Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

It is essential to an appreciation of Dante’s Dream, that we should not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know, to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the autobiography which he entitled La Vita Nuova. Boccaccio, however, writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when the time of spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own quarters for purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari, a citizen of mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the first of May, 1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who came to him was Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who lived within fifty yards; that it was common for children to accompany their parents at such merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine years old, was in the house on the day in question engaged in sports, appropriate to his years, with other children, amongst whom was a little daughter of Folco Portinari, eight years old. The child is described as being, even at this period, in aspect extremely beautiful, and winning and graceful in her ways. Not to dwell upon these passages of childhood, it may be sufficient to say that the boy, young as he was, is said to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its mortal put on immortality.

The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood, she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal, Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity, wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, “Certainly it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.” Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives that a friend comes to him, and says, “Hast thou not heard? She that was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life.” Then as he looks towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, “Osanna in excelsis.” So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him that he goes to look upon the body where it has its abiding-place.

The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
And each wept at the other;
And birds dropp’d at midflight out of the sky;
And earth shook suddenly;
And I was ‘ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
Who ask’d of me: ‘Hast thou not heard it said—
Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?

Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
Having a little cloud in front of them,
After the which they went, and said ‘Hosanna;’
And if they had said more, you should have heard.

Then Love said, ‘Now shall all things be made clear:
Come, and behold our lady where she lies
These ‘wildering phantasies
Then carried me to see my lady dead.
Even as I there was led,
Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
And with her was such very humbleness
That she appeared to say, ‘I am at peace.’
(Dante and his Circle.)

The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, “The Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.”

It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the poet’s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us—the portrait of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one taken after death. Giotto’s portrait represents Dante at the age of twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a soldier; and in Dante it is all combined.

Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and by the long brooding memory of his life’s one, deep, irreparable loss. We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino: the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain, half-reluctant gait,—these are profoundly true to the man and the dream.

Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the Vita Nuova or the Commedia as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante’s love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is like a ray of sunshine flooding a landscape—we see it only in the effect it produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness. These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.

The personage of Love, who plays throughout the Vita Nuova a mystical part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the pilgrim’s scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on earth which Love is.