The sonnets to Fiammetta, sixty-nine of which were written to her living and nine to her dead, he arranges in a sort of categories, thus: twenty-six sonnets he calls "ideal"—these were written to her in the first years that followed Boccaccio's meeting with her; nineteen he calls "sensual"—these were composed before he possessed her at Baia; twenty-three he calls "very sensual"—these were written in the fullness of his enjoyment, when his most impetuous desires had been satisfied. Finally, Signor Antona Traversi finds one sonnet where we may see his sorrow at having lost his mistress.
But this method is almost the same as that we found so absurd in the dissenters, who eagerly deny the reality of any love which man has cared to express. Its success depends entirely on our absolute knowledge of the psychology of man's heart, of a poet's heart. What knowledge, then, have we which will enable us to divide what is ideal love here from what is base love, the false from the true? Is the parable of the tares and the wheat to go for nothing? And again, can we divide love, the love of any man for any woman, if indeed it be love, into "sensual," "ideal," and so forth? Indeed, for such a desperate operation one would need a knowledge of man beside which that of Shakespeare would be as a rushlight to the sun. Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion? Who shall divide love into periods of the soul? These are things too wonderful for me, which I know not. Are not "idealism" and "sensuality" moods of the same passion, often simultaneous and always interchangeable? Or do the critics speak of affection? But I speak not of affection. I speak of love—a flame of fire. And whatever Boccaccio's love may have been, good or bad as you will, I care not what you decide to think, this at least it was, a passion, a passion which mastered him and destroyed in him much that was good, much that was bad, but that made of him a poet and the greatest story-teller in the world. Such a passion was composed of an infinite number of elements spiritual and physical, in which the sensual presupposes the ideal even as the ideal does the sensual. Who may divide what God has joined together? And if one might—what disaster!
As though this difficulty were not enough to stagger even the most precise among us, we have to take this also into account, that for the first time in modern literature, love, human love, is freely expressed in Boccaccio's sonnets. It is true Dante had sung of Beatrice till she vanishes away into a mere symbol, far and far from our world in the ever-narrowing circles of his Paradise. So Petrarch had sung of Laura till the coldness of her smile—ah! in the sunshine of Provence—has frozen his song on his lips, so that it is as smooth and as brittle as ice. It is not of such as these that Boccaccio sings, but of a woman mean and lovely, beautiful as the sea and as treacherous, infinitely various, licentious, sentimental, of two minds in a single heart's beat, who smiled his soul out of his body in a short hour on a spring morning in church, who passed with him for her own pleasure in the shadow of the myrtles at Baia, whom he took by the hair, and kissed cruelly, thirsty for kisses, on the mouth, and who, being weary, as women will be, threw him aside for no cause but for this, that she had won his love. No man but Dante could have loved Beatrice, for he made her; and for Laura, she is so dim, so mere a ghost, I only know her name; but for Fiammetta, which of us would not have staked his eternal good, since in her we recognise the very truth; not "every woman"—God forbid—but woman, and if, as the dissenters would assert, she is a myth, a creation of Boccaccio's, then indeed he was an artist only second to the greatest, for she is only less human, less absolute than Cleopatra.
We may take it then, first, that Boccaccio's love was a reality, and not a "literary exercise" that he performed in these sonnets; and then, that if we are to get any order at all out of those which deal with so profound and difficult a subject as love, we must not hope to do it by dividing them into certain artificial categories, such as of "ideal love," of "sensual love," of "very sensual love."
Let us begin with certainties. We can dispose of certain of the poems at once. Sonnet xcvii. to Petrarch, who is dead, must have been written after July 20, 1374. Sonnets vii., viii., ix., which deal with certain censures which had been passed on his Exposition of Dante, were certainly written after August, 1373, when Boccaccio was appointed to lecture on the Divine Comedy. In sonnets i., xxvi., xlii., lxiv., lxviii., and xciii. he alludes to the fact that he is growing old.[370] In sonnet ciii. he says he is sorry to depart without hope of seeing his lady again:—
"Ma ciò mai non avviene, e me partire
Or convien contra grado, nè speranza
Di mai vederti mi rimane alcuna.
Onde morrommi, caro mio disire,
E piangerò, il tempo che m' avanza,