THE STORY OF GRISELDA. (DEC. X, 10.)
iii. A banquet is prepared for the new bride; Griselda is sent for to serve, but is reinstated in her husband's affections and finds her children. From the picture in the National Gallery by (?) Bernardino Fungai.
The letter which Boccaccio took with him was from the Prior of the Arti: Reverendo Viro D. Francisco Petrarcha, Canonico Padoano, Laureato Poetæ, concivi nostro carissimo, Prior Artium Vexillifer Justitiæ Populi et Communis Florentiæ. It was very flattering, laudatory, and moving. It greeted Petrarch as a citizen of Florence, spoke of his "admirable profession," his "excellent merit in studies," his "utter worthiness of the laurel crown," his "most rare genius which shall be an example to latest posterity," etc. etc. etc. Then it spoke of the offer. "No long time since," it said, "seeing our city deprived of learning and study, we wisely decided that henceforth the arts must flourish and ought to be cultivated among us, and that it would be necessary to introduce studies of every sort into our city so that by their help our Republic, like Rome of old, should be glorious above the other cities of Italy and grow always more happy and more illustrious. Now our fatherland believes that you are the one and only man by whom this result can be attained. The Republic prays you, then, as warmly as it may, to give yourself to these studies and to make them flourish...." So on and so forth, quoting Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero, with allusions to that "immortal work the Africa which...." Boccaccio was to do the rest. "Other things," the letter ends, "many and of infinitely greater consideration, you will hear from Giovanni Boccaccio, our citizen, who is sent to you by special commission...."[415]
With this letter in his pocket Boccaccio made his way to Padua, where, as we know, he was delighted to come, nor was Petrarch less happy to see him. And when he returned he bore Petrarch's answer to the Republic: "Boccaccio, the bearer of your letter and of your commands, will tell you how I desire to obey you and what are my projects." No doubt while Boccaccio was with him, seeing his sincerity, Petrarch felt half inclined to accept; but he was at all times infirm of purpose. "If I break my word that I have given to my friends," he writes,[416] "it is because of the variation of the human spirit, from which none is exempt except the perfect man. Uniformity is the mother of boredom, that one can only avoid by changing one's place." However that may be, when later in the year he left Padua, it was to return not to Florence, but to France.
If we know nothing else of this embassy, we know, at least, that this sojourn in Padua passed pleasantly for Boccaccio. In a letter written to Petrarch from Ravenna, in July, 1353,[417] he reminds his "best master" of his visit. "I think," he writes, "that you have not forgotten how, when less than three years ago I came to you in Padua the ambassador of our Senate, my commission fulfilled, I remained with you for some days, and how that those days were all passed in the same way: you gave yourself to sacred studies, and I, desiring your compositions, copied them. When the day waned to sunset we left work and went into your garden, already filled by spring with flowers and leaves.... Now sitting, now talking, we passed what remained of the day in placid and delightful idleness, even till night."
Some of that talk was doubtless given to Letters, but some too fell, as it could not but do, on politics. For that letter, so charming in the scene it brings before us of that garden at nightfall, goes on to speak in a transparent allegory of the affairs of Italy and of Petrarch's sudden change of plans, for whereas in 1351 he had promised to enter the service of Florence and had cursed the Visconti, when he returned to Italy in 1353, it was with these very Visconti he had taken shameful service—with the enemies of "his own country" Florence, whom he had spurned, and who in return had repealed the repeal of his banishment and refrained from returning to him the money value of his father's possessions. Is it in revenge for this, Boccaccio asks, that he has taken service with the enemy? He reproaches him in the subtlest and gentlest way, yet with an eager patriotism that does him the greatest honour, representing him to himself even as a third person, one Sylvanus, who "had been of their company" in Padua. Yet Boccaccio does not spare him, and though he loved and revered him beyond any other living man, he bravely tells him his mind and points out his treachery, when his country is at stake.
That Sylvanus, it seems—Petrarch himself really—had lamented bitterly enough the unhappy state of Italy, neglected by the Emperors and the Popes, and exposed to the brutality and tyranny of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti of Milan. More and more he cursed the tyrants, and especially the Visconti, and "how eagerly you agreed with him!... But now," the letter continues,[418] "I have heard that this Sylvanus is about to enter the service of those very Visconti, who even now menace his country. I would not have believed it had not I had a letter from him in which he tells me it is so himself. Who would ever have suspected him of so much mobility of character, or as likely to forswear his own faith out of greediness? But he has done so perhaps to avenge himself on his fellow-citizens who have retaken the property of his father, which they had once returned to him. But what man of honour, even when he has received a wrong from his country, would unite himself with her enemies? How much has Sylvanus mystified and compromised, by these acts, all his admirers and friends...."
Just here we come upon something noble and firm in the character of Boccaccio, something of the "nationalism" too which was to be the great force of the future, to which Petrarch was less clairvoyant and which Dante had never perceived at all. The Empire was dead; in less than a hundred years men were to protest they did not understand what it meant. The Papacy then too seemed almost as helpless as it is to-day. Internationalism—the latest cry of the modern decadent or dreamer—was already a mere ghost frightened and gibbering in the dawn, and the future lay in the growth of nationalities, in the variety and freedom of the world, perhaps in the federation of Italy. Were these the thoughts that occupied the two pioneers of the modern world on those spring nights in that garden at Padua?