Page:Dante and His Circle, with the Italian Poets Preceding Him.djvu/47

Rh but it is true that the Vita Nuova is a book which only youth could have produced, and which must chiefly remain sacred to the young ; to each of whom the figure of Beatrice, less lifelike than lovelike, will seem the friend of his own heart. Nor is this, perhaps, its least praise. To tax its author with efteminacy on account of the extreme sensitiveness evinced by this narrative of his love, would be manifestly unjust, when we find that, though love alone is the theme of the Vita Nuova, war already ranked among its author's experiences at the period to which it relates. In the year 1289, the one preceding the death of Beatrice, Dante served with the foremost cavalry in the great battle of Campaldino, on the eleventh of June, when the Florentines defeated the people of Arezzo. In the autumn of the next year, 1290, when for him, by the death of Beatrice, the city as he says " sat solitary," such refuge as he might find from his grief was sought in action and danger : for we learn from the Commedia (Hell, C. xxi.) that he served in the war then waged by Florence upon Pisa, and was present at the surrender of Caprona. He says, using the reminis- cence to give life to a description, in his great way:—

A word should be said here of the title of Dante's autobiography. The adjective Nuovo, nuova, or Novello, novella, literally New, is often used by Dante and other early writers in the sense of young. This has induced some editors of the Vita Nuova to explain the title as meaning Early Life. I should be glad on some accounts to adopt this supposition, as everything is a gain which increases clearness to the modern reader; but on consideration I think the more mystical interpretation of the words, as New Life (in reference to that revulsion of his being which Dante so minutely describes as