New tributes to the genius of Dante will be offered by our generation,
for already great preparations are under way in all parts of Italy and
the literary world to commemorate in 1921, the six hundredth anniversary
of the death of the author of the greatest of all Christian poems. The
question naturally suggests itself: Has not the world moved forward many
centuries from Dante's viewpoint and lost interest in many things
regarded as truths or at least as burning issues by Dante? Who is now
concerned with the Ptolomaic system of astronomy, which is so often the
subject of Dante's thought? Who is now interested in the tragic
jealousies and injustices suffered by the people of Florence which led
to the bitter feuds that helped to make Dante the great poet? Who, in
this twentieth century so intent upon making the world safe for
democracy, has sympathy with Dante's advocated scheme of a world-wide
absolute monarchy as the cure for the ills of the society of his day?
Is this generation which sees Italy united as a result of the overthrow
of the Papal states, so universally concerned with Papal claims which
were matters of vital importance to Dante and his generation? Is our
era, which unfortunately looks upon religion as a negligible factor and
not as the animating principle of life, interested in the golden age of
faith of which Dante is the embodiment, and his message in which the
eternal is the object?

Yet, Dante's following is today larger than ever before; his empire over
minds and hearts is more extensive. The moving pictures feature his
Inferno; the press issues, even in languages not his own, such a mass of
books and articles concerning him that a specialist can hardly keep
track of the output. In the universities, especially of Harvard, Cornell
and Columbia, not to speak of those in other lands, the courses on Dante
attract an unusually large number of students. Outside of the academic