No More Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with

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

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

[Footnote 2: Canto xv. 88. ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 31: _Discorso_, p. 103. ]

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

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

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

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




THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

I.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Argument.

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

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


THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journeying on through spirits as thick as leaves, Dante perceived a
lustre at a little distance, and observing shapes in it evidently of
great dignity, inquired who they were that thus lived apart from the
rest. Virgil said that heaven thus favoured them by reason of their
renown on earth. A voice was then heard exclaiming, "Honour and glory to
the lofty poet! Lo, his shade returns.