erty of
materials and means which the poet allowed himself in working out his
design.

Doubtless his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt.
And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all
ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That
he should take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part
of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he
subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of
his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet
this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who
read the _Commedia_ in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained
as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labor and
pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than
the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred
cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the
Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and
scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in
all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang
of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the
greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to
which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to
solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in
which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or
infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and
even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic
doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries
of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
blindness.

Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an
imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party.
It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up,
and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were
at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party; and he acted with
them for a time. But no words can be stronger than those in which he
disjoins himself from that "evil and foo