ner of Lucca, may
mean that the imprudent poet be found weltering in blood under some
archway the next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feudalism must
be restrained; and little by little, under the pressure of such very
different social habits, it grows into a veritable platonic passion.
Poets must sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore; so men
actually begin to seek out, and adore and make themselves happy and
wretched about women from whom they can hope only social distinctions;
and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side nay, rather on the
top, of their humdrum, conjugal life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's
bastards were born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that they
should have been, was no more a slight or infidelity to her than to the
other Madonna, the one in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal
sentiments ideal relations; the poet was at liberty to carry more
material preferences elsewhere.

But could such love as this exist, could it be genuine? To my mind,
indubitably. For there is, in all our perceptions and desires of
physical and moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to love;
and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a perception of, a
craving for, beauty, real or imaginary which is identical with our
merely aesthetic perceptions and cravings; hence the possibility, once
the wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love which is mainly
aesthetic, which views the beloved as gratifying merely to the wish for
physical or spiritual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite
reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there comes, to all
nobler natures, a love dawning: a brightening and delicate flushing of
the soul before the actual appearance of the beloved one above the
horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its very clearness,
pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly purity of the pale amber and
green and ashy rose which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love
of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Guinicelli, in virtue of
his language, as a Tuscan) had been restrained, by social necessities
first, then by habit and deliberate aesthetic choice, within the limits
of this dawning state; and in this state, it had fed itself off mere
spiritual food, and acquired the strange intensity of mere intellectual
passions. We give excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all
things, apt to think that only the accident