Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative, and,
arriving precisely in that period of transition when Church and Empire
were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve
both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection.
The whole nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon
proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission Like the
Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was
back to the old worship and the God of the fathers that he called his
people, and not Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that
sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of
a sceptic. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character,
the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of
supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant
Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely
literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of
scepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position of Dante is
remarkable. Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics
also, his great poem stands as a monument on the boundary line between
the ancient and modern.
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