His incomparable sonnets seemed to their author in his later years little more than a youthful diversion. They earned for him among the illiterate multitude a reputation which he claimed to despise; they could never constitute the foundation for the scholar's fame to which he aspired. Had he foreseen that posterity would brush aside the great works in Latin which, cost him years of toil, and keep only his "popular trifles in the mother tongue" (nugellas meas vulgares), his chronic melancholy might have deepened into dark despair. Near the close of his life, in preparing a copy of his Italian verses for a friend, he says: "I must confess that I look with aversion upon the silly boyish things I at one time produced in the vernacular (vulgari juveniles ineptias). Of these I could wish everyone ignorant, myself included. Although their style may testify to a certain ability considering the period at which I composed them; their subject matter ill comports with the gravity of age. But what am I to do? They are in the hands of the public and are read more willingly than the serious works which with more highly developed faculties I have written since."[3]
A German scholar (Voigt) has gone so far as to declare that Petrarch would be no less bright a star in the history of the human mind, had he never written a verse of Italian. This very obvious exaggeration is perhaps both natural and salutary. The Latin works, especially the letters, are so fascinating and exhibit such new and important phases of his character and ideals, that those who have enthusiastically busied themselves with them have gradually come to accept the poet's repeated assertion that his Italian works were mere youthful trifles, of little interest as compared with his great Latin epic or his various treatises.[4] Yet the world has decided otherwise, and decided rightly. It has allowed over three hundred years to pass without demanding a new edition of those Latin works, by which the author sought to gain everlasting renown, while, on the other hand, hundreds of editions of the despised Canzoniere have been published, not only in the original but in many translations. For the poet finds his fullest expression in his greatest literary work, the Italian lyrics. No one really familiar with the letters will fail to recognise in them the author of the sonnets. We find there the same strength and weakness, the same genuine feeling, often disguised by mannerisms and traditional conceits, the same aspirations and conflicts, the same subjectivity and self-analysis. We have to do with a single great spirit revealing itself with a diversity and mobility of literary form known only to genius. Opening the Canzoniere, we find in the following lines sentiments which might have been despatched in an elegant epistle to his friend Nelli, or to "Lælius," or recorded in his Confessions.
Ma ben veggi' or sì come al popol tutto
Favola fui gran tempo: onde sovente
Di me medesmo meco mi vergogno:
E del mio vaneggiar vergogna è 'l frutto,
E 'l pentirsi, e 'l conoscer chiaramente
Che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.[5]
But even if it be admitted that the lyrics form Petrarch's greatest claim to renown, and that the letters often only reflect, as might be anticipated, sentiments familiar to the thoughtful reader of the Italian verses, yet the poems alone can never tell the whole story of their author's importance and influence. Literary ideals which have no place in the sonnets are to be found in the letters; in them we may study the reviver of a forgotten culture, and the prophet of an era of intellectual advance the direct results of which we still enjoy.
The Middle Ages furnish us no earlier example of the psychological analysis which we discover in both the verse and prose of Petrarch. His writings are the first to reveal completely a human soul, with its struggles, its sufferings, and its contradictions. "Petrarch was a master in one respect at least, he understood how to picture himself; through him the inner world first receives recognition; he first notes, observes, analyses, and sets forth its phenomena."[6] The all-pervading self-consciousness that meets us in the letters is sure to produce a painful impression as we first open them. It may, for a time, indeed, seem little better than common priggishness. But behind a thin veil of vanity and morbid sensitiveness we straightway discover a great soul grappling with the mystery of life. Baffled by the contradictions that it feels within itself, it gropes tremblingly towards a new ideal of earthly existence.
Petrarch was not content to live unquestioningly, adjusting his conduct to the conventional standard. He was constantly preoccupied with his own aims and motives. Nor was the problem that he confronted a simple one, for the old and the new were contending for supremacy within his breast. The mediæval conception of our mortal life was that of a brief period of probation, during which each played his obscure rôle in the particular group, guild, or corporation to which Providence had assigned him, bearing his burdens patiently in the beatific vision of a speedy reward in another and better world. Petrarch formally assented to this view but never accepted it. The preciousness of life's opportunity was ever before him. Life was certainly a preparation for heaven, but, he asked himself, was it not something more? Might there not be worthy secular aims? Might not one raise himself above those about him and earn the approval of generations to come, as the great writers of antiquity had done? His longing to obtain an earthly reputation, and the temptation consciously to direct his energies toward achieving posthumous fame, seemed to him now a noble instinct, and again where tradition weighed heavily upon him, a godless infatuation. In order to put the matter before himself in all its aspects he prepared an imaginary dialogue, after the model offered by Boëthius and Cicero, between himself and Saint Augustine. This little book he called his Secret, as he did not desire to have it enumerated among the works he had written for fame's sake: and here he recorded his spiritual conflicts for his own personal good.[7] Of the contents of this extraordinary confession something will be said later. Its very existence is an historic fact of the utmost significance.[8]
Petrarch aspired to be both a poet and a scholar, and it is not easy to determine definitely whether in his later years he looked upon his great Latin epic or upon his historical works as his best title to fame. He often refers to the high mission of the poet, and in the address that he delivered at Rome, when he received the laurel crown, he took for his subject the nature of poetry. For him poetry embraced only Latin verse in its classical form. The popular, rhyming cadences of the Middle Ages, in which the rhythmic accent followed not quantity but the prose accent,[9] doubtless seemed to him no more deserving of the name of poetry than Dante's Commedia or his own Italian sonnets. We shall have occasion later to describe his peculiar conception of allegory.[10]
As a scholar Petrarch had no definite bent. "Among the many subjects which have interested me," he says, "I have dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own. In order to forget my own time I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I have delighted in history."[11] We shall not then be going far astray if we style Petrarch a classical philologist, using the term in a broad sense, and always remembering that an enlightened and enthusiastic classical philologist was just what the world much needed in the fourteenth century.
Although the letters are by far the most interesting of Petrarch's Latin productions, the reader may be curious to know something of the character and extent of the other long-forgotten books which the author trusted would earn him eternal fame. No complete edition of his works has ever been published,[12] but were they brought together, they would fill some seventeen volumes of the size of the present one, and we may imagine that the publishers would issue them somewhat as follows: