He would not have been the great
poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never
have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to
generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of
us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the
_Purgatorio_ says that "unless you understand him and his figures
allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our
author made his pilgrimage as the representative of the rest (_in,
persona ceterorum_).[197] To give his vision reality, he has adapted it
to the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the author meant, it
must be taken in the larger sense. To confine it to Florence or to Italy
is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. It was not from the
campanile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life and man.
The relation of Dante to literature is monumental, and marks the era at
which the modern begins. He is not only the first great poet, but the
first great prose writer who used a language not yet subdued to
literature, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphysical
discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to the culture of his
countrymen by making the laity free of what had hitherto been the
exclusive guild of clerks.
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