Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

Whose fault was it? Perhaps there is not much need to ask. Fiammetta was incapable of any stability in love, and Giovanni could never help looking at "altre donne."[191] As we have seen, Fiammetta was surrounded by admirers who were not, be sure, more scrupulous than Boccaccio. So that his suspicions were aroused, and he must have found it difficult to obey her when she forbade him to follow her to Baia in 1338. Perhaps he had compromised her, and for that cause alone she had ceased to care for him—it would perhaps be after her nature; but however it may have been, it was no marvel that he was jealous, angry, and afraid.[192]

And his fears prophesied truly—he was betrayed. He did not know it when she first returned to Naples after the summer was gone. She took care of that,[193] but she gave him excuses instead of kisses, which only roused his angry jealousy the more. "Il geloso," she told him, "ha l' animo pieno d' infinite sollecitudini, alle quali nè speranza nè altro diletto può porgere conforto o alleviare la sua pena.... Egli vuole e s' ingegna di porre legge a' piedi e alle mani, e a ogni altro atto della sua donna,"[194] and so on and so forth. These hypocritical and eloquent commonplaces did not soothe him, but rather increased his anxiety. We must remember that though Giovanni would gad after other beauties, he loved Fiammetta then and always. It is not surprising, then, that his jealousy became a wild anger. "Nel cuore mi s' accese un' ira sì ferocissima, che quasi con lei non mi fece allora crucciare, ma pur mi ritenni."[195] Little by little suspicion grew to certainty; he guessed he was betrayed, he knew it, he suspected the very man, his supplanter, his friend; and he sees him, as it were in a dream, on the "montagne vicine a Pompeano," like a great mastiff who devours the hen pheasant at a mouthful.[196] What could he do, what could he say? "Let Thy name perish, Baia...."

After rage, humiliation. He tells himself that in spite of all he will love her always, more and more, yes, more than his own life or honour. He will persist, he will not be easily beaten, he will regain her. And yet it is all quite useless, as he knows.[198] Was it not in this hour that he wrote the following beautiful lines:—

But fate was not content, as he himself says,[200] with this single blow. Till now he had wanted for nothing; he had had a home of his own, and had been able to go to court when, and as, he would, and to enter fully into the life of the gay city. Now suddenly poverty stared him in the face. His father, from whom all that was stable and good in his life hitherto had proceeded, was ruined.[201] But even in his fall he remembered his son, and though Giovanni was now twenty-five years of age, he maintained him, at considerable inconvenience doubtless, from 1st November, 1338, to 1st November, 1339, by buying for him the produce of a podere near Capua, "i beni della chiesa di S. Lorenzo dell' Arcivescovato di Capua," which cost him twenty-six florins.[202] Della Torre thinks that the wretched youth was compelled to visit the place (possibly this was his fateful journey) and to deal with a fattore di campagna and the wily contadini of whom Alberti has so much to tell us a century later. With them he would have to take account of the grain, the grapes, the olives, the swine, and so forth, while trying to write romances and to save his love from utter disaster.

As though the ills he suffered were not enough, it was at this time he lost a friend and protector from whom he expected very much. Niccolò Acciaiuoli, whom he had known since 1331, left Naples on 10th October, 1338, and two years later Boccaccio writes to him on his return from the Morea: "Nicola, if any trust can be placed in the miserable, I swear to you by my suffering soul that the departure of Trojan Æneas was not a deeper sorrow to the Carthaginian Dido than was yours to me: not without reason, though you knew it not: nor did Penelope long for the return of Ulysses more than I longed for yours."[203]

And then all his companions forsook him owing to his change of fortune; one by one they fell away. He who had consorted with nobles and loved a king's daughter was left alone; not in his own dwelling, but outside the city now, "sub Monte Falerno apud busta Maronis," as he dates his letters: close then to the tomb of Virgil. Was it now, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, in all this tempest of ill, that he turned to the verse of the Mantuan who has healed so many wounds that the Church may not touch; and so, dreaming beside his sepulchre at Posilippo, remembering the wasted life, the irrecoverable years, made that vow which posterity has so well remembered, sworn as it was on Virgil's grave, to give himself to letters, to follow his art for ever?

Henceforth his life belongs to literature. "Every cloud," says the proverb, "has a silver lining," and the miseries of youth, though not the least bitter, differ, in this at least, from those of old age, that one has time to profit by them. So it was with Giovanni. The tempest which had destroyed so much that he valued most highly was in some sort his salvation. To love is good, they had told him, to write verses even better; but to ruin oneself for love——! What madness! Yet it was just that he had done, and like many others who have practised his art, he found in ruin the highway of the world.

Driven by poverty outside the city, deprived alike of its pleasures and the excitement and distractions of his love, he had nothing left but his art, and for the first time in his life he seems to have set himself to study and to practise it with all his might. Deserted by his companions, he reminded himself that he was a poet and that solitude was his friend. He seems to have read much, studying in the shadow of Virgil's tomb the works of that poet[204] and the writings of the ever-delightful Apuleius, while in the letter to Calmeta we find—and this is most interesting in regard to his own work—that he was already reading the Thebais of Statius.[205] Helpers, too, of a sort he had, among them Dionigi Roberti da Borgo Sansepolcro,[206] who, as Della Torre thinks, made him write to Petrarch, a thing Boccaccio no doubt had long wished, but hesitated, to do. The first extant communication between them, however, dates from 1349.

In the midst of this resurrection of energy in which, as we learn, he had already grown calm enough to see Fiammetta afar off without flinching and even with a sort of pleasure, his father, widowed by the death of Margherita, "full of years, deprived by death of his children," summoned him home.[207] When did Boccaccio obey this summons? That he was in Naples in 1340 is proved by the letter "Sacro famis et angelice viro," dated "sub Monte Falerno apud busta Maronis Virgilii, Julii Kal IIII.," i.e. 28th June, and, as the contents show, of the year 1340.[208] He was still there in October, for on 1st November the renewal of the contract of the podere of S. Lorenzo fell due, but by 11th January, 1341, we know him to have been in Florence.[209] He left Naples, then, between 1st November, 1340, and 11th January, 1341,[210] and as the journey took eleven days or so he must have set out in the end of the year. By so doing, as it happened, he just missed seeing Petrarch, who, invited to his court by King Robert, left Avignon on 16th February, 1341, in the company of Azzo da Correggio, to reach Naples in March.[211]

So Giovanni came back into the delicate and strong Florentine country, along the bad roads, through the short days, the whole world lost in wind and rain, neither glad nor sorry, but thoughtful, and, yes, homesick after all for that ghost in his heart.

CHAPTER V

BOCCACCIO'S EARLY WORKS—THE FILOCOLO—THE FILOSTRATO—THE TESEIDE—THE AMETO—THE FIAMMETTA—THE NINFALE FIESOLANO

I have written at some length and in some detail of the early years of Boccaccio and of the circumstances attending his love for Fiammetta, because they decided the rest of his life, and are in many ways by far the most important in his whole career. But the ten years which follow his return to Florence are even more uncertain and obscure that those which preceded them, while we are without any of those semi-biographical allegories to help us. It will be necessary, therefore, to deal with these years less personally, and to regard them more strictly from the point of view of the work they produced. And to begin with, let us consider the work already begun before Boccaccio left Naples, or at any rate worked on during the years 1341-4, which were spent in and around Florence.

That his life was far from happy on his return from Naples we know not only from the bitter and cruel verses he has left us, in which he speaks of his home—

but also from the letters he sent to Niccolò Acciaiuoli,[213] in which he says: "I can write nothing here where I am in Florence, for if I should, I must write not in ink, but in tears. My only hope is in you—you alone can change my unhappy fate." That he was very poor we may be certain, and though he was not compelled to work at business, the abomination of his youth, no doubt he had to listen to the regrets, and perhaps to the reproaches, of an old man whom misfortune had soured. His father, however, seems to have left him quite free to work as he wished, satisfying himself with his mere presence and company. And then the worst was soon over, for, by what means we know not, by December, 1342, he was able to buy a house in the parish of S. Ambrogio, and to live in his own way.[214]

This period, then, materially so unfortunate, not for Boccaccio alone, as we shall see, is nevertheless the most fruitful of his existence. For it is in the five years which follow his return from Naples that we may be sure he was at work on the Filocolo, the Ameto, the Teseide, the Amorosa Visione, the Filostrato, and wrote the Fiammetta and the Ninfale Fiesolano, and somewhat in that sequence; though save with regard to the Filocolo perhaps, we have no notice or date or hint even of the order of their production, either from himself or any of his contemporaries.

It was at this time, too, that he perfected himself in the Latin tongue and read the classics, of which he shows he had a marvellously close if uncritical knowledge. His state of soul is visible in his work, which is so extraordinarily personal. A single thought seems to fill his mind: he had loved a princess, and had been loved in return; she had forsaken him, but she remained, in spite of everything, the lode-star of his life. He writes really of nothing else but this. Full of her he sets himself to glorify her, and to tell over and over again his own story.

It was the story of Florio and Biancofiore, popular enough in Naples, that had charmed Fiammetta at first hearing in the convent parlour at S. Arcangelo a Baiano, and it is round this tale that the Filocolo is written.[215] As he tells us himself in the first page, this was the first book he made to please her, and it was therefore probably begun in the summer of 1331.[216] The work thus undertaken seems to have grown on his hands, and can indeed have been no light task: it is the longest of his works after the Decameron, and the weakest of all. The book, indeed, as we now have it, must have demanded years of labour; as he himself exclaims: "O piccolo mio libretto a me più anni stato graziosa fatica";[217] and it is certain that it was still unfinished when he returned to Florence, and probable that it remained so for some years. The narrative is complicated, and the relation very long drawn out and even tiresome.

There live in Rome, we learn, Quinto Lelio Africano and Giulia Tropazia his wife, who have been married for five years, and yet, to their sorrow, have no children. Lelio is descended from the conqueror of Carthage, Scipio Africanus, and Giulia from the Julian stock. They are both pious Christians and vow a pilgrimage to S. James of Compostella if, in answer to the prayers of that saint, God will vouchsafe them a child. Their prayers are heard, and with a great company they set out on pilgrimage to Spain in fulfilment of their vow.

Now this pilgrimage has especially infuriated the ancient enemy of mankind, here half Satan, half Pluto, and he is resolved to hinder it. In the form of a knight he appears before King Felice of Spain, who is descended in direct line from Atlas, the bearer of the heavens, and tells him how his faithful city of Marmorina has been assailed by the Romans, how it was sacked and its inhabitants put to the sword without mercy.

Much moved to anger by this tale, King Felice sets out against the Romans, and meeting Lelio with his people on pilgrimage, takes them for his enemies and attacks them. The little Roman company defends itself with the courage of despair, but ends by succumbing to overwhelming force. All the Romans are killed on the field and their women made prisoners; but not before the King understands how maliciously he has been deceived by the devil, and how the folk he has killed were but innocent pilgrims. So he leads Giulia and Glorizia her friend to his wife in Seville, where a great fête is given in his honour.

And as it happens Giulia and the Queen give birth in the same day to a daughter and a son respectively, who are given the names of Biancofiore and Florio. Giulia, however, dies in child-bed, and her daughter Biancofiore is educated by the Queen with her son Florio. The two children learn to read in the "santo libro d' Ovidio," in which Boccaccio tells us the poet shows, "come i santi fuochi di Venere si deano ne' freddi cuori con sollecitudine accendere." And this reading is not without its effect; the two children fall in love, Love himself appearing to them.

There follows what we might expect. The King is angered at their love, and refuses to permit the union of his son with an unknown Roman girl. He sends the fifteen-year-old Florio to Montorio, ostensibly to study philosophy, but really to forget Biancofiore. After the parting, charmingly told, in which Florio calls on the gods and heroes, and Biancofiore gives him a ring which will always tell him of her safety, he departs. The King, however, profiting by his absence, plots against Biancofiore with the assistance of Massamutino the seneschal. At a sumptuous banquet given in the castle the girl is accused of having tried to poison him. She is condemned to the stake, and Massamutino is to execute the sentence.

Meanwhile Florio has been disquieted by the sudden tarnishing of the ring. Suddenly Venus appears to him, and bids him go to the assistance of his mistress. Armed with arms terrestrial and celestial, accompanied by Mars, Florio hastens to Marmorina. He frees Biancofiore, and in a sort of duel conquers the seneschal, and having obtained from him a confession of the conspiracy, proves the innocence of Biancofiore and kills him. During all this he is incognito. Then, without heeding her prayers, he gives her once more into the care of the King and returns to Montorio without declaring who he is. There he is tempted to be false to his love by two girls who offer him every sort of love and pleasure, and it is only with difficulty he keeps his faith. He is then assaulted by jealousy, however, for he knows that a young knight, Fileno by name, altogether noble and valorous, is fallen in love with Biancofiore. Florio resolves to kill him, but the youth is advised in a dream of his danger and flies into Tuscany, where, by reason of his continual weeping, he is changed into a fountain near a temple.

The persecutions of Biancofiore, however, are not over. King Felice, wishing to be rid of her, sells her one day to some merchants, and these take her at length to Alexandria in Egypt. Florio, returning, is told she is dead; he tries to kill himself on her pretended tomb, but his mother prevents him and tells him the truth. He resolves to set out through the world in search of his love. Here the first part of the story may be said to end.

The second part is concerned with Florio's adventures. He travels unknown under the name of Filocolo,[218] that is to say Fatica d' Amore. With his companions he voyages first towards Italy, and, blown by a tempest to Partenope (Naples), meets there in a garden the beautiful Fiammetta and her lover Galeone amid a joyful and numerous company, each member of which recounts an amorous adventure, and closes the narrative with a demand for the solution of the Questione d' Amore which arises out of it.

Meanwhile Biancofiore has been sold to the admiral of the Sultan of Babylon in Alexandria, who makes a collection of beauties for his lord. This treasure is kept well guarded, but with every consideration, at the top of a lofty and beautiful tower by Sadoc, a ferocious old Arab, who, however, has two weaknesses—his love of money and his love of chess. Florio allows him to win at a game of chess, and at the same time bribes him generously. Having thus won his good will he has himself carried to Biancofiore in a great basket of flowers. She rewards him for all his labour. The admiral, however, learns of this, and, furious at the spoliation of his property, condemns both Florio and his mistress to be burned alive. But when they are at the stake, Venus makes their bodies invulnerable, and inspires Florio's companions to heroic deeds. In admiration of their courage, the admiral is reconciled with them; and, in fact, when Florio, Filocolo till now, declares who he is, he finds that the old admiral is his uncle. Then follows the marriage and the marriage feast.

Here the book might well have ended; but Boccaccio has by no means finished.

On the way back to Spain, Florio, Biancofiore and their companions pass through Italy. In Naples they find Galeone abandoned by Fiammetta. They visit the places round about, the baths of Baia, the ancient sepulchre of Misenum,[219] Cuma, the Mare Morto and Pozzuoli. Florio fishes in the bay and hunts in the woods. One day following a stag, he shoots an arrow that not only wounds the animal, but also strikes the root of a tall pine, and, wonderful to relate, Florio and Biancofiore see blood spring from the wounded tree and hear a mournful voice cry out in pain. This being, changed into a tree, proves to be Idalagos, who, questioned by Florio, tells him all his history, the history, as we have seen,[220] of Boccaccio himself, for it is his own story he tells in the name of Idalagos.

After these adventures Florio, with Biancofiore and his companions, goes on to Rome, where, like a modern tourist, he visits all the sights. In the Lateran he meets the monk Ilario, who discourses on religion, dealing severely with paganism, and recounting briefly the contents of the Old and New Testaments. He speaks also of the history of the Greeks and Romans, and at last converts Florio and his companions to Christianity.[221] Then follows the reconciliation with Biancofiore's relations and the return to Spain, where, Felice being dead, Florio inherits his kingdom, and with Biancofiore lives happily ever after.

Such, in the most meagre outline, is the main story of the Filocolo; but Boccaccio is not really concerned with it in its integrity, and in the construction of it he does not show himself to be the future composer of the Decameron. He collects in haste, and without much discernment, all sorts of episodes and adventures, and tells them, not without some confusion, solely to serve his own ends, to express himself and his love. Sometimes he copies the French poems from which in part he had the story,[222] though probably his real sources were tradition; sometimes he invents his own story, as in the tale of Idalagos. But as a work of art the Filocolo is now intolerable, and is, in fact, even in Italy, quite unread. For when we have followed the hero in detail from birth to the unspeakable happiness which is the finality of all such creations, we know nothing of his character. He is not a man, but a shadow; the ghost of a ghost. And as it is with Florio, so it is with Biancofiore: they are pure nothing. But, as it seems, Boccaccio was too young and too eager to care about anything but flattering Fiammetta and telling her he loved her. The story, in so far as it is a story, is an imitation of the endless medieval tales told by word of mouth in the streets and piazzas up and down Italy. Yet now and again, even in this wearying and complicated desert of words, we may find hints of the author's attitude of mind towards the great things of the world, while once certainly we find a prophecy not only of a great artist, but of the Decameron itself.

In the course of the book Boccaccio makes all sorts of excursions into mythology, and towards the end into religion. If we examine these pages we find that for him the gods of Greece once reigning in Olympus are now devils and demons according to the transformation of the Middle Age. The monk who converts Florio and teaches him Christian doctrine speaks with the same faith of Saturn and the Trojan war, while Mars and Venus are never named without the epithet of Santi, and S. James of Compostella is "il Dio che viene adorato in Galizia."

In spite, however, of its faults of prolixity and preciosity, the Filocolo has, as I have said, this much interest for us to-day, that in the finest episode, that of the Questioni d' Amore, it prophesies the Decameron. In the course of his search for Biancofiore, Florio, it will be remembered, comes to Naples, where in a beautiful garden he finds Fiammetta and her lover Galeone. There, amid a joyful company, he assists at a festa given in his honour, where thirteen questions are proposed by four ladies—Cara, Pola, and Graziosa, and one dressed in bruni vestimenti; and nine gentlemen—Filocolo, Longanio, Menedon, Clonico, Galeone, Feramonte, Duke of Montorio, Ascalione, Parmenione, and Massalino.[223] It is Fiammetta's task to resolve these questions. Neither the tales nor the questions which rise out of them are entirely new. For instance, Galeone asks: "Whether a man for his own good ought to fall in love or no?" Feramonte demands: "Whether a young man should love a married woman, a maiden, or a widow?" It is not indeed so much in the questions as in the stories and the assembly we are interested, for they announce the Decameron, the whole of which, as Bartoli[224] says, is contained in the Questioni d' Amore.[225]

The first edition of the Filocolo was published in Venice in 1472 by Gabriele di Piero, with a life of Boccaccio written by Girolamo Squarciafico. A French translation appeared in 1542 by Adrien Sevin. It was translated again in 1554 by I. Vincent (Paris, 1554, Michel Fezandat).

The Filocolo was written in prose. In his next venture[226] Boccaccio, who had no doubt already written many songs for Fiammetta, attempted a story in verse. It is written in ottave, and was begun during the earlier and brighter period of his love.[227] "You are gone suddenly to Samnium," he writes in the dedication to Fiammetta, "and ... I have sought in the old histories what personage I might choose as messenger of my secret and unhappy love, and I have found Troilus son of Priam, who loved Criseyde. His miseries are my history. I have sung them in light rhymes and in my own Tuscan, and so when you read the lamentations of Troilus and his sorrow at the departure of his love, you shall know my tears, my sighs, my agonies, and if I vaunt the beauties and the charms of Criseyde you will know that I dream of yours." Well, the intention of the poem is just that. It is an expression of his love. He is tremendously interested in what he has suffered; he wishes her to know of it, he is eager to tell of his experiences, his pains and joys. The picture is the merest excuse, a means of self-expression. And yet in its exquisite beauty of sentiment and verse it is one of the loveliest of his works. The following is an outline of the narrative.

During the siege of Troy, Calchas, priest of Apollo, deserts to the Greek camp,[228] and leaves his daughter Criseyde, the young and beautiful widow, in Troy.[229] Troilus sees her there in the temple of Minerva,[230] and falls in love. By good luck he finds that Criseyde is a cousin of his dear friend Pandarus, whom he immediately makes his confidant,[231] obtaining from him the promise that he will help him.[232] Pandarus goes slowly and cautiously to work. He first persuades Criseyde to let herself be seen by Troilus,[233] and when this does not satisfy his friend he shows himself rich in resource. At his suggestion Troilus writes to Criseyde and he bears the letter. He spares no way of persuading her, who at first swearing "per la mia salute" that she will never consent, consents and makes Troilus happy.[234]

Almost all the third Canto is devoted to a description of the happiness of the two lovers.

But the happiness of the Trojan prince does not last. Calchas, who desires to see his daughter, contrives that she shall come to him in an exchange of prisoners. Inexpressible is the sorrow of Troilus when he learns of this design.[236] He prays the gods, if they wish to punish him, to take from him his brother Hector or Polissena, but to leave him his Criseyde.[237] Nor is Criseyde less affected.[238] Pandarus, when appealed to, suggests that Troilus shall take the girl, if need be, by force: a marriage seems to have been out of the question.

In fact, Cassandra has already discovered that her brother is in love with a lady of no birth, the daughter of a wretched and vulgar priest. So Troilus decides to have a last meeting with Criseyde before she goes, to contrive with her what is to be done. At this meeting the lovers swear eternal fidelity[240] and Criseyde promises to return to him in Troy in ten days' time. Then in that same day Diomede delivers one prisoner and takes Criseyde back with him to the Greek camp.

Now Troilus is alone with his sorrow. He visits all the places that remind him of Criseyde, and this pilgrimage is described in some of the most splendid verses of the poem:—[241]

So he passes the time. In vain Pandarus seeks to distract him;[242] in vain he seeks to comfort himself with making verses; the longing to see Criseyde again is stronger than anything else.

At last the ten days pass, and Criseyde ought to return to Troy. Troilus awaits her at dawn at the gate of the city; but in vain: she does not come. He consoles himself, however, by thinking that perhaps she has forgotten to count the days and will come to-morrow. But neither does she come on the morrow. Thus he awaits her for a whole week in vain at the gate of the city, till at last in despair he resolves to take his own life.[243]

Meanwhile Criseyde, from the day of her departure, has passed the time much better than Troilus. For in truth she has consoled herself with Diomede, who, after the first four days, has easily made her forget the Trojan. She does not wish, however, that Troilus should know she has broken faith. She answers his letters and puts him off with words and excuses.

This sort of deception, however, cannot last long. Troilus grows more and more suspicious, till one day Deiphebus having fought with Diomede, he brings into Troy a clasp taken from the Greek which Troilus recognises as the same he had given to Criseyde, and is persuaded of her falsity.[245] So he resolves to avenge himself on Diomede. In every encounter he rushes headlong on the foe, achieving miracles of valour, seeking everywhere for Diomede; but fate is against him even here, and he falls at last unavenged, but at least by the noble hand of Achilles.[246]

Thus ends this simple work. In it we see an extraordinary advance on the Filocolo and the Teseide, both of which were possibly planned and begun before the Filostrato and finished later, for there is a fine unity about the last which suggests that it was begun and ended without intervention. Certainly here Boccaccio has freed himself from all the mythological nonsense of those works as well as from the lay figures and ghosts of knights who take antique names and follow impossible ways. Here are real people of flesh and blood, and among them nothing is finer than the study of Criseyde. She is as living as any figure in the Decameron itself. We see her first as a widow mourning for a husband she has altogether forgotten; yet when Pandarus makes his first overtures, she pleads her bereavement, while she reads with delight the letters Troilus sends her, and is already contriving in her little head how and when she shall meet him. She tries to make Pandarus think she is doing everything out of pity, but in her mind she has already decided to give everything to her lover, although she writes him that she is "desirous to please him so far as she may with safety to her honour and chastity." Then, as soon as she has left Troy weeping, and Diomede has revealed his love to her, she forgets Troilus because the Greek "was tall and strong and beautiful":—