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Dante's Unconscious Mental Life. Memories and Impressions from His Childhood. Alice Sperber.
The History of the Miner of Falun, especially by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Richard Wagner, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. E. F. Lorenz.
Dante's Unconscious Mental Life.—This study is an attempt to supplement the knowledge of the poet obtained from external sources by that which can be learned psychoanalytically from his works. It is based upon the assumption that a man's fate in love is in part conditioned by childhood experiences. Dante's love to Beatrice is the first subject of investigation. He tells us in the Vita Nuova that he first saw her when he was at the end, she at the beginning of the ninth year. The passionate yet self-denying love which he felt for her continued beyond her death, which occurred when she was about twenty-five, and throughout his own life. Whether he relates trivial details concerning her or important events, his feeling toward her is that toward a perfect ideal, an angel in human form dispensing blessings upon all about her and before whom pride and anger disappear. Dante hides from her his adoration, his happiness consisting merely in honoring her. He seeks consolation upon her death at the hands of another woman but Beatrice's love conquers and he gives the promise of the honor he will do her in his later work, the Divine Comedy.
Sperber is not concerned with the question of the historical identity of Beatrice or the actual facts of her life. Her interest is rather in the hold that the thought of Beatrice had in Dante's soul and his lifelong desire to honor her. Dante's own criticism of expression of his later feeling toward the Vita Nuova, that he was ashamed of the book, quoted by Boccaccio, might be taken as the admission by so reserved a man as he was that he had revealed too much of himself in it, that he
had set before the world the dearest and tenderest feelings of his earlier days. On the other hand, the personal factor in the Vit