A reflection of the gracious and placid life the Venetians led will be apparent to all who may observe and compare the art of Venice with the art of Milan, or Florence, or Naples. What a contrast is there between that charming idyll which Titian has made of the marriage of St. Catherine,[[11]] a group full of joy, and beauty, and sunlight, and set in the midst of one of those delightful sub-alpine landscapes which he painted with such rare skill and insight, and the many other renderings of the same subject by Lombard or Tuscan masters, who, almost invariably, put on the canvas some foreshadowing of the coming tragedy in the shape of the boding horror of the toothed wheel! The Madonnas of Carpaccio and Bellini are stately ladies, well nourished, and having about them that unmistakable air of distinction which grows up with the daily use and neighbourhood of splendid and luxurious modes of life. There is no doubt a look of gravity and holiness upon their handsome faces, but there is no sign, either in the pose or in the glance of them, that they are conscious of any embarrassment, and it would take a very keen eye to discern a trace of quasi-divinity, or of any trouble aroused by the caress of the mysterious child, or of the burden of that “intolerable honour” which has been thrust upon them unsought—a mood which latter-day preachers have detected in renderings of the same theme conceived and executed in the more emotional atmosphere of the Val d’Arno. Take these Venetian Madonnas out of their pictured environment, and put on them a gala dress and sumptuous jewels, and one will find a bevy of comely dames who might well have kept company with the Signora Lucretia of the “Notti” in the fair garden at Murano, and listened to some sprightly story from Messer Pietro Bembo or from Messer Antonio Molino; or they might have gone out with the youths and damsels of whom Browning sings,
“Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to midday,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?”
In the pictures he draws Straparola illustrates a life like this, with now and then a touch of pathos, perhaps undesigned, as in the prologue to the second Night, where he tells of the laughter of the blithe company, ringing so loud and so hearty that it seemed to him as if the sound of their merriment yet lingered in his ears.[[12]] There was, therefore, good reason why Straparola’s imaginary exiles from the turbulent court of Milan should have sought at Murano, under the sheltering wings of St. Mark’s lion, that ease and gaiety which they would have looked for in vain at home; there were also reasons equally valid why he should make the genius of the place inspire with its jocund spirit the stories with which the gentle company gathered around the Signora Lucretia wiled away the nights of carnival. In the whole of the seventy-four fables there are hardly half-a-dozen which can be classed as tragic in tone, but of these one—the story of Malgherita Spolatina[[13]]—is the finest of the whole collection. It is rarely one meets with anything told with such force and sincerity; yet, in placing before his readers this vivid picture of volcanic passion and studied ruthless revenge, Straparola uses the simplest treatment and succeeds à merveille. The fact that this fable and certain others of more than average merit belong to the category of stories to which no source or origin in other writings has been assigned, raises a regret that Straparola did not trust more to his own inventive powers and draw less freely upon Ser Giovanni and Morlini. Of these creations of his own the story of Flamminio Veraldo[[14]] is admirably told and strikingly original and dramatic in subject; so is that of Maestro Lattantio,[[15]] and, for a display of savage cynicism and withering rage, it would be hard to find anything more powerfully portrayed than the death of Andrigetto.[[16]]
In the fables of adventure, and in every other case where such treatment is possible, Straparola deals largely with the supernatural. All the western versions, except Straparola’s, of the story best known to us as “Giletta of Narbonne” and as “All’s Well that Ends Well,” are worked out without calling in auxiliaries of an unearthly character. Boccaccio and Shakespeare bring together the husband and the forsaken wife by methods which, if somewhat strained, are quite natural; but Straparola at once calls for the witch and the magic horse, and whisks Isabella off to Flanders forthwith.[[17]] The interest of the reader is kept alive by accounts of the trials and dangers—a trifle bizarre now and again—which heroes and heroines are called to undergo, the taste of the age preferring apparently this stimulant to the intense dramatic power exhibited in the story of Malgherita, and demanding that the ending should be a happy one, for the pair of lovers nearly always marry in the end, and live long and blissful years. In the tales of country life and character the fun is boisterous and even broad, but it is always real fun, and the laugh rings true. Straparola is often as coarse as Bandello, but, unlike Bandello, he never smirches his pages merely for the sake of setting forth some story of simple brutality, or of leading up to a climax which is at the same time painfully shocking and purposeless. Il Lasca in “Le Cene” makes as free use of the beffe and the burle as Straparola, but the last-named showed in the “Notti” that he was incomparably the better hand in dealing with his material. Il Lasca as a rule sets out his subject on the lines of the broadest farce, but he cannot keep to genuine farce, his natural bent of mind leading him always to elaborate his theme in some unseemly and offensive fashion. Very often he is obscene and savage at the same time, and the abominable practical jokes he makes his characters play the one on the other must surely have outraged even the coarse feeding taste of the age in which he wrote. He delights in working up long stories of lust, and of infidelity, and of vengeance worked on account of these, in a spirit of heartless cruelty which, more often than not, is horrible without being in the least impressive, for the reason that, fine stylist as he was, he lacked the touch of the artist. Masuccio, though his savage indignation against the vices of the priests and monks occasionally became mere brutality, sounded now and then the note of real tragedy, and, inferior as he was to Il Lasca in style, was by far the better story-teller of the two. Both of these would be commonly set down as abler writers than Straparola, yet, by some means or other, the latter could put a touch upon his work which was beyond the power of the others—something which enables one to read the “Notti” without being conscious of that unpleasant aftertaste which one almost always feels on laying down either “Le Cene” or “Il Novellino.”
No other of the Italian novelists used a style as bad as Straparola’s. Errors in grammar abound, and his bald meagre periods often fail to express adequately the sense of the idea he manifestly wishes to portray. His faulty prose did not escape the censure of his contemporaries, for Messer Orfeo dalla Carta, in his introduction to the first part of the “Notti” (edition 1554), makes allusion to it, begging the reader at the same time not to be repelled by what he calls “il basso et rimesso stilo dello autore;” and La Monnoie, in the preface to the French translation (edition 1726) writes in a similar strain. Dalla Carta, probably by way of banter, advances an apology for Straparola’s slovenly work in terms taken from that introduction to the second part which has already been cited, explaining that the author did not write his fables as he would have done, but as they had been told to him by the ten damsels who were the narrators.
Straparola’s Italian is much more like the Italian of the present day than the English of Sidney or the German of Hans Sachs is like modern English or German, but this is not remarkable, considering how much earlier prose writing as an art came to perfection in Italy than in the rest of Europe. The impression gained by reading his prose is that he cared vastly more for subject than for treatment. He laid hold of whatever themes promised to suit his purpose best as a story-teller, careless as to whether other craftsmen had used them before or not, and these he set forth in the simplest manner possible, taking little heed of his style or even of his grammar. He hardly ever indulges in a metaphor. One never feels that he has gone searching about fastidiously for some particular turn of phrase or neatly-fitting adjective; on the other hand, one is often obliged to pause in the middle of some long sentence and search for his meaning in the strange mixture of phrases strung together. Perhaps this spontaneity, this absence of studied design, may have helped to win for him the wide popularity he enjoyed. His aim was to lead his readers into some enchanted garden of fairyland; to thrill them with the woes and perils of his heroes and heroines; to shake their sides with laughter over the misadventures of some too amorous monk or lovesick cavalier, rather than to send them into ecstasy over the measured elegance of his phrases. In many of the later editions of the “Notti,” the meaning has been further obscured, and the style rendered more rugged than ever, owing to the frequent and clumsy excisions made by the censors of morals. The early exclusion of the fourth Fable of the ninth Night shows that the eye of authority was soon attracted towards the popular novelist of the age. The motive for this activity was nominally the care of public morals, and one of the few extant references to Straparola is with regard to the expurgation of his works. In “Cremona Illustrata,” by Franciscus Arisius (Cremona, 1741), we read concerning Caravaggio: “In hoc enim oppido inclytæ stirpis Sfortiadum antiquo feudo ortum habuit Io. Franciscus Straparola cujus liber sæpe editus circumfertur italice hoc programmate: ‘Le tredici piacevolissime notti overo favole ed enimmi.’ Liber vetitus a sacra indicis congregatione et jure quidem merito cum obscenitates sordidas contineat moribus plerumque obnoxias et pluribi vulgatas. Optime quippe animadvertit Possevinus S. J. de cultura ingeniorum cap. 52, quod expediens esset homines potius nasci mutos et rationis expertes, quam in propriam et aliorum perniciam divinæ providentiæ dona convertere, imo ante eum ejusdem sententiæ fuisse M. F. Quintilianum licet gentilem, ipse Possevinus confirmat.”
On reading even the most severely castrated edition of the “Notti,” one may be at first a little surprised to find that some of the most indecent stories (in spite of the care of public morals) have been left almost untouched, and it is not until one realizes the fact that expurgation has been held to mean the cutting out of every word concerning religion and its professors, that one fully understands the principle upon which “Possevinus S. J.” and his colleagues worked. The presence of matter injurious to public morals had evidently less to do with the action of these reformers than certain anecdotes describing the presence of priests and nuns in certain places where, by every rule of good manners, they ought not to have been found. In plain words, the book was prohibited and castrated on account of the ugly picture of clerical morals which was exhibited in its pages.[[18]] A glance at any of the editions issued “con licenza de’ superiori” will show that the revisers went to their work with set purpose, caring nought as to the mangled mass of letterpress they might leave behind them. In some fables bits are cut out so clumsily that the point of the story is entirely lost; in others the feelings of orthodoxy are spared by changing the hero of amorous intrigue from a Prete to a Giovene. In one a pope is reduced to a mere initial (of course standing for a layman), and the famous story of Belphegor is left out altogether. It was surely little short of impertinent to ask for a condemnation of the “Notti” on the ground of offence to public decency from a generation which read such books as “Les facétieuses journées” of Chapuys and “Les contes aux heures perdues;” which witnessed the issue of Morlini’s novels and of Cinthio degli Fabritii’s book, “Dell’ origine delli volgari proverbii,” printed “cum privilegio summi pontificis et sacræ Cæsareæ majestatis;” a generation for which Poggio’s obscene fables were favourite reading, and which remembered that Pietro Bembo had been a cardinal and Giovanni di Medici a pope.
It is impossible to indicate precisely the sources of the fables seriatim, seeing that in many cases there was available for Straparola a choice of origins. An approximate reckoning would give fifteen fables to the novelists who preceded him, twenty-two to Morlini, four to mediæval and seven to oriental legends, thus leaving twenty-eight to be classed as original. Towards the close of his work it would appear that his imagination must have been stricken with sterility, or that he became indolent, for of the concluding twenty fables nineteen are mere translations from Morlini. It is not improbable that such wholesale borrowing as this may have been the cause of the charges of plagiary to which allusion has already been made. From beginning to end he certainly made free use of all the storehouses of materials which were available, selecting therefrom whatever subjects pleased him, and working them up to the best of his skill. It was unreasonable to censure him on this score, seeing that in what he did he merely followed the fashion of the age. If he borrowed from Ser Giovanni, had not Ser Giovanni borrowed also from the “Directorium” and the “Gesta Romanorum”? Folk-lorists have discovered for us the fact that all the stories the world ever listened to may, by proper classification, be shown to be derived from some half-dozen sources. As the sorting and searching goes on, new facts constantly come to light, the drift of which tends to prove that the charge of plagiarism is now almost meaningless. It is hard to say what new and strange fruits may not be gathered from the wide field now covered by the folk-lorist. Formerly he hunted only in the East; now we find him amongst the Lapps and the Zulus—in Labrador, and in the South Pacific as well. A still more extended search will very likely find a fresh source for those of the fables in the “Notti” which have heretofore been classed as the original work of Straparola, and will discover for us a new and genuine author of “Puss in Boots.”