CHAPTER IV.

PETRARCH AND LAURA.

On the 6th April 1327, which was the Monday in Holy Week, Petrarch saw, in the church of the Nuns of St Clara at Avignon, the lady who stamped at a glance her image for ever on his genius and his life.

What man is there of tenderness and imagination who does not look back to " some particular star"-the morning-star of life-which shed an influence over his earlier years that no time can obliterate, and still lingers, though it be in the setting, upon the horizon of the past? To Petrarch that influence lasted always; it rose in the fervour of youth; it strengthened in the maturity of manhood; it became his art, his philosophy, his religion; neither Time nor Death quenched its radiance; and the visionary glory spread and grew until it lost itself in dreams of heaven.

Laura de Noves (for that was the name of her family) had married in 1325 Hugo de Sade, a gentleman of the Avignonais, whose family flourishes there to this day. Laura was born in 1307; she was consequently three years younger than Petrarch, and just twenty when first he saw her. These facts are attested beyond all doubt

F.C.-IV.

by documents in the archives of the De Sade family; by her will, made a few days before her death, in 1348; and by her tomb in the sepulchral vault of the family in the Church of the Cordeliers at Avignon. It is therefore useless to follow the speculations which have been published as to the person of Laura, and, indeed, as to her existence. The known facts of her life, few in number, correspond exactly with the details which may be collected from Petrarch's own Sonnets and Letters. Laura de Sade was beautiful, and she was virtuous. Her husband is said to have been a jealous man—not unnaturally, if the passion of a poet for his wife made her immortally famous as that poet's mistress. But, in truth, there is nothing to show that Laura was at all sensible to the passion she inspired. She was, as far as we know, a very good wife to Hugo de Sade; and we have Petrarch's own authority for the fact that she presented her husband with a large family of children. The reader of Petrarch's amatory verses, and of these pages dedicated to his memory, will seek in vain for any incidents of romance to give a colour of reality to those endless effusions of the poet's heart and lyre. The merest trifles, such as the passage of his lady's shadow, the dropping of her glove, the scent of a flower, the rustle of a laurel bush, are all that Petrarch's imagination fed on; and it may be doubted whether he was ever honoured by a nearer approach to her personal favour or even acquaintance.

Romantic devotion to a well-known beauty was a characteristic of the age of chivalry, not yet extinct. It inspired the Troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it had fired the legendary prowess of King

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Arthur's knights. It mingled with the feats of arms in the tilt-yard, and with the prayers and ritual of the sanctuary. Surrounded and adorned by this atmosphere of dutiful and courteous admiration, the part of a "Queen of Beauty" was one to which women of the purest lives might by the custom of the times aspire. The romances of chivalry breathe no other spirit; and the same ideal enthusiasm lingered in the world long enough to be ridiculed by Cervantes, and even to inspire the "toasts" of the last century.

In Petrarch this ideal passion took the shape, not of knightly exercises, but of poetry. He was one of the men gifted with an inimitable art of expression, who can create and perpetuate by language emotions more intense and lasting than their own. Without disputing the reality of his tenderness for Laura, it is impossible not to see that it was prodigiously enhanced by the pleasure he found in transfusing it into verse. There is in the Canzoniere at least as much of the artist as of the lover; and the sonnets which record his sufferings at a separation from an unrelenting mistress, or his matured grief over her early grave, all partake of this artificial character. This, too, was in the spirit and taste of the age.

Petrarch boasts in one of his letters that he copied and followed no one, and declared that he would not read the great poem of Dante for many years, lest it should affect his own style. But he is the lineal descendant and direct offspring of the troubadours of Languedoc and Provence, and the earlier poets of Italy. In his own "" Triumph of Love" he passes them all in review-Arnauld Daniel, Pierre Roger, De Marueil, Folquet of Marseilles, and Geoffrey Rudel; and in

Italy, Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d'Arezzo, Dante himself. The theme was the same; and although it cannot be said that the theory of Platonic love, which entered Italy from Greece in the fifteenth century, was familiar to these early poets, yet the spirit of devotion to the beautiful, the pure, and the true was allied in them to a simpler and a nobler faith than that of the Humanists of a later age. The highest and most perfect consecration of these sentiments is, no doubt, to be found in the 'Vita Nuova' of Dante, rising, as it were, by the steps of Paradise, to the beatific vision which is the transfiguration of love. Petrarch, at his loftiest flight, reaches no such level of grandeur and power; but then he retains a graceful familiarity, a dramatic charm, a perfection of language, which were sometimes lost in the sublime depths of the Dantesque imagery.

It is an anachronism to ascribe the diffusion of these sentiments in the Italy of the fourteenth century to the dialogues or influence of Plato. The Greek language

was still unknown to the most learned men of that century. No Greek manuscripts had been collected. Here and there, the troubles of the East sent some wandering scholar, like Barlaam or Pilatus, across the Adriatic, who was hailed as a marvel. Nothing is more strange than this total severance of the Latin and the Hellenic races. Aristotle was only known in the schools of the West through an Arabic translation, illustrated by Arabian commentators. Plato was only dimly seen by the reflected light of the Ciceronian dialogues, and by the traces of the Alexandrian school of philosophy in the early Christian Fathers. Dim as that light was, Petrarch followed it. It is curious to remark how little

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effect was ever produced on his mind by the Aristotelian traditions or the reigning philosophy of the schools. Averroes, especially, he regarded as a pestilent heretic; and one of his most vehement controversial passages was directed against four young Venetian gentlemen professing an unbounded respect for that commentator, who may justly be regarded as one of the founders of sceptical and negative opinions. Petrarch, on the contrary, held a highly spiritual and Christian creed. For him, this world, this life, were but the first steps on an infinite scale leading from earth to heaven. Nothing in humanity is complete. Nothing in Deity is deficient; and the spirit of Love, interfused through all the thoughts and actions of our being, is the guiding-star, the link, the clue, which raises the corruptible to the incorruptible, the mortal to immortality, the soul of man to its divine source in God.

These sentiments, which are nearly akin to those of Dante in the scheme of his great work, gave Petrarch a lofty pre-eminence over all his predecessors save one. He was not only a poet penning a sonnet to the eyebrow of his mistress, but a sage and a philosopher.

Italy possessed, in truth, an entire cycle of amatory poets, dating from the Sicilian Ciullo d'Alcamo at the close of the twelfth century, down to the constellation of the friends and early companions of Dante, in which the two Guidos, Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinicelli, were the most conspicuous stars.

"Thus hath one Guido from another ta'en

The praise of speech, and haply one hath passed

Through birth, who from their nest will chase the twain." -Purgatorio, B. xi.