Though he himself
has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of
his greatest work,[74] though he has indirectly pointed out the way to
its interpretation in the _Convito_, and though everything he wrote is
but an explanatory comment on his own character and opinions,
unmistakably clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue not only
to be misunderstood popularly, but also by such as should know
better.[75] That those who confined their studies to the _Commedia_
should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the
first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider
circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own heavens, giving and
receiving light.[76] Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame for this.
"The form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, fictive,
descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive,
probative, improbative, and positive of examples." Here are conundrums
enough, to be sure! To Italians at home, for whom the great arenas of
political and religious speculation were closed, the temptation to find a
subtler meaning than the real one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on
the other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from behind which they
could take a long shot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes.
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