In opening the Divina Commedia one would venture to issue a further warning on the mistake of limiting the field of observation to the Inferno, or of allowing its temper and atmosphere too great a place in our estimate of the characteristics of Dante. Whatever he was to the women of Verona, Alighieri is to us much more than “the man who goes down to Hell and comes up again at will.” Yet now and then even educated Italians, if you mention Dante’s name, are apt to make it clear that they knew him mainly as the creator of two episodes—Paolo and Francesca and Conte Ugolino; and there is a real danger among Englishmen—amply illustrated in Dr. Paget Toynbee’s Dante in English Literature—of laying too much stress on the Inferno, even if they do not confine themselves to it.
The humour of the Inferno is, of necessity, prevailingly grim; sometimes almost coarsely grotesque. Here we may see the hand of the subtle artist, and detect a deliberate purpose on Dante’s part to pour (as I have said elsewhere) “a disdainful and indignant ridicule upon the futile, monstrous, hideousness of sin.”[111] “His fine scorn of sin tempts him to heap upon it all the ... burden of loathsome grotesqueness that the resources of his imagination can furnish.”
Typical of this method is the fierce sport of the scene described in Inf. xxii-xxiii, which culminates in the “nuovo ludo”[112] (puzzlingly compared by Dante to the apocryphal Aesopian Fable of the “Frog and the Mouse”)[113] in which Ciampolo outwits the Demons and brings them to confusion.[114] We are in mid-Hell, in the fifth Bolgia of the eighth circle, Malebolge, the place of the Barattieri, of those, that is, who have made traffic of justice or of public interests. Dante, who had been falsely accused of this crime, expends all the resources at his command to express his detestation of it, and holds it up at once to ridicule and loathing.
In Purgatory, on the terrace where pride is purged, he seems to acknowledge his appropriate place; but far different is his attitude towards the spot in Hell where his political enemies would fain have placed him.
The whole of these two Cantos and a half is pervaded by an unholy reek of boiling pitch; the appropriate similes are those of frogs immersed to the muzzle in stagnant ditch water[115]; of clawings, flayings, proddings of raw flesh.[116] Here, if anywhere, Dante verges on the vulgar. The names of the Demons are fantastically ridiculous and unpleasantly suggestive; their actions and their gestures, their badinage and their horseplay all remind one that the stately pageant of the Middle Ages had its unspeakable and unpresentable side. The Cantos are only redeemed from unreadableness by the fine similes, the lofty poetical touches which Dante, because he was Dante, could not but introduce here and there.
The graphic picture of the Venetian arsenal in full activity,[117] the swiftly drawn but masterly sketches of the wild duck’s dive to escape the swooping falcon,[118] of the mother’s rescue of her child by night from a flaming house[119]; the vivid reminiscences of Dante’s own campaigning days, at Caprona and before Arezzo: these play, like sunlit irridescence on the surface of a noisome pool, where foul creatures sport and gambol in a nightmare fashion.
We must note, however, one point; that Dante never represents himself here as moved to mirth by the fiendish antics he so conscientiously describes. Rather he is pictured as consistently consumed by fear and loathing.[120]
More reprehensible from the point of view of good taste is the Poet’s eager attention attracted to the vulgar harlequinade between Master Adam the false-coiner and the Greek Sinon, where the latter strikes the former on his “inflated paunch” till it resounds—
Come fosse un tamburo.[121]
But Dante is careful to put things right in the sequel, and makes his own blush of shame respond at once to Virgil’s chiding—