iving
in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante's genius could not have
fused the contents of mediaeval thought into a poem. How many
passages in the _Commedia_ illustrate this--like the lovely picture of
Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her
a garland. The twenty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, telling of the
triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration; and
within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of
angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its
melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration
which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if it be
Dante's genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries,
which lifts the last cantos of the _Paradiso_ from glory to glory, and
makes this closing singing of the _Commedia_ such supreme poetry.
Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in
Dante. Passage after passage of the _Paradiso_ is the apotheosis of
scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for
example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics
had endeavoured to put in words the universalities of substance
and accident and the absolute qualities of God.[1]

[Footnote 1: Taylor: _The Mediaeval Mind_, vol. II, pp. 588-89.]

In these supreme instances the ideas have been given a genuinely
aesthetic expression. They are beautiful in form and
music, as well as in content and vision. But not infrequently
where propaganda appears, art flies out of the window. Many
modern plays and novels might be cited, which in their serious
devotion to the enunciation of some social ideal, lapse from
song into statistics. The artist with his eye on the social
consequences of his work may come altogether to cease to regard
standards of beauty. It is only the rare genius who can make
poetry out of politics. Even Shelley lapses into deadly and
arid prosiness when his chief interest becomes the presentation
of the political ideas of Godwin.

In contrast with the theory that art has a social responsibility,
that so powerful an instrument must be used exclusively
in the presentation of adequate social ideals, must be
set the doctrine, widely current in the late nineteenth century,
of "art for art's sake." To the exponents of this point of view,
the artist has only one responsibility, the creation of beauty.
It is his to realize in form ever