Giovanni da Prato, author ofIl Paradin degli Alberti (about 1420) also deserves mention here, on account of the short stories inserted into his ethical dialogues; but the first novelist of much importance after Giovanni Fiorentino is MASSUCCIO of Salerno, a Neapolitan, who seems to have been a man of rank, and to have been for some time in the service of the Duke of Milan. He wrote about 1470, and his tales were first printed in 1476. The celebrity which he continues to enjoy is, it may be feared, mainly owing to his character as the most licentious of the Italian novelists in fact, although, if we may trust his own assurance, the most virtuous in intention. His tales are divided into five parts, each of the first three of which has what the writer considers to be a distinct moral purpose. In the first, in Dunlop’s words, “the scope of the stories is to show that God will sooner or later inflict vengeance on dissolute monks.” The second “proves that the monks of those days invented many frauds.” The third “is intended to show that the greatest and finest ladies of Italy indulged in gallantries of a nature which did them very little honour.” All these propositions might have been thought susceptible of demonstration without theNovellino, and much better established than Massuccio’s claim to a place among moralists or reformers. He protests that his tales are “ower true,” and for the most part founded on recent transactions; and, in fact, he appears less indebted than any predecessor to folk-lore and the French fabliaux. The last two sections of his work, however, contain love adventures of too exceptional a nature to be founded upon actual incidents. Some of these manifest, not merely ingenuity of invention, but considerable tragic power. The style is somewhat barbarous; and the same remark applies to the lighter fiction, generally of the nature of anecdote, of his contemporary Sabadino degli Arienti, a native and historian of Bologna. Sabadino’s tales are much less objectionable than Massuccio’s, though no less than his in the author’s opinion moralissimi documenti. They are entitledPorrettane, from their having been composed for the amusement of the visitors to the baths of Porretta, which gives them some importance as an index to the taste of the more opulent and leisured classes of society.
The novels of the following century are exceedingly numerous, but in general too much upon one pattern to deserve especial notice until we arrive at those of Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini, each of whom is eminent for some special characteristic. Of Firenzuola, one of the most typical writers of his day, we have already spoken, his novelettes being generally interwoven with his other prose works. Two single novelettes by separate authors deserve special notice as world-famous, though not by the genius of their authors. TheRomeo and Giulietta of Luigi da Porto, a gentleman of Vicenza who died in 1529, is a powerful and well-told story, although it would have been little heard of but for Shakespeare, who nevertheless seems to have been unacquainted with it, having founded his tragedy upon the inferior version made by Arthur Brooke after the French of Boistuau. The other story which has become a portion of the world’s repertory of fiction is theBelphegor of Giovanni Brevio, a subject also treated by Machiavelli, and revived in our own day by Thackeray. The idea of the devil’s aversion to matrimony, not as a divine ordinance, but as a nuisance inconsistent with his own peace and comfort, is so irresistibly comic that one is surprised to find it originally Slavonian.
The celebrity of Pietro Aretino requires the mention of his novels, which, however, possess no very distinctive features. To find these we must turn chiefly to Straparola, whose genre requires a distinct notice; and, among those who diverged less from the beaten track, Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini. Bandello, says Settembrini, depicts the Italian, Grazzini the Florentine, Cinthio humanity at large.
MATTEO BANDELLO (1480-1561) was a Lombard and a Dominican, who resided successively at Mantua and at Milan, the latter city in his time one of the most uncomfortable places in Italy from the oppressions and depredations of the Spanish soldiery. Popular commotions concurred to drive him to France, where Henry II. made him Bishop of Agen. His novelettes had been composed before this distinction befell him, but his episcopacy was no obstacle to their publication in 1554. Though frequently licentious, his stories indicate a considerable advance upon his forerunners in the power of depicting character and in seriousness of tone. He prefers historical narration to invention, and usually bases his tales upon some actual occurrence, often revolting for its cruelty or indecency. The story ofViolante, analysed in No. 380 of theEdinburgh Review, is a good example of his tragic force, and many others might be given. The pathetic grace of the opening of hisGerardo and Elena, analysed in the same essay, is no less excellent in its more romantic and delicate way. He was a prolific writer, producing no fewer than eighty-nine novelettes, more esteemed by foreigners than by his own countrymen, who were offended by his Lombardisms. Settembrini, however, not in general favourable to the productions of the Cinque Cento, pronounces him the first Italian novelist after Boccaccio.
No imputation of rusticity can be attached to the diction of ANTONIO MARIA GRAZZINI, surnamedIl Lasca (1503-83), for here the style is the main recommendation of the work. Grazzini, an apothecary by profession, was one of the chief promoters of the movement for prescribing a standard of pure Tuscan, and as one of the founders of the celebrated Academy degli Umidi, each of whose members was bound to assume the name of some fish, he called himselfIl Lasca (the Roach), by which name he is best known. Such toys occupied the thoughts of Italians in an age of decay when great deeds had become impossible. Grazzini’s stories are mostly taken from Florentine private life, and as such have their value, apart from the idiomatic Tuscan, which is best apprehended by the writer’s countrymen. They are not of enthralling interest, and when tragical are sometimes revolting, but the exposition is easy and artistic.
GIOVANNI BATTISTA GIRALDI CINTHIO of Ferrara (1504-73) is better known by name to English readers than most of his fellow-novelists, since from him Shakespeare derived the plots ofOthello andMeasure for Measure. The story on which the former drama is founded is not a bad specimen of Cinthio’s usual work. His subjects are frequently tragical, sometimes shocking, but the treatment is generally powerful, the narrative direct and forcible, and he is in great measure exempt from the grossness of his contemporaries. The tales, a hundred in number, whence their title ofEcatomithi, are supposed to be narrated on board a ship bound for Marseilles, and conveying a party of Romans escaping from the sack of the Eternal City. They are divided like Boccaccio’s into ten classes, each considered to illustrate some particular point of morals or manners. They are highly respectable performances; but by so much as they surpass Grazzini’s in matter they fall below them in style, which, though not incorrect, is devoid of colour and individuality.
STRAPAROLA, already briefly alluded to, was a native of Caravaggio, and published hisNotti Piacevoli in 1554. He is a good story-teller, although a bad stylist; but what gives him an epoch-making rank among Italian novelists is not his merit or demerit in either capacity, but his having been the first to avail himself of popular folk-lore as a groundwork for fiction. Nothing is more annoying than the almost complete neglect of popular mythology by men of culture in antiquity. Apuleius tells one inimitable tale, without saying where he got it. Synesius spends his evenings listening to the stories of the Libyan peasants, and is not at the trouble to preserve a single one. It is nevertheless clear that such tales must have been as rife in ancient times as in our own. Straparola was perhaps the first man who systematically turned them to literary account: it would have been well if he had gone much further, and proportionately reduced his debt to Hieronymo Morlini, the chief recommendation of whose generally indecent and always ungrammatical Latin stories (Naples, 1520) is their exceeding rarity. Nearly a hundred years afterwards Straparola was completely eclipsed both as concerned the quantity and the quality of his folk-lore fictions, by thePentamerone of GIOVANNI BASILE, Count of Morone, a collection whose relation to the popular mythology of other nations has occasioned endless discussion. Puss in Boots, and Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and many another favourite owe to Basile their first appearance in literary costume. In narrative he is the breathless, loquacious, exuberant Neapolitan, too much in a hurry to trouble himself about style or art, but carrying all before him by his vigour and vehemence, and betraying, as his German translator has pointed out, strong traces of the influence of Rabelais.
It will be evident from the above brief sketch of the Italian novel that in the sixteenth century the art of novel-writing was nearly identical with the art of narrative. This was fully possessed by most writers of fiction; but characterisation, ingenuity of construction and development of plot, underplot, episode, artful suspension of interest, above all the application of the novelist’s art to weighty purposes, were all in the most rudimentary condition. Compared with the modern novel, the ancient story is as a simple air upon a flute to the complicated harmony of an organ. It is true that the old romances abound with hints and germs only needing development, but development was slow in coming, and even when about the beginning of the eighteenth century romance and novelette had grown into the novel, it was still long before the novel became a vehicle of ideas and a potent factor in civilisation. The reason probably is that while the novel may employ the highest human faculties, it is at the same time the best medium for conveying ideas to the less cultivated orders of society. The extension of reading and writing to these classes has called forth a tribe of readers which had no existence in the days of the Cinque Cento, and has invested the only description of literature which powerfully appeals to them with extraordinary significance. The influence of the novel in the modern sense grows, and will continue to grow; but there is still abundant room for the short and simple story, the consistent development of a single incident or situation, compensating in art for what it lacks in variety, yet, now that human life has become so much richer and more complex than of old, at a further remove from mere anecdote than seemed necessary for its Italian prototype.
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