statement by another great literary artist, Gustave Flaubert:

L'enfant et le barbare (le primitif) ne distinguent pas le réel du fantastique. Je me souviens très nettement qu'à cinq ou six ans je voulais "envoyer mon cœur" à une petite fille dont j'étais amoureux (je dis mon cœur matériel). Je le voyais au milieu de la paille, dans une bourriche, une bourriche d'huîtres!1

Do the conventional elements and the artful construction of the Vita Nuova prove, as some have thought, that the narrative and the personages are fictitious or symbolic, without basis of reality? The arguments cannot be given here in detail. We must remember, however, that the Troubadours wrote about real ladies, not abstractions. Many realistic incidents in the Vita Nuova were certainly derived from personal observation, and have no point unless they actually happened-a funeral, a wedding, the passage of a group of pilgrims on the way to Rome, etc. The scene is evidently laid in Florence, although the name of the city is not mentioned. In some cases Dante makes a special effort to have the circumstances conform to his scheme, as when he uses three calendars to connect the number nine with the death of Beatrice. If he had invented the story, he would have made the details conform to his scheme without such devices, just as he would have carried the symmetrical arrangement out more uniformly if he had composed all the poems together. No satisfactory explanation can be given of many details, except on the supposition that they were real: the gabbo and the death of Beatrice, her father's death, the request of her brother for a poem of condolence, the presence of Dante's sister at his bedside, etc.

The element of symbolism is easily recognized; it was Dante's method to ascribe symbolic significance to persons or things that really existed, putting the literal meaning before the

1 Correspondance entre George Sand et Gustave Flaubert, letter no. CVII, written in 1869.

allegorical. Beatrice in the Divina Commedia is undoubtedly a symbol, although a real woman at the same time; Vergil also is a symbol, but no one doubts that Dante thought of him as the Latin poet.

The question which may fairly be asked is, how far the symbolism extends into the texture of the Vita Nuova, and whether there is, properly speaking, allegory in it. Allegory has been defined as "organized symbolism"; if found in the Vita Nuova, it is of the most elementary sort, hardly organized at all, and not comparable to the complex allegory of the Divina Commedia. Whether or not we consider the Vita Nuova as a prelude to the greater work, it is easy to see in it the central theme of Dante's spiritual development under the power of his love a real love, though surrounded by traditional embellishments-for Beatrice, the woman whose beneficent influence is indicated by her very name. In treating this theme he does not invent or distort incidents, he merely interprets them. The modern reader, in attempting to interpret the book, must follow the same principle.

If Dante had written nothing after the Vita Nuova, no one would have been likely to think it other than an ingenuous narrative with a tendency to idealization. But the exalted position of Beatrice in the Divina Commedia leads some to infer that in the Vita Nuova she was primarily a symbol; and the Convivio gives an allegorical interpretation of the latter part of the Vita Nuova. In the uncompleted form in which Dante left it, the Convivio consists of three canzoni and an elaborate commentary in prose. The first two canzoni, written not long after the Vita Nuova, are connected with the episode of the gentile donna who consoled Dante for a time, after the death of Beatrice; they are inserted in the note on XXXV, where the matter is more fully discussed. The prose was written probably ten years later; in it, after expounding the literal meaning of the first canzone, Voi che 'ntendendo, Dante affirms that in the guise of the sympathetic lady he really meant to represent

Philosophy. According to the principles already stated, it would be illogical to infer from this that the lady was nothing but a symbol, and still more so to apply the same argument to Beatrice. Dante had no intention here of misleading his readers, for it would not have occurred to him that the inference would be made. He merely wished to bring out, in accordance with his later point of view, what he chose to regard as the allegorical significance of an episode which he had recounted in the earlier work from the literal, realistic point of view. In the Convivio, it may be noted, he does not speak of Beatrice as a symbol; but his attitude toward her there, as also in the Vita Nuova, leads logically to his glorification of her in the Divina Commedia. In the words of Vernon Lee, he gave a "philosophical explanation of his seemingly inexplicable passion for an unapproachable woman."

Except in the sonnet of XXIV, where she is called Monna Bice, the name of Beatrice is not mentioned in the poems written during her life. After her death, both in verse and in prose the name is frequent in the full form, Beatrice, with emphasis on its significance. Nowhere does Dante give a hint as to her identity. His son Pietro and Giovanni Boccaccio both say that she was the daughter of Folco Portinari and the wife of Simone de' Bardi. The evidence of Pietro Alighieri is not accepted as conclusive, since some manuscripts of his comment on the Inferno do not contain this item. The evidence of Boccaccio is discredited by some critics because he wrote novelle; in this case, however, he obviously believed his statement to be true, and he had trustworthy sources of information that are lost to us to-day. The existence of Folco Portinari is attested by documents; in 1288 he mentioned in his will his daughter Bice, and in the following year he died, at just about the time indicated in the Vita Nuova for the death of the father of Beatrice. All the evidence that we have, while not conclusive, is in favor of accepting Bice Portinari as the Beatrice of Dante; on the other side there is no evidence, but simply a general

skepticism, partly inherited from the not quite extinct theory that Beatrice never lived at all.1

Many of the points already touched upon are discussed more fully in the Notes. It is hoped that the extraordinary charm of the Vita Nuova, with its exuberance of youthful sentiment, is not obscured by the amount of commentary that seems necessary for the intelligent reading of the text. The discussion of many questions could have been greatly enlarged; in presenting the views that he believes to be correct, the editor has endeavored to suggest other possibilities as well, and to open the way for further investigation. From the early 19th century on, the Vita Nuova has been edited by many of the foremost scholars of Italy. All the important editions are listed in the Bibliography. The text is preserved in some forty manuscripts, which, with the editions, are carefully described by Barbi in the critical edition of the Società Dantesca Italiana (1907). The poems were printed at Florence in 1527. The prose and verse were first printed at Florence in 1576, more than a century after the Divina Commedia; the divisioni were omitted, and several passages were arbitrarily modified. The first complete edition appeared at Florence in 1723. The poems were translated into English by Charles Lyell in 1835, the complete text by Garrow in 1846. The best English translations are by D. G. Rossetti and C. E. Norton; there have been several others, which are listed in the Bibliography. The French translation by Cochin is admirable. A number of interesting paintings have been inspired by the Vita Nuova, the finest being Dante's Dream by Rossetti; and it has been made into a cantata with musical setting by Wolf-Ferrari.

1 The question of Beatrice is discussed from many angles in books mentioned in the Bibliography. The best discussions are still those of D'Ancona, reprinted in his Scritti Danteschi from his edition of the V. N., and of E. Moore in his Studies in Dante, second series. See also Scherillo's edition of the V. N. and his Alcuni Capitoli; I. Del Lungo's Beatrice; and many notes and reviews by Barbi and by Parodi in the Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana; Shaw reviews the subject in his Essays on the Vita Nuova, 1929.

Unfortunately, the numbering of the paragraphs or chapters, first introduced by Torri in 1843, is not uniform in all the editions. The Oxford Dante, followed by Sheldon's Concordanza, adopts Witte's numbering, dividing Barbi's XXVI into two, so that the following chapters are numbered one higher; many older editions give no number to the proemio, but divide III into two parts. For IV-XXV practically all editions agree. The new critical edition of Dante's complete works, issued by the Società Dantesca Italiana in September, 1921, in connection with the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante's death, indicates the older numbering both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio, where it differs from that now adopted as the standard. The new arrangement of the Rime, also due to Barbi, is entirely different from that in older editions. Since first publishing the V. N. in 1907, with notes, Barbi has introduced a few minor changes in the text; the changes in the Rime and Conv. are frequently extensive. In this book, quotations and references, as well as the text, follow the new critical edition; the latter has no notes, but is to be followed by elaborate commentaries on each one of Dante's works.

It is often said that Dante is the representative man of the Middle Ages, and at the same time strikingly modern. In fact, his life and work make an excellent starting-point for the study of the times in which he lived; he foreshadows the modern world by his insight into the permanent qualities of human character and by his poetic imagination and power of expression. On account of its strangeness, the Vita Nuova may at first either attract or repel a modern reader; to understand it requires study. The poems are not merely Dante's earliest expression of his attitude toward life, they belong to a period when the Italian language was not yet fully developed. The prose, even more than the poems, shows that it was pioneer work not merely for its author but for Italian literature. As the book progresses, the poet's technical proficiency increases, and the