Decameron

“ But whatever may be the final verdict of criticism upon these minor works of Boccaccio, it is impossible to imagine an age in which the Decameron will fail of general recognition as, in point alike of invention as of style, one of the most notable creations of human genius. Of few books are the sources so recondite, insomuch that it seems to be certain that in the main they must have be merely oral tradition, and few have exercised so wide and mighty an influence. ”

“ To employ the figure of speech by which M. Brunetière is enabled to speak of literature in terms of evolution, the tale is the original jackal. From it have been developed two distinct species; but their parent stock persists. Indeed, for aught we can see from the past, posterity may behold a reversion to type.
The Decameron.
The significance of a division of ancient and early mediæval tales into anecdote and scenario or summary romance becomes at once clearer by reference to the greatest mediæval collection, the Decameron (1353) of Boccaccio. ”

“ In the Decameron, though we are not justified in interpreting all the sentiments and opinions there expressed as necessarily his own, the evidence is too strong to be put altogether [176] aside. He loves women and would pleasure them, but he is a sceptic in regard to them; he treats them always with an easy, tolerant, and familiar condescension, sometimes petulant, often ironical, always exquisite in its pathos and humanity; but beneath all this—let us confess it at once—there is a certain brutality that is perhaps the complement to Petrarch's sentiment. ”

“ That he always loved his mother, dead so long ago, better than his father goes for nothing; that he loved his father as all men love him who has given them life is certain, he could not choose but love him. But in spite of the easy laugh, too like a sneer to be quite true or sincere, at the beginning of the Decameron, the wound he felt most nearly, that he never really forgot or quite forgave, was the death of Fiammetta, whom he had loved at first sight, with all the eagerness and fire of his youth, with all his heart, as we might say, ruthlessly keeping nothing back. ”

“ The Proem to the Decameron shews us the after-glow of his passion; the lady herself appears as one of the "honourable company," and her portrait, as in the act of receiving the laurel wreath at the close of the Fourth Day, is a masterpiece of tender and delicate delineation.
Boccaccio appears to have been recalled to Florence by his father in 1341; and it was probably in that year that he wrote L'Amorosa Fiammetta and the allegorical prose pastoral (with songs interspersed) which he entitled Ameto, and in which Fiammetta masquerades in green as one of the nymphs. ”

“ Unlucky husbands are sneered at; jealousy of honour is censured as stupidity or tyranny. Some of the female characters are even worse than the male; and the world of the Decameron is one which no man of common decency or honour 133could bear to live in. Boccaccio saw the mischief he had done, and was sorry when it was too late. In a letter to Mainardo de’ Cavalcanti, Marshal of Sicily, he entreated him not to suffer the females of his family to read the Decameron ”

“ It will be well to say something on this topic of medieval love, for making love was the great pastime of the middle ages, and most of the tales in the Decameron deal with amourettes. It is all most fantastic to our modern eyes, very exciting, very brightly coloured, but with a touch of grossness. ”

“ Iniquitous though they be, I prefer the record of his warm human passions to the dry spirituality of Petrarch; and to me one tale out of the Decameron, with its high beat of joyous and exultant life, is worth all the sonnets in which the poet of Avignon bewailed the fact that the moon would not come down out of heaven.
No one who has turned over the works of Boccaccio is unacquainted with the name of Fiammetta. She was of course not least among the seven ladies of noble birth who met in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence on that Tuesday morning when the tales of the Decameron begin. ”

“ It is not that in the Decameron virtue is not often rewarded in the orthodox way, but that such cases are not to the point; they are as unreal, as merely poetical or fictional as they are to-day. But where real life is dealt with—and in no other book of the fourteenth century is there so much reality—the evidence is what we have seen. ”

“ But Italian prose maybe said to consist of the Decameron alone for a hundred years after Boccaccio's death. It is written in a very beautiful but very complicated style, a sort of poetical prose—exquisite, it is true, but often without simplicity. Yet who will dare to attack it? It has justified itself, if need be, as every great work has done, by its appeal to mankind, its utter indifference to criticism. ”

“ See Dunlop’s History of Fiction, ed. Wilson, II, 91; von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, I, CXXII f.; Clarence Sherwood, Die neu-englischen Bearbeitungen der Erzählung Boccaccios von Ghismonda und Guiscardo, Berlin, 1892; Varnhagen in Literaturblatt, December, 1892, p. 412 ff.
[31] The too late repentance and the burial of the two lovers in one grave occur, also, in Decameron, IV, 9, presently to be spoken of.
[32] There is a mixture of Decameron, IV, 1 and 9 (with arbitrary variations) , in Palmerin of England (ch. 87, II, 328, of Southey’s edition of the English translation) . ”

“ Or if he is to tell a broad farce or a bit of downright obscenity, it is done so merrily, so frankly, so fully, with such evident delight in the carnal details as almost robs it of its sting. It is the triumphant humanity of the man, his passionate interest in all aspects of life, his appetite for reality, that is his defence and his acquittal. As Sir Walter Raleigh said in his lecture on Boccaccio, the secret of the Decameron is the secret of air and light. Brilliant sunshine inundates it. As soon as you open the book you are out of doors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bembo, the secretary of Leo, and a cardinal himself, and Berni, the secretary to several cardinals, give no more quarter to them than is given in the Decameron. No wonder then that laymen should take similar liberties, and that a friar should be regarded, as Ugo Foscolo observes, as a sort of scape-goat for the sins of the whole clergy. These considerations may explain how the Decameron went through several editions, both at Venice and Florence, without attracting the censures of the Court of Rome. ”

“ The husband, who, ignorant of all, is so sorry for his wife's unhappiness, and seeks to console and comfort her, really lives and is the fine prototype of a lot of base work done later in which the cruel absurdity of the situation and the ridiculous figure he cuts who plays his part in it are insisted on. In fact, in the Fiammetta we find many of the finest features of the Decameron. ”

“ There you have a sleepless king, to whom a woman tells a thousand and one stories in order to save her life which this same king would have taken. You have, then, but two protagonists and an anxiety which touches but one of them, the fear of death on the part of the woman, soon forgotten in the excitement of the stories. In the Decameron, on the other hand, you have ten protagonists, three youths and seven ladies, and the horror which is designed to set off the stories is an universal pestilence which has already half depopulated the city of Florence, from which they are fled away. ”

“ Their real immorality is not often observed, nor is it obvious in any single story; but when one reflects on all such stories as a class, whether in the Decameron or in other collections, the amazing thing is that though they picture villainy, cruelty, and treachery, they picture no effects of villainy, cruelty, or treachery; their escapades continue to be merry; there is no hint of possible tragedy for man nor of pity for woman. ”

“ In the fullness of his youth from thirty-three to forty, busy with important work, engaged in responsible missions, the friend of great men of action as well as of poets and scholars, almost all that bitterness and anger passes away from him, and instead he assumes the pose we see in the Decameron, to which all his knowledge of the world, his tolerance of life, his sense of humour, and in some sort his sanity, must have urged him. He has lost every illusion with regard to woman save that she is able to give him pleasure. ”

“ According to one of the commentators of the Decameron, there are as many churches at Ravenna as days in the year and each day is there celebrated as that of some saint or other.
[142] A trifling jingle upon the similarity in sound of the words mortale (mortal) , mortaio (mortar) , pestello (pestle) , and pestilente (pestilential) . The same word-play occurs at least once more in the Decameron.
[143] Il mal foro, a woman's commodity (Florio) . ”

“ At any rate the repentance of Boccaccio might have arrested his exhumation, and it should have been recollected and told, that in his old age he wrote a letter entreating his friend to discourage the reading of the Decameron, for the sake of modesty, and for the sake of the author, who would not have an apologist always at hand to state in his excuse that he wrote it when young, and at the command of his superiors. ”

“ There are very few husbands in the Decameron who do not suffer from righteous jealousy. In those days this was all a matter of course. There is a charming alba (or dawn-song) by a Provençal troubadour of the thirteenth century, supposed to be sung outside the windows of the wife and her lover to warn them of the return of her husband. The point is that the singer expressly prays the aid of the Almighty for his friend and invokes confusion upon the jealous spouse. The Lord is all on the side of the medieval lover and the husband is nowhere. ”

“ Boccaccio celebrates the apotheosis of natural appetite, of il talento, stigmatized as sin by ascetic Christianity. [87] His strongest sympathies are reserved for those who suffer by abandoning themselves to impulse, and in this self-abandonment he sees the poetry of life. This is the very core of the antithesis presented by the Human to the Divine Comedy. The Decameron is an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine. Like all vehement reactions, it is not satisfied with opposing the extravagances of the view it combats. Instead of negativing asceticism, it affirms license. ”

“ But one might as well accuse Chaucer or Shakespeare of a want of originality because they took what they wanted where they found it, as arraign Boccaccio for a dependence he was quite unaware of on sources such as these. [664] He has made the tales his own. The Decameron is a work of art, a world in itself, and its effect upon us who read it is the effect of life which includes, for its own good, things moral and immoral. The book has the variety of the world, and is full of an infinity of people, who represent for us the fourteenth century in Italy, in all its fullness, almost. ”

“ The following story, which I have translated with some slight condensation, is not only the best and most famous of the Decameron, but it illustrates on the one hand the vast antiquity of the short-story (existing, as it does, not only in all European languages in the Middle Ages, but running back its roots to the early antiquity of India) , and on the other hand, the influence of Boccaccio, "Patient Griselda" having become almost a household word in modern literature, and having furnished themes for poet, painter, and sculptor. ”

“ The Decameron was among the earliest of printed books, Venice leading the way with a folio edition in 1471, Mantua following suit in 1472, and Vicenza in 1478. A folio edition, adorned, with most graceful wood- engravings, was published at Venice in 1492. Notwithstanding the freedom with which in divers passages Boccaccio reflected on the morals of the clergy, the Roman Curia spared the book, which the austere Savonarola condemned to the flames. ”

“ At times they will seem to him almost to attain the standard of the Decameron; yet even he will remark that they want the direct aim and clear comprehension of story which are never wanting in Boccacio . ”

“ Purgatorio, xviii. contains striking instances. Mary hastens over the mountains, Cæsar to Spain; Mary is poor and Fabricius disinterested. We may here remark on the chronological introduction of the Sibyls into the profane history of antiquity as attempted by Uberti in his Dittamondo (i. cap. 14, 15) , about 1360.
[473] The first German translation of the Decameron, by H. Steinhovel, was printed in 1472, and soon became popular. The translations of the whole Decameron were almost everywhere preceded by those of the story of Griselda, written in Latin by Petrarch. ”

“ Wherein were I discovered, I were, I confess, dishonoured; but discovery being avoided, I count the dishonour all but nought. Moreover, love has been so gracious to me that not only has he spared to blind me in the choice of my lover, but he has even lent me his most effective aid, pointing me to one well worthy of the love of a lady such as I, even to yourself; whom, if I misread not my mind, I deem the most handsome and courteous and debonair, and therewithal the sagest cavalier that the realm of France may shew. ”

“ The story, in so far as it is a story, is an imitation of the endless medieval tales told by word of mouth in the streets and piazzas up and down Italy. Yet now and again, even in this wearying and complicated desert of words, we may find hints of the author's [69] attitude of mind towards the great things of the world, while once certainly we find a prophecy not only of a great artist, but of the Decameron itself.
A WOODCUT FROM "DES NOBLES MALHEUREUX" (DE CASIBUS VIRORUM) PARIS, 1515.
This cut originally appears in the "Troy Book." (T. Bonhomme, Paris, 1484.) Unique copy at Dresden. ”