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CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION.

ALTHOUGH such a process necessarily involves repetition, it is desirable, before closing the record, to "tabulate" the results obtained in the preceding pages -in other words, to exhibit, without special regard to authors or countries, the qualities characterising the period as a whole. The fourteenth century differs from earlier ages in being a time of great personalities. For centuries there had been no commanding name -no Homer, no Virgil even-to bespeak the homage of contemporaries and successors. Dante, it is true, speaks in high terms of Arnaut Daniel, but such compliments show the nakedness of the land, and Dante, moreover, knew nothing of Walther von der Vogelweide, sweetest and freshest of lyrical poets. Even Walther, however, though he carols charmingly, rises as the lark rises. He does not tower above his fellows by virtue of his own bulk; and, again, while his note is sweet, his plumage is plain. Perchance, in another age, he might have grown to larger proportions and

There is some

attired himself in brighter vesture. thing magical about the fourteenth century. Dante himself, whilst confined within the limits of the thirteenth century, is still a follower of Guido Guinicelli; but the moment he crosses the threshold of the fourteenth century, all is changed. In the year 1300 a.d. comes the wondrous vision, and the Divina Commedia, impossible before, becomes possible now.

But Dante, though incomparably the greatest man of his time, is not a solitary figure. Single reputations of the highest, or all but the highest, distinction were achieved in Italy by Petrarch and Boccaccio, in France by Froissart, in England by Chaucer. What is the explanation? Is it a simple accident that five of the world's greatest writers lived and laboured in the same age? Doubtless accident played some-and, indeed, an important part in this, as in all human affairs, but there may have been other elements. Dante's example, for instance, proving that literary excellence was in no sense the prerogative of antiquity, exercised a powerful influence over the best minds of the succeeding generation. They could not indeed repeat his performance; but the memory of what he had accomplished stimulated them to fresh effort, and kept ambition in them awake. Boccaccio and Chaucer openly acknowledge Dante as their master, and if Petrarch long strove against his mastery, the final capitulation is for that reason all the more striking.

The fourteenth century is remarkable as an epoch of harvestings, of vast consummations. Dante sums up the whole of the Middle Age-theological, philo

sophical, economic, social, artistic; it is all there, in his great poem. In this sense the nearest parallels to the Commedia are the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. In them we find the same variety, the same juxtaposition of old and new, domestic and foreign, the same universality. Neither the one nor the other, however, possesses the same organic perfection. In the case of both later works, the relation of the parts to the whole is looser, less necessary, and the connection might be dissolved without fatal consequences. This circumstance might be interpreted as a sign of inferiority on the part of the writers, as it is certainly a proof of inferiority in the compositions themselves. But all three works are alike in their material genesis. They have been formed out of a pre-existing chaos of heterogeneous elements. They are alike, too, in their artistic ripeness. Where the past could show only half-hearted attempts, unfinished abbozzi, the products of Dante's, of Boccaccio's, of Chaucer's old age display firm outlines, contrasts of light and shade, and plenitude of detail.

The vital connection between politics and literature is a topic which in these days hardly needs emphasising; but, if emphasis be needed, it may be in some sort vicariously provided in Professor Fenini's brief Letteratura Italiana, based on the absolute recognition of the principle. The "system of actions and reactions" is capable of easy exemplification in the history, political and literary, of the fourteenth century. Thus the grand ideas of which the GuelfGhibelline riots were the caricature are worthily

reflected in the breadth and majesty of the Commedia, while the fact that the poem was written in a tongue. understanded of the people" attests the influence and freedom of the people in the Italian commonwealths. The absence of literary pretence and literary frippery, in so far as it is not attributable to the nobility of the writer, is due to the same cause. A generation passes; commonwealths are supplanted by despotisms, and the new style in politics is kept, as it were, in countenance by new fashions in literature. The wide sweep of the Commedia, with its remissus et humilis modus loquendi, gives place to the soliloquies of the Canzoniere, or the proud aloofness of the Secretum. Boccaccio, it is true, seems cast in a more popular mould, but the pomp of his period is symptomatic of a tendency which culminated, politically, in pinchbeck Cæsarism.

A political and economic fact of the first importance is the prosperity of the middle-class. This fact has been already insisted on in the opening chapters, and incidentally throughout the work. A few remarks, however, may be permitted by way of apology." Deliberately to assail the middle-class, in a country of which it is popularly supposed to be the backbone, would argue a temerity of which the writer is guiltless, and he has no desire to bring a swarm of hornets about his ears by representing, as some wretches have done, the sober and salutary middle-class as of essence vulgar and unpoetical. If anything is assailed, it is not the middle-class, at any rate per se, but monopoly and limitation. All true

literature is a protest against the undue predominance of the sentiment of class. The best and highest literature appeals, not to a party, but, fully and frankly, to mankind. Were it not for this necessary qualification, I should not scruple to describe the Commedia as a splendid expression of middle-class feeling; but Dante does not address his poem to the middle-class-he is not prejudiced against the barons, poor fellows-and so there is a difference. Literature addressed to a stratum of humanity is bound to suffer for its favouritism. The line of section, if it is to be drawn at all, must be drawn vertically, and delimit, not a class, but a nation.

Dante is middle-class by virtue of the purity of his moral sentiment, by virtue of his "ecclesiasticalmindedness." In the region of art it seems fair to associate with the prevalence of the middle-class the spread and triumph of allegory, of which, of course, the Commedia is the supreme example. Although Dante in his later years espoused the cause of the Ghibellines, he was never Ghibelline, as it were, outand-out. He was Guelf by inheritance, and the whole bias of his nature was towards Guelfism. It was his instinct to sympathise with the clerisy, not with the secular nobility. Indeed, he was a clerk himself. Now the abstract, the allegorical-"the evidence of things not seen"-was essentially the field of the clerks, condemned to live for the most part at secondhand, and to postpone their enjoyments to beyond the tomb. Courtiers and worldlings might invade this field, either for convenience or for disport, but the