Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  Such is one of the stories of the De Claris Mulieribus. But though it be one of the best tales there, and indeed we may compare it with a famous story in the Decameron,547 it is by no means characteristic of the whole book, which has its more serious side, for Boccaccio uses his facts, his supposed facts, often enough to admonish his contemporaries, and therefore to some extent the work may be said to have had a moral purpose.

  Yet after all, what chiefly interests us in an inferior piece of work is the view of woman we find there. And strangely enough, in this book so full of mere foolishness and unhappy scolding we find a purer and more splendid praise of woman than anywhere else in his work. “A woman,” he tells us, “can remain pure in the midst of corruptions and every horror and vice as a ray of sunlight remains pure even when it falls on a filthy puddle.” Yes, they can do so, and that he admits it, is at least something, but if we may judge from this book it was by no means his opinion that commonly they do. For he is always pointing in scorn at the women of his time. He tells of the death of Seneca’s wife, who killed herself that she might not survive her husband, in order that he may preach to the widows of his day, who do not hesitate, we learn, to remarry, “not twice nor thrice, but five or six times.” Again, he tells the story of Dido more according to the legends that had grown up around it than according to the Æneid, in order that it may be an example “above all among Christians” to those widows who take a third or fourth husband.548 Having been betrayed by a widow, he is as personally suspicious of and vindictive against them as the elder Mr. Weller.

  Nor is he sparing in his abuse of women in general. They can only keep a secret of which they are ignorant, he tells us. And like many men who have lived disorderly, he puts an extraordinary, a false, value on chastity. For after recommending all parents to bring up their daughters chastely, which is sane and right, he bids women guard their chastity even to the death, adding that they should prefer a certain death to an uncertain dishonour.549 And after giving more than one example to bear this out, he cites the women of the Cimbri, who, when their husbands fled, besought the Romans to let them enter the house of the Vestals, and when this was denied them killed themselves after murdering their children. Nor does he ever cease to deplore the luxury and coquetry of women, blaming the Roman Senate when, in honour of Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, who had saved the Republic, it allowed matrons to wear earrings. For luxury, says he, is the ruin of women, and so of men also, for the world belongs to men, but men to women.

  Again and again he returns to the attitude he assumed in the Decameron,550 but without its gaiety. Man is the more perfect and the firmer and stronger: how then can a woman do else but yield to her lover? If there are exceptions it is because some women partake of the nature of man, Sulpicia, for instance, who was, he says, “rather a man than a woman,” and indeed some women have a man’s soul in a woman’s body. Nor does he omit any sort or kind of temperament. He shows us the courageous woman in Sofonisba, the voluptuous in Cleopatra, the chaste in Gualdrada, the simple in Paolina, the proud in Zenobia, the resigned in Costanza, the wise in Proba, the intriguer in Poppea, the generous in Sempronia.551 He writes three hundred lives, and in every one we find the same sentiments of passionate interest, suspicion, distrust. If it were possible to gather from this vast depository the type of woman Boccaccio himself preferred, we should find, I think, that she was by no means the intelligent, learned, energetic, independent, and strong-willed woman that negatively, as it were, he praises, for to him she would seem not a woman but a kind of man. No, he remains to worship the beautiful, subtle, credulous, and distracting creature that he had found in that Fiammetta who had betrayed him, — in two minds during a single heart’s beat, cruel and sensual too, eager to love and without responsibility, afraid of the dark, but ready to do anything in things to her mind; in fact, the abused heroine of all his books. But while he adores her, he makes fun of her, he scorns her, he curses her, he hates her, yet in a moment she will be in his arms.

  It was to one such he thought to dedicate this book of Famous Ladies,552 to that Queen Giovanna of Naples, the granddaughter of King Robert the Wise, who had been the father of his own Fiammetta. But in the last chapter of the book, which is a long panegyric in her honour, he praises her not as a woman but as a great and powerful king. We do not know, alas! what he really thought of her, for eager Guelf and Angevine as he always was, he would be the last to tell us the truth, if it were evil, about this unhappy lady, and here at least his work is so full of praise that there is no room for judgment. If he had once spoken evil of her553 he has here made amends, but in such a way that we are in no way enlightened and remain as always at the mercy of the chroniclers.554

  If we needed any evidence other than the works themselves that these compilations in Latin worried and bored Boccaccio, we should find it in the De Casibus Virorum, a vast work in nine books, which was taken up and put aside in disgust not less than three times, and at last only completed by the continual urgings of Petrarch, who, not understanding the disgust of the creative artist for this kind of book-making, was reduced to reply to the protests of Boccaccio that “man was born for labour.”555 The De Casibus Virorum is certainly a more considerable work than the De Claris Mulieribus, but it is without the occasional liveliness of the earlier work, as we see it, for instance, in the story of Paolina, and is in fact merely an enormous compilation, as I have said, made directly under the influence of Petrarch, who, in imitation of the ancients, was always willing to discourse concerning the instability of Fortune. It was a theme which suited his peculiar genius, and in the De Viris Illustribus and the De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ we see him at his best in this manner.556 But for Boccaccio such moralising became a mere drudgery, a mere heaping together of what he had read but not digested. Eager to follow in Petrarch’s footsteps, however, he took up the same theme as the subject of an historical work, in which he sets out to show the misfortunes of famous men. Beginning with Adam and Eve — for he admits a few women — he passes in review with an enormous languor that makes the book one of the most wearying in all literature the personages of fable and legend and history, treating all alike, down to his own time. Sometimes he is merely dull, sometimes absurd, sometimes theatrical, but always lifeless in these accounts of the tragic ends of “Famous Men” or of their fall from power. He is never simple, nor does he take his work simply; by every trick he had used in his creative work he tries in vain to give this book some sort of life. He sees his characters in vision, then, in imitation of Petrarch, he interrupts the narrative to preach, to set down tedious moral sentiments — that bad habit of his old age — or philosophical conclusions, or to lose himself in long digressions upon a thousand and one subjects — on riches, on fortune, on happiness, on rhetoric, on the lamentable condition of Rome, on the sadness (acedia) of writers, of which Petrarch had cured him, or again in defence of poetry, never choosing a subject, however, that had not been already treated by Petrarch, except it be woman, whom he again attacks, more soberly perhaps, but infinitely more tediously, warning us against her wiles in the manner of a very minor prophet. As long as he is a mere historian, a mere compiler, a mere scholar, he remains almost unreadable, but as soon as he returns to life, to what he has seen with his own eyes, even in this uncouth jargon, this Church Latin, he becomes an artist, a man of letters, and we find then without surprise that one of the last episodes he recounts, the history of Filippa la Catanese was, even in the seventeenth century, still read apparently with the greatest delight, for very many editions were published of this fragment of his book, of which I have already spoken.557

  Certainly the most original and probably the best of Boccaccio’s Latin works in prose is the De Genealogiis Deorum, with which is generally printed the De Montibus, Sylvis, etc. The first, however, is really but a mass of facts and confused details quite undigested and set forth without any unity, while the latter is an alphabetical dictionary of ancient geography to assist those who read the Latin poets.558 A
t the time these books appeared, however, such matters were a novelty, and we have in them the first complete manual of an ancient science and the first dictionary of geography of the modern world. I say of the modern world, yet though we cannot but admire their erudition and the patient research of the author, these do not suffice to place these works really above the meagre compilations of the Middle Age,559 yet we find there perhaps a change of method which makes them important. Both books are, however, full of credulities, they altogether lack judgment and any system, and can therefore scarcely be said to belong to humanism.

  In the De Genealogiis Deorum Boccaccio gathers every mythological story he can find, and would explain them all by means of symbols and allegories, and in doing this he very naturally provoked the fervent applause of his contemporaries.560 But what renders the volume really interesting and valuable to us is the eager and passionate defence of poetry which forms its epilogue.

  Boccaccio had always fought valiantly in defence of “poetry,” by which he understood the art of literature, and the new learning, the knowledge of antiquity. This art, for it was by no means yet a science, had many more enemies than friends. To a great extent Petrarch refused to meet these foes, considering them as beneath his notice; it was left for Boccaccio to defend not only letters, but Petrarch and his Muse. To this defence he consecrates two whole books of the De Genealogiis Deorum, the fourteenth and fifteenth, and there he takes under his protection not only the poets of antiquity, but poetry in general and his own occupation with mythology. He pounds away with much success at the scholastic philosophers and theologians, who had no idea that they were already dead and damned, and while they declared poetry to be a sheer tissue of fables he busily dug their graves or heaped earth upon them. He left really nothing undone. He attacked their morality, and where so much was an absurdity of lies that was easy; but he appealed too to S. Augustine and S. Jerome, which was dangerous;561 and at last, somewhat embarrassed by certain Latin poets who had proved to be too involved in their frivolity to defend, he abandoned them to their fate, reluctantly, it is true, but he abandoned them, and among these were Plautus, Terence, whom he had copied with his own hand, and Ovid, who had been the companion of his youth. The men whom Petrarch refused to touch lest he should soil his hands had to be content with these.

  In Boccaccio’s definition of the poet, which owed very much to Petrarch we may think, he comprehended the philosopher, the mystic, the prophet — especially the mystic; for he is much concerned with allegory and the hidden meaning of words. For him the work of the poet, and truly, is with words, but with words only. He must find new material if he can it is true, but, above all, he must dress it in long-sought-out words and rhythms that shall at once hide and display the real meaning. He seems to leave nothing to the moment, to spontaneous feeling. The true mistress of the poet does not enter into his calculations; yet there is more spontaneity in the Decameron than in all Petrarch’s work. Still he lays stress on that truly Latin gift, the power to describe or contrive a situation which will hold and excite men.

  What he most strongly insists upon, however, is the hidden meaning of the ancient poets. He declares that only a fool can fail to see allegories in the works of antiquity.562 One must be mad not to see, in the Bucolics, the Georgics, and the Æneid of Virgil, allegories, though we may not certainly read them.563 Is it not thus, he asks, that Dante has hidden in the Comedy the mysteries of the Catholic religion? Are there not allegories in the work of his master Petrarch?564

  He turns from Petrarch to Homer, whom he declares he has always by him. He speaks of Pilatus, to whom he says he owes much: “A little man but great in learning, so deep in the study of great matters that emperors and princes bore witness that none as learned as he had appeared for many centuries.” He closes the book with an appeal to Ugo, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, who had begged him to write this work, which is a truly marvellous cyclopædia of learning and mythology, with this defence of poetry and poets added to it in the two last books, which are later than the rest.565

  It is not, however, in the De Genealogiis but in the De Montibus, Sylvis, Lacubus, Fluminibus, Stagnis seu Paludis, de Nominibus Maris that we have the true type of these works. They are all really dictionaries of learning and legend, but it is only this that is actually in the form of a dictionary, the various subjects being set forth and described in alphabetical order.

  The enormous popularity of these works in their day is witnessed by the numerous editions through which they passed both in Latin and Italian in Italy and abroad. They were the textbooks of the early Renaissance, and we owe Boccaccio, as one of the great leaders of that movement, all the gratitude we can give him; all the more that the work he began has been so fruitful that we can scarcely tolerate the works that guided its first steps.

  CHAPTER XVI

  DANTE AND BOCCACCIO — THE VITA — AND THE COMENTO

  IN THE SUMMER of the year 1373 when Boccaccio was sixty years old the Signoria of Florence was petitioned by a number of citizens to appoint a lecturer who should publicly expound “librum qui vulgariter appellatur el Dante,” the work which is commonly called “el Dante,” the Divine Comedy, that is to say, the work of one who little by little was coming to be known as a very great poet, as a very great man, but who more than seventy years before had been ignominiously expelled from Florence and had died in exile.

  The petition, a copy of which may still be found in the Florentine Libro delle Provvisioni for 1373, is as follows: — 566

  “Whereas divers citizens of Florence, being minded as well for themselves and others, their fellow-citizens, as for their posterity, to follow after virtue, are desirous of being instructed in the book of Dante, wherefrom, both to the shunning of vice and to the acquisition of virtue, no less than in the ornaments of eloquence, even the unlearned may receive instruction; The said citizens humbly pray you, the worshipful Government of the People and Commonwealth of Florence, that you be pleased, at a fitting time, to provide and formally to determine, that a worthy and learned man, well versed in the knowledge of the poem aforesaid, shall be by you elected, for such term as you may appoint, being not longer than one year, to read the book which is commonly called el Dante in the city of Florence, to all such as shall be desirous of hearing him, on consecutive days, not being holidays, and in consecutive lectures, as is customary in like cases; and with such salary as you may determine, not exceeding the sum of one hundred gold florins for the said year, and in such manner and under such conditions as may seem proper to you; and further that the said salary be paid to the said lecturer from the funds of the Commonwealth in two terminal payments, to wit, one moiety about the end of the month of December, and the other moiety about the end of the month of April, such sum to be free of all deduction for taxes whatsoever....”

  The petition was favourably considered by the Signoria on August 9, and was put to the vote of the assembly. Two hundred and five persons voted in all, one hundredand eighty-six in its favour, and nineteen against it.567 The voting was by ballot and secret, and no names have come down to us, but it is perhaps permitted us to suppose, as Mr. Toynbee suggests, that the opposition came from those whose ancestors, whose fathers and grandfathers, Dante had placed in Hell, or had otherwise insulted and condemned. The decision come to on August 9 was carried on the 25th, when the Signoria appointed “Dominus Johannes de Certaldo, honorabilis civis Florentinus,” to lecture on the Divine Comedy568 for a year from the 18th October at a salary of one hundred gold florins, half of which, as the petition had suggested, was paid to him on December 31, 1373.569 And on Sunday, October 23, 1373,570 Boccaccio delivered his first lecture in S. Stefano della Badia.571

  In thus appointing Boccaccio to the first Cathedra Dantesca that had anywhere been established, the Signoria not only in some sort made official amends for the cruel sentence by which the greatest son of Florence had been proclaimed and exiled,572 but they also showed their goodwill by choosing for lecturer the man who above all others was
best fitted to expound his work and to defend his memory.

  As we have already seen, Boccaccio had been an eager student of Dante in the first years of his literary life.573 It is probable that he was first introduced to Dante’s work by Cino da Pistoja, whom he seems to have met in Naples between October, 1330, and July, 1331,574 and in his first book, the Filocolo, he imitates and speaks of him;575 in the Filostrato he copies him so closely that in fact he quotes from him;576 in the Rime he not only, to a large extent, models his work on the sonnets of Dante, but he appeals to him and mentions his name more than once, in one case, in the sonnet already quoted addressed to Dante in Paradise after the death of Fiammetta, certainly before the Vita was written or the lectures begun.

  “Dante, if thou within the sphere of love,

  As I believe, remain’st contemplating

  Beautiful Beatrice whom thou didst sing

  Erewhile ...”

  while the Corbaccio is in some sort modelled on the allegory of the Divine Comedy.577 This was in 1355, and immediately after the completion of the Corbaccio we find him at work, about 1356-7, on the Vita di Dante.578 About this time too he seems to have begun to copy the Divine Comedy579 with his own hand in order to send it to Petrarch, and we may understand perhaps how great a pioneer he was in the appreciation of Dante when from that fact we learn that Petrarch had no copy in his library. With this MS. in his own hand he sent a Carme to Petrarch of forty lines written in Latin in praise of Dante,580 and before 1359 he evidently wrote to Petrarch excusing himself for his enthusiastic praise of Dante. That letter is unfortunately lost, but happily we have Petrarch’s answer, in which he most unsuccessfully tries to excuse himself for his coldness towards the Divine Comedy, and indeed attempts to set the charge aside.