Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things
of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or he
would never have put Sordello in hell and the meeting with Beatrice in
paradise. In France it was not much better (though Rivarol has said the
best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epithet)[68] before Ozanam,
who, if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well
of our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though not without
relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in hell, regards
him on the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was no better in
Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who affirms that "neither Pelli nor
others deservedly more celebrated than he ever read attentively the poem
of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the
last."[69] Accordingly we have heard that the _Commedia_ was a sermon, a
political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline,
nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is
savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is
scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of _la
Crusca_, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth century, it
is everything, in short, that a poem should not be; and yet, singularly
enough, the circle of its charm has widened in proportion as men have
receded from the theories of Church and State which are supposed to be
its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have become
more alien to those of his readers.
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