ions of the less highly endowed men who surround it, so Dante
moulded out of the love passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita
Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is fact; whether a real
woman whom he called Beatrice ever existed; some of those praiseworthy
persons, who prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its poor
fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of their laboratory, have
gravely doubted. But such doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of
the "Vita Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere romance
heroine, the real meaning and value of the book does not change in our
eyes; since, to concoct such a tale, Dante must have had a number of
real experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent; and to conceive
and create such a figure as Beatrice, and such a passion as she inspires
her poet, he must have felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a
lady, the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the soul, and of
the soul's movements and actions, this "Vita Nuova;" so why should it
matter if that which could never exist save in the spirit, should have
been but the spirit's creation? It is, in its very intensity, a vision
of love; what if it be a vision merely conceived and never realized?
Hence the futility of all those who wish to destroy our faith and
pleasure by saying "all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what
did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this as it may, the "Vita
Nuova," thank heaven, exists; and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to
our feelings. The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said
Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather itself into a
human shape; and a real being has been surrounded by the halo of
perfection emanated from the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory
have suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a distance; the
woman whom, as a child, the poet, himself a child, had already looked at
with the strange, ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in our
childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening of the "Vita Nuova;"
to put aside this narrative of childish love together with the pathetic
little pedantries of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses to
each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the recurrence and
combination of the number nine (and that curious little bit of
encyclopaedic display about the Syrian month _Tismin_) as so much pretty
local colo