Also we have in this leisure-class world vestigial traces of the sense of duty. We take this sense and refine it or exaggerate it, making it into something fantastic, stimulating to jaded tastes. So we find in Boccaccio the famous story of the “patient Griselda,” a leisure-class model of wifely fidelity and humility. She is married to a monster, who subjects her to every indignity the perverted imagination can conceive; but she endures all things, and continues to be his patient and devoted slave, and in the end she conquers her tormentor, and brings about the necessary happy ending. The legend of this most convenient lady represents a popular form of masculine wish-fulfillment. Giovanni Boccaccio died in ripe old age, and the Catholic Church took cognizance of his popularity among the Italian people by preparing an expurgated and authorized edition of his “Decameron.” From this edition they omitted no word of the obscenities, but they changed each of the stories so that wherever Boccaccio described indecencies committed by priests and monks and holy popes, the said indecencies were transferred to laymen! The tales of this darling of the Italian leisure class remain today one of the most popular of books, which every dirty old boy keeps hidden in his trunk, and every dirty young boy reads under his desk while the professor of moral philosophy is lecturing on the social responsibilities of great wealth. CHAPTER XXIX THE MUCKRAKER’S HELL Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with suffering; “the mournfulest face,” says Carlyle, “that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.” There has never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he believed to be sound ideas about conduct. Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a cruel hardship; he describes himself as “a pilgrim, almost a beggar, displaying against my will the wounds of fortune.... Truly have I been a vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.” Yet he never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile he died.