TH

INTRODUCTION

"1 the sea.

HE "Vita Nuova."-"Throughout the Vita Nuova there is a strain like the first falling murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow and prepares us to look upon Thus, finely, one poet of another, far greater than himself, but with whom he was in such complete sympathy, whom he loved so tenderly throughout his life, that the names of the two must ever remain entwined in the annals of literature and of art.

There is no need to tell again in detail the beautiful story of Dante's love: how he met his Beatrice one May morning, when he was nine years old, and she a year younger (1274); how they did not see each other again for nine years; how he worshipped her with the purest love from that day till the day of her death in 1290; how he forgot her memory for a

1 Although these words would seem to imply a greater admiration for the Commedia, it would be an easy task to show that Rossetti's worship of Dante was based primarily on the Vita Nuova.

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while, but soon regained his better self; how his love became more and more spiritualised, till it found its highest expression in the Commedia.

It has been held by some that this Beatrice never existed in flesh and blood. Non ragionam di lor ma guarda e passa. Such "scholars" deserve no more attention than the Shakespeare-Bacon fanatics. Others, with more reason, maintain that, though Dante was undoubtedly in love with some lady, yet we cannot identify his Beatrice. For our part, we prefer to believe the much-maligned and much-discredited Boccaccio, who lived in the fourteenth century and was far more likely to be able to get at the truth of who this Beatrice was or was not than students, however diligent, living in the nineteenth and twentieth. Moreover, while it may be difficult flatly to contradict these latter, nothing would have been easier than for

1 The various views that have been held on this subject have been examined by Dr. Moore in a masterly article which may now be most conveniently read in the second series of the Studies in Dante (Oxford, 1899), PP. 79-151. He divides the theories into symbolist, idealist and realist, and concludes that there is a "large element of truth in the idealist and symbolist theories, but not the whole truth. Every theory has its difficulties, but those of the realist the least formidable."

2 See the Early Lives of Dante, translated by P. H. Wicksteed, pp. 15-20 (King's Classics, 1904).

some kinsman or friend of the Alighieri or Portinari to have contradicted Boccaccio. Why is there no evidence that any of them did so? Let us assume therefore, though it is really quite immaterial, that Dante loved the daughter of Folco Portinari, Beatrice, who in 1287 married one Simone de' Bardi, and who died in 1290. Dante himself, a few years after the death of Beatrice, married one Gemma Donati, by whom he had several children; and to his eldest daughter he gave the name of the object of his early passion.

Lest students of the Vita Nuova should regard the Dante of this period as a mere love-sick swain, heedless of anything save his mistress only, it must be added that we know him to have been a soldier too. For why should we reject the testimony of one of his earliest biographers, Leonardo Bruni, that he was on the side of the victorious Tuscan Guelfs at the battle of Campaldino (June, 1289), "fighting valiantly on horseback in the front rank"? And surely none but an eye-witness could describe so vividly two later episodes of the same campaign, used by way of illustration in the Inferno: "And thus once I saw the footmen, who marched out under treaty from Caprona, fear at seeing themselves among so many enemies

(xxi. 94-96).

...

"I have ere now seen horse

men moving camp, and commencing the assault, and holding their muster, and at times retiring to escape; coursers have I seen upon your land, O Aretines! and seen the march of foragers, the shock of tournaments and race of jousts, now with trumpets, and now with bells, with drums and castle-signals, and with native things and foreign (xxii. 1-9). And no sooner had Dante put the finishing touches to the Vita Nuova than he joined one of the guilds (that of the Physicians and Apothecaries)—a necessary preliminary in those days to all communal service; and from July, 1295, his name appears in various public documents.

The manner in which the Vita Nuova was composed is curious in the extreme. The lyrics were no doubt, as a general rule, set down immediately or shortly after the events which first inspired them. Thus, the earliest sonnet would belong to the year 1283, and all the subsequent lyrics inspired by Beatrice before and on her death would fall between that year and 1290.

1 The prose versions of passages from Dante's works (other than the Vita Nuova and Canzoniere) used in this volume are by Carlyle (Inferno), Okey (Purgatorio), Wicksteed (Paradiso, Convivio) and Ferrers-Howell (De Vulgari Eloquio); all in the Temple Classics.