SOURCE: "Petrarch," in Littell's Living Age, Vol. XXIV, No. 1802, December, 1878, pp. 771-87.

[In the review below, the anonymous critic remarks on Henry Reeve's Petrarch (1878) and discusses Petrarch's contribution to the Italian Renaissance as a humanist and poetic stylist.]

The true position of Petrarch in the history of modern culture has recently been better understood, owing to a renewed and careful examination of his Latin works in prose and verse. Not very long ago he lived upon the lips of all educated people as the lover of Laura, the poet of the canzoniere, the hermit of Vaucluse, the founder of a school of sentimental sonneteers called Petrarchisti. This fame of Italy's first lyrist still belongs to Petrarch, and remains perhaps his highest title to immortality, seeing that the work of the artist outlives the memory of services rendered to civilization by the pioneer of learning. Yet we now know that Petrarch's poetry exhausted but a small portion of his intellectual energy, and was included in a vaster and far more universally important life-task. What he did for the modern world was not merely to bequeath to his Italian imitators masterpieces of lyrical art unrivalled for perfection of workmanship, but to open out for Europe a new sphere of mental activity. Petrarch is the founder of humanism, the man of genius who, standing within the threshold of the Middle Ages, surveyed the kingdom of the modern spirit, and by his own inexhaustible industry in the field of study determined the future of the Renaissance. He not only divined but, so to speak, created an ideal of culture essentially different from that which satisfied the mediæval world. By bringing the men of his own generation once more into sympathetic relation with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse to that great European movement which restored freedom, self-consciousness, and the faculty of progress to the human intellect. To assert that without Petrarch this new direction could not have been taken by the nations at the close of the Middle Ages would be hazardous. The warm reception which he met with in his lifetime and the extraordinary activity of his immediate successors prove that the age itself was ripe for a momentous change. Yet it is none the less certain that Petrarch did actually stamp his spirit on the time, and that the Renaissance continued to be what he first made it. He was in fact the hero of the humanistic struggle; and so far-reaching were the interests controlled by him in this his world-historical capacity, that his achievement as an Italian lyrist seems by comparison insignificant.

It is Mr. Reeve's merit, while writing for the public rather than for scholars, to have kept this point of view before him. Petrarch, he says, "foresaw in a large and liberal spirit a new phase of European culture, a revival of the studies and the arts which constitute the chief glory and dignity of man;" and there are some fine lines in his "Africa," in which he predicts the advancement of knowledge as he discerned it from afar:—

To thee, perchance, if lengthened days are
 given,
A better age shall mark the grace of
 Heaven;
Not always shall this deadly sloth endure;
Our sons shall live in days more bright and
     pure;
Then with fresh shoots our Helicon shall
     glow;
Then the fresh laurel spread its sacred
 bough;
Then the high intellect and docile mind
Shall renovate the studies of mankind,
The love of beauty and the cause of truth
From ancient sources draw eternal youth.

With reference to Mr. Reeve's life of the poet-scholar it may be briefly said that none of the more interesting or important topics of Petrarch's biography have been omitted, and that the chief questions relating to his literary productions have been touched upon. The little book is clearly the product of long-continued studies and close familiarity with the subject; it is, moreover, marked by unvarying moderation and good taste. Those who have no leisure for studying the more comprehensive biographies of De Sade and Koerting, or for quarrying for themselves in the rich mine of Signor Fracassetti's edition of the poet's letters, will find it a serviceable guide. One general criticism must here be added. Mr. Reeve is not always particularly happy in the choice of his translations. He quotes, for example, not without approval, Macgregor's version of the canzone to Rienzi, which renders the opening lines by this inconceivable clumsiness of phrase:—

Spirit heroic! who with fire divine
Kindlest those limbs, awhile which pilgrim
     hold
On earth a chieftain, gracious, wise, and
 bold.

It might also be parenthetically questioned why he prefers to call the river Sorgues, which in Italian is Sorga, by its Latin name of Sorgia. But these are matters of detail. The book itself is sound. Taking this volume of "Foreign Classics for English Readers" in our hand, we shall traverse a portion of the ground over, which Mr. Reeve has passed, using such opportunities as offer themselves for expressing disagreement upon minor points with his conclusions.

The materials for a comprehensive life of Petrarch are afforded in rich abundance by his letters, collected by himself and prepared for publication under his own eye. Petrarch was an indefatigable epistolographer, carrying on a lively correspondence with his private friends, and also addressing the dignitaries of his age upon topics of public importance. Self-conscious and self-occupied, he loved to pour himself out on paper to a sympathetic audience, indulging his egotism in written monologues, and finding nothing that concerned himself too trivial for regard. His letters have, therefore, a first-rate biographical importance. They not only yield precise information concerning the chief affairs of his life; but they are also valuable for the illustration of his character, modes of feeling, and personal habits. The most interesting of the series is addressed to posterity, and is nothing less than the fragment of an autobiography begun in the poet's old age. Of this remarkable document Mr. Reeve has printed a translation into English. Next in importance to the letters rank the epistles and eclogues in Latin verse and the Italian poems; while apart from all other materials, as furnishing a full confession of Petrarch's passions, weaknesses, and impulses, stand the dialogues upon the "Contempt of the World." The preoccupation with self which led Petrarch to the production of so many autobiographical works, marks him out as a man of the modern rather than the mediæval age. He was not content to remain the member of a class, or to conform his opinions to authorized standards, but strove at all costs to realize his own particular type. This impulse was not exactly egotism, nor yet vanity; though Petrarch had a good share of both qualities. It proceeded from a conviction that personality is infinitely precious as the central fact and force of human nature. The Machiavellian doctrine of self-conscious character and self-dependent virtù, so vitally important in the Renaissance, was anticipated by the poet-scholar of Vaucluse, who believed, moreover over, that high conditions of culture can only be attained by the free evolution and interaction of self-developed intellects. Nature, besides, had formed him for introspection, gifting him with the sensibilities that distinguish men like Rousseau. Subjectivity was the main feature of his genius, as a poet, as an essayist, as a thinker, as a social being. By surrendering himself to this control, and by finding fit scope for this temperament, he emancipated himself from the conditions of the Middle Ages, which had kept men cooped in guilds, castes, cloisters. Determined to be the best that God had made him, to form himself according to his ideal of excellence, he divested his mind of superstition and pedantry, refused such offices of worldly importance as might have hampered him in his development, and sought his comrades among the great men of antiquity, who, like himself, had lived for the perfection of their own ideal.

After the materials afforded to the biographer by Petrarch's own works, may be placed, but at a vast distance below them, the documents furnished by the Abbé de Sade in his bulky "Life." These chiefly concern Laura, and go to prove that she was a lady of noble birth, married to Hugh de Sade, and the mother of eleven children. It would hardly be necessary to refer to these papers, unless Mr. Reeve had expressed a too unqualified reliance on their authority. He says, "These facts are attested beyond all doubt by documents in the archives of the De Sade family." Yet it is still an open question, in the absence of the deeds which the abbé professed to have copied and printed, whether he was not either the fabricator of a historical romance very flattering to his family vanity, or else the dupe of some earlier impostor. It is true that he submitted the supposed originals to certain burghers of Avignon, who pronounced them genuine; but we may remember with what avidity Barrett and Burgon of Bristol swallowed Chatterton's forgeries about the same period: nor, even were we convinced of the abbé's trustworthiness, is there much beyond an old tradition at Avignon to justify the identification of Petrarch's Laura with his Laure de Sade. Mr. Reeve is therefore hardly warranted in asserting that it is "useless to follow the speculations which have been published as to the person of Laura, and, indeed, as to her existence."

Petrarch was born at the moment when the old order of mediævalism had begun to break up in Italy, but not before the main ideas of that age had been expressed in an epic which remains one of the three or four monumental poems of the world. Between the date 1302, when Dante and Petrarch's father were exiled on one day from Florence, and when Petrarch himself was born at Arezzo, and the year 1321, when Dante died, and when the younger poet was prosecuting his early studies in Montpellier, the "Divine Comedy" had been composed, and the mighty age of which it was the final product had already passed away. The papacy had been transferred from Rome to Avignon. The emperors had proved their inability to settle the Italian question. Italy herself, exhausted by the conflicts which succeeded to the first strong growth of freedom in her communes, had become a prey to factions. The age of the despots had begun. A new race was being formed, in whom the primitive Italian virtues of warlike independence, of profound religious feeling, and of vigorous patriotism were destined to yield to the languor of indifference beneath a tyrant's sceptre, to half-humorous cynicism, and to egotistic party strife. At the same time a new ideal was arising for the nation, an ideal of art and culture, an enthusiasm for beauty, and a passion for the ancient world. The Italians, deprived of their liberty, thwarted in their development as a nation, and depraved by the easygoing immorality of the rich bourgeoisie, intent on only money-getting and enjoyment, were at this momentous crisis of their fortunes on the point of giving to the modern world what now is known as humanism, and had already entered on that career of art which was so fruitful of masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and architecture. The allegories, visions, ecstasies, legends, myths, and mysteries of the Middle Ages had lost their primitive vitality. If handled at all by poets or prose-writers, they had become fanciful or frigid forms of literature, at one time borrowing the colors of secular romance, at another sinking into the rigidity of ossified conventionality. Wearied with the effort of the past, but still young, and with a language as yet but in its infancy, the Italians sought a new and different source of intellectual vitality. They found this in the Roman classics, to whom, as to their own authentic ancestors, they turned with the enthusiasm of discoverers, the piety of neophytes.

For Dante the Middle Age still lived, and its stern spirit, ere it passed away, was breathed into his poem. Petrarch, though he retained a strong tincture of mediævalism, belonged to the new period: and this is the reason why, though far inferior in force of character and grasp of thought to Dante, his immediate influence was so much greater. For the free growth of his genius, and for the special work he had to do, it was fortunate for Petrarch that he was born and lived an exile. This circumstance disengaged him from the concerns of civic life and from the strife of the republics. It left him at liberty to pursue his own internal evolution unchecked. It enabled him to survey the world from the standpoint of his study, and to judge its affairs with the impartiality of a philosophical critic. Without a city, without a home, without a family, without any function but the literary, absorbed in solitary musings at Vaucluse, or accepted as a petted guest by the Italian princes, he nowhere came in contact with the blunt realities of life. He was therefore able to work out his ideal; and visionary as that ideal seems to us in many of its details, it controlled the future with a force that no application of his personal powers to the practical affairs of life could have engendered.

Another circumstance of no little weight in the formation of Petrarch for his destined life-work was his education at Avignon. When his father settled there in 1313, the boy of eleven years had already acquired his mother-tongue at Arezzo, Incisa, and Pisa. Nothing therefore was lost for the future poet of the canzoniere in regard to purity of diction. But Avignon was a far more favorable place of training for the humanistic student than any Tuscan town could have been. It was the only cosmopolitan city of that time. A fief of Provence, and owning King Robert of Naples for its sovereign, it was now inhabited by the popes, who swayed Christendom from their palace on the hill above the Rhone. All roads, it is said, lead to Rome; but this proverb in the first half of the fourteenth century might with more propriety have been applied to Avignon. The business of the Catholic Church had to be transacted here; and this brought men of mark together from all quarters of the globe. Petrarch therefore grew up in a society more mingled than could have been found elsewhere at the time in Europe; and since he was destined to be the apostle of the new culture, he had the opportunity of forming a cosmopolitan and universal conception of its scope. His own attitude towards the papal court was not a little peculiar. Though he could boast of being favored by five popes, though he lived on intimate relations with high dignitaries of the Church, though he was frequently pressed to accept the office of apostolic secretary, though he owed his pecuniary independence to numerous small benefices conferred upon him by the pontiffs whom he served, and though he undertook the duties of ambassador at their request, he was unsparing both in prose and verse of the abuse he showered upon them. No fiercer satire of the papal court exists than is contained in the "Epistolœ sine Titulo." It was not that Petrarch was other than an obedient son of the Church; but he could not endure to see the chiefs of Christendom neglecting their high duties to Rome. He thought that if they would but return to the seat of St. Peter, a golden age would begin; and thus his residence in Avignon intensified that idealization of Rome which was the cardinal point of his enthusiasm.

Next in importance to his exile from Provence and his education at Avignon, must be reckoned Petrarch's numerous journeys. His biographers have no slight difficulty in following him from place to place. Besides visiting the most important cities of Italy, he travelled through France and the Low Countries, saw the Rhine, crossed the Alps to Prague, and touched the shores of Spain. No sooner is he established in Vaucluse than we find him projecting a flight to Naples or to Rome. His residence at Parma is interrupted by return flights to Avignon. He settles for a while at Milan; then transfers his library to Venice; next makes Padua his home; then goes on pilgrimage to the Eternal City. The one thing that seems fixed in his biography is change. How highly Petrarch valued freedom of movement, may be gathered from his refusal to accept any office which would have bound him to one spot. Thus he persistently rejected the advances of the popes who offered him the post of secretary; and when Boccaccio brought him the invitation to occupy a professorial chair at Florence in 1351, even this proposal, so flattering to his vanity as an exile and a scholar, was declined with thanks. He knew that he must ripen and possess himself in disengagement from all local ties; for the student belongs to the world, and his internal independence demands a corresponding liberty of action. At the same time there is no doubt that he loved a restless life for its own sake; and he expressly tells us that many of his journeys were undertaken in the vain hope of casting off his passion for Laura, in the unaccomplished effort to break the chains of an internal discontent. The effect of so much movement on himself was still further to develop his cosmopolitan ideal of humanism. He was also flung back by contrast on his inner self, and while he made acquaintance with all the men worth knowing among his contemporaries, he remained a solitary in the midst of multifarious societies. Fame came to him upon his travels, and some of his excursions resembled royal progresses rather than the expeditions of a simple priest. In this way he enhanced the dignity of the humanist's vocation. He may be called the first and by far the most illustrious of those poet-scholars who fitted restlessly from town to town in the Renaissance, ever athirst for glory, and scattering the seeds of knowledge where they went.

When we seek to analyze the ideal of life formed by Petrarch in exile, at Avignon, in the solitary valley of Vaucluse, and in the courts of Europe, we shall be led to consider him from several general points of view— as a scholar, as a politician, as a philosopher, as a poet, and lastly as the man who, living still within the Middle Ages, was first clearly conscious of a modern personality. The discussion of these topics will also serve as well as any other method to bring the complex qualities of one of the most strangely blended characters the world has ever known into sufficient prominence.

It is a mistake to suppose that, though Greek was lost to western Europe, the Latin classics were unknown in the Middle Ages. A fair proportion of both poets and prose-writers are quoted by men of encyclopædic learning like John of Salisbury, Vincent of Beauvais, and Brunetto Latini. But the capacity for understanding them was in abeyance, and their custody had fallen into the hands of men who were antagonistic to their spirit. Between Christianity and paganism there could be no permanent truce. Moreover, the visionary enthusiasms of the cloister and crusade were diametrically opposed to the positive precision of the classic genius. The intellectual strength of the Middle Ages lay not in science or in art, but in a vivid quickening of the spiritual imagination. Their learning was a compilation of detached, ill-comprehended fragments. Their theology, as represented in the "Summa," resembled a vast structure of Cyclopean masonary—block placed on block of roughhewn inorganic travertine, solidified and weighty with the force of dogma. Their philosophy started from narrow data of authority, and occupied its energies in the proof or disproof of certain assumed formulæ. It was inevitable that mediæval scholarship should regard the classical literatures as something alien to itself and should fail to appropriate them. The mediæval mind was no less incapable of sympathizing with their æsthetic and scientific freedom than the legendary mathematician, who asked what the "Paradise Lost" proved, was unable to take the point of view required by poetry. Its utter misapprehension of the subject-matter of these studies was expressed in the legends which made Virgil a magician and turned the gods of Hellas into devils. Nor were the most learned men free from such radically false conceptions, such palpable and incurable "lies in the soul," poisoning the very source of erudition, and converting their industry into a childish trifling with the puppets of blindfold fancy. The very fact that, while Greek was a living language in the east and in the south of Italy, it should have been abandoned by the students of the north and west, proves the indifference to literature for its own sake and the apathy with regard to human learning that prevailed in Europe. Had not Latin been the language of the Church, the language of civilized communication, it is certain that the great authors of Rome would have fallen into the same oblivion as those of Athens. An accident of social and ecclesiastical necessity preserved them. Yet none the less did they need to be rediscovered when the time came for a true comprehension of their subject-matter to revive. What Petrarch did for scholarship was to restore the lost faculty of intelligence by placing himself and his generation in a genial relation of sympathy to the Latin authors. He first treated the Romans as men of like nature with ourselves. For him the works of Virgil and Cicero, Livy and Horace, were canonical books—not precisely on a par with the Bible, because the matter they handled had a less vital relation to the eternal concerns of humanity—but still possessing an authority akin to that of inspiration, and demanding no less stringent study than the Christian sacred literature.

The dualism of the papacy and the empire, which had struck such deep roots in mediæval politics, repeated itself in Petrarch's theory of human knowledge. Just as the pope was the sun, the emperor the moon of the mediæval social system, so, with Petrarch, Christ and the Church shed the light of day upon his conscience, while the great men of antiquity were luminaries of a secondary splendor, by no means to be excluded from the heaven of human thought. This is the true meaning of his so-called humanism. It was this which made him search indefatigably for MSS., which prompted him to found public libraries and collect coins, and which impelled him to gather up and live again in his own intellectual experience whatever had been thought and done by the heroes of the Roman world. At its beginning, humanism was a religion rather than a science. Its moral force was less derived from the head than from the heart. It was an outgoing of sympathy and love and yearning towards the past, not a movement of sober curiosity. Petrarch made the classic authors his familiar friends and confidants. His epistles to Cicero, Seneca, and Varro are but fragments of a long-sustained internal colloquy, detached by a literary caprice and offered to the public as a specimen of his habitual mood. Unlike Machiavelli, after a day passed among the boon companions of a village inn, Petrarch had no need to cast aside his vulgar raiment on the threshold of his study, and assume a courtly garb before he entered the august society of the illustrious dead. He had wrought himself into such complete sympathy with the objects of his admiration, that he was always with them. They were more real to him than the men around him. He tells Augustine or Cicero more about his inner self than he communicates to the living friends whom he called Lælius and Socrates and Simonides. These men, of whom we know almost nothing, served Petrarch as the audience of his self-engrossed monologues; but they were separated from him by the spirit of the Middle Ages. He held converse with them, and presumably loved them; but he recognized a difference of intellectual breed which removed them to a greater distance than the lapse of years dividing him from antiquity. Only those friends of Petrarch's who were animated by an instinct for humanism, kindred in nature and equal in intensity to his own, emerge from the shadow-world and stand before us in his correspondence as clearly as his comrades of the Roman age. Cola di Rienzo and Boccaccio have this privilege. The rest are formless, vague, devoid of substance. …

When we enquire into the range of Petrarch's knowledge, we find that he had by no means more than belonged to the mediæval students in general. It was not the extent, but the intensity of his erudition, not the matter, but the spirit of his scholarship, not its quantity, but its quality, that placed him at an immeasurable distance of superiority above his predecessors. He had so far appropriated Virgil and Seneca, with the larger portions of Cicero and Livy, as to find some difficulty in avoiding verbal reproductions of their works. Had he so willed, he might have expressed himself in a cento of their prose and verse. Horace and Ovid, Juvenal and Persius, Terence, Lucan, Statius, Ausonius, and Claudian, were among his favorite poets. It is possible that he had read Lucretius, and he twice refers somewhat vaguely to Catullus: but Propertius and Tibullus seem to have been unknown to him, while he makes but scanty use of Martial and Plautus. Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus he never saw: else it is improbable that he would have chosen Scipio Africanus for the hero of his Latin epic. With Apuieius he was partially acquainted; but there seems good reason to suppose that he had never read the "Golden Ass," though he alludes to it. He knew Macrobius, Aulus Gellius, Solinus, Hyginus, and Pomponius Mela in part, if not completely; for it must be remembered, in reading this lengthy list of authors, that the MSS. were imperfect and full of errors. What Poggio tells us about his finding Quintilian at St. Gallen, proves that the discovery of a good codex was almost equal to the resuscitation of a forgotten author. Cæsar, Sallust, Suetonius, Florus, Justin, Curtius, Vopiscus, Ælius Lampridius, Spartian, together with the anecdotes of Valerius Maximus and the universal history of Orosius, were among the authors he studied and epitomized while composing his great work on "Famous Men." Tacitus was unfortunately unknown to him; and he possessed Quintilian only in a mutilated copy. It may also be regarded as a special calamity that he was unacquainted with the letters of the younger Pliny, though he possessed the natural histories of the elder. The style of these letters would have supplied Petrarch with a better model than Seneca's rhetorical epistles; and he could have assimilated it more easily than that of Cicero, partly because it is itself less idiomatic, and partly because the poet of Vaucluse would have recognized a vivid bond of intellectual sympathy between himself and the humane and tranquil dilettante of Como. As it was, Petrarch's letters bear the stamp of Seneca, Augustine, and the Middle Ages. He found the MS. of Cicero too late (at Verona in 1345) to profit by its study. And here we must express a total disagreement with a passage of Mr. Reeve's "Petrarch," where he says: "But though the style of Cicero was, no doubt, his model, he attained rather to the epistolary than to the philosophical diction of that great master." It is true that on the next page Mr. Reeve appears to contradict this statement by the following admission: "As his knowledge of the Ciceronian epistles was not attained till Petrarch had passed his fortieth year, it may be concluded that his own epistolary style was formed before he knew them." The fact is here correctly given. There is no trace of Cicero's diction, at once epigrammatic and easy, in Petrarch's letters; but in his philosophical treatises, though these reveal the paramount influence of Seneca, St. Augustine, and Lactantius, we occasionally detect an aiming at Cicero's oratorical cadences. The variety of matter handled in his letters, the rapid transition from description to dissertation, their masterly portraits of men, the pleasant wit and caustic humor that relieve the graver passages, the unaffected friendliness of their familiar discourse, the earnest enthusiasm of their political and philosophical digressions, the animation and the movement that carry the reader on as through an ever-shifting, ever-changing scene, render this great mass of correspondence not only valuable for the historian but delightful to the general reader. The scholar will detect a less than classic elegance in their diction, and the student will desire less generality of treatment on some personal topics. But both will admit that neither the ear for rhythm nor the quick intelligence which Petrarch recognized among his choicest literary gifts, had failed him in their composition.

It was Petrarch's merit, while absorbing the Roman classics and the Latin fathers, to have aimed consistently at a style that should express his own originality, and be no mere copy of however eminent a master's. The ruling consciousness of self, which formed so prominent a feature of his moral character, lying at the root of his vanity and conditioning his genius as a poet, here decided his literary development. He would be no man's ape—not even the ape of Cicero or Virgil. Come good, come bad, he meant to be himself. With this end in view, he forced himself to deal with the most formidable stylistic difficulties, and to find utterance in a practically dying language for thoughts and feelings that were modern. In this respect he contrasted favorably with his Italian followers, and proved that his conception of humanism was loftier than that of Ciceronian Bembo, or Virgilian Vida. They cut their matter down to the requirements of an artificially assimilated standard. He made the idiom bend to his needs, and preferred that purity of form should suffer, rather than that the substance to be expressed should be curtailed. It may indeed be said with truth that Erasmus, at the close of the fifteenth century, returned to the path trodden by Petrarch in the first half of the fourteenth, which had been abandoned by a set of timid and subservient purists on the quest of an impossible ideal.

Petrarch knew no Greek, yet he divined its importance, and made every effort in his power to learn it, if we except the supreme effort of going to the fount of Greek in Constantinople. His opportunities at Avignon were few; and he obtained no hold upon the language. What the subsequent history of Italian scholarship would have been, if Petrarch had but ventured on that journey to Byzantium which Filelfo and Guarino took with such immediate profit, or if by any other means he had acquired the key to Greek literature, it is now impossible to say. The weak side of the Renaissance was that it depended mainly upon. Latin: and this explains in no small measure its philosophical superficiality, its tendency to lifeless rhetoric, its stylistic insipidity, the timidity and artificiality that stamp its literary products with the note of mediocrity. It was the echo of an echo, the silver age of a culture which had its own golden age in the Hellenic past: and all that it achieved in close relation to antiquity was consequently third-rate. Whether Petrarch, if he had known Greek, could have resisted the powerful bias which drew Italians back to Rome rather than to Athens, and whether, if he had overcome this tendency himself, he could have had the force to dye the humanism of the Renaissance with Hellenic instead of Latin colors, are questions that cannot by their very nature be decided. But none the less may we regret that tardy and partial impregnation of the modern mind by the Greek spirit which, had it but come earlier and in fuller measure, might have given the world a new birth of Athens instead of Rome. At the moment when humanism was a religion, the Italians absorbed the Latin genius; but now that scholarship has passed into the scientific stage, we are directed to Hellas with an unassimilative curiosity. As regards Petrarch's own knowledge of Greek authors, it may be briefly stated that he possessed MSS. of Homer and some dialogues of Plato. But he lamented that they were dumb for him while he was deaf. He read the "Iliad" in the pitiful Latin version dictated to Boccaccio by Pilatus; and the doctrines of Plato were known to him only in the meagre abstract of Apuleius, in Cicero, and in the works of St. Augustine.

Rome lay near to the Italians on their emergence from the Middle Ages. They were not a new nation, like the French or Germans; but were conscious that once, not very long ago, and separated from them only by a space of dream-existence, their ancestors through Rome had ruled the habitable world. Therefore Florence clung to her traditions of Catiline; the soldiers on watch at Modena told tales of Hector; Padua was proud of Antenor, and Como of the Plinies; Mantua sang hymns to Virgil; Naples pointed out his tomb; Sulmo rejoiced in Ovid, and Tivoli remembered Horace. The newly-formed Italian people, the people who had fought the wars of independence and had founded the communes, were essentially Roman. In no merely sentimental sense, but as a fact of plain historical survival, what still remained of Rome was indefeasibly their own. The plebs of the Italian cities was of Roman blood. Their municipal constitution, in the form and name at least, was Roman. Yet this great memory was but dimly descried through the mist of legends and romance, till Petrarch seized upon it and called his fellow-countrymen to recognize their birthright. His letter describing the impression made upon him by the ruins of Rome, dated with pride from the Capitol upon the Ides of March, his epistles to Varro and Cicero, and his burning appeals to each succeeding pope that he should end the Babylonian captivity and place a crown upon the brows of the world's mistress, prove with what a passion of anticipation he forecast the time when Rome should once more be the seat of empire. In the field of scholarship his enthusiasm was destined to be fruitful. The spirit of Roman art and literature arose from the grave to sway a golden period in the history of human civilization. But in the sphere of politics it remained impotent, idealistic, fanciful.

As a politician, Petrarch continued to the end an incurable idealist. The very conditions of expatriation and pilgrimage, which rendered him so powerful as the leader of the humanistic movement, loosened his grasp upon the realities of political life. We see this on every occasion of his attempting to play a part in the practical business of the world. In his mission from the papal court to Naples, after the accession of Queen Joan, and in his representation of the Visconti at Venice toward the close of her long struggle with Genoa, he was unsuccessful, mainly because he thought that affairs of State could be decided upon moral principles, and because he assumed the tone of an oratorical pedagogue. It was only when the rhetorician's art was needed for a magnificent display, as in his embassy from the Visconti to the French court upon the delivery of John the Good from captivity, in his speech to the conquered people of Novara, and in his ceremonial address to Charles IV. at Prague, that he justified the confidence which had been placed in him. He never saw the world as it was, but as he wished it. And what he wished, was the imposible resuscitation of the Roman commonwealth. Rome was destined, he believed, to be the centre of the globe again as it had been before. With a thoroughly unpractical conception of the very conditions of the problem, he at one time called upon the popes to re-establish themselves in the Eternal City; at another he besought the emperor to make it his headquarters, and to finish by this simple act the anarchy of Italy; at a third, when Rienzi for a moment evoked the pale shadow of the republic from the ruins of the Campagna, he hailed in him the inaugurator of a new and better age. It was nothing to Petrarch that these three solutions were discordant; that pope, emperor, and commonwealth could not simultaneously exist at Rome. Whatever seemed to reflect lustre on the Rome of his romantic vision satisfied him. Indifferent to the claims of gratitude in the past, careless of consequences in the future, he published letters which denounced his old friends and patrons, the Colonna family, as barbarous intruders in the sacred city. Even his humanity forsook him. He burned to play the Brutus, and bade Rienzi to strike and spare not. By the same heated utterances, penetrated, it is true, with the spirit of a sincere patriotism and piety to Rome, he risked the hatred of the papal see. Nor was it until Rienzi had foamed himself away in the madness of vanity that Petrarch awoke from his wild dream. He awoke indeed, but he never relinquished the hope that, if not by this man or that policy, at least by some other Messiah, and upon a different foundation, Rome might still be restored to her primeval splendor. It would seem as though the great ones of the earth estimated his enthusiasm at its real value, and allowed him to pass free as a chartered lunatic; for, much as he said and wrote about the republic, he never seriously imperilled his consideration at the papal court, nor did he interrupt his friendly relations with the petty princes whom he so vehemently denounced as traitors to the Italian people. There was a strange confusion in his mind between his admiration for the ancient Roman commonwealth, which he had imbibed from Livy and which inspired his "Africa," and his mediæval worship of the mixed papal and imperial idea. To Dante's theory of monarchy he added a purely literary enthusiasm for the populus Romanus. Yet Petrarch was no real friend of the people, as he found it, and as alone it could exist in the new age. His friendship for Azzo da Correggio and Luchino Visconti, for the tyrants of Padua, Verona, and Parma, and for King Robert of Sicily, prove that, though in theory he desired some phantom of republican government, in practice he accommodated himself to the worst forms of despotism. Democracy formed no portion of his creed; and his plan of Roman government, submitted to the consideration of Clement VI. in 1351, simply consisted of a scheme for placing power in the hands of the Roman burghers to the exclusion of the great Teutonic families. He was possessed with scholarly hauteur and literary aristocracy; and if he could not have a senate in Rome, with Scipios and Gracchi perorating before popes and emperors in some impossible chimera of mixed government, he did not care how cities suffered or how princes ground their people into dust. His apathetic attitude toward Jacopo da Bussolari's revolution in Pavia, and his sermon to the Novaresi on obedience, would be enough to prove this, if his whole life at Milan, Parma, and Padua were not conclusive testimony.

The main fault of Petrarch's treatises on politics is that they are too didactic. They do not touch the points at issue, but lose themselves in semi-ethical and superficially rhetorical discourses. Thus he prepared the way for those orators of the Renaissance who thought it enough to adorn their subject with moral sentences and learned citations, neglecting the matter of dispute and flooding their audience with conventional sermons. The same fault may be found with his philosophical writings, although a nobler spirit appears in them and a more sturdy grasp upon the realities of life. It was his misfortune to be cast exclusively upon the Roman eclectics—Cicero, Seneca, and Lactantius— for his training in moral science. His ignorance of Greek deprived him of the opportunity of studying any complete system, while his temperament rendered him incapable of absorbing and reconstructing the stoicism of the later Latin writers. According to his view, orthodoxy was the true philosophy; nor did he ever grasp the notion that in the scientific impulse there is an element of search and criticism perilous to Christian dogmatism. It need scarcely be said that he was a good churchman, though of a type less monumentally severe than Dante. Early in life he took orders; and here it may be observed that Mr. Reeve is possibly wrong in supposing he was never ordained priest. The point seems proved by his own declaration that he was in the habit of saying mass;¹ and though his life was not irreproachable from a moral point of view, he never pretended that in this respect his conduct had not fallen short of sacerdotal duty.

St. Augustine, whose mental attitude as an orthodox philosopher was similar to his own, became the author of his predilection. Few moments in the history of thought are more interesting than the meeting of that last Roman, already merging his antique individuality in the abyss of theological mysticism, with Petrarch, the first modern to emerge from that contemplative eclipse and reassert the rights of human personality. Between them rolled the river of the Middle Ages, which had almost proved the Lethe of learning; but Petrarch stretched his hand across it, and found in the author of the "Civitas Dei" a friend and comrade. The exquisite sensibility of Augustine, his fervid language, the combat between his passions and his piety, his self-analysis, and final conquest over all that checks the soul's flight heavenward, drew Petrarch to him with irresistible attraction. The poet of Vaucluse recognized in him a kindred nature. The "Confessions" were his Werther, his Rousseau, his cherished gospel of tenderness, "running over with a fount of tears." But, more than this, Augustine pointed him the path that he should tread; and though Petrarch could not tread it firmly, though he bitterly avowed that love, restlessness, vanity, thirst for earthly fame, coldness, causeless melancholy, and divided impulse, kept him close to earth, when he would fain have flown aloft to God, yet the communion with this sterner but still sympathetic nature formed his deepest consolation. Those who wish to study Petrarch's very self must seek it in the book he called his Secretum, the dialogues with St. Augustine upon the contempt of the world. Between Augustine's own "Confessions" and this masterpiece of self-description, the human intellect had produced nothing of the same kind, if we except Dante's exquisite but comparatively restricted "Vita Nuova." With a master hand Petrarch touches the secret springs of his character in these dialogues, lays his finger upon his hidden wounds, and traces the failures and achievements of his life to their true sources. No more consummate piece of self-conscious analysis has ever been penned. It is inspired with an artistic interest in the subject for its own sake; and though the tone is grave, because Petrarch was sincerely religious, there is no obvious aiming at edification. In this intense sense of personality, this delight in the internal world revealed by introspection, it differs widely from mediæval manuals of devotion, from the "Imitatio Christi," for example, which is not the delineation of a man but of a class.

The De Contemptu Mundi is the most important of Petrarch's quasi-philosophical works, chiefly, perhaps, because it was not written with a would-be scientific purpose. Together with a very few books of a similar description, gathered from all literatures ancient and modern, it remains as a fruitful mine for the inductive moralist. His treatise, De Remediis utriusque Fortunœ though bulkier, has less value. It consists of sentences and commonplaces upon the good and evil things of life, and how to deal with them, very often acute, and not seldom humorous, and written in a fluent style, that must have made them infinitely charming to the fourteenth century of arid composition. Petrarch had the art of literary gossip; and he displayed it not only in his letters, but also in such studied works as this The essay De Vitâ Solitariâ has a greater personal interest. Petrarch unfolds in it his theory of the right uses to be made of solitude, and shows how intellectual activity can best be carried on in close communion with nature. What he preached he had fully proved by practice at Vaucluse and Selvapiana. His recluse is no hermit or mediæval monk. He does not retire to the desert, or the woods, or to the cloister; but he lives a life of rational study and sustained communion with himself in the midst of nature's beauties. These he enjoys with placidity and passion, mingled in a wise enthusiasm, till, living thus alone, he finds his true self, enters into the possession of his own mental kingdom, and needs no external support of class interests, official dignities, or work among his fellow-men to buoy him up. There is a profoundly modern tone in this essay. Petrarch describes in it an intellectual egotist, devoted to self-culture, and bent on being sufficient to himself. It is, in fact, the ideal of Goethe, anticipated by four centuries, and colored with a curious blending of piety and paganism peculiar to Petrarch. The De Vitâ Solitariâ might be styled the panegyric of the wilderness, from a humanistic point of view. … [What] Petrarch did was to restate a classic theory of life, which had been merged in the asceticism of the cloister. He did so, without doubt, unconsciously; for Menander was a closed book to him. In harsh contrast is the companion essay on the leisure of the religious, De Otio Religiosorum, composed by Petrarch after a visit to his brother Gherardo in his cloister near Marseilles. The fascination which, in spite of humanism, the Middle Ages still exerted over Petrarch, may be seen in every line of this apparent palinode. If we examine the two discourses side by side, we are almost driven to the conclusion that his command of rhetoric induced their author to treat two discordant aspects of the same theme with something like cynical indifference. Yet this was not the case. In each discourse Petrarch is sincere; for the mediæval and humanistic ideals, irreconcilable and mutually exclusive, found their meeting-point in him. Their conflict caused his spiritual restlessness, and it was the effort of his life to bring them into equilibrium. At one time the humanist, athirst for glory, bent on self-effectuation, forensic, eloquent, enjoying life, devoting his solitary hours to culture, and communing in spirit with the orators of ancient Rome, was upper-most. At another the ascetic, renouncing the world, absorbing himself in mystic contemplation, fixing all his thoughts on death and on the life beyond the grave, assumed supremacy. In his youth and early manhood the former prevailed. After the year 1348, the year of Laura's death, the year of the great plague, which swept away his friends and changed the aspect of society, the latter gained a permanently growing ascendency. But it may be safely said that both impulses co-existed in him till the day of his own death in 1374. A common ground for both was found in the strong love of seclusion which formed one of his chief characteristics, driving him from time to time away from towns and friends into the country houses he possessed at Vaucluse, near Parma, near Milan, and at Arquà. A singular scheme, communicated in 1348 to his friends Mainardo Accursio and Luca Cristiano, for establishing a kind of humanistic convent, of which the members should be devoted to study as well as to religious exercises, shows that Petrarch even meditated a practical fusion of the scholarly and monastic modes of life.

Petrarch was neither a systematic theologian nor a systematic philosopher. He was an orthodox essayist on moral themes, biassed by a leaning towards pagan antiquity. Far more valuable than any of his ethical dissertations was his large and liberal view of human knowledge; and in this general sense he rightly deserves the title of philosopher. Mere repetitions of prescribed formulæ, reproductions of a master's ipse dixit, and scholastic reiterations of authorized doctrines, whether in theology or in philosophy, moved his bitterest scorn. He held that everything was worthless which a man had not assimilated and lived into by actual experience, so as to reconstruct it with the force of his own personality. This point of view was eminently precious in an age of formalism. His antipathy to law, in like manner, did not spring from any loathing of a subject redolent with antiquity and consecrated by the genius of Rome. He only despised the peddling sophistries and narrow arts of those who practised it. His polemic against the physicians, condensed into four ponderous invectives, was likewise based upon their false pretensions to science and their senseless empiricism. In every sphere of human activity he demanded that men should possess real knowledge, and be conscious of its limitations. When he entered into the lists against the Averrhoists, his weightiest argument was founded on the fact that they piqued themselves upon their erudition in the matter of stones, plants, and animals, while they neglected the true concerns of man, and all that may affect his destinies for weal or woe. He dreaded a debasement of human culture by Averrhoistic materialism hardly less than an injury to religion from Averrhoistic atheism. A steady preference of the spirit to the letter, and a firm grasp of the maxim that "the proper study of mankind is man," formed the pith and substance of his intellectual creed. It was here that his humanism and his philosophy joined hands. Nor can we regard the revival of learning in Italy without regretting that the humanists diverged so signally from the path prescribed for them in this respect by their great leader. They copied his faults of vanity and rhetoric. They exaggerated his admiration of Cicero and Virgil into a servile cult. They adhered to Latin authors and Latin canons of taste, when they might have carried on his work into the region of Greek metaphysics. But they lost his large conception of human learning, and gave themselves to puerilities which Petrarch would have been the first to denounce. Thus the true strength of Petrarch's spirit failed to sustain his disciples; while his foibles and shortcomings were perpetuated. In particular it may be affirmed that the Renaissance in Italy produced no philosophy worth notice until the dawn of modern science appeared in Telesio and Campanella, and in the splendid lunes of visionary Bruno.

In his general theory of poetry Petrarch did not free himself from mediæval conceptions, however much his practice may have placed him first upon the list of modern lyrists. He held that the poet and the orator were nearly equal in dignity, though he inclined to assigning a superiority to the latter. This estimate of the two chief species of impassioned eloquence, which we are accustomed to regard as separate and rarely combined in the same person, was probably due to the then prevalent opinion that poets must be learned—an opinion based upon the difficulty of study, and the belief that the unapproachable masterpieces of the ancients had been produced by scientific industry. With the same high sense of the literary function which marked his conception of humanism, he demanded that both orator and poet should instruct and elevate as well as please. The content of the work of art was no matter of indifference to Petrarch; and though he was the most consummate artist of Italian verse, the doctrine of art for art's sake found no favor in his eyes. It may, indeed, be said that he overstepped the mark, and confounded the poet with the prophet or the preacher, retaining a portion of that half-religious awe with which the students of the Middle Ages, unable to understand Virgil, and wonder-smitten by his greatness, had contemplated the author of the "Æneid." It was, he thought, the poet's duty to set forth truth under the veil of fiction, partly in order to enhance the pleasure of the reader and attract him by the rarity of the conceit, and partly to wrap his precious doctrine from the coarse unlettered world. This view of the necessary connection between poetry and allegory dates as far back as Lactantius, from whose "Institutions" Petrarch borrowed the groundwork of his own exposition. That it was shared by the early Florentine lyrists, especially by Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, is well-known. It reappears in the diploma presented to Petrarch upon the occasion of his coronation. It pervades Boccaccio's critical treatises, and it lives on with diminished energy until the age of Tasso, who supplied a key to the moral doctrine of his Gerusalemme Liberata. Genius, however, works by instinct far less than by precept; and the best portions of Petrarch's poetry are free from this æsthetic heresy. We find allegory pure and simple, it is true, in his Latin eclogues, while the concetti of the Italian lyrics, where he plays upon the name of Laura, reveal the same taint. In the Trionfi allegorical machinery is used with high art for the legitimate presentation of a solemn pageant; so that we need not quarrel with it here. The Latin epistles are comparatively free from the disease, while the "Africa" is an epic of the lamp, modelled upon Virgil, and vitiated less by allegory than by an incurable want of constitutional vitality. It is the artificial copy of a poem which itself was artificial, and is therefore thrice removed from the truth of nature. What must be said about Petrarch's Latin poetry may be briefly stated. It has the same merits and the same defects as his prose. That is to say, he studiously strove at being original while he imitated; and, paradoxical as this may seem, he was not unsuccessful. His verse is his own; but it is often rough, and almost always tedious, deformed by frequent defects of rhythm, and very rarely rising into poetry except in some sonorous bursts of declamation. The lament for King Robert at the end of the "Africa," with its fine prophecy of the Renaissance, and a fervid address to Italy, written on the heights of Mont Genèvre in 1353 upon the occasion of his crossing the Alps, to return to Avignon no more,² might be cited as two favorable specimens. But when we speak of Petrarch as a poet, we do not think of these scholastic lucubrations. We think of the canzoniere, for the sake of which the lover of Madonna Laura is crowned second in the great triumvirate of the trecento by the acclaim of his whole nation.

Petrarch the author of the Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura, seems at first sight a very different being from Petrarch the humanist. There is a famous passage in the De Remediis utriusque Fortunœ, where the lyrist of chivalrous love pours such contempt on women as his friend Boccaccio might have envied when he wrote the satire of "Corbaccio." In the Secretum, again, he describes his own passion as a torment from which he had vainly striven to emancipate himself by solitude, by journeys, by distractions, and by obstinate studies. In fact, he never alludes to the great love of his life without a strange mixture of tenderness and sore regret. That Laura was a real woman, and that Petrarch's worship of her was unfeigned; that he adored her with the senses and the heart as well as with the head; but that this love was at the same time more a mood of the imagination, a delicate disease, a cherished wound, to which he constantly recurred as the most sensitive and lively well-spring of poetic fancy, than a downright and impulsive passion, may be clearly seen in the whole series of his poems and his autobiographical confessions. Laura was a married woman; for he calls her mulier. She treated him with the courtesy of a somewhat distant acquaintance, who was aware of his homage and was flattered by it. But they enjoyed no intimacy, and it may be questioned whether, if Petrarch could by any accident have made her his own, the fruition of her love would not have been a serious interruption to the happiness of his life. He first saw her in the Church of St. Claire, at Avignon, on the 6th of April, 1327. She passed from this world on the 6th of April, 1348. These two dates are the two turning-points of Petrarch's life. The interval of twenty-one years, when Laura trod the earth, and her lover in all his wanderings paid his orisons to her at morning, evening, and noonday, and passed his nights in dreams of that fair form which never might be his, was the storm and stress period of his checkered career. There is an old Greek proverb that "to desire the impossible is a malady of the soul." With this malady in its most incurable form the poet was stricken; and, instead of seeking cure, he nursed his sickness and delighted in the discord of his soul. From that discord he wrought the harmonies of his sonnets and canzoni. That malady made him the poet of all men who have found in their emotions a dreamland more wonderful and pregnant with delight than in the world which we call real. After Laura's death his love was tranquillized to a sublimer music. The element of discord had passed out of it; and just because its object was now physically unattainable, it grew in purity and power. The sensual alloy which, however spiritualized, had never ceased to disturb his soul, was purged from his still vivid passion. Laura in heaven looked down upon him from her station amid the saints; and her poet could indulge the dream that now at last she pitied him, that she was waiting for him with angelic eyes of love, and telling him to lose no time, but set his feet upon the stairs that led to God and her. The romance finds its ultimate apotheosis in that transcendent passage of the Trionfo della Morte, which describes her death and his own vision. Throughout the whole course of this labyrinthine love-lament, sustained for forty years on those few notes so subtly modulated, from the first sonnet on his "primo giovenile errore" to the last line of her farewell, "Tu stara' in terra senza me gran tempo" Laura grows in vividness before us. She only becomes a real woman in death, because she was for Petrarch always an ideal, and in the ideal world beyond the tomb he is more sure of her than when "the fair veil" of flesh was drawn between her and his yearning.

No love-poetry of the ancient world offers any analogue to the canzoniere. Nor has it a real parallel in the Provençal verse from which it sprang. What distinguishes it, is the transition from a mediæval to a modern mood, the passage from Cino and Guido to Werther and Rousseau. Its tenacity and idealism belong to the chivalrous age. Its preoccupation with emotion as a given subject-matter and its infinite subtlety of self-analysis place it at the front of modern literature. Among the northern nations chivalrous love was treated as a motive for epic poetry in the Arthurian romances. It afterwards found lyrical expression among the poets of Provence. From them it passed to Italy, first appearing among the Lombard troubadours, who still used the langue d'oc, and next in Sicily at Frederick's court, where the earliest specimens of genuine Italian verse were fashioned. Guido Guinicelli further developed the sonnet, and built the lofty rhymes of the canzone at Bologna. By this time Italian literature was fully started; and the traditions of Provençal poetry had been both assimilated and transcended. From Guido's hands the singers of Florence took the motive up, and gave it a new turn of deeper allegory and more philosophic meaning. The canzoni of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti were no mere poems of passion, however elevated. Love supplied the form and language; but there lurked a hidden esoteric meaning. It is true that in the "Vita Nuova" Dante found at once the most delicate and the most poetically perfect form for the expression of an unsophisticated feeling. Beatrice was here a woman, seen from far and worshipped, but worshipped with a natural ardor. He was not, however, contented to rest upon this point; nor had he any opportunity of becoming properly acquainted with the object of his adoration in her lifetime. In the "Convito," she had already been idealized as Philosophy, and in the "Divine Comedy" she is transfigured as Theology. Death, by separating her from him, rendered Beatrice's apotheosis conceivable; and Dante may be said to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby love is an initiation into the secrets of the spiritual world. It was the intuition of a sublime nature into the essence of pure impersonal enthusiasm for beauty, an exaltation of woman similar to that attempted afterwards by Shelley in "Epipsychidion," which pervades the poetry of Michelangelo, and which forms a definite portion of the Positivistic creed. Yet there remained an ineradicable unsubstantiality in this point of view, when tested by the common facts of human feeling. The Dantesque idealism was too far removed from the sphere of ordinary experience to take firm hold upon the modern intellect. In proportion as Beatrice personified abstractions, she ceased to be a woman; nor was it possible, except by losing hold of the individual, to regard her as a symbol of the universal. Plato in the "Symposium" had met this difficulty, by saying that the lover, having reached the beatific vision, must renounce the love by which he had been led to it. A different solution, in harmony with the spirit of their age and their religion was offered by the trecentisti. Their transmutation of the simpler elements of chivalrous love into something mystical and complex, where the form of the worshipped lady transcends the sphere of experience, and her spirit is identified with the lover's profoundest thoughts and highest aspirations, was a natural process in mediæval Florence. The Tuscan intellect was too virile and sternly strung at that epoch to be satisfied with amorous rhymes. The mediæval theory of æsthetics demanded allegory, and imposed upon the poet erudition; nor was it easy for the singer of that period to command his own immediate emotions, with a firm grasp upon their relation to the world around him, or to use them for the purposes of conscious art. He found it more proper to express a philosophic content under the accepted form of erotic poetry than to paint the personality of the woman he loved with natural precision. Between the mysticism of a sublime but visionary adoration on the one side, and the sensualities of vulgar passion or the decencies of married life upon the other, there lay for him no intermediate artistic region. The Italian genius, in the Middle Ages, created no feminine ideal analogous in the reality of womanhood to Gudrun or Chriemhild, Guinevere or Iseult: and when it left the high region of symbolism, it descended almost without modulation to the prose of common life. Guido Cavalcanti is in this respect instructive. We find in his poetry the two tendencies separated and represented with equal power, not harmonized as in the case of Dante's allegory. His canzoni dealt with intellectual abstractions. His ballate gave artistic form to feelings stirred by incidents of everyday experience. The former were destined to be left behind, together with the theological scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The latter lived on through Boccaccio to Poliziano and the poets of the sixteenth century. Still we can fix one moment of transition from the transcendental philosophy of love to the positive romance of the "Decameron." Guided by his master, Cino da Pistoja, the least metaphysical and clearest of his immediate predecessors, Petrarch found the right artistic via media; and perhaps we may attribute something to that double education which placed him between the influences of the Tuscan lyrists and the troubadours of his adopted country. At any rate he returned from the allegories of the Florentine poets to the simplicity of chivalrous emotion; but he treated the original motive with a greater richness and a more idealizing delicacy than his Provençal predecessors. The marvellous instruments of the Italian sonnet and canzone were in his hands, and he knew how to draw from them a purer if not a grander melody than either Guido or Dante. The best work of the Florentines required a commentary; and the structure of their verse, like its content, was scientific rather than artistic. Petrarch could publish his canzoniere without explanatory notes. He had laid bare his heart to the world, and every man who had a heart might understand his language. Between the subject-matter and the verbal expression there lay no intervening veil of mystic meaning. The form had become correspondingly more clear and perfect, more harmonious in its proportions, more immediate in musical effects. In a word, Petrarch was the first to open a region where art might be free, and to find for the heart's language utterance direct and limpid.

This was his great achievement. The forms he used were not new. The subject-matter he handled was given to him. But he brought both form and subject closer to the truth, exercising at the same time an art which had hitherto been unconceived in subtlety, and which has never since been equalled. If Dante was the first great poet, Petrarch was the first true artist of Italian literature. It was, however, impossible that Petrarch should overleap at one bound all the barriers of the Middle Ages. His Laura has still something of the earlier ideality adhering to her. She stands midway between the Beatrice of Dante and the women of Boccaccio. She is not so much a woman with a character and personality, as woman in the general, la femme, personified and made the object of a poet's reveries. Though every detail of her physical perfections, with the single and striking exception of her nose, is carefully recorded, it is not easy to form a definite picture even of her face and shape. Of her inner nature we hear only the vaguest generalities. She sits like a lovely model in the midst of a beautiful landscape, like one of Burne Jones's women, who incarnate a mood of feeling while they lack the fulness of personality. The thought of her pervades the valley of Vaucluse; the perfume of her memory is in the air we breathe. But if we met her, we should find it hard to recognize her; and if she spoke, we should not understand that it was Laura. Petrarch had no objective faculty. Just as he failed to bring Laura vividly before us, until she had by death become a part of his own spiritual substance, so he failed to depict things as he saw them. The pictures etched in three or four lines of the Purgatorio may be sought for vainly in his rime. That his love of nature was intense, there is no doubt. The solitary of Vaucluse, the pilgrim of Mont Ventoux, had reached a point of sensibility to natural scenery far in advance of his age. But when he came to express this passion for beauty, he was satisfied with giving the most perfect form to the emotion stirred in his own subjectivity. Instead of scenes, he delineates the moods suggested by them. He makes the streams and cliffs and meadows of Vaucluse his confidants. He does not lose himself in contemplation of the natural object, though we feel that this self found its freest breathing-space, its most delightful company, in the society of hill and vale. He never cares to paint a landscape, but contents himself with such delicate touches and such cunning combinations of words as may suggest a charm in the external world. At this point the humanist, preoccupied with man as his main subject, meets the poet in Petrarch. What is lost, too, in the precision of delineation, is gained in universality. The canzoniere reminds us of no single spot; wherever there are clear, fresh rills and hanging mountains, the lover walks with Petrarch by his side.

If the poet's dominant subjectivity weakened his grasp upon external things, it made him supreme in self-portraiture. Every mood of passion is caught and fixed forever in his verse. The most evanescent shades of feeling are delicately set upon the exquisite picture. Each string of love's many-chorded lyre is touched with a masterly hand. The fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise; the "yea and nay twinned in a single breath;" the struggle of conflicting aspirations in a heart drawn now to God and now to earth; the quiet resting-places of content; the recrudescence of the ancient smart; the peace of absence, when longing is luxury; the agony of presence, adding fire to fire,—all this is rendered with a force so striking, in a style so monumental, that the canzoniere may still be called the "introduction to the book of love." Thus, when Petrarch's own self was the object, his hand was firm; his art failed not in modelling the image into roundness. Dante brought the universe into his poem. But "the soul of man, too, is an universe;" and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet. It remained for Boccaccio, the third in the supreme triumvirate, to treat of common life with art no less consummate. From Beatrice through Laura to the Fiammetta; from the "Divine Comedy" through the canzoniere to the "Decameron;" from the world beyond the grave through the world of feeling to the world in which we play our puppet parts; from the mystic terza rima, through the stately lyric stanzas, to Protean prose. Such was the rapid movement of Italian art within the brief space of some fifty years. We cannot wonder that when Boccaccio died, the source of inspiration seemed to fail. Heaven and hell, the sanctuaries of the soul, and the garden of our earth, had all been traversed. Well might Sacchetti exclaim:—

     Sonati sono i corni
D' ogni parte a ricolta:
La stagione è rivolta:
Se tornerà non so, ma credo tardi.

Hitherto we have spoken only of Petrarch's love-verses. There is a short section of the canzoniere devoted to poems on various arguments, which presents him in another light. The oratorical impulse was only second to the subjective in his genius; and three canzoni, addressed to Giacomo Colonna, to Rienzi, and to the Princess of Italy, display the pleader's eloquence in its most perfect lustre. If the Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura bequeathed to the Italians models of meditative poetry, these canzoni taught them how classical form might be given to hortatory lyrics on subjects of national interest. There was a wail, an outcry in their passionate strophes, which went on gathering volume as the centuries rolled over Italy, until at last, in her final servitude beneath the feet of Spanish Austria, they seemed less poems than authentic prophecies. The Italians inherited from their Roman ancestors a strong forensic bias. What the forum was for the ancients, the piazza became for them. To follow out the intricacies of this thought would require more time and space than we can spare. It must be enough to remark that in their literature at large there is a powerful declamatory element. It impairs their philosophical writing, and helps to give an air of superficiality to their poetry. They lack what the Germans call Innigkeit, and the French intimité. What will not bear recitation in the market-place, what does not go at once home without difficulty to the average intelligence of the crowd, must be excluded from their art. It is rarely that we catch an undertone piercing the splendid resonances of their verse, or that we surprise a singer hidden in the cloud of thought, pouring his song forth as the night-bird sings to ease her soul in solitude. Such being, roughly speaking, the chief bent of the Italians, it followed that Petrarch's rhetorical canzoni had a better and more fruitful influence than his meditative poems on their literature. The Petrarchisti of chivalrous passion attenuated his feeling without realizing it in their own lives, and imitated his style without attaining to his mastery of form, until the one lost all vitality and the other became barren mannerism. But from time to time, as in Filicaja's sonnet or Leopardi's "Ode to Italy," we catch the true ring of his passionate "Italia mia!"

It will be understood that what has been said in the foregoing paragraph, about the rhetorical bias of the Italians, is only generally applicable. Their greatest artists and poets—Dante, Petrarch, Signorelli, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Leopardi—have combined the forensic qualities of the Latins with the Innigkeit of the Teutons, just as, from the opposite point of view, we find a similar combination in Germans like Goethe, and in the French intellect at large. Petrarch's preoccupation with self so far balanced the oratorical impulse that, while the latter found its scope in his prose works, by far the larger portion of his poems gave expression to the former.

By right of his self-consciousness and thirst for glory, Petrarch was a modern man, fashioned by contact with antiquity. But dwelling as he did within the thresh-old of the Middle Ages, he had to pay the penalty of this emancipation from their intellectual conditions. After all is said, the final characteristic of Petrarch is the state of spiritual flux in which he lived. His love of Laura seemed to him an error and a sin, because it clashed with an ascetic impulse that had never been completely blunted. In his "Hymn to the Virgin," he spoke of this passion as the Medusa which had turned his purer self to stone:—

Medusa e l'error mio m'han fatto un sasso
D'umor vano stillante.

Yet he knew that this same passion had been the cause of his most permanent achievements in the sphere of art. Laura's name was confounded with the laurel wreath, for which he strove, and which he wore with pride upon the Capitol. Even here a new contradiction in his nature revealed itself. Thirsting as he did for fame, he judged this appetite ungodly. The only immortality to be desired by the true Christian was a life beyond this earth. While he expressed a contempt for the world inspired by sympathy with monasticism, he enjoyed each mundane pleasure with the fine taste of an intellectual epicure. Solitude was his ideal, and in solitude he planned his most considerable literary masterpieces: but he frequented the courts of princes, made himself their mouthpiece, and delighted in the parade of a magnificent society. Humanism, which was destined to bring forth a kind of neo-paganism in Italy, had its source in him; and no scholar was more enthusiastic for the heroes of the antique age. But even while he gave his suffrage to the "starry youth" of Scipio, he was reminded that the saints of the Thebaid had wreathed their brows with the palms of a still more splendid victory. He worshipped Laura with a chivalrous devotion; but he lived, according to the custom of his time and his profession, with a concubine who bore him two children. No poet exalted the cult of woman to a higher level; but no monk expressed a bitterer hostility against the sex. He could not choose between the spirit and the flesh, or utter the firm "I will" of acceptance or renunciation upon either side. The genius of Rome and the genius of Nazareth strove in him for mastery. At one time he was fain to ape the antique patriot; at another he affected the monastic saint. He pretended to despise celebrity and mourned the vanity of worldly honors; yet he was greedy of distinction. His correspondence reveals the intrigues with which he sought the poet's laurel, pulling wires at Rome and Paris, in order that he might have the choice of being either crowned upon the Capitol or else before the most august society of learned men in Europe. At the same time, when fame had found him, when he stood forth as the acknowledged hero of culture, he complained that the distractions of renown withdrew him from the service of religion and his soul. He claimed to have disengaged himself from the shackles of personal vanity. Yet a foolish word dropped by some young men in Padua against his learning, made him take up cudgels in his failing years, and engage in a gladiatorial combat for the maintenance of his repute. He was clamorous for the freedom of the populus Romanus, and importunate in his assertion of Italian independence. Yet he stooped to flatter kings in letters of almost more than Byzantine adulation, and lent his authority to the infamies of Lombard despotism. It would be easy enough, but weariful, to lengthen out this list of Petrarch's inner contradictions. The malady engendered by them—that incurable acedia, that atonic melancholy, which he ascribed to St. Augustine—made him the prototype of an age which had in it, and which still has, a thousand unreconciled antagonisms. Hamlet and Faust, Werther and René, Childe Harold and Dipsychus, find their ancestor in Petrarch; and it is this which constitutes his chief claim on the sympathies of the modern world. He too has left us a noble example of the method whereby the inevitable discords of an awakened consciousness may be resolved in a superior harmony. Through all his struggles he remained true to the one ideal of intellectual activity, and the very conflict saved him from stagnation. His energies were never for one moment prostrated, nor was his hope extinguished. He labored steadily for the completion of that human synthesis, embracing the traditions of antiquity and Christianity, which, as though by instinct, he felt to be the necessary condition of a European revival. It may be confidently asserted that if his immediate successors had continued his work in the spirit of their leader, the Renaissance would have brought forth nobler fruits.

We are told that the faces of dying persons sometimes reproduce the features of their youth, and the memory of old men reverts to the events of boyhood. Thus Petrarch at the close of life survived the struggles of his manhood, and returned with single-hearted impulse to the alma mater of his youth. From the year 1348 forward, he approximated more and more to the mediæval type of character, without losing his zeal for liberal studies. The coming age, which he inaugurated, faded from his vision, and the mystic past resumed its empire. Yet, as a scholar, he never ceased to be industrious. One of his last works was the translation into Latin of Boccaccio's "Griselda;" and on the morning after his unwitnessed death, his servant found him bowed upon his books. But Petrarch was not sustained in age and sickness by a forecast of the culture he had labored to create. The consolations of religion, the piety of the cloister, soothed his soul; and he who had been the Erasmus of his century, passed from it in the attitude of an Augustinian monk.

At Arquà they still show the house where Petrarch spent his last years, the little study where he worked, the chair in which he sat, the desk at which he wrote. From those soft-swelling undulations of the Euganean hills, hoary with olives, rich with fig and vine, the Lombard plain breaks away toward Venice and the Adriatic. The air is light; the prospect is immense; there is a sound of waters hurrying by. In front of the church-door, below the house, and close beside the rushing stream, stands the massive coffer of Verona marble where his ashes rest. No inscription is needed. The fame of Petrarch broods on Arquà like the canopy of heaven. For one who has dwelt long in company with his vexed, steadfast spirit—so divine in aspiration, so human in tenderness, and so like ourselves in its divided impulses—there is something inexpressibly solemn to stand beside this sepulchre, and review the five centuries through which the glory he desired has lived and grown. Few men capable of comprehending his real greatness, while there standing, will not envy him the peace he found upon the end of life, and pause to wonder when that harmony will be achieved between the wisdom of this world and the things of God which Petrarch, through all contradictions, clung to and in death accomplished.

Notes

1. See Koerting, "Petrarca's Leben und Werke," p. 51.
2. Ep. Poet Lat., iii. 24.