volumes of tales put together.  What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement, and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception, does the framework of incident support and display?  That is the aesthetic question.  The novels of every day bristle with this material inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.  The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions of the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” is not admirable for their mere exuberance and diversity,—­for that might have come from a comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,—­but for the heart there is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift poetically to portray.  A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as regards the epic quality of Dante’s poem, an important consequence, is that there is in it no unity of interest.  The sympathies of the reader are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.  Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each one awakening a new interest.  Hereby the mind is distracted, the attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure or group.  We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits, classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and separated by the projection of as many different frames.  We are on a weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet.  We go from person to person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has effaced the other.  Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great unity, the “Divina Commedia,” as an organic, artistic whole, is inferior to the “Iliad” and “Paradise Lost,” and to the Grecian and Shakespearean tragedies.

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and, with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his page—­fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination.  Among the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most active is that of form.  Goethe says of him, “The great intellectual and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that just in his life-time—­Giotto being his contemporary—­was the re-birth of plastic art in all its natural strength.  By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed.