Matteo Bandello: Twelve Stories/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Matteo Bandello, who deserves to rank as the most important of the Italian novellieri, was born at Castelnuovo, in Tortona, Piedmont, towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was doubtless owing to the influence of his uncle, Vincenzio Bandello, General of the Dominicans, that he was led to choose the Church as a profession. While yet a boy, he visited Rome, where he joined the Order of the Predicatori, and in due course was sent to the famous convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie at Milan. His stay there, however, was brief, as he was soon called upon to accompany his uncle when in his official capacity he had to visit the various Dominican convents of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Travel thus brought the young monk into touch with the world, and so rare an opportunity, at this impressionable age, of studying men and manners was not wasted; indeed it may have served to shape his taste for letters. Much of Bandello's early manhood was passed at Mantua, where he became the tutor and devoted admirer of the accomplished, bewitching Lucrezia Gonzaga. In Scaliger he also found another distinguished friend, and was upon familiar terms with all the most cultured, scholarly gentlemen of the time; for he could count the illustrious families of Visconti, Gonzaga, Da Este, and Sforza as his patrons and friends. Statesmen, and not only men of letters, recognised his ability, and several princes and courtiers entrusted him with important negotiations of a political nature. During this time he had excellent opportunities to collect and arrange materials for his famous series of novels, the suggestion to compose these having been made to him by Ippolita Sforza-Bentivoglio—one of the first and most constant of his patrons.
But his literary work was grievously interrupted when, in 1525, the Spaniards routed the French and took possession of Milan. As a partisan of France, Bandello's father was condemned to exile, his goods being confiscated and his house destroyed. Matteo himself was obliged to escape, leaving all his papers and manuscripts behind. After various vicissitudes, he accepted the offer of Cesare Fregoso and his wife, Costanza Rangoni, to accompany them to France, since in Italy he could find no permanent home. Fregoso, at one time a distinguished Venetian general, had espoused the French cause, and possessed a beautiful château at Bassen, near Agen, in Aquitaine. Here with these friends Bandello remained, living, as he himself tells us, "tranquilly for the muses and for himself." Through the influence of friends, some of his manuscripts were eventually recovered from the Spaniards, and he now spent this period of leisure in revising and re-writing his stories with a view to their publication.
In 1541 Bandello lost his patron, for Fregoso, who had gone to Venice as ambassador of Francis I., was assassinated at Milan, by order of the Governor, the Marchese del Vasto. However, for this misfortune Matteo had a recompense when nine years later Henry II. made him Bishop of Agen, as an acknowledgment of his allegiance to France during the Italian wars. Bandello, nevertheless, exercised his Episcopal functions as little as possible, leaving the government of his diocese to a deputy, Giovanni Valerio, Bishop of Grasse, while enjoying to the full the pecuniary and social advantages of his new position. Being thoroughly worldly by nature, he preferred to remain to the last a citizen of the world, a literary courtier for whom the austere seclusion of the cloister had no charm.
The date of his death is uncertain. The first set of his novels, in three parts, appeared at Lucca in 1554. He had originally intended the renowned Aldus to bring them out, but the printer's death prevented this. In 1573 the fourth part of his novels was published, this time at Lyons, as the Lucca edition had caused no small outcry in Italy. This final instalment may have appeared after his death, which certainly did not occur until 1561, if not later. In this fourth part Bandello prints the tale of Simone Turchi, which his kinsfolk in Lucca had suppressed, when it was intended to include it in the 1554 edition. Indeed there is no doubt that many of the stories, all founded, as their author delights to inform us, upon actual facts, gave grievous offence to many Italian families of rank, who could read between the lines and identify the actors in many a romance of passion and treachery, bloodshed and revenge; and, but for the fact that he remained on alien soil and sheltered by the Church, the novelist's boldness might have been punished with tragic speed. The meagre details of his life leave us at least with the conviction that Bandello was a man of scholarly attainments. We know that he produced a version of the Hecuba of Euripides, that he made several translations from the Latin, and that he had amassed materials for the construction of an important Latin dictionary, which were among the manuscripts lost when the Spaniards sacked Milan. He also wrote love-sonnets and canti in ottava rima to his patroness, Lucrezia Gonzaga. But these counted only as interludes, as trifles by the way. It was by his novels that he determined to achieve a reputation, and with unfailing diligence and zeal he made them the serious business of his life.
The interest roused by the Decamerone and by Masuccio's tales may have encouraged Bandello to win success in the same field. The novella was the fashionable pastime of the moment, and Bandello sought to make his collection of tales remarkable for their vividness and force. Above all he desired to base them upon actual fact. "These novels of mine," he says, "are not fables but true histories." From Masuccio he doubtless took the idea of dedicating each tale to some illustrious friend, prefacing this by an elaborately-written prologue. These dedications have their value as showing the reasons which led to the writing of this or that story. But in the present short selection we have preferred to omit them, and let the tales speak for themselves.
Derived as it was from the French fabliau, at that epoch for Italians of all classes the novella possessed absorbing attraction. When Bandello came forward to contribute to the entertainment of his countrymen he brought them a set of tales surprisingly varied in detail and in interest, full of human nature, and touched with the reckless buoyant spirit of the time. Their appeal was immediate and extensive. By their spontaneous simplicity and vigour they reached a larger public than Boccaccio had been able to allure by his florid, more delicately finished work. But then the Tuscan intended his Decamerone to belong to literature; and to literature Bandello avowedly gave little heed. His main intention was to be popular and to amuse. Rhetoric and the graces of style he eschews, being only eager to get to his incidents and to marshal these in such a manner as to hold the reader's attention to the last. To point a moral was still less a part of his design; entertainment was all. Certainly, as a story-teller, as a cunning narrator who has absolutely mastered the mechanism of his craft, Bandello stands with the very first. If at times extravagant and verbose, he never disregards the architecture of the tale that he is narrating, but presents the incidents rapidly and with a picturesque vehemence that often lights imagination and not infrequently transports.
It has been said that he copied Boccaccio. His reverence for that writer's grace of form was indeed so deep that he took the pains to translate one of the Decamerone tales into Latin, while appropriating from this work many ornate expressions and melodious turns of phrase which had caught his fancy. But if somewhat clumsily he imitated Boccaccio's manner, the method of Bandello was essentially his own. He is far more direct. He relates his facts with greater brevity and speed, with a vigour and breadth of expression more impressive, more convincing in the main than a recital which depends upon the elaborate adjustment of words for its effect. The scholar may dislike his rugged, careless, impetuous Lombard style, but the student of manners, the humanist must admit that as a raconteur Bandello knew his business thoroughly, and that he performed it with quite conspicuous skill.
It is remarkable that, while all, or nearly all, his tales contain the germs of drama, being tragedies and comedies in brief, Bandello should himself have no dramatic sense. With something of the frank unconsciousness of a child he handles his vast materials dexterously, almost jocularly, yet with no clear perception of their deep tragic and spiritual significance. The tale for him is just a tale, to move, to divert one for the moment; a succession of merry, romantic, or grievous events, not the appalling picture of the warfare and the shipwreck of souls. He is at no pains to bring us into touch with his characters, to breathe upon the dry bones and make them live. A poet, a psychologist, even within the narrow space of a novella, would assuredly have done this. Bandello was neither. He could not give the touch that transfigures. He was merely a fluent, adroit tale-teller, with a power of graphic description that, were he among us to-day, would presently have made him the enfant gâté of the Fleet Street press. At this point he certainly touches our century. To use a slang phrase, just for its very expressiveness, he was so tremendously "up to date." Indeed, if journalism be to seize the topic of the hour and give it to the world in a fresh, attractive guise, then we may almost style Bandello a triumphant journalist of the Renascence, with a keen eye for gossip of all sorts, and an infallible instinct for the materials from which good "copy" may be spun.
An interesting sign of Bandello's effort to draw character may be found in the Don Diego story, where the stubborn Ginevra fills the whole canvas and controls the entire action of the tale, until her amazing obstinacy disappears at the sudden perception of her despondent lover's unswerving fidelity. But this is a solitary instance. In most of the stories the characters are shadowy, pulseless figures, without magnetism, without life.
In the treatment of purely romantic themes, such as the delightful story of Gerardo and Elena, which we unhesitatingly include in this selection, Bandello's power and ability are best displayed. As an enchanting series of pictures of old Venice, vivid and brilliant in colouring as any by Carpaccio, it exhibits all the novelist's excellences, while it has few or none of his faults. Another tale that deserves unstinted praise is the account of Cornelio and of his tragi-comic adventures in Milan. As a faithful study of contemporary life, we are bound to value it, apart from its absolute naturalness and humour, which bring it to the level of the best. At its side may be set the story of the hapless Veronese lovers, which the bright genius of Shakespeare was afterwards to make immortal.
Shakespeare probably found it in the garbled French version of Bandello's tales, published in 1559 by Boaistuau and his collaborator, De Belleforest, which had then a great vogue, and went through several successive editions. If these worthies may be said to have popularised Bandello, as translators they certainly proved themselves traitors, altering the stories, substituting climaxes and situations of their own invention, while showing a most sublime disregard for the author's text. In fact, their book was not a translation, but a somewhat pretentious paraphrase. From this, however, Shakespeare took the theme of his noble tragedy, missing, in common with his French guides, the supreme pathos of the lovers' death scene as given by Da Porto and by Bandello. Bandello makes Romeo drink the poison before he rouses Giulietta from her trance, and in 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 appealed to Boaistuau and De Belleforest. These preponderate; and we have sought to give striking examples of them in Violante and Simone Turchi. There are the suavely romantic tales represented here by Gerardo and Elena, Don Diego, and Romeo and Giulietta. There are love-tales brightened by occasional episodes of an amusing sort, such as Cornelio, Pandolfo, and the Judge of Lucca; and then of course we have the humorous stories at the expense of the clergy, of which the Avaricious Priest, Bigolino, and The Donkey and the Prior constitute fair samples. Finally there are the gross tales, which, for various reasons, we have preferred to ignore. For the humour of Bandello, the humour untouched by obscenity, we cannot find much praise. It is usually of such a blunt, crude sort, so wanting in subtlety, in suggestiveness. Strange indeed is it that the polished people of the Renascence, with their fine keen sense, should have been readily satisfied with such thin, feeble fun, and should never have tired of the eternal mockery of the eternal friar, nor of the ruthless baiting of the greedy bishop. Bandello assuredly gave them of such stuff good measure, pressed down indeed, and running over.
The charge of coarseness which, as a writer, Bandello cannot escape, needs happily in the present instance neither substantiation nor excuse, for of this we have provided no sample. But, in passing, we may note that gross stories were the fashion, and that a popular novel-monger was obliged to give the public that for which it always craved. To-day, we profess to be infinitely appalled by Bandello's obscenity, just as his contemporaries seemed horror-struck that a bishop, robed in ecclesiastical purple and in touch with courts, should deliberately seek to cover his Church with shame, by printing infamous tales about the priests. Yet in our virtuous disdain let us remember that, if Bandello sinned, it was solely in his desire to amuse. Tout pour soullas might well have served him for motto. Herein, again, he emphasises the force of our fin-de-siècle law, which, in the effort to entertain, permits us to shock or to scandalise society, but absolutely forbids us to be dull. To this rule our reverend prelate blandly conforms.
In conclusion, we must admit that Bandello's work is valuable to us as a specimen of the literature which found wide favour with all classes in Italy at the time of the Renascence. It reflects the whole of Italian society, and gives us surprisingly truthful, vivid pictures of its manners and its life. Nor by any one of his contemporaries has the sheer craft of story-telling been more convincingly shown than by the worldly, pleasure-loving, genial bishop to whom Leandro Alberti refers as virum in scribendo, floridum, clarum, nitidum, emunctum et accuratum. A flattering verdict, which, however, on the whole we need not reverse.
August, 1894.