PETRARCH AS MAN OF LETTERS
Although, hardly less than Shakespeare, born not for an age but
for all time, Dante was nevertheless in an especial sense the poet
of the mediæval period. The vast advance which he effected in the
poetic art had no counterpart in a corresponding progress in the world
of intellect. Powerful as his mind was, it seemed as an organ of
thought rather architectural than creative; more intent on combining
the materials it found into the most august edifice which their
constitution admitted, than on gaining new channels for feeling and
intelligence. This was to be the work of a mind far less original than
Dante’s, but happily placed at the confluence of mediæval ideas with an
element by which they were destined to be submerged and transformed.
In the year 1304, on the very day when Dante and his exiled companions
were making their desperate attempt to fight their way back into
Florence, FRANCESCO PETRARCA, the child of one of their number, was
born a humanist by the grace of God in the Tuscan town of Arezzo. Six
years after Dante’s death a casual encounter with a lady who awoke
the faculty of song within him made the scholar the first poet of his
age. But neither the innate love of letters nor the awakened faculty
of poetry would have exalted Petrarch to the literary supremacy he
attained if he had not lived at the very juncture when literature,
hitherto cultivated in some of its branches for mere utility, in
others as an ornament of courtly life, was beginning to revive as a
profession. Dante, a statesman, a philosopher, a prophet, was not
in a true sense a man of letters, and neither his ideals nor his
contemporary influence extended beyond the limits of Italy. Petrarch
was the first modern literary dictator, the first author to receive the
unanimous homage of a world of culture. Such a world had not existed
since the decay of antique civilisation, and he may be said to have
been in a manner both its cause and its effect. As the Erasmus, the
Voltaire, the Goethe of his age, he claims a more distinguished place
in literary history than even his exquisite poetry, much less his but
relatively ample erudition, could have secured for him.
Seven months after Petrarch’s birth his mother was allowed to return to
her patrimonial estate near Florence, where she was sometimes secretly
visited by her husband. The elder Petrarca (or, as the name was then
spelt, Petracco) might have returned to his native city on the same
dishonourable terms as those offered to Dante, but, like Dante, spurned
them. Despairing of repatriation, he betook himself to Avignon, then
the seat of the Papal Court, where he followed the profession of the
law.
Petrarch was successively educated at Carpentras, at Montpellier, and
at the University of Bologna, where his father’s commands compelled him
to the study of jurisprudence. The death of his parent in 1326 recalled
him to Avignon, and restored him to letters. To qualify himself for
ecclesiastical preferment he received the tonsure without taking
orders, a step not unusual in those days, and devoted himself entirely
to literature. The “Babylonish captivity” of the Church at Avignon,
violently as he denounces it in his writings, was highly favourable to
his interests, for it helped him to the patronage of Cardinal Colonna,
whose brother, afterwards Bishop of Lombès, he had known intimately at
the University of Bologna. It was probably from this source that he
derived means to mingle with gay society and indulge in the fashionable
follies of eccentric costume, which he ridicules in his later writings;
for letters as yet afforded him no sure subsistence, and his scanty
patrimony had been embezzled or wasted by his guardians. On April 6,
1327[4], occurred the most momentous event of his life, his vision of
Laura in church “at the hour of prime,” which made him a poet. But
for this, he might never have written in the vernacular. Cicero and
Virgil, his literary idols, enjoined Latin composition, to which in all
probability he would have exclusively addicted himself but for the need
of celebrating Laura in a language which she understood.
The question of Laura’s identity will be best considered along with
the poems devoted to her praise and her adorer’s passion. Neither love
nor society, meanwhile, kept Petrarch from letters, and his reputation
waxed daily. He displayed a happy faculty for maintaining relations
with the great, equally honourable to both parties, exempt alike from
presumption and servility. In 1330 he spent a considerable time with
Bishop Colonna at his Pyrenean diocese of Lombès, and on his return
was formally enrolled as a member of the Cardinal’s household. His
residence at Avignon made him known to the learned English prelate,
Richard de Bury, and other distinguished visitors at the Papal Court,
and he began to enjoy the favour of Robert, King of Naples. His
vernacular poetry, though far inferior to that which he was destined to
produce, was nevertheless making him and Laura famous, for he exclaims
in an early sonnet:
_Blest all songs and music that have spread
Her laud afar._
In 1333 he made a journey to Paris, Belgium, and the Rhine, of which he
has given us a lively account in his correspondence, and which produced
at least one sonnet which showed that by this time he wanted but little
of perfection:
_Through wild inhospitable woods I rove
Where fear attends even on the soldier’s way,
Dreadless of ill; for nought can me affray
Saving that Sun which shines by light of Love:
And chant, as idly carolling I move,
Her, whom not Heaven itself can keep away,
Borne in my eyes; and ladies I survey
Encircling her, who oaks and beeches prove.
Her voice in sighing breeze and rustling bough
And leaf I seem to hear, and birds, and rills
Murmuring the while they slip through grassy green.
Rarely have silences and lonely thrills
Of overshadowing forests pleased as now,
Except for my own Sun too little seen._
In the same year Petrarch graduated as a patriotic poet by composing
his fine Latin metrical epistle on the woes of Italy. In 1335 he
received from the Pope a canonry in the cathedral of his patron the
Bishop of Lombès. In 1336 he achieved his celebrated ascent of Mount
Ventoux, which marks an era as the inauguration of mountain-climbing
for pleasure’s sake. In 1336 and 1337 he undertook his first journey
to Rome, which he found in a most lamentable condition from rapine and
civil war. Attributing this to the absence of the Popes in France, he
began his long series of exhortations to them to return, to which,
being throughout his lifetime Frenchmen, they naturally turned deaf
ears. Hence in a measure the disgust with Avignon which led him
to seclude himself more and more in Vaucluse (_shut valley_), the
picturesque retreat on the Sorga whither he betook himself in 1337, a
beautiful description of which by Ugo Foscolo may be read in Reeve’s
biography. His adoration of Laura had not prevented his contracting
less spiritual ties, for two children were born to him about this time.
Petrarch’s rural leisure was largely employed in the composition
of a Latin history of Rome, which can have had no critical value,
but would have been deeply interesting as exhibiting the classical
feeling of the representative of the early Renaissance. He ultimately
destroyed it, and turned to the composition of his Latin epic on the
Punic war, _Africa_, for and from which he long expected immortality.
His detestation of the Papal Court breaks out about this time in some
powerful sonnets. His Italian poems, meanwhile, had made their way with
the world to a degree surprising in an age unacquainted with printing.
In 1340 he received on the same day the offer of the poetic laurel from
the cities of Paris and Rome. Deciding for the latter, he embarked at
Marseilles in February 1341, voyaged to Naples, received signal marks
of favour from the King, and, repairing to Rome, was invested with the
laurel by the Senator of the city, April 8, 1341. From this day the
history of modern literature as a recognised power may be said to date.
Ere his return at the beginning of 1342, he had finished his _Africa_,
and bought a house at Parma to give himself a footing in his native
land.
In 1343 Petrarch was again in Italy, discharging an important
diplomatic mission with which he had been entrusted by the new Pope
Clement VI. to the Court of Naples; the state of which he describes in
dark colours, not too dark, as the history of the hapless Queen Joanna,
Robert’s successor, sufficiently proves. He nevertheless rendered
himself acceptable to her, and, his mission honourably discharged,
repaired to Parma, where (1344) he wrote the first of his great
political odes, _Italia mia benche il parlar sia indarno_, and whence
he was chased by civil discord. He did not, however, return to Avignon
until towards the end of this year. The next few years were chiefly
spent in literary occupations, the most remarkable of which was the
composition (1347) of his ode to the Tribune Cola di Rienzi, in whom
he saw the deliverer of his country. Petrarch’s course was not free
from the imputation of ingratitude to his old friends and patrons,
the Colonna family; yet it would have been worse to have been silent
at the prospect, however brief and delusive, of the resurrection of
Rome. Other poets before him had written on Italian politics, but none,
not even Dante, had so exalted their theme by eloquence and ennobling
largeness of view:
_Her ancient-walls, which still with fear and love
The world admires, whene’er it calls to mind
The days of Eld, and turns to look behind;
Her hoar and caverned monuments above
The dust of men whose fame, until the world
In dissolution sink, can never fail;
Her all, that in one ruin now lies hurled,
Hopes to have healed by thee its every ail.
O faithful Brutus! noble Scipios dead!
To you what triumph, where ye now are blest,
If of our worthy choice the fame have spread!
And how his laurelled crest
Will old Fabricius rear, with joy elate
That his own Rome again shall beauteous be and great!_
--MACGREGOR.
The next year, 1348, was one of havoc and desolation for Europe,
through the ravages of the Black Death, which swept away a larger
proportion of her inhabitants than any similar visitation recorded in
history. Laura was among the victims, dying on April 6, the anniversary
of her meeting with Petrarch. Cardinal Colonna, his chief patron since
the death of the Bishop of Lombès, was also carried off on July 3.
Nothing can be added to his own words:
_The lofty Column and the Laurel green,
Whose shade was shelter for my weary thought,
Are broken; mine no longer that which sought
North, south and east and west shall not be seen.
Ravished by Death the treasures twain have been
Whereby I wended with glad courage fraught,
By land or lordship ne’er to be rebought,
Or golden heap or gem of Orient sheen.
If this the high arbitrament of Fate,
What else remains for me than visage bent,
And eye embathed and spirit desolate?
O life of man, in prospect excellent!
What scarce stow striving years accumulate
So lightly in a morning to be spent!_
Petrarch’s demeanour after the death of his Laura presents a strong
contrast to Dante’s after the like bereavement, nor does he suffer by
the comparison. Nothing can surpass the poignancy of Dante’s first
grief as depicted in the _Vita Nuova_; but he soon forms another
tie, and though the memory of Beatrice is ever with him, the human
affection sublimates more and more into an abstract spiritual type.
Petrarch’s utterances, on the other hand, wear at first something
of a conventional semblance, but constantly increase in depth and
tenderness, and while he remains the humanist in his studies and
the diplomatist in active life, his poetry, as of old, is all but
monopolised by his one passion. As his attachment to Laura in her life
had been compatible with frequent and long absences, so her death did
not prevent him from discharging the public functions fitly entrusted
to the most eminent scholar of his age.
Although he often expresses in his verse his delight in revisiting
the banks of the Sorga, his life from this time was chiefly spent in
Upper Italy, much occupied by the discharge of diplomatic commissions
from the Pope, the Venetian Republic, and the Lords of Milan and Padua;
constantly appealing to the Avignon Popes to terminate the “Babylonish
captivity” of the Church; vexed by the undutifulness of his natural
son, but finding comfort in his daughter; indefatigable in collecting
and transcribing manuscripts; giving, though himself ignorant of
Greek, a powerful impulse to Hellenic studies by commissioning a
Latin translation of Homer; producing many of his most pleasing minor
Latin writings; and throwing his last energies into the apotheosis of
Laura in his _Trionfi_. He went to Paris to congratulate John, King
of France, on his release from captivity in England; and was present
at the marriage of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, at Milan, where or soon
afterwards he may possibly have encountered Chaucer. Boccaccio followed
him with respectful homage, and almost his last literary labour was
the Latin translation of the Florentine’s tale of _Patient Griselda_.
The last four years of his life, though with many intervals of public
business, were chiefly spent in his retirement at Arquá, a village in
the Euganean Hills, where death overtook him as he bent over a book,
July 20, 1374. He had virtually finished the _Trionfi_ about three
months previously.
We have devoted more space to the biography of Petrarch than to that
of Dante, because, although Dante towers above him as a poet, Petrarch
is the more important figure in Italian literary history. Dante
stands alone: venerated as he was by his countrymen, and not wholly
destitute of imitators, he yet founded no school, and his influence
on the development of the Italian intellect is slight in comparison
with Petrarch’s. Together with the great schoolman who quitted the
world as he entered it, he sums up the Middle Age, which in him and
Aquinas attains its highest development. Petrarch, on the other hand,
is the representative Italian. He does not, like Dante, deliver, but
is himself a prophecy: the future of Italian culture is prefigured in
him. He was also the first to bestow on Italy an unquestioned supremacy
in the world of literature, and was the earliest restorer of the
republic of letters, a conception extinct in the ages of barbarism.
In this restoration, transcending the limits of his own country, his
Latin writings were necessarily more influential than his Italian[5],
and although they do not properly belong to our subject, their great
importance in the history of culture entitles them to a few words.
The chief causes of Petrarch’s failure as a Latin poet are evident. In
the infancy of vernacular literature it was not sufficiently understood
that compositions in a dead language, however exquisite, must fail
to bestow immortality. Nor could Petrarch himself be fully aware
how impossible it was to write like a Roman poet in the new dawn of
reviving classical studies. It took two centuries of culture to produce
a Vida and a Sannazaro, and if their names are undying, the same can
hardly be said of their Latin works. But there was a deeper reason.
Petrarch attempted epic composition without epic inspiration. His
genius was entirely lyric, and his poetry has little value except where
it palpitates with lyrical feeling. When he writes on the misfortunes
of his country, he is a poet even when writing in Latin; and his great
Latin epic, the _Africa_, too often tame, notwithstanding its true
natural feeling, sometimes, especially when near the end of the poem
he speaks of himself, kindles into poetry. The Latin verses placed by
Coleridge on the half-title of his own love-poems in _Sibylline Leaves_
are almost as exquisite as the tenderest passages of the _Canzoniere_
itself[6]:
_Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in ævo,
Perlegis hic lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta
Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus.
Omnia paulatim consumit longior ætas,
Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo.
Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor:
Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago,
Voxque aliud sonat.
Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes,
Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus
Mens horret, relegensque alium putat ista locutum._
Although Petrarch preferred Latin to Italian in the abstract, and
even affected to undervalue Dante because his chief works were
composed in the vulgar tongue, he acknowledged that he had missed
the perfection in Latin which he was conscious of having attained in
Italian. His only prose-writings with any significance for us now are
the autobiographic. Some of his ethical disquisitions, however, if they
had come down from classic times, would have been regarded as precious
monuments of antiquity. The most important of these is the _De Remediis
utriusque Fortunæ_ (1356), in two books, the first treating of the
snares of prosperity, the second arming the soul against adversity.
The reflections are forcibly expressed, but in themselves somewhat
trite. His tract _De sua et aliorum Ignorantia_ (1361), on the other
hand, abounds with energy, and gives a lively picture of the strife in
his bosom between the humanistic scholar and the orthodox Christian.
More vital still, at least after some pedantic digressions have been
discarded, is his _Secretum, sive de Contemptu Mundi_ (1342), where
the conflict in his mind between the sense of moral obligation and
his passion for Laura is so depicted as to render him the prototype
of Rousseau, and entitle us to derive one of the most characteristic
departments of modern literature from him. He is no less the father
of modern autobiography by the slight but charming sketch he has left
of himself in his _Epistola ad Posteros_, prefixed to the general
collection of his letters. It was a great discovery that the external
circumstances of a remarkable life are not the only ones worth relating.
The most important of all Petrarch’s Latin works is his collection
of Epistles, partly formed by himself in his lifetime, and greatly
enriched by the diligence of recent editors, especially Fracassetti.
These are not only of high interest from the portrait they convey of
the man himself, equally as an individual and as the ideal type of the
man of letters, but form a perpetual commentary on the manners and
customs of his age. Many, though composed by Petrarch, are written in
the names of sovereigns or public bodies; others are letters of warm
encouragement or warmer remonstrance to popes, emperors, and others who
then seemed, but only seemed, to have the world’s destinies in their
hands. In all his correspondence with the great, Petrarch, like Dante,
appears as the idealist, inspired by the remembrance of antiquity, and
urging upon the rulers of the day a more exalted course of action than
suited their dispositions, or, it must be admitted, was compatible
with the circumstances of the time. They on their parts seem to have
appreciated the honour of being lectured by such a man, and to have
permitted him to say what he pleased, satisfied that he could exert
no practical influence upon the course of politics. Printing and the
liberty of the press have now made the humblest newspaper scribe more
potent than the first man of letters of the fourteenth century. Some
of Petrarch’s epistles are of unique interest, such as the description
of his ascent of Mount Ventoux, of the great tempest at Naples, and
of the apparition of the ghost of the Bishop of Lombès, the first
circumstantial narrative of the kind, and perhaps to this day the best
authenticated.
Petrarch’s encouragement of classical study is not the least among
his titles to fame. He was the Erasmus of his age in so far as the
rudimentary condition of criticism allowed, and, in so far as his means
permitted, its Mæcenas. He discovered Cicero’s epistles to Atticus,
and, by his own statement, which there seems no sufficient reason
for rejecting, had at one time the lost treatise _De Gloria_ in his
hands. He yearned towards Homer and Plato, whom he could not read in
the original, but perused in translations. The fullest information
respecting his literary tastes, the extent of his library and his
knowledge of the classics, his borrowings and loans of manuscripts, his
copyists and his bindings, will be found in the excellent monograph
of Pierre de Nolhac, _Pétrarque et l’Humanisme_ (Paris, 1892). Many
manuscripts known to have belonged to him still exist, chiefly in
French public libraries. The story of the destruction of his books by
the neglect of the Venetians is groundless; they ought to have been
made over to the Republic after his death, but they never reached
Venice. The Aldine Italic type is said to have been modelled after
Petrarch’s handwriting, and the first book in which it was used was an
edition of the author whom he principally annotated, Virgil.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Petrarch says on a Good Friday, but Good Friday did not fall on
April 6 in 1327, and the statement of the encounter having taken place
in church at all is inconsistent with other passages in his writings.
[5] “It is pleasing,” says Coleridge, in a note to his little-known
_Maximian_, “to contemplate in this illustrious man at once the
benefactor of his own times and the delight of the succeeding, and
working on his contemporaries by that portion of his works which is
least in account with posterity.”
[6] From the epistle to Barbatus, Coleridge says of the entire
composition: “Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all
his _substantiality_ of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and
manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida, and their co-rivals,
this letter would have been a classical gem” (_Anima Poetæ_, p. 263).