DANTE

BY
EDMUND G. GARDNER, M.A.

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1923
By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
PHILIP H. WICKSTEED
A SMALL TRIBUTE
OF
DEEP AFFECTION AND HIGH ESTEEM

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I would ask the reader to take the present volume, not as a new book on Dante, but merely as a revision of the Primer which was first published in 1900. It has been as far as possible brought up to date, the chief modifications being naturally in the sections devoted to the poet’s life and Opere minori, and in the bibliographical appendix; but the work remains substantially the same. Were I now to write a new Dante Primer, after the interval of nearly a quarter of a century, I should be disposed to attach considerably less importance to the allegorical meaning of the Divina Commedia, and to emphasise, more than I have here done, the aspect of Dante as the symbol and national hero of Italy.

E. G. G.

London, July, 1923.

N.B.—The “Sexcentenary Dante” (the testo critico published under the auspices of the Società Dantesca Italiana) adopts a slightly different numbering of the chapters, or paragraphs, of the Vita Nuova and the second treatise of the Convivio from that presented by the “Oxford Dante” and the “Temple Classics.” I have kept to the latter (which is indicated in brackets in the testo critico). Similarly, I have followed the numbering of the Epistolae in Dr. Toynbee’s edition and the “Oxford Dante” (also given in brackets in the testo critico). In the section on the lyrical poetry, Rime refers to the testo critico as edited by Professor Barbi, O. to the new Oxford edition revised by Dr. Toynbee. In the closing passage of the Letter to a Florentine friend, I have followed the reading retained by Dr. Toynbee. I have frequently availed myself of Dr. Wicksteed’s translation of the Letters and Monarchia, of Mr. A. G. F. Howell’s version of the De Vulgari Eloquentia, and occasionally of Carlyle’s rendering of the Inferno. Every student of Dante must inevitably owe much to others; but, in this new edition of my Primer, I would express my indebtedness in particular to the writings of Dr. Paget Toynbee, Dr. Philip H. Wicksteed, the late Ernesto Giacomo Parodi, and Prof. Michele Barbi.

⁂ To the Bibliographical Appendix should be added: A. Fiammazzo, Il commento dantesco di Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli (Savona, 1915), and P. Revelli, L’Italia nella Divina Commedia (Milan, 1923).

CONTENTS

DANTE

CHAPTER I
DANTE IN HIS TIMES

1. The End of the Middle Ages

From Gregory VII. to Frederick II.—The twelfth and thirteenth centuries cover the last and more familiar portion of the Middle Ages. They are the period of chivalry, of the crusades and of romance, when the Neo-Latin languages bore fruit in the prose and poetry of France, the lyrics of the Provençal troubadours, and the earliest vernacular literature of Italy; the period which saw the development of Gothic architecture, the rise of scholastic philosophy, the institution of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, the recovery by western Europe of the works of Aristotle, the elevation of Catholic theology into a systematic harmony of reason and revelation under the influence of the christianised Aristotelianism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The vernacular literature of Italy developed comparatively late, and (until the time of Aquinas and Bonaventura) her part in the scholastic movement was secondary to that of France, but she had led the way in the revival of the study of Roman law and jurisprudence, which centred at Bologna, where the great Irnerius taught at the beginning of the twelfth century. It was thus that the first European university, studium generale, came into being, and Bologna boasts the proud title alma mater studiorum.

There are two predominant political factors in Italy which appear at the end of the twelfth century, and hold the field up to the time of Dante’s birth. Out of the war of investitures between Pope and Emperor, the struggle which we associate mainly with the name of Hildebrand (Gregory VII.), emerged the Italian city-states, the free communes of northern and central Italy, whose development culminated in the heroic resistance offered by the first Lombard League to the mightiest of mediaeval German Caesars, Frederick I. (Barbarossa), which won the battle of Legnano (1176) and obtained the peace of Constance (1183). In the south, the Normans—conquering Apulia and Calabria, delivering Sicily from the Saracens—consolidated their rule into a feudal monarchy, making their capital Palermo one of the most splendid cities of the mediaeval world. The third and last of these Norman kings of Sicily, William II. (Par. xx. 61-66), died in 1189. The son of Barbarossa, Henry VI., claimed the kingdom in the right of his wife Constance (Par. iii. 115-120), and established the Suabian dynasty on the throne. His son, Frederick II., continued the cultured traditions of the Norman kings; but the union in his person of the kingdom of Sicily with the Empire led to a continuous struggle with the Italian communes and the Papacy, which embittered his closing years until his death in 1250. The reign of Frederick II. is the period of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, and the beginning of the rise of tyrants in the Italian cities, tyrants of whom the most terrible example was Ezzelino da Romano (Inf. xii. 110).

The Battle of Benevento.—The policy of Frederick II. was continued by his son Manfred (crowned King of Sicily in 1258), against whom Pope Clement IV., claiming the right to dispose of the kingdom as a fief of the Church, summoned Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis of France. Charles entered Italy (Purg. xx. 67), encountered and defeated Manfred on the plains of Grandella near Benevento, in February 1266, and the papal legate refused the rites of Christian burial to the fallen king (Purg. iii. 124-132). This battle of Benevento marks an epoch in Italian history. It ended for the time the struggle between the Roman Pontiffs and the German Caesars; it initiated the new strife between the Papacy and the royal house of France. Henceforth the old ideal significance of “Guelf” and “Ghibelline,” as denoting adherents of Church and Empire respectively, becomes lost in the local conflicts of each Italian district and city. The imperial power was at an end in Italy; but the Popes, by calling in this new foreign aid, had prepared the way for the humiliation of Pope Boniface at Anagni and the corruption of Avignon. The fall of the silver eagle from Manfred’s helmet before the golden lilies on Charles’s standard may be taken as symbolical. The preponderance in Italian politics had passed back from Germany to France; the influence of the house of Capet was substituted for the overthrown authority of the Emperor (Purg. xx. 43, 44). Three weeks after the battle Charles entered Naples in triumph, King of Apulia and Sicily; an Angevin dynasty was established upon the throne of the most potent state of Italy.

Art and Letters.—This political transformation was profoundly felt in Italian literature. A new courtly poetry, that of the so-called “Sicilian School,” had come into being in the south, partly based on Provençal models, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Its poets—mainly Sicilians and Apulians, but with recruits from other parts of the peninsula—had almost given to Italy a literary language. “The Sicilian vernacular,” writes Dante in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, “seems to have gained for itself a renown beyond the others; for whatever Italians produce in poetry is called Sicilian, and we find that many native poets have sung weightily.” This he ascribes to the fostering influence of the imperial rule of the house of Suabia: “Those illustrious heroes, Frederick Caesar and his well-begotten son Manfred, showing their nobility and rectitude of soul, as long as fortune lasted, followed human things, disdaining the bestial; wherefore the noble in heart and endowed with graces strove to cleave to the majesty of such great princes; so that, in their time, whatever the excellent among Italians attempted first appeared at the court of these great sovereigns. And, because the royal throne was Sicily, it came about that whatever our predecessors produced in the vernacular is called Sicilian” (V. E. i. 12). The house of Anjou made Naples their capital, and treated Sicily as a conquered province. After Benevento the literary centre of Italy shifted from Palermo and the royal court of the south to Bologna and the republican cities of Tuscany. Guittone d’Arezzo (Purg. xxvi. 124-126) founded a school of Tuscan poets, extending the field of Italian lyrical poetry to political and ethical themes as well as love (which had been the sole subject of the Sicilian School). The beginnings of Italian literary prose had already appeared at Bologna, with the first vernacular models for composition of the rhetoricians, the masters of the ars dictandi. Here, within the next eight years, St. Thomas Aquinas published the first and second parts of the Summa Theologica; and the poetry of the first great singer of modern Italy, Guido Guinizelli (Purg. xxvi. 91-114), rose to spiritual heights undreamed of in the older schools, in his canzone on Love and true nobility: Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore; “To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair.” And, in the sphere of the plastic arts, these were the years that saw the last triumphs of Niccolò Pisano, “the Father of Sculpture to Italy,” and the earliest masterpieces of Cimabue, the teacher of Giotto (Purg. xi. 94-96), the shepherd boy who came from the fields to free Italian painting from Byzantine fetters, and who “developed an artistic language which was the true expression of the Italian national character.”

2. Dante’s Childhood and Adolescence

Birth and Family.—Dante Alighieri, in its Latin form Alagherii, was born at Florence in 1265, probably in the latter part of May, some nine months before the battle of Benevento. His father, Alighiero di Bellincione di Alighiero, came of an ancient and honourable family of that section of the city named from the Porta San Piero. Although Guelfs, the Alighieri were probably of the same stock as the Elisei, decadent nobles of supposed Roman descent, who took the Ghibelline side in the days of Frederick II., when the city was first involved in these factions after the murder of young Buondelmonte in her “last peace” in 1215 (Par. xvi. 136-147). Among the warriors of the Cross, in the Heaven of Mars, Dante meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida. Born probably in 1091, Cacciaguida married a wife from the valley of the Po, a member of one or other of the families afterwards known as the Aldighieri or Alighieri at Ferrara, Parma, and Bologna, was knighted by Conrad III., and died in battle against the infidels in the disastrous second crusade (Par. xv. 137-148). None of Cacciaguida’s descendants had attained to any distinction in the Republic. Brunetto di Bellincione, Dante’s uncle, probably fought for the Guelfs at Montaperti in 1260, where he may have been one of those in charge of the carroccio, the battle-car which accompanied the army. Besides Cacciaguida and his son Alaghiero, or Alighiero, the first to bear the name, who is said by his father to be still in the purgatorial terrace of the proud (Par. xv. 91-96), the only other member of the family introduced into the Divina Commedia is Geri del Bello, a grandson of the elder Alighiero and cousin of Dante’s father, a sower of discord and a murderer (Inf. xxix. 13-36), whose violent and well-deserved death had not yet been avenged.

The Florentine Republic.—As far as Florence was concerned, the real strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines was a struggle for supremacy, first without and then within the city, of a democracy of merchants and traders, with a military aristocracy of partly Teutonic descent, who were gradually being deprived of their territorial and feudal sway, which they had held nominally from the Emperor in the contado, the country districts of Tuscany included in the continually extending Florentine commune. Although the party names were first introduced into Florence in 1215, the struggle had virtually begun after the death of the great Countess Matilda in 1115; and had resulted in a regular and constitutional advance of the power of the people, interrupted by a few intervals. It was in one of these intervals that Dante was born. The popular government (Primo Popolo), which had been established shortly before the death of Frederick II. in 1250, and worked victoriously for ten years, had been overthrown in 1260 at the disastrous battle of Montaperti, “the havoc and the great slaughter, which dyed the Arbia red” (Inf. x. 85, 86). The patriotism of Farinata degli Uberti saved Florence from total destruction, but all the leading Guelf families were driven out, and the government remained in the power of a despotic Ghibelline aristocracy, under Manfred’s vicar, Count Guido Novello, supported by German mercenaries. After the fall of Manfred, an attempt was made to effect a peace between the Ghibellines and the people; but a revolution on St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, 1266, led to the expulsion of Guido Novello and his forces, and the formation of a provisional democratic government. In January 1267 the banished Guelfs—many of whom had fought under the papal banner at Benevento—returned; on Easter Day French troops entered Florence, the Ghibellines fled, the Guelfs made Charles of Anjou suzerain of the city, and accepted his vicar as podestà. The government was reorganised, with a new institution, the Parte Guelfa, to secure the Guelf predominance in the Republic.

The defeat of young Conradin, grandson of Frederick II., at Tagliacozzo in 1268, followed by his judicial murder (Purg. xx. 68), confirmed the triumph of the Guelfs and the power of Charles in Italy. In Florence the future conflict lay between the new Guelf aristocracy and the burghers and people, between the Grandi and the Popolani; the magnates in their palaces and towers, associated into societies and groups of families, surrounding themselves with retainers and swordsmen, but always divided among themselves; and the people, soon to become “very fierce and hot in lordship,” as Villani says, artisans and traders ready to rush out from stalls and workshops to follow the standards of their Arts or Guilds in defence of liberty. In the year after the House of Suabia ended with Conradin upon the scaffold, the Florentines took partial vengeance for Montaperti at the battle of Colle di Valdelsa (Purg. xiii. 115-120), where the Sienese were routed and Provenzano Salvani (Purg. xi. 109-114) killed. It is said to have been Provenzano Salvani who, in the great Ghibelline council at Empoli, had proposed that Florence should be destroyed.

Dante’s Boyhood.—It is not clear how Dante came to be born in Florence, since he gives us to understand (Inf. x. 46-50) that his family were fiercely adverse to the Ghibellines and would naturally have been in exile until the close of 1266. Probably his father, of whom scarcely anything is known, took no prominent part in politics and had been allowed to remain in the city. Besides the houses in the Piazza San Martino, he possessed two farms and some land in the country. Dante’s mother, Bella (perhaps an abbreviation of Gabriella), is believed to have been Alighiero’s first wife, and to have died soon after the poet’s birth. Her family is not known, though it has been suggested that she may have been the daughter of Durante di Scolaio degli Abati, a Guelf noble. Alighiero married again, Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi, the daughter of a prominent Guelf popolano; by this second marriage he had a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Tana (Gaetana), who married Lapo Riccomanni. Another daughter, whose name is not known, married Leone Poggi; it is not quite certain whether her mother was Bella or Lapa. Dante never mentions his mother nor his father, whom he also lost in boyhood, in any of his works (excepting such indirect references as Inf. viii. 45, and Conv. i. 13); but, in the Vita Nuova, a “young and gentle lady, who was united to me by very near kindred,” appears watching by the poet in his illness. In the loveliest of his early lyrics she is described as

Adorna assai di gentilezze umane,

which Rossetti renders:

Exceeding rich in human sympathies.

This lady was, perhaps, one of these two sisters; and it is tempting to infer from Dante’s words that a tender affection existed between him and her. It was from Dante’s nephew, Andrea Poggi, that Boccaccio obtained some of his information concerning the poet, and it would be pleasant to think that Andrea’s mother is the heroine of this canzone (V. N. xxiii.); but there are chronological difficulties in the identification.

Sources.—Our sources for Dante’s biography, in addition to his own works, are primarily a short chapter in the Chronicle of his neighbour Giovanni Villani, the epoch-making work of Boccaccio, Filippo Villani’s unimportant sketch at the end of the fourteenth and the brief but reliable life by Leonardo Bruni at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In addition we have some scanty hints given by the early commentators on the Divina Commedia, and a few documents, including the consulte or reports of the deliberations of the various councils of the Florentine Republic. Boccaccio’s work has come down to us in two forms: the Vita di Dante (or Trattatello in laude di Dante) and the so-called Compendio (itself in two redactions, the Primo and Secondo Compendio); the researches of Michele Barbi have finally established that both are authentic, the Compendio being the author’s own later revision. The tendency of recent scholarship has in a considerable measure rehabilitated the once discredited authority of Boccaccio, and rejected the excessive scepticism represented in the nineteenth century by Bartoli and Scartazzini.

Beatrice.—Although Leonardo Bruni rebukes Boccaccio, “our Boccaccio that most sweet and pleasant man,” for having lingered so long over Dante’s love affairs, still the story of the poet’s first love remains the one salient fact of his youth and early manhood. We may surmise from the Vita Nuova that at the end of his eighteenth year, presumably in May 1283, Dante became enamoured of the glorious lady of his mind, Beatrice, who had first appeared to him as a child in her ninth year, nine years before. It is not quite certain whether Beatrice was her real name or one beneath which Dante conceals her identity; assuredly she was “Beatrice,” the giver of blessing, to him and through him to all lovers of the noblest and fairest things in literature. Tradition, following Boccaccio, has identified her with Bice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine who founded the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, and died in 1289 (cf. V. N. xxii.). Folco’s daughter is shown by her father’s will to have been the wife of Simone dei Bardi, a rich and noble banker. This has been confirmed by the discovery that, while the printed commentary of Dante’s son Pietro upon the Commedia hardly suggests that Beatrice was a real woman at all, there exists a fuller and later recension by Pietro of his own work which contains a distinct statement that the lady raised to fame in his father’s poem was in very fact Bice Portinari. Nevertheless, there are still found critics who see in Beatrice not a real woman, but a mystically exalted ideal of womanhood or a merely allegorical figure; while Scartazzini at one time maintained that the woman Dante loved was an unknown Florentine maiden, who would have been his wife but for her untimely death. This can hardly be deduced from the Vita Nuova; in its noblest passages the woman of Dante’s worship is scarcely regarded as an object that can be possessed; death has not robbed him of an expected beatitude, but all the world of an earthly miracle. But, although it was in the fullest correspondence with mediaeval ideals and fashions that chivalrous love and devotion should be directed by preference to a married woman, the love of Dante for Beatrice was something at once more real and more exalted than the artificial passion of the troubadours; a true romantic love that linked heaven to earth, and was a revelation for the whole course of life.

Poetry, Friendship, Study.—Already, at the age of eighteen, Dante was a poet: “I had already seen for myself the art of saying words in rhyme” (V. N. iii.). It was on the occasion of what we take as the real beginning of his love that he wrote the opening sonnet of the Vita Nuova, in which he demands an explanation of a dream from “all the faithful of Love.” The new poet was at once recognised. Among the many answers came a sonnet from the most famous Italian lyrist then living, Guido Cavalcanti, henceforth to be the first of Dante’s friends: “And this was, as it were, the beginning of the friendship between him and me, when he knew that I was he who had sent that sonnet to him” (cf. Inf. x. 60). In the same year, 1283, Dante’s name first occurs in a document concerning some business transactions as his late father’s heir.

There are no external events recorded in Dante’s life between 1283 and 1289. Boccaccio represents him as devoted to study. He certainly owed much to the paternal advice of the old rhetorician and statesman, Brunetto Latini, who had been secretary of the commune and, until his death in 1294, was one of the most influential citizens in the state: “For in my memory is fixed, and now goes to my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when in the world, from time to time, you taught me how man makes himself eternal” (Inf. xv. 82). Of his growing maturity in art, the lyrics of the Vita Nuova bear witness; the prose narrative shows that he had studied the Latin poets as well as the new singers of Provence and Italy, had already dipped into scholastic philosophy, and was not unacquainted with Aristotle. At the same time, Leonardo Bruni was obviously right in describing Dante as not severing himself from the world, but excelling in every youthful exercise; and it would seem from the Vita Nuova that, in spite of his supreme devotion for Beatrice, there were other Florentine damsels who moved his heart for a time. Dante speaks of “one who, according to the degrees of friendship, is my friend immediately after the first,” and than whom there was no one nearer in kinship to Beatrice (V. N. xxxiii.). Those who identify Dante’s Beatrice with the daughter of Messer Folco suppose that this second friend was one of her three brothers, probably Manetto Portinari, to whom a sonnet of Guido’s may have been addressed. Casella the musician, and Lapo Gianni the poet, are mentioned with affection in the Purgatorio (Canto ii.), and in one of Dante’s sonnets respectively; Lippo de’ Bardi, evidently like Casella a musician, and a certain Meuccio likewise appear as friends in other of his earliest lyrics. Cino da Pistoia, like Cavalcanti, seems to have answered Dante’s dream; their friendship was perhaps at present mainly confined to exchanging poems. Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola speak of an early visit of Dante’s to the universities of Bologna and Padua, and there is some evidence for thinking that he was at Bologna some time not later than 1287. He may possibly have served in some cavalry expedition to check the harrying parties of Aretines in 1288; for, when the great battle of the following year was fought, it found Dante “no novice in arms,” as a fragment of one of his lost letters puts it, non fanciullo nell’ armi.

Popular Government.—Twenty years had now passed since the victory of Colle di Valdelsa in 1269. Great changes had taken place in the meanwhile. The estrangement between Charles of Anjou and the Popes, Gregory X. and Nicholas III., the attempts of these latter to weaken the king’s power by reconciling the Florentine Guelfs with the Ghibelline exiles, and the dissensions among the Guelf magnates themselves within the city, had led, in 1280, to the peace arranged by Cardinal Latino Frangipani. A government was set up of fourteen buonuomini, magnates and popolani, eight Guelfs and six Ghibellines. But the city remained strenuously Guelf. Nicholas III. had deprived King Charles of the offices of Senator of Rome and Vicar Imperial and had allowed Rudolph of Hapsburg to establish a vicar in Tuscany (Inf. xix. 99). In 1282 came the Vespers of Palermo (Par. viii. 75). The Sicilians rose, massacred Charles’s adherents, and received as their king Peter of Aragon, the husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance (Purg. iii. 143). The hitherto united kingdom of Sicily, which had been the heritage of the imperial Suabians from the Norman heroes of the house of Hauteville, was thus divided between a French and a Spanish line of kings (Par. xx. 63); the former at Naples as kings of “Sicily and Jerusalem,” the latter in the island as kings of “Trinacria.” Charles was henceforth too much occupied in war with the Sicilians and Aragonese to interfere in the internal affairs of Tuscany. In the June of this year a peaceful revolution took place in Florence. Instead of the fourteen buonuomini, the government was put into the hands of the Priors of the Arts or Guilds, who, associated with the Captain, were henceforth recognised as the chief magistrates of the Republic, composing the Signoria, during the two months for which they were elected to hold office. Their number, originally three, was raised to six; both grandi and popolani were at first eligible, provided the former left their order by enrolling themselves in one of the Guilds. A thorough organisation of these Guilds, the Arti maggiori (which were mainly engaged in wholesale commerce, exportation and importation, and the mercantile relations of Florence with foreign countries) and Arti minori (which carried on the retail traffic and internal trade of the city), secured the administration in the hands of the trading classes.

Thus was established the democratic constitution of the state in which Dante was afterwards to play his part. There was the central administration of the six Priors, one for each sesto of the city, with the council of a hundred “good men of the people without whose deliberation no great thing or expenditure could be done” (Villani, vii. 16). The executive was composed of the Captain of the People and the Podestà, both Italian nobles from other states, holding office for six months, each with his two councils, a special and a general council, the general council of the Podestà being the general council of the Commune. The great Guilds had their own council (Consiglio delle Capitudini delle Arti), and their consuls or rectors, while specially associated with the two councils of the Captain, were sometimes admitted to those of the Podestà; the nobles were excluded from all these councils, excepting the special council of the Podestà and the general council of the Commune. But, while the central government of the Republic was thus entirely popular, the magnates still retained control over the captains of the Guelf Society, with their two councils, and exerted considerable influence upon the Podestà, always one of their own order and an alien, in whose councils they still sat. The Podestà, however, was now little more than a chief justice; “the Priors, with the Captain of the People, had to determine the great and weighty matters of the commonwealth, and to summon and conduct councils and make regulations” (Villani).

Battle of Campaldino.—A period of prosperity and victory followed for Florence. The crushing defeat inflicted upon Pisa by Genoa at the great naval battle of Meloria in 1284 was much to her advantage; as was also, perhaps, the decline of the Angevin power after the victory of Peter of Aragon’s fleet (Purg. xx. 79). Charles II., the “cripple of Jerusalem,” who succeeded his father as king of Naples, was a less formidable suzerain. On June 11th, 1289, the Tuscan Ghibellines were utterly defeated by the Florentines and their allies at the battle of Campaldino. According to Leonardo Bruni—and there seems no adequate reason for rejecting his testimony—Dante was present, “fighting valiantly on horseback in the front rank,” apparently among the 150 who volunteered or were chosen as feditori, amongst whom was Vieri de’ Cerchi, who was later to acquire a more dubious reputation in politics. Bruni states that in a letter Dante draws a plan of the fight; and he quotes what seems to be a fragment of another letter, written later, where Dante speaks of “the battle of Campaldino, in which the Ghibelline party was almost utterly destroyed and undone; where I found myself no novice in arms, and where I had much fear, and in the end very great gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle.”

Dante probably took part in the subsequent events of the campaign; the wasting of the Aretine territory, the unsuccessful attack upon Arezzo, the surrender of the Pisan fortress of Caprona. “Thus once I saw the footmen, who marched out under treaty from Caprona, fear at seeing themselves among so many enemies” (Inf. xxi. 94-96). There appears to be a direct reference to his personal experiences of the campaign in the opening of Inferno xxii.: “I have seen ere now horsemen moving camp and beginning the assault, and holding their muster, and at times retiring to escape; coursers have I seen upon your land, O Aretines! and seen the march of foragers, the shock of tournaments and race of jousts, now with trumpets and now with bells, with drums and castle signals.” He has sung of Campaldino in peculiarly pathetic strains in Canto V. of the Purgatorio. On the lower slopes of the Mountain of Purgation wanders the soul of Buonconte da Montefeltro, who led the Aretine cavalry, and whose body was never found; mortally wounded and forsaken by all, he had died gasping out the name of Mary, and his Giovanna had forgotten even to pray for his soul.

Death of Beatrice.—In the following year, 1290, Beatrice died: “The Lord of justice called this most gentle one to glory under the banner of that blessed queen Mary virgin, whose name was in very great reverence in the words of this blessed Beatrice” (V. N. xxix.). Although Dante complicates the date by a reference to “the usage of Arabia,” she appears to have died on the evening of June 8th;[1] and the poet lifts up his voice with the prophet: “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!”

3. After the Death of Beatrice

Philosophic Refuge.—It is not easy to get a very definite idea of Dante’s private life during the next ten years. With the completion of the Vita Nuova, shortly after Beatrice’s death, an epoch closes in his life, as in his work. From the Convivio it would appear that in his sorrow Dante took refuge in the study of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boëthius and Cicero’s De Amicitia; that he frequented “the schools of the religious and the disputations of philosophers,” where he became deeply enamoured of Philosophy. Cino da Pistoia addressed to him an exceedingly beautiful canzone, consoling him for the loss of Beatrice, bidding him take comfort in the contemplation of her glory among the saints and angels of Paradise, where she is praying to God for her lover’s peace. This poem is quoted years later by Dante himself in the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 6), where he couples it with his own canzone—

Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,

“Love that in my mind discourses to me,” with which Casella consoles the penitent spirits upon the shore of Purgatory: “The amorous chant which was wont to quiet all my desires.”

Aberrations.—It would seem, however, that neither the memory of Beatrice nor his philosophical devotion kept Dante from falling into what he afterwards came to regard as a morally unworthy life. Tanto giù cadde, “so low he fell” (Purg. xxx. 136). It is almost impossible to hold, as Witte and Scartazzini would have us do, that the poignant reproaches which Beatrice addresses to Dante, when he meets her on Lethe’s banks, are connected mainly with intellectual errors, with culpable neglect of Theology or speculative wanderings from revealed truth, for there are but scanty, if any, traces of this in the poet’s writings at any period of his career. The dark wood in which he wandered, led by the world and the flesh, was that of sensual passion and moral aberration for a while from the light of reason and the virtue which is the “ordering of love.”

Friendship with Forese Donati.—Dante was evidently intimate with the great Donati family, whose houses were in the same district of the city. Corso di Simone Donati, a turbulent and ambitious spirit, had done heroically at Campaldino, and was now intent upon having his own way in the state. A close and familiar friendship united Dante with Corso’s brother Forese, a sensual man of pleasure. Six sonnets interchanged between these two friends, though now only in part intelligible, do little credit to either. “If thou recall to mind,” Dante says to Forese in the sixth terrace of Purgatory, “what thou wast with me and I was with thee, the present memory will still be grievous” (Purg. xxiii, 115). Forese died in July 1296; the author of the Ottimo Commento, who wrote about 1334, and professes to have known the divine poet, tells us that Dante induced his friend when on his death-bed to repent and receive the last sacraments. Another sonnet of Dante’s shows him in friendly correspondence with Brunetto (Betto) Brunelleschi, a noble who later played a sinister part in the factions and, like Corso Donati, met a violent death.

Loves, Marriage, and Debts.—Several very striking canzoni, written for a lady whom Dante represents under various stony images, and whose name may possibly have been Pietra, are frequently assigned to this period of the poet’s life, but may perhaps have been written in the early days of his exile. From other lyrics and sonnets we dimly discern that several women may have crossed Dante’s life now and later, of whom nothing can be known. Dante married Gemma di Manetto Donati, a distant kinswoman of Corso and Forese. In the Paradiso (xvi. 119) he refers with complacency to his wife’s ancestor, Ubertino Donati, Manetto’s great-grandfather, whose family pride scorned any alliance with the Adimari. According to Boccaccio, the marriage took place some time after the death of Beatrice, and it was certainly not later than 1297; but there is documentary evidence that Gemma’s dowry was settled in 1277, which points to an early betrothal. The union has generally been supposed—on somewhat inadequate grounds—to have been an unhappy one. Gemma bore Dante two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, and either one or two daughters. Boccaccio’s statement, that she did not share the poet’s exile, is usually accepted; she was living in Florence after his death, and died there after 1332.[2] During the following years, between 1297 and 1300, Dante was contracting debts (Durante di Scolaio degli Abati and Manetto Donati being among his sureties), which altogether amounted to a very large sum, but which were cleared off from the poet’s estate after his death.

4. Dante’s Political Life

Election of Boniface VIII.—Upon the abdication of Celestine V., Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani was made Pope on Christmas Eve 1294, under the title of Boniface VIII. (Inf. xix. 52-57), an event ominous for Florence and for Dante. Although canonised by the Church, there is little doubt that St. Celestine is the first soul met by Dante in the vestibule of Hell: Colui che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto (Inf. iii. 58-60), “He who made from cowardice the great renunciation.”

Giano della Bella.—Florence had just confirmed the democratic character of her constitution by the reforms of Giano della Bella, a noble who had identified himself with the popular cause (Par. xvi. 132). By the Ordinances of Justice in 1293 stringent provisions were enacted against the nobles, who since Campaldino had grown increasingly aggressive towards the people and factious against each other. They were henceforth more rigorously excluded from the Priorate and Council of the Hundred, as also from the councils of the Captain and Capitudini; severe penalties were exacted for offences against popolani; and, in order that these ordinances should be carried out, a new magistrate, the Gonfaloniere di Guistizia or Standard-bearer of Justice, was added to the Signoria to hold office like the Priors for two months in rotation from the different districts of the city. Thus was completed the secondo popolo, the second democratic constitution of Florence. The third of these standard-bearers was Dino Compagni, the chronicler. Giano della Bella was meditating the continuation of his work by depriving the captains of the Guelf Society of their power and resources, when a riot, in which Corso Donati played a prominent part, caused his overthrow in March 1295. By his fall the government remained in the hands of the rich burghers, being practically an oligarchy of merchants and bankers.

First Steps in Political Life.—In this same year 1295, the first year of the pontificate of Boniface VIII., Dante entered political life. Although of noble descent, the Alighieri do not seem to have ranked as magnates. By a modification in the Ordinances of Justice in July 1295, citizens, without actually exercising an “art,” were admitted to office provided they had matriculated and were not knights, if not more than two persons in their family had held knighthood within the last twenty years. Dante now (or perhaps a little later) enrolled his name in the matricola of the Art of Physicians and Apothecaries, which included painters and booksellers. For the six months from November 1st, 1295, to April 30th, 1296, he was a member of the Special Council of the Captain. On December 14th, as one of the savi or specially summoned counsellors, he gave his opinion (consuluit) in the Council of the Capitudini of the Arts on the procedure to be adopted for the election of the new Signoria. On January 23rd, 1296, the Pope inaugurated his aggressive policy towards the Republic by addressing a bull to the Podestà, Captain, Ancients, Priors and Rectors of the Arts, to the Council and the Commune of Florence (purposely ignoring the new office of Gonfaloniere). After denouncing in unmeasured terms the wickedness of that “rock of scandal,” Giano della Bella, and extolling the prudence of the Florentines in expelling him, the Pope, hearing that certain persons are striving to obtain his recall, utterly forbids anything of the kind without special licence from the Holy See, under penalty of excommunication and interdict. The Pope further protests his great and special affection for Florence, amongst the cities devoted to God and the Apostolic See. “I love France so well,” says Shakespeare’s King Henry, “that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine.”

Although Boccaccio, and others in his steps, have somewhat exaggerated Dante’s influence in the politics of the Republic, there can be no doubt that he soon came to take a decided attitude in direct opposition to all lawlessness, and in resistance to any external interference in Florentine matters, whether from Rome, Naples, or France. The eldest son of Charles II., Carlo Martello, whom Dante had “loved much and with good cause” (Par. viii. 55) during his visit to Florence in the spring of 1294, had died in the following year; and his father was harassing the Florentines for money to carry on the Sicilian war. Dante, on leaving the Council of the Captain, had been elected to the Council of the Hundred, in which, on June 5th, 1296, he spoke in support of various proposals, including one on the embellishment of the cathedral and baptistery by the removal of the old hospital, and another undertaking not to receive men under ban of the Commune of Pistoia in the city and contado of Florence. In the previous May, in consequence of internal factions, Pistoia had given Florence control of the city, with power to send a podestà and a captain every six months. After this we do not hear of Dante again until May 7th, 1300, when he acted as ambassador to San Gemignano to announce that a parliament was to be held for the purpose of electing a captain for the Guelf League of Tuscany, and to invite the Commune to send representatives. But already the storm cloud which loomed on the horizon had burst upon the city on May Day 1300.

Blacks and Whites.—The new division of parties in Florence became associated with the feud between two noble families, the Donati and the Cerchi, headed respectively by two of the heroes of Campaldino, Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi. The names Neri and Bianchi, Black Guelfs and White Guelfs, by which the two factions became known, seem to have been derived from a similar division in Pistoia, the ringleaders of which, being banished to Florence, embittered the quarrels already in progress in the ruling city. But the roots of the trouble went deeper and were political, connected with the discontent of both magnates and popolo minuto under the hegemony of the Greater Arts. The Bianchi were opposed to a costly policy of expansion; the Neri, who had wider international and mercantile connections, looked beyond the affairs of the Commune, and favoured intimate relations with the Angevin sovereigns of Naples and the Pope. To the Bianchi adhered those nobles who had matriculated in the Arts, the more moderate spirits among the burghers, the remains of the party of Giano della Bella who supported the Ordinances of Justice in a modified form. While the Bianchi drew closer to the constitutional government, the strength of the Neri lay in the councils of the Guelf Society and the influence of the aristocratic bankers. Guido Cavalcanti (who, even after the modification of the Ordinances, would have been excluded from office) was allied with the Cerchi, but probably less influenced by political considerations than by his personal hostility towards Messer Corso, who was in high favour with the Pope. Florence was now indeed “disposed for woeful ruin” (Purg. xxiv. 81), but there had been a “long contention” (Inf. vi. 64) before the parties came to bloodshed.

The Jubilee.—On February 22nd, 1300, Pope Boniface issued the bull proclaiming the first papal jubilee. It began with the previous Christmas Day and lasted through the year 1300. Amongst the throngs of pilgrims from all parts of the world to Rome were Giovanni Villani and, probably, Dante (Inf. xviii. 29). This visit to Rome inspired Villani to undertake his great chronicle; and it is the epoch to which Dante assigns the vision which is the subject of the Divina Commedia (Purg. ii. 98). The Pope, however, had his eyes on Florence, and had apparently resolved to make Tuscany a part of the Papal States. Possibly he had already opened negotiations with the Neri through his agents and bankers, the Spini. A plot against the state on the part of three Florentines in the service of the Pope was discovered to the Signoria, and sentence passed against the offenders on April 18th.[3] Boniface wrote to the Bishop of Florence, on April 24th, 1300, demanding from the Commune that the sentences should be annulled and the accusers sent to him. The Priors having refused compliance and denied his jurisdiction in the matter, the Pope issued a second bull, declaring that he had no intention of derogating from the jurisdiction or liberty of Florence, which he intended to increase; but asserting the absolute supremacy of the Roman Pontiff both in spiritual and temporal things over all peoples and kingdoms, and demanding again, with threats of vengeance spiritual and temporal, that the sentences against his adherents should be annulled, that the three accusers with six of the most violent against his authority should appear before him, and that the officers of the Republic should send representatives to answer for their conduct. This was on May 15th, but, two days earlier, the Pope had written to the Duke of Saxony, and sent the Bishop of Ancona to Germany, to demand from Albert of Austria the renunciation absolutely to the Holy See of all rights claimed by the Emperors in Tuscany.

Dante’s Priorate.—But in the meantime bloodshed had taken place in Florence. On May 1st the two factions came to blows in the Piazza di Santa Trinita; and on May 4th full powers had been given to the Priors to defend the liberty of the Commune and People of Florence against dangers from within and without (which had evidently irritated the Pope). The whole city was now divided; magnates and burghers alike became bitter partisans of one or other faction. The Pope, who had previously made a vain attempt to reconcile Vieri de’ Cerchi with the Donati, sent the Franciscan Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta as legate and peacemaker to Florence, in the interests of the captains of the Guelf Society and the Neri, who accused the Signoria of Ghibelline tendencies. The Cardinal arrived in June. From June 15th to August 14th Dante was one of the six Priors by election. “All my misfortunes,” he says in the letter quoted by Leonardo Bruni, “had their cause and origin in my ill-omened election to the Priorate; of which Priorate, though by prudence I was not worthy, still by faith and age I was not unworthy.” We know too little of the facts to be able to comment upon this cryptic utterance. On the first day of office (June 15th), the sentence passed in the previous April against the three Florentines in the papal service was formally consigned to Dante and his colleagues—Lapo Gianni (probably the same person as his poet friend of that name) acting as notary. There were disturbances in the city. On St. John’s Eve an assault was made upon the Consuls of the Arts by certain magnates of the Neri, and their opponents threatened to take up arms. The Priors, perhaps on Dante’s motion, exiled (or, more accurately, put under bounds outside the territory of the Republic) some prominent members of both factions, including Corso Donati and Guido Cavalcanti. The Neri attempted to resist, expecting aid from the Cardinal and from Lucca; the Bianchi obeyed. Negotiations continued between the Signoria and the Cardinal, Dante and his colleagues resisting the papal demands without coming to a formal rupture.

The Bianchi in Power.—The succeeding Signoria was less prudent. The banished Bianchi were allowed to return just after Dante had left office (as he himself states in a lost letter seen by Leonardo Bruni), on the plea of the illness of Guido Cavalcanti, who had contracted malaria at Sarzana, and died at Florence in the last days of August. At the end of September a complete rupture ensued with Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, who broke off negotiations and retired to Bologna, leaving the city under an interdict. Corso Donati had broken bounds and gone to the Pope, who, towards the close of 1300, nominated Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair, captain-general of the papal states, and summoned him to Italy to aid Charles of Naples against Frederick of Aragon in Sicily and reduce the “rebels” of Tuscany to submission.

We meet the name of Dante on several occasions among the consulte of the Florentine Republic during 1301. It is probable that he was one of the savi called to council on March 15th, and that he opposed the granting of a subsidy in money which the King of Naples had demanded for the Sicilian war and which was made by the Council of the Hundred.[4] On April 14th he was among the savi in the Council of the Capitudini for the election of the new Signoria, of which Palmieri Altoviti was the leading spirit. On April 28th Dante was appointed officialis et superestans, in connection with the works in the street of San Procolo, possibly with the object of more readily bringing up troops from the country. During the priorate of Palmieri Altoviti (April 15th to June 14th), a conspiracy was discovered, hatched at a meeting of the Neri in the church of S. Trinita, to overthrow the government and invite the Pope to send Charles of Valois to Florence. In consequence a number of Neri were banished and their possessions confiscated, a fresh sentence being passed against Corso Donati. The Bianchi were all potent in Florence; and, in May 1301, they procured the expulsion of the Neri from Pistoia (ruthlessly carried out by the Florentine captain, Andrea Gherardini), which was the beginning of the end (Inf. xxiv. 143): “Pistoia first is thinned of Neri; then Florence renovates folk and rule.”

The Coming of Charles of Valois.—The government still shrank from directly opposing the Pope, who, by letter from Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, demanded the continuation of the service of a hundred horsemen. On June 19th, 1301, in a united meeting of the Councils of the Hundred, of the Captain, and of the Capitudini, and again in the Council of the Hundred apart, Dante spoke against compliance, urging “quod de servitio faciendo domini Papae nihil fiat”—with the result that the matter was postponed. In the united Councils of the Hundred, the Captain, the Podestà, and the Capitudini, on September 13th, he pleaded for the preservation of the Ordinances of Justice (a sign that the State was regarded as in peril). On this occasion all the twenty-one arts were represented, which we may connect with Leonardo Bruni’s statement that Dante had advised the Priors to strengthen themselves with the support of the “moltitudine del popolo.” On September 20th, in the Council of the Captain, he supported a request of the ambassadors of the Commune of Bologna (then allied with the Bianchi) for free passage for their importation of grain. On September 28th, again in the Council of the Captain, he defended a certain Neri di Gherardino Diedati (whose father was destined to share the poet’s fate) from an injust charge. This is the last recorded time that Dantes Alagherii consuluit in Florence. Already Charles of Valois was on his way, preparing to “joust with the lance of Judas” (Purg. xx. 70-78). On November 1st, after giving solemn pledges to the Signoria (Dino Compagni being one of the Priors), Charles with 1200 horsemen entered Florence without opposition.

Leonardo Bruni asserts that Dante was absent at Rome on an embassy to the Pope when the latter’s “peacemaker” entered Florence. It would appear that the Florentine government had requested the allied Commune of Bologna to send an embassy to Boniface, simultaneously with an embassy from Siena with which were associated three ambassadors from Florence: Maso di Ruggierino Minerbetti, Corazza da Signa, and Dante Alighieri. Their purpose was to make their own terms with the Pontiff in order to avert the intervention of Charles. The mission set out at the beginning of October; but one of the Bolognese ambassadors, Ubaldino Malavolti, having business of his own with the Florentine government, delayed the others so long that they did not arrive in time.[5] Boccaccio asserts that, when the Bianchi proposed to send Dante on such an embassy, he answered somewhat arrogantly: “If I go, who stays? and if I stay, who goes?” According to Dino Compagni, Boniface sent two of the Florentines—Maso Minerbetti and Corazza da Signa—back to Florence to demand submission to his will, but detained Dante at his court. The fact of Dante taking part in such an embassy is confirmed by the author of the Ottimo Commento, as also by an anonymous commentator on the canzone of the Tre donne, and, though seriously questioned by many Dante scholars, it is now generally accepted as historical. The other two ambassadors returned almost simultaneously with the arrival of the French prince. Yielding to necessity and trusting to his solemn oath, the Signoria, in a parliament held in S. Maria Novella, gave Charles authority to pacify the city; which he set about doing by restoring the Neri to power. Corso Donati with his allies entered Florence in arms, to plunder and massacre at their pleasure, the last Signoria of the Bianchi being compelled to resign on November 7th (cf. Purg. vi. 143, 144). A second effort by the Cardinal Matteo from the Pope to reconcile the two factions was resisted by Charles and the Neri; and the work of proscription began. The new Podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, passed sentence after sentence against the ruined Bianchi. Finally, at the beginning of April, their chiefs were betrayed into a real or pretended conspiracy against Charles, and driven out with their followers and adherents, both nobles and burghers, six hundred in number; their houses were destroyed, and their goods confiscated, themselves sentenced as rebels. On April 4th, 1302, Charles left Florence, covered with disgrace and full of plunder, leaving the government entirely in the hands of the Neri. “Having cast forth the greatest part of the flowers from thy bosom, O Florence,” writes Dante in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, “the second Totila went fruitlessly to Sicily” (V. E. ii. 6).

Sentences against Dante.—The first sentence against Dante is dated January 27th, 1302, and includes four other names. Gherardino Diedati, formerly Prior, is accused of taking bribes for the release of a prisoner, and has not appeared when summoned. Palmieri Altoviti (who had taken the lead in putting down the conspiracy hatched in Santa Trinita), Dante Alighieri, Lippo Becchi (one of the denouncers of Boniface’s agents in 1300), and Orlanduccio Orlandi are accused of “barratry,” fraud and corrupt practices, unlawful gains and extortions and the like, in office and out of office; of having corruptly and fraudulently used the money and resources of the Commune against the Supreme Pontiff, and to resist the coming of Messer Carlo, or against the pacific state of Florence and the Guelf Party; of having caused the expulsion of the Neri from Pistoia, and severed that city from Florence and the Church. Since they have contumaciously absented themselves, when summoned to appear before the Podestà’s court, they are held to have confessed their guilt, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine and restore what they have extorted. If not paid in three days, all their goods shall be confiscated; even if they pay, they are exiled for two years and perpetually excluded as falsifiers and barrators, tamquam falsarii et barattarii, from holding any office or benefice under the Commune of Florence. On March 10th, a further sentence condemns these five with ten others to be burned to death, if any of them at any time shall come into the power of the Commune. In this latter sentence there is no mention of any political offence, but only of malversation and contumacy. None of Dante’s six colleagues in the Signoria are included in either sentence; but in the second appear the names of Lapo Salterelli, who had headed the opposition to Boniface in the spring of 1300, but whom the poet judges sternly (cf. Par. xv. 128), and Andrea Gherardini, who had been Florentine captain at Pistoia.

There can be little doubt that, in spite of the wording of these two sentences, Dante’s real offence was his opposition to the policy of Pope Boniface. In the De Volgari Eloquentia (i. 6) he declares that he is suffering exile unjustly because of his love for Florence. All his early biographers bear testimony to his absolute innocence of the charge of malversation and barratry; it has been left to modern commentators to question it. In the letter to a Florentine friend, Dante speaks of his innocence manifest to all, innocentia manifesta quibuslibet, as though in direct answer to the fama publica referente of the Podestà’s sentence. His likening himself to Hippolytus is a no less emphatic protestation of innocence: “As Hippolytus departed from Athens, by reason of his pitiless and treacherous stepmother, so from Florence needs must thou depart. This is willed, this is already being sought, and soon will it be done for him who thinks it, there where Christ is put to sale each day” (Par. xvii. 46-51). “I hold my exile as an honour”:

L’essilio che m’è dato, on or mi tegno,

he says in his canzone of the Tre donne. Had Dante completed the Convivio, he would probably have furnished us with a complete apologia in the fourteenth treatise, where he intended to comment upon this canzone and discuss Justice. “Justice,” he says in Conv. i. 12, “is so lovable that, as the philosopher says in the fifth of the Ethics, even her enemies love her, such as thieves and robbers; and therefore we see that her contrary, which is injustice, is especially hated (as is treachery, ingratitude, falseness, theft, rapine, deceit, and their like). The which are such inhuman sins that, to defend himself from the infamy of these, it is conceded by long usance that a man may speak of himself, and may declare himself to be faithful and loyal. Of this virtue I shall speak more fully in the fourteenth treatise.”

5. First Period of Exile

“Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth from her sweet bosom (in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire with all my heart to rest my wearied mind and to end the time given me), I have gone through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is wont unjustly to be ofttimes reputed to the wounded.”

In these words (Conv. i. 3), Dante sums up the earlier portion of his exile. There are few lines of poetry more noble in pathos, more dignified in reticence, than those which he has put into the mouth of Cacciaguida (Par. xvii. 55-60): “Thou shalt leave everything beloved most dearly, and this is that arrow which the bow of exile first shoots. Thou shalt test how savours of salt another’s bread, and how hard the ascending and descending by another’s stairs.”

Early Days of Exile.—The terms of the first sentence against Dante seem to imply that, if he had returned to Florence, he fled from the city before January 27th, 1302. We do not know where he went. Boccaccio, apparently from a misunderstanding of Par. xvii. 70, says Verona; if we suppose it to have been Siena, this would explain Leonardo Bruni’s account of Dante’s first hearing particulars of his ruin at the latter city. The sentence against Messer Vieri de’ Cerchi, with the other leaders, is dated April 5th in the terrible Libro del Chiodo, the black book of the Guelf Party. Arezzo, Forlì, Siena, Bologna, were the chief resorts of the exiled Bianchi; in Bologna they seem for some time to have been especially welcome. Dante first joined them in a meeting held at Gargonza, where they are said by Bruni to have made the poet one of their twelve councillors, and to have fixed their headquarters at Arezzo. For a short time Dante made common cause with them, but found their society extremely uncongenial (Par. xvii. 61-66). On June 8th, 1302, there is documentary evidence of his presence with some others in the choir of San Godenzo at the foot of the Apennines, where the Bianchi allied with the Ghibelline Ubaldini to make war upon Florence. The fact of this meeting having been held in Florentine territory and followed by several cavalry raids induced a fresh sentence in July from the new Podestà, Gherardino da Gambara of Brescia, in which, however, Dante is not mentioned.

Failure of the Bianchi.—A heavy blow was inflicted upon the exiles by the treachery of Carlino di Pazzi (Inf. xxxii. 69), who surrendered the castle of Piantravigne in Valdarno to the Neri, when many Bianchi were slain or taken. The cruelty of the Romagnole, Count Fulcieri da Calboli, the next Podestà of Florence from January to September 1303, towards such of the unfortunate Bianchi as fell into his hands has received its meed of infamy in Purg. xiv. 58-66. It is perhaps noteworthy (as bearing upon the date of Dante’s separation from his fellow-exiles) that the poet’s name does not appear among the Bianchi who, under the leadership of the Ghibelline captain, Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi of Forlì, signed an agreement with their allies in Bologna on June 18th in this year; but this may merely imply that he did not go to Bologna. He was possibly associated with Scarpetta at Forlì about this time. These renewed attempts to recover the state by force of arms resulted only in the disastrous defeat of Pulicciano in Mugello.

Death of Boniface VIII.—In this same year Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret, in the name of Philip the Fair, seized Boniface VIII. at Anagni, and treated the old Pontiff with such barbarity that he died in a few days, October 11th, 1303. The seizure had been arranged by the infamous Musciatto Franzesi, who had been instrumental in the bringing of Charles of Valois to Florence. “I see the golden lilies enter Alagna,” cries Hugh Capet in the Purgatorio; “and in His vicar Christ made captive. I see Him mocked a second time. I see renewed the vinegar and gall, and Him slain between thieves that live” (Purg. xx. 86-90).

Benedict XI.—In succession to Boniface, Nicholas of Treviso, the master-general of the Dominicans, a man of humble birth and of saintly life, was made Pope on October 22nd, 1303, as Benedict XI. He at once devoted himself to healing the wounds of Italy, and sent to Florence as peacemaker the Dominican Cardinal, Niccolò da Prato, who was of Ghibelline origin. The peacemaker arrived in March 1304, and was received with great honour. Representatives of the Bianchi and Ghibellines came to the city at his invitation; and, when May opened, there was an attempt to revive the traditional festivities which had ended on that fatal May Day of 1300. But a terrible disaster on the Ponte alla Carraia cast an ominous gloom over the city, and the Neri treacherously forced the Cardinal to leave. Hardly had he gone when, on June 10th, fighting broke out in the streets, and a fire, purposely started by the Neri, devastated Florence. On July 7th Pope Benedict died, perhaps poisoned, at Perugia; and, seeing this last hope taken from them, the irreconcilable portion of the Bianchi, led by Baschiera della Tosa, aided by the Ghibellines of Tuscany under Tolosato degli Uberti, with allies from Bologna and Arezzo, made a valiant attempt to surprise Florence on July 20th from Lastra. Baschiera, with about a thousand horsemen, captured a part of the suburbs, and drew up his force near San Marco, “with white standards displayed, and garlands of olives, with drawn swords, crying peace” (Compagni). Through his impetuosity and not awaiting the coming of Tolosato, this enterprise ended in utter disaster, and with its failure the last hopes of the Bianchi were dashed to the ground.

Separation from the Bianchi and Wanderings in Exile.—After the defeat of Lastra, Bruni represents Dante as going from Arezzo to Verona, utterly humbled. We learn from the Paradiso (xvii. 61-69) that, estranged from his fellow-exiles who had turned violently against him, he had been compelled to form a party to himself. It is held by some scholars that he had broken away from them in the previous year, and that, towards the end of 1303, he had found his first refuge at Verona in “the courtesy of the great Lombard,” Bartolommeo della Scala, at whose court he now first saw his young brother, afterwards famous as Can Grande, and already in boyhood showing sparks of future greatness (ibid. 70-78). Others would identify il gran Lombardo with Bartolommeo’s brother and successor, Albuino della Scala, who ruled in Verona from March 1304 until October 1311, and associated Can Grande with him as the commander of his troops. There is no certain documentary evidence of Dante’s movements between June 1302 and October 1306. It is not improbable that, in 1304 or 1305, he stayed some time at Bologna. The first book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia seems in many respects to bear witness to this stay at Bologna, where the exiles were still welcome; a certain kindliness towards the Bolognese, very different from his treatment of them later in the Divina Commedia, is apparent, together with a peculiar acquaintance with their dialect. But on March 1st, 1306, the Bolognese made a pact with the Neri, after which they expelled the Florentine exiles, ordering that no Bianchi or Ghibellines should be found in Bolognese territory on pain of death. Dante perhaps went to Padua from Bologna, and, though the supposed documentary proof of his residence in Padua on August 27th, 1306, cannot be accepted without reserve, it is tempting to accept the statement of Benvenuto da Imola that the poet was entertained by Giotto when the painter was engaged upon the frescoes of the Madonna dell’ Arena. In October, Dante was in Lunigiana, a guest of the Malaspina, that honoured race adorned with the glory of purse and sword (Purg. viii. 121-139). Here, according to Boccaccio, he recovered from Florence some manuscript which he had left behind him in his flight; possibly what he afterwards rewrote as the first seven cantos of the Inferno. On October 6th he acted as ambassador and nuncio of the Marquis Franceschino Malaspina in establishing peace between his house and the Bishop of Luni. This is the last certain trace of Dante’s feet in Italy for nearly five years. There is a strangely beautiful canzone of his which may have been written at this time. Love has seized upon the poet in the midst of the Alps (i.e. Apennines): “In the valley of the river by whose side thou hast ever power upon me”; “Thou goest, my mountain song; perchance shalt see Florence, my city, that bars me out of herself, void of love and nude of pity; if thou dost enter in, go saying: Now my maker can no more make war upon you; there, whence I come, such a chain binds him that, even if your cruelty relax, he has no liberty to return hither.”[6]

Dante had probably, as Bruni tells us, been abstaining from any hostile action towards Florence, and hoping to be recalled by the government spontaneously. There are traces of this state of mind in the Convivio (i. 3). It would be about this time that he wrote in vain the letter mentioned by Bruni, but now lost, Popule mee quid feci tibi.

Clement V.—Death of Corso Donati.—In the meantime Clement V., a Gascon, and formerly Archbishop of Bordeaux, had been elected Pope. “From westward there shall come a lawless shepherd of uglier deeds” than even Boniface VIII., writes Dante in Inferno xix. He translated the Papal Court from Rome to Avignon, and thus in 1305 initiated the Babylonian captivity of the Popes, which lasted for more than seventy years, “to the great damage of all Christendom, but especially of Rome” (Platina). Scandalous as was his subservience to the French king, and utterly unworthy of the Papacy as he showed himself, it must be admitted that Clement made serious efforts to relieve the persecuted Bianchi and Ghibellines—efforts which were cut short by the surrender of Pistoia in 1306 and the incompetence of his legate, the Cardinal Napoleone Orsini. In October 1308, Corso Donati came to the violent end mentioned as a prophecy in Purg. xxiv.; suspected, with good reason, of aiming at the lordship of Florence with the aid of the Ghibelline captain, Uguccione della Faggiuola, whose daughter he had married, he was denounced as a traitor and killed in his flight from the city.

Dante Possibly at Paris.—Villani tells us that Dante, after exile, went to the Studio at Bologna, and then to Paris and to many parts of the world. The visit to Paris is also affirmed by Boccaccio, and it is not impossible that Dante went thither, between 1307 and 1309, by way of the Riviera and Provence. A highly improbable legend of his presence at Oxford is based upon an ambiguous line in a poetical epistle from Boccaccio to Petrarch and the later testimony of Giovanni da Serravalle at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Dante’s stay in Paris has been seriously questioned, and still remains uncertain. The University of Paris was then the first in the world in theology and scholastic philosophy. Boccaccio tells us that the disputations which Dante sustained there were regarded as most marvellous triumphs of scholastic subtlety. According to Giovanni da Serravalle (who has, however, placed his Parisian experiences too early), Dante was forced to return before taking the doctorate of theology, for which he had already fulfilled the preliminaries. He may have stayed in Paris until 1310, when tremendous events put an end to his studies and imperatively summoned him back to Italy.

6. The Invasion of Henry VII.

“Lo, now is the acceptable time wherein arise the signs of consolation and peace. For a new day is breaking from the east, showing forth the dawn which already is dispersing the darkness of our long calamity; and already the eastern breezes begin to blow, the face of heaven glows red, and confirms the hopes of the nations with a caressing calm. And we too shall see the looked-for joy, we who have kept vigil through the long night in the desert” (Epist. v. 1).

Election of Henry VII.—On May 1st, 1308, Albert of Austria, who, by his neglect of Italy, had suffered the garden of the Empire to be desert, was assassinated by his nephew (Purg. vi. 97-105). In November, with the concurrence of the Pope and in opposition to the royal house of France, Henry of Luxemburg was elected Emperor. In January 1309 he was crowned at Aix as Henry VII.; in May 1310 he announced to the Italian cities his intention of coming to Rome for the imperial crown. Here was a true King of the Romans and successor of Caesar, such as the Italians had not recognised since the death of Frederick II. (Conv. iv. 3). The saddle was no longer empty; Italy had once more a king and Rome a spouse. It is in the glory of this imperial sunrise that Dante appears again, and, in the letter just quoted to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, his voice is heard, hailing the advent of this new Moses, this most clement Henry, divus Augustus Caesar, who is hastening to the nuptials, illuminated in the rays of the Apostolic benediction. The letter seems to have been written after the beginning of September, when the Pope issued an encyclical on Henry’s behalf, and before the latter part of October 1310, when the Emperor arrived in Italy. According to the fifteenth-century historian, Flavio Biondo, Dante was at this time at Forlì with Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi. In January 1311 Henry took the iron crown (or its substitute) at Milan. Dante, sometime before the end of March, paid his homage to the Emperor (Epist. vii. 2): “I saw thee, as beseems Imperial Majesty, most benignant, and heard thee most clement, when that my hands handled thy feet and my lips paid their debt. Then did my spirit exult in thee, and I spoke silently with myself: ‘Behold the Lamb of God. Behold Him who hath taken away the sins of the world.’”

National Policy of Florence.—The Emperor himself shared the golden dream of the Italian idealists, and, believing in the possibility of the union of Church and Empire in a peaceful Italy healed of her wounds, addressed himself ardently to his impossible task, forcing cities to take back their exiles, patching up old quarrels. Opposed to him arises the less sympathetic figure of King Robert of Naples, who, having succeeded his father, Charles II., in May 1309, was preparing—though still for a while negotiating on his own account with Henry—to head the Guelf opposition. While others temporised, Florence openly defied the Emperor, insulted his envoys, and refused to send ambassadors to his coronation. While the Emperor put his imperial vicars into Italian cities, as though he were another Frederick Barbarossa, the Florentines drew closer their alliance with Robert, formed a confederation of Guelf cities, and aided with money and men all who made head against the German King. In spite of the bitter language used by Dante in his letters, modern historians have naturally recognised in this one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Republic. “Florence,” writes Pasquale Villari, “called on the Guelf cities, and all seeking to preserve freedom and escape foreign tyranny, to join in an Italian confederation, with herself at its head. This is, indeed, the moment in which the small merchant republic initiates a truly national policy, and becomes a great Italian power. So, in the medieval shape of a feudal and universal Empire, on the one hand, and in that of a municipal confederation on the other, a gleam of the national idea first began to appear, though still in the far distance and veiled in clouds.”

Letters and Fresh Sentence.—On March 31st, 1311, from “the boundaries of Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” and on April 17th, from “Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” Dante addressed two terrible letters to “the most wicked Florentines within,” and to “the most sacred triumphant and only lord, Henry by divine providence King of the Romans, ever Augustus.” In the former he reasserts the rights and sanctity of the Empire, and, whilst hurling the fiercest invective upon the Florentine government, foretells their utter destruction and warns them of their inability to withstand the might of the Emperor. In the latter he rebukes the “minister of God and son of the Church and promoter of Roman glory” for his delay in Lombardy, and urges him on against Florence, “the sick sheep that infects all the flock of the Lord with her contagion.” Let him lay her low and Israel will be delivered. “Then shall our heritage, the taking away of which we weep without ceasing, be restored to us again; and even as we now groan, remembering the holy Jerusalem, exiles in Babylon, so then, citizens breathing again in peace, we shall look back in our joy upon the miseries of confusion.” These letters were evidently written from the Casentino, where Dante had gone probably on an imperial mission to one or other of the Conti Guidi. He was perhaps staying at the castle of Poppi, and there is a tradition that the Florentine government sent agents to arrest him there. Probably in consequence of these letters, a new condemnation was pronounced against him; on September 2nd, 1311, Dante is included in the long list of exiles who, in the “reform” of Baldo d’Aguglione, are to be excepted from amnesty and for ever excluded from Florence.

Failure of the Emperor.—But in the meantime Brescia, “the lioness of Italy,” who had offered as heroic a resistance to Henry VII. as she was to do five centuries later to the Austrians of Haynau, had been forced to surrender; and the Emperor had at last moved southwards to Genoa and thence to Pisa, from which parties of imperialists ravaged the Florentine territory. From Genoa, on December 24th, 1311, he issued a decree placing Florence under the ban of the Empire, and declaring the Florentine exiles under his special protection. Dante (with Palmieri Altoviti and other exiles) was probably at Pisa in the early spring of 1312, and it may well have been there that Petrarch—then a little boy in his eighth year—saw his great predecessor. Rome itself was partly held by the troops of King Robert and the Florentines; with difficulty was Henry crowned by the Pope’s legates in the Church of St. John Lateran on June 29th, 1312. From September 19th to October 31st Henry besieged Florence, himself ill with fever. “Do ye trust in any defence girt by your contemptible rampart?” Dante had written to the Florentines: “What shall it avail to have girt you with a rampart and to have fortified yourselves with outworks and battlements, when, terrible in gold, that eagle shall swoop down on you which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, ever strengthened by the support of the soldiery of heaven, looked down of old upon vast oceans in its flight?” But the golden eagle did not venture upon an assault. Wasting the country as it went, the imperial army retreated. Early in 1313 the Florentines gave the signory of their city to King Robert for five years, while the Emperor from Pisa placed the king under the ban of the Empire, and declared him a public enemy. The Pope himself had deserted the imperial cause, and was fulminating excommunication if Henry invaded Robert’s kingdom (cf. Par. xvii. 82; xxx. 144), when the Emperor, moving from Pisa with reinforcements from Germany and Sicily, died on the march towards Naples at Buonconvento, near Siena, on August 24th, 1313. Dante had not accompanied the imperialists against Florence; he yet retained so much reverence for his fatherland, as Bruni writes, apparently from some lost letter of the poet’s. We do not know where he was when the fatal news reached him. Cino da Pistoia and Sennuccio del Bene broke out into elegiac canzoni on the dead hero; Dante was silent, and waited till he could more worthily write the apotheosis of his alto Arrigo in the Empyrean (Par. xxx. 133-138).

7. Last Period of Exile

Dante’s Wanderings—Death of Clement V.—Dante was again a proscribed fugitive. His movements are hardly known, excepting by more or less happy conjecture, from the spring of 1311 in the Casentino to the close of his days at Ravenna. Boccaccio and Bruni agree that he had now given up all hope of return to Florence. According to the latter, he wandered about in great poverty, under the protection of various lords, in different parts of Lombardy, Tuscany, and Romagna. There is a tradition, perhaps mainly based upon a passage in the Paradiso (Par. xxi. 106-120), that Dante retired to the convent of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, from which he gazed forth upon the perishing world of the Middle Ages, which was finding imperishable monument in his work. To this epoch might possibly be assigned—for what it may be worth—the story of his visit to the other convent of Santa Croce del Corvo in Lunigiana in quest of peace; but the only authority for this episode is the letter of Frate Ilario to Uguccione della Faggiuola, now almost universally regarded as a fabrication. But, if his steps are hidden, his voice is heard, and with no uncertain sound. On April 20th, 1314, Clement V. died in Provence (Par. xxx. 145); and, early in the interregnum that followed, Dante addressed a famous letter to the Italian cardinals, rebuking them for their backsliding and corruption, urging them to make amends by striving manfully for the restoration of the papacy to Rome. It is a noble production, full of zeal and dignity, impregnated with the sublimest spirit of mediaeval Catholicity. It had no immediate effect; after a long interval the Cahorsine, John XXII., was elected in August 1316; and the disgrace of Avignon continued. The ideal Emperor had failed; no ideal Pope was forthcoming; conscious at last of his own greatness, with luci chiare ed acute (Par. xxii. 126), eyes clear from passion and acute with discernment, the divine poet turned to the completion of his Commedia.

Rejection of the Amnesty.—After the death of the Emperor, the Ghibelline leader, Uguccione della Faggiuola, had been chosen lord of Pisa; he captured Lucca in June, 1314, and began a brief career of conquest in Tuscany which seriously alarmed Florence. In this crisis the Florentine government on May 19th, 1315, decreed a general ribandimento, or recall of exiles, under condition of a small fine, a merely formal imprisonment, and the ceremony of “oblation” in the Baptistery. Dante was probably at Lucca when he received letters to the effect that he was included.[7] The famous letter to a Florentine friend contains his rejection of this amnesty. While deeply and affectionately grateful to the friends who have striven for his return, the conditions of this “revocatio gratiosa” seem to Dante derogatory to his fame and honour, and with calm dignity he refuses to avail himself of it: “This is not the way of return to our native land, my father; but if another may be found, first by you and then by others, which does not derogate from Dante’s fame and honour, that will I accept with no lagging feet. But, if by no such way Florence may be entered, I will never enter Florence. What then? May I not anywhere gaze upon the mirror of the sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths anywhere beneath the heaven, unless first I return to the city, inglorious, nay dishonoured, in the sight of the Florentine people? Nor, assuredly, will bread fail me” (Epist. ix 4).[8]

New Condemnation.—On August 29th, 1315, Uguccione utterly defeated the united armies of Florence and Naples at the great battle of Montecatini; the Pisan ploughman had crushed the flowers and the lilies, as Giovanni del Virgilio afterwards wrote to Dante. Dante’s two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, had perhaps joined him in Lucca. The original death sentence had apparently been commuted (probably because of his having refrained from joining in the imperialist attack upon Florence in 1312) to being placed under bounds in some defined locality; and in October 1315 the poet, with his two sons, and others were cited to appear before Ranieri di Zaccaria of Orvieto, royal vicar in the city of Florence and its district (King Robert’s vicars having replaced the podestàs), to give surety as to going and staying in the places appointed. On their neglecting to appear, “Dante Alighieri and his sons,” in Ranieri’s sentence of November 6th, are condemned as contumacious and rebels, and sentenced to be beheaded if they ever come into the power of the royal vicar or of the Commune of Florence. “And, lest they should glory in their contumacy, we put all and each of them under ban of the city of Florence and district, giving licence to anyone to offend all and any one of them in goods and in person, according to the form of the statutes of Florence.” All the Portinari are included in this decree, with the exception of Manetto and fourteen others who have given security.

Dante at Verona.—In the following year, 1316, Uguccione lost Pisa and Lucca, and fled to Verona, where Can Grande della Scala, since the death of his brother Albuino in 1311, held sovereign sway as imperial vicar, and had become the champion of Ghibellinism in northern Italy; in 1318 Cane was elected captain of the Ghibelline League, and in his service Uguccione died during the siege of Padua in 1319 or 1320. It is probable that, somewhere about this time, Dante’s wandering feet had led him back to Verona to renew his friendship with Can Grande (Par. xvii. 85-90; Epist. x. 1). The old legend of Dante having met with discourtesy at his hands is to be absolutely rejected, as indeed every reference to Can Grande in his works demands. That, on his earlier visit, there may have been some unpleasantness with Albuino (Conv. iv. 16) is more credible. But Dante needed a more peaceful refuge than Verona to complete his life’s work; the city of the imperial vicar resounded with the clash of warlike preparations:

But at this court, peace still must wrench

Her chaplet from the teeth of war:

By day they held high watch afar,

At night they cried across the trench;

And still, in Dante’s path, the fierce

Gaunt soldiers wrangled o’er their spears.

At Ravenna.—It was most likely towards the end of 1316, or early in 1317, that Dante finally settled at Ravenna; probably, as Boccaccio tells us, on the invitation of Guido Novello da Polenta, who had succeeded to the lordship of Ravenna in June 1316. This Guido was the nephew of Francesca da Rimini, the hapless heroine of one of the most familiar episodes of the Inferno. These few remaining years of Dante’s life are the pleasantest to contemplate. His two sons were with him, though their mother apparently remained in Florence. Dino Perini, a younger Florentine, seems to have been to some extent the friend of Dante’s later days, as Guido Cavalcanti had been of his youth. And there were other congenial companions round him, including perhaps Giotto, who was probably working at Ravenna about this time. It is possible that Dante held some kind of professorship in the local university. Scholars and disciples came to be instructed in the poetic art, among them, it would seem, Guido da Polenta himself. His relations were still cordial with Can Grande, to whom, probably in 1318 or 1319, he addressed the epistle which contains the dedication of the Paradiso. From the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (which is now generally accepted as authentic) we gather that, at the end of 1319 or beginning of 1320, Dante paid a visit to Mantua, and that at Verona, on January 20th, 1320, he delivered a discourse concerning the relative position of the two elements, earth and water, on the globe’s surface. A curious document of 1320—the report of a process at Avignon in which Dante’s name is incidentally mentioned—seems to show that the poet was regarded as an authority upon sorcery, but as one whom persons intending to put this power to guilty use should abstain from consulting. There is also some vague evidence that accusations of heresy may have been brought against him.

Last Days and Death.—At Ravenna, amidst the monuments of ancient Caesars and the records in mosaic of primitive Christianity, where the church walls testified the glory of Justinian and the music of the Pine Forest sounded in his ears, Dante finished his Divina Commedia. His poetical correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, a shining light of the University of Bologna, reveals the kindliness and affability of the austere “preacher of Justice.” But he was not to end his days in peace. A storm cloud of war seemed about to burst over Ravenna. According to Venetian accounts—and we have no version of the matter from the other side—the Ravennese had taken Venetian ships and killed Venetian sailors in time of peace without just cause. In consequence the Doge entered into an alliance with the lords of Forlì and Rimini, and prepared to make war upon Ravenna with forces far beyond Guido’s power to meet. In August 1321 an embassy was sent by Guido to Venice, to avert the war by diplomatic means. Of this embassy Dante formed part. According to Filippo Villani, the Venetians refused the poet a hearing, and forced him, sick with fever, to return by land. It is more probable that Dante returned with offered terms by the quickest way, which would bring him back through the Pineta to Ravenna. There he died in the night between September 13th and 14th, 1321, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. The poet of a renovated Empire and a purified Church had passed away on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—the Cross which he represents as the mystical bond with which Christ had bound the chariot of the Church to the tree of the Empire. He left his Church sinking, though but for a time, still deeper into the scandal and corruption of Avignon; his Empire preparing new degradation for itself, now that the Eagle had passed into the greedy and unworthy hands of Bavarian Louis; his Italy torn and rent by factions and dissensions; his own Florence still ranking him as a proscribed rebel and criminal. But the divine work of his life had been completed, and remains an everlasting proof of the doctrine formulated by another poet, five hundred years later: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[9]

8. Dante’s Work and First Interpreters

Four Periods in Human Life.—In the Convivio (iv. 23, 24) Dante represents human life under the image of an arch, ascending and descending. For the perfectly-natured the summit of this arch is in the thirty-fifth year. Life is divided into four ages, like the four seasons of the year. Adolescence, Adolescenza, the increase of life, ascends from birth to the twenty-fifth year; Youth or Manhood, Gioventute, the perfection and culmination of life, lasts from the twenty-fifth to the forty-fifth year; Age, Senettute, descends from the forty-fifth to the seventieth year; after which remains Old Age, Senio, the winter of life.

Three Periods in Dante’s Work.—Dante’s work falls into three periods, representing to some extent Adolescenza, Gioventute, Senettute. The first is that of his “New Life,” the epoch of the romantic worship of Beatrice in her life and after her death, in which the youthful poet beheld many things by his intellect, as it were dreaming, quasi come sognado (Conv. ii. 13). This period comprises the Vita Nuova, with the lyrics contemporaneous with it, and closes in the promise “yet to utter concerning her what hath never been said of any woman.” The second period corresponds to Dante’s second age, or Gioventute; it is the period in which the image of Beatrice in the citadel of his mind is somewhat obscured by the tempests of passion and political turmoil, and for a while had become less paramount when her poet directed his thoughts to the service of philosophical research. Joined to the first period by the canzone addressed to the angelic movers of the sphere of Venus, it includes the greater part of the collection of lyrics (Canzoni, Bellate, Sonnets) included in the Rime or Canzoniere; the two unfinished prose treatises which expound the mystical meaning and technical construction of these canzoni, the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia. The three political letters connected with the Italian expedition of Henry VII. and, most probably, the special treatise in Latin prose on the Empire, the Monarchia, connect the second with the third period. This last period is the period of the Divina Commedia; the return to Beatrice, but now the allegorical Beatrice; the fulfilment of the supreme promise of the Vita Nuova; the result of the labours in art and philosophy which the second period had witnessed, of political experience, and of the spiritual and moral revulsion of Dante’s later years, after the bitter disillusion of the Emperor Henry’s enterprise and failure: “A fruit of sufferings excess.” To this period, subsidiary to the Divina Commedia, belong the letters to the Italian Cardinals, to the Florentine friend and to Can Grande, the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (if authentic), and the two Eclogues.

In addition to these works, several Italian scholars of high repute have attributed to Dante the Fiore—a rendering of the Roman de la Rose in 232 sonnets—the author of which twice calls himself “Durante.” The editors of the sexcentenary testo critico have wisely excluded it from their volume, and it has been edited as an “appendice dantiana” by Parodi. Also we know of several smaller things of Dante’s now lost: the letters mentioned by Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo; a serventese containing the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence, referred to in the Vita Nuova (V. N. vi.), one of his earliest poems; and a canzone on love, of peculiar structure, quoted in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (V. E. ii. 11).

Early Commentators.—No sooner had Dante passed away than his apotheosis began with the epitaph by Giovanni del Virgilio:

Theologus Dantes, nullius dogmatis expers

—“Dante, the theologian, skilled in every branch of knowledge,” and the canzone on his death by Cino da Pistoia:

Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte

—“Up the side, Love, of the lofty mountain.” Boccaccio tells us that it was Dante’s custom to send the Divina Commedia by instalments to Can Grande at Verona, and he adds a striking story of how, eight months after his death, the poet appeared in a vision, “clad in whitest garments and his face shining with an unwonted light,” to his son Jacopo, to reveal to the world where the manuscript of the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso was hidden. It is a fact that in April or May, 1322, Jacopo presented a complete copy of the sacred poem to Guido da Polenta, who was then Captain of the People at Bologna. Straightway the work of copyists and commentators began, above all at Florence and Bologna. The earliest dated MSS. are the Codice Landiano at Piacenza and the Codice Trivulziano at Milan (the latter of Florentine origin), dated 1336 and 1337 respectively. Of commentaries, the first two are those on the Inferno, written in the twenties of the century, by Dante’s son, Jacopo Alighieri, in Italian, and Ser Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, chancellor of the Commune of Bologna, in Latin. The earliest extant commentators on the complete poem are the Bolognese Jacopo della Lana and the Florentine author of the Ottimo Commento, probably Andrea Lancia; the former wrote shortly before and the latter shortly after 1330. Both wrote in Italian. Pietro Alighieri composed a Latin commentary on his father’s work about 1340, and revised it, with additions, some years later. An important Latin commentary on the Inferno, by the Carmelite Guido da Pisa, dates from the forties of the century. And, before the fourteenth century closed, a new epoch in Dante scholarship was inaugurated by the lectures and commentaries of Giovanni Boccaccio at Florence (1373), Benvenuto da Imola at Bologna (1375-80), and Francesco da Buti at Pisa (1380-90). Of all these earlier commentators, Benvenuto da Imola is by far the greatest; and he unites mediaeval Dantology with England’s cult of the divine poet in the first complete edition of his commentary which was given to the world by Lacaita and William Warren Vernon.

In his proem, Ser Graziolo, or his contemporary translator, strikes the keynote of all reverent criticism of the Divina Commedia, and defines the attitude in which the divine poet and his works should be approached:

“Although the unsearchable Providence of God hath made many men blessed with prudence and virtue, yet before all hath it put Dante Alighieri, a man of noble and profound wisdom, true fosterling of philosophy and lofty poet, the author of this marvellous, singular, and most sapient work. It hath made him a shining light of spiritual felicity and of knowledge to the people and cities of the world, in order that every science, whether of heavenly or of earthly things, should be amply gathered up in this public and famous champion of prudence, and through him be made manifest to the desires of men in witness of the Divine Wisdom; so that, by the new sweetness and universal matter of his song, he should draw the souls of his hearers to self-knowledge, and that, raised above earthly desires, they should come to know not only the beauties of this great author, but should attain to still higher grades of knowledge. To him can be applied the text in Ecclesiasticus: ‘The great Lord will fill him with the spirit of understanding, and he will pour forth the words of his wisdom as showers.’”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] V. N. xxx. Cf. Moore, Studies in Dante, ii. pp. 123, 124. Del Lungo and others calculate the date as June 19th.

[2] Two daughters are mentioned: Antonia and Beatrice. It is probable that they are one and the same person, Antonia being the name in the world of the daughter who became a nun at Ravenna as “Suora Beatrice.” A recent discovery has revealed the existence of a Giovanni di Dante Alighieri, “Johannes filius Dantis Alagherii de Florentia,” at Lucca in October 1308, who would then have been at least fourteen years old. But it seems more probable that the “Dante Alighieri” in question is not the poet. See M. Barbi, Un altro figlio di Dante? in Studi danteschi, v. (Florence, 1922).

[3] It is to this conspiracy, as initiating the papal interference in Florentine politics which led ultimately to Dante’s own exile, that the poet alludes in Par. xvii. 49-51, where Cacciaguida speaks from the standpoint of April 1300.

[4] See B. Barbadoro, La condanna di Dante, in Studi danteschi diretti da Michele Barbi, vol. ii.

[5] Cf. Del Lungo’s notes to La Cronica di Dino Compagni in the new Muratori (tom. ix. pt. ii.), and Luzzatto, La Cronica di Dino Compagni, p. 70, n. 1. It is clear that both Bologna and Siena sent ambassadors, but that Compagni (misled by the name) erroneously supposed Malavolti to have been a Sienese.

[6] Rime cxvi.: O. canz. xi. Torraca takes this canzone as written when Dante was in the Casentino in 1311. Boccaccio speaks of an earlier stay of the poet in that region. It should be noted that Del Lungo has argued that Dante, after withdrawing from the active measures of the Bianchi, remained in Tuscany, or near at hand, until the dissolution of the party in 1307, when he may have gone to Verona.

[7] We know from the Purgatorio that Dante at some time visited Lucca, where a lady, said to have been Gentucca Morla, made the city pleasant to him. Dante’s words seem to imply no more than an agreeable friendship (Purg. xxiv. 43-45). This visit may have been at an earlier date.

[8] Cf. A. Della Torre, L’epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, n.s. xii.; M. Barbi, Per un passo dell’ epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Studi danteschi, ii.

[9] In 1350 Boccaccio was commissioned by the captains of Or San Michele, a religious confraternity at Florence, to convey a sum of money to “Suora Beatrice, daughter of the late Dante Alighieri,” a Dominican nun in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi at Ravenna. This Suora Beatrice is mentioned, as no longer living, in a document of 1371. In a document of 1332, the only children of the poet who appear, together with his widow Gemma, are Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia (of whom we know nothing more). It seems, therefore, probable that Dante had one daughter, Antonia, who, after 1332 (perhaps after the death of her mother), entered religion at Ravenna as Suora Beatrice. See O. Bacci, “Beatrice di Dante,” in Giornale Dantesco, viii. pp. 465-471.

CHAPTER II
DANTE’S MINOR ITALIAN WORKS

1. The “Vita Nuova”

Guido Guinizelli is acknowledged by Dante himself as his master in poetic art and the founder of the great new school of Italian poetry: “The father of me and of the others, my betters, who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love” (Purg. xxvi. 97). Guido’s “Canzone of the Gentle Heart”:

Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore,

“To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair,” the first great Italian lyric of this dolce stil nuovo, set forth an ideal creed of love which Dante made his own, and is the most fitting introduction to the Vita Nuova and the Rime. Love has its proper dwelling in the gentle heart, as light in the sun, for Nature created them simultaneously for each other, and they cannot exist apart. “The fire of Love is caught in gentle heart as virtue in the precious stone, to which no power descends from the star before the sun makes it a gentle thing. After the sun has drawn forth from it all which there is vile, the star gives it power. So the heart which is made by Nature true, pure, and noble, a woman like a star enamours.” But a base nature will extinguish love as water does fire. Unless a man has true gentlehood in his soul, no high birth or ancient lineage will ennoble him. Even as God fills the celestial intelligence with the Beatific Vision of His Essence, so the bella donna inspires him of gentle heart with the perfection of faithful love. Nor need the poet fear to take divine things as similitudes of his love, for such love as this is celestial, and will be accepted in Paradise:

My lady, God shall ask, “What daredst thou?”

(When my soul stands with all her acts reviewed)

“Thou passedst Heaven, into My sight, as now,

To make Me of vain love similitude.

To Me doth praise belong,

And to the Queen of all the realm of grace

Who slayeth fraud and wrong.”

Then may I plead: “As though from Thee he came,

Love wore an angel’s face:

Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame.”

Rossetti’s Translation.

The poetry of the dolce stil nuovo developed the spiritual conception of love already in germ in the later troubadours, and added an infusion of the new scholastic philosophy, but the real novelty lay in the superiority of Guido Guinizelli as a poet over his predecessors. From Bologna the pre-eminence passed to Florence with Guido Cavalcanti, who took from the other Guido “la gloria de la lingua” (Purg. xi. 98), and developed a complicated poetical psychology which culminates in his famous canzone on the nature of love:

Donna me prega, perch’io voglio dire;

“A lady prays me, therefore I would tell of an accident which is often fierce and is so lofty that it is called Love.” The Vita Nuova, beginning under the influence of Cavalcanti, becomes the supreme development in prose and verse of the doctrine of Guinizelli.

“This glorious poet,” writes Boccaccio, “first, when still weeping for the death of his Beatrice, about in his twenty-sixth year put together in a little volume, which he called the New Life, certain small works, as sonnets and canzoni, made by him in diverse times before and in rhyme, marvellously beautiful; writing at the head of each, severally and in order, the occasions which had moved him to make them, and adding at the end the divisions of each poem. And although, in maturer years, he was much ashamed of having made this little book, nevertheless, when his age is considered, it is very beautiful and pleasing, and especially to the general reader.”

But this spotless lily of books is too delicate a flower in the garden of art to be plucked by the hands of the writer of the Decameron. A greater poet than Boccaccio has said of it: “Throughout the Vita Nuova there is a strain like the first falling murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow, and prepares us to look upon the sea.” It is a preparation for the Commedia, inasmuch as it tells us how the divine singer became a poet, and how she crossed his path who was to be his spiritual pilot over that mighty ocean. Boccaccio’s statement, that Dante in maturer years was ashamed of having written this book, is perhaps due to a misunderstanding or confused recollection of a passage about certain canzoni in the Convivio (i. 2). In the Convivio, where he discusses the nature of allegory and interprets the whole of certain later poems in an allegorical sense, Dante suggests no such significance for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova; but, while declaring that the Vita Nuova was written at the entrance of manhood, he seems to contrast it with his more mature work, to which alone he would apply an allegorical interpretation. And he is most emphatic that this is in no way to derogate from the Vita Nuova (Conv. i. 1): “For it is fitting to speak and act differently in one age than in another.”

The Vita Nuova is the most spiritual and ethereal romance of love that exists, but its purity is such as comes, not from innocent simplicity of soul, but from self-repression. In the form of a collection of lyrics connected together by a prose narrative (itself a thing of rare and peculiar beauty), with quaint and curious scholastic divisions and explanations, Dante tells the tale of his love for Beatrice, from his first sight of her in their ninth year to a vision which is the anticipation of her final apotheosis. Although conforming with the poetic conventions of the age, especially in the earlier portions, it is based upon a real love story, however deeply tinged with mysticism and embellished with visionary episodes. The heroine in her loveliness and purity becomes an image upon earth of the Divine Beauty and Goodness; the poet’s love for her is the stepping-stone to love of the Supreme Good. Dante has learned his lesson from Guido Guinizelli, and does not fear to take God Himself as a similitude of his love; Heaven itself requires his lady for its perfection of beatitude (V. N. xix.); she has her precursor in Monna Giovanna, even as St. John came before the True Light (xxiv.); nay, she is a very miracle whose only root is the Blessed Trinity (xxx.).

Here beginneth the “New Life,” Incipit vita nova! We shall probably do well in taking the New Life not as merely meaning the poet’s youth, but as referring to the new life that began with the dawn of love, the regeneration of the soul. Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice at the beginning of her ninth and at the end of his ninth year, when she appeared to him robed in crimson, the colour of love and charity—and her “most sweet salutation” nine years later, when she came dressed all in pure white, the hue of Faith and Purity, between two gentle ladies older than herself—these things may have a certain analogy with the representation of his moral and political conversion, in the vision of the Commedia, as happening in his thirty-fifth year, 1300, the year of Jubilee. We may perhaps surmise that Dante, looking back from this second meeting, from which his love really dates, artistically worked up the recollections of his childhood to correspond with it; just as many years later, when he turned to the composition of the sacred poem, he looked back in his memory to some great spiritual experience when “in the middle of the journey of our life.” And, although Dante’s own words in the Convivio seem absolutely to preclude any possibility of allegorising the figure of Beatrice herself, it is clear that many of the minor episodes in the Vita Nuova must be regarded as symbolical.

After the proem, in which the poet’s intention is set forth, the Vita Nuova falls into three divisions. Each contains ten poems set as gems in a golden prose framework, the end of each part being indicated by a reference to new matter, nuova matera (xvii., xxxi.). The whole book is closed by an epilogue containing one sonnet, una cosa nuova, “a new thing,” with an introductory episode and a visionary sequel. In the first part Dante mainly depicts the effects in himself of Beatrice’s beauty, the loveliness of the belle membra, “the fair members in which I was enclosed” (Purg. xxxi. 50); in the second, the miracles wrought by the splendour of her soul; the third contains his worship of her memory, when “the delight of her fairness, departing from our view, became great spiritual beauty that spreads through heaven a light of love, gives bliss to the Angels, and makes their lofty and subtle intellect wonder” (xxxiv.).

The first part (ii. to xvii.) contains nine of Dante’s earliest sonnets and one ballata, with the story of his youthful love up to a certain point, where, after having passed through a spiritual crisis, he resolves to write upon a new and nobler matter than the past. We have the wondrous effects of Beatrice’s salutation; the introductory sonnet resulting in the friendship with Guido Cavalcanti, to whom the book is dedicated, and who seems to have induced Dante to write in Italian instead of Latin (V. N. xxxi.); his concealment of his love by feigning himself enamoured of two other ladies. Throughout the Vita Nuova, while Beatrice on earth or in heaven is, as it were, the one central figure in the picture, there is a lovely background of girlish faces behind her; just as, in the paintings of many early Italian masters, there is shown in the centre the Madonna and her Divine Babe, while around her all the clouds and sky are full of sweetly smiling cherubs’ heads. There have been students of the book who supposed that, while Beatrice represents the ideal of womanhood, these others are the real Florentine women in whom Dante for a while sought this glorious ideal of his mind; others have endeavoured in one or other of the minor characters of the Vita Nuova to recognise the Matelda of the Earthly Paradise. And there are visions and dreams introduced, in which Love himself appears in visible form, now as a lord of terrible aspect within a cloud of fire with Beatrice in his arms, now by a river-side in the garb of a traveller to bid Dante feign love for another lady, now as a youth clad in very white raiment to console him when Beatrice refuses her salutation. It may be that these two latter episodes mean that Dante was for a time enamoured of some girl whom he afterwards represented as the second lady who shielded his real love from discovery, and that he resolved to turn from it to a nobler worship of Beatrice. The most beautiful sonnet of this group is the fifth:

Cavalcando l’altr’ier per un cammino,

“As I rode the other day along a path, thinking of the journey that was irksome to me,” the journey in question being probably to Bologna (cf. p. 12).

This part is not wanting in the “burning tears” which Leonardo Bruni finds such a stumbling-block in Boccaccio’s narrative. Its lyrics show the influence of Guido Cavalcanti, particularly in the personification of the faculties of the soul as spiriti, and in the somewhat extravagant metaphors with which Dante depicts his torment in love. But a complete change comes. The mysterious episode of Dante’s agony at a wedding feast, where Beatrice mocks him, marks a crisis in his new life. Io tenni li piedi in quella parte de la vita di là da la quale non si puote ire più per intendimento di ritornare, “I have set my feet on that part of life beyond the which one can go no further with intention of returning.” He crushes the more personal element out of his love, and will be content to worship her from afar; he has sufficiently made manifest his own condition, even if he should ever after abstain from addressing her. “It behoved me to take up a new matter and one nobler than the past.”

This matera nuova e più nobile che la passata is the subject of the second part of the Vita Nuova (xviii. to xxviii.). The poet’s youthful love has become spiritual adoration for a living personification of all beauty and nobleness. Since Beatrice denies him her salutation, Love has placed all his beatitude in those words that praise his lady: so he tells the lady of very sweet speech, donna di motto leggiadro parlare, who questions him concerning this love, and whose rebuke marks the turning-point of the whole book. And, for the first time, the supreme poet is revealed in the great canzone:

Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,

“Ladies that have understanding of love,” uniting earth and heaven in glorification of her who was the giver of blessing. Here the apotheosis of womanhood, sketched by Guido Guinizelli, is developed with mystical fullness, and there is even perhaps a hint of some future work in honour of Beatrice that will deal with the world beyond the grave. The two sonnets that follow are a kind of supplement; the first:

Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa,

“Love and the gentle heart are one same thing,” gives a definition of love, elaborating the Guinizellian doctrine; the second:

Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore,

“Within her eyes my lady carries Love,” pursues the conception further, to represent Beatrice herself as the creatrix of the divine gift of gentilezza by which the heart is capable of noble love. Two sonnets on the death of Beatrice’s father lead up to a veritable lyrical masterpiece, the canzone:

Donna pietosa e di novella etate,

“A lady pitiful and of tender age,” the anticipatory vision of Beatrice’s death—the “Dante’s Dream” of Rossetti’s famous picture. The following sonnet, in which Beatrice and Cavalcanti’s lady, Primavera or Giovanna, appear together, is the only place in the Vita Nuova where Dante calls her whom he loved by the name by which she was actually known—“Bice.” Love now no longer appears weeping, but speaks joyfully in the poet’s heart. All that was personal in Dante’s worship seems to have passed away with his earlier lamentations; his love has become a transcendental rapture, an ecstasy of self-annihilation. This part of the book culminates in the two sonnets:

Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,

“So noble and so pure seems my lady,” in which a similar sonnet of Guinizelli’s is easily surpassed, and

Vede perfettamente onne salute,

“He seeth perfectly all bliss, who beholds my lady among the ladies”; sonnets which are flawless gems of mediaeval poetry. Then abruptly, in the composition of a canzone which should have shown how Love by means of Beatrice regenerated his soul, the pen falls from his hand: Beatrice has been called by God to Himself, to be glorious under the banner of Mary, “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people!”

Some falling off may be detected here and there in the third part of the Vita Nuova (xxix. to xli.), which includes the prose and poetry connected with Beatrice’s death, the love for the lady who takes pity upon the poet’s grief, his repentance and return to Beatrice’s memory. A stately canzone:

Li occhi dolenti per pietà del core,

“The eyes that grieve for pity of the heart,” is a companion piece to the opening canzone of the second part; the poet now speaks of Beatrice’s death in the same form and to the same love-illumined ladies to whom he had formerly sung her praises. More beautiful are the closing lines of the shorter canzone, written for Dante’s second friend, who was apparently Beatrice’s brother. After the charming episode of the poet drawing an Angel on her anniversary, the “gentle lady, young and very fair,” inspires him with four sonnets; and his incipient love for her is dispelled by a “strong imagination,” a vision of Beatrice as he had first seen her in her crimson raiment of childhood. The bitterness of Dante’s repentance is a foretaste of the confession upon Lethe’s bank in the Purgatorio. The pilgrims pass through the city on their way to Rome, “in that season when many folk go to see that blessed likeness which Jesus Christ left us as exemplar of His most beauteous face, which my lady sees in glory” (V. N. xli.); and this third part closes with the sonnet in which Dante calls upon the pilgrims to tarry a little, till they have heard how the city lies desolate for the loss of Beatrice.

In the epilogue (xlii., xliii.), in answer to the request of two of those noble ladies who throng the ways of Dante’s mystical city of youth and love as God’s Angels guard the terraces of the Mount of Purgation, Dante writes the last sonnet of the book; wherein a “new intelligence,” born of Love, guides the pilgrim spirit beyond the spheres into the Empyrean to behold the blessedness of Beatrice. It is an anticipation of the spiritual ascent of the Divina Commedia, which is confirmed in the famous passage which closes the “new life” of Love:

“After this sonnet there appeared unto me a wonderful vision: wherein I saw things which made me purpose to say no more of this blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to attain to that I labour all I can, even as she knoweth verily. Wherefore if it shall be His pleasure, through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue for some years, I hope that I shall yet utter concerning her what hath never been said of any woman. And then may it seem good unto Him, who is the Lord of courtesy, that my soul may go hence to behold the glory of its lady: to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who gazeth gloriously upon the countenance of Him who is blessed throughout all ages.”[10]

From the mention of the pilgrimage, and this wonderful vision, it has been sometimes supposed that the closing chapters of the Vita Nuova were written in 1300. It seems, however, almost certain that there is no reference whatever to the year of Jubilee in the first case. When Dante’s positive statement in the Convivio, that he wrote the Vita Nuova at the entrance of manhood (gioventute being the twenty years from twenty-five to forty-five, Conv. iv. 24), is compared with the internal evidence of the book itself, the most probable date for its completion would be between 1291 and 1293. It should, however, be borne in mind that, while there is documentary evidence that some of the single poems were in circulation before 1300, none of the extant manuscripts of the whole work can be assigned to a date much earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century. It is, therefore, not inconceivable that the reference to the vision may be associated with the spiritual experience of 1300 and slightly later than the rest of the book.[11]

The form of the Vita Nuova, the setting of the lyrics in a prose narrative and commentary, is one that Dante may well have invented for himself. If he had models before his eyes, they were probably, on the one hand, the razos or prose explanations which accompanied the poems of the troubadours, and, on the other, the commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas on the works of Aristotle, which Dante imitates in his divisions and analyses of the various poems. His quotations show that he had already studied astronomy, and made some rudimentary acquaintance with Aristotle and with the four chief Latin poets; the section in which he speaks of the latter, touching upon the relations between classical and vernacular poetry (xxv.), suggests the germ of the De Vulgari Eloquentia. The close of the book implies that he regarded lack of scientific and literary equipment as keeping him from the immediate fulfilment of the greater work that he had even then conceived for the glory of Beatrice.

In the Convivio, where all else is allegorical, Beatrice is still simply his first love, lo primo amore (ii. 16). Even when allegorically interpreting the canzone which describes how another lady took her place in his heart, after her death, as referring to Philosophy, there is no hint of any allegory about quella viva Beatrice beata, “that blessed Beatrice, who lives in heaven with the Angels and on earth with my soul” (Conv. ii. 2). When about to plunge more deeply into allegorical explanations, he ends what he has to say concerning her by a digression upon the immortality of the soul (Conv. ii. 9): “I so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that I shall pass after this to another better life, there where that glorious lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured.”

Those critics who question the reality of the story of the Vita Nuova, or find it difficult to accept without an allegorical or idealistic interpretation, are best answered in Dante’s own words: Questo dubbio è impossibile a solvere a chi non fosse in simile grado fedele d’Amore; e a coloro che vi sono è manifesto ciò che solverebbe le dubitose parole; “This difficulty is impossible to solve for anyone who is not in similar grade faithful unto Love; and to those who are so, that is manifest which would solve the dubious words” (V. N. xiv.).

2. The “Rime”

The Rime—for which the more modern title, Canzoniere, has sometimes been substituted—comprise all Dante’s lyrical poems, together with others that are more doubtfully attributed to him. In the Vita Nuova were inserted three canzoni, two shorter poems in the canzone mould, one ballata, twenty-five sonnets (including two double sonnets). The “testo critico” of the Rime, edited by Michele Barbi for the sexcentenary Dante, in addition to these accepts as authentic sixteen canzoni (the sestina is merely a special form of canzone), five ballate, thirty-four sonnets, and two stanzas. Dante himself regards the canzone as the noblest form of poetry (V. E. ii. 3), and he expounded three of his canzoni in the Convivio. From the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, a large number of MSS. give these three and twelve others (fifteen in all) as a connected whole in a certain definite order, frequently with a special rubric in Latin or Italian prefixed to each; this order and these rubrics are due to Boccaccio.[12] It has been more difficult to distinguish between the certainly genuine and the doubtful pieces among the ballate and sonnets, and the authenticity of some of those now included by Barbi in the canon is still more or less open to question. The Rime, on the whole, are the most unequal of Dante’s works; a few of the sonnets, particularly some of the earlier ones and those in answer to other poets, have but slight poetic merit, while several of the later canzoni rank among the world’s noblest lyrics. In the sexcentenary edition the arrangement of the lyrics is tentatively chronological, with subsidiary groupings according to subject-matter. While following the same general scheme, I slightly modify the arrangement, as certain poems regarded by Barbi as “rime d’amore” appear to me to be more probably allegorical.

(a) A first group belongs to the epoch of the Vita Nuova. Conspicuous among them are two canzoni. One:

La dispietata mente che pur mira,

“Pitiless memory that still gazes back at the time gone by,” is addressed directly to a woman (in this respect differing from Dante’s other canzoni), who is probably the second lady represented as the poet’s screen. The other:

E ’m’ incresce di me si duramente,

“I grieve for myself so bitterly,” seems to give fuller expression to the first part of the Vita Nuova with an alien note—the image of the little maiden has yielded to that of the woman whose great beauty is the object of unattainable desire. At times a lighter note is struck; Dante is apparently simply supplying words for composers to set to music, or revealing a spirit of playfulness of which there is no trace in the Vita Nuova.[13] Besides sonnets in honour of Beatrice, we have a few relating to other women, and in two ballate even their names are given: Fioretta and Violetta. One delightful sonnet:

Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare,

“Beagles questing and huntsmen urging on,” reveals the poet taking part in sport and appreciating a jape at his own expense. A number of correspondence sonnets belong to this epoch, a small series addressed to Dante da Maiano (of which no MS. has been preserved) being probably earlier than the first sonnet of the Vita Nuova. A note of pure romance is struck in the charming sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti, in which the younger poet wishes that they two, with Lapo Gianni and their three ladies (Dante’s being the first lady who screened his love), might take a voyage over enchanted seas in Merlin’s magic barque. Several admirable sonnets, now included in this group, were formerly attributed to Cino da Pistoia.[14]

(b) The tenzone with Forese Donati forms a little group apart. Its date is uncertain, but may be plausibly taken as between 1290 and 1296. These sonnets, though not free from bitterness which is perhaps serious, may be regarded as exercises in that style of burlesque and satirical poetry to which even Guido Guinizelli had once paid tribute, and which Rustico di Filippo had made characteristically Florentine.

(c) Next comes a group of poems, connected with the allegory of the Convivio, in which an intellectual ideal is pursued with the passion and wooed in the language of the lover who adores an earthly mistress. “I say and affirm that the lady, of whom I was enamoured after my first love, was the most beautiful and most pure daughter of the Emperor of the Universe, to whom Pythagoras gave the name Philosophy” (Conv. ii. 16). By some, not entirely reconcilable, process the donna gentile, who appears at the end of the Vita Nuova, has become a symbol of Philosophy, and the poet’s love for her a most noble devotion. The canzone:

Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,

“Ye who by understanding move the third heaven” describing the conflict in Dante’s mind between this new love and the memory of Beatrice, deals again with the matter of one of the sonnets of the Vita Nuova; but the allegory is perhaps an after-thought. It is commented upon in the second treatise of the Convivio and quoted in Canto viii. of the Paradiso. The other poems of this group seem purely allegorical: “By love, in this allegory, is always intended that study which is the application of the enamoured mind to that thing of which it is enamoured” (Conv. ii. 16). At first this service is painful and laborious; and the mystical lady seems a cruel and proud mistress, as she is represented in the “pitiful ballata”:

Voi che savete ragionar d’Amore,

“Ye who know how to discourse of love,” which is referred to in the third treatise of the Convivio (iii. 9). But the defect is on the lover’s own part, and in her light the difficulties which sundered him and her are dispersed like morning clouds before the face of the sun. This mystical worship culminates in the supreme hymn to his spiritual mistress, whose body is Wisdom and whose soul is Love:

Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,

“Love that in my mind discourses to me of my lady desirously,” which is the second canzone of the Convivio (quoted in V. E. ii. 6), the amorous song that Casella was to sing “met in the milder shades of Purgatory.” It is one of Dante’s lyrical masterpieces. Hardly less beautiful is the canzone, likewise cited in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (V. E. ii. 5, II):

Amor, che movi tua vertù dal cielo,

“Love that movest thy power from heaven”; with a mystical comparison of the workings of love to those of the sun and striking lines on the supernatural power of the illumined imagination. This allegorical group may be regarded as closed by the canzone:

Io sento si d’Amor la gran possanza,

“I feel so the great power of love,” in which Dante represents himself as too young to obtain his lady’s grace, but is content to serve on, finding the quest of philosophic truth its own reward. This poem has two commiati (the commiato, or tornata, being the stanza or part of a stanza, or a few independent lines, added as an address or farewell at the end of a canzone); both seem to imply that philosophic verse may be the instrument of political or social reform.[15]

(d) Dante originally held that Italian poetry should only be used for writing upon love, and therefore, in his younger days, a philosophical poem would naturally take the form of a love ode. In the Vita Nuova, he argues “against those who rhyme upon any matter other than amorous; seeing that such mode of speech was originally found for speaking of love” (V. N. xxv). His views naturally widened before he wrote his later canzoni (cf. V. E. ii. 2); but when, lacking inspiration for a higher lyrical flight or baffled by some metaphysical problem, he turns to set erring men right in didactic canzoni on some humbler ethical subject, he represents himself as so doing because out of favour with his lady or deserted by love. Thus, “The sweet rhymes of love, which I was wont to seek in my thoughts, needs must I leave”—

Le dolci rime d’amor, ch’i’ solia

—opens the canzone on the spiritual nature of true gentilezza (inspired in part by Guinizelli), which is expounded in the fourth treatise of the Convivio, and, although somewhat unequal, contains one ineffable stanza upon the noble soul in life’s four stages. A companion poem:

Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ ha lasciato,

“Since love has left me utterly,” deals with leggiadria, the outward expression of a chivalrous soul, and shows the influence of the Tesoretto of Brunetto Latini. These two canzoni, which contain transcripts from the Aristotelian Ethics, only here and there become poetry. In the larger proportion of short lines in the stanza, Dante seems feeling his way to a more popular metrical form and a freer treatment, as well as a wider range of subject. The second has satirical sketches of vicious or offensive types of men, with whom he will deal more severely in the Commedia.

(e) There are certain lyrics of Dante’s which can hardly admit of an allegorical interpretation, but are almost certainly the expression of passionate love for real women. Most notable among these are a group of four canzoni, known as the rime per la donna pietra, which are characterised by a peculiar incessant playing upon the word pietra, or “stone,” which has led to the hypothesis that they were inspired by a lady named Pietra, or at least by one who had been as cold and rigid as Beatrice had been the giver of blessing. The canzone of the aspro parlare:

Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro,

“So in my speech would I be harsh, as this fair stone is in her acts,” shows that Dante could be as terrible in his love as in his hate, and has a suggestion of sensuality which we hardly find elsewhere in his poetry. It is indirectly referred to in the Convivio, and quoted by Petrarch. The other three canzoni of this “stony” group show very strongly the influence of the Provençal Arnaut Daniel in their form, and all their imagery is drawn from nature in winter. The sestina:

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra,

“To the short day and the large circle of shade have I come,” is the first Italian example of that peculiar variety of the canzone which was invented by Arnaut (V. E., ii. 10, 13). It gives a most wonderful picture of this strange green-robed girl, her golden hair crowned with grass like Botticelli’s Libyan Sibyl, in the meadow “girdled about with very lofty hills.” Less beautiful and more artificial, the canzone:

Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna,

“Love, thou seest well that this lady cares not for thy power,” is likewise quoted with complacency, for its novelty and metrical peculiarity, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 13). And the passion of the whole group is summed up in the poem on Love and Winter:

Io son venuto al punto de la rota,

“I am come to the point of the wheel,” where, stanza by stanza, the external phenomena of the world in winter are contrasted with the state of the poet’s soul, ever burning in the “sweet martyrdom” of love’s fire. It is the ultimate perfection of a species of poem employed by Arnaut and other troubadours; another lyrical masterpiece, anticipating in its degree the treatment of nature which we find in the Commedia. These four poems were probably composed shortly before Dante’s banishment, but another canzone of somewhat similar tone was certainly written in exile—the famous and much discussed “mountain song”:

Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia,

“Love, since I needs must make complaint,” apparently describing an overwhelming passion for the fair lady of the Casentino; its pathetic close, with its reference to Florence, has been already quoted. The striking sonnet to Cino da Pistoia about the same time:

Io sono stato con Amore insieme.

“I have been in company with love since the circling of my ninth sun,” affords further testimony that, at certain epochs of his life, earthly love took captive Dante’s freewill.

(f) To the earlier years of Dante’s exile belongs the noblest and most sublime of his lyrics, the canzone:

Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,

“Three ladies are come around my heart and are seated without, for within sits Love who is in lordship of my life.” They are Justice and her spiritual children; Love prophesies the ultimate triumph of righteousness, and the poet, with such high companionship in outward misfortune, declares that he counts his exile as an honour. While recalling the legend of the apparition of Lady Poverty and her two companions to St. Francis of Assisi, and a poem of Giraut de Borneil on the decay of chivalry, the canzone echoes Isaiah (ch. li.). Its key may be found in the prophet’s words: “Hearken unto me, ye that know Justice, the people in whose heart is my law; fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings.” It was probably written between 1303 and 1306; its opening lines have been found transcribed in a document of 1310.[16] To about the same epoch must be assigned the powerful canzone against vice in general and avarice in particular:

Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire,

“Grief brings daring into my heart,” which is cited in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (associated with another poem of Giraut de Borneil) as a typical poem on rectitudo, “righteousness,” “the direction of the will” (V. E. ii. 2). These two canzoni are the connecting link between the Rime and the Commedia; the first contains the germ of Dante’s prophecy of the Veltro, his Messianic hope of the Deliverer to come, who shall make Love’s darts shine with new lustre and renovate the world; in the second, we already catch the first notes of the saeva indignatio of the sacred poem. With the exception of the “montanina canzone” and some sonnets to Cino da Pistoia, Dante wrote few other lyrics at this period[17]; indeed, one of the sonnets seems to imply that he had finally turned away from such poetry (da queste nostre rime) in contemplation of his greater task:

Io mi credea del tutto esser partito,

“I deemed myself to have utterly departed from these our rhymes, Messer Cino, for henceforth another path befits my ship and further from the shore.”

3. The “Convivio”

The Convivio, or “Banquet,” bears a somewhat similar relation to the work of Dante’s second period as the Vita Nuova did to that of his adolescence. Just as after the death of Beatrice he collected his earlier lyrics, furnishing them with prose narrative and commentary, so now in exile he intended to put together fourteen of his later canzoni and write a prose commentary upon them, to the honour and glory of his mystical lady, Philosophy. Dante was certainly not acquainted with Plato’s Symposium. It was from the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boëthius that the idea came to him of representing Philosophy as a woman; but the “woman of ful greet reverence by semblaunt,” who “was ful of so greet age, that men ne wolde nat trowen, in no manere, that she were of oure elde” (so Chaucer renders Boëthius), is transformed to the likeness of a donna gentile, the idealised human personality of the poetry of the “dolce stil nuovo”:

“And I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady; and I could not imagine her in any bearing save that of compassion; wherefore so willingly did the sense of truth look upon her, that scarcely could I turn it from her. And from this imagining I began to go there where she revealed herself in very sooth, to wit, in the schools of religious and at the disputations of philosophers; so that in a short time, perchance of thirty months, I began to feel so much of her sweetness, that her love drove out and destroyed every other thought” (Conv. ii. 13).

The Convivio is an attempt to bring philosophy out of the schools of religious and away from the disputations of philosophers, to render her beauty accessible even, to the unlearned. “The Convivio”, says Dr. Wicksteed, “might very well be described as an attempt to throw into popular form the matter of the Aristotelian treatises of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.” Dante’s text is the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know”; which he elaborates from the commentary of Aquinas and the latter’s Summa contra gentiles. He would gather up the crumbs which fall from the table where the bread of Angels is eaten, and give a banquet to all who are deprived of this spiritual food. It is the first important work on philosophy written in Italian—an innovation which Dante thinks necessary to defend in the chapters of the introductory treatise, where he explains his reasons for commenting upon these canzoni in the vernacular instead of Latin, and incidentally utters an impassioned defence of his mother-tongue, with noteworthy passages on the vanity of translating poetry into another language and the potentialities of Italian prose (Conv. i. 7, 10).

In addition to this principal motive for writing the work, the desire of giving instruction, Dante himself alleges another—the fear of infamy, timore d’infamia (Conv. i. 2): “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion as whoso reads the above-mentioned canzoni will conceive to have held sway over me; the which infamy ceases entirely by the present speaking of myself, which shows that not passion, but virtue, has been the moving cause.” It would seem that Dante intended to comment upon certain of the canzoni connected with real women, and to represent them as allegorical; it may be that, consumed with a more than Shelleyan passion for reforming the world, he chose this method of getting rid of certain episodes in the past which he, with too much self-severity, regarded as rendering him unworthy of the sublime office he had undertaken. And, by a work of lofty style and authority, he would rehabilitate the man who, in his exiled wanderings, had “perchance cheapened himself more than truth wills” (i. 4).

Only the introductory treatise and three of the commentaries were actually written: those on the canzoni Voi cite ’ntendendo, Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, Le dolci rime d’amor. If the whole work had been completed on the same scale as these four treatises, a great part of the field of knowledge open to the fourteenth century would have been traversed in the ardent service of this mystical lady, whom the poet in the second treatise—not without considerable inconsistency—represents as the same as the donna gentile who appeared towards the end of the Vita Nuova (Conv. ii. 2). As it is, the movements of the celestial bodies, the ministry of the angelic orders, the nature of the human soul and the grades of psychic life, the mystical significance and universality of love, are among the subjects discussed in the second and third treatises. The fourth treatise is primarily ethical: nobility as inseparable from love and virtue, wealth, the Aristotelian definition of moral virtue and human felicity, the goal of human life, the virtues suitable to each age, are among the themes considered. Under one aspect the Convivio is a vernacular encyclopaedia (like the Trésor of Brunetto Latini), but distinguished from previous mediaeval works of the kind by its peculiar form, its artistic beauty, and its personal note. From the first treatise it is evident that the whole work had been fully planned; but it is not possible to reconstruct it with any plausibility, or to decide upon the question of which of the extant canzoni were to be included, and in what order. From iv. 26, it may be conjectured that the passionate canzone, Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (Rime ciii., O. canz. xii.), was to be allegorised in the seventh treatise; while, from i. 12, ii. 1, iv. 27, it appears fairly certain that the canzone of the three ladies, Tre donne intorno al cor (Rime civ., O. canz. xx.), would have been expounded in the fourteenth, where Justice and Allegory were to have been discussed; and, from i. 8 and iii. 15, that the canzone against the vices, Doglia mi reca (Rime cvi., O. canz. x.), was destined for the poetical basis of the last treatise of all. It is thus clear that the Convivio would have ended with the two canzoni which form the connecting link between the lyrical poems and the Divina Commedia. For the rest, it is certain that there would have been no mention of Beatrice in any of the unwritten treatises. In touching upon the immortality of the soul (Conv. ii. 9), Dante had seen fit to end what he wished to say of “that living blessed Beatrice, of whom I do not intend to speak more in this book.” There seems also good reason for supposing that the canzone for the beautiful lady of the Casentino (Rime cxvi., O. canz. xi.), which may be of a slightly later date than the others, would not have formed part of the completed work.

Witte and others after him have supposed that the Convivio represents an alienation from Beatrice; that the Philosophy, which Dante defines as the amorous use of wisdom, is a presumptuous human science leading man astray from truth and felicity along the dangerous and deceptive paths of free speculation. There is, however, nothing in the book itself to support this interpretation,[18] and, indeed, a comparison between the second canzone, Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, and the first canzone of the Vita Nuova points to the conclusion that the personification of philosophy is but a phase in the apotheosis of Beatrice herself. The Convivio is the first fruit of Dante’s labours to fulfil the promise made at the end of the book of his youth; his knowledge of literature and philosophy has immeasurably widened, his speculations on human life and nature have matured, and his prose style, in its comparative freedom and variety, its articulation and passages of spontaneous eloquence, shows a vast progress from that of the Vita Nuova.

There are passages in the Convivio which appear to be contradicted in the Divina Commedia. One of the most curious is the treatment of Guido da Montefeltro, who, in Conv. iv. 28, is “our most noble Italian,” and a type of the noble soul returning to God in the last stage of life, whereas, in the Inferno (Canto xxvii.), he is found in the torturing flames of the evil counsellors. Several opinions are directly or indirectly withdrawn in the Paradiso; but these are to be rather regarded as mistakes which, in the light of subsequent knowledge, Dante desired to rectify or repudiate; such as the theory of the shadow on the moon being caused by rarity and density, based upon Averroës, and a peculiar arrangement of the celestial hierarchies, derived from the Moralia of St. Gregory the Great. And, in the Purgatorio, the poet discards his “dread of infamy,” when he dares not meet Beatrice’s gaze in the Garden of Eden; he casts aside the allegorical veil he had tried to draw over a portion of the past, and makes the full confession which we find in Cantos xxx. and xxxi. In the fourth treatise, an erroneous sentence attributed to Frederick II. (in reality a mutilated version of the definition of nobility given by Aristotle in the Politics) leads Dante to examine the limits and foundation of the imperial authority, the divine origin of Rome and the universal dominion of the Roman people, the relation of philosophy to government; a theme which he will work out more fully and scientifically in the Monarchia. The result is two singularly beautiful chapters (iv.-v.); a prose hymn to Rome, an idealised history of the city and her empire. It is the first indication of the poet’s conversion from the narrower political creed of the Florentine citizen to the ideal imperialism which inspires his later works.

It has sometimes been held that portions of the Convivio were written before exile. Nevertheless, while two of the canzoni were composed before 1300, it seems most probable that the prose commentaries took their present shape between Dante’s breaking with his fellow-exiles and the advent of Henry VII. A passage concerning Frederick II., “the last emperor of the Romans with respect to the present time, although Rudolph and Adolph and Albert were elected after his death and that of his descendants” (Conv. iv. 3), shows that the fourth treatise was written before the election of Henry VII., in November 1308; while a reference to Gherardo da Cammino, lord of Treviso (iv. 14), seems to have been written after his death in March 1306. From the mention of Dante’s wanderings in exile through so many regions of Italy (i. 3), it has sometimes been argued that the first is later than the subsequent treatises. It is tempting to associate the breaking off the work with Boccaccio’s story of the recovery of the beginning of the Inferno. Be that as it may, the advent of the new Caesar, Dante’s own return for a while to political activity, probably interrupted his life of study; and, when the storm passed away and left the poet disillusioned, his ideals had changed, another world lay open to his gaze, and the Convivio was finally abandoned.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna: dicer (dire) and detta, have here (as elsewhere in Dante) the sense of artistic utterance, and more particularly composition in poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Cf. V. N. xxv.

[11] Livi has shown that the first documentary evidence of the existence of the Vita Nuova as a book is found at Bologna in June 1306.

[12] The Sexcentenary Dante admits as authentic one canzone not included in this series: Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce (Rime lxviii., O. canz. xvi.*); which is evidently an early composition.

[13] Cf. Rime xlviii., lvi., lxiii. and the later xcix.; O. son. xlviii.*, ball. viii., son. I.*, son. xxxvii.*

[14] Note especially Rime lix., lxvi.; O. sonnets lv., xxxviii*.

[15] To this group I would assign the sonnet, Chi guarderà già mai sanza paura, and the ballata, I’ mi son pargoletta bella e nova, without attaching any special significance to the fact that “pargoletta” (“maiden” or “young girl”) occurs also in the canzone, Io son venuto al punto de la rota, and in Beatrice’s rebuke, Purg. xxxi. 59.

[16] Cf. G. Livi, Dante suoi primi cultori sua gente in Bologna, p. 24.

[17] Barbi adds to the Rime written in exile the impressive political sonnet, yearning for justice and peace, Se vedi li docchi miei di pianger vaghi (of which the attribution to Dante has sometimes been questioned), and the sonnet on Lisetta, Per quella via che la bellezza corre, a beautiful piece of unquestionable authenticity, but which may, perhaps, belong to an earlier epoch in the poet’s life.

[18] But cf. Wicksteed, From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, pp. 93-121.

CHAPTER III
DANTE’S LATIN WORKS

1. The “De Vulgari Eloquentia”

In the first treatise of the Convivio (i. 5), Dante announces his intention of making a book upon Volgare Eloquenza, artistic utterance in the vernacular. Like the Convivio, the De Vulgari Eloquentia remains incomplete; only two books, instead of four, were written, and of these the second is not finished. In the first book the poet seeks the highest form of the vernacular, a perfect and imperial Italian language, to rule in unity and concord over all the dialects, as the Roman Empire over all the nations; in the second book he was proceeding to show how this illustrious vulgar tongue should be used for the art of poetry. Villani’s description of the work applies only to the first book: “Here, in strong and ornate Latin, and with fair reasons, he reproves all the dialects of Italy”; Boccaccio’s mainly to the second: “A little book in Latin prose, in which he intended to give instruction, to whoso would receive it, concerning composition in rhyme.”[19]

Book I.—At the outset Dante strikes a slightly different note from that of the Convivio, by boldly asserting that vernacular in general (as the natural speech of man) is nobler than “grammar,” literary languages like Latin or Greek, which he regards as artificially formed (V. E. i. 1). To discover the noblest form of the Italian vernacular, the poet starts from the very origin of language itself. To man alone of creatures has the intercourse of speech been given: speech, the rational and sensible sign needed for the intercommunication of ideas. Adam and his descendants spoke Hebrew until the confusion of Babel (cf. the totally different theory in Par. xxvi. 124), after which this sacred speech remained only with the children of Heber (i. 2-7). From this point onwards the work becomes amazingly modern. Of the threefold language brought to Europe after the dispersion, the southernmost idiom has varied into three forms of vernacular speech—the language of those who in affirmation say oc (Spanish and Provençal), the language of oil (French), the language of sì (Italian).[20] And this Italian vulgar tongue has itself varied into a number of dialects, of which Dante distinguishes fourteen groups, none of which represent the illustrious Italian language which he is seeking. “He attacks,” wrote Mazzini, “all the Italian dialects, but it is because he intends to found a language common to all Italy, to create a form worthy of representing the national idea.” The Roman is worst of all (i. 11). A certain ideal language was indeed employed by the poets at the Sicilian court of Frederick and Manfred, but it was not the Sicilian dialect (i. 12). The Tuscans speak a degraded vernacular, although Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni and another Florentine (Dante himself), and Cino da Pistoia have recognised the excellence of the ideal vulgar tongue (i. 13). Bologna alone has a “locution tempered to a laudable suavity”; but which, nevertheless, cannot be the ideal language, or Guido Guinizelli and other Bolognese poets would not have written their poems in a form of speech quite different from the special dialect of their city (i. 15). “The illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial vulgar tongue in Italy is that which belongs to every Italian city, and yet seems to belong to none, and by which all the local dialects of the Italians are measured, weighed, and compared” (i. 16). This is that ideal Italian which has been artistically developed by Cino and his friend (Dante himself) in their canzoni, and which makes its familiars so glorious that “in the sweetness of this glory we cast our exile behind our back” (V. E. i. 17). Such should be the language of the imperial Italian court of justice, and, although as far as Italy is concerned there is no prince, and that court is scattered in body, its members are united by the gracious light of reason (i. 18). This standard language belongs to the whole of Italy, and is called the Italian vernacular (latinum vulgare); “for this has been used by the illustrious writers who have written poetry in the vernacular throughout Italy, as Sicilians, Apulians, Tuscans, natives of Romagna, and men of both the Marches” (i. 19).

The examination of the dialects is perhaps the most original feature in the book; that Dante did not recognise that what was destined to be the literary language of Italy was, in reality, the Tuscan dialect, but adopted instead the theory of a conventional or artificial Italian, was largely due to his theories being based upon the lyrical poetry of his predecessors, in which he seemed to find this abstraction realised; for, though natives of different regions of Italy, they used—or, in the form in which their poems came to him, appeared to have used—a common literary language. Nevertheless in the Divina Commedia, which was to codify the national language, Dante recognised that he himself was speaking Tuscan (Inf. xxiii. 76, Purg. xvi. 137).

Book II.—The unfinished second book is of the utmost value to the student of Italian poetic form. It makes us realise, too, how zealously Dante sought out technical perfection, studying subtle musical and rhythmical effects, curiously weighing the divisions of his stanzas, balancing lines, selecting words, harmonising syllables. No less noteworthy are his modest references to his own work and his generous appreciation of that of others, his predecessors and contemporaries, with reference to whose poems, as well as to his own, he illustrates his maxims. There is a certain limitation in that Dante conceives of poetry as only lyrical and written to be set to music (ii. 4), recognising only the most elaborate and least spontaneous forms of lyrical poetry—the Canzone (of which the Sestina is a variety), the Ballata, the Sonnet (ii. 3). There is no hint of that splendid rhythm, at once epical and lyrical, in which the Divina Commedia was to be written; though it is possible that Dante would have dealt with it in the fourth book, in which he intended to treat the discernment to be exercised with a subject fit to be sung in the “comic” style, in which sometimes the “middle” and sometimes the “lowly” vernacular may be used (ii. 4), and also, dealing with poems in the “middle” vulgar tongue, to treat specially of rhyme (ii. 13). The third book would perhaps have been concerned with the use of the illustrious vernacular in Italian prose (ii. 1.)

The illustrious vulgar tongue having been found, Dante proceeds thus to show the noblest use to which it can be put by the poet. Only three subjects are sufficiently exalted to be sung in this stateliest form of Italian speech, this highest vernacular: Salus, Venus, Virtus; or those things which specially relate to them: the rightful use of arms, the fire of love, the direction of the will; and the first of these themes had not been handled, according to Dante, by any Italian poet. He cites Bertran de Born as having written on arms, Arnaut Daniel and Cino da Pistoia on love, Giraut de Borneil and “the friend of Cino” (himself) on rectitudo (ii. 2). Of the three legitimate lyrical forms the canzone is noblest, and contains what Rossetti called the “fundamental brainwork” of the most illustrious poets (ii. 3). And the ballata is nobler than the sonnet. It is in the canzone alone, in the “tragic” or highest style, that these sublime themes are to be sung; the style in which the stateliness of the lines, the loftiness of the construction, and the excellence of the words agree with the dignity of the subject. In this superexcellent sense, a canzone is a composition in the loftiest style of equal stanzas, without a refrain, referring to one subject.[21] And the rest of the book is occupied with rules for its proper construction; the different lines to be used, the choice of words, the structure of the various types of stanza, in which the whole art of the canzone is contained, the arrangement of rhymes; the work breaking off at the point where Dante was about to treat of the number of lines and syllables in the stanza. It is noteworthy that, though he illustrates his practical rules by examples from the Provençal troubadours, his Italian predecessors and contemporaries, and his own canzoni, the great Latin poets are set up as models: “The more closely we imitate these, the more correctly we write poetry” (ii. 4). There is some indication that the De Vulgari Eloquentia would have been dedicated to Cino da Pistoia as the Vita Nuova had been to Guido Cavalcanti.

Date of Composition.—The De Vulgari Eloquentia was probably written about the same time as the Convivio or slightly earlier. From a mention of the Marquis Giovanni of Monferrato apparently as living (V. E. i. 12), who died in January (?) 1305, it has been supposed that Book i. cannot be much later than the beginning of that year. Dante’s evident friendly feeling for Bologna (which altered before he wrote the Commedia) may be connected with the time when the Florentine exiles were welcomed in that city, before the decree of expulsion in 1306. It has sometimes been thought that Book ii. may be a much later piece of work, produced as a poetical textbook at Ravenna in Dante’s last years, and broken off, as Boccaccio suggests, by his death. Nevertheless, when the tone of the work and the probable dates of the lyrics quoted be taken into account, it seems more probable that what we have of the De Vulgari Eloquentia was written between 1304 and 1306; it represents part of the labours which were interrupted by the advent of Henry VII., or abandoned when the poet turned to the Divina Commedia.

2. The “Monarchia”

The Empire.—Upon all the political life of mediaeval Italy lay the gigantic shadow of a stupendous edifice, the Holy Roman Empire. Although the barbarians had struck down the body of the Empire of Rome, the spirit of Julius Caesar was mighty yet, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The monarchy of Augustus, of Trajan, of Constantine and Justinian, still lived; not in the persons of the impotent Caesars of Byzantium, but in those of the successors of Charlemagne. From the coronation of Otto the Saxon (962) to the death of the Suabian Frederick II. (1250), the mediaeval western world saw in the man whom the Germans recognised as their sovereign the “King of the Romans ever Augustus,” the Emperor-elect, who when crowned at Rome would be “Romanorum Imperator,” the supreme head of the universal Monarchy and the Vicar of God in things temporal, even as the Pope was the supreme head of the universal Church and the Vicar of God in things spiritual. In the eyes of Dante, the Papacy and the Empire alike proceeded from God, and were inseparably wedded to Rome, the eternal city; from which as two suns they should shed light upon man’s spiritual and temporal paths, as divinely ordained by the infinite goodness of Him from whom the power of Peter and of Caesar bifurcates as from a point (Purg. xvi. 106-108, Epist. v. 5).

Papal Claims.—With the increase of their temporal power, the successors of Hildebrand, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had extended their authority from spiritual into purely secular regions. For them the imperial dignity was not of divine origin, but the gift of the Church to Charlemagne and his German successors. “What is the Teutonic King till consecrated at Rome?” wrote Adrian to Frederick Barbarossa: “The chair of Peter has given and can withdraw its gifts.” In the interregnum that followed the fall of the house of Suabia, the Popes had claimed to exercise imperial rights in Italy, with disastrous results. They had joined the sword with the pastoral staff; and the Church, by confounding in herself the two governments, had fallen into the mire (Purg. xvi. 109-112, 127-129). And this tendency in the Papacy culminated in the extravagant pretensions of Boniface VIII., in his relations with both the Empire and France, and his famous Bull Unam Sanctam (November 1302), declaring that the temporal power of kings is subject to the spiritual power of the priesthood, and directed by it as the body by the soul.

Date of the “Monarchia.”—The Monarchia is Dante’s attempt to solve this burning mediaeval question of the proper relations of Church and State, of spiritual and temporal authority. Although it is undoubtedly the most famous of his prose works, the most widely divergent views have been held as to its date of composition. If the Vita Nuova is the most ideal book of love, the Monarchia is one of the most purely idealistic works ever written on politics. Even as Beatrice is the most glorious lady of the poet’s mind, la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, so the temporal monarchy or Empire is to be considered by the poet in its ideal aspect according to the divine intention, typo et secundum intentionem (Mon. i. 2). Like the Vita Nuova, and unlike any other of Dante’s longer works, the Monarchia contains no mention of the poet’s exile, and no explicit references or allusions to contemporary events or persons. From this, and other considerations, it has sometimes been held that the Monarchia was written during his political life in Florence. Boccaccio, on the other hand, declares that Dante made this book on the coming of Henry VII., and the trend of criticism to-day is to accept 1313 as the approximate date. There are, however, scholars who consider it more probable that the Monarchia was written towards the close of the poet’s life.

Book I.—The Monarchia is divided into three books, corresponding to the three questions to be answered touching this most useful and least explored amongst occult and useful truths, the knowledge of the temporal monarchy (i. 1). In its ideal sense, the temporal Monarchy, or Empire, is defined as “a unique princedom extending over all persons in time, or in and over those things which are measured by time” (i. 2). And the first question arising concerning this temporal Monarchy is—whether it is necessary for the well-being of the world.

The proper function of the human race taken as a whole, the ultimate end or goal, for which the eternal God by His art, which is nature, brings into being the human race in its universality, is constantly to actualise or bring into play the whole capacity of the possible intellect, for contemplation and for action, for speculation and for operation (i. 3). And, for this almost divine function and goal, the most direct means is universal peace (i. 4). Since it is ordained for this goal, the human race must be guided by one ruling power, the Emperor, with reference to whom all its parts have their order; in subjection to whom, the human race becomes in its unity most like to God (i. 5-9). There must be some one supreme judge to decide by his judgment, mediately or immediately, all contentions; and such a judge can only be the Monarch (i. 10).

Again, the world is best disposed when justice is paramount therein; but this can only be under the Monarch or Emperor, who alone, free from covetousness and supreme in authority, will have the purest will and the greatest power to practise justice upon the earth (i. 11). Under him the human race will be most free, since it will have the fullest use of freewill, the greatest gift of God to man (i. 12). He alone, adorned with judgment and justice in the highest degree, will be best disposed for ruling, and able to dispose others best (i. 13). From him the particular princes receive the common rule by which the human race is guided to peace; his is the dominating will that rules the wills of mortals, disposing them to unity and concord (i. 14, 15). All these and other reasons show that, for the well-being of the world, it is necessary that there should be the Monarchy. And they are confirmed by the sacred fact that Christ willed to become man in the “fullness of time,” when the world was blessed with universal peace under the perfect monarchy of Augustus, the seamless garment that has since been rent by the nail of cupidity (i. 16).

To the modern mind the first book of the Monarchia is the most important. The conception that the goal of civilisation is the realising of all human potentialities is one of abiding significance. Divested of its mediaeval garb, the Empire itself becomes a permanent court of international justice, a supreme and impartial tribunal of international arbitration. Within such a restored unity of civilisation, nations and kingdoms and cities will develop freely and peacefully, in accordance with their own conditions and laws (cf. i. 10, 12, 14, and Conv. iv. 4). Here Dante anticipates what Mazzini called the “United States of Europe,” or, more broadly, “Humanity.”

Book II.—The second book answers the question whether the Roman people took to itself this dignity of Monarchy, or Empire, by right. But right in things is nothing else than the similitude of the Divine Will, and what God wills in human society is to be held as true and pure right. God’s will is invisible; but it is manifested in this matter by the whole history of Rome (ii. 1, 2). The surpassing nobleness of Aeneas, and therefore of his descendants (ii. 3); the traditional miracles wrought for the Romans (ii. 4); the devotion of the great Roman citizens from Cincinnatus to Cato, showing that the Roman people, in subjecting the world to itself, contemplated the good of the Commonwealth, and therefore the end of right (ii. 5, 6); the manifest adaptation of the Roman people by nature for ruling the nations with imperial sway (ii. 7);—all these prove that it was by right that the Romans acquired the Empire. The hidden judgment of God is sometimes revealed by contest, whether in the clash of champions in an ordeal or in the contention of rivals striving together for some prize (ii. 8). Such a prize was the empire of the world, which by divine judgment fell to the Roman people, when all were wrestling for it, and the kings of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, and even Alexander himself had failed (ii. 9). Their wars, too, from the earliest times were under the form of an ordeal; and Divine Providence declared in their favour. Thus arguments resting on principles of reason prove that the Roman people acquired the supreme and universal jurisdiction by right (ii. 10, 11). And arguments based upon principles of Christian faith support it. Christ, by His birth under the edict of Augustus, confirmed the imperial jurisdiction from which that edict proceeded; and, by His death under the vicar of Tiberius, He confirmed the universal penal jurisdiction of the Emperor over all the human race which was to be punished in His flesh (ii. 12, 13). “Let them cease to reproach the Roman Empire, who feign themselves to be sons of the Church; when they see that the Bridegroom, Christ, thus confirmed it at either limit of His warfare” (i.e. at the beginning and at the end of His life upon earth).

Book III.—And this rebuke to the clergy, from whom the main opposition to the Empire proceeded, naturally leads to the great question of the third book, the pith of the whole treatise.[22] Does the authority of the Roman Monarch or Emperor, who is thus by right the monarch of the world, depend immediately upon God, or upon some vicar of God, the successor of Peter? (iii. 1, 2, 3). The stock arguments of those who assert from passages of Scripture, such as the creation of the sun and moon, or the two swords mentioned in St. Luke’s Gospel, that the authority of the Empire depends upon that of the Church, are readily brushed away (iii. 4-9). And, as for their historical evidence, the donation of Constantine, if genuine, was invalid; the coronation of Charlemagne was an act of usurpation (iii. 10, 11). The authority of the Church cannot be the cause of the imperial authority, since the latter was efficient, and was confirmed by Christ, before the Church existed (iii. 13). Neither has the Church this power of authorising the Emperor from God, nor from herself, nor from any Emperor, nor from the consent of the majority of mankind; indeed, such power is absolutely contrary to her very nature and the words of her Divine Founder (iii. 14, 15).

But it may be directly shown that the authority of the Emperor depends immediately upon God. For man, since he alone partakes of corruptibility and incorruptibility, is ordained for two ultimate ends—blessedness of this life, which is figured in the Earthly Paradise, and blessedness of life eternal, which consists in the fruition of the Divine Aspect in the Celestial Paradise.[23] To these two beatitudes, as to diverse ends, man must come by diverse means. For to the first we come by philosophic teachings, provided that we follow them by acting in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues; to the second by spiritual teachings, transcending human reason, as we follow them by acting in accordance with the theological virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity. But in spite of reason and revelation, which make these ends and means known to us, human cupidity would reject them, “were not men, like horses going astray in their brutishness, held in the way by bit and rein.” “Wherefore man had need of a twofold directive power according to his twofold end, to wit, the supreme Pontiff, to lead the human race, in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the Emperor, to direct the human race to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy.” It is the special function of the Emperor to establish liberty and peace upon earth, to make the world correspond to the divinely ordained disposition of the heavens. Therefore he is chosen and confirmed by God alone; the so-called Electors are only the proclaimers (denuntiatores) of Divine Providence. “Thus, then, it is plain that the authority of the temporal monarch descends upon him without any mean from the fountain of universal authority.” Yet it must not be taken that the Roman Prince is not subordinate in anything to the Roman Pontiff, since this mortal felicity is in some sort ordained with reference to immortal felicity. “Let Caesar, therefore, observe that reverence to Peter which a firstborn son should observe to a father, so that, illuminated by the light of paternal grace, he may with greater power irradiate the world, over which he is set by Him alone who is ruler of all things spiritual and temporal” (Mon. iii. 16).

Reception of the Work.—The Monarchia remained almost unknown until the great conflict between Louis of Bavaria and Pope John XXII., after Dante’s death. Boccaccio tells us that the Imperialists used arguments from the book in support of their claims, and it became in consequence very famous. A tempest of clerical indignation roared round it. A Dominican friar, Guido Vernani, wrote a virulent but occasionally acute treatise, “on the power of the Supreme Pontiff and in confutation of the Monarchy composed by Dante Alighieri,” which he dedicated as a warning to Ser Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, chancellor of Bologna, Dante’s commentator and apologist. The notorious Cardinal Bertrando del Poggetto, who had been sent as papal legate to Italy by John XXII., had the Monarchia burnt as heretical, and followed this up—apparently in 1329—by an infamous attempt to desecrate Dante’s tomb. In the sixteenth century it was placed upon the Index of Prohibited Books. Dante had anticipated this, and the splendid passage which opens the third book of the Monarchia strikes the keynote, not only of this treatise, but of all his life-work for what he conceived the service of God and the welfare of man:

“Since the truth about it cannot be laid bare without putting certain to the blush, perchance it will be the cause of some indignation against me. But since Truth from her immutable throne demands it, and Solomon, too, as he enters the forest of the Proverbs, teaches us by his own example to meditate upon the truth and abjure the impious man, and the Philosopher, teacher of morals, urges us to sacrifice friendship for truth, therefore I take courage from the words of Daniel, wherein the divine power, the shield of such as defend the truth, is proffered; and, putting on the breastplate of faith, according to the admonition of Paul, in the warmth of that coal which one of the Seraphim took from the celestial altar and touched the lips of Isaiah withal, I will enter upon the present wrestling-ground, and, by the arm of Him who delivered us from the power of darkness by His blood, will I hurl the impious and the liar out of the ring in the sight of all the world. What should I fear, since the Spirit, coeternal with the Father and with the Son, says by the mouth of David: ‘The just shall be had in everlasting remembrance; he shall not be afraid of an evil report’?”

3. The “Epistolae”

Dante tells us in the Vita Nuova that, on the death of Beatrice, he wrote a Latin letter to the chief persons of the city, concerning its desolate and widowed condition, beginning with the text of Jeremiah: “How doth the city sit solitary.” Neither this nor the letter mentioned by Leonardo Bruni, in which Dante described the fight at Campaldino, has survived. Many epistles ascribed to Dante were extant in the days of Boccaccio and Bruni. Bruni tells us that, after the affair at Lastra, Dante wrote for permission to return to Florence both to individual citizens in the government and to the people, especially a long letter beginning: “O my people, what have I done unto thee?” This may perhaps have been the letter which Bruni records, in which the poet defends his impartiality when the leaders of the two factions were banished; but there appears to have been another, denying that he had accompanied the Emperor against Florence. From one of these the perplexing fragment may have come, about his want of prudence in the priorate and his service at Campaldino. Giovanni Villani mentions three noble epistles, the style of which he praises highly: one to the government of Florence, “complaining of his unjust exile,” which is probably the lost letter mentioned by Bruni; the second, to the Emperor Henry, and the third, to the Italian cardinals, have both been preserved. Flavio Biondo, in the fifteenth century, professes to have seen letters at Forlì dictated by Dante, notably one addressed by the poet, in his own name and on behalf of the exiled Bianchi, to Can Grande della Scala concerning the reply of the Florentines to the ambassadors of the Emperor.

There are now thirteen extant Latin letters ascribed to Dante. They have come down to us mainly in two fourteenth-century manuscripts; three have been preserved in Boccaccio’s handwriting in the Laurentian MS., known as the Zibaldone Boccaccesco; nine others in a Vatican MS., of which Boccaccio was perhaps the original compiler. Two of these latter have also been found in another MS. of the fourteenth century—the San Pantaleo MS. at Rome. No MS. of the letter to Can Grande is known earlier than the fifteenth century.[24]

Epistles I. and II.—Epistles i. and ii. are connected with Count Alessandro da Romena, who, Bruni states, was appointed captain of the Bianchi in their meeting at Gargonza, and whom Dante brands with infamy in Inferno xxx. The former is addressed in the name of Alessandro, the council and whole body of the White party, to the Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, legate of Benedict XI., assuring him of their gratitude and confidence, promising to refrain from hostilities in expectation of his good offices in the pacification of Florence. It may be accepted as an authentic document of 1304; but whether it was written by Dante, who had perhaps already left his fellow-exiles, is still open to question. The second is a letter of condolence to Alessandro’s nephews, Oberto and Guido, on the occasion of their uncle’s death, which probably occurred in the same year. Its authenticity is highly doubtful. Both letters are found only in the Vatican manuscript.

Epistles III. and IV.—Epistles iii. and iv. are directly connected with the Rime. The third, which occurs in the Boccaccian autograph, seems to be to Cino da Pistoia, affectionate greetings from the Florentine exile to the Pistoian, explaining how one passion may be replaced by another in the soul. It was accompanied by a poem, which is identified with the sonnet, “Io sono stato con Amore insieme.” If authentic, its date would be not later than 1306, when Cino’s exile ended. The fourth letter, found in the Vatican MS., is addressed to the Marquis Moroello Malaspina, apparently from the Casentino, and describes in forcible language how the writer was suddenly enamoured of a woman’s beauty. It, too, was accompanied by a poem, evidently the canzone, “Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia.” The more probable date is 1307 or thereabouts.[25] The authenticity of these two letters is doubtful, but on the whole probable.

Epistles V., VI. and VII.—Next come the three great political letters, glorified pamphlets on the enterprise of Henry of Luxemburg. Letter v., the manifesto to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, seems to have been written in September or October, 1310, before Henry crossed the Alps. It announces the advent of Henry, the bridegroom and glory of Italy, as bringing a new era of peace, declares the rightful authority and historical sanctity of the Empire, exhorting the peoples to free and joyous submission, and those who, like the writer himself, have suffered injustice to be merciful in their anticipated triumph. The letter, one of the noblest of Dante’s utterances, is a landmark in the growth of the national idea in Italy; rulers and peoples are admonished as members of one body; the good tidings are announced to the nation as a whole; the writer’s Italian citizenship is placed before his Florentine origin, when he subscribes himself: “The humble Italian, Dante Alighieri, a Florentine unjustly exiled.” It was in the bitter indignation caused by the Guelf opposition, the alliance between Florence and King Robert, and the doubt occasioned by the Emperor’s own delay in Lombardy, that Dante from the Casentino wrote the terrible Letters vi. and vii., on March 31st, 1311, to the Florentines, “the most wicked Florentines within,” and on April 17th to Henry himself, “the most sacred triumphant and only lord.” The former denounces the Florentines for their rebellion, their “shrinking from the yoke of liberty,” their attempt to make their civic life independent of that of Rome, and, in prophetic fashion, warns them of their coming destruction at the hands of “the prince who is the giver of the law.” In the latter, adopting the part of Curio towards Caesar (which he himself condemns in the Inferno), Dante urges the Emperor without further delay to turn his forces upon Florence, who “sharpens the horns of rebellion against Rome which made her in her own image and after her likeness.” The poet’s attitude is that of the Hebrew prophets; his motive, the conviction that his native city had adopted a line of policy opposed to the true interests of Italy. These three letters are contained in the Vatican MS.; Letters v. and vii. (of both of which early Italian translations are extant) also in the S. Pantaleo MS., and there is a third (fifteenth century) MS. of the letter to the Emperor.

Epistles VII.*, VII.** and VII.***.—These three letters are a humble pendant to the three just considered. They are addressed to Margaret of Brabant, the wife of the Emperor Henry, in the name of the Countess of Battifolle (Gherardesca, daughter of Count Ugolino, married to Guido di Simone of the Conti Guidi). They are in answer to letters from the Empress, and, while containing mere expressions of loyal devotion and aspirations for the triumph of the imperial cause, their place in the Vatican MS. among the letters of Dante, together with the close resemblance in style and phraseology with the latter, has led to a general acceptance of the view that they were written by the poet. They were written in the spring of 1311, the third being dated from Poppi on May 18th.

Epistle VIII.—The letter to the Italian Cardinals, which is mentioned by Villani, and echoed by Petrarch in his canzone on Rome (“Spirto gentil che quelle membra reggi”), is found only in Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript. It was written shortly after the death of Clement V. (April 20, 1314), when the cardinals were assembled in conclave at Carpentras; lamenting the desolation of the sacred city, it exhorts them, “for the bride of Christ, for the seat of the bride, which is Rome, for our Italy, and, to speak more fully, for the whole estate of those on pilgrimage on earth,” to restore the Apostolic See to its consecrated place. It is a noble protest of a devout and learned layman against a corrupt and ignorant clergy, of a Catholic and an Italian patriot against the papal desertion of Rome, in which Dante stands forth as the new Jeremiah, renewing for the sacred city of Christendom the lamentation of his Hebrew predecessor for Jerusalem. The letter presents striking analogies with the canto of the simonist popes (Inf. xix.), but is more moderate in tone, as the poet is here less denouncing than attempting to convert the cardinals to his point of view. There is extant a letter to the French King from Cardinal Napoleone Orsini (whom Dante admonishes by name in the epistle) with passages of a somewhat similar kind; it is tempting to suppose that the cardinal had actually received the exhortation and caught fire from the burning words of his fellow Italian.

Epistle IX.—The occasion of the letter refusing the amnesty has been already considered (chap. i.). It was probably written in the latter part of May 1315. In the Boccaccian autograph (in which alone it is found) it has no title; the traditional Amico florentino, “to a Florentine friend,” is a later addition. It is practically the only example of the poet’s personal correspondence that has been preserved. Barbi has thrown grave doubts upon the identification of the person to whom the letter is addressed with Teruccio di Manetto Donati, the brother of Dante’s wife; the nephew mentioned may perhaps be Andrea Poggi (cf. chap. i.) or, more probably, Niccolò Donati, the son of Gemma’s brother Foresino. It is here that Dante calls himself the preacher of justice, vir praedicans iustitiam, a claim which is the key of the Commedia and may be traced from the canzone of the “Tre donne.” Nor is it without significance that the closing words of the letter, nec panis deficiet, “nor will bread fail me,” echo the same chapter of Isaiah (li. 14) which inspired the canzone in which Dante holds his exile as an honour.

Epistle X.—The Epistle to Can Grande stands apart from the others. Although eight MSS. are now known, none are earlier than the fifteenth century, and the two earliest contain no more than the opening sections. Some of the early commentators—Pietro Alighieri, Fra Guido da Pisa, and Boccaccio—were evidently acquainted with it; it was first expressly quoted by Filippo Villani in 1391, and published first in 1700, before any of Dante’s letters had seen the light, excepting the unsatisfactory Italian version of the Epistle to Henry of Luxemburg. If genuine, and its authenticity though much disputed seems now almost certain, it was probably written in 1318 or early in 1319, apparently before the first Eclogue.

Beginning with language of enthusiastic praise and grateful friendship, which recalls analogous passages in Canto xvii., the poet prepares to pay back the benefits he has received with the dedication of the Paradiso. So far (1-4), the epistolary form has been maintained, and this is the only portion of the letter found in the earlier MSS.; but now the writer assumes the office of a lecturer, and, with a quotation from the Metaphysics of Aristotle, proceeds to give an introduction to the Commedia and a commentary upon the first canto of the third cantica. He distinguishes the literal and allegorical meanings, defines the title of the whole (“The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by birth, not by character”) and of the part, and explains the difference between comedy and tragedy from a somewhat different point of view from that of the De Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 4). The subject of the Paradiso, in the literal sense, is the state of the blessed after death; in the allegorical sense, man according as by meriting he is subject to Justice rewarding. “The end of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and to lead them to the state of felicity” (Epist. x. 15). Dante emphasises the ethical aspect of the poem: “The whole as well as the part was conceived, not for speculation, but with a practical object” (x. 16). Then follows a minute scholastic and mystical interpretation of the opening lines of the first canto of the Paradiso in the literal sense, closing in an eloquent and very beautiful summary of the ascent through the spheres of Paradise to find true beatitude in the vision of the Divine Essence. Throughout this part of the letter Dante, when touching upon the details of his vision, always speaks of himself in the third person, evidently following the example of St. Paul in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. He unmistakably implies that he has actually been the recipient of some personal spiritual experience, which he is unable adequately to relate. That passionate self-reproach, which sounds in so many passages of the Divina Commedia, makes itself heard here too. If the invidious do not believe in the power of the human intellect so to transcend the measure of humanity, let them read the examples cited from Scripture and the mystical treatises of Richard of St. Victor, Bernard, Augustine. But, if the unworthiness of the speaker makes them question such an elevation, let them see in Daniel how Nebuchodonosor by divine inspiration had a vision against sinners: “For He who ‘maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,’ sometimes in mercy for their conversion, sometimes in wrath for their punishment, reveals His glory, in greater or less measure, as He wills, to those who live never so evily” (Epist. x. 28). This section of the letter, for the student of mystical experience, is of the highest significance.

4. The “Eclogae”

Belonging, like the tenth Epistle, to that closing period of Dante’s life when he was engaged on the Paradiso, are two delightful pastoral poems in Latin hexameters. Here, too, we owe much to the piety of Boccaccio. The earliest and most authoritative of the five manuscripts is again in his handwriting, in the Zibaldone Boccaccesco (where the poems are accompanied by explanatory notes), in the Laurentian Library.

Giovanni del Virgilio, a young lecturer and a poet, had written to Dante from Bologna a letter in Latin verse, expressing his profound admiration for the singer of the Commedia, but respectfully remonstrating with him for writing in Italian, and suggesting some stirring contemporary subjects as worthy matters for his muse: the death of Henry VII., the battle of Montecatini, a victory of Can Grande over the Paduans, the struggle by sea and land between King Robert of Naples and the Visconti for the possession of Genoa. The reference to this last event shows that the letter cannot have been written before July 1318, while a passage towards the close clearly indicates the early part of the following year. It further contains a pressing invitation to come and take the laurel crown at Bologna, or, at least, to answer the letter, “if it vex thee not, to have read first the feeble numbers which the rash goose cackles to the clear-voiced swan.”

Dante’s first Eclogue is the answer. Adopting the pastoral style, he himself and his companion Dino Perini (whom Boccaccio afterwards knew) appear as shepherds, Tityrus and Meliboeus, discussing the invitation from Mopsus. It was probably written in the spring or early summer of 1319. In a medley of generous praise and kindly banter, Dante declines to visit Bologna, “that knows not the gods,” and still hopes to receive the poet’s crown at Florence. When the Paradiso is finished, then will it be time to think of ivy and laurel; and in the meanwhile, to convert Mopsus from his errors with respect to vernacular poetry, he will send him ten measures of milk fresh from the best-loved ewe of all his flock—ten cantos from the Paradiso, which evidently are not yet published, since the sheep is yet unmilked.

Mopsus in his answer expresses the intense admiration with which he and his fellow Arcadians have heard this song, and adopts the same style. Condoling with Dante on his unjust exile, he foresees his return home and reunion with Phyllis, who may perhaps be Gemma or (as Carducci suggested) an impersonification of Florence. But, in the meanwhile, pastoral pleasures and an enthusiastic welcome await him at Bologna, if Iolas (Guido da Polenta) will let him go. A reference to “Phrygian Muso” enables us to fix approximately the date; towards the beginning of September, 1319, Albertino Mussato, the Paduan poet and patriot, was at Bologna, endeavouring to get aid from the Guelf communes for his native city against Can Grande. Dante could hardly have with consistency accepted the invitation.

The writer of the notes on the Laurentian manuscript, whether Boccaccio himself or another, commenting upon a poem sent by Giovanni del Virgilio to Albertino Mussato, states that Dante delayed a year before answering this Eclogue, and that his reply was forwarded after his death by his son. His second Eclogue is in narrative form, and professes to be no more than the report by the writer of a conversation between Dante and his friends which is overheard by Guido da Polenta. A new associate of the poet’s last days is introduced to us: the shepherd Alphesiboeus, who is identified with Fiducio de’ Milotti of Certaldo, a distinguished physician resident at Ravenna. The tone is the same as that of the other Eclogue. Ravenna becomes the pastures of Pelorus, while Bologna is the Cyclops’ cave, to which Dante still refuses to go, for fear of Polyphemus, whose atrocities in the past are recorded.[26] And the crown expected now is, perhaps, no longer one which any earthly city can give: “For this illustrious head already the Pruner is hastening to award an everlasting garland.”

These two Eclogues are of priceless value. Nowhere else is such a comparatively bright picture of Dante’s closing days given us. The genuine and hearty laughter which greets Giovanni’s two letters, the generous tone of the supreme singer towards the young scholar poet, the kindly joking at the expense of Dino, make delightful reading and show us quite another side of Dante’s character. Giovanni’s first letter implies that the earlier parts of the Commedia had not only been published, but had acquired a certain popularity. From Dante’s first Eclogue it follows that, by 1319, both Inferno and Purgatorio were completed, and that the Paradiso was in preparation: “When the bodies that flow round the world, and they that dwell among the stars, shall be shown forth in my song, even as the lower realms, then shall I delight to crown my head with ivy and with laurel.” And after this the passage in the second Eclogue, written apparently in 1321, however we interpret it, has the same pathos and sanctity as Petrarch’s note on the last line of his Triumph of Eternity, or the abrupt ending of Shelley’s Triumph of Life:

Hoc illustre caput, cui iam frondator in alta

virgine perpetuas festinat cernere frondes.[27]

5. The “Quaestio de Aqua et Terra”

The Quaestio de Aqua et Terra—which purports to be a discourse or lecture delivered by Dante in the church of Sant’ Elena at Verona on January 20th, 1320—was first published in 1508 by an Augustinian friar, Giovan Benedetto Moncetti. No manuscript of it is known to exist, and there is no reference to the work or to the event in any earlier writer, though Antonio Pucci (after the middle of the fourteenth century) implies that Dante sought disputations of this kind. In this work the poet—in accordance with the physical science of his age—discusses the question of the relative position of the element earth and the element water upon the surface of the globe. The Quaestio was until recently regarded as a fabrication of the early sixteenth century, but Moore in England and Vincenzo Biagi in Italy, mainly on the internal evidence of the work itself, have convinced many Dante scholars that it may be regarded with some probability as authentic.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In the recently discovered codex at Berlin—the earliest of the four extant MSS.—the work is entitled Rectorica Dantis (“The Rhetoric of Dante”), which would associate it with the similarly named treatises of the masters of the ars dictandi, such as Boncompagno da Signa, who wrote a Rhetorica novissima.

[20] This southern idiom (nostrum ydioma, i. 10)—from which Dante apparently regards both classical Latin and the modern romance languages derived—would be what we now call Vulgar Latin; but he restricts the phrase vulgare latinum (or latium) to Italian, which—when discussing the rival claims of the three vernaculars to pre-eminence—he rightly recognises to be closest to classical Latin.

[21] Equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio (ii. 8). The sine responsorio distinguishes the true canzone, canzone distesa, from the ballata, canzone a ballo, in which the ripresa of from two to four lines was repeated after each stanza as well as sung as a prelude to the whole. Dante’s example is his own Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, the poem which began “le nove rime” (Purg. xxiv. 49-51). The tragica coniugatio is most nearly realised in English poetry by the ode, while the closest counterpart to the canzone with stanzas divisible into metrical periods is offered by Spenser’s Epithalamion. The sestina has been employed by English poets from the Elizabethans to Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling.

[22] Cipolla showed that the matter of the first two books more directly controverts the anti-imperialist and anti-Roman arguments of the French political writers of the beginning of the fourteenth century—writers like the Dominican, John of Paris. But these or similar views were now being adduced by Robert of Naples and supported by Clement V.

[23] These two ends are the two cities—the earthly and the heavenly—of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei; but the earthly city, blessedness of this life, is more significant for Dante than it was for Augustine. Felicity in peace and freedom is in some sort man’s right: Che è quello per che esso è nato (Conv. iv. 4).

[24] For the whole history of the Letters, the reader is referred to Dr. Paget Toynbee’s introduction, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, Oxford, 1920.

[25] Torraca would assign it to 1311.

[26] Polyphemus, as Biscaro has shown, is most probably Fulcieri da Calboli, the ferocious podestà of Florence in 1303, who had been elected Captain of the People at Bologna for the first six months of 1321 (his predecessor having died in office). Cf. Ecl. ii. (iv.) 76-83 with Purg. xiv. 58-66. See Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, lxxxi. p. 128. Others have taken the person meant as Robert of Naples, or, with Ricci, a kinsman of Venedico Caccianemico whom Dante had covered with infamy in Inf. xviii.

[27] “This illustrious head, for which the Pruner is already hastening to select unwithering leaves from the noble laurel,” or “to decree an everlasting garland in the divine justice,” according to whether the Virgin is taken as Daphne or Astraea.

CHAPTER IV
THE “DIVINA COMMEDIA”

1. Introductory

Letter and Allegory.—The Divina Commedia is a vision and an allegory. It is a vision of the world beyond the grave; it is an allegory, based upon that vision, of the life and destiny of man, his need of light and guidance, his duties to the temporal and spiritual powers, to the Empire and the Church. In the literal sense, the subject is the state of souls after death. In the allegorical sense, according to the Epistle to Can Grande, the subject is “man as by freedom of will, meriting and demeriting, he is subject to Justice rewarding or punishing” (Epist. x. 11). There is, therefore, the distinction between the essential Hell, Purgatory, Paradise of separated spirits—the lost and the redeemed—after death; and the moral or spiritual Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, of men still united to their bodies in this life, using their free will for good or for evil; sinning, doing penance, living virtuously. The Inferno represents the state of ignorance and vice; the Purgatorio is the life of converted sinners, obeying Caesar and reconciled to Peter, doing penance and striving God-wards; after the state of felicity has been regained in the Earthly Paradise, the Paradiso represents the ideal life of action and contemplation, closing in an anticipation, here and now, of the Beatific Vision. The whole poem is the mystical epic of the freedom of man’s will in time and in eternity, the soul after conversion passing through the stages of purification and illumination to the attainment of union and fruition.

It must be admitted that the allegorical interpretation of the Commedia has frequently been carried to excess. This has led to a reaction, represented now by Benedetto Croce, who would separate the allegorical and didactic elements from the poetry, in which alone the true value of the work consists. Such a tendency in its turn, if pressed too far, derogates from Dante’s greatness and mars the unity of the poem. In Dante the poet and the practical man—teacher, prophet, politician, philosopher, reformer—are inseparable; more often purely doctrinal themes become so fused in his imagination, so identified with his personality, that the result is lyrical and great poetry.

Title.—Dante unquestionably called his work simply Commedia, which he wrote Comedia and pronounced Comedìa (Inf. xvi. 128, xxi. 2). The epithet divina first appears in the sixteenth-century editions; but it would be almost as pedantic to discard it now as it would be, except when reading the word where it occurs in the poem, to return to the original pronunciation, comedìa.[28]

Metrical Structure.—Each of the three parts, or cantiche, is divided into cantos: the Inferno into thirty-four, the Purgatorio into thirty-three, the Paradiso into thirty-three—thus making up a hundred cantos, the square of the perfect number. Each canto is composed of from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and sixty lines, forming thirty-eight to fifty-three terzine, a continuous measure of three hendecasyllabic lines, woven together by the rhymes of the middle lines, with an extra line rhyming with the second line of the last terzina to close the canto:

ABA, BCB, CDC, DED ... XYX, YZY, Z.

The normal hendecasyllabic line is the endecasillabo piano, in which the rhyme has the accent upon the penultimate syllable (rima piana, trochaic ending). Occasionally, but rarely, we find the endecasillabo sdrucciolo, with the rhyme accentuated on the antepenultimate syllable (rima sdrucciola, dactylic ending), or the endecasillabo tronco, with the accent on the final syllable (rima tronca). Italian prosody regards both these latter forms (which appear to have twelve and ten syllables respectively) as lines of eleven syllables.[29]

The terza rima seems to be derived from the serventese incatenato (“linked serventese”), one of the rather numerous forms of the Italian serventese or sermontese, a species of poem introduced from Provence in the first half of the thirteenth century. The Provençal sirventes was a serviceable composition employed mainly for satirical, political, and ethical purposes, in contrast with the more stately and “tragical” canzone of love. Although the Italians extended its range of subject and developed its metres, no one before Dante had used it for a great poem or had transfigured it into this superb new measure, at once lyrical and epical. In his hand, indeed, “the thing became a trumpet,” sounding from earth to heaven, to call the dead to judgment.

Sources.—The earlier mediaeval visions of the spirit world, of which the most famous are Irish in origin, bear the same relation, in a much slighter degree, to the spiritual content of the Commedia as the Provençal sirventes does to its metrical form. Even if Dante was acquainted with them (and there are episodes occasionally in the poem which recall the vision of Tundal or Tnuthgal), he was absolutely justified in asserting, in Purgatorio xvi., that God willed that he should see His court “by method wholly out of modern use”:

Per modo tutto fuor del moderno uso.

Such ideas, even in special details, were common property. Dante transformed the mediaeval vision of the world beyond the grave into a supreme work of art, making it the receptacle for all that was noblest in the thought and aspiration of the centuries down to his own day. If a hint or two came from Ibernia fabulosa, as Ariosto calls Ireland, the main suggestion was Roman; and Virgil was his imperial master in very fact, as he was his guide by poetical fiction (Inf. i. 82-87): “O honour and light of the other poets, may the long study avail me, and the great love, that has made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author; thou alone art he from whom I took the fair style that hath gained me honour.”

The influence of Virgil pervades the whole poem, and next to his comes that of Lucan. Ovid was mainly a source of classical mythology (frequently spiritualised in Dante’s hands); the contribution of Horace, Statius, and Juvenal is slighter. And Dante was as familiar with the Bible as with the Aeneid and the Pharsalia; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of the Commedia is the writer’s adaptation of the message of the Hebrew prophets to his own times in the language and with the consummate art of the Latin poets. In its degree, the influence of Boëthius is as penetrating as that of Virgil; Orosius has contributed as much history as has Livy. The philosophy of the poem is naturally coloured by Aristotle, studied in the Latin translations as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. Augustine and Aquinas (more generally the latter) are the poet’s chief theological sources; his mysticism has derived something from Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventura as well as from Dionysius. But he deals with his matter with independence, as a poet, in the light of his own spiritual experience, his own imaginative interpretation of life and history, his own observation of nature. Though versed in a super-eminent degree with most of the knowledge, sacred and profane, possible to a man of his epoch, and well-read to an almost incredible extent when the circumstances of his life are considered, Dante’s main and direct source of inspiration lay, not in books, but in that wonderful world of the closing Middle Ages that lay open to his gaze, as from a celestial watch-tower of contemplation: “The little space of earth that maketh us so fierce, as I turned me with the eternal Twins, all appeared to me from the hills to the sea” (Par. xxii. 151-153).

Virgil and Beatrice.—The end of the poem, as the Epistle to Can Grande shows, is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity. In the individual, this will be accomplished by opening his eyes to the nature of vice; by inducing him to contrition, confession, satisfaction; by leading him to contemplation of eternal Truth. In the universality, it can only be effected by the restoration of the Empire and the purification of the Church. The dual scheme of the Monarchia reappears in the Commedia, but transferred from the sphere of Church and State to the field of the individual soul. In the allegorical sense, Virgil may be taken to represent Human Philosophy based on Reason; Beatrice to symbolize Divine Philosophy, which includes the sacred science of Theology, and is in possession of Revelation. But, primarily, Virgil and Beatrice (like the other souls in the poem) are living personalities, not allegorical types. Allegory may be forgotten in the tender relation between Dante and Virgil, and, when that “sweetest father” leaves his disciple in the Earthly Paradise to return to his own sad place in Limbo, there is little of it left in Beatrice’s rebuke of her lover’s past disloyalty; none when she is last seen enshrined in glory beneath the Blessed Virgin’s throne.

There is then a universal and a personal meaning to be distinguished, as well as the literal and allegorical significations. The Divina Commedia is the tribute of devotion from one poet to another; it is the sequel to a real love, the glorification of the image of a woman loved in youth; the story of one man’s conversion and spiritual experience. Nor can we doubt that the study of the imperial poet of alma Roma helped Dante to his great political conception of the destiny of the Empire, even as Philosophy first lifted him from the moral aberrations that severed him from the ideal life (Purg. xxiii. 118). But, at the same time, Dante represents all mankind; as Witte remarks, “the poet stands as the type of the whole race of fallen man, called to salvation.”