The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno. Dante Alighieri
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it is certain that while the fugitive Guelfs were mostly accompanied by their wives, and did not return till 1267, we have Dante’s own word for it that he was born in the great city by the Arno,[29] and was baptized in the Baptistery, his beautiful St. John’s.[30] At the font he received the name of Durante, shortened, as he bore it, into Dante. It is in this form that it finds a place in the Comedy,[31] once, and only once, written down of necessity, the poet says—the necessity of being faithful in the report of Beatrice’s words: from the wider necessity, we may assume, of imbedding in the work itself the name by which the author was commonly known, and by which he desired to be called for all time.
When Dante was about ten years old he lost his father. Of his mother nothing but her Christian name of Bella is known. Neither of them is mentioned in the Comedy,[32] nor indeed are his wife and children. Boccaccio describes the Alighieri as having been in easy though not in wealthy circumstances; and Leonardo Bruni, who in the fifteenth century sought out what he could learn of Dante, says of him that he was possessed of a patrimony sufficient for an honourable livelihood. That he was so might be inferred from the character of the education he received. His studies, says Boccaccio, were not directed to any object of worldly profit. That there is no sign of their having been directed by churchmen tends to prove the existence in his native town of a class of cultivated laymen; and[Pg xlviii] that there was such appears from the ease with which, when, passing from boyhood to manhood, he felt a craving for intellectual and congenial society, he found in nobles of the stamp of Guido Cavalcanti men like-minded with himself. It was indeed impossible but that the revival of the study of the civil law, the importation of new learning from the East, and the sceptical spirit fostered in Italy by the influence of Frederick II. and his court, should all have told on the keen-witted Florentines, of whom a great proportion—even of the common people—could read; while the class with leisure had every opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world.[33] Heresy, the rough word for intellectual life as well as for religious aspiration, had found in Florence a congenial soil.[34] In the thirteenth century, which modern ignorance loves to reckon as having been in a special sense an age of faith, there were many Florentines who, in spite of their outward conformity, had drifted as far from spiritual allegiance to the Church as the furthest point reached by any of their descendants who some two ages later belonged to the school of Florentine Platonists.
Chief among these free-thinkers, and, sooth to say, free-livers—though in this respect they were less distinguished from the orthodox—was Brunetto Latini, for some time Secretary to the Republic, and the foremost Italian man of letters of his day. Meagre though his greatest work, the Tesoro, or Treasure, must seem to any one who now glances over its pages, to his contemporaries it answered the promise of its title and stood for a magazine of almost complete information in the domains of natural history, ethics, and politics. It was written in French, as being a more agreeable language than Italian; and was composed, there is reason to believe, while Latini lived in Paris as an exiled Guelf after Montaperti. His Tesoretto, or Little Treasure, a poem in jingling eight-syllabled Italian verse, has been thought by some to have supplied hints to Dante for the Comedy.[35] By neither of these works is he evinced a man of strong intellect, or even of good taste. Yet there is the testimony of Villani that he did much to refine the language of his contemporaries, and to apply fixed principles to the conduct of State affairs.[36] Dante meets him in Inferno, and hails him as his intellectual father—as the master who taught him from day to day how fame is to be won.[37] But it is too much to infer from these words that Latini served as his teacher, in the common sense of the word. It is true they imply an intimacy between the veteran scholar and his young townsman; but the closeness of their intercourse is perhaps best accounted for by supposing that Latini had been acquainted with Dante’s father, and by the great promise of Dante’s boyhood was led to take a warm interest in his intellectual development. Their intimacy, to judge from the tone of their conversation down in Inferno, had lasted till Latini’s death. But no tender reminiscence of the days they spent together avails to save him from condemnation at the hands of his severe disciple. By the manners of Brunetto, and the Epicurean heresies of others of his friends, Dante, we may be sure, was never infected or defiled.
Dante describes himself as having begun the serious study of philosophy and theology only at the mature age of twenty-seven. But ere that time he had studied to good effect, and not books alone, but the world around him too, and the world within. The poet was formed before the theologian and philosopher. From his earliest years he was used to write in verse; and he seems to have esteemed as one of his best endowments the easy command of his mother tongue acquired by him while still in boyhood.
Of the poems written in his youth he made a selection, and with a commentary gave them to the world as his first work.[38] All the sonnets and canzoni contained in it bear more or less directly on his love for Beatrice Portinari. This lady, whose name is so indissolubly associated with that of Dante, was the daughter of a rich citizen of good family. When Dante saw her first he was a child of nine, and she a few months younger. It would seem fabulous, he says, if he related what things he did, and of what a passion he was the victim during his boyhood. He seized opportunities of beholding her, but for long never passed beyond a silent worship; and he was eighteen before she spoke to him, and then only in the way of a passing salutation. On this he had a vision, and that inspired him with a sonnet, certainly not the first he had written, but the first he put into circulation. The mode of publication he adopted was the common one of sending copies of it to such other poets as were within reach. The sonnet in itself contains a challenge to interpret his dream. Several poets attempted the riddle—among them the philosopher and poet Guido Cavalcanti. They all failed in the solution; but with some of them he was thus brought into terms of intimacy, and with Cavalcanti of the closest friendship. Some new grace of style in Dante’s verse, some art in the presentation of his mystical meaning that escapes the modern reader, may have revealed to the middle-aged man of letters that a new genius had arisen. It was by Guido’s advice that the poems of which this sonnet stands the first were some years later collected and published with the explanatory narrative. To him, in a sense, the whole work is addressed; and it agreed with his taste, as well as Dante’s own, that it should contain nothing but what was written in the vulgar tongue. Others besides Guido must have recognised in the little book, as it passed from hand to hand, the masterpiece of Italian prose, as well as of Italian verse. In the simple title of Vita Nuova, or The New Life,[39] we can fancy that a claim is laid to originality of both subject and treatment. Through the body of the work, though not so clearly as in the Comedy, there rings the note of assurance of safety from present neglect and future oblivion.
It may be owing to the free use of personification and symbol in the Vita Nuova that some critics, while not denying the existence of a real Beatrice, have held that she is introduced only to help out an allegory, and that, under the veil of love for her, the poet would express his youthful passion for truth. Others, going to the opposite extreme, are found wondering why he never sought, or, seeking, failed to win, the hand of Beatrice. To those who would refine the Beatrice of the early work into a being as purely allegorical as she of the Comedy, it may be conceded that the Vita Nuova is not so much the history of a first love as of the new emotional and intellectual life to which a first love, as Dante experienced it, opens the door. Out of the incidents of their intercourse he chooses only such as serve for motives to the joys and sorrows of the passionate aspiring soul. On the other hand, they who seek reasons why Dante did not marry Beatrice have this to justify their curiosity, that she did marry another