The name is absent

Dante and the Renaissance 197
enteen years old at the time of Dante’s death, yet they are
worlds apart; Petrarch is the first in date of truly modern
men. Thus Dante and Boccaccio. Boccaccio might have
remembered the sound of Dante’s living voice. He admired
the divine poet, lectured upon him, wrote his biography;
but he did not understand him. He made Beatrice carnal
and not spiritual: “between him and the enthusiasms of
the Middle Ages a ninefold Styx already poured its
waves.”¹

We shall see that this opposition between the spirit of
Dante and that of the Renaissance was no superficial an-
tinomy of artistic technique: it was the fundamental feud
between the Christian and the “natural man”—that natural
man whose energies, whose pleasures, and whose vices were
so magnificently released by the reviving Pagan gods. This
opposition was felt almost immediately: within a genera-
tion the worship of Dante was already mingled with a sen-
timent of remoteness, of awe, shall we say of discomfort?
May we not consider the appointment of lecturers to ex-
pound Dante as an ambiguous compliment? Certain it is
that the age of the Renaissance ignored Dante as completely
as it dared. Editions and commentaries still appeared—
the eclipse was never complete. But the marvelous roman-
tic grotesqueness of Hell, the theological music of Paradise,
could no longer be enjoyed to the full. A. J. Butler² warns
us that “the beginner in Dante study can pretty safely ignore
everything written between 1400 and 1800. The Renais-
sance,” he adds, “practically stifled anything like an intelli-
gent study of Dante for those four centuries.” It may
seem odd to call Voltaire a late product of the Renaissance;

¹ J. A. Symonds, “Italian Literature,” I, 102.

² A. J. Butler, “Dante, His Times and His Works.”

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