Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

The letter which Boccaccio took with him was from the Prior of the Arti: Reverendo Viro D. Francisco Petrarcha, Canonico Padoano, Laureato Poetæ, concivi nostro carissimo, Prior Artium Vexillifer Justitiæ Populi et Communis Florentiæ. It was very flattering, laudatory, and moving. It greeted Petrarch as a citizen of Florence, spoke of his "admirable profession," his "excellent merit in studies," his "utter worthiness of the laurel crown," his "most rare genius which shall be an example to latest posterity," etc. etc. etc. Then it spoke of the offer. "No long time since," it said, "seeing our city deprived of learning and study, we wisely decided that henceforth the arts must flourish and ought to be cultivated among us, and that it would be necessary to introduce studies of every sort into our city so that by their help our Republic, like Rome of old, should be glorious above the other cities of Italy and grow always more happy and more illustrious. Now our fatherland believes that you are the one and only man by whom this result can be attained. The Republic prays you, then, as warmly as it may, to give yourself to these studies and to make them flourish...." So on and so forth, quoting Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero, with allusions to that "immortal work the Africa which...." Boccaccio was to do the rest. "Other things," the letter ends, "many and of infinitely greater consideration, you will hear from Giovanni Boccaccio, our citizen, who is sent to you by special commission...."[415]

With this letter in his pocket Boccaccio made his way to Padua, where, as we know, he was delighted to come, nor was Petrarch less happy to see him. And when he returned he bore Petrarch's answer to the Republic: "Boccaccio, the bearer of your letter and of your commands, will tell you how I desire to obey you and what are my projects." No doubt while Boccaccio was with him, seeing his sincerity, Petrarch felt half inclined to accept; but he was at all times infirm of purpose. "If I break my word that I have given to my friends," he writes,[416] "it is because of the variation of the human spirit, from which none is exempt except the perfect man. Uniformity is the mother of boredom, that one can only avoid by changing one's place." However that may be, when later in the year he left Padua, it was to return not to Florence, but to France.

If we know nothing else of this embassy, we know, at least, that this sojourn in Padua passed pleasantly for Boccaccio. In a letter written to Petrarch from Ravenna, in July, 1353,[417] he reminds his "best master" of his visit. "I think," he writes, "that you have not forgotten how, when less than three years ago I came to you in Padua the ambassador of our Senate, my commission fulfilled, I remained with you for some days, and how that those days were all passed in the same way: you gave yourself to sacred studies, and I, desiring your compositions, copied them. When the day waned to sunset we left work and went into your garden, already filled by spring with flowers and leaves.... Now sitting, now talking, we passed what remained of the day in placid and delightful idleness, even till night."

Some of that talk was doubtless given to Letters, but some too fell, as it could not but do, on politics. For that letter, so charming in the scene it brings before us of that garden at nightfall, goes on to speak in a transparent allegory of the affairs of Italy and of Petrarch's sudden change of plans, for whereas in 1351 he had promised to enter the service of Florence and had cursed the Visconti, when he returned to Italy in 1353, it was with these very Visconti he had taken shameful service—with the enemies of "his own country" Florence, whom he had spurned, and who in return had repealed the repeal of his banishment and refrained from returning to him the money value of his father's possessions. Is it in revenge for this, Boccaccio asks, that he has taken service with the enemy? He reproaches him in the subtlest and gentlest way, yet with an eager patriotism that does him the greatest honour, representing him to himself even as a third person, one Sylvanus, who "had been of their company" in Padua. Yet Boccaccio does not spare him, and though he loved and revered him beyond any other living man, he bravely tells him his mind and points out his treachery, when his country is at stake.

That Sylvanus, it seems—Petrarch himself really—had lamented bitterly enough the unhappy state of Italy, neglected by the Emperors and the Popes, and exposed to the brutality and tyranny of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti of Milan. More and more he cursed the tyrants, and especially the Visconti, and "how eagerly you agreed with him!... But now," the letter continues,[418] "I have heard that this Sylvanus is about to enter the service of those very Visconti, who even now menace his country. I would not have believed it had not I had a letter from him in which he tells me it is so himself. Who would ever have suspected him of so much mobility of character, or as likely to forswear his own faith out of greediness? But he has done so perhaps to avenge himself on his fellow-citizens who have retaken the property of his father, which they had once returned to him. But what man of honour, even when he has received a wrong from his country, would unite himself with her enemies? How much has Sylvanus mystified and compromised, by these acts, all his admirers and friends...."

Just here we come upon something noble and firm in the character of Boccaccio, something of the "nationalism" too which was to be the great force of the future, to which Petrarch was less clairvoyant and which Dante had never perceived at all. The Empire was dead; in less than a hundred years men were to protest they did not understand what it meant. The Papacy then too seemed almost as helpless as it is to-day. Internationalism—the latest cry of the modern decadent or dreamer—was already a mere ghost frightened and gibbering in the dawn, and the future lay in the growth of nationalities, in the variety and freedom of the world, perhaps in the federation of Italy. Were these the thoughts that occupied the two pioneers of the modern world on those spring nights in that garden at Padua?

CHAPTER XI

1351-1352

TWO EMBASSIES

Boccaccio did well to be anxious. The greed of the Visconti, the venality and indifference of the Pope, threatened the very liberty of Tuscany, and though Boccaccio had till now held no permanent public office in Florence, we have seen him as a witness to the donation of Prato, as ambassador for the Republic in Romagna, and as its representative offering Petrarch a chair in the new university. He was now to be entrusted with a more delicate and serious mission. But first, on his return from Padua in January-February, 1351, he became one of the Camarlinghi del Comune.[419] During the remainder of that year we seem to see him quietly at work in Florence,[420] most probably on the Decameron, and then suddenly in December he was called upon to go on a mission to Ludwig of Brandenburg, Count of Tyrol.[421]

Florence was tired of appealing to the Pope always in vain and had at last looked for another champion against the Visconti. Deserted by the Church, at war with the Visconti, Florence had either to submit or to find a way out for herself, and with her usual astuteness she hoped to achieve the latter by calling to her aid the excommunicated Ludwig. The moment was well chosen. Ludwig was just reconciled with Charles IV, King of the Romans, the greatest enemy of his house. He was poor and in need of money, little loved in his own country, and not indisposed to try any adventure that offered. So Boccaccio set out. The letters given to him December 12, 1351, were directed to Conrad, Duke of Teck, who had already visited Florence in 1341, and to Ludwig himself.[422] We know, however, nothing personal to Boccaccio with regard to this mission. In fact save that it was so far successful that Ludwig sent Diapoldo Katzensteiner to Florence to continue the overtures we know little about it at all. Katzensteiner's pretensions, however, proved to be such that the Florentines would not accept them, and communications were broken off.[423] That was in March, 1352. On May 1 a new project was on foot. Florence decided to call the prospective Emperor Charles IV, the grandson of her old enemy Henry VII, into Italy to her assistance.[424]

That a Guelf republic should turn for assistance to the head of the Ghibelline cause seems perhaps more strange than in fact it was. Guelf and Ghibelline had become mere names beneath which local jealousies hid and flourished, caring nothing for the greater but less real quarrel between Empire and Papacy. Charles, however, was to fail Florence; for at the last moment he withdrew from the treaty, fearing to leave Germany; when he did descend later, things had so far improved for her that she was anything but glad to see him especially when she was forced to remember that it was she who had called him there. After these two failures Florence was compelled to make terms with the Visconti at Sarzana in April, 1353, promising not to interfere in Lombardy or Bologna, while Visconti for his part undertook not to molest Tuscany.[425] But by this treaty the Visconti gained a recognition of their hold in Bologna from the only power that wished to dispute it. They profited too by the peace, extending their dominion in Northern Italy. In this, though fortune favoured them, they began to threaten others who had looked on with composure when they were busy with Tuscany. Among these were the Venetians, who made an alliance with Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, and Padua, and were soon trying to persuade Florence, Siena, and Perugia to join them.[426] Nor did they stop there, for in December, 1353, they too tried to interest Charles IV in Italian affairs. When it was seen that Charles was likely to listen to the Venetians the Visconti too sent ambassadors to him, nor was the Papacy slow to make friends.

In 1352 Clement VI had died, and in his stead Innocent VI reigned in Avignon. He was determined to assert his claims in Italy, and especially in the Romagna, and to this end despatched Cardinal Albornoz, the redoubtable Spaniard, to bring the unruly barons of that region to order. The whole situation was delicate and complicated. Florence was in a particularly difficult position. She had called Charles into Italy without the Pope's leave—she, the head of the Guelf cause. He had not come. Now when she no longer wanted him he seemed to be coming in spite of her and with the Pope's goodwill. She seems to have doubted the reality of that, as well she might. Moreover, though she and her allies would have been glad enough to join the Venetians, the situation was too complicated for hurried action, especially as a treaty only two years old bound them not to interfere in Lombardy and Bologna so long as they were left alone.

Charles's own position can have been not less difficult. Now that he seemed really eager to enter Italy, both sides seemed eager for him to do so. Should he enter Italy as the "Imperatore de' Preti," and so make sure of a coronation, or descend as the avenger of the imperial claims? He hesitated. In these circumstances it seemed to the Florentines that there was but one thing to do—to inform themselves of the real intentions of the Pope, and when these were known, to decide on a course of action. In these very delicate missions his countrymen again had recourse to Boccaccio. He set out on April 28, 1354.[427] His instructions were to find out whether the Emperor was coming into Italy with consent of His Holiness, to speak of the loyalty of Florence to the Holy See, and to protest her willingness to do whatever the Pope desired. At the same time he had to obtain at least this, that the Pope should exert himself to save the honour and independence of the republic. Again, if the Pope pretended that heknew nothing of the advent of Charles, but asked the intentions of Florence in case he should enter Italy, Boccaccio was instructed to say that he was only sent to ask the intentions of His Holiness. In any case he was to return as quickly as possible.

The Pope's answer seems to have been far from clear. Boccaccio returned, but a few months later Dietifeci di Michele was sent as ambassador to Avignon with almost the same instructions and with the same object in view.

Can it be that Florence really did not understand the situation as we see it, or was that situation in reality very dangerous to her liberty? It is difficult to understand how she can have failed to see that the Pope had already won. It was obvious that he had come to some arrangement with Charles, which proved to be that the Church would crown him on condition that he only spent the day of his incoronation in Rome and respected the sovereignty of the Pope in the states of the Church. Moreover, if this were not enough, as Florence knew, the presence of Albornoz in Romagna had already drawn the teeth of the Visconti so far as they were dangerous to Tuscany. However, it seems to have been in considerable fear and perplexity that she saw Charles enter Padua early in November, 1354. Now if ever, some thought doubtless, the White Guelf ideal was to be realised. Among these idealists was, alas, Petrarch, whose hymn, not long written perhaps, Italia Mia, surely dreamed of quite another king than a German prince. Boccaccio was, as I think, better advised. In his seventh Eclogue he mercilessly ridicules Charles, who in fact, though not maybe in seeming, was the instrument of the Pope. He entered Italy by the Pope's leave. Padua received him with honour, but Cane della Scala of Verona clanged to his gates, and the Visconti with bared teeth waited to see what he would do. He went to Mantua and Gonzaga received him well. There he expected the ambassador of Tuscany, but as the Pope's friend the Ghibellines knew him not, they smiled bitterly at the "Priests' Emperor," only Pisa pathetically stretching out her hands to Cæsar's ghost, while, as claimant of the imperial title the Guelf republics would have none of him. Florence need have had no fear, the Church had out-manœuvred her enemies as in old time.

Charles, however, was not contemptible. Simple German as he was, he soon grasped the situation. He made friends in some sort with Visconti, and in this doubtless Petrarch, who had urged him on, was able to assist him. From them he received the iron crown, though not indeed at Monza, but in Milan, in the church of S. Ambrogio, and at their hands. That must have been a remarkable and unhappy time for the King of the Romans, in spite of Petrarch's talk and friendship. Presently he set out for Pisa and so to Rome, where he received the imperial crown on April 4, 1355, and, returning to Pisa, as though in irony of Petrarch's enthusiastic politics, crowned the grammarian Zanobi da Strada poet laureate. Yet this was surely but a German joke. As for Florence, still trembling it seems, she took as firm a stand as she could, and asked only the protection and friendship of the Emperor, offering no homage or subordination. The Sienese, on the other hand, in spite of their treaty with Florence, offered him their lordship. Others followed their example, and Pisa was filled with Ghibellines claiming the destruction of Florence, the head and front of the Guelf faction. Charles, however, refused to adventure. He demanded from Florence only money, as a fine, by paying which she was to be restored to his favour, and that her magistrates should be called Vicars of the Empire. She forfeited nothing of her liberty and none of her privileges as a free republic. Yet at first she refused to acquiesce. It was only after an infinite number of explanations that she was brought to consent. Indeed, we read that the "very notary who read out the deed broke down, and the Senate was so affected that it dissolved. On the next day the Act was rejected seven times before it was passed. The bells were the only merry folk in Florence, so jealous were her citizens of the liberty of their state."

CHAPTER XII

1353-1356

BOCCACCIO'S ATTITUDE TO WOMAN—
THE CORBACCIO

Those embassies, for the most part so unsuccessful one may think, which from time to time between 1350 and 1354 Boccaccio had undertaken at the request of the Florentine Republic, heavy though his responsibility must have been in the conduct of them, had by no means filled all his time or seriously prevented the work, far more important as it proved to be, which he had chosen as the business of his life. Between 1348 and 1353, as we shall see, he had written the Decameron; in 1354-5 he seems to have produced the Corbaccio, and not much later the Vita di Dante; while in the complete retirement from political life, from the office of ambassador at any rate, which followed the embassy of 1354 and lasted for eleven years, till indeed in 1365 he went again to Avignon on business of the Republic, he devoted himself almost entirely to study and to the writing of those Latin works of learning which his contemporaries appreciated so highly and which we have perhaps been ready too easily to forget.

It is generally allowed[428] that Boccaccio began the Decameron in 1348, but that it did not see the light in its completeness till 1353, and this would seem reasonable, for it is surely impossible that such a work can have been written in much less than four years. That a considerable time did in fact divide the beginning from the completion of the book Boccaccio himself tells us in the conclusion, at the end of the work of the Tenth Day, where he says: "Though now I approach the end of my labours, it is long since I began to write, yet I am not oblivious that it was to none but to ladies of leisure that I offered my work...."

That the Decameron was not begun before 1348 would seem to be certain, for even if we take away the Prologue, the form itself is built on the dreadful catastrophe of the Black Death.[429] If the book was begun between that year and 1351, it cannot, however, have been suggested, as some have thought, by Queen Giovanna of Naples, for she was then in Avignon. In 1348 Boccaccio was thirty-five years old, and whether at that time he was in Naples or in Forlì with Ordelaffo is, as we have seen, doubtful, though that he was in Naples would appear more likely; but wherever he was he had ample opportunity of witnessing the appalling ravages of the pestilence which he so admirably describes, and which is the contrast of and the excuse for his book, for save in Lombardy and Rome the pestilence was universal throughout Italy. In 1353, however, we know him to have been resident in Florence, and if we accept the tradition, which there is no reason at all to doubt, it was in that year that the complete Decameron first saw the light.[430] It was known, however, in part, long before that, and would seem indeed to have been published—if one may so express it—in parts; not perhaps ten stories at a time—a day at a time—as Foscolo[431] has conjectured, but certainly in parts, most likely of various quantity and at different intervals. This would seem to be obvious from the introduction to the Fourth Day, where Boccaccio speaks of the envy and criticism that "these little stories" had excited, and proceeds to answer his detractors. It is obvious that he could not at the beginning of the Fourth Day have answered criticisms of his work if some of it had not already seen the light and been widely read.

It must have been then when he was about forty years old that he finished the Decameron, that extraordinary impersonal work in which in the strongest contrast with his other books he has almost completely hidden himself from us. He might seem at last in those gay, licentious, and profoundly secular pages, often so delightfully satirical and always so full of common sense, so sane as we might say, to have lost himself in a joyous contemplation and understanding of the world in which he lived, to have forgotten himself in a love of it.

I speak fully of the Decameron elsewhere, and have indeed only mentioned it here for two reasons—to fix its date in the story of his life, and to contrast it and its mood with the work which immediately followed it, the Corbaccio and the Vita di Dante.

We cannot, I think, remind ourselves too often in our attempts—and after all they can never be more than attempts—to understand the development of Boccaccio's mind, of his soul even, that he had but one really profound passion in his life, his love for Fiammetta. And as that had been one of those strong and persistent sensual passions which are among the strangest and bitterest things in the world,[432] his passing love affairs—and doubtless they were not few—with other women had seemed scarcely worth recounting.[433] That he never forgot Fiammetta, that he never freed himself from her remembrance, are among the few things concerning his spiritual life which we may assert with a real confidence. It is true that in the Proem to the Decameron he would have it otherwise, but who will believe him? There he says—let us note as we read that even here he cannot but return to it—that: "It is human to have compassion on the afflicted; and as it shows very well in all, so it is especially demanded of those who have had need of comfort and have found it in others: among whom, if any had ever need thereof or found it precious or delectable, I may be numbered; seeing that from my early youth even to the present,[434] I was beyond measure aflame with a most aspiring and noble love, more perhaps than were I to enlarge upon it would seem to accord with my lowly condition. Whereby, among people of discernment to whose knowledge it had come, I had much praise and high esteem, but nevertheless extreme discomfort and suffering, not indeed by reason of cruelty on the part of the beloved lady, but through superabundant ardour engendered in the soul by ill-bridled desire; the which, as it allowed me no reasonable period of quiescence, frequently occasioned me an inordinate distress. In which distress so much relief was afforded me by the delectable discourse of a friend and his commendable consolations that I entertain a very solid conviction that I owe it to him that I am not dead. But as it pleased Him who, being infinite, has assigned by immutable law an end to all things mundane, my love, beyond all other fervent, and neither to be broken nor bent by any force of determination, or counsel of prudence, or fear of manifest shame or ensuing danger, did nevertheless in course of time abate of its own accord, in such wise that it has now left naught of itself in my mind but that pleasure which it is wont to afford to him who does not adventure too far out in navigating its deep seas; so that, whereas it was used to be grievous, now, all discomfort being done away, I find that which remains to be delightful ... now I may call myself free."

His love is not dead, but is no longer the sensual agony, the spiritual anguish it had once been, but it "remains to be delightful." That it remained, though perhaps not always "to be delightful," that it remained, is certain. For though he "may now call myself free," that Proem tells us that after all we owe the Decameron itself indirectly to Fiammetta. And who reading those tales can believe in his vaunted emancipation, if by that is meant his forgetfulness of her? She lives everywhere in those wonderful pages. Is she not one of the seven ladies of the Decameron? That is true, it will be said, but she has no personality there, she is but one of ten protagonists who are without life and individuality. Let it be granted. But whereas the others are in fact but lay figures, she, Fiammetta, though she remains just an idol if you will, is to be worshipped, is to be decked out with the finest words, to be honoured and glorified. Her name scarcely occurs but he praises her; he is always describing her; while for the others he seldom spares a word. Who can tell us what Pampinea, Filomena, Emilia, Neifile, or Elisa were like? But for Fiammetta—he tells us everything; and when, as in the Proem we have just discussed or in the Conclusion to the Fourth Day, he speaks for himself, it is her he praises, it is of her he writes. She is there crowned as queen. It is Filostrato who crowns her: "taking the laurel wreath from his own head, and while the ladies watched to see to whom he would give it, set it graciously upon the blonde head of Fiammetta, saying: 'Herewith I crown thee, as deeming that thou, better than any other, will know how to make to-morrow console our fair companions for the rude trials of to-day.' Fiammetta, whose wavy tresses fell in a flood of gold over her white and delicate shoulders, whose softly rounded face was all radiant with the very tints of the white lily blended with the red of the rose, who carried two eyes in her head that matched those of the peregrine falcon, while her tiny sweet mouth showed a pair of lips that shone as rubies...."

And it is the same with the Conclusion of the book, which in fact closes with her name, and with the question Boccaccio must have asked her living and dead his whole life long: "Madonna, who is he that you love?"

That he never forgot her, then, is certain; but Fiammetta was dead, and for Boccaccio more than for any other man of letters perhaps, love with its extraordinary bracing of the intellect as well as of the body was in some sort a necessity. Never, as we may think, handsome, in 1353, at forty years of age, he was already past his best, fat and heavy and grey-haired. The death of Fiammetta, his love affair with her, had left him with a curious fear of marriage, ill-disguised and very characteristic. If he had ever believed in the perfection of woman in the way of Dante and Petrarch and the prophets of romantic love—and without thereby damning him it is permissible to doubt this—he had long ceased to hold any such creed or to deceive himself about them. Woman in the abstract was for him the prize of life; he desired her not as a friend, but as the most exquisite instrument of pleasure, beyond the music of flutes or the advent of spring. In the Decameron, though we are not justified in interpreting all the sentiments and opinions there expressed as necessarily his own, the evidence is too strong to be put altogether aside. He loves women and would pleasure them, but he is a sceptic in regard to them; he treats them always with an easy, tolerant, and familiar condescension, sometimes petulant, often ironical, always exquisite in its pathos and humanity; but beneath all this—let us confess it at once—there is a certain brutality that is perhaps the complement to Petrarch's sentiment. "The Muses are ladies," he says,[435] speaking in his own person—he had, as we have seen, been accused of being too fond of them—"and albeit ladies are not the peers of the Muses, yet they have their outward semblance, for which cause, if for no other, it is reasonable that I should be fond of them. Besides which ladies have been to me the occasion of composing some thousand verses, but of never a verse that I made were the Muses the occasion."

He loves women then, but he is not deluded by them—or rather, as we should say, because he loves them he does not therefore respect them also. He considers them as fair or unfair, or as he himself has it,[436] "fair and fit for amorous dalliance" or "spotted lizards." He does not believe in them or their virtue—their sexual virtue that is—nor does he value it very highly.[437] It is a thing for priests and nuns, and even there rare enough. But in the world——!

In one place in the Decameron[438] he speaks of the "insensate folly of those who delude themselves ... with the vain imagination that, while they go about the world, taking their pleasure now of this, now of the other woman, their wives, left at home, suffer not their hearts to stray from their girdles, as if we who are born of them and live among them could be ignorant of the bent of their desires." Moreover, he considers that "a woman who indulges herself in the intimate use with a man commits but a sin of nature; but if she rob him or slay him or drive him into exile, her sin proceeds from depravity of spirit." Thus, as the story shows, to deny him the satisfaction of his desire would be a greater sin than to accord it to him.

Again, in another tale,[439] we see his insistence upon what he considers—and not certainly without reason—as the reality of things, to deny which would be not merely useless, but even ridiculous. Certain "very great merchants of Italy, met in Paris," are "discussing their wives at home...."[440] "I cannot answer for my wife," says one, "but I own that whenever a girl that is to my mind comes in my way, I give the go-by to the love I bear my wife and take my pleasure of the new-comer to the best of my power." "And so do I," said another, "because I know that whether I suspect her or no my wife tries her fortune, and so it is 'do as you are done by.'" All agree save a Genoese, who stakes everything on his wife's virtue. He proves right, his wife is virtuous; but the whole company is incredulous, and when one of them tells him he is talking nonsense, and that the general opinion of women's virtue "is only what common sense dictates," he carries the whole company with him. He admits that "doubtless few [women] would be found to indulge in casual amours if every time they did so a horn grew out on the brow to attest the fact; but not only does no horn make its appearance, but not so much as a trace or vestige of a horn, so only they be prudent; and the shame and dishonour consist only in the discovery; wherefore if they can do it secretly they do it, or are fools to refrain. Hold it for certain that she alone is chaste who either had never a suit made to her, or suing herself was repulsed. And albeit I know that for reasons true and founded in nature this must needs be, yet I should not speak so positively thereof as I do had I not many a time with many a woman verified it by experience."

It is not that in the Decameron virtue is not often rewarded in the orthodox way, but that such cases are not to the point; they are as unreal, as merely poetical or fictional as they are to-day. But where real life is dealt with—and in no other book of the fourteenth century is there so much reality—the evidence is what we have seen. It was not that woman as we see her there is basely vicious; but that she is altogether without ideality, light-hearted and complacent, easily yielding to caprice, to the allure of pleasure, to the first solicitation that comes to her in a propitious hour, and this rather because of a certain gaminerie, a lightness, an incorrigible naughtiness, than because of a real depravity. Like all Italians—the great exceptions only prove the rule—she is without a fundamental moral sense. She sins lightly, easily, without regret, dazzled by life, by the pleasure of life.

Such, then, was the attitude of Boccaccio towards woman at the time when he was writing the Decameron, that is to say, from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year. And we may well ask whether he had always thought as he did then, and if not, what had been the cause of his disillusion and what was to be the result of it?

It is difficult to answer the first of these questions with any certainty. And yet it might seem incredible that in his youth he had already emancipated himself from an illusion—if illusion it be—that seems proper to it in all ages, and that was so universal in the Middle Age as to inform the greater part of its secular literature—the illusion that woman was something to be worshipped, something almost sacred, to be approached in great humility, with gentleness and reverence.

In reading the early romances of Boccaccio, it must be confessed that while his attitude towards woman is not so assured, nor so masterful in its realism and humour as in the Decameron, it is nevertheless much the same in character. In the Filocolo, as in the Ameto, he thinks of her always as a prize, as something to be hunted or cajoled, yes, like a barbarian; nor are his early works less sensual than the Decameron. The physical reality is for him—and not only in regard to woman—so much more than the spiritual.

Yet in spite of the general character of his work, we observe from time to time, and more especially in the Rime, a certain idealism, still eagerly physical, if you will, but none the less ideal on that account, which centres in Fiammetta and his thoughts concerning her.

We have already traced that story from its beginning to its end, we shall but return to it here to repeat that whatever we may come to think of it, this at least is assured and certain: that it was a genuine and sincere passion in which Boccaccio's whole being was involved—inextricably involved—soul as well as body. To a nature such as Boccaccio's, so lively and full of energy, that awakening, so far as his physical nature was concerned, came not without preparation—he had had other loves before he saw Fiammetta—but spiritually it seems to have been in the nature of an unexpected revelation. It made him a poet, as we have seen, and one cannot read the Rime without being convinced that something more was involved in his love for his lady than the body.

It would seem, then, that we have here under our hands a history, logical and inevitable, developed by the character of the man in the circumstances which befell him. Like all the men of his day, he was in love with love. Without the profound spiritual energy of Dante, but with a physical vitality greater far than Petrarch's, Boccaccio was inevitably in youth at the mercy of the lust of the eye, following woman because she was beautiful and because he desired her with all the fresh energy of his nature. He met Fiammetta and loved her. And then, though his desire abated no jot, there was added to it a certain idealism in which to some extent, sometimes greater, sometimes less, the spirit was involved to his joy and his sorrow. So, when Fiammetta forsook him, she wounded him not only in his pride, but in his soul, a wound that might never altogether be healed. That at least might seem certain, for had he loved her only as he had loved the others, to forget her would have been easy; but he could not forget.

Well, this wound, as we might say, grew angry and festered, poisoning his whole being with its bitterness. Thus in the years which follow his betrayal by Fiammetta we see him regarding woman now with a furious bitterness and anger, as in the subtle cruelty of the Fiammetta, now merely sensually as the instrument and means of the pleasure of man—a flower to be plucked in the garden of life, worn a little and thrown away e'er one grow weary of it.

But this phase, mixed of too bitter and too sweet, unhealthy too and without the capacity of laughter, presently passed away before the essential virility and energy of his nature. In the fullness of his youth from thirty-three to forty, busy with important work, engaged in responsible missions, the friend of great men of action as well as of poets and scholars, almost all that bitterness and anger passes away from him, and instead he assumes the pose we see in the Decameron, to which all his knowledge of the world, his tolerance of life, his sense of humour, and in some sort his sanity, must have urged him. He has lost every illusion with regard to woman save that she is able to give him pleasure. He may "call himself free" from her, he says, and he shows her to us, well, as the realist sees her, as she appears, that is, to the bodily eye, and as we find her in the Decameron.

Let it be granted if you will that such an attitude as that of the poets of romantic love was ridiculous, and that like all illusion and untruth it entailed in some sort a denial of life and brought its own penalty. But was Boccaccio's attitude really, fundamentally any nearer the truth? And if not, must not it too be paid for? Assuredly. Life will not be denied. If woman be nothing but the flesh, however we may glorify her, she is but dust, and our mouth, eloquent with her praises, full of ashes. So it was with Boccaccio. All his early works, including the Decameron, had been written to please women. In the Corbaccio we see the reaction.

It seems that during the time he was writing the Decameron, towards his forty-first year, he found himself taken by a very beautiful woman, a widow, who pretended to encourage him, perhaps because of his fame, provoked his advances, allured him to write to her, and then laughing at this middle-aged and obese lover, gave his letters to her young lover, who scattered them about Florence.

Boccaccio had already been hurt, as we have seen, by the criticisms some had offered on his work.[441] This deception by the widow exasperated him, his love for women turned to loathing, and he now composed a sort of invective against them, which was called the Corbaccio, though whether he so named it himself remains unknown.[442]

The story is as follows: A lover finds himself lost in the forest of love, and is delivered by a spirit. The lover is Boccaccio, the spirit is the husband of the widow who has returned from hell, where his avarice and complaisance have brought him. In setting Boccaccio in the right way, the spirit of the husband reveals to him all the imperfections, artifices and defects, the hidden vices and weaknesses of his wife with the same brutality and grossness that Ovid had employed in his Amoris Remedia. "Had you seen her first thing in the morning with her night-cap on, squatting before the fire, coughing and spitting.... Ah, if I could tell you how many different ways she had of dealing with that golden hair of hers, you would be amazed. Why, she spent all her time treating it with herbs and washing it with the blood of all sorts of animals. The house was full of distillations, little furnaces, oil cups, retorts, and such litter. There wasn't an apothecary in Florence or a gardener in the environs who wasn't ordered to send her fluid silver or wild weeds...."

Such was Boccaccio's revenge. But he was not content with this fierce attack on the foolish woman who had deceived him; he involved the whole sex in his contempt and ridicule. "Women," he says, "have no other occupation but in making themselves appear beautiful and in winning admiration; ... all are inconstant and light, willing and unwilling in the same heart's beat, unless what they wish happens to minister to their incorrigible vices. They only come into their husband's house to upset everything, to spend his money, to quarrel day and night with the servants or with his brothers and relations and children. They make out that they are timid and fearful, so that if they are in a lofty place they complain of vertigo, if in a boat their delicate stomachs are upset, if we must journey by night they fear to meet ghosts, if the wind rattles the window or they hear a pebble fall they tremble with fright; while, as you know, if one tries to do anything, to go anywhere without warning them, they are utterly contrary. But God only knows how bold and how ready they are in things to their taste. There is no place so difficult, precipices among the mountains, the highest palace walls, or the darkest night, that will stop them. Their sole thought, their only object, there one ambition is to rob, to rule, and to deceive their husbands, and for this end they will stoop to anything."[443]

The Corbaccio, however, was not the only work in which his pessimism and hatred of woman showed itself. It is visible also in the Vita di Dante, which was written about this time or a little later than the Corbaccio,[444] perhaps in 1356-7. All goes well till we come to Dante's marriage, when there follows a magnificent piece of invective which, while it expresses admirably Boccaccio's mood and helps us to date the book, has little or nothing to do with Dante. Indeed, we seem to learn there, reading a little between the lines, more of Boccaccio himself than of the husband of Gemma Donati.