Benedetto Croce’s[382] contention is, of course, fundamentally true, that Dante is first and last a Poet, and that it is the magnetism of his poetic genius that attracts interest to all the varied subjects which he touches. If he had not been a Poet, these essays would never have been written; and the writer hopes that the poetic quality of his hero will have been felt as a background all through the book. His lyrical power is the driving force of his many-sided message. To the struggling patriot, whether of 1848 or of 1918, he is a Tyrtaeus; to the artist in poetry, a Horace (although he never saw the Ars Poetica); to the lover, a Christian Anacreon; to the religious devotee, a Psalmist and Prophet in one; to the student of human nature in its detail and its large epic aspect, a Homer and a Virgil; in every aspect a supreme poet. The very magnetism of his lyrical appeal will, however, continue to keep countless disciples busy, in the future as in the past, exploring the by-ways and investigating the by-products of his genius; gloating over his obscurities, and glorying in everything, big or little, that Dante has touched. Those “questioni dantesche” on the more puerile of which Croce rightly pours his scorn,[383] will emerge to the end of the chapter—a lush growth of mingled flowers and weeds witnessing to the extraordinary fertility of the soil.

And we may go on to ask, what, exactly, is the value, or the nature of that “lyrical quality” which Croce justly exalts if it is entirely divorced from its content, its subject-matter?

True, Beauty has a value of its own, as Dante himself saw. In theory, indeed, he makes Poetry a humble gilding of the didactic pill, on the Horatian principle of miscere utile dulci; a beauteous fiction for a moral purpose—“una veritÀ ascosa sotto bella menzogna”[384] a “clumsy device,” as Professor Foligno puts it, “to rivet the attention of readers while the lessons of virtue and truth were expounded.”[385] In practice, however, the author of the Convivio “spoke as Love dictated”[386]—nay, even in the Convivio itself (as Prof. Foligno points out), in the envoi of the first Canzone,[387] he bids his poetry, if its argument prove unintelligible, take heart of grace and draw attention to its own sheer beauty—

But lyrical form cannot exist as a mere abstraction. It must needs express itself in words that have a meaning—in “subject-matter.” The Poet sings of what is in his heart, and sings—

he sings because he must. And Dante has this irresistible impulse of the artist to express himself. He tells us in the XIXth chapter of the Vita Nuova the story of the birth of his canzone, “Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore,” the famous song by which Bonagiunta knew him in Purgatory.[388] First, a great desire for utterance, then a pondering over the appropriate mode, and finally, “I declare,” he says, “my tongue spake as though by its own impulse and said—

That is the artistic impulse to create, and represents, indeed, the sum total of his “Message” as conceived by many an artist. But Dante took his message and his mission seriously; and unless we recognise as a factor in his poetry this sense of responsibility for the gift, and for the use of it—in however exalted a sense—as the handmaid of Religion, we surely misconceive him. He is essentially (not accidentally) didactic, prophetic, a conscious and purposeful inspirer of his own generation and of those to come.

From the point of view of purely aesthetic criticism his “Theological Romance,” his “Epic of man’s freewill,” with its massive architectural framework and its recurring theological, philosophical, political and otherwise didactic passages may be entirely secondary—may be, in fact, so much awkward and obstructive material which the poet only reduces to order and dominates by force of titanic genius.[390]

Dante certainly rises superior in fact to the contemporary theory of the Art of Poetry which he repeats in the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia.[391] It is this which makes his verse to be, as we have called it, the driving power of his message. But this homage to the traditional theory is not mere lip-service. Supreme poet as he is, he deliberately makes his sublime verse the instrument of spiritual teaching. And in so doing only renders it the more sublime.