literature was already in full swing; while in France, Germany, and
Provence there had been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic
lore. Whereas the trouveres and troubadours had possessed but the light
intellectual luggage of a military aristocracy; and the minnesingers
had, for the most part, been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing
(Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein relates how he
carried about his lady's letter for days unread until the return of his
secretary); the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, were
eminently scholars; men to whom, however much they might be politicians
and ringleaders, like Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of
antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such men were familiar with
whatever yet survived of the transcendental theories of Plato and
Plotinus; and they seized at once upon the mythic metaphysics of an
antenatal condition, of typical ideas, of the divine essence of beauty,
on all the mystic discussions on love and on the soul, as a
philosophical explanation of their seemingly inexplicable passion for an
unapproachable woman. The lady upon whom the poetic fervour, the
mediaeval love, inherited from Provence and France, was now expended, and
whom social reasons placed quite beyond the reach of anything save the
poet's soul and words, was evidently beloved for the sake of that much
of the divine essence contained in her nature; she was loved for purely
spiritual reasons, loved as a visible and living embodiment of virtue
and beauty, as a human piece of the godhead. So far, therefore, from
such an attachment being absurd, as absurd it would have seemed to
troubadours and minnesingers, who never served a lady save for what they
called a reward; it became, in the eyes of these platonizing Italians,
the triumph of the well-bred soul; and as such, soon after, a necessary
complement to dignities, talents, and wealth, the very highest
occupation of a liberal mind. Thus did their smattering of platonic and
neo-platonic philosophy supply the Tuscan poets with a logical reality
for this otherwise unreal passion.
But there was something more. In this democratic and philosophizing
Italy, there was not the gulf which separated the chivalric poets, men
of the sword and not of books, from the great world of religious
mysticism; for, though the minnesingers especially were extremely devout
and sang many a strange love-song to the Virgin; they knew, they could
know, nothing of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his
disciples--humble and transcendental spirits, whose words were treasured
by the sedentary, dreamy townsfolk of the Rhine, but would have conveyed
no meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its battles and
feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash morality, Wolfram von
Eschenbach. In the great manufacturing cities of Italy, such religious
mysticism spread as it could never spread in feudal courts; it became
familiar, both in the mere passionate sermons and songs of the wandering
friars, and in the subtle dialectics of the divines; above all, it
became familiar to the poets. Now the essence of this contemplative
theology of the Middle Ages, which triumphantly held its own against the
cut-and-dry argumentation of scholastic rationalism, was love. Love
which assuredly meant different things to different minds; a passionate
benevolence towards man and beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of
Assisi; a mere creative and impassive activity of the divinity to
deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange passionate eyes
and lips reflected in the dark well of knowledge) and almost pantheistic
thinkers like Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor,
amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild rhapsody, a sort
of mystic dance, a kind of furious _malaguena_ of divine love; and that
he who would wish to know God, let him love--"Qui vult habere notitiam
Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of St. Victor, one of the subtlest
of all the mystics. "Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love,
love--was not love then the highest of all human faculties, and must not
the act of loving, of perceiving God's essence in some creature which
had virtue, the soul's beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the
noblest business of a noble life? Thus argued the poets; and their
argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing Phaedrus and
Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria and the Courts of Love of
Provence, resulted in adding all the fervid reality of philosophical and
religious aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disembodied love
of woman.
Little by little therefore, together with the carnal desires of
Provencals and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets put behind them those little
coquetries of style and manner, complications of metre and rhythm
learned and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair; those
metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or shining golden ribbons
dropped from the lady's bosom and head and eagerly snatched by the
lover, which we still find, curiously transformed and scented with the
rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant poetry of modern
Tuscany. Little by little does the love poetry of the Italians reject
such ornaments; and cloth itself in that pale garment, pale and stately
in heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and radiant and
solemn as the garment of some painted angel, which we have all learned
to know from the "Vita Nuova."
To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors and contemporaries
of Dante is to the last degree difficult: it can be described only by
symbols, and symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself, after
translating with exquisite beauty the finest poems of this school,
showed how he had read into them his own spirit, when he drew the
beautiful design for the frontispiece of his collection. These two
lovers--the youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his long
throbbing neck towards the beloved; the lady stooping down towards him,
raising him up and kissing him; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the
four tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the profile
hidden by the profile, the passion and the pathos, the eager, wistful
faces, nay, the very splendour of brocade robes and jewels, the very
sweetness of blooming rose spaliers; all this is suitable to illustrate
this group of sonnets or that of the "House of Life;" but it is false,
false in efflorescence and luxuriance of passion, splendour and colour
of accessory, to the poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their
poetry certainly is, and passionate; indeed the very concentration of
imaginative passion; but imagination and passion unlike those of all
other poets; perhaps because more rigorously reduced to their elements:
imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the intellect,
neither of the senses: love in its most essential condition, but, just
because an essence, purged of earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into
a cultus or a philosophy.
These poems might nearly all have been written by one man, were it
possible for one man to vary from absolute platitude to something like
genius, so homogeneous is their tone: everywhere do we meet the same
simplicity of diction struggling with the same complication and subtlety
of thought, the same abstract speculation strangely mingled with most
individual and personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling, the
conception of all the large characteristics of love, and of all its
small incidents are, in this _cycle_ of poets, constantly the same; and
they are the same in the "Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem,
invented and felt nothing unknown to his immediate predecessors and
contemporaries, but merely concentrated their thoughts and feelings by
the greater intenseness of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's
days is, as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy and a
cultus. The philosophy of love engages much of these poets' attention;
all have treated of it, but Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in
poetry, is love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or
Bonaventura might explain the mysteries of God's being and will, the
nature and operation of love. "Love, which enamours us of excellence,
arises out of pure virtue of the soul, and equals us to God," he tells
us; and subtly developes his theme. This being the case, nothing can be
more mistaken than to suppose, as do those of little sense, that Love is
blind, and goes blindly about ("Da sentir poco, e da credenza vana--Si
move il dir di cotal grossa gente--Ch' amor fa cieco andar per lo suo
regno"). Love is omniscient, since love is born of the knowledge and
recognition of excellence. Such love as this is the only true source of
happiness, since it alone raises man to the level of the divinity.
Cavalcanti has in him not merely the subtlety but the scornfulness of a
great divine. His wrath against all those who worship or defend a
different god of Love knows no bounds. "I know not what to say of him
who adores the goddess born of Saturn and sea-foam. His love is fire: it
seems sweet, but its result is bitter and evil. He may indeed call
himself happy; but in such delights he mingles himself with much
baseness." Such is this god of Love, who, when he descended into Dante's
heart, caused the spirit of life to tremble terribly in his secret
chamber, and trembling to cry, "Lo, here is a god stronger than myself,
who coming will rule over me. Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens
dominabitur mihi!"
The god, this chaste and formidable archangel Amor, is the true subject
of these poets' adoration; the woman into whom he descends by a mystic
miracle of beauty and of virtue becomes henceforward invested with
somewhat of his awful radiance. She is a gentle, gracious lady; a
lovable and loving woman, in describing whose grey-green eyes and colour
as of snow tinted with pomegranate, the older Tuscans would fain linger,
comparing her to the new-budded rose, to the morning star, to the golden
summer air, to the purity of snowflakes falling silently in a serene
sky; but the sense of the divinity residing within her becomes too
strong. From her eyes dart spirits who strike awe into the heart; from
her lips come words which make men sigh; on her passage the poet casts
down his eyes; notions, all these, with which we are familiar from the
"Vita Nuova;" but which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even to
Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante. The poet bids his verse go forth
to her, but softly; and stand before her with bended head, as before the
Mother of God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from heaven, a
spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful of all his sonnets, the
summing up of all that the poets of his circle had said of their
lady--"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare."
"She passes along the street so beautiful and gracious," says
Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in all whom she greets, and makes
him of our faith if he does not yet believe. And no base man can come
into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue of her: no man can
think ought of evil as long as he looks upon her." "The noble mind which
I feel, on account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes me
despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni. The women who surround
her are glorified in her glory, glorified in their womanhood and
companionship with her. "The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti, "are
dear to me for the sake of your love; and I pray them as they are
courteous, that they should do you all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely
a woman, and something more than a saint: an avatar, an incarnation of
that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty, and raises men's minds to
heaven; and when Cavalcanti speaks of his lady's portrait behind the
blazing tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she should be
on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The idea of a mysterious
incarnation of love in the lady, or of a mystic relationship between her
and love, returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that she is
Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's bride; nay, in this love
theology of the thirteenth century, arises the same kind of confusion as
in the mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A Sienese poet, Ugo
da Massa, goes so far as to say, "Amor and I are all one thing; and we
have one will and one heart; and if I were not, Amor were not; mind you,
do not think I am saying these things from subtlety ('e non pensate ch'
io 'l dica per arte'); for certainly it is true that I am love, and he
who should slay me would slay love."
Together with the knowledge of public life and of scholastic theories,
together with the love of occult and cabalistic science, and the craft
of Provencal poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the thirteenth
century the knowledge of this new, this exotic and esoteric intellectual
love. And, as it is the mission of genius to gather into an undying
whole, to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings and
perceptions of the less highly endowed men who surround it, so Dante
moulded out of the love passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita
Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is fact; whether a real
woman whom he called Beatrice ever existed; some of those praiseworthy
persons, who prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its poor
fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of their laboratory, have
gravely doubted. But such doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of
the "Vita Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere romance
heroine, the real meaning and value of the book does not change in our
eyes; since, to concoct such a tale, Dante must have had a number of
real experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent; and to conceive
and create such a figure as Beatrice, and such a passion as she inspires
her poet, he must have felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a
lady, the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the soul, and of
the soul's movements and actions, this "Vita Nuova;" so why should it
matter if that which could never exist save in the spirit, should have
been but the spirit's creation? It is, in its very intensity, a vision
of love; what if it be a vision merely conceived and never realized?
Hence the futility of all those who wish to destroy our faith and
pleasure by saying "all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what
did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this as it may, the "Vita
Nuova," thank heaven, exists; and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to
our feelings. The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said
Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather itself into a
human shape; and a real being has been surrounded by the halo of
perfection emanated from the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory
have suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a distance; the
woman whom, as a child, the poet, himself a child, had already looked at
with the strange, ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in our
childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening of the "Vita Nuova;"
to put aside this narrative of childish love together with the pathetic
little pedantries of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses to
each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the recurrence and
combination of the number nine (and that curious little bit of
encyclopaedic display about the Syrian month _Tismin_) as so much pretty
local colouring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing at which to
laugh in such childish fascinations; the wonderful, the perfect, is more
open to us as children than it is afterwards: a word, a picture, a
snatch of music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning; and
how much more so some human being, often some other, more brilliant
child from whose immediate contact we are severed by some circumstance,
perhaps by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes that other
appear strangely distant, above us, moving in a world of glory which we
scarcely hope to approach; a child sometimes, or sometimes some grown
person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks or looks at us, the
child, with ways which we do not understand, like some fairy or goddess.
No indeed, there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first
blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful things, which in
most of us is trodden down, left to wither, by our maturer selves;
nothing to make us laugh; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we
see too well, see others too much on their real level, scrutinize too
much; too much, alas, for what at best is but an imperfect creature. And
in this state of fascination does the child Dante see the child
Beatrice, as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish sphere
quite above him; treasuring up that vision, till with his growth it
expands and grows more beautiful and noble, but none the less
fascinating and full of awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young
poet, full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer, sweeter,
less metaphysic and theological than the Paradise of his manhood); as
yet but a gracious, learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still
undeveloped by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer of Giotto's
fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish face, marked only by dreamy
eyes and lips, wandering through this young Florence of the Middle
Ages--when, I say, he meets after long years, the noble and gentle
woman, serious and cheerful and candid; and is told that she is that
same child who was the queen and goddess of his childish fancies; then
the vague glory with which his soul is filled expands and enwraps the
beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new. And the blood retreats from
his veins, and he trembles; and a vague god within him, half allegory,
half reality, cries out to him that a new life for him has begun.
Beatrice has become the ideal; Beatrice, the real woman, has ceased to
exist; the Beatrice of his imagination only remains, a piece of his own
soul embodied in a gracious and beautiful reality, which he follows,
seeks, but never tries to approach. Of the real woman he asks nothing;
no word throughout the "Vita Nuova" of entreaty or complaint, no shadow
of desire, not a syllable of those reproaches of cruelty which Petrarch
is for ever showering upon Laura. He desires nothing of Beatrice, and
Beatrice cannot act wrongly; she is perfection, and perfection makes him
who contemplates humble at once and proud, glorifying his spirit. Once,
indeed, he would wish that she might listen to him; he has reason to
think that he has fallen in her esteem, has seemed base and uncourteous
in her eyes, and he would explain. But he does not wish to address her;
it never occurs to him that she can ever feel in any way towards him; it
is enough that he feels towards her. Let her go by and smile and
graciously salute her friends: the sight of her grave and pure
regalness, nay, rather divinity, of womanhood, suffices for his joy;
nay, later the consciousness comes upon him that it is sufficient to
know of her existence and of his love even without seeing her. And, as
must be the case in such ideal passion, where the action is wholly in
the mind of the lover, he is at first ashamed, afraid; he feels a terror
lest his love, if known to her, should excite her scorn; a horror lest
it be misunderstood and befouled by the jests of those around him, even
of those same gentle women to whom he afterwards addresses his praise of
Beatrice. He is afraid of exposing to the air of reality this ideal
flower of passion. But the moment comes when he can hide it no longer;
and, behold, the passion flower of his soul opens out more gloriously in
the sunlight of the world. He is proud of his passion, of his worship;
he feels the dignity and glory of being the priest of such a love. The
women all round, the beautiful, courteous women, of whom, only just
now, he was so dreadfully afraid, become his friends and confidants;
they are quite astonished (half in love, perhaps, with the young poet)
at this strange way of loving; they sympathize, admire, are in love with
his love for Beatrice. And to them he speaks of her rather than to men,
for the womanhood which they share with his lady consecrates them in his
eyes; and they, without jealousy towards this ideal woman, though
perhaps not without longing for this ideal love, listen as they might
listen to some new and unaccountably sweet music, touched and honoured,
and feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half-mad thing. He
talks of her, sings of her, and is happy; the strangest thing in this
intensely real narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of
the passion in its own existence, this complete absence of all desire or
hope. But this happiness is interrupted by the sudden, terrible thought
that one day all this must cease; the horrible, logical necessity coming
straight home to him, that one day she must die--"Di necessita conviene
che la gentilissima Beatrice alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing
truer, more intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful
pang of evil, not real, but first imagined; this frightful nightmare
vision of the end coming when reality is still happy. Have we not all of
us at one time felt the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that
happiness must end; that the beloved, the living, must die; that this
thing the present, which we clasp tight with our arms, which throbs
against our breast, will in but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving
us to grasp mere phantom recollections? Compared with this the blow of
the actual death of Beatrice is gentle. And then, the truthfulness of
his narration how, with yearning, empty heart, hungering after those
poor lost realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of his
lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed consciousness of her
existence, he little by little lets himself be consoled, cradled to
sleep like a child which has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the
vague love, of another--the Donna della Finestra--with whom he speaks of
Beatrice; and the sudden, terrified, starting up and shaking off of any
such base consolation, the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the
dead one, the indignant impatience with his own weakness, with his
baseness in not understanding that it is enough that Beatrice has lived
and that he has loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the
ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future. A revolution
in himself which gradually merges in that grave final resolve, that
sudden seeing how Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet,
brief determination not to say any more of her as yet; not till he can
show her transfigured in Paradise. "After this sonnet there appeared
unto me a marvellous vision, in which I beheld things that made me
propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed one, until the
time when I might more worthily treat of her. And that this may come to
pass, I strive with all my endeavour, even as she truly knows it. Thus,
if it should please Him, through whom all things do live, that my life
continue for several more years, I hope to say of her such things as
have never been said of any lady. And then may it please Him, who is the
lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go forth to see the glory of
its lady, that is to say, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously looks
up into the face of Him, _qui est per omnia saecula benedictus_"