Middle Ages, was endowed with a passionate love for the beauty of
ancient literature, and an entire sympathy with its ruling ideas, and
at the same time, it must be observed, with a saving incapacity to
foresee the disintegration of thought and faith that in the long run
would inevitably result from such sympathy. Both in his strength and in
his weakness he was eminently fitted to be the founder, or furtherer,
of Humanism.
Petrarch's love of the classics began in admiration of their more
superficial charm, which is just what would be expected of the
youth who wrote the graceful lyrics of the _Canzoniere_. But this
feeling developed soon into a perception of their deeper beauty and
significance. At the time when he first becomes thoroughly known to
us as a student of antiquity we are amazed at the justness of his
appreciation. Only occasionally does he betray the fact that he is a
man of the Middle Ages, hampered by a narrow intellectual inheritance;
and that his work is that of a pioneer, in a country which is
absolutely unexplored.
Of these rare limitations we detect the fewest traces in his criticism
of Cicero. This may be accounted for largely on the ground that Cicero
and Petrarch were men of the same temperament and cast of mind. They
were both typical men of letters. The man of letters is intellectually
alert; sensitive to impressions and able to report them; hospitable
to all the ideas of his time; sometimes inconsistent, because of
this very catholicity; and often despised in consequence by practical
men, although in reality more practical than they, inasmuch as he
has the art of communicating his flashes of insight and his generous
enthusiasm to others, who in the end reconcile his inconsistencies
and make his dreams come true. This is an exceptional character, but
Cicero sustained it fully, and so did Petrarch too. They were thus
of the same stamp. Moreover, their circumstances were similar in
many respects. Cicero's task as an interpreter of Greek thought was
not unlike Petrarch's life-work. It was impossible, with all these
likenesses, that the one, however defective his knowledge, should fail
to comprehend the other.
Petrarch's letters afford countless illustrations of the truth of these
statements. In outward form, to be sure, and once in a while in their
material and the treatment of it, they suggest rather Seneca than
Cicero. That, however, is easily explained. Petrarch's epistolary ways
had been fully determined before ever he saw Cicero's correspondence,
or any portion of it.[1] So it was quite impossible that he should
follow him in matters of fashion and form. But in spirit and intention,
in all their deeper affinities, the letters are distinctly Ciceronian,
akin to Cicero's essays and treatises. Cicero's style is plainly
Petrarch's ideal, although he is too wise to imitate it slavishly. And
he falls, at his best, not very far short of Cicero's clearness and
animation, his variety, his aptness of quotation and illustration.
A clearer case of sympathetic comprehension of another, and of
reproduction without imitation, it would be hard to find.
Next to Cicero, Petrarch cared most among Roman writers for Virgil.
One would have expected to find this order reversed,--to find the
poet of the _Africa_ far more devoted to his great forerunner than to
one who was essentially unpoetical, a rhetorician and prosaist. The
explanation of the seeming anomaly is twofold. In the first place, it
was in temperament only that Petrarch was a poet, and not, after the
splendid lyrical outburst of the _Canzoniere_, in the whole compass
of his thought and feeling. He could not have done the work which he
did if it had been otherwise. It was necessary that the first Humanist
should combine with the poet's openness of mind, and love of whatever
is beautiful, scholarly patience and a willingness to lead a scholar's
life. And then, in the second place, Petrarch was debarred from full
appreciation of Virgil by an inability to escape from the dominion of
certain mediæval conceptions of poetry.
For one thing, he valued poetry largely in proportion as it is made
the vehicle of criticism of life, of the more obvious sort. One is
surprised, in examining the numerous quotations from Virgil that are
scattered throughout the letters, to find how invariably they are
chosen either because they are strikingly rhetorical in form or in
consequence of their didactic quality. Poetry seems to have become to
Petrarch, as his life and his studies advanced and he drew farther away
in time and temper from his early creative period, little more than a
somewhat finer form of prose. Virgil, with all his reverence for him,
was not unlike another Cicero. He says in one of his letters: "Our
beloved Cicero is beyond doubt the father of Latin eloquence. Next to
him comes Virgil. Or perhaps, since there are some who dislike the
order in which I am placing them, I had better say that Tullius and
Maro are the two parents of Roman literature." Such remarks, which
are not infrequent, are indicative of an incapacity to feel keenly and
enjoy deeply what is finest in Virgil. Petrarch seems to us to-day like
a child, who values the beautiful commonplaces of the poet more highly
than his occasional soundings of the depths and mysteries of life.
He had no adequate appreciation of Virgil's 'majestic sadness,' his
'pathetic half lines,' his 'tears for the things that are.'
To this same insensitiveness on the æsthetic side we must ascribe
Petrarch's inability to free himself from the mediæval delusion as to
the profound allegorical significance of the _Æneid,_ and of all other
noble poetry as well. A true poet may entertain very strange theories
concerning the nature of his art, but in his better moments he will
rise above them and unconsciously belie them, both in his practice
and in his criticism of others. This Petrarch, after his early youth,
never did. His highest aim in his own poetical compositions was to set
forth moral truths under an obscure veil of allegory, and his greatest
delight in studying the poets of antiquity was to penetrate the veil
under, which he believed they had hidden their wisdom. Dante's chance
lines in the ninth book of the _Inferno_ give exact expression to this
ruling thought of his:
O voi che avete gl' intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
Sotto il velame degli versi strani!
Dante's application of this idea, however, was one thing and Petrarch's
another. Petrarch aimed at nothing worthier than a multitude of minute
and trivial correspondences. The effect upon his verse is indicated by
the letter to his brother Gherardo which is given toward the close of
this chapter. The effect upon his criticism may be learned by examining
certain other letters, in the _Seniles_. In one of these he says:[2]
"Virgil's subject, as I understand the matter, is The Perfect Man....
In the passage that you ask me to explain I look upon the winds as
nothing more nor less than blasts of anger and mad desire, which
disturb with their wild storms the quiet of our life, as tempests do
some tranquil sea. Æolus is our reason, which curbs and controls these
headstrong passions. If it did not do so they would sweep away sea and
land and the overarching sky, that is, our blood and flesh and bones
and our very souls, and plunge them down to death and destruction:
... maria ac terras cœlumque profundum quippe ferant
rapidi secum.
The dark caverns where Virgil represents them as being hidden away,
what are they but the hollow and hidden parts of our bodies, where,
according to Plato's determination, the passions dwell in abodes of
their own, in the breast and entrails? The mountain mass which is
placed above them is the head, where Plato thinks the reason has its
home.... Venus, who meets them in the middle of the wood, is pleasure,
whose pursuit by us becomes hotter and keener toward the middle of our
life. Her assumption of a maidenly look and air is for the purpose
of deceiving the unwary. If we saw her as she is we should flee from
her in fear and trembling; for, as there is nothing more tempting
than pleasure, so there is nothing more foul. Her garments are girded
up because her flight is swift. For this same reason she is compared
to the swiftest of creatures and things.[3] It cannot be denied that
nothing swifter exists, whether you consider her comprehensively
or part by part; for pleasure as a whole passes from us very soon,
and even while it still abides with us each taste of it lasts but
a moment. And then, finally, she appears in the garb of a huntress,
because she hunts for the souls of miserable mortals. And she has a
bow, and has flowing hair, in order that she may smite us and charm
us."[4]
Petrarch's love for Cicero and Virgil sprang from what one may call
the fundamental humanistic impulse, delight in the free play of the
mind among ideas that are stimulating and beautiful. His devotion to
Livy came, in part, from a different source, from a singular sort of
patriotism. He felt that he, and every other Italian of his day, was
descended in a certain sense from the Romans of old; that their glory
was his rightful heritage; that Rome, the ancient Rome, which he found
still in existence beneath the wretched mediæval stronghold, was the
city of his love and allegiance. Livy's pages accordingly were to him
the record of the great deeds of his forefathers. He studied them with
the utmost eagerness.
Under the influence of one or the other of these two passions, the
thirst for new truth and beauty and the love of the past, or of
both of them in conjunction, Petrarch laboured strenuously, until
he had gathered together from a hundred obscure sources all the
remains of Roman literature that were obtainable in his day, and had
made himself familiar with them. Greek literature, unfortunately,
it was impossible for him to know. In spite of a lifelong desire,
and at least one determined effort, he was unable to acquire even a
rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language.[5] He read in barren
Latin translations more or less of Plato and Aristotle and Homer, but
this could afford him nothing like an adequate conception of the power
and beauty of the literature as a whole. It is a sad pity that he was
so handicapped, for if the first Humanist had known and appreciated
Homer and Plato and Sophocles, as he did Cicero and Virgil and Seneca
and Livy, all our modern culture would be something far finer. We
should be simpler and clearer in our conceptions, and better developed
æsthetically. If Hellenic influences have never played their due part
in our education, if the proportion between the Greek and the Roman
elements has been unnatural, this is owing mainly to the insufficient
opportunities of Petrarch and his earliest disciples.
To the classical authors that he did possess he devoted a prolonged
and intense study that has very rarely been equalled. He followed
faithfully his own injunctions given in the _De Remediis Utriusque
Fortunæ:_ "If you would win glory from your books you must know them,
and not merely have them; must stow them away, not in your library, but
in your memory, not in your bookcases, but in your brain." Annotations
in his hand on the manuscripts that have been traced back to him[6]
show that he weighed with care every word of his favourite writers.
But external evidence like this is not necessary. Every page of his
letters, and of all his other Latin writings too, is proof in itself
that as far as his limitations permitted he had absorbed the very
spirit of his beloved classics.
[Illustration: A page of Petrarch's copy of the "Iliad."]
The letters show also how eager he was to hand on to others the light
that he had gained from these studies. He had as wide and varied an
acquaintance as any man of his time, thanks to the fame that he had won
in his youth by his verses, and to the attraction that he exercised
upon everyone in later life, through his personal charm and his
remarkable intellectual powers; and one of the inevitable consequences
of such a connection was a correspondence that was both active and
large. He wrote to the emperor and the pope, to kings and their
regents, to churchmen of every degree, to scholars in almost all parts
of Europe, to men of every profession, every age, every taste; and he
wrote always as a Humanist, a lover of the classics, who found in them
the quintessence of human wisdom. Men everywhere were ready for broader
views, deeper knowledge, keener life, and he, through these letters
and through personal contact, stimulated their longing and showed them
where they might find that which would satisfy it. The influence that
he thus exerted is incalculable. This volume is but an effort to give
some comprehension of it.
1: He did not discover the group _Ad Atticum_ until 1345, when he was
more than forty years old. And Voigt and Viertel have shown that the
very existence of the _Ad Familiares_ was unknown to him.
2: _Sen_., iv., 4
3: ......... qualis equos Threissa fatigat Harpalyce volucremque fuga
prævertitur Hebrum.
4: Petrarch sometimes applies this method of criticism more wisely and
with better results. _Cf. Fam._, xiv., 1 (vol. ii., pp. 268, 269).
5: There was no apparatus for the study of Greek at that time. Oral
instruction from Greek or Byzantine scholars was the only possible
means of access to the great writers of the past. Such instruction was
difficult to secure, as Petrarch's efforts and failure prove.
6: Through the patience and ingenuity of M. de Nolhac.
* * * * *
Of the letters that follow the first four are given for the sake of
showing the range and quality of Petrarch's classical scholarship. They
are taken, with one exception, from the letters to dead authors, which
constitute a large part of the twenty-fourth book of the _Familiares_.
The first is addressed to Cicero.
_To Marcus Tullius Cicero_[1]
Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I
least expected it, I found them. At once I read them, over and over,
with the utmost eagerness. And as I read I seemed to hear your
bodily voice, O Marcus Tullius, saying many things, uttering many
lamentations, ranging through many phases of thought and feeling. I
long had known how excellent a guide you have proved for others; at
last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave yourself.
Now it is your turn to be the listener. Hearken, wherever you are, to
the words of advice, or rather of sorrow and regret, that fall, not
unaccompanied by tears, from the lips of one of your successors, who
loves you faithfully and cherishes your name. O spirit ever restless
and perturbed! in old age--I am but using your own words--self-involved
in calamities and ruin! what good could you think would come from your
incessant wrangling, from all this wasteful strife and enmity? Where
were the peace and quiet that befitted your years, your profession,
your station in life? What Will-o'-the-wisp tempted you away, with
a delusive hope of glory; involved you, in your declining years, in
the wars of younger men; and, after exposing you to every form of
misfortune, hurled you down to a death that it was unseemly for a
philosopher to die? Alas! the wise counsel that you gave your brother,
and the salutary advice of your great masters, you forgot. You were
like a traveller in the night, whose torch lights up for others the
path where he himself has miserably fallen.
Of Dionysius I forbear to speak; of your brother and nephew, too; of
Dolabella even, if you like. At one moment you praise them all to the
skies; at the next fall upon them with sudden maledictions. This,
however, could perhaps be pardoned. I will pass by Julius Cæsar, too,
whose well-approved clemency was a harbour of refuge for the very men
who were warring against him. Great Pompey, likewise, I refrain from
mentioning. His affection for you was such that you could do with
him what you would. But what insanity led you to hurl yourself upon
Antony? Love of the republic, you would probably say. But the republic
had fallen before this into irretrievable ruin, as you had yourself
admitted. Still, it is possible that a lofty sense of duty, and love
of liberty, constrained you to do as you did, hopeless though the
effort was. That we can easily believe of so great a man. But why,
then, were you so friendly with Augustus? What answer can you give to
Brutus? If you accept Octavius, said he, we must conclude that you are
not so anxious to be rid of all tyrants as to find a tyrant who will
be well-disposed toward yourself. Now, unhappy man, you were to take
the last false step, the last and most deplorable. You began to speak
ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not
doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were.
I grieve, dear friend, at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill
me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts
in which you are so proficient. What, pray, does it profit a man to
teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding
words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? Ah! how much
better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to
have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself
have somewhere said, upon the life that endures for ever, and not
upon this poor fragment of life; to have known no fasces, yearned
for no triumphs, found no Catilines to fill the soul with ambitious
longings!--All this, however, is vain. Farewell, forever, my Cicero.
Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in
Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the
year of that God whom you never knew the 1345th.
1: _Fam._, xxiv., 3. This epistle was written very soon after
Petrarch's discovery, at Verona, of the _Letters to Atticus and
Quintus_ and the _Correspondence with Brutus_, known collectively
as the _Letters addressed to Atticus_. It undoubtedly gives us the
impressions derived from the first eager perusal of these.
It will be observed that Petrarch is less at his ease here than in his
ordinary correspondence. One feels in all his letters to the great men
of the past a certain constraint. He was awe-struck, and his style
consequently is a little self-conscious and laboured.
* * * * *
With that should go the following interesting little account of a
controversy between Petrarch and a certain aged scholar whom he met
in the course of one of his journeys. Nothing could afford a clearer
insight into either the nature of Petrarch's own feeling for the
classics or the general humanistic conditions of the time. This is one
of the letters, as the opening sentences show, that were carefully
revised for the public.
_The Old Grammarian of Vicenza,_
_To Pulice di Vicenza_[1]
On my way I stopped overnight in one of Vicenza's suburbs, and there I
found something new to write about. It happened that I had left Padua
not much before noon, and so did not reach the outskirts of your city
until the sun was getting low. I tried to make up my mind whether I had
better put up there or push on a little farther; for I was in a hurry,
and the days are long now, and it would be light for a good while yet.
I was still hesitating, when lo!--for who can remain hidden from the
friends who love him?--all my doubts were happily resolved by your
arrival, in company with several other men of mark, such as that little
city has always produced in great abundance. My mind was tossing this
way and that, but you and your companions, with your pleasant varied
talk, furnished the cable that bound it fast. I planned to go, but
still stayed on; and did not realise that the daylight was slipping
away from me until night was actually at hand. So I discovered once
again what I had observed often before, that there is nothing that
filches time away from us, without our perceiving it, like converse
with our friends. They are the greatest of all thieves of time. And yet
we ought to deem no time less truly stolen from us, less truly lost out
of our lives, than such as is expended (next to God) upon them.
Well, not to review the story at too great length, you remember that
some one made mention of Cicero, as will very often happen among men of
literary tastes. This name at once brought our desultory conversation
to an end. We all turned our thoughts toward him. Nothing but Cicero
was discussed after that. As we sat and feasted together we vied with
one another in singing his praises. Still, there is nothing in this
world that is absolutely perfect; never has the man existed in whom
the critic, were he ever so lenient, would see nothing at all to
reprehend. So it chanced that while I expressed admiration for Cicero,
almost without reservation, as a man whom I loved and honoured above
all others, and amazement too at his golden eloquence and his heavenly
genius, I found at the same time a little fault with his fickleness
and inconsistency, traits that are revealed everywhere in his life and
works. At once I saw that all who were present were astonished at so
unusual an opinion, and one among them especially so. I refer to the
old man, your fellow-citizen, whose name has gone from me, although his
image is fresh in my memory, and I revere him, both for his years and
for his scholarship.