Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Pope’s answer seems to have been far from clear. Boccaccio returned, but a few months later Dietifeci di Michele was sent as ambassador to Avignon with almost the same instructions and with the same object in view.

  Can it be that Florence really did not understand the situation as we see it, or was that situation in reality very dangerous to her liberty? It is difficult to understand how she can have failed to see that the Pope had already won. It was obvious that he had come to some arrangement with Charles, which proved to be that the Church would crown him on condition that he only spent the day of his incoronation in Rome and respected the sovereignty of the Pope in the states of the Church. Moreover, if this were not enough, as Florence knew, the presence of Albornoz in Romagna had already drawn the teeth of the Visconti so far as they were dangerous to Tuscany. However, it seems to have been in considerable fear and perplexity that she saw Charles enter Padua early in November, 1354. Now if ever, some thought doubtless, the White Guelf ideal was to be realised. Among these idealists was, alas, Petrarch, whose hymn, not long written perhaps, Italia Mia, surely dreamed of quite another king than a German prince. Boccaccio was, as I think, better advised. In his seventh Eclogue he mercilessly ridicules Charles, who in fact, though not maybe in seeming, was the instrument of the Pope. He entered Italy by the Pope’s leave. Padua received him with honour, but Cane della Scala of Verona clanged to his gates, and the Visconti with bared teeth waited to see what he would do. He went to Mantua and Gonzaga received him well. There he expected the ambassador of Tuscany, but as the Pope’s friend the Ghibellines knew him not, they smiled bitterly at the “Priests’ Emperor,” only Pisa pathetically stretching out her hands to Cæsar’s ghost, while, as claimant of the imperial title the Guelf republics would have none of him. Florence need have had no fear, the Church had out-manœuvred her enemies as in old time.

  Charles, however, was not contemptible. Simple German as he was, he soon grasped the situation. He made friends in some sort with Visconti, and in this doubtless Petrarch, who had urged him on, was able to assist him. From them he received the iron crown, though not indeed at Monza, but in Milan, in the church of S. Ambrogio, and at their hands. That must have been a remarkable and unhappy time for the King of the Romans, in spite of Petrarch’s talk and friendship. Presently he set out for Pisa and so to Rome, where he received the imperial crown on April 4, 1355, and, returning to Pisa, as though in irony of Petrarch’s enthusiastic politics, crowned the grammarian Zanobi da Strada poet laureate. Yet this was surely but a German joke. As for Florence, still trembling it seems, she took as firm a stand as she could, and asked only the protection and friendship of the Emperor, offering no homage or subordination. The Sienese, on the other hand, in spite of their treaty with Florence, offered him their lordship. Others followed their example, and Pisa was filled with Ghibellines claiming the destruction of Florence, the head and front of the Guelf faction. Charles, however, refused to adventure. He demanded from Florence only money, as a fine, by paying which she was to be restored to his favour, and that her magistrates should be called Vicars of the Empire. She forfeited nothing of her liberty and none of her privileges as a free republic. Yet at first she refused to acquiesce. It was only after an infinite number of explanations that she was brought to consent. Indeed, we read that the “very notary who read out the deed broke down, and the Senate was so affected that it dissolved. On the next day the Act was rejected seven times before it was passed. The bells were the only merry folk in Florence, so jealous were her citizens of the liberty of their state.”

  CHAPTER XII

  1353-1356

  BOCCACCIO’S ATTITUDE TO WOMAN —

  THE CORBACCIO

  Those embassies, for the most part so unsuccessful one may think, which from time to time between 1350 and 1354 Boccaccio had undertaken at the request of the Florentine Republic, heavy though his responsibility must have been in the conduct of them, had by no means filled all his time or seriously prevented the work, far more important as it proved to be, which he had chosen as the business of his life. Between 1348 and 1353, as we shall see, he had written the Decameron; in 1354-5 he seems to have produced the Corbaccio, and not much later the Vita di Dante; while in the complete retirement from political life, from the office of ambassador at any rate, which followed the embassy of 1354 and lasted for eleven years, till indeed in 1365 he went again to Avignon on business of the Republic, he devoted himself almost entirely to study and to the writing of those Latin works of learning which his contemporaries appreciated so highly and which we have perhaps been ready too easily to forget.

  It is generally allowed428 that Boccaccio began the Decameron in 1348, but that it did not see the light in its completeness till 1353, and this would seem reasonable, for it is surely impossible that such a work can have been written in much less than four years. That a considerable time did in fact divide the beginning from the completion of the book Boccaccio himself tells us in the conclusion, at the end of the work of the Tenth Day, where he says: “Though now I approach the end of my labours, it is long since I began to write, yet I am not oblivious that it was to none but to ladies of leisure that I offered my work....”

  That the Decameron was not begun before 1348 would seem to be certain, for even if we take away the Prologue, the form itself is built on the dreadful catastrophe of the Black Death.429 If the book was begun between that year and 1351, it cannot, however, have been suggested, as some have thought, by Queen Giovanna of Naples, for she was then in Avignon. In 1348 Boccaccio was thirty-five years old, and whether at that time he was in Naples or in Forlì with Ordelaffo is, as we have seen, doubtful, though that he was in Naples would appear more likely; but wherever he was he had ample opportunity of witnessing the appalling ravages of the pestilence which he so admirably describes, and which is the contrast of and the excuse for his book, for save in Lombardy and Rome the pestilence was universal throughout Italy. In 1353, however, we know him to have been resident in Florence, and if we accept the tradition, which there is no reason at all to doubt, it was in that year that the complete Decameron first saw the light.430 It was known, however, in part, long before that, and would seem indeed to have been published — if one may so express it — in parts; not perhaps ten stories at a time — a day at a time — as Foscolo431 has conjectured, but certainly in parts, most likely of various quantity and at different intervals. This would seem to be obvious from the introduction to the Fourth Day, where Boccaccio speaks of the envy and criticism that “these little stories” had excited, and proceeds to answer his detractors. It is obvious that he could not at the beginning of the Fourth Day have answered criticisms of his work if some of it had not already seen the light and been widely read.

  It must have been then when he was about forty years old that he finished the Decameron, that extraordinary impersonal work in which in the strongest contrast with his other books he has almost completely hidden himself from us. He might seem at last in those gay, licentious, and profoundly secular pages, often so delightfully satirical and always so full of common sense, so sane as we might say, to have lost himself in a joyous contemplation and understanding of the world in which he lived, to have forgotten himself in a love of it.

  I speak fully of the Decameron elsewhere, and have indeed only mentioned it here for two reasons — to fix its date in the story of his life, and to contrast it and its mood with the work which immediately followed it, the Corbaccio and the Vita di Dante.

  We cannot, I think, remind ourselves too often in our attempts — and after all they can never be more than attempts — to understand the development of Boccaccio’s mind, of his soul even, that he had but one really profound passion in his life, his love for Fiammetta. And as that had been one of those strong and persistent sensual passions which are among the strangest and bitterest things in the world,432 his passing love affairs — and doubtless they were not few — with other women had seemed scarcely worth recounting.433 That he never forgot Fiammetta, that he never f
reed himself from her remembrance, are among the few things concerning his spiritual life which we may assert with a real confidence. It is true that in the Proem to the Decameron he would have it otherwise, but who will believe him? There he says — let us note as we read that even here he cannot but return to it — that: “It is human to have compassion on the afflicted; and as it shows very well in all, so it is especially demanded of those who have had need of comfort and have found it in others: among whom, if any had ever need thereof or found it precious or delectable, I may be numbered; seeing that from my early youth even to the present,434 I was beyond measure aflame with a most aspiring and noble love, more perhaps than were I to enlarge upon it would seem to accord with my lowly condition. Whereby, among people of discernment to whose knowledge it had come, I had much praise and high esteem, but nevertheless extreme discomfort and suffering, not indeed by reason of cruelty on the part of the beloved lady, but through superabundant ardour engendered in the soul by ill-bridled desire; the which, as it allowed me no reasonable period of quiescence, frequently occasioned me an inordinate distress. In which distress so much relief was afforded me by the delectable discourse of a friend and his commendable consolations that I entertain a very solid conviction that I owe it to him that I am not dead. But as it pleased Him who, being infinite, has assigned by immutable law an end to all things mundane, my love, beyond all other fervent, and neither to be broken nor bent by any force of determination, or counsel of prudence, or fear of manifest shame or ensuing danger, did nevertheless in course of time abate of its own accord, in such wise that it has now left naught of itself in my mind but that pleasure which it is wont to afford to him who does not adventure too far out in navigating its deep seas; so that, whereas it was used to be grievous, now, all discomfort being done away, I find that which remains to be delightful ... now I may call myself free.”

  His love is not dead, but is no longer the sensual agony, the spiritual anguish it had once been, but it “remains to be delightful.” That it remained, though perhaps not always “to be delightful,” that it remained, is certain. For though he “may now call myself free,” that Proem tells us that after all we owe the Decameron itself indirectly to Fiammetta. And who reading those tales can believe in his vaunted emancipation, if by that is meant his forgetfulness of her? She lives everywhere in those wonderful pages. Is she not one of the seven ladies of the Decameron? That is true, it will be said, but she has no personality there, she is but one of ten protagonists who are without life and individuality. Let it be granted. But whereas the others are in fact but lay figures, she, Fiammetta, though she remains just an idol if you will, is to be worshipped, is to be decked out with the finest words, to be honoured and glorified. Her name scarcely occurs but he praises her; he is always describing her; while for the others he seldom spares a word. Who can tell us what Pampinea, Filomena, Emilia, Neifile, or Elisa were like? But for Fiammetta — he tells us everything; and when, as in the Proem we have just discussed or in the Conclusion to the Fourth Day, he speaks for himself, it is her he praises, it is of her he writes. She is there crowned as queen. It is Filostrato who crowns her: “taking the laurel wreath from his own head, and while the ladies watched to see to whom he would give it, set it graciously upon the blonde head of Fiammetta, saying: ‘Herewith I crown thee, as deeming that thou, better than any other, will know how to make to-morrow console our fair companions for the rude trials of to-day.’ Fiammetta, whose wavy tresses fell in a flood of gold over her white and delicate shoulders, whose softly rounded face was all radiant with the very tints of the white lily blended with the red of the rose, who carried two eyes in her head that matched those of the peregrine falcon, while her tiny sweet mouth showed a pair of lips that shone as rubies....”

  And it is the same with the Conclusion of the book, which in fact closes with her name, and with the question Boccaccio must have asked her living and dead his whole life long: “Madonna, who is he that you love?”

  That he never forgot her, then, is certain; but Fiammetta was dead, and for Boccaccio more than for any other man of letters perhaps, love with its extraordinary bracing of the intellect as well as of the body was in some sort a necessity. Never, as we may think, handsome, in 1353, at forty years of age, he was already past his best, fat and heavy and grey-haired. The death of Fiammetta, his love affair with her, had left him with a curious fear of marriage, ill-disguised and very characteristic. If he had ever believed in the perfection of woman in the way of Dante and Petrarch and the prophets of romantic love — and without thereby damning him it is permissible to doubt this — he had long ceased to hold any such creed or to deceive himself about them. Woman in the abstract was for him the prize of life; he desired her not as a friend, but as the most exquisite instrument of pleasure, beyond the music of flutes or the advent of spring. 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 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. “The Muses are ladies,” he says,435 speaking in his own person — he had, as we have seen, been accused of being too fond of them— “and albeit ladies are not the peers of the Muses, yet they have their outward semblance, for which cause, if for no other, it is reasonable that I should be fond of them. Besides which ladies have been to me the occasion of composing some thousand verses, but of never a verse that I made were the Muses the occasion.”

  He loves women then, but he is not deluded by them — or rather, as we should say, because he loves them he does not therefore respect them also. He considers them as fair or unfair, or as he himself has it,436 “fair and fit for amorous dalliance” or “spotted lizards.” He does not believe in them or their virtue — their sexual virtue that is — nor does he value it very highly.437 It is a thing for priests and nuns, and even there rare enough. But in the world —— !

  In one place in the Decameron438 he speaks of the “insensate folly of those who delude themselves ... with the vain imagination that, while they go about the world, taking their pleasure now of this, now of the other woman, their wives, left at home, suffer not their hearts to stray from their girdles, as if we who are born of them and live among them could be ignorant of the bent of their desires.” Moreover, he considers that “a woman who indulges herself in the intimate use with a man commits but a sin of nature; but if she rob him or slay him or drive him into exile, her sin proceeds from depravity of spirit.” Thus, as the story shows, to deny him the satisfaction of his desire would be a greater sin than to accord it to him.

  Again, in another tale,439 we see his insistence upon what he considers — and not certainly without reason — as the reality of things, to deny which would be not merely useless, but even ridiculous. Certain “very great merchants of Italy, met in Paris,” are “discussing their wives at home....”440 “I cannot answer for my wife,” says one, “but I own that whenever a girl that is to my mind comes in my way, I give the go-by to the love I bear my wife and take my pleasure of the new-comer to the best of my power.” “And so do I,” said another, “because I know that whether I suspect her or no my wife tries her fortune, and so it is ‘do as you are done by.’” All agree save a Genoese, who stakes everything on his wife’s virtue. He proves right, his wife is virtuous; but the whole company is incredulous, and when one of them tells him he is talking nonsense, and that the general opinion of women’s virtue “is only what common sense dictates,” he carries the whole company with him. He admits that “doubtless few [women] would be found to indulge in casual amours if every time they did so a horn grew out on the brow to attest the fact; but not only does no horn make its appearance, but not so
much as a trace or vestige of a horn, so only they be prudent; and the shame and dishonour consist only in the discovery; wherefore if they can do it secretly they do it, or are fools to refrain. Hold it for certain that she alone is chaste who either had never a suit made to her, or suing herself was repulsed. And albeit I know that for reasons true and founded in nature this must needs be, yet I should not speak so positively thereof as I do had I not many a time with many a woman verified it by experience.”

  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. It was not that woman as we see her there is basely vicious; but that she is altogether without ideality, light-hearted and complacent, easily yielding to caprice, to the allure of pleasure, to the first solicitation that comes to her in a propitious hour, and this rather because of a certain gaminerie, a lightness, an incorrigible naughtiness, than because of a real depravity. Like all Italians — the great exceptions only prove the rule — she is without a fundamental moral sense. She sins lightly, easily, without regret, dazzled by life, by the pleasure of life.

  Such, then, was the attitude of Boccaccio towards woman at the time when he was writing the Decameron, that is to say, from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year. And we may well ask whether he had always thought as he did then, and if not, what had been the cause of his disillusion and what was to be the result of it?

  It is difficult to answer the first of these questions with any certainty. And yet it might seem incredible that in his youth he had already emancipated himself from an illusion — if illusion it be — that seems proper to it in all ages, and that was so universal in the Middle Age as to inform the greater part of its secular literature — the illusion that woman was something to be worshipped, something almost sacred, to be approached in great humility, with gentleness and reverence.