Even without their setting his tales would have been something memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do not make good books. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are very short and make a collection of anecdotes. The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the Canterbury Tales are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems—the morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:—'Help me,' as Chaucer says:—
'Help me that am the sorwful instrument
That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'
As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:—
'Maults gone down, maults gone down
From an old angel to a French crown.
And every drunkard in this town
Is very glad that maults gone down.'
When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:—'With worse hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple piety:—'God grant us the like.' The Decameron owes much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death.