III The Father of Humanism
Quæ cum scholar atque ævi comitibus quædam quasi somnia viderentur, mihi jam tunc, omnia videntem testor Deum, et vera et pæne præsentia videbantur.
Fam., xxiv., 1.
Every age has a philosophy of life, which reaches and affects, in greater or less degree, the thought and action of all of its members. To the centuries before Petrarch the world was a place in which to prepare for a life beyond; the noblest subject of thought was theology; the saving of the soul was the one important task. The centuries since have realised in some measure that the present life is precious in itself and is not to be thus subordinated. This shifting of the view is of immense significance; and it is owing to Petrarch, more than to any other one man.
The process was, after all, not so much a shifting as a blending, a powerful modification of the mediæval notions by those of the ancient world. The ancients frankly delighted in sensuous beauty, and felt an unrestrained joy in mere living, and trusted nature and the natural impulses. They were thoroughly human, and the return to them humanised the narrow conceptions of the Middle Ages. And this return was largely Petrarch’s work.
Men had conversed with the classics before his day. They were by no means unstudied in mediæval times. John of Salisbury, for example, in the twelfth century, had known almost as many of the Roman poets and moralists and historians as Petrarch himself. He had known them, however, and used them, in a very different fashion. He had read them with no surrender to their charm, and no response to their views concerning life and its uses. We wonder at his knowledge of the text of his classical authors, and at the aptness with which he cites them in illustration of his thought; but we wonder still more at his utter inability to understand their attitude, to find their point of view. Lifelong intercourse with them failed to widen his range of vision. Despite their influence he remained mediæval in all his thought.
But with Petrarch it was otherwise. He first, among the men of the Middle Ages, was endowed with a passionate love for the beauty of ancient literature, and an entire sympathy with its ruling ideas, and at the same time, it must be observed, with a saving incapacity to foresee the disintegration of thought and faith that in the long run would inevitably result from such sympathy. Both in his strength and in his weakness he was eminently fitted to be the founder, or furtherer, of Humanism.
Petrarch’s love of the classics began in admiration of their more superficial charm, which is just what would be expected of the youth who wrote the graceful lyrics of the Canzoniere. But this feeling developed soon into a perception of their deeper beauty and significance. At the time when he first becomes thoroughly known to us as a student of antiquity we are amazed at the justness of his appreciation. Only occasionally does he betray the fact that he is a man of the Middle Ages, hampered by a narrow intellectual inheritance; and that his work is that of a pioneer, in a country which is absolutely unexplored.
Of these rare limitations we detect the fewest traces in his criticism of Cicero. This may be accounted for largely on the ground that Cicero and Petrarch were men of the same temperament and cast of mind. They were both typical men of letters. The man of letters is intellectually alert; sensitive to impressions and able to report them; hospitable to all the ideas of his time; sometimes inconsistent, because of this very catholicity; and often despised in consequence by practical men, although in reality more practical than they, inasmuch as he has the art of communicating his flashes of insight and his generous enthusiasm to others, who in the end reconcile his inconsistencies and make his dreams come true. This is an exceptional character, but Cicero sustained it fully, and so did Petrarch too. They were thus of the same stamp. Moreover, their circumstances were similar in many respects. Cicero’s task as an interpreter of Greek thought was not unlike Petrarch’s life-work. It was impossible, with all these likenesses, that the one, however defective his knowledge, should fail to comprehend the other.
Petrarch’s letters afford countless illustrations of the truth of these statements. In outward form, to be sure, and once in a while in their material and the treatment of it, they suggest rather Seneca than Cicero. That, however, is easily explained. Petrarch’s epistolary ways had been fully determined before ever he saw Cicero’s correspondence, or any portion of it.1 So it was quite impossible that he should follow him in matters of fashion and form. But in spirit and intention, in all their deeper affinities, the letters are distinctly Ciceronian, akin to Cicero’s essays and treatises. Cicero’s style is plainly Petrarch’s ideal, although he is too wise to imitate it slavishly. And he falls, at his best, not very far short of Cicero’s clearness and animation, his variety, his aptness of quotation and illustration. A clearer case of sympathetic comprehension of another, and of reproduction without imitation, it would be hard to find.
Next to Cicero, Petrarch cared most among Roman writers for Virgil. One would have expected to find this order reversed,—to find the poet of the Africa far more devoted to his great forerunner than to one who was essentially unpoetical, a rhetorician and prosaist. The explanation of the seeming anomaly is twofold. In the first place, it was in temperament only that Petrarch was a poet, and not, after the splendid lyrical outburst of the Canzoniere, in the whole compass of his thought and feeling. He could not have done the work which he did if it had been otherwise. It was necessary that the first Humanist should combine with the poet’s openness of mind, and love of whatever is beautiful, scholarly patience and a willingness to lead a scholar’s life. And then, in the second place, Petrarch was debarred from full appreciation of Virgil by an inability to escape from the dominion of certain mediæval conceptions of poetry.
For one thing, he valued poetry largely in proportion as it is made the vehicle of criticism of life, of the more obvious sort. One is surprised, in examining the numerous quotations from Virgil that are scattered throughout the letters, to find how invariably they are chosen either because they are strikingly rhetorical in form or in consequence of their didactic quality. Poetry seems to have become to Petrarch, as his life and his studies advanced and he drew farther away in time and temper from his early creative period, little more than a somewhat finer form of prose. Virgil, with all his reverence for him, was not unlike another Cicero. He says in one of his letters: “Our beloved Cicero is beyond doubt the father of Latin eloquence. Next to him comes Virgil. Or perhaps, since there are some who dislike the order in which I am placing them, I had better say that Tullius and Maro are the two parents of Roman literature.” Such remarks, which are not infrequent, are indicative of an incapacity to feel keenly and enjoy deeply what is finest in Virgil. Petrarch seems to us to-day like a child, who values the beautiful commonplaces of the poet more highly than his occasional soundings of the depths and mysteries of life. He had no adequate appreciation of Virgil’s ‘majestic sadness,’ his ‘pathetic half lines,’ his ‘tears for the things that are.’
To this same insensitiveness on the æsthetic side we must ascribe Petrarch’s inability to free himself from the mediæval delusion as to the profound allegorical significance of the Æneid, and of all other noble poetry as well. A true poet may entertain very strange theories concerning the nature of his art, but in his better moments he will rise above them and unconsciously belie them, both in his practice and in his criticism of others. This Petrarch, after his early youth, never did. His highest aim in his own poetical compositions was to set forth moral truths under an obscure veil of allegory, and his greatest delight in studying the poets of antiquity was to penetrate the veil under, which he believed they had hidden their wisdom. Dante’s chance lines in the ninth book of the Inferno give exact expression to this ruling thought of his:
O voi che avete gl’ intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde
Sotto il velame degli versi strani!
Dante’s application of this idea, however, was one thing and Petrarch’s another. Petrarch aimed at nothing worthier than a multitude of minute and trivial correspondences. The effect upon his verse is indicated by the letter to his brother Gherardo which is given toward the close of this chapter. The effect upon his criticism may be learned by examining certain other letters, in the Seniles. In one of these he says:2
“Virgil’s subject, as I understand the matter, is The Perfect Man.... In the passage that you ask me to explain I look upon the winds as nothing more nor less than blasts of anger and mad desire, which disturb with their wild storms the quiet of our life, as tempests do some tranquil sea. Æolus is our reason, which curbs and controls these headstrong passions. If it did not do so they would sweep away sea and land and the overarching sky, that is, our blood and flesh and bones and our very souls, and plunge them down to death and destruction:
... maria ac terras cœlumque profundum quippe ferant rapidi secum.
The dark caverns where Virgil represents them as being hidden away, what are they but the hollow and hidden parts of our bodies, where, according to Plato’s determination, the passions dwell in abodes of their own, in the breast and entrails? The mountain mass which is placed above them is the head, where Plato thinks the reason has its home.... Venus, who meets them in the middle of the wood, is pleasure, whose pursuit by us becomes hotter and keener toward the middle of our life. Her assumption of a maidenly look and air is for the purpose of deceiving the unwary. If we saw her as she is we should flee from her in fear and trembling; for, as there is nothing more tempting than pleasure, so there is nothing more foul. Her garments are girded up because her flight is swift. For this same reason she is compared to the swiftest of creatures and things.3 It cannot be denied that nothing swifter exists, whether you consider her comprehensively or part by part; for pleasure as a whole passes from us very soon, and even while it still abides with us each taste of it lasts but a moment. And then, finally, she appears in the garb of a huntress, because she hunts for the souls of miserable mortals. And she has a bow, and has flowing hair, in order that she may smite us and charm us.”4
Petrarch’s love for Cicero and Virgil sprang from what one may call the fundamental humanistic impulse, delight in the free play of the mind among ideas that are stimulating and beautiful. His devotion to Livy came, in part, from a different source, from a singular sort of patriotism. He felt that he, and every other Italian of his day, was descended in a certain sense from the Romans of old; that their glory was his rightful heritage; that Rome, the ancient Rome, which he found still in existence beneath the wretched mediæval stronghold, was the city of his love and allegiance. Livy’s pages accordingly were to him the record of the great deeds of his forefathers. He studied them with the utmost eagerness.
Under the influence of one or the other of these two passions, the thirst for new truth and beauty and the love of the past, or of both of them in conjunction, Petrarch laboured strenuously, until he had gathered together from a hundred obscure sources all the remains of Roman literature that were obtainable in his day, and had made himself familiar with them. Greek literature, unfortunately, it was impossible for him to know. In spite of a lifelong desire, and at least one determined effort, he was unable to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language.5 He read in barren Latin translations more or less of Plato and Aristotle and Homer, but this could afford him nothing like an adequate conception of the power and beauty of the literature as a whole. It is a sad pity that he was so handicapped, for if the first Humanist had known and appreciated Homer and Plato and Sophocles, as he did Cicero and Virgil and Seneca and Livy, all our modern culture would be something far finer. We should be simpler and clearer in our conceptions, and better developed æsthetically. If Hellenic influences have never played their due part in our education, if the proportion between the Greek and the Roman elements has been unnatural, this is owing mainly to the insufficient opportunities of Petrarch and his earliest disciples.
To the classical authors that he did possess he devoted a prolonged and intense study that has very rarely been equalled. He followed faithfully his own injunctions given in the De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ: “If you would win glory from your books you must know them, and not merely have them; must stow them away, not in your library, but in your memory, not in your bookcases, but in your brain.” Annotations in his hand on the manuscripts that have been traced back to him6 show that he weighed with care every word of his favourite writers. But external evidence like this is not necessary. Every page of his letters, and of all his other Latin writings too, is proof in itself that as far as his limitations permitted he had absorbed the very spirit of his beloved classics.
The letters show also how eager he was to hand on to others the light that he had gained from these studies. He had as wide and varied an acquaintance as any man of his time, thanks to the fame that he had won in his youth by his verses, and to the attraction that he exercised upon everyone in later life, through his personal charm and his remarkable intellectual powers; and one of the inevitable consequences of such a connection was a correspondence that was both active and large. He wrote to the emperor and the pope, to kings and their regents, to churchmen of every degree, to scholars in almost all parts of Europe, to men of every profession, every age, every taste; and he wrote always as a Humanist, a lover of the classics, who found in them the quintessence of human wisdom. Men everywhere were ready for broader views, deeper knowledge, keener life, and he, through these letters and through personal contact, stimulated their longing and showed them where they might find that which would satisfy it. The influence that he thus exerted is incalculable. This volume is but an effort to give some comprehension of it.
Of the letters that follow the first four are given for the sake of showing the range and quality of Petrarch’s classical scholarship. They are taken, with one exception, from the letters to dead authors, which constitute a large part of the twenty-fourth book of the Familiares. The first is addressed to Cicero.
Notes
1 He did not discover the group Ad Atticum until 1345, when he was more than forty years old. And Voigt and Viertel have shown that the very existence of the Ad Familiares was unknown to him.
2 Sen., iv., 4
3......... qualis equos Threissa fatigat Harpalyce volucremque fuga prævertitur Hebrum.
4 Petrarch sometimes applies this method of criticism more wisely and with better results. Cf. Fam., xiv., 1 (vol. ii., pp. 268, 269).
5 There was no apparatus for the study of Greek at that time. Oral instruction from Greek or Byzantine scholars was the only possible means of access to the great writers of the past. Such instruction was difficult to secure, as Petrarch’s efforts and failure prove.
6 Through the patience and ingenuity of M. de Nolhac.