Novelle Antiche" (the earliest thirteenth-century collection), the "libro di bel parlar gentile," the familiar form of the Lady of Scalot, crowned with gold and girdled with silver, drifts down the river in her silent barge to Camelot. In "Il Pecorone," a collection of the fourteenth century, the bold and crafty architect and his son, who in Herodotus rob the Egyptian treasury, return to earth in the persons of Messer Bindo and his son,' and Bindo is surely cousin to the Minister-Thief of the "Seven Wise Masters"? The "Master of all Masters," of Indian renown, finds reincarnation in the foolish-wise priest of Straparola.2

The list can be indefinitely prolonged, and doubtless it has its own interest. But beyond this region of criticism there lies another and a more human attraction in these stories of an older and a younger-day. It is an attraction independent of learned inquisitions, and one without which it is more than possible the reprints of such books as Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," and the recent translations of the novellieri might come to us as forgotten stories told to deaf ears.

More than fifty years ago Roscoe pleaded the claims of these stories to attention in the language of conscientious pedantry which makes his commentaries so humorously out of tune with his subject. "They are," he says, "deserving our notice, as they exhibit not infrequently curious pictures of the history, manners and feelings of the people during the respective periods in which they were composed." So he prefaces his four volumes of translations; but there is room to doubt if his renderings of the originals would justify his plea for popularity, or place his readers in any approximate relationship with the world for whom Boccaccio made his "Decameron," or Straparola his "Nights." Roscoe's design is laboriously complete. Over a hundred novels are given in chronological order, with notes and references. Further,

1 Il Pecorone, 9th Day, 1st Novel.
2 Piacevoli Notti, 5th Night, 4th Fable.
3 David Nutt, London.

the selection is guaranteed to consist only of stories of a "pleasing and unexceptionable character." To this end he has effected the most fundamental metamorphoses. The faithless wife, engaged in the blackest intrigue, is transformed into the virtuous and prudent maiden; the lawless lover into her father's "young friend, in whose honor and integrity" the parental trust is amply justified. Marriage ties are forged or dissolved with an ingenuity that removes all suspicion of indecorum from the most equivocal situations! Yet the failure of Roscoe's enterprise does not lie with the severity of his expurgations, which have expelled the characteristic features of domestic Italian life from the scene. The defect lies deeper. It is his lack of imaginative realization which left him outside that strange world of the Renaissance. Its many-colored lights were lost for him, its sinister shadows passed by him unseen. The contagion of its vivid, versatile temperament, its squalors, its nobleness, its refinements, and its brutalities, left him unmoved.

And what Roscoe did not achieve for the general reader has remained undone. The almost literal translations of Mr. Payne and Mr. Waters are, it is needless to say, volumes issued for the use not of the many but of the few. In them the stories stand as they were written for their own age, and, without entering upon any questions of comparative morality, their own age is not ours. Thus it is that the novellieri written about, spoken of, and referred to by so many are necessarily familiar to so few.

It may well be that the difficulty of presenting them in a form and with modifications which would place them within reach of a wider public are insurmountable. It is even a hazardous endeavor to attempt any consistent portraiture of the contradictions offered to the modern mind by the works of these old storytellers. Take Boccaccio alone, for sake of the household word his name has become, and try to form some unimaginary idea of the greatest of the novellieri, his audience, and his art. At

once we are face to face with a maze of apparent paradoxes of moods and tastes-paradoxes in religion, in morals, in art-and face to face with words and sentiments for which the England of to-day has no equivalents.

In the matter of morals it is undeniably difficult to draw a definite line between personal, national, and circumstantial morality; to distinguish, that is, between the individual morality of a man-his right thinking and right doing-and the morality of his race and the conventions of his day. Inseparably fused in the retrospect of centuries, it needs more than the alchemy of criticism to recrystallize the ingredients of a character. That, broadly speaking, here a man was better, or there worse, than his times, we all allow; but whether by contrast or conformity, as an embodiment of a general tendency or as a reactionist, we cannot detach him from his environment.

Even less easy is it to isolate a man's book. A book avowedly represents that part of a man he seeks to place in contact with the world around. It is a part, therefore, necessarily subjected to the influence of sympathy, praise, dispraise, appreciation, aversion, indifference. "I pipe to please myself" is the lamentably incredible statement made by one of our greatest poets; but no reiteration of the assertion avails to shake our conviction that when he reduced his piping to print he piped to please his audience. To the storyteller, par excellence, the acute consciousness of his audience is the essence of his art. An active reciprocity of sympathy is requisite. As if to emphasize the necessity, the fictions of older days often included a fictitious narrator and a fictitious audience or auditor. As in the "Arabian Nights," through all the adventures of Sindbad, the perils of Ali Baba, the loves of Badoura, we are never allowed to forget that the voice relating these wonders is the voice of Scheherazade and that the ears that listen are those of the great Sultan Schahriar.

So is it notably in these tales of dead Italy, and now and then these figures

of the prologue, as we may call them, have their own story, as Scheherazade had hers. In the proemio to the sequence of tales collected or invented by Ser Giovanni, called "Il Pecorone," we hear how renown of the beauty, graciousness, and wisdom of Suor Saturnina, the angelic nun of Forli, reaches the ears of Auretto, the young Florentine gallant. He has spent all his wealth in gifts (cortesia); he has learned all that youth can learn of life; but for the sake of the cloistered face he has never yet beheld, for her whom, unknown, he loves better than himself, Auretto forsakes the gay Tuscan world, and, in the country beyond the Apennines, becomes chaplain of the Forli convent where she dwells. There "amor che a cor gentil ratto s'apprende"1 teaches Suor Saturnina much. Auretto for love wins love; heart is exchanged for heart. The lovers meet daily in the convent parlatorio, "luogo assai remoto e solitario." With reverence of gentle words, with tenderest caresses, "senza nessuna disonestà" (Ser Giovanni knows, for he was often there!), they pass the noonday hour of intercourse, hours stolen from the grasp of that rigorous fate which has debarred their loves from any closer union. There each in turn, "per mitigar la fiamma dell' ardente amore," recounts some tale heard, we may well believe, in bygone days, when no vows had sealed Saturnina's lips, and when Auretto had been, even from his youth, "ben practicato in ogni cosa." Nor are we ever oblivious, dissonant as are many of the ensuing narratives with the silence of that sanctuary, of the quiet background with its two solitary figures, cut off from the busy turmoil of life, cut off also, even while hand holds hand, each from the other.

In vivid contrast to that tranquil convent scene, where the very sunlight seems misted with the passive melancholy of stunted happiness and incom

1 See also the line in Guido Guinicelli's exquisite thirteenth-century canzone, "Fuoco d' amore in gentil cor s' apprer de," given in the "Rime di diversi Antichi autori Toscani” (translated by D G. Rossetti in his "Early Italian Poets").

plete joys (but a no less integral part of Boccaccio's best known work), is the group of joyous companions whose facile laughter and ready tears are alike the inspiration and the guerdon of the successive narratives of the "Decameron." Amid those refugees, filed from the plague-stricken streets of the city death had made desolate, Fiammetta sits, as Boccaccio saw her, with red garland and golden hair, in the glad love days of his youth.

And there my lady, mid the shadowings Of myrtle trees, mid flowers and grassy

space,

Singing I saw, with others who sat round, her comrades of noble birth, beautiful of feature, gracious of aspect, and of fair virtue. Indeed, here, as with the lovers of Forli, nothing is more characteristic of the conventions of the day than the lack of correspondence between the delicate decorum attributed to the audience and the coarse license of the story-telling; a recreation suspended-it is an added touch of propriety-on Fridays in honor of the Redemption, on Saturdays in veneration of the Virgin.

The whole painting of the fanciful garden landscapes following upon that masterpiece of horror, the opening description of the plague, accentuates the sense of dissonance. It is scene painting of almost unrivalled perfection. Through all the squalid burlesques, the witless comedy, the passionless sensuality, the profane ribaldry of the stories, one is ever aware of the greenness of the little hillside meadow, shadowed by cypress and orange trees, where fitful winds come and go across the sunlit grasses, and the cool water ripples in the fountain basin or lies smooth in the carved stone well. We hear the drowsy noonday notes of singing birds who rest overhead in the branches, we are kept throughout-although more than once the scene shifts-kept by the subtle skill of the great artist, continually conscious of all the open-air grace of those fair Tuscan pleasances Boccaccio has seen with the eye of a lover and drawn with the hand of a master. Nor is it

without significance that he elects to set his tales of sordid crimes and scurrilous tricksters in that framework of fresh leaves and herbs, beneath that blue canopy of open sky.

Was it, in truth, as Sismondi would have us believe, that the king's daughter, Fiammetta herself, the beautiful Sicilian Maria d'Aquino, for whose pleasure Boccaccio doubtless did much amiss, was responsible for the moral ugliness in his work, which, apart from morality, blunts the perceptions of beauty and encrusts and clogs the imaginative faculties, and which in the "Decameron" transcended, be it remembered, the lax conventions of his own age? Surely not.

I know that where all joy doth most abound,

In the third heaven, my own Fiammetta

sees

The grief which I have borne since she is dead.

Oh, pray her (if mine image be not drown'd

In Lethe) that her prayers may never

cease

Until I see her and am comforted.

So Boccaccio addresses Dante, begging the pilgrim of heaven and hell to do him this love-service of sad remembrance to his dead lady. Incongruous indeed is the sonnet with the accusation, and yet it is but another example of the incongruities characteristic of the day, and the dead Fiammetta of the third heaven (the star of Venus) may have had little enough in common with the living Fiammetta of the first earth.

Let, however, the blame and its bur- . den lie where the critics will-on the depraved taste of the woman he loved, on the blood of the Parisian girl whom, if tradition speak truth, his father had loved in like fashion before. Let it rest on the morals of his century or upon his own head, he at least made no effort to shift responsibility when repentance overtook him. For repentance came. The sequel was curious enough. A prophecy made in 1361 (the "Decameron" was finished, it is said, in 1350) of his approaching death struck terror into the spirit of the free critic of supersti

1

tion. Boccaccio was "talmente atterrito e conturbato" that he forthwith proposed totally to abandon the profane arts. Later, Villani states that he strove to recall the works his awakened conscience condemned, "ma non potè, come desiderava, la parola già detta al petto rivocare, nè il foco, che col mantice avea acceso, colla sua volontà spegnere," and dying in 1375, clothed in canonical vestments, Boccaccio left behind him the reputation of having excelled in scandal the literary records of his contemporaries.

Nevertheless, be it acknowledged that when we turn to the novelle of less famous and less notorious authors, they do not seem in this matter to lag so very far behind the steps of their master. Ser Giovanni, Firenzuola-who also, as Boccaccio before, wore the ecclesiastical habit and whose eight stories deal chiefly with incidents of conventual life-Parabosco, Cinthio, bear the same reproach. The eighty-nine novelle of Matteo Bandello, by the grace of God monk of S. Dominic, and by the grace of Francis I. Lord Bishop of Agen, written in the sixteenth century, are open to the same censure. Nor do they betray any consciousness of their sins. "Wind, Water, and Shame met at a tavern." (The fable occurs in one of their stories.) "Where, O Shame, is your home?" asks Water. Shame answers, "Of a truth I cannot tell." Then Wind and Water take pity upon her, because no man living will give her harborage. So "Let her live in our company," they say. But the Wind rises into a hurricane and the Water to storm-waves, and Shame in the tempest is drowned. "Since then," concludes the allegorist, "I will live the life that seems good to me . . . forasmuch as in this our day such a thing as shame is not to be found in all the world."

coarseness itself is less ingrain. Straparola's sympathies are decidedly, as his translator indicates, “on the side of good manners." To Mr. Waters a debt of genuine gratitude is owing, for, with the exception of one tale in the "Palace of Pleasure" and one in Roscoe's volumes, this is the first appearance of Straparola's stories in a literal English version. Their substance, whatever

2

may be said concerning Straparola's disregard of style, is often the product of true imagination, an imagination which seized and fixed the floating fairy lore of the time. The glamour of fairyland, the sun-glamour of the East, not the moon-glamour of the North, lies over many a passage. Magic lore, represented in the "Decameron" by only two stories, that of the "Summer Garden in Winter Snow" and that of "Saladin and Messer Thorelo," in Straparola is rife. His Nights are full, it may be said, of dreams. Perrault and Mme. d'Aulnoy have popularized many a one. Grimm's brilliant tale of the "Master Thief" is identical with the "Cassandrino" of the first Night. The Grateful Dead episode of the eleventh Night surely lingered in Hans Andersen's memory when he invented the weird tale of the "Fellow Traveller:" They are a mine of enchantments: fairy horses, star children, water that danced, apples that sang. There is Samaritana, the gentle snake-sister, and Biancabella, more gentle and less wise. (Why does Dunlop in his abstract turn the snake into a fawn?) There is the "Fairy Doll," and, stranger than all, the fable of the Fool, Flamminio, "who went to seek Death and found Life, who showed him Fear and let him make trial of Death," in which one feels a touch of northern mysticism alien to Italian sentiment. Lastly, born of Straparola's own brain-so far criticism has traced no other originalis Puss in (or rather here out of) Boots. Moreover, even when incidents of actual enchantment are wanting, there

Tiraboschi, libro III. p. xli.

version in "Stories from the Italian Poets.") 3 Decameron, 10th Day, 9th Novel.