On the death of her great poet, all Italy appeared to go into mourning. On every side copies of his work were multiplied, and enriched with numerous commentaries. In the year 1350, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and prince of Milan, engaged a number of learned men in the laborious task of illustrating and explaining the obscure passages of the Divina Commedia. Six distinguished scholars, two theologians, two men of science, and two Florentine antiquaries united their talents in this undertaking. Two professorships were instituted for the purpose of expounding the works of Dante. One of these, founded at Florence, in the year 1373, was filled by the celebrated Boccaccio. The duties of the other, at Bologna, were no less worthily discharged by Benvenuto d’Imola, a scholar of eminence. It is questionable whether any other man ever exercised so undisputed an authority and so direct an influence over the age immediately succeeding his own.
An additional proof of the superiority of this great genius may be drawn from the commentaries upon his works. We are there surprised to see his most enthusiastic admirers incapable of appreciating his real grandeur. Dante himself, in his Latin treatise entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, appears to be quite unconscious of the extent of his services to the literature of his country. Like his commentators, he principally values himself upon the purity and correctness of his style. Yet he is neither pure nor correct; but, what is far superior to either, he had the powers of creative invention. For the sake of the rhyme, we find him employing a great number of barbarous words, which do not occur a second time in his verses. But, when he is himself affected, and wishes to communicate his emotions, the Italian language of the thirteenth century, in his powerful hands, displays a richness of expression, a purity, and an elegance which he was the first to elicit, and by which it has ever since been distinguished. The personages whom he introduces are moving and breathing beings; his pictures are nature itself; his language speaks at once to the imagination and to the judgment; and it would be difficult to point out a passage in his poem which would not form a subject for the pencil. The admiration of his commentators has also been abundantly bestowed upon the profound learning of Dante, who, it must be allowed, appears to have been master of all the knowledge and accomplishments of the age in which he lived. Of these various attainments, his poem is the faithful depository, from which we may infer, with great precision, the progress which science had at that time made, and the advances which were yet necessary to afford full satisfaction to the mind.[e]
The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope—all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the Commedia where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.
“This Dante,” continues Villani, “from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless his noble works left to us in writing bear true testimony of him and honourable fame to our city.”[f]
LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF DANTE
To the same period with Dante belongs Francesco Barberini, the disciple, like Dante, of Brunetto Latini, and author of a treatise in verse on moral philosophy, which, in conformity with the affected spirit of the times, he entitled I Documenti d’Amore. Cecco d’Ascoli was also the contemporary of Dante, and his personal enemy. His poem in five books, called L’Acerba, or rather, according to M. Ginguené, L’Acerva, “the heap,” is a collection of all the sciences of his age, including astronomy, philosophy, and religion. It is much less remarkable for its intrinsic merit than for the lamentable catastrophe of its author, who was burned alive in Florence as a sorcerer, in 1327, at the age of seventy years, after having long held the professorship of judicial astrology in the University of Bologna.
Cino da Pistoia, of the house of the Sinibaldi, was the friend of Dante, and was equally distinguished by the brilliancy of his talents in two different departments: as a lawyer, by his commentary on the first nine books of the code, and, as a poet, by his verses addressed to the beautiful Selvaggia de’ Vergiolesi, of whom he was deprived by death, about the year 1307. As a lawyer, he was the preceptor of the celebrated Bartolo, who, if he has surpassed his master, yet owed much to his lessons. As a poet, he was the model which Petrarch loved to imitate; and, in this view, he perhaps did his imitator as much injury by his refinement and affectation as he benefited him by the example of his pure and harmonious style. Fazio de’ Uberti, grandson of the great Farinata, who, in consequence of the hatred which the Florentines entertained for his ancestor, lived and died in exile, raised himself to equal celebrity at this period by his sonnets and other verses. At a much later time of life, he composed a poem of the descriptive kind, entitled Dettamondo, in which he proposed to imitate Dante, and to display the real world, as that poet had portrayed the world of spirits. But it need hardly be said that the distance between the original and the imitation is great indeed.
In some respects all these poets, and many others whose names are yet more obscure, have common points of resemblance. We find, in all, the same subtlety of idea, the same incoherent images, and the same perplexed sentiments. The spirit of the times was perverted by an affected refinement; and it is a subject of just surprise that, in the very outset of a nation, simplicity and natural feeling should have been superseded by conceit and bombast. It is, however, to be considered that this nation did not form her own taste, but adopted that of a foreign country, before she was qualified, by her own improved knowledge, to make a proper choice. The verses of the troubadours of Provence were circulated from one end of Italy to the other. They were diligently perused and committed to memory by every poet who aspired to public notice, some of whom exercised themselves in compositions in the same language; and although the Italians, if we except the Sicilians, had never any direct intercourse with the Arabians, yet they derived much information from them by this circuitous route. The almost unintelligible subtleties with which they treated of love passed for refinement of sentiment; while the perpetual rivalry which was maintained between the heart and the head, between reason and passion, was looked upon as an ingenious application of philosophy to a literary subject. The causeless griefs, the languors, the dying complaints of a lover became a constituent portion of the consecrated language in which he addressed his mistress, and from which he could not without impropriety depart. Conventional feelings in poetry thus usurped the place of those native and simple sentiments which are the offspring of the heart.
PETRARCH
But, instead of dwelling upon these defects in the less celebrated poets, we shall attempt to exhibit the general spirit of the fourteenth century, as displayed in the works of the greatest man whom Italy, in that age, produced, whose reputation has been most widely spread, and whose influence has been most extensively felt, not only in Italy but in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. The reader will easily imagine that it is Petrarch, the lover of Laura, to whom we here allude.