To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us. He and we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple. Hell is the absence of God.... If the reader begins with the consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually understood, he never loses the thread, he is never at a loss, never slips back into the literal signification.
Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between literal and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are misleading. Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly the Comedy is in some way a “moral education.” The question is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Convivio we are seriously informed that
the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;
and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a scholar as M. Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase “didactique d’intention.” We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways of dealing with it. One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its significance for the seeker of “spiritual light,” or one may, with Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in passages where he frees himself from his divine purposes. With neither of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the “preacher and prophet,” and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah or Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and denounces the politics. Some of Landor’s errors are more palpable than Mr. Sidgwick’s. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the standards of classical epic. Whatever the Comedy is, an epic it is not. M. Hauvette well says:
Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre classique de l’épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s’en écarte, est un exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n’en pas douter, n’a jamais eu l’intention de composer une action épique dans les règles.
But we must define the framework of Dante’s poem from the result as well as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form; and even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something else. The examination of any episode in the Comedy ought to show that not merely the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of the poem. Landor appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a passage as the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its relations:
In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.
This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected delight would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify. For in Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable.
E il modo ancor m’offende.
It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite pole from Landor’s, should have fallen into a similar error. He says: