Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/863

Rh the charges of wilful ignorance and envy brought against him. A life of Dante, and the commentaries on the first 1G cantos of the Inferno, bear witness to Boccaccio s learn ing and enthusiasm. In the chronological enumeration of our author s writ ings we now come to his most important work, the De cameron, a collection of one hundred stories, published in their combined form in 1353, although mostly written at an earlier date. This work marks in a certain sense the rise of Italian prose. It is true that Dante s Vita Nuova was written before, but its involved sentences, founded essentially on Latin constructions, cannot be compared with the infinite suppleness and precision of Boccaccio s prose. The Cento Novelle Antiche, on the other hand, which, also precedes the Decameron in date, can hardly be said to be written in artistic language according to definite rules of grammar and style. Boccaccio for the first time speaks a new idiom, flexible and tender, like the character of the nation, and capable of rendering all the shades of feeling, from the coarse laugh of cynicism to the sigh of hopeless love. It is by the name of &quot; Father of Italian Prose&quot; that Boccaccio ought to be chiefly remembered. Like most progressive movements in art and literature, Boccaccio s remoulding of Italian prose may be described as a &quot; return to nature.&quot; It is indeed the nature of the Italian people itself which has become articulate in the Decameron ; here we find southern grace and elegance, together with that unveiled naivete of impulse which is so striking and so amiable a quality of the Italian character. The undesirable complement of the last-mentioned feature, a coarseness and indecency of conception and expression hardly comprehensible to the northern mind, also appears in the Decameron, particularly where the life and conver sation of the lower classes are the subject of the story. At the same time, these descriptions of low life are so admir able, and the character of popular parlance rendered with such humour, as often to make the frown of moral disgust give way to a smile. It is not surprising that a style so concise and yet so pliable, so typical and yet so individual, as that of Boc caccio was of enormous influence on the further progress of a prose in a manner created by it. This influence has indeed prevailed down to the present time, to an extent beneficial upon the whole, although frequently fatal to the development of individual writers. Novelists like Giovanni Fiorentino or Franco Sacchetti are completely under the sway of their great model ; and Boccaccio s influence may be discerned equally in the plastic fulness of Machiavelli and in the pointed satire of Aretino. Without touching upon the individual merits of Lasca, Bandello, and other novelists of the cinquecento, it may be asserted that none of them created a style independent of their great predecessor. One cannot indeed but acquiesce in the authoritative utterance of the Accademia della Crusca, which holds up the Decameron as the standard and model of Italian prose. Even the Della Cruscan writers themselves have been unable to deprive the language wholly of the fresh spontaneity of Boccaccio s manner, which in modern litera ture we again admire in Manzoni s Promessi sposi. A detailed analysis of a work so well known as the Deca meron would be unnecessary. The description of the plague of Florence preceding the stories is universally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of epic grandeur and vividness. It ranks with the paintings of similar calami ties by Thucydides, Defoe, and Manzoni. Like Defoe, Boccaccio had to draw largely on hearsay and his own imagination, it being almost certain that in 1348 he was at Naples, and therefore no eye-witness of the scenes he describes. The stories themselves, a hundred in number, range from the highest pathos to the coarsest licentiousness. A creation like the patient Griselda, which international literature owes to Boccaccio, ought to atone for much that is morally and artistically objectionable in the Decameron. It may be said on this head, that his age and his country- were not only deeply immoral, but in addition exceedingly outspoken. Moreover, his sources were anything but pure. Most of his improper stories are either anecdotes from real life, or they are taken from the fabliaux of mediaeval French poets. On comparing the latter class of stories (about one-fifth of the whole Decameron] with their French originals, one finds that Boccaccio has never added to, but has sometimes toned down the revolting ingredients. Not withstanding this, it cannot be denied that the artistic value of the Decameron is greatly impaired by descriptions and expressions, the intentional licentiousness of which is but imperfectly veiled by an attempt at humour. Boccaccio has been accused of plagiarism, particularly by French critics, who correctly state that the subjects of many stories in the Decameron are borrowed from their literature. A similar objection might be raised against Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe (in Faust), and indeed most of the master minds of all nations. Power of invention is not the only nor even the chief criterion of a great poet. He takes his subjects indiscriminately from his own fancy, or from the consciousness of his and other nations. Stories float about in the air, known to all yet realized by few ; the poet gathers their disjecta membra, into an organic whole, and this he inspires and calls into life with the breath of his genius. It is in this sense that Boccaccio is the creator of those innumerable beautiful types and stories, which have since become household words amongst civilized nations. No author can equal him in these con tributions to the store of international literature. There are indeed few great poets who have not in some way become indebted to the inexhaustible treasure of Boccaccio s creativeness. One of the greatest masterpieces of Ger man literature, Lessing s Nathan the Wise, contains a story from Boccaccio (Decameron, Day 1st, tale iii.), and the list of English poets who have drawn from the same source comprises amongst many others the names of Chaucer, Lydgate, Dryden, Keats, and Tennyson. For ten years Boccaccio continued to reside in Florence, leaving the city only occasionally on diplomatic missions or on visits to his friends. His fame in the meantime began to spread far and wide, and his Decameron, in par ticular, was devoured by the fashionable ladies and gentle men of the age. About 1360 he seems to have retired from the turbulent scenes of Florence to his native Certaldo, the secluded charms of which he describes with rapture. In the following year took place that strange turning- point in Boccaccio s career, which is generally described as his conversion. It seems that a Carthusian monk came to him while at Certaldo charged with a posthumous message from another monk of the same order, to the effect that if Boccaccio did not at once abandon his godless ways in life and literature his death would ensue after a short time. It is also mentioned that the revelation to the friar on his deathbed of a secret known only to Boccaccio gave additional import to this alarming information. Boccaccio s impressionable nature was deeply moved. His life had been far from virtuous ; in his writings he had frequently sinned against the rules of morality, and worse still, he had attacked with bitter satire the institutions and servants of holy mother church. Terrified by the approach of immediate death, he resolved to sell his library, aban don literature, and devote the remainder of his life to penance and religious exercise. To this effect he wrote to Petrarch. We possess the poet s answer; it is a masterpiece of writing, and what is more, a proof of tenderest friendship. The message of the monk Petrarch is evidently inclined 