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.

"Oh, ye blind souls," he writes there,[445] "oh ye clouded intellects, oh, ye vain purposes of so many mortals, how counter to your intentions in full many a thing are the results that follow;—and for the most part not without reason! What man would take another who felt excessive heat in the sweet air of Italy to the burning sands of Lybia to cool himself, or from the Isle of Cyprus to the eternal shades of the RhodopÆan mountains to find warmth? What physician would set about expelling acute fever by means of fire, or a chill in the marrow of the bones with ice or with snow? Of a surety not one; unless it be he who shall think to mitigate the tribulations of love by giving one a bride. They who look to accomplish this thing know not the nature of love, nor how it maketh every other passion feed its own. In vain are succours or counsels brought up against its might, if it have taken firm root in the heart of him who long hath loved. Even as in the beginning every feeblest resistance is of avail, so when it hath gathered head, even the stoutest are wont many times to turn to hurt. But returning to our matter, and conceding for the moment that there may (so far as that goes) be things which have the power to make men forget the pains of love, what hath he done who to draw out of one grievous thought hath plunged me into a thousand greater and more grievous? Verily naught else save by addition of that ill which he hath wrought me, to bring me into a longing for return into that from which he hath drawn me. And this we see come to pass to the most of those who in their blindness marry that they may escape from sorrows, or are induced to marry by others who would draw them hence; nor do they perceive that they have issued out of one tangle into a thousand, until the event brings experience, but without power to turn back howsoever they repent. His relatives and friends gave Dante a wife that his tears for Beatrice might have an end; but I know not whether for this (though the tears passed away, or rather perhaps had already passed) the amorous flame departed; yet I do not think it. But even granted that it were quenched, many fresh burdens, yet more grievous, might take its place. He had been wont, keeping vigil at his sacred studies, to discourse whensoever he would with emperors, with kings, with all other most exalted princes, to dispute with philosophers, to delight himself with most pleasing poets and giving heed to the anguish of others to mitigate his own.[446] Now he may be with these only so much as his new lady chooses; and what seasons it is her will shall be withdrawn from so illustrious companionship, he must bestow on female chatter, which, if he will not increase his woes, he must not only endure but must extol. He who was wont, when weary of the vulgar herd, to withdraw into some solitary place, and there consider in his speculations what spirit moveth the heaven, whence cometh life to the animals that are on earth, what are the causes of things; or to rehearse some rare invention, compose some poem which shall make him though dead yet live by fame amongst the folk that are to come; must now not only leave these sweet contemplations as often as the whim seizes his new lady, but must submit to company that ill sorts with such like things. He, who was wont to laugh, to weep, to sing, to sigh, at his will, as sweet or bitter emotions pierced him, now dares it not; for he must needs render an account to his lady, not only of greater affairs, but of every little sigh, explaining what started it, whence it came, and whither it tended; for she takes gladness as evidence of love for another, and sadness as hatred of herself.

"Oh weariness beyond conception of having to live and hold intercourse, and finally grow old and die with so suspicious an animal! I choose not to say aught of the new and most grievous cares which they who are not used to them must bear, and especially in our city; I mean how to provide for clothes, ornaments, and rooms crammed with superfluities that women make themselves believe are a support to an elegant existence; how to provide for man and maid servants, nurses and chambermaids ... I speak not of these ... but rather come to certain things from which there is no escape.

"Who doubts that judgment will be passed by the general whether his wife be fair or no? And if she be reputed fair, who doubts but she will straightway have a crowd of lovers who will most pertinaciously besiege her unstable mind, one with his good works and one with his noble birth and one with marvellous flattery and one with gifts and one with pleasant ways? And that which many desire shall scarce be defended against every one; and women's chastity need only once be overtaken to make them infamous and their husbands miserable in perpetuity. But if, by misfortune of him who brings her home, she be foul to look upon—well, it is plain to see that even of the fairest women men often and quickly grow weary, and what are we then to think of the others, save that not only they themselves, but every place which they are like to be found of them who must have them for ever with them, will be detested? And hence springs up their wrath; nor is there any wild beast more cruel than an angry woman—no, nor so much. Nor may any man live in safety of his life who hath committed him to any woman who thinketh she hath good cause to be in wrath against him. And they all think it.

"What shall I say of their ways? Would I show how greatly they all run counter to the peace and repose of men, I must draw out my discourse to an all too long harangue; and therefore let me be content to speak of one common to almost all. They imagine that any sorriest menial can keep his place in the house by behaving well, but will be cast out for the contrary. Wherefore they hold that if they themselves behave well theirs is no better than a servile lot; for they only feel that they are ladies when they do ill, but come not to the evil end that servants would.

"Why should I go on pointing out that which all the world knows? I judge it better to hold my tongue, than by my speech to give offence to lovely woman. Who doth not know that trial is first made by him who should buy ere he take to himself any other thing save only his wife—lest she should displease him or ever he have her home? Whoso taketh her must needs have her not such as he would choose, but such as fortune yieldeth her to him. And if these things above be true (as he knoweth who hath tried) we may think what woes those chambers hide, which from outside to whoso hath not eyes whose keenness can pierce through walls, are reputed places of delight.

"Assuredly I do not affirm that these things chanced to Dante; for I do not know it: though true it is that (whether such like things or others were the cause) when once he had parted from her (who had been given him as a consolation in his sufferings!) never would he go where she was, nor suffered he her to come where he was, albeit he was the father of several children by her. But let not any suppose that from the things said above I would conclude that men ought not to take to themselves wives. Contrariwise, I much commend it; but not for every one. Let philosophers leave marrying to wealthy fools, to noblemen and peasants; and let them take their delight with philosophy, who is a far better bride than any other."

Such then was Boccaccio's mood, "his state of soul" in the years between 1354 and 1357. Well might Petrarch discern in him "a troubled spirit": "from many letters of yours," he writes from Milan on December 20, 1355, "I have extracted one thing, that you have a troubled spirit."