Purity of purpose, sincerity in speech and conduct—sancta simplicitas—ready to cast away earthly privilege, to face joyfully the call to “low living and high thinking,” and to find freedom in fewness of material possessions and richness of moral and spiritual endowment—that is the temper eagerly embraced by Francis and his followers, loyally accepted by Dante, exile and pilgrim; and it is the only temper which can adapt itself to live happily in a denuded world: the temper which, when saturated with the passion of loving service as was that of “Christ’s Poor Man” may hope, Franciscan-wise, to heal the world’s wounds, to assuage its quarrels, and to build up better and more strongly that which has been broken down.
BEATI MITES; QUONIAM IPSI POSSIDEBUNT TERRAM.
BEATI PACIFICI: QUONIAM FILII DEI VOCABUNTUR.
VIII
THE LAST CRUSADE
Pero ch’ me venia “Resurgi e Vinci.”
—Par. xiv. 125.
It is a far cry from Dante Alighieri to Torquato Tasso: from thirteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century Ferrara. Yet Tasso is, poetically, a direct descendant of the great Florentine, down the line of Petrarca and Ariosto. His Italian represents the utmost legitimate development of Dante’s language, beyond which lies decadence. The purity, if not the exuberance, of his style and the grandeur of his epic treatment flows direct from the fountain-head of Italianità—the Divine Comedy; and the great poem has left its clear impress now and again upon the Gerusalemme Liberata, in haunting phrases.
Thus the “fierce Circassian,” in Canto x. 56 of the Gerusalemme, assumes the attitude of Sordello in Purg. vi. 66—