there was yet no imperial court, authoritative though there was yet no supreme tribunal; for though, as Dante finely says, the limbs of Italy be united by no single rule, as are those of Germany, yet they are united by the gracious light of reason, and therefore it is false to say we have no government, because we have no prince; 'we have a government, though its seat be scattered.'*

It remained to prescribe the literature. And, here as there, Dante appears as the aristocratic idealist, eager to uplift his countrymen, but haughtily fastidious and exacting in his choice of means. Their virtue may be feeble, but he will not stoop to it. The noble language is to convey only noble matter in noble form. Its end is not to further business or social intercourse, but to be the privileged dialect of genius and learning. The kind of writing which alone he thinks worthy to be the wine poured into this precious vessel of speech he distinguishes as 'tragic.' The phrase has nothing to do with drama, which Dante, as we saw, ignores, but denotes that which results when, in his own words, weight of meaning' is matched with lofty rhythm, choice construction, and excellent vocabulary.'† He does not exclude the rhythm of prose, but virtually his 'tragic' writing is equivalent to the more serious kind of poetry. His classification of the proper subject-matter of such poetry is still interesting and valuable. The modern gospel of art for art's sake, which cares nothing for substance provided there be tune, would have been even less to his mind than the opposite heresy, which cares nothing for tune provided there be substance. He lays his foundations deep in human nature. Poetry is concerned with one or other of certain original interests and elementary desires.

In common with all living things we desire what is useful. In common with all animals we desire pleasure. In common with all rational beings we desire what is good. The supreme degree of the useful is self-preservation; the supreme degree of pleasure is love; the supreme degree of the good is righteousness. Hence the three great interests or topics of poetry: valour in arms, the kindling of love, and the guidance of will. The analysis by which Dante reaches this result is sufficiently daring, but it

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seems to have landed him finally upon pretty firm ground. Valour, love, righteousness-these were the central enthusiasms which called forth the serious poetry of the Middle Ages; and they expressed, at least plausibly, the inspirations of the serious poetry of antiquity as known to Dante. Arms' was the theme of Virgil's great epic; arms and the man' who, on his way to fulfil the righteous will of the gods, had turned aside to become the hero, for the whole Middle Ages, of the greatest lovestory in the world. But what more specially concerns us is that Dante's formula for the matter of great poetry has, since the Vita Nuova' days, immensely expanded; while his psychology, disengaged from the exalted dreams of Guinizelli, has become almost aggressively scientific. Love is no longer the sole worthy subject of poetry; arms, which that intellectual dreamer had ignored, and which no Italian poet whatever, known to Dante, had yet sung, are asserted as an independent and equal theme; while righteousness, which Guido's sublime but insecure affirmation had declared to be inseparable from love, is sternly detached from it, and made a third in the trio. The earlier theory is that of the ardent love-poet; the later is that of the man who had found consolation in the lady Philosophy for the loss of the lady Beatrice. And if the poetry of Virgil, later Dante's symbol for philosophy, did not contribute, as it surely did, to detach him from his earlier theory, it must have seemed a magnificent illustration and confirmation of the new.

In the same way Dante's ideals of style, and even of vocabulary, as now set forth in the 'De Vulgari Eloquentia,' bear the stamp of the more masculine school into which the quondam disciple and friend of the Guidos had now passed. The style that he desires for tragic poetry is not either sweet or new, but succulent, beautiful, and majestic (sapidus, venustus, excelsus). It is true that among the Italian examples that he chooses to illustrate it are two from the Guidos; but these, like the other samples from the Provençal, only show that among the older poets and poetic schools he still recognised occasional achievements which he could approve. Of his own work he instances only one of the later canzoni : 'Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona,' chosen for detailed commentary in the 'Convivio.' And he goes on to make

quite clear that the standard by which he measures them all is derived from Latin style, from the Latin poets, Virgil above all, of Ovid, Statius and Lucan, and a few great writers in prose.* The very curious and in parts puzzling discussion of diction, finally, is hardly inspired by the temper of the dolce stil. The diction is to be masculine and urbane; the soft effeminate words and the harsh rustic ones are alike to be expelled; and among those that are urbane, the 'sleek' and the 'tousled' are to be avoided, in favour of those that are merely 'well-combed' or 'shaggy.' This is the ideal of one who has definitely renounced the elementary beauty which merely soothes and cajoles the sense, for the deeper beauty which wins us the more because some sternness is mingled with its charm. He will presently go further to that consummate and sublimer beauty which even the abysmal horror and gloom of the 'Inferno' does not rend and shatter, but enforces and completes-a crashing discord which the harmony cannot do without. But with all these marks of a riper and more masculine literary ideal, Dante still holds fast to some cherished preconceptions of the earlier school. In spite of Virgil, lyric is still the supreme mode of poetry, alone worthy of the illustrious vernacular, and of all the aristocratic graces of chosen rhythm and phrase. Within the lyric sphere, however, the Virgilian taste asserts itself. Sonnets had comprised almost the whole of the poetry of the Vita Nuova.' But the sonnet and the ballad are now slighted as inferior kinds, while the prize of surpassing excellence is given to the majestic canzone alone.†

Dante's position as a thinker about poetry, in this middle section of his life, thus closely resembles his position, during this period, as a thinker at large. It is a period, with him, in the strictest sense, of transition; the dark wood, and the rampant bear and lion; but the young dawn of Beatrice now grown dim, and the way to the earthly Paradise still unknown. The little treatise, left fragmentary like the 'Convivio,' touches both the past and the future of his art; it rests upon the prepossessions of his early prime, coloured by the national ideal which first found complete utterance in the 'Comedy.' His temper

is profoundly patriotic; he seeks the spiritual uplifting of the Italian people. But the tools he works with are still not adequate to the vastness of his task; they are the tools of an aristocrat, a Ghibelline, superbly fastidious and exclusive, refusing concession, disdaining compromise. As a reformer he embraces the desperate policy of calling in an alien emperor to impose peace; as a poet he offers for a common speech an 'illustrious vernacular,' jealously confined to the utterance of the most flawlessly beautiful and majestic modes of art; a choice music to be won only by elaborate and strenuous discipline, and demanding ears as choice for its apprehension. With scorn like that of Apollo for the rustic music of Marsyas, he warns off the untaught singer who relies on a native gift of song.

...

'Let him take warning, and mark these words of ours, and when he proposes to himself to sing flawlessly of these three topics, . . . having first drunk of Helicon and strung his lyre, let him fearlessly take up the plectron and duly begin. But to make the song as beseems, this is a matter of labour and toil; for it can never be accomplished without strenuousness of intellect and assiduous art and acquired knowledge. And these are they whom the poet in the sixth Aeneid calls the beloved of God, lifted up to the aether. And therefore let their folly be confessed who, wanting art and science, and trusting in their wits alone, rush in to sing of the supreme matters in the supreme style; let them leave this presumption, and refrain from emulating the star-aspiring eagle if by reason of native sloth they are geese.'

But this Apolline scorn for the untaught was not the final temper of Dante's poetry. There came a time when Apollo borrowed Marsyas's pipe and played to his audience; when the haughty and fastidious singer subdued his tongue to speak in the language of 'simple womenfolk' and through images which went home to their hearts. The Comedy,' consummate flower and fruit of Dante's poetry, involved, in his theory of poetry, a certain shifting of his ground, a certain withdrawal from impracticable or insufficient positions. But the result, for the afterworld, if not for Dante himself, was an enormous advance in theory also; a vast expansion of the recognised scope and possibilities of song. It must suffice here to summarise in the briefest way the conditions and nature of this last and supreme phase of Dante's art.

The death of the Emperor Henry VII in 1313, which finally frustrated the Ghibelline solution of the political problem, also sapped the basis, for an ardent patriot like Dante, of an aristocratic poetry From authority, in the State as in the Church, nothing was visibly to be hoped; and Dante, abandoning the direct path towards national salvation which rapine and lust had barred, chose under the guidance of Virgil the other way,' and set his hand to the great work of which the aim, in his own words, was 'to win all men in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of felicity,' by setting before them the vision of humanity in its choice of good and evil. In other words, he addresses himself no longer primarily to a circle of select hearers, but to the whole body of his countrymen. He goes out from the sanctuary to the public ways. He takes up the common tunes into his symphony, touching them to finer issues. The didactic allegory of his old master Brunetto is resumed in a compendium of universal knowledge. The savage realism of the Ceccos reappears transmuted into the words of flame and steel that burn and rend the shades of Boniface and Brutus.

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The inner core of his poetry-its fundamental passion and thought-remained; righteousness and love were the final theme of the 'Comedy' as, in more naïve and personal form, they had been of the Vita Nuova.' But the whole fabric of the imaginative presentment, the whole vesture of speech and figure, are new. For the author of the 'De Vulgari Eloquentia,' love and righteousness could only be worthily sung in majestic lyric canzoni; now song gives way to story, the canzone to the verse in which tales were recited in the public piazzas, the fine woof of philosophic symbolism to the immemorial marvels of the popular creed. They could only be worthily sung in the choice high-wrought tragie style; now he utters them, if we may accept his express assurance, in the lowly and careless manner of comedy, and in the language in which simple women-folk converse, 'in qua et mulierculae communicant.' We smile at this description of the language of the 'Inferno'; but the simple women-folk themselves went far to justify him when they pointed, in the streets of Verona, to the man' who had seen hell.' He had told them of hell in language which spoke home.