[585] The Early Lives of Dante, tr. by P. H. Wicksteed, m.a. (King's Classics, Chatto and Windus, 1907). This little book, besides preface and introduction, contains Boccaccio's Vita in English, as well as Leonardo Bruni's and three appendices.
[586] Cf. Mr. Wicksteed's translation, p. 41.
[587] As Mr. Wicksteed's translation is the version of the Vita most likely to come into the hands of English readers, I propose here to traverse his "warnings" and "cautions." Whatever scholars may "appear to be settling down to," this at least is certain, that of writers upon Dante, Boccaccio is the only one who in professing to write a life can have had absolutely first-hand evidence. The points that Mr. Wicksteed wishes to warn us against are three. Boccaccio asserts that Dante was licentious, that he was a bitter political partisan, and that when he had once left Gemma he never returned to her or allowed her to follow him. In order that we may be quite sure what Boccaccio says, as well as what Mr. Wicksteed thinks he says, I quote Mr. Wicksteed's translation (p. 79): "... there was no fiercer Ghibelline than he, nor more opposed to the Guelfs. And that for which I most blush, in the interest of his memory, is that in Romagna it is matter of greatest notoriety that any feeble woman or little child who had but spoken, in party talk, in condemnation of the Ghibelline faction would have stirred him to such madness as to move him to hurl stones at such, had they not held their peace; and in such bitterness he lived even until his death. And assuredly I blush to be forced to taint the fame of such a man with any defect; but the order of things on which I have begun in some sort demands it; because that if I hold my peace concerning those things in him which are less worthy of praise, I shall withdraw much faith from the praiseworthy things already recounted. So do I plead my excuse to him himself, who perchance, even as I write, looketh down with scornful eye from some lofty region of heaven. Amid all the virtue, amid all the knowledge that hath been shown above to have belonged to this wondrous poet, lechery found most ample place not only in the years of his youth, but also of his maturity; the which vice, though it be natural and common and scarce to be avoided, yet in truth is so far from being commendable that it cannot even be suitably excused. But who amongst mortals shall be a righteous judge to condemn it? Not I. Oh, the impurity, oh, the brutish appetite of men." The passage as to Gemma will be found at the end of the interpolation against marriage (p. 27), at the end of which he says: "Assuredly I do not affirm that these things chanced to Dante; for I do not know it; though true it is that (whether such like things or others were the cause) when once he had parted from her [Gemma] who had been given him as a consolation in his sufferings! never would he go where she was, nor suffer her to come to where he was, albeit he was the father of several children by her." Let us take these things in order.
Boccaccio asserts, much to Mr. Wicksteed's distress, it seems, that Dante was a bitter and intolerant politician. He will have none of it. Well, let Dante speak for himself. When he hails as the "Lamb of God" a German king whom the Guelfs defeated and most probably poisoned; when he speaks of Florence, the Guelf city, as "the rank fox that lurketh in hiding, the beast that drinketh from the Arno, polluting its waters with its jaws, the viper that stings its mother's heart, the black sheep that corrupts the whole flock, the Myrrha guilty of incest with her father," according to Mr. Wicksteed, we ought not to consider him a bitter politician at all; indeed only an "ill-informed" and "superficial" person like Boccaccio would call him so. To ordinary men, however, such semi-scholastic, semi-Biblico-classical language sounds like politics, and fierce party politics too, and one cannot conceive what other explanation Mr. Wicksteed would offer us of it. Mr. Wicksteed tells us that when Boccaccio declares that it was well known in Romagna that he would have flung stones at any who "in party talk had but spoken in condemnation of the Ghibelline cause" he was speaking figuratively. Perhaps so; but I doubt if Mr. Wicksteed, had he had the happiness to be a Guelf, would have cared to put Dante to the proof. And we may well ask what would have deterred the man, who in hell thought it virtuous to cheat Frate Alberigo and leave him blinded by his frozen tears, from hurling a few stones on behalf of his cause?
Nor is Mr. Wicksteed any more ready to believe that Dante was a lover of women. When Boccaccio tells us that Dante fell into the sin of lechery not only in his youth but in his maturity, it is on the face of it certain that he is compelled to say so, that he has irrefutable evidence for it, since he excuses himself for the necessity of his assertion. Nor is there a tittle of evidence to refute Boccaccio. Mr. Wicksteed, like a good Protestant, prefers his own private judgment. He prefers to think of Dante as in all respects what he would have him. "On the whole," he says, "I think the student may safely form his own judgment from the material in his hands [viz. Dante's own works, I think] without attaching any authoritative significance whatever to Boccaccio's assertion. It is safe to go even a step further and to say that the dominating impression which that assertion leaves is definitely false...!" It is clear that Mr. Wicksteed is not going to allow Boccaccio to involve Dante in any of his Decameron stories!
Mr. Wicksteed is equally indignant that Boccaccio should have asserted that Dante when he parted from Gemma never returned to her nor suffered her to come to him. It seems, then, that Dante too must become a respectable and sedate person in the modern middle-class manner. He was not a bitter party politician; he was not a lover of women; far from it: he lived as peaceably and continuously as circumstances allowed him with his wife, whom he cherished with all the tenderness we might expect of a nature so docile, so well controlled, and so considerate of the sin and weakness of others. "What was Boccaccio's source of information as to Dante and Gemma never having met after the former's exile," Mr. Wicksteed angrily declares, "it is impossible to say." But that does not invalidate the statement. What is Mr. Wicksteed's source of doubt? Is there any evidence that they did meet? And if they did not, why curse Boccaccio? Boccaccio tells us they never did meet. Yet having no evidence at all to offer us in the matter Mr. Wicksteed has the extraordinary temerity to close his tirade, one cannot call it an argument, by this weird confession: "It would be straining the evidence [? what evidence] to say that we can establish a positive case on the other side." I agree with him; it would, it would. But enough! Such is the virtue of certain prepossessions that, though the sun be as full of spots as a housewife's pudding is full of raisins, if it please us not we will deny it.
[588] Elsewhere in the Vita he tells us the month (September), but nowhere the day (21st). He makes a slip in saying Urban IV was then Pope. Clement IV had been elected in February.
[589] But it is also Boccaccio who seems to suggest that Dante may have come to England, to Oxford. This visit Tiraboschi supposed to stand merely on the assertion of Giovanni di Serravalle (1416-17), who says Dante had studied "Paduæ, Bononiæ, demum Oxoniis et Parisiis"; but in the Carme, which accompanied the copy of the Divine Comedy Boccaccio sent to Petrarch (Corazzini, op. cit., p. 53), he shows us Dante led by Apollo:—
"per celsa nivosi
Cyrreos, mediosque sinus tacitosque recessus