STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS: WITH LIVES OF THE WRITERS.
BY LEIGH HUNT.
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.
MDCCCXLVI.
TO SIR PERCY SHELLEY, BART.
MY DEAR SIR PERCY,
As I know no man who surpasses yourself either in combining a love of
the most romantic fiction with the coolest good sense, or in passing
from the driest metaphysical questions to the heartiest enjoyment of
humour,--I trust that even a modesty so true as yours will not grudge me
the satisfaction of inscribing these volumes with your name.
That you should possess such varieties of taste is no wonder,
considering what an abundance of intellectual honours you inherit; nor
might the world have been the better for it, had they been tastes, and
nothing more. But that you should inherit also that zeal for justice to
mankind, which has become so Christian a feature in the character of the
age, and that you should include in that zeal a special regard for the
welfare of your Father's Friend, are subjects of constant pleasurable
reflection to
Your obliged and affectionate
LEIGH HUNT.
PREFACE.
The purpose of these volumes is, to add to the stock of tales from the
Italian writers; to retain as much of the poetry of the originals as it
is in the power of the writer's prose to compass; and to furnish careful
biographical notices of the authors. There have been several collections
of stories from the Novellists of Italy, but none from the Poets; and it
struck me that prose versions from these, of the kind here offered to
the public, might not be unwillingly received. The stories are selected
from the five principal narrative poets, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto,
and Tasso; they comprise the most popular of such as are fit for
translation; are reduced into one continuous narrative, when diffused
and interrupted, as in the instances of those of Angelica, and Armida;
are accompanied with critical and explanatory notes; and, in the case of
Dante, consist of an abstract of the poet's whole work. The volumes are,
furthermore, interspersed with the most favourite _morceaux_ of the
originals, followed sometimes with attempts to versify them; and in the
Appendix, for the furtherance of the study of the Italian language, are
given entire stories, also in the original, and occasionally rendered
in like manner. The book is particularly intended for such students or
other lovers of the language as are pleased with any fresh endeavours to
recommend it; and, at the same time, for such purely English readers as
wish to know something about Italian poetry, without having leisure to
cultivate its acquaintance.
I did not intend in the first instance to depart from the plan
of selection in the case of Dante; but when I considered what an
extraordinary person he was,--how intense is every thing which he
says,--how widely he has re-attracted of late the attention of the
world,--how willingly perhaps his poem might be regarded by the reader
as being itself one continued story (which, in fact, it is), related
personally of the writer,--and lastly, what a combination of
difficulties have prevented his best translators in verse from giving
the public a just idea of his almost Scriptural simplicity,--I began to
think that an abstract of his entire work might possibly be looked upon
as supplying something of a desideratum. I am aware that nothing but
verse can do perfect justice to verse; but besides the imperfections
which are pardonable, because inevitable, in all such metrical
endeavours, the desire to impress a grand and worshipful idea of Dante
has been too apt to lead his translators into a tone and manner the
reverse of his passionate, practical, and creative style--a style which
may be said to write things instead of words; and thus to render every
word that is put out of its place, or brought in for help and filling
up, a misrepresentation. I do not mean to say, that he himself never
does any thing of the sort, or does not occasionally assume too much
of the oracle and the schoolmaster, in manner as well as matter;
but passion, and the absence of the superfluous, are the chief
characteristics of his poetry. Fortunately, this sincerity of purpose
and utterance in Dante render him the least pervertible of poets in a
sincere prose translation; and, since I ventured on attempting one, I
have had the pleasure of meeting with an express recommendation of such
a version in an early number of the _Edinburgh Review_.[1]
The abstract of Dante, therefore, in these volumes (with every
deprecation that becomes me of being supposed to pretend to give a
thorough idea of any poetry whatsoever, especially without its metrical
form) aspires to be regarded as, at all events, not exhibiting a false
idea of the Dantesque spirit in point of feeling and expression. It is
true, I have omitted long tedious lectures of scholastic divinity, and
other learned absurdities of the time, which are among the bars to the
poem's being read through, even in Italy (which Foscolo tells us is
never the case); and I have compressed the work in other passages not
essentially necessary to the formation of a just idea of the author.
But quite enough remains to suggest it to the intelligent; and in no
instance have I made additions or alterations. There is warrant--I hope
I may say letter--for every thing put down. Dante is the greatest poet
for intensity that ever lived; and he excites a corresponding emotion
in his reader--I wish I could say, always on the poet's side; but his
ferocious hates and bigotries too often tempt us to hate the bigot,
and always compel us to take part with the fellow-creatures whom he
outrages. At least, such is their effect on myself. Nor will he or his
worshippers suffer us to criticise his faults with mere reference to the
age in which he lived. I should have been glad to do so; but the claims
made for him, even by himself, will not allow it. We are called upon to
look on him as a divine, a prophet, an oracle in all respects for all
time. Such a man, however, is the last whom a reporter is inclined to
misrepresent. We respect his sincerity too much, ferocious and arrogant
though it be; and we like to give him the full benefit of the recoil of
his curses and maledictions. I hope I have not omitted one. On the
other hand, as little have I closed my feelings against the lovely
and enchanting sweetness which this great semi-barbarian sometimes so
affectingly utters. On those occasions he is like an angel enclosed
for penance in some furious giant, and permitted to weep through the
creature's eyes.
The stories from goodnatured Pulci I have been obliged to compress for
other reasons--chiefly their excessive diffuseness. A paragraph of the
version will sometimes comprise many pages. Those of Boiardo and Ariosto
are more exact; and the reader will be good enough to bear in mind, that
nothing is added to any of the poets, different as the case might seem
here and there on comparison with the originals. An equivalent for
whatever is said is to be found in some part of the context--generally
in letter, always in spirit. The least characteristically exact passages
are some in the love-scenes of Tasso; for I have omitted the plays upon
words and other corruptions in style, in which that poet permitted
himself to indulge. But I have noticed the circumstance in the comment.
In other respects, I have endeavoured to make my version convey some
idea of the different styles and genius of the writers,--of the severe
passion of Dante; of the overflowing gaiety and affecting sympathies
of Pulci, several of whose passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles are
masterpieces of pathos; of the romantic and inventive elegance of
Boiardo; the great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy
_anima mundi_; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination,
and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the poet of Armida
and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose versions of passages from these
writers can supersede the necessity of metrical ones, supposing proper
metrical ones attainable. They suffice for them, in some respects, less
than for Dante, the manner in their case being of more importance to
the effect. But with all due respect to such translators as Harrington,
Rose, and Wiffen, their books are not Ariosto and Tasso, even in manner.
Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike
Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her
majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet
he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into
inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical,
did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and
a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the
superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to
a work of any length, is the best metrical translator our language has
seen, and, like Chapman, a genuine poet, strangely aggravated the sins
of prettiness and conceit in his original, and added to them a love
of tautology amounting to that of a lawyer. As to Hoole, he is below
criticism; and other versions I have not happened to see. Now if I had
no acquaintance with the Italian language, I confess I would rather get
any friend who had, to read to me a passage out of Dante, Tasso, or
Ariosto, into the first simple prose that offered itself, than go to any
of the above translators for a taste of it, Fairfax excepted; and we
have seen with how much allowance his sample would have to be taken.
I have therefore, with some restrictions, only ventured to do for the
public what I would have had a friend do for myself.
The _Critical and Biographical Notices_ I did not intend to make so long
at first; but the interest grew upon me; and I hope the reader will
regard some of them--Dante's and Tasso's in particular--as being
"stories" themselves, after their kind,--"stories, alas, too true;"
"romances of real life." The extraordinary character of Dante, which is
personally mixed up with his writings beyond that of any other poet, has
led me into references to his church and creed, unavoidable at any
time in the endeavour to give a thorough estimate of his genius, and
singularly demanded by certain phenomena of the present day. I hold
those phenomena to be alike feeble and fugitive; but only so by reason
of their being openly so proclaimed; for mankind have a tendency to the
absurd, if their imaginations are not properly directed; and one of the
uses of poetry is, to keep the faculty in a healthy state, and cause it
to know its duties. Dante, in the fierce egotism of his passions, and
the strange identification of his knowledge with all that was knowable,
would fain have made his poetry both a sword against individuals, and a
prop for the support of the superstition that corrupted them. This was
reversing the duty of a Christian and a great man; and there happen to
be existing reasons why it is salutary to chew that he had no right to
do so, and must not have his barbarism confounded with his strength.
Machiavelli was of opinion, that if Christianity had not reverted to its
first principles, by means of the poverty and pious lives of St. Francis
and St. Dominic,[2] the faith would have been lost. It may have been;
but such are not the secrets of its preservation in times of science and
progression, when the spirit of inquiry has established itself among
all classes, and nothing is taken for granted, as it used to be. A few
persons here and there, who confound a small superstitious reaction in
England with the reverse of the fact all over the rest of Europe, may
persuade themselves, if they please, that the world has not advanced in
knowledge for the last three centuries, and so get up and cry aloud to
us out of obsolete horn-books; but the community laugh at them. Every
body else is inquiring into first principles, while they are dogmatising
on a forty-ninth proposition. The Irish themselves, as they ought to do,
care more for their pastors than for the Pope; and if any body wishes to
know what is thought of his Holiness at head-quarters, let him consult
the remarkable and admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the
pen of Mr. Mazzini.[3] I have the pleasure of knowing excellent Roman
Catholics; I have suffered in behalf of their emancipation, and would do
so again to-morrow; but I believe that if even their external form of
Christianity has any chance of survival three hundred years hence, it
will have been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordinary
man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, or rather in
charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have proclaimed that the
time had arrived for living in the flower of Christian charity, instead
of the husks and thorns which may have been necessary to guard it. If it
were possible for some new and wonderful Pope to make this change, and
draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that between the
Old and New Testaments, the world would feel inclined to prostrate
itself again and for ever at the feet of Rome. In a catholic state
of things like that, delighted should I be, for one, to be among the
humblest of its communicants. How beautiful would their organs be then!
how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense! how unselfish
their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It
would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this
than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered
with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform
itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its
perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native
country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want
no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no
completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.
But if Charity (and by Charity I do not mean mere toleration, or any
other pretended right to permit others to have eyes like ourselves, but
whatever the delightful Greek word implies of good and lovely), if this
truly and only divine consummation of all Christian doctrine be not
thought capable of taking a form of belief "strong" enough, apart from
threats that revolt alike the heart and the understanding, Superstition
must look out for some new mode of dictation altogether; for the world
is outgrowing the old.
* * * * *
I cannot, in gratitude for the facilities afforded to myself, as well
as for a more obvious and public reason, dismiss this Preface without
congratulating men of letters on the establishment and increasing
prosperity of the _London Library_, an institution founded for the
purpose of accommodating subscribers with such books, at their own
houses, as could only be consulted hitherto at the British Museum. The
sole objection to the Museum is thus done away, and the literary world
has a fair prospect of possessing two book-institutions instead of one,
each with its distinct claims to regard, and presenting in combination
all that the student can wish; for while it is highly desirable that
authors should be able to have standard works at their command, when
sickness or other circumstances render it impossible for them to go to
the Museum, it is undoubtedly requisite that one great collection should
exist in which they are sure to find the same works unremoved, in case
of necessity,--not to mention curious volumes of all sorts, manuscripts,
and a world of books of reference.
[Footnote 1: "It is probable that a prose translation would give a
better idea of the genius and manner of this poet than any metrical
one." Vol. i. p. 310.]
[Footnote 2: _Discorsi sopra la Prinza Deca di Tito Livio_, lib. iii.
cap. i. At p. 230 of the present volume I have too hastily called
St. Dominic the "founder of the Inquisition." It is generally conceded, I
believe, by candid Protestant inquirers, that he was not; whatever zeal
in the foundation and support of the tribunal may have been manifested
by his order. But this does not acquit him of the cruelty for which he
has been praised by Dante. He joined in the sanguinary persecution of
the Albigenses.]
[Footnote: 3 It is entitled, "_Italy, Austria, and the Pope_;" and
is full, not only of the eloquence of zeal, and of evidences
of intellectual power, but of the most curious and instructive
information.]
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
* * * * *
DANTE.
CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS
THE ITALIAN PILGRIMS PROGRESS
I. The Journey through Hell II. Purgatory. III. Heaven
PULCI.
CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS
HUMOURS OF GIANTS
THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES
APPENDIX.
I. Story of Paulo and Francesca. Translation.
II. Accounts given by different writers of the circumstances relating to
Paulo and Francesca; concluding with the only facts ascertained.
III. Story of Ugolino. Translation. Real Story of Ugolino, and Chaucer's
feeling respecting the Poem.
IV. Picture of Florence in the time of Dante's Ancestors. Translation.
V. The Monks and the Giants
VI. Passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles.
DANTE
Critical Notice
OF
DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.[1]
Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant
of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a
semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination,
as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the
fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods
over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt
to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some
important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in
particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one
point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot
in some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the
wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to which
it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the same time
exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what
we conceive to be the natural wisdom and temper of great poets; in
other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied
his imagination with so much that is contradictory to good feeling, in
matters divine as well as human; that I should not have thought myself
justified in assisting, however humbly, to extend the influence of his
writings, had I not believed a time to have arrived, when the community
may profit both from the marvels of his power and the melancholy
absurdity of its contradictions.
Dante Alighieri, who has always been known by his Christian rather than
surname (partly owing to the Italian predilection for Christian names,
and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics in his time), was the
son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, and was born in that city on
the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three years before the birth of Chaucer).
The stock is said to have been of Roman origin, of the race of the
Frangipani; but the only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a
Florentine cavalier of the house of the Elisei, who died in the
Crusades. Dante gives an account of him in his _Paradiso_.[2]
Cacciaguida married a lady of the Alighieri family of the Valdipado;
and, giving the name to one of his children, they subsequently retained
it as a patronymic in preference to their own. It would appear, from the
same poem, not only that the Alighieri were the more important house,
but that some blot had darkened the scutcheon of the Elisei; perhaps
their having been poor, and transplanted (as he seems to imply) from
some disreputable district. Perhaps they were known to have been of
ignoble origin; for, in the course of one of his most philosophical
treatises, he bursts into an extraordinary ebullition of ferocity
against such as adduce a knowledge of that kind as an argument against a
family's acquired nobility; affirming that such brutal stuff should be
answered not with words, but with the dagger.[3]
The Elisei, however, must have been of some standing; for Macchiavelli,
in his History of Florence, mentions them in his list of the early
Guelph and Ghibelline parties, where the side which they take is
different from that of the poet's immediate progenitors.[4] The arms of
the Alighieri (probably occasioned by the change in that name, for it
was previously written Aldighieri) are interesting on account of their
poetical and aspiring character. They are a golden wing on a field
azure.[5]
It is generally supposed that the name Dante is an abbreviation of
Durante; but this is not certain, though the poet had a nephew so
called. Dante is the name he goes by in the gravest records, in
law-proceedings, in his epitaph, in the mention of him put by himself
into the mouth of a blessed spirit. Boccaccio intimates that he was
christened Dante, and derives the name from the ablative case of _dans_
(giving)--a probable etymology, especially for a Christian appellation.
As an abbreviation of Durante, it would correspond in familiarity with
the Ben of Ben Jonson--a diminutive that would assuredly not have been
used by grave people on occasions like those mentioned, though a wit of
the day gave the masons a shilling to carve "O rare Ben Jonson!" on his
grave stone. On the other hand, if given at the font, the name of Ben
would have acquired all the legal gravity of Benjamin. In the English
Navy List, not long ago, one of our gallant admirals used to figure as
"Billy Douglas."
Of the mother of Dante nothing is known except that she was his father's
second wife, and that her Christian name was Bella, or perhaps surname
Bello. It might, however, be conjectured, from the remarkable and only
opportunity which our author has taken of alluding to her, that he
derived his disdainful character rather from his mother than father.[6]
The father appears to have died during the boyhood of his illustrious
son.
The future poet, before he had completed his ninth year, conceived a
romantic attachment to a little lady who had just entered hers, and who
has attained a celebrity of which she was destined to know nothing. This
was the famous Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a rich Florentine who
founded more than one charitable institution. She married another man,
and died in her youth; but retained the Platonical homage of her young
admirer, living and dead, and became the heroine of his great poem.
It is unpleasant to reduce any portion of a romance to the events of
ordinary life; but with the exception of those who merely copy from
one another, there has been such a conspiracy on the part of Dante's
biographers to overlook at least one disenchanting conclusion to be
drawn to that effect from the poet's own writings, that the probable
truth of the matter must here for the first time be stated. The case,
indeed, is clear enough from his account of it. The natural tendencies
of a poetical temperament (oftener evinced in a like manner than the
world in general suppose) not only made the boy-poet fall in love, but,
in the truly Elysian state of the heart at that innocent and adoring
time of life, made him fancy he had discovered a goddess in the object
of his love; and strength of purpose as well as imagination made him
grow up in the fancy. He disclosed himself, as time advanced, only by
his manner--received complacent recognitions in company from the young
lady--offended her by seeming to devote himself to another (see the poem
in the _Vita Nuova_, beginning "Ballata io vo")--rendered himself the
sport of her and her young friends by his adoring timidity (see the 5th
and 6th sonnets in the same work)--in short, constituted her a paragon
of perfection, and enabled her, by so doing, to shew that she was none.
He says, that finding himself unexpectedly near her one day in company,
he trembled so, and underwent such change of countenance, that many of
the ladies present began to laugh with her about him--"_si gabbavano di
me_." And he adds, in verse,
"Con l'altre donne mia vista gabbate,
E non pensate, donna, onde si mova
Ch'io vi rassembri sì figura nova,
Quando riguardo la vostra beltate," &c. Son. 5.
"You laugh with the other ladies to see how I look (literally, you mock
my appearance); and do not think, lady, what it is that renders me so
strange a figure at sight of your beauty."
And in the sonnet that follows, he accuses her of preventing pity of him
in others, by such "killing mockery" as makes him wish for death ("_la
pietà, che 'l vostro gabbo recinde_," &c.)[7]
Now, it is to be admitted, that a young lady, if she is not very wise,
may laugh at her lover with her companions, and yet return his love,
after her fashion; but the fair Portinari laughs and marries another.
Some less melancholy face, some more intelligible courtship, triumphed
over the questionable flattery of the poet's gratuitous worship; and the
idol of Dante Alighieri became the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi. Not
a word does he say on that mortifying point. It transpired from a clause
in her father's will. And yet so bent are the poet's biographers on
leaving a romantic doubt in one's mind, whether Beatrice may not have
returned his passion, that not only do all of them (as far as I have
observed) agree in taking no notice of these sonnets, but the author
of the treatise entitled _Dante and the Catholic Philosophy of the
Thirteenth Century_, "in spite" (as a critic says) "of the _Beatrice,
his daughter, wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi_, of the paternal will,"
describes her as dying in "all the lustre of virginity." [8] The
assumption appears to be thus gloriously stated, as a counterpart to the
notoriety of its untruth. It must be acknowledged, that Dante himself
gave the cue to it by more than silence; for he not only vaunts her
acquaintance in the next world, but assumes that she returns his love in
that region, as if no such person as her husband could have existed, or
as if he himself had not been married also. This life-long pertinacity
of will is illustrative of his whole career.
Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing was wanting
on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, to furnish him with
an excellent education. It was so complete, as to enable him to become
master of all the knowledge of his time; and he added to this learning
more than a taste for drawing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing
an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.[9]
One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then
living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna. At
eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as
to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a
philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a
reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he
became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella,
the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.
Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's
death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his countrymen gained
against the people of Arezzo; and the year after it he was present at
the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. It has been supposed that he once
studied medicine with a view to it as a profession; but the conjecture
probably originated in nothing more than his having entered himself of
one of the city-companies (which happened to be the medical) for the
purpose of qualifying himself to accept office; a condition exacted of
the gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is
asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Franciscan
order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed; and, indeed,
the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated and impatient
turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had done with the world when it
lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi.
Weddings that might have taken place but do not, are like the reigns
of deceased heirs-apparent; every thing is assumable in their favour,
checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. Would the great
but splenetic poet have made an angel and a saint of Beatrice, had he
married her? He never utters the name of the woman whom he did marry.
Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It
seems not improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the
young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his
passion for Beatrice;[10] and in common justice to his feelings as a man
and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded, that he felt some sort
of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort; though he
afterwards did not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and
Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of
any body after herself.[11] At any rate, he probably roused what was
excitable in his wife's temper, with provocations from his own; for the
nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but
tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion
that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of
Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of
letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing
to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after
quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, or suffer
her to come to him, mother as she was by him of so many children;--a
statement, it must be confessed, not a little encouraging to the
tradition.[12] Be this as it may, Dante married in his twenty-sixth
year; wrote an adoring account of his first love (the _Vita Nuova_) in
his twenty-eighth; and among the six children which Gemma brought him,
had a daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of
the fair Portinari; which surely was either a very great compliment, or
no mean trial to the temper of the mother.
We shall see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted,
and what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as
conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history.
Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and
Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy
and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of
Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Cæsar, and paramount over the
Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as
to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and
bred a Guelph: he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline
neighbours; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of his
marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed chief
of the temporary administrators of affairs, called Priors;--functionaries
who held office only for two months.
Unfortunately, at that moment, his party had become subdivided into the
factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of two different sides
in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The consequences becoming
serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, as mediator, the French
Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms for the Pope against the
Emperor; but the Whites, of whom Dante was one, were hostile to the
measure; and in order to prevent it, he and his brother magistrates
expelled for a time the heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of
neither. The Whites accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines,
and the Blacks of openly favouring the Whites; who being, indeed,
allowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of the
unwholesomeness of their place of exile, which was fatal to Dante's
friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante answered it by
saying, that he had then quitted office; but he could not shew that he
had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles was still urged to interfere,
and Dante was sent ambassador to the Pope to obtain his disapprobation
of the interference; but the Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had
probably discovered that the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but
their own disputes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection
to his representative, beguiled the ambassador and encouraged the French
prince; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their ascendancy; and
the luckless poet, during his absence, was denounced as a corrupt
administrator of affairs, guilty of peculation; was severely
mulcted; banished from Tuscany for two years; and subsequently, for
contumaciousness, was sentenced to be _burnt alive_, in case he returned
ever. He never did return.
From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his wife. Her
relations obtained possession of power, but no use was made of it except
to keep him in exile. He had not accorded with them; and perhaps half
the secret of his conjugal discomfort was owing to politics. It is the
opinion of some, that the married couple were not sorry to part; others
think that the wife remained behind, solely to scrape together what
property she could, and bring up the children. All that is known is,
that she never lived with him more.
Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to
do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party
of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party
but his own; a naïve confession, probably true in one sense, considering
his scorn of other people, his great intellectual superiority, and the
large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon
quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party,
however stanch he apparently remained to their cause. His former
associates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and for
their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated
the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with
Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them
all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting
Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and
the mistress of the world.
With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in
which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him,
he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man,
"grudging in his great disdain." At one moment he was conspiring and
hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his
beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of
the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing
her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his
thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is
conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether
with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his
"sacred poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his
prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest
people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted
to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual
attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great
work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the
_Convito_, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (_de Monarchia_),
recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts,
and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (_de Vulgari
Eloquio_); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us,
"how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste
of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable,
from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have "placed himself in
some public way," and, "stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling
in his very vitals," have stretched out his hand "for charity" [13]--an
image of suffering, which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a
man, is almost enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon
at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of
that nature for his outrages on God and man. Several of the princes and
feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their
houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find
it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his. There must be
great wisdom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy
of one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take in
such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace,
and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo, now in
Bologna; then probably in Verona with Can Grande's elder brother; then
(if we are to believe those who have tracked his steps) in Casentino;
then with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; then with the
great Ghibelline chieftain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino; then
in Romagna, in Padua, in _Paris_ (arguing with the churchmen), some say
in Germany, and at _Oxford_; then again in Italy; in Lucca (where he is
supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity to Beatrice in favour of
a certain "Gentucca"); then again in Verona with the new prince, the
famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms appear to have lost him a doubtful
hospitality); then in a monastery in the mountains of Umbria; in Udine;
in Ravenna; and there at length he put up for the rest of his life with
his last and best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but
the nephew of the hapless Francesca.
It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the
moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that
affecting passage in the _Convito_, which was evidently a direct effort
at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in
the style of that work, he exclaims, "Ah! would it had pleased the
Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed;
that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty
undeservedly--the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty. For it
pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of
Rome--Florence--to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was
born, and bred, and passed half of the life of man, and in which, with
her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary
spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in
almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a
beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too
often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly I have been a
vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different
ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty;
and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by
some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in
whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy
opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do." [14]
How simply and strongly written! How full of the touching yet
undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to take upon
itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of manly endeavour and a
good motive! How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with
abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!
The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are
not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his
abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence,
on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following
noble letter to a kinsman. The old spelling of the original (in the
note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on "Dante" in the
_Edinburgh Review_ (vol. XXX. no. 60); and I have retained also, with
little difference, the translation which accompanies it:
"From your letter, which I received with due respect and affection, I
observe how much you have at heart my restoration to my country. I am
bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch as an exile rarely finds a
friend. But after mature consideration, I must, by my answer, disappoint
the wishes of some little minds; and I confide in the judgment to which
your impartiality and prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has
written to me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends,
that, by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to
Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to the
humiliation of asking and receiving absolution: wherein, my father, I
see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. I speak of the
impertinence of those who mention such conditions to me; for in your
letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, there is no such thing. Is
such an invitation, then, to return to his country glorious to d. all.
(Dante Allighieri), after suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it
thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and
the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is
familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth,
that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some
others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man
who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his
persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that shall lead me back
to my country. I will return with hasty steps, if you or any other can
open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of d.
(Dante); but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I
shall never enter. What! shall I not everywhere enjoy the light of the
sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every corner of
the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth,
without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people
and republic of Florence? Bread, I hope, will not fail me." [15]
Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly
exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him
their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his
exile upon him, or closed it as he did. To that close we have now come,
and it is truly melancholy and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with
the Venetians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been
the last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. He
returned from Venice to Ravenna, worn out, and there died, after fifteen
years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, aged fifty-seven. His
life had been so agitated, that it probably would not have lasted so
long, but for the solace of his poetry, and the glory which he knew it
must produce him. Guido gave him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to
give him a monument; but such was the state of Italy in those times,
that he himself died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and
one of a noble sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardinal
Bembo, in 1483; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, by Cardinal
Gonzaga. His countrymen, in after years, made two solemn applications
for the removal of his dust to Florence; but the just pride of the
Ravennese refused them.
Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a
nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their
father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left
families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line,
still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego
Alighieri. No direct descent of the other kind from poets of former
times is, I believe, known to exist.
The manners and general appearance of Dante have been minutely recorded,
and are in striking agreement with his character. Boccaccio and other
novelists are the chief relaters; and their accounts will be received
accordingly with the greater or less trust, as the reader considers them
probable; but the author of the Decameron personally knew some of his
friends and relations, and he intermingles his least favourable reports
with expressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle height,
of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, large piercing
eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting under-lip, and thick
curling hair--an aspect announcing determination and melancholy. There
is a sketch of his countenance, in his younger days, from the immature
but sweet pencil of Giotto; and it is a refreshment to look at it,
though pride and discontent, I think, are discernible in its lineaments.
It is idle, and no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his
mere worshippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and
exacerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect the
poor victim of events--the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What
came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; and so
inconsistent was his nature altogether, or, at any rate, such an epitome
of all the graver passions that are capable of co-existing, both sweet
and bitter, thoughtful and outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to
think he must have had an angel for one parent, and--I shall leave his
own toleration to say what--for the other.
To continue the account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with
a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom
spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the
anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and
sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in
Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark
which made the saturnine poet smile--"That is the man who goes to hell
whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which
her companion observed--"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he
has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He
was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music--is thought to
have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might
be supposed from his platonical aspirations--(Boccaccio says, that even
a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)--could
be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet
addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat--and though
his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a
biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat
and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is
his word.