22 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS As a statesman, Dante, like most of the Florentines, was at this time a Guelph, and an adherent of the papal party, though in later years he became, by mature conviction, a Ghibelline, and placed his hopes for Italy in the intervention of the emperor. The disputes between the Guelphs and Ghibellines were com- plicated by the party factions of Neri and Bianchi, and by the influence of Dante the leaders of both factions were banished from the city, and among them his dearest friend, Guido Cavalcanti. At this time Pope Boniface encouraged Charles of Valois to enter Florence with an army. Dante resisted the proposal, and was sent as an ambassador to Rome. During his absence a decree of banish- ment was passed upon him. The NerHaction triumphed. The house of Dante was sacked and burned. He never saw Florence more. The news of his sentence reached him in Siena, in April, 1302, and from that time began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow agony of his exile and bitter disappointment Disillusioned, separated from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it is to climb another's stairs. " Alas," he says, " I have gone about like a men- dicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without sail and without rudder, carried to divers shores by the dry wind that springs from poverty." In 13 16 he did indeed re- ceive from ungrateful Florence an offer of return, but on the unworthy conditions that he should pay a fine and publicly acknowledge his criminality. He scorned such recompense of his innocence after having suffered exile for well-nigh three lustres. " If," he wrote, "by no honorable way can entrance be found into Flor- ence, there will I never enter. What ? Can I not from every corner of the earth behold the sun and the stars ? Can I not under every climate of heaven meditate the sweetest truths, except I first make myself a man of ignominy in the face of Florence ? " Looking merely at outward success, men would have called the life of Dante a failure and his career a blighted career. But his misery was the condition of his immortal greatness. He endured for many a year the insults of the foolish and the company of the base, and on earth" he did not find the peace for which his heart so sorely yearned. He died in 1321, at the age of fifty-six, of a broken heart, and lies, not at the Florence which he loved, but at Ravenna, near the now blighted pine woods, on the bleak Adrian shore. But if he lost himself he found himself. He achieved his true greatness, not among the bloody squabbles of political intrigue, but in the achievement of his great works, and above all of that " Divine Comedy," which was " the imperishable monument of his love of Beatrice, now identified with Divine Philosophy his final gift to humanity and offering to God." On the consummate greatness of that poem as the one full and perfect voice of many silent centuries I only touch, for it would require a volume to elucidate its many-sided significance. It is not one thing, but many things. In one as- pect it is an autobiography as faithful as those of St. Augustine or of Rousseau,
