Читать книгу A history of Italian literature онлайн

73 страница из 109

FOOTNOTES:

ssss1 Petrarch says on a Good Friday, but Good Friday did not fall on April 6 in 1327, and the statement of the encounter having taken place in church at all is inconsistent with other passages in his writings.

ssss1 “It is pleasing,” says Coleridge, in a note to his little-knownMaximian, “to contemplate in this illustrious man at once the benefactor of his own times and the delight of the succeeding, and working on his contemporaries by that portion of his works which is least in account with posterity.”

ssss1 From the epistle to Barbatus, Coleridge says of the entire composition: “Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his substantiality of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida, and their co-rivals, this letter would have been a classical gem” (Anima Poetæ, p. 263).

ssss1

Petrarch’s activity as a scholar claimed so much larger a portion of his time and thoughts than his Canzoniere, and the bulk of the latter, considerable as it is, is so small in comparison with that of the mass of his writings, that Symonds seems almost justified in depreciating his work as an Italian lyrist in comparison with his influence as a humanist. Yet Petrarch’s Latin works were like the falling rain, which passes away as a distinct existence, though long invisibly operative as a fertilising agent; while his poetry, confined to a definite channel by the restraints of consummate diction and style, flows in a crystal stream for ever. Here and there in other men’s books, no doubt, an isolated love-strain of higher quality may be found, but nothing approaching theCanzoniere as an epitomised encyclopædia of passion. The best is transcendently excellent; and if many of the pieces, especially near the beginning, might well have been dispensed with as far as their individual desert is concerned, they still have their value as notes in a great harmony. As his translator Cayley well remarks, “No poet has so fully represented the whole world of love in every tone and variety of play and earnest, delight and pain, enthusiasm and self-reproach, expostulation, rebellion, submission, adoration, and friendship, or regret and religious consolations leading gradually to another sphere of hope and devotion.” One thing only is wanting to this encyclopædia of emotion, the rapture of possession. This was not for Petrarch: throughout the first part he is the yearning suitor, throughout the second the dejected mourner. Hardly another man ever sighed or wept with so much constancy or so little recompense.