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