Читать книгу A history of Italian literature онлайн

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Dante’s great position, nevertheless, in this point of view, somewhat detracts from his originality in other respects. He is the man of his age, not a man in advance of his age. He does not, like Goethe, point the path of progress along an illimitable future. He has no prevision of Bacon and Galileo; nor is he fertile in germs, hints, or prefigurements of greater things to come. His philosophy is that of Aquinas, and his science that of Aristotle. This in no way impairs his poetical power, and it still remains the greatest of marvels that the transcendent poet and the most representative thinker of the age should have met in the same person. Much that appears original in him is really not peculiar to him, as, for instance, his generous treatment of the heathen world. There was nothing in this that could surprise any contemporary. The beatification of the Emperor Trajan was already an approved legend, and similar promotions in the instances of Ripheus and Statius 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 theÆneid. 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 theDivine 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.