Dell' Purgatorio, canto XII.
"That being came, all beautiful, to meet us,
Clad in white raiment, and the morning star
Appear'd to tremble in his countenance;
His arms he spread, and then he spread his wings
And cried, 'Come on, the steps are near at hand.
And here the ascent is easy.'"
Leonardo Aretino, who had seen Dante's handwriting, mentions, with no small commendation, that the letters were long; slender, and exceedingly distinct,—the characteristics of what is called in ornamental writing a fine Italian hand. The circumstance may seem small, but it is not insignificant as a finishing stroke in the portraiture of one who, though he was the first poet unquestionably, and not the last philosopher, was also one of the most accomplished gentlemen of his age.
Two of Dante's sons, Pietro and Jacopo, inherited a portion of their father's spirit, and were among the first commentators on his works,—an inestimable advantage to posterity, since the local and personal histories were familiar to them; for had these not been explained by contemporaries, many of the brief and more exquisite allusions must have been irrecoverably lost, and some of the most affecting passages remained as uninterpretable as though they had been carved on granite in hieroglyphics. For example, in the fifth canto of the "Purgatorio," the travellers meet three spirits together,—the first, Giacopo del Cassero of Fano, who had been assassinated by order of a prince of Ferrara, for having spoken ill of his highness;—the second, Buonconte, of Montefeltro, who had fallen fighting on the side of the Aretines, in the battle of Campaldino; and for whose soul a singular contention took place between a good angel and an evil one, in which the former happily prevailed;—the third shade was that of a female of rank, who, having quietly waited till the two gentlemen had told their tales, thus emphatically hinted hers:—
"Ah! when thou hast return'd to yonder world,
And art reposing from thy long, long journey,
Remember me, for I am Pia:—
* * * *
Siena gave me birth, Maremma death,
And this he knows, who, with his ring and jewel,
But newly had espoused me."[18]
This unfortunate lady was the bride of Nello della Pietra, a grandee of Siena, who, becoming jealous of her, removed his predestined victim to the putrid marshes of Maremma, where she soon drooped and died, without suspicion on her part, or intimation on his, of the hideous purpose for which she had been hurried thither; her gloomy keeper, with a dreadful eye, watching her life go out like a lamp in a charnel-vault, and after her death abandoning himself to despair.—One of Dante's sons above mentioned (Pietro) was an eminent lawyer at Verona, and enjoyed the friendship of Petrarch, who dedicated some lines to him, at Trevizi, in 1361. Jacopo is said to have been a writer of Italian verse. Of three others, almost nothing is known, except that they died young. His daughter Beatrice, so named after his first love, took the veil in the convent of St. Stefano del' Uliva, at Ravenna.
Dante was the author of two Latin treatises,—the one already noticed, "De Monarchia;" and another, "De Vulgari Eloquio," on the structure of language in general, and that of Italy in particular. But for his celebrity he is indebted solely to his productions in the latter tongue, consisting of "La Vita Nuova," a reverie of fact and fable, in prose and rhyme, referring to his youthful love;—"Canzoni[19] and Sonnets" of which his lady was the eternal theme;—"Il Convito," a critical and mystical commentary on three of his lyrics;—and the "Divina Commedia, or Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise," by the glory of which its forerunners have been at once eclipsed and kept in mid-day splendour, instead of glimmering through that doubtful twilight of obscure fame among the feeble productions of contemporaries, which must have been their lot but for such fortunate alliance.
The prose of the "Vita Nuova" and the "Convito" is deemed, at this day, not only nervous and racy, but in a high degree pure and elegant Italian; while much greater praise may be unhesitatingly bestowed upon his verse. Whether employed upon the arbitrary structure of Canzoni, the love-knot form of the sonnet, or the interminable chain of terze rime, (the triple intertwisted rhyme of the "Divina Commedia," which Dante is supposed to have invented,) his language is not more antiquated to his countrymen than the English of Shakspeare is to ours. The limits of the present essay preclude further notice of his lyrics than the general remark, that they have all the stately, brief, sententious character of his heroics, with occasional strokes of natural tenderness, and not unfrequently exhibit a delicacy of thought so pure, graceful, and unaffected, that Petrarch himself has seldom reached it in his more ornate and laboured compositions.
Dante did more than either his predecessors or contemporaries had done to improve, ennoble, and refine his native idiom; indeed he was wont to speak indignantly of those who would degrade it below the Provençal, the fashionable vehicle of verse in that age of transition, when the young languages of modern Europe, begotten between the stern tongues of the north and the classic ones of the south, were growing up together, on both sides of the Alps and the Pyrenees, like children in rivalry of each other, as the nations that spoke them respectively, so often intermingled in war or in peace. At the close of canto XXVI. of the "Purgatorio," Arnauld Daniel is introduced as the master-minstrel of the age gone by, singing some lines in a "Babylonish dialect," partly Provençal and partly Catalonian; pitting infamous French against the worst kind of Spanish (according to P. P. Venturi); and these certainly present a striking contrast of barbarous dissonance with the full-toned Tuscan of the context.