And ye have seen desiring without fruit,
Those whose desire would have been quieted
Which evermore is given them for a grief.
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato
And many others."[151]
Whether at the time when the poems of the _Vita Nuova_ were written the
Lady who withdrew him for a while From Beatrice was (which we doubt) a
person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose
narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings
will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to
look out of, he intended to imply that she personified Speculation, a
word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as _looking
for_, sometimes as seeing (like Shakespeare's
"There is no speculation in those eyes"),
sometimes as _intuition_, or the beholding all things in God, who is the
cause of all. This is so obvious, and the image in this sense so
familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked.
It is plain that, even when the _Vita Nuova_ was written, the Lady was
already Philosophy, but philosophy applied to a lower range of thought,
not yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who seduced him was the
science which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects,
instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the First Cause;
she was the Philosophy which looks for happiness in the visible world (of
shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) world.
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