Death rendered Beatrice's apotheosis conceivable; and Dante may be said to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby love is an initiation into the secrets of the spiritual world. It was the intuition of a sublime nature into the essence of pure impersonal enthusiasm. It was an exaltation of womanhood similar to that attempted less adequately by Shelley in _Epipsychidion_. It was a real instinct like that which pervades the poetry of Michelangelo, and which sustains some men even in our prosaic age. Still there remained an ineradicable unsubstantiality in Dante's point of view, when tested by the common facts of feeling. His idealism was too far removed from ordinary experience to take firm hold upon the modern mind. In proportion as Beatrice personified abstractions, she ceased to be a woman even for her lover; nor was it possible, except by diminishing her individuality, to regard her as a symbol of the universal. She passed from the sphere of the human into the divine; and though her face was still beautiful, it was the face of Science rather than of one we love. There was even too little alloy of earth in Dante's passion for Beatrice.
Petrarch's love for Laura was of a different type. The unrest of earthly desire, for ever thwarted but recurring with imperious persistence, and the rebellion of the conscience against emotions which the lover recognized as lawless, broke his peace. It is true that, using the language of the earlier poets and obeying a sanguine mood of his own mind, he from time to time spoke of Laura as of one who led his soul to God. But his sincerest utterances reveal the discord of a heart divided between duty and inclination, the melancholy of a man who knows himself the prey of warring powers. His love for Laura seemed an error and a sin because it clashed with an ascetic impulse which had never been completely blunted. In his Hymn to the Virgin he referred to this passion as the Medusa that had turned his better self to stone:
Medusa e l'error mio m'han fatto un sasso D'umor van stillante.
There is a passage in the _De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ_, where the lyrist of chivalrous love pours such contempt on women as his friend Boccaccio might have envied. In the _Secretum_, again, he describes his own emotion as a torment from which he had vainly striven to emancipate himself by solitude, by journeys, by distractions, and by obstinate studies. In truth, he rarely alludes to the great passion of his life without a strange blending of tenderness and sore regret. Herein he proved himself not only a true child of his age, but also the precursor of the modern world. While he was still bound by the traditions of medieval asceticism, a Christian no less devout and only less firm than Dante, his senses and his imagination, stirred possibly by contact with classic literature, rebelled against the mysticism of the Florentine School. This rebellion, but dimly apprehended by the poet himself, and complicated with the yearnings of a deeply religious nature after purity of thought and deed, gave its supreme strength and beauty to his verse. The _Canzoniere_ is not merely the poetry of love but the poetry of conflict also. The men of the Renaissance overleaped the conflict, and satisfied themselves with empty idealizations of sensual desire. But modern men have returned to Petrarch's point of view and found an echo of their own divided spirit in his poetry. He marks the transition from a medieval to a modern mood, the passage from Cino and Guido to Werther and Rousseau.