PETRARCH THE AUTHOR 



by turning it to account in public life) as in poetry. 

 Said Dante to one of his odes: " Ode! I believe they 

 shall be but rare who shall rightly understand thy 

 meaning, so intricate and knotty is thy utterance of it. 

 Wherefore, if it perchance come about that thou take 

 thy way into the presence of folk who seem not rightly 

 to perceive it, then I pray thee to take heart again, and 

 say to them, O my beloved lasthng, ^ Give heed at least 

 how beautiful I am.' " Now, the first and last appeal of 

 Petrarch's verse must be its unsurpassed lovehness of 

 form. The subject matter is too often trivial; but if we 

 observe closely as we read the poem, we find it an ex- 

 quisite mosaic, the beauty of whose every bit is enhanced 

 by the skillful juxtaposition of its neighbor — or else it 

 is pure music. And, as I have said, Petrarch's distinc- 

 tion mainly rests, in my opinion, on his being the greatest 

 lyricist of the Renaissance, and one of the few supreme 

 lyric poets the world has ever seen. At the same time, 

 I fully appreciate his other claims to our study and 

 admiration. The two best exemplars of self-study — 

 study of the ego and, through the ego, of Man — in the 

 Renaissance are the Frenchman, Montaigne, and the 

 ItaUan, Petrarch, who preceded him by two centuries. 

 In Petrarch's case, even more interesting than the pub- 

 lication of his self-analysis is his insistence upon the 

 right of individualism to recognition and reward. When 

 Petrarch tried to legitimize glory by asserting that a very 

 essential part of it was due to a man's virtue and good 

 deeds, he was not quite consistent. So far as these were 



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