy there lies a lake afoot the Alp that bars out Germany above Tyrol, that bears the name Benaco:” he seems to include not only the whole of Lake Garda but the Trentino too, “barring out Germany” beyond the great watershed.

At Ravenna, in 1908, one might have been led to suppose that these two passages summed up the main interest of the Divina Commedia; but though the utterances are, as a matter of fact incidental, they do point to the fact that the Italy which Dante so passionately loved, and which consciously or unconsciously he did so much to bring into being, was a definite “geographical expression” if it was also something more.

If with Witte we go on to enquire how far Young Italy is justified in fathering upon Dante the passion of “hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke,” the question is at once confused by the fact that in Dante’s day the authority and prestige of that Holy Roman Empire, of which the Poet was so convinced and so enthusiastic an advocate, was associated with a succession of German princes. Teutons of the Swabian House of Hohenstaufen, albeit Italian born, were “the illustrious heroes Frederic the Caesar and his well-begotten Manfred” whom in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (I. xii. 20; Bemp. p. 330) he extols for their nurture, in the Sicilian Court, of the beginnings of Italian vernacular poetry; Teutons the Rudolf and Albert of Hapsburg, to whom the poet of the Divine Comedy looks in vain for the liberation of Italy from its overwhelming ills; Teuton also Henry of Luxemburg, on whom his hopes were finally fixed, the “Alto Arrigo” of the Paradiso—

... Ch’ a drizzare Italia

Verrà in prima ch’ ella sia disposta,

for whom he sees a vacant throne prepared in the White Rose of heaven.[25]

These heroes are not for him, however, Germans, Tedeschi, but Roman Caesars; and had the sceptre of Empire chanced, then, as afterwards, to have been wielded by other hands, we cannot doubt that a non-Teutonic line of monarchs would have drawn from him a like reverence, a like expectation and a like passionate appeal. Similarly, had the House of Swabia been dissociated from the Roman Imperial tradition and played a rôle of overweening and unscrupulous self-aggrandisement like that actually played by Philippe le Bel, Hugh Capet’s words in the fifth Cornice of Purgatory—so well applied by a recent writer in the Times to the Hohenzollern—would have been put into the mouth of an ancestor of the two Frederics, and applied to the House of Hohenstaufen. “I was the root,” he says, “of the evil plant whose shadow blights the whole land of Christendom”—[26]

Io fui radice de la mala pianta,

Che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia.

There is indeed one passage at least where Dante mentions the German people in a non-political context (Inf. xvii. 21), and designates them from the point of view of their national or racial habits. Tedeschi lurchi—“Guzzling Germans”—he calls them. How one’s heart goes out to him, as one recalls memories of sojourns in Swiss hotels! Had poor Dante like experiences or worse to put up with in the days of his wanderings?

Witte, who spontaneously brings forward this word of insight into national character, is delightfully frank about it. “Only in one place,” he says, “does he accuse us of a weakness which we would fain repudiate, but it has been laid to the charge of Germany down even to our own day, on so many hands, that we cannot escape the fear that our forefathers at least must have given grounds for the accusation.” ...

This is a poor note on which to end our study of Witte. Yet it is one on which recent events have thrown a portentous illumination. The tendency which we are combating together, Italians and English, with the haughty spirit of Dante on our side, is one which begins in grossness of bodily appetite, and goes all lengths of cruel and brutalising bestiality.

It is a relief to turn one’s back on this sordid atmosphere and launch out once more into the “better waters”[27] of Italian Patriotism.

I have by me a book which corroborates very strongly—for the sixties at least—Witte’s contention that Young Italy consciously draws her patriotic inspiration from Dante. Some few years ago I picked up in Venice a bound copy of the Giornale del Centenario di Dante Allighieri, of which the first number was published in Florence on February 10th, 1864, and the 48th on May 31st, 1865. There should by rights have been two more numbers, published after an interval, with Index and Frontispiece. Whether these ever appeared in fact, I have not been able to discover. My copy concludes with Number 48, which describes the Festival, to which the year’s publication was planned to lead up—the Feste Dantesche held in Piazza Sta Croce, in May, 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the Poet’s birth. In that year Florence became the temporary capital of an Italy free and united, but still barred out from Rome by French bayonets; and she signalised the occasion by welcoming back in spirit her exiled Son to the “Bello ovile,” where as a lamb he had slept,[28] when the Re Galantuomo himself unveiled the Poet’s statue in the Piazza. A quaint woodcut of the ceremony adorns the volume.[29]

The successive numbers of this Giornale, with their varied contributions to the study and appreciation of the Poet—contributions drawn from every part of the Peninsula—bear eloquent testimony to the widespread feeling among the Italian patriots of that epoch, that Dante was rightly to be acclaimed Pater Patriae.

The articles are of all sorts, from chronological and etymological notes to formal and discursive interpretations and illustrations of Dante’s writings and his life, and studies of contemporary political and social problems in the light of his dicta. They would probably repay a fuller investigation than the present writer has had opportunity to apply to them. We will take one or two typical utterances to indicate something of the general tone of the contributors.

“Dante was the first among his contemporaries,” says Prof. A. Zoncada,[30] “to rise to the conception of a United Italy”—an Italy united in powers, in purpose, in language, and that in spite of the manifold disuniting influences at work in his day. “Fatto è che Dante primo ne’ suoi tempi seppe levarsi al concetto d’un Italia unita e concorde d’ intenti, di forze, di favella: primo abbraciò nel suo amore tutta intera l’ Italia, senza divario di cielo, di usi, di memorie, di legge, di stato, donde appunto risulta il sentimento di nazionalità.” Dante’s desire for the establishment of an Imperial Court in Italy was, he says, a desire for national and linguistic unity. “Non può essere nazione senza una comune favella, nè comune favella dove nazione non sia. Il perchè voleva Dante stabilito in Italia la sede degli imperatori, unico mezzo, a suo credere, di conseguire l’ una e l’ altra unità, della lingua, cioè, e della nazione.” There may perhaps be a little exaggeration in this statement of the reciprocal relations of nationality and vernacular, but at any rate it fastens on facts. Dante, as we have seen, visualised Italy as one, sighed for her divisions, expostulated with her on her undisciplined factiousness; longed, hoped, and prayed for the speedy advent of a strong unifying force. He also devised for her and bequeathed to her the noble instrument of a classical vernacular; and if it be not strictly true that a nation cannot exist save where there is one national language spoken, yet it is more than half true. Dante doubtless did more in the end for the cause of Italian nationality by his bequest of that splendid vehicle of thought and feeling which the mother-tongue became in his hands, and by his initiation of a glorious literary tradition, than he or any other man could have done by actual utterances, however inspired. The importance of his work for the vernacular is recognised again and again by the epigraphists who in the Giornale del Centenario have taken Dante as their theme. “The mother-tongue supplies a bond of nationality which cannot be broken,” exclaims Prof. Lorenzo Berardi in his epigraph,[31] “and that bond we owe to Dante.”

DANTE ALLIGHIERI

FU IL PADRE IMMORTALE

DI NOSTRA LINGUA

QUESTA

FU IL VINCOLO NAZIONALE

CHE MAI SI RUPPE.

Father of the language, father of the national spirit, prophetic delineator of the national frontiers.[32] So the Festa of 1865 joins hands with that of 1908, wherein the official document drawn up by Commendatore Guido Biagi to accompany the gifts offered at the Poet’s shrine describes the offering communities as—

CONCORDI IN LUI

CHE NEL VERSO IMMORTALE

SEGNAVA I TERMINI AUSPICATI

DELLA PATRIA ITALIANA

But these festas are no longer an ideal and a dream; All-Saint’s-tide, 1918, has sounded a note of triumph which resounds, it may be, in the world whither Dante is gone. Since the words above were penned, there has rung out at once the knell of the justly hated Hapsburg autocracy, and the joy-bells of Italia Redenta!

The Piave, associated by Dante[33] with the grim thought of a humbled and degenerate Italy, harried by the outrageous violence of Eccelino da Romano and his minions; associated for us all to-day with nobler memories, as the line of defence where for long months and weary, patriots shed their blood like water to ward off from Italy horrors of brutality before which even Eccelino’s record—a byword in the Middle Age—reads like a little ill-timed horseplay: the Piave and the land behind it—

... Quella parte de la terra....

Italica che siede tra Rialto

E le fontane di Brenta e di Piava,

have witnessed wonderful events. That famous river of which D’Annunzio exclaims:[34] “It runs beside the walls and past the doors and through the streets of all the cities of Italy; runs past the threshold of all our dwellings, of all our churches, of all our hospitals. It safeguards from the destroyer all our altars and all our hearths”; it has witnessed a great victorious onrush that has swamped the very memory of Caporetto, just a year, exactly, after that day of disaster.

And the dream of the Ravenna pilgrims of 1908 has come true. Trento and Trieste, “staked out,” as it were, by Dante’s verse as Italian, proclaimed Italian by race and speech and aspiration, are at last Italian in fact.

Evviva Italia Redenta!

Postscript.—September, 1921, takes us back once more to Ravenna. Once more the short and narrow street that faces the “little cupola more neat than solemn,” is packed with an enthusiastic crowd. Once more the soul of Italy is concentrated in that exiguous space, offering votive gifts at the shrine. But this time the men of the Trentino and of the Dalmatian cities come as “Redeemed Brothers,” fused in the general life of the larger Italy. The Army gives a Wreath of bronze and silver, the Communes of Italy a Bell, the city of Rome a bronze Door.

The sexcentenary of Dante’s birth in 1865 marked a great stage in the liberation and unification of Italy; the sexcentenary of his death, a still greater.

May the Poet’s best dreams come true, as interpreted by the Prophet Mazzini, and Dante’s native land find at last that “peace” which she has been “seeking from world to world”—find it in the fulfilment of her God-given mission to the nations.