Chapter XVI: Dante and Boccaccio--The Vita--And the Comento (2)

[584] It must be observed that the _Vita_ appears in many forms, but it will be enough for us to consider the two principal, both of which claim to be by Boccaccio. The whole question is thoroughly dealt with by MACRI LEONE in his edition of the _Vita_ (Firenze, 1888), and more briefly by WITTE, _The two versions of Boccaccio's life of Dante_ in _Essays on Dante_ (London, 1898), p. 262 _et seq._, and by Dr. E. MOORE, _Dante and his early Biographers_ (London, 1890).

Of these two versions the longer we shall call the _Vita_, the shorter the _Compendio_, but the latter is by no means a mere epitome of the former, for some of the episodes are more fully treated in it, while others are ignored. We shall find ourselves in agreement with the great majority of modern critics if we regard the _Vita_ as the original and the _Compendio_ as a modification of it executed either by Boccaccio or by another, and if we assert that the _Vita_ is by Boccaccio and the _Compendio_ an unauthorised redraft of it, we shall be supported not only by so great an authority as MACRI LEONE, but by Biscioni, Pelli, Tiraboschi, Gamba, Baldelli, Foscolo, Paur, Witte (who hesitates to condemn the _Compendio_ altogether), Scartazzini, Koerting, and Dr. Moore. On the other hand, Dionisi and Mussi held that the _Compendio_ was the original and the _Vita_ a _rifacimento_; while Schaeffer-Boichorst thought both to be the work of Boccaccio, the _Vita_ being the original; and the editors of the Paduan edition of the _Divine Comedy_ (1822) thought both to be genuine, but the _Compendio_ the first draft. Dr. Witte enters into the differences between the two, printing passages in parallel columns; Macri Leone is even fuller in his comparison; Dr. Moore also compares them. Briefly we may say that the _Compendio_ is shorter, that it "hedges" when it can and softens and abbreviates the denunciation of Florence, and omits much: e.g. the _Vita's_ assertion of Dante's devotion to Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius, while inserting certain personal suggestions: e.g. that in his later years Dante having quite recovered from his love for Beatrice ran after other women especially in his exile in Lucca, where he became enamoured of a young girl called Pargoletta, and in the Casentino of another who "had a pretty face but was afflicted with a goitre." As for Pargoletta, it is not a proper name at all, as Boccaccio knew, for in the same chapter of the _Vita_ he writes: "in sua pargoletta età." He was incapable of falling into this error, which apparently arose from a confusion of _Purgatorio_, XXIV, 34-6, and XXXI, 59. In the _Compendio_ the attacks on marriage are not less bitter, only whereas in the _Vita_ they are only against marriage in general, in the _Compendio_ we get an amusing description of the hindrances to Dante's studies caused by his wife's complaints of his solitary habits and her absurd interruptions of his meditations by asking him to pay nurse's wages and see to children's clothes. The _Compendio_ too in all matters concerning Dante's contemporaries is more vague. Thus the _Vita_ (possibly wrongly) tells us that in Verona Dante took refuge with Alberto della Scala; the _Compendio_, more cautious, says with the "Signore della terra." It also omits the stories concerning Dante at Siena and Paris, and entirely remodels the digressions in chapters ix. and x. of the _Vita_ on Poetry. It omits the extremely characteristic excuse for lechery of the _Vita_ and omits all dates: e.g. that Dante began the _Vita Nuova_ in his twenty-sixth year, as well as the assertion that he was in his later years ashamed of it. There are many other differences also. But it might seem impossible in the face of the evidence brought forward by Macri Leone and others to doubt that the _Vita_ is Boccaccio's work and not the _Compendio_. We shall therefore here leave the latter and devote ourselves to the former, only remarking that if Boccaccio wrote the _Vita_ it is improbable that he wrote another work on the same subject, since, if he did so, it must have been written in the last two years of his life, for only one work is referred to by him in the _Comento_, viz. the _Trattatello in lode di Dante_. We consider then the _Compendio_ as a _rifacimento_ not from Boccaccio's hand. The evidence is thoroughly sifted by MACRI LEONE, _op. cit._, whom the reader should consult for a complete treatment of the matter.

[585] _The Early Lives of Dante_, tr. by P. H. Wicksteed, M.A. (King's Classics, Chatto and Windus, 1907). This little book, besides preface and introduction, contains Boccaccio's _Vita_ in English, as well as Leonardo Bruni's and three appendices.

[586] Cf. Mr. Wicksteed's translation, p. 41.

[587] As Mr. Wicksteed's translation is the version of the _Vita_ most likely to come into the hands of English readers, I propose here to traverse his "warnings" and "cautions." Whatever scholars may "appear to be settling down to," this at least is certain, that of writers upon Dante, Boccaccio is the only one who in professing to write a life can have had absolutely first-hand evidence. The points that Mr. Wicksteed wishes to warn us against are three. Boccaccio asserts that Dante was licentious, that he was a bitter political partisan, and that when he had once left Gemma he never returned to her or allowed her to follow him. In order that we may be quite sure what Boccaccio says, as well as what Mr. Wicksteed thinks he says, I quote Mr. Wicksteed's translation (p. 79): "... there was no fiercer Ghibelline than he, nor more opposed to the Guelfs. And that for which I most blush, in the interest of his memory, is that in Romagna it is matter of greatest notoriety that any feeble woman or little child who had but spoken, in party talk, in condemnation of the Ghibelline faction would have stirred him to such madness as to move him to hurl stones at such, had they not held their peace; and in such bitterness he lived even until his death. And assuredly I blush _to be forced_ to taint the fame of such a man with any defect; but the order of things on which I have begun in some sort demands it; _because that if I hold my peace concerning those things in him which are less worthy of praise_, I shall withdraw much faith from the praiseworthy things already recounted. So do I plead my excuse to him himself, who perchance, even as I write, looketh down with scornful eye from some lofty region of heaven. Amid all the virtue, amid all the knowledge that hath been shown above to have belonged to this wondrous poet, lechery found most ample place not only in the years of his youth, but also of his maturity; the which vice, though it be natural and common and scarce to be avoided, yet in truth is so far from being commendable that it cannot even be suitably excused. But who amongst mortals shall be a righteous judge to condemn it? Not I. Oh, the impurity, oh, the brutish appetite of men." The passage as to Gemma will be found at the end of the interpolation against marriage (p. 27), at the end of which he says: "Assuredly I do not affirm that these things chanced to Dante; for I do not know it; _though true it is_ that (whether such like things or others were the cause) when once he had parted from her [Gemma] who had been given him as a consolation in his sufferings! never would he go where she was, nor suffer her to come to where he was, albeit he was the father of several children by her." Let us take these things in order.

Boccaccio asserts, much to Mr. Wicksteed's distress, it seems, that Dante was a bitter and intolerant politician. He will have none of it. Well, let Dante speak for himself. When he hails as the "Lamb of God" a German king whom the Guelfs defeated and most probably poisoned; when he speaks of Florence, the Guelf city, as "the rank fox that lurketh in hiding, the beast that drinketh from the Arno, polluting its waters with its jaws, the viper that stings its mother's heart, the black sheep that corrupts the whole flock, the Myrrha guilty of incest with her father," according to Mr. Wicksteed, we ought not to consider him a bitter politician at all; indeed only an "ill-informed" and "superficial" person like Boccaccio would call him so. To ordinary men, however, such semi-scholastic, semi-Biblico-classical language sounds like politics, and fierce party politics too, and one cannot conceive what other explanation Mr. Wicksteed would offer us of it. Mr. Wicksteed tells us that when Boccaccio declares that it was well known in Romagna that he would have flung stones at any who "in party talk had but spoken in condemnation of the Ghibelline cause" he was speaking figuratively. Perhaps so; but I doubt if Mr. Wicksteed, had he had the happiness to be a Guelf, would have cared to put Dante to the proof. And we may well ask what would have deterred the man, who in hell thought it virtuous to cheat Frate Alberigo and leave him blinded by his frozen tears, from hurling a few stones on behalf of his cause?

Nor is Mr. Wicksteed any more ready to believe that Dante was a lover of women. When Boccaccio tells us that Dante fell into the sin of lechery not only in his youth but in his maturity, it is on the face of it certain that he is compelled to say so, that he has irrefutable evidence for it, since he excuses himself for the necessity of his assertion. Nor is there a tittle of evidence to refute Boccaccio. Mr. Wicksteed, like a good Protestant, prefers his own private judgment. He prefers to think of Dante as in all respects what he would have him. "On the whole," he says, "I think the student may safely form his own judgment from the material in his hands [viz. Dante's own works, I think] _without attaching any authoritative significance whatever to Boccaccio's assertion. It is safe to go even a step further and to say that the dominating impression which that assertion leaves is definitely false_...!" It is clear that Mr. Wicksteed is not going to allow Boccaccio to involve Dante in any of his _Decameron_ stories!

Mr. Wicksteed is equally indignant that Boccaccio should have asserted that Dante when he parted from Gemma never returned to her nor suffered her to come to him. It seems, then, that Dante too must become a respectable and sedate person in the modern middle-class manner. He was not a bitter party politician; he was not a lover of women; far from it: he lived as peaceably and continuously as circumstances allowed him with his wife, whom he cherished with all the tenderness we might expect of a nature so docile, so well controlled, and so considerate of the sin and weakness of others. "What was Boccaccio's source of information as to Dante and Gemma never having met after the former's exile," Mr. Wicksteed angrily declares, "it is impossible to say." But that does not invalidate the statement. What is Mr. Wicksteed's source of doubt? Is there any evidence that they did meet? And if they did not, why curse Boccaccio? Boccaccio tells us they never did meet. Yet having no evidence at all to offer us in the matter Mr. Wicksteed has the extraordinary temerity to close his tirade, one cannot call it an argument, by this weird confession: "It would be straining the evidence [? what evidence] to say that we can establish a positive case on the other side." I agree with him; it would, it would. But enough! Such is the virtue of certain prepossessions that, though the sun be as full of spots as a housewife's pudding is full of raisins, if it please us not we will deny it.

[588] Elsewhere in the _Vita_ he tells us the month (September), but nowhere the day (21st). He makes a slip in saying Urban IV was then Pope. Clement IV had been elected in February.

[589] But it is also Boccaccio who seems to suggest that Dante may have come to England, to Oxford. This visit Tiraboschi supposed to stand merely on the assertion of Giovanni di Serravalle (1416-17), who says Dante had studied "Paduæ, Bononiæ, demum Oxoniis et Parisiis"; but in the _Carme_, which accompanied the copy of the _Divine Comedy_ Boccaccio sent to Petrarch (CORAZZINI, _op. cit._, p. 53), he shows us Dante led by Apollo:--

"per celsa nivosi
Cyrreos, mediosque sinus tacitosque recessus
Naturæ, cœlique vias, terræque, marisque
Aonios fontes, Parnasi culmen et antra
Julia, Parisios dudum, extremosque Britannos."

Cf. MAZZINGHI, _A Brief Notice of Recent Researches respecting Dante_ (1844), quoted by PAGET TOYNBEE, _Dante in English Literature_ (Methuen, 1909), Vol. II, p. 696 _et seq._

[590] See _supra_, p. 185 _et seq._ As we have seen, this tirade is not altogether original, but is founded on a passage of Theophrastus, translated by Jerome, and copied out by Boccaccio. Cf. MACRI LEONE, _Vita di Dante_ (Firenze, 1888).

[591] Mr. Wicksteed's translation, p. 53.

[592] On what Boccaccio has to say on Dante's pride see pp. 58 and 77 of Mr. Wicksteed's translation.

[593] He treats of the _Divine Comedy_ more fully than of the rest. "The question is moved at large by many men, and amongst them sapient ones," he writes, "why Dante, a man perfectly versed in knowledge, chose to write in the Florentine idiom so grand a work, of such exalted matter and so notable as this comedy; and why not rather in Latin verses, as other poets before him had done. In reply to which question, two chief reasons, amongst many others, come to my mind. The first of which is that he might be of more general use to his fellow-citizens and the other Italians; for he knew that if he had written metrically in Latin, as the other poets of past times had done, he would only have done service to men of letters, whereas writing in the vernacular he did a deed ne'er done before, and (without any let to men of letters whereby they should not understand him) showing the beauty of our idiom and his own excelling art therein, gave delight and understanding of himself to the unlearned, who had hitherto been abandoned of every one. The second reason which moved him thereto was this: seeing that liberal studies were utterly abandoned, and especially by the princes and other great men, to whom poetic toils were wont to be dedicated (wherefore the divine works of Virgil and the other poets had not only sunk into neglect, but well nigh into contempt at the hands of many), having himself begun, according as the loftiness of the matter demanded, after this guise--

"Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo,
Spiritibus que lata patent que premia solvunt
Pro meritis cuicumque suis ..."

he abandoned it; for he conceived it was a vain thing to put crusts of bread into the mouths of such as were still sucking milk; wherefore he began his work again in style suited to modern tastes, and followed it up in the vernacular." He adds that Dante, "as some maintain," dedicated the _Inferno_ to Uguccione della Faggiuola, the _Purgatorio_ to Marquis Moruello Malespina, and the _Paradiso_ to Frederic third King of Sicily; but as others assert, the whole poem was dedicated to Messer Cane della Scala. He does not resolve the question.

[594] Cf. Dr. Moore, _op. cit._

[595] Cf. Paget Toynbee, _Life of Dante_ (Methuen, 1904), pp. 130 and 147.

[596] Cf. _Comento_, _ed. cit._, _Lez. 2_, Vol. I, p. 104.

[597] Cf. _Comento_, _ed. cit._, _Lez._ 33, Vol. II, p. 129.

[598] He tells us this in the _Comento_ as well as in the _Vita_, where he gives certain facts as "as others to whom his desire was known declare" (WICKSTEED, _op. cit._, p. 18).

[599] Cf. _supra_, p. 257, n. 1.

[600] Cf. MACRI LEONE, _op. cit._, cap. ix., who describes twenty-two in Italy.

[601] The _Compendio_ has been printed four times--first in 1809 in Milan, before the _Divine of Comedy_ as published by Luigi Mussi.

[602] Printed by Lord Vernon at Florence in 1846 under title _Chiose sopra Dante_.

[603] Cf. their _Vocabolario_, eds. 1612, 1623, 1691. Mazzuccheli also in the eighteenth century accepted it. Yet Betussi knew it was incomplete in 1547. Cf. his translation of _De Genealogiis_.

[604] Mr. Paget Toynbee, whose learned article on the _Comento_ in _Modern Language Review_, Vol. II, No 2, January, 1907, I have already referred to, and return to with profit and pleasure, says: "It is not unreasonable to suppose that though too ill to lecture publicly, Boccaccio may have occupied himself at Certaldo in continuing the Commentary in the hope of eventually resuming his course at Florence."

[605] Cf. MANNI, _Istoria del Decamerone_, pp. 104-6, who prints all the documents of the lawsuit.

[606] Cf. Appendix V, where I print the Will.

[607] He valued the MS. at 18 gold florins.

[608] The best edition is Milanesi's (Florence, Le Monnier, 1863). He divided it first into sixty _lezioni_ which do not necessarily accord with Boccaccio's lectures.

[609] Cf. PAGET TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 112. It is significant too, as Dr. Toynbee does not fail to note, that Boccaccio often uses _scrivere_ instead of _parlare_ in speaking of his lectures. Cf. _Lez._ 2 and _Lez._ 20; MILANESI, Vol. I, 120 and 148, also _Lez._ 52, Vol. II, 366.

[610] Cf. _De Genealogiis_, XIV, 7 and 10, and _supra_, p. 247.

[611] For instance, he explains that an oar is "a long thick piece of wood with which the boatman propels his boat and guides and directs it from one place to another" (_Comento_, I, 286). Cf. TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 116.

[612] Through the medium of Chalcidius, whom he does not name. In this form the medieval world knew the _Timæus_. Cf. TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 113.

[613] _Æneid_, II, 689-91.

[614] Cf. _Comento_, I, 82-5, and _Epist._, X, par. 8, 9, 15, 10, and see TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 113 and n. 7.

[615] Nor was all this original matter. "To the discussion of these points," says Dr. Toynbee, "he devotes what amounts to some ten printed pages in Milanesi's edition of the _Commentary_ (_Comento_, I, p. 92 _et seq._), at least half of the matter being translated word for word from a previous work of his own, the _De Genealogiis Deorum_...."

[616] Cf. _supra_, p. 262.

[617] _Comento_, II, 454.

[618] _Ibid._, II, 139.

[619] _Ibid._, I, 304 _et seq._

[620] _Ibid._, I, 347-50.

[621] _Rime_, _ed. cit._, sonnets vii. and viii.

[622] In Rossetti's beautiful translation.

[623] Cf. _Comento_, I, 143-4, 214, 359, 361, 362, 367, 437, 448-51, 451-6, 457-62, 463-6, 498, and II, 190, 435.

[624] Cf. _Comento_, I, 177, 180, 362, 435, and II, 18, 36, 65.

[625] Cf. _Comento_, I, 479, and II, 51, 149, 184, 220, 368, 385, 448-9; and see PAGET TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 117 and notes.

[626] From this book Boccaccio translated more than three times as much as from any other. Cf. _Comento_, I, 92-5, 99-101, 123-6, 128-35, etc. etc.

[627] Dr. Toynbee has long promised to publish a paper on this matter. It will be very welcome.

[628] Cf. _Comento_, I, 347, 462, 467, 511.

[629] Cf. _Comento_, I, 97, 466.

[630] See _supra_, p. 205 _et seq._

[631] At caps. 56-7 and 69-70.

[632] Cf. _Comento_, I, 333-4.

[633] Cf. _Comento_, I, 397-402. See PAGET TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, pp. 118-19. He notes that Boccaccio "nowhere employs the title _Annals_ ... but uses the term _storie_ ... even when he is quoting from the _Annals_" as in _Comento_, I, 400. He seems to have made no use of the _Histories_ in his _Comento_.

[634] As to this see PAGET TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, p. 105.

[635] Eight times in all. Besides these quotations he uses him freely.

[636] Cf. PAGET TOYNBEE, _op. cit._, 110. All trace of Boccaccio's own MS. about which there was the lawsuit has vanished.

[637] Cf. MILANESI, _Comento_, Vol. I, p. v.

[638] At Naples (imprint Florence), two vols., 1724, in _Opere Volgari in Prosa del Boccaccio_, published by Lorenzo Ciccarelli (Cellurio Zacclori).

[639] In _Opere Volgari_ (1827-34, Florence, Magheri), Vols. X, XI, XII.

[640] _Rime_, _ed. cit._, cviii. (Rossetti's translation).