refusal: it turns her into a kind of
Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him! into a kind of Dante--a
Dante for the use of the world at large. He goes on visiting Laura, and
writing to her a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the best,
carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at regular intervals.
It is a determined cultus, a sort of half-real affectation, something
equivalent to lighting a lamp before a very well-painted and very
conspicuous shrine. All his humanities, all his Provencal lore go into
these poems--written for whom? For her? Decidedly; for she has no reason
not to read the effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet; she feels
nothing for him. For her; but doubtless also to be handed round in
society; a new sonnet or canzone by that charming and learned man, the
Abate Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this: he praises
Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then praises her again; adores
her, calls her cruel, his goddess, his joy, his torment; he does not
really want her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does;
calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic names which mean
nothing. He plays loud and soft with this absence of desire; he fiddle
faddles in descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but
delicately undressed: he sees her (but with chaste eyes) in her bath;
he envies her veil, &c.; he neither violently intellectually embraces,
nor humbly bows down in imagination before her; he trifles gracefully,
modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the locks of her
hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing Beatrice; fancy Dante talking of
Beatrice in her bath; the mere idea of his indignation and shame makes
one shameful and indignant at the thought. But this perfect Laura is no
Beatrice, or only a half-and-half sham one. She is no ideal figure,
merely a figure idealized; this is no imaginative passion, merely an
unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion of Laura's possible
death with the suggestion of the possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch
does not love sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then
Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing of the dear old
habits, the absence of the sweet reality, the terrible sense that all is
over, Death, the great poetizer and giver of love philters, all this
makes him love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor weak
creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek a n