yet will you shudder to remember with what trouble you attained it. I
clearly divine what excuse you will make, and I see your thought the
moment you open your lips. You will allege that you were devoted to
these studies some time before you became a lover at all, and that
desire for the glory of the poet's crown had kindled your heart from
childhood. I neither deny it or forget it; but the fact of the usage
being obsolete for centuries, and this being an epoch very unfavourable
for studies like yours, the dangers also of long voyages, which would
have brought you to the threshold of prison and of death itself, not
to mention other obstacles of fortune no less violent than those--all
these difficulties, I say, would perhaps have broken your resolve
entirely, if the remembrance of a name so sweet, always entwining
itself with your inmost soul, had not banished every other care, and
drawn you over sea, over land, across mountains of difficulty, to Rome
and to Naples, where at length you attained what you had longed for
with such ardour. If all this seems to you the token of but a moderate
passion, then at least shall be quite certain you are the victim of the
moderate delusion.
I purposely leave out what Cicero was not ashamed to imitate from
Terence when he wrote, "Wrongs, suspicions, fierce quarrels,
jealousies, war, and then again peace--behold the miseries of love." Do
you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the
madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power
in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you
may reply: "I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such
excess." Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added--
"Such fickle things to settle by sane rule
Is to be sanely insane."[19]
The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end,
unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours.
Such, then, are the miseries of love, the particulars of which it is
needless to mention to those who have proved them, and which would not
be believed by those who never tried. But the worst of them all, to
come back to our subject, is that it engenders a forgetfulness of God
and of man's real state. For how should the soul thus crushed beneath
these weights ever arise to that one and only most pure fountain of
true Good? And since it is so, you may lay aside your wonder that
Cicero should tell us no passion of man's soul seemed to him more
violent than love.
_Petrarch_. I must own myself beaten; for it appears all you have said
is taken from the very heart of the book of experience. And as you have
quoted from the play of Terence, let me please myself by bringing from
there also this sad complaint--
"O deed of shame! now am I foil of woe.
Weary I burn with love; with open eyes,
Brain clear, I am undone; and what to do
I know not."[20]
I would also call to mind this counsel from the same poet's words--
"Think, while there's time, again and yet again."[21]
_S. Augustine._ And I likewise from the lips of Terence will give you
my reply--
"What in itself contains no rule or reason,
By rule or reason you can never hold."[22]
_Petrarch._ What is to be done, then? Am I to despair?
_S. Augustine._ That is the last thing in the world to do. However,
let me briefly tell you the remedy I propose. You know that on this
subject there are not only special treatises compiled by philosophers
of eminence, but that some of the most famous poets have written on it
whole books.
It would be almost an insult to point out which they are, above all, to
you who are a past-master in the whole field, or to offer any advice
as to reading them; but perhaps I might say a word without offence to
suggest in what way their study might be applied for your own welfare.
First, then, notice what is said by Cicero--
"Some think that an old love can best be driven out by
a new, as one nail is by another."[23]
And Ovid agrees, giving this general rule--
"Old love affairs must always yield to new."[24]
And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided and
parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less
force towards each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided
up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that
was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable
streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable
by the enemy; so Fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power in
the world, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced. On
the other hand, I think this is not to be overlooked, that there may
be great danger when you lay aside a passion and, if one may say so,
a passion of the nobler kind; you may, if you are not watchful, fall
into dissipation of another sort, run after women and become a loose
libertine. In my judgment, then, if one must die for certain, there is
some consolation in dying of a nobler rather than a less noble wound.
So if you ask my advice, it is this: Take your courage in both hands.
Fly, if you possibly can; and I would even say, go from one prison to
another; perchance you might escape by the way or else find a milder
discipline to be under. Only beware, when your neck is freed from one
such yoke as this, that you place it not under the weight of a crowd of
more base and vile oppressions.
_S. Petrarch._ While the doctor is finishing his advice, will he allow
the patient, in the throes of his malady, to interrupt him for a minute?
_Augustine._ Of course. Why not? Many a doctor, guided by the symptoms
of his patient thus declared, has been able to find the very remedy he
needed.
_Petrarch._ Then what I want to say is just this: For me to love
another is impossible. My mind has grown only to love her; my eyes to
look only for her; excepting her, all to them is nothing, or is mere
darkness. And so if your remedy is that in order to be healed of this
love I should love another, your condition is an impossible one. In
that case all is over, and I am lost.
_S. Augustine._ Your senses are dulled, your appetite is lost; since
then you can take no internal remedy, one must have recourse to other
treatment and see what can be done by change of scene. Can you bring
your mind to think of flight or exile and going right away from the
places that you know?
_Petrarch_. Though I feel that her attraction draws me to her with
hooks of steel, nevertheless if I have to go, I can.
_S. Augustine_. If you can, you will be safe. What else can I say,
then, but this advice of Virgil's, changing only two little words--
"Ah! flee this land beloved, and leave behind
shore to thee so dear."[25]
For how can you continue in safety in these scenes where there are so
many memories of your wounds, where things present and the memory of
things past cling always to you? So that I say, as Cicero also advises,
"Seek change of scene; take care to do as one does who is recovering
from some illness."[26]
_Petrarch_. Think of what you are prescribing. For how often and
often, longing to get well, and familiar with advice like this, have I
tried this remedy of flight; and though I have feigned various other
reasons for it, yet the end and aim of all my peregrinations and all
my retirement to the country was this one thing--to become free! For
that I have wandered far away to the West, to the North, to the very
confines of the ocean. Far and wide have I roamed. You see what good
it has done me. And so Virgil's simile has many a time come home to my
heart,--
"E'en as the stricken deer, that unaware
Rooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete,
The hunter pierces with his weapon keen.
And she unknowing o'er Mount Dicte's side
Flees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleaves
To her poor side."[27]
I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound
with me.
_S. Augustine._ Yourself have given me the answer for which you look.
_Petrarch._ How so?
_S. Augustine_. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with
him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means
of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man
who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him
no good whatever. "You went touring with yourself,"[28] said the Sage.
You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must
make your soul ready. _Then_ you must fly. For it is proved to
demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that
unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor's help is in vain.
Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that
Horace only spoke truth when he said--
"Who cross the ocean making peace their goal,
Change but their sky and cannot change their soul."
Or thus--
"We come to this; when o'er the world we range,
'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change."[29]
_Petrarch_. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription
to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then
flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is
cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good
will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell
me briefly what are the remedies I must use?
_S. Augustine._ I did not say that you must cure and heal your soul.
What I said was you must make it ready. As for the rest, either you
will be cured, and the change of scene will then establish your health
on a firm footing; or you will not yet be cured, but only made ready,
and then the change of scene will have the same ultimate result. But,
if your soul is neither cured nor made ready, this change and frequent
moving from place to place will only stir up its grief. I will still
advise you to take a leaf out of Horace's book--
"For if the cure of mental ills is due
To sense and wisdom, not a fine sea view,"[30]
--what he says is true. You will set out full of the hope and the wish
to return, carrying along with you all that has ensnared your soul.
In whatever place you are, to whatever side you turn, you will behold
the face, you will hear the voice of her whom you have left. By that
sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have power to see her
though you are absent, and to hear her though she is far away; and
do you imagine that love is to be extinguished by subterfuges like
this? Believe me, it will rather burn more fiercely. Those who call
themselves masters in the art of love enjoin among their other maxims
short absences one from another on the part of lovers, for fear they
should become tired of seeing each other face to face or from their
importunity. Therefore I advise, I recommend, I enjoin upon you that
you learn to wholly sever your soul from that which weighs it down
and go away without hope of return. You will discover then, but not
before, what absence is able to do for the soul's healing. If fate had
placed your lot in some unhealthy plague-stricken region where you
were liable to constant illness, should you not flee from it never to
return? And so I counsel you to do now, unless, as I much fear, men
care more for their body than their soul.
_Petrarch_. That is their affair. But undoubtedly if I found myself ill
on account of the unhealthiness of the place I was in, I should choose
for my recovery some place with a healthier climate, and I should act
in the same way, and with stronger reasons still, in case of maladies
of the soul. Yet, as far as I can see, the cure of these is a more
difficult matter.
_S. Augustine_. The united testimony of the greatest philosophers
proves the falsity of that assertion. It is evident that all the
maladies of the soul can be healed if only the patient puts no obstacle
in the way, although many diseases of the body are incurable by any
known means. For the rest, and not to go too far from our subject, I
stick to my judgment. You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and
teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back,
never to see that which it was wont to look for. This is the only sure
road for a lover; and if you wish to preserve your soul from ruin, this
is what you must do.
_Petrarch._ That you may see how perfectly I have learned all you have
said, let me recapitulate that to go for change of scene is useless,
unless the soul is first made ready; such journeys will cure it when
made ready, and will establish it when once cured. Is not that the
conclusion of your threefold precept?
_S. Augustine._ Yes, it is precisely that, and you sum up very well
what I have unfolded.
_Petrarch._ I could have divined your two first truths by myself,
without you pointing them out; but as for the third, that the soul,
when it is cured and established in health, still needs absence, I
do not understand it, unless it is the fear of a relapse that is the
motive of what you say.
_S. Augustine._ But you surely do not suppose that to be a slight point
even in bodily health? And how much more grave a matter ought one to
think it in regard to the soul, where a relapse is so much more rapid
and dangerous. So I would say, let us refer once more to what seems one
of the soundest remarks of Seneca, where in a letter he writes, "If any
man wishes to have done with love he must avoid all recollection of
the beloved form," and adds as his reason, "For nothing is so easily
rekindled to life again as love."[31] O how true a saying is that,
and from what profound experience of life is he speaking! But it is
needless to call any other witness of this than your own knowledge will
supply.
_Petrarch._ Yes, I agree he speaks truth, but if you notice he is
speaking not of one who already has done with love, but of one who
wishes to have done with it.
_S. Augustine_. He speaks of any man who is in danger. Any kind of
blow is more dangerous if there is some wound before unhealed, or
some disease not yet cured; and even afterwards it is not safe. And
since we remember most, instances that have come home to us in our own
experience, let me ask how often have you who speak to me not found
yourself, as you went about these well-known spots, by their mere look,
though no person met you, reminded of your former vanities; standing
speechless, full of sighs, as you pace this town that has been, I will
not say the cause, but at any rate the scene of all your evils; though
before you came back to it you thought you were cured, and would have
been to a very great extent if only you had remained away? And then
with difficulty restraining your tears, half-wounded to death, you have
fled, and cried to your own heart, "Here in these places I see at every
turn the ambush of my ancient foe. The signs of death are ever about
me!" So, then, were you healed already, if you would take counsel of
me, I should say, "Do not stay long in this place. It is not wise for
the prisoner who has broken his chains to go wandering round the prison
gates, ever ready to take him in again, before which the jailer is ever
on guard, laying his traps with special care to recapture those whose
escape he regrets.
"The downward path to hell is ever smooth,
Its dismal gate is open night and day."[32]
If precautions like these are needful for men in health, how much
more are they in the case of those who have not yet shaken off their
sickness. It is of the latter that Seneca was thinking when he wrote
that maxim. He was giving counsel to those who were most in danger, for
it was no use to speak of those whom the flame had already devoured
and who were past all care for their safety. He addressed himself to
those in another stage, who still felt the heat but tried to come forth
of the flame. Many a sick man on the way to recovery has been thrown
back by a draught of water which before his illness would have done
him no harm; and often has one wearied out, with a long day's work,
been knocked down by some trifling shake which when he was in his full
strength would not have moved him at all.
It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its
miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the
purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping
ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for
gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light
glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love.
It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when
you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their
way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. And since it is so, it
is not enough merely to leave a plague-stricken spot, but you, O man,
must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything
that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when
you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back, you lose your
Eurydice once more.
Such is the sum of my counsel.
_Petrarch_. I accept it heartily and with thankfulness, for I feel that
the remedy is suited to my wound. My intention is to fly, but I know
not yet where lies the direction I should choose.
_S. Augustine._ A thousand ways are open to you to make choice of on
every side; a thousand ports are ready to receive you. I know that,
more than to other lands, your heart turns to Italy, and that a love of
your native soil is inborn in you; and you are right, for--
"Not Media's forests rich, nor Ganges' stream,
Though fair it be, nor Hermus rolling gold,
May vie with Italy; Bactria and Ind,
And all Pachaia with its odours rare
Shall not be mentioned."[33]
I think you have yourself not long ago, in a letter to one of your
friends,[34] treated this theme of the famous Poet at fuller length in
a Latin poem. Italy then would be my choice for you; because the ways
of its people, its climate, the sea washing its shores, the Apennine
range coming between them, all promise that a sojourn there would be
better suited to extirpate your troubles than going anywhere else in
the world. I would not, however, wish to confine you only to one corner
of the land. Go under good auspices wherever inclination may lead; go
without fear and with a free mind; take no backward glances, forget
the past and step forward to the future. See how long you have been a
stranger to your own country and your own self. It is time to return,
for--
"O now 'tis evening, and the night
Is chiefly friend to thieves."[35]
I warn you in words of your own.
One further counsel I must urge which I had nearly forgotten. You must
avoid solitude, until you are quite sure that you have not a trace of
your old ailment left. You told me that a country life had done you no
good. There is nothing surprising in that. What remedy were you likely
to find in a place all lonely and remote? Let me confess that often
when you were retreating thither all by yourself, sighing, and turning
longing eyes back to the town, I have laughed heartily and said to
myself: "What a blindfold fool love has made of this unhappy wight! and
led him to quite forget the verse that every schoolboy knows, about
flying from his trouble and finding his death."
_Petrarch_. I am afraid you are right, but what are the lines to which
you allude?
_S. Augustine._ Ovid, of course.
"Lover! whoe'er you be, dwell not alone;
In solitude you're sure to be undone.
You're safer in a crowd; the word is true,
Lone woods are not the place for such as you."[36]
_Petrarch_. Yes, I remember them perfectly, and knew them almost by
heart from my childhood.
_S. Augustine._ Much good has it done you to know so many things yet
not know how to suit them to your need. When you not only know all
the testimony of the ancients, but have yourself proved the evils of
solitude, it astonishes me that you should commit such a blunder as to
seek it. You have, in fact, often complained that there was no good in
being alone. You have expressed it in a thousand places, and especially
in the fine poem you composed on your own misfortune. The sweet accents
of it charmed me while you were writing.[37]
It surprised me to hear a song so harmonious arise from a soul so full
of agitation, and come from the lips of a man so far out of his senses
and I asked myself what power of love can stay the offended Muses from
abandoning so dire a nest of troubles, and, scared by such aberration
of mind in their host, forsaking utterly their wonted dwelling? I
thought of words of Plato, "Let no man wholly sane knock at Poe try'd
door," and then of Aristotle, who followed him and said, "All great
genius has a touch of madness in it,"[38] but I remembered that in
these sayings of theirs they were thinking of a frenzy far indeed
removed from yours. However, we will return to this subject at some
other time.
_Petrarch_. I must fain own what you say is the truth; but I never
thought to have made verses so harmonious as to be worth your praise
and commendation. They will be all the dearer to me now that I know it.
If you have other remedy to offer me, I beg you withhold it not from
him who is in need.
_S. Augustine_. To unfold all one knows is the act of a braggart more
than of a wise friend. And remember that men did not invent all the
sundry kinds of remedies, internal and external, for diverse kinds of
sickness, on purpose that each and every one should be tried on every
occasion; but that, as Seneca remarks to Lucilius, "Nothing is so
contrary to the work of healing as a frequent change of remedy; and
no wound will ever be healed perfectly, to which first one and then
another medicine is continually applied. The true way is only to try
the new when the old remedy has failed."[39]
So, then, although the remedies for this kind of ailment are many and
varied, I will content myself with only pointing out a few, and I will
choose those which in my judgment will best suit your need. For indeed,
I have no wish merely to show you what is new, but only to tell you, of
all those which are known, what remedies, so far as I can judge, are
most likely in your case to be efficacious.
There are three things, as Cicero says, that will avert the mind of man
from Love,--Satiety, Shamefastness, Reflection.[40]
There may indeed be more; there may be less. But, to follow the steps
of so great an authority, let us suppose there are three. It will be
useless for me to speak of the first in your case, because you will
judge it is impossible you should ever come to satiety of your love.
But still if your passion will hear the voice of reason and judge the
future from the past, you will readily agree that an object, even
the most beloved, can produce, I do not say satiety only, but even
weariness and disgust. Now, as I am quite sure I should be entering
on a vain quest if I embark on this track, because, even if it were
granted that satiety is a possible thing, and that it kills love, you
will pretend that by the ardour of your passion you are a thousand
leagues removed from any such possibility, and, as I am not at all
disposed to deny it, what remains is for me to touch only upon the
other two remedies that are left. You will not wish to dispute my
assertion that Nature has endowed you with a certain power of reason,
and also with some talent for forming a weighty judgment.
_Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived by acting as judge in my own cause,
what you say is so true that I am often inclined to fear I am too
wanting in what is due both to my sex and this age; wherein, as
you doubtless observe, everything goes to the shameless. Honours,
prosperity, wealth--all these hold the field; and to these, virtue
itself, nay even fortune, must give way.[41]
_S. Augustine._ Do you not see what conflict there is between Love and
Shamefastness? While the one urges the soul forward, the other holds it
back; the one drives in the spur, the other pulls hard at the bridle;
the one looks at nothing, the other watches carefully on every side.
_Petrarch_. This is only too familiar to me, and I feel to my cost
how distracted is my life by passions so contrary. They come upon me
by turn, so that my poor spirit, tossed hither and thither, knows not
which impulse to obey.
_S. Augustine._ Do you mind telling me if you have looked in your glass
lately?
_Petrarch._ And, pray, what do you ask that question for? I have only
done as usual.
_S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you do it no oftener, neither with more
self-complacency, than you should! Well, and have you not noticed that
your face is changing from day to day, and that from time to time grey
hairs begin to show themselves around your temples?
_Petrarch._ Is that all? I thought you were about to ask me something
out of the common; but to grow up, to grow old, to die is the common
lot of all that are born. I have observed what befalls almost all my
contemporaries; for nowadays men seem to age more quickly than they
used to, though I know not why or wherefore.