too; he had, when still young, held office in the state, and was one of the chief enemies of Corso Donati and his black Guelfs. According to Boccaccio, in his Vita di Dante the poet put together (compose) the Vita Nuova when he was about twenty-six. This would place it about 1292. 2 Boccaccio's statements must not always be taken as purely historical, and his biography of Dante is often coloured by the romance of the picturesque and charming storyteller of the Decamerone; but in this particular case he is supported by the authority of Dante himself, who tells us in the Convivio that he wrote the Vita Nuova before he entered on his gioventù. Now gioventù3 lasts from the age of twenty-five to forty-five. Some critics, however, place the composition of the Vita Nuova in 1300, partly on evidence of style in the later sections, and partly from the statement made in C. xl. about the pilgrimage to Rome, which they identify with that of the year of Jubilee, 1300. This is by no means certain, and as some MSS. read va instead of andava, the words may refer merely to the season of the year; the suggestion, too, that the city was still dolorosa for the death of Beatrice would hardly be applicable to so late a date. On the other hand, Dante places the vision of the Divina Commedia in the year 1300, and it seems almost certain that it was this vision to which he refers in the last section of the Vita Nuova. In any case, there is no doubt that most of the poems were written on the occasions stated, beginning in 1283, though some of them may have been retouched when Dante put them See Dino Compagni, edited by Del Lungo, Florence, 1877, passim ; Villani, viii. 42; Boccaccio, Dec., vi. 9, and the meeting of Dante with Guido's father, Inf., x. 52. 2 Convivio, i. 1. 3 Ibid., iv. 24. together in the Vita Nuova and wrote the narration connecting them, either soon after 1292 or in 1300. The strongest argument for the latter date is derived from the statement of Dante,' that it was only more than a year after the death of Beatrice that he began to study philosophy, while in the Vita Nuova we find signs of his being already acquainted with Aristotle and the Schoolmen. It seems probable that the poems, and perhaps some of the prose, were composed before 1292, but that the work was finished after this, most likely between 1292 and 1295, and certainly not later than 1300, and that he modified some of the poems, and gave explanations of others, to suit the philosophical system which he had by that time adopted, and to picture the development of his own mind, and of his love for Beatrice, in the light of such philosophy. With reference to this, the suggestion of D'Ancona is very much to the point: that the philosophical poems of the Convivio may be placed in time between the episode of the donna gentile and the vision of C. xl. Taking the Vita Nuova by itself, and leaving out of sight the complication arising from Dante's statements in the Convivio the difficulties it presents are no greater than those which meet us in any modern romantic poem, except in so far as the turns of thought and terms of expression of the thirteenth century differ from ours; and in some ways the men of that century are even more remote from us than the Greeks and Romans, who, though farther off in time, have been brought nearer to us in literature by the revival of classic learning. But there are difficulties which are not only dependent on the remoteness of Dante's age from ours, though Convivio, ii. 13. 2 they are no doubt somewhat increased by that remoteness. These are the doubts of which he himself speaks,' and the obscurity for which he was ridiculed by Cecco d'Angiolieri; these are due to the nature of his subject, and their solution must remain hidden from those who are incapable of a like passion e questo dubbio è impossibile a solvere a chi non fosse in simil grado fedele d'amore.3 The Vita Nuova falls naturally into six parts. I. The first part comprises the chapters i.-xvii. Dante, who was born in Florence in 1265, first saw Beatrice in 1274, when he was nine and she was eight years old, perhaps, as Boccaccio tells us, at a fête given by her father, Folco Portinari, an important man of the Guelf party, to which the Alighieri also adhered. The houses of both families were in the Corso, and he no doubt often saw her in the interval, which he passes over till their second notable meeting in 1283, when he was eighteen, and when she deigned to give him that salutation which confirmed him for ever in the way of love. Probably the position of the two families was very different, the Portinari being important people of their time, while the Alighieri, though claiming to have Roman blood in their veins, were in no affluent circumstances. For a time Dante had reason to hide his passion from Beatrice under the semblance of devotion to another lady, and when she was no longer in Florence he was aided by yet another to conceal his real love, and that so successfully that Beatrice denied him her salutation. Beatrice was married in 1287 to Simone de' Bardi, and it is possible that Dante refers to her marriage in 1 C. xiv. 77. 2 See note to C. xlii. 47, and the sonnet quoted in the Appendix. that famous scene, where he remarks to his friend Guido Cavalcanti, "Of a truth I have now set my feet on that point of life, beyond the which he must not pass who would return." Such is the story of the first part; the poetry often shows an uncertain hand, and contains many reminiscences of Dante's predecessors in Provence and Italy. 3 II. The next part, chapters xviii.-xxiii., contains materia nuova e più nobile.' He no longer tells of his desire for Beatrice, but his happiness lies in the praise of her beauty: quelle parole che lodano la donna mia. In this praise he develops that dolce stil nuovo which was the beginning of true Italian poetry, and of which Dante himself was the greatest master. Here he leaves behind him the empty conceits of poetic diction which had trammelled his predecessors; here his tongue speaks as the heart prompts it, parla come per se stessa mossa.* This attempt to give a more direct expression to the feelings will remind English readers of the literary movement which we associate with Wordsworth, and of the battles fought in his time over prosaic and poetic diction, though Dante was too wise, and too much imbued with respect for his great master, to confuse the ways of poetry and prose. A more apt parallel is perhaps to be found in the step towards realism in painting taken by Giotto, the friend of Dante. In these cases, as in the efforts of the Romantic school of French literature, and of Turner and Millais in England, such greater realism implies not, indeed, a step in the direction of merely copying nature, or of baldly narrating events as they occur, but a progress toward the representation of the sensible 3 1 C. xvii. 5. 2 C. xviii. 32. Purg., xxiv. 55. + C. xix. 7. world according to conventions, which should express the thoughts and feelings of the poet and of his time, the artist being no longer content to repeat the forms and phrases which had served generations in the past, but which it was now mere affectation to use, since they no longer contained a living meaning. This new style of poetry, by which Dante and his friends. Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, surpassed their predecessors, is referred to by Bonagiunta da Lucca in the Purgatorio: "Mi di s' io veggio qui colui che fuore Diretro al dittator sen vanno strette, But no man, however great, can make an entirely new beginning, and there are lines by Guido Guinicelli of Bologna, who died in 1276, which are not unworthy precursors of the dolce stil nuovo; see Purg., xxvi. 92 ff., where Dante calls him il padre mio and Guido's own sonnets quoted in the Appendix. To this part belong two sonnets expressing sympathy with Beatrice, when her father, Folco Portinari, died on the last day of 1289. The spirit of the poems in this part of the Vita Nuova |