Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Vol. 1 (of 3)

"Ben si convien, che la lunga fatica Tu gli raccorci con l' opere tue."

"And well it would be, were his long fatigue Shorten'd by thy good deeds."

Dante was born in the spring of the year 1265. Benvenuta da Immola calls his father a lawyer; but little more is recorded of him except that he was twice married, and left two sons and a daughter, at an early age, to the guardianship of relatives. Dante (abridged from Durante) was born of Bella, his father's second wife, of whom, during her pregnancy, Boccaccio relates a very significant dream,--on what authority he does not say, and with what truth the reader may judge for himself. She imagined herself sitting under the shade of a lofty laurel, in the midst of a green meadow, by the side of a brilliant fountain. Here she was delivered of a boy, who, in as little time as might easily happen in a dream, grew up into a man before her eyes, by feeding upon the berries that fell from the tree, and drinking of the pure stream which watered its roots. Presently he had become a shepherd; but, climbing too eagerly up the stem to gather some leaves from the laurel, with the fruit of which he had been hitherto nourished, he fell headlong to the ground, and on rising appeared no longer a man, but a magnificent peacock. It would be aggravating the offence of wasting time by quoting such a fable, were we to give the obvious interpretation. This, however, the great Boccaccio has done with most magniloquent gravity,--a task for which, of all men, he was no doubt the most competent, as it is probable that no soul living (the lady herself not excepted) besides himself was in the secret either of the vision or the moral. One point of the latter, which could not easily be guessed, may be mentioned; namely, that the spots on the peacock's tail (the hundred eyes of Argus) foreshowed the hundred cantos of the "Divina Commedia." The ingenious author of the Decameron may have borrowed the idea of this dream from Dante's own allusion to the laurel and its leaves,--the meed of poets and of princes,--in his preposterous invocation of Apollo at the commencement of the "Paradiso."

Dante himself never alludes to this notable omen, though often referring, with conscious pride, to his genius, and the circumstances by which it had been awakened and exercised. This he attributed to the benign influence of the constellation Gemini, which ruled at his nativity. In the "Paradiso," Canto XXII., mentioning his flight from the planetary system to the eighth sphere, where the fixed stars have their dwelling, he exclaims,--

"O Reader! as I hope once more to reach That realm of holy triumph[1], for whose sake I oft lament my sins and smite my breast, Thou could'st not, in so brief a space, through fire Have pass'd and pluck'd thy finger, as I saw And was within the sign that follows Taurus. O glorious stars! light full of highest virtue! From whence, whate'er it be, my genius sprang, With you arose, and set the Sire of life[2], When first I breathed the Tuscan air. With you My lot was cast, when grace was given to mount The lofty wheel which guides your revolutions. To you, devoutly, my whole soul aspires To gather courage for the bold adventure That draws me onward tow'rds itself."[3]

Brunetto Latini (his tutor afterwards) is reported to have foretold the boy's illustrious destiny, on due consultation with the heavenly bodies that presided at his birth. Yet, superstitious as Dante appears to have been in this respect, in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno" he punishes astrologers, and those who presume to predict events, by twisting their heads over their shoulders, and making those for ever look backward who, too daringly, had looked forward into inscrutable futurity.

"People I saw within that nether glen, Silent, and weeping as they went, with slow Pace, like the chaunters of our litanies.[4] As I gazed down on them, the chin of each Seem'd marvellously perverted from the chest, And from the reins the visage turn'd behind: Wherefore, since none could look before him, all Must needs walk backward;--so it may have chanced To some one palsy-stricken, to be wrench'd Thus all awry; but I have never seen Aught like it, nor believe the like hath happened. Reader,--so help thee Heaven to gather fruit From this strange lesson!--think within thyself If I could keep my countenance unwet When I beheld our image so transposed, That the eyes wept their tears between the shoulders."[5]

Though early deprived of his father by death, Dante appears to have been well attended to by his relatives and guardians, who placed him for education under Brunetto Latini and other eminent tutors. He was by them instructed not only in polite letters, but in those liberal accomplishments which became his rank and prospects in life. In these he excelled; yet, while he delighted in horsemanship, falconry, and all the manly as well as military exercises practised by persons of distinction in those days, he was, at the same time, so diligent a scholar, that he readily made himself master of all the crude learning then in vogue. It is stated by Pelli that, while yet a boy, he entered upon his noviciate at a convent of the Minor Friars. But his mind was too active and enterprising to enslave itself to dulness in any form; and he withdrew before the term of probation was ended.

According to Boccaccio, before he could be either student, sportsman, soldier, or monk, he became a lover; and a lover thenceforward to the end of his life he appears to have remained, with a passion so pure and unearthly, that it has been gravely questioned whether his mistress were a real or an imaginary being. The former, however, happening to be quite as probable as the latter, all true youths and maidens will naturally choose to believe that which is most pleasant, and give the credence of the heart to every eulogium which the poet, throughout his works, has lavished upon his Beatrice, whatever greybeards may think of the following story:--One fine May-day, when, according to the custom of the country, parties of both sexes used to meet in family circles, and, under the roofs of common friends, rejoice on the return of the genial season, Folco Portinari, a Florentine of no mean parentage, had invited a great number of neighbours to partake of his hospitality. As it was common on such occasions for children to accompany their relatives, Dante Alighieri, then in his ninth year, had the good fortune to be present; where, mingling with many other young folks, in their afternoon sports, he singled out, with the second sight of the future poet, that one whom his verse was destined to eternise. The little lady, a year younger than himself, was Bicè (the familiar abbreviation of Beatricè), daughter of the gentleman at whose house the festivities were held. She need not be pictured here; for premature as such a fit must have been, every one who remembers a first love, at any age, will know how she looked, how she spoke, how she stepped, and how her hero felt,--growing at every instant greater and better, and braver in his own esteem, that he might become worthy of hers:--suffice it to say, from Boccaccio, that Dante, though but a boy, received her beautiful image into his heart with such fondness of affection, that, from that day, it never departed thence.

In his "Vita Nuova" (a romantic and sentimental retrospect of his youth), he has himself described his raptures and his agonies in the commencement and progress of this passion; which was not extinguished, but refined; not buried with her body, but translated with its object, (her soul,) when Beatrice died, in 1290, at the age of twenty-four years. Judging from the general tenor of his poetry, of which his mistress was at once the inspirer and the theme, it must be presumed that the lady returned his noble attachment with corresponding tenderness and delicacy; though why they were not united by marriage has never been told. He intimates, indeed, that it was long before he could learn, by any token from herself, that his faithful passion was not hopeless. As usual in cases of this kind, a most unpoetical accident has been ill-naturedly interposed, by truth or tradition, to spoil a charm almost too exquisite to be more than a charm which the breath of five words might break. On the evidence of a marriage certificate, which Time unluckily dropped in his flight, and some poring antiquary picked up a century or two afterwards, it seems as though Beatrice became the wife of a cavalier de Bardi. Dante himself, however (who pretends to no bosom-secrets too dark to be uttered), never alludes to such a blight of his prospects on this side of that threefold world which he was afterwards privileged to explore, at her spontaneous intercession, that he might be purged from every baser flame than entire affection to herself, while she gave him in the eighth heaven a heart divided only with her God. After her decease, he intimates that he was tempted to infidelity to her memory (in which she was the bride of his soul), by the appearance at a window of a lady who so much resembled his "late deceased saint," that he almost forgot her in retracing her own loveliness in the features of this new apparition. His tears flowed freely at the sight; and he felt comforted by the sympathy of the beautiful stranger in his sufferings. But when, after a little while, he found love to the living symbol growing up like a serpent among the flowers, he fled in terror from it, before the gaze which had gained such power over his senses had irrevocably fascinated him to destruction; and he bewailed, in the most humiliating terms, the frailty of his heart and the wandering of his eyes. It is, moreover, the glory of his great work that the posthumous affection of Beatrice herself is represented as having so troubled her spirit, that, even amidst the blessedness of Paradise, she devised means whereby her lover might be reclaimed from the irregularities into which he had fallen after her restraining presence had been withdrawn from him on earth, and that he might be prepared, by visions of the eternal world, for future and everlasting companionship with her in heaven.

Dante, as he grew up to manhood, and for several years afterwards, continued successfully to pursue his studies in the universities of Padua, Bologna, and Paris. In the latter city he is said to have held various theological disputations, alike creditable to his learning, eloquence, and acuteness; though, from the failure of pecuniary means, he could not remain long enough there to obtain academical honours. On the authority of Giovanni da Serraville, bishop of Fermo, it has been believed that he also visited Oxford, where, as elsewhere, his different exercises gained him,--according to the respective tastes of his admirers,--from some the praise of being a great philosopher, from others a great divine, and, from the rest, a great poet. Serraville, at the request of cardinal Saluzzo and two English bishops, (Nicholas Bubwith, of Bath, and Robert Halam, of Salisbury,) whom he met at the council of Constance, translated Dante's "Divina Commedia" into Latin prose; of which one manuscript copy only, with a commentary annexed, is known to be in existence, in the Vatican library. The extraordinary interest which the two English prelates took in Dante's poem may be regarded as indirect, though of course very indecisive, evidence of his having been personally known at our famous university, and having been honourably remembered there. It is, however, certain that, soon after his decease, the "Divina Commedia" was in high repute among the few in this country who, during the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., in a chivalrous age, cultivated polite letters. This is apparent from the numerous imitations of passages in it by Chaucer, who was then attempting to do for England what his magnificent prototype had recently done for Italy.