to
accompany him no longer on his journey through the invisible world.

"O ye who in some pretty little boat
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along,
Turn back to look again upon your shores,
Do not put out to sea, lest, peradventure,
In losing me, you might yourselves be lost."
(Par. bk. II, I.)

With obscurity thus acknowledged, is it any wonder that Dante is
subjected to prolonged controversy by historical criticism which has not
hesitated to cast doubt upon the authorship of the Iliad and the Synotic
Gospels? In the face of this obscurity it is the opinion of such well
known Dantian scholars as D'Ancona, Charles Eliot Norton, John Addington
Symonds, Dean Plumtre, Edmund Gardiner, W.W. Vernon, Paget Toynbe, C.H.
Grandgent, Jefferson B. Fletcher, James Russell Lowell--that Beatrice is
both a real human being and a symbol.

The direct testimony, not to urge the subtle arguments furnished by
internal evidence of Dante's works, as to the reality of Beatrice
Portinari as the beloved of our poet is offered first by Boccaccio who
was acquainted with Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun who lived near
enough to the poet to get information from the Portinari family.
Certainly Boccaccio did not hesitate when chosen in 1373 by the
Florentines to lecture on Dante, to make the very positive statement
that the boy Dante, "received the image of Beatrice Portinari into his
heart with such affection that from that day forward as long as he lived
it never departed from him." That statement was doubtless made within
the hearing of many relatives and friends of the families concerned, the
Alighieri, the Portinari, the Bardi. "If the statement was false,"
argues Dr. Edward Moore, England's foremost Dantian scholar, "it must
have been so glaring and palpable that its assertion could only have
covered Boccaccio with ridicule." The second authority for the statement
that Beatrice Portinari had a real existence and was the object of
Dante's love is furnished by Dante's own son Pietro, who wrote a
commentary on the Divine Comedy nineteen years after his father's
demise--a commentary in which he declares "because mention is here first
made of Beatrice of whom so much has been said, especially in the third
book of the Paradiso, it is to be premised that there really was a lady
Beatrice by name, greatly distinguished for her beauty and virtues who,
in the time of the author, lived in