200 Dante Sexcentenary Lectures
that name fully as much as the fifteenth. When the Blond
Beasts so dear to the hearts of Teutomaniac historians
swooped down upon enfeebled Rome, civilization was all
but blotted out. The eclipse of the Western mind lasted for
five hundred years. But soon after the year ɪooo, we feel
the coming of a universal spring in all fields of human cul-
ture. Soon everything burst into flower: the crusading
spirit, chivalry, monastic reform, epic and romance, guilds
and communes, the universities and the cathedrals. It was
the time when, in the joyous words of Raoul Glaber, “the
earth was shaking off the rags of its antiquity, and clothing
itself anew in a white mantle of churches.” This age pro-
duced Godfrey of Bouillon and St. Louis, St. Bernard,
Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi and
St. Dominic, the Song of Roland, the love lyrics of the
Troubadours, the romances of the Arthurian cycle: why
should it not produce a Dante? Between him and his times
there is no discrepancy. He is immeasurably greater than
his predecessors and his contemporaries, no doubt; such is
the privilege, such is the very essence of genius. But he be-
longs to their world of art, thought, and faith, to their
world and to no other.
In a very definite sense Dante sounds strangely and de-
lightfully modern; there is no need of deep Italian scholar-
ship to realize that his language is very similar to that of
the present day. To a Frenchman with an ordinary high-
school education, the writers up to the fourteenth century
are sealed, almost hermetically; even Villon is shrouded in
linguistic difficulties. But whoever can read Italian can read
Dante. This fact comes out most strongly when we com-
pare the “Divine Comedy” with the masterpieces of other
medieval literatures. The “Romance of the Rose” is, like
Dante’s poem, an encyclopedia in the form of a dream or