"When to Maro"s tomb they brought him Tender grief and pity wrought him To bedew the stone with tears; What a saint I might have crowned thee, Had I only living found thee, Poet first and without peers!"]
Meanwhile the utter confusion consequent upon the downfall of the Roman Empire and the irruption of the Germanic races was causing, by the mere brute force of circ.u.mstance, a gradual extinction of scholarship too powerful to be arrested. The teaching of grammar for ecclesiastical purposes was insufficient to check the influence of many causes leading to this overthrow of learning. It was impossible to communicate more than a mere tincture of knowledge to students separated from the cla.s.sical tradition, for whom the antecedent history of Rome was a dead letter. The meaning of Latin words derived from the Greek was lost. Smaragdus, a grammarian, mistook _Eunuchus Comoedia_ and _Orestes Tragoedia_, mentioned by Donatus, for the names of authors. Remigius of Auxerre explained _poema_ by _positio_, and _emblema_ by _habundantia_. Homer and Virgil were supposed to have been friends and contemporaries, while the Latin epitome of the "Iliad," bearing the name of Pindar, was fathered on the Theban lyrist. Theological notions, grotesque and childish beyond description, found their way into etymology and grammar. The three persons of the Trinity were discovered in the verb, and mystic numbers in the parts of speech. Thus a.n.a.lytical studies like that of language came to be regarded as an open field for the exercise of the mythologising fancy; and etymology was reduced to a system of ingenious punning. _Voluntas_ and _voluptas_ were distinguished, for example, as pertaining to the nature of _Deus_ and _diabolus_ respectively; and, in order to make the list complete, _voluntas_ was invented as an attribute of _h.o.m.o_. It is clear that on this path of verbal quibbling the intellect had lost tact, taste, and common sense together.
When the minds of the learned were possessed by these absurdities to the exclusion of sound method, we cannot wonder that antiquity survived but as a strange and shadowy dream in popular imagination.
Virgil, the only cla.s.sic who retained distinct and living personality, pa.s.sed from poet to philosopher, from philosopher to Sibyl, from Sibyl to magician, by successive stages of trans.m.u.tation, as the truth about him grew more dim and the faculty to apprehend him weakened. Forming the staple of education in the schools of the grammarians, and metamorphosed by the vulgar consciousness into a wizard,[16] he waited on the extreme verge of the dark ages to take Dante by the hand, and lead him, as the type of human reason, through the realms of h.e.l.l and Purgatory.
[Footnote 16: The common use of the word _grammarie_ for occult science in our ballads ill.u.s.trates this phase of popular opinion. So does the legend of Friar Bacon. See Thoms, _Early English Prose Romances_.]
With regard to the actual knowledge of Latin literature possessed in the Middle Ages, it may be said in brief that Virgil was continually studied, and that a certain familiarity with Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, and Statius was never lost. Among the prose-writers, portions of Cicero were used in education; but the compilations of Boethius, Priscian, Donatus, and Ca.s.siodorus were more widely used. In the twelfth century the study of Roman law was revived, and the scholastic habit of thought found scope for subtlety in the discussion of cases and composition of glosses. The general knowledge and intellectual sympathy required for comprehension of the genuine cla.s.sics were, however, wanting; and thus it happened that their place was taken by epitomes and abstracts, and by the formal digests of the Western Empire in its decadence. This lifeless literature was better suited to the meagre intellectual conditions of the Middle Ages than the masterpieces of the Augustan and Silver periods.
Of Greek there was absolutely no tradition left.[17] When the names of Greek poets or philosophers are cited by mediaeval authors, it is at second hand from Latin sources; and the Aristotelian logic of the schoolmen came through Latin translations made by Jews from Arabian MSS. Occasionally it might happen that a Western scholar acquired Greek at Constantinople or in the south of Italy, where it was spoken; but this did not imply h.e.l.lenic culture, nor did such knowledge form a part and parcel of his erudition. Greek was hardly less lost to Europe then than Sanskrit in the first half of the eighteenth century.
[Footnote 17: Didot, in his _Life of Aldus_, tries to make out that Greek learning survived in Ireland longer than elsewhere.]
The meagreness of mediaeval learning was, however, a less serious obstacle to culture than the habit of mind, partly engendered by Christianity and partly idiosyncratic to the new races, which prevented students from appreciating the true spirit of the cla.s.sics.
While mysticism and allegory ruled supreme, the clearly-defined humanity of the Greeks and Romans could not fail to be misapprehended.
The little that was known of them reached students through a hazy and distorting medium. Poems like Virgil"s fourth Eclogue were prized for what the author had not meant when he was writing them; while his real interests were utterly neglected. Against this mental misconception, this original obliquity of vision, this radical lie in the intellect, the restorers of learning had to fight at least as energetically as against brute ignorance and dulness. It was not enough to multiply books and to discover codices; they had to teach men how to read them, to explain their inspiration, to defend them against prejudice, to protect them from false methods of interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy and fable, to prove that poetry apart from its supposed prophetic meaning was delightful for its own sake, and that the history of the antique nations, in spite of Paganism, could be used for profit and instruction, was the first step to be taken by these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short, to create a new mental sensibility by establishing the truth that pure literature directly contributes to the dignity and happiness of human beings. The achievement of this revolution in thought was the great performance of the Italians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
During the dark ages Italy had in no sense enjoyed superiority of culture over the rest of Europe. On the contrary, the first abortive attempt at a revival of learning was due to Charlemagne at Aix, the second to the Emperor Frederick in Apulia and Sicily; and while the Romance nations had lost the cla.s.sical tradition, it was still to some extent preserved by the Moslem dynasties. The more we study the history of mediaeval learning, the more we recognise the debt of civilised humanity to the Arabs for their conservation and transmission of Greek thought in altered form to Europe. Yet, though the Italians came comparatively late into the field, their action was decisive. Neither Charlemagne nor Frederick, neither the philosophy of the Arabian sages nor the precocious literature of Provence, succeeded in effecting for the education of the modern intellect that which Dante and Petrarch performed--the one by the production of a monumental work of art in poetry, the other by the communication of a new enthusiasm for antiquity to students.
Dante does not belong in any strict sense to the history of the Revival of Learning. The "Divine Comedy" closes the Middle Ages and preserves their spirit. It stands before the vestibule of modern literature like a solitary mountain at the entrance of a country rich in all varieties of landscape. In order to become acquainted with its grandeur, we must leave the fields and forests that we know, ascend the heights, and use ourselves to an austerer climate. In spite of this isolation, Dante"s influence was powerful upon succeeding generations. The modern mind first found in him its scope, and recognised its freedom; first dared and did what placed it on a level with antiquity in art. Many ideas, moreover, destined to play an important part in the coming age, received from him their germinal expression. It may thus be truly said that Dante initiated the movement of the modern intellect in its entirety, though he did not lead the Revival considered as a separate moment in this evolution.
That service was reserved for Petrarch.
There are spots upon the central watershed of Europe where, in the stillness of a summer afternoon, the traveller may listen to the murmurs of two streams--the one hurrying down to form the Rhine, the other to contribute to the Danube or the Po. Born within hearing of each other"s voices, and nourished by the self-same clouds that rest upon the crags around them, they are henceforth destined to an ever-widening separation. While the one sweeps onward to the Northern seas, the other will reach the sh.o.r.es of Italy or Greece and mingle with the Mediterranean. To these two streamlets we might compare Dante and Petrarch, both of whom sprang from Florence, both of whom were nurtured in the learning of the schools and in the lore of chivalrous love. Yet how different was their mission! Petrarch marks the rising of that great river of intellectual energy which flowed southward to recover the culture of the ancient world. The current of Dante"s genius took the contrary direction. Borne upon its mighty flood, we visit the lands and cities of the Middle Ages, floating toward infinities divined and made the heritage of human nature by the mediaeval spirit.
In speaking of Petrarch here, it is necessary to concentrate attention upon his claims to be considered as the apostle of scholarship, the inaugurator of the humanistic impulse of the fifteenth century. We have nothing to do with his Italian poetry. The _Rime_ dedicated to Madonna Laura have eclipsed the fame of the Latin epic, philosophical discourses, epistles, orations, invectives, and dissertations, which made Petrarch the Voltaire of his own age, and on which he thought his immortality would rest. Yet it is with these latter products of his genius, not with the _Canzoniere_, that we are now concerned; nor can it be too emphatically a.s.serted that his originality was even more eminently displayed in the revelation of humanism to the modern world than in the verses that impressed their character upon Italian literature. To have foreseen a whole new phase of European culture, to have interpreted its spirit, and determined by his own activity the course it should pursue, is in truth a higher t.i.tle to fame than the composition of even the most perfect sonnets. The artist, however, has this advantage over the pioneer of intellectual progress, that his delicate creations are indestructible, and that his work cannot be merged in that of a continuator. Therefore Petrarch lives and will live in the memory of millions as the poet of Laura, while only students know how much the world owes to his humanistic ardour.
As I cannot dispense with the word Humanism in this portion of my work, it may be well to fix the sense I shall attach to it.[18] The essence of humanism consisted in a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations, and in the further perception that cla.s.sic literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom. It was partly a reaction against ecclesiastical despotism, partly an attempt to find the point of unity for all that had been thought and done by man, within the mind restored to consciousness of its own sovereign faculty. Hence the single-hearted devotion to the literature of Greece and Rome that marks the whole Renaissance era. Hence the watchword of that age, the _Litterae Humaniores_. Hence the pa.s.sion for antiquity, possessing thoughtful men, and subst.i.tuting a new authority for the traditions of the Church. Hence the so-called Paganism of centuries bent upon absorbing and a.s.similating a spirit no less life-giving from their point of view than Christianity itself. Hence the persistent effort of philosophers to find the meeting-point of two divergent inspirations. Hence, too, the ultimate antagonism between the humanists, or professors of the new wisdom, and those uncompromising Christians who, like S. Paul, preferred to remain fools for Christ"s sake.
[Footnote 18: The word Humanism has a German sound, and is in fact modern. Yet the generic phrase _umanita_ for humanistic culture, and the name _umanista_ for a professor of humane studies, are both pure Italian. Ariosto, in his seventh satire, line 25, writes--
"Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti."]
Humanism in this, the widest, sense of the word was possessed by Petrarch intuitively. It belonged to his nature as much as music to Mozart; so that he seemed sent into the world to raise, by the pure exercise of innate faculties, a standard for succeeding workers.
Physically and aesthetically, by the fineness of his ear for verbal harmonies, and by the exquisiteness of his sensibilities, he was fitted to divine what it took centuries to verify. While still a boy, long before he could grasp the meaning of cla.s.sical Latin, he used to read the prose of Cicero aloud, delighting in the sonorous cadence and balanced periods of the master"s style.[19] Nor were the moral qualities of industry and perseverance, needed to supplement these natural gifts, defective. In his maturity he spared no pains to collect the ma.n.u.scripts of Cicero, sometimes transcribing them with his own hand, sometimes employing copyists, sending and journeying to distant parts of Europe where he heard a fragment of his favourite author might be found.[20] His greatest literary disappointment was the loss of a treatise by Cicero on Glory, a theme exceedingly significant for the Renaissance, which he lent to his tutor Convennevole, and which the old man p.a.w.ned.[21] Though he could not read Greek, he welcomed with profoundest reverence the codices of Homer and Plato sent to him from Constantinople, and exhorted Boccaccio to dedicate his genius to the translation of the sovran poet into Latin.[22] In this susceptibility to the melodies of rhetorical prose, in this special cult of Cicero, in the pa.s.sion for collecting ma.n.u.scripts, and in the intuition that the future of scholarship depended upon the resuscitation of Greek studies, Petrarch initiated the four most important momenta of the cla.s.sical Renaissance. He, again, was the first to understand the value of public libraries;[23]
the first to acc.u.mulate coins and inscriptions, as the sources of accurate historical information; the first to preach the duty of preserving ancient monuments. It would seem as though, by the instinct of genius, he foresaw the future for at least three centuries, and comprehended the highest uses whereof scholarship is capable.
[Footnote 19: See the interesting letter to Luca di Penna, _De Libris Ciceronis_, p. 946, and compare _De Ignorantia sui ipsius_, &c. p.
1044. These references, as well as those which follow under the general sign _Ibid._, are made to the edition of Petrarch"s collected works, Basle, 1581.]
[Footnote 20: _Ibid._ p. 948. Cf. the fine letter on the duty of collecting and preserving codices (_Fam. Epist._ lib. iii. 18, p.
619). "Aurum, argentum, gemmae, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, pictae tabulae, phaleratus sonipes, caeteraque id genus mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem: libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva quadam n.o.bis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur."]
[Footnote 21: _De Libris Ciceronis_, p. 949. Cf. his _Epistle to Varro_ for an account of a lost MS. of that author. _Ibid._ p. 708.]
[Footnote 22: _Ibid._ p. 948. Cf. _De Ignorantia_, pp. 1053, 1054.
See, too, the letter to Nicolaus Syocerus of Constantinople, _Epist.
Var._ xx. p. 998, thanking him for the Homer and the Plato, in which Petrarch gives an account of his slender Greek studies. "Homerus tuus apud me mutus, immo vero ego apud illum surdus sum. Gaudeo tamen vel aspectu solo, et saepe illum amplexus et suspirans dico.... Plato philosophorum princeps ... nunc tandem tuo munere Philosophorum principi Poetarum princeps a.s.serit. Quis tantis non gaudeat et glorietur hospitibus?... Graecos spectare, et si nihil aliud, certe juvat." The letter urging Boccaccio to translate Homer--"an tuo studio, mea impensa fieri possit, ut Homerus integer bibliothecae huic, ubi pridem Graecus habitat, tandem Latinus accedat"--will be found [Transcriber"s Note: original missing "in"] _Ep. Rer. Sen._ lib. iii.
5, p. 775. In another letter, _Ep. Rer. Sen._ lib. vi. 2, p. 807, he thanks Boccaccio for the Latin version.]
[Footnote 23: _De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, p. 43. A plea for public as against private collections of useful books. "Multos in vinculis tenes," &c.]
So far the outside only of Petrarch"s instinct for humanism has been touched. How fully he possessed its large and liberal spirit is shown by the untiring war he carried on against formalism, tradition, pedantry, and superst.i.tion. Whatever might impede the free play of the intellect aroused his bitterest hatred. Against the narrow views of scholastic theologians, against the futile preoccupations of the Middle-Age materialists, against the lawyers and physicians and astrologers in vogue, he declared inexorable hostility.[24] These men, by their puerilities and falsities, obstructed the natural action of the mind; therefore Petrarch attacked them. At the same time he recognised the liberators of the reason by a kind of tact. Though he could not interpret the sixteen dialogues of Plato he possessed in Greek, he perceived intuitively that Plato, as opposed to Aristotle, would become the saint of liberal philosophy, surveyed by him as in a Pisgah-view. His enthusiasm for Cicero and Virgil was twofold; in both respects he proved how capable he was of moulding the taste and directing the mental force of his successors. As an artist, he discerned in their style the harmonies of sound and the proprieties of diction, whereby Latin might once again become the language of fine thoughts and delicate emotions. As a champion of intellectual independence, he saw that, studying their large discourse of all things which the reason and imagination can appropriate, the thinkers of the modern age might shake off scholastic fetters, and enter into the inheritance of spiritual freedom. Poetry and rhetoric he regarded not merely as the fine arts of literature, but as two chief instruments whereby the man of genius arrives at self-expression, perpetuates the qualities of his own soul, and impresses his character upon the age. Since this realisation of the individual in a high and puissant work of art appeared to him the n.o.blest aim of man on earth, it followed that the inspired speech of the poet and the eloquence of the orator became for Petrarch the summit of ambition, the two-peaked Parna.s.sus he struggled through his lifetime to ascend.[25] The ideal was literary; but literature implied for Petrarch more than words and phrases. It was not enough to make melodious verse, or to move an audience with well-sounding periods. The hexameters of the epic and the paragraphs of the oration had to contain solid thought, to be the genuine outcome of the poet"s or the rhetorician"s soul. The writer was bound to be a preacher, to discover truth, and make the truths he found agreeable to the world.[26] His life, moreover, ought to be in perfect harmony with all he sought to teach.[27] Upon the purity of his enthusiasm, the sincerity of his inspiration, depended the future well-being of the world for which he laboured.[28] Thus for this one man at least the art of letters was a priesthood; and the earnestness of his vocation made him fit to be the master of succeeding ages. It is not easy for us to appreciate the boldness and sincerity of these conceptions. Many of them, since the days of Petrarch, have been overstrained and made ridiculous by false pretensions. Besides, the whole point of view has been appropriated; and men invariably undervalue what they feel they cannot lose. It is only by comparing Petrarch"s own philosophy of literature with the dulness of the schoolmen in their decadence, and with the stylistic shallowness of subsequent scholars, that we come to comprehend how luminous and novel was the thesis he supported.
[Footnote 24: See the four books of Invectives, _Contra Medic.u.m quendam_, and the treatise _De sui ipsius et aliorum Ignorantia_. Page 1038 of the last dissertation contains a curious list of frivolous questions discussed by the Averrhoists. Cf. the letter on the decadence of true learning, _Ep. Var._ 31, p. 1020; the letter to a friend exhorting him to combat Averrhoism, _Epist. sine t.i.tulo_, 18, p. 731; two letters on physicians, _Epist. Rerum Senilium_, lib. xii.
1 and 2, pp. 897-914; a letter to Frances...o...b..uno on the lies of the astrologers, _Epist. Rer. Sen._ lib. i. 6, p. 747; a letter to Boccaccio on the same theme, _Epist. Rer. Sen._ lib. iii. 1, p. 765; another on physicians to Boccaccio, _Epist. Rer. Sen._ lib. v. 4, p.
796. Cf. the Critique of Alchemy, _De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, p.
93.]
[Footnote 25: In comparing the orator and the poet, Petrarch gives the palm to the former. He thought the perfect rhetorician, capable of expressing sound philosophy with clearness, was rarer than the poet.
See _De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, lib. ii. dial. 102, p. 192.]
[Footnote 26: See, among other pa.s.sages, _Inv. contra Medic.u.m_, lib.
i. p. 1092. "Poetae studium est veritatem veram pulchris velaminibus adornare." Cf. p. 905, the paragraph beginning "Officium est ejus fingere," &c.]
[Footnote 27: See the preface to the _Epistolae Familiares_, p. 570.
"Scribendi enim mihi vivendique unus (ut auguror) finis erit."]
[Footnote 28: For his lofty conception of poetry see the two letters to Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola, pp. 740, 941. _Epist. Rerum Senilium_, lib. i. 4, lib. xiv. 11.]
Having thus conceived of literature, Petrarch obtained a standard for estimating the barren culture of his century. He taxed the disputations of the doctors with lifeless repet.i.tion unmeaning verbiage. Schoolman after schoolman had been occupied with formal trifles. The erudition of the jurist and the theologian revealed nothing fruitful for the heart or intellect; and everything was valueless that did not come straight from a man"s soul, speaking to the soul of one who heard him. At the same time he read the Fathers and the Scriptures in a new light. Augustine, some few of whose sentences had been used as links in the catena of dogmatic orthodoxy, seemed to Petrarch no longer a mere master of theology, but a man conversing with him across the chasm of eight centuries. In the "Confessions," "running over with a fount of tears," the poet of Vaucluse divined a kindred nature; one who used exalted eloquence for the expression of vital thoughts and pa.s.sionate emotions; one, moreover, who had reached the height of human happiness in union with G.o.d.[29] Not less real was the grasp he laid upon the prophets and apostles of the Bible. All words that bore a message to his heart were words of authority and power. The _ipse dixit_ of an Aristotle or a Seraphic doctor had for him no weight, unless it came home to him as a man.[30] Even Cicero and Seneca, the saints of philosophical antiquity, he dared to criticise for practising less wisdom than they preached.[31]
[Footnote 29: The references to Augustine as a "divine genius," equal to Cicero in eloquence, superior to the cla.s.sics in his knowledge of Christ, are too frequent for citation. See, however, _Fam. Epist._ lib. ii. 9, p. 601; the letter to Boccaccio, _Variarum_, 22, p. 1001; and _Fam. Epist._ lib. iv. 9, p. 635. The phrase describing the _Confessions_, quoted in my text, is from Petrarch"s letter to his brother Gerard, _Epist. Var._ 27, p. 1012, "Scatentes lachrymis Confessionum libros."]
[Footnote 30: "Sum sectarum negligens, veri appetens." _Epist. Rer.
Sen._ lib. i. 5, p. 745. "Nam apud Horatium Flacc.u.m, nullius jurare in verba magistri, puer valde didiceram." _Epist. Fam._ lib. iv. 10, p.
637.]
[Footnote 31: See the letters addressed to Cicero and Seneca, pp. 705, 706.]
While regarding Petrarch as the first and, in some respects, the greatest of the humanists, we are bound to recognise the faults as well as the good qualities he shared with them. To dwell on these in detail would be a thankless task, were it not for the conviction that his personality impressed itself too strongly on the fourteenth century to escape our criticism. We cannot afford to leave even the foibles of the man who gave a pattern to his generation unstudied.
Foremost among these may be reckoned his vanity, his eagerness to grasp the poet"s crown, his appet.i.te for flattery, his restless change from place to place in search of new admirers, his self-complacent garrulity. This vanity was perhaps inseparable from the position he a.s.sumed upon the threshold of the modern world. It was hardly possible that the prophet of a new phase of culture should not look down with contempt upon the uneducated ma.s.ses, and believe that learning raised a man into a demiG.o.d. Study of the cla.s.sics taught him to despise his age and yearn for immortality; but the a.s.surance of the honours that he sought, could only come to him upon the lips of his contemporaries.
In conflict with the dulness and the darkness of preceding centuries, he felt the need of a new motive, unrecognised by the Church and banished from the cloister. That motive was the thirst for fame, the craving to make his personality eternal in the minds of men. Meanwhile he was alone in a dim wilderness of transitory interests and sordid aims, where human life was shadowy, and where, when death arrived, there would remain no memory of what had been. The gloom of this present in contrast with the glory of the past he studied, and the glory of the future he desired, confirmed his egotism. His name and fame depended on his self-a.s.sertion. To achieve renown by writing, to wrest for himself even in his lifetime a firm place among the immortals, became his feverish spur to action. He was conscious how deep a hold the pa.s.sion for celebrity had taken on his nature; and not unfrequently he speaks of it as a disease.[32] The Christian within him wrestled vigorously with the renascent Pagan. Religion taught him to renounce what ambition prompted him to grasp. Yet he continued to deceive himself. While penning dissertations on the worthlessness of praise and the futility of fame, he trimmed his sails to catch the breeze of popular applause; and as his reputation widened, his desires grew ever stronger. The last years of his life were spent in writing epistles to the great men of the past, in whom alone he recognised his equals, and to posterity, in whom he hoped to meet at last with judges worthy of him.
[Footnote 32: "aegritudo" is a phrase that constantly recurs in his epistles to indicate a restless, craving habit of the soul. See, too, the whole second book of the _De Contemptu Mundi_.]
This almost morbid vanity, peculiar to Petrarch"s temperament and encouraged by the circ.u.mstances of his life, introduced a division between his practice and his profession. He was never tired of praising solitude, and many years of his manhood he spent in actual retirement at Vaucluse.[33] Yet he only loved seclusion as a contrast to the society of Courts, and would have been most miserable if the world, taking him at his own estimate, had left him in peace. No one wrote more eloquently about equal friendship, or professed a stronger zeal for candid criticism. Yet he admitted few but professed admirers to his intimacy, and regarded his literary antagonists as personal detractors. The same sensitive egotism led him to depreciate the fame of Dante, in whom he cannot but have recognised a poet in the highest sense superior to himself.[34] Again, while he complained of celebrity as an obstacle to studious employment, he showed the most acute interest when the details of his life were called in question.[35]
Nothing, if we took his philosophic treatises for record, would have pleased him better than to live unnoticed. His letters make it manifest that he believed the eyes of the whole world were fixed upon him, and that he courted this attention of the public with a greedy appet.i.te.
[Footnote 33: See the treatise _De Vita Solitaria_, pp. 223-292, and the letters on "Vaucluse," pp. 691-697.]
[Footnote 34: See the discussion of this point in Baldelli"s _Vita del Boccaccio_, pp. 130-135.]
[Footnote 35: Compare the chapter in the dissertation _De Remediis_ on troublesome notoriety, p. 177, with the letter on his reception at Arezzo, p. 918, the letter to Nerius Morandus on the false news of his death, p. 776, and the letter to Boccaccio on his detractors, p. 749.]
These qualities and contradictions mark Petrarch as a man of letters, not of action. He belonged essentially to the _genus irritabile vatum_, for whom the sphere of thoughts expressed on paper is more vivid than the world of facts. We may trace a corresponding weakness in his chief enthusiasms. Unable to distinguish between the realities of existence and the dreamland of his study, he hailed in Rienzi the restorer of old Rome, while he stigmatised his friends the Colonnesi as barbarian intruders.[36] The Rome he read of in the pages of Livy, seemed to the imagination of this visionary still alive and powerful; nor did he feel the absurdity of addressing the mediaeval rabble of the Romans in phrases high-flown for a Gracchus.[37] While he courted the intimacy of the Correggi, and lived as a house-guest with the Visconti, he denounced these princes as tyrants, and appealed to the Emperor to take the reins and bring all Italy beneath his yoke.[38]
Herein, it may be urged, Petrarch did but share a delusion common to his age. This is true; but the point to notice is the contradiction between his theories and the habits of his life. He was not a partisan on the Ghibelline side, but a believer in impossible ideals. His patriotism was no less literary than his temperament. The same tendency to measure all things by a student"s standard made him exaggerate mere verbal eloquence. Words, according to his view, were power. Cicero held the highest place in his esteem, because his declamation was most copious. Aristotle, in spite of his profound philosophy, was censured for his lack of rhetoric.[39] Throughout the studied works of Petrarch we can trace this vice of a stylistic ideal.
Though he never writes without some solid germ of thought, he loves to play with phrases, producing an effect of unreality, and seeming emulous of casuistical adroitness.[40]