I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain which a book can have is the _Explicit_, or _Colophon_; but I only know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I mean is the _Song of Roland_, which, as we have it now, has neither beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon--
“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’ Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;
and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:
“Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”
Clearly, if Turoldus made the _Song of Roland_, he did not put his colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff, devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long story by beginning another. These things are not done.
The ending of the _Divine Comedy_ is original and characteristic at once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and lamentation of Hell he issues
after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself
the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe is Love, and that Love it is which