CHAPTER IV

PETRARCH AND LAURA

How well one understands why it is that the South has produced so much art and so little philosophy! We found ourselves spending hours basking in this delicious sun, while we idly wondered how often the beautiful Laura crossed the square, exactly how she looked, and spoke, and smiled; above all, how she felt: the real truth about that mysterious romance. The customs of the day, the universal habit of love-making as part of the necessary accomplishments of a gentleman, make it difficult to recognise the genuine love-story when one finds it.

Barbara was much interested in these immortal lovers, much more so than in Rienzi's tower or old churches; and we managed to glean a good deal of desultory information on the subject, which brought us to the conclusion that Laura was a real person and Petrarch's a real passion. The fact that in his prose writings he scarcely ever alludes to his beloved one seemed to us to support our views. He did not care to talk to all the world of what he felt so deeply. Sonnets were more impersonal. In his favourite copy of Virgil he records his first meeting with Laura, and her death twenty-one years later. Barbara considered this conclusive.

"Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in early manhood in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at the first hour in the Church of St. Clara at Avignon." In the same minute way he records her death while he was at Verona, "ignorant of his fate."

"I have experienced," he adds, "a certain satisfaction in writing this bitter record of a cruel event, especially in this place where it will often come under my eyes, for so I may be led to reflect that life can afford me no farther pleasures."

He appears all through his career to have been struggling between his love for this unattainable lady and the monastic view of life as inculcated by St. Augustine. No wonder his was a tempest-tossed and melancholy soul! Among his published works the imaginary dialogue between himself and the saint lays bare the curious combat of a nature essentially modern in its instincts, while intellectually under the dominion of mediÆval theories. His sentiment was noble in character: a noble love for a noble woman; but the pitiless saint will not accept that as an excuse for the soul's enslavement. The monitor does his utmost to prove that it is a chain utterly unworthy of a rational being, whose thoughts should be fixed on things eternal. It does not occur to Petrarch to make high claim for the sentiment itself, still less to number it among eternal things, as probably it would have occurred to a mind of that idealistic type had he lived a few hundred years later. But his feeling and his mental outlook are evidently not at one. He feels ahead of his thought by many centuries, and never all his life does he succeed in harmonising the two parts of his being, and that is probably why he was always unsatisfied, sad at heart even at his gayest; unable to fully enjoy the savour of life in spite of his extraordinary fulness of opportunity and his ardent nature.

As for the theory that Laura was merely a symbol for Laurea, the crown of poetic fame, it is not easy to accept the view in face of a letter of Petrarch to his friend, Giacomo Colonna, in which he speaks of this supposition: "Would that your humorous suggestion were true; would to God it were all a pretence and not a madness!"

His defence of this passion, in the "Segreto," is described by a writer of to-day as "purely modern."

In the singular dialogue between the poet and the saint, the poet, while making a brave stand for the unconquerable sentiment, finally allows the saint to have the best of the argument.

Barbara flatly refused to listen to the theory that Petrarch and Laura never exchanged so much as a word in their lives, but it is believed by many. The poet is said to have worshipped the lady at a distance across the golden shadows of the Church of St. Clara at Avignon, where she used to come for the celebration of Mass. Her family—if to the family of de Noves she really belonged—owned a chÂteau in the neighbourhood. She married into the house of De Sades (or so runs the story) and she was a niece of the famous Fanette, who was President of the renowned Court of Love at the ChÂteau of Romanin in the Alpilles: those strange little limestone mountains that we saw to the south as we looked over the country from the Rocher du Dom.

Some writers, on the other hand, speak of a passionate history, clandestine meetings, tragedy and despair. But of this there is not a hint in the poet's own writings. Nothing certain seems to be known about the matter, and it is even regarded as entirely fabulous by some sceptics who would banish from history all its charming stories, the mere fact of a romantic flavour seeming to them to prove a legend untrue. As if real life were constructed on such dull and unimaginative lines!

If, however, the story of Petrarch and Laura be well founded, he must have been the very prince of lovers, for his love was well-nigh untiring, although seemingly hopeless, uncheered by even an occasional meeting; and it remained in his heart obstinately and irrevocably, in spite of the most persistent efforts of his intellect and his religious sense to oust it; in spite of a life among the Courts of Europe the most brilliant and varied that can be imagined.

Petrarch possessed also the genius of friendship, and had swarms of friends. When Pope Clement VI., one of the number, lay dying in his fortress palace, the poet sent a message: "Remember the epitaph of the Roman Emperor Hadrian: 'Turba Medicorum Perii.'" And he wrote a letter to the Pope in the same strain: "What makes me really tremble is to see your bed surrounded with physicians who never agree."...

One likes to picture him in these old halls and to know that he possessed the genial faculty of making people feel the happier for his presence. Yet it is recorded that "deep remorse and profound melancholy afflicted the poet's soul."

Perhaps his hopeless love may have clouded his spirit, for this does happen in exceptional natures; or is it that, in truth, there are untold agonies, late or soon, in the hearts of all who have the power to move and to delight?

Certain it is that Petrarch possessed an immense attraction for almost every type of mind and character. He must indeed have been a man of infinite charm. He was the friend of kings, scholars, Popes, princes, soldiers, statesmen. He ardently championed the cause of Rienzi, and of the Emperor Charles IV.; for the idea of keeping up the succession of the Holy Roman Empire appealed powerfully to his imagination, and when that monarch gave up his campaign before he had made good his imperial claims on Italy, Petrarch wrote bitterly reproaching him for abandoning so sacred a heritage.

In Avignon, among hosts of devoted friends, were the Princes of the House of Colonna; and the friendship was not destroyed even when Petrarch sided warmly with Rienzi against the turbulent nobles of Rome, among whom the Colonna were pre-eminent.

But in spite of his popularity in the Papal city, Petrarch heartily detested this Gallic Babylon, as he called it, and loved to retire from its splendours to Vaucluse, not far off, where he tried to regain serenity in the silence of that strangely romantic spot. A sad-looking little house is still pointed out as the home of the poet; with a shady, wild garden running down to the waters of the Sorgue as they rush foaming from the narrow vale, whose stupendous cliffs are as gloomy and hope-destroying as St. Augustine himself!—St. Augustine as represented in the "Segreto" at any rate.

Here, in his beloved retreat, the poet seems to have perpetually tormented himself with reflections about the vanity of life and the folly of human affections, as if the stern figure of his monitor were indeed still shadowing his spirit. But the saint, for all his arguments, cannot conquer the poet's nature, or free him from what he calls the adamantine chains that bind him to Love and Fame.

"These charm while they destroy," he makes the saint declare.

"What have I done to you?" Petrarch exclaims, "that you should deprive me of my most splendid preoccupations and condemn to eternal darkness the brightest part of my soul?"

It is in the grip of his splendid preoccupations that one sees him oftenest.

Petrarch's parents were forced to leave Florence, where his father was a notary, by the same revolution that exiled Dante, and after some wanderings they fixed themselves at Avignon, sending the poet to study jurisprudence at Montpellier, close at hand. It was on his return to the Papal city, after the death of his parents, that he saw Laura for the first time.

Judging by the sonnets, he met her fairly often afterwards in Avignon, but never with any hope of a return for his passion.

A glance, a word of greeting at most, were all his reward, but out of these he appears to have woven a sort of painful joy. His was an unquiet spirit. One feels it as almost a relief to read of his death and of his peaceful tomb at Arqua in the EuganÆan hills above a clear and beautiful river. "It stands on the little square before the church where the peasants congregate at Mass-time—open to the skies, girdled by the hills and within hearing of the vocal stream."

It is a pathetic picture that is left in the mind at the last, as the poet writes from the sweet solitude of his garden at Parma, whither he had retired towards the end of his days, drawn, doubtless, to his native land, for which he had always a profound attachment.

"I pass my life in the church or in my garden," he says. The words are so simple and quiet, and yet they are infinitely pathetic. When one remembers what a centre of emotion and longing and sorrow the human heart must be from its very nature, and what a stormy, ambitious, loving and suffering spirit Petrarch's had always been, the quietness of those words and the picture they call up is more touching and significant than a hundred homilies. One knows a little now what sort of thoughts used to pass through the poet's mind, as he bent his steps towards the great painted chambers where his entry brought to all quick nerves a touch of sunshine and a wave of harmony.

Barbara gave a little laugh as we ascended the broad whitewashed staircase, once rich with colour, that led to the endless galleries of this leviathan of a palace.

"I wonder what our friend would say to this!" she exclaimed.

"Not a rag of ornament," I quoted sadly.

"Not Gothic or anything," Barbara complained.

"Wait a minute," I warned, as we entered a vast room with a vaulted ceiling, which revealed by one small corner of the huge expanse the magnificent canopy of rich frescoes that had once overhung the assemblies of the Popes. "If it is not Gothic, at least it's—anything!" I cried, with enthusiasm. And truly anything and everything that is sumptuous, mellow, exquisite in wealth and modulation of colour this great hall, with its painted vaultings, must have been. But the splendour had been desecrated by some Vandal, careless of his country's pride. Instead of leaving the great audience chamber to tell its own eloquent tale, the unpardonable one had cut it up into a couple of rooms—lofty indeed even then—by dividing its height, and now the dinners of the troops are cooked irreverently below, while the men spend their leisure in the vaulted upper half of the Hall of the Frescoes; painted, perhaps, by Giotto, if the faint tradition may be believed.[3]

The hall is filled with carpenters' benches, turning-lathes, tools which lie scattered among wood shavings, glue-pots, and various disorderly properties.

Through the enormous window at the end of this haunted chamber of history there is a dazzling view of the plain of the Rhone and the circle of mountains enclosing it, Mont Ventoux, richly blue, rising magnificently in the centre of the amphitheatre.

We thought of Petrarch's famous ascent of the mountain, and of his reflections on the vanity of all things when at last, after a hard scramble, he reached the summit.

"No doubt he was tired," said the practical Barbara.

It was just what she would have said about one of her own brothers with a similar excuse for pessimism.

Perhaps if Petrarch had had a Barbara to look after him he would not have made so many reflections about the vanity of things. She would have treated him as a charming child, whose fitful moods have to be allowed for and soothed. It is indeed a rare man whom women do not feel called upon to treat more or less in that way! However, Petrarch has the support of a modern very different from himself when he complains of the disillusions of mountain climbing. Nietzsche remarks the same thing, but he accounts for it by the fact that the whole charm and spell of the country has come from the mountain which draws one to it irresistibly, but once we are there, the sorceress is no longer visible, and so the charm disappears.

It was in this fortress-palace that the Anti-Pope Benedict XIII. (Pierre de Luna) withstood the attacks of Charles V., whose religious sentiments, outraged by the schism in the Church, prompted him to send one of his generals to drive the pretender from his stronghold. The siege continued for months, and ruined many houses in Avignon and killed many of the people. At last, when the place was stormed the Pope took refuge in the tower and finally escaped out of a secret door.

We lingered for some minutes at the great window in the Hall of the Frescoes studying the landscape, and trying to find out the direction of Petrarch's romantic Vale of the Sorgue and the site of the Castle of Romanin and Les Baux in the Alpilles. Near to the window to our left, as a stern foreground to that radiant picture of Provence, stands Rienzi's tower, bare and bald indeed. And there the last of the Tribunes passed days of one knows not what anguish in his dark little prison, while the sunlight beat and beat without upon its ruthless walls. There is a touching story, showing the honour in which the troubadour's profession was held in those days: that the people of Avignon interceded for the condemned patriot, pleading for his life on the ground that he too was a singer of songs. One is relieved to remember that at least he did not end his days in this miserable dungeon, but met his death in the streets of Rome, at the foot of the Capitol itself.

Alexandre Dumas says of this palace: "We find some sparks of art shining like gold ornaments in dark armour! These are paintings which belong to the hard style which marks the transition from Cimabue to Raphael. They are thought to be by Giotto or Giottino, and certainly if they are not by these masters they belong to their age and school. These paintings ornament a tower which was probably the ordinary abode of the Pope, and a chapel which was used as a tribunal of the Inquisition."

The young woman who showed us over the Palace with sustained hauteur, told us that it was the custom to execute papal prisoners by throwing them from the top of Rienzi's tower. This was the only subject that seemed to interest our guide, a young lady of very modern type, and aggressively "equal." In case we should have any doubt on the matter she adopted an abrupt gait and an extremely noisy and resolved manner of inserting the keys in the locks of the various doors through which she admitted the sightseers. Barbara and I would fain have hung back among the strange little passages hidden in the thickness of the inner walls, ominous little mole-corridors suggestive of plot and passion such as a Court of mediÆval Popes could well be imagined to harbour. But our guide fretted impatiently at the exit, eager to hurry us out, and she would scarcely vouchsafe an answer to the meekest of questions. In fact, by the time she had given us a very much foreshortened view of the Palace (I am convinced that she did us out of more than half of the appointed round), most of us felt more or less trampled upon—her equality was such!

It is perhaps a paradox, but it is none the less true that one does not fully realise the character of a scene till one has left it.

Under the shadow of that terrible building we were held by a spell, wandering bewildered from dusky corridor to darker chamber, scarcely able to take count of our own impressions. They were so strong and they came so fast.

But once out again in the sunshine, we found that the images grouped themselves into gloomy pictures, and all the crime and all the splendid misery of that wonderful stage of mediÆval drama seemed to crowd before the mind's eye, re-peopling the melancholy place with brilliant figures, filling it with voices and all the indescribable sound and murmur of a stirring centre of human life.