Dante

by Edmund G. Gardner

By day they held high watch afar,

At night they cried across the trench;

And still, in Dante’s path, the fierce

Gaunt soldiers wrangled o’er their spears.

At Ravenna.—It was most likely towards the end of 1316, or early in 1317, that Dante finally settled at Ravenna; probably, as Boccaccio tells us, on the invitation of Guido Novello da Polenta, who had succeeded to the lordship of Ravenna in June 1316. This Guido was the nephew of Francesca da Rimini, the hapless heroine of one of the most familiar episodes of the Inferno. These few remaining years of Dante’s life are the pleasantest to contemplate. His two sons were with him, though their mother apparently remained in Florence. Dino Perini, a younger Florentine, seems to have been to some extent the friend of Dante’s later days, as Guido Cavalcanti had been of his youth. And there were other congenial companions round him, including perhaps Giotto, who was probably working at Ravenna about this time. It is possible that Dante held some kind of professorship in the local university. Scholars and disciples came to be instructed in the poetic art, among them, it would seem, Guido da Polenta himself. His relations were still cordial with Can Grande, to whom, probably in 1318 or 1319, he addressed the epistle which contains the dedication of the Paradiso. From the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (which is now generally accepted as authentic) we gather that, at the end of 1319 or beginning of 1320, Dante paid a visit to Mantua, and that at Verona, on January 20th, 1320, he delivered a discourse concerning the relative position of the two elements, earth and water, on the globe’s surface. A curious document of 1320—the report of a process at Avignon in which Dante’s name is incidentally mentioned—seems to show that the poet was regarded as an authority upon sorcery, but as one whom persons intending to put this power to guilty use should abstain from consulting. There is also some vague evidence that accusations of heresy may have been brought against him.

Last Days and Death.—At Ravenna, amidst the monuments of ancient Caesars and the records in mosaic of primitive Christianity, where the church walls testified the glory of Justinian and the music of the Pine Forest sounded in his ears, Dante finished his Divina Commedia. His poetical correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, a shining light of the University of Bologna, reveals the kindliness and affability of the austere “preacher of Justice.” But he was not to end his days in peace. A storm cloud of war seemed about to burst over Ravenna. According to Venetian accounts—and we have no version of the matter from the other side—the Ravennese had taken Venetian ships and killed Venetian sailors in time of peace without just cause. In consequence the Doge entered into an alliance with the lords of Forlì and Rimini, and prepared to make war upon Ravenna with forces far beyond Guido’s power to meet. In August 1321 an embassy was sent by Guido to Venice, to avert the war by diplomatic means. Of this embassy Dante formed part. According to Filippo Villani, the Venetians refused the poet a hearing, and forced him, sick with fever, to return by land. It is more probable that Dante returned with offered terms by the quickest way, which would bring him back through the Pineta to Ravenna. There he died in the night between September 13th and 14th, 1321, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. The poet of a renovated Empire and a purified Church had passed away on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—the Cross which he represents as the mystical bond with which Christ had bound the chariot of the Church to the tree of the Empire. He left his Church sinking, though but for a time, still deeper into the scandal and corruption of Avignon; his Empire preparing new degradation for itself, now that the Eagle had passed into the greedy and unworthy hands of Bavarian Louis; his Italy torn and rent by factions and dissensions; his own Florence still ranking him as a proscribed rebel and criminal. But the divine work of his life had been completed, and remains an everlasting proof of the doctrine formulated by another poet, five hundred years later: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[9]

8. Dante’s Work and First Interpreters

Four Periods in Human Life.—In the Convivio (iv. 23, 24) Dante represents human life under the image of an arch, ascending and descending. For the perfectly-natured the summit of this arch is in the thirty-fifth year. Life is divided into four ages, like the four seasons of the year. Adolescence, Adolescenza, the increase of life, ascends from birth to the twenty-fifth year; Youth or Manhood, Gioventute, the perfection and culmination of life, lasts from the twenty-fifth to the forty-fifth year; Age, Senettute, descends from the forty-fifth to the seventieth year; after which remains Old Age, Senio, the winter of life.

Three Periods in Dante’s Work.—Dante’s work falls into three periods, representing to some extent Adolescenza, Gioventute, Senettute. The first is that of his “New Life,” the epoch of the romantic worship of Beatrice in her life and after her death, in which the youthful poet beheld many things by his intellect, as it were dreaming, quasi come sognado (Conv. ii. 13). This period comprises the Vita Nuova, with the lyrics contemporaneous with it, and closes in the promise “yet to utter concerning her what hath never been said of any woman.” The second period corresponds to Dante’s second age, or Gioventute; it is the period in which the image of Beatrice in the citadel of his mind is somewhat obscured by the tempests of passion and political turmoil, and for a while had become less paramount when her poet directed his thoughts to the service of philosophical research. Joined to the first period by the canzone addressed to the angelic movers of the sphere of Venus, it includes the greater part of the collection of lyrics (Canzoni, Bellate, Sonnets) included in the Rime or Canzoniere; the two unfinished prose treatises which expound the mystical meaning and technical construction of these canzoni, the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia. The three political letters connected with the Italian expedition of Henry VII. and, most probably, the special treatise in Latin prose on the Empire, the Monarchia, connect the second with the third period. This last period is the period of the Divina Commedia; the return to Beatrice, but now the allegorical Beatrice; the fulfilment of the supreme promise of the Vita Nuova; the result of the labours in art and philosophy which the second period had witnessed, of political experience, and of the spiritual and moral revulsion of Dante’s later years, after the bitter disillusion of the Emperor Henry’s enterprise and failure: “A fruit of sufferings excess.” To this period, subsidiary to the Divina Commedia, belong the letters to the Italian Cardinals, to the Florentine friend and to Can Grande, the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (if authentic), and the two Eclogues.

In addition to these works, several Italian scholars of high repute have attributed to Dante the Fiore—a rendering of the Roman de la Rose in 232 sonnets—the author of which twice calls himself “Durante.” The editors of the sexcentenary testo critico have wisely excluded it from their volume, and it has been edited as an “appendice dantiana” by Parodi. Also we know of several smaller things of Dante’s now lost: the letters mentioned by Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo; a serventese containing the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence, referred to in the Vita Nuova (V. N. vi.), one of his earliest poems; and a canzone on love, of peculiar structure, quoted in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (V. E. ii. 11).