“The Englishman in Italy”: Free Trade as a Principle of Aesthetics

Abstract

Dante Alighieri, whom Chaucer could read with pleasure and Byron with delight or even identification, has not always been so well-met in England. Horace Walpole found him “absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in bedlam.” The line is often cited as an example of how limited were the literary tastes of the eighteenth century. But I must confess that Walpole's reaction does not seem strange to me. Whether one may sympathize with it or not, I expect, depends upon the degree of one's experience with Christian zealots. D. H. Lawrence, in his depressing book Apocalypse, draws a vivid picture of the gleeful ease with which such persons come to employ the millenarian poetry of the New Testament. To consign one's enemies to immortal tortures while reserving for one's heroes all the delights of a tropical resort constructed largely out of diamonds and emeralds is not a subtle pleasure. Its appeal can reach the crudest minds. So urbane and elegant a fellow as Walpole, confronted by the self-righteous hymn-singing disciples of John Wesley, not only recoiled in disgust but quite properly recognized in the scheme of the Commedia something of the same primitive spirit. In every age, there will be persons to whom the blunt simplicity of this arrangement, say what you will for the profundities and revisions in Dante's handling of it, will be repulsive. Nowadays, perhaps, we are so hermeneutically splintered, so historically well-nourished, that we can entertain sympathies for Dante and for Walpole, for Byron and for Chaucer, for Eliot and even for Pound, all at the same time, always keeping in mind that our understanding of the one sets some kind of boundary