Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/8

INTRODUCTION and shepherdesses becomes the medium for presenting the vast and chaotic pageant of the Middle Ages, the depth of Hell and the height of Heaven, the angelic doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and the greed of a glutton. The blood lust, the loves and hates, the arid pedantry, the grim dogma of damnation and salvation, the wild prejudices of a time when men were masters of logic but seldom reasonable, and saints were fiercer than sinners, and Christ's Vicars on Earth went armed in complete steel—all this weltering life is enshrined for ever in the Divine Comedy by one who often judged his age and his fellows, as we may think now, harshly, pedantically, sometimes even cruelly, but who had keener vision and felt more deeply than any one since the great Greek dramatists, and lends us his heart and his eyes. Dante expresses his time because he has the vision of genius; every aspect of the Middle Ages is of burning interest to him, and he is able to give his idea complete expression in the 'fair new style' which was partially discovered by his almost forgotten forerunners.

Whilst Dante follows the 'comedy' of the soul's progress towards heavenly wisdom from the selva oscura of ignorance and sensuality, he does not attempt to analyse the actual life of the soul, with its phantom fears and inexplicable yearnings—all that intricate history which every one of us is compiling day by day. Man, for him, is an individual only in the external sense; the soul of man is not an active agent possessing all Hell and Heaven within itself, but simply the object of divine grace, and is differentiated from other souls mainly by its capacity 8