Of these rare limitations we detect the fewest traces in his criticism of Cicero. This may be accounted for largely on the ground that Cicero and Petrarch were men of the same temperament and cast of mind. They were both typical men of letters. The man of letters is intellectually alert; sensitive to impressions and able to report them; hospitable to all the ideas of his time; sometimes inconsistent, because of this very catholicity; and often despised in consequence by practical men, although in reality more practical than they, inasmuch as he has the art of communicating his flashes of insight and his generous enthusiasm to others, who in the end reconcile his inconsistencies and make his dreams come true. This is an exceptional character, but Cicero sustained it fully, and so did Petrarch too. They were thus of the same stamp. Moreover, their circumstances were similar in many respects. Cicero's task as an interpreter of Greek thought was not unlike Petrarch's life-work. It was impossible, with all these likenesses, that the one, however defective his knowledge, should fail to comprehend the other.
Petrarch's letters afford countless illustrations of the truth of these statements. In outward form, to be sure, and once in a while in their material and the treatment of it, they suggest rather Seneca than Cicero. That, however, is easily explained. Petrarch's epistolary ways had been fully determined before ever he saw Cicero's correspondence, or any portion of it.[1] So it was quite impossible that he should follow him in matters of fashion and form. But in spirit and intention, in all their deeper affinities, the letters are distinctly Ciceronian, akin to Cicero's essays and treatises. Cicero's style is plainly Petrarch's ideal, although he is too wise to imitate it slavishly. And he falls, at his best, not very far short of Cicero's clearness and animation, his variety, his aptness of quotation and illustration. A clearer case of sympathetic comprehension of another, and of reproduction without imitation, it would be hard to find.
Next to Cicero, Petrarch cared most among Roman writers for Virgil. One would have expected to find this order reversed,—to find the poet of the Africa far more devoted to his great forerunner than to one who was essentially unpoetical, a rhetorician and prosaist. The explanation of the seeming anomaly is twofold. In the first place, it was in temperament only that Petrarch was a poet, and not, after the splendid lyrical outburst of the Canzoniere, in the whole compass of his thought and feeling. He could not have done the work which he did if it had been otherwise. It was necessary that the first Humanist should combine with the poet's openness of mind, and love of whatever is beautiful, scholarly patience and a willingness to lead a scholar's life. And then, in the second place, Petrarch was debarred from full appreciation of Virgil by an inability to escape from the dominion of certain mediæval conceptions of poetry.
For one thing, he valued poetry largely in proportion as it is made the vehicle of criticism of life, of the more obvious sort. One is surprised, in examining the numerous quotations from Virgil that are scattered throughout the letters, to find how invariably they are chosen either because they are strikingly rhetorical in form or in consequence of their didactic quality. Poetry seems to have become to Petrarch, as his life and his studies advanced and he drew farther away in time and temper from his early creative period, little more than a somewhat finer form of prose. Virgil, with all his reverence for him, was not unlike another Cicero. He says in one of his letters: "Our beloved Cicero is beyond doubt the father of Latin eloquence. Next to him comes Virgil. Or perhaps, since there are some who dislike the order in which I am placing them, I had better say that Tullius and Maro are the two parents of Roman literature." Such remarks, which are not infrequent, are indicative of an incapacity to feel keenly and enjoy deeply what is finest in Virgil. Petrarch seems to us to-day like a child, who values the beautiful commonplaces of the poet more highly than his occasional soundings of the depths and mysteries of life. He had no adequate appreciation of Virgil's 'majestic sadness,' his 'pathetic half lines,' his 'tears for the things that are.'
To this same insensitiveness on the æsthetic side we must ascribe Petrarch's inability to free himself from the mediæval delusion as to the profound allegorical significance of the Æneid, and of all other noble poetry as well. A true poet may entertain very strange theories concerning the nature of his art, but in his better moments he will rise above them and unconsciously belie them, both in his practice and in his criticism of others. This Petrarch, after his early youth, never did. His highest aim in his own poetical compositions was to set forth moral truths under an obscure veil of allegory, and his greatest delight in studying the poets of antiquity was to penetrate the veil under, which he believed they had hidden their wisdom. Dante's chance lines in the ninth book of the Inferno give exact expression to this ruling thought of his:
O voi che avete gl' intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
Sotto il velame degli versi strani!
Dante's application of this idea, however, was one thing and Petrarch's another. Petrarch aimed at nothing worthier than a multitude of minute and trivial correspondences. The effect upon his verse is indicated by the letter to his brother Gherardo which is given toward the close of this chapter. The effect upon his criticism may be learned by examining certain other letters, in the Seniles. In one of these he says:[2]
"Virgil's subject, as I understand the matter, is The Perfect Man.... In the passage that you ask me to explain I look upon the winds as nothing more nor less than blasts of anger and mad desire, which disturb with their wild storms the quiet of our life, as tempests do some tranquil sea. Æolus is our reason, which curbs and controls these headstrong passions. If it did not do so they would sweep away sea and land and the overarching sky, that is, our blood and flesh and bones and our very souls, and plunge them down to death and destruction:
... maria ac terras cœlumque profundum quippe ferant rapidi secum.
The dark caverns where Virgil represents them as being hidden away, what are they but the hollow and hidden parts of our bodies, where, according to Plato's determination, the passions dwell in abodes of their own, in the breast and entrails? The mountain mass which is placed above them is the head, where Plato thinks the reason has its home.... Venus, who meets them in the middle of the wood, is pleasure, whose pursuit by us becomes hotter and keener toward the middle of our life. Her assumption of a maidenly look and air is for the purpose of deceiving the unwary. If we saw her as she is we should flee from her in fear and trembling; for, as there is nothing more tempting than pleasure, so there is nothing more foul. Her garments are girded up because her flight is swift. For this same reason she is compared to the swiftest of creatures and things.[3] It cannot be denied that nothing swifter exists, whether you consider her comprehensively or part by part; for pleasure as a whole passes from us very soon, and even while it still abides with us each taste of it lasts but a moment. And then, finally, she appears in the garb of a huntress, because she hunts for the souls of miserable mortals. And she has a bow, and has flowing hair, in order that she may smite us and charm us."[4]