Dante’s Ten Terms for the Treatment of the Treatise

It would seem likely that anything written on Dante as a critic could only echo, and echo imperfectly, what has been written before, and especially if written in English and from a point of view mainly concerned with the criticism of contemporary literature. These remarks, therefore, are meant to concern the Dante scholars only if the affliction seems so great in them of blunder and error that it must be corrected. It should be possible, though, to correct without destroying. There is a part of Dante which never came to life until our own time; which every one knows is true of the poetry; but which does not seem generally recognized of the criticism—perhaps only because it is so rare to find any criticism surviving the generation or so after the time of its appearance. When criticism some six centuries old comes suddenly to life, and relevant life, in a new context, that new life cannot be destroyed even if it can be shown to be based on a misunderstanding of the life in the original text. We have a right—we literary critics with a little bent for poetry—to whatever life we can find.

There is a sentence in the letter to Can Grande which could hardly have been fresher the day it was written, though, for all I know, on the day it was written it may have represented only the dullest of commonplaces, true but over-recognized; mechanically apt but automatic in motion; relevant to actual creative technique but taken for granted; conceptually sound but reduced to hocus-pocus; in short, coinage debased by lip service. All this may be but does not seem likely; and even if true, our present purposes only need to remind themselves that only a life and a value originally honorable and genuine can be so debased. Besides, to repeat, the house of criticism is jerry-built—in constant need of reconstruction out of second-hand materials, wherever got and whatsoever kind, so long as sound. Nobody in his senses wants a critical structure to last even his own time; only the materials. Dante’s sentence is obviously, once found, of lasting material. Here it is (Epistolæ X, 9, ad fin.). Dante has been saying that the form of the comedy is two-fold, the form of the treatise and the form of the treatment. After summarizing the form of the treatise he proceeds: “The form or method of treatment is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive; and likewise proceeding by definition, division, proof, refutation, and setting forth of examples.” To Dante it was evidently not desirable—perhaps Can Grande was the wrong correspondent—to develop or expound the feelings about poetry which arise when these terms are taken in their several relations; at any rate he says nothing about them and goes on at once to expound the title of his work at considerable length and with much discrimination. These remarks have therefore the liberty, under law, to develop as we please.