Book 3 — CHAPTER II. DANTE.

THE ‘DE VULGARI ELOQUIO’: ITS HISTORY AND AUTHENTICATION—ITS IMPORTANCE, AND THE SCANTY RECOGNITION THEREOF—ABSTRACT OF ITS CONTENTS: THE “VULGAR TONGUE” AND “GRAMMAR”—THE NATURE, ETC., OF THE GIFT OF SPEECH—DIVISION OF CONTEMPORARY TONGUES, AND OF THE SUBDIVISIONS OF ROMANCE—THE ‘ITALIAN DIALECTS’: SOME REJECTED AT ONCE—OTHERS: SICILIAN, APULIAN, TUSCAN, AND GENOESE—VENETIAN: SOME GOOD IN BOLOGNESE—THE “ILLUSTRIOUS” LANGUAGE NONE OF THESE, BUT THEIR COMMON MEASURE—ITS FOUR CHARACTERISTICS—THE SECOND BOOK: WHY DANTE DEALS WITH POETRY ONLY—ALL GOOD POETRY SHOULD BE IN THE “ILLUSTRIOUS”—THE SUBJECTS OF HIGH POETRY: WAR, LOVE, VIRTUE—ITS FORM: CANZONI—DEFINITION OF POETRY—ITS STYLES, AND THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE GRAND STYLE—“SUPERBIA CARMINUM”—“CONSTRUCTIONIS ELATIO”—“EXCELLENTIA VERBORUM”—“PEXA ET HIRSUTA”—THE CANZONE—IMPORTANCE OF THIS BOOK—INDEPENDENCE AND NOVELTY OF ITS METHOD—DANTE’S ATTENTION TO FORM—HIS DISREGARD OF ORATORY—THE INFLUENCE ON HIM OF ROMANCE, AND OF COMPARATIVE CRITICISM—THE POETICAL DIFFERENTIA ACCORDING TO HIM—HIS ANTIDOTE TO THE WORDSWORTHIAN HERESY—HIS HANDLING OF METRE—OF DICTION—HIS STANDARDS OF STYLE—THE “CHAPTER OF THE SIEVE”—THE “PEXA”—THE “HIRSUTA”—OTHER CRITICAL “LOCI” IN DANTE: THE EPISTLE TO CAN GRANDE—THE “CONVITO”—DANTE ON TRANSLATION—ON LANGUAGE AS SHOWN IN PROSE AND VERSE—FINAL REMARKS ON HIS CRITICISM.

Many are the fortunes of books and the curiosities of them: but there are few which exceed, in curiosity of many kinds, the history, character, and fate of the treatise variously entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia and De Vulgari Eloquio, and attributed generally, if not universally, to Dante Alighieri.^[547] Its mere 417history is unusual. In the fifth chapter of the first book of |The De Vulgari Eloquio. Its history and authentication.| the Convito, Dante says that he shall speak elsewhere more fully, on the subject of Latin and the Vernacular, in a book which, D.V., he intends to write on Volgare Eloquenza. Boccaccio further says that very near his death he did write it, and the statement is confirmed by Villani. These mentions give it us as written in Latin prose and in two books, but after them we hear nothing about it. In 1529 the poet and dramatist Trissino printed at Vicenza an Italian translation of it, not under his own name, but under that of Giovan Battista Doria. No indication was given that this was not the original, and for a time it was taken as such. But in 1577 Jacopo Corbinelli published, at Paris, the Latin Text. The MS. which he used, and which for centuries was supposed to be unique, appears to be that rediscovered at Grenoble in 1840, and published in facsimile by MM. Maignien and Prompt in 1892; but there are two other early MSS. One of these, belonging to the Trivulzi, is taken to be as old, perhaps, as the Grenoble, both not improbably being older than 1400. A third, at the Vatican, is a century younger, but still some twenty years older than the first printed (and translated) edition. The usual difficulties have been started over these facts, and over some supposed contradictions between the treatise and Dante’s more certain work. But these concern us little, and may be sought, by those who want them, in the editions of the book. It is sufficient to say that few books have a better external testimony, and that the internal 418difficulties (some of which will be referred to later) are quite insignificant.

We may take it then on its own showing; and, without haggling about dates, be reasonably confident that it was written |Its importance.| after Dante’s banishment, and of course before his death—that is to say, in the opening years of the fourteenth century. Forgery is practically out of the question, for, as has been said, the oldest manuscripts are some century and a quarter older than Trissino’s version, and there could be no conceivable reason why any one late in the fourteenth century—even if he had the wits to forge such a thing, which is begging a huge question—should have abstained from reaping the sole advantage derivable from such a forgery by making it known as Dante’s. We take it, then—and may take it with confidence very nearly if not completely absolute—as in two different ways a document of the very highest value, even before its intrinsic worth is considered at all. In the first place, there is the importance of date, which gives us in it the first critical treatise on the literary use of the vernacular, at exactly the point when the various vernaculars of Europe had finished, more or less, their first stage. Secondly, there is the importance of authorship, in that we have, as is hardly anywhere else the case, the greatest creative writer, not merely of one literature but of a whole period of the European world, betaking himself to criticism. If Shakespeare had written the Discoveries instead of Ben Jonson, the only possible analogue would have been supplied. Even Homer could not have given us a third, for he could hardly have had the literature to work upon.

As a matter of fact, however, the book, as I shall hope to show, would be of almost the highest interest if it were anonymous. |And the scanty recognition thereof.| Its intrinsic value has been by no means universally recognised: indeed I hardly know any editor or critic of Dante who has put it in quite its right place. This is, I venture in all humility to think, due mainly to the fact that the historic estimate of criticism in general has hitherto been so rarely taken, and so scantily based. But there are minor reasons. In the first place, the book, 419except by professed Dantists, has been very little studied.^[548] And in the second, what I shall endeavour to prove to be its greatest value may, in the curious critical prejudices which still prevail so largely, have told positively against it. It has shocked people to find the author of the Commedia indulging in grammatical and prosodic scholasticism; and the shocked ones either do not pause to ask, or refuse to answer, the question whether the said scholasticism had not a good deal to do with the quality of the Commedia.

As in the case of other books of importance, we may give a pretty full abstract of the book, which will be all the more desirable in that it is, as has been said, far from well known. The Latin, though not very crabbed, is sometimes peculiar, and some of the terms require careful elucidation.

Dante begins by stating in due form his reasons for writing; the absence of any treatise of the kind, the importance of the |Abstract of its contents: The “Vulgar Tongue” and “Grammar.”| subject, and so forth. He is going to write about the Vulgar Tongue, and this Vulgar Tongue is that which we acquire, without any rule, by imitating our nurses. But, he says, we also have another and secondary speech, which the Romans called Grammar. The Greeks also have it, and other nations, but not all, while comparatively few individuals possess it, because its acquisition means time and trouble. And the Vulgar Tongue is nobler, because it is more natural: so we shall treat of it.

Here a slight crux arises as to what Dante meant by “Grammar”: at least (for the first part of his observations is clear enough) what he meant by saying that “the Greeks have it, and others but not all.”^[549] Are Grammatica and “Latin” interchangeable terms? or does he mean that there was a literary as well as a vernacular form of Greek, and literary as well as vernacular forms of Hebrew, Arabic, &c.? The latter seems to suit the argument best up to a certain point; but it is exposed to the difficulty that, if so, Dante would be trying to make, out of the Vulgars, a Grammatica for Italian, which nowhere seems to have been his intention. But it is no great matter.

420He has so far cleared his ground very well; but, to his own orderly and scholastically educated mind, he does not seem to |The nature, &c., of the gift of speech.| have done enough. He lays down in chap. ii. that man alone has intercourse by speech. Angels and animals do not want it, for angels communicate intuitively; devils have no need of it;^[550] to animals^[551] it were useless: and if anybody urges the serpent in Paradise, Balaam’s ass, Ovid in the Metamorphoses about magpies, these objections can be met in various ways. The real power of speech has been given to man alone. He needed it (chap. iii.) because he has both reason and senses, and therefore must have some medium which will convey the discourse of the former in a manner acceptable to the latter. It is probable (chap. v.) that man spoke before woman, though the earliest recorded speech is assigned to Eve: for man is more excellent. And it is probable that the first word he spoke was “El,” “God,” and was addressed to God Himself in Paradise. No doubt (vi.) the language was Hebrew. Foolish people may be driven (had Dante heard of the Gaelic claim?) to believe that their own vernacular was that of Adam. But he knows better. Though he drank of Arno before his teeth appeared, and loves Florence so dearly that for the love he bore her is he wrongfully suffering exile—though for the pleasure of his own senses there exists no pleasanter place than Florence, yet he thinks that there are places in the world nobler and more delightful than Tuscany and Florence, and that many nations and races may use a pleasanter and handier speech. The consideration of the Flood, Babel, and the consequent division of speech (chap, vii.) saddens him very much; but the facts are indisputable.

It is probable that these chapters, coming as they do at the very outset, have, with hasty readers and thinkers, brought some discredit on the book. They exhibit what it used to be, and still is to some extent, the fashion to call the childish side of mediævalism and scholasticism. Every age no doubt has 421its own childishnesses, and is profoundly convinced that in holding them it has thoroughly put away childish things. I do not myself know that, if it were possible to take a simultaneous horizontal view of the ages, the nineteenth century would be found so very much in advance of the thirteenth in this respect. But putting this aside as matter of separable controversy, we may observe that, in the main body of his argument, Dante is merely arguing, and arguing very sensibly and closely, from premisses which no one educated man in a thousand of his contemporaries would have disputed, and that at the beginning and end there are very notable things. The notable thing at the beginning is the separation of “Grammar” and the “Vulgar Tongue,” and the, at that time, exceedingly bold ascription of greater “nobility” to the latter.^[552] The notable thing at the end is the unexpectedly cosmopolitan character of Dante’s sentiments about the excellence of various countries and their vernaculars. It is true that, for good as well as for evil, there was about Europe then a certain solidarity which has entirely disappeared; but local, as distinct from national, patriotism was as strong, and occasionally as silly, as at any other time. Dante’s own attitude puts us at once into a position for literary criticism which neither Greek nor Roman had enjoyed—the Greek losing it by his arrogant assumption of a solitary literary position for his own tongue, and the Roman partly by his imitation of Greek, partly by the lurking desire to make out that Latin was not so very inferior after all.

At any rate, in the chapter (viii.) which follows, there is no deficiency in what we are pleased to call the scientific spirit; |Division of contemporary tongues.| on the contrary, any one who knows the historical circumstances of the time can only be amazed at the precision, the general justice, and, on the whole, the particular exactness with which Dante, in full Middle Age, surveys the languages of Europe. He is well aware of the threefold general division of language—Teutonic-Slavonic, Turanian or Tartar, and Romance—and assigns the boundaries quite correctly. He is further aware of the divisions of Romance speech itself, and as he had adopted as his criterion 422of Teutonic speech different forms of “yea” (“jo”) for the word of affirmation, so he uses the same criterion in this case. Of Romance-speaking nations he says, some say “oc,” some “oil,” and some “si.” The first are “Spaniards,” the second Frenchmen, the third Italians. The connection of “Spaniards” and “oc” need excite no surprise. Castilian, though in existence, and already provided with the noble Poema del Cid and other documents, was as yet by no means the dominant language of Spain. In particular, Aragon and Catalonia, which spoke a Provençal dialect, had far more to do with Italy than Castile: Galicia, which all Europe visited in pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago, also favoured the “oc,” and Provençal was actually later than this the dialect of Portugal, if not of all Spain, for certain literary purposes. And the Spanish kingdom of Aragon was infinitely the most important country that spoke “oc.”

Proceeding, Dante illustrates the relationship of the three tongues by observing that all call most important things (God, |And of the subdivisions of Romance.| heaven, earth, living, dying, loving—the selection is not negligible) by forms of the same Latin originals. In the next chapter he continues the stress on this point, producing literary and poetical quotations, from Provençal (Giraut de Borneil), French (Thibaut of Navarre), and Italian (Guido Guinicelli), of the word Amor; and points out—thus ever drawing nearer, in true methodic way, to his special subject—that the variations between the three great Romance speeches are produced, in each language, by dialectic differences. And he has, on the fact and on the consequent necessity of establishing some common centrical form by Grammar^[553], observations which lack neither truth nor sense. Then, Which is the best of the three Romance forms? He will not say, only timidly advancing for Italian that si is nearest sic. Otherwise, each has strong claims. Oil is not only easier and pleasanter,^[554] but whatever has been composed or translated in vernacular 423prose belongs to it, the “most fair intricacies of Arthur,”^[555] those of Trojans and Romans, &c. Oc was first employed for poetry, being more finished and sweeter. Italian has the sweetest and most refined poets^[556] of all, and seems to be the closest to “grammar.”^[557]

He will not, however, attempt componere lites^[558], but consider the variations, &c., of the Vulgar Tongue itself—i.e., Italian—though, |The Italian Dialects: Some rejected at once.| as we shall see, he does not hesitate to draw illustrations from the others. He first takes the Apennines as his language-watershed, and allowing fifteen main dialects, not a few of which are sub-divided, he proceeds to examine their claims, clearing away the bad ones. As the Romans think they ought to have precedence^[559] (note the crisp touch of life in this), let us give it them—by kicking their claims out of the way at once.^[560] The alma sdegnosa gives something more than a hint of itself in the description of Roman dialect as a “tristiloquy,” the ugliest of all the vernacular dialects; which is no wonder, since they stink worst of all in the deformity of their customs and morals. The Marchers of Ancona and the Spoletans go next, each of the rejected ones having a scornful tag of his own barbarism tied to his tail, as Dante ejects him from the competition. And he tells us, as if it settled the matter (for, as we shall see, the Canzone is rather a fetish with Dante), “many Canzoni have been written in contempt of them.” The Milanese, the Bergamasks, the Aquileans and Istrians follow, with all the mountainous and country patois^[561], and the Sardinians, who are not Latins, though “to be joined with them,” and who only imitate Latin as apes do men. After this rapid sifting (he uses the metaphor) a new chapter is necessary.

Of those “kept in the sieve” Sicilian claims the first place. Indeed Dante acknowledges that “whatsoever the Italians 424poetise is called Sicilian.” He admits this, but says it is merely |Others—Sicilian, Apulian, Tuscan, and Genoese.| due to the fact that Sicilian princes, or princes resident in Sicily, Frederick the Emperor and his son Manfred, have been patrons of literature, and have thus attached the best Italian genius to the Sicilian court. But he says (after an indignant digressory denunciation of contemporary sovereigns) that there is no special value in the common Sicilian dialect, which indeed is seldom used for poetry at all, while of that which is used, more to follow. As for the Apulians, there have been some good writers among them, but their ordinary speech is spoilt with barbarisms.^[562]

But what of the Tuscans? Dante can only repeat that cosmopolitan criticism, which, though it would be very illiberal to impute it wholly to his exile, was no doubt assisted thereby. They may madly assert their title to the possession of the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, and even some distinguished men may have condescended to the Tuscan vernacular. But let us examine them town by town. Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Arezzo are hit off each in a sentence expressing its boast, and, we may suppose, expressing it with some provincialism. But Dante says, when men really to be admired, Guido, Lapo, and “another”^[563] of Florence, and Cino da Pistoia, have written, it is in “curial,” not in the vulgar Tuscan tongue.

As for the Genoese, the annihilation of the letter Z would strike them dumb, for they can say nothing without it.

Then he crosses the Apennines^[564] and decides successively that Romagnese, in its various divisions, and Venetian, are full of |Venetian: Some good in Bolognese.| drawbacks and vulgarities.^[565] After which a whole chapter (xv.) is given to the dialect of Bologna. It is perhaps better than any other and why? Because it borrows the best things from the others, as, for instance, Sordello the Mantuan borrowed from Cremona, Brescia, and 425Verona. On the other hand, Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio are too Lombardic, and though they have lent a touch of piquancy to Bolognese, cannot create a good literary dialect for themselves. Still Bolognese, though better than other individual dialects, because more composite, is not the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, for otherwise Guido Guinicelli and other great Bolognese poets would not have departed from it. So down with the sieve for, as for places like Trent and Turin, they are too near the frontier, and if they were pulcherrima as they are turpissima they would not be vere Latinum.

Having thus for fifteen chapters pursued a sort of “Rule of False” in order to catch that panther^[566], the Illustrious Vulgar |The “Illustrious” Language none of these, but their common measure.| Tongue, by the a posteriori method, Dante determines to track her a priori. He calls Logic to his aid, and observes that every individual, species, genus is subject to a common measure. The measure of individual conduct is Virtue; of conduct between man and man, Law; in public behaviour, national manners and customs. So too there must be some norm, some common measure of all Italian tongues and dialects, and this, perceptible in all, abiding in none, will be what is sought for. This is the—

1. Illustre.

2. Cardinale.

3. Aulicum; et

4. Curiale vulgare in Latio.

Each of these epithets has then to be discussed.

So we have the substance, the underlying and fashioning unity, of Italian defined as a tongue possessing a quadripartite |Its four characteristics.| differentia, and so it becomes necessary to explain the four parts. Illustrious, as the seventeenth chapter, devoted to it, explains, is something that “shines forth,” illuminans et illuminatum. Men are so called who, having been well trained, are great trainers, like Numa 426Pompilius and Seneca. This is what the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue of Italy is. It has cleared off much rubbish, as in Cino da Pistoia. It attracts even the unwilling. It exalts those who practise it. They surpass kings, marquises, counts. It gives a glory which even we, exiles as we are, acknowledge as sweetening the bitterness of our exile. Therefore it is Illustrious.

The three other epithets enjoy but a chapter between them. It is Cardinal, for as a door turns on a hinge, so all the throng of dialects turns on it. It is Aulic, because, if we Italians had a Court, it would be spoken there, and because, as a matter of fact, all those who enjoy courtly frequentation speak it. It is Curial because, though as in the Aulic case the conditions are wanting, it would be spoken in the great Law Courts of Italy if they existed, and it presents the action of a great Court of Law in trying and sifting cases. This is the proper Italian language, common to all, aimed at (if unconsciously) by all, giving the real key to all.

And so the first book ends, with the establishment on logical bases (none the weaker because the struts and props of them are sometimes decorated with a bygone ornamentation) at once of the necessity and the fact of a literary language for Italy, a language combining the merits, and purified from the defects, of the various local kinds of speech.

The First Book of the De Vulgari Eloquio has been chiefly concerned with language, though—as it is of the very highest |The Second Book—Why Dante deals with poetry only.| importance to observe—always with a side-glance at literature. The Second passes to literature itself, at least to that part of literature which was almost the only serious part to the earlier Middle Ages—namely, poetry. If we wanted anything to show us what a man of letters Dante was, it would be found in the apology which he makes at the beginning of this book for not dealing with Rhetoric at large, but only with Poetic. It is simply that “prosaicants” usually get their language from “inventors,” and “invention” remains a solid example to them, not vice versa. This, perhaps, with some exceptions (the chief among them he has himself referred to in citing the French Arthurian legend), was true in his time, though it was ceasing to be true; 427and a certain amount of truth remains still, greatly as the circumstances have changed. There is, he goes on to say, a kind of primacy about verse; so let us deal with it secundum quod metricum est.

Now, ought writers in verse to write vulgariter? Yes, he thought. The best things require the best language, and that, |All good poetry should be in the Illustrious.| as we have seen, is the Illustrious Vernacular. Things not so good will be improved by the best expression. So all verse-writers should use it, at least at first sight, though we must alter this conception on further thought. The Illustrious language demands illustrious writers (alma sdegnosa again!), and not only that, but the best thoughts or subjects. Very inferior persons writing on very inferior subjects had better not use the Illustrious, for an ugly woman never looks uglier than when dressed in gold and silk.

Now what subjects are good enough for the Illustrious Vernacular? Only Three: Salus, Venus, Virtus—in other words, |The subjects of High Poetry—War, Love, Virtue.| War, Love, and Moral Beauty, which means philosophy plus religion. Dante reaches this conclusion in the queer-looking but perhaps not easily improvable manner usual with him, by the prior and the posterior roads alike. These subjects are, first, the three things of most importance to a Vegetable-Animal-Rational-creature like man, and they are also those discussed by the best writers in the Vulgar Tongue, Bertran de Born, Arnaut Daniel, Cino da Pistoia, &c. But he does not find that any Italian has written on the subject of Salus or Arms. (An ominous fact!)

So much for subject; now for form. What forms are there of Illustrious Vulgar Verse? Some have written Canzoni, some |Its form: Canzoni.| Ballades, some Sonnets, some other and irregular forms. The best of these are Canzoni, for a wilderness of reasons, good, not very good, indifferent, and bad, the strongest of which, though not expressed, evidently is that Dante likes Canzoni best and knows he writes them well. They unite, he says, all the best points of art; the works of the best poets are found in them. So let us write of Canzoni, putting off Ballades, &c., to the Fourth Book—which, alas! we have not.

428What is Poetry? It is fictio rhetorica in musica posita. |Definition of Poetry.| This is so important that no passing criticism of it will do, and we must postpone the discussion.

But here comes in the curious mediæval humility which made a poet like Dante regard himself as inferior to Ovid, and |Its styles and the constituents of the grand style.| Lucan, and Statius. Our poets differ from the “great” poets, the “regular” ones; but they ought to approach them as nearly as possible, and, as Magister noster Horatius teaches, take a suitable subject. And then they must decide what style to write in. If in the Tragic or Higher style, the Illustrious Vernacular will be suitable; if in the comic, a mixed or intermediate style; if in Elegy, the lower. But these two latter are again relegated to the lost, or never written, Fourth Book. Canzoni must be written in the Tragic style, and the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue. This is to be attained when, with the gravity of the meaning, not merely the pride of the verse, but the loftiness of the phrasing and the excellence of the words, agrees. It is no light matter to compose in this way; the most strenuous efforts are necessary. And, therefore, let the folly of those be confessed who, guiltless of art and science, and trusting to their wits alone, break out into the highest song on the highest subjects.

So the considerations are marked out, the Gravitas Sententiæ having been already distributed between War, Love, and Virtue.

1. Superbia Carminum.

2. Constructionis elatio.

3. Excellentia vocabulorum.

Beginning with metric, Dante, like a sensible man, confines himself here to the teachings of experience, eschewing all |Superbia Carminum.| argument in the vague. What lines have actually given the best results in the Illustrious Vernacular? He looks them over, and finds that lines have varied from three syllables to eleven, that those of five, seven, and eleven are best of all, and that that of eleven (in which he rightly includes the French decasyllable with its weak ending) is the best of these best. Seven comes next; then five, then three. Nine is not good, because divisible into three threes. Even lines are “rude,” by which he means (as is undoubtedly true) that they 429do not suit the structure of Italian. The hendecasyllable is that superbissimum carmen that we sought.

Next for the phrase or construction. Here Dante becomes a little difficult, chiefly because he uses peculiar words, which have |Constructionis elatio.| not been always judiciously translated. He says that there is first the “insipid” style, that without flavour (sapor) or individual character, which merely states a fact, his example being Petrus amat multum dominam Bertam.

Next there is the purely “sapid” or tasteful, described oddly as that of “rigid scholars or masters”; the sapidus et venustus, which is of those who have drunk superficial draughts of rhetoric; and the sapid, venust, and also lofty, which is the best of all. The examples of these shall be given below^[567], but they are hard to follow in detail, though the classes are clear enough, corresponding to (1) sheer prose, (2) efforts at style, (3) ornate prose without much distinction, (4) style achieved.

This last, of course, is what the poet must aim at, and again examples of hitting it are given. But the chapter ends with a valuable catalogue of the “great,” the “regular” poets: Virgil, Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Statius, and Lucan, with, in prose, Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus, and (O ye groves of Blarney!) Paulus Orosius. Let people read these, and not talk about Guido of Arezzo.

Lastly the words.

|Excellentia Verborum.|

Here the subdivision is again of great importance and some difficulty. Dante distinguishes a sort of tree—

Puerilia — Muliebria — Virilia.

Silvestria. Urbana.

Pexa et hirsuta. Lubrica et reburra.

430All these words (save perhaps reburra, which, however, a remembrance of the French à rebours will clear up at once) are easy to understand, if sometimes rather hard of application.

Now, according to Dante, Pexa et Hirsuta are grandiosa, while lubrica et reburra in superfluum sonant. And it will be most specially important to use the “sieve,” for, looking to the poets who have succeeded in the Illustrious Vernacular, sola vocabula nobilissima are to be left therein. “Childish”^[568] words must be left out altogether: “feminine”^[569] words are too soft, “silvan”^[570] words too rough, nor will lubrica nor reburra^[571], though urbana, do. So pexa^[572] et hirsuta^[573] alone are left.

All this terminology is, of course, more than a little obscure, and the explanation of the obscurities rather concerns a commentator |Pexa et hirsuta.| on Dante than a historian of literary criticism. But the explanation, given by the critic-poet himself, of pexa et hirsuta does concern us, and is interesting. The former, it seems, are words which are trisyllabic, or “neighbours to trisyllabity,” without an aspirate, without an acute or circumflexed accent, without double x’s or z’s, without the conjunction of two liquids, or the placing of them after a mute, which freedoms give a certain sweetness. Hirsuta, on the other hand, are all others which, like the monosyllabic pronouns and articles, cannot be dispensed with, or which, though the above uglinesses have not been “combed out” of them, still, when mixed with combed-out words, are ornamental. He includes in this last class sovramagnificentissimamente, a hendecasyllabic in itself. He would not even mind onorificabilitudinitate, which has thirteen syllables in two of its Latin cases, if it were not by its length excluded from Italian verse.

So having got the sticks of words for our faggot the canzone, and the cords of construction and classification to bind them |The Canzone.| up^[574], let us set to work to the actual binding and faggoting, before which something more must be said about the faggot itself, the Canzone. The Canzone (cantio) 431is the action or passion of singing, just as a “reading” or book (lectio) is the action or passion of reading. A little metaphysic follows on actio and passio, and the fact that the cantio is actio when composed, passio when sung or acted. But is the cantio the words or the tune? Surely the words; nobody calls the tune canzone. In fact, all words written for music may in a sense be called canzoni, even ballads, even sonnets, even poems in Latin (regulariter). But we are speaking of the supreme canzone, like Dante’s Donne ch’ avete. It is “a tragic composition” of equal stanzas, without responsorium (dialogue or antiphon). The last six chapters concern us less, because they are wholly occupied with the particular rhyming, lining, and stanza-fashion of the canzone itself, and, interesting as they are, overflow our limits, except as a particular example of the general kind of criticism which has been so laboriously built up.

With the conclusion of this the tractate stops abruptly, nor have we any indication of what the Third Book was to consist of, though the Fourth, as we have seen above, is more than once referred to. The loss of both must be regarded as one of the most serious that the history of criticism has suffered.

Yet the possession of what we have is no mean consolation, and I must be excused for repeating an expression of the |Importance of the book.| extremest surprise at the comparatively small attention which the book has received, and at the slighting fashion in which it has been treated by some of those who have paid attention to it. For myself, I am prepared to claim for it, not merely the position of the most important critical document between Longinus and the seventeenth century at least, but one of intrinsic importance on a line with that of the very greatest critical documents of all history. There is no need at all to lay much stress on the mere external attractiveness, unusual as that may be, of the combination in one person of the greatest poet and the first, if not the sole, great critic of the Middle Ages. The tub can stand on its own bottom.

In the first place, it only requires acquaintance with that previous history of the subject, which we have here endeavoured to unfold, to see that we have the inestimable advantage of a 432quite new and independent treatment of that subject. There is |Independence and novelty of its method.| no direct evidence that Dante knew the Poetics^[575]: we see that he cites Horace and cites him magnificentissime. But the Epistle to the Pisos might never have been written, for any sign there is of direct influence from it on Dante’s method. So, too, singular as is the resemblance between the spirit of him and the spirit of Longinus; remarkable as is the coincidence between the words of both about words; and possible as the John of Sicily^[576] reference makes it that Dante might have known the Great Unknown of Criticism—yet there is not the faintest evidence that he did know him, and an almost overwhelming probability that he did not. To the method of no classical predecessor in pure criticism does his method bear the smallest resemblance, even if faint resemblances might be pointed out in phrase.

But it is still more remarkable that, steeped to the lips as he is in scholastic lore—though trivium and quadrivium must have been at his fingers’ ends—the De Vulgari Eloquio, even in mentioning Rhetoric itself, shows not the faintest tincture of that scholastic rhetoric which we have noticed. There is not so much as an allusion to the Figures: they have been, for Dante on this occasion, as completely banished from rerum natura as poor Albucius feared they would be, if his judges disallowed his pleading.^[577] The familiar Arts of Composition make no appearance: Beginning, Middle, and End are with the Figures. If we did not know that these things must have been as familiar to Dante as the alphabet or the multiplication-table to any modern child, we might think, from this treatise, that he had never heard of them.

It would seem, indeed, without too much guess-work, that, despite his attempts to assimilate writing vulgariter et regulariter, Dante had an unconscious and an infinitely salutary instinct, telling him that regulariter and vulgariter were not the same thing. He may have sometimes thought that the former was the nobler; even in his disdainful soul, the touching humility 433of the Middle Ages existed, as we know, to such an extent that he could put Virgil, who may be worthy to unloose his shoe-latchet, in a position above himself. But something must have warned him to keep the two apart, to approach the criticism of the illustrious Vernacular literature by a path nullius ante trita solo.

That path, as has been pointed out, is in fact a double approach: we might almost say that the restless manymindedness |Dante’s attention to Form.| of Dante attacks the hill on half-a-dozen different sides at once. We have a chain of mainly a priori argument, reaching from the origin and nature of language to the completely built and fitted-out canzone. We have careful surveys of existing language and literature, with the keenest observation bent upon what is the actual state of each, on what each has actually achieved. But besides these two ways of approach, neither of which is at all like those of the ancient critics, there is a third difference which is more striking still: and that is that the critic’s attention is evidently from the first fixed, not exclusively, but, from the point of view of his business, mainly, on questions of form, expression, result, rather than on questions of matter, conception, plan. Not exclusively—let that be emphatically repeated: but still mainly.

Again we see, incidentally, but none the less to an important effect, that he has, no doubt by the mere operation of the lapse |His disregard of Oratory.| of ages in part, in part by the activity of his own intellect, and the character of the matter presented to it, got rid of divers prejudices which weighed upon the ancients. It is not a just retort, when it is said that he has completely got rid of the oratorical preoccupation, to say that he is only dealing with Poetics. For the ancients themselves this preoccupation was constant, even when they dealt with Poetics; and Dante does, as a matter of fact, make references to prose which show that he did not dream (as how indeed should he?) of oratory having any pre-eminence. And at the same time that the fruitful modern literatures helped him to get rid of this, the greatest drawback or interfering flaw of ancient criticism, they helped him to get rid of another, the ignorance of prose fiction. True, he may in his quaint low Latin use inventor for 434poeta; but the simple reference to the prose Arthurian, Trojan, and Roman legends shows that the gap, which led Aristotle and all the rest astray, had been filled up.

Yet again, the character of the Romance poetry which he chiefly had before him, as well as (if he knew anything of them, |The influence on him of Romance.| which is quite possible) that of the German minnesingers, was such as to require positively, from any vigorous and subtle intellect, a quite different treatment from that appropriate to most ancient poetry. The war-songs might stand on no very different footing; but, as he admits, there were no war-songs in Italian. The mystical passion and the mystical religion of the other two divisions are like nothing in ancient poetry, except scraps and flashes of things which must have been mostly unknown to Dante,—the choruses of the Greek Poets, Catullus, Lucretius, and some things in the Greek Anthology. There was in most cases no action at all; the subject, though varying and twisting in facet and form, like a mountain mist, was always more or less the same; the expression of the poet’s passionate intense individual feeling and thought was all, and of this no general criticism was possible. The forms, on the other hand, the language, the arrangements, these were matters of intense, novel, and pressing interest. The ancient critic, at the very earliest date at which we have any utterances of his in extenso, had a sort of catholic faith already provided for him on these points. Tragedy, Comedy, Oratory, History, Lyric, &c., were established forms. Rhetoric, though interesting, was almost as scientific as arithmetic or geometry. As for language, you imitated the best models, and did not play personal tricks. Besides, it was quite a minor matter.

Lastly, we see that (again half, or more than half, unconsciously and instinctively) Dante has been brought by the "forward |And of comparative criticism.| flowing tide of time" to a more advanced position in respect of comparative criticism. No ancient critic could have made such a survey as he makes of the different languages of Europe; no ancient critic did make such a survey of the dialects of Greek as he makes of the dialects of Italian. That curious spirit of routine which (valuable as it was in the time and in the circumstances) mars ancient literature 435to some extent, shows itself nowhere more oddly than here. You used Æolic dialect for lyric poetry, because Sappho and Alcæus were Æolians; Doric for pastorals, because Theocritus and the others were Dorians. You might use Ionic in history because Herodotus was a Halicarnassian; and Homer preserved a special dialect for you in epic likewise. But otherwise you wrote in Attic, not because Attic was the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue of Greece (as it very nearly if not quite was), but because an enormous proportion of the best writers in most departments were Athenians. So in Latin you might—almost must—use loose verse, and familiar or abstruse phrase, in satire, but not elsewhere.

Of this there is no trace in Dante, though he may allot his Illustrious tongue to one kind, his Intermediate and Lower to others. He may indeed cite, as a subsidiary argument, the fact that such and such a one has used such and such a dialect or form, but it is only subsidiary. He is, in effect, looking about to see, partly how the reason of things will go, partly what has actually had the best effect. He, groping dimly in the benighted, the shackled Middle Ages, actually attains to a freer and more enlightened kind of criticism than the Greeks, with all their “play of mind,” all their “lucidity,” had reached.

And his bent towards formal criticism—towards those considerations of prosody, of harmony, of vocabulary, of structure, which, when they are considered to-day, even now send some critics into (as the poet says)

“A beastly froth of rage”

against those who so consider them—is all the more important, because not the most impudent accuser of the brethren can |The poetical differentia according to him.| bring against Dante the charge of being a mere formalist, of being indifferent to meaning, of having no “criticism of life” in him, of lacking “high seriousness,” attention to conduct, care for meaning and substance. On the contrary, there is not a poet in the whole vast range of poetry, not the Greek tragedians at their gravest and highest chorus-pitch, not Lucretius in his fervour of Idealist Materialism, not Shakespeare in the profoundest moments 436of Macbeth, or Prospero, or Hamlet, not Milton, not Wordsworth, who is more passionately ideal, “thoughtful,” penetrated and intoxicated with the “subject,” than Dante is. But he, thanks very mainly to the logical training of the despised scholasticism, thanks partly to the mere progress of time, the refreshing of the human mind after its season of sleep—most of all no doubt to his own intense and magnificent poetical genius—had completely separated and recognised the differentia of poetry, its presentation of the subject in metrical form with musical accompaniment, whether of word or of actual music.^[578] He knows—he actually says in effect—that prosemen may have the treatment of the same subjects; but he knows that the poet’s treatment is different, and he goes straight for the difference.

And where does he find it? Exactly where Wordsworth five hundred years later refused to find it, in Poetic Diction and |His antidote to the Wordsworthian heresy.| in Metre. The contrast of the De Vulgari Eloquio and of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is so remarkable that it may be doubted whether there is any more remarkable thing of the kind in literature. Whether Wordsworth was acquainted with the treatise it is impossible to say. (Coleridge certainly knew of it, though it is not quite clear whether he had read it.) But it is improbable, for Wordsworth was not a wide reader. And, moreover, though in tendency the two tractates are diametrically opposed, he nowhere answers Dante; but, on the contrary, is answered by Dante, with an almost uncanny anticipation of the privilege of the last word, in a word five hundred years earlier.

We shall have to return to this matter in dealing with Wordsworth himself. But for the present let us confine ourselves to Dante.

The details of his metrical part need the lesser notice because they are of the more limited and particular application. |His handling of metre.| Had Dante completed his book, it would still have had the limitation of dealing solely with Romance, if not 437exclusively with Italian, poetry. And with particular episodes we shall only meddle when they are closely connected with general critical quarrels. But his method is worth a word or two, because it is again, precisely, that apparently loose but really unerring mixture of general reasoning and particular observation which the critic requires, which prevents him from being ever exactly scientific, but which gives to his craft the dignity, the difficulty, the versatile charm of art. His recognition of the hendecasyllable, not merely as the line preferred by the best writers in Italian, but as the longest line really manageable in Italian, would be sufficient proof of this.

But he is considerably more interesting on diction, because here his observations (mutatis mutandis, and that in extremely |Of diction.| few cases and unimportant measure) are of universal application. The theory of Poetic Diction, the twin pillar of the temple of Poetry, had been put by Longinus in one flashing axiom, true, sound, illuminative for ever and ever. But he had not elaborated this; he had even, in some cases, as in his remarks on the Εἰς ἐρωμέναν, given occasion to those who blaspheme the doctrine. Dante, with no such single phrase (which indeed the odd mongrel speech he uses denied him), expresses the doctrine far more fully, elaborates it, establishes it soundly, and, moreover, is never in the very least inconsistent with himself about it. Even Aristotle himself would have joined no direct issue with the quadripartite division of the necessities of serious poetry as gravitas sententiæ and superbia carminum, constructionis elatio and excellentia verborum; but he would have given the first preponderance over all the others, and would have laid descending stress on the rest. It may almost be said that Dante exactly reverses the order. The gravitas sententiæ is not denied, but assumed as a thing of course, common to all good matter in verse and prose alike. The superbia carminum is a matter of investigation; but when you have got your form of cantio, &c., settled, that is settled. It is upon the third and the fourth, which are, briefly, Style and Diction, that he bends his whole strength, and that he exhibits his most novel, most important, most eternally valid criticism.

It has been said that the examples, both Latin and Italian, 438produced in the chapter on Style (that is to say, the construction |His standards of style.| or arrangement of selected phrase as opposed to selection of the component words) are not free from difficulty. But if we examine them all carefully together, something will emerge from the comparison. In the four Latin sentences^[579] (for translations here are totally useless) we observe that the first^[580] is a mere statement of fact, possessing, indeed, that complete expression of the meaning which Coleridge so oddly postulates as the differentia of style, but possessing nothing more—nourishing, in short, but not “sapid.” The next^[581] is carefully (“tastefully”) arranged according to the scholastic rules—verb at the end, important words at end or beginning of clause, &c., but nothing more. The charm (venustas) of the third^[582] is more difficult to identify; but it would seem to consist in a sort of superficially rhetorical declamation. But there is no difficulty in discovering in what the fourth sentence^[583] differs from the rest. There is the conceit of the “casting out of the flowers” with the interwoven play of florum and Florentia, the apostrophe to the town, the double alliteration of florum, Florentia, Trinacriam, Totila, with the reverse order of length in the words, and their vowel arrangement. And in almost all the verse vernacular examples, though it may not always be easy to discern their exact attraction for Dante, we shall find the same alliteration—

“Sols sui qui sai lo sobrafan, que me sortz;”

the same vowel-music—

“Dreit Amor qu’ en mon cor repaire;”

or a combination of this music with careful mounting and falling rhythm, as in

“Si com l’ arbres, que per sobrecarcar.”

In other words, we shall find, in all, devices for making the common uncommon, for giving the poetic strangeness, unexpectedness, 439charm,—by mere arrangement, by arrangement plus music, and so forth.

The contempt of style as something “vulgar,” which had beset all antiquity (save always Longinus), would have alone prevented the ancients from criticising in this way, even if the lack of various language had not done so.

And so we find, on the threshold, or hardly even on the threshold, of what is commonly called modern literature, an anticipation, and more than an anticipation, of what is really modern criticism. Of course this is a disputable even more than a disputed statement. Of course there are many respectable authorities who will not hear of it, who will accuse those who make it of mere will-worship, perhaps even of gross error, for assuming any such thing. Yet it may be said in all humility, but after a very considerable number of years of study of a subject to which little general attention has been given, that there is this difference between ancient and modern criticism, and that it appears in the De Vulgari Eloquio. I shall be content, I shall even be much obliged, if any one will point out to me, in the authors who have been hitherto considered, or in any who may have been overlooked, a passage like this. I can only say that, in my reading, I have found none.

But the chapter of words—the Chapter of the Sieve, as we may call it—is that which contains the real heart and kernel |The "Chapter of the Sieve."| of Dante’s criticism. For, dwell as much as he may on the importance of arrangement and phrase, it is impossible that these should be beautiful without beautiful words to make them of. And his system of “sifting,” quaint as its phraseology may seem at first sight, arbitrary as some of its divisions may appear, and here and there difficult as it may be exactly to follow him, is a perfectly sound scheme, and only requires working out at greater length. The objection to puerilia, though it may be too sweepingly expressed, is absolutely just, and cuts away Wordsworth’s childishnesses by anticipation. That to “effeminate” words, “silvan” words, words too “slippery” and too much “brushed the wrong way,” is, in its actual form, perhaps somewhat too closely connected 440with the peculiarities of the Italian language. We can understand that the snarling sound of the r in gregia and corpo—the silvestre and the reburrum—may have offended the delicate Italian musical ear; and it is perfectly easy for a pretty well-educated English one to perceive that donna, with the ring of the n’s and the sudden descent—the falcon drop—to a, is a far more poetical word than femina, where, except the termination, there is no hold for the voice at all; it merely “slips over” the “lubric” syllables fe and mi. But it is much more difficult to understand the objection to dolciada and piacevole as too effeminate. Not only is dolciada itself a very charming word to us, but it is impossible to see anything more effeminate in it than in many of those which Dante admits and admires. These things, however, will always happen.

The metaphor of the pexa and hirsuta, odd as it seems, is not difficult to work out when we have once accepted the |The pexa.| analogy of hair, for which in itself it would not be difficult to find a more or less fanciful justification. The merely “glossy”—smooth, soft, insufficient—will not do, and those “brushed the wrong way” still less. What is wanted is natural curl and wave—with light and colour in them, of course, though not mere gloss. This may be either the result of careful “combing out” of all tangle and disorder, or it may be wilder grace, the hirsutum, the “floating hair” of our poet. Dante’s rigid orthodoxy makes him assign very strict qualification to the pexa. They are to be trisyllabic or vicinissima to this—that is to say, they are either to be amphibrachs complete—amore, difesa, salute—or words like donna, on the one hand, or letizia^[584] on the other, which, by a slight rest of the voice or a little slur of it, can be made amphibrachic in character. And why? Because these amphibrachic words help, as no others can do, to give that trochaic swing, with little intervals between, which supplies the favourite rhythm of Italian poetry, as in the very instance given a little later by Dante from his own poetry—

“Donne ch‘ avete intelletto d’ amore”—

441where the rhythm (as opposed to the actual scansion) of the line is represented by almost sinking the italicised syllables, and leaving the four main trochees to carry the rock of the verse on their backs. The dislike to aspirates, to double x’s and z’s, to certain collocations of consonants, &c., is again purely Italian, though it would not be difficult to assign somewhat similar qualifications to the pexa of other languages.

But Dante is far too free and far too opulent a poet to confine himself, or recommend others to confine themselves, to a mere |The hirsuta.| “prunes and prism”—to simple prettiness of precious words. The hirsuta, the more careless ordered vocabulary, must be had too sometimes, because you cannot do without them, as in the case of the monosyllabic particles, copulatives, and what not, sometimes as dissyllables, and polysyllables, which will make an ornamental effect by combination and contrast with the pexa. Here, yet once more, there may be difficulties with the individual cases; it is indeed hard to see the possibility of beauty, even in the most combed-out company, of such a word as disavventuratissimamente: but the principle is clear and sound. What that principle is we may |Other critical loci in Dante.| shortly state when we have given a glance at Dante’s other and much less important critical utterances, contained in the undoubtedly genuine Convito, and in the sometimes, but perhaps captiously, disputed Letter to Can Grande.

This last^[585], which, as is well known, sets itself forth as a dedication of the Paradiso to the Lord of Verona, contains a kind of |The Epistle to Can Grande.| expository criticism by the author of the Commedia itself. There is nothing in it inconsistent with the De Vulgari, but the method is very much more scholastic and jejune. There are six things to be inquired about in any serious matter—the subject, the agent, the form, the end, the title, the kind of philosophy.

The Paradiso is different from the other two cantiche in subject, form, and title, not in author, end, and philosophic tone. 442The meaning or subject is partly literary, partly allegorical; the form is duplex—the external by cantiche, cantos, verses; while the method or internal form is poetic, figurative, &c. The title is, “Here beginneth the Comedy of D. A., Florentine by birth not disposition.” Comedy comes from, &c., tragedy from, &c. As Comedy begins ill and ends well, we call this a comedy. It is in the vulgar tongue: its end is evangelic, its philosophy ethical and practical.

There is little to notice here except the poet’s comparative depreciation of the Vulgar Tongue as “humble and weak,”^[586] but this of course is only said rhetorically.

The curious First Book of the Convito^[587] not merely contains the promise of the De Vulgari^[588], but is a sort of pendent |The Convito.| to it, being an elaborate excuse for writing the book in the Vulgar tongue itself. Its expressions are not always in literal agreement with those of the other treatise; but these differences, even the exaltation of Latin as “nobler,”^[589] in an apparent contradiction to the argument of the later book, are sufficiently accounted for by the difference of purpose and subject. But the elaborate apology for writing in the vernacular, and the elaborate arguments by which it is supported, have no small critical interest of their own; and the later chapters contain eager championship of Italian, if not against Latin, yet against Provençal, which it was the fashion to compare to it. It is scarcely necessary to go through this book in detail; but it contains some very interesting glimpses, and, as it were, vistas of critical truth. The two most noteworthy of these are the remarks about translation, and those about the respective advantages for showing a language of prose and verse.

Translation Dante condemns utterly. Nothing harmonised 443by the laws of the Muses can be changed from one tongue to |Dante on Translation.| another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony. This (which is arch-true) connects itself directly with Dante’s unerring direction towards the criticism of form. If “all depends on the subject,” translation can do no harm, for the subject can be maintained in exactly the same condition through more languages than Mezzofanti or Prince Lucien Bonaparte ever meddled with. But the form, the language, the charm of the verse, the music of the composition, they go utterly and inevitably; and even if the translator succeeds in putting something in their place, it is another, and not themselves.

Again, in the eloquent and admirable defence^[590] of the tongue of Si against the Lingua d’Oco, he has this remarkable saying, |On language as shown in prose and verse.| that you cannot see its real excellence in rhymed pieces, for the accidental accompaniments (“accidental,” quoad language). So do the clothes and jewels of a beautiful woman distract the attention from her real beauty, as much as this is set forth by them. In prose the ease, propriety, and sweetness of the language itself can best be shown. Now, let it be observed that this is no exaltation of prose above poetry as such—Dante was far too good a critic, as well as far too great a poet, to make a blunder which has been made since, though hardly before. His argument is the perfectly sound, and, unless I mistake, almost wholly novel one—that the intrinsic powers (if they be doubted) of a language are best shown in prose. If it can do well there, a fortiori it can do better in poetry; but the “added sweetness” of rhythm, metre, rhyme, poetic diction, and the like may distract the attention from the mere and sheer merits of the language itself. And so once more we find Dante, in opposition to the Master, in opposition to all ancient critics except Longinus, and partly even to him, recognising the ultimate and real test of literary excellence as lying in the expression, not in the meaning.

This would in itself be a thing so great that no greater has met or will meet us throughout this history. Even yet the 444truth, which Longinus caught but as in a Pisgah-sight, which |Final remarks on his criticism.|Dante himself rather felt and illustrated throughout than consciously or deliberately championed in any particular place—the truth that the criticism of literature is first of all the criticism of expression as regards the writer, of impression as regards the reader—is far from being universally recognised, is far even from being a prevailing or a popular doctrine. By many it is regarded as an unquestionable heresy, by others as a questionable half-truth. But that Dante did feel, if he hardly saw, it, that he was penetrated by it, that his criticism in the De Vulgari Eloquio turns on it—for these things I hope to have shown some cause.

Not of course (it may, though it should not, be necessary to repeat this) that he was himself by any means indifferent to the “subject.” On the contrary, the great threefold division of the subjects of high poetry into Salus, Venus, Virtus—Arms, Love, and religiously guided Philosophy—is to this day the best that exists. And here too Dante has made a notable advance on the ancients, in admitting Love to equality in principle, to the primacy (I had almost said), in practice. We saw how the good Servius found it necessary to apologise for the fourth book of the Æneid, as dealing with the trifling subject of Love; we know how Greek criticism slighted Euripides, not, as it might have done, for his literary shortcomings, but because of his reliance on the tender passion; we know further how, except in mystical philosophisings of the Platonic kind, there is nothing satisfactory on the matter anywhere—that not merely Dionysius but Longinus, in the very act of preserving for us the two chief love-poems of the ancient world, can find nothing adequate to say about them, and that Aristotle leaves the subject severely alone.

Here also Dante knew better; here also he expressed consummately all the enormous gain of dream which the sleep of the Dark Ages had poured into the heart and the soul of the world. But here his service, though critical in category, was hardly critical in method; and, besides, he was only one of a myriad. From Brittany to Transylvania, and from Iceland to Provence, the whole thirteenth century, if not the whole twelfth also, had been “full of loves”—there had been no fear of “Venus” being 445forgotten. But all these thousand singers had simply sung because they must or would. They had had no critical thought of the manner of their singing. If they had written in Latin, it was because of custom, because they wanted learned appreciation, because they had been taught to write in Latin. If they had written in the vernacular, it was because it came naturally to them, and there was guerdon for it.

But this, as we have seen, was not possible to Dante. Ever a fighter, he was not content to serve the Illustrious Vernacular, to write in it, to advance its powers, without arguing for it as well, without giving it a critical title to place and eminence. Ever a thinker, too, he was not satisfied to write the best poetry, but must know how and in what the best poetry consisted, what made it best, what were its resources and stores of attack and of charm. Most fortunately, his conviction that vulgare and regulare were two very different things, and that the methods of treating them must be different also, led him, as it would seem, to abandon the devices of the regular Rhetoric, and to construct, half-consciously no doubt, a new and really Higher Rhetoric of the vulgar tongue itself.

This is what we have systematically, if incompletely, for Poetics in the De Vulgari Eloquio, while we have hints towards a prose Rhetoric in the first book of the Banquet^[591]. And it cannot be too much insisted on that, in the former case definitely and systematically, in the latter by sample and suggestion rather than directly, a kind of criticism is disclosed of which we hardly find any trace in the ancients (Longinus partly excepted), though if Aristotle had worked out one side of his own doctrines, and had been less afraid of Art and its pleasure, we might have had it from him.

That the book itself remained so long unknown, and that even after its belated publication it attracted little attention, and has for the most part been misunderstood, or not understood at all, is no doubt in part connected with the fact of its extraordinary precocity. On the very threshold of modern literature, Dante anticipates and follows out methods which 446have not been reached by all, or by many, who have had the advantage of access to the mighty chambers whereof the house has since been built and is still a-building.

We shall see nothing like this in the rest of the present Book. Some useful work on Prosody, a little contribution of the usual Rhetoric, some interesting if indirect critical expression, will meet us. But no, or next to no, such criticism properly so called, no such exploration and exposition of the secrets of the literary craft, no such revelation of the character of the literary bewitchment.^[592]

447