CHAPTER IV
THE DIVINE COMEDY
To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in the Vita Nuova, would alone have ensured Dante immortality as a poet. But his lyrical works are to his epic as Shakespeare's sonnets to Shakespeare's dramas.
Any narrative in verse not familiar or humorous, nor of extreme brevity, may be entitled an epic; although we might do well to naturalise, as we have done in the case of idyll, the pretty Greek word epyll to denote a narrative composition of such compass as Keats's Eve of St. Agnes or Wordsworth's Laodamia. But there are at least three classes of epics, excluding the merely romantic like the Orlando, and the mock-heroic, from consideration. The most important in every point of view is the national, originally not the work of a man but of a people; sometimes, as in the Iliad and Odyssey indebted for its final form to the shaping hand of the most consummate genius; sometimes, as in the Finnish Kalevala, an agglomeration of legends, united by community of spirit, but not fashioned into an artistic whole. At the remotest point from these stands the artificial epic, like the Teseide of Boccaccio or the Jason of William Morris, where the poet has selected for its
