LOVE’S CRUCIFIX · NINE SONNETS AND A CANZONE · FROM PETRARCH BY AGNES TOBIN · WITH A PREFACE BY ALICE MEYNELL · ILLUSTRATED BY GRAHAM ROBERTSON

LONDON      WILLIAM HEINEMANN      1902

The Sonnets of Petrarch did as much as the Divina Commedia of Dante to establish the language of Italy. The two poets were Tuscans, and Tuscan—rather than any other of the many forms of the “soft bastard Latin”—became, because of them, classical. It is true that such an influence as this has not been so important in Italy as it would have been in a literary nation. The day of Dante and Petrarch past, it is not possible—even though her novels and her ingenious rhythms set the literary fashions during a couple of centuries—to name Italy a literary nation. Nevertheless it was fortunate that Tuscan became “Italian,” for of all dialects of the Peninsula (and Lombardy by itself counts many) it has the most dignity, and has trained its speakers in the most orderly habits of grammar. Although other kinds of Italian have their præterite and their proper subjunctive tenses, their speakers evade them (as do the French in their own tongue), whereas the Tuscan does not keep them for print, but has them in daily use on the highways and in the vineyards. Hard to translate into equivalent verse is this most polysyllabic Tuscan; not only for the obvious reason that a thing said tersely in ten syllables of a polysyllabic language must needs be said at greater length, and therefore generally most languidly, in ten syllables of a monosyllabic language such as the English. The chief difficulty is rather in the slender and sometimes weak graces of antithesis in the original; the language justifies these, affords them room, gives them opportunity and attitude. Turned into English, they take a slight rigidity, and no longer seem so well worth while. Nevertheless it is possible to translate Petrarch, and the translator’s chief quality has to be good faith. Petrarch is full of good faith; because of this he does not deserve the name of sentimentalist which James Russell Lowell gives him. The good faith of a vulgar man may be sentimental, not that of so distinguished and so simple and so entire a nature as this. Petrarch’s integrity is somewhat like that of an Italian melodist; in neither case is there a very great nature, but in both cases there is a whole one, a clear one; the sentiment explores its (not remote) depths, and employs its (not inaccessible) powers. This is it, and it is all, we are convinced as we read; and it is a beautiful all, and not only fond but tender.

Petrarch’s good faith uses the conventions of the fourteenth century; the dream, for instance. Nothing could be more unlike the dream of sleep than is the dream of convention. In the dream of sleep is that capacity for more than merely mortal wonder or grief which, I think, but three writers have seized awake; and they are all modern: Charlotte Brontë, who says, “Suffering brewed in merely mortal measure tastes not as this suffering tasted;” Robert Louis Stevenson, who gives his grotesque dream of a dog; and Coventry Patmore in his “Eurydice”:

This is another thing. Compare it with the gentle convention and arbitrary fiction—the machinery—of Petrarch’s “dreams.”

It is, by the way, chiefly in these dreams, in morte di Madonna Laura, that Laura speaks. Thus Petrarch in his romance speaks for her, and she remains one of the most nearly silent figures in history. The twenty-one years of Petrarch’s love for her in her lifetime give us little more than the picture of her beauty, and of her manners, severe or kind. And the secret which Petrarch never knew—whether he had touched her heart—she took with her to her discreet and honourable grave. She keeps it from the world. In the sonnets after her death Petrarch is obliged to respect her secret. She had yielded him an ambiguous smile; he duly causes her to speak to him ambiguous tendernesses in his “dreams.”

Surviving Laura twenty-six sorrowful years, Petrarch could look back upon her maturity from his day of old age. She had been a little—she became greatly—his junior. Death matches lovers in her own way. One would think that the malice of burlesque might have spared the years of Dr. Johnson’s wife, because of the fact that he lived so long as to make her a more equal mate, and loved her and prayed for her soul when he was a much older man than she ever was a woman. Petrarch’s love-story has no doubt been burlesqued by the modern sense of humour; he, in his day, foresaw and feared no mockery. What he feared was theological rebuke, and he argued the matter out with his conscience until he died.