III

THE DIVINA COMMEDIA THE EMBODIMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF A

TRIUMPHANT LIFE

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.1

The

LET us consider briefly what was the plan of the
Divina Commedia and Dante's aim in writing it,
which, if not to justify, was at least to illustrate, for
warning and example, the ways of God to man. The
higher intention of the poem was to set forth the re-
sults of sin, or unwisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in
this life, and consequently in the life to come, which
is but the continuation and fulfillment of this.
scene accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we
are as truly denizens now as hereafter. The poem is a
diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from
error through repentance to atonement with God.
To make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant
to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and
not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set forth
everything by means of sensible types and images.

To speak thus is adapted to your mind,
Since only from the sensible it learns
What makes it worthy of intellect thereafter.
On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands

To God attributes, and means something else.2

1 "Dante," James Russell Lowell. Among My Books, vol. ii.; Literary Essays, vol. iv. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

2 Par. iv. 40-45 (Longfellow's version).

Whoever has studied medieval art in any of its branches need not be told that Dante's age was one that demanded very palpable and even revolting types. As in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the damned soul must shrivel the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make them wince if not to turn them away from evil-doing. To consider his hell a place of physical torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its inmates meet you in the street every day.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there we must ever be.1

It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appearance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by the grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corruption.2 It is this office of reason which Dante undertakes to perform, by divine commission, in the Inferno. There can be no doubt that he looked upon himself as invested with the prophetic function, and the Hebrew forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consolation and sustainment, certainly set him no example of observing the conventions of good society in dealing

1 Marlowe's Faustus. "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell" (Paradise Lost, iv. 75). In the same way, ogni dove in cielo e Paradiso (Par. iii. 88, 89).

2 Purg. xix. 7-33.

with the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of good society were not altogether those of this world in any generation. He would have defined it as meaning "the peers" of Philosophy, "souls free from wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed with genius and memory."1 Dante himself had precisely this endowment, and in a very surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see and to show what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw clearly enough that the Divine justice did at length overtake Society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. "It is Thou," he says sternly, "who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of universal Nature 2 from before the beginning of the world.” 3 Accordingly the highest reason, typified in his guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compassion to the judgments of God, and again embraces him and calls

1 Convito, Tr. ii. c. 16.

2 La natura universale, cioè Iddio. (Convito, Tr. iii. c. 4.)
8 Inf. iii. 7, 8.

the mother that bore him blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone among the other dogs. This latter case shocks our modern feelings the more rudely for the simple pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer when asked who he was, "Thou seest I am one that weeps." It is also the one that makes most strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindictiveness,2 and it may count for what it is worth. We are not greatly concerned to defend him on that score, for he believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and whoever hindered or jostled it, whether willfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God's law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.

Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a wonderful

1 Inf. viii. 40.

2 "I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as the passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of the errors (Convito, Tr. iv. c. 1). "Wherefore, in my judgment, as he who defames a worthy man ought to be avoided by people and not listened to, so a vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be hunted out by all" (Convito, Tr. iv. c. 29).

self-reliance and originality in his genius. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry.

L'acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse.1

He discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, but that of any man might be epical; that the way to heaven was not outside the world, but through it. Living at a time when the end of the world was still looked for as imminent,2 he believed that the second coming of the Lord was to take place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of man; that his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. A poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a life as his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must have a meaning in it which few men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to penetrate. That its allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with which the modern mind has little sympathy, we should no more think of denying than of whitewashing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we may nature, which is also full of double meanings, either as picture or as parable, either for the simple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of the spiritual world. We may take it as we may history, either for its picturesqueness or its moral, either for the variety of its figures or as a witness to that perpetual presence of God in his creation of which Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had seen and suffered much, but it is only to the man who is himself of value that

1 Par. ii. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast:

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo.

2 Convito, Tr. iv. c. 15.