Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES)

by Lewis, R. W. B.

  to find any treasure, but your fickle heart

  where the bard of love never made a wound

  leads you away from it.

  Cino’s last surviving sonnet to Dante speaks mordantly about his condition of exile, but then brightens at the prospect of a new beauty available for love. Dante again scolds him amiably:One who falls in love as you, now here, now there ... shows that love wounds him but lightly.

  Before offering that nugget of wisdom, however, Dante struck a surprising new note:I thought, Master Cino, that I had quite abandoned this poetry of ours, for now my ship must hold a different course, being further from the shore.

  He will comment briefly on Cino’s philandering, Dante says, but after that he will be otherwise occupied.

  This sonnet was probably written in Lucca, the old walled city thirty-five miles due west of Florence. In his new commitment to the party of the self, Dante had come to realize that though he was still a Florentine—“native and citizen” of the city, as he continued to say emphatically—he was above all a Florentine poet, or better, a man of letters. He was ready to embark, to borrow his own metaphor, upon new poetic ventures: and first a prose study of poetry, especially Italian and Tuscan and Florentine poetry; more largely, of the language of poetry and of language in general and historically. Such was the large aim of De Vulgari Eloquentia, the treatise on vernacular poetry that he began in Lucca—a singularly fitting place, it might be added, since the Lucchese have often been said to speak the purest Tuscan of all.

  The work emerges directly from the Bologna days with Cino da Pistoia. Dante’s sonnet from the Lunigiana spoke of Cino’s “sweet and clear voice”; there is a similar allusion to Cino’s “sweet words” (dolci detti) in the sonnet following; and, conspicuously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante points more than once to him as a rare example of what Tuscan poetry can hope to achieve at its finest.

  Before arriving at those accolades, Dante offers a survey of human language—something only human beings are capable of and that is the basis of common human life—from the single language of Adam through the infamous Tower of Babel, which brought a chaos of languages into the world, down to the (then) present time. Three major groups of language can be observed (the number three, as always, frames the analysis): northern, eastern, and southern. Of the latter, there are three main groups: French, or the language of oui; Provençal, or the language of oc; and Italian, or the language of si. But Italian speech—very much like the ill-fated country of Italy, so Dante implies—divided rapidly into rival idioms. Not only do Pisans and Paduans speak differently, but so do people in neighboring cities and even people in different parts of the same city.

  All in all, Dante identifies fourteen separate Italian dialects. He has said at the outset that no one before him had ever attempted a study of this sort; and indeed, in its conceptual reach and empirical detail—Dante’s remarkable ear had listened to and recorded differing accents in almost every corner of the land, apparently—nothing remotely like it had ever previously been undertaken.

  Italian, even so, is the best of the existing languages, Dante contends, because the best poetry has been written in it. Here Dante pauses to denounce Tuscan modes of expression as in effect idiotic blather. But a few writers, he says, have reached excellence in the vernacular: and he cites “Guido [Cavalcanti], Lapo [Gianni], and one other [himself], all from Florence, and Cino da Pistoia.”

  The treatise moves on to a celebration of the lyric mode known as the canzone: the highest form of poetry, so Dante claims at this moment (c. 1305) in his career, the one that combines the best features of the ballad and sonnet. Most of Book II of De Vulgari Eloquentia is devoted to the canzone, the only poetic form capable of handling the lofty themes of poetry: heroism, love, virtue—these latter being further defined as boldness in arms, true passion, the righteous will. Among the few truly expert practitioners, Dante cites the Provençal poet Bertrand de Born (c. 1140-1215), who sang of war as the finest human pleasure:I tell you that I find less pleasure

  in eating, drinking and sleeping,

  than in hearing the cry of “Charge!” ...

  and seeing the dead with bits of lances

  and banners protruding from their sides.

  The warrior in Dante had admired this sentiment; nonetheless, in the Inferno, Bertrand is located far down in the eighth circle, swinging his severed head by its hair and confessing to having given evil counsel to young Prince Henry of England (pushing him to rebel against his father, King Henry II).

  Dante also mentions Arnaut Daniel, who sighed in Provençal about the great love that had entered his heart, and for whom Dante had a high regard. Closer to home, he lists Cino as the Tuscan poet of love and as “the poet of righteousness.” From his own work, Dante quoted “Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire” [Grief brings boldness to my heart], the opening line of a lengthy canzone that Dante had only recently completed and the next-to-last canzone he would ever write. It was intended as a poem in praise of liberality, but it consists mainly of a multi-pronged attack on the sin that most aroused Dante’s fury: that of avarice.

  For the rest, Dante identifies the canzone as tragic in nature, suited to “the superior style of poetry,” whereas comedy was fit for “the inferior style” and elegy for “the style of the unhappy.” A canzone should consist of stanzas of equal length. There are references to Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizelli (“the great Guido”), and further presentations from his own writing, including several entries in the Vita Nuova, among them “Donne ch‘avete intelletto d’amore” and “Donna pietosa e di novella etate.”

  Though its aim is to establish the validity of vernacular literature, the De Vulgari Eloquentia was written in Latin, as befitted an essay directed toward the learned. It ran to two books and about fifty pages (in a modern edition). The work was intended to run a great deal longer, but it breaks off at the end of chapter xiv of Book II; probably because Dante wanted to hurry on to a companion piece, the essay composed in the vernacular and called the Convivio.

  By way of illustrating his claims for the canzone, Dante in the Convivio proposes to examine a number of canzoni he had written over the years, though not without meditating at some length on the propriety of an author’s talking so much about himself. The Convivio, as its title indicates, is a banquet, a feast of knowledge in which all men of goodwill are invited to participate—on the assumption that Aristotle was right when he said at the start of the Metaphysics that all men by nature desire to know. The food at this banquet will be served in fourteen courses, as fourteen canzoni, submitted for inspection and understanding. In fact, Dante analyzed only three, and the treatise breaks off after four books and about 250 pages.

  The Convivio was written between 1306 and 1308. The first part may have been written in Lucca, soon after breaking off De Vulgari Eloquentia.The remainder may have been put together “on the road.” That itinerant condition is palpable in the text, which is at once the most demandingly abstract and the most openly personal of anything Dante had yet written. The personal posture is exactly that of the forlorn wanderer, praying to be allowed back into his proper home. This note is struck in the third chapter of Book I, where he speaks of havingunjustly suffered punishment, the punishment, I mean, of exile and of poverty. After it was the pleasure of the citizens of that fairest and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me out of her dearest bosom—wherein I was born and brought up to the summit of my life, and wherein with their good leave, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary mind and to end my allotted span—I have wandered through almost every region to which the tongue of ours extends, a stranger, almost a beggar ...

  To make matters worse, Dante writes, “Not only was my person held cheap, but every work of mine became of less esteem. ”

  The Convivio, among its other intentions, is an elaborate effort to reestablish that lost esteem by demonstrating the high merit of the poems Dante had written and circulated over the years. But there is anothe
r note audible in the lament just quoted, the hint of an apology, or at least of a readiness to make an apology. The same note was sounded in “Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute” [Three women have come round my heart], a canzone written during the Bologna days and introducing three women who identify themselves as Justice, Generosity, and Temperance. They are sorrowful and disheveled; Justice’s dress is so torn that there is visible “that part of her which it is decent not to name.” Like Dante, they are in exile, they have been driven from their home (Florence, presumably); they are “weary and abandoned by all.” If these great qualities have been banished from Florence, Dante reflects musically, then he counts it as an honor to be exiled along with them. But he begins to wonder if he may not have been in small part to blame for what happened, and asks if he has not by now repented enough. So he sends the canzone back to Florence, with a plea to the Whites and the Blacks alike to forgive him:Song, go hawking with the white wings; song, go

  hunting with

  the black hounds—which I have had to flee,

  though they

  could still make me the gift of peace ... A wise man

  will not lock

  the chamber of forgiveness; to forgive is a fine victory

  in war.

  Whether the canzone, or “song,” ever reached Florence or was even glanced at there is not known, but no offer of peace resulted. At the same moment, Dante addressed an open letter to the Florentine people; the letter has been lost, but Lionardo Bruni quotes the opening sentence, the Gospel phrase, in Latin: “Popule mee, quidfecitibi?” [Oh, my people, what have I done to you?].

  As the Convivio goes ahead, Dante measures his present poetic self against the self represented in the Vita Nuova. That work, he says, was written when he was entering his youth, and its manner was properly passionate and fervid (there is a trifle of self-fabricating here: Dante was close to thirty when he finished the Vita Nuova). The Convivio is composed by the mature man (entirely accurate), and so its style will be manly and temperate. It is in this spirit that Dante, in Book II, discussed “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, ” maintaining, as we recall, that the figure envisaged is not a flesh-and-blood woman but an allegorical image of philosophy.

  Book III takes as its central text the canzone “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” [Love, speaking in my mind of my lady so reverently]. It is the poetry of praise, deliberately echoing the dolce stil of the Vita Nuova; but now the lady is unequivocally philosophy or what philosophy leads to: Divine Wisdom, with which the human soul longs to be united. In the Comedy, Divine Wisdom takes the form of Beatrice.

  Finally, in Book IV, Dante examines a canzone that announces at the start that it will not consist of love poetry but, rather, will employ “harsh and subtle rhymes” to study a practical question: what is the source of true nobility, of gentilezza? Dante calls this his “against-the-erring” poem (contra-li-erranti). Among the false notions it confronts is that nobility has anything to do with wealth; riches, the poem proposes, are themselves “base by nature ... base and defective.” Nor is nobility a matter of birth, as some mistakenly believe. True nobility arises from virtue; “nobility is wherever virtue is.”

  We recognize another large swing of Dante’s mental and imaginative energy, from love and philosophy to the world of human affairs. In his commentary on the canzone, and in view of the enormous changes and challenges on the international scene at the time of writing, in 1307, Dante argues forcefully for the desperate need for a super-national state presided over by a single secular authority. Dante, in his political thinking, had moved beyond the city-state as the happiest context for human life; but he was still enough of an Italian to assume that the international ruler would be an emperor crowned in Rome. The discourse shows that Dante would be ready for the appearance in 1309 and 1310 of the human being who might fulfill this supreme role, Henry VII, the young king of Luxembourg.

  Dante wrote one more canzone before he gave up the lyric mode altogether and moved to the vast epic enterprise of the Comedy. It is a fascinating, spirited, and tormentingly uncertain poem, known by its initial phrases: “Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia” [Love, since after all I am forced to grieve for others]. It was evidently written in the Casentino Valley; Dante addressed it as his “mountain song” (montanina canzon) and speaks in it of some extraordinary experience of love “among the mountains,” along the banks of a river. Dante made the case clearer in a Latin epistle he sent to his former patron Malaspina of the Lunigiana, accompanying the poem. Here Dante apologizes for not having been of further service to his lordship (on some mission or other) and explains that he hadscarcely set foot along the fluid streams of the Arno, when suddenly, alas, descending like a flash of lightning from on high, there appeared a woman, I know not how, delighting me with her appearance.

  In the poem itself, Dante complains that he cannot get her out of his mind, or out of his poetry, so obsessed is he by “her beauty and malice”—malice, because of her disastrous effect upon him.

  Dante instructs his mountain song, should it go back to Florence—“my city, that shuts me out from her”—to say that Dante is no longer belligerent: “My maker can make war on you no longer, he’s bound by such a chain in the place I come from.”

  The lady who so convulsed Dante has been thought by some to be a real woman of the Casentino, toward whom he felt an overpowering carnal desire. Others have taken her to be Beatrice, appearing suddenly from on high in a vision that paralyzes Dante’s whole being. But Dante was by now a writer who took joy in doing and saying two or more things at once. We may suppose that the Casentino lady was real enough—beautiful and tempting enough—to begin with; but that in Dante’s imagination, as he was writing the poem, she began to change magically into Beatrice. It is a first glimpse, so to speak, of the Beatrice he will meet up with at the summit of Mount Purgatory, in the Earthly Paradise, heart-stirringly lovely and morally stern at the same time.

  In this view, the mountain song marks the transition from impassioned lyric to visionary epic. The letter to Malaspina, narrating the origins of the canzone, was written in 1308 or 1309. The writing of the Inferno, by this reckoning, began in that period, somewhere in the Casentino.

  “The author of the Commedia, ”says Francis Fergusson in his superior study of Dante (1966), “with its sustained movement, its freedom of style, its unparalleled wealth of concrete perceptions, is a new Dante.” At some time between writing the Convivio and beginning the Commedia, Fergusson suggests, Dante underwent “a change of heart ... a turn to a religious view of man and his fate.” But Dante’s religious view being what it was, essentially a mode of Christian humanism, Fergusson continues, “this meant freeing him as poet to represent the human with a subtle, many-sided realism that had no parallel in his time, and has not been surpassed since.... He can, for the first time, fill his poem with many spirits and many voices besides his own, and with all the sights and sounds and smells of ‘God’s world.’ ”

  So he embarked on his otherworldly journey: down through the circling of the Inferno, where souls like Paolo and Francesca, and others much wickeder than they are doomed to eternal punishment; up the slopes of Mount Purgatory, where souls like Pia Tolomei are being purged of their sins and prepared for ultimate salvation; and into Paradise, where souls like Piccarda Donati live in eternal blessedness. We have no record of the successive phases of writing. But Dante’s fabulous mind evidently carried the whole of the Commedia within itself from the instant of its inception.

  “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—in the middle of the journey of our life—such is the ever-echoing opening of the Inferno. It tells us that the adventure occurred when Dante was thirty-five years old; the span of human life was then reckoned to be seventy years. This means in turn that we are in the year 1300, eight or nine years before Dante wrote the line. We will learn that it is April 7, Thursday evening in Holy Week. The pilgrimage continues through Good Friday, the day of Christ’s cru
cifixion, through Easter Sunday and the first few days of the week following.

  Dante remembers finding himself “in a dark wood, where the straight way was lost.” (Nothing in Dante’s conduct in the early months of 1300 suggests a loss of moral direction; if any literal reference is intended, it is more likely to be the mid-1290s, when he flirted with the window-lady and wrote scabrous verses to Forese Donati.) As he now moves warily toward the foot of the hill—a means of escape, he hopes—he is confronted by three beasts who block his way: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.

  The animals, we gather retrospectively, are allegorical representations of the qualities and forces that have wrought destruction upon Florence and Italy and would lead to Dante’s exile: lust, a special Florentine sin; ambition, the fatal flaw of the papacy; and avarice, for Dante the most unattractive and most common human failing. Fifty lines later, the poet alludes to another allegorical beast, a greyhound, who seems in some way to be the future redeemer of Italy, possibly the then nine-year-old Can Grande della Scala.

  An apparently human figure appears. He declares himself to be “not man, but a man I once was.” It is Virgil, the Mantuan poet who sang of Aeneas. Dante greets him as “my master and my author,” the one from whom he learned the style of writing poetry that has brought him honor. Virgil explains that a hard journey lies ahead of them. The threatening beasts prevent their ascending the mountain; they must take another way. Virgil will serve as guide through “an eternal place where you shall hear the hopeless shrieks”—the Inferno; then through the place assigned to “those who are contented in the fire, for they hope to come ... among the blessed”—Purgatory. And last, if Dante wishes to ascend, “there shall be a spirit worthier than I to guide you”—Beatrice, who has sent Virgil to rescue Dante from the depths and who will escort him up into the heavens.