In countless other ways the Poet’s writings are representative of what was best and highest in contemporary thought: the wide grasp of innumerable topics and details, the encyclopaedic temper, quaintly obvious in the Convivio but more worthily embodied in the Divina Commedia; the spiritualising of troubadour love, beautifully manifested in the promise of Vita Nuova and Canzoniere, but more sublimely still in the Beatrice of the Paradiso; the blending of religious with political theory so conspicuous in the Monarchia and Commedia; the realistic vividness of conception; the eye for contrast, which makes Dante’s great poem a mirror of the kaleidoscopic life of the Middle Ages.
Among the qualities which made Dante what he was—and is—two would seem to be supreme. First his encyclopaedic knowledge, and secondly the unrivalled power of plastic visualisation, by which he was enabled “to use as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar.”[174]
Dante has been described by Eliot Norton as an instance of “the incredible diligence of the Middle Ages.” In days when there was no Funk and Wagnalls Company to minister encyclopaedic knowledge by cheap instalments—when everything must be painfully acquired from MSS. and the diligent student ran the risk not only of leanness[175] but of blindness[176] Dante appears, from his extant works, to have known all that was to be known. Dr. Moore’s investigations (in Dante Studies, Vol. I) go some way towards justifying—if anything can absolutely justify so dogmatic a statement—the perhaps over-enthusiastic words of A. G. Butler:
“Dante was born a student as he was born a poet, and had he never written a single poem, he would still have been famous as the most profound scholar of his time.”[177]
But if Dante had finished the Convivio, and written nothing else, his vast learning would have been as uninteresting to the average modern mind as is that of Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas. Albertus Magnus with his incredible learning and his more than incredible fecundity and voluminousness is unknown to most of us. Thomas Aquinas, though the soundness of his judgment and the depth of his insight have given his writings a permanent place of honour, more especially in the Roman Communion, is little more than a name to the average student even of literature and philosophy.
Albert and Thomas were theologians: so was Dante, but he was a poet as well.[178] Dante is saturated with the entire knowledge of the Middle Ages; he has absorbed and assimilated it, and he gives it out again transfigured—alive! It becomes in his hands an original and immortal contribution to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic heritage of mankind.
From our present study the Divine Poet emerges once more as the “Apostle of Freedom.” He handles his subject-matter with the master-touch that makes it live, and with the independence of standpoint and sincerity of judgment that draws Catholics to claim him as a Catholic, and Protestants as a Protestant. As a matter of fact he is a loyal Catholic, as was rightly proclaimed by the late lamented Pope Benedict XV in his Encyclical of May, 1921.[179] A Catholic, but above all, a Christian. And, as the Pope also justly remarked, his work and his message are alive to-day—more living than that of many a present-day Poet—just because he is not dependent on mere pagan models and sources, however classical, but is saturated with Christian thought and feeling. For the future lies with Christianity.
In our next Essay we shall endeavour to show how the free spirit of the artist and the theologian merges into that of the Educationist: how the characteristic modern principles of freedom in the educational sphere underlie Dante’s thought and writing, and how, in particular, they dominate his scheme of the Purgatorio.