Aspice nos: hoc tantum: et, si pietate meremur
Da deinde auxilium, pater!"[613]
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