Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/742

 710 him there was no schism between Home and Galilee, be tween classical genius and sacred inspiration. Though the latter took the first rank in relation to man s eternal wel fare, the former was necessary for the perfection of his intellect and the civilization of his manners. With this double ideal in view, Petrarch poured scorn upon the French physicians and the Italian Averroists for their illiberal philistinism, no less than for their materialistic impiety. True to his conception of independent intellectual activity, he abstained from a legal career, refused import ant ecclesiastical office, and contented himself with paltry benefices which implied no spiritual or administrative duties, because he was resolved to follow the one purpose of his life, self-culture. Whatever in literature revealed the hearts of men was infinitely precious to him ; and for this reason he professed almost a cult for St Augustine. It was to Augustine, as to a friend or a confessor, that ho poured forth the secrets of his own soul in the book De Contemptu Jfundi. In this effort to realize his truest self Petrarch was eminently successful. Much as he effected by restoring to the world a sound conception of learning, and by rousing that genuine love and curiosity which led to the revival, he did even more by impressing on the age his own full- formed and striking personality. In all things he was original. Whether we regard him as a priest who published poem after poem in praise of an adored mistress, as a plebeian man of letters who conversed on equal terms with kings and princes, as a solitary dedicated to the love of nature, as an amateur diplomatist treating affairs of state with pompous eloquence in missives sent to popes and emperors, or again as a traveller eager for change of scene, ready to climb mountains for the enjoyment of broad prospects over spreading champaigns ; in all these divers manifestations of his peculiar genius we trace some contrast with the manners of the 14th century, some emphatic anticipation of the 16th. The defects of Petrarch s char acter were no less striking than its qualities, and were indeed their complement and counterpart. That vivid conception of intellectual and moral self -culture which determined his ideal took the form in actual life of all- absorbing egotism. He was not content with knowing himself to be the leader of the age. He claimed autocracy, suffered no rival near his throne, brooked no contradiction, demanded unconditional submission to his will and judg ment. His friends were treated by him as subordinates and vassals with exacting magnanimity. The preoccu pation with himself, which makes his letters and prose treatises a mine of autobiographical information, rouses a certain contempt when we watch it degenerating into vanity, appetite for flattery, intrigues for the poet s crown, restless change from place to place in search of new admirers, desire for ceremonial pomp, and half-concealed detraction of superior genius. Petrarch was made up of contradictions. Praising solitude, playing the hermit at Vaucluse, he only loved seclusion as a contrast to the society of courts ; while he penned dissertations on the futility of fame and the burden of celebrity, he was trimming his sails to catch the breeze of popular applause. No one professed a more austere morality, and few mediaeval writers indulged in cruder satire on the female sex ; yet he passed some years in the society of a concubine, and his living masterpiece of art is the apotheosis of chivalrous passion for a woman. These discords of an undecided nature displayed themselves in his political theories and in his philosophy of conduct. In one mood he was fain to ape the antique patriot ; in another he affected the monastic saint. He was clamorous for the freedom of the Roman people ; yet at one time he called upon the popes to re-establish themselves in the Eternal City ; at another he besought the emperor to make it his headquarters ; at a third he hailed in Rienzi the founder of a new republic. He did not perceive that all these plans were incompatible. His relations to the Lombard nobles were equally at variance with his professed patriotism ; and, while still a housemate of Visconti and Correggi, he kept on issuing invectives against the tyrants who divided Italy. It would not be difficult to multiply these antitheses in the character and the opinions of this singular man. But it is more to the purpose to remark that they were harmonized in a personality of potent and enduring force. Petrarch was essentially the first of the moderns, the ancestor of Hamlet and Faust, Rousseau and Childe Harold. That strange spirit of unrest and melancholy, of malady and isolation, which drove him from time to time into the desert, where lie sought companionship with the great writers of the past, was the inner witness to an irresoluble contradiction between himself and the age in which he lived. The point to notice in this complex personality is that Petrarch s ideal remained always literary. As philosopher, politician, historian, essayist, orator, he aimed at lucid and harmonious expression, not, indeed, neglecting the import ance of the material he undertook to treat, but approach ing his task in the spirit of an artist rather than a thinker or a man of action. This accounts for his bewildering versatility, and for his apparent want of grasp on conditions of fact. Viewed in this light Petrarch anticipated the Italian Renaissance in its weakness, that philosophical superficiality, that tendency to ornate rhetoric, that pre occupation with stylistic trifles, that want of profound con viction and stern sincerity, which stamp its minor literary products with the note of mediocrity. Had Petrarch been possessed with a passion for some commanding principle in politics, morality, or science, instead of with the thirst for self-glorification and the ideal of artistic culture, it is not wholly impossible that Italian humanism might have assumed a manlier and more conscientious tone. But this is not a question which admits of discussion ; for the con ditions which made Petrarch what he was were already potent in Italian society. He did but express the spirit of the period he opened ; and it may also be added that his own ideal was higher and severer than that of the illus trious humanists who followed him. As an author Petrarch must be considered from two points of view, first as a writer of Latin verse and prose, secondly as an Italian lyrist. In the former capacity he was speedily outstripped by more fortunate scholars. His eclogues and epistles and the epic of Africa, on which he set such store, exhibit a comparatively limited command of Latin metre. His treatises, orations, and familiar letters, though remarkable for a prose style which is emi nently characteristic of the man, are not distinguished by purity of diction. Much as he admired Cicero, it is clear that he had not freed himself from current mediaeval Latinity. Seneca and Augustine had been too much used by him as models of composition. At the same time it will be conceded that he possessed a copious vocabulary, a fine ear for cadence, and the faculty of expressing every shade of thought or feeling. What he lacked was that insight into the best classical masterpieces, that command of the best classical diction, which is the product of suc cessive generations of scholarship. To attain to this, Giovanni da Ravenna, Colluccio Salutato, Poggio, and Filelfo had to labour, before a Poliziano and a Bembo finally prepared the path for an Erasmus. Had Petrarch been born at the close of the 15th instead of at the open ing of the 14th century there is no doubt that his Latinity would have been as pure, as versatile, and as pointed as that of the witty stylist of Rotterdam. With regard to his Italian poetry Petrarch occupies a