Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/68

50 ineffable purity, such as we see in the early Italian painters, and an intensity of minute description which surpasses the similar performances of others, except, England may say with pride, Robert Browning's, as the work of the etching tool surpasses the work of the pen. These gifts are best displayed upon a small scale, and hence Dante's cabinet pieces are more successful than his vast pictures. They depend, too, in the last resort upon the poet's own fidelity of observation, and hence his best delineations retrace what he has actually seen. His general description of the Inferno is more impressive from its unflinching realism than from its imaginative sublimity. There is no grandeur in his picture of Lucifer, though much quaint ingenuity. Milton's "not less than archangel ruined" tells us more and affects us more profoundly than all Dante's elaborate word-painting. If Milton has nothing so beautiful as the exquisite comparison of Beatrice to a bird awaiting the dawn that she may gather food for her young, neither has Dante anything so sublime as Milton's comparison of the flying fiend to a fleet discerned afar off as hanging in the clouds, or of Satan equipped for battle to the comet "that fires the length of Ophiuchus huge." The magnificent lines in which Tennyson has celebrated the might and music of Milton would seem inappropriate to Dante. In an age when minute description is in fashion, Dante's virtuoso-like skill in graphic delineation has been favourable to his renown; but a reaction must ensue when a bolder and ampler style of handling is again appreciated at its worth.

If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure and simple, he is more important as a