The enthusiasm, the unselfishness of that! But he does not stop there. Petrarch is as admirable morally as he is as an artist or as a scholar.
"Petrarch," he tells us,[526] "living from his youth up as a celibate, had such a horror of the impurities of the excess of love that for those who know him he is the best example of honesty. A mortal enemy of liars, he detests all vices. For he is a venerable sanctuary of truth, and honours and joys in virtue, the model of Catholic holiness. Pious, gentle, and full of devotion, he is so modest that one might name him a second Parthenias [i.e. Virgil]. He is too the glory of the poetic art. An agreeable and eloquent orator, philosophy has for him no secrets. His spirit is of a superhuman perspicacity; his mind is tenacious and full of all knowledge that man may have. It is for this reason that his writings, both in prose and in verse, numerous as they are, shine so brilliantly, breathe so much charm, are adorned with so many flowers, enclosing in their words so sweet a harmony, and in their thoughts an essence so marvellous that one believes them the work of a divine genius rather than the work of a man. In short he is assuredly more than a man and far surpasses human powers. I am not singing the praises of some ancient, long since dead. On the contrary, I am speaking of the merits of a living man.... If you do not believe these words, you can go and see him with your eyes. I do not fear that it will happen to him as to so many famous men, as Claudius says, 'Their presence diminishes their reputation.' Rather I affirm boldly that he surpasses his reputation. He is distinguished by such dignity of character, by an eloquence so charming, by an urbanity and old age so well ordered, that one can say of him what Seneca said of Socrates, that 'one learns more from his manners than from his discourse.'"
In this enormous praise, in this humility, Petrarch does not seem to have seen anything extraordinary; in fact he seems to have taken it as the most natural thing in the world. We gather that he considered it was to have much regard for Boccaccio to let him hope for some little glory after him.[527] And we may suspect that he found in him a friend after his own heart. He showed his gratitude by addressing a number of letters to him and by leaving him in his Will fifty florins of gold to buy a mantle to protect him against the cold during the long and studious nights of winter.[528] Boccaccio was ill when he heard of that benefaction and the death of his beloved master. The letter he then wrote in praise of the dead, his hand trembling with emotion and weakness, his eyes full of tears, is perhaps the most beautiful, if not the most touching, document of their friendship.[529]
POMPEIA, PAULINA AND SENECA
A woodcut from the "De Claris Mulieribus" (Ulm, 1473), cap. 92. (By the courtesy of Messrs. J. & J. Leighton.)
And then, as we have already seen, the love of Boccaccio for his master, his solicitude for his memory, did not cease with Petrarch's death. His first thought was for the Africa of which his master had made, in imitation of Virgil perhaps, so great a mystery, and, as it was said, had wished to burn it. Though he was as ignorant as others of its contents, believing as he did in Petrarch, he was altogether convinced that it was a great and marvellous poem, worthy of Homer and full of a divine inspiration.[530] While some said Petrarch had left instructions to burn it, others declared that he had appointed a commission to decide whether it should live or die. Boccaccio does not seem to have thought that he himself would necessarily have been on any such commission; but immediately addressed a supplication in verse to the tribunal, which he feared would be composed of lawyers, demanding in the name of the Muses, of kings, of peoples, of cities that this masterpiece should not be allowed to perish.
So Boccaccio loved Petrarch. And that Petrarch was good for him, as we might say, who can doubt after reading that noble letter on the vision of the Blessed Pietro? But that Boccaccio was intellectually altogether at his mercy unhappily we cannot doubt either after reading his Latin works. He follows Petrarch so far as he can, but nearly always blindly, exaggerating the predilections or prejudices of his master even in little things. In all his works in Latin he makes no allusion to his works in the vulgar: Petrarch often mentions his, but always with an affected disdain. Yet Boccaccio was by no means destitute of a passion for literary glory. He desired it as eagerly as Petrarch, but more modestly; and following the precept of his master to the letter, he does not believe he can attain to it by any other means than by classical studies. Like his master too, he regretted the writings of his youth, and would have destroyed them if they had not been spread through all Italy and well out of his reach. In all these things Boccaccio is but the follower of Petrarch, and nothing can be more to the point than to compare them, not indeed as artists, but as students, as scholars, as philosophers.
And here let us admit, to begin with, that as a student, as a man of culture, in a sense of the reality of history and in a due sense of the proportion of things, Petrarch is as much Boccaccio's superior as Boccaccio is Petrarch's as a creative artist. For Petrarch antiquity was a practical school of life. Convinced of the superiority of his spirit, he possessed himself of what he read and assimilated what he wanted.[531] Boccaccio, on the other hand, remained entirely outside, and can claim no merit as a scholar but that of industry. As a student he is a mere compiler. His continual ambition is to extend his knowledge, but Petrarch dreams only of making his more profound. He too in reading the ancients has collected an incalculable number of extracts, but after putting them in order from various points of view he has only begun; he proceeds to draw from them his own works.
Nor is Petrarch deceived in his own superiority. He was by far the most cultured man of his time; as a critic he had already for himself disposed of the much-abused claims of the Church and the Empire. For instance, with what assurance he recognises as pure invention, with what certainty he annihilates with his criticism the privileges the Austrians claimed to hold from Cæsar and Nero.[532] And even face to face with antiquity he is not afraid; he is sure of the integrity of his mind; he analyses and weighs, yes, already in a just balance, the opinions of the writers of antiquity; while Boccaccio mixes up in the most extraordinary way the various antiquities of all sorts of epochs. Nor has Boccaccio the courage of his opinions; all seems to him worthy of faith, of acceptance. He cannot, even in an elementary way, discern the false from the true; and even when he seems on the point of doing so he has not the courage to express himself. When he reads in Vincent de Beauvais that the Franks came from Franc the son of Hector, he does not accept it altogether, it is true, but, on the other hand, he dare not deny it, "because nothing is impossible to the omnipotence of God."[533] He accepts the gods and heroes of antiquity; the characters in Homer and the writers of Greece, of Rome, are equally real, equally authentic, equally worthy of faith, and we might add equally unintelligible. They are as wonderful, as delightful, as impossible to judge as the saints. What they do or say he accepts with the same credulity as that with which he accepted the visions of Blessed Pietro. Petrarch only had to look Blessed Pietro in the eye, and he shrivelled up into lies and absurdities. But to dispose of a charlatan and a rascal of one's own day is comparatively easy: the true superiority of Petrarch is shown when he is face to face with the realities of antiquity—when, for instance, venerating Cicero as he did, he does not hesitate to blame him on a question of morals. But Boccaccio speaks of Cicero as though he scarcely knew him;[534] he praises him as though he were a mere abstraction, calls him "a divine spirit," a "luminous star whose light still waxes."[535] He does not know him. He goes to him for certain details because Petrarch has told him to do so.
The truth seems to be that as soon as Boccaccio was separated from life he became a nonentity. If this is not so, how are we to explain the fact that he who was utterly incapable of criticism, of any sense of difference or proportion in regard to the ancients, could appreciate Petrarch so exquisitely, not only as a writer, where he is often at sea, but as a man? He has a philosophy of life, but he cannot apply it to antiquity because he cannot realise antiquity. Nor does he perceive that Petrarch is continually opposing the philosophy of life to the philosophy of the schools. It is true he defends Petrarch against the more obvious absurdities of scholastic philosophy; but, like his opponents, philosophy for him is nothing but the trick, we cannot say the art, of reasoning, of dialectic.[536] While Petrarch with an immense and admirable courage bravely dares to attack the tyranny of Aristotle in the world of thought, he remains for Boccaccio "the most worthy authority in all things of importance."[537] And so, for example, when Aristotle affirms that the founders of religion were the poets, Boccaccio does not hesitate to oppose this theory to the theologians of his time.[538] Where in fact Petrarch shows himself really superior to the vulgar prejudices of his time his disciple cannot follow him. For instance, in regard to astrology: Boccaccio attributed an immense importance to it, but Petrarch never misses a chance of ridiculing it even in his letters to Boccaccio.[539] Nevertheless Boccaccio remains persuaded that the art of astrology combines in itself much truth, and at any rate rests on a solid basis. If it sometimes deceives us, we must seek the cause in the greatness of the heavens, so difficult to explore, and in the imperfect knowledge we have of the movements and conjunctions of the planets.[540]