Now you must know that after that whimsical encounter of wit between
Dante and Simone, which I have already narrated, Messer Dante seemed to
change his mood again, as he had changed his mood oft-time before.
Messer Brunetto Latini saw much less of his promising pupil, and a
certain old soldier that was great at sword-play much more, and there
was less in Dante's life of the ancient philosophies and more of the
modern chivalries. I presently found out that Messer Dante, having taken
much to heart that gibing defiance of Simone of the Bardi, had set
himself, with that stubborn resolution which characterized all his
purposes, to making himself a master of the sword. Of this, indeed, he
said nothing to me or other man, but Florence, for all that it is so
great and famous a city, is none so large that a man can easily hide his
business there from the eyes of those that have a mind to find out that
business. So I learned that Dante, who had been, as I told you before,
no more than a passable master of the weapon, now set himself to gain
supremacy over it. Day after day, through long hours, Dante labored at
his appointed task, bracing his sinews, strengthening his muscles,
steadying his eye, doing, in a word, all that a spare and studious youth
must do who would turn himself into a strong and skilful soldier. And
because whatever Dante set head and heart and hand to he was like to
accomplish, I learned later what I guessed from the beginning--that his
patience had its reward.
By reason of his white-hot zeal and tireless determination, Dante gained
his desired end sooner than many a one whom nature had better moulded
for the purpose. And being of a generous eagerness to learn, he did not
content himself with mastering alone the more skilled usage of the
sword, but made his earnest study of the carriage and command of other
weapons, and he applied himself, besides, to the investigation of the
theory and practice of war as it is waged between great cities and great
states, and to the history of military affairs as they are set forth and
expounded in the lives of famous captains, such as Alexander, and Cæsar,
and their like. Had he been in expectation of sudden elevation to the
headship of the Republic, he could not have toiled more furiously, nor
more wisely devoured a week's lesson in a day, a month's lesson in a
week, a year's lesson in a month, with all the splendid madness of
desireful youth.
But the marvel of it all was that he did not suffer these studies,
arduous as they were, to eat up his time and his mind, but he kept store
of both to spare for yet another kind of enterprise no less exacting and
momentous, albeit to my mind infinitely more interesting. I will freely
admit that I was never other than an indifferent soldier. I did my part
when the time came, as I am glad to remember, not without sufficient
courage if wholly without distinction, but there was ever more pleasure
for me in the balancing of a rhyme than in the handling of a pike, and I
would liefer have been Catullus than Cæsar any day of the week. So the
work that Dante did in his little leisure from application to arms is
the work that wonders me and delights me, and that fills my memory, as I
think of it, with exquisite melodies.
It was about this time that sundry poets of the city, of whom let us say
that Messer Guido Cavalcanti was the greatest and your poor servant the
least, began to receive certain gifts of verses very clearly writ on
fair skins of parchment, which gave them a great pleasure and threw them
into a great amazement. For it was very plain that the writer of these
verses was one in whose ear the god Apollo whispered, was one that knew,
as it seemed, better than the best of us, how to wed the warmest
thoughts of the heart to the most exquisite music of flowing words.
These verses, that were for the most part sonnets and longer songs,
were all dedicated to the service of love and the praise of a nameless
lady, and they were all written in that common speech which such as I
talked to the men and women about me, so that there was no man nor woman
in the streets but could understand their meaning if once they heard
them spoken--a fact which I understand gave great grief to Messer
Brunetto Latini when some of these honey-sweet verses of the unknown
were laid before him.
To Messer Brunetto's eyes and to Messer Brunetto's ears and to Messer
Brunetto's understanding there was but one language in the world that
was fit for the utterances and the delectation of scholars, and that
language, of course, was the language which he wrote so well--the Latin
of old-time Rome. If a man must take the love-sickness, so Messer
Brunetto argued, and must needs express the perfidious folly in words,
what better vehicle could he have for his salacious fancy than the forms
and modes and moods which contented the amorous Ovidius, and the
sprightly Tibullus, and the hot-headed, hot-hearted Catullus, and the
tuneful Petronius, and so on, to much the same purpose, through a string
of ancient amorists? But we that were younger than Messer Brunetto, and
simpler, and certainly more ignorant, we found a great pleasure in these
verses that were so easy to understand as to their language, if their
meaning was sometimes a thought mystical and cryptic.
The fame of these verses spread widely, because no man of us that
received a copy kept the donation to himself, but made haste to place
abroad the message that had been sent to him. So that in a little while
all Florence that had any care for the Graces was murmuring these
verses, and wondering who it was that wrote them, and why it was that he
wrote. It seems to me strange now, looking back on all these matters
through the lapse of years, and through a mist of sad and happy
memories, that I was not wise enough to guess at once who the man must
be that made these miraculous stanzas. I can only plead in my own excuse
that I did not live a generation later than my day, and that I had no
means of divining that a work-a-day friend possessed immortal qualities.
Everybody now in this late evening knows who that poet was, and loves
him. I knew and loved him then, when I had no thought that he was a
poet. Even if it had been given me to make a wild guess at the
authorship of these poems, and my guess had chanced all unwitting to be
right, as would have been thereafter proved, I should have dismissed it
from my fancy. For I conceived that my friend was so busy upon that new
red-hot business of his of fitting himself to be a soldier and use arms,
and answer the taunt of Simone dei Bardi, that he could have no time,
even if he had the desire, of which, as far as I was aware till then,
he had shown no sign, to try his skill on the strings of the muses. You
may be pleased here to remind me of the discourse between Messer
Brunetto Latini and Dante, which I strove to overhear on that May
morning in the Piazza Santa Felicita, to which I will make bold to
answer that I did not truly overhear much at the time, and that the
substance of what I set down was garnered later, both from Dante and
from Messer Brunetto. But even if I had caught sound of those poetical
aspirations of Dante's, I doubt if they would have stuck in my memory.
I suppose it was not for such an idle fellow as I, to whom to do nothing
was ever better than to do--I speak, of course, of any measure of
painful labor, and not of such pleasing pastime as eating or drinking or
loving--to guess how much a great brain and a great heart and a great
purpose could crowd into the narrow compass of a little life. In the
mean time, as I say, these songs and sonnets were blown abroad all over
Florence, and men whispered them to maids, and the men wondered who
wrote the rhymes and the maids wondered for whom they were written.
They would come to us, these rhymes, curiously enough. One or other of
us would find some evening, on his return to his lodging, a scroll of
parchment lying on his table, and on this scroll of parchment some new
verses, and in the corner of the parchment the words in the Latin
tongue, "Take up, read, bear on." And he of us that found himself so
favored, having eagerly taken up and no less eagerly read, would hurry
to the nearest of his comrades and read the new gift to him, delighted,
who would busy himself at once to make a fair copy before speeding the
verses to another. So their fame spread, and so the copies multiplied,
till there was never a musical youth in Florence that did not know the
better part of them by heart; and still, for all this publicity, there
was no man could say who wrote the rhymes, nor who was the lady they
honored. I think and believe, indeed, there were many in Florence who
would gladly have declared themselves the author, but dared not for fear
of detection, and who contented themselves by slight hints and
suggestions and innuendoes, which earned them, for a time, a brief
measure of interest, soon to be dissipated by the manifest certainty of
their incapacity.
And the first of all these sonnets was that which is now as familiar as
honey on the lips of every lover of suave songs--I mean that sonnet
which begins with the words:
"To every prisoned soul and gentle heart--"
To this sonnet it pleased many of our poets of the city to write their
replies, though they knew not then to whom they were replying, and
Messer Guido Cavalcanti wrote his famous sonnet, the one that begins:
"Unto my thinking thou beheldst all worth--"
Now I, being fired by the same spirit of rhyming that was abroad, but
being of a different temper from the most of my fellows, took it upon me
to pretend a resentment of all this beautiful talk of Love and My Lady.
So I wrote a sonnet, and here it is, urging the advantages of a
plurality in love-affairs:
"Give me a jolly girl, or two, or three--
The more the merrier for my weathercock whim;
And one shall be like Juno, large of limb
And large of heart; and Venus one shall be,
Golden, with eyes like the capricious sea;
And my third sweetheart, Dian, shall be slim
With a boy's slimness, flanks and bosom trim,
The green, sharp apple of the ancient tree.
With such a trinity to please each mood
I should not find a summer day too long,
With blood of purple grapes to fire my blood,
And for my soul some thicket-haunting song
Of Pan and naughty nymphs, and all the throng
Of light o' loves and wantons since the Flood."
I showed this sonnet to Messer Guido, who laughed a little, and said
that I might be the laureate of the tavern and the brothel, but that
this new and nameless singer was a man of another metal, whom I could
never understand. Whereat I laughed, too; but being none the less a
little piqued, as I think, I made it a point thereafter, whenever Guido
had one of these new poems come to him, to answer it with some poem of
my own, cast in a similar form to that chosen by the unknown. But my
verses were always written in praise of the simple and straightforward
pleasures of sensible men, to whom all this talk about the God of Love
and about some single exalted lady seems strangely away from the mark of
wise living. For assuredly if it be a pleasant thing to love one woman,
it is twenty times as pleasant to love twenty. But I will not give you
all of these poems, nor perhaps any more, for you can read them for
yourselves, if you wish to, in my writings.
Now in a little while this same unknown poet was pleased to put abroad a
certain ballad of his that was ostensibly given over to the praise of
certain lovely ladies of our city. Florence was always a very paradise
of fair women. An inflammable fellow like myself could not walk the
length of a single street without running the risk of half a dozen
heartaches, and never was traveller that came and went but was loud in
his laudations of the loveliness of Florence feminine. A poet,
therefore, could scarcely have a more alluring theme or a livelier or
more likable, and the fact that the mysterious singer had taken such a
subject for his inspiration was rightly regarded as another instance of
his exceeding good sense. It was a very beautiful ballad, fully worthy
of its honorable subject, and it paid many compliments of an exquisite
felicity to many ladies that were indicated plainly enough by some play
upon a name or some praise of an attribute. But it was, or might have
been, plain enough to all that read it that this poem was written for no
other purpose than to bring in by a side wind, as it were, the praise of
a lady that was left nameless, but that he who wrote declared to be the
loveliest lady in that noble city of lovely ladies. This ballad seemed
to be unfinished, for in its last stanza the writer promised to utter
yet more words on this so favorable theme. Now when I had heard of this
poem and before I had read it--for Guido, to whom the first copy was
given, loved it so much and lingered so long upon its lines that he kept
it an unconscionable time from his fellows--I bethought me that I, too,
would write me a set of verses on the brave and fair ladies of Florence,
and that in doing so I could bring in the name of the girl of my heart.
It was easy enough for me to write a passable ring of rhymes that should
introduce with all due form and honor the names of those ladies that all
in that time agreed to be most eminent for their beauty and gentleness
in the beautiful and gentle city. And so I got a good way upon my work
with very little trouble indeed, for, as I have said, rhymes always came
easy to me and I loved to juggle with colored words. My difficulty came
with the moment when I had to decide upon the introduction of my own
heart's desire.
Now about this time of the year when I began my ballad, I was myself
very plenteously and merrily in love with a certain lady whose name I
will here set down as Ippolita, for that was what I called her, seeing
in her a kind of amazonian carriage, though that was not the name she
was known by among the men and the women, her neighbors. She had dark
eyes whose brightness seemed to widen and deepen as you kissed her
lips--and, indeed, the child loved to be kissed exceedingly, for all her
quaint air of woman-warrior--and she had dark hair that when you, being
permitted to play her lover, uncoiled it, rolled down like a great mane
to her haunches, and her face, both by its paleness and by the
perfection of its featuring, seemed to vie with those images of Greece
by which the wise set such store. To judge by the serenity of her
expression, the suavity of her glances, you would have sworn by all the
saints that here if ever was an angel, one that would carry the calm of
Diana into every action of life, and challenge passion with a chastity
that was never to be gainsaid. But he that ever held her in his arms
found that the so-seeming ice was fire, under those snows lava bubbled,
and she that might have passed for a priestess of Astarte quivered with
frenzy under the dominion of Eros. To speak only for myself, I found her
a very phoenix of sweethearts.
She was married to a tedious old Mumpsiman that kept himself and her in
little ease by plying the trade of a horse-leech, which trade, for the
girl's felicity, held him much abroad, and gave her occasion, seldom by
her neglected, to prove to her intimate of the hour that there can be
fire without smoke. Now I, being somewhat top-heavy at this season with
the wine of so fair a lady's favors, thought that I might, with no small
advantage to myself and no small satisfaction to my mistress, set me to
doing her honor with some such tuneful words as the unknown singer was
blowing with such sweet breath about Florence in praise of his lady. For
it is cheaper to please a woman with a sonnet than with a jewel, and as
my Ippolita was not avaricious, I was blithe to oblige her in golden
numbers in lieu of golden pieces.
Wherefore I set my wits to work one morning after an evening of delight,
and found the muse complaisant. My fancy spouted like a fountain, the
rhymes swam in the water like gilded or silver fishes, so tame you had
but to dip in your fingers and take your pick, while allusion and simile
crowded so thickly about me that I should have needed an epic rather
than my legal fourteen lines to make use of the half of them. I tell you
I was in the very ecstasy of composition that lasted me for the better
part of a fortnight. But by the time that I had come to this point the
pretty Ippolita, whose name I had intended to place there, was no longer
the moment's idol of my soul, and between the two dainty girls that had
succeeded her I sat for a long while embarrassed, like the schoolman's
ass between the two bundles of hay, not knowing, as it were, at which to
bite.
At last I bethought me that the best way out of my trouble was to set
down the names of all the sweet women whom I loved or had loved, and to
let those others and more famous, of whom I knew nothing save by sight
or renown, stand to one side. So it came to pass that this poem of mine
proved, at the last, more like an amorous calendar of my own life than a
hymn in praise of the famous beauties of Florence. For with famous
beauties I have never at any time had much to do. It has always been my
desire to find my beauties for myself, and I have ever found that there
is a greater reward in the discovery of some pretty maid and assuring
her that she is lovelier than Helen of Troy or Semiramis or Cleopatra,
than in the paying of one's addresses to some publicly acclaimed
loveliness.
By the time my tale of verses was complete, it was as different as it
might be from that which it set itself, I will not say to rival, but to
parody, for it contained few names of great ladies that were upon the
lips of every Florentine, but sang the praises of unknown witches and
minxes that were at the time of writing, or had been, very dear to me.
If my song was not so fine a piece of work as that of Messer Dante,
though Messer Dante was at that time only in the earlier flights of his
efforts, and his pinions were, as yet, unfamiliar to the poet's ether,
it was perhaps as true a picture, after its fashion, of a lover's heart.
After all, it must be remembered that there are many kinds of lovers'
hearts, and that those who can understand the "New Life" of Messer
Dante's are very few, and fewer still those that can live that life. But
I here protest very solemnly that it was with no thought of scoff or
mockery that I made my ballad, but just for the sake of saying, in my
way, the things I thought about the pretty women that pleased me and
teased me, and made life so gay and fragrant and variegated in those
far-away, dearly remembered, and no doubt much-to-be-deplored days.
It was the dreaming of this ballad of mine that led me to think of Monna
Vittoria, whom you will remember if you bear in mind the beginning of
this, my history, the lady that Messer Simone of the Bardi was
whimsically pledged to wed if he failed to win a certain wager that I
trust you have not forgotten. And thinking of Monna Vittoria led, in due
time, to a meeting with Monna Vittoria that was not without
consequences.
It is not incurious, when you come to reflect upon it, how potent the
influence of such a woman as Vittoria may be upon the lives of those
that would seem never destined by Heaven to come in her way. My Dante
was never in those days a wooer of such ladies. As to certain things
that are said of him later, in the hours of his despair, when the world
seemed no better than an empty shell, I shall have somewhat to say,
perhaps, by-and-by, for there is a matter that has led to not a little
misunderstanding of the character of my friend. As for Madonna Beatrice,
she that was such a flower in a guarded garden, why, you would have said
it was little less than incredible that the clear course of her simple
life could be crossed by the summer lightning of Madonna Vittoria's
brilliant, fitful existence. Yet, nevertheless, from first to last,
Madonna Vittoria was of the utmost moment in the lives of this golden
lass and lad, and this much must be admitted in all honesty: that she
never did, or at least never sought to do, other than good to either of
them. I should not like to say that she would have troubled at all about
them or their welfare if it had not served her turn to do so. But
whatever the reasons for her deeds, let us be grateful that their
results were not malefic to those whose interests concern us most. If
Messer Simone had never made his brutal boast, Madonna Vittoria would
never have made her wild wager. But having made it, she was eager to win
it at all costs, and it was her determination that Simone of the Bardi
should never wed with Beatrice of the Portinari, that led, logically
enough if you do but consider it aright, to the many strange events
which it is my business to narrate.