"This our poet, then, was of middle height; and when he had reached maturity he went somewhat bowed, his gait grave and gentle, and ever clad in most seemly apparel, in such garb as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline, and his eyes rather large than small; his jaws big, and the under lip protruding beyond the upper. His complexion was dark, his hair and beard thick, black, and curling, and his expression was ever melancholy and thoughtful."[591] There follow several stories about him in Verona and at Paris. And Boccaccio seems to have come very near to the secret of Dante's tragedy when he tells us at last that "he longed most ardently for honour and glory; perchance more than befitted his illustrious virtue." He understood the enormous pride of the man, his insatiable superiority, his scorn of those who had wronged him; and he is full of excuses for him, full of pity too for his sorrows and eager to heap praise on praise of the great poet he so much reverenced and loved.[592]
The rest of the Vita is concerned with Dante's work, and forms, as it were, a third part, introduced by a long dissertation on poetry and poets, followed by a short chapter on Dante's pride and some in which he gives certain instances of it. Then he passes to the consideration of the Vita Nuova, of the Divine Comedy,[593] the De Monarchia, the Convivio, the De Vulgari Eloquentia, and the Rime in the briefest possible manner. As a critic it must be confessed Boccaccio is lacking in judgment, but the facts he gives us, the assertions he makes in matters of fact regarding these works must be received, I think, with the utmost seriousness. It is impossible to doubt that Boccaccio wrote in all good faith, and it must be remembered that there were any number of people living who had he departed from the truth could have contradicted him. No one of whom we have any record did contradict him; we hear no whisper of any protest. Most of those who busied themselves with Dante, on the contrary, gladly copied him. Had he been a liar with regard to Dante the Republic of Florence would scarcely have appointed him to the first Cathedra Dantesca; but they gave him the lectureship just because he was the one person who could fill it with honour.
And so when he tells us that in his maturer years Dante was ashamed of the Vita Nuova we must accept it, reminding ourselves that this was no impossibility, for Petrarch too was ashamed of his Italian sonnets, while Boccaccio actually destroyed a great part of his own. When he tells us again that Dante left behind him seven cantos of the Inferno when he fled from Florence, we must accept it in the same way as we must accept the story of the recovery of the last thirteen cantos of theParadiso by Dante's son Jacopo. Indeed, there is no good reason to find Boccaccio either careless or a liar anywhere in the work. The immense care he bestowed upon the collection of his facts has, on the contrary, been admitted by one of the best Dante scholars of our day[594] and proved by another not less learned,[595] so that we have no right at all to regard his work as anything less than the most valuable document we possess on Dante's life. It has often been treated as a mere romance, it has been sneered at and abused, but it has never yet been proved to be at fault in any matter of the least importance touching Dante, or in any matter of personal fact. Of course it is not the work of a modern historian; it has not the reassurance of dullness or the mechanical accuracy of "scientific" history. But to sneer at it because its "account of the Guelf and Ghibelline disputes and of the political events in which Dante was chiefly concerned" may seem "vague and inadequate in the extreme" is merely absurd. Boccaccio is not writing of these events, he does not propose to give an account of them; he confesses in the most sincere fashion that he does not rightly know what the words Guelf and Ghibelline originally implied. He is writing of Dante; and on Dante's life, on Dante's work, he had enquired and studied and read and, as he himself says, "pondered" for many years.
We must not demand from the Vita more than it will readily give us. It was written with a purpose. Its intention was both to praise Dante and to arrest the attention of the Florentines to the wrong they had done him; Boccaccio wished to set the facts before them as an advocate of the dead. The facts: he had known Beatrice, Dante's daughter, and three other relations or friends of Dante's whom he names, Pier Giardino of Ravenna,[596] one of Dante's most intimate friends; Andrea Poggio,[597] Dante's nephew, and Dino Perini, Andrea's rival in the discovery of the lost cantos of the Inferno, and many others who had known both Dante and Beatrice;[598] thus he could if he wished come by facts; and that he set down just facts has been proved over and over again. And then there were still living those who had hated Dante bitterly and would gladly have found fault if they could. There were others too who would certainly have allowed nothing entirely to the detriment of Dante to pass unchallenged: they made no sign. That they were silent is in itself a sufficient tribute to the truthfulness of the book.
I have already said something as to the versions of the Life:[599] it remains to add that though the MSS. of the Compendium are rare, those of the Vita are very numerous,[600] while the first printed edition of the work was published in Venice in 1477 by Vindelin da Spira before the edition of the Divine Comedy with the comment of Jacopo della Lana, erroneously attributed to Benvenuto da Imola. Prof. Macri Leone describes nineteen later editions, making with his own some twenty-one in all.[601]
It is not surprising that the author of this eager defence of Dante, of the first life of the poet, should on the petition of the Florentines for a lecturer in the Divine Comedy have been chosen by the Signoria to fill that honourable and difficult post. His first lecture, as we have seen, was delivered in the church of Santo Stefano on Sunday, October 23, 1373. Already an old man, infirm in health, he can scarcely have hoped to finish his work, and as it proved he was not able to complete a sixth part of it, for attacked by illness in the winter of 1373, he broke off abruptly at the seventeenth verse of the seventeenth canto of the Inferno and returned to Certaldo really to die. That, after that sudden breakdown, if such it was, he never resumed his lectures seems certain, and although it was at the time supposed that Boccaccio had written a complete commentary on the Divine Comedy, and a fourteenth-century Comento, now commonly known as Il Falso Boccaccio,[602] was accepted even by the Academicians of the Crusca as his work,[603] it seems certain that the fragment we know as his Comento was all that was ever written, though how much of it was actually delivered in lectures it is impossible to say.[604]
That the Comento we have and no other is really the work of Boccaccio was proved long ago by Manni,[605] for it seems, that when Boccaccio died at last, a dispute arose among his heirs as to the meaning of his Will, the bone of contention being this very Comento, which both Fra Martino da Signa of Santo Spirito in Florence, to whom he had left his books, claimed as part of his library, and also Jacopo his half-brother, to whose children Boccaccio had left all the other property he had.[606] The affair was at last referred to the Consoli dell' Arte del Cambio, the two sides submitting their claims in writing. We find there that Fra Martino, if the Comento were adjudged his property, professed his willingness to let Jacopo have it, a sheet at a time, to copy. Jacopo, however, makes no such offer; we should nevertheless be grateful to him—he was the victor—for in his claim he minutely describes the MS. in question and so enables us to identify it with those we possess.[607] "Dinanzi a voi domando," we read there, "ventiquattro quaderni, et quattordici quadernucci, tutti in carta di bambágia, non legati insieme, ma l' uno dall' altro diviso, d' uno iscritto, o vero isposizione sopra sedici Capitoli, e parte del diciassettesimo del Dante, il quale scritto il detto Messer Giovanni di Boccaccio non compiè...."
This incomplete work,[608] which breaks off so suddenly really in the middle of a paragraph, might seem to be rather a true commentary, a sort of full notes on the work in question, such as is still common in Italy, than a series of lectures delivered vivâ voce. Indeed the living voice is almost entirely absent, and as Dr. Toynbee says, "if it were not for a single passage at the beginning of his opening lecture in which he directly addresses his audience as 'Voi, Signori fiorentini,' it would be difficult to gather from the work itself that it was composed originally for public delivery."[609] He seems to have composed it as he would have composed a book, with the utmost care and foresight, often referring some point forward to be discussed later; and thus we may see that he had already considered as a critic and as a commentator the whole of the work, and had made up his mind that such and such a reference would be better discussed at some point in the Purgatorio or at another in the Paradiso, and so refused to discuss it at the moment. His work too is not only filled with Dantesque thought and phraseology, but is in its form composed in the manner of Dante, that is to say, he expounds first the literal meaning, the obvious sense, and then the secondary meaning or sense allegorical, just as Dante does in the Convivio when speaking of his Canzoni, and as he had already begun to do even in the Vita Nuova. Nor was this anything new for Boccaccio; all his life he had himself written in allegory, and had been used to condemn those who found no secondary meaning in the poets.[610]
But the most characteristic part of the Comento, its greatest surprise for us too, is perhaps to be found in its opening. For after excusing himself with his usual modesty as wholly insufficient for the task, he addresses his audience as "men of lofty understanding and of wonderful quickness of understanding"—facts his commentary does not altogether lead us to endorse, for he feels called upon to explain the simplest things,[611] and then after quoting Plato[612] in the Timæus as to the propriety of invoking divine aid, he asks for God's help not in any Christian prayer, but in the words of Anchises in the second Æneid:—
"Jupiter omnipotens, precibus si flecteris ullis,