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The Radical to-day goes one worse even than Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. His registrars are to be neither hereditary nor elected: they are to be nominated. That is sheer, stark, staring constitutional lunacy, and in no sense of the word reform. That there is plenty of room for reform and improvement in the House of Lords, that great changes may be made with immense benefit, no one doubts. Lord Salisbury never denied it, any more than Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour deny it. But to throw away the good with the bad in the House of Lords, and, having done that, to refuse to set up an effi. cient substitute, would be to bring England back to the rule of the few-the very condition which it has been the aim of the constitutional struggle of centuries to defeat.

What we have to do, what I hope a Unionist Government will undertake, is to confirm the House of Lords in its loyalty to democracy. It was John Stuart Mill's belief that in a really democratic State the House of Lords would be of no practical value as a moderator. The House of Lords, being the less powerful, in any conflict must, he said, suffer utter defeat. It can only act with advantage to itself, not by compelling everyone to declare himself for or against it, but by "taking a position among rather than in opposition to the crowd." Is not that precisely what they are doing now? The Lords must not appear at all as an antagonistic body, said Mill, and "the really moderating power of a democratic constitution must act in and through the democratic House." What Mill and the philosophical Radicals did not see, any more than the latter-day would-be-practical Radicals are prepared to admit, was that the lack of moderation in the Commons might leave the Lords no alternative but to take action which should test the moderation of the country. Mill again was

unable to conceive how in a state of democracy, if there were two Chambers, one considered representative of the people, the other of a class, the second House would have "any real ability to resist even the aberrations of the first." But that is the very thing, in a state of democracy rounded off by the Radicals themselves in 1884, that the Lords have done. They resisted the Home Rule aberration, for instance. Mill, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was much nearer the sentiment of the beginning of the twentieth when he said that the Second Chamber "should be composed of elements which, without being open to the imputation of class interests adverse to the majority, would incline it to oppose itself to the class interests of the majority, and qualify it to raise its voice with authority against their errors and weaknesses. These conditions evidently are not found in a body constituted in the manner of the House of Lords." He thereupon proceeded to outline a scheme which, in its essentials, was remarkably like that adopted by the Rosebery Committee in 1908.

The report of that Committee, the best effort we have had to grapple with the problem of a Second Chamber that should not merely be an efficient instrument but command the unqualified respect of the people, is strangely neglected. Why do not the Unionists run it for all it is worth? That the Radicals should ignore it is easily to be understood: they could only advertise its merits by discussion, and emphasize their dislike of real reform by criticism. Lord Rosebery and his colleagues propose to abolish the right of peers to sit in Parliament because they are peers; but the hereditary principle is not to be dispensed with entirely. The whole body of the peers would constitute a sort of electoral college to elect from among their number-now roughly 665 Representative Government.

-200 Lords of Parliament: the spiritual Lords of Parliament would be limited to two archbishops and eight bishops; there might be representatives of the chief Nonconformist Churches, and the high officials representing the Colonies in London might also be included. Others entitled to receive a writ of summons would be Cabinet Ministers or ex-Cabinet Ministers, Viceroys or ex-Viceroys, Governors-General or ex-Governors-General, those who have served the Empire for a period of years, attained a certain rank in the Navy or Army, any who had earned certain high judicial office, or rendered certain service in the House of Commons. Life peers might be created and summoned at the rate of four peers per annum, their number never to exceed forty, the membership of the House all told amounting to some four hundred. The Fortnightly Review.

Peers who hold aloof from candidaturefor the position of a Lord of Parliament would be free to secure election, if possible, to the House of Commons, but no person who had once sat in the House of Lords would be eligible for election to the other House. "Such a Chamber," we may say in the words of Mill, "would be fitted for much more than a merely moderating body," and might go far to realize the suggestion that "if one is the People's Chamber, the other should be the Chamber of Statesmen." It would eliminate the lordly undesirables-the blacklegs, the incompetents, the backwoodsmen, and the dregs of nobility. It would reduce the Chamber to more reasonable proportions and be a guarantee that the lump was leavened by the best.. whether among the aristocracy of birth. or the aristocracy of ability.

Edward Salmon.

BOCCACCIO.*

Great is the power of matter-of-fact, greater and made up of richer elements than perhaps we care to remember. It is part of the power-the eternal power of the story-teller over the mind of

man.

There is no great story-teller, from Homer to Scott and Guy de Maupassant, who, whatever else he may have, has not the faculty for matter-of-factness. It is the treasury from which the wit and cynic draw their income, and often the philosopher his capital. Stranger still, it is the bed-rock upon which the poets build their palaces; glorious views from top windows are made possible by the hard substance below the basement, and the men who build without it, trusting

"The Decameron." Preserved to Posterity by Giovanni Boccaccio, and Translated into English Anno 1620. With an Introduction by Edward Hutton. Four volumes. (The Tudor Translations. Nutt. £3 net.)

wholly to imagination, are not the men who endure. What reason is to faith, matter-of-fact is to imagination; and it is a striking consideration that two of the most consummately matter-offact books in existence-the "Arabian Nights" and "The Decameron"-have inspired some of the world's greatest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare among them. For "The Decameron,” in its defects as in its qualities, is essentially matter-of-fact. It has wit, it has invention, it has style and beauty and deftness, with a grace-may we say a chic?-all its own. Boccaccio moves with the swiftness of a swallow over the surface of life, dipping just far enough into its waters to return with

"Giovanni Boccaccio. A Biographical Study." By Edward Hutton. (Lane 16s net.) "The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues. By A. C. Lee. (Nutt, 12s. 6 dd. net.

glittering drops upon his beak. But he is without poetry and profundity, and so his human insight fails, his fun is dead, and he is often inordinately dull.

This is not the view of Mr. Hutton, as given in his introduction to the Tudor translation of "The Decameron."

The truth about Boccaccio [he says] can be summed up in one statement almost: he was a poet before all things, not only because he could express himself in perfect verse, nor even because of the grace and beauty of his writing, his gifts of sentiment and sensibility, but because he is an interpreter of nature and man, who knows that poetry is holy and sacred, and that one must accept it thankfully in fear and humility.

It is not easy to understand what Mr. Hutton means by these last phrases, or why Boccaccio is holy, or why he is sacred, or what is the difference here between the two. It seems as if Mr. Hutton had indulged in a little pulpit emotion and did not quite know what he meant himself. Besides, it is just in the "interpretation of man" that Boccaccio, who creates types not individuals, falls short. We have only (as Mr. Hutton himself admits) to compare the story-tellers of "The Decameron" with those of "The Canterbury Tales" to feel the full force of the defect. But we suspect that Mr. Hutton confounds poetry with romance, as he has done in his "Giovanni Boccaccio." The well-known design of "The Decameron" is in itself romantic. The Plague had left Florence the prey of death and horror. Four lovely ladies, whose relations have nearly all been swept away, meet by chance in Sta. Maria Novella, and fall in with three courtly gentlemen with whom they plan to flee the haunted city and the fear of death, and to drown their sorrows in pleasant country places. So, for ten days, on shaven lawns, in leafy glades

and palace-gardens, they daily choose a sovereign of their revels, and in turn tell each other tales till the night falls. From the first you are in a blue and golden atmosphere of pleasure, and in this old translation (the first complete translation of "The Decameron") the glamor is enhanced twofold by the beauty of the noble English-the English of 1625.

All the starres were departed out of the East, but onely that which we commonly cal bright Lucifer, or the DayStar, gracing the morning very gloriously; when the master of the household being risen, went with all the provision to the Valley of Ladies to make everie thing in due and decent readiness, according as his Lord over-night had commanded him. After which departure of his, it was not long before the King arose, being awaked by the noise which the carriages made; and when he was up the other two Gentlemen and the Ladies were quickly readie soon after. On they set towards the Valley, even as the sunne was rising; and all the way as they went, never before had they heard so many sweete Nightingales, and other pretty Birds melodiously singing, as they did this morning, which keeping them company throughout the journey they arrived at the Valley of Ladies. After they had broken their fast, with excellent Wines and Banquetting stuffe. they began to tune their instruments and sing; because (therein) the sweet Birds should not excell them. . . When dinner-time drew neere, the tables were covered under the spreading trees, and by the goodly Pond's side, where they sate downe orderly by the King's direction; and all dinner while they saw the Fishes swimme by huge shoales in the Pond, which sometimes gave them occasion to talke, as well as gaze on them.

This is deliciously romantic-the romance of early morning-and it is a typical passage. But romance it remains, not poetry. Romance is, as

it were, the fine

flower, the poetry of matter-of-fact-a poetry of externals, descriptive of things as they are enjoyed or suffered, but not the poetry of the heart and of the inner life of man. The one does not preclude the other; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, many others are romantic, yet profoundly poetic; but if we think of Boccaccio, Scott, and Dumas, or else of the pictures of Millais, and then of Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley, and of the work of Gabriel Rossetti, we shall feel the contrast between the two; most of all when we remember what glories of insight and of feeling Shakespeare, and sometimes Chaucer too, wrought out of Boccaccian tales, out of the cynical tricks and ingenious chicaneries which make the plots of "The Decameron." And the converse is as true, even truer. When Shakespeare is most careless and least Shakespeare, he is most Boccaccio. When we cry out at the crude and incongruous cynicism with which he treats the character of Helena in All's Well that Ends Well, or the end of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we shall find it is because he has taken no pains to transmute the Boccaccio-like stories of intrigue and neat falsehood from which he drew his plots, and to pass them through the splendid loom of his imagination, thus making them at one with his characters. Great poets can afford to find Boccaccio poetic, and to infuse his lovely word-embroideries with their own fancy. Keats, Shelley, Landor have done so, and others before and since their time. But the less gifted reader must feel the lack of that connecting human quality which, for want of a better name, may be called the moral imagination. Not that it involves any moral; it only sets up "a moral relation" between itself and the world. Boccaccio, with his love of success and dislike of suffering, with his cold-blooded rascals, and coarse friars, and brilliantly bad ladies who

stick at nothing in the art of stratagem, is not so much immoral-which implies a rejected morality-as non-moral; he is deficient in human nature and, never enlisting our sympathies, he too often becomes tedious.

the

The old translator insists in sturdy English fashion on drawing a moral from him and making "The Decameron" into a good book for Sundays. "It was," he says, "his full scope and aime by discovering all vices in their ugly deformities to make sacred vertues to shine the clearer," and he glows over Boccaccio's "singular moral applications." "Singular" they certainly are, little triumphs of unconscious cynicism; for the strength and the weakness of Boccaccio lie in his naive good faith-a good faith even in bad matters-and he takes his "morals" seriously. Here are one or two gathered at random, which are tacked on to tales of odious foolish husbands and odious clever wives, whose low cunning is nearly always rewarded by success. "Wherein is manifestly discerned that if Love be driven to a narrow straite in any of his attempts, yet he can accomplish his purpose by some other supply." "Whereby appeareth that an Husband ought to be very well advised, when he meaneth to discover any wrong offered by his wife, except he himselfe doe rashly run in all the shame and reproach"-and so on ad infinitum, with such an exuberant love of deception that it ceases to affect us, because it places Boccaccio's world outside the pale of reality. Chaucer painted rascals and liars, too, and painted them with enjoyment, but it was a human enjoyment born of sympathy with men, not with the vices. He had another side to make a contrast:

That thee is sent, receyve in buxum

nesse:

The wrastling for this wordle axeth a fal.

Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse;

Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!

Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

Hold the hye way, and lat thy gost thee lede:

And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

Boccaccio could never have written that. As soon as he approached any wilderness, he fled, like his ladies and gentlemen from the plague-stricken city, and found himself in a garden to play in. And that is what makes him refreshing. Yet, once or twice, he rises to something like poetry: in the beautiful story (used by Tennyson) of poor Federigo, who killed his only and dearly-prized possession, a rare falcon. to regale the lady he had loved without return; or in the picture of patient Griselda, sent forth from her husband's palace to her father's hut, in a peasant's smock-though there exists perhaps no more irritating heroine than this lady of extravagant meekness.

But if we cannot agree with Mr. Hut ton that Boccaccio is bigger than Chaucer and has a greater "significance" than Dante "in the history of culture, of civilization," we can agree with much else that he says. It seems churlish to complain at such length when there is so much to please. Boccaccio is, after all, one of the few great story-tellers of the earth. He has "held children from play and old men from the chimneycorner." More than this, he is of the still smaller band of great tellers of short stories. "The Lady Marquesse of Montferrat, with a Banquet of Hennes, and divers other gracious speeches beside, repressed the fond love of the King of France." This heading of the Fifth "Novell" of the First Day of "The Decameron" sums up the art of short story-telling. It has the essential qualities. It is simple, it is pithy, it is dramatic, and, to

use a modern word, it is realistic. Boccaccio is indeed a great realist. The famous picture of Florence stricken by the Plague, with its sickening details of disease and degradation and ghostly terror, its mortal rout, its mad revellers urged on to recklessness by all-surrounding Death-the woe of it all, and his hatred of the woe, no Zola could paint more drastically, more forcibly, or half as shortly. And Boccaccio is as literal as Zola, as literal as a child. In his tale of Giotto's feeble tu quoque to the gibe about his ugliness (Vol. III., p. 121) he gives us his own idea of art -one to raise the ghost of Ruskin in the Spanish Chapel.

The other man being named Giotto, had a spirit of so great excellency, as there was not any particular thing in Nature, the mother and work-mistresse of all ... but he by his pen and pensell could perfectly portrait; shaping them all so truly alike and resemblable that they were taken for the reall matters indeede; and whether they were present or no, there was hardly any possibility of their distinguishing.

This is what Boccaccio himself tried to

accomplish, and his realism, unlike that of later writers, can be merry. It lends as strong a life to homely little incidents as to big themes like the

Plague, whether he is describing a servants' quarrel, or the difficulties found by the ladies in continuing their storytelling between Friday and Monday. For Friday and Saturday were "days somewhat molestuous," on account of Saturday tubs and Sunday devotions.

Boccaccio's wit, often merely of his time, is at its best when he is sarcastic. It is honey with the sting of the bee left in it. After the stirring story of the adventures of a princess "who happened into the custodie of nine men." most of them Sultans

The Ladies sighed verie often, hearing the varieties of wofull miseries hap

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