The Cent

The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (1432)1 was for long attributed to Louis XI., and not inappropriately, as far as the prevailing tone of deceit and Nouvelles cruelty is concerned; but the weight of evinouvelles. dence is against his authorship and strongly in favour of that of Antoine de la Salle, who is referred to in the text as the author of one of the stories. The book is Burgundian in origin; many of the names are those of Philip the Good's courtiers; and the collection is dedicated to that prince. Antoine de la Salle's intimacy with Poggio favours the assumption that these facetiae, or the idea of working them up, may have been inspired from that quarter. In the dedication the author admits an Italian influence, and tells us that the title at least is borrowed from the Hundred Tales of Boccaccio's Decameron. The only argument against Antoine de la Salle's responsibility in the matter is that the extreme licence of the stories is unredeemed by the delicate irony and reserve of his accredited works.

As a Burgundian composition, intended for the amusement of the élite of that Court, it is rather remarkable. The stories are direct and simple in style, unaffected by the pedantic rhetoric of the ducal court; and they are intensely bourgeois in spirit. There is no faëry, or chivalry, or any of the tricks of romance in the framework of these tales: we have the personnel of the novelle, gay merchants, lusty dames, and naughty serving-maids, bent on practical joking

1 Ed. Wright in Bibl. Elzév., 1858. A handy edition is published by Garnier, 1893.

and cuckoldry. If there is anything 'Burgundian ' in these stories it is in their flamboyant sensuality, in their ingenious elaboration of every variety of intrigue. They are an overdrawn picture of contemporary libertinism, just as the golden phrases of Chastellain are overstrained art. This exaggeration is probably to a large extent the result of the fact that the book is unoriginal, a redressing of the old fun of the Gesta Romanorum and the Decameron, with borrowings from the Italian novellieri and the Facetiae of Poggio, and an admixture of some of the traditional details of the fabliaux. It is only in this editorial sense that the epithet nouvelles is justified. The morbid ingenuity nowise affects the literary expression, which is direct and simple, and never loses itself in metaphorical pruriency. The popularity of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles thus served in a positive way the artistic interests of French prose, a fact which cannot be so readily assumed in the case of later classics among the contes pour rire.

382

CHAPTER XII.

A PROSE MISCELLANY: SOUTHERN EUROPE AND GERMANY.

ITALIAN PROSE-THE LETTERS-THE VITE"-THE SERMONS-TRANS"NOVELLE - MASUCCIO GUARDATO

LATIONS HISTORY THE

'IL GRASSO LEGNAIUOLO -'REALI DI FRANCIA'-ALBERTI-HIS
TREATMENT OF THE VERNACULAR - HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLI-
PHILI'-ITS HISTORICAL POSITION IN MOTIF AND IN LANGUAGE
-SPANISH PROSE- THE CHRONICLES THE LIBRO DEL PASO

HONROSO'-OTHER TYPES-THE 'CÁRCEL DE AMOR -THE GERMAN
ROMANCES-'TILL EULENSPIEGEL'-ITS SATIRICAL "MOTIF "-MINOR
GERMAN PROSE-THE 'DE IMITATIONE CHRISTI '-A CONTEMPORARY
CONTRAST.

Italian prose.

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY Italy is not so seriously concerned with the problem of a vernacular prose, either as to its rights to usurp the subject-matter of verse, or as to its claims as an instrument of style. The remains are ample, but they are, with but few exceptions, of subsidiary importance, and rather indirectly literary in intention. It is not till the sixteenth century that a definite attempt is made to realise the purpose of Dante's great declaration, and to carry out Boccaccio's experiment to its logical conclusion. The retarding influence was Latin, which

had attracted the literary mind both earlier and more irresistibly in Italy than elsewhere. In the full flood of the Renaissance both the great and the small writers were swept into the ocean of classicism; the work of men like Eneas Sylvius, or Pontano, than whom none express more fully the spiritual intention of the age, is entirely in Latin; Alberti, Politian, Bruni, Palmieri, Collenuccio, Sannazaro, and Savonarola, many indeed of high repute in the vulgar, write more often in Latin, and set greater store by their scholarship; even the chronicles, which in France. were already almost exclusively in the mother-speech, remain the history books of monks and learned persons. Italian prose, such as it was, had to fall back upon the models of the trecentismo. Boccaccio's more ornate style was of small avail, for, its object being to attune Italian prose to classical rhythm, there was every reason, especially in the circumstance of the Revival, to accept the classical tradition in its entirety. Vernacular prose is therefore handicapped both in style and in subject, in the one showing, at the hands of writers like Belcari, an arrested development, and in the other a lack of that material which might inspire more strenuous effort.

If we omit three authors of exceptional interestto whom we shall return in this chapter-the entire corpus of Italian prose is concerned with the minor and unsustained matters of literature. The greatest activity is in letters, short biographies or 'Vite,' sermons, and the like.

There are very few translations, and but few novelle. The chronicles are more

numerous, but they are concerned with small periods or limited subjects. Most of the prose pieces are short and occasional in tone, with the outstanding exception of the romance of the Reali di Francia.

The Letters.

The epistolary and biographical material is, taken as a whole, the most interesting. In both varieties Italy takes the lead in point of time and in accomplishment. Valuable as the Paston Letters are to the English historian and antiquary, they are too matterof-fact to deserve the epithet 'literary,' and they are unique. 'Lives' of the type of Cavendish's Wolsey belong to the next century; and in France, the Mémoires, which we have seen were consecrated to certain reigns, are biographical only in the loose sense that a prince's life is the political history of his time. The Italians made more of the Letter; made it, in many cases, the medium for the utterance of thoughts on all kinds of literary and political matters, and even collected the more notable examples into volumes for popular edification.1 This was in all probability a direct effect of the stimulus which Humanism had given to the epistolary style, as shown so emphatically in the great body of Latin correspondence from Gasparino, the protégé of Filippo Maria Visconti, early in the century, down to the more Ciceronian days of Filelfo and the later Humanists. Lorenzo's best vernacular prose is contained in a letter to Federigo of Aragon, which is

1 As in the dainty volumes of Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini, et eccellentissimi ingegni, scritte in diverse materie, collected and printed by Paolo Manuzio at Venice (revised edition, 1549).