Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/64

46 and similar promotions in the instances of Ripheus and Statins only carry the principle somewhat further. His astonishing treatment of Ulysses might be regarded as a strong counterpoise, but it must be remembered that he was unacquainted with Homer, and probably took his view of the character of Ulysses from the Æneid. On the whole, his attitude towards the classical world is highly to his credit; but it merely expresses the dim perception of his age, that greater men and greater civilisations had flourished before them, and that inspiration from these was wanting to transform the semi-barbarism around them into a well-ordered society. Hence Dante's loving devotion to Virgil, the only portrait in his epic that evinces any considerable power of character painting; and his tenderness to all things classical. Had he flourished along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, Dante would have been a great humanist, his scholarship and statesmanship would have found wider and more profitable fields of action than his own age vouchsafed to them; but we should not have had the Divine Comedy, towering above every other work of the age much higher even than Shakespeare towers above contemporary dramatists; and all his own, even to its metrical structure, since terza rima appears to have been Dante's invention.

The thought at the foundation of the Divina Commedia, nevertheless, is more ancient than Dante, although the details evince marvellous fertility of invention. The idea of a descent to the under-world is the groundwork of a primitive Assyrian epic in comparison with whose antiquity the similar narratives in the Buddhistic and other scriptures are but of yesterday. It is found in Plato's Republic and the Odyssey, both unknown to Dante,