INTRODUCTION
cesses, enabling us to distinguish between that which is vital in his work and that which is excrescent, and showing us exactly where he broke free from old conventions and became unique. Much of the lyric poetry of Dante, especially that of the Vita Nuova, itself Provençal in form, is overweighted with the scholasticism of Bologna and has more than a trace of the Troubadour conventions, and an Englishman who reads, for instance, the intricate Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute which troubled Coleridge for so long, may be forgiven if he finds the style nuovo rather than dolce. But a comparison of the lyrics of Cavalcanti and Dante with those of their contemporaries and immediate forerunners will convince him that the dolce stil was really a new voice that arose from the tentative confusion of the Middle Ages—a voice that had found the appropriate expression of real and often deep emotion. It would be unkind, of course, to deny that the learned men of Bologna were capable of emotion, but certainly their method of expressing it often strangely resembled a lecture on the Syllogism. Just as the work of a very young writer changes when, after imitating the whole tribe of modern poets, he discovers at last that he actually possesses an inner voice which says nothing resembling the words of these masters, but yet has a note of startling reality which seems, to his partial ear, to have escaped them utterly, so the poetry of Italy ceased to be an elegant experiment and became a vivid expression of deep feeling. This is the real miracle wrought by the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, and the Divina Commedia is its deathless memorial. With Dante, an art which had seemed capable of expressing only the trivial loves and conventions of courtiers
