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The First Treatise - CHAPTER III
Much fault is in that thing which is appointed to remove some grave
evil, and yet encourages it; even as in the man who might be sent to
quell a tumult, and, before he had quelled it, should begin another.
And forasmuch as my bread is made clean on one side, it behoves me to
cleanse it on the other, in order to shun this reproof: that my
writing, which one may term, as it were, a Commentary, is appointed to
remove obscurity from the before-mentioned Songs, and is, in fact,
itself at times a little hard to understand. This obscurity is here
intended, in order to avoid a greater defect, and does not occur
through ignorance. Alas! would that it might have pleased the
Dispenser of the Universe that the cause of my excuse might never have
been; that others might neither have sinned against me, nor I have
suffered punishment unjustly; the punishment, I say, of exile and
poverty! Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most
beautiful and the most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me
out from her most sweet bosom (wherein I was born and nourished even
to the height of my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire
with all my heart to repose my weary soul, and to end the time which
is given to me), I have gone through almost all the land in which this
language lives--a pilgrim, almost a mendicant--showing forth against
my will the wound of Fortune, with which the ruined man is often
unjustly reproached. Truly I have been a ship without a sail and
without a rudder, borne to divers ports and lands and shores by the
dry wind which blows from doleful poverty; and I have appeared vile in
the eyes of many, who perhaps through some report may have imaged me
in other form. In the sight of whom not only my person became vile,
but each work already completed was held to be of less value than that
might again be which remained yet to be done.
The reason wherefore this happens (not only to me but to all), it now
pleases me here briefly to touch upon. And firstly, it is because
rumour goes beyond the truth; and then, what is beyond the truth
restricts and strangles it. Good report is the first born of kindly
thought in the mind of the friend; which the mind of the foe, although
it may receive the seed, conceives not.
That mind which gives birth to it in the first place, so to make its
gift more fair, as by the charity of friendship, keeps not within
bounds of truth, but passes beyond them. When one does that to adorn a
tale, he speaks against his conscience; when it is charity that causes
him to pass the bounds, he speaks not against conscience.
The second mind which receives this, not only is content with the
exaggeration of the first mind, but its own report adds its own effect
of endeavours to embellish, and so by this action, and by the
deception which it also receives from the goodwill generated in it,
good report is made more ample than it should be; either with the
consent or the dissent of the conscience; even as it was with the
first mind. And the third receiving mind does this; and the fourth;
and thus the exaggeration of good ever grows. And so, by turning the
aforesaid motives in the contrary direction, one can perceive why
ill-fame in like manner is made to grow. Wherefore Virgil says in the
fourth of the AEneid: "Let Fame live to be fickle, and grow as she
goes." Clearly, then, he who is willing may perceive that the image
generated by Fame alone is always larger, whatever it may be, than the
thing imaged is, in its true state. _
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