Doubtless, his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no doubt. And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record to all ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men governed. That he should take the deepest interest in the goings on of his time, is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the _Commedia_ in their own mother-tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it--maintained with great labour and pertinacious ingenuity--that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal triumph of a political party. The hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon, cant, and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works, by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's Historic Doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness.[73] [Footnote 73: In the _Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam_ is a paper, in which he examines and disposes of this theory with a courteous and forbearing irony, which would have deepened probably into something more, on thinking over it a second time.] Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an Imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party[74]; and he acted with them for a time.[75] But no words can be stronger than those in which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his independence-- A te fia bello _Averti fatto parte per te stesso_.[76] [Footnote 74: _Dino Comp._ pp. 89-91.] [Footnote 75: His name appears among the White delegates in 1307. Pelli, p. 117.] [Footnote 76: _Parad._ 17.]