The name is absent

212 DanteSexcentenaryLectures

sided intensity and perfection; Benvenuto Cellini the most
picturesque; but Italy was teeming with such demigods. It
cannot be said that the age of St. Bernard had been lack-
ing in striking individualities. But on the whole, medieval
men seem to us curiously one-sided, and apt to lose their
identity in the system—ecclesiastical or feudal—which
formed the framework of their lives. We think of the
warrior, the priest, or the bourgeois, rather than of Count
Raoul, Abbot Odo, or Master Guillaume. The vast epic
production is almost anonymous: the author’s name, when
we happen to know it, conveys very little information. The
medieval ideal might be exemplified by the humble stone-
cutter in the cathedral, willing to work silently at his ap-
pointed post for the glory of God. The men of the Renais-
sance, on the contrary, had ardent passions of the flesh and
of the spirit, which, far from curbing, they flaunted to the
world. Geniuses or ruffians, athirst for fame and pleasure,
they were the nearest approach to the usual conception of
the Nietzschean Superman, the prototypes of that Napoleon
in whom Taine recognized a condottiere of Renaissance
Italy. In contrast to such full-bodied and vivid figures,
medieval men seem pale indeed. Armor and cowl may be
picturesque, but the human features that peer from beneath
them are indistinct.

Now Dante shared to the full this Renaissance quality of
virtù, of all-round, untamed energy. No humanist, no des-
pot or pontiff, no courtier or poet of a later age, was so
many-sided or so intense as he. He was a politician, a sol-
dier, a diplomat, a courtier—on a small stage no doubt, but
the personality of the actor is not to be measured in terms
of physical magnitude. He who dies in a skirmish offers as
much as if he had been killed in a world-battle, and the
citizen of a tiny state feels, not less, but more intensely than

<<   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   >>

More intriguing information