BOCCACCIO
If the works of the third great Italian writer cannot be compared to
Dante’s for sublimity, or to Petrarch’s for perfection of style, the
most important of them is of even greater significance in the history
of culture. By his _Decameron_ GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO[8] endowed his
country with a classic prose, and won for himself a unique place as the
first modern novelist.
Boccaccio always speaks of himself as “of Certaldo,” a small Tuscan
town under Florentine dominion, where he possessed some properly. It
would seem, however, from his own expressions, not to have been his
birthplace. This was most probably Florence. The early legend of his
birth at Paris rests upon a too absolute identification of himself
with a character in his _Ameto_. His birth probably took place in
1313; and, if not early orphaned of his mother, he must have been an
illegitimate child. His father, a Florentine merchant of the prudent
and thrifty type, had him taught grammar and arithmetic, sent him into
a counting-house at thirteen, and four years afterwards placed him
with a mercantile firm at Naples. When, after two years, the youth’s
distaste to trade proved insuperable, the father made him study law at
the Neapolitan University. It is not likely that he gave much attention
to so dry a subject amid the distractions of the lively city, where
he was insensibly receiving the inspiration of his future poetry and
fiction.
Notwithstanding the accusation of stinginess brought against his
father, Boccaccio must apparently have possessed considerable means,
mixing in the best society of Naples. He probably owed much to the
Florentine extraction of Nicola Acciajuoli, a leading personage, and
subsequently Grand Seneschal of the kingdom. By 1338 he had progressed
so far as to fall in love with the lady he has celebrated as Fiammetta,
but whose real name was Maria, putative daughter of the Count of
Aquino, but generally believed to be the offspring of King Robert
himself. Fiammetta was married. The degree in which she returned his
passion is uncertain, but she appears to have exerted considerable
influence upon his career as an author. He composed the _Filocopo_
for her entertainment about 1339, and the close of his activity as
an imaginative writer about twelve years afterwards coincides with
the probable period of her death. _Ameto_ and _Fiammetta_, in both
of which she is celebrated were written after Boccaccio’s return to
Florence whither he was recalled by his unsympathising father about
1340; here the wild oats sown at Naples came up in a plentiful crop of
fiction and poetry. Literary productions must have occupied most of
Boccaccio’s time until 1345, when, probably on account of his father’s
remarriage, he returned to Naples, where he is said to have begun the
_Decameron_ under the patronage of Queen Joanna. In 1348 the pestilence
which devastated Florence carried off his father. Boccaccio returned
in 1349 to arrange family affairs, and thenceforth appears in quite
a new light, as a trusty diplomatist, the author of various manuals
(_Genealogiæ deorum gentilium_, _De casibus virorum illustrium_, &c.)
of the information most sought for in the age, and, under Petrarch’s
direction, a chief agent in the promotion of humanistic studies. Copies
of Terence and Apuleius are extant in his handwriting.
One of Boccaccio’s first duties after he had settled himself in his
native city was to entertain Petrarch upon his visit in 1350, and one
of his first public missions, performed in the following year, was to
solicit him to fix his residence at Florence and enter the service of
the Republic. Petrarch declined to entrust his repose to so unstable
a community, but his acquaintance with Boccaccio ripened into an
intimacy which might have been compared to that of Goethe and Schiller
if Boccaccio had not gracefully and judiciously assumed a tone of
deference to the acknowledged sovereign of contemporary literature. He
is indefatigable in literary suit and service. His piety towards Dante
as well as Petrarch leads him to transcribe for the latter the _Divine
Comedy_. His equal affection for Petrarch and classical studies made
him at Petrarch’s instigation entertain an erudite but uncomfortable
Greek, Leontius Pilatus, who rendered Homer for him into very lame
Latin; but still it was Homer that he read; while the mediæval epicist
of the Trojan war, Josephus Iscanus, had known his theme only in Dares
Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis.
Landor has delightfully depicted a supposed visit of Petrarch to
Boccaccio at Certaldo; one only regrets that the conversation of the
poets should turn so exclusively on Dante. Petrarch rendered his
friend one inestimable service in dissuading him from the renunciation
of the world, into which he had been almost scared by the prophecies
and denunciations of an expiring monk. Boccaccio nevertheless so
far profited by these admonitions as to write nothing more to which
morality could take exception. Shortly before his end he received one
of the most honourable and appropriate commissions with which he could
have been entrusted, that of delivering public lectures on Dante, which
he had carried down to the seventeenth canto of the _Inferno_, when
death overtook him on December 21, 1375.
The _Filocopo_, Boccaccio’s first and longest work of fiction, would
be thought intolerably tedious at the present day, when one must be
indeed [Greek: philokopos] to get through it. It forms nevertheless
a most important landmark in the history of literature, for it
signalises the transition from the metrical romance to the pure novel.
Something similar had been attempted two centuries earlier in the
delightful miniature romance of mingled prose and verse, _Aucassin and
Nicolette_, but the example had not been followed. About the middle
of the thirteenth century the _Novellino_ had been compiled with a
distinct moral purpose, but its hundred tales are rather anecdotes
than novelettes. The _Filocopo_ is founded upon the ancient lay of
Floris and Blanchefleur, which Boccaccio has converted into prose, with
a copious admixture of new incidents, characters, and descriptions.
There is little semblance of probability in the incidents, or accurate
delineation in the characters, while the diction, though polished,
is full of what would now be justly considered affectation and bad
taste. In the fourteenth century it was neither, but the faithful
image of the mental ferment inevitably produced by the irruption of
the classical spirit into the contracted world of the Middle Age.
Everything, indeed, was confused and bewildered; as the blind man
suddenly restored to sight saw men as trees, so the classical forms
appeared most strangely distorted in the mediæval atmosphere. This
ignorance, which might have excited the reprehension of critics in
Boccaccio’s age, had such then existed, is the salvation of his book
in ours: his mistaken erudition has become charming naïveté, and the
eloquence which no longer impresses at least amuses. For its own day
the _Filocopo_ was an epoch-making work, and traces of its style may be
met with until the displacement of the ideal romance by the novel of
manners, a development of which the fourteenth century had no notion;
although Petronius, as yet unknown, had given an example as early as
the age of Nero. Boccaccio’s affinities are rather with Apuleius, whom
he frequently follows in the _Decameron_.
The _Ameto_ of Boccaccio also possesses considerable importance
in literary history, being the first well-defined modern instance
of an important _genre_, the pastoral romance, afterwards carried
to perfection by Sannazaro and Montemayor; and also of a literary
artifice, the interweaving of several stories to compose a whole. The
stories are not very attractive, and the combination is not very well
managed, but the idea was an important contribution to literature, and,
though Longus is more likely to find emulators than Boccaccio, the
pastoral romance still has a future before it. The tales are supposed
to record the experiences of shepherdesses who personify the virtues,
and that placed in the mouth of Fiammetta is certainly in some measure
autobiographical.
More autobiographical still, and consequently nearer to the truth
of nature, is the romance called after Fiammetta, the precursor of
the modern psychological novel, although a germ that long remained
unproductive in unkindly soil. Written, probably, about 1346, it is
half-way in style between the _Filocopo_ and the _Decameron_, and the
plot is simplicity itself in comparison with the bewildering intricacy
of the former. It is merely Fiammetta’s own detail of her unfortunate
passion for a young Tuscan, and her lamentation for his inconstancy
after his recall to his home by a stern father. The auto-biographical
element is unquestionable, but it is extremely unlikely that Boccaccio
would have accused himself of infidelity in the person of Pamfilo. It
has been conjectured to be the work of some anonymous writer who took
him as a hero; but had this been so, the fact would assuredly have
come to light. It is more probable that it represents, not Fiammetta’s
feelings, but his own, and that, to avoid gossip, or for artistic
reasons, he inverted the situation and the characters. Fiammetta
undoubtedly excites more interest than Pamfilo could have done, and her
sufferings appear in a more tragic light as the penalty of her breach
of conjugal fidelity.
It may also well be the case that Boccaccio, finding his affection for
Fiammetta on the wane, anticipated Goethe by hastening to cleanse his
bosom of the perilous stuff while it yet retained sufficient vitality
for the purposes of art. However this may be, Fiammetta has the merits
and defects of Werther, real pathos and truth to nature associated
with the tedium hardly separable from a long monologue, however well
composed; and Boccaccio’s style here, although a great advance on
that of the _Filocopo_, still suffers from ambitious rhetoric and
a superfluity of adjectives. Great part of the book, nevertheless,
attains the level of true eloquence; and Boccaccio did much for prose
when he proved it to be an apt medium for the expression of passions
heretofore chiefly restricted to verse.
His fame, nevertheless, rests on his _Decameron_, for here he attained
the perfection which elsewhere he only indicated. Among many lights in
which this epoch-making book may be regarded is that of an alliance
between the elegant but superfine literature of courts and the vigorous
but homely literature of the people. Nobles and ladies, accustomed
to far-fetched and ornate compositions like the _Filocopo_, heard
the same stories which amused the common people, told in a style
which the uneducated too could apprehend and enjoy, but purged of all
roughness and vulgarity, and, in truth, such masterpieces of clear,
forcible prose as the greatest scholars had till then been unable to
produce. All that we know of Boccaccio leads to the conclusion that
his true mission was to have been a poet of the people, such an one
as the unknown balladists who in simple ages have given immortal form
to popular traditions, or as the Burnses and Heines who in artificial
periods have gone back to the fountains of popular song. Neither of
these was a possible part in the fourteenth century; but if Boccaccio
is in no respect archaic, the sap of his best work is drawn from the
soil of popular interest and sympathy.
Few of the stories are of Boccaccio’s invention; the originals of
some may be discovered in traditionary folk-lore, of others in French
fabliaux or classical or Oriental writers; very many are probably true
histories in every respect but for the alteration of the names. This
is Boccaccio’s best defence against the charge of licentiousness--he
did not, like so many others, write with the express purpose of
stimulating the passions, but reproduced the ordinary talk of hours
of relaxation, giving it the attraction of a pure and classic style.
The share of the ladies as narrators of or listeners to these loose
stories, so repugnant to ideal conceptions of the female character,
is not only explained by the manners of the time, but has greatly
contributed to the charm of his work by tempering its licence with a
refinement best appreciated by comparison with such similar collections
as the _Facetiæ_ of Poggio. After all, the sensuous element, though
conspicuous, is not predominant in the _Decameron_, and few books
contain more or finer traits of courtesy, humanity, and generosity.
Prose fiction had existed before Boccaccio, and his manner had been in
some measure anticipated by some of the tales which have found their
way into the _Cento Novelle Antiche_, but he was probably the first to
employ in Europe the Oriental device of setting his stories in a frame.
The structure of the _Decameron_ is too generally known to render it
necessary to more than barely mention its scheme as a succession of
stories told by ten persons in ten successive days, on the feigned
occasion of the retirement of a _lieta brigata_ to a delightful
retreat from the plague which devastated Florence in 1348. Many among
us will think that they ought to have remained to aid their perishing
fellow-countrymen, and, what is more, would themselves have done so.
But it would be absurd to blame the fourteenth century for a conception
of public duty and a completeness of organisation in public calamity
which did not and could not exist in it. Mediæval Italy produced but
one Florence Nightingale, and she was a saint. The step once taken, the
exclusion of all unpleasant tidings was its indispensable corollary;
and hence the scene of the story-telling, with its groves and orchards,
gardens and fountains, charming company and frank converse, has ever
remained one of the green spots on which imagination loves to rest.
Such an ideal of cultivated society afforded no room for the vivacity
of delineation so admirable in Chaucer’s portraits derived from all
classes; yet the prologue and the little introductory passages to each
day are, with their feeling for landscape and poetic truth, even more
delightful than the stories themselves. If, as seems probable, some
of these were composed at Naples before the pestilence, this lovely
framework must have been an afterthought. Of Boccaccio’s greatness
as a master of narrative, nothing need here be said, unless that his
progressiveness is even more surprising than his talent. Ten years
(1339-49) had sufficed to raise him from the eloquent but confused
and hyperbolical style of the _Filocopo_ to the perfection of Italian
narrative. He was now the unapproached model of later story-tellers,
who can, indeed, produce stronger effects by the employment of stronger
means, but have never been able to rival him on his own ground of easy,
unaffected simplicity.
Two minor works of Boccaccio, written subsequently to the _Decameron_,
deserve a word of notice--the _Corbaccio_, a lampoon upon a widow
who had jilted him, which does him no credit morally, but evinces
much satiric force; and the _Urbano_, a pretty little romance of the
identification of an emperor’s abandoned son--the genuineness of which,
however, has sometimes been doubted.
It was the constant destiny of Boccaccio to make epochs--producing
something absolutely or virtually new, and tracing out the ways in
which his successors, far as they might outstrip him, were bound to
walk. We have seen that the heroic, the pastoral, the familiar romance
owed, if not their actual birth, at least their first considerable
beginnings to him; and his activity was no less important in the domain
of narrative poetry. He may not have been the inventor of the octave
stanza, but undoubtedly he was the first to show its supreme fitness
for narrative, and thus mark out the channel in which the epic genius
of Italy has flowed ever since. The peculiar grace of her language,
and its affluence of rhymes, adapt it especially to this singularly
elegant, if not massive or sublime, form of versification, superior for
narrative purposes to the sinuous and digressive _terza rima_, or to
Italian counterfeits of the majestic blank verse of England. It could
not be expected that Boccaccio’s attempts should at first display all
the perfection his metre is capable of receiving, he is undoubtedly
lax and diffuse. Yet all the main recommendations of the octave are
discoverable in his _Teseide_ and _Filostrato_, poems especially
interesting to English readers from the imitation--frequently
translation--of them in Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_ and _Troilus_.
The _Teseide_ is the earlier, having been composed shortly after
Boccaccio’s return to Florence in 1340 for the gratification of his
Neapolitan mistress; while the _Filostrato_, apparently composed upon
his second visit to Naples about 1347, is a disguised satire upon her
inconstancy.
Both from the acuteness of feeling thus engendered, and from the
rapid progress Boccaccio had in the interim made in the poetic art,
the _Filostrato_ is the more powerful and poetical composition; the
prosperity of Troilus’s love while returned, for example, is described
in the liveliest colours and with the truest feeling. The _Teseide_,
on the other hand, has the advantage of a more dignified and heroic
story, known to the English reader, not only from Chaucer, but from
Dryden’s imitation of the latter in his _Palamon and Arcite_. It also
gave the plot to Fletcher’s _Two Noble Kinsmen_. Boccaccio’s source
is uncertain, but is believed to have been some Greek romance written
under the later Roman Empire. If so, he can only have been acquainted
with it in a Latin translation, now lost as well as the original. His
own poem was translated back into Greek in a miserable Romaic version
printed in 1529. For the tale of _Troilus and Cressida_ he had Guido de
Colonna’s history of the Trojan war, itself indebted for this episode
to an ancient metrical romance.
The little idyllic narrative _Ninfale Fiesolano_ is one of the most
attractive of Boccaccio’s minor writings. It relates the breach of
“Diana’s law” by one of her nymphs, and its tragical consequences--the
suicide of the lover, and the metamorphosis, or rather the assumption
of the nymph into the waters of a river; although the fruit of their
union survives to become a hero and found the city of Fiesole. If, as
is probable, somewhat later than the _Filostrato_, this pleasing little
story evinces Boccaccio’s increasing mastery of the octave couplet,
ease of narrative, and power of natural description. Had he continued
to compose in verse, he would probably have ranked higher among Italian
poets than he does now.
The _Amorosa Visione_ is an earlier and very different work. It is
written in _terza rima_, and betrays an evident ambition to imitate
Dante, while in its turn it has not been without influence on
Petrarch’s _Trionfi_. Like the latter, it testifies to the mediæval
love of allegories and stately shows, and may well have aided to
inspire the _Polifilo_ of Francesco Colonna. The poet is conducted
through a number of visions illustrative of the pomps and vanities of
the world, and the poem leaves off just as, by command of his mistress,
he is about to attempt the narrow way which he should have taken at
first. Written apparently for the entertainment of a courtly circle,
and encumbered with fantastic acrostics, it reveals little of the deep
feeling of its predecessor or its successor; but if regarded simply as
the description of a series of pageants, must be allowed the merits
of fertile invention and glowing colour. Boccaccio’s enthusiastic
praise of Dante, whom he calls the lord of all science, and the source
of everything, if there be anything, excellent in himself, is highly
honourable to him.
A good example of Boccaccio’s epic vein is afforded by the prayer of
Emilia to Diana in the _Teseide_, uttered when Palamon and Arcite are
about to fight for her sake. For this, as for several other versions,
the writer is indebted to Miss Ellen Clerke:
_She thus in broken vows 'mid sighs began:
“Chaste Goddess, who dost purify the glades,
And of a maiden train dost lead the van,
And him chastises who thy law evades,
As lost Actæon learned in briefest span,
Who, young and hapless, smit 'mid sylvan shades,
Not by scourge whip, but by thy wrath celestial,
Fled as a stag in transformation bestial._
_“Hear, then, my voice, if worthy of thy care,
While I implore by thy divinity,
In triple form, accept my lowly prayer,
And if it be an easy task to thee
To perfect it--I prithee strive, if e’er
Soft pity filled thy heart so cold and free
For maiden client who in prayer addrest thee,
And who for grace or favour did request thee._
_“For I, a maiden of thy maiden train,
Am fitter far, with quiver and with bow,
To roam the forest, than 'neath love’s soft reign
To do a husband’s will; and if thou go
In memory back, thou must in mind retain
How harder face than granite did we show
’Gainst headlong Venus’ law, based not on reason,
But headlong passion, to its promptings treason._
_“And if it be my better fate to stay
A little maid amid thy vestal throng,
The fierce and burning fumes do thou allay
Sprung from desires so passionate and strong
Of both the enamoured youths my love who pray,
And both for joy of love from me do long,
Let peace supplant between them war’s contention,
Since grief to me, thou know’st, is their dissension._
_“And if it be reserved for me by fate
To Juno’s law subjected now to be,
Ah, pardon thou my lapse from maiden state,
Nor therefore be my prayer refused by thee;
On others’ will, thou seest, condemned to wait,
My actions must conform to their decree:
Then help me, Goddess, hear my prayer thus lowly,
Who still deserve thy favour high and holy.”_
Boccaccio thought little of his own poetry, would have destroyed his
sonnets but for the remonstrances of Petrarch, and laments that even
the incitement of Fiammetta is unavailing to spur him on to the Temple
of Fame. Yet in another place he says that he has spared no pains to
excel:
_Study I have not spared, or scanted time:
Now rest unto my labour I permit,
Lamenting this so tittle could avail
To raise me to that eminence sublime._
This judgment was unreasonably severe. It is true, nevertheless, that
Boccaccio would have gained more renown as a poet if the taste of his
time had permitted him to seek inspiration among the people for his
verses, as he did for his stories. How exquisite he could sometimes be
is shown by two of the sonnets translated by Rossetti--versions, it
must be owned, which surpass the originals:
_Love steered my course, while yet the sun rode high,
On Scylla’s waters to a myrtle-grove:
The heaven was still and the sea did not move;
Yet now and then a little breeze went by,
Stirring the tops of trees against the sky:
And then I heard a song as glad as love,
So sweet that never yet the like thereof
Was heard in any mortal company.
“A nymph, a goddess, or an angel sings
Unto herself, within this chosen place
Of ancient loves,” so said I at that sound.
And there my lady, 'mid the shadowings
Of myrtle-trees, 'mid flowers and grassy space,
Singing I saw, with others who sat round._
_By a clear well, within a little field
Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,
Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)
Their loves; and each had twined a bough to shield
Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield
The golden hair their shadow; while the two
Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through
With a soft wind for ever stirred and stilled.
After a little while one of them said
(I heard her), “Think! if ere the next hour struck,
Each of our lovers should come here to-day,
Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?”
To whom the others answered, “From such luck
A girl would be a fool to run away.”_
Apart from the merits of his writings, Boccaccio might rest a claim to
no ordinary renown as the creator of classic Italian prose; and even if
he had found this instrument ready to his hand, his work with it might
alone have assured him immortality. Perhaps he has a still higher title
to fame in his quality as a great originator, achieving, indeed, no
consummate work except the _Decameron_, but reconnoitring the unknown
world through which the human spirit travels, and opening out new paths
on every side as he steers “bound upon beating wing to golden bough.”
As the first effective exemplar of the heroic and pastoral romance and
of the epic in octave stanza, as the principal populariser of classical
lore, his influence will be felt to the end of time. The books which
gave him this power are, indeed, comparatively forgotten. On the other
hand, the great marvel of his _Decameron_ is its undying freshness.
The language is as terse and bright, the tale as readable as ever:
the commentator may exercise his research in detecting the sources of
the stories, but has little to do in explaining obsolete diction or
obsolete manners.
In morals and conduct, until his latter days, Boccaccio seems to have
been a perfect type of the gay and easy class of Florentine citizens,
and as remote as possible from the wary and penurious burghers depicted
in his tale of the Pot of Basil. Apart from the fair and courteous
presence revealed in the _Decameron_, his principal titles to moral
esteem are his disinterested love of culture, his enthusiasm for
his master Dante, and his obsequious yet graceful demeanour towards
Petrarch, embodying sentiments which could have found no entrance into
an ungenerous breast.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] When preceded by the Christian name, “Boccaccio” ought, in
strictness, to lose the final vowel, but this would seem pedantic in
English.