And as that in its artistic unity is but the
completed thought of a single architect, which yet could never have been
realized except out of the faith and by the contributions of an entire
people, whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagination and fancy,
find expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and
martyrs now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches,
and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every pinnacle
and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as
if it were his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read the
diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth century and of the Italian
people. Complete and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no
Pagan temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph of
corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single saint and
dedicate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion; it is truly
a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the
Divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence
of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, but informing and
sustaining the material. In this cathedral of Dante's there are
side-chapels as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and
perfections; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of
aspiration, for ever and ever.
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