V
DANTE AND MODERN EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
... Io sarò tua guida
E trarrotti di qui per loco eterno.
—Inf. i. 177 sq.
In face of Benedetto Croce’s new Book,[180] wherein all the meticulous industry exerted by the typical Dantist upon side-issues of the Divine Comedy is held up to scorn, and denounced, like Cromwell’s House of Lords, as “useless and dangerous,” one hardly dares to labour a point—even if it be so exalted a point as the principles and method of education. But it is the criticism of Dante’s Poesy that is Croce’s concern: his jealous anxiety is directed against any admixture in that criticism of any irrelevant considerations—allegorical, theological, philosophical, poetical. As we are not attempting a criticism of Dante’s Poesy (though none can approach the Commedia without falling under the spell of its beauty and passion), we may perhaps hope to evade the fiery darts of the Poet’s latest critic.
Croce himself would be the last to deny Dante’s extraordinary versatility: only he pleads that if the author of the Divine Comedy had not been, “as he is, grandissimo poeta,” the world would not have noted his other accomplishments.[181] We may therefore perhaps be pardoned if we indulge in something of that “sonorous but empty phraseology”[182] which he attributes to those who look for much more than Poetry in the great Poem; and come to the Commedia as to a mine of varied treasures reflecting the versatile spirit of one who was not only a sublime poet, but also a man of many-sided knowledge and experience—theological, philosophical, political, practical—and who poured all the wealth of his knowledge and experience into the supreme effort of his genius:
Il poema sacro
Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.
Before Dante as a boy learnt his lessons of the good friars of Sta. Croce, and in the school of the great lord, Love blossomed out into verse under the sunshine of his “first friend’s” encouragement, pored over crabbed manuscripts under the inspiration of the learned Ser Brunetto, and grew up to be an unique exponent of mediaeval lore; that lore, which formed the material out of which he wrought the scheme of his immortal poem had very slowly and gradually come into being. The course of Christian Education had passed through rhythmic vicissitudes of advance and retrogression, of decadence and revival. Sown broadcast over the fields of the Graeco-Roman world by Apostolic hands[183] the seed fructified and gave forth foliage to delight and refresh mankind. In the golden age of the Greek Fathers, when Clement and Origen wrote and taught, when Basil and Gregory at the University of Athens drank in all that the old world had to teach, and transmuted it into something fresh and new by the fertilising power of the New Life that was in them, the Christian Church became, in Harnack’s phrase, “the great elementary schoolmistress of the Roman Empire.”