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very subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of feeling or thought is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the past. The inward life unwillingly admits any break in its continuity, and nothing is more common than to hear a man, in venting an opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, "I have always thought so and so." Whatever belief occupies the whole mind soon produces the impression on us of having long had possession of it, and one mode of consciousness blends so insensibly with another that it is impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins and the other ends. Dante in his exposition of the Canzoni must have been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of influences. He would try to reconcile so far as he conscientiously could his present with his past. This he could do by means of the allegorical interpretation. "For it would be a great shame to him," he says in the Vita Nuova, "who should poetize something under the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that vesture in such wise that they should have a true meaning." Now in the literal exposition of the Canzone beginning, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete," he tells us that the grandezza of the Donna Gentil was "temporal greatness" (one certainly of the felicities. attainable by way of the vita attiva), and immediately after gives us a hint by which we may comprehend why a proud + man might covet it. "How much wisdom and how great a persistence in virtue (abito virtuoso) are hidden for want of this lustre !" When Dante reaches

Which he cites in the Paradiso, VIII. 37.

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† Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as ap pears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in Purgatorio, XIII. 136, 137.

Convito, Tr. II. c. 11.

the Terrestrial Paradise which is the highest felicity of this world, and therefore the consummation of the Active Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its symbol,

"Who went along

Singing and culling floweret after floweret."

and warming herself in the rays of Love, or 66 actual speculation," that is, "where love makes its peace felt."+ That she was the symbol of this is evident from the previous dream of Dante, ‡ in which he sees Leah, the universally accepted type of it,

"Walking in a meadow,

Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying,
"Know whosoever may my name demand

That I am Leah, who go moving round

My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,'"

that is to say, of good works. She, having "washed him thoroughly from sin," §

"All dripping brought

Into the dance of the four beautiful," ||

who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a passage before quoted

* Purgatorio, XXVIII.

↑ Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.

Purgatorio, XXVII. 94–105.

§ Psalm li. 2. "And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's] beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other vices." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 15.)

Purgatorio, XXXI. 103, 104.

from the Convito.*
confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,t

That this was Dante's meaning is

"Short while shalt thou be here a forester (silvano)
And thou shalt be with me forevermore

A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman";

for by a "forest " he always means the world of life and action. At the time when Dante was writing the Canzoni on which the Convito was a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and not the way to it,"§ but before the Convito was composed he had become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that Beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul." ||

So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the Vita Nuova, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti, have doubted her real existence. But surely we must consent to believe that she who speaks of

"The fair limbs wherein I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"

was once a creature of flesh and blood,

"A creature not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food."

When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo

Tr. IV. c. 22.

† Purgatorio, 100-102.

Such is the selva oscura (Inferno, I. 2), such the selva erronea di questa vita (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24).

§ Convito, Tr. I. c. 13.

Convito, Tr. II. c. 2.

that change into something rich and strange in the sea * of his mind which so completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think, to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the Convito Canzoni, when he had so given himself to study that to his weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur," + this star of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had never been of the senses (which is bestial ‡), so his sorrow was all the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler impulses of his nature,

("Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially,")

and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. With that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him, her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed (beat), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with him even in the flesh. Already, in the Vita Nuova, § she appears to him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate God in himself, simply, and not in his relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit. When misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed, and science was helpless to console, as it had

Mar di tutto il senno, he calls Virgil (Inferno, VIII. 7). Those familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly applicable to himself.

† Convito, Tr. III. c. 9. Convito, Tr. III. c. 3.

8 Vita Nuova, XI.

Vita Nuova, Tr. II. c. 6.

never been able wholly to satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth, reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of adolescence.*

That there should seem to be a discrepancy between the Lady of the Vita Nuova and her of the Convito, Dante himself was already aware when writing the former and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning Gentil pensier, he says, "In this sonnet I make two parts of myself according as my thoughts were divided in two. The one part I call heart, that is, the appetite, the other soul, that is, reason. It

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is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart against the eyes [which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and that appears contrary to what I say in the present one; and therefore I say that in that sonnet also I mean by my heart the appetite, because my desire to remember me of my most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold this one, albeit I had already some appetite for her, but slight as should seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the other."+ When, therefore, Dante speaks of the love of this Lady as the "adversary of Reason," he uses the word in its highest sense, not as understanding (Intellectus), but as synonymous with soul. Already,

* Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is uncertain, but the period he assigns for it (Paradiso, XXII. 112-117) extends from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we understand Buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in June rather than May.

↑ Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, "The New Life of Dante, an Essay with Translations," by C. E. Norton, pp. 92 et seq.

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