'"[160]
We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as purely imaginary as
the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real
Beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _Divina Commedia_
as her glorified Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante
understood perfectly well.[161] Take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart
of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul.
She is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into
unity. Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful
sonnet[162] to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as Sancho's story of his
having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it
from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved
for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[163] But we
should always remember in reading Dante that with him the allegorical
interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he
represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world
only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in
other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[164] Love with
him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it
(_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite
source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense).
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