AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world “from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s Last Judgment at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probably painted under the personal influence of that great authority and explorer. There is no justification in Dante’s own work, however, for the Father’s supersession by the Son, who—while Il Padre Eterno is relegated to the choir-arch—occupies, as so often, the judicial bench, and looms dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an incomplete spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath his feet making a decorative division of Heaven from Hell, and its arms providing clinging-points for floating angels. Among the beatific company on the celestial side of the Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady saints, and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing up out of their coffins, some looking round in surprise, some instinctively begging for grace, and one looking back into his coffin, as into a cab for something forgotten. The Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by the Personal Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow very familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You see their legs protruding, and others ready for his maw clutched in his greedy hands. Still other sinners stand on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver under the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine beasts, or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over all the agony, with beautiful serene face, floats the angel, clinging to the Cross, and the saints sit placid on their golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic prevision of Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of woe, as one’s enjoyment of one’s warm hearth is spiced by the howling of the winds about.
The mere ardour of life was immoral to the mediæval mind, as we may see from the celebrated anonymous frescoes of Il Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo of Pisa—as if a cemetery needed any enforcement of Death’s triumph! But the opportunity is seized of besmirching “The Triumph of Life,” and by way of prelude to the tomb and its terrors a gay cavalcade of hunters rides to the chase, with hound and horn, winding through a lovely landscape. Their horses are arrested by three open coffins on the roadside, precisely of the shape of horse-troughs, but containing corpses, apparently a king’s, a priest’s, and a layman’s. The last is a mere skeleton; the others are fully robed and serpents curl spitefully about them. A stag, a rabbit, and a partridge rest serenely upon a little plateau, as if conscious there will be no danger to-day from these disconcerted sportsmen. A cowled monk holds out a long scroll to the leader of the chase, like an official presenting an address. Other holy hermits read ostentatiously beneath the trees outside their humble cottage, and one milks a quaint goat. As if the hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of pull devil, pull angel. In one case the angel has gripped the arms, the devil the feet, and they tug and lug with wings distended to their fullest, every muscle a-strain; even if the angel succeeds, the racked ghost will have known the Inferno. Let us pray the poor soul may recover breath in the Hesperian garden, where sit the meek sainted playing on lutes and lyres or nursing pet doves and spaniels.
A companion fresco devotes itself to The Last Judgment. To the sound of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their coffins, to be marched right or left by stern sworded archangels, as the great arbiter—again in a surmounting oval—may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe platform on high and watch the suppliant, panic-stricken sinners in the dock. Hell in many compartments takes half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a grisly Colossus, horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of horrors unspeakable, or a caldron of stewing sinners, most noteworthy of whom are the three arch-heretics of the fourteenth century, Mohammed, Anti-Christ, and Averroes (the last grown much less respectable since Dante put him with Plato). This composition—the heretics apart—is obviously on the general lines of Giotto’s, which may be considered the archetype of all the Judgment pictures, and the crudity of the conception is apparent. It is a mere parody of earthly tribunals. In the hands of a Signorelli—as at Orvieto—the vigour of the technique dominates and sweeps away the naïveté. It is the sublimity of terror—
“Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.”
But this conventional and crowded rendering has always impressed me far less than Maso di Bianco’s in S. Croce, where a solitary soul appears for judgment in a wild gorge under the throne of Christ, while two down-sweeping angels, blowing their trumpets perpendicularly, assist the awesomeness of the design. What a pity Michelangelo did not handle the theme with this massive simplicity, and give us one naked, shivering soul with the fierce light of judgment beating upon him, instead of the stereotyped arrangement of the Judge on high, the blessed on his right, the damned on his left, the rising dead at his feet, with Hell opening underneath! His colossal fresco, with its huddle of naked saints—to which the clothes provided by later Popes lent the last touch of gloom—is, with the possible exception of Tintoretto’s Paradise, the dismallest picture in the world, and it is even worse placed than Tintoretto’s stupendous canvas.
The angel Michael, whose scales weigh souls, must have been hard at work ere he could find enough good people to fill this Paradise. When I last peeped into it in the Palace of the Doges, it was conveniently on the floor, having been removed from its wall for repair, and, standing thus propped up in the centre of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, it loomed even more gigantic than my recollection of it, filling half the vast hall and extending to the ceiling. Its precise dimensions, according to a buzzing attendant, were twenty-two metres broad by seven metres high. Here surely is the prize of prizes for the American millionaire. The largest picture in the world! Think of it! But, alas! a pauperised Government arrogantly clings to its treasures, forbids exportation. How smuggle it out? What railway carriage could hold it? How get it even across the Grand Canal to the station? What gondola, what barca, what vapore even could carry it? Perhaps a bridge of boats might be built, as for the passing of an army. And an army indeed it holds.
Tintoretto’s Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any hygienic standard. ’Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleasing and muddy in colour, where you are doomed to carry for ever the emblems of your life, where Moses must eternally uphold his Tables of the Law and St. George sport his armour, and martyrs shiver in perpetual undress. As usual, God the Father is an absentee Lord, and Christ and the Madonna—in equal authority, not with the woman subordinate, as in a Veronese in the same Sala—dominate the chaos of figures, flying, whirling, praying, playing, or reading. To see this Heaven is to be reconciled with Earth. Some parts of it are already destroyed, and I look forward to the day when it shall pass away with a great noise. Smaller but far more select is Tintoretto’s impressionist Paradiso in the Louvre, with its rainbow swirls or celestial vortices, its curving sweeps of figures flying on clouds, only prosaic by its platform where Christ, the Madonna, and the greater saints sit like the distinguished persons at a public meeting. His Purgatorio in Parma is equally imaginative, a whirl of figures and wild cliffs and rugged, lurid, serpent-haunted chasms, down which angels plunge to bring up souls to the Madonna, who sits alone in her gloriole. Bartolommeo Spranger’s Heaven—which may be seen in Turin—is a place where saintly companies link hands as in a child’s game, while grimacing demons or snakes tear at sinners.
Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace with an emulation of Tintoretto, but the main renown of his Last Judgment seems to rest on his humorous idea of putting his wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay off private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course everybody can plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise—that of Jacobello del Fiore—the symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue and red and gold recall exactly the groups in the La Scala ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli’s Assumption of the Virgin in the National Gallery is also somewhat geometric, though the empty lilied court below gives beautiful relief. Fra Bartolommeo’s large faded fresco of The Last Judgment, in Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet the poor souls as they rise from their graves, is inspired by the Pisan fresco, and is less interesting than that of Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San Marco, in whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweetness and finish accentuate again the intellectual naïveté. His series of little panels in the Accademia of Florence has a quaint originality, the Judge sitting over a mystic red and green wheel, with the blessed on either hand. Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected, while demons poke spears into the damned. More conventional in composition is his large easel-picture in the same room—a miracle of detailed loveliness, except for the Hell, which is botched, as though unsuited to his artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil hideous out of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep are divided from the goats by a curious row of open graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is superdominant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the saints in couples and companies; the sinners—in crowns, mitres, or mere caps—are driven Hellward at the points of a pitchfork into their respective circles, where some are eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are eating one another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands. There are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a laden table, sinners hung up, sinners holding their own heads in their hands. Demons like brown bears gnash white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of Hell a capacious big-toothed gullet—horrible in its suggestion of more behind—is gulping down two red-headed wretches. In his Christ in Hades the gentle painter, following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates Hell in a demon crushed beneath its door.
In the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella the theme is repeated by the brothers Orcagna. Andrea took Paradise and suffused it with tender beauty, fitting it with row upon row of seraphim and saintly figures, whose serried symmetrical haloes suggest, however, a marshalling of saints for inspection; while Bernardo made of Hell a chart of ugliness—a compartmental chaos of strange fading horrors—fading though the Heaven has lasted. But it is not easy to get decorative beauty into the Inferno, especially when broken up into parishes of pain and not part of a complete Last Judgment such as that by Andrea single-handed in the same Chapel. In this last, angels carrying the cross and the thorns make a variant in the composition. In the Spanish Chapel of the same church The Way to Paradise is treated as of more concern to mortals than the nature of the goal, of which we get the merest peep; and perhaps the artist’s own concern was Beauty, for the central pattern of the picture is woven by a procession on richly caparisoned horses winding round and round. Tranquilly beautiful are the figures at the Passion, even apart from the tender figure of Christ, whose halo hides the form of the decorative polished cross he bears.
The Paradise is, however, a Dominican Paradise, for this noble fresco on examination turns out to be a complicated allegory in glorification of the order, even including the pictorial pun or rebus of black-and-white dogs (domini canes), guarding the faithful sheep and worrying the heretical wolves. The Dominican Heaven has always a marked preference for Dominican dogma, as the Dominican Hell is particularly hospitable to rival forms of teaching. Incidentally this great anonymous painting is a social Mappamondo of the mediæval, including every type in Church and State from Pope to pauper; the vanities and pomps, the penances and renunciations. A lovely peace broods over this picture, as over all the Chapel. Hell does not disturb its restful walls, save as the mild Limbo to which Christ descends to redeem Adam, Noah, and other figures, proleptically haloed. He hovers majestically over the vague scene, carrying a red-cross flag over his left shoulder. It is only the demons who give grotesquerie to the picture, but they are unsurpassable. One of these baffled imps falls prostrate in the void, another is tearing his goatee beard, a third stands scowling, with folded wings, the hair of a fourth stands on end, a bristle of wires. This last demon is livid in hue; his fellows are more or less fiery.
Bronzino has dealt less happily, if less grotesquely, with the same theme, for to his later vision it was a good opportunity for studying the nude and the half-nude. But to follow out the theme of Christ in Hades would carry me too far. I must, however, refer to the touching conception of Christ rushing to the rescue: as in the picture by Andrea Previtali in which Christ is seen in a whirl of drapery with a streaming flag, pulling up an old woman and a girl. A large cross occupies the centre of this Limbo, to which cling or pray rescued nude figures, while St. John stands by with a smaller cross.
The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but in other art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa Niccolò Pisano carved it in relief, imaginatively rendering the faces of the damned almost animal with sin. Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel, in stone and bronze, while on the rich-jewelled Pala d’Oro of St. Mark’s, Christ in Hades has called forth the craft of the goldsmith. An exhaustive study of eschatological æsthetics would include also the innumerable apotheoses and receptions in Heaven, would involve a comparison with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the decorative compositions of the decadents.
I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the genesis and evolution of these pictorial images. They certainly did not derive from Dante, for Dante’s poem itself contains an allusion to a Florentine calamity, which we know to have been the collapse in 1304 of a wooden bridge over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular representation of the horrors of the Inferno.
Moreover—apart from the demons and chimæras dire on the old Etruscan tombs—fumblings at the theme exist in art prior to Dante, as, for instance, those rude bronze reliefs in the Byzantine manner on the doors of S. Zeno in Verona, which mark, as it were, the Bronze Age of the concept. These, I was assured, were ninth-century, but even dating them at the eleventh or twelfth—and the church contains frescoes as early—they were in time for Dante to have seen them when enjoying Can Grande’s hospitality in Verona. His denunciation of Alberto della Scala for appointing his bastard as abbot of the monastery shows his interest in S. Zeno. In these rude bronzes Dante beheld the bare elements of that Hell which he furnished so handsomely. Here is already the giant fee-fi-fo-fum figure holding—O primeval irony!—a quaking monk. Here is the sinner upside down whose legs are disappearing within a caldron. Here also, in another bronze relief, is Christ in Limbo, haling figures out. Christ’s halo is novel, consisting of three tufts, one sticking out on either side of his head, the other on top. It may interest the decadent to learn that there is also a relief of Salome dancing, in which she anticipates all the modern contortionists.
To pass back from the Bronze Age of the Last Judgment to the Stone Age, that fine old Lombardic cathedral of Ferrara, whose lateral façades date from 1135, shows in a lunette over one of them a stone relief of The Day of Judgment. Flanked by saints, “God’s in his Heaven,” holding the saved souls in his lap in a sort of sheet, while the devil in his Hell pokes up his busy fire and an acolyte shoves a sinner down a dragon’s mouth. The Baptistery of Parma, a structure less ancient, but still antecedent to Dante, shows on its left portal three dead men coming out of their tombs, to be received by the angels or the executioner, according to the dictum of the Judge on high, who is nursing a saved soul. The guilty lean anxiously out of curious stone buildings, apparently awaiting their turn to be decapitated.
With such compositions existing in Italy, it seems supererogatory of M. Didron to have counted more than fifty French illustrations of the “Divine Comedy,” before Dante, painted on church windows or sculptured on church portals, or for M. Lafitte to seek for Dante’s inspiration in the western portal of Notre-Dame, which he must have seen during his stay in Paris.
Giotto, then, did not altogether originate his conception of the Judgment scene. Indeed, already in the alleged discourse of Josephus to the Greeks concerning Hades, we have a word-picture of the Hebrew Day of Judgment in which the souls of the just are marshalled to the right and the souls of the sinners to the left.
Dante may equally be exonerated from the crime of having originated these grotesque notions of the after-world, if he cannot be exonerated from the crime of corroborating them. These infantile images were made in the brains of fasting monks and terror-stricken sinners—for brains make day-dreams as well as nightmares—on a confused basis of the classic Hades and Tartarus and Elysium and the Egyptian after-world and the Hebrew Gehennah, supplemented by misapplied texts and misunderstood metaphors. They drew their appeal from that conflict ’twixt good and evil which every man felt raging in his own soul, and which made plausible the externalisation of these forces as angels and demons fighting for its possession.
But though the first sketch of the Christian Hell appears in literature as early as the apocryphal “Acts of St. Thomas,” Dante may be said to have systematised these chaotic conceptions, drawn the chart of the Hereafter, and determined the scientific frontiers between Hell and Limbo, Purgatory and Paradise. His are the nine concentric circles of the Inferno, though Acheron and Minos, Charon and Cerberus, are borrowed from his guide and master; he is the sole discoverer and surveyor of the island-mountain of Purgatory, so precisely antipodal to Jerusalem, with its seven parishes corresponding to the seven deadly sins; his are the nine Heavens, ascending to the Beatific Vision, that is circumscribed by the thrice three orders of the angelic hierarchies. Nevertheless, marvellous as is the sustained imaginativeness of the achievement, his contribution to the stock of eschatological ideas is comparatively small. The vulgar imagination is quite capable of bodying forth these grimacing, horned demons, these imps with prongs and lashes, those swooping fiends, that heavy head-gear,—not unlike the English high hat in August—those fiery floods, those gibbering, wailing ghosts, those wretches immersed in ordure, those ghastly sinners munching each other, those disgustful stenches and itchings. Dante would not be remembered for such nursery horrors. Happily, he enriched the theme with finer imaginings. They meet us at the very threshold of the dolorous city in those neutral souls good enough neither for Heaven nor Hell; like the abdicating Pope Celestine V, neither rebels against God nor true to Him. Yet Dante almost spoilt his own conception by adding the material pains inflicted by wasps and hornets to their eternal nullity. Kipling, in his probably unconscious approximation to the idea in “Tomlinson,” had a sounder instinct, though perhaps Ibsen’s idea of returning Peer Gynt to the Button-Moulder hits the truer penology. Dante’s touch is more satisfying when he pictures the doom of those who were sad in sunny air, and must now continue sad in the more appropriate surroundings of slime. Yet there is here a touch of the Gilbertian grotesque; a foreshadowing of the Mikado, whose “object all sublime” was “to make the punishment fit the crime.” This suggestion is even stronger in the twenty-seventh canto, where Mohammed and the arch-heretics who provoked schisms are ripped and cleft from chin to forelock. Savagery, too, is met by savage punishment, as in the Ugolino episode.
There are a few inventions, indeed, beyond the vulgar imagination: the six-footed serpent that transmutes the sinner to its own form, a passage palpitating with Æschylean genius; the monstrous-paunched coiner, consumed with a terrible hate; the shore “turreted with giants”; the tears that cannot be shed. Nor could the vulgar—pre-occupied with fire—have conceived a Hell of ice, though Dante’s Arctic circle is bettered in the Gospel of Barnabas preserved in an Italian MS., which compounds a Hell of fire and ice united by the Justice of God, “so that neither tempers the other, but each gives its separate torment to the infidel,” and in Vondel’s “Lucifer” the archfiend is condemned to
“The eternal fire
Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled.”
But neither the Dutch poet nor his contemporary, Milton, condescended to the fee-fi-fo-fum infantility of Dante’s three-headed King of Hell, that fantastic fiend who holds in each of his mouths one of the three archetypal traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. And that Dante’s “Judgment” was not considered “The Last” is shown by the popularity of Brutus—as a tyrannicide—in the Florence of the Medici. The beauty of the verse and the imaginative intensity alone render Dante’s “Inferno” bearable. Translated into the images of Signorelli or Michelangelo—and these more truly than Botticelli were Dante’s illustrators—the grossness of his “Inferno” leaps to the eye, while his finer imaginings are not capable of interpretation by brush or pencil.
The paradox of the “Divina Commedia,” indeed, is that it lives less by its supernatural visionings, sombre and splendid as these occasionally are, than by its passages of the earth, earthy, when the world the poet has left behind breaks in upon the starless gloom of Hell or upon the too ardent radiancy of Paradise. Nor need I prove my case by the familiar episodes of Paolo and Francesca, and of Ugolino, though Dante’s fame rests so largely upon them. Never was poem more terrestrial, more surcharged with the beauty and grossness of earth-life. The delicious touches of natural beauty, the splendid descriptions of sunrise and moonlight, the keen observation of animal and insect life, of starlings and doves, of storks and frogs, of falcons and goshawks, the pictures of the jousts at Arezzo, or of the busy arsenal of Venice, the homely similes painting indirectly the labours of ploughmen and shepherds, warriors and sailors, even the demeanour of dicers—this last Dante’s sole approach to humour—it is by these that Dante will live when his Heaven and Hell are rolled up like a scroll. The sound of the vesper bell that touches the earthly pilgrim moves us more than all the celestial music of the Purgatory; the vision of beatific goodness, beside the lovely picture of the ancient virtue of Florence in the homely ages, is an airy nothing—one is more interested even to hear the ladies of the day rebuked for their low-necked dresses. The dazzling circles of Paradise leave us lethargic compared with the irrelevant intrusion therein of the lark’s rapture of song or the earthly pain of exile.
“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle
Lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.”
To prove how salt is others’ bread, how hard the passage up and down others’ stairs! How impotent all the laboured strivings to shadow forth the vision celestial compared with this touch of the terrestrial concrete! In truth Dante did not go “out of his senses,” even in his most transcendental moments of inspiration. His five senses were all he had wherewith to obtain the raw material of his imaginings, and out of his sensations of touch and sight, of smell and taste and hearing, he wove both his Hell and his Heaven. The stored repugnances of mankind, the shudders and horrors at beasts and serpents, at bites and wounds and loathsome diseases, the dread of fire—he himself was condemned to be burnt alive—the chill of ice, the nausea of stinks and dizzying motions—these are the factors of his Hell, as the odour of flowers and incense, the shimmer of jewels, the sound of music, and the pains and pleasures of anticipation are the factors of his Purgatory. As for his Paradise, it is merely the sublimation of the philosophic Elysium Aristotle and Cicero had conceived before Christianity; his very ecstasy of Light is anticipated by Seneca.
Restlessness is a recurring image of doom with Dante—and perhaps his own wander-years of exile lent vividness to the onward drifting of the neutral spirits, the unrepose of the learned sinners, the eternal whirl of Paolo and Francesca. Yet there are moments in which Dante rises beyond his gross scale of punishments to a more spiritual plane.
“Thou art more punished in that this thy pride
Lives yet unquenched; no torrent, save thy rage,
Were to thy fiery pain proportioned full.”
In addressing this observation to Capaneus, Virgil, says Dante, spoke in a higher-raised accent than ever before. In a less literal sense, it is indeed a higher accent: it is even the note of modern thinking, from Spinoza onwards. The wages of sin is—sin! It is probably even the note of an earlier and still more misunderstood Master. But this note is only heard once and faintly. The wages of sin is physical torture. But surely such a Hell is unjustly balanced by such a Heaven—all Platonic intellection, Plotinian ecstasy, and ethereal Light. If the wages of sin is physical torture, then the wages of virtue should be physical rapture. Dante’s Hell requires Mohammed’s Heaven, just as Christ’s Heaven requires an immaterial Hell. For if the Kingdom of God is within you, the Kingdom of the Devil cannot be without. This thought broke dimly on Milton when, despite his material Hell, he wrote of Satan:
“But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid-heaven. . . .”
Dante’s Purgatory possesses, indeed, some of the material attractions a logical Heaven needs: it has all the makings of an Earthly Paradise not inferior to Addison’s in his “Vision of Mirza.” There are even great set pieces of painting, and much that might well tempt the soul to linger on its upward way.
The soul of the present critic is also tempted to seek superiority by preferring the Paradise to the Inferno. Alas! a law of psychology has ordained that pleasures shall be less exciting than tortures, and hence the Purgatory is far duller than the Inferno, while the Paradise is hopelessly swamped in sweetness and light. The splendid vision of the snow-white Rose—wonderful as poetry—retains little spiritual value under analysis, though the majestic passion of the close of the great poem almost carries up the spirit with closed eyes to this dazzling infinitude of Light and Love.
Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete Mappamondo of the mediæval, a complete vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine background is of the pettiest—including even Dante’s apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John—it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante’s Mappamondo held neither America nor China, neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world—that autocosm—in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as they have in the poetry of Milton—so that the very “Paradiso” could open with an invocation to Apollo! And this world-history is unified by being strung together on a moral plan, precisely as in the Hebrew Bible, Judas and Brutus finding themselves equally in Lucifer’s avenging fangs. The flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brimstone, and if we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chastisement are mainly those we would wish purged from the universe in the white flame of righteousness. Indeed, this great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went unscathed through the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up to Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own ardour. His passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty and infinity. Each of his three great sections ends with the very words. “The stars” shine again in that noble letter refusing the Republic’s terms of pardon. “What!” cries the exile, “shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of the sun and the stars?” “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is, indeed, the great doctrine of the poem—its literal last word. How this love, “this goodness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the universe,” is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the flame and the other dooms, he does not explain. Though ever and anon his own tears of pity flow, the doctrine of eternal hopeless torture does not appal him; not even though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the sufferers shall by then have subtilised their practised nerves for the final damnation. It does not disconcert him—any more than it disconcerts his great admirer, Michelangelo—that unbaptised infants and heathens whose only crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and that Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should need for their salvation the special descent of Christ. For all his sublimity, his passionate metaphysic insight into the Godhead, he falls below the homely Rabbis of the Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Yet there are broken lights of this truth here and there.
“But lo! of those
Who call, ‘Christ, Christ,’ there shall be many found
In judgment, further off from Him by far
Than such to whom His name was never known.”
And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle against the pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology; in his gratitude towards the great Teachers of Antiquity, his reverence for whom anticipated the Renaissance, albeit the Greeks among them were probably known to him only in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance—if such were possible—might have placed Aristotle and Plato in Paradise by interposition of a Christ loving his Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did, indeed, place Cicero and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle were in Hell, and the best that Dante in his rigider century could do for them was to put them in a painless Limbo, which they perambulate “with slow majestic port,” acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which it seems not beyond all hoping may ultimately exalt them to bliss. And with Aristotle, the “maestro di color che sanno,” walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his Mohammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical figures like Orpheus and Hector. A Christendom that had never altogether lost touch with the classical world—were it only by way of Virgil, mediæval saint and sorcerer—a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious inspiration in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the flames either the classical writers or their works. Classic literature and mythology made a second Bible, as the lore of chivalry and general history a third; indeed, these were the three great circles in which swam the world of the mediæval Mappamondo, the Biblical circle outermost and nearest to Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tolerance on Dante’s part to make Virgil his guide, chronology giving him no chance, as it gave with Statius, of a legendary conversion to Christianity. And this penchant for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the great Christian heretics. But if Virgil himself was excluded from Heaven “for no sin save lack of faith”—Virgil who could not possibly have believed—if even the merits of those who lived before the Gospel, could not profit them because they had missed baptism, it is not surprising to find the Christian heretics collected in the ninth canto in burning sepulchres of carefully graduated temperatures. One wishes that they, rather than Farinata degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine disdain foreshadowing Milton’s Satan. How Socrates would have smiled over the perverted morality of the Christian poet, as we smile over the constricted foot of a Chinese lady! Despite the attempt of a recent writer to moralise his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said for Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding that there is no positive pain in that absence of the divine vision which St. Chrysostom made the severest part of the punishment of the damned. But in tolerance as well as humour he falls far below the Ha-Tofet weha-Eden (“Hell and Paradise”) of his Jewish friend and imitator, Immanuel. It is in vain that Émile Gebhart (in “L’Italie Mystique”) points to his revolutionary liberalism in placing Ripheus the Pagan and Trajan, the Roman Emperor, in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only bring out his lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though the Æneid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as “justissimus unus” among the Trojans and “the most observant of right,” yet it is not by the simple force of his own goodness but by some complex operation of grace under which he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the “luci sante.” As for the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still worse confounded, for he—despite the title he had won of Optimus—must serve his time in hell, and is only popped into Paradise after being resuscitated, converted and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his first decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Christians, Dante assures us gravely, not Gentiles as the world imagines; one believing in the Crucifixion that was to be, and the other in the Crucifixion that had been.
“Cristiani, in ferma fede
Quel de’ passuri, e quel de’ passi piedi.”
With all Dante’s stippling and geometric chart-drawing, his conception of the after-world is not really clear. The sinners are able to deliver long monologues, amid all their agony; they foreknow things terrestrial, exactly like the Manes of Paganism; they quarrel with one another; there are even high jinks in Hell, which according to Burckhardt show an Aristophanic humour. (But then Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a certain free will reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into Dante’s excursion through their dominions a deal of breathlessness and terror from which one should be exempt who travels with a “safe-conduct” acquired by the interposition of powerful personages in Paradise.
Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante’s Mappamondo Infernale. But the circles of his Mappamondo Terrestre are clear and resplendent. ’Twas within the illumination of these circles—unnecessarily narrowing though they were—that the Middle Ages, and even Ages later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light which electricity cannot replace.
But is our modern Mappamondo as scientific as we think it? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the infinities?