DANTE’S LIFE AND MINOR WRITINGS
Creditable as were their essays in the new literary instrument of
thought, Dante’s predecessors can be regarded as his forerunners only
in so far as they had helped to create an intellectual atmosphere
congenial to the special bent of his genius. The general character of
this may be defined as an alliance of the chivalrous and impassioned
sentiment which had come down from the troubadours with the science
of Aristotle and the thought of Aquinas. Guido Cavalcanti had shown
how these might be combined, and Dante followed in his steps without,
perhaps, any clear consciousness of his own infinite superiority; of
which, however, a well-known passage in the _Inferno_ seems to intimate
that he eventually came to entertain a sufficient notion.
DANTE (DURANTE) ALIGHIERI was born at Florence in 1265, in the later
part of May. The origin of his family is variously attributed to
Rome, Ferrara, Parma, and Verona. The first of his ancestors whom he
mentions, Cacciaguida degli Elisei, a crusader in 1147, had bestowed
his wife’s surname of Alighieri upon his son, and it had continued in
the family. Dante’s relatives belonged to the Guelf party, and had had
their share in the turmoils which for half a century had distracted
Florence no less than most other Italian cities. Of his boyhood we
know nothing, except that he lost his mother at an early age, and
that he profited by the instructions of the most learned of the
Florentines, Brunetto Latini. He appears to have taken part in several
military expeditions in his youth, and the glimpses of his personal
circumstances which he allows us in the _Vita Nuova_ exhibit him as a
man of means, mingling on equal terms with the wealthy and polished
society of prosperous Florence.
If our knowledge of Dante’s outer life at this period of his history
is imperfect, it is otherwise with his spiritual life, which he has
revealed as no other could, in the above-mentioned _Vita Nuova_,
written probably about 1292. This alone would have immortalised him
as the author of the earliest modern book of its class--though it had
a prototype in the _Confessions of Saint Augustine_--and of the first
book of genius, or indeed of any real importance, written in Italian
prose. Nothing can more forcibly proclaim the superiority of Dante’s
mind than the uniqueness of his first production, unless it be the fact
that, high as is its place in literature, its chief interest for us is
its concern with the man. It is simply the record of his attachment
to a young lady whom he calls Beatrice, and whom Boccaccio enables us
to identify with one whom we know from other sources to have actually
existed, Beatrice de’ Portinari. The notion that Beatrice is but an
abstraction is utterly refuted, to adduce no other testimony, by Cino’s
consolatory poem on her death, quoted in the preceding chapter, and can
only be entertained by those who know little of love, or are entirely
possessed by the passion for allegorising. If ever intense affection
was conveyed in intense language it is here, while at the same time the
passion is purely Platonic, and there is no proof that it was in any
degree shared by its object, who appears to have been already married.
Dante’s biographers, except the late and untrustworthy Filelfo, cast
no doubt on the real existence of Beatrice, and it would require very
strong evidence to overthrow the testimony of the chief among them,
Boccaccio, who lived near Dante’s age, whose veneration for him was
boundless, and who was personally acquainted with his daughter. We
can perceive no adequate reason for the scepticism of Scartazzini
and others respecting Boccaccio’s trustworthiness. It is true that
the use which he made of his opportunities falls sadly below the
modern standard. Not only is he careless in collecting and verifying
authorities, but he makes no attempt to think himself back into the
period of his hero. “Between him and the enthusiasms of the Middle
Ages,” says Symonds, “a ninefold Styx already rolled its waves.” Yet
his faults are offences of defect, not of excess in statement, though
he sins by introducing many useless disquisitions. His work exists in
two shapes, a longer and a shorter recension. The latter is undoubtedly
an unauthorised abridgment of the former, and the novel statements
which it occasionally introduces can claim no authority from Boccaccio.
It seems to have been made by some Florentine who was offended by the
severity of Boccaccio’s strictures upon his city for her ingratitude to
Dante.
The biography by Filippo Villani, one of his _Lives of Illustrious
Florentines_, written about 1400, is mainly taken from Boccaccio,
but is important for its vindication of Dante from the charge of
profligacy, and for its particular details of his last illness. The
valuable life by Leonardo Bruni (1369-1414) is avowedly designed as a
supplement to Boccaccio, who in Bruni’s opinion had neglected weighty
matters for love stories and such-like frivolities. He therefore,
while omitting all mention of Beatrice and the _Vita Nuova_, gives a
much fuller account than Boccaccio of Dante’s share in the affairs of
Florence, and even cites an autograph letter of his, now lost like all
others. He is entitled to much respect as a sensible and impartial
writer, who took pains to obtain information; while the later mediæval
biographers, Manetti and Filelfo, have some literary merit, but no
historical value. Of the other three it may be said that a statement
in which any two of them agree may usually be received, and that the
assertion of any one is entitled to a fair amount of credit when it
is not contradicted by another’s. The absolute trustworthiness of the
chronicle long attributed to Dinoi Campagni must now be given up;
it is, nevertheless, most probably of sufficient antiquity to have
preserved some authentic notices.
No biographer of Dante, however, could possibly have compared
with Dante himself, and it is much to be lamented that the entire
disappearance of what must have been for his time an extensive body
of correspondence has deprived us of all autobiographic record except
the _Vita Nuova_, which, almost devoid of incident, paints the inner
man with lively force. Except Shelley’s _Epipsychidion_, the world has
nothing to set beside this dithyrambic of purely Platonic passion.
We must recur to it, and need only here fix the death of Beatrice,
one of the great landmarks of Dante’s life, at June 9, 1290. Somewhat
more than a year afterwards we find Dante moved, as a noble soul might
well be, not by the attractions but by the spiritual sympathy of a
compassionate lady. It is impossible to entertain the least doubt of
the reality of an episode described by himself with such tenderness of
self-excuse and poignancy of self-reproach, but to admit it is to admit
the actuality of all the rest of the _Vita Nuova_:
_The salt stream that did sorrowfully flow,
Speeded, ye Eyes, from your deep springs apace,
Gave marvel unto all who such long space
Beheld you weeping, as yourselves do know.
Now fear I that all such ye would forgo,
If I upon my own part would be base,
And not all shift and subterfuge displace,
Reminding you of her who made your woe.
Your levity lays load of heavy thought
Upon me, sore disquieted with dread
Of her who looks on you in wistful wise.
By nothing less than Death should you be wrought
E’er to forget your Lady who is dead;
Thus saith my heart, and afterward it sighs._
Dante appears to say that he entirely overcame this rather regrettable
than reprehensible lapse from his ideal, and we believe him. If so, the
pitiful lady cannot be identified with Gemma Donati, whom, at latest in
1293, if she had really borne him seven children by 1300, he married by
the persuasion of his friends. The _Vita Nuova_ was in all probability
written by this time, and from its conclusion we learn that Dante was
even then preparing to celebrate Beatrice in the _Divina Commedia_. It
is therefore exceedingly improbable that he would have wedded one at
all likely to impair or efface the freshness of her image in his soul;
and though his union with Gemma was apparently untroubled by discord,
it probably lacked all consecration but the ceremonial. It was brought
to a close by Dante’s exile from his native city in 1301. Gemma and the
children did not accompany him, and he never saw them more. The reason
is not difficult to discover: it prefigured the case of Milton. Gemma’s
family, the Donati, had come to belong to a party opposed to Dante.
The interests of her numerous children, mostly of very tender age,
undoubtedly counselled Gemma to cleave to the winning side, and she
can scarcely be blamed if she declined to forsake her blood relations
for a husband whom she had probably found unsympathetic. Whether Dante
approved her course, or rejoiced in his liberty (Short-sighted Devil,
not to take his spouse!), or was simply choked by indignation, he never
honours or dishonours her by a single word. Gemma Donati’s portrait
hangs in the gallery of poets’ wives, like Marshal Marmont’s in the
gallery of French marshals, covered by a veil of crape.
Few of the more distinguished Italian men of letters have been able to
keep themselves clear of public employment. Dante’s wealth and social
eminence in the days of his prosperity did not allow him to decline the
invidious office of Prior, to which he was raised in 1300. It was only
tenable for two months, but this was long enough for his ruin. Florence
was then rent by dissensions between two factions, the Whites and
Blacks. The Government, by Dante’s courageous and probably wise advice,
resolved to banish the leaders of both. As the chiefs of the Guelfic
Blacks were Dante’s own connections, the Donati, while the Ghibelline
Whites included Guido Cavalcanti, his most intimate friend, his counsel
must have been patriotic and disinterested. Unfortunately, it was not
unflinchingly carried out, some of the Whites being shortly afterwards
allowed to return. Pope Boniface VIII., fearing that the Ghibelline or
Imperialist party would thus obtain the upper hand in the city, incited
Charles de Valois, brother of the French King, Philip the Fair, whom he
had allured into Italy to attack the King of Naples, to make himself
master of Florence. This he accomplished, and the consequent return of
Dante’s adversaries led to the sacking of his house, the ruin of his
fortune, and his life-long exile from his native city. He was at the
time absent on an embassy at the Papal Court, from which he retired to
Arezzo, where the other exiles had assembled, and must henceforth be
reckoned among the Ghibellines.
For some years Dante participated in their endeavours to reinstate
themselves by force; but eventually, well-nigh as disgusted with his
friends as with his enemies, scorning the ignominious terms on which
alone return would have been permitted, and especially discouraged by
the failure of the Emperor Henry VII., whose advent to Italy he had
welcomed with enthusiasm, he became a wanderer among the courts of
the princes and nobles of Northern Italy, generally finding honour
and protection, which he frequently repaid by diplomatic services.
There seems no doubt of his having visited Paris and studied in
the University. The alleged extension of his journey to Oxford
is unsupported by convincing evidence, but is not impossible or
improbable. A writer near his own day seems to assert that he had
been in England. During all this time, like his ancient prototype
Thucydides, he was devoting himself to his immortal work, which,
published as the respective parts were completed, brought him celebrity
and wondering reverence even in his lifetime. His most distinguished
patron in his later years was Cane della Scala, surnamed the Great,
Lord of Verona, from whose court he retired in 1320 to that of Guido
Novello da Polenta, at Ravenna. In the following year he undertook a
mission to Venice, and there contracted a fever, which, aggravated it
is said by the inhospitality of the Venetians in compelling him to
return by land, carried him off on September 14, 1321, shortly after
he had completed his great epic. His funeral obsequies were celebrated
with magnificence; but political troubles delayed for a hundred and
sixty years the erection of the monument ultimately raised by the piety
of Cardinal Bembo’s father, then governing Ravenna for the Venetians,
and inscribed with six rhyming Latin verses attributed without adequate
evidence to Dante’s own pen, but sufficiently ancient to have been
expanded by Boccaccio into a noble sonnet:
_Dante am I, of deepest lore in song
Hierophant, elected to combine
Inheritance in Art with Nature’s sign,
Accounted miracle all men among.
Wings of Imagination sure and strong
Bore me through worlds infernal and divine,
And gave to verse immortal to consign
What doth to Earth or doth to Heaven belong.
Bright Florence brought me forth, but her fond son
To bitter exile drove, step-mother made
By guile of tongues malevolent and base.
Ravenna sheltered me; in her is laid
My dust; my spirit thitherward has gone
Where Wisdom reigns, and Envy hath not place._
It is usual to commence a review of an author’s productions by his
most important work; but the _Divina Commedia_ requires a chapter to
itself, and precedence must consequently be given to Dante’s minor
writings. Of these the _Vita Nuova_ stands first both in time and in
importance. It is epoch-making in many ways, as the first great example
of Italian prose, the first revelation of the genius of the greatest
mediæval poet, and the incarnation of that romantic conception of ideal
love by which the Middle Age might fairly claim to have augmented the
heritage bequeathed by antiquity. The main note of Dante’s genius here
is its exquisite and unearthly spirituality, which, indeed, is visible
in much of the poetry and art of the time, but attains its most intense
expression in him. Something like it has occasionally been seen since,
as in John Henry Newman; but it is in our day too much out of keeping
with the legitimate demands of a busy and complicated society to occur
except as a temporary and individual phenomenon.
Nothing is more remarkable in a composition apparently so fanciful than
the entire sincerity and straightforwardness of the _Vita Nuova_: grant
that Beatrice was a real person, and it is impossible to doubt the
literal truth of the entire narrative. This is the more extraordinary
in consideration of the impersonality alike of the enamoured poet and
of the object of his passion. Dante, indeed, speaking throughout in
his own character, cannot help portraying himself in some measure,
though our conception of him is probably largely made up of involuntary
associations with the more palpable Dante of the _Divina Commedia_. But
Beatrice remains what he meant her to be, a spiritual presence, visible
but intangible. No heroine of fiction conveys a stronger impression of
perfection; but we see her as Andromeda saw Medusa, merely reflected in
the mind of her lover.
More extraordinary works than the _Vita Nuova_ have been composed
at even an earlier age, but there is perhaps no other book in the
world in which a young man appears as asserting by his first attempt
so unchallenged a superiority over predecessors and contemporaries,
with whom he has nevertheless much in common. The evolution of Italian
poetry has up to this point proceeded gradually and systematically;
all of a sudden it makes a bound, and seems as it were to have
sprung across a chasm. The prose is of more equable desert than the
interspersed poetry, some of which is inferior; while, on the other
hand, the best poetry far transcends the prose. The finest among the
sonnets and canzoni, if sometimes rivalled, have not hitherto been
surpassed in Italian literature, while the most famous of the former
still stands at the head of its own class:
_So goodly and so seemly doth appear
My Lady, when she doth a greeting bring,
That tongue is stayed, silent and quivering,
And eye adventures not to look on her.
She thence departeth, of her laud aware,
Meek in humility’s apparelling;
And men esteem her as a heavenly thing
Sent down to earth a marvel to declare.
Whoso regardeth, so delightedly
Beholds, his eyes into his heart instil
Sweet only to be known by tasting it;
And from her face invisibly doth flit
A gentle spirit Love doth wholly fill,
That to the soul is ever saying, Sigh._
The length of Italian canzoni renders it extremely difficult to do
them justice in a work of necessarily contracted limits. Two stanzas,
however, of Dante’s canzone on the death of his lady are, as it were,
a little poem complete in themselves, and may be cited in Rossetti’s
matchless version:
_I was a-thinking how life fails with us
Suddenly after such a little while;
When Love sobbed in my heart, which is his home.
Whereby my spirit waxed so dolorous
That in myself I said, with sick recoil:
'Yea, to my Lady too this Death must come.’
And therewithal such a bewilderment
Possessed me, that I shut mine eyes for peace;
And in my brain did cease
Order of thought, and every healthful thing.
Afterwards, wandering
Amid a swarm of doubts that came and went,
Some certain women’s faces hurried by,
And shrieked to me, 'Thou too shalt die, shalt die!'_
_Then saw I many broken, hinted sights
In the uncertain state I stepped into.
Meseemed to be I know not in what place,
Where ladies through the streets, like mournful lights,
Ran with loose hair, and eyes that frightened you
By their own terror, and a pale amaze:
The while, little by little, as I thought,
The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
And each wept at the other;
And birds dropped in mid flight out of the sky,
And earth shook suddenly,
And I was 'ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
Who asked of me, 'Hast thou not heard it said?
Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead’._
Although the _Vita Nuova_ is essentially true history, the same
cannot be said of a later work preferred to it by the author himself,
albeit posterity has reversed his judgment. This is the _Convito_,
or _Banquet_, in which Beatrice appears as an allegory of divine
philosophy. The process of this mutation is not difficult to discover.
Not long after her death, Dante, as he tells us at the end of the _Vita
Nuova_, had resolved, under the influence of a wondrous vision, “_di
dire di lei quello che mai non fu detto d’alcuna_.” The mortal maiden
thus necessarily becomes a type of supernatural glory and perfection,
as we see her in the _Divina Commedia_, and the metamorphosis
inevitably extends to the lyrics in which Dante celebrates her. She is
no longer Beatrice de’ Portinari, but Philosophy, and unfortunately
in too many instances Dante’s poetry has become philosophy also.
The nobility of the form still assures it pre-eminence over all
contemporary verse but the author’s own; but the substance is often
mere reasoning in rhyme. Two canzoni, however, are of distinguished
beauty, “_Voi ch’ intendendo il terzo ciel movete_” (translated by
Shelley), and “_Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute_,” which
Coleridge says, in 1819, he is at length beginning to understand after
reading it over twelve times annually for the last fourteen years.
“Such a fascination had it in spite of its obscurity!”
The former of these pieces is shown by internal evidence to have been
written as early as 1295, and the latter was composed after Dante’s
banishment, to which period most of the other canzoni and the prose
commentary probably belong. This commentary constitutes the substance
of the work. It was intended to have expounded fourteen canzoni,
but treats only of three, apart from a general introduction. More
remarkable, perhaps, than the philosophical subtleties of which it
consists, is Dante’s appeal to a new public. He writes no longer for
literary circles, but for the world of persons of worth wherever found,
especially persons of rank. Hence the treatise is necessarily composed
in Italian, which has the good effect of drawing from Dante a spirited
vindication of his native tongue. It was probably completed up to the
point where the author left it by 1308 or 1309. The exceedingly corrupt
text has been revised by the last editor, Dr. Moore, upon the authority
of two manuscripts in England.
The literary merits of the Italian language are more fully expounded
in another work of Dante’s, which, however, he composed in Latin,
that his arguments might reach those who would not have condescended
to read the vernacular. The _De Vulgari Eloquio_, originally entitled
_De Eloquentia Vulgari_, or _Of the Vulgar Tongue_, is shown by
historical allusions to have been composed by 1304. Like the _Convito_
it is unfinished, only two books of the four of which it was to have
consisted having been written. Dante’s conception of the capabilities
of his native tongue does him honour, even though he restricts the
number of subjects adapted to it, and would deny its use to all but
gifted writers. It is a still higher honour to have recommended it
more effectually by his example than by his reasonings, which, as was
inevitable in his age, frequently rest upon entirely fanciful and
visionary data. His account, nevertheless, of the Italian dialects as
they existed in his day, and his precepts on the metrical structure of
Italian poetry, which he seems not to have then contemplated as capable
of existing apart from music, retain a substantial value for all time.
The hopes founded upon the appearance of the Emperor in Italy in 1311
probably induced Dante to publish a work written some years previously,
his treatise _De Monarchia_, embodying the best mediæval conception
of the spheres of temporal and spiritual government upon earth. So
powerfully had the universality of Roman sway impressed men’s minds,
that the Roman people were believed to have obtained the empire of
the earth by the donation of Heaven, and the Emperor of Germany was
regarded as their lawful representative. This belief, so strange to us,
was, nevertheless, salutary in its time, by repressing the champions of
universal despotism who made the Pope the fountain of secular as well
as spiritual authority. By numerous arguments satisfactory to himself,
but which would now be considered entirely irrelevant, Dante proves
that universal monarchy is a portion of the Providential scheme, that
the Romans possessed by divine appointment jurisdiction over the entire
earth. The inheritance of this prerogative by the Emperor of Germany is
taken for granted, and it is next demonstrated that the Emperor does
not derive his authority from the Church, any more than the Church
hers from the Emperor. Yet Cæsar is to be reverent to Peter, as the
first-born son to his father. There is no trace of religious heterodoxy
in the treatise, though nothing can be more uncompromising than its
limitation of the Papal authority to its legitimate sphere.
The amount of fugitive poetry ascribed to Dante is inconsiderable.
Bruni, in his biography, remarks that there are two classes of
poets--those who sing by inspiration and those who compose by art--and
that Dante belongs to the second. It cannot be admitted that Dante
was devoid of inspiration, but it is certainly true that he was one
of those who possess a special power of regulating this divine gift.
A Shelley or a Coleridge must write when the impulse seizes him; but
a Milton, with the conception of _Paradise Lost_ in his mind, can
defer putting pen to paper for seventeen years, and, with consummate
lyric power, is but unfrequently visited by the lyric impulse. Dante,
so marvellously similar to Milton in many respects, also, if we may
trust his account of the genesis of the pieces in the _Vita Nuova_,
but seldom found himself under an irresistible impulse to lyrical
composition. Something suggests to him that a sonnet or a canzone would
be expedient or decorous; he plots it out, and fills up the outline
with unerring fidelity to his first conception. The gigantic plan of
the _Divine Comedy_ is similarly carried out without interruption or
misgiving; and but for the death of Beatrice, it is by no means certain
that it would have existed, any more than that Milton would have
written _Comus_ if the noble children had never been lost in the wood.
A poet of this stamp was not likely to enrich literature with much
fugitive verse. A few occasional poems glitter here and there, to
employ Wordsworth’s simile, like myrtle leaves in his chaplet of bay.
The most remarkable among them is a sestine, the finest example of its
artificial and elaborate class, and superbly translated by Rossetti;
this and other pieces are supposed to refer to a certain Pietra,
otherwise unknown. These poems seem to breathe the language of genuine
passion, but are too few and of too uncertain date to contribute
much to the solution of the question whether Dante was, as Boccaccio
asserts, remarkable for susceptibility to female charms, or a paragon
of continence, as Villani will have him. It is at least certain that,
after Beatrice, no woman exercised any noteworthy influence upon his
writings. He moves through life a great, lonely figure, estranged from
human fellowship at every point: a citizen of eternity, misplaced
and ill-starred in time; too great to mingle with his age, or, by
consequence, to be of much practical service to it; too embittered and
austere to manifest in action the ineffable tenderness which may be
clearly read in his writings; one whose friends and whose thoughts are
in the other world, while he is yet more keenly alive than any other
man to the realities of this; one whose greatness impressed the world
from the first, and whom it does not yet fully know, after the study of
six hundred years.