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DANTE:

"THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD."

A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body
of the New York State College for Teachers,
Albany, 1919, 1920

BY

JOHN T. SLATTERY, Ph.D.

WITH A PREFACE BY
JOHN H. FINLEY, L.H.D.

New York
P. J. Kenedy & Sons

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BYP. J. KENEDY & SONS,
NEW YORK

Printed in U.S.A.

DEDICATION

THIS MODEST WORK OWES ITS
PUBLICATION TO THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF

PRESIDENT ABRAM R. BRUBACHER

AND

DEAN HARLAN H. HORNER

OF THE STATE COLLEGE FOR TEACHERS, ALBANY, N.Y.

WHERE MANY PLEASANT HOURS WERE PASSED IN
DELIVERING THESE LECTURES. TO THESE FRIENDS
AND TO THE STUDENT-BODY OF THE COLLEGE THE
AUTHOR HAS THE HONOR OF DEDICATING THIS BOOK

PREFACE

I stand as does the reader at the entrance to this book which I have notas yet entered myself. I have before me the journey through the Infernoand Purgatorio, into Paradise, with a new companion. I have made thejourney before many times with others, or with Dante and Virgil alone,but I know that I shall enjoy especially the companionship and commentof one with whom I have had such satisfaction of comradeship in ourjourney as neighbors for a little way across this earth. I inviteothers, and I hope they may be many, to make this brief journey withus, not because I know specifically what Dr. Slattery will say alongthe way, but because whatever he says out of his deep and reverentacquaintance with the Divine Comedy will help us all who follow him,whether we are of his particular faith or not, to an appreciation ofthe meaning of this immortal poem, and make us desire to go again andagain in our reading through these spaces of the struggles of human souls.

A world-literary-movement will commemorat in 1921 the six hundredthanniversary of the death of the immortal Dante. That a medievalistshould call forth the homage of the twentieth century to the extent ofbeing honored in all civilized lands and by cultured peoples who, forthe most part, do not know the language spoken by him, or who do notprofess the religion of him who wrote the most religious book ofChristianity, is a marvel explainable by the fact that the Divine Comedyis a drama of the soul,—the story of a struggle which every man mustmake to possess his own spirit against forces that would enslave it. Thecentral interest of the poem is in the individual who may be you or Iinstead of Dante the subject of the work, and that fact exalts thepersonal element and gives the spiritual value which we of modern timesappreciate as well as did the thirteenth century.

The Divine Comedy is attractive for other reasons. It may appeal to usas it did to Tennyson, because of "its divine intensity," or it mayaffect us as it did Charles Eliot Norton by "its powerful exposition ofmoral penalties and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable;or it may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength ofconception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, itsperfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect."Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his DivineComedy will ever be both a discipline "not so much to elevate ourthoughts," says Coleridge, "as to send them down deeper," and a delightcalling forth the deepest emotions of our being.