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PROFESSOR J. S.WILL
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in 2007 with funding from
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DANTE
ESSAYS IN COMMEMORATION 1321-1921
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DANTE
ESSAYS IN COMMEMORATION 1321-1921
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LONDON UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD
18 WARWICK SOtlARE, E.C. 4 1921
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DANTE
ESSAYS IN COMMEMORATION 1321-1921
Quanto dime si dee non si pub dire,
Che troppo agli orbi il suo splendor s'accese.
With Illustrations
LONDON UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD 18 WARWICK SQUARE, E.G. 4 J921
Edited for the Dante Sexcentenary Committee by
ANTONIO CIPPICO HAROLD E. GOAD EDMUND G. GARDNER W. P. KER WALTER SETON
^365
«osa6i
CONTENTS
/ PAGE
V^SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE IN HIS RELATION TO
OUR OWN TIME ... . . i
Viscount Bryce.
CARATTERE E UNITX DELLA POESIA DI DANTE . .17 Benedetto Croce.
ALLEGORY AND MYTH 31
W. P. Ker.
OXFORD AND DANTE 37
Paget Toynbee.
"INFERNO," "THE VOYAGE OF ULYSSES" ... 75 Laurence Binyon. - {Translation)
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 81
Edmund G. Gardner.
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND THE ITALY OF VIRGIL . 105 J. W. Mackail
'♦INFERNO," "FARINATA" 133
Harold E. Goad. {Translation)
NOTES ON THE DATE OF COMPOSITION OF THE ^'DE
MONARCHIA" 141
Cesare Foligno.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS I57
Philip H. Wicksteed.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 189
A. G. Ferrers Howell.
HUMOUR OF DANTE 225
Canon L. Ragg.
"A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO" . . . -235 Antonio Cippico.
V
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
PORTRAIT OF DANTE. By Amico di Sandro (?).
{Frontispiece)
''1 " PURGATORIO," CANTO XXIX
2
J (From a XIV. Century MS.)
«' INFERNO," CANTO II. By Sandro Botticelli. "INFERNO," CANTO IX. By Sandro Botticelli. ''INFERNO," CANTO XV. By Sandro Botticelli. "INFERNO," CANTO XXXIII. By Luca Signorelli. "INFERNO," CANTO XXXIII. By William Blake. '* PURGATORIO,'^ CANTO XXIX. By William Blake.
vil
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE IN HIS RELATION TO OUR OWN TIME
Viscount Bryce.
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE IN HIS RELATION TO OUR OWN TIME
Every great book has its message to other ages as well as to that in which it is produced. When a powerful mind addresses itself to the permanent problems of human life, — the life of the individual and the life of society, — his thoughts are a recurring stimulus to one generation after another, because they go down to those foundations which are the same for all men in all times. When the great thinker is also a Poet, the words in which his ideas are expressed have an enduring charm which makes them always fresh, always enjoy- able. The perfection of form keeps the ideas alive for those who have imagination and a sense of beauty, even if they be neither philosophers nor historians.
Dante is as truly a Thinker as he is a Poet, and were he not so great a poet, his thought would be sometimes too weighty for his poetry to bear the load. He is so intensely interested in the problems of his own time that he makes alive and real to us, living six centuries away, things which the dust of oblivion would otherwise have long since covered. Hardly any poet whom all ages have valued was so much concerned with his own. There have been great geniuses whom we can read without thinking of the times in which
3
DANTE
they wrote. Pindar and Lucretius, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Ariosto and MoHere, Keats and Walter Scott, would in the essential quality of their imaginative work have been much the same when- ever they had lived ; and in reading them we do not feel them to be children of their age and environment, even when it is from their surround- ings that their themes are taken. I choose by pre- ference instances of poets who are in other respects markedly unlike one another. Fewer are the cases in which the poetwas so profoundly concerned with or moved by the events of his own time that he compels us to think of it when we think of him. Such are Milton and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller and Victor Hugo, Claudian and even, though in a subtler way, Virgil himself. But is any at once so universal, and at the same time so local or " temporary," if one may use that word in an unusual sense, as the Florentine exile ? He is so evidently an Italian of the thirteenth century, that great and wonderful century of intellectual achievement, that we cannot think of him without it, nor of it without him. Yet he has also his message to us as well as to his contemporaries, and it may indeed be said that the deepest significance of that message has become plainer to us than it was to his contemporaries, and will remain full of meaning so far as we can look into the dim and distant vistas of the future.
Dante may be called the most poHtical of the great poets. But he is also the most theological — indeed
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE 5
more theological than he is political, because his politics are rooted in his theology. A third element, the furthest removed from politics, is Love ; and in Dante's mind Love is so blent v^ith Theology that one can hardly say where Love begins and Theology ends. That which seems to lie at the bottom of all his thinking, and to be the main burden of his poem, is Sin, both the power of Sin and the means provided for escaping from its power and reaching forward to purity and quietness of soul in this life with the hope of blessedness in the life to come. To his sight Sin seems to cover the whole earth as the waters cover the sea. Sin, and strife the offspring of Sin — ^strife, hatred, violence, injustice are spread everywhere in Europe. He sees tyranny ram- pant in France, where PhiHp IV, " il mal de Francia,'^^ was showing an example of rapacious ferocity which shocked even his own time. There was fighting in Spain, where the Christians were in hot battle with the Moors, while the Moors were also fighting among themselves. Lawless violence had raged far and wide throughout Germany, which after the death of Conrad IV had relapsed into anarchy ; while in Britain the Scot and the Englishman were engaged in a furious and ap- parently interminable conflict.^ But injustice and dis- order were at their worst in Italy, the ancient seat of an Empire which had given Peace to the world. Dante had a first-hand knowledge of poHtics in his own city, and had learnt, as do most men who have had to swim that whirlpool, that in no department of human life ^ ParadisOyCdiTito XIX, 1. 122.
DANTE
does human nature wear a less engaging aspect. He had wandered alone through many lands, finding shelter sometimes in secluded monasteries, sometimes in the courts of princes, and had seen deep into the vanity of human ambitions and the worthless- ness of transient pleasures, n Forced to renounce the ordinary joys of life, his mind turned to the Past and sought for some explanation of the Divine Purpose in the course of history. What was the age in which an almost perfect peace prevailed over the whole world, and why did it then prevail ? He found that age at the time when the first Roman Emperor ruled over a world reduced to obedience, and when in Judaea the Prince of Peace was born.
Always isolated, stern and stately in his isolation, mingling a love for his mother city with resentment at the citizens who had driven him forth from her, not to be deemed altogether unhappy, for his keenly observant and richly stored mind gave him the enjoy- ments of imagination and reflection, he was nevertheless filled with sad meditations upon the dominance of sin and strife, and seems to have been brooding for ever over the causes whence sprang the evils he saw every- where all around him in Italy, and over the means for curing them.
The closing years of the thirteenth century had given much cause for disappointment to patriotic men and fervent Christians. The earlier years of that century had seen a wonderful revival in religion, as well as incessant labour and much creative
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE 7
energy in the realms of thought. The two Orders of St..„. Francis and St. Dominic had brought the teachings of the Church into the homes and hearts of peasants and the humbler townsfolk in a way un- known before. The great Universities had given an unprecedented impulse to logical and metaphysical discussion. Constructive minds, like those of St. Thomas of Aquinum and St. Bonaventura, had built up a compact scheme of theological doctrine in which pious Christians could find repose. The famous school of Bologna had turned to account the treasures of the ancient Roman jurisprudence and laid the founda- tion of the legal systems of the modern world. Pope Gregory the Ninth had followed their example and built up a parallel system of law for the Church. The brilliant dawn of poetry in Provence had been followed by an outburst of song in Italy. Painting had escaped from Byzantine formalism, and noble buildings, unsurpassed by any that have followed them, were rising everywhere in Lombardy and Tuscany. These were great achievements. Yet one feels in Dante, than whom no one ever loved theology and poetry and art more fervently, the note of disappoint- ment. He sheds no tears over the fall of republics, but he denounces the tyrants who had risen by de- stroying the republics, and with whom Italy was filled.^ He condemns the Ghibelline nobles, though he had been compelled to seek the hospitality of some of the best among them, as sternly as he
1 Purgatorio, Canto VI, 1. 124.
8 DANTE
J
does those Black Guelfs who drove him forth from Florence.^
But that which pained him most was the decadence of what ought to have been at once the inspiring and guiding and restraining force in human society. The Church, or at least those who held power in the Church, had contracted the vices of the world. They were of the earth, earthy, ensnared by its temptations, partakers of its ambitions and its avarice, many of them almost as deep sunk in sensuality as the least scrupulous laymen.^ When these were the shepherds, when such a man as Nicholas III bought himself into the Popedom,^ and such a man as Boniface the Eighth, was wearing the tiara, moral influence had been divorced from ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, the Church had (except during a few intervals of truce) been Tor two centuries at deadly feud with the secular pdwef'~of the Emperor, and had in^jthe person of pontiffs like Gregory IX, Innocent IV, and above all Boniface VIII, claimed a power over-riding or super- seding, even in secular matters, that of the temporal monarch. If the light of the Church was going out in darkness, how great was that darkness !
A mind like Dante's could not mourn over these evils without seeking a remedy for them. Perceiving that* the only complete and permanent cure was to be foundl in the purification of the soul, he set forth in his poem|
1 Paradiso, Canto VI, 1. 103.
2 Cf. Inferno, Canto XV, 1. 106.
3 Ibid., Canto XIX, 1. 52.
\
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE
the hideousness of sin and the awful penalties tha awaited it, the means of purging it away, the final blessedness of those who were permitted, when purified to enter the presence of God. However often he turns aside in the course of the poem into bypaths of astronomy, or dogmatic theology, or contemporary politics, or pensive recollections of those whom he had loved, we feel this to be his main aim and purpose.
This is the centre of all his thinking. But though he feels as a Christian that a return to primitive faith and an absolute subjection of the individual believer to the Divine Will is the only way to perfect virtue and happiness, he is concerned also with the special and tangible evils of his own time and tries to explore their causes. ^^ The strife which was ruining Italy by substituting Force for Justi^, seemed to him to spring from the perversion and corruption of one of the two authorities which God had provided for the direction of mankind, and from the weakness or slackness of the other. The Church had lost her heavenly purity : she was misusing her authority for selfish ends. The imperial power had been discredited by a feebleness which was largely due to the usurpations of the ecclesiastical sovereign.
This theory, which shines through nearly all his writings, is most explicitly set forth in the treatise De Monarchia, It was written to show how God had, partly by His express commands recorded in Scripture, partly by directing and disposing the actual course
lo DANTE
of events, provided in the Roman Emperor a temporal
sovereign to hold the sword, preserve order, administer
justice, and in the Universal Bishop at Rome a spiritual
sovereign bearing the pastoral staff, commissioned to
proclaim the Law of Christ, whose Vicar he is, and to
guide the temporal sovereign and his subjects into the
path that leads to eternal life. This was the true
order. But the Bishop, yielding to the lust of power,
led astray by wealth and the love of it, had encroached
on the province of his colleague, assuming the
monarch's sword as well as the shepherd's staff.
" L' un 1' altro ha spento, ed e junta la spada Col pastorale."
Hence came confusion, no man knowing whom he should obey : hence the strife of Guelfs and GhibeUines, hence disorder and tyrannies in Italy, wars all the world over. The supreme need of Italy and the world was Peace. But Peace can be secured only by restoring the order established by God's providence, and recognising the imprescriptible rights of the Divinely appointed Emperor, no less than the Divine commission of the Universal Bishop, who holds the keys of Heaven and Hell.
The Monarchy of Dante's De Monarchia is not an Italian kingdom, though there had been for centuries a kingdom of Italy, and the emperors had usually re- ceived its crown, thereby establishing their feudal rights south of the Alps. Dante was not thinking of Italy as a political entity, nor of ItaHan nationaHty and Italian unity, nor indeed especially of Italy, except in so far
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE ii
as he saw and felt most deeply for his own land and its sorrows. Italy was to him the Garden of the Empire, that choicest part of his dominions which ought to have been most cared for by the monarch, and had been most neglected. The sentiment of nationality, as we understand it, had not yet become a definite and self-conscious factor in the life of European peoples. The unity he desired was a unity that rose as a bright vision of the whole Christian world living in concord as one community under its two legally appointed heads. He was a Christian before he was an Italian, or a Tuscan, or a Florentine, the greater patriotism embracing, though not effacing, the minor duties and affections. He would have said, with the men of old, "Roma communis omnium patria," because Christian Rome was the centre of imperial glory and of sanctity. O^
How came it then that Dante was taken by the r"^ ij £^ men of the Risorgimento from 1820 to i860 as the \ earliest champion — one might almost say, as a patron f <^"-'*^'*- ' saint — of the cause for which they wrote and fought and died — the independence and unity of Italy ? Why did his name become a rallying cry for the friends of liberty ? It may be said, and truly said, that the struggle of the patriots of those days was largely a struggle against the temporal power of the papacy, which then covered a large part of Central Italy, and was supported by Austria and by Naples, as well as by France, and that Dante, though strenuously orthodox, had condemned the secular ambitions of the pontiffs of his own time.
12 DANTE
But there was a larger and more potent cause. The Italians had in the field of politics no national hero ; it was in the field of literature that they must find a name who united them all, and represented the collective greatness of the nation. They found such a name in Dante. He was, he had long been, a national poet, more clearly and conspicuously the sun of the national firmament than any poet has been for France or Spain or Germany. Dante was for the Italians the embodied gloria delta lengua, Dante loved Italy, as Virgil had loved Italy, with its beauty and its fertility, with its picturesque charm and its historic traditions : —
Tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis Fluminaque antiques subterlabentia muros,
and he had written of it as no one had done since Virgil had penned those incomparable lines which end with the solemn greeting : —
Salve magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus Magna virum ; tibi res antiquae laudis et artis Ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes.
Dante had been the first great light of poetry to Italy since Virgil, and what Virgil had been to him, he became to Italy.
This, however, is a digression : I return from it to observe that the theory of a universal monarchy was not peculiar to Dante. It had been held by many before him. It was held by most educated men in his time, though most churchmen would have subordinated the imperial to the papal power, and
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE 13
it continued to be held by many laymen and churchmen long after his time, though none ever stated and argued it with such passionate convic- tion. The very intensity of Dante's belief in his doctrine blinded him to the impossibility of giving effect to it. That impossibility was demonstrated seven years after his death by the failure of the only Emperor who ever seriously tried, after the fruitless effort of Henry VH, to assert imperial authority in Italy »^ To Dante this was the dominant truth of politics, appearing so frequently in the Divina Commedia that parts of the poem are scarcely intelli- gible without a perception of the faith he had in it. To us it is only the illusion of a grand imagination and of a faith so strong as to make him believe that what ought to be will, because it ought to be, somehow come eventually to pass. That which com- mands our attention to-day is not the form which Dante's hopes took, but his ardour for the restora- tion of Justice and Peace, things to him inseparable, because without Justice there can be no Peace, since
^ In A.D. 1328, the Emperor Lewis IV, with the help of the Colonna and of Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca, held a solemn assembly in Rome which deposed Pope John XXII, then residing at Avignon, and chose in his place a Franciscan friar, but next year this audacious scheme collapsed and the Emperor returned to Germany. He had been prompted and advised by Marsilius of Padua, who wrote a famous book {Defensor Pacts) denying papal claims and urging those of the Emperor. Dante may probably have met MarsiHus at the court of the Delia Scala in Verona, and one wonders whether the poet would have been more pleased by the defence of the Empire which the book of Marsilius contained or horrified at its heresies.
14 DANTE
oppression and aggression provoke war, and without Peace there can be no Justice, since brute force will prevail against it. The call for Peace and some authority to enforce Peace that came from him first among laymen was taken up by great spirits in after ages, such as Erasmus in the beginning, and Henry IV of France in the end of the sixteenth century, Grotius and Leibnitz in the seventeenth, Kant in the eighteenth. All these thought and worked in vain. Everybody deplored the crimes and sufferings and losses war brought, but they were deemed inevitable, and had proved to be equally so under all forms of government, republics as well as monarchies. Our own time has seen these evils renewed on a vaster scale than ever before, and our twentieth century, like Dante's four- teenth century, opens with a sense of disappointment. Wonderful enlargements of human knowledge, immense additions to human wealth and comfort, have been followed by widespread slaughter and destruction ; racial and national hatreds burn with a hotter flame :y-'- and threaten further strife. In the midst of disasters f~0'^^'^'"' and discouragements not so great as ours, Dante raised his voice to plead for Peace as the world's greatest need. As Wordsworth in a noble sonnet invoked the shade of his great predecessor : —
"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee,"
SO may Italy and England look back to the Florentine poet and prophet who saw the only safety for the world
SOME THOUGHTS ON DANTE 15
in Justice and Peace, and may wish that an equally- exalted soul and equally puissant voice were raised to plead for peace to-day. If some new Pilgrim of Eternity, guided by a new Virgil and another Beatrice, could bring back from Purgatory or Paradise a message to the peoples of this vaster world, would it not be that which Dante delivered to the peoples of his own : " Seek Peace and ensue it ; seek Peace through Justice, and despair not, as I never despaired -' ?
CARATTERE E UNITA BELLA POESIA DI DANTE
Benedetto Croce.
CARATTERE E UNITA BELLA POESIA DI DANTE
Che cosa e lo spirito dantesco, I'ethos e il pathos della Commedia, la " tonalita " che le e propria ? E — si puo dire in brevi e semplici parole — un senti- mento del mondo, fondato sopra una ferma fede e un sicuro giudizio, e animato da una robusta volonta. Quale sia la realta, Dante conosce, e nessuna perples- sita impedisce o divide e indebolisce il suo conoscere, nel quale di mistero e solo quel tanto a cui bisogna piegarsi reverente e che e intrinseco alia concezione stessa, il mistero della creazione, provvidenza e volonta divina, che si svela solo nella visione di Dio, nella beatitudine celeste. A Dante parve forse talora che anche questo mistero gli si diradasse, negli attimi in cui provo o immagino mistici rapimenti ; senonche questa mistica cognizione nella sua poesia si traduceva, e doveva tradursi, in modo negativo, come racconto di un'esperienza che si sia fatta di cose ineffabili. E parimente egli sa come convenga giudicare i vari affetti umani e come verso di essi comportarsi, e quali azioni approvare e compiere, e quali biasimare e repri- mere, per rivolgere a verace e degno fine la vita ; e la sua volonta non tentenna e oscilla tra ideali discor- danti e non e straziata da desideri che la tirino in parti
19
20 DANTE
opposte. I dissidi e contrasti, che noi possiamo scoprire nei suoi concetti e nei suoi atteggiamenti, sono nei profondo delle cose stesse, si svolgeranno nella storia ulteriore, ma in lui rimangono in germe, non sviluppati, e non appartengono alia sua coscienza, che e coscienza compatta e unitaria : fede salda e abito costante, sicurezza del pensare e dell' operare. Ma in questa robusta inquadratura intellettiva e morale si agita, come si e detto, il sentimento del mondo, il piu vario o complesso sentimento, di uno spirito che ha tutto osservato e sperimentato e meditato, e a pieno esperto dei vizi umani e del valore, ed esperto non in modo sommario e generico e di seconda mano, ma per aver vissuto quegli affetti in se medesimo, nella vita pratica e nei vivo simpatizzare e immaginare. L'inqua- dratura intellettiva ed etica chiude e domina questa materia tumultuante, che ne e interamente soggio- gata, ma come si soggioga e incatena un avversario poderoso, il quale, anche sotto il piede del dominatore, anche tra le catene che lo stringono, tende i suoi muscoli forti e si compone in linee grandiose.
Non altro che I'atteggiamento spirituale che si e cosi definito hanno presente e si sforzano di cogliere e determinare le varie altre definizioni, che s'incontrano sparsamente presso critici e interpreti, circa il carattere della poesia dantesca. E come non vedere in niun modo cio che e cosi reale ed effettuale e patente ? La verita si fa valere sempre, o, per lo meno, trainee con molti bagliori. Senonche quelle formule si sforzano all' intento e mal vi riescono, perche o adoperano con-
UNITA BELLA POESIA DI DANTE 21
cetti inadeguati, o fanno ricorso a metafore, o si per- dono in astrattezze e in cataloghi di astrattezze. Si suol osservare, per esempio, che Dante ritrae non il divenire ma il divenuto, non il presente ma il passato ; e che cos'altro si vuol dire con questa astrusa distin- zione, o che cos'altro e in fondo alle osservazioni che I'hanno mossa, se non per I'appunto che, in Dante, tutti gli affetti sono contenuti e assoggettati a un generale pensiero e a una costante volonta, che ne supera la particolarita ? Ma questa energica rappre- sentazione di una forza che supera e domina una forza e pure, come ogni poesia, rappresentazione di un divenire e non di un divenuto, di un moto e non di una stasi. Si suol dire che Dante e sommamente oggettivo ; ma nessuna poesia e mai oggettiva, e Dante, come si sa, e sommamente soggettivo, sempre lui, sempre dantesco ; sicche, evidentemente, " ogget- tivita " e, in questo caso, una vaga metafora per designare I'assenza di turbamento e di dissidio nella sua concezione del mondo, il suo pensare con nitidezza e il suo volere con determinatezza e percio il suo rappresentare con netti contorni. Si suol osservare che e proprio di Dante I'abolire ogni distanza di tempi e diversita di costumi, e uomini e avvenimenti di ogni tempo collocare sullo stesso piano : la qual cosa torna a dire che egli misurava le cose mondane di ogni tempo e di ogni sorta con unica e ferma misura, con un defi- nito modello di verita e di bene, e proiettava il tran- seunte sullo schermo delP eterno. Si enumerano i caratteri della forma dantesca, I'intensita, la precisione,
22 DANTE
la concisione e simili ; e certo chi domina con la forza del volere le forti passioni esprime qualcosa di vigoroso e d'intenso, e, poiche le affisa e conosce, e precise, e, poiche non si perde nelle loro minuzie, e concise ; ma contentarsi di tali enumerazioni di caratteri varrebbe attenersi all'estrinseco. Si suol chiamarlo " poeta scultore," e non gia " pittore " ; e, certo, quando per I'atto dello scolpire e per lo strumento dello scalpello s'intende il gesto virile, vigoroso, robusto, risoluto, a differenza del dipingere a grand' agio col " lievissimo pennello " (come Leonardo ritraeva la sua arte), Dante sara bene scultore e non pittore ; delle imma- gini, che place adoperare, non si disputa, se anche logicamente e criticamente siano prive di senso, com'e privo di senso il famoso parallelo tra Dante e Michel- angelo. E noto un luogo del? Ottimo Comento : " lo, scrittore, sentii dire a Dante che mai rima nol trasse a dir altro da quello ch'aveva in suo proponimento, ma ch'elli molte e spesse volte facea da vocaboli dire nelle sue rime altro che quello che erano appo gli altri dicitori usati di esprimere." Ferba sequentur, e, se non seguono pronte, sono trascinate a forza, come aggiungeva il Montaigne. Anche quando si afferma che il carattere e I'unita della poesia dantesca stanno per intero nel metro, su cui il poema e cantato, nella terzina, incatenata, serrata, disciplinata, veemente e pur calma, si dice e non si dice il vero ; come sempre, del resto, in simili tentativi di cogliere I'essenza dell'arte nelle forme astrattamente concepite, tentativi che son ora in molta voga, specialmente nella critica delle
UNITA BELLA POESIA DI DANTE 23
arti figurative. Senza dubbio, con la terzina sola- mente nasce il Dante della Commedia, e solo in essa e per essa egli vive il dramma della sua anima ; e la terzina non pote essere (com' e stato talora congettu- rato) da lui intellettualisticamente e volontariamente scelta in quanto allegorica della Trinita, perche, se anche egli penso a codesta allegoria, il suo pensiero dove questa volta sovrapporsi o allearsi alia necessita della sua anima, alia spontanea mossa della sua fantasia espressiva, con la quale la terzina fa tutt' uno. Ma quale terzina ? Non certamente la terzina in genere, ma quella propriamente dantesca, impastata col materiale linguistico, sintattico e stilistico proprio di Dante, battuta con I'inflessione e I'accento che egli le d^, diversa dalla terzina adoperata da altri poeti : con la quale ovvia considerazione si fa altresi chiaro che la terzina viene ricordata in questo caso non come determinatrice per se stessa di quella particolare poesia, ma in quanto richiama tutto Tethos e il pathos della Commedtay la sua intonazione o tonalit^, lo spirito di Dante.
Che questo spirito sia uno spirito austero, risponde al concetto che universalmente si ha di Dante, ed e implicito nella caratteristica segnata di sopra, perche colui che raifrena e domina le passioni e austero, e, come tale, chiude in se una grande esperienza di dolore. Ma, quando I'immaginazione dipinge un Dante col volto perpetuamente contratto dallo sdegno, o quando i critici parlano, come hanno parlato, del suo " umor nero," della sua " misantropia," del suo " pessimismo,"
24 DANTE
conviene forse ammonire a non esagerare, e giova procurar di ritoccare e di ammorbidire (come ci siamo provati a fare nel corso della nostra esposizione) qualcuna della linee di quel ritratto tradizionale e convenzionale. Quale che Dante apparisse ai con- temporanei e passasse nella leggenda, e pur conce- dendo che la sua faccia fosse " pensosa e malinconica," come scrive il Boccaccio, e certo, perche il poema ce lo prova, che egli ebbe neU'animo una ricchezza e variety d'interessi che dal presente lo portavano all'antico, dalla immediatezza del vivere e soffrire al compiacersi dei ricordi eruditi e di scuola, e una ricchezza e variety di affetti, che dai piu violenti o dai piu sublimi giunge- vano ai dolci e ai teneri e si stendevano ai celianti e giocosi. Ed era poeta : e il suo occhio di profugo per le terre d'ltalia non guardava solo politicamente e moralmente le cose politiche e morali, ma spaziava in ogni sorta di spettacoli, godendo degli spettacoli, e si volgeva con ammirazione alle cose belle e si chinava con simpatia anche alle umili. Ed era, oltre che poeta, specificamente artista : e Parte studio sempre, e vi teorizzo sopra, e si glorio del " bello stile," e assai gioia ebbe dalla parola, dalla parola appropriata, cal- zante, sensuosa, che e il pensiero stesso che genera a se, con divino f remito di creazione, il suo corpo vivente. Ci furono* dunque nel suo animo molto piu vari senti- menti, e soprattutto molto piu lietezza che non si pensi generalmente ; sebbene anche quel sentimenti e quella lietezza s'inquadrassero per sempre nel suo abito austero e fossero in esso temperati e intonati.
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UNITA BELLA POESIA DI DANTE 25
Su questo ethos e pathos di Dante, e suUa conce- zione intellettuale e le tendenze pratiche che lo con- dizionano, s'impianta di frequente la controversia, dibattuta non meno nei paesi stranieri che in Itaha, intorno alia " modernita " o " non modernita " del suo spirito ; il che, messo in termini piu esatti e chiari, vale domandare se Dante possa o no essere a noi moderni il maestro e la guida della vita spirituale, degli ideali politici e morali, e di ogni altra cosa. Ora il vero e che tutti i grandi sono maestri di vita, ma nessuno puo esser tale da solo, perche ciascuno di essi e un momento della storia, e la vera maestra e la storia tutta, e non solo quella che noi di continuo ricreiamo, ma anche, e soprattutto, quella che noi, in ogni istante, creiamo. Eterna nella forma della poesia, la Commedia e, per altro rispetto, ossia nella sua materia, limitata al momento storico in cui sorse e di cui si e gia a suo luogo brevemente delineata la particolare fisionomia. E la considerazione di questo storico nascimento basta a discriminare cio che in Dante c'e, che prima non era, e cio che in lui non e, e non poteva essere, perche si formo di poi, e a togliere dal suo ritratto alcune ombre e colori, che vi sono stati mala- mente aggiunti.
Non c'e piu in Dante il medioevo, il crudo medioevo, cosi quello della feroce ascesi come 1' altro del fiero e allegro battagliare ; che mai forse niun altro gran poema e come quello di Dante privo di passione per la guerra in quanto guerra, delle commozioni che accom- pagnano la lotta militare, il rischio, lo sforzo, il trionfo,
26 DANTE
I'avventura. L'epopea medievale, il ciclo carolingio, appena vi romba da lontano, in una terzina di paragone. In cambio dell' ascesi vi si ritrova la ferma fede, raffor- zata da pensiero e dottrina ; in cambio dell'ardore guerresco, I'ardore civile. Queste, e non piu quelle cose, appartenevano all' eta sua, all' Italia del suo tempo, o, a ogni modo, appartenevano alia sua coscienza e formavano oggetto della sua continua e intensa sollecitudine, della sua umana passione. E sebbene io abbia piu volte manifestato la mia diffidenza e ripu- gnanza verso le caratterologie etniche dei poeti, pur diro che, se il nome di " germanico," del quale Dante e stato fregiato (e non solo da tedeschi, e anzi non da tedeschi per primi), s'intende simbolicamente come designazione ora dell' impeto mistico e ascetico ora dell' impeto guerresco, Dante non fu " germanico," e dovrebbe denominarsi italiano o latino o con altret- tale contrapposto. Nella bellissima rievocazione che Giovanni Berchet fece, nelle Fantasie^ dell' incontro di italiani e tedeschi a Costanza pei negoziati della pace, Dante non starebbe tra il " popol biondo " e tra i baroni che, col ferreo cappello e col busto chiuso nelle ferree maglie, " emergono segnal di un di'vetusto," ma in quel gruppo di avvolti in lunghe e semplici cappe, " sol cospicui per negri cigli accorti."
Per altro rispetto bisogna astenersi dal troppo ravvicinare, paragonando, Dante alio Shakespeare, il primo poeta pari a lui di grandezza che s'incontri dopo di lui nella storia della poesia europea ; perche lo Shakespeare, per I'appunto, rappresenta, ed e,
UNITA DELLA POESIA DI DANTE 27
un'altra epoca dello splrito umano, nella quale la concezione dantesca del mondo era stata sconvolta, e sulla chiarezza, che illuminava anche la necessita del mistero, si era distesa una nuova ombra di mistero, e la perplessita della mente e dell' animo, che Dante non conosceva o aveva presto vinta, era diventata la nota dominante.^ E, quanto ai romantici, che poi seguirono, che cosa dire ? II loro infinito non e il suo, il loro sognare non e il suo sognare, il loro stile non e il suo " bello stile," il loro " sentimento della natura " (che lacopo Grimm percio negava a Dante) non e il suo, e, in genere, il loro sentimento della vita e I'opposto del suo : chi legge o declama Dante romanticamente lo sfigura e tradisce. Anche qui, se " germanico " si toglie come simbolo di " romantico," Dante, come non si puo dire germanico del medioevo, cosi non fu dell'ottocento. Se egli avesse conosciuto gli eroi del romanticismo, i Werther, gli Obermann e i Renati, e la loro pallida genia, li avrebbe forse messi nella " bel- letta negra," tra gli " accidiosi." E qualcosa dove conoscere di questa trista disposizione di spirito, che nel periodo romantico propriamente si arricchi, si complico, si estese e ottenne ammirazione e apoteosi, ma che e di tutti i tempi ; e forse esso stesso, da gio- vane, dove, per alcun tempo, soffrire quella malattia, e, come gli eroi romantici, per effetto della malinconia, della tristezza, dell' accidia, si lascio andare alle dissi- pazioni : se tale e il significato del sonetto che I'amico
^ Rimando per questa parte al mio saggio shakespeariano, nel volume : Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille (Bari, 1920).
28 DANTE
Cavalcanti gl'indirizzava, rimproverandolo della " vil vita," nella quale " posava," dell' " anima invilita " e dello " spirito noioso," che s'era impadronito di lui. Ma, per ogni caso, egli si trasse presto fuori da questo smarrimento, e lo mise tra le altre sue esperi- enze ; come mise tra le sue esperienze quelle furenti passioni amorose, delle quali parlano i suoi biografi, e ne fece I'episodio di Francesca. Nella Commedia^ non c'e sentimentalismo di sorta, ma la gioia e il dolore e il coraggio del vivere, infrenato dal timore morale, sorretto e animato dall'alta speranza.
Tale e, in rapidi tratti, I'immagine di Dante, I'imma- gine autentica, quella che si desume dalla sua stessa opera. Ma non bisogna dimenticar mai, — e qui termi- nando conviene ripetere, — che quella immagine, che vale a differenziare Dante da altri poeti e ad aiutare I'intelligenza e la comprensione della sua opera, ritiene, come ogni caratteristica, alcunche di angusto e, per cosi dire, di prosaico, se non la si coUochi e risolva nell' amplitudine della poesia, dell'unica poesia, che non si rinserra in cosa alcuna o gruppo di cose partico- lari, ma spazia sempre nel cosmo. Donde il nostro rapimento ai ritmi e alle parole di Dante, anche alle piu piccole e fuggevoli, che ci vengono innanzi cir- confuse di quell' incanto : o che mitologizzando egli dica dell' alba, " la concubina di Titone antico," che esce " fuor delle braccia del suo dolce amico," o che chiami la neve la " sorella bianca," e simili. Questo, che poi e I'essenziale, non comporta altra caratteristica che il carattere stesso universale della poesia ; e in tal
UNITA DELLA POESIA DI DANTE 29
riguardo Dante non e piu Dante, nella sua definita individualita, ma e quella voce meravigliata e com- mossa, che tramanda I'anima umana nella perpetua- mente ricorrente creazione del mondo. Ogni diffe- renza, a questo punto, svanisce, e risuona solo quell' eterno e sublime ritornello, quella voce che ha il mede- simo timbro fondamentale in tutti i grandi poeti ed artisti, sempre nuova, sempre antica, accolta da noi con sempre rinnovata trepidazione e gioia : la Poesia senza oggettivo. A coloro, che parlano con quel divino o piuttosto profondamente umano accento, si dava un tempo il nome di Geni ; e Dante fu un Genio.^
1 These pages by B. Croce will be issued in a book by the same author, translated by Mr. Douglas Ainsley, and published during the present year by Henry Holt and Co., New York.
ALLEGORY AND MYTH
W. p. Ker.
ALLEGORY AND MYTH
Dante is more given to analytical reasoning than any other poet : what seems at first most alien to poetry, the process of analytical division and explana- tion, accompanies his poems from the Vita Nuova to the Paradiso, But he cannot, any more than the most prosaic scholiast, make analysis do the v^ork of poetry, or even explain it, and his account of allegory, in the letter to Can Grande, leaves out the main thing. Compare the prose interpretation of the Psalm In exitu Israel with the same phrase as it is sung in the celestial ship at the beginning of Purgatorio. The allegory is the same in poetry as in prose ; only in the poem the double reference which is part of the nature of allegory is absorbed in the one real meaning : In exitu Israel de Mgypto is not a text to be explained tropologically ; it is the song of the redeemed, and they are what they sing. Imaginative and poetical allegory is a different thing from the common allegorical interpretation of Scripture ; but there are no convenient words to express the differences.
Poetical allegory has a way of turning into poetical
reality; the image into the thing itself. The Psalm
In convertendo Dominus is not surpassed even by Dante
in the transcendent beauty of its change from allegory
D 33
34 DANTE
to direct utterance : " When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion, then were we like unto men that dream." You take this, rightly, for a song of triumph, but the triumph is verily a dream, a thought, a hope : and the true passion of the Church, not yet triumphant, is heard breaking through the dream : " Lord, turn again our captivity as streams in the South 1 "
Much of the allegory in Dante's poetry is of this sort : reality breaking through and sweeping away the imagery. In Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim's Progress likewise, often, what we find is not an allegorical pil- grimage, but a true story. Dante's vision of eternal life in the Paradiso makes use of allegory, like other figures of speech, but the main argument is what he believed without any figure. He has nothing in verse or prose at all like the conventional epic allegory which descended from the mediaeval moralisations of Ovid to Tasso, who wrote an allegorical interpretation of his Gerusalemme liber at a ; to Pope, who adopted one ready-made for his Iliad,
It is not easy always to distinguish allegory from myth. Myth was allegory for the readers of " Ovid Moralised," the popular old French book which was not quite antiquated in the days of Rabelais. In a different way passages of mythology, like Narcissus or the spear of Peleus, became part of the tradition of the lyrical " courtly makers," used in similes and comparisons, not strictly allegorical. Dante in his copious use of mythology does not stop to interpret allegorically. He does not point out that Cain is
ALLEGORY AND MYTH 35
historical (Purg. xiv. 133) and Aglaurus not so (ibid. 139), if indeed he thought of any such difference. That he was not careless about historical truth appears curiously in Monarchia iii. 9, where the allegorical interpretation of Peter's two swords, which did not suit Dante's theory, is rejected in favour of plain historical fact. " Peter, as usual, answered without thinking of any deeper meaning." Dicunt enim illos duos gladios quos adsignaverit Petrus duo prcejata regi- mina importare : quod omnino negandum est, turn quia ilia responsio nonfuisset ad intentionem Christi, turn quia Petrus, de more, subito respondebat ad rerum superjiciem tantum,
Dante here, of course, had a particular motive for preferring the literal sense, but that does not spoil the force of this example, which shows clearly that his mind was not confused, as so many were, by tropologi- cal interpretations, to the point of not caring whether historical fact were fact or no.
With regard to Apollo and the other gods, he did not raise any question of historic truth or falsehood. He accepts what Jupiter said to Mercury in the Aeneid as evidence of the destiny of Rome. He does not encourage the common theory of the ancient gods, that they were fiends deceiving the people through oracles. He thinks more nobly of Apollo, though the other theory had been taught by St. Augustine, and was popularly current in Ovide Moralise, and other books.
In certain most miraculous works of modern poetry,
36 DANTE
in Collins's Ode to Evenings in Keats's Autumn, there is mythological imagination, personifying, and at the same time keeping what may be called the truth of ordinary experience. Wordsworth goes beyond this in his Ode to Duty : " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong : " no figurative imagination, but vision of the law of the world. Dante thinks in the same way of Fortune {Inf, vii.), so intensely that he sees her as a goddess, turning her sphere in like manner as the Intelligences move the spheres of the planets. There is nothing like this anywhere else in his verse or prose ; nowhere else does allegory or mythology turn into the revelation of an unknown deity. Nowhere else in Dante is there more clearly the accent of true worship than in Virgil's defence of Fortune :
Quest' h colei ch' e tanto posta in croce Pur da color che le dovrian dar lode, Dan dole biasmo a torto e mala voce.
Ma ella s' h. beata e ci6 non ode : Con 1' altre prime creature lieta Volve sua spera, e beata si gode.
Words like allegory and mythology fail utterly to describe this poetical mode of imagination, yet both are required when one thinks of this passage, though it is as far removed as Wordsworth's " brave trans- lunary things " from the common fashion of allegory.
OXFORD AND DANTE
Paget Toynbee.
OXFORD AND DANTE
" Fama superstes Gentibus extinctum memorat, populumque per omnem Vivet et aeterno referetur laudibus aevo."
{Benevenutus Imol. in Dantem.)
In the following pages an attempt is made to give some account, necessarily only by way of summary, of the part played by Oxford and her sons in the further- ance of the study and appreciation of the works of " I'altissimo poeta," the sixth centenary of whose death is being celebrated throughout the civilised world at the present time.
The earliest mention of Oxford in connexion with Dante occurs in the Latin commentary on the Divina Commedia, written by Giovanni da Serravalle, Bishop of Fermo. This work was composed between February i, 1 41 6, and January 16, 141 7, during the Council of Constance, nearly a hundred years after Dante's death, at the instance of Serravalle's two English colleagues, Nicholas Bubwith, Bishop of Bath and Wells (1407-142 7), and Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury (i 407-1 41 7), the latter of whom, it may be noted, had been Chancellor of the University of Oxford ( 1 403-1 407).
In the preamble to his commentary Serravalle, who
39
40 DANTE
had himself been in England, as we learn from his comment on Inferno xx. 126/ states twice, on what authority he does not tell us, that Dante visited England and studied at Oxford. This statement he makes in the first place a propos of Beatrice and of Dante's relations with her : —
" Notandum quod Dantes dilexit hanc Beatricem hystorice et litteraliter ; sed allegorice et anagogice dilexit Theologiam sacram, in qua diu studuit tam in Oxoniis in regno Anglie, quam Parisiis in regno Frantic " (ed. Prato, 1891, p. 15).
He repeats it in the course of a discussion as to the etymology of the name Dante : —
" Dantes dicitur quasi Dans te ad aliqua. Iste auctor Dantes se in iuventute dedit omnibus artibus liberalibus, studens eas Padue, Bononie, demum Oxoniis et Parisiis " {ed, cit,, p. 21).
Twenty-seven years after the completion of Serra- valle's commentary a copy of the work ^ was presented (on February 25, 1444) to the library of the University of Oxford by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a former member of Balliol College, together with a copy of the Italian text of the Commedia^ Oxford having thus been the possessor of the earliest recorded
^ Speaking of the Straits of Gibraltar, he says : " Ego iam transivi per iUud angustum spatium, quando redibam de regno Anglie ad partes Ytalie per mare."
2 " Commentaria Dantes . . . secundo folio, torment ahimt " (see Times Lit. Stipp., March 18, 1920).
3 " Librum Dantes . . . secundo folio a te " (see Times Lit. Supp., April 22, 1920).
OXFORD AND DANTE 41
cop7 of the latter in England. The copy of Serra- valle's commentary was still in the University library a hundred years later, when it was seen and registered (" Commentarii Joannes de Serauala super opera Dantis Aligerii ") during his tour through England as King's antiquary (1536-1542) by John Leland ; but the copy of the Commedia itself had apparently disappeared.
In 1550 William Thomas, said to have been a scholar of Oxford, who in the previous year had published a Historie of Italie^ in which he referred to Dante's account {Inf, xx. 55-93) of the founding of Mantua, issued an Italian grammar, the first attempt of the kind in English, under the title of Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer, with a Dictionarie for the better under standyng of Boccace^ Pethrarcha^ and Dante, which was three times reprinted, namely in 1560, 1562, and 1567.
In 1559, another Oxford scholar, John Foxe, the martyrologist, sometime Fellow of Magdalen, while engaged as press-reader in the printing-office of Johannes Oporinus (Johann Herbst) at Basle, saw through the press, as there is every reason to believe,^ the editio princeps of Dante's De Monarchia, which was published by Oporinus in that year, together with three other tracts on the Roman Empire, in the volume entitled Andre/ Alciati De Formula Romani Imperii, a volume from which Foxe subsequently, in
^ See my note on " John Foxe and the editio princeps of Dante's De Monarchia" in Atheneeum, April 14, 1906.
42 DANTE
the second edition of his Book of Martyrs (1570), quoted Dante's opinion concerning the donation of Const ant ine.
In 1567 an Oxford prelate, John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, formerly Fellow of Corpus, in his Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, referred to Dante's denunciation of Rome in Purgatorio xxxii. 148 ff., this being the first citation of Dante by an English author as a writer against Rome.
In 1 581 a son of Oxford, namely, Sir Philip Sidney, formerly of Christ Church, in his Apologie for Poetrie, made the first mention in English literature of Dante and Beatrice together by name. " Thus doing," he says (i, ^., if a man believe that poets can confer immortality), " your soule shal be placed with D aniens Beatrix^ or VirgiVs Anchises,^^
In 1602 the newly-founded Bodleian Library received from Sir Henry Danvers, afterwards Earl of Danby, a copy of the 1568 Venice edition of the Divina Commedia, with the commentary of Bernar- dino Daniello, which was registered, together with a folio edition of the De Monarchia (doubtless that published at Basle in 1566), and a copy of the second Aldine edition (Venice, 1515) of the Commedia, in the MS. catalogue compiled by Thomas James, Bodley's Librarian, in 1 602-1 603. In the following year (1603) a copy of the 1484 Venice edition of the Commedia, with Landino's commentary, which had first appeared at Florence three years before, was presented to the library by Sir Michael Dormer.
OXFORD AND DANTE 43
Two years later (1605) was published Thomas James's first printed Bodleian catalogue, in which, besides the editions of the Commedia presented by Sir Henry Danvers and Sir Michael Dormer, were registered the 1544 Venice edition with the commentary of Vellu- tello, and the 15 12 Venice edition with the commentary of Landino, these, together with the second Aldine registered in the MS. catalogue, but now omitted by an oversight, making a total of five editions of the Commedia possessed by the University Library at this date.
In this same year (1605) John Sanford, a graduate of Balliol, at this time Chaplain of Magdalen, printed at Oxford A Grammer^ or Introduction to the Italian Tongue^ which contains sundry quotations, with translations, from the Commedia by way of illustration, and to which is prefixed the following motto from Paradiso xxvi. 130-132 : —
" Opera di natura ^ h. c'huom favella, Ma se cosi 6 cosi, natura lascia Poi fare a voi secondo che v'abbella."
In 1 613 Bodley's Librarian, James, compiled a second MS. catalogue, in which an addition to the previous list of Dante's works was made in the shape of the 1 610 Offenbach edition of the De Monarchia. The Basle edition of 1566, which was registered in the catalogue of 1 602-1 603, does not figure in this, having presumably been sold or exchanged, as being superseded by the later edition — ^a practice which, ^ Misquoted, the correct reading being " Opera naturale."
44
DANTE
as the Library knows to its cost, led not many years later to the elimination from its shelves of the first folio of Shakespeare, which was only recovered, after nearly three hundred years' exile, for the sum of j^3,ooo, raised by public subscription.^ The second Aldine (1515) edition of the Commedia^ which had been omitted from the catalogue of 1605, was again overlooked, in spite of James's description of this catalogue as " catalogus exactissimus," but it was restored to the list when the catalogue was printed in 1620.
In 1627 James printed at Oxford an Index Generalis Lihrorum Prohibitorum a Pontificiis^ arranged alpha- betically, in which, under the head of Dante, are included the De Monarchia and the Commedia, the 1564 Venice edition of the latter, containing the commentaries of Landino and Vellutello, being specially banned.
The next mention of Dante by an Oxford author occurs in 1661, in which year Barten Holyday, son of an Oxford tailor, who was educated at Christ Church, and subsequently became Archdeacon of Oxford, published at Oxford a poem in ten books called ^he Survey of the Worlds consisting of about a thousand disconnected couplets, of which one (No. 354) is devoted to Dante : —
" Heav'n, Purgatory, Hell, were Dante's Three Themes. Two were Wise Melancholy ; yet extremes."
^ In March 1906. See Strickland Gibson, Some Oxford Libraries, pp. 75-76.
OXFORD AND DANTE 45
In the notes to a translation of Juvenal completed some years before this date, but not published till 1673, after his death, Holyday quotes the stricture upon Dante of " a learned Italian," Nogarola, a " hypercritick," who, he says, " does censure at once the whole Italian tongue, even the Tuscan puritie, terming it but peregrinitas Latini sermonis, et verhorum colluvies ; and as for the three most famous of the ancient poetical wits in that language, Dante, Petrarch and Boccace, he requires in the first more elegant words ; in the second matter and sentences for his words ; and in the third discretion (very magis- terially)."
About this time (i 661-1666) Anthony Wood, a native of Oxford, formerly a Postmaster of Merton, compiled his Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford^ an early chapter of which contains an interesting comparison between the old " Vicus Scholarum " at Oxford, and the " Vicus Stramineus " (Rue du Fouarre) at Paris, " where the philosophical professors taught in the time of Dantes the poet," this being an obvious reference to Dante's mention of the street (as " Vico degli Strami ") in Paradiso X. 137, as the place where Siger de Brabant " sillo- gizzo invidiosi veri." It may be observed in this connexion that if Dante ever was a student at Oxford, as Serravalle alleges, he would have been as familiar with the " Vicus Scholarum " (Schools Street, the present Radcliffe Street, which was a continuation of the former Schydyerd Street, now Oriel Street) as
46 DANTE
he presumably was with the Rue du Fouarre at Paris.
In 1674 Thomas Hyde, of Queen's College, who was Bodley's Librarian from 1665 to 1701, issued the third printed Bodleian catalogue. The meticulous particularity displayed in this catalogue in connexion with Dante's name, who is described as " Dante Alghieri, sive Alighieri vel Aligherius, seu Aligieri, vel Alaghieri," was unfortunately not extended to the list of his works, which was responsible for at least one long-standing bibliographical error. In this list the total of editions of the Divina Commedia, which in the 1620 catalogue was five, is reduced to four, the 151 5 Aldine edition, which had been omitted from the catalogues of 1605 and 161 3, but had been included in that of 1620, being once more overlooked. Per contra^ we now find registered for the first time an edition with the commentary of Landino, printed at Venice in 1584. This edition, however, though duly registered by Colomb de Batines in his Bibliografia Dantesca, as I have shown elsewhere,^ has no existence, the copy in question being, no doubt, the 1484 Venice edition presented by Sir Michael Dormer in 1603. Hyde's catalogue registers no less than five editions of the De Monarchia, as against one in the previous catalogues, among them being an edition printed at Basle in 1557. But this edition, like the 1584 edition of the Commedia, is
^ See " An Apocryphal Venice edition of the Divina Commedia" in Bulletin Italien, vii. 85-86.
OXFORD AND DANTE 47
non-existent, the editio princeps of the De Monarchia^ of which a copy is included in the list, having, as we have seen,^ been published at Basle in 1559. Hyde's list is further noteworthy as including for the first time a copy of the Convivio, the edition being the latest at that date, namely, the third Venice edition
(1531)-
In 1746 appeared the first Oxford specimen of
translation from the Commedia, This was in the shape of an anonymous poetical rendering of Inferno xxiv. 1-18, contributed to the second number (April 12, 1 746) of Dodsley's Museum, under the title of " The Three First Stanzas of the 24th Canto of Dante's Inferno ^ made into a Song, In Imitation of the Earl of Surry's Stile." The author of this composi- tion, which is a decidedly pleasing performance, as was revealed incidentally fifty years later by Joseph Warton in the fourth volume ^ of his edition of Pope (1797), was Joseph Spence, Fellow of New College, formerly Professor of Poetry at Oxford (i 728-1 738), and at that time Regius Professor of Modern History. Ten years later (in 1756) Joseph Warton, who was a member of Oriel College, and Second Master of Winchester, published in the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope a prose rendering of part of the Ugolino episode from Inferno xxxiii. 43-75, in which, as the translator explains in a note, in order that none of the pathos
1 See above, p. 41. ^ Printed Inferna.
3 P. 283.
48 DANTE
should be missed, "it was thought not unproper to distinguish the more moving passages by italics."
The next attempt in this line emanating from Oxford was a version in heroic couplets of the para- phrase of the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the eleventh canto of the Purgatorio, which was printed anonymously in 1760 in the first volume (No. 5) of the British Magazine. A special interest attaches to this piece, inasmuch as it was published as a specimen of a completed translation of the whole poem. The author was William Huggins, a Fellow of Magdalen, who at his death in 1761 left the MS. of this trans- lation to his executors, with directions that it should be published, funds being allocated for the purpose and his portrait by Hogarth having been engraved for the frontispiece. But his wishes were disregarded, and the work never saw the light, with the conse- quence that Huggins and his Alma Mater have been deprived of the credit of producing the first complete English translation of the Commedia — a distinction which is commonly claimed for Henry Boyd, of Dublin University, whose version was not published till more than forty years after Huggins's death.
In 1 78 1 Thomas Warton, Fellow and Tutor of Trinity, younger brother of Joseph Warton, and a former Professor of Poetry (17S7-1767), published the third volume of his History of English Poetry, in which he gave a lengthy " general view " of the Divina Commedia, with numerous quotations from the original, and prose renderings of the inscription over
OXFORD AND DANTE 49
the Gate of Hell {Inf, iii. 1-9), and of the Ugolino episode. Warton's renderings can hardly be described as felicitous, for in the former passage he perpetrated an extraordinary mistranslation, involving a " bull " of the first water, the last line but one being rendered, " if not eternal, I shall eternally remain " ; v^hile in his account of Ugolino he credits the Count and his victim, the Archbishop, v^ith the remarkable feat of simultaneously " gnawing each other's sculls."
In the last decade of the eighteenth century the name appears for the first time in connexion with Dante of Henry Francis Gary, of Christ Church, the most widely known of all English translators of the Commedia. On May 7, 1792, while still an under- graduate, he writes from Oxford to Miss Seward at Lichfield, advising her to " give a few months to the acquisition of Italian," and to " go and see the wonders of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso " ; and he sends her a prose translation of two passages from the Purgatorio, as being " less known than the Inferno^"* namely, the simile of the sheep from the third canto (vv. 79-85), and of the meteors from the fifth (vv.
37-39)-
Five years later, in January 1797, Cary records in his journal that he began work on his blank verse translation, the work which was destined to link his name lastingly with that of Dante.
In a letter of September 27, 1800, to Rev. Robert Fellowes, of St. Mary Hall, Miss Seward quotes the opinion on Dante of an Oxford dignitary, Cyril
so DANTE
Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, namely, that " of all, in every age and nation, who have aspired to the name of poet, only four deserve it : Homer, Dante, Ariosto, and Shakespeare."
In 1805 the Bodleian Library purchased the MSS. of the classical scholar, James Philip D'Orville, among which was a MS. of the Divina Commedta, this being the first MS. of Dante acquired by the Library since the disappearance of Duke Humphrey's MS.^ In the same year Cary published the first instalment of his translation, consisting of Cantos i.-xvii. of the Inferno, accompanied by the Italian text (now for the first time printed in England), with notes, and a life of Dante ; the remaining seventeen cantos being published in the following year.
About the year 1810, Dr. George Frederick Nott, Fellow of All Souls, and Prebendary of Winchester, an accomplished Italian scholar, gave a commission to the Viennese artist, Josef Anton Koch (i 768-1 839), to make a series of drawings from the Divina Commedia, forty of which, in sepia, illustrating the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, eventually passed into the possession of King John of Saxony, the well-known translator of the Commedia into German, under the pseudonym of Philalethes, and are now preserved at Dresden. Nott's library, which was sold at Winches- ter in 1842, the year after his death, contained a large and valuable collection of Dante literature, including three MSS. of the Commedia, a MS. of Boccaccio's Vita
^ See above, pp. 40-1.
OXFORD AND DANTE 51
di Dante, and upwards of eighty printed editions of the Commedia, among them the editio princeps (Foligno, 1472), and six other fifteenth-century editions, besides several editions of the Fita Nuova and Convivio, in- cluding the editio princeps (Florence, 1576) of the former, as well as the first collected edition of the Epistolce, namely, that privately printed by Witte at Padua in 1827.
On May 8, 181 2, Gary noted in his journal that he on that day finished his translation of the Commedia, on which he had been engaged off and on for some fifteen years. But it was not until the beginning of 1 814 that the work at last made its appearance in three diminutive volumes, printed at Gary's own expense, under the title of " The Vision ; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, translated by the Rev. H. F. Gary, A.M." Among the earliest notes of appreciation was one from Oxford, from the Public Orator, William Growe, Fellow and Tutor of New GoUege, whose eulogy, writes Gary to a friend, was " couched in such a strain of compliment as my modesty will not let me repeat."
In the same year (1814) a member of Balliol GoUege published anonymously a volume of Poetical Epistles, which contained, among other translations, a rendering of the Ugolino episode in Spenserian stanzas, the first attempt at translation from the Commedia in this metre. The author was Robert Morehead, who subsequently contributed to the Edinburgh Review (December 181 8) an interesting article on the poetical
52 DANTE
character of Dante, and who in the following year (1819) pi*inted anonymously in the Edinburgh Maga- zine two further attempts in Spenserian stanzas from the Inferno, namely, the inscription over the Gate of Hell {Inf. iii. 1-9), and the account of the frozen lake of Cocytus {Inf, xxxii. 1-39).
The next name on the record is of one whose con- nexion with Oxford in his lifetime was tragically brief, namely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who entered University College in October, 1810, and was expelled in the following March, in consequence of having circulated a pamphlet on the Necessity of Atheism — a sentence which was reversed in our own day, the counterfeit presentment of the poet being now an object of reverence within the walls from which he himself had been driven out in disgrace. Shelley was a close student of Dante,^ whose influence is traceable in many of his poems, notably in parts of Prometheus Unbound (1820), in Epipsychidion (1821), and in the unfinished Triumph of Life (1822). The noble tributes to Dante in his Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients relative to the Subject of Love (181 8), and in his Defence of Poetry (1821) are well known. His love of translation and of metrical experiments found scope in several renderings from the Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante, the earliest of which, a
^ His annotated copy of the Venice 1793 edition of the Opere di Dante (5 vols.), containing the Commedia, Canzoniere, and prose works (Italian and Latin), was in the collection of the late Lord Abinger, which was dispersed in Febrpary 1920.
OXFORD AND DANTE 53
translation of the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti (" Guido, vorrei "), known as the " Boat of Love," appears to have been written in 1816. Other pieces, assigned to the year 1820, are the canzone (" Voi che inten- dendo ") prefixed to the second book of the Convivio ; " Matilda gathering flowers," a rendering in terza rima of Purgatorio xxviii. 1-51 ; and a composite version with Medwin, if Medwin is to be believed, of part of the Ugolino episode, also in terza rima.
The year 181 7 was signalised by one of the most important events in the annals of the Bodleian, an event of special interest in view of our immediate subject, namely, the purchase from Venice (for ^5,444) of the great Canonici collection of MSS., numbering over 2,000. Of these 295 were Italian, among which were no less than fifteen Dante MSS., fourteen of the Commedia, and one containing the Fita Nuova, Convivio, and Canzoniere, An elaborate catalogue of this section of the collection was compiled some thirty years later at Oxford by Count Alessandro Mortara, which was seen through the press by Dr. Wellesley, Principal of New Inn Hall, and eventually published at Oxford in 1864. By this purchase the Bodleian Library became possessed of the richest collection of Dante MSS. in England, its total being sixteen, as against nine in the British Museum at this date.
In 1 819 a second edition of Gary's Dante was published, in response to a popular demand, stimu- lated by a eulogistic reference to the work by Coleridge
54 DANTE
in a lecture in London, and by a highly appreciative article in the Edinburgh Review. This edition, which, in marked contrast to the insignificant first edition, was in three handsome octavo volumes, was followed by a third in 1 831, and by a fourth, in a single volume, the last superintended by Gary himself, in 1844, the year of his death.
In 1824, the year after his retirement from public life. Lord Grenville, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, formerly of Christ Church, Prime Minister in the administration of "All the Talents " (i 806-1 807), who had won the Chancellor's prize for Latin verse forty-five years before (1779), printed privately at Oxford a volume of Greek and Latin verse, chiefly translations, entitled Nugce Metricce^ among which was a rendering in Latin elegiacs of Paradiso xvii. 55-60. Some years previously, as Rogers records in his Commonplace Book, Lord Grenville had made a rendering in English verse of another passage from the Commedia, namely, Dante's address to Virgil in Inferno i. 79-80, 82-84.
In 1826 another Latin verse prizeman, John Latham, Fellow of All Souls, while in residence at Oxford, translated in terza rima the Ugolino episode (Inf. xxxiii. 1-75), which was afterwards included in a volume of Poems, Original and Translated, published in 1836 at Sandbach in Cheshire.
In the following year (1827) Charles Strong, Fellow of Wadham, published anonymously Specimens of Sonnets from the most celebrated Italian Poets, with
OXFORD AND DANTE 55
Translations^ in which Dante was represented by a verse rendering of Sonnet xxiv. (" Deh pellegrini ") from the Vita Nuova (§41).
In 1833 appeared the first instalment, the Inferno^ with introduction and notes, of a new Oxford trans- lation of the Commedia, in bastard terza rima. This was by Ichabod Charles Wright, late Fellow of Magdalen. The Inferno^ of which a second edition was issued in the same year, was dedicated to Lord Brougham, as " one of the most ardent admirers of Dante." The Purgatorio, dedicated to the Archbishop of Canter- bury, William Howley, formerly Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, followed in 1836; and the Para- diso, dedicated to the translator's father-in-law. Lord Denman, Lord Chief Justice, in 1840. A collective edition in three volumes was published in 1845, and another in a single volume in 1854.
In 1835 William Ewart Gladstone, former student of Christ Church, at that time Conservative M.P. for Newark, made a translation in terza rima of Purgatorio xi. 1-21 (" The Lord's Prayer "), and Paradiso iii. 70-87 (" Speech of Piccarda "), which, together with a rendering in the same metre of Inferno xxxiii. 1-78 (" Ugolino "), made in 1837, was published in 1861 in a volume of Translations hy Lord Lyttelton and Rt. Hon, W, E. Gladstone, the trans- lator, who had been elected an honorary Fellow of All Souls three years before (1858), being then
^ A certain number of copies, with new title-page, on which the author's name was given, were issued in the same year.
S6 DANTE
Chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston's second administration.
In 1840 the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Rev. John Keble, late Fellow of Oriel, devoted one of his Latin lectures during his second tenure of the pro- fessorship to an appreciation of Dante as the poet of the Commedia, " Florentinum ilium triplici carmine nobilem," and drew a parallel between him and Lucretius in respect of his love for the mysterious and infinite, " ea quae obscura sunt et infinita."
In 1843 was published the first volume of Modern Painters^ by " a Graduate of Oxford." The second volume, also anonymous, followed three years later (1846). It was an open secret that the author was John Ruskin, lately a gentleman-commoner at Christ Church, who had graduated in 1842. In the first volume Dante is not mentioned. In the second the writer's enthusiasm for the poet of the Divina Corn- media is a marked feature. From one point of view Dante ranks with Phidias and Michael Angelo,^ from another with Homer, iEschylus, and Shakespeare.^ The last line of Francesca's narrative {Inf. v. 138) is singled out for special appreciation ^ ; while the comment on Dante's account of the purifying flame at the beginning of Purgatorio xxvi., with the summing up, " it is lambent annihilation," * has become famous. It was during a visit to Italy in 1845 that Ruskin first made himself acquainted with the Commedia ^ ; and
1 i. ch. 7. 2 ii, ch. 3. 3 7^^-^^ 4 iii^^
5 See Epilogue to vol. ii. of the 1883 ed. of Modern Painters.
OXFORD AND DANTE 57
from that time forth, for many years, no book, with the exception of the Bible, was his more constant companion, either in the original or in Gary's trans- lation. To no single author, perhaps, was his debt greater than to Dante. In a well-known passage in the third volume of the Stones of Venice^ published in 1853, he writes ^ : "I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." There can be no doubt that Ruskin's whole-hearted appreciation of the Corn- media^ so insistently and so eloquently expressed in his numerous works, has played no small part in awakening and stimulating the widespread interest in this country in the study of Dante.
The year 1843 saw the issue of the fifth printed Bodleian catalogue, in which were registered thirteen editions of the Divina Commedia^ as against four in the third (1674) and fourth (1738) catalogues; of these, seven were of the fifteenth century, including the editio princeps (Foligno, 1472), and the first Florentine edition (1481), and six of the sixteenth, including the two Aldines (1502, 1515) ; besides these were the first editions of the De Monarchia (1559), and of the Vita Nuova (1576) ; this last work now appearing for the first time on a Bodleian list.
In this same year (1843) was published a translation in terza rima of the Inferno^ by John Dayman, for- merly Fellow of Corpus, this being the first com-
' § ^1.
58 DANTE
plete English version of any of the three divisions of the Commedia in the metre of the original. More than twenty years later, on the occasion of the cele- bration of the sixth centenary of the birth of Dante in 1865, Dayman published a translation of the whole poem in the same metre ; but he was not first in the field on this occasion, no less than three other terza rima versions having already appeared, namely, those of C. B. Cayley, J. W. Thomas, and Mrs. Ramsay.
In January 1850 an anonymous article was published in the Christian Remembrancer (the successor of the British Critic)^ which purported to be a review of John Carlyle's prose translation of the Inferno, It was, in fact, an exhaustive and illuminating essay on Dante and his works, written with consummate literary skill by one whose knowledge of the subject was unrivalled. The author of this essay, which has come to be regarded as one of the classics of Dante literature, was Rev. Richard William Church, Fellow of Oriel, subsequently (1871) Dean of St. Paul's. The article was reprinted in a volume of Church's Essays and Reviews in 1854, and again separately, with his son's translation of the De Monarchia, in 1879, on which occasion Dean Church took the opportunity of expressing regret for his neglect of the work which had stood at the head of his article, a neglect which was partly responsible for Carlyle's abandonment of his intention to publish a translation of the whole poem.
In 185s Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul's,
OXFORD AND DANTE 59
formerly Fellow of Brasenose, published his magnum opus^ the History of Latin Christianity^ in which necessarily Dante and his works figure conspicuously. In the seventh volume several pages are devoted to the idealism of the De Monarchia, and in the ninth is a lengthy dissertation on the relation of the Divina Commedia to the popular traditions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In the same volume Milman dwells on the " singular kindred and similitude " which to his mind existed between Tacitus and Dante, " between the last great Latin and the first great Italian writer, though one is a poet and the other a historian."
In 1 861 Rev. Samuel Henry Reynolds, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, contributed to the January number of the Westminster Review an anonymous article on '' Dante and his English Translators," which was subsequently (1898) reprinted in a collection of his essays entitled Studies on Many Subjects, A passage in this article gives an interesting view of the state of Dante studies in England at that date. " Dante," says the writer, " is certainly more studied now than he has been for very long. Translations, particularly of the Inferno^ are numerous and widely circulated ; criticisms, some of them of a very high order, have occasionally appeared ; and allusions to his writings may be detected not infrequently in portions of our floating literature. But the change, whatever its cause may be, has been quite recent : it would hardly be untrue to say that there is more of Dante's in- fluence traceable in Chaucer's poems — more genuine
6o DANTE
evidence that Dante had been read and loved — ^than in the whole body of English literature (Milton's v^ritings alone excepted) from Chaucer's time to our own."
In 1863 Matthew Arnold, formerly Fellow of Oriel, at that time Professor of Poetry, printed in Fraser^s Magazine an essay on " Dante and Beatrice," which was devoted mainly to an examination of the theory of the relations between Dante and Beatrice propounded by Theodore Martin in the introduction to his trans- lation of the Vita Nuova published in the previous year.
In 1864 James Bryce, Fellow of Oriel, published as an amplification of the essay which had won the Arnold Historical Prize the year before, his now famous work, l^he Holy Roman Empire, which claims mention here in virtue of the masterly analysis, in the fifteenth chapter, of Dante's De Monarchia, that book which, with the death of the Emperor Henry VII and the doom of the Empire in Italy, was fated, as the essayist puts it, to become " an epitaph instead of a prophecy."
In the following year (1865), which was the six- hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dante, Dayman, as we have seen, brought out his terza rima translation of the whole of the Commedia, in commemoration of the centenary. With the same object. Rev. James Ford, Prebendary of Exeter, formerly of Oriel College, published a terza rima translation of the Inferno, as the first instalment of a rendering in the same metre
OXFORD AND DANTE 6i
of the whole poem, which was published in 1870. In 1865 also a subject relating to Dante was selected for the Latin verse prize at Oxford, namely, " Dantis Exsilium," the prizeman being R. B. Michell, of Balliol. Two years later (1867) the Gaisford prize for Greek verse was won by A. M. Bell, of Balliol, with a poem on " Dante Poeta apud Inferos."
In 1 871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby, Fellow of Wadham, published a translation in irregular verse of the first ten cantos of the Inferno^ of which a revised edition was printed in 1874. In the preface to the latter it was stated that other cantos had been translated, which it was hoped to publish, but no more appeared. In 1872 was published the well-known Intro due tio7i to the Study of Dante by John Addington Symonds, formerly Fellow of Magdalen, a second edition of which was issued in 1 890. In the years 1 873-1 874 Rev. Mandell Creighton, Fellow of Merton, subsequently Bishop of Peterborough (i 891-1897), and of London ( 1 897-1901), published in Macmillan^s Magazine two essays on " Dante, his Life, his Writings," which were reprinted in 1902, after his death, in a volume of his Historical Essays and Reviews,
In 1874 the Clarendon Press for the first time published a work upon Dante, in the shape of a volume of Selections from the " Inferno, ^^ edited, with introduc- tion and notes, by H. B. Cotterill — ^a pioneer volume, which was destined to be the forerunner of a notable series of books upon Dante from the University Press.
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In 1875 E. D. A. Morshead, Fellow of New College, printed privately at Winchester an essay on Dante, which had been read before the New College Essay Society in that year. This essay was accompanied by sundry verse translations from the Commedia^ four of which, including the episodes of Francesca da Rimini (Inf, V. 70-142), Ulysses {Inf, xxvi. 85-142), and Ugolino {Inf. xxxiii. 1-75), were in Spenserian stanzas, a metre which Morshead adopted for the rendering of other passages printed at intervals in subsequent years in the Oxford Magazine^ viz., " Dante and Casella " {Purg. ii. 55-133) in 1884 (February 20); "Manfred of Sicily" {Purg, iii. 91-145) in 1885 (February 25) ; and " Virgil and Statius " {Purg, xxii. 55-112) in 1904 (March 2).
The year 1876 was marked by an event of primary importance from the point of view of the subject here dealt with, namely, the founding by Rev. Edward Moore, Principal of St. Edmund Hall, in conjunction with Signor de Tivoli, Taylorian Teacher in Italian, Rev. H. F. Tozer of Exeter, Rev. G. W. Kitchin of Christ Church, and Rev. R. G. Livingstone of Pem- broke, of the Oxford Dante Society — ^an event which gave an impulse to the study of Dante in Oxford, and consequentially far beyond the limits of Oxford, that has lasted unimpaired to the present day, as the succeeding pages of this record bear witness.
In 1877 the Taylorian Institution acquired by purchase from Naples for ^30 a Cent. XV. MS. of the Paradiso, with the Italian commentary of Fran-
OXFORD AND DANTE 63
cesco da Buti, which had formerly belonged to Pope Pius VI, whose arms are on the binding.^
In 1879 a former scholar of New College, F. J. Church, son of Dean Church, published a translation of the De Monarchia, the first English translation of this treatise, which, as has already been mentioned, was reprinted in the same year in a volume containing his father's essay on Dante. In this year also Baron Seymour Kirkup, to whom the world is indebted for the preservation, by means of his tracing and subse- quent drawing, of the portrait of Dante in the Bargello at Florence, presented to the Oxford Dante Society a cast from a mask of Dante in his possession which had been given to him by the sculptor Bartolini.2
In 1880 Dr. Moore, Principal of St. Edmund Hall, purchased from Rome a Cent. XV. MS. of the Divina Commedia, and a Cent. XV. MS. of the Convivio, the latter being one of the only three complete MSS. of that treatise in this country.^
In 1 88 1 Canon Liddon, of Christ Church, Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis, contributed to the Proceedings of the Oxford Dante Society a paper on " Dante and Aquinas," which was followed by a
^ See Moore's Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the " Divina Commedia,^^ pp. 549-550.
2 This cast is now exhibited in the Picture Gallery at the Bodleian, in association with the collection of portraits, busts, and masks of Dante presented hy Dr. Paget Toynbee in 191 7.
3 See Moore, op. cit., pp. 550-552; and Studies in Dante, iv., pp. 130-13 1. After Dr. Moore's death (in 1916) these two MSS. passed by his bequest to the Bodleian Library.
64 DANTE
second on the same subject in 1883, and by a third on " Dante and the Franciscans " in 1888 — contributions which were subsequently printed in a volume of his Essays and Addresses, published in 1892, after his death. In 1882 C. L. Shadwell, Fellow of Oriel, translated in Marvellian stanzas the episode of Ulysses from Inferno xxvi. 90-142/ by way of experi- ment with this metre, with a view to its adoption for a translation of the Purgatorio,
In 1883 the Dean of Wells, Dr. Plumptre, formerly Fellow of Brasenose, who in December 1881 had pub- lished "Two Studies in Dante" in the Contemporary Review, printed, as " samples of a new translation," a rendering in terza rima of the first four cantos of the Inferno, together with the episodes of Francesca and Ugolino. In the following year he contributed an article on " The Purgatorio of Dante : a Study in Autobiography," to the September number of the Con- temporary Review ; and in 1 886-1 887 he published two substantial volumes, the fruits of thirty years' labour, containing a translation of the Commedia (in terza rima) and Canzoniere of Dante, accompanied by notes, essays, and a biographical introduction, constituting the most solid and comprehensive contribution to the study of Dante which had yet appeared in this country. Dean Plumptre was one of the most ardent upholders of the belief that Dante visited England and studied at Oxford, attracted thither, as he sup-
^ Printed in In the Footprints of Dante, ed. Paget Toynbee, London, 1907.
OXFORD AND DANTE 65
posed, by the reputation of Roger Bacon. He even persuaded himself, on the strength of the mentions of clockwork in Paradiso x. 139 ff. and xxiv. 13 ff., that Dante may have wandered as far west as Glas- tonbury (where was then the famous clock now in Wells Cathedral), and may have " worshipped within the walls of my own cathedral.*'
In 1886 Dr. Moore was appointed to the Barlow Lectureship on Dante at University College, London, the first-fruits of which were published in the following year in a volume on the Time- References in the *' Divina CommediaJ^ In 1887 F. K. H. Haselfoot (formerly Cock), of University College, Oxford, who claimed to know the whole of the Commedia in the original by heart, published a translation of the poem in terza rima, with notes, of which a revised edition was issued in 1899.
In 1889 was published by the Cambridge University Press Dr. Moore's monumental work. Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the " Divina Commedia,''^ which comprised the text of the Inferno with colla- tions of all the MSS. at Oxford and Cambridge, an account of each of the MSS. examined and collated, numbering between 200 and 300, and a separate collation of about 1 80 carefully selected test passages from each of the three cantiche of the poem. This work, which at once placed Dr. Moore in the front rank of living Dantists, was the first serious attempt that had been made in England or elsewhere to deal scientifically and methodically with the complicated
ee DANTE
problems presented by the text of the Commedia^ and it is still the chief authority on the subject. In an appendix to this volume was printed a valuable essay by Rev. H. F. Tozer, Fellow of Exeter, which had originally been read before the Oxford Dante Society, on ''The Principles of Metre and Scansion Observed by Dante in the Divina CommediaJ^
In November of this same year Dr. John Henry Bridges, former Fellow of Oriel, delivered a lecture on " Dante's Position in the History of Humanity," one of a series in illustration of the Positivist Calendar of Great Men, in which Dante is acclaimed as " the herald of the wider and loftier Church of which the foundations are already laid, and which the coming centuries will complete." In a previous lecture on " Love the Principle," addressed to the Positivist Society in October 1888, which, with the above, was printed in a volume of his Essays and Addresses (1907), Bridges embodied a prose translation, with comments, of Dante's conception of love, as explained in Purgatorio xvii. 91-139, a translation which the late Provost of Oriel (Dr. Shadwell) was wont to quote as a model of " what can be done by a real scholar in reproducing the language of a foreign poet so that it shall read like an original work." The year 1889 saw also the publication by Hon. W. W. Vernon, of Christ Church, of his Readings on the " Purgatorio " (second edition, 1897 ; third, 1907), based mainly on the Latin Commen- tary of Benvenuto da Imola, which had been published at Florence two years before, under the editorship of
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Sir James Lacaita, at Mr. Vernon's expense. Readings on the '^ Inferno ^^ followed in 1894 (second edition, 1906), and Readings on the " Paradiso " in 1900 (second edition, 1909).
In 1890 Dr. Moore published a second series of his Barlow lectures in the shape of a volume on Dante and his Early Biographers ; and from this date onwards, on an average, one or more volumes on Dante (to say nothing of articles in weekly, monthly, or quarterly periodicals too numerous to specify) have been published annually, either by Oxford scholars, or by the University Press on behalf of scholars not con- nected with Oxford. In 1892 C. L. Shadwell, of Oriel, printed the first instalment (cantos i.-xxvii.) of his translation of the Purgatorio in Marvellian stanzas, with an introduction by Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose. In the same year Mr. Gladstone once more discussed the question " Did Dante Study in Oxford ? " in the June number of the Nineteenth Century Maga- zine^ his conclusion being in the affirmative. In this year also R. R. Whitehead, of Balliol, printed privately at the Chiswick Press, for the first time in England, the Italian text of the Vita Nuova^ with introduction and notes. In the next year G. Musgrave, of St. John's, published a translation of the Inferno in Spenserian stanzas, the only version of any of the three cantiche in this metre.
^ In this article Gladstone makes the extraordinary blunder of putting into the mouth of Sordello the speech of Nessus in Inferno xii. 1 19-120.
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In 1894 the Clarendon Press published, under the editorship of Dr. Moore, an edition in one volume of the whole works of Dante, with index of proper names, etc., compiled by Paget Toynbee, of Balliol — ^the now well-known " Oxford Dante." Of this work, which was the first, and until the publication of Barbera's edition at Florence in 191 9, the only, single- volume edition of Dante's works, a second edition was published in 1897, and a third, very considerably revised, in 1904.
In 1895 C. H. St. John Hornby, of New College, printed at his own private Ashendene Press an edition of the Vita Nuova, which he followed up with editions of great beauty of the Inferno in 1902, the Purgatorio in 1904, the Paradiso in 1905, and the Ashendene Dante, a folio reprint of the " Oxford Dante," with woodcuts, in 1909, editions from the typographical point of view worthy to be ranked with some of the finest productions of the Cinquecento.
In 1896 Dr. Moore, who in the previous year had been appointed Taylorian lecturer on Dante at Oxford, a lectureship which was created for him, and which he held for three years, published the first series of his Studies in Dante, consisting largely, as did the subsequent volumes, of articles which he had contributed to the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and other reviews. A second series followed in 1899, a third in 1903, and a fourth in 191 7, the year after his death. The most important articles were those on Scripture and classical authors in Dante, with elaborate indices,
OXFORD AND DANTE 69
in the first series ; the discussion of the genuineness of the Qucestio de Aqua et Terra^ in the second ; the astronomy and geography of Dante, and the discus- sion of the genuineness of the Letter to Can Grande, in the third ; and the textual criticism of the Con- vivio^ in the fourth — the whole collection, covering as it does practically the entire range of Dante's writings, constituting probably the most considerable and the most weighty contribution to the critical study of Dante due to any one author.
In the Quarterly Review for July 1896 there appeared a remarkable essay by the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Rev. John Earle, of Oriel, containing what is in many respects a wholly original view of the interpretation of the Vita Nuova. In this essay, which was an amplification of a paper read to the Oxford Dante Society, and which was subse- quently translated into Italian, Prof. Earle held that Dante deliberately composed the Vita Nuova as a preliminary to the Divina Commedia^ in order to be able to introduce Beatrice, his central figure in the latter, as a personality already familiar to his readers — an ingenious theory, which attracted considerable attention at the time, but which has not met with acceptance from Dante scholars.
In 1897 E. H. Pember, Q.C., of Christ Church, printed privately a volume of poems {Adrastus of Phrygid) in which was included a blank-verse transla- tion of Paradiso xv. A translation, in the same metre, of Purgatorio viii. was printed in a second volume
70 DANTE
{7 he Death-Song of ^hemyris) in 1899; and of the first four cantos of the Inferno in a third {l^he Finding of Pheidippides) in 190 1. A translation of Purgatorio xxviii.-xxxiii. (The Earthly Paradise) was completed a few years later, but was never printed.
In 1898 the Clarendon Press published a Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante^ by Paget Toynbee, of Balliol, much of the material for which had been published during the preceding ten years in a number of articles con- tributed to the Academy^ the Afhenceum, Romania^ the Giornale Storico della Letteratura I tali ana, and the Annual Reports of the Cambridge (U.S.A.) Dante Society.
In the following year Dr. Shadwell published the second instalment (cantos xxviii.-xxxiii.) of his trans- lation of the Purgatorio in Marvellian stanzas, with an introduction by Prof. Earle.
The sixth centenary, in 1900, of the assumed date of Dante's Vision, was commemorated by the publi- cation, under Oxford editorship, of two editions of the Divina Commedia, in honour of the occasion, the first being a revision of Witte's text, edited by Paget Toynbee, the other a reissue in large type by the Clarendon Press of the Oxford text, edited by Dr. Moore, with revised index of proper names by Paget Toynbee. In the same year the latter published a Life of Dante, of which a second edition was published in 1 901, a third in 1904, which was translated into Italian in 1908, and a fourth, considerably enlarged, in 1910.
OXFORD AND DANTE 71
In 1 90 1 the Clarendon Press published an English Commentary on the " Divina Commedia^'^ by the Rev. H. F. Tozer, of Exeter ; and in the following year T^he Troubadours of Dante^ by Rev. H. J. Chaytor, of All Souls. In that year (1902) also v^^as published Dr. Toynbee's Dante Studies and Researches^ the chief contents of v^^hich appeared in Italian at Bologna in 1899 and 1904. In the latter year the Clarendon Press published a prose translation of the Divina Commedia^ by Rev. H. F. Tozer ; and Dr. James Williams, Fellow of Lincoln, printed privately Thoughts on Dante, containing a terza rima translation of the Francesca episode, which was followed two years later by the publication at Oxford of Dante as a Jurist, the expansion of an article in the Law Magazine and Review for February 1897.
In the year 1905 there appeared at Oxford an important contribution to Dantesque literature, which, though not the work of Oxford scholars, is entitled to a place in this record as having been printed and published by the Clarendon Press, namely, the Con- cordance of the Italian Prose Works and Canzoniere of Dante, which was compiled by members of the Cambridge (U.S. A). Dante Society on the initiative of the late Professor C. E. Norton. This volume, it may be observed, and the companion Concordance of the Latin Works of Dante, produced in like condi- tions, and likewise published at Oxford (in 191 2), owe no inconsiderable part of their value as works of reference to the ' Oxford Dante/ upon which_^they are
72 DANTE
dependent for the line-references to the prose works. In the years 1 905-1 906 H. B. Garrod, formerly Post- master of Merton, delivered a series of lectures on Dante in London in connexion with University extension, which with others were published in 191 3, after his death.
During the next few years there is little to record of Oxford achievement in the field of Dante beyond occasional articles in periodicals, till we come to 1909, which, by way of compensation, proved exceptionally fruitful. In that year the Clarendon Press published a translation of the Convivio, by Dr. W. W. Jackson, Rector of Exeter ; a critical text and translation of the Qucestio de Aqua et Terra^ by Dr. Sha dwell. Provost of Oriel ; and T^he Moral System of Daniels Inferno^ by W. H. V. Reade, of Keble. The same year saw the publication of Dante in English Literature front Chaucer to Cary^ in two volumes, by Dr. Toyn- bee, the introduction to which had previously appeared in the Edinburgh Review (April 1908), and has since been translated into Italian ; ^he Use of Dante as an Illustrator of Scripture^ by Rev. Sir John Hawkins, Bart., of Oriel ; and a Handbook to the Works of Dante, by F. J. Snell, of Balliol.
In January 191 2 Dr. Toynbee published in the Modern Language Review the first of a series of twelve articles on the Letters of Dante, of which the last appeared in July 191 9, with a view to a critical edition of the Epistolce. In 191 3 Dante's De Monarchia was taken as the text of the Romanes Lecture on *' The
OXFORD AND DANTE 73
Imperial Peace, an Ideal in European History," by Sir W. M. Ramsay, former Fellow of Exeter and Lincoln, and Professor of Classical Archaeology and * Art at Oxford. In this year Oriel College received by donation from Miss Church the Dante books of her father, the late Dean Church, a former Fellow. In 1 91 4 the Clarendon Press published Dr. Toynbee's Concise Dante Dictionary ; and in 191 6 a reprint of the Oxford text of the De Monarchia, with an intro- duction on the Political Theory of Dante, by W. H. V. Reade. In the previous year was published Dr. Shad- well's translation of the Paradise in Marvellian stanzas, with an introduction by Dr. J. W. Mackail, former Fellow of Balliol, and Professor of Poetry.
In 1 91 6 the Bodleian received two Dante MSS., one of the Commedia (Cent. XV.), the other of the Convivio (Cent. XV.), by bequest from Dr. Moore, late Principal of St. Edmund Hall ; and 350 volumes of editions of Dante's works as a donation from Dr. Toynbee, who in the following year presented a collection of portraits, busts, and masks of Dante, and about 600 volumes of editions, commentaries, and translations of Dante. By Dr. Moore's bequest also Queen's College received his valuable Dante library, an accession, it may be hoped, which will serve to keep alive in Oxford the studies to which he devoted so many years of his life.
In 1 91 7 Hon. W. W. Vernon, of Christ Church, printed privately a volume of lectures on Dante, entitled Dante and his Times ; and in the same year
74 DANTE
was published by the Clarendon Press the last series, the fourth, of Dr. Moore's Studies in Dante, The record closes with the publication by the Clarendon Press in 1920 of Dr. Toynbee's edition, with critical text and translation, of the Epistolce ; and the issue at Oxford of the privately printed Record of the Oxford Dante Society^ as a contribution to the sexcentenary celebration.
If Oxford may not claim the honour of having welcomed Dante in person, according to the fond belief of Giovanni da Serravalle, and of Dean Plumptre and Mr. Gladstone, she can console herself with the thought that the first recorded copy in England of his immortal poem came to Oxford, and that with his other works, as the foregoing pages abundantly testify, it has been the object of " lungo studio e grande amore^"^ not wholly unfruitful, on the part of many generations of her sons.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF ULYSSES
Laurence Binyon.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF ULYSSES
Inferno, Canto XXVL 1. 52.
Who is in that fire which comes so torn in twain
As if it rose out of the pyre that hearsed
Eteocles beside his brother slain ? He answered me : Ulysses there is cursed
And with him Diomed ; as in wrath erewhile
Together, so together now amerced. They in their flame, tormented for old guile.
Bemoan the horse, whose wooden ambuscade
The gentle seed of Romans did exile. And they lament the fraud, whereby the shade
Of Deidamia for Achilles rues ;
And for Palladium stolen are they paid. If they within those sparks a voice can use,
Master, I said, I pray thee of thy grace —
A thousand times I pray thee, if thou refuse — Forbid me not to tarry in this place
Till that the horned flame blow hitherward ;
See, toward it how the longing bends my face ! And he to me : The thing thou hast implored
Deserveth praise, and for that cause thy need
Is answered ; yet refrain thy tongue from word. Leave me to speak, for well thy wish I read.
But they, since they were Greeks, might turn aside,
It may be, and thy voice disdain to heed.
n
78 DANTE
When that the fire had come where to my Guide Time and the place seemed fit, I heard him frame His speech upon this manner, as he cried :
O ye who are two within a single flame, If any merit I of you have won, If merit, much or little, had my name.
When the great verse I made beneath the sun, Move not, but let the one of you who can Tell where he went to perish, being undone.
The greater horn of the ancient flame began To shudder and make a murmur, like a fire When the wind troubles it with gusty fan,
Then carrying its crests, to and fro, higher, As it had been a tongue that spoke, it cast A voice forth from the strength of its desire.
Saying : When I from Circe got me at last. Who more than a year by Gaeta (before iEneas had so named it) held me fast.
Neither sweet son, nor old fond father, nor
The long-due love which was to have made glad Penelope for all the pain she bore.
Could conquer the inward hunger that I had To master earth's experience, and to attain Knowledge of man's mind, both the good and bad.
But I put out on the deep open main
With one ship only, and with that little band Which chose not to desert me ; far as Spain,
Far as Morocco, either shore I scanned ; Sardinia's isle I coasted, steering straight. And the isles of which that water bathes the strand.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF ULYSSES 79
I and my crew were old and over-late
When, at the narrow pass, we could discern The towers that Hercules set for a gate
That none should dare beyond, or farther learn. Already I had Seville on the right, And on the larboard Ceuta lay astern.
Brothers, I said, who manfully, despite
Ten thousand perils, have attained the West, In the brief vigil that remains of light
To feel in, stoop not to renounce the quest Of what in the sun's path may be essayed. The world that never man-kind hath possessed.
Think on the seed ye spring from ! Ye were made Not to live life of brute beasts of the field, But follow virtue and knowledge unafraid.
With such few words their spirit so I steeled. That I thereafter scarce could have restrained My comrades from the voyage, had I willed ;
And, our poop turned to where the Morning reigned. We made, for the mad flight, wings of our oars. And on the left continually we gained.
By now the Night beheld within her course All stars of the other pole, and ours so low, It was not lifted from the ocean floors.
Five times beneath the moon re-kindled slow The light had been, and quenched as oft, since we Broached the hard issue we were sworn to know,
When there arose a Mountain in the sea, Dimm'd by the distance ; loftier than aught That ever I beheld, it seemed to be.
8o DANTE
Then we rejoiced ; but soon to grief were brought. A storm came out of the strange land, and found The ship, and violently the fore-part caught.
Three times it made her to whirl round and round With all the waves ; and, as Another chose, The fourth time, heaved the poop up, the prow
drowned, Till over us we heard the waters close.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC
Edmund G. Gardner.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC
The literary criticism of the Middle Ages was naturally of a rudimentary character, and had in the main a practical tendency. It was directed towards teaching men how to speak well and write well, and how to compose poetry, rather than towards the aesthetic appreciation of works of art of the past. When such works were considered, it was normally from the point of view elucidated by Dante himself in the Letter to Can Grande.
But in this, as in so much else, Dante frequently soars beyond the' ideas of his age, and, from an early stage in his career, approaches literary questions with those same " luci chiare ed acute " which were to penetrate so deeply into the mysteries of the human spirit in the Divina Commedia,
We find a short chapter of literary criticism in the Fita Nuova. Dante is justifying himself for making love a human personification by appealing to the example of the classical poets, who similarly personify inanimate things, and even things which have no real existence. He distinguishes between such classical poets, poete litterati, and the new vernacular poets, poete volgari, dicitori per rima : " che dire per rima in volgare tanto e quanto dire per versi in latino,
83
84 DANTE
secondo alcuna proporzione." His summary account of previous romance poetry shows that his knowledge was at that time scanty, and his restriction of the matter of lyrical poetry to love is one that he will presently outgrow; but the rest of the chapter is legitimate and significant. " Onde, con cio sia cosa che a li poete sia conceduta maggiore licenza di parlare che a li prosaici dittatori, e questi dicitori per rima non siano altro che poete volgari, degno e ragionevole e che a loro sia maggiore licenzia largita di parlare che a li altri parlatori volgari ; onde, se alcuna figura o colore rettorico e conceduto a li poete, conceduto e a li rimatori." If the poete have used these figures and rhetorical colours, lo dicitore per rima has a right to do the same : " ma non sanza ragione alcuna, ma con ragione, la quale poi sia possibile d'aprire per prosa." After citing passages from Virgil, Lucan, Horace and Ovid, he adds a warning against abuse of the practice : " Dico che ne li poete parlavano cosi sanza ragione, ne quelli che rimano deono parlare cosi, non avendo alcuno ragionamento in loro di quello che dicono ; pero che grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guisa che avessero verace intendi- mento." ^ It is at once a defence of the classical tradition in imagery and a plea for sincerity in literary art. Figures and rhetorical colour are allow- able, not for their own sake, but when covering a
^ Vita Nuova xxv.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 85
real meaning which is capable of being expressed in prose.
The opening chapters of the Convivio, where Dante defends the writing of a prose treatise in the vernacular as a commentary upon his own canzoni, contain literary criticism of a higher order. Vernacular prose in Italy had not yet reached a stage of development comparable with that of the poetry, and he can justly say that " lo latino molte cose manifesta concepute nella mente, che il volgare fare non puo," and that its structure is more beautiful.^ His long plea, never- theless, for a vernacular rather than a Latin commen- tary, is based, as Dr. Wicksteed well notes, on the principle " that the atmosphere of the commentary should as much as possible harmonise with that of the text." Incidentally, we have this notable passage on the translation of poetry into another language, anticipating, for EngHsh readers, what Shelley was to write in his Defence of Poetry : —
" E pero sappia ciascuno, che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si puo della sua loquela in altra trasmutare, senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia. E questa e la ragione per che Omero non si muto di greco in latino, come I'altre scritture che avemo da loro ; e questa e la ragione per che i versi del Psaltero sono senza dolcezza di musica e d'armonia ; che essi furono trasmutati d'ebreo in greco, e di greco
^ Convivio i. 5.
86 DANTE
in latino, e nella prima trasmutazione tutta quella dolcezza venne meno." ^
M£:<^^'^^ , Further, Dante has a most striking passage on the
iX*^^ \ potentialities of Italian prose, which carries with it a ^/H^y "^ corollary of more general application, for he implies I / that the real beauty and capacities of a language are to be tested by its prose rather than by its poetry : —
" Per questo comento la gran bonta del volgare di St si vedra, pero che (si come per esso altissimi e novissimi concetti convenevolmente, sufficientemente e acconciamente, quasi come per esso latino, si espri- mono) la sua virtu nelle cose rimate, per le accidentali adornezze che quivi sono connesse, cioe la rima e lo ritmo o'l numero regolato, non si puo bene mani- festare ; si come la bellezza d'una donna, quando gli adornamenti dell'azzimare e delle vestimenta la fanno piu ammirare che essa medesima. Onde chi vuole bene giudicare d'una donna, guardi quella quando solo sua natural bellezza si sta con lei da tutto acci- dentale adornamento discompagnata ; si come sara questo comento, nel quale si vedra I'agevolezza delle sue sillabe, la proprieta delle sue condizioni, e le soavi orazioni che di lui si fanno ; le quali chi bene agguardera, vedra essere piene di dolcissima ed ama- bilissima bellezza." ^
^ Convivio i. 7. The translations from Greek prose which Dante knew were the works of Aristotle, the Timceus of Plato, and some of the writings of Dionysius and John of Damascus.
2 Convivio i. 10.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 87
Dante, the poet of the continuity of the Latin civilisation, the prophet of Italy's re-vindication of her rightful place among the nations who owe to her their share in that civilisation, was the first romance phil- ologist. The De Vulgar i Eloquentia is the first treatise ever written on romance philology, the Italian language, and the art of Italian poetry. Croce has observed : " Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia has great importance as a concomitant symptom of the new romance literature which is becoming aware of its own power, rather than for the aesthetic ideas that it contains or for the quality of its critical judgments." But we must remember that Dante is labouring as a pioneer in a totally unexplored field ; he has naturally none of the advantages of modern philologists and students of language, but only his own intuition and observation to guide him. The fact that his critical judgments are occasionally at fault, his conclusions sometimes erroneous, is less surprising than his originality and insight. This, perhaps, applies particularly to the wonderful first book, in some respects (as, for instance, in his treatment of the Italian dialects) the most modern in spirit of all that Dante has left us. It is true that the conclusion, to which this examination and classification of the dialects lead him, is an erroneous one ; for he rejects Tuscan, among the rest, in favour of the vulgar e illustre, as a form, Mazzini finely said, worthy of representing the national idea ; an ideal literary Italian, an abstraction free from local character- istics. In this he was influenced mainly by two
88 DANTE
^
considerations : the analogy between such a conven- tional language and the mediaeval conception of clas- sical Latin as grammatica ; and the fact that he finds, or seems to find, this abstraction realised in the lyrical poetry of certain of his predecessors — Sicilians, Apu- lians, Bolognese, Tuscans — who, though natives of different regions of Italy, appeared to be using a common literary language. As D'Ovidio well remarks : " The true and great unity of the language, of the language sufficient for every kind of poetry and of prose, was certainly still in the future. But a small ifnd circumscribed unity, the unity of the lyrical language, was already formed. The one was to be in great part the child of the Divina Commedia ; the other had already inspired the mistakes of the De Vulgari Eloquentia.^'* ^
But these matters less directly touch our present subject. I will here confine myself to the poetic theory of the second book.
Having evolved his doctrine of " the illustrious Italian vernacular," Dante declares that it is equally fit for use in prose and in verse. But, since not every kind of poetry requires this vulgare illustre^ it would seem to follow that there can be prose statelier than certain forms of poetry (the prose of which he was at the same time giving a practical example in the Convivio). Only certain subjects are worthy to be thus treated in poetry. In the Vita Nuova, he had censured " color o che rimano sopra altra mater a che
^ Fersificazione italiana e arte ■poetic a medioevaUy p. 525.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 89
amorosa, con cio sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d'amore." ^ Now he admits a wider range of subjects as worthy to be sung in the highest vernacular, and characteristically links his theory with a philosophical conception of human life. " As man has a threefold vital activity (tripliciter spirituatus est), to wit, the vegetable, the animal, and the rational, he journeys on a threefold way." ^ It is the old scholastic doctrine, derived from Aristotle, of the soul having three principles or modes of energy — what Dante in the Convivio calls potenze : potenza vegetativa (which Aquinas terms " nutritive "), concerned with the maintenance of the bodily organism ; potenza sensitiva ; potenza intellettiva^ or rational power. ^ We live by the first, perceive and feel by the second, know and understand by the third. They may be called " Life," " Sense " or " Sensation," " Reason " or " Understanding." In man, these three powers or functions are dependent upon each other, and are included in the rational soul, which is the one actuating principle. Dante says that, accord- ing to the vegetative power, man seeks what is useful ; according to the animal, what is pleasurable ; " secundum quod rationale, honestum quserit, in quo solus est, vel angelicae naturae sociatur " ; ^ " according as he is rational, he seeks what is spiritually beautiful, in which he is alone, or shares in the angelic nature." Both Augustine and Aquinas attach the
1 Vita Nuova xxv. " De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 2.
3 Convivio iii. 2. * De Vulgari Eloquentia ii, 2.
90 DANTE
meaning of " spiritually beautiful " to the word honestum ; Aquinas adopting a sentence of Augustine, to the effect that by honestum he understands " intel- ligible beauty which we properly call spiritual." ^ We remember that the epithet onesta is applied to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova : " Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare " ; and there is a passage in the Convivio where heltate delV anima is used as practically equivalent to the present quod est honestum? In each of these spheres, what is greatest is worthy of supreme artistic treatment : —
" First, in respect of what is useful ; in which, if we carefully consider the purpose of all who seek utility, we shall find it nought else except safety. Secondly, in respect of what is pleasurable ; in which we say that to be most greatly pleasurable which delights by the most precious object of the appetite ; and this is Love. Thirdly, in respect of what is spiritually beautiful ; in which no one doubts that it is Virtue, Therefore these three, to wit, Safety^ Love and Virtue^ appear to be those highest matters which are to be treated most greatly, or rather, the things which are chief with respect to them — as valour in arms^ thejlre of love, and the direction of the zvill.^^^
The widening of Dante's conception of the legiti- mate subject of vernacular poetry, since the days of the Vita Nuova, was probably in part due to his study
^ Summa Theologica, II. ii., q. 145, a. 2.
2 Convivio iii. 15.
2 Dg Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 2.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 91
of the troubadours. Taking his examples from both Provence and Italy, he cites Bertran de Born as having written on arms, Arnaut Daniel and Cino da Pistoia on love, Giraut de Borneil and himself (" the friend of Cino ") on rectitudo.
Turning now to consider what is the most excellent form in which these subjects can be treated, Dante finds it to be the canzone. A subject fit to be sung in the highest or " tragic " style must be dealt with in a canzone : the stateliness of the lines, the loftiness of the construction, and the excellence of the words harmonising with the weightiness of the matter.^ Thus a canzone is a tragic a conjugatio, a joining together in the tragic style of equal stanzas without a refrain and referring to one subject (ad unam sen- tentiam). The words " without a refrain " {sine responsorio) are inserted to distinguish the canzone proper from the ballata or canzone a ballo, which had a special ripresa sung at the beginning and repeated after each stanza. What Dante calls the tragic a conjugatio is most nearly realised in English poetry by the ode, while the closest counterpart to the canzone — though with the number of lines varying in the stanza — is offered by Spenser's Epithalamion,^ In the rules that Dante lays down for the construction of the canzone in every detail, we may notice his
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 4.
2 De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 8. This, of course, refers only to the type of canzone with stanzas divisible into metrical periods ; the other type, the sestina, is familiar to English poetry from the Elizabethans to our own day.
^//(Tv-U--^^
92 DANTE
predilection for a stanza ending with a rhyming couplet : '' Pulcerrime tamen se habent ultimorum carminum desinentiae, si cum rithimo in silentium cadant." ^
Professor Saintsbury has noted the remarkable contrast between the De Vulgari Eloquentia and Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. The principal object proposed in the Lyrical Ballads was " to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them through- out, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men " ; " humble and rustic life was generally chosen " ; the language of men in such life was adopted, with avoidance of " poetic diction." Further, Wordsworth lays down as a general rule that " the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose." Dante, on the other hand, declares that the illustrious language is not suited " to dwellers in the mountains dealing with rustic concerns," ^ and conceives of his three noblest subjects, dealt with in the highest style, with deliberate choice of the noblest construction and of the noblest words, excluding childish words because of their simplicity, and sylvan words because of their roughness : " Consider, reader, how much it behoves thee to use the sieve in selecting noble words ; for if thou hast regard to the illustrious vulgar tongue, which poets ought to use when writing in the tragic style in the
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 13. ^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. I.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 93
vernacular, thou wilt take care that the noblest words alone are left in thy sieve." ^ But the opposition between Dante and Wordsworth is not so complete as might thus appear. Dante is here considering one particular form of poetry, the " one supreme poem in the vulgar tongue which we call canzone by super- excellence " ; ^ and Wordsworth himself gives us some- thing directly analogous with the tragica conjugatio in such pieces as Intimations of Immortality, the Ode to Duty, the Ode " Who rises on the banks of Seine."
For Dante, as for his contemporaries, lyrical poetry was poetry written for a musical setting. In the De Vulgari Eloquentia, he defines poetry Sisjictio rethorica musice composita, " a rhetorical fiction [or, perhaps, " fashioning "] musically composed " — and he tells us, in the Convivio, that poets are " those who have bound their words with the art of music " : " i poeti che colP arte musaica le loro parole hanno legate." ^ To complete this definition of poetry, we need the famous conversation between Dante and Bonagiunta of Lucca in the Pur gator io : — ■
Ma di' s'io veggio qui colui che fuore
Trasse le nuove rime, cominciando :
Donne, cFavete intelletto d'amore. Ed io a lui : Io mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Che ditta dentro, vo significando.*
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 7.
2 De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 8. In these three quotations I avail myself of Mr. A. G. F. Howell's translation. ^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 4 ; Convivio iv. 6. * Purgatorio xxiv. 49-54.
94
DANTE
Here poetry is treated as depending upon direct inspiration and artistic correspondence with it. We see that Dante admits two elements in his definition : the one referring to inspiration and spiritual content (" lo mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto ") ; the other to technique and external form (" ed a quel modo che ditta dentro, vo significando.") The first part clearly corresponds with what, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia^ he calls sententia.
Again, still in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante curiously contrasts the poets who write verse in the vernacular with the Latin poets, the " regular " or " great " poets : " They differ from the great poets, that is, the regular poets, for the latter were great in language and regular in art when they wrote poetry, whereas the former compose casually. It therefore happens that, the more closely we imitate those, the more correctly we write poetry." ^ He apparently means that the Italian poets had hitherto composed without the perfectly formed language and clearly defined metrical rules of the Latin poets, whom he holds up for imitation in these respects.
This sentence surely illustrates Dante's own words to Virgil in the Divina Commedia : — •
O degli altri poeti onore e lume,
Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore, c Che m'han fatto cercar lo tuo volume.
Tu se' lo mio maestro e il mio autore : / Tu se' solo colui da cui io tolsi
Lo bello stile che m'ha fatto onore.^
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 4. ^ Inferno i. 82-87.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 95
It has also a direct bearing upon the lines associating Guido Cavalcanti with himself, in the tenth canto of the Inferno ; a passage of searching literary criticism, presented in allegorical fashion : —
Piangendo disse : Se per questo cieco
Carcere vai per altezza d'ingegno, / LVf<jO
Mio figlio ov'b ? e perchfe non fe teco ? / ^ '
Ed io a lui : Da me stesso non vegno : /^ Jj^
Colui, ch'attende Ih, per qui mi mena, ^^^IT j^/JiC'^^''''^ Forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno.^ L^-''^
These lines answer the question why Guido Caval- canti, with all his talent, could not, like Dante, compose a Divina Commedia, and thus follow Virgil through the other world. In the eyes of men like Guido's father the two had begun alike. They had appeared as the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, and had practised lyrical poetry together; but, whereas Guido had studied exclusively his Provengal and Italian pre- decessors, neglecting the classical poets, and more particularly the JEneid, Dante could appeal in addition to il lungo studio e il grande amore which had made him search through Virgil's volume, had given him a higher flight, the hello stile, and the starting-point for his own poem.^
It is clear that the two poets whom Dante regarded as the greatest among the Italians of the thirteenth century were Guido GuiniceUi and Guido Cavalcanti — though he speaks, in the De Fulgari Eloquentia, of his younger contemporary, Cino da Pistoia, in a way
^ Inferno x. 58-63.
2 Cf. F. D'Ovidio, Studii sulla Divina Commedia, pp. 162-168.
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that implies that the last named was at least their equal. The two Guides, Guido of Florence and Guido of Bologna, are coupled in the well-known lines placed upon the lips of Oderisi of Gubbio in the Purgatorio : —
Cosi ha tolto I'uno all' altro Guido La gloria della lingua, e forse t nato Chi Tuno e I'altro caccer^ del nido.^
I think that the full meaning of the episode is not realised by understanding this as either a mere general prophecy of a greater poet to come or a specific reference to Dante himself. The tone of the whole passage, taken in connexion with what follows, seems to imply that Oderisi is supposed to be making a vague general statement, but that Dante — for a moment — does apply it to himself ; for, when presently the former goes on to speak of the transient character of such renown, the poet answers : —
Tug vero dir m'incora Buona umiltS, e gran tumor m'appiani.^
And he is still in this humbled frame of mind when, in the seventh terrace, he looks upon Guido Guinicelli : —
Quand'i' odo nomar se stesso, il padre Mio e degli altri miei miglior, che mai Rime d'amore usar dolci e leggiadre.^
He is speaking here of love-poetry only, of lyrical love- poetry in which la gloria della lingua had originally been won. There is possibly an allusion to Cino da
^ Purgatorio xi. 97-99. ^ ibid. 1 1 8-1 19. ^ ibid. xxvi. I97-99.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 97
Pistoia, who is nowhere mentioned in the Divina Commedia, but whom Dante had exalted in the De Vulgari Eloquentia as the representative poet of love, and thus, perhaps, by implication, superior in this respect to himself. It is a little tempting to associate with this the way Guido Guinicelli is made to place Arnaut Daniel above Giraut de Borneil in the same canto, for, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante had coupled Arnaut Daniel with Cino, Giraut de Borneil with himself : —
O frate, disse, questi ch'io ti cerno
Col dito (ed addit6 uno spirto innanzi), Fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.
Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi
Soverchio tutti ; e lascia dir gli stolti, Che quel di Lemos\ credon ch'avanzi.
A voce pill ch'al ver drizzan li volti ; E cosl ferman sua opinione, Prima ch'arte o ragion per lor s'ascolti.
Cosl fer molti antichi di Guittone,
Di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio, Fin che I'ha vinto il ver con piu persone.^
For the rest, Dante's exaltation of Arnaut Daniel and his constant depreciation of Guittone d'Arezzo are his two critical judgments the least easy of accept- ance for the modern reader. In the case of Arnaut Daniel, the metrical skill and originality of that " miglior fabbro del parlar materno," which so pro- foundly influenced Dante himself at the stage of the rime pietrose, had clearly won for him this high place in the estimation of his Italian successor. Even Guido
^ Purgatorio xxvi. 1 15-126. Cf. De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 2. H
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Guinicelli had been no innovator in matters of technique ; his gift to Dante, and to Italian poetry in general, had been in the sphere of the spirit. As for Fra Guittone, " qui nunquam se ad curiale vulgare direxit," his " municipalia dicta " would seem to have obscured in Dante's eyes the " gravitas sententiarum " which we must surely recognise in much of his verse. On the other hand, it is noticeable that the polished language, the use of " vocabula curialiora " in his lyrics which Dante perceives in Giacomo da Lentino (together with Rinaldo d' Aquino, whom elsewhere he seems to rank higher), does not save the Notary from inclusion by Bonagiunta among those whom the nodo (of conventionality or imitation) held back from the dolce stil nuovo : —
O frate, issa vegg'io, diss' elli, il nodo,
Che il Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne
Di qua dal dolce stil novo ch'i' odo. lo veggio ben come le vostre penne
Diretro al dittator sen vanno strette,
Che delle nostre certo non avvenne. E qual Tpih a riguardar oltre si mette,
Non vede piti dall' uno all' altro stile.^
" Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi." This line
brings us back to that singularly interesting passage in
the De Vulgari Eloquentia where Dante, examining
the rival claims for pre-eminence of the three neo-
Latin languages, cites the vernacular prose of France,
the alleged chronological primacy of the poetry of
Provence. Here, for romanzi (the only place where
^ Purgatorio xxiv. 55-62. Cf. De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 10, ii. 13. i. 13, ii. 6, i. 12.
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 99
Dante uses the word " romance "), we have the Latin ambages : " Arturi regis ambages pulcerrimae." ^ It is evident, I think, that Dante was from the beginning more attracted and impressed by the Arthurian legends than by the matter of the Carolingian cycle. From the Carolingian story we have indeed one terzina, full of romantic feeling, where the horn of Nimrod thunders through the lowest circle of Hell : —
Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quando Carlo Magno perd^ la santa gesta, Non son6 s\ terribilmente Orlando.^
But a bare indication suffices for Ganellon. Charle- magne and Roland, William and Rainouart, flash through the ruddy cross of the sphere of Mars ; Dante's gaze follows their flight, " com'occhio segue suo falcon volando " ; but that is all. The Arthurian glamour, on the other hand, touched the poet's spirit to finer issues. The magic boat which Merlin gave to the Lady of Shalott supplies the imagery of his early sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti (Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed to) ; " il cavaliere Lancilotto " is surely felt as more than a mere name in one of the most striking passages of the Convivio ; the fifth canto of the Inferno^ with " le donne antiche e i cavalieri," has the true Arthurian intonation ; out of the romances of
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia i. lo. On the word ambages^ cf. Rajna, in the first volume of Barbi's new series of Studi Danteschi.
^ Inferno xxxi. 16-18. Since writing this, I find the following appreciation of these lines in Croce, La foesia di Dante, p. 93 : " La terzina in cui par che si raddensi e si componga nella sua maggior linea I'epica delle chansons de geste"
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Lancelot and Tristram alike came the ineffable episode of Paolo and Francesca.
There can, I think, be little doubt that Dante intended to dedicate the De Fulgari Eloquentia to Cino da Pistoia, as he had previously dedicated the Vita Nuova to Guido Cavalcanti. We remember how Cino himself, in a sonnet after his friend's death, describes the Divina Commedia as the book " che mostra Dante signor d'ogni rima." What, then, is its relation to the poetic theories of the De Fulgari Eloquentia P
We read in the Letter to Can Grande : " There are six things which must be inquired into at the beginning of any work of instruction : to wit, the subject^ agent, form, and end, the title of the work, and the branch of philosophy it concerns." ^ This illustrates the spirit in which the mediaeval critic approached a great literary work. It is not peculiar to Dante. A slightly older contemporary, Albertino Mussato of Padua, about 1 3 14, wrote a Latin tragedy, the Ecerinis, on the subject of the tyranny of Ezzelino and Alberico da Romano, and we possess the commentary composed upon it in 1317 (a year or two before the Letter to Can Grande) by a Bolognese grammarian, Guizzardo. This commentary begins with precisely the same indication of treatment as the Letter to Can Grande : " In the beginning of this book, which is the Ecerinis, as is the fashion of commentators, the six usual things must be said : to wit, the efficient cause, the final ^ Epistola X. 6 (Dr. Wicksteed's translation).
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC loi
cause ^ th.Q formal cause ^ the material cause ^ under what part of philosophy it falls, and what is the title of the book.^^ The efficient cause is the author (or, as Dante puts it, the agent), the final cause is what Dante calls the end, the formal cause is the form of the poem, the material cause is the subject. But the method and phraseology are similar. Just as the end of the Divina Commedia is "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and to lead them to the state of felicity," so the final cause of the Ecerinis is "to instruct those present or to come to preserve free governments and to shun tyrannies." ^
Under the title of the work, Dante still retains more or less the theory of style that he had maintained in the De Vulgari Eloquentia : tragedy being an exalted and sublime mode of speech, comedy lax and humble ; and, therefore, the Divina Commedia falls under the latter head. Also, we know from the De Vulgari Eloquentia that he intended, in its unwritten fourth book, 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 ver- nacular should be used, and also, dealing with poems in the middle vulgar tongue, to treat specially of rhyme.^ In the Letter to Can Grande, speaking of the form, Dante does not touch the metre of the Divina Commedia ; but there is extant what is prac- tically a contemporary criticism of the subject.
^ Albertino Mussato, Ecerinide, ed. L. Padrin, pp. 78-83. 2 De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 4, ii. 13.
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Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan judge, in 1332 dedicated to Alberto della Scala (the nephew of Can Grande) a treatise on Italian poetry, Summa artis rithimici or De Rithimis vulgarihus. It is written in Latin, but with examples of Italian verse composed by the author himself. Antonio da Tempo had read the Divina Commedia^ but knew nothing of the De Fulgari Eloquentia, and thought that he was the first writer on " vernacular rhythms " ; his work had a wide circulation, whereas the De Fulgari Eloquentia fell out of sight until the Cinquecento. The book is an important supplement to the De Fulgari Eloquentia, because, although Antonio da Tempo deals scantily and superficially with the canzone, he treats certain minor kinds of vernacular rhythms very fully — the sonnet (of which he distinguishes sixteen varieties), the ballata, the serventese, the madrigal, and others. When he comes to the serventese (a species of popular poetry, what we should now call occasional verse, originally used more particularly for satirical and political purposes as distinguished from the stately canzone of love), he says that it is probably called '* serventese " because it serves all men, including those who have not a more subtle intellect. It is thus a deviation from its normal character when the serven- tese depicts history or is subtly fashioned from histories or ancient deeds, " as was the method of Master Dante Alighieri. For although in its arrangement of rhymes that manner of Dante had, as it were, the form of a serventese, it nevertheless was not a serventese, but
DANTE AS LITERARY CRITIC 103
could rather be called tragedy, albeit he himself called his book a comedy." ^
Modern scholarship has confirmed the Paduan judge, and regards the ter7:,a rima of the Divina Corn- media as the development of a particular form of serventese — though so entirely transfigured that its humble origin is concealed. No doubt the serventese was one of the kinds of poetry to be dealt with in the fourth book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia, But, whatever its metrical origin, it is difficult to believe that Dante would have thus consigned to a humble corner of his treatise
II poema sacro Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.
Rather must we suppose that, as he advanced with the Divina Commedia, Dante's views on vernacular poetry had undergone modification. As far as we know, he wrote no canzoni in later life ; the tragica conjugatio was no longer his ideal of poetry. All kinds of speech find their place in the poem, which is at times epical in intonation, at others moving with the freedom of familiar conversation, at others rising on exquisite flights of lyrical interbreathing. " Armorum pro- bitas," " amoris accensio," " directio voluntatis," all receive due utterance, and the Divina Commedia ^^ prepared the way for that unity of Italian literature * in the illustrious vernacular that Dante had already sought, not quite successfully, in the De Vulgari
^ Delle rime volgari trattato di Antonio da Tempo, ed. G. Grion, p. 147.
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Eloquentia, as a worthy medium for the expression of the national idea.
It is obvious that characterisation, when based upon literary sources, may be essentially an exercise of literary criticism. There is a chapter in the De Monarchia, reconstructing the character of St. Peter — with his " puritas et simplicitas naturalis " — out of the Gospels,^ which anticipates such creation of character in the Divina Commedia. The presentation of Virgil himself is an example. Discarding the medieval legends of Virgil the magician, Dante gave the world a figure of his master and predecessor, " I'altissimo poeta," derived — at least in its main features — from the long and loving study of the jEneid and the fourth Eclogue. The delineation of Cato — when the allegorising tendencies of the Convivio have been left behind — is surely a critical appreciation of the noblest aspect of the Pharsalia. The somewhat enigmatical figure of Sordello, and the part he plays in the Purgatorio, is nothing but an imaginative reconstruction of the troubadour's personality from his own great poem on the death of Blacatz. It would not be hard to show that the function and character of certain of the blessed in the Paradiso — notably Thomas Aquinas, Peter Damian, and St. Bernard — are so based upon their own writings as to furnish an interpretation and illumined criticism. We turn from the Paradiso to their works upon our shelves as to the books of a personal friend of our own. ^ De Monarchia iii. 9.
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND THE ITALY OF VIRGIL
J. W. Mackail.
.^^
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND THE ITALY OF VIRGIL
It is matter of common consent that Dante is, not only the greatest of the poets produced by Italy since the age of Virgil, but also a national Italian poet in the fullest and most vital sense. From the begin- nings of the Risorgimento until now, he has been accepted and proclaimed as the poet and prophet of Italy. Writers and thinkers of all types, ranging from Leopardi to Mazzini, were at one in so regarding him. To this view, when once it had been firmly established and had spread through the common consciousness of the civilised world, is very largely due the extraordinary growth, both in extent and in depth, of the study of Dante during the last thirty or forty years. There were many contributory reasons for it : the general widening of the intellectual horizon ; the development of the historical method as a new calculus for searching and interpreting the past ; the revival of interest in the medieval Empire and in the institutions or ideals of the Middle Ages ; and, it may be added, a better appreciation both of poetry as an art and of art as not merely an expression, but a function of life. But among all these and other reasons stands prominent this : that Dante was one, and one of the most impor-
io8 DANTE
^y
tant, of the intellectual and spiritual forces which went to create Italian unity and nationality, and to show the path for the mission of Italy as well as for her effective existence.
The purpose of the present paper is not to analyse this claim. It is rather to attempt some closer defini- tion of it, and to mention some lines of thought which it suggests. To weigh it more fully would be a task at once intricate and immense. It will be sufficient for the moment to indicate, without pursuing them into detail, some of these lines of thought and their interconnexion, and, more particularly, to observe, as has perhaps not hitherto been clearly enough done, the analogies in this respect between Dante and Dante's master. The more we study these, the more fertile they will appear in suggestion, the more potent in illumination, not as regards the two poets and their work only ; for they bear directly on the question, no mere abstract one, how far Italian nationality and Italian unity are a new creation, and how far the recapture of an ancient ideal, or even the renewal of an ancient achievement.
Questions which at once occur in our reading of Dante are, among others, these. First, what precise meaning is to be attached to the term Italy as he uses it ? Secondly, in what sense was Dante, or in what sense did he feel himself to be, an Italian, as distinct from a Florentine on the one hand and an Imperialist on the other ? Thirdly, what influence was exercised on him by his conception of Italy,
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 109
and what influence did he in turn exercise on that conception in other minds, in his own time and afterwards ?
All these questions may be asked about Virgil likewise ; and in exactly the same terms, if " Mantuan " be substituted for " Florentine." With regard to all three, the parallel between Dante and Virgil is striking and highly significant, quite apart from the further and equally interesting study of the direct influence of Virgil on Dante in the whole matter. In so large a subject, all that can be done here is to sketch its outlines and indicate some of the primary conclusions to be drawn from the inquiry. Further study would lead on to the still larger question of the relation of poetry to history. That has two sides. It involves the extent to which political and civic institutions or ideals mould poetry, and the extent to which, con- versely, the poets mould them. And yet more ; it leads on to a still higher claim — perhaps the highest — which can be made for poetry ; namely, that poetry is the ultimate expression of history, as of philosophy.
Geographically, Italy is one of the most striking instances of a country with definite natural boundaries. It is, in the classic phrase of Petrarch,
il bel paese Ch' Apennin parte e '1 mar circonda e V Alpe.
It lies, with but one gap, within a ring-fence of sea and mountain-wall. That gap is the open gateway on the north-eastern frontier, through which from
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time immemorial the peninsula has again and again been invaded and re-populated, and in whose fortunes lies the main key to Italian history. On its importance, both in Virgil's time and in Dante's, as long before Virgil and down to the present day, something more will have to be said. Otherwise the Italian peninsula is to the geographer a single country, clean-cut and well defined. Sicily and Sardinia are separate countries, connected with or disconnected from it politically by changes of events. The Alpine frontier on north and north-west has varied from time to time, but the precise line followed by it at one time or another has been chiefly a matter of the occupation of strategic points ; otherwise the changes in it have been neither extensive nor important.
But seldom, if indeed ever, has this single geogra- phical entity been fully either a single nation or a single state until the unification of the nineteenth century ; and that unification, though now politically secured, is still nationally far from complete. Italy, through- out history, has been the seat of kingdoms, republics, principalities, confederacies, which were all local and partial, and generally in acute conflict, racial and cultural, as well as political, among one another. And when it approached unity most nearly, it was not as a self-developed and independent state, but as a portion or province of a larger empire.
At the dawn of systematically recorded history — behind which it is needless to go for the present purpose — Italy was occupied by four main groups
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL in
among many others of smaller importance. These were : —
(i) The Celtic tribes of the north and north-west. They never coalesced into either a state or a nation.
(2) The Etruscan League, a powerful and well- organised confederacy, stretching slantwise across the peninsula from the north-eastern frontier down to the mouth of the Tiber, and at its greatest extension some way further. Its dominions covered the whole of the territory, and rather more, which was under the rule of the great Countess Matilda in the twelfth century.
(3) The Central-Italian populations. They were all seemingly of kindred blood, but were divided by language and tradition into the three groups of Oscans, Sabellians, and Umbro-Latins. It was among them that municipal organisation and conscious citizen- ship began. They had some sense of kinship, though not enough to keep them from perpetual warfare among one another; and they had a tendency to combine into leagues of smaller groups. The most important among these was the Latin league, within or rather on the edge of which grew up the unique city-state of Rome. But Rome was a city, not a nation. For the Latins themselves, no less than for the successive circles of tribes or peoples beyond them, Rome was the stone cut out without hands which smote them to pieces, and became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
(4) The Greek colonies in the south. The string
112 DANTE
of Greek towns with their territories was so nearly Continuous all round the coast from Cumae to Bari that it received a common name, Magna Graecia, the Greater Greece beyond the seas. The native popula- tion along this strip of coast was more or less Hellenised ; but Greek control nowhere reached far inland, and Greek influence not much further.
Among all these populations there was no trace and no sense of unity. The name of Italy (itself of uncertain origin) was for long used loosely and with a fluctuating sense. Records of the growth both of the name and of the thing it meant are almost wholly Roman. Beyond the Greek colonies on the southern coasts, the peninsula lay outside of the Greek world and of any special Greek interest. We do not know when the Romans began to use the word Italia, or what extent of country the name covered in its earliest use. At the time of the Pyrrhic wars it appears to have applied, though still very loosely, to the whole peninsula exclusive of Cisalpine Gaul and Liguria ; it covered, that is to say, pretty nearly the " leg " of Italy, south of the transverse section of the Apennine range. Its first definite extension to the full geo- graphical sense, the country " which the sea and the Alps surround," is found in Polybius. At the time of the Second Punic War, " the Romans," he says, " had subdued all Italy except the land of the Gauls " ; and Hannibal, when he crossed the Alps, descended the valley of the Dora " into Italy." For a hundred and fifty years more, usage continued to fluctuate, often
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 113
perplexingly, between the larger and the more restricted meaning.
But in whichever sense the term " Italy " were taken, Rome did not either then, or for long afterwards, identify herself with Italy, or seek to merge the Roman in an Italian state. The Roman primacy was that of a conqueror. Italy remained a complex aggregation of tribes, communities and municipalities, under Roman control, with a status ranging from that of full allies to that of mere subjects. It was dotted over at strategic points with Roman colonies sharing the full citizenship. The defeat of Pyrrhus, as stated by historians, " put an end to the last war which the Italians had waged for their independence " ; ^ but the independence sought was in no sense the independence of a united Italy, of a nation or a commonwealth.
As Roman control became more oppressive, and her Italian allies were treated more as subjects, a common desire to shake off this yoke led to a feeling towards joint Italian nationality. Concurrently, a movement arose at Rome for the incorporation of Italy in the Roman republic. Legislation in this sense was repeatedly brought forward. The question remained a burning one for a full generation. The assassination of Livius Drusus, in 91 b.c, before he had brought in his proposed law extending Roman citizenship to all the allies, was followed at once by
^ The words are those of Mommsen, Roman History^ Book IV. ch. vii.
114
DANTE
that general Italian revolt known as the Social War. An Italian Government, the first in history, v^as set up. Samnite and Latin were adopted as the joint official languages of the new state. Italian coinage was issued ; and the town of Italica (afterwards known as Corfinium) was founded in the centre of the peninsula as the new capital. It was the first of the disastrous attempts made in the course of history to create a unified Italy from which Rome was excluded.
Rome conquered in the field ; but as the result of the war Roman citizenship was, two years later, extended over Italy including Cispadane Gaul. The status of the north, however, remained anomalous and confused. In the eye of the law all the territory beyond the Rubico was still a province. The admission of the Transpadanes to citizenship was proposed in 65 B.C., but not effected until 49 b.c. Cisalpina only ceased to be technically a province in 42 b.c, the year of Philippi. A unified Italy then at last existed; and the Latin language, though still subject to local variations of dialect, soon became the common speech of the whole peninsula.
Virgil was born in 70 b.c, midway in the process of fusion. He combined in himself, in a very singular and significant way, all the strains which have been noted as the main elements in the complex fabric of an earlier period. He was a native of the Cisalpina. Mantua had been an important Etruscan city, and there is much reason to believe that Virgil himself was, on one side at least, of Etruscan blood. On more
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 115
doubtful evidence, drawn partly from his name and partly from the temper and romantic quality of his genius, he has been claimed, and very widely accepted, as Celtic by parentage. He was either born, or became very early in life, a Roman citizen. In his youth he absorbed Greek culture, and in later years lived at Tarentum, and finally settled at Naples, both originally Greek towns of the south.
The dominant ideal in his poetry, the keynote both of the Georgics and, more definitely, of the ^neid^ is the reconciliation and coalescence of Rome and Italy. In the Georgics he is perhaps more an Italian than a Roman. The laudes Italice, the matchless panegyric at the end of the Second Book, became a sort of sub- title for the whole poem. Yet it is interesting to note that the word Romanus occurs in the Georgics much oftener than Italus, In the Mneid their frequency is almost the same. Of set purpose, they are used as far as may be interchangeably. The synthesis, as a doctrine, a faith, and a prophecy, has become com- plete. It is the running motive of the Mneid through- out, emphasised over and over again in a hundred passages. The most striking in their setting are two at the beginning and end of the poem. In the prologue Virgil gives his whole argument in the seven majestic lines which begin on the word Italiam and end on the word Romce, At the conclusion he concentrates it into a single line in the scene of the reconciliation of the Gods, at once a prayer, a decree, and a benediction : Sit Romana potens Itala virtute
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propago. And midway between these he crystallises it into two words, Romula tellus, almost the last which come (vi. 876) from the glorified spirit of Anchises. It was this, even more than his quality as an artist, which secured for Virgil his unique place among the poets of the whole world through age after age. He may be called, in a very real sense, the creator for all time of Italian Rome and Roman Italy.
The unified Italy of Augustus and Virgil had reached its definite natural boundaries except at the open gates of the north-eastern frontier. From the prologue to the third Georgic may be inferred, in the difficult years between 36 and 31 b.c, a contem- plated retirement and consolidation of that frontier upon, or but little in advance of, the short and easily defensible line of the Mincio. Something similar had to be contemplated, as possibly inevitable, by the Italian Chief Command in the autumn of 191 7, after the disaster of Caporetto. But the situation was changed some years later by the successful offensive campaigns of Tiberius and Drusus. The frontier, instead of being drawn back, was pushed well forward into the Tyrol and Istria, up beyond Trent on the left, down beyond Trieste on the right. The Region of Venetia, numbered X in the Augustan organisation, included pretty nearly the whole of what until recently was known as Italia Irredenta. On west and south the Adige was the boundary between it and Region XI, Gallia Transpadana. Its northern limit was advanced from the foothills of the Venetian Alps
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 117
up to the watershed of the mountain chain, running roughly east and west, on the southern slopes of which are the sources of the Bacchiglione, Piave, and Tag- liamento. From the further end of that line, in the mountains above the sources of the Isonzo, the frontier turned at a right angle and ran almost due south. It followed, at least approximately, the watershed between the basins of the Isonzo and the upper Save ; it crossed the plateau of the Carso near its south- eastern end ; and it apparently reached the sea at the mouth of the little river Arsa, on the further side of the Istrian peninsula, just outside the mouth of the Quernero channel. It thus followed almost exactly the line traced by the Treaty of London in 191 5. In later years the upper half of this north-to-south line was again thrown forward in a deep salient, comprising the upper valley of the Save and its tributary streams, and extending at its apex a good way east of Laibach. Beyond this frontier were the provinces of Noricum to the north and Pannonia to the south of the Save. The covering legions were quartered far forward in these provinces, along the line of the Drave. Italy. was unified and complete ; and except for trifling modifications, the Augustan limits remained good for more than three hundred years.
But that unified Italy, impressive and majestic as it was, could hardly be called either a state or a nationality. It was the central core of the Roman Empire, which itself was the state, and in which dis- tinctions of nationality tended to become obliterated.
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Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam, says the last classical panegyrist of the Imperial achievement. Italy continued to have an administrative and a fiscal system differing from those of the provinces, but the distinction grew less and less. Its practical disappearance is registered, as an accepted fact which had to be regularised, by the historic Edict of Cara- calla in 212 a.d. The Latin language and culture had before then spread over the entire West. Gaul, Spain, Africa ranked side by side with Italy ; and while Rome was still the caput orbis^ the centre of the system and the seat of the central government, Italy was otherwise little more than one of the provinces.
Under Constantine's reorganisation of the Empire Italy becomes once more, as it was to be again in later ages, a geographical expression. Unity is lost. For other purposes than those of the geographer, the word Italy is used in three wholly different senses. The Prefecture of Italy included, besides the Italian peninsula, Rhaetia {i,e. Switzerland, and Bavaria up to the line of the Danube), Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, and the portion of Northern Africa now covered by Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitana. The Diocese of Italy was the Italian peninsula ; but it was little more than an administrative coupling-up of two Vicariates, corresponding in substance to the old Italy of the later Republic and to Cisalpine Gaul ; and now it is the latter, not the former, that bears the specific name of Italy. North and South have fallen asunder again ; and the capital is no longer Rome, but Milan.
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 119
The visit of Constantius to Rome in 357, so vividly described hy Ammianus, is a transitory apparition, like that of some Saxon or Swabian Emperor in the Middle Ages. We are passing from the ancient to the medieval and modern world. The Vicariate of Italy comprised the sub-provinces of Emilia, Flaminia, Liguria, Venetia, Istria, and the Cottian and Rhaetian Alps. The remainder of the peninsula, south of it, constituted the Vicariate of Rome. The Virgilian unity of Italy, like the Virgilian ideal of the identifi- cation or consubstantiation of Italy with Rome, had failed to accomplish itself.
To trace, even in brief summary, the course of Italian history between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries would be impossible within the limits of this paper. But a few salient points may be noted, as landmarks in the wide tract which lies between the Italy of Virgil and the Italy of Dante.
The deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odovakar in 476 registers, as it were, the disappearance of the old Virgilian and Augustan world, while it emphasises the complete severance of Italy and Rome. Odovakar took the title, for the first time in history, of King of Italy. But his kingdom was practically the Con- stantinian Vicariate, and the seat of government was Pavia. At the same time, the Senate and People of Rome formally renounced their traditional world- sovereignty; and while they nominally accepted the position of a diocese of the Byzantine Empire, left the way clear for the growth of the Temporal Power.
120 DANTE
The Gothic kingdom founded by Theodoric seventeen years later was larger and more of a reality. With better fortune it might gradually have taken effective possession of the peninsula and developed in it a nascent sense of common Italian nationality. But the fates were adverse ; when it was smashed to pieces by the military genius of Narses, Italy fell again into a bundle of fragments, under the general control of the exarchs of Ravenna. A few years later came the Lombard invasion and the foundation of a Lombard kingdom, also with its capital at Pavia, which lasted for two centuries. At its greatest extent it covered the bulk of the peninsula, exclusive of Genoa and Venice in the north, Rome and the Patrimony of Peter in the centre, and the coast towns of the South with their territories. But it was essentially, like its Gothic predecessor, a North-Italian kingdom ; the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento being only in loose feudal adherence to it, and the divorce of Rome from Italy which has lasted until modern times having taken full effect.
The resettlement of Italy by Charlemagne is obscure. But under the provisions of the Peace of Verdun in 843, the kingdom of Italy stretched, nominally at least, from the Alps to Terracina. The kings of Italy had little or no control over their feudatories ; and later in that century the Eastern Empire re-estab- lished itself in the south, with Bari as the Greek capital. The last futile attempt towards the creation of an independent and unitary Italy was made by
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 121
Berenger, Marquis of Ivrea, about the middle of the tenth century. But the hour of Piedmont had not yet come. Berenger ceded his kingdom to Otto the Great, who assumed the Iron Crown at Milan the year before he was crowned as Emperor. The kingdom of Italy as a substantive thing then ceased to exist for just nine hundred years.
During the three centuries from this point to the birth of Dante, the most important points to be noted as bearing on the Italian problem are perhaps these : —
(i) The development within the peninsula of five prominent powers which were in some .sense states. These were the republics of Milan, Florence, and Venice, the Patrimony of Peter, and the kingdom of Naples.
(2) The re-emergence of the Italian municipal instinct which had been developed and fostered by the policy and genius of Rome. It was accompanied by the growth of civic life and institutions and by the expansion of commerce. With these there gradually arose the consciousness of an Italian race, though not of an Italian nation.
(3) A further separation between north and south brought about by the Norman conquests in lower Italy. These began early in the eleventh century; but the Norman dukes did not assume the title of king until 11 30, and then called themselves kings of Sicily. This became later the joint kingdom of Sicily and Apulia.
(4) A series of transitory republics at Rome, which
122 DANTE
served to keep alive some memory of the great Roman past.
(5) The irreconcilable hostility between the Papacy and the Empire, from the time of Hildebrand (1073- 1085) onwards.
Between these two last great forces the heap of fragments into which Italy had fallen were used as gambling counters. Each of them passed from one side to the other according to the momentary prepon- derance of Guelfs or Ghibellines. LAny latent sense of nationality was swallowed up by the forces of municipal autonomy, which never re-combined except in shift- ing and short-lived confederacie§Ji After the battle of Legnano, in 11 76, historians note that the name Italy is not once used in the terms of pacification. But the idea of an independent Italy still lurked in the background. When Charles of Anjou was called in to crush Manfred, he received, in 1265, investiture in the indivisible regno — the kingdom of Italy — on condition that it should not be held together with the Empire. But from that so-called indivisible kingdom, Rome, with the Patrimony of St. Peter and the duchy of Benevento, was reserved ; and he was to hold the kingdom thus mutilated as a fief of the Church.
In the course of these three centuries, with the growth of inter-civic and foreign commerce, came wealth. With wealth and the extension of relations to other countries and races came culture. Culture could not be confined within municipal or provincial limits. The sense of common nationality grew up
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 123
concurrently with the spread of a highly internation- alised civilisation. At the court of Frederick II " Italian came into being as a language." Dante wrote in Tuscan ; but the Tuscan in which he wrote was also Italian. He created Italian literature ; and the immense power of words over human affairs is nowhere shown more remarkably than in the influence exercised on later history by that great achievement. In the De Vulgar i Eloquentia there is an extremely interesting passage illustrative of the interrelation between a common language and a common organised state. In the Italy of his own time, he says, there are fourteen distinct regional dialects, while the local sub-dialects run to not less than a thousand. The object of his inquiry is the discovery and definition of an established and regulated Italian language, the vulgare illustre, as he calls it. One of the notes of such a language is that it should be curiale^ the accepted language of a court. But here he anticipates an objection ; is it not idle — videtur nugatio — to speak of a curial Italian, cum curia careamus^ when there is no such thing as an Italian court ? And his answer to this objection is very striking : licet curia in Italia non sit^ membra tamen eius non desunt : curiam habemus, licet corporaliter sit dispersa : though there is no Italian court, there are the elements of one. These are " corporeally severed " ; but in the mass of frag- ments there is the material for, the potentiality of, the movement towards, an Italian court as the functional organ of an Italian state or nation.
124 DANTE
We may now turn to Dante's writings, and attempt ' to examine in them both how he defines or describes Italy geographically, and also in what terms he speaks of it either as an organised community or as a nation ; how it sorts itself in the ascending series {De Mon- archia i. 3) of vicinia, civitas, regnum, genus humanum, or in the collateral organism (ibid. 14) of nationes, regna et civitates,
Italia, Europce regio nobilissima, as he calls it else- where with national pride,^ extends " a lanuensium. Jinibus usque ad promontorium illud qua sinus Adriatici maris incipit et Siciliam " (De Vulgari Eloquentia i. 8). The area so defined is there named as that over which " St affirmando loquuntur.^^ It is based, that is to say, on the ground of a common language rather than of a common race or citizenship. Thus likewise, in a corresponding passage in the Inferno (xxxiii. 79), its inhabitants are referred to as le genti, not la gente,
Del bel paese la dove il si suona.
From east to west it extends tra due liti (Paradiso xxi. 106). Lo dosso d"* Italia (Purgatorio xxx. 86) is the backbone of the Apennines, running right from end to end of it. The I anuensium fines are practically the same as the Augustan boundary between Italy and Gallia Narbonensis, which was fixed at the river Var. From that point its northern frontier is approximately defined in the lines (Inferno xx. 61-3),
I De Monarfhia ii. 3.
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 125
Suso in Italia bella giace un laco Appie deir Alpe, che serra Lamagna Sopra Tiralli, ch' ha nome Benaco ;
it includes, that is, the whole of the Lago di Garda, and marches with " Germany " in the sense in which that term includes Teutonic-speaking Switzerland. Its north-eastern limit is precisely assigned in another passage of the Inferno (ix. 113): —
a Pola presso del Quarnaro Che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna.
The channel of Quarnero divides Istria from the island of Cherso. Outside of it, at the tip of the promontory of the Istrian peninsula, is Pola. Thus Pola is placed definitely in Italy. But if Dante's words are pressed closely, his frontier does not reach up to the head of the Istrian Gulf beyond the Quarnero channel, and a fortiori does not include Fiume, which is further on round the corner of the Gulf. North- west of this, and in the debateable land, Dante's Italy includes the sources of the Brenta and Piave (Paradiso ix. 27) ; in other words, it reaches up to the watershed of the Carnic Alps. The much-debated meaning of the umile Italia of Inferno i. 106, does not affect the question of geographical boundaries.
Virgil had, with a conscious and definite purpose,^ made the words Roman and Italian as nearly as might be interchangeable and equivalent. Dante uses the words Latin and Italian indiscriminately; they coalesce with him into a single meaning less as a matter of deliberate doctrine than at the prompting
126 DANTE
of a mixed poetical and historical instinct. Sordello calls Virgil (Purgatorio vii. i6) gloria de^ Latin. The terra Latina of Inferno xxviii. 71, quella dolce terra Latina in line 26 of the previous canto, is not Latium, but Italy. The Sienese Omberto says {Purgatorio xi. 58), io fui Latino. When Virgil asks {Inferno xxix. 88
foil.)
Dinne s' alcun Latino e tra costoro Che son quinc' entro,
Grifolino of Arezzo answers for himself and Capocchio of Siena, Latin sem noi amhedue. So also to the question {Inferno xxii. 65)
Conosci tu alcun che sia Latino Sotto la pece ?
the reply given {ibid. 1. 97) is
Se voi volete vedere o udire. . . . Toschi o Lombardi, io ne far6 venire.
The identification is even more pointedly made by the wording of the question {Purgatorio xiii. 92), Ditemi . . . s^anima e qui tra voi che sia Latina^ and the reply given to it,
O frate mio, ciascuna h cittadina D' una vera cittd : ma tu vuoi dire, Che vivesse in Italia peregrina.
The supreme expression of the unity and solidarity of Italy in Dante is, of course, the magnificent outburst beginning Ahi serva Italia in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio, which was a storm-beacon through the
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 127
centuries, and became the watchword of the Risor- gimento. Next to it in importance come the vision of the Emperor Rudolf in the next canto (vii. 91-6),
imperador che potea Sanar le piaghe ch' hanno Italia morta,
but who neglected his task and calling; and that of the Emperor Henry VII (Paradiso xxx. 137), who
a drizzare Italia Verra in prima che ella sia disposta.
Striking also is the bitter cry (Paradiso xxvii. 57-60) from the lips of St. Peter,
O difesa di Dio, perch^ pur giaci ? Del sangue nostro Caorsini e Guaschi S'apparecchian di bere : o buon principio, A che vil fine convien che tu caschi !
It is not only an expression of the Italian loathing for the French Popes, John XXII and Clement V, but a sombre prophecy of the Age of Invasions, beginning with that of 1494, when once more, as in 1265, Carlo venne in Italia.
The apostrophe to Italy in the De Monarchia ii. 13, " O Ausoniam gloriosam si nunquam infirmator tile imperii tui " — the Emperor Constantine — " natus fuisset ! " identifies " Ausonia," the whole of Italy, with Rome or the Populus Romanus to which {ibid, i. 2) belonged by divine ordinance the monarchy of the world. It is in this sense probably that Dante calls Italy (Purgatorio vi. 78) donna di provincie ; though it must be remembered that the eleven regions into
128 DANTE
which Italy itself was divided by Augustus also came to be called provinces (as with modifications they still are) as early as the fourth century. The title donna di provincie has in any case imposed itself on the imagination of the world ; the " lady of lands," the " donna e reina^'' ^ has ever since been named and passionately loved as such.
It would be beyond the present scope to trace the faith and doctrine of a unified Italy and a single Italian nation through the times after Dante had given them vital expression. Through the successive periods which fill these six hundred years — the Age of the Despots, the Age of the Invasions, the Age of Spanish-Austrian ascendancy, the revolutionary Napoleonic changes, the reinstated Austrian pre- dominance, the complex movements which resulted in the creation of the kingdom of Italy in 1861, and the extension of the kingdom to its full natural boundaries which has only now been completed — Dante's vision has been a spiritual influence, a con- structive force, which has waxed or waned, but has never ceased to operate.
Nor would it be possible here to follow out the equally important history of the politico-ecclesiastical relations between Italy and Rome, or to trace more fully the causes and results of that inherent duality which goes back, as we have seen, to the beginnings of Roman and Italian history. The solution of that
■^ Swinburne, T^he Song of the Standard ; Leopardi, So-pra il Monu- mento di Dante.
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 129
duality in a higher synthesis was the prophetic message of Virgil, and, in a different way, of Dante also. It still remains an unrealised ideal. The Fortuna Urhis of the Roman Empire never became a Fortuna Italia, Rome, the city, has for just fifty years been the Italian capital; but the spiritual Rome, like her imperial predecessor, has reached out beyond and become separated from Italy in the gigantic effort to include the world.
In the Augustan age the canonisation of Rome was the work of Livy. Virgil's greater aim was the inter- substantiation of Rome and Italy, the creation of a Roman Italy which should also be an Italian Rome. That this was never effected has been the tragedy of history since. If we try to define Virgil's position on the graded scale of patriotism, we may say that he was first and foremost an Italian; that he was a Roman in so far as he identified the mission and the glory of Rome with the glory and the mission of Italy; and that he was a Cisalpine, and more particularly a Mantuan, mainly by blood, birth, and early associa- tions. Of Mantua he speaks over and over again with a thrill of pride and affection: in the superet modo Mantua nobis of the Eclogues (ix. 27) ; in the Et qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum of the Georgics (ii. 198) ; and most conspicuously in two great passages : the proem to the third Georgic^ 11. 12-39, beginning with
Primus Idumeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas, K
130 DANTE
and the passage in the tenth Mneid (11. 198-203) : —
Tusci filius amnis Qui muros matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen, Mantua, dives avis,
where the personal note of local patriotism in
Ipsa caput populis, Tusco de sanguine vires,
is clear and unmistakable. But the cariia del natio locOy though strong, was not nearly as powerful in him as that of Florence in Dante. It does not appear that he ever lived in northern Italy after the period of the Eclogues. His Hfe was passed, his poetry written, mainly in the centre or the south. Even in the second Georgic the reference to his birthplace quoted above is coupled with one to the extreme south, saltus et saturi longinqua T^arenti^ as a rival affection ; and the years of the composition of the Mneid were mainly spent in Campania.
For Dante, to be out of Florence was to be in exile. Florence was not only his city, but his f atria terra^ a microcosm of the Italy of his ideals or dreams. He speaks of Florence {Inferno xvi. 9) as nostra terra prava, just as in the line of the Paradiso already quoted he speaks of the terra frava Italica. Further, the Italy that he actually knew and cared about was northern Italy. The south, the corno d^Ausonia, as he calls it (Paradiso viii. 61), is hardly taken into account by him. It was, in fact, a separate kingdom. It does not appear that he was ever in it, or indeed that he was ever even as far south as Rome except on the
THE ITALY OF DANTE AND VIRGIL 131
embassy of 1300. When he writes {Convivio i. 3) that after his banishment, per le parte quasi tutte alle quali questa lingua si stende peregrino quasi mendicando sono andato, the words must be taken with this qualifi- cation ; and even so, stress must be laid on the original as well as the acquired sense of the word peregrinus. In these wanderings he felt himself an exile in the full sense ; not only a pilgrim, but a foreigner.
The Homeric poems gave some sense of unity, and even of common nationality, to Hellas. Virgil and Dante, more directly and more powerfully, created a sense of the nationality and unity of Italy. The effect of poetry on history is incalculably great : not immediately, it may be, but in its cumulative and often long-deferred action. As poetry is the final distilla- tion of both history and philosophy, the ideal expres- sion towards which both tend, so it re-descends from its own empyrean and acts as a germinal force, vital and constructive (the " shaping spirit " of Coleridge, the " elan vital " of modern thought) to create new philosophy and make new history. The Italy of Virgil and Dante is not yet fully substantialised. This means that their work is not yet fully done. That it will be completed is the faith and the assured hope of England as well as of Italy.
' FARINATA '—TRANSLATION
Harold E. Goad.
" FARINATA " Canto X
Now by a secret passage that did wind
Between the towers and the tormenting fire My Master moves and I hold close behind.
" O highest Worth, who thro' these circles dire Guides t me as it please thee, now reply," I prayed, " and satisfy my heart's desire !
Might they be seen, the wretched folk who lie Within these tombs ? For all the lids are wide And there is no one near us to deny."
" All shall be shut down one day," he replied, " When from Jehoshaphat they sink to gloom With the old flesh they laid on earth aside.
In this part Epicurus hath his tomb
With all his followers, who in life professed That soul and body have a common doom.
So thou shalt have thy will in this request Which thou hast proffered to me, and beside In the desire thou holdest unexpressed." • •••••
" O Tuscan, passing thro' the fiery heat Of this fell city, living, stay and rest Awhile with me, for so thy words are sweet !
135
136 DANTE
pv,i4iJ!MX
For by thy gentle speech thou art confessed A native of that noble fatherland Which haply I too sorely did molest."
This voice so sudden issued close at hand From a dark coffer, that I shrank in doubt Nearer to him who led me thro' that strand.
Said he to me, " What dost thou ? Turn about ! Lo ! there is Farinata ; to thy sight ^X^-^^g Erect waist upward he is raised without."
^ '"^^ Mine eyes already fronted his : upright
Proudlj his^ brow and^ b he rear
As he had very Hell in high despite.
Then with bold hands my Master thrust me near To him among the Sepulchres and said, *' Take heed thy words be ready now and clear ! "
When I had reached the foot of his dark htdi^^jf/fj^0 J\ Regarding me awhile with some disdain, //i'V-^' ' He asked me, " Say, from whom then wast thpvi bred?" , ^^^'^^ '•" '^"^"^f^hA
Frankly I told him all, for I was fain To do him favour ; whereupon in pride He slightly raised his eyebrows, and again,
" Fierce foes," quoth he, " were they unto my .jjty^^r side, ,(/
Alike to kindred, party and my heart. Yet twice I scattered them ! " But I replied,
" If they were driven forth, from every part Each time did they return, but until now Your friends have not so aptly learned that art ! "
f
'-d.
#
,^.v
'FARINATA' 137
And then beside a Shadow rose, its brow jai^*'
Down to the chin unto my sight showed plain, ^ ' C fy^'^
For it had raised it on its knees, I trow. ^"^ *
It peered around me eagerly, as fain To know if, chance, another came with me, But knew at last that its desire was vain.
And wept and said : " If it be thine to see This gloomy prison by exalted mind. Where is my son ? Why comes he not with thee ? "
" Not of myself I come ; I could not find Save he who waits me yonder told, the road. Haply your Guido to his worth was blind.'*
I answered him thus fully, for he showed His name to me by speaking in this wise. And by the penalty of his abode.
" How saidst thou ? Was ? Lives he no more ? '^ he cries, And for an instant all erect upbore, " Doth the sweet light no longer strike his eyes ? "
And then perceiving, I delayed before I found an answer, to his dolorous rest Swift he fell backwards and appeared no more.
But that exalted Soul, at whose request
I tarried there, had never turned his head.
And never a change his pose nor mien expressed. And he pursued his former speech and said,
" And if my party have but badly learned
That art, it more torments me than this bed.
138 DANTE
*
But fifty times the face shall not have burned Of her who reigneth in this world of sin Ere thou have tried it and its weight discerned.
Now so unto the sweet world mayst thou win
As thou shalt tell me why this race to-day .^^Q-
Shows in its laws so hostile to my kin ? " 0 ff)W
I said, " The havoc and the bloody fray That dyed the Arbia crimson are the cause, Why such vows in our temples yet we pay." y He shook his head and sighed ; then after pause, " Not sole was I in that, nor had I stirred With others in it," quoth he, " without cause !
Nay, but alone I stood when all conferred To blot away fair Florence ; undismayed Sole I defended her with open word."
" So may thy race have sometime rest," I prayed, " Vouchsafe to solve me of the knot that ties My judgment and about my mind is laid.
Meseems you see beforehand that which lies Still in Time's bosom, — if I hear aright, — But with the present it is otherwise."
" We see," he said, " like one that hath weak sight : And unto things afar we are not blind. For still the great God gives us so much light.
But when events draw nigh, or are, our mind Is vain and void of all, and nothing knows Save others bring us tidings of mankind.
So mayst thou see how all our knowledge goes To darkness one day, from the moment when The future's gate for evermore shall close."
FARINATA
139
Then with remorse my fault came to my ken ;
I said, " Now pray you tell that fallen shade
That still his child is joined unto men. And when he asked before, if I delayed.
Tell him it was because I did debate
That very error that your words have laid."
And now my Master called me back, whereat HAJ^^ /
I pressed that spirit with more eager prayer PjiliJy^
To tell what souls were joined with him in fate. ^j^^ WCl
" Beyond a thousand are with me, and there," J a/i //?£a/ f^'^'^^^^ Said he, " the second Frederick lies in pain, ^^"^^^ ^JK The Cardinal, and many that I spare." (h/IU^ c-^^"^^
Wherewith he sank and passed from sight again. - q/x^I^^
. / /^/^ •
NOTES ON THE DATE OF COMPOSITION OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA'
Cesare Foligno.
NOTES ON THE DATE OF COMPOSITION OF THE "DE MONARCHIA"
According to Boccaccio, Dante wrote the De Monarchia during the Italian expedition of Henry VI I,^ but the treatise was scarcely known until Louis of Bavaria availed himself of it in order to justify his disloyal behaviour towards the Pope of the time.^ In modern days Boccaccio's account was chal- lenged, and different dates of composition were suggested, so that it would seem a task equally pre- sumptuous and hopeless to attempt a solution of the problem. Nevertheless each student of Dante has been compelled to accept one of the solutions which had been previously proposed, or to suggest a new,
1 Giovanni Boccaccio, La Vita di Dante, edited by A. Solerti, Milan, Vallardi, s.a. (" Storia letteraria d'ltalia scritta da una society di professor! "), § i6, p. 6l : " Similmente questo egregio autore nella venuta di Arrigo VII imperadore fece un libro in latina prosa, il cui titolo h. Monarchia.''^ P. 62 : " E nata poi in molti casi della sua (of Louis of Bavaria) autorita questione, egli e' suoi seguaci, trovato questo libro, . . . molti degli argomenti in esso posti cominciarono a usare ; per la qual cosa il libro, il quale fino allora appena era saputo, divenne famoso."
2 For a bibliography of the subject the following may be consulted : A. d' Ancona, // " De Monarchia,'' Lectura Dantis. Le opere minori. Florence, Sansoni, 1906, p. 247, «. 2 ; C. Sauter, Dante's " Monarchic " uhersetztu. erkldrt, Freiburg i. B., Herder, 191 3, pp. 74seq. ; Zingarelli, Dante (" Storia letteraria d'ltalia scritta da una societa di professori "), Milan, Vallardi, s.a. (1899-1903), pp. 731-2.
H3
144 DANTE
answer to the riddle, because our conception of Dante's political ideals and their historical develop- ment hangs upon it. Even Dr. Vossler and Prof. Gentile — and no one is less inclined to linger upon minute points of irrelevant scholarship — have been forced to face this difficulty.
In such circumstances the re-statement of the question may not be fruitless (I have no more ambitious object in view), even though it may lead very little farther than the simple acceptance of Boccaccio's account. 1300, 1310-11, 1313, 1314, 1315, 1317, 1 3 19 and 1320 have all been suggested as possible birth years of the De Monarchia. It was Karl Witte who first effectively challenged tradition,^ and the main internal objections were clearly seen by him. He pointed out that at the very beginning of the treatise Dante wrote : " Quumque . . . temporalis monarchia notitia utilissima sit, et maxime latens et . . . ab omnibus intentata," ^ and that such a state- ment cannot be explained unless Dante was writing it before Boniface's bull " Unam Sanctam " (1302), so that Dante would have entered the fray practically at a time when Pope Boniface VIII and his supporters were counteracting the controversial onslaught engineered by the King of France.^ Dr. Witte also saw the
^ Karl Witte, Dantis Alligherii " De Monarchia,'" libri II codicum manuscriptorum ope emendati^ ed. altera, Vindobonae, Braumiiller, 1874, pp. XXXV. seq.
2 'Tutte le opere di Dante Alighieri, ed. Moore (Oxford Dante), 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 1904, p. 341, De Monarchia i. I, 14-19 and 27-35.
® For this controversy see Carlo Cipolla, // trattato "Z)^ Monarchia "
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 145
objection based on the reading of the manuscripts in De Monarchia i. 8, 41/ which contains a reference to the Paradiso, but did not think it strong enough to weaken the convincing effect of his previous remarks, especially as he considered the reading of the manu- scripts to be the interpolation of a marginal note. It was Dr. Witte who suggested the emendation which is still printed in the " Oxford Dante," but, as was natural, other scholars felt more strongly impressed by that passage, and it was found that in De Monarchia iii. 4 Dante favours those theories about the spots in the moon which Beatrice explains in Paradiso ii. 58 seq., refuting in that canto the explanation he had pre- viously accepted in Convivio ii. 14. As these Dantist's held the Paradiso to have been begun not earlier than 1315 or 131 7, the composition of the De Monarchia was forced forward to 131 7 or 1319 or later .^
di Danti Alighieri e Vopiscolo " De ptestate regia et papali " di Giovanni da Parigi, in " Memorie della R. Accademia delle Scienze di Torino," Serie II, classe di scienze morali, storiche, filologiche, T. XLII, pp. 325-419 ; and P. Scholz, Die Publizistik zur Zeit Philipp des schonen u. Bonifaz VIII^ Stuttgart, 1903.
^ Karl Witte, Dantis Alligherii " De Monarchia,'' p. 49. " Gravis- simum certe omnium, quae contra me pugnare videntur, est argu- mentum, quod ipse primus in luce protraxi, et quo neminem adver- sariorum usum esse, profecto miror : citatio inquam Paradisi, quam libri I, cap. 12, textus latini codici fere omnes . . . exhibent. . . . Qui contrarium sentit, necessario Monarchies compositionem in ultimos omnino vitae Dantis annos rejicere debet quod fieri non posse hodie omnes consentiunt."
^ Franz Xavier Kraus, Dante. Sein Leben u. sein Werk, sein Verhdltniss zur Kunst u. Politik, Berlin, Grote, 1897, pp. 275 and 277 ; Nicola Zingarelli, op, cit., pp. 426-7 ; C. Sauter, op, cit., p. y6. L
146 DANTE
Yet another passage of Paradiso ^ has been pointed out in which Dante seems to correct an opinion he had expressed in the De Monarchia ii. 8, and in order to reconcile the various conflicting theories Professor Villari proposed a compromise, by suggesting that the first and second books were written at an early date, Witte's date, and that, after a long interruption, Dante added a third book during the imperial expedition.^
Villari's was the last attempt to save any part of Witte's theory ^ ; most students of the question prefer either the traditional or the later date. Dr. Vossler favours the later date, being impressed by a change in Dante's philosophical opinions, which he traces in the De Monarchia, as though Dante were following less obediently Aquinas and accepting some Aver- rhoistic ideas.^ Professor Gentile, on the other hand, does not lay special stress on the solution of the chronological problem and does not give any new
^ ParadisOy xix. 64-9.
Lume non ^, se non vien dal Sereno che non si turba mai ; anzi ^ ten^bra, od ombra della came, o suo veleno.
Assai t'^ mo aperta la latebra che t'ascondeva la giustizia viva, di che facei question cotanto crebra.
2 Pasquale Villari, // " De Monarchia " di Dante Alighieri^ in " Nuova Antologia," February i, 191 1.
^ H. Grauert, Dante u. die Idee des Weltfriedens, Munich, 1909, pp. 5-42, also favours the date suggested by Dr. Witte, in this as well as in other Dantesque works.
* Karl Vossler, Die gottliche Komodie, i Band, II Teil, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, 1907, pp. 552-3.
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 147
reasons in support of the theory he favours/ but the close study of other Dantesque questions brought to light many facts which seem consistent with the traditional, but not with a later date. Dr. Witte had realised from the outset that Dante used in his political letters ^ several of the arguments which he expanded in the De Monarchta, but he considered it unlikely that Dante should use the same line of reasoning twice at the same date, first in an epistle, and later in a general treatise. Dr. Witte's facts were right, but his inferences were clearly mistaken ; and his error was easily proved. It was left for Professor Parodi to expound a closely-knitted theory showing that Dante's political thought evolved by degrees ; that the identity of political opinions, when clearly demon- strable, is the strongest possible argument in favour of contemporaneous composition, and that the De Monarchta must have been written, therefore, at the same time as the letters. Professor Parodi is even averse to accepting the slightly later date suggested by Professor Chiappelli.^ Of course, the discussion was not primarily chronological, it depended upon
* Giovanni Gentile, La profezta di Dante, in " Nuova Antologia," May I, 1918, pp. 10-12.
^ The three letters are dated September or October 1310 (V.), March 31, 13 11 (VI.); April 17, 131 1 (VII.). See Dantis Alagherii efistolce, emended text, by Paget Toynbee, M.A., D.Litt. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1920, pp. 42, 63 and 82.
3 E. G. Parodi, review of Egidio Gorra, Quando Dante scrisse la " Divina Commedia" in " Bulletino della societi dantesca," N.S., vol. XV., 1908, pp. 1 1-24 ; and review of Franz Kampers, Dantes Kaiser- traum, etc., in " Bullettino della societi dantesca," N.S., vol. xvi., 1909, pp. 286-9.
148 DANTE
entirely different views about the treatise. In point of fact, Chiappelli, in the course of a special study which was intended to test Dante's knowledge of law, became convinced that Dante was well versed in Roman law and familiar with the principal currents of juridical study in his age,^ and he urged that the De Monarchia was a reply to the main plea contained in a message sent by King Robert of Naples to the Pope,^ and that the relation between the two works was too close to be accidental.^
It became highly probable that Dante's treatise was, if only in part, a reply to King Robert's message, and therefore slightly later than the message itself. The juridical tone of this document suggests that the writer was the lawyer Jacopo Bel Viso,^ and by internal evidence the date was limited to the first months of 131 3. On the contrary, Parodi maintains that no such occasional source of inspiration can be accepted because the substance of the treatise is to be found in the political letters, and he affirms that Dante, from the day of Henry's arrival in Italy, had been meditating upon the problem of the relations between the Empire and the Papacy.
^ LiHGi Chiappelli, Dante in raff or to alle fonti del diritto ed alia letteratura giuridica del suo tempo, in " Archivio storico italiano," Serie V, vol. xli., 1908, pp. I seq.
2 F. BoNAiNi, Jcta Henrici VII, Florence, 1877, No. CXLII, pp. 233 seq.
2 LuiGi Chiappelli, SulV eta del " De Monarchia,^^ in " Archivio storico italiano," Serie V, T. XLIII, 1909, pp. 237-56.
* p. 239, Ibid.f note.
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 149
Signer Chiaudano, by seeking to disprove Chiap- pelli's conclusions about Dante's knowledge of Roman law and urging that the De Monarchia is a philoso- phical, not a juridical treatise/ called forth a reply from Chiappelli which contains further instances of passages in Dante's work which seem to evince a close familiarity with the Digestum,^ and Chiappelli further explained that, in his view, Dante did not intend to write a juridical, but a philosophical treatise, and to derive from general principles, by philosophical reasoning, the conclusions which formed the object of legal controversy. In this, according to Professors Solmi^ and Ercole,^ lies the novelty of the De Monarchia and the justification of the words written by Dante in its first chapter. Yet another document has been discovered which seems clearly connected with the De Monarchia^ and which is dated 1313.^ Hence it may be assumed that by two rational demonstrations, independent of one another, the issue was narrowed down, to all practical purposes, to the years
^ Mario Chiaudano, Dante e il diritto romano, in " II giornale dantesco," vol. xx., 191 2, pp. 37-56, 94-119.
2 LuiGi Chiappelli, Ancora su Dante e il diritto romano^ in " II giornale dantesco," vol. xx., 191 2, pp. 202-6.
3 Arrigo Solmi, review of FritTi. Kern, Acta Imperii Anglice et FrancicE, 1267-13 13, in " Bullettino della societa dantesca," N.S., vol. xviii., 191 1, pp. 251-4.
* Francesco Ercole, review of Mario Chiaudano, Dante e il diritto romano, in " Bullettino della societa dantesca italiana," N.S., vol. xx., 1913, p. 171.
5 Fritz Kern, Acta Imperii Anglice et Francice, ah a. 1267 ^^^.1313, Tubingen, Mohr, 191 1, pp. 244 seq., No. 295. The document is incomplete and is connected with the sentence passed by Henry VII on Robert of Anjou on April 26, 1313.
150 DANTE
1311-1314. Thus the date of composition which was traditionally accepted upon Boccaccio's authority, is corroborated by internal evidence, as shown by Pro- fessor Parodi ; it is accepted by many scholars,^ it seems consistent with the contemporary political conditions and with Dante's position at that period, and is further endorsed by an independent research on the history of law. Gentile does not seem to press strongly for a later date ; Vossler's strictures seem insufficient to outweigh the facts which run counter to them, and Dr. Kraus, and especially Professor Zingarelli, rely mainly on the evidence of a passage which seems to allow for another explanation. And since the approxi- mate date 1 31 3 is favoured by an overwhelming array of facts and inferences, and stands out as by far the most probable, one may consider it a legitimate process to explain away the one fact which, at first sight, prevents the general acceptance of that date.
Henry's plans and promises had stirred up new hopes ; they were hailed with enthusiasm by all those who were distressed by contemporary conditions or suffered from them ; by none other with more con- fident expectation than Dante. He followed the Emperor in person for a time, and he followed him constantly in thought ; he endeavoured even, to the best of his abilities, to remove some of the difficulties
^ Also Fritz Kern {Humana Civilitas [Staat Kirche und Kultur] : eine Dante Untersuchung, Leipsic, Kohler, 191 3, ch. II) accepts the date 1313-1314; see also E. G. Parodi, Del concetto delV Im-pero in Dante e del sua averroismo, in " BuUettino della societa dantesca," N.S., vol. xxvi., 1919, p. 133.
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 151
of Henry's imperial policy by writing the political letters. By gradual steps he adapted to the new conditions the political theories which he had derived from Aristotle and Aquinas ; he was constantly in fear lest the support of Clement V, never truly cordial and unqualified, should be withdrawn from the Emperor, and he became convinced that the Pope had no right to oppose the well-meant plans that the sovereign proposed to carry out. According to Dante, such a position was insufficiently demonstrated by mere legal arguments, and he developed a philosophical theory by which his hopes and the imperial intentions and contentions were proved just and necessary. In this way the requirements of his intellect, trained as it was on philosophical thought, were satisfied,^ and he wished that all his contemporaries, or at least those among them who took a side in politics by conviction, and not only on account of factious sentiment or interests, would share the advantage of a theory which seemed to him true, and, as such, completely satisfied his intellectual needs. From internal conviction he drew the moral force to write his political letters, and in the letters he gave clear hints of his theory; but meanwhile he perfected his political theory, perhaps during 1311 and 131 2, or even put it on paper in part. When he became acquainted with King Robert's letter which embodied the lawyer's Bel Viso specious pleading, he borrowed from the lawyers some of their phraseology, but meant 1 De Momrchia i. i, 32-9.
152 DANTE
to write, and did write, a work that was new (" ah omnibus intentatum "), which probed deeper into the matter than any lawyer had attempted to probe in the past, and the treatise he called De Monarchia.
We must face now the crucial objection to the 1 31 3 date. Dr. Bertalot's edition shows that all manuscripts contain the incidental sentence ^ that Dr. Witte partly excised and after him was generally omitted or amended by the editors of the De Monarchia. The correct reading of De Monarchia i. 12, 41 is " sicut in Paradiso Comoedice iam dixi^"^ and not, as the sentence runs in the " Oxford Dante," among other editions, " sicut dixit P Professor Chiappelli was impressed by the implicit reference to Paradiso v. in the passage, even though he accepted the emended reading, and suggested a date rather later than mere considerations of fact require. King Robert's message must have been written between January i and April 26, 1 31 3, for reasons that ChiappeUi explains; Dante appears to have been cognisant of the Angevin document, at least when he wrote the second and third books of his treatise, and alludes indirectly to King Robert's refusal to appear before the imperial court, a fact which led to his condemnation on April 26 ; he gives no hint of the bull " Pastoralis cura " (March 13, 1314), so that Chiappelli suggests that the De Monarchia cannot have been composed later than
^ Dantis Alagherii ^^ De Monarchtay" libri III, rec. Ludovicus Bertalot, Friedrichsdorf in Monte Tauno apud Francofurtum apud editorem, 19 1 8, p. 27.
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 153
March 1 3 14, nor earlier than April 1313.^ It seems scarcely credible that Dante should have written any considerable part of his treatise, and far less initiated such a work, after Henry's death. Though it is not an occasional writing, an item in a long controversy, the book was composed with only one conceivable object — to uphold imperial claims against the debaters belonging to the Church party. Dante may well have continued the composition of the Commedia (some say begun) after Henry's death, but what could have prompted him to undertake such a work as the De Monarchia while the Imperial throne was vacant ? One may grant the possibility that he completed some small section of it after the tragedy of Buonconvento (August 24, 1 31 3), but he would surely not have been so foolhardy as to circulate such a work in circum- stances so perilous. Chiappelli's suggestion that perhaps the condemnation of the Florentine exiles of November 6, 1315, and the exclusion of some of them from the benefits of the amnesty granted in 1 316 to many of them, are to be taken as King Robert's revenge against Dante for the writing of the De Monarchia^ is a suggestion which seems equally unlikely and unnecessary.^ More probably, while still waiting for an occasion to circulate his treatise, or perhaps while still composing the last paragraphs of it, Dante learned of the Emperor's demise. The treatise lost any immediate value and, if known, would have
1 Chiappelli, Suir eta del " De Monarchia^"^ op. cit.^ p. 253.
2 Ibid., p. 252.
154 DANTE
rendered more dangerous the position of an exile who had no reason to look confidently to the future, and who, from the letter to a friend in Florence,^ would appear to have entertained some vague hope of being recalled to Florence.
And yet the incidental sentence of i. 12, 41 shows that the manuscript whence all the extant copies of the De Monarchia derive was still in Dante's hands at a later date. No one would argue that before August 1 31 3 Dante had already written five cantos of the ParadisOy and the sentence can scarcely be explained away as an interpolated marginal note,^ so that we are compelled to find an occasion for the insertion of such a sentence by Dante himself. It is generally held that Dante was not given to correcting and polishing his works ; the more cogent therefore the reason to suggest an explanation for the departure from custom that we note in this case. We know that the Paradiso was dedicated to Cangrande della Scala, and that Dante must have sent the first cantos of the poem to Cangrande, together with the dedicatory letter,^ and it would seem natural to think that the De Monarchia also was given or sent by Dante to the lord of Verona, as no one else could quite as probably have been expected to be familiar with a canto of the Paradiso^ nor so keen on reading a treatise in which the rights of the Emperor were upheld. Was not
^ Paget Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 148 seq. ; see especially p. 152.
* ZiNGARELLI, Op. Ctt., p. 42/.
^ Paget Toynbee, op. cit.y pp. 160-21 1 ; especially p. 165.
THE DATE OF THE 'DE MONARCHIA' 155
Cangrande the mainstay of the Ghibelline party in Italy, and was he not Vicarius imperialis since 1312 and captain-general of the Ghibelline league in Lom- bardy since 1318 ? The reasons which Professor Zingarelli assigns in support of his dating the com- position of the De Monarchia 13 19 or later could be repeated, with a greater force, as favouring the circu- lation of the treatise about that time.^ Any attempt to reach a more precise date would probably be both irrelevant and pedantic ; one might think that, in discharge of his obligations as a guest and a protege, the poet offered to Cangrande, at the first favourable opportunity, the treatise he had written some time previously, just as he had offered to Cangrande the first cantos of the Paradiso before the completion of the poem ; or one might connect such a presentation with a renewal of political controversial writings such as Zingarelli mentions, and one might even think of such an occasion as the debate which gave rise to the " Qucestio de aqua et terra^'* which was also sent to Cangrande ; but any such suggestion would lack corroboration. It has been pleaded ^ that the inci- dental sentence is not Dantesque in manner because Dante does not quote in the De Monarchia any part of the Convivio, where he had dealt with some of the most relevant points on which he was touching again, and would not have been likely to quote the Paradiso, an incomplete poem, on a side issue. Once more the
^ Zingarelli, op. at., pp. 424-5, 426-7. 2 Sauter, of. cit.j p. 106, note l.
iS6 DANTE
facts, not the conclusions, are correct. But the facts would allow for an explanation if the De Monarchia was sent or given to Cangrande together with, or shortly after the tenth letter, because the Lord of Verona could well be supposed to have been un- acquainted with the Convivio^ but must have been familiar with the first cantos of the Paradiso}
It might also be argued further, if even this were not really of little import, that Dante offered the De Monarchia after he had composed the fifth, and before he completed the nineteenth, canto of the Paradiso, because in the latter canto he seems at pains to correct (U. 64 seq.) what he had written in De Monarchia ii. 8 about the limitations of human reason.^
^ Of course most of the upholders of a late composition think that the book treatise was written at Verona or sent to Cangrande. Zin- GARELLi, op. cit., p. 427 ; Hermann Grauert, Zur Danteforschungy in " Historisch. Jahrbuch," vol. xiv. (1895), p. 539; A. Gaspary, Storia della letteratura italtana, Italian edition, vol. i., pp. 248 seq.
2 MicHELE ScHERiLLo, Tcview of Ttto Bottagtsto, II limbo danUsco, in " Bullettino della societa dantesca," N.S., vol. viii, p. 14.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS
p. H. WiCKSTEED.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS i
Great literature was open to Dante in three vernacular languages : in French there were the " bewitching meanderings " of Arthurian Romance ; in Proven gal there was the finished art with which the troubadours sang of Love and War ; and the Italian successors of the Provencal poets, with their wider outlook and their profounder thought, had learned that the courtly graces of valour, gallantry and generosity did not in themselves fill up the measure of greatness in human character. What Dante calls " Virtue " — ^we may paraphrase it as " nobility of character " — touched them to finer issues and drew, them into nearer fellowship with the sovran poets of antiquity.
But who were these sovran poets ? Homer was only a great name to Dante and his compatriots, and Greek poetry was a sealed book. Moreover Dante,
^ For a full treatment of the quotations from the Latin poets and the references to them in Dante's works, Dr. Moore's great essay in the first series of his Dante Studies (Oxford, 1896) and the several articles in Dr. Paget Toynbee's Dante Dictionary are the classical authorities.
De Vulgari Eloquentia, 1. 10: 19; ii. 2: 70-98 (where, however, Dante's distinction between the Troubadours and the Italians does not coincide with the one I have drawn).
159
i6o DANTE
at least, well knew that whatever beauty in the Hebrew poets had survived translation, all the " charm of music and harmony " had necessarily vanished. The Latin poets alone were left. And of them two of the greatest, in modern estimation, were unknown to Dante ; for in spite of at least one striking coincidence of imagery, it seems clear that he was unacquainted with Lucretius ; and, unlike his contemporary, Albertino Mussato, he shows no trace of familiarity with Catullus.
This leaves Virgil as the one poet whom posterity has placed in the supreme rank (not quite unchal- lenged) with whose work Dante was intimate at first hand.
I suppose this is the explanation of the passage in the first Canto of the Inferno which has given the commentators so much trouble. Dante there declares to Virgil that he owes to him, and to no other, that " beauteous style that has won him honour." What traces of Virgil's poetic style or diction — ^as compared with those of the two Guidos, for instance — can be found in Dante's work before 1300, or even before the date, whatever it may be, of the actual composi- tion of the Comedy, to justify this declaration ? The only answer seems to be that Virgil had taught Dante what great style is, and that it was only under the pressure of the immeasurably larger and fuller
Convivio i. 7 : 9 1 -103.
De Rerum Nat. ii. 114 sqq. ; Paradiso xiv. 112 sqq.
Inferno^ i. 85 sqq.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS i6i
vein of the great Epic that the imagination of the vernacular poet, pressing against the limits of the Canzone (the highest recognised form of Italian poetry), could bring it to its stateliest height.
Whatever may be thought of this suggestion, it is certain that Virgil's influence upon Dante is not only greater than that of all the other Latin poets put together, but that it is distinguished by a certain intimacy of penetration that makes it stand alone. Virgil affected much more than Dante's " style," and furnished him with much more than models and materials for his epic. He heightened the native power of his imagination and ennobled his thought and feeling, as well as enriching his power of expression. Hence we can often say of Dante that where he is most closely or obviously Virgilian he is at the same time most truly himself. Who would dream of saying, for instance, that the great scene in which Cavalcante interrupts the dialogue between Dante and Farinata lacks originality, or has not the specific Dantesque note ? To feel the close parallel between it and the meeting of ^Eneas and Andromache in the third Mneid is only to deepen the intensity of its appeal. Even where the parallel is so close as to enable us to determine a disputed reading, we can speak of influence, but hardly of imitation. I refer to a passage in the third Canto of the Inferno. Virgil speaks in the second Georgic of the fruit-tree on which an alien shoot had been grafted looking up with glad
Inferno x. 52 sqq. ALneid iii. 306 sqq.
i62 DANTE
wonder at the mighty branch that has sprung from it, and on the " fruits that are not its own." Hence when Dante compares the flitting ghosts falling feebly into Charon's boat to the leaves that drop from a branch, till, naked and desolate, it " gazes upon all its stripped-off foliage " lying at its feet, we know that vede^ not the rival reading of Tender is what Dante wrote. The passage is no imitation of Virgil, though but for him it might never have been v^ritten, and he can give us a touchstone to tell us how it was phrased. It is needless to multiply examples. They crowd upon the mind. This in- timate transfusion of Virgil's greatness into the very sap of Dante's poetic vitality is the more remarkable because of the divergence, amounting often to the sharpest contrast, between the methods and charac- teristics of the genius of the two poets. An instance of this may be found in the treatment of the monsters of mythology in the sixth Mneid and the Inferno respectively. Virgil's imaginative power is nowhere more apparent than in the atmosphere he creates as -^neas stands in the very jaws of hell. All images of gloom and misery. Death, Disease and Dismal Eld, Foul Imaginations of Evil, and death-like Torpor, are just touched into semi-personification, as they crowd, together with Centaurs, Harpies, the threefold Geryon and twi-form Chaemeras, to create a vague atmos- phere of horror ; but there is not a word of description. It is all impressionist. We see nothing distinctly,
Georgic ii. 82. Inferno iii. 114.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS 163
but we feel the deepening effect of every stroke. Now mark the strict " economy " with which Dante introduces his Harpies, his Centaurs and the rest, just where each has its specific meaning and gives its definite support to the architecture of the poem. And note how Dante makes us see each one of the uncanny forms with a vivid distinctness that is the despair of artists. In this instance Virgil's stupendous imagination is of no use to Dante. He wants the material for other purposes. He takes it clean out of the marvellous atmosphere with which Virgil has surrounded it and deals with it in quite other fashion. And he can afford to do so ; for Virgil's imagination has impregnated his own, and will vitalise it every- where. It need not be imported in its fixed mould. Dante has moulds of his own to fill.
But having said all this, we have still, in a sense, only touched on the relatively superficial aspects of Virgil's influence on Dante ; for it was in very truth Virgil that brought Dante back to Beatrice and so gave us the Comedy. That Dante had that in him which must have found great utterance even had he never met Beatrice or read Virgil, it would be rash indeed to deny; but that without them he could have written the Comedy is plainly impossible. And of these two our immediate concern is with Virgil.
I do not think any one can read the Convivio with
Mneid vi. 273 sqq.
Inferno ix. 46 sqq., 52; xii. 55 sqq.; xiii. 10; xvii.
i64 DANTE
an open mind and fail to accept Dante's very frank confession — ^with whatever formal reservation it is made — ^that when he wrote it he had (to state it baldly) outgrown the Vita Nuova and Beatrice's dominating influence. He had formless enthusiasms and aspirations struggling within him that could no longer be kept within the limitations of that early vow which embalmed the tender memories of youth, already half-submerged under the storm and pressure of manhood. But there is no coherence in the differ- ent motives that inspire the author of the Convivio, Self- justification as to his own private character and his political record, a missionary and prophetic ardour as a teacher of Philosophy to the laity and a preacher of righteousness to all and sundry, a loving desire to handle his own poems and talk to the world about them, together with an uneasy sense that some of them tell a tale that scarcely harmonises with his present role as a preacher, the promptings of the mere smith and wielder of words within him, urging him to show what Italian can do in prose, as he has already shown what it can do in rhyme — ^all these and other impulses jostle each other in this amazing work, the formlessness of which is as astonishing as its wealth and beauty. In this gorgeous jungle there is only one really formative indication of the plan for which its exuberant vitality was ultimately to make way. It is to be found in the two chapters of the fourth Treatise, in which the character and significance of
Convivio ii. i6 : 48 sqq; i. 2 : 1 14-130.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS 165
the Roman Empire are sketched. And this he owed to Virgil.
Before he came under Virgil's deeper influence (as we can read quite clearly on, or between, the lines of the De Monarchid) the history of the human race was divided for Dante by a sharp line into sacred and secular. The history of Israel, culminating in the manifestation of the Incarnate Word and the founding of the Church, was divinely guided in every smallest incident ; and accordingly every detail was significant. It was not only something that God did, but also, if we could rightly interpret it, something that he said for our guidance or instruction. But the secular history of the world was a mere welter of senseless violence that had no scheme, no development, and no purpose. Into this chaos Virgil brought order. No Roman writer ever had so clear a vision of Rome's mission as had he. It was he who taught Dante that force was only the instrument of Roman power, and that Law was its soul. Justinian lived five centuries and more after Virgil, but nevertheless it was Virgil whose description of Rome's mission taught Dante to find in the great law-giver its truest representative. In all his mature work you will find that by the Roman Empire Dante means the supremacy of Roman law, and by the Roman Emperor the God-commissioned administrator — ^faithful or faithless as the case may be — of that most august of all instruments for regulating
Convivio iv. 4, 5.
De Monarchia ii. i : 11-17 ; 5 : 15-42 ; 7 : 59-77. Paradiso vi.
1 66 DANTE
the relations of men and of nations under the guidance of justice and along the paths of peace.
What a flood of light this reclaiming of secular history, as within the range of the providential government of the world, threw back upon all Dante's own past life ! The obscure conflicts of Florentine factions were now seen (as they had always been darkly felt) to turn upon the re-vindication of the Roman tradition of industrial civilisation against the feudal barbarism of the military invaders ; for — ^let it once again be said — the inner meaning of Roman history was not that of victorious war, but that of established peace. Hence- forth there were two sacred histories to Dante, the history of Palestine and the history of Rome.
To readers of the De Monarchia and the Comedy it is not necessary to dwell upon the elaborate parallels between the two providentially guided histories that are motived in the former work and developed all through the latter, from the first bracketing of -^neas and Paul onwards. Of this parallelism the Convivio contains the germ, but the germ only, and when we notice that in that work all the stress is laid on the secular side (the sacred side being taken for granted, quite heartily, even fervently, but receiving no dis- tinctive impress), we are led to the closer considera- tion of a curious feature in the Convivio that has constituted a standing perplexity to Dantists, and that brought confusion into Witte's memorable attempt to co-ordinate Dante's works in some
Inferno ii. 13 sqq., 28 sqq.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS 167
intelligible and organic relation to each other. I refer to the fact that though Dante, when he wrote the Convimo, was already an eager student of Aquinas and accepted in perfect faith the supreme authority of the Church — ^the " secretary and spouse of God," as he calls her — ^and though he expressly places Reve- lation above Reason, yet the flow of his active thought and affection seems to run almost exclusively within the realm of the Aristotelian philosophy and to fer- tilise the secular side of life and government. Even when he is speaking of the martyrs and confessors who held all material things cheap in comparison with truth and holiness, Dante's examples are taken from the lives of Pagan philosophers, not of Christian saints ; and the passages of splendid eloquence which he borrows from the discourses of Aquinas on the truths of Revelation and the supreme authority of the Pope he applies (in this last instance even in the De Monarchid) to the speculations of Philosophy and the authority of the Emperor.
In like manner, in the Convivio, the Lady of Dante's " Second Love " is " Wisdom " herself. Her range is vaguely comprehensive. She stands alike for Grammar and Arithmetic on the one hand, and on the other for the supreme and queenly science of Theology, and whereas at one time she can be ade- quately symbolised by a Gentle Lady whose pitying
Convivio ii, 15 : 124-127; iv. 30 : 24-30; ii. 4 : 30-32 ; 6 : 33 sq. iv. 15 : 90-96 ; ii. 6 : 16-20 ; iii. 14 : 69-86 ; i. i. Contra Gentiles i. 4. De Monarchia i. 14 : 38-65. Contra Gentiles iv. yS.
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sympathy gives Dante's grieving soul the relief of tears, at another she is the Divine Wisdom's self, the Word who became incarnate for our salvation. But through it all the centre of gravity is still on the secular side, and v^e feel that both Dante's heart and his mind draw their true nourishment from the sages of the Pagan world. The Christian contrast between the Active life of good works and the ministra- tions of religion on the one side, and the Contemplative life of the saintly mystic on the other, has not yet disengaged itself in his thought from the Aristotelian distinction between the social activities of the citizen and the devotion of philosophic leisure to speculation ranging over the whole realm of truth. So, too, the distinction between Reason and Revelation, though quite explicitly recognised, leads up to no distinction between Church and State, and is practically merged in the Aristotelian contrast just referred to between the civic and the philosophic life.
What then is the exact position in which we find Dante at this point of his career ? The Vita Nuova stands as the record of his impressionable youth. He will not cancel it, but his mind is now full of other things suiting the robuster fibre of maturity. Aris- totle has inspired him with a passion for study. His own participation in the affairs of his city has widened his outlook upon the practical side of life and quick- ened his insight into human character. And Virgil
Convivio ii. 14 : 47-66 ; iii. 14 : 61-64 ; 15 : 182 sqq. ; ii. 9 : 126 sqq. ; iii. 7 : 161-166; i. I : 11 1 sqq.
PLATE VI.— Inferno, Canto XXXIII. {Luca Signorelli) Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
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is beginning to teach him to look upon a social and political life of ordered peace and harmony, giving scope to the nobler faculties and affections, as a holy thing, designed by the Creator from the beginning for man to enjoy.
But the equilibrium of the Convivio is in all respects unstable, and it is no accident that the work remained a fragment. Dante was a Christian, and as such he inherited that Christian conception of holiness which tends to make every great emotion, at its highest, partake of the nature of worship. But hitherto his mysticism, if we may so call it, though of heavenly origin, had breathed itself most fully into earthly things. The Empire was in fact, if not in theory, more to Dante than the Church, science dearer than contemplation, and the Temporal more real than the Eternal. Even his study of theology bore its first- fruits only in a heightened sense of the significance of Politics.
This was the beginning, but it could not be the end. A Christian believer who in his ardour for knowledge, in his ideal of personal greatness of character, and in his practical political inspirations, was uplifted and stimulated by the greatest theologian of his day, must sooner or later turn his thoughts directly to the problems of the Church herself, to the relations of the Temporal to the Spiritual Power, and to the direct bearing of the dogmas and devotions of the Church upon the actual life of the human soul. In a word, he cannot permanently confine his intensest
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feeling within the world of Ethnic philosophy; but must explore and assimilate — not only acknowledge — the realms of Christian truth. Virgil, having brought Dante from Athens to Imperial Rome, must see him pass out of his care into regions beyond his range. The Roman chapters of the Convivio must reveal themselves as the stepping-stones to the De Monarchia and the Comedy.
The direct occasion of this development was the election of Henry of Luxemburg in 1309 and his avowed purpose of coming to Italy as a peace-maker, to restore the exiles, to reconcile the factions, and to inaugurate a new epoch in the history of distracted Italy. The attitude assumed by the Pope to Henry might be of critical importance to the issue, and Dante's thoughts were necessarily directed to it. Of the mission of the Roman Empire he had already a clear conception, but what was its relation to the mission of the Church ? The answer to this question was already held in solution in his mind and only needed precipitation. As the Empire had charge of all happenings and successions that took place in time, so the Church was the appointed guide to the eternal life of the soul. As the Fall of man had thrown in the parenthesis of mortal life between Eden and the Beatific Vision, so also it had thrown the long and dismal parenthesis of human history between the loss and the recovery of Eden itself. The Church was the appointed organ of revealed truth, commissioned to hold man in touch, through all his wanderings,
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with his eternal destiny, and in like manner the Roman Empire was commissioned to hold men in peaceful and helpful relations with each other, guided by all such truth as could keep their hearts in touch with the life of Eden.
This connection between the ideal Empire, fos- tering and protecting the natural expansion of the higher faculties of man, and the life of Innocence before the Fall, is formulated with the utmost pre- cision and earnestness by Dante in the concluding passages of the De Monarchia, He verily believed that the poetic pictures of the Golden Age preserved a dim tradition of that life of innocence in which human passion and delight had needed no jealous watching and could never betray ; and he believed, too, that in proportion as the spirit of justice and zeal for the common good, as manifested in the history and the Law of Rome, were faithful and vic- torious, in that proportion would mankind, in the progress of civilisation, receive the consecration and recover the atmosphere of Eden.
This life of earthly innocence, as a stage in the experience of man, seemed to Dante no less essential to the full realisation of the creative plan than did the heavenly glory as its goal. And if, at best, civi- lisation could only give an imperfect reflection of Eden during this mortal life, then its realisation in its fullness of freedom and beauty must be held in store for the souls of the blessed, as an incident in
De Monarchia iii. i6 and passim.
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their path to heaven. It might not be that a divine thought and purpose for man, so tender and so tem- pered to his native powers, should be wholly cancelled and obliterated by the Fall — and forgotten in the Redemption.
All this is more than foreshadowed in the De Monarchia ; and it is integral to the inmost structure and spirit of the Comedy ; for the place which the Earthly Paradise occupies in Dante's poem has always been recognised as an outstanding feature in his conception of the after life. It is wholly without ecclesiastical authority and it determines the poet's bold and original conception of the site of Purgatory, not in the dismal purlieus of Hell, but on the sides of the mountain pedestal of Eden. The repentant souls climb it to recover the life of Innocence. In no merely allegorical sense did Virgil lead Dante to the Earthly Paradise, for it was he who had first taught him so to apprehend the ideals and ideal possibilities of the earthly life that he must perforce link them close to Heaven at the Summit of the mount of Purgation. Virgil was Beatrice's emissary and had brought him back to her.
So now the mists have cleared. The blurred divisions of the Convivio are superseded by the dominating contrasts and alliances between Revela- tion and Reason, the Eternal and the Temporal, the Church and the Empire ; and the contrast between the civic and the speculative life, the statesmanship of a Frederick and the philosophic authority of an Convivio iv. 6.
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Aristotle, sinks into a subdivision of the domain of human reason. Above and beyond it rise the divine truths of Revelation.
One more step remains. The De Monarchia dis- integrates without replacing the symbolism of the Convivio, It disintegrates it because its constructive ideas and contrasts break up the symbol of an un- differentiated Philosophy the theoretically higher aspect of which (the divine) is practically subordinated to the lower (the human). It does not replace it be- cause it is itself entirely without symbolism. But the scheme symbolised in the Comedy, is already here in its completeness. Reason and Revelation are already the appointed guides. The only step that remains is to make Virgil and Beatrice their personified symbols. If we may trust the obvious indica- tions of history and psychology, that step was taken under the terrible experience of hopes disappointed and prophetic fervours chilled that followed upon the disastrous failure of Henry's intervention in the affairs of Italy. To compare the great series of the Political Letters with the opening canto of the Inferno, and with such passages as the D V X cypher in the Purgatorio, or the close of Justinian's discourse in the Paradiso, is to find Dante's faith constant and un- shaken, but his hopes and his affections turned wist- fully to a vague and uncertain future. In the Comedy the Roman Empire is still the appointed organ of temporal government, and the political
Purgatorio xxxiii. 43. Paradiso vi. 97 sqq.
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Messiah who shall realise its ideal possibilities and secure the conditions of human blessedness upon earth is still to be looked for ; but Henry came " ere Italy was ready to his hand," and the crown laid up for him in heaven was never firmly planted on his earthly brow. The vision of the Imperial Hound who shall chase the wolf of greed back to hell is a vision for many days. The corruption of the Church, the faithlessness of the Empire, and the discords between them have made havoc of earthly happiness, and obscured its prophecy of heavenly bliss. He who would escape from the tangled forest of the world as it is, must look for guidance and support elsewhere than to the official organs of Reason and Revelation. He must fall back upon the eternal principles them- selves and be his own Emperor and Pope. Earthly blessedness, until the political Messiah comes, can only be found in the recovered Eden beyond the grave ; and they who would hear by anticipation the harmonies of heaven amid the discords of earth must look into their own souls, must strengthen them by contemplation and support them by divine promises that cannot fail. To them the path of redemption is still open ; and Reason and Revelation, though renounced and betrayed by those to whose guardian- ship they have been entrusted, are still at hand with their divine testimony for such as can hear their voice, and the poet braces himself to the task of
Paradiso xxx. 133 sqq. Inferno i. loi sqq. Purgatorio xxxii. 34 — xxxiii. 12, and elsewhere.
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" drawing them who are living the life on earth out of their misery and leading them to the state of bliss."
When Dante fell back upon these inner lights and ideal hopes and found in them a deeper peace and the promise of a fuller and more divine fruition than his most ecstatic Messianic fervours had ever inspired, he recognised a note in this music of the soul which he had heard long since in the innocence of his childhood and early manhood, when beauty, truth and goodness had seemed to walk the earth incarnate in one whom many, without realising what they were saying, had called " the giver of blessing " — Beatrice. Many waters had flowed over Dante's soul since then and had seemed almost to wash away that blessed and consecrated memory, for his very studies and ex- panding powers had seemed to lead him away from Beatrice. And so in a sense they had, for in their undisciplined violence they had full often led him astray. But now that he had at last found himself again, he once more found Beatrice, not as a distant memory, but as a living presence. That child, that maiden who had left the earthly life in the beauty of her early womanhood — she, more than all the saints — was his guide to the heavenly life of which her earthly presence had been the promise and the symbol.
But it was Virgil who had called him back to her ; for it was he who, in the thought of the divine mission of the Empire, had opened to his vision at once the
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meaning and the limitations of the earthly Hfe, and in leading him to the Earthly Paradise had brought him into the presence of a guide whom he himself was forbidden to follow. Virgil brought Dante back to Beatrice. Then he vanished in silence from his side, but left in his heart a passionate protest, which heaven itself could but half silence, against the exclusion from heavenly bliss of the Pagan saints who seemed to fill the measure of human wisdom and goodness, and whose only defect was that they were ignorant of that which by their very nature and destiny they could not know.
" What can the man do who cometh after the king ? " — or what can we others say of him ? Dante's " Canonical " poets, so to speak, are Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Statins. Of these Horace need not detain us. Dante knew the Ars Poetic a well, and repeatedly refers to it as an authority; but the only passage that seems to have touched his imagination is the beautiful analogy of falling leaves to the words that wither and fall out of use in our languages, to be succeeded by fresh and living growths. There is no clear evidence that Dante was acquainted at first hand with any other of the works of Horace, and
Paradiso xix. 22 sqq. ; xxvi. 137 sq. Ars Poetica 60 sqq.
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Juvenal, who is outside his Canon, seems to have touched him more to the quick.^
With the other three the case is very different. Each one of them is strongly felt in the Comedy with a specific influence of his own.
Statins is the only poet except Virgil who has a definitely symbolic significance and a considerable actual part in the action of the poem. He is a kind of Christianised Virgil, and it hardly seems fanciful to say that if Virgil stands for Philosophy unilluminated by revelation, though at its highest on its own ground, Statins stands for the Aristotelian side of the philosophy of the Christian Schoolmen. In his main discourse, on the nature of the intelligence, he refutes Averrhoes and gives precision to the teaching of Aristotle just at the point where natural philosophy most closely touches the boundary that separates it from Revelation. On this point, if I am right in my interpretation,
^ Dante's references to Juvenal, and his quotations from him, are few, but significant. There is a note of passionate assent in his citation of 5^/. viii. 6-32, in Convivio iv. 29 : 37 sq. A few precious lines in the Purgatorio (xxii. 13-18) tell us that it was Juvenal, on his descent to Limbo, who first told Virgil how Statins loved and honoured him, and who thus woke in the master a reciprocal affection for the disciple. Juvenal's personality therefore is associated with one of the most moving incidents of the Purgatorio, and at the same time with the one glimpse that is allowed us of the life and converse of that great society of sages, heroes and poets in the Limbo. It may be noted, too, that Juvenal is the only contemporary author who mentions Statins, and he speaks of the dulcedo of his verse (vii : 82 sqq.). Hence doubtless Dante's description of Statins as il doles foeta {Conv. iv. 25 : 60) and his ascription to Statins himself of the words : " Tanto fu dolce mio vocale spirito."
Purgatorio xxi. 88, xxv. 61 sqq. N
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Dante would seem to imply that the Christian doctors alone are to be fully trusted as guides. Having a clear knowledge of the truths that human reason cannot reach, and having themselves expatiated in them, they can return to the lower range with energies braced to higher efficiency, and at the same time with a clearer sense of the limitation of the powers of reason. Combined courage and humility give firmness and security to their steps.
As a poet Statins had a marked influence upon Dante ; but it is difficult to bring his verses into any direct connection with his symbolic character in the Comedy, except in the one point of his supposed secret conversion to Christianity. In a striking and beautiful passage in the Thehaid Statins describes an altar of refuge at Athens, dedicated to dementia. There was no image or likeness of the deity there, and the crowd of suppliants that found asylum in the grove could only feel the divine influence in their hearts, and count themselves blessed by the protection of the " un-named altar." Little wonder that this passage should have been regarded as a cryptic reference to the altar dedicated to " the unknown God " which S. Paul saw at Athens ! Was Statins, then, a Chris- tian ? Had he read the secret of Virgil's fourth Eclogue, which Virgil himself had never understood ? Had Virgil thus been the vehicle to him of the salva- tion he, Virgil, could give but could not receive ? And had fear of persecution prevented him, Statins,
Thebaid xii. 481 sqq.
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from openly avowing his faith ? So Dante believed, and on that belief he based his gracious fiction that Statins had spent long centuries expiating his timidity on the terrace of the Laggards, and was overtaken by the pilgrim and his guide on the way to the Earthly Paradise, at the very moment when his release at last arrived. Few passages in the Comedy rival the tender beauty and pathos of the lines in which Statins meets Virgil and tells him how it was from him that he received the gift of salvation which the loved giver himself might never share — like one who paces through the night bearing a light behind him that shines on the path of another, but not upon his own.
It may be noted, in passing, that Dante's descrip- tion of the Mount of Purgatory itself owes more than a hint to Statins.
The real Statins is amazingly unequal in his poems. Extravagance and sentimental absurdity, coupled with a want of poetic taste that will allow him to speak — in a really fine passage too — of a mountain being so lofty that no birds can reach its sum- mit, and it only serves for the stars to sit down upon when they are tired, alternate or intertwine with strains of gloomy splendour and images of true beauty and tenderness. Dante appears to have been insensible to his defects, but, on the other hand, it is startling to find how many outstanding passages, chiefly in the Inferno^ are founded upon hints caught PuTgatorio xxii. 64-73. Thebaid ii. 32 sqq. ; 36,
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from his poems. A few examples must suffice. The splendid description of the Angel that crosses the Styx to rebuke the fiends who would close the city of Dis to Dante and Virgil is taken — but " with a dif- ference " that makes it what it is — ^from a similar description by Statius of Mercury carrying a divine mandate to the infernal regions. The removal of Achilles from the care of Chiron was known to Dante from Statius. It was from the same source that he drew his conception of the blasphemer Capaneus. It was a line in Statius that brought the cleft flame that swathed Ulysses and Diomede before Dante's pregnant gaze ; and lastly, it was from the merely loathsome scene in Statius, where in bestial rage the dying Tydeus gnaws the head of Melanippus, that Dante drew that death- less picture of Ugolino and Ruggiero, in which blended horror and tenderness seem to speak their last word.
It will have been observed that though the symbolic significance of Statius in Dante's poem is based on an intellectual and philosophical conception, his poetic influence betrays itself entirely on the imaginative side. It is far othervdse with Lucan, who profoundly affects Dante's personal estimates, and obviously helps to guide and develop, if he does not actually form, some of his characteristic poetic habits. The influence of
Inferno ix. 82 sqq. Thebaid ii. I sq. Purgatorio ix. 34-39. Achille id i. 247 sqq. ^
Inferno xiv. 46 sqq. Thehaid iii. 660 sq. ; x. 904 sqq. Inferno xxvi. 52 sqq. Thehaid i. 33 sq. ; xii. 429 sqq. Inferno xxxii. 124 sqq. Ilhehaid viii. 739 sqq.
DANTE AND THE LATIN POETS i8i
Lucan, taken in the broad, is far less incidental and detached than is that of Statins. Thus his concep- tion of Cato and the place he occupies in the spiritual economy of the after life, though it has many con- tributory sources, is founded in the main on the representations of Lucan. Even the description of his personal appearance is closely modelled on Lucan's. This is the more noteworthy because there are so many reasons why Cato should not be the guardian spirit who receives the souls on the island basis of Purgatory. He was a Pagan. He was a suicide. He was the arch opponent of Caesar, who stands on the temporal plane as the earthly analogue of Christ in the spiritual order, so that Brutus and Cassius share the fate of Judas. Cato, it is true, was no traitor, but he was the determined opponent of the prime representative of the Roman Empire, which in its turn is the antitype of that very life of Eden which the repentant spirits seek. How then can Cato, of all men, be the shepherd of this pilgrim flock ? The answer to these questions has. never been given in detail with any convincing force ; but for our present purpose it is enough to treat them as difficulties that Dante overcame or ignored, and to ask what urged him to go apparently out of his way to encounter them by choosing Cato for this office. What was the force majeure which made Cato inevitable ? To this question Lucan, more than any other, gives the answer. The keynote of the Purgatorio is ethical, Purgatono i. 34 sqq. Pharsalia ii. 372 scjq.
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not mystic. Justice is the foundation of all virtue. Neither justice nor any true virtue is possible without freedom. No man who is a slave of his pleasures is free. It is this moral liberty that the repentant souls are seeking to recover. And Cato stands alone as the one man who had realised the Stoic ideal of this perfect freedom. For him, as Lucan testifies, " no pleasure had any say on its own account," and even his most intimate personal relations were regarded by him primarily in their social and civic aspects. So to Dante he was inevitably the appropriate guardian of the Mount. His opposition to Caesar must be regarded as a defence of freedom, not as an opposition to law and order ; and his very suicide must be under- stood allegorically as the delivery of the spirit from the tyranny of the flesh.
But Lucan, in his own person, has no feeling at all for the idealising of the Empire, or for Caesar as its representative. He hates the Empire, and though he cannot restrain a certain admiration for the firmness and rapidity of Caesar's dauntless advance to his goal, yet he uniformly represents it as a kind of daemonic energy that worked with baleful force against all better influences ; and it can hardly be denied that whereas Lucan in no way affects Dante's estimate of the mission of Rome, he does very notably affect his representations of Caesar. Dante borrows
Pharsalia ii. 387 sq. (where Henry Fielding — in Amelia — and Lord Macaulay are surely right, as against the grammarians, in taking the dative in urbi fater est not as fro genitivOy but as the dative of "interest" or "advantage").
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more than one touch from Lucan in his personal references to Caesar, and the result is an absence of warmth in them, to say the least, which we should hardly have anticipated. They strike us as almost unfriendly.
For the rest, note Lucan's description of how Pompey, springing from his neglected and but half- burned ashes, and seeking the ethereal abode of heroic spirits, " when he had gathered his soul to the eternal orbs and filled himself with very light, looking down upon the wandering planets and the stars that hold fixed places on the pole, perceived how deep the darkness under which what we call light abides, and smiled at the insults offered to his lifeless trunk." Here, and so far as I can remember here alone amongst the ancient poets known to Dante, we catch something akin to the " note " of the Paradiso. Dante is able to quote him, too, as supplying an Ethnic scripture to confirm the belief in the omnipresence of God. It is the wonderful passage in which Lucan summarises the Stoic creed at its highest, and (anticipating almost the very words of Wordsworth, though not his passion) declares : " The seat of God is there where earth and sea and air and virtue are. Why do we seek the Gods beyond ? Whatever you see, wherever you go, is Jupiter."
I can only touch upon the obvious influence of Lucan on those elaborate astronomical circum-
Pharsaliaix. 1-14. Paradiso xxii. 133 sqq. Pharsaliau.. 578 sqq. Epst. ad Kan, Grand, 22 (412-426).
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locutions that are a weariness of the flesh to most readers of the Comedy, but are so full of poetic beauty to the " other few " who have mastered the alphabet and grammar of the speech. The hint for the striking scene in which Dante is bewildered by the astrono- mical appearances of the southern hemisphere is found in a line in which Lucan represents certain soldiers in Pompey's army, supposed to have come from below the Line, as " marvelling not to see the shadows go round to the left " — i e. not travel counter clockwise, as they do in the southern hemi- sphere. All the elaborate synchronisms of the Comedy spring from this root. And lastly Dante's eye for great tracts of country marked out by their river basins or mountain ridges, and his interest in the life history of a stream may have been trained, and must certainly have been delighted, by the fine though less perfect passages in Lucan which they recall.
Ovid remains. We note, without surprise, that his love-poetry, which had such enormous influence on the French poets of the twelfth century, appears to have left Dante altogether cold. And though on other grounds he would seem superficially to owe more to him than to all the other poets except Virgil put together, yet his direct influence seldom if ever goes deep. He gave him a vast store of illustrations and associations ; but the scenes and incidents that
Pharsalia iv. 56 sqq. ; viii. 467 sqq. Paradiso xxix. I sqq. ; X. 28 sqq. Pharsalia i. 65 1 sqq. Canzone, " lo son venuto." Pharsalia iii. 247 sqq. ; ix. 537. Purgatorio iv. 82 and passim, Pharsalia i. 399 sqq. Inferno xvi, 97 sqq.
'x )••
«
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Ovid presented to Dante, Dante saw with his own eyes, not Ovid's. He placed them in his own context and inspired them with his own imagination or passion. Nowhere more markedly than here is the principle illustrated that the thing that matters most in a builder is not where he got his stones, but where he put them. Ovid is indeed a quarry, but Dante is his own architect. The ghastliness of Hell is heightened by the reference to Narcissus as much as the tender- ness of Purgatory is deepened by that to Pyramus, or the scarce supportable glory of heaven brought home by that to Semele. Ovid's stories constantly enrich Dante's imagery, geographical or natural. As we watch for the sunrise, we are awaiting the first point of " the chariot pole that Phaeton erst misguided " ; as we look from aloft upon the Levant, it is the coast on which " Europa made herself a sweet burden " (the phrase is supplied by Statius — Blanda juvenci Pondera — but the tale is Ovid's), and in the description of a double rainbow, when Echo is called in as an illus- tration, she is " the wandering nymph whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours," but nowhere that I can recall is Dante really stirred by Ovid's presentation of his matter as distinct from the mere telling of the tale. It is the situation, and no more, that Ovid supplies. Nor is this strange. For Ovid, in his treatment of his subjects, is often tenderly human, especially — and perhaps unexpectedly — in his depicting of matrimonial love, faithful to the end. fbebaid i : i8i scj.
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The story of Baucis and Philemon does not stand alone. But this same Ovid has carried to its extremest limit the art of robbing mythology of any trace of mystery or reminiscent significance, and of bleaching every suggestion of awe out of legends of the Gods. And the strange thing is that Dante seems to be quite unaware of this weakness. When Ovid gives him a situation he sees its possibilities so inevitably that he thinks Ovid saw them too and even that he has already developed them for him. Thus he refers to the story of Argus lulled to sleep by Mercury, who is telling him the tale of Syrinx, as though Ovid had carried as far as human power can take it the vain attempt to depict the very act of dropping asleep, which in its nature cannot be made to sit for its portrait. He seems to be unconscious of the fact that he has himself performed that miracle in an earlier canto with touches for which Ovid's finest brush would be no better than a besom. Yet more striking is it that he refers his reader to Ovid, where he, Dante, is himself helpless. It is when he is trying to describe the " passing beyond humanity " of the soul caught into the atmos- phere of heaven. Such an experience cannot be expressed in human speech, but it was like that of Glaucus in Ovid's story. The reader turns to that story of the fisherman who, by tasting the magic herb that had re-animated the expiring fishes he had
Pur gator io xxxii. 6^-6g. Metamorphoses i. 685-714. Purgatorio xviii. 139-145. Paradiso i. 67-72.
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caught and enabled them to leap back into the sea, is himself inwardly transformed into divine kinship with the ocean, and plunges into its depth, no longer a man but a deity. But reading the story in Ovid does but show us how infallibly Ovid misses the spiritual suggestions of his material, and how instinctively Dante feels them.
It would be ungracious to close on a note of de- preciation. Ovid never pretends to more than he attains, and he attains much. If Dante saw more in him than was really there, it is our gain. To all students of the Comedy the Metamorphoses, charming in themselves, have a special added charm thrown back upon them by that further " metamorphosis " which they themselves owe to Dante.
Metamorphoses xiii. 920 sqq.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS
A. G. Ferrers Howell.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS
In studying the works of Dante, especially the Vita Nuova and the lyrical poems in general, we cannot fail to be struck by the evident influence of the troubadours upon him ; and not only by their influence, but by the equally notable contrast between their view of life and his. It may, therefore, not be unprofitable to attempt to establish the relation between them. But before entering on this attempt it will be well to set forth briefly the nature of the love which was the predominant theme of the trou- badours' poetry at its most brilliant period, the latter half of the twelfth century, when it was being enthu- siastically cultivated at the courts of the sovereigns and the nobles of greater or lesser degree in the south of France and the north-east of Spain.^ For the illustration of the nature of this love I shall rely chiefly on the authority of its most celebrated and gifted votary, Bernart de Ventadorn, from whose chansos the whole lore of chivalrous love in its most splendid development may be gathered. " No other of the prominent troubadours," it has been well said, " is so singly and exclusively a poet of love ; without a thought of the business of this world, or the claims
^ Cf. De Vulgari Eloquentia, i. 8 : 42-44; ii. 12 : 20, 21. 191
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of another ; without a word of politics, morality, or piety in his whole works." ^
The love extolled by the troubadours of the early and middle periods — say, from iioo to 1209 — ^how- ever sometimes disguised by high-flown language, was the love founded on sexual passion. This is made plain by the nature of the reward that the lover looked for at his mistress's hand. This reward might vary in its degree according to the greater or lesser intimacy or opportunity in the particular case ; but it was always of the same kind. " I languish in grievous distress," cries Bernart, '* for the sake of her whom Beauty willed to fashion ; for her body is formed of the best that Nature could select ; her hips are slender and graceful ; her face appears fresh as a rose, wherewith she might easily revive me if I were dead. Shall I tell you how ? I am not bold enough. . . . When I see her go away from me, so great is the chill that I am undone, for the fire coming from her which is wont to warm me flies, and I remain colourless. . . . High is the reward vouchsafed me in that she but deigned to greet me. Much thanks ! God protect her for it. Lady, if you would listen to me with that same tenderness with which I am speaking, we would at the beginning of our love make an exchange of our souls. Then a delightful consciousness would be mine, for I should forthwith understand how it is with you, and you,
^ C. Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn, p. Ixxi (Halle, 191 5). This work contains Bernart's complete poems, with facsimile reproductions of twenty-three of their melodies.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 193
how it is with me, in perfect unanimity, and our two hearts would be joined in one." ^
Again : " And since you were pleased to do me such honour the day that with a kiss you gave me your love, contrive, if it please you, that still more [than a kiss] may be mine." ^ And this is amplified in the most explicit language in other passages.^ A poem by Peire Rogier, a contemporary of Bernart, also throws light on the point we are considering. He begins by professing that such is his mistress's excel- lence, that the most ill-conditioned churl, did he but speak a word or two with her, would become courteous ; next, after expressing his utter devotion to her service, and congratulating himself on his sagacity in choosing such an object for his homage, he bewails the misery he endures in her absence, and in his failure to win her favour. Finally his aim is disclosed, namely, that he may " enjoy her." ^
This love was the troubadour's supreme good. " Through nothing," says Bernart, " is a man so excellent as through love and gallantry ; for from hence proceed gaiety and song, and all that chivalry implies. Wherefore I would not have the lordship of all the world unless I could secure the rapture of
^ Can lo boschatges es jioritZy 11. 25 ff. (Appel, No. 40).
2 Bern cuidei de chantar sofrtr, st. ii. (Appel, No. 13). Cf. Can la f re f aura (al. douss^aura) venta, st. v. (Appel, No. 37).
3 Pos freyatz me Senhor, st. iv. (Appel, No. 36). Lone terns a qti'eu no chantei mat, st. v., vi. (Appel, No. 27).
* Ges non puesc en bon vers faillir. Appel, Das Leben u. die Lieder des Trobadors Peire Rogier, pp. 54-57 (Berlin, 1882). O
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love." ^ Here we have in a nutshell the troubadours' philosophy of life.
In the Court circles of those days the young girl was kept completely in the background, and the troubadours invariably paid their homage to some married lady of high station ; and when we remember that there were some 460 troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose poems have survived, we may be sure that there was a good deal of " com- mon form " and simulated passion in their songs. But Appel explodes the extravagant thesis main- tained by some, that nearly all the troubadours' love- songs were mere poetic exercises without any emotional foundation, and that the ladies celebrated in them were " purely imaginary phantoms." ^
The south of France in the twelfth century was a comparatively peaceful region, and the courtly society there led a cultivated, gay, frivolous existence which has been vividly depicted in the charming poem of Flamenca.^ It was a non-moral, if not an immoral world, and though sacred names often occur in the troubadours' poems, they are seldom met with save as expletives or adjurations. The most remarkable example of this is found in the famous Alha of Giraut de Bornelh, which begins with a magnificent invoca- tion of God, that He may be pleased to protect the person of the singer's companion, who is passing the
* Ges de chantar nom -pren talans, 11. 25-30 (Appel, No. 21).
2 Bernart von Ventadorn, xxiv. ff.
^ P. Meyer, Le roman de Flamenca (Paris, 1901).
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 195
night with his mistress.^ In something of the same spirit we find B. de Ventadorn thus enjoining unselfish- ness from a selfish motive : " For her sake it is right and seemly that I should serve every creature : even my enemy I ought to call my lord ; for by fair speech you may win over even him who is most opposed to love to further the lover's interest." ^
In connection with this subject we may briefly refer to the troubadour known as the Monk of Montaudon, who, after delighting the courts of the nobility around with his minstrelsy, and enriching his monastery with the presents he received, obtained permission to visit Alfonso II, King of Aragon (1162-1196). This monarch " commanded him to eat flesh and pay court to the ladies, and sing, and compose poetry ; and this he did." We possess, in fact, some twenty pieces by him — love-songs and other poems. ^
When, however, we come to the troubadours of the thirteenth century, we see that the treatment of the theme of chivalrous love has undergone a transforma- tion. The later poems of Giraut de Bornelh {ft. 1 1 70 ?-i 220 ?) clearly indicate the beginning of the transition from the old chivalry to the new. The peculiar social conditions amid which the earlier trou- badours had sung in the courts of the princes and nobles of southern France had been swept away by
^ A. Kolsen, Sdmtliche Lieder des Trobadors Giraut de Bornelh^ No. 54 (Halle, 1907). See below, p. 215.
2 Bern cuidei de chantar sofrir, 11. 41-45 (Appel, No. 13).
3 Published in E. Philippson, Der Monch von Montaudon (Halle, 1872).
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the Albigensian War, which had raged intermittently from 1209 till 1229 ; and, partly in consequence of this, partly in consequence of the action of the Inquisition and of the preaching of the Friars, the spiritual and moral elements began to prevail over the carnal in the love-lyrics of the later troubadours, whose most meritorious compositions indeed were not love-songs (chansos), but pieces on political, moral, or personal topics (sirventes). Take, for example, the troubadour Bertran d'Alamanon, who flourished at the court of the Count of Provence under Raymond Berenger IV (d, 124s) and his successor, Charles of Anjou. Of the twenty-one poems of his which we possess, three only are love-songs, and in one of them an entirely fresh note is sounded. The love-lorn poet laments that his mistress will not attend to him because of her absorp- tion in her religious duties ! ^ His contemporary, G. Montanhagol {d, about 1258), expresses the newer doctrine of love in very plain terms : " Truly," he says, " lovers should give willing service to love ; for love is not sin, but contrariwise a virtue which makes the wicked good, and the good better, and sets men in the road to act well day by day. Moreover, love is the source of chastity, for he who realises what love is cannot afterwards conduct himself ill." ^ And Aimeric de Pegulhan says, in the course of an elaborate apology for love, that without her (i, e. love) he can
1 Nuls horn non deu eser meraveilaz, st. i. Salverda de Grave, Le Troubadour Bertran d'Jlamanon, No. XX. (Toulouse, 1902).
2 Ar ab lo coinde pascor, 11. 11 ff. Coulet, Le Troubadour Guilhem Montanhagol^ No. II. (Toulouse, 1898).
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have no honour, and that many times she keeps him from baseness from which he could not keep himself otherwise.-^ The feeling expressed by this and other of the later troubadours, that love needed any apology, shows the strength of the reaction in favour of religion and morality that had set in ; and it would have moved Bernart de Ventadorn to incredulous contempt. A comparison of this poem with the two chansos of Bernart cited above (p. 193, note 3) is instructive. We shall see Dante under the influence of both these opposite doctrines of love.
The later troubadours continued to employ all the old formulas of their predecessors' love-songs ; and their attempt to adapt them to the new conception of love inevitably led to affectation and conventionality. Morality gained at the expense of poetry : and the early Italians who, if we may use the expression, took over the stock-in-trade of the late Provencals, found themselves entangled in the " knot " from which it required all the subtlety of Guido Guinizelli and the other poets of the dolce stil nuovo to deliver them.^
The pastime of chivalrous love was carried on under certain well-understood rules and conventions. The first and most important was, that the identity of the object of the poet's love and homage should not be disclosed, under the stress of whatsoever temptation. This is very clearly explained by B. de Ventadorn :
^ Selh que spirals ni guerrey* ah amor, st. iv. Monaci, Testi antichi frovenzali, col. 60 (Rome, 1889). * Pur gat or to f xxiv. 49 if.
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" So much does the ecstasy of love overpower and conquer me that it is a marvel how I can endure not to tell and declare on account of whom I am so joyful and exultant. But scarce will you see any true love free from apprehension and misgiving ; for a man is always fearful of failing in his duty to his beloved ; wherefore I dare not be bold to speak. As to one point, my understanding helps me ; namely, that no one ever questioned me concerning my joy without my readily lying to him about it : for it does not appear to me to be sound sense, but rather childish folly, for one that is happy in love to disclose his heart to another unless he can thereby be of service to him. There is no discourtesy (enois) nor transgression greater than that of him who spies upon another's love." ^ Hence, in the troubadours' lyrics the poet's mistress is designated by some fanciful nickname, such as Aziman (magnet), Conort (consolation).^ The secret was doubtless often an open secret, but so far as poetry was concerned it was always kept. The reason for this rule was, of course, the damage that might be caused to the reputation of the lovers by the envy of slanderers and backbiters. Bernart accordingly protests to his lady : " If those false envious ones who have robbed me of many a good day should set them- selves in ambush to discover how things stand between us, be not dismayed by the talk of base scoundrels,
^ Abjoi mou lo vers el comens, 11. 9-30 (Appel, No. i). 2 The poets' patrons and men friends are also often referred to in the same way.
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for our love shall not be known through me ; be well assured of that." ^
Next, the lover must be devoted and constant to the service of his mistress : " I will always wish her honour and her good, and will be to her a vassal, a friend, and a servant." ^ " Among lovers," says G. de Bornelh,^ " the highest praise is secrecy and constancy. Let him be blotted out from among the faithful, and let him renounce the best that love has to give, who follows not her rule and law, but asso- ciates himself with many, so that one is of no concern to him."
Absolute submission to the desires, and even the whims of the lady were enjoined : " I welcome her love which takes me captive for her sake, though she makes me a hard prison, for she is always reproaching me for that which / have cause to complain of. She is wrong ; but I forgive her, for I know her to be so fair and good that all ills from her are good to me." * Still, if the mistress remained persistently obdurate, or betrayed her lover, he was not doomed to languish in perpetual desolation, but was free to turn his attention else- where. " I had served her very well," says Bernart, " until her heart was fickle toward me : but since she is not destined for me, I am very foolish if I serve her any more." ^ Most of the troubadours, in fact, wor-
'^ A ! tantas bonas chansos, St. vi. (Appel, No. 8).
2 Be trCan ferdut lai enves Ventadorn, st. iv. (Appel, No. 12).
3 Qui chantar sol, st. vi. (Kolsen, No. 44).
* B. de Ventadorn, Bel mes can eu vei la brolha, st. iii. (Appel, No. 9). ^ La dousa votz at auztda, 11. 32-36 (Appel, No. 23).
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shipped at different altars at different times, and would have yielded a hearty assent to the comfortable doctrine, " amorem huius posse torpescere atque denique interire^ nee non huius , , , in anima reJormariP ^
Some troubadours adopted an obscure and subtle style of composition (trohar clus^ or sotil) character- ised by unusual words and constructions, rare rhymes and every metrical artifice that their ingenuity could suggest. The supreme master in this style was Dante's favourite, Arnaut Daniel, whom I shall discuss later. The motives leading to the adoption of the obscure style were two : first, a striving after origin- ality, which, naturally, became harder and harder to attain as time went on. Peire d'Alvernhe, a noted artist in the trohar clus (whom Dante mentions in De Vulgari Eloquentia, i. lo), whose muse was evidently somewhat intractable, sets forth his difficulty quite frankly at the beginning of one of his poems. " I will sing," says he, " since I see I must, a new song which is buzzing in my mouth. I have been sore puzzled how I might sing in such wise that my song should not resemble any one else's ; for no song was ever worth anything if it resembled those of other people.^ The second motive was a practical one, namely, the desire to guard against the danger of the words being tam- pered with in performance, by making them as diffi- cult as possible. This appears from another quotation
^ Dante, Epistola, iii., § 2 (ed. Paget Toynbee, p. 23). 2 Chantarai pus vei qu^a far vCer^ st. i., in Zenker, Die Lieder Peires von Juvergnej No. V. (Erlangen, 1900).
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from Peire d'Alvernhe : " It is pleasing and agree- able to me when any one applies himself to sing in close and guarded words which people are afraid to misquote." ^
We now open the Vita Nuova, We begin with the narrative of the first appearance to Dante of " the glorious lady of his mind," and the origin of that love for his ideal mistress, to whom, in spite of much stumbling, falling, and backsliding, he remained con- stant until his life's end. Here we find delineated the dawn of a genuine passion, free alike from the carnal taint of the earlier troubadours and from the frigid conventionality of the later. From the outset, the rule of secrecy is so effectually kept that the first sentence in which the name Beatrice occurs has proved one of the most puzzling places in the whole book.
We turn the page and find that the poet's devotion to his mistress has entered on a new. phase : it is brought within the domain of the conventions of chivalrous love. The poetry of the troubadours, as Appel points out,^ was social poetry. The troubadour did not pour out his soul in the solitude of his own chamber, but brought his emotions into the common stock, and performed his composition, or had it per- formed, in public. Dante accordingly makes his passion a subject of literary discussion, and comes before " all the faithful people of love," proposing to them in a
1 Zenker, o-p. cit., No. XIV., st. i. {Be mes plazen).
2 Bernart von Ventadom, p. Ix.
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sonnet a dream of which he solicits the interpretation. Many answers were returned, and he notes that the true meaning was hidden from all, " though now," he adds, " it is plain even to the simplest." The dream, in fact, contained a forecast of the issue of the poet's love. We are reminded of Giraut de Bornelh's dream which he related to his friend, who interpreted it as a prediction that Giraut would enjoy the love of a mistress of exalted rank.^
The incidents of the two " screen-ladies," with their attendant circumstances, further illustrate the maintenance of the rule of secrecy ; but as regards the second lady, Dante confesses himself to have been guilty of a grave transgression of chivalrous convention in having given occasion for scandalous gossip con- cerning her. This coming to his lady's ears, she, the foe of every violation of the conventions of chivalrous love (contraria di tutte le noie), fearing that Dante had become even as one of the enoios so often girded at by the troubadours, refused to greet him ; which greeting had been wont to fill him with such bliss that he could scarce endure it. Then, in accord- ance with the rules of the pastime, Dante sat down to compose an exculpatory poem, such as the troubadours denominated escondig, Dante's escondig takes the form of a hallata ; he has not yet that assured mastery of style to which he afterwards attained, and there is a certain laboured affectation about the piece, which lacks the simple grace and elegance of the poem which ^ No -pose sofrir c'a la dolor (Kolsen, No. 40).
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 203
the troubadour Pons de Capduoill composed on some similar occasion.^ There is one interesting point about this ballata. It must not be forgotten that the music was an essential part alike of Provencal and of Italian lyrics ; ^ and Dante seems to intimate (Fita Nuova xii.) that he employed a professional minstrel to set his ballata to music. This was the practice of such troubadours, Bertran de Born, for example, as were not themselves musicians : whether it was Dante's usual procedure, we do not know. He was devotedly fond of music, as the most cursory perusal of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso shows, and De Vulgar i Eloquentia ii. 10 implies that he pos- sessed a theoretical knowledge of it ; but there is nothing in his writings, so far as I know, to lead us to suppose that he was a composer and a performer himself.
The next division of the Vita Nuova marks a pause in the poet's development. In the four sonnets it contains he is entirely self-centred, and they set forth the painful conflict he endured before he could resolve to renounce the wooing of his mistress in the trouba- dour manner, and to devote himself thenceforth to singing her praises without the thought of winning anything from her in return. From the point of view of Dante's progress as a lyric poet, this portion of the Vita Nuova would seem to adumbrate the period of
^ S'ieu jis ni dis nuilla saisso, in Von Napolski, Leben und Werke des Trobadors Pons de Capduoill, No. VIII. (Halle, 1879).
2 See De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 8 ; and Beck, La musique des troubadours (Paris, H. Laurens).
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gestation and travail which preceded the great trans- formation set forth in § xix. when he had accomplished the passage from the Provencal, or chivalrous, to the Guinizellian, or philosophic conception of love, and fuore trasse le nuove rime cominciando ; Donne cWavete intelletto d^amore. He says, it is true, concerning the beginning of this canzone ^ " la mia lingua parU quasi come per se stessa mossa " ; but it cannot be that such a momentous change in his whole view of love as we see in comparing this canzone with the preceding poems was not the result of prolonged study and meditation during which he had found himself in amorosa erranza} The Provencal setting of the earlier part of the Vita Nuova is now cast aside as inapplicable and outworn, and the poet, in the exquisite lyrics which follow, soars to heights of philosophic mysticism far beyond the troubadours' ken. Frequent verbal reminis- cences of the troubadours, however, still occur, to attest the strong grip they held on Dante's mind, but though his language may seem at times to be but a reflection of theirs, it is animated by a new spirit and a deeper meaning.^ We may perhaps except the dirge (or planh, to use the Proven9al term) which as a good troubadour Dante composed on his lady's death : I mean the can- zone " Gli occhi dolentiJ^ ^ This may well be compared with Pons de Capduoill's planh on the death of his
1 Ftta Nuova, sonnet vi.
2 These parallels are worked out in detail in Scherillo's excellent edition of the Fita Nuova (Milan, 191 1).
• Fita Nuova, § xxxii.
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lady, Azalais de Mercoeur.^ The tone and sentiments of the two poets are very similar : each dwells upon the abiding of his lady with the angels in heaven ; but while Pons bewails the loss which the whole world has sustained, not less than his own distress, Dante seems more absorbed in his personal desolation, sharing his grief only with those sympathetic donne e donzelle to whom the poem is addressed.
In the MS. song-books wherein the troubadours' poems are preserved, some of the poems ^ are preceded by explanatory prose narratives, much later in date, called razos. Observing that Dante in three passages of the Vita Nuova ^ refers to the prose narrative as ragione, some have thought that the composition of this narrative may have been suggested to him by the Provencal razos ; but it is equally likely that the razos in Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophic, to the study of which Dante tells us that he applied himself for comfort after Beatrice's death,^ may have given the suggestion.
We now turn from the Fita Nuova to consider Dante's relation to the troubadour whom he seems to honour and admire above all others — I mean Arnaut Daniel. Arnaut is referred to four times in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, first (ii. 2 : 80) as the typical Pro- vencal singer of love, next (ii. 6 : 60) as a master of style,
^ De totz chaitius son eu aicel que plus, Napolski, op. cit.. No. XXIV. 2 About seventy in number. Chabaneau, Les Biographies des Troubadours, p. 2 (Toulouse, 1885). 2 xxxvi., xxxviii., xl. * Convivio ii. 13 : 15.
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and again (ii. lo and ii. 13) as an authority on the technique of the canzone; while in Purgatorio xxvi. 1 1 7-1 1 9 he is preferred before even Guido Guinizelli as " a better craftsman of the mother-tongue " ; and is declared to have surpassed " all verses of love and proses of romances " — sl much-discussed phrase, the meaning of which probably is, that in respect of technical skill Arnaut surpassed all writers both in southern and in northern France.^ It is interesting, therefore, to try to discover on what foundation Dante's opinion of him is based. As material for this inquiry we possess only eighteen poems by Arnaut,^ one of which may be left out of account, since it is merely a very coarse satirical piece, and without metrical interest, being composed of simple mono-rhymed stanzas. It is probably an early production, and to be taken more or less as a joke, but it may account for Dante's choice of the particular group of sinners among whom to place Arnaut in Purgatory. The other seventeen poems arc all chansos, and as a specimen of Arnaut's handling of his theme I give a literal version of one of them ^ (omitting the tornado), which presents less formidable difficulties to the translator than most of the others.
I. Before the tips of the branches are left dry and
^ See Paget Toynbee, Dante Studies and Researches, 7, n. 2, 262 ; and Torraca, in Bullettino delta Societd Dantesca Italiana, N. S., xii. 336. ^
2 Printed in Canello, La vita e le opere del trovatore Arnaldo Daniello (Halle, 1883), a work to which I am much indebted.
^ Ans quel cim reston de branch as (Canello, No. 16).
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stript of leaves, I will sing, for Love so bids me, a brief song on an ample theme. For Love has in- structed me graciously in the arts of her school ; so much know I that I stop the stream flowing against me, and my ox is much swifter than a hare.^
2. With pleasing, friendly discourse Love has bid me not depart from her [i, e, his lady], nor serve nor woo another, since she does me such a favour as to welcome me to her ; and Love tells me that I am not to seem to her a violet which soon withers though winter be not yet come, but rather that for her sake I should be a bay-tree or juniper.
3. Love said : " Thou who tarriest not elsewhere for another who may deign to desire thee, do thou avoid and reject any intrigue in any place, whoever may invite thee. He who maims himself does him- self great harm ; but do thou make no mistake which may lead men to mock thee ; and next after God, do thou honour and celebrate her.
4. " And thou, faint-hearted one, be not dismayed for fear she may not love thee : pursue, if she flies thee or avoids thee ; for he who persists in his entreaties and does not leave off can scarce fail to attain his end. For I [to gain such a lady] would pass amid the marsh of Lerna as a pilgrim, or yonder through the land where Hebrus flows."
5. If I have crossed rivers and torrents for her,
^ Allusion to his having said in a former poem, in reference to his then hopeless love, that he was " hunting the hare with an ox and swimming against the stream."
2o8 DANTE
think you that I repent it ? Not I ; for with Love's joy alone, without other food, she can make me the sweet medicine of her embrace and kisses ; and my heart, e'en though it flies, parts not from her who guides and governs it. Heart, whithersoever I go, leave her not, nor sever thyself from her !
6. From Nile to Sanehas ^ no fairer lady clothes and unclothes herself ; for so great is her beauty that the report of it would seem to you a lie. Prosperous am I in love since she kisses and embraces me ; cold nor frost nor fog chills me, nor does gout nor fever hurt me !
I may note that the far-fetched reference to the Hebrus in Thrace, and the rather prosaic mention of gout and fever {gota ni febres)^ are due to the rare rhyme in ehres which occurs in the last line of every stanza. Similarly the rhyme in erna may account for the allusion to the Lernean marsh.
The mention in this chanso of kissing and embrac- ing, and other still more ardent expressions elsewhere, leave no room for doubt as to the carnal nature of the love that is the theme of Arnaut's song ; and this seems to supply the clue to the meaning of Dante's eulogy of him in the passage of the Purgatorio already referred to. On account of the love which he had celebrated — or, rather, the abuse of it — ^he is represented as undergoing the purgatorial discipline ; but at the same time Dante speaks of his poetic achievement in ^ Locality and reading doubtful.
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the language already quoted. It seems therefore to follow, that the eulogy applies not to the subject- matter of his poetry, which Dante is there condemn- ing, but to his treatment of it — in other words, to his supreme technical skill. Therefore no disparagement can be intended of quel di Lemost (G. de Bornelh), except only in respect of technique ; ^ and this harmonises per- fectly with De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 2, where Giraut is associated with Dante and " his friend " Cino of Pistoia as a singer of virtus^ rectitudo, and directio voluntatis ^ whereas Arnaut appears as the singer of Fenus, accensio amorisy and amor, which, I take it, must here be limited to carnal affection. Dante's praise of Arnaut attests the great importance he attached to technical skill in poetry. He saw that, since G. Guinizelli had infused a new spirit into the infant vernacular poetry hidebound by worn-out Provencal tradition, the one thing needful was to complete the formation of a literary language which should be a fit vehicle for the expression of the new philosophy of love ; and to this task he devoted himself both by precept in the De Vulgari Eloquentia and by example in his own lyrical compositions.
As regards metrical technique, Dante mentions a device which is very characteristic of A. Daniel.^ The practice of leaving one or more " isolated "
^ Note that the speech of Limoges was held to be the best of all for chansos and sirventes (Raimon Vidal, Las razos de trobar in Monad, op. cit., 5).
^ De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 13 : 22 ff. P
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rhymes in a stanza, answered by rhymes in the follow- ing stanza or stanzas, was followed by the troubadours from the first, and sometimes with the happiest effect. But Arnaut used this device more freely than any of his predecessors. In six of his chansos we find from three to thirteen isolated rhymes, and in no less than eight all the rhymes are isolated. Here he compen- sates for the absence of rhyme within the stanza by a scheme of subtle assonances. This practice was not followed by Dante nor by the Italians in general ; but he speaks in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 13 of one Gotto of Mantua, who always put an isolated rhyme into his stanza.
The musical setting of the canzone determined the structure of the stanza in accordance with the rules given in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 10, where Arnaut 's practice in regard to it is likewise adverted to. With the object of avoiding the monotonous iteration of short musical phrases, Arnaut usually set his poems to an undivided melody, and consequently adopted the undivided form of stanza which, though already in use, had not been so lavishly employed before.^ But his crowning achieve- ment was the Sestina,^ a form in all probability in- vented by him. Here rhyme is discarded altogether, and the same six words occur as line-endings in each of the six stanzas, and in the tornada (or envoy) accord- ing to a particular scheme. The metrical structure
^ See Canello, op. cit. 23-25 ; and Appel, Bernart von Ventadom^ xcviii. if.
^ Canello, No. xviii.
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of this poem was imitated (with two slight modifica- tions) by Dante in his canzone ''Al poco giorno^'^ ^ and even surpassed by him in the extraordinary composition " Amor tu vedi hen^^ ^ which he viewed with so much complacency. Another interesting development of the Sestina form is seen in the poem ''Al prim pres dels breus jorns hraus^"* ^ by Aimeric de Belenoi, another of whose poems is cited in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 6, 12. Arnaut Daniel's chansos smell strongly of the lamp, and more than once he alludes to his care in com- position. He uses a large number of words not met with in any other troubadour, and a large number in an unusual sense, while, as might be expected in the supreme artist of the trohar clus, difficult inversions and complicated constructions are not wanting. There is also a wonderful variety in the length of his lines, which range from one to eleven syllables. The rhymes are excessively difficult ; sometimes, indeed, he has to "cook" them, as, for instance, where he says Roam for Roma, and Luna-pampa for Pampaluna.* The result of all this is that his style is often cramped and affected ; as when he declares, " A thousand times a day I yawn and stretch for that fair dame who surpasses all others as much as delight surpasses sorrow and vexation." ^ After this astonishing performance
1 See De Vulgari Eloquentia^ ii. lo : 15-28, and ii. 13 : 5-14.
2 " Oxford Dante," p. 160.
3 Appel, Provenzalische Chrestomathie, p. 71 (Leipzig, 1902), and see Chaytor, The Troubadours of Dante^ p. 171 (Oxford, 1902), in which book the poem is also printed.
* Dous brais e critz,^ 11. 36, 40 (Canello, No. xii). '^ Ibid, 13-16.
212 DANTE
we are not surprised that the poet finds it necessary to protest that his fervent affection is not due to intoxication, or as he phrases it, " issues not from the bottle." 1
In his references to Nature, Arnaut, though brief, is less perfunctory than most of the troubadours, and gives evidence of his sympathetic observation of her ; though there is nothing in his poems comparable to Bernart de Ventadorn's famous description of the lark's song.2
The personification of Love, of which a good example occurs in the poem above translated (p. 206), is more thoroughly worked out by Arnaut than by most of the troubadours. It is noticeable that in the seemingly needless digression in the Vita Nuova^ where Dante justifies his personification of Love, he does not refer to Arnaut nor to any other dicitor per rima, but boldly appeals to the practice of the great Roman poets, thus exalting the despised vernacular to the august level of Latin.
Arnaut's influence over Dante is distinctly percept- ible in the so-called rime pietrose, that is to say, the canzoni '^Jlpoco giorno,''^ "Amor tu vedi ben,^^ " Cost nel mio parlar,^^ "lo son venuto al punto delta rota^'^ and the sonnet "jE' non e legno di siforti nocchi,^^ The love which inspired them was the same love of which Arnaut sang,
^ This occurs in ^^ Sim fos Jmors" (Canello, No. 17), cited in De Vulgari Eloquentia, ii. 13.
2 Can vei la lawLeta mover (Appel, No. 43).
3 XXV. Cf. De Vulgari Eloquential ii. 6 : 78 ff.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 213
and, as Canello remarks/ Dante's psychological condi- tion was at the time of their composition similar to Arnaut's, and disposed him to a sympathetic study of that poet. Arnaut plays upon the name of Laura, Dante plays still more persistently upon the word pietra, which has led to the belief that Pietra was the name of the lady by whom he had been infatuated.
The almost entire absence from the Vita Nuova poems and from those written in honour of Philosophy of references to the aspects of Nature, is remarkable, and not easy to explain. In " Alfoco giorno^'' and still more in " lo son venuto^'^ Dante was led — and, it may be, under Arnaut's guidance — ^to perceive the poetic value of Nature, and to turn his keen eye in that direction. The elaborate descriptions of the pheno- mena of Nature in winter in each of the five stanzas of " lo son venuto " give us a foretaste of the splendid results of Dante's Nature-study which meet us on every page of the Comedy.
I have already spoken of Dante's technical achieve- ments in "^/ foco giorno " and "Amor tu vedi hen^"* and only add that they are real poems, and not, like their prototype, little better than an exercise in metrical gymnastics. " lo son venuto " seems to be a preliminary essay in this style, for we find that the last two lines of every stanza end with the same word in the same sense : the words are, pietra^ donna^ tempo^ sempre, dolce, and the first three of them are used as end-words in ''Amor tu vedi hen^ In " Cost nel mio 1 Of, cit.y p. 47.
214 DANTE
parlar " the structure of the stanza is relatively simple ; we may, however, note the difficult rhymes aspro, diaspro ; scorza, forza ; corro, borro, soccorro ; and the equivocal rhyme latra (adj.) and latra (verb) in lines 58, 59. In the ethical canzoni " Doglia mi reca^'* " Le dolci rime " (on which the fourth treatise of the Convivio is a comment), and " Poscia che Amor " the indirect influence of Arnaut Daniel may perhaps be traced in the extreme complication of the structure of the stanzas and in the varied length of their lines. Having seen how Dante, under the stress of an over- powering passion, was influenced by Arnaut Daniel in the composition of certain poems, we now come to the troubadour whom he associates with himself and " his friend " as a singer of righteousness, and with whom, in his better moments, he was in far greater sympathy than with Arnaut — I mean Giraut deBornelh. Little is authentically known of Giraut 's life, save that he frequented the courts of the sovereigns of Navarre, Castile and Aragon ; and that he took part with Richard Cceur-de-Lion in the Third Crusade. He was a man of learning ; ^ and the razo to one of his poems mentions that he was robbed of his house and of his books by the satellites of Guy V, Viscount of Limoges, in 1211.^ Another razo informs us that he would spend the winter in study, and the summer in visiting various courts, accompanied by two minstrels to per- form his songs ; and that he gave his earnings to his
1 Can branch al hrondels e rama^ st. vii (Kolsen, No. 39).
2 Chabaneau, of. cit. 16, n. 3.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 215
poor relations and to the church of his native place. ^ But if we are scantily informed as to his outward life, his poems, of which nearly eighty have survived, tell us much of his character and views. He was of a proud and sensitive disposition ; his career as a lover was on the whole unhappy, and he bitterly felt and deeply resented the slights which his mistress put upon him.^ There is hardly a trace of sensuality in his affection ; thrice, indeed, he expressly disclaims it,^ and in a fourth passage reprobates it.^ His Alba (above, p. 194) is quite out of keeping with the tone of all his other poems, and must be regarded as a singular concession to popular taste. He is, in fact, the pro- phet of chivalrous love at its best, free from the baser emotions of some of his predecessors and contempo- raries, and from the conventional affectation of his successors. But it is his moral poems which chiefly attracted Dante's sympathy; and their influence on the canzoni " Le dolci rime^^ and " Poscia ch^Amor " is unmistakable. The latter, indeed, might be described as an attempt to write in Giraut's manner, and the closeness of the imitation is intensified by the use of the Provengalisms messione^ fallenza^ and coraggi ; while donneare and sollazzo are the Italian equivalents of domnejar, solatz, technical terms in the language of
1 Chabaneau, op. cit. 14.
2 See especially lois e chans, st. vi (Kolsen, No. 47).
3 Amars^ onrars e charteners, St. iv (Kolsen, No. 6) ; Chans en brolh, St. vii (Kolsen, No. 22) ; Si sotils sens, st. iii (Kolsen, No. 51).
* Ges aisi del tot nom lais, st. vi, vii (Kolsen, No. 45), and cf. the Pastorela Valtrer lo 'primer jorn d'aost (Kolsen, No. 56).
2i6 DANTE
chivalrous love. By way of illustration I quote a short passage from one of Giraut's finest moral sirventes^ cited in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 6, as the first example of an " illustrious canzonet " The v^orld w^as good w^hen joy was everywhere welcomed, when nobleness was united to high rank. But now it is the worst men who are called good, and he is said to be ' superior ' who is least filled with joy, while the man will be most envied who gathers as much of other people's pro- perty as ever he can. . . . Reason has gone astray, since men have deemed the bad good and judged the noble, the courteous, and the true to be the worst." The fourth stanza of this poem should also be compared with the second of " Poscia cWAmorT ^ Similarly the germ of the doctrine of nobleness set forth in ''^Le dolci rime^^ and Convivio iv. is to be found in Giraut's ^' Molt era dolz e plazens^^ (Kolsen, No. 64); while, as I have pointed out elsewhere,^ the canzone " ^re donne " is, as to its dramatic form, a direct imitation of " Z<? dolz chans d^un auzelP ^
As I have already mentioned, there is little sense of religious obligation in the songs of most of the twelfth- century troubadours ; but it is far otherwise with Giraut de Bornelh, in whose poems the note of religious exhortation is not infrequently heard. Two of his poems (Kolsen, Nos. 70, 74) are entirely religious ;
^ 5z fer mon Sobu-Totz nofos (Kolsen, No. 73).
2 Reference may also be made to Nos fot sofrir ma lenga qu^ilh non dia (Kolsen, No. 69).
3 Dante, his Life and Work, p. 60 (Jack & Nelson, 1920). * Kolsen, No. 55.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 217
as, of course, are the two crusading songs .■'■ Like Dante,^ Giraut blames the Pope for not bestirring himself in the holy cause. The Pope, he says, is so fast asleep between Tierce and Nones that he has no leisure to urge the barons to go against the Saracens. But whereas with Dante the deliverance of the Holy Land was a matter important indeed, but secondary, in Giraut's eyes, it was a valuable means of grace, and almost the central point of the Christian religion.
Giraut essayed both the trohar clus and the trohar leu, and his utterances on their respective merits are conflicting. In one place he declares that a song lacks its full worth unless all can enjoy it, and that he likes to hear his songs in the mouths of the water- carriers on their way to the spring.^ Again, in a tenso with his friend and patron Linhaure (Raimbaut, Count of Orange), he asks what is the good of composing poetry unless any one can understand it at once ? ^ Elsewhere, however, he deliberately charges his lan- guage with " a strange and noble meaning, though all do not understand with what meaning " ; ^ and in another place he deprecates " singing for all in com- mon." ^ It must be confessed that in whatever style he may be writing, Giraut is nearly always difficult, though the difficulty arises as frequently from a natural
^ Kolsen, Nos. 60, 61.
- Inferno xxvii. 89; Paradiso ix. 124-142.
^ A fenas sat comensar, st. ii (Kolsen, No. 4).
* Kolsen, No. 58.
^ Si m sentisjizels amies, st. vi (Kolsen, No. 27).
® Lajlors del verjan, st. iii (Kolsen, No. 26).
21 8 DANTE
originality of expression as from intentional obscurity ; and in one place lie allows that it is harder to write clearly than to write obscurely.^ We can now guess why it is that Dante makes no mention of Bernart de Ventadorn, a fact which has often caused surprise, seeing that to modern taste Bernart would probably stand first in merit among the troubadours. But he was not the sort of poet whom Dante most admired. Though his technique fully reaches the high standard of the troubadours generally, he does not attempt to compete with other poets in metrical ingenuities which would indeed be quite incompatible with his style ; nor is this blemish — ^for blemish it would be in Dante's estimation — redeemed by any moral or religious fervour or philosophic subtlety. This being so, the prominent place given in the Purgatorio to so second-rate a poet as Sordello is at first sight puzzling, and needs explana- tion. Dante's first mention of this troubadour is in De Vulgari Eloquentia i. 15, where he appears to intimate that Sordello, after some literary attempts in his local Mantuan dialect, forsook his native tongue entirely. He had, in fact, after numerous wanderings and adventures (including an intrigue with the too-famous Cunizza), secured a footing at the court of Raymond Berenger IV, Count of Provence, by 1233 ; and must thence- forward be considered a Provencal. The forty-two poems of his that we possess are all in the Provencal tongue. They comprise chansos, tensos, sirventes, ^ Leu chansonef e vily st. i (Kolsen, No. 48).
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 219
and a long didactic poem known as ''U ens enh amen d^onorP ^ His love-poems are of no special interest or importance. They are in the conventional style of the thirteenth century ; but Sordello rather over-acts the part of the devout lover, and is at times very affected. His sirventes and tensos have greater individuality; the Ensenhamen may rank with Tupper's once famous Proverbial Philosophy!^ But one happy inspiration visited Sordello, and procured him the sort of pinchbeck immortality he now enjoys. On the occasion of the death (probably in 1237) of his patron Blacatz, one of the chief nobles of Provence, instead of composing a dirge in the approved solemn style, with an intricate melody, it occurred to him to write in simple mono-rhymed stanzas, set to an easy tune, a satire on the chief sovereigns of the time, the Emperor (Frederick n),the Kings of France (Louis IX), England (Henry HI), Castile (Ferdinand HI), Aragon (James I), Navarre (Thibaut I), and the Counts of Toulouse (Raymond VH) and Provence (Raymond Berenger IV), who are bidden to eat of the heart of Blacatz in order to gain a martial spirit and make head
^ Forty of the poems, including the Ensenhamen, were published by de Lollis in his Vita e Poesie di Sordello di Goito (Halle, 1896) ; and two others subsequently discovered by Bertoni were published by him in the Giornale Storico della Letter atur a Italiana, xxxviii. 269 ff. He also published in the same article a poem in a north Italian dialect, which he considered might have been written by Sordello.
2 One passage (11. 909-928), where Sordello describes the rich " poor-spirited and void of understanding," who " living are dead," affords a pretty close parallel to Inferno iii. 61-64. Extracts from the Ensenhamen are given in Chaytor, ofi. cit. 77 ff.
220 DANTE
against their foes. Henry III must " eat much of the heart," for that he is poor-spirited ; Louis IX will only eat of it if his mother will let him ; while James I must eat it on the sly, for if his mother heard of it she would give him a thrashing. The correspondence between this list of sovereigns and that of those whom Sordello rebukes in Purgatorio vii. 91 ff .^ leaves us in no doubt that it was the sirventes on the death of Blacatz which suggested to Dante the employment of Sordello in the function assigned to him in the Purgatorio. His sojourn in the Ante-purgatory had been long enough to improve the historical Sordello almost beyond recognition,^ and Dante's presentment of him would have caused some merriment among his fellow-poets at the court of the Count of Provence ; but a trace of the old insolent levity is discernible where he uses the nicknames Big-nose and Little-nose {Nasuto, Nasetto) to designate Charles of Anjou and Philip III of France.
Of the greater troubadours, two others must be briefly referred to, Bertran de Born and Folquet of Marseilles. Bertran's turbulent character and war- like career earned him his place in the Inferno among the sowers of discord, and are faithfully reflected in his sirventes. His dirge on the death of Prince Henry of England — ^the " young king " — is one of the most beautiful pieces in the whole range of Provencal literature, while his few love-poems are distinguished
^ It is worked out in detail by de Lollis, of. cit. 91, 92.
2 The date of his death is unknown, but he was living in 1269.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 221
by characteristic vigour and originality. His technical skill is of the high order one would expect from a friend of Arnaut Daniel, as Bertran probably was. His poem " Non pose mudaty^ cited in De Vulgari Eloquentia ii. 2 as a specimen of a war-song, is in its metrical structure an imitation of Arnaut's " Sim fos Amors ^^ (above, p.2i2,n.i). In Convwio W. II : 128, Dante includes him among various potentates as an example of munificence,-'- which virtue is there designated by the Provencal term messione.
Folquet, son of a Genoese merchant settled at Marseilles, inherited a fortune from his father, and followed the career of a troubadour, his chief patrons having been Alfonso H of Aragon, Richard Coeur-de- Lion, Raymond VH Count of Toulouse, and Barral Viscount of Marseilles. His earlier life, if we may believe the razos to two of his poems,^ was not free from scandal, but in maturer age he renounced the world and became a Cistercian monk. In or after 1 201 he became Abbot of Toronet, and Bishop of Toulouse in 1205, which see he held till his death in 1 23 1. As bishop he was distinguished by his vigour in the prosecution of the Albigensian crusade against heresy, and by the assistance he gave to St. Dominic in the establishment of the Friars Preachers. Dante pondered this story, and from it evolved, with extra- ordinary skill and subtlety, the scene in Paradiso ix.
^ See Paget Toynbee, Dante Studies and Researches ^ p. 143. 2 Printed in Stronski, Le troubadour Folquet de Marseille^ pp. 4-6 (Cracow, 1910).
222 DANTE
82 ff., as Zingarelli has pointed out.^ The elaborate geographical paraphrasis with which the passage opens indicates the scenes of Folquet's poetic activity ; the significance of the word arse (1. 97) comes from his chanso "En chantan nCaven a memhrar " ; ^ Dido, Phyllis and lole point to the three ladies said to have been loved by him ; the invective against Florence was suggested by a poem composed by him in 11 95 to exhort the princes of the West to succour the Kings of Castile and Aragon against the victorious Arabs ; ^ while the rest of the passage is elicited in subtle fashion from the story of Folquet's conversion and his ecclesiastical career.
Folquet's poems are remarkable for their artificiality, and he may perhaps be claimed as a precursor of the Guinizellian school in virtue of his " methodical application of the processes of scholasticism to the ancient commonplaces of the chansoP ^ This would be a passport to Dante's favourable consideration, and account for the honourable place assigned to Folquet in De Vulgar i Eloquentia ii. 6.
Enough has now been said in illustration of the troubadours' influence on Dante. They furnished him with examples of technical skill in vernacular lyric poetry immeasurably surpassing any that his
^ La personalitd stone a di Folchetto di MarsigUa nella Commedia di Dante (Bologna, 1899).
2 Stronski, of. cit. No. V. (p. 27).
s Ibid., op. cit. No. XIX. (p. 83).
* A. Jeanroy, in Revue des Deux Mondes, February i, 1903, p. 681 ; and cf. Stronski, op. cit. 73* ff.
DANTE AND THE TROUBADOURS 223
Italian predecessors could supply ; and if in their chansos they were, as to subject-matter, rather a hindrance than a help, as we saw in speaking of the earlier part of the Vita Nuova, their sirventes furnished models for such outbursts of invective as Purgatorio vi. y6 if. and Paradiso xxii. 70 ff ., which are, in fact, sirventes embodied in the structure of the Comedy. But there is more than this : the vanished life of courtly chivalry, which was the background of the troubadours' lyrics, had a powerful attraction for Dante.^ He could sympathise with Giraut de Bor- nelh's longing for the good old days, when " for the sake of a glove thrown among the young courtiers a chivalrous contest arose which lasted for all the rest of the year." ^ But while Giraut could only turn his despairing glance backward, Dante, with his wider moral vision, comforted himself in the words with which, in the famous canzone of the Three Ladies ^ " Amore " heartened his disconsolate kinswomen : —
" Drizzate i colli . . . Larghezza e Temperanza e I'altre nate Del nostro sangue mendicando vanno, Pero se questo e danno Pianganlo gli occhi, e dolgasi la bocca Degli nomini a cui tocca Che sono a' raggi di cotal ciel giunti ; Non noi, che semo dell' eterna rocca."
^ See, for instance, Purgatorio xiv. 103 ff. ; Convivio iv. 1 1. 2 Lo dolz chans d^un auzel, st. v. (Kolsen, No. 55). 8 " Oxford Dante," p. 171.
HUMOUR OF DANTE
IiONSDALE RaGG,
HUMOUR OF DANTE
" Cicero hath observed," says the Spectator of November 5, 1714, "that a jest is never uttered with a better grace than v^hen it is accompanied v^ith a serious countenance."
If v^^e combine this v^th Burton's citation from Aristotle in the Anatomy of Melancholy that " melan- choly men of all others are most witty," we seem to have proved a prima facie case for the possibility of a humorous strain in the austere-faced poet of the Divine Comedy, whom Boccaccio describes (Fita, § 8) as " nella faccia sempre malinconico e pensoso."
Aristotle's " witty " — if we rightly trace the quota- tion to the De Divinatione per Somnum (ii. 464^ : 33) — is not exactly witty in our modern sense, yet it is really germane to the subject, for it implies imagina- tive gifts — a swift intuition, such as graces the scientific inventor, and the power of seeing quaint and happy analogies {evoxoxCa, cf. Rhet. iii. li : 1412^).
We beHeve that Professor Sannia was right in his main contention, when in 1909 he claimed that the popular tradition of a humourless Dante is a travesty and a libel. Dante was at once too great and too human to be devoid of this saving grace, though the
227
228 DANTE
very sublimity of his work tends to draw our atten- tion away from the playful flashes, the subtler ironies, the masterly handling of the grotesque, and from that readiness to turn the flashlight upon his own weak- nesses and to look at himself from outside which redeem him at once from affinity to the " cattivo coro " of those who " take themselves too seriously,"
" Laughter," says Dante himself {Convivio III. viii. 96), " is a coruscation of the soul's delight." And such " coruscation " is described by Boccaccio, when he pictures to us the poet as " sorridendo alquanto," when he overhears the gossips of Verona commenting on the crisped hair and darkened complexion of the man who " goes down to Hell and returns at will to bring back word of those below."
A like smile — only not so self-betraying as the " lampeggiar di riso " of Purgatorio xxi. 114 — must have followed on his own famous utterance on the road from Porciano, when, according to tradition, the poet's ready wit saved him at once from bodily arrest and from verbal mendacity. " Is Dante Alighieri at Porciano ? " asks the Florentine envoy of the escaping refugee. " Quando io era, v'era " (" When I was there, he was "), came out the deliciously ironical reply.
The group of would-be humorous stories about him collected in Dr. Paget Toynbee's Life (3rd ed., pp. 176 sqq.), authentic or otherwise, strike one in the main as clumsy and heavy, and unworthy of the author of the Divine Comedy, though they witness
HUMOUR OF DANTE 229
to a popular tradition that Dante's severe austerity- had another side. But such a tradition as that recorded by the Anonimo Fiorentino on the episode of Belacqua ■ (Purgatorio iv. 106 sqq,) has a more convincing ring4 Belacqua excuses his own laziness, quoting Aristotle to^^ the effect that " by repose and quiet the mind attains j to wisdom." " Certainly," rips out his friend, " if | repose will make a man wise, you ought to be thej wisest man on earth."
When we turn to Dante's own works, we meet at once flashes of humour of a grim sort that would be recognised and acknowledged by all — the biting satire of his invectives against degenerate Florence and the Papal Court, concentrated now and again upon indi- viduals, as upon the Simoniacal Popes, and particularly on Boniface VIII. These are too obvious to need more than a general and passing reference. The grotesque horseplay of the Demons in Inferno xxi- xxiii., at first sight unworthy of any self-respecting poet, and descending ultimately to the level of sheer vulgarity, acquires a new interest if we regard it as a delicately adjusted attempt to pour appropriate scorn and ridicule on the revolting foolishness of sin. We may interpret it in the light of Dante's own com- ment on a similar scene — the vulgar harlequinade of Sinon and Maestro Adamo in Inferno xxx., where the poet depicts himself as blushing with shame when Virgil reproves his childish absorption in the unworthy spectacle {Inferno xxx. 131). This habit of visualising his own shortcomings — his hesitation, his falterings, his
230 DANTE
cowardice — of drawing our attention to a puny Dante hiding behind a rock, or a faint-hearted poet needing the spur of Virgil's tongue or the encouragement of his leadership — -is in some ways the surest guarantee that the sense of humour is not wanting.
The man whose attitude towards himself is such, is evidently far removed from that pompous self-import- ance which takes itself so seriously that its only relation to the humorous is that of supplying unconscious material for legitimate ridicule. If there is irony here it is not of the mordant, trenchant kind — that response " not with words, but with a knije^'' which in the Convivio (IV. xiv. 105) he declares to be a meet retort to senseless stupidity. And the genial irony which sometimes plays about his own figure as we accompany him on the mystic pilgrimage, gives place to the most delightful playfulness in those inimitable scenes where Virgil and Statins are together his companions in the twenty-first and twenty-second cantos of Purgatorio,
The charming situation which arises out of the fact that Virgil and Dante know who Statins is, while he as yet is not aware that he is in the presence of that author of the Mneid for whose acquaintance in the world below he protests he would gladly have under- gone an extra year of purgatorial discipline, is matched later on by the scene in the Earthly Paradise where Matilda gravely discourses to Dante, in the presence of the two Roman poets, of those " who in ancient days sang of the Golden Age " {Purgatorio xxviii.
139-47)-
HUMOUR OF DANTE 231
Dante turns round, and sees a smile pass from one to another of his poet companions.
Less exquisite, but perhaps more remarkable in its way, is his attribution of laughter to spirits who have not yet, like Statins, won their release — the mirth that rises to the lips of penitents still " serving their time " in purgatorial discipline. On the Terrace of Avarice, Midas's self-inflicted distress — " per la qual sempre convien che si rida " — is a constant source of glee (Purgatorio xx. 108), as is also the fate of Crassus — his dead mouth crammed full of the gold for which in hfe he had been so hungry : " Tell us, Crassus, for thou knowest, what is the flavour of gold ? " (xx. 116 sq).
Dante is not only ready to poke fun at himself when occasion serves, he is also bold enough to intro- duce a similar situation into Heaven itself, and to picture St. Gregory the Great " waking up " in his proper celestial sphere to a sense of the absurdity of his own mistake in deviating from the " Dionysian " scheme of the Angelic Hierarchy {Paradiso xxviii. 135).
It is unnecessary to labour the point by quotations from the Convivio — where each of the four Trattati might furnish us with instances — or from the De Vulgari Eloquentia^ where he makes mischievous allusions to the quaint phonetics of the various Italian dialects of his day. Here, too, as in the Commedia^ there are touches of bitter sarcasm, especially when political themes are touched, as in the references to Azzo of Este (in II. vi.) and to Charles of Valois.
232 DANTE
In a more playful strain he drives home a lesson against over-ornate versifying, taking up a phrase of Horace.
" Optat ephippia bos piger . . .," he declares. " We do not speak of an ox caparisoned as a horse, or a belted pig as ornatus, we laugh at them, and v^rould rather apply the term deturpatus.^^
There are limits to the incongruity of adornment w^hich cannot be tolerated 1
Dante, after all, was a Florentine : a native of that city of which the poet's elder contemporary, the jovial Friar Salimbene of Parma, declared that its citizens were the greatest wags of their generation : " Floren- tini maximi trufatores sunt." Similarly Prof. Sannia reminds us that the poet must have inherited a strain of humour in his Tuscan blood — " il genio comico e satirico fu in lui impronta, eredita etnica."
His humour is, on the whole, wonderfully restrained. There is none of the boisterous jollity of Shakespeare's comic scenes, nor of the rollicking breadth of Sacchetti's or Boccaccio's style of humour. In the Convivio he expressly deprecates the " cackling " laughter that argues utter want of restraint.
In the Inferno, as we have seen, he most nearly " lets himself go " to the verge of vulgarity — but with a definite purpose. And Benedetto Croce has pointed out, even in this first Cantica, instances of a light and mischievous playfulness (La Poesia di Dante, p. 57), more in the vein of what we find in the second.
It has seemed worth while to draw attention to
HUMOUR OF DANTE 233
this subject when Dante's name is in every mouth as the " altissimo poeta." For without a sense of humour — that " giftie " which takes us out of ourselves, opens for us a true perspective, enables us to sympathise with human frailty, and " going through the Vale of Misery " to " use it for a well "— a man cannot be a full man, nor a poet a full poet. It is because he possesses this gift that his poem touches the imagination as it does, and thrills the heart :—
Sunt lacrymse rerum, et mentem mortaha tangunt.
'A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO '
Antonio Cippico.
"A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO "
A don Gelasio Caetani,
FuoRi quasi della soglia di questo libro di omaggio all' Alighieri, nel quale abbiamo convitati, in questo anno santo del sesto centenario della sua morte, a modesto ma festevole simposio, alcuni spiriti devoti all' alta poesia, desidero d'auguralmente porre il tuo nome, amico mio molto caro, die, disceso del piu nobile sangue d' Italia e d'lnghilterra, sei, a mezzo dell' avo, insigne dantista, e dell' atavo tuo, 1' ottavo Bonifacio, cosi intimamente, oltre che per lo studio diuturno, per me coUegato — alia opera immortale di Dante. E in queste poche pagine che nel volgare nostro chiudono il volume mio e degli altri " miei migliori," poi che arduo sarebbe alia mia coscienza, ne di settator d'ignoranza ne di professore " sudante in traccia del veltro," scoprire o dire cose mai prima dette, voglio continuare certi nostri coUoqui dilettosi, iniziati, meno di un anno fa, in una loggetta aperta sopra uno spiazzo arborato, per oltre al quale scorreva, senza quasi voce, la Bormida verde sotto quattro grandi archi di acquedotto romano. Ricordi ? Eravamo ambedue, inferme le membra, con la speranza
237
238 DANTE
della guarigione, presso al bulicame di uno di quegli spenti vulcani die sono testimoni perenni del grande fuoco die tuttora e nelle viscere piu profonde della nostra terra, del fuoco originario in cui I'ltalia ingenera la nostra stirpe aspra e crucciosa, del fuoco ond' e tutto " cio die fummo e saremo." Era naturale, forse, in quella nostra solitudine, tra la folia degl' infermi, dentro al cratere stesso del morto vulcano, d'onde solforose e fumose affiorano perpetuamente le calde misteriose acque di sotterra, die nei tramonti di sangue appaiono vive d'un " boUor vermiglio," noi confortas- simo con Dante i nostri ozi e i nostri lunghi conversari. lo estraevo — ricordi ? — a quando a quando dalla tasca una Commedia di piccolo formato, ch'e viatico fedele della mia esistenza : e da mane e da sera, il cantare di Dante comentava a noi ogni pensiero, colorava ogni discussione, illuminava i fatti del mondo tuttavia sospeso fra la guerra e la pace. Nelle fresdie notti di stelle o di luna, saliti faticosamente le lacclie e i gironi di qualcuna di quelle dantesdie coUine, arse e pure lussureggianti di vigne e di messi, cli' impen- dono suUe Terme, simili a minuscole montagne di PuTgatorio, ci rifugiavamo, soli o con un dolce amico, sotto la pergola pampinosa di qualdie osteria campa- gnuola, a riposarci dell' aspra via e a riepilogare, con la lettura di qualdie terzina dantesca, i nostri discorsi. Qualdie falena sperduta cozzava, per ebrieta di luce, nel vetro della fioca lampana appesa a un tronco fronzuto. Tra la frasca ammiccavano altissime, ora si ora no, sopra di noi le stelle. Tu mi parlavi de' tuoi
' A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO ' 239
grandi antenati, con quella secura conoscenza storica che di loro hai, oltre che dallo studio, dal tuo stesso sangue. E il terribile guerriero pontefice, gloria prima della tua casata, " che gitto in terra Penestrino " e I'aro, mi appariva, cosi, fra luce e ombra, suUo sfondo della notte, oltre che nelle tue parole, nella vivezza degli occhi e nel tuo volto affilato e saldo e glabro, in cui e il sigillo fiero della tua specie. Bonifacio m'era presente e vivo a quel modo, assai piu formidabile che nell' affresco giottesco, come mai prima nella vita, come mai prima nella storia letta. II buon Moscato di Strevi, cosi dolce e frizzantino, indorava i bicchieri. Tutt' intorno, per i colli e su dalle valli, saliva il canto insonne e assiduo dei grilli, intermesso nei silenzi succeduti a una terzina o a una tua evocazione della 1' antica istoria, che ne appariva recente come se con- temporanea. II tempo era per noi, in quelle ore, abolito. Lo sostituiva con la sua luce senza ombre, la Poesia.
Riusciti all' aperto, giu per la china, tu, sotto quella pioggia delle vergini stelle, mi narravi ancora i casi della tragedia famigliare della donna dei Tolomei. L'ombra di lei n'era a paro nella discesa, assurta su di non so qual burratello. Ci ricantava nei cuori, pie- tosa : " Ricordati di me che son la Pia." E riera quasi non ombra piu, ma viva e dolente, come gia in Maremma, nella sua vita triste.
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Se noi, volevo dunque dirti, in questo sesto cente- nario, publicamente celebriamo la " grande anima
240 DANTE
redita " dell' Alighieri, non e per colore con i quali sempre ella e stata ed e, si perche all' obliosa umanita giova trarre il pretesto di una data, a ridarle, sia pure per un giorno, la conoscenza del suoi Luminari — che I'abitudine quotidiana la fa cieca al sole e alle stelle, — a accennarle le vette piu alte dello spirito, a incitarla, se possibile, verso nuove ascension!. " Ascensiones in corde meo disposui," consiglia e comanda I'alto Sal- mista. Onde se Dante, da oggi, da questo suo anno di giubileo, potra riapparir tutta nova e limpida luce, e contemporanea perche perpetua, a coloro che a lui con studio e ingegno s'avvicineranno, queste sue feste centenarie, pur con I'eccesso della straripante rettorica che inevitabilmente le accompagna, non saranno state in vano.
Che la lettura e I'interpretazione e la conoscenza della sua opera sono giunte, o m'inganno, finalmente, oggi, a un bivio. Da un lato e la strada lunga e tortuosa, percorsa, nei secoli della varia ammirazione o della crassa dimenticanza, dai fedeli zelatori del Poeta, piu quasi sempre teneri di proprie ideologie individuali settarie, filosofiche o teologiche o storiche o filologiche o politiche. Dall' altro e il cammino diritto di tutti coloro che nell' opera di Dante hanno, nei secoli, quasi con timoroso pudore e senza con- fessarlo, null' altro cercato di trovare che la consola- zione della poesia.
" La grandezza di questo divin poeta, che in molti modi largamente si manifesta a chi I'attende con diligenza, tanto piu veramente e mirabile, quanto
' A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO ' 241
piu nella sua Commedia abbondantissimamente si trova da satisfarsi e da contentarsi in qualunque si voglia cosa che intrattenere e dilettar possa la mente." II GiambuUari, che queste parole ha scritte in una epoca in cui I'ammirazione per Dante era venuta rapidamente scemando, accenna qui a quella ch'e virtu massima del Poema, all' universality, ma porge facile pretesto a chi voglia o non voglia, di cercare in esso, o piuttosto, come quasi sempre e avvenuto, di porre " qualunque si voglia cosa " : a cercarvi cioe tante altre cose che non sono la poesia dell' Alighieri, e a mettervi, con la scusa della critica o dell' interpreta- zione, ogni sorta cose che nulla hanno a che fare con quella poesia.
Sviati f orse dallo stesso Dante, che in una sua sentenza antepone il vero litterale o " fittizio " (" sempre lo litter ale dee andare inanzi ") agli altri veri, perche li contiene, pure i migliori e piu puri devoti della Commedia hanno posto in non cale o obliato, quasi sempre, il senso e il vero, ch'e ben piu alto e illuminante, della poesia. La moltitudine grande, poi, ha preferito arrabattarsi faticosamente, ahime sempre, intorno al vero anagogico o " sovrapposto," o, ch'e quasi peggio, all' allegorico o unico " verace." E come in vaso senza fondo, ognuno ha voluto specchiare o versare in esso la propria piccolezza. Quest a sorte toccata al Poema Sacro e, dunque, unica nella storia della grande poesia. Che, per quanti esegeti abbiano ponzato e Bibbia e Omero e Shakespeare, nessuno di questi testi e stato tanto fondamentalmente e voluttuo-
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samente svisato e falsato nei secoli, quanto il Dante. Dagl' interpret! teologici filosofici e pietisti, da Ben- venuto imolese a Francesco da Buti, dal Filelfo al Landino, da Leonardo Aretino a Jacopo Mazzoni, dal Vellutello a Jason de Nores, che s'armeggiarono a concordare element! discordi, scolastica e umanesimo, tomismo e Platone, allegoria e poesia, per darci I'imagine di un Dante loico, etico e teologo e filosofo ; sino ai settatori della nostra storia nazionale, al Gioberti, al Balbo, al Mazzini, al Rosmini e specialmente a Gabriele Rossetti, che su dall' opera sua per amor d' Italia estrassero, tutta sola ne' suoi bassi tempi, I'alma sdegnosa del primo e maggiore patriotta italiano, del primo profeta della nazione ; per finire coi molti, coi troppi dottori sottilissimi, che, negli ultimi cinquant'anni, s'accanirono a discettare con i ferruzzi della grammatica, deir erudizione e, ahime, della filologia pura, le tre cantiche e le minori opere dell' Alighieri — e gran merce se oggi ci sia dato di volere e di potere ripristinare nelle anime nostre la religione del Poeta, alia quale sono necessari, si, studio ingegno e conoscenza storica, ma solo, come altamente ha scritto Benedetto Croce, " in funzione di poesia."
# # # # 4C
Ho voluto leggere, negli ultimi tempi, quasi a affogare nella loro aridezza capziosa la tragedia della anima mia per la sorte toccata alia mia terra natale dopo la guerra vittoriosa dell' Italia, non so quanti mai testi, che non avevo prima che sfuggevolmente sfogliati, di comentatori e esegeti della Commedia.
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Giunto, con fra le mani Benvenuto, a " quelfgiorno piu non vi leggemmo avante " di Francesca, e letto il comentario " Et dicit " : " Soli eravamo . . .," ecce aliud incitamentum, quia proverbialiter dicitur quod opportunitas facit homines fures et foeminas mere- trices," ah, per Dio, non ho piu letto avante, ne piu mai leggero, I'Imolese.
Apersi altro, non piu moderno, libraccio, altra volta, il quale per filologicamente dimostrarmi che ben " Dante " (che da, per il Boccaccio stesso, " con libe- rale animo le cose di grazia ricevute da Dio ") era accorciativo di " Durante " — importantissima verit^ lapalissiana — affermava che I'emistichio " mar di tutto il senno" dell' ottavo canto dell' Inferno includeva I'accorciamento di " Marone " (Vergilio).
E cosi dall' Anonimo delle Chiose del 1337 al grande " fanciullino," ma maggiore poeta, che fu il nostro Giovanni Pascoli, io mi sono quasi sperduto, per alcuni mesi, nella selva veramente oscura della ponderosa o ridevole " erudizione " dantesca, per esserne tratto fuori in tempo a salvamento solo dalla misericordia dello stesso Dante, che, a comento di quegl' inutilissimi o ingenui o gaglioffi o presuntuosi comenti, riconsegno alia mia nausea e al mio dispetto la lucerna unica possibile, atta a penetrare il suo regno trino : quella della poesia.
Ah non piu, ora, mi lambiccheranno e tortureranno il cervello gli enigmisti, i fossilizzatori, i fossori, i cabalisti, i geologi, e gl'indovini delle tre fiere, delle " tre disposizioni," delle " tre rovine," del " veltro " e
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dei semplici o duplici " schemi penali." Non piu vorro suUe loro orme indagare, perche, senza irriverenza a alcuno, e tanto meno a Dante, in verita non me ne importa un bel corno, se colui del " gran rifiuto " sia o non sia Celestino o Pilato o Diocleziano o Romolo Augustolo o Giano della Bella o Esau o Vieri dei Cerchi ; se la Bice sia o non sia Sapienza o Virtu o Idea o Teologia, o la madre della Gontessa Matilde (che " fu figlia dello imperator di Constantinopoli " e " moritte in Pisa nel 1116 ") o la *' favolosa Pandora " filelfiana, o I'lmpero contrapposto dal Rossetti alia Meretrice vaticana, o " intelligenza attiva illumi- natrice del? intelletto possibile," o " oggettivazione di una intima e profonda soggettivita " ; se Vergilio sia studio o sia scienza, se gli spiriti ostili all' apparizione di Bice siano i " contrasti," se le compagne di lei " discipline dello spirito " ; se la morte del padre della gentilissima di Dante sia, ahime, la morte di Brunetto. Ah no, il messo di Dio, che passa Stige a aprire Dite, la Citt^ roggia delle immani tombe, con una sua verghetta verde, non sar^ piu per me, pure per un istante, Enea ; ne Matelda, tra la gran variazion dei freschi mai, sara Mechtild von Magdeburg o, se meglio vi piaccia, la Contessa Matilde stessa (la figlia, dunque, della Beatrice identificata da Francesco da Buti !), consobrina di Enrico IV, stirpe saHca, difesa del Papato.
A proposito di Matelda. Piu di venti anni or sono, la mia ammirante e fervida giovinezza ebbe I'onore d'incontrarsi col Pascoli. In una trattoria romana,
' A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO ' 245
present! la sua sorella Mariu e il poeta nobilissimo fra tutti, Adolfo de Bosis, io, giovinetto, con nella anima canora le musiche di " Myricae " e del " Poe- metti," pendevo, muto, dalle labbra del semplice e grande ultimo " figlio di Vergilio." Questi parlo di poesia antica e moderna alia mia beatitudine. A un tratto, pero, egli, cosi schivo e modesto nel parlar della sua propria poesia, prese a vantarsi, come ne' suoi libri danteschi piu tardi ha voluto fare, di aver trovato " tra i roghi e i bronchi che la nascondevano, la porticciuola del gran tempio mistico " di Dante. Una strana fiamma gl'illuminava i piccoli ma vividi occhi. Affermo, quasi con ira : " Io ho veduto." E degli altri disse poi che "avevano veduto, senz' entrare," ma ch'egli solo, con la sua chiave scoperta, v'era entrato.
Attonito e ammirato, ma senza comprendere, fissavo il volto acceso del mio buon Poeta. Ma la mia ammirazione cedette alio smarrimento, quando egli voile persuadermi che nessuno aveva mai potuto com- prendere il " vero " di Matelda prima di lui, e che quella Beata, il cui nome egli faceva derivare dalla etimologia di " fiavBduto^''^ non era altra che una " Maestra della scuola e dell' arte."
Non quella, no, poteva essere, pur nel mio rispetto al Maestro, interpretazione di poesia, degna di una delle piu alte e pure " bellezze," che Jacopo di Dante offeriva nel calendimaggio del 1322 a Guido da Polenta, col testo primo della Commedia,
"Che mia sorella nel suo lume porta."
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Ben e vero die il Pascoli stesso, il quale mai non va confuso con la gente dispetta a meraviglia, che nasce e vive " in prosa," come il Balbo la defini, a mal grado della sua letifica infatuazione dantesca, ebbe altra volta magnificamente a dire : " Solo ora che il tempo dei santi sembra gia molto lontano, e lontano e quello degli asceti e dei teologi, solo ora il Poema Sacro, che stupl e commosse, ispira quel sentimento che non si deve confondere con nessun altro, e si chiama ' poesia.' Che * poesia ' e rivivere cio che f u, riviverlo improvvisa- mente e pienamente, avanti un tempio dalle colonne corcate a terra, avanti un poema dal linguaggio antico e disusato, rialzando a un tratto con la leva del sogno quelle gigantesche colonne e ricreando, col soffio del pensiero, quel mondo immenso."
Col pensiero, cioe, ma piu, se possibile, con la leva stessa e con la luce del sogno : come Dante, poco edotto, com' egli confessa, dell' arte di grammatica, aveva operato, a acquistar altezza d'ingegno, sopra i sudati testi delle sue letture al tempo della decenne sete. Che la dove grammatica e ingegno non lo soccorrevano, egli suppliva col sogno, con I'intuizione cioe vivificata dalla poesia : " per lo quale ingegno molte cose, quasi come sognando, gia vedea," egli, il disegnatore di spiriti. Quello che usa, dunque, chiamare il " mondo " del Poema altro non e che la storia del suo proprio tempo, e quella conosciuta ai tempi del Poeta. L'interpreta- zione, pero, di quel " mondo" dev' essere fatta risalire, piu quasi che a quella storia stessa, alle fonti della ispirazione di Dante, le quali, piu e meglio assai dei
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libri da lui letti, piu e meglio della sua cultura, sono nella sua poesia e nel nostro sogno.
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Gia, dunque, da quel tempo della mia immaturita, per quanto bramoso di penetrare ogni velame con un continuo studio, s'era venuta radicando in me la diffi- denza delle quasi sempre contrarie glosse del Poema. Non ignoravo che, in vita, I'Alighieri, " quasi a guisa di filosofo mal grazioso non sapea, — come Giovanni Villani afferma di lui, — conversare coi laici," e che quindi a nessun comento d'altri, posteriore alia sua morte, ci si convenisse ciecamente d'affidarci. Sapevo che la vera sentenza, d'altronde, com' e scritto nel Convivio, " per alcuno vedere non si puo, s'io non la conto," e che ne critica filologica ne letteraria ne, quasi, storica stessa potevano illuminarmi adeguata- mente i passi nei quali " il piu divin s'invola," se non li avessi interpretati io stesso con lume solo di poesia, che unico puo illuminare, meglio d'ogni altro, pure la storia. E ricordavo certa risposta del poeta tedesco della Messiade^ il quale a chi I'importunava volesse spiegare certi passi oscuri, rispondeva : " AUora che li scrissi, lo sapevamo io e Dio : ora, se non se ne ricorda lui, io, per me, me ne sono scordato."
La Commedia^ visione di " alte cose," e ben piu che fiore e frutto degli studi dall' Alighieri compiuti nella sua " decenne sete." Rileggendo i suoi testi, la ciceroniana De Amicitia o il Sogno di Scipione, rileg- gendo il De Consolatione di Boezio, San Bernardo, Sant' Agostino, Pietro Lombardo, Alberto Magno, la
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Visio ^undali, San Bonaventura, Ugo e Riccardo di San Vittore, Brunette e I'Aquinate, Aristotile etico e la Lettera ai Corinti, I'Apocalisse e " lo Genesi " stesso, ci avvicineremo assai meno al piu vero e mag- giore Dante, che se ci accostiamo a lui con verginita d'anima e d'intuizione.
Qualcuno, che pur di Dante conosce profondamente " lo fondo," il d'Ovidio, per esempio, ha scritto : " Si pongono i problemi come sciarade, si vogliono scio- gliere piu o meno astrattamente con qualche bel ritro- vato. Si vuol addentrarsi nel mondo del poema, senza aver I'occhio al mondo del poeta : alle sue letture predilette, alle dottrine dei suoi maestri, alle fantasie dei suoi autori, le quali furono come la materia greggia rilavorata dalla fantasia sua." Non nego che la conoscenza delle letture, delle dottrine, delle fantasie dei probabili autori dell' Alighieri possano essere utili alia comprensione della cultura del Poeta. Ma queste, ahime, se isolate, anzi che avvicinarci, ci fanno retro- cedere piu d'una volta da quello ch'e, a noi, Dante, ce ne complicano e a volte oscurano I'intelligenza. Legger cronisti o storici, da Ricordano a Dino Com- pagni e al Villani, ci agevola la cognizione del suo mondo storico, senza dubbio : ma sarebbe assurdo, cosi da essi come dai suoi autori, attenderci la chiarificazione di quanto e tenebroso o enimmatico o controverso nella Commedia, Quel suoi autori rimangono per se, quello ch' essi sono. Sono, in qualche modo, chi piu chi meno, estrinseci alia sua opera, come Svetonio e Plutarco sono estrinseci all' opera immane dello
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Shakespeare, come lo Spencer e il Chapman traduttore di Omero sono esteriori al favoloso mondo lirico del Keats. Questa delle ricerche delle fonti diviene, parmi, fatica sempre piu oziosa, da tesi scolastiche (ne bene storiche, ne bene estetiche), quando sia ben piu neces- sario solo, mettendoci a petto a petto con i piu ardui poeti dell' umanita, vedere profondamente in essi e, per la nostra consolazione, continuare nel nostro sogno il loro, far rifiorire, tutta verde e nuova, e fruttificare la pianta immortale della loro poesia.
Dante, a volte, e illogico : come il sogno. Tanto meglio. Dante ci lascia, innumere volte, dubitosi, non dei simboli soli, ma degli stessi agonisti storici del suo Poema. Quella dubbiezza e vaghezza sono parte viva a noi della sua poesia. Dante ci nasconde nomi volti gesti di persone. Poiche egli ha voluto che cosi fosse, perche lamentarcene, perche voler violare, con testardaggine peggio che puerile, il suo alto segreto, — • fascino, e non dei minori, della sua fantasia ? La Commedia e sogno, realta cioe piu vera e intensa della vita nostra mortale, — o non e. In questo la sua quasi inaccessibile grandezza. Egli, unico fra i gran- dissimi poeti — -come nemmeno il suo Vergilio — ha trasportato di sana pianta, Giustiziere implacabile e mirifico Poeta, con gesto solo consentito a un Die creatore e di giustizia, la nostra vita, la nostra aiuola picciola, la nostra morale fra cristiana e pagana, nei tre Regni della Morte. Di lassu, di tra le luci fisse dei Gemelli, egli ha contemplato, quasi in iscorcio di beatifica lumiera, il Cosmo fisico e il morale, come
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nessun altro poet a mai ne prima ne dopo, salito su, per la sua scala di poesia, dalP umano al divino, come vuole la nostra natura storica, realista e idealista a un tempo, di gente enotria, di gente nata della terra piu varia e chiara e travagliosa d'Europa. Che cosa chie- dergli, dunque, di piu ? Egli ha abolito per noi, come la grande arte unica fa, spazi e tempi : Vergilio e contemporaneo di Sordello, Capaneo di Farinata, Cesare di Cacciaguida. E sono di uno stesso luogo : Arrigo d'Inghilterra e Carlo Martello, Ulisse e Lano da Siena, Maometto e Pier da Medicina. E tutti favellano in una lingua sola, — ombre vane, ma quasi tutte con volto e voce di vivi, — in quella dell' umanita ritornata alia sua origine : in quella di Dante. Ma in quel tempo senza tempo, in quello spazio senza spazio, e I'Uomo, e tutta I'umanita, ignuda di vesti e d'ipocri- sia, I'umanit^ esteriore e interiore, sottomessa a un identico immutabile destino : e a dark risalto, sono la storia antica e la recente, I'lmpero e la Chiesa, 1' Italia e le citt^ spartite, le sormontanti fazioni, le passioni degli uomini, i loro traviamenti, la Fortuna. Due misure, finito e infinito, la cosmica e la terrena, in una sola, due mondi in uno, il mistico e il naturale, due sistemi, I'allegorico e il politico, mescolati e fusi insieme, colti di la e di qua dal " velo " contempora- neamente, in una unita superiore a ogni trattato d'etica, di teologia, di filosofia e di politica : in quella della poesia, " presente eterno," immobile nella parola, ma estendentesi nell' eternita, prolungantesi nella musica, ma fissa in uno schema in cui ogni " metafora
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e realt^," ogni " figura e lettera." La chiave storica del Poema Sacro possono essere, si, Roma eterna, " caput mundi," e Fimperiale Vergilio ; ma la lucerna che ci segnera securamente la via per le sue ascensioni, non potra essere che quella della poesia, che ognuno di noi ha, varia, nel profondo cuore, e ch' e not piu della nostra stessa esistenza : " a quel modo che ditta dentro," dunque, — come usava far Dante stesso con la sua poesia.
Dunque ? Non disconosco, fra il ciarpame molto, le grandi benemerenze acquistate, per la conoscenza della vita, della cultura e dei tempi di Dante, da parecchi instauratori della critica storica, italiani e stranieri, dal Foscolo al Vossler. Ma, fra tutti, se io volessi essere condotto da qualche fida scorta per mano a Dante, preferirei rileggermi alcune pagine prestigiose del Tommaseo, del Carlyle, del De Sanctis e del Carducci, a citare alcuni degli esegeti-poeti che meglio appagano la mia sete d'interpretazione estetica o lirica.
E non disconosco, che sarebbe ingratitudine e idiozia, gli alti meriti di tutti quel pazientissimi ricer- catori delle migliori lezioni dell' opera dantesca, dal Witte al Barbi, dal Moore al Del Lungo, dal Vernon al Parodi, dal Toynbee al Passerini, grazie al cui indefesso e laborioso amore riusciremo, fra qualche mese o anno, parrebbe, a avere fra le mani il testo definitivo della Commedia. Essi soli avranno, coi loro studi, compiuto piu di quanto, forse, sei secoli
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interi hanno operate a onorare Dante. Grazie a loro, la maggiore fatica sara stata compiuta. E, se Dio voglia, non dovremo udire piu parlare di comenti nuovi e di nuove originali esegesi di Dante. Saremo soli, anche una volta, finalmente, con lui, col Poeta no- stro, a faccia a faccia col suo testo piu probabile, liberi di leggerlo e d'interpretarlo, ciascuno a seconda della 1' " anima dantesca " che ci saremo venuti formando nel quotidiano studio o amore del suo Poema, nella misura della nostra intuizione, in relazione diretta e immediata con la nostra piu squisita facolta intellettiva : la poesia. Siamo, dunque, arrivati oggi, in questo Centenario dantesco, al bivio fatale. II Croce, col suo bel volume recente, apre la strada maestra, die qualche spirito solitario aveva divinato nei secoli morti. Chiunque studiera Dante nell' avvenire, per la gioia e la pace dell' anima sua solamente, dovra mettersi per quella. Gli altri, e sara giusta pena, continueranno a incana- gliarsi e a dannarsi per le ambagi ridevoli della loro propria selva oscura.
Ricordi, amico mio, una nostra visita al tempietto della Valle Giulia, in Roma, in cui s'e temporanea- mente rifugiato, sorto su dal suo silenzio e dal suo esilio sotterraneo di almeno ventitre secoli, I'ApoUo etrusco di Vei ? II cielo di settembre era vivo turchese, sopra e intorno a noi. II sole del meriggio stagliava netti ogni edificio ogni pietra ogni pianta ogni fiore, contro quell' azzurro di cristallo. La nostra guida, il Giglioli, direttore valentissimo del Museo ci prece-
' A QUEL MODO CHE DITTA DENTRO ' 253
dette, fra le lucide siepi di bosso e di mortella, sino al colonnato dipinto. Apri la grande porta. E la, contro I'ombra cerula, avvolto fulmineamente dalla gran luce del suo astro, il terribile Iddio chiomato e clamidato e coturnato d'Etruria, die un lucumone di Vei, contemporaneo forse di Demarato Corinzio o di Tarquinio Prisco, aveva fatto plasmare e colorare da qualche etrusco discepolo di un peloponnesiaco o corinzio scultore Buona-Mano, o di un pittore Buon- Disegno, o di un architetto Misura-di-Giove, per la sua feroce satrapia religiosa, ci apparve, alto e proteso come a procedere, subitamente vendicativo, verso di noi, — con fra i piedi, ostacolo unico, una muta lira senza corde,— immortalmente vivo sul suo zoccolo. La fissita ermetica dello sguardo chino, 1' enigma crudele del suo sorriso incuterono nelle nostre anime, come nessuna cosa viva o morta mai, un terrore inesprimi- bile. E io, non so perche, ho pensato, allora, a Dante, romano e langobardo, ma piu forse misterioso epigone dei gravi cittadini etruschi, a Dante e al suo sorriso di segreta e malevola gioia di fronte a Filippo Argenti, a Farinata e agli altri dannati di Fiorenza o d'altrove, che il Poeta nostro seppe crudelissimamente odiare.
Poscia, di suUe tavole vicine, sopra le quali erano disordinatamente raccolti i piu recenti scavi di Vei, fra le antefisse delle ironiche Meduse variodipinte e fra le maschere dei barbuti Acheloi, trascelsi, a caso, una meravigliosa testina di terracotta. Non m'era nuovo, quel delicato e forte viso di giovinetto sorri- dente appena, del sesto secolo prima di Cristo. Lo
254 DANTE
avevo veduto prima. Quando ? L'identica modella- tura della creta, la squisita e meticolosa grazia stessa dei capelli cesellati e un poco inanellati mi fecero affiorare nella memoria rapita un nome. E a voce alta dissi : " Verrocchio." II Giglioli sorrise lievemente. E annul.
Quell' Apollo e gl' idoli coUeghi e contemporanei suoi erano stati seppelliti nella notte della terra etrusca, per secoli lunghi, sino a ieri. Ne il Verrocchio, ne Jacopo della Querela, ne il Donatello, ne il Ghiberti conobbero n^i quelli ne altri simili a loro. Pure dalla misteriosa terra stessa, d'onde erano nati, in cui erano sprofondate le radici della loro stirpe, essi, quegli artefici, trassero inconsapevolmente I'ispirazione prima e lo stile d'ineffabile grazia e di forza schietta della loro magica arte. E cosl e avvenuto, naturalmente, all' etrusco Dante. Nella terra da cui egli e nato, nell' arte che da quella terra e stata nei lontani secoli espressa in marmo, in bronzo, in colori, in parole, nella poesia, in una parola, di quella sua terra natale potremo, amico, ritemprare, come in fucina sempre ardente, la nostra stessa individuale poesia. E ubbidiremo, cosi, al monito delio saviamente interpretato da Enea : " Antiquam exquirite Matrem."
Ma di questo, con orazion meno breve e picciola, m'intratterro piu a lungo, spero, insieme a te, fra due o tre settimane, quando, ritornato nella patria nostra, tu mi condurrai, come mi hai promesso, a Anagni e a Sermoneta, a ritrovarvi la grande Ombra del tuo antenato.
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Passeremo anche, confido, allora, sotto alle verdi pur mo' nate chiome della nova Primavera, dalla tua Ninfa feudale, piu che storia, mito semisepolto nella selvatica rigogliosa e febbricosa maremma pontina. In quel silenzio della citta morta, riviva e lussureg- giante, fra le stagnant! acque, di mille fiori e uccelli e serpi e farfalle, interprete meglio eloquente di quale si sia scritta parola, riapriremo il Dante. La storia antica e la contemporanea saranno una cosa sola senza intermittenza, a noi, quali, in realta, esse sono, tranne che ai ciechi e all' oltracottata schiatta dei pedanti. E storia e leggenda, insieme fuse inestrica- bilmente, dittateci dentro dalla Madre Antica, saranno chiave e lucerna a noi nell' interpretazione del Poema Sacro.
Rileggeremo, per forse la millesima volta, assisi sopra un rudere pezzato di gromme, il canto eroico di Ulisse, quel giorno. E, tesi gli orecchi al largo moUe e profumato vento del Tirreno, udiremo, distinto, in quel silenzio, giungerci, sul vento istesso, dal selvoso Circeo, il canto immortale della Maga.
Ave valeque, amico mio molto caro, Ulisside della Alaska e del Col di Lana.
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Dante; essays in commemoration
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