Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/850

Rh 814 DANTE the meed of the coward and the traitor, where shall we find them but in the pages of the Florentine ? The religion of the future, if it be founded on faith, will demand that faith be reconciled with all that the mind can apprehend of know ledge or the heart experience of emotion. The saint of those days will be trained, not so much on ascetie counsels of Imitation, or in Thoughts which base man s greatness on the consciousness of his fall, as on the verse of the poet, theologian, and philosopher, who stands with equal right in the conclave of the doctors and on the slopes of Parnassus, and in whom the ardour of study is one with the love of Beatrice, and both are made sub servient to lift the soul from the abyss of hell, along the terraces of purgatory, to the spheres of paradise, till it gazes on the ineffable revelation of the existence of God himself, which can only be apprehended by the eye of faith. &quot;Vita It only remains now to give a short account of Dante s Nuova. separate works. The Vita Nuova, or Young Life of Dante, contains the history of his love for Beatrice. Like the In Memoriam of our own poet it follows all the varying phases of a deep and overmastering passion from its com mencement to its close. He describes how he met Beatrice as a child, himself a child, how he often sought her glance, liow she once greeted him in the street, how he feigned a false love to hide his true love, how he felt ill and saw in a dream the death and transfiguration of his beloved, how she died, and how his health failed from sorrow, how the tender compassion of another lady nearly won his heart from its first affection, how Beatrice appeared to him in a vision and reclaimed his heart, and how at last he saw a vision which induced him to devote himself to study that he might be more fit to glorify her who gazes on the face of God for ever. This simple story is interspersed with sonnetti, ballate, and canzoni, chiefly written at the time to emphasize some mood of his changing passion. After each of these, in nearly every case, follows an explanation in prose, which is intended to make the thought and argument intelligible to those to whom the language of poetry was not familiar. The book was probably completed in 1307. It was- first printed by Sermartelli in Florence, 1576. The latest and best edition is that by Witte, pub lished by Brockhaus, Leipsic, 1876. Convito. The Convito, or Banquet, is the work of Dante s manhood, as the Vita Nuova is the work of his youth. It consists, in the form in which it has come down to us, of an intro duction and three treatises, each forming an elaborate com mentary in a long canzone. It was intended, if completed, to have comprised commentaries on eleven more canzoni, making fourteen in all, and in this shape would have formed a tesoro or hand-book of universal knowledge, such as Brunette Latini and others have left to us. It is perhaps the least well known of Dante s Italian works, but crabbed and unattractive as it is in many parts, it is. well worth reading, and contains many passages of great beauty and elevation. Indeed a knowledge of it is quite indis pensable to the full understanding of the Divina Corn-media, The time of its composition is uncertain. Dante mentions princes as living who died in 1309 ; he does not mention Henry VII. as emperor, who succeeded in 1310. There are some passages which seem to have been inserted at a later date. The canzoni upon which the commentary is written were clearly composed between 1292 and 1300, when he sought in philosophy consolation for the loss of Beatrice. The present text is very defective. The Convito was first printed in Florence by Buonaccorsi in 1490. Rime di Dante. Besides the smaller poems contained in the Vita Nuova and Convito there are a considerable number of canzoni, ballate, and sonnetti bearing the poet s name. Of these many undoubtedly are genuine, others as un doubtedly spurious. Some which have been preserved under the name of Dante belong to Dante de Maiano, a poet of a harsher style ; others which bear the name of Aldighiero are referable to Dante s sons Jacopo or Pietro, or to his grandsons ; others may be ascribed to Dante s contemporaries and predecessors Cino da Pistoia and others. Those which are genuine secure Dante a place among lyrical poets scarcely if at all inferior to that of Petrarch. The best edition of the Canzoniere of Dante is that by Fraticelli published by Barbara at Florence. His collection includes seventy-eight genuine poems, eight doubtful and fifty-four spurious. To these are added an Italian paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms in terza rima, and a similar paraphrase of the Credo, the seven sacraments, the ten commandments, the Lord s Prayer, and the Ave Maria. The Latin treatise De MonarcJiia, in three books, D contains the creed of Dante s Ghibellinism. In it he pro- ^ pounds the theory that the supremacy of the emperor ia derived from the supremacy of the Roman people over the world, which was given to them direct from God. As the emperor is intended to assure their earthly happiness, so does their spiritual welfare depend upon the Pope, to whom the emperor is to do honour as to the first-born of the Father. The date of its composition is almost universally admitted to be the time of the descent of Henry VII. into Italy, between 1310 and 1313, although attempts have been made to assign it to a much earlier period. The book was first printed by Oporinus at Basel in 1559. The treatise De Vidgari Eloquio, in two books, also in D, Latin, is mentioned in the Convito. Its object was first to 5^ establish the Italian language as a literary tongue, and to A distinguish between the noble speech which might become the property of the whole nation, at once a bond of internal unity and a line of demarcation against external nations ; and secondly, to lay down rules for poetical composition in the language so established. The work was probably intended to be in four books, but only two are extant. The first of these deals with the language, the second with the&amp;gt; style and with the composition of the canzone. The third was probably intended to continue this subject, and the fourth was destined to the laws of the ballata and sonnetto. This work was first published in the Italian translation of Trissino at Vicenza in 1529. The original Latin was not published till 1729 at Verona. The modern editions both of this work and of the De Monarchia by Fraticelli are very admirable. The work was probably left unfinished in consequence of Dante s death. Boccaccio mentions in his life of Dante that he wrote two EC eclogues in Latin in answer to Johannes de Virgilio, who invited him to come from Ravenna to Bologna and compose a great work in the Latin language. The most interesting passage in the work is that in the first poem, where he ex presses his hope that when he has finished the three parts of his great poem his grey hairs may be crowned with laurel on the banks of the Arno. Although the Latin of these poems is superior to that of his prose works, we may feel thankful that Dante composed the great work of his life in his own vernacular These eclogues have also been printed with notes by Fraticelli. The Letters of Dante are among the most important ke materials for his biography. Giovanni Villani mentions throe as specially remarkable one to the Government of Florence, in which he complains of undeserved exile ; another to the Emperor Henry VII., when he lingered too long at the siege of Brescia ; and a third to the Italian car dinals to urge them to the election of an Italian Pope after the death of Clement V. The first of these letters has not come down to us, the two last are extant. Besides these we have one addressed to the Cardinal da Prato, one to a