Here we must pause. I have made no attempt to give a systematic account of the Inferno, still less to select the finest passages from it. I have only tried to interpret some of the leading thoughts which run through it, some of the deep lessons which it can hardly fail to teach the reader.
Like all great works, the Inferno should be studied both in detail and as a whole in order to be rightly understood; and when we understand it, even partially, when we have been with Dante down through all the circles to that central lake of ice in which all humanity seems frozen out of the base traitors who showed no humanity on earth, when we have faced the icy breath of the eternal air winnowed by Satan's wings, and have been numbed to every thought and feeling except one—one which has been burned and frozen into our hearts through all those rounds of shame and woe—the thought of the pity, the misery, the hatefulness of sin; then, but then only, we shall be ready to understand the Purgatory, shall know something of what the last lines of the Inferno meant to Dante: 'We mounted up, he first and second I, until through a round opening I saw some of those beauteous things that Heaven bears; and thence we issued forth again to see the stars.'[53]
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Compare pp. 21-23.
[32] Epistola xi. § 8.
[33] Inferno, ii. 1-6.
[34] Inferno, xxviii.
[35] Ibid. xxiii. 58 sqq.
[36] Ibid. xviii. 103-136.
[37] Inferno, xx. 27, 28: 'Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta.' The double force of pietà, 'pi[e]ty,' is lost in the translation.