Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 05

by Unknown

And Boccaccio too wrote poetry of no ignoble type, but probably because he was part of an age when verse had become the habitual form of culture, and all who could write caught the habit of versification,--a habit easier to fall into in Italian than in any other language. But while the consecration of time has been given to the 'Commedia,' and the 'Convito' passes into the shadow and perspective of lesser things, so the many verses of Boccaccio are overlooked, and his greatest prose work, the 'Decameron,' is that with which his fame is mostly bound up.

Born in 1313, at seven years of age he showed signs of a literary facility, and his father, a merchant of Florence, put him to school with a reputable grammarian; but afterward, deciding to devote him to merchandise, sent him to study arithmetic,--restive and profitless in which, he was sent to study canon law, and finding his level no better there, went back to traffic and to Naples in his father's business when he was about twenty. The story runs that the sight of the tomb of Virgil turned his thoughts to poetry; but this confusion of the post hoc with the propter hoc is too common in remote and romantic legend to value much. The presence of Petrarch in the court of Robert, King of Naples, is far more likely to have been the kindling of his genius to its subsequent activity: and the passion he acquired while there for the illegitimate daughter of the King, Maria,--the Fiammetta of his later life,--furnished the fuel for its burning; his first work, the 'Filocopo,' being written as an offering to her. It is a prose love story, mixed with mythological allusions,--after the fashion of the day, which thought more of the classics than of nature; and like all his earlier works, prolix and pedantic.

The 'Theseide,' a purely classic theme, the war of Theseus with the Amazons, is in verse; and was followed by the 'Ameto,' or 'Florentine Nymphs,' a story of the loves of Ameto, a rustic swain, with one of the nymphs of the valley of the Affrico, a stream which flows into the Arno not far from where the poet was born, or where at least he passed his youth; and to which valley he seems always greatly attached, putting there the scene of most of his work, including the 'Decameron.' 'Ameto' is a mythological fiction, in which the characters mingle recitations of verse with the prose narration, and in which the gods of Greece and Rome masque in the familiar scenes. Following these came the 'Amorosa Visione,' and 'Filostrato,' in verse; 'Fiammetta' in prose, being the imaginary complaint of his beloved at their separation; 'Nimfale Fiesolano,' in verse, the scene also laid on the Affrico; and then the 'Decameron,' begun in 1348 and finished in 1353, after which he seems to have gradually acquired a disgust for the world he had lived in as he had known it, and turned to more serious studies. He wrote a life of Dante, 'II Corbaccio,' a piece of satirical savagery, the 'Genealogy of the Gods,' and various minor works; and spent much of his time in intercourse with Petrarch, whose conversation and influence were of a different character from that of his earlier life.

Boccaccio died at Certaldo in the Val d'Elsa, December 2d, 1375. Of the numerous works he left, that by which his fame as a writer is established is beyond any question the 'Decameron,' or Ten Days' Entertainment; in which a merry company of gentlemen and ladies, appalled by the plague raging in their Florence, take refuge in the villas near the city, and pass their time in story-telling and rambles in the beautiful country around, only returning when the plague has to a great extent abated. The superiority of the 'Decameron' is not only in the polish and grace of its style, the first complete departure from the stilted classicism of contemporary narrative, the happy naturalness of good story-telling,--but in the conception of the work as a whole, and the marvelous imagination of the filling-in between the framework of the story of the plague by the hundred tales from all lands and times, with the fine thread of the narrative of the day-by-day doings of the merry and gracious company, their wanderings, the exquisite painting of the Tuscan landscape (in which one recognizes the Val d'Arno even to-day), and the delicate drawing of their various characters. It is only when all these elements have been taken into consideration, and the unity wrought through such a maze of interest and mass of material without ever becoming dull or being driven to repetition, that we understand the power of Boccaccio as an artist.

We must take the ten days' holiday as it is painted: a gay and entrancing record of a fortunate and brilliant summer vacation, every one of its hundred pictures united with the rest by a delicate tracery of flowers and landscape, with bird-songs and laughter, bits of tender and chaste by-play--for there were recognized lovers in the company; and when this is conceived in its entirety, we must set it in the massive frame of terrible gloom of the great plague, through which Boccaccio makes us look at his picture. And then the frame itself becomes a picture; and its ghastly horror--the apparent fidelity of the descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence of an eye-witness--gives a measure of the power of the artist and the range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly paradise, such as even the 'Commedia' does not give us. In this stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a mere story-book, in which the only charm is the polish of the parts, the shine of the fragments that made the mosaic. The tales came from all quarters, and only needed to be amusing or interesting enough to make one suppose that they had been listened to with pleasure: stories from the 'Gesta Romanorum,' the mediæval chronicles, or any gossip of the past or present, just to make a whole; the criticism one might pass on them, I imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling; the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house: these are the real 'Decameron.' The author presents it in a prelude which has for its scope only to give the air of reality to the whole, as if not only the plague, but the 'Decameron,' had been history; and the proof of his perfect success is in the fact that for centuries the world has been trying to identify the villas where the merry men and maidens met, as if they really had met.

"Whenever, most gracious ladies, I reflect how pitiful you all are by nature, I recognize that this work will in your opinion have a sad and repulsive beginning, as the painful memory of the pestilence gone by, fraught with loss to all who saw or knew of it, and which memory the work will bear on its front. But I would not that for this you read no further, through fear that your reading should be always through sighs and tears. This frightful beginning I prepare for you as for travelers a rough and steep mountain, beyond which lies a most beautiful and delightful plain, by so much the more pleasurable as the difficulty of the ascent and passage of the mountain had been great. And as the extreme of pleasure touches pain, so suffering is effaced by a joy succeeding. To this brief vexation (I call it brief, as contained in few words) follow closely the sweets and pleasures I have promised, and which would not be hoped for from such a beginning if it were not foretold. And to tell the truth, if I had been able frankly to bring you where I wished by other way than this rough one, I had willingly done so; but because I could not, without these recollections, show what was the occasion of the incidents of which you will read, I was obliged to write of them."

The elaborate description of the plague which follows, shows not only Boccaccio's inventive power,--as being, like that of Defoe of the plague of London (which is a curious parallel to this) altogether imaginary, since the writer was at Naples during the whole period of the pestilence,--but also that it was a part indispensable of the entire scheme, and described with all its ghastly minuteness simply to enhance the value of his sunshine and merriment. He was in Naples from 1345 until 1350, without any other indication of a visit to Florence than a chronological table of his life, in which occurs this item:--"1348, departs in the direction of Tuscany with Louis of Taranto:" as if either a prince on his travels would take the plague in the course of them, or a man so closely interested in the events of the time at Naples, and in the height of his passion for Fiammetta,--the separation from whom he had hardly endured when earlier (1345) he was separated from her by his duty to his aged father,--would have chosen the year of the pestilence, when every one who could, fled Florence, to return there; and we find him in May, 1349, in Naples, in the full sunshine of Fiammetta's favor, and remaining there until his father's death in 1350.

There is indeed in Boccaccio's description of the plague that which convicts it of pure invention, quickened by details gathered from eye-witnesses,--the very minuteness of the description in certain points not in accord with the character of the disease, as when he narrates that the hogs rooting in the garments of the dead thrown out into the streets "presently, as if they had taken poison, after a few dizzy turns, fell dead"; and this, which he says he saw with his own eyes, is the only incident of which he makes this declaration (the incident on which the unity of his work hinges, the meeting of the merry troupe in the church of S. Maria Novella, being recorded on the information of a person "worthy of belief"). Nor does he in his own person intrude anywhere in the story; so that this bit of intense realization thrown into the near foreground of his picture, as it were by chance, and without meaning, yet certified by his own signature, is the point at which he gets touch of his reader and convinces him of actuality throughout the romance.