It is impossible to read for the first time, and with something of the eagerness of youth, Dante's three great poems, the "Convito", the "Commedia" and the "Convivio"; it is no less impossible to read them with the leisure of maturity and yet with the fresh mind. One always comes back to Dante as to a house whose rooms are many and have not yet been explored. But the house is not only large, it is also white; and the white walls are plainly visible even in the dusk. This particular fact about Dante has been overlooked by many who profess to study him. They see his ideas,—theological, political, poetical,—and they do not see the form in which they are expressed. They find him moral, he is also an artist; they read the contents of his mind, and they ignore the shape in which they are embodied.
The dramatic quality of Dante's work is the first point to be made clear. He is not primarily a systematic thinker; he is a poet whose thought is always expressed in action. The narrative in the "Commedia" is not merely an occasion for the exposition of ethical and theological doctrines; the ethical and theological doctrines are shown in their effect upon the sentiments and will of the man who is the hero of the poem. Dante's characters are not abstractions embodied, they are impulses and affections in action; and for this reason, because those affections are real and not merely logical consequences, Dante's world is lived in and lived through, and the reader is carried along by a momentum which is not that of dialectic but of passion and of pity.
Dante's method is therefore essentially dramatic rather than didactic; and this also explains the unity and the tension of the "Commedia". The poem is the record of a personal experience; it is at once the description of a spiritual pilgrimage and the analysis of the soul that makes that pilgrimage. The unity of the poem is not that of a treatise, where successive sections add to an abstract argument; it is the unity of a moral process, where each incident is an episode in the development of the moral consciousness. The reader's interest is not intellectual curiosity alone, it is the same interest which we take in the fortunes of a living man who is undergoing change.
Dante's art is intimately connected with his own life. He never completely escapes from his personality; his characters are often masks of himself, and yet they are not mere masks. The complexity of his vision arises from his capacity to identify himself with many points of view. He can be stern and pitiless; he can be tender and humane; he can be the judge and the sorrowing friend. The multiple tones of the "Commedia" give it the authority of experience; and they ask of the reader a corresponding capacity for sympathy and judgment.
Finally, it should be noted that Dante's language is the vehicle of his thought. His words are not neutral; they are charged and colored by associations which come from his whole culture. To understand Dante we must be attentive to the sound and rhythm of his verse as well as to the meaning of his words; we must hear the voice as well as apprehend the sense. The art of Dante is the art of combining the exact word with the right cadence, and this combination creates the peculiar moral atmosphere of his poetry.