Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

by Edward Hutton

"Your letter," he says—"Your letter, my brother, has filled me with an extraordinary trouble. In reading it I became the prey of a great astonishment, and also of a great chagrin: after reading it both the one and the other have disappeared. How could I read without weeping the story of your tears and of your approaching death, being totally ignorant of the facts and only paying attention to the words? But at last when I had turned and fixed my thoughts on the thing itself, the state of my soul changed altogether, and both astonishment and chagrin fled away....

"You tell me that this holy man had a vision of our Lord, and so was able to discern all truth—a great sight for mortal eyes to see. Great indeed, I agree with you, if genuine; but how often have we not known this tale of a vision made a cloak for an imposture? And having visited you, this messenger proposed, I understand, to go to Naples, thence to Gaul and Britain, and so to me. Well, when he comes I will examine him closely; his looks, his demeanour, his behaviour under questioning, and so forth, shall help me to judge of his truthfulness. And the holy man on his death-bed saw us two and a few others to whom he had a secret message, which he charged this visitor of yours to give us; so, if I understand you rightly, runs the story. Well, the message to you is twofold: you have not long to live, and you must give up poetry. Hence your trouble, which I made my own while reading your letter, but which I put away from me on thinking it over, as you will do also; for if you will only give heed to me, or rather to your own natural good sense, you will see that you have been distressing yourself about a thing that should have pleased you. Now if this message is really from the Lord, it must be pure truth. But is it from the Lord? Or has its real author used the Lord's name to give weight to his own saying? I grant you the frequency of death-bed prophecies; the histories of Greece and Rome are full of instances; but even though we allow that these old stories and your monitor's present tale are all true, still what is there to distress you so terribly? What is there new in all this? You knew without his telling you that you could not have a very long space of life before you. And is not our life here labour and sorrow, and is it not its chief merit that it is the road to a better?... Ah! but you have come to old age, says your monitor. Death cannot be far off. Look to your soul. Well, I grant you that scholarship may be an unreasonable and even bitter pursuit for the old, if they take it up then for the first time; but if you and your scholarship have grown old together, 'tis the pleasantest of comforts. Forsake the Muses, says he: many things that may grace a lad are a disgrace to an old man; wit and the senses fail you. Nay, I answer, when he bids you pluck sin from your heart, he speaks well and prudently. But why forsake learning, in which you are no novice but an expert, able to discern what to choose and what to refuse?... All history is full of examples of good men who have loved learning, and though many unlettered men have attained to holiness, no man was ever debarred from holiness by letters.... But if in spite of all this you persist in your intention, and if you must needs throw away not only your learning, but the poor instruments of it, then I thank you for giving me the refusal of your books. I will buy your library, if it must be sold, for I would not that the books of so great a man should be dispersed abroad and hawked about by unworthy hands. I will buy it and unite it with my own; then some day this mood of yours will pass, some day you will come back to your old devotion. Then you shall make your home with me, you will find your books side by side with mine, which are equally yours. Thenceforth we shall share a common life and a common library, and when the survivor of us is dead, the books shall go to some place where they will be kept together and dutifully tended, in perpetual memory of us who owned them."[466]

That noble letter, so sane in its piety, in some sort cured Boccaccio. We hear no more of the fanatic monk, and the books were never bought, for they were never sold. Petrarch, however, did not forget his friend. He caused the office of Apostolic Secretary to be offered him, and that Boccaccio had the strength and independence to refuse the sinecure assures us of his restored sanity.

But we may well ask ourselves what had brought Boccaccio to such a pass that he was at the mercy of such infernal humbugs and liars as the Blessed Pietro and his rascal friend. That he was in a wretched state of mind and soul we know, and the causes we know too in part, but they by no means account for the fact that the first enemy of monks and friars and all their blackguardism should have fallen so easily into their hands. Was Boccaccio superstitious? That he was less superstitious, less credulous, than the men of his time generally is certain; that he was content to believe what Petrarch attacked and laughed at we shall presently see; but that he can be properly accused of superstition remains doubtful. Certainly he believed in dreams;[467] he believed in astrology;[468] he believed that a strabism or squint was an indication of an evil soul;[469] he believed in visible devils;[470] he believed that Æneas truly descended into Hades and that Virgil was a magician.[471] He may well have believed all such things and have been no worse off than many a Prince of the Church to-day; at any rate, such beliefs, unreasonable as they may appear to us, cannot have led him to the incredible folly of believing in the Blessed Pietro and his messenger.

It might seem inexplicable that he who had exposed the lies and tricks of the monks so often should have been himself so easily deceived. Had he not exposed them? There was Fra Cipolla—true he was a friar—part of whose stock-in-trade was a tale of relics—"the finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and entire as ever it was, the tuft of the seraph that appeared to S. Francis and one of the nails of the cherubim, one of the ribs of the Verbum caro fatti alle finestre (factum est) and some of the vestment of the Holy Catholic Faith, some of the rays of the star that appeared to the Magi, a phial of the sweat of S. Michael abattling with the Devil, the jaws of death of S. Lazarus, and other relics."[472]

It might seem inexplicable! Unfortunately, however, Boccaccio also believed that those about to die can participate in the spirit of prophecy.[473] Thus he was for the moment, at any rate, altogether at the mercy of the Blessed Pietro. The splendid common-sense, the caustic wit of Petrarch helped him, it is true, to recover himself, but that bitter and humiliating experience left a permanent mark upon him. He was a changed man. With an immense regret he looked back on his life, and would have destroyed if he could the gay works of his youth, even the Decameron, and, for a time at least, he would have been content to sacrifice everything, not only his poetry in the vulgar and his romances and stories, but the new learning itself, the study of antiquity, and to enter into some monastery.

That he did not do so we owe in part at least to Petrarch. For when he had read his letter and come to himself, he returned to Pilatus and the translation of Homer.[474]

That translation was scarcely finished when Pilatus wished to be gone, and he seems in fact to have accompanied Boccaccio to Venice on his visit to Petrarch probably in May, 1363.[475] That visit was a kind of flight; he seems to have taken refuge with Petrarch from the fears of his own heart, and that it was as full of pleasure and enjoyment for Petrarch, as of consolation for Boccaccio, happily we know and can assert.

"I have always thought," Petrarch writes to him after his return to Tuscany,[476] "I have always thought that your presence would give me pleasure, I knew it would, and I felt that it would please you too. What I did not know, however, was that it would bring good fortune. For during the very few months, gone so quickly, that you have cared to dwell with me in this house that I call mine, and which is yours, it seems to me, in truth, that I have contracted a truce with fortune who, while you were here, dared not spoil my happiness...."

We know nothing more of that visit save that Boccaccio must have returned to Tuscany before the writing of that letter, before the 7th of September then. As for Pilatus, he too left Venice "at the end of the summer"[477] to return to Constantinople, "cursing Italy and the Latin name," as Petrarch says. "One would have thought him scarcely arrived there," Petrarch continues, "when I received a badly written and very long letter, more untidy than his beard or his hair, in which among other things he said he loved and longed for Italy as for some heavenly country, that he hated Greece which he had loved and execrated Byzantium which he had praised, and he supplicated me to send for him back as eagerly as Peter, about to be shipwrecked, prayed Christ to still the waves."