No More Learning

Among his deepest admirers we shall find women of virtue above
suspicion, who are willing to forget his Laura being married, or to
forgive the circumstance for the eloquence of his courtship and the
unwavering faith of his affection. Nor is this predilection for Petrarch
the result of female vanity and the mere love of homage. No; it is a
wise instinctive consciousness in women that the offer of love to them,
without enthusiasm, refinement, and _constancy_, is of no value at all.
Without these qualities in their wooers, they are the slaves of the
stronger sex. It is no wonder, therefore, that they are grateful to
Petrarch for holding up the perfect image of a lover, and that they
regard him as a friend to that passion, on the delicacy and constancy of
which the happiness, the most hallowed ties, and the very continuance of
the species depend.

In modern Italian criticism there are two schools of taste, whose
respective partizans may be called the Petrarchists and the Danteists.
The latter allege that Petrarch's amatory poetry, from its platonic and
mystic character, was best suited to the age of cloisters, of dreaming
voluptuaries, and of men living under tyrannical Governments, whose
thoughts and feelings were oppressed and disguised. The genius of Dante,
on the other hand, they say, appeals to all that is bold and natural in
the human breast, and they trace the grand revival of his popularity in
our own times to the re-awakened spirit of liberty. On this side of the
question the most eminent Italian scholars and poets are certainly
ranged. The most gifted man of that country with whom I was ever
personally acquainted, Ugo Foscolo, was a vehement Danteist. Yet his
copious memory was well stored with many a sonnet of Petrarch, which he
could repeat by heart; and with all his Danteism, he infused the deepest
tones of admiration into his recitation of the Petrarchan sonnets.

And altogether, Foscolo, though a cautious, is a candid admirer of our
poet. He says, "The harmony, elegance, and perfection of his poetry are
the result of long labour; but its original conceptions and pathos
always sprang from the sudden inspiration of a deep and powerful
passion. By an attentive perusal of all the writings of Petrarch, it may
be reduced almost to a certainty that, by dwelling perpetually on the
same ideas, and by allowing his mind to prey incessantly on itself, the
whole train of his feelings and reflections acquired one strong
character and tone, and, if he was ever able to suppress them for a
time, they returned to him with increased violence; that, to
tranquillize this agitated state of his mind, he, in the first instance,
communicated in a free and loose manner all that he thought and felt, in
his correspondence with his intimate friends; that he afterwards reduced
these narratives, with more order and description, into Latin verse; and
that he, lastly, perfected them with a greater profusion of imagery and
more art in his Italian poetry, the composition of which at first served
only, as he frequently says, to divert and mitigate all his afflictions.
We may thus understand the perfect concord which prevails in Petrarch's
poetry between Nature and Art; between the accuracy of fact and the
magic of invention; between depth and perspicuity; between devouring
passion and calm meditation.
It is precisely because the poetry of
Petrarch originally sprang from the heart that his passion never seems
fictitious or cold, notwithstanding the profuse ornament of his style,
or the metaphysical elevation of his thoughts. "

I quote Ugo Foscolo, because he is not only a writer of strong poetic
feeling as well as philosophic judgment, but he is pre-eminent in that
Italian critical school who see the merits of Petrarch in no exaggerated
light, but, on the whole, prefer Dante to him as a poet. Petrarch's
love-poetry, Foscolo remarks, may be considered as the intermediate link
between that of the classics and the moderns. * * * * Petrarch both
feels like the ancient and philosophizes like the modern poets. When he
paints after the manner of the classics, he is equal to them.

I despair of ever seeing in English verse a translation of Petrarch's
Italian poetry that shall be adequate and popular. The term adequate, of
course, always applies to the translation of genuine poetry in a subdued
sense. It means the best that can be expected, after making allowance
for that escape of etherial spirit which is inevitable in the transfer
of poetic thoughts from one language to another. The word popular is
also to be taken in a limited meaning regarding all translations.
Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin is twenty times more popular than his
Homer; yet the latter work is deservedly popular in comparison with the
bulk of translations from antiquity. The same thing may be said of
Cary's Dante; it is, like Cowper's Homer, as adequate and popular as
translated poetry can be expected to be. Yet I doubt if either of those
poets could have succeeded so well with Petrarch. Lady Dacre has shown
much grace and ingenuity in the passages of our poet which she has
versified; but she could not transfer into English those graces of
Petrarchan diction, which are mostly intransferable. She could not bring
the Italian language along with her.

Is not this, it may be asked, a proof that Petrarch is not so genuine a
poet as Homer and Dante, since his charm depends upon the delicacies of
diction that evaporate in the transfer from tongue to tongue, more than
on hardy thoughts that will take root in any language to which they are
transplanted? In a general view, I agree with this proposition; yet,
what we call felicitous diction can never have a potent charm without
refined thoughts, which, like essential odours, may be too impalpable to
bear transfusion.