He not only marks, but is in himself, the
transition. _Arma virumque cano_, that is the motto of classic song; the
things of this world and great men. Dante says, _subjectum est homo_, not
_vir_; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama
was in this world, and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the
human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He makes himself the
protagonist of his own drama. In the _Commedia_ for the first time
Christianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal
principle. But aesthetically also, as well as morally, Dante stands
between the old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem
is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment
is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a
form of classic severity. In the same way he sums up in himself the two
schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially
lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he
combines the deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic
races with the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the
Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can in some sort
account for such representative men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even
Shakespeare) by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in
which they lived, Dante seems morally isolated and to have drawn his
inspiration almost wholly from his own internal reserves.
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