III
HELL
The first cantica of the 'Divine Comedy'—the Inferno or Hell—is the best known of all Dante's works in prose or verse, in Latin or Italian; and though students of Dante may sometimes regret this fact, yet no one can be at a moment's loss to understand it.
For the attributes of heart and brain requisite for some kind of appreciation of the Inferno are by many degrees more common than those to which the other works of Dante appeal. It is easy to imagine a reader who has not even begun truly to understand either the poet or the poem nevertheless rendering a sincere tribute of admiration to the colossal force of the Inferno, and feeling the weird spell of fascination and horror ever tightening its grasp on him as he descends from circle to circle of that starless realm.
There is no mystery in the inveterate tendency to regard Dante as pre-eminently the poet of Hell. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Tradition tells of the women who shrank aside as Dante passed them by, and said one to another, shuddering as they spoke, 'See how his black hair crisped in the fire as he passed through Hell!' But no tradition tells of awe-struck passers-by who noted that the stains had been wiped from that clear brow in Purgatory, that the gleam of that pure and dauntless eye had been kindled in Heaven.
The machinery of the Inferno, then, is moderately familiar to almost all. Dante, lost in the darksome forest, scared from the sunlit heights by the wild beasts that guard the mountain side, meets the shade of Virgil, sent to rescue him by Beatrice, and suffered by Omnipotence to leave for a time his abode in the limbo of the unbaptised, on this mission of redeeming love. Virgil guides Dante through the open gate of Hell, down through circle after circle of contracting span and increasing misery and sin, down to the central depth where the arch-rebel Satan champs in his triple jaws the arch-traitors against Church and State, Judas Iscariot, and Brutus and Cassius.[31]
Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious dead in torment.
And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of guilt, of misery? Even so. And we shall not look in vain.
But let us listen first to Dante's own account of the subject-matter of his poem. Five words of his are better than a volume of the commentators. 'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted,' he says, 'is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken allegorically the subject is Man, as rendering himself liable, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or punishing justice.'[32]
According to Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to punishing justice.' Surely a subject fraught with unutterable sadness, compassed by impenetrable mystery, but one which in the hands of a prophet may well be made to yield the bread of life; a subject fitly introduced by those few pregnant words, 'The day was going, and the dusky air gave respite to the animals that are on earth from all their toils; and I alone girt me in solitude to bear the strain both of the journey and the piteous sight, which memory that errs not shall retrace.'[33]