Dante and the Renaissance 207
is non-ltalɪan. Now this feeling for art existed in Italy
long before the Renaissance—unless we stretch the word
Renaissance out of its usual meaning so as to include the
whole of Italian culture. The English Preraphaelites dis-
covered it in the Trecento and the Quattrocento. It shone
forth in Dante. The Song of Roland has sincerity, brevity,
a rare virtue in those days; rough-hewn epic grandeur and
genuine pathos; with all these qualities it is not artistic.
The Breton Romances, much less primitive, pour inter-
minably the thin babbling brook of their octosyllabic
couplets. John of Meung took twenty thousand lines to
finish the slight allegory of William of Lorris; he has
speeches 900 lines in length, and mazy digressions which
lead nowhither. Compare with these amorphous produc-
tions the massy and symmetrical structure of the “Divine
Comedy,” as plain and robust in its main lines, as infinitely
varied in its details, as the west front of Notre-Dame.
Think of the three parts so exquisitely contrasted and bal-
anced, of the hundred cantos progressing evenly toward
the inevitable end. Think of the interlocking of the triple
rhymes, so simple as never to suggest artifice or effort, yet
so rigid that not a single line could be deleted or added.
Compare the garrulity of Thomas and Beroul in their
Tristan with the supreme reticence of Francesca’s tragic
story. “That day we read no farther.”1 What is the
secret of the difference? Genius, no doubt, but also the
principles of art, definitely grasped and resolutely applied.
“The curb of art,” says Dante at the end of “Purgatorio,”
“does not allow me to proceed.”2
To this sense for the discipline of art we are tempted to
1 “Inferno,” V, 82-138.
2 Ma perché pɪene son tutte Ie carte
Ordite a questa cantica seconda
Non mi Iascia più ir Io fren dell’ arte. (“Purgatorio,” XXXIII, 139-142.)