The Palace of Pleasure | Page 4

Peter Alphonsi see my edition of Caxton's Æsop,
which contains selections from him in Vol. II.]

[Footnote 5: Signor Bartoli has written on I Precursori di Boccaccio,
1874, Landau on his Life and Sources (Leben, 1880, Quellen des
Dekameron, 1884), and on his successors (Beiträge zur Geschichte der
ital. Novelle, 1874). Mr. Symonds has an admirable chapter on the
Novellieri in his Renaissance, vol. v.]
It is an elementary mistake to associate Boccaccio's name with the tales
of gayer tone traceable to the Fabliaux. He initiated the custom of
mixing tragic with the comic tales. Nearly all the novelle of the Fourth
Day, for example, deal with tragic topics. And the example he set in
this way was followed by the whole school of Novellieri. As Painter's
book is so largely due to them, a few words on the Novellieri used by
him seem desirable, reserving for the present the question of his
treatment of their text.
Of Giovanne Boccaccio himself it is difficult for any one with a love of
letters to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a
Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of
genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly
said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing as a
prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser
topics--and these he derived from others--he half disarms disgust by the
lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most difficult
of literary tasks. When he deals with graver actions, if he does not
always rise to the occasion, he never fails to give the due impression of
seriousness and dignity. It is not for nothing that the Decamerone has
been the storehouse of poetic inspiration for nearly five centuries. In
this country alone, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Tennyson,
have each in turn gone to Boccaccio for material.
In his own country he is the fountainhead of a wide stream of literary
influences that has ever broadened as it flowed. Between the fifteenth
and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four
thousand novelle, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of
these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio's
genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and
deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but the

master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down
over the greater part of all this literature. Every memorable outburst of
the fiercer passions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of passion,
for all these years, found record in a novella of Boccaccio's followers.
The Novelle answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of
trials and the earlier Last Speech and Confession. But the example of
Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often
these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the
disguise of fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of
the artist's freedom in dealing with such topics.
[Footnote 6: Specimens of these in somewhat wooden English were
given by Roscoe in his Italian Novelists.]
The other Novellieri from whom Painter drew inspiration may be
dismissed very shortly. Of Ser Giovanne Fiorentino, who wrote the
fifty novels of his Pecorone about 1378, little is known nor need be
known; his merits of style or matter do not raise him above mediocrity.
Straparola's Piacevole Notti were composed in Venice in the earlier
half of the sixteenth century, and are chiefly interesting for the fact that
some dozen or so of his seventy-four stories are folk-tales taken from
the mouth of the people, and were the first thus collected: Straparola
was the earliest Grimm. His contemporary Giraldi, known as Cinthio
(or Cinzio), intended his Ecatomithi to include one hundred novelle, but
they never reached beyond seventy; he has the grace to cause the ladies
to retire when the men relate their smoking-room anecdotes of feminine
impudiche. Owing to Dryden's statement "Shakespeare's plots are in the
one hundred novels of Cinthio" (Preface to Astrologer), his name has
been generally fixed upon as the representative Italian novelist from
whom the Elizabethans drew their plots. As a matter of fact only
"Othello" (Ecat. iii. 7), and "Measure for Measure" (ib. viii. 5), can be
clearly traced to him, though "Twelfth Night" has some similarity with
Cinthio's "Gravina" (v. 8): both come from a common source,
Bandello.
Bandello is indeed the next greatest name among the Novellieri after
that of Boccaccio, and has perhaps had even a greater influence on

dramatic literature than his master. Matteo Bandello was born at the
end of the fifteenth century at Castelnuovo