After the Filostrato, Boccaccio next produced the Ameto, Amorosa Visione, Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolano, and Corbaccio, between the years 1343 and 1355. The Ameto is a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. To read it attentively is now almost impossible, in spite of frequent passages where the luxuriant word-painting of the author is conspicuous. In the Amorosa Visione he attempted the style which Petrarch had adopted for his Trionfi. After reviewing human life under the several aspects of learning, glory, love, fortune, the poet finally resigns himself to a Nirvana of sensual beatitude. The poem is unsuccessful, because it adapts an obsolete form of art to requirements beyond its scope. Boccaccio tries to pour the new wine of the Renaissance into the old bottles of medieval allegory. In the Fiammetta Boccaccio exhibited all his strength as an anatomist of feeling, describing the effects of passion in a woman's heart, and analyzing its varying emotions with a subtlety which proved his knowledge of a certain type of female character. It is the first attempt in modern literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer. Since Virgil's Dido, or the Heroidum Epistolæ of Ovid, nothing of the sort had been essayed upon an equal scale. Taken together with Dante's Vita Nuova and Petrarch's Secretum, each of which is a personal confidence, the Fiammetta may be reckoned among those masterpieces of analytic art, which revealed the developed consciousness of the Italian race, at a moment when the science of emotion was still for the rest of Europe an undiscovered territory. This essay exercised a wide and lasting influence over the descriptive literature of the Renaissance. Yet when we compare its stationary monologues with the brief but pregnant touches of the Decameron, we are forced to assign it the rank of a study rather than a finished picture. The Fiammetta is to the Decameron what rhetoric is to the drama. This, however, is hardly a deduction from its merit. The delineation of an unholy and unhappy passion, blessed with fruition for one brief moment, cursed through months of illness and despair with all the furies of vain desire and poignant recollection, is executed with incomparable fullness of detail and inexhaustible richness of fancy. The reader rises from a perusal of the Fiammetta with impressions similar to those which a work of Richardson leaves upon the mind. At the same time it is full of poetry. The Vision of Venus, the invocation to Sleep, and the description of summer on the Bay of Baiæ relieve a deliberate anatomy of passion, which might otherwise be tedious.[111] The romance is so rich in material that it furnished the motives for a score of tales, and the novelists of the Renaissance availed themselves freely of its copious stores.[112]
The Corbaccio or Laberinto d'Amore is a satire upon women, animated with the bitterest sense of injury and teeming with vindictive spite. It was written with the avowed purpose of reviling a lady who had rejected Boccaccio's advances, and it paints the whole sex in the darkest colors. We could fancy that certain passages had been penned by a disappointed monk. Though this work is in tone unworthy of its author, it bore fruits in the literature of the next century. Alberti's satires are but rhetorical amplifications of themes suggested by the Corbaccio. Nor is it without value for the student of Italian manners. The list of romances read by women in the fourteenth century throws light upon Francesca's episode in Dante, and proves that the title Principe Galeotto was not given without precedent to Boccaccio's own writings.[113] The discourse on gentle birth in the same treatise should be studied in illustration of the Florentine conception of nobility.[114] Boccaccio, though he follows so closely in time upon Dante, already anticipates the democratic theories of Poggio.[115] Feudal feeling was extinct in the bourgeoisie of the great towns; nor had the experience of the Neapolitan Court suppressed in Boccaccio's mind the pride of a Florentine citizen. At the same time he felt that contempt of the literary classes for the common folk which was destined in the next century to divide the nation and to check the development of its vulgar literature. He apologizes for explaining Dante, and for bringing poetry down to the level of the feccia plebeia, the vulgo indegno, the ingrati meccanici, and so forth.[116]
It remains to speak of yet another of Boccaccio's minor works, the Ninfale Fiesolano. This is a tale in octave stanzas, which, under a veil of mythological romance, relates the loves of a young man and a nun, and their subsequent tragic ending. It owes its interest to the vivid picture of seduction, so glowingly painted as to betray the author's personal enjoyment of the motive. The story is thrown back into a time antecedent to Christianity and civil life. The heroine, Mensola, is a nymph of Diana; the hero, Affrico, a shepherd. The scene is laid among the mountains above Florence; and when Mensola has been changed into a fountain by the virgin goddess, whose rites she violated, the poem concludes with a myth invented to explain the founding of Fiesole. Civil society succeeds to the savagery of the woodland, and love is treated as the vestibule to culture.[117] The romantic and legendary portions of this tale are ill-connected. The versification is lax; and except in the long episode of Mensola's seduction, which might have formed a passage of contemporary novel-writing, the genius of Boccaccio shines with clouded luster.[118] Yet the Ninfale Fiesolano occupies a not unimportant place in the history of Italian literature. It adapts the pastoral form to that ideal of civility dependent upon culture, which took so strong a hold upon the imagination of the cinque cento. Its stanzas are a forecast of the Arcadia and the Orfeo.
In the minor poems and romances, which have here been passed in review, except perhaps in the Fiammetta, Boccaccio cannot be said to take a place among European writers of the first rank. His style is prolix; his versification, if we omit the Canzoni a Ballo and some sonnets, is slovenly; nor does he show exceptional ability in the conception and conduct of his stories. He is strongest when he paints a violent passion or describes voluptuous sensations, weakest when he attempts allegory or assumes the airs of a philosopher. We feel, in reading these productions of his earlier manhood, that nearly all were what the Germans call Gelegenheits-gedichte. The private key is lost to some of these works, which were intended for the ears of one among the multitude. On others it is plainly written that they were the outpourings of a personal desire, the self-indulgence of a fancy which reveled in imagined sensuality, using literature as the safety-valve for subjective longings. They lack the calm of perfect art, the full light falling on the object from without, which marks a poem of the highest order. From these romances of his youth, no less than from the Latin treatises of his maturity, we return to the Decameron when we seek to place Boccaccio among the classics. Nothing comparable with this Human Comedy for universal interest had appeared in modern Europe, if we except the Divine Comedy; and it may be questioned whether any work of equal scope was given to the world before the theater of Shakspere and the comedies of Molière. Boccaccio, though he paints the surface of life, paints it in a way to suggest the inner springs of character, and to bring the motives of action vividly before us. Quicquid agunt homines is the matter of his book. The recoil from medieval principles of conduct, which gives it a certain air of belonging to a moment rather than all time, was necessary in the evolution of intellectual freedom. In this respect, again, it faithfully reflected the Florentine temperament. At no epoch have the Italians been sternly and austerely pious. Piety with them is a passionate impulse rather than a deeply-reasoned habit based upon conviction. Their true nature is critical, susceptible to beauty, quick at seizing the ridiculous and exposing shams, suspicious of mysticism, realistic, pleasure-loving, practical. These qualities, special to the Florentines, but shared in large measure by the nation, found artistic expression in the Decameron, and asserted their supremacy in the literature of the Renaissance. That a sublime ideal, unapprehended by Boccaccio, and destined to remain unrepresented in the future, should have been conceived by Dante; that Petrarch should have modulated by his masterpiece of poetic workmanship from the key of the Divine Comedy to that of the Decameron; that one city should have produced three such men, and that one half-century should have witnessed their successive triumphs, forms the great glory of Florence, and is one of the most notable facts in the history of genius.
It remains to speak about Boccaccio's prose, and the relation of his style to that of other trecentisti. If we seek the origins of Italian prose, we find them first in the Franco-Italian romances of the Lombard period, which underwent the process of toscaneggiamento at Florence, next in books of morality and devotion, and also in the earlier chronicles. Among the Tuscanized tales of chivalry belonging to the first age of Italian literature are the Conti di antichi cavalieri and the Tavola Ritonda, both of which bear traces of translation from Provençal sources.[119] The Novellino, of which mention has already been made, betrays the same origin. The style of these works offers a pretty close parallel to the English of Sir Thomas Mallory. At the same time that the literature of France was assuming an Italian garb, many versions of Roman classics appeared. Orosius, Vegetius, Sallust, with parts of Cicero, Livy and Boethius were adapted to popular reading. But the taste of the time, as we have already seen in the preceding [chapter], inclined the authors of these works to make selections with a view to moral edification. Their object was, not to present the ancients in a modern garb, but to cull notable examples of conduct and ethical sentences from the works that found most favor with the medieval intellect. Passing under the general titles of Fiori, Giardini, Tesori and Conviti—Fiori di filosofi e molto savi, Giardino di Consolazione, Fiore di Rettorica, Fiore del parlar gentile—these collections supplied the laity with extracts from Latin authors, and extended culture to the people. The Libro di Cato might be chosen as a fair example of their scope.[120] The number of such books, ascribed to Bono Giamboni, Brunetto Latini, and Guidotto of Bologna, proves that an extensive public was eager for instruction of this sort; and it is reasonable to believe that they were studied by the artisans of central Italy. The bass-reliefs and frescoes of incipient Italian art, the pavement of the Sienese Cathedral, the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua, bear traces of the percolation through all social strata of this literature. A more important work of style was the De Regimine Principum, of Egidio Colonna, translated from the French version by an unknown Tuscan hand; while Giamboni's Florentine version of Latini's Tesoro introduced the erudition of the most learned grammarian of his age to the Italians. Contemporaneously with this growth of vernacular treatises on rhetorical and ethical subjects, we may assume that memoirs and chronicles began to be written in the vulgar tongue. But so much doubt has recently been thrown upon the earliest monuments of Italian historiography that it must here suffice to indicate the change which was undoubtedly taking place in this branch also of composition toward the close of the thirteenth century.[121] Literature of all kinds yielded to the first strong impact of the native idiom. Epistles, for example, whether of private or of public import, were now occasionally written in Italian, as can be proved by reference to the published letters of Guittone d'Arezzo.[122]
The works hitherto mentioned belong to the latter half of the thirteenth century. Their style, speaking generally, is dry and tentative. Except in the versions of French romances, which borrow grace from their originals, we do not find in them artistic charm of diction. The Fiori and Giardini are little better than commonplace books, in which the author's personality is lost beneath a mass of extracts and citations. The beginning of the fourteenth century witnessed the growth of a new Italian prose. Of this second stage, the masterpieces are Villani's Chronicle, Dante's Vita Nuova, the Fioretti di S. Francesco, the Leggende dei Santi Padri of Domenico Cavalca, and Jacopo Passavanti's Specchio della vera Penitenza.[123] These writers have no lack of individuality. Their mind moves in their style, and gives a personal complexion to their utterance. The chief charm of their manner, so far as it is common to characters so diverse, is its grave and childlike spontaneity. For vividness of description, for natural simplicity of phrase, and for that amiable garrulity which rounds a picture by innumerable details and unconscious touches of graphic force, not one of the books of this period surpasses the Fioretti. Nor are the Leggende of Cavalca less admirable. Modern, especially Northern, students may discover too much suavity and unction in the writer's tone—a superfluity of sweetness which fatigues, a caressing tenderness that clogs. After reading a few pages, we lay the book down, and wonder whether it could really have been a grown man, and not a cherub flown from Fra Angelico's Paradise, who composed it. This infantine note belongs to the cloister and the pulpit. It matches the simple credulity of the narrator, and well befits the miracles he loves to record. We seem to hear a good old monk gossiping to a party of rosy-cheeked novices, like those whom Sodoma painted in his frescoes of S. Benedict at Monte Oliveto. It need hardly be observed that neither in Villani's nor in Dante's prose do we find the same puerility. But all the trecentisti have a common character of limpidity, simplicity, and unaffected grace.
The difficulties under which even the best Italian authors labor while using their own language, incline them to an exaggerated admiration for these pearls of the trecento. They look back with envy to an age when men could write exactly as they thought and felt and spoke, without the tyranny of the Vocabolario or the fear of an Academy before their eyes. We, with whom the literary has always closely followed the spoken language, and who have, practically speaking, no dialects, while we recognize the purity of that incomparably transparent manner, cannot comprehend that it should be held up for imitation in the present age. To paint like Giotto would be easier than to write like Passavanti. The conditions of life and the modes of thought are so altered that the style of the trecento will not lend itself to modern requirements.
Among the prosaists of the fourteenth century—Cavalca, Villani, the author of the Fioretti, and Passavanti—Boccaccio meets us with a sudden surprise. They aimed at finding the readiest and most appropriate words to convey their meaning in the simplest, most effective manner. Without artistic purpose, without premeditation, without side-glances at the classics, they wrote straightforward from their heart. There is little composition or connection in their work, no molding of paragraphs or rounding of phrases, no oratorical development, no gradation of tone. Boccaccio, on the contrary, sought to give the fullness and sonority of Latin to the periods of Italian prose. He had the Ciceronian cadence and the labyrinthine sentences of Livy in view. By art of style he was bent on rendering the vulgar language a fit vehicle for learning, rhetoric, and history. In order to make it clear what sorts of changes he introduced, it will be necessary to compare his prose with that of his contemporaries. Dante used the following words to describe his first meeting with Beatrice[124]:
Nove fiate già, appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto, quanto alla sua propria girazione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa Donna della mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era già in questa vita stata tanto che nel suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente delle dodici parti l'una d'un grado: sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi alla fine del mio nono anno.
Boccaccio, relating his first glimpse of Fiammetta on April 17, 1341, spins the following cocoon of verbiage:[125]