The Romance of Biography Volume I Part 8

Dante then puts into her mouth the most severe yet eloquent accusation against himself: while he stands weeping by, bowed down by shame and anguish. She accuses him before the listening angels for his neglected time, his wasted talents, his forgetfulness of her, when she was no longer upon earth to lead him with the light of her "youthful eyes,"

(gli occhi giovinetti.)

Soon as I had changed My mortal for immortal, then he left me, And gave himself to others; when from flesh To spirit I had risen, and increase Of beauty and of virtue circled me, I was less dear to him and valued less!

PURGATORY, C. 30.--CAREY'S TRANS.

This praise of herself and stern upbraiding of her lover, would sound harsh from woman's lips, but have a solemnity, and even a sublimity, as uttered by a disembodied and angelic being. When Dante, weeping, falters out a faint excuse--

Thy fair looks withdrawn, Things present with deceitful pleasures turned My steps aside,--

she answers by reproaching him with his inconstancy to her memory:--

Never didst thou spy In art or nature aught so pa.s.sing sweet As were the limbs that in their beauteous frame Enclosed me, and are scattered now in dust.

If sweetest thing thus failed thee with my death, What afterward of mortal should thy wish Have tempted?

PURGATORY, c. 31.

And she rebukes him, for that he could stoop from the memory of her love to be the thrall of a _slight girl_. This last expression is supposed to allude either to Dante's unfortunate marriage with Gemma Donati,[44] or to the attachment he formed during his exile for a beautiful Lucchese named Gentucca, the subject of several of his poems. But, notwithstanding all this severity of censure, Dante, gazing on his divine monitress, is so rapt by her loveliness, his eyes so eager to recompence themselves for "their ten years' thirst," (Beatrice had been dead ten years) that not being yet freed from the stain of his earthly nature, he is warned not to gaze "too fixedly" on her charms. After a farther probation, Beatrice introduces him into the various spheres which compose the celestial paradise; and thenceforward she certainly a.s.sumes the characteristics of an allegorical being. The true distinction seems this, that Dante has not represented Divine Wisdom under the name and form of Beatrice, but the more to exalt his Beatrice, he has clothed her in the attributes of Divine Wisdom.

She at length ascends with him into the Heaven of Heavens, to the source of eternal and uncreated light, without shadow and without bound; and when Dante looks round for her, he finds she has quitted his side, and has taken her place throned among the supremely blessed, "as far above him as the region of thunder is above the centre of the sea:" he gazes up at her in a rapture of love and devotion, and in a sublime apostrophe invokes her still to continue her favour towards him. She looks down upon him from her effulgent height, smiles on him with celestial sweetness, and then fixing her eyes on the eternal fountain of glory, is absorbed in ecstasy. Here we leave her: the poet had touched the limits of permitted thought; the seraph wings of imagination, borne upwards by the inspiration of deep love, could no higher soar,--the audacity of genius could dare no farther!

Dante died at Ravenna in 1321, and was sumptuously interred at the cost of Guido da Polenta, the father of that unfortunate Francesca di Rimini, whose story he has so exquisitely told in the fifth canto of the Inferno. He left several sons and an only daughter, whom he had named Beatrice, in remembrance of his early love: she became a nun at Ravenna.

Now where, in the name of all truth and all feeling, were the heads, or rather the hearts, of those commentators, who could see nothing in the Beatrice thus beautifully pourtrayed, thus tenderly lamented, and thus sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent pa.s.sions and active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia!

FOOTNOTES:

[44] This marriage was one of policy, and negociated by the friends of Dante and of Gemma Donati: her temper was violent and harsh, and their domestic peace was, probably, not increased by Dante's obstinate regret for his first love.

CHAPTER X.

CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD.

After Italy, England,--who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length outstript her in the race of intellect,--was the next to produce a great and prevailing genius in poetry, a master-spirit, whom no change of customs, manners, or language, can render wholly obsolete; and who was destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration.

Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was twenty-four years younger than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373; this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women,--the story of Griselda.

Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, pa.s.sed over what was vicious and blameable, or only recommended by the wit and the style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in itself, and so honourable to the s.e.x whom he had poetically deified in the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud.

His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he began again, but was unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the ma.n.u.script. This incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio, occurred about the period when Chaucer pa.s.sed from Genoa to Padua to visit the poet and lover of Laura--

Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto il mondo.

Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering, enthusiastic admiration with which we should now hail a Milton or a Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla; and his heart and soul being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impression which the Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer, may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are so redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the sentiment, that I suppose it never was perused for the first time without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the story from Boccaccio, but that it was

Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk, As proved by his wordes and his work; Francis Petrark, the Laureat Poete;

which is also proved by internal evidence.

Chaucer so far resembled Petrarch, that, like him, he was at once poet, scholar, courtier, statesman, philosopher, and man of the world; but considered merely as poets, they were the very antipodes of each other.

The genius of Dante has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, vast and lofty, and dark and irregular. In the same spirit, Petrarch may be likened to a cla.s.sical and elegant Greek temple, rising aloft in its fair and faultless proportions, and compacted of the purest Parian marble; while Chaucer is like the far-spreading and picturesque palace of the Alhambra, with its hundred chambers, all variously decorated, and rich with barbaric pomp and gold: he is famed rather as the animated painter of character, and manners, and external nature, than the poet of love and sentiment; and yet no writer, Shakspeare always excepted, (and perhaps Spenser) contains so many beautiful and tender pa.s.sages relating to, or inspired by, women. He lived, it is true, in rude times, times strangely deficient in good taste and decorum; but when all the inst.i.tutions of chivalry, under the most chivalrous of our kings and princes,[45] were at their height in England. As a poet, Chaucer was enlisted into the service of three of the most ill.u.s.trious, most beautiful, and most accomplished women of that age--Philippa, the high-hearted and generous Queen of Edward the Third; the Lady Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt; and the lovely Anne of Bohemia, the Queen of Richard the Second;[46] for whom, and at whose command, he wrote his "Legende of G.o.de Women," as some amends for the scandal he had spoken of us in other places. The Countess of Ess.e.x, the Countess of Pembroke, and that beautiful Lady Salisbury, the ancestress of the Montagu family, whose famous mischance gave rise to the Order of the Garter, were also among Chaucer's patronesses. But the most distinguished of all, and the favourite subject of his poetry, was the d.u.c.h.ess Blanche. The manner in which he has contrived to celebrate his own loves and individual feelings with those of Blanche and her royal suitor, has given additional interest to both, and has enabled his commentators to fix with tolerable certainty the name and rank of the object of his love, as well as the date and circ.u.mstances of his attachment.

In the earliest of Chaucer's poems, "The COURT OF LOVE," he describes himself as enamoured of a fair mistress, whom in the style of the time, he calls Rosial, and himself Philogenet: the lady is described as "sprung of n.o.ble race and high," with "angel visage," "golden hair," and eyes orient and bright, with figure "sharply slender,"

So that from the head unto the foot all is sweet womanhead,

and arrayed in a vest of green, with her tresses braided with silk and gold. She treats him at first with disdain, and the Poet swoons away at her feet: satisfied by this convincing proof of his sincerity, she is induced to accept his homage, and becomes his "liege ladye," and the sovereign of his thoughts. In this poem, which is extremely wild, and has come down to us in an imperfect state, Chaucer quaintly admonishes all lovers, that an absolute faith in the perfection of their mistresses, and obedience to her slightest caprice, are among the first of duties; that they must in all cases believe their ladye faultless; that,

In every thing she doth but as she should.

Construe the best, believe no tales new, For many a lie is told that seem'th full true; But think that she, so bounteous and so fair, Could not be false; imagine this alway.

And tho' thou seest a fault right at thine eye, Excuse it quick, and glose it prettily.[47]

Nor are they to presume on their own worthiness, nor to imagine it possible they can earn

By right, her mercie, nor of equity, But of her grace and womanly pitye.[47]

There is, however, no authority for supposing that at the time this poem was written, Chaucer really aspired to the hand of any lady of superior birth, or was very seriously in love; he was then about nineteen, and had probably selected some fair one, according to the custom of his age, to be his "fancy's queen," and in the same spirit of poetical gallantry, he writes to do her honour; he says himself,

My intent and all my busie care Is for to write this treatise as I can, Unto my ladye, stable, true, and sure; Faithful and kind sith firste that she began Me to accept in service as her man; To her be all the pleasures of this book, That, when her like, she may it rede and look.[48]

Mixed up with all this gallantry and refinement are some pa.s.sages inconceivably absurd and gross; but such were those times,--at once rude and magnificent--an odd mixture of cloth of frieze and cloth of gold!

The "Parliament of Birds," ent.i.tled in many editions, the "_a.s.sembly of Fowls_," celebrates allegorically the courts.h.i.+p of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster.

Blanche, as the greatest heiress of England, with a duchy for her portion, could not fail to be surrounded by pretenders to her hand; but, after a year of probation, she decided in favour of John of Gaunt, who thus became Duke of Lancaster in right of his bride. This youthful and princely pair were then about nineteen.

The "Parliament of Birds" being written in 1358, when Blanche had postponed her choice for a year, has fixed the date of Chaucer's attachment to the lady he afterwards married; for, here he describes himself as one who had not yet felt the full power of love--

For albeit that I know not love indeed, Ne wot how that he quitteth folks their hire, Yet happeth me full oft in books to read Of his miracles.----

But the time was come when the poet, now in his thirty-second year, was destined to feel, that a strong attachment for a deserving object--for one who will not be obtained unsought, "was no sport," as he expresses it, but

Smart and sorrow, and great heavinesse.

During the period of trial which Lady Blanche had inflicted on her lover, it was Chaucer's fate to fall in love in sad earnest.--The object of this pa.s.sion, too beautifully and unaffectedly described not to be genuine, was Philippa Picard de Rouet, the daughter of a knight of Hainault, and a favourite attendant of Queen Philippa. Her elder sister Catherine, was at the same time maid of honour to the d.u.c.h.ess Blanche.

Both these sisters were distinguished at Court for their beauty and accomplishments, and were the friends and companions of the Princesses they served: and both are singularly interesting from their connection, political and poetical, with English history and literature.

Philippa Picard is one of the princ.i.p.al personages in the poem ent.i.tled "Chaucer's Dream," which is a kind of epithalamium celebrating the marriage of John of Gaunt with the Lady Blanche, which took place at Reading, May 19, 1359. It is a wild, fanciful vision of fairy-land and enchantments, of which I cannot attempt to give an a.n.a.lysis. In the opening lines, written about twelve months after the "Parliament of Birds," we find Chaucer in deep love according to all its forms. He is lying awake,

About such hour as lovers weep And cry after their lady's grace,