Part 3 (2/2)

The interest of the events which moulded Dante's career and influenced his work has perhaps led to their occupying too large a share of these pages; but it has been thought best to go into the history at so after all the first and h cos, and especially the _Commedia_, hold in European literature This is quite unique of its kind Never before or since has a poeination served--not merely as a political manifesto, but--as a party pamphlet; and we may safely say that no such poem will in future serve that purpose, at all events until the conditions under which it was produced occur Whether that is ever likely to be the case, those who have followed the history e

FOOTNOTES:

[27] So I understand an obviously corrupt passage in Villani, viii 41 One of the unlucky Blacks was a Portinari, doubtless a kinsman of Beatrice--a fact which curiously seems to have escaped the conjectural commentators

CHAPTER VI

THE ”COMMEDIA”

So ive another may appear superfluous At the same time, experience shows not only that such a summary is found by most readers to be the best of all helps to the study of the poem, but also that every fresh summariser treats it from a somewhat different point of view It is therefore possible that in the following pages answers, or at least suggestions of answers, land at all events, have passed over; and that they may serve in some measure as a supplement to the works which will be mentioned in the appendix

-- 1 hell

The first eleven cantos of the _hell_ form a very distinct subdivision of the poem They embrace, first, the introduction contained in Canto i; secondly, the description of the place of punishe in the character of the sins punished is indicated In one sense, no doubt, an ie in the journey is completed when the City of Dis is reached, in Canto viii; but it will be observed, e reach that point, that the class of sinners who are met with immediately within the walls of the City, the Epicureans or, as we should now say, the Materialists, bear really a er affinity to those who are outside the walls, those whose sin has been lack of self-restraint in one form or another, than they do to the worse criminals who have ”offended of malicious wickedness,” and who lie at and below the foot of the steep guarded by the Minotaur The former class at all events have been, to use a common phrase, ”their oorst enemies;” their sins have not been, at any rate in their essence, like those of the latter, of the kind which break up the fabric of society, and with them the heretics may most naturally be considered It can hardly be doubted that soreat break of level in his scheme of the loorld at a point which would leave the freethinkers and materialists actually nearer to the sinners of whoh theological exigencies compel him to place them within the walls of the ”red-hot city” We may thus conveniently take these eleven cantos for consideration as a group by thehout the poem, the main difficulties hich we meet depend far ” of the words; and even if it were otherwise, all purely linguistic difficulties have been so fully dealt with over and over again in commentaries and translations that it would, as has been said, be quite superfluous to enter here upon any discussion of the canto, as every reader will at once perceive, is sy to end, froins to the ”hound” who is to free Italy

These, iven asin the whole poem; indeed it may be said that in the matter of the _Veltro_ we have not made much advance on Boccaccio, who frankly admitted that he could not tell as meant But between these two points we have some hundred lines in nearly every one of which, beside its obvious and literal interpretation, we must look for all the others enue of his letter to Can Grande The second canto is of much the same character, in sonificance of the three beasts who hinder Dante is easier to make out than that of the three heavenly ladies who assist him Meantime, if we are content to read the poereat difficulty to be overcohtforward on the whole, al ii 108, which has not yet been satisfactorily explained, nor is the iery other than simple

With Canto iii and the arrival within the actual portal of hell (though hardly in hell properly so called) we enter upon a fresh subdivision of the poeht up by the first, and one of the , of the allusions to contemporary history hich it abounds The elucidation of these would constantly offer almost hopeless difficulties, were it not for the early commentators, who are often able to explain thee Now and then, however, it happens that they differ, and then the modern student is at a loss This has been in soran rifiuto,” iii 60; so that while we ree of probability accept the more usual view that the allusion is to the abdication of Celestine V, we cannot without further evidence feel so certain about it as we could wish The whole conception of this canto seems to be due to Dante's own invention; only to a nature like his, keenly alive to the eternal distinction between right and wrong, and burning with zeal in the cause of right, could it have occurred to nominy people whose sole fault sees too easily” When, in Canto iv, we pass the river of Acheron, and find ourselves for the first time actually on the border of hell itself, we are conscious at first of an alleviation Melancholy there is, but it is a dignified melancholy, as different from the sordid misery of the wretches we have just left, as the ”noble city” and the green sward enclosed by it are different fro which they have to dwell Both in this and in the second circle we have punishation Virgil at least enjoys the converse of the sages and great o, of recent times; while Francesca is solaced by the perpetual companionshi+p of him for whose sake she has lost her soul Even the penalty which she suffers, of being whirled for ever on the stor Froluttons seated or lying on putrid earth and exposed to lashi+ng rain; the aged in a foolish and weariso on the surface of the foulas their disposition was to fierce wrath or sullen brooding--all these are notthe Styx (Canto viii) we find a further change Thus far the sins punished have differed only in degree froatory They are indeed the simpler forms, so to speak, of the defects common to all animal nature They are the same which, in one of their interpretations, the three symbolical beasts of Canto i denote Henceforth we find sins which are only possible to the higher intelligence of humanity It will be observed, too, that at this point what ins Hitherto we have had eneral i perhaps a little toward the centre, and intersected now and again by a stream Now the City of Dis with minarets and towers rises in front of us, and, as we shall see in future cantos, from this tireat preciseness, even to its ss whose will, as Aquinas says, is obstinately set upon evil, appear for the first tiy, who act as warders of the various circles Virgil, or huer sufficient of hiates of the fiery city and on subsequent occasions he is as helpless, without superior aid, as his disciple and follower

The ninth canto contains a piece of allegory, that involved in the introduction of Medusa and the Furies, which has earned perhaps a greater reputation for obscurity than it deserves, from the fact that Dante himself calls special attention to it

Cantos x and xi are both very i on the history of Florence Those who have read the sketch of that history in the preceding chapters will understand the full force of Farinata's discourse with Dante We have had a brief passage of the sareater length, and with some hly mastered if Dante's scheme of ethics is to be understood It foreh comprehension and retention of it in the memory will be found a wonderful help to a recollection of the whole Cantica

At the conclusion of the discourse in which Dante, speaking by the il, has set forth this ethical syste the brink of the pit until they arrive at a spot where they can reach the lower level The descent is rendered possible by a steep and broken slope of loose rock, which Dante coreat landslip between Trent and Verona, known as the Slavino di Marco[28] Virgil explains that this was due to the ”rending of the rocks” at the tiendary Minotaur, the Cretan monster, part bull, part ested by classical y, who are met with in the division of hell which lies between the wall of the City of Dis and the brink of Malebolge, the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies, and Geryon (as Dante conceives hi to the semi-bestial class In spite of the opinion held by some of the most eminent Dante-scholars, that Dante in his classification of sins does not follow Aristotle's grouping of thenises the first two only, it seems difficult not to see in this, especially when it is taken in connection with expressions scattered throughout his writings, an indication that in the sins of the seventh circle he found the equivalent of the Greek philosopher's ?????t??--the result of giving a free range to the brutal, as distinct from the common animal, impulses

In this seventh circle, too, we first meet with _fire_ as an instrule exception of the suicides, for whonificant chastiseroup, from the heretics in their red-hot tombs to the usurers tormented on one side by the fiery rain, and on the other by the exhalations from the deeper pit, are punished by reat circular plain, ringed with a river of boiling blood in which spoilers, robbers, and ed more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation From one of these, who in life had been the faement they will recover their bodies, like others, but will not be allowed to reassus Here, as in the case of the avaricious and the wrathful, the spirits of other sinners take a part in the infliction of the punishment The wood is inhabited by the souls of those who had wasted their substance in life, and these are constantly chased through it by hounds, withfroe of a great circular plain of sand, upon which flakes of fire are ceaselessly dropping Skirting the wood for some distance they reach the bank of the streain of the wood, now coh it, and crosses the sandy plain in a channel carefully built of shaped stone Virgil takes occasion to explain the origin of the rivers of hell Thick fu fla its bank, and there only, can a way be found As they proceed they find sinners lying prone or running under the fiery shower These are they who had done violence to God, either directly by open blasphe the divinely appointed natural order whereby both the race of mankind and its possessions should increase andthese sinners (Cantos xv and xvi); and Dante talks long with the famous statesman and philosopher, Brunetto Latini, who had been his early friend and adviser, and with sundry great captains and men of renown After this they reach the point where the river falls with a hty roar down to the next level There is no natural il a cord hich he is girt The ht to capture the leopard with it;” and if the leopard denotes the factions of Florence, the cord il has thrown it down they wait a short time, and presently a monster appears whose name we find to be Geryon, and who symbolises fraud or treachery It is perhaps not unnatural that when the power to enforce justice has been cast away, treachery should raise its head This monster draws near the brink (Canto xvii), but before they il allows Dante to walk a few paces to the right, in order that he may take note of the last class of ”violent”

sinners, namely, the usurers These hold an intermediate position between the violent and the treacherous; just as the heretics did between the incontinent and the violent Here again are many Florentines Like the other nisable, and they are only to be known by the ar a feords froil, and both take their place on the croup of Geryon, who bears thehth circle This (Canto xviii), froe, or Evilpits It is divided into ten concentric rings, or circular trenches, separated by a tract of rocky ground Froather that each trench is half a round a mile and a quarter The trenches are spanned by rocky ribs, fores by which the central cavity can be reached Here we find for the first time devils, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, employed as tormentors

The sinners in this circle are those who have been guilty in any way of leading others into sin, deceiving or cheating theratitude or breach of natural ties In the first pit are those who have led woed by fiends In the next lie flatterers immersed in the most loathsome filth

In each Dante notes two examples: one of recent times--indeed, in both cases an acquaintance of his own,--and one taken froend Jason, for his desertion of Hypsipyle and Medea, is the classical exaical persons we have many examples, but the typical flatterer of old ti a character in a play, whom Dante has borrowed froain find fire as the instrument hich the sinners are punished Those who have made money by misuse of sacred offices are buried head doards in holes with their feet projecting, and fire plays about their soles Naturally an opportunity is here presented for soainst the recent unworthy occupants of the See of Ros us to the fourth pit, in which those who have professed to foretell the future march in a dismal procession with their heads turned round so that they look down their own backs The sight of Manto, daughter of Tiresias, suggests a description of the origin of the city of Mantua The last lines of this canto contain one of the ives in this part of the poeree with those of the third, except that in their case the traffic which is punished has to do with secular offices Canto xxi opens with the famous description of the work in the arsenal of Venice, which is introduced in order to afford an i pitch in which sinners of this class are immersed For some reason, which is not very clear, Dante devotes thole cantos to this subdivision of the subject There is no doubt that _baratteria_, peculation or jobbery, was rahout Southern Europe at the tiht against the poet hiain one of ”the torments of heat;” with one exception, that of the evil counsellors in Canto xxv, the last instance in which heat plays a part It would be interesting, by comparison of the various sins into the punishested for its employment in their case

Cantos xxi and xxii are also noteworthy as bringing into pro them actually at work Ten are introduced and naanisation Dante's skill is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the way in which he has surs in whoood quality They are plausible; and their leader, Malacoda, appears at first sight almost friendly It is not until later that his apparent friendliness turns out to be a deliberate atte of Canto xxiii we find the poets exactly half-way through Malebolge, on the rocky table-land, so to call it, which separates the fifth and sixth pits They are quite solitary, for the first ti of any other beings; but still in fear of pursuit from the fiends whom they have just left These do not, however, coun the descent into the sixth pit, and here their power is at an end

In this pit are punished the hypocrites, who go in slow procession clad in cowls of gilded lead Contrary to the usual practice the poets have in this case to descend to the botto all broken away Malacoda, the leader of the fiends in the last _bolgia_, had mentioned one, but (falsely) assured them that they would find a sound one further on He also infores had taken place 1266 years ago on the previous day, but five hours later than the tiives an important ”time-reference” There can be no doubt that the allusion is to the rending of the rocks at the moment of Our Lord's death (_cf_ xii

31-45), which took place at 3 PM, so that we have 10 AM on Easter Eve fixed as the hour at which the poetsthe hypocrites Dante talks with two istrate, at Florence in the year after his birth[30] They belonged to opposite parties, and the double appointment had been one of the many expedients devised to restore peace; but it had not answered, and the tere suspected of having sunk their own differences of opinion, not to conciliate the factions, but to enrich the to theround with three stakes, as though crucified This, it is explained, is Caiaphas; Annas being siil have to leave this pit as they entered it, by cli over the rocks (Canto xxiv); and from the minuteness hich this process is described (even to so characteristic a touch as ”I talked as I went, to show that ht that Dante was not without experience in mountain-craft

The seventh pit is appointed for the punishons are here introduced In some cases the body is reduced to ashes in consequence of the bite, and presently recovers its shape; in others e natures, the sinners the the instruments of torment to their fellows A kind of reckless and brutal joviality seems to characterise thethem are many Florentines, a fact which prompts Dante to an apostrophe full of bitter irony, hich Canto xxvi opens In the following pit a curious change of tone is reeable one--fireflies flitting in suh terrible is in no way loathso, like most of those which have hitherto been described in the present circle The sinners, too, who are mentioned are men who on earth had played heroic parts; the nified, and Dante treats the wicked counsel to others, and so leading theuished and who relate their stories at length are Ulysses (Canto xxvi) and Count Guy of Montefeltro, a great Ghibeline leader (xxvii) The foril's epithet _scelerue which has deservedly becoratifies Dante's curiosity as to the e, apart fro, so far as can be traced, due entirely to the poet's own invention At all events, beyond two or three words in the _Odyssey_, nothing in either classical or estion for it In the case of the Count of Montefeltro, who is alleged to have given treacherous counsel to Boniface VIII, it also appears difficult to understand how the facts, if facts they are, becaives the story, but in language so similar to that of the poe on it as his authority