FOOTNOTES:

The soul that this celestial grace adornsIn secret holds it not;For from the first, when she the body weds,She shows it, until death:Gentle, obedient, and alive to shame,Is seen in her first age,Adding a comely beauty to the frame,With all accomplishments:In youth is temperate and resolute,Replete with love and praise of courtesy,Placing in loyalty her sole delight:And in declining ageIs prudent, just, and for her bounty known;And joys within herselfTo listen and discourse for others' good:Then in the fourth remaining part of lifeTo God is re-espoused,Contemplating the end that draws a-nigh,And blesseth all the seasons that are past:—Reflect now, how the many are deceived![27]

Cherishing such an ideal, Dante wandered from court to court of Italy, finding here and there a heart of gold, but for the most part moving amongst those to whom grace and purity and justice were but names. Can we wonder that sometimes the lonely exile felt as if his own sorrow-laden heart were the sole refuge upon earth of love and temperance?

Three noble dames, he tells us—noble in themselves but in nought else, for their garments were tattered, their feet unshod, their hair dishevelled, and their faces stained with tears—came and flung themselves at the portal of his heart, for they knew that Love was there. Moved with deep pity, Love came forth to ask them of their state. They were Rectitude, Temperance, and Generosity, once honoured by the world, now driven out in want and shame, and they came there for refuge in their woe. Then Love, with moistened eyes, bade them lift up their heads.If they were driven begging through the world, it was for men to weep and wail whose lives had fallen in such evil times; but not for them, hewn from the eternal rock—it was not for them to grieve. A race of men would surely rise at last whose hearts would turn to them again. And hearing thus how exiles great as these were grieved and comforted, the lonely poet thought his banishment his glory.

Yet when he looked for his sweet home and found it not, the agony that could not break his spirit fast destroyed his flesh, and he knew that death had laid the key upon his bosom.[28]

When this sublime and touching poem was composed we have no means of knowing, but it can hardly have been long before the end. When that end came, Dante can barely have completed his great life work, he can barely have written the last lines of the 'Divine Comedy.' He had been on an unsuccessful mission in the service of his last protector, Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. On his return he was seized with a fatal illness, and died at Ravenna in 1321, at the age of fifty-six.

Who can grudge him his rest? As we read the four tracts of the 'Convito,' which were to have been the first of fourteen, but must now remain alone, as we are brought to a sudden stand at the abrupt termination of his unfinished work on the dialects and poetry of Italy,[29]as we ponder on the unexhausted treasures that still lay in the soul of him who could write as Dante wrote even to the end, we can hardly suppress a sigh to think that our loss purchased his rest so soon. But his great work was done; he had told his vision, that men might go with him to Hell, to Purgatory, and to Heaven, and be saved from all things base. Then his weary head was laid down in peace, and his exile was at an end. 'That fair fold in which, a lamb, he lay'[30]was never opened to him again, but he went home, and the blessings of the pure in heart and strong in love go with him.

The thoughts with which we turn from the contemplation of Dante's life and work find utterance in the lines of Michael Angelo. 'The works of Dante were unrecognised, and his high purpose,by the ungrateful folk whose blessing rests on all—except the just. Yet would his fate were mine! For his drear exile, with his virtue linked, glad would I change the fairest state on earth.'

FOOTNOTES:[14]See Symonds, p. 186.[15]SeeInferno, i. 1-111.[16]Inferno, i. 105.[17]Purgatorio, vi. 76-126.[18]See especially Epistolæ v-vii.;Paradiso, xxx. 133-138.[19]See Epistola xi.[20]Paradiso, xvii. 70-93.[21]Ibid.xxv. 52-54.[22]Inferno, i. 112-129.[23]Inferno, i. 121-123, ii. 52-142;Purgatorio, xxx. sqq.;Paradiso, passim.[24]Paradiso, xvii. 103-142.[25]Epistola x.[26]Quæstio de Aqua et Terra, § 1.[27]Canzone xvi., 'Le dolci rime,' st. vii. SeeConvito, trat. iv. Translation slightly altered from Lyell.[28]Canzone xix., 'Tre donne.'[29]De Vulgari Eloquio.[30]Paradiso, xxv. 5.

[14]See Symonds, p. 186.

[15]SeeInferno, i. 1-111.

[16]Inferno, i. 105.

[17]Purgatorio, vi. 76-126.

[18]See especially Epistolæ v-vii.;Paradiso, xxx. 133-138.

[19]See Epistola xi.

[20]Paradiso, xvii. 70-93.

[21]Ibid.xxv. 52-54.

[22]Inferno, i. 112-129.

[23]Inferno, i. 121-123, ii. 52-142;Purgatorio, xxx. sqq.;Paradiso, passim.

[24]Paradiso, xvii. 103-142.

[25]Epistola x.

[26]Quæstio de Aqua et Terra, § 1.

[27]Canzone xvi., 'Le dolci rime,' st. vii. SeeConvito, trat. iv. Translation slightly altered from Lyell.

[28]Canzone xix., 'Tre donne.'

[29]De Vulgari Eloquio.

[30]Paradiso, xxv. 5.

The first cantica of the 'Divine Comedy'—the Inferno or Hell—is the best known of all Dante's works in prose or verse, in Latin or Italian; and though students of Dante may sometimes regret this fact, yet no one can be at a moment's loss to understand it.

For the attributes of heart and brain requisite for some kind of appreciation of the Inferno are by many degrees more common than those to which the other works of Dante appeal. It is easy to imagine a reader who has not even begun truly to understand either the poet or the poem nevertheless rendering a sincere tribute of admiration to the colossal force of the Inferno, and feeling the weird spell of fascination and horror ever tightening its grasp on him as he descends from circle to circle of that starless realm.

There is no mystery in the inveterate tendency to regard Dante as pre-eminently the poet of Hell. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Tradition tells of the women who shrank aside as Dante passed them by, and said one to another, shuddering as they spoke, 'See how his black hair crisped in the fire as he passed through Hell!' But no tradition tells of awe-struck passers-by who noted that the stains had been wiped from that clear brow in Purgatory, that the gleam of that pure and dauntless eye had been kindled in Heaven.

The machinery of the Inferno, then, is moderately familiar to almost all. Dante, lost in the darksome forest, scared from the sunlit heights by the wild beasts that guard the mountain side, meets the shade of Virgil, sent to rescue him by Beatrice, and suffered by Omnipotence to leave for a time his abode in the limbo of the unbaptised, on this mission of redeeming love. Virgil guides Dante through the open gate of Hell, down through circle after circle of contracting span and increasing misery and sin, down to the central depth where the arch-rebel Satan champs in his triple jaws the arch-traitorsagainst Church and State, Judas Iscariot, and Brutus and Cassius.[31]

Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious dead in torment.

And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of guilt, of misery? Even so. And we shall not look in vain.

But let us listen first to Dante's own account of the subject-matter of his poem. Five words of his are better than a volume of the commentators. 'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted,' he says, 'is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken allegorically the subject isMan, as rendering himself liable,by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or punishing justice.'[32]

According to Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to punishing justice.' Surely a subject fraught with unutterable sadness, compassed by impenetrable mystery, but one which in the hands of a prophet may well be made to yield the bread of life; a subject fitly introduced by those few pregnant words, 'The day was going, and the dusky air gave respite to the animals that are on earth from all their toils; and I alone girt me in solitude to bear the strain both of the journey and the piteous sight, which memory that errs not shall retrace.'[33]

Now if this be the true subject of the poem, it follows that all those physical horrors of which it seems almost to consist must be strictly subordinate to something else, must be part of the machinery or means by which the end of the poet is reached, but in no way the end itself.

If the subject of the poem is a moral one, then the descriptions of physical torment and horror must never even for a moment overbalance or overwhelm the true 'motive' of the work, must never even for a moment so crush or deaden the feelings as to render them incapable of moral impressions, must never in a single instance leave a prevailingly physical impression upon the mind.

And it is just herein that the transcendent power of the Inferno is displayed. Horrors which rise and ever rise in intensity till they culminate in some of the ghastliest scenes ever conceived by mortal brain are from first to last held under absolute control, are forced to support and intensify moral conceptions which in less mighty hands they would have numbed and deadened.

Oh, the pity of this sin, the unutterable, indelible pity of it! Its wail can never be stilled in our hearts while thought and memory remain. The misery of some forms of sin, the foul shame of others, the vileness, the hatefulness, the hideous deformity of others yet—this, and not horror at the punishment of sin, is whatDante stamps and brands upon our hearts as we descend with him towards the central depths, stamps and brands upon our hearts till the pity, the loathing, the horror can endure no more;—then in the very depth of Hell, at the core of the Universe, with one mighty strain that leaves us well-nigh spent, we turn upon that central point, and, leaving Hell beneath our feet, ascend by the narrow path at the antipodes.

With the horror and the burden of the starless land far off, we lift up our eyes again to see the stars, and our souls are ready for the purifying sufferings of Purgatory.

Sometimes the tortures of the damned are a mere physical translation, so to speak, of their crimes. Thus the ruthless disseminators of strife and dissension who have torn asunder those who belonged one to another, those who had no proper existence apart from one another, are in their turn hewn and cleft by the avenging sword; and ever as their bodies reunite and their wounds are healed, the fierce blow falls again. Amongst them Dante sees the great troubadour Bertram de Born, who fostered the rebellion ofthe sons of our own king Henry II. In that he made father and son each other's enemy, his head is severed from his trunk, his brain from its own root.[34]

In other cases a transparent metaphor or allegory dictates the form of punishment; as when the hypocrites crawl in utter weariness under the crushing weight of leaden garments, shaped like monkish cloaks and cowls, and all covered with shining gold outside.[35]Or when the flatterers and sycophants wallow in filth which fitly symbolises their foul life on earth.[36]

It is probable that some special significance and appropriateness might be traced in almost all the forms of punishment in Dante's Hell, though it is not always obvious. But one thing at least is obvious: the uniform congruousness of the impression which the physical and moral factors of each description combine to produce. In fact, the Inferno is an account of 'man, as deserving ill by the exercise of his free will,' in which all the external surroundings are brought into precise accord with the central conception. Thetortures are only the background; and as in the picture of a great artist, whether we can trace any special significance and appropriateness in the background or not, we always feel that it supports the true subject of the picture and never overpowers it, so it is here. Man as misusing his free will. This is the real subject of the Inferno. All else is accessory and subordinate.

But if this be so, we should expect to find an endless variety and gradation, alike of guilt and punishment, as we pass through the circles of Hell. And so we do. At one moment indignation and reproof are all swallowed up in pity, and the suffering of the exiled soul only serves to quicken an infinite compassion in our hearts, a compassion not so much for the punishment of sin as for sin itself with its woeful loss and waste of the blessings and the holiness of life. At another moment we are brought face to face with a wretch whose tortures only serve to throw his vileness into sharper relief; and when we think of him and of his deeds, of him and of his victims, we can understand those awful words of Virgil's whenDante weeps, 'Art thou too like the other fools? The death of pity is true pity here.'[37]Infinite pity would indeed embrace the most abandoned, but it is only weak and misdirected pity that wakes or slumbers at the dictate of mere suffering.

And as there is infinite variety of guilt and woe, so is there infinite variety of character in Dante's Hell. Though the poet condemns with sternest impartiality all who have died in unrepented sin, yet he recognises and honours the moral distinctions amongst them. What a difference, for instance, between the wild blaspheming robber Vanni Fucci,[38]and the defiant Capaneus,[39]a prototype of Milton's Satan, the one incited by the bestial rage of reckless self-abandonment, the other by the proud self-reliance of a spirit that eternity cannot break—alike in their defiance of the Almighty, but how widely severed in the sources whence it springs.

Look again where Jason strides. The wrongs he did Medea and Hypsipyle have condemnedhim to the fierce lash under which his base companions shriek and fly; but he, still kingly in his mien, without a tear or cry bears his eternal pain.[40]

See Farinata, the great Florentine—in his ever burning tomb he stands erect and proud, 'as holding Hell in great disdain;' tortured less by the flames than by the thought that the faction he opposed is now triumphant in his city; proud, even in Hell, to remember how once he stood alone between his country and destruction.[41]

See again where Pietro delle Vigne, in the ghastly forest of suicides, longs with a passionate longing that his fidelity at that time when he 'held both the keys of the great Frederick's heart' should be vindicated upon earth from the unjust calumnies that drove him to self-slaughter.[42]

And see where statesmen and soldiers of Florence, themselves condemned for foul and unrepented sin, still love the city in which they lived, still long to hear some good of her. As the flakes of fire fall 'like snow upon a windlessday' on their defenceless bodies, see with what dismay they gaze into one another's eyes when Dante brings ill news to them of Florence.[43]

In a word, the souls in Hell are what they were on earth, no better and no worse. This is the key-note to the comprehension of the poem. No change has taken place; none are made rebels to God's will, and none are brought into submission to it, by their punishment; but all are as they were. Even amongst the vilest there is only the rejection of a thin disguise, no real increase of shamelessness. Many souls desire to escape notice and to conceal their crimes, just as they would have done on earth; many condemn their evil deeds and are ashamed of them, just as they would have been on earth; but there is no change of character, no infusion of a new spirit either for good or ill; with all their variety and complexity of character, the unrepentant sinners wake in Hell as they would wake on earth our mingled pity and horror, our mingled loathing and admiration. Man as misusing his free will, in all thescope and variety of the infinite theme, is the subject of the poem.

And this brings us to another consideration: the eternity of Dante's Hell. Those who know no other line of Dante, know the last verse of the inscription upon the gate of Hell: 'All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.' The whole inscription is as follows: 'Through me the way lies to the doleful city; through me the way lies to eternal pain; through me the way lies 'mongst the people lost. 'Twas justice moved my Lofty Maker; Divine Power made me, Wisdom Supreme and Primal Love. Before me were no things created, save things eternal; and I, too, last eternal. All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.'[44]

The gates of Hell reared by the Primal Love! If we believe in the eternity of sin and evil, the eternity of suffering and punishment follows of necessity. To be able to acquiesce in the one, but to shrink from the thought of the other, is sheer weakness. The eternity and hopelessness of Dante's Hell are the necessary corollaries of the impenitence of his sinners.To his mind wisdom and love cannot exist without justice, and justice demands that eternal ill-desert shall reap eternal woe.

But how could one who so well knew what an eternal Hell of sin and suffering meant, believe it to be founded on eternal love? Why did not Dante's heart in the very strength of that eternal love rebel against the hideous belief in eternal sin and punishment? I cannot answer the question I have asked. Dante believed in the Church, believed in the theology she taught, and could not have been what he was had he not done so. Had he rejected any of the cardinal beliefs of the Christianity of his age and rebelled against the Church, he might have been the herald of future reformations, but he could never have been the index and interpreter to remotest generations of that mediæval Catholic religion of which his poem is the very soul.

Meanwhile note this, that if ever man realised the awful mystery and contradiction involved in the conception of a good God condemning the virtuous heathen to eternal exile, that man was Dante. If ever heart ofman was weighed down beneath the load of pity for the damned, that heart was Dante's. The virtuous heathen he places in the first round of Hell; here 'no plaint is to be heard except of sighs, which make the eternal air to tremble;' here, with no other torture than the death of hope without the death of longing, they live in neither joy nor sorrow, eternal exiles from the realms of bliss.[45]

Dante, as we shall see hereafter, longed with a passionate thirsty longing to know how the Divine justice could thus condemn the innocent. But his thirst was never slaked. It was and remained an utter mystery to him; and there are few passages of deeper pathos than those in which he remembers that his beloved and honoured guide and master, even Virgil, the very type of human wisdom and excellence, was himself amongst these outcasts.[46]

Again and again, as we pass with Dante through the circles of Hell, we feel that his yearning pity for the lost, racking his very soul and flinging him senseless to the ground formisery, shows an awakening spirit which could not long exist in human hearts without teaching them that God's redeeming pity is greater and more patient than their own. So, too, when Francesca and Paolo, touched by Dante's pitying sympathy, exclaim, 'Oh, thou gracious being, if we were dear to God, how would we pray for thee!'[47]who can help feeling that Dante was not far from the thought that all souls are dear to God?

Meanwhile, how strong that faith which could lift up all this weight of mystery and woe, and still believe in the Highest Wisdom and the Primal Love! Only the man who knew the holiness of human life to the full as well as he knew its infamy, only the man who had seen Purgatory and Heaven, and who had actually felt the love of God, could know that with all its mystery and misery the universe was made not only by the Divine Power, but by the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love, could weave this Trinity of Power, Wisdom, Love, into the Unity of the all-sustaining God, who made both Heaven and Hell.

And we still have to face the same insoluble mystery. The darker shade is indeed lifted from the picture upon which we gaze; we have no eternal Hell, no eternity of sin, to reckon with; but to us too comes the question, 'Can the world with all its sin and misery be built indeed upon the Primal Love?' And our answer too must be the answer not of knowledge but of faith. Only by making ourselves God's fellow workers till wefeelthat the Divine Power and the Primal Love are one, can we gain a faith that will sustain the mystery it cannot solve. Alas! how often our weaker faith fails in its lighter task, how often do we speak of sin and misery as though they were discoveries of yesterday that had brought new trials to our faith, unknown before; how often do we feel it hard to say even of earth what Dante in the might of his unshaken faith could say of Hell itself—that it is made by Power, Wisdom, Love!

But perhaps we have dwelt too long already on this topic, and in any case we must now hasten on. Dante's Hell, as we have seen, representssinful and impenitent humanity with all its fitting surroundings and accessories, cut off from everything that can distract the attention, confuse the moral impression, or alleviate its appalling strength. And as the magic power of his words, with the absolute sincerity and clearness of his own conceptions, forces us to realise the details of his vision as if we had trodden every step of the way with him, this result follows amongst others: that we realise, with a vividness that can never again grow dim, an existence without any one of those sweet surroundings and embellishments of human life which seem the fit support and reflection of purity and love.

We have been in a land where none of the fair sounds or sights of nature have access, no flowers, no stars, no light, and if there are streams and hills there they are hideously transformed into instruments and emblems not of beauty but of horror. We are made to realise all this, and to feel that it is absolutely and eternally fitting as the abode of sin and of impenitence. And when once this association has been stamped upon our minds, the beauty and the sweetness of the world in which we live gain a new meaningfor us. They become the standing protest of all that is round us against every selfish, every sinful thought or deed; the standing appeal to us to bring our souls into sweet harmony with their surroundings, since God in His mercy brings not their surroundings into ghastly harmony with them.

When we have been with the poor wretch, deep down in Hell, who gasps in his burning fever for 'the rivulets that from the green slopes of Casentino drop down into the Arno, freshening the soft, cool channels, where they glide,'[48]and have realised that in that land there are not and ought not to be the cooling streams and verdant slopes of earth; we can never again enjoy the sweetness and the peace of nature without our hearts being consciously or unconsciously purified, without every evil thing in our lives feeling the rebuke.

When we have known what it is to be in a starless land, and have felt how strange and incongruous the fair sights of Heaven would be, have felt that they would have no place ormeaning there, have felt that cheerless gloom alone befits the souls enveloped there, then when we leave the dreary realms, and once more gaze upon the heavens by night and day, they are more to us than they have ever been before, they are indeed what Dante so often calls them, using the language of the falconers, thelureby which God summons back our wayward souls from vain and mean pursuits.

Look, again, upon this fearful picture. Dante and Virgil come to a black and muddy lake in which the passionate tear and smite one another in bestial rage; and all over its surface are bubbles rising up. They come from the cries of the morose and sullen ones 'who are fixed in the slime at the bottom of the lake. They cry: "Gloomy we were in the sweet air that the sun gladdens, bearing in our hearts the smoke of sullenness; now we are gloomy here in the black slime"—such is the strain that gurgles in their throats, but cannot find full utterance.'[49]Who that has seen those bubbles rise upon the lake can ever suffer himself again to cherishsullenness within his heart without feeling at the very instant the rebuke of the 'sweet air that the sun gladdens,' and thinking of that gurgling strain of misery?

Another of the lessons taught by the Inferno is, that no plea, however moving, can avail the sinner, or take away the sinfulness of sin, that no position can place him above punishment, that no authority can shield him from it.

The guilty love of Francesca and Paolo, so strong, so deathless in that it was love, has sunk them to Hell instead of raising them to Heaven in that it was guilty. Stronger to make them one than Hell to sever them, it is powerless to redeem the sin to which it has allied itself, and its tenderness has but swelled the eternal anguish of those whom it still joins together, because it has suffered the sanctuary of life, which love is set to guard, to be polluted and betrayed. Sung in those strains of deathless tenderness and pity where 'tears seem to drop from the very words,' the story of this guilty love reveals the fatalest of all mischoice, and tells us that no passion, however wild in its intensity, howeverinnocent in its beginnings, however unpremeditated in its lawless outburst, however overmastering in its pleas, however loyal to itself in time and in eternity, may dare to raise itself above the laws of God and man, or claim immunity from its wretched consequences for those who are its slaves. How infinite the pity and the waste, how irreparable the loss, when the love that might have been an ornament to Heaven, adds to the unmeasured guilt and anguish of Hell a wail of more piercing sorrow than rings through all its lower depths!

Nor could any height of place claim exemption from the moral law. Dante was a Catholic, and his reverence for the Papal Chair was deep. But against the faithless Popes he cherished a fiery indignation proportioned to his high estimate of the sacred office they abused. In one of the most fearful passages of the Inferno he describes, in terms that gain a terrible significance from one of the forms of criminal execution practised in his day, how he stood by a round hole in one of the circles of Hell, in which Pope Nicholas III. was thrust head foremost—stood like the confessor hearing the assassin'sfinal words, and heard the guilty story of Pope Nicholas.[50]

It is characteristic of Dante that he tells us here, as if quite incidentally, that these holes were about the size of the baptising stands or fonts in the Church of San Giovanni, 'one of which,' says he, 'I broke not many years ago to save one who was drowning in it. Let this suffice to disabuse all men.' Evidently he had been taxed with sacrilege for saving the life of the drowning child at the expense of the sacred vessel, and it can hardly be an accident that he recalls this circumstance in the Hell of the sacrilegious Popes and Churchmen. These men, who had despised their sacred trust and turned it to basest trafficking, were the representatives of that hard system of soulless officialism that would pollute the holiest functions of the Church, while reverencing with superstitious scruple their outward symbols and instruments.

And if the Papal office could not rescue the sinner that held it, neither could the Papal authority shield the sins of others. It is said that Catholics have not the keeping of their ownconsciences. Dante at least thought they had. In the Hell of fraudulent counsellors, wrapped in a sheet of eternal flame one comes to him and cries, 'Grudge not to stay and speak with me a while. Behold, I grudge it not, although I burn.' It is Guido da Montefeltro, whose fame in council and in war had gone forth to the ends of the earth. All wiles and covert ways he knew, and there had ever been more of the fox than of the lion in him. But when he saw himself arriving at that age when every man should lower sails and gather in his ropes, then did he repent of all that once had pleased him, and girding him with the cord of St. Francis he became a monk. Alas! his penitence would have availed him well but for the Prince of the new Pharisees, Pope Boniface VIII., who was waging war with Christians that should have been his friends, hard by the Lateran. 'He demanded counsel of me,' continues Guido, 'but I kept silence, for his words seemed drunken. Then he said to me, "Let not thy heart misdoubt: henceforth do I absolve thee, but do thou teach me so to act that I may cast Prenestina to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open, as thou knowest."... Then the weighty arguments impelled me to think silence worse than speech; and so I said, "Father, since thou dost cleanse me from that guilt wherein I now must fall, long promise and performance short will make thee triumph in thy lofty seat." Then when I died St. Francis came for me, but one of the black cherubim said to him: "Do me no wrong, nor take thou him away. He must come down amongst my menials, e'en for the fraudulent advice he gave, since when I have kept close upon his hair. He who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can one will the same thing he repents, the contradiction not permitting it." Ah wretched me! how did I shudder then, for he laid hold of me, and with the cry, "Haply thou knew'st not I was a logician?" bore me to judgment.'[51]

Who can fail to recognise the utter truth of Dante's teaching here? What can stand between a man's own conscience and his duty? Though the very symbol and mouthpiece of the collective wisdom and piety of Christendom should hold the shield of authority before the culprit, yet it cannot ward off the judgment for onesingle deed done in violation of personal moral conviction. When once we have realised the meaning of this awful passage, how can we ever urge again as an excuse for unfaithfulness to our own consciences, that the assurance of those we loved and reverenced overcame our scruples? Here as everywhere Dante strips sin of every specious and distracting circumstance, and shows it to us where it ought to be—in Hell.

Contrast with the scene we have just looked upon the companion picture from the Purgatory; where Buonconte di Montefeltro tells how he fled on foot from the battle-field of Campaldino, his throat pierced with a mortal wound ensanguining the earth. Where Archiano falls into the Arno there darkness came upon him, and he fell crossing his arms upon his breast and calling on the name of Mary with his last breath. 'Then,' he continues, 'God's angel came and took me, and Hell's angel shrieked, "O thou of Heaven, wherefore dost thou rob me? Thou bear'st with thee the eternal part of him, all for one wretched tear which saves it from me. But with the other part of him I'll deal in other fashion."' Upon which the infuriated demonswells the torrent with rain, sweeps the warrior's body from the bank, dashes away the hateful cross into which its arms are folded, and in impotent rage rolls it along the river bed and buries it in slime so that men never see it more; but the soul is meanwhile saved.[52]

Here we must pause. I have made no attempt to give a systematic account of the Inferno, still less to select the finest passages from it. I have only tried to interpret some of the leading thoughts which run through it, some of the deep lessons which it can hardly fail to teach the reader.

Like all great works, the Inferno should be studied both in detail and as a whole in order to be rightly understood; and when we understand it, even partially, when we have been with Dante down through all the circles to that central lake of ice in which all humanity seems frozen out of the base traitors who showed no humanity on earth, when we have faced the icy breath of the eternal air winnowed by Satan's wings, and have been numbed to every thoughtand feeling except one—one which has been burned and frozen into our hearts through all those rounds of shame and woe—the thought of the pity, the misery, the hatefulness of sin; then, but then only, we shall be ready to understand the Purgatory, shall know something of what the last lines of the Inferno meant to Dante: 'We mounted up, he first and second I, until through a round opening I saw some of those beauteous things that Heaven bears; and thence we issued forth again to see the stars.'[53]

FOOTNOTES:[31]Compare pp. 21-23.[32]Epistola xi. § 8.[33]Inferno, ii. 1-6.[34]Inferno, xxviii.[35]Ibid.xxiii. 58 sqq.[36]Ibid.xviii. 103-136.[37]Inferno, xx. 27, 28: 'Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta.' The double force of pietà, 'pi[e]ty,' is lost in the translation.[38]Ibid.xxiv. 112-xxv. 9 &c.[39]Ibid.xiv. 43-66.[40]Inferno, xviii. 82-96.[41]Ibid.x. 22-93.[42]Ibid.xiii. 55-78.[43]Inferno, xvi. 64-85.[44]Inferno, iii. 1-9.[45]Inferno, iv. 23-45, 84.[46]Compare e.g.Purgatorio, iii. 34-45, xxii. 67-73.[47]Inferno, v. 88, 91, 92.[48]Inferno, xxx. 64-67.[49]Inferno, vii. 117-126.[50]Inferno, xix.[51]Inferno, xxvii.[52]Purgatorio, v. 85-129.[53]Inferno, xxxiv. 136-139.

[31]Compare pp. 21-23.

[32]Epistola xi. § 8.

[33]Inferno, ii. 1-6.

[34]Inferno, xxviii.

[35]Ibid.xxiii. 58 sqq.

[36]Ibid.xviii. 103-136.

[37]Inferno, xx. 27, 28: 'Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta.' The double force of pietà, 'pi[e]ty,' is lost in the translation.

[38]Ibid.xxiv. 112-xxv. 9 &c.

[39]Ibid.xiv. 43-66.

[40]Inferno, xviii. 82-96.

[41]Ibid.x. 22-93.

[42]Ibid.xiii. 55-78.

[43]Inferno, xvi. 64-85.

[44]Inferno, iii. 1-9.

[45]Inferno, iv. 23-45, 84.

[46]Compare e.g.Purgatorio, iii. 34-45, xxii. 67-73.

[47]Inferno, v. 88, 91, 92.

[48]Inferno, xxx. 64-67.

[49]Inferno, vii. 117-126.

[50]Inferno, xix.

[51]Inferno, xxvii.

[52]Purgatorio, v. 85-129.

[53]Inferno, xxxiv. 136-139.

'Leaving behind her that so cruel sea, the bark of poesy now spreads her sails to speed o'er happier waters; and I sing of that mid kingdom where the soul of man is freed from stain, till worthy to ascend to Heaven.'[54]Such are the opening words of Dante's Purgatory, and they drop like balm upon our seared and wounded hearts when we have escaped from the dread abode of eternal ill-desert.

'Man, atoning for the misuse of his free will,' may be regarded as the subject of this poem. And it brings it in a sense nearer to us than either the Hell or the Paradise. Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that the Purgatory has not by any means taken such a hold of the general imagination as the Hell, and that its machinery andincidents are therefore far less widely known; for the power of the Purgatory does not overwhelm us like that of the Inferno whether we understand or no. There are passages indeed in the poem which take the reader by storm and force themselves upon his memory, but as a whole it must be felt in its deeper spiritual meaning to be felt at all. Its gentleness is ultimately as strong as the relentless might of the Hell, but it works more slowly and takes time to sink into our hearts and diffuse its influence there. Nor again need we be surprised that the inner circle of Dante students often concentrate their fullest attention and admiration upon the Paradise, for it is the Paradise in which the poet is most absolutely unique and unapproached, and in it his admirers rightly find the supreme expression of his spirit.

And yet there is much in the Purgatory that seems to render it peculiarly fitted to support our spiritual life and help us in our daily conflict, much which we might reasonably have expected would give its images and allegories a permanent place in the devout heart ofChristendom; for, as already hinted, it is nearer to us in our struggles and imperfections, in our aspirations and our conscious unworthiness, nearer to us in our love of purity and our knowledge that our own hearts are stained with sin, in our desire for the fullness of God's light, and our knowledge that we are not yet worthy or ready to receive it; it is nearer to us in its piercing appeals, driven home to the moral experience of every day and hour, nearer to us in its mingled longing and resignation, in its mingled consolations and sufferings, nearer to us in its deep unrest of unattained but unrelinquished ideals, than either the Hell in its ghastly harmony of impenitence and suffering, or the Paradise in its ineffable fruition.

Moreover, the allegorical appropriateness of the various punishments is far more obvious and simple, and the spiritual significance of the whole machinery clearer and more direct, in the Purgatory than in the Hell. In a word, the Purgatory is more obviously though not more truly, more directly though not more profoundly, moral and spiritual in its purport than the Hell.

Dante addresses some of the sufferers onthe fifth circle of Purgatory as 'chosen ones of God whose pains are soothed by justice and by hope.'[55]And in truth the spirits in Purgatory are already utterly separated from their sins in heart and purpose, are already chosen ones of God. They are deeply sensible of the justice of their punishment, and they are fed by the certain hope that at last, when purifying pain has done its work, their past sins will no longer separate them from God, they will not only be parted in sympathy and emotion from their own sinful past, but will be so cut off from it as no longer to feel it as their own, no longer to recognise it as a part of themselves, no longer to be weighed down by it. Then they will rise away from it into God's presence. 'Repenting and forgiving,' says one of them, 'we passed from life, at peace with God, who pierces our hearts with longing to see Him.'[56]

The souls in Purgatory, then, are already transformed by the thirst for the living water, already filled with the longing to see God, already at one with Him in will, already gladdened by the hope of entering into fullcommunion with Him. But they do not wish to go into His presence yet. The sense of shame and the sense of justice forbid it. They feel that the unexpiated stains of former sin still cleave to them, making them unfit for Heaven, and they love the purifying torments which are burning those stains away. In the topmost circle of Purgatory, amongst the fierce flames from which Dante would have hurled himself into molten glass for coolness, he sees souls whose cheeks flush at the memory of their sin with a shame that adds a burning to the burning flame; whilst others, clustering at the edge that they may speak with him, yet take good heed to keep within the flame, lest for one moment they should have respite from the fierce pain which is purging away their sins and drawing them nearer to their desire.[57]

Sweet hymns of praise and supplication are the fitting solace of this purifying pain; and as Dante passes through the first of the narrow ascents that lead from circle to circle of Purgatory, he may well contrast this place of torment with the one that he has left, may wellexclaim, 'Ah me! how diverse are these straits from those of Hell!'[58]

Penitence, humility, and peace—though not the highest or the fullest peace—are the key-notes of the Purgatory.

When Dante issued from the deadly shades of Hell, his cheeks all stained with tears, his eyes and heart heavy with woe, his whole frame spent with weariness and agony, the sweet blue heavens stretched above him, and his eyes, that for so long had gazed on nought but horror, rested in their peaceful depths; Venus, the morning star, brightened the east, and the Southern Cross poured its splendour over the heavens; daybreak was at hand, and the poets were at the foot of the mount of Purgatory.

The sea rippled against the mountain, and reeds, the emblems of humility, ever yielding to the wave that swept them, clustered round the shore. Dante and Virgil went down to the margin, and there the living poet bathed away the stains and tears of Hell.

Ere long the waves were skimmed by a lightbark, a radiant angel standing in the prow, bearing the souls of the redeemed, who must yet be purified, singing the psalm, 'When Israel came out of Egypt.' Amongst the shades thus borne to the mount of purification was Dante's friend Casella, the singer and musician. How often had his voice lulled all Dante's cares to sleep, and 'quieted all his desires,' and now it seemed as though he were come to bring his troubled heart to peace, to rest him in his utter weariness of body and of soul.

So, at his entreaty, Casella raised his voice, and all the shades gathered entranced around him as he sang a noble canzone composed by Dante himself in years gone by.[59]The sweet sound never ceased to echo in the poet's memory—not even the ineffable harmonies of Paradise drowned those first strains of peace that soothed him after his awful toil.

But Purgatory is no place of rest, and Casella's song was rudely interrupted by the guardian of the place, who cried aloud, 'How now, ye sluggard souls! What negligence andwhat delay is here? Speed to the mountain! Rid you of the crust that lets not God be manifest to you!' To purge away our sins is not to rest; and no longing for repose must tempt us to delay even for a moment.[60]

Dante draws no flattering picture of the ease of self-purification; Hell itself hardly gives us such a sense of utter weariness as the first ascent of the mount of Purgatory. Virgil is on in front, and Dante cries out, altogether spent, 'Oh, my sweet father, turn thou and behold how I am left alone unless thou stay;' but Virgil still urges him on, and after a time comforts him with the assurance that though the mountain is so hard to scale at first, yet the higher a man climbs the easier the ascent becomes, till at last it is so sweet and easy to him that he rises without effort as a boat drops down the stream: then he may know that the end of his long journey has come, that the weight of sin is cast off, that his soul obeys its own pure nature, and rises unencumbered to its God.[61]

The lower portion of the mountain forms akind of ante-Purgatory, where the souls in weary exile wait for admission to the purifying pain for which they long. Here those who have delayed their penitence till the end of life atone for their wilful alienation by an equal term of forced delay ere they may enter the blessed suffering of Purgatory. Here those who have lived in contumacy against the Church expiate their offences by a thirty-fold exile in the ante-Purgatory; but as we saw in Hell that Papal absolution will not shield the sinful soul, so we find in Purgatory that the Papal malediction, the thunders of excommunication itself, cannot permanently part the repentant soul from the forgiving God.[62]

When this first exile is at an end, and the lower mountain scaled, the gate of the true Purgatory is reached. Three steps lead up to it, 'the first of marble white, so polished and so smooth that in it man beholds him as he is.' This represents that transparent simplicity and sincerity of purpose that, throwing off all self-delusion, sees itself as it is, and is the firststep towards true penitence. 'The second step, darker than purpled black, of rough and calcined stone, all rent through length and breadth,' represents the contrite heart of true affliction for past sin. 'The third and crowning mass methought was porphyry, and flamed like the red blood fresh spouting from the vein.' This is the glowing love which crowns the work of penitence, and gives the earnest of a new and purer life. Above these steps an angel stands to whom Peter gave the keys—the silver key of knowledge and the golden key of authority—bidding him open to the penitent, and err rather towards freedom than towards over-sternness.[63]

Within the gate of Purgatory rise the seven terraces where sin is purged. On the three lower ledges man atones for that perverse and ill-directed love which seeks another's ill—for love of some sort is the one sole motive of all action, good or bad.[64]In the lowest circle the pride that rejoices in its own superiority, and therefore in the inferiority of others, is purgedand expiated. 'As to support a ceiling or a roof,' says Dante, 'one sees a figure bracket-wise with knees bent up against it bosom, till the imaged strain begets real misery in him who sees, so I beheld these shades when close I scanned them. True it is that less or greater burdens cramped each one or less or more, yet he whose mien had most of patience, wailing seemed to say, "I can no more!"'[65]

In the second circle the blind sin of envy is expiated. Here the eyelids of the envious are ruthlessly pierced and closed by the stitch of an iron wire, and through the horrid suture gush forth tears of penitence that bathe the sinner's cheeks. 'Here shall my eyes be closed,' says Dante, half in shame at seeing those who saw him not, 'here shall my eyes be closed, though open now—but not for long. Far more I dread the pain of those below; for even now methinks I bend beneath the load.'[66]

In the third circle the passionate wend their way through a blinding, stinging smoke, darker than Hell; but all are one in heart, and join insweet accord of strain and measure singing the 'Agnus Dei.'

In these three lower circles is expiated the perverse love that, in pride, in envy, or in passion, seeks another's ill.

Round the fourth or central ledge hurry in ceaseless flight the laggards whose feeble love of God, though not perverse, was yet inadequate.

Then on the succeeding circles are punished those whose sin was excessive and ill-regulated love of earthly things.

There in the fifth round the avaricious and the prodigal, who bent their thoughts alike to the gross things of earth and lost all power of good, lie with their faces in the dust and their backs turned to heaven, pinioned and helpless.

In the sixth circle the gluttonous in lean and ghastly hunger gaze from hollow eyes 'like rings without the gems,' upon the fruit they may not taste.[67]

And lastly, in the seventh circle the sin of inchastity is purged, in flames as fierce as its own reckless passion.

Through all of these circles to which its lifeon earth has rendered it liable, the soul must pass, in pain but not in misery; at perfect peace with God, loving the pain that makes it fit to rise into His presence, longing for that more perfect union, but not desiring it as yet because still knowing itself unworthy.

At last the moment comes when this shrinking from God's presence, this clinging to the pain of Purgatory, has its end. The desire to rise up surprises the repentant soul, and that desire is itself the proof that the punishment is over, that the soul is ripe for Heaven. Then, as it ascends, the whole mountain shakes from base to summit with the mighty cry of 'Gloria in excelsis!' raised by every soul in Purgatory as the ransomed and emancipated spirit seeks its home.[68]

Through all these circles Dante is led by Virgil, and here as in Hell he meets and converses with spirits of the departed. He displays the same unrivalled power and the same relentless use of it, the same passionate indignation, the same yearning pity, which take the soul captive in the earlier poem. In the descriptionof Corso Donati's charger dragging his mangled body towards the gorge of Hell in ever fiercer flight; in the indignant protest against the factious spirit of Italy and the passionate appeal to the Empire; in the description of the impotent rage of the fiend who is cheated by 'one wretched tear' of the soul of Buonconte; in the scathing denunciations of the cities of the Arno;[69]in these and in many another passage the poet of the Purgatory shows that he is still the poet of the Hell; but it is rather to the richness of the new thoughts and feelings than to the unabated vigour and passion of the old ones, that we naturally direct our attention in speaking of the Purgatory. And these we have by no means exhausted.

When Dante first entered the gate of Purgatory he heard 'voices mingled with sweet strains' chanting the Te Deum, and they raised in his heart such images as when we hear voices singing to the organ and 'partly catch and partly miss the words.'[70]And this sweet music, only to find its fullest and distinctest utterancein the Paradise, pervades almost the whole of the Purgatory, filling it with a reposeful longing that prepares for the fruition it does not give.

There is a tender and touching simplicity in the records of their earthly lives which the gentle souls in Purgatory give to our poet. Take as an example, the story of Pope Adrian V., whom Dante finds amongst the avaricious: 'A month and little more I felt the weight with which the Papal mantle presses on his shoulders who would keep it from the mire. All other burdens seem like feathers to it. Ah me! but late was my conversion; yet when I became Rome's Shepherd then I saw the hollow cozenage of life; for my heart found no repose in that high dignity, and yonder life on earth gave it no room to aim yet higher; wherefore the love of this life rose within me. Till then was I a wretched soul severed from God, enslaved to avarice, for which, thou seest, I now bear the pain.'[71]

Most touching too are the entreaties of the souls in Purgatory for the prayers of those on earth, or their confession that they have already been lifted up by them. 'Tell my Giovanna tocry for me where the innocent are heard,' says Nino to Dante;[72]and when the poet meets his friend Forese, who had been dead but five years, in the highest circle but one of Purgatory, whereas he would have expected him still to be in exile at the mountain's base, he asks him to explain the reason why he is there, and Forese answers, 'It is my Nella's broken sobs that have brought me so soon to drink the sweet wormwood of torment. Her devout prayers and sighs have drawn me from the place of lingering, and freed me from the lower circles. My little widow, whom I greatly loved, is all the dearer and more pleasing to God because her goodness stands alone amid surrounding vice.'[73]

Surely it is a deep and holy truth, under whatever varying forms succeeding ages may embody it, that the faithful love of a pure soul does more than any other earthly power to hasten the passage of the penitent through Purgatory. When under the load of self-reproach and shame that weighs down our souls, we dare not look up to Heaven, dare not look into our own hearts, dare not meet God, thenthe faithful love of a pure soul can raise us up and teach us not to despair of ourselves, can lift us on the wings of its prayer, can waft us on the breath of its sobs, swiftly through the purifying anguish into the blissful presence of God.

A feature of special beauty in the Purgatory is formed by the allegorical or typical sculptures on the wall and floor of some of the terraces, by the voices of warning or encouragement that sweep round the mountain, and by the visions that from time to time visit the poet himself. Let one of these visions suffice. Dante is about to enter the circles in which the inordinate love of earthly things, with all vain and vicious indulgence, is punished. 'In dream there came to me,' he says, 'a woman with a stuttering tongue, and with distorted eyes, all twisted on her feet, maimed in her hands, and sallow in her hue. I gazed at her, and as the sun comforts the chilled limbs by the night oppressed, so did my look give ease unto her speech, and straightway righted her in every limb, and with love's colours touched her haggard face. And when her speech was liberated thus, she sang sosweetly it were dire pain to wrest attention from her. "I," she sang, "am that sweet siren who lead astray the sailors in mid sea, so full am I of sweetness to the ear. 'Twas I that drew Ulysses from his way with longing for my song; and he on whom the custom of my voice has grown, full rarely leaves me, so do I content him."' In the end this false siren is exposed in all her foulness, and Dante turns from her in loathing.[74]

Throughout Purgatory Dante is still led and instructed by Virgil. I think there is nothing in the whole Comedy so pathetic as the passages in which the fate of Virgil, to be cut off for ever from the light of God, is contrasted with the hope of the souls in Purgatory. The sweetness and beauty of Virgil's character as conceived by Dante grow steadily upon us throughout this poem, until they make the contemplation of his fate and the patient sadness with which he speaks of it more heartrending than anything that we have heard or seen in Hell. After this we hardly need to hear from Dante the direct expression he subsequently gives of his passionatethirst to know the meaning of so mysterious a decree as that which barred Heaven against the unbaptised.

In Purgatory, Virgil and Dante meet the emancipated soul of the Roman poet Statius, freed at last after many centuries of purifying pain, and ready now to ascend to Heaven. Virgil asks him how he became a Christian, and Statius refers him to his own words in one of the Eclogues, regarded in those days as containing a prophecy of Christ. 'Thou,' says Statius, 'didst first guide me to Parnassus to drink in its grottoes, and afterwards thou first didst light me unto God. When thou didst sing, "The season is renewed, justice returns, and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from Heaven," thou wast as one who, marching through the darkness of the night, carries the light behind him, aiding not himself, but teaching those who follow him the way. Through thee was I a poet, and through thee a Christian.' Not a shade of envy, not a thought of resentment or rebellion, passes over Virgil's heart as he hears that while saving others he could not save himself.[75]

But now, without dwelling further on the episodes of the poem, we must hasten to consider the most beautiful and profoundest of its closing scenes.

Under Virgil's guidance Dante had traversed all the successive circles of the mount of Purgatory. He stood at its summit, in the earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden which Eve had lost. There amid fairest sights and sounds he was to meet the glorified Beatrice, and she was to be his guide in Heaven as Virgil had been his guide in Hell and Purgatory.

In any degree to understand what follows we must try to realise the intimate blending of lofty abstract conceptions and passionate personal emotions and reminiscences in Dante's thoughts of Beatrice.

This sweet and gentle type of womanhood, round whose earthly life the genius and devotion of Dante have twined a wreath of the tenderest poetry, the most romantic love, that ever rose from heart of man, had been to him in life and death the vehicle and messenger of God's highest grace. Round her memory clustered all the noblest purposes and purest motives of his life,and in her spirit seemed to be reflected the divinest truth, the loftiest wisdom, that the human soul could comprehend. And so, making her objectively and in the scheme of the universe what she had really been and was to him subjectively, he came to regard her as the symbol of Divine philosophy as Virgil was the symbol of human virtue and wisdom.

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