Chapter X: The Novellieri (1)

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, AEneas 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]

[Footnote 58: See Bandello's Introduction to _Nov._ xxxv. of Part i., where a most disgusting story is ushered in with ethical reflections; and take this passage from the opening of one of Il Lasca's least presentable novels: "Prima che al novellare di questa sera si dia principio, mi rivolgo a te, Dio ottimo e grandissimo, che solo tutto sai e tutto puoi, pregandoti divotamente e di cuore, che per la tua infinita bonta e clemenza mi conceda, e a tutti questi altri che dopo me diranno, tanto del tuo ajuto e della tua grazia, che la mia lingua e la loro non dica cosa niuna, se non a tua lode e a nostra consolazione."--_Le Cene_ (Firenze, Lemonnier, 1857), p. 7.]

[Footnote 59: It may be mentioned that not _all_ stories were recited before women. Bandello introduces one of his tales with the remark that in the absence of the ladies men may be less careful in their choice of themes (_Nov._ xxx. pt. i.). The exception is singular, as illustrating what was thought unfit for female ears. The _Novella_ itself consists of a few jokes upon a disgusting subject; but it is less immodest than many which he dedicated to noble women.]

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.

[Footnote 60: _I Novellieri in Prosa_, by Giambattista Passano (Milano, Schiepatti, 1864), will be found an excellent dictionary of reference.]

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 Caesar 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.

[Footnote 61: This motive may have been suggested by Folgore da S. Gemignano's sonnet on the month of January.]

[Footnote 62: These are the pair so nobly painted by Luini above the high-altar of S. Maurizio at Milan. See my _Sketches and Studies in Italy_.]

[Footnote 63: What we know about manners at the Courts of our Elizabeth and James, and the gossip of the French Court in Brantome's _Dames Galantes_, remind us that this blending of grossness and luxury was not peculiar to Italy.]

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.

[Footnote 64: See Dedication to _Nov._ xi. of second part.]

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 _facetiae_ 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 _regime_, 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]

[Footnote 65: Read, for example, the _Novella_ of Zilia, who imposed silence on her lover because he kissed her, and the whole sequel to his preposterous obedience (iii. 17); or the tale of Don Giovanni Emmanuel in the lion's den (iii. 39); or the rambling story of Don Diego and Ginevra la Bionda (i. 27). The two latter have a touch of Spanish extravagance, but without the glowing Spanish passion. In quoting Bandello, I shall refer to _Part_ and _Novel_ by two numerals. References are made to the Milanese edition, _Novellieri Italiani_, 1813-1816.]

[Footnote 66: For instance, Parte ii. _Nov._ 14; ii. xlv.; iii. 2, 3, 4, 7, 20.]

[Footnote 67: See the description in ii. 36 (vol. v. p. 270); and again, iii. 61; ii. 45.]

[Footnote 68: ii. 2.]

[Footnote 69: ii. 24.]

[Footnote 70: See, for instance, ii. 20; ii. 7.]

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]

[Footnote 71: I need not give any references to the _Novelle_ of this groveling type. But I may call attention to i. 35; ii. 11; iv. 34, 35. These tales are not exceptionally obscene; they illustrate to what extent mere filth of the Swiftian sort passed for fun in the Italy of Bembo and Castiglione.]

[Footnote 72: i. 42; iii. 21; iii. 52; ii. 12.]

[Footnote 73: iii. 18; ii. 21; i. 36; iii. 55.]

[Footnote 74: ii. 35; cp. i. 37.]

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.

[Footnote 75: The pictures of Milanese luxury before the Spanish occupation are particularly interesting. See i. 9, and the beginning of ii. 8. It seems that then, as now, Milan was famous for her equipages and horses. The tale of the two fops who always dressed in white (iii. 11) brings that life before us. For the Venetian and Roman _demi-monde_, iii. 31; i. 19; i. 42; ii. 51, may be consulted. These passages have the value of authentic studies from contemporary life, and are told about persons whom the author knew at least by name.]

[Footnote 76: i. 8; i. 47.]

[Footnote 77: i. 26.]

[Footnote 78: i. 108.]

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.

[Footnote 79: iii. 65.]

[Footnote 80: i. 44.]

[Footnote 81: ii. 41.]

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.

[Footnote 82: ii. 37. It is clear that both followed the earlier version of Da Porto.]

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.

[Footnote 83: ii. 36. This tale was fashionable in Italy. It forms the basis of that rare comedy, _Gli Ingannati_, performed by the Academy degli Intronati at Siena, and printed in 1538. The scene in this play is laid at Modena; the main plot is interwoven with two intrigues--between Isabella's father and Lelia, the heroine; and between Isabella's maid and a Spaniard. In spite of these complications the action is lucid, and the comedy is one of the best we possess. There is an excellent humorous scene of two innkeepers touting against each other for travelers (Act iii. 2). That Shakspere knew the _Novella_ or the comedy before he wrote his _Twelfth Night_ is more than probable.]

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.

[Footnote 84: ii. 37. Historians will not look for accuracy in what is an Italian love-tale founded on an English legend.]

[Footnote 85: Take the description of the King's love-sickness (_Nov. It._ vol. v. p. 352), the incident of the King's offer to the Earl (pp. 353, 354), Edward's musings (p. 364), Alice alone in London (p. 376), the King's defiance of opinion (p. 379), the people's verdict against Alice (p. 380), Alice arming herself with the dagger (p. 398), the garden scene upon the Thames (p. 399). Then the discourses upon love and temperament (p. 325), on discreet conduct in love affairs (pp. 334-338), on real and false courtiers (pp. 382-388). Compare the descriptive passages on pp. 352, 354, 369, 393, 395, 398, with similar passages in Beaumont and Fletcher.]

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.

[Footnote 86: _Nov. It._ vol. iv. p. 226. Compare the peroration of his Preface to the third part (vol. vii. p. 13).]

[Footnote 87: Vol. v. p. 38.]

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]

[Footnote 88: Vol. iv. p. 226. Cp. vol. ix. p. 339.]

[Footnote 89: Vol. vi. p. 254.]

[Footnote 90: Vol. vii. p. 11.]

[Footnote 91: In the biography of Bandello he says, "Lo stile e piuttosto colto e studiato, che che taluno n'abbia detto in contrario, non pero in guisa che possa mettersi a confronto di quello del Boccaccio."]

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.

[Footnote 92: See Sonnet 79, _Rime_ (ed. 1741).]

[Footnote 93: Founded respectively in 1540 and 1583. Grazzini quarreled with them both.]

[Footnote 94: _Cena_ i. _Nov._ 3, is in its main motive modeled on that novel.]

[Footnote 95: The contrast between the amiable manners of the young men and women described in the introduction to _Le Cene_, and the stories put into their mouths; between the profound immorality, frigid and repellent, of the tales and Ghiacinto's prayer at the beginning; need not be insisted on.]

[Footnote 96: As I shall not dilate upon these novels further in the text, I may support the above censure by reference to the practical joke played upon the pedagogue (i. 2), to the inhuman novel of _Il Berna_ (ii. 2), to the cruel vengeance of a brother (ii. 7), and to the story of the priest (ii. 8).]

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]

[Footnote 97: See above, p. 56, note.]