by A. N. Wilson
Ladies who have intelligence of love,
I wish to speak to you about my lady,
not thinking to complete her litany,
but to talk in order to relieve my heart.
I tell you, when I think of her perfection,
Love lets me feel the sweetness of his presence,
and if at that point I could still feel bold,
my words could make all mankind fall in love.
I do not want to choose a tone too lofty,
for fear that such ambition make me timid;
instead I shall discuss her graciousness,
defectively, to measure her by merit,
with you, ladies and maidens whom Love knows,
for such a theme is only fit for you.16
Dante believes, when he thinks of Beatrice, that a new order of things is about to come. Musa deftly has ‘God does have something new in mind for earth’. From the beginning of Dante’s serious poetic career, there exists the bold idea that in the experience of loving Beatrice, he will discover not only what is generally meant by the term Love. He will discover that Love itself (the force, as he would conclude, which moves the sun and other stars) is going to bring about great changes in his lifetime – changes to the Church, changes to the way that society is ordered – as well as changes in the relations between men and women. To this extent, Dante and Beatrice are to be seen as subversives, as revolutionaries, in the sphere of human or secular love, just as St Francis of Assisi was a revolutionary in the sphere of Christian love, reminding the world of Christ’s call to holy poverty.
This poem, ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’, which became famous while Dante was still a young man, addresses these questions, not as a philosophical essay would do, but by a series of apostrophes to women other than Beatrice – to women who know so much more about love than we men do. Dante is afraid that if he told the world about Beatrice, then all the world would fall in love with her too. Because that, in a sense, is just what does happen in his life. There is something in this experience of his, this rapture, this delight in another person, this unsettling love, which suggests a universal principle. He does not spell this out in the poem – one of the many stupendous things about it. The parcel remains wrapped.
Even the angels in Heaven are praying to God for the unfolding of a miracle. They know that there is something which has not yet been unfolded. We are very close here to the sort of blasphemy deliberately intended by Guido Cavalcanti when, for example, he compares his mistress to a holy picture in church, and further, to the Blessed Virgin herself, and says that the Franciscans are now losing trade because his mistress is so sensationally attractive.
But Dante, although a long way from being fully Christian, and still under Guido’s spell, takes the ‘blasphemous’ image into a disturbing hinterland. He has God saying to the angel, Wait. For the time being, Beatrice is on earth. There will come a time when her lover, Dante, will lose her. When he does so, the experience will be so shattering that he will go through Hell – literally. And yearning for her will lead him to Heaven.
Is it possible, we ask, that such a poem could have been written about Beatrice before she actually died? Already, in life, he was seeing Beatrice as having a cosmic significance. No more extraordinary line can ever have been written about a woman than: ‘ella è quanto de ben può far natura.’ ‘She is the utmost that Nature can create of goodness’ is Thomas Okey’s translation in the Temple Classics edition. Musa has ‘she is the best that Nature can achieve’. This is more comprehensible than Barbara Reynolds’s ‘she is the sum of nature’s universe’ and better than Rossetti’s euphonious ‘she is as high as Nature’s skill can soar’. Nature isn’t going to get better than this. Saints, the Blessed Virgin herself, are not going to be greater or more wonderful than Beatrice. Yet is he describing Beatrice herself (for whom such claims must be extravagant) or is he describing the feelings he has, feelings which are actually common, as most of us can attest? If so, then we see why Beatrice from an early stage becomes more than just a person; she is the vehicle for his thoughts about love, the allegory of his love.
And from an early age and stage we see him diverging from Guido Cavalcanti in his philosophy of love. He is becoming less ‘modern’, to use Ezra Pound’s phrase, by which I think Pound means that Dante, even in his adventurous youth, in which he is mixing with avant-garde thinkers and writers and experimenting with new ideas, and outsoaring his contemporaries in skill, does not rule out the chance that the ‘old old story of Jesus and His love’ might have something to do with the emotions we feel when we fancy one another, and fall in love. But what? Almost from the beginning, Christianity had feared the body and downgraded sexual emotion or indeed any feelings of human love beyond generalized ‘charity’. From St Paul to St Augustine and beyond, all the great Christian thinkers would seem to suggest that love of the kind which interested Dante was a distraction from Divine Love. Dante, for whom Charles Williams believed the Church was still not ready, believed that what he felt for this Italian teenager was part of, or identifiable with, the Love which moved the stars.
It must not be supposed that because Dante made Beatrice into a heavenly emblem, he thereby lost his appetite for the messiness, and jokiness, of normal sexual life. In the exchanges of poems with his friend Forese Donati, we see a coarse-grained male humour. Forese’s wife had an infuriating cough – was that an excuse for screwing other women? Forese was notoriously greedy, and Dante’s poems to his chum interlace mockery for this fact with ribald suggestions about Forese’s (and, for that matter, his Baron brother’s) inadequacy between the sheets. J. G. Nichols excellently conveys the quality of Dante’s jokey relationship with Forese, whom he called Bicci:
Young Bicci, son of whom I couldn’t say
(Unless your mother Tess decides to tell it),
You’ve spent so much to stuff things down your gullet
That now it’s others’ stuff you take away.
So anyone who sees you head his way
Steers clear and keeps a good hold on his wallet:
‘A face like that, and with a scar to spoil it!
You’d know him for a robber any day.’
The poor old man who just can’t sleep at nights
For fear you’re caught red-handed – he’s your dad
As much as Joseph ever was to Christ.
Of Bicci and his brothers it is said
That their bad blood and loot give them the right
To treat their wives like sisters when in bed.
[Rime, Nichols, p.79]
When the old friends meet up in Purgatory, Forese has become rather a prude, complaining that the loose women of Florence have such low-slung dresses that they show not merely their breasts but their actual paps [Purg. XXIII.102]. It is not something which appeared to have worried Forese in life – in fact, the reverse; and many readers might find in such prurient denunciation the reverse side of a pornographic coin. The wife with the annoying cough, Nella, is apparently praying for her reprobate husband [Purg. XXIII.87], which is what explains his comparatively swift progress through Purgatory. In life, he responded to Dante’s crude jokes about her by a snobbish dig at Dante’s father’s activities as a banker and moneylender.
As in the cases of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Goethe, Dante was capable of sublime thoughts about love, held side by side with base earthiness. For Dante, however, these matters – the actual being in love, the capacity to write about it, the truth of what he was writing and thinking – are inescapably connected with a powerful professional ambition.
As the journey of the Comedy progresses, it becomes progressively simpler. This is something which the confused reader should bear in mind. The great book seems at first as if it will be a quite impossible concatenation of classical mythology, Catholic theology and Italian history, in none of which, perhaps, the contemporary reader is well versed. As the journey progresses, however, you realize that although there are innumerable r
eferences which require elucidation, the broad outlines of things you need to know to make the story intelligible are comparatively few. One is the cataclysm of Dante’s wrecked political career, which involved both his betrayal by his wife’s cousin, Corso Donati, and the group of Guelfs with whom he had grown up as a Florentine neighbour. The other, which we have already touched upon, is his relationship with the Pope and the Papacy. But another, very simple theme, is his desire to become the best Italian poet, the poet of Italy who deserves to be placed alongside the great poets of antiquity. This is a simple and very ruthless need.
The poet who recognizes him as he walks through Purgatory as the author of ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ is dismissed because he wrote in the dialect of Lucca. He is also to blame for not seeing the poetic merit of Guido Guinizelli, the father of Tuscan verse. But Guinizelli himself bows before Arnaut Daniel, in a phrase which T. S. Eliot was later to make famous when applied to Pound:
‘My brother, I can show you now,’ he said
(he pointed to a spirit up ahead),
‘a better craftsman of his mother tongue.
[fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno]
[Purg. XXVI.115–17, Musa]
Keep that phrase in mind – ‘parlar materno’ – as a good indication of how Dante, in common with all his European contemporaries, did not yet think that the dialectal and local variations in the Romance tongue necessarily constituted different ‘languages’ in our sense. But for now, note the extraordinarily strong sense of a pecking order. The poets are being lined up in competition with one another. Guinizelli beats Bonagiunta; Arnaut Daniel beats Guinizelli. Maybe all serious writers think in this way to some extent. When the poet Swinburne died, W. B. Yeats exulted, ‘Now I’m King of the Cats.’ In Dante, the streak of destructive competitiveness is very, very strong; never stronger than in relation to the man who first saw his true poetic potential, who introduced him to the magic circle of Florentine poets, who was his guide and mentor and his first true friend, Guido Cavalcanti.
The year 1300 was the year of the vision which became the Comedy. It was the year of the crisis in Dante’s life: the year of the Jubilee in Rome, the year which set in train those political events which would lead to Dante’s exile from Florence. It is the pivotal year, the mid-point of his life from which he saw, and rationalized, all the years before and after. It is also the year when, after a seventeen-year friendship with Dante, Guido Cavalcanti found himself being sent into exile, and dying, aged about fifty.17
IX
THE WARRIOR WHO FOUGHT AT CAMPALDINO
DANTE CHANGED HIS VIEWPOINT – ABOUT HIS FRIENDS, ABOUT philosophy, about politics – with startling frequency. Partly this can be attributed to his personal lively-mindedness. Partly the explanation lies in the fact that he lived in an age of exceptional change. In Dante’s century, if you can so designate the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, history finds the origins of modern Europe – a Europe of emerging vernacular languages and literature, emerging nation states as opposed to the idea of Empire, emerging freedom of thought in science, philosophy and religion.
In Italy, we see the development of the universities. The word comes from the Latin term universitas, and in medieval times it was used to signify any collective or corporation. The terms universitas studii or collegium (a group of people bound together for the purposes of study) are phrases sometimes used. By the fourteenth century, we find the word universitas being used on its own in the modern sense.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries had seen the origins of universities – the great medical school of Salerno and the philosophical schools of Paris were among the first. Paris was especially significant as a place of philosophical inquiry independent of the hierarchies of the Church.
It was small wonder that Frederick II should have wished to emulate the high reputation of Paris by founding the University of Naples, and conferring upon it the status of studium generale, that is, a place to which students outside the area would wish to come and study. In Italy, universities tended to be much more geared to what we should call vocational training. They were designed to train young men for careers. At Bologna, a law school was established which was to become one of the most prestigious in Europe, and one Pepo is named as having lectured on Roman law in about 1276. By the time that Dante was a young man, Bologna was recognized as the chief school both of civil and of canon law. Law was a study which covered areas which in a modern university would be studied in the faculties of politics and philosophy. As we have already observed, all the Popes from Innocent III to Boniface VIII, with the exception of the Holy Idiot Celestine V, were canon lawyers. The whole debate in which Dante’s public life was caught up – concerning how Europe should be governed, who had the power over the money supply and the coinage, as well as the status of independent states and republics – these were legal questions.
Dante was in Bologna from 1286 to 1287. At this period, there was no university at Florence as there had been at Arezzo since 1215 and at Siena since 1246. In later life he was used as a political and legal negotiator, not only by the city of Florence in relation to the Papacy, but also by some of the great noble families and – at the very end – in relations between Ravenna and Venice. His treatise written in exile, when he had changed his mind about being a papalist Guelf, and become an ardent supporter of a universal monarchy, would strike many modern readers as bizarre; and the open letters he wrote to the Emperor Henry VII would strike most dispassionate readers as deranged. But they are deeply read. He had clearly made studies in the broadest sense of law. If he had done so as a young man, while he was also making his reputation as a poet, this would explain the fact, to which he freely confesses, that he was poorly read in philosophy and Latin literature as a very young man. By the time Dante was resident in Bologna as a young man, the university had developed along collegiate lines, and there were faculties of theology, medicine and law. There is no evidence that Dante studied for a degree. Perhaps he dipped in and out of lectures at all these faculties. But, clearly, he was not solely engaged in the study of law, any more than he was solely engaged in poetry. Like most Florentines above the middle class, he had a life outside the city; whether on his own or on other people’s lands, he pursued the rural sports of hawking and hunting; he was a horseman; he was sufficiently skilled in the arts of war, when the moment arose, to serve as a soldier.
Falconry, about which the Emperor Frederick II wrote a book, was obviously part of Dante’s life, and he frequently draws upon it in his poetry. When two angels drive away a devil from Purgatory, he sees them as heavenly goshawks chasing a snake [Purg. VIII.104]; it is an exact image, the goshawk flying low to catch its prey, unlike a peregrine, which would have swooped down from on high.1 When Geryon sets down Virgil and Dante at the bottom of some roughly hewn rocks, it reminds Dante of a falcon wearily settling, having caught no prey [Inf. XVII.127–32]. In Paradise, Dante is reminded of the joyous way in which a falcon warbles when it is unhooded, shaking its head and clapping its wings [Par. XIX.34]. In Hell [Inf. XXII.128–41], a devil, Alichino, flies after a sinner, misses him, and then grapples with another devil, Calcabrina, ‘just like when a falcon approaches, dives down and returns angry and ruffled’. Perhaps most chilling of all is the circle of Purgatory where the envious are punished, whose eyelids ‘had been sewn shut/with iron threads, like falcons newly caught,/whose eyes we stitch to tame their restlessness.’ [Purg. XIII.70–72, Musa]. In his book on falconry, Frederick II devotes a chapter to ‘seeling’ the eyes of birds in this way, piercing the lids with needle and thread. Dante had clearly seen it done.
Just as he was obviously a witness to country sports, and probably a participant in them, so Dante is a poet who was wonderfully observant of dogs. The Comedy is full of doggy references, though most of these are indoor, or urban. Ugolino, gnawing on the skull of the Archbishop who locked him in the tower, inevitably suggests the ill-tempered cur gnawing a bone [Inf. XXXIII.75–8]. Two
of the devils in Hell have dog-names – Dog-face and Dog-grabber, Cagnazzo [Inf. XXI.119] and Graffiacane [Inf. XXI.122]. One suspects that Dante did not like dogs – most of the dog-images occur to him in Hell. But how he notices them! Trying to bite fleas out of their paws on a hot summer’s day [Inf. XVII.49]; or the way they grin, treacherously [Inf. XXXII.70.] Most horrifying of all, perhaps, is the pack of hunting dogs which pursues the suicides in Hell:
Behind them, and throughout the wood, there rushed
A horde of sable bitches, hungry, rapid,
Like greyhounds that are suddenly unleashed.
They, where he crouched, got their teeth into him.
[Inf. XIII.124–9, Nichols]
The period of Dante’s boyhood and youth was an exceptionally volatile one politically, even by Florence’s lively standards. But though there was much violence, warfare itself, in the sense of pitched battles, had been rare in his lifetime. Part of the reason for this was the sheer expense of raising mercenary armies. Partly, however, it was because in the Tuscan communes, only Pisa had a Ghibelline government.
The balance of power was held by violence. Before Dante’s birth, the great decisive battle, determining the political destiny of Florence, and of all Tuscany, had been Montaperti, on 4 September 1260, the havoc and great slaughter which dyed red the little Tuscan stream of the Arbia [Inf. X.85]. It was the magnificent Ghibelline victory, accomplished by Manfred, bastard son of the lately dead Frederick II. It drove the Guelfs out of Florence and, had it been a lasting victory, it would, before he was even born, have utterly changed Dante’s destiny since he would probably have been ineligible for political office, and therefore would never have been exiled, and never written the Comedy.