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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Great Men as
Prophets of a New Era
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Great Men as Prophets of a New Era
Author: Newell Dwight Hillis
Release date: August 1, 2019 [eBook #60038]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David T. Jones, L. Harrison, Al Haines & the
online Project Gutenberg team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT MEN AS
PROPHETS OF A NEW ERA ***
Great Men as Prophets
of a New Era
By Newell Dwight Hillis
REBUILDING EUROPE IN THE FACE OF WORLD-WIDE BOLSHEVISM
THE BLOT ON THE KAISER'S 'SCUTCHEON
Cloth,
GERMAN ATROCITIES
Cloth,
Each 12mo. cloth,
STUDIES OF THE GREAT WAR
What Each Nation Has at Stake
LECTURES AND ORATIONS BY HENRY WARD BEECHER
Collected by Newell Dwight Hillis
THE MESSAGE OF DAVID SWING TO HIS GENERATION
Compiled, with Introductory Memorial Address
by Newell Dwight Hillis
ALL THE YEAR ROUND
Sermons for Church and Civic Celebrations
THE BATTLE OF PRINCIPLES
A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict
THE CONTAGION OF CHARACTER
Studies in Culture and Success
THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC
Studies, National and Patriotic, upon the America of To-day and To-
morrow
GREAT BOOKS AS LIFE-TEACHERS
Studies of Character, Real and Ideal
THE INVESTMENT OF INFLUENCE
A Study of Social Sympathy and Service
A MAN'S VALUE TO SOCIETY
Studies in Self-Culture and Character
FORETOKENS OF IMMORTALITY
12mo. cloth,
HOW THE INNER LIGHT FAILED
18mo. cloth,
RIGHT LIVING AS A FINE ART
A Study of Channing's Symphony
12mo. boards,
THE MASTER OF THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT LIVING
12mo. boards,
ACROSS THE CONTINENT OF THE YEARS
16mo. old English boards,
THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME
Great Men as Prophets
of a New Era
By
NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
Author of "The Investment of Influence,"
"A Man's Value to Society," "Great
Books as Life Teachers"
New York Chicago
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1922, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
Foreword
Great institutions are the shadows that great men cast across the
centuries. A great law, a great liberty, a great art or tool or reform
represents a great soul, organized, and made unconsciously
immortal for all time. Explorers trace the Nile or Amazon back to the
lake in which the river takes its rise. Historians trace institutions back
to some hero from whose mind and heart the life-giving movement
pours forth. When the scholar travels back to the far-off beginnings
of jurisprudence, he comes to some Moses, toiling in Thebes, to
some Solon in Athens, to some Justinian in Rome. Not otherwise the
renaissance of painting, sculpture, and architecture begins with
some Giotto, some Michael Angelo, some Christopher Wren. Scholars
often speak of history as narratory or philosophical, but in the last
analysis, history is biographical. These studies were prepared for the
students of Plymouth Institute in the belief that biography is life's
wisest teacher, and that the lives of great men are the most inspiring
books to be found in our libraries.
N. D. H.
Plymouth Institute,
Brooklyn, N. Y.
Contents
I. Dante, and the 9
Dawn After the
Dark Ages
(1265–1321)
II. Savonarola, and 34
the Renaissance of
Conscience
(1452–1498)
III. William the Silent, 55
and Brave Little
Holland
(1533–1584)
IV. Oliver Cromwell, 84
and the Rise of
Democracy in
England
(1599–1658)
V. John Milton, the 115
Scholar in Politics
(1608–1674)
VI. John Wesley, and 143
the Moral
Awakening of the
Common People
(1703–1791)
VII. Garibaldi, the Idol 166
of the New Italy
(1807–1882)
VIII. John Ruskin, and 190
the Diffusion of the
Beautiful
(1819–1900)
Index 217
I
DANTE
(1265–1321)
And the Dawn After the Dark Ages
All scholars are agreed as to the classes of men who build the State.
There are the soldiers who keep the State in liberty, the physicians
who keep the State in health, the teachers who sow the land with
wisdom and knowledge, the farmers and merchants who feed and
clothe the people, the prophets who keep the visions burning, and
the poets who inspire and fertilize the soul of the race. But in every
age and clime, the poet has been the real builder of his city and
country. The only kind of work that lives forever is the work of the
poet. Parthenons and cathedrals crumble, tools rust, bridges decay,
bronzes melt, but the truth, put in artistic work, survives war, flood,
fire, and the tooth of time itself. "The poet's power," said George
William Curtis, "is not dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like
that of the statesman, the warrior and the inventor. But it is as deep
and as strong and abiding. The soldier fights for his native land, but
the poet makes it worth fighting for. The statesman enlarges liberty,
but the poet fosters that love in the heart of the citizen. The inventor
multiplies the conveniences of life, but the poet makes the life itself
worth living. We cannot find out the secret of his power. Until we
know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow
beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of
humanity. But we know that the poet is the harmonizer, strengthener
and consoler, and that the inexpressible mystery of Divine Love and
purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem."
By common consent the three great poets of the world are Homer,
Dante and Shakespeare; and of the three, the two supreme names
are Dante and Shakespeare. After six centuries, what Hallam said
nearly a hundred years ago still holds true: "Dante's orbit is his own,
and the track of his wheels can never be confounded with that of
any rival." Dante was the greatest man of his country, he wrote the
greatest book of his era, he started the greatest intellectual
movement of any age or time. The influence of his thinking upon the
people of Italy, the Italy of his own day and of succeeding
generations, is one of the marvels of history. He was the interpreter
of his age to itself; but he was also the interpreter of man to all
ages. Some names there are whose light shines brightly for a brief
time, after the fashion of the falling stars, but Dante's emblem is the
sun, whose going forth is unto the ends of the earth, and whose
shining brings universal summer.
Dante has been well-called the "Morning Star of the Renaissance."
He was born at the end of, perhaps, the darkest period in history,—
the five black centuries succeeding the fall of Rome; he lived to see
the first fruits of his own sowing—that wonderful rebirth of art and
culture which was to culminate, two hundred years later, in the
canvases of Raphael and the sculptures of Michael Angelo. It has
been beautifully said that before singing his song Dante had to
invent his harp. No graceful phrase ever had a sounder kernel of
truth. Great poets are more than great artists in language; they
create languages, and Dante, like his two great compeers, Homer
and Shakespeare, moulded and shaped the tongue for future
generations. He began his career at a moment when the Latin
tongue was dying and the Italian language was still waiting to be
born. He took the vulgar speech of his own day and gave it colour
and richness, form and substance, eternal dignity and beauty. What
Homer did for the Greek language, what King Alfred's Bible did for
English literature, that, and more, did Dante for the Italian tongue.
The influence of his thinking upon the people of Italy is indicated by
the fact that The Divine Comedy was printed three times in the one
year of 1472, nine times before the fifteenth century ended, and, to-
day, there are literally thousands of volumes in the libraries of the
world upon Dante and his poems. With loving extravagance
d'Annunzio said at the great celebration held last year in Italy:
"Single-handed Dante created Italy, as Michael Angelo by sheer force
of genius created his Moses, and made it the supreme marble in
history."
No one has ever been able to define genius, though many scholars
have told us what genius is not. Many men in the English lecture
halls and universities had talent, but that stablekeeper's son, John
Keats, had genius. More than one of the four hundred members of
the House of Lords during Charles the Second's reign had talent, but
a poor tinker, John Bunyan, had genius, that blazed like the sun.
There were multitudes of men living in the Thirteen Colonies, and
many of them rich, but that poor boy flying a kite, Benjamin
Franklin, had the divine gift. Not otherwise, many men living in
Florence at the end of the thirteenth century had talent, but Dante
Alighieri had the gift, and he towered above his fellows as Monte
Rosa towers above the burning plains of Italy. Strictly speaking,
Dante's gift was not that of the poet alone. He was a moralist as well
as a poet—above all others, the singer of man's soul. He believed
himself to be ordained of God to explain the moral order of the
universe, man's share in that order, his duty and his destiny. Blind
Homer gave us the immortal Iliad and Odyssey, but Homer was a
poet, not a teacher, and if there are lessons in the story of Achilles
and Ulysses we have to learn those lessons for ourselves.
Shakespeare, the organ-voice of England, gave us Lear and Hamlet,
Othello and Macbeth, but Shakespeare was a poet, not a teacher,
and Macbeth's sin, written though it is in letters of fire, is
nevertheless accompanied by no comments of the author. Not so
with the immortal Comedy of Dante. For Dante was a teacher first,
and a poet afterward. Without the brilliancy of intellect or the
compass of achievements that were Shakespeare's, without the
directness or the simplicity of Homer, he was more serious than
either. He had the passion of a reformer, the fiery courage of a
prophet. He poured his very heart's blood into his pages. Hating
oppression, he was like one specially raised up to point the path to
peace, and to vindicate the ways of God to man.
The great thinker was born in Florence in the year 1265. His era was
the era of the Dark Ages; his century one of the submerged
centuries. For five hundred years black darkness had lain upon the
world. It was an era of war, when barons were constantly at strife.
Feudalism was entrenched behind stone walls, the landowners were
masters, and the serfs were slaves. Every road was infested with
bandits. There was no shipping upon the Mediterranean. The
mariner's compass had not yet been invented. Commerce was scant
and factories almost unknown. Men lived, for the most part, on
coarse bread and vegetables, without luxuries, and without what we
call the simplest necessities. The common people were huddled in
miserable villages, behind stone walls, with unpaved streets and
windowless houses, in which ignorance, filth, squalor, and bestiality
prevailed. Peasants wore the same leather garments for a lifetime.
The dead were buried under the churches. Prisoners rotted in
dungeons under the banqueting hall of the castle. Two hundred
years were to pass before Columbus set foot upon the deck of the
Santa Maria. Two hundred and fifty years were to pass before
Michael Angelo could lift the dome above St. Peter's. But if the
peasant was ignorant, and the poor man wretched, the nobleman
and courtier was the child of luxury and gilded vice. It was an age of
contrasts so violent as to be all but incredible to the modern reader.
There were no books, for the art of printing was still to be invented,
yet in an age of parchment manuscripts young noblemen were
taught to speak in verse and to write in rhymed pentameters. There
was no science of geography and the world was believed to be a flat
board with a fence around it. Yet in this era, when few men could
spell and fewer read, the very monks in the monasteries were
writing theses on problems so abstract as to weary the modern
scholar. For five hundred years the world had looked to the Church,
but the Church had descended to the perpetration of crimes so
terrible, that their mere chronicle sickens the heart and chills the
blood.
Into this world of paradox and contradiction—a world of gloom, shot
through with fitful gleams of superstition—was born Dante, the poet
of love and hope and divine regeneration. We know little of Dante's
parentage, as we know all too little of his life, but this much we do
know—the family was the noble family of the Alighieri, followers and
supporters of the party then in power in Florence. Dante was
educated by his mother, and by his mother's relative, the scholar-
poet Brunetto Latini. Like John Stuart Mill he was a mental prodigy
from infancy. Like Milton he was trained in the strictest academical
education which the age afforded. Like Bacon he was a universal
scholar before he passed out of his teens. Like Pope he thought and
wrote in verse before he could write in prose. Among his friends and
intimates were the poets Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoria, Dino
Frescobaldi and Lapo Guianni, the musician Casella and the artist
Giotto. With such companions and under such guidance, Dante
mastered all the sciences of the day at a time when it was not
impossible to know all that could be known.
But dreamer and student though he was, he early insisted upon
sharing the burdens of the State. On two occasions he bore arms for
his country. While still in his twenties he was offered the post of
ambassador to Rome; before he was thirty he had represented his
native city at foreign courts, and from his thirtieth to his thirty-fifth
year his voice was heard with growing frequency in municipal affairs.
In the summer of the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years of
age, he was chosen as one of the Priors, or magistrates, of Florence.
The opening year of the new century—the year in which Giotto was
meditating his immortal Duomo, with its famous tower—was ushered
in by a civic revolution in Florence. Dante, with other innocent
citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. A
statesman, he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a
man of property, he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of
men, he was forced to humble himself and live on foreign alms.
Inspired by the noblest intentions, the world gave him no thanks,
but drove him forth like a wild beast, branded his name with foul
crimes and condemned him to wander over the hills of Italy till death
at last gave him release. He never saw Florence again. For years he
knew poverty, neglect and hatred. Sick with the noise of political
dissension, he strained his eyes toward the hills for the appearance
of a universal monarch; but the vision was never realized. We know
but little of his wanderings. Many cities and castles have claimed the
honour of giving him shelter; we know only that in old age he was
compelled to "climb the stranger's toilsome stairs, and eat the bitter
bread of others."
Such, briefly sketched, is the life-history of this man who has been
called "the voice of ten silent centuries." In an era of luxury he had
lived simply and frugally; in an era of debate and publicity, he had
preferred seclusion; drawn at last into public life by his own sense of
duty, he had been driven forth into exile, to die alone in a foreign
city. It is the greatness of Dante that, in spite of defeat and
disappointment, in spite of every form of hardship, in the face of
every conceivable form of adversity, he went on with his work and
completed his masterpiece, the greatest achievement in the whole
history of Italian literature. Out of his own heart-break he distilled
hope and encouragement for others and from the broken harmonies
of his own life he created a world-symphony.
The best-loved books in our libraries are books of heroism, books of
eloquence, books of success, and books of love. It is a matter of
misfortune that no history of human love has ever been written.
Scholars have set forth the history of wars, the history of engines
and ships, the history of laws and reforms, but no library holds a
history of the greatest gift of man, the gift of love. That is the one
creative gift that belongs to his soul. Beyond all other writers, the
author of the Divine Comedy is the poet of love. Love was the
inspiration of his youth, the beacon of his middle life and the
transfiguring glory of his old age. All his poems are monuments to
the abiding and ennobling power of a pure passion. His love for
Beatrice has fascinated the generations, and remains to-day one of
the few immortal love stories of the world, as moving as the
romance of Abelard and Héloise, and infinitely more exalting. No
understanding of his poems is possible without a knowledge of that
love and its tremendous influence upon his life and work.
Beatrice Portinari, the object of Dante's devotion, was the daughter
of a merchant, living in a street not far from his father's house.
Dante saw her but a few times, and she died when he was twenty-
seven, but from the moment when, on that bright spring morning,
he first viewed her lovely face, his whole heart and mind were
kindled. "She appeared to me," he writes, "at a festival, dressed in
that most noble and honourable colour, scarlet—girden and
ornamented in a manner suitable to her age, and from that moment
love ruled my soul. After many days had passed, it happened that
passing through the streets, she turned her eyes to the spot where I
stood, and with ineffable courtesy, she greeted me, and this had
such an effect on me that it seemed I had reached the furthest limit
of blessedness." He describes but three other meetings. While he
was absent from the city—probably during one of the two campaigns
in which he fought—her father gave her in marriage to another man.
She was only twenty-four when she died.
No one will ever know whether Beatrice was indeed the loveliest girl
in Italy; whether she really was the daughter of intellect, or whether
the greatness was in Dante, who projected the image of beauty,
created by his imagination and superimposed upon Beatrice. We all
know that it is within the power of the sun in the late afternoon to
cast the brilliant hues of gold and purple upon the vine and
transform slender tendrils into purest gold. Dante had a powerful
intellect, the finest imagination of any known artist, vast moral
endowments—gifts, however, that in themselves are impotent. The
sailing vessel, no matter how large the sails, is helpless until the
winds fill the canvas, and hurl the cargo toward some far-off port.
Just as Abelard waited for the coming of Héloise; just as Robert
Browning's soul was never properly enkindled before the coming of
Elizabeth Barrett, so the intellect of Dante waited for Beatrice. The
quality and quantity of flame in the fireplace is not determined by
the size of the match that kindles the fire, but by the quality of fuel
that waits for the spark. The strength and power of Dante's
attachment was in the vast endowments of his soul, and not in
Beatrice. It may well be that thirty years later, Dante, who realized
that he was the strongest man then living in the world and who was
at once a scholar, a statesman and a soldier, during the solitude of
his exile in a distant city turned his mind backward and broke the
alabaster box of genius upon the head of a commonplace girl, just
as Raphael lent the beauty of St. Cecilia to the face and figure of a
flower-woman, a girl whose face and figure furnished the outlines
for his drawing, but held no part of the divine, ineffable and dazzling
loveliness of an angel.
Whatever the truth—and there is little chance that we shall ever
know the truth—this much is certain: Dante's earliest long poem, the
famous "Vita Nuova" (New Life) celebrates his love for Beatrice, and
is nothing more than a journal of the heart, a secret diary of his
emotions. The Vita Nuova is as far removed from the modern
sentimental love tale as June is removed from some almanac
prepared a year in advance of the weather changes predicted. It
records Dante's first glimpse of Beatrice, the adoration she
awakened in him, and the fervour of devotion to which she lifted
him; it describes his premonition of her death, and it ends with his
resolve to devote his remaining years to her memory. The last
chapter of the book looks forward to the Divine Comedy. About a
year after Beatrice's death, he writes: "It was given me to behold a
wonderful vision, wherein I saw things which determined me to say
nothing further of this blessed one unto such time as I could
discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I
can, as she in truth knoweth. Therefore if it be His pleasure through
whom is the life of all things that my life continue with me a few
years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath
not before been written of any woman." Completed years later, the
immortal Comedy exists to-day as the most wonderful tribute to a
woman ever penned by any poet.
In a mood of lofty pride, Dante placed himself among the six great
poets of all time. To-day, all scholars applaud the accuracy and
humility of his judgment. Every strong man knows what he can do.
He is conscious of his own vast reserves. So often has he measured
himself with his fellow-men that he realizes the number, the
magnitude and relative strength of his divine endowments. All men
of the first order of genius have realized the endowment they have
received from God and their fathers. And the Divine Comedy justifies
Dante's pride in his own powers. It cannot be classified with a
phrase nor dismissed with a label. It is not a poem, like one of
Tennyson's Idylls of the King; it is rather an encyclopedia upon Italy.
It is at one and the same moment an autobiography, a series of
personal reminiscences, a philosophy, an oration and the spiritual
pilgrimage of a thirteenth century Childe Harold, with here and there
a lyric poem. The motive which inspired Dante was his sense of the
wretchedness of man in this mortal life. The only means of rescue
from this wretchedness he conceived to be the exercise of reason,
enlightened by God. To convince man of this truth, to bring home to
him the conviction of the eternal consequences of his conduct in this
world, to show him the path of salvation, was Dante's aim. To lend
force and beauty to such a design he conceived the poem as an
allegory, and made himself to be its protagonist. He depicts a vision,
in which the poet is conducted first by Virgil, as the representative of
human reason, through Hell and Purgatory, and then by Beatrice, as
the representative of divine revelation, through Paradise to the
Heaven, where at last he beholds the triune God.
The action of the Divine Comedy opens in the early morning of the
Thursday before Easter in the year 1300. Dante dreams that he had
"reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an
obscure forest." He would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the
way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of
the world—cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. Then
the shade of Virgil appears, representing the intellect and
conscience, glorified—to serve as his guide in the long wanderings
through the Inferno. Virgil tells him he can accompany him only
