Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
lover, the truest friend, the firmest patriot, and, rarest of glories!
the poet who cherishes another's fame as dearly as his own.
_Petrarca._ If aught of this is true, let it be recorded of me that my
exhortations and entreaties have been successful, in preserving the
works of the most imaginative and creative genius that our Italy, or
indeed our world, hath in any age beheld.
_Boccaccio._ I would not destroy his poems, as I told you, or think I
told you. Even the worst of the Florentines, who in general keep only
one of God's commandments, keep it rigidly in regard to Dante--
Love them who curse you.
He called them all scoundrels, with somewhat less courtesy than
cordiality, and less afraid of censure for veracity than adulation: he
sent their fathers to hell, with no inclination to separate the child
and parent: and now they are hugging him for it in his shroud! Would
you ever have suspected them of being such lovers of justice?
You must have mistaken my meaning; the thought never entered my head:
the idea of destroying a single copy of Dante! And what effect would
that produce? There must be fifty, or near it, in various parts of
Italy.
_Petrarca._ I spoke of you.
_Boccaccio._ Of me! My poetry is vile; I have already thrown into the
fire all of it within my reach.
_Petrarca._ Poetry was not the question. We neither of us are such
poets as we thought ourselves when we were younger, and as younger men
think us still. I meant your _Decameron_; in which there is more
character, more nature, more invention, than either modern or ancient
Italy, or than Greece, from whom she derived her whole inheritance,
ever claimed or ever knew. Would you consume a beautiful meadow
because there are reptiles in it; or because a few grubs hereafter may
be generated by the succulence of the grass?
_Boccaccio._ You amaze me: you utterly confound me.
_Petrarca._ If you would eradicate twelve or thirteen of the
_Novelle_, and insert the same number of better, which you could
easily do within as many weeks, I should be heartily glad to see it
done. Little more than a tenth of the _Decameron_ is bad: less than a
twentieth of the _Divina Commedia_ is good.
_Boccaccio._ So little?
_Petrarca._ Let me never seem irreverent to our master.
_Boccaccio._ Speak plainly and fearlessly, Francesco! Malice and
detraction are strangers to you.
_Petrarca._ Well then: at least sixteen parts in twenty of the
_Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ are detestable, both in poetry and
principle: the higher parts are excellent indeed.
_Boccaccio._ I have been reading the _Paradiso_ more recently. Here it
is, under the pillow. It brings me happier dreams than the others, and
takes no more time in bringing them. Preparation for my lectures made
me remember a great deal of the poem. I did not request my auditors to
admire the beauty of the metrical version:
Osanna sanctus deus Sabbaoth,
Super-illustrans charitate tua
Felices ignes horum Malahoth,
nor these, with a slip of Italian between two pales of Latin:
Modicum,[14] et non videbitis me,
Et iterum, sorelle mie dilette,
Modicum, et vos videbitis me.
I dare not repeat all I recollect of
Pepe Setan, Pepe Setan, aleppe,
as there is no holy-water-sprinkler in the room: and you are aware
that other dangers awaited me, had I been so imprudent as to show the
Florentines the allusion of our poet. His _gergo_ is perpetually in
play, and sometimes plays very roughly.
_Petrarca._ We will talk again of him presently. I must now rejoice
with you over the recovery and safety of your prodigal son, the
_Decameron_.
_Boccaccio._ So then, you would preserve at any rate my favourite
volume from the threatened conflagration.
_Petrarca._ Had I lived at the time of Dante, I would have given him
the same advice in the same circumstances. Yet how different is the
tendency of the two productions! Yours is somewhat too licentious; and
young men, in whose nature, or rather in whose education and habits,
there is usually this failing, will read you with more pleasure than
is commendable or innocent. Yet the very time they occupy with you,
would perhaps be spent in the midst of those excesses or
irregularities, to which the moralist, in his utmost severity, will
argue that your pen directs them. Now there are many who are fond of
standing on the brink of precipices, and who nevertheless are as
cautious as any of falling in. And there are minds desirous of being
warmed by description, which without this warmth might seek excitement
among the things described.
I would not tell you in health what I tell you in convalescence, nor
urge you to compose what I dissuade you from cancelling. After this
avowal, I do declare to you, Giovanni, that in my opinion, the very
idlest of your tales will do the world as much good as evil; not
reckoning the pleasure of reading, nor the exercise and recreation of
the mind, which in themselves are good. What I reprove you for, is the
indecorous and uncleanly; and these, I trust, you will abolish. Even
these, however, may repel from vice the ingenuous and graceful spirit,
and can never lead any such toward them. Never have you taken an
inhuman pleasure in blunting and fusing the affections at the furnace
of the passions; never, in hardening by sour sagacity and ungenial
strictures, that delicacy which is more productive of innocence and
happiness, more estranged from every track and tendency of their
opposites, than what in cold, crude systems hath holden the place and
dignity of the highest virtue. May you live, O my friend, in the
enjoyment of health, to substitute the facetious for the licentious,
the simple for the extravagant, the true and characteristic for the
indefinite and diffuse.
* * * * *
_Boccaccio._ And after all this, can you bear to think what I am?
_Petrarca._ Complacently and joyfully; venturing, nevertheless, to
offer you a friend's advice.
Enter into the mind and heart of your own creatures: think of them
long, entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of
critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of
an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become
smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended
the most spider-webs; and the quarry out of which palaces are erected
is the nursery of nettle and bramble.
_Boccaccio._ It is better to keep always in view such writers as
Cicero, than to run after those idlers who throw stones that can never
reach us.
_Petrarca._ If you copied him to perfection, and on no occasion lost
sight of him, you would be an indifferent, not to say a bad writer.
_Boccaccio._ I begin to think you are in the right. Well then,
retrenching some of my licentious tales, I must endeavour to fill up
the vacancy with some serious and some pathetic.
_Petrarca._ I am heartily glad to hear of this decision; for,
admirable as you are in the jocose, you descend from your natural
position when you come to the convivial and the festive. You were
placed among the Affections, to move and master them, and gifted with
the rod that sweetens the fount of tears. My nature leads me also to
the pathetic; in which, however, an imbecile writer may obtain
celebrity. Even the hard-hearted are fond of such reading, when they
are fond of any; and nothing is easier in the world than to find and
accumulate its sufferings. Yet this very profusion and luxuriance of
misery is the reason why few have excelled in describing it. The eye
wanders over the mass without noticing the peculiarities. To mark them
distinctly is the work of genius; a work so rarely performed, that, if
time and space may be compared, specimens of it stand at wider
distances than the trophies of Sesostris. Here we return again to the
_Inferno_ of Dante, who overcame the difficulty. In this vast desert
are its greater and its less oasis; Ugolino and Francesca di Rimini.
The peopled region is peopled chiefly with monsters and moschitoes:
the rest for the most part is sand and suffocation.
_Boccaccio._ Ah! had Dante remained through life the pure solitary
lover of Bice, his soul had been gentler, tranquiller, and more
generous. He scarcely hath described half the curses he went through,
nor the roads he took on the journey: theology, politics, and that
barbican of the _Inferno_, marriage, surrounded with its
Selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte.
Admirable is indeed the description of Ugolino, to whoever can endure
the sight of an old soldier gnawing at the scalp of an old archbishop.
_Petrarca._ The thirty lines from
Ed io sentii,
are unequalled by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions
of poetry.
_Boccaccio._ Give me rather the six on Francesca: for if in the former
I find the simple, vigorous, clear narration, I find also what I would
not wish, the features of Ugolino reflected full in Dante. The two
characters are similar in themselves; hard, cruel, inflexible,
malignant, but, whenever moved, moved powerfully. In Francesca, with
the faculty of divine spirits, he leaves his own nature (not indeed
the exact representative of theirs) and converts all his strength into
tenderness. The great poet, like the original man of the Platonists,
is double, possessing the further advantage of being able to drop one
half at his option, and to resume it. Some of the tenderest on paper
have no sympathies beyond; and some of the austerest in their
intercourse with their fellow-creatures have deluged the world with
tears. It is not from the rose that the bee gathers her honey, but
often from the most acrid and the most bitter leaves and petals:
Quando leggemmo il disiato viso
Esser baciato di cotanto amante,
Questi, chi mai da me non sia diviso!
La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante ...
_Galeotto_ fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse ...
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the
tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight;
and, instead of naming Paolo, which indeed she never has done from the
beginning, she now designates him as
Questi chi mai da me non sia diviso!
Are we not impelled to join in her prayer, wishing them happier in
their union?
_Petrarca._ If there be no sin in it.
_Boccaccio._ Ay, and even if there be ... God help us!
What a sweet aspiration in each cesura of the verse! three love-sighs
fixed and incorporate! Then, when she hath said
La bocca mi bacio, tutto tremante,
she stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for
the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says: '_Galeotto_ is the
name of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she has
drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle
beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her.
'_Galeotto_ is the name of the book.'
'What matters that?'
'And of the writer.'
'Or that either?'
At last she disarms him: but how?
'_That_ day we read no more.'
Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception,
exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who,
on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a
deplorable want of it.
_Petrarca._ Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at
discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole
section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,
And he who fell as a dead body falls,
would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What
execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Siena, Pisa, Genoa! what hatred