place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns,[36]
the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the
world is collected? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle
--streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling
dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse
chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew
of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting
luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the
others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of
characters--such diverse rôles in life--the endless clamour of their
confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets?
All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life,
banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the
student's habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as
frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever
I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit.
"Now," I say in mockery, "now betake yourself to noble thoughts "--
"Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre."[37]
S. _Augustine._ That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts
you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study,
for as the same poet says--
"Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade."[38]
And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words--
"The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse,
And bards the noisy life of towns refuse."[39]
If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm
itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will
strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what
you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca's letter[40] on this
subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also
on "Tranquillity of Soul"; you have beside, for combating this mental
malady, an excellent book of Cicero's which sums up the discussions
of the third day in his _Tusculan Orations_, and is dedicated to
Brutus.[41]
_Petrarch._ You know I have read all that work and with great attention.
_S. Augustine_. And have you got no help from it?
_Petrarch._ Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner
is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes.
_S. Augustine._ This way of reading is become common now; there is such
a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves
everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life,
which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make
notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the
fruit of your reading.
_Petrarch._ What kind of notes?
_S. Augustine._ Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome
maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not
trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of
learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating
on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter
when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy
written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as
in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that
if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not
aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and
strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise,
they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that
a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in
point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul
into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and
reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and
desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was
ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions
beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to
sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of
anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control.
_Petrarch._ Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth
not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that
fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his
mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them
with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger
and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our
heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in
their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us
over sea and land and the very sky itself.[42] In effect, he has given
us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea,
the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the
soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere
he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.[43] It is
as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man
himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this
King sitting on high--what can they mean but the head placed on high
where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil's words--
"There, in a cave profound, King Æolus
Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind,
Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls
Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side
Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top
Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand."[44]
So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with
my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the
trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies
to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the
King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand,
subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,--who
can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason?
However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the
soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line--
"And calms their passion and allays their wrath."[45]
_S. Augustine_. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand
you find hidden in the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for
whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any
such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what
you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems
to me expressed with equal wit and truth.
But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading
if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul,
and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been
speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you
useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them
fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to
flee away.
By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the
passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some
pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the
fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero--
"The fount and head of all miseries."[46]
Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your
own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of
grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground,
the recollection of your own sins--always supposing it is not suffered
to drive you to despair--then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven
has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation
and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur
and complain.
As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and
the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find
no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been
made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own
free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will
make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to
the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the
murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will
find the same result easily if you will but first calm down the tumult
of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not
the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of
the world.
And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon
the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of
those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with
tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure
also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long
I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has
oppressed your soul.
_Petrarch_. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and
especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on
myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the
better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite
overthrown.
_S. Augustine_. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and
be more reconciled to your fortune?
_Petrarch_. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such
thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets
are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned
to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other
mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty.[47]
And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous
orator. Sallust has said of fortune that "all things are under her
dominion."[48] And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that "she is the
mistress; of human affairs."[49] For myself, perhaps I will declare
what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as
concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of
such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other
men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did.
_S. Augustine_. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you,
and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has
lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for
a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion?
_Petrarch._ With my whole heart I adore the very number three
itself, not so much because the three Graces are contained in it,
as because it is held to be nearest of kin to the Deity; which is
not only the persuasion of yourself and other professors of the true
faith, who place all your faith in the Trinity, but also that of
Gentile philosophers who have a traditional use of the same number in
worshipping their own deities. And my beloved Virgil seems to have
been conversant with this when he wrote--
"Uneven number to the gods is dear."[50]
For what goes before makes it clear that three is the number to which
he alludes. I will therefore presently await from your hands the third
part of this your threefold gift.
[1] _Æneid_, viii. 385-86.
[2] _De bonis et malis_, i. 3.
[3] _Tusculan Orations_, ii. 15. But Cicero's words are more guarded,
"_inops interdum._"
[4] _Declamations_, i.
[5] Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 172-73.
[6] Suetonius Domitian, xviii.
[7] Seneca, _Epist.,_ 65.
[8] Scipio is speaking of the souls admitted to heaven, freed from the
body. _Africa,_ i. 329.
[9] Juvenal, i. 161 (not correctly quoted).
[10] Terence L'Audrienne, 68.
[11] Horace, _Odes_, i. 4, 15.
[12] Horace, _Epist._ i. 18, 109. Conington's translation.
[13] Horace, _Odes_, I. xxxi. 19, 20.
[14] Juvenal, _Sat.,_ xiv. 135.
[15] _Æneid,_ iii. 629.
[16] _Georgics,_ iv. 132.
[17] _Georgics_, i. 106.
[18] Juvenal, vi. 361.
[19] Seneca, _Epist.,_ xxv.
[20] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 2, 56.
[21] _De Senectute,_ xi.
[22] Horace, _Epist._ i. 2, 62-3.
[23] Petrarch refers to a Calabrian monk who had begun giving him
lessons in Greek, but left him on being appointed to a bishopric.
[24] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 21.
[25] Wisdom, viii. 21.
[26] _Cor_. xii. 9.
[27] _Confessions_, viii. 7.
[28] _Æneid_, ii. 361-9.
[29] _Æneid_, ii. 622.
[30] Horace, _Odes,_ xi. 10, 6-8.
[31] _Tusculan Orations,_ iii. 11.
[32] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 110.
[33] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 106-8.
[34] Lucian, 343.
[35] He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence,
and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo.
[36] Avignon.
[37] Horace, _Epist._, ii. 2, 76.
[38] _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77 (Conington).
[39] Petrarch's _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77.
[40] Seneca's _Letters,_ lvi.
[41] _Tusculan Orations,_ cxi.
[42] _Æneid,_ i. 58.
[43] _Ibid.,_ vi. 730.
[44] _Ibid.,_ i. 52-57.
[45] _Æneid_ i. 57.
[46] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 38.
[47] _Æneid,_ viii. 334.
[48] _Pro Marcello,_ ii.
[49] _Catilina_, viii.
[50] _Eclogue_, vii. 75.
DIALOGUE THE THIRD
PETRARCH--S. AUGUSTINE
_S. Augustine_. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from
my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend
me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and
contradiction.
_Petrarch._ You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to
your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my
distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you
may still have to say.
_S. Augustine._ I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated
wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember
what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion
to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you
have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without
flinching a severer handling of the trouble.
_Petrarch._ Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to
hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the
surgeon's hand.
_S. Augustine_. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right
hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer
you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have
always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet
at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break
and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I
think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is
accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that
to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same
way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is
of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart
but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is.
In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I
am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say
will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering
brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make
you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished
greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains.
Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain
your freedom by breaking your chains.
_Petrarch_. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you
mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am
unconscious?
_S. Augustine_. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled
by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to
keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet
fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and
not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded
eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are
charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and,
what is most sad of all, you glory in them!
_Petrarch._ What may these chains be of which you speak?
_S. Augustine._ Love and glory.
_Petrarch._ Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things
chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you?
_S. Augustine._ Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed.
All the other things that held you back were less strong and also
less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the
contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a
false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will
make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good.
Nevertheless I mean to try.
_Petrarch._ Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve
me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting
darkness the clearest faculties of my soul?
_S. Augustine._ Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of
philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some
false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a
course is right?
_Petrarch._ I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing
to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that
the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and
I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two
passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of
all.
_Augustine._ Let us take them separately for the present, while I
endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my
weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately.
Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not
hold it to be the height of all madness?
_Petrarch._ To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that
love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest
action of the soul.
_S. Augustine._ Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view
you have put forward?
_Petrarch._ If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love
is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of
virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say
to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed?
Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you
my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy
and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is
hardly any greater blessing to it; if it so happen that you hold an
opposite view, let each one follow his own feeling, for, as you are
well aware, truth is a large field and every man should have freedom to
judge for himself.
_S. Augustine_. In matters directly contradictory opinions also may be
diverse. But truth itself is one and always the same.
_Petrarch_. I admit that is so. But what makes us go wrong is that we
bind ourselves obstinately to old opinions, and will not easily part
from them.
_S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you may think as wisely on the whole
matter of love as you do on this point.
_Petrarch_. To speak briefly, I think I am so certainly right that
those who think the opposite I believe to be quite out of their senses.
_S. Augustine_. I should certainly maintain that to take for truth
some ancient falsehood, and to take as falsehood some newly-discovered
truth, as though all authority for truth were a matter of time, is the
very climax of madness.
_Petrarch._ You are wasting your labour. Whoever asserts that view of
love I shall never believe him. And I will rest on Cicero's saying, "If
I err here I err willingly, and I shall never consent to part with this
error as long as I live."[1]
_S. Augustine._ When Cicero uses those words he is speaking of the
immortality of the soul, and referring to it as the noblest of
conceptions, and declaring his own belief in it to be so firm that he
would not endure to listen to any one who maintained the contrary. You,
however, to urge the ignoblest and most false of all opinions, make
use of those same terms. Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal,
it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet
would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired
for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken
away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become
weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the
other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out
a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human
nature being what it is.
But you see what will be the consequences of that error in which you
stand; it will precipitate your soul into all manner of folly, when
shame, and fear, even reason, that now acts as some check on passion,
and the knowledge of truth itself shall all have disappeared.
_Petrarch._ I have already told you you were wasting your time. My own
remembrance tells mo that I have never loved anything to be ashamed of,
and, on the contrary, have ever loved what is most noble.
_S. Augustine._ Even noble things may be loved in a shameful way; it is
beyond doubt.
_Petrarch._ Neither in the object of love nor in the manner of loving
am I guilty. So you may as well give up tormenting me.
_S. Augustine._ Well, well! Do you wish, like those with fever on the
brain, to die laughing and joking? Or will you rather take some remedy
for your mind so pitiable and so far from its true health?
_Petrarch._ I will not refuse a remedy if you will prove to me that
I am ill, but, when a man is quite well, to begin taking remedies is
often fatal.
_S. Augustine._ As soon as you have reached the stage of convalescence
you will perceive quickly enough, as men generally do, that you have
been seriously ill.
_Petrarch._ After all, I cannot but show deference to one who often in
the past, and especially in these last two days, has given me proof how
good were his counsels. So please go on.
_S. Augustine._ In the first place I ask you to forgive me if,
compelled by the subject, I have to deal severely with what has been
so delightful to you. For I cannot but foresee that the truth will
sound bitterly in your ears.
_Petrarch_. Just one word before you begin. Do you thoroughly know the
matter you are to touch upon?
_S. Augustine._ I have gone into it all carefully beforehand. It is
about a mortal woman, in admiring and celebrating whom you have, alas!
spent a large part of your life. That a mind like yours should have
felt such an insensate passion and for so long a time does greatly
astonish me.
_Petrarch_. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both
mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set
out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns
only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is
an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character
is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living
expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form
and motion is not as that of others. Consider this again and again, I
entreat you, and I trust you may have understanding in what words to
speak.
_S. Augustine._ Ah! out of all reason have you grown! Have you then
for sixteen long years been feeding: with false joys this flame of
your heart? Of a truth not longer did Italy once suffer the assaults
of her most famous enemy, the great Hannibal; nor did she then endure
more frequent onsets of her would-be lover, nor was consumed with more
furious fires. You to-day carry within you as hot a flame of passion,
you endure as fierce stings. Yet was there found one who forced him to
retreat and, though late, to take his leave! But who shall expel this
invader from your soul if you yourself forbid him to depart; if you of
your own will invite him to stay long with you; if you, unhappy as you
are, delight in your own calamity? Far other will be your thoughts when
the fatal day shall come that will close for ever those eyes that are
now so pleasing to you to look upon; when you shall see that face and
those pale limbs changed by death; then you will be filled with shame
to have so knit your mortal affections to a perishing body such as
this, and what now you so obstinately maintain you will then blush to
remember.
_Petrarch_. Heaven forbid any such misery. I shall not see your threats
fulfilled.
_S. Augustine_. They will inevitably come to pass.