Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/106

88 an apt medium for the expression of passions heretofore chiefly restricted to verse.

His fame, nevertheless, rests on his Decameron, for here he attained the perfection which elsewhere he only indicated. Among many lights in which this epoch-making book may be regarded is that of an alliance between the elegant but superfine literature of courts and the vigorous but homely literature of the people. Nobles and ladies, accustomed to far-fetched and ornate compositions like the Filocopo, heard the same stories which amused the common people, told in a style which the uneducated too could apprehend and enjoy, but purged of all roughness and vulgarity, and, in truth, such masterpieces of clear, forcible prose as the greatest scholars had till then been unable to produce. All that we know of Boccaccio leads to the conclusion that his true mission was to have been a poet of the people, such an one as the unknown balladists who in simple ages have given immortal form to popular traditions, or as the Burnses and Heines who in artificial periods have gone back to the fountains of popular song. Neither of these was a possible part in the fourteenth century; but if Boccaccio is in no respect archaic, the sap of his best work is drawn from the soil of popular interest and sympathy.

Few of the stories are of Boccaccio's invention the originals of some may be discovered in traditionary folk-lore, of others in French fabliaux or classical or Oriental writers; very many are probably true histories in every respect but for the alteration of the names. This is Boccaccio's best defence against the charge of licentiousness—he did not, like so many others, write with the express purpose of stimulating the passions, but reproduced the ordinary talk of hours of relaxation,