How do we know that all these works are Dante’s? it will be asked. Here we rest on unusually sure ground, for which once more we have to thank Villani.
In the Chapter to which we have already more than once referred, containing the notice of Dante’s death, that historian gives a list of his works. “In his youth,” we read—
“he made the book called The New Life of Love; and afterwards, when he was in exile, he made some twenty moral and amatory odes, very excellent; and, among others, he wrote three notable letters, one to the Government of Florence, lamenting his own exile without any fault; the second he sent to the Emperor Henry; the third to the Italian cardinals, when the vacancy occurred after the death of Pope Clement.... And he made the Comedy, wherein, in polished rhyme, and with great and subtle questions of morals, nature, and astrology, philosophy and theology ... he composed and treated in one hundred chapters, or chants, concerning the being and condition of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.... He also made the Monarchy, in which he treated of the duty of the Pope and of the Emperor. And he began a commentary on fourteen of the above-mentioned moral odes, in the vulgar tongue, which, through his death supervening, is only completed for three.... Also he made a little work which he calls De Vulgari Eloquentia, whereof he promises to make four books, but only two are extant, perhaps by reason of his speedy end; in which, in powerful and elegant style, and with fine arguments, he examines all the vernaculars of Italy.”
The last two paragraphs, it should be said, do not occur in all manuscripts. But, assuming them to be genuine, it will be seen that we have here an almost contemporary notice, with one or two exceptions, of all the main works now contained in the editions of Dante. The chief exception is the curious little treatise on physical geography, called De aqua et terra, which purports to be a lecture delivered by Dante at Verona, in the last year of his life; but this is of very questionable genuineness. It was first printed, indeed, in 1508, but no manuscript of it is now known to exist.
Of the other works, Villani’s notice may be regarded as clear proof that they are what they profess to be; and incidentally it may be said that his mention of them has probably been of great service. Literary morality was sufficiently lax in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and people’s ideas as to the use that might legitimately be made of famous names differed considerably from those now in force. As it is, a good many compositions have passed under Dante’s name, from an early date, which scarcely pretend to be genuine works of his. We can imagine what a temptation it would have been for some enterprising man of letters to complete the Convito or the De Vulgari Eloquentia, or even to add a canto or two to the Commedia, if there had been no record in existence to let the world know where the genuine ended and the spurious began.[41] Even this security, however, is not quite sufficient to set us at our ease in the case of the letters. True, we have three letters purporting to be the three which Villani mentions, as well as several others passing under Dante’s name; but it is, of course, possible that the very fact of his mentioning them may have sufficed to set ingenious scribes at work to produce them. Manuscripts of them are very few, and they occur in company with other works which are undoubted exercises of fancy.
On the other hand, more than one writer of the fifteenth century professes to have seen letters of Dante’s, of which no trace can now be found. That referring to the battle of Campaldino, for which Leonardo Bruni vouches, has already been mentioned; and Flavius Blondus of Forlì, a historian about contemporary with Leonardo, speaks of others as extant in his time. These, if they could now be recovered, would be of the greatest interest, since they related to the obscure period immediately following the exile of the White party. Meanwhile the genuineness of the more important letters which we possess is perhaps the most interesting question which remains to be settled in connection with Dante’s works.
Besides the prose letters, two poetical epistles are still extant, and these, strange to say, the most sceptical critics have so far allowed to pass unquestioned. There is something a little pathetic about their history. Two or three years before Dante’s death, a young scholar of Bologna, known from his devotion to the great Latin bard, as Joannes de Virgilio, addressed an extremely prosaic, but highly complimentary, epistle to the old poet, urging him to write something in the more dignified language of antiquity. Dante replied in an “Eclogue,” wherein, under Virgilian pastoral imagery, he playfully banters his correspondent, and says that he had better finish first the work he has in hand, namely the Commedia. One more communication on either side followed, and then Dante’s death brought the verse-making to a close. In his own pieces one is struck rather by the melody of the rhythm and occasional dignity of the thought, than by the classical quality of the Latinity. But they are unquestionably remarkable specimens of Latin verse for an age previous to the revival of classical study, and, we should say, far more genial and more truly Virgilian in spirit than the most polished composition of the Humanists.
It is not intended here to enter into any analysis or estimate of Dante’s prose works. The former task is one which readers should perform for themselves. Nor need they find it too much for their powers. With all his obscurity of allusion, and occasionally of phrase, Dante is not really a difficult author. From his teachers, the schoolmen, he had learnt to arrange his matter with due, perhaps more than due, regard to order and symmetry; and consequently the attentive reader is seldom at a loss to know what part of the subject is, at any given place, under consideration.
Of the obscurity which results from over-elaboration of the thought, or from an attempt at originality of expression, Dante is, in his maturer works, singularly free.[42] It must be remembered, too, that very often phrases which look to us like “conceits” are merely instances of the employment of scientific and technical terms now obsolete, but then familiar to every cultivated reader.
For æsthetic, or, as it has been unkindly called, “sign-post” criticism—that which, under the guise of directing the reader’s taste, often seems intended to call attention mainly to the acuteness of the critic’s own perception or his delicacy of phrase—the study of Dante would seem to be a very unpromising field. The sentimentalist and the elegant craftsman in words seem out of place in the company of this uncompromising seeker after realities, this relentless exposer of shams.