In spite of all objections, some of
which are well founded, the _Commedia_ remains one of the three or four
universal books that have ever been written.
We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern distinction between the
Artist and the Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with the other
Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. The
one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range
of perception and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to
imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. With the
moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior purpose; with
the artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. In the fine arts the
vehicle makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. The living
conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or modulated sound, and
henceforth the two are inseparable. The results of the moralist pass into
the intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode of
conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious sentiment and the
imagination are both organic, something interfused with the whole being
of the man, so that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will
insensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that
fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the assonance between facts
seemingly remote and unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds,
though convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be
persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance
somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible image
because it suggests the ineffably higher charm of the unseen original.
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