But that poetic
instinct, which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his age,
could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic structure he had begun
to stand as a monument of failure, he completed his work in Italian.
Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was
foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic
which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, and which
might have had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing
itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written in the universal
dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets have been in a certain sense
provincial,--Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the
"Heart of Midlothian" and "Bride of Lammermoor,"--because the office of
the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been living
experience can become living expression, because the collective thought,
the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result of
many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and stronger than any
single person, and will make a great statesman or a great poet out of any
man who can entirely surrender himself to it.
As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the Christian idea, so is
it also of Dante's poem.
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