Dialogue the Third — Petrarch — S. Augustine — Petrarch’s Secret by Petrarch

Dialogue the Third Petrarch — S. Augustine

S. Augustine. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and contradiction.

Petrarch. You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you may still have to say.

S. Augustine. I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without flinching a severer handling of the trouble.

Petrarch. Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the surgeon’s hand.

S. Augustine. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is. In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains.

Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain your freedom by breaking your chains.

Petrarch. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am unconscious?

S. Augustine. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and, what is most sad of all, you glory in them!

Petrarch. What may these chains be of which you speak?

S. Augustine. Love and glory.

Petrarch. Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you?

S. Augustine. Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed. All the other things that held you back were less strong and also less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good. Nevertheless I mean to try.

Petrarch. Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul?

S. Augustine. Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right?

Petrarch. I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of all.

Augustine. Let us take them separately for the present, while I endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately. Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not hold it to be the height of all madness?

Petrarch. To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest action of the soul.

S. Augustine. Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view you have put forward?

Petrarch. If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed? Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is hardly any greater blessing to it; if it so happen that you hold an opposite view, let each one follow his own feeling, for, as you are well aware, truth is a large field and every man should have freedom to judge for himself.

S. Augustine. In matters directly contradictory opinions also may be diverse. But truth itself is one and always the same.

Petrarch. I admit that is so. But what makes us go wrong is that we bind ourselves obstinately to old opinions, and will not easily part from them.

S. Augustine. Heaven grant you may think as wisely on the whole matter of love as you do on this point.

Petrarch. To speak briefly, I think I am so certainly right that those who think the opposite I believe to be quite out of their senses.

S. Augustine. I should certainly maintain that to take for truth some ancient falsehood, and to take as falsehood some newly-discovered truth, as though all authority for truth were a matter of time, is the very climax of madness.

Petrarch. You are wasting your labour. Whoever asserts that view of love I shall never believe him. And I will rest on Cicero’s saying, “If I err here I err willingly, and I shall never consent to part with this error as long as I live.”1

S. Augustine. When Cicero uses those words he is speaking of the immortality of the soul, and referring to it as the noblest of conceptions, and declaring his own belief in it to be so firm that he would not endure to listen to any one who maintained the contrary. You, however, to urge the ignoblest and most false of all opinions, make use of those same terms. Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal, it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human nature being what it is.

But you see what will be the consequences of that error in which you stand; it will precipitate your soul into all manner of folly, when shame, and fear, even reason, that now acts as some check on passion, and the knowledge of truth itself shall all have disappeared.

Petrarch. I have already told you you were wasting your time. My own remembrance tells mo that I have never loved anything to be ashamed of, and, on the contrary, have ever loved what is most noble.

S. Augustine. Even noble things may be loved in a shameful way; it is beyond doubt.

Petrarch. Neither in the object of love nor in the manner of loving am I guilty. So you may as well give up tormenting me.

S. Augustine. Well, well! Do you wish, like those with fever on the brain, to die laughing and joking? Or will you rather take some remedy for your mind so pitiable and so far from its true health?

Petrarch. I will not refuse a remedy if you will prove to me that I am ill, but, when a man is quite well, to begin taking remedies is often fatal.

S. Augustine. As soon as you have reached the stage of convalescence you will perceive quickly enough, as men generally do, that you have been seriously ill.

Petrarch. After all, I cannot but show deference to one who often in the past, and especially in these last two days, has given me proof how good were his counsels. So please go on.

S. Augustine. In the first place I ask you to forgive me if, compelled by the subject, I have to deal severely with what has been so delightful to you. For I cannot but foresee that the truth will sound bitterly in your ears.

Petrarch. Just one word before you begin. Do you thoroughly know the matter you are to touch upon?

S. Augustine. I have gone into it all carefully beforehand. It is about a mortal woman, in admiring and celebrating whom you have, alas! spent a large part of your life. That a mind like yours should have felt such an insensate passion and for so long a time does greatly astonish me.

Petrarch. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form and motion is not as that of others. Consider this again and again, I entreat you, and I trust you may have understanding in what words to speak.

S. Augustine. Ah! out of all reason have you grown! Have you then for sixteen long years been feeding: with false joys this flame of your heart? Of a truth not longer did Italy once suffer the assaults of her most famous enemy, the great Hannibal; nor did she then endure more frequent onsets of her would-be lover, nor was consumed with more furious fires. You to-day carry within you as hot a flame of passion, you endure as fierce stings. Yet was there found one who forced him to retreat and, though late, to take his leave! But who shall expel this invader from your soul if you yourself forbid him to depart; if you of your own will invite him to stay long with you; if you, unhappy as you are, delight in your own calamity? Far other will be your thoughts when the fatal day shall come that will close for ever those eyes that are now so pleasing to you to look upon; when you shall see that face and those pale limbs changed by death; then you will be filled with shame to have so knit your mortal affections to a perishing body such as this, and what now you so obstinately maintain you will then blush to remember.

Petrarch. Heaven forbid any such misery. I shall not see your threats fulfilled.

S. Augustine. They will inevitably come to pass.

Petrarch. I know it. But the stars in their courses will not so fight against me as to prevent the order of Nature by hastening her death like that. First came I into this world and I shall be first to depart.

S. Augustine. I think you will not have forgotten that time when you feared the contrary event, and made a song of your beloved as if she were presently to die, a song full of moving sorrow.

Petrarch. Certainly I remember very well, but the thought that filled me then with grief, and the memory of which makes me shiver, was a jealous indignation at the bare possibility of my outliving her who is the best part of my life and whose presence makes all its sweetness. For that is the motive of that song; I remember it well, and how I was overcome with tears. Its spirit is still with me, if with you perchance are the words.

S. Augustine. I was not complaining how many tears the fear of her death made you shed, nor of how much grief you felt. I was only concerned that you should realise how this fear of yours in the past may certainly return; and more easily, in that every day is a step nearer to death, and that that fair form, worn by sicknesses and the bearing of many children, has already lost much of its first strength.

Petrarch. I also am borne down with cares and am worn with age, and in that onward path towards death I have outrun her whom I love.

S. Augustine. What folly it is to calculate the order of death by that of birth! For what are those sad lamentations of the old but because of the early deaths of their young children? What is it that yonder aged nurse is grieving over but that she sees the loss of her little nursling—

“Whom some dark day
Has stripped of his sweet life; and cruel fate
Snatched from his mother’s breast and covered him
In a too early grave.”2

In your own case the small number of years by which you have preceded her gives you a very uncertain hope that you will be gone before the fire of your passion shall be extinguished; and yet you indulge the fiction that this order of Nature is unchangeable.

Petrarch. Not exactly unchangeable, but I pray without ceasing that it may not be changed, and whenever I think of death I remember Ovid’s line—

“Late may her time arrive, and after mine.”3

S. Augustine. I can listen to these trifles no more; but since you now admit that she may possibly die before you, I ask what should you say if she really were dead?

Petrarch. What should I say but that such a calamity would be the climax of all my miseries? Yet I should try and comfort myself with what was past. But may the winds bear away the words from our lips and the hurricane scatter such an omen to the ends of the earth!

S. Augustine. Ah, blindfold one! you see not yet what foolishness it is so to subject your soul to things of earth, that kindle in it the flames of desire, that have no power to give it rest, that cannot endure; and, while promising to charm you with their sweetness, torment you with perpetual agitations.

Petrarch. If you have any more effectual remedy, I beg you will point it out. You will never frighten me with talk like this; for I am not, as you suppose, infatuated with any creature that is mortal. You might have known that I have loved her physical charm loss than her soul, that what has captivated me has been a life above that of ordinary lives, the witnessing of which has shown me how the blessed live above.

Therefore, since you inquire of me (and the mere question is a torture to listen to) what I should do supposing she were to leave me and be the first to die—well, I should try and console myself in sorrow with Lælius, the wisest of the Romans. With him I should say, “It is her goodness that I loved and that is not dead;” and I would say to myself those other words that he pronounced after the death of him for whom he had conceived an affection surpassing all common affection.4

S. Augustine. You retire to Error’s inaccessible fastness, and it will not be easy to dislodge you. But as I notice you are inclined to listen much more patiently to the truth about yourself and her, sing the praises of your darling lady as much as you will, and I will gainsay nothing. Were she a queen, a saint—

“A very goddess, or to Apollo’s self
Own sister, or a mother of the nymphs,”5

yet all her excellence will in nowise excuse your error.

Petrarch. Let us see what fresh quarrel you seek with me?

S. Augustine. It is unquestionably true that oftentimes the loveliest things are loved in a shameful way.

Petrarch. I have already met that insinuation on a previous occasion. If any one could see the image of the love that reigns in my heart, he would recognise that there is no difference between it and that face that I have praised indeed much, but less by far than it deserves to be praised. I call to witness the spirit of Truth in whose presence we are speaking when I assert that in my love there has never been anything dishonourable, never anything of the flesh, never anything that any man could blame unless it were its mere intensity. And if you add that even so it never passed the line of right, I think a fairer thing could never be conceived.

S. Augustine. I might reply to you with a word of Cicero and tell you, “You are talking of putting boundary lines in vice itself.”6

Petrarch. Not in vice, but in love.

S. Augustine. But in that very passage he was speaking of love. Do you remember where it occurs?

Petrarch. Do I remember indeed? Of course I have read it in the Tusculans. But he was speaking of men’s common love; mine is one by itself.

S. Augustine. Other people, I fancy, might say the same of theirs; for true it is that in all the passions, and most of all in this, every man interprets his own case favourably, and there is point in the verse though from a common poet—

“To every man his lady,
Then one to me assign;
To every man his love affairs,
And so let me have mine!”7

Petrarch. Would you like, if you have time, to hear me tell you a few of those many charms of hers that would strike you with astonishment and admiration?

S. Augustine. Do you think I am ignorant of all

“Those pleasant dreams that lovers use to weave”?

Every schoolboy knows the line, but I confess I am ashamed to hear such silliness from the lips of one whose words and thoughts should seek a higher range.

Petrarch. One thing I will not keep silence on,—call it silliness, call it gratitude, as you please,—namely, that to her I owe whatever I am, and I should never have attained such little renown and glory as I have unless she by the power of this love had quickened into life the feeble germ of virtue that Nature had sown in my heart. It was she who turned my youthful soul away from all that was base, who drew me as it were by a grappling chain, and forced me to look upwards. Why should you not believe it? It is a sure truth that by love we grow like what we love. Now there is no backbiter alive, let his tongue be as sharp as it may, that has ventured to touch her good name, or dared to say he had seen a single fault, I will not say in her conduct, but even in any one of her gestures or words. Moreover, those whisperers who leave no one’s reputation untouched if they can help it, have been obliged in her, case to utter only reverence and respect.

It is no wonder, then, if such a glory as hers should have fostered in my heart the longing for more conspicuous glory, and should have sweetened those hard toils which I had to endure if I would attain that which I desired. What were all the wishes of my youth but solely to please her who above all others had pleased me? And you are not ignorant that to gain my end I scorned delights a thousand times, I gave myself before my time to labour and to cares without number; and now you bid me forget or diminish somewhat of my love for her who first taught me how to escape the vulgar crowd, who guided all my steps, spurred on my lagging mind, and wakened into life my drowsy spirit.

S. Augustine. Poor man! you would have done better to be silent than to speak, although even if you had been silent I should have discerned what you are within. But such stout words as these stir my indignation and anger.

Petrarch. I wonder why?

S. Augustine. To have a false opinion shows ignorance, but to keep on boldly proclaiming it shows pride as well as ignorance.

Petrarch. Suppose you try and prove that what I think and say is false.

S. Augustine. It is all false; and, first, what you say as to owing all you are to her. If you mean that she has made you what you are, there you certainly lie; but if you were to say that it is she. who has prevented you being any more than you are, you would speak the truth. O what long contention would you have been spared if by the charm of her beauty she had not held you back. What you are you owe to the bounty of Nature; what you might have been she has quite cut off, or rather let me say you yourself have cut it off, for she indeed is innocent. That beauty which seemed so charming and so sweet, through the burning flame of your desire, through the continual rain of your tears, has done away all that harvest that should have grown from the seeds of virtue in your soul. It is a false boast of yours that she has held you back from base things; from some perhaps she may, but only to plunge you into evils worse still. For if one leads you from some miry path to bring you to a precipice, or in lancing some small abscess cuts your throat, he deserves not the name of deliverer but assassin. Likewise she whom you hold up as your guide, though she drew you away from some base courses, has none the less overwhelmed you in a deep gulf of splendid ruin. As for her having taught you to look upwards and separate yourself from the vulgar crowd, what else is it than to say by sitting at her feet you became so infatuated with the charm of her above as to studiously neglect everything else?

And in the common intercourse of human life what can be more injurious than that? when you say she has involved you in toils without number, there indeed you speak truth. But what great gain is there in that? When there are such varied labours that a man is perforce obliged to engage in, what madness is it of one’s own accord to go after fresh ones! As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this. But the time for this is not yet come.

Petrarch. I believe the readiest of warriors first threatens and then strikes. I seem, however, to find threat and wound together. And already I begin to stagger.

S. Augustine. How much more will you stagger when I deliver my sharpest thrust of all? Forsooth that woman to whom you profess you owe everything, she, even she, has been your ruin.

Petrarch. Good Heavens! How do you think you will persuade me of that?

S. Augustine. She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator: and that one path alone leads, sooner than any other, to death.

Petrarch. I pray you make no rash judgment. The love which I feel for her has most certainly led me to love God.

S. Augustine. But it has inverted the true order.

Petrarch. How so?

S. Augustine. Because ‘every creature’ should be dear to us because of our love for the Creator. But in your case, on the contrary, held captive by the charm of the creature, you have not loved the Creator as you ought. You have admired the Divine Artificer as though in all His works He had made nothing fairer than the object of your love, although in truth the beauty of the body should be reckoned last of all.

Petrarch. I call Truth to witness as she stands here between us, and I take my conscience to witness also, as I said before, that the body. of my lady has been less dear to me than her soul. The proof of it is here, that the further she has advanced in age (which for the beauty of the body is a fatal thunderstroke) the more firm has been my admiration; for albeit the flower of her youth has withered visibly with time, the beauty of her soul has grown with the years, and as it was the beginning of my love for her, even so has it been its sustainer. Otherwise if it had been her bodily form which attracted me, it was, ere this, time to make a change.

S. Augustine. Are you mocking me? Do you mean to assert that if the same soul had been lodged in a body ill-formed and poor to look upon, you would have taken equal delight therein?

Petrarch. I dare not say that. For the soul itself cannot be discerned, and the image of a body like that would have given no indication of such a soul. But were it possible for the soul to be visible to my gaze, I should most certainly have loved its beauty even though its dwelling-place were poor.

S. Augustine. You are relying on mere words; for if you are only able to love that which is visible to your gaze, then what you love is the bodily form. However, I deny not that her soul and her character have helped to feed your flame, for (as I will show you before long) her name alone has both little and much kindled your mad passion; for, as in all the affections of the soul, it happens most of all in this one that oftentimes a very little spark will light a great fire.

Petrarch. I see where you would drive me. You want to make me say with Ovid—

“I love at once her body and her soul.”8

S. Augustine. Yes, and you ought to confess this also, that neither in one or the other case has your love been temperate or what it should be.

Petrarch. You will have to put me to the torture ere I will make any such confession.

S. Augustine. And you will allow that this love has also cast you into great miseries.

Petrarch. Though you place me on the block itself, I will not acknowledge any such thing.

S. Augustine. If you do not ignore my questions and conclusions, you will soon make both those confessions. Tell me, then, can you recall the years when you were a little child, or have the crowding cares of your present life blotted all that time out?

Petrarch. My childhood and youth are as vividly before my eyes as if they were yesterday.

S. Augustine. Do you remember, then, how in those times you had the fear of God, how you thought about Death, what love you had for Religion, how dear goodness and virtue were to you?

Petrarch. Yes, I remember it all, and I am sorry when I see that as my years increased these virtues grew less and less in me.

S. Augustine. For my part I have ever been afraid lest the wind of Spring should cut that early blossom off, which, if only it might be left whole and unhurt, would have produced a wondrous fruitage.

Petrarch. Pray do not wander from the subject; for what has this to do with the question we were discussing?

S. Augustine. I will tell you. Recall each step in your life, since your remembrance is so complete and fresh; recall all the course of your life, and recollect at what period this great change you speak of began.

Petrarch. I have run over in my mind all the course and number of my years.

S. Augustine. And what do you find?

Petrarch. I see that the doctrine in the treatise of Pythagoras, of which I have heard tell and have read, is by no means void of truth. For when travelling the right road, still temperate and modest, I had reached the parting of the ways and had been bidden to turn to the right hand, whether from carelessness or perversity I know not, behold I turned to the left; and what I had read in my boyhood was of no profit to me—

“Here the ways part: the right will thee conduct
To the walled palace of the mighty King
And to Elysium, but the left will lead
Where sin is punished and the malefactor
Goes to his dreaded doom.”9

Although I had read of all this before, yet I understood it not until I found it by experience. Afterwards I went wrong, in this foul and crooked pathway, and often in mind went back with tears and sorrow, yet could not keep the right way; and it was when I left that way, yes, that was certainly the time when all this confusion in my life began.

S. Augustine. And in what period of your age did this take place?

Petrarch. About the middle of my growing youth. But if you give me a minute or two, I think I can recall the exact year when it took place.

S. Augustine. I do not ask for the precise date, but tell me about when was it that you saw the form and feature of this woman for the first time?

Petrarch. Never assuredly shall I forget that day.

S. Augustine. Well now, put two and two together; compare the two dates.

Petrarch. I must confess in truth they coincide. I first saw her and I turned from my right course at one and the same time.

S. Augustine. That is all I wanted. You became infatuated. The unwonted dazzle blinded your eyes, so I believe. For they say the first effect of love is blindness. So one reads in the poet most conversant with Nature—

“At the first sight was that Sidonian dame
Blinded,”

and then he adds presently—

“With love was Dido burning.”10

And though, as you well know, the story is but on ancient fable, yet did the Poet in making it follow the order of Nature.

And when you had been struck blind by this meeting, if you chose the left-hand path it was because to you it seemed more broad and easy; for that to the right is steep and narrow, and of its hardship you were afraid. But that woman so renowned, whom you imagine as your most safe guide, wherefore did not she direct you upward, hesitating and trembling as you were? Why did she not take you by the hand as one does the blind, and set you in the way where you should walk?

Petrarch. She certainly did so, as far as it was in her power. What but this was in her heart when, unmoved by my entreaties, unyielding to my caress, she safeguarded her woman’s honour, and in spite of her youth and mine, in spite of a thousand circumstances that would have bent a heart of adamant, she stood her ground, resolute and unsubdued? Yes, this womanly soul taught me what should be the honour and duty of a man; and to preserve her chastity she did, as Seneca expresses it—

“What was to me at once an example and a reproach.”11

And at last, when she saw the reins of my chariot were broken and that I was rushing to the abyss, she chose rather to part from me than follow where I went.

S. Augustine. Base desires, then, sometimes you felt, though not long since you denied it? But it is the common folly of lovers, let me say of mad folk. One may say of them all alike—

“I would not, yet I would; I would, yet would not.”12

You know not, any of you, what you want or what you want not.

Petrarch. Without seeing, I fell into the snare. But if in past days my feelings were other than they are now, love and youth were the cause. Now I know what I wish and what I desire, and I have at last made firm my staggering soul. She for her part has ever been firm in her mind and always the same. The more I understand this woman’s constancy, the more I admire it; and if sometimes I regretted her resolution, now I rejoice in it and give her thanks.

S. Augustine. It is not easy to believe a man who has once taken you in. You may have changed the outside fashion of your life, but have not yet persuaded me that your soul is also changed.

If your flame is calmed and softened somewhat, yet it is not for certain quite put out. But you who set such price on her you love, do you not see how deeply by absolving her you condemn yourself? You delight in seeing in her the model of purity, and you avow yourself to be without any feeling and a criminal; and you protest that she is the most happy of women, while her love has made you the most unhappy of men. If you remember, it is just what I said at the beginning.

Petrarch. Yes, I remember. I cannot deny that what you say is true, and I see whither you are gradually leading me.

S. Augustine. To see it better still, lend me all your attention. Nothing so much leads a man to forget or despise God as the love of things temporal, and most of all this passion that we call love; and to which, by the greatest of all desecrations, we even gave the name of God, without doubt only that we may throw a heavenly veil over our human follies and make a pretext of divine inspiration when we want to commit an enormous transgression. In the case of the other passions, the sight of the object, the hope of enjoying it, and the ardour of the will take us captive. Love also demands all that, but in addition it asks also a reciprocal passion, without which it will be forced to die away. So, whereas in the other cases one loves singly and alone, in this case we must give love for love, and thus man’s heart is stung and stung again. Therefore, Cicero was right when he wrote that “Of all the passions of the soul, assuredly the most violent is love,”13 and he must have been very certain of his ground when he added that “assuredly”—he who in four books shows he was aware how Plato’s Academy doubted everything.14

Petrarch. I have often noticed that reference, and wondered that of the passions he should call this the most violent of all.

S. Augustine. Your surprise would have vanished if you had not lost your powers of memory. But I must recall you by a short admonition to a recollection of its many evils. Think what you were when that plague seized upon your soul; how suddenly you fell to bemoaning, and came to such a pitch of wretchedness that you felt a morbid pleasure in feeding on tears and sighs. Passing sleepless nights, and murmuring ever the name of your beloved, scorning everything, hating life, desiring death, with a melancholy love for being alone, avoiding all your fellow-men, one might well apply to you, for they exactly fit your case, the lines in which Homer describes Bellerophon—

“There in the pleasant fields he wandered sad,
Eating his heart, far from the ways of men.”15

What meant that pale face and wasted figure? that flower of your age withering before its time, those heavy eyes, ever bathed in tears, your mind in a state of agitation, your broken rest and troubled moans, even when you were asleep? Why was your voice weak and altered through your sorrow of heart, and the very sound of your words, indistinct and broken, with whatever other token can be imagined, of a heart distressed and in disorder? Do you call these the signs of one in good health? Was it not this lady with whom for you every day, whether feast or fast, began and ended? Was it not at her coming the sun shone forth, and when she left you, night returned? Every change of her countenance brought a change in your heart; and if she were sad, you forthwith were filled with sadness. In a word, your life became wholly dependent upon hers. You know that I say but what is true and what is in every one’s mouth.

And what could be more senseless than that, not content with the presence of her living face, the cause of all your woes, you must needs obtain a painted picture by an artist 16 of high repute, that you might carry it everywhere with you, to have an everlasting spring of tears, fearing, I suppose, lest otherwise their fountain might dry up? Of all such things you were only too vigilant, and you neglected everything else. But to come to that which is the very crowning instance of your folly, and of which I gave you warning a little while ago, who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that, infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as of her person, you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honour to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself? Had you any liking for the laurel of empire or of poetry, it was forsooth because the name they bore was hers; and from this time onwards there is hardly a verse from your pen but in it you have made mention of the laurel, as if indeed you were a denizen of Peneus’ stream,17 or some priest on Cirrha’s 18 Mount.

And finally, discovering that the laurel of empire was beyond your reach, you have, with as little self-restraint as you showed in the case of your beloved herself, now coveted the laurel of Poetry of which the merit of your works seemed to give more promise.

Although to gain your reward you were borne up on the wings of genius, yet will you shudder to remember with what trouble you attained it. I clearly divine what excuse you will make, and I see your thought the moment you open your lips. You will allege that you were devoted to these studies some time before you became a lover at all, and that desire for the glory of the poet’s crown had kindled your heart from childhood. I neither deny it or forget it; but the fact of the usage being obsolete for centuries, and this being an epoch very unfavourable for studies like yours, the dangers also of long voyages, which would have brought you to the threshold of prison and of death itself, not to mention other obstacles of fortune no less violent than those—all these difficulties, I say, would perhaps have broken your resolve entirely, if the remembrance of a name so sweet, always entwining itself with your inmost soul, had not banished every other care, and drawn you over sea, over land, across mountains of difficulty, to Rome and to Naples, where at length you attained what you had longed for with such ardour. If all this seems to you the token of but a moderate passion, then at least shall be quite certain you are the victim of the moderate delusion.

I purposely leave out what Cicero was not ashamed to imitate from Terence when he wrote, “Wrongs, suspicions, fierce quarrels, jealousies, war, and then again peace—behold the miseries of love.” Do you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you may reply: “I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such excess.” Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added—

“Such fickle things to settle by sane rule
Is to be sanely insane.”19

The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end, unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours.

Such, then, are the miseries of love, the particulars of which it is needless to mention to those who have proved them, and which would not be believed by those who never tried. But the worst of them all, to come back to our subject, is that it engenders a forgetfulness of God and of man’s real state. For how should the soul thus crushed beneath these weights ever arise to that one and only most pure fountain of true Good? And since it is so, you may lay aside your wonder that Cicero should tell us no passion of man’s soul seemed to him more violent than love.

Petrarch. I must own myself beaten; for it appears all you have said is taken from the very heart of the book of experience. And as you have quoted from the play of Terence, let me please myself by bringing from there also this sad complaint—

“O deed of shame! now am I foil of woe.
Weary I burn with love; with open eyes,
Brain clear, I am undone; and what to do
I know not.”20

I would also call to mind this counsel from the same poet’s words—

“Think, while there’s time, again and yet again.”21

S. Augustine. And I likewise from the lips of Terence will give you my reply—

“What in itself contains no rule or reason,
By rule or reason you can never hold.”22

Petrarch. What is to be done, then? Am I to despair?

S. Augustine. That is the last thing in the world to do. However, let me briefly tell you the remedy I propose. You know that on this subject there are not only special treatises compiled by philosophers of eminence, but that some of the most famous poets have written on it whole books.

It would be almost an insult to point out which they are, above all, to you who are a past-master in the whole field, or to offer any advice as to reading them; but perhaps I might say a word without offence to suggest in what way their study might be applied for your own welfare.

First, then, notice what is said by Cicero—

“Some think that an old love can best be driven out by
a new, as one nail is by another.”23

And Ovid agrees, giving this general rule—

“Old love affairs must always yield to new.”24

And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided and parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less force towards each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable by the enemy; so Fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power in the world, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced. On the other hand, I think this is not to be overlooked, that there may be great danger when you lay aside a passion and, if one may say so, a passion of the nobler kind; you may, if you are not watchful, fall into dissipation of another sort, run after women and become a loose libertine. In my judgment, then, if one must die for certain, there is some consolation in dying of a nobler rather than a less noble wound. So if you ask my advice, it is this: Take your courage in both hands. Fly, if you possibly can; and I would even say, go from one prison to another; perchance you might escape by the way or else find a milder discipline to be under. Only beware, when your neck is freed from one such yoke as this, that you place it not under the weight of a crowd of more base and vile oppressions.

S. Petrarch. While the doctor is finishing his advice, will he allow the patient, in the throes of his malady, to interrupt him for a minute?

Augustine. Of course. Why not? Many a doctor, guided by the symptoms of his patient thus declared, has been able to find the very remedy he needed.

Petrarch. Then what I want to say is just this: For me to love another is impossible. My mind has grown only to love her; my eyes to look only for her; excepting her, all to them is nothing, or is mere darkness. And so if your remedy is that in order to be healed of this love I should love another, your condition is an impossible one. In that case all is over, and I am lost.

S. Augustine. Your senses are dulled, your appetite is lost; since then you can take no internal remedy, one must have recourse to other treatment and see what can be done by change of scene. Can you bring your mind to think of flight or exile and going right away from the places that you know?

Petrarch. Though I feel that her attraction draws me to her with hooks of steel, nevertheless if I have to go, I can.

S. Augustine. If you can, you will be safe. What else can I say, then, but this advice of Virgil’s, changing only two little words—

“Ah! flee this land beloved, and leave behind
shore to thee so dear.”25

For how can you continue in safety in these scenes where there are so many memories of your wounds, where things present and the memory of things past cling always to you? So that I say, as Cicero also advises, “Seek change of scene; take care to do as one does who is recovering from some illness.”26

Petrarch. Think of what you are prescribing. For how often and often, longing to get well, and familiar with advice like this, have I tried this remedy of flight; and though I have feigned various other reasons for it, yet the end and aim of all my peregrinations and all my retirement to the country was this one thing—to become free! For that I have wandered far away to the West, to the North, to the very confines of the ocean. Far and wide have I roamed. You see what good it has done me. And so Virgil’s simile has many a time come home to my heart,—

“E’en as the stricken deer, that unaware
Rooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete,
The hunter pierces with his weapon keen.
And she unknowing o’er Mount Dicte’s side
Flees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleaves
To her poor side.”27

I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound with me.

S. Augustine. Yourself have given me the answer for which you look.

Petrarch. How so?

S. Augustine. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him no good whatever. “You went touring with yourself,”28 said the Sage.

You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must make your soul ready. Then you must fly. For it is proved to demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor’s help is in vain. Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that Horace only spoke truth when he said—

“Who cross the ocean making peace their goal,
Change but their sky and cannot change their soul.”

Or thus—

“We come to this; when o’er the world we range,
’Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change.”29

Petrarch. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell me briefly what are the remedies I must use?

S. Augustine. I did not say that you must cure and heal your soul. What I said was you must make it ready. As for the rest, either you will be cured, and the change of scene will then establish your health on a firm footing; or you will not yet be cured, but only made ready, and then the change of scene will have the same ultimate result. But, if your soul is neither cured nor made ready, this change and frequent moving from place to place will only stir up its grief. I will still advise you to take a leaf out of Horace’s book—

“For if the cure of mental ills is due
To sense and wisdom, not a fine sea view,”30

—what he says is true. You will set out full of the hope and the wish to return, carrying along with you all that has ensnared your soul. In whatever place you are, to whatever side you turn, you will behold the face, you will hear the voice of her whom you have left. By that sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have power to see her though you are absent, and to hear her though she is far away; and do you imagine that love is to be extinguished by subterfuges like this? Believe me, it will rather burn more fiercely. Those who call themselves masters in the art of love enjoin among their other maxims short absences one from another on the part of lovers, for fear they should become tired of seeing each other face to face or from their importunity. Therefore I advise, I recommend, I enjoin upon you that you learn to wholly sever your soul from that which weighs it down and go away without hope of return. You will discover then, but not before, what absence is able to do for the soul’s healing. If fate had placed your lot in some unhealthy plague-stricken region where you were liable to constant illness, should you not flee from it never to return? And so I counsel you to do now, unless, as I much fear, men care more for their body than their soul.

Petrarch. That is their affair. But undoubtedly if I found myself ill on account of the unhealthiness of the place I was in, I should choose for my recovery some place with a healthier climate, and I should act in the same way, and with stronger reasons still, in case of maladies of the soul. Yet, as far as I can see, the cure of these is a more difficult matter.

S. Augustine. The united testimony of the greatest philosophers proves the falsity of that assertion. It is evident that all the maladies of the soul can be healed if only the patient puts no obstacle in the way, although many diseases of the body are incurable by any known means. For the rest, and not to go too far from our subject, I stick to my judgment. You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back, never to see that which it was wont to look for. This is the only sure road for a lover; and if you wish to preserve your soul from ruin, this is what you must do.

Petrarch. That you may see how perfectly I have learned all you have said, let me recapitulate that to go for change of scene is useless, unless the soul is first made ready; such journeys will cure it when made ready, and will establish it when once cured. Is not that the conclusion of your threefold precept?

S. Augustine. Yes, it is precisely that, and you sum up very well what I have unfolded.

Petrarch. I could have divined your two first truths by myself, without you pointing them out; but as for the third, that the soul, when it is cured and established in health, still needs absence, I do not understand it, unless it is the fear of a relapse that is the motive of what you say.

S. Augustine. But you surely do not suppose that to be a slight point even in bodily health? And how much more grave a matter ought one to think it in regard to the soul, where a relapse is so much more rapid and dangerous. So I would say, let us refer once more to what seems one of the soundest remarks of Seneca, where in a letter he writes, “If any man wishes to have done with love he must avoid all recollection of the beloved form,” and adds as his reason, “For nothing is so easily rekindled to life again as love.”31 O how true a saying is that, and from what profound experience of life is he speaking! But it is needless to call any other witness of this than your own knowledge will supply.

Petrarch. Yes, I agree he speaks truth, but if you notice he is speaking not of one who already has done with love, but of one who wishes to have done with it.

S. Augustine. He speaks of any man who is in danger. Any kind of blow is more dangerous if there is some wound before unhealed, or some disease not yet cured; and even afterwards it is not safe. And since we remember most, instances that have come home to us in our own experience, let me ask how often have you who speak to me not found yourself, as you went about these well-known spots, by their mere look, though no person met you, reminded of your former vanities; standing speechless, full of sighs, as you pace this town that has been, I will not say the cause, but at any rate the scene of all your evils; though before you came back to it you thought you were cured, and would have been to a very great extent if only you had remained away? And then with difficulty restraining your tears, half-wounded to death, you have fled, and cried to your own heart, “Here in these places I see at every turn the ambush of my ancient foe. The signs of death are ever about me!” So, then, were you healed already, if you would take counsel of me, I should say, “Do not stay long in this place. It is not wise for the prisoner who has broken his chains to go wandering round the prison gates, ever ready to take him in again, before which the jailer is ever on guard, laying his traps with special care to recapture those whose escape he regrets.

“The downward path to hell is ever smooth,
Its dismal gate is open night and day.”32

If precautions like these are needful for men in health, how much more are they in the case of those who have not yet shaken off their sickness. It is of the latter that Seneca was thinking when he wrote that maxim. He was giving counsel to those who were most in danger, for it was no use to speak of those whom the flame had already devoured and who were past all care for their safety. He addressed himself to those in another stage, who still felt the heat but tried to come forth of the flame. Many a sick man on the way to recovery has been thrown back by a draught of water which before his illness would have done him no harm; and often has one wearied out, with a long day’s work, been knocked down by some trifling shake which when he was in his full strength would not have moved him at all.

It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love.

It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. And since it is so, it is not enough merely to leave a plague-stricken spot, but you, O man, must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back, you lose your Eurydice once more.

Such is the sum of my counsel.

Petrarch. I accept it heartily and with thankfulness, for I feel that the remedy is suited to my wound. My intention is to fly, but I know not yet where lies the direction I should choose.

S. Augustine. A thousand ways are open to you to make choice of on every side; a thousand ports are ready to receive you. I know that, more than to other lands, your heart turns to Italy, and that a love of your native soil is inborn in you; and you are right, for—

“Not Media’s forests rich, nor Ganges’ stream,
Though fair it be, nor Hermus rolling gold,
May vie with Italy; Bactria and Ind,
And all Pachaia with its odours rare
Shall not be mentioned.”33

I think you have yourself not long ago, in a letter to one of your friends,34 treated this theme of the famous Poet at fuller length in a Latin poem. Italy then would be my choice for you; because the ways of its people, its climate, the sea washing its shores, the Apennine range coming between them, all promise that a sojourn there would be better suited to extirpate your troubles than going anywhere else in the world. I would not, however, wish to confine you only to one corner of the land. Go under good auspices wherever inclination may lead; go without fear and with a free mind; take no backward glances, forget the past and step forward to the future. See how long you have been a stranger to your own country and your own self. It is time to return, for—

“O now ’tis evening, and the night
Is chiefly friend to thieves.”35

I warn you in words of your own.

One further counsel I must urge which I had nearly forgotten. You must avoid solitude, until you are quite sure that you have not a trace of your old ailment left. You told me that a country life had done you no good. There is nothing surprising in that. What remedy were you likely to find in a place all lonely and remote? Let me confess that often when you were retreating thither all by yourself, sighing, and turning longing eyes back to the town, I have laughed heartily and said to myself: “What a blindfold fool love has made of this unhappy wight! and led him to quite forget the verse that every schoolboy knows, about flying from his trouble and finding his death.”

Petrarch. I am afraid you are right, but what are the lines to which you allude?

S. Augustine. Ovid, of course.

“Lover! whoe’er you be, dwell not alone;
In solitude you’re sure to be undone.
You’re safer in a crowd; the word is true,
Lone woods are not the place for such as you.”36

Petrarch. Yes, I remember them perfectly, and knew them almost by heart from my childhood.

S. Augustine. Much good has it done you to know so many things yet not know how to suit them to your need. When you not only know all the testimony of the ancients, but have yourself proved the evils of solitude, it astonishes me that you should commit such a blunder as to seek it. You have, in fact, often complained that there was no good in being alone. You have expressed it in a thousand places, and especially in the fine poem you composed on your own misfortune. The sweet accents of it charmed me while you were writing.37

It surprised me to hear a song so harmonious arise from a soul so full of agitation, and come from the lips of a man so far out of his senses and I asked myself what power of love can stay the offended Muses from abandoning so dire a nest of troubles, and, scared by such aberration of mind in their host, forsaking utterly their wonted dwelling? I thought of words of Plato, “Let no man wholly sane knock at Poe try’d door,” and then of Aristotle, who followed him and said, “All great genius has a touch of madness in it,”38 but I remembered that in these sayings of theirs they were thinking of a frenzy far indeed removed from yours. However, we will return to this subject at some other time.

Petrarch. I must fain own what you say is the truth; but I never thought to have made verses so harmonious as to be worth your praise and commendation. They will be all the dearer to me now that I know it.

If you have other remedy to offer me, I beg you withhold it not from him who is in need.

S. Augustine. To unfold all one knows is the act of a braggart more than of a wise friend. And remember that men did not invent all the sundry kinds of remedies, internal and external, for diverse kinds of sickness, on purpose that each and every one should be tried on every occasion; but that, as Seneca remarks to Lucilius, “Nothing is so contrary to the work of healing as a frequent change of remedy; and no wound will ever be healed perfectly, to which first one and then another medicine is continually applied. The true way is only to try the new when the old remedy has failed.”39

So, then, although the remedies for this kind of ailment are many and varied, I will content myself with only pointing out a few, and I will choose those which in my judgment will best suit your need. For indeed, I have no wish merely to show you what is new, but only to tell you, of all those which are known, what remedies, so far as I can judge, are most likely in your case to be efficacious.

There are three things, as Cicero says, that will avert the mind of man from Love,—Satiety, Shamefastness, Reflection.40

There may indeed be more; there may be less. But, to follow the steps of so great an authority, let us suppose there are three. It will be useless for me to speak of the first in your case, because you will judge it is impossible you should ever come to satiety of your love. But still if your passion will hear the voice of reason and judge the future from the past, you will readily agree that an object, even the most beloved, can produce, I do not say satiety only, but even weariness and disgust. Now, as I am quite sure I should be entering on a vain quest if I embark on this track, because, even if it were granted that satiety is a possible thing, and that it kills love, you will pretend that by the ardour of your passion you are a thousand leagues removed from any such possibility, and, as I am not at all disposed to deny it, what remains is for me to touch only upon the other two remedies that are left. You will not wish to dispute my assertion that Nature has endowed you with a certain power of reason, and also with some talent for forming a weighty judgment.

Petrarch. Unless I am deceived by acting as judge in my own cause, what you say is so true that I am often inclined to fear I am too wanting in what is due both to my sex and this age; wherein, as you doubtless observe, everything goes to the shameless. Honours, prosperity, wealth—all these hold the field; and to these, virtue itself, nay even fortune, must give way.41

S. Augustine. Do you not see what conflict there is between Love and Shamefastness? While the one urges the soul forward, the other holds it back; the one drives in the spur, the other pulls hard at the bridle; the one looks at nothing, the other watches carefully on every side.

Petrarch. This is only too familiar to me, and I feel to my cost how distracted is my life by passions so contrary. They come upon me by turn, so that my poor spirit, tossed hither and thither, knows not which impulse to obey.

S. Augustine. Do you mind telling me if you have looked in your glass lately?

Petrarch. And, pray, what do you ask that question for? I have only done as usual.

S. Augustine. Heaven grant you do it no oftener, neither with more self-complacency, than you should! Well, and have you not noticed that your face is changing from day to day, and that from time to time grey hairs begin to show themselves around your temples?

Petrarch. Is that all? I thought you were about to ask me something out of the common; but to grow up, to grow old, to die is the common lot of all that are born. I have observed what befalls almost all my contemporaries; for nowadays men seem to age more quickly than they used to, though I know not why or wherefore.

S. Augustine. The growing old of others will not give you back your youth, neither will their dying bring you immortality. So let us leave on one side everything else and return to your own case. Tell me; when you have noticed these signs of change in your body, has it not brought some change also in your soul?

Petrarch. It has certainly made some impression on me, but not exactly a change.

S. Augustine. What, then, were your thoughts, and what did you say to yourself?

Petrarch. What would you have me say, except what was said by Domitian the Emperor, “With even mind I brook the sight of watching, though still young, my hairs grow grey.”42 So illustrious an example has consoled me for what grey hairs I too behold. And if I needed more, I brought to mind a king beside that emperor; I mean Numa Pompilius the Second, who, as the historian relates, had grey hair even from his youth. And Poetry as well as History comes to my aid, since in his Bucolics our own Virgil, writing when he was but five-and-twenty, speaking of himself in the person of a shepherd, exclaims—

“When now my whitening beard the razor knew.”43

S. Augustine. What vast abundance of examples you can command! Pray heaven you have as many recollections of your own death. For I praise not those exemplars that lead one to dissemble grey hairs which are the heralds of old age, and the avant-couriers of Death. And good those examples are not, if their effect is to take you off the trouble of remembering how time flies, and to lead you to forget your own last hour; to the recollection of which the whole of my discourse is entirely and without ceasing directed. When I bid you think on your own whitening forehead, do you quote me a crowd of famous men whose locks were white also? What does it prove? Ah, if you were able to say these were immortal, then you might from their example put away the dread of your changing brow. If instead of mentioning greyness I had ventured to hint that you were getting bald, you would, I suppose, have thrown Julius Cæsar in my teeth!

Petrarch. Certainly. What more illustrious example could I need? Now, unless I am mistaken, it is in fact a great comfort to find oneself surrounded by companions so famous. Yes, I will freely admit that I am not disposed for a moment to reject such examples, which are, for me, part of the luggage I carry daily in my mind; for it is a pleasure to me not only in such misfortunes as Nature or chance have already allotted me, but also in those which they may still have in store; it is a pleasure, I say, to have ever at hand such matter of comfort and consolation as I can obtain only from some truly cogent reason or outstanding example.

If, then, you meant to reproach me for being afraid of thunder—a charge I could not deny (and one of the chief reasons why I love the laurel is because it is said that thunder will not strike this tree), then I shall reply to you that this was a weakness Cæsar Augustus shared; if you allege that I am getting blind (and there also you would be right), I should quote you Appius Cæcus and also Homer, the Prince of Poets; if you call me one-eyed, I will, shield myself behind Hannibal, the Punic leader, or Philip, King of Macedon; call me deaf, and Marcus Crassus shall be my defence; say I cannot stand the heat, and I will say I am but like Alexander, Prince of Macedonia.

It were tedious to go through all the list; but after these you can judge who they would be.

S. Augustine. Yes, perfectly. I am nowise displeased with your wealth of instances, provided it does not make you self-negligent and only serves to disperse the clouds of fear and sadness. I applaud anything that helps a man to face with courage the coming of old age, and keeps him from bewailing its presence when it has arrived. But I loathe and abominate profoundly everything that conceals from him the truth that old age is the port of departure from this life, and blinds him to the need of reflecting on death. To take with equanimity the going grey before one’s time is the sign of a good natural disposition; but to try and interpose artificial checks, to cheat time of his years, to raise an outcry and declare grey hairs are come too soon, to begin dyeing or plucking them out, is a piece of folly, which, common as it may be, is none the less egregious for all that.

You perceive not, O blind that you are, how swiftly the stars roll in their course, and how soon the flight of time consumes the space of your short life, and you marvel when you see old age coming on, hastening quickly the despatch of all your days.

Two causes seem to foster this delusion. The first is that even the shortest life is partitioned out by some people into four, by others into six, and by others again into a still larger number of periods; that is to say, the reality is so small, and as you cannot make it longer, you think you will enlarge it by division. But of what profit tis all this dividing? Make as many particles as you like, and they are all gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

“Yesterday was born the baby,
See to-day the lovely boy,
Then the young man quick as may be,
Then an end of life and joy.”

You observe with what quick hurrying words the subtle poet has sketched out the swift course of our life. So it is in vain you strive to lengthen out what Nature, the mother of us all, has made so short.

The second cause is that you will persist in letting old age find you still in the midst of games and empty pleasures; like the old Trojans who in their customary ways passed the last night without perceiving.

“The cunning, fatal horse, who bore within
Those armed bands, had overleapt the wall
Of Pergamos.”44

Yes, even so you perceive not that old age, bringing in his train the armed warrior Death, unpitying and stem, has over-leapt the weakly-guarded rampart of your body; and then you find your foe has already glided by stealth along his rope—

“And now the invader climbs within the gate
And takes the city in its drunken sleep.”45

For in the gross body and the pleasure of things temporal, not less drunk are you than those old Trojans were, as Virgil saw them, in their slumber and their wine.

Or, looking to another quarter, no less truth is to be found in the neat lines of the Satirist—

“Our lives unfold in morning air As lilies of a day, ‘Come bring us wine,’ we shout. ‘Ho, there, Fetch garlands, odours, damsels fair.’ But ah! before we are aware, Old Age sweeps all away.”[46]

Now, to come back to our subject and to yourself, when this old age comes stealing on and knocks at your door, you make an effort to bar him out. You pretend that by some infraction of the order of Nature he has come too soon. You are delighted when you come across some rather elderly person who declares he knew you when you were a child, especially if, as people generally do, he makes out it was but yesterday or the day before. You find it convenient to forget that one can say as much about any old dotard however decrepit. Who was not a child yesterday, or to-day, as far as that goes?

We can look here and there and find infants of ninety quarrelling about trifles and even now occupied with infantine toys. The days flee away, the body decays, the soul is where it was. Though everything is rotten with age, the soul has never grown up, never come to maturity, and it is a truth, as the proverb says, “One soul uses up many bodies.” Infancy passes, but, as Seneca remarks, “childishness remains.”47 And, believe me, perhaps you are not so young as you imagine, for the greater part of mankind have not yet reached the age which you have.

Blush, therefore, to pass for an aged lover; blush to be so long the Public’s jest; and if true glory has no charm for you and ridicule no terror, at least let change of heart come to the rescue and save you from disgrace. For, if I see things at all truly, a man should guard his reputation, if only to spare his own friends the shameful necessity of telling lies. All the world owes this to itself, but especially such a man as yourself, who have so great a public to justify, and one which is always talking of you.

“Great is the task to guard a great man’s name.”48

If in your poem of Africa you make a truculent enemy tender such good counsel to your beloved Scipio, you may well allow, for your own profit, a father, who loves you tenderly, to utter with his lips the very same monition.

Put away the childish things of infancy; quench the burning desires of youth; think not all the time of what you are going to be and do next; look carefully what you are now; do not imagine that the mirror has been put before your eyes for nothing, but remember that which is written in the Book of Questions on Nature:—

“Mirrors were invented that men might know themselves. Much profit comes thereby. First, knowledge of self; second, wise counsel. You are handsome, then beware of what disfigures: plain, then make up by virtue what is wanting in good looks. You are young, then remember youth’s springtime is the time for study and for manly work: old, then lay aside the ugly vices off the flesh and turn your thoughts to what will be the latter end.”49

Petrarch. It has dwelt in my remembrance always, from the first day that ever I read it; for the thing itself is worth remembering and its warning is wise.

S. Augustine. Of what profit has it been to you to read and remember? You had better excused yourself had you pleaded ignorance for your shield. Knowing what you do, are you not ashamed to see that your grey hairs have brought no change in you?

Petrarch. I am ashamed, I regret it, I repent of it, but as for doing more, I cannot. Moreover, you know I have this much of consolation, that she too is growing old with me.

S. Augustine. The very word of Julia, Cæsar Augustus’ daughter! Doubtless it has lain fixed in your mind, has it not? When her father found fault because she would not have older people round her, as did Livia, she parried the paternal reproof by the neat rejoinder—“They will be older as soon as I am.”50

But pray, tell me, do you suppose that at your age it will be more becoming to doat upon an old woman than to love a young one? On the contrary, it is the more unbecoming, as the reason for loving is less. Well may you take shame to yourself never to grow any wiser though you see your body daily growing older. That is all I can say on the subject of shame.

But, as Cicero tells us, it is but a poor thing to make shame do the work of reason; and so to reason, the true source of all remedies, let us now turn for help. You will assuredly find it through using deep Reflection—the third of the things that turn the soul away from love. Remember what you are now called to is that citadel wherein alone you can be quite safe against the incursions of passion and by which alone you will deserve the name of Man. Consider, then, first how noble a thing is the soul, and that so great is it that were I to discourse as I should wish, I must needs make a whole book thereon. Consider, again, the frailty and vileness of the body, which would demand no less full treatment than the other. Think also of the shortness of our life, concerning which many great men have left their books. Think of the flight of time, that no one yet has been able to express in words. Think of Death, the fact so certain, the hour so uncertain, but everywhere and at all times imminent. Think how men are deceived just in this one point, that they believe they can put off what in fact never can be put off: for no one is really such a fool as, supposing the question is asked him, not to answer that of course some day he will die. And so let not the hope of longer life mock you, as it mocks so many others, but rather lay up in your heart the verse that seems as it were an oracle of heaven—

“Count every day that dawns to be your last,”51

For is it not so that to mortal men every day is in truth the last, or all but the last? Consider, moreover, how shameful it is to have men point the finger at you, and to become a public laughing-stock; remember, too, how ill your profession accords with a life like this. Think how this woman has injured your soul, your body, your fortune. Remember what you have borne for her, all to no purpose: how many times you have been mocked, despised, scorned; think what flatteries, what lamentations, and of all the tears you have cast upon the wind; think how again and again she has heaped all this on you with an air of haughty disdain, and how if for a moment she showed herself more kind, it was but for the passing of a breath and then was gone.

Think, moreover, how much you have added to her fame, and of what she has subtracted from your life: how you have ever been jealous for her good name, but she has been always regardless of your very self and condition. Remember how she has turned you aside from loving God, and into how great miseries you have fallen, known to me, but which I pass in silence lest the birds of the air carry the matter abroad.

Think, moreover, what tasks on all sides are claiming your attention, and by which you may do far more good and deserve far more honour: how many things you have on hand, as yet uncompleted, to which it would be far better for you to return, and devote more time, instead of attempting them so perfunctorily as you have en doing lately.

Finally, ponder well what that thing is for which you have such consuming desire. But think like a man and with your wits about you; for fear lest while you are in the act of flying you be cunningly entangled, as not a few have been when Beauty’s fascinating charm steals upon them by some little, unlooked-for channel, and then is fed and strengthened by evil remedies.

For how be there that have once tasted this seductive pleasure and can retain enough manliness, not to say courage, to rate at its true value that poor form of woman of which I speak. Only too easily Man’s strength of mind gives way, and with nature pressing on, he falls soonest on that side to which he has long leaned. Take most earnest heed that this happen not to you. Banish every recollection of those old cares of yours: put far away from you every vision of the past, and, as one has said in a certain place, “dash the little children against the stones,”52 lest if they grow up you yourself be cast into the mire. And defer not to knock at Heaven’s door with prayers; let your supplications weary the ears of the heavenly King; day and night lift up your petition with tears and crying, if perchance the Almighty will take compassion upon you and give an end to your sore trouble and distress.

These are the things that you must do, these the safeguards you must employ; if you will observe them faithfully the Divine Help will be at hand, as I trust; and the right hand of the Deliverer whom none can resist will succour you.

But albeit I have spoken on this one malady what is too short for your needs but too long for the briefness of our time, let us pass now to another matter. One evil still is left, to heal you of which I now will make a last endeavour.

Petrarch. Even so do, most gentle Father. For though I be not yet wholly set free from my burdens, yet, nevertheless, from great part of them I do feel in truth a blessed release.

S. Augustine. Ambition still has too much hold on you. You seek too eagerly the praise of men, and to leave behind you an undying name.

Petrarch. I freely confess it. I cannot beat down that passion in my soul. For it, as yet, I have found no cure.

S. Augustine. But I greatly fear lest this pursuit of a false immortality of fame may shut for you the way that leads to the true immortality of life.

Petrarch. That is one of my fears also, but I await your discovering to me the means to save my life; you, of a truth, will do it, who have furnished me with means for the healing of evils greater still.

S. Augustine. Think not that any of your ills is greater than this one, though I deny not that some may be more vile.

But tell me, I pray you, what in your opinion is this thing called glory, that you so ardently covet?

Petrarch. I know not if you ask me for a definition. But if so, who so capable to give one as yourself?

S. Augustine. The name of glory is well enough known to you; but to the real thing, if one may judge by your actions, you are a stranger. If you had known what it is you would not long for it so eagerly. Suppose you define glory, with Cicero, as being “the illustrious and world-wide renown of good services rendered to one’s fellow citizens, to one’s country, or to all mankind”; or as he expresses it elsewhere, “Public opinion uttering its voice about a man in words of praise.”53 You will notice that in both these cases glory is said to be reputation. Now, do you know what this reputation is?

Petrarch. I cannot say any good description of it occurs to me at the moment; and I shrink from putting forward things I do not understand. I think, therefore, the truer and better course is for me to keep silence.

S. Augustine. You act like a wise and modest man. In every serious question, and especially when the matter is ambiguous, one should pay much less attention to what one will say than to what one will not say, for the credit of having said well is something much less than the discredit of having said ill. Now I submit to you that reputation is nothing but talk about some one, passing from mouth to mouth of many people.

Petrarch. I think your definition, or, if you prefer the word, your description, is a good one.

S. Augustine. It is, then, but a breath, a changing wind; and, what will disgust you more, it is the breath of a crowd. I know to whom I am speaking. I have observed that no man more than you abhors the manners and behaviour of the common herd. Now see what perversity is this! You let yourself be charmed with the applause of those whose conduct you abominate; and may Heaven grant you are only charmed, and that you put not in their power your own everlasting welfare! Why and wherefore, I ask, this perpetual toil, these ceaseless vigils, and this intense application to study? You will answer, perhaps, that you seek to find out what is profitable for life. But you have long since learned what is needful for life and for death.

What was now required of you was to try and put in practice what you know, instead of plunging deeper and deeper into laborious inquiries, where new problems are always meeting you, and insoluble mysteries, in which you never reach the end. Add to which the fact that you keep toiling and toiling to satisfy the public; wearying yourself to please the very people who, to you, are the most displeasing; gathering now a flower of poesy, now of history—in a word, employing all your genius of words to tickle the ears of the listening throng.

Petrarch. I beg your pardon, but I cannot let that pass without saying a word. Never since I was a boy have I pleased myself with elegant extracts and flowerets of literature. For often have I noted what neat and excellent things Cicero has uttered against butchers of books, and especially, also, the phrase of Seneca in which he declares, “It is a disgrace for a man to keep hunting for flowers and prop himself up on familiar quotations, and only stand on what he knows by heart.”54

S. Augustine. In saying what I did, I neither accuse you of idleness nor scant memory. What I blame you for is that in your reading you have picked out the more flowery passages for the amusement of your cronies, and, as it were, packed up boxes of pretty things out of a great heap, for the benefit of your friends—which is nothing but pandering to a desire of vainglory; and, moreover, I say that, not being contented with your duty of every day (which, in spite of great expense of time, only promised you some celebrity among your contemporaries), you have let your thoughts run on ages of time and given yourself up to dreams of fame among those who come after. And in pursuit of this end, putting your hand to yet greater tasks, you entered on writing a history from the time of King Romulus to that of the Emperor Titus, an enormous undertaking that would swallow up an immensity of time and labour. Then, without waiting till this was finished, goaded by the pricks of your ambition for glory, you sailed off in your poetical barque towards Africa; and now on the aforesaid books of your Africa you are hard at work, without relinquishing the other. And in this way you devote your whole life to those two absorbing occupations—for I will not stop to mention the countless others that come in also—and throw utterly away what is of most concern and which, when lost, cannot be recovered. You write books on others, but yourself you quite forget. And who knows but what, before either of your works be finished, Death may snatch the pen from your tired hand, and while in your insatiable hunt for glory you hurry on first by one path, then the other, you may find at last that by neither of them have you reached your goal?

Petrarch. Fears of that kind have sometimes come over me, I confess. And knowing I suffered from grave illness, I was afraid death might not be far off. Nothing then was more bitter to me than the thought of leaving my Africa half finished. Unwilling that another hand should put the finishing touch, I had determined that with my own I would cast it to the flames, for there was none of my friends whom I could trust to do me this service after I was gone. I knew that a request like that was the only one of our Virgil’s which the Emperor Cæsar Augustus declined to grant. To make a long story short, this land of Africa, burnt already by that fierce sun to which it is for ever exposed, already three times by the Roman torches devastated far and wide, had all but yet again, by my hands, been made a prey to the flames.

But of that we will say no more now, for too painful are the recollections that it brings.

S. Augustine. What you have said confirms my opinion. The day of reckoning is put off for a short time, but the account remains still to be paid. And what can be more foolish than thus to waste such enormous labour over a thing of uncertain issue? I know what prevents you abandoning the work is simply that you still hope you may complete it. As I see that there will be some difficulty (unless I am mistaken) in getting you to diminish this hope, I propose we try to magnify it and so set it out in words that you will see how disproportionate it is to toils like yours. Suppose, therefore, that you have full abundance of time, leisure, and freedom of mind; let there be no failure of intellect, no languor of body, none of those mischances of fortune which, by checking the first onrush of expression, so often stop the ready writer’s pen; let all things go better even than you had dared to wish—still, what considerable work do you expect to achieve?

Petrarch. Oh, certainly, one of great excellence, quite out of the common and likely to attract attention.

S. Augustine. I have no wish to seem contradictory: let us suppose it may be a work of great excellence. But if you knew of what greater excellence still is the work which this will hinder, you would abhor what you now desire. For I will go so far as to assert that this work of yours is, to begin with, taking off your attention from cares of a nobler kind; and, greatly excellent as you think it, has no wide scope nor long future before it, circumscribed as it must be by time and space.

Petrarch. Well do I know that old story bandied about by the philosophers, how they declare that all the earth is but a tiny point, how the soul alone endures for infinite millions of years, how fame cannot fill either the earth or the soul, and other paltry pleas of this sort, by which they try to turn minds aside from the love of glory. But I beg you will produce some more solid arguments than these, if you know any; for experience has shown me that all this is more specious than convincing. I do not think to become as God, or to inhabit eternity, or embrace, heaven and earth. Such glory as belongs to man is enough for me. That is all I sigh after. Mortal myself, it is but mortal blessings I desire.

S. Augustine. Oh, if that is what you truly mean, how wretched are you! If you have no desire for things immortal, if no regard for what is eternal, then you are indeed wholly of the earth earthy: then all is over for you; no hope at all is left.

Petrarch. Heaven defend me from such folly! But my conscience is witness, and knows what have been my desires, that never have I ceased to love with burning zeal the things eternal. I said—or if, perchance, I am mistaken, I intended to say—that my wish was to use mortal things for what they were worth, to do no violence to nature by bringing to its good things a limitless and immoderate desire, and so to follow after human fame as knowing that both myself and it will perish.

S. Augustine. There you speak as a wise man. But when you declare you are willing to rob yourself of the riches that will endure merely for the sake of what you own is a perishing breath of applause—then you are a fool indeed.

Petrarch. True, I may be postponing those riches, but not relinquishing them altogether.

S. Augustine. But how dangerous is such delay, remembering that time flies fast and how uncertain our short life is. Let me ask you a question, and I beg you to answer it. Suppose that He who alone can fix our time of life and death were this day to assign you one whole year, and you had the definite certainty of how would you propose to use that year?

Petrarch. Assuredly I should use great economy of time, and be extremely, careful to employ it on serious things; and I suppose no man alive would be so insolent or foolish as to answer your question in any other way.

S. Augustine. You have answered rightly. And yet the folly men display in this case is matter of astonishment, not to me only but to all those who have ever written on this subject. To set forth what they feel, they have combined every faculty they possess and employed all their eloquence, and even then the truth itself will leave their utmost efforts far behind.

Petrarch. I fear I do not understand the motive of so great astonishment.

S. Augustine. It is because you are covetous of uncertain riches and altogether wasteful of those which are eternal, doing the very contrary of what you ought to do, if you were not quite devoid of wisdom.

So this space of a year, though short enough indeed, being promised you by Him who deceives not, neither is deceived, you would partition out and dissipate on any kind of folly, provided you could keep the last hour for the care of your salvation! The horrible and hateful madness of you all is just this, that you waste your time on ridiculous vanities, as if there were enough and to spare, and though you do not in the least know if what you have will be long enough for the supreme necessities of the soul in face of death. The man who has one year of life possesses something certain though short; whereas he who has no such promise and lies under the power of death (whose stroke may fall at any moment), which is the common lot of all men—this man, I say, is not sure of a year, a day; no, not even of one hour. He who has a year to live, if six months shall have slipped away, will still have another half-year left to run; but for you, if you lose the day that now is, who will promise you to-morrow?55

It is Cicero who says: “It is certain that we must die: what is uncertain is whether it will be to-day; and there is none so young that-he can be sure he will live until the evening.”56 I ask, then, of you, and I ask it likewise of all those who stand gaping after the future and pay no heed to the present, “Who knows if the high gods will add even one morrow to this your little day of life?”57

Petrarch. If I am to answer for myself and for all: No one knows, of a truth. But let us hope for a year at least; on which, if we are still to follow Cicero, even the most aged reckons!

S. Augustine. Yes; and, as he also adds, not old men only but young ones too are fools in that they cherish false hope, and promise themselves uncertain goods as though they were certain.58

But let us take for granted (what is quite impossible) that the duration of life will be long and assured: still, do you not find it is the height of madness to squander the best years and the best parts of your existence on pleading only the eyes of others and tickling other men’s ears, and to keep the last and worst—the years that are almost good for nothing—that bring nothing but distaste for life and then its end—to keep these, I say, for God and yourself, as though the welfare of your soul were the last thing you cared for?

Even supposing the time were certain, is it not reversing the true order to put off the best to the last?

Petrarch. I do not think my way of looking at it is so unreasonable as you imagine. My principle in that, as concerning the glory which we may hope for here below, it is right for us to seek while we are here below. One may expect to enjoy that other more radiant glory in heaven, when we shall have there arrived, and when one will have no more care or wish for the glory of earth. Therefore, as I think, it is in the true order that mortal men should first care for mortal things; and that to things transitory things eternal should succeed; because to pass from those to these is to go forward in most certain accordance with what is ordained for us, although no way is open for us to pass back again from eternity to time.

S. Augustine. O man, little in yourself, and of little wisdom! Do you, then, dream that you shall enjoy every pleasure in heaven and earth, and everything will turn out fortunate and prosperous for you always and everywhere? But that delusion has betrayed thousands of men thousands of times, and has sunk into hell a countless host of souls. Thinking to have one foot on earth and one in heaven, they could neither stand here below nor mount on high. Therefore they fell miserably, and the moving breeze swept them suddenly away, some in the flower of their age, and some when they were in midst of their years and all their business.

And do you suppose what has befallen so many others may not befall you? Alas! if (which may God forefend!) in the midst of all your plans and projects you should be cut off—what grief, what shame, what remorse (then too late!) that you should have grasped at all and lost all!

Petrarch. May the Most High in His mercy save me from that misery!

S. Augustine. Though Divine Mercy may deliver a man from his folly, yet it will not excuse it. Presume not upon this mercy overmuch. For if God abhors those who lose hope, He also laughs at those who in false hope put their trust. I was sorry when I heard fall from your lips that phrase about despising what you called the old story of the philosophers on this matter. Is it, then, an old story, pray, by figures of geometry, to show how small is all the earth, and to prove it but an island of little length and width? Is it an old story to divide the earth into five zones, the largest of which, lying in the centre, is burned by the heat of the sun, and the two utmost, to right and left, are a prey to binding frost and eternal snow, which leave not a corner where man can dwell; but those other two, between the middle and two utmost zones, are inhabited by man? Is it an old story that this habitable part is divided again into two parts, whereof one is placed under your feet, guarded by a vast sea, and the other is left you to inhabit everywhere, or, according to some authorities, is again in two parts subdivided, with but one part habitable and the other surrounded by the winding intricacies of the Northern Ocean, preventing all access to it? As to that part under your feet, called the antipodes, you are aware that for a long time the most learned men have been of two opinions whether it is inhabited or not: for myself, I have set forth my opinion in the book called The City of God, which you have doubtless read. Is it also an old story that your habitable part, already so restricted, is yet further diminished to such an extent by seas, marshes, forests, sand and deserts, that the little corner left you, of which you are so proud, is brought down to almost nothing? And, finally, is it an old story to point out to you that on this narrow strip, where you dwell, there are divers kinds of life, different religions which oppose one another, different languages and customs, which render it impossible to make the fame of your name go far?

But if these things are to you nought but fables, so, to me, all I had promised myself of your future greatness must be a fable also; for I had thought, hitherto, that no man had more knowledge of these things than you yourself To say nothing of the conceptions of Cicero and Virgil and other systems of knowledge, physical or poetic, of which you seemed to have a competent knowledge, I knew that not long since, in your Africa, you had expressed the very same opinions in these pretty lines—

“The Universe itself is but an isle
Confined in narrow bounds, small, and begirt
By Ocean’s flowing waves.”59

You have added other developments later on, and now that I know you think them all fables, I am astonished you have put them forth with such hardihood.

What shall I say now of the brief existence of human fame, the short, short span of time, when you know too well how small and recent even the oldest memory of man is if compared to eternity? I spare to call to your mind those opinions of the men of old, laid up in Plato’s Timæus and in the sixth book of Cicero’s Republic, where it is foretold what floods and conflagrations shall be coming not seldom on the earth. To many men such things have seemed probable; but they wear a different aspect to those who, like yourself, have come to know the true religion.

And besides these, how many other things there are that militate against, I do not say the eternity, but even the survival of one’s name. First there is the death of those with whom one has passed one’s life; and that forgetfulness which is the common bane of old age: then there is the rising fame, ever growing greater, of new men; which always, by its freshness, is somewhat derogatory to that of those who went before, and seems to mount up higher just in so far as it can depress this other down. Then you must add, also, that persistent envy which ever dogs the steps of those who embark on any glorious enterprise; and the hatred of Truth itself, and the fact that the very life of men of genius is odious to the crowd. Think, too, how fickle is the judgment of the multitude. And alas for the sepulchres of the dead! to shatter which—

“The wild fig’s barren branch is strong enough,”60

as Juvenal has told us.

In your own Africa you call this, elegantly enough, “a second death”; and if I may here address to you the same words you have put in the mouth of another—

“The animated bust and storied urn
Shall fall, and with them fall thy memory,
And thou, my son, thus taste a second death.”61

Lo, then, how excellent, how undying that glory must be which the fall of one poor stone can bring to nought!

And, then, consider the perishing of books wherein your name has been written, either by your own hand or another’s. Even though that perishing may appear so much more delayed as books outlast monuments, nevertheless it is sooner or later inevitable; for, as is the case with everything else, there are countless natural or fortuitous calamities to which books are ever exposed. And even if they escape all these, they, like us, grow old and die—

“For whatsoever mortal hand has made,
With its vain labour, shall be mortal too,”62

if one may be allowed, for choice, to refute your childish error by your own words.

What need to say more? I shall never cease to bring to your recollection lines of your own making which only too truly fit the case.

“When your books perish you shall perish too;
This is the third death, still to be endured.”63

And now you know what I think about glory.

Perhaps I have used more words in expressing it than was needful for you or me; and yet fewer, I believe, than the importance of the subject demands—unless perchance you still think all these things only an old story?

Petrarch. No indeed. What you have been saying—so far from seeming to me like old stories—has stirred in me a new desire to get rid of my old delusions. For albeit that these things were known to me long ago, and that I have heard them oftentimes repeated, since, as Terence puts it—

“Everything that one can say
Has all been said before,”64

nevertheless the stateliness of phrase, the orderly narration, the authority of him who speaks, cannot but move me deeply.

But I have yet a last request to make, which is that you will give me your definite judgment on this point. Is it your wish that I should put all my studies on one side and renounce every ambition, or would you advise some middle course?

S. Augustine. I will never advise you to live without ambition; but I would always urge you to put virtue before glory. You know that glory is in a sense the shadow of virtue. And therefore, just as it is impossible that your body should not cast a shadow if the sun is shining, so it is impossible also in the light of God Himself that virtues should exist and not make their glory to appear. Whoever, then, would take true glory away must of necessity take away virtue also; and when that is gone man’s life is left bare, and only resembles that of the brute beasts that follow headlong their appetite, which to them is their only law. Here, therefore, is the rule for you to live by—follow after virtue and let glory take care of itself; and as for this, as some one said of Cato, the less you seek it the more you will find it. I must once more allow myself to invoke your own witness—

“Thou shalt do well from Honour’s self to flee,
For then shell Honour follow after thee.”65

Do you not recognise the verse? It is your own. One would surely think that man a fool who at midday should run here and there in the blaze of the sun, wearing himself out to see his shadow and point it out to others; now the man shows no more sense or reason who, amid the anxieties of life, takes huge trouble, first one way, then another, to spread his own glory abroad.

What then? Let a man march steadily to the goal set before him, his shadow will follow him step by step: let him so act that he shall make virtue his prize, and lo! glory also shall be found at his side. I speak of that glory which is virtue’s true companion; as for that which comes by other means, whether from bodily grace or mere cleverness, in the countless ways men have invented, it does not seem to me worthy of the name. And so, in regard to yourself, while you are wearing your strength out by such great labours in writing books, if you will allow me to say so, you are shooting wide of the mark. For you are spending all your efforts on things that concern others, and neglecting those that are your own; and so, through this vain hope of glory, the time, so precious, though you know it not, is passing away.

Petrarch. What must I do, then? Abandon my unfinished works? Or would it be better to hasten them on, and, if God gives me grace, put the finishing touch to them? If I were once rid of these cares I would go forward, with a mind more free, to greater things; for hardly could I bear the thought of leaving half completed a work so fine and rich in promise of success.

S. Augustine. Which foot you mean to hobble on, I do not know. You seem inclined to leave yourself derelict, rather than your books.

As for me, I shall do my duty, with what success depends on you; but at least I shall have satisfied my conscience. Throw to the winds those great loads of histories; the deeds of the Romans have been celebrated quite enough by others, and are known by their own fame. Get out of Africa and leave it to its possessors. You will add nothing to the glory of your Scipio or to your own. He can be exalted to no higher pinnacle, but you may bring down his reputation, and with it your own. Therefore leave all this on one side, and now at length take possession of yourself; and to come back to our starting-point, let me urge you to enter upon the meditation of your last end, which comes on step by step without your being aware. Tear off the veil; disperse the shadows; look only on that which is coming; with eyes and mind give all your attention there: let nought else distract you. Heaven, Earth, the Sea—these all suffer change. What can man, the frailest of all creatures, hope for? The seasons fulfil their courses and change; nothing remains as it was. If you think you shall remain, you are deceived. For, Horace beautifully says—

“The losses of the changing Heaven,
The changing moons repair;
But we, when we have gone below,
And our rich land no longer know,
And hear no more its rivers flow,
Are nought but dust and air.”66

Therefore, as often as you watch the fruits of summer follow the flowers of spring, and the pleasant cool of autumn succeed the summer heat, and winter’s snow come after autumn’s vintage, say to yourself: “The seasons pass, yet they will come again; but I am going, never again to return.” As often as you behold at sunset the shadows of the mountains lengthening on the plain, say to yourself: “Now life is sinking fast; the shadow of death begins to overspread the scene; yonder sun to-morrow will again be rising the same, but this day of mine will never come back.”

Who shall count the glories of the midnight sky, which, though it be the time that men of evil heart choose for their misdoing, yet is it to men of good heart the holiest of all times? Well, take care you be not less watchful than that admiral of the Trojan fleet;67 for the seas you sail upon are no more safe than his; rise up at the mid hour of night, and

“All the stars, that in the silent sky
Roll on their way, observe with careful heed.”68

As you see them hasten to their setting in the west, think how you also are moving with them; and that as for your abiding you have no hope, saving only in Him who knows no change and suffers no decline. Moreover, when you meet with those whom you knew but yesterday as children, and see them now growing up in stature to their manhood, stage by stage, remember how you in like manner, in the same lapse of time, are going down the hill, and at greater speed, by that law in nature under which things that are heavy tend to fall.

When your eyes behold some ancient building, let your first thought be, Where are those who wrought it with their hands? and when you see new ones, ask, Where, soon, the builders of them will be also? If you chance to see the trees of some orchard, remember how often it falls out that one plants it and another plucks the fruit; for many a time the saying in the Georgics comes to pass—

“One plants the tree, but eh, the slow-grown shade
His grandchild will enjoy.”69

And when you look with pleased wonder at some swiftly flowing stream, then, that I bring no other poet’s thought, keep ever in mind this one of your own—

“No river harries with more rapid flight
Than Life’s swift current.”70

Neither let multitude of days or the artificial divisions of time deceive your judgment; for man’s whole existence, let it be never so prolonged, Is but as one day, and that not a day entire.

Have oftentimes before your eyes one similitude of Aristotle’s, whom I know to be a favourite of yours; and his words I am sure you never read or hear without feeling them deeply. You will find it reported by Cicero in the Tusculan Orations, and in words possibly even more clear and impressive than the original. Here is what he says, or very nearly so, for at the moment I have not his book at hand:—

“Aristotle tells us that on the banks of the river Hypanis, which on one side of Europe empties itself into the Euxine Sea, there exists a race of little animals who only live one day. Any one of them that dies at sunrise dies young; he that dies at noon is middle-aged; and should one live till sunset, he dies in old age: and especially is this so about the time of the solstice. If you compare the time of man’s life with eternity, it will seem no longer than theirs.”71 So far I give you Cicero; but what he says seems to me so beyond all cavil that now for a long time the saying has passed from the tongue of philosophers into common speech. Every day you hear even ignorant and unlearned men, if they chance to see a little child, make use of some expression like this—“Well, well, it’s early morning with him yet”; if they see a man they will say, “Oh, it’s high noon with him now,” or “He’s well in the middle of his day”; if they see one old and broken down they will remark, “Ah! he’s getting toward evening and the going down of the sun.”

Ponder well on these things, my very dear son, and on others akin to them, which will, I doubt not, flock into your thoughts, as these on the spur of the moment have come into mine. And one more thing I beseech you to have in mind: look at the graves of those older, perhaps, than you, but whom nevertheless you have known; look diligently, and then rest assured that the same dwelling-place, the same house, is for you also made ready. Thither are all of us travelling on; that is our last home. You who now, perchance, are proud and think that your springtime has not quite departed, and are for trampling others underfoot, you in turn shall underfoot be trampled. Think over all this; consider it by day and by night; not merely as a man of sober mind and remembering what nature he is of, but as becomes a man of wisdom, and so holding it all fast, as one who remembers it is written

“A wise man’s life is all one preparation for death.”72

This saying will teach you to think little of what concerns earthly things, and set before your eyes a better path of life on which to enter. You will be asking me what is that kind of life, and by what ways you can approach it? And I shall reply that now you have no need of long advice or counsel. Listen only to that Holy Spirit who is ever calling, and in urgent words saying, “Here is the way to your native country, your true home.”

You know what He would bring to mind; what paths for your feet, what dangers to avoid. If you would be safe and free obey His voice. There is no need for long deliberations. The nature of your danger calls for action, not words. The enemy is pressing you from behind, and hastening to the charge in front; the walls of the citadel, where you are besieged, already tremble. There is no time for hesitation. Of what use is it to make sweet songs for the ears of others, if you listen not to them yourself?

I must draw to an end. Shun the rocks ahead, at all costs; drop anchor in a place of safety; follow the lead which the inspirations of your own soul give you. They may, on the side of what is evil, be evil; but towards that which is good they are themselves of the very best.

Petrarch. Ah! would that you had told me all this before I had surrendered myself over to these studies!

S. Augustine. I have told you, many a time and oft. From the moment when I saw you first take up your pen, I foresaw how short life would be, and how uncertain: how certain, too, and how long the toil. I saw the work would be great and the fruit little, and I warned you of all these things. But your ears were filled with the plaudits of the public, which, to my astonishment, took you captive, although you talked as if you despised them. But as we have now been conferring together long enough, I beg that if any of my counsels have seemed good to you, you will not allow them to come to nothing for want of energy or recollection; and if, on the other hand, I have sometimes been too rough, I pray you take it not amiss.

Petrarch. Indeed I owe you a deep debt of gratitude, as for many other things, so, especially, for this three days’ colloquy; for you have cleansed my darkened sight and scattered the thick clouds of error in which I was involved. And how shall I express my thankfulness to Her also, the Spirit of Truth, who, unwearied by our much talking, has waited upon us to the end? Had She turned away her face from us we should have wandered in darkness: your discourse had then contained no sure truth, neither would my understanding have embraced it. And now, as She and you have your dwelling-place in heaven, and I must still abide on earth, and, as you see, am greatly perplexed and troubled, not knowing for how long this must be, I implore you, of your goodness, not to forsake me, in spite of that great distance which separates me from such as you; for without you, O best of fathers, my life would be but one long sadness, and without Her I could not live at all.

S. Augustine. You may count your prayer already granted, if you will only to yourself be true: for how shall any one be constant to him who is inconstant to himself?

Petrarch. I will be true to myself, so far as in me lies. I will pull myself together and collect my scattered wits, and make a great endeavour to possess my soul in patience. But even while we speak, a crowd of important affairs, though only of the world, is waiting my attention.

S. Augustine. For the common herd of men these may be what to them seem more important; but in reality there is nothing of more importance, and nothing ought to be esteemed of so much worth. For, of other trains of thought, you may reckon them to be not essential for the soul, but the end of life will prove that these we have been engaged in are of eternal necessity.

Petrarch. I confess they are so. And I now return to attend to those other concerns only in order that, when they are discharged, I may come back to these.

I am not ignorant that, as you said a few minutes before, it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight path of the way of salvation. But I have not strength to resist that old bent for study altogether.

S. Augustine. We are falling into our old controversy. Want of will you call want of power. Well, so it must be, if it cannot be otherwise. I pray God that He will go with you where you go, and that He will order your steps, even though they wander, into the way of truth.

Petrarch. O may it indeed be as you have prayed! May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me; that I may raise up no cloud of dust before my eyes; and, with my mind calmed down and at peace, I may hear the world grow still and silent, and the winds of adversity die away.

Francis Petrarch, Poet, Most illustrious Orator; his Book, which he entitled Secretum; in which a Three days’ Discussion concerning Contempt of the World is carried on. Finis.

Notes

1 De Senectute, xxiii.

2 Æneid, i. 428-29.

3 “Tarda sit illa dies et nostro serior ævo.”—Met. xv. 868.

4 This refers to the second Scipio Africanus, and the words alluded to are these: “It is his goodness that I loved, and that is not dead; it lives not alone for me, who have had it ever before my eyes, but it will go down in all its beauty to those who come after. Whenever a man is meditating some great undertaking, or shall be nourishing in his breast great hopes, his shall be the memory, and his the image that such a man shall take for a pattern.”—Cicero, De Amicitiâ, xxvii.

5 Æneid, i. 328-29.

6 Cicero, Tusculan Orations, iv. 18.

7 Quoted from Attilius in Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, xiv.

8 Ovid, Amores, I. x. 13.

9 Æneid, vi. 540-43.

10 Æneid, i. 613

11 Seneca, De Beneficiis, vii. 8.

12 Terence, Phormio, 949.

13 Tusculan Orations, iv. 35

14 Academica.

15 Quoted from Tusculan Orations, iii. 26.

16 Simone Martini, of Siena.

17 A river in Thessaly.

18 A town in Phocis, near Delphi.

19 Terence, Eunuch, 59-63.

20 Terence, Eunuch, 70-73.

21 Ibid., 56.

22 Ibid. 57, 58.

23 Tusculan Orations, iv. 35.

24 De Remediis Amoris, I. 162.

25 Æneid, iii. 44.

26 Tusculan Orations, iv. 35.

27 Æneid, iv. 69-73.

28 Seneca, Epist., xxviii.

29 Horace, Epistles, Book I., Epist., xi. 27 (Conington).

30 Horace, Epist., Book I., xi. 25-26 (Conington).

31 Seneca’s Epist., lxiv.

32 Æneid, vi. 126-27.

33 Georgics, ii. 136-39.

34 Ildebrandino di Conte, Bishop of Padua, Epist. cxi. 25.

35 Petrarch’s Penitential Psalms, iii. (translated by George Chapman).

36 Ovid’s De Remediis Amoris, 579-80.

37 Petrarch’s Epistles, i. 7.

38 Quoted in Seneca’s treatise, De Animæ tranquillitate, xv.

39 Seneca’s Epistles, ii.

40 Tusculan Orations, iv. 35.

41 The text here is obscure.

42 Suetonius Domitian, xviii.

43 Virgil, Eclogues, i. 29.

44 Æneid, vi. 615-16.

45 Ibid., ii. 265.

47 Seneca, Epistles, iv.

48 Petrarch’s Africa, vii. 292.

49 Seneca, De Natura Quæstiones, i. 17.

50 Macrobius Saturnalia, ii 5.

51 Horace, Epistles, i 4, 13.

52 PS. cxxxi. 9.

53 Cicero, Pro Marcello, viii.

54 Seneca, Letters.

55 De Senectute, xx.

56 Ibid., xix.

57 Horace, Odes, iv. 7,17.

58 De Senectute, xix.

59 Africa, ii. 361, 363.

60 Satira, x. 145.

61 Africa, ii. 481, &c.

62 Africa, ii. 455-6.

63 Ibid., ii. 464-5.

64 Terence’s Eunuch, 41.

65 Africa, ii 486.

66 Horace, Odes, iv. 7, 13-16.

67 Palinurus.

68 Æneid, iii. 515.

69 Georgics, ii. 58.

70 Petrarch’s Epist., I. iv. 91-2.

71 Tusculan Orations, i. 39.

72 Tusculan Orations, i. 30.

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