FRATE ALBERTO
IN A FAMOUS NOVELLA of the Decameron (4, 2), Boccaccio tells of a man from Imola whose vice and dishonesty had made him a social outcast in his native town, so that he preferred to leave it. He went to Venice, there became a Franciscan monk and even a priest, called himself Frate Alberto, and managed to attract so much attention by striking penances and pious acts and sermons that he was generally regarded as a godly and trustworthy man. Then one day he tells one of his penitents—a particularly stupid and conceited creature, the wife of a merchant away on a journey—that the angel Gabriel has fallen in love with her beauty and would like to visit her at night. He visits her himself as Gabriel and has his fun with her. This goes on for a while, but in the end it turns out badly. This is what happens:
Pure avenne un giorno che, essendo madonna Lisetta con una sua comare, et insieme di bellezze quistionando, per porre la sua innanzi ad ogni altra, si come colei che poco sale aveva in zucca, disse: Se voi sapeste a cui la mia bellezza piace, in verità voi tacereste dell’altre. La comare vaga d’udire, si come colei che ben la conoscea, disse: Madonna, voi potreste dir vero, ma tuttavia non sappiendo chi questo si sia, altri non si rivolgerebbe così di leggiero. Allora la donna, che piccola levatura avea, disse: Comare, egli non si vuol dire, ma l’intendimento mio è l’agnolo Gabriello, il quale più che sè m’ama, si come la più bella donna, per quello che egli mi dica, che sia nel mondo o in maremma. La comare allora ebbe voglia di ridere, ma pur si tenne per farla più avanti parlare, e disse: In fè di Dio, madonna, se l’agnolo Gabriello è vostro intendimento, e dicevi questo, egli dee ben esser così; ma io non credeva che gli agnoli facesson queste cose. Disse la donna: Comare, voi siete errata; per le piaghe di Dio egli il fa meglio che mio marido; e dicemi che egli si fa anche colassù; ma perciocchè io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo, s’è egli innamorato di me, e viensene a star meco ben spesso: mo vedi vu? La comare partita da madonna Lisetta, le parve mille anni che ella fosse in parte ove ella potesse queste cose ridire; e ragunatasi ad una festa con una gran brigata di donne, loro ordinatamente raccontò la novella. Queste donne il dissero a’ mariti et ad altre donne; e quelle a quell’ altre, e così in meno di due dì ne fu tutta ripiena Vinegia. Ma tra gli altri, a’ quali questa cosa venne agli orecchi, furono i cognati di lei, li quali, senza alcuna cosa dirle, si posero in cuore di trovare questo agnolo, e di sapere se egli sapesse volare; e più notti stettero in posta. Avvenne che di questo fatto alcuna novelluzza ne venne a frate Alberto agli orecchi, il quale, per riprender la donna, una notte andatovi, appena spogliato s’era, che i cognati di lei, che veduto l’avean venire, furono all’uscio della sua camera per aprirlo. Il che frate Alberto sentendo, e avvisato ciò che era, levatosi, non avendo altro rifugio, aperse una finestra, la qual sopra il maggior canal rispondea, e quindi si gittò nell’aqua. Il fondo v’era grande, et egli sapeva ben notare, si che male alcun non si fece: e notato dall’altra parte del canale, in una casa, che aperta v’era, prestamente se n’entrò, pregando un buono uomo, che dentro v’era, che per l’amor di Dio gli scampasse la vita, sue favole dicendo, perchè quivi a quella ora et ignudo fosse. Il buono uomo mosso a pietà, convenendogli andare a far sue bisogne, nel suo letto il mise, e dissegli che quivi infino alla sua tornata si stesse; e dentro serratolo, andò a fare i fatti suoi. I cognati della donna entrati nella camera trovarono che l’agnolo Gabriello, quivi avendo lasciate l’ali, se n’era volato: di che quasi scornati, grandissima villania dissero alla donna, e lei ultimamente sconsolata lasciarono stare, et a casa lor tornarsi con gli arnesi dell’agnolo.
(However, it chanced one day that Madam Lisetta, being in dispute with a gossip of hers upon the question of female charms, to set her own above all others, said, like a woman who had little wit in her noddle, “An you but knew whom my beauty pleaseth, in truth you would hold your peace of other women.” The other, longing to hear, said, as one who knew her well, “Madam, maybe you say sooth; but knowing not who this may be, one cannot turn about so lightly.” Thereupon quoth Lisetta, who was eath enough to draw, “Gossip, it must go no farther; but he I mean is the angel Gabriel, who loveth me more than himself, as the fairest lady (for that which he telleth me) who is in the world or the Maremma.” The other had a mind to laugh, but contained herself, so she might make Lisetta speak further, and said, “Faith, madam, an the angel Gabriel be your lover and tell you this, needs must it be so; but methought not the angels did these things.” “Gossip,” answered the lady, “you are mistaken; zounds, he doth what you wot of better than my husband and telleth me they do it also up yonder; but, for that I seem to him fairer than any she in heaven, he hath fallen in love with me and cometh full oft to lie with me; seestow now?” The gossip, to whom it seemed a thousand years till she would be whereas she might repeat these things, took her leave of Madam Lisetta and foregathering at an entertainment with a great company of ladies, orderly recounted to them the whole story. They told it again to their husbands and other ladies, and these to yet others, and so in less than two days Venice was all full of it. Among others to whose ears the thing came were Lisetta’s brothers-in-law, who, without saying aught to her, bethought themselves to find the angel in question and see if he knew how to fly, and to this end they lay several nights in wait for him. As chance would have it, some inkling of the matter came to the ears of Fra Alberto, who accordingly repaired one night to the lady’s house, to reprove her, but hardly had he put off his clothes ere her brothers-in-law, who had seen him come, were at the door of her chamber to open it. Fra Alberto, hearing this and guessing what was to do, started up and having no other resource, opened a window, which gave upon the Grand Canal, and cast himself thence into the water. The canal was deep there and he could swim well, so that he did himself no hurt, but made his way to the opposite bank and hastily entering a house that stood open there, besought a poor man, whom he found within, to save his life for the love of God, telling him a tale of his own fashion, to explain how he came there at that hour and naked. The good man was moved to pity and it behoving him to go do his occasions, he put him in his own bed and bade him abide there against his return; then, locking him in, he went about his affairs. Meanwhile, the lady’s brothers-in-law entered her chamber and found that the angel Gabriel had flown, leaving his wings there; whereupon, seeing themselves baffled, they gave her all manner hard words and ultimately made off to their own house with the angel’s trappings, leaving her disconsolate.) The Decameron. Giovanni Boccaccio. Translation by John Payne. The Macy Library edition.
As I have said, the story ends very badly for Frate Alberto. His host hears on the Rialto what happened that night at Madonna Lisetta’s and infers who the man he took in is. He extorts a large sum of money from Frate Alberto and then betrays him nevertheless; and he does it in so disgusting a way that the frate becomes the object of a public scandal with moral and practical consequences from which he never recovers. We feel almost sorry for him, especially if we consider with what delight and indulgence Boccaccio relates the erotic escapades of other clerics no better than Frate Alberto (for instance 3, 4—the story of the monk Don Felice who induces his lady love’s husband to perform a ridiculous penance which keeps him away from home nights; or 3, 8, the story of an abbot who takes the husband to Purgatory for a while and even makes him do penance there).
The passage reprinted above contains the crisis of the novella. It consists of Madonna Lisetta’s conversation with her confidante and the consequences of their conversation: the strange rumor spreading through the town; the relatives hearing it and deciding to catch the angel; the nocturnal scene in which the frate escapes for the time being by boldly jumping into the canal. The conversation between the two women is psychologically and stylistically a masterly treatment of a vivid everyday scene. Both the confidante who, suppressing her laughter, voices some doubt with simulated politeness to get Lisetta to go on talking, as well as the heroine herself who, in her vaingloriousness, lets herself be lured even beyond the limits of her innate stupidity, impress us as true to life and natural. Yet the stylistic devices which Boccaccio employs are anything but purely popular. His prose, which has often been analyzed, reflects the schooling it received from antique models and the precepts of medieval rhetoric, and it displays all its arts. It summarizes complex situations in a single period and puts a shifting word order at the service of emphasizing what is important, of retarding or accelerating the tempo of the action, of rhythmic and melodic effect.
The introductory sentence itself is a rich period, and the two gerunds essendo and quistionando—one in initial, the other in final position, with a leisurely interval between them—are as well-calculated as the syntactic stress on la sua which concludes the first of two rhythmically quite similar cadences, the second of which ends with ogni altra. And when the actual conversation begins, our good Lisetta is so enthusiastic about herself that she fairly bursts into song: se voi sapeste a cui la mia bellezza piace. … Still more delightful is her second speech with its many brief and almost equisyllabic units in which the so-called cursus velox predominates. The most beautiful of them, ma l’intendiménto mío / è l’ágnolo Gabriéllo, is echoed in her confidante’s reply, se l’ágnolo Gabriéllo / è vòstro intendiménto. In this second speech we find the first colloquialisms: intendimento, presumably of social rather than local color, can hardly have been in polite usage in this particular acceptation (roughly, desiderium, English “sweetheart”), nor yet the expression nel mondo o in maremma (which gives us another charming cadence). The more excited she grows, the more numerous are the colloquial and now even dialectal forms: the Venetian marido in the enchanting sentence which stresses the praises of Gabriel’s erotic prowess by the adjurational formula, per le piaghe di Dio, and the climactic effect (again Venetian), mo vedi vu, whose note of vulgar triumph is the more humorous as, just before, she had again been singing sweetly, … ma perciocchè io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo, s’è egli innamorato di me. …
The next two periods comprise the spreading of the rumor throughout the town, in two stages. The first leads from la comare to the brigata di donne, the second from queste donne to Vinegia. Each has its own source of motion: the first in the confidante’s impatience to unburden herself of her story, an impatience whose urgency and subsequent appeasement come out remarkably well in a corresponding movement of the verbs (partita … le parve mille anni che ella fosse … dove potesse … e ragunatasi … ordinatamente raccontò); the second, in the progressive expansion, paratactically expressed, of the field covered. From here on the narration becomes more rapid and more dramatic. The very next sentence reaches all the way from the moment when the relatives hear the rumor to their nocturnal ambush, although there is room in it for a few additional details of fact and psychological description. Yet it seems relatively empty and calm compared with the two which follow and in which the entire night scene in Lisetta’s house, down to Frate Alberto’s bold leap, takes its course in two periods which, however, together constitute but a single movement. This is done by interlacing hypotactic forms, with participial constructions (generally a favorite device with Boccaccio) playing the most important part. The first sentence begins quietly enough with the principal verb avenne and the corresponding subject clause che … venne …; but in the attached relative clause, il quale (a secondary subordinate clause, that is), the catastrophe bursts: … andatovi, appena spogliato s’era, che i cognati … furono all’ uscio. And then comes a tempest of verb forms: sentendo, e avvisato, levatosi, non avendo, aperse, e si gittò. If only by reason of the brevity of the crowding units, the effect is one of extraordinary speed and dramatic precipitation. And for the same reason—despite the learned and classical origin of the stylistic devices employed—it is not at all literary; the tone is not that of written language but of oral narrative, the more so because the position of the verbs, and hence the length and tempo of the intervening sections of greater calm, is constantly varied in an artistically spontaneous fashion: sentendo and avvisato are placed close together, as are levatosi and non avendo, aperse soon follows, but the concluding si gittò appears only after the relative clause referring to the window. I do not quite see, by the way, why Boccaccio has the frate hear of the rumor which is going the rounds. So shrewd a knave would hardly put his head in such a trap, in order to give Lisetta a piece of his mind, if he were at all aware that there was any risk. The whole thing, it seems to me, would be more natural if he had no inkling that something was afoot. His quick and bold escape requires no special motivation in the form of a previously crystallized suspicion. Or did Boccaccio have some other reason for making the statement? I see none.
While the frate swims the canal, the narrative becomes momentarily quieter, more relaxed, slower: we have principal verbs, in an imperfect of description, arranged paratactically. But no sooner has he reached the other side than the verbs begin jostling each other again, especially when he enters the strange house: prestamente se n’entrò, pregando … che per l’amor di Dio gli scampasse la vita, sue favole dicendo, perchè … fosse. The intervals between verbs are likewise brief or urgent. Exceedingly condensed and hurried is quivi a quella ora e ignudo. Then the tide begins to ebb. The ensuing sentences are still packed full of factual information and hence with participial hypotaxes, but at least they are governed by the progressively more leisurely pace of principal clauses linked by “and”: mise, et dissegli, e andò. Entrati … trovarono che … se n’era volato is still quite dramatic; but then comes the progressive relaxation of the paratactic series dissero, e ultimamente lasciarono stare, e tornarsi.
Of such artistry there is no trace in earlier narrative literature. First let us take a random example from the Old French genre of droll tales in verse, the greatest number of which were produced about a century before Boccaccio. I choose a passage from the fablel Du prestre qui ot mere a force (from Berlin Ms Hamilton 257, after the text by G. Rohlfs, Sechs altfranzösische Fablels, Halle, 1925, p. 12). The theme is a priest who has a very mean, ugly, and stingy mother whom he keeps away from his house while he spoils his mistress, especially in the matter of clothes. The cantankerous old woman complains of this, and the priest answers:
“Tesiez”, dist il, “vos estes sote;
25 De quoi me menez vos dangier,
Se du pein avez a mengier,
De mon potage et de mes pois;
Encor est ce desor mon pois,
Car vos m’avez dit mainte honte.”
30 La vieille dit: “Rien ne vos monte
Que ie vodre d’ore en avant
Que vos me teigniez par covent
A grant honor com vostre mere.”
Li prestre a dit: “Par seint pere,
35 James du mien ne mengera,
Or face au pis qu’ele porra
Ou au mieus tant com il li loist!”
“Si ferai, mes que bien vos poist”,
Fet cele, “car ie m’en irai
40 A l’evesque et li conterai
Vostre errement et vostre vie,
Com vostre meschine est servie.
A mengier a ases et robes,
Et moi volez pestre de lobes;
45 De vostre avoir n’ai bien ne part.”
A cest mot la vieille s’en part
Tote dolente et tot irée.
Droit a l’evesque en est allée.
A li s’en vient et si se claime
50 De son fiuz qui noient ne l’aime,
Ne plus que il feroit un chien,
Ne li veut il fere nul bien.
“De tot en tot tient sa meschine
Qu’il eime plus que sa cosine;
55 Cele a des robes a plenté.”
Quant la vieille ot tot conté
A l’evesque ce que li pot,
A tant ne li vot plus respondre,
60 Que il fera son fiz semondre,
Qu’il vieigne a court le jour nommé.
La vieille l’en a encliné,
Si s’en part sanz autre response.
Et l’evesque fist sa semonse
65 A son fil que il vieigne a court;
Il le voudra tenir si court,
S’il ne fet reson a sa mere.
Je criem trop que il le compere.
Quant le termes et le jor vint,
70 Que li evesques ses plet tint,
Mout i ot clers et autres genz,
Des proverres plus de deus cens.
La vieille ne s’est pas tue,
Droit a l’evesque en est venue
75 Si li reconte sa besoigne.
L’evesque dit qu’el ne s’esloigne,
Car tantost com ses fiz vendra,
Sache bien qu’il le soupendra
Et toudra tot son benefice. …
(“Be still,” he said, “you are silly! What are you complaining about, since you have bread to eat and my soup and my peas? And even that is a burden to me, for you keep saying nasty things to me.” The old woman says: “That won’t do you any good, for I want from now on that you bind yourself to honor me greatly as your mother.” The priest said: “By the Holy Father, never again shall she eat of what I have. Let her do her worst, or her best, as she likes.” “I shall, and more than will suit you,” says the old woman, “for I am going to go to the bishop and tell him about your misdoing and your life, and how well your mistress is served. She has enough to eat and plenty of clothes, and me you want to feed on empty words. Of your wealth I have no part.” With these words the old woman runs off, grieved and angry. Straight to the bishop she went. She gets to him and complains of her son who loves her no more than he would a dog and will do nothing for her. “He cares for his mistress above everything else and loves her more than his relatives. She has plenty of clothes.” When the old woman had told the bishop everything she could, he answers her in a word. For the moment he will not say more than that he will have her son summoned and he must come to court on the appointed day. The old woman bowed, and leaves without further reply. And the bishop issued his summons to her son that he must come to court. He means to rein him in short if he does not do what is right by his mother. I am very much afraid he is going to pay dearly for it. When the time and the day came on which the bishop held his court, there were many clerks and other people and more than two hundred priests. The old woman did not keep quiet. She went straight up to the bishop and told him her business. The bishop tells her not to leave, because as soon as her son arrives she should know that he will suspend him and take away his whole benefice. …)
The old woman misunderstands the word soupendra. She thinks her son is to be hanged. Now she regrets having accused him, and in her anxiety she points out the first priest who comes in, and claims that he is her son. To this uncomprehending victim the bishop administers such a tongue-lashing that the poor fellow has no chance to get in a word. The bishop orders him to take his old mother with him and henceforth to treat her decently, as a priest should. And woe to him if there should be any more complaints about his conduct! The bewildered priest takes the old woman with him on his horse. On his way home he meets the old woman’s real son and tells him about his adventure, while the old woman makes signs to her son not to give himself away. The other priest ends his story by saying that he would gladly give forty pounds to anyone who would rid him of his unwanted burden. Fine, says the son, it’s a bargain; give me the money, and I will relieve you of your old woman. And it was done.
Here too the part of the story reprinted begins with a realistic conversation, an everyday scene, the quarrel between mother and son, and here too the course of the conversation is a very lively crescendo. Just as, in the other case, Lisetta’s confidante, by replying with ostensible amiability, gets Lisetta to talk on and on until her secret is out, so here the old woman, by her cantankerous complaints, irritates her son until he flies into a rage and threatens to cut off the supply of food he has been giving her, whereupon the mother, also beside herself with rage, runs off to the bishop. Although the dialect of the piece is hard to identify (Rohlfs considers that of the Ile de France likely), the tone of the conversation is far less stylized and more directly popular than in Boccaccio. It is invariably the common speech of the people (and the people includes the lower clergy): thoroughly paratactic, with lively questions and exclamations, full, and indeed overfull, of popular turns of expression. The narrator’s tone is not essentially different from that of his characters. He too tells his story in the same simple tone, with the same sensory vividness, giving a graphic picture of the situation through the most unpretentious means and the most everyday words. The only stylization he permits himself is the verse form, rhymed octosyllabic couplets, which favors extremely simple and brief sentence patterns and as yet knows nothing of the rhythmic multiplicity of later narrative verse forms, such as those of Ariosto and Lafontaine. Thus the arrangement of the narrative which follows upon the dialogue is wholly artless, even though its freshness makes it delightful. In paratactic single file, without any effort to complicate or to unravel, without any compression of what is of secondary importance, without any change of tempo, the story runs or stumbles on. In order to bring in the joke about soupendre, the scene between the old woman and the bishop has to be repeated, and the bishop himself has to state his views no less than three times. No doubt these things and, more generally, the many details and lines of padding brought in to resolve difficulties of rhyme, give the narrative a pleasantly leisurely breadth. But its composition is crude and its character is purely popular, in the sense that the narrator himself belongs to the type of people he describes, and of course also to the people he addresses. His own horizon is socially and ethically as narrow as that of his personages and of the audience he wishes to set laughing by his story. Narrator, narrative, and audience belong to the same world, which is that of the common, uneducated people, without aesthetic or moral pretensions. In keeping with this is the characterization of the personages and of the way they act, a characterization which is certainly lively and graphic but also relatively crude and monochromatic. They are popular in the sense that they are characters with which everybody was familiar at the time: a boorish priest susceptible to every kind of worldly pleasure, and a cantankerous old woman. The minor characters are not described as specific individuals at all; we get only their behavior, which is determined by the situation.
In the case of Frate Alberto, on the other hand, we are told his previous history, which explains the very specific character of his malicious and witty shrewdness. Madonna Lisetta’s stupidity and the silly pride she takes in her womanly charms are unique of their kind in this particular mixture. And the same holds true of the secondary characters. Lisetta’s confidante, or the buono uomo in whose house Frate Alberto takes refuge, have a life and a character of their own which, to be sure, is only hastily indicated but which is clearly recognizable. We even get an inkling of what sort of people Madonna Lisetta’s relatives are, for there is something sharply characteristic in the grim joke, si posero in cuore di trovare questo agnolo e di sapere se egli sapesse volare. The last few words approach the form which German criticism has recently come to call erlebte Rede (free indirect discourse). Then too the setting is much more clearly specified than in the fablel. The events of the latter may occur anywhere in rural France, and its dialectal peculiarities, even if they could be more accurately identified, would be quite accidental and devoid of importance. Boccaccio’s tale is pronouncedly Venetian. It must also be borne in mind that the French fablel is quite generally restricted to a specific milieu of peasants and small townspeople, and that the variations in this milieu, insofar as they are observable at all, owe their existence exclusively to the accidental place of origin of the piece in question, whereas in Boccaccio’s case we are dealing with an author who in addition to this Venetian setting chose numerous others for his tales: for example Naples in the novella about Andreuccio da Perugia (2, 5), Palermo in the one about Sabaetto (8, 10), Florence and its environs in a long series of droll tales. And what is true of the settings is equally true of the social atmosphere. Boccaccio surveys and describes, in the most concrete manner, all the social strata, all the classes and professions, of his time. The gulf between the art of the fablel and the art of Boccaccio by no means reveals itself only in matters of style. The characterization of the personages, the local and social setting, are at once far more sharply individualized and more extensive. Here is a man whose conscious grasp of the principles of art enables him to stand above his subject matter and to submerge himself in it only so far as he chooses, a man who shapes his stories according to his own creative will.
As for Italian narrative literature before Boccaccio, the specimens known to us from that period have rather the character of moralizing or witty anecdotes. Their stylistic devices as well as the orbit of their views and concepts are much too limited for an individualized representation of characters and settings. They often exhibit a certain brittle refinement of expression but in direct appeal to the senses they are by far inferior to the fablels. Here is an example:
Uno s’andò a confessare al prete suo, ed intra l’altre cose disse: Io ho una mia cognata, e’l mio fratello è lontano; e quando io ritorno a casa, per grande domistichezza, ella mi si pone a sedere in grembo. Come debbo fare? Rispose il prete: A me il facesse ella, ch’io la ne pagherei bene! (From the Novellino, ed. Letterio di Francia, Torino, 1930. Novella 87, p. 146.)
(A man went to his priest to confess and said to him, among other things: I have a sister-in-law, and my brother is away; and when I get home, in her great familiarity, she comes and sits on my lap. What shall I do? The priest answered: If she did that to me, I’d show her!)
In this little piece the whole emphasis is on the priest’s ambiguous answer; everything else is mere preparation and is told straight forwardly, in rather flat parataxes, without any sort of graphically sensory visualization. Many stories of the Novellino are similarly brief anecdotes, whose subject is a witty remark. One of the book’s subtitles is, accordingly, Libro di Novelle e di bel parlar gentile. There are some longer pieces as well; most of these are not droll tales but moralizing and didactic narratives. But the style is the same throughout: flatly paratactic, with the events strung together as though on a thread, without palpable breadth and without an environment for the characters to breathe in. The undeniable artistic sense of the Novellino is chiefly concerned with brief and striking formulations of the principal facts of the event being narrated. In this it follows the model of medieval collections of moral examples in Latin, the so-called exempla, and it surpasses them in organization, elegance, and freshness of expression. With sensory visualization it is hardly concerned, but it is clear that here, as with its Italian contemporaries, this limitation is a result of the linguistic and intellectual situation which prevailed at the time. The Italian vernacular was as yet too poor and lacking in suppleness, the horizon of concepts and judgments was as yet too narrow and restricted, to make possible a relaxed command of factual data and a sensory representation of multiplex phenomena. The entire available power of sensory visualization is concentrated upon a single climactic witticism, as, in our example, upon the priest’s reply. If it is permissible to base a judgment upon a single case, that of Fra Salimbene de Adam, a Franciscan and the extremely gifted author of a Latin chronicle, it would seem that, at the end of the thirteenth century, Latin, as soon as a writer heavily interspersed it with Italian vulgarisms, as Salimbene did, could yield a much greater sensory force than written Italian. Salimbene’s chronicle is full of anecdotes. One of these—which has been repeatedly quoted by others as well as by myself—I will cite at this point. It tells the story of a Franciscan named Detesalve, and runs as follows:
Cum autem quadam die tempore yemali per civitatem Florentie ambularet, contigit, ut ex lapsu glatiei totaliter caderet. Videntes hoc Florentini, qui trufatores maximi sunt, ridere ceperunt. Quorum unus quesivit a fratre qui ceciderat, utrum plus vellet habere sub se? Cui frater respondit quod sic, scilicet interrogantis uxorem. Audientes hoc Florentini non habuerunt malum exemplum, sed commendaverunt fratrem dicentes: Benedicatur ipse, quia de nostris est!—Aliqui dixerunt quod alius Florentinus fuit, qui dixit hoc verbum, qui vocabatur frater Paulus Millemusce ex ordine Minorum. (Chronica, ad annum 1233; Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores 32, 79.)
(One day in winter when he was walking about in the city of Florence, it happened that he fell flat on the frozen ground. Seeing this, the Florentines, who are great jokers, began to laugh. One of them asked the friar who was lying there if he would not like to have something put under him. To which the friar answers Yes, the wife of him who asked. When they heard this, the Florentines did not take it amiss but praised the friar, saying: Good for him, he is one of us!—Some say that he who said this was another Florentine, named Paul Thousandflies, of the Minorite Order.)
Here too the point is a witty rejoinder, a bel parlare. But at the same time we have a real scene: a winter landscape, the monk who has slipped and lies there on the ground, the Florentines standing about making fun of him. The characterization of the participants is much livelier, and in addition to the climactic jest (interrogantis uxorem) there are other witticisms and vulgarisms (utrum plus vellet habere sub se; benedicatur ipse quia de nostris est; frater Paulus Millemusce; and before that trufatores) which are doubly amusing and savory by reason of their transparent Latin disguise. Sensory visualization and freedom of expression are here more fully developed than in the Novellino.
Yet whatever we choose from among the products of the earlier period—be it the crude, boorish sensory breadth of the fabliaux, or the threadbare, sensorily poor refinement of the Novellino, or Salimbene’s lively, vividly graphic wit—none of it is comparable to Boccaccio. It is in him that the world of sensory phenomena is first mastered, is organized in accordance with a conscious artistic plan, caught and held in words. For the first time since antiquity, his Decameron fixes a specific level of style, on which the relation of actual occurrences in contemporary life can become polite entertainment; narrative no longer serves as a moral exemplum, no longer caters to the common people’s simple desire to laugh; it serves as a pleasant diversion for a circle of well-bred young people of the upper classes, of ladies and gentlemen who delight in the sensual play of life and who possess sensitivity, taste, and judgment. It was to announce this purpose of his narrative art that Boccaccio created the frame in which he set it. The stylistic level of the Decameron is strongly reminiscent of the corresponding antique genus, the antique novel of love, the fabula milesiaca. This is not surprising, since the attitude of the author to his subject matter, and the social stratum for which the work is intended, correspond quite closely in the two periods, and since for Boccaccio too the concept of the writer’s art was closely associated with that of rhetoric. As in the novels of antiquity, Boccaccio’s literary art is based upon a rhetorical treatment of prose; as in them, the style sometimes borders on the poetic; he too sometimes gives conversation the form of well-ordered oratory. And the general impression of an “intermediate” or mixed style, in which realism and eroticism are linked to elegant verbal formulations, is quite similar in the two cases. Yet while the antique novel is a late form cast in languages which had long since produced their best, Boccaccio’s stylistic endeavor finds itself confronted by a newly-born and as yet almost amorphous literary language. The rhetorical tradition—which, rigidified in medieval practice into an almost spectrally senile mechanism, had, so recently as the age of Dante, been still timidly and stiffly tried out on the Italian volgare by the first translators of ancient authors—in Boccaccio’s hands suddenly becomes a miraculous tool which brings Italian art prose, the first literary prose of postclassical Europe, into existence at a single stroke. It comes into existence in the decade between his first youthful work and the Decameron. His particular gift of richly and sweetly moving prose rhythms, although a heritage from antiquity, he possessed almost from the beginning. It is already to be found in his earliest prose work, the Filocolo, and seems to have been a latent talent in him, which his first contact with antique authors brought out. What he lacked at first was moderation and judgment in using stylistic devices and in determining the level of style; sound relationship between subject matter and level of style had still to be achieved and become an instinctive possession. A first contact with the concept of an elevated style as practiced by the ancients—especially since the concept was still influenced by medieval notions—very easily led to what might be termed a chronic exaggeration of the stylistic level and an inordinate use of erudite embellishment. This resulted in an almost continuously stilted language, which, for that very reason, could not come close to its object and which, in such a form, was fit for almost nothing but decorative and oratorical purposes. To grasp the sensory reality of passing life was completely impossible to a language so excessively elevated.
In Boccaccio’s case, to be sure, the situation was different from the beginning. His innate disposition was more spontaneously sensory, inclined toward creating charmingly flowing and elegant forms imbued with sensuality. From the beginning he was made for the intermediate rather than the elevated style, and his natural bent was strongly furthered by the atmosphere of the Angevin court at Naples where he spent his youth and where the playfully elegant late forms of the chivalric culture of Northern France had taken stronger hold than elsewhere in Italy. His early works are rifacimenti of French romances of chivalric love and adventure in the late courtly style; and in their manner, it seems to me, one can sense something characteristically French: the broader realism of his descriptions, the naive refinement and the delicate nuances of the lovers’ play, the late feudal mundaneness of his social pictures, and the malice of his wit. Yet the more mature he grows, the stronger become the competing bourgeois and humanist factors and especially his mastery of what is robust and popular. In any case, in his youthful works the tendency toward rhetorical exaggeration—which represented a danger in Boccaccio’s case too—plays a role only in his representation of sensual love, as do the excess of mythological erudition and of conventional allegorizing which prevail in some of them. Thus we may assert that despite his occasional attempts (as in the Teseida) to reach out for something more, he remains within the limits of the intermediate style—of the style which, combining the idyllic and the realistic, is designated for the representation of sensual love. It is in the intermediate, idyllic style that he wrote the last and by far the most beautiful of his youthful works, the Ninfale fiesolano; and the intermediate style serves too for the great book of the hundred novelle. In the determination of stylistic level it is unimportant which of his youthful works were written partly or wholly in verse and which in prose. The atmosphere is the same in them all.
Within the realm of the intermediate style, to be sure, the nuances in the Decameron are most varied, the realm is no narrow one. Yet even when a story approaches the tragic, tone and atmosphere remain tenderly sensual and avoid the grave and sublime; and in stories which employ far more crudely farcical motifs than our example, both language and manner of presentation remain aristocratic, inasmuch as both narrator and audience unmistakably stand far above the subject matter, and, viewing it from above with a critical eye, derive pleasure from it in a light and elegant fashion. It is precisely in the more popularly realistic and even the crudely farcical subjects that the peculiarity of the intermediate elegant style is most clearly to be recognized; for the artistic treatment of such stories indicates that there is a social class which, though it stands above the humble milieu of everyday life, yet takes delight in its vivid representation, and indeed a delight whose end is the individually human and concrete, not the socially stratified type. All the Calandrinos, Cipollas, and Pietros, the Peronellas, Caterinas, and Belcolores are, like Frate Alberto and Lisetta, individualized and living human beings in a totally different way from the villein or the shepherdess who were occasionally allowed to enter courtly poetry. They are actually much more alive and, in their characteristic form, more precise than the personages of the popular farce, as may be apparent from what we have indicated above, and this although the public they are meant to please belongs to an entirely different class. Quite evidently there was in Boccaccio’s time a social class—high in rank, though not feudal but belonging to the urban aristocracy—which derived a well-bred pleasure from life’s colorful reality wherever it happened to be manifested. It is true, the separation of the two realms is maintained to the extent that realistic pieces are usually set among the lower classes, the more tender and more nearly tragic pieces usually among the upper. But even this is not a rigidly observed rule, for the bourgeois and the sentimentally idyllic are apt to constitute borderline cases; and elsewhere too the same sort of mixture is not infrequent (e.g., the novella of Griselda, 10, 10).
The social prerequisites for the establishment of an intermediate style in the antique sense were fulfilled in Italy from the first half of the fourteenth century. In the towns an elevated stratum of patrician burghers had come to the fore; their mores, it is true, were still in many respects linked to the forms and ideas of the feudal courtly culture, but, as a result of the entirely different social structure, as well as under the influence of early humanist trends, they soon received a new stamp, becoming less bound up with class, and more strongly personal and realistic. Inner and outer perception broadened, threw off the fetters of class restriction, even invaded the realm of learning, thitherto the prerogative of clerical specialists, and gradually gave it the pleasant and winning form of personal culture in the service of social intercourse. The language, so recently a clumsy and inelastic tool, became supple, rich, nuanced, flourishing, and showed that it could accommodate itself to the requirements of a discriminating social life of refined sensuality. The literature of society acquired what it had not previously possessed: a world of reality and of the present. Now there is no doubt that this gain is strictly connected with the much more important gain on a higher stylistic level, Dante’s conquest of a world, made a generation before. This connection we shall now attempt to analyze, and for that purpose we return to our text.
Its most conspicuous distinguishing characteristics, if we compare it with earlier narratives, are the assurance with which, in both perception and syntactical structure, it handles complex factual data, and the subtle skill with which it adapts the narrative tempo and level of tone to the inner and outer movement of the narrated events. This we have tried to show in detail above. The conversation between the two women, the spreading of the rumor through the town, and the dramatic night scene at Lisetta’s house are made a clearly surveyable, coherent whole within which each part has its own independent, rich, and free motion. That Dante possesses the same ability to command a real situation of any number of constituent parts and varied nuances, that he possesses it to a degree which no other medieval author known to us can even distantly approach, I tried to show in the preceding chapter, using as my example the occurrences at the beginning of the tenth canto of the Inferno. The coherence of the whole, the shift in tone and rhythmic pulse between let us say the introductory conversation and the appearance of Farinata, or upon Cavalcante’s sudden emergence and in his speeches, the sovereign mastery of the syntactic devices of language, I there analyzed as carefully as I know how. Dante’s command over phenomena impresses us as much less adaptable but also as much more significant than the corresponding ability in Boccaccio. In itself the heavy beat of the tercets, with their rigid rhyme pattern, does not permit him as free and light a movement as Boccaccio allowed himself, but he would have scorned it in any case. Yet there is no mistaking the fact that Dante’s work was the first to lay open the panorama of the common and multiplex world of human reality. Here, for the first time since classical antiquity, that world can be seen freely and from all sides, without class restriction, without limitation of the field of vision, in a view which may turn everywhere without obstruction, in a spirit which places all phenomena in a living order, and in a language which does justice both to the sensory aspect of phenomena and to their multiple and ordered interpenetration. Without the Commedia the Decameron could not have been written. No one will deny this, and it is also clear that Dante’s rich world is transposed to a lower level of style in Boccaccio. This latter point is particularly striking if we compare two similar movements—for example, Lisetta’s sentence, Comare, egli non si vuol dire, ma l’intendimento mio è l’agnolo Gabriello, in our text, and Inferno 18, 52, where Venedico Caccianimico says, Mal volontier lo dico; / ma sforzami la tua chiara favella, / Che mi fa sovvenir del mondo antico. It is of course not his gift of observation and his power of expression for which Boccaccio is indebted to Dante. These qualities he had by nature and they are very different from the corresponding qualities in Dante. Boccaccio’s interest is centered on phenomena and emotions which Dante would not have deigned to touch. What he owes to Dante is the possibility of making such free use of his talent, of attaining the vantage point from which it is possible to survey the entire present world of phenomena, to grasp it in all its multiplicity, and to reproduce it in a pliable and expressive language. Dante’s power, which could do justice to all the various human presences in his work, Farinata and Brunetto, Pia de’ Tolomei and Sordello, Francis of Assisi and Cacciaguida, which could make them arise out of their own specific conditions and speak their own language—that power made it possible for Boccaccio to achieve the same results for Andreuccio and Frate Cipolla or his servant, for Ciappelletto and the baker Cisti, for Madonna Lisetta and Griselda. With this power of viewing the world synthetically there also goes a critical sense, firm yet elastic in perspective, which, without abstract moralizing, allots phenomena their specific, carefully nuanced moral value—a critical sense which, indeed, causes the moral value to shine out of the phenomena themselves. In our story, after the relatives reach home con gli arnesi del agnolo, Boccaccio continues as follows: In questo mezzo, fattosi il dì chiaro, essendo il buono uomo in sul Rialto, udì dire come l’agnolo Gabriello era la notte andato a giacere con Madonna Lisetta, e da cognati trovatovi, s’era per paura gittato nel canale, nè si sapeva che divenuto se ne fosse.
(Broad day come, the good man with whom Fra Alberto had taken refuge, being on the Rialto, heard how the angel Gabriel had gone that night to lie with Madam Lisetta and being surprised by her kinsmen, had cast himself for fear into the canal, nor was it known what was come of him.) Trans. John Payne.
The tone of seeming seriousness, which never mentions the fact that the Venetians on the Rialto are bursting with laughter, insinuates, without a word of moral, aesthetic, or any other kind of criticism, exactly how the occurrence is to be evaluated and what mood the Venetians are in. If instead Boccaccio had said that Frate Alberto’s behavior was underhanded and Madonna Lisetta stupid and gullible, that the whole thing was ludicrous and absurd, and that the Venetians on the Rialto were greatly amused by it, this procedure would not only have been much clumsier but the moral atmosphere, which cannot be exhausted by any number of adjectives, would not have come out with anything like the force it now has. The stylistic device which Boccaccio employs was highly esteemed by the ancients, who called it “irony.” Such a mediate and indirectly insinuating form of discourse presupposes a complex and multiple system of possible evaluations, as well as a sense of perspective which, together with the occurrence, suggests its effect. In comparison, Salimbene strikes us as decidedly naive when, in the anecdote quoted above, he inserts the sentence, videntes hoc Florentini, qui trufatores maximi sunt, ridere ceperunt. The note of malicious irony in our present passage from Boccaccio is his own. It does not occur in the Commedia. Dante is not malicious. But the breadth of view, the incisive rendering of a clearly defined, complex evaluation by means of indirect suggestion, the sense of perspective in binding up event with effect, are Dante’s creation. He does not tell us who Cavalcante is, what he feels, and how his reactions are to be judged. He makes him appear and speak, and merely adds: le sue parole e il modo de la pena m’avean di costui già letto il nome. Long before we are given any details, Dante fixes the moral tone of the Brunetto episode (Inf., 15):
Così adocchiato da cotal famiglia
fui conosciuto da un che mi prese
per lo lembo e gridò: Qual maraviglia!
E io, quando ’l suo braccio a me distese,
ficcai li occhi per lo cotto aspetto,
sì che ’l viso abbrucciato non difese
la conoscenza sua al mio intelletto;
e chinando la mia a la sua faccia
rispuosi: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?
E quelli: O figliuol mio. …
(Thus eyed by that family, I was recognized by one who took me by the skirt, and said: “What a wonder!” And I, when he stretched out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his baked aspect, so that the scorching of his visage hindered not my mind from knowing him; and bending my face to his, I answered: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” And he: “O my son! …”) Trans. Dr. J. A. Carlyle, “Temple Classics.”
Without a single word of explanation he gives us the whole Pia de’ Tolomei in her own words (Purg., 5; see above, p. 201):
Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo
e riposato de la lunga via,
(seguitò il terzo spirito al secondo),
ricorditi di me che son la Pia. …
(“Pray, when thou shalt return to the world, and art rested from thy long journey,” followed the third spirit after the second, “remember me, who am La Pia. …”)
And from among the abundance of instances in which Dante illustrates the effects of phenomena, or even phenomena through their effects, I choose the famous simile of sheep coming out of the pen, by which he describes the slow dispelling of the amazement which fell upon the crowd in the Antipurgatorio at the sight of Virgil and Dante (Purg., 3). Compared with such methods of characterization, which operate with the most exact perception of what is individual and the most varied and subtle means of expression, everything earlier seems narrow and crude and without any real order as soon as it attempts to come close to phenomena. Take for instance the lines in which the author of the previously quoted fablel describes his priest’s old mother:
Mout felonnesse et mout avere;
Bochue estoit, noire et hideuse
Et de touz biens contralieuse.
Tout li mont l’avoit contre cuer,
Li prestres meisme a nul fuer
Ne vosist pour sa desreson
Qu’el entrast ja en sa meson;
Trop ert parlant et de pute ere. …
(He had an old mother who was a horrible creature and very avaricious. Hunch-backed she was, and black and hideous and opposed to everything that was good. Everybody loathed her. Even the priest, because of her unreasonableness, would under no conditions let her come into his house. She was too much of a gossip and too disgusting. …)
This is by no means devoid of graphic elements, and the transition from a general characterization to effect upon the surroundings, and then the meisme-climax giving the son’s attitude, represents a natural and vivid continuity. But everything is stated in the coarsest and crudest manner possible; there is no personal and no precise perception. The adjectives, on which, after all, the principal work of characterization must fall, seem to be sprinkled into the lines at random, as syllable count and rhyme happened to permit, in a hotchpotch of moral and physical characteristics. And of course the entire characterization is direct. To be sure, Dante by no means scorns direct characterization through adjectives, at times through adjectives of the widest content. But then the effect is something like this:
La mia sorella che tra bella e buona
non so qual fosse più. … (Purg., 24, 13-14.)
(My sister, who, whether she were more fair or more good I know not. …)
Nor does Boccaccio scorn the direct method of characterization. At the very beginning of our text we find two popular phrases which serve to set forth Lisetta’s stupidity directly and graphically: che poco sale avea in zucca and che piccola levatura avea. Reading the beginning of the novella, we find a whole collection of things similar in form and intent: una giovane donna bamba e sciocca; sentiva dello scemo; donna mestola; donna zucca al vento, la quale era anzi che no un poco dolce di sale; madonna baderla; donna poco fila. This little collection looks like a merry game Boccaccio is playing with his knowledge of amusing colloquial phrases and perhaps it also serves to describe the vivacious mood of the teller of the tale, Pampinea, whose purpose it is to divert the company, who have just been touched to tears by the preceding story. In any case, Boccaccio is very fond of this sort of play with a variety of phrases drawn from the vigorous and imaginative language of the common people. Consider for instance the way in which (in novella 10 of the sixth day) Frate Cipolla’s servant, Guccio, is characterized, partly directly and partly by his master. It is a striking example of Boccaccio’s characteristic mixture of popular elements and subtle malice, ending in one of the most beautifully extended periods that he ever wrote (ma Guccio Imbratta il quale era, etc.). In it the stylistic level shifts from a most enchanting lyrical movement (più vago di stare in cucina che sopra i verdi rami l’usignolo) through the coarsest realism (grassa e grossa e piccola e mal fatta e con un paio di poppe che parevan due ceston da letame, etc.) to something approaching horror (non altramenti che si gitta l’avoltoio alla carogna), yet all the parts form a whole by virtue of the author’s malice, which glints through everywhere.
Without Dante such a wealth of nuances and perspectives would hardly have been possible. But of the figural-Christian conception which pervaded Dante’s imitation of the earthly and human world and which gave it power and depth, no trace is to be found in Boccaccio’s book. Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth. He sees the abundance of phenomena directly as a rich world of earthly forms. He was justified in so doing, because he had not set out to compose a great, weighty, and sublime work. He has much better reason than Dante to call the style of his book umilissimo e rimesso (introduction to the fourth day), for he really writes for the entertainment of the unlearned, for the consolation and amusement of the nobilissime donne, who do not go to study at Rome or Athens or Bologna. With much wit and grace he defends himself in his conclusion against those who claim that it is unseemly for a weighty and serious man (ad un uom pesato e grave) to write a book with so many jests and fooleries:
Io confesso d’essere pesato, e molte volte de’ miei dì esser stato; e perciò, parlando a quelle che pesato non m’hanno, affermo che io non son grave, anzi son io si lieve che io sto a galla nell’acqua: e considerato che le prediche fatte da’ frati, per rimorder delle lor colpe gli uomini, il più oggi piene di motti e di ciance e di scede si veggono, estimai che quegli medesimi non stesser male nelle mie novelle, scritte per cacciar la malinconia delle femmine.
(I confess to being a man of weight and to have been often weighed in my time, wherefore, speaking to those ladies who have not weighed me, I declare that I am not heavy; nay, I am so light that I abide like a nutgall in water, and considering that the preachments made of friars, to rebuke men of their sins, are nowadays for the most part seen full of quips and cranks and jibes, I conceived that these latter would not sit amiss in my stories written to ease women of melancholy.) Trans. John Payne.
Boccaccio is probably on solid ground with his malicious little thrust at the preaching friars (to be found in almost exactly the same words, though on a quite different level of tone, in Dante, Par., 29, 115). But he forgets or does not know that the vulgar and naive farcicality of the sermons is a form—already, it is true, a somewhat degenerate and disreputable form—of Christian-figural realism (see above, pp. 158-161). Nothing of the sort applies in his case. And the very thing which justifies him from his point of view (“if even the preachers joke and jape, why cannot I do the same in a book designed to amuse?”) puts his venture, from the Christian-medieval point of view, in a dubious light. What a sermon, under the aegis of Christian figuralism, has a perfect right to do (exaggerations may go to objectionable extremes, but the right as a matter of principle cannot be denied), a secular author may not do—all the more because his work is not in the last analysis quite as light in weight as he claims; it is simply not naive and devoid of basic attitudes, as the popular farces are. If it were, then, from the Christian-medieval point of view, it could be regarded as a venial irregularity of the kind occasioned by man’s instincts and his need for entertainment, as proof of his imperfection and weakness. But such is not the case with the Decameron. Boccaccio’s book is of the intermediate style, and for all its frivolity and grace, it represents a very definite attitude, and one which is by no means Christian. What I have in mind is not so much Boccaccio’s way of making fun of superstition and relics, nor even such blasphemies as the phrase la resurrezion della carne for a man’s sexual erection (3, 10). Such things are part and parcel of the medieval repertoire of farce and need not necessarily be of fundamental importance—although of course, once an anti-Christian or anti-ecclesiastical movement was under way, they acquired great propagandistic effectiveness. Rabelais, for example, unmistakably uses them as a weapon (a similarly blasphemous joke is to be found toward the end of chapter 60 of Gargantua, where words from the 24th Psalm, ad te levavi, are used in a corresponding sense, a fact which serves, however, to show once again how traditional, how much a part of the repertoire, this type of joke really was; for another example see tiers livre, 31, toward the end). The really important characteristic of the attitude reflected in the Decameron, the thing which is diametrically opposed to medieval-Christian ethics, is the doctrine of love and nature which, though it is usually presented in a light tone, is nevertheless quite certain of itself. The reasons why the modern revolt against Christian doctrines and forms of life could prove its practical power and its propagandistic efficacy so successfully in the realm of sexual morality are grounded in the early history and in the essential nature of Christianity. In that realm the conflict between the worldly will to life and the Christian sufferance of life became acute as soon as the former attained to self-consciousness. Doctrines of nature which praised the instinctive life of sex and demanded its emancipation had already played an important role in connection with the theological crisis at Paris in the seventies of the thirteenth century; they also found literary expression in the second part of the Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meun. All this has no direct bearing on Boccaccio. He is not concerned with these theological controversies of many decades earlier. He is no halfscholastic pedagogue like Jean de Meun. His ethics of love is a recasting of courtly love, tuned several degrees lower in the scale of style, and concerned exclusively with the sensual and the real. That it is now earthly love which is in question is unmistakable. There is still a reflection of the magic of courtly love in some of the novelle in which Boccaccio expresses his attitude most clearly. Thus the story of Cimone (5, 1)—which, like the earlier Ameto, has education through love as its central theme—clearly shows that it is descended from the courtly epic. The doctrine that love is the mother of all virtues and of everything noble in man, that it imparts courage, self-reliance, and the ability to make sacrifices, that it develops intelligence and social accomplishments, is a heritage from courtly culture and the stil nuovo. Here, however, it is presented as a practical code of morals, valid for all classes. The beloved is no longer an inaccessible mistress or an incarnation of the divine idea, but the object of sexual desires. Even in details (though not quite consistently) a sort of ethics of love is discernible—for example, that it is permissible to employ any kind of treachery and deceit against a third person (the jealous rival, the parents, or whatever other powers hinder the designs of love) but not against the object of one’s love. If Frate Alberto gets so little sympathy from Boccaccio, it is because he is a hypocrite and because he won Madonna Lisetta’s love not honestly but by underhanded methods. The Decameron develops a distinct, thoroughly practical and secular ethical code rooted in the right to love, an ethics which in its very essence is anti-Christian. It is presented with much grace and without any strong claim to doctrinal validity. The book rarely abandons the stylistic level of light entertainment. Yet at times it does, when Boccaccio defends himself against attacks. This happens in the introduction to the fourth day when, addressing himself to the ladies, he writes:
E, se mai con tutta la mia forza a dovervi in cosa alcuna compiacere mi disposi, ora più che mai mi vi disporrò; perciocchè io conosco che altra cosa dir non potrà alcun con ragione, se non che gli altri et io, che vi amiamo, naturalmente operiamo. Alle cui leggi, cioè della natura, voler contrastare, troppe gran forze bisognano, e spesse volte non solamente in vano, ma con grandissimo danno del faticante s’adoperano. Le quali forze io confesso che io non l’ho nè d’averle disidero in questo; e se io l’avessi, più tosto ad altrui le presterei, che io per me l’adoperassi. Per che tacciansi i morditori, e, se essi riscaldar non si possono, assiderati si vivano; e ne’ lor diletti, anzi appetiti corrotti standosi, me nel mio, questa brieve vita, che posta n’è, lascino stare.
(And if ever with all my might I vowed myself to seek to please you in aught, now more than ever shall I address myself thereto; for that I know none can with reason say otherwise than that I and others who love you do according to nature, whose laws to seek to gainstand demandeth overgreat strength, and oftentimes not only in vain, but to the exceeding hurt of whoso striveth to that end, is this strength employed. Such strength I confess I have not nor ever desired in this to have; and an I had it, I had liefer lend it to others than use it for myself. Wherefore, let the carpers be silent and an they avail not to warm themselves, let them live benumbed and abiding in their delights—or rather their corrupt appetites,—leave me to abide in mine for this brief life that is appointed me.) Trans. John Payne
This, I believe, is one of the most aggressive and energetic passages Boccaccio ever wrote in defense of his ethics of love. The view he wishes to express cannot be understood; yet one cannot fail to see that it is without weight. Such a battle cannot seriously be fought with a few words on the irresistibility of nature and a couple of malicious allusions to the private vices of one’s adversaries. Nor, indeed, did Boccaccio have any such intention. We treat him unfairly and judge by a wrong standard if we measure the order of life which speaks from his work by Dante’s standard or by the works of the later and fully developed Renaissance. The figural unity of the secular world falls apart at the very moment when it attains—in Dante—complete sovereignty over earthly reality. Sovereignty over reality in its sensory multiplicity remained as a permanent conquest, but the order in which it was comprehended was now lost, and for a time there was nothing to take its place. This, as we said, must not be made a reproach against Boccaccio, but it must be registered as a historical fact which goes beyond him as a person. Early humanism, that is, lacks constructive ethical force when it is confronted with the reality of life; it again lowers realism to the intermediate, unproblematic, and non-tragic level of style which, in classical antiquity, was assigned to it as an extreme upper limit, and, as in the same period, makes the erotic its principal, and almost exclusive, theme. Now, however, this theme contains—what in antiquity there could be no question of its containing—an extremely promising germ of problem and conflict, a practical starting point for the incipient movement against the culture of medieval Christianity. But at first, and merely in itself, the erotic is not yet strong enough to treat reality problematically or even tragically. When Boccaccio undertakes to depict all the multiplex reality of contemporary life, he abandons the unity of the whole: he writes a book of novelle in which a great many things stand side by side, held together only by the common purpose of well-bred entertainment. Political, social, and historical problems which Dante’s figuralism penetrated completely and fused into the most everyday reality, fall entirely by the wayside. What happens to erotic and metaphysical problems, and what level of style and human depth they attain in Boccaccio’s work, can easily be ascertained from comparisons with Dante.
There are in the Inferno several passages in which damned souls challenge or mock or curse God. Good examples are the important scene in canto 14 in which Capaneus, one of the seven against Thebes, challenges God from amid the rain of fire and exclaims: Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto—or the scornful gesture of the robber of churches Vanni Fucci in canto 25, upon his recovery from the dreadful metamorphosis caused by the serpent’s bite. In both cases the revolt is conscious and is in keeping with the history, character, and condition of the two condemned sinners. In Capaneus’ case it is the unvanquished defiance of Promethean rebellion, an enmity to God which is superhuman; in Vanni Fucci it is wickedness immeasurably exaggerated by despair. Boccaccio’s first novella (1, 1) tells the story of the vicious and fraudulent notary Ser Ciappelletto who falls mortally ill away from home, in the house of two Florentine usurers. His hosts know the evil life he has led and fear the worst for themselves if he should die in their house without confession and absolution. That he will be refused absolution if he makes a true confession, they have no doubt. To extricate his hosts from this difficult situation, the mortally ill old man deceives a naive confessor with a false and absurdly overpious confession in which he represents himself as a virginal, almost faultless paragon of all virtues, who is yet beset by exaggerated scruples. In this fashion he not only obtains absolution, but after his death his confessor’s testimony gains him the reverence due to a saint. This sneering contempt for confession in the hour of death would seem to be a theme which could hardly be treated without the assumption of a basically anti-Christian attitude on the part of the penitent nor without the author’s taking a stand—be it Christian and hence condemnatory, or anti-Christian and hence approving—in regard to the problem involved; but here it is merely auxiliary to working out two farcically comic scenes: the grotesque confession and the solemn interment of the supposed saint. The problem is hardly posed. Ser Ciappelletto decides upon his course of action quite lightly, merely in order to free his hosts from imminent danger by a last sly trick which shall be worthy of his past; the justification he alleges for it is so stupid and frivolous that it proves that he has never given a serious thought to God or his own life (“in the course of my life I have offended God so much that in the hour of death a little more or less won’t matter”); and equally frivolous and exclusively concerned with what is momentarily expedient are the two Florentine masters of the house who, as they listen to the confession, do, it is true, say to each other: “What sort of man is he, who even now when he is old and ill and about to appear before the throne of the heavenly judge will not desist from his evil tricks but wishes to die as he has lived”—but who then, when they see that the end of assuring him a Christian burial has been gained, do not give the matter another thought. Now it is certainly true and quite in accordance with common experience that many people undertake the most momentous acts with no full conviction commensurate with such acts, simply in consequence of a momentary situation, force of habit, a fleeting impulse. Yet from the author who relates a matter of this kind, we still expect a comparative evaluation. And in fact Boccaccio does allow the narrator Panfilo to take a position in a few concluding words. But they are lame words, indecisive and without weight; they are neither atheistic nor decisively Christian, as the subject demands. There is no doubt, Boccaccio reports the monstrous adventure only for the sake of the comic effect of the two scenes mentioned above, and avoids any serious evaluation or taking of position.
In the story of Francesca da Rimini, Dante had given grandeur and reality in accordance with his way of being and his stage of development. Here, for the first time in the Middle Ages, is no avanture, no tale of enchantment; it is free from the charmingly witty coquetry and the class ceremonial of love which were characteristic of courtly culture; it is not hidden behind a veil of secret meaning, as in the stil nuovo. Instead it is a truly present action on the highest level of tone, equally immediate and real in terms of memories of an earthly destiny as in terms of an encounter in the beyond. In the love stories which Boccaccio tries to present tragically or nobly (they are mostly to be found among the novelle of the fourth day), the preponderant ingredients are the adventurous and the sentimental. At the same time the adventure is no longer, as it was in the heyday of the courtly epic, the trial and test of the chosen few, which as a fully assimilated element in the ideal conception of class had become an inner necessity (see above, pp. 134-136), but really only coincidence, the ever unexpected product of quickly and violently shifting events. The elaboration of the coincidental character of the adventure can even be demonstrated in novelle in which comparatively little occurs, as for instance the first of the fourth day, the story of Guiscardo and Ghismonda. Dante scorned to mention the conditions under which Francesca and Paolo were surprised by her husband; in treating such a theme he scorns every kind of finely wrought coincidence, and the scene which he describes—the lovers reading the book together—is the most ordinary thing in the world, of interest only through what it leads to. Boccaccio devotes a considerable portion of his text to the complicated and adventurous methods the lovers are forced to employ in order to meet undisturbed, and to the chance concatenation of events which leads to their discovery by the father, Tancredi. These are adventures like those in the courtly romance—for example the love story of Cligès and Fenice in Chrétien de Troyes’ romance. But the fairy tale atmosphere of the courtly epic is gone, and the ethical concept of the knight’s testing has become a general morality of nature and love, itself expressed in extremely sentimental forms. The sentimental, in turn, which is often bound up with physical objects (the heart of the beloved, the falcon), and to that extent is reminiscent of fairy tale motifs, is in the majority of cases tricked out with a superabundance of rhetoric—think, for example, of Ghismonda’s long apology. All these novelle lack any decisive unity of style. They are too adventurous and too reminiscent of fairy tales to be real, too free from magic and too rhetorical to be fairy tales, and much too sentimental to be tragic. The novelle which aim at the tragic are not immediate and direct in the realm either of reality or of feeling. They are at best what is called touching.
It is precisely when Boccaccio tries to enter the realm of problem or tragedy that the vagueness and uncertainty of his early humanism becomes apparent. His realism—which is free, rich, and assured in its mastery of phenomena, which is completely natural within the limits of the intermediate style—becomes weak and superficial as soon as the problematic or the tragic is touched upon. In Dante’s Commedia the Christian-figural interpretation had compassed human and tragic realism, and in the process had itself been destroyed. Yet that tragic realism had immediately been lost again. The worldliness of men like Boccaccio was still too insecure and unsupported to serve, after the fashion of Dante’s figural interpretation, as a basis on which the world could be ordered, interpreted, and represented as a reality and as a whole.