SOURCE: Annie Russell Marble, "Petrarch" and "Modern Echoes of Petrarch," in The Dial, Chicago, Vol. XXXVI, No. 434, July 16, 1904, pp. 27-9, 29-31.

[In the essay below, Marble discusses Petrarch's influence on poetry from the Renaissance to the present.]

In the summer of 1304, the exiled Ghibellines, including in their number the greatest of Italian poets, made their headquarters in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, whence they vainly sought to effect a return to their beloved Florence, which had cast them forth with contumely. One of these exiles, expelled from Florence on the same day with Dante something more than two years earlier, was a scholar and politician of some consequence named Petracco; and to him there was born, on the 20th of July, the child destined to a fame among Italian poets second only to that of his father's friend and fellow-exile. The personal relations which thus link the names of Dante and Petrarch did not, however, operate to shape the two poets in anything like the same mould; and the chief instruction offered by setting them side by side is found in the marked contrast between their temperament, their outlook, and their ideals. The main point of contrast is, of course, to be found in the fact that Dante was the incarnation of the mediæval spirit, while Petrarch had in some dim sense the vision of the world to come 'and all the wonder that should be'; the thoughts and the emotions of Dante were held in the strait-jacket of scholasticism, while those of Petrarch were working themselves free from that hampering confinement; while Dante's ideal of the future took the utopian form of the universal dual monarchy of Papacy and Empire, the words of Petrarch, declaring that

''L'antico valore
Nell' italici cor non e 'ancor morto,'

made his voice the first of those to be raised in prophecy of the very practical ideal of a united Italy. In a word, the temper of Dante, for all his deep tenderness and spiritual exaltation, was that of the schoolman; that of Petrarch, on the other hand, for all the mistaken direction of his aims, was that of the humanist.

It has recently been suggested, in a semi-humorous way, that American contributions toward the erection of a monument at Arezzo might most appropriately be made by such of our fellow-countrymen as had ventured to practice the art of sonnet-writing. Certainly, if all of those thus designated should respond to the appeal, abundant means would be forthcoming, no matter how modest the individual offerings. The sonnets of Petrarch have had a multitudinous progeny, not all of whom have done credit to their progenitor, and many a modern maiden has been the recipient of a form of tribute which might never have been thought of had it not been for the sonnets addressed to Madonna Laura six hundred years ago. The Canzoniere of Petrarch, that 'epitomised encyclopædia of passion,' as Dr. Garnett calls it, is so precious a jewel among the world's poetical possessions that it predisposes us to a kindly indulgence of the feeblest of Petrarch's modern followers. The 'Africa' upon which the poet set his hopes of enduring fame has gone the way of all artificial epics, and of all mediæval attempts to keep Latin alive as the medium of literary expression; but the odes, and the sonnets, and the trionfi, written in the despised vulgar tongue, have taken on with the succeeding centuries a more assured immortality. Of the influence of Petrarch upon the poetry of later ages, something is said in the special article which we print elsewhere; we wish to devote our own brief remarks to the humanist rather than to the poet, to the forerunner of the revival of learning rather than to the singer of his own joys and sorrows.

The Alpinists claim Petrarch as the first of their number by virtue of his famous ascent of Mont Ventoux. We doubt, however, if they can read with proper sympathy the letter in which the expedition is described. The modern mountain-climber is not likely to sit down in the first convenient valley and say to himself, 'What thou hast repeatedly experienced to-day in the ascent of this mountain, happens to thee, as to many, in the journey toward the blessed life,' and then to indulge in a long retrospective survey of his career. Nor is he apt, after having reached his summit, to take St. Augustine's 'Confessions' from his pocket and ponder over its message. In Petrarch's case the effect was startling, for he hit upon the following passage: 'And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.' Whereupon, he says: 'I was abashed, and … closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself.' From that moment, the panorama of hill-tops and clouds and skies meant no more to him than the view of Lake Leman had meant to Bernard of Clairvaux. 'Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain. I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.'

But Petrarch could hardly have been expected to climb his mountain in the modern spirit; the significant thing is that he did such a thing at all. 'My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer,' is his simple prefatory statement. But we, knowing in how many things his thought groped unconsciously toward the future, may be pardoned for finding this exploit in a certain sense symbolical, or at least highly suggestive of what we can now see to have been his relations to the development of culture. He cherished the past,—none more fondly than he,—but he never took the view that the sum of all possible culture had been made up by the ancients, leaving nothing for the coming ages to add. He knew not what those ages might bring forth; but he had a wistful sense of their possibilities, which amounted almost to prescience.

The analysis of Petrarch's humanism reveals a number of distinct elements. He not only climbed the mountain, but he also travelled far and wide, because he was genuinely curious about the world of nature and of men, and took a wholesome interest in things and affairs. He read the classical authors, not to find in them texts for disputation, but for the purposes of culture as we understand the term, and with a passionate enthusiasm for their beauty. He collected a library of some two hundred manuscript volumes, not for the reputation of owning them, but because they were for him the very bread and wine of the intellectual life. He even planned to bequeath his books to Venice for the general good, thus conceiving the modern idea of the public library. He wrote the most delightful letters to his friends, following the example of Pliny and Cicero, and he wrote them with an eye to their preservation for future generations. He even wrote a fragmentary autobiography; and, what is particularly noteworthy, he made it largely a record of his inner life, of his intellectual and emotional experiences. The course of his speculation was singularly self-determined; he rejected the narrow educational ideals of his age, and made free to find flaws in the teaching of Aristotle,—not, indeed, calling him 'that accursed heathen,' as Luther was to do two centuries later, but flatly refusing to recognize his authority as pontifical.

All these matters, as well as others unmentioned, bring Petrarch into closer touch with the modern world than any of his contemporaries. Carducci makes him the intellectual arbiter of his age, as Erasmus and Voltaire were the intellectual arbiters of theirs; but that strictly historical fact appeals to us less directly than the fresh and sympathetic quality of his work. Those who would like to come into close contact with Petrarch the humanist, as distinguished from Petrarch the poet, will do well to read the volume of selections admirably translated and edited by Professors Robinson and Rolfe. The English reader could have no better introduction than this to the man and his writings. The poems, of course, need no such introduction. There have been over four hundred editions of them in Italian alone, besides countless translations into numerous tongues. And of their author, now in his grave six hundred years less the three score and ten of his life, let our closing words be those of the contemporary who thus described his end: 'Francesco Petrarca, the mirror of our century, after completing a vast array of volumes, on reaching his seventy-first year closed his last day in his library. He was found leaning over a book as if sleeping, so that his death was not at first suspected by his household.'

Each century brings new proof of the permanence of Petrarch's influence and the charm of his poetry. As Italy celebrates, on the 20th of July, the six-hundredth anniversary of his birth, she challenges the world to name a literary hero who has won more sympathetic homage from cultured men and women of every age. Research during the last century has disclosed few new facts in Petrarch's life; but knowledge of his work, both as humanist and poet, has been widely disseminated. Earlier studies, by Abbe de Sade, Foscolo, Ginguene, and Sismondi, have been translated and appreciated. In Italy and France many biographic and critical treatises have appeared; there have also been a few significant volumes by English and American scholars, from the biography by the poet Campbell in 1843 to more recent studies by Mr. Symonds, Mr. Reeve, and the collaborated work of Professors James Harvey Robinson and H. W. Rolfe. Other popular sketches, both in book and magazine form, have testified to the increasing interest in the romantic phases of Petrarch's life. More illuminative, both of the man and the poet, have been the translations of his sonnets, canzone, and letters, by such modern scholars as Hartley Coleridge, Walter Savage Landor, Mr. Richard Garnett, and Colonel T. W. Higginson. Indirect evidences of his literary influence abound. The Victorian poets and their successors made frequent allusions to him, and their works bear impress of his mode and spirit.

No one would claim Petrarch as one of the world's greatest poets. But the duration of his popularity, and the acknowledged and indirect imitations of his style, give evidence of the progressive quality of his influence. As the lover and sonneteer of Laura, as the patriot-friend of Rienzi and Colonna, as the enthusiast for pure classicism in an age of mental lethargy and pedantry, he merits the remembrance which has never waned from his day to our own. Without loss of his prestige as a scholar, he has won more general recognition as an amatory lyrist, combining the best elements of chivalrous worship for women with the conflicting passions of a modern lover. In the more than three hundred sonnets, and the scores of canzone and sestinas, celebrating the charms and reserve of his mistress, photographing the lover's struggles of heart and conscience, Petrarch has accomplished a work of poetic art more memorable than his cultural reforms. There is an ever-new fascination in his revelations of this fourteenth-century woman, with her soft dark eyes, her golden hair, her alluring voice, and her reposeful beauty of face and presence. Midway between the spiritual Beatrice and the sensual Fiametta, she is a humanized creation of rare charm. Whether she was in truth, as later authorities aver, the wife of Hugo de Sade and the mother of nine children, or only the personification of a poet's vision, she is essentially real yet ideal,—the mistress of feudal days, with the dominant traits of modern womanhood of a loftier type arousing in her lover's heart a conflict between reverence and yearning.

While the last century has given attention chiefly to the love-poetry of Petrarch, it has not overlooked his qualities as a leader both in affairs and in letters. His Latin essays in available form for the modern scholar, his voluminous correspondence carefully edited and largely translated, afford distinct signs of the directive force which he wielded in his own age. Undoubtedly the time was ripe for his influence; but such consideration does not minimize his service. Inferior to Dante as a poet, and separated from him by less than a generation, he was eminently modern in spirit and mode, while Dante was the last noble exponent of mediaevalism. With all his breadth of insight, Petrarch was more than a scholar and a poet; he was the first true Italian patriot-prophet. With vanity and a proneness to servility, he possessed deep-rooted aspirations for political reform, in which are found many of the later tenets of patriotism. In his diplomatic missions, in consultation with Pope and Doge, even in his ardent hope and disappointment in Rienzi, Petrarch was an idealist tempered by practical wisdom. Like Mazzini, his great compatriot of five hundred years later, Petrarch saw in his vision a free and united Italy, though it was his belief that this should come through a revival of Roman standards. For Petrarch, whose father had suffered exile from Florence, there was no specific city-allegiance; he was a patriot, not a partisan, well called by Mr. Symonds 'a freeman of the City of the Spirit.'

Passages in his letters reveal the hidden ethical motives of the man. His honesty, his hatred of deceit in any form, are often reiterated. In the confession of his unabating passion for work, he seems strangely akin to our modern day. The wish expressed to Boccaccio, that death might find him reading or writing, was fulfilled with unexpected literalness. From the letters covering the period between 1326 and 1374, Mr. Lohse selected, translated, and published in London, in 1901, certain 'Thoughts' that well disclose Petrarch's moral and literary traits. Keen insight into humanity and into the fundamental truths of life are interwoven with intimate hints of personal experiences. A few pertinent epigrams have special force,—as 'Nothing can succeed in definance of nature (Bk. IV: Letter 16); 'Idleness alone causes us to disbelieve in our own powers' (Bk. XXI: Letter 10); 'Humble and earnest research is always the first step toward knowledge' (Letters of Old Age; Bk. IV: Letter 5).

Modern scholarship has not only found new meanings in Petrarch, but it has shown greater discrimination in the study of his literary forms. Leigh Hunt's Book of the Sonnet, in the middle of the nineteenth century, emphasized for English readers the perfection of Petrarch's verse and its many adaptations. To Mrs. Shelley he wrote, in general tribute, 'Petrarch and Boccaccio and Dante are the morning and noon and night of the great Italian day; or, rather, Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio are the night and morning and noon.—"And the evening and the morning were the first day.'" (Dowden's Life of Shelley, II., 220.) To Leigh Hunt we are indebted for one of the most musical translations of Petrarch's 'Ode to Vaucluse.' Hunt caught the playful spirit of the verse, and delicately portrayed the vision of Laura amid a shower of blossoms. Passing by occasional tributes to Petrarch in prose and verse, by Samuel Rogers, Barry Cornwall, Lord Houghton, Lord Hammer, and other English seholars, one is reminded of the more significant allusions by that coterie of poets to whom Italy was not alone a goal of pilgrimage but a place of long and happy sojourn. In 1813, Byron, in disgust at his own inability in sonnet form, had written: 'They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions. I detest the Petrarch so much that I would not be the man even to have obtained his Laura, which the metaphysical, whining dotard never could.' In Don Juan he interpolated a characteristic sneer,—

'Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's
  wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?'

When, however, chance brought Byron to the Euganean hills, he found himself moved to a more sympathetic note toward Petrarch and his adjacent home. In a somewhat skeptical mood, he paid his first visit to Arqua in 1817. He confessed that he was 'moved to turn aside in a second visit,' and two years later he urged the poet Moore 'to spare a day or two to go with me to Arqua; I should like to visit that tomb with you,—a pair of poetical pilgrims,—eh, Tom, what say you?' All are familiar with his commemoration of 'the soft, quiet hamlet at Vaucluse' in 'Childe Harold' (IV: xxx).

Shelley had been under the spell of Petrarch's influence before he came to Italy, when, in 1813, he joined his friend Hogg, and read the Italian poets in company with Mrs. Boinville and her sentimental daughter Cornelia Turner. Shelley's earlier interest was revived under these close associations, and in his 'Defense of Poetry' he spoke warmly of Petrarch, 'whose verses are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate.' Vaucluse became a pilgrim-shrine to the Brownings, from that first romantic scene pictured by Mrs. Jamieson, as well as by Mrs. Browning, when the poet-lovers 'sate upon two stones in the midst of the fountain which in its dark prison of rocks flashes and roars and testifies to the memory of Petrarch.' In their Italian studies, the Brownings found Dante and Camoens more stimulating than Petrarch, though one recalls significant references to the latter in 'Apparent Failure,' 'The Ring and the Book,' and 'The Vision of Poets,' such as,

     'And Petrarch pale,
From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each lucid with the name of One.'

For the most pronounced reflection of Petrarch's influence, one turns to Landor. At the outset, he challenges all English writers who have transformed his hero's name. 'For I pretend to no vernacular familiarity with a person of his distinction, and should almost be as ready to abbreviate Francesco into Frank as Petrarca into Petrarch.' The idea of 'The Pentameron' may be traced to the letter sent by Petrarch to Boccaccio after the latter had given him a copy of Dante and asked for a more sympathetic reading of the earlier master. That Petrarch recognized the mental superiority of Dante cannot be questioned; but he confessed that he was repelled by two causes,—the severe adherence to mediaeval standards, and a persistent memory of one glance, when he was eight years old, at the cold and rigorous face of Dante. Two other reasons for this indifference are suggested in Landor's dialogue: first, Petrarch's youthful fear lest by reading Dante he should become a mere imitator; and, second, an objection to Dante's persistent use of the Italian rather than the Latin text for his lofty poetic vision. The natures of these great poets were too antithetical to be in accord,—leaving out all suggestions of Petrarch's vanity; and Landor has well delineated what Disraeli called 'Petrarch's caustic smile on Dante.' To Landor, the character of Petrarch was thus unfolded: 'Unsuspicious, generous, ardent in study, in liberty, in love, with a self-complacency which in less men would be vanity, but arising in him from the general admiration of a noble presence, from his place in the interior of a heart which no other could approach or merit, and from the homage of all who held the principalities of Learning in every part of Europe.'

The early studies and translations of Petrarch's sonnets by Lord Morley, Major MacGregor, Lord Surrey, Lady Dacre, and Susan Wollaston, are still valuable to the modern reader. During the last three decades, several volumes of translations and anthologies have extended general study of the Petrarchan sonnet,—notably the anthologies by Samuel Waddington, William Sharp, Dr. Richard Garnett, and the scientific treatise on the sonnet by Mr. Charles Tomlinson. In his recent volume of sonnets from Dante, Petrarch, and Camoens, Dr. Garnett has shown skill and poetic insight in his renderings of more than sixty Petrarchan sonnets. Especially fine are the thirty-ninth, with the poet's benediction upon Laura; the eightieth, on Vaucluse; and the second of the later memorial sonnets after the passing of Laura and his friend Colonna. Dr. Garnett has prefaced the translations by an original sonnet of tribute, closely following his model in structure and effective play upon the words Laura and Laurel:

'Laurel in right of Laura thou didst claim,
Which wreath Apollo with his bay
 enwound;
Nature with flower and wit with diamond
 crowned;
Thine were the wind, the dawn, the star, the
 flame.'

Of American translators, none have rendered more scholarly and sympathetic sonnets by Petrarch and Camoens than Colonel Higginson. Some of these were included in his earlier volume of verse, The Afternoon Landscape; and with them have been incorporated a few new translations in the exquisite volume of this memorial year, Fifteen Sonnets of Petrarch. Here also is reproduced the essay published in The Atlantic many years ago, 'Sunshine and Petrarch,' in which the earlier sonnets were imbedded. The elusive memory of Laura's beauty, and the vacuity of mind after her death, have been retold with perfect sympathy in sonnet 251, 'Gli occhi di ch' io parlai.'

'Dead is the source of all my amorous
  strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad heart can sound but notes of
 pain.'

Deft in portrayal of the lighter fancies, Colonel Higginson has been even more successful in the deeper revelations of the spirit. With earnest grace he has interpreted the three hundred and twenty-third sonnet, the exaltation of Laura's womanliness and its admonition to maidenhood of all ages,—'Qual donna atende a gloriosa fama.'

'Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame
Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy?
Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy
Whom all the world doth as my lady name!
How honor grows and pure devotion's
 flame,
How truth is joined with graceful dignity,
There thou may'st learn, and what the path
 may be
To that high heaven which doth her spirit
 claim;
There learn that speech beyond all poet's
 skill,
And sacred silence, and those holy ways
Unutterable, untold by human heart.
But the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill,
This none can learn; because its lovely rays
Are given by God's pure grace, and not by
 art.'

Though Petrarch's sonnets and songs can never be placed in the very first rank among world-poetry, yet there is an unwaning charm in the life and verse of this man of warm passion, of strenuous ambition for himself and the modern world. Refreshing the mind of his own age with draughts from the spring of classic letters, he speaks a message as pertinent today as when it issued from his romantic valley retreat, or was listened to by his flatterers at the Venetian court.