As to Vaucluse, I well know the beauties of that charming valley,
and ten years' residence is proof of my affection for the place. I
have shown my love of it by the house which I built there. There I
began my article "Africa," there I wrote the greater part of my
epistles in prose and verse. At Vaucluse I conceived the first idea
of giving an epitome of the Lives of Illustrious Men, and there I
wrote my treatise on a Solitary Life, as well as that on religious
retirement. It was there, also, that I sought to moderate my passion
for Laura, which, alas, solitude only cherished. And so this lonely
valley will be forever sacred to my recollections.
--_Journal of Petrarch_
[Illustration: PETRARCH]
"A literary reputation once attained can never be lost," says Balzac.
This for the reason that we find it much easier to admit a man's
greatness than to refute it. The safest and most solid reputations are
those of writers nobody reads. As long as a man is read he is being
weighed, and the verdict is uncertain, which remark, of course, does not
apply to the books we read with our eyes shut.
Shakespeare's proud position today is possible only through the fact
that he is not read.
We get our Shakespeare from "Bartlett's Quotations": and the statement
made by the good old lady that Shakespeare used more quotations than any
other man who ever lived is true, although she should have added that he
used blessed few quotation-marks.
In all my life I never knew anybody, save one woman and a little girl,
who read Shakespeare in the original. I know a deal of Shakespeare,
although I never read one of his plays, and never could witness a
Shakespearean performance without having the fidgets. All the
Shakespeare I have, I caught from being exposed to people who have the
microbe.
I never yet met any one who read Petrarch. But every so-called educated
person is compelled to admit the genius of Petrarch.
We know the gentleman by sight; that is, we know the back of his books.
And then we know that he loved Laura--Petrarch and Laura!
We walk into Paradise in pairs--just as the toy animals go into a Noah's
Ark. Shakespeare is coupled thus: Shakespeare and----
He wrote his sonnets to Her, exactly as did Dante, Petrarch and
Rossetti. A sonnet is a house of life enclosing an ostermoor built for
two.
Petrarch is one of the four great Italian poets, and his life is vital
to us because all our modern literature traces a pedigree to him.
The Italian Renaissance is the dawn of civilization: the human soul
emerging into wakefulness after its sleep of a thousand years.
The Dark Ages were dark because religion was supreme, and to keep it
pure they had to subdue every one who doubted it or hoped to improve
upon it. So wrangle, dispute, faction, feud, plot, exile, murder and
Sherlock Holmes absorbed the energies of men and paralyzed spontaneity
and all happy, useful effort. The priest caught us coming and going. We
had to be christened when we were born and given extreme unction when we
died, otherwise we could not die legally--hell was to pay, here and
hereafter.
The only thing that finally banished fear and stopped the rage for
vengeance, revenge and loot was Love. Not the love for God. No! Just the
love of man and woman.
Passionate, romantic love! When the man had evolved to a point where he
loved one woman with an absorbing love, the rosy light of dawn appeared
in the East, the Dark Ages sank into oblivion, and Civilization kicked
off the covers and cooed in the cradle.
Is it bad to love one woman with all the intensity that was formerly
lavished on ten? Some people think so; some have always thought so--in
the Dark Ages everybody thought so. Religion taught it: God was jealous.
Marriage was an expediency. Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare live only
because they loved.
Literature, music, sculpture, painting, constitute art--not, however,
all of art. And art is a secondary sexual manifestation. Beauty is the
child of married minds, and Emerson says, "Beauty is the seal of
approval that Nature sets upon Virtue."
So, if you please, love and virtue are one, and a lapse from virtue is a
lapse from love. It is love that vitalizes the intellect to the creative
point. So it will be found that men with the creative faculty have
always been lovers. To give a list of the great artists that the world
has seen would be to name a list of lovers.
The Italian Renaissance was the birth of Romantic Love. It was a new
thing, and we have not gotten used to it yet. It is so new to men's
natures that they do not always know how to manage it, and so it
occasionally runs away with them and leaves them struggling in the
ditch, from which they emerge sorry sights, or laughable, according to
the view of the bystander and the extent of the disaster. And yet, in
spite of mishaps, let the truth stand that those who travel fast and go
far, go by Love's Parcel-Post, concerning which there is no limit to the
size of the package.
Romantic Love was impossible at the time when men stole wives. When
wife-stealing gave place to wife-buying, it was likewise out of the
question. To win by performance of the intellect, the woman must have
evolved to a point where she was able to approve and was sufficiently
free to express delight in the lover's accomplishments. Instead of
physical prowess she must be able to delight in brains. Petrarch paraded
his poems exactly as a peacock does its feathers.
And so it will be seen that it was the advance in the mental status of
woman that made possible the Italian Renaissance. The Greeks regarded a
woman who had brains with grave suspicion.
The person who can not see that sex equality must come before we reach
the millennium is too slow in spirit to read this book, and had better
stop right here and get him to his last edition of the "Evening
Garbage."
Lovers work for each other's approval, and so, through action and
reaction, we get a spiritual chemical emulsion that, while starting
with simple sex attraction, contains a gradually increasing percentage
of phosphorus until we get a fusion of intellect: a man and a woman who
think as one being.
* * * * *
For the benefit of people with a Petrarch bee and time to incinerate, I
may as well explain that Professor Marsand, of the ancient and honorable
University of Padua, has collected a "Petrarch Library," which consists
of nine hundred separate and distinct volumes on the work and influence
of Petrarch. This collection of books was sold to a French bibliophile
for the tidy sum of forty thousand pounds, and is now in the Louvre.
I have not read all of these nine hundred books, else probably I should
not know anything about Petrarch. It seems that for two hundred years
after the death of the poet there was a Petrarch cult, and a storm of
controversy filled the literary air.
The accounts of Petrarch's life up to the Eighteenth Century were very
contradictory; there were even a few attempts to give him a supernatural
parentage; and certain good men, as if to hold the balance true, denied
that he had ever existed.
Petrarch was born in Thirteen Hundred Four, and the same edict that sent
Dante into exile caught the father of Petrarch in its coils.
His father was a lawyer and politician, but on account of a political
cyclone he became a soldier of fortune--an exile. The mother got
permission to remain, and there she lived with their little brood at
Incisa, a small village on the Arno, fourteen miles above Florence.
It is a fine thing to live near a large city, but you should not go
there any more often than you can help. A city supplies inspiration,
from a distance, but once mix up in it and become a part of it, and you
are ironed out and subdued. The characters and tendencies of the
majority of men who have done things were formed in the country. Read
the lives of the men who lifted Athens, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris,
London and New York out of the fog of the commonplace, and you will
find, almost without exception, that they were outsiders. Transplanted
weeds often evolve into the finest flowers.
And so my advice would be to any one about to engage in the genius
business: Do not spend too much time in the selection of your parents,
beyond making sure that they are not very successful. They had better be
poor than very rich. They had better be ignorant than learned,
especially if they realize they are learned. They had better be morally
indifferent than spiritually smug. If their puritanism is carried to a
point where it absolutely repels, it then has its beneficent use,
teaching by antithesis. They had better be loose in their discipline
than carry it so far that it makes the child exempt from coming to
conclusions of his own. And as for parental love, it had better be
spread out than lavished so freely that it stands between the child and
the result of his own misdeeds.
In selecting environment, do not pick one too propitious, otherwise you
will plant your roses in muck, when what they demand for exercise is a
little difficulty in way of a few rocks to afford an anchor for roots.
Genius grows only in an environment that does not fully satisfy, and the
effort to better the environment and bring about better conditions is
exactly the one thing that evolves genius.
Petrarch was never quite satisfied. To begin with, he was not satisfied
with his father's name, which was Petracco. When our poet was fifteen he
called himself Petrarch, probably with Plutarch in mind, "for the sake
of euphony," he said. But the fact was that his wandering father had
returned home, and the boy looking him over with a critical eye was not
overpleased with the gentleman.
Then he became displeased with his mother for having contracted an
intimacy with such a man. Hence the change of name--he belonged to
neither of them. But as this was at adolescence, the unrest of the youth
should not be taken too seriously.
The family had moved several times, living in half a dozen different
towns and cities. They finally landed at Avignon, the papal capital.
Matters had mended the fortunes of Petracco, and the boy was induced to
go to Montpelier and study law. The legend has it that the father,
visiting the son a few months later, found on his desk a pile of books
on rhetoric and poetry, and these the fond parent straightway flung into
the fire. The boy entering the room about that time lifted such a
protest that a "Vergil" and a "Cicero" were recovered from the flames,
but the other books, including some good original manuscript, went up in
smoke.
The mother of Petrarch died when our poet was twenty years of age. In
about two years after, his father also passed away. Their loss did not
crush him absolutely, for we find he was able to write a poem expressing
a certain satisfaction on their souls being safely in Paradise.
At this time Petrarch had taken clerical orders and was established as
assistant to the secretary of one of the cardinals. Up to his twentieth
year Petrarch was self-willed, moody, and subject to fits of melancholy.
He knew too much and saw things too clearly to be happy.
Four authors had fed his growing brain--Cicero, Seneca, Livy and Vergil.
In these he reveled. "Always in my hand or hidden in my cloak I carried
a book," he says, "and thoughts seem to me to be so much more than
things that the passing world--the world of action and
achievement--seemed to me to be an unworthy world, and the world of
thought to be the true and real world. It will thus be seen that I was
young and my mind unformed."
The boy was a student by nature--he had a hunger for books. He knew
Latin as he did Italian, and was familiarizing himself with Greek.
Learning was to him religion. Priests who were simply religious did not
interest him. He had dallied in schools and monasteries at Montpelier,
Pisa, Bologna, Rome, Venice and Avignon, moving from place to place, a
dilettante of letters. At none of the places named had he really entered
his name as a student. He was in a class by himself--he knew more than
his teachers, and from his nineteenth year they usually acknowledged it.
He was a handsome youth, proud, quiet, low-voiced, self-reliant. His
form was tall and shapely, his face dark and oval, with almost perfect
features, his eyes especially expressive and luminous.
Priests in high office welcomed him to their homes, and ladies of high
degree sighed and made eyes at him as he passed, but they made eyes in
vain.
He was wedded to literature. The assistance he gave to his clerical
friends in preparing their sermons and addresses made his friendship
desirable. The good men he helped, occasionally placed mysterious
honorariums in his way which he pocketed with a silent prayer of
gratitude to Providence.
A trifle more ambition, a modicum of selfishness, a dash of the
worldly-wise, and his course would have been relieved of its curves, and
he would have gravitated straight to the red hat. From this to being
pope would have been but a step, for he was a king by nature.
But a pope must be a businessman, and a real, genuine king must draw his
nightcap on over his crown every night or he'll not keep his crown very
long.
Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but also of
everything else. High positions must be fought for inch by inch, and
held by a vigilance that never sleeps.
Petrarch would not pay the price of temporal power. His heart was in the
diphthong and anapest. He doted on a well-turned sentence, while the
thing that caught the eye of Boccaccio was a well-turned ankle.
It seems that Petrarch took that proud, cold position held by religious
enthusiasts, and which young novitiates sincerely believe in, that when
you have once entered the Church you are no longer subject to the
frailties of the flesh, and that the natural appetites are left behind.
This is all right when on parade, but there is an esoteric doctrine as
well as an exoteric, which all wise men know, namely, that men are men,
and women are women--God made them so--and that the tonsure and the veil
are vain when Eros and Opportunity join hands.
* * * * *
No man has ever taken the public more into his confidence than Petrarch,
not even Rousseau, who confessed more than was necessary, and probably
more than was true.
Petrarch tells us that at twenty-two years of age he had descended from
his high estate and been led into the prevailing follies of the court by
more than one of the dames of high degree who flocked to Avignon, the
seat of the Papal See. These women came from mixed motives: for their
health, religious consolation, excitement.
Petrarch states his abhorrence for the overripe, idle and feverish
female intent on confession. He had known her too well, and so not only
did he flee from the "Western Babylon," as he calls Avignon, but often
remained away at times for two whole weeks. Like Richard Le Gallienne,
who has Omar say:
Think not that I have never tried your way
To Heaven, you who pray and fast and pray,
Once I denied myself both love and wine,
Yea, wine and love--for a whole Summer day.
Much of this time Petrarch spent in repenting. He repined because he had
fallen from the proud pedestal where he delighted to view himself, being
both the spectator and the show.
In his twenty-second year he met James Colonna, of the noble and
illustrious Colonna family, and a fine friendship sprang up between
them. The nobleman was evidently a noble man indeed, with a heart and
head to appreciate the genius of Petrarch, and the good commonsense to
treat the poet as an equal.
Petrarch pays James Colonna a great tribute, referring to his
moderation, his industry, his ability to wait on himself, his love for
the out-of-doors. The friends used to take long walks together, and
discuss Cicero and Vergil, seated on grassy banks by the wayside.
"Men must have the friendship of men, and a noble, highminded companion
seems a necessity to prevent too much inward contemplation. It is better
to tell your best to a friend, than to continually revolve it." Look
out, not in--up, not down. Then Petrarch innocently adds, "I vowed I
would not have anything to do with women, nor even in the social
converse, but that my few friends should be sober, worthy and noble men
of gravity."
No man is in such danger from strong drink as the man who has just sworn
off. Petrarch with pious steps went regularly to early mass. By going to
church early in the day he avoided the fashionable throng of females
that attended later. Early in the morning one sees only fat market-women
and fishwives.
On the Sixth of April, Thirteen Hundred Twenty-seven, at six o'clock in
the morning, Petrarch knelt in the Church of Saint Clara at Avignon. The
morning was foggy, and the dim candles that dotted the church gave out
a fitful flare. As Petrarch knelt with bowed head he repeated his vow
that his only companions should be men--men of intellect--and that the
one woman to arrest his thoughts should be his mother in Heaven--peace
be to her!
And then he raised his head to gaze at the chancel, so his vow should
there be recorded. He tried to look at the chancel, but failed to see
that far.
He could see only about ten feet ahead of him. What he saw was two
braids of golden hair wound round a head like a crown of glory. It was a
woman--a delicate, proud and marvelous personality--a woman! He thought
her a vision, and he touched the cold floor with his hands to see if he
were awake.
Petrarch began to speculate as to when she had entered the church. He
concluded she had entered in spirit form and materialized there before
him. He watched her, expecting any moment she would fade away into
ethereal nothingness. He watched her. The fog of the cold church seemed
to dissipate, the day grew brighter, a stray ray of light stole in and
for an instant fell athwart the beautiful head of this wonderful woman.
Petrarch was now positive it was all a dream.
Just at that moment the woman rose, and with her companion stood erect.
Petrarch noted the green mantle sprinkled with violets. He also made
mental note of the slender neck, the low brow, the length of the head,
compared with the height, the grace, the poise, the intellect, the soul!
There he was on his knees--not adoring Deity, just Her! The rest of the
congregation were standing. She turned and looked at him--a look of pity
and reproof, tinged with amusement, but something in her wondrous eyes
spoke of recognition--they had something in common!
She looked at him. Why did she turn and look at him? Don't ask me--how
do I know!
Perhaps telepathy is a fact after all. It may be possible that man is a
storage-battery--man the positive, woman the negative--I really can not
say. Telepathy may be a fact--it may hinge on the strength of the
batteries, and the condition of currents.
She turned and looked at him. He had disturbed her religious
meditations--rung up the wrong number--she had turned and looked at
him--a look of recognition--a look of pity, rebuke, amusement and
recognition.
He rose and half-tiptoed, half-stumbled to the door, ashamed, chagrined,
entranced. Ashamed because he had annoyed an Angel of Light, chagrined
because he had lost his proud self-control and been unhorsed, entranced
by the fact that the Angel of Light had recognized him.
Still they had never before met. To have seen this woman once would have
been unforgetable--her glance had burned her brand into his soul. She
had set her seal upon him--he was hers.
He guessed that she knew who he was--he was sure he did not know her
name.
He lingered an instant at the church-door, crossed himself foolishly
with holy water, then passed out into the early morning bustle of the
streets.
The cool air fanned his face, and the gentle breeze caressed his hair.
He put his hand to his brow.
He had left his hat--left it in the church. He turned to go back after
it, but it came over him that another glance from those eyes would melt
him though he were bronze. He would melt as if he had met God face to
face, a thing even Moses dare not do and hope to live.
He stood in the church-door as if he were dazed. The verger came
forward. "My hat, good Stephano, I left it just back of the fair lady."
He handed the man a piece of silver and the verger disappeared. Petrarch
was sure he could not find the lady--she was only a vision, a vision
seen by him alone. He would see.
The verger came back with the hat.
"And the lady--you--you know her name?"
"Oh, she, the lovely lady with the golden hair? That is Laura, the wife
of Hugh de Sade."
"Of course, of course!" said Petrarch, and reaching into a leather
pocket that was suspended from his belt under his cloak he took out a
handful of silver and gave it to the astonished verger, and passed out
and down the street, walking nowhere, needlessly fast.
The verger followed Petrarch to the door and watching the tall
retreating form muttered to himself, "He does not look like a man who
cuts into the grape to excess--and so early in the morning, too!"
* * * * *
That was a foolish saying of Lord Byron, "Man's love is of man's life a
thing apart; 'tis woman's whole existence." Does it not all depend upon
the man and the woman? The extent and quality of a woman's love as
compared with a man's have furnished the physiologists and psychologists
a great field for much innocent speculation. And the whole question is
still unsettled, as it should be, and is left to each new crop of poets
to be used as raw stock, just as though no one had ever dreamed,
meditated and speculated upon it before.
As for Petrarch and Laura, Laura's love was of her life apart, 'twas
Petrarch's whole existence.
Laura was very safely married to a man several years her senior--a
stern, hard-headed, unromantic lawyer, who was what the old ladies call
"a good provider." He even provided a duenna, or chaperon of experience,
one who knew all the subtle tricks of that base animal, man, and where
Laura went there went the chaperon.
Petrarch once succeeded in slipping a purse of gold into the duenna's
hands, and that worthy proved her fitness by keeping the purse, and
increasing her watchfulness of her charge as the danger of the poet's
passion increased. The duenna hinted that the sacrifice of her own
virtue was not entirely out of the question, but Laura was her sacred
charge. That is, the duenna could resist the temptations of Laura.
This passion of Petrarch for Laura very quickly became known and
recognized. The duenna doubtless retailed it below-stairs, and the
verger at the church also had his tale to tell. Love-stories allow us to
live the lover's life vicariously, and so that which once dwelt in the
flesh becomes a thought. Matchmakers are all living their lives over
again in their minds.
But besides the gossips, Petrarch himself made no secret of his passion.
Almost daily he sent Laura a poem. She could have refused the gentle
missive if she had wished, but she did not wish.
Petrarch had raised her to a dizzy height. Wherever she went she was
pointed out, and the attorney, her husband, hired another duenna to
watch the first. This love of a youth for a married woman was at that
time quite proper. The lady of the knight-errant might be one to whom he
had never spoken.
Petrarch sang for Laura; but he sang more melodiously than any one had
sung before, save Dante alone. His homage was the honorable homage of
the cavalier.
Yet Hugh de Sade grew annoyed and sent a respectful request to Petrarch
to omit it.
This brought another sonnet, distributed throughout the town, stating
that Petrarch's love was as sacred as that of his love for the Madonna,
and indeed, he addressed Laura as the Madonna.
Only at church did the lovers meet, or upon the street as they passed.
Gossip was never allowed to evolve into scandal.
Bliss Carman tells in a lecture of a fair and frail young thing crying
aloud to her mother in bitter plaint, "He loves me--yes, I know he loves
me--but only for literary purposes!"
Love as a mental "Martini" is a well-known fact, but its cold, plotted
concoction is a poison and not a stimulant. Petrarch's love for Laura
was genuine and sincere; and that she fed and encouraged this love for
twenty years, or to the day of her death, we know full well.
In Goethe's "Elective Affinities," the great German philosopher explains
how a sublime passion can be preserved in all its purity on the Platonic
plane for a long term of years. Laura was a married woman, wedded to a
man she respected, but could not love. He ruled her--she was his
property. She found it easier to accept his rule than to rebel. Had his
treatment of her descended to brutality, she would have flown to her
lover or else died. One critic says: "Laura must have been of a
phlegmatic type, not of a fine or sensitive nature, and all of her wants
were satisfied, her life protected and complete. The adoration of
Petrarch was not a necessity to her--it came in as a pleasing diversion,
a beautiful compliment, but something she could easily do without. Had
she been a maid and been kept the prisoner that she was, the flame of
love would have burned her heart out, and life for her would have been a
fatal malady, just as it was for Simonetta."
And so we find Goethe coldly reasoning that a great Platonic love is
possible where the woman is married to a man who is endurable, and the
man is wedded to a woman he can not get rid of. "Thus four persons are
required to work the miracle," says Goethe, and glides off casually into
another theme.
Laura was flattered by Petrarch's attentions: she became more attentive
than ever to her religious obligations. She wore the dresses he liked
best. In her hair or on her breast there always rested a laurel-leaf.
She was nothing loath to being worshiped.
"You must not speak to me," she once whispered as they passed. And again
she wrote on a slip of parchment, "Remember my good name and protect
it."
A note like that would certainly rouse a lover's soul. It meant that she
was his in heart, but her good name must be protected, so as not to
start a scandal. The sin was in being found out.
A sonnet, extra warm, quickly followed.
Petrarch was full of unrest. His eyes burned with fever; he walked the
streets in despair. Colonna seeing his distress, and knowing the reason
of it, sought to divert him. He offered to secure him a bishopric, or
some other high office, where his energies would be absorbed.
Petrarch would not accept office or responsibility. His heart was all
bound up in Laura and literature.
Colonna, in order to get his friend away from Avignon, then had himself
appointed Bishop of Lombes, and engaged Petrarch as his secretary. So
the two friends started away for the new field, six hundred miles
distant. They had a regular cavalcade of carriages and horsemen, for
Colonna was a very rich man and everything was his for the asking. They
traveled by a circuitous route, so as to visit many schools, monasteries
and towns on the way. Everywhere honors were paid them.
The change of scene, meeting so many new people, and the excitement of
making public addresses, revived the spirits of Petrarch. Slowly the
intensity of his passion subsided. He began to think of something else
beside his lady-love.
Petrarch kept a journal of his trip, which has been preserved for us in
the form of letters. At one place on the route a most tragic
circumstance came to his notice. It affected him so much that he wrote
it out with many sorrowful comments. It seems a certain monk of decided
literary and musical ability was employed by a nobleman to give
music-lessons to his daughters. The inevitable happened.
Petrarch said it did not--that the monk was wrongfully accused. Anyway,
the father of the girl, who was the magistrate of the district, ordered
the monk to be sealed up in a cell and to remain there the rest of his
life. The girl was sent to a nunnery, and the monk in a few weeks
succeeded in killing himself, and his cell became his grave. This kind
of punishment, carried out by the judge, who according to our ideas had
no right to try the case, reveals the kind of "justice" that existed
only a few hundred years ago.
The barbarity of the sentence came close home to Petrarch, and both he
and the young bishop tell what they think of the Christianity that
places a penalty on natural affection.
So they hastened away from the monastery where had lived the monk whose
love cost him his life, on to their own field of labor.
Here Petrarch remained for two years. His health and spirits came back,
but poetry had gone by the board. In Lombes there was no one who cared
for poetry.
Petrarch congratulated himself on having mastered his passion. Laura had
become but a speck on the distant horizon, a passing incident of his
youth. But he sighed for Avignon. There was life and animation, music,
literature, art, oratory and the society of great men. Besides he wanted
to prove to his own satisfaction that he had mastered his love for
Laura.
He would go back to Avignon.
He went back; he saw Laura; she saw him, and passing him with a swift
glance of recognition moved on. At sight of her his knees became weak,
his heart seemed to stop and he leaned against a pillar for support.
That night he eased his soul with a sonnet.
To his great embarrassment he found he had not mastered his passion--it
was now mastering him. He tells us all this at length, and he told it to
Laura, too.
His health began to decline, and his physician advised that he move to
the country. And so we find him taking a course of solitude as a cure
for love. He moved to Vaucluse, a hamlet fifteen miles from the city.
Some of the old-time biographies tried to show that Laura visited him
there in his solitude, and that was the reason he lived there. It is now
believed that such stories were written for the delectation of the
Hearst Syndicate, and had no basis in fact. The only way Petrarch ever
really met Laura was in imagination.
Boccaccio, a contemporary and friend of Petrarch, declared that Laura
had no existence outside of the imagination of the poet. But Boccaccio
was a poet with a roistering proclivity, and truth to such a one in a
love-affair is out of the question. Lies and love, with a certain
temperament, go hand in hand. Possibly the absurd position of modern
civilization towards the love-emotions has much to do with this. We have
held that in human love there was something essentially base and bad,
and so whenever a man or a woman become involved in Cupid's meshes they
are sudden and quick in swearing an alibi, no matter what the nature of
the attachment may be.
Boccaccio had to defend himself continually from charges, which most
people knew were true, and so by habit he grew to deny everything, not
only for himself, but for his friends. The poet needs solitude and
society, in right proportions of course.
Petrarch lived at Vaucluse for ten years, making occasional trips to
various capitals. Of his solitary life he says:
Here at Vaucluse I make war upon my senses, and treat them as my
enemies. My eyes, which have drawn me into a thousand difficulties,
see no longer either gold or precious stones, or ivory, or purple;
they behold nothing save the water, the firmament and the rocks. The
only female who comes within their sight is a swarthy old woman, dry
and parched as the Lybian deserts. My ears are no longer courted by
those harmonious instruments and voices which have so transported my
soul; they hear nothing but the lowing of the cattle, the bleating
of the sheep, the warbling of the birds, and the murmurs of the
river.
I keep silence from noon till night. There is no one to converse
with; for the people, employed in spreading their nets, or tending
their vines and orchards, are no great adepts at conversation. I
often content myself with the dry bread of the fisherman, and even
eat it with pleasure. Nay, I almost prefer it to white bread. This
old fisherman, who is as hard as iron, earnestly remonstrates
against my manner of life; and assures me that I can not long hold
out. I am, on the contrary, convinced that it is easier to accustom
one's self to a plain diet than to the luxuries of the feast. I am
fond of the fish with which this stream abounds, and I sometimes
amuse myself with spreading the nets. As to my dress, there is an
entire change; you would take me for a laborer or a shepherd.
My mansion resembles that of Cato or Fabricius. My whole
house-establishment consists of myself, my old fisherman and his
wife, and a dog. My fisherman's cottage is near to mine; when I want
him I call, when I no longer need him, he returns to his cottage. I
have made two gardens that please me wonderfully. I do not think
they are equaled in all the world. And I must confess to you a more
than female weakness with which I am haunted. I am positively angry
that there is anything so beautiful out of Italy.
One of these gardens is shady, formed for contemplation, and sacred
to Apollo. It overhangs the source of the river, and is terminated
by rocks, and by places accessible only to the birds. The other is
nearer to my cottage, of an aspect less severe, and devoted to
Bacchus; and, what is extremely singular, it is in the midst of a
rapid river. The approach to it is over a bridge of rocks; and there
is a natural grotto under the rocks, which gives them the appearance
of a rustic bridge. Into this grotto the sun's rays never penetrate.
I am confident that it much resembles the place where Cicero
sometimes went to declaim. It invites to study. Hither I retreat
during noontide hours; my mornings are engaged upon the hills, or in
the garden sacred to Apollo. Here I would most willingly spend my
days, were I not too near Avignon, and too far from Italy. For why
should I conceal this weakness of my soul? I love Italy, and hate
Avignon. The pestilential influence of this horrid place empoisons
the pure air of Vaucluse, and will eventually compel me to quit my
retirement.
* * * * *
The verdict of humanity seems to be that Laura was the most consummate
coquette in history. She dressed to catch Petrarch's attention; wore the
flowers he liked best; accepted his amorous poems without protest;
placed herself in his way by running on the same schedule.
The "Standard Dictionary" makes some fine distinctions between
flirtation, coquetry and coyness. Flirtation means to fascinate and
leave the lover in doubt as to his fate--to lead him on and leave him in
a maze. It does not imply that he does not have reason for hope.
Flirtation is coyness refined to a system.
Coquetry is defined as an attempt to attract admiration and lead the
lover up to the point of a matrimonial proposal and then reject him--a
desire to gratify personal vanity. Coquettes are regarded as heartless,
while flirts are often sincere creatures who adopt certain tactics for
the sole purpose of bagging the game. That is, the flirt works to win,
the coquette to reject. Coquetry is attention without intention.
Flirtation is a race with the intention of being overtaken, and has in
it the rudiments of that old idea that a woman must be captured. So we
have a legend concerning those Sabine women, where one of them asks
impatiently, "How soon does this attack begin?"
Laura was not a flirt. She was an honest wife and became the mother of
ten children in her twenty years of married life. When Petrarch first
saw her she had a babe at home a year old. In another year, this first
babe became "the other baby," and was put on a bottle with its little
pug-nose out of joint. There was always one on bread and milk, one on
the bottle and one with nose under the shawl--and all the time the
sonnets came fluttering adown the summer winds.
Laura was a cool-headed woman, shrewd and astute, with heart under
perfect control, her feelings well upholstered by adipose. If she had
been more of the woman she would have been less. Like the genuine
coquette that she was, she received everything and gave nothing. She had
a good digestion and no nerves to speak of.
Petrarch describes her in a thousand ways, but the picture is so
retouched that the portrait is not clear or vivid. He dilates on her
mental, moral, spiritual and physical qualities, according to his mood,
and the flattery to her was never too fulsome. Possibly she was not
fully aware before that she was such a paragon of virtue, but believing
in the superior insight of Petrarch she said, "It must be so." Thus is
flattery always acceptable, nor can it be overdone unless it be laid on
with a trowel.
To flatter in rhythm and rhyme, with due regard for euphony and cadence,
is always safe, and is totally different from bursting out upon a
defenseless woman with buckets of adoration.
Laura evidently knew by intuition that her success in holding the love
of Petrarch lay in never allowing him to come close enough to be
disillusioned. She kept him at a distance and allowed him to do the
dialogue. All she desired was to perform a solo upon his imagination.
Clothes play a most important part in Cupid's pranks. Though the little
god himself goes naked, he never allows his votaries to follow suit.
That story of Venus unadorned appearing from the sea is only a
fairy-tale--such a sight would have made a lovelorn swain take to the
woods, and would have been interesting only to the anatomist or a member
of the life class. The wicket, the lattice, the lace curtain, the veil
and mantilla, are all secondary sexual manifestations. In rural
districts where honesty still prevails, the girls crochet a creation
which they call a "fascinator," and I can summon witnesses to prove it
is one.
Just why coquetry should be regarded as distinctly feminine I can not
say. Laura has been severely criticized by certain puritan ladies with
cold pedals, for luring Petrarch on in his hopeless passion. Yet he knew
her condition of life, and being a man of sense in most ways he must
have known that had she allowed his passion to follow its unobstructed
course it would have wrecked the lives of both. He was a priest and was
forbidden to marry; and while he could carry on an intrigue with a woman
of inferior station and society would wink in innocency, it was
different with a woman of quality--his very life might have paid the
penalty, and she would have been hoisted high by the social petard.
Petrarch was no fool--he probably had enough confidence in Laura to know
that she would play the part. I know a successful businessman in Saint
Louis, an owner of monopolies, on the profits of which he plays at being
a Socialist. This man knows that if he could succeed in bringing about
the things he advocates it would work his ruin.
He elocutes to the gallery of his cosmic self, for the ego is a
multi-masked rascal and plays I-Spy and leap-frog with himself the
livelong day.
Had the love of Petrarch and Laura ever gone to the point of executive
session, he would straightway have ceased to write about it, and
literature would have been the loser.
It is not likely that either Petrarch or Laura reasoned things out thus
far--we are all puppets upon the chess-board of Time, moved by the gods
of Fate, and the fact that we know it proved for William Ellery Channing
the soul of man. I am both the spectator and the play.
* * * * *
Laura died in her fortieth year of "the plague." Seven months after her
death her husband paid her memory the compliment of taking a second
wife, thus leaving us to assume that the first venture was a happy one,
otherwise he would not have been in such haste to repeat it.
The second wife of Hugh de Sade never stirred the pool of ink from which
Petrarch fished his murex up. He refers to this second wife once by
indirection, thus: "The children of Laura are no longer motherless."
On the death of Laura the poet was overwhelmed with grief. But this
paroxysm of pain soon gave way to a calm reflection, and he realized
that she was still his as much as she ever was. Her death, too, stopped
all flavor of scandal that was in the bond, and thus Petrarch stood
better in the eyes of the world and in his own eyes than he did when
gossip was imminent.
Petrarch expected to be immortalized by his epic poem "Africa," but it
is not read today, even by scholars, except in fragments to see how deep
are the barren sands of his thought.
The sonnets which he calls "fragments, written in the vulgar tongue,"
the Italian, are verses which have made him live. They are human
documents inspired by the living, throbbing heart, and are vital in
their feeling and expression. His "best" poems are fifteen times as
voluminous as his love-poems; they were written in Latin and polished
and corrected until the life was sandpapered out of them.
His love for Laura was an idyllic thing as artificial as a monk's life,
and no more virtuous. It belongs to a romantic age where excess was
atoned for by asceticism, and spasms of vice galled the kibe of negative
virtue.
This love for Laura was largely a lust for the muse.
Fame was the god of Petrarch, and to this god he was forever faithful.
He toiled unremittingly, slavishly, painfully, cruelly for fame--and he
was rewarded, so far as fame can reward.
At Rome, on Easter Sunday in April, Thirteen Hundred Forty-one, with
great ceremony, Petrarch was crowned with the laurel-wreath, reviving
the ancient custom of thus honoring poets. Petrarch had been working
hard to have this distinction shown him at Paris as well as at Rome, and
the favorable response to his request at both places arrived on the same
day. His heart longed for Rome.
All his life he worked both wisely, and otherwise, for the Holy See to
be removed to that city of his dreams. Paris was second choice.
Petrarch had been cramming for exams for many months, and when he set
out on his journey in February his heart beat high. He stopped at Naples
to be examined by the aged King Robert as to his merit for the honor of
the laurel, and "for three days I shook all my ignorance," is Petrarch's
reference to the way he answered the questions asked him by the scholars
of his time.
The King wanted to go on to Rome to the coronation, but he was too
feeble in strength to do this, so he placed his own royal robe upon the
young man and sent him to the ancient city of learning, where a three
days' proceeding marked an epoch in the history of learning from which
the Renaissance began. Petrarch closed the Preraphaelite period in
letters.
While there is much in Petrarch's character that is vain and
self-conscious, it must not be forgotten that there was also much that
was true, tender, noble and excellent.
Petrarch was the founder of Humanism. He is the first man of modern
times to make us realize that Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Quintilian and
Seneca were real and actual men--men like ourselves. Before his time the
entire classic world stood to us in the same light that the Bible
characters did to most so-called educated people, say in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-five. Even yet there are people who stoutly maintain that
Jesus was something different from a man, and that the relationship of
God to Moses, Isaiah, Abraham, Elijah and Paul was totally different
from God's attitude towards us.
Before Petrarch's time the entire mental fabric of Greece and Rome for
us was steeped in myth, fable and superstition. Petrarch raised the
status of man, and over and over again proclaimed the divinity of all
humanity.
He realized his own worth, and made countless other men realize theirs.
He wrote familiar letters to Homer, Sallust, Plato, Socrates and Seneca,
addressing them as equals, and issued their replies. He showed the
world that time is only an illusion, and that the men of Greece derived
their life from the same source from whence ours is derived, and that in
all respects they were men with like tastes, passions, aspirations and
ambitions as ourselves.
He believed in the free, happy, spontaneous life of the individual; and
again and again he affirms that the life of expression--the life of
activity--is the only life. Our happiest moments are when we forget self
in useful effort. He held that every man should sing, speak, paint or
carve--this that he might taste the joys of self-expression. Constantly
he affirms that this expression of our highest and best is Paradise. He
combats the idea of Dante that Heaven and Hell are places or localities.
Yet Petrarch was profoundly influenced by Dante. He used the same
metaphors, symbols and figures. As a word-artist, possibly he was not
the equal of Dante, but as a man, an educated man, sane and useful, he
far surpasses Dante. He met princes, popes and kings as equals. He was
at home in every phase of society; his creations were greater than his
poems; and as a diplomat, wise, discreet, sincere, loyal to his own, he
was almost the equal of our own Doctor Franklin.
And always and forever he clung to his love for Laura. From his
twenty-third year to his seventieth, he dedicated and wrote poems to
Laura.
He sings her wit, her beauty, her grace, her subtle insight, her
spiritual worth. The book compiled after his death entitled, "Poems on
the Life and Death of Laura," forms a mine of love and allusion that
served poets and lovers in good stead for three hundred years, and which
has now been melted down and passed into the current coin of every
tongue. It was his love-nature that made Petrarch sing, and it was his
love-poems that make his name immortal. He expressed for us the undying,
eternal dream of a love where the man and woman shall live together as
one in their hopes, thoughts, deeds and desires; where they shall work
for each other; live for each other; and through this blending of
spirit, we will be able to forget the sordid present, the squalid here,
the rankling now. By love's alchemy we will gild each hour and day, so
it will be a time of joyous hope, and life will be a continual
feast-day. And so through the desire and effort to express, we will
reach the highest good, or paradise.
Petrarch did not live this ideal life of love and service--he only
dreamed it. But his dream is a prophecy--all desire is a promise. We
double our joys by sharing them, and the life for the Other Self seems a
psychological need. Man is only in process of creation. We have not
traveled far; we are only just learning to walk, and so we sometimes
stumble and fall. But mankind is moving toward the light, and such is
our faith now in the Divine Intelligence that we do not believe that in
our hearts were planted aspirations and desires that are to work our
undoing. The same God who created paradise devised the snake, and if the
snake had something to do with driving the man and woman out of the
Garden into a world of work, it was well. Difficulty, trial, hardship,
obstacle, are all necessary factors in the evolution of souls.
A man alone is only half a man--he pines for his mate. When he reaches a
certain degree of mentality he craves partnership. He wants to tell it
to Her! When she reads she wants to read to Him. And when a man and a
woman reach an altitude where they spiritualize their love, they are in
no danger of wearing it out.