Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  One dimly seen, the other out of sight,

  But ever playing in his swollen bed

  Of polisht stone and willing to be led

  Where clustering vines protect him from the sun —

  Here by the lake Boccaccio’s fair brigade

  Bathed in the stream and tale for tale repaid.”

  The hundred tales that were thus told in the shade of those two beautiful gardens may doubtless be traced to an infinite number of sources — Egyptian, Arabian, Persian, and French;663 but these origins matter little. Boccaccio was almost certainly unaware of them, for the most part at any rate, gathering his material as he did from the tales he had heard, up and down Italy. Certainly to the Contes and Fabliaux of Northern France a third part of the Decameron may be traced, much too to Indian and Persian sources, and a little to the Gesta Romanorum. But one might as well accuse Chaucer or Shakespeare of a want of originality because they took what they wanted where they found it, as arraign Boccaccio for a dependence he was quite unaware of on sources such as these.664 He has made the tales his own. The Decameron is a work of art, a world in itself, and its effect upon us who read it is the effect of life which includes, for its own good, things moral and immoral. The book has the variety of the world, and is full of an infinity of people, who represent for us the fourteenth century in Italy, in all its fullness, almost.665 It deals with man as life does, never taking him very seriously, or without a certain indifference, a certain irony and laughter. Yet it is full too of a love of courtesy, of luck, of all sorts of adventures, both gallant and sad. In details, at any rate, it is true and even realistic, crammed with observation of those customs and types which made up the life of the time. It is dramatic, ironic, comic, tragic, philosophic, and even lyrical; full of indulgence for human error, an absolutely human book beyond any work of Dante’s or Petrarch’s or Froissart’s. Even Chaucer is not so complete in his humanism, his love of all sorts and conditions of men. Perfect in organism, in construction, and in freedom, each of these tales is in some sort a living part of life and a criticism of it. Almost any one could be treated by a modern writer in his own way, and remain fundamentally the same and fundamentally true. What immorality there is, might seem owing rather to the French sources of some of the tales than to any invention on the part of Boccaccio, who, as we have seen, later came to deplore it. But we must remember that the book was written to give delight to “amorous” women, and women have always delighted in “immoral literature,” and in fact write most of it to-day.666 Yet only a Puritan, and he foul-minded, could call the Decameron vicious, for it is purified with an immortal laughter and joy.

  But it is in its extraordinary variety of contents and character that the Decameron is chiefly remarkable. We are involved in a multitude of adventures, are introduced to innumerable people of every class, and each class shows us its most characteristic qualities. Such is Boccaccio’s art, for the stories were not originally, or even as they are, ostensibly studies of character at all, but rather anecdotes, tales of adventure, stories of illicit love, good stories about the friars and the clergy and women, told for amusement because they are full of laughter and are witty, or contain a brief and ready reply with which one has rebuked another or saved himself from danger. But I have given the subjects of the stories of the Decameron elsewhere.667 Whatever they may be, and they are often of the best, of the most universal, they are not, for the real lover of the Decameron, the true reason why he goes to it always with the certainty of a new joy. The book is full of people, of living people, that is the secret of its immortality. Fra Cipolla, whom I especially love, Calandrino, whom I seem always to have known, poor Monna Tezza, his wife, whom at last he so outrageously gives away, Griselda, Cisti, the Florentine baker, the joyous Madonna Filippa, or Monna Belcolore should be as dear to us as any character in any book not by Shakespeare himself. They live for ever.

  And yet it must be confessed that while the book is a mirror of the world, and doubtless as true to the life of its time as any book that was ever written, it lacks a certain idealism, a certain moral sense which is never absent from English work, and which, even from a purely æsthetic point of view, would have given a sort of balance or sense of proportion to the book, which, I confess, in my weaker moments, it has sometimes seemed to me it lacks.

  It is true that Boccaccio deals with life and with life alone. It is true that life then as now made little of sexual morality. But with Boccaccio, as with almost all Latin art, sexual immorality usurps, or seems to us to usurp, a place out of all proportion to its importance in life. One is not always thinking of one’s neighbour’s wife, even though one should have the misfortune to affect her. Yet it is just there that Boccaccio’s comic genius is seen at its best; it is his most frequent theme. And just there too we come upon the unreality of this most real book. His spose are all beautiful young women who live in the arms of beautiful youths; they are nearly all adulteresses; Griselda, indeed, might seem to be the only faithful wife among them. Consider, then, the wife of Pietro di Vincolo,668 who sells herself fresh and lovely as she is. Consider the pretty Prunella the Neapolitan, who abandons herself voluptuously in her husband’s presence to Gianello Galeone.669 She, like the rest, is not only without regret, but without scruple. They all have this extraordinary astuteness, this readiness of the devil. There is Sismonda, the wife of the rich merchant Arriguccio Berlinghieri.670 There is Isabella, who loved Leonetto, and Monna Beatrice, who to her adultery adds contempt of her husband, when, victorious at last, trembling with voluptuousness, she kisses and re-kisses “the sweet mouth” of the happy and delighted Lodovico.671 Nor is she by any means alone, they are all her sisters. Lydia672 is even more wily, Bartolommea more shameless.673

  And if the women are thus joyful, lustful, and cunning, the husbands are fools. Yet Boccaccio knows well how to draw the honest peasant, the hard-working artisan, the persistent and adventurous merchant, and a harder thing — the man of good society, such as Federigo degli Alberighi,674 when he will.

  What he cannot do is to compose a tragedy; he has not a sufficiently virile moral sense for it, and so just there he fails with the rest of his Latin brethren. But as a writer of comedy he is one of the greatest masters; and as a master of comedy he was in some degree at the mercy both of it and of his audience. This may excuse him perhaps for his too persistent stories about adulteries. The deceived husband was always a comic figure; he probably always will be. This being granted, we shall not judge the women of Boccaccio’s time by his tales, and it might seem that we should discount in the same way his stories about the clergy. Like every other comic master, he naturally finds some of his choicest material among them, who always have been, are now, and ever will be a never-failing source of amusement. But here we must go warily, for Boccaccio’s treatment of the clergy might almost be said to exhaust what little moral indignation he was possessed of. “I have spoken the truth about the friars,” he tells us with an immense relief in the conclusion to his work, and if he had not time, courage, or opportunity to tell us the truth about the monks, the nuns, and the secular clergy, he has left us, it must be confessed, some very remarkable evidence. His whole attitude of attack is different when he exposes the clergy; moreover, while we have no evidence at all in support of his supposed representation of the married woman as universally adulterous — and it may be questioned whether it was his intention to leave us with any such impression — we have ample evidence from the best possible sources of the frightful wickedness, immorality, and general rottenness of the clergy, both religious and secular, monks, friars, nuns, and priests. We have only to consult the pages of S. Catherine of Siena675 to find every separate accusation of Boccaccio’s confirmed ten times over, with a hundred others added to them which he has failed to bring forward. Nor is it only in the mouth of S. Catherine that Boccaccio is justified. Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, had long ago informed Innocent IV that the Curia was the source of all that vileness which rendered the priesthood a reproach to C
hristianity. Alexander IV himself described the corruption of the people as proceeding from the clergy. What this had become after the Black Death we know not only from Boccaccio, Petrarch, and S. Catherine, but from every writer of the time. The Church was rotten to the core, she seemed about to sink for ever into the pit of her abominations. Consider, then, what such a beast as the priest of Varlungo must have been in a village; consider the rector of Fiesole. Is Boccaccio’s irony too bitter? Is it any wonder that Monna Belcolore answers the wolf of Varlungo, “There is never a one of you priests but would overreach the very devil.”

  As for the friars, we should not recognise in any one of them the brother of S. Francis or S. Dominic. Consider them then: Fra Cipolla676 is a lovely rogue of the best; who more cunning than Fra Alberto da Imola;677 who more eagerly wily than Fra Rinaldo;678 who more goat-like and concupiscent than Fra Rustico? The only son of S. Francis illumined with light and piety is the confessor of Ser Ciappelletto,679 and he has no name, and is, I fear, quickly forgotten.

  Nor have we better news of the nuns680 or the monks,681 and indeed, so far as the clergy are concerned, the Decameron is as eager in its attack on wickedness as the Divine Comedy itself, though its justice is tempered with kindness and its scorn with a sort of pity, a sort of understanding.

  And indeed, if we compare the book with that of Dante, a much greater man, it holds its own because of its humanity. Dante puts the centre of gravity into the next world. He hates this world almost without ceasing, and has dared to arraign it before his hatred. His satire is cruel, unjust, intolerant, and vindictive. Of course we are wont to excuse all this on account of the genius which it expressed, of its sincerity and beauty of form. Boccaccio, however, with less than half Dante’s genius, was not subject to his madness. He was content to satirise what is bad, the bad customs of ecclesiastics and of fools; but he excuses and pardons all too because of the “misfortunes of the time,” and above all he understands.

  But if we may not compare the Decameron, the Human Comedy, with the Divine Comedy of Dante as a work of art, we may claim for it that it was the greatest though not quite the first prose work in the Tuscan tongue. But Italian prose maybe said to consist of the Decameron alone for a hundred years after Boccaccio’s death. It is written in a very beautiful but very complicated style, a sort of poetical prose — exquisite, it is true, but often without simplicity. Yet who will dare to attack it? It has justified itself, if need be, as every great work has done, by its appeal to mankind, its utter indifference to criticism.

  That the Decameron, though widely read and enthusiastically received, was censured very strongly in its own day we gather from the Proem to the Fourth Day and from the Conclusion to the work; while later the book did not escape the knife of the Church, though it was never suppressed.682 That it was enthusiastically received in its day we know from contemporary documents,683 and though Petrarch failed to understand it, he praised it in certain places, which were those, it seems, that were the most rhetorical. He translated the last tale of Griselda into Latin, however, but as he tells us, he had known this for many years. Petrarch, however, stood alone; from the day the Decameron was finished its influence both in Italy and abroad was very great.

  The original manuscript has disappeared, and the oldest we possess seems to be that written in 1368 by Francesco Mannelli, though the later Hamilton MS. now in Berlin is the better of the two.684 More than ten editions were, however, printed in the fifteenth century, and some seventy-seven in the sixteenth; while there is not a Novelliere in Italian literature for many centuries who has not inspired himself with the Decameron. Its fortune abroad was almost equally good. Hans Sachs, Molière, La Fontaine,685 Lope de Vega, to mention only European names, were in its debt; and in England our greatest poets have drawn from it, once the form and often the substance of their work. One has only to name Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Dryden,686 Keats,687 and Tennyson688 to suggest England’s debt to Boccaccio. And although our prose literature, strangely enough, produced no great original example of this school of fiction, its influence was shown by the number of translations and imitations of the “mery bookes of Italy,” when, according to Ascham, “a tale of Bocace was made more account of than a story out of the Bible.”689

  In his Praise of Poets, Thomas Churchyard, referring to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, says —

  “In Italy of yore did dwell

  Three men of special spreete,

  Whose gallant stiles did sure excell,

  Their verses were so sweet”

  Of these three great Italians Dante was by far the least known, and William Thomas, in his Dictionarie (1550) defines “Dante Aldighieri” as “the name of a famous poet in the Italian tongue,” while he does not think it necessary to explain who Petrarch and Boccaccio are.690 Sir Philip Sidney, it is true, refers to Dante several times, with the other two, and even mentions Beatrice in his Defence of Poesie, yet there is no trace of Dante’s influence in his work. The only writer after Chaucer who shows internal evidence of knowing Dante fairly well is Sir John Harrington, the translator of Orlando Furioso. In his Apology of Poetry he refers to Dante’s relations to Virgil, and in the Allegorie of the fourth book of his translation he translates the first five lines of the Inferno: —

  “While yet my life was in the middle race

  I found I wandered in a darksome wood,

  The right way lost with mine unsteadie pace ...”691

  Spenser does not mention Dante though he used him; but in the Epistle to Gabriel Harvey prefixed to the Shepherd’s Calendar he speaks of Boccaccio as well as of Petrarch and others.

  That Boccaccio was well known in England, at least by name, in the fourteenth century, seems certain. Sacchetti (1335-1400) in the Proemio to his Novelle writes as follows: “... and taking into consideration the excellent Florentine poet Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote the Book of the Hundred Tales in one material effort of his great intellect, ... that (book) is so generally published and sought after, that even in France and England they have translated it into their language ... and I, Franco Sacchetti, though only a rude and unrefined man, have made up my mind to write the present work.” All trace of any such translation, if indeed it was ever made, has been lost.692 In fact, it might seem that the only man in England at that time really capable of carrying out such a task, worthily at least, was Geoffrey Chaucer, who, though for some reason we can never know he refused to mention Boccaccio’s name, adapted and translated the Teseide, the Filostrato, and it seems, three tales from the Decameron — the first of the Eighth Day, the fifth of the Tenth Day, and the tenth of the Tenth Day.693 May it not have been Chaucer’s work to which Sacchetti referred? It was not until 1566 that any translation even of isolated stories from the Decameron appeared; in that year and the following Painter’s Palace of Pleasure was published, which contained sixteen stories translated from the Decameron. Then in 1579 came the Forest of Fancy, by H. C., in which two more appeared, while Tarlton’s News out of Purgatorie (1590) contained four more, and the Cobler of Caunterburie, published in the same year, two more. These and other translations of isolated stories will best be shown by a table.694

  Such were the stories from the Decameron that had been translated in English when in 1620 the first practically complete edition appeared, translated inaccurately, but very splendidly, apparently from the French version of Antoine Le Macon. Isaac Jaggard published it, in folio in two parts, with woodcuts, and the title bore no translator’s name. In 1625 this edition was reprinted, the title bearing the legend “Isaac Jaggard for M. Lownes”:695 other editions appeared in 1655 and 1657 and 1684, making five editions in all during the seventeenth century. In 1700 Dryden’s translations appeared of the Three Tales: Decameron, IV 1, V 1, and V 8. A new translation, practically complete, appeared in 1702, and was, I think, twice reprinted in 1722 and 1741. Certainly eight editions were published in the nineteenth century696 and two have appeared already in the twentieth.697 The first really compl
ete translation to appear in English, however, was that of Mr. John Payne, printed for the Villon Society (1886), but the first complete translation to pass into general circulation was that of Mr. J. M. Rigg, 1896-1905, which is rendered with a careful accuracy and much spirit.

  “The ordinary recreations which we have in Winter,” says Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, “and in most solitary times busy our minds with, are Cards, Tables and Dice, Shovel-board, Chess-play, the Philosopher’s game, Small Trunks, Shuttle-cock, Billiards, Musick, Masks, Singing, Dancing, Yulegames, Frolicks, Jests, Riddles, Catches, Purposes, Questions and Commands, Merry Tales of Errant Knights, Queens, Lovers, Lords, Ladies, Giants, Dwarfs, Thieves, Cheaters, Witches, Fairies, Goblins, Friars, etc., such as the old women told [of] Psyche in Apuleius, Boccaccio’s Novels and the rest, quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.”

  Well, after all, we are our fathers’ sons, and (God be thanked) there are still winter evenings in which, while the rest are occupied with Burton’s frolicks and jests, dancing and singing and card-play, we, in some cosy place, may still turn the old immortal pages.

  APPENDICES

  APPENDIX I

  THE DATES OF BOCCACCIO’S ARRIVAL IN NAPLES AND OF HIS MEETING WITH FIAMMETTA

  That the date of the arrival of Boccaccio in Naples commonly accepted, namely the end of 1330, is inadmissible, has, I think, been proved by Della Torre (op. cit., caps. ii. and iii.), who gives us many good reasons to think that the true date was December 13, 1323. With his conclusions I agree, nor do I see how they are easily to be put aside.

  To begin with, the departure of Idalagos in the Filocolo698 forms part of the same episode as the birth of the fratellastro, so that it would seem the two events cannot have been separated by any great length of time; certainly not by nine years, which would be the case if Boccaccio really left Florence in 1330, for Francesco the fratellastro was born in 1321.699