ιg8 Dante Sexcentenary Lectures
yet he was that “average sensual man,” the practical pagan,
the worshiper of human reason, the determined classicist,
that the Renaissance had moulded. The eighteenth cen-
tury did but add a rococo pinnacle to the great classical
temple of which the Renaissance had first traced the plan
and laid the foundations. His iconoclastic comments,
therefore, are significant; in his thin, sardonic voice he tells
us what most of the French, and even many of the Italians,
thought in their hearts: Dante had become a superstition,
unworthy of the “age of enlightenment.” . . . “The Ital-
ians,” he writes in his “Philosophical Dictionary,” “call
Dante Divine. But it is a hidden divinity, and few are those
who comprehend his oracles. He has had commentators:
this is probably an additional reason for his not being un-
derstood. His reputation will endure because he is not
read. There are in his works a score or so of passages that
every one knows by heart: that is sufficient to spare one self
the trouble of examining the rest. . . . Dante may find a
place in the libraries of antiquarians, but he will never be
read. People invariably fail to return to me some tome
of ‘Ariosto’ ; but no one has ever thought of stealing my
Dante.” Dante is no longer read in Europe, because every-
thing in his works is an allusion to some “unknown fact.”
The one central fact in Dante, we may add, the fact that
the Renaissance and the eighteenth century alike spurned or
ignored, was Christianity. Voltaire proceeds to give a
burlesque account of the “Comedy,” and adds, “this hotch-
potch has been considered as a great epic poem.” He has,
however, one good word to say for Dante: “A poem in
which Popes are consigned to Inferno deserves our atten-
tion.”1
1 Voltaire, “Dictionnaire Philosophique,” art. Dante Mélanges et Corre-
spondance, XXΠ, 174, XLI1 251.