would be incomprehensible and in no way creditable to the poet's taste if we are really to assume that his Beatrice was a married woman. The rejoinder which has been made to objections based on the fact of the marriage of Beatrice Portinari by appeal to the manners of the time we may dismiss as trivial. We know all about the manners of the time and the poetry of the Troubadours. In the present case we have to do not only with love poems but also with a work which, though deeply imbued with mysticism, is written in prose. In the case of Dante we cannot recognize as possible the continued hymning of a married woman; but when it comes to collecting the hymns shortly after her death, furnishing them with a commentary which forms a love story in plain prose, and publishing the whole thing, it is more than any troubadour ever did. Even Boccaccio saw the improbability and tried to escape with a statement that in his riper years Dante was ashamed of his Vita Nuova. He might have had reason for being so if the object of his love, the heroine of his work, had been the wife of Bardi. But his own words (Conv. i. 1; Purg. xxx. 115) show pretty plainly that he felt no shame.

Among the grounds which induced him to compose the Convito, Dante mentions a care for his own good name. "I fear," he says, "the disgrace of having followed a passion such as he who reads the aforesaid odes can conceive to have had the lordship over me, which disgrace comes entirely to an end by what I am saying at the present about myself. For it shows that not passion but the love of virtue was the moving cause. The odes referred to are those which he addressed to the comforter who appeared to him after

Beatrice's death. Is it possible that Dante should have feared to come into disgrace if people had believed that after the death of a married woman he was in love with a maiden and yet feared no disgrace on the assumption that he had for years been enamored of another man's wife? If any one can reconcile himself to such an assumption it would be better to avoid all scientific inquiry and be content with tradition. But if we are to test the matter critically the fashion in which Dante expressed himself in the Convito in regard to his love affair should be decisive. To his love for his Beatrice he allows its full and complete value; it is only the second love that is not to be taken literally, but is rather a spiritual love for philosophy. Since, then, he is in no way anxious lest his first love should be made a reproach to him, it was clearly no illicit passion.

The magnificent vision at the end of the Purgatory points in the same direction. The reproofs which the poet puts into the mouth of Beatrice have no doubt a highly symbolical meaning, but so far as their form goes they are just such reproaches as a woman would address to a man whom she loves, and who has proved himself untrue to her. What right would Bardi's wife have to utter such? Surely no reader could ever have imagined that Beatrice was a married woman had it not been for tradition. In that case too we should have been spared the symbolical and idealistic systems.

But how did the tradition itself arise? It certainly goes back farther than Boccaccio; he found it already in existence. For the "credible person" to whom he appeals is assuredly no invention of his own. The testimony of this "credible person" is, however, ren

dered somewhat suspicious by the fact that he or she was one of Madonna Bardi's nearest relations. Forty or fifty years after the poet's death, when he had already attained a high fame, there must have been a strong temptation first to conjecture, then to say, and lastly to believe, that the Beatrice whom he had glorified and rendered immortal was no other than the narrator's mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, as the case might be. Yet we would not say either that Boccaccio's "credible person was the first to set the tradition on foot. The person may have found it in existence, so that the question as to its origin is not yet solved.

The following solution has recently been suggested. On Dante's own showing he was talked about in connection with two ladies whom he pretended to love with a view of concealing his secret. One of these may well have been the Bardi-Portinari lady, and the gossip which he relates may afterwards have been made up into the tradition. The assumption involved in this acute and clever hypothesis is that in the first twenty years of the fourteenth century people in Florence should have troubled themselves to ascertain who was the fair lady who had aroused the enthusiasm of a fellow-citizen known to them as having been exiled and frequently condemned to death. Being unable to share this assumption, we must venture to attempt another solution. . . .

Even before the Vita Nuova was completed there may well have been some curiosity to know who was the object of the author's passion; there are indeed indications to this effect in the work itself. But he was quite able to guard his secret. Then he entered

himself into family life, and took part in public affairs in the government of the state. During these years people would hardly have inquired any further with whom the statesman and father of a family had been in love in his young days. Then came his exile, and the question was even less likely to be asked. Thus the whole love story must have fallen into oblivion; even though in 1290 guesses might have been made at it. But now the poet published his Convito, and then the Commedia, which quickly sprang into renown. Then was kindled a lively interest in the question of the identity of the lady whom he so glorified. But if the secret had been so closely kept all these years, who would now be able to discover it? Conjecture was driven to fix itself on the name Beatrice. It was assumed that this was her real name; inquiries were made as to possible acquaintances or contemporaries so named, and who was found in his near neighborhood. "Beatrice Portinari, of course," said every one; "it would be no other." And perhaps after this fashion the tradition grew up.

Perhaps also in quite a different fashion. Who at the present day can ascertain the truth with any security? Just as the people of old could only conjecture as to the true Beatrice, so can we only conjecture with regard to the origin of the tradition regarding her.

XI

THE PARADISO: ITS ASTRONOMICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS1

I. THE SUBLIME CANTICLE OF THE COMEDY.

THE Inferno is the most widely known portion of the Divine Comedy, and the Purgatorio the most human and natural because it best describes the present life in its weaknesses and its disciplines; yet Dante undoubtedly considered the Paradiso the supreme triumph of his prophetic and artistic genius, as well as the culmination of his thought. His theme here reaches the fullness of its grandeur, and to rise to the height of his great argument he realized that he taxed his powers to their utmost. In his dedication of it to Can Grande he called it "the sublime Canticle of the Comedy." He felt that he was constantly struggling with the ineffable, that the vision hopelessly transcended his speech. Into this consecrated poem he threw his whole soul. "It is no coasting voyage for a little barque, this which the intrepid prow goes cleaving, nor for a pilot who would spare himself," 2 and he pleads that he may well be excused, if, under the ponderous burden, his mortal shoulder sometimes trembles. Greater task, indeed, never essayed poet or prophet. He sought to combine in a form of perfect

1 The Teachings of Dante, Charles Allen Dinsmore, pp. 161 ff. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 2 Par. xxiii. 67-69.