Читать книгу Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters - Франческо Петрарка - Страница 4

Petrarch's enlightenment and scholarship would, however, have availed the world but little, had he not possessed at the same time certain quite different qualities which go to make up the successful reformer. History abundantly proves that one may be far in advance of one's age and yet leave not a solitary disciple behind. In the fourteenth century, to cite one or two instances, a certain Pierre Dubois eloquently advocated the higher education of women and their instruction in medicine and surgery, the study of the modern languages, the marriage of the clergy and the secularisation of their misused property, the simplification of judicial procedure, and a system of international arbitration.[37] But no one, so far as is known, gave ear to his suggestions, however salutary: six centuries have elapsed and the world has still but half carried out his programme. While Petrarch was studying law at Bologna, Marsiglio of Padua issued one of the most extraordinary treatises ever produced on government, but, although the circumstances of its publication were favourable to publicity, its influence was imperceptible.

We have, therefore, but half explained the secret of Petrarch's influence if we dwell only upon his profound insight and his moral and intellectual saneness. He might well have been "the first modern" and yet have suffered the fate of many another whom we know to have conceived prophetic ideals. He was in advance of his world, it is true, but he was of it. There was a fundamental sympathy between him and his age. He was mediæval as well as modern. He belonged both to the present and the future. Like Luther and Voltaire, he spoke to a generation that was eagerly and expectantly awaiting its leader, and ready to obey his summons when it should come. Luther was a monk before he was a reformer. Had he been less certain that the devil disported himself in the box of hazel-nuts that he kept on his desk, he might, in just so far, have exercised a less potent influence over a superstitious people. Had Voltaire been less blasphemous and more appreciative of the true greatness of Hebrew literature, he might never have advanced the cause of humanity.

Of Petrarch's affinities with the culture of his time the reader may form his own judgment from the abundant evidence furnished by the letters. In one important respect he was ever the child of the Middle Ages; he never freed himself from the monastic theory of salvation, although he frequently questioned some of its implications.

His success was not, however, due solely to the gospel that he preached and its fitness for his day and generation. He enjoyed, in addition to these, the inestimable advantage of personal popularity. He was the hero of his age. He was courted, as he says with perfect truth, by the greatest rulers of his time, who omitted no inducement that might serve to draw him to their capitals. He was the friend of successive Popes and of the far-away Emperor himself. The King of France claimed the honour of his presence at the French Court, as Frederick the Great sought that of Voltaire. Luther and Erasmus were scarcely more widely known than he.

It was, however, with men of letters that his influence was most potent. Among his fellows he ruled supreme. His relations with Boccaccio, the greatest of his Italian contemporaries, were especially sympathetic and affectionate, but scarcely less cordial was his esteem for aspiring young Humanists whose names are now forgotten. Of their feelings for him we can judge from the few letters addressed to him that have come down to us. A modest Florentine scholar, Francesco Nelli, who had won the great man's love, tells us of the rejoicing which the arrival of Petrarch's messages occasioned among his Florentine friends.

"Your circle," Nelli writes, "assembled to partake of an elegant repast.... Those who live and rejoice in the renown of your name and profess your revered friendship (you will understand me, although I express myself but ill) each brought forth his treasure and refreshed us with its sweetness.... Your poem was eagerly read with delight and fraternal good-will. Then we joyously discussed your letters, by means of which you were joined to each of us by a lasting bond of friendship, so that we each silently proved your affection for us by thus producing incontestable evidence. There was no envy, such as is usually aroused by commendation, no detraction or aspersions; each was bent upon adding his part to the applause aroused by your eloquence."[38]

As the reader turns to the letters themselves, he will soon discover that, in spite of their author's assertions to the contrary, each is a well-rounded and carefully elaborated Latin essay, hardly destined to perform the ordinary functions of a letter. While he believed Cicero to be his model, he allowed himself, whether by some natural inclination or from the fact that he knew them earlier, to follow Seneca's epistles more closely. All trivial domestic matters or questions of business, which he regarded as beneath his own dignity and that of the Latin language, were relegated to a separate sheet, written presumably in Italian, which was much better adapted to every-day affairs than the intractable classical forms which he strove to imitate.[39] But none of these contemned post-scripts, interesting as they would probably be to us, have been preserved, and we have not a single line of Italian prose from Petrarch's pen.[40]

Although he was fond of saying that he took no pains with his style in his intercourse with his friends, the constant traces of care and revision will scarcely escape the reader. Moreover, these finished communications were not to be treated lightly. "I desire," he says, "that my reader, whoever he may be, should think of me alone, not of his daughter's wedding, his mistress's embraces, the wiles of his enemy, his engagements, house, lands, or money. I want him to pay attention to me. If his affairs are pressing, let him postpone reading the letter, but when he does read, let him throw aside the burden of business and family cares, and fix his mind upon the matter before him. I do not wish him to carry on his business and attend to my letter at the same time. I will not have him gain without any exertion what has not been produced without labour on my part."[41]

The conditions were, indeed, very untoward in those days for regular correspondence between friends, and it is natural that the modern note, lightly dashed off and despatched for the most trifling sum, with almost unfailing security, to any part of the globe, should have had no analogy in the fourteenth century. There was in Petrarch's time no regular postal system. Letters were intrusted to a special messenger, or to someone going in the proper direction, pilgrim or merchant. Sometimes a long period might elapse without any opportunity of forwarding a letter, for the scarcity of messengers was as familiar an evil to those living in a great city like Milan as to the solitary sojourner in the wilderness.[42] Once Petrarch resorted to his cook as a messenger. When once under way, there was no assurance that the letter would reach its destination. Many are Petrarch's laments, over the loss of his own and his friends' messages. They were often intercepted and opened, sometimes apparently by autograph-mongers; they might then be returned or not as it pleased those who violated them. Once, as he was returning to Padua, Petrarch came upon two letters from his friend Nelli, in the hands of certain fellows—"not bad men indeed," but those whom he was as much surprised to find interested in such things as if he had discovered "a mole amusing itself with a mirror."

At last Petrarch's patience was quite exhausted and he resolved to give up writing letters altogether. About a year before his death he imparted his purpose to Boccaccio, as follows:

"I know now that neither of two long letters that I wrote to you have reached you. But what can we do?—nothing but submit. We may wax indignant, but we cannot avenge ourselves. A most insupportable set of fellows has appeared in northern Italy, who nominally guard the passes, but are really the bane of messengers. They not only glance over the letters that they open, but they read them with the utmost curiosity. They may, perhaps, have for an excuse the orders of their masters, who, conscious of being subject to every reproach in their restless careers of insolence, imagine that everyone must be writing about and against them; hence their anxiety to know everything. But it is certainly inexcusable, when they find something in the letters that tickles their asinine ears, that instead of detaining the messengers while they take time to copy the contents, as they used to do, they should now, with ever increasing audacity, spare their fingers the fatigue, and order the messengers off without their letters. And, to make this procedure the more disgusting, those who carry on this trade are complete ignoramuses, suggesting those unfortunates who possess a capacious and imperious appetite together with a weak digestion, which keeps them always on the verge of illness. I find nothing more irritating and vexatious than the interference of these scoundrels. It has often kept me from writing, and often caused me to repent after I had written. There is nothing more to be done against these letter-thieves, for everything is upside down, and the liberty of the state is entirely destroyed.

"To this obstacle to correspondence I may add my age, my flagging interest in almost everything, and not merely satiety of writing but an actual repugnance to it. These reasons taken together have induced me to give up writing to you, my friend, and to those others with whom I have been wont to correspond. I utter this farewell, not so much that these frivolous letters shall, at last, cease to interfere, as they so long have done, with more serious work, but rather to prevent my writings from falling into the hands of these paltry wretches. I shall, in this way, at least escape their insolence, and when I am forced to write to you or to others I shall write to be understood and not to please.[43] I remember already to have promised, in a letter of this kind, that I would thereafter be more concise in my correspondence, in order to economise the brief time which remained to me. But I have not been able to keep this engagement. It seems to me much easier to remain silent altogether with one's friends than to be brief, for when one has once begun, the desire to continue the conversation is so great that it were easier not to begin than to check the flow."[44]

If the letters of Erasmus can, as Mr. Froude suggested, be properly regarded as the most important single source for the history of the Reformation, those of Petrarch must, by reason of the scantiness of other material, be looked upon as indispensable to an understanding of the intellectual life of Italy at the opening of the Renaissance. Still his entire correspondence is by no means available as yet in even a tolerable Latin edition, and, except for an Italian translation, his letters are quite out of the reach of those who cannot read them in the original.[45] The editors of the present volume therefore feel no hesitation in offering to the English-reading public a version of some of the more characteristic examples of a correspondence possessing such exceptional interest. They were unfortunately forced to select, since the letters that have been preserved would, if reproduced in extenso, fill no less than eight volumes of the size of this. The choice has been determined by a desire to shed all possible light upon the historical rôle of Petrarch and upon the times in which he lived. Some explanations have necessarily been added to the text, but a constant effort has been made to exclude all that was mere erudition or interesting only to the special student. The letters selected have nearly always been given in their entirety and with all possible literalness, for condensation would inevitably have interfered with the true impression which the original produces, even if it served at times to render the book more readable. We can but hope that the choice that we have made will, so far as is possible in so brief a compass, give a correct notion, at first hand, of the extraordinary character with whom we have to do.

[1] The writer has ventured to suggest that the thought of the Renaissance is much more akin to that of the Middle Ages than with that of to-day. See The New History pp. 101 sqq.

[2] Ep. de Rebus Sen., xvi., 2.

[3] Sen., xiii., 10; Opera (1581), p. 923.

[4] For Petrarch's attitude toward the Italian language the reader is referred to Part II., below.

[5] From the first sonnet, beginning, Voi ch'ascoltate.

[6] Gaspary, Geschichte der italienischen Literatur, 1885, i., 480.

[7] Cf. Preface to Dialogus de Contemptu Mundi, as the work is called in the Basle editions. Many MSS. entitle the work more appropriately De Secreto Conflictu Curarum Suarum. Cf. Voigt, op. cit., p. 132.

[8] See below, pp. 93 sqq. and 404 sqq.

[9] For example the familiar,

Dies iræ, dies illa,

Solvet sæclum in favilla.

or Abelard's lines:

In hac urbe lux solemnis,

Ver æternum, pax perennis.

In hac odor implens cœlos,

In hac semper festum melos.

[10] See below, p. 233 sqq.

[11] Letter to Posterity.

[12] The wretchedly printed, editions published at Basle in 1554 and 1581 are the most complete, but they omit the work on Famous Men and nearly half of the letters.

[13] As first (and last) Englished by Thomas Twyne, London, 1579.

[14] This is a part of the Lives of Famous Men, but is nearly as long as all the others together.

[15] Cf. Ferrazzi, "Bibliografia Petrarchesca," in vol. v. of his Enciclopedia Dantesca, Bassano, 1877.

[16] E. g., Book i., chap, xliii.: on the possession of a library.

[17] Conradini has edited the work in Padova a Petrarca, 1874, and there are now two Italian versions and one in French.

[18] Edited by A. Razzolini, Bologna, 1874-9, in Collezione di Opere Inedite o Rare. Vols. 34-36. The Life of Cæsar was carefully edited by Schneider (Leipzig, 1827), with a discussion of Petrarch's divergences from classical Latin.

[19] For this whole subject see Ferrazzi, op. cit., especially p. 760. An excellent analysis of the Latin works may be found in Körting, Petrarca's Leben u. Werke, Leipzig, 1878, pp. 542 sqq.

[20] De Rem. Utriusq. Fortunæ, i., 43; Opera (1581), p. 43.

[21] Rerum Mem., i., 2, as corrected by M. de Nolhac: Pétrarque et l'Humanisme, p. 268.

[22] Cf. de Nolhac, op. cit., p. 99.

[23] Sen., v., 1; Opera (1581), p. 792. Compare, on the general subject, G. H. Putnam's Books and their Makers in the Middle Ages, New York, 1896.

[24] Epistolæ de Rebus Familiaribus, xvi., 1 (Fracassetti's edition, vol. ii., p. 363).

[25] The Latin original, transcribed from the archives of Venice, is to be found in de Nolhac, op. cit., p. 80.

[26] Petrarcha Redivivus, 2d ed. (Padua, 1650), p. 72.

[27] Cf. Fam., xxiv., 1 (vol. iii., p. 250).

[28] Fam., iv., 15.

[29] Il Convito, iv., 16. For the conceptions of grammar in the thirteenth century see Turot's remarkable study in the Notices et Extraits des MSS., vol. 22.

[30] Migne, Patrologia Lat., vol. 82, pp. 408, 426.

[31] "De Sui ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia," Opera (1581), pp. 1042, 1043.

[32] Opera (1581), p. 1038. Steele's extracts from Bartholomew Anglicus, in Mediæval Lore (Stock, London), give a good idea of the popular science of the thirteenth century.

[33] Cf. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1895.

[34] Sen., iii., 1; Opera (1581), pp. 768, 769.

[35] See below, p. 68.

[36] Fam. v., 7.

[37] Cf. De Recuperatione Terre Sancte, excellently edited by Ch.-V. Langlois, Paris, 1891.

[38] Lettres de F. Nelli, ed. Cochin. Paris, 1892, p. 166.

[39] He says distinctly in one letter: Ad epistolæ tuæ finem de familiaribus curis stilo alio et seorsum loquar, ut soleo. Fam., xx., 2 (vol. iii., p. 11). Again we find: Quidquid hodie æconomicum mihi domus attulit, seorsum altera perleges papyro. Fam., xviii., 7 (vol. ii., p. 486). Cf. below, p. 230 sq.

[40] There is one possible exception, a short address upon the death of the Archbishop of Milan, delivered in 1354; given by Hortis, Scritti Inediti, pp. 335 sqq. The reader will find a discussion of the editing of the letters below, p. 150 sqq.

[41] Fam., xiii., 5 (vol. ii. pp. 232, 233).

[42] Fam., xx., 6 (vol. iii., p. 25).

[43] Perhaps with a hope that simple notes would escape the fate of his more polished missives.

[44] Opera (1581), p. 546 sq.

[45] M. Victor Develay has turned a part of the correspondence into French, with conscientious fidelity to the original.