"I hope also here and now to prevent you in one thing, so as not to repent myself later for having passed it by in silence. You say that the translation will be word for word. Hear how on this point S. Jerome expresses himself in the preface to the book De Temporibus of Eusebius of Cæsarea that he translated into Latin. It pleases me to send you the very words of one so learned in both tongues and in many others, and especially in the art of translation. 'Let him who says that in translation one does not lose the grace of the original try to translate Homer literally into Latin, and into any tongue which he has, and he will see how ridiculous is the order of the words and how the most eloquent of poets is made tostammer like a child.' I tell you this for your advice whilst there is yet time, so that such a great work may not be useless.
"For myself I desire only that the thing be well done.... In truth the portion I have which the same Leon translated for me into Latin prose—the beginning of Homer—has given me a foretaste of the complete work.... It contains indeed a secret charm.... Go on then with the aid of Heaven; give us back Homer who was lost to us....
"In asking me at the same time for the volume of Plato that I have with me and that escaped the fire in my house across the Alps, you give me a proof of your ardour, and I will hold this book at your disposition when you want it. I will second with all my power such noble enterprises. But take care that the union of these two great Princes of Greece be not unseemly, and that the weight of these two geniuses does not crush the shoulders of mortals.... And remember that the one wrote many centuries before the other. Good-bye. Milan, 18 August (1360)."[463]
From that letter we may gather how eagerly Boccaccio had turned to this new labour. Was it in order to escape from himself? Certainly it might seem that in his new enthusiasm he found for a time, at any rate, a certain consolation; but the crisis was not long delayed. In those long months while the wretched Pilatus was with him, however, he was able for a time to ward off the danger; and realising this, the comedy of that friendship is almost pathetic.
We seem to see him eagerly drinking in the words that fell from the surly Calabrian, pressing him with questions, taking note of all and trying to understand everything—even what his master himself could not understand. As for the master, flattered and puffed up by the confidence that Boccaccio seems to have felt in him, he no doubt replied to all his questionings in the tone of a man who knew perfectly what he was talking about, and had nothing to fear or to hide. Sometimes, no doubt, the adventurer showed itself. Weary and bored by the incessant work, his sullen humour exasperated by the sedentary life, Pilatus would demand his liberty. Then Boccaccio would have to arm himself with all his patience, and by sweetness and gentleness and good-humour would at last persuade the wretched man to remain a little longer with him.
Suddenly in the midst of this difficult work with Pilatus his trouble descended upon him, with a supernatural force as he thought. He received a message from a dying saint—a message that warned him of his approaching end and certain damnation unless he should repent. When exactly this message reached him we do not know. It may well have been in the end of 1361, but it was more probably in the first months of 1362. He was in any case in no fit state to meet the blow.
In those days when political crises followed hard on one another, and the very aspect of a city might change in the course of a few years, Boccaccio's youth must then have seemed infinitely far away. His Corbaccio had been written "to open the eyes of the young" to the horror of woman. While in very many ways he is the pioneer of the Renaissance, in his heart there lingered yet something, if only a shadow, of the fear of joy. All his joys had been adventures on which he scarcely dared to enter, and while he was never a puritan, as one sometimes thinks Petrarch may have been, he was so perfectly of his own time as to "repent him of his past life." For a nature like that of Boccaccio was capable only of enthusiasm. He had loved Fiammetta to distraction, and those who only see there a lust of the flesh have never understood Boccaccio. His other loves were what you will, what they always are and must be; but when Fiammetta died, the very centre of his world was shaken.[464] He could not follow her through Hell and Purgatory into the meadows of Paradise as Dante had followed Beatrice: he was of the modern world. For Dante, earth, heaven, purgatory, and hell were but chambers in the universe of God. For Boccaccio there remained just the world.
Having the religious sense, he accused himself of sin as St. Paul had done, as St. John of the Cross was to do, with an astonishing eccentricity, an exaggeration which lost sight of the truth, in a profound self-humiliation. Of such is the lust of the spirit. He too had found it difficult "to keep in the right way amid the temptations of the world." And then, suddenly it seems, on the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him this impassioned consolation, and his "spirit was troubled," as the wise and steadfast eyes of Petrarch had seen.
It was in the midst of this disease, to escape from which, as we may think, he had so eagerly thrown himself into the translation of Homer with Pilatus, that a certain Gioacchino Ciani sought him out to warn him, as he intended to warn Petrarch, of the nearness of death. In doing this the monk, for he was a Carthusian, was but obeying the dying commands of the Beato Pietro Petroni,[465] a Sienese who had seen on his death-bed "the present, the past, and the future." Already drawn towards a new life—a life which under the direction of the Church he was told would be without the consolations of literature—at the sudden intervention, as it seemed, of Heaven, Boccaccio did the wisest thing of his whole life—he asked for the advice of Petrarch.
The letter which Petrarch wrote him takes its rank among the noblest of his writings, and is indeed one of the most beautiful letters ever written.