Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 - Leigh Hunt
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing was wanting
on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, to furnish him with
an excellent education. It was so complete, as to enable him to become
master of all the knowledge of his time; and he added to this learning
more than a taste for drawing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing
an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.[9]
One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then
living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna. At
eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as
to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a
philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a
reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he
became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella,
the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.
Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's
death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his countrymen gained
against the people of Arezzo; and the year after it he was present at
the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. It has been supposed that he once
studied medicine with a view to it as a profession; but the conjecture
probably originated in nothing more than his having entered himself of
one of the city-companies (which happened to be the medical) for the
purpose of qualifying himself to accept office; a condition exacted of
the gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is
asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Franciscan
order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed; and, indeed,
the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated and impatient
turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had done with the world when it
lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi.
Weddings that might have taken place but do not, are like the reigns
of deceased heirs-apparent; every thing is assumable in their favour,
checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. Would the great
but splenetic poet have made an angel and a saint of Beatrice, had he
married her? He never utters the name of the woman whom he did marry.
Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It
seems not improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the
young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his
passion for Beatrice;[10] and in common justice to his feelings as a man
and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded, that he felt some sort
of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort; though he
afterwards did not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and
Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of
any body after herself.[11] At any rate, he probably roused what was
excitable in his wife's temper, with provocations from his own; for the
nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but
tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion
that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of
Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of
letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing
to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after
quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, or suffer
her to come to him, mother as she was by him of so many children;--a
statement, it must be confessed, not a little encouraging to the
tradition.[12] Be this as it may, Dante married in his twenty-sixth
year; wrote an adoring account of his first love (the _Vita Nuova_) in
his twenty-eighth; and among the six children which Gemma brought him,
had a daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of
the fair Portinari; which surely was either a very great compliment, or
no mean trial to the temper of the mother.
We shall see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted,
and what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as
conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history.
Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and
Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy
and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of
Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Caesar, and paramount over the
Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as
to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and
bred a Guelph: he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline
neighbours; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of his
marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed chief
of the temporary administrators of affairs, called Priors;--functionaries
who held office only for two months.
Unfortunately, at that moment, his party had become subdivided into the
factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of two different sides
in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The consequences becoming
serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, as mediator, the French
Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms for the Pope against the
Emperor; but the Whites, of whom Dante was one, were hostile to the
measure; and in order to prevent it, he and his brother magistrates
expelled for a time the heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of
neither. The Whites accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines,
and the Blacks of openly favouring the Whites; who being, indeed,
allowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of the
unwholesomeness of their place of exile, which was fatal to Dante's
friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante answered it by
saying, that he had then quitted office; but he could not shew that he
had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles was still urged to interfere,
and Dante was sent ambassador to the Pope to obtain his disapprobation
of the interference; but the Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had
probably discovered that the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but
their own disputes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection
to his representative, beguiled the ambassador and encouraged the French
prince; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their ascendancy; and
the luckless poet, during his absence, was denounced as a corrupt
administrator of affairs, guilty of peculation; was severely
mulcted; banished from Tuscany for two years; and subsequently, for
contumaciousness, was sentenced to be _burnt alive_, in case he returned
ever. He never did return.
From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his wife. Her
relations obtained possession of power, but no use was made of it except
to keep him in exile. He had not accorded with them; and perhaps half
the secret of his conjugal discomfort was owing to politics. It is the
opinion of some, that the married couple were not sorry to part; others
think that the wife remained behind, solely to scrape together what
property she could, and bring up the children. All that is known is,
that she never lived with him more.
Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to
do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party
of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party
but his own; a naive confession, probably true in one sense, considering
his scorn of other people, his great intellectual superiority, and the
large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon
quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party,
however stanch he apparently remained to their cause. His former
associates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and for
their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated
the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with
Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them
all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting
Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and
the mistress of the world.
With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in
which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him,
he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man,
"grudging in his great disdain." At one moment he was conspiring and
hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his
beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of
the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing
her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his
thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is
conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether
with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his
"sacred poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his
prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest
people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted
to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual
attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great
work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the
_Convito_, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (_de Monarchia_),
recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts,
and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (_de Vulgari
Eloquio_); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us,
"how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste
of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable,
from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have "placed himself in
some public way," and, "stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling
in his very vitals," have stretched out his hand "for charity" [13]--an
image of suffering, which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a
man, is almost enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon
at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of
that nature for his outrages on God and man. Several of the princes and
feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their
houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find
it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his. There must be
great wisdom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy
of one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take in
such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace,
and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo, now in
Bologna; then probably in Verona with Can Grande's elder brother; then
(if we are to believe those who have tracked his steps) in Casentino;
then with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; then with the
great Ghibelline chieftain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino; then
in Romagna, in Padua, in _Paris_ (arguing with the churchmen), some say
in Germany, and at _Oxford_; then again in Italy; in Lucca (where he is
supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity to Beatrice in favour of
a certain "Gentucca"); then again in Verona with the new prince, the
famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms appear to have lost him a doubtful
hospitality); then in a monastery in the mountains of Umbria; in Udine;
in Ravenna; and there at length he put up for the rest of his life with
his last and best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but
the nephew of the hapless Francesca.
It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the
moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that
affecting passage in the _Convito_, which was evidently a direct effort
at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in
the style of that work, he exclaims, "Ah! would it had pleased the
Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed;
that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty
undeservedly--the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty. For it
pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of
Rome--Florence--to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was
born, and bred, and passed half of the life of man, and in which, with
her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary
spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in
almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a
beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too
often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly I have been a
vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different
ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty;
and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by
some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in
whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy
opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do." [14]
How simply and strongly written! How full of the touching yet
undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to take upon
itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of manly endeavour and a
good motive! How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with
abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!
The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are
not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his
abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence,
on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following
noble letter to a kinsman. The old spelling of the original (in the
note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on "Dante" in the
_Edinburgh Review_ (vol. XXX. no. 60); and I have retained also, with
little difference, the translation which accompanies it:
"From your letter, which I received with due respect and affection, I
observe how much you have at heart my restoration to my country. I am
bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch as an exile rarely finds a
friend. But after mature consideration, I must, by my answer, disappoint
the wishes of some little minds; and I confide in the judgment to which
your impartiality and prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has
written to me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends,
that, by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to
Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to the
humiliation of asking and receiving absolution: wherein, my father, I
see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. I speak of the
impertinence of those who mention such conditions to me; for in your
letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, there is no such thing. Is
such an invitation, then, to return to his country glorious to d. all.
(Dante Allighieri), after suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it
thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and
the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is
familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth,
that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some
others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man
who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his
persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that shall lead me back
to my country. I will return with hasty steps, if you or any other can
open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of d.
(Dante); but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I
shall never enter. What! shall I not everywhere enjoy the light of the
sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every corner of
the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth,
without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people
and republic of Florence? Bread, I hope, will not fail me." [15]
Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly
exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him
their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his
exile upon him, or closed it as he did. To that close we have now come,
and it is truly melancholy and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with
the Venetians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been
the last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. He
returned from Venice to Ravenna, worn out, and there died, after fifteen
years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, aged fifty-seven. His
life had been so agitated, that it probably would not have lasted so
long, but for the solace of his poetry, and the glory which he knew it
must produce him. Guido gave him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to
give him a monument; but such was the state of Italy in those times,
that he himself died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and
one of a noble sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardinal
Bembo, in 1483; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, by Cardinal
Gonzaga. His countrymen, in after years, made two solemn applications
for the removal of his dust to Florence; but the just pride of the
Ravennese refused them.
Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a
nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their
father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left
families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line,
still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego
Alighieri. No direct descent of the other kind from poets of former
times is, I believe, known to exist.
The manners and general appearance of Dante have been minutely recorded,
and are in striking agreement with his character. Boccaccio and other
novelists are the chief relaters; and their accounts will be received
accordingly with the greater or less trust, as the reader considers them
probable; but the author of the Decameron personally knew some of his
friends and relations, and he intermingles his least favourable reports
with expressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle height,
of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, large piercing
eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting under-lip, and thick
curling hair--an aspect announcing determination and melancholy. There
is a sketch of his countenance, in his younger days, from the immature
but sweet pencil of Giotto; and it is a refreshment to look at it,
though pride and discontent, I think, are discernible in its lineaments.
It is idle, and no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his
mere worshippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and
exacerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect the
poor victim of events--the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What
came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; and so
inconsistent was his nature altogether, or, at any rate, such an epitome
of all the graver passions that are capable of co-existing, both sweet
and bitter, thoughtful and outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to
think he must have had an angel for one parent, and--I shall leave his
own toleration to say what--for the other.
To continue the account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with
a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom
spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the
anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and
sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in
Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark
which made the saturnine poet smile--"That is the man who goes to hell
whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which
her companion observed--"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he
has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He
was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music--is thought to
have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might
be supposed from his platonical aspirations--(Boccaccio says, that even
a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)--could
be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet
addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat--and though
his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a
biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat
and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is
his word.
There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be
written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline leader, a
friend of Dante's, which, though hitherto accounted apocryphal by most,
has such an air of truth, and contains an image of the poet in his exile
so exceedingly like what we conceive of the man, that it is difficult
not to believe it genuine, especially as the handwriting has lately been
discovered to be that of Boccaccio.[16] At all events, I am sure the
reader will not be sorry to have the substance of it. The writer says,
that he perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none of
its inmates knew. He asked him what he wanted; but the stranger saying
nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building as though contemplating
its architecture, the question was put a second time; upon which,
looking round on his interrogators, he answered, "_Peace_!" The prior,
whose curiosity was strongly excited, took the stranger apart, and
discovering who he was, shewed him all the attention becoming his fame;
and then Dante took a little book out of his bosom, aid observing that
perhaps the prior had not seen it, expressed a wish to leave it with his
new friend as a memorial. It was "a portion," he said, "of his work."
The prior received the volume with respect; and politely opening it at
once, and fixing his eyes on the contents, in order, it would seem,
to shew the interest he took in it, appeared suddenly to check some
observation which they suggested. Dante found that his reader was
surprised at seeing the work written in the vulgar tongue instead of
Latin. He explained, that he wished to address himself to readers of all
classes; and concluded with requesting the prior to add some notes, with
the spirit of which he furnished him, and then forward it (transcribed,
I presume, by the monks) to their common friend, the Ghibelline
chieftain--a commission, which, knowing the prior's intimacy with that
personage, appears to have been the main object of his coming to the
place[17].
This letter has been adduced as an evidence of Dante's poem having
transpired during his lifetime: a thing which, in the teeth of
Boccaccio's statement to that effect, and indeed the poet's own
testimony[18], Foscolo holds to be so impossible, that he turns the
evidence against the letter. He thinks, that if such bitter invectives
had been circulated, a hundred daggers would have been sheathed in the
bosom of the exasperating poet[19]. But I cannot help being of opinion,
with some writer whom I am unable at present to call to mind (Schlegel,
I think), that the strong critical reaction of modern times in favour
of Dante's genius has tended to exaggerate the idea conceived of him in
relation to his own. That he was of importance, and bitterly hated in
his native city, was a distinction he shared with other partisans who
have obtained no celebrity, though his poetry, no doubt, must have
increased the bitterness; that his genius also became more and more felt
out of the city, by the few individuals capable of estimating a man of
letters in those semi-barbarous times, may be regarded as certain; but
that busy politicians in general, war-making statesmen, and princes
constantly occupied in fighting for their existence with one another,
were at all alive either to his merits or his invectives, or would have
regarded him as anything but a poor wandering scholar, solacing his
foolish interference in the politics of this world with the old clerical
threats against his enemies in another, will hardly, I think, be doubted
by any one who reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by
ages, and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread. A writer
on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and even with
a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little known, and less
cared for, out of the pale of that very private literary public, which
was almost exclusively their own. When we read, now-a-days, of the great
poet's being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and
sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but
his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present
competed with him in the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the
different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince's table in those
days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence,
kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into
lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only
shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no
longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the amusement
derived from it by the master. On one occasion, his platter is slily
heaped with their bones, which provokes him to call them dogs, as having
none to shew for their own. Another time, Can Grande asks him how it is
that his companions give more pleasure at court than himself; to which
he answers, "Because like loves like." He then leaves the court, and his
disgusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption.