In the boyhood of Dante, Florence, the Flower City, was a place of much beauty, of perfect calm, of almost perfect equality, of pleasurable and polished life.  There a brigade, the Brigata Amorosa, formed of a thousand people, had a lord who was a Lord of Love.  During one of their recurrent festivals an entertainment was held at the home of Folco Portinari.  To such entertainments Boccaccio said that children frequently accompanied their parents.  To this particular entertainment, Dante, then a lad of nine, came with his father.  He found there a number of boys and girls, among whom was Folco’s daughter, Beatrice, a child with delicate features whose speech and attitude were perhaps superserious for her age.

Dante looked at her.  “At that moment,” he afterward, wrote, “I may truly say that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of my heart, trembled in such wise that the least pulses of my being shook....  So noble was her manner, that assuredly one might repeat of her the words of Homer:  ‘She seemed born not of mortal but of God.’”

Years passed during which often he encountered her, without, however, a word being interchanged.  Subsequently, at a festival, she recognized him and bowed-“so virtuously,” he said, “that I thought myself lifted to the limits of beatitude.”

Another interval ensued.  Again she met him.  Dante was then twenty, Beatrice nineteen.  On this occasion she omitted to bow.  The omission affected him profoundly.  It was even inspirational.  He began to write, “so well” said Boccaccio “that he effaced the fame of poets that had been and menaced that of those to be.”

In promenading his young glory he again encountered Beatrice, this time in a house where a betrothal was being celebrated.  On entering he was so emotionalized that he had to lean against a wall.  The women who were present divined the reason.  Beatrice was there.  The situation amused them.  They laughed.  Beatrice also laughed. Whether or not it was her betrothal that was being feted is uncertain.  It may have been.  Shortly she became the wife of Simon dei Bardi, gentiluomo.

Dante more profoundly affected than ever cursed the day on which they met: 

     Io maledico il di ch’io vidi imprima
     La luce de’ vostri occhi traditori.

To the melody of the imprecation, Petrarch, in honor of Laura, added a variant: 

     Benedetto sia l’giorno, e l’mese, e l’anno.

Both were unfortunate in their loves but of the two Dante’s was the least favored.  It had nothing for sustenance.  Yet, save for that one reproach, it persisted.  Its continuance was fully justified by the code, though, in the absence of any reciprocity whatever, it was perhaps more vaporous than any that the codifiers had considered.

Hitherto Dante had hoped but for a bow.  Thereafter the hope seemed ambitious.  He ceased to expect so much.  A woman, cognizant, as all Florence was, of the circumstances said to him:  “Since you barely dare to look at Beatrice, what can your love for her be?” Dante answered:  “The dream of my love was in her salutation but since it has pleased her to withhold it from me, my happiness now resides in what cannot be withdrawn.”  “And what is that?” the donna asked.  “In words that praise her,” he replied.

Seemingly instead of that, instead rather of limiting his previous ambition to a salutation he might have supplanted Dei Bardi.  Dante too was gentiluomo.  In addition he was famous.  Had he asked, doubtless it would have been given.  But Dante, nourished on troubadourian verse and views, held love to be incompatible with marriage.  Afterward, if any Provencal suggestion of extra-matrimonial possibilities presented itself, it was too incongruous with the ideal to be detained.  Even otherwise, shortly and speedily Beatrice died and he very nearly died also.

The distraction of writing of her, of drawing angels that resembled her, these occupations, combined with other incidents, consoled.  Then presently he had visions, among them one in which he saw that which decided him to write nothing further until he could do so more worthily.  “To that end,” he said, “I labor all I can, as she well knows.  Wherefore if it please Him, through whom all things live, that my life be suffered to continue yet awhile, I hope one day to say of her what has not been said of any woman.  After which may it please the Lord of Grace that my soul go hence in quest of the Blessed Beatrice who now gazes continuously on the countenance of Him qui est omnia sécula benedictus.  Laus Deo!”

With these words, with which the Vita Nuova ends, the Divina Commedia is announced.  Voltaire commended an imbecile for calling the latter a monster.  It is regrettable that there are not more like it.  Other imbéciles have called Beatrice an abstraction.  That she lived is fully attested.  Dante admired a child who became a young woman from whom he asked next to nothing, which, being refused, he asked nothing at all, contenting himself with laudations.  From that moment, Beatrice, who had really been, ceased to really be.  She became a personified worship.  Finally she died and her death was her assumption, an apotheosis in which typifying the Eternal Feminine, she lifted the poet from sphere to sphere, from glory to glory, to the heights where, imperishable, he stands.

Said Tennyson: 

     King that hast reigned six hundred years and grown
     In power and ever growest ... 
     I, wearing but the garland of a day
     Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away.

The tribute, perfect in itself, was perfectly deserved.  There never was such tenderness as Dante’s.  There never was such intensity.  Save only in the case of the human oceans that men call Homer and Shakespeare, there never has been such greatness.

Homer engendered antiquity.  From Dante modernity proceeds.  Of Shakespeare, England was born.  Without resemblance to one another, on their thrones in the ideal each sits alone.  Behind them is the past, at their feet the present, before them the centuries unroll.  They are the immortals.  They have all time as we all have our day.  It is from them we get our daily bread.  Their genius feeds our starving soul.  Talent has never done that.  Talent makes us laugh and forget and yawn.  Talent is agreeable, it provides us with pleasures, with means of getting rid of time.  But to the heart it brings no message, for the soul it has no food.  It is ephemeral, not eternal.  Only genius and its art endure.

The genius of Dante, Beatrice awoke, of his art she was the inspiration.  For that be she, as he called her, Blessed,-thrice Blessed since she did not love him.  Had she loved him, he could not have done better, that is not possible, and he might have omitted to do as well.

Dante made Francesca say of Paolo: 

     Questi che mai da me non fía diviso,
     La bocca mi bacio tutto tremente.

Francesca added: 

Quel giorno piú non vi leggemmo avante-we read no more that day.  Nor on any other.  Had she, from whom Dante is equally inseparable, tremblingly kissed his mouth, it may be that not their reading merely but his writing would have ceased.  But Dante, whom Petrarch called a miracle of nature, was not Paolo.  Far from attempting to kiss Beatrice he did not even aspire to such a grace.  He had, as the genius should have, everything, even to sex, in his brain, a circumstance that might have preserved him from Gemma Donati and la Gentucca,-the first, his wife; the second, another’s-dual infidelities for which, at the summit of Purgatory, Beatrice, who, in the interim, had become very feminine, reproached him with slow scorn.

For punishment he beheld her.  The spectacle of her beauty was such that memories of his sins seared him like thin flames.  He was in Purgatory.  But Beatrice who in a cloud of flowers-un nuvola di fiori-had come, forgave him.  Together then their ascension began. Ella guardava suso, ed io in lei. She looked above and he at her.  In the mounting his sins fell by.  As they did so her beauty increased.  In proportion to his redemption she became more fair.

That picture, at once real and ideal, displayed in its exquisiteness the miracle of two hearts saving and embellishing each other.  Set at the threshold of modern life it prefigured what love was to be, what it is now when it truly appears, but what it was long in becoming.

It had no part in the conceptions of Cecco Angioleiri, a poet contemporaneous, very vulgar, consequently more popular, who “sat” his heart on a donna and flung at her cries that were squeaks.

     Io ho in tal donna lo mio core assiso,
     Che chi dicesse:  Ti fo imperadore,
     E sta che non la veggi per due ore,
     Io li direi:  Va che to sia ucciso.

Other was Petrarch,

     From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown
     A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
     Each lucid with the name of One.

The One was Laura.  Petrarch, young, good-looking, already aureoled, saw her first at matins in a church at Avignon.  She too was young.  Married, a woman of position, of probable beauty, she was dark-eyed, fair-haired, pensive, serene.  With spells as gossamer as those of the Monna Bice, at once she imparadised his heart.  Precipitately he presented it to her.  She refused it.

Hughes de Sade, her husband, was a perfectly unsympathetic person, jealous without reason, notoriously hard.  Yet his excuse, if he had one, may have resided in local conditions.  Avignon stately and luxurious, was, Petrarch declared, the gully of every vice.  “There is here,” he said, “nothing holy, nothing just, nothing human.  Decency and modesty are unknown."

Yet he found them there.  Laura represented both.  In the profligacy of the Papal city she at least was pure.  She would have none of Petrarch, or, more exactly, so little that hardly can it be said to count.  Rebuffed he departed.  She beckoned him back, rebuffed him again and, alternately, for twenty-one years, rebuffed and beckoned, preserving his love without according her own, giving him an infrequent smile, now and then a nod from a window, on one memorable occasion as much as the touch of her hand.  Once only, and that at their last interview her eyes looked longly in his.  That was all.

To be near her he purchased at Vaucluse an estate so gloomy that his servants forsook him and where, such women as he saw, it mortified him to look at.  The expression is his own.  Day after day he stood before her gates, which he never entered, fully repaid, if among the orange trees there, he but caught sight of her.  On one occasion he met her by accident, on another he was fortunate enough to be able to restore a glove which she had dropped, again in a reunion where were assembled the ladies of Avignon, a foreign prince marched up to the woman whom Petrarch’s verses had made famous and kissed her on the eyes.  It was a prince’s privilege.  Petrarch related the occurrence in a sonnet.  It was incidents of this character that form the bundle of poetry that immortalized them both.

Sometimes he rebelled.  He went away, travelled, studied, worked.  Whatever he did, where-ever he were, always, in haunting constancy, she was before him.  Always her presence inhabited his eyes.  He tried to vanquish the love of woman in the love of God.  In the struggle it was he who was defeated.  Even age, even death could not aid him.  Laura ultimately had nine children.  She was growing old, certainly she was worn.  To Petrarch always she was in the first festival of her beauty.

     Blessed be the day and the month and the year,
     And the season, the hour, the minute,
     And the fair land and the spot itself where
     Her beautiful eyes subjected my spirit.

It was that which he had ever before him.  It was that which made him what he was, the foremost personality of his day.  It was that which distinguished him from other poets.  Unlike anybody, every one wanted to resemble him.  It was love that did it.  Dante told of love with an intensity that was divine.  Petrarch wrote with a comprehensiveness that was human.  There have been thousands of poets and but one Dante, myriads of lovers and but one Petrarch.  Whether Laura deserved his devotion must be a matter of opinion.  This alone is obvious.  She made his life a combat which antiquity would not have understood, which chivalry would not have appreciated and which Dante did not experience.  In antiquity love had for form but the senses.  That form chivalry draped with graces and Dante dematerialized.  In Petrarch, love was both of the flesh and of the spirit in addition to being sincere.  That was a great step.  With him for the first time there entered into history an honest man ardently in love with an honest woman.  To the superficial she has seemed but a coquette and he merely sentimental.  He were perhaps better regarded as creative, the founder of the real love which is the love of the heart, the “amour eternel en un moment concu.”

The quality of Laura’s love, whether she loved him or whether she did not, whether for that matter she was capable of loving at all, whether on the other hand while loving him wholly she, like the woman in the sonnet of Arvers who inspired the “amour eternel” preferred to remain “piously faithful to the austere devoir,” is immaterial and unimportant.  Another man would have abandoned her completely or carried her violently away.  Petrarch, too sincere for treason and too poetic for vulgarity, unfit in consequence for either enterprise, became obsessed with a love that developed into a delicate malady, a disease that sent him from his studies, tormenting him into an incessant struggle with the most terrible of all combatants-one’s self.  The malady had its compensations.  It made him the source of modern lyricism and the most conspicuous figure of his day.  In Milan when he appeared every head was uncovered.  On the Po, a battle was interrupted that he might pass.  At Venice his seat was at the right of the doge.  Rome’s ghost revived in beauty for him and put a laurel on his brow.  It was his verse that induced these tributes.  The verse was inspired by love.

To Dante, love was what it had been to Plato, a mysterious initiation into the secrets of the material world.  To Petrarch it was a rebellion against those very things.  In Dante it was sublimated, in Petrarch it was distilled.  Laura stood at the parting of the roads, midway between the symbolism of the Divina Commedia and the freedom of the Decamerone.

The Decamerone is the chronicle of a society in extremis of which the Divine Comedy is the Last Judgment.  One is the dirge of the past, the other the dawn of the future.  Between the gravity of the one and the unconcern of the other is the distance of the poles.  Separated but by half a century the cantos are the antipodes of the novellas.  In the former is gloom, palpable and thick.  In the latter is light, frivolous and clear.  One is mediaeval, the other, modern.  But one was constructed for all time, the other for a day.  If the Decamerone still survive, it is through one of Time’s caprices.

Boccaccio wrote endlessly.  He produced treatises theological, historical, mystical.  With his pen he built a vast monument.  Time passed and in passing loosed from the edifice a single stone.  The rest it reduced to dust.  But that stone it sent rolling into posterity, regarding it, wrongly or rightly as a masterpiece.  A masterpiece is a thing that seems easy to make and which no one can duplicate.  The Queen of Navarre tried and failed augustly.  Indolent reviewers have summarized both efforts as gossip.  Boccaccio’s work was at once that and something else.  It was a viaticum for the Middle Ages and a signal for the Renaissance.

Through Florence at that hour stalked the Black Pest.  The narrow streets were choked with corpses.  The people were dying.  So too was an epoch.  While grave-diggers were at work a page of history was being turned.  On the other side was a dawn which now is day.  The knell of expiring night Boccaccio answered with laughter.  Into a shroud he tossed flowers.  Of these many were frail, some blood-red, others toxic; a few only were white.  From them come the odors that formed the moral atmosphere of indifferent Italy, of careless France, of England after the Restoration.  They were the parterre on which gallantry grew.