of thought in its highest forms, the only expression of refinement and civilization; and had not conceived the hope that their own dialects could ever rise to such heights of dignity and power. Latin, which had enchased and preserved such precious remains of ancient wisdom, was now shackling the living mind in its efforts. Men imagined that they were still using it naturally on all high themes and solemn business; but though they used it with facility, it was no longer natural; it had lost the elasticity of life, and had become in their hands a stiffened and distorted, though still powerful, instrument. The very use of the word latino in the writers of this period, to express what is clear and philosophical in language,1 while it shows their deep reverence for it, shows how Latin civilization was no longer their own, how it had insensibly become an external and foreign element. But they found it very hard to resign their claim to a share in its glories; with nothing of their own to match against it, they still delighted to speak of it as "our language," or its writers as 66 our poets,' our historians." 2 Dante, by the Divina Commedia, was the restorer of seriousness in literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more. Lit 66 1 Par. 3, 12, 17; Convito, p. 108. "A più Latinamente vedere la sentenza letterale." 2 Vide the De Monarchia. erature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance; the Commedia checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II., for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the idea of infidelity not heresy, but infidelity was quite a familiar one; and that side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of skepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin Schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia had not seized on all minds. It would have been an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European literature, if the siren tales of the Decameron had been the first to occupy the ear with the charms of a new language. Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was wor thy to open the grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote from popular thought too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so undoubting, her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always owning allegiance to Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, - keen and subtle as a Schoolman, as much an idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance, — his eye is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of external nature, to the wonders of the physical world—his interest in them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as elastic, and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and original-as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real, in feeling and image, as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. But let no reader of fastidious taste disturb his temper by the study of Dante. Dante certainly opened that path of freedom and poetic conquest, in which the greatest efforts of modern poetry have followed him - opened it with a magnificence and power which have never been surpassed. But the greatest are but pioneers; they must be content to leave to a posterity which knows more, if it cannot do as much, a keen and even growing sense of their defects. The Commedia is open to all the attacks that can be made on grotesqueness and extravagance. This is partly owing, doubtless, to the time, in itself quaint, quainter to us, by being remote and ill understood; but even then, weaker and less daring writers than Dante do not equally offend or astonish us. So that an image or an expression will render forcibly a thought, there is no strangeness which checks him. Barbarous words are introduced, to express the cries of the demons or the confusion of Babel even to represent the incomprehensible song of the blessed; 1 inarticulate syllables, to convey the impression of some natural sound, the cry of sorrowful surprise : A sigh profound he drew, by brief intense; or the noise of the cracking ice : 1 Par. 7, 1-3. For Tambernicchi falling down below, Or Pietra-pana hurled in ruin there, Had now e'en cracked its margin with the blow (Inf. 32); even separate letters to express an image, to spell a name, or as used in some popular proverb.1 He em-( ploys without scruple and often with marvelous force of description, any recollection that occurs to him, however homely, of everyday life, the old tailor threading his needle with trouble (Inf. 15); the cook's assistant watching over the boiling broth (Inf. 21); the hurried or impatient horse-groom using his curry-comb (Inf. 29); or the common sights of the street or the chamber, the wet wood sputtering on the hearth: Like to a sapling, lighted at one end, Which at the other hisses with the wind, So from the broken twig, both words and blood flow'd forth; (Inf. 13. Wright.) the paper changing color when about to catch fire: Like burning paper, when there glides before The advancing flame a brown and dingy shade, (Inf. 25. Wright.) the steaming of the hand when bathed, in winter: On either hand I saw them haste their meeting, 1 Purg. 23, 31. (Purg. 26. Wright.) |