This very method which in regard to Shakespeare and Sidney has brought us to absurdity has been applied, though with some excuse, to Boccaccio in regard to his love for Fiammetta. It has been necessary, apparently, to defeat the heresiarchs with their own weapons, to write pamphlets to prove that Boccaccio’s love for Fiammetta was a real passion361 and not a figment of his imagination, and this in spite of the fact that he tells us over and over and over again almost every detail of that love which was the sunlight and shadow of his youth, the consolation and the regret of his manhood and age. Yes, say the dissenters, we must admit that; but on the other hand you must allow that Boccaccio carefully wraps everything up in mystery; he gives us not a single date, and in his own proper person he says nothing, or almost nothing, about it. Well, there is some truth in that; but Boccaccio did not write an autobiography, and if he had, it would scarcely have been decent then, whatever it may be thought now, to proclaim himself, actually in so many words with names and dates, the lover of a married lady, and this would have been almost impossible if that lady were the daughter of a king. Thus on the face of it, the last thing we ought to expect is a frank statement of such facts as these.
But then, the dissenters continue, none of the contemporary biographers, such as Villani and Bandino,362 say anything of the matter. Our answer to that is that they had nothing to say for the same reason that a modern biographer would have or should have nothing to say in similar circumstances. But in spite of the diversity of opinion which we find for these and similar reasons, we must suppose, that even to-day, to every type of mind and soul save the critic of literature it must be evident that the love of Boccaccio for Fiammetta was an absolutely real thing, so real that it made Boccaccio what he was, and led him to write those early works which we have already examined and to compose the majority of the poems which we are now about to consider and to enjoy.363
But before we proceed to consider in detail these sonnets and songs of Boccaccio, we must decide which of all those that from time to time have passed under his name are really his. And here we will say at once that no English writer, no foreign writer at all, has a right to an opinion. Such a question, involving as it does the subtlest and most delicate rhythm of verse, cannot be solved by any one who is not an Italian, for to us the most characteristic and softest music of the Tuscan must ever pass unheard. So the French have made of Poe a very great poet because they, being foreigners, can hear, and not too easily, his melody; while the music of Herrick, for instance, is too subtle for them in the foreign tongue. No, for us there remains the received canon of Boccaccio’s Rime to which no doubt can attach, and that consists of one hundred and four sonnets, namely, Nos. 1-101 and 107, 109, and 110 in Baldelli’s edition,364 and a poem which Baldelli refused to print because he thought it obscene, though in fact it is not, Poi, Satiro se’ fatto sì severo — all these conserved in Prof. Cugnoni’s codex of the Rime.365 We may add the two ballate, the first madrigale, the capitolo on the twelve beautiful ladies, and the ballata which Baldelli mistakenly calls a canzone from the Livorno collection. To these we may add again four sonnets and a ternario from the codex Marciana (Venice, it cl. ix. 257), and finally the madrigal O giustizia Regina in codex Laurenziana (Florence, xl. 43).366
Having thus decided on our text, let us try to get it into some sort of order. Baldelli’s collection, which has been twice reprinted, is itself an utter confusion,367 a mere heap of good things. If we are to make anything of these poems we must arrange them in some sort of sequence, either of date or of contents. No one can possibly arrange them in the order in which they were written, and therefore, though there are lacunæ, for we cannot suppose that we are in possession of all Boccaccio’s verse, or if we were that he would consciously have written a story in sonnets, we shall try to arrange them in accordance with their subjects. In this I follow for the most part the work of the Signori Manicardi and Massera. They were not, however, the first to try their hands at it. The learned Signore Antona Traversi368 had already suggested a method of grouping these sonnets, when they began to bring a real order out of chaos.
To make a long story short, Signor Antona Traversi thought he could distinguish four sonnets which were written before any of those he wished to give to Fiammetta. He found seventy-eight which were inspired by her, nine of which were concerned with her death. Two others he thought were composed for the widow of the Corbaccio.369
The sonnets to Fiammetta, sixty-nine of which were written to her living and nine to her dead, he arranges in a sort of categories, thus: twenty-six sonnets he calls “ideal” — these were written to her in the first years that followed Boccaccio’s meeting with her; nineteen he calls “sensual” — these were composed before he possessed her at Baia; twenty-three he calls “very sensual” — these were written in the fullness of his enjoyment, when his most impetuous desires had been satisfied. Finally, Signor Antona Traversi finds one sonnet where we may see his sorrow at having lost his mistress.
But this method is almost the same as that we found so absurd in the dissenters, who eagerly deny the reality of any love which man has cared to express. Its success depends entirely on our absolute knowledge of the psychology of man’s heart, of a poet’s heart. What knowledge, then, have we which will enable us to divide what is ideal love here from what is base love, the false from the true? Is the parable of the tares and the wheat to go for nothing? And again, can we divide love, the love of any man for any woman, if indeed it be love, into “sensual,” “ideal,” and so forth? Indeed, for such a desperate operation one would need a knowledge of man beside which that of Shakespeare would be as a rushlight to the sun. Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion? Who shall divide love into periods of the soul? These are things too wonderful for me, which I know not. Are not “idealism” and “sensuality” moods of the same passion, often simultaneous and always interchangeable? Or do the critics speak of affection? But I speak not of affection. I speak of love — a flame of fire. And whatever Boccaccio’s love may have been, good or bad as you will, I care not what you decide to think, this at least it was, a passion, a passion which mastered him and destroyed in him much that was good, much that was bad, but that made of him a poet and the greatest story-teller in the world. Such a passion was composed of an infinite number of elements spiritual and physical, in which the sensual presupposes the ideal even as the ideal does the sensual. Who may divide what God has joined together? And if one might — what disaster!
As though this difficulty were not enough to stagger even the most precise among us, we have to take this also into account, that for the first time in modern literature, love, human love, is freely expressed in Boccaccio’s sonnets. It is true Dante had sung of Beatrice till she vanishes away into a mere symbol, far and far from our world in the ever-narrowing circles of his Paradise. So Petrarch had sung of Laura till the coldness of her smile — ah! in the sunshine of Provence — has frozen his song on his lips, so that it is as smooth and as brittle as ice. It is not of such as these that Boccaccio sings, but of a woman mean and lovely, beautiful as the sea and as treacherous, infinitely various, licentious, sentimental, of two minds in a single heart’s beat, who smiled his soul out of his body in a short hour on a spring morning in church, who passed with him for her own pleasure in the shadow of the myrtles at Baia, whom he took by the hair, and kissed cruelly, thirsty for kisses, on the mouth, and who, being weary, as women will be, threw him aside for no cause but for this, that she had won his love. No man but Dante could have loved Beatrice, for he made her; and for Laura, she is so dim, so mere a ghost, I only know her name; but for Fiammetta, which of us would not have staked his eternal good, since in her we recognise the very truth; not “every woman” — God forbid — but woman, and if, as the dissenters would assert, she is a myth, a creation of Boccaccio’s, then indeed he was an artist only second to the greatest, for she is only less human, less absolute than Cleopatra.
We may take it then, first, t
hat Boccaccio’s love was a reality, and not a “literary exercise” that he performed in these sonnets; and then, that if we are to get any order at all out of those which deal with so profound and difficult a subject as love, we must not hope to do it by dividing them into certain artificial categories, such as of “ideal love,” of “sensual love,” of “very sensual love.”
Let us begin with certainties. We can dispose of certain of the poems at once. Sonnet xcvii. to Petrarch, who is dead, must have been written after July 20, 1374. Sonnets vii., viii., ix., which deal with certain censures which had been passed on his Exposition of Dante, were certainly written after August, 1373, when Boccaccio was appointed to lecture on the Divine Comedy. In sonnets i., xxvi., xlii., lxiv., lxviii., and xciii. he alludes to the fact that he is growing old.370 In sonnet ciii. he says he is sorry to depart without hope of seeing his lady again: —
“Ma ciò mai non avviene, e me partire
Or convien contra grado, nè speranza
Di mai vederti mi rimane alcuna.
Onde morrommi, caro mio disire,
E piangerò, il tempo che m’ avanza,
Lontano a te, la mia crudel fortuna.”
If this refers to Fiammetta, as seems certain, it should have been written in 1340-1. Finally, it is natural to suppose that the greater part of the sonnets written to Fiammetta living were composed between 1331 and 1341, while those to Fiammetta dead were written after 1348. From these facts I pass on to make the only possible distribution of the Rime that our present knowledge allows.
Let us begin by distinguishing the love poems from the rest, which for the most part belong to Boccaccio’s old age. There are thirty-two poems which are not concerned with love, namely, twenty-nine sonnets: Nos. i., vi.-xii., xxvi.-xxviii., xxxvi., xlii., xlix., lvi., lxviii., lxxiv., lxxviii., xci.-xcvi., xcix., ci., Poi Satiro, Saturna al coltivar, Allor che regno, and to these we may add the capitolo, the ballata of the beautiful ladies, and the madrigal O giustizia regina.
There are nine, if not eleven, sonnets written in morte di Madonna Fiammetta: (xix.?), xxi., xxix., li., (lviii.?), lx., lxvii., lxxiii., lxxxviii., xc., xcviii.
All the rest are love poems. Let us begin with them. And the first question that must be answered is: Were they all written to Fiammetta, or were some of them composed for one or other of the women with whom Boccaccio from time to time was in relations?
Crescini tells us that it is only just to admit that atleast the greater part of the love poems of Boccaccio refer to Fiammetta. Landau is more precise, and Antona Traversi follows him in naming sonnets c. and ci. (the latter we do not call a love poem) as written for Pampinea or Abrotonia. To these Antona Traversi adds sonnets xii. and xvii. (the former we do not call a love poem), which he thinks were written for one of the ladies Boccaccio loved before he met Fiammetta.371 I give them both in Rossetti’s translation: —
“By a clear well, within a little field
Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,
Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)
Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield
Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield
The golden hair their shadow; while the two
Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through
With a soft wind for ever stirred and still.
After a little while one of them said
(I heard her), ‘Think! If, ere the next hour struck,
Each of our lovers should come here to-day,
Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?’
To whom the others answered, ‘From such luck
A girl would be a fool to run away.’”
That might seem to be just a thing seen, perfectly expressed, so that we too feel the enchantment of the summer day, the stillness and the heat; but if indeed it be written for any one, it might seem to be rather for the blonde Fiammetta than for any other lady.
THE STORY OF GRISELDA. (DEC. X, 10)
From the picture by Pesellino in the Morelli Gallery at Bergamo.
Sonnet xvii., however, is, it seems to me as it seemed to Rossetti, clearly Fiammetta’s. Is it not a reminiscence of happiness at Baia?
“Love steered my course, while yet the sun rode high,
On Scylla’s waters to a myrtle grove:
The heaven was still and the sea did not move;
Yet now and then a little breeze went by
Stirring the tops of trees against the sky:
And then I heard a song as glad as love,
So sweet that never yet the like thereof
Was heard in any mortal company.
‘A nymph, a goddess or an angel sings
Unto herself, within this chosen place,
Of ancient loves’; so said I at that sound.
And there my lady, ‘mid the shadowings
Of myrtle trees, ‘mid flowers and grassy space,
Singing I saw, with others who sat round.”
Of the rest the following seem to be doubtfully addressed to Fiammetta:372 Sonnet xxxv. may refer to his abandonment by Fiammetta; cix. seems to refer to the same misfortune; lxxxi. was possibly written before he possessed her; but these two and xlv., lxiv., lxv., and c. seem to Manicardi and Massera too much of the earth for Fiammetta, and they regard them as later work. As we have already said,373 in sonnet lxiv. he speaks of growing grey.
When we have disposed of these, the rest seem to belong to Fiammetta. If we would have nothing but certainties, however, we must distinguish. In lxvii. and lxx. (the first in morte) her name occurs, while in xl., xli., xlvi., lxiii., in the ternaria, Amor che con sua forza (verse 18), and the fragment of the sestina, her name is clearly hinted at, as it probably is in sonnet lxxxiii. (verse 11).374 Again in iv., xv., xxxiii., lxix., Baia is spoken of; and in xxxiv., xlvii., xlviii., Miseno. In v. and lii. Naples is named as Parthenope; in xxxii. and liii. the scene is on the sea, and near it in xxxi.375 In sonnet xxxviii. we see him falling in love: —
“All’ ombra di mille arbori fronzuti,
In abito leggiadro e gentilesco,
Con gli occhi vaghi e col cianciar donnesco
Lacci tendea, da lei prima tessuti
De’ suoi biondi capei crespi e soluti
Al vento lieve, in prato verde e fresco,
Un’ angioletta, a’ quai giungeva vesco
Tenace Amor, ed ami aspri ed acuti;
Da quai, chi v’ incappava lei mirando,
Invan tentava poi lo svilupparsi;
Tant’ era l’ artificio ch’ ei teneva,
Ed io lo so, che me di me fidando
Più che ‘l dovere, infra i lacciuoli sparsi
Fui preso da virtù, ch’ io non vedeva.”
While in sonnets iii., xviii., xxiv., xxv., xxx., xl., xli., lxi. he praises who but Fiammetta: —
“Le bionde trecce, chioma crespa e d’ oro
Occhi ridenti, splendidi e soavi....”
These sonnets were written to Fiammetta before the betrayal, and to them I would add sonnets xxii. and lxxxvi. —
“Se io potessi creder, che in cinqu’ anni ...”
which I have already referred to and used in suggesting that five years passed between the innamoramento and the possession in Boccaccio’s love affair.376
I now turn to the sonnets, which, in their dolorous complaint, would seem to belong to the period after his betrayal. In sonnets lxxix. and lxxx. he reproves Love, in lxx. he swears that love is more than honour, in lvii. he invokes death as his only refuge, in lxxvii. he burns with love and rage: —
“Ed io, dolente solo, ardo ed incendo
In tanto fuoco, che quel di Vulcano
A rispetto non è ch’ una favilla.”
In sonnets iv., v., xliii., lv., and ballata i. he is altogether desperate. In iv. we have the splendidly bitter invective against Baia already quoted.377
It is true that we should not have recognised the soul of Fiammetta as the “chastest that ever was in woman”; but that
Boccaccio could think so is not only evidence that he had been blind, as he says, but also of the eagerness of his passion. If we had any doubt of the reason of his misery, however, it is removed by sonnets xliii., lv., and ballata i., where his betrayal is explicitly mentioned.378 In sonnet xvi. a thousand ways of dying present themselves to him; in cv. he hopes, how vainly, to win her back again: —
“Questa speranza sola ancor mi resta,
Per la qual vivo, ingagliardisco e tremo
Dubbiando che la morte non m’ invole....”
With these sonnets we should compare xxxvii., xxxix., xlvi., lxxv., lxxxvii., and ciii. Sonnet lxxxvii. is perhaps the most beautiful of these poems written in despair: it has been quoted above.379
In sonnets xiv. and lxxi. he tries to rouse himself, to free himself, in vain, from love;380 while in sonnet lxxii. he likens himself to Prometheus. He bemoans his fortune again and again in sonnets ii., xxx., lii., cx.; while in xx. and cvii. he tries to hope in some future. Whether that future ever came we do not know. There is no hint of it in the sonnets, and on the whole one is inclined to think it did not.381 His last sight of Fiammetta, recorded after her death, we may find in the beautiful sonnet so marvellously translated by Rossetti: — 382
“Round her red garland and her golden hair
I saw a fire about Fiammetta’s head;
Thence to a little cloud I watched it fade,
Than silver or than gold more brightly fair;
And like a pearl that a gold ring doth bear,
Even so an angel sat therein, who sped
Alone and glorious throughout heaven, array’d
In sapphires and in gold that lit the air.
Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio Page 465
