Читать книгу Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie – Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben und ergänzt um Aufsätze, Primärbibliographie und Nachwort von Matthias Bormuth und Martin Vialon онлайн

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Precisely by this element of rigid composition, of powerful condensation, DanteDante’s text differs from the earlier mediaeval eulogies. Without this unique power which enabled him to concentrate in a few verses the history of mankind, he would never have been able to achieve the Commedia; this is borne out by our text as it is evident almost everywhere in the great poem. In the verses of his eulogy, the images and figures become actual reality, presenting, in one widely sweeping movement, the destiny of the world. Compared to the Commedia, all earlier mediaeval poetry seems to be loosely constructed; the tendency towards conciseness which began to appear in Provençal poetryTroubadourdichtung and in the Dolce Stil NuovoDolce stil nuovo is incomparably weaker, and these poets never tried to master such a content. Did DanteDante take his supremo constructio, his bello stile from the ancients, as he told us in a passage of De Vulgari Eloquentia and in the verses he addresses, with a beautiful tu anaphoraAnaphertu-Anapher, to VergilVergil?80 To a large extent, he did. He learned from his ancient models the harmony of the sentence, the variety of syntactic and stylistic devices, the understanding of the different levels of style, and, with all that, the capacity to coordinate the different parts of a vast aggregate into one coherent stylistic movement. Yet, the general impression produced by his manner of composition is entirely different from that of the ancient poets. Let us consider, once again, Lucretius’ prooemium, which DanteDante did not know, and which, in my opinion, is the most beautiful specimen of eulogy in classical Latin. It, too, contains a world in an image; the ‘appearance’ or ‘birth’ of Venus, to whom the universe presents all its fertility and all its living beauty, is a symbol of Lucretius’ philosophical doctrine. It is a mythical symbol of a philosophy; in spite of its traditional elements, it is a free play of human imagination. DanteDante’s image of Christ as the love enkindled in the body of the Virgin for the salvation of mankind is a symbol of an historical event: irreplaceable by another event, inseparable from the doctrine. The rigid coherence of history, symbol, and doctrine confers upon the composition of DanteDante’s eulogy a degree of rigidity which an ancient poet could neither have achieved nor have desired to achieve.