THE NOVEL
The novel presents one of the most remarkable examples in literary
history of arrested development, and of all departments of literature
is perhaps the only one which failed to attain perfection in the hands
of the ancients. Great progress is indeed observable from its first
artless beginnings under the Pharaohs, so recently recovered for us;
but having advanced far along several lines, it becomes stationary
upon all. The germ of the picaresque novel is clearly discernible in
Petronius, of the novel of adventure in Apuleius, of erotic fiction
in Longus; but these examples apparently remain ineffectual. Either
the path is not prosecuted at all, or it leads to mere repetition. No
new element appears until we encounter the chivalric romance, which in
Spain produced an extensive prose literature, but in Italy ran almost
entirely to verse. The more elaborate romances of Boccaccio, indeed,
disclose influences from this quarter; but their reputation was slight
in comparison with those short and familiar tales, commonly founded
upon some anecdote and dealing with scenes and personages of real
life, which prescribed the form for the national novelette. A more
distinctively national type never existed. The extraordinary thing is
that the nation never got beyond it. It should have seemed an obvious
advance to lengthen the stories; to stimulate surprise and suspense by
greater intricacy of plot; to embellish by elaborate description; to
depict character with fulness and exactness; to employ fiction for the
ventilation of ideas. Precedents for all these improvements, except
the last, might have been found in the classical romances, and it
might have been expected that fiction would have experienced the same
development as other branches of literature. On the contrary, the last
Italian novelette is as far from the novel of the nineteenth century
as the first, and the most powerful literary agent of good or evil,
next to the equally modern newspaper, remained to be created in recent
times. Whatever the defects of the Italian novel of the sixteenth
century, it was nevertheless, unlike the drama, a thoroughly national
form of composition, it was far in advance of anything of the kind
existing elsewhere, and it exerted great influence on the literature of
other countries as the general storehouse of dramatic plots.
It is no doubt to the credit of Italian novelists as artists that they
did not overload their stories with didactic purpose; but this was an
error which, writing mainly to amuse, they lay under little temptation
to commit. None of them were endowed with creative imagination; none
transcended the sphere of ordinary experience, or showed the least
inclination to effect for prose fiction what Boiardo and Ariosto had
accomplished for narrative poetry. Their _notti piacevoli_ were not
Arabian Nights. Their object of amusing could consequently only be
achieved by keeping close to actual manners, and we may depend upon
receiving from them a tolerably accurate picture of Italian society in
so far as it suited them to present it; although the portion that best
lent itself to their objects was the most licentious and corrupt, and
the loose women and salacious priests who recur in their tales from
generation to generation, though by no means creatures of imagination,
are still far from typical of the entire society of Italy. Like the
masks of the Greek comedy, like the rakes and topers of the English
comedy of the Restoration and Revolution, they are in a certain degree
traditional and conventional. Modern fiction is encyclopædic: no class
of the community is outside its scope. Italian fiction was eclectic,
restricted by a tacit convention to what was deemed its appropriate
sphere. The history of pictorial and plastic art has been reproduced
in modern fiction; the property of the connoisseur has become the
possession of the nation. Hence, whatever the literary merits of the
Italian novelists of this period, whatever the fidelity with which they
reproduce the social atmosphere of the time, their works all taken
together count for less in the history of the human mind than those of
a single first-class modern novelist such as Dickens or Balzac.
Boccaccio’s immediate successors as novelists are FRANCO SACCHETTI
and GIOVANNI FIORENTINO, already mentioned as poets of the fifteenth
century. Sacchetti (1335-1410) had in his youth been a merchant, and
had travelled much both in Italy and in Slavonian countries. After his
return he became a Florentine magistrate, and filled some important
public offices. He was a man of solid and humorous wisdom, who
instructed his times, partly by religious and moral discourses, which
frequently display great liberality of feeling, partly by his stories,
which, apart from their literary merits, afford a valuable picture of
a society half-way on the road from barbarism to civilisation. The
majority are founded on real occurrences, generally humorous, though
the humour is not always as visible to us as to his contemporaries; but
sometimes tragic. Some, as with Boccaccio, are derived from folk-lore
in the _Gesta Romanorum_ or the _Fabliaux_. All are recounted with
extreme simplicity and brevity. The art of working up a single incident
into a long story by subtle delineation of character, elaborate
description, and ingenious plot and underplot, was then unknown.[16]
Sacchetti is the straightforward _raconteur_ and nothing more, but
he deserves as much praise for the ease of his narrative as for the
purity of his style. He can hardly be considered as an imitator of
Boccaccio, who is always the poet and man of letters, while Sacchetti
rather produces the impression of an ordinary Florentine gentleman
telling stories after dinner with no special care for artistic effect,
which nevertheless he attains by the plain good sense which bids
him go straight to his subject and subordinate minor details to the
really essential. His tales are single, not set in a framework like
Boccaccio’s.
This is not the case with his contemporary Ser Giovanni Fiorentino,
author of the _Pecorone_ (_Great Stupid_), who has exposed himself to
ridicule by the quaintness of his introductory machinery. A friar and
a nun are supposed to meet weekly in the parlour of a convent, and
console themselves for the insuperable obstacles to their attachment by
telling stories, upon the merits of which they compliment each other
extravagantly. The tales, however, are interesting, well told, and
greatly esteemed for the excellence of their style. Like Sacchetti’s,
they are mostly genuine anecdotes, or at least founded upon fact or
popular tradition; some are taken with little alteration from Villani’s
Chronicles. Nothing is certainly known of the author, except that
he began to write his tales in 1378 at the Castle of Dovadola, in
compulsory or voluntary exile from his native city. He is believed to
have been a notary, and a partisan of the Guelf faction.
Giovanni da Prato, author of _Il Paradin degli Alberti_ (about 1420)
also deserves mention here, on account of the short stories inserted
into his ethical dialogues; but the first novelist of much importance
after Giovanni Fiorentino is MASSUCCIO of Salerno, a Neapolitan, who
seems to have been a man of rank, and to have been for some time
in the service of the Duke of Milan. He wrote about 1470, and his
tales were first printed in 1476. The celebrity which he continues
to enjoy is, it may be feared, mainly owing to his character as the
most licentious of the Italian novelists in fact, although, if we
may trust his own assurance, the most virtuous in intention. His
tales are divided into five parts, each of the first three of which
has what the writer considers to be a distinct moral purpose. In the
first, in Dunlop’s words, “the scope of the stories is to show that
God will sooner or later inflict vengeance on dissolute monks.” The
second “proves that the monks of those days invented many frauds.”
The third “is intended to show that the greatest and finest ladies of
Italy indulged in gallantries of a nature which did them very little
honour.” All these propositions might have been thought susceptible
of demonstration without the _Novellino_, and much better established
than Massuccio’s claim to a place among moralists or reformers. He
protests that his tales are “ower true,” and for the most part founded
on recent transactions; and, in fact, he appears less indebted than any
predecessor to folk-lore and the French fabliaux. The last two sections
of his work, however, contain love adventures of too exceptional a
nature to be founded upon actual incidents. Some of these manifest,
not merely ingenuity of invention, but considerable tragic power. The
style is somewhat barbarous; and the same remark applies to the lighter
fiction, generally of the nature of anecdote, of his contemporary
Sabadino degli Arienti, a native and historian of Bologna. Sabadino’s
tales are much less objectionable than Massuccio’s, though no less than
his in the author’s opinion _moralissimi documenti_. They are entitled
_Porrettane_, from their having been composed for the amusement of the
visitors to the baths of Porretta, which gives them some importance
as an index to the taste of the more opulent and leisured classes of
society.
The novels of the following century are exceedingly numerous, but in
general too much upon one pattern to deserve especial notice until we
arrive at those of Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini, each of whom is
eminent for some special characteristic. Of Firenzuola, one of the most
typical writers of his day, we have already spoken, his novelettes
being generally interwoven with his other prose works. Two single
novelettes by separate authors deserve special notice as world-famous,
though not by the genius of their authors. The _Romeo and Giulietta_ of
Luigi da Porto, a gentleman of Vicenza who died in 1529, is a powerful
and well-told story, although it would have been little heard of but
for Shakespeare, who nevertheless seems to have been unacquainted with
it, having founded his tragedy upon the inferior version made by Arthur
Brooke after the French of Boistuau. The other story which has become
a portion of the world’s repertory of fiction is the _Belphegor_ of
Giovanni Brevio, a subject also treated by Machiavelli, and revived
in our own day by Thackeray. The idea of the devil’s aversion to
matrimony, not as a divine ordinance, but as a nuisance inconsistent
with his own peace and comfort, is so irresistibly comic that one is
surprised to find it originally Slavonian.
The celebrity of Pietro Aretino requires the mention of his novels,
which, however, possess no very distinctive features. To find these
we must turn chiefly to Straparola, whose genre requires a distinct
notice; and, among those who diverged less from the beaten track,
Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini. Bandello, says Settembrini, depicts
the Italian, Grazzini the Florentine, Cinthio humanity at large.
MATTEO BANDELLO (1480-1561) was a Lombard and a Dominican, who resided
successively at Mantua and at Milan, the latter city in his time one
of the most uncomfortable places in Italy from the oppressions and
depredations of the Spanish soldiery. Popular commotions concurred
to drive him to France, where Henry II. made him Bishop of Agen. His
novelettes had been composed before this distinction befell him, but
his episcopacy was no obstacle to their publication in 1554. Though
frequently licentious, his stories indicate a considerable advance upon
his forerunners in the power of depicting character and in seriousness
of tone. He prefers historical narration to invention, and usually
bases his tales upon some actual occurrence, often revolting for its
cruelty or indecency. The story of _Violante_, analysed in No. 380
of the _Edinburgh Review_, is a good example of his tragic force,
and many others might be given. The pathetic grace of the opening
of his _Gerardo and Elena_, analysed in the same essay, is no less
excellent in its more romantic and delicate way. He was a prolific
writer, producing no fewer than eighty-nine novelettes, more esteemed
by foreigners than by his own countrymen, who were offended by his
Lombardisms. Settembrini, however, not in general favourable to the
productions of the Cinque Cento, pronounces him the first Italian
novelist after Boccaccio.
No imputation of rusticity can be attached to the diction of ANTONIO
MARIA GRAZZINI, surnamed _Il Lasca_ (1503-83), for here the style
is the main recommendation of the work. Grazzini, an apothecary
by profession, was one of the chief promoters of the movement for
prescribing a standard of pure Tuscan, and as one of the founders
of the celebrated Academy _degli Umidi_, each of whose members was
bound to assume the name of some fish, he called himself _Il Lasca_
(the Roach), by which name he is best known. Such toys occupied the
thoughts of Italians in an age of decay when great deeds had become
impossible. Grazzini’s stories are mostly taken from Florentine private
life, and as such have their value, apart from the idiomatic Tuscan,
which is best apprehended by the writer’s countrymen. They are not of
enthralling interest, and when tragical are sometimes revolting, but
the exposition is easy and artistic.
GIOVANNI BATTISTA GIRALDI CINTHIO of Ferrara (1504-73) is better
known by name to English readers than most of his fellow-novelists,
since from him Shakespeare derived the plots of _Othello_ and _Measure
for Measure_. The story on which the former drama is founded is not
a bad specimen of Cinthio’s usual work. His subjects are frequently
tragical, sometimes shocking, but the treatment is generally powerful,
the narrative direct and forcible, and he is in great measure exempt
from the grossness of his contemporaries. The tales, a hundred in
number, whence their title of _Ecatomithi_, are supposed to be narrated
on board a ship bound for Marseilles, and conveying a party of Romans
escaping from the sack of the Eternal City. They are divided like
Boccaccio’s into ten classes, each considered to illustrate some
particular point of morals or manners. They are highly respectable
performances; but by so much as they surpass Grazzini’s in matter they
fall below them in style, which, though not incorrect, is devoid of
colour and individuality.
STRAPAROLA, already briefly alluded to, was a native of Caravaggio,
and published his _Notti Piacevoli_ in 1554. He is a good story-teller,
although a bad stylist; but what gives him an epoch-making rank among
Italian novelists is not his merit or demerit in either capacity, but
his having been the first to avail himself of popular folk-lore as
a groundwork for fiction. Nothing is more annoying than the almost
complete neglect of popular mythology by men of culture in antiquity.
Apuleius tells one inimitable tale, without saying where he got it.
Synesius spends his evenings listening to the stories of the Libyan
peasants, and is not at the trouble to preserve a single one. It
is nevertheless clear that such tales must have been as rife in
ancient times as in our own. Straparola was perhaps the first man who
systematically turned them to literary account: it would have been
well if he had gone much further, and proportionately reduced his debt
to Hieronymo Morlini, the chief recommendation of whose generally
indecent and always ungrammatical Latin stories (Naples, 1520) is
their exceeding rarity. Nearly a hundred years afterwards Straparola
was completely eclipsed both as concerned the quantity and the quality
of his folk-lore fictions, by the _Pentamerone_ of GIOVANNI BASILE,
Count of Morone, a collection whose relation to the popular mythology
of other nations has occasioned endless discussion. Puss in Boots, and
Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and many another favourite owe to Basile
their first appearance in literary costume. In narrative he is the
breathless, loquacious, exuberant Neapolitan, too much in a hurry to
trouble himself about style or art, but carrying all before him by
his vigour and vehemence, and betraying, as his German translator has
pointed out, strong traces of the influence of Rabelais.
It will be evident from the above brief sketch of the Italian novel
that in the sixteenth century the art of novel-writing was nearly
identical with the art of narrative. This was fully possessed by most
writers of fiction; but characterisation, ingenuity of construction
and development of plot, underplot, episode, artful suspension of
interest, above all the application of the novelist’s art to weighty
purposes, were all in the most rudimentary condition. Compared with
the modern novel, the ancient story is as a simple air upon a flute to
the complicated harmony of an organ. It is true that the old romances
abound with hints and germs only needing development, but development
was slow in coming, and even when about the beginning of the eighteenth
century romance and novelette had grown into the novel, it was still
long before the novel became a vehicle of ideas and a potent factor in
civilisation. The reason probably is that while the novel may employ
the highest human faculties, it is at the same time the best medium for
conveying ideas to the less cultivated orders of society. The extension
of reading and writing to these classes has called forth a tribe of
readers which had no existence in the days of the Cinque Cento, and has
invested the only description of literature which powerfully appeals
to them with extraordinary significance. The influence of the novel
in the modern sense grows, and will continue to grow; but there is
still abundant room for the short and simple story, the consistent
development of a single incident or situation, compensating in art for
what it lacks in variety, yet, now that human life has become so much
richer and more complex than of old, at a further remove from mere
anecdote than seemed necessary for its Italian prototype.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] The Italian style of novel has been imitated in English in
_Stories after Nature_, by Charles Wells, author of _Joseph and his
Brethren_, with great success, except for Wells’s deficiency in humour,
and his employment of a more poetical diction than the Italians would
have allowed themselves.