DANTE AND BOCCACCIO—THE VITA—AND THE COMENTO

In the summer of the year 1373 when Boccaccio was sixty years old the Signoria of Florence was petitioned by a number of citizens to appoint a lecturer who should publicly expound "librum qui vulgariter appellatur el Dante," the work which is commonly called "el Dante," the Divine Comedy, that is to say, the work of one who little by little was coming to be known as a very great poet, as a very great man, but who more than seventy years before had been ignominiously expelled from Florence and had died in exile.

The petition, a copy of which may still be found in the Florentine Libro delle Provvisioni for 1373, is as follows:—[566] "Whereas divers citizens of Florence, being minded as well for themselves and others, their fellow-citizens, as for their posterity, to follow after virtue, are desirous of being instructed in the book of Dante, wherefrom, both to the shunning of vice and to the acquisition of virtue, no less than in the ornaments of eloquence, even the unlearned may receive instruction; The said citizens humbly pray you, the worshipful Government of the People and Commonwealth of Florence, that you be pleased, at a fitting time, to provide and formally to determine, that a worthy and learned man, well versed in the knowledge of the poem aforesaid, shall be by you elected, for such term as you may appoint, being not longer than one year, to read the book which is commonly called el Dante in the city of Florence, to all such as shall be desirous of hearing him, on consecutive days, not being holidays, and in consecutive lectures, as is customary in like cases; and with such salary as you may determine, not exceeding the sum of one hundred gold florins for the said year, and in such manner and under such conditions as may seem proper to you; and further that the said salary be paid to the said lecturer from the funds of the Commonwealth in two terminal payments, to wit, one moiety about the end of the month of December, and the other moiety about the end of the month of April, such sum to be free of all deduction for taxes whatsoever...."

The petition was favourably considered by the Signoria on August 9, and was put to the vote of the assembly. Two hundred and five persons voted in all, one hundredand eighty-six in its favour, and nineteen against it.[567] The voting was by ballot and secret, and no names have come down to us, but it is perhaps permitted us to suppose, as Mr. Toynbee suggests, that the opposition came from those whose ancestors, whose fathers and grandfathers, Dante had placed in Hell, or had otherwise insulted and condemned. The decision come to on August 9 was carried on the 25th, when the Signoria appointed "Dominus Johannes de Certaldo, honorabilis civis Florentinus," to lecture on the Divine Comedy[568] for a year from the 18th October at a salary of one hundred gold florins, half of which, as the petition had suggested, was paid to him on December 31, 1373.[569] And on Sunday, October 23, 1373,[570] Boccaccio delivered his first lecture in S. Stefano della Badia.[571]

In thus appointing Boccaccio to the first Cathedra Dantesca that had anywhere been established, the Signoria not only in some sort made official amends for the cruel sentence by which the greatest son of Florence had been proclaimed and exiled,[572] but they also showed their goodwill by choosing for lecturer the man who above all others was best fitted to expound his work and to defend his memory.

As we have already seen, Boccaccio had been an eager student of Dante in the first years of his literary life.[573] It is probable that he was first introduced to Dante's work by Cino da Pistoja, whom he seems to have met in Naples between October, 1330, and July, 1331,[574] and in his first book, the Filocolo, he imitates and speaks of him;[575] in the Filostrato he copies him so closely that in fact he quotes from him;[576] in the Rime he not only, to a large extent, models his work on the sonnets of Dante, but he appeals to him and mentions his name more than once, in one case, in the sonnet already quoted addressed to Dante in Paradise after the death of Fiammetta, certainly before the Vita was written or the lectures begun.

while the Corbaccio is in some sort modelled on the allegory of the Divine Comedy.[577] This was in 1355, and immediately after the completion of the Corbaccio we find him at work, about 1356-7, on the Vita di Dante.[578] About this time too he seems to have begun to copy the Divine Comedy[579] with his own hand in order to send it to Petrarch, and we may understand perhaps how great a pioneer he was in the appreciation of Dante when from that fact we learn that Petrarch had no copy in his library. With this MS. in his own hand he sent a Carme to Petrarch of forty lines written in Latin in praise of Dante,[580] and before 1359 he evidently wrote to Petrarch excusing himself for his enthusiastic praise of Dante. That letter is unfortunately lost, but happily we have Petrarch's answer, in which he most unsuccessfully tries to excuse himself for his coldness towards the Divine Comedy, and indeed attempts to set the charge aside.

"In your letter," he writes in 1359,[581] "there are many things that need no answer, for instance those of which we have lately spoken face to face. But there are two besides, which I have singled out, and these I do not wish to pass over in silence.... Firstly, then, you excuse yourself with some eagerness for having been so prodigal in your praise of our countryman, a poet for the people assuredly as to his style,[582] yet undoubtedly noble if one consider the subject of which he writes. But you seek to justify yourself as though I might see in your praise of him or another a stain on my own reputation. You say too that all the praise you give him—if I look at it closely—turns to my glory. And you excuse too yourself by saying that in your youth he was the first guide, the first light in your studies. Well, then, you are acting with justice, with gratitude, in not forgetting him, and in short, with piety. If we owe everything to those who have given us life, if we owe much to those who have enriched us, what do we not owe to those who have nurtured and formed our spirits? Those who have cultivated our souls have indeed greater titles to our remembrance than those who have cared for our bodies.... Courage, then; I not only permit you, I invite you to celebrate and to honour this torch of your mind who has given you of his heat and of his light in this path along which you pass towards a glorious goal. It has been long blown upon and, so to say, wearied by the windy applause of the vulgar, and I bid you elevate it then even to the heaven by true praises worthy of him and of yourself. Such will be pleasing to me, because he is worthy of this commendation and, as you say, it is for you a duty. I approve then your commendatory verses,[583] and in my turn I crown with praise the poet you commend.

But in your letter of excuse the only thing that has really hurt me is to see how little you know me even now; yet I thought you at least knew me altogether. What is this? You think I should not rejoice, that I should not even glory in the praise of illustrious men? But believe me, nothing is stranger to my character than envy, nothing is more unknown...."

Perhaps Petrarch protests too much. Yet one may well think that, noble as he was, he was at least above envying Dante Alighieri, for he knew very little about him, and sincerely thought him of small account since his greatest work was written not in Latin, the tongue as he so wonderfully thought absolutely necessary to immortality, but in the sweeter and lovelier "Florentine idiom," the "glory" of which, as Boccaccio had already said in the Vita, Dante had revealed.

Thus all his life long we see Boccaccio as the enthusiastic lover and defender of the greatest of Italian poets, gently protesting against Petrarch's neglect of him, passionately protesting against the treatment "Florence, noblest among all the cities of Italy," had measured out to him, fiercely contemptuous of "those witless ones," priests and the scholastics, who considered his works to be "vain and silly fables or marvels," and could not perceive that "they have concealed within them the sweetest fruits of historical or philosophical truth." Indeed, alone among his contemporaries he values the Divine Comedy at its true worth and for the right reasons. Nor in fact should we know half we do know concerning Dante—much more that is than we know of Chaucer and Shakespeare, for instance—if Boccaccio had not loved him and shared, as he says, "the general debt to his honour" in so far as he could, "that is to say in letters, poor though they be for so great a task. But hereof I have, hereof I will give; lest foreign peoples should have power to say that his fatherland had been alike unthankful to so great a poet, whether taken generally or man by man."

It has become the fashion of late, and yet maybe it was always so, to sneer at, to doubt and to find fault with Boccaccio's Vita di Dante[584] in season and out of season on all possible points, and on some that are impossible. Scholars of Dante generally, with some eminent exceptions, seem to consider it a kind of impertinence in the author of the Decameron to have interested himself in Dante.

Mr. Wicksteed, for instance, to whom we owe a charming translation of the Vita[585]—so charming and so full of Boccaccio's own flavour that in all modesty I have taken leave to use it when I must—though he is himself its translator, finds it necessary not so much to commend it to us as to give us "some needful warnings" and "further cautions" in introducing us to it. He nowhere, I think, tells us how very valuable it is, nor instructs us why above all other works of the kind it is valuable to us. He nowhere takes the trouble to tell his readers that Boccaccio was the most eminent student of Dante in his day—the years that immediately followed the poet's death—nor that he must have met and talked with many who had known Dante. He nowhere thinks it necessary to record that Boccaccio spent more than one considerable period of time in Romagna and the Marche, and even in the very city and at the same court where Dante lived and died. It did not occur to him as a point of honour before giving us his "warnings" and "cautions" to state that Boccaccio was well acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, nor to mention that it was probably during a sojourn in Ravenna, where she was a nun, that Boccaccio conceived, or at any rate "pondered" the Vita itself.[586] Mr. Wicksteed does none of these things; but having spoken somewhat vaguely of the "versions" of the Vita and still more vaguely of its date, he proceeds to discuss its "documentary value," assuring us a little reluctantly that "scholars appear to be settling down to the conclusion that ... [Boccaccio] is to be taken as a serious biographer, who made careful investigations and who used the material he had gathered with some degree of critical judgment."[587]It will be seen, then, that such scholars are right, and that we have indeed in the Vita not only the earliest, but incomparably the most authoritative life of Dante that has come down to us, for it was written not merely by the greatest lover and defender of Dante in the years that immediately followed his death in 1321, but by one who was then already a boy of eight years old, and who in his manhood was well acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, and with others who had known him in Ravenna and Romagna, where he had passed so much of his time.

The Vita then comes to us with a certain unassailable authority, and is besides a work of piety, of love, of vindication. It opens a little pedantically perhaps with an appeal to Solon, that "temple of human wisdom," against the policy of the Florentine Commonwealth in its failure to reward the deserving and to punish the guilty. A passionate attack on those who had exiled Dante follows in which he demands: "If all the wrongs Florence hath wrought could be hidden from the all-seeing eye of God, would not this one alone suffice to call down His wrath upon her? Yea, verily!" Then follows the reason for his book, which it seems he has determined to write in expiation of the sin of Florence, "recognising that I myself am a part, though but a small one, of the same city whereof Dante Alighieri, considering his deserts, his nobility, and his virtue, was a very great one." His book will consist, he tells us, of "those things as to which he [Dante] kept seemly silence concerning himself, to wit, the nobility of his origin, his life, his studies, and his character; and after that I will gather together the works he composed; wherein he hath rendered himself so illustrious amongst those to come...." And he will write in the vulgar "in style full humble, and light ... and in our Florentine idiom, that it may not depart from what he used in the greater part of his works." He returns more than once to praise the vulgar tongue, praising Dante in one place as he who "was first to open the way for the return of the Muses banished from Italy. It was he who revealed the glory of the Florentine idiom. It was he that brought under the rule of due numbers every beauty of the vernacular speech. It was he who may be truly said to have brought back dead poesy to life." In another place he says: "by his teachings he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vulgar, which to my thinking he first exalted and brought into repute among us Italians, no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins.... He showed by the effect that every lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious above every other."

Having thus introduced his work to us, he proceeds to speak of the birth of Dante, who, he says, was born in 1265.[588] He speaks then of his "boyhood continuously given to study in the liberal arts"; of his reading of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius; of his mastering history "by himself," and philosophy under divers teachers by long study and toil. He then tells us of his places of study, naming Florence, Bologna, and Paris.[589] He then passes on to his meeting in his ninth year with Beatrice, who, he tells us, was the little daughter of Folco Portinari, and recounts her death in her twenty-fourth year and Dante's grief, his relations' purpose to cure him by giving him a wife, and his marriage with Gemma. There follows the famous interpolation against marriage which I have already quoted at length,[590] but which, as he confesses, has nothing to do with Dante.

Having thus brought Dante to manhood, Boccaccio speaks of his entrance into politics, "wherein the vain honours that are attached to public office so entangled him that, without considering whence he had departed nor whither he was going, with loosened rein he gave himself almost wholly up to the management of these things; and therein fortune was so favourable to him that never an embassy was heard nor answered, never a law enacted nor cancelled, never a peace made, never a war undertaken, and, in short, never a deliberation of any weight conducted till he first had given his opinion thereon." We are told of the factions into which the city was divided, and how the faction opposed to that of which Dante was in some sense the leader got the mastery and "hurled Dante in a single moment from the height of government of his city," so that he was cast out from it an exile, his house gutted and plundered, and his real property confiscated.

He shows us the poet wandering hither and thither through Tuscany "without anxiety" on account of his wife and children, because he knew Gemma "to be related to one of the chiefs of the hostile faction ... and some little portion of his possessions she had with difficulty defended from the rage of the citizens, under the title of her dowry, on the proceeds of which she provided in narrow style enough for herself and for his children; whilst he in his poverty must needs provide for his own sustenance by industry, to which he was all unused.... Year after year he remained (turning from Verona, where he had gone to Messer Alberto della Scala on his first flight, and had been graciously received by him), now with the Count Salvatico in the Casentino, now with the Marquis Moruello Malespina in the Lunigiana, now with the Della Faggiola in the mountains near Urbino, held in much honour so far as consisted with the times and with their power." Thence Boccaccio tells us he went to Bologna and Padua, and again to Verona. It was at this time, seeing no way yet of returning to Florence, that he went to Paris and there studied philosophy and theology. While he was in Paris, Henry of Luxemburg was elected King of the Romans and had left Germany to subdue Italy. Dante "supposed for many reasons that he must prove victorious, and conceived the hope of returning to Florence by his power ... although he heard Florence had taken sides against him." So he crossed the Alps, "he joined with the enemies of the Florentines, and both by embassies and letters strove to draw the Emperor from the siege of Brescia in order to lay siege to Florence ... declaring that if she were overcome, little or no toil would remain to secure the possession and dominion of all Italy free and unimpeded." This proved a failure, for Florence was not to be beaten, and the death of the Emperor "cast into despair all who were looking to him, and Dante most of all; wherefore no longer going about to seek his return, he passed the heights of the Apennines and departed to Romagna, where his last day that was to put an end to all his toils awaited him." There in Ravenna ruled Guido Novello da Polenta, who, as Boccaccio says, "did not wait to be requested" to receive him, "but considering with how great shame men of worth ask such favours, with liberal mind and with free proffers he approached him, requesting from Dante of special grace that which he knew Dante must needs have begged of him, to wit, that it might please him to abide with him.... Highly pleased by the liberality of the noble knight, and also constrained by his necessities, Dante awaited no further invitation but the first, and took his way to Ravenna...." There in "the middle or thereabout of his fifty-sixth year he fell sick ... and in the month of September in the years of Christ one thousand three hundred and twenty-one, on the day whereon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is celebrated by the Church, not without the greatest grief on the part of the aforesaid Guido, and generally all the other Ravennese, he rendered up to his Creator his toilworn spirit, the which I doubt not was received into the arms of his most noble Beatrice, with whom ... he now lives most joyously in that life the felicity of which expects no end." Then after speaking of the plans of Guido for Dante's tomb, and again reproaching Florence for her ingratitude, and inciting her for her own honour to demand his body, "not but that I am certain he will not be surrendered to thee," what we may call the first part of the Vita comes to an end.

The second part opens with a portrait of the poet very careful and minute in its description.

"This our poet, then, was of middle height; and when he had reached maturity he went somewhat bowed, his gait grave and gentle, and ever clad in most seemly apparel, in such garb as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline, and his eyes rather large than small; his jaws big, and the under lip protruding beyond the upper. His complexion was dark, his hair and beard thick, black, and curling, and his expression was ever melancholy and thoughtful."[591] There follow several stories about him in Verona and at Paris. And Boccaccio seems to have come very near to the secret of Dante's tragedy when he tells us at last that "he longed most ardently for honour and glory; perchance more than befitted his illustrious virtue." He understood the enormous pride of the man, his insatiable superiority, his scorn of those who had wronged him; and he is full of excuses for him, full of pity too for his sorrows and eager to heap praise on praise of the great poet he so much reverenced and loved.[592]

The rest of the Vita is concerned with Dante's work, and forms, as it were, a third part, introduced by a long dissertation on poetry and poets, followed by a short chapter on Dante's pride and some in which he gives certain instances of it. Then he passes to the consideration of the Vita Nuova, of the Divine Comedy,[593] the De Monarchia, the Convivio, the De Vulgari Eloquentia, and the Rime in the briefest possible manner. As a critic it must be confessed Boccaccio is lacking in judgment, but the facts he gives us, the assertions he makes in matters of fact regarding these works must be received, I think, with the utmost seriousness. It is impossible to doubt that Boccaccio wrote in all good faith, and it must be remembered that there were any number of people living who had he departed from the truth could have contradicted him. No one of whom we have any record did contradict him; we hear no whisper of any protest. Most of those who busied themselves with Dante, on the contrary, gladly copied him. Had he been a liar with regard to Dante the Republic of Florence would scarcely have appointed him to the first Cathedra Dantesca; but they gave him the lectureship just because he was the one person who could fill it with honour.

And so when he tells us that in his maturer years Dante was ashamed of the Vita Nuova we must accept it, reminding ourselves that this was no impossibility, for Petrarch too was ashamed of his Italian sonnets, while Boccaccio actually destroyed a great part of his own. When he tells us again that Dante left behind him seven cantos of the Inferno when he fled from Florence, we must accept it in the same way as we must accept the story of the recovery of the last thirteen cantos of theParadiso by Dante's son Jacopo. Indeed, there is no good reason to find Boccaccio either careless or a liar anywhere in the work. The immense care he bestowed upon the collection of his facts has, on the contrary, been admitted by one of the best Dante scholars of our day[594] and proved by another not less learned,[595] so that we have no right at all to regard his work as anything less than the most valuable document we possess on Dante's life. It has often been treated as a mere romance, it has been sneered at and abused, but it has never yet been proved to be at fault in any matter of the least importance touching Dante, or in any matter of personal fact. Of course it is not the work of a modern historian; it has not the reassurance of dullness or the mechanical accuracy of "scientific" history. But to sneer at it because its "account of the Guelf and Ghibelline disputes and of the political events in which Dante was chiefly concerned" may seem "vague and inadequate in the extreme" is merely absurd. Boccaccio is not writing of these events, he does not propose to give an account of them; he confesses in the most sincere fashion that he does not rightly know what the words Guelf and Ghibelline originally implied. He is writing of Dante; and on Dante's life, on Dante's work, he had enquired and studied and read and, as he himself says, "pondered" for many years.

We must not demand from the Vita more than it will readily give us. It was written with a purpose. Its intention was both to praise Dante and to arrest the attention of the Florentines to the wrong they had done him; Boccaccio wished to set the facts before them as an advocate of the dead. The facts: he had known Beatrice, Dante's daughter, and three other relations or friends of Dante's whom he names, Pier Giardino of Ravenna,[596] one of Dante's most intimate friends; Andrea Poggio,[597] Dante's nephew, and Dino Perini, Andrea's rival in the discovery of the lost cantos of the Inferno, and many others who had known both Dante and Beatrice;[598] thus he could if he wished come by facts; and that he set down just facts has been proved over and over again. And then there were still living those who had hated Dante bitterly and would gladly have found fault if they could. There were others too who would certainly have allowed nothing entirely to the detriment of Dante to pass unchallenged: they made no sign. That they were silent is in itself a sufficient tribute to the truthfulness of the book.

I have already said something as to the versions of the Life:[599] it remains to add that though the MSS. of the Compendium are rare, those of the Vita are very numerous,[600] while the first printed edition of the work was published in Venice in 1477 by Vindelin da Spira before the edition of the Divine Comedy with the comment of Jacopo della Lana, erroneously attributed to Benvenuto da Imola. Prof. Macri Leone describes nineteen later editions, making with his own some twenty-one in all.[601]

It is not surprising that the author of this eager defence of Dante, of the first life of the poet, should on the petition of the Florentines for a lecturer in the Divine Comedy have been chosen by the Signoria to fill that honourable and difficult post. His first lecture, as we have seen, was delivered in the church of Santo Stefano on Sunday, October 23, 1373. Already an old man, infirm in health, he can scarcely have hoped to finish his work, and as it proved he was not able to complete a sixth part of it, for attacked by illness in the winter of 1373, he broke off abruptly at the seventeenth verse of the seventeenth canto of the Inferno and returned to Certaldo really to die. That, after that sudden breakdown, if such it was, he never resumed his lectures seems certain, and although it was at the time supposed that Boccaccio had written a complete commentary on the Divine Comedy, and a fourteenth-century Comento, now commonly known as Il Falso Boccaccio,[602] was accepted even by the Academicians of the Crusca as his work,[603] it seems certain that the fragment we know as his Comento was all that was ever written, though how much of it was actually delivered in lectures it is impossible to say.[604]

That the Comento we have and no other is really the work of Boccaccio was proved long ago by Manni,[605] for it seems, that when Boccaccio died at last, a dispute arose among his heirs as to the meaning of his Will, the bone of contention being this very Comento, which both Fra Martino da Signa of Santo Spirito in Florence, to whom he had left his books, claimed as part of his library, and also Jacopo his half-brother, to whose children Boccaccio had left all the other property he had.[606] The affair was at last referred to the Consoli dell' Arte del Cambio, the two sides submitting their claims in writing. We find there that Fra Martino, if the Comento were adjudged his property, professed his willingness to let Jacopo have it, a sheet at a time, to copy. Jacopo, however, makes no such offer; we should nevertheless be grateful to him—he was the victor—for in his claim he minutely describes the MS. in question and so enables us to identify it with those we possess.[607] "Dinanzi a voi domando," we read there, "ventiquattro quaderni, et quattordici quadernucci, tutti in carta di bambÁgia, non legati insieme, ma l' uno dall' altro diviso, d' uno iscritto, o vero isposizione sopra sedici Capitoli, e parte del diciassettesimo del Dante, il quale scritto il detto Messer Giovanni di Boccaccio non compiÈ...."

This incomplete work,[608] which breaks off so suddenly really in the middle of a paragraph, might seem to be rather a true commentary, a sort of full notes on the work in question, such as is still common in Italy, than a series of lectures delivered viv voce. Indeed the living voice is almost entirely absent, and as Dr. Toynbee says, "if it were not for a single passage at the beginning of his opening lecture in which he directly addresses his audience as 'Voi, Signori fiorentini,' it would be difficult to gather from the work itself that it was composed originally for public delivery."[609] He seems to have composed it as he would have composed a book, with the utmost care and foresight, often referring some point forward to be discussed later; and thus we may see that he had already considered as a critic and as a commentator the whole of the work, and had made up his mind that such and such a reference would be better discussed at some point in the Purgatorio or at another in the Paradiso, and so refused to discuss it at the moment. His work too is not only filled with Dantesque thought and phraseology, but is in its form composed in the manner of Dante, that is to say, he expounds first the literal meaning, the obvious sense, and then the secondary meaning or sense allegorical, just as Dante does in the Convivio when speaking of his Canzoni, and as he had already begun to do even in the Vita Nuova. Nor was this anything new for Boccaccio; all his life he had himself written in allegory, and had been used to condemn those who found no secondary meaning in the poets.[610]

But the most characteristic part of the Comento, its greatest surprise for us too, is perhaps to be found in its opening. For after excusing himself with his usual modesty as wholly insufficient for the task, he addresses his audience as "men of lofty understanding and of wonderful quickness of understanding"—facts his commentary does not altogether lead us to endorse, for he feels called upon to explain the simplest things,[611] and then after quoting Plato[612] in the TimÆus as to the propriety of invoking divine aid, he asks for God's help not in any Christian prayer, but in the words of Anchises in the second Æneid:—

He was so much a man of the Renaissance that he does not seem to have felt it at all inappropriate to ask thus for God's aid in expounding the greatest of Christian poems, by addressing himself to Jupiter: he merely explains that as the work he is to explain is in verse it is proper to invoke God in verse also.

Having thus asked for God's blessing, he proceeds to open his lecture. He first examines the work he is to discuss as to its kind, then as to its causes, its title and school of philosophy. In doing so he shows us that he was aware of the doubtful letter of Dante to Can Grande della Scala,[614] for he quotes it, though he names it not. He does not approve of the title—The Comedy—for such is used for low subjects and common people; but Dante's poem is concerned with the greatest persons and deeds, with sin and penitence, the ways of angels and the secrets of God. The style too of comedy, he asserts, is humble and simple, while Dante's poem is lofty and ornate, although it is written in the vulgar tongue, and he is obliged to admit that in the Latin it would have had a finer dignity.

From this he proceeds to discuss Dante's name and its significance much as he had already done in the Vita, and having decided that the poem belongs to moral philosophy, proceeds, after formally submitting all he may say to the judgment of the Catholic Church, to deal with the Inferno. Yet even now he cannot come at the poem without discussing the Inferno itself, whether there be a Hell, or maybe more than one, where it is placed, how it is approached, what are its shape and size and its purpose, and lastly why it is called Infernus.[615] Then on the very brink of the poem he turns away again to discuss why Dante wrote in Tuscan instead of in Latin; and having given practically the same explanation as that we have already noted in the Vita,[616] he proceeds at long last to the Commentary proper.

And here we cannot but be astonished at the extraordinary mixture of simplicity and subtlety, of elementary knowledge and profound learning which are heaped together without any discrimination. There is something here of the endless leisure of the Middle Age in which Boccaccio seems determined to say everything. "One wonders," says Dr. Toynbee, "for what sort of audience Boccaccio's lectures were intended." In the terms of the petition the lecturer was to expound the Commedia for the benefit of "etiam non grammatici." But it is difficult to conceive that any audience of Florentines, even of Florentine children, however ignorant of Latin, let alone the "uomini d' alto intendemento e di mirabile perspicacitÀ" to whom Boccaccio refers in such flattering terms in his opening lecture, could require to be informed, as Boccaccio carefully informs it, that an anchor is "an instrument of iron which has at one end several grapples, and at the other a ring by which it is attached to a rope whereby it is let down to the bottom of the sea,"[617] or that "every ship has three principal parts, of which one is called the bows, which is sharp and narrow, because it is in front and has to cut the water; the second is called the poop and is behind, where the steersman stands to work the tiller, by means of which, according as it is moved to one side or the other, the ship is made to go where the steersman wishes; while the third part is called the keel, which is the bottom of the ship, and lies between the bows and the stern,"[618] and so on.

Nor is this all, for even the Bible stories are retold at length,[619] and a whole discourse is given upon Æneas.[620] The elementary subjects dealt with at such length cheek by jowl with the most profound questions seems to us extraordinary, nor apparently are we the only readers to be surprised; for possibly on this account Boccaccio was bitterly reproached in his own day for lecturing on the Commedia to the vulgar. He replied, really admitting the offence, and pleading poverty as his excuse in two sonnets,[621] one of which I quote here:—[622]

"If Dante mourns, there wheresoe'er he be

That such high fancies of a soul so proud

Should be laid open to the vulgar crowd

(As touching my Discourse, I'm told by thee)

This were my grievous pain; and certainly

My proper blame should not be disavow'd;

Though hereof somewhat, I declare aloud

Were due to others, not alone to me.

False hopes, true poverty, and therewithal

The blended judgment of a host of friends,

And their entreaties, made that I did this.

But of all this there is no gain at all

Unto the thankless souls with whose base ends

Nothing agrees that's great or generous."