That is the artistic impulse to create, and represents, indeed, the sum total of his “Message” as conceived by many an artist. But Dante took his message and his mission seriously; and unless we recognise as a factor in his poetry this sense of responsibility for the gift, and for the use of it—in however exalted a sense—as the handmaid of Religion, we surely misconceive him. He is essentially (not accidentally) didactic, prophetic, a conscious and purposeful inspirer of his own generation and of those to come.
From the point of view of purely aesthetic criticism his “Theological Romance,” his “Epic of man’s freewill,” with its massive architectural framework and its recurring theological, philosophical, political and otherwise didactic passages may be entirely secondary—may be, in fact, so much awkward and obstructive material which the poet only reduces to order and dominates by force of titanic genius.[390]
Dante certainly rises superior in fact to the contemporary theory of the Art of Poetry which he repeats in the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia.[391] It is this which makes his verse to be, as we have called it, the driving power of his message. But this homage to the traditional theory is not mere lip-service. Supreme poet as he is, he deliberately makes his sublime verse the instrument of spiritual teaching. And in so doing only renders it the more sublime.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See esp. Inf. ix. 113; xx. 61: “Dante and the Redemption of Italy,” p. 15.
[2] 1865: See ib. p. 19.
[3] Par. xxv. 1, 2.
[4] “Dante and Educational Principles,” pp. 83 sqq.
[5] Nos. III and VI.