Of his mastery
in style we need say little here. Of his mere language, nothing could be
better than the expression of Rivarol "His verse holds itself erect by
the mere force of the substantive and verb, without the help of a single
epithet." We will only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary
misapprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by comparing his
Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems to have forgotten that the precise
measurements of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by the
nature of his poem. He is describing an actual journey, and his exactness
makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read the "Paradise Lost" as a
poem, the _Commedia_ as a record of fact; and no one can read Dante
without believing his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself.
It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with the imaginative.
Milton's angels are not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and
supernatural; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while
nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of Dante's
vision of God at the conclusion of the _Paradiso_. In all literary
history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life
and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the
unessential; and there is no moral more touching than that the
contemporary recognition of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to
its endowment, should be summed up in the sentence of Florence: _Igne
comburatur sic quod moriatur_.
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