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.
a horrible odour, was as if all the hospitals in the sultry marshes of
Valdichiana had brought their maladies together into one infernal ditch.
Stories from the Italian Poets
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.
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.
