_The Sonnets of Petrarch did as much as the Divina Commedia of Dante to
establish the language of Italy. The two poets were Tuscans, and
Tuscan—rather than any other of the many forms of the “soft bastard
Latin”—became, because of them, classical. It is true that such an
influence as this has not been so important in Italy as it would have
been in a literary nation. The day of Dante and Petrarch past, it is not
possible—even though her novels and her ingenious rhythms set the
literary fashions during a couple of centuries—to name Italy a literary
nation. Nevertheless it was fortunate that Tuscan became “Italian,” for
of all dialects of the Peninsula (and Lombardy by itself counts many) it
has the most dignity, and has trained its speakers in the most orderly
habits of grammar. Although other kinds of Italian have their præterite
and their proper subjunctive tenses, their speakers evade them (as do
the French in their own tongue), whereas the Tuscan does not keep them
for print, but has them in daily use on the highways and in the
vineyards. Hard to translate into equivalent verse is this most
polysyllabic Tuscan; not only for the obvious reason that a thing said
tersely in ten syllables of a polysyllabic language must needs be said
at greater length, and therefore generally most languidly, in ten
syllables of a monosyllabic language such as the English. The chief
difficulty is rather in the slender and sometimes weak graces of
antithesis in the original; the language justifies these, affords them
room, gives them opportunity and attitude. Turned into English, they
take a slight rigidity, and no longer seem so well worth while.
Nevertheless it is possible to translate Petrarch, and the translator’s
chief quality has to be good faith. Petrarch is full of good faith;
because of this he does not deserve the name of sentimentalist which
James Russell Lowell gives him. The good faith of a vulgar man may be
sentimental, not that of so distinguished and so simple and so entire a
nature as this. Petrarch’s integrity is somewhat like that of an Italian
melodist; in neither case is there a very great nature, but in both
cases there is a whole one, a clear one; the sentiment explores its (not
remote) depths, and employs its (not inaccessible) powers. This is it,
and it is all, we are convinced as we read; and it is a beautiful all,
and not only fond but tender._
_Petrarch’s good faith uses the conventions of the fourteenth century;
the dream, for instance. Nothing could be more unlike the dream of sleep
than is the dream of convention. In the dream of sleep is that capacity
for more than merely mortal wonder or grief which, I think, but three
writers have seized awake; and they are all modern: Charlotte Brontë,
who says, “Suffering brewed in merely mortal measure tastes not as this
suffering tasted;” Robert Louis Stevenson, who gives his grotesque dream
of a dog; and Coventry Patmore in his “Eurydice”:_
_Is it the portent of a restless grave,
O’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast?_
_This is another thing. Compare it with the gentle convention and
arbitrary fiction—the machinery—of Petrarch’s “dreams.”_
_It is, by the way, chiefly in these dreams_, in morte di Madonna Laura,
_that Laura speaks. Thus Petrarch in his romance speaks for her, and she
remains one of the most nearly silent figures in history. The twenty-one
years of Petrarch’s love for her in her lifetime give us little more
than the picture of her beauty, and of her manners, severe or kind. And
the secret which Petrarch never knew—whether he had touched her
heart—she took with her to her discreet and honourable grave. She keeps
it from the world. In the sonnets after her death Petrarch is obliged to
respect her secret. She had yielded him an ambiguous smile; he duly
causes her to speak to him ambiguous tendernesses in his “dreams.”_
_Surviving Laura twenty-six sorrowful years, Petrarch could look back
upon her maturity from his day of old age. She had been a little—she
became greatly—his junior. Death matches lovers in her own way. One
would think that the malice of burlesque might have spared the years of
Dr. Johnson’s wife, because of the fact that he lived so long as to make
her a more equal mate, and loved her and prayed for her soul when he was
a much older man than she ever was a woman. Petrarch’s love-story has no
doubt been burlesqued by the modern sense of humour; he, in his day,
foresaw and feared no mockery. What he feared was theological rebuke,
and he argued the matter out with his conscience until he died._