Boccaccio did all in his power to remove by word and example this barbarous indifference. He bought or copied with his own hand numerous valuable manuscripts, and an old writer remarks that if Boccaccio had been a professional copyist, the amount of his work might astonish us. His zealous endeavours for the revival of the all but forgotten Greek language in western Europe are well known. The most celebrated Italian scholars about the beginning of the 15th century were unable to read the Greek characters. Boccaccio deplored the ignorance of his age. He took lessons from Leone Pilato, a learned adventurer of the period, who had lived a long time in Thessaly and, although born in Calabria, pretended to be a Greek. By Boccaccio’s advice Leone Pilato was appointed professor of Greek language and literature in the university of Florence, a position which he held for several years, not without great and lasting benefit for the revival of classical learning. Boccaccio was justly proud of having been intimately connected with the foundation of the first chair of Greek in Italy. But he did not forget, in his admiration of classic literature, the great poets of his own country. He never tires in his praise of the sublime Dante, whose works he copied with his own hand. He conjures his friend Petrarch to study the great Florentine, and to defend himself against the charges of wilful ignorance and envy brought against him. A life of Dante, and the commentaries on the first sixteen cantos of the Inferno, bear witness to Boccaccio’s learning and enthusiasm.
In the chronological enumeration of our author’s writings we now come to his most important work, the Decameron, 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 “Father of Italian Prose” 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 “return to nature.” 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 naïveté 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 conversation of the lower classes are the subject of the story. At the same time, these descriptions of low life are so admirable, 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 Boccaccio 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 cinque-cento, 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 literature we again admire in Manzoni’s Promessi sposi.
A detailed analysis of a work so well known as the Decameron 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 calamities 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 medieval 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. Notwithstanding 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 contributions 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 German 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, among 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 particular, was devoured by the fashionable ladies and gentlemen 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
