They are of a higher mood than any other poems of the
same style in their own language, or indeed in any other. In beauty of
phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the Greek
tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in them by a nobleness of tone,
whose absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by
conceits. So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that in
compositions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,[199] the form seems
rather organic than mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the
Provencal poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also have a
grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. His lyrical
excellence would have got him into the Collections, and he would have
made here and there an enthusiast as Donne does in English, but his great
claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It is that he was the first
Christian poet, in any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued
dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is
still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the
disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. Verses of the
kind usually called _sacred_ (reminding one of the adjective's double
meaning) had been written before his time in the vulgar tongue,--such
verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at
with distant reverence by the pious, and with far other feelings by the
profane reader.
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