T. Wright. sc.
ARIOSTO READING HIS VERSES TO ALESSANDRA STROZZI.

London, Published by H. Colburn, 1829.

THE LOVES OF THE POETS.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY S. AND R. BENTLEY,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

THE ROMANCE OF BIOGRAPHY;

OR

MEMOIRS OF WOMEN LOVED AND CELEBRATED BY POETS,

FROM

THE DAYS OF THE TROUBADOURS TO THE PRESENT AGE;

A SERIES OF ANECDOTES INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE THE INFLUENCE WHICH FEMALE BEAUTY AND VIRTUE HAVE EXERCISED OVER THE CHARACTERS AND WRITINGS OF MEN OF GENIUS.

BY MRS. JAMESON,

Authoress of the Diary of an Ennuyée; Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns; Female Characters of Shakspeare's Plays; Beauties of the Court of Charles the Second, &c.

THIRD EDITION,
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
SAUNDERS AND OTLEY.
MDCCCXXXVII.

Enfin, relevons-nous sous le poids de l'existence; ne donnons pas à nos injustes ennemis, à nos amis ingrats, le triomphe d'avoir abattu nos facultés intellectuelles. Ils reduisent à chercher la celèbrité ceux qui se seraient contentés des affections: eh bien! il faut l'atteindre. Ces essais ambitieux ne porteront point remède aux peines de l'âme; mais ils honoreront la vie. La consacrer à l'espoir toujours trompé du bonheur, c'est la rendre encore plus infortunée. Il vaut mieux réunir tous ses efforts pour descendre avec quelque noblesse, avec quelque réputation, la route qui conduit de la jeunesse à la mort.

MADAME DE STAËL.

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.

These little sketches (they can pretend to no higher title,) are submitted to the public with a feeling of timidity almost painful.

They are absolutely without any other pretension than that of exhibiting, in a small compass and under one point of view, many anecdotes of biography and criticism, and many beautiful poetical portraits, scattered through a variety of works, and all tending to illustrate a subject in itself full of interest,—the influence which the beauty and virtue of women have exercised over the characters and writings of men of genius. But little praise or reputation attends the mere compiler, but the pleasure of the task has compensated its difficulty;—"song, beauty, youth, love, virtue, joy," these "flowers of Paradise," whose growth is not of earth, were all around me; I had but to gather them from the intermingling weeds and briars, and to bind them into one sparkling wreath, consecrated to the glory of women and the gallantry of men.

The design which unfolded itself before me, as these little sketches extended gradually from a few memoranda into volumes, is not completed; much has been omitted, much suppressed. If I have paused midway in my task, it is not for want of materials, which offer themselves in almost exhaustless profusion—nor from want of interest in the subject—the most delightful in which the imagination ever revelled! but because I desponded over my own power to do it justice. I know, I feel that it required more extensive knowledge of languages, more matured judgment, more critical power, more eloquence;—only Madame de Staël could have fulfilled my conception of the style in which it ought to have been treated. It was enthusiasm, not presumption, which induced me to attempt it. I have touched on matters, on which there are a variety of tastes and opinions, and lightly passed over questions on which there are volumes of grave "historic doubts;" but I have ventured on no discussion, still less on any decision. I have been satisfied merely to quote my authorities; and where these exhibited many opposing facts and opinions, it seemed to me that there was far more propriety and much less egotism in simply expressing, in the first person, what I thought and felt, than in asserting absolutely that a thing is so, or is said to be so. Every one has a right to have an opinion, and deliver it with modesty; but no one has a right to clothe such opinions in general assertions, and in terms which seem to insinuate that they are or ought to be universal. I know I am open to criticism and contradiction on a thousand points; but I have adhered strictly to what appeared to me the truth, and examined conscientiously all the sources of information that were open to me.

The history of this little book, were it worth revealing, would be the history, in miniature, of most human undertakings: it was begun with enthusiasm; it has been interrupted by intervals of illness, idleness, or more serious cares; it has been pursued through difficulties so great, that they would perhaps excuse its many deficiencies; and now I see its conclusion with a languor almost approaching to despair;—at least with a feeling which, while it renders me doubly sensitive to criticism, and apprehensive of failure, has rendered me almost indifferent to success, and careless of praise.

I owe four beautiful translations from the Italian (which are noticed in their proper places,) to the kindness of a living poet, whose justly celebrated name, were I allowed to mention it, would be subject of pride to myself, and double the value of this little book. I have no other assistance of any kind to acknowledge.

Will it be thought unfeminine or obtrusive, if I add yet a few words?

I think it due to truth and to myself to seize this opportunity of saying, that a little book published three years ago, and now perhaps forgotten, was not written for publication, nor would ever have been printed but for accidental circumstances.

That the title under which it appeared was not given by the writer, but the publisher, who at the time knew nothing of the author.

And that several false dates, and unimportant circumstances and characters were interpolated, to conceal, if possible, the real purport and origin of the work. Thus the intention was not to create an illusion, by giving to fiction the appearance of truth, but, in fact, to give to truth the air of fiction. I was not then prepared for all that a woman must meet and endure, who once suffers herself to be betrayed into authorship. She may repent at leisure, like a condemned spirit; but she has passed that barrier from which there is no return.

C'est assez,—I will not add a word more, lest it should be said that I have only disclaimed the title of the Ennuyée, to assume that of the Ennuyeuse.

CONTENTS

OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

Page
CHAPTER I.
A Poet's Love [1]
CHAPTER II.
Loves of the Classic Poets [7]
CHAPTER III.
The Loves of the Troubadours [14]
CHAPTER IV.
The Loves of the Troubadours (continued) [34]
CHAPTER V.
Guido Cavalcanti and Mandetta.—Cino da Pistoja and Selvaggia [55]
CHAPTER VI.
Laura [64]
CHAPTER VII.
Laura and Petrarch (continued) [85]
CHAPTER VIII.
Dante and Beatrice Portinari [105]
CHAPTER IX.
Dante and Beatrice (continued) [125]
CHAPTER X.
Chaucer and Philippa Picard.—King James and Lady Jane Beaufort [133]
CHAPTER XI.
Lorenzo de' Medici and Lucretia Donati [161]
CHAPTER XII.
The Fair Geraldine [185]
CHAPTER XIII.
Ariosto, Ginevra, and Alessandra Strozzi [198]
CHAPTER XIV.
Spenser's Rosalind. Spenser's Elizabeth [219]
CHAPTER XV.
On the Love of Shakspeare [237]
CHAPTER XVI.
Sydney's Stella (Lady Rich) [249]
CHAPTER XVII.
Court and Age of Elizabeth.

Drayton, Daniel, Drummond, Mary Queen Of Scots, Clement Marot and Diana de Poictier,
Ronsard's Cassandre, Ronsard's Marie, Ronsard's Helène [263]
CHAPTER XVIII.
Leonora d'Este [288]
CHAPTER XIX.
Milton and Leonora Baroni [330]

THE LOVES OF THE POETS.

CHAPTER I.

A POET'S LOVE.

Io ti cinsi de gloria, e fatta ho dea!—guidi.

Of all the heaven-bestowed privileges of the poet, the highest, the dearest, the most enviable, is the power of immortalising the object of his love; of dividing with her his amaranthine wreath of glory, and repaying the inspiration caught from her eyes with a crown of everlasting fame. It is not enough that in his imagination he has deified her—that he has consecrated his faculties to her honour—that he has burned his heart in incense upon the altar of her perfections: the divinity thus decked out in richest and loveliest hues, he places on high, and calls upon all ages and all nations to bow down before her, and all ages and all nations obey! worshipping the beauty thus enshrined in imperishable verse, when others, perhaps as fair, and not less worthy, have gone down, unsung, "to dust and an endless darkness." How many women who would otherwise have stolen through the shades of domestic life, their charms, virtues, and affections buried with them, have become objects of eternal interest and admiration, because their memory is linked with the brightest monuments of human genius? While many a high-born dame, who once moved, goddess-like, upon the earth, and bestowed kingdoms with her hand, lives a mere name in some musty chronicle. Though her love was sought by princes, though with her dower she might have enriched an emperor,—what availed it?

"She had no poet—and she died!"

And how have women repaid this gift of immortality? O believe it, when the garland was such as woman is proud to wear, she amply and deeply rewarded him who placed it on her brow. If in return for being made illustrious, she made her lover happy,—if for glory she gave a heart, was it not a rich equivalent? and if not—if the lover was unsuccessful, still the poet had his reward. Whence came the generous feelings, the high imaginations, the glorious fancies, the heavenward inspirations, which raised him above the herd of vulgar men—but from the ennobling influence of her he loved? Through her, the world opened upon him with a diviner beauty, and all nature became in his sight but a transcript of the charms of his mistress. He saw her eyes in the stars of heaven, her lips in the half-blown rose. The perfume of the opening flowers was but her breath, that "wafted sweetness round about the world:" the lily was "a sweet thief" that had stolen its purity from her breast. The violet was dipped in the azure of her veins; the aurorean dews, "dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn," were not so pure as her tears; the last rose-tint of the dying day was not so bright or so delicate as her cheek. Her's was the freshness and the bloom of the Spring; she consumed him to languor as the Summer sun; she was kind as the bounteous Autumn, or she froze him with her wintry disdain. There was nothing in the wonders, the splendours, or the treasures of the created universe,—in heaven or in earth,—in the seasons or their change, that did not borrow from her some charm, some glory beyond its own. Was it not just that the beauty she dispensed should be consecrated to her adornment, and that the inspiration she bestowed should be repaid to her in fame?

For what of thee thy poet doth invent,
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
But found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.

Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay!

shakspeare's sonnets.

The theory, then, which I wish to illustrate, as far as my limited powers permit, is this: that where a woman has been exalted above the rest of her sex by the talents of a lover, and consigned to enduring fame and perpetuity of praise, the passion was real, and was merited; that no deep or lasting interest was ever founded in fancy or in fiction; that truth, in short, is the basis of all excellence in amatory poetry, as in every thing else; for where truth is, there is good of some sort, and where there is truth and good, there must be beauty, there must be durability of fame. Truth is the golden chain which links the terrestrial with the celestial, which sets the seal of heaven on the things of this earth, and stamps them to immortality. Poets have risen up and been the mere fashion of a day, and have set up idols which have been the idols of a day: if the worship be out of date and the idols cast down, it is because these adorers wanted sincerity of purpose and feeling; their raptures were feigned; their incense was bought or adulterate. In the brain or in the fancy, one beauty may eclipse another—one coquette may drive out another, and tricked off in airy verse, they float away unregarded like morning vapours, which the beam of genius has tinged with a transient brightness: but let the heart once be touched, and it is not only wakened but inspired; the lover kindled into the poet, presents to her he loves, his cup of ambrosial praise: she tastes—and the woman is transmuted into a divinity. When the Grecian sculptor carved out his deities in marble, and left us wondrous and god-like shapes, impersonations of ideal grace unapproachable by modern skill, was it through mere mechanical superiority? No;—it was the spirit of faith within which shadowed to his imagination what he would represent. In the same manner, no woman has ever been truly, lastingly deified in poetry, but in the spirit of truth and of love!

CHAPTER II.

LOVES OF THE CLASSIC POETS.

I am not sufficiently an antiquarian or scholar, to trace the muses "upward to their spring," neither is there occasion to seek our first examples of poetical loves in the days of fables and of demi-gods; or in those pastoral ages when shepherds were kings and poets: the loves of Orpheus and Eurydice are a little too shadowy, and those of the royal Solomon rather too mixed and too mystical for our purpose.—To descend then at once to the classical ages of antiquity.

It must be allowed, that as far as women are concerned, we have not much reason to regard them with reverence. The fragments of the amatory poetry of the Greeks, which have been preserved to our times, show too plainly in what light we were then regarded; and graceful and exquisite as many of them are, they bear about them the taint of degraded morals and manners, and are utterly destitute of that exalted sentiment of respect and tenderness for woman, either individually or as a sex, which alone can give them value in our eyes.

I must leave it then to learned commentators to explore and elucidate the loves of Sappho and Anacreon. To us unlearned women, they shine out through the long lapse of ages, bright names, and little else; a kind of half-real,—half-ideal impersonations of love and song; the one enveloped in "a fair luminous cloud," the other "veiled in shadowing roses;" and thus veiled and thus shadowed, by all accounts, they had better remain.

The same remark, with the same reservation, applies to the Latin poets. They wrote beautiful verses, admirable for their harmony, elegance and perspicuity of expression; and are studied as models of style in a language, the knowledge of which, as far as these poets are concerned, were best confined to the other sex. They lived in a corrupted age, and their pages are deeply stained with its licentiousness; they inspire no sympathy for their love, no interest, no respect for the objects of it. How, indeed, should that be possible, when their mistresses, even according to the lover's painting, were all either perfectly insipid, or utterly abandoned and odious?[1] Ovid, he who has revealed to mortal ears "all the soft scandal of the laughing sky," and whose gallantry has become proverbial, represents himself as so incensed by the public and shameless infidelities of his Corinna, that he treats her with the unmanly brutality of some street ruffian;—in plain language, he beats her. They are then reconciled, and again there are quarrels, coarse reproaches, and mutual blows. At length the lady, as might be expected from such tuition, becoming more and more abandoned, this delicate and poetical lover requests, as a last favour, that she will, for the future, take some trouble to deceive him more effectually; and the fair one, can she do less? kindly consents!

Cynthia, the mistress of Propertius, gets tipsey, overturns the supper-table, and throws the cups at her lover's head; he is delighted with her playfulness: she leaves him to follow the camp with a soldier; he weeps and laments: she returns to him again, and he is enchanted with her amiable condescension. Her excesses are such, that he is reduced to blush for her and for himself; and he confesses that he is become, for her sake, the laughing-stock of all Rome. Cynthia is the only one of these classical loves who seems to have possessed any mental accomplishments. The poet praises, incidentally, her talents for music and poetry; but not as if they added to her charms or enhanced her value in his estimation. The Lesbia[2] of Catullus, whose eyes were red with weeping the loss of her favourite sparrow, crowned a life of the most flagitious excesses by poisoning her husband. Of the various ladies celebrated by Horace and Tibullus, it would really be difficult to discover which was most worthless, venal, and profligate. These were the refined loves of the classic poets!

The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; sentiment, as we now understand the word,—that is, the union of fervent love with reverence and delicacy towards its object,—a thing unknown and unheard of,—and all is "of the earth, earthy."

It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As monuments of the language and literature of a great and polished people, rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind; considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the Church raised at Constantinople:—what a flame it must have made![3]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I need scarcely observe, that the following sketch of the lyrical poets of Rome is abridged from the analysis of their works, in Ginguené's Histoire Littéraire, vol. 3.

[2] Clodia, the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer.

[3] "J'ai oui dire dans mon enfance à Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme très instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grèce, qui les Prétres avaient eu assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager à brûler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens poëtes Grecs, et en particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces prètres, sans doute, montrèrent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens poëtes; mais ils donnèrent une grande preuve d'intégrité, de probité, et de religion."—Alcyonius.

This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania of classical learning was at its height.—See Roscoe, (Leo X.) and Ginguené.

CHAPTER III.

THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS.

Gente, che d'amor givan ragionando.—petrarca.

The irruptions of the northern nations, among whom our sex was far better appreciated than among the polished Greeks and Romans; the rise of Christianity, and the institution of chivalry, by changing the moral condition of women, gave also a totally different character to the homage addressed to them. It was in the ages called gothic and barbarous,—in that era of high feelings and fierce passions,—of love, war, and wild adventure, that the sex began to take their true station in society. From the midst of ignorance, superstition, and ferocity, sprung up that enthusiasm, that exaggeration of sentiment, that serious, passionate, and imaginative adoration of women, which has since, indeed, degenerated into mere gallantry, but was the very fountain of all that is most elevated and elegant in modern poetry, and most graceful and refined in modern manners.

The amatory poetry of Provence had the same source with the national poetry of Spain; both were derived from the Arabians. To them we trace not only the use of rhyme, and the various forms of stanzas, employed by the early lyric poets, but by a strange revolution, it was from the East, where women are now held in seclusion, as mere soulless slaves of the passions and caprices of their masters, that the sentimental devotion paid to our sex in the chivalrous ages was derived.[4] The poetry of the Troubadours kept alive and enhanced the tone of feeling on which it was founded; it was cause and effect re-acting on each other; and though their songs exist only in the collections of the antiquarian, and the very language in which they wrote has passed away, and may be accounted dead,—so is not the spirit they left behind: as the founders of a new school of amatory poetry, we are under obligations to their memory, which throw a strong interest around their personal adventures, and the women they celebrated.

The tenderness of feeling and delicacy of expression in some of these old Provençal poets, are the more touching, when we recollect that the writers were sometimes kings and princes, and often knights and warriors, famed for their hardihood and exploits. William, Count of Poitou, our Richard the First, two Kings of Arragon, a King of Sicily, the Dauphin of Auvergne, the Count de Foix, and a Prince of Orange, were professors of the "gaye science." Thibault,[5] Count of Provence and King of Navarre, was another of these royal and chivalrous Troubadours, and his lais and his virelais were generally devoted to the praises of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis the Ninth—the same Blanche whom Shakspeare has introduced into King John, and decked out in panegyric far transcending all that her favoured poet and lover could have offered at her feet.[6]

Thibault did, however, surpass all his contemporaries in refinement of style: he usually concludes his chansons with an envoi, or address, to the Virgin, worded with such equivocal ingenuity, that it is equally applicable to the Queen of Heaven, or the queen of his earthly thoughts,—"La Blanche couronnée." There is much simplicity and elegance in the following little song, in which the French has been modernised.

"Las! si j'avais pouvoir d'oublier
Sa beauté,—son bien dire,
Et son très doux regarder
Finirait mon martyre!

Mais las! mon cœur je n'en puis ôter;
Et grand affolage
M'est d'espérer;
Mais tel servage
Donne courage
A tout endurer.

Et puis comment oublier
Sa beauté, son bien dire,
Et son très doux regarder?
Mieux aime mon martyre!"

Princesses and ladies of rank entered the lists of poesy, and vanquished, on almost every occasion, the Troubadours of the other sex. For instance, that Countess of Champagne, who presided with such éclat in one of the courts of love; Beatrice, Countess of Provence, the mother of four queens, among whom was Berengaria of England; Clara d'Anduse, one of whose songs is translated by Sismondi; a certain Dame Castellosa, who in a pathetic remonstrance to some ungrateful lover, assures him that if he forsakes her for another, and leaves her to die, he will commit a heinous sin before the face of God and man; that charming Comtesse de Die, of whom more presently, and others innumerable, "tout hommes que femmes, la pluspart gentilshommes et Seigneurs de Places, amoureux des Roynes, Imperatrices, Duchesses, Marquises, Comtesses, et gentils-femmes; desquelles les maris s'estimaient grandement heureux quand nos poëtes leurs addressaient quelque chant nouveau en notre langue Provençal." The said poets being rewarded by these debonnaire husbands with rich dresses, horses, armour, and gold;[7] and by the ladies with praise, thanks, courteous words, and sweet smiles, and very often, "altra cosa più cara." The biography of these Troubadours generally commences with the same phrase—Such a one was "gentilhomme et chevalier," and was "pris d'amour" for such a lady, always named, who was the wife of such a lord, and in whose honour and praise he composed "maintes belles et doctes chansons." In these "chansons,"—for all the amatory poetry of those times was sung to music,—we have love and romantic adventure oddly enough mixed up with piety and devotion, such as were the mode in an age when religion ruled the imagination and opinions of men, without in any degree restraining the passions, or influencing the conduct. One Troubadour tells us, that when he beholds the face of his mistress, he crosses himself with delight and gratitude; another pathetically entreats a priest to dispense him from his vows of love to a certain lady, whom he loved no longer; the lady being the wife of another, one would imagine that the dispensation should rather have been required in the first instance. Arnaldo de Daniel, unable to soften the obdurate heart of his mistress, performs penance, and celebrates six (or as some say, a thousand) masses a day, "en priant Dieu de pouvoir acquerir la grace de sa dame," and burns lamps before the Virgin, and consecrates tapers for the same purpose: the lady with whom he is thus piously in love, was Cyberna, the wife of Guillaume de Bouille. This was something like the incantations and sacrifices of the classic poets, who familiarly mixed up their mythology with their amours; but in a spirit as different as the allegorical cupid of these chivalrous poets is from the winged and wanton deity of the Greeks and Romans. Pierre Vidal sees a vision of Love, whom he describes as a young knight, fair and fresh as the day, crowned with a wreath of flowers instead of a helmet; and mounted on a palfrey as white as snow, with a saddle of jasper, and spurs of chalcedony; his squires and attendants are "Mercy, Pudeur, and Loyauté." Sir Cupid on horseback, with his saddle and his spurs, attended by Gentleness, Modesty, and Good Faith, is a novel divinity.—Thus, among the Greeks, Love was attended by the Graces, and among the Troubadours by the Virtues. In the same spirit of allegory, but touched with a more classic elegance, we have Petrarch's Cupid, driving his fiery car in triumph, followed by a shadowy host of captives to his power,—the heroes who had confessed and the poets who had sung his might.

Vidi un vittorioso e sommo duce,
Pur com' un di color ch' in Campidoglio
Trïonfal carro a gran gloria conduce.

....*....*....*....*

Quattro destrier via più che neve bianchi:
Sopr' un carro di foco un garzon crudo
Con arco in mano, e con säette a' fianchi.

And yet more finished is Spenser's "Masque of Cupid," in the third book of the Fairy Queen, where Love, as in the antique gem, is mounted on a lion, preceded by minstrels carolling

A lay of love's delight with sweet concent,

attended by Fancy, Desire, Hope, Fear, and Doubt; and followed by Care, Repentance, Shame, Strife, Sorrow, &c.—The vivid colours in which these imaginary personages are depicted, the image of the God "uprearing himself," and looking round with disdain on the troop of victims and slaves who surround him, the rattling of his darts, as he shakes them in defiance and in triumph, and "claps on high his coloured wings twain," forms altogether a most finished and gorgeous picture; such as Rubens should have painted, as far as his pencil, rainbow-dipt, could have reflected the animated pageant to the eye.

The extravagance of passion and boundless devotion to the fair sex, which the Troubadours sang in their lays, they not unfrequently illustrated by their actions; and while the knowledge of the first is confined to a few antiquarians, the latter still survive in the history and the traditions of their province. One of these (Guillaume de la Tour) having lost the object of his love, underwent, during a whole year, the most cruel and unheard-of penances, in the hope that heaven might be won to perform a miracle in his favour, and restore her to his arms; at length he died broken-hearted on her tomb.[8] Another,[9] beloved by a certain princess, in some unfortunate moment breaks his vow of fidelity, and unable to appease the indignation of his mistress, he retires to a forest, builds himself a cabin of boughs, and turns hermit, having first made a solemn vow that he will never leave his solitude till he is received into favour by his offended love. Being one of the most celebrated and popular Troubadours of his province, all the knights and the ladies sympathise with his misfortunes: they find themselves terribly ennuyés in the absence of the poet who was accustomed to vaunt their charms and their deeds of prowess; and at the end of two years they send a deputation, entreating him to return,—but in vain: they then address themselves to the lady, and humbly solicit the pardon of the offender, whose disgrace in her sight, has thrown a whole province into mourning. The princess at length relents, but upon conditions which appear in these unromantic times equally extraordinary and difficult to fulfil. She requires that a hundred brave knights, and a hundred fair dames, pledged in love to each other, (s'aimant d'amour) should appear before her on their knees, and with joined hands supplicate for mercy: the conditions are fulfilled: the fifty pair of lovers are found to go through the ceremony, and the Troubadour receives his pardon.[10]

The story of Peyre de Ruer, "gentilhomme et Troubadour," might be termed a satirical romance, did we not know that it is a plain fact, related with perfect simplicity. He devotes himself to a lady of the noble Italian family of Carraccioli, and in her praise he composes, as usual, "maintes belles et doctes chansons:"—but the lady seems to have had a taste for magnificence and pleasure; and the poet, in order to find favour in her eyes, expends his patrimony in rich apparel, banquets, and joustes in her honour. The lady, however, continues inexorable; and Peyre de Ruer takes the habit of a pilgrim and wanders about the country. He arrives in the holy week at a certain church, and desires of the curé permission to preach to his congregation of penitents:—he ascends the pulpit, and recites with infinite fervour and grace one of his own chansons d'amour,—for, says the chronicle, "autre chose ne sçavait," "he knew nothing better." The people mistaking it for an invocation to the Virgin Mary or the Saints, are deeply affected and edified; eyes are seen to weep that never wept before; the most impenitent hearts are suddenly softened: he concludes with an exhortation in the same strain—and then descending from the pulpit, places himself at the door, and holding out his hat for the customary alms, his delighted congregation fill it to overflowing with pieces of silver. Peyre de Ruer forthwith casts off his pilgrim's gown, and in a new and splendid dress, and with a new song in his hand, he presents himself before the ladye of his love, who charmed by his gay attire not less than by his return, receives him most graciously, and bestows on him "maintes caresses."

I must observe that the biographer of this Peyre de Ruer, himself a churchman, does not appear in the least scandalised or surprised at this very novel mode of recruiting his finances and obtaining the favour of the lady; but gives us fairly to understand, that after such a proof of loyauté he should have thought it quite contrary to all rule if she had still rejected the addresses of this gentil Troubadour.

Jauffred (or Geffrey) de Rudel is yet more famous, and his story will strikingly illustrate the manners of those times. Rudel was the favourite minstrel of Geffrey Plantagenet de Bretagne, the elder brother of our Richard Cœur de Lion, and like the royal Richard, a patron of music and poetry. During the residence of Rudel at the court of England, where he resided in great honour and splendour, caressed for his talents and loved for the gentleness of his manners, he heard continually the praises of a certain Countess of Tripoli; famed throughout Europe for her munificent hospitality to the poor Crusaders. The pilgrims and soldiers of the Cross, who were returning wayworn, sick and disabled, from the burning plains of Asia, were relieved and entertained by this devout and benevolent Countess; and they repaid her generosity, with all the enthusiasm of gratitude, by spreading her fame throughout Christendom.

These reports of her beauty and her beneficence, constantly repeated, fired the susceptible fancy of Rudel: without having seen her, he fell passionately in love with her, and unable to bear any longer the torments of absence, he undertook a pilgrimage to visit this unknown lady of his love, in company with Bertrand d'Allamanon, another celebrated Troubadour of those days. He quitted the English court in spite of the entreaties and expostulations of Prince Geffrey Plantagenet, and sailed for the Levant. But so it chanced, that falling grievously sick on the voyage, he lived only till his vessel reached the shores of Tripoli. The Countess being told that a celebrated poet had just arrived in her harbour, who was dying for her love, immediately hastened on board, and taking his hand, entreated him to live for her sake. Rudel, already speechless, and almost in the agonies of death, revived for a moment at this unexpected grace; he was just able to express, by a last effort, the excess of his gratitude and love, and expired in her arms: thereupon the Countess wept bitterly, and vowed herself to a life of penance for the loss she had caused to the world.[11] She commanded that the last song which Rudel had composed in her honour, should be transcribed in letters of gold, and carried it always in her bosom; and his remains were inclosed in a magnificent mausoleum of porphyry, with an Arabic inscription, commemorating his genius and his love for her.

It is in allusion to this well-known story, that Petrarch has introduced Rudel into the Trionfo d'Amore.

Gianfré Rudel ch' uso la vela e 'l remo,
A cercar la suo morte.

The song which the minstrel composed when he fell sick on this romantic expedition, and found his strength begin to fail, and which the Countess wore, folded within her vest, to the end of her life, is extant, and has been translated into most of the languages of Europe; of these translations, Sismondi's is the best, preserving the original and curious arrangement of the rhymes, as well as the piety, naïveté, and tenderness of the sentiment.

Irrité, dolent partirai
Si ne vois cet amour de loin,
Et ne sais quand je le verrai
Car sont par trop nos terres loin.
Dieu, qui toutes choses as fait
Et formas cet amour si loin,
Donne force à mon cœur, car ai
L'espoir de voir m'amour au loin.
Ah, Seigneur, tenez pour bien vrai
L'amour qu'ai pour elle de loin.
Car pour un bien que j'en aurai
J'ai mille maux, tant je suis loin.
Ja d'autr'amour ne jouirai
Sinon de cet amour de loin—
Qu'une plus belle je n'en sçais
En lieu qui soit ni près ni loin!

Mrs. Piozzi and others have paraphrased this little song, but in a spirit so different from the antique simplicity of the original, that I shall venture to give a version, which has at least the merit of being as faithful as the different idioms of the two languages will allow; I am afraid, however, that it will not appear worthy of the honour which the Countess conferred on it.

"Grieved and troubled shall I die,
If I meet not my love afar;
Alas! I know not that I e'er
Shall see her—for she dwells afar.
O God! that didst all things create,
And formed my sweet love now afar;
Strengthen my heart, that I may hope
To behold her face, who is afar.
O Lord! believe how very true
Is my love for her, alas! afar,
Tho' for each joy a thousand pains
I bear, because I am so far.
Another love I'll never have,
Save only she who is afar,
For fairer one I never knew
In places near, nor yet afar."

Bertrand d'Allamanon, whom I have mentioned as the companion of Rudel on his romantic expedition, has left us a little ballad, remarkable for the extreme refinement of the sentiment, which is quite à la Petrarque: he gives it the fantastic title of a demi chanson, for a very fantastic reason: it is thus translated in Millot. (vol. i. 390).

"On veut savoir pourquoi je fais une demi chanson? c'est parceque je n'ai qu'un demi sujet de chanter. Il n'y a d'amour que de ma part; la dame que j'aime ne veut pas m'aimer! mais au défaut des oui qu'elle me refuse, je prendrai les non qu'elle me prodigue:—espérer auprès d'elle vaut mieux que jouir avec tout autre!"

This is exactly the sentiment of Petrarch:

Pur mi consola, che morir per lei
Meglio è che gioir d'altra—

But it is one of those thoughts which spring in the heart, and might often be repeated without once being borrowed.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Sismondi—Littérature du Midi.

[5]

Thibault fût Roi galant et valoureux,
Ses hâuts faits et son rang n'ont rien fait pour sa gloire;
Mais il fût chansonnier—et ses couplets heureux,
Nous ont conservé sa mémoire.
anthologie de monet.

[6]

If lusty Love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If zealous Love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanche?
If Love, ambitious, sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?

[7] La plus honorable recompence qu'on pouvait faire aux dits poëtes, était qu'on leur fournissait de draps, chevaux, armure, et argent.

[8] Millot, vol. ii. p. 148.

[9] Richard de Barbesieu.

[10] Millot, vol. iii. p. 86.—Ginguené, vol. i. p. 280.

[11] "Depuis ne fut jamais veue faire bonne chère," says the old chronicle.—I am tempted to add the description of the first and last interview of the Countess and her lover in the exquisite old French, of which the antique simplicity and naïveté are untranslateable.

"En cet estat fut conduit au port de Trypolly, et là arrivé, son compagnon feist (fit) entendre à la Comtesse la venue du Pelerin malade. La Comtesse estant venue en la nef, prit le poête par la main; et lui, sachant que c'éstait la Comtesse, incontinent après le doult et gracieux accueil, recouvra ses esprits, la remercia de ce qu'elle lui avait recouvré la vie, et lui dict: 'Très illustre et vertueuse princesse, je ne plaindrai point la mort oresque'—et ne pouvant achever son propos, sa maladie s'aigrissant et augmentant, rendit l'esprit entre les mains de la Comtesse."—Vies des plus célèbres Poëtes Provençaux, p. 24.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS CONTINUED.

In striking contrast to the tender and gentle Rudel, we have the ferocious Bertrand de Born: he, too, was one of the most celebrated Troubadours of his time. As a petty feudal sovereign, he was, partly by the events of the age, more by his own fierce and headlong passions, plunged in continual wars. Nature however had made him a poet of the first order. In these days he would have been another Lord Byron; but he lived in a terrible and convulsed state of society, and it was only in the intervals snatched from his usual pursuits,—that is, from burning the castles, and ravaging the lands of his neighbours, and stirring up rebellion, discord, and bloodshed all around him,—that he composed a vast number of lays, sirventes, and chansons; some breathing the most martial, and even merciless spirit; others devoted to the praise and honour of his love, or rather loves, as full of submissive tenderness and chivalrous gallantry.

He first celebrated Elinor Plantagenet, the sister of his friend and brother in arms and song, Richard Cœur de Lion; and we are expressly told that Richard was proud of the poetical homage rendered to the charms of his sister by this knightly Troubadour, and that the Princess was far from being insensible to his admiration. Only one of the many songs addressed to Elinor has been preserved; from which we gather, that it was composed by Bertrand in the field, at a time when his army was threatened with famine, and the poet himself was suffering from the pangs of hunger. Elinor married the Duke of Saxony, and Bertrand chose for his next love the beautiful Maenz de Montagnac, daughter of the Viscount of Turenne, and wife of Talleyrand de Perigord. The lady accepted his service, and acknowledged him as her Knight; but evil tongues having attempted to sow dissension between the lovers, Bertrand addressed to her a song, in which he defends himself from the imputation of inconstancy, in a style altogether characteristic and original. The warrior poet, borrowing from the objects of his daily cares, ambition and pleasures, phrases to illustrate and enhance the expression of his love, wishes "that he may lose his favourite hawk in her first flight; that a falcon may stoop and bear her off, as she sits upon his wrist, and tear her in his sight, if the sound of his lady's voice be not dearer to him than all the gifts of love from another."—"That he may stumble with his shield about his neck; that his helmet may gall his brow; that his bridle may be too long, his stirrups too short; that he may be forced to ride a hard trotting horse, and find his groom drunk when he arrives at his gate, if there be a word of truth in the accusations of his enemies:—that he may not have a denier to stake at the gaming-table, and that the dice may never more be favourable to him, if ever he had swerved from his faith:—that he may look on like a dastard, and see his lady wooed and won by another;—that the winds may fail him at sea;—that in the battle he may be the first to fly, if he who has slandered him does not lie in his throat," &c. and so on through seven or eight stanzas.

Bertrand de Born exercised in his time a fatal influence on the counsels and politics of England. A close and ardent friendship existed between him and young Henry Plantagenet, the eldest son of our Henry the Second; and the family dissensions which distracted the English Court, and the unnatural rebellion of Henry and Richard against their father, were his work. It happened some time after the death of Prince Henry, that the King of England besieged Bertrand de Born in one of his castles: the resistance was long and obstinate, but at length the warlike Troubadour was taken prisoner and brought before the King, so justly incensed against him, and from whom he had certainly no mercy to expect. The heart of Henry was still bleeding with the wounds inflicted by his ungrateful children, and he saw before him, and in his power, the primary cause of their misdeeds and his own bitter sufferings. Bertrand was on the point of being led out to death, when by a single word he reminded the King of his lost son, and the tender friendship which had existed between them.[12] The chord was struck which never ceased to vibrate in the parental heart of Henry; bursting into tears, he turned aside, and commanded Bertrand and his followers to be immediately set at liberty: he even restored to Bertrand his castle and his lands, "in the name of his dead son." It is such traits as these, occurring at every page, which lend to the chronicles of this stormy period an interest overpowering the horror they would otherwise excite: for then all the best, as well as the worst of human passions were called into play. In this tempestuous commingling of all the jarring elements of society, we have those strange approximations of the most opposite sentiments,—implacable revenge and sublime forgiveness;—gross licentiousness and delicate tenderness;—barbarism and refinement;—treachery and fidelity—which remind one of that heterogeneous mass tossed up by a stormy ocean; heaps of pearls, unvalued gems, wedges of gold, mingled with dead men's bones, and all the slimy, loathsome, and monstrous productions of the deep, which during a calm remain together concealed and unknown in its unfathomed abysses.

To return from this long similitude to Bertrand de Born: he concluded his stormy career in a manner very characteristic of the times; for he turned monk, and died in the odour of sanctity. But neither his late devotion, nor his warlike heroism, nor his poetic fame, could rescue him from the severe justice of Dante, who has visited his crimes and his violence with so terrible a judgment, that we forget, while we thrill with horror, that the crimes were real, the penance only imaginary. Dante, in one of the circles of the Inferno, meets Bertrand de Born carrying his severed head, lantern wise, in his hand;—the phantom lifts it up by the hair, and the ghastly lips unclose to confess the cause and the justice of this horrible and unheard-of penance.

——Or vedi la pena molesta
Tu che spirando vai veggendo i morti;
Vedi s'alcuna è grande come questa.
E perchè tu di me novella porti,
Sappi ch' i' son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli
Che diedi al Re giovane i ma' conforti.
I' feci 'l padre e 'l figlio in se ribelli:

....*....*....*....*

Perch'io partii così giunte persone,
Partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!
Dal suo principio ch 'è 'n questo troncone.
Così s'osserva in me lo contrappasso.[13]

Now behold
This grievous torment, thou, who breathing goest
To spy the dead: behold, if any else
Be terrible as this,—and that on earth
Thou mayst bear tidings of me, know that I
Am Bertrand, he of Born, who gave King John
The counsel mischievous. Father and son
I set at mutual war:——
Spurring them on maliciously to strife.
For parting those so closely knit, my brain
Parted, alas! I carry from its source
That in this trunk inhabits. Thus the law
Of retribution fiercely works in me.[14]

Pierre Vidal, whose description of love I have quoted before, was one of the most extraordinary characters of his time, a kind of poetical Don Quixotte:—his brain was turned with love, poetry, and vanity: he believed himself the beloved of all the fair, the mirror of knighthood, and the prince of Troubadours. Yet in the midst of all his extravagances, he possessed exquisite skill in his art, and was not surpassed by any of the poets of those days, for the harmony, delicacy, and tenderness of his amatory effusions. He chose for his first love the beautiful wife of the Vicomte de Marseilles: the lady, unlike some of the Princesses of her time, distinguished between the poet and the man, and as he presumed too far on the encouragement bestowed on him in the former capacity, he was banished: he then followed Richard the First to the crusade. The verses he addressed to the lady from the Island of Cyprus are still preserved. The folly of Vidal, or rather the derangement of his imagination, subjected him to some of those mystifications which remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho, in the court of the laughter-loving Duchess. For instance, Richard and his followers amused themselves at Cyprus, by marrying Vidal to a beautiful Greek girl of no immaculate reputation, whom they introduced to him as the niece of the Greek Emperor. Vidal, in right of his wife, immediately took the title of Emperor, assumed the purple, ordered a throne to be carried before him, and played the most fantastic antics of authority. Nor was this the greatest of his extravagances: on his return to Provence, he chose for the second object of his amorous and poetical devotion, a lady whose name happened to be Louve de Penautier: in her honour he assumed the name of Loup, and farther to merit the good graces of his "Dame," and to do honour to the name he had adopted, he dressed himself in the hide of a wolf, and caused himself to be hunted in good earnest by a pack of dogs: he was brought back exhausted and half dead to the feet of his mistress, who appears to have been more moved to merriment than to love by this new and ridiculous exploit.

In general, however, the Troubadours had seldom reason to complain of the cruelty of the ladies to whom they devoted their service and their songs. The most virtuous and illustrious women thought themselves justified in repaying, with smiles and favours, the poetical adoration of their lovers; and this lasted until the profession of Troubadour was dishonoured by the indiscretions, follies, and vices of those who assumed it. Thus Peyrols, a famous Provençal poet, who was distinguished in the court of the Dauphin d'Auvergne, fell passionately in love with the sister of that Prince, (the Baronne de Mercœur) and the Dauphin, (himself a Troubadour) proud of the genius of his minstrel and of the poetical devotion paid to his sister, desired her to bestow on her lover all the encouragement and favour which was consistent with her dignity. The lady, however, either misunderstood her instructions, or found it too difficult to obey them: the seducing talents and tender verses of this gentil Troubadour prevailed over her dignity:—Peyrols was beloved; but he was not sufficiently discreet. The sudden change in the tone and style of his songs betrayed him, and he was banished. A great number of his verses, celebrating the Dame de Mercœur, are preserved by St. Palaye, and translated by Millot.

Bernard de Ventadour was beloved by Elinor de Guienne, afterwards the wife of our Henry the Second, and the mother of Richard the First:—I have before observed the poetical penchants of all Elinor's children, which they seem to have inherited from their mother.

Sordello of Mantua, whose name is familiar to all the readers of Dante, as occurring in one of the finest passages of his great poem,[15] was an Italian, but like all the best poets of his day, wrote in the Provençal tongue: he is said to have carried off the sister of that modern Phalaris, the tyrant Ezzelino of Padua. There is a very elegant ballad (ballata) by Sordello, translated in Millot's collection; it is properly a kind of rondeau, the first line being repeated at the end of every stanza; "Helas! à quoi me servent mes yeux?"—"Alas! wherefore have I eyes?"—It describes the pleasures of the Spring, which are to him as nothing, in the absence of the only object on which his eyes can dwell with delight. The arrangement of the rhymes in this pastoral song is singularly elegant and musical.

Lastly, as illustrating the history of the amatory poetry of this age, I extract from Nostradamus[16] the story of the young Countess de Die; she loved and was beloved by the Chevalier d'Adhèmar: (ancestor I presume to that Chevalier d'Adhèmar who figures in the letters of Madame de Sevigné.) It was not in this case the lover who celebrated the charms of his mistress, but the lady, who, being an illustrious female Troubadour, "docte en poësie," celebrated the exploits and magnanimity of her lover. The Chevalier, proud of such a distinction, caused the verses of his mistress to be beautifully copied, and always carried them in his bosom; and whenever he was in the company of knights and ladies, he enchanted them by singing a couplet in his own praise out of his lady's book. The publicity thus given to their love, was quite in the spirit of the times, and does not appear to have injured the reputation of the Countess for immaculate virtue,[17] which Adhèmar would probably have defended with lance and spear, against any slanderous tongue which had dared to defame her.

The conclusion of this romantic story is melancholy. Adhèmar heard a false report, that the Countess, whose purity and constancy he had so proudly maintained, had cast away her smiles on a rival: he fell sick with grief and bitterness of heart: the Countess, being informed of his state, set out, accompanied by her mother, and a long train of knights and ladies, to visit and comfort him with assurances of her fidelity; but when she appeared at his bed-side, and drew the curtain, it was already too late: Adhèmar expired in her arms. The Countess took the veil in the convent of St. Honoré, and died the same year of grief, says the chronicle;—and to conclude the tragedy characteristically, the mother of the young Countess buried her in the same grave with her lover, and raised a superb monument to the memory of both. The Countess de Die was one of the ten ladies who formed the Court of Love, held at Pierrefeu, (about 1194) and in which Estifanie de Baux presided.

These Courts of Love, and the scenes they gave rise to, were certainly open to ridicule; the "belles et subtiles questions d'amour" which were there solemnly discussed, and decided by ladies of rank, were often absurd, and the decisions something worse: still the fanciful influence they gave to women on these subjects, and the gallantry they introduced into the intercourse between the sexes, had a tendency to soften the manners, to refine the language, and to tinge the sentiments and passions with a kind of philosophical mysticism. But these gay and gallant Courts of Love, the Provençal Troubadours, their lays, which for two centuries had been the delight of all ranks of people, and had spread music, love, and poetry through the land;—their language, which had been the chosen dialect of gallantry in every court of Europe,—were at once swept from the earth.

The glory of the Provençal literature began when Provence was raised to an independent Fief, under Count Berenger I. about the year 1100; it lasted two entire centuries, and ended when that fine and fertile country became the scene of the horrible crusade against the Albigenses; when the Inquisition sent forth its exterminating fiends to scatter horror and devastation through the land, and the wars and rapacity of Charles of Anjou, its new possessor, almost depopulated the country. The language which had once celebrated deeds of love and heroism, now sang only of desolation and despair. The Troubadours, in a strain worthy of their gentle and noble calling, generally advocated the part of the Albigenses, and the oppressed of whatever faith; and in many provinces, in Lombardy especially, their language was interdicted, lest it might introduce heretical or rebellious principles; gradually it fell into disuse, and at length into total oblivion. The Troubadours, no longer welcomed in castle or in hall, where once

They poured to lords and ladies gay,
The unpremeditated lay,

were degraded to wandering minstrels and itinerant jugglers. An attempt was made, about a century later, (1324) by the institution of the Floral Games at Thoulouse, to keep alive this high strain of poetical gallantry. They were formerly celebrated with great splendour, and a shadow of this institution is, I believe, still kept up, but it has degenerated into a mere school of affectation. The original race of the Troubadours was extinct long before Clemence d'Isaure and her golden violet were thought of.

I cannot quit the subject of the Troubadours without one or two concluding observations. To these rude bards we owe some new notions of poetical justice, which never seem to have occurred to Horace or Longinus, and are certainly more magnanimous, as well as more true to moral feeling, than those which prevailed among the polished Greeks and Romans. For instance, the generous Hector and the constant Troilus are invariably exalted above the subtle Ulysses and the savage Achilles. Theseus, Jason, and Æneas, instead of being represented as classical heroes and pious favourites of the gods, are denounced as recreant knights and false traitors to love and beauty. In the estimation of these chivalrous bards, a woman's tears outweighed the exploits of demi-gods; all the glory of Theseus is forgotten in sympathy for Ariadne; and Æneas, in the old ballads and romances, is not, after all his perfidy, dismissed to happiness and victory, but is plagued by the fiends, haunted by poor Dido's "grimly ghost," and, finally, doomed to perish miserably.[18] Nor does Jason fare better at their hands; in all the old poets he is consigned to just execration. In Dante, we have a magnificent and a terrible picture of him, doomed to one of the lowest circles of hell, amid a herd of vile seducers, who betrayed the trusting faith, or bartered the charms of women. Demons scourge him up and down, without mercy or respite, in vengeance for the wrongs of Hypsipyle and Medea.

Guarda quel grande che viene
E per dolor, non par lagrima spanda;
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!
Quelli è Giasone—

—Con segni e con parole ornate
Isifile inganno——
Tal colpa a tal martiro lui condanna,
Ed anche di Medea si fa vendetta.

Inferno, C. 18.

"Behold that lofty shade, who this way tends,
And seems too woe-begone to drop a tear;
How yet the regal aspect he retains!
'Tis Jason—
—He who with tokens and fair witching words
Hypsipyle beguil'd—
Such is the guilt condemns him to this pain;
Here too Medea's injuries are aveng'd!"—

Carey.

And Chaucer, in relating the same story, begins with a burst of generous indignation:

Thou root[19] of false lovers, Duke Jason,
Thou slayer, devourer, and confusion
Of gentil women, gentil creatures!

The story of his double perfidy is told and commented on in the same chivalrous feeling: and the old poet concludes with characteristic tenderness and simplicity—

This was the mede of loving, and guerdon
That Medea received of Duke Jason,
Right for her truth and for her kindnesse,
That loved him better than herself I guesse!
And lefte her father and her heritage:
And of Jason this is the vassalage
That in his dayes was never none yfound
So false a lover going on the ground.

It is in the same beautiful spirit of reverence to the best virtues of our sex, that Alcestis, the wife of Admetus, who sacrificed her life to prolong that of her husband, is honoured above all other heroines of classical story. She has even been elevated into a kind of presiding divinity,—a second Venus, with nobler attributes,—and in her new existence is feigned to be the consort and companion of Love himself.

Another peculiarity of the poetry of the middle ages, was the worship paid to the daisy, (la Marguerite) as symbolical of all that is lovely in women. Why so lowly a flower should take precedence of the queenly lily and the sumptuous rose, is not very clear; but it seems to have originated with one of the old Provençal poets, whose mistress bore the name of Marguerite; and afterwards it became a fashion and a kind of poetical mythology.[20]

Thus in the "Flower and the Leafe" of Chaucer, the ladies and knights of the flower approach singing a chorus in honour of the Daisy, of which the burthen is, "si douce est la Marguerite."

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Le Roi lui demande, "S'il a perdu raison?" il lui répond, "Helas, oui! c'est depuis la mort du Prince Henri, votre fils!"

[13] Inferno, c. xxviii.

[14] Carey's translation of Dante. Mr. Carey reads Re Giovanni, instead of Re giovane:—King John, instead of Prince Henry.

[15] Purgatorio, c. vi.

[16] Vies des plus célèbres poëtes Provençaux.

[17] Agnes de Navarre, Comtesse de Foix, was beloved by Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet; he became jealous, and she sent her own confessor to him to complain of the injustice of his suspicions, and to swear that she was still faithful to him. She required, also, of her lover, to write and to publish in verse the history of their love; and she preserved, at the same time, in the eyes of her husband and of the world, the character of a virtuous Princess.—See Foscolo—Essays on Petrarch.

[18] Percy's Reliques.

[19] Root, i. e. example or beginner.

[20] See the notes to Chaucer, the works of Froissart, and Mémoires sur les Troubadours.

CHAPTER V.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI AND MANDETTA,

CINO DA PISTOJA AND SELVAGGIA.

Amatory poetry was transmitted from the Provençals to the Italians and Sicilians, among whom the language of the Troubadours had long been cultivated, and their songs imitated, but in style yet more affected and recherché. Few of the Italian poets who preceded Dante, are interesting even in a mere literary point of view: of these only one or two have shed a reflected splendour round the object of their adoration. Guido Cavalcanti, the Florentine, was the early and favourite friend of Dante: being engaged in the factions of his native city, he was forced on some emergency to quit it; and to escape the vengeance of the prevailing party, he undertook a pilgrimage to Sant Jago. Passing through Tolosa, he fell in love with a beautiful Spanish girl, whom he has celebrated under the name of Mandetta:

In un boschetto trovai pastorella
Più che la stella bella al mio parere,
Capegli avea biondetti e ricciutelli.

Some of his songs and ballads have considerable grace and nature; but they were considered by himself as mere trifles. His grand work on which his fame long rested, is a "Canzone sopra l'Amore," in which the subject is so profoundly and so philosophically treated, that seven voluminous commentaries in Latin and Italian have not yet enabled the world to understand it.

The following Sonnet is deservedly celebrated for the consummate beauty of the picture it resents, and will give a fair idea of the platonic extravagance of the time.

Chi è questa che vien ch' ogni uom la mira!
Che fa tremar di caritate l' a're?
E mena seco amor, sì che parlare
Null' uom ne puote; ma ciascun sospira?
Ahi dio! che sembra quando gli occhi gira!
Dicalo Amor, ch'io nol saprei contare;
Cotanto d' umiltà donna mi pare
Che ciascun' altra inver di lei chiam' ira.
Non si porria contar la sua piacenza;
Che a lei s'inchina ogni gentil virtute,
E la beltate per sua Dea la mostra.
Non è si alta già la mente nostra
E non s'è posta in noi tanta salute
Che propriamente n' abbian conoscenza!

LITERAL TRANSLATION.

"Who is this, on whom all men gaze as she approacheth!—who causeth the very air to tremble around her with tenderness?—who leadeth Love by her side—in whose presence men are dumb; and can only sigh? Ah! Heaven! what power in every glance of those eyes! Love alone can tell; for I have neither words nor skill! She alone is the Lady of gentleness—beside her, all others seem ungracious and unkind. Who can describe her sweetness, her loveliness? to her every virtue bows, and beauty points to her as her own divinity. The mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and appreciate all her perfections!"

The vagueness of this portrait is a part of its beauty:—it is like a lovely dream—and probably never had any existence, but in the fancy of the Poet.

Cino da Pistoia enjoyed the double reputation of being the greatest doctor and teacher of the civil law, and most famous poet of his time. He was also remarkable for his personal accomplishments and his love of pleasure. There is a sonnet which Dante addressed to Cino, reproaching him with being inconstant and volatile in love.[21] Apparently, this was after the death of the beautiful Ricciarda dei Selvaggi; or, as he calls her, his Selvaggia: she was of a noble family of Pistoia, her father having been gonfaliere, and leader of the faction of the Bianchi; and she was also celebrated for her poetical talents. It appears from a little madrigal of hers, which has been preserved, that though she tenderly returned the affection of her lover, it was without the knowledge of her haughty family. It is not distinguished for poetic power, but has at least the charm of perfect frankness and simplicity, and a kind of abandon that is quite bewitching.

A MESSER CINO DA PISTOJA.

Gentil mio sir, lo parlare amoroso
Di voi sì in allegranza mi mantene,
Che dirvel non poria, ben lo sacciate;
Perchè del mio amor sete giojoso,
Di ciò grand' allegria e gio' mi vene,
Ed altro mai non haggio in volontate,
Fuor del vostro piacere;
Tutt' hora fate la vostra voglienza:
Haggiate previdenza
Voi, di celar la nostra desienza.

"My gentle love and lord! those tender words
Of thine so fill my conscious heart with joy,
—I cannot speak it—but thou know'st it well;
Wherefore do thou rejoice in that deep love
I bear thee, knowing that I have no thought
But to fulfil thy will and crown thy wish:
—Watch thou—and hide our mutual hope from all!"

Meantime the parents of Ricciarda were exiled from Pistoia, by the faction of the Neri. They took refuge from their enemies in a little fortress among the Appenines, whither Cino followed them, and was received as a comforter amid their distresses. Probably the days passed in this dreary abode, among the wild and solitary hills, when he assisted Ricciarda in her household duties, and in aiding and consoling her parents, were among the happiest of his life; but the winter came, and with it many privations and many hardships. Their mountain retreat was ill calculated to defend them against the fury of the elements: Ricciarda drooped under the pressure of misery and want, and her parents and her lover watched the gradual extinction of life—saw the rose-hue fade from her cheek, and the light from her eye, till she melted from their arms into death; then they buried her with tears, in a nook among the mountains.

Many years afterwards, when Cino had reached the height of his fame, and had been crowned with wealth and honours by his native city, he had occasion to cross the Appenines on an embassy, and causing his suite to travel by another road, he made a pilgrimage alone to the tomb of his lost Selvaggia. This incident gave rise to the most striking of all his compositions, which with great pathos and sweetness describes his feelings, when he flung himself down on her humble grave, to weep over the recollection of their past happiness:

Io fu' in sull'alto e in sul beato monte,
Ove adorai baciando il santo sasso,
E caddi in su quella pietra, oimè lasso!
Ove l' onestà pose la sua fronte;
E ch' ella chiuse d' ogni virtù il fonte
Quel giorno che di morte acerbo passo
Fece la donna dello mio cor,—lasso!—
Già piena tutta d' adornezze conte.
Quivi chiamai a questa guisa Amore:
"Dolce mio Dio, fa che quinci mi traggia
La morte a se, che qui giace il mio cor!"
Ma poi che non m'intese il mio signore,
Mi disparti, pur chiamando, Selvaggia!
L'alpe passai, con voce di dolore.

The circumstance in the last stanza, "I rose up and went on my way, and passed the mountain summits, crying aloud 'Selvaggia!' in accents of despair," has a strong reality about it, and no doubt was real. Her death took place about 1316.

In the history of Italian poetry, Selvaggia is distinguished as the "bel numer' una,"—"the fair number one"—of the four celebrated women of that century—The others were Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, and Boccaccio's Fiammetta.

Every one who reads and admires Petrarch, will remember his beautiful Sonnet on the Death of Cino, beginning "Piangete Donne"

Perchè 'l nostro amoroso messer Cino
Novellamente s'è da noi partito.

In the venerable Cathedral at Pistoia, there is an ancient half-effaced bas-relief, representing Cino, surrounded by his disciples, to whom he is explaining the code of civil law: a little behind stands the figure of a female veiled, and in a pensive attitude, which is supposed to represent Ricciarda de' Selvaggi.

All these are alluded to by Petrarch in the Trionfo d'Amore.

Ecco Selvaggia,
Ecco Cin da Pistoja; Guitton d'Arezzo;
Ecco i due Guidi che già furo in prezzo.

The two Guidi are, Guido Guizzinello, and Guido Cavalcanti. Guitone was a famous monk, who is said to have invented the present form of the sonnet: to him also is attributed the discovery of counterpoint, and the present system of musical notation.

Of Conti's mistress nothing is known, but that she had the most beautiful hand in the world, whence the volume of poems written by her lover in her praise, is entitled, La Bella Mano, the fair hand. Conti lived some years later than Petrarch. I mention him merely to fill up the list of those ancient minor poets of Italy, whose names and loves are still celebrated.

FOOTNOTES:

[21]

Chi s' innamora, siccome voi fate
Ed ad ogni piacer si lega e scioglie
Mostra ch'amor leggermente il saetti—son. 44.

CHAPTER VI.

LAURA.

There are some who doubt the reality of Petrarch's love, because it is expressed in numbers; and others, refining on this doubt, profess even to question whether his Laura ever existed, except in the imagination and the poetry of her lover. The first objection could only be made by the most prosaic of commentators—some true "black-letter dog"[22]—who had dustified and mistified his faculties among old parchments. The most real and most fervent passion that ever fell under my own knowledge, was revealed in verse, and very exquisite verse too, and has inspired many an effusion, full of beauty, fancy, and poetry; but it has not, therefore, been counted less sincere; and Heaven forbid it should prove less lasting than if it had been told in the homeliest prose, and had never inspired one beautiful idea or one rapturous verse!

To study Petrarch in his own works, and in his own delightful language; to follow him line by line, through all the vicissitudes and contradictions of passion; to listen to his self-reproaches, his terrors, his regrets, his conflicts; to dwell on his exquisite delineations of individual character and peculiar beauty, his simple touches of profound pathos and melancholy tenderness:—and then believe all to be mere invention,—the coinage of the brain,—a tissue of visionary fancies, in which the heart had no share; to confound him with the cold metaphysical rhymesters of a later age,—seems to argue not only a strange want of judgment, but an extraordinary obtuseness of feeling.[23]

The faults of taste of which Petrarch has been accused over and over again, by those who seem to have studied him as Voltaire studied Shakspeare,—his concetti—his fanciful adoration of the laurel, as the emblem of Laura—his playing on the words Laura, L'aura, and Lauro, his freezing flames and burning ice,—I abandon to critics, and let them make the best of them, as defects in what were else perfection.

These were the fashion of the day: a great genius may outrun his times, but not without bearing about him some ineffaceable impressions of the manners and character of the age in which he lived. He is too witty—"Il a trop d'esprit," to be sincere, say the critics,—"he has a conceit left him in his misery,—a miserable conceit;" but we know—at least I know—how in the very extremity of passion the soul can mock at itself—how the fancy can with a bitter and exaggerated gaiety sport with the heart!—These are faults of composition in the writer, and admitted to be such; but they prove nothing against the man, the poet, or the lover. The reproach of monotony, I confess I never could understand. It is rather matter of astonishment, how in a collection of nearly four hundred poems, all, with one or two exceptions, turning upon the same subject and sentiment, the poet has poured forth such an endless and redundant variety both of thought and feeling—how from the wide universe, the changeful face of all beautiful nature, the treasures of antique learning, and, above all, from his own overflowing heart, he has drawn those lovely pictures, allusions, situations, sentiments and reflections, which have, indeed, been stolen, borrowed, imitated, worn threadbare by succeeding poets, but in him were the fresh and spontaneous effusions of profound feeling and luxuriant fancy. Schlegel very justly observes, that the impression of monotony may arise from our considering at one view, and bound up in one volume, a long series of poems, which were written in the course of many years, at different times, and on different occasions. Laura herself, he avers, would certainly have been ennuyée to death with her own praises, if she had been obliged to read over, at one sitting, all the verses which her lover composed on her charms; and I agree with him.

It appears to me that the very impression of Petrarch's individual character, and the circumstances of his life, on the whole mass of his poetry, are evidence of the truth of his attachment, and the reality of its object. He was by nature a poet; his love was, therefore, poetical: he loved "in numbers, for the numbers came." He was an accomplished scholar in a pedantic age,—and his love is, therefore, illustrated by such comparisons and turns of thought as were allied to his habitual studies. He had a fertile and playful fancy, and his love is adorned by all the luxuriance of his imagination. He had been educated for the profession of the Civil Law, "per vender parole anzi mensogne,"—to sell words and lies, as he disdainfully expressed it,—and his love is mixed up with subtile reasonings on his own hapless state. He was a philosopher, and it is tinged with the mystic reveries of Platonism, the favourite and fashionable philosophy of the age. He was deeply religious, and the strain of devotional and moral feeling which mingles with that of passion, or of grief,—his fears lest the excess of his earthly affections should interfere with his eternal salvation,—his continual allusions to his faith, to a future existence, and the nothingness and vanity of the world,—are not so many proofs of his profaneness, but of his sincerity. He was suspicious, irritable, and susceptible; subject to quick transitions of feeling; raised by a word to hope—plunged by a glance into despair; just such a finely-toned instrument as a woman loves to play on;—and all this we have set forth in the contradictions, the self-reproaches, the little daily vicissitudes which are events and revolutions in a life of passion; a life, which when exhibited in the rich and softening tints of poetry, has all the power of strong interest, united to the charm of harmony and expression; but in the reality, and in plain prose, cannot be contemplated without a painful compassion. "The day may perhaps come," says Petrarch in one of his familiar letters,[24] "when I shall have calmness enough to contemplate all the misery of my soul, to examine my passion, not however, that I may continue to love her—but that I may love thee alone, O my God! But at this day, how many obstacles have I yet to surmount, how many efforts have I yet to make! I no longer love as I did love, but still I love; I love in spite of myself—in lamentations and in tears. I will hate her—No!—I must still love her!" Seven years afterwards he writes,—"my love is extreme, but it is exclusive and virtuous—virtuous!—no!—this disquietude, these suspicions, these transports, this watchfulness, this utter weariness of every thing, are not signs of a virtuous love!" What a picture of an impassioned and distracted heart!

And who was this Laura, the illustrious object of a passion which has filled the wide universe from side to side with her name and fame? What was her station, her birth, her lineage? What were her transcendant qualities of person, heart, and mind, that she should have swayed, with such despotic and distracting power, one of the sovereign spirits of the age? Is it not enough that we acknowledge her to have been Petrarch's love—as chaste as fair?

And whether coldness, pride, or virtue, dignify
A woman, so she is good, what does it signify?

In the present case, it signifies much:—we are not to be put off with a witty or satirical couplet:—the insatiable curiosity which Laura has excited from age to age—the volumes which have been written on the subject—are a proof of the sincerity of her lover; for nothing but truth could ever inspire this lasting and universal interest. But without diving into these dry disputations, let us take Laura's portrait from Petrarch himself, drawn, it will be said, by the partial hand of a poetic lover:—true; but since Laura is interesting to us from the charms she possessed in his eyes, it were unfair to seek her portraiture elsewhere.

Laura was of high birth and station, though her life was spent in retirement and domestic cares;

In nobil sangue, vita umile e quete.

Her father, Audibert de Noves, was of the haute noblesse of Avignon, and died in her infancy, leaving her a dowry of 1000 gold crowns, (about 10,000 pounds)—a magnificent portion for those times. She was married at the age of eighteen to Hugh de Sade, a man of rank equal to her own, and of corresponding age, but not distinguished by any advantages either of person or mind. The marriage contract is dated in January, 1325, two years before her first meeting with Petrarch: and in it, her mother, the Lady Ermessende, and brother John de Noves, stipulate to pay the dower left by her father; and also to bestow on the bride two magnificent dresses for state occasions; one of green, embroidered with violets; the other of crimson, trimmed with feathers. In all the portraits of Laura now extant, she is represented in one of these two dresses, and they are frequently alluded to by Petrarch. He tells us expressly, that when he first met her at matins in the Church of St. Claire, she was habited in a robe of green, spotted with violets.[25] Mention is also made of a coronal of silver, with which she wreathed her hair; of her necklaces and ornaments of pearl. Diamonds are not once alluded to, because the art of cutting them had not then been invented. From all which, it appears that Laura was opulent, and moved in the first class of society. It was customary for the women of rank, in those times, to dress with extreme simplicity on ordinary occasions, but with the most gorgeous splendour when they appeared in public. There are some beautiful descriptions of Laura surrounded by her young female companions, divested of all her splendid apparel, in a simple white robe and a few flowers in her hair; but still pre-eminent over all by her superior loveliness. From the frequent allusions to her dress, and Petrarch's angry apostrophes to her mirror, because it assisted to heighten charms already too destructive,[26] we may infer that Laura was not unmindful of the cares of the toilette.

She was in person a fair Madonna-like beauty with soft dark eyes, and a profusion of pale golden hair parted on her brow, and falling in rich curls over her neck. He dwells on the celestial grace of her figure and movements, "l' andar celeste."

Non era l' andar suo cosa mortale
Ma d' angelica forma.

He describes the beauty of her hand in the 166th sonnet,—

O bella man che mi distringi il core.

And the loveliness of her mouth,—

La bella bocca angelica.

The general character of her beauty must have been pensive, soft, unobtrusive, and even somewhat languid:

L' angelica sembianza umile e piana—
L' atto mansueto, umile e tardo—

the last line is exquisitely characteristic. This extreme softness and repose must have been far removed from insipidity; for he dwells also on the rare and varying expression of her loveliness, "Leggiadria singolare e pellegrina;"—the lightning of her smile, "Il lampeggiar dell' angelico riso;"—and the tender magic of her voice, which was felt in the inmost heart, "Il cantar che nell' anima si sente." She had a habit of veiling her eyes with her hand, and her looks were generally bent on the earth, "o per umiltade o per orgoglio." In the portrait of Laura, which I saw at the Laurentian Library at Florence, the eyes have this characteristic downcast look. Her lover complains also of a veil, which she was fond of wearing. Wandering in the country, one summer's day, he sees a young peasant-girl washing a veil in the running stream; he recognises the very texture which had so often intervened between him and the heaven of Laura's beauty, and he trembles as if he had been in the presence of Laura herself. This little incident is the subject of the first Madrigal.

He describes her dignified humility, "l' umiltà superba;"—her beautiful silence, "il bel tacere;"—her frequent sighs, "i sospir soavemente rotti;"—her sweet disdain and gentle repulses, "dolci sdegni, placide repulse;"—the gesture which spoke without the aid of words, "l'atto che parla con silenzio." The picture, it must be confessed, is most finished, most delicate, most beautiful;—supposing only half to be true, it is still beautiful. But far more flattering, and more honourable to Laura, is her lover's confession of the influence which her charming character possessed over him; for it is certain that we owe to Laura's exquisite purity of mind and manners, the polished delicacy of the homage addressed to her. Passing over, of course, the circumstance of her being a married woman, and therefore not a proper object of amorous verse,—there is not in all the poetry she inspired, a line or sentiment which angels might not hear and approve. Petrarch represents her as expressing neither surprise nor admiration at the self-sacrifice of Lucretia, but only wondering that shame and grief had not anticipated the dagger of the Roman matron. He describes her conversation, "pien d'intelletti dolci ed alti," and her mind ever serene, though her countenance was pensive, "in aspetto pensoso, anima lieta." He tells us that she had raised him above all low-thoughted cares, and purified his heart from all base desires. "I bless the place, the time, the hour, when I presumed to lift my eyes upon her,—I say, O my soul, thankful shouldst thou be that hast been deemed worthy of such high honour—for from her spring those gentle thoughts which shall lead thee to aspire to the highest good, and to disdain all that the vulgar mind desires."

I' benedico il loco e 'l tempo e l'ora
Che si alti miraron gli occhi mici;
E dico: anima, assai ringraziar dei
Che fosti a tanto onor degnata allora.

....*....*....*....*

Da lei ti vien l' amoroso pensiero
Che, mentre 'l segui all' Sommo ben t'invia
Poco prezzando quel ch' ogni uom desia.

Every generous feeling, every noble and elevated sentiment, every desire for improvement, he refers to her, and to her only:

S' alcun bel frutto
Nasce di me, da voi vien prima il seme.
Io per me son quasi un terreno asciutto
Colto da voi; e 'l pregio è vostro in tutto.

canzone 8.

He gives us in a single line the very beau idéal of a female character, when he tells us that Laura united the highest intellect with the purest heart, "In alto intelletto un puro core." He dwells with rapture on her angelic modesty, which excited at once his reverence and his despair; but he confesses that he still hopes something from the pitying tenderness of her disposition.—

Non è sì duro cor, che lagrimando,
Pregando, amando, talor non si smova
Nè sì freddo voler, che non si scalde.

The attachment inspired by such a woman was not likely to be lessened by absence, or removed by death itself; and it is certain that the second part of the Canzonière of Petrarch, written after the death of Laura, is more beautiful than the first part: in a more impassioned style, a higher tone of feeling, with far fewer faults, both of taste and style.

It will be said perhaps that "the picture of such a mind as Petrarch's, enslaved and distracted by a dreaming passion, employed even in his declining years, in writing and polishing love verses, is a pitiable subject of contemplation; that if he had not left us his Canzonière, he would probably have performed some other excelling work of genius, which would have crowned him with equal or superior glory; and that if he had never been the lover of Laura, he would have been no less that master-spirit who gave the leading impulse to the age in which he lived, by consecrating his life, his energies, all his splendid talents, to the cultivation of philosophy and the fine arts, the extension of learning and liberty, and the general improvement of mankind."

I doubt this, and I appeal to Petrarch himself.

I believe there is no version into English of the 48th Canzone. If Lady Dacre had executed it—and in the same spirit as the "Chiare, fresche e dolce acque," and the "Italia mia," the reader had been spared my abortive prose sketch, which will give as just an idea of the original as a hasty penciled outline of one of Titian's or Domenichino's masterpieces would give us of all the magic colouring and effect of their glorious and half-breathing creations.

In this Canzone, Petrarch, in a high strain of poetic imagery, which takes nothing from the truth or pathos of the sentiment, allegorises his own situation and feelings: he represents himself as citing the Lord of Love, "Suo empio e dolce Signore," before the throne of Reason, and accusing him as the cause of all his sufferings, sorrows, errors, and misspent time. "Through him (Love) I have endured, even from the moment I was first beguiled into his power, such various and such exquisite pain, that my patience has at length been exhausted, and I have abhorred my existence. I have not only forsaken the path of ambition and useful exertion, but even of pleasure and of happiness: I, who was born, if I do not deceive myself, for far higher purposes than to be a mere amorous slave! Through him I have been careless of my duty to Heaven,—negligent of myself:—for the sake of one woman I forgot all else!—me miserable! What have availed me all the high and precious gifts of Heaven, the talents, the genius which raised me above other men? My hairs are changed to grey, but still my heart changeth not. Hath he not sent me wandering over the earth in search of repose? hath he not driven me from city to city, and through forests, and woods, and wild solitudes?[27] hath he not deprived me of peace, and of that sleep which no herbs nor chaunted spells have power to restore? Through him, I have become a bye-word in the world, which I have filled with my lamentations, till by their repetition I have wearied myself, and perhaps all others."

To this long tirade, Love with indignation replies: "Hearest thou the falsehood of this ungrateful man? This is he who in his youth devoted himself to the despicable traffic of words and lies, and now he blushes not to reproach me with having raised him from obscurity, to know the delights of an honourable and virtuous life. I gave him power to attain a height of fame and virtue to which of himself he had never dared to aspire. If he has obtained a name among men, to me he owes it. Let him remember the great heroes and poets of antiquity, whose evil stars condemned them to lavish their love upon unworthy objects, whose mistresses were courtezans and slaves; while for him, I chose from the whole world one lovely woman, so gifted by Heaven with all female excellence, that her likeness is not to be found beneath the moon,—one whose melodious voice and gentle accents had power to banish from his heart every vain, and dark, and vicious thought. These were the wrongs of which he complains: such is my reward for all I have done for him,—ungrateful man! Upon my wings hath he soared upwards, till his name is placed among the greatest of the sons of song, and fair ladies and gentle knights listen with delight to his strains:—had it not been for me, what had he become before now? Perhaps a vain flatterer, seeking preferment in a Court, confounded among the herd of vulgar men! I have so chastened, so purified his heart through the heavenly image impressed upon it, that even in his youth, and in the age of the passions, I preserved him pure in thought and in action;[28] whatever of good or great ever stirred within his breast, he derives from her and from me. From the contemplation of virtue, sweetness, and beauty, in the gracious countenance of her he loved, I led him upwards to the adoration of the first Great Cause, the fountain of all that is beautiful and excellent;—hath he not himself confessed it? And this fair creature, whom I gave him to be the honour, and delight, and prop of his frail life"—

Here the sense is suddenly broken off in the middle of a line. Petrarch utters a cry of horror, and exclaims—"Yes, you gave her to me, but you have also taken her from me!"

Love replies with sweet austerity—"Not I—but He—the eternal One—who hath willed it so!"

After this, it will be allowed, I think, that it is to Laura we owe Petrarch; and that if the recompense she bestowed on him was not exactly that which he sought,—yet in fame, in greatness, in virtue, and in happiness, she well and richly repaid the adoration he lavished at her feet, and the glorious wreath of song with which he has circled her brows!

FOOTNOTES:

[22] See Pursuits of Literature.

[23] In a private letter of Petrarch to the Bishop of Lombes, occurs the following passage—(the Bishop, it appears, had rallied him on the subject of his attachment.) "Would to God that my Laura were indeed but an imaginary person, and my passion for her but sport!—Alas! it is rather a madness!—hard would it have been, and painful, to feign so long a time—and what extravagance to play such a farce in the world! No! we may counterfeit the action and voice of a sick man, but not the paleness and wasted looks of the sufferer; and how often have you witnessed both in me!"—Sade, vol. i. p. 281.

[24] Quoted by Foscolo.

[25] Canz. xv. Son. 10.

[26] See Son. 37, 38, &c.

[27] Foscolo remarks the restless spirit which all his life drove Petrarch, like a perturbed spirit, from one residence to another.

[28] Here Petrarch seems to have forgotten himself; he was not always immaculate.

CHAPTER VII.

LAURA AND PETRARCH CONTINUED.

Much power of lively ridicule, much coarse wit,—principally French wit,—has been expended on the subject of Laura's virtue; by those, I presume, who under similar circumstances would have found such virtue "too painful an endeavour."[29] Much depraved ingenuity has been exerted to twist certain lines and passages in the Canzonière into a sense which shall blot with frailty the memory of this beautiful and far-famed being: once believe these interpretations, and all the peculiar and graceful charm which now hangs round her intercourse with Petrarch vanishes,—the reverential delicacy of the poet's homage becomes a mockery, and all his exalted praises of her unequalled virtue, and her invincible chastity, are turned to satire, and insult our moral feeling.

But the question, I believe, is finally set at rest, and it were idle to war with epigrams. All the evidence that has been collected, external and internal, prose and poetry, critical and traditional, tends to prove, first, that Laura preserved her virtue to the last; and, secondly, that she did not preserve it unassailed; that Petrarch, true to his sex,—a very man, (as Laura has been called a very woman,) used at first every art, every effort, every advantage, which his diversified accomplishments of mind and person lent him, to destroy the very virtue he adored. He only hints this in his poetry, just sufficiently to enhance the glory which he has thrown round his divinity; but he speaks more plainly in prose.

"Untouched by my prayers, unvanquished by my arguments, unmoved by my flattery, she remained faithful to her sex's honour; she resisted her own young heart, and mine, and a thousand, thousand, thousand things, which must have conquered any other. She remained unshaken. A woman taught me the duty of a man! to persuade me to keep the path of virtue, her conduct was at once an example and a reproach; and when she beheld me break through all bounds, and rush blindly to the precipice, she had the courage to abandon me, rather than follow me."[30]

But whether, in this long conflict, Laura preserved her heart untouched, as well as her virtue immaculate; whether she shared the love she inspired; or whether she escaped from the captivating assiduities and intoxicating homage of her lover, "fancy-free;"—whether coldness, or prudence, or pride, or virtue, or the mere heartless love of admiration, or a mixture of all together, dictated her conduct, is at least as well worth inquiry, as the exact colour of her eyes, or the form of her nose, upon which we have pages of grave discussion. She might have been coquette par instinct, if not par calcul; she might have felt, with feminine tacte, that to preserve her influence over Petrarch, it was necessary to preserve his respect. She was evidently proud of her conquest: she had else been more or less than woman; and at every hazard, but that of self-respect, she was resolved to retain him. If Petrarch absented himself for a few days, he was generally better treated on his return.[31] If he avoided her, then her eye followed him with a softer expression. When he looked pale from sickness of heart and agitation of spirits, Laura would address him with a few words of pitying tenderness. He thanks her in those exquisite lines, which seem to glow with all the renovation of hope,

Volgendo gli occhi al mio novo colore
Che fa di morte rimembrar le gente
Pietà vi mosse, onde benignamente
Salutando teneste in vita il core.

La frale vita ch'ancor meco alberga,
Fu de' begli occhi vostri aperto dono,
E della voce angelica soave![32]

He presumes upon this benignity, and is again dashed back with frowns. He flies to solitude,—solitude!—Never let the proud and torn heart, wrung with the sense of injury, and sick with unrequited passion, seek that worst resource against pain, for there grief grows by contemplation of itself, and every feeling is sharpened by collision. Petrarch sought to "mitigate the fever of his heart" amid the shades of Vaucluse, a spot so gloomy and so solitary, that his very servants forsook him; and Vaucluse, its fountains, its forests, and its hanging cliffs, reflected only the image of Laura.

L'acque parlan d'amore, e l'aura, e i rami
E gli augeletti, e i pesci e i fiori e l'erba;
Tutti insieme pregando ch' io sempr'ami![33]

He is driven again to her feet by his own insupportable thoughts—and in terror of himself;—

Tal paura ho di ritrovarmi solo!

He endeavours to maintain in her presence that self-constraint she had enjoined. He assumes a cold and calm deportment, and Laura, as she passes him, whispers in a tone of gentle reproach, "Petrarch! are you so soon weary of loving me?" (ten or eleven years of adoration were, in truth, nothing—to signify!) At length, he resolved to leave Laura and Avignon for ever; and instead of plunging into solitude, to seek the wiser resource of travel and society. He announced this intention to Laura, and bade her a long farewell; either through surprise, or grief, or the fear of losing her glorious captive, she turned exceedingly pale, a cloud overspread her beautiful countenance, and she fixed her eyes on the ground. This was to her lover an intoxicating moment; in the exultation of sudden delight, he interpreted these symptoms of relenting, this "vago impallidir," too favourably to himself. "She bent those gentle eyes upon the earth, which in their sweet silence said,—to me at least they seemed to say,—'who takes my faithful friend so far from me?'"

Chinava a terra il bel guardo gentile,
E tacendo dicea, com' a me parve—
"Chi m'allontana il mio fedele amico?"

On his return to Avignon, a few months afterwards, Laura received him with evident pleasure; but he is not, therefore, more avançé; all this was probably the refined coquetterie of a woman of calm passions; but not heartless, not really indifferent to the devotion she inspired, nor ungrateful for it.

Petrarch has himself left us a most minute and interesting description of the whole course of Laura's conduct towards him, which by a beautiful figure of poetry he has placed in her own mouth. The passage occurs in the Trionfo di Morte, beginning, "La notte che segui l'orribil caso."

The apparition of Laura descending on the morning dew, bright as the opening dawn, and crowned with Oriental gems,

Di gemme orientali incoronata,

appears before her lover, and addresses him with compassionate tenderness. After a short dialogue, full of poetic beauty and noble thoughts,[34] Petrarch conjures her, in the name of heaven and of truth, to tell him whether the pity she sometimes expressed for him was allied to love? for that the sweetness she mingled with her disdain and reserve—the soft looks with which she tempered her anger, had left him for long years in doubt of her real sentiments, still doating, still suspecting, still hoping without end:

Creovvi amor pensier mai nella testa,
D' aver pietà del mio lungo martire
Non lasciando vostr' alta impresa onestà?

Che vostri dolci sdegni e le dolc' ire—
Le dolci paci ne' begli occhi scritte—
Tenner molt' anni in dubbio il mio desire.

She replies evasively, with a smile and a sigh, that her heart was ever with him, but that to preserve her own fair fame, and the virtue of both, it was necessary to assume the guise of severity and disdain. She describes the arts with which she kept alive his passion, now checking his presumption with the most frigid reserve, and when she saw him drooping, as a man ready to die, "all fancy-sick and pale of cheer," gently restoring him with soft looks and kind words:

"Salvando la tua vita e'l nostro onore."

She confesses the delight she felt in being beloved, and the pride she took in being sung by so great a poet. She reminds him of one particular occasion, when seated by her side, and they were left alone, he sang to his lute a song composed to her praise, beginning, "Dir più non osa il nostro amore;" and she asks him whether he did not perceive that the veil had then nearly fallen from her heart?[35]

She laments, in some exquisite lines, that she had not the happiness to be born in Italy, the native country of her lover, and yet allows that the land must needs be fair in which she first won his affection.

Duolmi ancor veramente, ch'io non nacqui
Almen più presso al tuo fiorito nido!—
Ma assai fu bel päese ov'io ti piacqui.

In another passage we have a sentiment evidently taken from nature, and exquisitely graceful and feminine. "You," says Laura, "proclaimed to all men the passion you felt for me: you called aloud for pity: you kept not the tender secret for me alone, but took a pride and a pleasure in publishing it forth to the world; thus constraining me, by all a woman's fear and modesty, to be silent."—"But not less is the pain because we conceal it in the depths of the heart, nor the greater because we lament aloud: fiction and poetry can add nothing to truth, nor yet take from it."

Tu eri di mercè chiamar già roco
Quand'io tacea; perchè vergogna e tema
Facean molto desir, parer si poco;
Non è minor il duol perch' altri 'l prema,
Ne maggior per andarsi lamentando:
Per fizïon non cresce il ver, nè scema.

Petrarch, then all trembling and in tears, exclaims, "that could he but believe he had been dear to her eyes as to her heart, he were sufficiently recompensed for all his sufferings;" and she replies, "that will I never reveal!" ('quello mi taccio.') By this coquettish and characteristic answer, we are still left in the dark. Such was the sacred respect in which Petrarch held her he so loved, that though he evidently wishes to believe—perhaps did believe, that he had touched her heart, he would not presume to insinuate what Laura had never avowed. The whole scene, though less polished in the versification than some of his sonnets, is written throughout with all the flow and fervour of real feeling. It received the poet's last corrections twenty-six years after Laura's death, and but a few weeks previous to his own.

When at Milan, I was taken, as a matter of course, to visit the Ambrosian library. At the time I was ill in health, dejected and indifferent; and I only remember being led in passive resignation from room to room, and called upon to admire a vast variety of objects, at the moment when I was pining for rest; when to look, think, speak, or move, was pain,—when to sit motionless and gaze out upon the sunshine, seemed to me the only supreme blessedness. In such moments as these, we can have sympathies with nature, but not with old books and antiquities. I have a most confused recollection both of the locality and the contents of this famous collection; but there were two objects which roused me from this sullen stupor, and indelibly impressed my imagination and my memory; and one of these was the celebrated copy of Virgil, which had been the favourite companion and constant study of Petrarch, containing that memorandum of the death of Laura, in his own handwriting, which, after much expenditure of paper, and argument, and critical abuse, is at length admitted to be genuine. I knew little of the controversy this famous inscription had occasioned in Italy,—though I was aware that its authenticity had been disputed: but as a homely proverb saith, seeing is believing; to look upon the handwriting with my own eyes, would have made assurance double sure, if in that moment I needed such assurance. I do not remember reasoning or doubting on the subject;—but gushing up like the waters of an intermitting fountain, there was a sudden flow of feeling and memory came over my heart:—I stood for some moments silently contemplating the name of Laura, in the pale, half-effaced characters traced by the hand of her lover; that name with which his genius and his love have filled the earth: confused thoughts of the mingling of vanity and glory,—of the "poco polvere che nulla sente," and the immortality of deified beauty, were crowded in my mind. When all were gone, I turned back, and gave the guide a small gratuity to be allowed to do homage to the name of Laura, by pressing my lips upon it. The reader smiles at this sentimental enthusiasm; so would I, if time had not taught me to respect, as well as regret, what it has taken from me, and never can restore.

The memorandum has often been quoted; but this account of the love of Petrarch would not be complete were it omitted here. It runs literally thus:—

"Laura, illustrious by her own virtues, and long celebrated by my verses, I beheld for the first time, in my early youth, on the 6th of April, 1327, about the first hour of the day, in the church of Saint Claire in Avignon: and in the same city, in the same month of April, the same day and hour, in the year 1348, this light of my life was withdrawn from the world while I was at Verona, ignorant, alas! of what had befallen me. The terrible intelligence was conveyed in a letter from Louis, and reached me at Parma the 19th of May, early in the morning.

"Her chaste and beautiful remains were deposited the same day after vespers, in the Church of the Fratri Minori (Cordeliers). Her spirit, as Seneca said of Scipio Africanus,[36] has returned, doubtless, to that heaven whence it came.

"To preserve the memory of this afflicting loss, it is with a bitter pleasure I record it here, in this book which is ever before my eyes, that nothing in this world may hereafter delight me: and that the chief tie which bound me to life being broken, I may, by frequently looking on these words, and thinking on this transitory existence, be prepared to quit this earthly Babylon, which, with the help of the divine grace, and the constant and manly recollection of those fruitless desires, and vain hopes, and sad vicissitudes which have so long agitated me, will be an easy task."

Laura died of the plague, which then desolated Avignon, and terminated the life of the sufferer on the third day. The moment she was seized with the fatal symptoms, she dictated her will; and notwithstanding the pestilential nature of her disorder, she was surrounded to the last by her numerous relations and friends, who braved death rather than forsake her.

Her tomb was discovered and opened in 1533, in the presence of Francis the First, whose celebrated stanzas on the occasion are well known.

Of the fame, which even in her lifetime, the love and poetical adoration of Petrarch had thrown round his Laura, a curious instance is given which will characterise the manners of the age. When Charles of Luxemburgh (afterwards Emperor) was at Avignon, a grand fête was given, in his honour, at which all the noblesse were present. He desired that Petrarch's Laura should be pointed out to him; and when she was introduced, he made a sign with his hand that the other ladies present should fall back; then going up to Laura, and for a moment contemplating her with interest, he kissed her respectfully on the forehead and on the eyelids. Petrarch alludes to this incident in the 201st sonnet, the last line of which shows that this royal salutation was considered singular.

"M'empia d'invidia l'atto dolce e strano."

Petrarch survived her twenty-six years, dying in 1374. He was found lifeless one morning in his study, his hand resting on a book.

The inferences I draw from this rapid sketch are, first, that Laura was virtuous, but not insensible;—for had she been facile, she would not have preserved her lover's respect; had she been a heartless trifler, she could not have retained his love, nor deserved his undying regrets: and secondly, that if Petrarch had not attached himself fervently to this beautiful and pure-hearted woman, he would have employed his splendid talents like other men of his time. He might then have left us theological treatises and Latin epics, which the worms would have eaten; he might have risen high in the church or state; have become a bold, intriguing priest; a politic archbishop,—a cardinal,—a pope;—most worthless and empty titles all, compared with that by which he has descended to us, as Petrarch, the poet and the lover of Laura![37]

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Madame Deshoulières speaks "avec connaissance de fait," and even points out the very spot in which Laura, "de l'amoureux Petrarque adoucit le martyre."—Another French lady, who piqued herself on being a descendant of the family of Laura, was extremely affronted and scandalised when the Chevalier Ramsay asserted that Petrarch's passion was purely poetical and platonic, and regarded it heresy to suppose that Laura could have been "ungrateful,"—such was her idea of feminine gratitude!—(Spence's Anecdotes.) Then comes another French woman, with the most anti-poetical soul that God ever placed within the form of a woman—"Le fade personage que votre Petrarque! que sa Laure était sotte et precieuse! que la Cour d'Amour était fastidieuse!" &c. exclaims the acute, amusing, profligate, heartless Madame du Deffand. It must be allowed that Petrarch and Laura would have been extremely desplaçes in the Court of the Regent,—the only Court of Love with which Madame du Deffand was acquainted, and which assuredly was not fastidieuse.

[30] From the Dialogues with St. Augustin, as quoted in the "Pieces Justificatives," and by Ginguené (Hist. Litt. vol. iii. notes.) These imaginary dialogues are a series of Confessions not intended for publication by Petrarch, but now printed with his prose works.

[31] Sonnet 39.

[32] Ballata 5.

[33] Petrarch withdrew to Vaucluse in 1337, and spent three years in entire solitude. He commenced his journey to Rome in 1341, about fourteen years after his first interview with Laura.

[34] Petrarch asks her whether it was "pain to die?" she replies in those fine lines which have been quoted a thousand times: