Vita Nuova, is easy enough of understanding if taken by itself, but is very much complicated by the fact of Dante having in the Convivio described another donna gentile, who caused a terrible conflict in his mind, and who led him away for a season from his allegiance to Beatrice.

The question arises whether these two gentildonne have anything to do with each other, and here we are met by the statement of Dante, that they are the same.1 But it seems to me that Dante in the Convivio is in a much less poetical frame of mind than Dante in the Vita Nuova, and that he is led away by the subtleties of scholastic philosophy, which he began to study after the death of Beatrice, to give an allegorical interpretation to that which was at first merely personal; it appears, too, that, for some reason now no longer clear to us, he intentionally confused with that donna gentile who is "divine philosophy," that other donna gentile who is a living woman, and probably Gemma Donati his wife. Some critics are led by the words of the Convivio to maintain that he acted thus in order to give himself more importance when he entered on the political stage of Florence; as a philosopher he would have more weight than as a writer of mere love-poems.

A full discussion of the donna gentile of the Convivio really belongs to an edition of that treatise, and is hardly in place here. Some account, however, must be given of the matter, since, as I said before, there is a thread running through all that Dante wrote, and we shall be more likely to trace it to the end if we mark any places where it is visible. Briefly, then, the story of the donna gentile of the Con

vivio is this: In the second year after the death of Beatrice, lo trapassamento di quella Beatrice beata, che vive in cielo con gli angioli, e in terra colla mia anima,' appeared to Dante that gentil donna, of whom he spoke towards the end of the Vita Nuova, accompanied by Love, and, being assisted by the power of the eyes, at length conquered the thought of Beatrice, whose ally was the memory, and who up to this time had held the stronghold of his mind.

He then explains, how, failing to find consolation in himself, or his friends, after the death of Beatrice, he had sought it in the writings of Boetius and Cicero. Their meaning was at first hard for him to decipher, but finally he found in them not only consolation, but acquired so much knowledge by the way as to provide him with an introduction to philosophy, who was the mistress of those writers: che era donna di questi autori; he then pictured her as a donna gentile full of pity, and seeking her company in the schools, after thirty months began to feel the power of her charms, which drove out of his mind every other thought; and so he wrote the canzone, Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete, describing his love for the donna gentile, who is philosophy, under the semblance of love for a living woman.

Then he plays on the word "philosophy," which is "a loving converse with Wisdom," and in this part of his writing reminds one of the language of Plato in the Symposium. He has been careful to tell us that he is treating of the same matter as he has written of in the Vita Nuova, from which

1 Convivio, ii. 2.

4

2 Ibid., ii. 13.

3 Ibid., iii. 12: Filosofia è uno amoroso uso di Sapienza. Ibid., iii. 13 : A filosofia è necessario amore.

he wishes in no wise to derogate, but rather to add force to it; then he wrote as beseemed his youth with passionate fervour, but now with more temperance and manly force. This passage is sufficient authority to oppose to the statement of Boccaccio, that Dante was in later years ashamed of the Vita Nuova; of the part of his life of which it tells he speaks with tender affection in the Purgatorio.

In spite, then, of certain passages in the Convivio, in which Dante implies the identity of the two donne gentili, I prefer to believe that this identity is only imaginary, and that it dates from the time when he composed the prose of the Convivio, part of which was written before 1300, and part after he was already in exile, and that, so far as the Vita Nuova is concerned, we are in the presence of a real woman, whose existence is confirmed by the reproach which Beatrice makes him in the passage of the Purgatorio which I shall quote further on. I think that in the Convivio there is a real falling off in poetic feeling, which is swamped for a season under a sea of scholastic pedantry, and perhaps this backsliding is the object of that same reproach, when taken allegorically.

In the Divina Commedia Dante, recalled by the wondrous vision of which he tells us in the last section of the Vita Nuova, returns to his allegiance to Beatrice, and profiting by the knowledge which he had acquired by study, and by the experience of life which his part in the politics of his city had given him, as later by that wider experience of the world which the wanderings of his exile brought with them, begins to raise such a monument to Beatrice, as, with the confidence

1 Purg., xxx. 115.

of true greatness, he declares never before to have been raised to woman.

It is perhaps a mistake to seek to fit the statements as to time in the Convivio, on one hand, and in the Vita Nuova and Commedia, on the other, too definitely together. Dante writes as a poet, not as an historian. It has been found impossible by all critics, and many have tried their hands at the task,' to harmonize the different data, which they find in these three works of Dante. It would be easier if we could place the Convivio entirely between the completion of the Vita Nuova, as finished between the years 1292 and 1294, and the Commedia, the scene of which is laid in 1300, but which Dante went on working at till near his death in 1321. But there are words in the Convivio which make it certain that some of it was written after 1300, and it is not by any means proved that the Vita Nuova was finished in 1292. For the discussion of this much-vexed chronology I must refer to the writers already quoted.

Ideally at least we shall not be far wrong in placing the Convivio between the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, as the outcome of a period of Dante's life when the fire of poetry burnt low, and the meaner world and its mere intellect usurped the place of the heart and the imagination. We may quite well believe that in the Vita Nuova the poet was influenced in his presentation of the facts of his life, as far as he has cared to refer to them, by the artistic end he had in view; and inasmuch as "poetry is truer than history," the presentation of these occurrences in an ideal instead of in a

1 See Fraticelli, Introduction to Convivio; Fornaciari, Studj sul Dante; Wegele, Dante's Leben; Scartazzini, Selmi, Lubin, De Witte, passim.

matter-of-fact way brings out their inmost character; for the ideal, here as ever, is not a false and empty phantasy, but embodies the deeper realities of life, whose bare facts are dull and uninteresting until taken up into a unity which is imposed on them by the mind of man.

In any case, the Divina Commedia represents ideally the return of Dante to that allegiance which had been the safety of his youth. He had forgotten her who had been the joy of his life, and had gone after vain imaginings and empty pleasures; he had lost his ideal and had sunk into the merely intellectual maze of scholastic philosophy. He had reached that turning point in life when the hopes of youth are already fading, and there is nothing to take their place. So to most men there comes a time when the brightness and glamour of early years is no longer about them, and when they have to face the realities of life as a whole; then it is that their own littleness becomes oppressive, as it never was while they had still looked forward to growth and development; then they must either find an ideal which is independent of fortune as of the exuberance of earlier years, or become cynics at the best.

Fortunate he for whom, when lost like Dante in such a selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte, there is one to mark his despair, to lead him, by the consciousness of her care, to a faith that is never more to be shaken. Fortunate he who, like Dante, is still capable of the enthusiasm without which even the call of Beatrice would be heard in vain.

To Dante, thus lost in the selva oscura of doubt and sensuality and cynicism, came Virgil, greatest of those poets of antiquity whose writings were still known, and according

1 Purg., xxxiii. 124; xxxi. 56.

D