Why did not
Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before?
Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before?
Petrarch
An everlasting spring reigns there, and the place commands a
view of pleasingly-scattered villas. Petrarch built himself a house on
the high ground of the village, and he added to the vines of the country
a great number of other fruit-trees.
He had scarcely fixed himself at Arqua, when he put his last hand to a
work which he had begun in the year 1367. To explain the subject of this
work, and the circumstances which gave rise to it, I think it necessary
to state what was the real cause of our poet's disgust at Venice. He
appeared there, no doubt, to lead an agreeable life among many friends,
whose society was delightful to him. But there reigned in this city what
Petrarch thought licentiousness in conversation. The most ignorant
persons were in the habit of undervaluing the finest geniuses. It fills
one with regret to find Petrarch impatient of a liberty of speech,
which, whatever its abuses may be, cannot be suppressed, without
crushing the liberty of human thought. At Venice, moreover, the
philosophy of Aristotle was much in vogue, if doctrines could be called
Aristotelian, which had been disfigured by commentators, and still worse
garbled by Averroes. The disciples of Averroes at Venice insisted on the
world having been co-eternal with God, and made a joke of Moses and his
book of Genesis. "Would the eternal architect," they said, "remain from
all eternity doing nothing? Certainly not! The world's youthful
appearance is owing to its revolutions, and the changes it has undergone
by deluges and conflagrations. " "Those free-thinkers," Petrarch tells
us, "had a great contempt for Christ and his Apostles, as well as for
all those who did not bow the knee to the Stagirite. " They called the
doctrines of Christianity fables, and hell and heaven the tales of
asses. Finally, they believed that Providence takes no care of anything
under the region of the moon. Four young Venetians of this sect had
attached themselves to Petrarch, who endured their society, but opposed
their opinions. His opposition offended them, and they resolved to
humble him in the public estimation. They constituted themselves a
tribunal to try his merits: they appointed an advocate to plead for him,
and they concluded by determining that he was a good man, but
illiterate!
This affair made a great stir at Venice. Petrarch seems at first to have
smiled with sensible contempt at so impertinent a farce; but will it be
believed that his friends, and among them Donato and Boccaccio, advised
and persuaded him to treat it seriously, and to write a book about it?
Petrarch accordingly put his pen to the subject. He wrote a treatise,
which he entitled "De sui ipsius et aliorum Ignorantia--" (On his own
Ignorance, and on that of others).
Petrarch had himself formed the design of confuting the doctrines of
Averroes; but he engaged Ludovico Marsili, an Augustine monk of
Florence, to perform the task. This monk, in Petrarch's opinion,
possessed great natural powers, and our poet exhorts him to write
against that rabid animal (Averroes) who barks with so much fury against
Christ and his Apostles. Unfortunately, the rabid animals who write
against the truths we are most willing to believe are difficult to be
killed.
The good air of the Euganean mountains failed to re-establish the health
of Petrarch. He continued ill during the summer of 1370. John di Dondi,
his physician, or rather his friend, for he would have no physician,
would not quit Padua without going to see him. He wrote to him
afterwards that he had discovered the true cause of his disease, and
that it arose from his eating fruits, drinking water, and frequent
fastings. His medical adviser, also, besought him to abstain from all
salted meats, and raw fruits, or herbs. Petrarch easily renounced salted
provisions, "but, as to fruits," he says, "Nature must have been a very
unnatural mother to give us such agreeable food, with such delightful
hues and fragrance, only to seduce her children with poison covered over
with honey. "
Whilst Petrarch was thus ill, he received news very unlikely to forward
his recovery. The Pope took a sudden resolution to return to Avignon.
That city, in concert with the Queen of Naples and the Kings of France
and Arragon, sent him vessels to convey him to Avignon. Urban gave as a
reason for his conduct the necessity of making peace between the crowns
of France and England, but no one doubted that the love of his own
country, the difficulty of inuring himself to the climate of Rome, the
enmity and rebellious character of the Italians, and the importunities
of his Cardinals, were the true cause of his return. He was received
with great demonstrations of joy; but St. Bridget had told him that if
he went to Avignon he should die soon afterwards, and it so happened
that her prophecy was fulfilled, for the Pope not long after his arrival
in Provence was seized with a mortal illness, and died on the 19th of
December, 1370. In the course of his pontificate, he had received two
singular honours. The Emperor of the West had performed the office of
his equerry, and the Emperor of the East abjured schism, acknowledging
him as primate of the whole Christian Church.
The Cardinals chose as Urban's successor a man who did honour to their
election, namely, Pietro Rogero, nephew of Clement VI. , who took the
name of Gregory XI. Petrarch knew him, he had seen him at Padua in 1307,
when the Cardinal was on his way to Rome, and rejoiced at his accession.
The new Pontiff caused a letter to be written to our poet, expressing
his wish to see him, and to be of service to him.
In a letter written about this time to his friend Francesco Bruni, we
perceive that Petrarch is not quite so indifferent to the good things of
the world as the general tenor of his letters would lead us to imagine.
He writes:--"Were I to say that I want means to lead the life of a
canon, I should be wrong, but when I say that my single self have more
acquaintances than all the chapter put together, and, consequently, that
I am put to more expenses in the way of hospitality, then I am right.
This embarrassment increases every day, and my resources diminish. I
have made vain efforts to free myself from my difficulties. My prebend,
it is true, yields me more bread and wine than I need for my own
consumption. I can even sell some of it. But my expenses are very
considerable. I have never less than two horses, usually five or six
amanuenses. I have only three at this moment. It is because I could find
no more. Here it is easier to find a painter than an amanuensis. I have
a venerable priest, who never quits me when I am at church. Sometimes
when I count upon dining with him alone, behold, a crowd of guests will
come in. I must give them something to eat, and I must tell them amusing
stories, or else pass for being proud or avaricious.
"I am desirous to found a little oratory for the Virgin Mary; and shall
do so, though I should sell or pawn my books. After that I shall go to
Avignon, if my strength permits. If it does not, I shall send one of my
people to the Cardinal Cabassole, and to you, that you may attempt to
accomplish what I have often wished, but uselessly, as both you and he
well know. If the holy father wishes to stay my old age, and put me into
somewhat better circumstances, as he appears to me to wish, and as his
predecessor promised me, the thing would be very easy. Let him do as it
may please him, much, little, or nothing; I shall be always content.
Only let him not say to me as Clement VI. used to do, 'ask what you wish
for. ' I cannot do so, for several reasons. In the first place, I do not
myself know exactly what would suit me. Secondly, if I were to demand
some vacant place, it might be given away before my demand reached the
feet of his Holiness. Thirdly, I might make a request that might
displease him. His extreme kindness might pledge him to grant it; and I
should be made miserable by obtaining it.
"Let him give me, then, whatever he pleases, without waiting for my
petitioning for it. Would it become me, at my years, to be a solicitor
for benefices, having never been so in my youth? I trust, in this
matter, to what you may do with the Cardinal Sabina. You are the only
friends who remain to me in that country. These thirty years the
Cardinal has given me marks of his affection and good-will. I am about
to write to him a few words on the subject; and I shall refer him to
this letter, to save my repeating to him those miserable little details
with which I should not detain you, unless it seemed to be necessary. "
A short time afterwards, Petrarch heard, with no small satisfaction, of
the conduct of Cardinal Cabassole, at Perugia. When the Cardinal came to
take leave of the Pope the evening before his departure for that city,
he said, "Holy father, permit me to recommend Petrarch to you, on
account of my love for him. He is, indeed, a man unique upon earth--a
true phoenix. " Scarcely was he gone, when the Cardinal of Boulogne,
making pleasantries on the word phoenix, turned into ridicule both the
praises of Cabassole and him who was their object. Francesco Bruni, in
writing to Petrarch about the kindness of the one Cardinal, thought it
unnecessary to report the pleasantries of the other. But Petrarch, who
had heard of them from another quarter, relates them himself to Bruni,
and says:--"I am not astonished. This man loved me formerly, and I was
equally attached to him. At present he hates me, and I return his
hatred. Would you know the reason of this double change? It is because
he is the enemy of truth, and I am the enemy of falsehood; he dreads the
liberty which inspires me, and I detest the pride with which he is
swollen. If our fortunes were equal, and if we were together in a free
place, I should not call myself a phoenix; for that title ill becomes
me; but he would be an owl. Such people as he imagine, on account of
riches ill-acquired, and worse employed, that they are at liberty to say
what they please. "
In the letter which Bruni wrote to Petrarch, to apprize him of
Cabassole's departure, and of what he had said to the Pope in his
favour, he gave him notice of the promotion of twelve new cardinals,
whom Gregory had just installed, with a view to balance the domineering
authority of the others. "And I fear," he adds, "that the Pope's
obligations to satiate those new and hungry comers may retard the
effects of his good-will towards you. " "Let his Holiness satiate them,"
replied Petrarch; "let him appease their thirst, which is more than the
Tagus, the Pactolus, and the ocean itself could do--I agree to it; and
let him not think of me. I am neither famished nor thirsty. I shall
content myself with their leavings, and with what the holy father may
think meet to give, if he deigns to think of me. "
Bruni was right. The Pope, beset by applications on all hands, had no
time to think of Petrarch. Bruni for a year discontinued his
correspondence. His silence vexed our poet. He wrote to Francesco,
saying, "You do not write to me, because you cannot communicate what you
would wish. You understand me ill, and you do me injustice. I desire
nothing, and I hope for nothing, but an easy death. Nothing is more
ridiculous than an old man's avarice; though nothing is more common. It
is like a voyager wishing to heap up provisions for his voyage when he
sees himself approaching the end of it. The holy father has written me a
most obliging letter: is not that sufficient for me? I have not a doubt
of his good-will towards me, but he is encompassed by people who thwart
his intentions. Would that those persons could know how much I despise
them, and how much I prefer my mediocrity to the vain grandeur which
renders them so proud! " After a tirade against his enemies in purple,
evidently some of the Cardinals, he reproaches Bruni for having dwelt so
long for lucre in the ill-smelling Avignon; he exhorts him to leave it,
and to come and end his days at Florence. He says that he does not write
to the Pope for fear of appearing to remind him of his promises. "I have
received," he adds, "his letter and Apostolic blessing; I beg you to
communicate to his Holiness, in the clearest manner, that I wish for no
more. "
From this period Petrarch's health was never re-established. He was
languishing with wishes to repair to Perugia, and to see his dear friend
the Cardinal Cabassole. At the commencement of spring he mounted a
horse, in order to see if he could support the journey; but his weakness
was such that he could only ride a few steps. He wrote to the Cardinal
expressing his regrets, but seems to console himself by recalling to his
old friend the days they had spent together at Vaucluse, and their long
walks, in which they often strayed so far, that the servant who came to
seek for them and to announce that dinner was ready could not find them
till the evening.
It appears from this epistle that our poet had a general dislike to
cardinals. "You are not," he tells Cabassole, "like most of your
brethren, whose heads are turned by a bit of red cloth so far as to
forget that they are mortal men. It seems, on the contrary, as if
honours rendered you more humble, and I do not believe that you would
change your mode of thinking if they were to put a crown on your head. "
The good Cardinal, whom Petrarch paints in such pleasing colours, could
not accustom himself to the climate of Italy. He had scarcely arrived
there when he fell ill, and died on the 26th of August in the same year.
Of all the friends whom Petrarch had had at Avignon, he had now none
left but Mattheus le Long, Archdeacon of Liege, with whom his ties of
friendship had subsisted ever since they had studied together at
Bologna. From him he received a letter on the 5th of January, 1372, and
in his answer, dated the same day at Padua, he gives this picture of his
condition, and of the life which he led:--
"You ask about my condition--it is this. I am, thanks to God,
sufficiently tranquil, and free, unless I deceive myself, from all the
passions of my youth. I enjoyed good health for a long time, but for two
years past I have become infirm. Frequently, those around me have
believed me dead, but I live still, and pretty much the same as you have
known me. I could have mounted higher; but I wished not to do so, since
every elevation is suspicious. I have acquired many friends and a good
many books: I have lost my health and many friends; I have spent some
time at Venice. At present I am at Padua, where I perform the functions
of canon. I esteem myself happy to have quitted Venice, on account of
that war which has been declared between that Republic and the Lord of
Padua. At Venice I should have been suspected: here I am caressed. I
pass the greater part of the year in the country, which I always prefer
to the town. I repose, I write, I think; so you see that my way of life
and my pleasures are the same as in my youth. Having studied so long it
is astonishing that I have learnt so little. I hate nobody, I envy
nobody. In that first season of life which is full of error and
presumption, I despised all the world except myself. In middle life, I
despised only myself. In my aged years, I despise all the world, and
myself most of all. I fear only those whom I love. I desire only a good
end. I dread a company of valets like a troop of robbers. I should have
none at all, if my age and weakness permitted me. I am fain to shut
myself up in concealment, for I cannot endure visits; it is an honour
which displeases and wears me out. Amidst the Euganean hills I have
built a small but neat mansion, where I reckon on passing quietly the
rest of my days, having always before my eyes my dead or absent friends.
To conceal nothing from you, I have been sought after by the Pope, the
Emperor, and the King of France, who have given me pressing invitations,
but I have constantly declined them, preferring my liberty to
everything. "
In this letter, Petrarch speaks of a sharp war that had arisen between
Venice and Padua. A Gascon, named Rainier, who commanded the troops of
Venice, having thrown bridges over the Brenta, established his camp at
Abano, whence he sent detachments to ravage the lands of Padua. Petrarch
was in great alarm; for Arqua is only two leagues from Abano. He set out
on the 15th of November for Padua, to put himself and his books under
protection. A friend at Verona wrote to him, saying, "Only write your
name over the door of your house, and fear nothing; it will be your
safeguard. " The advice, it is hardly necessary to say, was absurd. Among
the pillaging soldiery there were thousands who could not have read the
poet's name if they had seen it written, and of those who were
accomplished enough to read, probably many who would have thought
Petrarch as fit to be plundered as another man. Petrarch, therefore,
sensibly replied, "I should be sorry to trust them. Mars respects not
the favourites of the Muses; I have no such idea of my name, as that it
would shelter me from the furies of war. " He was even in pain about his
domestics, whom he left at Arqua, and who joined him some days
afterwards.
Pandolfo Malatesta, learning what was passing in the Paduan territory,
and the danger to which Petrarch was exposed, sent to offer him his
horses, and an escort to conduct him to Pesaro, which was at that time
his residence. He was Lord of Pesaro and Fossombrone. The envoy of
Pandolfo found our poet at Padua, and used every argument to second his
Lord's invitation; but Petrarch excused himself on account of the state
of his health, the insecurity of the highways, and the severity of the
weather. Besides, he said that it would be disgraceful to him to leave
Padua in the present circumstances, and that it would expose him to the
suspicion of cowardice, which he never deserved.
Pandolfo earnestly solicited from Petrarch a copy of his Italian works.
Our poet in answer says to him, "I have sent to you by your messenger
these trifles which were the amusement of my youth. They have need of
all your indulgence. It is shameful for an old man to send you things of
this nature; but you have earnestly asked for them, and can I refuse you
anything? With what grace could I deny you verses which are current in
the streets, and are in the mouth of all the world, who prefer them to
the more solid compositions that I have produced in my riper years? "
This letter is dated at Padua, on the 4th of January, 1373. Pandolfo
Malatesta died a short time after receiving it.
Several Powers interfered to mediate peace between Venice and Padua, but
their negotiations ended in nothing, the spirits of both belligerents
were so embittered. The Pope had sent as his nuncio for this purpose a
young professor of law, named Uguzzone da Thiene, who was acquainted
with Petrarch. He lodged with our poet when he came to Padua, and he
communicated to him some critical remarks which had been written at
Avignon on Petrarch's letter to Pope Urban V. , congratulating him on his
return to Rome. A French monk of the order of St. Bernard passed for the
author of this work. As it spoke irreverently of Italy, it stirred up
the bile of Petrarch, and made him resume the pen with his sickly hand.
His answer to the offensive production flows with anger, and is harsh
even to abusiveness. He declaims, as usual, in favour of Italy, which he
adored, and against France, which he disliked.
After a suspension the war was again conducted with fury, till at last a
peace was signed at Venice on the 11th of September, 1373. The
conditions were hard and humiliating to the chief of Padua. The third
article ordained that he should come in person, or send his son, to ask
pardon of the Venetian Republic for the insults he had offered her, and
swear inviolable fidelity to her. The Carrara sent his son Francesco
Novello, and requested Petrarch to accompany him. Our poet had no great
wish to do so, and had too good an excuse in the state of his health,
which was still very fluctuating, but the Prince importuned him, and he
thought that he could not refuse a favour to such a friend.
Francesco Novello, accompanied by Petrarch, and by a great suite of
Paduan gentlemen, arrived at Venice on the 27th of September, where they
were well received, especially the poet. On the following day the chiefs
of the maiden city gave him a public audience. But, whether the majesty
of the Venetian Senate affected Petrarch, or his illness returned by
accident, so it was that he could not deliver the speech which he had
prepared, for his memory failed him. But the universal desire to hear
him induced the Senators to postpone their sitting to the following day.
He then spoke with energy, and was extremely applauded. Franceso Novello
begged pardon, and took the oath of fidelity.
Francesco da Carrara loved and revered Petrarch, and used to go
frequently to see him without ceremony in his small mansion at Arqua.
The Prince one day complained to him that he had written for all the
world excepting himself. Petrarch thought long and seriously about what
he should compose that might please the Carrara; but the task was
embarrassing. To praise him directly might seem sycophantish and fulsome
to the Prince himself. To censure him would be still more indelicate. To
escape the difficulty, he projected a treatise on the best mode of
governing a State, and on the qualities required in the person who has
such a charge. This subject furnished occasion for giving indirect
praises, and, at the same time, for pointing out some defects which he
had remarked in his patron's government.
It cannot be denied that there are some excellent maxims respecting
government in this treatise, and that it was a laudable work for the
fourteenth century. But since that period the subject has been so often
discussed by minds of the first order, that we should look in vain into
Petrarch's Essay for any truths that have escaped their observation.
Nature offers herself in virgin beauty to the primitive poet. But
abstract truth comes not to the philosopher, till she has been tried by
the test of time.
After his return from Venice, Petrarch only languished. A low fever,
that undermined his constitution, left him but short intervals of
health, but made no change in his mode of life; he passed the greater
part of the day in reading or writing. It does not appear, however, that
he composed any work in the course of the year 1374. A few letters to
Boccaccio are all that can be traced to his pen during that period.
Their date is not marked in them, but they were certainly written
shortly before his death. None of them possess any particular interest,
excepting that always in which he mentions the Decameron.
It seems at first sight not a little astonishing that Petrarch, who had
been on terms of the strictest friendship with Boccaccio for twenty-four
years, should never till now have read his best work.
Why did not
Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before? The solution of this
question must be made by ascribing the circumstance to the author's
sensitive respect for the austerely moral character of our poet.
It is not known by what accident the Decameron fell into Petrarch's
hands, during the heat of the war between Venice and Padua. Even then
his occupations did not permit him to peruse it thoroughly; he only
slightly ran through it, after which he says in his letter to Boccaccio,
"I have not read your book with sufficient attention to pronounce an
opinion upon it; but it has given me great pleasure. That which is too
free in the work is sufficiently excusable for the age at which you
wrote it, for its elegant language, for the levity of the subject, for
the class of readers to whom it is suited. Besides, in the midst of much
gay and playful matter, several grave and pious thoughts are to be
found. Like the rest of the world, I have been particularly struck by
the beginning and the end. The description which you give of the state
of our country during the plague, appeared to me most true and most
pathetic. The story which forms the conclusion made so vivid an
impression on me, that I wished to get it by heart, in order to repeat
it to some of my friends. "
Petrarch, perceiving that this touching story of Griseldis made an
impression on all the world, had an idea of translating it into Latin,
for those who knew not the vulgar tongue. The following anecdote
respecting it is told by Petrarch himself:--"One of his friends, a man
of knowledge and intellect, undertook to read it to a company; but he
had hardly got into the midst of it, when his tears would not permit him
to continue. Again he tried to resume the reading, but with no better
success. "
Another friend from Verona having heard what had befallen the Paduan,
wished to try the same experiment; he took up the composition, and read
it aloud from beginning to end without the smallest change of voice or
countenance, and said, in returning the book, "It must be owned that
this is a touching story, and I should have wept, also, if I believed it
to be true; but it is clearly a fable. There never was and there never
will be such a woman as Griseldis. "[N]
This letter, which Petrarch sent to Boccaccio, accompanied by a Latin
translation of his story, is dated, in a MS. of the French King's
library, the 8th of June, 1374. It is perhaps, the last letter which he
ever wrote. He complains in it of "mischievous people, who opened
packets to read the letters contained in them, and copied what they
pleased. Proceeding in their licence, they even spared themselves the
trouble of transcription, and kept the packets themselves. " Petrarch,
indignant at those violators of the rights and confidence of society,
took the resolution of writing no more, and bade adieu to his friends
and epistolary correspondence, "Valete amici, valete epistolae. "
Petrarch died a very short time after despatching this letter. His
biographers and contemporary authors are not agreed as to the day of his
demise, but the probability seems to be that it was the 18th of July.
Many writers of his life tell us that he expired in the arms of Lombardo
da Serigo, whom Philip Villani and Gianozzo Manetti make their authority
for an absurd tradition connected with his death. They pretend that when
he breathed his last several persons saw a white cloud, like the smoke
of incense, rise to the roof of his chamber, where it stopped for some
time and then vanished, a miracle, they add, clearly proving that his
soul was acceptable to God, and ascended to heaven. Giovanni Manzini
gives a different account. He says that Petrarch's people found him in
his library, sitting with his head reclining on a book. Having often
seen him in this attitude, they were not alarmed at first; but, soon
finding that he exhibited no signs of life, they gave way to their
sorrow. According to Domenico Aretino, who was much attached to
Petrarch, and was at that time at Padua, so that he may be regarded as
good authority, his death was occasioned by apoplexy.
The news of his decease made a deep impression throughout Italy; and, in
the first instance, at Arqua and Padua, and in the cities of the
Euganean hills. Their people hastened in crowds to pay their last duties
to the man who had honoured their country by his residence. Francesco da
Carrara repaired to Arqua with all his nobility to assist at his
obsequies. The Bishop went thither with his chapter and with all his
clergy, and the common people flocked together to share in the general
mourning.
The body of Petrarch, clad in red satin, which was the dress of the
canons of Padua, supported by sixteen doctors on a bier covered with
cloth of gold bordered with ermine, was carried to the parish church of
Arqua, which was fitted up in a manner suitable to the ceremony. After
the funeral oration had been pronounced by Bonaventura da Praga, of the
order of the hermits of St. Augustin, the corpse was interred in a
chapel which Petrarch himself had erected in the parish church in honour
of the Virgin. A short time afterwards, Francesco Brossano, having
caused a tomb of marble to be raised on four pillars opposite to the
same church, transferred the body to that spot, and engraved over it an
epitaph in some bad Latin lines, the rhyming of which is their greatest
merit. In the year 1637, Paul Valdezucchi, proprietor of the house and
grounds of Petrarch at Arqua, caused a bust of bronze to be placed above
his mausoleum.
In the year 1630, his monument was violated by some sacrilegious
thieves, who carried off some of his bones for the sake of selling them.
The Senate of Venice severely punished the delinquents, and by their
decree upon the subject testified their deep respect for the remains of
this great man.
The moment the poet's will was opened, Brossano, his heir, hastened to
forward to his friends the little legacies which had been left them;
among the rest his fifty florins to Boccaccio. The answer of that most
interesting man is characteristic of his sensibility, whilst it
unhappily shows him to be approaching the close of his life (for he
survived Petrarch but a year), in pain and extreme debility. "My first
impulse," he says to Brossano, "on hearing of the decease of my master,"
so he always denominated our poet, "was to have hastened to his tomb to
bid him my last adieu, and to mix my tears with yours. But ever since I
lectured in public on the Divina Commedia of Dante, which is now ten
months, I have suffered under a malady which has so weakened and changed
me, that you would not recognise me. I have totally lost the stoutness
and complexion which I had when you saw me at Venice. My leanness is
extreme, my sight is dim, my hands shake, and my knees totter, so that I
can hardly drag myself to my country-house at Certaldo, where I only
languish. After reading your letter, I wept a whole night for my dear
master, not on his own account, for his piety permits us not to doubt
that he is now happy, but for myself and for his friends whom he has
left in this world, like a vessel in a stormy sea without a pilot. By my
own grief I judge of yours, and of that of Tullia, my beloved sister,
your worthy spouse. I envy Arqua the happiness of holding deposited in
her soil him whose heart was the abode of the Muses, and the sanctuary
of philosophy and eloquence. That village, scarcely known to Padua, will
henceforth be famed throughout the world. Men will respect it like Mount
Pausilippo for containing the ashes of Virgil, the shore of the Euxine
for possessing the tomb of Ovid, and Smyrna for its being believed to be
the burial-place of Homer. " Among other things, Boccaccio inquires what
has become of his divine poem entitled Africa, and whether it had been
committed to the flames, a fate with which Petrarch, from excess of
delicacy, often threatened his compositions.
From this letter it appears that this epic, to which he owed the laurel
and no small part of his living reputation, had not yet been published,
with the exception of thirty-four verses, which had appeared at Naples
through the indiscretion of Barbatus. Boccaccio said that Petrarch kept
it continually locked up, and had been several times inclined to burn
it. The author of the Decameron himself did not long survive his master:
he died the 21st of December, 1375.
Petrarch so far succeeded in clearing the road to the study of
antiquities, as to deserve the title which he justly retains of the
restorer of classical learning; nor did his enthusiasm for ancient
monuments prevent him from describing them with critical taste. He gave
an impulse to the study of geography by his Itinerarium Syriacum. That
science had been partially revived in the preceding century, by the
publication of Marco Polo's travels, and journeys to distant countries
had been accomplished more frequently than before, not only by religious
missionaries, but by pilgrims who travelled from purely rational
curiosity: but both of these classes of travellers, especially the
religionists, dealt profusely in the marvellous; and their falsehoods
were further exaggerated by copyists, who wished to profit by the sale
of MSS. describing their adventures. As an instance of the doubtful
wonders related by wayfaring men, may be noticed what is told of
Octorico da Pordenone, who met, at Trebizond, with a man who had trained
four thousand partridges to follow him on journeys for three days
together, who gathered around like chickens when he slept, and who
returned home after he had sold to the Emperor as many of them as his
imperial majesty chose to select.
His treatise, "De Remediis utriusque Fortunae" (On the Remedies for both
Extremes of Fortune) was one of his great undertakings in the solitude
of Vaucluse, though it was not finished till many years afterwards, when
it was dedicated to Azzo Correggio. Here he borrows, of course, largely
from the ancients; at the same time he treats us to some observations on
human nature sufficiently original to keep his work from the dryness of
plagiarism.
His treatise on "A Solitary Life" was written as an apology for his own
love of retirement--retirement, not solitude, for Petrarch had the
social feeling too strongly in his nature to desire a perfect hermitage.
He loved to have a friend now and then beside him, to whom he might say
how sweet is solitude. Even his deepest retirement in the "shut-up
valley" was occasionally visited by dear friends, with whom his
discourse was so interesting that they wandered in the woods so long and
so far, that the servant could not find them to announce that their
dinner was ready. In his rapturous praise of living alone, our poet,
therefore, says more than he sincerely meant; he liked retirement, to be
sure, but then it was with somebody within reach of him, like the young
lady in Miss Porter's novel, who was fond of solitude, and walked much
in Hyde Park by herself, with her footman behind her.
His treatise, "De Otio Religiosorum," was written in 1353, after an
agreeable visit to his brother, who was a monk. It is a commendation of
the monastic life. He may be found, I dare say, to exaggerate the
blessing of that mode of life which, in proportion to our increasing
activity and intelligence, has sunk in the estimation of Protestant
society, so that we compare the whole monkish fraternity with the drones
in a hive, an ignavum pecus, whom the other bees are right in expelling.
Though I shall never pretend to be the translator of Petrarch, I recoil
not, after writing his Life, from giving a sincere account of the
impression which his poetry produces on my mind. I have studied the
Italian language with assiduity, though perhaps at a later period of my
life than enables the ear to be _perfectly_ sensitive to its harmony,
for it is in youth, nay, almost in childhood alone, that the melody and
felicitous expressions of any tongue can touch our deepest sensibility;
but still I have studied it with pains--I believe I can thoroughly
appreciate Dante; I can perceive much in Petrarch that is elevated and
tender; and I approach the subject unconscious of the slightest
splenetic prejudice.
I demur to calling him the first of modern poets who refined and
dignified the language of love. Dante had certainly set him the example.
It is true that, compared with his brothers of classical antiquity in
love-poetry, he appears like an Abel of purity offering innocent incense
at the side of so many Cains making their carnal sacrifices. Tibullus
alone anticipates his tenderness. At the same time, while Petrarch is
purer than those classical lovers, he is never so natural as they
sometimes are when their passages are least objectionable, and the
sun-bursts of his real, manly, and natural human love seem to me often
to come to us straggling through the clouds of Platonism.
I will not expatiate on the _concetti_ that may be objected to in many
of his sonnets, for they are so often in such close connection with
exquisitely fine thoughts, that, in tearing away the weed, we might be
in danger of snapping the flower.
I feel little inclined, besides, to dwell on Petrarch's faults with that
feline dilation of vision which sees in the dark what would escape other
eyes in daylight, for, if I could make out the strongest critical case
against him, I should still have to answer this question, "How comes it
that Petrarch's poetry, in spite of all these faults, has been the
favourite of the world for nearly five hundred years? "
So strong a regard for Petrarch is rooted in the mind of Italy, that his
renown has grown up like an oak which has reached maturity amidst the
storms of ages, and fears not decay from revolving centuries. One of the
high charms of his poetical language is its pure and melting melody, a
charm untransferable to any more northern tongue.
No conformation of words will charm the ear unless they bring silent
thoughts of corresponding sweetness to the mind; nor could the most
sonorous, vapid verses be changed into poetry if they were set to the
music of the Spheres. It is scarcely necessary to say that Petrarch has
intellectual graces of thought and spiritual felicities of diction,
without which his tactics in the mere march of words would be a
worthless skill.
The love of Petrarch was misplaced, but its utterance was at once so
fervid and delicate, and its enthusiasm so enduring, that the purest
minds feel justified in abstracting from their consideration the
unhappiness of the attachment, and attending only to its devout
fidelity. Among his deepest admirers we shall find women of virtue above
suspicion, who are willing to forget his Laura being married, or to
forgive the circumstance for the eloquence of his courtship and the
unwavering faith of his affection. Nor is this predilection for Petrarch
the result of female vanity and the mere love of homage. No; it is a
wise instinctive consciousness in women that the offer of love to them,
without enthusiasm, refinement, and _constancy_, is of no value at all.
Without these qualities in their wooers, they are the slaves of the
stronger sex. It is no wonder, therefore, that they are grateful to
Petrarch for holding up the perfect image of a lover, and that they
regard him as a friend to that passion, on the delicacy and constancy of
which the happiness, the most hallowed ties, and the very continuance of
the species depend.
In modern Italian criticism there are two schools of taste, whose
respective partizans may be called the Petrarchists and the Danteists.
The latter allege that Petrarch's amatory poetry, from its platonic and
mystic character, was best suited to the age of cloisters, of dreaming
voluptuaries, and of men living under tyrannical Governments, whose
thoughts and feelings were oppressed and disguised. The genius of Dante,
on the other hand, they say, appeals to all that is bold and natural in
the human breast, and they trace the grand revival of his popularity in
our own times to the re-awakened spirit of liberty. On this side of the
question the most eminent Italian scholars and poets are certainly
ranged. The most gifted man of that country with whom I was ever
personally acquainted, Ugo Foscolo, was a vehement Danteist. Yet his
copious memory was well stored with many a sonnet of Petrarch, which he
could repeat by heart; and with all his Danteism, he infused the deepest
tones of admiration into his recitation of the Petrarchan sonnets.
And altogether, Foscolo, though a cautious, is a candid admirer of our
poet. He says, "The harmony, elegance, and perfection of his poetry are
the result of long labour; but its original conceptions and pathos
always sprang from the sudden inspiration of a deep and powerful
passion. By an attentive perusal of all the writings of Petrarch, it may
be reduced almost to a certainty that, by dwelling perpetually on the
same ideas, and by allowing his mind to prey incessantly on itself, the
whole train of his feelings and reflections acquired one strong
character and tone, and, if he was ever able to suppress them for a
time, they returned to him with increased violence; that, to
tranquillize this agitated state of his mind, he, in the first instance,
communicated in a free and loose manner all that he thought and felt, in
his correspondence with his intimate friends; that he afterwards reduced
these narratives, with more order and description, into Latin verse; and
that he, lastly, perfected them with a greater profusion of imagery and
more art in his Italian poetry, the composition of which at first served
only, as he frequently says, to divert and mitigate all his afflictions.
We may thus understand the perfect concord which prevails in Petrarch's
poetry between Nature and Art; between the accuracy of fact and the
magic of invention; between depth and perspicuity; between devouring
passion and calm meditation. It is precisely because the poetry of
Petrarch originally sprang from the heart that his passion never seems
fictitious or cold, notwithstanding the profuse ornament of his style,
or the metaphysical elevation of his thoughts. "
I quote Ugo Foscolo, because he is not only a writer of strong poetic
feeling as well as philosophic judgment, but he is pre-eminent in that
Italian critical school who see the merits of Petrarch in no exaggerated
light, but, on the whole, prefer Dante to him as a poet. Petrarch's
love-poetry, Foscolo remarks, may be considered as the intermediate link
between that of the classics and the moderns. * * * * Petrarch both
feels like the ancient and philosophizes like the modern poets. When he
paints after the manner of the classics, he is equal to them.
I despair of ever seeing in English verse a translation of Petrarch's
Italian poetry that shall be adequate and popular. The term adequate, of
course, always applies to the translation of genuine poetry in a subdued
sense. It means the best that can be expected, after making allowance
for that escape of etherial spirit which is inevitable in the transfer
of poetic thoughts from one language to another. The word popular is
also to be taken in a limited meaning regarding all translations.
Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin is twenty times more popular than his
Homer; yet the latter work is deservedly popular in comparison with the
bulk of translations from antiquity. The same thing may be said of
Cary's Dante; it is, like Cowper's Homer, as adequate and popular as
translated poetry can be expected to be. Yet I doubt if either of those
poets could have succeeded so well with Petrarch. Lady Dacre has shown
much grace and ingenuity in the passages of our poet which she has
versified; but she could not transfer into English those graces of
Petrarchan diction, which are mostly intransferable. She could not bring
the Italian language along with her.
Is not this, it may be asked, a proof that Petrarch is not so genuine a
poet as Homer and Dante, since his charm depends upon the delicacies of
diction that evaporate in the transfer from tongue to tongue, more than
on hardy thoughts that will take root in any language to which they are
transplanted? In a general view, I agree with this proposition; yet,
what we call felicitous diction can never have a potent charm without
refined thoughts, which, like essential odours, may be too impalpable to
bear transfusion. Burns has the happiest imaginable Scottish diction;
yet, what true Scotsman would bear to see him _done_ into French? And,
with the exception of German, what language has done justice to
Shakespeare?
The reader must be a true Petrarchist who is unconscious of a general
similarity in the character of his sonnets, which, in the long perusal
of them, amounts to monotony. At the same time, it must be said that
this monotonous similarity impresses the mind of Petrarch's reader
exactly in proportion to the slenderness of his acquaintance with the
poet. Does he approach Petrarch's sonnets for the first time, they will
probably appear to him all as like to each other as the sheep of a
flock; but, when he becomes more familiar with them, he will perceive an
interesting individuality in every sonnet, and will discriminate their
individual character as precisely as the shepherd can distinguish every
single sheep of his flock by its voice and face. It would be rather
tedious to pull out, one by one, all the sheep and lambs of our poet's
flock of sonnets, and to enumerate the varieties of their bleat; and
though, by studying the subject half his lifetime, a man might classify
them by their main characteristics, he would find they defy a perfect
classification, as they often blend different qualities. Some of them
have a uniform expression of calm and beautiful feeling. Others breathe
ardent and almost hopeful passion. Others again show him jealous,
despondent, despairing; sometimes gloomily, and sometimes with touching
resignation. But a great many of them have a mixed character, where, in
the space of a line, he passes from one mood of mind to another.
As an example of pleasing and calm reflection, I would cite the first of
his sonnets, according to the order in which they are usually printed.
It is singular to find it confessing the poet's shame at the retrospect
of so many years spent.
_Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. _
Ye who shall hear amidst my scatter'd lays
The sighs with which I fann'd and fed my heart.
When, young and glowing, I was but in part
The man I am become in later days;
Ye who have mark'd the changes of my style
From vain despondency to hope as vain,
From him among you, who has felt love's pain,
I hope for pardon, ay, and pity's smile,
Though conscious, now, my passion was a theme,
Long, idly dwelt on by the public tongue,
I blush for all the vanities I've sung,
And find the world's applause a fleeting dream.
The following sonnet (cxxvi. ) is such a gem of Petrarchan and Platonic
homage to beauty that I subjoin my translation of it with the most
sincere avowal of my conscious inability to do it justice.
In what ideal world or part of heaven
Did Nature find the model of that face
And form, so fraught with loveliness and grace,
In which, to our creation, she has given
Her prime proof of creative power above?
What fountain nymph or goddess ever let
Such lovely tresses float of gold refined
Upon the breeze, or in a single mind,
Where have so many virtues ever met,
E'en though those charms have slain my bosom's weal?
He knows not love who has not seen her eyes
Turn when she sweetly speaks, or smiles, or sighs,
Or how the power of love can hurt or heal.
Sonnet lxix. is remarkable for the fineness of its closing thought.
Time was her tresses by the breathing air
Were wreathed to many a ringlet golden bright,
Time was her eyes diffused unmeasured light,
Though now their lovely beams are waxing rare,
Her face methought that in its blushes show'd
Compassion, her angelic shape and walk,
Her voice that seem'd with Heaven's own speech to talk;
At these, what wonder that my bosom glow'd!
A living sun she seem'd--a spirit of heaven.
Those charms decline: but does my passion? No!
I love not less--the slackening of the bow
Assuages not the wound its shaft has given.
The following sonnet is remarkable for its last four lines having
puzzled all the poet's commentators to explain what he meant by the
words "Al man ond' io scrivo e fatta arnica, a questo volta. " I agree
with De Sade in conjecturing that Laura in receiving some of his verses
had touched the hand that presented them, in token of her gratitude. [O]
In solitudes I've ever loved to abide
By woods and streams, and shunn'd the evil-hearted,
Who from the path of heaven are foully parted;
Sweet Tuscany has been to me denied,
Whose sunny realms I would have gladly haunted,
Yet still the Sorgue his beauteous hills among
Has lent auxiliar murmurs to my song,
And echoed to the plaints my love has chanted.
Here triumph'd, too, the poet's hand that wrote
These lines--the power of love has witness'd this.
Delicious victory! I know my bliss,
She knows it too--the saint on whom I dote.
Of Petrarch's poetry that is not amatory, Ugo Foscolo says with justice,
that his three political canzoni, exquisite as they are in versification
and style, do not breathe that enthusiasm which opened to Pindar's grasp
all the wealth of imagination, all the treasures of historic lore and
moral truth, to illustrate and dignify his strain. Yet the vigour, the
arrangement, and the perspicuity of the ideas in these canzoni of
Petrarch, the tone of conviction and melancholy in which the patriot
upbraids and mourns over his country, strike the heart with such force,
as to atone for the absence of grand and exuberant imagery, and of the
irresistible impetus which peculiarly belongs to the ode.
Petrarch's principal Italian poem that is not thrown into the shape of
the sonnet is his Trionfi, or Triumphs, in five parts. Though not
consisting of sonnets, however, it has the same amatory and constant
allusions to Laura as the greater part of his poetry. Here, as
elsewhere, he recurs from time to time to the history of his passion,
its rise, its progress, and its end. For this purpose, he describes
human life in its successive stages, omitting no opportunity of
introducing his mistress and himself.
1. Man in his youthful state is the slave of love. 2. As he advances in
age, he feels the inconveniences of his amatory propensities, and
endeavours to conquer them by chastity. 3. Amidst the victory which he
obtains over himself, Death steps in, and levels alike the victor and
the vanquished. 4. But Fame arrives after death, and makes man as it
were live again after death, and survive it for ages by his fame. 5. But
man even by fame cannot live for ever, if God has not granted him a
happy existence throughout eternity. Thus Love triumphs over Man;
Chastity triumphs over Love; Death triumphs over both; Fame triumphs
over Death; Time triumphs over Fame; and Eternity triumphs over Time.
The subordinate parts and imagery of the Trionfi have a beauty rather
arabesque than classical, and resembling the florid tracery of the later
oriental Gothic architecture. But the whole effect of the poem is
pleasing, from the general grandeur of its design.
In summing up Petrarch's character, moral, political, and poetical, I
should not stint myself to the equivocal phrase used by Tacitus
respecting Agricola: _Bonum virum facile dixeris, magnum libenter_, but
should at once claim for his memory the title both of great and good. A
restorer of ancient learning, a rescuer of its treasures from oblivion,
a despiser of many contemporary superstitions, a man, who, though no
reformer himself, certainly contributed to the Reformation, an Italian
patriot who was above provincial partialities, a poet who still lives in
the hearts of his country, and who is shielded from oblivion by more
generations than there were hides in the sevenfold shield of Ajax--if
this was not a great man, many who are so called must bear the title
unworthily. He was a faithful friend, and a devoted lover, and appears
to have been one of the most fascinating beings that ever existed. Even
when his failings were admitted, it must still be said that _even his
failings leaned to virtue's side_, and, altogether we may pronounce that
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man! "
[Footnote A: Before the publication of De Sade's "Memoires pour la vie
de Petrarque" the report was that Petrarch first saw Laura at Vaucluse.
The truth of their first meeting in the church of St. Clara depends on
the authenticity of the famous note on the M. S. Virgil of Petrarch,
which is now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. ]
[Footnote B: Petrarch, in his dialogue with St. Augustine, states that
he was older than Laura by a few years. ]
[Footnote C: "The Floral games were instituted in France in 1324. They
were founded by Clementina Isaure, Countess of Toulouse, and annually
celebrated in the month of May. The Countess published an edict, which
assembled all the poets of France, in artificial arbours, dressed with
flowers; and he that produced the best poem was rewared with a violet of
gold. There were, likewise, inferior prizes of flowers made in silver.
In the meantime, the conquerors were crowned with natural chaplets of
their own respective flowers. During the ceremony degrees were also
conferred. He who had won a prize three times was pronounced a doctor
'_en gaye science_,' the name of the poetry of the Provencal
Troubadours. This institution, however fantastic, soon became common,
through the whole of France. "--_Warton's History of English Poetry_, vol
i. p 467. ]
[Footnote D: I have transferred the following anecdote from Levati's
Viaggi di Petrarea (vol. i. p. 119 et seq. ). It behoves me to confess,
however, that I recollect no allusion to it in any of Petrarch's
letters, and I have found many things in Levati's book which make me
distrust his authority. ]
[Footnote E: Quest' anima gentil che si disparte. --Sonnet xxiii. ]
[Footnote F: Dated 21st December. 1335. ]
[Footnote G: Guido Sette of Luni, in the Genoese territory, studied law
together with Petrarch; but took to it with better liking. He devoted
himself to the business of the bar at Avignon with much reputation. But
the legal and clerical professions were then often united; for Guido
rose in the church to be an archbishop. He died in 1368, renowned as a
church luminary. ]
[Footnote H: Canzoni 8, 9, and 10.
view of pleasingly-scattered villas. Petrarch built himself a house on
the high ground of the village, and he added to the vines of the country
a great number of other fruit-trees.
He had scarcely fixed himself at Arqua, when he put his last hand to a
work which he had begun in the year 1367. To explain the subject of this
work, and the circumstances which gave rise to it, I think it necessary
to state what was the real cause of our poet's disgust at Venice. He
appeared there, no doubt, to lead an agreeable life among many friends,
whose society was delightful to him. But there reigned in this city what
Petrarch thought licentiousness in conversation. The most ignorant
persons were in the habit of undervaluing the finest geniuses. It fills
one with regret to find Petrarch impatient of a liberty of speech,
which, whatever its abuses may be, cannot be suppressed, without
crushing the liberty of human thought. At Venice, moreover, the
philosophy of Aristotle was much in vogue, if doctrines could be called
Aristotelian, which had been disfigured by commentators, and still worse
garbled by Averroes. The disciples of Averroes at Venice insisted on the
world having been co-eternal with God, and made a joke of Moses and his
book of Genesis. "Would the eternal architect," they said, "remain from
all eternity doing nothing? Certainly not! The world's youthful
appearance is owing to its revolutions, and the changes it has undergone
by deluges and conflagrations. " "Those free-thinkers," Petrarch tells
us, "had a great contempt for Christ and his Apostles, as well as for
all those who did not bow the knee to the Stagirite. " They called the
doctrines of Christianity fables, and hell and heaven the tales of
asses. Finally, they believed that Providence takes no care of anything
under the region of the moon. Four young Venetians of this sect had
attached themselves to Petrarch, who endured their society, but opposed
their opinions. His opposition offended them, and they resolved to
humble him in the public estimation. They constituted themselves a
tribunal to try his merits: they appointed an advocate to plead for him,
and they concluded by determining that he was a good man, but
illiterate!
This affair made a great stir at Venice. Petrarch seems at first to have
smiled with sensible contempt at so impertinent a farce; but will it be
believed that his friends, and among them Donato and Boccaccio, advised
and persuaded him to treat it seriously, and to write a book about it?
Petrarch accordingly put his pen to the subject. He wrote a treatise,
which he entitled "De sui ipsius et aliorum Ignorantia--" (On his own
Ignorance, and on that of others).
Petrarch had himself formed the design of confuting the doctrines of
Averroes; but he engaged Ludovico Marsili, an Augustine monk of
Florence, to perform the task. This monk, in Petrarch's opinion,
possessed great natural powers, and our poet exhorts him to write
against that rabid animal (Averroes) who barks with so much fury against
Christ and his Apostles. Unfortunately, the rabid animals who write
against the truths we are most willing to believe are difficult to be
killed.
The good air of the Euganean mountains failed to re-establish the health
of Petrarch. He continued ill during the summer of 1370. John di Dondi,
his physician, or rather his friend, for he would have no physician,
would not quit Padua without going to see him. He wrote to him
afterwards that he had discovered the true cause of his disease, and
that it arose from his eating fruits, drinking water, and frequent
fastings. His medical adviser, also, besought him to abstain from all
salted meats, and raw fruits, or herbs. Petrarch easily renounced salted
provisions, "but, as to fruits," he says, "Nature must have been a very
unnatural mother to give us such agreeable food, with such delightful
hues and fragrance, only to seduce her children with poison covered over
with honey. "
Whilst Petrarch was thus ill, he received news very unlikely to forward
his recovery. The Pope took a sudden resolution to return to Avignon.
That city, in concert with the Queen of Naples and the Kings of France
and Arragon, sent him vessels to convey him to Avignon. Urban gave as a
reason for his conduct the necessity of making peace between the crowns
of France and England, but no one doubted that the love of his own
country, the difficulty of inuring himself to the climate of Rome, the
enmity and rebellious character of the Italians, and the importunities
of his Cardinals, were the true cause of his return. He was received
with great demonstrations of joy; but St. Bridget had told him that if
he went to Avignon he should die soon afterwards, and it so happened
that her prophecy was fulfilled, for the Pope not long after his arrival
in Provence was seized with a mortal illness, and died on the 19th of
December, 1370. In the course of his pontificate, he had received two
singular honours. The Emperor of the West had performed the office of
his equerry, and the Emperor of the East abjured schism, acknowledging
him as primate of the whole Christian Church.
The Cardinals chose as Urban's successor a man who did honour to their
election, namely, Pietro Rogero, nephew of Clement VI. , who took the
name of Gregory XI. Petrarch knew him, he had seen him at Padua in 1307,
when the Cardinal was on his way to Rome, and rejoiced at his accession.
The new Pontiff caused a letter to be written to our poet, expressing
his wish to see him, and to be of service to him.
In a letter written about this time to his friend Francesco Bruni, we
perceive that Petrarch is not quite so indifferent to the good things of
the world as the general tenor of his letters would lead us to imagine.
He writes:--"Were I to say that I want means to lead the life of a
canon, I should be wrong, but when I say that my single self have more
acquaintances than all the chapter put together, and, consequently, that
I am put to more expenses in the way of hospitality, then I am right.
This embarrassment increases every day, and my resources diminish. I
have made vain efforts to free myself from my difficulties. My prebend,
it is true, yields me more bread and wine than I need for my own
consumption. I can even sell some of it. But my expenses are very
considerable. I have never less than two horses, usually five or six
amanuenses. I have only three at this moment. It is because I could find
no more. Here it is easier to find a painter than an amanuensis. I have
a venerable priest, who never quits me when I am at church. Sometimes
when I count upon dining with him alone, behold, a crowd of guests will
come in. I must give them something to eat, and I must tell them amusing
stories, or else pass for being proud or avaricious.
"I am desirous to found a little oratory for the Virgin Mary; and shall
do so, though I should sell or pawn my books. After that I shall go to
Avignon, if my strength permits. If it does not, I shall send one of my
people to the Cardinal Cabassole, and to you, that you may attempt to
accomplish what I have often wished, but uselessly, as both you and he
well know. If the holy father wishes to stay my old age, and put me into
somewhat better circumstances, as he appears to me to wish, and as his
predecessor promised me, the thing would be very easy. Let him do as it
may please him, much, little, or nothing; I shall be always content.
Only let him not say to me as Clement VI. used to do, 'ask what you wish
for. ' I cannot do so, for several reasons. In the first place, I do not
myself know exactly what would suit me. Secondly, if I were to demand
some vacant place, it might be given away before my demand reached the
feet of his Holiness. Thirdly, I might make a request that might
displease him. His extreme kindness might pledge him to grant it; and I
should be made miserable by obtaining it.
"Let him give me, then, whatever he pleases, without waiting for my
petitioning for it. Would it become me, at my years, to be a solicitor
for benefices, having never been so in my youth? I trust, in this
matter, to what you may do with the Cardinal Sabina. You are the only
friends who remain to me in that country. These thirty years the
Cardinal has given me marks of his affection and good-will. I am about
to write to him a few words on the subject; and I shall refer him to
this letter, to save my repeating to him those miserable little details
with which I should not detain you, unless it seemed to be necessary. "
A short time afterwards, Petrarch heard, with no small satisfaction, of
the conduct of Cardinal Cabassole, at Perugia. When the Cardinal came to
take leave of the Pope the evening before his departure for that city,
he said, "Holy father, permit me to recommend Petrarch to you, on
account of my love for him. He is, indeed, a man unique upon earth--a
true phoenix. " Scarcely was he gone, when the Cardinal of Boulogne,
making pleasantries on the word phoenix, turned into ridicule both the
praises of Cabassole and him who was their object. Francesco Bruni, in
writing to Petrarch about the kindness of the one Cardinal, thought it
unnecessary to report the pleasantries of the other. But Petrarch, who
had heard of them from another quarter, relates them himself to Bruni,
and says:--"I am not astonished. This man loved me formerly, and I was
equally attached to him. At present he hates me, and I return his
hatred. Would you know the reason of this double change? It is because
he is the enemy of truth, and I am the enemy of falsehood; he dreads the
liberty which inspires me, and I detest the pride with which he is
swollen. If our fortunes were equal, and if we were together in a free
place, I should not call myself a phoenix; for that title ill becomes
me; but he would be an owl. Such people as he imagine, on account of
riches ill-acquired, and worse employed, that they are at liberty to say
what they please. "
In the letter which Bruni wrote to Petrarch, to apprize him of
Cabassole's departure, and of what he had said to the Pope in his
favour, he gave him notice of the promotion of twelve new cardinals,
whom Gregory had just installed, with a view to balance the domineering
authority of the others. "And I fear," he adds, "that the Pope's
obligations to satiate those new and hungry comers may retard the
effects of his good-will towards you. " "Let his Holiness satiate them,"
replied Petrarch; "let him appease their thirst, which is more than the
Tagus, the Pactolus, and the ocean itself could do--I agree to it; and
let him not think of me. I am neither famished nor thirsty. I shall
content myself with their leavings, and with what the holy father may
think meet to give, if he deigns to think of me. "
Bruni was right. The Pope, beset by applications on all hands, had no
time to think of Petrarch. Bruni for a year discontinued his
correspondence. His silence vexed our poet. He wrote to Francesco,
saying, "You do not write to me, because you cannot communicate what you
would wish. You understand me ill, and you do me injustice. I desire
nothing, and I hope for nothing, but an easy death. Nothing is more
ridiculous than an old man's avarice; though nothing is more common. It
is like a voyager wishing to heap up provisions for his voyage when he
sees himself approaching the end of it. The holy father has written me a
most obliging letter: is not that sufficient for me? I have not a doubt
of his good-will towards me, but he is encompassed by people who thwart
his intentions. Would that those persons could know how much I despise
them, and how much I prefer my mediocrity to the vain grandeur which
renders them so proud! " After a tirade against his enemies in purple,
evidently some of the Cardinals, he reproaches Bruni for having dwelt so
long for lucre in the ill-smelling Avignon; he exhorts him to leave it,
and to come and end his days at Florence. He says that he does not write
to the Pope for fear of appearing to remind him of his promises. "I have
received," he adds, "his letter and Apostolic blessing; I beg you to
communicate to his Holiness, in the clearest manner, that I wish for no
more. "
From this period Petrarch's health was never re-established. He was
languishing with wishes to repair to Perugia, and to see his dear friend
the Cardinal Cabassole. At the commencement of spring he mounted a
horse, in order to see if he could support the journey; but his weakness
was such that he could only ride a few steps. He wrote to the Cardinal
expressing his regrets, but seems to console himself by recalling to his
old friend the days they had spent together at Vaucluse, and their long
walks, in which they often strayed so far, that the servant who came to
seek for them and to announce that dinner was ready could not find them
till the evening.
It appears from this epistle that our poet had a general dislike to
cardinals. "You are not," he tells Cabassole, "like most of your
brethren, whose heads are turned by a bit of red cloth so far as to
forget that they are mortal men. It seems, on the contrary, as if
honours rendered you more humble, and I do not believe that you would
change your mode of thinking if they were to put a crown on your head. "
The good Cardinal, whom Petrarch paints in such pleasing colours, could
not accustom himself to the climate of Italy. He had scarcely arrived
there when he fell ill, and died on the 26th of August in the same year.
Of all the friends whom Petrarch had had at Avignon, he had now none
left but Mattheus le Long, Archdeacon of Liege, with whom his ties of
friendship had subsisted ever since they had studied together at
Bologna. From him he received a letter on the 5th of January, 1372, and
in his answer, dated the same day at Padua, he gives this picture of his
condition, and of the life which he led:--
"You ask about my condition--it is this. I am, thanks to God,
sufficiently tranquil, and free, unless I deceive myself, from all the
passions of my youth. I enjoyed good health for a long time, but for two
years past I have become infirm. Frequently, those around me have
believed me dead, but I live still, and pretty much the same as you have
known me. I could have mounted higher; but I wished not to do so, since
every elevation is suspicious. I have acquired many friends and a good
many books: I have lost my health and many friends; I have spent some
time at Venice. At present I am at Padua, where I perform the functions
of canon. I esteem myself happy to have quitted Venice, on account of
that war which has been declared between that Republic and the Lord of
Padua. At Venice I should have been suspected: here I am caressed. I
pass the greater part of the year in the country, which I always prefer
to the town. I repose, I write, I think; so you see that my way of life
and my pleasures are the same as in my youth. Having studied so long it
is astonishing that I have learnt so little. I hate nobody, I envy
nobody. In that first season of life which is full of error and
presumption, I despised all the world except myself. In middle life, I
despised only myself. In my aged years, I despise all the world, and
myself most of all. I fear only those whom I love. I desire only a good
end. I dread a company of valets like a troop of robbers. I should have
none at all, if my age and weakness permitted me. I am fain to shut
myself up in concealment, for I cannot endure visits; it is an honour
which displeases and wears me out. Amidst the Euganean hills I have
built a small but neat mansion, where I reckon on passing quietly the
rest of my days, having always before my eyes my dead or absent friends.
To conceal nothing from you, I have been sought after by the Pope, the
Emperor, and the King of France, who have given me pressing invitations,
but I have constantly declined them, preferring my liberty to
everything. "
In this letter, Petrarch speaks of a sharp war that had arisen between
Venice and Padua. A Gascon, named Rainier, who commanded the troops of
Venice, having thrown bridges over the Brenta, established his camp at
Abano, whence he sent detachments to ravage the lands of Padua. Petrarch
was in great alarm; for Arqua is only two leagues from Abano. He set out
on the 15th of November for Padua, to put himself and his books under
protection. A friend at Verona wrote to him, saying, "Only write your
name over the door of your house, and fear nothing; it will be your
safeguard. " The advice, it is hardly necessary to say, was absurd. Among
the pillaging soldiery there were thousands who could not have read the
poet's name if they had seen it written, and of those who were
accomplished enough to read, probably many who would have thought
Petrarch as fit to be plundered as another man. Petrarch, therefore,
sensibly replied, "I should be sorry to trust them. Mars respects not
the favourites of the Muses; I have no such idea of my name, as that it
would shelter me from the furies of war. " He was even in pain about his
domestics, whom he left at Arqua, and who joined him some days
afterwards.
Pandolfo Malatesta, learning what was passing in the Paduan territory,
and the danger to which Petrarch was exposed, sent to offer him his
horses, and an escort to conduct him to Pesaro, which was at that time
his residence. He was Lord of Pesaro and Fossombrone. The envoy of
Pandolfo found our poet at Padua, and used every argument to second his
Lord's invitation; but Petrarch excused himself on account of the state
of his health, the insecurity of the highways, and the severity of the
weather. Besides, he said that it would be disgraceful to him to leave
Padua in the present circumstances, and that it would expose him to the
suspicion of cowardice, which he never deserved.
Pandolfo earnestly solicited from Petrarch a copy of his Italian works.
Our poet in answer says to him, "I have sent to you by your messenger
these trifles which were the amusement of my youth. They have need of
all your indulgence. It is shameful for an old man to send you things of
this nature; but you have earnestly asked for them, and can I refuse you
anything? With what grace could I deny you verses which are current in
the streets, and are in the mouth of all the world, who prefer them to
the more solid compositions that I have produced in my riper years? "
This letter is dated at Padua, on the 4th of January, 1373. Pandolfo
Malatesta died a short time after receiving it.
Several Powers interfered to mediate peace between Venice and Padua, but
their negotiations ended in nothing, the spirits of both belligerents
were so embittered. The Pope had sent as his nuncio for this purpose a
young professor of law, named Uguzzone da Thiene, who was acquainted
with Petrarch. He lodged with our poet when he came to Padua, and he
communicated to him some critical remarks which had been written at
Avignon on Petrarch's letter to Pope Urban V. , congratulating him on his
return to Rome. A French monk of the order of St. Bernard passed for the
author of this work. As it spoke irreverently of Italy, it stirred up
the bile of Petrarch, and made him resume the pen with his sickly hand.
His answer to the offensive production flows with anger, and is harsh
even to abusiveness. He declaims, as usual, in favour of Italy, which he
adored, and against France, which he disliked.
After a suspension the war was again conducted with fury, till at last a
peace was signed at Venice on the 11th of September, 1373. The
conditions were hard and humiliating to the chief of Padua. The third
article ordained that he should come in person, or send his son, to ask
pardon of the Venetian Republic for the insults he had offered her, and
swear inviolable fidelity to her. The Carrara sent his son Francesco
Novello, and requested Petrarch to accompany him. Our poet had no great
wish to do so, and had too good an excuse in the state of his health,
which was still very fluctuating, but the Prince importuned him, and he
thought that he could not refuse a favour to such a friend.
Francesco Novello, accompanied by Petrarch, and by a great suite of
Paduan gentlemen, arrived at Venice on the 27th of September, where they
were well received, especially the poet. On the following day the chiefs
of the maiden city gave him a public audience. But, whether the majesty
of the Venetian Senate affected Petrarch, or his illness returned by
accident, so it was that he could not deliver the speech which he had
prepared, for his memory failed him. But the universal desire to hear
him induced the Senators to postpone their sitting to the following day.
He then spoke with energy, and was extremely applauded. Franceso Novello
begged pardon, and took the oath of fidelity.
Francesco da Carrara loved and revered Petrarch, and used to go
frequently to see him without ceremony in his small mansion at Arqua.
The Prince one day complained to him that he had written for all the
world excepting himself. Petrarch thought long and seriously about what
he should compose that might please the Carrara; but the task was
embarrassing. To praise him directly might seem sycophantish and fulsome
to the Prince himself. To censure him would be still more indelicate. To
escape the difficulty, he projected a treatise on the best mode of
governing a State, and on the qualities required in the person who has
such a charge. This subject furnished occasion for giving indirect
praises, and, at the same time, for pointing out some defects which he
had remarked in his patron's government.
It cannot be denied that there are some excellent maxims respecting
government in this treatise, and that it was a laudable work for the
fourteenth century. But since that period the subject has been so often
discussed by minds of the first order, that we should look in vain into
Petrarch's Essay for any truths that have escaped their observation.
Nature offers herself in virgin beauty to the primitive poet. But
abstract truth comes not to the philosopher, till she has been tried by
the test of time.
After his return from Venice, Petrarch only languished. A low fever,
that undermined his constitution, left him but short intervals of
health, but made no change in his mode of life; he passed the greater
part of the day in reading or writing. It does not appear, however, that
he composed any work in the course of the year 1374. A few letters to
Boccaccio are all that can be traced to his pen during that period.
Their date is not marked in them, but they were certainly written
shortly before his death. None of them possess any particular interest,
excepting that always in which he mentions the Decameron.
It seems at first sight not a little astonishing that Petrarch, who had
been on terms of the strictest friendship with Boccaccio for twenty-four
years, should never till now have read his best work.
Why did not
Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before? The solution of this
question must be made by ascribing the circumstance to the author's
sensitive respect for the austerely moral character of our poet.
It is not known by what accident the Decameron fell into Petrarch's
hands, during the heat of the war between Venice and Padua. Even then
his occupations did not permit him to peruse it thoroughly; he only
slightly ran through it, after which he says in his letter to Boccaccio,
"I have not read your book with sufficient attention to pronounce an
opinion upon it; but it has given me great pleasure. That which is too
free in the work is sufficiently excusable for the age at which you
wrote it, for its elegant language, for the levity of the subject, for
the class of readers to whom it is suited. Besides, in the midst of much
gay and playful matter, several grave and pious thoughts are to be
found. Like the rest of the world, I have been particularly struck by
the beginning and the end. The description which you give of the state
of our country during the plague, appeared to me most true and most
pathetic. The story which forms the conclusion made so vivid an
impression on me, that I wished to get it by heart, in order to repeat
it to some of my friends. "
Petrarch, perceiving that this touching story of Griseldis made an
impression on all the world, had an idea of translating it into Latin,
for those who knew not the vulgar tongue. The following anecdote
respecting it is told by Petrarch himself:--"One of his friends, a man
of knowledge and intellect, undertook to read it to a company; but he
had hardly got into the midst of it, when his tears would not permit him
to continue. Again he tried to resume the reading, but with no better
success. "
Another friend from Verona having heard what had befallen the Paduan,
wished to try the same experiment; he took up the composition, and read
it aloud from beginning to end without the smallest change of voice or
countenance, and said, in returning the book, "It must be owned that
this is a touching story, and I should have wept, also, if I believed it
to be true; but it is clearly a fable. There never was and there never
will be such a woman as Griseldis. "[N]
This letter, which Petrarch sent to Boccaccio, accompanied by a Latin
translation of his story, is dated, in a MS. of the French King's
library, the 8th of June, 1374. It is perhaps, the last letter which he
ever wrote. He complains in it of "mischievous people, who opened
packets to read the letters contained in them, and copied what they
pleased. Proceeding in their licence, they even spared themselves the
trouble of transcription, and kept the packets themselves. " Petrarch,
indignant at those violators of the rights and confidence of society,
took the resolution of writing no more, and bade adieu to his friends
and epistolary correspondence, "Valete amici, valete epistolae. "
Petrarch died a very short time after despatching this letter. His
biographers and contemporary authors are not agreed as to the day of his
demise, but the probability seems to be that it was the 18th of July.
Many writers of his life tell us that he expired in the arms of Lombardo
da Serigo, whom Philip Villani and Gianozzo Manetti make their authority
for an absurd tradition connected with his death. They pretend that when
he breathed his last several persons saw a white cloud, like the smoke
of incense, rise to the roof of his chamber, where it stopped for some
time and then vanished, a miracle, they add, clearly proving that his
soul was acceptable to God, and ascended to heaven. Giovanni Manzini
gives a different account. He says that Petrarch's people found him in
his library, sitting with his head reclining on a book. Having often
seen him in this attitude, they were not alarmed at first; but, soon
finding that he exhibited no signs of life, they gave way to their
sorrow. According to Domenico Aretino, who was much attached to
Petrarch, and was at that time at Padua, so that he may be regarded as
good authority, his death was occasioned by apoplexy.
The news of his decease made a deep impression throughout Italy; and, in
the first instance, at Arqua and Padua, and in the cities of the
Euganean hills. Their people hastened in crowds to pay their last duties
to the man who had honoured their country by his residence. Francesco da
Carrara repaired to Arqua with all his nobility to assist at his
obsequies. The Bishop went thither with his chapter and with all his
clergy, and the common people flocked together to share in the general
mourning.
The body of Petrarch, clad in red satin, which was the dress of the
canons of Padua, supported by sixteen doctors on a bier covered with
cloth of gold bordered with ermine, was carried to the parish church of
Arqua, which was fitted up in a manner suitable to the ceremony. After
the funeral oration had been pronounced by Bonaventura da Praga, of the
order of the hermits of St. Augustin, the corpse was interred in a
chapel which Petrarch himself had erected in the parish church in honour
of the Virgin. A short time afterwards, Francesco Brossano, having
caused a tomb of marble to be raised on four pillars opposite to the
same church, transferred the body to that spot, and engraved over it an
epitaph in some bad Latin lines, the rhyming of which is their greatest
merit. In the year 1637, Paul Valdezucchi, proprietor of the house and
grounds of Petrarch at Arqua, caused a bust of bronze to be placed above
his mausoleum.
In the year 1630, his monument was violated by some sacrilegious
thieves, who carried off some of his bones for the sake of selling them.
The Senate of Venice severely punished the delinquents, and by their
decree upon the subject testified their deep respect for the remains of
this great man.
The moment the poet's will was opened, Brossano, his heir, hastened to
forward to his friends the little legacies which had been left them;
among the rest his fifty florins to Boccaccio. The answer of that most
interesting man is characteristic of his sensibility, whilst it
unhappily shows him to be approaching the close of his life (for he
survived Petrarch but a year), in pain and extreme debility. "My first
impulse," he says to Brossano, "on hearing of the decease of my master,"
so he always denominated our poet, "was to have hastened to his tomb to
bid him my last adieu, and to mix my tears with yours. But ever since I
lectured in public on the Divina Commedia of Dante, which is now ten
months, I have suffered under a malady which has so weakened and changed
me, that you would not recognise me. I have totally lost the stoutness
and complexion which I had when you saw me at Venice. My leanness is
extreme, my sight is dim, my hands shake, and my knees totter, so that I
can hardly drag myself to my country-house at Certaldo, where I only
languish. After reading your letter, I wept a whole night for my dear
master, not on his own account, for his piety permits us not to doubt
that he is now happy, but for myself and for his friends whom he has
left in this world, like a vessel in a stormy sea without a pilot. By my
own grief I judge of yours, and of that of Tullia, my beloved sister,
your worthy spouse. I envy Arqua the happiness of holding deposited in
her soil him whose heart was the abode of the Muses, and the sanctuary
of philosophy and eloquence. That village, scarcely known to Padua, will
henceforth be famed throughout the world. Men will respect it like Mount
Pausilippo for containing the ashes of Virgil, the shore of the Euxine
for possessing the tomb of Ovid, and Smyrna for its being believed to be
the burial-place of Homer. " Among other things, Boccaccio inquires what
has become of his divine poem entitled Africa, and whether it had been
committed to the flames, a fate with which Petrarch, from excess of
delicacy, often threatened his compositions.
From this letter it appears that this epic, to which he owed the laurel
and no small part of his living reputation, had not yet been published,
with the exception of thirty-four verses, which had appeared at Naples
through the indiscretion of Barbatus. Boccaccio said that Petrarch kept
it continually locked up, and had been several times inclined to burn
it. The author of the Decameron himself did not long survive his master:
he died the 21st of December, 1375.
Petrarch so far succeeded in clearing the road to the study of
antiquities, as to deserve the title which he justly retains of the
restorer of classical learning; nor did his enthusiasm for ancient
monuments prevent him from describing them with critical taste. He gave
an impulse to the study of geography by his Itinerarium Syriacum. That
science had been partially revived in the preceding century, by the
publication of Marco Polo's travels, and journeys to distant countries
had been accomplished more frequently than before, not only by religious
missionaries, but by pilgrims who travelled from purely rational
curiosity: but both of these classes of travellers, especially the
religionists, dealt profusely in the marvellous; and their falsehoods
were further exaggerated by copyists, who wished to profit by the sale
of MSS. describing their adventures. As an instance of the doubtful
wonders related by wayfaring men, may be noticed what is told of
Octorico da Pordenone, who met, at Trebizond, with a man who had trained
four thousand partridges to follow him on journeys for three days
together, who gathered around like chickens when he slept, and who
returned home after he had sold to the Emperor as many of them as his
imperial majesty chose to select.
His treatise, "De Remediis utriusque Fortunae" (On the Remedies for both
Extremes of Fortune) was one of his great undertakings in the solitude
of Vaucluse, though it was not finished till many years afterwards, when
it was dedicated to Azzo Correggio. Here he borrows, of course, largely
from the ancients; at the same time he treats us to some observations on
human nature sufficiently original to keep his work from the dryness of
plagiarism.
His treatise on "A Solitary Life" was written as an apology for his own
love of retirement--retirement, not solitude, for Petrarch had the
social feeling too strongly in his nature to desire a perfect hermitage.
He loved to have a friend now and then beside him, to whom he might say
how sweet is solitude. Even his deepest retirement in the "shut-up
valley" was occasionally visited by dear friends, with whom his
discourse was so interesting that they wandered in the woods so long and
so far, that the servant could not find them to announce that their
dinner was ready. In his rapturous praise of living alone, our poet,
therefore, says more than he sincerely meant; he liked retirement, to be
sure, but then it was with somebody within reach of him, like the young
lady in Miss Porter's novel, who was fond of solitude, and walked much
in Hyde Park by herself, with her footman behind her.
His treatise, "De Otio Religiosorum," was written in 1353, after an
agreeable visit to his brother, who was a monk. It is a commendation of
the monastic life. He may be found, I dare say, to exaggerate the
blessing of that mode of life which, in proportion to our increasing
activity and intelligence, has sunk in the estimation of Protestant
society, so that we compare the whole monkish fraternity with the drones
in a hive, an ignavum pecus, whom the other bees are right in expelling.
Though I shall never pretend to be the translator of Petrarch, I recoil
not, after writing his Life, from giving a sincere account of the
impression which his poetry produces on my mind. I have studied the
Italian language with assiduity, though perhaps at a later period of my
life than enables the ear to be _perfectly_ sensitive to its harmony,
for it is in youth, nay, almost in childhood alone, that the melody and
felicitous expressions of any tongue can touch our deepest sensibility;
but still I have studied it with pains--I believe I can thoroughly
appreciate Dante; I can perceive much in Petrarch that is elevated and
tender; and I approach the subject unconscious of the slightest
splenetic prejudice.
I demur to calling him the first of modern poets who refined and
dignified the language of love. Dante had certainly set him the example.
It is true that, compared with his brothers of classical antiquity in
love-poetry, he appears like an Abel of purity offering innocent incense
at the side of so many Cains making their carnal sacrifices. Tibullus
alone anticipates his tenderness. At the same time, while Petrarch is
purer than those classical lovers, he is never so natural as they
sometimes are when their passages are least objectionable, and the
sun-bursts of his real, manly, and natural human love seem to me often
to come to us straggling through the clouds of Platonism.
I will not expatiate on the _concetti_ that may be objected to in many
of his sonnets, for they are so often in such close connection with
exquisitely fine thoughts, that, in tearing away the weed, we might be
in danger of snapping the flower.
I feel little inclined, besides, to dwell on Petrarch's faults with that
feline dilation of vision which sees in the dark what would escape other
eyes in daylight, for, if I could make out the strongest critical case
against him, I should still have to answer this question, "How comes it
that Petrarch's poetry, in spite of all these faults, has been the
favourite of the world for nearly five hundred years? "
So strong a regard for Petrarch is rooted in the mind of Italy, that his
renown has grown up like an oak which has reached maturity amidst the
storms of ages, and fears not decay from revolving centuries. One of the
high charms of his poetical language is its pure and melting melody, a
charm untransferable to any more northern tongue.
No conformation of words will charm the ear unless they bring silent
thoughts of corresponding sweetness to the mind; nor could the most
sonorous, vapid verses be changed into poetry if they were set to the
music of the Spheres. It is scarcely necessary to say that Petrarch has
intellectual graces of thought and spiritual felicities of diction,
without which his tactics in the mere march of words would be a
worthless skill.
The love of Petrarch was misplaced, but its utterance was at once so
fervid and delicate, and its enthusiasm so enduring, that the purest
minds feel justified in abstracting from their consideration the
unhappiness of the attachment, and attending only to its devout
fidelity. Among his deepest admirers we shall find women of virtue above
suspicion, who are willing to forget his Laura being married, or to
forgive the circumstance for the eloquence of his courtship and the
unwavering faith of his affection. Nor is this predilection for Petrarch
the result of female vanity and the mere love of homage. No; it is a
wise instinctive consciousness in women that the offer of love to them,
without enthusiasm, refinement, and _constancy_, is of no value at all.
Without these qualities in their wooers, they are the slaves of the
stronger sex. It is no wonder, therefore, that they are grateful to
Petrarch for holding up the perfect image of a lover, and that they
regard him as a friend to that passion, on the delicacy and constancy of
which the happiness, the most hallowed ties, and the very continuance of
the species depend.
In modern Italian criticism there are two schools of taste, whose
respective partizans may be called the Petrarchists and the Danteists.
The latter allege that Petrarch's amatory poetry, from its platonic and
mystic character, was best suited to the age of cloisters, of dreaming
voluptuaries, and of men living under tyrannical Governments, whose
thoughts and feelings were oppressed and disguised. The genius of Dante,
on the other hand, they say, appeals to all that is bold and natural in
the human breast, and they trace the grand revival of his popularity in
our own times to the re-awakened spirit of liberty. On this side of the
question the most eminent Italian scholars and poets are certainly
ranged. The most gifted man of that country with whom I was ever
personally acquainted, Ugo Foscolo, was a vehement Danteist. Yet his
copious memory was well stored with many a sonnet of Petrarch, which he
could repeat by heart; and with all his Danteism, he infused the deepest
tones of admiration into his recitation of the Petrarchan sonnets.
And altogether, Foscolo, though a cautious, is a candid admirer of our
poet. He says, "The harmony, elegance, and perfection of his poetry are
the result of long labour; but its original conceptions and pathos
always sprang from the sudden inspiration of a deep and powerful
passion. By an attentive perusal of all the writings of Petrarch, it may
be reduced almost to a certainty that, by dwelling perpetually on the
same ideas, and by allowing his mind to prey incessantly on itself, the
whole train of his feelings and reflections acquired one strong
character and tone, and, if he was ever able to suppress them for a
time, they returned to him with increased violence; that, to
tranquillize this agitated state of his mind, he, in the first instance,
communicated in a free and loose manner all that he thought and felt, in
his correspondence with his intimate friends; that he afterwards reduced
these narratives, with more order and description, into Latin verse; and
that he, lastly, perfected them with a greater profusion of imagery and
more art in his Italian poetry, the composition of which at first served
only, as he frequently says, to divert and mitigate all his afflictions.
We may thus understand the perfect concord which prevails in Petrarch's
poetry between Nature and Art; between the accuracy of fact and the
magic of invention; between depth and perspicuity; between devouring
passion and calm meditation. It is precisely because the poetry of
Petrarch originally sprang from the heart that his passion never seems
fictitious or cold, notwithstanding the profuse ornament of his style,
or the metaphysical elevation of his thoughts. "
I quote Ugo Foscolo, because he is not only a writer of strong poetic
feeling as well as philosophic judgment, but he is pre-eminent in that
Italian critical school who see the merits of Petrarch in no exaggerated
light, but, on the whole, prefer Dante to him as a poet. Petrarch's
love-poetry, Foscolo remarks, may be considered as the intermediate link
between that of the classics and the moderns. * * * * Petrarch both
feels like the ancient and philosophizes like the modern poets. When he
paints after the manner of the classics, he is equal to them.
I despair of ever seeing in English verse a translation of Petrarch's
Italian poetry that shall be adequate and popular. The term adequate, of
course, always applies to the translation of genuine poetry in a subdued
sense. It means the best that can be expected, after making allowance
for that escape of etherial spirit which is inevitable in the transfer
of poetic thoughts from one language to another. The word popular is
also to be taken in a limited meaning regarding all translations.
Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin is twenty times more popular than his
Homer; yet the latter work is deservedly popular in comparison with the
bulk of translations from antiquity. The same thing may be said of
Cary's Dante; it is, like Cowper's Homer, as adequate and popular as
translated poetry can be expected to be. Yet I doubt if either of those
poets could have succeeded so well with Petrarch. Lady Dacre has shown
much grace and ingenuity in the passages of our poet which she has
versified; but she could not transfer into English those graces of
Petrarchan diction, which are mostly intransferable. She could not bring
the Italian language along with her.
Is not this, it may be asked, a proof that Petrarch is not so genuine a
poet as Homer and Dante, since his charm depends upon the delicacies of
diction that evaporate in the transfer from tongue to tongue, more than
on hardy thoughts that will take root in any language to which they are
transplanted? In a general view, I agree with this proposition; yet,
what we call felicitous diction can never have a potent charm without
refined thoughts, which, like essential odours, may be too impalpable to
bear transfusion. Burns has the happiest imaginable Scottish diction;
yet, what true Scotsman would bear to see him _done_ into French? And,
with the exception of German, what language has done justice to
Shakespeare?
The reader must be a true Petrarchist who is unconscious of a general
similarity in the character of his sonnets, which, in the long perusal
of them, amounts to monotony. At the same time, it must be said that
this monotonous similarity impresses the mind of Petrarch's reader
exactly in proportion to the slenderness of his acquaintance with the
poet. Does he approach Petrarch's sonnets for the first time, they will
probably appear to him all as like to each other as the sheep of a
flock; but, when he becomes more familiar with them, he will perceive an
interesting individuality in every sonnet, and will discriminate their
individual character as precisely as the shepherd can distinguish every
single sheep of his flock by its voice and face. It would be rather
tedious to pull out, one by one, all the sheep and lambs of our poet's
flock of sonnets, and to enumerate the varieties of their bleat; and
though, by studying the subject half his lifetime, a man might classify
them by their main characteristics, he would find they defy a perfect
classification, as they often blend different qualities. Some of them
have a uniform expression of calm and beautiful feeling. Others breathe
ardent and almost hopeful passion. Others again show him jealous,
despondent, despairing; sometimes gloomily, and sometimes with touching
resignation. But a great many of them have a mixed character, where, in
the space of a line, he passes from one mood of mind to another.
As an example of pleasing and calm reflection, I would cite the first of
his sonnets, according to the order in which they are usually printed.
It is singular to find it confessing the poet's shame at the retrospect
of so many years spent.
_Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. _
Ye who shall hear amidst my scatter'd lays
The sighs with which I fann'd and fed my heart.
When, young and glowing, I was but in part
The man I am become in later days;
Ye who have mark'd the changes of my style
From vain despondency to hope as vain,
From him among you, who has felt love's pain,
I hope for pardon, ay, and pity's smile,
Though conscious, now, my passion was a theme,
Long, idly dwelt on by the public tongue,
I blush for all the vanities I've sung,
And find the world's applause a fleeting dream.
The following sonnet (cxxvi. ) is such a gem of Petrarchan and Platonic
homage to beauty that I subjoin my translation of it with the most
sincere avowal of my conscious inability to do it justice.
In what ideal world or part of heaven
Did Nature find the model of that face
And form, so fraught with loveliness and grace,
In which, to our creation, she has given
Her prime proof of creative power above?
What fountain nymph or goddess ever let
Such lovely tresses float of gold refined
Upon the breeze, or in a single mind,
Where have so many virtues ever met,
E'en though those charms have slain my bosom's weal?
He knows not love who has not seen her eyes
Turn when she sweetly speaks, or smiles, or sighs,
Or how the power of love can hurt or heal.
Sonnet lxix. is remarkable for the fineness of its closing thought.
Time was her tresses by the breathing air
Were wreathed to many a ringlet golden bright,
Time was her eyes diffused unmeasured light,
Though now their lovely beams are waxing rare,
Her face methought that in its blushes show'd
Compassion, her angelic shape and walk,
Her voice that seem'd with Heaven's own speech to talk;
At these, what wonder that my bosom glow'd!
A living sun she seem'd--a spirit of heaven.
Those charms decline: but does my passion? No!
I love not less--the slackening of the bow
Assuages not the wound its shaft has given.
The following sonnet is remarkable for its last four lines having
puzzled all the poet's commentators to explain what he meant by the
words "Al man ond' io scrivo e fatta arnica, a questo volta. " I agree
with De Sade in conjecturing that Laura in receiving some of his verses
had touched the hand that presented them, in token of her gratitude. [O]
In solitudes I've ever loved to abide
By woods and streams, and shunn'd the evil-hearted,
Who from the path of heaven are foully parted;
Sweet Tuscany has been to me denied,
Whose sunny realms I would have gladly haunted,
Yet still the Sorgue his beauteous hills among
Has lent auxiliar murmurs to my song,
And echoed to the plaints my love has chanted.
Here triumph'd, too, the poet's hand that wrote
These lines--the power of love has witness'd this.
Delicious victory! I know my bliss,
She knows it too--the saint on whom I dote.
Of Petrarch's poetry that is not amatory, Ugo Foscolo says with justice,
that his three political canzoni, exquisite as they are in versification
and style, do not breathe that enthusiasm which opened to Pindar's grasp
all the wealth of imagination, all the treasures of historic lore and
moral truth, to illustrate and dignify his strain. Yet the vigour, the
arrangement, and the perspicuity of the ideas in these canzoni of
Petrarch, the tone of conviction and melancholy in which the patriot
upbraids and mourns over his country, strike the heart with such force,
as to atone for the absence of grand and exuberant imagery, and of the
irresistible impetus which peculiarly belongs to the ode.
Petrarch's principal Italian poem that is not thrown into the shape of
the sonnet is his Trionfi, or Triumphs, in five parts. Though not
consisting of sonnets, however, it has the same amatory and constant
allusions to Laura as the greater part of his poetry. Here, as
elsewhere, he recurs from time to time to the history of his passion,
its rise, its progress, and its end. For this purpose, he describes
human life in its successive stages, omitting no opportunity of
introducing his mistress and himself.
1. Man in his youthful state is the slave of love. 2. As he advances in
age, he feels the inconveniences of his amatory propensities, and
endeavours to conquer them by chastity. 3. Amidst the victory which he
obtains over himself, Death steps in, and levels alike the victor and
the vanquished. 4. But Fame arrives after death, and makes man as it
were live again after death, and survive it for ages by his fame. 5. But
man even by fame cannot live for ever, if God has not granted him a
happy existence throughout eternity. Thus Love triumphs over Man;
Chastity triumphs over Love; Death triumphs over both; Fame triumphs
over Death; Time triumphs over Fame; and Eternity triumphs over Time.
The subordinate parts and imagery of the Trionfi have a beauty rather
arabesque than classical, and resembling the florid tracery of the later
oriental Gothic architecture. But the whole effect of the poem is
pleasing, from the general grandeur of its design.
In summing up Petrarch's character, moral, political, and poetical, I
should not stint myself to the equivocal phrase used by Tacitus
respecting Agricola: _Bonum virum facile dixeris, magnum libenter_, but
should at once claim for his memory the title both of great and good. A
restorer of ancient learning, a rescuer of its treasures from oblivion,
a despiser of many contemporary superstitions, a man, who, though no
reformer himself, certainly contributed to the Reformation, an Italian
patriot who was above provincial partialities, a poet who still lives in
the hearts of his country, and who is shielded from oblivion by more
generations than there were hides in the sevenfold shield of Ajax--if
this was not a great man, many who are so called must bear the title
unworthily. He was a faithful friend, and a devoted lover, and appears
to have been one of the most fascinating beings that ever existed. Even
when his failings were admitted, it must still be said that _even his
failings leaned to virtue's side_, and, altogether we may pronounce that
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man! "
[Footnote A: Before the publication of De Sade's "Memoires pour la vie
de Petrarque" the report was that Petrarch first saw Laura at Vaucluse.
The truth of their first meeting in the church of St. Clara depends on
the authenticity of the famous note on the M. S. Virgil of Petrarch,
which is now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. ]
[Footnote B: Petrarch, in his dialogue with St. Augustine, states that
he was older than Laura by a few years. ]
[Footnote C: "The Floral games were instituted in France in 1324. They
were founded by Clementina Isaure, Countess of Toulouse, and annually
celebrated in the month of May. The Countess published an edict, which
assembled all the poets of France, in artificial arbours, dressed with
flowers; and he that produced the best poem was rewared with a violet of
gold. There were, likewise, inferior prizes of flowers made in silver.
In the meantime, the conquerors were crowned with natural chaplets of
their own respective flowers. During the ceremony degrees were also
conferred. He who had won a prize three times was pronounced a doctor
'_en gaye science_,' the name of the poetry of the Provencal
Troubadours. This institution, however fantastic, soon became common,
through the whole of France. "--_Warton's History of English Poetry_, vol
i. p 467. ]
[Footnote D: I have transferred the following anecdote from Levati's
Viaggi di Petrarea (vol. i. p. 119 et seq. ). It behoves me to confess,
however, that I recollect no allusion to it in any of Petrarch's
letters, and I have found many things in Levati's book which make me
distrust his authority. ]
[Footnote E: Quest' anima gentil che si disparte. --Sonnet xxiii. ]
[Footnote F: Dated 21st December. 1335. ]
[Footnote G: Guido Sette of Luni, in the Genoese territory, studied law
together with Petrarch; but took to it with better liking. He devoted
himself to the business of the bar at Avignon with much reputation. But
the legal and clerical professions were then often united; for Guido
rose in the church to be an archbishop. He died in 1368, renowned as a
church luminary. ]
[Footnote H: Canzoni 8, 9, and 10.
