The Banquet

The Banquet (Il Convito)

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Title: The Banquet (Il Convito)
Author: Dante Alighieri
Release Date: July 9, 2004 [EBook #12867]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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IL CONVITO
THE BANQUET
OF
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Translated By
Elizabeth Price Sayer
With An Introduction By Henry Morely LL.D., Professor Of English
Literature At University College, London

1887

INTRODUCTION.
This translation of Dante's Convito--the first in English--is from the
hand of a lady whose enthusiasm for the genius of Dante has made it a
chief pleasure of her life to dwell on it by translating, not his Divine
Comedy only, but also the whole body of his other works. Among
those works the Vita Nuova and the Convito have a distinct place, as
leading up to the great masterpiece. In the New Life, Man starts on his
career with human love that points to the divine. In the Banquet, he
passes to mature life and to love of knowledge that declares the power
and the love of God in the material and moral world about us and
within us. In the Divine Comedy, the Poet passes to the world to come,
and rises to the final union of the love for Beatrice, the beatifier, with
the glory of the Love of God. Of this great series, the crowning work
has, of course, had many translators, and there have been translators
also of the book that shows the youth of love. But the noble fragment
of the Convito that unites these two has, I believe, never yet been
placed within reach of the English reader, except by a translation of its
poems only into unrhymed measure in Mr. Charles Lyell's "Poems of
the Vita Nuova and the Convito," published in 1835.
The Convito is a fragment. There are four books where fifteen were
designed, including three only of the intended fourteen songs. But the
plan is clear, and one or two glances forward to the matter of the last
book, which would have had Justice for its theme, show that all was to
have been brought to a high spiritual close.
Its aim was no less than the lifting of men's minds by knowledge of the
world without them and within them, bound together in creation,
showing forth the Mind of the Creator. The reader of this volume must
not flinch from the ingenious dialectics of the mediæval reasoner on
Man and Nature. Dante's knowledge is the knowledge of his time.
Science had made little advance since Aristotle--who is "the
Philosopher" taken by Dante for his human guide--first laid its
foundations. It is useful, no doubt, to be able in a book like this, shaped
by a noble mind, to study at their best the forms of reasoning that made
the science of the Middle Ages. But the reader is not called upon to
make his mind unhappy with endeavours to seize all the points, say, of

a theory of the heavens that was most ingenious, but in no part true.
The main thing is to observe how the mistaken reasoning joins each of
the seven sciences to one of the seven heavens, and here as everywhere
joins earth to heaven, and bids man lift his head and look up, Godward,
to the source of light. If spiritual truth could only come from right and
perfect knowledge, this would have been a world of dead souls from
the first till now; for future centuries, in looking back at us, will wonder
at the little faulty knowledge that we think so much. But let the known
be what it may, the true soul rises from it to a sense of the divine
mysteries of Wisdom and of Love. Dante's knowledge may be full of
ignorance, and so is ours. But he fills it as he can with the Spirit of God.
He is not content that men should be as sheep, and look downward to
earth for all the food they need. He bids them to a Banquet of another
kind, whose dishes are of knowledge for the mind and heavenward
aspiration for the soul.
Dante's Convito--of which the name was, no doubt, suggested by the
Banquets of Plato and Xenophon--was written at the close of his life,
after the Divine Comedy, and no trace has been found of more of its
songs than the three