anecdotes of shallow tricks, ribald and repulsive frauds practised by one man upon another, by wives upon their lovers and husbands, and (significantly less often) by husbands upon their wives. They consist of situations rather than of plots, and the victims evoke as little sympathy with their sufferings as do the perpetrators of the tricks with their motives. In many instances a taste for mere brutal horseplay serves as the chief instigation to mischief; in others other motives for malice are supplied. More often than not, in the more elaborate compositions a lurid spot of tragedy discolors the scene, and, as M. Gebhart observes, "on n'y rit point toujours de très bon cœur." Thus they succeed one another. Comedies of humor without wit; comedies of sordid revenges for sordid wrongs; trivial jests ending in torture and madness; burlesques where death, in its most formidable aspects, terminates the farce. Such are the themes for laughter presented to audiences whose insatiable passion for gaiety is represented as dominating alike all sentiments of pity and all repugnance to vice.

There is a certain grimness in the spectacle of a levity so consistent and complete-so, if one may thus express it, impenetrable. It is a levity without bounds. It extends almost beyond the horizon of imaginative realization. It has no modern equivalent. The ostentation, superficiality, the assertiveness and flippancy of later days is unknown to it; it is as absolutely spontaneous and unconscious as it is callous and invincible. Nothing is too sacred or too revolting to enhance its enjoyment. The stories in the fabliaux of incidents connected with dead bodies-where fiction perhaps touches its lowest stratabecame favorite models for the novellieri. The abbreviated sketch of one composition of the kind will serve to illustrate the light-hearted brutality of such inventions.1 A young priest, Pietro by name, "avendo in animo di voler far una beffa" on a youth attached to the service of his church, steals from

1 See "Le Cene" di A. F. Grazzini (Il Lasca). Cena I., Novella vii.

its vault the body of a girl, and places it in the church in such a manner that the youth, whose duty calls him to ring the matin bell in the darkness of the early morning, is confronted by the apparition. The young sacristan's first panie over, he discovers the truth of the "beffa,” and resolves to be quits with the priest. Pietro now sleeps the sleep of the just; the sacristan secretly conveys the dead girl to Pietro's sleeping room, and the first sight upon which his waking eyes fall is her dead face. Conscience-stricken by the memory of her violated sepulchre, Pietro, blind with terror, flies from what he takes to be an avenging spectre. Flying, he falls upon the stairway, and, as the sacristan's bell summons the household to prayers, is found senseless. Restored to con. sciousness, he raves of the phantom, and thus raving confesses the night's misdeed. Meanwhile the sacristan, in the general confusion, has re-entered the house unmarked and restores the body to its grave, replacing the flower garland in the hair and rearranging the death drapery. Thus, while both Pietro's room and the vault are searched for confirmation of the young priest's tale, no evidence is found to corroborate his delirious statement. while the sacristan, when interrogated, declares the whole episode to be a figment of Pietro's imagination. The profaned sanctity of death now takes its sinister revenge. Knowing for truth what all around hold for a delusion, Pietro doubts his own sanity. A frenzied melancholy creeps over him, he can neither eat nor sleep, and, finally throwing himself from a window, he dies miserably upon the stones of the court below. Truly in such stories "on n'y rit point de bon cœur."

Such stories, however, are but a section of the whole. Much still remains to rivet our imagination in the literature from which Shakespeare drew his "Cymbeline" and Chaucer his "Griseldis." Despite all its sins, it attracts and repels in almost equal degrees; at

2

2 Decameron, 2nd Day, 9th Novel. (Though Hallam attributes it to Cinthio.)

8 Ibid. 10th Day, 10th Novel.

tracts by its gay simplicity, carrying us back to a world which laughed so easily at such sorry jests, interested itself in the contemplation of such childish stratagems, and wept over such fantastic extravaganzas of grief. Its passages of didactic piety, often the prefix to some peculiarly scurrilous episode or the envoy to the most unedifying anecdote, its moralizings on the obligations of domestic duties, the infringe ment of which in their most binding elements the ensuing plot most frequently illustrates, give a curious and illuminating color to the atmosphere. They afford a key to the ethics of a world where principle and practice had agreed in all courtesy to differ; where religion, faith, purity, truth and honor received befitting verbal reverence, their contraries due condemnation, but where one deciphers in the very fact of that unquestioning acceptance of duly authorized truth-truth spiritual and moral-the testimony of a profound indifference. Thus they merely evade the laws of right doing. Antagonism to good, the antagonism of evil will, or that deeper antagonism of loyal minds embittered and alienated by the hypocrisies of convention, is absent. Avarice, the ambition which of sinners makes false saints, the marriage of the old to the young, the faithlessness of women-for the novellieri have their own decalogue-are rebuked and ridiculed, but rebuked without indignation, and ridiculed without scorn. The vices of the Church, moving Dante to austere rage, and Petrarca to resentful melan choly, serve Boccaccio and his comrades as convenient subject matter for comic raillery. The sins of the world are likewise arraigned, but it is at the world's tribunal only. It is not the code of the soul, but the law of custom, they have infringed. Satires lapse into harlequinades, and the most criminal delinquencies wear the mask of Christ mas mummeries. It is this resolutely maintained levity of judgment, levity of heart, and levity of soul that ends, even more in the "Decameron" than elsewhere, by jarring our sympathiesthis incessant recurrence to a very

frenzy of buffoonery that eventually frets and outwearies our imagination.

Yet the novellieri are not without their prophet. Masuccio, it has been said, stands to them in much the same relationship as that borne by Savonarola to his brother monks. A gulf divides his work from theirs. They wrote to amuse, from the wide standpoint of the indifferent, to dissipate the malinconia of idle hours, to combat the tedium of life with laughter, to please their audience and to please themselves. Masuccio laughs too-it was the custom of the time-but his laughter is harsh. He, too, concocts-it was the fashioncoarse burlesques, but with him they have not even the merit of riotous spontaneity; they are jests extorted from a sombre clown. He wrote with a pen of red-hot iron, pursuing the two objects of his especial hatred, the evil priest and the evil woman, with the invectives of a savage justice. He rails on the priesthood with the concentrated insolence of the priest, he denounces womanhood with the passionate hysteria of a woman. His denunciation of either is tainted with the worst qualities of both. In all his writings that unmistakable note, which we call personal, is seldom absent; his flail is not that of the apostle but of the fellowsinner, and reading the stories of “Il Novellino" with their creed of fierce scepticism, one asks involuntarily "What woman's sin wrote Masuccio's novels?"

He has put on one side, and forever, the levity of Boccaccio's philosophy; the common phrases of artificial courtesy break in his hand; where others deride he stabs; nor are the sufferings he heaps upon his women allowed to expiate their least weaknesses; he has no use for pity. Nevertheless, let all be forgiven to him for the sake of that monopoly he held of virulent sincerity. of envenomed seriousness; for the reality of his sentiment and the overpowering force of his conviction; for his hate itself, which climbs like a tongue of living flame through the sham stage fires of other novellieri, scorching, defacing, destroying, yet. like the

storm-wind and the flood. an element of nature purifying while it devastates the earth.

Of character-drawing either in Masuccio or his contemporaries there is little. The figures in their stories are types rather than individuals. A single motive, a dominant passion, determines the plot-love, revenge, malice. vanity, are the prominent agencies. A man loves; forthwith he sacrifices honor, friendship, affection, to attain the satisfaction of his wishes. He suffers injury; straightway he sets himself, in similar guise, to inflict an equal hurt upon his wronger. Vacillations born of the inner wavering of conflicting emo tions, complications rising from the contention of contrary instincts, are ignored. The result is a brilliant directness impossible to analysts to whom the side issues of action are apparent. "Two types of women alternate.

The

woman who, astute or foolish, is solely actuated by a sordid love of gain and pleasures, or a vulgar delight in intrigue who is herself, according to the exigency of plot, either dupe or decelver. Where her cunning fails she is ridiculed; where it triumphs, applauded; for never more barefacedly has the success of a crime been upheld as its apology. The converse type, be she peasant or gentile donna, wedded or unwedded, is gracious and loveworthy, "bella, honesta, costumata, savia." The epithets are lavish. Where she loves she is invariably faithful, whether the bond be legitimate or, as is more often the case, unlawful. of faith towards any other tie she is mainly innocent. Her morals have been much and often impugned, yet, it must be allowed, she possesses to the full the virtues of her sins. There is possibly little to urge in defence of her lighthearted ill-doings, but they have one extenuating point: she incurs the penal. ties of her weakness with uncalculat. ing courage, and endures them, when Inevitable, with unflinching impenitence. She deviates from the narrow road, but it is to walk at the edge of a precipice for the menace of a swift vengeance hung over the head of the

woman who sinned. Sometimes evaded, more often the sword fell. The screen of easy lies which no one believes and every one, for social convenience, accepts, was a shield the Italian husband of the Renaissance never suffered for a moment to stand between his outraged honor and his revenge, and for the woman love's crimes were wrought under the very shadow of a relentless death. A sinister phantom, armed and pitiless, waited upon the threshold in the veriest farce of commonplace intrigue.

As the art of the novelist developed, however, a more definite individualization takes the place of the type. In the sixteenth-century novels of Bandello there is a clear attempt at characterization. For buoyant freshness and the jubilant grace of April the child-figure in the Venetian romance of "Gerardo and Elena"1 stands out almost alone. The opening description, at its own period, has few parallels. Elena, a motherless child, is provided by her father's solicitude with the feast-day companionship of four sisters.

When together with Elena they played many games; amongst others they played forfeits, which was a game of ball. The four being from seventeen to twenty-one years old were each in love, and often while playing, now one, now another, would run out and look over the balconies at their lovers as they passed in gondolas below. But Elena, who was most simple, grew much displeased at this and pulled them back by their gowns to make them go on with the game. But they, to whom the sight of their lovers gave more joy than the ball, cared little for Elena, but stood fast by the windows, sometimes flinging flowers to their lovers as they went by.

One day, when teased by Elena, one of her playmates said, "Elena, if you could taste but a tithe of the pleasure we get in would care nothing whatever for forfeits; amusing ourselves at these windows, you but you are a simpleton, knowing nothing

as yet of such traffic."

So the story opens: with those four girl faces looking down from the palace

1 Bandello, Parte I., Novella, xxxxi. (The third story in Mr. Pinkerton's translations.)

windows on the water street below, with its throng of gondolas, its merchants, its black-veiled women, and its lingering groups of lovers. Then came a day, feast-day though it be, when the girl faces are absent; Elena's playfellows have forsaken her, and, sad and lonely, the little maiden of thirteen or fourteen summers takes her stand, not at the great windows of the palace frontage, but at the balcony overhanging a narrow sideway canal, and young Gerardo, on some enterprise of love, so fate will have it, passes below down the sequestered waterway. He sees the fair child's head decked with a red carnation in the setting of the old grey wall, and seeing, he looks again. Her girl companions have taught Elena something, if but little; the word without its meaning, the token without the significance thereof. Elena "turned to Gerardo a merry look, such as she had often seen her playmates give to "their gallants." Gerardo returns the silent greeting of her eyes, "while she, thinking it was a game, repaid him with a smile." When the poat passes onwards, but soon the gondola returns and goes very slowly beneath the house, and Elena is still there, still looking down, with it may be, her melancholy abated. This time it is Gerardo who smiles up at her, and lest the game should be in complete or the picture lose one fraction of its mute grace, leaning over the edge of the stone she lets the crimson flower fall from its resting-place "above her ear" to seek the kisses of Gerardo's lips. "The scent of the flower and the fairness of the girl set his "heart on fire." That other woman on whose quest the youth was bound has long to wait. But Elena "being very simple and not having as yet opened her breast to the darts of love, took no great heed of Gerardo, though it pleased her to see him." It was all to her but a pas time of looks exchanged and flowers cast down to kiss-a pastime which, like that ball play she had played before, she will learn to know is a game of forfeits.

The days go by. Each festival Elena. who now seeks solitude as much as

earlier she had desired companionship. takes her stand at the window, and with glad, ignorant eyes awaits her lover's salutation-though "on common days she deemed it unmeet to play this game." Then Gerardo for very love falls sick, and the feasts come and go, but his gondola is no more seen. Elena's old nurse, whose fosterling he was, becomes his confidant. He tells her all, and of his love's strange nature, "see ing that he knew not the name of his beloved;" nor knew anything save that she is the fairest of five maidens who with gay faces look down from the palace balconies on festival mornings. And the old nurse is "sure it must be one of Elena's companions, Elena being so innocent." Presently the old woman's eyes are opened. Watching Elena unseen, one day, the girl grew very joyous. And surely so, for once again Gerardo's gondola halts beneath the walls of her father's house. With childish gestures Elena shows him, all unashamed, her gladness. In her hand she holds a nosegay of blossoms, doubtless sweet as that first carnation, and merrily she throws them down. This time she has not cherished her flowers in vain. Gerardo-her love-has come back.

Then, with semblance of great anger, the old nurse accuses her nurseling of her unabashed sins. First half with fear Elena listens, then her eyes tell her the old face she loves so well is not really wrathful, and thus "she flung her arms about her neck, and kissing her as a child would do, 'Nena'-it is the pet name Venetian nurses bear'sweetest of mothers, I humbly crave your pardon if in the game you saw me playing I erred, though myself I do not think it." She tells all that has passed, the love-game she has played with roses and carnations, "and he with whom I chose to play was the youth you saw. For my own part, I wish he would often go by, and I know not why you scold me; but if it be very wrong, I will refrain therefrom." With a pathetic simplicity, strangely at variance with Bandello's writings, the old nurse teaches the child her first lesson