The Decameron

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE monograph on Boccaccio by Mr. J.A. Symonds, which has been lately published, sets one a-thinking again about the Decameron. Mr. Symonds is exceedingly enthusiastic in his praises, and hands on the Boccaccio tradition bright as a dollar. Everybody has flattered Boceaccio, great men, little men, grave old plodders, gay young friskers, until it should seem that the consent of many generations had correctly expressed the measure of the man. You have almost a conviction of this until you read the Decameron ; then comes over you a growing sense of irreverence, of a sort of sans-culottisme littéraire, and you look around you over the great gravestones in the churchyard of literature, and wonder if it be a sacred place. Why has there been this deal of courtesy to Messer Giovanni Boccaccio ? Ulysses says that

And in truth, Time commonly deals with men in a most unmannerly way ; but once you get on the right side of Time, he proves the best of friends. The more the years roll on, the firmer stand his favorites, especially if they be writers of books ; for the years sweep away the books, and no sooner is all evidence gone than judgment of immortality is entered at once. Howbeit, it is easier to say why a man wins Time’s partiality than why he should deserve it. Boccaccio’s success is readily explained. He was the first in the field, and came in on the rising tide of the Renaissance. Yet the Decameron is a book with a feeble pulse of life. It has more genuine fin de siècle flavor than any such put forth nowadays. Once a man is first, by the law that whips creatures along the line of least resistance, he will have imitators, disciples, advocates, and a grand army of pensioners, all living on his reputation. So it fell out with Boccaccio, and at last he got into encyclopædias and literature primers, and such like perdurable niches of fame, as the “ Father of Italian Prose “ and the “ Prince of StoryTellers,” and his name shall live forever. Professors, sub-professors, and essayists make literary genealogies immortal as that of Noah. And so it has come to be common report that Petrarch while he was yet young begat Boccaccio, and Boccaccio after living two hundred years begat Ariosto, Sannazzaro, Aretino, and many others. And in fact by that time, Boccaccio, having no rivals, was lauded and applauded by the cinquecentisti till they too passed away, and since then nobody has read him. I mean that nobody reads him for the pleasure of it, but by authority or curiosity, or to pass examinations, except that noble company to whom a book is a book and a tiling of beauty, and its contents may be such as pleases God.

All this I say, admitting, of course, that Boccaccio was an artist and a very clever man. In art he was full of the true spirit of the Renaissance, and he put his hundred tales into a most enduring form. The story of the plague in Florence is mightily interesting ; and in front of this horrid black background, fearful as the scrubby thickets where the harpies roost, come tripping along seven delightful young ladies and three charming young gentlemen, like a troop from one of Burne-Jones’s pictures. You may think, as you read, that your interest is absorbed by this description of the plague because it is a tale about the wonderful city of Florence told by an eye-witness. But that explanation is not enough, as is proved by Machiavelli’s account of a plague in Florence. Machiavelli, weighed in moral scales, tips up Boccaccio ten times over, but his plague compared to Boccaccio’s is a very humdrum and chickenpox affair.

The places whither these ladies and gentlemen go are very delightful places, but how can they help themselves, all dressed up in la favella Toscana ? You have only to shake an Italian dictionary, and such wonderful words drop out that you at once dream of “ magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairyland.”In the Decameron carissime donne e nobilissimi giovani wander over montagnette, through boschetti verdissimi, alongside of chiarissimi fiumicelli, brushing with loitering feet the rugiadose erbette, and everything is so gradevole, piacevole, and dilettevole that there care could not kill a cat. This lovely frame peeps out again at the end of every ten stories ; for after all the company have told their tales, they dance and sing and sup, and one among them recites a ballata. The workmanship of this is like the shine of beads on a rich brocade. I wish some one would get out an edition of the Decameron without the stories. Those hundred stories are some ninety-eight or ninety-nine too many.

As to the matter of Boccaccio’s invention, Mr. Symonds admits that he laid his hands upon plots wherever he found them, and says, What of it ? It is Boccaccio’s art that has given them their value. That may be true, but it is Boccaccio’s misfortune that Cymbeline should have been built on the plot of one of his tales, and The Clerk’s Tale and the Pot of Basil on those of others. These Englishmen whet your appetite for poetry till it becomes so voracious and intolerant that you cannot abide a story of life without it ; and they convince you that wherever two or three human beings are gathered together the spirit of poetry is there also, and that the chief business of the story-teller is to bring it out. In all Boccaccio’s hundred tales there is not one breath of poetry.

However, it may not be fair, and it is not necessary, to go to Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Keats. Take the famous story of the husband who murdered his wife’s lover, cut his heart out, and had it served up to her for dinner. Compare Boccaccio’s version with the same story told of Guillem de Cabestahn, the troubadour, which Mr. Francis Hueffer has taken from a Provencal manuscript in the Laurentian Library at Florence. It is possible that Boccaccio got his story from that very source. The Provencal version is full of passion, and Boccaccio has kept nothing but the bare brutality of the plot. Boccaccio’s artful way of stabbing romance shows itself in this story. The wife, on being told that she has eaten her lover’s heart, kills herself, and the husband’s emotion is — “parvegli aver mal fatto.” In most of the stories the plot is the most interesting thing, and it must be confessed that the variety of incident is most excellent work.

Mr. Symonds, in his athletic way, calls the Decameron “ that stately art work, completely finished, fair in all its parts, appropriately framed, subordinate to one principle of style, with the master’s Shakspehrean grasp on all heights and depths, on the kernel and tlie superficies, the pomp and misery, the pleasures and the pangs of mortal life.” This is a melancholy instance of the band being subdued to what it works in. In the Decameron there are no heights or depths, nor mountains nor valleys, nor hills nor dells; only little hummocks and hollows. It is merely excellent landscape gardening. In fact, it is the monotonous human level that strikes the reader, — no virtue, no vice. For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, and Boccaccio was an extraordinarily clever Florentine epicurean, to whom virtue and vice were but two Dromios playing the world’s farce.

Inability to depict character is another conspicuous failing. Giannelloand Peronella, Frate Cipolla, Madonna Agnese, Messer Calandrino, and Niccolosa are a stock company of bad actors, who change their names and clothes from time to time, but nothing else.

The principal objection to the Decameron for tlie modern reader must necessarily be the indecency of the stories. After making all allowances for autres temps, autres mœurs, and for the fact that human beings are akin to the brutes, the reader is forced to the conclusion that this perpetual indecency is not due to the fact that the writer was a cittadino Fiorentino and a trecentista, but that he was Messer Giovanni Boccaceio. Indecency may be more popular and more public at one time than at another, of course, but probably there are always some people who believe that decency makes life richer and more enjoyable, and others who do not. Of the latter was Boccaccio. In Italy, at that very time, Petrarch was employing’ his genius writing love poems of a most delicate and refined nature, and Dante, the greatest idealist in this respect that ever lived, was alive when Boccaccio was a hoy. Boccaccio himself lectured on Dante. Mr. Symonds admits that Boccaccio could not understand Dante’s sentiment for Beatrice. He puts it thus : “ Between Boccaccio and the enthusiasms of the Middle Ages a ninefold Styx already rolled its waves.” But the difficulty with this apology is that this ninefold Styx shows an infernal ingenuity in rolling around Boccaccio alone. Read Petrarch’s tenth sonnet : —

Yet it is not merely the denial of the value of idealizing the love of woman, as to which there may be an honest disagreement, but the lack of all interest in anything that vitally concerns human society, that confounds the reader : no loyalty, no honor, no generosity, no sympathy, no courage, no fortitude, no recklessness of consequence,— nothing male in the whole book. Boccaccio left these things out because he wished to interest, and did not think them interesting. Nothing is fit to his hand except the meetings of one blackguard with another of the opposite sex.

“ Spitzbübin war sie, er war ein Dieb,” is true of all his heroes and heroines.

It is this narrow range of interest that prevents the Decameron from being a great book. It has been called the Commedia Humana, but compare it with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine ; and though Balzac may be deficient in appreciation of the poetry of life, you see at once how much wider and more generous his sympathies are. When Boccaccio’s contemporary, Chaucer, tells his tales, he roams up and down through the emotions. This limitation of the Decameron strikes the reader into a melancholy, in spite of its beautiful framework, its merriment and its variety. He perceives that even the memory of ancient Rome is gone from Italy, and in its stead has come that intelligent and rational epicureanism which, as Mr. Kidd tells us so vivaciously, must inevitably bring national degradation in its train. We cannot but believe that some of Boccaccio’s original readers foresaw the five hundred years of servitude between Petrarch’s “ Italia Mia ” and Leopardi’s “ O Patria Mia,” and that the book even then had a profoundly tragic element.