Boccaccio was abourgeoisof the fourteenth century; but his character, as stamped on the Decameron, was common to Italy during the next two hundred years. The whole book glows with the joyousness of a race discarding dreams for realities, scorning the terrors of a bygone creed, reveling in nature's liberty, proclaiming the empire of the senses with a frankness which passes over into license. In Boccaccio, the guiding genius of the Italian Renaissance arrives at consciousness. That blending of moral indifference with artistic seriousness, which we observe in him, marks the coming age. He is not the precursor but the inaugurator of the era. The smile which plays around his mouth became, though changeful in expression, fixed upon the lips of his posterity—genial in Ariosto, gracious in Poliziano, mischievous in Pulci, dubious in Lorenzo de' Medici, sardonic in Aretino, bitter in Folengo, toned to tragic irony in Machiavelli, impudent in Berni, joyous in Boiardo, sensual in Bandello—assuming every shade of character, Protean, indescribable, until at last it fades from Tasso's brow, when Italy has ceased to laugh except in secret.
The Decameron has been called theCommedia Umana.[85]This title is appropriate, not merely because the book portrays human life from a comic rather thana serious point of view, but also because it is the antithesis of Dante'sCommedia Divina. As poet and scene-painter devised for our ancestors of the Elizabethan period both Mask and Anti-mask, so did the genius of Italy provide two shows for modern Europe—the Mask and Anti-mask of human nature. Dante's Comedy represents our life in relation to the life beyond the grave. Boccaccio in his Comedy depicts the life of this earth only, subtracting whatsoever may suggest a life to come. It would be difficult to determine which of the two dramas is the more truthful, or which of the two poets had a firmer grasp upon reality. But the realities of the Divine Comedy are spiritual; those of the Human Comedy are material. The world of the Decameron is not an inverted world, like that of Aristophanes. It does not antithesize Dante's world by turning it upside down. It is simply the same world surveyed from an opposite point of view—unaltered, uninverted, but seen in the superficies, presented in the concrete. It is the prose of life; and this justifies the counterpoise of its form to that of Dante's poem. It is the world as world, the flesh as flesh, nature as nature, without intervention of spiritual agencies, without relation to ideal order, regarded as the sphere of humor, fortune, marvelous caprice. It is everything which the Church had banned, proscribed, held in abhorrence, without that which the Church had inculcated for the exaltation of the soul. This world, actual and unexplained, Boccaccio paints with the mastery of an accomplished artist, molding its chaotic elements into a form of beauty which compels attention.
Dante condemned those "who submit their reason to natural appetite."[86]Boccaccio celebrates the apotheosis of natural appetite, ofil talento, stigmatized as sin by ascetic Christianity.[87]His strongest sympathies are reserved for those who suffer by abandoning themselves to impulse, and in this self-abandonment he sees the poetry of life. This is the very core of the antithesis presented by the Human to the Divine Comedy. The Decameron is an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine. Like all vehement reactions, it is not satisfied with opposing the extravagances of the view it combats. Instead of negativing asceticism, it affirms license. Yet though the Divine Comedy and the Decameron are antithetical, they are both true, and true together, inasmuch as they present the same humanity studied under contradictory conditions. Human nature is vast enough to furnish the materials for both, inexplicable enough to render both acceptable to reason, tolerant enough to view with impartial approbation the desolate theology of theInfernoand the broad mirth of the Decameron.[88]
The Decameron did not appear unheralded by similar attempts. No literary taste was stronger in the middle ages than the taste for stories. This is proved by the collection known asGesta Romanorum, and by theBestiarii,Lapidarii,PhysiologiandApiarii, which contain a variety of tales, many of them surprisingly indecent, veiling spiritual doctrine under obscenities which horrify a modern reader.[89]From the hands of ecclesiastical compilers these short stories passed down to popular narrators, who in France made thefabliauxa special branch of vulgar literature. The follies and vices of the clergy, tricks practiced by wives upon their husbands, romantic adventures of lovers, and comic incidents of daily life, formed the staple of their stock in trade. When thefabliaureached Italy, together with other literary wares, from France, it was largely cultivated in the South; and the first known collection of Italian stories received the name ofIl Novellino, orIl Fiore del parlar gentile. The language of this book was immature, and the tales themselves seem rather memoranda for the narrator than finished compositions to be read with pleasure.[90]It may therefore be admitted that the rudeform of the Decameron was given to Boccaccio. Not to mention the larger chivalrous romances,Conti di antichi Cavalieri, and translations from FrenchChansons de Geste, which have no genuine link of connection with the special type of the Novella, he found models for his tales both in the libraries of medieval convents and upon the lips of popularraccontatori. Yet this must not be taken to imply any lack of originality in Boccaccio. Such comparisons as Professor Bartoli has instituted between the Decameron and some of its supposed sources, prove the insignificance of his debt, the immeasurable inferiority of his predecessors.[91]
The spirit of the Decameron no less than the form, had been long in preparation. Satire, whether superficial, as in the lays of thejongleurs, or searching, as in the invectives of Dante and Petrarch, was familiar to the middle ages; and the popular Latin poems of the wandering students are steeped in rage against a corrupt hierarchy, a venal Curia.[92]Those sameCarmina Vagorumreveal the smoldering embers of unextinguished Paganism, which underlay the Christian culture of the middle ages. Written by men who belonged to the clerical classes, but who were often on bad terms with ecclesiastical authorities, tinctured with the haughty contempt of learning for the laity, yet overflowing with the vigorous life of the proletariate, these extraordinary poems bring to view a bold and candid sensuality, an ineradicable spontaneity of natural appetite, which is strangely at variance with the cardinal conceptions of ascetic Christianity.[93]In the sect of the Italian Epicureans; in the obscure bands ofthe Cathari and Paterini; in the joyous companies of Provençal Court and castle, the same note of irrepressible nature sounded. Side by side with the new-built fabric of ecclesiastical idealism, the old temples of unregenerate human deities subsisted. They were indeed discredited, proscribed, consigned to shame. They formed themauvais lieuxof Christendom. Yet there they stood, even as the Venusberg of Tannhäuser's legend abode unshaken though cathedrals rose by Rhine. All that was needed to restore the worship of these nature-gods was that a great artist should decorate their still substantial temple-walls with the beauty of a new, sincere, and unrepentant style, fitting their abandoned chambers for the habitation of the human spirit, free now to choose the dwelling that it listed. This Boccaccio achieved. And here it must again be noticed that the revolution of time was about to bring man's popular and carnal deities once more, if only for a season, to the throne. The murmured songs of a few wandering students were about to be drowned in the pæan of Renaissance poetry. The visions of the Venusberg were to be realized in Italian painting. The coming age was destined to live out Boccaccio's Human Comedy in act and deed. This is the true kernel of his greatness. As poet, he ranked third only, and that at a vast interval, in the triumvirate of the fourteenth century. But the temper of his mind, the sphere of his conceptions, made him the representative genius of the two following centuries. Awaiting the age when science should once more co-ordinate the forces of humanity in a coherent theory, men in the Renaissance exchanged superfluousrestraint for immoderate license. It is not to be wondered at that Boccaccio and not Dante was their hero.
The description of the Plague at Florence which introduces the Decameron, has more than a merely artistic appropriateness. Boccaccio may indeed have meant to bring his group of pleasure-seeking men and maidens into strong relief by contrast with the horrors of the stricken city. Florence crowded with corpses, echoing to the shrieks of delirium and the hoarse cries of body-buriers, is the background he has chosen for that blooming garden, where the birds sing and the lovers sit by fountains in the shade, laughing or weeping as the spirit of each tale compels them. But independently of this effect of contrast, which might be used to illustrate the author's life-philosophy, the description of the Plague has a still deeper significance, whereof Boccaccio never dreamed. Matteo Villani dates a progressive deterioration of manners in the city from the Plague of 1348, and justifies us in connecting the Ciompi riots of 1378 with the enfeeblement of civic order during those thirty years. The Plague was, therefore, the outward sign, if not the efficient cause, of those very ethical and social changes which the Decameron immortalized in literature. It was the historical landmark between two ages, dividing the Florence of the Grandi from the Florence of the Ciompi. The cynicism, liberated in that time of terror, lawlessness, and sudden death, assumed in Boccaccio's romance a beautiful and graceful aspect. It lost its harsh and vulgar outlines, and took the air of genial indulgence which distinguished Italian society throughout the years of the Renaissance.
Boccaccio selects seven ladies of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-eight, and three men, the youngest of whom is twenty-five. Having formed this company, he transports them to a villa two miles from the city, where he provides them with a train of serving-men and waiting-women, and surrounds them with the delicacies of medieval luxury. He is careful to remind us that, though the three men and three of the ladies were acknowledged lovers, and though their conversation turned on almost nothing else but passion, "no stain defiled the honor of the party." Stories are told; and these unblemished maidens listen with laughter and a passing blush to words and things which outrage Northern sense of decency. The remorseless but light satire of the Decameron spares none of the ideals of the age. All the medieval enthusiasms are reviewed and criticised from the standpoint of the Florentinebottegaandpiazza. It is as though thebourgeois, not content with having made nobility a crime, were bent upon extinguishing its spirit. The tale of Agilulf vulgarizes the chivalrous conception of love ennobling men of low estate, by showing how a groom, whose heart is set upon a queen, avails himself of opportunity. Tancredi burlesques the knightly reverence for a stainless scutcheon by the extravagance of his revenge. The sanctity of the Thebaid, that ascetic dream of purity and self-renunciation for God's service, is made ridiculous by Alibech. Ser Ciappelletto brings contempt upon the canonization of saints. The confessional, the worship of relics, the priesthood, and the monastic orders are derided with the deadliest persiflage. Christ himself is scoffed at in a jest which points the most indecent of these tales.[94]Marriage affords a never-failing theme for scorn; and when, by way of contrast, the novelist paints an ideal wife, he runs into such hyperboles that the very patience of Griselda is a satire on its dignity. Like Balzac, Boccaccio was unsuccessful in depicting virtuous womanhood. Attempting this, he fell, like Balzac, into the absurdities of sentiment. His own conception of love was sensual and voluptuous—not uniformly coarse, nay often tender, but frankly carnal. Without having recourse to the Decameron, this statement might be abundantly substantiated by reference to theFilostrato,Fiammetta,Amorosa Visione,Ninfale Fiesolano. Boccaccio enjoyed the painting of licentious pleasure, snatched in secret, sometimes half by force, by a lover after moderate resistance from his paramour. He imported into these pictures the plebeian tone which we have already noticed in the popular poetry of the preceding century, and which was destined to pervade the erotic literature of the Renaissance. There is, therefore, an ironical contrast between the decencies observed by hisbrigataand their conversation; a contrast rooted in the survival from chivalrous times of conventional ideals, which have lost reality and been persistently ignored in practice. This effect of irony is enhanced by the fact that many of the motives are such as might have been romantically treated, but here are handled from thepopolano grasso'spoint of view. A skeptical and sensuous imagination plays around thesanctities and sublimities which have for it become illusory.
We observe the same kind of unconscious hypocrisy, the same spontaneous sapping of now obsolete ideals, in theAmorosa Visione.[95]Here Love is still regarded as the apotheosis of mortal experience. It is still said to be the union of intelligence and moral energy in an enthusiasm of the soul. Yet the joys of love revealed at the conclusion of the poem are such as abayadèremight offer.[96]Thebourgeoiseffaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance. This vision, composed interza rima, was assuredly not meant to travesty Dante. Still it would be difficult to imagine a more complete inversion of the Dantesque point of view, a more deliberate substitution of an Earthly Paradise for the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. It is as though Boccaccio, the representative of the new age, in all the fullness of his sensuousnaïveté, appealed to the poets of chivalry, and said: "See here how all your fancies find their end in nature!"
It will not do to over-strain the censure implied in the foregoing paragraphs. Natural appetite, no less than the ideal, has its elements of poetry; and the sensuality of the Decameron accords with plastic beauty in a work of art incomparably lucid. Shelley, no lenient critic, wrote these words about the setting of the tales[97]: "What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiaritywhich makes it obscure to us." Boccaccio's sense of beauty has already been alluded to; and it so pervades his work that special attention need scarcely be called to it. His prose abounds in passages which are perfect pictures after their own kind, like the following, selected, not from the Decameron, but from an earlier work, entitledFilocopo[98]:
Con gli orecchi intenti al suono, cominciò ad andare in quella parte ove il sentiva; e giunto presso alla fontana, vide le due giovinette. Elle erano nel viso bianchissime, la quale bianchezza quanto si conveniva di rosso colore era mescolata. I loro occhi pareano mattutine stelle, e le picciole bocche di colore di vermiglia rosa, più piacevoli diveniano nel muoverle alle note della loro canzone. I loro capelli come fila d'oro erano biondissimi, i quali alquanto crespi s'avvolgevano infra le verdi frondi delle loro ghirlande. Vestite per lo gran caldo, come è detto sopra, le tenere e dilicate carni di sottilissimi vestimenti, i quali dalla cintura in su strettissimi mostravano la forma delle belle mamme, le quali come due ritondi pomi pignevano in fuori il resistente vestimento, e ancora in più luoghi per leggiadre apriture si manifestavano le candide carni. La loro statura era di convenevole grandezza, in ciascun membro bene proporzionata.
Con gli orecchi intenti al suono, cominciò ad andare in quella parte ove il sentiva; e giunto presso alla fontana, vide le due giovinette. Elle erano nel viso bianchissime, la quale bianchezza quanto si conveniva di rosso colore era mescolata. I loro occhi pareano mattutine stelle, e le picciole bocche di colore di vermiglia rosa, più piacevoli diveniano nel muoverle alle note della loro canzone. I loro capelli come fila d'oro erano biondissimi, i quali alquanto crespi s'avvolgevano infra le verdi frondi delle loro ghirlande. Vestite per lo gran caldo, come è detto sopra, le tenere e dilicate carni di sottilissimi vestimenti, i quali dalla cintura in su strettissimi mostravano la forma delle belle mamme, le quali come due ritondi pomi pignevano in fuori il resistente vestimento, e ancora in più luoghi per leggiadre apriture si manifestavano le candide carni. La loro statura era di convenevole grandezza, in ciascun membro bene proporzionata.
Space and nineteenth-century canons of propriety prevent me from completing the picture made byFlorio and these maidens. It might be paralleled with a hundred passages of like intention, where the Italian artist is revealed to us by touches curiously multiplied.[99]We find in them the sense of color, the scrupulous precision of form, and something of that superfluous minuteness which belongs to painting rather than to literature. The writer has seen a picture, and not felt a poem. In rendering it by words, he trusted to the imagination of his reader for suggesting a highly-finished work of plastic art to the mind.[100]Thefêtes champêtresof the Venetian masters are here anticipated in the prose of thetrecento. Such descriptions were frequent in Italian literature, especially frequent in the works of the best stylists, Sannazzaro, Poliziano, Ariosto, the last of whom has been severely but not unjustly criticised by Lessing for overstepping the limits of poetry in his portrait of Alcina. It may be pleaded in defense of Boccaccio and his followers that they belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and that they wrote for a public familiar with painted form. Their detailed descriptions were at once translated into color by men habituated to the sight of pictures. During the Renaissance, painting dominated the Italian genius, and all the sister arts of expression felt that influence,just as at Athens sculpture lent something even to the drama.
As a poet, Boccaccio tried many styles. His epic, theTeseide, cannot be reckoned a great success. He is not at home upon the battle-field, and knew not how to sound the heroic trumpet.[101]Yet the credit of discovery may be awarded to the author of this poem. He introduced to the modern world a tale rich in romantic incidents and capable of still higher treatment than he was himself able to give it. When we remember how Chaucer, Shakspere, Fletcher and Dryden handled and rehandled the episode of Palamon's rivalry with Arcite for the hand of Emilia, we dare not withhold from Boccaccio the praise which belongs to creative genius.[102]It is no slight achievement to have made a story which bore such noble fruit in literature. TheTeseide, moreover, fulfilled an important mission in Italian poetry. It adapted the popularottava rimato the style of the romantic epic, and fixed it for Pulci, Poliziano, Boiardo, and Ariosto. That Boccaccio was not the inventor of the stanza, as used to be assumed, may now be considered beyond all question. That he had not learned to handle it with the majestic sweetness of Poliziano, or the infinite variety of Ariosto, is evident. Yet he deserves credit for having discerned its capacity and brought it into cultivated use.
Though unequal in quality, his sonnets andballate, whether separately published or scattered through his numerous prose works, have a higher merit. The best are those in which, following Guido Cavalcanti's path, he gives free scope to his incomparable sense of natural beauty. The style is steeped in sweetness, softness and the delicacy of music. From these half-popular poems I might select the BallataIo mi son giovinetta; the song of the Angel from the planet Venus, extracted from theFilocopo; a lament of a woman for her lost youth,Il fior che 'l valor perde; and the girl's prayer to Love,Tu se' nostro Signor caro e verace.[103]It is difficult for the critic to characterize poems so true to simple nature, so spontaneously passionate, and yet so artful in the turns of language, molded like wax beneath the poet's touch. Here sensuousness has no vulgarity, and the seductions of the flesh are sublimed by feeling to a beauty which is spiritual in refinement. It may be observed that Boccaccio writeshis best love-poetry to be sung by girls. He has abandoned the standpoint of the chivalrous lover, though he still uses the phraseology of the Italo-Provençal school. What arrests his fancy is, not the ideal of womanhood raising man above himself, but woman conscious of her own supreme attractiveness. He delights in making her the mirror of the feelings she inspires. He bids her celebrate in hymns the beauty of her sex, the perfume of the charms that master man. When the metaphysical forms of speech, borrowed from the elder style, are used, they give utterance to a passion which is sensual, or blent at best with tenderness—a physical love-longing, a sentiment born of youth and desire. A girl, for instance, speaks about herself, and says:[104]
On the lips of him who wrote the tale of Alibech, this language savors of profanity. Yet we are forced to recognize the poet's sincerity of feeling. It is the same problem as that which meets us in theAmorosa Visione.[105]The god Boccaccio worshiped was changed: but this deity was still divine, and deserved, he thought, the honors of mystic adoration. At the same time there is nothing Asiatic in his sensuous inspiration. The emotion is controlled and concentrated; the form is pure in all its outlines.
The Decameron was the masterpiece of Boccaccio'smaturity. But he did not reach that height of excellence without numerous essays in styles of much diversity. While still a young man, not long after his meeting with Fiammetta, he began theFilocopoand dedicated it to his new love.[106]This romance was based upon the earlier tale ofFloire et Blanceflor.[107]But the youthful poet invested the simple love-story of his Florio and Biancofiore with a masquerade costume of mythological erudition and wordy rhetoric, which removed it from the middle ages. The gods and goddesses of Olympus are introduced as living agents, supplying the machinery of the romance until the very end, when the hero and heroine are converted to Christianity, and abjure their old protectors with cold equanimity. We are left to imagine that, for Boccaccio at any rate, Venus, Mars and Cupid were as real as Christ and the saints, though superseded as objects of pious veneration. This confusion of Pagan and Christian mythology is increased by his habit of finding classical periphrases for the expression of religious ideas. He calls nunsSacerdotesse di Diana. God the Father isQuell'eccelso e inestimabile principe Sommo Giove. Satan becomes Pluto, and human sin is Atropos. The Birth of Christ is described thus:la terra come sentì il nuovo incarco della deità delfigliuol di Giove. The Apostles appear asnuovi cavalieri entrati contro a Plutone in campo.[108]The style of theFilocopowas new; and in spite, or perhaps because of, its euphuism, it had a decided success. This encouraged Boccaccio to attempt theTeseide. TheFilostratosoon followed; and here for the first time we find the future author of the Decameron. Under Greek names and incidents borrowed from the War of Troy, we are in fact studying some episode from thechroniques galantesof the Neapolitan Court, narrated with the vigor of a perfect master in the art of story telling. Nothing could be further removed in sentiment from the heroism of the Homeric age or closer to the customs of a corrupt Italian city than this poem. In Troilo himself a feverish type of character, overmastered by passion which is rather a delirium of the senses than a mood of feeling, has been painted with a force that reminds us of theFiammetta, where the same disease of the soul is delineated in a woman. Pandaro shows for the first time in modern literature an utterly depraved nature, reveling in seduction, and glutting a licentious imagination with the spectacle of satiated lust. The frenzied appetite of Troilo, Pandaro's ruffian arts, and the gradual yieldings of Griselda to a voluptuous inclination, reveal the master's hand; and though the poem is hurried toward the close (Boccaccio being only interested in the portrayal of his hero's love-languors, ecstasies and disappointment), theFilostratomustundoubtedly be reckoned the finest of his narratives in verse. The second and third Cantos are remarkable for dramatic movement and wealth of sensuous imagination, never rising to sublimity nor refined with such poetry as Shakspere found for Romeo and Juliet, but welling copiously from a genuinely ardent nature. The love described is nakedly and unaffectedly luxurious; it is an overmastering impulse, crowned at last with all the joys of sensual fruition. According to Boccaccio the repose conferred by Love upon his votaries is the satiety of their desires.[109]Between Dante'sSignore della nobilitadeand hisSir di tutta pacethere is indeed a wide gulf fixed.[110]
After theFilostrato, Boccaccio next produced theAmeto,Amorosa Visione,Fiammetta,Ninfale Fiesolano, andCorbaccio, between the years 1343 and 1355. TheAmetois a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. To read it attentively is now almost impossible, in spite of frequent passages where the luxuriant word-painting of the author is conspicuous. In theAmorosa Visionehe attempted the style which Petrarch had adopted for hisTrionfi. After reviewing human life under the several aspects of learning, glory, love, fortune, the poet finally resigns himself to a Nirvana of sensual beatitude. The poem is unsuccessful, because it adapts an obsolete form of art to requirements beyond its scope. Boccaccio tries to pour the new wine of the Renaissance into the old bottles of medieval allegory. In theFiammettaBoccaccio exhibited all his strength as an anatomist of feeling, describing the effects of passion in a woman's heart, and analyzing its varying emotions with a subtlety which proved his knowledge of a certain type of female character. It is the first attempt in modern literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer. Since Virgil's Dido, or theHeroidum Epistolæof Ovid, nothing of the sort had been essayed upon an equal scale. Taken together with Dante'sVita Nuovaand Petrarch'sSecretum, each of which is a personal confidence, theFiammettamay be reckoned among those masterpieces of analytic art, which revealed the developed consciousness of the Italian race, at a moment when the science of emotion was still for the rest of Europe an undiscovered territory. This essay exercised a wide and lasting influenceover the descriptive literature of the Renaissance. Yet when we compare its stationary monologues with the brief but pregnant touches of the Decameron, we are forced to assign it the rank of a study rather than a finished picture. TheFiammettais to the Decameron what rhetoric is to the drama. This, however, is hardly a deduction from its merit. The delineation of an unholy and unhappy passion, blessed with fruition for one brief moment, cursed through months of illness and despair with all the furies of vain desire and poignant recollection, is executed with incomparable fullness of detail and inexhaustible richness of fancy. The reader rises from a perusal of theFiammettawith impressions similar to those which a work of Richardson leaves upon the mind. At the same time it is full of poetry. The Vision of Venus, the invocation to Sleep, and the description of summer on the Bay of Baiæ relieve a deliberate anatomy of passion, which might otherwise be tedious.[111]The romance is so rich in material that it furnished the motives for a score of tales, and the novelists of the Renaissance availed themselves freely of its copious stores.[112]
TheCorbaccioorLaberinto d'Amoreis a satire upon women, animated with the bitterest sense of injury and teeming with vindictive spite. It was written with the avowed purpose of reviling a lady who had rejected Boccaccio's advances, and it paints the whole sex in the darkest colors. We could fancy that certain passages had been penned by adisappointed monk. Though this work is in tone unworthy of its author, it bore fruits in the literature of the next century. Alberti's satires are but rhetorical amplifications of themes suggested by theCorbaccio. Nor is it without value for the student of Italian manners. The list of romances read by women in the fourteenth century throws light upon Francesca's episode in Dante, and proves that the titlePrincipe Galeottowas not given without precedent to Boccaccio's own writings.[113]The discourse on gentle birth in the same treatise should be studied in illustration of the Florentine conception of nobility.[114]Boccaccio, though he follows so closely in time upon Dante, already anticipates the democratic theories of Poggio.[115]Feudal feeling was extinct in thebourgeoisieof the great towns; nor had the experience of the Neapolitan Court suppressed in Boccaccio's mind the pride of a Florentine citizen. At the same time he felt that contempt of the literary classes for the common folk which was destined in the next century to divide the nation and to check the development of its vulgar literature. He apologizes for explaining Dante, and for bringing poetry down to the level of thefeccia plebeia, thevulgo indegno, theingrati meccanici, and so forth.[116]
It remains to speak of yet another of Boccaccio's minor works, theNinfale Fiesolano. This is a tale in octave stanzas, which, under a veil of mythological romance, relates the loves of a young man and a nun, and their subsequent tragic ending. It owes its interest to the vivid picture of seduction, so glowingly painted as to betray the author's personal enjoyment of the motive. The story is thrown back into a time antecedent to Christianity and civil life. The heroine, Mensola, is a nymph of Diana; the hero, Affrico, a shepherd. The scene is laid among the mountains above Florence; and when Mensola has been changed into a fountain by the virgin goddess, whose rites she violated, the poem concludes with a myth invented to explain the founding of Fiesole. Civil society succeeds to the savagery of the woodland, and love is treated as the vestibule to culture.[117]The romantic and legendary portions of this tale are ill-connected. The versification is lax; and except in the long episode of Mensola's seduction, which might have formed a passage of contemporary novel-writing, the genius of Boccaccio shines with clouded luster.[118]Yet theNinfale Fiesolanooccupies a not unimportant place in the history of Italian literature. It adapts the pastoral form to that ideal of civility dependent upon culture, which took so strong a hold upon the imagination of thecinque cento. Its stanzas are a forecast of theArcadiaand theOrfeo.
In the minor poems and romances, which have here been passed in review, except perhaps in theFiammetta, Boccaccio cannot be said to take a placeamong European writers of the first rank. His style is prolix; his versification, if we omit theCanzoni a Balloand some sonnets, is slovenly; nor does he show exceptional ability in the conception and conduct of his stories. He is strongest when he paints a violent passion or describes voluptuous sensations, weakest when he attempts allegory or assumes the airs of a philosopher. We feel, in reading these productions of his earlier manhood, that nearly all were what the Germans callGelegenheits-gedichte. The private key is lost to some of these works, which were intended for the ears of one among the multitude. On others it is plainly written that they were the outpourings of a personal desire, the self-indulgence of a fancy which reveled in imagined sensuality, using literature as the safety-valve for subjective longings. They lack the calm of perfect art, the full light falling on the object from without, which marks a poem of the highest order. From these romances of his youth, no less than from the Latin treatises of his maturity, we return to the Decameron when we seek to place Boccaccio among the classics. Nothing comparable with this Human Comedy for universal interest had appeared in modern Europe, if we except the Divine Comedy; and it may be questioned whether any work of equal scope was given to the world before the theater of Shakspere and the comedies of Molière. Boccaccio, though he paints the surface of life, paints it in a way to suggest the inner springs of character, and to bring the motives of action vividly before us.Quicquid agunt hominesis the matter of his book. The recoil from medieval principles of conduct, which gives it a certain air ofbelonging to a moment rather than all time, was necessary in the evolution of intellectual freedom. In this respect, again, it faithfully reflected the Florentine temperament. At no epoch have the Italians been sternly and austerely pious. Piety with them is a passionate impulse rather than a deeply-reasoned habit based upon conviction. Their true nature is critical, susceptible to beauty, quick at seizing the ridiculous and exposing shams, suspicious of mysticism, realistic, pleasure-loving, practical. These qualities, special to the Florentines, but shared in large measure by the nation, found artistic expression in the Decameron, and asserted their supremacy in the literature of the Renaissance. That a sublime ideal, unapprehended by Boccaccio, and destined to remain unrepresented in the future, should have been conceived by Dante; that Petrarch should have modulated by his masterpiece of poetic workmanship from the key of the Divine Comedy to that of the Decameron; that one city should have produced three such men, and that one half-century should have witnessed their successive triumphs, forms the great glory of Florence, and is one of the most notable facts in the history of genius.
It remains to speak about Boccaccio's prose, and the relation of his style to that of othertrecentisti. If we seek the origins of Italian prose, we find them first in the Franco-Italian romances of the Lombard period, which underwent the process oftoscaneggiamentoat Florence, next in books of morality and devotion, and also in the earlier chronicles. Among the Tuscanized tales of chivalry belonging to the first age of Italian literature are theConti di antichi cavalieriand theTavola Ritonda, both of which bear traces of translation from Provençal sources.[119]TheNovellino, of which mention has already been made, betrays the same origin. The style of these works offers a pretty close parallel to the English of Sir Thomas Mallory. At the same time that the literature of France was assuming an Italian garb, many versions of Roman classics appeared. Orosius, Vegetius, Sallust, with parts of Cicero, Livy and Boethius were adapted to popular reading. But the taste of the time, as we have already seen in the precedingchapter, inclined the authors of these works to make selections with a view to moral edification. Their object was, not to present the ancients in a modern garb, but to cull notable examples of conduct and ethical sentences from the works that found most favor with the medieval intellect. Passing under the general titles ofFiori,Giardini,TesoriandConviti—Fiori di filosofi e molto savi,Giardino di Consolazione,Fiore di Rettorica,Fiore del parlar gentile—these collections supplied the laity with extracts from Latin authors, and extended culture to the people. TheLibro di Catomight be chosen as a fair example of their scope.[120]The number of such books, ascribed to Bono Giamboni, Brunetto Latini, and Guidotto of Bologna, proves that an extensive public was eager for instruction of this sort; and it is reasonable to believe that they were studied by the artisans ofcentral Italy. The bass-reliefs and frescoes of incipient Italian art, the pavement of the Sienese Cathedral, the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua, bear traces of the percolation through all social strata of this literature. A more important work of style was theDe Regimine Principum, of Egidio Colonna, translated from the French version by an unknown Tuscan hand; while Giamboni's Florentine version of Latini'sTesorointroduced the erudition of the most learned grammarian of his age to the Italians. Contemporaneously with this growth of vernacular treatises on rhetorical and ethical subjects, we may assume that memoirs and chronicles began to be written in the vulgar tongue. But so much doubt has recently been thrown upon the earliest monuments of Italian historiography that it must here suffice to indicate the change which was undoubtedly taking place in this branch also of composition toward the close of the thirteenth century.[121]Literature of all kinds yielded to the first strong impact of the native idiom. Epistles, for example, whether of private or of public import, were now occasionally written in Italian, as can be proved by reference to the published letters of Guittone d'Arezzo.[122]
The works hitherto mentioned belong to the latter half of the thirteenth century. Their style, speakinggenerally, is dry and tentative. Except in the versions of French romances, which borrow grace from their originals, we do not find in them artistic charm of diction. TheFioriandGiardiniare little better than commonplace books, in which the author's personality is lost beneath a mass of extracts and citations. The beginning of the fourteenth century witnessed the growth of a new Italian prose. Of this second stage, the masterpieces are Villani's Chronicle, Dante'sVita Nuova, theFioretti di S. Francesco, theLeggende dei Santi Padriof Domenico Cavalca, and Jacopo Passavanti'sSpecchio della vera Penitenza.[123]These writers have no lack of individuality. Their mind moves in their style, and gives a personal complexion to their utterance. The chief charm of their manner, so far as it is common to characters so diverse, is its grave and childlike spontaneity. For vividness of description, for natural simplicity of phrase, and for that amiable garrulity which rounds a picture by innumerable details and unconscious touches of graphic force, not one of the books of this period surpasses theFioretti. Nor are theLeggendeof Cavalca less admirable. Modern, especially Northern, students may discover too much suavity and unction in the writer's tone—a superfluity of sweetness which fatigues, a caressing tenderness that clogs. After reading a few pages, we lay the book down, and wonder whether it could really have been a grown man, and not a cherub flown from Fra Angelico's Paradise, who composed it. This infantine note belongs to the cloister and the pulpit. It matches the simple credulity of the narrator, and well befits the miracles he loves to record. We seem to hear a good old monk gossiping to a party of rosy-cheeked novices, like those whom Sodoma painted in his frescoes of S. Benedict at Monte Oliveto. It need hardly be observed that neither in Villani's nor in Dante's prose do we find the same puerility. But all thetrecentistihave a common character of limpidity, simplicity, and unaffected grace.
The difficulties under which even the best Italian authors labor while using their own language, incline them to an exaggerated admiration for these pearls of thetrecento. They look back with envy to an age when men could write exactly as they thought and felt and spoke, without the tyranny of theVocabolarioor the fear of an Academy before their eyes. We, with whom the literary has always closely followed the spoken language, and who have, practically speaking, no dialects, while we recognize the purity of that incomparably transparent manner, cannot comprehend that it should be held up for imitation in the present age. To paint like Giotto would be easier than to write like Passavanti. The conditions of life and the modes of thought are so altered that the style of thetrecentowill not lend itself to modern requirements.
Among the prosaists of the fourteenth century—Cavalca, Villani, the author of theFioretti, and Passavanti—Boccaccio meets us with a sudden surprise. They aimed at finding the readiest and most appropriate words to convey their meaning in the simplest, most effective manner. Without artistic purpose,without premeditation, without side-glances at the classics, they wrote straightforward from their heart. There is little composition or connection in their work, no molding of paragraphs or rounding of phrases, no oratorical development, no gradation of tone. Boccaccio, on the contrary, sought to give the fullness and sonority of Latin to the periods of Italian prose. He had the Ciceronian cadence and the labyrinthine sentences of Livy in view. By art of style he was bent on rendering the vulgar language a fit vehicle for learning, rhetoric, and history. In order to make it clear what sorts of changes he introduced, it will be necessary to compare his prose with that of his contemporaries. Dante used the following words to describe his first meeting with Beatrice[124]: