Dante and His Vision of Life

...and such warmth of charity came upon me that most cer- tainly in that moment I would have pardoned whoso- ever had done me an injury...

...But through that whole early work the young scholar is carefully obscured by the young lover...

...She was exquisite, she was unattainable, she came in vision and all untimely "hid her face amid a crowd of stars...

...The sins atoned for here are the sad perennial seven of our daily lives--familiar enough in Hell also when un- repentedmand sins every one of love defective, exces- sive or perverted...

...Doctrinally, of course, he builds upon the Scriptures and the Summa--as setting he uses the admirably alle- gorical Ptolemaic system of...

...These are but the first of the sinners against continence, the others being the Gluttonous, the Avaricious, and the Wrathful...

...while Charles of Anjou had arrived in Italy to settle these perpetual feuds as the French Pope naturally thought they ought to be set- tied...

...When she appeared in any place, it seemed to me there was no man mine enemy any longer," wrote the proud, tempestuous youth...

...It is all familiar ground: for once the Ante-Purgatory is passed--where Negligent Rulers, the Late Repentant and those who die suddenly while Excommunicate must wait before beginning their bit- ter-sweet ascent--Dante kneels before the angel of the doorway, most palpably representing Confession, and bidden to err "in opening rather than in keeping shut...

...But in Paris he must have seen Notre Dame in her mysterious youth and the newly completed radiance of the Sainte Chapelle...

...But under whatever allegory, it is distinctly terrible to be able to visualize so many soulsnsouls of his neighbors and friends as well as his enemies---in unending torment...

...Next above are the blind Envious, learning at last the joy of sharing all good...

...Very re- vealing, too, is the unfinished Convito or Banquet, in which he attempts to break the bread of knowledge to those who hunger...

...Stranger and pilgrim upon earth, a tragic comedian he must remain to the common-sensible man --but friend immortally of the woman who had been his revelation first of human love and then of divine wisdom...

...Like our own contempor- ary Paul Claudel, the mediaeval Florentine had learned to fathom and to face a universe in which "love has ended in pain, but pain has ended in love...

...Finally, Dante's own minor works complete the many-sided personality...

...The book, probably begun in Flor- ence and continued in exile, is a series of poems with long accompanying glosses on all sorts of subjects...

...But being a poet, and holding fast to what Patmore called the vital and mystical "corollaries of belief," Dante bequeathed us, not a catechism, but a work of art...

...Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man...

...and he recoils in hor- ror until the faithful Virgil reminds him, " 'Twixt Beatrice and thee is this wall...

...without the falls and risings of his own Via Crucis he could not have dramatized the Purgatorio...

...Certain, ex- cept in that innermost ninth circle where all is frozen, and the Traitors, with faces "made doggish by the cold," have slipped below the final fellowship of human motives...

...And wherever the Gothic inspiration had lifted up men's souls and hands, they were already fashioning a Europe "new washed to its irradiant birth" in the sister arts...

...In the fourth circle the Slothful are goaded on...

...Yet no one could pretend that it is or ever was easy reading...

...so did the year 129 ~ when "the Lord God of justice called that most gracious lady to Himself...

...In the Heaven of the Moon are the happy souls whose earthly stain was inconstancy--particularly to a solemn vow: but questioning whether this lower state of bless- edness brings any'lessening of joy, Dante receives the immortal answer, "E la sua voluntate e nostra pace...

...And as the earlier French invasion had spelled the prosperity of his child- hood, so this latter spelled the temporal ruin of his ma- turity: his disgusted veering away from the Guelf and toward the Ghibeline party, his lifelong enmity against Boniface and all papal activity in politics, and imme- diate exile from his native city...

...His work, with its sometimes fanatical im fulminations against any Pope who ventured to regu- late or dictate to this empire, is sheer political propa- ganda, written in good faith but in the heat of party prejudice...

...Presently the Angel of Purity prays Dante himself to plunge into the flames...

...But it is not enough that the evil of life be forgottenmits good must be recalled...

...and since his family was only dis- tantly noble and not conspicuously wealthy, this inti- macy and the subsequent one with the young Prince Carlo Martello have been cited to show that he was already proving himself a youth of "parts...

...In Mars of the Courageous, Dante confronts his ancestor Cacciaguido, who foretells his banishment and bids him never to conciliate men by tempering the truth of his vision...

...But it was only to Beatrice that death came in the June of ~29o, leaving Florence "widowed and desolate" like Jerusalem of old...

...by way of the renaissance, on to the paradoxes of our glorious, dubious modernity...

...As celestial gravitation draws them upward, Dante is instructed by Beatrice and other saints upon diificult questions of faith, yet he is warned of truths that are not wholly to be com- passed save by those whose wit is "matured within love's flame...

...And everywhere the longing for prayers--or for mesages to their beloved left on earth --wins from the souls those confessions of which, in the Inferno, ambition had been the motive...

...It was a milestone not only in Dante's life but in the history of romantic love when that "wonderful vision" came which determined him to "say nothing further of that most blessed one" until he should be able to put into words "what hath not before been written of any woman...

...Then he, too, leaps into the holy fire--and issuing from its purification, finds himself at the entrance of Eden, the Earthly Paradise lost by man's original sin...

...So the end of the Vita Nuova became the prelude of the Divine Comedy...

...In the Seventh Heaven, Beatrice does not smile nor the Blessed any longer sing lest Dante be shattered by excess of joy...

...Everywhere Dante meets old friends or makes new ones, everywhere the shadow betraying his living body raises eager inquiry...

...Everything about her took on immense and occult meaning, everything gave subject for sonnet or canzone...

...But he was writing subjectively, impres- sionistically even--and only of the things which mat- tered vitally in the development of his love life...

...Leave all hope, ye that enter here" is the grim legend of that portal...

...when, as the Convito tells us, he turned for consolation to wisdom, seeking her "in the schools of men of religion and at the discussions of philosophers" --before the political activities which date from about his own thirtieth year...

...It is by no means a subtle Mephistopheles, for Dante seems to have spent none of his creative genius on this figure of ultimate evil...

...Here, confined in a central well of ice, is Satan the arch-traitor--gigantic, three-headed, with bat-wings keeping the intolerable winds astir...

...While many of the Dante legends, like many of the Dante letters are, of course, dubious, it is quite possible from his own and contemporary words to conjure up a picture of this apocalyptic figure : the young, eager boy, alternately studying, fighting, and writing mystical love poems--the man devoted to learning and civic right- eousness, embittered by the injustice which drove him into exile--the proud, wandering scholar, a bowed fig- ure, courteous yet "melancholy and thoughtful," as Boccaccio tells us, loving to live "apart from mankind, that his meditations might not be interrupted"--until in his fifty-seventh year death found him, far from Florence, his "mother of little love...

...As soon as his voice began to be heard in the councils of the city, it was raised in- variably and fearlessly against the outside interference and outside levies which, under whatever provocation, ended always in the bloodshed so common in mediaeval communities or the graft so common in our own...

...Quiet is her look, Like the dull reds and deepened blues and such Quaint, twisted letters as preserve the thoughts of seers...

...So is the young soldier, although we know that Dante saw active military service and probably fought at the battle of Compaldino...

...But what really mat- ters is that these years of wandering and heartache bore fruit in one of the greatest masterpieces in all lit- eraturemthe Comedy which men have agreed to call Divine...

...But in Purga- tory he was to learn of a soul saved "by one little tear"rain Paradise to hear the warning, "We who see God know not as yet all the elect...

...It was characteristic that only for the Simon- ists was his indignation greater than his compassion: to the other tormented souls he brings "not contempt, but sorrow...

...Dante apotheosized it as a haven of harmony in which man might be free to seek learning and God--image of the undivided monarchy of heaven--a government divinely established in the secular order as the Church was in the spiritual...

...There was hardly a doctrine of Catholic Christianity as defined in his day which Dante did not embody in his work : God the First Cause and Final End of Creation our Redemption by Christ and its necessity--Free Will, Sin, and because of God's justice, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven--the Church, with Prayer and Sacraments--Mary's power and loveliness...

...and when she had gone by, it was said of many, 'This is not a woman, but one of the beautiful angels of heaven.' " Already she embodied all the virtues he himself needed most-- meekness, magnaminity, that "peace" which he calls elsewhere the "crown of every good...

...For the most part, Dante's allegory is obvi- ous enough, with grotesquerie as well as poetry in the punishmentsJthe Evil Counselors floating like wilful flames, the Sowers of Schism with their own bodies horribly and symbolically rent, the metamorphoses of the Thieves, suggesting Fafner's change into the dragon guarding his own gold...

...But she is frail as is some antique book Whose thin, browned pages reverently we touch, As breathing forth the fragrance of long years And ancient wisdom...

...Yet Dante never thought it worth while to mention her marriage to Simone Bardi, nor his own subsequent es- pousal of Gemma Donati...

...That is the first and the last lesson Paradise has to teach--"In His will is our peace...

...Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic were less than half a century dead when Dante was born...

...It was a curious irony that he should have been elected to the office of prior in that very year i3oo when Pope Boniface VIII, at the instance of the Black faction of Florentines, once again tried the experiment of asking a French prince to intervene as peacemaker...

...And persistent among these fallen ones Dante finds the inscrutable wish for remembrance...

...Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, and Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor, were still living: so were Roger Ba- con and Albertus Magnus, grown already old, while Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart were almost as young as our poet...

...Autobiography is touched upon, so are love and learn- ing and the Nine Angelic Choirs...

...He finds it again in the Heaven of the Moon, which harbors those souls in whom human love too ardently contended with Love Divine: yet "Here we not repent but smile," for God is the eternal Lover and Artist, too, joying in each com- pleted phase of His work...

...As a boy, Dante seems to have been rather a favorite proteg6 of the learned Brunetto Latini...

...The atmosphere of Hell is essentially abnormal, but there is a very human touch in the punishment of famil- iar mortal diseases, without the familiar hope of recov- ery, meted out to the Falsifiers in Words and Deeds and Things...

...The first glimpse of little Beatrice Portinari in her dress of "subdued and goodly crimson" mattered overwhelm-ingly...

...Without his disillusion, his hatred of injustice, he could never have conceived the Inferno...

...When, in the May of I265, he was born at Florence, Italy was in the midst of her long Guelf and Ghibeline warfare...

...But he only wondered, and went home, crushed, to write more verses about it all...

...It seems to have been in I3oz or I3o 3 that Dante turned his face from Flor- ence, never to return...

...and so the tale is told...

...But neither his own transcendentalism nor the trap- pings of romance can disguise how unsatisfactory he must have seemed to the lady herself, in his dizzy, in- articulate adoration--or, worse still, in the mad in- genuity of choosing another lady for "screen" and ad- dressing verses to her...

...He could be as concrete as he liked: and he never hesi-tated to speak as politician as well as poet or prophet...

...He had the good fortune to be born in the second half of the thirteenth century-- very arch of the bridge of mediaevalism which stretched, by way of the dark ages, back to the old order of dubious, glorious antiquity...

...The most human thing Dante ever tells us of Beatrice--more human even than the tears shed for her father's death--was her refusal to greet him when gossip of that little vicarious flirtation was particularly rife...

...then the Wrathful, groping their way through deep and bitter fog...

...Also it is a place of that love which one of the poet's most pregnant passages declares "the seed of every virtue and of every deed deserving punishment...

...Among his own Florentine contemporaries, Cimabue and Giotto were a little older--Boccaccio, Villani, and Petrarch a little younger...

...adding that because of his learning (but we could divine other reasons l) he was "some-what arrogant, fastidious, and disdainful...

...For youth is like new books that gleam with gold And colors traced on white leaves brilliantly...

...It was the blessedness of creating a poem which should so perfectly concentrate all the knowledge and inspiration of his own age that it must forever teach and inspire the ages to follow...

...All over Christendom legal forms were becoming settled, and chivalric grace was tempering the force of feudalism...

...Its inspiration had, of course, come long before : for if Dante's wisdom were indeed the "child of suffering," his beauty was the "child of love...

...Perhaps even these were necessary, that he might learn for all time how dear was the ideal he had momentarily betrayed...

...In his first initiation into the paradisal vision, the souls are sym-bolically manifested in the "many mansions" of their Father's House--the ascent from circle to circle being revealed by the increasing beauty of Beatrice's face...

...Here are Guido Guinicelli and Arnault Dan- iel, who "weeps and goes a-singing," and even for joy of Dante's converse will not stir beyond the cleansing sea of fire...

...for further initiation will come from Beatrice, his symbol of divine faith or revelation...

...The universities of Bologna and Oxford were thriving, while that of Paris, a cen- tury after Abelard, must have seemed already vener- able...

...Scaling with sure step the peaks of sublim- ity he does not forget that the purpose of the Comedy, as declared in his letter to Can Grande, is ethical rather than speculative...

...It is perhaps the crucial test of his integrity in art and life, too, that he is more intent upon the truth as he conceives it than even upon the inebriating beauty of his subject...

...One does not like to remember that of our familiar Florence Dante can have known only an unfinished Baptistery and the beginnings of Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, and the Palazzo Vecchio...

...And everywhere men and women, too, rejoiced in poetry, in romance...

...It is evident from refer...

...All the world of romance knows the story--for he has told it in that curious rhapsody, the Vita Nuova, of how love came to him in the person of the Florentine maiden, Beatrice Portinari...

...For a while Dante continued to pour his immense grief into the mold of his little verses, driving himself to illness and naturally attracting a good deal of feminine sym- pathy...

...He was content with the typical fiend of mediaeval aftra fallen, frozen figure, the direct negation of all effective life and light and warmth and love...

...And when, mus- ing one day "how frail a thing life is though health keep with it," he is rapt into sudden prophetic vision of her own leavetaking, his prayer to death is simply: "Now come unto me, and be not bitter against me any longer...

...So the Purga- torio ends as he is bathed yet again in the sister-stream Euno/~: then, with Beatrice for guide, he stands ready to climb the ladder of stars into Paradise...

...Justice is a difficult virtue to handle, and Dante as judge alone, without love linking him to "man's unpardonable race," would scarcely have survived the ages...

...and nowhere is this balance more rigorously maintained than in the Paradiso...

...And it might have been just like a thousand other romances in the chivalric conventionq except that this happened to be a great and not a little passion...

...Yet if Italy--in fact, the whole seething world of Europewknew little external peace, it knew marvelous creative energy in every field and an amazing interest in politics, philosophy, theology, and a few other sci- ences and arts...

...But from this ultimate revelation he comes stunned and silent, like every other authentic seer...

...and Scartazzini's supposition that he also taught at these and other schools seems most credible...

...Along with the Vita Nuova one remembers those early lyrics in the "dolce stil' nuova" which would have.ranked Dante high as a love poet if he had not himself superseded them...

...The first circle of absolute punishment is that of the Carnal Sinners...

...Individuality, personality even, is never lost: but definite and dazzling as the poet's imagery is, he lets us understand that reality still escapes...

...astronomy...

...Within, the first sound he hears is a surging Te Deum Laudamus, for Purgatory is a place of joy and prayer as well as of pain--such joy as the woman has in her travail...

...where men and women--for there is no "double standard" here-are tossed endlessly upon the winds of passion, and where Dante introduces the exquisite episode of his meeting with Francesca da Riminl...

...One reason for Dante's consummate success through- out this supreme work is his balance of novelty and fa- miliarity, of imagination and intellect...

...or at Ravenna, where he died shortly after completing a diplomatic mission for Guido da Polenta in I32I...

...ences throughout his works and from his later civic activities, that Dante had--like so many sons of the renaissance--considerable knowledge of design and ar- chitecture...

...Life, to the mystical temperament, has always the dual meaning which he so constantly claims for his own words--real and allegorical...

...Indeed, so profound are its disquisitions that in any language less incorrigibly musical than the Italian they could scarcely be claimed as poetry at all...

...in the fifth, the Avaricious and the Prodigal suffer--sugges- tively enough--for the same offense...

...DANTE AND HIS VISION OF LIFE By KATHERINE BRI~,GY tt "~k/~ Y FRIEND, but not the friend of fortune"-IVI that is the description of Dante which he puts upon the lips of the blessed Beatrice when, at the opening of the Divine Comedy, she sum- mons Virgil to rescue her poet from the "dark wood" of his wanderings...

...so that Pope Benedict XV, magnanimously passing over Dante's personal animosity toward earlier prelates, could de- clare his work the very "juice of Christian philosophy and theology...

...The vernacular was emerging, daring to lift its young, sweet voice in songs of trouba- dour and minnisinger, in the love poems of Italy and the prayer poems of England...

...She went along crowned and clothed with humility, showing no whit of pride in all that she heard and saw...

...But the bitter Black and White controversies were still ahead, so that anything called peace in thirteenth-century Florence was merely in the nature of a breathing space...

...Concerning its punishments he could give imagination free rein, since the Church had not--either then or since--made any definition about them...

...It matters little enough now whether the "Lady of the Window" was (as he implies in the Vita Nuova) a very human person of whom he thought temporarily "as of one too dear," or (as he liked to believe in the later Convito) a symbol of philosophy...

...Mystery cycle and mira- de play rubbed shoulders with the Arthurian legend and the nai've sophistication of Aucassin and Nicolette or the Romaunt of the Rose...

...All these are the commonplaces (only never commonplace l) of his thought...

...So, apparently, in his riches and his poverty, he liked best to think of himself: and after 600 years there seems no better way for us to think of him...

...For to the original sentence of banishment with confiscation of his goods, a decree of death was later added...

...The two things dearest to Dante on the human side wBeatrice and Florencewlife took from him before he was thirty-eight years old...

...And its glorification of the Roman empire anticipates that most curious and intellectually obsolete of all his works, De Monarchia...

...So, as we know he did at- tend both Paris and Bologna, it seems likely that his first sojourns there may have been after Beatrice's death...

...He is weaker still when her rebuke brings the shamed confession of ancient infidel- ity--until pitiful angel-hands plunge him into the waters of Lethe...

...And probably, in the spa- cious perspective of the soul and the centuries, he was quite right...

...It was a time of high lights and heavy shadows...

...More and more, as they pass the realm of the Fixed Stars, through the Primum Mobile and into the divine quiet of the Empyrean, the spectral colors are focused into one blaze of perfect light...

...He had the advantage of not having to argue any of his essentials: what he had to do was to build a cathedral where there already existed a way-side shrine l So he placed the Hell in which all his contemporary readers believed just where they believed it to be--in circles narrowing down to the centre of the earth...

...I Know a Lady I know a lady very, very old, Who is more beautiful than youth may be...

...And when he faces Beatrice at the close of the Purgatorio, he confesses candidly enough that there had been d6tours of sense and imagination, too--treacheries for which he paid in bitter self-re- proach...

...And just as his moral teaching avoids the noble but morbid reactions of untempered ascetic- ism, so his devotion avoids, or rather controls, the ex- cesses of untempered rapture...

...Yet in a poet bruised and weary from the warring of faction against faction, city against city, it is at least a comprehensible reaction...

...Constantly throughout this pageant of "terror and pity" one is struck by the innate refinement of Dante's thought...

...So may your memory not fade from human minds" is the lure certain to win an answer from them...

...and from this realm his "beloved father," Virgil, has come to be his guide through the Underworld...

...Be-low them looms the dread City of Dis, with the Her- etics lying lonely in their burning tombs, and all the circles of increasingly malicious evil: the river of blood choking the Murderers and Tyrants, the pitiful wood of the Self-Destroyers, the rain of fire upon those who had sinned in violence against God or Art (Order) or Nature...

...In the Heaven of the Pru- dent the singing, circling suns pause a moment while Thomas Aquinas rehearses the story of the Poverello --then, with reciprocal courtesy, Bonaventura comes to praise Dominic...

...When he took for subject that arresting fifth act of man's pilgrimage which is played upon the stage of eternity, Dante faced an audience whom poets and preachers had already made familiar with visions and otherworld voyages, for whom the curtain between material and spiritual things constantly fluttered back and forth...

...First comes the circle of the Proud, consoled by the Angel of Humility as they stagger under their burden of stones...

...It is easy enough for the modern mind to see in the "holy" mediaeval empire a mere survival of the antique order, bound to disintegrate before the developing na- tionalities of Christendom...

...However intensive his self-teaching, Dante could scarcely have become one of the greatest scholars of his scholarly age without study at some of the great contemporary universities...

...giving in their place "'heart's hunger and soul's thirst and blessedness be- yond the pride of kings...

...without his yearning love for the Supreme Good, and for the human image of it he had found in one woman, he could scarcely have pictured that Paradiso which is simply the sublimation of light and love...

...She is waiting for him, when the colorful pageant of Faith has passed--precisely the sort of pageant Dante must have seen at many a mediaeval festa, only sublimated to the nth degreeJand at the very thresh- old of Paradise he falls weak beneath the "mighty power of ancient love...

...This time it was Charles of Valois, whom Dante bitterly opposed --but history repeated itself...

...Young Alighieri's love for Florence was an intense and impassioned thing, like his love for justice : indeed, like all his loves and hates...

...His momentary curiosity to listen to the wrangling of fiends is rebuked by Virgil as "a vul- gar wish"~and, perhaps because he never finds them amusing, he can treat all the intricacies of evil with less than the candid coarseness of our robust and ra-diant Chaucer...

...On the other hand, there is a curious and comforting mixture of the human and divine in his Mount of Purgatory, where penitent man consorts with sympathetic angels and may still learn from the beauties of nature and of art...

...Very near it, in a merciful "sadness without torment," he places the Heathen and Unbaptized...

...Writing in the "vulgar" tongue and choosing the fa- miliar title of "Comedy," Dante seems to have set out deliberately to popularize the teaching of saint and philospher and his own great dream...

...And, who, in all the ages, has been more perfectly equipped to write the romance of the human soul in all the changes of the purgative, the unitive, and the il- luminative ways ? For Dante loved the beauty of holi- ness, and knew the price which in our bruised world must be paid for all beauty...

...But death lifted that fragile, unfulfilled romance up into immortality, and in the mysterious nearness of eternity Beatrice was to pos- sess him beyond shadow of change or misunderstand- ing...

...Saint Louis reigned in France, although his life and the Christian hope in the East were soon to be sacrificed in the desperate hope of the last Crusade...

...But while many of Dante's passionate personalities have grown uninteresting or unintelligible with the centuries, we are as near as he to the "Trimmers"-choosers neither of good nor evil upon earth--whom he assigns to a perpetuity of paltry pains just inside the gate of Hell...

...The disenchanted exile had only learning to commend him at Lucca, or at Can Grande's court in Verona...

...Obviously he could never have done this without the treasures of creative genius, profound learning, and rich if searing experience...

...I~E~s H. WILSON...

...Then for twenty years he was to learn "how salt his food who fares upon another's breadmhow steep his path who treadeth up and down another's stairs...

...Only Mary, joy of the angels, her face "most likened unto Christ's," may obtain for him the Beatific Vision of God...

...It is granted...

...Among the emaciated Gluttonous he encounters the gay com- panion of his youth, Forese Donati--but most of the young love poets are found in the highest circle of all, where the "last wound" of our sensual nature is purged in flame...

...Incentive and inspiration too, little by little the "Lady of his delight" was transmuted into a symbol of all truth, all grace, all wisdom, the very sum of God's revelation to man...

...With sight miraculously unconsumed, Dante reads: "In one volume clasped of love, whate'er the universe enfolds," while by sublime intuition he appre- hends the mysteries of the Trinity and the Divine and Human Nature...

...Even Beatrice must leave him at last, returning to the mystical, luminous rose whose petals are the thrones of the saints...

...Crowned now and mitred" over himself, he must take leave of Virgil, the wise poet chosen to represent human reason...

...He studied prodigiously, probably at Bologna and Paris again, possibly even further north...

...Manfred as hope of the waning empire and Urban IV as that of the Papacy, faced each other...

...But to contemporary imaginations this idea of a peaceful, universal domin- ion may well have loomed as some such panacea as the League of Nations seemed after our recent war...

...His faith was highly intel- ligent, even highly intellectualized...

...It happened that his coming did establish the supremacy of the Guelf party, to which Dante's father belonged, in Tuscany...

...Only he knows that peace has come at last, and henceforth his will must roll around like a mighty wheel, "By the love impelled that moves the sun in heaven and all the stars...

...At last even he saw the folly of these concealments, and in spite of the popular convention of secrecy, openly proclaimed his devotion, so that because of his songs and of her own exceeding loveliness Beatrice became the legend of Florence: "When she passed anywhere folk ran to behold her...

...surely there, where thou hast been, thou hast learned gentleness...

...How important Dante had become almost immediately after his death Villani shows by the space devoted to him in his his- tory of the city...

...Its observations upon the vernacular--a subject naturally dear to Dante, since he was the first great poet daring enough to confide a masterpiece to it~anticipate his Latin treatise, De Vulgari Eloquentia...

...But about his actual schooling in those early years we know practically nothing...

...And the author of the Vita Nuova was emphatically not ignorant of the Seven Liberal Arts...

...Dante Alighieri lived in what Wilde has aptly called "symbolic relations" with his own age: and it was, of course, one of the most stormy and most stimu- lating in human history...