Part 7

_S. Augustine._ Yes, your false opinion is precisely the cause of all your miseries, and especially of this last. As Cicero puts it, "You must flee Charybdis, with all hands to the oars, and sails as well!"[31]

_Petrarch._ Whither can I flee? where direct my ship? In a word, what am I to think except what I see before my eyes?

_S. Augustine._ You only see from side to side where your view is limited. If you look behind you will discover a countless throng coming after, and that you are somewhat nearer to the front rank than to that in the rear, but pride and stubbornness suffer you not to turn your gaze behind you.

_Petrarch._ Nevertheless from time to time I have done so, and have noticed many people coming along behind. I have no cause to blush at my condition, but I complain of having so many cares. I deplore, if I may yet again make use of a phrase of Horace, that I must live "only from day to day."[32] As to this restlessness of which I have suffered more than enough, I gladly subscribe to what the same poet says in the same place.

"What prayers are mine? O may I yet possess The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less! Let the few years that Fate may grant me still Be all my own, not held at others' will."[33]

Always in a state of suspense, always uncertain of the future, Fortune's favours have no attraction for me. Up to now, as you see, I have lived always in dependence on others; it is the bitterest cup of all. May heaven grant me some peace in what is left of my old age, and that the mariner who has lived so long amid the stormy waves may die in port!

_S. Augustine._ So then in this great whirlpool of human affairs, amid so many vicissitudes, with the future all dark before you; in a word, placed as you are at the caprice of Fortune, you will be the only one of so many millions of mankind who shall live a life exempt from care! Look what you are asking for, O mortal man! look what you demand! As for that complaint you have brought forward of never having lived a life of your own, what it really amounts to is not that you have lived in poverty, but more or less in subservience. I admit, as you say, that it is a thing very troublesome. However, if you look around you will find very few men who have lived a life of their own. Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others. To quote you a striking instance, Julius Cæsar, of whom some one has reported this true but arrogant saying, "The human race only lives for a small number,"[34] Julius Cæsar, after he had subdued the human race to live for himself alone, did himself live for other people. Perhaps you will ask me for whom did he live? and I reply, for those who slew him--for Brutus, Cimber, and other traitorous heads of that conspiracy, for whom his inexhaustible munificence proved too small to satisfy their rapacity.

_Petrarch_. I must admit you have brought me to my senses, and I will never any more complain either of my obligations to others or of my poverty.

_S. Augustine._ Complain rather of your want of wisdom, for it is this alone that can obtain for you liberty and true riches. For the rest, the man who quietly endures to go without the cause of those good effects, and then makes complaint of not having them, cannot truly be said to have any intelligent understanding of either the cause or the effects. But now tell me what is it that makes you suffer, apart from what we have been speaking of? Is it any weakness of health or any secret trouble?

_Petrarch_. I confess that my body has always been a burden every time I think of myself; but when I cast my eyes on the unwieldiness of other people's bodies, I acknowledge that I have a fairly obedient slave. I would to Heaven I could say as much of my soul, but I am afraid that in it there is what is more than a match for me.

_S. Augustine_. May it please God to bring that also under the rule of reason. But to come back to your body, of what do you complain?

_Petrarch._ Of that of which most other people also complain. I charge it with being mortal, with implicating me in its sufferings, loading me with its burdens, asking me to sleep when my soul is awake, and subjecting me to other human necessities which it would be tedious to go through.

_S. Augustine._ Calm yourself, I entreat you, and remember you are a man. Presently your agitation will cease. If any other thing troubles you, tell me.

_Petrarch._ Have you never heard how cruelly Fortune used me? This stepdame, who in a single day with her ruthless hand laid low all my hopes, all my resources, my family and home?[35]

_S. Augustine._ I see your tears are running down, and I pass on. The present is not the time for instruction, but only for giving warning; let, then, this simple one suffice. If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which; you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to nought along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field for long meditation.

_Petrarch._ Who shall find words to utter my daily disgust for this place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns,[36] the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collected? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle --streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of characters--such diverse rôles in life--the endless clamour of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets?

All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student's habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit.

"Now," I say in mockery, "now betake yourself to noble thoughts "--

"Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre."[37]

S. _Augustine._ That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study, for as the same poet says--

"Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade."[38]

And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words--

"The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse, And bards the noisy life of towns refuse."[39]

If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca's letter[40] on this subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also on "Tranquillity of Soul"; you have beside, for combating this mental malady, an excellent book of Cicero's which sums up the discussions of the third day in his _Tusculan Orations_, and is dedicated to Brutus.[41]

_Petrarch._ You know I have read all that work and with great attention.

_S. Augustine_. And have you got no help from it?

_Petrarch._ Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes.

_S. Augustine._ This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life, which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the fruit of your reading.

_Petrarch._ What kind of notes?

_S. Augustine._ Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control.

_Petrarch._ Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself.[42] In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.[43] It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high--what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil's words--

"There, in a cave profound, King Æolus Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind, Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand."[44]

So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,--who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line--

"And calms their passion and allays their wrath."[45]

_S. Augustine_. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth.

But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away.

By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero--

"The fount and head of all miseries."[46]

Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins--always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair--then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain.

As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will find the same result easily if you will but first calm down the tumult of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world.

And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has oppressed your soul.

_Petrarch_. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite overthrown.

_S. Augustine_. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and be more reconciled to your fortune?

_Petrarch_. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty.[47] And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous orator. Sallust has said of fortune that "all things are under her dominion."[48] And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that "she is the mistress; of human affairs."[49] For myself, perhaps I will declare what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did.

_S. Augustine_. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you, and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion?

_Petrarch._ With my whole heart I adore the very number three itself, not so much because the three Graces are contained in it, as because it is held to be nearest of kin to the Deity; which is not only the persuasion of yourself and other professors of the true faith, who place all your faith in the Trinity, but also that of Gentile philosophers who have a traditional use of the same number in worshipping their own deities. And my beloved Virgil seems to have been conversant with this when he wrote--

"Uneven number to the gods is dear."[50]

For what goes before makes it clear that three is the number to which he alludes. I will therefore presently await from your hands the third part of this your threefold gift.

[1] _Æneid_, viii. 385-86.

[2] _De bonis et malis_, i. 3.

[3] _Tusculan Orations_, ii. 15. But Cicero's words are more guarded, "_inops interdum._"

[4] _Declamations_, i.

[5] Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 172-73.

[6] Suetonius Domitian, xviii.

[7] Seneca, _Epist.,_ 65.

[8] Scipio is speaking of the souls admitted to heaven, freed from the body. _Africa,_ i. 329.

[9] Juvenal, i. 161 (not correctly quoted).

[10] Terence L'Audrienne, 68.

[11] Horace, _Odes_, i. 4, 15.

[12] Horace, _Epist._ i. 18, 109. Conington's translation.

[13] Horace, _Odes_, I. xxxi. 19, 20.

[14] Juvenal, _Sat.,_ xiv. 135.

[15] _Æneid,_ iii. 629.

[16] _Georgics,_ iv. 132.

[17] _Georgics_, i. 106.

[18] Juvenal, vi. 361.

[19] Seneca, _Epist.,_ xxv.

[20] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 2, 56.

[21] _De Senectute,_ xi.

[22] Horace, _Epist._ i. 2, 62-3.

[23] Petrarch refers to a Calabrian monk who had begun giving him lessons in Greek, but left him on being appointed to a bishopric.

[24] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 21.

[25] Wisdom, viii. 21.

[26] _Cor_. xii. 9.

[27] _Confessions_, viii. 7.

[28] _Æneid_, ii. 361-9.

[29] _Æneid_, ii. 622.

[30] Horace, _Odes,_ xi. 10, 6-8.

[31] _Tusculan Orations,_ iii. 11.

[32] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 110.

[33] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 106-8.

[34] Lucian, 343.

[35] He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence, and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo.

[36] Avignon.

[37] Horace, _Epist._, ii. 2, 76.

[38] _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77 (Conington).

[39] Petrarch's _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77.

[40] Seneca's _Letters,_ lvi.

[41] _Tusculan Orations,_ cxi.

[42] _Æneid,_ i. 58.

[43] _Ibid.,_ vi. 730.

[44] _Ibid.,_ i. 52-57.

[45] _Æneid_ i. 57.

[46] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 38.

[47] _Æneid,_ viii. 334.

[48] _Pro Marcello,_ ii.

[49] _Catilina_, viii.

[50] _Eclogue_, vii. 75.

DIALOGUE THE THIRD

PETRARCH--S. AUGUSTINE

_S. Augustine_. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and contradiction.

_Petrarch._ You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you may still have to say.

_S. Augustine._ I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without flinching a severer handling of the trouble.

_Petrarch._ Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the surgeon's hand.

_S. Augustine_. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is. In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains.

Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain your freedom by breaking your chains.

_Petrarch_. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am unconscious?

_S. Augustine_. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and, what is most sad of all, you glory in them!

_Petrarch._ What may these chains be of which you speak?

_S. Augustine._ Love and glory.

_Petrarch._ Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you?

_S. Augustine._ Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed. All the other things that held you back were less strong and also less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good. Nevertheless I mean to try.

_Petrarch._ Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul?

_S. Augustine._ Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right?

_Petrarch._ I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of all.

_Augustine._ Let us take them separately for the present, while I endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately. Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not hold it to be the height of all madness?

_Petrarch._ To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest action of the soul.

_S. Augustine._ Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view you have put forward?