Dante: The Central Man of All the World | Page 2

imaginative, moral and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so
dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books.
Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the

thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary
spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism,
"constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this
commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its
supremacy. And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no
doubt upon the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty.
Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use
Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure
imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his
students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to be
followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own
profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me
into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school
of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has
served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of
inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's
master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling,
leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his
own age by revealing a mighty past.
To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth
century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which
ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here,
perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true
that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns who are
not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are dominated by
the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from medievalism,
arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we
have not only what all other centuries had, but something else
distinctively our own--a vast contribution to the world's progress. This
self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be in
the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory is not
confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was said of
the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were giants
in those days" which we presume to ignore. Homer, Shakespeare,
Dante, indeed stand forth in irrefutable protest against the questionable

assertion of evolution that the present is intellectually superior to the
past.
The evolutionary theory prejudices our age against acknowledging the
high accomplishments of the past. So to know the truth we must
overcome the conspiracy with which so-called history has enveloped
the past, especially those generations immediately prior to Dante's.
How that ignorance of the history and spirit of that period can blind
even a great writer to the wonderful feats inherited from the centuries
immediately preceding the thirteenth, is revealed by the assertion of
Carlyle that "in Dante ten silent centuries found a voice." To state what
history now regards as fact, it must be said that while Dante by his
giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble any
epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy
culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before
1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that
subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration and
have never quite equalled its originality and worth.
In verification of this statement I have only to mention to you the
names of the Cid of Spain, the Arthurian Legends of England, the
Nibelungen Lied of Germany and the poems of the Meistersingers, the
Trouveres and the Troubadours. The authors of these works had been
taught to make themselves eternal as Dante says Brunetto Latini taught
him. They are proof against the alleged dumbness of the ages just
preceding Dante's. Of those times speaks Dr. Ralph Adams Cram,
renowned equally for historical study and for architectural ability: "The
twelfth was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great
in its successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy,
religion and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of
aspiration and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the
first shock of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new
that was destined to unprecedented victories." (The Substance of
Gothic, p. 69.)
Let us now make a general survey