The name is absent

2θ8 Dante Sexcentenary Lectures

add a feeling for the beauty of nature. This also is a
permanent trait in the Italian mind, and seems to have
passed, in an unbroken pastoral tradition, from the author
of the “Georgies” to the author of the “Arcadia.” Of this
sentiment Dante had his full share. Our space, however, is
drawing short, and we prefer not to dwell on this aspect of
the question, which might involve us in a tangled contro-
versy.¹ The Middle Ages have not received full credit for
their love of nature, or, to use a less equivocal term, for
their love of the country. Dante’s exquisite description of
the Earthly Paradise strikes, indeed, no new note; trou-
badour and minnesinger had already discovered that the
earth is fair in the spring. What we find in Dante is not
the modern feeling for nature,—the blending of mood and
sensation, the love of wild and dramatic scenery,—these
were created by the Romantic school. His gift was a won-
derful definiteness of vision; most of his similes are topical,
accurate, and drawn from actual experience. The Renais-
sance writers do not offer such clear-cut realism. The
equivalent of Dante’s sharpness of line and freshness of
color is rather to be found in the plastic arts of his own
time; in the carved capitals of Rheims₁ on which humble
plants are so lovingly, so faithfully reproduced; in the rose
windows aflame at sunset; or in the quaint and vivid
miniatures.

In its most literal sense the Renaissance means the revival
of Antiquity, the resurrection of the Pagan gods. The
humanists carried this neopaganism to the verge of ab-
surdity. The Saints, the Virgin, Christ himself, through the

¹Burckhardt (“Italian Renaissance,” pt. IV, ch. Ill) claims IhatDantecould
not have climbed Bismantova for any other purpose but enjoying the view.
The reference ("Purgatorio,” IV, 26) is, however, vague and unconvincing;
and Oscar Kuhns (“Treatment of Nature in Dante”) thinks Burckhardt’s
interpretation “more than doubtful.”

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