Petrarch and Boccaccio Dante

DANTE, PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO Dante (1265-1321).—As the author of the Vita nuova, the greatest of all Italian poets, Dante, also belongs to the same lyric school and partly shares Guinicelli's and Cavalcanti's conception of love. In the lyrics of the Vita nuova there is a high idealization of love. It seems as if there were in it nothing earthly or human, and that the poet had his eyes constantly fixed on heaven while singing of his lady. Several of the lyrics (Rime) not included in the Vita nuova or the Convivio deal with the theme of the "new life"; but all the love poems do not refer to Beatrice, while other pieces are philosophical and bridge over to the Convivio (c. 1307), an unfinished philosophic treatise in which are to be read some of the finest passages of early Italian prose. About the literary language of Italy Dante expressed original views in another unfinished work in Latin (De vulgari eloquentia, c. 1305) ; just as later, in 1313, he expounded his political system in the Latin M onarchia and in some letters. Towards the end of his life he composed a short treatise De aqua et terra and two Latin eclogues of great interest. But the work which made him im mortal is of course the Divina Commedia which was probably written between 1307 and 1321. In ma cantos Dante describes a vision, during which he visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise under the guidance of Virgil, symbolizing human reason, and later of Beatrice (human reason illumined by Revelation). Many incidents in this pilgrimage, as well as the pilgrimage itself, have an allegorical meaning, and Dante succeeded in expressing his opinion upon all the subjects that principally interested him in the course of an anticipated Last Judgment to which he dared to summon some men of past ages and many of those who had lived or were living in his own time. It was so clear to him that he had a mission to fulfill and a message to deliver, that he felt inspired to greater effort by the very daring of his undertaking. And though as a pilgrim through the after-world he described himself as having risen from human to celestial heights, as a poet he kept faith to the same moral and political ideals for which he had fought and suffered. Even those readers who may be unequal to the effort of making out the grand lines of his majestic struc ture, cannot fail to see and to remember the ineffable charm of some particular passages tender or ghastly, stern or moving.

Dante is often said to have summed up the middle ages for the men who came after him ; it should not be overlooked, how ever, that there is much in his work that seems to herald the age which was to follow. He claimed to have learned his literary style from the classics and from Virgil in particular; and if his was not yet a scholarly return to the classics, the angle from which he looked upon them was no longer completely mediaeval.

Petrarch (1304-1374).

The next step was to be taken by Petrarch, and it will be easier to grasp its significance if one bears in mind that his principal aim was a rebellion against the philo sophy of the Schoolmen and against the deductive method in science and philosophy by which every truth could only be de rived from what Aristotle and his commentators had said. This rebellion he fostered by holding up Plato, whose works and ideas were only indirectly known to him, in opposition to Aristotle, and by summoning to his aid the results of his own introspection. The data of introspection he compared with the records which great writers of antiquity had set down of their own experiences. It was in order to render the study of such ancient records possible and fruitful that it became necessary to know exactly what the ancients had written, and therefore to discover and to collate as many of the manuscripts of their works as were still traceable. Scholarship and antiquarianism were means to an end, and not ends in themselves for Petrarch. He was the first humanist, and at the same time the first lyric poet of the modern school. His career was long and tempestuous. He lived for many years at Avignon, cursing the corruption of the papal court; he travelled through nearly the whole of Europe ; he corresponded with em perors and popes ; he was considered the first man of letters of his time ; he had honours and moderate riches; and he always bore about within him discontent, melancholy and incapacity for satisfaction—three characteristics of the modern man. He loved

Laura, whoever the lady was, and Laura may have for a time countenanced his courtship, but ever remained out of his reach. His life was passed in pining for her, admiring her beauty, sor rowing for her coldness and also in rebelling against love ; for love of woman and desire for worldly fame hindered, in his view, the spiritual freedom of man and his striving toward Christian perfection. These perpetual alternations of his moods he embroid ered upon with faultless technique, whether or not he happened to be prompted by feeling and strong inspiration, throughout the Rime sparse, as he seems to have called his Italian lyrics when, long after Laura's death (1348), he revised and collected them, including also a few political and occasional poems. A clearer but far less successful expression of his views is to be found in the vision that he called I trionfi, clearly imitated from Dante's Commedia; but no one could hope to penetrate the world of Petrarch's thought who did not read his Secretum, a dialogue between St. Augustine and himself, the treatise De vita solitaria, the great body of his Latin epistles, and last but not least his epic poem Africa by which he sometimes expected to be remembered by posterity.

Boccaccio (1313-1375).

Boccaccio had the same enthusiastic love of antiquity and the same worship for the new Italian litera ture as Petrarch. He supervised the work of Leon Pilatus, a Greek born in Calabria, who put together a Latin translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Boccaccio's vast classical learning was shown specially in the work De genealogic deorum, in which he enumerates the gods according to genealogical trees constructed on the authority of the various authors who wrote about the pagan divinities. Boccaccio was also the first historian of women in his De claris mulieribus, and the first to undertake to tell the story of the great unfortunate in his De casibus virorumillustrium. He continued and perfected former geographical investigations in his interesting book De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, flumi nibus, stagnis, et paludibus, et de nominibus maris, for which he made use of Vibius Sequester, but which contains also many new and valuable observations. Of his Italian works his lyrics do not approach the perfection of Petrarch's. His narrative poetry is better. He was the first to use ottava rima in a work of some length and written with artistic skill, such as is his Teseide, the oldest Italian romantic poem. The Filostrato relates the loves of Troiolo and Griseida (Troilus and Cressida). The Ninfale fieso lano tells the love story of the nymph Mesola and the shepherd Africo. The Amorosa Visione, a poem in terra rima, doubtless owed its origin to the Divina Commedia. The Ameto is a mixture of prose and poetry, and is the first Italian pastoral romance.

The Filocolo takes the earliest place among prose romances. In it Boccaccio tells in a laborious style, and in the most prolix way, the loves of Florio and Biancafiore. The Fiammetta is an other romance, about the loves of Boccaccio and Maria d'Aquino, a supposed natural daughter of King Robert, whom he always called by this name of Fiammetta.

The Italian work which principally made Boccaccio famous was the Decameron, a collection of ioo novels, related by a party of men and women, who had retired to a villa near Florence to escape from the plague in 1348. Novel-writing, so abundant in the preceding centuries, especially in France, now for the first time assumed an artistic shape. The rudeness of the old fabliaux gives place to the careful and conscientious work of a mind that has a feeling for what is beautiful, that has studied the classic authors, and that strives to imitate them as much as possible. Over and above this, in the Decameron Boccaccio is a delineator of char acter and an observer of passions. In this lies his novelty. Much has been written about the sources of the novels of the Decam eron. Probably Boccaccio made use both of written and of oral sources.

Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio felt for Dante something more than love—enthusiasm. He wrote a biography of him, of which the accuracy has been unsuccessfully challenged in the past, and he gave public lectures on the poem in Santa Maria del Fiore at Florence.