Week 12, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Machiavelli

Notes on Francis Petrarch’s “Letter to Dionisio de Borgo San Sepolcro” and “Sonnets”

2480-85. Petrarch lived from 1304-1374, during a time when there was a struggle for the seat of the papacy between France and Italy. Petrarch’s father, a lawyer, was exiled from Florence around the same time Dante was exiled, and he settled in Arezzo. Petrarch himself subsequently moved to Avignon. He chose not to practice law and did not go into the church, but devoted his life to literature and humanistic inquiry—he was a Renaissance man just before the Renaissance. Much of his work was done in Latin rather than Italian, so he partially rejected Dante’s bold venture into vernacular literature. The “Letter to Dionisio” chronicles not simply his attempt to scale Mount Ventoux, France in 1336 but instead (at least in its finished, literary form) a turning from material pursuits towards contemplation of heavenly things and the state of his own spiritual health. The letter takes on an Augustinian cast when Petrarch reads in the Confessions the sentence, “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea . . . but themselves they consider not” (2484). As in so many religious narratives (Augustine’s Confessions themselves being perhaps the most illustrious example), this textual moment has a profound influence on the speaker since the words seem to be aimed directly at him, here and now. He has not paid sufficient attention to what is going on in his own soul, and now realizes that the one thing necessary is to “trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthy impulses” (2485). The thought is conventional, but as any Renaissance intellectual would add, that isn’t necessarily a problem: what makes the letter worthwhile is the fineness of the allegory and the personal application Petrarch makes of the biblical and Augustinian imperative to “look within” rather than seeking answers and comforts from the material realm around us. In sum, Petrarch offers a spiritualized reading of a secular event. His thoughts turn towards a key parallel text, namely Augustine’s Confessions. Our editors say that Petrarch’s path heavenwards is full of introspection, confusion, and self-doubt. Augustine’s self-overcoming is a model Petrarch would like to follow with respect to his own responsiveness to inward events, but he finds it hard going since clarity and self-transcendence are the goal, and the letter ends with a prayer for assistance in his quest.

2485-90. Who was Laura? It is not certain, but most scholars identify Laura as Laurette de Noves, who was already married two years when Petrarch met her on April 6, 1327 (Good Friday), in the church of St. Clare in Avignon. Thomas Bergin says that Petrarch describes four Lauras. The first one stands for Petrarch’s pursuit of the poet’s Laurel crown. The second one is like Dante’s Beatrice, a guide to heaven. The third is beauty itself, a potential distraction from the poet’s Christian hopes for salvation. The fourth Laura is simply the young woman herself, without all the metaphoric and allusive baggage. But most important in Petrarch’s poems is his own attitudes: he is “nostalgic, melancholy, passionate and yet always curiously removed from life, an observer rather than a participant.” Introspection is the hallmark of these poems at their best, and although “Petrarchanism” (I mean the poetry written after the fashion of Petrarch, not so much Petrarch’s own work) may seem ridiculous in its extremes, it captures something true about the experience of love—that is, people tend to stylize their deepest emotions, as if we need a certain distance from them. Similarly, Robert Frost the American poet tends to make his ordinary characters speak in a very conventional, almost stilted way when they are undergoing the strain of difficult experiences or agonizing emotions, and the “burning and freezing” tenor of some Petrarchan sonnets captures the highs and lows of romantic love. Petrarch is a man of extremes, and that is the way he casts Laura: her inapproachability only makes him desire her more intensely. While Beatrice was a remote angel of light for Petrarch’s predecessor Dante and as such too distant for him to entertain hopes of reunion, Laura’s inapproachability endows her with a lasting erotic charge that spurs on Petrarch in his literary and spiritual quest.

Here is one of Francis Petrarch’s more typical sonnets, “Number 134,” as translated by Anthony Mortimer (keep in mind that Petrarch was a sophisticated poet—-not all of his sonnets are so programmatically oxymoronic):

I find no peace, and have no arms for war,
and fear and hope, and burn and yet I freeze,
and fly to heaven, lying on earth’s floor,
and nothing hold, and all the world I seize.

My jailer opens not, nor locks the door,
nor binds me to hear, nor will loose my ties;
Love kills me not, nor breaks the chains I wear,
nor wants me living, nor will grant me ease.

I have no tongue, and shout; eyeless, I see;
I long to perish, and I beg for aid;
I love another, and myself I hate.

Weeping I laugh, I feed on misery,
by death and life so equally dismayed:
for you, my lady, am I in this state.

The sonnet below is a memorial poem to “Laura,” the woman Petrarch (or “Francesco Petrarca”) loved “hopelessly and from afar” (Wilkie 1586) until her death in 1348. Though some of the 366 poems in the Canzoniere are not concerned with Laura, many of them deal with her in life or in memory. Central to Petrarch’s sequence is “the range of moods of the speaker, a range that includes every emotion from spiritual ecstasy to agonized self-laceration and melancholy resignation, every mood associated with love, perhaps, except the joy of physical consummation” (Wilkie 1586). “Laura” means many things in Petrarch’s poetry—she is the “laurel” of the poet’s ambitions, but she is also his spiritual guide, much like Dante’s beloved, Beatrice, and simply a beautiful young female of whom Petrarch was enamored. But most important, Wilkie points out, is the fact that all of Petrarch’s sonnets are concerned not so much with Laura herself as with the poet and his task; they are “metapoetic.” Here is “Sonnet 292” from the Canzoniere, as translated by Anthony Mortimer:

The eyes I spoke of once in words that burn,
the arms and hands and feet and lovely face
that took me from myself for such a space
of time and marked me out from other men;

the waving hair of unmixed gold that shone,
the smile that flashed with the angelic rays
that used to make this earth a paradise,
are now a little dust, all feeling gone;

and yet I live, grief and disdain to me,
left where the light I cherished never shows,
in fragile bark on the tempestuous sea.

Here let my loving song come to a close;
the vein of my accustomed art is dry,
and this, my lyre, turned at last to tears.

Sonnets and background information were taken from Literature of the Western World, Volume One. Eds. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan, 1984. 1586-87, 1593-94.

The Petrarchan sonnet, at least in its Italian-language form, generally follows a set rhyme scheme, which runs as follows: abba abba cdc dcd. The first eight lines, or “octave,” do not often deviate from the “abba abba” pattern, but the last six lines, or “sestet,” frequently follow a different pattern, such as “cde cde,” “cde ced,” or “cdc dee.” See Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, by Paul Fussell. New York: Random, 1979. Chapter 7. In addition, it’s good to know that in 2008, as I write this addition to an old guide, you can easily find information on most rhyme schemes simply by typing them in your Google or other search bar: Google “abba abba cdc dcd” and you’ll be surprised how many good guides to poetic form are available on the net.

Notes on Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince

2521-23. In his chapter “Cesare Borgia,” Machiavelli argues that Cesare or “Duke Valentino” combined the cunning of the fox and the martial audacity of the lion; he played the cards Fortune dealt him, and played them well. He weakened the Orsini and Colonnesi factions in Rome and called on the French to help him put down the rebellions that arose. More broadly, he managed to scatter such factions by appealing to men of rank and rewarding them without reference to which party they served. He took Romagna, shrewdly employing the cruel Remirro de Orco, who, we are told, “in a short time rendered the province peaceful and united, gaining enormous prestige” (1523). He then ordered that henchman to be cut in half and displayed in the public square, lest the people’s hatred flow towards him rather than towards the now-powerful de Orco. He assuaged public feeling against him, that is, not with kindness but rather with a well-directed act of violence—a political “holistic remedy,” with cruelty curing outrage over cruelty. But in the end, illness and bad fortune got the better of Cesare, something that can happen even to the best of Machiavellian princes. Cesare made the most of his opportunities, and that is the best anyone can do.

2524-26. In his chapter, “On the Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, Are Praised Or Censured,” Machiavelli says pointedly that “if a prince wishes to maintain himself, he must learn how to be not good, and to use that ability or not as is required” (2524). A vital question is, how can the prince use both his virtues and his vices to get and retain power? There are virtues that weaken a prince’s grasp, and vices that strengthen it. To be overly generous is a mistake, says Machiavelli in his chapter “On Liberality and Parsimony,” because generosity commits the prince to a ruinous economic policy based on unfair taxation. Liberality is not a renewable resource. It makes people like you at first, but then they keep asking for more until you have nothing left to give, and then they will begin to despise you.

2526-28. In his chapter “On Cruelty and Pity,” Machiavelli says that cruelty is sometimes necessary on the principle of sacrificing one person for the greater good of the many. He argues further that men are generally “ungrateful, mutable, pretenders and dissemblers, prone to avoid danger, thirsty for gain” (2527). In a word, people are selfish. Love establishes obligations that are easily abandoned, but fear induces the dread of punishment—a far more consistent motivator. Still, the prince must not become the object of hatred, which means that he must respect the property rights of his subjects and take care not to provoke the nobles or the populace beyond necessity. In military matters, cruelty may be excused on the grounds of immediate necessity. It is in the prince’s power to make people afraid, but love is something they have in their own power—the prince cannot control it. And control is the name of the game in politics: you don’t want to be defined by others, and you don’t want to be forced to act in ways that harm your interests or those of your subjects. Aristotle said that politics was the art of helping others achieve the good life and that as such it was among the most honorable of pursuits. Machiavelli’s view is not without idealism, but his understanding is that humans are flawed and selfish by nature and that this badness in us will come out under the pressure of circumstances. It takes craft and “art” to harness the subjects’ desires and make them useful. What’s needed as well is an honest assessment of one’s own powers, virtues, and limitations: if a ruler is of a generous and forgiving nature, he or she had better know how those qualities can affect the ability to govern. How are others likely to respond and in what circumstances?

2528-29. Should the prince keep his promises? In his chapter on that subject, “In What Way Faith Should be Kept by Princes,” Machiavelli says that promises are contingent upon circumstances. Others will break their promises whenever it suits them, so the prince has the right to do the same. It is his prerogative to behave like an animal—specifically, now like the audacious lion and now like the cunning fox. This is an amoral, bold application of the Renaissance idea that man is a microcosm containing within himself all elements of God’s creation. On 2529, Machiavelli says people often act like simpletons thanks to their selfishness and shortsightedness, so it will always be easy to find some way of deceiving them. Pope Alexander VI, Machiavelli points out, always deceived people, and never seemed to run out of eager dupes. It is only necessary to seem virtuous, to keep up an appearance of virtuousness, since doing so establishes cover for the times when it is, unfortunately, necessary not to be good. It’s interesting to speculate on what Machiavelli would say to President Lincoln’s democratic-spirited dictum, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” He might sympathize with this notion to some extent: after all, Machiavelli favored republican rule in Florence, so he believed the people should govern themselves without the aid of princes. And a prince who behaves with notorious wickedness and faithlessness might eventually make himself hated and so lose his grip on power.

Still, while Machiavelli is at his core idealistic as our editors say, there’s no denying the realist edge in his political theory—he says in this chapter that “the crowd is always caught by appearance and by the outcome of events, and the crowd is all there is in the world. . .” (2529). There’s little hope in such a sentence that “the crowd” is ever going to break out of its cage of illusion and see people and events for what they really are, so how much danger is the artfully deceptive prince really in here? The suggestion is that people want to be deceived, especially when the deception is pleasant and seems to offer them advantages and all the good things in life. The world turns on appearances, not truth. And as for those few who are able to see the deceitful, sometimes immoral or amoral prince for what he really is, “there is no place for the few when the many have room enough.” That idea is as old at least as Herodotus—I recall the example of the King who explains to his subordinate his principle of ruling. He points to a field of waving grass or flowers and suggests that the tallest ones must be cut down because they stand out too much. The intellectuals, the prideful and self-sufficient, the ones who see the truth too clearly, are dangerous. The notion that people judge only by success or failure gives us a whole theory of history—if you start a war, for example, you will be judged on the basis of success on the battlefield. If you lose, almost everyone will say that your cause was unjust and you should be punished; if you win, those who think such things will mostly keep quiet, and will be little heeded if they choose to speak out against you. In sum and in keeping with the “situational morality” Machiavelli has been positing, then, we are led back to the insistence the prince need only seem “compassionate, trustworthy, humane, honest, and religious” (1529). Above all, religious because when people believe you’re pious, they will credit you with all the other good qualities Machiavelli names.

2530-32. In his chapter, “Fortune Is a Woman,” Machiavelli’s remark, “la Fortuna ed una donna” implies aggression, true enough, but it also alludes to the capacities of a canny suitor. Boldness may imply humility, it may that one subject oneself to the storms of Lady Fortune. Stand up, keep up your half of the bargain by exercising free will, the field for which is open and subject to negotiation. The bold, even violent, prince gets the reward, while the passive are sheep to be directed and mobilized. Machiavelli insists that the prince must attend to circumstances, and not be a creature of habit. As Pater says, “failure is to form habits.” Flexibility is needed, and so is aggression when warranted. Fortune favors energy and youth, and sometimes smiles upon those who know better than to expect consistency from her, those who are willing to stand up, assert themselves, and fight, taking charge of circumstances to the extent possible. Life is full of uncertainties, and passion must go forth to meet them. But this audacity must be backed up with intelligence and talent: I suppose the assertively superior “blond boy” in Golding’s Lord of the Flies would not overly impress Machiavelli because he lacks the cunning of, say, a true Machiavellian like Cesare Borgia. (That doesn’t keep me from thinking of the kid when I see certain prominent politicians from time to time—after all, it takes a lot of arrogance to suppose you have the talent and the right to “rule the earth,” and then expect others just to fall in line behind you.)

2532-34. In his chapter, “The Roman Dream,” Machiavelli answers the question, “is there an ethics in this text?” in the affirmative. The ethical dimension has to do with the liberation of Italy from Spanish (and French) influence and its unification. Viva Italia! This goal, we are to understand, justifies the sometimes unpleasant means Machiavelli advocates, and the realization of the dream will require both looking back to the ancient Roman virtues and a strong man to gather and deploy great power in the present. At heart, Machiavelli is an admirer of republican virtues and of pan-Italian sovereignty, and it seems unfair to use his name as a byword for the cynical, selfish pursuit of “power for power’s sake” we sometimes ascribe to him.

Finally, there is probably no way out of the dilemma that The Prince as a whole raises: amoral or even immoral means can sometimes achieve worthy goals, but aren’t they a shaky foundation for perpetuating such goals? And if we try to lie and kill our way to the good society, aren’t we likely to lose sight of the end-point, instead getting lost in the wicked pursuit and worship of power itself? That said, Machiavellian analysis is still useful because politics is played as a game and staged as a spectacle. You and I wouldn’t want our friends applying Machiavelli to their own conduct and deceiving us because we had granted them our trust, and we wouldn’t care to be always acting in a purely Machiavellian “princely” fashion, doing good or ill to suit the circumstances and make gains in reputation and wealth. But it makes sense to bear in mind that not everyone is so idealistic—many are perfectly willing to behave that way. Unfortunately, in grand matters of state, entities usually behave that way, pursuing their own advantage at the expense of others and by means of duplicity. There’s much to be said in favor of Machiavelli’s attempt to balance genuine regard for political and moral ideals with a hard-edged capacity to see things as they are and to acknowledge the consequences of that disposition. Machiavelli’s analysis of princely authority, whatever its actual aims, should teach us to bear in mind that what politicians (even ones in democratic countries) give out as the “reasons” for their actions may not be—and often aren’t—the ones that actually motivate them. Machiavelli, in offering his vision of how the mind of a capable ruler works, is useful to anyone who doesn’t want to be treated like a simpleton or a child in matters of politics. It’s true that unbounded cynicism is shallow and self-defeating—it’s one of the easiest attitudes to adopt and it makes us seem “hip,” perhaps; but automatic acceptance of everything the government says at face value is stupid and ultimately disastrous to a people’s liberty. A government that repeatedly lies to and otherwise abuses its citizens without fear of being stripped of power will eventually lose all respect for them and stop maintaining even the sham appearance of “self-government.” Machiavelli sought to hold on to at least some degree of idealism while not giving in to naïve passiveness in the face of power. At least, that’s one positive way to read The Prince, for our own benefit.