A WOODCUT FROM THE “DECAMERON.” (VENICE, 1602.) TITLE TO DAY V
(By the courtesy of Messrs. J. & J. Leighton.)
That love of children so characteristic in an Italian, and yet so surprising in Boccaccio to those who without understanding the real simplicity of his nature have been content to think of him as a mere teller of doubtful stories, is one of the most natural and beautiful traits in his character. The little Eletta, “my delight,” appears like a ray of sunshine in a lonely and even gloomy old age, which we may think perhaps, had Violante lived, might have been less bitter, less hard to bear than it proved to be. Nor is this by any means the only glimpse he gives us of his interest in children. Apart from the neglected portraits of the Decameron, we find him referring to them, their health and upbringing, in the Commentary on the Divine Comedy, when he speaks of the danger they are in from careless or neglectful nurses, who put them to rest or sleep in the light and thus hurt their eyes and induce them to squint; and yet he can believe, though probably with less than the common conviction, that a squint is the sign of an evil nature dangerous alike to the afflicted person and to those whom he may encounter.
The letter to Petrarch, however, does not end with Eletta. Boccaccio proceeds to speak of Tullia and her husband Francesco, who presently returned to Venice, and finding him there would have made him his guest, and when he refused insisted on his daily presence at his table. Nor was this all, for Boccaccio tells us that on the eve of his departure, Francesco, knowing him to be very short of money, managed to get him into a quiet corner, and putting his strong hand on the feeble arm of his guest, would not let him depart till he had given him succour, rushing away before he could thank him. “Knowing me to be poor,” Boccaccio writes, “on my departure from Venice, the hour being already late, he led me into a corner (in secessu domus me traxit) and in a few words, his great hands on my feeble arm (manibus illis giganteis suis in brachiolum meum injectis), forced me in spite of my embarrassment to accept his great liberality and then escaped, saying good-bye as he went, leaving me to blame myself. May God render it him again!”
It is perhaps in that letter we see Boccaccio better than in any other of his writings; the greatest man then in Italy playing with a little child, obliged in his poverty to accept assistance from one who was almost a stranger. It was on the 30th June that Boccaccio wrote that letter to Petrarch from Florence, so that he would seem to have arrived home about midsummer.
In the following year we catch sight of him again in the service of the Republic, first, as one of the Camarlinghi,492 later, on an embassy to the Pope, who had set out for Italy in April, and had entered Rome in October, 1367.493
In 1365 Urban had been besieged in Avignon by Duguesclin on his way to Spain, and had had to pay an enormous ransom as well as to absolve his enemy and his followers from all censures. This mishap, coupled with the invitation of the Romans, the passionate exhortations of Peter of Aragon, the eloquent appeal of Petrarch, and the urgent call of Albornoz, seems to have induced the Pope to undertake this adventure, which he had always looked forward to. He sailed, in spite of the opposition of the King of France, for Corneto, and at last came safely to Viterbo, which he entered in state on June 9, 1367, “with such grace and exultation that it seemed the very stones would cry, ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord.’”494 In Viterbo the Pope began to arrange a league against the Visconti, but he was already having trouble with Siena, and on August 20 the great Albornoz died. In September, too, a French tumult broke out in the city, and though Florence, Siena, and even Rome sent aid, Urban was besieged for three days, and was doubtless very glad to set out under the escort of the Marquis of Ferrara on October 14 for Rome. Two days later he entered the City in triumph riding on a white mule; he was received with “universal joy and acclamation.”
In the spring of 1368 the Emperor, in accordance with his long unfulfilled promise to the league, came into Italy with an army to bridle the Visconti. The Papal forces and those of Giovanna of Naples joined his, but achieved nothing. Then the Emperor came into Tuscany. The rising of the Salimbeni followed in Siena, and the Emperor passed through Siena on his way to Viterbo. On October 21 he entered Rome leading the Pope’s mule on foot.
It seems to have been at this moment that the Florentines thought well to send an embassy to Urban and to choose Boccaccio once more as their ambassador. All we know about the affair is, however, that on December 1, 1368, Urban wrote to the Signoria of Florence that he understood from their ambassador Giovanni Boccaccio that they desired to assist him in reforming the affairs of Italy, and that Boccaccio, whom he praises, bears his reply viva voce.495
The truth of the matter was that all Italy was uneasy. The advent of the Emperor had ruined the peace of Tuscany, Lombardy was ablaze with war, the Papacy was divided against itself. The French party — five French cardinals had altogether refused to leave Avignon — now ceased urging the Pope to return. Helpless and disillusioned, Urban was at the mercy of the circumstances in which he found himself, and a year later he in fact abandoned Italy again, setting out for Avignon in September, and dying there in December, 1369.
It has been said that in 1368 Boccaccio went to Padua to see Petrarch.496 But this seems extremely unlikely, for quite apart from the fact that his growing infirmities made such a journey difficult, as we have seen in the previous year the circumstances of the time made such a journey almost impossible. Even Petrarch, a born traveller, a man who delighted in journeying, found it extremely difficult to make his way from Milan in July of that year, where he had been present at the marriage of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, to Violante, Duke Galeazzo Visconti’s daughter, to Padua. “He chartered a boat,” we read, “coaxed a half-frightened company of boatmen to work her, with no weapons to defend himself, and sailed down the Po. The adventure had an astonishing success. Through the river-fleets and between the manned squadrons of both armies sailed this invalid old man of a perfect courage, and the officers of both hosts vied with one another in doing him honour. His voyage was a triumphal progress....” But Boccaccio was not the world-famed Petrarch.
What does seem certain is that in 1370 he went to Naples, where he remained till 1371. This journey southward seems to have been undertaken at the invitation of a certain Abbate Niccolò di Montefalcone, who, probably during a sojourn in Tuscany, having borrowed his Tacitus of Boccaccio, invited the poet to visit him in his convent, the Certosa di S. Stefano, in Calabria.497
He set out from Certaldo much charmed by the affection which the Abbate had professed for him, and delighted at the prospect of visiting his convent, with its shady woods and tranquil country-side watered by limpid streams; a place rich in books and in peace. But he had not reached his destination before he learned that the Abbate had left Calabria, as he suspected on purpose to avoid him. He was compelled to turn aside in the winter rains and to take refuge in Naples. There, justly angry at the treatment he, a poor and old man, famous too, and the friend of Petrarch, had received at the hands of a rascal, he wrote the wretched monk a letter which, that posterity may add its indignation to his, has happily come down to us. In that letter, so full of just resentment, Boccaccio accuses this blackguard of being a liar and a hypocrite. It is in fact impossible to excuse this unworthy but too common son of the Church from the accusations of Boccaccio. He must have known that the poet was old and infirm and very poor, yet apparently to amuse himself he put him to the great expense of energy and money which such a journey entailed.498 In Florence it was said Boccaccio had gone to make him a monk.
That letter to the Abbate bears the date of xiii. Kal. Feb. and was written in Naples. The year is indicated by the fact that Boccaccio speaks there of the death of Urban V and the election of his successor, Gregory XI.499 It seems certain then that in January, 1371, Boccaccio was in Naples.500 There he was befriended by Conte Ugo di S. Severino, who as soon as he heard of his arrival and his poverty came to salute him and to offer to maintain him during his stay, and on his d
eparture presented him with gifts “more worthy of the giver than the receiver.”
While he was in Naples he also met a friar minor, by name Ubertino di Corigliano, who had been sent by Frederic of Sicily to conclude peace with Queen Giovanna. He was a professor of theology, a learned man and good talker. Boccaccio spoke with him of the revival of learning. “God,” he says, “has been moved to compassion for the Italian name.... For in our days great men have descended from heaven, unless I am mistaken, gifted with great souls, who have brought back poetry from exile to her ancient throne.”501 Who were these men but Dante, “worthy to be named before all,” and his master Petrarch. He does not add himself, as he well might.502
He seems to have left Naples in the autumn of 1371 and to have returned to Certaldo, where we find him in 1372, for he writes thence to Piero di Monteforte a letter dated “Nonis Aprilis.”503 From that quiet retreat, save to go to Florence, where indeed he had yet to hold the most honourable post of his whole life, he did not stir again, during the few years that remained to him.
CHAPTER XV
PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO — THE LATIN WORKS
THOSE TEN YEARS from 1363 to 1372 had not only been given by Boccaccio to the study of Greek and the service of his country, they had also been devoted to a vast and general accumulation of learning such as was possessed by only one other man of his time, his master and friend Petrarch. It might seem that ever since Boccaccio had met Petrarch he had come under his influence, and in intellectual matters, at any rate, had been very largely swayed by him. In accordance with the unfortunate doctrine of his master, we see him, after 1355, giving up all work in the vulgar, and setting all his energy on work in the Latin tongue, in the study of antiquity and the acquirement of knowledge. From a creative writer of splendid genius he gradually became a scholar of vast reading but of mediocre achievement. He seems to have read without ceasing the works of antiquity, annotating as he read. His learning, such as it was, became prodigious, immense, and, in a sense, universal, and little by little he seems to have gathered his notes into the volumes we know as De Montibus, Sylvis, Fontibus, Lacubus, Fluminibus, Stagnis seu Paludibus, De Nominibus Maris Liber, a sort of dictionary of Geography;504 the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, in nine books, which deals with the vanity of human affairs from Adam to Petrarch;505 the De Claris Mulieribus, which he dedicated to Acciaiuoli’s sister, and which begins with Eve and comes down to Giovanna, Queen of Naples;506 and the De Genealogiis Deorum, in fifteen books, dedicated to Ugo, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, who had begged him to write this work, which is a marvellous cyclopædia of learning concerning mythology507 and a defence of poetry and poets.508 In all these works it must be admitted that we see Boccaccio as Petrarch’s disciple, a pupil who lagged very far behind his master.
As a creative artist, as the author, to name only the best, of the Fiammetta and the Decameron, Boccaccio is the master of a world Petrarch could not enter; he takes his place with Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare, and indeed save Dante no other writer in the Italian tongue can be compared with him.
It is seldom, however, that a great creative artist is also a great scholar, for the very energy and virility and restless impatience which have in some sort enabled him to create living men and women prevent him in his work as a student, as an historian pure and simple, in short, as a scholar. So it was with Boccaccio. The author of the Latin works is not only inferior to the author of the Fiammetta and the Decameron, he is the follower and somewhat disappointing pupil of Petrarch, who contrives to show us at every step his inferiority to his master, his feebler sense of proportion, of philosophy, of the reality of history, above all his feebler judgment. The consideration of these works then would seem to demand of us the consideration of his relations with Petrarch, and it will be convenient at this point to undertake it as briefly as possible.
PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO DISCUSSING
From a miniature in the French version of the “De Casibus Virorum,” made in 1409 by Laurent le Premierfait. MS. late XV century. (Brit. Mus. Showcase V, MS. 126.)
Even in his youth Boccaccio had regarded Petrarch with an enthusiasm and an unenvying modesty that, lasting as it did his whole life long, ripening as it did into one of the greatest friendships in the history of Letters, was perhaps the most beautiful trait in his character. It always seemed to him an unmerited grace that one who was sought out by princes and popes, whose fame filled the universe, should care to be his friend, and this wonder, this admiration, remained with him till death; he never writes Petrarch’s name without, in his enthusiasm, adding to it some flattering epithet. He calls him his “illustrious and sublime master,” his “father and lord,” “a poet who is rather of the company of the ancients than of this modern world,” “a man descended from heaven to restore to Poetry her throne,” the “marvel and glory” of his time.509 He had known and loved his work, as he says, for forty years or more,510 but he had never dared to approach him, though opportunities had not been altogether lacking,511 till Petrarch came to Florence in the autumn of 1350 on his way to win the indulgence of the Jubilee in Rome.512 This was the beginning of that friendship513 which is almost without precedent or imitation in the history of literature. In the following spring, as we have seen, Boccaccio, in the name of Florence, went to Padua to recall Petrarch from exile, to offer him a chair in the new university of his native city, and to restore him the goods confiscated from his father. In Padua he had been Petrarch’s guest for some days; he was a witness of Petrarch’s enthusiasm for “sacred studies,” but apparently was not personally much interested in them, though he calls them sacred, for he employed himself with no less enthusiasm in copying some of Petrarch’s works; by which I at least understand some of his poems in the vulgar. The evenings were spent in the garden, talking, on Boccaccio’s part of politics, on Petrarch’s, as we may suppose, of learning, often till dawn.514
Boccaccio did not see Petrarch again for eight years, till in 1359 he visited him in Milan, and in that year sent him the Divine Comedy, which he had had copied for him; four years later, after his “conversion,” his hysterical adventure with the messenger of the Blessed Pietro, he went to meet his master in Venice for the last time,515 as it proved, for in 1367 he missed him, Petrarch being then in Pavia.516 In all these meetings it is Boccaccio who seeks out Petrarch; his visits are never returned. It is indeed almost touching to see with what ardour and with what abnegation Boccaccio cultivates this friendship which was in fact his greatest pride. He makes Petrarch presents, poor as he is; he sends him the Divine Comedy, S. Augustine’s Commentary on the Psalms, and with his own hand copies for him a book of extracts from Cicero and Varro.517 We do not hear of Petrarch giving him anything in return. It is true he lent him the MS. of Homer and another of Plato, but he borrowed the translation of the former made at Boccaccio’s expense in order to have it copied for his library. It is ill, however, reckoning up benefits. Petrarch was not small-minded, as the noble letter in which he offers to buy his friend’s library proves. He procured for him the offer of the office of Apostolic Secretary, which Boccaccio had the strength and independence to refuse, and in his will left him, since he knew him to be poor, a cloak to keep him warm on winter nights in his study. If we find his praise of Boccaccio’s work, especially of the Decameron, a little cold and lacking in spontaneity — in fact he admits he has not read the Decameron, but only “run through it”518 — we must remember his absurd and pedantic contempt for work in the vulgar which came upon him in his middle life, so that he was at last really incapable of judging and was in fact hostile to Italian literature,519 and would have destroyed if he could all his own work in that kind.
Boccaccio, on the other hand, was always eager on Petrarch’s behalf and in his defence. He composed an Elogium520 on him and his poetry, in which he defended him from certain reproaches which had been brought against him, and when, as it is said in 1372, a French cardinal attacked his venerated master in the presence of the Pope and denied him the title
of “Phœnix of Poets” that was ordinarily given him, Boccaccio replied with an apology in his favour.521 Nor was this all, for it was mainly by Boccaccio’s efforts that that very disappointing poem the Africa was preserved to us; and indeed, such was his delight in Petrarch, that he arranged in order in a book the letters he had received from him, for he thought himself assured of immortality rather by them than by his own works.522
It is indeed strange and lovely to come upon Boccaccio’s extraordinary modesty: the greatest prose-writer in the Italian language, the greatest story-teller in the world, considered himself of no account at all beside the pedantic lover of Laura, the author of the Africa which he had not seen. The very thought of comparing himself with Petrarch seemed to him a crime. He considered him as not altogether of this world; he dwelt, according to his friend, in a superior region; and as for his work, his writings, his style, they are marvellous and ornate, abounding in sublime thoughts and exquisite expressions, for he only wrote after long reflection, and he drew his thoughts from the depths of his spirit.523 And when Petrarch honoured him with the title of Poet, he declined it;524 his ideal was “to follow very modestly the footsteps of his Silvanus.”
“The illustrious Francesco Petrarca,” he writes in another place,525 “neglecting the precepts of certain writers who scarcely attain to the threshold of poetry, began to take the way of antiquity with so much force of character, with such enthusiasm and perspicacity, that no obstacle would arrest him, nor could ridicule turn him from his way. Far from that, breaking through and tearing away the brambles and bushes with which by the negligence of men the road was covered, and remaking a solid road of the rocks heaped up and made impassable by inundations, he opened a passage for himself and for those who would come after him. Then, cleansing the fountain of Helicon from slime and rushes, he restored to the waters their first chastity and sweetness. He opened the fount of Castalia, hidden by wild branches, and cleared the grove of laurels of thorns. Having established Apollo on his throne, and restored to the Muses, disfigured by neglect and rusticity, their ancient beauty, he climbed the highest summits of Parnassus. And having been crowned with a leafy garland by Daphne, he showed himself to the Roman people, with the applause of the Senate, a thing which had not been seen perhaps for more than a thousand years. He forced the gates of the ancient Capitol, creaking on their rusty hinges, and to the great joy of the Romans he made their annals famous by an unaccustomed triumph. O glorious spectacle! O unforgettable act! This man by his prodigious effort, by his work everywhere famous, as though he commanded through the universe the trumpet of Fame, sounded the name of Poetry, brought back again by him from darkness into light. He re-awakened in all generous spirits a hope almost lost till then, and he made it to be seen — what most of us had not believed — that Parnassus was still to be won, that her summit was still to be dared....”
Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio Page 472
