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INTRODUCTION
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
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 mediaeval 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 which may have been written and made known some
time before he began work on their Commentary. Death stayed his hand,
and the completion passed into a song that joined the voice of Dante
to the praise in heaven.
H.M.
_April_ 1887. _
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