Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

In a mood of lofty pride, Dante placed himself among the six great poets of all time. To-day, all scholars applaud the accuracy and humility of his judgment. Every strong man knows what he can do. He is conscious of his own vast reserves. So often has he measured himself with his fellow-men that he realizes the number, the magnitude and relative strength of his divine endowments. All men of the first order of genius have realized the endowment they have received from God and their fathers. And the Divine Comedy justifies Dante's pride in his own powers. It cannot be classified with a phrase nor dismissed with a label. It is not a poem, like one of Tennyson's Idylls of the King; it is rather an encyclopedia upon Italy. It is at one and the same moment an autobiography, a series of personal reminiscences, a philosophy, an oration and the spiritual pilgrimage of a thirteenth century Childe Harold, with here and there a lyric poem. The motive which inspired Dante was his sense of the wretchedness of man in this mortal life. The only means of rescue from this wretchedness he conceived to be the exercise of reason, enlightened by God. To convince man of this truth, to bring home to him the conviction of the eternal consequences of his conduct in this world, to show him the path of salvation, was Dante's aim. To lend force and beauty to such a design he conceived the poem as an allegory, and made himself to be its protagonist. He depicts a vision, in which the poet is conducted first by Virgil, as the representative of human reason, through Hell and Purgatory, and then by Beatrice, as the representative of divine revelation, through Paradise to the Heaven, where at last he beholds the triune God.

The action of the Divine Comedy opens in the early morning of the Thursday before Easter in the year 1300. Dante dreams that he had "reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an obscure forest." He would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of the world—cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. Then the shade of Virgil appears, representing the intellect and conscience, glorified—to serve as his guide in the long wanderings through the Inferno. Virgil tells him he can accompany him only through Hell and Purgatory, but that Beatrice shall conduct him through those happy spheres, the portals of which a pagan may not enter. So begins that wondrous journey through the regions of the damned, over the entrance of which is written the awful words: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." The world through which the two poets journey is peopled, not with characters of heroic story, but with men and women known personally or by repute to Dante. Popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors, Florentine citizens of all degrees are there, "some doomed to hopeless punishment, others expiating their offenses in milder torments and looking forward to deliverance in due time." Hell is conceived as a vast conical hollow, reaching to the center of the earth. It has three great divisions, corresponding to Aristotle's three classes of vice, incontinence, brutishness and malice. The sinners, by malice, are divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. They lie at the bottom of a pit, with vertical sides, and accessible only by supernatural means; a monster named Geryon bears the poets down on his back. At the very bottom of the pit is Lucifer, immovably fixed in ice. And climbing down his limbs, the travellers reach the center of the earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, which they reach as Easter Day is dawning.

Purgatory is conceived as a mountain, rising solitary from the ocean on that side of the earth that is opposite to ours. It is divided into terraces and its top is the terrestrial Paradise, the first abode of man. The seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, which encircle the mountain and are reached by a series of steep climbs, compared by Dante to the path from Florence to Samminiato. The penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or endurance; and in several cases Dante has to bear a share in them as he passes. At one point, the poet hesitates when he comes to a path filled with a sheet of flame; but Virgil speaks: "Between Beatrice and thee there is but that wall." Dante at once plunges into the heart of the flames. On the summit of the mountain is the Earthly Paradise, "a scene of unsurpassed magnificence," where Beatrice, representing divine knowledge, divine love and purity, is waiting to lead the wanderer through the nine spheres of the old Ptolemaic system to the very throne of God.

Such is the general scheme of the poem, in which Dante's conception of the universe is depicted in scenes of intense vividness and dramatic force. It embraces the whole field of human experience. Its aim is "not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, to form men's characters" by teaching them what courses of life will meet reward, what with penalty hereafter; to "put into verse," as the poet says, "things difficult to think." The title given it is often misunderstood. The men of the Middle Ages gave the name "Tragedy" to every poem that ended sadly, and the name "Comedy" to every tale that ended happily. There are no traces of wit and humour in this book with its descriptions of the cleansing pains of Purgatory and the highest reaches of Paradise. Men who have little imagination seem quite unable to transport themselves back into the life and thought of the thirteenth century. Even Voltaire calls Dante a savage, and Goethe, who blundered often in his judgments of men and books, and often had to reverse himself, thought Dante's work "dull and unreadable." But that reader who supposes that Dante is giving a literal description of the physical torments of hell, or imagines that Michael Angelo, in his Last Judgment, was portraying his own literal belief, will find nothing inspiring in this wonderful book.

During the last six centuries the thinking of the world has changed. Physical pain has assumed new importance. No man living to-day has ever witnessed a brother man sentenced by a court to be burned alive, or later on, has been tried himself, and upon a false charge sentenced to death by flame. We stand aghast at Dante's miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, lakes of pitch and pools of blood, a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair. But Dante's was an era of outbreaking and almost universal physical cruelty; sinners and criminals could not be reached by argument, for they could not think; there was but one way to approach animal man, and that was from the animal side. Through fear, Dante endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. He appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience, sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. For their allurement also he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers blooming in the fields of Paradise. He used his unrivalled genius to make vice and sin revolting and infinitely repulsive, just as he tried to make truth, kindness and justice alluring.

This volume, therefore, represents "the life history of a human soul redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and mammon, and restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable him to see things as they are." Dante's conception is that "penalty is the same thing as sin, only it is sin taken at a later period of its history and a little lower down the stream." It is in life, here and now, that men's hands are fouled with the pits of greed; their tongues tipped with envenomed hate; their hearts steeped in crimson ooze. It is here and now that materialists "load themselves down with sacks of yellow clay," that misers plunge into "the boiling pitch of avarice." The genius of the Inferno is that sins are seeds, big with the harvest of their own penalty.

Our age makes little of the Purgatory itself—this realm which Dante describes as the place where the human soul is cleansed and made worthy to ascend to heaven. It is described as a kind of vestibule of Paradise, where the soul fronts the results of wrong-doing, through the debt of penalty and the evil inclination of the will, and the instincts that have been perverted. The sins of which men are cleansed are the sins against love and pride, envy and anger; the sins of the body, avarice and gluttony and passion. The angels that cleanse are the angels of forgiveness and peace. On that island of cleansing Virgil and Dante land, and place their hands upon the ground and bathe in dew their tear-stained cheeks. But climbing up the steep way of penitence is like climbing up a craggy mountainside, toiling on hands and knees, with tire that almost brings despair; and yet the higher Dante climbs the easier the task. Just as in the Inferno, Dante placed certain well-known figures—Judas Iscariot, who for avarice betrayed his Lord, and Alberigo who with horrible treachery murdered his own guests at a banquet, and that "youth who made the Great Refusal"; so in the Purgatory he shows us many men known to history who have stumbled here and there and are breast-buried in the rubbish of the world, to whom comes some angel bringing release, and whispering "Loose him, and let him go."

When he approaches the confines of Paradise and sees from afar the glorified form of Beatrice, Dante asks that God may become to his soul like a refiner's fire and cleanse away any stain or dross of sin. Gladly he enters that healing flame, guided by a sweet voice, which sang, "Come, ye blessed of my Father;" but, says Dante, "When I was within I would have flung myself into molten glass to cool myself, so immeasurable was the burning there." Then, broken down with utter remorse, he falls in a swoon; but he is plunged in the waters of forgetfulness and refreshed, like young plants; re-clad as if by the angel of spring, he issues from the wave, pure and true, ready to mount to the stars beyond.

Strangely enough, this book, the Inferno, is the most widely read. The Purgatory is less frequently opened, while men value least of all the Paradise of Dante. Doubtless the reason is that experience has brought familiarity with sin, so that all men understand its penalties, and at the selfsame time know something of penitence and of pardon, while the nature of that realm of perfect happiness, righteousness and peace is beyond human experience. But if any man was ever purified by suffering and earned the right to trust his visions and surrender himself to the pictures that noble imagination painted, that man was Dante. On the side of culture the measure of education of any man is his knowledge of Shakespeare. On the side of imagination and of pure and tender goodness, a man is a man just in proportion as he knows his Dante. James Russell Lowell's supreme essay was his essay on Dante, and he tells us that the great Italian "wrote with his heart's blood, like an inspired prophet of old." 'Midst all his poverty, exile and grief, he rose triumphant over sorrow and neglect. He never lost his confidence in the ultimate victory of right and truth. Hating oppression, he struggled as a prophet of liberty. Offered an invitation to return to his native city, on the condition that he would humiliate himself by confessing that he had done a wrong, he accepted an exile's death rather than be faithless to his great convictions. Climbing the stairs of other men's houses, he salted his bread with his own tears.

An old man at fifty-six, his last days were spent in Ravenna, in the house of a noble duke, who recognized in Dante the greatest man of his time. Long afterward, Byron sought out the house where Dante died, and falling upon his knees, beat upon his breast and wept, at the recollection of the sorrows that overwhelmed the master of them all. Just as Bunyan was rewarded for the second book in English literature by twelve years in Bedford Jail, so Dante, as a reward for writing the greatest book in Italian literature, was exiled from his home and city, pursued by spies, hunted over the hills with hounds, made to conceal himself in dens and caves of the earth, and brought to an untimely death. Dying, Dante might have used the words which, later, fell from the lips of Bacon, "I leave my name and fame to foreign lands, and to my own country when long time has passed." Let us believe that after having lived for fifty-six years in at once an Inferno and a Purgatory, at last Dante, the prisoner, was redeemed out of his dungeon, the exile out of his loneliness, the fugitive out of his rags and crusts, and the cave wherein he was hiding from his pursuers; that the man who for years held heart-break at bay at last was brought in out of the night, the fire-mist and the hail, into the imperial palaces of God, where one word of welcome repaid him ten thousand times for the bitter, grievous years, and where one word of love leaped forth from the ineffable light—and in a moment, his every wound was healed!