: momentous material, masterly
method, and important personality. To discover certain truths of human
life that are eminently worth the telling, to embody them in imagined
facts with a mastery both of structure and of style, and, behind and
beyond the work itself, to be all the time a person worthy of being
listened to: this is, for the fiction-writer, the ultimate ideal.
Seldom, very seldom, have these three contrarious conditions revealed
themselves in a single author; seldom, therefore, have works of
fiction been created that are absolutely great. It would be difficult
for the critic to select off-hand a single novel which may be accepted
in all ways as a standard of the highest excellence. But if the
term _fiction_ be regarded in its broadest significance, it may be
considered to include the one greatest work of art ever fashioned by
the mind of man. The "Divine Comedy" is supreme in subject-matter.
The facts of its cosmogony have been disproved by modern science, the
religion of which it is the monument has fallen into disbelief, the
nation and the epoch that it summarizes have been trampled under the
progress of the centuries; but in central and inherent truth, in its
exposition of the struggle of the beleaguered human soul to win its
way to light and life, it remains perennial and new. It is supreme
in art. With unfaltering and undejected effort the master-builder
upreared in symmetry its century of cantos; with faultless eloquence
he translated into song all moods the human heart has ever known.
And it is supreme in personality; because in every line of it we feel
ourselves in contact with the vastest individual mind that ever
yet inhabited the body of a man. We know (to quote the Poet's most
appreciative translator)--

"from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This medieval miracle of song."

His labor kept him lean for twenty years; and many a time he learned
how salt his food who fares upon another's bread,--how steep his
path who treadeth up and down another's stairs. But Dante saw and
conquered,--realizing what he had to do, knowing how to do it, being
worthy of his work. Therefore, singly among authors, he deserves the
sacred epithet his countrymen apply to him,--divine.

"The Divine Comedy" is the supreme epic of the world.