Читать книгу A history of Italian literature онлайн

99 страница из 109

Prose fiction had existed before Boccaccio, and his manner had been in some measure anticipated by some of the tales which have found their way into theCento Novelle Antiche, but he was probably the first to employ in Europe the Oriental device of setting his stories in a frame. The structure of theDecameron is too generally known to render it necessary to more than barely mention its scheme as a succession of stories told by ten persons in ten successive days, on the feigned occasion of the retirement of a lieta brigata to a delightful retreat from the plague which devastated Florence in 1348. Many among us will think that they ought to have remained to aid their perishing fellow-countrymen, and, what is more, would themselves have done so. But it would be absurd to blame the fourteenth century for a conception of public duty and a completeness of organisation in public calamity which did not and could not exist in it. Mediæval Italy produced but one Florence Nightingale, and she was a saint. The step once taken, the exclusion of all unpleasant tidings was its indispensable corollary; and hence the scene of the story-telling, with its groves and orchards, gardens and fountains, charming company and frank converse, has ever remained one of the green spots on which imagination loves to rest.