by A. N. Wilson
It is one thing, of course, to urge the logical necessity of Hell, and quite another to know which human souls have so asserted their moral freedom as to turn from God in a position of complete knowledge of the consequences of their action. If even a flickering desire to be saved is felt at the moment of the soul’s departure from the body, the Divine Mercy can capture it.
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground,
Mercy I asked, mercy I found.23
Before he painted his own vast mural of humanity in Hell, however, Dante in exile wrote a number of short poems castigating human vice. The canzone which begins ‘Three women have come to sit around my heart’ belongs to this period of very early exile. It is an extraordinary blend of high symbolism, political fury and kinky eroticism, framed in the most exquisite verses. It puts one in mind of Mannerist sculptures of a much later era. Dante’s heart enthrones Love, who continues to hold sway over his life. But around the heart cluster three beautiful women, all in a state of misery. Love looks at the first, and finds himself looking at a torn, ragged gown which reveals that part of her which it would be more polite not to mention. We revert to this part of her body again at the end when, unable to take his eyes off it, Dante is afraid that it will be ravaged:
Deny to everyone the precious fruit
For which all hands reach out
[Rime, Mortimer, p. 155]
This melancholy female figure, in danger of being raped, and unable to conceal her nether parts, is Justice. The poem is a deeply troubling one. It summons up both the statuary of a later age and also one of the hideous realities of after-war situations, in which half-stripped women are the victims of the marauding troops of victory. The vulnerable, semi-naked figure of Justice is someone Dante has seen imploringly trying to hide herself in doorways when Corso Donati’s thuggish troops rode into town.
Is there, in this poem, also the shocking hint that he wants to reingratiate himself with the Black Guelfs, having flirted with White Guelfs and Ghibellines? It is early days in his exile, and he still hopes there is a chance of returning to Florence. He writes in a mysterious verse that, if he has been at fault, many a moon has passed since he committed it, suggesting that it is now months since he consorted with Corso’s enemies. These parts of the troubled canzone will always remain obscure. It is one of the reminders in Dante’s work that he sometimes wrote for an extremely small readership. The first readers of the ode would presumably have understood what the lines meant, but they remain forever impenetrable to the rest of us.
It was probably written in 1304. To about the same date belongs another magnificent, angry poem, ‘Grief sends into my heart a bold desire’. It comes at its hearers – addressed as ladies – with all guns blazing:
So, ladies, if my words
Berate the sins of almost everyone
Marvel not
[Rime, Mortimer, p. 159]
The poem is chiefly directed against the vice of avarice which has turned men into beasts and slaves. Not since Juvenal had Europe seen a poem of such power devoted to such moral fury. In its desire to categorize, and to form pictures of individual malefactors, the poem is clearly one in which Dante is ‘getting his eye in’. The miser, scuttling along like a mouse and staring adoringly at his gold, is the sort of wretch we are going to meet later in Hell.
But when Dante met Giotto at Padua, he was still a long way from having seen the direction of his own art. The Comedy was far from taking shape in his head. He had yet to conceive of the central idea of Virgil as his guide. He had not even come round to remythologizing Beatrice. On the contrary, she had been displaced in his mind by the Donna Gentile. The memories and desires of childhood, the symbolic significance of certain figures from his Florentine youth and early manhood, were yet to assume the proportions which they take in his Quest for Lost Time. But perhaps, in seeing Giotto fill his Gospel with recognizable Trecento Italian faces, and his Hell with known men and women, Dante had taken an important step towards tasting his version of the madeleine, and fashioning his own life into a mythology of his times.
XIV
THE COMMON TONGUE
DANTE COULD ALMOST BE SAID TO HAVE INVENTED THE ITALIAN language. This statement requires immediate modification in several different aspects – obviously. We need to acknowledge there were other people in the peninsula between the Alps and Sicily before he existed, speaking and writing in a language which we can recognize as Italian; and on another level, it depends what we mean by ‘Italian’. Dante himself noted at least fourteen variants or dialects of spoken language in his first years of exile [De Vulgari Eloquentia, thereafter DVE, I.x.7]. Modern biographers seem to discount his claim to have wandered all over the Italian peninsula during this unhappy period – but how do they know? Clearly, to Dante, it felt as if he had been everywhere, and his knowledge of the variety of Italian dialects was wide. And even if he had not travelled in every part of Italy, this would not have prevented him from meeting at least fourteen different varieties of Italian dialect-speakers on his travels. You do not need to go to Ireland to meet a wide variety of Irish accents.
Whatever the geographical extent of Dante’s explorations, consider this. At the beginning of Dante’s career, the vocabulary of the written Italian language was roughly 60 per cent of modern Italian. By the time that Dante had completed the Comedy, 90 per cent of the words in a modern Italian dictionary had entered the language – 30 per cent of Italian words are Dantean coinages.1
Given this impressive statistic, it makes sense to see Italian as a shell, to use the terminology of business takeover, which Dante utilized for his purposes. There is no wonder that, as well as the greatest Italian poet, Dante is seen as the father of modern Italian unity. Not for nothing is the Italian tricolour formed from the shades of marble in the steps leading up to Purgatory in Dante’s poem [Purg. IX.94–102]. And, understandably enough, the nineteenth-century liberals who dreamed of a united secular Italy, freed from the foreign dominion of Bourbons in the South, of Austria in the North, or of the temporal powers of the Popes, saw in Dante their master. In some senses it could be said that it does not matter whether or not they were right to see Dante in this light. Giacomo Leopardi’s poem about Dante’s Memorial outside Santa Croce in Florence expresses the view that Dante is fortunate in being dead, rather than witness Italy being ruled by Austrians – an anachronistic sentiment which ignores the fact that, in his developed political thought, Dante yearned for the feuding Italian cities to be brought to heel by a Germanic Emperor. Mazzini, likewise, the great prophet of Italian unity and of the Risorgimento in the early decades of the nineteenth century, invoked Dante in his view that ‘every people has its special mission which will cooperate towards the general mission of Humanity – that mission is Nationality’.2 The French (though Italian in origin) historian Sismonde de Sismondi in L’Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen age (1807–18) was enormously influential both upon Italian liberals who aspired to nationhood – Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour – and upon those English Whig historians such as Macaulay who supported them. Sismondi saw Dante as the embodiment of nineteenth-century liberalism: ‘the greatest name of Italy and the father of her poetry’,3 as a defender of the guilds and the city states as upholders of democracy.
Even while recognizing the anachronism of this, J. A. Symonds, English aesthete and historian of the Renaissance in Italy, could write, ‘Creator of her language and founder of her literature, Dante gave to Italy both word and thought, added intellectual individuality to the idea of race and soil, and hence is fairly entitled to be regarded as the father of an Italian nation, of an Italian autonomy; but neither as prophet nor father of the present Italian unity, of which he never dreamed.’4
It is no wonder, at a later period, that the Fascists should have claimed him as one of their number. Amilcare Rossi, Fascist Gold Medallist of the National Association of Combatants, one of Mussolini’s henchmen, claimed to see in Dante’s famous riddle – of a forthcoming great leader whom he code-named DXV or D
UX – a prophecy of Il Duce himself.5 His decision to write in Italian was, according to the Fascist Domenico Venturini, ‘a monument of incomparable glory to our Author and our Nation’.6
The first work of Dante’s exile was written some time between 1302 and 1305, and it was a disquisition in Latin on the Italian language.
Dante never once used the word ‘Italian’ (italiano) in his surviving writings. The word he used for that language, in so far as he had the concept of it, was latino; its spoken version is volgare and the written or grammatical language tends to be latino (see, for example, Conv. I.v.13). It is worth pausing here to think our way back into the language-world of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and in particular of the Romance-speakers. We probably think that the people of Europe at this date were speaking versions of what we call ‘French’, Spanish’, ‘Romanian’, ‘Ladino’, ‘Provençal’ etc. Dante, we might suppose, spoke ‘Italian’, albeit a dialect known as Tuscan or Florentine. We think in this way partly because we are programmed by nineteenth-century thinkers to imagine everything in terms of evolution. It used to be supposed that Late Latin somehow ‘evolved’ into Italian or French, just as we could suppose various half-ape creatures ‘evolved’ into human beings, and – much, much later in history – the scattered provinces, city states and kingdoms of Italy ‘evolved’ into modern, united Italy.
Dante believed himself to be the first to write about ‘the eloquence of the vernacular’; and if that is the case7 we must assume he is a vital witness in any account given of the state of European languages during his lifetime. Rather than distinguishing between ‘Italian’ and ‘Latin’, he distinguishes between what he calls vernacular and what the Romans had called grammatica. The first is the spoken language you learn as a baby, ‘without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses’ [DVE I.i.3, Steven Botterill’s translation]. The second is what was learnt at school.
Dante goes on to make the point – obvious to his contemporaries, but much less obvious to us, who regard literacy as a norm – that the great majority of human beings never acquire any knowledge of this grammatica. This is an observation with much wider application than the simple statement that many people do not know, or did not know in his lifetime, the rudiments of Latin. ‘Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third, because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial’ [DVE I.i.4, Botterill].
To us in the twenty-first century, who know that there are many different ‘language’ families, this statement must seem fantastical. Even if we do not go as far afield as Africa or China for examples, we can point out that Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish, say, exist outside the range of the Indo-European ‘family’ of languages to which the Romance tongues belong. But for Dante, ‘totus orbis ipsa’ – the whole world – means in effect the world of Europe and the Mediterranean. And for our purposes, the important thing is not the extent to which Dante’s philological knowledge was im perfect, but how he saw the world of language in which he spoke and wrote.
As far as he was concerned, ‘mundus est patria’ [DVE I.vi.3], the whole world was his homeland. Language is a uniquely human thing – used by neither angels nor beasts. The first language-user was Adam, who spoke to God in Hebrew. This was the form taken by vernacular human speech until the building of the Tower of Babel, which means, etymologically speaking, the Tower of Confusion. Dante here is following theories of language and etymologies which were commonplace. St Augustine’s City of God (c.413–26) and Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologies were both books which would have given him this information.
Dante was writing at the end of a great revolution in the way that Europeans produced written texts.8 The broad consensus – with variations – among scholars of Romance languages is now along these lines. First, it is accepted as a general principle that within any monolingual culture, there is enormous range and difference of vocabulary, speech patterns and pronunciation. It is posited that, until the ninth century, Dante’s vision of a common vernacular (at least as far as the Romance languages are concerned) is roughly true. With the establishment of Charlemagne’s (742–814) court and school at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in the early ninth century, something different began to happen.
For the Germanic-speaking peoples, the differences between Latin and their own vernacular had always been clear-cut and obvious. Half a century and more after Charlemagne, King Alfred the Great of England (849–99), for example, ordered various translations of Latin works (Boethius, Orosius) into what he clearly recognized as English. Charlemagne was a German, and the chief architect of his renaissance in Latin studies was an Englishman, Alcuin. It was Alcuin and his followers who decided to standardize Latin and above all to standardize its pronunciation. Alcuin felt that he was getting back to the ‘correct’ way of pronouncing Latin. In Germanic-speaking regions – England, and the areas covered by modern Belgium, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Scandinavia – the renovatio as they called it, was designed to help speakers who knew that Latin was not their own language. Yes, when they saw the word Hodie, they said Hiute, modern Heute (‘today’); when they saw the word Papa, they said Babest, modern Papst (‘Pope’); but the detachment, so to say, between what they read and what they said was now more than one of mere pronunciation. The morphological and grammatical structures of the Germanic tongues had long been detached from Latin, and their vocabulary alone proclaimed them separate languages. Germanic-speakers knew that when they spoke their vernacular they were not speaking a variant of Latin.
But Romance-speakers had no such ‘knowledge’. Indeed, it would have been correct for them to think they were not speaking a language which was any more morphologically distinct from written Latin than, say, the street-language of the Bronx is from Standard English. They thought of Latin as merely a written or ‘grammatical’ version of the language spoken by the illiterate farmer driving his goats through the vineyard near Arezzo, or the woman embroidering a shirt in Córdoba, or the philosopher ordering his meal (as opposed to writing his books) in Marseilles. You have to call back a time when Latin was the universal language for all administrative purposes, as it would continue to be until at least the seventeenth century. Latin was the language of the law. Latin, to a large degree, was the language of trade and commerce. It was not simply the language, as it might appear to a modern person relying upon guesswork, of the liturgy and a few scholars. It was truly a lingua franca. There inevitably developed situations in which Northern Europeans, who had been trained to pronounce Latin in the new Carolingian manner, saw the differences and discrepancies between the written Latin and the spoken Romance tongue. When they came into regions of Europe where the vernacular was some variety of the Romance tongue, how were they to pronounce that? It was then that there developed what has been called the scripta, the written version of Romance languages. The earliest examples of this occurred in France and Provence. Here we find scribes being trained into a new attempt to write down the way they spoke, rather as a modern phrasebook might print an attempted phonetic transcription of any given language, not in the internationally agreed phonetic alphabet, but in the orthography and spelling of the native speaker.
Scholars remain divided over the question as to whether these different scripta in the Middle Ages constitute different languages – or indeed what a different language might be. For example, when scribes in the Iberian Peninsula began to follow different conventions of writing and spelling, did this mean that one scribe was writing in ‘Spanish’ and the other in ‘Portuguese’? Some have gone so far as to suggest that these early texts helped actually to create new Romance languages.9
Roger Wright, one of the pioneers of this way of looking at the origins of Romance languages, has put it eloquently:
If Modern French audiences have pr
oblems in understanding the language of a play by Molière, or English audiences a play by Shakespeare, this is because the texts concerned were written in an earlier stage of French or English, rather than being in a different language altogether… The writers in the latter half of the eighth century were still able to write new texts in the traditional spelling system – Saints’ Lives in particular – without provoking general problems of lack of comprehension when these were read aloud to their audiences. There are difficulties in understanding Molière now, but there is no such problem in understanding Simenon, even though they both, on the whole, wrote French according to the same rules. They were using the same language, but at different times. From Molière to Simenon there is roughly speaking the same time difference as there was between the Vulgate [Bible] and the eighth-century hagiographers. The analogy suggests that texts elaborated in the fourth century might have led to some problems of comprehension when they were read aloud in the year 767, but that does not mean in itself that a Vita written the year before would offer the same problems. And here too there is no reason not to regard the works concerned as being written in the same language as each other. It took the new ‘scripta’ in my view to catalyse the final conceptual break.10
To follow this view is to see that the first awareness of the change which had come upon European languages began in the Iberian Peninsula, and is to be found in two manuscripts in which texts written several centuries before are glossed in what is recognizably ur-Spanish, not Latin. But if this self-conscious realization was dawning on a small number of scribes in La Rioja, it by no means followed that the majority of Spaniards in the eleventh century thought they were speaking ‘Spanish’. Indeed, among the illiterate population, such a distinction is totally unnecessary. Even into our own day, in the traditions of dialect and regional variation, groups of speakers would see themselves as speaking, let us say, ‘Yorkshire’; but if questioned further, no one, even if illiterate, would think this was not speaking English. Likewise, Dante at the beginning of the fourteenth century saw a multiplicity of scripta, of written evidences for dialectal variation within vernacular Romance. But he did not necessarily see this as evidence for the existence of separate languages called French, Provençal or Italian – the three languages which concern us most in a study of his life, apart from that written, grammatical language of which he was also a master – but which he did not consider a different language either, though subsequent philologists would do so: namely, Latin.
