It has been commonly
assumed that Dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he
took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with his fallen
fortunes, and that his theory of life and of man's relations to it was
altogether reshaped for him by the bitter musings of his exile. This
would be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us that he "felt
himself indeed four-square against the strokes of chance," and whose
convictions were so intimate that they were not merely intellectual
conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortunately we are called on
to believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints
and dates which enable us to watch the germination and trace the growth
of his double theory of government, applicable to man as he is a citizen
of this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the
celestial city. It would be of little consequence to show in which of two
equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six
hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know that a man of
ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of
factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all.
Dante's opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from
living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned
out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not
weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the
hour.
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