Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/40

Rh this. No, this book is to be read for what it is, a work in the same category with the memoirs of Casanova, "Gil Bias," and those other classics which, whether they be made of history or of fiction, appeal to the reader as being all compact of the very blood and bone of human experience.

Cellini is a master of picaresque literature. He loves adventure, and nothing in the world gives him quite the joy that he gets from a hand-to-hand fight. He is happy when he is at work; happy when he is foregathering with Giulio Romano or some other boon companion in Florentine Bohemia, when the day's task is done; happy when he is arguing with a patron; happy when he is driving his dagger up to the hilt in the neck of his enemy; happy, in short, whenever anything is toward that convinces him that he is alive and playing the part of a man. As he looks back over it all, his being thrills with an ineffable gusto, and small blame to him if the story loses nothing in the telling. Take, for example, the fracas which is soon reached in his narrative, the one following Gherardo Guasconti's insult. Benvenuto swoops down upon Gherardo in the midst of his family like an avenging flame. "I stabbed him in the breast," he says, "piercing doublet and jerkin through and through to the shirt, without, however, grazing his flesh or doing him the least harm in the world." He is promptly set upon in the street by "more than twelve persons," all of them crudely but effectively armed, and the fight waxes