Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

by Edward Hutton

He loves women then, but he is not deluded by them—or rather, as we should say, because he loves them he does not therefore respect them also. He considers them as fair or unfair, or as he himself has it,[436] "fair and fit for amorous dalliance" or "spotted lizards." He does not believe in them or their virtue—their sexual virtue that is—nor does he value it very highly.[437] It is a thing for priests and nuns, and even there rare enough. But in the world——!

In one place in the Decameron[438] he speaks of the "insensate folly of those who delude themselves ... with the vain imagination that, while they go about the world, taking their pleasure now of this, now of the other woman, their wives, left at home, suffer not their hearts to stray from their girdles, as if we who are born of them and live among them could be ignorant of the bent of their desires." Moreover, he considers that "a woman who indulges herself in the intimate use with a man commits but a sin of nature; but if she rob him or slay him or drive him into exile, her sin proceeds from depravity of spirit." Thus, as the story shows, to deny him the satisfaction of his desire would be a greater sin than to accord it to him.

Again, in another tale,[439] we see his insistence upon what he considers—and not certainly without reason—as the reality of things, to deny which would be not merely useless, but even ridiculous. Certain "very great merchants of Italy, met in Paris," are "discussing their wives at home...."[440] "I cannot answer for my wife," says one, "but I own that whenever a girl that is to my mind comes in my way, I give the go-by to the love I bear my wife and take my pleasure of the new-comer to the best of my power." "And so do I," said another, "because I know that whether I suspect her or no my wife tries her fortune, and so it is 'do as you are done by.'" All agree save a Genoese, who stakes everything on his wife's virtue. He proves right, his wife is virtuous; but the whole company is incredulous, and when one of them tells him he is talking nonsense, and that the general opinion of women's virtue "is only what common sense dictates," he carries the whole company with him. He admits that "doubtless few [women] would be found to indulge in casual amours if every time they did so a horn grew out on the brow to attest the fact; but not only does no horn make its appearance, but not so much as a trace or vestige of a horn, so only they be prudent; and the shame and dishonour consist only in the discovery; wherefore if they can do it secretly they do it, or are fools to refrain. Hold it for certain that she alone is chaste who either had never a suit made to her, or suing herself was repulsed. And albeit I know that for reasons true and founded in nature this must needs be, yet I should not speak so positively thereof as I do had I not many a time with many a woman verified it by experience."

It is not that in the Decameron virtue is not often rewarded in the orthodox way, but that such cases are not to the point; they are as unreal, as merely poetical or fictional as they are to-day. But where real life is dealt with—and in no other book of the fourteenth century is there so much reality—the evidence is what we have seen. It was not that woman as we see her there is basely vicious; but that she is altogether without ideality, light-hearted and complacent, easily yielding to caprice, to the allure of pleasure, to the first solicitation that comes to her in a propitious hour, and this rather because of a certain gaminerie, a lightness, an incorrigible naughtiness, than because of a real depravity. Like all Italians—the great exceptions only prove the rule—she is without a fundamental moral sense. She sins lightly, easily, without regret, dazzled by life, by the pleasure of life.

Such, then, was the attitude of Boccaccio towards woman at the time when he was writing the Decameron, that is to say, from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year. And we may well ask whether he had always thought as he did then, and if not, what had been the cause of his disillusion and what was to be the result of it?

It is difficult to answer the first of these questions with any certainty. And yet it might seem incredible that in his youth he had already emancipated himself from an illusion—if illusion it be—that seems proper to it in all ages, and that was so universal in the Middle Age as to inform the greater part of its secular literature—the illusion that woman was something to be worshipped, something almost sacred, to be approached in great humility, with gentleness and reverence.

In reading the early romances of Boccaccio, it must be confessed that while his attitude towards woman is not so assured, nor so masterful in its realism and humour as in the Decameron, it is nevertheless much the same in character. In the Filocolo, as in the Ameto, he thinks of her always as a prize, as something to be hunted or cajoled, yes, like a barbarian; nor are his early works less sensual than the Decameron. The physical reality is for him—and not only in regard to woman—so much more than the spiritual.

Yet in spite of the general character of his work, we observe from time to time, and more especially in the Rime, a certain idealism, still eagerly physical, if you will, but none the less ideal on that account, which centres in Fiammetta and his thoughts concerning her.

We have already traced that story from its beginning to its end, we shall but return to it here to repeat that whatever we may come to think of it, this at least is assured and certain: that it was a genuine and sincere passion in which Boccaccio's whole being was involved—inextricably involved—soul as well as body. To a nature such as Boccaccio's, so lively and full of energy, that awakening, so far as his physical nature was concerned, came not without preparation—he had had other loves before he saw Fiammetta—but spiritually it seems to have been in the nature of an unexpected revelation. It made him a poet, as we have seen, and one cannot read the Rime without being convinced that something more was involved in his love for his lady than the body.

It would seem, then, that we have here under our hands a history, logical and inevitable, developed by the character of the man in the circumstances which befell him. Like all the men of his day, he was in love with love. Without the profound spiritual energy of Dante, but with a physical vitality greater far than Petrarch's, Boccaccio was inevitably in youth at the mercy of the lust of the eye, following woman because she was beautiful and because he desired her with all the fresh energy of his nature. He met Fiammetta and loved her. And then, though his desire abated no jot, there was added to it a certain idealism in which to some extent, sometimes greater, sometimes less, the spirit was involved to his joy and his sorrow. So, when Fiammetta forsook him, she wounded him not only in his pride, but in his soul, a wound that might never altogether be healed. That at least might seem certain, for had he loved her only as he had loved the others, to forget her would have been easy; but he could not forget.