The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

My soul was wholly given over to the thought of this most gentle lady;whereby in brief time I fell into so frail and feeble a condition, that my appearance was grievous to many of my friends…. And many sought to know from me that which I wished to conceal. But I, perceiving their questioning, answered that it was Love that had brought me to this pass. I spoke of Love because I bore on my face so many signs that this could not be concealed. But when they asked me,“For whom has Love thus wasted thee?” I, smiling, looked at them and said nothing.

But Beatrice married another, and died at twenty-four, so that it was possible for Dante to love her to the end. To make this love doubly sure he married Gemma dei Donati, and had by her four children and many quarrels. He could never quite forget the face of the girl who had died before time could efface her beauty, or realized desire could dull the edge of imagery.

He plunged into politics, was defeated and exiled, and all his goods were confiscated by the state. After fifteen years of poverty and wandering, he received intimation that he might be reinstated in all his rights of citizenship and property if he would pay a fine to Florence and undergo the humiliating ceremony of “oblation” at the altar as a released prisoner. He refused with the pride of a poet. Thereupon the gentle Florentines—being Christians to a man—decreed that wherever caught, he should be burned alive. He was not caught, but spiritually he was burned alive: he could describe hell later because he went through every realm of it on earth, and if he painted Paradise less vividly, it was for lack of personal experience. He passed from city to city, hunted and friendless, time and again near to starvation.

Perhaps the poem which he now began to write saved him from madness and suicide. Nothing so cleanses the dross out of a man as the creation of beauty or the pursuit of truth, and if the two are merged in one with him, as they were with Dante, he must be purified. This bitter world was unbearable except, as Nietzsche would phrase it, to the eye that considered it a dramatic and aesthetic spectacle; to look at it as a scene to be pictured would take some of its sting away. So Dante resolved to write: he would tell, in terrible allegory, how he had gone through hell, how he had been made clean by the purgatory of suffering, and how he had won a heaven of happiness at last, under the guidance of wisdom and love. And so, aged forty-five, he set his hand to The Divine Comedy, the greatest poem of modern times.

“In the midway of this our life,” he tells us, he stumbled through a dark forest, and then, led by Virgil, found himself before the gates of hell, reading their dour inscription: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the Italian (“Lasciate ogni sper-anza, voi ch’entrate!”), it sounds like a racking of limbs, a tearing of flesh, and a gnashing of teeth on edge. He tells how he saw all the philosophers gathered in hell, and heard Francesca da Rimini recount her love and death with Paolo; and how from these scenes of torment he passed with Virgil to Purgatory, and then, with Beatrice to guide him, into heaven. It would not have been medieval had it not been an allegory: our human life is always a hell, says the poet, until wisdom (Virgil) purges us of evil desire, and love (Beatrice) lifts us to happiness and peace.

Dante himself never knew such peace, but remained to the end an exile, dark of countenance and soul, as Giotto painted him. People remarked that he was never known to smile, and they spoke of him, in awe, as the man who had returned from hell. Broken and worn, and prematurely old, he died at Ravenna in 1321, only fifty-six years of age. Seventy-five years later Florence begged for the ashes of him whom, alive, she would have burned at the stake, but Ravenna refused. His tomb still stands as one of the great monuments of that half-Byzantine city. There, five hundred years after Dante, another exile—Byron—knelt, and understood.