DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61902#0037
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
IS
and beautiful in her childish fashion, and in her behavior very gentle
and agreeable ; with habits and language more serious and modest
than her age warranted ; and besides this with features so delicate
and so beautifully formed, and full, besides mere beauty, of so much
candid loveliness, that many thought her almost an angel. This
girl then, such as I describe her, and perhaps even more beautiful,
appeared at the festa—not I suppose for the first time, but for the
first time in power to create love—before the eyes of Dante, who,
though still a child, received her image into his heart with so much
affection that from that day henceforward, as long as he lived, it
never again departed from him.”
The “ Vita Nuova” of Dante, is the story told, in detail,
of the love which thus began—a love which has been perhaps
more questioned, criticised, and commented upon than any
other which the world has known of since then. It is diffi-
cult to give any just description of this book to those who
are unacquainted with it without something which may
look to his adorers like irreverence toward the great poet.
The student of the “ Divine Comedy ” can scarcely fail to
experience a slight shock when he leaves the great and
serious Florentine, most solemn of all travelers between
life and death, and finds himself suddenly transplanted
into the unreal and dazzling dimness of that curious fan-
tastical world of mediaeval youth, with its one sentiment
upon which are rung perpetual changes, its elaborate and
sophistical refinements yet childlike simpleness—a picture
most artificial yet most real—fantastic as a dream, yet
penetrated, by the intense verity of the dreamer, with a
life whichisbeyond question. When, however, the strange
atmosphere has become a little more familiar to the eye,
the reader begins to find again, by help of this intensity,
the same vivid and extraordinary individual whom under
another guise he has accompanied in all his different moods
—stern, tender, indignant, always himself—through the
shadows and torments of the “Inferno/’ The strange youth-
ful figure of the poet, so bizarre yet so true, possessed by
IS
and beautiful in her childish fashion, and in her behavior very gentle
and agreeable ; with habits and language more serious and modest
than her age warranted ; and besides this with features so delicate
and so beautifully formed, and full, besides mere beauty, of so much
candid loveliness, that many thought her almost an angel. This
girl then, such as I describe her, and perhaps even more beautiful,
appeared at the festa—not I suppose for the first time, but for the
first time in power to create love—before the eyes of Dante, who,
though still a child, received her image into his heart with so much
affection that from that day henceforward, as long as he lived, it
never again departed from him.”
The “ Vita Nuova” of Dante, is the story told, in detail,
of the love which thus began—a love which has been perhaps
more questioned, criticised, and commented upon than any
other which the world has known of since then. It is diffi-
cult to give any just description of this book to those who
are unacquainted with it without something which may
look to his adorers like irreverence toward the great poet.
The student of the “ Divine Comedy ” can scarcely fail to
experience a slight shock when he leaves the great and
serious Florentine, most solemn of all travelers between
life and death, and finds himself suddenly transplanted
into the unreal and dazzling dimness of that curious fan-
tastical world of mediaeval youth, with its one sentiment
upon which are rung perpetual changes, its elaborate and
sophistical refinements yet childlike simpleness—a picture
most artificial yet most real—fantastic as a dream, yet
penetrated, by the intense verity of the dreamer, with a
life whichisbeyond question. When, however, the strange
atmosphere has become a little more familiar to the eye,
the reader begins to find again, by help of this intensity,
the same vivid and extraordinary individual whom under
another guise he has accompanied in all his different moods
—stern, tender, indignant, always himself—through the
shadows and torments of the “Inferno/’ The strange youth-
ful figure of the poet, so bizarre yet so true, possessed by