The name is absent

214 DanteSexcentenaryLectures
letters, scurrilous and cowardly; all three names of ill re-
pute. To this, and nowhere else, was the gospel of self-
realization bound to lead. If the most gifted of European
peoples slumbered so long under the yoke of Spain or Aus-
tria, the orgy of virtù must bear the blame.

Between this pure Renaissance type and Dante there is
an abyss. Intense he may be, violent and proud; self-indul-
gent never. Once more, they are natural men, he is a Chris-
tian. At the core of his art, thought, and life we find ever
the great idea of discipline. He seems, indeed, to have
foreseen the growth of a generation that would spurn all
curb; but, far from hailing it with delight, he condemned it
with his utmost power. The “Fais que vouldras” of The-
lème, the triumphant motto of the Renaissance, is abhorrent
to him. For the Epicureans he devised the condign punish-
ments of his fifth and sixth cantos. There he places those
who blur the sense of right and wrong, the “carnal sinners,
who subject reason to appetite,” Semiramis, “who made lust
licit in her law.”¹ The key-word here is talento, the natural
appetite. Dante, with the whole of ascetic Christianity,
stigmatizes the talento as sinful. Boccaccio, on the con-
trary, sings in all his works a hymn to U talento, the poetry
of life, triumphant over medieval discipline. These works
form the prelude to the paganism of the Renaissance, the
resurgence of the natural man. “It was this talento that
Valla philosophized, that Beccadelli and Pontano sang.”²
The survival of antique culture, and particularly the rev-
erence for Virgil, on the one hand; the growth of intense
personalities in the hotbeds of miniature states on the other,

¹                 . . . ɪ peccator carnali

Che Ia ragion Sommettono al talento. (“Inferno,” V, 38-39.)
(Semiramis) che Iibito fe’ Iicito in sua legge. (“Inferno,” V, 56.)

² J. A. Symonds, “Italian Literature,” I, ɪoz.

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