Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  The first work of Boccaccio, composed by him at Fiammetta’s command, was the prose tale, Filocopo, describing the romantic love and adventures of Florio and Biancafiore, a favourite subject with the knightly minstrels of France, Italy and Germany. The treatment of the story by Boccaccio is not remarkable for originality or beauty, and the narrative is encumbered by classical allusions and allegorical conceits. The style also cannot be held worthy of the future great master of Italian prose. Considering, however, that this prose was in its infancy, and that this was Boccaccio’s first attempt at remoulding the unwieldy material at his disposal, it would be unjust to deny that Filocopo is a highly interesting work, full of promise and all but articulate power. Another work, written about the same time by Fiammetta’s desire and dedicated to her, is the Teseide, an epic poem, and indeed the first heroic epic in the Italian language. The name is chosen somewhat inappropriately, as King Theseus plays a secondary part, and the interest of the story centres in the two noble knights, Palemone and Arcito, and their wooing of the beautiful Emelia. The Teseide is of particular interest to the student of poetry, because it exhibits the first example of the ottava rima, a metre which was adopted by Tasso and Ariosto, and in English by Byron in Don Juan. Another link between Boccaccio’s epic and English literature is formed by the fact of Chaucer having in the Knight’s Tale adopted its main features.

  Boccaccio’s poetry has been severely criticized by his countrymen, and most severely by the author himself. On reading Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio resolved in a fit of despair to burn his own attempts, and only the kindly encouragement of his great friend prevented the holocaust. Posterity has justly differed from the author’s sweeping self-criticism. It is true, that compared with Dante’s grandeur and passion, and with Petrarch’s absolute mastership of metre and language, Boccaccio’s poetry seems to be somewhat thrown into shade. His verse is occasionally slip-shod, and particularly his epic poetry lacks what in modern parlance is called poetic diction, — the quality, that is, which distinguishes the elevated pathos of the recorder of heroic deeds from the easy grace of the mere conteur. This latter feature, so charmingly displayed in Boccaccio’s prose, has to some extent proved fatal to his verse. At the same time, his narrative is always fluent and interesting, and his lyrical pieces, particularly the poetic interludes in the Decameron, abound with charming gallantry, and frequently rise to lyrical pathos.

  About the year 1341 Boccaccio returned to Florence by command of his father, who in his old age desired the assistance and company of his son. Florence, at that time disturbed by civil feuds, and the silent gloom of his father’s house could not but appear in an unfavourable light to one accustomed to the gay life of the Neapolitan court. But more than all this, Boccaccio regretted the separation from his beloved Fiammetta. The thought of her at once embittered and consoled his loneliness. Three of his works owe their existence to this period. With all of them Fiammetta is connected; of one of them she alone is the subject. The first work, called Ameto, describes the civilizing influence of love, which subdues the ferocious manners of the savage with its gentle power. Fiammetta, although not the heroine of the story, is amongst the nymphs who with their tales of true love soften the mind of the huntsman. Ameto is written in prose alternating with verse, specimens of which form occur in old and middle Latin writings. It is more probable, however, that Boccaccio adopted it from that sweetest and purest blossom of medieval French literature, Aucassin et Nicolette, which dates from the 13th century, and was undoubtedly known to him. So pleased was Boccaccio with the idea embodied in the character of Ameto that he repeated its essential features in the Cimone of his Decameron (Day 5th, tale i.). The second work referred to is a poem in fifty chapters, called L’amorosa Visione. It describes a dream in which the poet, guided by a lady, sees the heroes and lovers of ancient and medieval times. Boccaccio evidently has tried to imitate the celebrated Trionfi of Petrarch, but without much success. There is little organic development in the poem, which reads like the catalogue raisonné of a picture gallery; but it is remarkable from another point of view. It is perhaps the most astounding instance in literature of ingenuity wasted on trifles; even Edgar Poe, had he known Boccaccio’s puzzle, must have confessed himself surpassed. For the whole of the Amorosa Visione is nothing but an acrostic on a gigantic scale. The poem is written, like the Divina Commedia, in terza rima, and the initial letters of all the triplets throughout the work compose three poems of considerable length, in the first of which the whole is dedicated to Boccaccio’s lady-love, this time under her real name of Maria. In addition to this, the initial letters of the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth lines of the dedicatory poem form the name of Maria; so that here we have the acrostic in the second degree. No wonder that thus entrammelled the poet’s thought begins to flag and his language to halt. The third important work written by Boccaccio during his stay at Florence, or soon after his return to Naples, is called L’amorosa Fiammetta; and although written in prose, it contains more real poetry than the elaborate production just referred to. It purports to be Fiammetta’s complaint after her lover, following the call of filial duty, had deserted her. Bitterly she deplores her fate, and upbraids her lover with coldness and want of devotion. Jealous fears add to her torture, not altogether unfounded, if we believe the commentators’ assertion that the heroine of Ameto is in reality the beautiful Lucia, a Florentine lady loved by Boccaccio. Sadly Fiammetta recalls the moments of former bliss, the first meeting, the stolen embrace. Her narrative is indeed our chief source of information for the incidents of this strange love-story. It has been thought unlikely, and indeed impossible, that Boccaccio should thus have become the mouthpiece of a real lady’s real passion for himself; but there seems nothing incongruous in the supposition that after a happy reunion the poet should have heard with satisfaction, and surrounded with the halo of ideal art, the story of his lady’s sufferings. Moreover, the language is too full of individual intensity to make the conjecture of an entirely fictitious love affair intrinsically probable. L’amorosa Fiammetta is a monody of passion sustained even to the verge of dulness, but strikingly real, and therefore artistically valuable.

  By the intercession of an influential friend, Boccaccio at last obtained (in 1344) his father’s permission to return to Naples, where in the meantime Giovanna, grand-daughter of King Robert, had succeeded to the crown. Being young and beautiful, fond of poetry and of the praise of poets, she received Boccaccio with all the distinction due to his literary fame. For many years she remained his faithful friend, and the poet returned her favour with grateful devotion. Even when the charge of having instigated, or at least connived at, the murder of her husband was but too clearly proved against her, Boccaccio was amongst the few who stood by her, and undertook the hopeless task of clearing her name from the dreadful stain. It was by her desire, no less than by that of Fiammetta, that he composed (between 1344 and 1350) most of the stories of his Decameron, which afterwards were collected and placed in the mouths of the Florentine ladies and gentlemen. During this time he also composed the Filostrato, a narrative poem, the chief interest of which, for the English reader, lies in its connexion with Chaucer. With a boldness pardonable only in men of genius, Chaucer adopted the main features of the plot, and literally translated parts of Boccaccio’s work, without so much as mentioning the name of his Italian source.

  In 1350 Boccaccio returned to Florence, owing to the death of his father, who had made him guardian to his younger brother Jacopo. He was received with great distinction, and entered the service of the Republic, being at various times sent on important missions to the margrave of Brandenburg, and to the courts of several popes, both in Avignon and Rome. Boccaccio boasts of the friendly terms on which he had been with the great potentates of Europe, the emperor and pope amongst the number. But he was never a politician in the sense that Dante and Petrarch were. As a man of the world he enjoyed the society of the great, but his interest in the internal commotions of the Florentine
state seems to have been very slight. Besides, he never liked Florence, and the expressions used by him regarding his fellow-citizens betray anything but patriotic prejudice. In a Latin eclogue he applies to them the term “Batrachos” (frogs), by which, he adds parenthetically — Ego intelligo Florentinorum morem; loquacissimi enim sumus, verum in rebus bellicis nihil valemus. The only important result of Boccaccio’s diplomatic career was his intimacy with Petrarch. The first acquaintance of these two great men dates from the year 1350, when Boccaccio, then just returned to Florence, did all in his power to make the great poet’s short stay in that city agreeable. When in the following year the Florentines were anxious to draw men of great reputation to their newly-founded university, it was again Boccaccio who insisted on the claims of Petrarch to the most distinguished position. He himself accepted the mission of inviting his friend to Florence, and of announcing to Petrarch at the same time that the forfeited estates of his family had been restored to him. In this manner an intimate friendship grew up between them to be parted only by death. Common interests and common literary pursuits were the natural basis of their friendship, and both occupy prominent positions in the early history of that great intellectual revival commonly called the Renaissance.

  During the 14th century the study of ancient literature was at a low ebb in Italy. The interest of the lay world was engrossed by political struggles, and the treasures of classical history and poetry were at the mercy of monks, too lazy or too ignorant to use, or even to preserve them. Boccaccio himself told that, on asking to see the library of the celebrated monastery of Monte Cassino, he was shown into a dusty room without a door to it. Many of the valuable manuscripts were mutilated; and his guide told him that the monks were in the habit of tearing leaves from the codices to turn them into psalters for children, or amulets for women at the price of four or five soldi apiece. Boccaccio did all in his power to remove by word and example this barbarous indifference. He bought or copied with his own hand numerous valuable manuscripts, and an old writer remarks that if Boccaccio had been a professional copyist, the amount of his work might astonish us. His zealous endeavours for the revival of the all but forgotten Greek language in western Europe are well known. The most celebrated Italian scholars about the beginning of the 15th century were unable to read the Greek characters. Boccaccio deplored the ignorance of his age. He took lessons from Leone Pilato, a learned adventurer of the period, who had lived a long time in Thessaly and, although born in Calabria, pretended to be a Greek. By Boccaccio’s advice Leone Pilato was appointed professor of Greek language and literature in the university of Florence, a position which he held for several years, not without great and lasting benefit for the revival of classical learning. Boccaccio was justly proud of having been intimately connected with the foundation of the first chair of Greek in Italy. But he did not forget, in his admiration of classic literature, the great poets of his own country. He never tires in his praise of the sublime Dante, whose works he copied with his own hand. He conjures his friend Petrarch to study the great Florentine, and to defend himself against the charges of wilful ignorance and envy brought against him. A life of Dante, and the commentaries on the first sixteen cantos of the Inferno, bear witness to Boccaccio’s learning and enthusiasm.

  In the chronological enumeration of our author’s writings we now come to his most important work, the Decameron, a collection of one hundred stories, published in their combined form in 1353, although mostly written at an earlier date. This work marks in a certain sense the rise of Italian prose. It is true that Dante’s Vita Nuova was written before, but its involved sentences, founded essentially on Latin constructions, cannot be compared with the infinite suppleness and precision of Boccaccio’s prose. The Cento Novelle Antiche, on the other hand, which also precedes the Decameron in date, can hardly be said to be written in artistic language according to definite rules of grammar and style. Boccaccio for the first time speaks a new idiom, flexible and tender, like the character of the nation, and capable of rendering all the shades of feeling, from the coarse laugh of cynicism to the sigh of hopeless love. It is by the name of “Father of Italian Prose” that Boccaccio ought to be chiefly remembered.

  Like most progressive movements in art and literature, Boccaccio’s remoulding of Italian prose may be described as a “return to nature.” It is indeed the nature of the Italian people itself which has become articulate in the Decameron; here we find southern grace and elegance, together with that unveiled naïveté of impulse which is so striking and so amiable a quality of the Italian character. The undesirable complement of the last-mentioned feature, a coarseness and indecency of conception and expression hardly comprehensible to the northern mind, also appears in the Decameron, particularly where the life and conversation of the lower classes are the subject of the story. At the same time, these descriptions of low life are so admirable, and the character of popular parlance rendered with such humour, as often to make the frown of moral disgust give way to a smile.

  It is not surprising that a style so concise and yet so pliable so typical and yet so individual, as that of Boccaccio was of enormous influence on the further progress of a prose in a manner created by it. This influence has indeed prevailed down to the present time, to an extent beneficial upon the whole, although frequently fatal to the development of individual writers. Novelists like Giovanni Fiorentino or Franco Sacchetti are completely under the sway of their great model; and Boccaccio’s influence may be discerned equally in the plastic fulness of Machiavelli and in the pointed satire of Aretino. Without touching upon the individual merits of Lasca, Bandello and other novelists of the cinque-cento, it may be asserted that none of them created a style independent of their great predecessor. One cannot indeed but acquiesce in the authoritative utterance of the Accademia della Crusca, which holds up the Decameron as the standard and model of Italian prose. Even the Della Cruscan writers themselves have been unable to deprive the language wholly of the fresh spontaneity of Boccaccio’s manner, which in modern literature we again admire in Manzoni’s Promessi sposi.

  A detailed analysis of a work so well known as the Decameron would be unnecessary. The description of the plague of Florence preceding the stories is universally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of epic grandeur and vividness. It ranks with the paintings of similar calamities by Thucydides, Defoe and Manzoni. Like Defoe, Boccaccio had to draw largely on hearsay and his own imagination, it being almost certain that in 1348 he was at Naples, and therefore no eye-witness of the scenes he describes. The stories themselves, a hundred in number, range from the highest pathos to the coarsest licentiousness. A creation like the patient Griselda, which international literature owes to Boccaccio, ought to atone for much that is morally and artistically objectionable in the Decameron. It may be said on this head, that his age and his country were not only deeply immoral, but in addition exceedingly outspoken. Moreover, his sources were anything but pure. Most of his improper stories are either anecdotes from real life, or they are taken from the fabliaux of medieval French poets. On comparing the latter class of stories (about one-fifth of the whole Decameron) with their French originals, one finds that Boccaccio has never added to, but has sometimes toned down the revolting ingredients. Notwithstanding this, it cannot be denied that the artistic value of the Decameron is greatly impaired by descriptions and expressions, the intentional licentiousness of which is but imperfectly veiled by an attempt at humour.