Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special conditions and limitations, personal and social; but he fulfilled it, and he thereby fulfilled the conditions of supreme poetry. Even Homer, as we are beginning to perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion of his time that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a euphemistic art; it had a sort of pervasive blandness, like that which we now associate with a fashionable sermon. It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the state, to the conquerors; and it spread an intentional glamour over their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No such partiality in Dante; he paints what he hates as frankly as what he loves, and in all things he is complete and sincere. If any similar adequacy is attained again by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest imagination, the supernatural must figure as an idea in the human mind,--a part of the natural. To conceive it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight of this age, not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet of the supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that phase of thought and feeling in which the supernatural seems to be the key to nature and to happiness. This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral unity has been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the most complete idealization and comprehension of things achieved by mankind hitherto. Dante is the type of a consummate poet. * * * * * [1] Plato, _Phaedo_,97B-99C, Jowett’s translation. I have changed the rendering of _νοῡς_ from “mind” to “reason.” [2] “Est pro fundamento tenenda veritas historiae et desuper spirituales expositiones fabricandae.” Thomas Aquinas, _Summa Theologiae_, i. quaest. 102, conclusio. [3] _Paradiso_, xv. 97, 99: Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica... Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica. [4] Ibid., 100-26: Non avea catenella, non corona, Non donne contigiate, non cintura Che fosse a veder pin che la persona. Non faceva nascendo ancor paura La figlia al padre, chè il tempo e la dote Non fuggan quinci e quindi la misura. Non avea case di famiglia vote; Non v’era giunto ancor Sardanapalo A mostrar ciò che in camera si puote.... O fortunate! Ciascuna era certa Delia sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla Era per Francia nel letto deserta. L’ una vegghiava a studio della culla, E consolando usava l’ idioma Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla; L’ altra traendo alia rocca la chioma, Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia De’ Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma. [5] _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 143-45: