Boccaccio's Legacy—Social Conditions of Literature in Italy—Importance of the Novella—Definition of the Novella—Method of the Novelists—Their Style—Materials used—Large Numbers of Novelle in Print—Lombard and Tuscan Species—Introductions to Il Lasca's Cene, Parabosco's Diporti—Bandello's Dedications—Life of Bandello—His Moral Attitude—Bandello as an Artist—Comparison of Bandello and Fletcher—The Tale of Gerardo and Elena—Romeo and Juliet—The Tale of Nicuola—The Countess of Salisbury—Bandello's Apology for his Morals and his Style—Il Lasca—Mixture of Cruelty and Lust—Extravagant Situations—Treatment of the Parisina Motive—The Florentine Burla—Apology for Il Lasca's Repulsiveness—Firenzuola—His Life—His Satires on the Clergy—His Dialogue on Beauty—Novelettes and Poems—Doni's Career—His Bizarre Humor—Bohemian Life at Venice—The Pellegrini—His Novelle—Miscellaneous Works—The Marmi—The Novelists of Siena—Their specific Character—Sermini—Fortini—Bargagli's Description of the Siege of Siena—Illicini's Novel of Angelica—The Proverbi of Cornazano—The Notti Piacevoli of Straparola—The Novel of Belphegor—Straparola and Machiavelli—Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi—Description of the Sack of Rome—Plan of the Collection—The Legend of the Borgias—Comparison of Italian Novels and English Plays.
Of Boccaccio's legacy the most considerable portion, and the one that bore the richest fruit, was the Decameron. During the sixteenth century the Novella, as he shaped it, continued to be a popular and widely practiced form of literature. In Italy the keynote of the Renaissance was struck by the Novella, as in England by the Drama. Nor is this predominance of what must be reckoned a subordinate branch of fiction, altogether singular; for the Novella was in a special sense adapted to the public which during the Age of the Despots grew up in Italy. Since the fourteenth century the conditions of social life had undergone a thorough revolution. Under the influence of dynastic rulers stationed in great cities, merchants and manufacturers were confounded with the old nobility; and in commonwealths like Florence the bourgeoisie gave their tone to society. At the same time the community thus formed was separated from the people by the bar of humanistic culture. Literature felt this social transformation. Its products were shaped to suit the taste of the middle classes, and at the same time to amuse the leisure of the aristocracy. The Novella was the natural outcome of these circumstances. Its qualities and its defects alike betray the ascendency of the bourgeois element.
When a whole nation is addressed in drama or epic, it is necessary for the poet to strike a lofty and noble note. He appeals to collective humanity, and there is no room for aught that savors of the trivial and base. Homer and Sophocles, Dante and Shakspere, owed their grandeur in no slight measure to the audience for whom they labored. The case is altered when a nation comes to be divided into orders, each of which has its own peculiar virtues and its own besetting sins. Limitations are of necessity introduced and deflections from the canon of universality are welcomed. If the poet, for example, writes for the lowest classes of society, he can afford to be coarse, but he must be natural. An aristocracy, taken by itself, is apt, on the contrary, to demand from literature the refinements of fashionable vice and the subtleties of artificial sentiment. Under such influence we obtain the Arthurian legends of the later middle ages, which contrast unfavorably, in all points of simplicity and directness, with the earlier Niebelungen and Carolingian Cycles. The middle classes, for their part, delight in pictures of daily life, presented with realism, and flavored with satire that touches on the points of their experience. Literature produced to please the bourgeois, must be sensible and positive; and its success will greatly depend upon the piquancy of its appeal to ordinary unidealized appetites. The Italians lacked such means of addressing the aggregated masses of the nation as the panhellenic festivals of Greece afforded. The public, which gave its scale of grandeur and sincerity to the Attic and Elizabethan drama, was wanting. The literature of the cinque cento, though it owed much to the justice of perception and simple taste of the true people, was composed for the most part by men of middle rank for the amusement of citizens and nobles. It partook of those qualities which characterise the upper and middle classes. It was deficient in the breadth, the magnitude, the purity, which an audience composed of the whole nation can alone communicate. We find it cynical, satirical, ingenious in sly appeals to appetite, and oftentimes superfluously naughty. Above all it was emphatically the literature of a society confined to cities.
It may be difficult to decide what special quality of the Italian temperament was satisfied with the Novella. Yet the fact remains that this species of composition largely governed their production, not only in the field of narrative, but also in the associated region of poetry and in the plastic arts. So powerful was the attraction it possessed, that even the legends of the saints assumed this character. A notable portion of the Sacre Rappresentazioni were dramatized Novelle. The romantic poets interwove Novelle with their main theme, and the charm of the Orlando Furioso is due in no small measure to such episodes. Popular poems of the type represented by Ginevra degli Almieri were versified Novelle. Celebrated trials, like that of the Countess of Cellant, Vittoria Accoramboni, or the Cenci, were offered to the people in the form of Novelle. The humanists—Pontano, Poggio, Æneas Sylvius—wrote Novelle in Latin. The best serial pictures of the secondary painters—whether we select Benozzo Gozzoli's legend of S. Augustine at San Gemignano, or Carpaccio's legend of S. Ursula at Venice, or Sodoma's legend of S. Benedict at Monte Oliveto, or Lippo Lippi's legend of S. John at Prato—are executed in the spirit of the novelists. They are Novelle painted in their salient incidents for the laity to study on the walls of church and oratory.
The term Novella requires definition, lest the thing in question should be confounded with our modern novel. Although they bear the same name, these species have less in common than might be supposed. Both, indeed, are narratives; but while the novel is a history extending over a considerable space of time, embracing a complicated tissue of events, and necessitating a study of character, the Novella is invariably brief and sketchy. It does not aim at presenting a detailed picture of human life within certain artistically chosen limitations, but confines itself to a striking situation, or tells an anecdote illustrative of some moral quality. This is shown by the headings of the sections into which Italian Novellieri divided their collections. We read such rubrics as the following: "On the magnanimity of princes"; "Concerning those who have been fortunate in love"; "Of sudden changes from prosperity to evil fortune"; "The guiles of women practiced on their husbands." A theme is proposed, and the Novelle are intended to exemplify it. The Novelle were descended in a direct line from the anecdotes embedded in medieval Treasuries, Bestiaries, and similar collections. The novel, on the other hand, as Cervantes, Richardson, and Fielding formed it for the modern nations, is an expansion and prose digest of the drama. It implies the drama as a previous condition of its being, and flourishes among races gifted with the dramatic faculty.
Furthermore, the Novelle were composed for the amusement of mixed companies, who met together and passed their time in conversation. All the Novellieri pretend that their stories were originally recited and then written down, nor is there the least doubt that in a large majority of cases they were really read aloud or improvised upon occasions similar to those invented by their authors. These circumstances determined the length and ruled the mechanism of the Novella. It was impossible within the short space of a spoken tale to attempt any minute analysis of character, or to weave the meshes of a complicated plot. The narrator went straight to his object, which was to arrest the attention, stimulate the curiosity, gratify the sensual instincts, excite the laughter, or stir the tender emotions of his audience by some fantastic, extraordinary, voluptuous, comic, or pathetic incident. He sketched his personages with a few swift touches, set forth their circumstances with pungent brevity, and expended his force upon the painting of the central motive. Sometimes he contented himself with a bare narrative, leaving its details to the fancy. Many Novelle are the mere skeletons of stories, short notes, and epitomes of tales. At another time he indulged in descriptive passages of great verbal beauty, when it was his purpose to delight the ideal audience with pictures, or to arouse their sympathy for his characters in a situation of peculiar vividness. Or he introduced digressions upon moral themes suggested by the passion of the moment, discoursing with the easy flow of one who raises points of casuistry in a drawing-room. Again, he heightened the effects of his anecdote by elaborate rhetorical development of the main emotions, placing carefully-studied speeches into the mouth of heroine or hero, and using every artifice for appealing directly to the feelings of his hearers. Thus, while the several Novellieri pursue different methods at different times according to their purpose, their styles are all determined by the fact that recitation was essential to the species. All of them, moreover, have a common object in amusement. Though the Novellieri profess to teach morality by precept, and though some of them prefix prayers to their most impudent debauches of the fancy,[58] it is clear that entertainment was their one sole end in view. For their success they relied on the novelty and strangeness of their incidents; on obscenity, sometimes veiled beneath the innuendoes and suggestive metaphors of Italian convention, but more often unabashed and naked to the view; on startling horrors, acts of insane passion, or the ingenuities of diabolical cruelty. The humor of beffe and burle, jests played by rogues on simpletons, practical jokes, and the various devices whereby wives and lovers fooled confiding husbands, supplied abundant material for relieving the more tragic stories. Lastly, the wide realm of pathos, the spectacle of beauty in distress, young lovers overwhelmed by undeserved calamity, sudden reverses of fortune, and accidents of travel upon land and sea, provided the narrator with plentiful matter for working on the sympathy of his readers. Of moral purpose in any strict sense of the phrase the Novelle have none. This does not mean that they are invariably immoral; on the contrary, the theme of a considerable number is such that the tale can be agreeably told without violence to the most sensitive taste. But the novelist had no ethical intention; therefore he brought every motive into use that might amuse or stimulate, with business-like indifference. He felt no qualm of conscience at provoking the cruder animal instincts, at dragging the sanctities of domestic life in the mire of his buffoonery, or at playing on the appetite for monstrous vice, the thirst for abnormal sensations, in his audience. So long as he could excite attention, he was satisfied. We cannot but wonder at the customs of a society which derived its entertainment from these tales, when we know that noble ladies listened to them without blushing, and that bishops composed them as a graceful compliment to the daughter of a reigning duke.[59]
In style the Novelle are, as might be expected, very unequal. Everybody tried his hand at them: some wrote sparkling Tuscan, others a dense Lombard dialect; some were witty, others dull. Yet all affected to be following Boccaccio. His artificial periods and rhetorical amplifications, ill-managed by men of imperfect literary training, who could not free themselves from local jargons, produced an awkward mixture of discordant faults. Yet the public expected little from the novelist in diction. What they required was movement, stimulus, excitement of their passions. So long as the tale-maker kept curiosity awake, it was a matter of comparative indifference what sort of words he used. The Novella was a literary no-man's-land, where the critic exercised a feeble sway, and amateurs or artists did what each found suited to his powers. It held its ground under conditions similar to those which determined the supply of plays among us in the seventeenth century, or of magazine novels in this.
In their material the Novelle embraced the whole of Italian society, furnishing pictures of its life and manners from the palaces of princes to the cottages of contadini. Every class is represented—the man of books, the soldier, the parish priest, the cardinal, the counter-jumper, the confessor, the peasant, the duke, the merchant, the noble lady, the village maiden, the serving-man, the artisan, the actor, the beggar, the courtesan, the cut-throat, the astrologer, the lawyer, the physician, the midwife, the thief, the preacher, the nun, the pander, the fop, the witch, the saint, the galley-slave, the friar—they move before us in a motley multitude like the masquerade figures of carnival time, jostling each other in a whirl of merriment and passion, mixing together in the frank democracy of vice. Though these pictures of life are brightly colored and various beyond description, they are superficial. It is only the surface of existence that the Novelliere touches. He leaves its depths unanalyzed, except when he plunges a sinister glance into some horrible abyss of cruelty or lust, or, stirred by gentler feeling, paints an innocent unhappy youthful love. The student of contemporary Italian customs will glean abundant information from these pages; the student of human nature gathers little except reflections on the morals of sixteenth-century society. It was perhaps this prodigal superfluity of striking incident, in combination with poverty of intellectual content, which made the Novelle so precious to our playwrights. The tales of Cinthio and Bandello supplied them with the outlines of tragedies, leaving the poet free to exercise his analytic and imaginative powers upon the creation of character and the elaboration of motive. But that in spite of all their faults, the Novelle fascinate the fancy and stimulate the mental energies, will be admitted by all who have made them the subject of careful study.
To render an adequate account of the Novellieri and their works is very difficult.[60] The printing-press poured novels forth in every town in Italy, and authors of all districts vied with one another in their composition. At Florence Firenzuola penned stories with the golden fluency and dazzling wealth of phrase peculiar to him. Il Lasca's Cene rank among the most considerable literary products of the age. At Florence again, Machiavelli wrote Belphegor, and Scipione Bargagli printed his Trattenimenti. Gentile Sermini, Pietro Fortini and Giustiniano Nelli were the novelists of Siena; Masuccio and Antonio Mariconda, of Naples. At Rome the Modenese Francesco Maria Molza rivaled the purity of Tuscan in his Decamerone. But it was chiefly in the North of Italy that novelists abounded. Giraldi's hundred tales, entitled Hecatommithi, issued from Ferrara. They were heavy in style, and prosaic; yet their matter made them widely popular. Sabadino wrote his Porretane at Bologna, and Francesco Straparola of Caravaggio published his Tredici piacevoli Notti at Venice. There also appeared the Diporti of Girolamo Parabosco, the Sei Giornate of Sebastiano Erizzo, Celio Malespini's Ducento Novelle, and the Proverbi of Antonio Cornazano. Cademosto of Lodi, Monsignor Brevio of Venice, Ascanio de' Mori of Mantua, Luigi da Porto of Vicenza, and, last not least, the illustrious Matteo Bandello, proved how rich in this species of literature were the northern provinces. The Lombards displayed a special faculty for tales in which romance predominated. Venice, notorious for her pleasure-marts of luxury, became the emporium of publications which supplied her courtesans and rufflers with appropriate mental food. The Tuscans showed more comic humor, and, of course, a purer style. But in point of matter, intellectual and moral, there is not much to choose between the works of Florentine and Lombard authors.
Following the precedent of Boccaccio, it was usual for the Novellieri to invent a framework for their stories, making it appear that a polite society of men and women (called in Italy a lieta brigata) had by some chance accident been thrown upon their own resources in circumstances of piquant novelty. One of the party suggests that they should spend their time in telling tales, and a captain is chosen who sets the theme and determines the order of the story-tellers. These introductions are not unfrequently the most carefully written portion of the collection, and abound in charming sketches of Italian life. Thus Il Lasca at the opening of Le Cene feigns that a company of young men and women went in winter time to visit at a friend's house in Florence. It was snowing, and the youths amused themselves by a snow-ball match in the inner courtyard of the palace. The ladies watched them from a loggia, till it came into their heads to join the game. Snow was brought them from the roofs, and they began to pelt the young men from their balcony.[61] The fire was returned; and when the brigata had enough of this fun, they entered the house together, dried their clothes, and, sitting round a blazing hearth, formed a plan for telling stories at supper. Girolamo Parabosco places the scene of his Diporti on the Venetian lagoons. A party of gentlemen have left the city to live in huts of wood and straw upon the islands, with the intention of fowling and fishing. The weather proves too bad for sport, and they while away the hours of idleness with anecdotes. Bandello follows a different method, which had been suggested by Masuccio. He dedicates his Novelle to the distinguished people of his acquaintance, in prefaces not devoid of flattery, but highly interesting to a student of those times. Princes, poets, warriors, men of state, illustrious women, and humanists pass before us in these dedications, proving that polite society in Italy, the society of the learned and the noble, was a republic of wit and culture. Alessandro Bentivoglio and Ippolita Sforza, the leaders of fashion and Bandello's special patrons, take the first rank.[62] Then we have the Gonzaga family of Mantua, Lancinus Curtius, Aldus Manutius, Machiavelli, Molsa, Guicciardini, Castiglione, the Duchess of Urbino, Giovanni de' Medici, Julius CÆsar Scaliger, Bernardo Tasso, Prospero Colonna, Julius II., Porcellio, Pontano, Berni, the Milanese Visconti, the Neapolitan Sanseverini, the Adorni of Genoa, the Foscari of Venice, the Estensi of Ferrara. Either directly addressed in prefaces or mentioned with familiar allusion in the course of the narratives, these historic names remind us that the author lived at the center of civilization, and that his Novelle were intended for the entertainment of the great world. What Castiglione presents abstractedly and in theory as a critique of noble society, is set before us by Bandello in the concrete form of every-day occurrence. Nor does the author forget that he is speaking to this company. His words are framed to suit their prejudices; his allusions have reference to their sentiments and predilections. The whole work of art breathes the air of good manners and is tuned to a certain pitch-note of fashionable tone. We may be astounded that ladies and gentlemen of the highest birth and breeding could tolerate the licenses of language and suggestion furnished by Bandello for their delectation. We may draw conclusions as to their corruption and essential coarseness in the midst of refined living and external gallantries[63]. Yet the fact remains that these Novelle were a customary adjunct to the courtly pleasures of the sixteenth century; and it was only through the printing-press that they passed into the taverns and the brothels, where perhaps they found their fittest audience.
Matteo Bandello was a member of the petty Lombard nobility, born at Castelnuovo in Tortona. His uncle was General of the Dominicans, and this circumstance determined Matteo's career. After spending some years of his youth at Rome, he entered the order of the Predicatori in the Convent delle Grazie at Milan. He was not, however, destined to the seclusion of a convent; for he attended his uncle, in the character apparently of a companion or familiar secretary, when the General visited the chief Dominican establishments of Italy, Spain, France and Germany. A considerable portion of Bandello's manhood was passed at Mantua, where he became the tutor and the platonic lover of Lucrezia Gonzaga. Before the date 1525, when French and Spaniards contested the Duchy of Milan, he had already formed a collection of Novelle in manuscript—the fruits of all that he had heard and seen upon his frequent travels. These were dispersed when the Spaniards entered Milan and pillaged the house of the Bandello family.[64] Matteo, after numerous adventures as an exile, succeeded in recovering a portion of his papers, and retired with Cesare Fregoso to the Court of France. He now set himself seriously to the task of preparing his Novelle for the press; nor was this occupation interrupted by the duties of the see of Agen, conferred upon him in 1550 by Henry II. The new bishop allowed his colleague of Grasse to administer the see, drawing enough of its emoluments for his private needs, and attending till his death, about the year 1560, to study and composition.
Bandello's life was itself a novella. The scion of a noble house, early dedicated to the order of S. Dominic, but with the General of that order for his uncle, he enjoyed rare opportunities of studying men and manners in all parts of Europe. His good abilities and active mind enabled him to master the essentials of scholarship, and introduced him as tutor to one of the most fascinating learned women of his age. These privileges he put to use by carrying on a courtly flirtation with his interesting pupil, at the same time that he penned his celebrated novels. The disasters of the Milanese Duchy deprived him of his literary collections and probably injured his fortune. But he found advancement on a foreign soil, and died a bishop at the moment when Europe was ringing with the scandals of his too licentious tales. These tales furnished the Reformers with a weapon in their war against the Church; nor would it have been easy to devise one better to their purpose. Even now it moves astonishment to think that a monk should have written, and a bishop should have published, the facetiÆ with which Bandello's books are filled.
Bandello paints a society in dissolution, bound together by no monarchical or feudal principles, without patriotism, without piety, united by none of the common spiritual enthusiasms that make a people powerful. The word honor is on everybody's lips; but the thing is nowhere: and when the story-teller seeks to present its ideal image to his audience, he proves by the absurdity of his exaggeration that he has no clear conception of its meaning.[65] The virtues which inspired an earlier and less corrupt civility, have become occasions for insipid rhetoric. The vice that formerly stirred indignation, is now the subject of mirth. There is no satire, because there is no moral sense. Bandello's revelations of clerical and monastic immorality supplied the enemies of Rome with a full brief; but it is obvious that Bandello and his audience regarded the monstrous tale of profligacy with amusement. His frankness upon the very eve of the Council of Trent has something at once cynical and sinister. It makes us feel that the hypocrisy engendered by the German Reformation, the si non caste tamen caute of the new ecclesiastical rÉgime, was the last resort of a system so debased that vital regeneration had become impossible. This does not necessarily mean that the Italian Church had no worthy ministers in the sixteenth century. But when her dealing with the people ended in a humorous acceptance of such sin, we perceive that the rottenness had reached the core. To present the details of Bandello's clerical stories would be impossible in pages meant for modern readers. It is enough to say that he spares no rank or order of the Roman priesthood. The prelate, the parish curate, the abbot and the prioress, the monk and nun, are made the subject of impartial ribaldry.[66] The secrets of convents abandoned to debauchery are revealed with good-humored candor, as though the scandal was too common to need special comment.[67] Sometimes Bandello extracts comedy from the contrast between the hypocritical pretensions of his clerical ruffians and their lawless conduct, as in the story of the priest who for his own ends persuaded his parishioners that the village was haunted by a griffin.[68] Sometimes he succeeds in drawing a satirical portrait, like that of the Franciscan friar who domesticated himself as chaplain in the castle of a noble Norman family.[69] But the majority of these tales are simply obscene, with no point but a coarse picture or a shockingly painful climax.[70]
The same judgment may be passed upon a large portion of the Novelle which deal with secular characters. They are indecent anecdotes, and do not illustrate any specific quality in the author or in the temper of his times.[71] The seasoning of horror only serves to render their licentiousness more loathsome. As Bandello lacked the indignation of Masuccio, so he failed to touch Masuccio's tragic chord. When he attempted it, as in the ghastly story of Violante, who revenged herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to pieces with pincers, or in the disgusting novel of Pandora, or again in the tale of the husband who forced his wife to strangle her lover with her own hands, he only rouses physical repulsion.[72] He makes our flesh creep, and produces literature analogous to that of the Police Times. Nor does he succeed better with subjects that require the handling of a profound psychologist. His Rosmunda and Tarquin, his Faustina and Seleucus, leave an impression of failure through defect of imaginative force[73]; while the incestuous theme of one tale, treated as it is with frigid levity, can claim no justification on the score of dramatic handling or high-wrought spiritual agony.[74]
It was not in this region of tragic terror that Bandello's genius moved with freedom. In describing the luxury of Milan or the manners of the Venetian courtesans, in bringing before us scenes from the demi-monde of Rome or painting the life of a grisette, he shows acute knowledge of society, studied under its more superficial aspects, and produces pictures that are valuable for the antiquarian.[75] The same merit of freshness belongs to many minor anecdotes, like the romance of the girl who drowned herself in the Oglio to save her honor, or the pretty episode of Costantino Boccali who swam the Adige in winter at a thoughtless lady's behest.[76] Yet in Bandello's versions of contemporary histories which taxed the imaginative powers or demanded deeper insight into human passions, we miss the true dramatic ring. It was only when it fell into the hands of Webster, that his dull narrative of the Duchess of Amalfi revealed its capacities for artistic treatment.[77] Nor is the story of the Countess of Cellant, though full of striking details, so presented as to leave the impression of tragedy upon our minds.[78] We only feel what Webster, dealing with it as he dealt with Vittoria Corombona's crime, might have made out of this poor material.
It may be asked, if this is all, why any one should take the pains to read through the two hundred and fourteen Novelle of Bandello, and, having done so, should think it worth his while to write about them. Ought they not rather to be left among the things the world would willingly let die? The answer to this question is twofold. In the first place they fairly represent the whole class of novels which were produced so abundantly in Italy that the historian of Renaissance literature cannot pass them by in silence. Secondly, Bandello at his best is a great artist in the story-teller's craft. The conditions under which he displayed his powers to true advantage, require some definition. Once only did he successfully handle a really comic situation. That was in his tale of the monkey who dressed himself up in a dead woman's clothes, and frightened her family when they returned from the funeral, by mimicking her movement.[79] He was never truly tragic. But in the intermediate region between tragedy and comedy, where situations of romantic beauty offer themselves to the sympathetic imagination—in that realm of pathos and adventure, where pictures of eventful living can be painted, and the conflicts of tender emotion have to be described, Bandello proved himself a master. It would make the orthodox Italian critics shudder in their graves to hear that he had been compared to Ariosto. Yet a foreigner, gifted with obtuser sensibility to the refinements of Italian diction, may venture the remark that Bandello was a kind of prose Ariosto—in the same sense as Heywood seemed a prose Shakspere to Charles Lamb. Judged by the high standard of Athenian or Elizabethan art, neither Ariosto nor Bandello was a first-rate dramatist. But both commanded the material of which romantic tragedies can be constructed. Bandello's best Novelle abound in the situations which delighted our playwrights of the Jacobean age—in the thrilling incidents and scenes of high-wrought passion we are wont to deem the special property of Fletcher. He puts them before us with a force of realistic coloring, and develops them with a warmth of feeling, that leave no doubt of his artistic skill. Composition and style may fail him, but his sympathy with the poetic situation, and his power to express it are unmistakable. In support of this opinion I might point to his vigorous but repulsive presentation of Parisina's legend, where the gradual yielding of a sensitive young man to the seductions of a sensual woman, is painted with touches of terrible veracity.[80] Or the tale of the Venetian lovers might be chosen.[81] Gerardo and Elena were secretly married; but in his absence on a voyage, she was plighted by her father to another husband. Before the consummation of this second marriage, Elena fell through misery into a death-like trance, and was taken by her kindred to be buried at Castello on the shores of the lagoons. At the moment when the funeral procession was crossing the waters by the light of many torches, the ship of Gerardo cast anchor in the port of Venice, and the young man heard that his wife was dead. Attended by a single friend, he went under cover of the night to where she had been laid in a sarcophagus outside the church. This he opened, and, frantic between grief and joy, bore the corpse of his beloved to his boat. He kissed her lips, and laid himself beside her lifeless body, wildly refusing to listen to his friend's expostulations. Then while the gondola rocked on the waves of the lagoons and the sea-wind freshened before daybreak, Elena awoke. It is needless to add that the story ends in happiness. This brief sketch conveys no notion of the picturesque beauty of the incidents described, or of the intimate acquaintance with Venetian customs displayed in the Novella. To one who knows Venice, it is full of delicate suggestions, and the reader illuminates the margin with illustrations in the manner of Carpaccio.
There is a point of Romeo and Juliet in the tale of Gerardo and Elena. Bandello's own treatment of the Veronese romance deserves comparison with Shakspere's.[82] The evolution of the tragedy is nearly the same in all its leading incidents; for we hear of Romeo's earlier love, and the friar who dealt in simples is there, and so are the nurse and apothecary. Bandello has anticipated Shakspere even in Juliet's soliloquy before she drinks the potion, when the dreadful thought occurs to her that she may wake too soon, and find herself alone among the dry bones of her ancestors, with Tybalt festering in his shroud. But the prose version exhibits one motive which Shakspere missed. When Romeo opens the tomb, he rouses Juliet from her slumber, and in his joy forgets that he has drunk the poison. For a while the lovers are in paradise together in that region of the dead; and it is only when the chill of coming death assails him, that Romeo remembers what he has done. He dies, and Juliet stabs herself with his sword. Had Shakspere chosen to develop this catastrophe, instead of making Romeo perish before the waking of Juliet, he might have wrought the most pathetically tragic scene in poetry. Reading the climax in Bandello, where it is overpoweringly affecting, we feel what we have lost.
Another Novella which provokes comparison with our dramatic literature—with the Twelfth Night or with Fletcher's Philaster—is the tale of Nicuola.[83] She and her brother Paolo were twins, so like in height and form and feature that it was difficult even for friends to know them apart. They were living with their father at Rome, when the siege of 1527 dispersed the family. Paolo was taken prisoner by Spaniards, and Nicuola went to dwell at Jesi. The Novella goes on to relate how she fell in love with a nobleman of Jesi, and entering his service disguised as a page, was sent by him to woo the lady of his heart; and how this lady loved her in her page's dress. Then her brother, Paolo, returned, attired like her in white, and recognitions were made, and both couples, Paolo and the lady, Nicuola and the nobleman, were happily married in the end. It will be seen that these situations, involving confusions of identity and sex, unexpected discoveries, and cross-play of passions, offered opportunities for rhetorical and picturesque development in the style of a modern Euripides; nor did Bandello fail to utilize them.
Of a higher type is the Novella which narrates the love of Edward III. for the virtuous Alice of Salisbury.[84] Here the interest centers in four characters—the King, Alice, and her father and mother, the Earl and Countess of Salisbury. There is no action beyond the conflict of motives and emotions caused by Edward's passion, and its successive phases. But that conflict is so vigorously presented that attention never flags; and, though the tale is long, we are drawn without weariness by finely-modulated transitions to the point where a felicitous catastrophe is not only natural but necessary. What is at first a mere desire in Edward, passes through graduated moods of confident, despairing, soul-absorbing love. The ordinary artifices of a seducer are replaced by the powerful compulsion of a monarch, who strives to corrupt the daughter by working on her father's ambition and her mother's weakness. Thwarted by the girl's constancy at every turn, he sinks into love-melancholy, then rouses himself with the furious resolve to attempt force, and lastly, yielding to his nobler nature, offers his crown to Alice. These several moments in the King's passion are exhibited with a descriptive wealth and exuberance of resource that remind us forcibly of our own stage. The contrasts between the girl's invincible honor and her lover's ungovernable impulse, between her firmness and her mother's feebler nature, and again between the sovereign's overbearing willfulness and the Earl's stubborn but respectful resistance, suggest a series of high-wrought situations, which only need to be versified and divided into acts to make a drama. Fletcher himself might have proudly owned the scene in which Edward discovers his love to the Earl, begs him to plead with his daughter, and has to hear his reproaches, so courteously and yet unflinchingly expressed. What follows is equally dramatic. The Earl explains to Alice his own ideal of honor; still he fairly sets before her the King's lawless offer, and then receives the assurance of her unconquerable chastity. Her mother, moved to feebler issues by the same pressure, attempts to break her daughter's resolve, and at last extorts a reluctant consent by her own physical agony. Finally, the girl, when left alone with her royal lover, demands from him or death or honor, and wins her cause by the nobility of her carriage in this hour of trial. The whole Novella in its choice of motives, method of treatment, and ethical tone, challenges comparison with Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays. Nor is the style unlike theirs; for the situations are worked out in copious and colored language, hasty and diffuse, but charged and surcharged with the passion of the thing to be portrayed. Bandello, like Fletcher, strikes out images at every turn, enlarges in rhetorical digressions, and pours forth floods of voluble eloquence.[85] The morality, though romantic, is above his usual level; for while he paints a dissolute and willful prince in Edward, he contrives to make us feel that the very force of passion, when purified to true love by the constancy of Alice, has brought the monarch to a knowledge of his better self. Nor is the type of honor in Alice and the Earl exaggerated. They act and speak as subjects, conscious of their duty to the King, but resolved to preserve their self-respect at any cost, should speak and act. The compliance of the Countess, who is willing to sacrifice her daughter's honor under the impulse of blind terror, cannot be called unnatural. The consequent struggle between a mother's frailty and a daughter's firmness, though painful enough, is not so disagreeably presented as in Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. If all Bandello's novels had been conceived in the same spirit as this, he would have ranked among the best romantic writers of the modern age. As it is, we English may perhaps take credit to ourselves for the superior inspiration of the legend he here handled. The moral fiber of the tale is rather English than Italian.
Bandello was not unaware that his Novelle lay under censure for licentiousness. His apology deserves to be considered, since it places the Italian conscience on this point in a clear light. In the preface to the eleventh Novella of the second part, he attacks the question boldly.[86] "They say that my stories are not honest. In this I am with them, if they rightly apprehend honesty. I do not deny that some are not only not honest, but I affirm and confess that they are most dishonest; for if I write that a maiden grants favors to a lover, I cannot pretend that the fact is not in the highest sense immoral. So also of many things I have narrated. No sane person will fail to blame incest, theft, homicide, and other vicious actions; and I concede that my Novelle set forth these and similar enormous crimes. But I do not admit that I deserve to be therefore blamed. The world ought to blame and stigmatize those who commit such crimes, and not the man who writes about them." He then affirms that he has written his stories down as he heard them from the lips of the narrators, that he has clothed them in decent language, and that he has always been careful to condemn vice and to praise virtue. In the twenty-fourth novel of the same part he returns to the charge.[87] Hypocrites, he argues, complain that the Decameron and similar collections corrupt the morality of women and teach vice; "but I was always of opinion that to commit crimes rather than to know about them was vicious. Ignorance is never good, and it is better to be instructed in the wickedness of the world than to fall into error through defect of knowledge." This apology, when read by the light of Bandello's own Novelle, is an impudent evasion of the accusation. They are a school of profligacy; and the author was at pains to make his pictures of sensuality attractive. That he should plume himself upon the decorum of his language, is simply comic. Such simulation of a conscience was all that remained at an epoch when the sense of shame had been extinguished, while acquiescence in the doctrines of a corrupt Church had not ceased to be fashionable.
Bandello is more sensitive to strictures on his literary style, and makes a better defense. "They say that I have no style. I grant it; nor do I profess to be a master of prose, believing that if those only wrote who were consummate in their art, very few would write at all. But I maintain that any history, composed in however rough and uncouth a language, will not fail to delight the reader; and these novels of mine (unless I am deceived by their narrators) are not fables but true histories."[88] In another place he confesses that his manner is and always has been "light and low and deficient in intellectual quality."[89] Again, he meets the objection that his diction is not modeled on the purest Tuscan masterpieces, by arguing that even Petrarch wrote Italian and not Tuscan, and that if Livy smacked of Patavinity, he, a Lombard, does not shrink from Lombardisms in his style.[90] The line of defense is good; but, what is more, Bandello knew that he was popular. He cared to be read by all classes of the people rather than to be praised by pedants for the purity of his language. Therefore he snapped his fingers at Speron Sperone and Trifone, the so-called Socrates of his century. The Novella was not a branch of scholarly but of vulgar literature; and Bandello had far better right to class himself among Italian authors than Straparola or Giraldi, whose novels were none the less sought after with avidity and read with pleasure by thousands. It is true that he was not a master of the best Italian prose, and that his Novelle do not rank among the Testi di Lingua. He is at one and the same time prolix and involved, ornate and vulgar, coarse in phraseology and ambitious in rhetoric. He uses metaphors borrowed from the slang of the fashionable world to express gross thoughts or actions. He indulges in pompous digressions and overloads his narrative with illustrations. But, in spite of these defects, he is rarely dull. His energy and copiousness of diction never fail him. His style is penetrated with the passion of the subject, and he delights our imagination with wonderfully varied pictures drawn from life. It is probable that foreigners can render better justice to the merits of Bandello as a writer, than Italians, who are trained to criticise language from a highly refined and technical point of view. We recognize his vividness and force without being disgusted by his Lombardisms or the coarseness of his phrases. Yet even some Italian critics of no mean standing have been found to say a good word for his style. Among these may be reckoned the judicious Mazzuchelli.[91]
The author of Le Cene presents a marked contrast to Bandello. Antonfrancesco Grazzini belonged to an ancient and honorable family of Staggia in Valdelsa.[92] Some of his ancestors held office in the Florentine republic, and many were registered in the Art of the Notaries. Born at Florence in 1503, he was matriculated into the Speziali, and followed the profession of a druggist. His literary career was closely connected with the academies of Gli Umidi and La Crusca.[93] The sobriquet Il Lasca, or The Roach, assumed by him as a member of the Umidi, is the name by which he is best known. Besides Novelle, he wrote comedies and poems, and made the renowned collection of Canti Carnascialeschi. He died in 1583 and was buried in S. Pier Maggiore. Thus while Bandello might claim to be a citizen of the great world, reared in the ecclesiastical purple and conversant with the noblest society of Northern Italy, Il Lasca began life and ended it as a Florentine burgher. For aught we know, he may not have traveled beyond the bounds of the republic. His stories are written in the raciest Tuscan idiom and are redolent of the humor peculiar to Florence. If Bandello appropriated the romantic element in Boccaccio, Il Lasca chose his comic side for imitation. Nearly all his novels turn on beffe and burle, similar to those sketched in Sacchetti's anecdotes, or developed with greater detail by Pulci and the author of Il Grasso Legnaiuolo.[94] Three boon companions, Lo Scheggia, Il Monaco, and Il Pilucca are the heroes of his comedy; and the pranks they play, are described with farcical humor of the broadest and most powerful sort. Still the specific note of Il Lasca's novels is not pure fun. He combines obscenity with fierce carnal cruelty and inhuman jesting, in a mixture that speaks but ill for the taste of his time.[95] Neither Boccaccio nor the author of Il Grasso struck a chord so vicious, though the latter carried his buffoonery to the utmost stretch of heartlessness. It needed the depravity of the sixteenth century to relish the lust, seasoned with physical torture and spiritual agony, which was so cunningly revealed, so coldly reveled in by Il Lasca.[96] A practical joke or an act of refined vengeance had peculiar attraction for the Florentines. But the men must have been blunted in moral sensibility and surfeited with strange experiences, who could enjoy Pilucca's brutal tricks, or derive pleasure from the climax of a tale so ghastly as the fifth Novella of the second series.
This is a story of incest and a husband's vengeance. Substantially the same as Parisina's tragedy, Il Lasca has invented for it his own whimsically horrible conclusion. The husband surprises his wife and son. Then, having cut off their hands, feet, eyes and tongues, he leaves them to die together on the bed where he had found them. The rhetoric with which this catastrophe is embellished, and the purring sympathy expressed for the guilty couple, only serve to make its inhumanity more glaring. Incapable of understanding tragedy, these writers of a vitiated age sought excitement in monstrous situations. The work produced is a proper pendent to the filth of the burlesque Capitoli. Literature of this sort might have amused Caligula and his gladiators. Prefaced by an unctuous prayer to God, it realizes the very superfluity of naughtiness.[97]
In favor of the Florentines, we might plead that these Novelle were accepted as pure fictions—debauches of the fancy, escapades of inventive wit. The ideal world they represented, claimed no contact with realities of life. The pranks of Lo Scheggia and Il Pilucca, which drove one man into exile, another to the hospital, and a third to his death, had no more actuality than the tricks of clown and pantaloon. A plea of this sort was advanced by Charles Lamb for the dramatists of the Restoration; and it carries, undoubtedly, its measure of conviction. Literature of convention, which begins by stimulating curiosity, must find novel combinations and fresh seasonings, to pique the palate of the public. Thus the abominations of Il Lasca's stories would have to be regarded as the last desperate bids for popularity, as final hyperboles of exhausted rhetoric. Yet, after all, books remain the mirror of a people's taste. Whatever their quality may be, they are produced to satisfy some demand. And the wonderful vivacity of Il Lasca's coloring, the veracity of his art, preclude him from the benefit of a defense which presupposes that he stood in some unnatural relation to his age. While we read his tales, we cannot but remember the faces painted by Bronzino, or modeled by Cellini. The sixteenth-century Florentines were hard and cold as steel. Their temper had been brutalized by servitude, superficially polished by humanism, blunted by the extraordinary intellectual activity of three centuries. Compared with the voluptuous but sympathetic mood of the Lombard novelists, this cruelty means something special to the race.
Some of Il Lasca's stories, fortunately, need no such strained apology or explanation. The tale of Lisabetta's dream, though it lacks point, is free from his worse faults[98]; while the novel of Zoroaster is not only innocent, but highly humorous and charged with playful sarcasm.[99] It contains a portrait of a knavish astrologer, worthy to be set beside the Negromante of Ariosto or Ben Jonson's Alchemist. When Jerome Cardan was coquetting with chiromancy and magic, when Cellini was raising fiends with the Sicilian necromancer in the Coliseum, a novelist found sufficient stuff for comedy and satire in the foibles of ghost-seekers and the tricks of philter-mongers. The companion portrait of the dissolute monk, who sets his hand to any dirty work that has the spice of fun in it, is also executed with no little spirit.
Among the most graceful of the Tuscan novelists may be mentioned Agnolo Firenzuola. His family derived its name from a village at the foot of the Pistojan Apennines, and his father was a citizen of Florence. Agnolo spent his youth at Siena and Perugia, where he made the friendship of Pietro Aretino, leading the wild student life described in their correspondence.[100] That he subsequently entered the Vallombrosan order seems to be certain; but it is somewhat doubtful whether he attained the dignity of Abbot which his biographers ascribe to him.[101] Tiraboschi, unwilling to admit so great a scandal to the Church, has adduced reasons why we should suspend our judgment.[102] Yet the tradition rests on substantial authority. A monument erected by Firenzuola to his uncle Alessandro Braccio in the church of S. Prassede, at Rome, describes him as Ædis hujus Abbas. S. Maria di Spoleti and S. Salvator di Vaiano are supposed to have been his benefices. Some further collateral proof might be drawn from the opening of the dialogue Sopra le Bellezze delle Donne. The scene of it is laid in the convent grounds of Grignano, and Celso is undoubtedly Firenzuola. A portion of his manhood was spent at Rome in friendship with Molza, Berni, and other brilliant literary men. While resident in Rome he contracted a severe and tedious illness, which obliged him to retire to Prato, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life.[103] Nearly all his works contain frequent and affectionate recollections of this sunny little town, the beauty of whose women is enthusiastically celebrated by him. Firenzuola died before the middle of the sixteenth century at the age of about fifty. Neither his life nor his friendships nor yet his writings were consistent with his monastic profession and the dignity of Abbot. The charm of Firenzuola's Novelle is due in a large measure to his style, which has a wonderful transparency and ease, a wealth of the rarest Tuscan phrases, and a freshness of humor that renders them delightful reading. The storm at sea in the first tale, and the night scene in the streets of Florence in the third, are described with Ariostean brilliancy.[104] In point of subject-matter they do not greatly differ from the ordinary novels of the day, and some of the tales reappear in the collections of other novelists.[105] Most of them turn upon the foibles and the vices of the clergy. The fourth Novella, which is perhaps the best of all in style and humor, presents a truly comic picture of the parish priest, while the fifth describes the interior of a dissolute convent at Perugia, and the tenth exposes the arts whereby confessors induced silly women to make wills in the favor of their convents. Don Giovanni, Suor Appellagia, and Fra Cherubino, the chief actors in these stories, might be selected as typical characters in the Italian comedy of clerical dissoluteness.
Firenzuola prefaced his novels with an elaborate introduction, describing the meeting of some friends at Celso's villa near Pazolatico, and their discourse on love.[106] From discussion they pass to telling amorous stories under the guidance of a Queen selected by the company.[107] The introductory conversation is full of a dreamy, sensualized, disintegrated Platonism. It parades conventional distinctions between earthly and heavenly love, between the beauty of the soul and the beauty of the body; and then we pass without modulation into the region of what is here called accidenti amorosi. The same insincere Platonism gives color to Firenzuola's discourse on the Beauty of Women—one of the most important productions of the sixteenth century in illustration of popular and artistic taste.[108] The author imagines himself to have interrupted a bevy of fair ladies from Prato in the midst of a dispute about the beauty of Mona Amelia della Torre Nuova. Mona Amelia herself was present; and so were Mona Lampiada, Mona Amorrorisca, Mona Selvaggia, and Mona Verdespina.[109] Under these names it is clear that living persons of the town of Prato are designated; and all the examples of beauty given in the dialogue are chosen from well-known women of the district. The composition must therefore be reckoned as an elaborate compliment from Firenzuola to the fair sex of Prato.[110] Celso begins his exposition of beauty by declaring that "it is God's highest gift to human nature, inasmuch as by its virtue we direct our soul to contemplation, and through contemplation to the desire of heavenly things."[111] He then proceeds to define beauty as "an ordered concord, or, as it were, a harmony inscrutably resulting from the composition, union, and commission of divers members, each of which shall in itself be well proportioned and in a certain sense beautiful, but which, before they combine to make one body, shall be different and discrepant among themselves."[112] Having explained each clause of this definition, he passes to the appetite for beauty, and tells the myth invented for Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. This leads by natural transitions to the real business of the dialogue, which consists in analyzing and defining every kind of loveliness in women, and minutely describing the proportions, qualities, and colors of each portion of the female body. The whole is carried through with the method of a philosopher, the enthusiasm of an artist, and the refinement of a well-bred gentleman. The articles upon Leggiadria, Grazia, Vaghezza, VenustÀ, Aria, MaestÀ, may even now be read with profit by those who desire to comprehend the nice gradations of meaning implied by these terms.[113] The discourses on the form and color of the ear, and on the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers, bring incomparably graceful images before us[114]; and this, indeed, can be said about the whole dialogue, for there is hardly a sentence that does not reveal the delicate perceptions of an artistic nature.
Firenzuola's adaptation of the Golden Ass may be reckoned among the triumphs of his style, and the fables contained in his Discorsi degli Animali are so many minutely finished novelettes.[115] Both of these works belong to the proper subject of the present chapter. His comedies and his burlesque poems must be left for discussion under different headings. With regard to his serious verses, addressed to Mona Selvaggia, it will be enough to say that they are modeled upon Petrarch. Though limpid in style and musical, as all Firenzuola's writing never failed to be, they ring hollow. The true note of the man's feeling was sensual. The highest point it reached was the admiration for plastic beauty expressed in his dialogue on women. It had nothing in common with Petrarch's melancholy. Of these minor poems I admire the little ballad beginning O rozza pastorella, and the wonderfully lucid version of Poliziano's ViolÆ—O Viole formose, o dolci viole—more than any others.[116]
Except for the long illness which brought him to Prato, Firenzuola appears to have spent a happy and mirthful life; and if we may trust his introduction to the Novels, he was fairly wealthy. What we know about the biography of Antonfrancesco Doni, who also deserves a place among the Tuscan novelists, presents a striking contrast to this luxurious and amorous existence.[117] He was a Florentine, and, like Firenzuola, dedicated to religion. Born in 1513, he entered the Servite order in the cloister of the Annunziata. He began by teaching the boys intrusted to the monks for education. But about 1540 he was obliged to fly the monastery under the cloud of some grave charge connected with his pupils.[118] Doni turned his back on Florence; and after wandering from town to town in Northern Italy, settled at last in 1542 at Piacenza, where he seems for a short while to have applied himself with an unwilling mind to law-studies. At Piacenza he made the acquaintance of Lodovico Domenichi, who introduced him into the Accademia Ortolana. This was a semi-literary club of profligates with the Priapic emblems for its ensign. Doni's wild and capricious humor made him a chief ornament of the society; but the members so misconducted themselves in word and deed that it was soon found necessary to suppress their meetings. While amusing himself with poetry and music among his boon companions, Doni was on the lookout for a place at Court or in the household of a wealthy nobleman. His letters at this period show that he was willing to become anything from poet or musician down to fool or something worse. Failing in all his applications, he at last resolved to make what gains he could by literature. His friend Domenichi had already settled at Venice, when Doni joined him there in 1544. But his stay was of brief duration. We find him again at Piacenza, next at Rome, and then at Florence, where he established a printing-press. The principal event of this Florentine residence was a definite rupture with Domenichi. We do not know the causes of their quarrel; but both of them were such scamps that it is probable they took good care, while abusing one another in general terms, to guard the secrets of their respective crimes. During the rest of Doni's life he pursued his old friend with relentless animosity. His invectives deserve to be compared with those of the humanists in the preceding century; while Domenichi, who had succeeded in securing a position for himself at Florence, replied with no less hostility in the tone of injured virtue.
In 1547 Doni settled finally at Venice. The city of the lagoons was the only safe resort for a man who had offended the Church by abandoning his vows, and whose life and writings were a scandal even in that age of license. Everywhere else he would have been exposed to peril from the Inquisition. Though he had dropped the cowl, he could not throw aside the cassock, and his condition as priest proved not only irksome but perilous.[119] At Venice he lived a singular Bohemian existence, inhabiting a garret which overlooked one of the noisiest of the small canals, and scribbling for his daily bread. He was a rapid and prolific writer, sending his copy to the press before it was dry, and never caring for revision. To gain money was the sole object of his labors. The versatility of his mind and his peculiar humor made his miscellanies popular; and like Aretino he wheedled or menaced ducats out of patrons. Indeed, Doni's life at Venice is the proper pendent to Aretino's, who was once his friend and afterwards his bitter foe. But while Aretino contrived to live like a prince, Doni, for many years at any rate, endured the miseries of Grub Street. They quarreled about a present which the Duke of Urbino had promised Doni through his secretary. Aretino thought that this meant poaching on his manors. Accordingly he threatened his comrade with a thorough literary scourging. Doni replied by a pamphlet with this singular title: "Terremoto del Doni fiorentino, con la rovina d'un gran Colosso bestiale Antichristo della nostra etÀ." His capricious nature and bizarre passions made Doni a bad friend; but he was an incomparably amusing companion. Accordingly we find that his society was sought by the literary circles of all cities where he lived. At Florence he had been appointed secretary to the Umidi. At Venice he became a member of the Pellegrini. This academy was founded before the League of Cambrai in a deserted villa near the lagoons.[120] Mystery hung over its origin and continued to involve its objects. Several wealthy noblemen of Venice supplied the club with ample funds. They had a good library, and employed two presses for the printing of their works. The members formed a kind of masonic body, bound together by strict mutual obligations, and sworn to maintain each other in peril or in want. They also exercised generosity toward needy men of letters, dowered poor girls, and practiced many charities of a similar description. Their meetings took place in certain gardens at Murano or on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore. The two Sansovini, Nardi, Titian, Dolce, and other eminent men belonged to the society; but Doni appears to have been its moving spirit on all occasions of convivial intercourse.
The last years of this Bohemian life were spent beneath the Euganean hills in a square castle, which, picturesquely draped with ivy, may still be seen towering above Monselice. That Doni had accumulated some capital by his incessant scribbling, is proved by the fact that he laid out the grounds about his fortress with considerable luxury. A passage quoted from the Venetian Zilioli serves to bring the man more vividly before us: "At the summit of the hill above Monselice stands the house where Antonfrancesco Doni indulged his leisure with philosophy and poetry. He was a man of bizarre humor, who had but little patience with his neighbors. Retiring from society, he chose this abode in order to give full scope in his own way and without regard for any one to his caprices, which were often very ludicrous. Who could have refrained from laughter, when he saw a man of mature age, with a beard down to his breast, going abroad at night barefooted and in his shirt, careering among the fields, singing his own songs and those of other poets; or else in daytime playing on a lute and dancing like a little boy?" Doni died at Venice in the autumn of 1574.
Doni's Novelle are rather detached scenes of life than stories with a plot or theme. Glowing and picturesque in style, sharply outlined, and smartly told, they have the point of epigrams. The fourth of the series might be chosen to illustrate the extravagant efforts after effect made by the Italian novelist with a view to stimulating the attention of his audience. It is a tale of two mortal enemies, one of whom kills the father and the brother of his foe. The injured man challenges and conquers him in single combat, when, having the ruffian at his mercy, he raises him from the ground, pardons him, and makes him his bosom friend. Likelihood and moral propriety are sacrificed in order that the Novella may end with a surprise.
Doni's Novelle, taken by themselves, would scarcely have justified the space allotted to him in this chapter. His biography has, however, the importance attaching to the history of a representative man, for much of the literature of amusement in the sixteenth century was supplied by Bohemians of Doni's type. To give a complete account of his miscellaneous works would be out of the question. Besides treatises on music and the arts of design and a catalogue of Italian books, which might be valuable if the author had not used it as a vehicle for his literary animosities, he published letters and poems, collections of proverbs and short tales under the title of La Zucca, dialogues and dissertations on various topics with the name of I Mondi, an essay on moral philosophy, an edition of Burchiello's poems illustrated by notes more difficult to understand than the text, an explanation of the Apocalypse proving Luther to be Antichrist, a libel upon Aretino, two commonplace books of sentences and maxims styled I Cancellieri, a work on villa-building, a series of imaginary pictures, a comedy called Lo Stufaiuolo, and many others which it would be tedious to catalogue. It is not probable that any one has made a thorough study of Doni's writings; but those who know them best, report that they are all marked by the same sallies of capricious humor and wild fancy.[121]
A glance at the Marmi will suffice to illustrate Doni's method in these miscellanies.[122] In his preface to the reader he says it often happens that, awaked from sleep, he spends the night-hours in thinking of himself and of his neighbors—"not, however, as the common folk do, nor like men of learning, but following the whimsies of a teeming brain. I am at home, you see. I fly aloft into the air, above some city, and believe myself to be a huge bird, monstrous, monstrous, piercing with keen sight to everything that's going on below; and in the twinkling of an eye, the roofs fly off, and I behold each man, each woman at their several affairs. One is at home and weeping, another laughing; one giving birth to children, one begetting; this man reading, that man writing; one eating, another praying. One is scolding his household, another playing; and see, yon fellow has fallen starved to earth, while that one vomits his superfluous food! What contrasts are there in one single city, at one single moment! Then I pass from land to land, and notice divers customs, with variety of speech and converse. In Naples, for example, the gentry are wont to ride abroad and take the evening freshness. In Rome they haunt cool vineyards, or seek their pleasure by artificial fountains. In Venice they roam the canals in dainty gondolas, or sweep the salt lagoons, with music, women, and such delights, putting to flight the day's annoyances and heat. But above all other pleasures in the cool, methinks the Florentines do best. Their way is this. They have the square of Santa Liberata, midway between the ancient shrine of Mars, now San Giovanni, and the marvelous modern Duomo. They have, I say, certain stairs of marble, and the topmost stair leads to a large space, where the young men come to rest in those great heats, seeing that a most refreshing wind is always blowing there, and a delicious breeze, and, besides, the fair white marbles for the most part keep their freshness. It is there I find my best amusements; for, as I sail through the air, invisibly I settle, soaring over them; and hear and see their talk and doings. And forasmuch as they are all fine wits and comely, they have a thousand lovely things to say—novels, stratagems and fables; they tell of intrigues, stories, jokes, tricks played off on men and women—all things sprightly, noble, noteworthy and fit for gentle ears." Such is the exordium. What follows, consists of conversations, held at night upon these marble slabs by citizens of Florence. The dialogue is lively; the pictures tersely etched; the language racy; the matter almost always worthy of attention. One sustained dialogue on printing is particularly interesting, since it involves a review of contemporary literature from the standpoint of one who was himself exclusively employed in hack production for the press.[123] The whole book, however, abounds in excellent criticism and clever hints. "See what the world is coming to," says one of the speakers, "when no one can read anything, full though it be of learning and goodness, without flinging it away at the end of three words! More artifice than patience goes nowadays to the writing of a book; more racking the brains to invent some whimsical title, which makes one take it up and read a word or two, than the composition of the whole book demands. Just try and tell people to touch a volume labeled Doctrine of Good Living or The Spiritual Life! God preserve you! Put upon the title page An Invective against an Honest Man, or New Pasquinade, or Pimps Expounded, or The Whore Lost, and all the world will grab at it. If our Gelli, when he wanted to teach a thousand fine things, full of philosophy and useful to a Christian, had not called them The Cobbler's Caprices, there's not a soul would have so much as touched them. Had he christened his book Instructions in Civil Conduct or Divine Discourses, it must have fallen stillborn; but that Cobbler, those Caprices make every one cry out: 'I'll see what sort of balderdash it is!'"
One might fancy that this passage had been written to satirize our own times rather than the sixteenth century. More than enough, however, remains from the popular literature of Doni's days to illustrate his observation. We have already seen how ingeniously he titillated public curiosity in the title of his invective against Aretino. "The Earthquake of Doni, the Florentine, with the Ruin of a Great Bestial Colossus, the Antichrist of our Age," is worthy to take rank among the most capricious pamphlets of the English Commonwealth. Meanwhile the Venetian press kept pouring out stores of miscellaneous information under bizarre titles; such as the Piazza, which described all sorts of trades, including the most infamous, and Il PerchÈ, which was a kind of vulgar cyclopÆdia, with special reference to physiology. Manuals of domestic medicine or directions for the toilette, like the curious Comare on obstetrics, and Marinello's interesting Ornamenti delle Donne; eccentricities in the style of the Hospidale de' Pazzi or the Sinagoga degli Ignoranti; might be cited through a dozen pages. It is impossible to do justice to this undergrowth of literature, which testifies to the extent of the plebeian reading public in Italy.
The Novelists of Siena form a separate group, and are distinguished by a certain air of delicate voluptuous grace.[124] Siena, though it wears so pensive an aspect now, was famous in the middle ages for the refinements of sensuality. It was here that the godereccia brigata, condemned to Hell by Dante, spent their substance in gay living. Folgore da San Gemignano's pleasure-seeking Company was Sienese. Beccadelli called the city molles SenÆ, and Æneas Sylvius dedicated her groves and palaces to Venus—the Venus who appeared in dreams to Gentile Sermini.[125] The impress of luxury is stamped upon the works of her best novelists. They blend the morbidezza of the senses with a rare feeling for natural and artistic beauty. Descriptions of banquets and gardens, fountains and wayside thickets, form a delightful background to the never-ending festival of love. We wander through pleasant bypaths of Tuscan country, abloom in spring with acacia trees and resonant with song-birds. Though indescribably licentious, these novelists are rarely coarse or vulgar. There is no Florentine blackguardism, no acerbity of scorn or stain of blood-lust on their pages. They are humorous; but they do not season humor with cruelty. Their tales, for the most part, are the lunes of wanton love, day-dreams of erotic fancy, a free debauch of images, now laughable, now lewd, but all provocative of sensual desire. At the same time, their delight in landscape-painting, combined with a certain refinement of Æsthetic taste, saves them from the brutalities of lust.
The foregoing remarks apply in their fullest extension to Sermini and Fortini. The best passages from the Ars Amandi of these authors admit of no quotation. Attention, may, however, be called to the graphic description by Sermini of the Sienese boxing-matches.[126] It is a masterpiece of vigorous dialogue and lively movement—a little drama in epitome or profile, bringing the excitement of the champions and their backers vividly before us by a series of exclamations and ejaculated sentences. Fortini does not offer the same advantage to a modest critic; yet his handling of a very comic situation in the fourteenth Novella may be conveniently compared with Firenzuola's and Il Lasca's treatment of the same theme.[127] Those, too, who are curious in such matters, may trace the correspondences between his twelfth Novella and many similar subjects in the Cent nouvelles Nouvelles. The common material of a fabliau is here Italianized with an exquisite sense of plastic and landscape beauty; and the crude obscenity of the motif craves pardon for the sake of its rare setting.
Bargagli's tales are less offensive to modern notions of propriety than either Sermini's or Fortini's. They do not detach themselves from the average of such compositions by any peculiarly Sienese quality. But his Trattenimenti are valuable for their introduction, which consists of a minute and pathetically simple narrative of the sufferings sustained by the Sienese during the siege of 1553. Boccaccio's description of the Plague at Florence was in Bargagli's mind, when he made this unaffected record of a city's agony the frontispiece to tales of mirth and passion. Though somewhat out of place, it has the interest which belongs to the faithful history of an eye-witness.
One beautiful story, borrowed from the annals of their own city, was treated by the two Sienese novelists, Illicini and Sermini. The palm of excellence, however, must be awarded to the elder of these authors. Of Bernardo Lapini, surnamed Illicini or Ollicino, very little is known, except that he served both Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Borso da Este in the capacity of physician, and composed a commentary on the Trionfi of Petrarch. His Novella opens with a conversation between certain noble ladies of Siena, who agreed that the three most eminent virtues of a generous nature are courtesy, gratitude, and liberality. An ancient dame, who kept them company on that occasion, offered to relate a tale, which should illustrate these qualities and raise certain fine questions concerning their exercise in actual life. The two Sienese families De' Salimbeni and De' Montanini had long been on terms of coldness; and though their ancient feuds were passing into oblivion, no treaty of peace had yet been ratified between their houses, when Anselmo Salimbeni fell deeply in love with Angelica the only sister of Carlo Montanini. Anselmo was wealthy; but to Carlo and his sister there only remained, of their vast ancestral possessions, one small estate, where they lived together in retirement. Delicacy thus prevented the rich Anselmo from declaring his affection, until an event happened which placed it in his power to be of signal service to the Montanini. A prosperous member of the Sienese government desired to purchase Carlo's house at the price of one thousand ducats. Carlo refused to sell this estate, seeing it was his sister's only support and future source of dowry. Thereupon the powerful man of state accused him falsely of treason to the commonwealth. He was cast into prison and condemned to death or the forfeit of one thousand ducats. Anselmo, the very night before Carlo's threatened execution, paid this fine, and sent the deed of release by the hands of a servant to the prison. When Carlo was once more at liberty, he made inquiries which proved beyond doubt that Anselmo, a man unknown to him, the member of a house at ancient feud with his, had done him this great courtesy. It then rushed across his mind that certain acts and gestures of Anselmo betrayed a secret liking for Angelica. This decided him upon the course he had to take. Having communicated the plan to his sister, he went alone with her at night to Salimbeni's castle, and, when he had expressed his gratitude, there left her in her lover's power, as the most precious thing he could bestow upon the saviour of his life. Anselmo, not to be surpassed in this exchange of courtesies, delivered Angelica to the women of his household, and afterwards, attended by the train of his retainers, sought Carlo in his home. There he made a public statement of what had passed between them, wedded Angelica with three rings, dowered her with the half of his estates, and by a formal deed of gift assigned the residue of his fortune to Carlo. This is a bare outline of the story, which Illicini has adorned in all its details with subtle analyses of feeling and reflections on the several situations. The problem proposed to the gentlewoman is to decide which of the two men, Anselmo or Carlo, showed the more perfect courtesy in their several circumstances. How they settled this knotty point, may be left to the readers of Novelle to discover.
Bandello more than adequately represents the Lombard group of novelists; and since his works have been already discussed, it will suffice to allude briefly to three collections which in their day were highly popular. These are I Proverbi of Antonio Cornazano, Le Piacevoli Notti of Straparola, and Giraldi's Hecatommithi.[128] Cornazano was a copious writer both in Latin and Italian. He passed his life at the Courts of Francesco Sforza, Bartolommeo Colleoni, and Ercole I. of Ferrara. One of his earliest compositions was a Life of Christ. This fact is not insignificant, as a sign of the conditions under which literature was produced in the Renaissance. A man who had gained reputation by a learned or religious treatise, ventured to extend it by jests of the broadest humor. The Proverbi, by which alone Cornazano's name is now distinguished, are sixteen carefully-wrought stories, very droll but very dirty. Each illustrates a common proverb, and pretends to relate the circumstances which gave it currency. The author opens one tale with a simple statement: "From the deserts of the Thebaid came to us that trite and much used saying, Better late than never; and this was how it happened." Having stated the theme, he enters on his narrative, diverts attention by a series of absurdities which lead to an unexpected climax. He concludes it thus: "The abbot answered: 'It is not this which makes me weep, but to think of my misfortune, who have been so long without discovering and commending so excellent an usage.' 'Father,' said the monk, 'Better late than never.'" There is considerable comic vigor in the working of this motive. Our sense of the ridiculous is stimulated by a studied disproportion between the universality of the proverb and the strangeness of the incidents invented to account for it.
Straparola breaks ground in a different direction. The majority of his novels bear traces of their origin in fairy stories or VolksmÄrchen. Much interest attaches to the Notti Piacevoli, as the literary reproduction of a popular species which the Venetian Gozzi afterwards rendered famous. Students of folk-lore may compare them with the Sicilian fables recently committed to the press by Signor PitrÈ.[129] The element of bizarre fancy is remarkable in all these tales; but the marvelous has been so mingled with the facts of common life as to give each narrative the true air of the conventional Novella. One in particular may be mentioned, since it is written on the same motive as Machiavelli's Belphegor. The rubric runs as follows: "The Devil, hearing the complaints of husbands against their wives, marries Silvia Ballastro, and takes Gasparino Boncio for gossip of the ring, and forasmuch as he finds it impossible to live with his wife, enters into the body of the Duke of Melphi, and Gasparino, his gossip, expels him thence." Between Straparola's and Machiavelli's treatment of this subject, the resemblance is so close as to justify the opinion that the former tale was simply modeled on the latter, or that both were drawn from an original source. In each case it is the wife's pride which renders life unendurable to her demon husband, and in both he is expelled from the possessed person by mistaking a brass band in full play for the approach of his tumultuous consort. But Straparola's loose and careless style of narrative bears no comparison with the caustic satire of Machiavelli's meditated art.[130] The same theme was treated in Italian by Giovanni Brevio; and since Machiavelli's novel first appeared in print in the year 1549, Straparola's seeing the light in 1550, and Brevio's in 1545, we may reasonably conclude that each version was an adaptation of some primitive monastic story.[131]
On the score of style alone, it would be difficult to explain the widespread popularity of Giraldi Cinthio's one hundred and ten tales.[132] The Hecatommithi are written in a lumbering manner, and the stories are often lifeless. Compared with the brilliancy of the Tuscan Novelle, the point and sparkle of Le Cene, the grace and gusto of Sermini, or Firenzuola's golden fluency, the diction of this noble Ferrarese is dull. Yet the Hecatommithi were reprinted again and again and translated into several languages. In England, through Painter's Palace of Pleasure, they obtained wide circulation and supplied our best dramatists, including Shakspere and Fletcher, with hints for plays. It is probable that they owed their fame in no small measure to what we reckon their defects. Giraldi's language was more intelligible to ordinary readers of Italian than the racy Tuscan of the Sienese authors. His stories had less of a purely local flavor than those of the Florentines. They enjoyed, moreover, the singular advantage of diffusion through the press of Venice, which then commanded the book-market of Europe. But, if we put this point of style aside, the vogue of Cinthio in Italy and Europe becomes at once intelligible. There is a massive force and volume in his matter, which proclaims him an author to be reckoned with. The variety of scenes he represents, the tragic gravity of many of his motives, his intimate acquaintance with the manners and customs of a class that never fails to interest the vulgar, combined with great sagacity in selecting and multiplying instances of striking crime, stood him in the stead of finer art with the special public for whom Novelle were composed.[133] Compared even with Boccaccio, the prince of story-tellers, Cinthio holds his own, not as a great dramatic or descriptive writer but as one who has studied, analyzed, dissected, and digested the material of human action and passion in a vast variety of modes. His work is more solid and reflective than Bandello's; more moralized than Il Lasca's. The ethical tendency both of the tales and the discussions they occasion, is, for the most part, singularly wholesome. In spite, therefore, of the almost revolting frankness with which impurity, fraud, cruelty, violence, and bestial lust are exposed to view, one rises from the perusal of the Hecatommithi with an unimpaired consciousness of good and evil. It is just the negation of this conscience which renders the mass of Italian Novelle worse than unprofitable.
The plan of the Hecatommithi deserves a passing notice, if only because it illustrates the more than ordinary force of brain which Cinthio brought to bear upon his light material. He begins with an elaborate description of the Sack of Rome. A party of men and women take refuge from its horrors of rape, pestilence and tortures in one of the Colonna palaces. When affairs have been proved desperate, they set sail from CivitÀ Vecchia for Marseilles, and enliven their voyage with story-telling. A man of mature years opens the discussion with a long panegyric of wedded love, serving as introduction to the tales which treat of illicit passion. From this first day's debate the women of the party are absent. They intervene next day, and upon this and the following nine days one hundred stories are related by different members of the party upon subjects selected for illustration. Each novel is followed by a copious commentary in the form of dialogue, and songs are interspersed. Cinthio thus adhered, as closely as possible, to the model furnished by Boccaccio. But his framework, though ingeniously put together, lacks the grace and sweetness of the Decameron. Not a few of the novels are founded upon facts of history. In the tenth tale of the ninth decade, for example, he repeats the legend of the Borgia family—the murder of the Duke of Gandia, Alexander's death by poison, and Cesare's escape. The names are changed; but the facts, as related by Guicciardini, can be clearly discerned through the transparent veil of fiction.
In concluding this chapter on the Novelle, it may be repeated that the species of narrative in question was, in its ultimate development, a peculiar Italian product. Originally derived through the French fabliaux from medieval Latin stories, the Novella received in Italy more serious and more artistic treatment. It satisfied the craving of the race for such delineation of life and manners as a great literature demands; and it did this for reasons which will be explained in the next chapter, with more originality, more adequacy to the special qualities of the Italian people, than even their comedies. What De Quincey wrote concerning our theater in the age of Elizabeth and James, might almost be applied to the material which the Novellieri used: "No literature, not excepting even that of Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theater, such a carnival display, mask and anti-mask of impassioned life—breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing:
"Quicquid agunt homines—votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus." |
But, when we quit material to think of form, the parallel fails. De Quincey's further description of our dramas, "scenically grouped, draped, and gorgeously colored," is highly inapplicable to the brief, careless, almost pedestrian prose of the Novelle. In spite of their indescribable wealth of subject-matter, in spite of those inexhaustible stores of plots and situations, characters and motives, which have made them a mine for playwrights in succeeding ages, they rarely rise to the height of poetry, nor are they ever dramas. The artistic limitations of the Italian Novelle are among the most interesting phenomena presented by the history of literature.
