Petrarch also prevailed upon his friend Boccaccio to publish in Latin the Iliad and Odyssey. It was Leontius Pilatus who took charge of this work a little time after and thus began the great work of translating Greek authors which Pope Nicholas V. was later to bring to so successful an end.
But the works of the nature-loving Greeks would never have inspired in the heart and mind of Petrarch a love of the beauty of life around him—Hellenism was but a factor—were it not that his own beloved Provence revealed its charms to his eyes and filled his soul with poetic dreams. In his garden at Vaucluse, among his trees and vines, he found the inspiration which Nature never refuses to the open and responsive heart, whether the votary at her altar be a Wordsworth, amid the lakes and cliffs and scenes of Cumberland; a Burns, treading the hillsides of his native Ayr, or a Whittier, dreaming amid his Berkshire hills.
Many historians do an injustice to the character of Petrarch on the moral side. Petrarch, in the moral gospel of his life and living, was far from being either a Poggio or a Machiavelli. Much as was his respect for the master geniuses of antiquity, his love for the sacred writings of St. Jerome and St. Augustine was more profound, and it is said that on reading for the first time the works of the latter he thought of abandoning altogether the frivolous study of the classics, with a view of consecrating himself entirely to Christian meditation and reading. Petrarch’s respect for the Christian ideal is to be found in the marginal annotations of his manuscripts. We have the poet’s own word for it that he took the “Confessions of St. Augustine” for his model when he wrote his “De Contemptu Mundi.” Practices of scrupulous piety marked his whole life. Each night he arose to pray to God, and on every Friday he practised a rigorous fast, while his devotion to the Blessed Virgin was most ardent and sincere.
It is true that, like all men of the Renaissance period, Petrarch was intense in his character. He hated with a Renaissance fervor, and he was not free from the jealousy and vainglory which belonged especially to the spirit of his times.
In estimating the character of Petrarch one must remember the spirit of the times in which he had birth—that it was an age of great virtues and great vices, and that excessive liberty to sin followed in the wake of the Renaissance in every land. In England it is reflected in the lives of such men as Green and Marlowe and in Marlowe’s play of “Dr. Faustus,” while in France the courts of the House of Valois and the camps of the Huguenots were marked by the greatest wantonness and license. In Germany men like Ulrich von Hutten were anything but moral.
Petrarch was certainly “the morning star” of the Italian Renaissance, but it was the Papal Court of Avignon that made possible his light—it was the Pope, as representative and head of a universal Church, that quickened by contact the mind of the East with the West—in a word, it was the enlightened scholarship of fourteen centuries illumined by the rays of Divine Faith and speaking through the lips of the Vicar of Christ in exile at Avignon that led the way in that greatest of intellectual movements—the Italian Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Hyphenation, and spellings have been retained as in the original. Punctuation has been corrected without note.