Barbara was much interested in these immortal lovers, much more so than in Rienzi's tower or old churches; and we managed to glean a good deal of desultory information on the subject, which brought us to the conclusion that Laura was a real person and Petrarch's a real passion. The fact that in his prose writings he scarcely ever alludes to his beloved one seemed to us to support our views. He did not care to talk to all the world of what he felt so deeply. Sonnets were more impersonal. In his favourite copy of Virgil he records his first meeting with Laura, and her death twenty-one years later. Barbara considered this conclusive.
"Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in early manhood in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at the first hour in the Church of St. Clara at Avignon." In the same minute way he records her death while he was at Verona, "ignorant of his fate."
"I have experienced," he adds, "a certain satisfaction in writing this bitter record of a cruel event, especially in this place where it will often come under my eyes, for so I may be led to reflect that life can afford me no farther pleasures."
He appears all through his career to have been struggling between his love for this unattainable lady and the monastic view of life as inculcated by St. Augustine. No wonder his was a tempest-tossed and melancholy soul! Among his published works the imaginary dialogue between himself and the saint lays bare the curious combat of a nature essentially modern in its instincts, while intellectually under the dominion of mediæval theories. His sentiment was noble in character: a noble love for a noble woman; but the pitiless saint will not accept that as an excuse for the soul's enslavement. The monitor does his utmost to prove that it is a chain utterly unworthy of a rational being, whose thoughts should be fixed on things eternal. It does not occur to Petrarch to make high claim for the sentiment itself, still less to number it among eternal things, as probably it would have occurred to a mind of that idealistic type had he lived a few hundred years later. But his feeling and his mental outlook are evidently not at one. He feels ahead of his thought by many centuries, and never all his life does he succeed in harmonising the two parts of his being, and that is probably why he was always unsatisfied, sad at heart even at his gayest; unable to fully enjoy the savour of life in spite of his extraordinary fulness of opportunity and his ardent nature.
VALE AND SOURCE OF THE SORGUE, VAUCLUSE.
By E. M. Synge.
As for the theory that Laura was merely a symbol for Laurea, the crown of poetic fame, it is not easy to accept the view in face of a letter of Petrarch to his friend, Giacomo Colonna, in which he speaks of this supposition: "Would that your humorous suggestion were true; would to God it were all a pretence and not a madness!"
His defence of this passion, in the "Segreto," is described by a writer of to-day as "purely modern."
"Petrarch was modern enough to grasp, and even defend against the perversions of monasticism and the current of theological speculation, one of the noblest of man's attributes."