incompatible. His relations to the Lombard nobles were equally
at variance with his professed patriotism; and, while still a
housemate of Visconti and Correggi, he kept on issuing invectives
against the tyrants who divided Italy. It would not be difficult
to multiply these antitheses in the character and the opinions of
this singular man But it is more to the purpose to remark that
they were harmonized in a personality of potent and enduring
force.
The point to notice in this complex personality is that Petrarch’s ideal remained always literary. As philosopher, politician, historian, essayist, orator, he aimed at lucid and harmonious expression—not, indeed, neglecting the importance of the material he undertook to treat, but approaching his task in the spirit of an artist rather than a thinker or a man of action. This accounts for his bewildering versatility, and for his apparent want of grasp on conditions of fact. Viewed in this light Petrarch anticipated the Italian Renaissance in its weakness—that philosophical superficiality, that tendency to ornate rhetoric, that preoccupation with stylistic trifles, that want of profound conviction and stern sincerity, which stamp its minor literary products with the note of mediocrity. Had Petrarch been possessed with a passion for some commanding principle in politics, morality or science, instead of with the thirst for self-glorification and the ideal of artistic culture, it is not wholly impossible that Italian humanism might have assumed a manlier and more conscientious tone. But this is not a question which admits of discussion, for the conditions which made Petrarch what he was were already potent in Italian society. He did but express the spirit of the period he opened, and it may also be added that his own ideal was higher and severer than that of the illustrious humanists who followed him.
As an author Petrarch must be considered from two points of view—first as a writer of Latin verse and prose, secondly as an Italian lyrist. In the former capacity he was speedily outstripped by more fortunate scholars His eclogues and epistles and the epic of Africa, on which he set such store, exhibit a comparatively limited command of Latin metre. His treatises, orations, and familiar letters, though remarkable for a prose style which is eminently characteristic of the man, are not distinguished by purity of diction. Much as he admired Cicero, it is clear that he had not freed himself from current medieval Latinity. Seneca and Augustine had been too much used by him as models of composition. At the same time it will be conceded that he possessed a copious vocabulary, a fine ear for cadence, and the faculty of expressing every shade of thought or feeling What he lacked was that insight into the best classical masterpieces, that command of the best classical diction, which is the product of successive generations of scholarship. To attain to this, Giovanni da Ravenna, Colluccio Salutato, Poggio and Filelfo had to labour, before a Poliziano and a Bembo finally prepared the path for an Erasmus. Had Petrarch been born at the close of the 15th instead of at the opening of the 14th century there is no doubt that his Latinity would have been as pure, as versatile, and as pointed as that of the witty stylist of Rotterdam.
With regard to his Italian poetry Petrarch occupies a very different position. The Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura cannot become obsolete, for perfect metrical form has here been married to language of the choicest and the purest. It is true that even in the Canzoniere, as Italians prefer to call that collection of lyrics, Petrarch is not devoid of faults belonging to his age, and affectations which have imposed themselves with disastrous effect through his authority upon the literature of Europe. He appealed in his odes and sonnets to a restricted audience already educated by the chivalrous love-poetry of Provence and by Italian imitations of that style. He was not careful to exclude the commonplaces of the school, nor anxious to finish a work of art wholly free from fashionable graces and from contemporary conceits. There is therefore a certain element of artificiality in his treatment, and this, since it is easier to copy defects than excellencies, has been perpetuated with wearisome monotony by versifiers who chose him for their model. But, after making due allowance for peculiarities, the abuse of which has brought the name of Petrarchist into contempt, we can agree with Shelley that the lyrics of the Canzoniere “are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love.” Much might be written about the peculiar position held by Petrarch between the metaphysical lyrists of Tuscany and the more realistic amorists of succeeding generations. True in this respect also to his anticipation of the coming age, he was the first Italian poet of love to free himself from allegory and mysticism. Yet he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset. Though we believe in the reality of Laura, we derive no clear conception either of her person or her character. She is not so much a woman as woman in the abstract; and perhaps on this very account the poems written for her by her lover have been taken to the heart by countless lovers who came after him. The method of his art is so generalizing, while his feeling is so natural, that every man can see himself reflected in the singer and his mistress shadowed forth in Laura. The same criticism might be passed on Petrarch’s descriptions of nature. That he felt the beauties of nature keenly is certain, and he frequently touches them with obvious appreciation. Yet he has written nothing so characteristic of Vaucluse as to be inapplicable to any solitude where there are woods and water. The Canzoniere is therefore one long melodious monody poured from the poet’s soul, with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape, a perpetual object of delightful contemplation. This disengagement from local circumstance without the sacrifice of emotional sincerity is a merit in Petrarch, but it became a fault in his imitators. Lacking his intensity of passion and his admirable faculty for seizing the most evanescent shades of difference in feeling, they degenerated into colourless and lifeless insipidities made insupportable by the frigid repetition of tropes and conceits which we are fain to pardon in the master.
Petrarch did not distinguish himself by love-poetry alone in the Italian language. His odes to Giacomo Colonna, to Cola di Rienzi and to the princes of Italy display him in another light. They exhibit the oratorical fervour, the pleader’s eloquence in its most perfect lustre, which Petrarch possessed in no less measure than subjective passion. Modern literature has nothing nobler, nothing more harmonious in the declamatory style than these three patriotic effusions. Their spirit itself is epoch-making in the history of Europe. Up to this point Italy had scarcely begun to exist. There were Florentines and Lombards, Guelfs and Ghibellines; but even Dante had scarcely conceived of Italy as a nation, independent of the empire, inclusive of her several component commonwealths. To the high conception of Italian nationality, to the belief in that spiritual unity which underlay her many discords and divisions, Petrarch attained partly through his disengagement from civic and local partisanship, partly through his large and liberal ideal of culture.
The materials for a life of Petrarch are afforded in abundance by his letters, collected and prepared for publication under his own eyes. These are divided into Familiar Correspondence, Correspondence in Old Age, Divers Letters and Letters without a Title; to which may be added the curious autobiographical fragment entitled the Epistle to Posterity. Next in importance rank the epistles and eclogues in Latin verse, the Italian poems and the rhetorical addresses to popes, emperors, Cola di Rienzi and some great men of antiquity. For the comprehension of his character the treatise De contemptu mundi, addressed to St Augustine and styled his Secret, is invaluable. Without attempting a complete list of Petrarch’s works, it may be well to illustrate the extent of his erudition and his activity as a writer by a brief enumeration of the most important. In the section belonging to moral philosophy, we find De remediis utriusque fortunae, a treatise on human happiness and unhappiness; De vita solitaria, a panegyric of solitude; De otio religiosorum, a similar essay on monastic life, inspired by a visit to his brother Gherardo in his convent near Marseilles On historical subjects the most considerable are Rerum memorandarum libri, a miscellany from a student’s commonplace-book, and De viris illustribus, an epitome of the biographies of Roman worthies. Three polemical works require mention Contra cujusdam anonymi Galli calumnias apologia, Contra medicum quendam invectivarum libri, and De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia—controversial and sarcastic compositions, which grew out of Petrarch’s quarrels with the physicians of Avignon and the Averroists of Padua. In this connexion it might also be well to mention the remarkable
