ler as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of
platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing to men the
knowledge of a kind of love born of that idealizing and worshipping
passion of the Middle Ages; but of mediaeval love chastened by the
manners of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of Christian
mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this influence of the "Vita
Nuova"--for the "Vita Nuova" had concentrated in itself all the
intensest characteristics of Dante's immediate predecessors and
contemporaries, causing them to become useless and forgotten--of this
influence of the "Vita Nuova," there is perhaps no more striking example
than that of the poet who, constituted by nature to be the mere
continuator of the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours,
became, and hence his importance and glory, the mediator between Dante
and the centuries which followed him; the man who gave to mankind,
incapable as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual essence of
the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of intellectual love in an
immortal dilution. I speak, of course, of Petrarch. His passion is
neither ideal nor strong. The man is in love, or has been in love,
existing on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the beautiful
woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly, half-scholarly, and
altogether courtly mind is delighted with her; with her curly yellow
hair, her good red and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's
Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not than this Laura,
descended from all the golden-haired bright-eyed ladies of the
troubadours!), with her manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity
in this ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains a
semi-artificial love; frequenting her house, writing sonnet after
sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from the antique and the
Provencal, for the most part; he, who was born to be a mere troubadour
like Ventadour or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante, the
type of the poet Abate, of the poetic _cavaliere servente_; a good, weak
man with aspirations, who, failing to get the better of Laura's virtue,
doubtless consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual
contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a troubadour, an
Italian priest turned partly Provencal, vexed at her not becoming his
mistress; then (having made up his mind, which was but little set upon
her), quite pleased at her