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Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 1

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Title: Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 1

Author: Leigh Hunt

Contributor: Dante Alighieri
        Luigi Pulci


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10885]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS: WITH LIVES OF THE WRITERS, VOLUME 1 ***

STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS: WITH LIVES OF THE WRITERS.


BY LEIGH HUNT.



IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.




MDCCCXLVI.




TO SIR PERCY SHELLEY, BART.


MY DEAR SIR PERCY,

As I know no man who surpasses yourself either in combining a love of
the most romantic fiction with the coolest good sense, or in passing
from the driest metaphysical questions to the heartiest enjoyment of
humour,--I trust that even a modesty so true as yours will not grudge me
the satisfaction of inscribing these volumes with your name.

That you should possess such varieties of taste is no wonder,
considering what an abundance of intellectual honours you inherit; nor
might the world have been the better for it, had they been tastes, and
nothing more. But that you should inherit also that zeal for justice to
mankind, which has become so Christian a feature in the character of the
age, and that you should include in that zeal a special regard for the
welfare of your Father's Friend, are subjects of constant pleasurable
reflection to

Your obliged and affectionate

LEIGH HUNT.



PREFACE.


The purpose of these volumes is, to add to the stock of tales from the
Italian writers; to retain as much of the poetry of the originals as it
is in the power of the writer's prose to compass; and to furnish careful
biographical notices of the authors. There have been several collections
of stories from the Novellists of Italy, but none from the Poets; and it
struck me that prose versions from these, of the kind here offered to
the public, might not be unwillingly received. The stories are selected
from the five principal narrative poets, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto,
and Tasso; they comprise the most popular of such as are fit for
translation; are reduced into one continuous narrative, when diffused
and interrupted, as in the instances of those of Angelica, and Armida;
are accompanied with critical and explanatory notes; and, in the case of
Dante, consist of an abstract of the poet's whole work. The volumes are,
furthermore, interspersed with the most favourite _morceaux_ of the
originals, followed sometimes with attempts to versify them; and in the
Appendix, for the furtherance of the study of the Italian language, are
given entire stories, also in the original, and occasionally rendered
in like manner. The book is particularly intended for such students or
other lovers of the language as are pleased with any fresh endeavours to
recommend it; and, at the same time, for such purely English readers as
wish to know something about Italian poetry, without having leisure to
cultivate its acquaintance.

I did not intend in the first instance to depart from the plan
of selection in the case of Dante; but when I considered what an
extraordinary person he was,--how intense is every thing which he
says,--how widely he has re-attracted of late the attention of the
world,--how willingly perhaps his poem might be regarded by the reader
as being itself one continued story (which, in fact, it is), related
personally of the writer,--and lastly, what a combination of
difficulties have prevented his best translators in verse from giving
the public a just idea of his almost Scriptural simplicity,--I began to
think that an abstract of his entire work might possibly be looked upon
as supplying something of a desideratum. I am aware that nothing but
verse can do perfect justice to verse; but besides the imperfections
which are pardonable, because inevitable, in all such metrical
endeavours, the desire to impress a grand and worshipful idea of Dante
has been too apt to lead his translators into a tone and manner the
reverse of his passionate, practical, and creative style--a style which
may be said to write things instead of words; and thus to render every
word that is put out of its place, or brought in for help and filling
up, a misrepresentation. I do not mean to say, that he himself never
does any thing of the sort, or does not occasionally assume too much
of the oracle and the schoolmaster, in manner as well as matter;
but passion, and the absence of the superfluous, are the chief
characteristics of his poetry. Fortunately, this sincerity of purpose
and utterance in Dante render him the least pervertible of poets in a
sincere prose translation; and, since I ventured on attempting one, I
have had the pleasure of meeting with an express recommendation of such
a version in an early number of the _Edinburgh Review_.[1]

The abstract of Dante, therefore, in these volumes (with every
deprecation that becomes me of being supposed to pretend to give a
thorough idea of any poetry whatsoever, especially without its metrical
form) aspires to be regarded as, at all events, not exhibiting a false
idea of the Dantesque spirit in point of feeling and expression. It is
true, I have omitted long tedious lectures of scholastic divinity, and
other learned absurdities of the time, which are among the bars to the
poem's being read through, even in Italy (which Foscolo tells us is
never the case); and I have compressed the work in other passages not
essentially necessary to the formation of a just idea of the author.
But quite enough remains to suggest it to the intelligent; and in no
instance have I made additions or alterations. There is warrant--I hope
I may say letter--for every thing put down. Dante is the greatest poet
for intensity that ever lived; and he excites a corresponding emotion
in his reader--I wish I could say, always on the poet's side; but his
ferocious hates and bigotries too often tempt us to hate the bigot,
and always compel us to take part with the fellow-creatures whom he
outrages. At least, such is their effect on myself. Nor will he or his
worshippers suffer us to criticise his faults with mere reference to the
age in which he lived. I should have been glad to do so; but the claims
made for him, even by himself, will not allow it. We are called upon to
look on him as a divine, a prophet, an oracle in all respects for all
time. Such a man, however, is the last whom a reporter is inclined to
misrepresent. We respect his sincerity too much, ferocious and arrogant
though it be; and we like to give him the full benefit of the recoil of
his curses and maledictions. I hope I have not omitted one. On the
other hand, as little have I closed my feelings against the lovely
and enchanting sweetness which this great semi-barbarian sometimes so
affectingly utters. On those occasions he is like an angel enclosed
for penance in some furious giant, and permitted to weep through the
creature's eyes.

The stories from goodnatured Pulci I have been obliged to compress for
other reasons--chiefly their excessive diffuseness. A paragraph of the
version will sometimes comprise many pages. Those of Boiardo and Ariosto
are more exact; and the reader will be good enough to bear in mind, that
nothing is added to any of the poets, different as the case might seem
here and there on comparison with the originals. An equivalent for
whatever is said is to be found in some part of the context--generally
in letter, always in spirit. The least characteristically exact passages
are some in the love-scenes of Tasso; for I have omitted the plays upon
words and other corruptions in style, in which that poet permitted
himself to indulge. But I have noticed the circumstance in the comment.
In other respects, I have endeavoured to make my version convey some
idea of the different styles and genius of the writers,--of the severe
passion of Dante; of the overflowing gaiety and affecting sympathies
of Pulci, several of whose passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles are
masterpieces of pathos; of the romantic and inventive elegance of
Boiardo; the great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy
_anima mundi_; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination,
and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the poet of Armida
and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose versions of passages from these
writers can supersede the necessity of metrical ones, supposing proper
metrical ones attainable. They suffice for them, in some respects, less
than for Dante, the manner in their case being of more importance to
the effect. But with all due respect to such translators as Harrington,
Rose, and Wiffen, their books are not Ariosto and Tasso, even in manner.
Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike
Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her
majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet
he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into
inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical,
did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and
a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the
superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to
a work of any length, is the best metrical translator our language has
seen, and, like Chapman, a genuine poet, strangely aggravated the sins
of prettiness and conceit in his original, and added to them a love
of tautology amounting to that of a lawyer. As to Hoole, he is below
criticism; and other versions I have not happened to see. Now if I had
no acquaintance with the Italian language, I confess I would rather get
any friend who had, to read to me a passage out of Dante, Tasso, or
Ariosto, into the first simple prose that offered itself, than go to any
of the above translators for a taste of it, Fairfax excepted; and we
have seen with how much allowance his sample would have to be taken.
I have therefore, with some restrictions, only ventured to do for the
public what I would have had a friend do for myself.

The _Critical and Biographical Notices_ I did not intend to make so long
at first; but the interest grew upon me; and I hope the reader will
regard some of them--Dante's and Tasso's in particular--as being
"stories" themselves, after their kind,--"stories, alas, too true;"
"romances of real life." The extraordinary character of Dante, which is
personally mixed up with his writings beyond that of any other poet, has
led me into references to his church and creed, unavoidable at any
time in the endeavour to give a thorough estimate of his genius, and
singularly demanded by certain phenomena of the present day. I hold
those phenomena to be alike feeble and fugitive; but only so by reason
of their being openly so proclaimed; for mankind have a tendency to the
absurd, if their imaginations are not properly directed; and one of the
uses of poetry is, to keep the faculty in a healthy state, and cause it
to know its duties. Dante, in the fierce egotism of his passions, and
the strange identification of his knowledge with all that was knowable,
would fain have made his poetry both a sword against individuals, and a
prop for the support of the superstition that corrupted them. This was
reversing the duty of a Christian and a great man; and there happen to
be existing reasons why it is salutary to chew that he had no right to
do so, and must not have his barbarism confounded with his strength.
Machiavelli was of opinion, that if Christianity had not reverted to its
first principles, by means of the poverty and pious lives of St. Francis
and St. Dominic,[2] the faith would have been lost. It may have been;
but such are not the secrets of its preservation in times of science and
progression, when the spirit of inquiry has established itself among
all classes, and nothing is taken for granted, as it used to be. A few
persons here and there, who confound a small superstitious reaction in
England with the reverse of the fact all over the rest of Europe, may
persuade themselves, if they please, that the world has not advanced in
knowledge for the last three centuries, and so get up and cry aloud to
us out of obsolete horn-books; but the community laugh at them. Every
body else is inquiring into first principles, while they are dogmatising
on a forty-ninth proposition. The Irish themselves, as they ought to do,
care more for their pastors than for the Pope; and if any body wishes to
know what is thought of his Holiness at head-quarters, let him consult
the remarkable and admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the
pen of Mr. Mazzini.[3] I have the pleasure of knowing excellent Roman
Catholics; I have suffered in behalf of their emancipation, and would do
so again to-morrow; but I believe that if even their external form of
Christianity has any chance of survival three hundred years hence, it
will have been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordinary
man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, or rather in
charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have proclaimed that the
time had arrived for living in the flower of Christian charity, instead
of the husks and thorns which may have been necessary to guard it. If it
were possible for some new and wonderful Pope to make this change, and
draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that between the
Old and New Testaments, the world would feel inclined to prostrate
itself again and for ever at the feet of Rome. In a catholic state
of things like that, delighted should I be, for one, to be among the
humblest of its communicants. How beautiful would their organs be then!
how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense! how unselfish
their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It
would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this
than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered
with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform
itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its
perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native
country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want
no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no
completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.

But if Charity (and by Charity I do not mean mere toleration, or any
other pretended right to permit others to have eyes like ourselves, but
whatever the delightful Greek word implies of good and lovely), if this
truly and only divine consummation of all Christian doctrine be not
thought capable of taking a form of belief "strong" enough, apart from
threats that revolt alike the heart and the understanding, Superstition
must look out for some new mode of dictation altogether; for the world
is outgrowing the old.

       *       *       *       *       *

I cannot, in gratitude for the facilities afforded to myself, as well
as for a more obvious and public reason, dismiss this Preface without
congratulating men of letters on the establishment and increasing
prosperity of the _London Library_, an institution founded for the
purpose of accommodating subscribers with such books, at their own
houses, as could only be consulted hitherto at the British Museum. The
sole objection to the Museum is thus done away, and the literary world
has a fair prospect of possessing two book-institutions instead of one,
each with its distinct claims to regard, and presenting in combination
all that the student can wish; for while it is highly desirable that
authors should be able to have standard works at their command, when
sickness or other circumstances render it impossible for them to go to
the Museum, it is undoubtedly requisite that one great collection should
exist in which they are sure to find the same works unremoved, in case
of necessity,--not to mention curious volumes of all sorts, manuscripts,
and a world of books of reference.


[Footnote 1: "It is probable that a prose translation would give a
better idea of the genius and manner of this poet than any metrical
one." Vol. i. p. 310.]

[Footnote 2: _Discorsi sopra la Prinza Deca di Tito Livio_, lib. iii.
cap. i. At p. 230 of the present volume I have too hastily called
St. Dominic the "founder of the Inquisition." It is generally conceded, I
believe, by candid Protestant inquirers, that he was not; whatever zeal
in the foundation and support of the tribunal may have been manifested
by his order. But this does not acquit him of the cruelty for which he
has been praised by Dante. He joined in the sanguinary persecution of
the Albigenses.]

[Footnote: 3 It is entitled, "_Italy, Austria, and the Pope_;" and
is full, not only of the eloquence of zeal, and of evidences
of intellectual power, but of the most curious and instructive
information.]



CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.

       *       *       *       *       *

DANTE.

CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS

THE ITALIAN PILGRIMS PROGRESS

I. The Journey through Hell  II.   Purgatory.   III. Heaven


PULCI.

CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS

HUMOURS OF GIANTS

THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES


APPENDIX.

I. Story of Paulo and Francesca. Translation.

II. Accounts given by different writers of the circumstances relating to
Paulo and Francesca; concluding with the only facts ascertained.

III. Story of Ugolino. Translation. Real Story of Ugolino, and Chaucer's
feeling respecting the Poem.

IV. Picture of Florence in the time of Dante's Ancestors. Translation.

V. The Monks and the Giants

VI. Passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles.



DANTE


Critical Notice

OF

DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.[1]


Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant
of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a
semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination,
as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the
fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods
over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt
to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some
important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in
particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one
point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot
in some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the
wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to which
it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the same time
exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what
we conceive to be the natural wisdom and temper of great poets; in
other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied
his imagination with so much that is contradictory to good feeling, in
matters divine as well as human; that I should not have thought myself
justified in assisting, however humbly, to extend the influence of his
writings, had I not believed a time to have arrived, when the community
may profit both from the marvels of his power and the melancholy
absurdity of its contradictions.

Dante Alighieri, who has always been known by his Christian rather than
surname (partly owing to the Italian predilection for Christian names,
and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics in his time), was the
son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, and was born in that city on
the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three years before the birth of Chaucer).
The stock is said to have been of Roman origin, of the race of the
Frangipani; but the only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a
Florentine cavalier of the house of the Elisei, who died in the
Crusades. Dante gives an account of him in his _Paradiso_.[2]
Cacciaguida married a lady of the Alighieri family of the Valdipado;
and, giving the name to one of his children, they subsequently retained
it as a patronymic in preference to their own. It would appear, from the
same poem, not only that the Alighieri were the more important house,
but that some blot had darkened the scutcheon of the Elisei; perhaps
their having been poor, and transplanted (as he seems to imply) from
some disreputable district. Perhaps they were known to have been of
ignoble origin; for, in the course of one of his most philosophical
treatises, he bursts into an extraordinary ebullition of ferocity
against such as adduce a knowledge of that kind as an argument against a
family's acquired nobility; affirming that such brutal stuff should be
answered not with words, but with the dagger.[3]

The Elisei, however, must have been of some standing; for Macchiavelli,
in his History of Florence, mentions them in his list of the early
Guelph and Ghibelline parties, where the side which they take is
different from that of the poet's immediate progenitors.[4] The arms of
the Alighieri (probably occasioned by the change in that name, for it
was previously written Aldighieri) are interesting on account of their
poetical and aspiring character. They are a golden wing on a field
azure.[5]

It is generally supposed that the name Dante is an abbreviation of
Durante; but this is not certain, though the poet had a nephew so
called. Dante is the name he goes by in the gravest records, in
law-proceedings, in his epitaph, in the mention of him put by himself
into the mouth of a blessed spirit. Boccaccio intimates that he was
christened Dante, and derives the name from the ablative case of _dans_
(giving)--a probable etymology, especially for a Christian appellation.
As an abbreviation of Durante, it would correspond in familiarity with
the Ben of Ben Jonson--a diminutive that would assuredly not have been
used by grave people on occasions like those mentioned, though a wit of
the day gave the masons a shilling to carve "O rare Ben Jonson!" on his
grave stone. On the other hand, if given at the font, the name of Ben
would have acquired all the legal gravity of Benjamin. In the English
Navy List, not long ago, one of our gallant admirals used to figure as
"Billy Douglas."

Of the mother of Dante nothing is known except that she was his father's
second wife, and that her Christian name was Bella, or perhaps surname
Bello. It might, however, be conjectured, from the remarkable and only
opportunity which our author has taken of alluding to her, that he
derived his disdainful character rather from his mother than father.[6]
The father appears to have died during the boyhood of his illustrious
son.

The future poet, before he had completed his ninth year, conceived a
romantic attachment to a little lady who had just entered hers, and who
has attained a celebrity of which she was destined to know nothing. This
was the famous Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a rich Florentine who
founded more than one charitable institution. She married another man,
and died in her youth; but retained the Platonical homage of her young
admirer, living and dead, and became the heroine of his great poem.

It is unpleasant to reduce any portion of a romance to the events of
ordinary life; but with the exception of those who merely copy from
one another, there has been such a conspiracy on the part of Dante's
biographers to overlook at least one disenchanting conclusion to be
drawn to that effect from the poet's own writings, that the probable
truth of the matter must here for the first time be stated. The case,
indeed, is clear enough from his account of it. The natural tendencies
of a poetical temperament (oftener evinced in a like manner than the
world in general suppose) not only made the boy-poet fall in love, but,
in the truly Elysian state of the heart at that innocent and adoring
time of life, made him fancy he had discovered a goddess in the object
of his love; and strength of purpose as well as imagination made him
grow up in the fancy. He disclosed himself, as time advanced, only by
his manner--received complacent recognitions in company from the young
lady--offended her by seeming to devote himself to another (see the poem
in the _Vita Nuova_, beginning "Ballata io vo")--rendered himself the
sport of her and her young friends by his adoring timidity (see the 5th
and 6th sonnets in the same work)--in short, constituted her a paragon
of perfection, and enabled her, by so doing, to shew that she was none.
He says, that finding himself unexpectedly near her one day in company,
he trembled so, and underwent such change of countenance, that many of
the ladies present began to laugh with her about him--"_si gabbavano di
me_." And he adds, in verse,

  "Con l'altre donne mia vista gabbate,
  E non pensate, donna, onde si mova
  Ch'io vi rassembri sì figura nova,
  Quando riguardo la vostra beltate," &c.          Son. 5.

"You laugh with the other ladies to see how I look (literally, you mock
my appearance); and do not think, lady, what it is that renders me so
strange a figure at sight of your beauty."

And in the sonnet that follows, he accuses her of preventing pity of him
in others, by such "killing mockery" as makes him wish for death ("_la
pietà, che 'l vostro gabbo recinde_," &c.)[7]

Now, it is to be admitted, that a young lady, if she is not very wise,
may laugh at her lover with her companions, and yet return his love,
after her fashion; but the fair Portinari laughs and marries another.
Some less melancholy face, some more intelligible courtship, triumphed
over the questionable flattery of the poet's gratuitous worship; and the
idol of Dante Alighieri became the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi. Not
a word does he say on that mortifying point. It transpired from a clause
in her father's will. And yet so bent are the poet's biographers on
leaving a romantic doubt in one's mind, whether Beatrice may not have
returned his passion, that not only do all of them (as far as I have
observed) agree in taking no notice of these sonnets, but the author
of the treatise entitled _Dante and the Catholic Philosophy of the
Thirteenth Century_, "in spite" (as a critic says) "of the _Beatrice,
his daughter, wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi_, of the paternal will,"
describes her as dying in "all the lustre of virginity." [8] The
assumption appears to be thus gloriously stated, as a counterpart to the
notoriety of its untruth. It must be acknowledged, that Dante himself
gave the cue to it by more than silence; for he not only vaunts her
acquaintance in the next world, but assumes that she returns his love in
that region, as if no such person as her husband could have existed, or
as if he himself had not been married also. This life-long pertinacity
of will is illustrative of his whole career.

Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing was wanting
on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, to furnish him with
an excellent education. It was so complete, as to enable him to become
master of all the knowledge of his time; and he added to this learning
more than a taste for drawing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing
an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.[9]
One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then
living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna. At
eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as
to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a
philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a
reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he
became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella,
the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.

Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's
death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his countrymen gained
against the people of Arezzo; and the year after it he was present at
the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. It has been supposed that he once
studied medicine with a view to it as a profession; but the conjecture
probably originated in nothing more than his having entered himself of
one of the city-companies (which happened to be the medical) for the
purpose of qualifying himself to accept office; a condition exacted of
the gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is
asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Franciscan
order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed; and, indeed,
the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated and impatient
turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had done with the world when it
lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi.

Weddings that might have taken place but do not, are like the reigns
of deceased heirs-apparent; every thing is assumable in their favour,
checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. Would the great
but splenetic poet have made an angel and a saint of Beatrice, had he
married her? He never utters the name of the woman whom he did marry.

Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It
seems not improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the
young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his
passion for Beatrice;[10] and in common justice to his feelings as a man
and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded, that he felt some sort
of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort; though he
afterwards did not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and
Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of
any body after herself.[11] At any rate, he probably roused what was
excitable in his wife's temper, with provocations from his own; for the
nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but
tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion
that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of
Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of
letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing
to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after
quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, or suffer
her to come to him, mother as she was by him of so many children;--a
statement, it must be confessed, not a little encouraging to the
tradition.[12] Be this as it may, Dante married in his twenty-sixth
year; wrote an adoring account of his first love (the _Vita Nuova_) in
his twenty-eighth; and among the six children which Gemma brought him,
had a daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of
the fair Portinari; which surely was either a very great compliment, or
no mean trial to the temper of the mother.

We shall see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted,
and what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as
conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history.

Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and
Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy
and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of
Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Cæsar, and paramount over the
Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as
to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and
bred a Guelph: he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline
neighbours; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of his
marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed chief
of the temporary administrators of affairs, called Priors;--functionaries
who held office only for two months.

Unfortunately, at that moment, his party had become subdivided into the
factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of two different sides
in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The consequences becoming
serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, as mediator, the French
Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms for the Pope against the
Emperor; but the Whites, of whom Dante was one, were hostile to the
measure; and in order to prevent it, he and his brother magistrates
expelled for a time the heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of
neither. The Whites accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines,
and the Blacks of openly favouring the Whites; who being, indeed,
allowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of the
unwholesomeness of their place of exile, which was fatal to Dante's
friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante answered it by
saying, that he had then quitted office; but he could not shew that he
had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles was still urged to interfere,
and Dante was sent ambassador to the Pope to obtain his disapprobation
of the interference; but the Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had
probably discovered that the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but
their own disputes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection
to his representative, beguiled the ambassador and encouraged the French
prince; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their ascendancy; and
the luckless poet, during his absence, was denounced as a corrupt
administrator of affairs, guilty of peculation; was severely
mulcted; banished from Tuscany for two years; and subsequently, for
contumaciousness, was sentenced to be _burnt alive_, in case he returned
ever. He never did return.

From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his wife. Her
relations obtained possession of power, but no use was made of it except
to keep him in exile. He had not accorded with them; and perhaps half
the secret of his conjugal discomfort was owing to politics. It is the
opinion of some, that the married couple were not sorry to part; others
think that the wife remained behind, solely to scrape together what
property she could, and bring up the children. All that is known is,
that she never lived with him more.

Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to
do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party
of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party
but his own; a naïve confession, probably true in one sense, considering
his scorn of other people, his great intellectual superiority, and the
large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon
quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party,
however stanch he apparently remained to their cause. His former
associates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and for
their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated
the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with
Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them
all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting
Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and
the mistress of the world.

With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in
which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him,
he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man,
"grudging in his great disdain." At one moment he was conspiring and
hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his
beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of
the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing
her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his
thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is
conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether
with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his
"sacred poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his
prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest
people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted
to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual
attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great
work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the
_Convito_, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (_de Monarchia_),
recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts,
and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (_de Vulgari
Eloquio_); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us,
"how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste
of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable,
from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have "placed himself in
some public way," and, "stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling
in his very vitals," have stretched out his hand "for charity" [13]--an
image of suffering, which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a
man, is almost enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon
at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of
that nature for his outrages on God and man. Several of the princes and
feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their
houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find
it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his. There must be
great wisdom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy
of one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take in
such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace,
and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo, now in
Bologna; then probably in Verona with Can Grande's elder brother; then
(if we are to believe those who have tracked his steps) in Casentino;
then with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; then with the
great Ghibelline chieftain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino; then
in Romagna, in Padua, in _Paris_ (arguing with the churchmen), some say
in Germany, and at _Oxford_; then again in Italy; in Lucca (where he is
supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity to Beatrice in favour of
a certain "Gentucca"); then again in Verona with the new prince, the
famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms appear to have lost him a doubtful
hospitality); then in a monastery in the mountains of Umbria; in Udine;
in Ravenna; and there at length he put up for the rest of his life with
his last and best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but
the nephew of the hapless Francesca.

It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the
moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that
affecting passage in the _Convito_, which was evidently a direct effort
at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in
the style of that work, he exclaims, "Ah! would it had pleased the
Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed;
that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty
undeservedly--the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty. For it
pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of
Rome--Florence--to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was
born, and bred, and passed half of the life of man, and in which, with
her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary
spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in
almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a
beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too
often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly I have been a
vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different
ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty;
and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by
some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in
whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy
opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do." [14]

How simply and strongly written! How full of the touching yet
undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to take upon
itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of manly endeavour and a
good motive! How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with
abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!

The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are
not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his
abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence,
on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following
noble letter to a kinsman. The old spelling of the original (in the
note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on "Dante" in the
_Edinburgh Review_ (vol. XXX. no. 60); and I have retained also, with
little difference, the translation which accompanies it:

"From your letter, which I received with due respect and affection, I
observe how much you have at heart my restoration to my country. I am
bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch as an exile rarely finds a
friend. But after mature consideration, I must, by my answer, disappoint
the wishes of some little minds; and I confide in the judgment to which
your impartiality and prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has
written to me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends,
that, by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to
Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to the
humiliation of asking and receiving absolution: wherein, my father, I
see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. I speak of the
impertinence of those who mention such conditions to me; for in your
letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, there is no such thing. Is
such an invitation, then, to return to his country glorious to d. all.
(Dante Allighieri), after suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it
thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and
the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is
familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth,
that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some
others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man
who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his
persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that shall lead me back
to my country. I will return with hasty steps, if you or any other can
open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of d.
(Dante); but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I
shall never enter. What! shall I not everywhere enjoy the light of the
sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every corner of
the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth,
without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people
and republic of Florence? Bread, I hope, will not fail me." [15]

Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly
exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him
their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his
exile upon him, or closed it as he did. To that close we have now come,
and it is truly melancholy and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with
the Venetians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been
the last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. He
returned from Venice to Ravenna, worn out, and there died, after fifteen
years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, aged fifty-seven. His
life had been so agitated, that it probably would not have lasted so
long, but for the solace of his poetry, and the glory which he knew it
must produce him. Guido gave him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to
give him a monument; but such was the state of Italy in those times,
that he himself died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and
one of a noble sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardinal
Bembo, in 1483; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, by Cardinal
Gonzaga. His countrymen, in after years, made two solemn applications
for the removal of his dust to Florence; but the just pride of the
Ravennese refused them.

Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a
nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their
father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left
families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line,
still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego
Alighieri. No direct descent of the other kind from poets of former
times is, I believe, known to exist.

The manners and general appearance of Dante have been minutely recorded,
and are in striking agreement with his character. Boccaccio and other
novelists are the chief relaters; and their accounts will be received
accordingly with the greater or less trust, as the reader considers them
probable; but the author of the Decameron personally knew some of his
friends and relations, and he intermingles his least favourable reports
with expressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle height,
of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, large piercing
eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting under-lip, and thick
curling hair--an aspect announcing determination and melancholy. There
is a sketch of his countenance, in his younger days, from the immature
but sweet pencil of Giotto; and it is a refreshment to look at it,
though pride and discontent, I think, are discernible in its lineaments.
It is idle, and no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his
mere worshippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and
exacerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect the
poor victim of events--the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What
came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; and so
inconsistent was his nature altogether, or, at any rate, such an epitome
of all the graver passions that are capable of co-existing, both sweet
and bitter, thoughtful and outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to
think he must have had an angel for one parent, and--I shall leave his
own toleration to say what--for the other.

To continue the account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with
a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom
spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the
anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and
sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in
Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark
which made the saturnine poet smile--"That is the man who goes to hell
whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which
her companion observed--"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he
has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He
was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music--is thought to
have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might
be supposed from his platonical aspirations--(Boccaccio says, that even
a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)--could
be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet
addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat--and though
his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a
biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat
and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is
his word.

There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be
written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline leader, a
friend of Dante's, which, though hitherto accounted apocryphal by most,
has such an air of truth, and contains an image of the poet in his exile
so exceedingly like what we conceive of the man, that it is difficult
not to believe it genuine, especially as the handwriting has lately been
discovered to be that of Boccaccio.[16] At all events, I am sure the
reader will not be sorry to have the substance of it. The writer says,
that he perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none of
its inmates knew. He asked him what he wanted; but the stranger saying
nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building as though contemplating
its architecture, the question was put a second time; upon which,
looking round on his interrogators, he answered, "_Peace_!" The prior,
whose curiosity was strongly excited, took the stranger apart, and
discovering who he was, shewed him all the attention becoming his fame;
and then Dante took a little book out of his bosom, aid observing that
perhaps the prior had not seen it, expressed a wish to leave it with his
new friend as a memorial. It was "a portion," he said, "of his work."
The prior received the volume with respect; and politely opening it at
once, and fixing his eyes on the contents, in order, it would seem,
to shew the interest he took in it, appeared suddenly to check some
observation which they suggested. Dante found that his reader was
surprised at seeing the work written in the vulgar tongue instead of
Latin. He explained, that he wished to address himself to readers of all
classes; and concluded with requesting the prior to add some notes, with
the spirit of which he furnished him, and then forward it (transcribed,
I presume, by the monks) to their common friend, the Ghibelline
chieftain--a commission, which, knowing the prior's intimacy with that
personage, appears to have been the main object of his coming to the
place[17].

This letter has been adduced as an evidence of Dante's poem having
transpired during his lifetime: a thing which, in the teeth of
Boccaccio's statement to that effect, and indeed the poet's own
testimony[18], Foscolo holds to be so impossible, that he turns the
evidence against the letter. He thinks, that if such bitter invectives
had been circulated, a hundred daggers would have been sheathed in the
bosom of the exasperating poet[19]. But I cannot help being of opinion,
with some writer whom I am unable at present to call to mind (Schlegel,
I think), that the strong critical reaction of modern times in favour
of Dante's genius has tended to exaggerate the idea conceived of him in
relation to his own. That he was of importance, and bitterly hated in
his native city, was a distinction he shared with other partisans who
have obtained no celebrity, though his poetry, no doubt, must have
increased the bitterness; that his genius also became more and more felt
out of the city, by the few individuals capable of estimating a man of
letters in those semi-barbarous times, may be regarded as certain; but
that busy politicians in general, war-making statesmen, and princes
constantly occupied in fighting for their existence with one another,
were at all alive either to his merits or his invectives, or would have
regarded him as anything but a poor wandering scholar, solacing his
foolish interference in the politics of this world with the old clerical
threats against his enemies in another, will hardly, I think, be doubted
by any one who reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by
ages, and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread. A writer
on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and even with
a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little known, and less
cared for, out of the pale of that very private literary public, which
was almost exclusively their own. When we read, now-a-days, of the great
poet's being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and
sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but
his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present
competed with him in the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the
different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince's table in those
days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence,
kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into
lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only
shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no
longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the amusement
derived from it by the master. On one occasion, his platter is slily
heaped with their bones, which provokes him to call them dogs, as having
none to shew for their own. Another time, Can Grande asks him how it is
that his companions give more pleasure at court than himself; to which
he answers, "Because like loves like." He then leaves the court, and his
disgusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption.

He stopped long nowhere, except with Guido Novello; and when that
prince, whose downfal was at hand, sent him on the journey above
mentioned to Venice, the senate (whom the poet had never offended) were
so little aware of his being of consequence, that they declined giving
him an audience. He went back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that
he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the
street, who plagued him with party-words, as to throw stones at them--a
thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but
ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could do in all ages,
from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo. It
would be as difficult, from the evidence of his own works and of the
exasperation he created, to doubt the extremest reports of his irascible
temper, as it would be not to give implicit faith to his honesty. The
charge of peculation which his enemies brought against this great poet,
the world has universally scouted with an indignation that does it
honour. He himself seems never to have condescended to allude to it;
and a biographer would feel bound to copy his silence, had not the
accusation been so atrociously recorded. But, on the other hand, who
can believe that a man so capable of doing his fellow-citizens good and
honour, would have experienced such excessive enmity, had he not carried
to excess the provocations of his pride and scorn? His whole history
goes to prove it, not omitting the confession he makes of pride as his
chief sin, and the eulogies he bestows on the favourite vice of the
age--revenge. His Christianity (at least as shewn in his poem) was not
that of Christ, but of a furious polemic. His motives for changing his
party, though probably of a mixed nature, like those of most human
beings, may reasonably be supposed to have originated in something
better than interest or indignation. He had most likely not agreed
thoroughly with any party, and had become hopeless of seeing dispute
brought to an end, except by the representative of the Cæsars. The
inconsistency of the personal characters of the popes with the sacred
claims of the chair of St. Peter, was also calculated greatly to disgust
him; but still his own infirmities of pride and vindictiveness
spoiled all; and when he loaded every body else with reproach for the
misfortunes of his country, he should have recollected that, had his own
faults been kept in subjection to his understanding, he might possibly
have been its saviour. Dante's modesty has been asserted on the ground
of his humbling himself to the fame of Virgil, and at the feet of
blessed spirits; but this kind of exalted humility does not repay a
man's fellow-citizens for lording it over them with scorn and derision.
We learn from Boccaccio, that when he was asked to go ambassador
from his party to the pope, he put to them the following useless and
mortifying queries--"If I go, who is to stay?--and if I stay, who is to
go?" [21] Neither did his pride make him tolerant of pride in others.
A neighbour applying for his intercession with a magistrate, who had
summoned him for some offence, Dante, who disliked the man for riding in
an overbearing manner along the streets (stretching out his legs as wide
as he could, and hindering people from going by), did intercede with the
magistrate, but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration
of the horsemanship. The neighbour, who was a man of family, was so
exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the principal cause
of Dante's expatriation. This will be considered the less improbable,
if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained possession of his derider's
confiscated property; but, at all events, nothing is more likely to
have injured him. The bitterest animosities are generally of a personal
nature; and bitter indeed must have been those which condemned a man of
official dignity and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.[22]

That the Florentines of old, like other half-Christianised people, were
capable of any extremity against an opponent, burning included, was
proved by the fates of Savonarola and others; and that Dante himself
could admire the burners is evident from his eulogies and beatification
of such men as Folco and St. Dominic. The tragical as well as "fantastic
tricks" which

  "Man, proud man,
  Drest in a little brief authority,"

plays with his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, is among
the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, according to a greater
understanding than Dante's, "make the angels weep." (Dante, by the way,
has introduced in his heaven no such angels as those; though he has
plenty that scorn and denounce.) Lope de Vega, though a poet, was an
officer of the Inquisition, and joined the famous Armada that was coming
to thumb-screw and roast us into his views of Christian meekness.
Whether the author of the story of _Paulo and Francesca_ could have
carried the Dominican theories into practice, had he been the banisher
instead of the banished, is a point that may happily be doubted; but at
all events he revenged himself on his enemies after their own fashion;
for he answered their decree of the stake by putting them into hell.

Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, because it was
written in a middle style; though some, by a strange confusion of ideas,
think the reason must have been because it "ended happily!" that is,
because, beginning with hell (to some), it terminated with "heaven" (to
others). As well might they have said, that a morning's work in the
Inquisition ended happily, because, while people were being racked in
the dungeons, the officers were making merry in the drawing-room. For
the much-injured epithet of "Divine," Dante's memory is not responsible.
He entitled his poem, arrogantly enough, yet still not with that impiety
of arrogance, "The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by nation but
not by habits." The word "divine" was added by some transcriber; and it
heaped absurdity on absurdity, too much of it, alas! being literally
infernal tragedy. I am not speaking in mockery, any further than the
fact itself cannot help so speaking. I respect what is to be respected
in Dante; I admire in him what is admirable; would love (if his
infernalities would let me) what is loveable; but this must not hinder
one of the human race from protesting against what is erroneous in his
fame, when it jars against every best feeling, human and divine. Mr.
Cary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail himself of "the
popular creed in all its extravagance" as Homer had of his gods, or
Shakspeare of his fairies. But the distinction is obvious. Homer did not
personally identify himself with a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate
the worst parts of it in behalf of a ferocious inquisitorial church, and
to the risk of endangering the peace of millions of gentle minds.

The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theology, partly an
abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate
and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's
times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen
of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform
church and state by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly
needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential.
The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has
obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of
things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil
to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself
through the spheres of heaven, where Saint Peter catechises and confirms
him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of
Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!

His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most
fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre
of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a
separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and
the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory
is a corresponding mountain on the other side of the globe, commencing
with the antipodes of Jerusalem, and divided into exterior circles of
expiation, which end in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise.
From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely
conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic
system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of
heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or
region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.

The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so
confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held
in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem,
speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower
mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There
was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the
past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of
Providence; but that Dante partook of what may be called the literary
superstition of the time, even for want of better knowledge, is clear
from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise
on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of
saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even
now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told,
Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones,
are existing under the sanction of other names;--heathenisms christened.
A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets,
concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in
London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a
friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson from Hercules.

Dante accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the schools, he
puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with the exception of two
or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of
Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door
as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian
lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus,
and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates
the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It
has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of
purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in
the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies,
the whole place of punishment becomes a _reductio ad absurdum_, as
ridiculous as it is melancholy; so that one is astonished how so great a
man, and especially a man who thought himself so far advanced beyond his
age, and who possessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful,
could endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for
any length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of his
passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absurdity
throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy as well as
sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not only will
the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but when those increasing
purifications of Christianity which our blessed reformers began, shall
finally precipitate the whole dregs of the author into the mythology to
which they belong, the world will derive a pleasure from it to an amount
not to be conceived till the arrival of that day. Dante, meantime, with
an impartiality which has been admired by those who can approve the
assumption of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling
and decency, has put friends as well as foes into hell: tutors of his
childhood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father
of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante--the last for not believing in a
God: therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of the belief, and
totally differing both with the pious heathen Plutarch, and the great
Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of opinion that a contumelious
belief is worse than none, and that it is far better and more pious to
believe in "no God at all," than in a God who would "eat his children
as soon as they were born." And Dante makes him do worse; for the whole
unbaptised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus.

Milton has spoken of the "milder shades of Purgatory;" and truly they
possess great beauties. Even in a theological point of view they are
something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the
_Inferno_. The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the
blue serenity of heaven, is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming.
So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the
angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other
pictures of gentleness and love. And yet, special and great has been the
escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief;
for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs about the neck of the
old and feeble in that communion. Hell is avoidable by repentance; but
Purgatory, what modest conscience shall escape? Mr. Cary, in a note on a
passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows
this expiatory state, rather than what is suffered there,[23] looks upon
the poet's injunction as an "unanswerable objection to the doctrine of
purgatory," it being difficult to conceive "how the best can meet death
without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and
intense suffering." Luckily, assent is not belief; and mankind's
feelings are for the most part superior to their opinions; otherwise
the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and nature not been
vindicated of her children. But let us watch and be on our guard against
all resuscitations of superstition.

As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though
sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be
found in either of the other books. I shall speak of some of them
presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no
heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of its smiles and its
beatitude; but always excepting the poetry--especially the similes
brought from the more heavenly earth--we realise little but a
fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful characters, far more
angry and theological than celestial; giddy raptures of monks and
inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints denouncing popes and
Florentines; in short, a heaven libelling itself with invectives against
earth, and terminating in a great presumption. Many of the people put
there, a Calvinistic Dante would have consigned to the "other place;"
and some, if now living, would not be admitted into decent society. At
the beginning of one of the cantos, the poet congratulates himself,
with a complacent superiority, on his being in heaven and occupied with
celestial matters, while his poor fellow-creatures are wandering and
blundering on earth. But he had never got there! A divine--worthy of
that name--of the Church of England (Dr. Whichcote), has beautifully
said, that "heaven is first a temper, and then a place." According to
this truly celestial topography, the implacable Florentine had not
reached its outermost court. Again, his heavenly mistress, Beatrice,
besides being far too didactic to sustain the womanly part of her
character properly, alternates her smiles and her sarcasms in a way that
jars horribly against the occasional enchantment of her aspect. She does
not scruple to burst into taunts of the Florentines in the presence of
Jesus himself; and the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the very
bosom of Christian bliss, promises him revenge on his enemies! Is this
the kind of zeal that is to be exempt from objection in a man who
objected to all the world? or will it be thought a profaneness against
such profanity, to remind the reader of the philosopher in Swift, who
"while gazing on the stars, was betrayed by his lower parts into a
ditch!"

The reader's time need not be wasted with the allegorical and other
mystical significations given to the poem; still less on the question
whether Beatrice is theology, or a young lady, or both; and least of all
on the discovery of the ingenious Signor Rossetti, that Dante and all
the other great old Italian writers meant nothing, either by their
mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice
it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us
that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade
by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote
his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I
think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read the
poem, especially the passage about his father. The understanding of
Guido, who had not the admiration for Virgil that Dante had (very likely
for reasons that have been thought sound in modern times), was in all
probability as good as that of his friend in many respects, and perhaps
more so in one or two; and modern criticism might have been saved some
of its pains of objection by the poet's contemporary.

The author did not live to publish, in any formal manner, his
extraordinary poem, probably did not intend to do so, except under those
circumstances of political triumph which he was always looking for; but
as he shewed portions of it to his friends, it was no doubt talked of
to a certain extent, and must have exasperated such of his enemies as
considered him worth their hostility. No wonder they did all they could
to keep him out of Florence. What would they have said of him, could
they have written a counter poem? What would even his friends have said
of him? for we see in what manner he has treated even those; and yet how
could he possibly know, with respect either to friends or enemies, what
passed between them and their consciences? or who was it that gave
him his right to generate the boasted distinction between an author's
feelings as a man and his assumed office as a theologian, and parade
the latter at the former's expense? His own spleen, hatred, and avowed
sentiments of vengeance, are manifest throughout the poem; and there is
this, indeed, to be said for the moral and religious inconsistencies
both of the man and his verse, that in those violent times the spirit
of Christian charity, and even the sentiment of personal shame, were so
little understood, that the author in one part of it is made to blush by
a friend for not having avenged him; and it is said to have been thought
a compliment to put a lady herself into hell, that she might be talked
of, provided it was for something not odious. An admirer of this
infernal kind of celebrity, even in later times, declared that he would
have given a sum of money (I forget to what amount) if Dante had but
done as much for one of his ancestors. It has been argued, that in all
the parties concerned in these curious ethics there is a generous love
of distinction, and a strong craving after life, action, and sympathy
of some kind or other. Granted; there are all sorts of half-good,
half-barbarous feelings in Dante's poem. Let justice be done to the
good half; but do not let us take the ferocity for wisdom and piety; or
pretend, in the complacency of our own freedom from superstition, to see
no danger of harm to the less fortunate among our fellow-creatures in
the support it receives from a man of genius. Bedlams have been filled
with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering
by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best
critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in
which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and
absurdity is almost inexplicable. The truth is, that like everything
else which appears harsh and unaccountable in nature, it was an excess
of the materials for good, working in an over-active and inexperienced
manner; but knowing this, we are bound, for the sake of the good, not
to retard its improvement by ignoring existing impieties, or blind
ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of the bigotries of great men.
Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting
the "divine Plato" into the service of diviner charity, only kept the
latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between
the philosopher's unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own
malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might
have saved us! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even this
form of it has had its uses. If Dante thought it salutary to the world
to maintain a system of religious terror, the same charity which can
hope that it may once have been so, has taught us how to commence a
better. But did he, after all, or did he not, think it salutary? Did
he think so, believing the creed himself? or did he think it from an
unwilling sense of its necessity? Or, lastly, did he write only as a
mythologist, and care for nothing but the exercise of his spleen and
genius? If he had no other object than that, his conscientiousness would
be reduced to a low pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only
in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and
would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to
the pretension.[24] Thank heaven, his "Hell" has not embittered the mild
reading-desks of the Church of England.

If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and
willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St.
Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would
have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell-gate, or the
account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gentle chapels of Queen
Victoria? May those chapels have every beauty in them, and every air of
heaven, that painting and music can bestow--divine gifts, not unworthy
to be set before their Divine Bestower; but far from them be kept the
foul fiends of inhumanity and superstition!

It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of the
opinions of Dante even in theology; and his morals, if judged according
to the received standard, are not seldom puzzling. He rarely thinks as
the popes do; sometimes not as the Church does: he is lax, for instance,
on the subject of absolution by the priest at death.[25] All you can be
sure of is, the predominance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and
the notions he entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue. Towards
the errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because
he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would not
have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had not been
too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to assume their
repentance in the teeth of the evidence required. He avails himself of
orthodox license to put "the harlot Rahab" into heaven ("cette bonne
fille de Jericho," as Ginguéné calls her); nay, he puts her into the
planet Venus, as if to compliment her on her profession; and one of her
companions there is a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a
lady famous for her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says,
that she "was overcome by her star"--to wit, the said planet Venus; and
yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs over the
Guelphs. But both these ladies, it is to be understood, repented--for
they had time for repentance; their good fortune saved them. Poor
murdered Francesca had no time to repent; therefore her mischance was
her damnation! Such are the compliments theology pays to the Creator.
In fact, nothing is really punished in Dante's Catholic hell but
impenitence, deliberate or accidental. No delay of repentance, however
dangerous, hinders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his
heaven. The best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has
sinned as Dante thinks; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him:
the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful duration
of agony in purgatory--the great horror of Catholic death beds.
Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it. O Luther!
vast was the good you did us. O gentle Church of England! let nothing
persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of
God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above
all things.

If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily
have forgiven him--for the excesses of charity are the extensions of
hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a
hundred times. This is the impression he makes on universalists of all
creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole
round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final
judges of sovereign pretension. It is very well for individuals to
make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or
pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be;
and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the
very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius
of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of
unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would
spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version
of _Ugolino_). Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso,
and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into
the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "_take upon
themselves to know" (Cymbeline_, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet
to Henry Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine"--a lamenting epithet,
by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. The
historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of
Milton, says that "Hell grows darker at his frown." [26]

Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He tells
Miss Seward that the "plan" of the poem appeared to him "unhappy;
the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and
uninteresting." [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider
it. The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and
both are surely interesting to most people.

Landor, in his delightful book the _Pentameron_--a book full of the
profoundest as well as sweetest humanity--makes Petrarch follow up
Boccaccio's eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Francesca with
ebullitions of surprise and horror:

"_Petrarca_. Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at
discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section
of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,

  'And he who fell as a dead body falls'

would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What
execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa! what hatred
against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal
and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the
_Inferno_ as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.
Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and
certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged
forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it,
if this had been his intention." [28]

Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the
undesirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of view,
and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of
poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and
leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.

Again, Petrarch says, "What an object of sadness and of consternation,
he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!

"_Boccaccio_. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire
by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy
than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to
his poetry than his temper."

See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50),
respecting the most impious and absurd passage in all Dante's poem, the
assumption about Divine Love in the inscription over hell-gate--one of
those monstrosities of conception which none ever had the effrontery to
pretend to vindicate, except theologians who profess to be superior to
the priests of Moloch, and who yet defy every feeling of decency and
humanity for the purpose of explaining their own worldly, frightened,
or hard-hearted submission to the mistakes of the most wretched
understandings. Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper
and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's
dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings
entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. But all gentle and considerate
hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even were it true (as
the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never be regenerated till
one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the other![29] Such men, with
all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by
nobler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation. They fancy,
no doubt, that they are vindicating the energies of Nature herself, and
the inevitable necessity of "doing evil that good may come." But Dante
in so doing violated the Scripture he professed to revere; and men must
not assume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which is the
only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which is to be
arrogated by no earthly wisdom. One calm discovery of science may do
away with all the boasted eternal necessities of the angry and the
self-idolatrous. The passions that may be necessary to savages are not
bound to remain so to civilised men, any more than the eating of man's
flesh or the worship of Jugghernaut. When we think of the wonderful
things lately done by science for the intercourse of the world, and
the beautiful and tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal
energy and benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind,
and views of creation to which Dante's universe was a nutshell,--such
a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no
better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, and his nutshell a
rottenness to be spit out of the mouth.

Heaven send that the great poet's want of charity has not made myself
presumptuous and uncharitable! But it is in the name of society I
speak; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not the terrible,
stake-preceding things they were in his. Readers in general,
however--even those of the literary world--have little conception of
the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The
former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling
habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of
the ludicrous--positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it
out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose;
though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible
to his mistakes.

"The people of Sienna," according to this national and Christian poet,
were "a parcel of cox-combs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino,
hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pistoia was a den of beasts, and
ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and
drown every soul in Pisa. Almost all the women in Florence walked
half-naked in public, and were abandoned in private. Every brother,
husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all
Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in
Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality
were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the 'lowest
pit of hell' to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen." [30]

So much for his beloved countrymen. As for foreigners, particularly
kings, "Edward the First of England, and Robert of Scotland, were a
couple of grasping fools; the Emperor Albert was an usurper; Alphonso
the Second, of Spain, a debauchee; the King of Bohemia a coward;
Frederick of Arragon a coward and miser; the Kings of Portugal and
Norway forgers; the King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed
by a unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the
descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St.
Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas
rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old
men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger." [31]

When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as well as foes,
of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes,
pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and
incapable, men, women, and children,--it is really no better than a kind
of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the _Rolliad_,
which begins with

  "Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with

  "Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell,
  Confound, sink, plunge them all to deepest blackest hell." [32]

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

No burlesque can beat it. But in the particular, one is astonished and
saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to
riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not
to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to
amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy
and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and
indignation. Thus, in a circle in hell, where traitors are stuck up
to their chins in ice (canto xxxii.), the visitor, in walking about,
happens to give one of their faces a kick; the sufferer weeps, and
then curses him--with such infernal truth does the writer combine the
malignant with the pathetic! Dante replies to the curse by asking the
man his name. He is refused it. He then seizes the miserable wretch
by the hair, in order to force him to the disclosure; and Virgil is
represented as commending the barbarity![33] But he does worse. To
barbarity he adds treachery of his own. He tells another poor wretch,
whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn a crystal vizor,
that if he will disclose his name and offence, he will relieve his eyes
awhile, _that he may weep_. The man does so; and the ferocious poet
then refuses to perform his promise, adding mockery to falsehood, and
observing that ill manners are the only courtesy proper to wards such
a fellow![34] It has been conjectured, that Macchiavelli apparently
encouraged the enormities of the princes of his time, with a design to
expose them to indignation. It might have been thought of Dante, if he
had not taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his
hell out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions of
God. This is certainly the effect of the worst part of his descriptions
in an age like the present. Black burning gulfs, full of outcries
and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally eating their
fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads
against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by
force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathing, and spitting
with hate and disgust when it is done--Enough, enough, for God's sake!
Take the disgust out of one's senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom
and charity, now beginning to fill the air with fragrance!

But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty
itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he
thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon
the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes. It is true
the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such
things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with
horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's
creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief;
and however we may suppose such a belief to have had its use in giving
alarm to ruffian passions and barbarously ignorant times, an age arrives
when a beneficent Providence permits itself to be better understood, and
dissipates the superfluous horror.

Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante's poem are too obvious
now-a-days to need remark. Even the composition of the poem,
egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who
thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style does, of the
faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is nervous, concise,
full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is
often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective
in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme. Sometimes, also,
the writer is inconsistent in circumstance (probably from not having
corrected the poem); and he is not above being filthy. Even in the
episode of Paulo and Francesca, which has so often been pronounced
faultless, and which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful
pieces of writing in the world, some of these faults are observable,
particularly in the obscurity of the passage about _tolta forma_, the
cessation of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two
lovers in the manner that Virgil prescribes.

But truly it is said, that when Dante is great, nobody surpasses him. I
doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant intensity and incessant
variety of his pictures; and whatever he paints, he throws, as it were,
upon its own powers; as though an artist should draw figures that
started into life, and proceeded to action for themselves, frightening
their creator. Every motion, word, and look of these creatures becomes
full of sensibility and suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the
visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character, nay,
forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of
lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is
standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet,
full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in
the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found
which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the
minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most
generalising poetry; and this feeling of matter-of-fact is impressed by
fictions the most improbable, nay, the most ridiculous and revolting.
You laugh at the absurdity; you are shocked at the detestable cruelty;
yet, for the moment, the thing almost seems as if it must be true. You
feel as you do in a dream, and after it;--you wake and laugh, but the
absurdity seemed true at the time; and while you laugh you shudder.

Enough of this crueller part of his genius has been exhibited; but it is
seldom you can have the genius without sadness. In the circle of hell,
soothsayers walk along weeping, with their faces turned the wrong way,
so that their tears fall between their shoulders. The picture is still
more dreadful. Warton thinks it ridiculous. But I cannot help feeling
with the poet, that it is dreadfully pathetic. It is the last mortifying
insult to human pretension. Warton, who has a grudge against Dante
natural to a man of happier piety, thinks him ridiculous also in
describing the monster Geryon lying upon the edge of one of the gulfs
of hell "like a beaver" (canto xvii.). He is of opinion that the writer
only does it to shew his knowledge of natural history. But surely the
idea of so strange and awful a creature (a huge mild-faced man ending in
a dragon's body) lying familiarly on the edge of the gulf, as a beaver
does by the water, combines the supernatural with the familiar in a very
impressive manner. It is this combination of extremes which is the life
and soul of the whole poem; you have this world in the next; the same
persons, passions, remembrances, intensified by superhuman despairs
or beatitudes; the speechless entrancements of bliss, the purgatorial
trials of hope and patience; the supports of hate and anger (such as
they are) in hell itself; nay, of loving despairs, and a self-pity made
unboundedly pathetic by endless suffering. Hence there it no love-story
so affecting as that of Paulo and Francesca thus told and perpetuated in
another world; no father's misery so enforced upon us as Ugolino's, who,
for hundreds of years, has not grown tired of the revenge to which it
wrought him. Dante even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into
passages of mere transient emotion or illustration, unconnected with the
next world; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, and
many others which the reader will meet with in this volume. Indeed, if
pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all
kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will
think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord
and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge
competition with any in point of interest. His Heaven, it is true,
though containing both sublime and lovely passages, is not so good as
his Earth. The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly
it became. When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he
literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself
_arrived there_ in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of
Beatrice, then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express
degrees of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,--of
dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry
crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of
stars full of blessed souls, with saints _forming an eagle's beak_ and
David in its _eye!_--such superhuman attempts become for the most part
tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity
and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared for those
winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most
beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguéné
has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels.
Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto
of the _Inferno_, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an
entrance into the city of Dis:--an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian
lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and
is like a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the
peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after
rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they
fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the
two companions. His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts.
This angel is announced by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of
the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually
disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes
in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is
impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two other angels
have green wings and green garments, and the drapery is kept in motion
like a flag by the vehement action of the wings. A fifth has a face like
the morning star, casting forth quivering beams. A sixth is of a lustre
so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows
what is coming. Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance
of a May-morning; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has
a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occasional
pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic
creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. You long to bathe
your eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in his dews. You gaze
enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so
from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels,
almost to his ferocity; and that is saying every thing. It is not
always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material
impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and
far more abundant. His infernal precipices--his black whirlwinds--his
innumerable cries and claspings of hands--his very odours of huge
loathsomeness--his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits,
like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move--his earthquake of
the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven--his
dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they
go by, "like a lion on his watch"--his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in
unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire
(human precursor of Milton's Satan)--his aspect of Paradise, "as if the
universe had smiled"--his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying
out _so loud_, in accordance with the anti-papal indignation of Saint
Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, _could not hear what
they said_--and the blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which
takes place at the apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth
of the court of Rome--all these sublimities, and many more, make us not
know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the
raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two
such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry,
I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not
the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times.
Compared with Homer and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only
superior to theirs from an excess of the morbid; and he is inferior to
both in other sovereign qualities of poetry--to the one, in giving you
the healthiest general impression of nature itself--to Shakspeare, in
boundless universality--to most great poets, in thorough harmony and
delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and
a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large vital bosom, breathes
like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and
sunshine, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but
also activity and beauty to be enjoyed. The feeling of health and
strength is predominant. Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with
a noble confidence--is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin.
Shakspeare has all the smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns
the "soul of goodness in things evil." He is comedy as well as
tragedy--the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences;
and he beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make nature
their subject through her own inspiriting medium--not through
the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in
constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the
general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional
beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into
his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over
again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great
value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which
anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch's; and he was the author of
various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less
masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his
poetry in fixing his native tongue. His account of his Early Life (the
_Vita Nuova_) is a most engaging history of a boyish passion, evidently
as real and true on his own side as love and truth can be, whatever
might be its mistake as to its object. The treatise on the Vernacular
Tongue (_de Vulgari Eloquio_) shews how critically he considered his
materials for impressing the world, and what a reader he was of every
production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (_Convito_) is but an
abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy
(_de Monarchia_) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his
great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age.
It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one
man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor--God
having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman
empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be
independent of the Pope--spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far
only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father;
and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two divided
supremacies. And all this assumption of the obsolete and impossible the
author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by arguments drawn from
the history of Æneas, and the providential cackle of the Roman geese!

How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in extolling
the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of bigotry in his
verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to perplex the friends
of advancement with making a type of their success out of so erring
though so great a man? Such slavishness, even to such greatness, is a
poor and unpromising thing, compared with an altogether unprejudiced
and forward-looking self-reliance. To have no faith in names has been
announced as one of their principles; and "God and Humanity" is their
motto. What, therefore, has Dante's name to do with their principles? or
what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do with the
final triumph of "God and Humanity?" Dante's lauded wish for that union
of the Italian States, which his fame has led them so fondly to identify
with their own, was but a portion of his greater and prouder wish to see
the whole world at the feet of his boasted ancestress, Rome. Not,
of course, that he had no view to what he considered good and just
government (for what sane despot purposes to rule without that?); but
his good and just government was always to be founded on the _sine qua
non_ principle of universal Italian domination.[35]

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his
errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius;
but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does,
in his principal work. He was a gratuitous logician, a preposterous
politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and
(considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful
sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will
remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which
they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers
feel to associate his entire memory, as a poet, with their usual
personal delight in a poet and his name.


[Footnote 1: As notices of Dante's life have often been little but
repetitions of former ones, I think it due to the painstaking character
of this volume to state, that besides consulting various commentators
and critics, from Boccaccio to Fraticelli and others, I have diligently
perused the _Vita di Dante_, by Cesare Balbo, with Rocco's annotations;
the _Histoire Littéraire d'Italie,_ by Ginguéné; the _Discorso sul Testo
della Commedia_, by Foscolo; the _Amori e Rime di Dante_ of Arrivabene;
the _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, by Troja; and Ozanam's _Dante et la
Philosophie Catholique an Treixième Siècle._]

[Footnote 2: Canto xv. 88.]

[Footnote 3: For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district,
see canto xvi. 43, or the summary of it in the present volume. The
following is the passage alluded to in the philosophical treatise
"Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle parole, ma col coltello, a tanta
bestialità." _Convito,--Opere Minori_, 12mo, Fir. 1834, vol. II. p. 432.
"Beautiful mode" (says Perticeri in a note) "of settling questions."]

[Footnote 4: _Istorie Fiorentine, II_. 43 (in _Tutte le Opere_, 4to,
1550).]

[Footnote 5: The name has been varied into _Allagheri_, _Aligieri_,
_Alleghieri_, _Alligheri_, _Aligeri_, with the accent generally on the
third, but sometimes on the second syllable. See Foscolo, _Discorso sul
Testo, p_. 432. He says, that in Verona, where descendants of the poet
survive, they call it _Alìgeri_. But names, like other words, often
wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to ascertain it.
Who would suppose that _Pomfret_ came from _Pontefract_, or _wig_ from
_parrucca_? Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove
nothing but the whims of the heralds.

Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his
name, may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim
significations of the word in the dictionaries:

"_Dante_, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard
skin."--_Florio's Dictionary_, edited by Torreggiano.

"_Dante_, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast."--_Vocabolario
della Crusca, Compendiato_, Ven. 1729.]

[Footnote 6: See the passage in "Hell," where Virgil, to express his
enthusiastic approbation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante chews to
one of the condemned, embraces and kisses him for a right "disdainful
soul," and blesses the "mother that bore him."]

[Footnote 7: _Opere minori_, vol iii 12. Flor. 1839, pp. 292 &c.]

[Footnote 8: "Béatrix quitta la terre dans tout l'éclat de la jeunesse
et de la virginité." See the work as above entitled, Paris, 1840, p. 60.
The words in Latin, as quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in
the _Foreign Quarterly Review_ (No._ 65, art. _Dante Allighieri_), are,
"Bici filiæ suæ et uxori D. (Domini) Simonis de Bardis." "Bici" is
the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation of Beatrice. This
employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a will, may seem to
go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante. And it
may really do so. Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a
beatified spirit; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a
matter of course, in the abbreviated names of male and female.]

[Footnote 9: _Vita Nuova_. ut sup. p. 343]

[Footnote 10: _Vita Nuova_, p. 345.]

[Footnote 11: In the article on _Dante, in_ the _Foreign Quarterly
Review_, (ut supra), the exordium of which made me hope that the
eloquent and assumption-denouncing writer was going to supply a good
final account of his author, equally satisfactory for its feeling
and its facts, but which ended in little better than the customary
gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the
union with Gemma Donati characterised as "calm and cold,--rather the
accomplishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible
impulse of the heart," p. 15. The accomplishment of the "social duty" is
an assumption, not very probable with regard to any body, and much less
so in a fiery Italian of twenty-six; but the addition of the epithets,
"calm and cold," gives it a sort of horror. A reader of this article,
evidently the production of a man of ability but of great wilfulness, is
tempted to express the disappointment it has given him in plainer terms
than might be wished, in consequence of the extraordinary license which
its writer does not scruple to allow to his own fancies, in expressing
his opinion of what he is pleased to think the fancies of others.]

[Footnote 12: "Le invettive contr' essa per tanti secoli originarono
dalla enumerazione rettorica del Boccaccio di tutti gli inconvenienti
del matrimonio, e dove per altro ei dichiara,--'Certo io non affermo
queste cose a Dante essere avvenute, che non lo so; comechè vero sia,
che o a simili cose a queste, o ad altro che ne fusse cagione, egli una
volta da lei partitosi, che per consolazione de' suoi affanni gli era
stata data, mai nè dove ella fusse volle venire, nè sofferse che dove
egli fusse ella venisse giammai, con tutto che di più figliuoli egli
insieme con lei fusse parente." _Discorso sul Testo_, ut sup. Londra,
Pickering, 1825, p. 184.]

[Footnote 13: Foscolo, in the _Edinburgh review_, vol. xxx. p. 351. ]

[Footnote 14: "Ahi piaciuto fosse al Dispensatore dell'universo, che la
cagione della mia scusa mai non fosse stata; che nè altri contro a me
avria fallato, nè io sofferto avrei pena ingiustamente; pena, dico,
d'esilio e di povertà. Poichè fu piacere de' cittadini della bellissima
e famosissima figlia di Roma, Florenza, di gettarmi fuori del suo
dolcissimo seno (nel quale nato e nudrito fui sino al colmo della mia
vita, e nel quale, con buona pace di quella, desidero con tutto il core
di riposare l'animo stanco, e terminare il tempo che m'è dato); per le
parti quasi tutte, alle quali questa lingua si stende, peregrino, quasi
mendicando, sono andato, mostrando contro a mia voglia la piaga della
fortuna, che suole ingiustamente al piagato molte volte essere imputata.
Veramente io sono stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a
diversi porti e foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora la dolorosa
povertà; e sono vile apparito agli occhi a molti, che forse per alcuna
fama in altra forma mi aveano immaginato; nel cospetto de' quali non
solamente mia persona inviliò, ma di minor pregio si fece ogni opera, si
già fatta, come quella che fosse a fare."-_Opere Minori_, ut sup. vol.
ii. p. 20.]

[Footnote 15: "In licteris vestris et reverentia debita et affectione
receptis, quam repatriatio mea cure sit vobis ex animo grata mente ac
diligenti animaversione concepi, etenim tanto me districtius obligastis,
quanto rarius exules invenire amicos contingit. ad illam vero
significata respondeo: et si non eatenus qualiter forsam pusillanimitas
appeteret aliquorum, ut sub examine vestri consilii ante judicium,
affectuose deposco. ecce igitur quod per licteras vestri mei: que
nepotis, necnon aliorum quamplurium amicorum significatum est mihi. per
ordinamentum nuper factum Florentie super absolutione bannitorum. quod
si solvere vellem certam pecunie quantitatem, vellemque pati notam
oblationis et absolvi possem et redire ut presens. in quo quidem duo
ridenda et male perconciliata sunt. Pater, dico male perconciliata per
illos qui tali expresserunt: nam vestre litere discretius et consultius
clausulate nicil de talibus continebant. estne ista revocatio gloriosa
qua d. all. (i. e. _Dantes Alligherius_) revocatur ad patriam per
trilustrium fere perpessus exilium? becne meruit conscientia manifesta
quibuslibet? hec sudor et labor continuatus in studiis? absit a viro
philosophie domestica temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more
cujusdam cioli et aliorum infamiam quasi vinctus ipse se patiatur
offerri. absit a viro predicante justitiam, ut perpessus injuriam
inferentibus. velud benemerentibus, pecuniam suam solvat. non est hec
via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi, sed si alia per vos, aut deinde per
alios invenietur que fame d. _(Dantis)_ que onori non deroget, illam non
lentis passibus acceptabo. quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur,
nunquam Florentiam introibo. quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula
ubique conspiciam? nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique
sub celo, ni prius inglorium, imo ignominiosum populo, Florentineque
civitati am reddam? quippe panis non deficiet."]


[Footnote 16: _Opere minori_, ut sup. vol iii. p. 186.]

[Footnote 17: _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, ut sup. p. 208, where the
Appendix contains the Latin original.]

[Footnote 18: See Fraticelli's Dissertation on the Convito, in _Opere
Minori_, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 560.]

[Footnote 19: _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 54.]

[Footnote 20: _Balbo_. Naples edition, p. 132.]

[Footnote 21: "Di se stesso presunse maravigliosamente tanto, che
essendo egli glorioso nel colmo del reggimento della republica, e
ragionandosi trà maggiori cittadini di mandare, per alcuna gran bisogna,
ambasciata a Bonifazio Papa VIII., e che principe della ambasciata fosse
Dante, ed egli in ciò in presenzia di tutti quegli che ciò consigliavano
richiesto, avvenne, che soprastando egli alla risposta, alcun disse, che
pensi? alle quali parole egli rispose: penso, se io vo, chi rimane; e
s'io rimango, chi va: quasi esso solo fosse colui che tra tutti valesse
e per cui tutti gli altri valessero." And he goes on to say respecting
the stone-throwing--"Appresso, come che il nostro poeta nelle sua
avversità paziente o no si fosse, in una fu impazientissimo: ed egli
infino al cominciamento del suo esilio stato guelfissimo, non essendogli
aperta la via del ritornare in casa sua, si fuor di modo diventò
ghibellino, che ogni femminella, ogni picciol fanciullo, e quante
volte avesse voluto, ragionando di parte, e la guelfa proponendo alla
ghibellino, l'avrebbe non solamente fatto turbare, ma a tanta insania
commosso, che se taciuto non fosse, a gittar le pietre l'avrebbe
condotto." (_Vita di Dante_, prefixed to the Paris edition of the
Commedia, 1844, p. XXV.) And then the "buon Boccaccio," with his
accustomed sweetness of nature, begs pardon of so great a man, for being
obliged to relate such things of him, and doubts whether his spirit may
not be looking down on him that moment _disdainfully_ from _heaven_!
Such an association of ideas had Dante produced between the celestial
and the scornful!]

[Footnote 22: _Novelle di Franco Sacchetti_, Milan edition, 1804, vol.
ii. p. 148. It forms the setting, or frame-work, of an inferior story,
and is not mentioned in the heading.]

[Footnote 23: _The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante
Alighieri, &c._ Smith's edition, 1844, p. 90.]

[Footnote 24: _Discorso sul Testo_, pp. 64, 77-90, 335-338.]

[Footnote 25: _Purgatorio_, canto III. 118, 138; referred to by Foscolo,
in the _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 383.]

[Footnote 26: Warton's _History of English Poetry_, edition of 1840,
vol. iii. p. 214.]

[Footnote 27: _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott_, Bart. vol. ii.
p. 122.]

[Footnote 28: _Pentameron and Pentalogia_, pp. 44-50.]

[Footnote 29: _Discorso sul Testo_, p. 226. The whole passage (sect.
cx.) is very eloquent, horrible, and _self-betraying_.]

[Footnote 30: _Discorso_, as above, p. 101.]

[Footnote 31: _Discorso_, p. 103.]

[Footnote 32: _Criticisms on the Rolliad, and Probationary Odes for the_
_Laureateship_. Third edit. 17S5, p. 317.]

[Footnote 33: The writer of the article on Dante in the _Foreign
Quarterly Review_ (as above) concedes that his hero in this passage
becomes "_almost_ cruel." Almost! Tormenting a man further, who is up to
his chin in everlasting ice, and whose face he has kicked!]

[Footnote 34: "Cortesia fu lui esser villano." _Inferno_, canto xxxiii.
150.]

[Footnote 35: Every body sees this who is not wilfully blind.
"Passionate," says the editor of the _Opere Minori_, "for the ancient
Italian glories, and the greatness of the Roman name, he was of
opinion that it was only by means of combined strength, and one common
government, that Italy could be finally secured from discord in its own
bosom and enemies from without, _and recover its ancient empire over
the whole world_." "Amantissimo delle antiche glorie Italiane, e della
grandezza del nome romano, ei considerava, che soltanto pel mezzo d'una
general forza ed autorita poteva l'Italia dalle interne contese e dalle
straniere invasioni restarsi sicura, _e recuperare l'antico imperio
sopra tutte le genti_."--Ut sup. vol. iii. p. 8.]




THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

I.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Argument.

The infernal regions, according to Dante, are situate in the globe we
inhabit, directly beneath Jerusalem, and consist of a succession of
gulfs or circles, narrowing as they descend, and terminating in the
centre; so that the general shape is that of a funnel. Commentators have
differed as to their magnitude; but the latest calculation gives 315
miles for the diameter of the mouth or crater, and a quarter of a mile
for that of its terminating point. In the middle is the abyss, pervading
the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the opening; which reduces
the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a size
comparatively small. These territories are more or less varied with land
and water, lakes, precipices, &c. A precipice, fourteen miles high,
divides the first of them from the second. The passages from the upper
world to the entrance are various; and the descents from one circle
to another are effected by the poet and his guide in different
manners-sometimes on foot through by-ways, sometimes by the conveyance
of supernatural beings. The crater he finds to be the abode of those who
have done neither good nor evil, caring for nothing but themselves.
In the first circle are the whole unbaptised world--heathens and
infants--melancholy, though not tormented. Here also is found the
Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the
agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the
sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime
from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath,
sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief
in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences),
usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal
enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft,
trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on
the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the
Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these,
from seduction downwards, in one circle); then, in the frozen or lowest
circle of all, treachery; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into
the centre of the earth.

With the centre of the globe commences the antipodean attraction of its
opposite side, together with a rocky ascent out of it, through a
huge ravine. The poet and his guide, on their arrival at this spot,
accordingly find their position reversed; and so conclude their
_downward_ journey _upwards_, till they issue forth to light on the
borders of the sea which contains the island of Purgatory.


THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Dante says, that when he was half-way on his pilgrimage through this
life, he one day found himself, towards nightfall, in a wood where he
could no longer discern the right path. It was a place so gloomy and
terrible, every thing in it growing in such a strange and savage manner,
that the horror he felt returned on him whenever he thought of it. The
pass of death could hardly be more bitter. Travelling through it all
night with a beating heart, he at length came to the foot of a hill, and
looking up, as he began to ascend it, he perceived the shoulders of the
hill clad in the beams of morning; a sight which gave him some little
comfort. He felt like a man who has buffeted his way to land out of a
shipwreck, and who, though still anxious to get farther from his peril,
cannot help turning round to gaze on the wide waters. So did he stand
looking back on the pass that contained that dreadful wood. After
resting a while, he again betook him up the hill; but had not gone far
when he beheld a leopard bounding in front of him, and hindering his
progress. After the leopard came a lion, with his head aloft, mad with
hunger, and seeming to frighten the very air;[1] and after the lion,
more eager still, a she-wolf, so lean that she appeared to be sharpened
with every wolfish want. The pilgrim fled back in terror to the wood,
where he again found himself in a darkness to which the light never
penetrated. In that place, he said, the sun never spoke word.[2] But the
wolf was still close upon him.[3]

While thus flying, he beheld coming towards him a man, who spoke
something, but he knew not what. The voice sounded strange and feeble,
as if from disuse. Dante loudly called out to him to save him, whether
he was a man or only a spirit. The apparition, at whose sight the wild
beasts disappeared, said that he was no longer man, though man he
had been in the time of the false gods, and sung the history of the
offspring of Anchises.

"And art thou, then, that Virgil," said Dante, "who has filled the world
with such floods of eloquence? O glory and light of all poets, thou art
my master, and thou mine _author_; thou alone the book from which I have
gathered beauties that have gained me praise. Behold the peril I am in,
and help me, for I tremble in every vein and pulse."

Virgil comforted Dante. He told him that he must quit the wood by
another road, and that he himself would be his guide, leading him first
to behold the regions of woe underground, and then the spirits that
lived content in fire because it purified them for heaven; and then that
he would consign him to other hands worthier than his own, which should
raise him to behold heaven itself; for as the Pagans, of whom he was
one, had been rebels to the law of him that reigns there, nobody could
arrive at Paradise by their means.[4]

So saying, Virgil moved on his way, and Dante closely followed. He
expressed a fear, however, as they went, lest being "neither Æneas nor
St. Paul," his journey could not be worthily undertaken, nor end in
wisdom. But Virgil, after sharply rebuking him for his faintheartedness,
told him, that the spirit of her whom he loved, Beatrice, had come down
from heaven on purpose to commend her lover to his care; upon which the
drooping courage of the pilgrim was raised to an undaunted confidence;
as flowers that have been closed and bowed down by frosty nights, rise
all up on their stems in the morning sun.[5]

 "Non vuol che 'n sua città per me sì vegna."

The Pagans could not be rebels to a law they never heard of, any
more than Dante could be a rebel to Luther. But this is one of the
absurdities with which the impious effrontery or scarcely less
impious admissions of Dante's teachers avowedly set reason at
defiance,--retaining, meanwhile, their right of contempt for the
impieties of Mahometans and Brahmins; "which is odd," as the poet says;
for being not less absurd, or, as the others argued, much more so, they
had at least an equal claim on the submission of the reason; since the
greater the irrationality, the higher the theological triumph.

  "Through me is the road to the dolorous city;
  Through me is the road to the everlasting sorrows;
  Through me is the road to the lost people.
  Justice was the motive of my exalted maker;
  I was made by divine power, by consummate wisdom, and by primal love;
  Before me was no created thing, if not eternal; and eternal am I also.
  Abandon hope, all ye who enter."

Such were the words which Dante beheld written in dark characters over a
portal. "Master," said he to Virgil, "I find their meaning hard."

"A man," answered Virgil, "must conduct himself at this door like one
prepared. Hither must he bring no mistrust. Hither can come and live no
cowardice. We have arrived at the place I told thee of. Here thou art to
behold the dolorous people who have lost all intellectual good." [6]

So saying, Virgil placed his hand on Dante's, looking on him with a
cheerful countenance; and the Florentine passed with him through the
dreadful gate.

They entered upon a sightless gulf, in which was a black air without
stars; and immediately heard a hubbub of groans; and wailings, and
terrible things said in many languages, words of wretchedness, outcries
of rage, voices loud and hoarse, and sounds of the smitings of hands one
against another. Dante began to weep. The sound was as if the sand in
a whirlwind were turned into noises, and filled the blind air with
incessant conflict.

Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were those only who had
lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing but themselves. These
miserable creatures were mixed with the angels who stood neutral in the
war with Satan. Heaven would not dull its brightness with those angels,
nor would lower hell receive them, lest the bad ones should triumph in
their company.

"And what is it," said Dante, "which makes them so grievously suffer?"

"Hopelessness of death," said Virgil. "Their blind existence here, and
immemorable former life, make them so wretched, that they envy every
other lot. Mercy and justice alike disdain them. Let us speak of them no
more. Look, and pass."

The companions went on till they came to a great river with a multitude
waiting on the banks. A hoary old man appeared crossing the river
towards them in a boat; and as he came, he said, "Woe to the wicked.
Never expect to see heaven. I come to bear you across to the dark
regions of everlasting fire and ice." Then looking at Dante, he said,
"Get thee away from the dead, thou who standest there, live spirit."

"Torment thyself not, Charon," said Virgil. "He has a passport beyond
thy power to question."

The shaggy cheeks of the boatman of the livid lake, who had wheels of
fire about his eyes, fell at these words; and he was silent. But the
naked multitude of souls whom he had spoken to changed colour, and
gnashed their teeth, blaspheming God, and their parents, and the human
species, and the place, and the hour, and the seed of the sowing of
their birth; and all the while they felt themselves driven onwards, by a
fear which became a desire, towards the cruel river-side, which awaits
every one destitute of the fear of God. The demon Charon, beckoning to
them with eyes like brasiers, collected them as they came, giving blows
to those that lingered, with his oar. One by one they dropped into the
boat like leaves from a bough in autumn, till the bough is left bare; or
as birds drop into the decoy at the sound of the bird-call.

There was then an earthquake, so terrible that the recollection of it
made the poet burst into a sweat at every pore. A whirlwind issued from
the lamenting ground, attended by vermilion flashes; and he lost his
senses, and fell like a man stupefied.

A crash of thunder through his brain woke up the pilgrim so hastily,
that he shook himself like a person roused by force. He found that he
was on the brink of a gulf, from which ascended a thunderous sound of
innumerable groanings. He could see nothing down it. It was too dark
with sooty clouds. Virgil himself turned pale, but said, "We are to go
down here. I will lead the way."

"O master," said Dante, "if even thou fearest, what is to become of
myself?" "It is pity, not fear," replied Virgil, "that makes me change
colour."

With these words his guide led him into the first circle of hell,
surrounding the abyss. The great noise gradually ceased to be heard, as
they journeyed inwards, till at last they became aware of a world of
sighs, which produced a trembling in the air. They were breathed by the
souls of such as had died without baptism, men, women, and infants; no
matter how good; no matter if they worshipped God before the coming of
Christ, for they worshipped him not "properly." Virgil himself was
one of them. They were all lost for no other reason; and their "only
suffering" consisted in "hopeless desire!"

Dante was struck with great sorrow when he heard this, knowing how many
good men must be in that place. He inquired if no one had ever been
taken out of it into heaven. Virgil told him there had, and he named
them; to wit, Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, King David, obedient Abraham the
patriarch, and Isaac, and Jacob, with their children, and Rachel, for
whom Jacob did so much,--and "many more;" adding, however, that there
was no instance of salvation before theirs.

Journeying on through spirits as thick as leaves, Dante perceived a
lustre at a little distance, and observing shapes in it evidently of
great dignity, inquired who they were that thus lived apart from the
rest. Virgil said that heaven thus favoured them by reason of their
renown on earth. A voice was then heard exclaiming, "Honour and glory to
the lofty poet! Lo, his shade returns." Dante then saw four other noble
figures coming towards them, of aspect neither sad nor cheerful.

"Observe him with the sword in his hand," said Virgil, as they were
advancing. "That is Homer, the poets' sovereign. Next to him comes
Horace the satirist; then Ovid; and the last is Lucan."

"And thus I beheld," says Dante, "the bright school of the loftiest of
poets, who flies above the rest like an eagle."

For a while the illustrious spirits talked together, and then turned to
the Florentine with a benign salutation, at which his master smiled and
"further honour they did me," adds the father of Italian poetry, "for
they admitted me of their tribe; so that to a band of that high account
I added a sixth." [7]

The spirits returned towards the bright light in which they lived,
talking with Dante by the way, and brought him to a magnificent castle,
girt with seven lofty walls, and further defended with a river, which
they all passed as if it had been dry ground. Seven gates conducted them
into a meadow of fresh green, the resort of a race whose eyes moved with
a deliberate soberness, and whose whole aspects were of great authority,
their voices sweet, and their speech seldom.[8] Dante was taken apart to
an elevation in the ground, so that he could behold them all distinctly;
and there, on the "enamelled green," [9] were pointed out to him the
great spirits, by the sight of whom he felt exalted in his own esteem.
He saw Electra with many companions, among whom were Hector and Æneas,
and Cæsar in armour with his hawk's eyes; and on another side he beheld
old King Latinus with his daughter Lavinia, and the Brutus that expelled
Tarquin, and Lucretia, and Julia, and Cato's wife Marcia, and the mother
of the Gracchi, and, apart by himself, the Sultan Saladin. He then
raised his eyes a little, and beheld the "master of those who know" [10]
(Aristotle), sitting amidst the family of philosophers, and honoured
by them all. Socrates and Plato were at his side. Among the rest was
Democritus, who made the world a chance, and Diogenes, and Heraclitus,
&c. and Dioscorides, the good gatherer of simples. Orpheus also he saw,
and Cicero, and the moral Seneca, and Euclid, and Hippocrates, and
Avicen, and Averroes, who wrote the great commentary, and others too
numerous to mention. The company of six became diminished to two, and
Virgil took him forth on a far different road, leaving that serene air
for a stormy one; and so they descended again into darkness.

It was the second circle into which they now came--a sphere narrower
than the first, and by so much more the wretcheder. Minos sat at the
entrance, gnarling--he that gives sentence on every one that comes, and
intimates the circle into which each is to be plunged by the number of
folds into which he casts his tail round about him. Minos admonished
Dante to beware how he entered unbidden, and warned him against his
conductor; but Virgil sharply rebuked the judge, and bade him not set
his will against the will that was power.

The pilgrims then descended through hell-mouth, till they came to a
place dark as pitch, that bellowed with furious cross-winds, like a sea
in a tempest. It was the first place of torment, and the habitation of
carnal sinners. The winds, full of stifled voices, buffeted the souls
for ever, whirling them away to and fro, and dashing them against one
another. Whenever it seized them for that purpose, the wailing and the
shrieking was loudest, crying out against the Divine Power. Sometimes a
whole multitude came driven in a body like starlings before the wind,
now hither and thither, now up, now down; sometimes they went in a line
like cranes, when a company of those birds is beheld sailing along in
the air, uttering its dolorous clangs.

Dante, seeing a group of them advancing, inquired of Virgil who they
were. "Who are these," said he, "coming hither, scourged in the blackest
part of the hurricane?"

"She at the head of them," said Virgil, "was empress over many nations.
So foul grew her heart with lust, that she ordained license to be law,
to the end that herself might be held blameless. She is Semiramis, of
whom it is said that she gave suck to Ninus, and espoused him. Leading
the multitude next to her is Dido, she that slew herself for love, and
broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus; and she that follows with the next
is the luxurious woman, Cleopatra."

Dante then saw Helen, who produced such a world of misery; and the great
Achilles, who fought for love till it slew him; and Paris; and Tristan;
and a thousand more whom his guide pointed at, naming their names, every
one of whom was lost through love.

The poet stood for a while speechless for pity, and like one bereft of
his wits. He then besought leave to speak to a particular couple who
went side by side, and who appeared to be borne before the wind with
speed lighter than the rest. His conductor bade him wait till they came
nigher, and then to entreat them gently by the love which bore them in
that manner, and they would stop and speak with him. Dante waited his
time, and then lifted up his voice between the gusts of wind, and
adjured the two "weary souls" to halt and have speech with him, if none
forbade their doing so; upon which they came to him, like doves to the
nest.[11]

There was a lull in the tempest, as if on purpose to let them speak;
and the female addressed Dante, saying, that as he showed such pity for
their state, they would have prayed heaven to give peace and repose to
his life, had they possessed the friendship of heaven.[12]

"Love," she said, "which is soon kindled in a gentle heart, seized this
my companion for the fair body I once inhabited--how deprived of it, my
spirit is bowed to recollect. Love, which compels the beloved person
upon thoughts of love, seized me in turn with a delight in his passion
so strong, that, as thou seest, even here it forsakes me not. Love
brought us both to one end. The punishment of Cain awaits him that slew
us."

The poet was struck dumb by this story. He hung down his head, and stood
looking on the ground so long, that his guide asked him what was in his
mind. "Alas!" answered he, "such then was this love, so full of sweet
thoughts; and such the pass to which it brought them! Oh, Francesca!" he
cried, turning again to the sad couple, "thy sufferings make me weep.
But tell me, I pray thee, what was it that first made thee know, for a
certainty, that his love was returned?--that thou couldst refuse him
thine no longer?"

"There is not a greater sorrow," answered she, "than calling to mind
happy moments in the midst of wretchedness.[13] But since thy desire is
so great to know our story to the root, hear me tell it as well as I
may for tears. It chanced, one day, that we sat reading the tale of
Sir Launcelot, how love took him in thrall. We were alone, and had no
suspicion. Often, as we read, our eyes became suspended,[14] and we
changed colour; but one passage alone it was that overcame us. When we
read how Genevra smiled, and how the lover, out of the depth of his
love, could not help kissing that smile, he that is never more to be
parted from me kissed me himself on the mouth, all in a tremble. Never
had we go-between but that book. The writer was the betrayer. That day
we read no more."

While these words were being uttered by one of the spirits, the other
wailed so bitterly, that the poet thought he should have died for pity.
His senses forsook him, and he fell flat on the ground, as a dead body
falls.[15]

On regaining his senses, the poet found himself in the third circle of
hell, a place of everlasting wet, darkness, and cold, one heavy slush of
hail and mud, emitting a squalid smell. The triple-headed dog Cerberus,
with red eyes and greasy black beard, large belly, and hands with claws,
barked above the heads of the wretches who floundered in the mud,
tearing, skinning, and dismembering them, as they turned their sore and
soddened bodies from side to side. When he saw the two living men, he
showed his fangs, and shook in every limb for desire of their flesh.
Virgil threw lumps of dirt into his mouth, and so they passed him.

It was the place of Gluttons. The travellers passed over them, as if
they had been ground to walk upon. But one of them sat up, and addressed
the Florentine as his acquaintance. Dante did not know him, for the
agony in his countenance. He was a man nicknamed Hog (Ciacco), and by no
other name does the poet, or any one else, mention him. His countryman
addressed him by it, though declaring at the same time that he wept to
see him. Hog prophesied evil to his discordant native city, adding
that there were but two just men in it--all the rest being given up to
avarice, envy, and pride. Dante inquired by name respecting the fate of
five other Florentines, _who had done good_, and was informed that they
were all, for various offences, _in lower gulfs of hell_. Hog then
begged that he would mention having seen him when he returned to the
sweet world; and so, looking at him a little, bent his head, and
disappeared among his blinded companions.

"Satan! hoa, Satan!" roared the demon Plutus, as the poets were
descending into the fourth circle.

"Peace!" cried Virgil, "with thy swollen lip, thou accursed wolf. No one
can hinder his coming down. God wills it." [16]

Flat fell Plutus, collapsed, like the sails of a vessel when the mast is
split.

This circle was the most populous one they had yet come to. The
sufferers, gifted with supernatural might, kept eternally rolling round
it, one against another, with terrific violence, and so dashing apart,
and returning. "Why grasp?" cried the one--"Why throw away?" cried the
other; and thus exclaiming, they dashed furiously together.

They were the Avaricious and the Prodigal. Multitudes of them were
churchmen, including cardinals and popes. Not all the gold beneath the
moon could have purchased them a moment's rest. Dante asked if none of
them were to be recognised by their countenances. Virgil said, "No;" for
the stupid and sullied lives which they led on earth swept their faces
away from all distinction for ever.

In discoursing of fortune, they descend by the side of a torrent, black
as ink, into the fifth circle, or place of torment for the Angry, the
Sullen, and the Proud. Here they first beheld a filthy marsh, full of
dirty naked bodies, that in everlasting rage tore one another to pieces.
In a quieter division of the pool were seen nothing but bubbles, carried
by the ascent, from its slimy bottom, of the stifled words of the
sullen. They were always saying, "We were sad and dark within us in the
midst of the sweet sunshine, and now we live sadly in the dark bogs."
The poets walked on till they came to the foot of a tower, which hung
out two blazing signals to another just discernible in the distance. A
boat came rapidly towards them, ferried by the wrathful Phlegyas;[17]
who cried out, "Aha, felon! and so thou hast come at last!"

"Thou errest," said Virgil. "We come for no longer time than it will
take thee to ferry us across thy pool."

Phlegyas looked like one defrauded of his right; but proceeded to convey
them. During their course a spirit rose out of the mire, looking Dante
in the face, and said, "Who art thou, that comest before thy time?"

"Who art thou?" said Dante.

"Thou seest who I am," answered the other; "one among the mourners."

"Then mourn still, and howl, accursed spirit," returned the Florentine.
"I know thee, all over filth as thou art."

The wretch in fury laid hold of the boat, but Virgil thrust him back,
exclaiming, "Down with thee! down among the other dogs!"

Then turning to Dante, he embraced and kissed him, saying, "O soul, that
knows how to disdain, blessed be she that bore thee! Arrogant, truly,
upon earth was this sinner, nor is his memory graced by a single virtue.
Hence the furiousness of his spirit now. How many kings are there at
this moment lording it as gods, who shall wallow here, as he does, like
swine in the mud, and be thought no better of by the world!" "I should
like to see him smothering in it," said Dante, "before we go."

"A right wish," said Virgil, "and thou shalt, to thy heart's content."

On a sudden the wretch's muddy companions seized and drenched him so
horribly that (exclaims Dante) "I laud and thank God for it now at this
moment."

"Have at him!" cried they; "have at Filippo Argenti;" and the wild fool
of a Florentine dashed his teeth for rage into his own flesh.[18]

The poet's attention was now drawn off by a noise of lamentation, and
he perceived that he was approaching the city of Dis.[19] The turrets
glowed vermilion with the fire within it, the walls appeared to be of
iron, and moats were round about them. The boat circuited the walls till
the travellers came to a gate, which Phlegyas, with a loud voice, told
them to quit the boat and enter. But a thousand fallen angels crowded
over the top of the gate, refusing to open it, and making furious
gestures. At length they agreed to let Virgil speak with them inside;
and he left Dante for a while, standing in terror without. The parley
was in vain. They would not let them pass. Virgil, however, bade his
companion be of good cheer, and then stood listening and talking to
himself; disclosing by his words his expectation of some extraordinary
assistance, and at the same time his anxiety for its arrival. On a
sudden, three raging figures arose over the gate, coloured with gore.
Green hydras twisted about them; and their fierce temples had snakes
instead of hair.

"Look," said Virgil. "The Furies! The one on the left is Megæra; Alecto
is she that is wailing on the right; and in the middle is Tisiphone."
Virgil then hushed. The Furies stood clawing their breasts, smiting
their hands together, and raising such hideous cries, that Dante clung
to his friend.

"Bring the Gorgon's head!" cried the Furies, looking down; "turn him to
adamant!"

"Turn round," said Virgil, "and hide thy face; for if thou beholdest
the Gorgon, never again wilt thou see the light of day." And with these
words he seized Dante and turned him round himself, clapping his hands
over his companion's eyes.

And now was heard coming over the water a terrible crashing noise, that
made the banks on either side of it tremble. It was like a hurricane
which comes roaring through the vain shelter of the woods, splitting and
hurling away the boughs, sweeping along proudly in a huge cloud of dust,
and making herds and herdsmen fly before it. "Now stretch your eyesight
across the water," said Virgil, letting loose his hands;--"there, where
the smoke of the foam is thickest." Dante looked; and saw a thousand of
the rebel angels, like frogs before a serpent, swept away into a heap
before the coming of a single spirit, who flew over the tops of the
billows with unwet feet. The spirit frequently pushed the gross air
from before his face, as if tired of the base obstacle; and as he came
nearer, Dante, who saw it was a messenger from heaven, looked anxiously
at Virgil. Virgil motioned him to be silent and bow down.

The angel, with a face full of scorn, as soon as he arrived at the gate,
touched it with a wand that he had in his hand, and it flew open.

"Outcasts of heaven," said he; "despicable race! whence this fantastical
arrogance? Do ye forget that your torments are laid oil thicker every
time ye kick against the Fates? Do ye forget how your Cerberus was bound
and chained till he lost the hair off his neck like a common dog?"

So saying he turned swiftly and departed the way he came, not addressing
a word to the travellers. His countenance had suddenly a look of some
other business, totally different from the one he had terminated.

The companions passed in, and beheld a place full of tombs red-hot. It
was the region of Arch heretics and their followers. Dante and his guide
passed round betwixt the walls and the sepulchres as in a churchyard,
and came to the quarter which held Epicurus and his sect, who denied the
existence of spirit apart from matter. The lids of the tombs remaining
unclosed till the day of judgment, the soul of a noble Florentine,
Farinata degli Uberti, hearing Dante speak, addressed him as a
countryman, asking him to stop.[20] Dante, alarmed, beheld him rise half
out of his sepulchre, looking as lofty as if he scorned hell itself.
Finding who Dante was, he boasted of having three times expelled the
Guelphs. "Perhaps so," said the poet; "but they came back again each
time; an art which their enemies have not yet acquired."

A visage then appeared from out another tomb, looking eagerly, as if it
expected to see some one else. Being disappointed, the tears came into
its eyes, and the sufferer said, "If it is thy genius that conducts thee
hither, where is my son, and why is he not with thee?"

"It is not my genius that conducts me," said Dante, "but that of one,
whom perhaps thy son held in contempt."

"How sayest thou?" cried the shade;--"_held_ in contempt? He is dead
then? He beholds no longer the sweet light?" And with these words
he dropped into his tomb, and was seen no more. It was Cavalcante
Cavalcanti, the father of the poet's friend, Guido.[21]

The shade of Farinata, who had meantime been looking on, now replied to
the taunt of Dante, prophesying that he should soon have good reason to
know that the art he spoke of _had_ been acquired; upon which Dante,
speaking with more considerateness to the lofty sufferer, requested to
know how the gift of prophecy could belong to spirits who were ignorant
of the time present. Farinata answered that so it was; just as there was
a kind of eyesight which could discern things at a distance though
not at hand. Dante then expressed his remorse at not having informed
Cavalcante that his son was alive. He said it was owing to his being
overwhelmed with thought on the subject he had just mentioned, and
entreated Farinata to tell him so.

Quitting this part of the cemetery, Virgil led him through the midst
of it towards a descent into a valley, from which there ascended a
loathsome odour. They stood behind one of the tombs for a while, to
accustom themselves to the breath of it; and then began to descend a
wild fissure in a rock, near the mouth of which lay the infamy of Crete,
the Minotaur. The monster beholding them gnawed himself for rage; and
on their persisting to advance, began plunging like a bull when he
is stricken by the knife of the butcher. They succeeded, however, in
entering the fissure before he recovered sufficiently from his madness
to run at them; and at the foot of the descent, came to a river of
boiling blood, on the strand of which ran thousands of Centaurs armed
with bows and arrows. In the blood, more or less deep according to the
amount of the crime, and shrieking as they boiled, were the souls of the
Inflicters of Violence; and if any of them emerged from it higher than
he had a right to do, the Centaurs drove him down with their arrows.
Nessus, the one that bequeathed Hercules the poisoned garment, came
galloping towards the pilgrims, bending his bow, and calling out from
a distance to know who they were; but Virgil, disdaining his hasty
character, would explain himself only to Chiron, the Centaur who
instructed Achilles. Chiron, in consequence, bade Nessus accompany
them along the river; and there they saw tyrants immersed up to the
eyebrows;--Alexander the Great among them, Dionysius of Syracuse, and
Ezzelino the Paduan. There was one of the Pazzi of Florence, and Rinieri
of Corneto (infestors of the public ways), now shedding bloody tears,
and Attila the Scourge, and Pyrrhus king of Epirus. Further on, among
those immersed up to the throat, was Guy de Montfort the Englishman, who
slew his father's slayer, Prince Henry, during divine service, in
the bosom of God; and then by degrees the river became shallower and
shallower till it covered only the feet; and here the Centaur quitted
the pilgrims, and they crossed over into a forest.

The forest was a trackless and dreadful forest--the leaves not green,
but black--the boughs not freely growing, but knotted and twisted--the
fruit no fruit, but thorny poison. The Harpies wailed among the trees,
occasionally showing their human faces; and on every side of him Dante
heard lamenting human voices, but could see no one from whom they came.
"Pluck one of the boughs," said Virgil. Dante did so; and blood and a
cry followed it.

"Why pluckest thou me?" said the trunk. "Men have we been, like thyself;
but thou couldst not use us worse, had we been serpents." The blood and
words came out together, as a green bough hisses and spits in the fire.

The voice was that of Piero delle Vigne, the good chancellor of the
Emperor Frederick the Second. Just though he had been to others, he
was thus tormented for having been unjust to himself; for, envy having
wronged him to his sovereign, who sentenced him to lose his eyes, he
dashed his brains out against a wall. Piero entreated Dante to vindicate
his memory. The poet could not speak for pity; so Virgil made the
promise for him, inquiring at the same time in what manner it was that
Suicides became thus identified with trees, and how their souls were to
rejoin their bodies at the day of judgment. Piero said, that the moment
the fierce self-murderer's spirit tore itself from the body, and passed
before Charon, it fell, like a grain of corn, into that wood, and so
grew into a tree. The Harpies then fed on its leaves, causing both pain
and a vent for lamentation. The body it would never again enter, having
thus cast away itself, but it would finally drag the body down to it by
a violent attraction; and every suicide's carcass will be hung upon the
thorn of its wretched shade.

The naked souls of two men, whose profusion had brought them to a
violent end, here came running through the wood from the fangs of black
female mastiff's--leaving that of a suicide to mourn the havoc which
their passage had made of his tree. He begged his countryman to gather
his leaves up, and lay them at the foot of his trunk, and Dante did so;
and then he and Virgil proceeded on their journey.

They issued from the wood on a barren sand, flaming hot, on which
multitudes of naked souls lay down, or sat huddled up, or restlessly
walked about, trying to throw from them incessant flakes of fire, which
came down like a fall of snow. They were the souls of the Impious. Among
them was a great spirit, who lay scornfully submitting himself to the
fiery shower, as though it had not yet ripened him.[22] Overhearing
Dante ask his guide who he was, he answered for himself, and said, "The
same dead as living. Jove will tire his flames out before they conquer
me."

"Capaneus," exclaimed Virgil, "thy pride is thy punishment. No martyrdom
were sufficient for thee, equal to thine own rage." The besieger of
Thebes made no reply.

In another quarter of the fiery shower the pilgrims met a crowd of
Florentines, mostly churchmen, whose offence is not to be named; after
which they beheld Usurers; and then arrived at a huge waterfall, which
fell into the eighth circle, or that of the Fraudulent. Here Virgil, by
way of bait to the monster Geryon, or Fraud, let down over the side
of the waterfall the cord of St. Francis, which Dante wore about his
waist,[23] and presently the dreadful creature came up, and sate on the
margin of the fall, with his serpent's tail hanging behind him in
the air, after the manner of a beaver; but the point of the tail was
occasionally seen glancing upwards. He was a gigantic reptile, with the
face of a just man, very mild. He had shaggy claws for arms, and a body
variegated all over with colours that ran in knots and circles, each
within the other, richer than any Eastern drapery. Virgil spoke apart
to him, and then mounted on his back, bidding his companion, who was
speechless for terror, do the salve. Geryon pushed back with them from
the edge of the precipice, like a ship leaving harbour; and then,
turning about, wheeled, like a sullen successless falcon, slowly down
through the air in many a circuit. Dante would not have known that he
was going downward, but for the air that struck up wards on his face.
Presently they heard the crash of the waterfall on the circle below,
and then distinguished flaming fires and the noises of suffering.
The monster Geryon, ever sullen as the falcon who seats himself at a
distance from his dissatisfied master, shook his riders from off his
back to the water's side, and then shot away like an arrow.

This eighth circle of hell is called Evil-Budget,[24] and consists of
ten compartments, or gulfs of torment, crossed and connected with
one another by bridges of flint. In the first were beheld Pimps and
Seducers, scourged like children by horned devils; in the second,
Flatterers, begrimed with ordure; in the third, Simonists, who were
stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with their heads downwards,
and their legs only discernible, the soles of their feet glowing with a
fire which made them incessantly quiver. Dante, going down the side of
the gulf with Virgil, was allowed to address one of them who seemed in
greater agony than the rest; and, doing so, the sufferer cried out in a
malignant rapture, "Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface?[25]
Thou hast come sooner than it was prophesied." It was the soul of Pope
Nicholas the Third that spoke. Dante undeceived and then sternly
rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him that nothing but
reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him from using harsher
words, and that it was such as he that the Evangelist beheld in the
vision, when he saw the woman with seven heads and ten horns, who
committed whoredom with the kings of the earth.

"O Constantine!" exclaimed the poet, "of what a world of evil was that
dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a
rich man!" [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at
these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him
the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth
gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.

It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and
weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. Their faces were
turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost,
and their tears fell on their loins. Dante was so overcome at the sight,
that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling
him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There
was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and
Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in
a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on
the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses
over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived
in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and
Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus,
the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut
away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face
over his swarthy shoulders. Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer of
Forli; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he had stuck to
his last; and the wretched women who quit the needle and the distaff to
wreak their malice with herbs and images. Such was the punishment of
those who, desiring to see too far before them, now looked only behind
them, and walked the reverse way of their looking.

The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving and
subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those within it.
They were Public Peculators. Winged black devils were busy about the
lake, pronging the sinners when they occasionally darted up their backs
for relief like dolphins, or thrust out their jaws like frogs. Dante
at first looked eagerly down into the gulf, like one who feels that he
shall turn away instantly out of the very horror that attracts him.
"See--look behind thee!" said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from
the place where he stood, to a covert behind a crag. Dante looked round,
and beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his
shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down after him,
like a mastiff let loose on a thief. It was a man from Lucca, where
every soul was a false dealer except Bonturo.[29] The devil called out
to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon the wretch with hooks as
he rose to the surface; telling him, that he must practise there in
secret, if he practised at all; and thrusting him back into the boiling
pitch, as cooks thrust back flesh into the pot. The devils were of the
lowest and most revolting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and
parade.

Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and were going
to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy rebuke. For a
while they let him alone; and Dante saw one of them haul a sinner out of
the pitch by the clotted locks, and hold him up sprawling like an otter.
The rest then fell upon him and flayed him.

It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thiebault, king
of Navarre. One of his companions under the pitch was Friar Gomita,
governor of Gallura; and another, Michael Zanche, also a Sardinian.
Ciampolo ultimately escaped by a trick out of the hands of the devils,
who were so enraged that they turned upon the two pilgrims; but Virgil,
catching up Dante with supernatural force, as a mother does a child in
a burning house, plunged with him out of their jurisdiction into the
borders of gulf the sixth, the region of Hypocrites.

The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a wearisome and
exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore huge cowls, which hung
over their eyes, and the outsides of which were gilded, but the insides
of lead. Two of them had been rulers of Florence; and Dante was
listening to their story, when his attention was called off by the sight
of a cross, on which Caiaphas the High Priest was writhing, breathing
hard all the while through his beard with sighs. It was his office to
see that every soul which passed him, on its arrival in the place, was
oppressed with the due weight. His father-in-law, Annas, and all his
council, were stuck in like manner on crosses round the borders of the
gulf. The pilgrims beheld little else in this region of weariness, and
soon passed into the borders of one of the most terrible portions of
Evil-budget, the land of the transformation of Robbers.

The place was thronged with serpents of the most appalling and unwonted
description, among which ran tormented the naked spirits of the
robbers, agonised with fear. Their hands were bound behind them with
serpents--their bodies pierced and enfolded with serpents. Dante saw one
of the monsters leap up and transfix a man through the nape of the neck;
when, lo! sooner than a pen could write _o_, or _i_, the sufferer burst
into flames, burnt up, fell to the earth a heap of ashes--was again
brought together, and again became a man, aghast with his agony, and
staring about him, sighing.[30] Virgil asked him who he was.

"I was but lately rained down into this dire gullet," said the man,
"amidst a shower of Tuscans. The beast Vanni Fucci am I, who led a
brutal life, like the mule that I was, in that den Pistoia."

"Compel him to stop," said Dante, "and relate what brought him hither. I
knew the bloody and choleric wretch when he was alive."

The sinner, who did not pretend to be deaf to these words, turned round
to the speaker with the most painful shame in his face, and said, "I
feel more bitterly at being caught here by thee in this condition, than
when I first arrived. A power which I cannot resist compels me to let
thee know, that I am here because I committed sacrilege and charged
another with the crime; but now, mark me, that thou mayest hear
something not to render this encounter so pleasant: Pistoia hates thy
party of the Whites, and longs for the Blacks back again. It will have
them, and so will Florence; and there will be a bloody cloud shall burst
over the battlefield of Piceno, which will dash many Whites to the
earth. I tell thee this to make thee miserable."

So saying, the wretch gave a gesture of contempt with his thumb and
finger towards heaven, and said, "Take it, God--a fig for thee!" [31]

"From that instant," said Dante, "the serpents and I were friends; for
one of them throttled him into silence, and another dashed his hands
into a knot behind his back. O Pistoia! Pistoia! why art not thou
thyself turned into ashes, and swept from the face of the earth, since
thy race has surpassed in evil thine ancestors? Never, through the
whole darkness of hell, beheld I a blasphemer so dire as this--not even
Capaneus himself."

The Pistoian fled away with the serpents upon him, followed by a
Centaur, who came madly galloping up, crying, "Where is the caitiff?" It
was the monster-thief Cacus, whose den upon earth often had a pond of
blood before it, and to whom Hercules, in his rage, when he slew him,
gave a whole hundred blows with his club, though the wretch perceived
nothing after the ninth. He was all over adders up to the mouth; and
upon his shoulders lay a dragon with its wings open, breathing fire on
whomsoever it met.

The Centaur tore away; and Dante and Virgil were gazing after him, when
they heard voices beneath the bank on which they stood, crying, "Who are
ye?" The pilgrims turned their eyes downwards, and beheld three spirits,
one of whom, looking about him, said, "Where's Cianfa?" Dante made a
sign to Virgil to say nothing.

Cianfa came forth, a man lately, but now a serpent with six feet.[32]

"If thou art slow to believe, reader, what I am about to tell thee,"
says the poet, "be so; it is no marvel; for I myself, even now, scarcely
credit what I beheld."

The six-footed serpent sprang at one of the three men front to front,
clasping him tightly with all its legs, and plunging his fangs into
either cheek. Ivy never stuck so close to a tree as the horrible monster
grappled with every limb of that pinioned man. The two forms then
gradually mingled into one another like melting wax, the colours of
their skin giving way at the same time to a third colour, as the white
in a piece of burning paper recedes before the brown, till it all
becomes black. The other two human shapes looked on, exclaiming,
"Oh, how thou changest, Agnello! See, thou art neither two nor yet one."
And truly, though the two heads first became one, there still remained
two countenances in the face. The four arms then became but two, and
such also became the legs and thighs; and the two trunks became such a
body as was never beheld; and the hideous twofold monster walked slowly
away.[33]

A small black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body
of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on
the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated
and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand
steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or
fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and
both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled into one
volume.

And now, let Lucan never speak more of the wretched Sabellus or
Nisidius, but listen and be silent; and now, let Ovid be silent, nor
speak again of his serpent that was Cadmus, or his fountain that was
Arethusa; for, says the Tuscan poet, I envy him not. Never did he change
the natures of two creatures face to face, so that each received the
form of the other.

With corresponding impulse, the serpent split his train into a fork,
while the man drew his legs together into a train; the skin of the
serpent grew soft, while the man's hardened; the serpent acquired
tresses of hair, the man grew hairless; the claws of the one projected
into legs, while the arms of the other withdrew into his shoulders; the
face of the serpent, as it rose from the ground, retreated towards the
temples, pushing out human ears; that of the man, as he fell to the
ground, thrust itself forth into a muzzle, withdrawing at the same time
its ears into its head, as the slug does its horns; and each creature
kept its impious eyes fixed on the other's, while the features beneath
the eyes were changing. The soul which had become the serpent then
turned to crawl away, hissing in scorn as he departed; and the serpent,
which had become the man, spat after him, and spoke words at him. The
new human-looking soul then turned his back on his late adversary, and
said to the third spirit, who remained unchanged, "Let Buoso now take to
his crawl, as I have done."

The two then hastened away together, leaving Dante in a state of
bewildered amazement, yet not so confused but that he recognised the
unchanged one for another of his countrymen, Puccio the Lame. "Joy to
thee, Florence!" cried the poet; "not content with having thy name
bruited over land and sea, it flourishes throughout hell."

The pilgrims now quitted the seventh, and looked down from its barrier
into the eighth gulf, where they saw innumerable flames, distinct from
one another, flickering all over the place like fire-flies.

"In those flames," said Virgil, "are souls, each tormented with the fire
that swathes it."

"I observe one," said Dante, "divided at the summit. Are the Theban
brothers in it?"

"No," replied Virgil; "in that flame are Diomed and Ulysses." The
sinners punished in this gulf were Evil Counsellors; and those two were
the advisers of the stratagem of the Trojan horse.

Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his adventures,
not to be found in books: how he tired of an idle life, and sailed forth
again into the wide ocean; and how he sailed so far that he came into a
region of new stars, and in sight of a mountain, the loftiest he ever
saw; when, unfortunately, a hurricane fell upon them from the shore,
thrice whirled their vessel round, then dashed the stern up in air and
the prow under water, and sent the billows over their heads.

"Enough," said Virgil; "I trouble thee no more." The soul of Guido di
Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect,
asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how
he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at
once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He
was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on
purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his
absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim. "To repent evil, and to will
to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful angel,
"impossible: therefore wrong me not."

"Oh, how I shook," said the unhappy Guido, "when he laid his hands upon
me!" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for
agony, and so took its way.

The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the
Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False
Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the
sins of those whom they seduce.

The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels,
and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked his son-in-law,
Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church
were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They
all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on
their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a
sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims
warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his
mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish
speedily to follow him.[35]

Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of
dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and
Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Cæsar to cross
the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and
one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up
the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember
Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing
ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."

"And death to thy family," cried Dante.

The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief;
and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the
testimony of a good conscience--that best of friends, which gives a
man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless
innocence[36]--he should be afraid to relate without further proof. He
saw--and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to
see--a headless trunk about to come past him with the others. It held
its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up
at the two pilgrims, and said, "Woe is me!" The head was, in fact, a
lantern to the paths of the trunk; and thus there were two separated
things in one, and one in two; and how that could be, he only can tell
who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted the head aloft,
that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. "Behold," it said,
"behold, thou that walkest living among the dead, and say if there be
any punishment like this. I am Bertrand de Born, he that incited John
of England to rebel against his father. Father and son I set at
variance--closest affections I set at variance--and hence do I bear my
brain severed from the body on which it grew. In me behold the work of
retribution." [37]

The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of bleeding
wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide proceeded
further. Something also struck them on the sudden which added to his
desire to stop. But Virgil asked what ailed him, and why he stood gazing
still on the wretched multitude. "Thou hast not done so," continued he,
"in any other portion of this circle; and the valley is twenty-two miles
further about, and the moon already below us. Thou hast more yet to see
than thou wottest of, and the time is short."

Dante, excusing himself for the delay, and proceeding to follow his
leader, said he thought he had seen, in the cavern at which he was
gazing so hard, a spirit that was one of his own family--and it was so.
It was the soul of Geri del Bello, a cousin of the poet's. Virgil said
that he had observed him, while Dante was occupied with Bertrand de
Born, pointing at his kinsman in a threatening manner. "Waste not a
thought on him," concluded the Roman, "but leave him as he is." "O
honoured guide!" said Dante, "he died a violent death, which his kinsmen
have not yet avenged; and hence it is that he disdained to speak to me;
and I must needs feel for him the more on that account." [38]

They came now to the last partition of the circle of Evil-budget, and
their ears were assailed with such a burst of sharp wailings, that Dante
was fain to close his with his hands. The misery there, accompanied by
a horrible odour, was as if all the hospitals in the sultry marshes of
Valdichiana had brought their maladies together into one infernal ditch.
It was the place of punishment for pretended Alchemists, Coiners,
Personators of other people, False Accusers, and Impostors of all such
descriptions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl
about--some itching madly with leprosies--some swollen and gasping with
dropsies--some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time. One
was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer than the French; another a
Florentine, who tricked a man into making a wrong will; another, Sinon
of Troy; another, Myrrha; another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries
did not hinder them from giving one another malignant blows; and Dante
was listening eagerly to an abusive conversation between Sinon and
a Brescian coiner, when Virgil rebuked him for the disgraceful
condescension, and said it was a pleasure fit only for vulgar minds.[39]

The blushing poet felt the reproof so deeply, that he could not speak
for shame, though he manifested by his demeanour that he longed to do
so, and thus obtained the pardon he despaired of. He says he felt like a
man that, during an unhappy dream, wishes himself dreaming while he
is so, and does not know it. Virgil understood his emotion, and, as
Achilles did with his spear, healed the wound with the tongue that
inflicted it.

A silence now ensued between the companions; for they had quitted
Evil-budget, and arrived at the ninth great circle of hell, on the mound
of which they passed along, looking quietly and steadily before them.
Daylight had given place to twilight; and Dante was advancing his head
a little, and endeavouring to discern objects in the distance, when his
whole attention was called to one particular spot, by a blast of a
horn so loud, that a thunder clap was a whisper in comparison. Orlando
himself blew no such terrific blast, after the dolorous rout, when
Charlemagne was defeated in his holy enterprise.[40] The poet raised his
head, thinking he perceived a multitude of lofty towers. He asked Virgil
to what region they belonged; but Virgil said, "Those are no towers:
they are giants, standing each up to his middle in the pit that goes
round this circle." Dante looked harder; and as objects clear up by
little and little in the departing mist, he saw, with alarm, the
tremendous giants that warred against Jove, standing half in and
half out of the pit, like the towers that crowned the citadel of
Monteseggione. The one whom he saw plainest, and who stood with his arms
hanging down on each side, appeared to him to have a face as huge as
the pinnacle of St. Peter's, and limbs throughout in proportion. The
monster, as the pilgrims were going by, opened his dreadful mouth, fit
for no sweeter psalmody, and called after them, in the words of some
unknown tongue, _Rafel, maee amech zabee almee_.[41] "Dull wretch!"
exclaimed Virgil, "keep to thine horn, and so vent better whatsoever
frenzy or other passion stuff thee. Feel the chain round thy throat,
thou confusion! See, what a clenching hoop is about thy gorge!" Then he
said to Dante, "His howl is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he through
whose evil ambition it was that mankind ceased to speak one language.
Pass him, and say nothing; for every other tongue is to him, as his is
to thee."

The companions went on for about the length of a sling's throw, when
they passed the second giant, who was much fiercer and linger than
Nimrod. He was fettered round and round with chains, that fixed one arm
before him and the other behind him--Ephialtes his name, the same that
would needs make trial of his strength against Jove himself. The hands
which he then wielded were now motionless, but he shook with passion;
and Dante thought he should have died for terror, the effect on the
ground about him was so fearful. It surpassed that of a tower shaken by
an earthquake. The poet expressed a wish to look at Briareus, but he was
too far off. He saw, however, Antæus, who, not having fought against
heaven, was neither tongue-confounded nor shackled; and Virgil requested
the "taker of a thousand lions," by the fame which the living poet had
it in his power to give him, to bear the travellers in his arms down the
steep descent into this deeper portion of hell, which was the region of
tormenting cold. Antmus, stooping, like the leaning tower of Bologna,
to take them up, gathered them in his arms, and, depositing them in the
gulf below, raised himself to depart like the mast of a ship.[42]

Had I hoarse and rugged words equal to my subject, says the poet, I
would now make them fuller of expression, to suit the rocky horror of
this hole of anguish; but I have not, and therefore approach it with
fear, since it is no jesting enterprise to describe the depths of the
universe, nor fit for a tongue that babbles of father and mother.[43]
Let such of the Muses assist me as turned the words of Amphion into
Theban walls; so shall the speech be not too far different from the
matter.

Oh, ill-starred creatures! wretched beyond all others, to inhabit a
place so hard to speak of--better had ye been sheep or goats.

The poet was beginning to walk with his guide along the place in which
the giant had set them down, and was still looking up at the height from
which he had descended, when a voice close to him said, "Have a care
where thou treadest. Hurt not with thy feet the heads of thy unhappy
brethren."

Dante looked down and before him, and saw that he was walking on a lake
of ice, in which were Murderous Traitors up to their chins, their teeth
chattering, their faces held down, their eyes locked up frozen with
tears. Dante saw two at his feet so closely stuck together, that the
very hairs of their heads were mingled. He asked them who they were, and
as they lifted up their heads for astonishment, and felt the cold doubly
congeal them, they dashed their heads against one another for hate and
fury. They were two brothers who had murdered each other.[44] Near them
were other Tuscans, one of whom the cold had deprived of his ears; and
thousands more were seen grinning like dogs, for the pain.

Dante, as he went along, _kicked_ the face of one of them, whether by
chance, or fate, or _will_,[45] he could not say. The sufferer burst
into tears, and cried out, "Wherefore dost thou torment me? Art thou
come to revenge the defeat at Montaperto?" The pilgrim at this question
felt eager to know who he was; but the unhappy wretch would not tell.
His countryman seized him by the hair to force him; but still he said
he would not tell, were he to be scalped a thousand times. Dante, upon
this, began plucking up his hairs by the roots, the man _barking_,[46]
with his eyes squeezed up, at every pull; when another soul exclaimed,
"Why, Bocca, what the devil ails thee? Must thou needs bark for cold as
well as chatter?" [47]

"Now, accursed traitor, betrayer of thy country's standard," said Dante,
"be dumb if thou wilt; for I shall tell thy name to the world."

"Tell and begone!" said Bocca; "but carry the name of this babbler with
thee; 'tis Buoso, who left the pass open to the enemy between Piedmont
and Parma; and near him is the traitor for the pope, Beccaria; and
Ganellone, who betrayed Charlemagne; and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza
to the enemy at night-time."

The pilgrims went on, and beheld two other spirits so closely locked up
together in one hole of the ice, that the head of one was right over the
other's, like a cowl; and Dante, to his horror, saw that the upper head
was devouring the lower with all the eagerness of a man who is famished.
The poet asked what could possibly make him skew a hate so brutal;
adding, that if there were any ground for it, he would tell the story to
the world.[48]

The sinner raised his head from the dire repast, and after wiping his
jaws with the hair of it, said, "You ask a thing which it shakes me to
the heart to think of. It is a story to renew all my misery. But since
it will produce this wretch his due infamy, hear it, and you shall see
me speak and weep at the same time. How thou tamest hither I know not;
but I perceive by thy speech that thou art Florentine.

"Learn, then, that I was the Count Ugolino, and this man was Ruggieri
the Archbishop. How I trusted him, and was betrayed into prison, there
is no need to relate; but of his treatment of me there, and how cruel a
death I underwent, bear; and then judge if he has offended me.

"I had been imprisoned with my children a long time in the tower which
has since been called from me the Tower of Famine; and many a new moon
had I seen through the hole that served us for a window, when I dreamt a
dream that foreshadowed to me what was coming. Methought that this man
headed a great chase against the wolf, in the mountains between Pisa
and Lucca. Among the foremost in his party were Gualandi, Sismondi, and
Lanfranchi, and the hounds were thin and eager, and high-bred; and in a
little while I saw the hounds fasten on the flanks of the wolf and the
wolf's children, and tear them. At that moment I awoke with the voices
of my own children in my ears, asking for bread. Truly cruel must thou
be, if thy heart does not ache to think of what I thought then. If thou
feel not for a pang like that, what is it for which thou art accustomed
to feel? We were now all awake; and the time was at hand when they
brought us bread, and we had all dreamt dreams which made us anxious. At
that moment I heard the key of the horrible tower turn in the lock of
the door below, and fasten it. I looked at my children, and said not a
word. I did not weep. I made a strong effort upon the soul within me.
But my little Anselm said, 'Father, why do you look so? Is any thing the
matter?' Nevertheless I did not weep, nor say a word all the day, nor
the night that followed. In the morning a ray of light fell upon us
through the window of our sad prison, and I beheld in those four little
faces the likeness of my own face, and then I began to gnaw my hands for
misery. My children, thinking I did it for hunger, raised themselves on
the floor, and said, 'Father, we should be less miserable if you would
eat our own flesh. It was you that gave it us. Take it again.' Then I
sat still, in order not to make them unhappier: and that day and
the next we all remained without speaking. On the fourth day, Gaddo
stretched himself at my feet, and said, 'Father, why won't you help me?'
and there he died. And as surely as thou lookest on me, so surely I
beheld the whole three die in the same manner. So I began in my misery
to grope about in the dark for them, for I had become blind; and three
days I kept calling on them by name, though they were dead; till famine
did for me what grief had been unable to do."

With these words, the miserable man, his eyes starting from his head,
seized that other wretch again with his teeth, and ground them against
the skull as a dog does with a bone.

O Pisa! scandal of the nations! since thy neighbours are so slow to
punish thee, may the very islands tear themselves up from their roots in
the sea, and come and block up the mouth of thy river, and drown every
soul within thee. What if this Count Ugolino did, as report says he did,
betray thy castles to the enemy? his children had not betrayed them; nor
ought they to have been put to an agony like this. Their age was their
innocence; and their deaths have given thee the infamy of a second
Thebes.[49]

The pilgrims passed on, and beheld other traitors frozen up in swathes
of ice, with their heads upside down. Their very tears had hindered them
from shedding more; for their eyes were encrusted with the first they
shed, so as to be enclosed with them as in a crystal visor, which forced
back the others into an accumulation of anguish. One of the sufferers
begged Dante to relieve him of this ice, in order that he might vent a
little of the burden which it repressed. The poet said he would do so,
provided he would disclose who he was. The man said he was the friar
Alberigo, who invited some of his brotherhood to a banquet in order to
slay them.

"What!" exclaimed Dante, "art thou no longer, then, among the living?"

"Perhaps I appear to be," answered the friar; "for the moment any one
commits a treachery like mine, his soul gives up his body to a demon,
who thenceforward inhabits it in the man's likeness. Thou knowest Branca
Doria, who murdered his father-in-law, Zanche? He seems to be walking
the earth still, and yet he has been in this place many years." [50]

"Impossible!" cried Dante; "Branca Doria is still alive; he eats,
drinks, and sleeps, like any other man."

"I tell thee," returned the friar, "that the soul of the man he slew had
not reached that lake of boiling pitch in which thou sawest him, ere the
soul of his slayer was in this place, and his body occupied by a demon
in its stead. But now stretch forth thy hand, and relieve mine eyes."

Dante relieved them not. Ill manners, he said, were the only courtesy
fit for such a wretch.[51]

O ye Genoese! he exclaims,--men that are perversity all over, and full
of every corruption to the core, why are ye not swept from the face of
the earth? There is one of you whom you fancy to be walking about like
other men, and he is all the while in the lowest pit of hell!

"Look before thee," said Virgil, as they advanced: "behold the banners
of the King of Hell."

Dante looked, and beheld something which appeared like a windmill in
motion, as seen from a distance on a dark night. A wind of inconceivable
sharpness came from it.

The souls of those who had been traitors to their benefactors were here
frozen up in depths of pellucid ice, where they were seen in a variety
of attitudes, motionless; some upright, some downward, some bent double,
head to foot.

At length they came to where the being stood who was once eminent for
all fair seeming.[52] This was the figure that seemed tossing its arms
at a distance like a windmill.

"Satan," whispered Virgil; and put himself in front of Dante to
re-assure him, halting him at the same time, and bidding him summon all
his fortitude. Dante stood benumbed, though conscious; as if he himself
had been turned to ice. He felt neither alive nor dead.

The lord of the dolorous empire, each of his arms as big as a giant,
stood in the ice half-way up his breast. He had one head, but three
faces; the middle, vermilion; the one over the right shoulder a pale
yellow; the other black. His sails of wings, huger than ever were beheld
at sea, were in shape and texture those of a bat; and with these be
constantly flapped, so as to send forth the wind that froze the depths
of Tartarus. From his six eyes the tears ran down, mingling at his three
chins with bloody foam; for at every mouth he crushed a sinner with his
teeth, as substances are broken up by an engine. The middle sinner was
the worst punished, for he was at once broken and flayed, and his head
and trunk were inside the mouth. It was Judas Iscariot.

Of the other two, whose heads were hanging out, one was Brutus, and the
other Cassius. Cassius was very large-limbed. Brutus writhed with agony,
but uttered not a word.[53]

"Night has returned," said Virgil, "and all has been seen. It is time to
depart onward."

Dante then, at his bidding, clasped, as Virgil did, the huge inattentive
being round the neck; and watching their opportunity, as the wings
opened and shut, they slipped round it, and so down his shaggy and
frozen sides, from pile to pile, clutching it as they went; till
suddenly, with the greatest labour and pain, they were compelled to turn
themselves upside down, as it seemed, but in reality to regain their
proper footing; for they had passed the centre of gravity, and become
Antipodes.

Then looking down at what lately was upward, they saw Lucifer with his
feet towards them; and so taking their departure, ascended a gloomy
vault, till at a distance, through an opening above their heads, they
beheld the loveliness of the stars.[54]


[Footnote 1: "Parea che l'aer ne temesse."]

[Footnote 2: "Là dove 'l sol tace." "The sun to me is dark, And _silent_
is the moon, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."--Milton.]

[Footnote 3: There is great difference among the commentators respecting
the meaning of the three beasts; some supposing them passions, others
political troubles, others personal enemies, &c. The point is not of
much importance, especially as a mystery was intended; but nobody, as
Mr. Cary says, can doubt that the passage was suggested by one in the
prophet Jeremiah, v. 6: "Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay
them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them; a leopard shall watch
over their cities."]

[Footnote 4:

  "Che quello 'mperador che là su regna
  Perch' i' fu'ribellante à la sua legge,
  Non vuol che 'n sua città per me sì vegna." ]



[Footnote 5:

  "Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo
  Chinati e chiusi, poi che 'l sol gl'imbianca,
  Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo."

  Like as the flowers that with the frosty night
  Are bowed and closed, soon as the sun returns,
  Rise on their stems, all open and upright.]

[Footnote 6: This loss of intellectual good, and the confession of the
poet that he finds the inscription over hell-portal hard to understand
(_il senso lor m'è duro_), are among the passages in Dante which lead
some critics to suppose that his hell is nothing but an allegory,
intended at once to imply his own disbelief in it as understood by the
vulgar part of mankind, and his employment of it, nevertheless, as a
salutary check both to the foolish and the reflecting;--to the foolish,
as an alarm; and to the reflecting, as a parable. It is possible, in the
teeth of many appearances to the contrary, that such may have been the
case; but in the doubt that it affects either the foolish or the wise to
any good purpose, and in the certainty that such doctrines do a world
of mischief to tender consciences and the cause of sound piety, such
monstrous contradictions, in terms, of every sense of justice and
charity which God has implanted in the heart of man, are not to be
passed over without indignant comment.]

[Footnote 7: It is seldom that a boast of this kind--not, it must be
owned, bashful--has been allowed by posterity to be just; nay, in four
out of the five instances, below its claims.]

[Footnote 8:

  "Genti v'eran, con occhi tardi e gravi,
  Di grande autorita ne' lor sembianti
  Parlavan rado, con voci soavi." ]

[Footnote 9: "Sopra 'l verde smalto." Mr. Cary has noticed the
appearance, for the first time, of this beautiful but now commonplace
image.]

[Footnote 10: "Il maestro di color che sanno."]

[Footnote 11: This is the famous episode of Paulo and Francesca. She
was daughter to Count Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and wife to
Giovanni Malatesta, one of the sons, of the lord of Rimini. Paulo was
her brother-in-law. They were surprised together by the husband, and
slain on the spot. Particulars of their history will be found in the
Appendix, together with the whole original passage.

  "Quali colombe, dal disio chiamate,
  Con l'ali aperte e ferme, al dolce nido
  Volan per l'aer dal voler portate

  Cotali uscir de la schiera ov'è Dido,
  A noi venendo per l'aer maligno,
  Sì forte fu l'affettuoso grido."

  As doves, drawn home from where they circled still,
  Set firm their open wings, and through the air
  Come sweeping, wafted by their pure good-will

  So broke from Dido's flock that gentle pair,
  Cleaving, to where we stood, the air malign,
  Such strength to bring them had a loving prayer. ]

[Footnote 12: Francesca is to be conceived telling her story in anxious
intermitting sentences--now all tenderness for her lover, now angry at
their slayer; watching the poet's face, to see what he thinks, and
at times averting her own. I take this excellent direction from Ugo
Foscolo.]

[Footnote 13:

  "Nessun maggior dolore,
  Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
  Ne la miseria." ]

[Footnote 14:

  "Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
  Quella lettura."
"To look at one another," says Boccaccio; and his interpretation
has been followed by Cary and Foscolo; but, with deference to such
authorities, I beg leave to think that the poet meant no more than he
says, namely, that their eyes were simply "suspended"--hung, as it were,
over the book, without being able to read on; which is what I intended
to express (if I may allude to a production of which both those critics
were pleased to speak well), when, in my youthful attempt to enlarge
this story, I wrote "And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said,
And every lingering page grew longer as they read."

_Story of Rimini._]

[Footnote 15:

  "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse,
  L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade
  I' venni men così com'io morisse,
  E caddi come corpo morto cade."

This last line has been greatly admired for the corresponding deadness
of its expression.

  While thus one spoke, the other spirit mourn'd
  With wail so woful, that at his remorse
  I felt as though I should have died. I turn'd
  Stone-stiff; and to the ground, fell like a corse.

The poet fell thus on the ground (some of the commentators think)
because he had sinned in the same way; and if Foscolo's opinion could
be established--that the incident of the book is invention--their
conclusion would receive curious collateral evidence, the circumstance
of the perusal of the romance in company with a lady being likely enough
to have occurred to Dante. But the same probability applies in the case
of the lovers. The reading of such books was equally the taste of their
own times; and nothing is more likely than the volume's having been
found in the room where they perished. The Pagans could not be rebels
to a law they never heard of, any more than Dante could be a rebel
to Luther. But this is one of the absurdities with which the impious
effrontery or scarcely less impious admissions of Dante's teachers
avowedly set reason at defiance,--retaining, meanwhile, their right of
contempt for the impieties of Mahometans and Brahmins; "which is odd,"
as the poet says; for being not less absurd, or, as the others argued,
much more so, they had at least an equal claim on the submission of the
reason; since the greater the irrationality, the higher the theological
triumph.]

[Footnote 16: Plutus's exclamation about Satan is a great choke-pear to
the commentators. The line in the original is

  "Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe."

The words, as thus written, are not Italian. It is not the business of
this abstract to discuss such points; and therefore I content myself
with believing that the context implies a call of alarm on the Prince of
Hell at the sight of the living creature and his guide.]

[Footnote 17: Phlegyas, a son of Mars, was cast into hell by Apollo for
setting the god's temple on fire in resentment for the violation of his
daughter Coronis. The actions of gods were not to be questioned, in
Dante's opinion, even though the gods turned out to be false Jugghanaut
is as good as any, while he lasts. It is an ethico-theological puzzle,
involving very nice questions; but at any rate, had our poet been a
Brahmin of Benares, we know how he would have written about it in
Sanscrit.]

[Footnote 18: Filippo Argenti (Philip _Silver_,--so called from his
shoeing his horse with the precious metal) was a Florentine remarkable
for bodily strength and extreme irascibility. What a barbarous strength
and confusion of ideas is there in this whole passage about him!
Arrogance punished by arrogance, a Christian mother blessed for the
unchristian disdainfulness of her son, revenge boasted of and enjoyed,
passion arguing in a circle! Filippo himself might have written it.
Dante says,

  "Con piangere e con lutto
  Spirito maladetto, ti rimani.
  Via costà con gli altri cani," &c.

Then Virgil, kissing and embracing him,

  "Alma sdegnosa
  Benedetta colei che 'n te s'incinse," &c.

And Dante again,

  "Maestro, molto sarei vago
  Di vederlo attuffare in questa broda," &c. ]

[Footnote 19: Dis, one of the Pagan names of Pluto, here used for Satan.
Within the walls of the city of Dis commence the punishments by fire.]

[Footnote 20: Farinata was a Ghibelline leader before the time of Dante,
and had vanquished the poet's connexions at the battle of Montaperto.]

[Footnote 21: What would Guido have said to this? More, I suspect, than
Dante would have liked to hear, or known how to answer. But he died
before the verses transpired; probably before they were written; for
Dante, in the chronology of his poem, assumes what times and seasons he
finds most convenient.]

[Footnote 22:

  "Sì che la pioggia non par che 'l maturi."

This is one of the grandest passages in Dante. It was probably (as
English commentators have observed) in Milton's recollection when he
conceived the character of Satan.]

[Footnote 23: The satire of friarly hypocrisy is at least as fine as
Ariosto's discovery of Discord in a monastery.

The monster Geryon, son of Chrysaor (_Golden-sword_), and the
Ocean-nymph Callirhoe (_Fair-flowing_), was rich in the possession
of sheep. His wealth, and perhaps his derivatives, rendered him this
instrument of satire. The monstrosity, the mild face, the glancing point
of venom, and the beautiful skin, make it as fine as can be.]

[Footnote 24: "_Malebolge_," literally Evil-Budget. _Bolgia_ is an old
form of the modern _baule_, the common term for a valise or portmanteau.
"Bolgia" (says the _Vocabolario della Crusca, compendiato_, Ven. 1792),
"a valise; Latin, bulga, hippopera; Greek, ippopetha [Greek]. In
reference to valises which open lengthways like a chest, Dante uses the
word to signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per
similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di
cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.)
The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the
contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional
notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if well considered, of
their grandeur.]

[Footnote 25: Boniface the Eighth was the pope then living, and on

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