We shall have to return to this matter in dealing with Wordsworth himself. But for the present let us confine ourselves to Dante.
The details of his metrical part need the lesser notice because they are of the more limited and particular application. |His handling of metre.| Had Dante completed his book, it would still have had the limitation of dealing solely with Romance, if not exclusively with Italian, poetry. And with particular episodes we shall only meddle when they are closely connected with general critical quarrels. But his method is worth a word or two, because it is again, precisely, that apparently loose but really unerring mixture of general reasoning and particular observation which the critic requires, which prevents him from being ever exactly scientific, but which gives to his craft the dignity, the difficulty, the versatile charm of art. His recognition of the hendecasyllable, not merely as the line preferred by the best writers in Italian, but as the longest line really manageable in Italian, would be sufficient proof of this.
But he is considerably more interesting on diction, because here his observations (mutatis mutandis, and that in extremely |Of diction.| few cases and unimportant measure) are of universal application. The theory of Poetic Diction, the twin pillar of the temple of Poetry, had been put by Longinus in one flashing axiom, true, sound, illuminative for ever and ever. But he had not elaborated this; he had even, in some cases, as in his remarks on the Εἰς ἐρωμέναν, given occasion to those who blaspheme the doctrine. Dante, with no such single phrase (which indeed the odd mongrel speech he uses denied him), expresses the doctrine far more fully, elaborates it, establishes it soundly, and, moreover, is never in the very least inconsistent with himself about it. Even Aristotle himself would have joined no direct issue with the quadripartite division of the necessities of serious poetry as gravitas sententiæ and superbia carminum, constructionis elatio and excellentia verborum; but he would have given the first preponderance over all the others, and would have laid descending stress on the rest. It may almost be said that Dante exactly reverses the order. The gravitas sententiæ is not denied, but assumed as a thing of course, common to all good matter in verse and prose alike. The superbia carminum is a matter of investigation; but when you have got your form of cantio, &c., settled, that is settled. It is upon the third and the fourth, which are, briefly, Style and Diction, that he bends his whole strength, and that he exhibits his most novel, most important, most eternally valid criticism.
It has been said that the examples, both Latin and Italian, produced in the chapter on Style (that is to say, the construction |His standards of style.| or arrangement of selected phrase as opposed to selection of the component words) are not free from difficulty. But if we examine them all carefully together, something will emerge from the comparison. In the four Latin sentences[[579]] (for translations here are totally useless) we observe that the first[[580]] is a mere statement of fact, possessing, indeed, that complete expression of the meaning which Coleridge so oddly postulates as the differentia of style, but possessing nothing more—nourishing, in short, but not “sapid.” The next[[581]] is carefully (“tastefully”) arranged according to the scholastic rules—verb at the end, important words at end or beginning of clause, &c., but nothing more. The charm (venustas) of the third[[582]] is more difficult to identify; but it would seem to consist in a sort of superficially rhetorical declamation. But there is no difficulty in discovering in what the fourth sentence[[583]] differs from the rest. There is the conceit of the “casting out of the flowers” with the interwoven play of florum and Florentia, the apostrophe to the town, the double alliteration of florum, Florentia, Trinacriam, Totila, with the reverse order of length in the words, and their vowel arrangement. And in almost all the verse vernacular examples, though it may not always be easy to discern their exact attraction for Dante, we shall find the same alliteration—
“Sols sui qui sai lo sobrafan, que me sortz;”
the same vowel-music—
“Dreit Amor qu’ en mon cor repaire;”
or a combination of this music with careful mounting and falling rhythm, as in
“Si com l’ arbres, que per sobrecarcar.”
In other words, we shall find, in all, devices for making the common uncommon, for giving the poetic strangeness, unexpectedness, charm,—by mere arrangement, by arrangement plus music, and so forth.