DANTE'S VITA NUOVA.* THE love of Dante for Beatrice is
something more than a mere episode in the life of a great man. He himself, in the first passion of his grief, "all drowned in tears within this desolate city," declared
that he was abandoned by his salvation," but, looking back across
past years in the days of his exile, he knew that the vision of the
invisible world had been opened to him by the woman he loved and lost. Separation and death had made their union more spiritual and intimate. The New Lye, or history of his love, is, therefore, the preamble to the great tragic trilogy of the "DivinaCommedia," without which it cannot really be understood. Dante tells us so himself before a line of the " Inferno" was yet written : " So if it shall please Him by whom all things live to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady, and then may it please Him who is the Father of all good to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, that is, of this sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed through all ages." How the deep gaze that was strained during a whole life upon spiritual realities came at last to see the depths of suffering, the agonies of the penitential circles, and the fulness of unutterable glory, is matter of common knowledge. But, as the prophet in Dante is only the purified man, so it is difficult to understand the ecstasy without studying the life that made it possible : and until we know that the moral insight and moral calm of the poet are the aftergrowth of intense passion and deep suffering as well as of inspiration. Several foolish attempts have been made to show that the whole story of the New Life is an allegory. If Dante's positive and circumstantial narrative were not sufficient in itself to refute them, the "Divina Commedia" would be : the Ghibel- line statesman and husband of Gemma Donati, from whom he lived separate for years, could never have swooned for grief at the story of Francesca da Rimini. The lover of Beatrice had a bitter spring of sympathy in his own heart. Above all, the saying of Novalis may be inverted, and we may be sure that the man who sees God sees no ghosts. Truth in poetry is the surest attainable proof of reality in
life Dante was a boy of nine when he first met Beatrice Portinari, a girl of eight, at a merry-making in her father's house. Her appear- ance attracted him, and he loved, as an imaginative Southern boy might, to watch for her and look upon her. But the consciousness of an absorbing passion for her dates from a period nine years later (May 1, 1283), when he saw her " arrayed in the purest white, be- tween two noble ladies, older than herself, and as she passed along the street she turned her eyes towards the spot where I, thrilled through and through with awe, was standing, and in her ineffable courtesy, which now hath its guerdon in everlasting life, she saluted me in such gracious wise that I seemed in that moment to behold the utmost bounds of bliss." Without accepting as genuine the poem of "the Portrait," which Frnticelli shows good ground for rejecting, we agree with Mr. Martin in believing that it represents the type of beauty which Beatrice possessed, as in fact it agrees with her reputed picture and with Dante's scattered hints. The noble presence and quiet, graceful step, the pale, massive brow, shaded by an amber cloud of hair ; the calm sunny eyes and angelic smile—mere lovers' language as this may seem—are yet sufficiently distinct to separate Beatrice from the Madonnas of Raphael and Coreggio, quite as much as from the imperial brunettes of conventional Italian paintings. Quiet good sense and a certain absence of imagination are the usual characteristics of this type in the South, and the little we know of Beatrice goes far to show that she was a well-behaved, sensible wo- man, whose path in life was quite outside poetry. Between the critical meeting and her death in October, 1290, there lies a period of more than seven years, during which Dante's love lasted on, un- abated by her marriage, of which we only know that it took place before January, 1287, and probably not very long before. Now, although the customs of the time did not allow of much intercourse between young men and women, we know that Dante mixed largely in the society of Florence, that he was the intimate friend of Bea- trice's brother, that Beatrice herself had penetrated his secret, while it was yet unsuspected by others, and that she was angry with him
• The Vita Xeova of Dante. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Theodore Martin. London: Parker, Son, and Boum for feigning an unreal passion for other ladies in order to divert atten- tion from his mistress ; "that most gentle being . . . denied me when she passed me that most gracious salutation which was my all iu all of bliss." But the verygenuine language inwhich he complains of her as one whose heart could not readily be moved, seems to show that even if she wished to retain his allegiance as a lover, she neverencouraged him as a suitor. In our ignorance of the facts attending her marriage, it is impossible to press such a phrase as "fair traitor," which is supposed in one of the sonnets to allude to her ; rather it seems probable that she looked on the poet as an inspired boy, who was very fit to fill Florence with her praise, and whose love—the passion of a boy—was rather matter of amusement than of serious concern. He himself has related his first meeting with her after the marriage. Quite unpre- pared to see her; he staggered in a spasm of agony against the painted wall of the chamber where they met, and a peal of merry laughter from Beatrice and her lady friends greeted his despair. Keenly as he felt the mockery, he consoled himself, no doubt truly, with the re- flection that she could not have understood his suffering ; he told her in characteristic verses that her presence made him feel the pangs of the damned. But anger and bitterness left him when she died. He re- membered only that his love for her had kept him from all baseness; if it had been unrequited he ascribed it to his own short-comings, which made him unworthy her companionship. His dreams were thronged with angelic presences ; he saw the soul of Beatrice borne up into perfect peace ; he saw heaven shining with love's own light. We know, from the witness of a friend, that his own description fails to compass the reality of his grief; life almost gave way under the great shock. Thenceforward the man, many-sided as human nature itself, magistrate, soldier, student, and politician, with keen eyes to see beauty, and strong passions to desire it, had yet a life apart from the world, a memory more vivid than the present, a love that grew with age and made wisdom beautiful.
Mr. Martin, in his thoughtful and excellent preface, takes a rather different view of the relations of Dante and Beatrice from that which we have indicated in our narrative. He believes in Beatrice as an exemplar of perfect womanhood, who " smiled her own gentleness and purity into the heart of Dante," and was afterwards "transfigured into a semblance glorified, indeed, yet scarcely more pure and saintly than that which she wore on earth." He explains away the scene in which she ridicules her lover, by "the necessity of not seeming to encourage or sympathize with him," and believes that "sooner or later, before Beatrice died there came a day when words passed between them, which helped to reconcile Dante to the doom that severed her from his side, during her all too brief sojourn on earth." The spirit that inspires this theory is so reverent and beautiful that we should scarcely care to contradict it, if it were not a little false to nature, and to the highest art as well as to history. Mr. Martin 'is evidently perplexed by Dante's continued love for a married woman, and by the overpowering cha- racter of a passion which met with no encouragement. The first difficulty admits we believe of easier solution than can be given by the hypothesis that "the love of Dante was of an order too pure and noble to occasion distrust." Admitting his almost supernatural greatness, he was still a hot-blooded Italian, whose life, like that of his fellows, was traversed by little frailties of the flesh, and if loving Beatrice, and believing that she returned his passion, he continued to visit at her husband's house as a friend, his self-reliant Platonism, to call it by the mildest name, would have been criminal The plain fact is, that he lived in times when the wife was jealously guarded, when it was considered no dishonour in the man to intrigue, though it was creditable in the woman to resist, and when passion was more open and less artificial than it became in later centuries. In laying his heart at the feet of Beatrice, and calling on the world to witness it, Dante was really paying her an ordinary, though a high compli- ment ; from the moment that she was married, all fear of compromis- ing her good name was at an end; she was then brought out, as it were, to be seen and sung, and it was for her husband to guard her honour from stain. Our customs in this respect are so different from those of the Continent, that it is difficult for us to understand what is still more , or less the usage of France and Italy. Before the marriage of Beatrice she may have understood Dante's passion by the natural intelligence of sympathy, or it may have been known in the small circle of his friends ; but it is pretty certain that the two were not recognized lovers, and Dante seems to have exaggerated the ordinary precautions against notoriety. When Beatrice was once married—probably like other women of her time, as mere matter of contract—the poet could meet her, and address verses to her, but the very genuineness of his feelings must have made intimacy between them impossible. Doubtless Messer Simone dei Bardi was well ac- quainted with his wife's good sense, and knew that she was heart- free towards her admirer; but the absence of any scandal is more likely to prove that the lover was discreetly kept at a distance than that he was entertained as a friend. Besides, it is surely more honourable to Beatrice to have laughed at a lover whose passion she did not understand or return, than to have used raillery as a veil for deep feeling. The woman who could not un- derstand is pardonable ; the woman who could smile and deceive is surely not she whose "holy smile" drew her lover heavenwards.
The question, then, reduces itself to this : whether Beatrice, being as she was the light of a great man's life, was also nobly fashioned in the most perfect womanhood. Her coldness to the nobler man, her marriage with a meaner, her little jealous pique and unsympathetic raillery, are the evidence against her, and while they are not incon-
sistent with a high type of character, they do not in themselves point to the highest. What, then, is the exact value of Dante's evidence ? The love of all men who have any elements of greatness in them—and no other feeling deserves the name—is really i based upon two senti- ments : an intense sympathy with the good n any special person or type of character, and a vivid conception of the ideal on which human excellence should be moulded. The confusion of these two feel- ' gs, to which imaginative men and young men are peculiarly liable, 's the root of nameless bitternesses in after life. For although human nature is so infinite and various in the good it contains, that any character which is not absolutely vulgar or depraved may deserve discriminating affection and reverence, the shock of disenchantment to the man who has loved Rachel and marries Leah is none the less morally disastrous, and even terrible. We are apt to lose sight of God when our idols are shattered on our hearth. Perhaps, therefore, it was a merciful destiny that condemned a man like Dante, intole- rant through his very nobleness, to love at a distance, and unintel- ligently, a woman who could not have satisfied his highest nature. We need not sully with any positive dispraise one who was in all likelihood a comparatively blameless woman. Beautiful as a dream, with the moral purity and high bearing that are native to a rather passionless character, gentle and gracious among her friends, Beatrice, no doubt, was—as Dante imagined her. But he seems to have mistaken the calm of emotionless dignity for the re- pose of a strong self-contained will which is a law to itself. He whose blood was hot with every .passion of manhood, while his clear mind was filled with the visions of God's order, be- lieved that others were like.natured as himself, and that the quiet majesty of Beatrice was the royalty of grace over sin, of strength over weakness. She had climbed the shining heights of God's mountain while he was struggling out of the nether abyss heavenward. Without asking if even in this misconception there was not some truth, and if the innocence that does not sin because it is not tempted has not some beauty of its own, we may yet feel that distance gave a softer charm to Beatrice, and that death, who is a rare artist in humanity, invested her with the highest spiritual grace. She had never leaned on Dante's weakness for support, she had lived outside, and as it were above, his circle of experiences, and trivial years in common wider the same roof had never revealed her to him at once weaker and better than he esteemed her. Therefore, she who had been a fancy in his boyhood and a passion in his early manhood, grew upon his remembrance and filled his heart with a nobler and holier presence after death, till Dante the lover and Dante the Christian, Beatrice and heavenly goodness, seem changing and un- certain outlines in the beatific vision.
We have scarcely left ourselves space to notice Mr. Martin's translation. The prose strikes us as singularly good. Perhaps "empire" is a better word than " empiry,' and in one passage the translation suggested in the note is, we think, beyond all ques- tion, right, and ought to supersede that given in the text. (P. 20, note.) But these are mere matters of detail. Of the verse, we can only say that it would be hard to imagine a better rendering of so difficult a poet, and yet—that it is not Dante. Those who have not leisure to read the Vita Nuova in the original have now as good a substitute as they can expect, and Mr. Martin would be the first to tell them that they must not judge the poet in any language but his own. A passage from the vision in which Love leads the poet to the dead body. of Beatrice will give a fair idea of the translator's even workmanship : " I raised my eyes that drowned were with tears,
And like some gently falling shower of manna, Angels I saw up to the welkin soar.
Before them that bright choir a cloudlet bears, And as they mount, they all cry out • Hosannah P What else they said my mind hath not in store. Then Love exclaimed,' I'll hide the troth no more ; Come, see our lady, where in death she lies.' Imagination's fantasies Then took me where I saw my lady dead. And when with her I had my gazing fed, Some ladies drew a scarf the body o'er ; And on her face was perfect calm expressed, That seemed as though it said, " I am at rest."
Here " welkin" and " cloudlet" are a little affected; " bright choir" is an interpolation; the sixth line in Dante is literally, "And if they had said anything, I would tell it you," while the eleventh and twelfth really are, "and When I had discovered her, I saw that ladies were wrapping her in a shroud." But it will be easy to correct little points like these in a second edition, and the book, taking it all in all, is classical of its kind.
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