Imaginary Conversations and Poems Part 55

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 gra.s.s?

_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-ill.u.s.trans charitate tua Felices ignes horum Malahoth,

nor these, with a slip of Italian between two pales of Latin:

Modic.u.m,[14] et non videbitis me, Et iterum, sorelle mie dilette, Modic.u.m, 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sions; 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 subst.i.tute 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 acc.u.mulate 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 ma.s.s without noticing the peculiarities. To mark them distinctly is the work of genius; a work so rarely performed, that, if time and s.p.a.ce 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 baci 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 ... G.o.d 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 baci, 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.'