Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes in them?
But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her vows,
Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.
She wore the vestal’s veil within her heart.
And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:
... Ave
Maria, cantando; e cantando vanio,
She faded from our sight, singing Ave Maria,
and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and growth of his adoration of her, as described in the Vita Nuova.
To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was Dante’s overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.
Of the reality underlying the idealism of the Vita Nuova, we therefore need have no doubt whatever. Dante’s Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the Corso, near the Canto de’ Pazzi.
All that follows in the narrative of the Vita Nuova may be relied on just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how, with the naïf shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how, thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above. Then the Vita Nuova draws mournfully to a close, ending with these significant words:—
After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.