DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 15 September 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

DANTE: POET AND SOLDIER

(By

“Historicus.”)

Dante, soldier, statesman, poet and wanderer, died on September 14, 1321. The passage of time has only made his name the greater. His full name was Durante Alighieri, and his family was, by his own account, one of the most illustrious in Florence. The life of Dante contains, probably, the greatest story of pure idealism the world has known. That of Dante and Beatrice is not a tale of love. It raised itself to the worship of an ideal. At nine he saw her, a child of his own age, and throughout his life she remained his inspiration. He never married her, in fact it is doubtful whether he spoke to her more than once, but she lived long in his heart as a symbol of woman’s beauty and purity. Undoubtedly she had an immense effect upon his work. With Shakespeare, Milton and Homer, Dante stands among the world’s supreme poets, with a majesty of imagination unsurpassed. He made Italian a real langu'age. He stands in history between two great ages—the mediaeval times behind him and the first lights of the modem world breaking before him. His Divine Comedy is a picture of the future life of man as it was conceived in the middle ages—through hell to paradise, Beatrice conducting him through paradise. Political troubles made him a wanderer for 20 years, until he died disheartened and broken in spirit in Ravenna, where his tomb stands. £ Friend of Browning.

Crabbed, a little mad, but succoured by Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne, Walter Savage Landor died at Florence on September 17, 1864. He it was who wrote “I warmed both hands before the fire of life; it sinks and I am ready to depart.” The friendship of poets such as Browning and Swinburne proves that Landor had worth and genius. Otherwise we might dismiss him as a cold, pretentious man, not a poet save by flashes, making the most of his literary scholarship. He had his generous impulses. He went to Spain as a volunteer in 1808 to fight against the French in the Spanish national uprising. He began life as a man of means, the son of a country gentleman of Staffordshire. As a youth at Rugby and Oxford, he developed a love and keen understanding of classical poetry and art and he was dominated all his life by the impulse to shape English writing on classical lines. One might call him the Canova of English prose in the early Nineteenth Century. Naturally he took Milton for a master and a model. Yet he was a close friend of the Romantic Southey and he himself wrote books and a play of worse obscurity than any the Romantics produced. Landor squandered his patrimony, was constantly at law and chiefly • for these two reasons had to go abroad and settle in Florence, thereby helping in the Italian orientation of English nineteenth century culture, a change that Shelley had begun and Browning and Ruskin completed. That fact, and his “Imaginary Conversations” give him his chief importance in the history of English literature. “For Valour” in the Mutiny.

The story of the Indian Mutiny is a tale of heroes and fanatics, in which barbarities challenge the interest side by side with heroics. So much has been written of mass atrocities that individual has been squeezed into minor chapters. On September 14, 1857, the assault on Delhi opened. In the story of the storming there is nothing more soul-stirring than the gallant conduct of the men upon whom devolved the duty of blowing up the Cashmere Gate. Lieutenants Home and Salkeld, Sergeants Carmichael, Burgess and Smith, with a few 1 native sappers, and a bugler named Hawthorne, were told off for this heroic task. It was broad daylight and the design was easily perceived by the enemy. Home was the first to plant his bag of powder in the face of a hail of bullets. Carmichael, less fortunate, was killed almost immediately. Salkeld and Burgess were the next to fall. Smith’ then found himself alone at the gate. It was a critical moment. He, however, succeeded in striking a light and was applying it when a port, fire, which it was thought had been extinguished, went off in his face. In a confusion of smoke and dust he scrambled down into the ditch to the accompaniment of a flaming roar as the gate blew up. Here he found Home unhurt. Before the roar of the powder had died away the bugle of the steadfast Hawthorne had rung out the well-known notes telling their comrades to advance. There was little resistance. The exploding powder had killed all' the defenders of the gate except one. Home, Salkeld, Smith, and the bugler were awarded the Victoria Cross, a medal that had only been instituted a little' over a year previously. They were thus among the first of the small band of heroes to gain the coveted decoration. When India Mutinied.

Delhi , was captured, September 20, 1857. With distance nullified by the progress of science, it seems a little strange to-day, that, with the mutiny already some weeks old, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey was being celebrated in London, and the early cursory and casual discussion in Parliament provoked by the doubtful news that was beginning to arrive from India had not taken place. When the full story did come at last it swamped England in a flood of horror, it was terribly exaggerated. Stories of wholesale massacre, of degrading outrage, and vile mutilation filled the news columns. Meerut saw the outbreak, and it was allowed to spread to Delhi, 38 miles distant, where resided the aged and dissolute, so-called, King of Delhi. The mutineers proclaimed him Emperor of India, and thus found a leader, a flag, and a cause; and a military mutiny was converted into a religious and national war. They rushed through the streets to complete the massacre of the white man; scoured the European quarters with reeking blades, sparing no one. Throughout India Mahommedan and Hindu forgot their religious antipathies, and joined against the Christian. The grievance about the greased cartridges was but a chance spark flung amidst combustible material. Unconsciously they had seized one of the great critical moments of history. Some historians regard the incident as a fortunate one, precipitating as it did a great convulsion, which might, with more concerted operation later on, have been far more dangerous to the perpetuity of our rule.