by Will Durant
The rise of satire lowered the status of minstrelsy. The traveling singers derived their English name from the ministeriales, originally attendants in baronial courts, and their French name of jongleurs from the Latin ioculator, a purveyor of jokes. They filled the functions, and continued the lineage, of Greek rhapsodes, Roman mimes, Scandinavian scalds, Anglo-Saxon glee-men, and Welsh or Irish bards. In the twelfth-century heyday of the romances the minstrels took the place of printing, and kept their dignity by purveying stories occasionally worthy to be classed as literature. Harp or viol in hand, they recited lays, dits or contes (short stories), epics, legends of Mary or the saints, chansons de geste, romans, or fabliaux. In Lent, when they were not in demand, they attended, if they could, a confrèrie of minstrels and jongleurs like that which we know to have been held at Fécamp in Normandy about the year 1000; there they learned one another’s tricks and airs, and the new tales or songs of trouvères and troubadours. Many of them were willing, if their recitations proved too much of an intellectual strain for their audiences, to entertain them with juggling, tumbling, contortions, and rope walking. When the trouvères went about reciting their own stories, and when the habit of reading spread and reduced the demand for reciters, the minstrel became more and more of a vaudevillian, so that the jongleur became a juggler; he tossed knives, pulled Punch and Judy puppets, or displayed the repertoire of trained bears, apes, horses, cocks, dogs, camels, and lions. Some of the minstrels turned fabliaux into farces, and acted them without skimping the obscenities. The Church more and more frowned upon them, and forbade the pious to listen to them, or the kings to feed them; and Bishop Honorius of Autun was of the opinion that no minstrel would be admitted to paradise.
The popularity of the jongleurs and the fabliaux, and the uproarious welcome with which the newly lettered classes, and the rebellious students of the universities, received Jean de Meung’s epic of the bourgeoisie, marked the end of an age. Romance would continue, but it was challenged on every hand by satire, humor, and a realistic earthy mood that laughed at tales of chivalry long before Cervantes was born. For a century now satire would hold the stage, and would gnaw at the heart of faith until all the props and ribs of the medieval structure would crack and break, and leave the soul of man proud and tottering on the brink of reason.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Dante
1265–1321
I. THE ITALIAN TROUBADOURS
IT was at the Apulian court of Frederick II that Italian literature was born. Perhaps the Moslems in his retinue contributed some stimulus, for every literate Moslem versified. Some years before Frederick’s death in 1250, Ciullo d’Alcamo (c. 1200) wrote a pretty “Dialogue Between Lover and Lady”; and Alcamo, in Sicily, was almost wholly a Moslem town. But a more decisive influence came from the troubadours of Provence, who sent their poems, or came in person, to the appreciative Frederick and his cultured aides. Frederick himself not only supported poetry, he wrote it, and in Italian. His prime minister, Piero delle Vigne, composed excellent sonnets, and may have invented that arduous form. Rinaldo d’Aquino (brother to St. Thomas), living at Frederick’s court, Guido delle Colonne, a judge, and Iacopo da Lentino, a notary, in Frederick’s Regno, were among the poets of this “Apulian Renaissance.” A sonnet by Iacopo (c. 1233), a generation before Dante’s birth, has already the delicacy of sentiment and finish of form of the poems in the Vita Nuova:
I have it in my heart to serve God so
That into paradise I shall repair—
The holy place through the which everywhere
I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
Without my lady I were loath to go—
She who has the bright face and the bright hair;
Because if she were absent, I being there,
My pleasure would be less than nought, I know.
Look you, I say not this to such intent
As that I there would deal in any sin;
I only would behold her gracious mien,
And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
That so it should be my complete content
To see my lady joyful in her place.1
When Frederick’s court traveled through Italy he took poets along with his menagerie, and they spread their influence into Latium, Tuscany, and Lombardy. His son Manfred continued his patronage of poetry, and wrote lyrics that Dante praised. Much of this “Sicilian” verse was translated into Tuscan, and shared in forming the school of poets that culminated in Dante. At the same time French troubadours, leaving a Languedoc harried by religious wars, found refuge in Italian courts, initiated Italian poets into the gai saber, taught Italian women to welcome verse eulogies, and persuaded Italian magnates to reward poetry even when addressed to their wives. Some early Tuscan poets carried their imitation of the French troubadours so far as to write in Provençal. Sordello (c. 1200–70), born near Virgil’s Mantua, offended the terrible Ezzelino, fled to Provence, and wrote, in Provençal, poems of ethereal and fleshless love.
Out of this Platonic passion, by a strange marriage of metaphysics and poetry, came the dolce stil nuovo, or “sweet new style” of Tuscany. Instead of the frank sensuality which they found in the Provençal singers, the Italian poets preferred or pretended to love women as embodiments of pure and abstract beauty, or as symbols of divine wisdom or philosophy. This was a new note in an Italy that had known a hundred thousand poets of love. Perhaps the spirit of St. Francis moved these chaste pens, or the Summa of Thomas weighed upon them, or they felt the influence of Arabic mystics who saw only God in beauty, and wrote love poems to the deity.2
A bevy of learned singers constituted the new school. Guido Guinizelli (1230?-75) of Bologna, whom Dante saluted as his literary father,3 rhymed the new philosophy of love in a famous canzone (the Provençal canzo or song) “Of the Gentle Heart,” where he asked God’s pardon for loving his lady so, on the plea that she seemed an embodiment of divinity. Lapa Gianni, Dino Frescobaldi, Guido Orlandi, Cino da Pistoia, spread the new style through northern Italy. It was brought to Florence by its finest pre-Dantean exponent, Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1258–1300), Dante’s friend. By exception among these scholar poets, Guido was a noble, son-in-law of that Farinata degli Uberti who led the Ghibelline faction in Florence. He was an Averroistic freethinker, and played with doubts of immortality, even of God.4 He took an active, violent part in politics, was exiled by Dante and the other priors in 1300, fell ill, was pardoned, and died in that same year. His proud, aristocratic mind was well fitted to mold sonnets of cold and classic grace:
Beauty in woman; the high will’s decree;
Fair knighthood armed for manly exercise;
The pleasant song of birds; love’s soft replies;
The strength of rapid ships upon the sea;
The serene air when light begins to be;
The white snow, without wind, that falls and lies;
Fields of all flowers, the place where waters rise;
Silver and gold; azure in jewelry:
Weighed against these the sweet and quiet worth
Which my dear lady cherishes at heart
Might seem a little matter to be shown;
Being truly, over these, as much apart
As the whole heaven is greater than this earth.
All good to kindred creatures cleaveth soon.5
Dante learned much from Guido, imitated his canzoni, and perhaps owed to him the decision to write The Divine Comedy in Italian. “He desired,” says Dante, “that I should always write to him in the vernacular speech, not in Latin.”6 In the course of the thirteenth century Dante’s predecessors molded the new tongue from rude inadequacy to such melody of speech, such concentration and subtlety of phrase, as no other European vernacular could match; they created a language that Dante could call “illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial”7—fit for the highest dignities. Beside their sonnets the verses of the Provençaux were inharmonious, those of the trouvères and the minnesingers almost doggerel. Here poe
try had become no rhyming rivulet of gay garrulity but a work of intense and compact art as painstakingly carved as the figures on the pulpits of Niccolò Pisano and his son. Partly a great man is great because those less than he have paved his way, have molded the mood of the time to his genius, have fashioned an instrument for his hands, and have given him a task already half done.
II. DANTE AND BEATRICE
In May 1265 Bella Alighieri presented to her husband, Alighiero Alighieri, a son whom they christened Durante Alighieri; probably they took no thought that the words meant long-lasting wing-bearer. Apparently the poet himself shortened his first name to Dante.8 His family had a lengthy pedigree in Florence, but had slipped into poverty. The mother died in Dante’s early years; Alighiero married again, and Dante grew up, perhaps unhappily, with a stepmother, a half brother, and two half sisters.9 The father died when Dante was fifteen, leaving a heritage of debts.10
Of Dante’s teachers he remembered most gratefully Brunetto Latini, who, returning from France, had shortened his French encyclopedia, Tresor, into an Italian Tesoretto; from him Dante learned come l’uom s’eterna—how man immortalizes himself.11 Dante must have studied Virgil with especial delight; he speaks of the Mantuan’s bel stilo; and what other student has so loved a classic as to follow its author through hell? Boccaccio tells of Dante being at Bologna in 1287. There or elsewhere the poet picked up so much of the sorry science and miraculous philosophy of his time that his poem became top-heavy with his erudition. He learned also to ride, hunt, fence, paint, and sing. How he earned his bread we do not know. In any case he was admitted to cultured circles, if only through his friendship with Cavalcanti. In that circle he found many poets.
The most famous of all love affairs began when both Dante and Beatrice were nine years old. According to Boccaccio the occasion was a May Day feast in the home of Folco Portinari, one of the leading citizens of Florence. Little “Bice” was Folco’s daughter; that she was also Dante’s Beatrice is probable,12 but not close enough to certainty to calm the doubts of the meticulous. We know of this first meeting only through the idealized description written by Dante nine years later in the Vita nuova:
Her dress on that day was of a most noble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as suited with her very tender age. At that moment I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi [Behold a deity stronger than I, who, coming, will rule me]…. From that time forward Love quite governed my soul.13
A lad nearing puberty is ripe for such a trembling; most of us have known it, and can look back upon “calf love” as one of the most spiritual experiences of our youth, a mysterious awakening of body and soul to life and sex and beauty and our individual incompleteness, and yet with no conscious hunger of body for body, but only a shy longing to be near the beloved, to serve her, and hear her speak, and watch her modest grace. Give the male soul such sensitivity as Dante’s—a man of passion and imagination—and such a revelation and ripening might well remain a lifelong memory and stimulus. He tells us how he sought opportunities to see Beatrice, if only to gaze unseen upon her. Then he seems to have lost sight of her until, nine years later, when they were eighteen,
it happened that the same wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all in pure white, between two gentle [i.e., highborn] ladies elder than she. And passing through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely abashed; and by her unspeakable courtesy … she saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness…. I parted thence as one intoxicated…. Then, for that I had myself in some sort the art of discoursing with rhyme, I resolved on making a sonnet.14
So, if we may believe his account, was born his sequence of sonnets and commentaries known as La vita nuova, The New Life. At intervals in the next nine years (1283–92) he composed the sonnets, and later added the prose. He sent one sonnet after another to Cavalcanti, who preserved them and now became his friend. The whole romance is in some measure a literary artifice. The poems are spoiled for our changed taste by their fanciful deification of Love in the manner of the troubadours, by the long scholastic dissertations that interpret them, and by a number mysticism of threes and nines-, we must discount these infections of the time.
Love saith concerning her: “How chanceth it
That flesh, which is of dust, should be thus pure?”
Then, gazing always, he makes oath: “For sure,
This is a creature of God till now unknown.”
She hath that paleness of the pearl that’s fit
In a fair woman, so much and not more.
She is as high as nature and skill can soar;
Beauty is tried by her comparison.
Whatever her sweet eyes are turned upon,
Spirits of love do issue thence in flame,
Which through their eyes who then may look on them
Pierce to the heart’s deep chamber every one.
And in her smile Love’s image you may see;
Whence none can gaze upon her steadfastly.15
Some of the prose is more pleasing than the verse:
When she appeared in any place it seemed to me, by the hope of her excellent salutation, that there was no man mine enemy any longer; and such warmth of charity came upon me that most certainly in that moment I would have pardoned whosoever had done me an injury…. She went along crowned and clothed with humility … and when she had gone it was said by many: “This is not a woman, but one of the beautiful angels of heaven” … I say, of very sooth, that she showed herself so very gentle that she bred in those who looked upon her a soothing quiet beyond any speech.16
There is no thought, in this possibly artificial infatuation, of marriage with Beatrice. In 1289 she wedded Simone de’ Bardi, member of a rich banking firm. Dante took no notice of so superficial an incident, but continued to write poems about her, without mentioning her name. A year later Beatrice died, aged twenty-four, and the poet, for the first time naming her, mourned her in a quiet elegy:
Beatrice is gone up into high heaven,
The kingdom where the angels are at peace,
And lives with them, and to her friends is dead.
Not by the frost of winter was she driven
Away, like others, nor by summer heats;
But through a perfect gentleness instead.
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
Such an exceeding glory went up hence
That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
Until a sweet desire
Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
So that He bade her to Himself aspire,
Counting this weary and most evil place
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace.17
In another poem he pictured her surrounded with homage in paradise. “After writing this sonnet,” he tells us,
it was given unto me to behold a very wonderful vision, wherein I saw things which determined me that I would say nothing further of this blessed one until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labor all I can, as she well knoweth. Wherefore, if it be His pleasure through Whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman. After the which may it seem good unto Him Who is the Master of Grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady, to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on His countenance.
So, in the concluding words of his little book, he laid his sights for a greater one; and “from the first day that I saw her face in this life, until this vision” with which he ends the Paradiso, “the sequence of my song was never cut.”18 Rarely has any man, through all the tides and st
orms in his affairs, charted and kept so straight a course.
III. THE POET IN POLITICS
However, there were deviations. Some time after Beatrice’ death Dante indulged himself in a series of light loves—“Pietra,” “Pargoletta,” “Lisetta,” “or other vanity of such brief use.”19 To one lady, whom he names only gentil donna, he addressed love poems less ethereal than those to Beatrice. About 1291, aged twenty-six, he married Gemma Donati, a descendant of the oldest Florentine aristocracy. In ten years she gave him several children, variously reckoned at three, four, or seven.20 Faithful to the troubadour code, he never mentioned his wife or his children in his poetry. It would have been indelicate. Marriage and romantic love were things apart.
Now, perhaps through Cavalcanti’s aid, he entered politics. For reasons unknown to us he joined the Whites or Bianchi—the party of the upper middle class. He must have had ability, for as early as 1300 he was elected to the Priory or municipal council. During his brief incumbency the Blacks or Neri, led by Corso Donati, attempted a coup d’état to restore the old nobility to power. After suppressing this revolt the priors, Dante concurring, sought to promote peace by banishing the leaders of both parties—among them Donati, Dante’s relative by marriage, and Cavalcanti, his friend. In 1301 Donati invaded Florence with a band of armed Blacks, deposed the priors, and captured the government. Early in 1302 Dante and fifteen other citizens were tried and convicted on various political charges, were exiled, and were sentenced to be burned to death if they should ever enter Florence again. Dante fled, and, hoping soon to return, left his family behind him. This exile, with confiscation of his property, condemned the poet to indigent wandering for nineteen years, embittered his spirit, and in some measure determined the mood and theme of The Divine Comedy. His fellow exiles, against Dante’s advice, persuaded Arezzo, Bologna, and Pistoia to send against Florence an army of 10,000 men to restore them to power or their homes (1304). The attempt failed, and thereafter Dante followed an individual course, living with friends in Arezzo, Bologna, and Padua.