[CHAPTER XVIII]
THE DECAMERON
But we cannot leave him there. For he is not dead, but living; not only where, in the third heaven, he long since has found his own Fiammetta and been comforted, but in this our world also, where
"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
And so for this cause, if for no other, it seemed well to leave our consideration of his greatest work till now; that we might take leave of him, when we must, in turning its ever-living pages.
The greatest story-teller in the world! Does that seem a hard saying? But by what other title shall we greet the author of the Decameron, who is as secure in his immortality and as great in his narrative power as the author of the Arabian Nights, and infinitely greater in his humanism and influence?
The greatest work of the fourteenth century, as the Divine Comedy had been of the thirteenth, the Decameron sums up and reflects its period altogether impersonally, while the Divine Comedy would scarcely hold us at all without the impassioned personality of Dante to inform it everywhere with his profound life, his hatred, his love, his judgment of this world and the next. It is strange that the work which best represents the genius of Boccaccio, his humour and wide tolerance and love of mankind, should in this be so opposite to all his other works in the vulgar tongue, which are inextricably involved with his own personal affairs, his view of things, his love, his contempt, his hatred. Yet you will scarcely find him in all the hundred tales of the Decameron.[654] He speaks to us there once or twice, as we shall see, but always outside the stories, and his whole treatment of the various and infinite plots, incidents, and characters of his great work is as impersonal as life itself.
The Decameron is an absolute work of art, as "detached" as a play by Shakespeare or a portrait by Velasquez. The scheme is formal and immutable, a miracle of design in which almost everything can be expressed. To compare it with the plan of the Arabian Nights is to demonstrate its superiority. There you have a sleepless king, to whom a woman tells a thousand and one stories in order to save her life which this same king would have taken. You have, then, but two protagonists and an anxiety which touches but one of them, the fear of death on the part of the woman, soon forgotten in the excitement of the stories. In the Decameron, on the other hand, you have ten protagonists, three youths and seven ladies, and the horror which is designed to set off the stories is an universal pestilence which has already half depopulated the city of Florence, from which they are fled away.