and country estates to which they may flee from pestilence, famine and war; so we have the art of architecture. Because these homes have walls which must be decorated, we have the art of painting; and so on through a long list of cultural accomplishments. Moreover, not all ladies and gentlemen have been able to exclude the natural human emotions from their hearts; so in leisure-class art we have sentiments and sentimentalities. We like to be sorry for the poor, provided they are "worthy"; so we have "idylls" and other sad, sweet tales. When we are sick with ennui, we like to imagine going back to the country; so we have a long line of "return to nature" arts-eclogues and bucolics and pastorals, with beautiful shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on the green, and country lads and lasses giving touchingly quaint imitations of the manners of their betters.

Also we have in this leisure-class world vestigial traces of the sense of duty. We take this sense and refine it or exaggerate it, making it into something fantastic, stimulating to jaded tastes. So we find in Boccaccio the famous story of the "patient Griselda," a leisure-class model of wifely fidelity and humility. She is married to a monster, who subjects her to every indignity the perverted imagination can conceive; but she endures all things, and continues to be his patient and devoted slave, and in the end she conquers her tormentor, and brings about the necessary happy ending. The legend of this most convenient lady represents a popular form of masculine wish-fulfillment.

Giovanni Boccaccio died in ripe old age, and the Catholic Church took cognizance of his popularity among the Italian people by preparing an expurgated and authorized edition of his "Decameron." From this edition they omitted no word of the obscenities, but they changed each of the stories so that wherever Boccaccio described indecencies committed by priests and monks and holy popes, the said indecencies were transferred to laymen! The tales of this darling of the Italian leisure class remain today one of the most popular of books, which every dirty old boy keeps hidden in his trunk, and every dirty young boy reads under his desk while the professor of moral philosophy is lecturing on the social responsibilities of great wealth.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE MUCKRAKER'S HELL

Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with suffering; "the mournfulest face," says Carlyle, "that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face." There has never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he believed to be sound ideas about conduct.

Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a cruel hardship; he describes himself as "a pilgrim, almost a beggar, displaying against my will the wounds of fortune. ... Truly have I been a vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty." Yet he never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile he died.

We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician, and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards them may be judged by the

case of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair and tears it out by the handful!

The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, "cupiditia." He raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the "fatal gift" from the Emperor Constantine-the temporal possessions which made the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that each of them "has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth." This is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century!

It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a book entitled "Dante and Other Waning Classics," in which he argues that the “Divine Comedy" is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly Dante does not shirk this issue-he tells us in plain words: "The kind of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for speculation but for use."

What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our only advantage over him is that we do not even think

we can answer.

The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So

the simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of the Middle Ages; and Dante's whole being, his total art product, was illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without physical expression through the poet's whole life. No student of the science of sex today would accept Dante's attitude as sound or sensible; nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul.

In Dante's pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil. This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have stressed-the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a civilization. In Dante's time the cultured world was just making the discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or re-birth, we call it.

We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords, and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day, wishing to satirize the "war for democracy" by locating its leaders in hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America.

And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer, for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail; the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soapbox propaganda.

So the cultured Renaissance critics looked upon

Dante as a crude and "popular" person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke patronizingly concerning "the rustic homeliness of his language and style, his lack of decorum and grace." If space permitted I could show you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt with by the academic critics of his own time.

CHAPTER XXX

THE PIOUS POISONERS

The Italian princes were no more influenced by the moral austerity of Dante than the Roman ruling class had been by Virgil. Medieval Italy traveled the same road as imperial Rome, and two centuries after Dante we find the vicars of God on earth reproducing the worst crimes of the Neros and Caligulas. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, purchased his high office, and then set to work to plunder the cities of Italy and harry the whole peninsula with war. Among his children by his numerous mistresses was Cesare Borgia, who became the commander of the papal armies, and slaughtered and poisoned all who stood in his way, including his own brother. Returning from his wars, he would amuse himself by using his prisoners of war as targets for archery practice in the courtyard of the Vatican. In the end Cesare died of wounds, Alexander died by poison, and his daughter Lucrezia poisoned her own son and then herself.

Here was an ideal environment for the development of leisure-class art. These popes and princes built themselves magnificent palaces, and as a measure of soul-insurance they built cathedrals and churches. They were willing to spend fortunes upon famous artists; and the artists, needless to say, were willing to take the money. Browning has a poem, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," a vivid picture of the attitude of mind of these pious poisoners and artistic assassins. The bishop lies upon his couch dying, and his sons, politely known as "nephews," gather about him to hear his vision of a tomb which is to preserve his memory and bring peace to his soul. He describes the treasures of beauty which are to go upon the tomb