It would seem, indeed, without too much guess-work, that, despite his attempts to assimilate writing vulgariter et regulariter, Dante had an unconscious and an infinitely salutary instinct, telling him that regulariter and vulgariter were not the same thing. He may have sometimes thought that the former was the nobler; even in his disdainful soul, the touching humility of the Middle Ages existed, as we know, to such an extent that he could put Virgil, who may be worthy to unloose his shoe-latchet, in a position above himself. But something must have warned him to keep the two apart, to approach the criticism of the illustrious Vernacular literature by a path nullius ante trita solo.
That path, as has been pointed out, is in fact a double approach: we might almost say that the restless manymindedness |Dante’s attention to Form.| of Dante attacks the hill on half-a-dozen different sides at once. We have a chain of mainly a priori argument, reaching from the origin and nature of language to the completely built and fitted-out canzone. We have careful surveys of existing language and literature, with the keenest observation bent upon what is the actual state of each, on what each has actually achieved. But besides these two ways of approach, neither of which is at all like those of the ancient critics, there is a third difference which is more striking still: and that is that the critic’s attention is evidently from the first fixed, not exclusively, but, from the point of view of his business, mainly, on questions of form, expression, result, rather than on questions of matter, conception, plan. Not exclusively—let that be emphatically repeated: but still mainly.
Again we see, incidentally, but none the less to an important effect, that he has, no doubt by the mere operation of the lapse |His disregard of Oratory.| of ages in part, in part by the activity of his own intellect, and the character of the matter presented to it, got rid of divers prejudices which weighed upon the ancients. It is not a just retort, when it is said that he has completely got rid of the oratorical preoccupation, to say that he is only dealing with Poetics. For the ancients themselves this preoccupation was constant, even when they dealt with Poetics; and Dante does, as a matter of fact, make references to prose which show that he did not dream (as how indeed should he?) of oratory having any pre-eminence. And at the same time that the fruitful modern literatures helped him to get rid of this, the greatest drawback or interfering flaw of ancient criticism, they helped him to get rid of another, the ignorance of prose fiction. True, he may in his quaint low Latin use inventor for poeta; but the simple reference to the prose Arthurian, Trojan, and Roman legends shows that the gap, which led Aristotle and all the rest astray, had been filled up.
Yet again, the character of the Romance poetry which he chiefly had before him, as well as (if he knew anything of them, |The influence on him of Romance.| which is quite possible) that of the German minnesingers, was such as to require positively, from any vigorous and subtle intellect, a quite different treatment from that appropriate to most ancient poetry. The war-songs might stand on no very different footing; but, as he admits, there were no war-songs in Italian. The mystical passion and the mystical religion of the other two divisions are like nothing in ancient poetry, except scraps and flashes of things which must have been mostly unknown to Dante,—the choruses of the Greek Poets, Catullus, Lucretius, and some things in the Greek Anthology. There was in most cases no action at all; the subject, though varying and twisting in facet and form, like a mountain mist, was always more or less the same; the expression of the poet’s passionate intense individual feeling and thought was all, and of this no general criticism was possible. The forms, on the other hand, the language, the arrangements, these were matters of intense, novel, and pressing interest. The ancient critic, at the very earliest date at which we have any utterances of his in extenso, had a sort of catholic faith already provided for him on these points. Tragedy, Comedy, Oratory, History, Lyric, &c., were established forms. Rhetoric, though interesting, was almost as scientific as arithmetic or geometry. As for language, you imitated the best models, and did not play personal tricks. Besides, it was quite a minor matter.
Lastly, we see that (again half, or more than half, unconsciously and instinctively) Dante has been brought by the "forward |And of comparative criticism.| flowing tide of time" to a more advanced position in respect of comparative criticism. No ancient critic could have made such a survey as he makes of the different languages of Europe; no ancient critic did make such a survey of the dialects of Greek as he makes of the dialects of Italian. That curious spirit of routine which (valuable as it was in the time and in the circumstances) mars ancient literature to some extent, shows itself nowhere more oddly than here. You used Æolic dialect for lyric poetry, because Sappho and Alcæus were Æolians; Doric for pastorals, because Theocritus and the others were Dorians. You might use Ionic in history because Herodotus was a Halicarnassian; and Homer preserved a special dialect for you in epic likewise. But otherwise you wrote in Attic, not because Attic was the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue of Greece (as it very nearly if not quite was), but because an enormous proportion of the best writers in most departments were Athenians. So in Latin you might—almost must—use loose verse, and familiar or abstruse phrase, in satire, but not elsewhere.
Of this there is no trace in Dante, though he may allot his Illustrious tongue to one kind, his Intermediate and Lower to others. He may indeed cite, as a subsidiary argument, the fact that such and such a one has used such and such a dialect or form, but it is only subsidiary. He is, in effect, looking about to see, partly how the reason of things will go, partly what has actually had the best effect. He, groping dimly in the benighted, the shackled Middle Ages, actually attains to a freer and more enlightened kind of criticism than the Greeks, with all their “play of mind,” all their “lucidity,” had reached.
And his bent towards formal criticism—towards those considerations of prosody, of harmony, of vocabulary, of structure, which, when they are considered to-day, even now send some critics into (as the poet says)
“A beastly froth of rage”
against those who so consider them—is all the more important, because not the most impudent accuser of the brethren can |The poetical differentia according to him.| bring against Dante the charge of being a mere formalist, of being indifferent to meaning, of having no “criticism of life” in him, of lacking “high seriousness,” attention to conduct, care for meaning and substance. On the contrary, there is not a poet in the whole vast range of poetry, not the Greek tragedians at their gravest and highest chorus-pitch, not Lucretius in his fervour of Idealist Materialism, not Shakespeare in the profoundest moments of Macbeth, or Prospero, or Hamlet, not Milton, not Wordsworth, who is more passionately ideal, “thoughtful,” penetrated and intoxicated with the “subject,” than Dante is. But he, thanks very mainly to the logical training of the despised scholasticism, thanks partly to the mere progress of time, the refreshing of the human mind after its season of sleep—most of all no doubt to his own intense and magnificent poetical genius—had completely separated and recognised the differentia of poetry, its presentation of the subject in metrical form with musical accompaniment, whether of word or of actual music.[[578]] He knows—he actually says in effect—that prosemen may have the treatment of the same subjects; but he knows that the poet’s treatment is different, and he goes straight for the difference.
And where does he find it? Exactly where Wordsworth five hundred years later refused to find it, in Poetic Diction and |His antidote to the Wordsworthian heresy.| in Metre. The contrast of the De Vulgari Eloquio and of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is so remarkable that it may be doubted whether there is any more remarkable thing of the kind in literature. Whether Wordsworth was acquainted with the treatise it is impossible to say. (Coleridge certainly knew of it, though it is not quite clear whether he had read it.) But it is improbable, for Wordsworth was not a wide reader. And, moreover, though in tendency the two tractates are diametrically opposed, he nowhere answers Dante; but, on the contrary, is answered by Dante, with an almost uncanny anticipation of the privilege of the last word, in a word five hundred years earlier.