An Apology for Boccaccio

By Christopher Morley

OCCACCIO was born in Paris in 1313, the impromptu son of an Italian merchant who had come to the French capital to “look over the spring line.” The father was perhaps not as honest a man as O. Henry’s buyer from Cactus City, but he had no wish to shirk his due responsibilities, and young Giovanni was sent as a child to join his parent in Florence. He was put into business in Naples, endured the vicissitudes of clerkship and was finally sent out as a travelling salesman. This calling, then as now, was marked by a happy-go-lucky companionship with all sorts of people, and it is interesting to note how many of Boccaccio’s tales deal with the haps and mishaps of merchants “on the road.”

Commercial travellers have always been great tellers of tales, generally racy tales. The drummer of the fourteenth century must have had abundant opportunity to develop that inquisitive and zestful interest in all the aspects of life which is characteristic of the short-story writer. We do not know what Boccaccio’s “line” was, but at any rate he and his case of samples visited many a town in the days when expense accounts showed no Pullman fares. He was fleabitten at many an Italian inn, polished the rim of many a tankard, and exchanged many an anecdote in the course of his journeyings. His portrait shows him a keen, quick-witted, thoughtful youth, wide of gaze and with high-arched brows.

But salesmanship was not his dream. He was always tinkering with verses. He left a trail of sonnets behind him while his competitors were booking reorders. If remittances from the home office were delayed he helped pay his board bill by scrawled, for landlords in those days were lovers of neatly turned verses. Doubtless he gained quite a reputation in commercial circles as the rhyming drummer. Ultimately his distaste for business (or the dissatisfaction of his firm) ended this period of his career.

He studied law in Naples, subsisting on a pittance from his well-to-do but close-fisted father. But he was biting his nails for rhymes rather than poring over the statutes. At twenty-five he yielded to his overmastering impulse and became a professional literary man.

As I have said, he had always yearned to write. An interesting autobiographical fragment (quoted by J. A. Symonds) tells how before he was seven, almost before he could write, he was muttering rhymelets to himself. He wooed many women before Fiammetta came along; but his true mistress was the Muse, and to her he dedicated his most passionate devotion. The famous sentence on his tomb must have been the thought of one who was himself a poet—. One despairs of translating the simple tenderness of the words. He died in 1375.

above is very nearly all that we know of Boccaccio’s life. Our concern is with the Decameron, and to appreciate that we need to know what manner of man he was rather than the details of his career. Remember, then, that it was written just after the Black Death of 1348 had poisoned Italy and gripped the hearts of men with deadly fear. It was written by a man of thirty-five or so who had seen much of life, a man full of humour and tenderness and ribaldry, a man who expressed as well as anyone the double attitude of the middle ages towards woman—the utmost reverence for woman in the abstract, as idealized in the Mother of Christ; combined with an unabashed willingness to kiss every pretty barmaid whom he met.

It will be well to say something on this topic of medieval love, for making love was the great pastime of the middle ages, and most of the tales in the Decameron deal with amourettes. It is all most fantastic to our modern eyes, very exciting, very brightly coloured, but with a touch of grossness. Remember first that in the middle ages the unwedded woman was almost unknown. The old maid, the chaste spinster, the maiden aunt—you will seek in vain for them outside the nunnery. You will find in Shakespeare (and that is 200 years later) ladies who declare an intention of dying unwed, but all flappers say that, and Shakespeare’s women always change their names in the last act. Have you ever thought that there was no such word as “Miss” in English literature until comparatively lately?

It comes then to this, that in the middle ages when you fell in love, really seriously in love, it was with a married woman, not your own wife, but someone’s else. And medieval love (as far as we can gather) and at any rate Italian love, was a more serious thing than the modern passion. It demanded instant satisfaction, and if not satisfied was generally fatal. It came like a flash of lightning. As treated in the Decameron it appears as charmingly and naïvely extravagant and irresponsible. Shakespeare tells us that “Men have died, and worms have eaten them—but not for love!” But Shakespeare’s love is almost modern and quite different from Boccaccio’s. In the Decameron healthy young men do die of it, blooming young women are brought in a few days to death’s door, but a moment’s glimpse of the adored one sets their pulses leaping again. The countess falls in love with the steward and sends him word of her passion. He thinks it only a ruse to test him and asks for a sign. Accordingly she kills her husband’s favorite hawk, tugs out a hank of his beard, and pulls out one of his most useful teeth; and the steward is satisfied. The sequel of the magic pear tree is one of the cleverest things imaginable, but I must not deal with it here.

Besides the much-imposed-upon husband, the all-enduring wife was a favourite theme for the medieval tale-teller, and this plot continued a universal favourite until the modern feminist movement began. Boccaccio’s famous extravaganza of Griselda (“Patient Grizzel”) is perhaps the most imitated story in literature. Medieval lovers were capable of anything, would believe anything—I can vouch the popular ballads to warranty, or Boccaccio’s lady who was easily persuaded that the Angel Gabriel was sore enamoured of her. “I told you that my charms were celestial,” was her remark to the evangelist who brought the tidings.

And so in general the love that we have to deal with in medieval literature is the love for someone’s else wife, and the favourite butt of the medieval jest is not the mother-in-law, but the deceived husband. Shakespeare is modern and not medieval, but he put it well enough:

And after all, there was a certain fairness about it. Girls were married willy nilly in their early teens to the husband chosen for them by their father or brothers. And so when the fascinating Pietro came whispering in the garden in the moonlight the back door was left ajar and the game of love went on merrily. There are very few husbands in the Decameron who do not suffer from righteous jealousy. In those days this was all a matter of course. There is a charming alba (or dawn-song) by a Provençal troubadour of the thirteenth century, supposed to be sung outside the windows of the wife and her lover to warn them of the return of her husband. The point is that the singer expressly prays the aid of the Almighty for his friend and invokes confusion upon the jealous spouse. The Lord is all on the side of the medieval lover and the husband is nowhere. So-called platonic love is far to seek and medieval lovers are not content with what W. S. Gilbert (and Andrew Marvell before him) called “a vegetable love.” Love is a blind, imperious passion. The Decameron is a book for bachelors, not for married men.

It is almost impossible to discuss such a matter with delicacy today. “I am a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations, plainly and expressly rendered,” wrote R. L. S. “But to treat love as I treated David Balfour’s fatigue in the heather—my dear sir, there were grossness ready made. And hence, how to sweeten?”

There is the contrast. The modern asks how to sweeten, and passes over it with a certain shudder. We have learned to emphasize the spirituality of the love affair. But in the fourteenth century men were not so delicate. One side of love was as seemly as the other, and polite society regaled itself with the ancestors of the jests that one now hears in the club-car. In those days women were admitted to the one shrine that men nowadays hold unstormed by the suffragette—the masculine jest. Let women have the vote, let them sit in Congress, let them wear trousers, what you please, but do not allow them to share the masculine jest! In the Decameron they do share it, and it is not always pleasant.

And so the sensitive mind that approaches the Decameron, anticipating a great piece of literature, is often horrified, and recoils in disgust. Other minds, not sensitive, find in the book a pleasant storehouse of pungency. Thus we have this comic paradox that the Arabian Nights, those really lewd and dangerously provocative tales, are generally thought of as food for babes; whereas frank old Boccaccio with his broad grin is held to be a rather noisome joint that has been hung far too long and had better be cast in the midden—the sort of book that the fourth-form boy hides in his trunk and reads by candlelight in the dormitory.

But come, asks the sensitive mind. You are trying to be clever. Is not the Decameron “really lewd” too? If not, what is? Is it not only a rather crude source-book, a quarry in which great writers have found huge blocks of stone which they have fashioned into works of art?

One who defends the Decameron as a masterpiece is under a trinoda necessitas of manifesting three points:

1. That it is not a mere garner of smut.

2. That where it is obscene (it is undoubtedly so often enough) it is not a poisonous, vicious obscenity—not the obscenity of Dryden or Sterne.

3. That it is a treasure-house in itself alone, had it never been drawn upon by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson and countless others.

These three points I hope to establish.

remember the pleasant passage in one of Lamb’s essays where he mentions his discomposure when discovered on Primrose Hill, by one of his lady-friends, reading Pamela? He adds: “I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide.”

Perhaps you may think the embarrassment of being discovered with Pamela or Candide would be as nothing to that of being found red-handed with a well-thumbed and underlined Decameron. But if a familiar damsel found me on Primrose Hill or in St. Patrick’s Cathedral or anywhere else with that book, I would be no whit abashed. I should turn quickly to the ninth story of the fifth day.

The famous story of the falcon (the lineal progenitor of O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi) can hardly be summarized without injustice. It needs the grace of Boccaccio’s courtly phrases, but even a bald sketch of it will give an insight into his method.

Naturally it concerns love. Federigo, a wealthy and talented young bachelor, falls violently enamored of Madam Giovanna—a married woman, of course. To win her love he leads a life of golden display—lavishly entertains, goes in for the athletics of the day, and becomes very conspicuous among the gentry of Florence, but to no avail. Madam Giovanna, “no less virtuous than fair,” pays no heed to him. He spends all his substance in this way, and has to retire to a little farm in the country, where he lives alone, having only his favourite falcon to keep him in meat.

Madam Giovanna’s husband dies, leaving her wealthy and alone with her young son. She spends the summer on her country estate which happens to be very near the farm of Federigo. Her son strikes up a friendship with Federigo, and grows particularly fond of Federigo’s wonderful falcon. (One must remember that in the middle ages a man’s best falcon was his dearest possession.)

Now the son falls ill, and in his sickness cries out for the falcon, which in some childish or delirious whim he thinks is the only thing that, will make him well. His mother, after long hesitation, allows maternal affection to override her scruples, and goes (discreetly accompanied by a chaperone) to call on Federigo. Federigo in his poverty is hard put to it to provide decent entertainment for the ladies, but he bids them stay to lunch and serves them with the best he has.

After lunch Madam Giovanna, in the most gentle way, explains her predicament and asks Federigo if he will be so generous as to let her take the falcon, to save the boy’s life. To which Federigo replies that she has had it for lunch, and shows her with tears the feathers, talons and beak of the bird which he has sacrificed. Truly an O. Henry ending!

The story adds a little epilogue, to tell how the boy dies, and the mother later on, when urged by her brothers to marry again, refuses the rich man they suggest and says she will have none but Federigo. “I would liefer have a man ill-provided with wealth than wealth ill-provided with a man.”

crude synopsis, of course, loses the delicacy and beauty of the story, the lofty pathos, the loving tenderness with which the smallest details are sketched. It is the greatest and subtlest of tragedies, the tragedy which is perilously near the comic. The actual crux of the tale is (as Sir Walter Raleigh puts it) a mere housekeeper’s dilemma. And yet see how Boccaccio has taken the prose stuff of life and elevated it. He uses the commonest details of everyday happening, the very slightest of plots, but his zest of treatment, his huge delight in telling the tale, make is extraordinarily vital.

If you want to see how the courtly grace of the story can be pawed about and mishandled by a great poet read Tennyson’s dramatization. To write greatly, Tennyson needed a great theme. Boccaccio had the true story-teller’s knack, he can take the most trivial incident and make it significant. Hark to Hazlitt, who knew what he was talking about. He says: “Does not Baccaccio pass to this day for a writer of ribaldry, because his jests and lascivious tales were all that caught the vulgar ear, while the story of the Falcon is forgotten? There is indeed in B’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever.”

We have hit upon one of the secrets of the Decameron. It is the glorious zest and open-hearted abandon with which the tales are told. He is the master narrator who goes about his task in no half-hearted fashion. He throws his whole soul into the story. He has a lingering way of telling his tales, knitting in the little stitches with such a deft, happy touch—we can almost feel the drowsy Italian afternoon, and see the little circle gathered about the fountain in breathless attention. If it be pathetic—well and good, he is pathetic with a will, though now and again trembling on the verge of laughter. “The story told by Fiammetta had more than once brought the tears to the eyes of the ladies, her companions,” he says, after the tragic tale of Ghismonda and Guiscardo. For like all great laughers, he has the gift of tears as well. Or if he is to tell a broad farce or a bit of downright obscenity, it is done so merrily, so frankly, so fully, with such evident delight in the carnal details as almost robs it of its sting. It is the triumphant humanity of the man, his passionate interest in all aspects of life, his appetite for reality, that is his defence and his acquittal. As Sir Walter Raleigh said in his lecture on Boccaccio, the secret of the Decameron is the secret of air and light. Brilliant sunshine inundates it. As soon as you open the book you are out of doors. Dirty he may be, but it is an open-air dirt, not the leering hinting innuendo of Sterne—it is unashamed delight in phases of life that are after all very often exceedingly comic.

Of course it would be ridiculous to deny that the Decameron is appallingly licentious in many places. But I sincerely believe that it is not the kind of smut that makes one the worse for having read it. And the amusing thing is that the so-called process of expurgation in general leaves the Decameron worse than before. The tactics adopted by Payne in the large two-volume translation—omitting some passages, and printing others in a medieval French version—such tactics not only expressly call attention to the  of the work, but substitute for Boccaccio’s inimitable droll frankness a far more vicious suggestiveness. I could support this by parallel quotations, but time presses. Boccaccio’s obscenity loses its wickedness by its utter candour. To use a phrase of his own, it is an “honest sprightliness.” Nothing is too high nor too low for his great ringing laughter.

No one ever enjoyed sheer farce more than Boccaccio. Like Shakespeare he is wonderfully successful with his fools. There are the delightful trio—Calandrino the Butt, Bruno and Buffalmacco, the practical jokers—who come into several of the tales. If you care to make their acquaintance look up the third story of the Ninth Day or the sixth story of the Eighth Day. The latter of these tales is told by a woman and this suggests a more difficult question. Why did he put these smoking-room stories into the mouths of young ladies—ladies whom he describes thus: “Not one of them had passed her eight and twentieth year nor was less than eighteen years old, and each was discreet and of noble blood, fair of favour and well mannered and full of honest sprightliness”? Why, after one of the most licentious of the tales, does he tell us ““A thousand times or more had Dioneo’s story moved the modest ladies to laughter, so quaint and comical did his words appear to them”? And one notes with a certain amazement that the whole book is dedicated to the gentle ladies who need some diversion to help them pass away the time!

This seems queer indeed to our notions; but to go a-wayfaring in the fourteenth century with modern eyes is an absurdity. The first and most telling explanation is, that noble ladies of that time really did enjoy tales that would scandalize a modern sophomore. Remember that a French queen two centuries later wrote the Heptameron in frank imitation of Boccaccio, for the amusement of her ladies-in-waiting. Remember, too, that the Decameron was the most popular book of the middle ages, and reading the tales aloud was a favourite pastime in all courtly circles, just as Ovid’s Art of Love was the most thumbed folio in the monastic libraries. But convincing evidence is The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry (reprinted by the Early English Text Society), a charming work compiled by an Angevin nobleman in 1371 for the instruction of his daughters. Having three motherless girls, and desiring to bring them up as perfect gentlewomen, he wrote this little book, the fourteenth-century What a Young Girl Ought to Know. If you will dip into it you will soon see how very different were fourteenth century ideas of stories for young ladies.

It is well, too, to point out that the stories of the Decameron begin in irreproachable fashion and the worst ones are all told by one person, the irrepressible Dioneo. The first questionable tale is told by him, and causes some embarrassment—indeed he is “gently chidden” for it. But after this faint reproof, the racier the stories the more the party enjoyed them. Apparently even some of Boccaccio’s contemporaries were scandalized by his frankness, for in the Conclusion he vigorously defends himself against criticism. And he adds, wth [sic] a good deal of wit, “Whoso hath otherwhat to do, doth folly to read these stories!”

In the second place we have Boccaccio’s own explanation, given in the magnificent introduction which describes the ravages of the Black Death in Florence in 1348—a description which rivals Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The lighthearted parti-colored life of the city has been plunged into chaos and filth by the ravages of a loathsome disease. All the ordinary conditions of existence are subverted, the customary reserve and refinement of polite life is utterly abandoned in the face of this imminent horror, and everyone does what seems best at the moment. Ten young people of good birth, most of their families and relatives dead, flee the stricken city and find themselves sole occupants of a palace where (by the divine dispensation of story-books) rooms are already set with fresh flowers, the cellars stocked with rare wines, even the beds made and the bedrooms aired. When they see themselves lords of this goodly pleasance, and reflect on the scenes they have just been witnessing in the city of death, small wonder that their celebration savours of somewhat extravagant gaiety. Boccaccio, with his tongue in his cheek, seems to suggest this as an apology for the character of some of the stories.

the stories themselves are their own justification. Boccaccio would roar with laughter if he heard us gravely discussing whether his tales are really indelicate! His final word is, “There is nothing unseemly as to be forbidden unto anyone, so but he express it in seemly terms.”

Boccaccio the realist is the reaction from Dante the dreamer. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy: Boccaccio wrote the Human Comedy, long before Balzac and Edgar Lee Masters. Dante tried to reveal what underlies all earthly seemings. Boccaccio finds appearances interesting and important enough. His contemporary and counterpart (not to say pupil) in England is Chaucer, but in many ways the Decameron is greater than the Canterbury Tales. How much more artistic is the framework in which Boccaccio’s stories are set, than Chaucer’s device of the Canterbury pilgrimage! How can stories be told aloud by a party of twenty-nine stumbling on horseback amid the mud of an English fourteenth century road in April? Against the black background of plague, Boccaccio has set his bright picture of the merry party, star-scattered on the grass, telling their stories, watching the splash of the fountain, gathering flowers, dancing and singing. Hark to the order of the day. They rise in the cool of the morning and “go somewhither a-pleasuring.” By and by they come back for breakfast—about ten o’clock, we imagine. After which they dance or play chess and then sleep through the noontide heat. The afternoon passes away in story-telling and an expedition to the near-by waterfall, where they go paddling in the brook. The girls have charming white legs, we hazard. After sunset comes supper, and in the evening they sing.

So let us not fall into the pedantic error of taking it all too seriously. The Decameron is a great masterpiece and deserves our respect, but it is also a very glorious bit of foolery and light-heartedness and we must not be too grave about it. While we are cataloguing the sources of the tales and noting how the same plots have irrigated fiction ever since, yonder fellow has his feet on the fender and is reading the book with huge enjoyment.

It is indeed a palace of 100 rooms, as someone has said. But it is a medieval palace, and like all such, its sanitation is not quite up to our modern plumbing. It may be that in the cellar the drains have gone wrong, somehow, and in the south corridor (where Dioneo lives) one may sniff shrewdly; but there are broad terraces and flower gardens, too, and from the long upper gallery one commands a fair prospect into the fourteenth century. There are lovely ladies coming down the stair, a trifle broad of speech mayhap, but slender of waist and bright of eye. Wallace Irwin never said better word than this—

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