of his poem, unless Helen of Troy is the heroine of the Iliad. Neither poem could have existed without the woman; the action of each turns entirely upon her; but the appearance of each is infrequent until, in Beatrice's case, she appears as the pervading spirit of the Paradiso. Yet, had we merely known her from the Divina Commedia, their opinion who regard her as a mere symbol would not have appeared so groundless as it must in the light of the transparent autobiography of the Vita Nuova. If the great epic has given her her world-wide fame, she is indebted for her personality to the brief lyrics and snatches of impassioned prose. The old love, though not extinct, had been transformed into something far more expansive, as alchemists are said to revive a glowing rose from the ashes of a faded one. When Dante himself essays to give Can Grande some insight into the purpose of his poem, he does not mention Beatrice, but says: "The object of the whole work is to make those who live in this life leave their state of misery, and to lead them to a state of happiness." By this, as Symonds points out, is not to be understood that the purpose of the poem was the admonition of individuals. "It was both moral and political. The status miseriæ was the discord of divided Christendom as well as of the unregenerate will; the status felicitatis was the pacification of the world under the coequal sway of Emperor and Pope in Rome, as well as the restoration of the human soul to faith."
The conception, therefore, was essentially mediæval. It expressed the beliefs and aspirations of the Middle Age. It was in poetry what the work of another of the greatest of the Italians, St. Thomas Aquinas, had been in theology and philosophy—an endeavour to stereotype
