Here by the lake Boccaccio's fair brigade
Bathed in the stream and tale for tale repaid."
The hundred tales that were thus told in the shade of those two beautiful gardens may doubtless be traced to an infinite number of sources—Egyptian, Arabian, Persian, and French;[663] but these origins matter little. Boccaccio was almost certainly unaware of them, for the most part at any rate, gathering his material as he did from the tales he had heard, up and down Italy. Certainly to the Contes and Fabliaux of Northern France a third part of the Decameron may be traced, much too to Indian and Persian sources, and a little to the Gesta Romanorum. But one might as well accuse Chaucer or Shakespeare of a want of originality because they took what they wanted where they found it, as arraign Boccaccio for a dependence he was quite unaware of on sources such as these.[664] He has made the tales his own. The Decameron is a work of art, a world in itself, and its effect upon us who read it is the effect of life which includes, for its own good, things moral and immoral. The book has the variety of the world, and is full of an infinity of people, who represent for us the fourteenth century in Italy, in all its fullness, almost.[665] It deals with man as life does, never taking him very seriously, or without a certain indifference, a certain irony and laughter. Yet it is full too of a love of courtesy, of luck, of all sorts of adventures, both gallant and sad. In details, at any rate, it is true and even realistic, crammed with observation of those customs and types which made up the life of the time. It is dramatic, ironic, comic, tragic, philosophic, and even lyrical; full of indulgence for human error, an absolutely human book beyond any work of Dante's or Petrarch's or Froissart's. Even Chaucer is not so complete in his humanism, his love of all sorts and conditions of men. Perfect in organism, in construction, and in freedom, each of these tales is in some sort a living part of life and a criticism of it. Almost any one could be treated by a modern writer in his own way, and remain fundamentally the same and fundamentally true. What immorality there is, might seem owing rather to the French sources of some of the tales than to any invention on the part of Boccaccio, who, as we have seen, later came to deplore it. But we must remember that the book was written to give delight to "amorous" women, and women have always delighted in "immoral literature," and in fact write most of it to-day.[666] Yet only a Puritan, and he foul-minded, could call the Decameron vicious, for it is purified with an immortal laughter and joy.
But it is in its extraordinary variety of contents and character that the Decameron is chiefly remarkable. We are involved in a multitude of adventures, are introduced to innumerable people of every class, and each class shows us its most characteristic qualities. Such is Boccaccio's art, for the stories were not originally, or even as they are, ostensibly studies of character at all, but rather anecdotes, tales of adventure, stories of illicit love, good stories about the friars and the clergy and women, told for amusement because they are full of laughter and are witty, or contain a brief and ready reply with which one has rebuked another or saved himself from danger. But I have given the subjects of the stories of the Decameron elsewhere.[667] Whatever they may be, and they are often of the best, of the most universal, they are not, for the real lover of the Decameron, the true reason why he goes to it always with the certainty of a new joy. The book is full of people, of living people, that is the secret of its immortality. Fra Cipolla, whom I especially love, Calandrino, whom I seem always to have known, poor Monna Tezza, his wife, whom at last he so outrageously gives away, Griselda, Cisti, the Florentine baker, the joyous Madonna Filippa, or Monna Belcolore should be as dear to us as any character in any book not by Shakespeare himself. They live for ever.
And yet it must be confessed that while the book is a mirror of the world, and doubtless as true to the life of its time as any book that was ever written, it lacks a certain idealism, a certain moral sense which is never absent from English work, and which, even from a purely æsthetic point of view, would have given a sort of balance or sense of proportion to the book, which, I confess, in my weaker moments, it has sometimes seemed to me it lacks.
LA VALLE DELLE DONNE
From a print of the XVIII century in Baldelli's "Vita di Gio: Boccaccio."
It is true that Boccaccio deals with life and with life alone. It is true that life then as now made little of sexual morality. But with Boccaccio, as with almost all Latin art, sexual immorality usurps, or seems to us to usurp, a place out of all proportion to its importance in life. One is not always thinking of one's neighbour's wife, even though one should have the misfortune to affect her. Yet it is just there that Boccaccio's comic genius is seen at its best; it is his most frequent theme. And just there too we come upon the unreality of this most real book. His spose are all beautiful young women who live in the arms of beautiful youths; they are nearly all adulteresses; Griselda, indeed, might seem to be the only faithful wife among them. Consider, then, the wife of Pietro di Vincolo,[668] who sells herself fresh and lovely as she is. Consider the pretty Prunella the Neapolitan, who abandons herself voluptuously in her husband's presence to Gianello Galeone.[669] She, like the rest, is not only without regret, but without scruple. They all have this extraordinary astuteness, this readiness of the devil. There is Sismonda, the wife of the rich merchant Arriguccio Berlinghieri.[670] There is Isabella, who loved Leonetto, and Monna Beatrice, who to her adultery adds contempt of her husband, when, victorious at last, trembling with voluptuousness, she kisses and re-kisses "the sweet mouth" of the happy and delighted Lodovico.[671] Nor is she by any means alone, they are all her sisters. Lydia[672] is even more wily, Bartolommea more shameless.[673]
And if the women are thus joyful, lustful, and cunning, the husbands are fools. Yet Boccaccio knows well how to draw the honest peasant, the hard-working artisan, the persistent and adventurous merchant, and a harder thing—the man of good society, such as Federigo degli Alberighi,[674] when he will.
What he cannot do is to compose a tragedy; he has not a sufficiently virile moral sense for it, and so just there he fails with the rest of his Latin brethren. But as a writer of comedy he is one of the greatest masters; and as a master of comedy he was in some degree at the mercy both of it and of his audience. This may excuse him perhaps for his too persistent stories about adulteries. The deceived husband was always a comic figure; he probably always will be. This being granted, we shall not judge the women of Boccaccio's time by his tales, and it might seem that we should discount in the same way his stories about the clergy. Like every other comic master, he naturally finds some of his choicest material among them, who always have been, are now, and ever will be a never-failing source of amusement. But here we must go warily, for Boccaccio's treatment of the clergy might almost be said to exhaust what little moral indignation he was possessed of. "I have spoken the truth about the friars," he tells us with an immense relief in the conclusion to his work, and if he had not time, courage, or opportunity to tell us the truth about the monks, the nuns, and the secular clergy, he has left us, it must be confessed, some very remarkable evidence. His whole attitude of attack is different when he exposes the clergy; moreover, while we have no evidence at all in support of his supposed representation of the married woman as universally adulterous—and it may be questioned whether it was his intention to leave us with any such impression—we have ample evidence from the best possible sources of the frightful wickedness, immorality, and general rottenness of the clergy, both religious and secular, monks, friars, nuns, and priests. We have only to consult the pages of S. Catherine of Siena[675] to find every separate accusation of Boccaccio's confirmed ten times over, with a hundred others added to them which he has failed to bring forward. Nor is it only in the mouth of S. Catherine that Boccaccio is justified. Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, had long ago informed Innocent IV that the Curia was the source of all that vileness which rendered the priesthood a reproach to Christianity. Alexander IV himself described the corruption of the people as proceeding from the clergy. What this had become after the Black Death we know not only from Boccaccio, Petrarch, and S. Catherine, but from every writer of the time. The Church was rotten to the core, she seemed about to sink for ever into the pit of her abominations. Consider, then, what such a beast as the priest of Varlungo must have been in a village; consider the rector of Fiesole. Is Boccaccio's irony too bitter? Is it any wonder that Monna Belcolore answers the wolf of Varlungo, "There is never a one of you priests but would overreach the very devil."