PETRARCH THE MAN 



I am personally inclined to think that Petrarch 

 probably did see some beautiful woman; that, in- 

 fluenced by Provencal ideas (and by Italian, too), he 

 resolved to celebrate her; that, being a man of strong 

 passions, he conceived for her an admiration — even 

 though he may never have been actually in her com- 

 pany — not entirely pla tonic. In his thoughts he may 

 have liked to represent her as near him, and she may 

 have become very real to him. We do know that 

 Petrarch was fond, when lying awake, of imagining his 

 friends to be present, and of holding conversations with 

 them. I have an idea that he carried it rather far, that 

 he lived pretty freely in two worlds, one of fact, the 

 other of fancy; that a passage from one to the other was 

 easy, and that, furthermore, he could hardly tell after- 

 wards in which he had lived at a given time. Certain 

 ideas became almost concrete, and produced a greater 

 ejffect upon him than any external and material object. 

 It is possible, by change of occupations and change of 

 scenes, to avoid seeing and hearing things which trouble 

 us. But the fixed idea is ever with us, and this seems to 

 me to have been the case with Petrarch. Any real love 

 that he may have felt for the real woman may have 

 vanished, but in its place was substituted a passion for 

 an ideal creature, which caused infinitely greater dis- 

 tress. Expressions of this suffering we find in the 

 Secretum, and in a Latin poem. In one place in the 

 former work, St. Augustine, who has been pitilessly 

 probing the poet's heart, telling him that he ought to 



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