Violante Visconti, a few years later, was wedded to the English
duke of Clarence. Petrarch was now commissioned to congratulate
King John upon his liberation from captivity to England.
This duty performed, he returned to Milan, where in 1361 he
received news of the deaths of his son Giovanni and his old friend
Socrates. Both had been carried off by plague.
The remaining years of Petrarch’s life, important as they were for the furtherance of humanistic studies, may be briefly condensed. On the 11th of May 1362 he settled at Padua, from the neighbourhood of which he never moved again to any great distance. The same year saw him at Venice, making a donation of his library to the republic of St Mark. Here his friend Boccaccio introduced to him the Greek teacher Leontius Pilatus. Petrarch, who possessed a MS. of Homer and a portion of Plato, never acquired the Greek language, although he attempted to gain some little knowledge of it in his later years. Homer, he said, was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer; and he could only approach the Iliad in Boccaccio’s rude Latin version. About this period he saw his daughter Francesca happily married, and undertook the education of a young scholar from Ravenna, whose sudden disappearance from his household caused him the deepest grief This youth has been identified, but on insufficient grounds, with that Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna who was destined to form a most important link between Petrarch and the humanists of the next age of culture. Gradually his oldest friends dropped off. Azzo di Correggio died in 1362, and Laelius, Simonides, Barbato, in the following year. His own death was reported in 1365, but he survived another decade. Much of this last stage of his life was occupied at Padua in a controversy with the Averroists, whom he regarded as dangerous antagonists both to sound religion and to sound culture. A curious treatise, which grew in part out of this dispute and out of a previous duel with physicians, was the book Upon his own Ignorance and that of many others. At last, in 1369, tired with the bustle of a town so big as Padua, he retired to Arqua, a village in Euganean hills, where he continued his usual train of literary occupations, employing several secretaries, and studying unremittingly. All through these declining years his friendship with Boccaccio was maintained and strengthened. It rested on a solid basis of mutual affection and of common studies, the different temperaments of the two scholars securing them against the disagreements of rivalry or jealousy. One of Petrarch’s last compositions was a Latin version of Boccaccio’s story of Griselda. On the 18th of July 1374 his people found the old poet and scholar dead among his books in the library of that little house which looks across the hills and lowlands towards the Adriatic.
When we attempt to estimate Petrarch’s position in the history of modern culture, the first thing which strikes us is that he was even less eminent as an Italian poet than as the founder of Humanism, the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy. What he achieved for the modern world was not merely to bequeath to his Italian imitators masterpieces of lyrical art unrivalled for perfection of workmanship, but also, and far more, to open out for Europe a new sphere of mental activity. Standing within the threshold of the middle ages, he surveyed the kingdom of the modern spirit, and, by his own inexhaustible industry in the field of scholarship and study, he determined what we call the revival of learning. By bringing the men of his own generation into sympathetic contact with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse to that European movement which restored freedom. self-consciousness, and the faculty of progress to the human intellect. He was the first man to collect libraries, to accumulate coins, to advocate the preservation of MSS. For him the authors of the Greek and Latin world were living men—more real, in fact, than those with whom he corresponded; and the rhetorical epistles he addressed to Cicero, Seneca and Varro prove that he dwelt with them on terms of sympathetic intimacy. So far-reaching were the interests controlled by him in this capacity of humanist that his achievement as an Italian lyrist seems by comparison insignificant.
Petrarch’s ideal of humanism was essentially a noble one He regarded the orator and the poet as teachers, bound to complete themselves by education, and to exhibit to the world an image of perfected personality in prose and verse of studied beauty. Self-culture and self-effectuation seemed to him the highest aims of man. Everything which contributed to the formation of a free, impassioned, liberal individuality he regarded as praiseworthy. Everything which retarded the attainment of that end was contemptible in his eyes. The authors of antiquity, the Holy Scriptures and the fathers of the Church were valued by him as one common source of intellectual enlightenment. Eminently religious, and orthodox in his convictions, he did not seek to substitute a pagan for the Christian ideal. This was left for the scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. At the same time, the Latin orators, historians and poets were venerated by him as depositories of a tradition only second in importance to revelation. For him there was no schism between Rome and Galilee, between classical genius and sacred inspiration. Though the latter took the first rank in relation to man’s eternal welfare, 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 important 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 he poured forth the secrets of his own soul in the book De contemptu mundi.
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 campaigns; 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 character 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 judgment. 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 medieval 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
