"
(Purg. X, 121)
Like all great men of undoubted sincerity Dante was intellectually big
enough to change his mind when a new view presented itself in
condemnation of an earlier judgment. So his "Vernacular Composition"
retracts a statement he had made in the New Life where he had held that
as amatory poems were addressed to ladies ignorant of Latin, Love should
be the only subject the poet ought to present in the vernacular. He
learned later and published his new view that there is good precedent
for treating in the vulgar tongue not only Love but also Righteousness
and War.
Other examples of his honesty of mind are furnished in the Paradise
where he expresses through the mouths of his disembodied teachers views
opposed to those he had already advanced in his other works. Thus his
theory of the spots on the moon, his statement as to the respective rank
of the angelic orders, his assumption that Hebrew was the language of
Adam and Eve--all yield to a maturer conception in contradiction to his
original views. He is, it is true, sometimes blinded by partisanship or
lacking in the historical perspective necessary for a true judgment of
his contemporaries--but Dante is naturally so sincere a man that he is
eager to be just to every one.
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