indifferent, should become dominant with him. There he found a philosophy neither of the cloister nor of the school, but ranging over all the needs of public and of private life. There, too, he found the secret of a more various, supple, and plastic speech, and of an ampler mould of verse. The disciple of Guinizelli and Cavalcanti became, in short, the disciple of Virgil; the 'new sweet style expanded into the bello stilo which he so emphatically declares that Virgil alone has taught him;* and the 'Vita Nuova' is succeeded by those canzoni of the exile whose fame Villani attests, † and one of which he chose as an example of what he meant by the noble style.‡

Moreover, the stylistic influence of Virgil on Dante was not exerted only through his style. A poetry like his, penetrated with the sense of imperial destiny and touched only in one great episode with the passion of love, inevitably tended to relax the hold of the poetry of love upon his sensitive disciple; and this meant ipso facto to withdraw him from the sway of the 'sweet new style 'so intimately bound up with one another were the special matter and the special form. I will lay down that pleasant style of mine which I have used in handling love,' he declared at the opening of the third canzone of the Convivio,' and will sing of the worth by which man is indeed ennobled';§ and the words, though meant to describe a temporary deviation from a custom, really mark the direction of a continuous growth. The position accorded to Virgil in the Comedy' signifies, among other things, the triumph of the poetry of the 'Aeneid' in Dante's mind over that of Guinizelli and Cavalcanti and of his own Vita Nuova.' When he meets Guinizelli in Purgatory, he can hail him, in Virgil's presence, as his 'father' in the making of sweet lays of love, for that phase

.

* Inf. i, 87.

+ Quando fu in esilio fece da venti canzoni morali e d' amore molto eccelenti.' Vill. ix, 136, quoted by Toynbee, Dict, s.v. Canzoniere.'

of his poetry was long gone by. And Cavalcanti, his 'first friend' and comrade in the Vita Nuova,' is now very pointedly described as a 'scorner' of Dante's master and guide.t

But we are happily able to supplement these sometimes ambiguous indications of Dante's literary conceptions during the earlier years of his exile by one luminous and detailed document, the treatise on Vernacular Speech referred to at the outset. To this pregnant piece of writing, incomparably the most remarkable utterance in literary theory produced in the whole Middle Age, it is now necessary to turn.

It is no accident but, precisely, the clue to the purport of Dante's book, that the discussion of poetry is prepared for by an elaborate essay on language. Philology was in its infancy; and there are passages which make us smile, such as the chapter in which, after laying down that man alone has speech, he gravely replies to objections founded upon reports to the contrary about angels, serpents, asses, and magpies. But on the whole this little treatise is a wonderful example of a powerful intellect compelling an obscure and difficult matter to assume a crystalline clearness and symmetry. It is no academic and no merely literary interest which impels him. He is hunting & noble quarry, and though the course is devious the chase is never relaxed; it is for nothing less than the discovery of a common national speech adequate to the purposes of a national literature.

Nothing, in fact, could be more humiliating to an Italian poet of Dante's time who cared for his people and their tongue than the condition of the lingua de sì, compared with other tongues already famous in letters. Virgil had had at his disposal a language already supreme in Italy and familiar all over the civilised world. But the country of Virgil was now occupied by a crowd of semiindependent territories, each using its local patois for its songs as for its business and its talk. The political disintegration of the land was reflected in its speech. No court provided an authoritative standard of language,

Purg. xxvi, 97, 112. This is true even if the words be held to apply to 1300, the imaginary date of Dante's Vision.

any more than of manners or of law. French and Provençal were far nearer to linguistic, as those who spoke them were to political, unity, than Italian with its fourteen dialects could pretend to be. It was naturally no mere question of providing a convenient medium between speakers of different dialects, an Italian lingua franca or Esperanto.' Dante had a loftier conception of the function of language in civilisation. He saw in his common vernacular a step towards the spiritual unity of Italy, as he saw in the imperial rule the only means to her temporal unity. The one was to be a medium of the nascent soul, as the other was to organise the shattered body. And Dante's notions of his common language are as definitely aristocratic as his methods in politics. He is a Ghibelline idealist. But he is also the profound student of Aristotle and Aquinas; and Aristotelian conceptions gave him both guidance and support in the seemingly desperate quest for the visionary polity and the visionary speech. For Aristotle affirmed that the unity of the whole existed in and through the crowd of concrete particular parts; that it could be deciphered from them, and that it was more perfect than they, as reflecting the divine reason more clearly. The common Italian speech, therefore, like the common Italian polity, had a real existence; the reformer had but to disengage its nobler features from the confused and distorted figures by which it was overlaid. But for the same reason it was superior to any of the existing dialects; whereas the mere lingua franca, or lingo,' arrived at by rough and ready makeshifts for practical convenience, is always poorer than the languages it mediates between. It was thus qualified not merely to unite the speakers of different dialects, but to unite them on a higher plane by making them common possessors of a higher culture. It had to illuminate those who spoke it, as the ruler, in Dante's aristocratic politics, 'illuminates his people with justice and goodwill.' And it illuminated them by being itself luminous, that is, free from harsh constructions and obscure or equivocal phrase.

It is interesting to compare this conception of an ideal language with modern essays in the same kind. Wordsworth, of all English poets, most clearly resembles Dante in his sense of the bearing of poetical language

not merely upon poetry itself, but through it upon national life. Literary innovations in language have mostly been undertaken for purely literary ends; as Gautier and Hugo drew from the picturesque speech of the sixteenth century new resources of expression, or as Spenser borrowed scraps from Lydgate and Gower to sustain the illusion of his romance. Dante and Wordsworth had much more than this in view. Each sought in his ideal language a means of liberating men from narrow interests, and bringing them under the sway of a larger and more beneficent law. But, while Wordsworth laid the emphasis on the liberation from the old bonds, Dante laid it on the achievement of unity under the new sway. For Wordsworth the speech of English poetry in its noblest reaches was one of the guarantees of English freedom. We must be free or die, Who speak the tongue that Shakspere spake.' And it was towards the spiritual freedom of a life at one with Nature that he looked when he prescribed for poetry a language purified to the utmost from the artifices introduced by man's meddling intellect and the glossy insincerities of urbane discourse, indued with the bare, sheer, penetrating power of Nature herself. And he thought he found his ideal most clearly realised in the plain speech of the peasant, insensibly moulded, as he believed this to be, by the scenery amid which their daily life was passed. Wordsworth lived in an age in which the distrust of human interference with the spontaneous course of things, distrust of government, of art, of social institutions, of civilisation itself, had struck very deep, and left few noble and aspiring minds untouched. Beauty might wait upon his steps, and pitch her tent before him as he moved, an hourly neighbour, but she was, for him, no creature of the artist's fancy, but a living presence of the earth,

Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed
From earth's materials.'

To Dante the trouble and the solution lay alike in a very different quarter. The cleavage between the saving and the corrupting elements in life, between the promise and the menace of the universe, did not in the least correspond with the cleavage between naïve simplicity

and contriving will. Nature, a term of many vague associations, meant strictly (as in Parad. x. 28) the whole created universe, penetrated, in one part more and in another less, by the divine spirit; and where that penetrated most, in the human reason completely irradiated by God's, there the 'Law of Nature' was most perfectly fulfilled. Intelligence, conscious and contriving, under the inspiration of Love, was the ideal element in the universe; government, law, and society, in so far as they embodied it, became reflections of the divine; and Art, the 'grandchild of God,' nepote di Dio (Inf. xi, 105), was greater than her mother, Nature, precisely because she is more conscious and more intelligent.

Dante thus inevitably sought ideal language in the speech, not of the untutored peasant but of the cultured and intellectual elements of society-an authoritative, authorised, authentic speech. The dialect of the peasant is precisely what he seeks to eliminate; and here his passion for political cohesion adds its force to his passion for spiritual culture; for the dialect, at once local and rustic, is the sign of political disruption as well as of spiritual rudeness. And the modern, inured by Burns or Barnes, by Reuter or Hebel, to feel kindly towards peasant speech, is tempted to smile at the eager eloquence with which Dante glories in his illustrious' vernacular, the speech of the Court and government, enthroned (like it) in dominion and power, seeing that it has been extricated from so many common words, so many confused idioms, so many faulty terminations, so many rustic accents, in a form so distinguished, so pure, so perfect, so urbane, as Cino da Pistoja and his friend (Dante himself) present it in their canzoni.'† But, if we smile, we cannot but recognise too that this impassioned idealist, this dreamer of magnificent dreams, was the last man in the world to be satisfied with dreaming. The political unity of Italy was still a baffled hope, the Veltro was looked and longed for in vain; but the illustrious vernacular was already there and already in use, 'courtly' though

* The authors of the 'Stromtid' and the Alemannische Gedichte' hold an analogous place in Germany, as masters of poetry and humour in the dialects respectively of the North and the South, to that of Burns and Barnes in our own country.

† De Vulg. Eloq. i, 17.