That night was but the first of a long series, as we may suppose. “Oh,” says Fiammetta, in the romance which bears her name, “how he loved my room and with what joy it saw him arrive. He held it in greater reverence than any church (temple). Ah me, what pleasant kisses! What loving embraces! How many nights passed as though they had been bright days in sweet converse without sleep! How many delights, dear to every lover, have we enjoyed there in those happy days.”182
So autumn passed into winter and the long nights grew short, and all the world was at the spring; and for them too it was the golden age — so long ago. Well, do we not know how they spent their lives? It was ever Giovanni’s way to kiss and tell. Has he not spoken of the festas and the jousts, and the rare encounters that in Naples greeted Primavera?183 We see him with Fiammetta at the Courts of Love, in the deep shade of the gardens, in the joyful fields,184 on the seashore at Baia,185 and at the Bagno beside the lake of Avernus,186 while we may catch a glimpse of them too at a wedding feast.187 So passed what proved to be the one happy year of their love, and perhaps the happiest of Giovanni’s life.
That year so full of wild joy soon passed away. With the dawn of 1338 his troubles began. At first jealousy. He found it waiting to torture him on returning from a journey we know not whither,188 in which he had encountered dangers by flood and field; a winter journey then, doubtless. He came home to find Fiammetta disdainful, angry, even indifferent. All the annoyance of the road came back to him threefold: — 189
“... non ch’ alcun tormento
Mi desser tornand ‘io, ma fur gioconde,
Tanta dolce speranza mi recava
Spronato dal desio di rivederti,
Qual ver me ti lasciai, Donna, pietosa.
Or, oltre, a quel che io, lasso! stimava,
Trovo mi sdegni, e non so per quai merti;
Per che piange nel cor l’ alma dogliosa,
E maledico i monti, l’ alpe e ‘l mare,
Che mai mi ci lasciaron ritornare.”190
Whose fault was it? Perhaps there is not much need to ask. Fiammetta was incapable of any stability in love, and Giovanni could never help looking at “altre donne.”191 As we have seen, Fiammetta was surrounded by admirers who were not, be sure, more scrupulous than Boccaccio. So that his suspicions were aroused, and he must have found it difficult to obey her when she forbade him to follow her to Baia in 1338. Perhaps he had compromised her, and for that cause alone she had ceased to care for him — it would perhaps be after her nature; but however it may have been, it was no marvel that he was jealous, angry, and afraid.192
And his fears prophesied truly — he was betrayed. He did not know it when she first returned to Naples after the summer was gone. She took care of that,193 but she gave him excuses instead of kisses, which only roused his angry jealousy the more. “Il geloso,” she told him, “ha l’ animo pieno d’ infinite sollecitudini, alle quali nè speranza nè altro diletto può porgere conforto o alleviare la sua pena.... Egli vuole e s’ ingegna di porre legge a’ piedi e alle mani, e a ogni altro atto della sua donna,”194 and so on and so forth. These hypocritical and eloquent commonplaces did not soothe him, but rather increased his anxiety. We must remember that though Giovanni would gad after other beauties, he loved Fiammetta then and always. It is not surprising, then, that his jealousy became a wild anger. “Nel cuore mi s’ accese un’ ira sì ferocissima, che quasi con lei non mi fece allora crucciare, ma pur mi ritenni.”195 Little by little suspicion grew to certainty; he guessed he was betrayed, he knew it, he suspected the very man, his supplanter, his friend; and he sees him, as it were in a dream, on the “montagne vicine a Pompeano,” like a great mastiff who devours the hen pheasant at a mouthful.196 What could he do, what could he say? “Let Thy name perish, Baia....”
“Perir possa il tuo nome, Baia, e il loco;
Boschi selvaggi le tue piagge sieno,
E le tue fonti diventin veneno,
Nè vi si bagni alcun molto nè poco:
In pianto si converta ogni tuo gioco,
E suspetto diventi il tuo bel seno
A’ naviganti; il nuvolo e ‘l sereno
In te riversin fumo solfo e fuoco;
Che hai corrotto la più casta mente
Che fosse in donna colla tua licenza,
Se il ver mi disser gli occhi non è guari.
Là onde io sempre viverò dolente,
Come ingannato da folle credenza;
Or fuss’ io stato cieco non ha guari!”197
After rage, humiliation. He tells himself that in spite of all he will love her always, more and more, yes, more than his own life or honour. He will persist, he will not be easily beaten, he will regain her. And yet it is all quite useless, as he knows.198 Was it not in this hour that he wrote the following beautiful lines: —
“La lagrime e i sospiri e ‘l non sperare,
A quella fine m’ han si sbigottito
Ch’ io me ne vo per via com’ uom smarrito:
Non so che dire e molto men che fare.
E quando avvien che talor ragionare
Oda di me, che n’ ho talvolta udito,
Del pallido colore, e del partito
Vigore, e del dolor che di fuor pare,
Una pietà di me stesso mi vene
Sì grande, ch’ io desio di dir piangendo
Che sia cagion di tanto mio martiro:
Ma poi, temendo non aggiugner pene
Alle mie noie, tanto mi difendo,
Ch’ io passo in compagnia d’ alcun sospiro.”199
But fate was not content, as he himself says,200 with this single blow. Till now he had wanted for nothing; he had had a home of his own, and had been able to go to court when, and as, he would, and to enter fully into the life of the gay city. Now suddenly poverty stared him in the face. His father, from whom all that was stable and good in his life hitherto had proceeded, was ruined.201 But even in his fall he remembered his son, and though Giovanni was now twenty-five years of age, he maintained him, at considerable inconvenience doubtless, from 1st November, 1338, to 1st November, 1339, by buying for him the produce of a podere near Capua, “i beni della chiesa di S. Lorenzo dell’ Arcivescovato di Capua,” which cost him twenty-six florins.202 Della Torre thinks that the wretched youth was compelled to visit the place (possibly this was his fateful journey) and to deal with a fattore di campagna and the wily contadini of whom Alberti has so much to tell us a century later. With them he would have to take account of the grain, the grapes, the olives, the swine, and so forth, while trying to write romances and to save his love from utter disaster.
As though the ills he suffered were not enough, it was at this time he lost a friend and protector from whom he expected very much. Niccolò Acciaiuoli, whom he had known since 1331, left Naples on 10th October, 1338, and two years later Boccaccio writes to him on his return from the Morea: “Nicola, if any trust can be placed in the miserable, I swear to you by my suffering soul that the departure of Trojan Æneas was not a deeper sorrow to the Carthaginian Dido than was yours to me: not without reason, though you knew it not: nor did Penelope long for the return of Ulysses more than I longed for yours.”203
And then all his companions forsook him owing to his change of fortune; one by one they fell away. He who had consorted with nobles and loved a king’s daughter was left alone; not in his own dwelling, but outside the city now, “sub Monte Falerno apud busta Maronis,” as he dates his letters: close then to the tomb of Virgil. Was it now, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, in all this tempest of ill, that he turned to the verse of the Mantuan who has healed so many wounds that the Church may not touch; and so, dreaming beside his sepulchre at Posilippo, remembering the wasted life, the irrecoverable years, made that vow which posterity has so well remembered, sworn as it was on Virgil’s grave, to give himself to letters, to follow his art for ever?
Henceforth his life belongs to literature. “Every cloud,” says the proverb, “has a silver lining,” and the miseries of youth, though not the least
bitter, differ, in this at least, from those of old age, that one has time to profit by them. So it was with Giovanni. The tempest which had destroyed so much that he valued most highly was in some sort his salvation. To love is good, they had told him, to write verses even better; but to ruin oneself for love —— ! What madness! Yet it was just that he had done, and like many others who have practised his art, he found in ruin the highway of the world.
Driven by poverty outside the city, deprived alike of its pleasures and the excitement and distractions of his love, he had nothing left but his art, and for the first time in his life he seems to have set himself to study and to practise it with all his might. Deserted by his companions, he reminded himself that he was a poet and that solitude was his friend. He seems to have read much, studying in the shadow of Virgil’s tomb the works of that poet204 and the writings of the ever-delightful Apuleius, while in the letter to Calmeta we find — and this is most interesting in regard to his own work — that he was already reading the Thebais of Statius.205 Helpers, too, of a sort he had, among them Dionigi Roberti da Borgo Sansepolcro,206 who, as Della Torre thinks, made him write to Petrarch, a thing Boccaccio no doubt had long wished, but hesitated, to do. The first extant communication between them, however, dates from 1349.
In the midst of this resurrection of energy in which, as we learn, he had already grown calm enough to see Fiammetta afar off without flinching and even with a sort of pleasure, his father, widowed by the death of Margherita, “full of years, deprived by death of his children,” summoned him home.207 When did Boccaccio obey this summons? That he was in Naples in 1340 is proved by the letter “Sacro famis et angelice viro,” dated “sub Monte Falerno apud busta Maronis Virgilii, Julii Kal IIII.,” i.e. 28th June, and, as the contents show, of the year 1340.208 He was still there in October, for on 1st November the renewal of the contract of the podere of S. Lorenzo fell due, but by 11th January, 1341, we know him to have been in Florence.209 He left Naples, then, between 1st November, 1340, and 11th January, 1341,210 and as the journey took eleven days or so he must have set out in the end of the year. By so doing, as it happened, he just missed seeing Petrarch, who, invited to his court by King Robert, left Avignon on 16th February, 1341, in the company of Azzo da Correggio, to reach Naples in March.211
So Giovanni came back into the delicate and strong Florentine country, along the bad roads, through the short days, the whole world lost in wind and rain, neither glad nor sorry, but thoughtful, and, yes, homesick after all for that ghost in his heart.
CHAPTER V
BOCCACCIO’S EARLY WORKS — THE FILOCOLO — THE FILOSTRATO — THE TESEIDE — THE AMETO — THE FIAMMETTA — THE NINFALE FIESOLANO
I HAVE WRITTEN at some length and in some detail of the early years of Boccaccio and of the circumstances attending his love for Fiammetta, because they decided the rest of his life, and are in many ways by far the most important in his whole career. But the ten years which follow his return to Florence are even more uncertain and obscure that those which preceded them, while we are without any of those semi-biographical allegories to help us. It will be necessary, therefore, to deal with these years less personally, and to regard them more strictly from the point of view of the work they produced. And to begin with, let us consider the work already begun before Boccaccio left Naples, or at any rate worked on during the years 1341-4, which were spent in and around Florence.
That his life was far from happy on his return from Naples we know not only from the bitter and cruel verses he has left us, in which he speaks of his home —
“Dove la cruda ed orribile vista
D’ un vecchio freddo, ruvido ed avaro
Ogn’ ora con affanno più m’ attrista — —”212
but also from the letters he sent to Niccolò Acciaiuoli,213 in which he says: “I can write nothing here where I am in Florence, for if I should, I must write not in ink, but in tears. My only hope is in you — you alone can change my unhappy fate.” That he was very poor we may be certain, and though he was not compelled to work at business, the abomination of his youth, no doubt he had to listen to the regrets, and perhaps to the reproaches, of an old man whom misfortune had soured. His father, however, seems to have left him quite free to work as he wished, satisfying himself with his mere presence and company. And then the worst was soon over, for, by what means we know not, by December, 1342, he was able to buy a house in the parish of S. Ambrogio, and to live in his own way.214
This period, then, materially so unfortunate, not for Boccaccio alone, as we shall see, is nevertheless the most fruitful of his existence. For it is in the five years which follow his return from Naples that we may be sure he was at work on the Filocolo, the Ameto, the Teseide, the Amorosa Visione, the Filostrato, and wrote the Fiammetta and the Ninfale Fiesolano, and somewhat in that sequence; though save with regard to the Filocolo perhaps, we have no notice or date or hint even of the order of their production, either from himself or any of his contemporaries.
It was at this time, too, that he perfected himself in the Latin tongue and read the classics, of which he shows he had a marvellously close if uncritical knowledge. His state of soul is visible in his work, which is so extraordinarily personal. A single thought seems to fill his mind: he had loved a princess, and had been loved in return; she had forsaken him, but she remained, in spite of everything, the lode-star of his life. He writes really of nothing else but this. Full of her he sets himself to glorify her, and to tell over and over again his own story.
It was the story of Florio and Biancofiore, popular enough in Naples, that had charmed Fiammetta at first hearing in the convent parlour at S. Arcangelo a Baiano, and it is round this tale that the Filocolo is written.215 As he tells us himself in the first page, this was the first book he made to please her, and it was therefore probably begun in the summer of 1331.216 The work thus undertaken seems to have grown on his hands, and can indeed have been no light task: it is the longest of his works after the Decameron, and the weakest of all. The book, indeed, as we now have it, must have demanded years of labour; as he himself exclaims: “O piccolo mio libretto a me più anni stato graziosa fatica”;217 and it is certain that it was still unfinished when he returned to Florence, and probable that it remained so for some years. The narrative is complicated, and the relation very long drawn out and even tiresome.
There live in Rome, we learn, Quinto Lelio Africano and Giulia Tropazia his wife, who have been married for five years, and yet, to their sorrow, have no children. Lelio is descended from the conqueror of Carthage, Scipio Africanus, and Giulia from the Julian stock. They are both pious Christians and vow a pilgrimage to S. James of Compostella if, in answer to the prayers of that saint, God will vouchsafe them a child. Their prayers are heard, and with a great company they set out on pilgrimage to Spain in fulfilment of their vow.
Now this pilgrimage has especially infuriated the ancient enemy of mankind, here half Satan, half Pluto, and he is resolved to hinder it. In the form of a knight he appears before King Felice of Spain, who is descended in direct line from Atlas, the bearer of the heavens, and tells him how his faithful city of Marmorina has been assailed by the Romans, how it was sacked and its inhabitants put to the sword without mercy.
Much moved to anger by this tale, King Felice sets out against the Romans, and meeting Lelio with his people on pilgrimage, takes them for his enemies and attacks them. The little Roman company defends itself with the courage of despair, but ends by succumbing to overwhelming force. All the Romans are killed on the field and their women made prisoners; but not before the King understands how maliciously he has been deceived by the devil, and how the folk he has killed were but innocent pilgrims. So he leads Giulia and Glorizia her friend to his wife in Seville, where a great fête is given in his honour.
And as it happens Giulia and the Queen give birth in the same day to a daughter and a son respectively, who are given the names of Biancofiore and Florio. Giulia, however, dies in child-bed, and her daughter Bianc
ofiore is educated by the Queen with her son Florio. The two children learn to read in the “santo libro d’ Ovidio,” in which Boccaccio tells us the poet shows, “come i santi fuochi di Venere si deano ne’ freddi cuori con sollecitudine accendere.” And this reading is not without its effect; the two children fall in love, Love himself appearing to them.
There follows what we might expect. The King is angered at their love, and refuses to permit the union of his son with an unknown Roman girl. He sends the fifteen-year-old Florio to Montorio, ostensibly to study philosophy, but really to forget Biancofiore. After the parting, charmingly told, in which Florio calls on the gods and heroes, and Biancofiore gives him a ring which will always tell him of her safety, he departs. The King, however, profiting by his absence, plots against Biancofiore with the assistance of Massamutino the seneschal. At a sumptuous banquet given in the castle the girl is accused of having tried to poison him. She is condemned to the stake, and Massamutino is to execute the sentence.
Meanwhile Florio has been disquieted by the sudden tarnishing of the ring. Suddenly Venus appears to him, and bids him go to the assistance of his mistress. Armed with arms terrestrial and celestial, accompanied by Mars, Florio hastens to Marmorina. He frees Biancofiore, and in a sort of duel conquers the seneschal, and having obtained from him a confession of the conspiracy, proves the innocence of Biancofiore and kills him. During all this he is incognito. Then, without heeding her prayers, he gives her once more into the care of the King and returns to Montorio without declaring who he is. There he is tempted to be false to his love by two girls who offer him every sort of love and pleasure, and it is only with difficulty he keeps his faith. He is then assaulted by jealousy, however, for he knows that a young knight, Fileno by name, altogether noble and valorous, is fallen in love with Biancofiore. Florio resolves to kill him, but the youth is advised in a dream of his danger and flies into Tuscany, where, by reason of his continual weeping, he is changed into a fountain near a temple.
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