Among My Books, Second Series | Page 3

of his pupil. Of the order of
Dante's studies nothing can be certainly affirmed. His biographers send
him to Bologna, Padua, Paris, Naples, and even Oxford. All are
doubtful, Paris and Oxford most of all, and the dates utterly
undeterminable. Yet all are possible, nay, perhaps probable. Bologna
and Padua we should be inclined to place before his exile; Paris and
Oxford, if at all, after it. If no argument in favor of Paris is to be drawn
from his _Pape Satan_[13] and the corresponding _paix, paix, Sathan,_

in the autobiography of Cellini, nor from the very definite allusion to
Doctor Siger,[14] we may yet infer from some passages in the
Commedia that his wanderings had extended even farther;[15] for it
would not be hard to show that his comparisons and illustrations from
outward things are almost invariably drawn from actual eyesight. As to
the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he went through the
trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic,
music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course.
To these he afterward added painting (or at least drawing,--_designavo
un angelo sopra certe tavolette_),[16] theology, and medicine. He is
said to have been the pupil of Cimabue, and was certainly the friend of
Giotto, the designs for some of whose frescos at Assisi and elsewhere
have been wrongly attributed to him, though we may safely believe in
his helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his love of music, the
episode of Casella were enough, even without Boccaccio's testimony.
The range of Dante's study and acquirement would be encyclopedic in
any age, but at that time it was literally possible to master the omne
scibile, and he seems to have accomplished it. How lofty his theory of
science was, is plain from this passage in the _Convito_: "He is not to
be called a true lover of wisdom (_filosofo_) who loves it for the sake
of gain, as do lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen (_li
religiosi_), who study, not in order to know, but to acquire riches or
advancement, and who would not persevere in study should you give
them what they desire to gain by it.... And it may be said that (as true
friendship between men consists in each wholly loving the other) the
true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part of
the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and allows no
one of his thoughts to wander to other things."[17] The Convito gives
us a glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle (whom he calls the
philosopher, the master) cited seventy-six times; Cicero, eighteen;
Albertus Magnus, seven; Boethius, six; Plato (at second-hand), four;
Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid, three each;
Virgil, Juvenal, Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each; and Algazzali,
Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and Homer (at second-hand), once.
Of Greek he seems to have understood little; of Hebrew and Arabic, a
few words. But it was not only in the closet and from books that Dante
received his education. He acquired, perhaps, the better part of it in the

streets of Florence, and later, in those homeless wanderings which led
him (as he says) wherever the Italian tongue was spoken. His were the
only open eyes of that century, and, as nothing escaped them, so there
is nothing that was not photographed upon his sensitive brain, to be
afterward fixed forever in the Commedia. What Florence was during
his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs and Ghibellines, its nobles
and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, "all
parties loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her," as Voltaire
says, it would be beyond our province to tell even if we could.
Foreshortened as events are when we look back on them across so
many ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching the eye, while
the spaces of peace between sink out of the view of history, a whole
century seems like a mere wild chaos. Yet during a couple of such
centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got built; Cimabue,
Giotto, Arnolfo, the Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti gave the impulse
to modern art, or brought it in some of its branches to its culminating
point; modern literature took its rise; commerce became a science, and
the middle class came into being. It was a time of fierce passions and
sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts. It found
Dante, shaped him by every experience that life is capable of,--rank,
ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence,
despair,--until he became endowed with a sense of the nothingness of
this world's goods possible only to the rich, and a knowledge of man
possible only to the poor. The few well-ascertained facts of Dante's life
may