f the inexhaustible interest in the masterpieces of these two great
poets. Libraries of considerable dimensions have been written in the
way of commentaries upon, and expositions of, their notable works.
Many of these books are, it is true, deficient in insight and
possessed of very little power of interpretation or illumination; they
are the products of a barren, dry-as-dust industry, which has expended
itself upon external characteristics and incidental references.
Nevertheless, the very volume and mass of these secondary books
witness to the fertility of the first-hand books with which they deal,
and show beyond dispute that men have an insatiable desire to get at
their interior meanings. If these great poems had been mere
illustrations of individual skill and gift, this interest would have
long ago exhausted itself. That singular and unsurpassed qualities of
construction, style, and diction are present in "Faust" and the
"Divine Comedy" need not be emphasised, since they both belong to the
very highest class of literary production; but there is something
deeper and more vital in them: there is a philosophy or interpretation
of life. Each of these poems is a revelation of what man is and of
what his life means; and it is this deep truth, or set of truths, at
the heart of these works which we are always striving to reach and
make clear to ourselves.

In the case of neither poem did the writer content himself with an
exposition of his own experience; in both cases there is an attempt to
embody and put in concrete form an immense section of universal
experience. Neither poem could have been written if there had not been
a long antecedent history, rich in every kind and quality of human
contact with the world, and of the working out of the forces which are
in every human soul. These two forms of activity represent in a
general way what men have learned about themselves and their
surroundings; and, taken together, they constitute the material out of
which interpretations and explanations of human life have been made.
These explanations vary according to the genius, the environment, and
the history of races but in every case they represent the very soul of
race life, for they are the spiritual forms in which that life has
expressed itself. Other forms of race activity, however valuable or
beautiful, are lost in the passage of time, or are taken up and
absorbed, and so part with their separate and individual existence;
but