II
DANTE
I
The Divine Comedy is not yet complete. When the disdainful poet wrote that last fair starry line, he had merely finished the fundamental theme on which other men were to execute complicated variations. For a great book is only an initial motif, a starting point from which later generations proceed to develop all the possible themes of a perennial symphony. Every man who reads a great work, even though he be poor in spirit, adds to it some meaning, some pause, some intonation of his own; something of what he feels enters into it and is borne on to those who are to read thereafter.
The greatest books, then, such as the Divine Comedy, are to be considered not as mere personal creations, but rather as artistic structures of a special type in which an original central block has been so enlarged, by the addition of stratum after stratum, that the primitive form
7
