Dante

by Edmund G. Gardner

Love wore an angel’s face:

Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame.”

Rossetti’s Translation.

The poetry of the dolce stil nuovo developed the spiritual conception of love already in germ in the later troubadours, and added an infusion of the new scholastic philosophy, but the real novelty lay in the superiority of Guido Guinizelli as a poet over his predecessors. From Bologna the pre-eminence passed to Florence with Guido Cavalcanti, who took from the other Guido “la gloria de la lingua” (Purg. xi. 98), and developed a complicated poetical psychology which culminates in his famous canzone on the nature of love:

Donna me prega, perch’io voglio dire;

“A lady prays me, therefore I would tell of an accident which is often fierce and is so lofty that it is called Love.” The Vita Nuova, beginning under the influence of Cavalcanti, becomes the supreme development in prose and verse of the doctrine of Guinizelli.

“This glorious poet,” writes Boccaccio, “first, when still weeping for the death of his Beatrice, about in his twenty-sixth year put together in a little volume, which he called the New Life, certain small works, as sonnets and canzoni, made by him in diverse times before and in rhyme, marvellously beautiful; writing at the head of each, severally and in order, the occasions which had moved him to make them, and adding at the end the divisions of each poem. And although, in maturer years, he was much ashamed of having made this little book, nevertheless, when his age is considered, it is very beautiful and pleasing, and especially to the general reader.”

But this spotless lily of books is too delicate a flower in the garden of art to be plucked by the hands of the writer of the Decameron. A greater poet than Boccaccio has said of it: “Throughout the Vita Nuova there is a strain like the first falling murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow, and prepares us to look upon the sea.” It is a preparation for the Commedia, inasmuch as it tells us how the divine singer became a poet, and how she crossed his path who was to be his spiritual pilot over that mighty ocean. Boccaccio’s statement, that Dante in maturer years was ashamed of having written this book, is perhaps due to a misunderstanding or confused recollection of a passage about certain canzoni in the Convivio (i. 2). In the Convivio, where he discusses the nature of allegory and interprets the whole of certain later poems in an allegorical sense, Dante suggests no such significance for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova; but, while declaring that the Vita Nuova was written at the entrance of manhood, he seems to contrast it with his more mature work, to which alone he would apply an allegorical interpretation. And he is most emphatic that this is in no way to derogate from the Vita Nuova (Conv. i. 1): “For it is fitting to speak and act differently in one age than in another.”

The Vita Nuova is the most spiritual and ethereal romance of love that exists, but its purity is such as comes, not from innocent simplicity of soul, but from self-repression. In the form of a collection of lyrics connected together by a prose narrative (itself a thing of rare and peculiar beauty), with quaint and curious scholastic divisions and explanations, Dante tells the tale of his love for Beatrice, from his first sight of her in their ninth year to a vision which is the anticipation of her final apotheosis. Although conforming with the poetic conventions of the age, especially in the earlier portions, it is based upon a real love story, however deeply tinged with mysticism and embellished with visionary episodes. The heroine in her loveliness and purity becomes an image upon earth of the Divine Beauty and Goodness; the poet’s love for her is the stepping-stone to love of the Supreme Good. Dante has learned his lesson from Guido Guinizelli, and does not fear to take God Himself as a similitude of his love; Heaven itself requires his lady for its perfection of beatitude (V. N. xix.); she has her precursor in Monna Giovanna, even as St. John came before the True Light (xxiv.); nay, she is a very miracle whose only root is the Blessed Trinity (xxx.).

Here beginneth the “New Life,” Incipit vita nova! We shall probably do well in taking the New Life not as merely meaning the poet’s youth, but as referring to the new life that began with the dawn of love, the regeneration of the soul. Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice at the beginning of her ninth and at the end of his ninth year, when she appeared to him robed in crimson, the colour of love and charity—and her “most sweet salutation” nine years later, when she came dressed all in pure white, the hue of Faith and Purity, between two gentle ladies older than herself—these things may have a certain analogy with the representation of his moral and political conversion, in the vision of the Commedia, as happening in his thirty-fifth year, 1300, the year of Jubilee. We may perhaps surmise that Dante, looking back from this second meeting, from which his love really dates, artistically worked up the recollections of his childhood to correspond with it; just as many years later, when he turned to the composition of the sacred poem, he looked back in his memory to some great spiritual experience when “in the middle of the journey of our life.” And, although Dante’s own words in the Convivio seem absolutely to preclude any possibility of allegorising the figure of Beatrice herself, it is clear that many of the minor episodes in the Vita Nuova must be regarded as symbolical.