Ye who are living refer every occasion only up to heaven, as if all moved of itself by necessity. Were it so, in you would be destroyed free will; and it would not be justice to have joy for good, mourning for evil. II. xvi. 67. But this liberty is not innate merely as are the physical impulses. God’s gift of free will is a progressive energizing of man’s struggle to will higher and higher till he attains perfect freedom. Now in order that to this [will] every other may be reunited, innate in you is the virtue that giveth counsel,[24] and ought to guard the threshold of assent. This is the principle whence is derived the scheme of desert in you according as it collects and winnows good loves and guilty. Those whose scheme of life went to the foundation became aware of this innate liberty, and so left ethics to the world. III. xviii. 61. So developed by the mutual response of God and man, free will becomes the greatest gift (“lo maggior don,” III. v. 19). Heaven is the final release and achievement of personality. The culmination is quite beyond what is usually meant by self-satisfaction. As personality can be progressively released and achieved only through giving, so the self-expressive joy of _Paradiso_ contributes to the common joy. It is simultaneously giving and receiving, utterance and response. No longer, as the poet of _Pearl_ discerned again in the parable of the laborers, is giving and receiving frustrated by competition. Immediately every joy is the joy of all, every expression of personality is a gift and a response, in the creative activity of love. As in a fish-pond that is still and clear the fishes draw to what so comes from without that they deem it their food, so saw I more than a thousand radiances draw toward us, and in each was heard: “Lo! one who will increase our loves.” III. v. 100. I saw more radiances, living and conquering, make of us a center and of themselves a corona, sweeter in voice than lucent to behold. III. x. 64. The amazing figures in which this triumph is symbolized sum up also Dante’s poetic: vividness of charged simplicity in expression carried forward in a composition of progressive movement. No other single work of medieval art conveys so much of the middle age; for no other concedes so little to medieval convention. The centuries of St. Bernard, Adam of St. Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Chrétien and the _Roman de la Rose_, of Vézelay and Bourges, like other centuries, had their artistic conventions. These, as too often in other centuries, seemed to the makers of manuals to comprise the theory of art. Such theory needs both correction and expansion from great artists. D. THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL VERSE NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER