sion as the supreme judge of men. The Popes, faithless to Him who gave them their commission, could no longer claim to be His representatives on earth.

In the soul of Dante there rose instinctively the desire to take the place of these faithless vicars, and to judge them as God Himself would have judged them. He desired to exercise to the full extent of his power that judicial authority which the Popes had forgotten. But he was none the less resolved to remain within the Church, since for all its decadence it still represented the unbroken Christian tradition. He had no wish to become the leader of a revolt, or to overthrow the existing hierarchy. He chose the instrument which was most familiar to himart-and composed a poem which is not, as certain critics maintain, an anticlerical pamphlet, but rather a true actus pontificalis.

But if we are thoroughly to understand the significance of this act of his we must realize that his idea of divine vicarage was very different from that represented by the Roman tradition. The Catholic church was primarily a continuation of the apostolic service of Christ, and the Pope, as vicar of Christ, devoted himself especially to the spiritual education of men. The institution of the Mass as a daily symbol of man's redemption from sin, the confessional,

the propagation of the faith among the heathen-all these are proofs of the primarily pedagogical and moralizing purpose of the church. The church was the teacher of the world, and in Christ the church saw primarily the teacher of moral and eternal truths.

Dante, on the other hand, had in mind a part of the doctrine of Christ to which the Popes had given relatively slight importance: the idea of the Last Judgment. God is not only the God who enlightens and saves mankind, but the God who, on a terrible distant day, will judge the quick and the dead. The idea of the Last Judgment, so tragically expressed throughout the Middle Ages in hymns, in mosaic, and in painting, had not been hitherto associated with the idea of the Papacy.

Dante, aware that God is not only a teacher but a judge, and believing it necessary that God should have a vicar on earth, chose to represent Him rather as judge than as teacher. In this intent he conceived the Divine Comedy, which is, in fact, an anticipatory Last Judgment.

Dante knows that the world has not come to an end, that the roll of the dead is not yet complete; but he takes all peoples, all generations, from the Hebrew patriarchs to the leaders of his own day, and distributes them in the three realms even as God would have done. He takes the

place of God, forestalls the great Assize, exalts to the spheres or thrusts down into infernal caverns the souls of cowardly Popes, proud emperors, rapacious captains, enamored ladies, saints and warriors, hermits and thinkers, poets and politicians. No one is overlooked. Beside the queens of the thirteenth century appear the women of the Old Testament; beside the consuls of Rome, the painters of Tuscany. The king but newly dead converses with the Greek or Roman poet; the Christian martyr with the Florentine warrior.

Each has his penalty or his reward. Dante walks among them all in the guise of a spectator, but he is in reality their judge. The Divine Comedy is the Dies irae of a great spirit which cannot wait for the manifestation of divine wrath, and assigns a place provisionally to every man. It is an incomplete Vale of Jehoshaphat, in which all the dead are gathered, while beyond the dread hills the renewal of life goes on.

Dante felt that his genius was a divine investiture which gave him the right to judge those who had lived before his time. He was so sure of being a better representative of God than the venal priests and intriguing Popes of his experience that he did not hesitate to thrust into Hell men who passed themselves off before their fellow men as vicars and ministers of God. Thus

from a lofty throne, more enduring than bronze, the Florentine poet pronounces terrible condemnations which have not yet been canceled. He seems verily, by the power of his art, to compel God to ratify his sentences.

III

Only one man since Dante's time has achieved a conception of equal grandeur-and that man is Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel is the only worthy illustration of the Divine Comedy.

I have sometimes imagined a tremendous drama of the Last Judgment, the words to be written by Dante, the music to be composed by Palestrina-save that for the trumpets of the angel who is to wake the dead (think of the sound of trumpets that will wake even from the sleep of death!) I should have sought the aid of Richard Wagner.

Should there come to the throne of St. Peter a Pope with daring and initiative, he might well cover the quattrocentist frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel-frescoes that yield but incidental charm-and in their place inscribe, in fair red characters, the whole Divine Comedy, in the presence of its only worthy interpretation: the Last Judgment of Michelangelo.

III

LEONARDO DA VINCI

"Philosophieren ist vivificieren."

-NOVALIS.

I

HISTORIANS affirm with a surprising unanimity that in the Year of Grace 1452 there was born in the town of Vinci a child who received the fair name of Leonardo, and became famous throughout Italy and beyond the Alps. And they go on to tell how he was taken to Florence and apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, how he began to paint with marvelous skill, how he went to the court of Milan-and many other things which the reader surely knows much better than I. If he doesn't, he may find them duly set forth by the said historians-from the beloved unknown writer of the Gaddi manuscript, or the popular Vasari (equally famous for his horrible frescoes and his extraordinary misinformation), down to the latest biographers of Leonardo, whom I will not even name, lest I seem too erudite.