Dante and the Renaissance 199
But Voltaire was, like Ariosto, like Dante himself, the
ultimate representative of an age on the point of dissolution.
Rationalism draped in classical garb was soon to go the way
of scholasticism. Within half a century of these mocking
words Dante was to be again a living presence and Vol-
taire a grinning fossil. If Romanticism rehabilitated Dante,
it was because Romanticism was essentially hostile to the
spirit of the Latin Renaissance. The partial eclipse of
Dante is practically coextensive with the undisputed sway of
the classical doctrine, and the demonstration is complete.
Yet—who thinks of denying it?—there is a vague but wide-
spread feeling that somehow Dante and the Renaissance
were not so alien to each other. This sentiment may be a
delusion; even if it were, we should have to account for it,
for it is part and parcel of Dante’s fame: his figure would
seem unfamiliar if there did not fall upon it at least a ray
of Renaissance light. It behooves us, therefore, to analyze
this sentiment and to extract from it whatever element of
truth it may contain.
Perhaps the first foundation of this feeling is the
confusion that still exists in our minds between the
Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. Classical prejudices
die hard; we are still apt to think of the whole millennium
that elapsed between the downfall of the ancient world and
the Revival of Learning as a murky wilderness of cruelty,
superstition, and childish ignorance. Now the most casual
reader knows that Dante is not a barbarian, therefore he
cannot quite belong to the age that classical critics derided
as “Gothic”; the first man to emerge from that somber
chaos, he seems to us to herald the Renaissance.
The truth of the matter is that the Middle Ages were
themselves a Renaissance—the eleventh century deserves