CHAPTER II. 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 Provençal poets. After, or contemporaneously with them, the same Italo-Provençal 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-Provençal 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 Æneas, 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; Nè fe' Amore anti che gentil core, Nè 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-Provençal 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 "Phædrus" 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 æsthetics 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-Provençal 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 encyclopædic 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 beltà che Amore in voi consente, A virtù 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 virtù a noi, Ed a costui di due potere un fare, Voi non dovreste amare, Ma coprir quanto di beltà vi è dato, Poichè non è virtù, 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 sæcula, 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 Lælius 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 Æneid, 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 Cæsar 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 Fortunæ, 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 Provençal 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'è 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 Tranquillità, 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 dædal 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.

The Decameron has been called the Commedia Umana.[85] This title is appropriate, not merely because the book portrays human life from a comic rather than a serious point of view, but also because it is the antithesis of Dante's Commedia Divina. As poet and scene-painter devised for our ancestors of the Elizabethan period both Mask and Anti-mask, so did the genius of Italy provide two shows for modern Europe—the Mask and Anti-mask of human nature. Dante's Comedy represents our life in relation to the life beyond the grave. Boccaccio in his Comedy depicts the life of this earth only, subtracting whatsoever may suggest a life to come. It would be difficult to determine which of the two dramas is the more truthful, or which of the two poets had a firmer grasp upon reality. But the realities of the Divine Comedy are spiritual; those of the Human Comedy are material. The world of the Decameron is not an inverted world, like that of Aristophanes. It does not antithesize Dante's world by turning it upside down. It is simply the same world surveyed from an opposite point of view—unaltered, uninverted, but seen in the superficies, presented in the concrete. It is the prose of life; and this justifies the counterpoise of its form to that of Dante's poem. It is the world as world, the flesh as flesh, nature as nature, without intervention of spiritual agencies, without relation to ideal order, regarded as the sphere of humor, fortune, marvelous caprice. It is everything which the Church had banned, proscribed, held in abhorrence, without that which the Church had inculcated for the exaltation of the soul. This world, actual and unexplained, Boccaccio paints with the mastery of an accomplished artist, molding its chaotic elements into a form of beauty which compels attention.

Dante condemned those "who submit their reason to natural appetite."[86] Boccaccio celebrates the apotheosis of natural appetite, of il talento, stigmatized as sin by ascetic Christianity.[87] His strongest sympathies are reserved for those who suffer by abandoning themselves to impulse, and in this self-abandonment he sees the poetry of life. This is the very core of the antithesis presented by the Human to the Divine Comedy. The Decameron is an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine. Like all vehement reactions, it is not satisfied with opposing the extravagances of the view it combats. Instead of negativing asceticism, it affirms license. Yet though the Divine Comedy and the Decameron are antithetical, they are both true, and true together, inasmuch as they present the same humanity studied under contradictory conditions. Human nature is vast enough to furnish the materials for both, inexplicable enough to render both acceptable to reason, tolerant enough to view with impartial approbation the desolate theology of the Inferno and the broad mirth of the Decameron.[88]

The Decameron did not appear unheralded by similar attempts. No literary taste was stronger in the middle ages than the taste for stories. This is proved by the collection known as Gesta Romanorum, and by the Bestiarii, Lapidarii, Physiologi and Apiarii, which contain a variety of tales, many of them surprisingly indecent, veiling spiritual doctrine under obscenities which horrify a modern reader.[89] From the hands of ecclesiastical compilers these short stories passed down to popular narrators, who in France made the fabliaux a special branch of vulgar literature. The follies and vices of the clergy, tricks practiced by wives upon their husbands, romantic adventures of lovers, and comic incidents of daily life, formed the staple of their stock in trade. When the fabliau reached Italy, together with other literary wares, from France, it was largely cultivated in the South; and the first known collection of Italian stories received the name of Il Novellino, or Il Fiore del parlar gentile. The language of this book was immature, and the tales themselves seem rather memoranda for the narrator than finished compositions to be read with pleasure.[90] It may therefore be admitted that the rude form of the Decameron was given to Boccaccio. Not to mention the larger chivalrous romances, Conti di antichi Cavalieri, and translations from French Chansons de Geste, which have no genuine link of connection with the special type of the Novella, he found models for his tales both in the libraries of medieval convents and upon the lips of popular raccontatori. Yet this must not be taken to imply any lack of originality in Boccaccio. Such comparisons as Professor Bartoli has instituted between the Decameron and some of its supposed sources, prove the insignificance of his debt, the immeasurable inferiority of his predecessors.[91]

The spirit of the Decameron no less than the form, had been long in preparation. Satire, whether superficial, as in the lays of the jongleurs, or searching, as in the invectives of Dante and Petrarch, was familiar to the middle ages; and the popular Latin poems of the wandering students are steeped in rage against a corrupt hierarchy, a venal Curia.[92] Those same Carmina Vagorum reveal the smoldering embers of unextinguished Paganism, which underlay the Christian culture of the middle ages. Written by men who belonged to the clerical classes, but who were often on bad terms with ecclesiastical authorities, tinctured with the haughty contempt of learning for the laity, yet overflowing with the vigorous life of the proletariate, these extraordinary poems bring to view a bold and candid sensuality, an ineradicable spontaneity of natural appetite, which is strangely at variance with the cardinal conceptions of ascetic Christianity.[93] In the sect of the Italian Epicureans; in the obscure bands of the Cathari and Paterini; in the joyous companies of Provençal Court and castle, the same note of irrepressible nature sounded. Side by side with the new-built fabric of ecclesiastical idealism, the old temples of unregenerate human deities subsisted. They were indeed discredited, proscribed, consigned to shame. They formed the mauvais lieux of Christendom. Yet there they stood, even as the Venusberg of Tannhäuser's legend abode unshaken though cathedrals rose by Rhine. All that was needed to restore the worship of these nature-gods was that a great artist should decorate their still substantial temple-walls with the beauty of a new, sincere, and unrepentant style, fitting their abandoned chambers for the habitation of the human spirit, free now to choose the dwelling that it listed. This Boccaccio achieved. And here it must again be noticed that the revolution of time was about to bring man's popular and carnal deities once more, if only for a season, to the throne. The murmured songs of a few wandering students were about to be drowned in the pæan of Renaissance poetry. The visions of the Venusberg were to be realized in Italian painting. The coming age was destined to live out Boccaccio's Human Comedy in act and deed. This is the true kernel of his greatness. As poet, he ranked third only, and that at a vast interval, in the triumvirate of the fourteenth century. But the temper of his mind, the sphere of his conceptions, made him the representative genius of the two following centuries. Awaiting the age when science should once more co-ordinate the forces of humanity in a coherent theory, men in the Renaissance exchanged superfluous restraint for immoderate license. It is not to be wondered at that Boccaccio and not Dante was their hero.

The description of the Plague at Florence which introduces the Decameron, has more than a merely artistic appropriateness. Boccaccio may indeed have meant to bring his group of pleasure-seeking men and maidens into strong relief by contrast with the horrors of the stricken city. Florence crowded with corpses, echoing to the shrieks of delirium and the hoarse cries of body-buriers, is the background he has chosen for that blooming garden, where the birds sing and the lovers sit by fountains in the shade, laughing or weeping as the spirit of each tale compels them. But independently of this effect of contrast, which might be used to illustrate the author's life-philosophy, the description of the Plague has a still deeper significance, whereof Boccaccio never dreamed. Matteo Villani dates a progressive deterioration of manners in the city from the Plague of 1348, and justifies us in connecting the Ciompi riots of 1378 with the enfeeblement of civic order during those thirty years. The Plague was, therefore, the outward sign, if not the efficient cause, of those very ethical and social changes which the Decameron immortalized in literature. It was the historical landmark between two ages, dividing the Florence of the Grandi from the Florence of the Ciompi. The cynicism, liberated in that time of terror, lawlessness, and sudden death, assumed in Boccaccio's romance a beautiful and graceful aspect. It lost its harsh and vulgar outlines, and took the air of genial indulgence which distinguished Italian society throughout the years of the Renaissance.

Boccaccio selects seven ladies of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-eight, and three men, the youngest of whom is twenty-five. Having formed this company, he transports them to a villa two miles from the city, where he provides them with a train of serving-men and waiting-women, and surrounds them with the delicacies of medieval luxury. He is careful to remind us that, though the three men and three of the ladies were acknowledged lovers, and though their conversation turned on almost nothing else but passion, "no stain defiled the honor of the party." Stories are told; and these unblemished maidens listen with laughter and a passing blush to words and things which outrage Northern sense of decency. The remorseless but light satire of the Decameron spares none of the ideals of the age. All the medieval enthusiasms are reviewed and criticised from the standpoint of the Florentine bottega and piazza. It is as though the bourgeois, not content with having made nobility a crime, were bent upon extinguishing its spirit. The tale of Agilulf vulgarizes the chivalrous conception of love ennobling men of low estate, by showing how a groom, whose heart is set upon a queen, avails himself of opportunity. Tancredi burlesques the knightly reverence for a stainless scutcheon by the extravagance of his revenge. The sanctity of the Thebaid, that ascetic dream of purity and self-renunciation for God's service, is made ridiculous by Alibech. Ser Ciappelletto brings contempt upon the canonization of saints. The confessional, the worship of relics, the priesthood, and the monastic orders are derided with the deadliest persiflage. Christ himself is scoffed at in a jest which points the most indecent of these tales.[94] Marriage affords a never-failing theme for scorn; and when, by way of contrast, the novelist paints an ideal wife, he runs into such hyperboles that the very patience of Griselda is a satire on its dignity. Like Balzac, Boccaccio was unsuccessful in depicting virtuous womanhood. Attempting this, he fell, like Balzac, into the absurdities of sentiment. His own conception of love was sensual and voluptuous—not uniformly coarse, nay often tender, but frankly carnal. Without having recourse to the Decameron, this statement might be abundantly substantiated by reference to the Filostrato, Fiammetta, Amorosa Visione, Ninfale Fiesolano. Boccaccio enjoyed the painting of licentious pleasure, snatched in secret, sometimes half by force, by a lover after moderate resistance from his paramour. He imported into these pictures the plebeian tone which we have already noticed in the popular poetry of the preceding century, and which was destined to pervade the erotic literature of the Renaissance. There is, therefore, an ironical contrast between the decencies observed by his brigata and their conversation; a contrast rooted in the survival from chivalrous times of conventional ideals, which have lost reality and been persistently ignored in practice. This effect of irony is enhanced by the fact that many of the motives are such as might have been romantically treated, but here are handled from the popolano grasso's point of view. A skeptical and sensuous imagination plays around the sanctities and sublimities which have for it become illusory.

We observe the same kind of unconscious hypocrisy, the same spontaneous sapping of now obsolete ideals, in the Amorosa Visione.[95] Here Love is still regarded as the apotheosis of mortal experience. It is still said to be the union of intelligence and moral energy in an enthusiasm of the soul. Yet the joys of love revealed at the conclusion of the poem are such as a bayadère might offer.[96] The bourgeois effaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance. This vision, composed in terza rima, was assuredly not meant to travesty Dante. Still it would be difficult to imagine a more complete inversion of the Dantesque point of view, a more deliberate substitution of an Earthly Paradise for the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. It is as though Boccaccio, the representative of the new age, in all the fullness of his sensuous naïveté, appealed to the poets of chivalry, and said: "See here how all your fancies find their end in nature!"

It will not do to over-strain the censure implied in the foregoing paragraphs. Natural appetite, no less than the ideal, has its elements of poetry; and the sensuality of the Decameron accords with plastic beauty in a work of art incomparably lucid. Shelley, no lenient critic, wrote these words about the setting of the tales[97]: "What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us." Boccaccio's sense of beauty has already been alluded to; and it so pervades his work that special attention need scarcely be called to it. His prose abounds in passages which are perfect pictures after their own kind, like the following, selected, not from the Decameron, but from an earlier work, entitled Filocopo [98]:

Con gli orecchi intenti al suono, cominciò ad andare in quella parte ove il sentiva; e giunto presso alla fontana, vide le due giovinette. Elle erano nel viso bianchissime, la quale bianchezza quanto si conveniva di rosso colore era mescolata. I loro occhi pareano mattutine stelle, e le picciole bocche di colore di vermiglia rosa, più piacevoli diveniano nel muoverle alle note della loro canzone. I loro capelli come fila d'oro erano biondissimi, i quali alquanto crespi s'avvolgevano infra le verdi frondi delle loro ghirlande. Vestite per lo gran caldo, come è detto sopra, le tenere e dilicate carni di sottilissimi vestimenti, i quali dalla cintura in su strettissimi mostravano la forma delle belle mamme, le quali come due ritondi pomi pignevano in fuori il resistente vestimento, e ancora in più luoghi per leggiadre apriture si manifestavano le candide carni. La loro statura era di convenevole grandezza, in ciascun membro bene proporzionata.

Space and nineteenth-century canons of propriety prevent me from completing the picture made by Florio and these maidens. It might be paralleled with a hundred passages of like intention, where the Italian artist is revealed to us by touches curiously multiplied.[99] We find in them the sense of color, the scrupulous precision of form, and something of that superfluous minuteness which belongs to painting rather than to literature. The writer has seen a picture, and not felt a poem. In rendering it by words, he trusted to the imagination of his reader for suggesting a highly-finished work of plastic art to the mind.[100] The fêtes champêtres of the Venetian masters are here anticipated in the prose of the trecento. Such descriptions were frequent in Italian literature, especially frequent in the works of the best stylists, Sannazzaro, Poliziano, Ariosto, the last of whom has been severely but not unjustly criticised by Lessing for overstepping the limits of poetry in his portrait of Alcina. It may be pleaded in defense of Boccaccio and his followers that they belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and that they wrote for a public familiar with painted form. Their detailed descriptions were at once translated into color by men habituated to the sight of pictures. During the Renaissance, painting dominated the Italian genius, and all the sister arts of expression felt that influence, just as at Athens sculpture lent something even to the drama.

As a poet, Boccaccio tried many styles. His epic, the Teseide, cannot be reckoned a great success. He is not at home upon the battle-field, and knew not how to sound the heroic trumpet.[101] Yet the credit of discovery may be awarded to the author of this poem. He introduced to the modern world a tale rich in romantic incidents and capable of still higher treatment than he was himself able to give it. When we remember how Chaucer, Shakspere, Fletcher and Dryden handled and rehandled the episode of Palamon's rivalry with Arcite for the hand of Emilia, we dare not withhold from Boccaccio the praise which belongs to creative genius.[102] It is no slight achievement to have made a story which bore such noble fruit in literature. The Teseide, moreover, fulfilled an important mission in Italian poetry. It adapted the popular ottava rima to the style of the romantic epic, and fixed it for Pulci, Poliziano, Boiardo, and Ariosto. That Boccaccio was not the inventor of the stanza, as used to be assumed, may now be considered beyond all question. That he had not learned to handle it with the majestic sweetness of Poliziano, or the infinite variety of Ariosto, is evident. Yet he deserves credit for having discerned its capacity and brought it into cultivated use.

Though unequal in quality, his sonnets and ballate, whether separately published or scattered through his numerous prose works, have a higher merit. The best are those in which, following Guido Cavalcanti's path, he gives free scope to his incomparable sense of natural beauty. The style is steeped in sweetness, softness and the delicacy of music. From these half-popular poems I might select the Ballata Io mi son giovinetta; the song of the Angel from the planet Venus, extracted from the Filocopo; a lament of a woman for her lost youth, Il fior che 'l valor perde; and the girl's prayer to Love, Tu se' nostro Signor caro e verace.[103] It is difficult for the critic to characterize poems so true to simple nature, so spontaneously passionate, and yet so artful in the turns of language, molded like wax beneath the poet's touch. Here sensuousness has no vulgarity, and the seductions of the flesh are sublimed by feeling to a beauty which is spiritual in refinement. It may be observed that Boccaccio writes his best love-poetry to be sung by girls. He has abandoned the standpoint of the chivalrous lover, though he still uses the phraseology of the Italo-Provençal school. What arrests his fancy is, not the ideal of womanhood raising man above himself, but woman conscious of her own supreme attractiveness. He delights in making her the mirror of the feelings she inspires. He bids her celebrate in hymns the beauty of her sex, the perfume of the charms that master man. When the metaphysical forms of speech, borrowed from the elder style, are used, they give utterance to a passion which is sensual, or blent at best with tenderness—a physical love-longing, a sentiment born of youth and desire. A girl, for instance, speaks about herself, and says:[104]

Colui che muove il cielo et ogni Stella Mi fece a suo diletto Vaga leggiadra graziosa e bella, Per dar qua giù ad ogni alto intelletto Alcun segno di quella Biltà che sempre a lui sta nel cospetto.

On the lips of him who wrote the tale of Alibech, this language savors of profanity. Yet we are forced to recognize the poet's sincerity of feeling. It is the same problem as that which meets us in the Amorosa Visione.[105] The god Boccaccio worshiped was changed: but this deity was still divine, and deserved, he thought, the honors of mystic adoration. At the same time there is nothing Asiatic in his sensuous inspiration. The emotion is controlled and concentrated; the form is pure in all its outlines.

The Decameron was the masterpiece of Boccaccio's maturity. But he did not reach that height of excellence without numerous essays in styles of much diversity. While still a young man, not long after his meeting with Fiammetta, he began the Filocopo and dedicated it to his new love.[106] This romance was based upon the earlier tale of Floire et Blanceflor.[107] But the youthful poet invested the simple love-story of his Florio and Biancofiore with a masquerade costume of mythological erudition and wordy rhetoric, which removed it from the middle ages. The gods and goddesses of Olympus are introduced as living agents, supplying the machinery of the romance until the very end, when the hero and heroine are converted to Christianity, and abjure their old protectors with cold equanimity. We are left to imagine that, for Boccaccio at any rate, Venus, Mars and Cupid were as real as Christ and the saints, though superseded as objects of pious veneration. This confusion of Pagan and Christian mythology is increased by his habit of finding classical periphrases for the expression of religious ideas. He calls nuns Sacerdotesse di Diana. God the Father is Quell'eccelso e inestimabile principe Sommo Giove. Satan becomes Pluto, and human sin is Atropos. The Birth of Christ is described thus: la terra come sentì il nuovo incarco della deità del figliuol di Giove. The Apostles appear as nuovi cavalieri entrati contro a Plutone in campo.[108] The style of the Filocopo was new; and in spite, or perhaps because of, its euphuism, it had a decided success. This encouraged Boccaccio to attempt the Teseide. The Filostrato soon followed; and here for the first time we find the future author of the Decameron. Under Greek names and incidents borrowed from the War of Troy, we are in fact studying some episode from the chroniques galantes of the Neapolitan Court, narrated with the vigor of a perfect master in the art of story telling. Nothing could be further removed in sentiment from the heroism of the Homeric age or closer to the customs of a corrupt Italian city than this poem. In Troilo himself a feverish type of character, overmastered by passion which is rather a delirium of the senses than a mood of feeling, has been painted with a force that reminds us of the Fiammetta, where the same disease of the soul is delineated in a woman. Pandaro shows for the first time in modern literature an utterly depraved nature, reveling in seduction, and glutting a licentious imagination with the spectacle of satiated lust. The frenzied appetite of Troilo, Pandaro's ruffian arts, and the gradual yieldings of Griselda to a voluptuous inclination, reveal the master's hand; and though the poem is hurried toward the close (Boccaccio being only interested in the portrayal of his hero's love-languors, ecstasies and disappointment), the Filostrato must undoubtedly be reckoned the finest of his narratives in verse. The second and third Cantos are remarkable for dramatic movement and wealth of sensuous imagination, never rising to sublimity nor refined with such poetry as Shakspere found for Romeo and Juliet, but welling copiously from a genuinely ardent nature. The love described is nakedly and unaffectedly luxurious; it is an overmastering impulse, crowned at last with all the joys of sensual fruition. According to Boccaccio the repose conferred by Love upon his votaries is the satiety of their desires.[109] Between Dante's Signore della nobilitade and his Sir di tutta pace there is indeed a wide gulf fixed.[110]

After the Filostrato, Boccaccio next produced the Ameto, Amorosa Visione, Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolano, and Corbaccio, between the years 1343 and 1355. The Ameto is a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. To read it attentively is now almost impossible, in spite of frequent passages where the luxuriant word-painting of the author is conspicuous. In the Amorosa Visione he attempted the style which Petrarch had adopted for his Trionfi. After reviewing human life under the several aspects of learning, glory, love, fortune, the poet finally resigns himself to a Nirvana of sensual beatitude. The poem is unsuccessful, because it adapts an obsolete form of art to requirements beyond its scope. Boccaccio tries to pour the new wine of the Renaissance into the old bottles of medieval allegory. In the Fiammetta Boccaccio exhibited all his strength as an anatomist of feeling, describing the effects of passion in a woman's heart, and analyzing its varying emotions with a subtlety which proved his knowledge of a certain type of female character. It is the first attempt in modern literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer. Since Virgil's Dido, or the Heroidum Epistolæ of Ovid, nothing of the sort had been essayed upon an equal scale. Taken together with Dante's Vita Nuova and Petrarch's Secretum, each of which is a personal confidence, the Fiammetta may be reckoned among those masterpieces of analytic art, which revealed the developed consciousness of the Italian race, at a moment when the science of emotion was still for the rest of Europe an undiscovered territory. This essay exercised a wide and lasting influence over the descriptive literature of the Renaissance. Yet when we compare its stationary monologues with the brief but pregnant touches of the Decameron, we are forced to assign it the rank of a study rather than a finished picture. The Fiammetta is to the Decameron what rhetoric is to the drama. This, however, is hardly a deduction from its merit. The delineation of an unholy and unhappy passion, blessed with fruition for one brief moment, cursed through months of illness and despair with all the furies of vain desire and poignant recollection, is executed with incomparable fullness of detail and inexhaustible richness of fancy. The reader rises from a perusal of the Fiammetta with impressions similar to those which a work of Richardson leaves upon the mind. At the same time it is full of poetry. The Vision of Venus, the invocation to Sleep, and the description of summer on the Bay of Baiæ relieve a deliberate anatomy of passion, which might otherwise be tedious.[111] The romance is so rich in material that it furnished the motives for a score of tales, and the novelists of the Renaissance availed themselves freely of its copious stores.[112]

The Corbaccio or Laberinto d'Amore is a satire upon women, animated with the bitterest sense of injury and teeming with vindictive spite. It was written with the avowed purpose of reviling a lady who had rejected Boccaccio's advances, and it paints the whole sex in the darkest colors. We could fancy that certain passages had been penned by a disappointed monk. Though this work is in tone unworthy of its author, it bore fruits in the literature of the next century. Alberti's satires are but rhetorical amplifications of themes suggested by the Corbaccio. Nor is it without value for the student of Italian manners. The list of romances read by women in the fourteenth century throws light upon Francesca's episode in Dante, and proves that the title Principe Galeotto was not given without precedent to Boccaccio's own writings.[113] The discourse on gentle birth in the same treatise should be studied in illustration of the Florentine conception of nobility.[114] Boccaccio, though he follows so closely in time upon Dante, already anticipates the democratic theories of Poggio.[115] Feudal feeling was extinct in the bourgeoisie of the great towns; nor had the experience of the Neapolitan Court suppressed in Boccaccio's mind the pride of a Florentine citizen. At the same time he felt that contempt of the literary classes for the common folk which was destined in the next century to divide the nation and to check the development of its vulgar literature. He apologizes for explaining Dante, and for bringing poetry down to the level of the feccia plebeia, the vulgo indegno, the ingrati meccanici, and so forth.[116]

It remains to speak of yet another of Boccaccio's minor works, the Ninfale Fiesolano. This is a tale in octave stanzas, which, under a veil of mythological romance, relates the loves of a young man and a nun, and their subsequent tragic ending. It owes its interest to the vivid picture of seduction, so glowingly painted as to betray the author's personal enjoyment of the motive. The story is thrown back into a time antecedent to Christianity and civil life. The heroine, Mensola, is a nymph of Diana; the hero, Affrico, a shepherd. The scene is laid among the mountains above Florence; and when Mensola has been changed into a fountain by the virgin goddess, whose rites she violated, the poem concludes with a myth invented to explain the founding of Fiesole. Civil society succeeds to the savagery of the woodland, and love is treated as the vestibule to culture.[117] The romantic and legendary portions of this tale are ill-connected. The versification is lax; and except in the long episode of Mensola's seduction, which might have formed a passage of contemporary novel-writing, the genius of Boccaccio shines with clouded luster.[118] Yet the Ninfale Fiesolano occupies a not unimportant place in the history of Italian literature. It adapts the pastoral form to that ideal of civility dependent upon culture, which took so strong a hold upon the imagination of the cinque cento. Its stanzas are a forecast of the Arcadia and the Orfeo.

In the minor poems and romances, which have here been passed in review, except perhaps in the Fiammetta, Boccaccio cannot be said to take a place among European writers of the first rank. His style is prolix; his versification, if we omit the Canzoni a Ballo and some sonnets, is slovenly; nor does he show exceptional ability in the conception and conduct of his stories. He is strongest when he paints a violent passion or describes voluptuous sensations, weakest when he attempts allegory or assumes the airs of a philosopher. We feel, in reading these productions of his earlier manhood, that nearly all were what the Germans call Gelegenheits-gedichte. The private key is lost to some of these works, which were intended for the ears of one among the multitude. On others it is plainly written that they were the outpourings of a personal desire, the self-indulgence of a fancy which reveled in imagined sensuality, using literature as the safety-valve for subjective longings. They lack the calm of perfect art, the full light falling on the object from without, which marks a poem of the highest order. From these romances of his youth, no less than from the Latin treatises of his maturity, we return to the Decameron when we seek to place Boccaccio among the classics. Nothing comparable with this Human Comedy for universal interest had appeared in modern Europe, if we except the Divine Comedy; and it may be questioned whether any work of equal scope was given to the world before the theater of Shakspere and the comedies of Molière. Boccaccio, though he paints the surface of life, paints it in a way to suggest the inner springs of character, and to bring the motives of action vividly before us. Quicquid agunt homines is the matter of his book. The recoil from medieval principles of conduct, which gives it a certain air of belonging to a moment rather than all time, was necessary in the evolution of intellectual freedom. In this respect, again, it faithfully reflected the Florentine temperament. At no epoch have the Italians been sternly and austerely pious. Piety with them is a passionate impulse rather than a deeply-reasoned habit based upon conviction. Their true nature is critical, susceptible to beauty, quick at seizing the ridiculous and exposing shams, suspicious of mysticism, realistic, pleasure-loving, practical. These qualities, special to the Florentines, but shared in large measure by the nation, found artistic expression in the Decameron, and asserted their supremacy in the literature of the Renaissance. That a sublime ideal, unapprehended by Boccaccio, and destined to remain unrepresented in the future, should have been conceived by Dante; that Petrarch should have modulated by his masterpiece of poetic workmanship from the key of the Divine Comedy to that of the Decameron; that one city should have produced three such men, and that one half-century should have witnessed their successive triumphs, forms the great glory of Florence, and is one of the most notable facts in the history of genius.

It remains to speak about Boccaccio's prose, and the relation of his style to that of other trecentisti. If we seek the origins of Italian prose, we find them first in the Franco-Italian romances of the Lombard period, which underwent the process of toscaneggiamento at Florence, next in books of morality and devotion, and also in the earlier chronicles. Among the Tuscanized tales of chivalry belonging to the first age of Italian literature are the Conti di antichi cavalieri and the Tavola Ritonda, both of which bear traces of translation from Provençal sources.[119] The Novellino, of which mention has already been made, betrays the same origin. The style of these works offers a pretty close parallel to the English of Sir Thomas Mallory. At the same time that the literature of France was assuming an Italian garb, many versions of Roman classics appeared. Orosius, Vegetius, Sallust, with parts of Cicero, Livy and Boethius were adapted to popular reading. But the taste of the time, as we have already seen in the preceding chapter, inclined the authors of these works to make selections with a view to moral edification. Their object was, not to present the ancients in a modern garb, but to cull notable examples of conduct and ethical sentences from the works that found most favor with the medieval intellect. Passing under the general titles of Fiori, Giardini, Tesori and Conviti—Fiori di filosofi e molto savi, Giardino di Consolazione, Fiore di Rettorica, Fiore del parlar gentile—these collections supplied the laity with extracts from Latin authors, and extended culture to the people. The Libro di Cato might be chosen as a fair example of their scope.[120] The number of such books, ascribed to Bono Giamboni, Brunetto Latini, and Guidotto of Bologna, proves that an extensive public was eager for instruction of this sort; and it is reasonable to believe that they were studied by the artisans of central Italy. The bass-reliefs and frescoes of incipient Italian art, the pavement of the Sienese Cathedral, the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua, bear traces of the percolation through all social strata of this literature. A more important work of style was the De Regimine Principum, of Egidio Colonna, translated from the French version by an unknown Tuscan hand; while Giamboni's Florentine version of Latini's Tesoro introduced the erudition of the most learned grammarian of his age to the Italians. Contemporaneously with this growth of vernacular treatises on rhetorical and ethical subjects, we may assume that memoirs and chronicles began to be written in the vulgar tongue. But so much doubt has recently been thrown upon the earliest monuments of Italian historiography that it must here suffice to indicate the change which was undoubtedly taking place in this branch also of composition toward the close of the thirteenth century.[121] Literature of all kinds yielded to the first strong impact of the native idiom. Epistles, for example, whether of private or of public import, were now occasionally written in Italian, as can be proved by reference to the published letters of Guittone d'Arezzo.[122]

The works hitherto mentioned belong to the latter half of the thirteenth century. Their style, speaking generally, is dry and tentative. Except in the versions of French romances, which borrow grace from their originals, we do not find in them artistic charm of diction. The Fiori and Giardini are little better than commonplace books, in which the author's personality is lost beneath a mass of extracts and citations. The beginning of the fourteenth century witnessed the growth of a new Italian prose. Of this second stage, the masterpieces are Villani's Chronicle, Dante's Vita Nuova, the Fioretti di S. Francesco, the Leggende dei Santi Padri of Domenico Cavalca, and Jacopo Passavanti's Specchio della vera Penitenza.[123] These writers have no lack of individuality. Their mind moves in their style, and gives a personal complexion to their utterance. The chief charm of their manner, so far as it is common to characters so diverse, is its grave and childlike spontaneity. For vividness of description, for natural simplicity of phrase, and for that amiable garrulity which rounds a picture by innumerable details and unconscious touches of graphic force, not one of the books of this period surpasses the Fioretti. Nor are the Leggende of Cavalca less admirable. Modern, especially Northern, students may discover too much suavity and unction in the writer's tone—a superfluity of sweetness which fatigues, a caressing tenderness that clogs. After reading a few pages, we lay the book down, and wonder whether it could really have been a grown man, and not a cherub flown from Fra Angelico's Paradise, who composed it. This infantine note belongs to the cloister and the pulpit. It matches the simple credulity of the narrator, and well befits the miracles he loves to record. We seem to hear a good old monk gossiping to a party of rosy-cheeked novices, like those whom Sodoma painted in his frescoes of S. Benedict at Monte Oliveto. It need hardly be observed that neither in Villani's nor in Dante's prose do we find the same puerility. But all the trecentisti have a common character of limpidity, simplicity, and unaffected grace.

The difficulties under which even the best Italian authors labor while using their own language, incline them to an exaggerated admiration for these pearls of the trecento. They look back with envy to an age when men could write exactly as they thought and felt and spoke, without the tyranny of the Vocabolario or the fear of an Academy before their eyes. We, with whom the literary has always closely followed the spoken language, and who have, practically speaking, no dialects, while we recognize the purity of that incomparably transparent manner, cannot comprehend that it should be held up for imitation in the present age. To paint like Giotto would be easier than to write like Passavanti. The conditions of life and the modes of thought are so altered that the style of the trecento will not lend itself to modern requirements.

Among the prosaists of the fourteenth century—Cavalca, Villani, the author of the Fioretti, and Passavanti—Boccaccio meets us with a sudden surprise. They aimed at finding the readiest and most appropriate words to convey their meaning in the simplest, most effective manner. Without artistic purpose, without premeditation, without side-glances at the classics, they wrote straightforward from their heart. There is little composition or connection in their work, no molding of paragraphs or rounding of phrases, no oratorical development, no gradation of tone. Boccaccio, on the contrary, sought to give the fullness and sonority of Latin to the periods of Italian prose. He had the Ciceronian cadence and the labyrinthine sentences of Livy in view. By art of style he was bent on rendering the vulgar language a fit vehicle for learning, rhetoric, and history. In order to make it clear what sorts of changes he introduced, it will be necessary to compare his prose with that of his contemporaries. Dante used the following words to describe his first meeting with Beatrice[124]:

Nove fiate già, appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto, quanto alla sua propria girazione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa Donna della mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era già in questa vita stata tanto che nel suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente delle dodici parti l'una d'un grado: sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi alla fine del mio nono anno.

Boccaccio, relating his first glimpse of Fiammetta on April 17, 1341, spins the following cocoon of verbiage:[125]

Avvenne che un giorno, la cui prima ora Saturno avea signoreggiata, essendo già Febo co' suoi cavalli al sedecimo grado del celestiale Montone pervenuto, e nel quale il glorioso partimento del figliuiolo di Giove dagli spogliati regni di Plutone si celebrava, io, della presente opera componitore, mi trovai in un grazioso e bel tempio in Partenope, nominato da colui che per deificarsi sostenne che fosse fatto di lui sacrificio sopra la grata, e quivi con canto pieno di dolce melodia ascoltava l'uficio che in tale giorno si canta, celebrato da' sacerdoti successori di colui che prima la corda cinse umilmente esaltando la povertade quella seguendo.

Dante's style is analytic and direct. The sentences follow each other naturally; and though the language is stiff, from scrupulous precision, and in one place intentionally obscure, it is free from affectation. Boccaccio aims at a synthetic presentation of all he means to say; and he calls nothing by its right name, if he can devise a periphrasis. The breathless period pants its labored clauses out, and dwindles to a lame conclusion. The Filocopo was, however, an immature production. In order to do its author justice, and at the same time to compare his style with a graceful piece of fourteenth-century composition, I will select a passage from the Fioretti di S. Francesco, and place it beside one taken from the first novel of the Decameron. This is the episode of S. Anthony preaching to the fishes[126]:

E detto ch'egli ebbe così, subitamente venne alla riva a lui tanta moltitudine di pesci, grandi, piccoli e mezzani, che mai in quel mare nè in quel fiume non ne fu veduta sì grande moltitudine: e tutti teneano i capi fuori dell'acqua, e tutti stavano attenti verso la faccia di santo Antonio, e tutti in grandissima pace e mansuetudine e ordine: imperocchè dinanzi e più presso alla riva stavano i pesciolini minori, e dopo loro stavano i pesci mezzani, poi di dietro, dov'era l'acqua più profonda, stavano i pesci maggiori. Essendo dunque in cotale ordine e disposizione allogati i pesci, santo Antonio cominciò a predicare solennemente, e disse così: Fratelli miei pesci, molto siete tenuti, secondo la vostra possibilitade, di ringraziare il nostro Creatore, che v'ha dato così nobile elemento per vostra abitazione; sicchè, come vi piace, avete l'acque dolci e salse; e havvi dati molti rifugii a schifare le tempeste; havvi ancora dato elemento chiaro e transparente, e cibo, per lo quale voi possiate vivere, etc., etc.... A queste e simiglianti parole e ammaestramenti di santo Antonio, cominciarono li pesci ad aprire la bocca, inchinaronli i capi, e con questi ed altri segnali di riverenza, secondo li modi a loro possibili, laudarono Iddio.

This is a portion of the character of Ser Ciapelletto:

Era questo Ciapelletto di questa vita. Egli essendo notajo, avea grandissima vergogna quando uno de' suoi strumenti (come che pochi ne facesse) fosse altro che falso trovato; de' quali tanti avrebbe fatti, di quanti fosse stato richesto, e quelli più volentieri in dono, che alcun altro grandemente salariato. Testimonianze false con sommo diletto diceva richesto e non richesto; e dandosi a' que' tempi in Francia a' saramenti grandissima fede, non curandosi fargli falsi, tante quistioni malvagiamente vincea, a quante a giurare di dire il vero sopra la sua fede era chiamato. Aveva oltre modo piacere, e forte vi studiava, in commettere tra amici e parenti e qualunque altra persona mali et inimicizie e scandali; de' quali quanto maggiori mali vedeva seguire, tanto più d'allegrezza prendea. Invitato ad uno omicidio o a qualunque altra rea cosa, senza negarlo mai, volenterosamente v'andava; e più volte a fedire et ad uccidere uomini colle proprie mani si trovò volentieri.

These examples will suffice to show how Boccaccio distinguished himself from the trecentisti in general. When his style attained perfection in the Decameron, it had lost the pedantry of his first manner, and combined the brevity of the best contemporary writers with rhetorical smoothness and intricacy. The artful structure of the period, and the cadences of what afterwards came to be known as "numerous prose," were carried to perfection. Still, though he was the earliest writer of a scientific style, Boccaccio failed to exercise a paramount influence over the language until the age of the Academies.[127] The writers of the fifteenth century, partly no doubt because these were chiefly men of the people, appear to have developed their manner out of the material of the trecento in general, modified by contemporary usage. This is manifest in the Reali di Francia, a work of considerable stylistic power, which cannot probably be dated earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century. The novelist Masuccio modeled his diction, so far as he was able, on the type of the Decameron, and Alberti owed much to the study of such works as the Fiammetta. Yet, speaking broadly, neither the excellences nor the defects of Boccaccio found devoted imitators until the epoch when the nation at large turned their attention to the formation of a common Italian style. It was then, in the days of Bembo and Sperone, that Boccaccio took rank with Petrarch as an infallible authority on points of language. The homage rendered at that period to the Decameron decided the destinies of Italian prose, and has since been deplored by critics who believe Boccaccio to have established a false standard of taste.[128] This is a question which must be left to the Italians to decide. One thing, however, is clear; that a nation schooled by humanistic studies of a Latin type, divided by their dialects, and removed by the advance of culture beyond the influences of the purer trecentisti, found in the rhetorical diction of the Decameron a common model better suited to their taste and capacity than the simple style of the Villani could have furnished.

Boccaccio died in 1375, seventeen months after the death at Arquà of his master, Petrarch. The painter Andrea Orcagna died about the same period. With these three great artists the genius of medieval Florence sank to sleep. A temporary torpor fell upon the people, who during the next half century produced nothing of marked originality in literature and art. The Middle Age had passed away. The Renaissance was still in preparation. When Boccaccio breathed his last, men felt that the elder sources of inspiration had failed, and that no more could be expected from the spirit of the previous centuries. Heaven and hell, the sanctuaries of the soul, the garden of this earth, had been traversed. The tentative essays and scattered preludings, the dreams and visions, the preparatory efforts of all previous modern literatures, had been completed, harmonized and presented to the world in the master-works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. What remained but to make a new start? This step forward or aside was now to be taken in the Classical Revival. Well might Sacchetti exclaim in that canzone [129] which is at once Boccaccio's funeral dirge and also the farewell of Florence to the fourteenth century:

Sonati sono i corni D'ogni parte a ricolta; La stagione è rivolta: Se tornerà non so, ma credo tardi.