cavity thus made will represent Hell, and the cone Purgatory. Paradise comprises the heavens of the planets and fixed stars, and the Primum Mobile heaven, all of which revolve about the earth; and beyond stretches out to infinity the Empyrean, motionless in itself but the source of all motion, where abides the ineffable splendor of God, surrounded by the hierarchies of cherubim and seraphim, angels and archangels, principalities and powers. Hell is divided into nine circles, sloping down toward a yawning abyss in the centre, the depth of which is measured by half the diameter of the earth. It is impossible to give briefly an idea of the variety of these circles, each one bearing its individual stamp and presenting all the diversities of natural scenery that Dante had seen in the world above-woods and rivers, plains and valleys - but all shrouded in an atmosphere of darkness and terror. The Mount of Purgatory is situated on an island in the Southern Sea, and rises sheer up through the atmosphere which surrounds its lower portion, while at its top the Earthly Paradise basks eternally in the light of the sun, untouched by the atmospheric changes that affect its base. Purgatory is divided into seven terraces, which, with Ante-Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise, form nine divisions and thus correspond to the nine circles of Hell and the nine heavens. Dante's theory as to the origin of Hell and Purgatory is very naïve in its seriousness. When Lucifer was flung out of heaven he fell headlong to the earth and penetrated to its centre. The southern hemisphere shrank in terror before his face and covered itself with the waters of the great deep, while out of the interior a great mass was thrown up and formed the mountain of Purgatory. Scattered over the infernal circles and the purgatorial terraces is the infinite multitude of souls who sinned on earth, and who are now punished with all the refinements of horror which the mind of the poet can invent. In Hell the punishment is eternal; in Purgatory it is expiatory and temporary; in both it is physical and moral. The damned are not only tormented with fire and sword, with fever and thirst, but are filled with hate toward God and each other; they blaspheme the Creator and curse their parents and their birth. The physical punishment of the Divine Comedy is founded on the Old Testament principle of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Dante has often been accused of excessive cruelty in his conception of punishment; but he wrote according to the religious ideas of his times. In loading hypocrites with heavy cloaks of gilded lead he undoubtedly took the idea from Frederick II., who was wont to clothe traitors in a similar manner and then burn them alive. The terrible story of Piero Dolcino's public torture in the streets of Novara shows to what refinements of cruelty Dante's contemporaries could stoop. The poet gives a correspondence, literal or figurative, between a sin and its punishment. Thus, the licentious are forever blown about by a fierce wind, because on earth they had been the sport of the whirlwind of passion; the gluttonous lie in filth like swine; schismatics are cloven asunder; murderers and tyrants are plunged into rivers of boiling blood; in Purgatory the proud are crushed beneath heavy burdens, and the envious have their eyelids sewn together. One striking difference between the punishments of Purgatory and Hell is that in the former place the soul desires its own torment, which renders it capable of coming at last to peace and joy in the Lord. As hate is the prevailing note in Hell, in Purgatory love softens suffering and soothes pain. Not with blasphemies do the souls there receive the recompense of their sins, but with sweet old Latin hymns of praise and hope. "Salve Regina," "Te Lucis Ante," "Beati Pauperes Spiritu" - these are the sounds which greet the wanderers as they mount from terrace to terrace toward the summit whose ascent becomes more easy as they rise. Dante's doctrine of the forms of the souls that inhabit these kingdoms coincides with that of the Church fathers. They are living shadows, made of some spiritual substance; for their mortal bodies still lie in the grave, and only after the Last Judgment shall body and spirit be reunited. But these shadows have flesh and blood, and are capable of intensest physical suffering. It is often hard to see any essential difference between them and the human body. In Paradise the blessed have practically no body; they are lights and stars and splendors, which flash and coruscate in dazzling brilliancy. There are two kinds of devils in Hell — the guardian and the ministering — the latter plying their functions with fiendish joy and diabolical faithfulness. There is here a curious mingling of Christianity and classic mythology. We find among these devils Minos, Pluto, Cerberus, and the Harpies. Some explain this by saying that Dante was deeply saturated with classic antiquity and could not free himself from its influence. Others, perhaps more correctly, point out that the early Christian Church metamorphosed the gods of Greece and Rome into demons. This we find in Augustine and Origen; and St. Paul, it will be remembered, says, “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God"; and even to later times the Venusberg in the Thuringian Forest, which plays so great a part in Wagner's opera of Tannhäuser, bears witness to the tenacity with which old Grecian divinities clung to mediaval legends. The guardians of Purgatory and Paradise are beautiful angels, with white, or green, or golden wings, and faces as of flame. The action of the Divine Comedy begins at Easter in the year 1300 — "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," says Dante in the first line — that is, in the midst of the journey of his life, when he was thirty-five years old. He has lost his way in a dark wood, and as he tries to gain a distant mountain top he is filled with dismay at the sight of three fierce beasts who block his way. As he retreats a spirit coming toward him makes itself known as the poet Virgil, whose Eneid has been Dante's lifelong study. Virgil has been sent to his relief by Beatrice, Lucia, and the Blessed Virgin; and tells him that, to escape from the wood of error and sin, he must pass through the bitterness of Hell and so up to the alto lume, the light of God on high. With renewed courage the poet signifies his willingness to undertake the lofty task, and the two wanderers make their way toward the portals of Hell, which they reach as day begins to decline. It is during the first hours of twilight, as the world lies down to tranquil sleep, that Dante begins his weird journey into the undiscovered country filled with unutterable darkness and horror. Over the gate in dark letters is written a tremendous inscription, beneath which they pass. Making their way across the vestibule of Hell, inhabited by the ignoble souls of those who were neither God's enemies nor his friends, they reach the river Acheron, over which the poet is carried in a swoon. Hell proper begins with the second circle, and here dwell in a stately castle the souls of the virtuous men of ancient days, whose only punishment for an unbelief in Christ for which they are not responsible is to live always in desire without hope. Virgil and Dante pass through the midst of these venerable spirits, who speak rarely and with soft voices, and soon issue out upon the full fury of the infernal world. As they stand in the third circle and gaze upon the innumerable company of the licentious, blown hither and thither by a wind which roars like the sea in a storm, Dante's attention is attracted to two souls who still cling together, although tossed about like chaff before the breeze. He calls to them and invites them to approach. Leaving the “band where Dido is,” they fly toward the wanderers, and while a brief hush stills the air Francesca da Rimini tells her sad story of love and crime, in words full of deathless beauty and pathos.1 As Dante listens, so strongly does pity seize upon his heart that he faints and falls as one that is dead. Midnight finds the two poets standing at the foot of a tower on the shore of the Stygian marsh, whose sullen waters plash in the inky darkness. Hours have passed since Dante had swooned. On awakening he had moved forward and downward; he had seen the gluttonous beaten down upon by the heavily falling, rotting rain, and the misers and spendthrifts rolling heavy rocks against each other and cursing each other's sins. And now as the travellers peer through the murky air, looking for some way of crossing the putrid waters of the marsh, suddenly two lights flash from the top of the tower beside them; and soon a swift bark approaches the shore, and, entering in, the wanderers are rowed across by the fierce-mouthed boatman Phlegyas. 1 Hell, v. Nearing the other shore, they see looming up vaguely the wails of the infernal city of Dis, in shape like a mediæval fortress, surrounded by deep ditches, and with towers which gleam blood-red. Thousands of demons swarm on the walls and defend the entrance; high up on the summit of the towers stand the three furies stained with blood and girdled and crowned with writhing serpents. "Let Medusa come," they cry, "and turn him into stone." And now doubt assails the heart of Virgil, and Dante's courage failing, he would fain turn back; when lo, with earthquake and thunder roll, appears a celestial messenger, before whom the devils fly in terror and the gates of the city open. As they enter, there stretches out, as far as eye can reach, an immense graveyard, a sort of subterranean Père la Chaise, crowded thick with tombs whose sides are red-hot and from whose half-open covers issue flames. In them those who denied the immortality of the soul must dwell through all eternity. Here occurs that memorable colloquy between Dante and the fierce old Ghibelline chief, Farinata degli Uberti, who alone after the battle of Monteaperti saved Florence from being razed to the ground. Here too occurs the touching scene when Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, the father of Dante's intimate friend Guido, falls back into his tomb in despair, after hearing, as he thinks, the confirmation of his son's death. - In the beginning of the eighteenth canto of the Hell we find the words, “There is a place in Hell called Malebolge." To this place, these evil pits of Hell, the poets come after many varied experiences. On leaving the city of Dis they had clambered down a rocky precipice over which the Phlegethon thundered in a mighty waterfall, forming at the bottom a river of boiling blood where tyrants and murderers were plunged. Crossing this river on the back of a centaur, they had entered a grewsome wood, whose gnarled trees extended to a vast sandy plain where flakes of flame fell as snow falls in the still air of Alpine mountains. As they had issued from the wood of the suicides and walked along the stony margin of a stream Dante had seen and greeted with loving words "the dear, paternal image" of Brunetto Latini, who in youth had taught him how men may make themselves eternal. Then, having descended a tremendous abyss on the back of the monster Gerione, they had reached the ten concentric ditches of Malebolge, where ten different kinds of fraud are punished. In these evil pits is more horror, grotesqueness, and cruelty than in all the rest of the Hell. Passing over rocky bridges, sometimes chased by uncouth devils, the wanderers look down upon the wretched souls below - hypocrites and barterers, panderers and flatterers-bitten by serpents, plunged in lakes of boiling pitch, immersed in filth, or hewn asunder by the sword. Hour after hour they pass on through these scenes, stopping from time to time to talk with the wretches below, until finally they reach the well of the giants and are set down by Antæus at ✓ the lowest point in Hell, which is, at the same time, the centre of the universe. In the fourteenth canto there is a passage full of mysterious grandeur, in which the poet allegorically describes the vicissitudes of time, or, as some think, of the different forms of government. On Mount Ida, in the island of Crete, there stands the figure of an old man with his back turned toward Damietta and his face toward Rome. Like the figure seen by Nebuchadnezzar, its head is formed of pure gold, its arms and breast are of silver, and the rest is of brass and iron, except the right foot, which is of clay. All parts but the gold are rent, and from the fissures tears drop down into the abyss and form the rivers Styx, Acheron, and Phlegethon; and, finally settling at the bottom, they are frozen by the intense cold generated by the six wings of Lucifer and form the icy lake of Cocytus. The poets have here reached the last stage of their journey through Hell. As they walk over the glassy surface of the frozen lake they see beneath their feet, like straws in ice or insects in amber, the miserable souls of traitors against relatives, friends, country, and benefactors. Dante's glance here falls upon two spirits buried to the neck in the ice, one of whom is gnawing with fiendish rage the other's head. In answer to his question he learns that this is Ugolino della Gherardesca, who, having been betrayed by Bishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, was shut up in the Tower of Hunger at Pisa, and there with his sons and grandsons starved to death. Goethe has said that the lines containing the sad narrative of Ugolino belong to the highest order of composition ever produced by poetic art.1 First descending, and then climbing along the hairy sides of the prodigious body of Lucifer, the poets next leave Hell, and, by a rocky path, clamber painfully upward until they finally issue out into the light of heaven and see once more the stars. No words but those of the poet himself can describe the scene as, smoke-begrimed and choked with the fumes of Hell, they gaze upon the sky of sweet oriental sapphire and drink in the air that blows fresh and sweet from the southern sea sparkling beneath the first rays of the morning sun. Nor can we linger over that other scene, when the newly arrived spirits descend from the angel's boat with the songs of the redeemed on their lips; when Dante meets his old friend the musician Casella; and when the company listens, as the latter sings one of Dante's own songs, until Cato drives them with rebukes toward the heights they must ascend. The poets from the foot of the mountain clamber on hands and knees toward the entrance gate, which lies high above them. On the way they pass many souls who have put off salvation until too late or have died in contumacy with Holy Church and here must 1 Hell, xxxiii. |