Chapter 28

[12] Sir Oliver, who died in 1655, aged ninety-three, might, by possibility, have seen all the men of great genius, excepting Chaucer and Roger Bacon, whom England had produced from its first discovery down to our own times, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, and the prodigious shoal that attended these leviathans through the intellectual deep. Newton was but in his thirteenth year at Sir Oliver's death. Raleigh, Spenser, Hooker, Eliot, Selden, Taylor, Hobbes, Sidney, Shaftesbury, and Locke, were existing in his lifetime; and several more, who may be compared with the smaller of these.

[13] Chapman's _Homer_, first book.

THE COUNT GLEICHEM: THE COUNTESS: THEIR CHILDREN, AND ZAIDA.

_Countess._ Ludolph! my beloved Ludolph! do we meet again? Ah! I am jealous of these little ones, and of the embraces you are giving them.

Why sigh, my sweet husband?

Come back again, Wilhelm! Come back again, Annabella! How could you run away? Do you think you can see better out of the corner?

_Annabella._ Is this indeed our papa? What, in the name of mercy, can have given him so dark a colour? I hope I shall never be like that; and yet everybody tells me I am very like papa.

_Wilhelm._ Do not let her plague you, papa; but take me between your knees (I am too old to sit upon them), and tell me all about the Turks, and how you ran away from them.

_Countess._ Wilhelm! if your father had run away from the enemy, we should not have been deprived of him two whole years.

_Wilhelm._ I am hardly such a child as to suppose that a Christian knight would run away from a rebel Turk in battle. But even Christians are taken, somehow, by their tricks and contrivances, and their dog Mahomet. Beside, you know you yourself told me, with tear after tear, and scolding me for mine, that papa was taken by them.

_Annabella._ Neither am I, who am only one year younger, so foolish as to believe there is any dog Mahomet. And, if there were, we have dogs that are better and faithfuller and stronger.

_Wilhelm._ [_To his father._] I can hardly help laughing to think what curious fancies girls have about Mahomet. We know that Mahomet is a dog-spirit with three horsetails.

_Annabella._ Papa! I am glad to see you smile at Wilhelm. I do assure you he is not half so bad a boy as he was, although he did point at me, and did tell you some mischief.

_Count._ I ought to be indeed most happy at seeing you all again.

_Annabella._ And so you are. Don't pretend to look grave now. I very easily find you out. I often look grave when I am the happiest. But forth it bursts at last: there is no room for it in tongue, or eyes, or anywhere.

_Count._ And so, my little angel, you begin to recollect me.

_Annabella._ At first I used to dream of papa, but at last I forgot how to dream of him: and then I cried, but at last I left off crying. And then, papa, who could come to me in my sleep, seldom came again.

_Count._ Why do you now draw back from me, Annabella?

_Annabella._ Because you really are so very very brown: just like those ugly Turks who sawed the pines in the saw-pit under the wood, and who refused to drink wine in the heat of summer, when Wilhelm and I brought it to them. Do not be angry; we did it only once.

_Wilhelm._ Because one of them stamped and frightened her when the other seemed to bless us.

_Count._ Are they still living?

_Countess._ One of them is.

_Wilhelm._ The fierce one.

_Count._ We will set him free, and wish it were the other.

_Annabella._ Papa! I am glad you are come back without your spurs.

_Countess._ Hush, child, hush.

_Annabella._ Why, mamma? Do not you remember how they tore my frock when I clung to him at parting? Now I begin to think of him again: I lose everything between that day and this.

_Countess._ The girl's idle prattle about the spurs has pained you: always too sensitive; always soon hurt, though never soon offended.

_Count._ O God! O my children! O my wife! it is not the loss of spurs I now must blush for.

_Annabella._ Indeed, papa, you never can blush at all, until you cut that horrid beard off.

_Countess._ Well may you say, my own Ludolph, as you do; for most gallant was your bearing in the battle.

_Count._ Ah! why was it ever fought?

_Countess._ Why were most battles? But they may lead to glory even through slavery.

_Count._ And to shame and sorrow.

_Countess._ Have I lost the little beauty I possessed, that you hold my hand so languidly, and turn away your eyes when they meet mine? It was not so formerly ... unless when first we loved.

That one kiss restores to me all my lost happiness.

Come; the table is ready: there are your old wines upon it: you must want that refreshment.

_Count._ Go, my sweet children! you must eat your supper before I do.

_Countess._ Run into your own room for it.

_Annabella._ I will not go until papa has patted me again on the shoulder, now I begin to remember it. I do not much mind the beard: I grow used to it already: but indeed I liked better to stroke and pat the smooth laughing cheek, with my arm across the neck behind. It is very pleasant even so. Am I not grown? I can put the whole length of my finger between your lips.

_Count._ And now, will not _you_ come, Wilhelm?

_Wilhelm._ I am too tall and too heavy: she is but a child. [_Whispers._] Yet I think, papa, I am hardly so much of a man but you may kiss me over again ... if you will not let her see it.

_Countess._ My dears! why do not you go to your supper?

_Annabella._ Because he has come to show us what Turks are like.

_Wilhelm._ Do not be angry with her. Do not look down, papa!

_Count._ Blessings on you both, sweet children!

_Wilhelm._ We may go now.

_Countess._ And now, Ludolph, come to the table, and tell me all your sufferings.

_Count._ The worst begin here.

_Countess._ Ungrateful Ludolph!

_Count._ I am he: that is my name in full.

_Countess._ You have then ceased to love me?

_Count._ Worse; if worse can be: I have ceased to deserve your love.

_Countess._ No: Ludolph hath spoken falsely for once; but Ludolph is not false.

_Count._ I have forfeited all I ever could boast of, your affection and my own esteem. Away with caresses! Repulse me, abjure me; hate, and never pardon me. Let the abject heart lie untorn by one remorse. Forgiveness would split and shiver what slavery but abased.

_Countess._ Again you embrace me; and yet tell me never to pardon you! O inconsiderate man! O idle deviser of impossible things!

But you have not introduced to me those who purchased your freedom, or who achieved it by their valour.

_Count._ Mercy! O God!

_Countess._ Are they dead? Was the plague abroad.

_Count._ I will not dissemble ... such was never my intention ... that my deliverance was brought about by means of----

_Countess._ Say it at once ... a lady.

_Count._ It was.

_Countess._ She fled with you.

_Count._ She did.

_Countess._ And have you left her, sir?

_Count._ Alas! alas! I have not; and never can.

_Countess._ Now come to my arms, brave, honourable Ludolph! Did I not say thou couldst not be ungrateful? Where, where is she who has given me back my husband?

_Count._ Dare I utter it! in this house.

_Countess._ Call the children.

_Count._ No; they must not affront her: they must not even stare at her: other eyes, not theirs, must stab me to the heart.

_Countess._ They shall bless her; we will all. Bring her in.

[_Zaida is led in by the Count._]

_Countess._ We three have stood silent long enough: and much there may be on which we will for ever keep silence. But, sweet young creature! can I refuse my protection, or my love, to the preserver of my husband? Can I think it a crime, or even a folly, to have pitied the brave and the unfortunate? to have pressed (but alas! that it ever should have been so here!) a generous heart to a tender one?

Why do you begin to weep?

_Zaida._ Under your kindness, O lady, lie the sources of these tears.

But why has he left us? He might help me to say many things which I want to say.

_Countess._ Did he never tell you he was married?

_Zaida._ He did indeed.

_Countess._ That he had children?

_Zaida._ It comforted me a little to hear it.

_Countess._ Why? prithee why?

_Zaida._ When I was in grief at the certainty of holding but the second place in his bosom, I thought I could at least go and play with them, and win perhaps their love.

_Countess._ According to our religion, a man must have only one wife.

_Zaida._ That troubled me again. But the dispenser of your religion, who binds and unbinds, does for sequins or services what our Prophet does purely through kindness.

_Countess._ We can love but one.

_Zaida._ We indeed can love only one: but men have large hearts.

_Countess._ Unhappy girl!

_Zaida._ The very happiest in the world.

_Countess._ Ah! inexperienced creature!

_Zaida._ The happier for that perhaps.

_Countess._ But the sin!

_Zaida._ Where sin is, there must be sorrow: and I, my sweet sister, feel none whatever. Even when tears fall from my eyes, they fall only to cool my breast: I would not have one the fewer: they all are for him: whatever he does, whatever he causes, is dear to me.

_Countess._ [_Aside._] This is too much. I could hardly endure to have him so beloved by another, even at the extremity of the earth. [_To Zaida._] You would not lead him into perdition?

_Zaida._ I have led him (Allah be praised!) to his wife and children. It was for those I left my father. He whom we love might have stayed with me at home: but there he would have been only half happy, even had he been free. I could not often let him see me through the lattice; I was too afraid; and I dared only once let fall the water-melon; it made such a noise in dropping and rolling on the terrace: but, another day, when I had pared it nicely, and had swathed it up well among vine-leaves, dipped in sugar and sherbet, I was quite happy. I leaped and danced to have been so ingenious. I wonder what creature could have found and eaten it. I wish he were here, that I might ask him if he knew.

_Countess._ He quite forgot home then!

_Zaida._ When we could speak together at all, he spoke perpetually of those whom the calamity of war had separated from him.

_Countess._ It appears that you could comfort him in his distress, and did it willingly.

_Zaida._ It is delightful to kiss the eye-lashes of the beloved: is it not? but never so delightful as when fresh tears are on them.

_Countess._ And even this too? you did this?

_Zaida._ Fifty times.

_Countess._ Insupportable!

He often then spoke about me?

_Zaida._ As sure as ever we met: for he knew I loved him the better when I heard him speak so fondly.

_Countess._ [_To herself._] Is this possible? It may be ... of the absent, the unknown, the unfeared, the unsuspected.

_Zaida._ We shall now be so happy, all three.

_Countess._ How can we all live together?

_Zaida._ Now he is here, is there no bond of union?

_Countess._ Of union? of union? [_Aside_.] Slavery is a frightful thing! slavery for life, too! And she released him from it. What then? Impossible! impossible! [_To Zaida._] We are rich....

_Zaida._ I am glad to hear it. Nothing anywhere goes on well without riches.

_Countess._ We can provide for you amply....

_Zaida._ Our husband....

_Countess._ _Our!... husband!..._

_Zaida._ Yes, yes; I know he is yours too; and you, being the elder and having children, are lady above all. He can tell you how little I want: a bath, a slave, a dish of pilau, one jonquil every morning, as usual; nothing more. But he must swear that he has kissed it first. No, he need not swear it; I may always see him do it, now.

_Countess._ [_Aside._] She agonizes me. [_To Zaida._] Will you never be induced to return to your own country? Could not Ludolph persuade you?

_Zaida._ He who could once persuade me anything, may now command me everything: when he says I must go, I go. But he knows what awaits me.

_Countess._ No, child! he never shall say it.

_Zaida._ Thanks, lady! eternal thanks! The breaking of his word would break my heart; and better _that_ break first. Let the command come from you, and not from him.

_Countess._ [_Calling aloud._] Ludolph! Ludolph! hither! Kiss the hand I present to you, and never forget it is the hand of a preserver.

THE PENTAMERON;

OR,

INTERVIEWS OF MESSER GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO AND MESSER FRANCESCO PETRARCA

WHEN

SAID MESSER GIOVANNI LAY INFIRM AT HIS VILLETTA HARD BY CERTALDO;

AFTER WHICH THEY SAW NOT EACH OTHER ON OUR SIDE OF PARADISE.

FIRST DAY'S INTERVIEW

_Boccaccio._ Who is he that entered, and now steps so silently and softly, yet with a foot so heavy it shakes my curtains?

Frate Biagio! can it possibly be you?

No more physic for me, nor masses neither, at present.

Assunta! Assuntina! who is it?

_Assunta._ I cannot say, Signor Padrone! he puts his finger in the dimple of his chin, and smiles to make me hold my tongue.

_Boccaccio._ Fra Biagio! are you come from Samminiato for this? You need not put your finger there. We want no secrets. The girl knows her duty and does her business. I have slept well, and wake better. [_Raising himself up a little._]

Why? who are you? It makes my eyes ache to look aslant over the sheets; and I cannot get to sit quite upright so conveniently; and I must not have the window-shutters opened, they tell me.

_Petrarca._ Dear Giovanni! have you then been very unwell?

_Boccaccio._ O that sweet voice! and this fat friendly hand of thine, Francesco!

Thou hast distilled all the pleasantest flowers, and all the wholesomest herbs of spring, into my breast already.

What showers we have had this April, ay! How could you come along such roads? If the devil were my labourer, I would make him work upon these of Certaldo. He would have little time and little itch for mischief ere he had finished them, but would gladly fan himself with an Agnus-castus, and go to sleep all through the carnival.

_Petrarca._ Let us cease to talk both of the labour and the labourer. You have then been dangerously ill?

_Boccaccio._ I do not know: they told me I was: and truly a man might be unwell enough, who has twenty masses said for him, and fain sigh when he thinks what he has paid for them. As I hope to be saved, they cost me a lira each. Assunta is a good market-girl in eggs, and mutton, and cow-heel; but I would not allow her to argue and haggle about the masses. Indeed she knows best whether they were not fairly worth all that was asked for them, although I could have bought a winter cloak for less money. However, we do not want both at the same time. I did not want the cloak: I wanted _them_, it seems. And yet I begin to think God would have had mercy on me, if I had begged it of him myself in my own house. What think you?

_Petrarca._ I think he might.

_Boccaccio._ Particularly if I offered him the sacrifice on which I wrote to you.

_Petrarca._ That letter has brought me hither.

_Boccaccio._ You do then insist on my fulfilling my promise, the moment I can leave my bed. I am ready and willing.

_Petrarca._ Promise! none was made. You only told me that, if it pleased God to restore you to your health again, you are ready to acknowledge His mercy by the holocaust of your _Decameron_. What proof have you that God would exact it? If you could destroy the _Inferno_ of Dante, would you?

_Boccaccio._ Not I, upon my life! I would not promise to burn a copy of it on the condition of a recovery for twenty years.

_Petrarca._ You are the only author who would not rather demolish another's work than his own; especially if he thought it better: a thought which seldom goes beyond suspicion.

_Boccaccio._ I am not jealous of any one: I think admiration pleasanter. Moreover, Dante and I did not come forward at the same time, nor take the same walks. His flames are too fierce for you and me: we had trouble enough with milder. I never felt any high gratification in hearing of people being damned; and much less would I toss them into the fire myself. I might indeed have put a nettle under the nose of the learned judge in Florence, when he banished you and your family; but I hardly think I could have voted for more than a scourging to the foulest and fiercest of the party.

_Petrarca._ Be as compassionate, be as amiably irresolute, toward your own _Novelle_, which have injured no friend of yours, and deserve more affection.

_Boccaccio._ Francesco! no character I ever knew, ever heard of, or ever feigned, deserves the same affection as you do; the tenderest 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 tuâ 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.