urge you to compose what I dissuade you from cancelling. After this
avowal, I do declare to you, Giovanni, that in my opinion, the very
idlest of your tales will do the world as much good as evil; not
reckoning the pleasure of reading, nor the exercise and recreation of
the mind, which in themselves are good. What I reprove you for, is the
indecorous and uncleanly; and these, I trust, you will abolish. Even
these, however, may repel from vice the ingenuous and graceful spirit,
and can never lead any such toward them. Never have you taken an
inhuman pleasure in blunting and fusing the affections at the furnace
of the passions; never, in hardening by sour sagacity and ungenial
strictures, that delicacy which is more productive of innocence and
happiness, more estranged from every track and tendency of their
opposites, than what in cold, crude systems hath holden the place and
dignity of the highest virtue. May you live, O my friend, in the
enjoyment of health, to substitute the facetious for the licentious,
the simple for the extravagant, the true and characteristic for the
indefinite and diffuse.
* * * * *
_Boccaccio._ And after all this, can you bear to think what I am?
_Petrarca._ Complacently and joyfully; venturing, nevertheless, to
offer you a friend's advice.
Enter into the mind and heart of your own creatures: think of them
long, entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of
critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of
an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become
smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended
the most spider-webs; and the quarry out of which palaces are erected
is the nursery of nettle and bramble.
_Boccaccio._ It is better to keep always in view such writers as
Cicero, than to run after those idlers who throw stones that can never
reach us.
_Petrarca._ If you copied him to perfection, and on no occasion lost
sight of him, you would be an indifferent, not to say a bad writer.
_Boccaccio._ I begin to think you are in the right. Well then,
retrenching some of my licentious tales, I must endeavour to fill up
the vacancy with some serious and some pathetic.
_Petrarca._ I am heartily glad to hear of this decision; for,
admirable as you are in the jocose, you descend from your natural
position when you come to the convivial and the festive. You were
placed among the Affections, to move and master them, and gifted with
the rod that sweetens the fount of tears. My nature leads me also to
the pathetic; in which, however, an imbecile writer may obtain
celebrity. Even the hard-hearted are fond of such reading, when they
are fond of any; and nothing is easier in the world than to find and
accumulate its sufferings. Yet this very profusion and luxuriance of
misery is the reason why few have excelled in describing it. The eye
wanders over the mass without noticing the peculiarities. To mark them
distinctly is the work of genius; a work so rarely performed, that, if
time and space may be compared, specimens of it stand at wider
distances than the trophies of Sesostris. Here we return again to the
_Inferno_ of Dante, who overcame the difficulty. In this vast desert
are its greater and its less oasis; Ugolino and Francesca di Rimini.
The peopled region is peopled chiefly with monsters and moschitoes:
the rest for the most part is sand and suffocation.
_Boccaccio._ Ah! had Dante remained through life the pure solitary
lover of Bice, his soul had been gentler, tranquiller, and more
generous. He scarcely hath described half the curses he went through,
nor the roads he took on the journey: theology, politics, and that
barbican of the _Inferno_, marriage, surrounded with its
Selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte.
Admirable is indeed the description of Ugolino, to whoever can endure
the sight of an old soldier gnawing at the scalp of an old archbishop.
_Petrarca._ The thirty lines from
Ed io sentii,
are unequalled by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions
of poetry.
_Boccaccio._ Give me rather the six on Francesca: for if in the former
I find the simple, vigorous, clear narration, I find also what I would
not wish, the features of Ugolino reflected full in Dante. The two
characters are similar in themselves; hard, cruel, inflexible,
malignant, but, whenever moved, moved powerfully. In Francesca, with
the faculty of divine spirits, he leaves his own nature (not indeed
the exact representative of theirs) and converts all his strength into
tenderness. The great poet, like the original man of the Platonists,
is double, possessing the further advantage of being able to drop one
half at his option, and to resume it. Some of the tenderest on paper
have no sympathies beyond; and some of the austerest in their
intercourse with their fellow-creatures have deluged the world with
tears. It is not from the rose that the bee gathers her honey, but
often from the most acrid and the most bitter leaves and petals:
Quando leggemmo il disiato viso
Esser baciato di cotanto amante,
Questi, chi mai da me non sia diviso!
La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante ...
_Galeotto_ fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse ...
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the
tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight;
and, instead of naming Paolo, which indeed she never has done from the
beginning, she now designates him as
Questi chi mai da me non sia diviso!
Are we not impelled to join in her prayer, wishing them happier in
their union?
_Petrarca._ If there be no sin in it.
_Boccaccio._ Ay, and even if there be ... God help us!
What a sweet aspiration in each cesura of the verse! three love-sighs
fixed and incorporate! Then, when she hath said
La bocca mi baciò, tutto tremante,
she stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for
the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says: '_Galeotto_ is the
name of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she has
drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle
beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her.
'_Galeotto_ is the name of the book.'
'What matters that?'
'And of the writer.'
'Or that either?'
At last she disarms him: but how?
'_That_ day we read no more.'
Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception,
exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who,
on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a
deplorable want of it.
_Petrarca._ Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at
discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole
section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,
And he who fell as a dead body falls,
would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What
execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Siena, Pisa, Genoa! what hatred
against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal
and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the
_Inferno_ as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.
Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and
certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged
forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling
it, if this had been his intention. Much however as I admire his
vigour and severity of style in the description of Ugolino, I
acknowledge with you that I do not discover so much imagination, so
much creative power, as in the Francesca. I find indeed a minute
detail of probable events: but this is not all I want in a poet: it is
not even all I want most in a scene of horror. Tribunals of justice,
dens of murderers, wards of hospitals, schools of anatomy, will afford
us nearly the same sensations, if we hear them from an accurate
observer, a clear reporter, a skilful surgeon, or an attentive nurse.
There is nothing of sublimity in the horrific of Dante, which there
always is in Aeschylus and Homer. If you, Giovanni, had described so
nakedly the reception of Guiscardo's heart by Gismonda, or Lorenzo's
head by Lisabetta, we could hardly have endured it.
_Boccaccio._ Prithee, dear Francesco, do not place me over Dante: I
stagger at the idea of approaching him.
_Petrarca._ Never think I am placing you blindly or indiscriminately.
I have faults to find with you, and even here. Lisabetta should by no
means have been represented cutting off the head of her lover, '_as
well as she could_,' with a clasp-knife. This is shocking and
improbable. She might have found it already cut off by her brothers,
in order to bury the corpse more commodiously and expeditiously. Nor
indeed is it likely that she should have entrusted it to her
waiting-maid, who carried home in her bosom a treasure so dear to her,
and found so unexpectedly and so lately.
_Boccaccio._ That is true: I will correct the oversight. Why do we
never hear of our faults until everybody knows them, and until they
stand in record against us?
_Petrarca._ Because our ears are closed to truth and friendship for
some time after the triumphal course of composition. We are too
sensitive for the gentlest touch; and when we really have the most
infirmity, we are angry to be told that we have any.
_Boccaccio._ Ah, Francesco! thou art poet from scalp to heel: but what
other would open his breast as thou hast done! They show
ostentatiously far worse weaknesses; but the most honest of the tribe
would forswear himself on this. Again, I acknowledge it, you have
reason to complain of Lisabetta and Gismonda.
* * * * *
_Petrarca._ In my delight to listen to you after so long an absence, I
have been too unwary; and you have been speaking too much for one
infirm. Greatly am I to blame, not to have moderated my pleasure and
your vivacity. You must rest now: to-morrow we will renew our
conversation.
_Boccaccio._ God bless thee, Francesco! I shall be talking with thee
all night in my slumbers. Never have I seen thee with such pleasure as
to-day, excepting when I was deemed worthy by our fellow-citizens of
bearing to thee, and of placing within this dear hand of thine, the
sentence of recall from banishment, and when my tears streamed over
the ordinance as I read it, whereby thy paternal lands were redeemed
from the public treasury.
Again God bless thee! Those tears were not quite exhausted: take the
last of them.
FOOTNOTE:
[14] It may puzzle an Englishman to read the lines beginning with
'Modicum', so as to give the metre. The secret is, to draw out _et_
into a disyllable, et-te, as the Italians do, who pronounce Latin
verse, if possible, worse than we, adding a syllable to such as end
with a consonant.
THIRD DAY'S INTERVIEW
It being now the Lord's day, Messer Francesco thought it meet that he
should rise early in the morning and bestir himself, to hear mass in
the parish church at Certaldo. Whereupon he went on tiptoe, if so
weighty a man could indeed go in such a fashion, and lifted softly the
latch of Ser Giovanni's chamber door, that he might salute him ere he
departed, and occasion no wonder at the step he was about to take. He
found Ser Giovanni fast asleep, with the missal wide open across his
nose, and a pleasant smile on his genial, joyous mouth. Ser Francesco
leaned over the couch, closed his hands together, and looking with
even more than his usual benignity, said in a low voice:
'God bless thee, gentle soul! the mother of purity and innocence
protect thee!'
He then went into the kitchen, where he found the girl Assunta, and
mentioned his resolution. She informed him that the horse had eaten
his two beans,[15] and was as strong as a lion and as ready as a
lover. Ser Francesco patted her on the cheek, and called her
_semplicetta_! She was overjoyed at this honour from so great a man,
the bosom friend of her good master, whom she had always thought the
greatest man in the world, not excepting Monsignore, until he told her
he was only a dog confronted with Ser Francesco. She tripped alertly
across the paved court into the stable, and took down the saddle and
bridle from the farther end of the rack. But Ser Francesco, with his
natural politeness, would not allow her to equip his palfrey.
'This is not the work for maidens,' said he; 'return to the house,
good girl!'
She lingered a moment, then went away; but, mistrusting the dexterity
of Ser Francesco, she stopped and turned back again, and peeped
through the half-closed door, and heard sundry sobs and wheezes round
about the girth. Ser Francesco's wind ill seconded his intention; and,
although he had thrown the saddle valiantly and stoutly in its
station, yet the girths brought him into extremity. She entered again,
and dissembling the reason, asked him whether he would not take a
small beaker of the sweet white wine before he set out, and offered to
girdle the horse while his Reverence bitted and bridled him. Before
any answer could be returned, she had begun. And having now
satisfactorily executed her undertaking, she felt irrepressible
delight and glee at being able to do what Ser Francesco had failed in.
He was scarcely more successful with his allotment of the labour;
found unlooked-for intricacies and complications in the machinery,
wondered that human wit could not simplify it, and declared that the
animal had never exhibited such restiveness before. In fact, he never
had experienced the same grooming. At this conjuncture, a green cap
made its appearance, bound with straw-coloured ribbon, and surmounted
with two bushy sprigs of hawthorn, of which the globular buds were
swelling, and some bursting, but fewer yet open. It was young
Simplizio Nardi, who sometimes came on the Sunday morning to sweep the
courtyard for Assunta.
'Oh! this time you are come just when you were wanted,' said the girl.
'Bridle, directly, Ser Francesco's horse, and then go away about your
business.'
The youth blushed, and kissed Ser Francesco's hand, begging his
permission. It was soon done. He then held the stirrup; and Ser
Francesco, with scarcely three efforts, was seated and erect on the
saddle. The horse, however, had somewhat more inclination for the
stable than for the expedition; and, as Assunta was handing to the
rider his long ebony staff, bearing an ivory caduceus, the quadruped
turned suddenly round. Simplizio called him _bestiaccia_! and then,
softening it, _poco garbato_! and proposed to Ser Francesco that he
should leave the bastone behind, and take the crab-switch he presented
to him, giving at the same time a sample of its efficacy, which
covered the long grizzle hair of the worthy quadruped with a profusion
of pink blossoms, like embroidery. The offer was declined; but Assunta
told Simplizio to carry it himself, and to walk by the side of Ser
Canonico quite up to the church porch, having seen what a sad,
dangerous beast his reverence had under him.
With perfect good will, partly in the pride of obedience to Assunta,
and partly to enjoy the renown of accompanying a canon of Holy Church,
Simplizio did as she enjoined.
And now the sound of village bells, in many hamlets and convents and
churches out of sight, was indistinctly heard, and lost again; and at
last the five of Certaldo seemed to crow over the faintness of them
all. The freshness of the morning was enough of itself to excite the
spirits of youth; a portion of which never fails to descend on years
that are far removed from it, if the mind has partaken in innocent
mirth while it was its season and its duty to enjoy it. Parties of
young and old passed the canonico and his attendant with mute respect,
bowing and bare-headed; for that ebony staff threw its spell over the
tongue, which the frank and hearty salutation of the bearer was
inadequate to break. Simplizio, once or twice, attempted to call back
an intimate of the same age with himself; but the utmost he could
obtain was a _riveritissimo_! and a genuflexion to the rider. It is
reported that a heart-burning rose up from it in the breast of a
cousin, some days after, too distinctly apparent in the long-drawn
appellation of _Gnor_[16] Simplizio.
Ser Francesco moved gradually forward, his steed picking his way along
the lane, and looking fixedly on the stones with all the sobriety of a
mineralogist. He himself was well satisfied with the pace, and told
Simplizio to be sparing of the switch, unless in case of a hornet or a
gadfly. Simplizio smiled, toward the hedge, and wondered at the
condescension of so great a theologian and astrologer, in joking with
him about the gadflies and hornets in the beginning of April. 'Ah!
there are men in the world who can make wit out of anything!' said he
to himself.
As they approached the walls of the town, the whole country was
pervaded by a stirring and diversified air of gladness. Laughter and
songs and flutes and viols, inviting voices and complying responses,
mingled with merry bells and with processional hymns, along the
woodland paths and along the yellow meadows. It was really the _Lord's
Day_, for He made His creatures happy in it, and their hearts were
thankful. Even the cruel had ceased from cruelty; and the rich man
alone exacted from the animal his daily labour. Ser Francesco made
this remark, and told his youthful guide that he had never been before
where he could not walk to church on a Sunday; and that nothing should
persuade him to urge the speed of his beast, on the seventh day,
beyond his natural and willing foot's-pace. He reached the gates of
Certaldo more than half an hour before the time of service, and he
found laurels suspended over them, and being suspended; and many
pleasant and beautiful faces were protruded between the ranks of
gentry and clergy who awaited him. Little did he expect such an
attendance; but Fra Biagio of San Vivaldo, who himself had offered no
obsequiousness or respect, had scattered the secret of his visit
throughout the whole country. A young poet, the most celebrated in the
town, approached the canonico with a long scroll of verses, which fell
below the knee, beginning:
How shall we welcome our illustrious guest?
To which Ser Francesco immediately replied: 'Take your favourite
maiden, lead the dance with her, and bid all your friends follow; you
have a good half-hour for it.'
Universal applauses succeeded, the music struck up, couples were
instantly formed. The gentry on this occasion led out the
cittadinanza, as they usually do in the villeggiatura, rarely in the
carnival, and never at other times. The elder of the priests stood
round in their sacred vestments, and looked with cordiality and
approbation on the youths, whose hands and arms could indeed do much,
and did it, but whose active eyes could rarely move upward the
modester of their partners.
While the elder of the clergy were thus gathering the fruits of their
liberal cares and paternal exhortations, some of the younger looked on
with a tenderer sentiment, not unmingled with regret. Suddenly the
bells ceased; the figure of the dance was broken; all hastened into
the church; and many hands that joined on the green, met together at
the font, and touched the brow reciprocally with its lustral waters,
in soul-devotion.
After the service, and after a sermon a good church-hour in length to
gratify him, enriched with compliments from all authors, Christian and
Pagan, informing him at the conclusion that, although he had been
crowned in the Capitol, he must die, being born mortal, Ser Francesco
rode homeward. The sermon seemed to have sunk deeply into him, and
even into the horse under him, for both of them nodded, both snorted,
and one stumbled. Simplizio was twice fain to cry:
'Ser Canonico! Riverenza! in this country if we sleep before dinner it
does us harm. There are stones in the road, Ser Canonico, loose as
eggs in a nest, and pretty nigh as thick together, huge as mountains.'
'Good lad!' said Ser Francesco, rubbing his eyes, 'toss the biggest of
them out of the way, and never mind the rest.'
The horse, although he walked, shuffled almost into an amble as he
approached the stable, and his master looked up at it with nearly the
same contentment. Assunta had been ordered to wait for his return, and
cried:
'O Ser Francesco! you are looking at our long apricot, that runs the
whole length of the stable and barn, covered with blossoms as the old
white hen is with feathers. You must come in the summer, and eat this
fine fruit with Signor Padrone. You cannot think how ruddy and golden
and sweet and mellow it is. There are peaches in all the fields, and
plums, and pears, and apples, but there is not another apricot for
miles and miles. Ser Giovanni brought the stone from Naples before I
was born: a lady gave it to him when she had eaten only half the fruit
off it: but perhaps you may have seen her, for you have ridden as far
as Rome, or beyond. Padrone looks often at the fruit, and eats it
willingly; and I have seen him turn over the stones in his plate, and
choose one out from the rest, and put it into his pocket, but never
plant it.'
'Where is the youth?' inquired Ser Francesco.
'Gone away,' answered the maiden.
'I wanted to thank him,' said the Canonico.
'May I tell him so?' asked she.
'And give him ...' continued he, holding a piece of silver.
'I will give him something of my own, if he goes on and behaves well,'
said she; 'but Signor Padrone would drive him away for ever, I am
sure, if he were tempted in an evil hour to accept a quattrino for any
service he could render the friends of the house.'
Ser Francesco was delighted with the graceful animation of this
ingenuous girl, and asked her, with a little curiosity, how she could
afford to make him a present.
'I do not intend to make him a present,' she replied: 'but it is
better he should be rewarded by me,' she blushed and hesitated, 'or by
Signor Padrone,' she added, 'than by your reverence. He has not done
half his duty yet; not half. I will teach him: he is quite a child;
four months younger than me.'
Ser Francesco went into the house, saying to himself at the doorway:
'Truth, innocence, and gentle manners have not yet left the earth.
There are sermons that never make the ears weary. I have heard but few
of them, and come from church for this.'
Whether Simplizio had obeyed some private signal from Assunta, or
whether his own delicacy had prompted him to disappear, he was now
again in the stable, and the manger was replenished with hay. A bucket
was soon after heard ascending from the well; and then two words:
'Thanks, Simplizio.'
When Petrarca entered the chamber, he found Boccaccio with his
breviary in his hand, not looking into it indeed, but repeating a
thanksgiving in an audible and impassioned tone of voice. Seeing Ser
Francesco, he laid the book down beside him, and welcomed him.
'I hope you have an appetite after your ride,' said he, 'for you have
sent home a good dinner before you.'
Ser Francesco did not comprehend him, and expressed it not in words
but in looks.
'I am afraid you will dine sadly late to-day: noon has struck this
half-hour, and you must wait another, I doubt. However, by good luck,
I had a couple of citrons in the house, intended to assuage my thirst
if the fever had continued. This being over, by God's mercy, I will
try (please God!) whether we two greyhounds cannot be a match for a
leveret.'
'How is this?' said Ser Francesco.