In his treatment of chivalrous love we may notice this tendency to generalization. The material transmitted from the troubadours, handled with affectation by the Sicilians, philosophized by the Florentines, loses transient and specific quality in the _Canzoniere_. It takes rank at last among simply human emotions; and, though it has not lost a certain medieval tincture, the _Canzoniere_ rather than the _Vita Nuova_, the work of distinguished rather than of supreme genius, has on this account been understood and appropriated by all lovers in all ages and in every land. Petrarch"s verses, to use Sh.e.l.ley"s words, "are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love." And while we admit that "Dante understood the secrets of love even more than Petrarch," there is no doubt that the _Canzoniere_ strikes a note which vibrates more universally than the _Vita Nuova_. The majority of men cannot but prefer the comprehensive to the intense expression of personal emotion.
Death rendered Beatrice"s apotheosis conceivable; and Dante may be said to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby love is an initiation into the secrets of the spiritual world. It was the intuition of a sublime nature into the essence of pure impersonal enthusiasm. It was an exaltation of womanhood similar to that attempted less adequately by Sh.e.l.ley in _Epipsychidion_. It was a real instinct like that which pervades the poetry of Michelangelo, and which sustains some men even in our prosaic age. Still there remained an ineradicable unsubstantiality in Dante"s point of view, when tested by the common facts of feeling.
His idealism was too far removed from ordinary experience to take firm hold upon the modern mind. In proportion as Beatrice personified abstractions, she ceased to be a woman even for her lover; nor was it possible, except by diminishing her individuality, to regard her as a symbol of the universal. She pa.s.sed from the sphere of the human into the divine; and though her face was still beautiful, it was the face of Science rather than of one we love. There was even too little alloy of earth in Dante"s pa.s.sion for Beatrice.
Petrarch"s love for Laura was of a different type. The unrest of earthly desire, for ever thwarted but recurring with imperious persistence, and the rebellion of the conscience against emotions which the lover recognized as lawless, broke his peace. It is true that, using the language of the earlier poets and obeying a sanguine mood of his own mind, he from time to time spoke of Laura as of one who led his soul to G.o.d. But his sincerest utterances reveal the discord of a heart divided between duty and inclination, the melancholy of a man who knows himself the prey of warring powers. His love for Laura seemed an error and a sin because it clashed with an ascetic impulse which had never been completely blunted. In his Hymn to the Virgin he referred to this pa.s.sion as the Medusa that had turned his better self to stone:
Medusa e l"error mio m"han fatto un sa.s.so D"umor van stillante.
There is a pa.s.sage in the _De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, where the lyrist of chivalrous love pours such contempt on women as his friend Boccaccio might have envied. In the _Secretum_, again, he describes his own emotion as a torment from which he had vainly striven to emanc.i.p.ate himself by solitude, by journeys, by distractions, and by obstinate studies. In truth, he rarely alludes to the great pa.s.sion of his life without a strange blending of tenderness and sore regret. Herein he proved himself not only a true child of his age, but also the precursor of the modern world. While he was still bound by the traditions of medieval asceticism, a Christian no less devout and only less firm than Dante, his senses and his imagination, stirred possibly by contact with cla.s.sic literature, rebelled against the mysticism of the Florentine School. This rebellion, but dimly apprehended by the poet himself, and complicated with the yearnings of a deeply religious nature after purity of thought and deed, gave its supreme strength and beauty to his verse.
The _Canzoniere_ is not merely the poetry of love but the poetry of conflict also. The men of the Renaissance overleaped the conflict, and satisfied themselves with empty idealizations of sensual desire. But modern men have returned to Petrarch"s point of view and found an echo of their own divided spirit in his poetry. He marks the transition from a medieval to a modern mood, the pa.s.sage from Cino and Guido to Werther and Rousseau.
That Laura was a real woman, and that Petrarch"s worship of her was unfeigned; that he adored her with the senses and the heart as well as with the head; but that this love was at the same time more a mood of the imagination, a delicate disease, a cherished wound, to which he constantly recurred as the most sensitive and lively wellspring of poetic fancy, than a downright and impulsive pa.s.sion, may be clearly seen in the whole series of his poems and his autobiographical confessions. Laura appears to have treated him with the courtesy of a somewhat distant acquaintance, who was aware of his homage and was flattered by it. But her lover enjoyed no privileges of intimacy, and it may be questioned whether, if Petrarch could by any accident have made her his own, the fruition of her love would not have been a serious interruption to the happiness of his life. He first saw her in the church of S. Claire, at Avignon, on April 6, 1327. She pa.s.sed from this world on April 6, 1348. These two dates are the two turning-points of Petrarch"s life. The interval of twenty-one years, when Laura trod the earth, and her lover in all his wanderings paid his orisons to her at morning, evening, and noonday, and pa.s.sed his nights in dreams of that fair form which never might be his, was the storm and stress period of his checkered career. There is an old Greek proverb that "to desire the impossible is a malady of the soul." With this malady in its most incurable form the poet was stricken; and, instead of seeking cure, he nursed his sickness and delighted in the discord of his spirit. From that discord he wrought the harmonies of his sonnets and _canzoni_. That malady made him the poet of all men who have found in their emotions a dreamland more wonderful and pregnant with delight than in the world which we call real. After Laura"s death his love was tranquilized to a sublimer music. The element of discord had pa.s.sed out of it; and just because its object was now physically unattainable, it grew in purity and power. The sensual alloy which, however spiritualized, had never ceased to disturb his soul, was purged from his still vivid pa.s.sion.
Laura in heaven looked down upon him from her station mid the saints; and her poet could indulge the dream that now at last she pitied him, that she was waiting for him with angelic eyes of love, and telling him to lose no time, but set his feet upon the stairs that led to G.o.d and her. The romance finds its ultimate apotheosis in that transcendent pa.s.sage of the _Trionfo della Morte_ which describes her death and his own vision. Throughout the whole course of this labyrinthine love-lament, sustained for forty years on those few notes so subtly modulated, from the first sonnet on his _primo giovenile errore_ to the last line of her farewell, _tu starai in terra senza me gran tempo_, Laura grows in vividness before us. She only becomes a real woman in death, because she was for Petrarch always an ideal, and in the ideal world beyond the tomb he is more sure of her than when "the fair veil"
of flesh was drawn between her and his yearning.
Petrarch succeeded in bringing the old theme of chivalrous love back from the philosophizing mysticism of the Florentines to simple experience. He forms a link between their transcendental science and the positive romance of the Decameron, between the spirit of the middle ages and the spirit of the Renaissance. Guided by his master, Cino da Pistoja, the least metaphysical and clearest of his immediate predecessors, Petrarch found the right artistic _via media_; and perhaps we may attribute something to that double education which placed him between the influences of the Tuscan lyrists and the troubadours of his adopted country. At any rate he returned from the allegories of the Florentine poets to the directness of chivalrous emotion; but he treated the original motive with a greater richness and a more idealizing delicacy than his Provencal predecessors. The marvelous instruments of the Italian Sonnet and Canzone were in his hands, and he knew how to draw from them a purer if not a grander melody than either Guido or Dante. The best work of the Florentines required a commentary; and the structure of their verse, like its content, was scientific rather than artistic. Petrarch could publish his _Canzoniere_ without explanatory notes. He laid his heart bare to the world, and every man who had a heart might understand his language. Between the subject-matter and the verbal expression there lay no intervening veil of mystic meaning. The form had become correspondingly more clear and perfect, more harmonious in its proportions, more immediate in musical effects. In a word, Petrarch was the first to open a region where art might be free, and to find for the heart"s language utterance direct and limpid.
This was his great achievement. The forms he used were not new. The subject-matter he handled was given to him. But he brought both form and subject closer to the truth, exercising at the same time an art which had hitherto been unconceived in subtlety, and which has never since been equaled. If Dante was the first great poet, Petrarch was the first true artist of Italian literature. It was, however, impossible that Petrarch should overleap at one bound all the barriers of the middle ages. His Laura has still something of the earlier ideality adhering to her. She stands midway between the Beatrice of Dante and the women of Boccaccio. She is not so much a woman with a character and personality, as woman in the general, _la femme_, personified and made the object of a poet"s reveries. Though every detail of her physical perfections, with the single and striking exception of her nose, is carefully recorded, it is not easy to form a definite picture even of her face and shape. Of her inner nature we hear only the vaguest generalities. She sits like a lovely model in the midst of a beautiful landscape, like one of our Burne-Jones"s women who incarnate a mood of feeling while they lack the fullness of personality. The thought of her pervades the valley of Vaucluse; the perfume of her memory is in the air we breathe. But if we met her, we should find it hard to recognize her; and if she spoke, we should not understand that it was Laura.
Petrarch had no strong objective faculty. Just as he failed to bring Laura vividly before us, until she had by death become a part of his own spiritual substance, so he failed to depict things as he saw them. The pictures etched in three or four lines of the _Purgatorio_ may be sought for vainly in his _Rime_. That his love of nature was intense, there is no doubt. The solitary of Vaucluse, the pilgrim of Mont Ventoux, had reached a point of sensibility to natural scenery far in advance of his age. But when he came to express this pa.s.sion for beauty, he was satisfied with giving the most perfect form to the emotion stirred in his own subjectivity. Instead of scenes, he delineates the moods suggested by them. He makes the streams and cliffs and meadows of Vaucluse his confidants. He does not lose himself in contemplation of the natural object, though we feel that this self found its freest breathing-s.p.a.ce, its most delightful company, in the society of hill and vale. He never cares to paint a landscape, but contents himself with such delicate touches and such cunning combinations of words as may suggest a charm in the external world. At this point the humanist, preoccupied with man as his main subject, meets the poet in Petrarch.
What is lost, too, in the precision of delineation, is gained in universality. The _Canzoniere_ reminds us of no single spot; wherever there are clear fresh rills and hanging mountains, the lover walks with Petrarch by his side.
If the poet"s dominant subjectivity weakened his grasp upon external things, it made him supreme in self-portraiture. Every mood of pa.s.sion is caught and fixed precisely in his verse. The most evanescent shades of feeling are firmly set upon the exquisite picture. Each string of Love"s many-chorded lyre is touched with a vigorous hand. The fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise; the "yea and nay twinned in a single breath;" the struggle of conflicting aspirations in a heart drawn now to G.o.d and now to earth; the quiet resting-places of content; the recrudescence of the ancient smart; the peace of absence, when longing is luxury; the agony of presence, adding fire to fire--all this is rendered with a force so striking, in a style so monumental, that the _Canzoniere_ may still be called the Introduction to the Book of Love.
Thus, when Petrarch"s own self was the object, his hand was steady; his art failed not in modeling the image into roundness.
Dante brought the universe into his poem. But "the soul of man, too, is a universe:" and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet. It remained for Boccaccio, the third in the triumvirate, to treat of common life with art no less developed. From Beatrice through Laura to La Fiammetta; from the Divine Comedy through the Canzoniere to the Decameron; from the world beyond the grave through the world of feeling to the world in which we play our puppet parts; from the mystic _terza rima_, through the stately lyric stanzas, to Protean prose--such was the rapid movement of Italian art within the brief s.p.a.ce of some fifty years.
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, the eleventh year of Dante"s exile, the first of Petrarch"s residence at Avignon. His grandfather belonged originally to Certaldo; but he removed to Florence and received the rights of burghership among those countryfolk whom Dante reckoned the corrupters of her ancient commonwealth[77]:
Ma la cittadinanza, ch"e or mista Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine, Pura vedeasi nell"ultimo artista.
Certaldo was a village of Valdelsa, famous for its onions. This explains the rebuff which the author of the Decameron received from a Florentine lady, whom he afterwards satirized in the _Corbaccio_: "Go back to grub your onion-beds, and leave gentlewomen alone!" Boccaccio was neither born in wedlock nor yet of pure Italian blood. His mother was a Frenchwoman, with whom his father made acquaintance during a residence on business at Paris. These facts deserve to be noted, since they bear upon the temper of his mind and on the quality of his production.
It has been observed that the three main elements of Florentine society--the _popolo vecchio_, or n.o.bles who acquiesced in the revolution of 1282; the _popolo gra.s.so_, or burghers occupying a middle rank in the city, who pa.s.sed the Ordinances of 1293; and the _popolo minuto_, or artisans and _contadini_ admitted to the franchise, who came to the front between 1343 and 1378--are severally represented by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.[78] So rapid are the political and intellectual mutations in a little state like Florence, where the vigor of popular life and the vivacity of genius bear no proportion to the size of the community, that within the short span of fifty years the center of power may be transferred from an aristocracy to the proletariate, and the transition in art and literature from the Middle Age to the Renaissance may not only be accomplished but copiously ill.u.s.trated in detail.[79]
Boccaccio was the typical Italian _bourgeois_, the representative of a cla.s.s who finally determined the Renaissance. His prose and poetry contain in germ the various species which were perfected during that period. Studying him, we study in its immaturity the spirit of the next two centuries. He was the first to subst.i.tute a literature of the people for the literature of the learned cla.s.ses and the aristocracy. He freed the natural instincts from ascetic interdictions and the mysticism of the transcendental school. He exposed the shams of chivalrous romance and the hypocrisies of monkery with ridicule more deadly than satire or invective. He brought realism in art and letters back to honor by delineating the world as he found it--sensual, base, comic, ludicrous, pathetic, tender, cruel--in all its crudities and contradictions. He replaced the abstractions of the allegory by concrete fact. He vindicated the claims of appet.i.te and sensuous enjoyment against ideal aspirations and the scruples of a faith-tormented conscience. He taught his fellow-countrymen that a life of studious indifference was preferable to the strife of factions and the din of battle-fields.
Boccaccio did not act consciously and with fixed purpose to these ends.
He was rather the spokesman of his age and race--the sign in literature that Italian society had entered upon a new phase, and that the old order was pa.s.sing away. If the Decameron seemed to shake the basis of morality; if it gained the name of _Il Principe Galeotto_ or the Pandar; if it was denounced as the corrupter of the mult.i.tude; this meant, not that its author had a sinister intention, but that the medieval fabric was already sapped, and that the people whom Boccaccio wrote to please were disillusioned of their previous ideals. The honest easy-going man, Giovanni della Tranquillita, as he was called, painted what he saw and made himself the mouthpiece of the men around him.[80]
For the work he had to do, he was admirably fitted by nature and education. He combined the blood of a Florentine tradesman and a Parisian _grisette_. He had but little learning in his youth, and was the first great Italian writer who had not studied at Bologna. His early manhood was pa.s.sed in commerce at Naples, where he gained access to the dissolute Court of Joan, and made love to her ladies. At his father"s request he applied himself for a short while to legal studies; but he does not appear to have practiced as a lawyer in real earnest.
Literature very early became the pa.s.sion, the one serious and enn.o.bling enthusiasm of his life. We have already seen him at the tomb of Virgil, vowing to devote his powers to the sacred Muses; and we know what services he rendered to humanism by his indefatigable energy in the acquisition and diffusion of miscellaneous learning.[81] This is not the place to treat of Boccaccio"s scholarship. Yet it may be said that, just as his philosophy of life was the philosophy of a jovial and sensuous plebeian, so his conception of literature lacked depth and greatness. He repeated current theories about the dependence of poetry on truth, the dignity of allegory, the sacredness of love, the beauty of honor. But his own work showed how little he had appropriated these ideas. As a student, a poet, and a man, he lived upon a lower plane of thought than Petrarch; and when he left the concrete for the abstract, his penetrative insight failed him.
From this point of view Boccaccio"s Life of Dante is instructive. It is crammed with heterogeneous erudition. It bristles with citations and opinions learned by rote. It reveals the heartiest reverence for all things reckoned worthy in the realm of intellect. The admiration for the divine poet expressed in it is sincere and ungrudging. Yet this book betrays an astonishing want of sympathy with Dante, and transforms the sublime romance of the _Vita Nuova_ into a commonplace _novella_. Dante told the world how he first felt love for Beatrice at the age of nine.
His biographer is at a loss to understand this miracle. He supposes that the sweet season of May, the good wines and delicate dishes of the Portinari banquet, all the sensuous delights of a Florentine festival, combined to make the boy prematurely a man.[82] Dante called Beatrice "youngest of the angels." Boccaccio draws a lively picture of an angel in the flesh, as he imagined her; and in his portrait there is far less of the angelic than the carnal nature visible. This he does in perfect good faith, with the heartfelt desire to exalt Dante above all poets, and to spread abroad the truth of his ill.u.s.trious life. But the hero of Renaissance literature was incapable of comprehending the real feeling of the man he worshiped. Between him and the enthusiasms of the middle ages a nine-fold Styx already poured its waves.
Boccaccio"s n.o.blest quality was the recognition of intellectual power.
It was this cult of great men, if we may trust Filippo Villani, which first decided him to follow literature.[83] His devotion to the memory of Dante, and his frank confession of inferiority to Petrarch, whom he loved and served through twenty years of that exacting poet"s life, are equally sincere and beautiful. These feelings inspired some of his finest poems, and penetrated the autobiographical pa.s.sages of his minor works with a delicacy that endears the man to us.[84] No less candid was his worship of beauty--not beauty of an intellectual or ideal order, but sensuous and real--the beauty which inspired the artists and the poets of the following centuries. Nor has any writer of any age been gifted with a stronger faculty for its expression. From this service of the beautiful he derived the major impulse of his activity as an artist.
If he lacked moral greatness, if he was deficient in philosophical depth and religious earnestness, his devotion to art was serious, intense, profound, absorbing. He discharged his duties as a citizen with easy acquiescence, but no stern consciousness of patriotic purpose. He conformed to the Church, and allowed himself in old age to be frightened into a kind of half-repentance. But the homage he rendered to art was of a very different and more exacting nature. With his best energies he labored to make himself, at least in this sphere, perfect. How amply he succeeded must be acknowledged by all men who have read the Decameron, and who have seen that here Boccaccio forms the legends of all ages and all lands into one harmonious whole, brings a world of many-sided human interest and varied beauty out of the chaos of medieval materials, finishing every detail with love, inspiring each particle with life, and setting the daedal picture of society in a framework of delicate romance.
The conception and the execution of this masterpiece of literature are equally artistic. If the phrase "art for art" can be used in speaking of one who was unconscious of the theory it implies, Boccaccio may be selected as the typical artist for art"s sake. Within the sphere of his craft, he is impa.s.sioned, enthusiastic, sincere, profound. His att.i.tude with regard to all else is one of amused or curious indifference, of sensuous enjoyment, of genial ridicule, of playful cynicism.
Boccaccio was a _bourgeois_ of the fourteenth century; but his character, as stamped on the Decameron, was common to Italy during the next two hundred years. The whole book glows with the joyousness of a race discarding dreams for realities, scorning the terrors of a bygone creed, reveling in nature"s liberty, proclaiming the empire of the senses with a frankness which pa.s.ses over into license. In Boccaccio, the guiding genius of the Italian Renaissance arrives at consciousness.
That blending of moral indifference with artistic seriousness, which we observe in him, marks the coming age. He is not the precursor but the inaugurator of the era. The smile which plays around his mouth became, though changeful in expression, fixed upon the lips of his posterity--genial in Ariosto, gracious in Poliziano, mischievous in Pulci, dubious in Lorenzo de" Medici, sardonic in Aretino, bitter in Folengo, toned to tragic irony in Machiavelli, impudent in Berni, joyous in Boiardo, sensual in Bandello--a.s.suming every shade of character, Protean, indescribable, until at last it fades from Ta.s.so"s brow, when Italy has ceased to laugh except in secret.
The Decameron has been called the _Commedia Umana_.[85] This t.i.tle is appropriate, not merely because the book portrays human life from a comic rather than a serious point of view, but also because it is the ant.i.thesis of Dante"s _Commedia Divina_. As poet and scene-painter devised for our ancestors of the Elizabethan period both Mask and Anti-mask, so did the genius of Italy provide two shows for modern Europe--the Mask and Anti-mask of human nature. Dante"s Comedy represents our life in relation to the life beyond the grave. Boccaccio in his Comedy depicts the life of this earth only, subtracting whatsoever may suggest a life to come. It would be difficult to determine which of the two dramas is the more truthful, or which of the two poets had a firmer grasp upon reality. But the realities of the Divine Comedy are spiritual; those of the Human Comedy are material. The world of the Decameron is not an inverted world, like that of Aristophanes. It does not ant.i.thesize Dante"s world by turning it upside down. It is simply the same world surveyed from an opposite point of view--unaltered, uninverted, but seen in the superficies, presented in the concrete. It is the prose of life; and this justifies the counterpoise of its form to that of Dante"s poem. It is the world as world, the flesh as flesh, nature as nature, without intervention of spiritual agencies, without relation to ideal order, regarded as the sphere of humor, fortune, marvelous caprice. It is everything which the Church had banned, proscribed, held in abhorrence, without that which the Church had inculcated for the exaltation of the soul. This world, actual and unexplained, Boccaccio paints with the mastery of an accomplished artist, molding its chaotic elements into a form of beauty which compels attention.
Dante condemned those "who submit their reason to natural appet.i.te."[86]
Boccaccio celebrates the apotheosis of natural appet.i.te, of _il talento_, stigmatized as sin by ascetic Christianity.[87] His strongest sympathies are reserved for those who suffer by abandoning themselves to impulse, and in this self-abandonment he sees the poetry of life. This is the very core of the ant.i.thesis presented by the Human to the Divine Comedy. The Decameron is an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine. Like all vehement reactions, it is not satisfied with opposing the extravagances of the view it combats. Instead of negativing asceticism, it affirms license. Yet though the Divine Comedy and the Decameron are ant.i.thetical, they are both true, and true together, inasmuch as they present the same humanity studied under contradictory conditions. Human nature is vast enough to furnish the materials for both, inexplicable enough to render both acceptable to reason, tolerant enough to view with impartial approbation the desolate theology of the _Inferno_ and the broad mirth of the Decameron.[88]
The Decameron did not appear unheralded by similar attempts. No literary taste was stronger in the middle ages than the taste for stories. This is proved by the collection known as _Gesta Romanorum_, and by the _Bestiarii_, _Lapidarii_, _Physiologi_ and _Apiarii_, which contain a variety of tales, many of them surprisingly indecent, veiling spiritual doctrine under obscenities which horrify a modern reader.[89]
From the hands of ecclesiastical compilers these short stories pa.s.sed down to popular narrators, who in France made the _fabliaux_ a special branch of vulgar literature. The follies and vices of the clergy, tricks practiced by wives upon their husbands, romantic adventures of lovers, and comic incidents of daily life, formed the staple of their stock in trade. When the _fabliau_ reached Italy, together with other literary wares, from France, it was largely cultivated in the South; and the first known collection of Italian stories received the name of _Il Novellino_, or _Il Fiore del parlar gentile_. The language of this book was immature, and the tales themselves seem rather memoranda for the narrator than finished compositions to be read with pleasure.[90] It may therefore be admitted that the rude form of the Decameron was given to Boccaccio. Not to mention the larger chivalrous romances, _Conti di antichi Cavalieri_, and translations from French _Chansons de Geste_, which have no genuine link of connection with the special type of the Novella, he found models for his tales both in the libraries of medieval convents and upon the lips of popular _raccontatori_. Yet this must not be taken to imply any lack of originality in Boccaccio. Such comparisons as Professor Bartoli has inst.i.tuted between the Decameron and some of its supposed sources, prove the insignificance of his debt, the immeasurable inferiority of his predecessors.[91]
The spirit of the Decameron no less than the form, had been long in preparation. Satire, whether superficial, as in the lays of the _jongleurs_, or searching, as in the invectives of Dante and Petrarch, was familiar to the middle ages; and the popular Latin poems of the wandering students are steeped in rage against a corrupt hierarchy, a venal Curia.[92] Those same _Carmina Vagorum_ reveal the smoldering embers of unextinguished Paganism, which underlay the Christian culture of the middle ages. Written by men who belonged to the clerical cla.s.ses, but who were often on bad terms with ecclesiastical authorities, tinctured with the haughty contempt of learning for the laity, yet overflowing with the vigorous life of the proletariate, these extraordinary poems bring to view a bold and candid sensuality, an ineradicable spontaneity of natural appet.i.te, which is strangely at variance with the cardinal conceptions of ascetic Christianity.[93] In the sect of the Italian Epicureans; in the obscure bands of the Cathari and Paterini; in the joyous companies of Provencal Court and castle, the same note of irrepressible nature sounded. Side by side with the new-built fabric of ecclesiastical idealism, the old temples of unregenerate human deities subsisted. They were indeed discredited, proscribed, consigned to shame. They formed the _mauvais lieux_ of Christendom. Yet there they stood, even as the Venusberg of Tannhauser"s legend abode unshaken though cathedrals rose by Rhine. All that was needed to restore the worship of these nature-G.o.ds was that a great artist should decorate their still substantial temple-walls with the beauty of a new, sincere, and unrepentant style, fitting their abandoned chambers for the habitation of the human spirit, free now to choose the dwelling that it listed. This Boccaccio achieved. And here it must again be noticed that the revolution of time was about to bring man"s popular and carnal deities once more, if only for a season, to the throne. The murmured songs of a few wandering students were about to be drowned in the paean of Renaissance poetry. The visions of the Venusberg were to be realized in Italian painting. The coming age was destined to live out Boccaccio"s Human Comedy in act and deed. This is the true kernel of his greatness. As poet, he ranked third only, and that at a vast interval, in the triumvirate of the fourteenth century. But the temper of his mind, the sphere of his conceptions, made him the representative genius of the two following centuries. Awaiting the age when science should once more co-ordinate the forces of humanity in a coherent theory, men in the Renaissance exchanged superfluous restraint for immoderate license. It is not to be wondered at that Boccaccio and not Dante was their hero.
The description of the Plague at Florence which introduces the Decameron, has more than a merely artistic appropriateness. Boccaccio may indeed have meant to bring his group of pleasure-seeking men and maidens into strong relief by contrast with the horrors of the stricken city. Florence crowded with corpses, echoing to the shrieks of delirium and the hoa.r.s.e cries of body-buriers, is the background he has chosen for that blooming garden, where the birds sing and the lovers sit by fountains in the shade, laughing or weeping as the spirit of each tale compels them. But independently of this effect of contrast, which might be used to ill.u.s.trate the author"s life-philosophy, the description of the Plague has a still deeper significance, whereof Boccaccio never dreamed. Matteo Villani dates a progressive deterioration of manners in the city from the Plague of 1348, and justifies us in connecting the Ciompi riots of 1378 with the enfeeblement of civic order during those thirty years. The Plague was, therefore, the outward sign, if not the efficient cause, of those very ethical and social changes which the Decameron immortalized in literature. It was the historical landmark between two ages, dividing the Florence of the Grandi from the Florence of the Ciompi. The cynicism, liberated in that time of terror, lawlessness, and sudden death, a.s.sumed in Boccaccio"s romance a beautiful and graceful aspect. It lost its harsh and vulgar outlines, and took the air of genial indulgence which distinguished Italian society throughout the years of the Renaissance.
Boccaccio selects seven ladies of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-eight, and three men, the youngest of whom is twenty-five. Having formed this company, he transports them to a villa two miles from the city, where he provides them with a train of serving-men and waiting-women, and surrounds them with the delicacies of medieval luxury. He is careful to remind us that, though the three men and three of the ladies were acknowledged lovers, and though their conversation turned on almost nothing else but pa.s.sion, "no stain defiled the honor of the party." Stories are told; and these unblemished maidens listen with laughter and a pa.s.sing blush to words and things which outrage Northern sense of decency. The remorseless but light satire of the Decameron spares none of the ideals of the age. All the medieval enthusiasms are reviewed and criticised from the standpoint of the Florentine _bottega_ and _piazza_. It is as though the _bourgeois_, not content with having made n.o.bility a crime, were bent upon extinguishing its spirit. The tale of Agilulf vulgarizes the chivalrous conception of love enn.o.bling men of low estate, by showing how a groom, whose heart is set upon a queen, avails himself of opportunity. Tancredi burlesques the knightly reverence for a stainless scutcheon by the extravagance of his revenge. The sanct.i.ty of the Thebaid, that ascetic dream of purity and self-renunciation for G.o.d"s service, is made ridiculous by Alibech. Ser Ciappelletto brings contempt upon the canonization of saints. The confessional, the worship of relics, the priesthood, and the monastic orders are derided with the deadliest persiflage. Christ himself is scoffed at in a jest which points the most indecent of these tales.[94]
Marriage affords a never-failing theme for scorn; and when, by way of contrast, the novelist paints an ideal wife, he runs into such hyperboles that the very patience of Griselda is a satire on its dignity. Like Balzac, Boccaccio was unsuccessful in depicting virtuous womanhood. Attempting this, he fell, like Balzac, into the absurdities of sentiment. His own conception of love was sensual and voluptuous--not uniformly coa.r.s.e, nay often tender, but frankly carnal. Without having recourse to the Decameron, this statement might be abundantly substantiated by reference to the _Filostrato_, _Fiammetta_, _Amorosa Visione_, _Ninfale Fiesolano_. Boccaccio enjoyed the painting of licentious pleasure, s.n.a.t.c.hed in secret, sometimes half by force, by a lover after moderate resistance from his paramour. He imported into these pictures the plebeian tone which we have already noticed in the popular poetry of the preceding century, and which was destined to pervade the erotic literature of the Renaissance. There is, therefore, an ironical contrast between the decencies observed by his _brigata_ and their conversation; a contrast rooted in the survival from chivalrous times of conventional ideals, which have lost reality and been persistently ignored in practice. This effect of irony is enhanced by the fact that many of the motives are such as might have been romantically treated, but here are handled from the _popolano gra.s.so"s_ point of view. A skeptical and sensuous imagination plays around the sanct.i.ties and sublimities which have for it become illusory.
We observe the same kind of unconscious hypocrisy, the same spontaneous sapping of now obsolete ideals, in the _Amorosa Visione_.[95] Here Love is still regarded as the apotheosis of mortal experience. It is still said to be the union of intelligence and moral energy in an enthusiasm of the soul. Yet the joys of love revealed at the conclusion of the poem are such as a _bayadere_ might offer.[96] The _bourgeois_ effaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance. This vision, composed in _terza rima_, was a.s.suredly not meant to travesty Dante. Still it would be difficult to imagine a more complete inversion of the Dantesque point of view, a more deliberate subst.i.tution of an Earthly Paradise for the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. It is as though Boccaccio, the representative of the new age, in all the fullness of his sensuous _navete_, appealed to the poets of chivalry, and said: "See here how all your fancies find their end in nature!"
It will not do to over-strain the censure implied in the foregoing paragraphs. Natural appet.i.te, no less than the ideal, has its elements of poetry; and the sensuality of the Decameron accords with plastic beauty in a work of art incomparably lucid. Sh.e.l.ley, no lenient critic, wrote these words about the setting of the tales[97]: "What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us." Boccaccio"s sense of beauty has already been alluded to; and it so pervades his work that special attention need scarcely be called to it. His prose abounds in pa.s.sages which are perfect pictures after their own kind, like the following, selected, not from the Decameron, but from an earlier work, ent.i.tled _Filocopo_[98]:
Con gli orecchi intenti al suono, cominci ad andare in quella parte ove il sentiva; e giunto presso alla fontana, vide le due giovinette. Elle erano nel viso bianchissime, la quale bianchezza quanto si conveniva di rosso colore era mescolata.
I loro occhi pareano mattutine stelle, e le picciole bocche di colore di vermiglia rosa, piu piacevoli diveniano nel muoverle alle note della loro canzone. I loro capelli come fila d"oro erano biondissimi, i quali alquanto crespi s"avvolgevano infra le verdi frondi delle loro ghirlande. Vest.i.te per lo gran caldo, come e detto sopra, le tenere e dilicate carni di sottilissimi vestimenti, i quali dalla cintura in su strettissimi mostravano la forma delle belle mamme, le quali come due ritondi pomi pignevano in fuori il resistente vestimento, e ancora in piu luoghi per leggiadre apriture si manifestavano le candide carni. La loro statura era di convenevole grandezza, in ciascun membro bene proporzionata.
s.p.a.ce and nineteenth-century canons of propriety prevent me from completing the picture made by Florio and these maidens. It might be paralleled with a hundred pa.s.sages of like intention, where the Italian artist is revealed to us by touches curiously multiplied.[99] We find in them the sense of color, the scrupulous precision of form, and something of that superfluous minuteness which belongs to painting rather than to literature. The writer has seen a picture, and not felt a poem. In rendering it by words, he trusted to the imagination of his reader for suggesting a highly-finished work of plastic art to the mind.[100] The _fetes champetres_ of the Venetian masters are here antic.i.p.ated in the prose of the _trecento_. Such descriptions were frequent in Italian literature, especially frequent in the works of the best stylists, Sannazzaro, Poliziano, Ariosto, the last of whom has been severely but not unjustly criticised by Lessing for overstepping the limits of poetry in his portrait of Alcina. It may be pleaded in defense of Boccaccio and his followers that they belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and that they wrote for a public familiar with painted form. Their detailed descriptions were at once translated into color by men habituated to the sight of pictures. During the Renaissance, painting dominated the Italian genius, and all the sister arts of expression felt that influence, just as at Athens sculpture lent something even to the drama.
As a poet, Boccaccio tried many styles. His epic, the _Teseide_, cannot be reckoned a great success. He is not at home upon the battle-field, and knew not how to sound the heroic trumpet.[101] Yet the credit of discovery may be awarded to the author of this poem. He introduced to the modern world a tale rich in romantic incidents and capable of still higher treatment than he was himself able to give it. When we remember how Chaucer, Shakspere, Fletcher and Dryden handled and rehandled the episode of Palamon"s rivalry with Arcite for the hand of Emilia, we dare not withhold from Boccaccio the praise which belongs to creative genius.[102] It is no slight achievement to have made a story which bore such n.o.ble fruit in literature. The _Teseide_, moreover, fulfilled an important mission in Italian poetry. It adapted the popular _ottava rima_ to the style of the romantic epic, and fixed it for Pulci, Poliziano, Boiardo, and Ariosto. That Boccaccio was not the inventor of the stanza, as used to be a.s.sumed, may now be considered beyond all question. That he had not learned to handle it with the majestic sweetness of Poliziano, or the infinite variety of Ariosto, is evident.
Yet he deserves credit for having discerned its capacity and brought it into cultivated use.
Though unequal in quality, his sonnets and _ballate_, whether separately published or scattered through his numerous prose works, have a higher merit. The best are those in which, following Guido Cavalcanti"s path, he gives free scope to his incomparable sense of natural beauty. The style is steeped in sweetness, softness and the delicacy of music. From these half-popular poems I might select the Ballata _Io mi son giovinetta_; the song of the Angel from the planet Venus, extracted from the _Filocopo_; a lament of a woman for her lost youth, _Il fior che "l valor perde_; and the girl"s prayer to Love, _Tu se" nostro Signor caro e verace_.[103] It is difficult for the critic to characterize poems so true to simple nature, so spontaneously pa.s.sionate, and yet so artful in the turns of language, molded like wax beneath the poet"s touch. Here sensuousness has no vulgarity, and the seductions of the flesh are sublimed by feeling to a beauty which is spiritual in refinement. It may be observed that Boccaccio writes his best love-poetry to be sung by girls. He has abandoned the standpoint of the chivalrous lover, though he still uses the phraseology of the Italo-Provencal school. What arrests his fancy is, not the ideal of womanhood raising man above himself, but woman conscious of her own supreme attractiveness. He delights in making her the mirror of the feelings she inspires. He bids her celebrate in hymns the beauty of her s.e.x, the perfume of the charms that master man. When the metaphysical forms of speech, borrowed from the elder style, are used, they give utterance to a pa.s.sion which is sensual, or blent at best with tenderness--a physical love-longing, a sentiment born of youth and desire. A girl, for instance, speaks about herself, and says:[104]
Colui che muove il cielo et ogni Stella Mi fece a suo diletto Vaga leggiadra graziosa e bella, Per dar qua giu ad ogni alto intelletto Alcun segno di quella Bilta che sempre a lui sta nel cospetto.
On the lips of him who wrote the tale of Alibech, this language savors of profanity. Yet we are forced to recognize the poet"s sincerity of feeling. It is the same problem as that which meets us in the _Amorosa Visione_.[105] The G.o.d Boccaccio worshiped was changed: but this deity was still divine, and deserved, he thought, the honors of mystic adoration. At the same time there is nothing Asiatic in his sensuous inspiration. The emotion is controlled and concentrated; the form is pure in all its outlines.
The Decameron was the masterpiece of Boccaccio"s maturity. But he did not reach that height of excellence without numerous essays in styles of much diversity. While still a young man, not long after his meeting with Fiammetta, he began the _Filocopo_ and dedicated it to his new love.[106] This romance was based upon the earlier tale of _Floire et Blanceflor_.[107] But the youthful poet invested the simple love-story of his Florio and Biancofiore with a masquerade costume of mythological erudition and wordy rhetoric, which removed it from the middle ages. The G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of Olympus are introduced as living agents, supplying the machinery of the romance until the very end, when the hero and heroine are converted to Christianity, and abjure their old protectors with cold equanimity. We are left to imagine that, for Boccaccio at any rate, Venus, Mars and Cupid were as real as Christ and the saints, though superseded as objects of pious veneration. This confusion of Pagan and Christian mythology is increased by his habit of finding cla.s.sical periphrases for the expression of religious ideas. He calls nuns _Sacerdotesse di Diana_. G.o.d the Father is _Quell"eccelso e inestimabile principe Sommo Giove_. Satan becomes Pluto, and human sin is Atropos. The Birth of Christ is described thus: _la terra come sent il nuovo incarco della deita del figliuol di Giove_. The Apostles appear as _nuovi cavalieri entrati contro a Plutone in campo_.[108] The style of the _Filocopo_ was new; and in spite, or perhaps because of, its euphuism, it had a decided success. This encouraged Boccaccio to attempt the _Teseide_. The _Filostrato_ soon followed; and here for the first time we find the future author of the Decameron. Under Greek names and incidents borrowed from the War of Troy, we are in fact studying some episode from the _chroniques galantes_ of the Neapolitan Court, narrated with the vigor of a perfect master in the art of story telling.
Nothing could be further removed in sentiment from the heroism of the Homeric age or closer to the customs of a corrupt Italian city than this poem. In Troilo himself a feverish type of character, overmastered by pa.s.sion which is rather a delirium of the senses than a mood of feeling, has been painted with a force that reminds us of the _Fiammetta_, where the same disease of the soul is delineated in a woman. Pandaro shows for the first time in modern literature an utterly depraved nature, reveling in seduction, and glutting a licentious imagination with the spectacle of satiated l.u.s.t. The frenzied appet.i.te of Troilo, Pandaro"s ruffian arts, and the gradual yieldings of Griselda to a voluptuous inclination, reveal the master"s hand; and though the poem is hurried toward the close (Boccaccio being only interested in the portrayal of his hero"s love-languors, ecstasies and disappointment), the _Filostrato_ must undoubtedly be reckoned the finest of his narratives in verse. The second and third Cantos are remarkable for dramatic movement and wealth of sensuous imagination, never rising to sublimity nor refined with such poetry as Shakspere found for Romeo and Juliet, but welling copiously from a genuinely ardent nature. The love described is nakedly and unaffectedly luxurious; it is an overmastering impulse, crowned at last with all the joys of sensual fruition. According to Boccaccio the repose conferred by Love upon his votaries is the satiety of their desires.[109] Between Dante"s _Signore della n.o.bilitade_ and his _Sir di tutta pace_ there is indeed a wide gulf fixed.[110]
After the _Filostrato_, Boccaccio next produced the _Ameto_, _Amorosa Visione_, _Fiammetta_, _Ninfale Fiesolano_, and _Corbaccio_, between the years 1343 and 1355. The _Ameto_ is a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. To read it attentively is now almost impossible, in spite of frequent pa.s.sages where the luxuriant word-painting of the author is conspicuous. In the _Amorosa Visione_ he attempted the style which Petrarch had adopted for his _Trionfi_. After reviewing human life under the several aspects of learning, glory, love, fortune, the poet finally resigns himself to a Nirvana of sensual beat.i.tude. The poem is unsuccessful, because it adapts an obsolete form of art to requirements beyond its scope. Boccaccio tries to pour the new wine of the Renaissance into the old bottles of medieval allegory. In the _Fiammetta_ Boccaccio exhibited all his strength as an anatomist of feeling, describing the effects of pa.s.sion in a woman"s heart, and a.n.a.lyzing its varying emotions with a subtlety which proved his knowledge of a certain type of female character. It is the first attempt in modern literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer. Since Virgil"s Dido, or the _Heroidum Epistolae_ of Ovid, nothing of the sort had been essayed upon an equal scale. Taken together with Dante"s _Vita Nuova_ and Petrarch"s _Secretum_, each of which is a personal confidence, the _Fiammetta_ may be reckoned among those masterpieces of a.n.a.lytic art, which revealed the developed consciousness of the Italian race, at a moment when the science of emotion was still for the rest of Europe an undiscovered territory. This essay exercised a wide and lasting influence over the descriptive literature of the Renaissance. Yet when we compare its stationary monologues with the brief but pregnant touches of the Decameron, we are forced to a.s.sign it the rank of a study rather than a finished picture. The _Fiammetta_ is to the Decameron what rhetoric is to the drama. This, however, is hardly a deduction from its merit. The delineation of an unholy and unhappy pa.s.sion, blessed with fruition for one brief moment, cursed through months of illness and despair with all the furies of vain desire and poignant recollection, is executed with incomparable fullness of detail and inexhaustible richness of fancy. The reader rises from a perusal of the _Fiammetta_ with impressions similar to those which a work of Richardson leaves upon the mind. At the same time it is full of poetry.
The Vision of Venus, the invocation to Sleep, and the description of summer on the Bay of Baiae relieve a deliberate anatomy of pa.s.sion, which might otherwise be tedious.[111] The romance is so rich in material that it furnished the motives for a score of tales, and the novelists of the Renaissance availed themselves freely of its copious stores.[112]
The _Corbaccio_ or _Laberinto d"Amore_ is a satire upon women, animated with the bitterest sense of injury and teeming with vindictive spite. It was written with the avowed purpose of reviling a lady who had rejected Boccaccio"s advances, and it paints the whole s.e.x in the darkest colors.
We could fancy that certain pa.s.sages had been penned by a disappointed monk. Though this work is in tone unworthy of its author, it bore fruits in the literature of the next century. Alberti"s satires are but rhetorical amplifications of themes suggested by the _Corbaccio_. Nor is it without value for the student of Italian manners. The list of romances read by women in the fourteenth century throws light upon Francesca"s episode in Dante, and proves that the t.i.tle _Principe Galeotto_ was not given without precedent to Boccaccio"s own writings.[113] The discourse on gentle birth in the same treatise should be studied in ill.u.s.tration of the Florentine conception of n.o.bility.[114] Boccaccio, though he follows so closely in time upon Dante, already antic.i.p.ates the democratic theories of Poggio.[115]
Feudal feeling was extinct in the _bourgeoisie_ of the great towns; nor had the experience of the Neapolitan Court suppressed in Boccaccio"s mind the pride of a Florentine citizen. At the same time he felt that contempt of the literary cla.s.ses for the common folk which was destined in the next century to divide the nation and to check the development of its vulgar literature. He apologizes for explaining Dante, and for bringing poetry down to the level of the _feccia plebeia_, the _vulgo indegno_, the _ingrati meccanici_, and so forth.[116]
It remains to speak of yet another of Boccaccio"s minor works, the _Ninfale Fiesolano_. This is a tale in octave stanzas, which, under a veil of mythological romance, relates the loves of a young man and a nun, and their subsequent tragic ending. It owes its interest to the vivid picture of seduction, so glowingly painted as to betray the author"s personal enjoyment of the motive. The story is thrown back into a time antecedent to Christianity and civil life. The heroine, Mensola, is a nymph of Diana; the hero, Affrico, a shepherd. The scene is laid among the mountains above Florence; and when Mensola has been changed into a fountain by the virgin G.o.ddess, whose rites she violated, the poem concludes with a myth invented to explain the founding of Fiesole.