Dante and the Renaissance 213
if he had a hundred million compatriots. Dante knew
power, battle, exile. He was a writer on political subjects,
a philologist, a physicist, a scholastic philosopher, and a
theologian; he was an artist too—what would the world
give to recover those “angels” that Dante was fond of
drawing!1 He was even a husband and a father. And as
though his life were not full to the brim, he found time to be
all the time, and most of all, a poet and a lover. Whatever
he did was done with an intensity, with a magnificent arro-
gance of personal power, which have never been equaled by
any prophet of the strenuous life. “He trusted in himself
more than in any other,” he quietly proclaims. He was
irked by party loyalties, cursed his friends as vehemently
as his foes, and stood, as such men must stand, erect and
alone. The “Vita Nuova” is the first autobiographic
romance; but it is in the “Comedy” that the heights of pas-
sionate self-assertion are reached—in the poem which,
paradoxically enough, was meant to express the common
beliefs of his age. It is the Human Soul which is taken on
that pilgrimage through the triple realm of the life beyond.
But it is, first of all, Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, with
his alert senses, his fears, his fierce private hatreds, his
great mystic love. He does not hesitate in consigning his
personal enemies to the lowest hell; and of Beatrice he said,
as he had promised, that which had never been said of any
woman. Of medieval self-effacement there is in all this no
trace : we find the virility of self-reliance, and almost the
lawlessness of exulting pride—in a word, virtù.
Yet what are the names that embody most strikingly that
ideal of virtiι at the time of the Renaissance? Machiavelli,
his idol Cesare Borgia, and Aretino: the man of genius who
had lost his moral star; the princely ruffian; the brigand of
1 “Vita Nuova,” XXXV.