Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/43

Rh boyhood we know nothing, except that he lost his mother at an early age, and that he profited by the instructions of the most learned of the Florentines, Brunetto Latini. He appears to have taken part in several military expeditions in his youth, and the glimpses of his personal circumstances which he allows us in the Vita Nuova exhibit him as a man of means, mingling on equal terms with the wealthy and polished society of prosperous Florence.

If our knowledge of Dante's outer life at this period of his history is imperfect, it is otherwise with his spiritual life, which he has revealed as no other could, in the above-mentioned Vita Nuova, written probably about 1292. This alone would have immortalised him as the author of the earliest modern book of its class— though it had a prototype in the Confessions of Saint Augustine—and of the first book of genius, or indeed of any real importance, written in Italian prose. Nothing can more forcibly proclaim the superiority of Dante's mind than the uniqueness of his first production, unless it be the fact that, high as is its place in literature, its chief interest for us is its concern with the man. It is simply the record of his attachment to a young lady whom he calls Beatrice, and whom Boccaccio enables us to identify with one whom we know from other sources to have actually existed, Beatrice de' Portinari. The notion that Beatrice is but an abstraction is utterly refuted, to adduce no other testimony, by Cino's consolatory poem on her death, quoted in the preceding chapter, and can only be entertained by those who know little of love, or are entirely possessed by the passion for allegorising. If ever intense affection was conveyed in intense language it is here, while at the same time the