These two Eclogues are of priceless value. Nowhere else is such a comparatively bright picture of Dante’s closing days given us. The genuine and hearty laughter which greets Giovanni’s two letters, the generous tone of the supreme singer towards the young scholar poet, the kindly joking at the expense of Dino, make delightful reading and show us quite another side of Dante’s character. Giovanni’s first letter implies that the earlier parts of the Commedia had not only been published, but had acquired a certain popularity. From Dante’s first Eclogue it follows that, by 1319, both Inferno and Purgatorio were completed, and that the Paradiso was in preparation: “When the bodies that flow round the world, and they that dwell among the stars, shall be shown forth in my song, even as the lower realms, then shall I delight to crown my head with ivy and with laurel.” And after this the passage in the second Eclogue, written apparently in 1321, however we interpret it, has the same pathos and sanctity as Petrarch’s note on the last line of his Triumph of Eternity, or the abrupt ending of Shelley’s Triumph of Life:
Hoc illustre caput, cui iam frondator in alta
virgine perpetuas festinat cernere frondes.[27]
5. The “Quaestio de Aqua et Terra”
The Quaestio de Aqua et Terra—which purports to be a discourse or lecture delivered by Dante in the church of Sant’ Elena at Verona on January 20th, 1320—was first published in 1508 by an Augustinian friar, Giovan Benedetto Moncetti. No manuscript of it is known to exist, and there is no reference to the work or to the event in any earlier writer, though Antonio Pucci (after the middle of the fourteenth century) implies that Dante sought disputations of this kind. In this work the poet—in accordance with the physical science of his age—discusses the question of the relative position of the element earth and the element water upon the surface of the globe. The Quaestio was until recently regarded as a fabrication of the early sixteenth century, but Moore in England and Vincenzo Biagi in Italy, mainly on the internal evidence of the work itself, have convinced many Dante scholars that it may be regarded with some probability as authentic.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] In the recently discovered codex at Berlin—the earliest of the four extant MSS.—the work is entitled Rectorica Dantis (“The Rhetoric of Dante”), which would associate it with the similarly named treatises of the masters of the ars dictandi, such as Boncompagno da Signa, who wrote a Rhetorica novissima.
[20] This southern idiom (nostrum ydioma, i. 10)—from which Dante apparently regards both classical Latin and the modern romance languages derived—would be what we now call Vulgar Latin; but he restricts the phrase vulgare latinum (or latium) to Italian, which—when discussing the rival claims of the three vernaculars to pre-eminence—he rightly recognises to be closest to classical Latin.
[21] Equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio (ii. 8). The sine responsorio distinguishes the true canzone, canzone distesa, from the ballata, canzone a ballo, in which the ripresa of from two to four lines was repeated after each stanza as well as sung as a prelude to the whole. Dante’s example is his own Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, the poem which began “le nove rime” (Purg. xxiv. 49-51). The tragica coniugatio is most nearly realised in English poetry by the ode, while the closest counterpart to the canzone with stanzas divisible into metrical periods is offered by Spenser’s Epithalamion. The sestina has been employed by English poets from the Elizabethans to Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling.
[22] Cipolla showed that the matter of the first two books more directly controverts the anti-imperialist and anti-Roman arguments of the French political writers of the beginning of the fourteenth century—writers like the Dominican, John of Paris. But these or similar views were now being adduced by Robert of Naples and supported by Clement V.