"Dante, if thou within the sphere of love,
As I believe, remain'st contemplating
Beautiful Beatrice whom thou didst sing
Erewhile ..."
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.