whitebeard

Sunday, February 05, 2006

The Casentino and its story

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Follows the entire Chapter VIII

CHAPTER VIII DANTE IN THE VALLEY ( Pgg. 189 – 224 )
" Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the fairest and most famous daughter of Rome, Fiorenza, to cast me out from her most sweet bosom . . . through almost all the parts whereto this tongue extends, a pilgrim, almost begging, have I gone, showing, against my wi1l, the wound of fortune, which is wont often to be unjustly imputed to the wounded one. Verily I have been a bark without sail and without helm carried to divers ports and straits and shores by the harsh wind which grievous poverty breathes, and have appeared mean in the eyes of many, who peradventure because of a certain fame had imagined me in diiferent guise." Convivio, I, 3.
A PORTION, possibIy considerable, of that most tragic exile was passed in the Casentino. But long before, in the yet happy days of his youth, Dante, cc in different guise," had known the Valley, when as one of a brilliant band of FIorentine gentlemen and in the company among others of Bernardino da Polenta, brother of the ill-fated Francesca, and other noble friends of the RepubIic, he had ridden over the mountains and taken his pIace among the feditori in the front rank of the Guelf army at Campaldino. His biographer, Leonardo Bruni, speaks of certain letters, no longer to be found, in which the poet described the battle, and in another piece mentioned again "the. battle of Campaldino in which the Ghibelline party was almost wholly destroyed and undone; at which I myself was present, no longer an apprentice in arms, and had great anxiety and in the end very great gladness by reason of the varying haps of that battle."
His early experiences. of warfare colour many passages of the Divine Comedy, and it is generally supposed that this campaign in the Casentino was in his mind when he wrote of the swift riders spurring out across the Aretine country, " Corridor vidi per la terra vostra, o Aretini," and of the bustle and joyous sports and devastating forays of a victorious army (Inferno, C. XXII, vv. 1-6). Villani's account of the movements of the Florentines after the battle, the sounding of the retreat to those in pursuit of the enemy, the assault on Bibbiena, the wasting of the country, the palio run beneath the walls of Arezzo on the day of San Giovanni, read almost like a paraphrase of the passage in the poem.
In the touching episode of Buonconte da Montefeltro the poet has given us another and very different picture of Campaldino. That wonderful narrative is so instinct with personal feeling and experience that it may well remove any doubt of Dante's presence at the battle. The impression. of that tremendous day must have remained deeply printed upon his mind . through alI the years that elapsed before the writing of the passage, in which we feel still vivid the chivalrous admiration of the young warrior for a noble foe, mingled with the wonder roused by that mysterious death and the awe of an actual storm sweeping with the fury of devils over the dead calm of the field where the angels had already gleaned.
The interest and compassion of the young poet, expressed long after in the pathos of those exquisite verses, were the tribute of one noble soul to the sorrow of another. Dante himself, one of the elated victors, sharing in the triumph of that city in whose most sweet bosom he had been born and nurtured, the companion of her rarest minds and already famous among them, had at that time no outward need of compassion, no tears for himself, except for the inward woe of a poet souI. It is the memory of his later days that is poignant in the Casentino, when in the long-drawn-out sorrow of his exile he had time to gain that know ledge of the Valley and its places and inhabitants which appears in his writings. As has been often pointed out, no family is so often mentioned in his pages as the Guidi of the Casentino. They must have entered considerably into his life, and we may assume as a certainty that he stayed in one or more of their castles in the Valley, though there is no precise record of the fact. Boccaccio in his life of Dante names Conte Selvatico in Casentino as one of the hosts with whom he passed certain years of his exile, and says that he was held in much honour, as far as consorted with the times and with the power of hi& host. Count Guido Salvation of Dovadola is no doubt the person alluded to, but since this Baron and his son Ruggero were both fierce partisans of the " Black " faction which had banished the poet, the statement does not seem very probable.
Tradition, still less trustworthy, is rich in particulars of Dante's sojourn in the various castles. But his own canzone, Amor, dacché convien pur ch' io mi doglia, written most certainly in the Valley, is a surer testimony of his presence there, and there are also the two famous political letters, subscribed " on the borders of Tuscany, beneath the' source of Arno" -sub fonte Sarni-“ ( in the first year of the auspicious progress of Henry the Cesar to ltaly," that is in 1311. But long before this he had undoubtedly sought refuge in the Casentino. It was in 1302 that Dante Alighieri was first exiled. The circumstances of his great calamity have been often told. The poet, who took an active part in public life in Florence , had been elected one of the Priors during the previous autumn. The city was at the time in a crisis of the feud between the Bianchi and the Neri, the two factions into which the Guelf party had split, after the complete overthrow of their common enemy, the Ghibellines, at Campaldino. Dante, who used afterwards to attribute all his misfortunes to his tenure of office, did his utmost to restore peace to the distracted state, and though himself one of the Bianchi, joined with his fel1ow Priors in sending the chiefs of both factions in to exile, not sparing .his primo amico Guido Cavalcanti, whose health was so frail that it was to him a sentence of death.
But Dante made for himself a relentless enemy in Rome , " Là dove Cristo tutto dì si merca," Where Christ all of day is sold,

by resisting the attempts of Boniface VIII to manage FIorentine affairs, and his impartiality availed him nothing when Corso Donati and the other Neri, having strengthened themselves by a vile compact with the Pope and Charles of Valois, reentered the city in arms, and favoured by the French prince, who had come to Florence under pretext of restoring peace, massacred a number of their unresisting rivals and drove out the rest. In the proscription of the Bianchi which followed Dante was charged with barratry, that is, fraudulent and corrupt dealings in office, and was condemned unheard to confiscation and exile. A still harsher sentence, a few months later, doomed him to death by fire if he carne within the power of the Commune. The poet, aware of the ruthless temper of his foes, was out of their clutches, having fl.ed before the promulgation of the first sentence. Whither we cannot tell. The exiled Bianchi gathered together in Arezzo , Siena , Bologna and other cities hostile to Florence . They made common cause with the Ghibelline barons in Tuscany , including the Conti Guidi of Porciano and of Romena, and probably many of them harboured in the castles of their allies. Porciano, Romena and other mountain.homes of the Guidi would have been open to them. We have a fleeting glimpse of Dante before long afforded by a stilI existing document in which his name appears with those of the chiefs of the party as a signatory to a contract of alliance made with the Ubaldini on the 8th of June 1302 in the choir of the church at San Godenzo, a castle of the Guidi.(1) This shows that Dante had thrown in his lot with the other Bianchi, and was taking an active part in their plans for wresting the city from their enemies.
(Nota 1) - I San Godenzo, which is c1osely connected historical1y with the Casentino, and is peculiarly interesting from its association with Dante, lies on the north-east of Monte Falterona, in a side valley opening into the Mugello, upon a tributary of the Sieve. You look down upon it from the top of the mountain. It is accessible from Stia, in fine weather, over the hills on foot or on horseback, an expedition of about six hours for good walkers. lt is very probabIe that Dante passed this way, perhaps more than once, between Porciano and the castle of the Conti Guidi at San Godenzo. The little town stands picturesquely upon the slope of a hill, between twO streams. No traces exist now of walls or of the castle, in which Count Tegrimo of Porciano received the Emperor Henry VII. The church, however, which is perhaps the only pIace. of which it may be said with certainty that here the exiled Dante stood on such a day of such a year - when he signed the document mentioned in the text-still remains, partly modernised, but showing its original Romanesque proportions and massive square pilasters. The choir is raised high above a fine crypt, which is quite unspoilt.
It is exceedingly likely that he was in the Casentino during these early days of exile. Alessandro and Aghinolfo of Romena were zealous supporters of the excluded party, and Leonardo Bruni says that the first was made Captain of the Council of twelve which managed the affairs of the Bianchi, and of which, . according to the same authority, Dante was a member.. A letter addressed by Alessandro Capitaneus, as the A. CA. of the manuscript is understood to signify, and by the Council and Body of the Bianchi to Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, Pope Benedict XI's messenger of peace to Florence , thanking him for his good intentions towards their country and promising to lay down their swords and leave the differences between. them and their adversaries to his judgment, has been supposed to have been drawn up by Dante. The evidence of this does not, however, amount at all to certainty. Nor is there the slightest necessity to believe that he wrote the much-discussed letter of condolence, sometimes attributed to him, addressed to Oberto and Guido da Romena, on the death of their un de, Alessandro, and was thus guilty of the gross contradiction which appears between the laudatory terms of the epistle and his condemnation of the Count and his brothers as falsifiers in the lnferno. There is nothing whatever in the letter to connect it with Dante. But he was certainly in intimate relations at one time with the Guidi of Romena, and there can be little doubt that he found refuge for a while within the castle, of which the three desolate survivors of the fourteen towers are alI that is left on the pointed hilltop to-day. He probably served his hosts well with brain and pen. We do not know the circumstances which caused him later to expose them to infamy in his poem, but may rest assured that he was fully justified.
Meanwhile the Bianchi were meeting with misfortune. Many were taken and slain in various conflicts with the Neri, and in 1303 they were disastrously defeated at Pulicciano. The following year their daring surprise attack upon Florence from Lastra ended in utter discomfiture and in the final defeat of their hopes of regaining their lost homes and possessions. But we learn from that sad passage of his biography which the poet puts into the prophetic mouth of his ancestor, Cacciaguida (Paradìso, C. XVII, v. 66), that he had no part in this last shame.
" Ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia."
He had most probably already severed himself from that compagnia malvagia e scempia, that "wicked and foolish company" with which he had fallen into the vale of misfortune, and who were more grievous to him than the salt bread and hard paths of banishment, for they were become all ungratefuI, mad and pitiless towards him.
" Che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia
si farà contro a te…"
The circumstances of his rupture with his companions and the exact cause of their malice towards him are not known, but it is easy to divine the nature of the difference. We can imagine that great scornful spirit, occupied with lofty ideas; conscious of large and far-off issues, impatient of mean and deceitful ways, how alone it dwelt amid this crowd of selfish passions and ambitions, - of petty schemes of revenge, of weak, conflicting and short-sighted counsels. His tongue, which lacked the genial charm that wins men, but was a quick and fiery instrument of retort and of imprecation, would not have been restrained by any fear or respect of persons from urging unpopular views or mercilessly chastising the vices and weaknesses which spoiled the enterprises of the party. How much ineptitude there was among them is shown by the story of their failures, and Dante was not one to suffer fools gladly. Moreover, within him was the great soul's consciousness of its own merit, and his spirit, endowed with more than its share of thirteenth century rashness and fire, was vexed by the diminished respect of those childish persons who, as he tells us, were the greater part of men, and who, judging only by appearances, despised him because his poverty deprived him of that external dignity which they had expected of his fame. lt was not natural that a mind at once so passionate and so ideal should work harmoniously in practical affairs with ordinary self-seeking men.
Cacciaguida’s words give some colour to the conjecture that Dante had to fly from the vengeance of his comrades. Where he betook himself we do not know, but he appears, from his own testimony in the Convivio, to have wandered all over ltaly in a state of extreme poverty, sometimes perhaps lacking even bread, and compelled - oh, proud soul ! - to beg. We cannot tell in what remote mountain places he was fain sometimes to shelter, or of what poor and gentle peasant folk to ask for sustenance. lt would have been given with ready Loving-kindness and with no thought of scorn, but as one brother gives to another. Such charity was rarer at the courts in which he sought hospitality, but in some of these he was received according to his merit, notably by the great Lombard Bartolomeo della Scala, whose courtesy was his first refuge and first hostelry. Verona, Bologna and Padua were all included in his travels in the first years after parting from the Bianchi, and in 1306 the noble house of Malaspina gave him a generous welcome in the Lunigiana, which he rewarded afterwards by a splendid tribute in the Purgatorio (C. VIII, vv. 121-132). Nothing is known of his movements during the following years up to 1311, but there is much reason to suppose that he was in the Casentino at least part of the time. The Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia were apparently written in this period, possibly in the Valley. The feeling expressed in them towards Florence shows the writer to have lost something of his first indignation against the unjust city and to have found a certain degree of tranquillity and consolation in philosophical study. But he had not forgotten his grief, as the references in these books to his exile show; in none of his writings is there any word more poignantly sad than that little sentence used as an example of style in the De Vulgari Eloquentia: I grieve for all the sorrowful, but greatest pity have I for those, who languishing in exile, visit their country only in their dreams.
About this time he appears to have addressed an appeal to his fellow citizens for reconciliation and readmission to his home. This epistle, which is now lost, began: Oh, my people, what have I don e unto thee. But it did not touch the hearts of the party in power, who were the more enraged with him for having become as they considered a Ghibelline, and there seemed no hope that his sentence would ever be annulled.
So the years went on, and gradual1y the poet’s condition seems to have improved as his genius made itse1f more widely recognised.’ In 1310 his voice, long silent on political questions, is uplifted again for the public weal with a new power and grandeur. The lately elected Emperor Henry VII. was about to descend the Alps to pacify the differences of his Italian lieges and the dying courage of the Florentine exiles was quickened into fresh life. What this event signified for Dante must be learnt from his treatise, De Monarchia, in which he sets forth his ideal conception of the temporal monarchy and its mission of guiding the world to universal peace, and shows how by divine appointment it is vested in the Holy Roman Empire and in the prince who for the time being occupies the seat of Cesar. To his ardent imagination which conceived of mighty ends, belt was too great and too impatient to trace the long and sinuous ways by which men creep towards them, Henry of Luxemburg was in virtue of his divine authority to heal all the wounds and divisions of unhappy Italy, and by restraining the usurpations of the Papacy, to re-establish the balance ordained between the temporal and spiritual powers on earth by God, from Whom both proceed. In a letter to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, full of the joy of this great expectation, he hails the moment of the Emperor’s coming as the acceptable time in which appear the signs of consolation and peace, the dawn of a new day dispelling already the shades of their long calamity, the sun of peace arising, which, with the light of its rays, shall satisfy all those who live in hunger and in thirst. In exalted terms he predicts the clemency of the new Augustus for those that seek pardon, and his judgment upon the presumptuous and the evildoers, and exhorts his hearers to receive with humility and reverence, as their lord, him whose garden and lake the whole world is, and to submit themselves to his rule.
This letter gives no intimation of the place where it was written, but it may very possibly have been the Casentino. Early in the following year Dante was certainly in the V alley, the two famous epistles, indited sub fonte Sarni, being dated respectively in March and April 1311. How tragically changed is the tenor of his words now. The high and joyful hope of the year before, which .1eft”no room in his mind for doubt of its fulfilment, has turned into deepest indignation, the exhortation into fulminating denunciation. The hero was indeed come and had received the iron crown at Milan ; Dante had himself knelt before him at Pisa and saluted him in heart in terms of the most sacred imagery. behold the Lamb of God. Behold who hath taken away the sins of the world. Henry had shown a noble conception of the great nature of his mission. But , instead of welcoming her saviour, had armed herself to make his labour in vain. Above all, Florence had filled up the cup of her iniquities by leading the resistance against him at the head of a hostile federation of Guelf cities, seeing in him through the practical eyes of her merchants and shopkeepers no minister of God but a foreign tyrant, menacing their liberty to buy and sell, eat, drink and play as they would. It is to his fellow citizens that the poet now addresses himself; Dante Alighieri a FIorentine, and an exile contrary to his merits, to the most wicked Florentines within. The exalted enthusiasm of his noble political creed, the thwarted energy of a mighty will, the growing apprehension of possible failure and disappointment combine to give scathing force to this rebuke of the heedless 201 city. He prophesies awful and immediate ruin upon that most arrogant race which inhabits it, unless they repent without de1ay and submit themselves meekly to the representative of the Roman Empire , by which the compassionate providence of God has disposed that all human things should be governed. He laughs to scorn their preparations for defence. “What shall it avail to have girt you with a vallum and to have fortified you with outworks and batt1ements, when, terrible in gold, that eagle shall swoop down on you who, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now aver Caucasus, now over Atlas, ever strengthened by the breathing of the soldiery of heaven, looked down of old upon vast oceans in his flight?” They are to cherish no vain hope of pardon, far mercy, which ever accompanied his army, shall flee away in wrath, and where they think to uphold the roof of false liberty, there shall they fall instead into the dungeons of slavery. He foretells their anguish as they gaze upon their defences ruined and consumed by fire, “ upon the grievous sight of your temples thronged with the daily concourse of the matrons, given up to the spoiler; and of your wondering and unknowing little ones, destined to expiate the sins of their sires.” He brands them as vainest of alI the Tuscans, insensate alike by nature and ill custom, and deplores the blindness and lust which hold them back from the observance of the sacred laws, since they alone are free who of their own will obey the law.
Finally apostrophising his hearers as the most wretched offspring of the Fiesolani, the new Carthaginian ‘barbarians, .he points out, in order, as he says, that the streams of fear and grief may mingle in the bitterness of repentance, that this divine and triumphant Henry had undertaken his arduous task for the public weal and for no end of his own, freely sharing in the sufferings of the italian people. He boldly applies to him the words of Isaiah: truly he hath borne our weakness and hath carried our woes, and concludes with a solemn warning that the hour is at hand when repentance will be too late.
But his people would not hear him even now, deaf to the deep love and yearning over them which the harsh words concealed. The avenging Eagle was arrested in his progress by the long resistance of heroic Brescia, and Dante, impatient for the long-delayed consummation, sitting in fevered idleness on some hill-top of the Casentino, and waxing ever hotter with indignation as the obstinacy of his fellow countrymen continued to baffle his hopes, uttered himself in a second epistle, which he addressed this time to Henry himself. If before he scourged the recalcitrant Florentines with whips, now he used scorpions. The flood of his wrath sweeps down with the cataclysmic fury of the Apennine storms amid which he was dwelling, as with examples drawn from biblical and classic lore he reproves the Emperor for lingering in Lombardy in the vain attempt to destroy the poisonous hydra of the northern cities, and hounds him on to the attack of the real offender, the stinking fox that pollutes the streams of Arno, the dire plague named Florence, the vi per which turns against the bosom of the mother, the sick sheep which contaminates the flock by her contagion, the abominable and impious Myrrha, the raving Amata who, despising the lawful king and adoring the idol of her: wilfulness, ends by hanging herself in the noose. Let the Emperor take to himself courage from the eyes of the Lord God of Sabaoth, before whom he stands, and let him prostrate this Goliath with the sling of his wisdom and the stone of his strength, that the Philistines may flee and may be delivered. “And even as we now groan, remembering the holy J Jerusalem, exiles in Babylon, so then, citizens, breathing again in peace, we shall look back in our joy upon the miseries of our perplexity. “
But for Florence the Lord was not in the great and strong wind, in the earthquake, or the fire. Maybe the still small voice spake to her, but it was not Dante’s. She had to work out her own salvation, and though the end might be that which he looked for, the long way through the centuries to come was hidden from him and she had no need at that time for her noblest son. She answered his denunciations by condemning him anew and making his banishment perpetual.
And now he had to watch the slow destruction of his hopes; the prince, who was to restore calm to the troubled waters, stirring them up to worse fury, using the base means of tyranny and cruelty to work his high ends, and bringing not peace but a sharpened sword. This noble Henry was himself both the priest and the sacrifice at the altar of his high enterprise. We cannot tell whether it was still from the Casentino that-Dante looked on at that fine display of constancy through difficulties, privations, heavy personal loss and grievous bodily affliction, which ended, a year after the futile and ignominious attempt against Florence , in the sudden death of the Emperor at a wayside convent near Siena .
By this event every expectation of the exiles was utterly extinguished. The footsteps of the poet are lost again for several years after 131 I, the year of the letters, though there seems little doubt that he was at Lucca and also at Verona during this time, and tradition says that he spent some time at the convent of Fonte Avellana. But we have no reason to suppose that he stayed again in the Casentino, where the neighbourhood of Florence would have been perhaps a danger to him, and certainly an aggravation to his grief at being now a hopeless and perpetual Ol1tcast from her gates. According to Boccaccio one chance of return to his native city was offered him later, in 1316, but with the ins111ting condition of doing pl1blic penance. In a letter, the authenticity of which is not certain, the poet rejects such an unworthy way of return to his country, and declares that if no path can be found which hurts not Dante’s fair fame and honour, he will never enter Florence more. "What then? May I not gaze upon the mirror of the sun and stars wherever I may be? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths wherever I may be beneath the heaven, but I must first make me inglorious and shameful before the people and the state of Florence ? N or shall I lack for bread."
His future now assured from carking poverty by the love and esteem of noble friends, his passionate regret for his lost home calmed and chastened by the broadening years into a large and noble sorrow for al1 wrong and injustice, he passes out of the sphere of political strife and agitation into the spiritual realm of his great vision, in which he was to learn the interpretation of those things which he had seen and heard in his life, and to apprehend the figures of sin and repentance and blessedness in their eternal and immutable reality. Ravenna , with its great sea, its pines that sing to the silence, receives him; the Casentino, Tuscany , fretted and storm-tossed land of hills, loses him for ever.
Though nothing is known as to Dante's actual whereabouts when he was in the Casentino, the whole Valley is penetrated with the memory and tradition of his presence. One seems to come upon his footsteps at every turn, and to lose them as often; they flee before you into the obscurity of castle or rock or forest, as elusive as that light unattainable lady of his OWI1 odes, whom he was ever pursuing, if only to catch sight of the shadow of her vanishing garments. Sometimes standing within a: ruined tower, when the phases of the past crowd upon you. charged with dead passions, with memories. of, lives .begun and lived and ended here, unprescient of the roofless days to come, with visions of long monotonous years that are now but flashes in the revolving scenes, it happens that your mind is suddenly aware of the moment when he stood here, Ieaning idly, surrounded by the friends and. followers of the Count, yet alone, his soul moving in eternity, aware of the great silence, while the voices around c1attered and tinkIed without meaning. Or you see him wearied and irritated by the pretensions to knowledge of foolish and shallow minds, whose high pIace permitted no interruption or contradiction to their ignorant pratings, or bursting with scorn as he looked at his companions, knowing what men might do and be. When you mount the slopes of Falterona he is there, beside the springs of Arno, looking across to the city throned in the dim holIows, beyond the mountains which his eagle wings may not traverse, while at his feet the river winds on its despised way far round about to the goal. All the rills that run down into Arno from Romena sing of how they refreshed his ears many a time as he weari1y c1imbed to the parched hilltop. Still more hallowed is the meeting-pIace of Archiano and Arno. So preciseIy is this spot marked out in the poet's narrative of Buonconte's death that we cannot doubt that he knew it well. The halo lingers about it stilI of that large thought which, passing beyond the authority of God's vicegerent on earth, was aware of the infinite Mercy itself. Up in the lofty Eremo, also, where the stream is born which washed away Buonconte's body, his words are with us, and they accompany us still in that yet holier sanctuary upon "the rude rock between Tiber and Arno ."
But there are other pIaces, made for love idylls, green glades where flowers spring thick beside rushing rivulets, and the sun shoots golden darts between the thick leaves of the trees, in which we are haunted by the poet in a different aspect, that in which he reveals himself in the Canzoniere; not the enthusiastic dreamer of an ideaI reign of justice and peace, not the eager scholar wearing his eyes blind with study, nor yet the sage pondering the great truths of judgment and salvation, but the slave of an earthly passion. There is a very beautiful ode beginning : Amor, dacchè convien pur ch' io mi doglia, "Love, since I needs must make complaint," in which the writer calls upon Love to give him skill to bewail as he would the torment which a fair and cruel Lady inflicts upon him. He describes the piteous plight to which she has brought him; flee as he will, her image comes within his phantasy and draws him to her, where he must die, slain by her eyes. In her presence he becomes lifeless as. though struck by a thunderbolt, and, though it was a sweet smile that hurled it, yet, when his soul returns to his heart, he still trembles all over with fear, and his face remains darkened from the spirit's distrust of itself.
" Così m'hai concio, Amore, in mezzo l'alpi,
nella valle del fiume,
lungo il qual sempre sopra me sei forte.
Qui vivo e morto, come vuoi, mi palpi
mercè del fiero Iume,
che folgorando fa via alla morte.
Lasso! non donne qui, non genti accorte
Vegg' io, a cui incresca del mio male:
Se a costei non ne cale,
non spero mai da altrui aver soccorso:

e questa, sbandeggiata di tua corte,

Signor, non cura colpo di tuo strale ;

fatto ha d'orgoglio al petto schermo tale,

ch' ogni saetta lì spunta suo corso;

per che l'armato cuor da nulla è morso.

O montanina mia Canzon, tu vai;

forse vedrai Fiorenza la mia terra

che fuor di se mi serra,

vota d'amore, e nuda di pietate.

Se dentro v'entri, va dicendo: omai

non vi può fare il mio fattor più guerra;

là ond' io vegno una catena il serra

tal, che se piega vostra crudeltate,

non ha di ritornar più libertate."

I Thus hast thou used me, love, amid the alps,
in the vaIley of the river,
beside the which thou art ever strong upon me.
Here, living or dead, as thou wilt, thou dost handle me,
thanks to the fierce light        which, flashing,
makes a way for death.
Alas! No ladies here, no folk of wit, do I see
who will grieve them for my ills. If she care not,
I have no hope of other’s succour ;and
she, banned from thy court, Sire,
heeds not the stroke of thy darts,
such shield of pride hath she made for her breast that
every arrow there breaks its course, is pierced.
Oh, song, my mountain one, thou goest;
maybe thou'lt see my city Fiorenza,
which locks me forth from her,
void of love and bare of pity.
lf within thou enterest, go saying:
now no longer can my maker war upon you ;
there whence I come a fetter holds him,
such that though your cruelty should yield
no longer hath he freedom to return.
Translation of Witte's Essays on Dante, x., and Appendix
The river beside which love has ever been strong over him is of course the Arno, and its valley amid the Alps the Casentino. That the poem was written during his exile its own words reveal. So we learn that Dante in his mature years, when staying in the Casentino, was seized by a new passion. Early commentators mention the poet's love for a mountain lady and in the Compendium (1) of Boccaccio's Life of Dante it is related that near the dose of his life the poet experienced a passion for an Alpine lady in the Casentino, "who, if I am not misinformed, though beautiful in countenance, had a goitre." This statement, however, does not bear Boccaccio's authority, and it is quite unnecessary to believe in the goitre ! But the most striking commentary on the ode' is a letter purporting to be written by Dante himself, and addressed to the Marchese Moroello Malaspina, apparently from the Casentino. In this he tells how on his return from the Marquis's Court to the banks of the Arno, "all at once, a lady, like lightning descending from the sky, appeared to me, I know not how . . . Oh, how I was amazed by the wonder of her. But the amazement was overcome by the terror of a thunderstorm which foIlowed. For 'even as the divine flashes are succeeded by thunder, so as soon as I had seen the flame of her beauty, Love, the terrible and imperious, held me in his grasp. . . ."

This letter, if genuine, would throw much light on the poet's state of mind immediately before and during the course of this sudden passion. Many Dante students, however, regard it as a forgery. It seems indeed to repeat too closely and insistently the beautiful thoughts and images of the song, and to give a circumstantiality to the episode which steals away some of its poetic grace.
This "mountain song" is usually considered to stand by itself and to be the one expression, if the letter is left out, of this love aberration of the poet's later and graver days. There is, however, a series of lyrics which have much likeness to it in tone and expression; the rime pietrose or "stony rhymes," so called because _hey harp constantly on the word pietra, so that some have supposed them to be addressed to a certain lady named Pietra. This is apparently a quite baseless conjecture. But that the passion, fierce, earthly and elemental in its nature, which they disclose, was felt for a real woman seems impossible to doubt, though some commentators have attempted to give them an allegorical significance, classing them with the odes which are undoubtedly written in celebration of Philosophy.
They are almost certainly some of those which the poet himself meant to treat of and interpret allegorically in the unwritten books of the Convivio; but that would only have been another instance of Dante's habit of conceiving a mystical and symbolic personification in the image of, some earthly fair one whom he had known. Beatrice, the Lady of his noblest self, changes from the human maiden of the Vita Nuova into the vessel of the Divine Wisdom in the Divina Commedia. The Lad y of the Window at the end of the narrative of the Vita Nuova, whose consoling eyes make him forget Beatrice, reappears in the Convivio, transmuted by some mental alchemy into the "daughter of God, queen of all, most noble and beauteous Philosophy." The Convivio was indeed in some sort an apology: he tells us himself that he was parity moved to write it by the. fear of infamy; “the infamy of having pursued so great a passion as he who reads the above named odes conceives to have had dominion over me," and there is little doubt that if he had carried out his plan, the Stony Lady would have appeared in the later books in some lofty moral guise. But the work was never finished, and in the Purgatorio in his after days the poet, instead of attempting to explain away his frailties, took the nobler part of confessing them with shame and repentance.
The rime pietrose are now general1y supposed to belong to a period of moral aberration in the poet following on the death of Beatrice, and to have been written before I300, the date of his conversion, as represented in the Divina Commedia. The passion which they celebrate would then be one of the “false visions of good " for which he forsook Beatrice and the "right goal," and the pargoletta, whom his monitress in the earthly paradise includes among the vanities which hindered him from rising to her, might be the same as the maiden with the. heart of marble in the last ode of the series. But may not Dante have intended to include his later errors in Beatrice's indictment and in his' general repentance at the imaginary date of his vision? Such an anachronism in dealing with his own moral history would surely have been permissible. There can be little, doubt that long after I300 he was still astray from the ideal path which Beatrice had pointed out to him, and that she did not regain the empire of his mind till much later. The ode in celebration of the lady of the Casentino belongs in any case to a later period, and its whole tone is a contradiction to those who would deny the reality of its object and read it in an allegorical sense. It would be deeply interesting if we might believe that this same lady was also the heroine of the rime pietrose, and that they too belonged to the poet's exile and to the Casentino. There is much in the poems themselves which lends itself to this interpretation. Three of them are full of images of rocks and streams and hills in winter. You feel that the poet must have been in the midst of these wintry scenes as he wrote. A fourth, Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro, in which he hisses out all the consuming rage and vindictiveness of savage desire, has in its fierce grating sound the very scrunch and . scrape of furious feet grinding over the stones of the denuded hillsides. But it is the exquisite sestina of the group, Al poco giorno, a form of the canzone borrowed from the Provencal Arnaut Daniel, which by its landscape details, if one may so call, them, brings to mind especially thoughts of the Valley Enclosed. It presents a picture so incomparably lovely of the enchantress who has wounded the poet in such grievous fashion that I can not resist giving it here, the more so as I would fain take her to be the mysterious lady of the Casentino, the Alpigiana herself.

" Al poco giorno, ed al gran cerchio d'ombra
san giunto, lasso! ed al bianchir de' colli,

quando si perde lo colar nell' erba.

E'l mio disio però non cangia il verde,

si è barbato nella dura pietra,

che parla e sen te come fosse donna.

Similemente questa nuova donna

si sta gelata, come neve all' ombra,

che non la muove, se non come pietra,

il dolce tempo, che riscalda i colli,

e che gli fa tornar di bianco in verde,

perchè gli copre di fioretti e d'erba.

Quand' ella ha in testa una ghirlanda d'erba

trae della mente nostra ogni altra donna;

perchè si mischia il crespo giallo e 'l verde

sì bel, ch' Amar vi viene a stare all' ombra;

che m' ha serrato tra piccoli colli

più forte assai che la calcina pietra.
Le sue bellezze han più virtù che pietra
e'l colpo suo non può sanar per erba;
ch' io san fuggito per piani e per colli,
per potere scampar da cotal donna;
ed al suo viso non mi può far ombra poggio,
nè muro mai, nè fronda verde.

Io l'ho veduta già vestita a verde
sì fatta, ch' ella avrebbe messo in pietra l'amar,
ch' io porto pure alla sua ombra;
ond' io l'ho chiesta in un bel prato

d'erba innamorata, com' anca fu donna,

e chiuso intorno d'altissimi colli.

Ma ben ritorneranno i fiumi a' colli

prima che questo legno molle e verde s'infiammi,

come suoI far bella donna, di me, che mi torrei

dormir su pietra tutto il mio tempo,

e gir pascendo l'erba, Sol per vedere

de' suoi panni l'ombra.

Quantunque i colli fanno più nera ombra

sotto il bel verde la giovene donna

gli fa sparir, come pietra sott' erba."
To the short day and to the great circle of shadow am I come, alas! and to the blanching of the hills, when the colour goes from the grass. And my desire for that changes not its green so rooted is it in the hard stone, which speaks and hears as though 'twere woman. And in like manner this new woman remains frozen, like snow within the shadow, for she is not moved any more than stone by the sweet season which warms the hills and which makes them turn from white to green because it covers them with flowers and grass. When she has on her head a garland of grass she draws from our mind every other woman, for the cur1ing yellow mingles with the green so sweetly, that love comes there to dwell in the shadow; who has locked me between the little hills more fast by far than the calcined stone. Her beauty has more virtue than stone and her stroke may not be healed by grass ; and I have fled by plain and hills that I might 'scape from such a woman ; and from her face might not give me shadow hillside nor e'er a walI or frond of green. Ere now I have seen her vestured in green, so bedight she would have implanted in stone the love which I bear even to her shadow. Wherefore I have wooed her in a fair meadow of grass enamoured,r as was ever woman, and c1osed around with loftiest hills. But well may the rivers return to the hills, sooner than this wood, humid and green, shall inflame, as is the wont of fair woman, for me, who would consent to sleep on stone all my time and wander feeding on grass only to see of her garments the shadow. Whensoever the hills make blackest shadow beneath the fair green the youthful woman makes it vanish, like stone beneath grass. This new woman, green-garbed, with a garland of grass upon her golden head, pure and cold as the primal season of the year, swift and elusive as the flight of some shadow over the claimed rocks, is the very genius of that high snow-cooled valley, with its newly springing river and its green and flowery lawns cc closed about with loftiest hills." What place could answer so well to those very words, chiuso intorno d'altissimi colli, as the Clusentinum, the Valley Enclosed. The form of the poem, with the continually recurring fall of the same words at the ends of the verses, has something in it suggestive of the monotonous sound of the "ruscelletti" of the mountains. This effect is still more pronounced in the companion ode, "Amor, tu vedi ben," a sort of double sestina, with only five rhymes, and the same word repeated twice or three times in the sequence of the lines. In this the cruelty of this lady, this semblance of a woman made of beauteous stoI1e, is compared to the freezing cold of the wintry world, and the chill moisture of the air to his own tears. And in the final ode of the series, "lo son venuto al punto della rota," he shows himself still consumed" by the fierce heat of passion, in the midst of the mournful snows and rains and deadened waters of the season when the birds are silent or fled, the flowers are slain upon the slopes, and all animas that are wanton in their nature are unloosed from love.

" Canzone, or che sarà di me nell'altro
dolce tempo novello, quando piove
Amore in terra da tutti li cieli?

quando per questi geli

Amore è solo in me, e non altrove?

Saranne quello, ch' è d'un uom di marmo,

se in pargoletta fia per cuore un marmo."

"   Ode, what will now become of me, in the next sweet
new season, when rains love upon the earth from all the
heavens ;      if throughout these frosts love is in me alone
and not elsewhere? That will come to me which comes to
a man of marble if in the maiden, for a heart, be marble.

These continual images of winter, contrasted so insistently with the ever-greenness of his desire, seem to have an' inner significance relating to the poet's age. "To the short day and the great circle of shadow am I come, ah me!" and still he suffers for this lady of a ‘picciol tempo “— of the few years —the sweet torment which belongs to an earlier season. If this inference were justified, it would show that these poems were written later than the period usually assigned to them, when Dante was in the ascending half of the “arch” of life, according to his own division of human age. But his entrance upon old age, which he reckons to begin at forty-five, would have come to pass in 1310, and coincides very closely with the time when he was certainly in the Casentino.
It is difficult to conceive, however, that the exiled enthusiast, watching from the mountain top the progress of his embodied hope and aspiration in the world below and sending forth his own voice of thunder into the confusion of political counsels, could have been at the same time the lover of the “stony” poems. Yet, apart from this, nothing could be more natural than that having arrived at the point fixed by himself in earlier life as the limit of manhood and beginning of old age, he should have been surprised by the youthfulness of his own feelings and should have registered the sensation in enduring verse. One may reflect perhaps that the period of Henry VII’s enterprise was extended over a period of some length, and that even psalmists and prophets have their changing moods.
This love episode of the Casentino, whether we read it in the mountain ode alone, or amplify that with the rime pietrose, gives a deeply interesting glimpse of I)ante at one period of his exile. This was the time in his life when he was apparently least occupied with the thought of Beatrice and least under the influence of spiritual sentiment. The pure and beautiful flame of his New Life was long spent and had not yet rekindled stronger and more glorious in its transcendental form of the Divine Comedy. Earthly desire has him in thrall and rewards his pain by informing his art with new power and beauty. The rime pietrose show him at the fulness of his artistic development: “they reveal a power of art, a movement, a plasticity by which they surpass the rime which we already know, if in nothing else than in virile sentiment.” (Zingarelli. Dante).
It is impossible to say who the Lady of the Casentino was, or whether she was one of the Guidi family, as local gossips declare. Yet her personality is very real to us to-day. As one wanders in the woods and beside the little streams” which from the green hills of Casentino descend into Arno” the silence and solitude become strangely alive with the shades of the poet and the lady, the one fleeing after the other in neverending chase. Beneath Romena, by the side of the Arno, there is a grassy place where the poplars grow slim and sparse and blossoms are thick upon the banks in spring. In such a “bel prato d’erba,” closed around with loftiest hills, it was that he wooed her amid the love-laden flowers and herbs, and she remained cold and unmelting as the snow that lingered in the shadows of. the hills, relentless as the young stream racing on its downward course and telling its eternal story of ever—renewed, ever—unsatisfied desire. I fancy him descending some spring morning, lightened awhile of his thoughts, forgetful of sin and judgment, ‘a votary for once of the old god Pan; and she fleeting lightly in her alluring pride of dispiteous youth, grassy robed, gold-tressed, between the white poplar stems.
And here, may be, standing on the bank of the river beside which Love had ever been strong upon him, and watching the waters 1kw he bethought him in the midst of his torment of that other Lady of his deepest desire, more cruel to him than any, and breathed upon the stream a message to her of this new love, whose chain was so strong that even if her grace were granted to him it would be in vain.
“O montanina mia canzon, tu vai;
forse vedrai Fiorenza la mia terra .
And now after all these centuries one seems still to hear in that deep murmur beneath the ripple of the water the voices of Poet and Lady, grown grave and sweet with time, mingled for ever in a questioning that expects no answer and a rebuke that knows no unkindness. All is as it was then. The stony bed of the river makes a wide white strand through which the narrow current hurries, and again spreads out in broad tranquil pools in which the poplars mirror themselves. Everything here is delicate, pale and fine—herbage, water, stems of trees, and trembling leaves. But now the place is solitary. A little girl herding a few sheep wanders alone. Falterona rises up behind, clothed in storm-clouds, which shroud the cradle of the river of memories. There, to the left, stand up the towers of Romena. But they are shrunk to a bare anatomy. The poplars too are yellow this autumn evening; low clouds cover the sky “and no bird sings.”
But other thoughts deeper than. those of love, graver than those of worldly politics, possessed the poet’s mind also in the Casentino. Though the Divina Commedia was probably not yet begun, the intention of it had been in him ever since he closed the story of his young life and its love for Beatrice with the promise to write concerning her that which had not before been written of any woman. As he trod the Valley in the idleness which is big with the deeds of the morrow, the great work to be was doubtless taking form and substance in his brain, and a thousand impressions from the world in which he moved must have mingled in the process. The images of the mountains form the framework and architecture of the scenes of Hell and Purgatory, and the poet’s painful progress up the cliffs and steeps has in it the remembered anguish of many an arduous climb in the Apennines. “Dante,” says Ampère, “actually walks with Virgil. He toils upward, he stops to take breath, he helps himself with his hand when his foot is not enough. Re loses himself and asks his way. He observes the altitude of the sun and of the stars. In a word, one finds the habits and the souvenirs of the traveller in every verse or rather in every step of his poetic peregrination.” (Voyage Dantesque).
He recalls the mists in which he has been caught in the Alps, and the sun feebly appearing through them as they begin to thin, when he is emerging out of the fog of the third circle of Purgatory into the sunlight again. And that dawn, when in the rose of the eastern sky the newly risen sun appeared tempered by the mists, so that the eye long endured it, of which he is reminded by the vision of the veiled Beatrice within a cloud of flowers, was surely a morning in the mountains. Again, one can hardly doubt that some thought of the yawning rocks of La Verna and of the Franciscan legend that they were shattered at the moment of the Crucifixion is in the description of the fallen cliff in the Inferno (C. xxi., vv. 106-114), where the way had been broken a thousand two hundred and sixty-six years before that Good Friday, 1300, of the poet’s journey.
And those images drawn from the sweet pastoral scenes of earth, with which he refreshes himself now and again as he descends through the gloom of the godless region or climbs the painful hill of Purgatory, might well be memories of the Casentino; the sheep issuing from the fold and standing all timid, casting eye and nose to earth and huddling behind their leader, guileless and quick; the shepherd silently beside his flock, watching that no beast may scatter it; the goats wanton and agile on the hills or grown tame as they ruminate silent in the shade when the sun is hot, while the herd minds them, leaning on his staff (Purgatorio, C. xxvii.). There is a passage in the Inferno (C. xxiv., vv. 1-15) where the horror of the devilish depths of Malebolge is relieved by an enchanting glimpse of the life ofthe fields: -
“In that part of the youthful year wherein
the Sun his locks beneath Aquarius tempers,
and now the nights draw near to half the day,
what time the hoar-frost copies on the ground
the outward semblance of her sister white,
but little lasts the temper of her pen,
the husbandman, whose forage faileth him,
rises and looks, and seeth the champaign
all gleaming white, whereat he beats his flank,
returns in doors, and up and down laments,
like a poor wretch, who knows not what to do.
Then he returns, and hope revives again,
seeing the world has changed its countenance
in little time, and takes his shepherd’s crook,
and forth the little lambs to pasture drives.”’
(Longfellow’s translation)
These things may be seen to-day as then. Long familiarity with the ways of the weather still fails to teach the Italian peasant patience, and the customs of field and hill have not changed. At every turn almost one is reminded of some word of the divine poet's. I remember last autumn being shut out from an accustomed path through a vineyard because l'uom della villa had hedged up the opening with a little forkful of his thorns exactly as his ancestor in Dante's day was wont to do when the grape was darkening (Purgatorio, C. IV, vv. 19-21).
He for whom all things were doubled one against the other, and who looked upon the face of Nature as but the semblance of the unseen reality, saw, we cannot doubt, in every aspect of sky and earth, some similitude of the deeper existences of the moral and spiritual worlds, some adumbration of his visionary kingdoms of sin and sorrow and beatitude. Did not the pointed hill of Romena, that stands out in the midst of the Valley, circ1ed seven times and more with calcined terraces, seem at times when immaginativa rapt him from the outer world the figure of the toilsome Mount of Repentance, up which it behoved him to struggle. And on clear nights, as he stood on its summit, whence the heavens unrolled themselves before him, did not the eternal circling of the spheres become visible in the order of the degrees of the blessed, within the all-comprehending Heaven of infinite Love, where motion and rest are one ?
Often looking down at sunset into the western valley which opens behind Romena, where the stream's sanguine streak pierces its way into the gloom of the mountains, beneath the awful gold. of the sky, he thought perhaps of the river of sin, whereon the deathly boatman conducts the lost souls to their eternal prison.
And lifting his eyes, borne upwards in spirit on the thought of the glorious lady of his mind, did he not see, painted in the thrilling of crimsoned cloudlets around the intolerable brightness of the sky when the sun was just withdrawn, the mystic Garden of the Rose, the hosts of the seraphim, the throng of splendours still contemplating the radiance which his weak sight might not endure; and surely as he gazed he knew the time to come, when by painful steps and circling ways, casting off the burden of pride which bowed him to the earth, his soul too shou1d rise thither at last where it should abide the vision of the ineffable Light, and in unceasing contemplation know eternal peace.
End of Chapter VIII