Note 444 — Chapter XII

We shall consider the Vita di Dante later when we discuss Boccaccio's whole relation to Dante. It is necessary perhaps to decide here so far as we can the date at which it was written. Baldelli (op. cit., pp. 378-9) tells us that Buonmattei was of opinion that Boccaccio wrote the Vita di Dante while he was still young. But Baldelli assures us that it must have been written after the Ameto and before the Decameron, as its style is more pure and formed than the one and less so than the other. The Decameron first saw the light in 1353; and so Baldelli tells us the Vita was written in 1351. On such a question no foreigner has a right to an opinion. But if I may break my own rule, I shall say that I find myself in agreement with (among others) Antona Traversi, in his translation of Landau's life of Boccaccio (Giovanni Boccaccio sua vita, etc. (Naples, 1882), p. 786, n. 3), when he says that no really satisfactory conclusion can be arrived at on the evidence of a prose style alone; for nothing is more fluid or more subject to mood, and nothing, we might add, is more difficult to judge. Foscolo, with whom Carducci finds himself in agreement, tells us that "Fra quante opere abbiamo del Boccaccio la più luminosa di stile e di pensieri a me pare la Vita di Dante. Cf. Foscolo, Discorso storico sul testo del Decameron (Lugano, 1828), p. 94. But we need not admit so much to refute Baldelli. If the Decameron was published in 1353, it was certainly begun some years, four or five at least, before that. It is generally supposed, and with much reason, to have been begun in 1348-9. But Baldelli gives the Vita to 1351. It follows then that the work less pure in style than the Decameron was written two years after the Decameron was begun. If we accept Baldelli's evidence we must conclude that the Vita was written before 1348.

It seems extremely unlikely, however, that the Vita was written before 1353, for its whole tone, serious, even religious, and its extraordinary antipathy to marriage and contempt for women are entirely out of keeping with the eager love and sensuality of the Ameto and the gaiety of the Decameron. It has, on the other hand, much in common with the Corbaccio, which belongs to the years 1355 or 1356. With this conclusion Carducci—and no finer critic ever lived—is in agreement. He agrees with Foscolo, op. cit., p. 14, that the Corbaccio and the Vita di Dante were composed about the same time. To establish the very year in which Boccaccio wrote the Vita seems to me impossible. But I think it may be possible to prove that it was begun after the Corbaccio, though not long after, let us say in 1356-7, and finished some years later; according to Macri Leone (La Vita di Dante, Firenze, 1888), in 1363-4. We see in the Vita almost the same attitude towards women that we have already found in the Corbaccio, but less fiercely bitter, more reasoned, and less personal. But the immediate cause of Boccaccio's change from an eager and self-flattering love of women to a hatred for and contempt of them was his deception by the widow of the Corbaccio. We may psychologically have been certain of this hatred from the first, for it is in fact a logical development from his attitude to woman from his youth on; but the immediate and provocative cause of the change was the perfidy of the widow. It therefore seems to me that we must necessarily see in the Vita a later work than the Corbaccio, though not so much later. Doubtless he had been gathering facts all his life, and only in 1356-7 began to put them in order. That it was so seems probable from the fact that the invective against marriage is altogether an interpolation and has almost nothing to do with Dante; it is in fact largely a quotation from a quotation of Jerome's.