Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/25

 fleshly and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven, in their sheer bankruptcy of mind, to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it constituted a whole Universe. In the ways of these poor devils Dante walked a little; and he has left us, in his "Vita Nuova," a book which carries the system of individual fantasy about as near perfection as possible, and (of course) invests a radically absurd line of thought with a fictitious and tremendous interest.The "Vita Nuova" is enormously fine in its way, as the self-revelation of a man in whom the world is interested, and to whom many conceits may be freely pardoned. It is quaint, fine, subtle, suggestive; but its chief value is this, that it was composed, in a tender moment, by the tremendous creature who wrote the story of Roman Catholicism in unfaltering and colossal cipher for the study of all forthcoming ages.

What was great and potent in Dante remained in the "Divine Comedy" and bore no seed. What was absurd and unnatural in Dante, mingling with foul exhalations from the brains of his brother poets, formed the miasmic cloud which obscured all English culture, generated madness even as far north as Hawthornden and Edinburgh, obscured Chaucer for centuries, darkened the way to the vast spaces of the Elizabethan drama, and generally bred in the very bones and marrow of English literature the veriest ague of absurdity ever known to keep human creature crazy. Surrey, a naturally strong man, sickened and died in the fever; his limpid English just preserving his foolish subjects from total oblivion; while Wyatt, affected in form as well as in