Mr. Wicksteed, for instance, to whom we owe a charming translation of the Vita[585]—so charming and so full of Boccaccio's own flavour that in all modesty I have taken leave to use it when I must—though he is himself its translator, finds it necessary not so much to commend it to us as to give us "some needful warnings" and "further cautions" in introducing us to it. He nowhere, I think, tells us how very valuable it is, nor instructs us why above all other works of the kind it is valuable to us. He nowhere takes the trouble to tell his readers that Boccaccio was the most eminent student of Dante in his day—the years that immediately followed the poet's death—nor that he must have met and talked with many who had known Dante. He nowhere thinks it necessary to record that Boccaccio spent more than one considerable period of time in Romagna and the Marche, and even in the very city and at the same court where Dante lived and died. It did not occur to him as a point of honour before giving us his "warnings" and "cautions" to state that Boccaccio was well acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, nor to mention that it was probably during a sojourn in Ravenna, where she was a nun, that Boccaccio conceived, or at any rate "pondered" the Vita itself.[586] Mr. Wicksteed does none of these things; but having spoken somewhat vaguely of the "versions" of the Vita and still more vaguely of its date, he proceeds to discuss its "documentary value," assuring us a little reluctantly that "scholars appear to be settling down to the conclusion that ... [Boccaccio] is to be taken as a serious biographer, who made careful investigations and who used the material he had gathered with some degree of critical judgment."[587]
It will be seen, then, that such scholars are right, and that we have indeed in the Vita not only the earliest, but incomparably the most authoritative life of Dante that has come down to us, for it was written not merely by the greatest lover and defender of Dante in the years that immediately followed his death in 1321, but by one who was then already a boy of eight years old, and who in his manhood was well acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, and with others who had known him in Ravenna and Romagna, where he had passed so much of his time.
The Vita then comes to us with a certain unassailable authority, and is besides a work of piety, of love, of vindication. It opens a little pedantically perhaps with an appeal to Solon, that "temple of human wisdom," against the policy of the Florentine Commonwealth in its failure to reward the deserving and to punish the guilty. A passionate attack on those who had exiled Dante follows in which he demands: "If all the wrongs Florence hath wrought could be hidden from the all-seeing eye of God, would not this one alone suffice to call down His wrath upon her? Yea, verily!" Then follows the reason for his book, which it seems he has determined to write in expiation of the sin of Florence, "recognising that I myself am a part, though but a small one, of the same city whereof Dante Alighieri, considering his deserts, his nobility, and his virtue, was a very great one." His book will consist, he tells us, of "those things as to which he [Dante] kept seemly silence concerning himself, to wit, the nobility of his origin, his life, his studies, and his character; and after that I will gather together the works he composed; wherein he hath rendered himself so illustrious amongst those to come...." And he will write in the vulgar "in style full humble, and light ... and in our Florentine idiom, that it may not depart from what he used in the greater part of his works." He returns more than once to praise the vulgar tongue, praising Dante in one place as he who "was first to open the way for the return of the Muses banished from Italy. It was he who revealed the glory of the Florentine idiom. It was he that brought under the rule of due numbers every beauty of the vernacular speech. It was he who may be truly said to have brought back dead poesy to life." In another place he says: "by his teachings he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vulgar, which to my thinking he first exalted and brought into repute among us Italians, no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins.... He showed by the effect that every lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious above every other."
Having thus introduced his work to us, he proceeds to speak of the birth of Dante, who, he says, was born in 1265.[588] He speaks then of his "boyhood continuously given to study in the liberal arts"; of his reading of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius; of his mastering history "by himself," and philosophy under divers teachers by long study and toil. He then tells us of his places of study, naming Florence, Bologna, and Paris.[589] He then passes on to his meeting in his ninth year with Beatrice, who, he tells us, was the little daughter of Folco Portinari, and recounts her death in her twenty-fourth year and Dante's grief, his relations' purpose to cure him by giving him a wife, and his marriage with Gemma. There follows the famous interpolation against marriage which I have already quoted at length,[590] but which, as he confesses, has nothing to do with Dante.
Having thus brought Dante to manhood, Boccaccio speaks of his entrance into politics, "wherein the vain honours that are attached to public office so entangled him that, without considering whence he had departed nor whither he was going, with loosened rein he gave himself almost wholly up to the management of these things; and therein fortune was so favourable to him that never an embassy was heard nor answered, never a law enacted nor cancelled, never a peace made, never a war undertaken, and, in short, never a deliberation of any weight conducted till he first had given his opinion thereon." We are told of the factions into which the city was divided, and how the faction opposed to that of which Dante was in some sense the leader got the mastery and "hurled Dante in a single moment from the height of government of his city," so that he was cast out from it an exile, his house gutted and plundered, and his real property confiscated.
He shows us the poet wandering hither and thither through Tuscany "without anxiety" on account of his wife and children, because he knew Gemma "to be related to one of the chiefs of the hostile faction ... and some little portion of his possessions she had with difficulty defended from the rage of the citizens, under the title of her dowry, on the proceeds of which she provided in narrow style enough for herself and for his children; whilst he in his poverty must needs provide for his own sustenance by industry, to which he was all unused.... Year after year he remained (turning from Verona, where he had gone to Messer Alberto della Scala on his first flight, and had been graciously received by him), now with the Count Salvatico in the Casentino, now with the Marquis Moruello Malespina in the Lunigiana, now with the Della Faggiola in the mountains near Urbino, held in much honour so far as consisted with the times and with their power." Thence Boccaccio tells us he went to Bologna and Padua, and again to Verona. It was at this time, seeing no way yet of returning to Florence, that he went to Paris and there studied philosophy and theology. While he was in Paris, Henry of Luxemburg was elected King of the Romans and had left Germany to subdue Italy. Dante "supposed for many reasons that he must prove victorious, and conceived the hope of returning to Florence by his power ... although he heard Florence had taken sides against him." So he crossed the Alps, "he joined with the enemies of the Florentines, and both by embassies and letters strove to draw the Emperor from the siege of Brescia in order to lay siege to Florence ... declaring that if she were overcome, little or no toil would remain to secure the possession and dominion of all Italy free and unimpeded." This proved a failure, for Florence was not to be beaten, and the death of the Emperor "cast into despair all who were looking to him, and Dante most of all; wherefore no longer going about to seek his return, he passed the heights of the Apennines and departed to Romagna, where his last day that was to put an end to all his toils awaited him." There in Ravenna ruled Guido Novello da Polenta, who, as Boccaccio says, "did not wait to be requested" to receive him, "but considering with how great shame men of worth ask such favours, with liberal mind and with free proffers he approached him, requesting from Dante of special grace that which he knew Dante must needs have begged of him, to wit, that it might please him to abide with him.... Highly pleased by the liberality of the noble knight, and also constrained by his necessities, Dante awaited no further invitation but the first, and took his way to Ravenna...." There in "the middle or thereabout of his fifty-sixth year he fell sick ... and in the month of September in the years of Christ one thousand three hundred and twenty-one, on the day whereon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is celebrated by the Church, not without the greatest grief on the part of the aforesaid Guido, and generally all the other Ravennese, he rendered up to his Creator his toilworn spirit, the which I doubt not was received into the arms of his most noble Beatrice, with whom ... he now lives most joyously in that life the felicity of which expects no end." Then after speaking of the plans of Guido for Dante's tomb, and again reproaching Florence for her ingratitude, and inciting her for her own honour to demand his body, "not but that I am certain he will not be surrendered to thee," what we may call the first part of the Vita comes to an end.
Alinari.
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
From the fresco in S. Apollonia, Florence. By Andrea dal Castagno. (1396(?)-1457)
The second part opens with a portrait of the poet very careful and minute in its description.