And we may go on to ask, what, exactly, is the value, or the nature of that “lyrical quality” which Croce justly exalts if it is entirely divorced from its content, its subject-matter?
True, Beauty has a value of its own, as Dante himself saw. In theory, indeed, he makes Poetry a humble gilding of the didactic pill, on the Horatian principle of miscere utile dulci; a beauteous fiction for a moral purpose—“una verità ascosa sotto bella menzogna”[384] a “clumsy device,” as Professor Foligno puts it, “to rivet the attention of readers while the lessons of virtue and truth were expounded.”[385] In practice, however, the author of the Convivio “spoke as Love dictated”[386]—nay, even in the Convivio itself (as Prof. Foligno points out), in the envoi of the first Canzone,[387] he bids his poetry, if its argument prove unintelligible, take heart of grace and draw attention to its own sheer beauty—
Allor ti priego che ti ricomforte,
Dicendo lor, diletta mia novella.
“Ponete mente almen com’ io son bella!”
But lyrical form cannot exist as a mere abstraction. It must needs express itself in words that have a meaning—in “subject-matter.” The Poet sings of what is in his heart, and sings—
... A quel modo
Ch’ e’ ditta dentro;
he sings because he must. And Dante has this irresistible impulse of the artist to express himself. He tells us in the XIXth chapter of the Vita Nuova the story of the birth of his canzone, “Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore,” the famous song by which Bonagiunta knew him in Purgatory.[388] First, a great desire for utterance, then a pondering over the appropriate mode, and finally, “I declare,” he says, “my tongue spake as though by its own impulse and said—
Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore.”[389]