Toynbee Paget Jackson - Dante Alighieri, his life and works

DANTE ALIGHIERI

His Life and Works

BRONZE BUST OF DANTE
In the possession of Whitworth Wallis, Esq., Birmingham

His Life and Works

Paget Toynbee

Introduction by

Robert Hollander

Dover Publications, Inc.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Introduction copyright 2005 by Robert Hollander

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2005, is an augmented republication of the 1910 Revised and Considerably Enlarged fourth edition of the work originally published by Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, in 1900. Robert Hollander has written a new Introduction specially for the Dover edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Toynbee, Paget Jackson, 18551932.

Dante Alighieri : his life and works / Paget Toynbee ; introduction by Robert Hollander.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : Methuen, 1900.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 13: 978-0-4861-46423

1. Dante Alighieri, 12651321. 2. Authors, ItalianTo 1500 Biography I. Title.

PQ 4335.T7 2005
851'.1 dc22
[B]

2005045176

Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Robert Hollander

I N the first twenty years of the last century, Paget Jackson Toynbee (18551932) made a lasting mark on Dante studies. (His main contributions will be mentioned below.) This book, published as a short monograph in 1899 (with less detailed descriptions of the works being the most notable difference with respect to the present volume), was much revised in the fourth edition of 1910 (the third edition had already been paid the rareat that timecompliment, for a book about Dante, of an Italian translation).

What distinguishes Toynbees work is its meticulous attention to detail, bringing a gift for clear-headed analysis into play in an attempt to get the life and works right, since both are surrounded by uncertainty that results from the near-total absence of any corroborating record for the facts about Dante and his work that have come down to us. It is also distinguished by a judicious turn of mind in dealing with most of these thorny problems (some nearly inevitable, given that uncertainty).

We want to remember (as Toynbee himself demonstrates in his later volume Dante in English Literature) that, until the Romantic era, with the imposing exception of Chaucer, rarely were English poets excited to the level of imitation by Dantes great poem, as were, to name but two, Byron and Shelley. Thus Toynbees enthusiasm is part of a second British Dante moment, this one centered in Oxford (where both he and Edward Moore taught) and involving literary critics more than poets. The most important of these figures was the first of them, Moore (18351916), one of the great textual editors of the Comedy, his work used and admired even by Italian scholars, who did not hesitate to employ the texts that he edited as the new standard. In addition, and among his other contributions, were his Studies in Dante, collected in four volumes, useful even today. A great scholar himself, Toynbee, who collaborated with Moore on the collection of Dantes works known as The Oxford Dante (1924), frequently acknowledges his debt to Moore in the footnotes at the bottom of these pages. Another brilliant Dantean presence on the scene was that of Philip Wicksteed (18441927), a clergyman, a prolific student of economics, and a man who raised an amateurs interest in the Italian poet to the highest levels of scholarship, as is evident, for instance, in his Dante and Aquinas (1913). A sometime collaborator of Wicksteed was the much younger Edmund Gardner (18691935), whose two important book-length contributions are Dantes Ten Heavens (1898) and Dante and the Mystics (1913). These four men were the flower of this period in English Dante studies, but several other scholars also contributed to making this time extraordinary for Dante studies in Great Britain.

Toynbees own other major contributions include A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (1898; second edition, Charles Singleton, 1968); Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary (1909), an effort to gather every instance of the occurrence of references to Dante in English literature up to 1840; important articles collected in Dante Studies and Researches (1902) and Dante Studies (1921); and at that point the best critical edition of Dantes letters (1920). It is a record of accomplishment in Dante studies that is difficult to match.

This particular book was the first of its kind and obviously filled a need; it is a concise, straightforward presentation of Dantes life and works written for the general reader but useful for the specialist as well. One is impressed, reading through it, at how it has not become dated in a field of study in which the essential bibliography changes in major respects every quarter century. Only one present issue concerning the Dantean canon is not broached here, the question of the attribution of Il fiore and Il Detto damore, a question that divides its contemporary students but was not even an issue in Toynbees day; indeed, the first editions of Dantes complete works containing these two extended poetic exercises saw the light of day only after the First World War. Toynbees judgments hold up remarkably well, even his hedging on the date of composition of the Monarchia (while leaving the question open, he decidedly prefers a date sometime between 1310 and 1313, while most contemporary students of the problem, after Pier Giorgio Riccis intervention in his edition [1965], date it later, and no earlier than 1317). A century and more after he decided to dedicate himself to this task, forty years after Charles Singleton republished the then out-of-print text (1965), this book remains one of the best guides to someone trying to find an orientation in the world that Dante manufactured.

Hopewell, New Jersey
31 December 2004

T HIS little book lays no claim to originality, and makes no pretence to learning or research. It is addressed rather to the so-called general reader than to the serious Dante student. The narrative is taken largely from the pages of Villani, Boccaccio, and from other similar sources. The reader will find fiction (at any rate from the critics point of view) as well as fact in these pages, but he will, I hope, be at no loss to distinguish between the two. The legends and traditions which hang around the name of a great personality are a not unimportant element in his biography, and may sometimes serve to place him as well as, if not better than, the more sober estimates of the serious historian. I have not, therefore, thought it outside the scope of this sketch of Dantes life to include some of the anecdotes which at an early date began to be associated with his name, though certain of them demonstrably belong to a far earlier period.

Again, when a thing has been well said by a previous writer, I have been content to let him speak, instead of saying the same thing less well in my own words.

The translations for the most part are my own. I have, however, been indebted for an occasional turn or phrase to Selfe and Wicksteeds Selections from Villani, and to the latters versions of the Early Lives of Dante.

The illustrations are reproduced, by permission, from photographs by Messrs. Alinari and Messrs. Brogi of Florence.