Collected Poetical Works of Francesco Petrarch

by Francesco Petrarch

  Take Seneca’s advice then, “When you see how many people are in front of you, think also how many are behind. If you would be reconciled with Providence and your own lot in life, think of all those you have surpassed;” and as the same wise man says in the same place, “Set a goal to your desires such as you cannot overleap, even if you wish.”

  Petrarch. I have long ago set such a goal to my desires, and, unless I am mistaken, a very modest one; but in the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth?

  S. Augustine. Can your peace of mind be disturbed by the opinion of the crowd, whose judgment is never true, who never call anything by its right name? But unless my recollection is at fault, you used to look down on their opinion.

  Petrarch. Never, believe me, did I despise it more than I do now. I care as much for what the crowd thinks of me as I care what I am thought of by the beasts of the field.

  S. Augustine. Well, then?

  Petrarch. What raises my spleen is that having, of all my contemporaries whom I know, the least exalted ambitions, not one of them has encountered so many difficulties as I have in the accomplishment of my desires. Most assuredly I never aspired to the highest place; I call the spirit of Truth as witness who judges us, who sees all, and who has always read my most secret thoughts. She knows very well that whenever after the manner of men I have gone over in my mind all the degrees and conditions of our human lot. I have never found in the highest place that tranquillity and serenity of soul which I place above all other goods; and for that matter, having a horror of a life full of disquiet and care, I have ever chosen, in my modest judgment, some middle position, and given, not lip-service, but the homage of my heart to that truth expressed by Horace —

  “Whoso with little wealth will live content,

  Easy and free his days shall all be spent;

  His well-built house keeps out the winter wind,

  Too modest to excite an envious mind.”

  And I admire the reasons he gives in the same Ode not less than the sentiment itself.

  “The tallest trees most fear the tempest’s might,

  The highest towers come down with most affright,

  The loftiest hills feel first the thunder smite.”

  Alas! it is just the middle place that it has never been my lot to enjoy.

  S. Augustine. And what if that which you think is a middle position is in truth below you? What if as a matter of fact you have for a long while enjoyed a really middle place, enjoyed it abundantly? Nay, what if you have in truth left the middle far behind, and are become to a great many people a man more to be envied than despised?

  Petrarch. Well, if they think my lot one to be envied, I think the contrary.

  S. Augustine. Yes, your false opinion is precisely the cause of all your miseries, and especially of this last. As Cicero puts it, “You must flee Charybdis, with all hands to the oars, and sails as well!”

  Petrarch. Whither can I flee? where direct my ship? In a word, what am I to think except what I see before my eyes?

  S. Augustine. You only see from side to side where your view is limited. If you look behind you will discover a countless throng coming after, and that you are somewhat nearer to the front rank than to that in the rear, but pride and stubbornness suffer you not to turn your gaze behind you.

  Petrarch. Nevertheless from time to time I have done so, and have noticed many people coming along behind. I have no cause to blush at my condition, but I complain of having so many cares. I deplore, if I may yet again make use of a phrase of Horace, that I must live “only from day to day.” As to this restlessness of which I have suffered more than enough, I gladly subscribe to what the same poet says in the same place.

  “What prayers are mine? O may I yet possess

  The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less!

  Let the few years that Fate may grant me still

  Be all my own, not held at others’ will.”

  Always in a state of suspense, always uncertain of the future, Fortune’s favours have no attraction for me. Up to now, as you see, I have lived always in dependence on others; it is the bitterest cup of all. May heaven grant me some peace in what is left of my old age, and that the mariner who has lived so long amid the stormy waves may die in port!

  S. Augustine. So then in this great whirlpool of human affairs, amid so many vicissitudes, with the future all dark before you; in a word, placed as you are at the caprice of Fortune, you will be the only one of so many millions of mankind who shall live a life exempt from care! Look what you are asking for, O mortal man! look what you demand! As for that complaint you have brought forward of never having lived a life of your own, what it really amounts to is not that you have lived in poverty, but more or less in subservience. I admit, as you say, that it is a thing very troublesome. However, if you look around you will find very few men who have lived a life of their own. Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others. To quote you a striking instance, Julius Cæsar, of whom some one has reported this true but arrogant saying, “The human race only lives for a small number,” Julius Cæsar, after he had subdued the human race to live for himself alone, did himself live for other people. Perhaps you will ask me for whom did he live? and I reply, for those who slew him — for Brutus, Cimber, and other traitorous heads of that conspiracy, for whom his inexhaustible munificence proved too small to satisfy their rapacity.

  Petrarch. I must admit you have brought me to my senses, and I will never any more complain either of my obligations to others or of my poverty.

  S. Augustine. Complain rather of your want of wisdom, for it is this alone that can obtain for you liberty and true riches. For the rest, the man who quietly endures to go without the cause of those good effects, and then makes complaint of not having them, cannot truly be said to have any intelligent understanding of either the cause or the effects. But now tell me what is it that makes you suffer, apart from what we have been speaking of? Is it any weakness of health or any secret trouble?

  Petrarch. I confess that my body has always been a burden every time I think of myself; but when I cast my eyes on the unwieldiness of other people’s bodies, I acknowledge that I have a fairly obedient slave. I would to Heaven I could say as much of my soul, but I am afraid that in it there is what is more than a match for me.

  S. Augustine. May it please God to bring that also under the rule of reason. But to come back to your body, of what do you complain?

  Petrarch. Of that of which most other people also complain. I charge it with being mortal, with implicating me in its sufferings, loading me with its burdens, asking me to sleep when my soul is awake, and subjecting me to other human necessities which it would be tedious to go through.

  S. Augustine. Calm yourself, I entreat you, and remember you are a man. Presently your agitation will cease. If any other thing troubles you, tell me.

  Petrarch. Have you never heard how cruelly Fortune used me? This stepdame, who in a single day with her ruthless hand laid low all my hopes, all my resources, my family and home?

  S. Augustine. I see your tears are running down, and I pass on. The present is not the time for instruction, but only for giving warning; let, then, this simple one suffice. If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which; you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to nought along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field for long meditation.

  Petrarch. Who shall find words to utter my daily disgust for this place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns, the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collect
ed? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle — streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of characters — such diverse rôles in life — the endless clamour of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets?

  All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student’s habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit.

  “Now,” I say in mockery, “now betake yourself to noble thoughts “ —

  “Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre.”

  S. Augustine. That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study, for as the same poet says —

  “Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade.”

  And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words —

  “The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse,

  And bards the noisy life of towns refuse.”

  If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca’s letter on this subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also on “Tranquillity of Soul”; you have beside, for combating this mental malady, an excellent book of Cicero’s which sums up the discussions of the third day in his Tusculan Orations, and is dedicated to Brutus.

  Petrarch. You know I have read all that work and with great attention.

  S. Augustine. And have you got no help from it?

  Petrarch. Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes.

  S. Augustine. This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life, which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the fruit of your reading.

  Petrarch. What kind of notes?

  S. Augustine. Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason’s control.

  Petrarch. Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself. In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire. It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high — what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil’s words —

  “There, in a cave profound, King Æolus

  Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind,

  Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls

  Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side

  Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top

  Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand.”

  So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts, — who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line —

  “And calms their passion and allays their wrath.”

  S. Augustine. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet’s story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth.

  But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away.

  By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero —

  “The fount and head of all miseries.”

  Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins — always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair — then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain.

  As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will find the same resul
t easily if you will but first calm down the tumult of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world.

  And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has oppressed your soul.

  Petrarch. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite overthrown.

  S. Augustine. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and be more reconciled to your fortune?

  Petrarch. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty. And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous orator. Sallust has said of fortune that “all things are under her dominion.” And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that “she is the mistress; of human affairs.” For myself, perhaps I will declare what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did.

  S. Augustine. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you, and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion?