[77]
Infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy
which drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, _exul immeritus_
like themselves.[78] But they have too often wrung a meaning from Dante
which is injurious to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his
age. The aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an
endless variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it has of
great and perennial significance; for such it must have, or it would long
ago have ceased to be living and operative, would long ago have taken
refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all
mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute exegesis is useless or
unpraiseworthy, but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way.
It serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in Dante,
namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout the work, so that its
intimate coherence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and
complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. The poem has many
senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also,
and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind
them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of
doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own
phrase, the bread of angels.
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