It has been justly observed, and confirmed by all that we know of the
early history of literature, that the first forms of it were in verse.
This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert
Spencer on a different but related theme, that "Ornament was before
dress," the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian
preoccupations. History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before
Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions of the past take the
form of metrical, and generally musical, recitation. An excellent and
polished school of prose writers is the product of a tendency in
national life of later origin than that which calls out the bards and
ballad-singers, and is proof of a more advanced culture. The Renaissance
in Italy was but the resumption of a life long suspended, and the
succession of the phenomena in which was therefore far more rapid than
was possible in a nation which had to trace the path without any
survivals of a prior awakening; and while centuries necessarily
intervened between Homer and the "Father of History," a generation
sufficed between Dante and Boccaccio, for Italian literature had only to
throw off the leaden garb of Latin form to find its new dress in the
vernacular. Dante certainly wrote Italian prose, but he was more at ease
in verse; and while the latter provoked in him an abundance of those
happy phrases which seem to have been born with the thought they
express, and which pass into the familiar stock of imagery of all later
time, the prose of the 'Convito' and the 'Vita Nuova' hardly ever
recalls itself in common speech by any parallel of felicity.
And Boccaccio too wrote poetry of no ignoble type, but probably because
he was part of an age when verse had become the habitual form of
culture, and all who could write caught the habit of versification,--a
habit easier to fall into in Italian than in any other language. But
while the consecration of time has been given to the 'Commedia,' and the
'Convito' passes into the shadow and perspective of lesser things, so
the many verses of Boccaccio are overlooked, and his greatest prose
work, the 'Decameron,' is that with which his fame is mostly bound up.
Born in 1313, at seven years of age he showed signs of a literary
facility, and his father, a merchant of Florence, put him to school
with a reputable grammarian; but afterward, deciding to devote him to
merchandise, sent him to study arithmetic,--restive and profitless in
which, he was sent to study canon law, and finding his level no better
there, went back to traffic and to Naples in his father's business when
he was about twenty. The story runs that the sight of the tomb of Virgil
turned his thoughts to poetry; but this confusion of the _post hoc_ with
the _propter hoc_ is too common in remote and romantic legend to value
much. The presence of Petrarch in the court of Robert, King of Naples,
is far more likely to have been the kindling of his genius to its
subsequent activity: and the passion he acquired while there for the
illegitimate daughter of the King, Maria,--the Fiammetta of his later
life,--furnished the fuel for its burning; his first work, the
'Filocopo,' being written as an offering to her. It is a prose love
story, mixed with mythological allusions,--after the fashion of the day,
which thought more of the classics than of nature; and like all his
earlier works, prolix and pedantic.
The 'Theseide,' a purely classic theme, the war of Theseus with the
Amazons, is in verse; and was followed by the 'Ameto,' or 'Florentine
Nymphs,' a story of the loves of Ameto, a rustic swain, with one of the
nymphs of the valley of the Affrico, a stream which flows into the Arno
not far from where the poet was born, or where at least he passed his
youth; and to which valley he seems always greatly attached, putting
there the scene of most of his work, including the 'Decameron.' 'Ameto'
is a mythological fiction, in which the characters mingle recitations of
verse with the prose narration, and in which the gods of Greece and Rome
masque in the familiar scenes. Following these came the 'Amorosa
Visione,' and 'Filostrato,' in verse; 'Fiammetta' in prose, being the
imaginary complaint of his beloved at their separation; 'Nimfale
Fiesolano,' in verse, the scene also laid on the Affrico; and then the
'Decameron,' begun in 1348 and finished in 1353, after which he seems to
have gradually acquired a disgust for the world he had lived in as he
had known it, and turned to more serious studies. He wrote a life of
Dante, 'II Corbaccio,' a piece of satirical savagery, the 'Genealogy of
the Gods,' and various minor works; and spent much of his time in
intercourse with Petrarch, whose conversation and influence were of a
different character from that of his earlier life.
[Illustration: G. BOCCACCIO.]
Boccaccio died at Certaldo in the Val d'Elsa, December 2d, 1375. Of the
numerous works he left, that by which his fame as a writer is
established is beyond any question the 'Decameron,' or Ten Days'
Entertainment; in which a merry company of gentlemen and ladies,
appalled by the plague raging in their Florence, take refuge in the
villas near the city, and pass their time in story-telling and rambles
in the beautiful country around, only returning when the plague has
to a great extent abated. The superiority of the 'Decameron' is not only
in the polish and grace of its style, the first complete departure from
the stilted classicism of contemporary narrative, the happy naturalness
of good story-telling,--but in the conception of the work as a whole,
and the marvelous imagination of the filling-in between the framework of
the story of the plague by the hundred tales from all lands and times,
with the fine thread of the narrative of the day-by-day doings of the
merry and gracious company, their wanderings, the exquisite painting of
the Tuscan landscape (in which one recognizes the Val d'Arno even
to-day), and the delicate drawing of their various characters. It is
only when all these elements have been taken into consideration, and the
unity wrought through such a maze of interest and mass of material
without ever becoming dull or being driven to repetition, that we
understand the power of Boccaccio as an artist.
We must take the ten days' holiday as it is painted: a gay and
entrancing record of a fortunate and brilliant summer vacation, every
one of its hundred pictures united with the rest by a delicate tracery
of flowers and landscape, with bird-songs and laughter, bits of tender
and chaste by-play--for there were recognized lovers in the company; and
when this is conceived in its entirety, we must set it in the massive
frame of terrible gloom of the great plague, through which Boccaccio
makes us look at his picture. And then the frame itself becomes a
picture; and its ghastly horror--the apparent fidelity of the
descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence
of an eye-witness--gives a measure of the power of the artist and the
range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly
paradise, such as even the 'Commedia' does not give us. In this
stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling
in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a
mere story-book, in which the only charm is the polish of the parts, the
shine of the fragments that made the mosaic. The tales came from all
quarters, and only needed to be amusing or interesting enough to make
one suppose that they had been listened to with pleasure: stories from
the 'Gesta Romanorum,' the mediæval chronicles, or any gossip of the
past or present, just to make a whole; the criticism one might pass on
them, I imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were
placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling;
the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he
put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro
of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he
prepares for his _lieta brigata_ the way out of the charnel-house: these
are the real 'Decameron.' The author presents it in a prelude which has
for its scope only to give the air of reality to the whole, as if not
only the plague, but the 'Decameron,' had been history; and the proof of
his perfect success is in the fact that for centuries the world has been
trying to identify the villas where the merry men and maidens met, as if
they really had met.
"Whenever, most gracious ladies, I reflect how pitiful you
all are by nature, I recognize that this work will in your
opinion have a sad and repulsive beginning, as the painful
memory of the pestilence gone by, fraught with loss to all
who saw or knew of it, and which memory the work will bear on
its front. But I would not that for this you read no further,
through fear that your reading should be always through sighs
and tears. This frightful beginning I prepare for you as for
travelers a rough and steep mountain, beyond which lies a
most beautiful and delightful plain, by so much the more
pleasurable as the difficulty of the ascent and passage of
the mountain had been great. And as the extreme of pleasure
touches pain, so suffering is effaced by a joy succeeding. To
this brief vexation (I call it brief, as contained in few
words) follow closely the sweets and pleasures I have
promised, and which would not be hoped for from such a
beginning if it were not foretold. And to tell the truth, if
I had been able frankly to bring you where I wished by other
way than this rough one, I had willingly done so; but because
I could not, without these recollections, show what was the
occasion of the incidents of which you will read, I was
obliged to write of them."
The elaborate description of the plague which follows, shows not only
Boccaccio's inventive power,--as being, like that of Defoe of the plague
of London (which is a curious parallel to this) altogether imaginary,
since the writer was at Naples during the whole period of the
pestilence,--but also that it was a part indispensable of the entire
scheme, and described with all its ghastly minuteness simply to enhance
the value of his sunshine and merriment. He was in Naples from 1345
until 1350, without any other indication of a visit to Florence than a
chronological table of his life, in which occurs this item:--"1348,
departs in the direction of Tuscany with Louis of Taranto:" as if either
a prince on his travels would take the plague in the course of them, or
a man so closely interested in the events of the time at Naples, and in
the height of his passion for Fiammetta,--the separation from whom he
had hardly endured when earlier (1345) he was separated from her by his
duty to his aged father,--would have chosen the year of the pestilence,
when every one who could, fled Florence, to return there; and we find
him in May, 1349, in Naples, in the full sunshine of Fiammetta's favor,
and remaining there until his father's death in 1350.
There is indeed in Boccaccio's description of the plague that which
convicts it of pure invention, quickened by details gathered from
eye-witnesses,--the very minuteness of the description in certain
points not in accord with the character of the disease, as when he
narrates that the hogs rooting in the garments of the dead thrown out
into the streets "presently, as if they had taken poison, after a few
dizzy turns, fell dead"; and this, which he says he saw with his own
eyes, is the only incident of which he makes this declaration (the
incident on which the unity of his work hinges, the meeting of the merry
troupe in the church of S. Maria Novella, being recorded on the
information of a person "worthy of belief"). Nor does he in his own
person intrude anywhere in the story; so that this bit of intense
realization thrown into the near foreground of his picture, as it were
by chance, and without meaning, yet certified by his own signature, is
the point at which he gets touch of his reader and convinces him of
actuality throughout the romance.
And to my mind this opening chapter, with all its horrors and
charnel-house realization, its slight and suggestive delineation of
character, all grace and beauty springing out of the chaos and social
dissolution, is not only the best part of the work, but the best of
Boccaccio's. The well-spun golden cord on which the "Novelle" are strung
is ornamented, as it were, at the divisions of the days by little cameos
of crafty design; but the opening, the portico of this hundred-chambered
palace of art, has its own proportions and design, and may be taken and
studied alone. Nothing can, it seems to me, better convey the idea of
the death-stricken city, "the surpassing city of Florence, beyond every
other in Italy most beautiful,"--a touch to enhance the depth of his
shade, than the way he brings out in broad traits the greatness of the
doom: setting in the heavens that consuming sun; the paralysis of the
panic; the avarice of men not daunted by death; the helplessness of all
flesh before--
"the just wrath of God for our correction sent upon men; for
healing of such maladies neither counsel of physician nor
virtue of any medicine whatever seemed to avail or have any
effect--even as if nature could not endure this suffering or
the ignorance of the medical attendants (of whom, besides
regular physicians, there was a very great number, both men
and women, who had never had any medical education whatever),
who could discover no cause for the malady and therefore no
appropriate remedy, so that not only very few recovered, but
almost every one attacked died by the third day-after the
appearance of the above-noted signs, some sooner and some
later, and mostly without any fever or violent symptoms. And
this pestilence was of so much greater extent that by merely
communicating with the sick the well were attacked, just as
fire spreads to dry or oiled matter which approaches it....
Of the common people, and perhaps in great part of the middle
classes, the situation was far more miserable, as they,
either through hope of escaping the contagion or poverty,
mostly kept to their houses and sickened by thousands a day,
and not being aided or attended in any respect, almost
without exception died. And many there were who ended their
lives in the public streets by day or night, and many who,
dying in their houses, were only discovered by the stench of
their dead bodies; and of these and others that died
everywhere the city was full. These were mainly disposed of
in the same way by their neighbors, moved more by the fear
that the corruption of the dead bodies should harm them than
by any charity for the deceased. They by themselves or with
the aid of bearers, when they could find any, dragged out of
their houses the bodies of those who had died, and laid them
before the doors, where, especially in the morning, whoever
went about the streets could have seen them without
number,--even to that point had matters come that no more was
thought of men dying than we think of goats; more than a
hundred thousand human beings are believed to have been taken
from life within the walls of Florence, which before the
mortal pestilence were not believed to have contained so many
souls. Oh! how many great palaces, how many beautiful houses,
how many noble dwellings, once full of domestics, of
gentlemen and ladies, became empty even to the last servant!
How many historical families, how many immense estates, what
prodigious riches remained without heirs! How many brave men,
how many beautiful women, how many gay youths whom not only
we, but Galen, Hippocrates, or Esculapius would have
pronounced in excellent health, in the morning dined with
their relatives, companions and friends, and the coming night
supped with those who had passed away."
The ten companions, meeting in the church of S. Maria Novella, seven
ladies and three gentlemen, agree to escape this doom, and, repairing to
one of the deserted villas in the neighborhood, to pass the time of
affliction in merry doings and sayings; and with four maids and three
men-servants, move eastward out of the gloomy city. Their first
habitation is clearly indicated as what is known to-day as the Poggio
Gherardi, under Maiano. After the second day they return towards the
city a short distance and establish themselves in what seems a more
commodious abode, and which I consider incontrovertibly identified as
the Villa Pasolini, or Rasponi, and which was in their day the property
of the Memmi family, the famous pupils of Giotto. The site of this villa
overlooks the Valley of the Ladies, which figures in the framework of
the "Novelle," and in which then there was a lake to which Boccaccio
alludes, now filled up by the alluvium of the Affrico, the author's
beloved river, and which runs through the valley and under the villa.
The valley now forms part of the estate of Professor Willard Fiske. As
the entire adventure is imaginary, and the "merry company" had no
existence except in the dreams of Boccaccio, it is useless to seek any
evidence of actual occupation; but the care he put in the description of
the localities and surroundings, distances, etc., shows that he must
have had in his mind, as the framework of the story, these two
localities. The modern tradition ascribing to the Villa Palmieri the
honor of the second habitation has no confirmation of any kind.