For the present
we must confine ourselves to showing how the civilization even of the
vigorous fourteenth century necessarily prepared the way for the
complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest
representatives of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men
who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity in
the fifteenth century.
To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had
presided over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might
have absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a
characteristic and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy
nor Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the
man who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture.
In the 'Divine Comedy' he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds,
not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another. Just
as, at an earlier period of the Middle Ages, types and anti- types were
sought in the history of the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante
constantly bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of the
same fact. It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history
and legend was familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was
full of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the
upper hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no
longer a Dante to hold the balance between the two.
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