Petrarch's Secret; or, the Soul's Conflict with Passion Three Dialogues Between Himself and S. Augustine

Yet no English translation has hitherto been published. A French version by M. Victor Develay was issued a few years ago, and received the recognition of the French Academy; and, considering the great importance of Petrarch in the history of the Renaissance, not merely in Italy but in Europe, it is time that a similar opportunity of knowing him more fully was offered to English readers; for there are signs on both sides of the Atlantic that the number of those interested in him is steadily growing. The reason for this is undoubtedly the fact that, as the whole work of Petrarch comes to be better known, interest in him as a man increases. Mr. Sidney Lee has lately reminded us of his wide range and predominating influence in the matter of the sonnet in France and in Elizabethan England, as well as in his own country; and yet that influence was very far indeed from revealing all that Petrarch was. It was largely an influence of style, a triumph of the perfection of form, and his imitators did not trouble much about the precise nature of the sentiment and spirit informing the style. When this came to be weighed in the balances of a later day, the tendency of English feeling was to regard his sentiment as a trifle too serious and weak. The love-making of the Cavaliers brought in a robuster tone. When once the question was raised, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" there was really no good answer to it on Petrarchan lines, and the consequence was that his name and fame suffered something of eclipse among us. But eclipses are transient events, and when literary England felt once more the attraction of Italy in the end of the eighteenth century it was not only Dante who began to resume his sway and to provoke translation, but Petrarch also. Then attention was turned chiefly to his Italian poetry, but also in some degree to the general body of his Latin works and to his Letters, of which it is reported that Fox was among the first to perceive the high value. In England the pioneers in this direction were Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who published first a Life of Petrarch in two volumes in 1775, which had by 1805 reached a sixth edition, and, soon after, another volume called Petrarch's View of Life, purporting to be a translation, but in fact a very loose and attenuated abstract of the treatise De remediis utriusque Fortunæ, which nevertheless reached a new edition in 1797. Then came a volume of Essays on Petrarch (Murray 1823) by the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, and a little later a second Life of the Poet by no less a person than Thomas Campbell, also in two volumes.

Testifying to the re-awakened interest in Petrarch, numerous translations also of his poetry were published by Lady Dacre, Hugh Boyd, Leigh Hunt, Capel Lofft, and many others, who took up after a long interval the tradition begun by Chaucer and handed on by Surrey, Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Drummond of Hawthornden, and George Chapman.

Then for a while there was a pause, and the main drift of such attention in England as could be spared for things Italian in mid-Victorian days was concentrated on the greater luminary of the Divine Comedy and the exciting political events of the sixties; though some attention was drawn to things connected with Petrarch by Lytton's novel of Rienzi, which was first published in 1835 and had a considerable vogue.

Meanwhile in Italy itself his fame was well served by the excellent collection and reprint of his Latin letters by Fracasetti in three vols. (1859-63), and since that time there have appeared several important works dealing with the larger aspects of his life and work, most notable among them being Koerting's Petrarka's Leben und Werke (Leipsig 1878), and in France M. P. de Nolhac's Pétrarque et l'Humanisme (two vols., 1907, new edition), with other subsidiary works, and four small volumes by M. Henri Cochin, elucidating what is known of Petrarch's brother Gherardo and some of his many friends. Amongst ourselves in late years, following the labours of J. A. Symonds in his history of the Renaissance, we have Henry Reeve's small but well-planned volume in the "Foreign Classics for English Readers," and, more recently still, Mr. Hollway Calthrop's Petrarch: his Life, Work and Times (1907), and Mrs. Maud Jerrold's Francesco Petrarca: Poet and Humanist (1909).

It is significant that both the last writers single out the Secretum for its psychological interest, the former stating that "to those who feel the charm of Petrarch's nature and the intense humanity of his character, these three Dialogues are the most fascinating of all his writings"; and the latter "that this conflict of the dual self is of quite peculiar interest."

Mrs. Jerrold indeed goes so far as to say that Petrarch "plunges into the most scathing self-examination that any man ever made. Whether the book was intended for the public we may well doubt, both from the words of the preface and from the fact that it does not appear to have been published till after the author's death. But however this may be, it remains one of the world's great monuments of self-revelation and ranks with the Confessions of S. Augustine"--a verdict which to some critics will seem to have a touch of overstatement, though hardly beyond the opinion of Petrarch's French students, and not altogether unpardonable in so enthusiastic an admirer of her subject, and a verdict which at least would not have been displeasing to Petrarch himself.

Among the many points of human interest to be found in the Dialogues not the least is the one connected with Accidie, a theme which has of itself attracted special study in the present day, particularly since attention was called to it by the late Bishop of Oxford in his well-known introduction to the Spirit of Discipline. Observers of mental life incline to the view that the form of depression denoted by the mediæval word was not confined to those times or met with only in monasteries, and it is curious that he who is sometimes called the "first of the moderns" should take us into his confidence as to his sufferings from this trouble, and exemplify the truth of the observation to which reference has been made. M. P. de Nolhac, in his interesting work entitled Le Frère de Pétrarque, calls particular attention to this trait in Petrarch's character, and in an appendix on the subject writes, "Mais il faut surtout lire l'émouvante discussion que Pétrarque, dans le second dialogue du Secretum, suppose entre Saint Augustin et lui-meme, les aveux entrecoupés de sanglots qu'il laisse échapper. Cette torture, dit-il, où il passe des jours et des nuits, a pourtant en elle je ne sais quelle atroce volupté tellement que parfois il en conte de s'y arracher" (p. 220). It is the remarking on this note of self-will, this voluptas dolendi, that M. de Nolhac considers is Petrarch's special contribution to the subject and furnishes a new point beyond what is in previous definitions.

The fundamental question raised by these Dialogues is the question of what was the real nature and character of Petrarch, and wherein lay the secret of his extraordinary charm and influence among his contemporaries, and especially among contemporary men? It is difficult to convey in few words how great an impression the study of his Latin works makes in regard to this influence in his own lifetime. Of course, a reader is soon aware of the trait of personal vanity in Petrarch and of certain unconscious littlenesses, as in the matter of his appreciation of Dante; but the strange thing is how little this interfered with the regard and admiration extended to him by many sorts and conditions of men. In the ordinary intercourse of life one is apt to think such a trait fatal to anything like respect, and it must always detract somewhat from the full stature of any mind, but in the case of Petrarch it seems evident that he was one to whom much was forgiven, and that the reason is to be found in the presence in him of so rich an assemblage of other and better qualities that this one hardly counted at all, or was looked on with kindly amusement by friends large-hearted enough to think it nothing compared with what was good and admirable in his mind. We may take it for granted that, as he hints in his "Letter to Posterity," he started with the advantage of a good presence and a sufficient care of his own person and appearance in younger days; and it is evident that he had by nature a certain engaging frankness and impulsiveness, which nevertheless were not inconsistent with the contrasted qualities of gravity and dignity, learned at first from his father and mother and their friends, and cultivated by his study of the Law and afterwards by his attendance on the Papal court at Avignon. One can discern this in his Letters and see it reflected in those that were written to him or about him. But beyond these introductory qualities, as they may be called, there were other deeper traits, of rarer kind, that must be noted before one can understand the position he attained and has held so long. Studying his work from the cool distance of six centuries, one is inclined to judge that the most fundamental quality of his nature was his love of literature, and that every other trait took a subordinate place to this.

It is perhaps doubtful whether this or the life of personal affection, or even of devotion in a monastery, would have gained the upper hand if the circumstances of his life had been different in the matter of his love for Laura; but taking into consideration that she was separated from him apparently by temperament and circumstance, the one course that remained open to him without let or hindrance was the life of literature in the sense of devotion to the great writers of the Past and the practice of the art of writing for himself. He loved this for its own sake, and at the same time he was quickened by the sense of a new learning, which, since his time and largely by the impetus he gave it, has taken form and outline in a wonderful way, but was then only like the first streak of dawn upon the sky.

Petrarch was not the first man to find a certain contradiction between his desires and the possibilities of life around him, and to pass many years under the pain of contrary attractions that could not all be followed to fulfilment This conflict is what gives interest to the Secretum. Some have thought, and the idea was expressed by one of his correspondents, that his love for Laura was very much of a literary pose. Yet that such a view is an insufficient account of it seems pretty clearly established by the work here translated. It is, indeed, plain that his feelings ran a course, and not a smooth one, and did not continue in one stay; he came to see the whole matter in a changed light, and yet not wholly changed; his relation was transfigured, not abandoned, and after the death of Laura, which took place when he was forty-four, it continued as a memory from which the pain had faded away and only what was uplifting remained.