[67]
The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable than its intensity.
Minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel
the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of his light and
warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais are touched with the same reverential
enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen,
perhaps beyond the limit where critical appreciation merges in
enthusiasm; and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells us that "he, who was
wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made use
of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly
light into his inward life." Almost all other poets have their seasons,
but Dante penetrates to the moral core of those who once fairly come
within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. His readers turn students,
his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. The
homeless exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts. _E venne da
esilio in questa pace!_
Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and has been, made
to the _Divina Commedia_, especially by critics who have but a
superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with the _Inferno_, which is
as far as most English critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way of
divining what was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further,
though with Carey to help him.
Pages:
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57