VI
DANTE AND THE RENAISSANCE
OF all the loose, misleading, question-begging phrases
used in history, the word Renaissance is by common
consent easily the worst. One of the few things, however,
that can be definitely asserted of the Renaissance is that
Dante had nothing to do with it. If the Renaissance has
any meaning, it stands for a revival of the Pagan spirit, in
art, thought, life, and immorality. Now Dante’s “Com-
edy” is the Christian epic par excellence, the very soul of
the Middle Ages, although our latest major prophet, H. G.
Wells, achieved the feat of expounding medieval civiliza-
tion without mentioning Dante’s name. Victor Hugo ap
propriately termed Dante “the last of the great gothic
cathedrals”; there is in the vision of the poet the same
multitudinous and organic Iogicalness, the same weird
writhing under spiritual pain, the same mystic ecstasy as in
these grandest dreams that man ever hewed out of stone.
Dante, moreover, far from being ahead of his times, was
decidedly behind his generation : a dreamer of vanished
Utopias, a prophet of the past, whilst Europe around him
had already dismissed and half forgotten the phantasmal
hopes and fears he wove, and opened her eyes to the real-
ities of the new day. His religion was medieval Cathol-
icism undefiled. A powerful reasoner, he has in him no
touch of the rationalist; an outspoken critic of prelates and
popes, he is in no sense a protestant. His faith is bound
up with all the ecclesiasticism and theology of his day, or of
194