True, Beauty has a value of its own, as Dante himself saw. In theory, indeed, he makes Poetry a humble gilding of the didactic pill, on the Horatian principle of _miscere utile dulci_; a beauteous fiction for a moral purpose—“una verità ascosa sotto bella menzogna”[384] a “clumsy device,” as Professor Foligno puts it, “to rivet the attention of readers while the lessons of virtue and truth were expounded.”[385] In practice, however, the author of the _Convivio_ “spoke as Love dictated”[386]—nay, even in the _Convivio_ itself (as Prof. Foligno points out), in the _envoi_ of the first Canzone,[387] he bids his poetry, if its argument prove unintelligible, take heart of grace and draw attention to its own sheer beauty— Allor ti priego che ti ricomforte, Dicendo lor, diletta mia novella. “Ponete mente almen com’ io son bella!” But lyrical form cannot exist as a mere abstraction. It must needs express itself in words that have a meaning—in “subject-matter.” The Poet sings of what is in his heart, and sings— ... A quel modo Ch’ e’ ditta dentro; he sings because he _must_. And Dante has this irresistible impulse of the artist to express himself. He tells us in the XIXth chapter of the _Vita Nuova_ the story of the birth of his canzone, “Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore,” the famous song by which Bonagiunta knew him in Purgatory.[388] First, a great desire for utterance, then a pondering over the appropriate mode, and finally, “I declare,” he says, “my tongue spake as though by its own impulse and said— Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore.”[389] That is the artistic impulse to create, and represents, indeed, the sum total of his “Message” as conceived by many an artist. But Dante took his message and his mission seriously; and unless we recognise as a factor in his poetry this sense of responsibility for the gift, and for the use of it—in however exalted a sense—as the handmaid of Religion, we surely misconceive him. He is essentially (not accidentally) didactic, prophetic, a conscious and purposeful inspirer of his own generation and of those to come. From the point of view of purely aesthetic criticism his “Theological Romance,” his “Epic of man’s freewill,” with its massive architectural framework and its recurring theological, philosophical, political and otherwise didactic passages may be entirely secondary—may be, in fact, so much awkward and obstructive material which the poet only reduces to order and dominates by force of titanic genius.[390]