THE TRIUMVIRATE.
Chivalrous Poetry--Ideal of Chivalrous Love--Bolognese
Erudition--New Meaning given to the Ideal--Metaphysics of the
Florentine School of Lyrists--Guido Cavalcanti--Philosophical
Poems--Popular Songs--Cino of Pistoja--Dante's _Vita
Nuova_--Beatrice in the _Convito_ and the _Paradiso_--The
Preparation for the _Divine Comedy_ in
Literature--Allegory--The _Divine Comedy_--Petrarch's Position
in Life--His Conception of Humanism--Conception of Italy--His
Treatment of Chivalrous Love--Beatrice and Laura--The
_Canzoniere_--Boccaccio, the Florentine Bourgeois--His Point
of View--His Abandonment of the Chivalrous Standpoint--His
Devotion to Art--Anticipates the Renaissance--The
_Decameron_--_Commedia Umana_--Precursors of
Boccaccio--Novels--_Carmina Vagorum_--Plan of the Book--Its
Moral Character--The _Visione Amorosa_--Boccaccio's
Descriptions--The _Teseide_--The _Rime_--The _Filocopo_--The
_Filostrato_--The _Ameto_, _Fiammetta_, _Ninfale_,
_Corbaccio_--Prose before Boccaccio--_Fioretti di San
Francesco_ and _Decameron_ compared--Influence of Boccaccio
over the Prose Style of the Renaissance--His Death--Close of
the Fourteenth Century--Sacchetti's Lament.
The Sicilians followed closely in the track of the Provencal poets.
After, or contemporaneously with them, the same Italo-Provencal
literature was cultivated in the cities of central Italy. The
subject-matter of this imitative poetry was love--but love that bore a
peculiar relation to ordinary human feeling. Woman was regarded as an
ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration. The
lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy, from his
enthusiastic passion. Honor, justice, courage, self-sacrifice, contempt
of worldly goods, flowed from that one sentiment; and love united two
wills in a single ecstasy. Love was the consummation of spiritual
felicity, which surpassed all other modes of happiness in its beatitude.
Thus Bernard de Ventadour and Jacopo da Lentino were ready to forego
Paradise unless they might behold their lady's face before the throne of
God. For a certain period in modern history, this mysticism of the
amorous emotion was no affectation. It formulated a genuine impulse of
manly hearts, inflamed by beauty, and touched with the sense of moral
superiority in woman, perfected through weakness and demanding physical
protection. By bringing the cruder passions into accord with gentle
manners and unselfish aspirations, it served to temper the rudeness of
primitive society; and no little of its attraction was due to the
conviction that only refined natures could experience it. This new
aspect of love was due to chivalry, to Christianity, to the Teutonic
reverence for women, in which religious awe seems to have blended with
the service of the weaker by the stronger.
Sincere and beautiful as the ideal of chivalrous love may have been, it
speedily degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism,
existed, even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration
than a reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the
imagination of the people. For the Italo-Provencal poets that code of
love was almost wholly formal. They found it ready made. They used it
because the culture of a Court, in sympathy with feudal Europe, left
them no other choice. Not Arthur, but the Virgilian AEneas, was still the
Italian hero; and instead of S. Louis, the nations of the South could
only boast of a crusading Frederick II. Frederick the troubadour was a
no less anomalous being than Frederick the crusader. He conformed to
contemporary fashion, but his spirit ran counter to the age. Curiosity,
incipient humanism, audacious doubt, the toleration which inclined him
to fraternize with Saracens and seek the learning of the Arabs, placed
him outside the sphere of thirteenth century conceptions. His expedition
to the East appears a mere parade excursion, hypocritical, political,
ironical. In like manner his love-poetry and that of his courtiers rings
hollow in our ears.
It harmonized with the Italian genius, when Guido Guinicelli treated
chivalrous love from the standpoint of Bolognese learning. He altered
none of the forms; he used the conventional phraseology. But he infused
a new spirit into the subject-matter. His poetry ceased to be formal;
the phrases were no longer verbiage. The epicureanism of Frederick's
life clashed with the mystic exaltation of knighthood. There was no
discord between Guido's scientific habit of mind and his expression of a
philosophical idea conveyed in terms of amorous enthusiasm. Upon his
lips the words:
Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore,
Come l'augello in selva alla verdura;
Ne fe' Amore anti che gentil core,
Ne gentil cor anti che Amor, Natura:
acquire reality--not the reality of passion, but of sincere thought.
They do not convey the spontaneity of feeling, but a philosopher's
contemplation of love and beauty in their influence on human character.
Guido's mood might be compared with that of the Greek sage, when he
exclaimed that neither the morning nor the evening star is so wonderful
as Justice, or when he thus apostrophized Virtue:
Virtue, to men thou bringest care and toil;
Yet art thou life's best, fairest spoil!
O virgin goddess, for thy beauty's sake
To die is delicate in this our Greece,
Or to endure of pain the stern, strong ache.
For the chivalrous races, Love had been an enthusiastic ideal. For the
Italo-Provencal euphuists it supplied an artificial inspiration. At
Bologna it became the form of transcendental science; and here the
Italian intellect touched, by accident or instinct, the same note that
had been struck by Plato in the "Phaedrus" and "Symposium."
A public trained in legal and scholastic studies, whose mental furniture
was drawn from S. Thomas and Accursius, hailed their poet in Guido
Guinicelli. For them it was natural that poetry should veil philosophy
with verse; that love should be confounded with the movement of the soul
toward truth; that beauty should be treated as the manifestation of a
spiritual good. Dante in his Canzone, _Donne ch'avete intelletto
d'amore_, appeals, not to emotion, but to intelligence. He tells us that
_understanding_ was the ancient name of _love_, and describes the effect
of passion in a young man's heart as a revelation raising him above the
level of common experience. Thus the transmutation of the simpler
elements of the chivalrous code into philosophical doctrine, where the
form of the worshiped lady transcends the sphere of sense, and her
spirit is identified with the lover's deepest thought and loftiest
aspiration, was sincere in medieval Florence. The Tuscan intellect was
too virile and sternly strung to be satisfied with amorous rhymes. The
contemporary theory of aesthetics demanded allegory, and imposed upon the
poet erudition; nor was it easy for the singer of that epoch to command
his own immediate emotions, or to use them for the purposes of a direct
and plastic art. Enjoying neither the freedom of the Greek nor the
disengagement of the modern spirit, he found it more proper to clothe a
scientific content with the veil of passion, than to paint the
personality of the woman he loved with natural precision. Between the
mysticism of a sublime but visionary adoration on the one side, and the
sensualities of vulgar appetite or the decencies of married life on the
other, there lay for him no intermediate artistic region. He understood
the love of the imagination and the love of the senses; but the love of
the heart, familiar to the Northern races, hardly existed for him.
And here it may be parenthetically noticed that the Italians, in the
middle ages, created no feminine ideal analogous to Gudrun or
Chriemhild, Iseult or Guinevere. When they left the high region of
symbolism, they descended almost without modulation to the prose of
common life. Thus the Selvaggia of Cino, the Beatrice of Dante, the
Laura of Petrarch, made way for the Fiammetta of Boccaccio and the women
of the Decameron, when that ecstasy of earlier enthusiasm exhausted. For
a while, however, the Florentines were well prepared to give an
intellectual significance, and with it a new life, to the outworn
conventions of the Italo-Provencal lyrists. Nor must it be thought that
the emotions thus philosophized were unreal. Dante loved Beatrice,
though she became for him an allegory. The splendid vision of her beauty
and goodness attended him through life, assuming the guidance of his
soul in all its stages. Difficult as it may be to comprehend this
blending of the real and transcendental, we must grasp it if we desire
to penetrate the spirit of the fourteenth century in Italy.
The human heart remains unchanged. No metaphysical sophistication, no
allegory, no scholastic mysticism, can destroy the spontaneity of
instinct in a man who loves, or cloud a poet's vision. Love does not
cease to be love because it is sublimed to the quintessence of a
self-denying passion. It still retains its life in feeling, and its root
in sense. Beauty does not cease to be beautiful because it has been
moralized and identified with the attraction that lifts men upward to
the sphere of the eternal truths. Nor is poetry extinguished because the
singer deems it his vocation to utter genuine thought, and scorns the
rhyming pastimes of the simple amorist. The Florentine school presents
us with a poetry which aimed at being philosophical, but which at the
same time vibrated with life and delineated moods of delicate emotion.
To effect a flawless fusion between these two strains in the new style,
was infinitely difficult; nor were the poets of that epoch equally
successful. Guido Cavalcanti, the leader of the group which culminates
in Dante, won his fame by verse that savors more of the dialectician
than the singer. Ranking science above poetry, he is said to have
disdained even Virgil. His odes are dryly scholastic--especially that
famous _Donna mi priega_, which contemporaries studied clause by clause,
and which, after two centuries, served Dino del Garbo for the text of a
metaphysical discourse.[62] At the same time, certain lyrics, composed
in a lighter mood by the same poet, have in them the essence of
spontaneous and natural inspiration. His Ballate were probably regarded
by himself and his friends as playthings, thrown off in idle moments to
distract a mind engaged in thorny speculations. Yet we find here the
first full blossom of genuine Italian verse. Their beauty is that of
popular song, starting flowerlike from the soil, and fragrant in its
first expansion beneath the sun of courtesy and culture. Nothing
remained, in this kind, for Boccaccio and Poliziano, but to echo the
Ballata of the country maidens, and to complete the welcome to the
May.[63]
Two currents of verse, the one rising from the senses, the other from
the brain, the one deriving force and fullness from the people, the
other nourished by the schools, flowed apart in Guido Cavalcanti's
poetry. They were combined into a single stream by Cino da Pistoja.[64]
Cino was a jurist of encyclopaedic erudition, as well as a sweet and
fluent singer.[65] His verses have the polish and something of the chill
of marble. His Selvaggia deserves a place with Beatrice and Laura. From
Cino Petrarch derived his mastery of limpid diction. In Cino the
artistic sense of the Italians awoke. He produced something distinct
both from the scientific style of Guido Guinicelli, and also from the
wilding song which Guido Cavalcanti's Ballate echoed. He seems to have
applied himself to the main object of polishing poetical diction, and
rendering expression at once musical and lucid.[66] Though his hold upon
ideas was not so firm as Cavalcanti's, nor his passion so intense, he
achieved a fusion of thought and feeling in an artistic whole of
sympathetic suavity. We instinctively compare his work with that of Mino
da Fiesole in bass-relief.
Dante was five years older than Cino. To him belongs the glory of having
effected the same fusion in a lyric poetry at once more comprehensive
and more lofty. Dante yields no point as a dialectician and subtle
thinker to Guido Cavalcanti. He surpasses Cino da Pistoja as an artist.
His passion and imagination are more fiery than Guido's. His tenderness
is deeper and more touching than Cino's. Even in those minor works with
which he preluded the Divine Comedy, Dante soars above all competition,
taking rank among the few poets born to represent an age and be the
everlasting teachers of the human soul. Yet even Dante, though knowing
that he was destined to eclipse both the Guidi, though claiming Love
alone for his inspirer, was not wholly free from the scholasticism of
his century. In the earlier lyrics of the _Vita Nuova_ and in the
Canzoni of the _Convito_, he allows his feeling to be over-weighted by
the scientific content. Between his emotion and our sympathy there
rises, now and again, the mist of metaphysic. While giving them intenser
meaning, he still plays upon the commonplaces of his predecessors. Thus
in the sonnet _Amor e 'l cor gentil son una cosa_ he rehandles
Guinicelli's theme; while the following stanza repeats the well-worn
doctrine that Love should be the union of beauty and of excellence[67]:
Che la belta che Amore in voi consente,
A virtu solamente
Formata fu dal suo decreto antico,
Contro lo qual fallate.
Io dico a voi che siete innamorate,
Che se beltate a voi
Fu data, e virtu a noi,
Ed a costui di due potere un fare,
Voi non dovreste amare,
Ma coprir quanto di belta vi e dato,
Poiche non e virtu, ch'era suo segno.
Dante's concessions to the mannerism of the school weigh as nothing in
the scales against the beauty and the truth of that most spiritual of
romances, to which the _Vita Nuova_ gives melodic utterance. Within the
compass of one little book is bound up all that Florence in the
thirteenth century contributed to the refinement of medieval manners,
together with all that the new school of poets had imagined of highest
in their philosophical conception. The harmony of life and science
attains completion in the real but idealized experience, which
transcends and combines both motives in a personality uniquely
constituted for this blending. It is enough for the young Dante to meet
Beatrice, to pass her among her maidens in the city-ways, to receive her
salute, to admire her moving through the many-colored crowd, to meditate
upon her apparition, as of one of God's angels, in the solitude of his
chamber. She is a dream, a vision. But it is the dream of his existence,
the vision that unfolds for him the universe--more actual, more steeped
in emotion, more stimulative of sublime aspiration and virile purpose
than many loves which find fruition in long years of intercourse. We
feel that the man's true self has been revealed to him; that he has
given his life-blood to the ideal which, without this nourishment, would
have ranked among phantoms, but is now reality. Students who have not
followed the stages through which the doctrine of chivalrous love
reached Dante, and the process whereby it was transmuted into science
for the guidance of the soul, will regard the records of the _Vita
Nuova_ as shadowy or sentimental. Or if they only dwell upon the
philosophical aspect of Dante's work, if they do not make allowance for
the natural stirring of a heart that throbbed with liveliest feeling,
they will fail to comprehend this book, at once so complex and so
simple. The point lies exactly in the fusion of two elements--in the
truth of the passion, the truth of the idealization, and the spontaneity
of the artistic form combining them. What is most intelligible, because
most common to all phases of profound emotion, in the _Vita Nuova_, is
its grief--the poet's sympathy with Beatrice in the house of mourning
for her father's death, the vision of her own passage from earth to
heaven, and the apostrophe to the pilgrims who thread the city clothed
with mourning for her loss.[68] No one, reading these poems, will doubt
that, though Beatrice did but cross the path of Dante's life and shed
her brightness on it for a season from afar, the thought of her had
penetrated heart and fiber, making him a man new-born through love, and
striking in his soul a note that should resound through all his years,
through all the centuries which grow to understand him.
Dante was born in 1265 of poor but noble parents, who reconciled
themselves to the Guelf party. He first saw Beatrice in his ninth year;
and, when a man, he well remembered how her beauty dawned upon him.[69]
"Her dress, on that day, was of a most noble color, a subdued and goodly
crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very
tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life,
which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to
tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith;
and in trembling it said these words: _Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens
dominabitur mihi_." Beatrice died in 1290, and Dante closed the _Vita
Nuova_ with these words[70]: "It was given unto me to behold a very
wonderful vision; wherein I saw things which determined me that I would
say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could
discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labor all I
can; as she well knoweth. Wherefore if it be His pleasure through whom
is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it
is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before
been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto Him
who is the Master of Grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the
glory of its lady: to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gazeth
continually on His countenance _qui est per omnia saecula, benedictus.
Laus Deo_."
This passage was written possibly in Dante's twenty-eighth year. The
consecration of his younger manhood was the love of Beatrice. She made
him a poet. Through her came to him the "sweet new style," which shone
with purest luster in his verse; and the songs he made of Beatrice were
known through all the City of the Flower. Yet love had not absorbed his
energies. He studied under Brunetto Latini, and qualified himself for
the career of a Florentine citizen by entering the Guild of Speziali.
After Beatrice's death a great and numbing sorrow fell upon him. From
this eclipse he recovered by the help of reading, and also by the
distractions of public life. He fought in the battle of Campaldino, and
married his wife Gemma Donati. He went as ambassador to San Gemignano
in 1299; and in the year 1300, when Florence was divided by the parties
of Cerchi and Donati, he fulfilled the functions of the Priorate. These
ten years between Beatrice's death and Dante's election as Prior were a
period of hesitation and transition. He was no longer the poet of Divine
Love, inspired by spontaneous emotion, mastering and glorifying the form
which tradition imposed on verse. He had become a student of philosophy;
and this change makes itself felt in the more abstruse and abstract odes
of the _Convito_. Yet he was still attended, through those years of
study, civic engagements and domestic duties, by the vision of Beatrice.
This is how he speaks of science in the second part of the _Convito_:
"After some time my mind, which strove to regain strength, bethought
itself (since neither my own consolations nor those of friends availed
me aught) of having recourse to the method which had helped to comfort
other spirits in distress. I took to reading the book, not known to many
students, of Boethius, wherewith, unhappy and in exile, he had comforted
himself. And hearing also that Tully had written another book in which,
while treating of friendship, he had used words of consolation to Laelius
in the death of his friend Scipio, I read that also, and as it happens
that a man goes seeking silver, and far from his design finds gold,
which hidden causes yield him, not perchance without God's guidance, so
I who sought for consolation found not only comfort for my tears, but
also words of authors and of sciences and of books, weighing the which,
I judged well that philosophy, the lady of these authors, of these
sciences and of these books, was a thing supreme. And I imagined her in
fashion like a gentle lady, nor could I fancy her otherwise than
piteous; wherefore so truly did I gaze upon her with adoring eyes that
scarcely could I turn myself away. And having thus imagined her I began
to go where she displayed her very self, that is, in the schools of the
religious, and the disputations of philosophers; so that in short time,
about thirty months, I began so much to feel her sweetness that her love
chased away and destroyed all other thought in me."
Beatrice, who in her lifetime had been the revelation of beauty and all
good, lifting her lover above the region of sordid thoughts, and opening
a sphere of spiritual intelligence, now accompanied him through the
labyrinths of speculation. She was still the form, the essence, of all
he learned; and the vow which closes the _Vita Nuova_ had not been
forgotten.
Through the transition period, marked by the _Convito_, we are led to
the third stage of Dante's life--those twenty-one years, during which he
roamed in exile over Italy, and wrote the poem of medieval Christianity.
The studies of which the _Convito_ forms a fragment, and the political
career which ended in the embassy to Boniface, were both necessary for
the _Divine Comedy_. Had it not been for Dante's exile, the modern world
might have lacked its first and greatest epic; Beatrice might have
missed her promised apotheosis. As her hand had guided him through the
paths of love and the labyrinths of science, so now the brightness of
her glorified face lifted him from sphere to sphere of Paradise. By
gazing on her eyes, he rose through heaven, and stood with her before
the splendor of the Beatific Vision. To identify Beatrice with Theology
in this last stage of Dante's spiritual life is a facile but inadequate
expedient of criticism. From the earliest she had been for him the light
and guidance of his soul; and at the last he ascribed to her the best
and the sublimest of his inspirations.
Since its origin Italian poetry had pursued one line of evolution, first
following and then transmuting the traditions of Provence. In the
_Divine Comedy_ it took a new direction. Chivalry, insufficient for the
nation and ill-adapted to its temper, yielded to a motive force derived
from the religious sentiment. The Bible history, the Lives of the
Saints, and the doctrine of the Church concerning the future of mankind,
together with the emotions of piety, had hitherto received but partial
exposition at the hands of a few poets of the people. S. Francis struck
the keynote of popular Italian poetry in his _Cantico del Sole_, which
can be accepted as the first specimen of composition in the vulgar
tongue. Guittone of Arezzo, already mentioned as the earliest learned
poet who attempted to nationalize his style, acquired fame as the writer
of one sublime sonnet to Madonna and two Canzoni to the Mother and her
Son.[71] But the most decisive impulse toward religious poetry was given
by the Flagellants, who, starting from the Umbrian highlands in 1290,
diffused their peculiar devotion over Italy. I shall have occasion to
return in a future chapter to the history of this movement and to trace
its influence over popular Italian literature. It is enough, at present,
to have mentioned it among the forces tending toward religious poetry
upon the close of the thirteenth century.
The spirit of the epoch inclined to Allegory and Vision. When we
remember the prestige of Virgil in the middle ages, both as a
philosopher and also as the precursor of Christianity, it will be
understood how his descent into Hades fascinated the imagination, and
prepared the mind to accept the Vision as a proper form for conveying
theological doctrine.[72] The Journey of S. Brandan, the Purgatory of S.
Patrick, and the Visions of Tundalus and Alberic pretended to
communicate information concerning the soul's state after death, the
places of punishment, and the method of salvation. In course of time the
Vision was used for political or ecclesiastical purposes by preachers
who averred that they had seen the souls of eminent sinners in torment.
It became an engine of terrorism, assumed satiric tone, and finally fell
into the hands of didactic or merely fanciful poets.[73]
The chief preoccupation of the medieval mind was with the future destiny
of man. This life came to be regarded as a preparation for eternity.
Like a foreground, the actual world served to relieve the picture of the
world beyond the grave. Therefore popular literature abounded in manuals
of devotion and discipline, some of which set forth the history of the
soul in allegorical form. Among other examples may be cited three
stories of the spiritual life, corresponding to its three stages of
Nature, Purification, and Restoration, conveyed under the titles of
_Umano_, _Spoglia_, _Rinuova_. Many prelusions of this class were
combined in one religious drama called _Commedia dell'Anima_, the
substance of which is certainly old, though the form yields evidence of
sixteenth-century _rifacimento_.[74]
The object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show that the popular
intellect was well prepared for religious poetry, and had appropriated
the forms of Allegory and Vision. Not in order to depreciate the
originality of Dante, but to prove in how vital a relation he stood
toward his age, I have here insisted on those formless preludes to his
work of art. In the Epistle to Can Grande he thus explains the theme of
the _Commedia_: "The subject of the whole work, taken literally, is the
state of souls after death, regarded as fact; for the action deals with
this, and is about this. But if the work be taken allegorically, its
subject is man, in so far as by merit or demerit in the exercise of free
will he is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice." Attending
to the letter, we find in the _Commedia_ a vision of that life beyond
the tomb, in relation to which alone our life on earth has value. It
presents a picture of the everlasting destiny of souls, so firmly
apprehended and vividly imagined by the medieval fancy. But since this
picture has to set forth mysteries seen and heard by none, the
revelation itself, like S. John's Apocalypse, is conveyed in symbols
fashioned to adumbrate the truths perceived by faith. The same symbols
portray another reality, not apprehended merely by faith, but brought
home to the heart by experience. Attending to the allegory, we find in
the _Commedia_ a history of the soul in this life--an ethical analysis
of sin, purgation and salvation through grace. The poem is a narrative
of Dante's journey through the region into which all pass after death;
but at the same time it describes the hell and heaven and the transition
through repentance from sin to grace, which are the actual conditions of
the soul in this life. The _Inferno_ depicts unmitigated evil. The
_Paradiso_ exhibits goodness, absolute and free from stain. In the one
there is no relief, in the other no alloy; the one is darkness, the
other light. The intermediate region of the _Purgatorio_ is a realm of
expectation and conversion, where sin is no longer possible, but where
the fruition of goodness is delayed by the necessity of purification.
Here then are the natural alternations of day and night, the relative
twilight of a world where all is yet transition rather than
fulfillment. It may be observed that Purgatory belongs to the order of
things which by their nature pass away; while Hell and Heaven are both
eternal. Therefore the _Commedia_, considered as an apocalypse of the
undying soul, reveals absolute damnation and absolute salvation, both
states being destined to endure so long as God's justice and love exist;
but it also reveals a state of purifying pain, which ceases when the men
who need it have been numbered. Considered as an allegory of the
spiritual life on earth, it describes the process of escape from eternal
condemnation through grace into eternal happiness.
A theme so vast and all-embracing enabled Dante to inform the whole
knowledge of his epoch. The _Commedia_ is the poem of that scholastic
theology which absorbed every branch of science and brought the world
within the scope of one thought, God. As the _Summa_ of S. Thomas
combined philosophy and revelation, so Dante included both the Pagan and
Christian dispensations in his scheme. He starts from the wood of
terror, where men are assailed by the wild beasts of their passions; and
two guides lead him, by the light of knowledge, up to God. The one is
Virgil, the other Beatrice--Virgil, who stands for human reason,
science, the four cardinal virtues; Beatrice, who symbolizes divine
grace, faith formulated in theology, the virtues bestowed on man through
Christ for his salvation. Virgil cannot lead the poet beyond Purgatory;
because thus far only is human knowledge of avail to elevate and guide
the soul. Beatrice lifts him through the spheres of Paradise by
contemplation; because the highest summit attained by reason and natural
virtue is but the starting point of the true Christian's journey.
The _Commedia_ is thus the drama or the epos of the soul. It condenses
all that man has thought or done, can think or do; all that he knows
about the universe around him, all that he hopes or fears from the
future; his intuition of an incorruptible and ideal order, underlying
and controlling the phenomenal world. God, the world and man are brought
into one focus; and the interest of the poem is the relation of the
individual soul to them, the participation of each human personality in
the dramatic action. It need hardly be observed that Dante's solutions
of the problems which arise in the development of this theme, are
medieval. His physical science has been superseded. His theology is far
from approving itself to the general consciousness of Christians in our
age. Yet while all must recognize this obvious truth, the essence of the
_Commedia_ is indestructible because of its humanity, because of the
personality which animates it. Men change far less than the hypotheses
of religion and philosophy, which take form from experience as shadows
fly before the sun. However these may alter, man remains substantially
the same; and Dante penetrated human nature as few have done--was such a
man as few have been. The unity and permanence of his poem are in
himself. Never was a plan so vast and various permeated so completely
with a single self. At once creator and spectator of his vision,
neophyte and hierophant, arraigned and judge, he has not only seen hell
as the local prison-house of pain, but has felt it as the state of sin
within his heart. He has passed through purifying fires; and the songs
of Paradise have sounded by anticipation in his ears. Dante is both the
singer and the hero of his epic. In him the universal idea of mankind
becomes concrete. The continuous experience of this living person who is
at one and the same time a figure of each and every soul that ever
breathed, and also the real Dante Alighieri, exile from Florence without
blame, sustains as on one thread the medley of successive motives which
else might lack poetic unity, gives life to a scheme which else might be
too abstract. Expanding to embrace the universe, contracting to a point
within one breast, the _Commedia_ combines the general and the
particular in an individual commensurate with man.
It may be conjectured that Dante, obeying the scholastic impulse of his
age, started from the abstract or universal. Therein lay the reality of
things, not in the particular. What has been already quoted from the
letter to Can Grande justifies this supposition. He meant to lay bare
the scheme of the universe, as understood by medieval Christianity, and
viewed from the standpoint of the human agent. That scheme presented
itself in a series of propositions, a logic or a metaphysic apprehended
as truth. Each portion of the poem was mapped out with rigorous
accuracy. Each section illustrated a thought, an argument, a position.
The whole might be surveyed as a structure of connected syllogisms. To
this scientific articulation of its leading motives corresponds the
architectural symmetry, the simple outlines and severe masses of the
_Commedia_. The plan, however minute in detail, is comprehended at a
glance. The harmonies of the design are as geometrical as some colossal
church imagined by Bramante. But Dante had no intention of re-writing
the _Summa_ in verse. He meant to be a poet, using the vulgar speech of
"that low Italy" in the production of an epic which should rank on equal
terms with the _AEneid_, and be for modern Christendom what that had been
for sacred Rome. Furthermore he had it in his heart to yield such honor
to Virgil, "leader, lord, and master," as none had ever paid, and to
write concerning Beatrice "what had not before been written of any
woman." His poem was to be the storehouse of his personal experience.
His love and hatred, his admiration of greatness and his scorn for
cowardice, his resentment of injury, his gratitude for service rendered,
his political creed and critical opinions, the joy he had of nature, and
the pain he suffered when he walked with men: all this was to find
expression at right seasons and in seemly order. Upon the severe
framework of abstract truth, which forms the skeleton of the _Commedia_
and is the final end of its existence, Dante felt free to superimpose
materials of inexhaustible variety. Following the metaphor of building
more exactly, we may say that he employed these materials as the stones
whereby he brought his architectural design to view. The abstract
thought of the _Commedia_, tyrannous and all-controlling as it is, could
not lay claim to reality but for the dramatic episodes which present it
to the intellect through the imagination.
Some such clothing of abstractions with concrete images was intended in
the medieval theory of allegory. The Church proscribed the poets of
antiquity; and it had become an axiom that poetry was the art of
lies.[75] Poetry was hardly suffered to exist except as a veil to cloak
some hidden doctrine; and allegory presented a middle way of escape,
whereby the pleasure of art could be enjoyed with a safe conscience.
Virgil, whom the middle ages would not have relinquished, though a
General Council had condemned him, received the absolution of
allegorical interpretation. Dante, who defined poetry as the art "which
publishes the truth concealed beneath a veil of fable," frequently
interrupts the story to bid his readers note the meaning underneath the
figures of his verse. In composing the _Commedia_, he had moral
edification and scientific truth for his end. The dramatic, narrative,
descriptive, and lyrical beauties of his poem served to bring into
relief or to shroud in appropriate mystery--since allegory both
elucidates and obscures the matter it conveys--the doctrines he designed
to inculcate. Still Dante stood, as a poet, at a height so far above his
age and his own theories, that the cold and numbing touch of symbolism
rarely mars the interest of his work. We may, perhaps, feel a certain
confusion between the personalities of Virgil and Beatrice and the
thoughts they represent, which chills our sympathy, raising a feeling of
indignation when Virgil returns unwept to Hell, and removing Beatrice
into a world of intangible ideas. We may find the pageant at the close
of the "Purgatory" unattractive; nor will the sublimity of the
"Paradiso" save the figures by which spiritual meanings are here
suggested, from occasional grotesqueness. Thus much can be conceded.
Dante, though born to be the poet of all time, was still a scion of his
epoch. He could not altogether escape the influences of a misleading
conception. But, apart from allegory, apart from didactic purpose, the
_Commedia_ takes highest rank for the episodes, the action, the personal
interest which never flags. No poet ever had a finer sense of reality,
and none commanded the means of expressing it in all its forms more
fully. Dante's own theory of symbolism offered an illimitable sphere for
the exercise of his imagination, since it led him to give visible and
palpable shape to the thoughts of his brain. And here it may be noted
that the allegorical heresy proved less pernicious than another form of
false opinion based upon an ideal of classical purity might have been.
Since the poem was to present truth under a cloak of metaphor, it did
not signify what figures were used. The purpose they served, justified
them. Therefore Dante found himself at liberty to mingle satire with the
hymns of angels; to seek illustrations from vulgar life no less than
from nature in her sublimest moods; to delineate the horrible, the
painful, the grotesque, and the improbable with the same sincerity as
the beautiful, the charming, and the familiar. His dramatic faculty was
exercised on themes so varied that to classify them is impossible--on
the pathos of Francesca and the terror of Ugolino; the skirmish of the
fiends in Malebolge and the meeting of Statius with Virgil; the pride of
Farinata and the penitence of Manfred; the agonies of Adamo da Brescia
and the calm delights of Piccarda dei Donati. He tells the stories of
Ulysses and S. Francis, describes the flight of the Roman eagle and
Cacciaguida's manhood, with equal energy of brief but ineffaceably
impressive narration. This license inherent in the use of allegory
justified his classing the fameless folk of his own days with the heroes
of Biblical and classical antiquity, and permitted him to mingle ancient
history with his censure of contemporary politics. All times, ages,
countries, races of men are alike before the tribunal of God's justice.
Accordingly, the poet who had taken man's moral nature for his theme,
and was bound by his theory to present this theme symbolically, could
bring to view a multitude of concrete persons, arranged (whatever else
may issue from their converse with the protagonist) according to
gradations of merit or demerit. Thus the _Divine Comedy_, though written
with a didactic object and under the influence of allegory, surpasses
every other epic in the distinctness of its motives and the realism of
their presentation. The brief and pregnant style which scorns rhetorical
adornment, the accurate picture-painting which aims at vivid delineation
of the thing to be discerned, harmonize with its inflexible ethics, its
uncompromising sincerity, its intense human feeling.
The _Commedia_ is too widely commensurate with its theme, the Human
Soul, to be described or classified. The men of its era called it the
_Divine_; and this title it has preserved, in spite of the fierce
censures of the Church which it contains. They called it _La Divina_
because of its material doubtless, but also, we may dare to think,
because of its unfathomable depth and height and breadth of thought. In
course of time chairs were established at Florence, Padua, and in other
cities, for its explanation; and the labor of the commentator was
applied to it. That labor has been continued from Boccaccio's down to
our own day; yet the dark places of the _Commedia_ have not been
illuminated, nor is learning likely to solve some problems which perplex
a careful student of its cantos. That matters, indeed, but little; for
the main scope and purpose of the poem are plain, and its spirit is such
that none who read can fail to recognize it.
Before Dante the Christian world had no poet, and Italy had no voice.
The gift of Dante to Europe was an Epic on the one subject which united
the modern nations in community of interest. The gift of Dante to his
country was a masterpiece which placed her on a par with Homer's Hellas
and with Virgil's Rome. If the first century of Italian literature could
have produced three men of the caliber of Dante, Italy would have run
her future course, as she began, abreast with ancient Greece. That was
not, however, destined to be. The very conditions of the mission she had
to fulfill in the fourteenth and two following centuries, rendered the
emergence of a race of heroes impossible. Italy was about to recover the
past. Her energies could not be concentrated on the evolution of herself
in a new literature. To Dante succeeded Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Petrarch was born at Arezzo in the year 1304, when his father, like
Dante, and in the same cause, had been expelled from Florence. His
youth, passed partly in Tuscany and partly at Avignon, coincided with
the years spent by Dante in the composition of the _Commedia_. He was a
student at Montpellier, neglecting his law-books for Cicero and Virgil,
when Dante died at Ravenna in 1321. During those seventeen years of
Dante's exile and Petrarch's boyhood, a change had passed over the
political scene. The Papacy was transferred from Rome to France. The
last attempts of the German Emperors to vindicate their authority below
the Alps had failed. The Communes were yielding to anarchy and party
feuds, or fast becoming the prey of despots. A new age had begun; and of
this new age Petrarch was the representative, as Dante had been the poet
of the ages which had passed away. Petrarch's inauguration of the
classical Revival has been already described in this work; nor is it
necessary to repeat the services he rendered to the cause of
humanism.[76] In a volume dealing with Italian literature the poet of
the _Canzoniere_ must engage attention rather than the resuscitator of
antique learning. It is Petrarch's peculiar glory to have held two
equally illustrious places in the history of modern civilization, as the
final lyrist of chivalrous love and as the founder of the Renaissance.
Yet this double attitude, when we compare him with Dante, constitutes
the chief cause of his manifest inferiority.
The differences between Dante's and Petrarch's education were marked,
and tended to accentuate the divergence of their intellectual and moral
qualities. Dante, who lived until maturity within sight of his _bel San
Giovanni_, grew up a Florentine in core and fiber. In his earliest work,
the _Vita Nuova_, there is a home-bred purity of style, as of something
which could only have been perfected in Florence; a beauty akin to that
of Giotto's tower; a perfume as of some flower peculiar to a district
whence it will not bear transplanting. In his latest, the _Paradiso_, he
devotes one golden canto to the past prosperity of Florence, another to
her decadence through the corruption of her citizens. While wandering
like "the world's rejected guest" away from that fair city of his birth,
the unrest of his pilgrimage, contrasted with the peace of earlier
manhood, only strengthened the Florentine within him. Though he
traversed Italy in length and breadth, though the _Commedia_ furnishes
an epitome of her landscapes and her local customs, describes her cities
and resumes her history, the thought of national unity was not present
to his mind. Italy remained for him the garden of the empire, the unruly
colt whom Caesar should bestride and curb. Elsewhere than in Florence
Dante felt himself an alien. He refused the poet's crown unless it could
be taken by the font of baptism upon the square of Florence. He chose
banishment with honor and the stars of heaven, rather than ignominious
entrance through the gates he loved so well; and yet from the highest
sphere of Paradise he turned his eyes down to Florence and her erring
folk:
Io, ched era al divino dall'umano,
Ed all'eterno dal tempo venuto,
E di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano.
Petrarch, called to perform another mission, had a different training.
Brought up from earliest infancy in exile, transferred from Tuscany to
France, deprived of civic rights and disengaged from the duties of a
burgher in those troublous times, he surveyed the world from his study
and judged its affairs with the impartiality of a philosopher. Without a
city, without a home, without a family, consecrated to the priesthood
and absorbed in literary interests, he spent his life in musings at
Vaucluse or in the splendid hospitalities of the Lombard Courts. Through
all his wanderings he was a visitor, the citizen of no republic, but the
freeman of the City of the Spirit. Without exaggeration he might have
chosen for his motto the phrase of Marcus Aurelius: "I will not say dear
city of Cecrops but dear city of God!" Avignon, where his intellect was
formed in youth, had become through the residence of the Popes the
capital of Christendom, the only center of political and ecclesiastical
activity where an ideal of universal culture could arise. Itself in
exile, the Papacy still united the modern nations by a common bond; but
its banishment from Rome was the sign of a new epoch, when the hegemony
of civilization should be transferred from the Church to secular
control. In this way Petrarch was enabled to shape a conception of
humanism which left the middle age behind; and when his mind dwelt on
Italy at a distance, he could think of her as the great Italic land,
inheritor of Rome, mother of a people destined to be one, born to rule,
or if not rule, at least to regenerate the world through wisdom. From
his lips we hear of Florence nothing; but for the first time the
passionate cry of _Italia mia_ the appeal of an Italian who recognized
his race, yet had no local habitation on the sacred soil, vibrates in
his oratorical _canzoni_. Petrarch's dreams of a united Italy and a
resuscitated Roman republic were hardly less visionary than Dante's
ideal of universal monarchy with Rome for the seat of empire. Yet in his
lyrics the true conception of Italy, one intellectually in spite of
political discord and foreign oppression, the real and indestructible
unity of the nation in a spirit destined to control the future of the
human race, came suddenly to consciousness. There was an out-cry in
their passion-laden strophes which gathered volume as the years rolled
over Italy, until at last, in her final prostration beneath Spanish
Austria, they seemed less poems than authentic prophecies.
Thus while Dante remained a Florentine, Petrarch was the first Italian.
Nor is it insignificant that whereas Dante refused the poet's crown
unless he could place the laurels on his head in Florence, Petrarch
ascended the Capitol among the plaudits of the Romans, and, in the
absence of Pope and Emperor, received his wreath from the Senator
Romanus. Dante's renunciation and Petrarch's acceptance of this honor
were equally appropriate. Dante, as was fitting for a man of his era,
looked still to the Commune. Petrarch's coronation on the Capitol was
the outward sign that the age of the Communes was over, that culture was
destined to be cosmopolitan, and that the Eternal City, symbolizing the
imperishable empire of the intellect, was now the proper throne of men
marked out to sway the world by thoughts and written words.
In Petrarch the particular is superseded by the universal. The citizen
is sunk in the man. The political prejudices of the partisan are
conspicuous by absence. His language has lost all trace of dialect. He
writes Italian, special to no district, though Tuscan in its source; and
his verse fixes the standard of poetic diction for all time in Italy.
These changes mark an important stage in literature emerging from its
origins, and account for Petrarch's unequaled authority during the next
three centuries. Dante's Epic is classical because of its vivid humanity
and indestructible material; but its spirit is medieval and its details
are strictly localized. Petrarch's outlook over the world and life is,
in form at least, less confined to the limitations of his age.
Consequently the students of a period passing rapidly beyond the
medieval cycle of ideas, found no bar between his nature and their
sympathies.
In his treatment of chivalrous love we may notice this tendency to
generalization. The material transmitted from the troubadours, handled
with affectation by the Sicilians, philosophized by the Florentines,
loses transient and specific quality in the _Canzoniere_. It takes rank
at last among simply human emotions; and, though it has not lost a
certain medieval tincture, the _Canzoniere_ rather than the _Vita
Nuova_, the work of distinguished rather than of supreme genius, has on
this account been understood and appropriated by all lovers in all ages
and in every land. Petrarch's verses, to use Shelley's words, "are as
spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which
is the grief of love." And while we admit that "Dante understood the
secrets of love even more than Petrarch," there is no doubt that the
_Canzoniere_ strikes a note which vibrates more universally than the
_Vita Nuova_. The majority of men cannot but prefer the comprehensive to
the intense expression of personal emotion.
Death rendered Beatrice's apotheosis conceivable; and Dante may be said
to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby love is an initiation
into the secrets of the spiritual world. It was the intuition of a
sublime nature into the essence of pure impersonal enthusiasm. It was an
exaltation of womanhood similar to that attempted less adequately by
Shelley in _Epipsychidion_. It was a real instinct like that which
pervades the poetry of Michelangelo, and which sustains some men even in
our prosaic age. Still there remained an ineradicable unsubstantiality
in Dante's point of view, when tested by the common facts of feeling.
His idealism was too far removed from ordinary experience to take firm
hold upon the modern mind. In proportion as Beatrice personified
abstractions, she ceased to be a woman even for her lover; nor was it
possible, except by diminishing her individuality, to regard her as a
symbol of the universal. She passed from the sphere of the human into
the divine; and though her face was still beautiful, it was the face of
Science rather than of one we love. There was even too little alloy of
earth in Dante's passion for Beatrice.
Petrarch's love for Laura was of a different type. The unrest of earthly
desire, for ever thwarted but recurring with imperious persistence, and
the rebellion of the conscience against emotions which the lover
recognized as lawless, broke his peace. It is true that, using the
language of the earlier poets and obeying a sanguine mood of his own
mind, he from time to time spoke of Laura as of one who led his soul to
God. But his sincerest utterances reveal the discord of a heart divided
between duty and inclination, the melancholy of a man who knows himself
the prey of warring powers. His love for Laura seemed an error and a sin
because it clashed with an ascetic impulse which had never been
completely blunted. In his Hymn to the Virgin he referred to this
passion as the Medusa that had turned his better self to stone:
Medusa e l'error mio m'han fatto un sasso
D'umor van stillante.
There is a passage in the _De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, where the
lyrist of chivalrous love pours such contempt on women as his friend
Boccaccio might have envied. In the _Secretum_, again, he describes his
own emotion as a torment from which he had vainly striven to emancipate
himself by solitude, by journeys, by distractions, and by obstinate
studies. In truth, he rarely alludes to the great passion of his life
without a strange blending of tenderness and sore regret. Herein he
proved himself not only a true child of his age, but also the precursor
of the modern world. While he was still bound by the traditions of
medieval asceticism, a Christian no less devout and only less firm than
Dante, his senses and his imagination, stirred possibly by contact with
classic literature, rebelled against the mysticism of the Florentine
School. This rebellion, but dimly apprehended by the poet himself, and
complicated with the yearnings of a deeply religious nature after purity
of thought and deed, gave its supreme strength and beauty to his verse.
The _Canzoniere_ is not merely the poetry of love but the poetry of
conflict also. The men of the Renaissance overleaped the conflict, and
satisfied themselves with empty idealizations of sensual desire. But
modern men have returned to Petrarch's point of view and found an echo
of their own divided spirit in his poetry. He marks the transition from
a medieval to a modern mood, the passage from Cino and Guido to Werther
and Rousseau.
That Laura was a real woman, and that Petrarch's worship of her was
unfeigned; that he adored her with the senses and the heart as well as
with the head; but that this love was at the same time more a mood of
the imagination, a delicate disease, a cherished wound, to which he
constantly recurred as the most sensitive and lively wellspring of
poetic fancy, than a downright and impulsive passion, may be clearly
seen in the whole series of his poems and his autobiographical
confessions. Laura appears to have treated him with the courtesy of a
somewhat distant acquaintance, who was aware of his homage and was
flattered by it. But her lover enjoyed no privileges of intimacy, and it
may be questioned whether, if Petrarch could by any accident have made
her his own, the fruition of her love would not have been a serious
interruption to the happiness of his life. He first saw her in the
church of S. Claire, at Avignon, on April 6, 1327. She passed from this
world on April 6, 1348. These two dates are the two turning-points of
Petrarch's life. The interval of twenty-one years, when Laura trod the
earth, and her lover in all his wanderings paid his orisons to her at
morning, evening, and noonday, and passed his nights in dreams of that
fair form which never might be his, was the storm and stress period of
his checkered career. There is an old Greek proverb that "to desire the
impossible is a malady of the soul." With this malady in its most
incurable form the poet was stricken; and, instead of seeking cure, he
nursed his sickness and delighted in the discord of his spirit. From
that discord he wrought the harmonies of his sonnets and _canzoni_. That
malady made him the poet of all men who have found in their emotions a
dreamland more wonderful and pregnant with delight than in the world
which we call real. After Laura's death his love was tranquilized to a
sublimer music. The element of discord had passed out of it; and just
because its object was now physically unattainable, it grew in purity
and power. The sensual alloy which, however spiritualized, had never
ceased to disturb his soul, was purged from his still vivid passion.
Laura in heaven looked down upon him from her station mid the saints;
and her poet could indulge the dream that now at last she pitied him,
that she was waiting for him with angelic eyes of love, and telling him
to lose no time, but set his feet upon the stairs that led to God and
her. The romance finds its ultimate apotheosis in that transcendent
passage of the _Trionfo della Morte_ which describes her death and his
own vision. Throughout the whole course of this labyrinthine
love-lament, sustained for forty years on those few notes so subtly
modulated, from the first sonnet on his _primo giovenile errore_ to the
last line of her farewell, _tu starai in terra senza me gran tempo_,
Laura grows in vividness before us. She only becomes a real woman in
death, because she was for Petrarch always an ideal, and in the ideal
world beyond the tomb he is more sure of her than when "the fair veil"
of flesh was drawn between her and his yearning.
Petrarch succeeded in bringing the old theme of chivalrous love back
from the philosophizing mysticism of the Florentines to simple
experience. He forms a link between their transcendental science and the
positive romance of the Decameron, between the spirit of the middle ages
and the spirit of the Renaissance. Guided by his master, Cino da
Pistoja, the least metaphysical and clearest of his immediate
predecessors, Petrarch found the right artistic _via media_; and perhaps
we may attribute something to that double education which placed him
between the influences of the Tuscan lyrists and the troubadours of his
adopted country. At any rate he returned from the allegories of the
Florentine poets to the directness of chivalrous emotion; but he treated
the original motive with a greater richness and a more idealizing
delicacy than his Provencal predecessors. The marvelous instruments of
the Italian Sonnet and Canzone were in his hands, and he knew how to
draw from them a purer if not a grander melody than either Guido or
Dante. The best work of the Florentines required a commentary; and the
structure of their verse, like its content, was scientific rather than
artistic. Petrarch could publish his _Canzoniere_ without explanatory
notes. He laid his heart bare to the world, and every man who had a
heart might understand his language. Between the subject-matter and the
verbal expression there lay no intervening veil of mystic meaning. The
form had become correspondingly more clear and perfect, more harmonious
in its proportions, more immediate in musical effects. In a word,
Petrarch was the first to open a region where art might be free, and to
find for the heart's language utterance direct and limpid.
This was his great achievement. The forms he used were not new. The
subject-matter he handled was given to him. But he brought both form and
subject closer to the truth, exercising at the same time an art which
had hitherto been unconceived in subtlety, and which has never since
been equaled. If Dante was the first great poet, Petrarch was the first
true artist of Italian literature. It was, however, impossible that
Petrarch should overleap at one bound all the barriers of the middle
ages. His Laura has still something of the earlier ideality adhering to
her. She stands midway between the Beatrice of Dante and the women of
Boccaccio. She is not so much a woman with a character and personality,
as woman in the general, _la femme_, personified and made the object of
a poet's reveries. Though every detail of her physical perfections, with
the single and striking exception of her nose, is carefully recorded, it
is not easy to form a definite picture even of her face and shape. Of
her inner nature we hear only the vaguest generalities. She sits like a
lovely model in the midst of a beautiful landscape, like one of our
Burne-Jones's women who incarnate a mood of feeling while they lack the
fullness of personality. The thought of her pervades the valley of
Vaucluse; the perfume of her memory is in the air we breathe. But if we
met her, we should find it hard to recognize her; and if she spoke, we
should not understand that it was Laura.
Petrarch had no strong objective faculty. Just as he failed to bring
Laura vividly before us, until she had by death become a part of his own
spiritual substance, so he failed to depict things as he saw them. The
pictures etched in three or four lines of the _Purgatorio_ may be sought
for vainly in his _Rime_. That his love of nature was intense, there is
no doubt. The solitary of Vaucluse, the pilgrim of Mont Ventoux, had
reached a point of sensibility to natural scenery far in advance of his
age. But when he came to express this passion for beauty, he was
satisfied with giving the most perfect form to the emotion stirred in
his own subjectivity. Instead of scenes, he delineates the moods
suggested by them. He makes the streams and cliffs and meadows of
Vaucluse his confidants. He does not lose himself in contemplation of
the natural object, though we feel that this self found its freest
breathing-space, its most delightful company, in the society of hill and
vale. He never cares to paint a landscape, but contents himself with
such delicate touches and such cunning combinations of words as may
suggest a charm in the external world. At this point the humanist,
preoccupied with man as his main subject, meets the poet in Petrarch.
What is lost, too, in the precision of delineation, is gained in
universality. The _Canzoniere_ reminds us of no single spot; wherever
there are clear fresh rills and hanging mountains, the lover walks with
Petrarch by his side.
If the poet's dominant subjectivity weakened his grasp upon external
things, it made him supreme in self-portraiture. Every mood of passion
is caught and fixed precisely in his verse. The most evanescent shades
of feeling are firmly set upon the exquisite picture. Each string of
Love's many-chorded lyre is touched with a vigorous hand. The
fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise; the "yea and nay twinned in a
single breath;" the struggle of conflicting aspirations in a heart drawn
now to God and now to earth; the quiet resting-places of content; the
recrudescence of the ancient smart; the peace of absence, when longing
is luxury; the agony of presence, adding fire to fire--all this is
rendered with a force so striking, in a style so monumental, that the
_Canzoniere_ may still be called the Introduction to the Book of Love.
Thus, when Petrarch's own self was the object, his hand was steady; his
art failed not in modeling the image into roundness.
Dante brought the universe into his poem. But "the soul of man, too, is
a universe:" and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet. It
remained for Boccaccio, the third in the triumvirate, to treat of common
life with art no less developed. From Beatrice through Laura to La
Fiammetta; from the Divine Comedy through the Canzoniere to the
Decameron; from the world beyond the grave through the world of feeling
to the world in which we play our puppet parts; from the mystic _terza
rima_, through the stately lyric stanzas, to Protean prose--such was the
rapid movement of Italian art within the brief space of some fifty
years.
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, the eleventh year of Dante's exile,
the first of Petrarch's residence at Avignon. His grandfather belonged
originally to Certaldo; but he removed to Florence and received the
rights of burghership among those countryfolk whom Dante reckoned the
corrupters of her ancient commonwealth[77]:
Ma la cittadinanza, ch'e or mista
Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine,
Pura vedeasi nell'ultimo artista.
Certaldo was a village of Valdelsa, famous for its onions. This explains
the rebuff which the author of the Decameron received from a Florentine
lady, whom he afterwards satirized in the _Corbaccio_: "Go back to grub
your onion-beds, and leave gentlewomen alone!" Boccaccio was neither
born in wedlock nor yet of pure Italian blood. His mother was a
Frenchwoman, with whom his father made acquaintance during a residence
on business at Paris. These facts deserve to be noted, since they bear
upon the temper of his mind and on the quality of his production.
It has been observed that the three main elements of Florentine
society--the _popolo vecchio_, or nobles who acquiesced in the
revolution of 1282; the _popolo grasso_, or burghers occupying a middle
rank in the city, who passed the Ordinances of 1293; and the _popolo
minuto_, or artisans and _contadini_ admitted to the franchise, who came
to the front between 1343 and 1378--are severally represented by Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio.[78] So rapid are the political and intellectual
mutations in a little state like Florence, where the vigor of popular
life and the vivacity of genius bear no proportion to the size of the
community, that within the short span of fifty years the center of power
may be transferred from an aristocracy to the proletariate, and the
transition in art and literature from the Middle Age to the Renaissance
may not only be accomplished but copiously illustrated in detail.[79]
Boccaccio was the typical Italian _bourgeois_, the representative of a
class who finally determined the Renaissance. His prose and poetry
contain in germ the various species which were perfected during that
period. Studying him, we study in its immaturity the spirit of the next
two centuries. He was the first to substitute a literature of the people
for the literature of the learned classes and the aristocracy. He freed
the natural instincts from ascetic interdictions and the mysticism of
the transcendental school. He exposed the shams of chivalrous romance
and the hypocrisies of monkery with ridicule more deadly than satire or
invective. He brought realism in art and letters back to honor by
delineating the world as he found it--sensual, base, comic, ludicrous,
pathetic, tender, cruel--in all its crudities and contradictions. He
replaced the abstractions of the allegory by concrete fact. He
vindicated the claims of appetite and sensuous enjoyment against ideal
aspirations and the scruples of a faith-tormented conscience. He taught
his fellow-countrymen that a life of studious indifference was
preferable to the strife of factions and the din of battle-fields.
Boccaccio did not act consciously and with fixed purpose to these ends.
He was rather the spokesman of his age and race--the sign in literature
that Italian society had entered upon a new phase, and that the old
order was passing away. If the Decameron seemed to shake the basis of
morality; if it gained the name of _Il Principe Galeotto_ or the Pandar;
if it was denounced as the corrupter of the multitude; this meant, not
that its author had a sinister intention, but that the medieval fabric
was already sapped, and that the people whom Boccaccio wrote to please
were disillusioned of their previous ideals. The honest easy-going man,
Giovanni della Tranquillita, as he was called, painted what he saw and
made himself the mouthpiece of the men around him.[80]
For the work he had to do, he was admirably fitted by nature and
education. He combined the blood of a Florentine tradesman and a
Parisian _grisette_. He had but little learning in his youth, and was
the first great Italian writer who had not studied at Bologna. His early
manhood was passed in commerce at Naples, where he gained access to the
dissolute Court of Joan, and made love to her ladies. At his father's
request he applied himself for a short while to legal studies; but he
does not appear to have practiced as a lawyer in real earnest.
Literature very early became the passion, the one serious and ennobling
enthusiasm of his life. We have already seen him at the tomb of Virgil,
vowing to devote his powers to the sacred Muses; and we know what
services he rendered to humanism by his indefatigable energy in the
acquisition and diffusion of miscellaneous learning.[81] This is not the
place to treat of Boccaccio's scholarship. Yet it may be said that, just
as his philosophy of life was the philosophy of a jovial and sensuous
plebeian, so his conception of literature lacked depth and greatness. He
repeated current theories about the dependence of poetry on truth, the
dignity of allegory, the sacredness of love, the beauty of honor. But
his own work showed how little he had appropriated these ideas. As a
student, a poet, and a man, he lived upon a lower plane of thought than
Petrarch; and when he left the concrete for the abstract, his
penetrative insight failed him.
From this point of view Boccaccio's Life of Dante is instructive. It is
crammed with heterogeneous erudition. It bristles with citations and
opinions learned by rote. It reveals the heartiest reverence for all
things reckoned worthy in the realm of intellect. The admiration for the
divine poet expressed in it is sincere and ungrudging. Yet this book
betrays an astonishing want of sympathy with Dante, and transforms the
sublime romance of the _Vita Nuova_ into a commonplace _novella_. Dante
told the world how he first felt love for Beatrice at the age of nine.
His biographer is at a loss to understand this miracle. He supposes that
the sweet season of May, the good wines and delicate dishes of the
Portinari banquet, all the sensuous delights of a Florentine festival,
combined to make the boy prematurely a man.[82] Dante called Beatrice
"youngest of the angels." Boccaccio draws a lively picture of an angel
in the flesh, as he imagined her; and in his portrait there is far less
of the angelic than the carnal nature visible. This he does in perfect
good faith, with the heartfelt desire to exalt Dante above all poets,
and to spread abroad the truth of his illustrious life. But the hero of
Renaissance literature was incapable of comprehending the real feeling
of the man he worshiped. Between him and the enthusiasms of the middle
ages a nine-fold Styx already poured its waves.
Boccaccio's noblest quality was the recognition of intellectual power.
It was this cult of great men, if we may trust Filippo Villani, which
first decided him to follow literature.[83] His devotion to the memory
of Dante, and his frank confession of inferiority to Petrarch, whom he
loved and served through twenty years of that exacting poet's life, are
equally sincere and beautiful. These feelings inspired some of his
finest poems, and penetrated the autobiographical passages of his minor
works with a delicacy that endears the man to us.[84] No less candid was
his worship of beauty--not beauty of an intellectual or ideal order,
but sensuous and real--the beauty which inspired the artists and the
poets of the following centuries. Nor has any writer of any age been
gifted with a stronger faculty for its expression. From this service of
the beautiful he derived the major impulse of his activity as an artist.
If he lacked moral greatness, if he was deficient in philosophical depth
and religious earnestness, his devotion to art was serious, intense,
profound, absorbing. He discharged his duties as a citizen with easy
acquiescence, but no stern consciousness of patriotic purpose. He
conformed to the Church, and allowed himself in old age to be frightened
into a kind of half-repentance. But the homage he rendered to art was of
a very different and more exacting nature. With his best energies he
labored to make himself, at least in this sphere, perfect. How amply he
succeeded must be acknowledged by all men who have read the Decameron,
and who have seen that here Boccaccio forms the legends of all ages and
all lands into one harmonious whole, brings a world of many-sided human
interest and varied beauty out of the chaos of medieval materials,
finishing every detail with love, inspiring each particle with life, and
setting the daedal picture of society in a framework of delicate romance.
The conception and the execution of this masterpiece of literature are
equally artistic. If the phrase "art for art" can be used in speaking of
one who was unconscious of the theory it implies, Boccaccio may be
selected as the typical artist for art's sake. Within the sphere of his
craft, he is impassioned, enthusiastic, sincere, profound. His attitude
with regard to all else is one of amused or curious indifference, of
sensuous enjoyment, of genial ridicule, of playful cynicism.
Boccaccio was a _bourgeois_ of the fourteenth century; but his
character, as stamped on the Decameron, was common to Italy during the
next two hundred years. The whole book glows with the joyousness of a
race discarding dreams for realities, scorning the terrors of a bygone
creed, reveling in nature's liberty, proclaiming the empire of the
senses with a frankness which passes over into license. In Boccaccio,
the guiding genius of the Italian Renaissance arrives at consciousness.
That blending of moral indifference with artistic seriousness, which we
observe in him, marks the coming age. He is not the precursor but the
inaugurator of the era. The smile which plays around his mouth became,
though changeful in expression, fixed upon the lips of his
posterity--genial in Ariosto, gracious in Poliziano, mischievous in
Pulci, dubious in Lorenzo de' Medici, sardonic in Aretino, bitter in
Folengo, toned to tragic irony in Machiavelli, impudent in Berni, joyous
in Boiardo, sensual in Bandello--assuming every shade of character,
Protean, indescribable, until at last it fades from Tasso's brow, when
Italy has ceased to laugh except in secret.