Page:Matteo Bandello - twelve stories (IA cu31924102029083).pdf/25

 the first ecstacy of their meeting, he for a time forgets that death must soon take him. For the dramatist, this surely was a sublime catastrophe; had it been suggested to Shakespeare, he would have given us a death scene infinitely more touching than the one in his play. For in that, Romeo dies before Juliet wakes; and so we lose the moving spectacle of their rapturous meeting and their pitiful farewell. Bandello, for all his want of insight, recognised the overwhelming effect of this climax, and his account in its simplicity and directness cannot be matched. Though Da Porto used the incidents, Bandello really told the Romeo and Juliet story for the first time, clearly and fully, so that the tale may be said to belong to him: certainly no one has treated it with greater success.

Unlike Cintio, who in his Eccatommiti, by grouping his tales gave them a certain ethical significance, Bandello cares nothing for method, for classification, but permits a story unspeakably gross in motive and treatment to follow close upon one replete with tenderness and beauty. Yet a survey of his work will soon show us that in effect the two hundred odd tales separate themselves rather sharply into groups. There are the purely tragic stories which