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From The Quarterly Review.
PETRARCH.*

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

tain 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 worldhistorical capacity, that his achievement as an Italian lyrist seems by comparison insignificant.

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;

It is Mr. Reeve's merit, while writing for the public rather than for scholars, to have kept this point of view before him. PeItaly's first lyrist still belongs to Petrarch, liberal spirit a new phase of European trarch, he says, "foresaw in a large and and remains perhaps his highest title to immortality, seeing that the work of the culture, a revival of the studies and the arts which constitute the chief glory and artist outlives the memory of services rendered to civilization by the pioneer of dignity of man;" and there are some fine lines in his " Africa," in which he predicts learning. Yet we now know that Pe trarch's poetry exhausted but a small por-cerned it from afar : the advancement of knowledge as he distion of his intellectual energy, and was included in a vaster and far more univer- To thee, perchance, if lengthened days are sally 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 medieval 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, selfconsciousness, 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 hazard.

ous.

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 cer

Petrarch. By Henry Reeve. Edinburgh and

London, 1878.

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 | tion of so many autobiographical works,

opening lines by this inconceivable clum-
siness of phrase:
:-

Spirit heroic! who with fire divine

Kindlest those limbs, awhile which pilgrim

hold

marks him out as a man of the modern rather than the medieval age. He was not content to remain the member of a class, standards, but strove at all costs to realize or to conform his opinions to authorized On earth a chieftain, gracious, wise, and bold. his own particular type. This impulse was not exactly egotism, nor yet vanity; It might also be parenthetically questioned though Petrarch had a good share of both why he prefers to call the river Sorgues, qualities. It proceeded from a conviction which in Italian is Sorga, by its Latin that personality is infinitely precious as the name of Sorgia. But these are matters central fact and force of human nature. of detail. The book itself is sound. The Machiavellian doctrine of self-conTaking this volume of "Foreign Classcious character and self-dependent virtù, sics for English Readers" in our hand, so vitally important in the Renaissance, 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.

was anticipated by the poet-scholar of Vaucluse, who believed, moreover, 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 perfec tion of their own ideal.

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 After the materials afforded to the biogis addressed to posterity, and is nothing rapher by Petrarch's own works, may be less than the fragment of an autobiography placed, but at a vast distance below them, begun in the poet's old age. Of this re- the documents furnished by the Abbé de markable document Mr. Reeve has printed | Sade in his bulky "Life." These chiefly a translation into English. Next in im- concern Laura, and go to prove that she portance to the letters rank the epistles was a lady of noble birth, married to Hugh and eclogues in Latin verse and the Ital-de Sade, and the mother of eleven chil ian poems; while apart from all other dren. It would hardly be necessary to 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 lea Petrarch to the produc

refer to these papers, unless Mr. Reeve had expressed a too unqualified reliance on their authority. He says (p. 33), "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 | enthusiasm for beauty, and a passion for the absence of the deeds which the abbé the ancient world. The Italians, deprived professed to have copied and printed, of their liberty, thwarted in their developwhether he was not either the fabricator ment as a nation, and depraved by the of a historical romance very flattering to easy-going immorality of the rich bourhis family vanity, or else the dupe of some geoisie, intent on only money-getting and earlier impostor. It is true that he sub-enjoyment, were at this momentous crisis mitted the supposed originals to certain of their fortunes on the point of giving to burghers of Avignon, who pronounced the modern world what now is known as them genuine; but we may remember with humanism, and had already entered on what avidity Barrett and Burgon of Bristol that career of art which was so fruitful of swallowed Chatterton's forgeries about the masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and same period: nor, even were we convinced architecture. The allegories, visions, ecof the abbe's trustworthiness, is there much stasies, legends, myths, and mysteries of beyond an old tradition at Avignon to jus- the Middle Ages had lost their primitive tify the identification of Petrarch's Laura vitality. If handled at all by poets or with his Laure de Sade. Mr. Reeve is prose-writers, they had become fanciful or therefore hardly warranted in asserting frigid forms of literature, at one time borthat it is "useless to follow the specula- rowing the colors of secular romance, at tions which have been published as to the another sinking into the rigidity of ossified person of Laura, and, indeed, as to her conventionality. Wearied with the effort existence." 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.

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 destinedical critic. Without a city, without a 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

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 medievalism, 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 philosoph

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

non.

realities of life. He was therefore able to Next in importance to his exile from work out his ideal; and visionary as that Provence and his education at Avignon, ideal seems to us in many of its details, it must be reckoned Petrarch's numerous controlled the future with a force that no ap-journeys. His biographers have no slight plication of his personal powers to the prac-difficulty in following him from place to tical affairs of life could have engendered. place. Besides visiting the most imporAnother circumstance of no little weight tant cities of Italy, he travelled through 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 AvigThe 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 "Epistolæ 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.

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 ac quaintance 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 poetscholars who flitted 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 Avig

non, 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.

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 commu. nication, 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.

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 de- The dualism of the papacy and the emtached, ill-comprehended fragments. Their pire, which had struck such deep roots in theology, as represented in the “ Summa,” mediæval politics, repeated itself in Peresembled a vast structure of Cyclopean trarch's theory of human knowledge. Just masonry-block placed on block of rough- as the pope was the sun, the emperor the hewn inorganic travertine, solidified and moon of the mediæval social system, so, weighty with the force of dogma. Their with Petrarch, Christ and the Church shed philosophy started from narrow data of the light of day upon his conscience, while authority, and occupied its energies in the the great men of antiquity were luminaries proof or disproof of certain assumed for of a secondary splendor, by no means to mulæ. It was inevitable that mediæval be excluded from the heaven of human scholarship should regard the classical lit- thought. This is the true meaning of his eratures as something alien to itself and so-called humanism. It was this which should fail to appropriate them. The made him search indefatigably for MSS., medieval mind was no less incapable of which prompted him to found public sympathizing with their æsthetic and scien- libraries and collect coins, and which imtific freedom than the legendary mathema-pelled him to gather up and live again in tician, who asked what the "Paradise his own intellectual experience whatever Lost" proved, was unable to take the had been thought and done by the heroes point of view required by poetry. Its of the Roman world. At its beginning, utter misapprehension of the subject-mat- humanism was a religion rather than a ter of these studies was expressed in the science. Its moral force was less derived legends which made Virgil a magician from the head than from the heart. It and turned the gods of Hellas into devils. was an outgoing of sympathy and love Nor were the most learned men free from and yearning towards the past, not a such radically false conceptions, such pal movement of sober curiosity. Petrarch pable and incurable "lies in the soul," poi- made the classic authors his familiar soning the very source of erudition, and friends and confidants. His epistles to converting their industry into a childish Cicero, Seneca, and Varro are but fragtrifling with the puppets of blindfold fancy.ments of a long-sustained internal colloquy,

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