=vrTfr'Wn; , , , a3ar^4l . , PGi ii443 I Ov^ l^li 3 1924 074 589 106 All books are subject to recall after Olin/Kroch Library DATE DUE two weeks arc '"' 1 inncUaii* \ysi^&s^sis^ pjB>a™ ALiAM tiiiiiiiijiff 0^ GAVLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. EXILES OF ETERNITY * Le Intelligenze che sono in esilio della superna patria, le quali filosofare non possono; perocchi amore 6 in loro del tutto spento, e a filosofare, come eik detto i, 6 necessario amore. Jl Convito, III. 13. y.f Vi.' Crtles of eternity AN EXPOSITION OF DANTE'S INFERNO BY THE REV. JOHN S. CARROLL, M.A. THIRD EDITION HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO .^^"^ TO MY CONGREGATION ' n mio bel San Giovanni ' Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924074589106 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION I TAKE the opportunity of the issue of a new edition to express my gratitude for the kindly reception given to this volume. My hope of completing the exposition of the great poem is now fulfilled in the two volumes Prisoners of Hope and In Patria. During the course of my work on the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, I have seen no reason to think that the expository method which I adopted in the Eodles is mistaken. The new edition is therefore issued without alteration, because, while there are indeed many points of detail which I could have wished to change, I adhere to the substance of the exposition as a whole. There are, however, two subjects which !^ further study has made clearer to my mind; and although perhaps they are not strictly relevant to a Preface, I venture to insert them here in the hope that some light may be thrown on points of diffi- culty. 1. The first is the place which the Virgin Mary occupies in Dante's salvation. This, of course, is obvious in the Pwrgatorio : on every Terrace of the Mount one of her virtues is held up as the ideal. Still more obvious is it in the great prayer which St. Bernard addresses to her on behalf of Dante in the PREFACE ^ closing canto of the Paradiso. One is apt to forget, however, that it is by the same grace of the Virgin that the poet is able to complete his terrible journey- through the lost world. It is not merely that she is the ' gentle Lady in Heaven ' who, through S. Lucia and Beatrice, called Virgil from Limbo to be his ,\ guide. At one critical point Virgil's guidance con- spicuously failed — at the gate of Dis, the City of Heresy. The natural Reason is powerless to vanquish the fiends of doubt and unlock the mysteries of Faith. Hence a mysterious Messenger from Heaven is sent to open the gate with a rod. I have allowed the exposition of this on pp. 163-165 to stand ; but I wish now to make the suggestion that the Messenger, instead of being Michael, the Archangel of Judgment, is Gabriel, the Angel of the Annunciation, and that the rod in his right hand, instead of being a mere general symbol of authority, represents specifically the power of the Virgin Mary over the demons. The grounds for the suggestion are as follow : — (1) The Messenger is described as del del messo, 'sent from heaven' {Inf. ix. 85). In the lost world the names of the holiest are never mentioned — God, Christ, Mary. An Angel's name would be similarly avoided. Now messo del cielo corresponds to the Vulgate of Luke i. 26 : ' missus est angelus Gabrihel a Deo in civitatem Galilaese cui nomen Nazareth.' It would be quite after Dante's manner to indicate Gabriel by this phrase, which avoids the use of his name and of God's, as too holy for that abode of eternal sin. ^ (2) While the name Gabriel is thus reverentially PREFACE avoided, its signification is indicated in the power with which the Messenger sweeps across the Stygian Fen like a tempest which rends the forest (0. ix. 64 f.). St. Bernard, in his first sermon on the Missus est of Luke i. 26, says Gabriel means Fortitudo Dei, 'Strength of God,' because he announced Christ the Power of God, and strengthened the Virgin in her shrinking from the great tidings, saying, 'Fear not.' St. Gregory regards it as a name appropriate to one whose office is to announce the advent of Him who is 'virtutum Dominus,' 'powerful in battle to the vanquishing of the powers of the air.' (3) The reference to the Virgin lies in the rod which the Messenger bears in his right hand. The word used is verghetta, a diminutive of verga, the Italian form of virga, a rod. Any one familiar with mediaeval theology will remember the quaint play of pious fantasy which such saints as Bernard and Bonaventura wove around the words virgo and virga. The virga of Aaron, which budded miraculously (Numbers xvii.), became a familiar symbol of the Virgin Mother. St. Bernard quotes Isaiah xi. 1 : 'Et egredietur virga de radice Jesse, et flos de radice ejus ascendet,' and adds that the virga is the Virgin, and the flos the Virgin's Child {Missus est, ii. 5). St. Bonaventura revels in the pious fancy: 'Est autem Maria virga fumea, virga lignea, virga aurea, virga f errea ' — identifying Mary with the various rods mentioned in Scripture; 'virga fumea in nostra conversione : virga florida in nostra conversatione: virga aurea in nostra contemplatione: virga ferrea in nostra defensione.' Obviously, it is the virga ferrea which suits the passage befpre us. PREFACE Mary, says this saint, is a rod of iron to the demons, driving them away from men. This is precisely the use of the verghetta in the hand of the Messenger sent from Heaven. The demons that thronged the gate of the City of Heresy and refused the Pilgrims entrance, vanish before the virga, and the gate stands open. The rod, therefore, seems to me to represent some gracious help of the Virgin Mary which Dante was conscious of having received in some critical hour of doubt, when confronted with the mysteries of Faith, which Reason, in the person of Virgil, was powerless to penetrate. If the Messenger was the Angel of the Annunciation, the help may have been specially connected in Dante's mind with the Incar- nation ; and the use of the diminutive verghetta may imply that the Virgin had no need to put forth the fulness of her power: a little rod was enough to scatter the fiends of doubt. If to any reader the suggestion seems too ingenious to be true, he little knows the almost infinite subtlety of Dante's mind. It is just before the appearance of the Messenger from Heaven that he pauses in the narrative to call the reader's attention to the dark utterance, ' the doctrine that conceals itself Beneath the veil of the mysterious verses.' (0. ix. 61-63.) 2. The second point is the spiritual correspondence between soul and body — a correspondence which runs through the entire poem, and is the explanation of certain apparent anomalies. For example, when Dante attempted to embrace his friend Casella on the shores of Mount Purgatory, his arms failed thrice to enfold the 'empty shade' (Purg. ii. 79-81). But PREFACE in the Inferno the bodies of the lost are gross and palpable : Ugolino gnaws the head of his enemy as a dog a bone, Dante tears handfuls of hair off a traitor's head, and grapples with the shaggy body of Lucifer himself. Obviously, the bodies are of different ] kinds ; and this and naany other differences are due I to the great spiritual law that the soul is the efiGcient cause of the body, and determines its eternal state. (1) Properly speaking, the souls in all three divi- sions, being in an intermediate state, have no bodies. Dante, of course, was well aware that, according to the teaching of the Church, the soul exists without the body until the resurrection day. Hence during the intermediate state the 'sensitive powers' are ' dumb ' — not destroyed, but held in suspense in the soul as in their principle, awaiting the restoration of the body as their instrument (Purg. xxv. 79-84). But the dramatic necessities of the poem required that the souls be visualized in some manner of corporeal forms. Intermediate bodies are therefore given them ; and these bodies are represented as conform- ing to the law by which the resurrection body cor- responds to the moral and spiritual condition of the soul. (2) What this law is will best be seen if we begin with the souls of the saints in Paradise. According to the degree of their holiness, these souls will inform their resurrection bodies with four super- natural powers and qualities, named by Aquinas zm- passibilitas, subtilitas, agilitas, and claritas. They are impassible, superior to all suffering, increasing the eternal joy of the soul. They are subtle, having PREFACE where assumed it, I have not stated the law as a whole; and, while a Preface may not be the most appropriate place for it, I am glad that the issue of a new edition gives me the opportunity of supplying a certain framework of spiritual law inside of which the conception of the poem, from beginning to end, gains meaning and lucidity. JOHN S. CARROLL. Glasgow, 1911. PREFACE The sub-title of this volume indicates sufficiently its scope and purpose. While there exist many admirable essays, commentaries, and general intro- ductions to the study of Dante, I am not aware of anything in the way of an exposition, canto by canto, as simple and popular as the nature of the subject allows. Such an exposition it has been my aim to supply. A glance will show that I have written, not for Dante scholars, but for that large and in- creasing class of general readers who wish to make acquaintance with the great Italian poet, but find almost insuperable difficulties, partly in his naystical symbolism and partly in the innumerable references to contemporary men and events, now alraost en- tirely forgotten. While it is vain to pretend that these difficulties can be charmed out of existence, I have tried to make them as little of a stumbling- block as possible. My chief aim has been to bring out the general scope of Dante's ethical teaching. For this purpose I have avoided entangling either myself or the reader in mere niceties, ingenuities, Tii f viii PREFACE and intricacies of interpretation, in which too frequently Dante scholars are tempted to forget the broad outlines of their master's meaning. To many readers the punishments of the Inferno are little more than so many arbitrary and meaningless tortures, suggested by the play of a powerful but savage mediaeval imagination ; and I have tried to remove this utterly false impression. Once we understand Dante's symbolism, his terrible pictures of pain are seen to be the visible, material, and sym- bolic forms in which he shadows forth the natural and inevitable moral and spiritual issues of the various sins. Hell as an external place may or may not exist ; but he compels us to feel its reality as a state of the wicked and impenitent soul, by showing us the awful recoil of its own evil on itself. The interpretation given has no special claim to originality. On the contrary, I have regarded it as part of the duty of an expositor of Dante to avail himself as widely as possible of help from previous workers in the same field, and to be more anxious to discover the true meaning than to set forth any private interpretation of his own. I have to some extent acknowledged my obligations in the footnotes, but of course it is impossible to name every author to whom one is indebted. Vernon's Readings on the Inferno and Toynbee's Dante Dic- tionary have been specially helpful. The references PREFACE ix to Dante's own works are from Dr. Moore's Oxford edition. Speaking generally, the translation of the Commedia quoted is Longfellow's, of the Convito Miss Hillard's, of the Vita Nuova Rossetti's, and of the De Monorchia Church's ; but I have not thought it necessary in every instance to keep rigidly to the ipsissima verba of these versions. I have also frequently availed myself of Father Rickaby's Aquinas Ethicus, a version of the prin- cipal portions of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica ; and of Selections from the first nine books of the Croniche Florentine of Giovanni Villani, trans- lated by Rose E. Selfe, and edited by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. Constant reference has been made throughout the exposition to the writings of Dante's great ethical authorities, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas ; but my chief aim has been to make Dante his own interpreter. His principal works are so \ interwoven with one another that any satisfactory interpretation of the Inferno must bear a constant reference, not only to the Purgatorio and Paradiso, but also to the Vita Nuova, the Convito, the De Monarchia, and the Letters. One value of this refer- ence is that interest is enlisted in Dante's works as a whole. Whether my hope of completing the exposition of the poem be ever fulfilled, it would be a pleasure to think that the present volume has induced some readers to make acquaintance with the infinitely X PREFACE j- fairer and nobler universe of spirit unjolded in the Purgatorio and Paradiso. No man understands Dante until he has climbed with him the 'longer stairway.' JOHN S. CARROLL. Innispail, Newlands, Glasgow, November 1903. CONTENTS PAGB Dante Aliohibbi ..... xvii The Moral and Physical STBrcTUBE of the Inferno, WITHDIAOBAM ..... Ixii CHAPTER I The Savage Wood and the Three Wild Beasts . 1 CHAPTER II The Three Blessed Ladies .... 34 CHAPTER III Ante-Hell of the Neutrals . . . .46 CHAPTER IV Circle I.— The Limbo op the Unbaptizbd . . 61 CHAPTER V Circle II.— The Sensual .... 83 xi xii CONTENTS PAOB CHAPTER VI CiBOLB III.— The Gluttonous . . . .100 CHAPTER VII GibClb IV.— Misbbs and Pbodigaxs . . . 110 CHAPTER VIII Circle V.— Styx: Thb Wbathpul and the Sullen 126 CHAPTER IX CiBCLE VI.— The City of Dis: Hebbtios . . 137 1. The Narrative CHAPTER X CiBCLB VI.— The City oe Dis : Hbbetics . . 153 2. The Interpretation CHAPTER XI Cibolb VI.— Classification of Sins in the Inpebno CHAPTER XII OiBCLB Vll.— The Violent against Neighbours . 182 CONTENTS xiii PAQE CHAPTER XIII CiBOLB VII.— The Violent against Themselves . 199 CHAPTER XIV CiBCLB VII.— The Violent against God, Nature AND Art ...... 217 CHAPTER XV Cibcle VII.— The Violent against Art, and the Casting Away op the Cobd . . -246 CHAPTER XVI Circle VIII.— Malebolge : The Fraudulent . 260 Bolgia I. Betrayers of Women Bolgia II. Flatterers CHAPTER XVII Circle VIII.— Malebolge : The Fraudulent . 278 Bolgia III. Simoniacs CHAPTER XVIII CiBCLB VIII.— Malebolge : The Fbaudulent , 292 Bolgia IV. Diviners xiv CONTENTS FAGB CHAPTER XIX Circle VIII.— Malbbolge : The Fraudulent . 306 Bolgia V, Barrators 1. The Narrative CHAPTER XX Circle VIII.— Malbbolge: The Fraudulent . 317 Bolgia Y. Barrators 2. The Interpretation CHAPTER XXI Circle VIII.— Malebolqb: The Fraudulent . 330 Bolgia VI. Hypocrites CHAPTER XXII Circle VIII.— Malbbolge : The Fraudulent . 342 Bolgia VII. Thieves CHAPTER XXIII Circle VIII.— Malbbolge : The Fraudulent 861 Bolgia VIII. Evil Counsellors CHAPTER XXIV Circle VIII.— Malbbolge : The Fraudulent . 382 Bolgia IX. Schismatics CONTENTS XV PAGE CHAPTER XXV Circle VIII.— Malebolgb : The Fbaudhlknt . 403 BolgiaX. Falsifiers CHAPTER XXVI Circle IX.— The Lake of Coottus : Traitors . 420 I. Ca'ma : Traitors to their Kindred CHAPTER XXVII Circle IX.— The Lake op Coottus : Traitors , 434 II. Antenora : Traitors to their Country CHAPTER XXVIII Circle IX.— The Lake of Cocttxjs : Traitors . 452 III. Tolomea : Traitors to Friends and Guests CHAPTER XXIX Circle IX.— The Lake of Cocytus : Traitors . 461 IV. Giudecca : Traitors to Lords and Benefactors CHAPTER XXX The Contkesion of Dante . . . .481 INDEX ,.,,,,. 495 'Dante, pacer of the shore Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, Unbltten by its whirring sulphur-spume — Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope Into a darkness quieted by hope ; Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye In gracious twilights where His chosen lie.' Browning's Sordello. xvl DANTE ALIGHIERI One of the principal difficulties in writing a life of uncertainty of Dante arises from the phenomenal nature of his mind. There is no poet of the first rank whose writings are so full of his own personality: the / history of Florence, of Italy, for that matter of the universe, visible and invisible, crystallizes round himself and his fortunes. Our first thought is that this will make the writing of his life an easy task, but it is far otherwise. The very structure of Dante's mind half reveals and half conceals the. facts. ' His nature,' says Lowell, ' was one in which, as in Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was continually streamed over by the northern lights of mysticism.'^ No man ever saw facts with clearer eyes, but also no man ever had a more tantalizing genius for concealing them under a veil of allegory. The result is that while his writings are full to over- flowing of the events of his life, it is often impossible to say with certainty what exactly the events are, — how much is fact, how much figure. A further difficulty springs from the difference X between his contemporaries' estimate of Dante and our own, a difference which we are too apt to forget. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that to us his I Essay on Dante, Among my Books. b xviii DANTE ALIGHIERI age lives through him and through him alone. Some obscure Florentine becomes immortal because Dante names him, a Council meeting interesting because Dante was present, a battle memorable because Dante fought at it. But of all this his contemporaries knew nothing. No prophetic instinct warned them that the exile, driven about like a battered hulk by • the dry winds of poverty,' was one concerning whom future generations would ransack all Italy to dis- cover one little fact, and that wherever his feet had wandered would become a place of pilgrimage. No one dreamed that it would be worth while to preserve any record of his deeds or journeyings. When, a generation or two later, men began to suspect the greatness of the spirit that had walked amongst them, it was too late : the facts were irre- coverably gone, like the Sybil's leaves upon the wind, and little remained but the myths and legends which gather round every great name. These, begun by the inveterate romancer Boccaccio, have been handed down as history from commentator to commentator, until now it is almost impossible to disentangle fact from fiction. 'A complete bio- graphy of the poet,' declares Scartazzini, ' free from gaps and properly rounded off, cannot be written in the existing state of scientific research.'^ On the other hand, however, it is quite possible to exagger- ate the importance of this uncertainty. The larger outlines of the life are not doubtful ; and, after all, the real life of Dante consists far less in its external events than in the thoughts and emotions which 1 A Companion to Dante (English Translation), p. 30. DANTE ALIGHIERI xix they roused in Ms miiwi and soul. It is only the i larger outlines which can be here attempted, especi- \ ally as these become visible, more or less dimly, ) through the veil of his own writings. Dante — or, to give the full form, Durante — Alighieri Dante's Birth : was born in Florence in the year 1265. The month *^ was May, but the exact day is uncertain. In the Paradiso (xxii. 106-117) he tells us that he 'first felt the Tuscan air ' under the sign of Gemini, to which he owed all his genius, ' whatsoever it may be.' In 1265 it has been calculated that the sun entered this sign on May 18, and left it on June 17. Dante's birthday therefore lies between these two dates; and the 30th of May has been suggested as being the festa of Lucia, his patron saint, who comes to I his aid more than once in the Commedia} Of his ancestors almost nothing is known beyond what he Ancestors : himself tells us. In the Heaven of Mars he meets (e. 1090-1147). his crusading forefather, Cacciaguida, and confesses that even in Paradise he could not restrain a thrill of pride for 'our poor nobility of blood.' This ' Cacciaguida was his great-great-grandfather, who joined the Emperor, Conrad in., in the disastrous Second Crusade for which St. Bernard was re- sponsible, was knighted by him for his noble deeds, and laid down his life for Holy Land. He gives Dante an outline of his life : ' In your ancient Baptistery at once Chrietian and Cacciaguida I became. Moronto was my brother and Eliseo ; My wife came to me from Val di Pado, ' Inf. ii. 94-117 ; Purg. ix. 49-63. St. Bernard points out her place in the Rose of Paradise (Par. xzxii. 136-138). See also pp. 39, 40. XX DANTE ALIGHIERI And from her thy surname was derived. I followed afterward the Emperor Conrad, And he begirt me of his chivalry, So much by good work came I into grace. After him I went 'gainst the iniquity Of that law, whose people doth usurp Your just possession, through the Pastor's fault. There was I at the hands of that foul folk Unswathed of the deceitful world. The love of which full many a soul befouls, I And came from martyrdom unto this peace.' ^ Cacciaguida's wife is supposed to have been one of the Alighieri of Ferrara, and it is interesting to know that it is from her Dante's surname comes.* From the mention of Eliseo, Boccaccio asserts that he was descended from the Elisei, an ancient Roman family, but of this there is no proof. When Dante asks for further information of his ancestors, Caccia- guida declines to give it : ' SufQ.ce it of my forbears to hear this ; Who they were, and whence they hither came. Silence is more honourable than speech.'^ It is impossible to say with any certainty the reason for this strange reticence. It may be a confession of Dante's own ignorance; but from its context it seems rather the silence of humility which befits Paradise. From other passages it appears certain that Dante believed himself to be of the ancient » Par. XV. 134-148. 2 The derivation of Alighieri, or Aldighieri, has exercised the in- genuity of commentators. Federn says confidently it is 'a German name, and most probably derived from "Aldiger," which has about the same significance as the word "Shakespeare," meaning "the ruler of the spear."' Others derive it from alga, the sea- weed in which the swampy vaUey of the Po abounds. 3 Par. xvi. 43-45. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxi Roman stock ;^ but Cacciaguida refuses to encour- age this pride of blood. It is probably as a warning against it that he tells him how his own son, Dante's great-grandfather, Alighiero, has been circling the - Terrace of Pride on Mount Purgatory for more than a hundred years.^ The only other member of the house named is one of whom there was no tempta- tion to be proud — a certain Geri del Bello, a first cousin of Dante's father, a quarrelsome man who stirred up strife among the Sacchetti, and was stabbed for his pains by a member of that family. In the Bolgia of the Schismatics in the Eighth Circle of Hell, Virgil saw him pointing threateningly at Dante for having left his death unavenged.* Of his parents Dante makes no mention whatever, His Parents, except in the most indirect way. His father is said to have been a notary of Florence. He was twice married, and Dante was »the son of his first wife, Bella, of whose family nothing whatever seems to be certainly known. A single line in the Commedia is her only memorial.* The great and decisive event of Dante's boyhood^ Beatrice and \i you&, ai^ ^^\y_ ]E'^''^^?°.^~??Aeedi of hiswhple life 'nuovo! — was his love of Beatrice, narrated in his first work, i^^VUa Nuova. The title indicates, doubtless, the new existence into which this great passion ushered him. The story is told with a peculiar ethereal and dreamlike purity and beauty; and indeed it is 1 Inf. XV. 73-78, etc. 2 Par. xv. 91-96. s Inf. xxix. 1-36. See page 396. * Inf. viii. 45. Comp. Conv. i. 13, where, speaking of the benefits he had received from his native tongue, he says: 'this my language (FoZflrare) Was the uniter of my parents, who spoke with it, . . . and thus was one of the causes of my being.' xxii DANTE ALIGHIERI largely composed of dreams. It consists of a series of poems interpreted by a prose commentary. Nor- ton has shown that the book is most symmetrically constructed, and falls into three divisions of ten poems each.^ The first (sections i.-xvi.) relates the beginning of his love and its extraordinary effects upon himself. He saw this ' youngest of the Angels ' for the first time when she was at the beginning, and he at the end, of their ninth year. In his eighteenth year he met her in the street, and for the first time received her salutation. It threw him into a dream of terror and of joy. Love, a lord of terrible aspect outwardly but full of ioy within, appeared to him in a cloud of fire, bearing in his arms 'the Lady of the salutation,' asleep, and covered with a blood-red cloth. In his hand he held Dante's own heart which was all on fire, and, awaking the lady, he forced her to eat it, which she did as one in fear. ' Then, having waited again a space, all his joy was turned into most bitter weeping ; and as he wept he gathered the lady into his arms, and it seemed to me that he went with her up towards heaven : whereby such a great anguish came upon me that my light slumber could not endure through it, but was suddenly broken.' ^ It is obviously his first premonition of the early death of Beatrice. The dream made him a poet : he related it in the first Sonnet of The New Lifyj which he sent to the famous poets of the day for their interpretation. One of the answers came in a Sonnet from Guide 1 See Essay 'On the Structure of the Vita Nuova' in Charles E. Norton's Translation of The New Life, pp. 129-134. * V. N. iii. The passages quoted are from Rossetti's translation. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxiii Cavalcanti, whom Dante henceforth called ' the first among his friends.'^ To conceal his love he tells us that he used several ladies as screens, and with such un- happy success that Beatrice, hearing rumours which ' seemed to misfame him of vice,' denied him her salu- tation, and even mocked him at a marriage festivity. The second division of the Vita Nuova extends from section xvii. to section xxx. The refusal hy Beatrice of her salutation which had hitherto been his highest bliss, made him resolve to fall back upon another beatitude which could never fail : he begins ' new matter ' — materia nuova — ' more noble than the foregoing.' He has spoken sufficiently of himself and his condition; he will henceforth speak only of his lady's praise. But mingling with this praise come renewed premonitions of her early death. A sickness falls upon himself, and, musing on the frail thread of his own life, the thought suddenly came : ' Of necessity it must be that the most gentle Beatrice shall some time die.' In the delirium of his sickness he has a vision of her passing to Paradise. ' And at the first, it seemed to me that I saw certain faces of women with their hair loosened, which called out to me, "Thou shalt surely die " ; after the which, other terrible and unknown appearances said unto me, " Thou art dead." At length, as my phantasy held on in its wanderings, I came to be I knew not where, and to behold a throng of dishevelled ladies wonder- fully sad, who kept going hither and thither weeping. ^ Bossetti in Dante and his Circle translates three of these replies : Guido Cavalcanti's (p. 131), Cino da Fistoia's (p. 183), and Dante da Maiano's (p. 198). The last tells Dante to consult a doctor for such delirium. xxiv DANTE ALIGHIERI Then the sun went out, so that the stars showed themselves, and they were of such a colour that I knew they must be weeping: and it seemed to me that the birds fell dead out of the sky, and that there were great earthquakes. With that, while I wondered in my trance, and was filled with a grievous fear, I conceived that a certain friend came unto me and said : " Hast thou not heard? She that was thine excellent lady hath been taken out of life." Then I began to weep very piteously; and not only in mine imagination, but with mine eyes, which were wet with tears. And I seemed to look towards Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwa,rds, having before them an exceedingly white cloud : and these angels were singing together gloriously, and the words of their song were these : " Osanna in excelsis " ; and there was no more that I heard. Then my heart that was so full of love said unto me : " It is true that our lady lieth dead " ; and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding- place. And so strong was this idle imagining, that it made me to behold nay lady in death ; whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil ; and who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, " I have attained to look on the beginning of peace." ' ^ It was not long till the vision was fulfilled. A canzone which he was writing in her praise is suddenly broken ofE with the open- ing words of the Lamentations of Jeremiah: Quom,odo 1 V, Xf. xxiii. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxv sedet sola civitas plena populo ! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium t 'I was still occupied with this poem (having composed thereof only the above written stanza,) when the Lord God of justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself, that she might be glorious under the banner of that blessed Queen Mary, whose name had always a deep reverence in the words of holy Beatrice.' ^ The final sections (xxxi.-xliii.) take up a new The Donna y^ theme — nuova materia — the various phases of his '• J}^ grief, the greatest grief _of all being a temptation to '^'l,t, $3^ forget it : ' last regret, regret can die ! ' One day %;J.^4«<* struggling with his sorrow, and looking up in fear \f':"'"j^'^"'- lest he was observed, ' I saw,' he says, ' a young and "' i. 'J'l-^ very beautiful lady, who was gazing upon me from a window with a gaze full of pity, so that the very sum of pity appeared gathered together in her.' She reminded him of his own ' most noble lady who was wont to be of a like paleness.' His eyes began to be gladdened with her company overmuch, and he cursed them bitterly for their inconstancy. The ^X^ struggle was decided by another vision : ' There rose up in me on a certain day, about the ninth hour, a strong visible phantasy, wherein I seemed to behold the most gracious Beatrice, habited in that crimson raiment which she had worn when I had first beheld her ; also she appeared to me of the same tender age as then. Whereupon I fell into a deep thought of her; and my memory ran back, according to the order of time, unto all those matters in the which she had borne a part ; and my heart began painfully * V. N. xxix. XXVI DANTE ALIGHIERI Beatrice ■\ Fortinari. to repent of the desire by which it had so basely let itself be possessed during so many days, contrary to the constancy of reason. And then, this evil desire being quite gone from me, all my thoughts turned again unto their excellent Beatrice. And I say most truly that from that hour I thought constantly of her with the whole humbled and ashamed heart.' "■ I A final vision determined him to say no more until he could write of her what had never been written ' of any woman. The reference is, without doubt, to the Divina Commedia? It is impossible to enter at any length into the problem of the identity of Beatrice ; each reader will decide it according to the general conception which he forms of Dante and his works. The idea, how- ever, that she was a mere spiritual abstraction is / quite inconsistent with Dante's genius. However 1 much he might allegorize, it lay in the very nature of his mind to start from some concrete and literal fact.^ Tradition, following Boccaccio and Dante's own son, Pietro, has identified her with Beatrice, daughter of Polco Portinari, a wealthy and much esteemed citizen of Florence ; and we know that in 1287 this lady married Simone de' Bardi, and died on June 8, 1290, at the age of twenty-four. Whether it was Beatrice Portinari or another, it is plain that from the first Dante's intensely mystical imagination began to invest her with strange symbolic meanings 1 V. N. xl. 2 The passage is quoted on p. 43. ' Federn (Dante and his Time, 222 n.) points out that ' it Beatrice were a solemn and allegoric name, Dante never would have used the tender abbreviation of "Bice," and spoken of her in the same breath with " Vanna" (Jennie), Guido's love,' as he does in Sonnet xiv. of the Vita Nuova (section xxiv.) and in Sonnet xxxii. See also Par, vii. 14. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxvii and correspondences. In her, he says, Homer's Her Trans- words are fulfilled : ' She seemed not to be the daughter of mortal man, but of God.' Her saluta- tion destroyed every evil passion : ' When she ap- peared in any place, it seemed to me, by the hope of her excellent salutation, that there was no man mine enemy any longer ; and such warmth of charity came upon me that most certainly in that moment I would have pardoned whosoever had done me an injury.' ' This excellent lady came at last into such favour with all men, that when she passed anywhere folk ran to behold her ; which thing was a deep joy to me: and when she drew near unto any, so much truth and simpleness entered into his heart, that he dared neither to lift his eyes nor to return her salutation : and unto this many who have felt it can bear witness. She went along crowned and clothed with humility, showing no whit of pride in all that she heard and saw : and when she had gone by, it was said of many, "This is not a woman, but one of the beautiful angels of Heaven"; and there were some that said, "This is surely a miracle; blessed be the Lord, who hath power to work thus marvellously."'^ Her death conapleted the process ' of spiritual idealization — she is transformed into ' a miracle whose only root is the Holy Trinity.' He explains why the number nine is so friendly to Beatrice and Beatrice : ' I say, then, that according to the division nine. of time in Italy, her most noble spirit departed from among us in the first hour of the ninth day of the month; and according to the division of time in * V. N. xi., xxvi. xxviii DANTE ALIGHIERI Syria, in the ninth month of the year : seeing that Tismim, which with us is October, is there the first month. Also she was taken from among us in that year of our reckoning (to wit, of the years of our Lord) in which the perfect number was nine times multiplied within that century wherein she was born into the world : which is to say, the thirteenth century of Christians. 'And touching the reason why this number was so closely allied unto her, it may peradventure be this. According to Ptolemy, (and also to the Christian verity,) the revolving heavens are nine ; and accord- ing to the common opinion among astrologers, these nine heavens together have influence over the earth. Wherefore it would appear that this number was thus allied unto her for the purpose of signifying that, at her birth, all these nine heavens were at perfect unity with each other as to their influence. This is one reason that may be brought : but more narrowly considering, and according to the infallible truth, this number was her own self: that is to say, by similitude. As thus. The number three is the root of the number nine ; seeing that without the inter- position of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit : the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which, being Three, are also One :— this lady was accompanied by the number nine to the end that men might clearly perceive her to be a nine, DANTE ALIGHIERI xxix that is, a miracle, whose only root is the Holy Trinity. It may be that a more subtle person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtlety : but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.' ^ The ' more subtle person^' is perhaps one of Dante's commentators. Those writers who regard Beatrice as a mere II Conuito— abstraction, say for Theology or the Church, appeal ' ^^^^ to the Convifo, Dante's second great worki which undoubtedly has an intimate and mysterious con- nection with the Vita Nuova. When it was written is very uncertain — probably at various dates during the earlier years of his exile.* Dante's original in- tention was to take fourteen of his canzoni and write on each a commentary, thus forming, as one says, a kind of treasury of universal knowledge in fourteen books. The plan was never carried beyond the fourth. Book i. being an introduction to the whole. It is called the Convito or Banquet, because it \ was Danie's wish to spread a feast of wisdonijj bread of the angejs,"^ for the multitiide, the unlearned crowd, who else must 'feed in common with the sheep.' It is, in short, as Wicksteed says, 'an attempt to throw into popular form the matter of the Aristotelian treatises of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas,' and is therefore of the first ingi- portance for the interpretation of the Commedia, which cannot be fully understood without it. As its relation to already said, its relation to the Vita Nuova is at once nuova. ' V. N. XXX. For Tismin, or Tismim, as Rossetti has it, Moore reads Tisrin, the Syrian month Tixryn, as given by the Arabian astronomer, Alfraganus (see Toynbee's Dante Dictionary). ' See, however, Miss S^illard's discussion of the chronology in the introduction to her translation of the Convito (pp. xvii-xxxiv). XXX DANTE ALIGHIERI close and mysterious. We saw that Dante after the death of Beatrice was tempted to find consolation in the donna pietosa, the young and beautiful lady who looked at him from a window with eyes of pity, and that after a severe struggle with himself he turned away from the thought of her as a base treachery to Beatrice. Now, had he written nothing more of this Lady of Pity, we should have had little doubt of these three things : that she was a real woman ; that he regarded his desire for her as base ; and that he abandoned her society. But in the Convito he denies all three : she was not a real woman, but Philosophy; so far from being evil, Philosophy is Divine ; and instead of abandoning her, he gave himself up delightedly to the most passionate love of her. He tells us that what moves him to say this is ' the fear of infamy ' — the infamy of passion and inconstancy. Many having accused him of having ' changed from his first love,' he judges that his best defence is simply to tell who this lady is who had so changed him. ' I say and affirm that the lady with whom I was enamoured, after my first love, was the most beautiful and most virtuous daughter of the Emperor of the Universe, to whom Pythagoras gives the name of Philosophy.' ' This Lady is Philo- sophy, who is truly a lady full of sweetness, adorned with virtue, wonderful in knowledge, glorious in liberty.' 'God, who comprehends all things, sees nothing so fair as when he looks upon the place where this Philosophy is. For Philosophy is a loving use of Wisdom ; which exists above all in God, because in Him is supreme Wisdom, and DANTE ALIGHIERI xxxi supreme Love, and supreme Power. . . . Oh, most noble and most excellent heart, that hath com- munion with the Bride of the Emperor of Heaven I and not Bride only but most delectable Sister and Daughter ! ' ^ How this can be in any sense a descrip- tion of the Lady of Pity in The New Life, from whom Dante tore himself away as from a temptress, it is impossible to say. It is, however, argued by some writers that if this donna pietosa is an abstraction for Philosophy and nothing more, Beatrice herself is equally an abstraction for Theology and nothing more ; and that the sin which Beatrice on the top of Mount Purgatory drives home so sternly on Dante's conscience, is simply that of abandoning Theology for the study of worldly philosophy and science.* Against this, however, is the fact that while Dante in the Convito freely and explicitly allegorizes the pitiful Lady of the window, there is not a syllable of a similar treatment of Beatrice. It is likely to remain one of the many unsolved problems of Dante's life and character. Perhaps, as Lowell sug- gests, this transformation of the Lady of Pity into Philosophy was an illusion of memory. ' Such ideal- izations have a very subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of thought and feeling is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the past. . . . Dante in his exposition of the Canzoni must have been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of influ- ences. He would try to reconcile so far as he con- 1 Conv. 1. 2; ti. 16; iii. 1, etc. • Purg. X3UE. S5-xxxi. 90; xxxili. 85-90. See pp. 11-U. Education. xxxii DANTE ALIGHIERI scientiouBly could his present with his past. This he could do by means of the allegorical interpretation.' Gardner thinks that on the top of Mount Purgatory he dropped this delusive allegorical veil of self-justi- fication, and at last confessed the naked truth.^ Dante's The education of D^nte is involved in a mystery almost as great. His writings are a perfect mine of mediaeval learning. ' He anticipated,' says Hettinger, 'the most pregnant developments of Catholic doc- trine, mastered its subtlest distinctions, and treated its hardest problems with almost faultless accuracy. Were all the libraries in the world destroyed, and the Holy Scriptures with them, the whole Catholic system of doctrine and morals might be almost re- constructed out of the Dimna Commedia.' ^ How this vast knowledge was acquired is virtually unknown. Various conjectures have been made. Plumptre supposes that Dante, after the custom of boys of the Middle Ages, went forth to see the world, wandering from university to university in search of know- ledge. He constructs a romance of 'the student's wanderjahre,' in which the young Florentine visits the universities of Bologna, Padua, Paris, and even Oxford. The chief grounds for this romance are the many traces of travel scattered throughout the Commedia, but the obvious answer is that these may refer to the wanderings of his exile.* The view once ' iJomie (Temple Primers Series), p. 63. " Dante's Divina Commedia, p. 234. Dr. Hettinger writes from the Boman Catholic standpoint. 3 Plumptre's Dante, i. Life, xlii. ' From a phrase of Boccaccio in a Latin poem addressed to Petrarca, in which he mentions "Parisios demum extremosque Britannos " among the places visited by Dante, it has been assumed that Dante came to England ; and Giovanni Serra- DANTE ALIGHIERI xxxiii almost universally held that his tutor was Brunetto Latini, secretary to the Florentine government, is noviT generally abandoned ; although it is obvious from Dante's warm gratitude that he owed much to Brunette's kind and fatherly guidance and encour- agement.^ A third view has much in its favour, /v namely, that Dante was, to all intents and purposes, a self-taught man. In his youth he had received a good education, as the Vita Nuova shows ; but up to his twenty-fifth year he had probably attended no university. It was only after the death of Beatrice, partly to prepare himself for writing some great work in her praise, and partly to conquer his grief, that he threw himself seriously into the study of science and philosophy. In the Convito he gives the following Studies after account of himself at this period : ' After some time, Beatrice. my mind, which was struggling to regain its health, saw that it was necessary (as neither mine own nor others' consolation was of any avail) to try the plan which another disconsolate one had adopted to con- sole himself. And I set myself to read that book of Boethius, not known to many, wherewith, a prisoner and banished, he had comforted himself. And again, hearing that TuUius had written another book, in which, treating of Friendship, he had spoken con- soling words to Laelius, a most excellent man, on the death of his friend Scipio, I set myself to read that. And although at first it was hard for me to under- valle, in a commentary on the 7). C. written at the beginning of Cent, xv., goes the length of stating that he studied at Oxford. ... In the absence of more trustworthy evidence, the fact of this alleged visit to England must be regarded as extremely doubtful ' (Toynbee's Dante Dictionary). 1 Inf. XV. 79-87. See pp. 232-237. X xxxiv DANTE ALIGHIERI / stand their meaning, I finally made out as much as what art of grammar I possessed, together with some little intellectual power of my own, ! enabled me to do ; by the which intellectual power ; I had already beheld many things, as it were dream- I ing, as may be seen in the Vita Nuova. And just as if a man should go about looking for silver, and apart from his purpose should find gold (which some occult cause presented, perhaps not without Divine ordinance); so I, who sought to console myself, found not only a remedy for my tears, but sayings of authors, and of sciences, and of books ; considering which, I soon decided that Philosophy, who was the sovereign lady of these authors, these sciences, and these books, was the supreme thing. And I imagined her as a noble lady ; and I could not imagine her as other than merciful ; wherefore so willingly did my sense of Truth behold her that it could scarcely be diverted from her. And on account of this imagina- tion I began to go where she in truth showed herself, that is, in the schools of the religious and the disputa- tions of the philosophers ; so that, in a little while, perhaps thirty months, I began to be so deeply aware of her sweetness, that the love of her banished and destroyed every other thought.'^ In addition to this, his contemporary and neighbour in Florence, Giovanni Villani, says that after his banishment, ' he went to study at Bologna, and afterwards at Paris, and in many parts of the world ';^ but doubtless Scartazzini is not far wrong in supposing that the • Conv. ii. 13. The two books named are Boethius' Be Conaolatione Philosophice and Cicero's De Amicitia. For connection of the passage with the Savage Wood, see pp. 9-11. 2 Chronicle, Blc. ix. ch. 136. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxxv necessity of earning his bread made him frequent the universities no less as teacher than as student.^ However he gained his vast learning, he speaks of it with great humility : ' I who do not sit at the blessed table (i.e, where Wisdom, ' the bread of the angels,' is dispensed), but have fled from the pasture of the herd, and at the feet of them who are seated there, gather up what they let fall.' ^ The death of Beatrice was obviously a critical His Hatriage turning-point in Dante's moral life. There are pas- sages in the Commedia to which it seems almost impossible to give any real meaning, except on the supposition that they refer to certain moral lapses of this period. It may have been on this account that his friends, if Boccaccio is to be believed, ar- ranged his marriage with Gemma Donati, some time between 1291 and 1296. Of this lady little is known beyond that she was a distant kinswoman of the haughty and ambitious Corso Donati, to whom Dante owed his banishment ; ' that she bore Dante at least four children, two sons, Pietro and Jacopo, and two daughters, Antonia and Beatrice ; and that she did not join her husband in his exile. From this last fact Boccaccio has given currency to the impression which has prevailed ever since, that the marriage was an unhappy one, and that Gemma was a veritable Xanthippe. After expatiating at great length on the discomforts marriage might have caused the poet, ' A Compwnion to Dante, Part ii. ch. ii.— Student or Teacher ? * Conv. i. 1. Bante evidently regards himself as a dilettante, a mere 'picker-up of learning's crumbs.' ' Dante speaks affectionately of Corso's brother Forese {Purg. xxiii., xilv.), and of his sister Piccarda (Purg. xxiv. 10 ; Par. iii). Corso's death is foretold by Forese in Purg. xxiv. 82-87. xxxvi DANTE ALIGHIERI he winds up : ' I certainly do not say that all this happened in Dante's case, because I do not know it ; but, whether that be the truth or not, Dante when once parted from his wife — who, it will be remem- bered, had been supplied to him as a consolation in trouble — would never come where she was, nor \ allow her to come to him.' It is probable, of course, that Gemma, in common with the rest of the world, was unable to understand and appreciate her hus- band's genius, but there is no definite ground for the hostile view generally taken of her.^ It is true, Dante never mentions her in his writings, nor did she join him in his exile. The homeless man had enough to do to maintain himself, and it was mere prudence for his wife to remain behind in Florence and provide for herself and their children out of the revenues of her dowry — meagrely enough, as Boc- caccio admits, for she had to betake herself to 'unaccustomed toil.' In this struggle surely she had the sympathy and approval of her husband ; and if she had not, we may well spare from the transfigured and glorified Beatrice one pitying thought for the lonely wife, * unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.' Public Life : Dreamer, poet, and student as he was, Dante never- theless took the keenest interest in the public affairs of his time and city. At the age of twenty-four, he had already borne arms for his country. He be- longed to a Guelph family ; and one of his early biographers, Lionardo Bruni, says that he was ' It is surely unnecessary to suppose that when Porese Donati de- nounces the women of Florence for shamelessness (Purg. zxlii. 94-111), Dante meant to include his own wife in the general condemnation. War. DANTE ALIGHIERI xxxvii present, fighting vigorously in the very front rank, at the battle of Oampaldino in 1289, when the Flor- entine Guelphs inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ghibellines of Arezzo. He quotes from a letter now lost in which Dante speaks of ' the battle of Oam- paldino in which the Ghibelline party was almost destroyed and undone; where I found myself,' he says, ' no child in arms, and where I had much fear, and in the end very great joy through the varying chances of that battle.' In the Inferno (xxi. 93-96) he tells us he was present at the taking of the castle of Caprona near Pisa in the sanae year, and saw the terror of the garrison as they marched out, lest the besiegers should break the terms of surrender and slay them on the spot. In 1295 or 1296 Dante enrolled himself as poeta Poutics. • Fiorentino in the Guild of Physicians and Apothe- caries, this being the necessary preliminary to his taking any part in the government of the city. In 1300 he went as ambassador to San Gemignano near Siena, to invite its citizens to send representatives to an assembly about to be held for the purpose of electing a new Captain of the Guelph League of Tuscany. In the same year he was elected one of the six Priors of Florence, his term of office running from June 15 to August 15. In the letter already hib Priorate : quoted by Bruni, Dante traces his subsequent mis- J^Jsoo *"*' fortunes to this election : ' All my ills and all my troubles had their beginning and origin from my unlucky election as Prior. Though in respect of mature wisdom I was not worthy of this office, yet in loyalty I was not unworthy of it, nor in age, for xxxviii DANTE ALIGHIERI ten years had elapsed since the battle of Cam- paldino.' Oneipha and At this point it becomes necessary to say a word OUbellinea. *^ , • , n i about those faction-names which are of sucn con- stant recurrence in the wild and tangled politics of mediaeval Italy,— Guelphs and Ghibellines. The words came from Germany : Guelph from Welf, the name of the powerful family of the Counts of Altdorf ; • and Ghibelline from Weihlingen, a castle in Franconia belonging to the great Swabian house of the Hohen- stauf en. At the battle of Weinsberg in 1140 between these rival houses, ' the names Welf and Weihlingen were for the first time adopted as war-cries, which were subsequently naturalized in Italy as Giielfo and Ghihellino, and became the distinctive appellations of the opposing factions of the Pope and the Em- peror.' It is, however, much too simple a view to say that the Guelphs were Papalists and the Ghibel- I lines Imperialists. In course of time the original principles were swept into the background, 'the ! spirit of faction outlived the cause of faction,' and ■ the imperial and papal titles became mere labels covering every kind of feud and discord — national and local, class, family, and individual. Each side cared for the cause of Pope or Emperor just so far as Pope or Emperor enabled them to gain their own ends and drive their rivals into exile. As Dean Church says: 'The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the inheritance of a contest which, in its original meaning, had been long over. The old struggle between the priesthood and the empire was still kept up traditionally, but itfei ideas and interests DANTE ALIGHIERI xxxix were changed : they were still great and important ones, but not those of Gregory vii. It had passed ' oyer from the mixed region of the spiritual and ; temporal into the purely political. The cause of the popes was that of the independence of Italy — the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north, and the dependence of the centre and south on the Boman See. To keep the Emperor out of Italy — to create a barrier of powerful cities against him south of the Alps — to form behind themselves a compact territory, rich, removed from the first burst of invasion, and maintaining a strong body of inter- ested feudatories, had now become the great object of the popes. . . . The two parties did not care to ' keep in view principles which their chiefs had lost sight of. The Emperor and the Pope were both real powers, able to protect and assist ; and they divided between them those who required protection and assistance. Geographical position, the rivalry of ' neighbourhood, family tradition, private feuds, and above all private interest, were the main causes which assigned cities, families, and individuals to i the Ghibelline or Guelf party. One party called themselves the Emperor's liegemen, and their watch- word was authority and law ; the other side were the liegemen of Holy Church, and their cry was liberty ; and the distinction as a broad one is true. But a democracy would become Ghibelline, without ' scruple, if its neighbour town was Guelf ; and among , the Guelf liegemen of the Church and liberty the pride of blood and love of power were not a whit inferior to that of their opponents. . . . The Ghibel- xl DANTE ALIGHIERI Character- lines as a body reflected the worldliness, the licence, two^Parties. ^^^ irreligion, the reckless selfishness, the daring insolence, and at the same time the gaiety and pomp, the princely magnificence and generosity and largeness of mind of the house of Swabia ; they were the men of the court and camp, imperious and haughty from ancient lineage or the Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the frankness and courtesy of nobility ; careless of public opinion and public rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public objects and public services. Among them were found, or to them inclined, all who, whether from a base or a lofty ambition, desired to place their will above law — the lord of the feudal castle, the robber-knight of the Apennine pass, the magnificent but terrible tyrants of the cities, the pride and shame of Italy, the Visconti and Scaligers. . . . The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of the middle classes ; they rose out of and held to the people ; they were strong by their compactness, their organisation in cities, their commercial relations and interests, their command of money. Further, they were professedly the party of strictness and religion, a profession which fettered them as little as their opponents were fettered by the respect they claimed for im- perial law. But though by personal unscrupulous- ness and selfishness, and in instances of public vengeance, they sinned as deeply as the Ghibellines, they stood far more committed as a party to a public meaning and purpose — to improvement in law and the condition of the poor, to a protest against the insolence of the strong, to the encouragement of DANTE ALIGHIERI xli industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was austere, /■ frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its j home and Church, and of those celebrations which bound together Church and home ; but withal very proud, very intolerant ; in its higher form intolerant , of evil, but intolerant always to whatever displeased According to Villani, these factions were intro- Their intro- duced into Florence inJ2^ through the murder of Florence, Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti ; but, of course, ^^^''• this was only the occasion, not the cause.* The city became a battlefield. The great families built towers to fight their enemies. ' In these fortresses of the leading families, scattered about the city, were the various points of onset and recovery in civic battle ; in the streets barricades were raised, mangonels and crossbows were plied from the towers, a series of separate combats raged through the city, till chance at length connected the attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the resistance of the other, or a con- flagration interposed itself between the combatants, burning out at once Guelf and Ghibelline, and laying half Florence in ashes. Each party had their turn of victory ; each, when vanquished, went into exile, and carried on the war outside the walls ; each had their opportunity of remodelling the orders and framework of government, and each did so relent- 1 Dante : An Essay, pp. M-18. For the connection of Guelphs and Ghibellines with the 'struggle for the supremacy of the mercantile democracy and the Boman Law over the military aristocracy with its "barbarian" traditions,' see Wicksteed's Introduction to Selections from Villani's Chronicle, and Prof. Villari's The Two First Centuries of Florentine History. ' Chronicle, v. 38. See pp. 392, 393. xlii DANTE ALIGHIERI Biandil and NmL Cbarlea of Valols. lessly at the cost of their opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed families, they confiscated property, they sacked and burned warehouses, they levelled the palaces, and outraged the pride of their antagonists.' ^ To increase if possible the horror of this suicidal struggle, a new faction was added in the very year when Dante was elected Prior. In the neighbouring city of Fistoja, a feud had broken out in the Guelph family of the Cancellieri, the two sides being dis- tinguished as Bianchi and Neri, Whites and Blacks. The leaders were arrested and brought to Florence, with the unhappy issue that it also was set ablaze with the same feud. Corso Donati became the head of the Black Guelphs, his rival, Vieri de' Cerchi, of the White. They came to blows in the Piazza di Santa Trinita on May-day 1300, and the strife grew to such a head that Dante and his fellow-Priors found it necessary to banish the leaders of both sides. The Blacks appealed to Pope Boniface vni., who summoned Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair of France, and sent him as 'peacemaker' to Florence. Dante and the other White Guelphs were violently opposed to his entrance. Dino Compagni (ii. 25) says that Dante was among the ambassadors whom the Whites sent to Rome to protest against it ; and Boccaccio tells the well-known story that when his name was proposed Dante exclaimed, 'If I go, who remains ? and if I remain, who goes ? ' — a ques- tion which made him many enemies. Dante's em- bassy to Bome is generally regarded as very doubtful, ^ Church's Dante, pp. 20-21. DANTE ALIGHIERI xliu but so high an authority as Prof. Villari sees no cause to question it. ' The only reply the Pope deigned to give to the embassy was the haughty demand, ' Make humiliation to us.' On November 1, 1301, Charles of Hia Treacbery. Yalois entered Florence with his men unarmed ; and on the 5th, Villani, who was present on the occasion, tells us that he received the lordship of the city in the church of Santa Maria Novella, swearing, on his word 'as the King's son,' to 'preserve the city in peaceful and good state.' 'And straightway,' adds Villani, 'the contrary was done by him and by his followers.' He armed his horsemen, and the city saw that it had been betrayed. Corso Donati and the Neri were admitted, threw open the prisons, and drove the Priors from their Palace. 'And,' writes Villani, 'during all this destruction of the city M. Charles of Valois and his people gave no counsel nor help, nor did he keep the oath and promise made by him. Wherefore the tyrants and malefactors and banished men who were in the city took courage, and the city being unguarded and without government, they began to rob the shops and places of merchan- dise and the houses which pertained to the White party, or to any one that had not the power to resist, slaying and wounding many persons, good men of the White party. And this plague endured in the city for five days continually, to the great ruin of the city. And afterwards it continued in the country, the troopers going on robbing and burning houses for more than eight days, whereby a great number of beautiful and rich possessions were destroyed and 1 The Two First Centuries of Florentine History, Chap. ix. § tU. n. xliv DANTE ALIGHIERI The Banish- ment of Dante : Jan. 27, 1302. His Wander- Ing^s. burned. And when the said destruction and burning was ended, M. Charles and his council reconstituted the city, and elected a government of Priors of the popolani of the Black party.'^ It was in this wild storm that Dante's fortunes went down to rise no more. The Neri immediately took their revenge, Dante, who had been among the most resolute of the opponents of Charles and the Pope, was natur- ally one of the victims. On January 27, 1302, a decree of banishment was issued against him and four others. They are accused of ' barratry,' that is, corruption and malversation of public funds, opposi- tion to the Pope and the entrance of Charles, and to the peace of Florence and the Guelph party. Their failure to appear when summoned by a herald is taken as an acknowledgment of guilt. They are sentenced to pay a fine of five thousand gold florins each for contempt of court, and to restore the money they had taken by fraud within three days on pain of confiscation of their property ; to suffer banishment from Tuscany for two years ; and to have their names inscribed in the Statutes of the People as forgers and barrators who are excluded for ever from holding any public office under the Commune of Florence. On the 10th of March following, a further sentence condemned the five, along with ten others, to per- petual banishment, and, if caught on Florentine soil, to death by burning. ' From this time,' says Lowell, ' the life of Dante becomes semi-mythical, and for nearly every date 1 For an account of the origin of the Black and White factions, their Introduction to Florence, and the disastrous consequences to the city, Bee Villani's Chronicle, viii. 38-49. DANTE ALIGHIERI xlv we are reduced to the " as they say " of Herodotus, . . . During the nineteen years of his exile, it would be hard to say where he was not. In certain districts of Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has not its tradition of him, its sedia, rocca, spelonca, or torre di Dante ; and what between the patriotic com- plaisance of some biographers overwilling to gratify as many provincial vanities as possible, and the pet- tishness of others anxious only to snub them, the confusion becomes hopeless.' In a pathetic passage in the Convito the homeless exile reveals the desti- tute and far- wandering life he was doomed to lead : ' Since it pleased the citizens of the fairest and most famous daughter of Home, Florence, to cast me forth from her most sweet bosom (wherein I was born and nourished up to the climax of my life, and wherein by their good leave, I long with all my heart to rest my weary soul, and to end the days allotted to me), through almost every part where her language is spoken I have wandered, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, displaying against my will the wounds of fortune, which are often wont to be imputed unjustly to the wounded one himself. Truly have I been a vessel without sail or rudder, borne to divers ports and straits and shores by the dry wind which blows from dolorous poverty; and have appeared vile in the eyes of many who, perhaps, through some fame of me, had imagined me in other guise ; in whose consideration not only did I in person suffer abase- ment, but all my work became of less account, that already done as well as that yet to do.' ^ Thus amply 1 Conv. i. 3. xlvi DANTE ALIGHIERI With the Ejdled OUbeUinei. Forms ' a party by himself.' was his forefather Cacciaguida's well-known pro- phecy fulfilled : 'Thou shalt abandon everything beloved Most tenderly, and this the arrow is Which first the bow of exile shooteth forth. \ Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt ■ The bread of others, and how hard a road The going down and up another's stairs.' ^ It would be vain to attempt to trace his wander- ings in detail. He is said to have received the news of his exile in Siena on his way back from Borne. With other White Guelphs he joined the banished Ghibellines, and made common cause with them in their efforts to effect their return to Florence. Several attempts to force their way into the city failed, but what part Dante took in these is un- certain. It was not long till he severed his con- nection with both Guelphs and Ghibellines, and formed a party by himself. Speaking from the standpoint of 1300, his ancestor foretells this politi- cal detachment and isolation : ' And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders Will be the company malign and stupid With which thou shalt fall down into this valley, For all ungrateful, all mad and impious. Will they become against thee ; but soon after They and not thou shall have the forehead red. Of their bestiality their own procedure Shall make the proof, so 'twill be well for thee To have made thee a party by thyself.'^ Doubtless his fellow-exiles on their side felt the proud, impracticable, and visionary nature of the » Par. xvli. 55-60. ' Par. xvii. 61-( DANTE ALIGHIERI xlvii man, and were probably not unwilling to be rid of him; while Dante must quickly have discovered that their Ghibellinism was not his. The truth is.'pu owbei- y it is misleading to call Dante a Ghibelline at all, at j least in the ordinary meaning of the name. He did,; indeed, abandon the Guelph party, in which he was born and bred; but he found that the Ghibellineal with whom he acted for a time regarded the Empire as a mere means and instrument for securing their t supremacy as a faction, while he was dreaming of it | as an ideal kingdom of universal justice in which I the very spirit of faction must die.^ 'He became X a theoretical politician, an ardent and impassioned doctrinaire, an inspired prophet, standing outside existing factions and clinging tenaciously to the dream which he had formed of a future and better state of things, destined by the Providence of God to supersede factions and restore the divine order of the world,'* Dante's first refuge was with ' the great Lombard,' hib nrst \^ who is identified with Bartolommeo della Scala of ^ea?Lom- * Verona, who died in 1304. There he saw Can Grande, *"*•' a boy of nine, to whom afterwards he dedicated the Paradiso? His next resting-place was probably Bologna, where he cannot have remained longer than 1306, in which year all Florentine exiles and Ghibellines were expelled from the city. There is said to exist documentary evidence that in August ' In Par. vi. 100-102 the Emperor Justinian denounces the Guelphs for opposing the Eagle, the public standard, and is equally indignant with the Ghibellines for making it the standard of a faction. ' J. Addington Symonds' The Study of Dante, p. 63. ' Par. xvii. 70-93. See pp. Iviii, 29-32. Uonarehia, xlviii DANTE ALIGHIERI of this year he was in Padua, and in October in Lunigiana as the guest of one of the Malaspina family.^ For four or five years after this, Dante disappears entirely : the Oasentino, Forli, Lunigiana again are suggested, but it is pure guesswork. It is in this period that the visit to Paris referred to by Villani is generally supposed to have taken place; and if so, it would account for the absence of every trace of him in Italy. He was recalled by the advent in Italy of the Emperor Henry vii. in September 1310. Thefle In his Latin treatise, De Monarchia, Dante dis- cusses the standing problem of the relations of Church and Empire. The date of it is unknown, and in the absence of definite information we may regard it as written in view of Henry's advent. It is, as one says, 'perhaps the most purely ideal of political works ever written.' Dante took the Church and the Empire for granted as the necessary framework of society, without which, indeed, he could not conceive its existence; and the De Mon- archia is an attempt to lay down the limits of their respective jurisdictions. ' It is not the work of a statesman, but of a philosophical thinker, steeped in the abstractions of the school, and not construct- ing his system from given conditions, but basing it on dogmatic hypotheses, and explaining it from general 'I conceptions. Dante does not treat of the State, but of the ideal of the universal republic. With schol- astic method he develops three principles : that the universal monarchy — that is to say, the empire — is 1 Furg. viii. 118-139. DANTE ALIGHIERI xlix necessary to the wellbeing of human society; that the monarchial power — the one indivisible imperium — legally belongs to the Boman people, and through them to the emperor; lastly, that the authority of the emperor is derived immediately from God, and not, according to the opinion of the priests, from the pope, the Vicar of Christ or God.'^ It follows that Church and Empire have distinct and separate functions and jurisdictions: 'Therefore man had need of two guides for his life, as he had a twofold end in life ; whereof one is the Supreme Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life, according to the things revealed to us; and the other is the Emperor, to guide mankind to happiness in this world, in accord- ance with the teaching of philosophy.'* In 'the white star' of Jupiter, the Heaven of Righteous Apotheoiia of Bulers, Dante works out this conception of uni- versal monarchy on a wider scale than is possible on • this little plot of earth.' The just kings of every age and land in the form of starry lights spell out, letter by letter, the opening words of the Book of Wisdom: Diligite justitiam qui judicatis terram, each adding his contribution to the celestial empire of universal righteousness. Then on the final M, the initial of Monarchia, more than a thousand settle and form themselves into the head and neck of the glowing imperial eagle.^ It is the apotheosis of the Empire of which he had dreamed on earth. To an idealist like this, Henry Yii. of Luxemburg may well Henry vn. of have seemed the heaven-ordained fulfiUer of the "*" "'^' ' Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle Ages, vi. 20 (English Translation). * De Monarchia, iii. 16. See pp. 5, 6. ' Par, xviii. 70-114. 4 1 DANTE ALIGHIERl dream. For he too was an idealist, the best knight in Europe, a lover of righteousness and peace, his imagination touched to chivalry by the ancient glories of the Empire, and dreaming that, once crowned at Rome, the factions and wars of Italy would vanish as by enchantment in universal love and brotherhood. In the same generous delusion Dante welcomed him with a passion of religious joy which to our ears sounds, to say the least, irreverent. In his Letter to Henry, ' by divine providence King of the Romans, always august,' he says : ' In truth, I, who write as much for myself as for others, saw you naost gracious, as beseems imperial majesty, and heard you most clement, when my hands touched your feet and my lips paid their debt. Then my spirit gloried in you, and silently I said within myself : " Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world ! " ' ^ In another Letter be summons all Italy to receive the new Emperor as the lord and owner of the world : ' I exhort you not only to rise up to meet him, but also to do reverence to his presence. Ye who drink of his streams and navigate his seas ; ye who tread the sands of the shores and the summits of the Alps that are his ; ye who rejoice in any public thing whatsoever, and possess private goods not otherwise than by the bonds of his law ; do not, as if ignorant, deceive your- selves as though ye dreamt in your hearts and said ; Letter vii. 2. The references to the Letters are according to the Oxford edition of Dante's Works by Dr. Moore, and the translations are generally those of Mr. Latham— Z)a« Letter vii. 7, 8. * The Two First Centuries of Florentine History, chap. x. § Ix. ' Par. XXX. 133-144. In 1300, the ideal date of the poem, the seat, of course, was vacant, but Henry's crown is set above It in anticipation of his advent. In reality the passage was written after his death. DANTE ALIGHIERI liii Florence could not forgive the violence of his denun- ciations and threats ; in a decree of September 2, 1311, he is one of a number of exiles excluded from amnesty, and never to be allowed to return to the city. After Henry's death in 1313, Dante disappears almost entirely from public view. In the Purgatorio he himself speaks of a visit to Lucca, and it is sup-iucca(i3i47). posed that this took place in 1314, when that city was in the hands of the Ghibelline leader Uguccione della Faggiuola.^ In November of the following year another sentence was launched against him, his sons for some reason being included in it. Their doom as Ghibellines and rebels is, if captured, ' to be taken to the place of justice, and there to have their heads struck from their shoulders, so that they die outright.' In 1316 an amnesty was offered to the exiles. Dante, indeed, was excluded; but private Big BaftiBai of information seems to hav^ been conveyed to him ' by friends in the city that the pardon might be ex- tended to him if he would submit to the conditions — the payment of a fine and the performance of a public penance in the Baptistery of St. John. In the well- known Letter to a Florentine Friend, Dante indig- nantly refused to return on such unjust and shameful terms: 'Is this then the glorious recall wherewith Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after an exile patiently endured for almost fifteen years ? Did his innocence, manifest to whomsoever it may be, deserve this — this, the sweat and increas- ing toil of study? Far be the rash humility of a heart of earth from a man familiar with philosophy, ' Purg. xxiv, 34-48. liv DANTE ALIGHlERl that like a prisoner he may suffer himself to be offered up after the manner of a certain Ciolo and other criminals. Far be it from a man who preaches justice after having patiently endured injury to pay his money to those inflicting it, as though they were X his benefactors. This is not the way to return to my country, O my Father. If another shall be found by you, or by others, that does not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante, that will I take with no lagging steps. But if Florence is entered by no (^ such path, then never will I enter Florence. What ! Can I not look upon the face of the sun and the stars i everywhere? Can I not meditate anywhere under I the heavens upon most sweet truths, unless I first render myself inglorious, nay ignominious, to the people and state of Florence ? Nor indeed will bread be lacking.' * After a short visit which he is believed to have paid to the Court of Can Grande of Verona, perhaps HiBiast in 1316, Dante betook himself to his last earthly Ravenna refuge. Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, (1316 7). j^jjjj nephew of Francesca da Rimini, invited him to become his guest; and there among the ruins and mosaics of the old imperial city, and near ' the pine wood on the shore of Chiassi,' ^ he spent his closing years — probably, one is glad to think, in more com- fort than he had known during the greater part of his long exile. His host honoured him for his genius. His sons Fietro and Jacopo and his daughter Beatrice 1 Letter ix. 3, 4. The Ciolo is supposed to be a member of the Abati family — the only one of his house whose name was expressly excepted from the decree against the exiles, dated September 2, 1311, referred to above. 2 Purg. xxviii. 20. DANTE ALIGHIERI Iv were with him, the last a nun in the convent of Santo Stefano dell' Uliva. A number of pupils gathered X round him, so that ' he was making an independent living in the capacity of professor or reader of Ver- nacular Rhetoric at the Studio, or, as we should now say, University of Ravenna.' ^ The exchange of play- ful Eclogues between him and Giovanni del Virgilio, The Eclogues. a professor of Bologna, under the pastoral names of Tityrus and Mopsus, shows that his misfortunes had not entirely crushed Dante's spirits : he was able still to see^the sun. From references in the Eclogues it is inferred that the Inferno and Purgatorio were already finished, and that Dante was still engaged on the Paradiso. In 1321, Guido da Polenta sent him on an embassy to Venice in connection with a dis- pute which had arisen between the two cities ; and while returning through the marshes he caught fever and died on September 14, in the fifty-sixth Hia Death, \^ year of his age. So passed into the other world the *^' ' spirit that had so long been a pilgrim in it even upon earth ; and doubtless then were fulfilled to the weary exile the words he himself had written, probably when his hope of ever entering the earthly city had grown dim : ' And as to him who comes from a long », journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so to meet \ the noble soul go forth those citizens of the Eternal ; Life. And this they do because of her good works ' Wioksteed and Gardner's Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio — Prole- gomena, p. 81. It is suggested that the De Vulgari Eloguentia was ' a kind of poetical text-book for the use of Dante's students at Bavenna, perhaps actually the substance of his course of lectures at the Unirer- Bity'(p. 86). Scartazzini makes the same suggestion, and thinks the Convito was similarly used as a text-book. Ivi DANTE ALIGHIERI and contemplations.'^ It is the welcome Beatrice had already given him as he stood on the threshold of Paradise : ' And thou shalt be with me for evermore A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman.' * Such was the life of Dante Alighieri, a man broken with every variety of sorrow, disappointment, and worldly failure, Jb^t never losing the lordship and_ freedom of his own soul. ' He had suffered,' says Karl Federn, 'all ill chance that could fall to the lot of man. He loved and had lost his beloved one ; his family life was unhappy ; he was a statesman, and as such was unsuccessful ; he saw his party defeated and driven from the land, and when the Emperor, from whom he had expected the redemption of Italy and his own reinstatement, entered Italy with a victorious army, he saw him die. He had been full of the noblest intentions, yet men not only gave him no thanks, but had hunted him out, had branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to death. He had lost his whole fortune ; one of the proudest of men, he was forced continually to humble himself and to live on foreign alms; one of the greatest ' poets of all times, he saw himself neither understood nor honoured. His whole life was devoted to his native city, he clung to it with all his heart, and he passed twenty-two years longing in vain to return to it. A devout Catholic, full of reverence for his Church, he saw it degraded, governed by " New Pharisees," and at last fallen and dishonoured. Italy, ' Conv, iv. 28. 2 Pwrg. xxxll. 101-102. DANTE ALIGHIERI Ivii whose unity was dear to him, he saw torn by the hatred of parties and cruelly devastated by war. _A sea of wrong had passed over hini, he saw a sea of wrong raging over the world in which he lived^j wherever he turned his eyes everything was such.af . to drive him to despair^Jbuife lie ^despaired JSfi|tt He believed, a nd in spite of all, recog nized the high harmony o f the world. _ He^a d foun d the path for his soul, the w or k for his mind, by which he got rid of the weight which crushed him, and at the same time took his proud revenge on the men who had so maltreated him. ^n^" eternal letters of fire" he wrote his terrible judgment " aB_lightnin g w rites _its cipher on thexosks" to be read by all posterity, that men might one day fix the balance between this one man on the one side and mankind on the other.' ^ Nevertheless he is not to be pitied; it was this furnace of suffering which burnt away Jthe dross and left the gold.__Had he never been driven into exile and ' held heartbreak at bay,' the great poem which ' made him lean for many a year ' * would have remained unwritten. Entangled and lost in the ' dark and savage wood,' the paltry ambitions, quarrels, and vices of his city, he might never have become_a pilgrim of the invisible. The spirit of faction never did a nobler service to the world than when Florence, that 'mother of little • Dante and his Time, pp. 267-268. The ' twenty-two years ' is a slip for twenty. The first sentence of banishment is dated January 27, 130J, and the date of Dante's death is September 14, 1321. It is to be remem- bered that the Florentine year began on March 2S, and therefore in the foregoing mode of writing the year (130^) the upper figure represents the old method of reckoning, and the lower the modem. ' Par. XXV. 1-3. V^< y< Iviii DANTE ALIGHIERI love,' disowned her son and flung him out upon the universal hopes and fears, sins, sorrows, and aspira- fy^^/'^rj^tfict, tions of mankind, to steer his course by nothing lower than the steadfast stars. It was not Brunetto Latini, ' dear and good and fatherly,' but his long exile, cruel and relentless, that taught Dante * in the world from hour to hour how man makes himself eternal.' ^ The Com- How it was possible in the midst of this distracted, media, homeless, wandering life to gather the stores of encyclopaedic knowledge and to shape them into the ordered unity and symbolism of the Commedia, must remain a mystery and a miracle. All interpretation of the poem must start from the Epistle in which Dante dedicates the Paradiso to his former host, Can Grande of Verona, and gives his own commen- tary on part of the first Oanto.^ The title of the whole poem, he says, is — 'The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, not by character.'* ^ Meaning of He explains why it is called a Comedy. Tragedy is in its beginning ' admirable and quiet,' and in its ending 'foul and horrible'; whereas Comedy, re- versing this, begins with some asperity and ends » Inf. XV. 82-85. * This statement is true whether the Letter is authentic or not. Its genuineness is questioned chiefly on the grounds of its absence from old Mss., and the silence of Boccaccio and other early commentators. If authentic — and it is far from being proved that it is not — it is pathetic to find Dante abruptly ending the exposition because of poverty : ' In particular I will not expound it at present ; for poverty presseth so hard upon me that I must needs abandon these and other matters useful for the public good. But I hope of your magnificence that other means may be given me of continuing with a useful exposi- tion ' (par. 32). ' ' The title Bivina Com/media is subsequent to Dante ; it appears in some of the oldest mss. and in Boccaccio's " Vita dl Dante " ' (Toynbee). Sense. DANTE ALIGHIERI lix prosperously. There is also a difference in the manner of speech, Tragedy using a style ' lofty and sublime,' while that of Comedy is ' weak and humble.' 'From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy. For if we consider the theme, in its beginning it is horrible and foul, because it is Hell ; in its ending, fortunate, desirable, and joyful, because it is Paradise ; and if we consider the style of language, the style is careless and humble, because it is the vulgar tongue, in which even house- wives hold converse.' ^ He warns us that the mean- The Fourfold K. ing is not simple Jbut manifold : ' For the clearness, therefore, of what I shall say, it must be understood that the meaning of this work is not simple, but rather can be said to be of many significations (polyaemum), that is, of several meanings ; for there is one meaning that is derived from the letter, and another that is derived from the things signified by the letter. The first is called literal, but the second allegorical or mystical. That this method of expound- ing may be naore clearly set forth, we may consider it in these lines : " When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judah was His sanctuary, and Israel His dominion." For if we consider the letter alone, the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is signified; if the allegory, our redemption accom- plished in Christ is signified ; if the moral meaning, the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified ; if the 1 Letter x. 10. In De Vulg. Eloq, (il. i) he gives a very different account of Tragedy and Comedy. Ix DANTE ALIGHIERI anagogical, the departure of the sanctified soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is signified. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they can in general all be said to be allegorical, since they differ from the literal or historic ; for the word Allegoria is derived from the Greek dXXoros, which in Latin is alienum or diversum.'^ At first sight this seems to make confusion worse con- founded: how is a plain man to make his way through this labyrinth of manifold senses ? And doubtless 'the art of misunderstanding Dante' is )^ easy enough. Nevertheless the task of interpreta- tion is not so difficult as it looks. _These manifold senses are reducible to two with which every mind is familiar — the literal and the moral and spiritvxd. The moral and spiritual significance of the Com- media is not really obscure or uncertain, so far at least as its broad outlines are concerned. However Dante may conceal his meaning 'under the veil of the mysterious verses ' and the embarrassing riches of detail, the meaning when discovered is found to be the plain broad highway of common morality jind religion. To this highway it is the duty of an expositor to keep, refusing resolutely to be tempted too far down any of the picturesque and interesting lanes and by-paths, which almost invariably end in some cul-de-sac of private interpretation. In doing Dante's Final so, he will best fulfil the plain practical purpose which Dante, as the poet of Righteousness,^ ex- i Letter x. 7. See Cowv. ii. 1, where he expounds the same four senses at greater length. Also Aquinas, Summa i. q. 1. a. 10. ' De Vulg. Eloq. ii. 2. DANTE ALIGHIERI Ixi pressly professes: 'The subject of the whole work, taken according to the letter alone, is simply a con- sideration of the state of souls after death ; for from and around this the action of the whole work turneth. But if the work is considered according to y^ its allegorical meaning, the subject is man, liable to the reward or punishment of Justice, according as through the freedom of the will he is deserving or undeserving. . , .Omitting aU subtle investigation, it can be briefly stated that the aim of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life, ^^ from a state of misery, and to guide them to a state ^J-I \S-.- « of happiness.' ' -' ' 1 Letter x. 8, 15. In his Dante ZHctionaty, Toynbee says : ' In the ^ light of the fivefold interpretation of the Commedia indicated in his Letter to Can Grande (Epis. x. 7), Bante, as he appears in the poem, represents in the literal sense the Florentine Dante Alighieri ; in the allegorical, Man on his earthly pilgrimage ; in the moral, Man turning &om vice to virtue ; in the religious, the Sinner turning to God ; in the anagogical, the Soul passing from a state of sin to that of gloty.' THE MORAL AND PHYSICAL 8TEUCTURE OF THE INFERNO Dante's classification of sins is discussed in Chapter xi; but, even at the risk of some repetition, it is thought advisable to gather together here, in one short general statement, the various details of the structure of the Inferno which are scattered throughout the following exposition. If these are carefully compared with the accompanying diagram and mastered at the outset, the reader will find his understanding of the interpretation greatly facilitated. In material form, the Inferno is a vast underground cavern, which lies directly beneath Jerusalem and Calvary, and pierces to the exact centre of the earth. Originally, according to Bante's conception, the Southern hemisphere consisted of land, and the Northern of water ; but the fall of Lucifer produced a great convulsion and inversion of this arrangement. To avoid contact with so great a sinner, the land fled to the Northern hemisphere, the waters of which rushed into the vacant place. Further, the weight of his sin drove Satan with such violence that he tore his way to the very centre of gravity, where he lies embedded in ice and rocks. The bowels of the earth, recoiling from him in horror, flung themselves up into the great Mountain of Purgatory, the only land in the Southern Ocean, and the exact antipodes of Jerusalem and Mount Calvary. The vast subterranean hollow thus formed was utilised as the eternal prison of the finally impenitent. In shape, it is an inverted cone, its base pro- bably co-extensive with the land surface of the Northern hemisphere, and its apex at the centre. Around the Interior of this cone run ten concentric Terraces or Circles, narrowing and deepening, like an amphitheatre, to the point where Lucifer lies. It is on these Terraces the various sins are punished, being arranged higher or lower, wider or narrower, according to the degree of their guilt. Although there are ten of these Circles, the first is not reckoned of the number, since it forms a mere vestibule for neutral and cowardly souls, whom Dante regards as unworthy of a place even in Hell. Circle I. also lies outside the general ethical scheme, being the mere Limbo of Virtuous Heathen and TJnbaptized Infants. The sins of the remaining Circles are divided into two great classes : iTMontinence, punished in upper, and Malice, in nether HeU. I. Sins of Incontinence : set in the higher Circles because they are sins of frailty— mere non-control of various appetites and faculties normal to human nature : — Circle II. The Sensual. Circle HI. The Gluttonous. Circle IV. The Avaricious — Misers and Prodigals, Circle V. The Wrathful and Sullen. Circle VI. Heretics. This forms a transition Circle between upper and nether Hell. In relation to the Circles above. Heresy may be regarded as the last and most spiritual of the sins of Incontinence, being non-control of the intellectual powers. In addition, however, it is the beginning of Uii SECTIOTi OF THE ITiFEBTiO. GUARDIANS OF CIRCLES. t'°OE STRUCTURE OF THE INFERNO Ixiii the second great division of Hell. Heretics are punished in the City of Dis or Satan ; and it is by a great landslip in the centre of the city that the descent to nether Hell is made. In other words, the Circles beneath are, so to speak, the underground dungeons of the city, in which its vilest criminals are tortured. II. Sins oi' Malice: subdivided into two classes— FioZence and Fraud : — Circle VII. The Violent, I. Against Neighbours ; II. Against Themselves ; III. Against God, Nature, and Art. Fraud is subdivided into Fraud simple and Treachery, which are punished in the two lowest Circles : — Circle VIII. Fraud simple in ten forms, which are distributed in ten concentric Moats. The whole Circle is called Malebolge, which means Evil-pouches; and each class of the Fradulent occupies a separate Bolgia or Pouch in the following order :— Bolgia I. Betrayers of Women — Panders and Seducers. IL Flatterers. IIL Simoniacs. rV. Diviners. V. Barrators. VI. Hypocrites. VII. Thieves. Vni. EvU Counsellors. IX. Schismatics. X. Falsifiers. Circle IX. Treachery— that is, Fraud against some special trust reposed in us by our f ellowmen. The whole Circle consists of a lake of ice named Cocytus, and is divided into four concentric Kings in which Traitors are frozen at varying depths, according to the degree and quality of their treachery : — I. Traitors to Kindred— punished in Caina, so called from Cain, the first fratricide. II. Traitors to Country — in the Second Ring, Antenora, which receives its name from Antenor, who betrayed Troy. III. Traitors to Friends and Guests— set in Tolomea, named from Ptolomeus, captain of Jericho, who treacherously slew his guests, Simon the Maccabee and his two sons. IV. Traitors to Lords and Benefactors. This brings us to ' the last post ' of HeU, which receives its title of Giudecca from Judas, who be- trayed his Lord. In the exact centre of the lake of ice is frozen Lucifer, with the three arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, in his three mouths. The various orders of sin — Incontinence, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery — are separated by three great chasms, in token of their deepening heinousness and guilt. In their pilgrimage through the In- ferno, Dante and Virgil move uniformly to the left— partly because this is the direction appropriate to the world of the lost, and partly to indicate the increasing departure from virtue as they descend to the lower Circles. When they reach the centre of gravity, they turn a somersault, and find themselves in a narrow passage, which leads them out to the shore of Mount Purgatory in the great ocean of the Southern hemisphere. ' The great Florentine, who wove his web And thrust it into hell, and drew it forth Immortal, having burned all that could bum, And leaving only what shall still be found Untouched, nor with the smell of flre upon it, Under the final ashes of this world.' Sydney Dobell's Balder. CHAPTER I THE SAVAGE WOOD AND THE THREE WILD BEASTS The opening line of the Commedia gives us the age CANTO I at which, in poetic fiction, Dante began his great pilgrimage through the Invisible : 1^,3^ ^^^^ „, ~ Foem. In the middle of the pathway of our life. In the Convito he compares man's life to an arch, the highest point of which 'in perfect natures' is the thirty-fifth year. Since Dante was born in 1265, this brings us to the year 1300, from the standpoint of which it is generally agreed the poem was written. When later historical events are referred to, they are put in the form of prophecies. We do not know with certainty what Dante's reason was for making the year 1300 the ideal date on which the entire action of the poem hinges. It may have been partly because, being the top of the arch, it is the point from which his life began to decline towards another world ; but perhaps the simplest and most natural ) reason is that in this year he himself felt that he had passed through a great moral and spiritual crisis which altered the whole outlook and horizon of his life. If there is any truth in the conjecture that he j was in Bome during the Easter week of 1300, it is A 2 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I possible that the visit had more than we know to do with this change, which was nothing short of the The JnbUee. poet's conversion. It is a year famous in the Roman Catholic Church for the institution of the Jubilee. An impression spread mysteriously throughout Italy and far beyond that all who visited the tombs of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul during the first year of the new century would receive full absolution of their sins. Multitudes thronged to the Holy City; and Pope Boniface viii., falling in with the universal expectation, proclaimed the first Jubilee, granting ' a most full pardon of all sins ' to all who made the pilgrimage. ' It can scarcely be doubted,' says Grego- rovius, ' that Dante beheld the city in these days, and that a ray from them fell on his immortal poem, < which begins with Easter week of 1300.' ^ There are several passages in the Commedia which certainly seem to point to a visit to Rome during the Jubilee pilgrimages ; and such a visit may have produced in Dante's soul as great a spiritual crisis as it did in / Luther's at a later date. At all events, the spiritual idea is obvious : Dante's pilgrimage through the Invisible corresponds ideally to our Lord's Death, Descent into Hell, Resurrection and Ascension. On the evening of Good Friday he entered the Inferno ; on the morning of Easter Sunday he rose with Christ into newness of life ; and, probably on the following Wednesday, he ascended to the Heavenly 1 Borne in the Middle Ages, book x. chap. vi. ViUani, who was present, gives an account of the Jubilee in his Chronicle, book vlii. 36. ' It was the most marvellous thing that was ever seen, for through- out the year, without break, there were in Rome, besides the inhabi- tants of the city, 200,000 pilgrims, not counting those who were coming and going on their journeys,' THE THREE WILD BEASTS 3 Paradise. In the new life of repentance on which he CANTO I had entered, the soul dies, rises, and ascends with Christ. The year 1300 may have been chosen partly to carry out this parallelism, for in his curious mystical fashion he says in the Convito that ' our ' Saviour Christ, whose nature was perfect, chose to die in the thirty-fourth year of His age, because it did not befit Divinity to decline.' ^ On the morning, then, of this Good Friday in the The dark and very centre of his life, Dante tells us that, after a ^''*'^® ^"^ night of desperate fear, he came to himself in a dark and savage wood, where the way was lost. How he came to be there he did not know : he must have wandered from the true path in his sleep, the sinful slumber of the soul. What, then, does this savage wood symbolize, the very memory of which is as the bitterness of death? Probably the general meaning is given in a passage of the Convito (iv. 24), where Dante says that ' the adolescent who enters the wood of error of this life could not keep the good road were he not shown it by his elders.' But this is too general : in the Commedia Dante has usually some- thing much more definite before his mind. Among *\ commentators three main lines of interpretation ^ Conv. iv. 23, 24. Dante divides human life into four parts : Adolescence, lasting up to the twenty-fifth year ; Youth, from twenty- five to forty-five, having the thirty-fifth year as the centre of the arch ; Old Age, from forty-five to seventy; and Senility, about ten years longer, ' a little more or a little less.' In the Summa (iii. Q. xlvi. A. 9), Aquinas says Christ chose to die in the flower of His age for three reasons : 1, The more to commend His love to us because He gave His life for us at its prime ; 2, Because it was not fitting that there should appear any diminution of His natural powers ; and 3, That dying and rising again in His youthful prime. He should foreshow the quality of the bodies of those who should afterwards rise in Him. i THE SAVAGE WOOD AND 1. FoUtical interpreta- tion. CANTO I have been followed — the political, the moral, and the philosophical. According to the first, the wood represents the dark and savage condition of Italy in Dante's day in both Church and State. From a multitude of passages in the poem it is quite certain that this formed one element in his despondency. Happily, it is almost impossible for us to form any conception of the state of Florence and other Italian cities : political and family feuds almost incessantly drenching the streets with blood, and each party as it gained the mastery banishing its enemies and confiscating their property. The Commedia over- fiows with denunciations of these feuds, and of both Pope and Emperor for their neglect of duty which rendered possible this chronic state of civil war. Boniface viii. in particular roused Dante's sternest indignation : he calls him ' the prince of the new Pharisees,' and consigns him in anticipation to the Moat of the Simoniacs. In Paradise all heaven flushes with shame and anger as St. Peter describes ' the sewer of blood and stench ' which this usurper of his place had made of his ' cemetery,' the Vatican.* If we bear all this in mind, we shall find nothing improbable in the interpretation which sees in this dark, savage, and stubborn wood the tangled and desperate political condition of Italy in both Church and State. The corruptions of the Papal Court, the simony of the Pope and his haughty claim of tem- poral power, the absenteeism of the Emperor, the factions of Florence, his own banishment by his fellow-citizens, and the consequent ruin of his » Par. xxvii. 22-30. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 5 earthly fortunes, might well make Dante seem to CANTO I himself as a man entangled and lost in a dark forest, ' savage, rough, and stern.' Further, this interpretation is confirmed when we X. turn to the Earthly Paradise on the top of Mount Purgatory. There Dante finds himself in another forest which is undoubtedly meant to be understood as the counterpart of this one. It is not dark and savage, but fair with sunlight filtering through 'the living green,' and vocal with the songs of birds as he remembered hearing them sing to a murmurous accompaniment of leaves in the pine-forests of Chiassi by the Adriatic shore. A fair lady is gather- ing flowers and singing in her joy, so safe is it from every danger ; and Virgil, his guide, tells him there is no fear of his being lost in its depths — he has power and freedom to wander wheresoever he will : • take thine own pleasure for thy guide henceforth.' * The contrast between the two is obvious and inten- tional; for when we turn to the De Monarchia we find that this sunlit wood, glad with birds and flowers, represents the just and settled order of human life here on earth — the Earthly Paradise of ! good government: 'Two ends, therefore, have been " laid down by the ineffable providence of God for i man to aim at : the blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of his natural powers, and « which is prefigured in the Earthly Paradise; and , next, the blessedness of the life eternal, which con- sists in the fruition of the sight of God's countenance, and to which man by his own natural powers cannot ' Purg. xxTu. 131. 6 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I rise, if he be not aided by the divine light ; and this blessedness is understood by the Heavenly Paradise. "■ v . . . Therefore man had need of two guides for his life, as he had a twofold end in life ; whereof one is the Supreme Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life, according to the things revealed to us ; and the other is the Emperor, to guide mankind to happiness in this world, in accordance with the teaching of philo- sophy.' ^ In Dante's view, both guides had neglected their appointed task. The Emperor, by his absence from Italy, had allowed ' the garden of the empire to be waste ' ; while the Pope, in his anxiety not ' to let Caesar sit upon the saddle,' had disobeyed the plain command of God.^ The natural consequence was a political and ecclesiastical wilderness which might well be compared to a dark and savage forest, and set in contrast with the wood of the Earthly Para- dise, bright with sunlight and with flowers. Y 2. Moral inter- The second interpretation referred to regards this preta ion. dark wood as symbolic of the demoralization of Dante's own personal life ; and there can be little doubt that this is its primary naeaning. Whatever more the poem may be — and it is much more — it is in the first instance the story of the poet's own moral and spiritual conversion. The Purgatorio has well been called ' The Confessions of Dante Alighieri.* The Angel at the Gate of St. Peter touches his brow with his sword, and the seven deadly sins, hitherto concealed, instantly become visible, and are purged away one by one as he climbs from Terrace to Ter- race. When at last he stands on the summit of the * De Monarchia, iil. 16. ' Furg. vi. 88-105. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 7 Mount, Beatrice sternly and without pity for his CANTO I tears drives home upon his conscience the conviction of some great root-sin from which all the rest grew — unfaithfulness to herself : • As soon as ever of my second age ^ I was upon the threshold, and changed life, Himself from me he took and gave to others. When from the flesh to spirit I ascended. And beauty and virtue were in me increased, I was to him less dear and less delightful ; And into ways untrue he turned his steps, Pursuing the false images of good. That never any promises fulfil ; Nor prayer for inspiration me availed. By means of which in dreams and otherwise I called him back, so little did he heed them. So low he fell that all appliances For his salvation were already short, Save showing him the people of perdition.' * What precisely this unfaithfulness to Beatrice was has been subject of endless dispute. Some writers will have it that it was nothing worse than the sin of devoting himself to the study of Philosophy instead of Theology. But, putting aside meantime the question whether Dante regarded this as a sin at all, his own language throughout the poem is strangely misleading if it does not mean a great deal more. For instance, he expressly acknowledges the sin of Pride.' On the Terrace of the Gluttons on the ' See note on p. 8, on the four ages of human life. The second. Youth, begins at tweuty-flve, and Beatrice died in her twenty-fourth year, i.e. on the threshold of her ' second age.' » Purg. XXX. 124-138. 3 purg. xiii. 133-138. 8 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I Mount of Purification, one of the souls, Buonagiunta of Lucca, murmurs in a curious way the name of a certain Gentucca, a lady of that city, and it is diffi- cult to avoid receiving the impression of some love- intrigue, which Dante thus confesses.^ On the same Terrace he meets his old friend Forese Donati, and Bays to him : ' If thou bring back to mind What thou with me hast been and I with thee, The present memory will be grievous still.' ^ Surely, if this means anything, it is a confession of some irregularity of moral life in which they were companions on earth. From the Terrace, we might infer that it was the sin of gluttony ; but the refer- ence may be to a bundle of abusive and scurrilous sonnets which passed between the two during a quarrel, and which assuredly, if genuine, are no credit to either.* Add to this the sad and dignified sonnet in which Guido Cavalcanti, whom he called ' the first among his friends,' reproaches him for the way of life into which he has fallen : ' I come to thee by daytime constantly, But in thy thoughts too much of baseness find : Greatly it grieves me for thy gentle mind, And for thy many virtues gone from thee. It was thy wont to shun much company, Unto all sorry concourse ill inclined : And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind, Had made me treasure up thy poetry. 1 Purg. xxiv. 3448. « Purg. xxlii. 115-H7. ^ D. G. Bossetti's Dante and his Circle, 211-248. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 9 But now I dare not, for thine abject life, CANTO I Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes ; Nor come I in such sort that thou may'st know. Ah ! prythee read this sonnet many times : So shall that evil one who bred this strife Be thrust from thy dishonoured soul and go.' > In face of such things as these, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this dark wood means something more than the study of Philosophy. Turning, then, to this third interpretation, we 3. piiUobo- find ourselves entangled in difficulties. The idea that pretatlon. the unfaithfulness to herself with which Beatrice charges him is the study of Philosophy, is based on the words which she addresses to him in the closing Canto of the Purgatorio : 'That thou may'st recognize,' she said, ' the school Which thou hast followed, and may'st see how far Its doctrine follows after my discourse, And may'st behold your path from the divine Distant as far as separated is From earth the heaven that highest hastens on.'* The 'school' is here understood as some school of Philosophy for which Dante had abandoned Beatrice or Theology, and the Convito is quoted in proof. After telling us how, in order to comfort himself for the loss of Beatrice, he read Boethius's De Consolor tione Philosophice and Cicero's De Amicitia, he pro- ceeds : ' And just as if a man should go about looking for silver, and apart from his purpose should find gold, ... so I, who sought to console myself, found not only a remedy for my tears, but sayings of 1 D. G. Kossetti's Dante and his Circle, 161. ' Purg. zxziil. 85-90. 10 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I authors, and of sciences, and of books ; considering which, I soon decided that Philosophy, who was the sovereign lady of these authors, these sciences, and these books, was the supreme thing. And I imagined her as a noble lady ; and I could not imagine her as other than merciful ; wherefore so willingly did my sense of Truth behold her that it could scarcely be diverted from her. And on account of this imagina- tion I began to go where she in truth showed herself, that is, in the schools of the religious and the disputa- tions of the philosophers; so that in a little while, perhaps thirty months, I began to be so deeply aware of her sweetness, that the love of her banished and '.^ destroyed every other thought.' ^ This passage cer- tainly proves that after the death of Beatrice Dante did turn for consolation to Philosophy ; but it also proves with equal certainty that when he wrote the Convito he had no idea that in doing so he was com- mitting a sin. On the contrary, he speaks of Philo- sophy in a way which sounds to our ears as the very hyperbole of praise. We do not know the date of the Convito, and of course it is quite possible that Dante in the interval between it and the Commedia may have swung to the opposite extreme. But it ^ is entirely unlikely, from his general conception of \ the relations between Faith and Eeason. With his great theological authority, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante did indeed draw a distinction between Faith and Reason, but certainly not such a distinction as would turn the exercise of Reason into a positive sin, demanding the agony of contrition which Beatrice > Conv. ii. 13. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 11 wrings from him in the Purgatorio. On the contrary, CANTO I Beason is consistently regarded as the light of God shining in the natural mind of maji. True, for sal- vation it requires to be supplemented by the super- natural light of Faith ; nevertheless, so far as it goes, it is right and good. The relation between the two "'■■'' is symbolized by Dante's two chief guides. Virgil is the natural Beason of man ; but Beatrice, the symbol of the heavenly Wisdom which comes of Faith, does not disparage or condemn Virgil. On the contrary, it is she who seeks him out and gives him his com- mission to guide Dante to herself. It seems much nearer the mark to say that The Sunilt "■ Philosophy, so far from being the dark wood, is"»""**^- the sunlit hill which Dante attempted to climb.* Nothing is more unsatisfactory than the summary way in which this hill is usually dismissed by a quotation from the Psalms — • I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,' or a reference to ' the delectable moun- tains ' of the Pilgrim's Progress. As unsatisfactory is it to say that it is simply the opposite of the tangled wood of moral and political error — the hill of virtue, truth, and good government. There is a passage in \ the Purgatorio which almost certainly ought to be read in connection with this mountain. When, in the Earthly Paradise on the top of Mount Purgatory, Dante sees Beatrice for the first time, she greets him with the words : ' Look at me well : I, even I, am Beatrice ! How didst thou deign to come unto the mountain ? Didst thou not know that here man is happy ? ' ^ > Inf. i. 13-30. « Purg. xxx. 73-75, 12 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I The common interpretation is that the words — ' How didst thou deign to come unto the mountain ? ' refer to the mountain on which they are now standing, namely, Mount Purgatory; and, in that case, the question is ironical. But this is far from natural, and cannot by any ingenuity be made to harmonize with the second question — 'Didst thou not know that here man is happy?' But the questions fall into their proper relations if we suppose Beatrice to be speaking of two mountains and setting them in contrast: 'Why didst thou deign to approach the other mountain ? Didst thou not know that not there, but here, man is happy?' The other mountain can only be that mentioned here at the beginning of his pilgrimage. It was just after his vain attempt to climb it that Beatrice herself inter- posed on his behalf by sending Virgil as his guide ; and now that she meets him for the first time there- after, she reverts to that mountain and asks why he had approached it at all in quest of happiness. If now we say that the mountain Dante first attempted to climb was Philosophy, it fits in sufficiently well with all the facts. He himself tells us he at first sought refuge in Philosophy. For a time he thought her sunlit heights sufficient, not knowing that he had a far loftier mountain to climb, the highest under heaven, and far beyond it again, through the ten spheres of Paradise to the Beatific Vision. But, low as that mountain of Philosophy was, Dante found it beyond his power to climb — the three wild beasts impeded his way : even Philosophy is beyond the man who has not conquered the beast in himself. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 13 A writer in the Quarterly Review (July 1896) supports CANTO I this interpretation with singular ingenuity. For example, Dante tells us that, in attempting to climb this hill, 'the firm foot ever was the lower' (i. 30). The common interpretation is that the 'firm' or strong foot is the right, just as in Inf. xix. 41 the ' weary ' (stanca) hand means the left. When a man climbs a hill so that his right foot is always the lower, he must be rounding it towards the right hand ; and it is supposed that Dante simply wishes to tell the direction in which he moved. The writer in the Quarterly, however, discards this view, and holds that in these words Dante describes, and means to describe, the very method of Science and Philosophy as distinguished from Faith: 'At the opening of the poem the mystic pilgrim is lost in a forest of perplexity; and when at length he emerges and sees before him the serene heights of Science, he proceeds to toil upwards. That this (i7 dilettOso monte) means the hill of demonstrative Science is indicated by that line : " Si che il pi& fermo sempre era il piti basso." The lower step is the firmer in demonstration ; be- cause the propositions which sustain the fabric of argument are the surer and lower down, until we reach the foundation which is the surest of all, because it consists of axiomatic truths. . . . The commentators differ about the physical soundness of this as a mechanical description of hill-climbing, and perhaps it is not quite exact. But for allegory it is near enough: the poet was thinking more of 14 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I his meaning than of his figure.' Whether this is a sound interpretation of the line or not, the identi- fication of this hill with Philosophy would give a meaning and coherence to the whole passage which ^ . otherwise seem lacking. The substance would then amount to this : In the middle of his life Dante woke up to the alarming conviction that he had lost him- self in the dark forest of his own sins and the political miseries of his country. In bis effort to escape he turned to Philosophy, which shone above him as a hill whose top was lighted by the sun, in Dante the sensible image of God. To Virgil, the natural Keason of man, it seems ' the Mount Delectable, Which is the source and cause of every joy.' ^ But the Divine Wisdom personified in Beatrice knows that, though not evil, it is yet inadequate: not there can man be happy — he must purify him- self on another and higher mountain before he can find even an Earthly Paradise. Whatever the hill represents — Philosophy, or Good Government, or an ideal of Holiness — Dante found himself unequal to the task of climbing it. No sooner had he begun the ascent than his path was barred in turn by three wild beasts — a Panther, a Lion, and a She-wolf. The obvious reference is to Jer. V. 6 — ' Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities : every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces : because their The Three Beasts. 1 Inf. i. 77. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 15 transgressions are many, and their backslidings are CANTO I increased.' The exact symbolism, however, is not easy to determine. Once more we find two main i. Political lines of interpretation, the political and the moral, tion. According to the former, the Panther light and swift exceedingly Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er,^ is Florence with her factions of Guelphs and Ghibel- lines. Blacks and Whites, and her sudden changes of laws and customs.^ In Botticelli's drawing in illus- tration of this Canto, the spots of the Leopard are in the form of flowers ; but it is uncertain whether they are meant for the lily of Florence, or for the flowers of Spring, ' the sweet season ' of which Dante speaks in line 43. According to this political view, Dante's meaning is that the factions of Florence barred the way to the political regeneration of Italy, which is symbolized by the sunlit hill. The Lion cording With head uplifted, and with ravenous htmger, So that it seemed the air was afraid of him,^ is held to represent the royal house of France. We know that Dante opposed resolutely the interven- tion of Charles of Valois in Florentine politics, and that the treacherous conduct of this prince justified his opposition. In the Purgatorio he com- pares him to Judas : ' Unarmed he goes, alone, and with the lance That Judas jousted with ; and that he thrusts So that he makes the paunch of Florence burst.'* » Inf. i, 32, 33, 2 Purff. vi. 139-151. 3 inf. 1. 4648. « Purg. xi. 73-75. 16 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I Many other passages show that to Dante's mind the intervention of France had never proved anything but a curse to Italy. Philip the Fair, the brother of Charles, is the object of his bitterest indignation. He calls him 'the new Pilate,' and denounces the outrage which he committed on Boniface vin. at Anagni,^ and his carrying away of the Church into the Babylonish captivity at Avignon,^ He calls the royal house of France ' the evil tree Which overshadows all the Christian world, So that good fruit is seldom gathered from it.' ' The third beast is generally identified with the Papacy : A She-wolf, that with all hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagreness. And many folk has caused to live forlorn.* All through the poem the sin of Avarice is spoken of as a wolf. Plutus, the Guardian of the Fourth Circle, in which this sin is punished, is addressed, ' thou accursed wolf.' ' The same name is expressly applied to Avarice on the Fifth Cornice of Pur- gatory : Accursed may'st thou be, thou old She-wolf, That more than all the other beasts hast prey. Because of hunger infinitely hollow.* Now, Dante appears to regard Avarice as the peculiar vice of the Church. Not indeed, as he well knows, that the Church has any monopoly of this sin, for * Purg. XX. 85-91. 2 py,rg. xxxii. 151-160. ' Purg. xx. 43-45. < Inf. 1. 49-51. ' Inf. vij, 8, ° Purg. ix. 10-12. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 17 he calls it ' the evil which all the world pervades.' CANTO I Nevertheless it was obviously his belief that church- men lay peculiarly open to this temptation. In the Fourth Circle, for example, he notes that most of the Avaricious have tonsured heads, and Virgil in- forms hira that they are clerks. Popes, and Cardinals.^ In Circle viii, a special Moat is allotted to churchmen who have been guilty of that worst form of Avarice, Simony; and it is to this part of the Inferno that the reigning Pope, Boniface vin., is prophetically consigned.^ If, then, we are to identify this She- wolf of Avarice with any particular representative, it must be the Papacy : not, indeed, as the only sinner by any means, but as the one most deeply infected with this vice, and the chief hindrance in the path to the mountain-top. The line, ' Many are the animals with whom she weds,'* is commonly understood to refer to the numerous political alliances by means of which Rome sought to strengthen her power and increase her wealth ; but an equally good interpreta- tion is that Avarice allies itself with many other sins : ' the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.' Turning to the moral interpretation, the Panther 2. Moral inter- is generally regarded as the symbol of Sensuality or Worldly Pleasure ; the Lion of Pride or Ambition ; and the Wolf, as we have just seen, of Avarice. An old commentator points out that these are the three ' principal vices which commonly assail man at three different periods of his life, namely, Sensuality in youth. Pride or Ambition in manhood, and Avarice » Inf. vii. 3748. 2 Inf. xlx. 62-57. ' Inf. i. 100. B 18 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I or Cupidity in old age.' It is scarcely likely that Dante meant thus to distribute them over the different stages of human life ; probably he had in mind the words of St. John, ' the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.' It is a question of great interest how far Dante felt him- self personally in danger from these temptations. With regard to the last of them. Avarice, we know that one of the charges on which he was banished from Florence was that of Barratry, embezzlement or misappropriation of public funds during his magis- tracy. The well-known Dante scholar, Scartazzini, while indignantly defending the poet from the charge of sensuality, does not scruple to say that there is at least a primd facie appearance of guilt in this matter of embezzlement. ' We have seen,' he says, ' that exactly in the years which preceded his prior- ate he was seriously in debt, and that makes us reflect. In a position of power and in want of money at the same time, even the noblest and most honest of men are exposed to great temptations.' ^ On this mode of argument, no man's reputation would be safe who was ever in debt. Dante himself in- dignantly denied the charge. As we shall see, he describes at great length the punishment of Barrators, pouring contempt upon their sin by the very hideousness and grotesqueness of their doom. Much of what he writes of them seems to me to become intelligible only if we regard it as descriptive of the danger in which he himself stoodf rom this very charge; and it is almost impossible to imagine him ' A Companion to Dante, p. 107. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 19 writing as he does concerning a sin of which he knew CANTO I himself to be guilty. While, therefore, we must ac- quit him of this crime, it is still more than possible that Dante had felt the temptation of money, ' the accursed hunger of gold,' even though he never allowed it to corrupt his heart or soil his hands. Whatever doubt there may be about Avarice, there can be none of Dante's Pride, for he himself ex- pressly acknowledges it. I do not refer to a certain noble pride which meets us everywhere in his works, a high and serene consciousness of his own great powers. That, indeed, he counted a virtue : Aristotle, his master in Ethics, had taught him that the great soul is never ignorant of its own greatness. I refer in particular to what he says of himself as he stands on the Second Cornice of Mount Purgatory, and looks at the Envious whose eyes are sewed up in punishment of their misuse of them : ' Mine eyes,' I said, ' will yet be here ta'en from me 5 But for short space, for small is the offence Committed by their being turned with envy. Far greater is the fear wherein suspended My soul is, of the torment underneath. For even now the load down there weighs on me.' * 'The torment underneath' is the punishment of Pride on the First Cornice. In other words, Dante knew that Envy was not one of his besetting sins, and that Pride was ; and therefore feared that his proud neck must yet be bent by the stones under which he had seen the souls stagger on the Terrace beneath. » Purg. xiii. 133-138. 20 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I But by far the most interesting problem is that which gathers round the Leopard or Panther, the symbol of Sensual Pleasure. There are more pas- sages than one in which Dante seems at least to acknowledge this sin. "When he reaches the highest Cornice of Purgatory, it is with the utmost difficulty that Virgil and the Angel of the Terrace persuade him to enter the fire which burns the passions of Sensuality away ; and there is in bis cry of pain an intensity which is the obvjous sign of a personal experience : When I was in it, into molten glass I would have cast me to refresh myself, So without measure was the burning there.i But without doubt the most interesting passage in this connection is that of Inferno xvi. 106-114 : I had a cord around about me girt, And therewithal I whilom had designed To take the Panther with the painted skin, After I this had all from me unloosed. As my Conductor had commanded me, I reached it to him, gathered up and coiled, Whereat he turned himself to the right side, And at a little distance from the verge He cast it down into the deep abyss. The ' deep abyss ' is the great precipice which walls round the Eighth Circle of Hell, the prison of the Fraudulent. The depth is eo profound that the pilgrims are forced to summon its Guardian-Fiend to carry them down ; and their signal to him is the ' Purg. xxvii. 49-51. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 21 casting of this cord from Dante's waist, with which CANTO I he tells U3 he had at one time thought ' to take the Panther with the painted skin.' Obviously some symbolism underlies this, which must be more care- fully examined when we reach the passage. Mean- ** time I may anticipate to the extent of explaining that there seems to be ground for the tradition that in his earlier years Dante entered the Order of the Franciscans, who are called Cordeliers, from the cord with which they girt themselves. If this is so, the meaning is one of two, according as we take the Panther in its moral or its political sense. Taking it politically, the meaning may be that at one period of his life Dante thought the Franciscan Order could be utilised 'to take the Panther with the painted skin' — that is, to quell the factions of Florence. Taking it morally, it tells us he had once assumed the cord of the Order in the hope of thereby sub- duing the flesh. In either case, he came to the con- ) viction that the Franciscan cord was not the noose with which the Panther could be caught ; and there- I fore, unloosing it at the command of Virgil, who is i Beason personified, he handed it to him to cast into j the abyss. In his attempt to climb the sunlit mountain, the three beasts meet him in the order of their malignity: the Panther impeded his way, yet not so violently as to make him lose hope of attaining the heights ; the Lion struck him with terror ; but the She-wolf made him so utterly despair that he turned and rushed downwards to the dark valley of the savage wood. It is far from easy to understand what he says of V 22 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I the Panther : so far from discouraging him, it rather inspired him with good hope : The time was the beginning of the morning, And up the sun was mounting with those stars That with him were, what time the Love Divine At first in motion set those beauteous things ; So were to me occasion of good hope, The variegated skin of that wild beast, The hour of time, and the sweet season.' This seems to run counter to experience. ' The sweet season ' of spring, so far from giving hope of over- coming sensuality, is usually regarded as the season which rather excites it. It has been suggested that Dante means to say : If even in the spring-time of my days I am able thus to resist this temptation, how much stronger will my resistance be in the autumn and winter of my life. This, however, seems some- what forced. Perhaps the simplest way is to ask what is the natural effect of an early morning in the spring-time, just when the sun is rising and before the stars have vanished. There is surely no time when base desires are more incongruous; no time when the freshness and purity of Nature more readily kindle the desire and hope of a better life. If a man cannot be pure in that virginal purity of dawn, he cannot be pure at all. The meaning is not unlike the washing of the face in morning dew which Cato commanded at the foot of Mount Purga- ; tory — the cleansing power of a fresh dewy spring morning. Yet it is to be noted that Dante's ' good hope' is doomed to disappointment. The sun, the > Inf. 1. 37-43. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 23 season, the hour of dawn : all are powerless of them- CANTO I selves to overcome this beautiful wild beast. On the Mount of Purification, Dante had to learn that this is the last baseness which sinful man overcomes, and that it must be burnt out of the soul by a more pain- ful fire than the sunshine of a fair spring morning. Dante's flight down the mountain side was arrested Virgu. by one solitary figure in ' the desert vast,' whether ' shade or real man ' he did not know. To his intense ]oy, he discovers that he is in the presence of the poet Virgil ; and as Virgil is to be his companion and guide down all the Circles of Hell and up all the Terraces of Purgatory, we must understand from the outset what he represents in the symbolism of the poem. Dante had an almost superstitious rever- ""'' ence for Virgil, which it is not easy for us to share. He quotes his words almost as he quotes Scripture. He calls him the ' glory of the Latins,' ' that gentle sage who all things knew,' 'the sea of all intelli- gence,' 'my sweet pedagogue,' 'thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master thou ' ; and when at last, having guided him to the Earthly Paradise, he suddenly vanishes, even the presence of Beatrice cannot keep back Dante's tears for Virgilius, sweetest of all fathers, Virgilius, to -whom I for my salvation gave myself .i He seems even to have broken off his friendship with the poet Guido Cavalcanti, because he refused Virgil the reverence which Dante thought his due.* What, then, is the reason for this prodigality of • Purg. XXX. 50, 51. 2 Inf. x. 61-63. 24 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I veneration ? Why, for instance, does he not choose Why chosen as Aristotle as guide? He calls Aristotle 'the Master ^^»- of those who know,' ' the Master of our life,' ' the Master and Leader of human reason.' In his prose works he quotes him constantly, and it is seldom that his authority is not final on any disputed point: 'where the Divine judgment of Aristotle opens its mouth, it seems to me that we should pass by the judgment of all other men.'^ It is partly on his Ethics that the classification of sins in the Inferno , is based, We^ may well wonder why this great authority, who ruled the mediaeval intellectj is not chosen as guide through the moral issues of human ; life. The reason appears to lie in the peculiar nature and quality of Dante's mind. It was a mind which delighted in the manifoldness of the symbols with which it worked : the greater the number of mean- ings and correspondences they had the better they suited his purpose. Now, without doubt, Virgil stood in Dante's imagination for more than even Aristotle could stand for. JEe was a poet, and there- fore the representative of the human intellect work- ing in the highest region of thought ; he was a citizen of Rome in its golden days of Empire; and Jie lived at the exact moment of time when Paganism and phristianity met — that rare and pregnant moment when the natural heart grew prophetic in its yearn- jng for the New Bra. We can, therefore, distinguish at least four reasons why Dante chose him as his guide. , y{ As poet. To begin with, there is his obvious admiration of 1 Conv. iv. 17 ; Inf. iv. 130-133, etc. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 25 him as a poet. In his own Limbo, the four great CANTO I poets of antiquity hail him with one voice : ' Honour the loftiest poet ! ' In the passage before us Dante acknowledges him as his master in style ; ' Thou art my master, and my author thou. Thou art alone the one from whom I took The beautiful style that hath done honour to me,' ' He regrets that the study of his works had fallen into neglect, a fact which he indicates figuratively when he says that Virgil ' seemed from long silence hoarse.' As we saw a little ago, he quarrelled with •the first of his friends' because he held Virgil in disdain. In the second place, Virgil stood in Dante's mind as symbol of for the Roman Empire in its ideal glory, its golden smpS age, 'under the good Augustus.' The Empire was, in his view, the heaven-ordained seat and home of the Church. For the express purpose of founding it, ^neas was brought by God Himself from Troy to Italy, as surely as Israel from Egypt to Canaan ;^ and the poet who in its high imperial prime sang the fortunes of its founder, was the worthiest guide to that Earthly Paradise which it was the function and duty of the Boman Emperor to create. The descent of ^neas into the invisible world in the Sixth Book of the JEneid, and the prophetic vision there given him of Rome's future greatness, were undoubtedly additional reasons for choosing Virgil as his guide. It is on these grounds that some com- > Inf. i. 85-87. « Inf. il. 13-27 ; Conv. iv. 5 ; De Mon. 1. 16 ; ii. 7, 12, 13, etc. Natural Reason, 26 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I mentators regard Virgil as the symbol of Imperial Authority, and interpret the poem accordingly. As symbol of It can scarcely be doubted, however, that Dante's_ chief reason was that Virgil represented to him the natural human intellect at its best— the highest,_ " ■ ■ sanest wisdom of antiquity, unaided by Revelation., ' We shall see the reverence which Dante pays to the myths of Paganism, recognizing in them a natural revelation of ethics, written on the heart. In Virgil he sees the man of the pre-Christian world in whom this natural revelation shone with clearest ray. Being a Pagan, he could not — from Dante's Catholic standpoint — exercise the three distinctively Chris- tian or theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity; but in common with the best souls of the heathen world, he practised the four natural or cardinal virtues. Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Forti- tude. As Virgil himself says to Sordello, speaking of his own abode in Limbo : ' There dwell I among those who the three saintly Virtues did not put on, and without vice The others knew, and followed all of them.' * Virgil, therefore, stands for the natural Intellect and Conscience of man at their highest ; and for this union of Conscience and Intellect, unaided by special revelation, I shall use the word 'Reason': reserving •Wisdom ' for Beatrice, the symbol of that higher development of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual powers produced under the Christian Revelation, As prophet of This leads us to a fourth reason which seldom receives its due recognition, namely, that Virgil stood ' Purg. vii. 34-36. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 27 on the borderland between Paganism and Christi- CANTO I anity. Even the Church, as one has said, regarded, him as 'a species of Pagan Isaiah'; though, indeed, j we reach a truer parallel if we call him rather the John the Baptist of Paganism— ^he_ greatest of thej)ld era and the herald of the new. __ This was certainly Dante's conception of him. When, for example, the poet Statius meets Virgil on Mount Purgatory, he stoops reverently to embrace his feet in gratitude for that prophecy of the Christ to which he owed his conversion to the Christian faith. The reference is, of course, to the well-known passage in the Eclogues of Virgil : * Thou first directedst me Towards Parnassus in its grots to drink, And then didst light me on to God. Thou didst as he who walketh in the night, ' Who bears his light behind and helpeth not himself, But maketh wise the persons after him. When thou didst say : " The age renews itself ; Justice returns and man's primeval time. And a new progeny descends from heaven." • Through thee I poet was, through thee a Christian , , . Already was the world in every part Pregnant with the true creed, disseminated By the messengers of the eternal kingdom ; ' And the word of thine, touched on above, 1 With the new preachers was in unison.' ' 1 Purg. xxil. 64-80; Virgil, Eel. iv. 5-7. ' Since the time of Constantine passages of Virgil's poems, the Fourth Eclogue more especially, were regarded as Christian prophecies. The Muse had inspired the poet who liTed on the borderland between two ages with some gifted verses, which accidentally appeared to prophesy the birth of Christ. . . . The unconscious Pagan was elevated to the rank of a prophet of the Messiah, he became the favourite poet of the Church and of the credu- lous Middle Ages, and for centuries his books were quoted as the oracle of a sibylline seer, and appeal was made blindly to them in the same way as it is now frequently made to the Bible.'— Geegokovius, Borne in the Middle Ages, iv. 671. N" 28 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I It is obvious that one who thus stood on the border- land between Natural and Bevealed Religion was a fit guide from Nature to Grace— which is precisely Virgil's function in the poem. It explains among other things the limits within which his guidance works. As the natural Reason of man, he knows all the pathways of Hell, and can show us sin in all its forms and final issues ; for this, no supernatural revelation is needed, the natural intellect and con- V science suffice. It is somewhat different, however, when we reach the Purgatorio. Virgil, indeed, is still our guide, for Reason knows the necessity, and in some small part the means, of penitence and purifi- cation. But only in some small part. Hence on the Mount where sins are purged, we find that Virgil has often to ask his way, and lean on powers and experiences beyond himself. In other words, so far as the penitent life is concerned, the natural mind and conscience need the aid of a wisdom higher than its own — the experience of souls more advanced in that life, the guidance of angels, the words of Scrip- ture, and the hymns, anthems, and prayers of the \ Church. Finally, when the Earthly Paradise is gained, Virgil's power of guidance fails entirely, and he yields place to Beatrice, symbol of that diviner Wisdom of Faith, Hope, and Love, which alone can open to any soul of man the Paradise of God. In Virgil's own words as they climb the Mount : ' What Reason seeth here, Myself can tell thee ; beyond that await For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of faith.' i ' Purg. xviii. 46-48. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 29 In the passage before us, the scope and limits of his CANTO I guidance are stated by himself more fully : ' Therefore I think and judge it for thy best Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide. And lead thee hence through an eternal place, Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations, Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate. Who cry out each one for the second death ; ' And then thou shalt see those who contented are ; Within the fire, because they hope to come, , Whene'er it may be, to the blessed people ; To whom then if thou wishest to ascend, i A soul shall be for that than I more worthy ; With her at my departure I shall leave thee ; Because that Emperor, who reigns above. In that I was rebellious to his law, Wills that through me none comes into his city. He governs everywhere, and there he reigns ; There is his city and his lofty seat : p happy he whom thereto he elects^! ' ^ Virgil begins his guidance by a mysterious pro- virgu's pro- phecy, the meaning of which remains unknown to Greyhound, this day. Dante, he says, must take another path of escape, because the malignity of the She-wolf is so great that she destroys all who pass her way. But her doom is at hand : a Greyhound comes who will chase her back to Hell from which envy first set her free: ' Many are the animals with whom she weds, And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound ■ Inf. 1. 112-129. In addition to his reputation as a prophet of Chris- tianity, Virgil was transformed by medieeval legends into a magician and enchanter. A trace of these legends may be found in Inf. ix. 22- 30 ; but had Dante accepted this darker view, he must have set him among the Diviners in Circle viii. (Canto xx.). 30 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain. f He shall not feed on either earth or pelf, But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue ; 'Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be. Of that low Italy shall he be the salvation, On whose account the maid Camilla died, Buryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds ; Through every city shall he hunt her down, Until he shall have driven her back to Hell, There from whence envy first did let her loose.' * This passage has given rise to a whole literature ; for, as one has wittily said, 'every interpreter of Dante tries to slip his own collar on to the famous Greyhound.' Fortunately, for the understanding of the poem as a whole, it is not necessary to have any collar at all. The only hint of his identity is that his nation lies between Feltro and Feltro, from which is inferred the interpretation most widely received in modern times, namely, that the expected deliverer of Italy was Can Grande della Scala, lord of Verona, at whose court Dante found refuge during his exile. The title of Greyhound is regarded as a play on Can or Cane, a dog.^ The territory of Can Grande lies between Feltro, a city of Friuli, and Montefeltro in Bomagna. He was appointed Imperial Vicar, and elected Leader of the Ghibelline League of Lombardy. 1 Inf. i. 100-111. ^ A story is told of a very different play on the word. One day when Dante ■was Can Grande's guest at Verona, ' a boy was concealed under the table, who, collecting the bones that were thrown there by the guests, according to the custom of those times, heaped them up at Dante's feet. When the tables were removed, the great heap appear- ing, Cane pretended to show much astonishment, and said, " Certainly, Dante is a great devourer of meat." To which Dante readUy replied, " My lord, you would not have seen so many bones had I been a dog (cane).'" See Rossetti's poem, Dante at Verona. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 31 Many passages undoubtedly prove that his character CANTO I excited great expectations in Dante. Even at the early age of nine he discerns his future nobility and greatness : ' But ere the Gascon cheat the noble Henry, Some sparkles of his virtue shall appear In caring not for silver nor for toils. So recognized shall his magnificence Become hereafter, that his enemies Will not have power to keep mute tongues about it. On him rely, and on his benefits ; By him shall many people be transformed, Changing condition, rich and mendicant.' ^ To this Can Grande Dante dedicated his Paradiso ; and it is thought by many that he is again referred to in an equally mysterious passage in the Pur- gatorio : 'For verily I see, and hence narrate it. The stars already near to bring the time. From every hindrance safe and every bar, "Within which a five-hundred, ten, and five, Sent by God, shall slay the thief, With that same giant who with her is sinning ' ^ — the giant being Philip the Fair of France, and the thief the harlot of the Papacy, The 'five-hundred, ten, and five ' are, "in Koman numerals, DXV, or transposed DVX, Leader ; and much ingenuity has been spent in making 515 out of the letters of Can ' Par. svii. 82-90. The Gascon is Pope Clement v., under whom the Papacy was removed to Avignon. In Inf. xLx. 83 he is called 'a pastor without law.' See also Par. zxviL 58 ; xxx. 142. The treachery referred to is that Clement at first favoured the cause of Henry vn. in Italy, but afterwards, under the menaces of Philip the Fair, withdrew his support. ' Pwrg. zzxiii. 10-4S. 32 THE SAVAGE WOOD AND CANTO I Grande's name. The reference to ' Feltro and Feltro," however, has given rise to a widely different in- terpretation. Spelt without capitals, the allusion would be to ' a person of lowly birth, born between felt and felt — that is, in the garb of poverty ' ; and at a very early date this person was identified with Christ Himself. In the Middle Ages there existed a widespread expectation of the Second Advent, in which Dante may have shared. Since Virgil was believed to have foretold the First Advent, there would be a certain appropriateness in putting into his mouth here a prophecy of the Second. Fortun- ately, as already said, it is in no way essential to an understanding of the spiritual substance of the poem to decide the problem. The one thing certain is that Dante looked for some Messiah, and that traces of this hope are scattered throughout his various works; but, as one says, ' he himself neither knew nor could know who he was to be. Hence it is quite possible that at different times he may have built his hopes upon different personages ; both in Can Grande, and in an Emperor, and perhaps too in a Pope.'^ We know that when Henry of Luxemburg was elected Emperor, he firmly believed the long-wished-f or hour had struck ; but after his untimely death in 1313, it is more than likely that his hope of a Deliverer was a homeless wanderer like himself. A passage in the De Monarchia seems to hint that in the end it turned from every earthly aid. Speaking of the Church's misuse of her wealth, which is • the patrimony of the ' Letter of Scartazzini quoted in Vernon's Headings on the Inferno, I. 30. For list of principal interpretations of the Veltro, see pp. 26, 27. THE THREE WILD BEASTS 33 poor,' he asks indignantly : ' What shall we say to CANTO I shepherds like these ? What shall we say when the substance of the Church is wasted, while the private estates of their own kindred are enlarged? But perchance it is better to proceed with what is set before us ; and in religious silence to wait for our Saviour's help.' ^ ^ De Mon. il. 12, CHAPTER II THE THREE BLESSED LADIES of the Pilgrimage. CANTO II We come now to the true beginning of the Commedia, Dante's fear for the opening Canto is merely introductory to the whole poem. This is proved, among other things, by the fact that Dante in this Second Canto makes his invocation to the Muses, while the corresponding invocations in the Purgatorio and Paradiso occur in the opening Cantos. It is perhaps worth while noticing in passing that the three invocations rise in solemnity with the increasing sanctity of the sub- ject : here the poet appeals simply to the Muses ; in the Purgatorio to the ' holy Muses ' ; and in the Paradiso to ' good Apollo ' — the sun, which he calls in the Convito the sensible image of God. When Yirgil first offered his guidance, Dante tells us he was all eagerness to follow him ; but when the hour of evening came, the shadows of doubt fell with the shadows of the night. The loneliness of the pilgrimage, the toil and greatness of the way, the wofulness of the sights which awaited him, and the uncertainty of his own powers — all made him pause in irresolution and fear. He does not say whether it is the fear of the author or the fear of 31 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 35 the sinner, but we cannot doubt that he was assailed CANTO 11 by both. A poem like the (7owmec?ia, itt.. which the whole life, spirit, and learning of the Middle Ages are condensed, cannot have been undertaken and carried out without many a fear and hesitation ; its very greatness must have made the heart that con- ceived it tremble and almost despair. Much more important, however, is the moral hesitation. Dante knows that he is beginning the great pilgrimage of a sinful human soul to its God. At first, eagerness to escape from the dark and savage wilderness of his sins uplifts his heart ; but this is quickly followed by the natural recoil of despondency. The man who sees at once the lowness of his own soul and far above him that righteousness of God which is 'like / the great mountains,' cannot but have his Slough of Despond, his dark hour when the great enter- prise of salvation almost drops from his trembling hands. In his perplexity and fear Dante takes counsel of ^neaa and Reason in the person of Virgil, appealing to him to decide whether his powers are equal to the vast and mysterious pilgrimage. It is true, he grants, that two other instances exist of successful journeys into the Invisible. Virgil himself had sung how ^neas had 'dared to enter the Inferno alone with the Sibyl in search of his father Anchises, in the face of so many dangers';^ and Paul, 'the Chosen Vessel,' tells how ' he was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeak- able words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.'* But was it not presumption to dream that he could ^ • Conv, iv. 26. * 2 Cor. xii. 4. X 36 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES CANTO II descend to Hell with ^neas, and mount to Heaven with Paul? 'But I, why hither come, or who concedes it? I not ^neas am, I am not Paul, Nor I nor others think me worthy of it.' ^ Paul's vision, for instance, was given for the com- fort of the Christian Faith ; and j^neas was worthy to become a pilgrim of the Invisible because he was the chosen father of that mighty Boman Empire which was destined of Heaven to be the seat and home of that Faith on earth, — ' the holy place wherein Sits the successor of the greatest Peter.'* This setting of ^neas and Paul side by side is the first instance of a characteristic of Dante which meets us constantly throughout the poem, namely, the parallelism which he follows between sacred and profane history and legend. His custom is to give frona both alternate examples of sins and virtues. To understand him, we must dismiss from our minds the sharp contrast we are accustomed to draw be- tween Holy Scripture and the writings of such men as Aristotle and Virgil. The ^neid is quoted as of almost parallel authority with Scripture, Mne&s and Paul are set side by side. If we wish to under- stand why, we must study Dante's political theories as set forth at length in the De Monarchia. A large portion of that curious treatise is occupied with a series of arguments to prove that the empire of the world belonged of right to the Romans as the noblest 1 Inf. ii. 31-33. 2 Inf. ii. 23, 24. THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 37 people upon earth. One of liis proofs is that ^neas CANTO II 'was ennobled from all three continents both by his forefathers and his wives.' He proceeds to show that both forefathers and wives belonged to Asia, Africa, and Europe ; and on this he founds the curious argument that universal monarchy — the right to govern the three continents — belongs lawfully to his descendants. 'Who,' he asks triumphantly, 'will not rest persuaded that the father of the Bomans, and therefore the Romans themselves, were the noblest people under heaven ? Who can fail to see the divine predestination shown forth by the double meeting of blood from every part of the world in the veins of one man ? ' ^ An equally curious argument is used in the Convito, from the contemporaneousness of the birth of David and the founding of Rome : ' It was at one and the same time that David was born and that Rome was born ; that is, that Mneas came from Troy into Italy, which was the origin of the most noble city of Rome, as our books bear witness. Thus the divine election of the Roman Empire is made very evident by the birth of the holy city, which was contemporaneous with that of the root from which sprang the race of Mary.' ^ So sacred in his eyes was Rome that it became the earthly symbol of the Celestial City — 'that Rome where Christ is Roman.' ^ It is certainly not too much to say with ^ Dr. Moore that to Dante ' the people of Rome, as founders of the Empire, were as much God's " chosen people" as the Jews. Each was so "chosen" for 1 De Mon. ii. 3. ^ Conv. iv. 5. ' Purg. xxxii. 102. 38 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES CANTO II carrying out one branch of His great twofold design ; both these branches, moreover, coming, as it were, to maturity together in the nearly syn- chronous events of the establishment of the Roman Empire and the Incarnation of Christ.' ^ virgu's Returning to the narrative, let us see by what ment. arguments Reason overcame Dante's shrinking from the arduous pilgrimage. Virgil tells him plainly that his soul is ' attainted with cowardice.' Now, if there was any one thing the strenuous soul of Dante cou^ not bear, it was any cowardly shrinking from the moral responsibilities of life. We shall see immediately how he invented a special place of torment for the Neutrals — men and angels who through cowardly fear were neither for God nor against Him. His scorn of them is intense : Heaven and Hell alike reject them, and earth will not tolerate their memory. The charge of cowardice, therefore, was precisely that best fitted to sting Dante to activity. Probably what he had specially in view was the virtue which Aristotle calls Magnanimity or great-mindedness — the mean between vanity and pusillanimity, between an over- and an under- estimate of one's self. 'A high-minded' (or great- souled) ' person seems to be one who regards himself as worthy of high things, and who is worthy of them.'^ That it is this high-minded estimate of 1 Studies in Dante, second series, pp, 21, 22. ' Aristotle's Ethics, bk. iv. 7. Comp. Corvo. i. II. Eigh-mindedness is distinguished from small-mindedness, which under-estimates, and vanity, which over-estimates, its own worth. According to Aquinas, when a man ' denies of himself some greatness which at the same time he perceives to be in himself,' he is guilty of self-depreciation, which is sinful because a departure from truth {Smnma, ii-ii. q. 113, a. 1). THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 39 himself which Virgil is urging on him is proved CANTO II by the name which Dante here gives him — 'the Magnanimous,' the Great-minded : ' If I have well thy language understood,' Keplied that shade of the Magnanunous, 'Thy soul attainted is with cowardice.'* yX In short, it is the sign of true greatness of soul not ^ only to be equal to great enterprises, but to know one's self equal to them. Dante's fears and doubts made him under-estimate his own powers; and Virgil, who is Beason, seeks to rouse his 'magna- nimity,' a due and reasonable sense of the greatness of his own soul. Nothing is more characteristic of Dante : to undervalue one's self is no virtue, it is mere cowardice, which turns men back from ' honoured enterprise.' But Virgil has a still more potent persuasion. The Three XX Dante knew well that Reason by itself could never i^^^g. ^ carryEis great venture to a successful issue, or finally deliver his soul from sin. Hence Virgil — who, we must constantly remind'^ourselyes, is Reason per- sonified — assures him that behind himself heavenly powers are interested in his salvation. Not of his own motion had he offered his guidance ; the task was laid upon him from above. ' A fair saintly Lady ' trom Heaven, no other than Beatrice herself, had ventured into Hell to entreat his aid for one who is ^ a friend of hers, and not the friend of fortune.' She herself, she tells him, had been entreated for him by another heavenly Lady, ' Lucia, foe of all that cruel • Inf. iL 4345. 40 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES CANTO U is.' Lucia, in her turn, had been entreated by a third Lady, who said to her : ' Thy faithful one now stands in need Of thee, and unto thee I recommend him.' This is the Virgin Mary, called here ' a gentle Lady,' and, like her Son, never directly named in the Inferno} Lucia. Of these ' three blessed Ladies,' the least conspicu- ous in the poem is Lucia. We meet her twice again, once in the Purgatorio, when in his sleep she carries Dante up to the Gate of St. Peter : ' There came a Lady, and said : "I am Lucia ; Let me take this one up who is asleep, So will I make his journey easier for him " ' 2 ; and again in the Paradiso, where St. Bernard points her out in her place in the snow-white Rose of the redeemed. She is generally regarded as Dante's patron saint, perhaps because he was once threat- ened with blindness through excessive reading and weeping.' Plumptre says, 'The martyr-saint of ' ; Syracuse, who in the Diocletian persecution had torn out her eyes that her beauty might not minister to man's lust, was much honoured in Florence, and two churches, still standing, were dedicated to her. The story of her death had made her the patron saint of all who suffered from diseases of the eye.' * 1 Inf. ii. 49-126. 2 Purg. ix. 55-57. ' Conv. iii. 9 : ' Having wearied my eyes much with the labour of reading, so weakened were the visual spirits, that all the stars appeared to me to be blurred by some white mist.'— Cf. Vita Nuova, 32, for the effect on his eyes of excessive weeping. ■^ * In Art she sometimes bears a lighted lamp, sometimes a dish con- taining her two eyes, and sometimes an awl, on which, in rare instances, her eyes are skewered. See Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, li. 613-619. THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 41 Dante probably chooses her now as symbol of the )CANTO II better opening of the eyes of the soul — as her name , implies, the illuminating grace of God. Naturally, the Virgin Mary occupies a much more The virgin conspicuous place in the poem. It is from her that the first movement of Divine aid to Dante springs : at her entreaty, Lucia and Beatrice act on his behalf. It is she who ' breaks the stern judgment of Heaven.' On every Terrace of Mount Purgatory, the first example of each virtue by which penitent souls are urged on to holiness, is drawn from the Virgin's life. In the Paradiso, she is called ' the Rose in which the Word Divine became incarnate.' Her face is likest Christ's, and in the mystic Rose of Fkradise her place is nearest God. Through her, power is given to gaze upon the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. In Dante she represents the prevenient grace of God — that Divine love which neither hangs upon our merits nor waits for the ery of our need. Hence St. Bernard in his great prayer to her says that her aid outruns our prayers and anticipates our wants : 'Not only thy benignity gives succour To him who asketh it, but oftentimes Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.'^ But the principal interest and difficulty gather Beatrice, round the third of the Ladies, Beatrice, for love of m^ne ° whom ' he issued from the vulgar herd.' ^ The gener- ^'"*<»"- ally received view is that which identifies her with Beatrice, daughter of a Florentine gentleman, Folco Portinari, a near neighbour of the Alighieri family. ' Par. xxxiii. 16-18. 2 Inf. ii. 103. ■■\' 42 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES CANTO II This, however, haa been denied by many commen- tators. In the beginning of the Vita Nuova, Dante says of her that she ' was called Beatrice by many who knew not what to call her'; from which the inference has been drawn that the name Beatrice was employed as a screen to hide the true object of Dante's love, and that it was only the mistaken tradition of later times which identified her with Beatrice Portinari. The very existence of Beatrice as a woman of flesh and blood has been and is denied, and she has been resolved into a mere symbolic personification, standing for Ideal Womanhood, or Philosophy, Theology, the Ideal Church, or the Ideal Empire. For my own part, whether she was Beatrice Portinari or another, I have no doubt she was in the first instance a real woman. When, for example, Dante meets her glorified spirit in the Earthly Paradise, she speaks of her ' buried flesh ' and her ' fair members . . . which scattered are in earth' ; and this can scarcely refer to a mere symbolic abstrac- tion.^ Just as little doubt, however, is there that this lady, whoever she was, passed through a mar- vellous process of idealization 'into something rich and strange ' in the mystical imagination of the poet, becoming, as we have seen, the symbol of Heavenly Wisdom. Assuming that she was Beatrice Portinari, we know that she was married in 1287 to Simone de' Bardi of the great Florentine banking house, and that she died in 1290 in her twenty-fourth year. In his earliest work, the Vita Nuova, Dante tells us the story of his love in that peculiar mystical manner • Purg. xxxi. 47-51. THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 43 of his which has made it a beautiful enigma ever CANTO II since. It was in his ninth year that he saw her for the first time, ' clad in a subdued and goodly crimson'; and at the sudden vision he tells us that ' the spirit of life which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith.' Nine years after he met her in the street, and for the first time received her salutation. We need not hesi- ^ tateto believe, then, that Beatrice was a real woman, whom Dante's intensely mystical imagination trans- figured into a symbol of that Heavenly "Wisdom whose eyes, as he says in the Convito, are her demon- strations of the truth, and her smile her persuasions of it.^ After her^eath in 1290, he resolved to write some great work in her praise; and of this the Commedia is the fulfilment. The closing words of the Vita Nuova are : ' After writing this sonnet, it was given unto me to behold a very wonderful vision : wherein I saw things which determined me that I would say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I can ; as she well knoweth. Wherefore if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto Him who is the Master of Grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady : to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now ' Gonv. iii, 15. 44 THE THREE BLESSED LADIES CANTO II gazeth continually on His countenance qui est per omnia soecula henedictus. Laus Deo.' \ It is, then, this Beatrice, symbol of Divine Wisdom, who, for Dantri's salvation, leaves her place in Heaven beside the ancient Rachel, symbol of Con- templation,^ enters the Inferno, and charges Virgil to guide him to herself. _Nothing could show more clearly what is undoubtedly one of Dante's leadigg^ convictions, namely, the essential unity of Nature and Grace. Virgil is simply the servant of Grace^: from her, in the person of Beatrice, he takes his commands; and to her, in the person of Beatrice, he conducts the soul. In other words, although there is indeed a distinction, there is no real an- tagonism, between Faith and Beason. The natural raorality of the cardinal virtues, which consti- tute the Earthly Paradise, leads to the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love, without which the Celestial Paradise cannot be attained. The truths , of Christian Theology presuppose those of Natural Science and Philosophy. Just as Paul speaks of Law as our pedagogue to bring us to Christ, so Dante calls Virgil or Beason, 'the sweet pedagogue.'^ This essen- tial unity of Virgil and Beatrice, Nature and Grace, Beason and Faith, is expressed in another mystical form in the Convito. Dante there compares the Ten Heavens to the various sciences which together con- stitute Philosophy or Wisdom. The seven Planets, he says, correspond to the seven Sciences of the Trivium and Quadrivium which made up the 1 Inf. ii. 100-102 ; Par. xxxii. 7-9. 2 Purg. xii. 3 ; Gal. iii. 24, Vulgate : ' Itaque lex pedagogus noster fuit in Christo.' THE THREE BLESSED LADIES 45 mediseval curriculum of education : Grammar, Dia- CANTO II lectics, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geomietry, and Astronomy (or, as it was then called. Astrology). The eighth sphere, the Starry Heaven, with its Milky Way, represents Physics and Metaphysics; the ninth or Crystalline Heaven, Moral Philosophy ; while the tenth or Empyrean, to which the rest lead, and which enfolds them all, is ' Divine Science, which is called Theology.' ^ In fine, Grace inclu des Nature : Wisdom, like the Empyrean, folds in its sphere every earthly science — that Wisdom of which it was written of old : ' When He prepared the heavens, I was there ; when with a sure law and a circle He entrenched the ahysses ; when He established the aether above, and balanced the fountains of the waters; when He marked out its limits for the sea, and gave laws to the waters that they should not exceed their bounds; when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then was I with Him, disposing of all things, and rejoicing in every day.' ^ ' Gonv, ii. 14, 15. For explanation of the mediaeval curriculum, see Buskin's Mornings in Florence, ' The Strait Gate.' 2 Prov. viii. 27-30, Vulgate, quoted in Oonv. iii. 15. For further notice of Beatrice, see the biographical chapter on Dante at the beginning, pp. xzi-xszii. CHAPTER III ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS EeU. CANTO III The Third Canto brings us somewhat suddenly to The Gate of the Gate of Hell. How he reached it, or where exactly it was, Dante does not say. Since he con- ceived of the Inferno as directly under Jerusalem,' its entrance may have been in that valley of Hinnom \ which has given us the word Gehenna. The only guardian of the Gate is the awful superscription of despair. In this it differs from the Gate of Purga- tory, which is double-locked and guarded by an angel with a sword.^ Doubtless by this contrast Dante means to indicate the ease with which a man enters the open gate of sin — the ' f acilis descensus Averno ' of Virgil — and the difficulty with which he climbs his way back to virtue. We may note in passing that though now the Gate of Hell stands wide with- out a sentinel, there was one occasion when entrance was disputed. In the Eighth Canto, Dante, follow- ing the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemna, tells how the hosts of Hell resisted Christ's descent to release * Inf. xxxiv. 112-115. According to Jewish and Mohammedan belief, based on Joel iii. 2, 12, the Last Judgment was to take place in the valley of Jehoshaphat. Dante refers to this belief in Inf. x. 10-12, 2 Purg. Ix. 76-138. 46 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 47 ' the spirits in prison,' but so impotently that the CANTO III Gate ' finds itself without a fastening still.' ^ Of the inscription over the Gate- way, only the last inscription. line seems generally familiar : 'All hope abandon, ye who enter in.' The rest of the inscription, however, is of equal interest, since it gives us Dante's view of the neces- sity for the existence of a Hell : ' Through me the way is to the city dolent ! Through me the way is to eternal dole ; Through me the way among the people lost. Justice incited my sublime Creator ; Created me Divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and the Primal Love. Before me there were no created things, Only eterne, and I eternal dure.'^ The last two lines give us the time and occasion \ which called Hell into existence. Before it, there existed only ' eternal things,' — the first matter, the heavens, and the orders of angels which govern them.3 But when the great rebellion took place in Heaven, this prison-house was 'prepared for the devil and his angels.' The creation of it is attributed to the whole Trinity ; for in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, whom Dante follows throughout. Power is the attribute of the Father, Wisdom of the Son, and Love of the Spirit : ' the omnipotence of the Father ' Inf. viii. 125-127. Gospel of Nicodemus, ziii-ziz. On the approach of Christ, ' the prince (of Hell) said to his impious oflScers, Shot the brass gates of cruelty, and ma^e them fast with iron bars, and fight courageously, lest we be taken captives' (xvi. 4). 2 Inf. iii. 1-9. » Comp. Par. vii. 130-138. 48 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III strikes down all who oppose His will ; the wisdom of the Son ordains chastisements proportionate to the sinner's deserts; and the charity of the Holy Ghost demands their infliction, as part of that eternal moral order which all creatures must acknowledge, whether in the joy of the blessed, or in the impotent, despairing rage of the damned.' ^ That which moved I the Trinity was Justice. Dante cannot conceive of any Power, Wisdom, or Love, worthy to be called i Divine, which could be indifferent to the eternal distinction between good and evil. Even the Love of God, if it were possible to conceive it as indepen- dent of a law of righteousness, would mean moral indifference, a Divine Laodiceanism. 'It is not fit,' says Anselm, ' that God should allow anything dis- ordered in his kingdom ; and if the Divine Wisdom did not inflict these pains, the universe itself, the order of which God should preserve, would suffer a certain deformity from its violated beauty, and j'^. Divine Providence would seem to fail.'" Further, Dante was unable to conceive of ' the larger hope ' of these modern days ; to him, Hell endured eternally, and its most awful punishment was its utter absence of hope. It was not, as so many have thought, because he was a man of hard and cruel spirit, incapable of appreciating the grace and mercy of God. We shall, indeed, meet with a few traces of an almost ferocious severity, as when he flung the soul of Filippo Argenti back into the mire of Styx, and tore out the hair of Bocca degli Abati ; ^ nevertheless 1 Hettinger's Dante's Divina Commedia, p. 102. 2 Cur Deus Soma, i. 12, 15. 3 Inf. viii. 37-63 ; xxxii. 97-111. ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 49 the prevailing characteristic of this man is not a CANTO III love of eternal tortures, but the moat tender pity and yearning for the lost— a pity so excessive that Reason, in the person of Virgil, feels called upon at times to rebuke it. Again and again he weeps as he passes from Circle to Circle. When he hears the sad story of Francesca da Rimini, for very pity he swoons and falls to the ground like a dead man.^ Nor is it any want of appreciation of the grace of God that makes him represent Hell as a hopeless prison. * Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms That.it receives whatever turns to it.' ^ So says King Manfred at the base of Mount Purga- tory — a man stained with horrible crimes, excom- municated by the Church, his very bones torn up and flung beyond the borders of the Papal territory, yet saved by one cry for mercy in the article of death. We may well ask why a man like Dante, under- '^ standing thus how infinite is the grace of God, and yearning with an agony of pity over the fate of the lost, should yet feel that an eternal Hell is a neces- sary issue of Divine Justice. Doubtless there are many reasons, but one is wrought into the substance of the poem, namely, that it is never God's grace f that fails, but man's own will. 'Infinite Goodness I hath such ample arms ' that one cry of true repent- ance at the last hour is enough for salvation. But a man may, by persistent abuse of his free-will, lose 1 Inf. V. 139-142. 2 Purg. lii. 112-135. Compare the dying cry of Buonconte of Monte- feltro, Purg. v. 88-129. D 50 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III its freedom, becoming so rooted and grounded in sin that even this one cry is at last beyond his power, ' For such a man, said Dante with his inexorable logic, what is left but Hell ? — Hell, not as an external place, but, in the first instance, as a state of his own soul. For in the Inferno this is beyond doubt Dante's leading thought : that the punishment of sin is simply sin itself,^ the narrowing down of the soul to its one master vice, and its hopeless imprisonment therein, through having sinned away the very power of true repentance. As the guilty king in Hamlet says: • What then ? what rests ? Try what repentance can : what can it not ? Yet what can it, when one can not repent? ' Naturally the inscription, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter in,' makes Dante hesitate to cross the threshold; and it is only when Virgil with joyful countenance assures him this is not his place, that he is comforted : 'The good of . Thou ghalt behold the people dolorous Intellect. Who have foregone the good of intellect.' ^ We must remember that Dante uses the word * intel- lect' in a higher sense than that common among ourselves. In his writings it is not far from what we mean by 'soul' or 'spirit.' He calls God 'pure intellect.' ' The joy and nobility of all spirits, human and angelic, depend on the degree in which this pure 1 Wisdom of Solomon, xi. 16 : ' Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished'; ' Whereas men have lived dissolutely and unrighteously, Thou hast tormented them with their ovm abomi- nations '(xii. 23). » Inf. iii. 17, 18. 3 Conv, iii. 7. ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 51 intellect pervades them. Further, all mediaeval CANTO ni theology, as one says, started from the words of iTohn xvii. 3 : ' This is eternal life, to know Thee the only true God.' To know God is the one final happi- ness of the intellect of man ; or, as Aristotle puts it, 'the true is the good of the intellect.'^ It is the Beatific Vision of the mystics. This desire for Truth, and God who is Truth, exists in us as an original and perpetual thirst, and if we strive to quench it from any hut its natural and appointed fountain, it turns into an endless torture. Thus Dante, writing of the Paradiso, says: 'It will speak of the blessed souls discovered in each sphere, and will declare that true beatitude to consist in knowing the source of Truth, as appears by John, where he says, " This is the true beatitude, to know the only true God."'^ On the other hand, speaking of the lost, he calls them ' those ; Intelligences who are in exile from the eternal fatherland, and who cannot philosophize ; because love is in them entirely extinguished, and to philo- sophize, as has been already said, love is necessary. Wherefore we see that the infernal Intelligences are deprived of the sight of this most beautiful Lady (Philosophy or Wisdom, the daughter of God) ; and because she is the beatitude of the intellect, her loss is most bitter and full of every sadness.' ' This, there- fore, is the real torment of the exiles of eternity. It * Conv, ii. 14. The reference is to Aristotle's Ethics, vi. 2 : ' The apprehension of truth is the function of both the intellectual parts of the soul' (desire and reason). * Epistle to Can Grande, sect. 33. ^ Conv. iiU 13. The references to this thirst of the ' intellect ' for God are innumerable. See Conv. I. 1; iii. 6; iv. 12; Purg. xxi. 1; Par. li. 19; xxviii, 106-109, etc. 52 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III is not because they are blown about by hurricanes, or plunged in rivers of blood, or frozen in lakes of ice, that the dark underworld reverberates with \ cries and lamentations. These, and such as these, are only material figures to shadow forth the dif- ferent forms of pain their special sins produce ; but the essential suffering common to them all is that^ unsatisfied tMrst_ for the knowledge qf^ God, jUia. • good of the intellect,' which they have foregone .for ever. JFpr Dante's deepest conviction is that man was made with ' a concreated and perpetual thirst.' for the knowledge of God; and that when by his sin he foregoes that knowledge, the thirst only rages on the more violently, and what was meant to be an eternal bliss becomes an eternal pain. Assured, then, that he was not of the number of Vestibule of those who had ' lost the good of intellect,' Dante ventures to pass through the Gate, and finds himself not in Hell proper, but in a kind of Vestibule or Ante-Hell, where his ears are assailed by so dreadful a Babel of cries that he feels the horror of it tighten like a circle round his head : There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud Resounded through the air without a star, Whence I, at the beginning, wept thereat. Languages diverse, horrible dialects. Accents of anger, words of agony, And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands. Made up a tumult, that goes whirling on For ever in that air for ever dark. Even as the sand doth when the whirlwind breathes.^ Peering through the darkened air, Dante perceives » Inf. Hi. 22-30. ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 53 a multitude so vast he had not thought * that ever CANTO III death so many had undone,' carried on like sand before the whirlwind, in pursuit of a flying banner, which ' seemed indignant of all pause.' These naked wretches were so stung by hornets and wasps that their faces streamed with blood, which mingled with their tears and was gathered at their feet by loath- some worms. They are the souls of men who lived without praise or blame, because they never boldly and generously took a side — moral cowards and neutrals. Mingled with them are ' that caitifP choir of angels,' who, in the great war in Heaven, stood aloof and waited the event — neither for God nor against Him, but only for themselves. For this moral neutrality, Dante had an intense and noble scorn.' He denies it the name of life : ' they never were alive '; and Virgil says contemptuously : ' Let us not speak of them, but look and pass.' Probably Dante had known many such in the troubled politics of Florence — men who never boldly took a side and held to it, but like cowards and time- servers followed the banner of the majority of the moment. The breed has not died out yet. The general conception of their punishment is Their punist- \ plain enough : that spirit of time-serving Neutrality f'" ' in which they lived on earth has grown into the ; eternal habit of the soul. There as here they are . swept on the wind of public opinion, without minds * In De Mon. i. 1 Dante says he wrote this book lest some day he should have to answer the charge of the talent buried in the earth. In Purg. xxii. 89-93, the poet Statins for his lukewarmness in not confessing Christianity after his baptism was detained more than 400 years on the Terrace of Sloth. 54 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III or wills of their own. There as here they follow Whatever banner has the crowd behiniit, It is a banner not simply ' disdainful of all pause,' as it is usually translated, but 'unworthy of all pause,' as the word literally means. The idea plainly is that such men never follow the banner of any worthy cause, — any banner worthy to be set up permanently as a standard round which brave men may rally. And then Dante shows us by a series of minute touches, every one of which tells, the great horror of weary, empty, barren existence to which this cowardly Neutrality leads, — an eternity of trimming, of having no great moral cause to which to devote the soul. The sand to which he compares them is the symbol of their barrenness : such men produce ' nothing. They are naked ; on earth they carefully donned the garb of their party for the moment : now every party disguise is stripped off. Here one of their chief aims was, by following the popular banner, to avoid the stings of hostile criticism and of adverse fortune ; now they are stung by every wasp and hornet. Here they shed neither tears nor blood for any great and worthy cause ; there they do indeed shed both, but still for no great and worthy cause: the blood and tears of such cowards are worthy only to be the food of loathsome worms, the symbols of corruption and decay. They whose aim had been to stand well with all, to have a good name and fame, are now rejected and forgotten of all: ' No fame of them the world permits to be.' Heaven and Hell alike reject them — Heaven, to keep itself free f rorn stain ; Hell, ' lest the damned should ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 55 gain some glory from them,' the glory probably of CANTO III triumphing over cowards who had not even the courage to sin boldly. Such souls are of no use for either Heaven or Hell, for God's work or the devil's. Some use can be made of a man who boldly takes a side for good or for evil, but absolutely nothing can be made of one who is a mere trimmer and time- server. Hence these Neutrals are, we may say, of necessity rejected of both Hell and Heaven. 'So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.' ^ And all this it is that constitutes their eternal misery. The ancient habit of following the crowd forces them still to pursue some worthless cause. But all the illusions and disguises of earth are stripped away, and they are compelled to feel the empty, weary, barren wortblessness of a soul that never yielded itself to any great moral enthusiasm, never was swept out of itself by genuine devotion to a cause, either good or bad. At last, when it is too late, they understand the utter baseness of such an attitude of soul, though they cannot now escape from it. The misery of it is so great that anything, even death, would be welcomed : ' These people have not any hope of death, And this blind life of theirs is so debased, They envious are of every other fate.' * Such is the awful weariness and self-contempt j jwhich fall on souls that have no moral ideals or enthusiasms. i One only of these caitifP souls is singled out for ' The great refusal.' ' Bev. iii. 16. 2 Xnf. iii. 46-48. Vleri de' Cercbi. 56 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III mention, but, in accordance with that law of their punishment which permits no fame of them on earthj his name is withheld : When some among them I had recognized, I looked, and I beheld the shade of him Who made through cowardice the great refusal.^ This nameless shade has called forth a multitude of conjectures. Those who connect it with the ruin of Dante's own fortunes identify it with either Vieri de' Cerchi or Pope Celestine v. The former was the leader of the White Guelphs in Florence, and it is possible that Dante regarded his exile as due to his cowardly refusal to fight. Dean Church, indeed, thinks that the Whites were the originals of this picture of the Neutrals. ' They were upstarts, purse- proud, vain, and coarse-minded ; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and cowardly to pvrsue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule ; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, " more from cowardice than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their adversaries," ' " The common view, however, identifies this shade with Celestine V. In the year 1294, Peter, a hermit in the mountain of Morrone in the Abruzzi, was elected Pope in Perugia, and for five months occupied the Papal chair, under the name of Celestine. He then resigned. ' In the formal instrument of his renun- • Inf. iii. 58-60. 2 Church's Dante, pp.44, 45. Celestine V. ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 57 elation, he recites as the causes moving him to the CANTO III step, "the desire for humility, for a purer life, for ~ a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquillity of his former life."' Probably this last reason played no inconsiderable part in his abdication : the sudden wrench from the solitary habits of a life-time became intolerable, and he was only too glad to escape to the quiet of his mountain retreat. The Church chose to regard it as an act of saintly humility, and Gelestine was canonized in 1313. It was the popular belief, in which Dante shared, that the abdication was brought about by Cardinal Gaetani in order to procure his own election. This is the Pope known to us under the name of Boniface vin., on whom Dante pours the full vials of his wrath. He regarded him as one of the greatest enemies of both Church and State ; to his invitation to Charles of Yalois to enter Florence he traced his own exile and the ruin of his fortunes ; and he may well have scorned the coward- hermit whose ' great refusal ' of the Papacy threw the power into hands which proved so unworthy to wield it.^ If Celestine is meant, it is significant that the first soul mentioned in Hell is that of a canon- ized Pope. It is true, the decree of canonization was not published till 1328, when Dante was dead; but had it been published in his life-time, he would assuredly have allowed it to make no change in his verdict on a man whom he regarded as guilty of a ' Reference to his fraudulent seizing of the Papacy is made in Inf. xix. 52-57, where Boniface is consigned by anticipation to the Moat of the Simoniacs. See pp. 27S-28CL 58 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III cowardly betrayal of the most sacred interests of both Church and Empire. )( Among Scriptural conjectures we have Esau who sold his birthright, the young man of the Gospels who ' went away sorrowful,' and the Roman Gover- piiate. nor, Pilate. This last conjecture, made by Dr. Schaff, has so much to recommend it that it is strange it has not received more attention. Pilate, as Dr, Schaff says, ' was perfectly convinced of the innocence of Christ, but from cowardice and fear of losing his place, refused to do Him justice and surrendered Him to the bloodthirsty design of the Jewish hier- archy — the basest act a judge could commit. Of all men in biblical or ecclesiastical history, Pilate was the fittest representative of a cowardly and selfish neutrality.' ^ This argument is greatly strengthened by other considerations. The crucifixion of Christ naturally filled Dante's mind this Good Friday night. We shall find the other actors in that great tragedy in various parts of Hell : Caiaphas and the Coun- sellors lie crucified in the Moat of the Hypocrites, and Judas writhes in the central mouth of Lucifer. Pilate we find nowhere, and it would certainly be strange if so prominent an agent in the crucifixion were allotted no place in the Inferno. The man who washed his hands of all moral responsibility at the very moment when he was making 'the great refusal' to deliver Christ from His enemies, certainly deserves a place in this Vestibule of cowards and trimmers. There is one passage, indeed, which seems at first glance decisive against this interpretation. In Canto > Philip Schaff, D.D., Literature and Poetry, p. 380. ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS 59 VI. of the Paradiso, Dante sets forth a view of the CANTO in crucifixion so extraordinary that it is difficult to Dante's view imagine any Christian man holding it. After re- ^ ^^^jj^^^^ counting the great and glorious achievements of the Boman Eagle, he says they must all pale before the glory of what took place under ' the third Csesar,' Tiberius. This crowning glory of the Boman Eagle, marvellous to say, is the crucifixion of our Lord! Prom the Divine side that crucifixion was 'venge- ance of the ancient sin,' the greatest act of God's justice, on which hung the salvation of the world.^ In the De Monarchia, Dante argues that 'if the Boman Empire did not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ.' For 'punish- ment is not merely penalty inflicted on him who has done wrong, but that penalty inflicted by one who has penal jurisdiction. ... If , therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge, the penalty would not properly have been punishment ; and none could be a regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind ; for all mankind was punished in the flesh of Christ. . . . And if the Boman Empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Caesar, whose vicar was Pontius Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind,' and there- fore the Atonement would have been invalid.^ To ^ us, of course, the argument is absurd or worse ; but, such as it is, Miss Bossetti thinks it is < probably the key to a perplexing problem — why Pontius Pilate is nowhere met with in Hell.'* The conclusion, how- 1 Par. vi. 82-93. 2 j)g j^iq^. ii. 13. 3 A Shadow of Dante, p. 223. 60 ANTE-HELL OF THE NEUTRALS CANTO III ever, is by no means inevitable. Dante was aocus- tomed to distinguish between the man and his office ; it would be entirely after his manner to acquit Pilate as the lawful representative of the Emperor, and condemn him as an individual. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what he has done. It is true, the condemnation is indirect, but it is none the less severe. In Purg. xx. 86-93, he draws a parallel between the crucifixion of Christ and the outrage on His vicar, Boniface viii., at Anagni, in which Philip the Fair of France is ' the new Pilate ' : * I see the fleur-de-lys Alagna enter, And Christ in his own vicar captive made, I see him yet another time derided ; I see renewed the vinegar and the gall, And between living thieves I see him slain. I see the new Pilate so relentless, This doth not sate him, but without decree He bears his greedy sails into the temple,' — the reference in the last three lines being to Philip's cruel persecution of the Order of Templars. These words could never have been written had Dante re- garded Pontius Pilate merely as an upright judge lawfully fulfilling the duties of his office. They cer- tainly justify the suggestion that he is the man who made ' the great refusal,' the coward neutral who was unworthy of a place even in Hell. CHAPTER IV CIRCLE I. — THE LIMBO OP THE UNBAPTIZED Passing the coward Neutrals with one contemptuous CANTO IV glance, Dante sees through the dim air a great crowd upon a river bank. Wondering who they are, and The River why they seem so eager to cross over,* he ventures to ask his guide ; but Virgil rebukes his curiosity, bidding him restrain it until he reaches 'the sad shore of Acheron.' It is not easy to understand the reason for this rebuke, which makes Dante pass on in silence and with eyes downcast and ashamed. Perhaps the intention is to discourage all undue curiosity concerning the dead ; it will be time enough to know when we reach the dark river our- selves. When they come within sight of Acheron, Dante sees Charon, the • grim ferryman ' of Death, charon. approaching in his boat — an old man with hoary hair. He corresponds perhaps in the Inferno to Cato in the Purgatorio ; only that, whereas Cato's face shone like the sun with the light of the four holy stars, Charon is a demon whose eyes are circled round with 'wheels of flame." It represents the 1 Probably the eagerness is due partly to the stings of a guilty con- science, and partly to the natural longing to know the worst. ' Bather Charon corresponds to the Angel-Pilot of Purgatory, the white 'bird divine' who, unlike Charon, needs no ' human arguments' of sail or oar {Purg. ii. 31-33). 61 62 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CAKTO IV look of fiery terror which Death bears to wicked and impenitent souls. To the crowd upon the bank Charon cries ' Woe ! ' and terrifies them with antici- pations of their hopeless doom ; but when he sees Dante, he orders him away because he is 'a living soul.' This may mean, as some think, little more than that he is still in the flesh ; but from his further words, when he saw that Dante refused to withdraw, it is obvious that Charon had a deeper meaning : ' By other ways, by other ports, Thou to the shore shalt come, not here, for passage ; A lighter vessel needs must carry thee.' ^ The other ways and ports are clearly those which lead to Purgatory, and the lighter vessel that which needed no sail or oar beyond the white wings of its Angel-Pilot. Dante tells us that all the souls not destined for Hell gather at the mouth of the Tiber, to await there their passage across the sea to the Mount of Purification on their way to Paradise.^ Charon's meaning therefore is that Dante is 'a living soul' in the spiritual sense, not, like the others, 'dead I in trespasses and sins,' and that Paradise is his ulti- mate destination. The Crowd of With a few sharp words Virgil rebukes the churl- ishness of Charon, telling him that Dante's journey is divinely ordered. The demon thereupon turns furiously on the crowd of weary, naked souls, gather- ing them together, and beating with his oar those who lag behind — just as you may see him doing in Michael Angelo's great picture of the Last Judg- > Inf. iii. 91-93. 2 Purg. It. 100-105. Lost Souls. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 63 ment in the Sistine Chapel in Borne : except, indeed, CANTO IV that there he is beating the souls out of the boat, when they reach the other side of the river. The description of the agony of these lost souls is very terrible : But those souls who weary were and naked, Their colour changed and gnashed their teefch together, As soon as they had heard the cruel words. God they blasphemed and their progenitors, The human race, the place, the time, the seed Of their engendering and of their birth ! Thereafter all together they withdrew. Bitterly weeping, to the accursed shore. Which waiteth every man who fears not God.' It is, indeed, the instinct of hard and impenitent souls to cast the blame of their sins on others — Grod, their parents, their fellow-men ; yet Dante saw clearly that another instinct — that of Divine Justice — goads them on to meet their doom : • And ready are they to pass o'er the river. Because Divine Justice spurs them on. So that their fear is turned into desire.' ^ And then, one by one in that last loneliness of dying, like dead leaves in autumn, the dead souls cast themselves into the boat, which then departs upon its awful voyage ; and ere ever it reaches the far side, a new troop assembles on the river bank. In this narrative there are several matters with River-Syrtem which it will be well to acquaint ourselves before proceeding further. The first is the River-System of the Inferno. According to Dante, Hell is drained > Inf. iii. 100-108. » Inf. ill. 124-126. 64 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV by four great rivers taken from heathen mythology, but filled with symbolic meanings of his own.^ The first is this Acheron on the bank of which he stands — the River of Death in all its senses. The other three are connected symholically with the three great moral sections into which the Inferno is divided. The River Styx gathers into a stagnant marsh at the bottom of the highest section, which contains the sins of Incontinence, and the sad and sullen are immersed in its miry waters, — perhaps to indicate that sullen, lifeless melancholy in which sins of the flesh so often plunge those who indulge in them. The symbolism of the remaining two, Phlegethon and Cocytus, has been rightly divined by Ruskin as indicating the distinction between sins committed in hot blood and in cold blood.^ Phleg- ethon is a river of blood which flows through the central infernal region of Violence, to mark that the sins here are those of hot-blooded passion. The lowest river is Cocytus, which forms a lake of ice. Here are punished sins of cold-blooded treachery — treachery being, in Dante's view, the freezing up of all right feeling in the human soul. Source of the Perhaps at this point also it may be well to antici- pate somewhat the mystical account which Dante gives in Canto xrv. of the source of these four rivers. There Virgil informs him that on Mount Ida in Crete, 1 In ^neid vi. the same rivers appear, but are much less carefully distinguished from each other. Comp. PhcBdo, 113, 114. 2 Fors Clavigera, Letter xxiii. p. 21, ' The injurious sins, done in hot blood— that is to say, under the influence of passion — are in the midmost hell ; but the sins done in cold blood, without passion, or, more accurately, contrary to passion, far down below the freezing point, are put in the lowest hell : the Ninth Circle.' THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 65 • once glad with waters and with leaves,' but now CANTO IV 'deserted as a thing outworn,' stands 'a great Old Man ' — the Image of Time. His head is of gold ; his arms and breast of silver ; his trunk of brass ; and from the fork downward he is iron, with the excep- tion of the right foot, which is clay. The symbolism of this must be more carefully examined when we reach the passage ; in the meantime it is enough to note that with the exception of the golden head, which represents the golden age, each part is cleft by a fissure through which the tears of the human race drip into a cavern, and thence fall into the abyss of Hell, forming its rivers : ' From rock to rock they fall into this valley ; Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon, they form ; Then downward go along this narrow sluice Unto that point where is no more descending ; They form Cocytus.' i The idea seems to be that at first these tears of Time form Acheron ; further down Acheron changes into the miry marsh of Styx; this marsh is then drained into the Circle of the Violent, where it becomes red with blood, and is named Phlegethon ; and finally, Phlegethon falls into the lowest Hell and forms the frozen Lake of Cocytus, the cesspool of all the sorrows of the sinful world. Even this does not complete the symbolism. When the two pilgrims reach the central depth of Hell and pass out on the other side into the narrow passage which leads up to the shores of Purgatory, they find another etream meeting them — probably Lethe, the sins of 1 Inf, xiv. 115-U9, E 66 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV all the souls upon the Mount, forgiven and forgotten, seeking once more their Satanic source.^ Guardians of As Acheron has suggested this explanation of the River-System of Hell, so its grim Ferryman gives us the opportunity of making some inquiry concerning the Guardians or Jailors under whose charge Dante has placed the eternal prison-house. These too he has taken from heathen mythology. Charon may he regarded as the Guardian of the First Circle, or perhaps of the whole pit, since he is the symbol of Death, physical and moral. The Second Circle is guarded by Minos, King of Crete, who became in mythology one of the judges of the shades in Hades. Dante degrades him from his royal dignity into a snarling dog-demon with a tail. The use of this tail seems to us grotesque. As each soul appears before him confessing his sin, Minos girds himself with his tail as many times as the degrees he is to be thrust down in the Inferno, and straightway the wretch is hurled to his own Circle. Minos is thus the symbol of the condemning power of guilty conscience, 'a type of the sinner's disordered and terrified con- ception of Justice ' ; but the other Guardians simply represent the various sins. Cerberus is the symbol of Gluttony ; Plutus of Avarice ; Phlegyas of Wrath ; the Furies and the Medusa of Heresy ; the Minotaur of Violence; Geryon of Fraud; and the Giants of Treachery. This introduction of Pagan myths into a Christian 1 Inf. xxxiv. 127-132. Virgil assigns Lethe to Elysium, just as Dante sets it in the Earthly Paradise. Comp. Paradise Lost, bk. ii. 570-614, where Milton places Lethe far from the other rivers of Hell, and tan- talizes the lost with the sight of its waters of which they can never drink. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 67 poem is due to something more than the influence of CANTO IV Dante's half-converted age. It is true that in his day and for long after, this mingling of Christian and heathen elements was very common. Our Lord Himself, for example, is represented as Orpheus with his lute in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus ; and in the Baptistery of Ravenna the river-god of the Jordan is introduced into an ancient mosaic of His baptism. Long after Dante's day, Michael Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted the heathen Sibyls side by side with the Old Testament prophets. In short, this mingling was characteristic of the age, I and undoubtedly in the days of the Renaissance! meant the degradation of Christianity toward the | level of Paganism.^ But it is far otherwise in the \ Commedia^ In the myths of heathenism Dante gladly recognized the ethical truths which the natural heart had been able to reach without the aid of any special revelation. They were to him and to the. best thought of his age no mere blind and meaningless fantasies. He could have adopted the words of a modern poet concerning them : ' How should any hold Those precious scriptures only old-world tales Of strange impossible torments and false gods ; ' In The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church. Borne 15 — , Browning shows inimitably the mingling of Pagan and Christian elements in the Renaissance. The dying Bishop gives instructions to his 'nephews ' concerning his tomb : 'The ba3-reliet in bronze ye promised me, Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so. The Saviour at his sermon on the mount. Saint Fraxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off. And Moses with the tables.' 68 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV ^^ men and monsters in some brainless dream, Coherent, yet unmeaning, linked together ( By some false skein of song ? Nay ! evermore, t All things and thoughts, both new and old, are writ Upon the unchanging human heart and soul.' ^ Dante saw in Pagan mythology a revelation of God written on the natural heart and conscience, — a revelation, not indeed of salvation, but of sin and its awful, inevitable issues. The monsters of mythology become, therefore, in his hands dread symbols of the sins possible to human nature, whether Christian or pre-Christian ; and as such he makes them Guardians or Jailors of the various Circles of Hell. J[n Jihis way he entirely subordinates the heathen element to the Christian Faith. The mythical personages are reduced to mere officials of Hell; some of them are demonized, like Minos, who snarls like a dog. In short, this mythological element is neither a mere grotesque embroidery on the poem, nor the sign of a mind still half-Pagan. ! It indicates two things : first, the amount of ethical truth attained by the natural Reason; and second, the entire subordination of that truth to the Christian Revelation. Limbo of the To resume the narrative, there is much discussion among commentators as to the mode in which Dante crossed Acheron. It seems certain that Charon re- fused him passage. Possibly, as many think, he was carried over by an angel ; but no hint of this is given. All he himself says is that ' the tearful ground ' gave forth a wind, and that the wind flashed forth a ' Lewis Morris, Bpic of Hades, THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 69 crimson light which so overpowered him that he CANTO IV fell to the earth in a trance.^ He was roused on the other side of the River by a heavy thunder— probably the loud lamentations of the lost. In all likelihood, his intention is to indicate the mystery and terror with which the soul makes its first close acquaintance with the disastrous wreck and ruin produced by defiance of Divine Law. From the giving of that Law on Mount Sinai down through the judgment-days of the Apocalypse, we have the same terror of ' fire, and blackness, and darkness, and tempest ' ; and doubtless all this was before Dante's mind." When he awakes, he finds himself in a ' blind The virtuous world'— 'a land of darkness as darkness itself . . . where the light is as darkness.' Even his Guide be- comes all pale, and this Dante mistakes for a sign of terror. Virgil, however, assures him that the cause is not fear, but pity for the lost. All through the ^ Inferno there goes on a kind of struggle between Dante's heart and his reason as represented by Virgil. At times even Beason grows pale with pity for the sorrows of the lost ; at other times it rebukes pity, declaring it to be rebellion against the Justice of God. It is quite possible, however, that Virgil's pity has reference only to this First Circle, to which he himself belonged ; and certainly, if ever pity might be permitted, it is here. For its inhabi- tants are not sinners in the ordinary sense. Properly speaking, indeed, this First Circle is not Hell so much as its Limbo or Hem ; and its inhabitants are the > Inf. iii. 130-136. 2 Inf. iv. 1-3. 70 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV Virtuous Heathen and Unbaptized Infants. Of the former Virgil says : 'Now will I have thee know, ere thou go farther, That they sinned not ; and if they merit have, 'Tis not enough, because they had not baptism. Which is the portal of the Faith thou boldest ; And if they were before Christianity, In the right manner they adored not God ; And among such as these anai I myself. For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we, and only so far are punished, That without hope we live on in desire.' ^ In the Purgatorio we are told that they practised the four Cardinal Virtues, but Faith, Hope, and Love, the three Theological Virtues necessary for salvation, were unknown to them.'' Virgil, in reply to a ques- tion of Dante's, tells him that soon after his own arrival in this Limbo 'a Mighty One with sign of victory crowned' came and rescued many, among whom he names 'the First Parent,' Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, Israel, with his father, his sons, and his wife Rachel. These were the first human spirits saved .^ unbaptiied It is strange to find that Dante is absolutely silent concerning the Infants ; although in the Purgatorio he speaks of them pityingly as ' the little innocents Bitten by the teeth of death, or ever they Were from our human sinfulness exempt ' *— that is, before their original sin had been washed away by the waters of Christian baptism. Without > Inf. iv. 33-42. 2 Purg. vli. 34-36. » Inf. Iv. 52-63. « Purg. vil. 31-33. Infants. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 71 doubt he accepted the merciful view of his master in CANTO IV theology, St. Thomas Aquinas, that such infants are simply excluded from Paradise and suffer no pain even of loss : ' as they are not made capable of possessing the vision of God, they no more grieve for its loss than a bird does that it is not an emperor or a king. Moreover, though not united to God in glory, they are joined to Him by the share they possess of natural goods, and are able to rejoice in Him by natural knowledge and love.' ^ It is perhaps for this reason that Aquinas places infants in a separate Limbo. In the Paradiso, the lower half of the snow-white Rose is occupied by redeemed children, the little 'folk who hastened to the true life.'^ Advancing in the gloom 'through the forest of TheNoWe thick-crowded ghosts' — undistinguished souls that called for no special mention — they soon descried ' a fire which conquered a hemisphere of darkness'; and on nearer approach Dante perceived that ' hon- ourable people held the place.' The light came from ' a noble castle,' and represents the wisdom, learning, and virtue of its inhabitants. Four of them meet the pilgrims and escort them inside the castle walls — Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan : in Dante's view, along with Virgil the greatest poets of the ancient world. As they move towards the light they dis- course of things as becoming to speak of there, says Dante, as not to speak of here — either praises of himself, or, more probably, the high themes of the ' Appendix to Supplement, q. i. a. 2. 2 Par. xxxii. 40-84, where the conditions of their salvation are explained. 72 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV art of poetry. Within the castle walls, ' on the green enamel of a meadow,' they find seated the mighty spirits of antiquity : People were there with eyes slow and grave, Of great authority in their countenance ; They spake but seldom and with gentle voices.^ They are divided into two groups. The lower of the two consists of the souls of heroes and heroines of Rome, and those from whom the Romans were descended, beginning with Electra, mother of Dar- danus who founded Troy, Hector and Mneaa, and ' Osesar in armour with gerfalcon eyes.' Among them we may note Marcia, Oato's wife." Gato himself, though a heathen and a suicide, is chosen by Dante as the Guardian of Mount Purgatory. One soul sits apart by himself — Saladin, the great Sultan, who was defeated by Richard Ooeur-de-Lion in the Crusades. His mercy in sparing Christian prisoners made him the type to Europe of Oriental magnanimity and generosity. In the Convito (iv. 11) Dante holds him up as an example of ' munificence.' He sits alone as having no connection with the Empire, or, perhaps, as being of another race and faith. Raising his brows, Dante sees the second and higher group, composed of the great philosophers and men of science of the ancient world, or, speaking more strictly, of the non-Christian world. Their chief is 1 Inf. iv. 112-114. Comp. the slow movement of Sordello's eyes in Purg. vi. 63. 2 In Conv. iv. 28, she is talien as symbolic of the soul returning to God. The passage is very curious and difficult to harmonize with this. In Purg. i. 78-90, Virgil tells Cato that his Marcia still prays him to hold her for his own, but Cato replies that she no longer moves him. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 73 Aristotle, ' Master of those who know,' on whom all CANTO IV gaze with honour ; he is Dante's own principal authority on all ethical questions. Nearer him than the rest stand Socrates and Plato. It is difficult to understand why Dante makes so little use of Plato, 'whose idealism,' as Plumptre says, 'was more in harmony with Dante's mind than the more formal system of Aristotle.' ^ Probahly the reason is that his knowledge of Plato was confined to the TimcBua, and to the references scattered throughout Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, and his pupil Aquinas. After these come Democritus, Diogenes, and many another, down to Averroes, who made 'the great Comment' on Aristotle. The list, as Plumptre remarks, throws light on Dante's preferences in poetry, history, and philosophy; just as the two Circles of Theologians in the Heaven of the Sun tell us his favourite authors in theology. It is worth while pausing to notice with what Dante's > serene confidence Dante claims kinship with these mighty spirits of the past. We saw that they were met outside the castle walls by those who were un- doubtedly, along with his Guide, in Dante's regard the four greatest shades — Homer and Horace, Ovid and Lucan : their leader. Homer, bearing a sword in token of the warlike nature of his song. These four welcome Virgil back, hailing him as 'the loftiest Poet.' And then turning to Dante with sign of salutation, they greet him as a brother of the guild : 1 'Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A • , Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the stars ' (Lowell's Essay on Dante). 74 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV -A-nd more of honour still, much more, they did me, In that they made me one of their own hand, So that I was a sixth 'mid so much wisdom.^ At first reading, this gives perhaps the impression of pride or vanity: Dante, we think, has too well learnt the Aristotelian virtue of Magnanimity, and travelled far from the modesty which, only a few hours before, oppressed him with a sense of his un- fitness. In reality his estimate of himself here has turned out to be too humble. It will always, of course, be possible to take different views of Dante's rank as a poet. Ruskin will call him ' the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest ' ; " while Savage Landor, after ranking Homer with Milton, will declare that ' Dante is no more the equal of Homer than Hercules is the equal of Apollo.' ^ But amidst all such differ- ences, no one dreams of setting Dante on the level of Horace, or Ovid, or Lucan, or even Virgil. When, for example, Dr. Moore tells us that, after Virgil, the poets most frequently quoted are Ovid and Lucan, it almost makes us suspect the soundness of Dante's literary judgment. Assuredly he did himself scant justice when he ranked himself with such men ; instead of being one of six, he is one of three, and the names of the other two are not difficult to con- jecture.* Perhaps, however, Dante's intention in * Inf. iv. 100-102. 2 Stones of Venice, in. iii. 67. ^ Pentameron, '/ * 'This is he who among literary fames finds only two that for growth and immutahility can parallel his own. The auflrages of highest authority would now place him second in that company where he with proud humility took the sixth place' (Bussell Lowell's Dante). THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 75 the passage was to assert his standing as a poet CANTO IV against the contempt and depreciation of his own countrymen. We know that, almost to the last, it was his hope that Florence would receive him back into her fold and give him the poet's crown at his baptismal font in his 'beautiful St. John,'^ but it was not to be. Against this cruel injustice he here appeals : let the Florentines refuse him the laurel as they may, the great poets of antiquity will greet him as their peer. "We come now to the subject of greatest interest in ughtaeea of ^~ the passage, — Dante's view of the heathen world and „jgnt_ its fate. As a good Catholic he accepts in the main the teaching of the Church, that faith in Christ and baptism are essential to salvation ; but he accepts it with the utmost reluctance and grief, knowing that it excludes many great and noble souls from Para- dise. If, however, his creed thus forces him to shut them out, we cannot but mark how light by com- parison is the punishment he assigns them, and how many the alleviations of their pain. Strictly speak- ing, they are not in Hell proper at all, but in its Limbo or ' Border.' So far as he can hear, there are no cries and lamentations such as assail his ears lower down : ' only sighs made tremulous the eternal air.' Their sorrow has no element of torment in it. ' Without hope they live on in desire ' — the desire to see God, which is destined never to be gratified. But to the wisest and noblest of them, Dante gives what alleviations he can. The noble castle with its lumin- ous hemisphere has without doubt a symbolic mean- 1 Par. XXV. 1-9. 76 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV ing, which we must examine presently; but to my own mind it is a pity we cannot retain the simple natural sense. Remember how, as we descend from Circle to Circle, one of the. chief punishments seems to be the increasing loss of the light and joy and peace of Nature. The wind buffets the Sensual ; the rain pours down incessantly on the Gluttons; the souls of the Sullen in Styx bewail the loss of 'the sweet air made gladsome by the sun.' Far down, a wretch in the burning thirst of dropsy is but more deeply tortured by the memory of ' The rivulets, that from the verdant hills Of Casentino descend into the Arno, Making their channel-courses cool and soft.'^ They have lost it all for ever, the beauteous world, with its joyous sunshine, its meadows of deep green grass, its fair-flowing rivers. Might it not then seem to Dante one of the greatest consolations of these noble spirits of antiquity that something of the ancient joy of Nature should be left to them, the memory of its beauty and its peace — light which conquered a hemisphere of darkness, a fair rivulet, and the green enamel of the meadow ? When, however, we turn to the symbolism which the passage undoubtedly contains, we find in it even greater alleviations of their fate. The noble castle represents the Philosophy or Natural Wisdom attained by the sages and heroes who had no light of Revelation. In short, it represents precisely the same thing as Virgil does, for this castle is his home in the eternal world. The seven walls are seven of ' Inf. XXX. 64-66. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 77 the ten virtues possible to man. These St. Thomas CANTO IV Aquinas divides into three great classes — the intel- lectual, the moral, and the theological. The last, Faith, Hope, and Love, are supernatural, because they are beyond man's natural powers; hence, as Virgil afterwards tells Dante, the inhabitants of Limbo cannot know them. But the remaining seven are virtues possible to the natural man : the intel- lectual — Wisdom, Science, and Understanding ; and the moral, which are also called cardinal — Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude. There is little doubt that it is these seven natural virtues which, like protecting walls, encircle the wise and heroic spirits of the ancient world. The most probable interpretation of the seven gates is that they stand for the seven liberal arts which made up the cur- riculum of mediaeval education: the Trimum, con- sisting of Grrammar, Logic, and Rhetoric ; and the Quadrivium, of Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy. In the Convito they correspond to the seven lowest Heavens.^ It is more difficult to assign a meaning to the ' fair rivulet ' by which the castle is surrounded like a moat. The interpretation usually given, that it represents Eloquence, is probably the right one: Dante, for instance, applies this very figure to Virgil when he first meets him : ' Now, art thou that Virgilius, and that fountain Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech ? '* But when he says here that he and his poet-com- panions passed over this river of Speech or Elo- » Conv. ii. 14. a Inf. i. 79, 80. 78 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV quence as on solid ground, it is not so easy to say what he means, Longfellow regards it as a hint that Eloquence is not a very profound matter after all— an idea foreign, I think, to Dante's mind. So probably is the suggestion sometimes made that the wise do not need the persuasions of Eloquence to make them enter the castle of the Seven Virtues. It seems much more probable that Dante wishes to tell us of the dangers of human speech. It lies like a moat between us and wisdom; only across it can we reach the ' noble castle ' ; but to great minds alone is it as the firm earth. To others the fair river of Speech or Eloquence may prove a dangerous moat in which mind and soul sink to rise no more. It is no imaginary danger: 'life and death are in the power of the tongue.' The ' meadow of fresh verdure ' inside the seven gates represents the fame of the great spirits whom Dante finds reposing on it. If Buskin is right, it is a fame for ever green, but also for ever dead. Dante speaks of this meadow as ' the green enamel,' and Buskin maintains that he 'did not use this phrase as we use it. He knew well what enamel was ; and his readers, in order to understand him thoroughly, must remember what it is, — a vitreous paste, dis- solved in water, mixed with metallic oxides, to give it the opacity and the colour required, spread in a moist state on naetal, and afterwards hardened by fire, so as. never to change. And Dante means, in using this metaphor of the grass of the Inferno, to mark, that it is laid as a tempering and cooling substance over the dark, metallic, gloomy ground ; but yet so hardened THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 79 by the fire, that it is not any more fresh or living CANTO IV grass, but a smooth, silent, lifeless bed of eternal green.' ^ That Dante meant all this is more than doubtful ; nevertheless, when we remember his mar- vellously careful use of words, it is quite improbable that 'enamel' has no special significance. He may mean to indicate that while, indeed, the fame of these great spirits is for ever fresh and green, it is at the same time lifeless as enamel : not the living, growing fame which might have been theirs had their wisdom been of a higher, diviner order. Yet, such as it is, it remains to them. Dante will deprive them of nothing great or worthy that they ever possessed on earth. Even in the Inferno, their virtues, their learning, and their wisdom shed round them a hemisphere of light; they rest upon their fame as on 'a meadow of fresh verdure,' for ever green; ' with gentle voices ' the glorious company carry on the eternal intercourse and commerce of mind with mind. Such are the great alleviations with which Dante solaces the wise and virtuous souls of heathen- dom. His theology may compel him to put them in Limbo, but he will make their place as tolerable as lies within his power. The servants who knew not their Lord's will shall be beaten with few stripes. Yet, however tolerable, it is not the Paradise of Dante'a long- f^ ^ ing for SalTa- wroa — tionoftHe ' That perfect presence of His face, Heathen. Which we, for want of words, call Heaven.' To Dante's mind, it must have been an awful punish- ment to be for ever haunted by an unattainable 1 Modern Painters, iii. 228 (Edition 1888). 80 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV ideal, an eternal desire for the vision of God, doomed to eternal disappointment. Hence he makes eager inquiry whether any soul had ever been delivered from this Limbo. Virgil replies, as we have seen, that when he was but a 'novice' here, 'a Mighty One' came and drew forth the First Parent, Abel, Noah, and many others.^ But half the point of this answer is that they were all Old Testament saints: no heathen shade was rescued. For the moment Dante had to rest satisfied with this answer, but only for the moment. Afterwards, when he has mounted to the Sixth Heaven, the abode of men famous for their justice, the problem of the Divine justice in the fate of the heathen returns upon him, as the hunger of a ' great fast ' which had found no food on earth. He states the question thus : ' A man is born upon the bank Of the Indus, and there is no one there to speak Of Christ, nor none to read, nor none to write ; And all his volitions and his actions Are good, as far as human reason sees, Without a sin in life or in discourse : He dieth unbaptized and without faith ; Where is this justice that condemneth him ? Where is his fault, if he do not believe ? ' ^ So passionate is his desire for the salvation of the heathen, that he boldly breaks through the trammels of his creed so far as to set two heathen souls there The Emperor in that Heaven of Just Men. The first is the *^°^' Emperor Trajan, who is held up in the Purgatorio as an example of humility. There was a curious legend that St. Gregory the Great had so fervent an admira- ■ Inf. iv. 52-63. » Par. xlx. 70-78. THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED 81 tion for the Emperor's justice to a poor widow that CANTO IV by virtue of his prayers and tears he gained his release from Hell and his return ' to his bones,' as Dante puts it. He remained in them long enough to admit of his receiving Christian baptism, whereupon he was taken up to the Sixth Heaven, Dante gladly avails himself of this grotesque legend.^ The other heathen rescued from perdition is Bhipeus, whom RMpeus tue Virgil in the ^neid calls the justest,of the Trojans. This time, having no legend to help him, Dante takes a bolder course. It was an axiom of his creed that salvation is impossible without Faith and Baptism : how then could a heathen who lived so long before Christ be saved at all ? His reply is that God gave this soul, who ' set all his love below on righteous- ness,' a vision of *our redemption yet to be,' and that Faith, Hope, and Charity ' were unto him for baptism More than a thousand years before baptizing. '^ It remains a problem why Dante did not use the same means for the rescue of all the virtuous souls of the heathen world. There is certainly no reason why only two out of the great company should be saved. Indeed, there is a passage in St. Thomas Aquinas which seems written for the very purpose of opening the gate of Paradise to such souls : ' God never suffers any one to want what is necessary to his salvation, if he only desires it. No one loses his soul save through his own fault ; since God makes known to him truths which are essential to his 1 Par. XX. 43-48 ; 106-117; Purg. x. 73-93. » Par. XX. 67-72; 118-129; ^neid, il. 426, 427. F 82 THE LIMBO OF THE UNBAPTIZED CANTO IV salvation, either through interior revelation, or, as in the case of Cornelius, by the voice of a preacher,' ^ It is impossible to say why Dante did not avail him- self of such a passage, or how a mind like his could imagine that Grod would leave unsatisfied throughout eternity the desire of any human soul for that know- ledge of Him which is eternal life. Yet so it is : in Heaven, as on earth, he found no food to satisfy this hunger. All he can do is to bow before the justice of God as before an impenetrable mystery, saying as the Psalmist said before him, ' Thy judgments are a great deep ' : the bottom of that deep near the shore the eye of man can see, but far out in mid- ocean it is invisible; yet the bottom is there too, though we perceive it not.^ ' Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God ? ' ' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ?' ' Clouds and dark- ness are round about him : righteousness and judg- ment are the habitation of his throne.' I See Hettinger, 211 n. * Par. xix. 58-66. CHAPTER V CIBCLB n. — THE SENSUAL We come now to the Second Circle of Hell — the first CANTO V in which any positive sin is punished. The sin is incontinence : its Taxi ' forma. Sensuality, or Luxury in the mediaeval sense of that f^ '«"«™ word ; and in order to understand why it is placed here at the top as the least heinous, it may be well to remind ourselves of Dante's classification of sins already referred to. He divides sins into two great classes : Incontinence and Malice. To this uppermost section of the Inferno he assigns the sins of Incontinence in four or possibly five Circles, deepening, and also narrowing, according to their guilt. They are set here in the highest section because they are sins of mere want of self-control — sins of the individual man against the various parts of his own life and nature, by excess or defect. If he cannot control his bodily appetites and passions, we have the sins of Sensuality and Gluttony, as in Circles ll. and ili. If he cannot control his goods, we have the twin-sins of Miserliness and Prodigality, which, being ethically the same, are placed together in Circle rv. Passing deeper into the man, if he cannot control his spirits and temper, we have the twofold sin of Anger, an excess of temper, and sullen Sadness, a defect of it ; and tliese occupy Circle v. 84 THE SENSUAL CANTO V We shall see that Circle vi. is one of transition between upper and nether Hell, having relations to both ; meantime we may regard it as the last of the sins of Incontinence, namely Heresy — the lack of the due control of the Reason. Thus we see in this classification Incontinence entering step by step into the deeper parts of human nature ; beginning with the bodily appetites, it eats inward until the intel- lectual faculties are involved. According to Dante, the lusts of the mind sink men to a deeper perdition than those of the flesh. Separated from these by a great precipice are the sins of the lower Hell — Malice in its three principal forms, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery. While Incontinence is only the abuse of some normal power of human nature, and therefore for the most part an injury to the sinner himself. Malice is a social sin, having injury to others for its very end, and therefore ' wins ' greater ' hate in Heaven.' ^ Minos, the The Guardian of this Second Circle is Minos. As a Symbol of Bvii rule, the Warder of each Circle represents the sin consoience. which is punished in it, but Minos is an exception. Though he stands at the entrance to the Circle of Sensuality, he is not a symbol of that sin. He is the Judge of Hell in general, and represents the con- demning power of an evil and guilty conscience. Every lost soul is compelled to appear before him and confess all his sins ; whereupon Minos coils his tail round himself as many times as the number of the Circle to which he is to be thrust down, and immediately the guilty wretch is hurled to his place. > Inf. xi. 22-90. THE SENSUAL 85 Aa already pointed out, Dante has changed Minos CANTO V into a dog-demon with a tail : There standeth Minos horribly, and snarls.^ The change must be deliberate and intentional, for Dante cannot have been ignorant of the noble and radiant figure of the Minos of mythology. Originally a king and lawgiver of Crete, he is rewarded for his righteousness by being made the supreme Judge in Hades. Plato tells us that Zeus appointed Bhada- manthus judge of the dead from Asia, and ^acus of the dead from Europe ; ' but to Minos I shall give the primacy, and he shall hold a court of appeal, in case either of the two others are in doubt.' All have sceptres ; ' but Minos alone has a golden sceptre and is seated looking on, as Odysseus in Homer declares that he saw him : " Holding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead." '* In the u^neid he is the judge of those condemned to death by false accusations, and although not royal as in Homer, is yet a grave and dignified figure.* Why, then, has Dante degraded Minos into a mon- strous and demonic form ? Partly, doubtless, in obedience to the belief of his time that the beings of heathen mythology were not gods, as their wor- shippers thought, but demons, in accordance with Paul's words : ' The things which the Gentiles sacri- fice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God.' * But there can be little doubt that the principal reason is the one already stated. Dante wanted a symbol of > Inf, V. 4. 2 Gorgias, 524-526. 3 ^neid, vi. 430-433. * 1 Cor. x. 2a 86 THE SENSUAL CANTO V the evil conscience of the lost, a figure which would represent the horrible and distorted conception of the justice of God, which is one of the chief punish- ments of the hardened and impenitent soul. That this is the idea is evident when we compare Minos with the Angel who fulfils the same office of confes- sor at the Gate of St. Peter in the Purgatorio. He too is the synabol of Conscience, but of Conscience humbled, convicted, contrite. Such a conscience sees the justice of God not as a demon but an angel — an angel, indeed, whose face cannot be endured, and whose sword flashes with a blinding light, but still an angel.^ To the impenitent and despairing con- science, the same Divine justice appears a hideous demon, which turns on the sinner with cynical snarl- ings of contempt and fury. When Dante appears before him, Minos ' leaves the act of so great an office ' : that is, he passes no judg- ment on him as on the others. In other words, Dante's conscience does not condemn him as a finally impenitent sinner. Nevertheless the very sight of Minos, who represents the judgment of the impeni- tent, warns him that the pilgrimage before him is full of danger : ' O thou that to this dolorous hostelry Comest,' said Minos to me, when he saw me, Leaving the practice of so great an office, ' Look how thou enterest, and in whom thou trustest ; Let not the portal's amplitude deceive thee.'^ He in whom Dante trusted was Virgil or Beason; the warning therefore seems to mean that in the 1 Purg. ix. 73-132. 2 Inf. v. 16-20. THE SENSUAL 87 contemplation of sin and its penalties, it is possible CANTO V to trust Reason too much. Familiarity with sin is easy, ' the amplitude of the entrance ' is great, but the very contemplation of evil may leave unsus- pected stains upon the soul. And, indeed, Dante tells us that he found it so. When he emerged on the shore of Mount Purgatory, Virgil had to wash his tear-stained face with morning dew in order to ' uncover the hue which Hell had covered up ' in him.^ In the meantime, however, the answer which Virgil gives to Minos is that it is not in Heason alone that Dante puts his trust : this pilgrimage is ordained of Heaven, and therefore not undertaken in any pride of his own unaided intellect : ' It is so willed there where is power to do That which is willed ; and ask no further question. '^ We turn now to the punishment inflicted on the Tne sensual : Sensual, a punishment which, as with all the penal- ^ent. ties of the Inferno, is meant by Dante to represent the natural and necessary fruit of the sin, in accord- ance with the principle, ' Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.' The first penalty of a sen- sual life is darkness : I came unto a place mute of all light. ^ OarkneBB. This, of course, is not peculiar to this Circle ; dark- ness, as the natural symbol of evil, pervades the entire world of the lost. But what Dante wishes to indicate is that sensual sin produces its own special darkness. By concentrating the whole nature on the flesh, and, as he puts it, ' subjecting reason to appe- 1 Purg. i. 121-129. 2 j^f, v. 23, 24. 3 j^f. v. 28. 88 THE SENSUAL CANTO V tite,' reason itself is destroyed, the feelings are hardened, and the very capacity of spiritual vision is lost. Thus with this sin St. Paul joins the moral and intellectual blindness of the heathen world of his day: 'being darkened in their understanding, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart: who being past feeling gave them- selves up to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.'^ Probably Dante had specially before his mind the treatment of the subject by St. Thomas Aquinas. Luxury, says Aquinas, by the vehemence of its passions, ' throws the higher powers, the reason and will, into very great disorder.' Hence what he calls ' the daughters of Luxury ' are ' blind- ness of mind, inconsiderateness, headlong haste, inconstancy, self-love, hatred of God, affection for the present world, horror or despair of the world to come.'^ Probably too it is this 'hatred of God' and ' horror of the world to come,' of which he is think- ing when he says of these sinners of the flesh : When they arrive before the precipice, There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, There they blaspheme the power divine.* ' The precipice ' seems to mean the edge of the cliff above, from which, when Minos has pronounced judg- ment, they are hurled to their doom. They hate God, as Aquinas says, and blaspheme Him for ' for- bidding the coveted pleasure ' ; and they shrink with horror and despair from a world where such pleasure is now for ever impossible. 1 Evh. iv. 18, 19. 2 Summa, ii-ii. q. 153, a. 5. 3 Inf. v. 34-36. THE SENSUAL 89 For, accoi^ding to Dante, this is the special torment canto V of this sin, that lust lives on when all hope of its wiuriwin* gratification is dead. This eternal restlessness of o^'""** desire unsatisfied, Dante pictures under the figure of a whirlwind, which bellows like a sea in tempest, and sweeps the souls onward without hope of rest or even of less pain : The infernal hurricane that never rests Leads the spirits onward in its rapine ; Whirling and smiting, it distresses them.i At first glance, indeed, this seems a lighter punish- ment than is assigned to the same sin in Purgatory. Here it is the wind ; there it is fire so intense that, in comparison, molten glass had been a grateful coolness,* Yet if we once realize what this torment of the whirlwind is, we shall not think it small. Even in the present life and world, it not infrequently happens that this sin grows into a wild hurricane of passion, before which reason is swept away like a straw, and the man is driven helplessly on long after the jaded senses have lost the power to enjoy. It may be thought that in another world where the flesh no longer exists, the passions of the flesh must of necessity subside ; but Dante's conviction is far otherwise. He thinks rather of the naked human soul, a whirlwind of lusts, bereft for ever of the means of gratifying them. In the Purgatorio, for example, he declares that whereas at death the powers of the flesh are 'voiceless all,' the higher faculties are quickened into greater keenness : ' The memory, the intelligence, and the will In action far more vigorous than before.' ' 1 Inf. V. 31-33. 2 purg. xxvii. 49-51. ^ py,rg, nv. 79-84. 90 THE SJSNSUAL CANTO V We have to think, then, not of a soul freed from its passions through the easy process of escape from the flesh by death, but rather of a soul whose memory, intelligence, and will have been steeped in sensuality, having those faculties quickened into keener activity at the very moment when the flesh, the means of their gratification, is stripped away. Having sown the wind, it reaps the whirlwind. It is, indeed, much the same idea as is set forth in Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of Another Life. There it is argued that the present body acts as a curb on the passions by means of the physical exhaustion which they produce ; and that when this ' corporeal limitation ' is removed in a future state, the moral faculties, whether good or evil, will attain an intensity and power of which meantime we have no conception.^ As Dante watches these wretched shades, he sees them at first like a great flock of starlings in winter, whirled about in confusion by the wind, 'hither, thither, down, up.' Then, as the wind changes, it sweeps them out into a long line, like cranes ' chant- ing forth their lays.' As the stream floats past, Virgil points out and names the shades of lovers famous in classic and mediaeval story, ' dames of eld and cavaliers.' We may perhaps distinguish two groups. In the first are souls whose sensuality had been promiscuous, unbridled, utterly lawless, un- redeemed by any touch of nobler feeling, such as Semiramis, and ' Cleopatra the voluptuous.' Semir- amia, queen of Assyria, 'made lust legal in her law,' referring to a statement of Orosius that she 1 Physical Theory of Another Life, chap. xiil. The Two Bands. THE SENSUAL 91 legalized the crime of incest. It is probably for this CANTO V that she heads the long procession. It is not so easy p^g to understand why Dido is named between Semira- mis and Cleopatra : ' The next is she who killed herself for love, And broke faith with the ashes of Sichseus.'i her dead husband. As a suicide, we might expect to find her in the weird Wood of Circle vn. It has been suggested that the reason why she is not there is that to heathen minds suicide was not sinful, provided it was committed for some worthy cause. Passing from this, however, it seems certain that although Dante names Dido between Semiramis and Cleopatra, he has no intention of setting her on the same low level of guilt. They were women of un- bridled licentiousness, whereas Dido's sin was a single guilty passion. That this distinction is meant to be drawn by Dante is evident from the fact that he is careful to tell us that Paolo and Francesca 'issued from the band where Dido is ' ; and obviously a single passion which unites two lovers in both time and eternity, however guilty it may be, is not to be put upon the level of a base and indiscriminate profligacy. There are, then, two bands representing two widely different degrees of guilt : at the head of the one is Semiramis, of the other Dido. Before passing fronx the subject, one is tempted to wonder why Dido is here, while Mneaa reposes with the blameless souls of heroes on ' the green enamel ' of the meadow in the Circle above. In the De Mon- orchia^ indeed, Dante expressly recognizes Dido as • Inf. V. 61, 62. 2 De Mon. ii. 3. Comp. ^n. Iv. 171-172. 92 THE SENSUAL CANTO V ^neas's second wife, declaring that he was 'ennobled* by his three marriages, of which this second one related him to Africa, as the other two to Asia and Europe. If she was his wife, it is difficult to see why- she is in this Circle at all, and more difficult to understand why a marriage which * ennobled ' Mneas should brand her with shame. The silent indignation and hatred with which, according to Virgil, she meets ^neas in Hades, certainly seems nearer to his deserts.^ Among the souls that 'loved not wisely but too well,' Virgil points out Helen and Achilles, Paris and Tristan, with more than a thousand other shades ' whom Love had parted from our life.' To some of these — perhaps because their love had a touch of nobleness in it — there seem to come lulls in the storm, brief moments of respite from the agony of vain desire. The interest of many generations of readers has centred itself on two of these souls who have the comfort, bitter-sweet, of not being separated even in Hell. These are Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Bimini, perhaps next to Dante and Beatrice the most familiar names in the whole poem.^ It has been often pointed out that Francesca has the mournful distinction of being the only Christian woman in the Inferno. Indeed, in comparison with men, there are few women in it at all. It would almost seem as if Dante believed that goodness came more naturally and easily to women ; or it may be due to that rever- ence for Womanhood which we see in his worship of Mary, Beatrice, and Lucia.^ 1 ^n. vi. 450-476. 2 Inf. v. 73-142. ' This is the more remarkable as it is against the mediseval feelings Paolo and Francesca da R imini THE SENSUAL 93 Dante's attention is drawn to these two souls, CANTO V because they go together, And seem upon the wind to be bo light. This need not be taken, as is sometimes done, as symbolic of lightmindedness ; it is rather that their being together makes it easier for them to float on that wind of passion, — it seems almost their native elenxent. Hence the comparison to doves which follows. When Dante, moved by the intensity of his pity, calls them, they float towards him softly like doves ' to the sweet nest ' : there was to him something soft, gentle, dove-like in the love which had brought them to ' the woful pass.' As we saw, they come ' from the band where Dido is,' the nobler souls that have been mastered by a single guilty passion ; and in the momentary lull of the tempest, we hear 'a small flute-voice of infinite wail,' the voice of Francesca telling her sad story while her companion ceases not to weep. What exactly that story was, it is not easy now to discover through the successive veils of romance which have been thrown over it. The tale as thus popularly embellished is to this eflPect. Francesca's marriage was a political one. Her father, Guido Vecchio da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, in order to heal a feud between himself and the house of the Malatesta of Rimini, betrothed about women, if painting and sculpture are any guide. ' Characteris- tically enough, the procession waiting for judgment in Christian delineations of the scene consists almost entirely of women. The notion that woman is, in an emphatic and peculiar sense, the ally and satellite of Satan originated in the legend of the fall of man, and was strengthened by the institution of sacerdotal celibacy ' (Evans's Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture, 331-333), 94 THE SENSUAL CANTO V his beautiful daughter to Gianciotto, the second son of that family. Now this Gianciotto being deformed, as his name implies — • Cripple John ' — it was thought advisable to send to the betrothal his handsome brother Paolo as his proxy. Naturally enough, the young girl fell in love with him, thinking he was the husband chosen for her, and from this first deception of which she was the victim sprang the whole tragedy which followed. Some years after the husband sur- prised and slew them with his own hand. According to some forms of the story, Paolo would have escaped through a trap-door, had not his shirt of mail caught upon a nail, whereupon Francesca seeing his danger threw herself between the brothers and received the stroke meant for her lover. It is said that they were buried together just as they were, and that, three centuries later, on their tomb being opened, the silken garments in which they had been slain were found quite fresh. It is an ungrateful task to discredit a romance which would set the conduct of these lovers in a comparatively favourable light ; yet plain dates and facts leave us no alternative. The marriage took place about the year 1275, when Dante was a boy of ten. Paolo was already a married man. The tragedy occurred about ten years after, probably in 1285 ; and at the time Francesca had a daughter of nine, and Paolo, who had been married for sixteen years, was the father of two sons. Under such circumstances, their sin was not one of romantic and inexperienced youth, as it is popularly supposed to have been. Yet one difficulty remains. If these are the plain and THE SENSUAL 95 somewhat commonplace facts, how comes it that CANTO V Dante sets the story in a light so strangely pathetic and beautiful that we almost forget the sin in pity for the lovers' doom ? It certainly cannot have been because he did not know the facts. The closing years of his life were spent under the protection of Francesca's nephew, Guido Novello, lord of Ravenna; and there he must have heard all that could be told of the tragedy. Probably gratitude to his friend and host prompted him to throw round his kinswoman as favourable a light as possible. Nevertheless this would not account for everything. There is in Dante's whole treatment of the story a peculiar something which proves to my mind that, from all he knew, he did not regard it as the low and vulgar intrigue which such sins commonly are. There was in it, in spite of its guilt, some nobler quality of love, which he strives to bring out. Take, for example, the words concerning Love, which he puts into Francesca's lips : ' Love, that on gentle heart doth swiftly seize, Seized this man for the person beautiful Which was ta'en from me, and still the mode offends me. Love, which to no loved one pardons loving. Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly. That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me. Love has conducted us unto one death ; Caina waiteth him who quenched our life ! '^ When Dante hears these words which declare that love in their case was no momentary fever of the senses, but an eternal bond of soul with soul, he bows * Inf. V. 100-107. Mark the repetition of the word Lmie. 96 THE SENSUAL CANTO V his head so long that Virgil has to ask what he is thinking of. His answer is : • Ah me I How many sweet thoughts, how much desire. Conducted these unto the woful pass 1 '^ It was no low passion to begin with; no evil was thought at first. Slowly, unconsciously, Love led them to death by gentle gradations of sweet thoughts and fond desires. In those fair dreaming days when Love was still pure and innocent, they had no sus- picion, no sudden prophetic hint and flash, that sweet thought and fond desire would at last grow into this infernal hurricane of passion. Dante wonders what it was that brought to an end the long sweet con- flict and uncertainty of their ' dubious desires ' ; and Francesca, weeping bitterly at the memory of the happy day, tells him it was the reading together of the mediaeval Romance of Lancelot and Guinevere : ' One day we reading were for our delight Of Lancelot, how love did him enthrall. Alone we were and without all suspicion. Full many a time our eyes together drew That reading, and changed the colour of our faces ; But one point only was it that o'ercame us. Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile Being by such a noble lover kissed, This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided. Kissed me upon the mouth all trembling. Galeotto was the book, and he who wrote it ; That day no farther did we read therein.'^ Condemnation The reference to Galeotto is Dante's judgment on Romances. the mediaeval Romances of love. Galeotto is some- times confounded with Galahad ; but Mr. Paget I Inf. V. 112-114. » Inf. v. 127-138. THE SENSUAL 97 Toynbee has proved conclusively that the reference CANTO V is to Gallehault in the Old French Romance of Lance- lot du Lac} He was the knight who acted as inter- mediary between Lancelot and Guinevere, and urged the Queen to give the kiss which was the beginning of their guilt. Similarly the Romance itself had been their Gallehault — the pander that led them to the fatal sin. As already said, it is Dante's judgment concerning the evil influence of the Romances of love so popular in his day, and his warning to the writers of them : their guilt is greater and will set them in a much lower Circle. Although one would gladly escape from the sub- Compaxative ject, it may be well to glance briefly at Dante's treat- sensuality. ment of the kindred sins throughout the Commedia, in order to have the whole range of his teaching before our minds. In Circle vii., for example, we shall find those whose sensuality is unnatural, the sensuality of Sodom ; and in the Circle beneath that again, panders and seducers, betrayers of women.^ They are thrust down to these lower depths because Dante recognizes about this sin, as he does about all the sins of Incontinence, that there is a form of it which is by comparison natural, and, if one may say so, honest, frank, and open ; whereas there are other forms which involve the violation of Nature, and the basest betrayal of trust and love. When- ever these elements of vileness enter into this sin, they rightly sink the soul to a far deeper perdition. Passing to the Purgatorio, we find the souls of penitent Sensualists on the last Terrace of the * DanU Studies and Researches, 1-37. ^ Inf. xvi., xviii 98 THE SENSUAL CANTO V Mount, burning away their evil passions and habits by the fiery pain of parting with them.^ Obviously Dante's meaning is that Sensuality is the last evil of which human nature is purged, and that even then the soul is saved only • so as by fire,' — so tenacious is its grasp, and so burning is the pain of giving it up. Probably the reason is the same as that which makes it the least heinous sin in Hell, namely, that it has a natural basis in the flesh. For that reason it is the least guilty; for that reason it is also the most deeply rooted, the last of which the soul gets free. Nay further, Dante declares that there is a very real sense in which the soul never gets free from it. The third Heaven of Paradise is Venus, the symbol of the abode of Lovers. It lies, like the Moon and Mercury, within the shadow of the earth.^ The meaning is that the shadow of this sin of earth, although forgiven and purged away, yet lies like a darkness upon the joy of Heaven itself. What he wishes to tell us is that no man can give to sinful love a heart that was meant for the love of God, without permanently lessening the power of his soul to know the Divine light and rejoice in it ; the sinful love lies like the shadow of earth upon his soul for ever. So stern is Dante's judgment of this sin ; and it is this very sternness which gives intensity to his pity for the victims of it, at least in its more open and natural form. He sets it here in the highest Circle in which any sin is punished. When he hears Fran- cesca's story he weeps for pity, and at the close of it ' Purg. XXV., xxvl. ^ Par. ix. 118. THE SENSUAL 99 swoons and falls, ' even as a dead body falls.' He CANTO V recognizes the faithfulness of these lovers to each other even in their guilty passion, and rewards it by leaving them the sad comfort of floating light upon the wind together. Indeed, so strong is his sympathy with this sin throughout the poem, that we wonder what the reason is. In the passage before us, for instance, we cannot but mark how much severer is the punishment which he measures out to the injured husband : Francesca foretells his doom : ' Oaina waiteth him who quenched our life,' Now, Caina is that part of the lowest Circle in which traitors to their kin are frozen in a lake of ice. It receives its name from Cain, the first fratricide ; and perhaps this is why Gianciotto is consigned to it. But was he a traitor to his wife and brother ? Were not they rather traitors to him ? Probably the reason why Dante condemns him to the Circle of Traitors is that he knew of some element of treachery in his conduct towards them, although it is unknown to us. But passing this by, why does he set a sin like Treachery at the very bottom of Hell, and Sensuality at the top P As already said, the reason seems to be that the latter is mere lack of control of a natural appetite, whereas the former is a base and under- hand violation of the bonds of Nature's own creating. If this is somewhat of a reversal of popular and ecclesiastical conceptions of morality, it is at least more in harmony with the warning to the priests and elders of Israel: 'Verily I say unto you. That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.' CHAPTER VI CIRCLE III.— THE GLUTTONOUS CANTO VI When Dante awoke from the swoon into which his Guardian— pity for Francesca threw him, he found himself ^mboTof ^^ *^® Circle of the Gluttons, surrounded by 'new Gluttony. torments and new tormented.' As in his crossing of Acheron, he tells us nothing of the mode by which he reached this Circle. Its Guardian is Cerberus, an obvious symbol of the sin of Gluttony — a dog with the three throats of heathen mythology, to indicate his insatiable appetite. His red eyes denote drunken- ness ; his large belly his capacity of gorging himself ; his beard foul with grease, the want of physical self-respect which is characteristic of this sin. Virgil calls him contemptuously ' the great worm,' to indi- cate the low grovelling nature of a sin which feeds on earth; for when he opens his great mouths to attack the pilgrims, Virgil quiets him by flinging handfuls of earth into his 'rapacious gullets.' This is obviously imitated from the JEneid, but there it is a sop of honey and grain that the Sibyl flings to make him sleep. Here he is not so dainty, a few handfuls of the foul and sodden earth suffice. Like a watch-dog, he barks over the prostrate souls ; and the teeth and claws with which he 'rends and 100 THE GLUTTONOUS 101 flays and quarters ' them are symbolic of their own CANTO VI vile appetite, which devours them through eternity. Moreover, this devouring appetite lives on under punisimieiit of circumstances which greatly aggravate its torment. " '"^^' Dante seems to have had before his mind the terrible contrast drawn by Christ between the rich man, clothed in purple and fine linen and faring sump- tuously every day, and the same man stripped of everything, and glad to beg a drop of water from The Rain, the beggar who once lay at his gate. There is here the same utter reversal of the self-indulgent comfort and luxury which formed the happiness of these gluttons on earth. Then they sat in their warm and comfortable banqueting-rooms ; now they are utterly homeless, without a roof to shelter them from the storm. Under a murky sky they lie wal- lowing in the mud like pigs, beaten by hail, rain, and snow, which never cease, and glad if they can shelter one side by turning on the other. The perfumes and appetizing odours of their feasts are gone, and the foul earth on which they lie sends forth a noisome smell, symbolic of the foulness of their life. The deafening barking of Cerberus has taken the place of the song and music of old days ; instead of the pleasant talk and the 'flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar,' they now howl like dogs. It is possible, of course, to draw out the contrasts into too great detail; but they certainly seem too numerous to be accidental. Further, Gluttony, like all sins of the flesh, dulls The blinding and darkens the mind ; hence Dante speaks of these *" souls as 'the blind' — indeed, it is difficult to see how 102 THE GLUTTONOUS CANTO VI they could be anything else, since they lie with their faces sunken in the mud. Doubtless he is thinking of one of the * daughters of Gluttony ' of which St. Thomas Aquinas speaks, ' dulness of mind for intel- lectual things.' ' The edge of reason,' says Aquinas, ' is dulled by immoderation in meat and drink ; and in this respect dulness of perception in intellectual things is put down as a daughter of Gluttony ; as, on the contrary, abstinence helps to the gathering of wisdom, according to the text: "I thought in my heart to withdraw my flesh from wine, that I might turn my mind to wisdom.'"^ But, indeed, it needs no Aquinas to tell us this — most people know by experience that a heavy dinner clouds the mental faculties with drowsiness; and after a life-time of this over-indulgence the mind, in Spenser's words, is drowned in meat and drink. To Dante, however, FouinesB of probably the worst punishment of all, or at least the Gluttony. most disgusting, was the foulness of the sin, sym- bolized in the foulness of its punishment, and the way in which it brutalizes men. Cerberus, as we saw, is a dog — a ' great worm' — with all the disgust- ing marks of brutish excess upon him. The souls wallow in the mud like pigs and bark like dogs. The earth is foul with stench. The only shade singled out for special mention is one whose glut- tonous habits gained him in Florence the nickname of Oiacco, 'the Hog,' and whose foul intemperance had so disfigured his features, that Dante fails to ' Swrmna, ii-ii. q. cxlviii. a. 6. The quotation is from the Vulgate of Eccles. li. 3; in the English version the meaning is very difTerent: ' I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom.' THE GLUTTONOUS 103 recognize him when he lifts his mud-stained face CANTO VI from the ground. No wonder he says of this punishment, • If some are greater, none is so displeasing.'' For, in truth, there is something peculiarly disgusting in gluttony, something ruinous to a man's physical self-respect, no matter how the epicure may hide it from himself for a time by the fair appointments of the table. Nevertheless, foul and degrading as this sin is, ciacco— Dante proceeds to indicate that there are many ® °^' others more heinous morally and spiritually; and this he does by means of a conversation with the Ciacco just referred to. The passage is interesting because this is the first Florentine Dante meets in First Denun- the other world, and the encounter gives rise to the norenoe. first of the denunciations of Florence with which the poem abounds. This Ciacco is said to have been an inveterate frequenter of the tables of the rich, whether invited or not. It is uncertain whether Ciacco was his own proper name or a nickname given him for his gluttonous habits: Dante would have cared little which — name or nickname, the ' Hog ' was entirely appropriate. At first, he cannot recognize the bloated face, all stained with mud, although Ciacco tells him he was his contemporary : ' Thou wast made before I was unmade.' ^ On learning who he is, the poet is anxious to hear news of his native city, from which his banishment shut him out. According to a law of Hell which it is 1 Inf. vi. 48. « Inf. vL 42. 104 THE GLUTTONOUS CANTO VI difficult to account for, the shades know the future course of earthly events. Dante therefore asks Ciacco three questions about Florence : first, what would be the issue of its faction-feuds between Blacks and Whites; second, whether there were any just men left in it ; and lastly, what was the cause of its being plunged into such discord. Surprise has been expressed that he should ask such questions of such a man, yet the reason is simple enough. Nothing could better express the poet's despairing judgment on the moral condition of his native city : even Ciacco the blind, gluttonous hog, wallowing in mud, was prophet enough to foretell its inevitable fate. In reply to his first question, he informs Dante that after much strife and bloodshed, the Whites, whom he calls 'the party of the woods,' will expel the Blacks ; that ' within three suns ' they, in their turn, will be driven out and kept in exile for many years, in spite of their prayers and indignation. And this reverse, he says, will happen ' By force of him who now keeps tacking.' i The reference is almost certainly to the treacherous conduct of Pope Boniface viii. in the matter of Charles of Valois, through which the party of the Blacks were admitted to the city in order to expel the Whites. In short, it is a brief statement of the history of the two or three fatal years in which Dante himself had played no small part, and which ended in his exile and the ruin of his earthly fortunes. In answer to his second question, Ciacco tells him > Inf. vi. 69. THE GLUTTONOUS 105 there are only two just men left in the city, and they CANTO VI are not listened to. No hint of their identity is given, but it is conjectured that they are Dante himself and his friend Guide Cavalcanti. It matters less to know who they were, than to mark the low ebb to which, in Dante's opinion, common honesty had sunk in Florence in 1300, the year of his priorate. The answer to his third question is that the cause of all the dissensions is the threefold sin of envy, pride, and avarice. It may be said — it has often been said — that all this is only Dante's own angry and bitter way of giving back blow for blow to the city that had banished him. His statements, however, are entirely vindicated by those of his contemporary, Giovanni Villani, who was inside the city and did not belong to the party exiled. He narrates in his Chronicle the events of 1303, the last of the three years referred to in this passage. The various parties inside the city cam^e to blows and shed much blood over the question whether the public accounts of those in office and who administered the monies of the commonwealth should be examined. To such a pass did this civil war come, that Lucca had to inter- fere to prevent the city from totally destroying itself. Villani closes his account by attributing the danger and suffering through which the city had just passed to precisely the same three sins here named by Dante : ' And this adversity and peril of our city was not without the judgment of God, by reason of many sins committed through the pride and envy and avarice of our then living citizens, which were then ruling the city, and alike of the 106 THE GLUTTONOUS CANTO VI rebels therein, as of those which were governing, for they were great sinners, nor was this the end thereof, as hereafter in due time may be seen.' ^ nve Noble Dante proceeds to make some further inquiries norentineB. ^higi^ it is very difficult to account for. He asks Ciacco concerning the eternal fate of certain dead Florentines, five in number — 'whether Heaven soothes or Hell empoisons them.' They were men in whom good and evil were so strangely mingled that he wonders which won their souls in the end of the day. He had a great admiration for them because 'on good deeds they set their thoughts.' Yet Ciacco, who seems to know Hell as well as if it were Florence, destroys any linger- ing hope he may have had of their salvation : ' They are among the blackest souls ; A different crime downweighs them to the bottom ; If thou so far descendest, thou canst see them.' * Dante does descend so far, and meets them all except a certain Arrigo, of whom no further mention is made. Farinata degli Uberti, the great GhibeUine leader who saved Florence after the battle of Monta- perti in 1260, lies in a burning tomb in the City of Dis, the Circle of Heretics.^ Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, of the great Guelph family of the Adimari, also fought at Montaperti, but on the other side, after using his utmost influence to dissuade his party from a con- flict which almost destroyed it ; Dante sees him and Jacopo Busticucci whirled incessantly like a wheel in the Circle of the Violent against Nature.* The * Vaicmi, bk. viii. 68. ' Inf. vi. 85-87. » Inf. X. 22-121. « Inf. xvl. 1-89. THE GLUTTONOUS 107 last is Mosca de' Lamberti, who in 1215 gave the fatal CANTO VI advice which led to the murder of Buondelmonte, and divided the city into Guelphs and Ghibellines. In the Moat of the Schismatics, Dante sees him holding up the two bleeding stumps of his arms.* Now, it is difficult to believe that Dante's inquiry about these souls was prompted by mere curiosity concerning their fate. It is rather to emphasize the pessimistic and despairing view which he took of the moral state of his native city. Two just men it contained and only two : ten would have saved Sodom. And then his mind seems to have glanced off to the best men of an earlier generation — men who 'set their thoughts on doing good,' and left behind them noble names. Alas, at the heart of the goodness of every one of them some deadly sin was eating like a canker — Heresy, Unnatural Vice, Civil Faction ; and if such things were true of the noblest and best men of Florence, what of the rest? The city was another Sodom, ready for the penal flame. Some such association of ideas we may imagine led to Dante's curiosity concerning the doom of these five noble Florentines ; it reveals the sad despair- ing view which he took of the morals of his native city. The last words of Gidcco are a request that when Dante returns to ' the sweet world ' he would recall him to the minds of men. All down the Inferno, with the exception of a few who have the grace to wish to be forgotten, the souls of the lost feel that it is better to be remembered for their « Inf. xxviii. 103-111. of tbe Body. 108 THE GLUTTONOUS CANTO VI wickedness than not remembered at all. This long- ' ing for fame, even though it be ill-fame, seems to be regarded as a weakness peculiar to the lost. The souls on Mount Purgatory do, indeed, wish to be remembered by their friends on earth, but it is in order to receive the benefit of their prayers ; while the redeemed in Paradise have no desire for any remembrance in this lower world, so completely are RoBurreotion they satisfied with the vision of God. As Ciacco after this request falls back into the blinding mud, Virgil informs Dante that he will wake no more till 'the angelic trumpet' sounds. Then each soul must ' revisit his sad tomb,' re-assume his flesh and form, and hear his sentence which shall 'resound through eternity.' As they pass on, wading slowly through ' the filthy mixture of the shadows and the rain,' Dante inquires what the result will be of this re-assumption of the flesh at the last day: will it increase the torment, or lessen it, or leave it as it is ? Virgil's answer is : ' Return unto thy science, Which wills, that as the thing more perfect is, The more it feels of pleasure and of pain. ' i It is disputed whether ' thy science ' means the philosophy of Aristotle or the doctrines of Christian Theology. As a matter of fact, it means both : Dante is simply following the teaching of Aquinas as based on Aristotle. ' The soul without the body,' says St. Thomas, 'has not the perfection of its nature'; and » Inf. vi. 106-108. For the body, or rather shade, of the Intermediate State, see Purg. xxv. 79-108 ; for Resurrection body of the redeemed, Par. xiT. 13-66. THE GLUTTONOUS 109 he teaches that the re-assuming of the body in the CANTO VI resurrection will increase the joy of the redeemed and the agony of the lost. It is somewhat strange to find that Virgil has knowledge of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, especially as Aquinas holds that the power of the resurrection is miracu- lous, not natural. It almost seems as if Dante regarded the knowledge as lying within the circle of the natural mind and reason of man, without the aid of revelation. It is possible, however, as Plumptre suggests, that 'Virgil's knowledge has been enlarged behind the veil.' CHAPTER VII CIRCLE IV.— MISERS AND PRODIGALS Incontinence of Oooda. CANTO VII Sensuality and Gluttony are Incontinence of the body; we now come to Incontinence of goods. Following Aristotle, Dante regards this sin as con- sisting of two extremes : money may be abused by holding it too greedily, or by squandering it too lavishly. Hence the Fourth Circle, into which the pilgrims now descend, contains both Misers and Prodigals, sinners of the close fist and of the open hand. They are left and right of the self-same sin. Avarice. The Jailor of the Circle is Plutus, the Greek god of wealth, from which we have our familiar word plutocrat.^ As in the case of Minos, Dante degrades him into a demonic and brutal form. In mythology he is represented variously, — sometimes as a boy with a cornucopia, sometimes as a child carried in the arms of Fortune or of Peace. Dante, however, will have nothing to do with this conception of the god of riches as a thing of childlike innocence, the companion of peace and plenty, but sinks him into 1 ' It is uncertain whether Dante intended Pluto to represent Pluto, otherwise called Hades, the god of the nether world, ... or Plutus, the god of wealth. ... It is probable that he did not very clearly dis- tinguish between the two, since even in classical times they were sometimes identified ' (Toynbee, Dante Dictionary). W Qnardian — Flutns : Symbol of Blches. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 111 an ' accursed wolf ' with • bloated lip.' We saw that CANTO VII the fiercest of the three beasts which obstructed his ascent of the mountain was an old She-wolf ; and on the Fifth Cornice of Purgatory the name is expressly applied to Avarice.^ This brutifying and demonizing of Plutus is the poet's way of stripping ofE the dis- guise of innocence and peace which wealth often wears, and revealing the wolf underneath. The love of money is no harmless boy pouring out a horn of plenty, no sweet and innocent child borne in the arms of Peace: it is a beast of prey living upon others, ' a root of all kinds of evil.' When Plutus saw the travellers approaching, he cried out in his ' clucking voice ' : ' Pape Satan, pape Satan, aleppe 1 ' — ^ ' Fape Satoa t ' words which Virgil, 'who knew all,' may have understood, but which have never been satisfac- torily explained. Different commentators have regarded them as Hebrew, French, Greek, or Greek and Latin mixed. We need not waste time over what appears to be an insoluble problem. They seem to be meant as an intimidation to the pilgrims, or as a shout of warning to Satan, * the Emperor of the kingdom dolorous,' that his realm is being in- vaded by ' a living soul.' It has been suggested that the cry is an intentionally obscure way of saying that the Pope was Satan ; and, while there is no need to bind ourselves to this view, it is yet worth noting that the Church contributes to this Circle many shaven heads — Popes and Cardinals being expressly ' Pwrg. XX. 10. * Inf. yii. 1. 112 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII named as those ' in whom Avarice doth practise its excess.'^ For all his outcry, a few words from Virgil quickly dispose of Plutus. Commanding the 'ac- cursed wolf ' to be silent, he says : ' Not causeless is our journey to the abyss ; Thus it is willed on high, there where Michael wrought Vengeance upon the proud adultery.' ^ The reference is, of course, to the defeat of the rebel angels, but it is not easy to see why it is brought in here, or why their revolt is called ' the proud adul- tery.' In Scripture any unfaithfulness to God is regarded as spiritual adultery. Virgil's meaning seems to be that covetousness is also spiritual un- faithfulness, the giving to material things the devotion which is due to God alone; and that He who avenged Himself on the one form of infidelity was able to avenge Himself on the other. At the word, Plutus falls to the ground, Even as the sails inflated by the wind Together fall involved when snaps the mast ; * perhaps to indicate the ease with which Reason dis- poses of wealth with its swelling pretensions and threats; or the terror with which the thought of God's judgment inspires men whose god is this world. BiaeriiaesB Let US now examine somewhat more carefuUv the and Prodi- ... grauty— two sin of this Circle. As we saw, it is abuse of one's game coin.'' goods, and this abuse takes two opposite forms- Miserliness and Prodigality, greed in hoarding and Inf. vii. 46-48. 2 Inf. vii. 10-12. 3 j„^_ ^ii_ \%-\?>. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 113 recklessness in spending. These are placed in the CANTO VII same Circle hecause they are at root the same greed of gold: for greed is greed whether its ultimate ohject be to hoard or to squander. The idea is taken >' from Aristotle's Ethics. The liberal man is one who stands free of the evils of both extremes, giving the right amount, at the right time, to the right persons, and in the right spirit. The illiberal or miserly man is he who breaks these conditions of right giving by deficiency, as the prodigal breaks them by excess. Dante, it is to be noticed, indicates that Miser- Miserliness liness is the worse by setting it on the left hand ; *^^ ^°r^*- and in this estimate he follows both Aristotle and Aquinas. The latter gives three reasons why Prodi- gality is the lesser sin. In the first place, it is more akin to liberality, being an excess of giving. 'Secondly, because the prodigal is useful to many, to whom he gives; but the miser to none, not even to himself. Thirdly, because the prodigal is easy to cure, as well by the approach of old age, which is contrary to prodigality, as by his easily sinking into poverty through his many useless expenses, and thus impoverished, he cannot run to excess in giving; and also because he is easily brought to virtue by the likeness that he bears to it. But the miser's is no easy cure.' Indeed, Aris- totle declares that illiberality is incurable because it runs in human nature, and because old age and impotence of any kind only increase it.^ On the other hand, Dante knew well that there Yet Prodi- is a danger of exalting Prodigality into a virtue, virtue. 1 Ethics, iv. 1, 2, 3; Summa, ii-ii. q. cxix. a. 3. H 114 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII There is frequently about a spendthrift a certain open-handed 'generosity,' which hides the evil of his life ; and of this an instance is given in the Purga- torio. On the corresponding Terrace there he meets the poet Statius, whose besetting sin had been Prodigality. But the time was when he had not recognized it as a sin ; what opened his eyes, he tells Virgil, was a passage from his writings : ' When I the passage heard where thou exclaimest As if indignant against human nature, " Through what dost thou not drive, O cursed hunger Of gold, the appetite of mortal men ? " . . . Then I perceived the hands could spread too wide Their wings in spending.' ^ In other words, Statius learned that the spendthrift is cursed with the ' hunger of gold ' as surely as the miser, and that it often drives him into the same unscrupulous ways of satisfying it. Probably Dante had in mind the following passage from Aristotle's Ethics : ' Most prodigals not only give to the wrong people, but take from the wrong sources, and are so far illiberal. They become grasping because they are eager to spend, and are not able to do so easily, as their means soon run short; they are therefore obliged to get the means from other sources. At the same time, as nobleness is a matter of indiffer- ence to them, they are reckless and indiscriminate in their taking ; for they are eager to give but do not care at all how they give, or how they get the means 1 Purg. xxii. 38-44. The reference is to Virgil's ' Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames 1 ' {^n. iii. 56, 57). Sacra is sometimes taken in a good sense, ' O hallowed hunger of gold.' MISERS AND PRODIGALS 115 of giving.'^ In the Convito there is a passage in canto VII which Dante indignantly denounces this ' generosity ' with ill-got gains: 'Is this any other,' he asks sar- castically, 'than to steal the cloth from the altar, to cover with it both the thief and his table ? ' ^ Before passing on, let us note that another and Degrees of darker form of this sin of Prodigality is punished in a lower Circle, that of the Violent against Them- selves. There Dante sees spendthrifts who virtually committed suicide by a wild and reckless squander- ing of the very means of life, hunted and torn throughout eternity by the hounds of their own insane prodigality.' In similar fashion, he distinguishes various forms and of and degrees of the sister-sin of Avarice. In the three lowest Circles we shall find Usurers, Simoniacs, Barrators, and Judas who sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. Plainly all are avaricious, and in not setting them in this upper Circle Dante is once more following Aristotle, who distinguishes various kinds and qualities of Covetousness. There are men who are mere skinflints, not coveting the property of others, but simply determined not to part with their own. Others do indeed covet what belongs to their fellows, but are restrained from taking it by fear. Still others so far break through such re- straints that they engage in dishonourable and evil callings for love of wealth, such as 'usurers who lend small sums of money at extortionate rates of interest.' In short, Dante recognizes two distinct A qualities of Covetousness which differ widely in ' Ethics, iv. 3. > Conv. iv. 27. ' Inf. xiii. 109-129. the Sin, 116 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII their degrees of guilt. One is simple inability so to control our possessions that we neither grasp them too firmly nor throw them away with too free a hand. The other allies itself with Violence, Fraud, and Treachery, becomes therefore a sin against Society, and for this reason is plunged into deeper abysses of perdition. Prevalence of Dante tells us that this Circle is the most densely populated in Hell : Here saw I people many more than elsewhere.^ Again and again he refers to the prevalence of this sin: the ability to spend money wisely, neither hoarding nor squandering, is far from common. But what evidently surprises him most is the pre- valence of this abuse of money among the clergy. On the left hand, and therefore among the Misers, he sees many tonsured heads, and is informed by Virgil that they belong to clerks. Popes, and Cardi- nals, 'in whom Avarice practises its excess.' St. Thomas Aquinas, discussing Prodigality, says it is a sin against a man's self, and also against his neigh- bour, since it squanders the goods out of which he ought to provide for others. 'And this appears most of all in clerics, who are dispensers of the goods of the Church, which belong to the poor, and the poor they defraud by their prodigal expendi- ture.'^ It seems to have been Dante's belief that Miserliness was a greater temptation to churchmen than the more generous sin of spending too freely. It is a curious question why the very men who by * Inf. vii. 26. ^ Svmvma, ii-ii. q. cxiz. a. 3. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 117 their calling profess to have forsaken the world, are canto VII notoriously in bondage to it. Perhaps the conjee- ture of an old commentator is not far from the truth: 'I own I cannot find a cause for avarice in prelates, unless it be that perchance prohibition engenders concupiscence.'^ We come now to the punishment of this sin. It FmHsbment : consists in the perpetual rolling of great weights of weigiitf round the Circle. The Misers roll to the left, the Prodigals to the right, until they meet and clash together like billows on Charybdis.^ When this encounter takes place, the two companies revile each other: the Prodigals crying, 'Why hoardest thou?' — the Misers retorting, 'Why squanderest thou?' Then the rival bands turn and roll their weights in the opposite directions, until the waves clash again ; and thus through eternity they • dance their roundelay.' The meaning is obvious. It is the unrest which covetousness produces here, prolonged into another world. Aquinas says that one of ' the daughters of Avarice ' is restlessness ; and we know it without his testimony. The incessant toils which men undergo for money, the laborious days and sleepless nights, the dangers and privations they face: how truly they are symbolized in this per- petual rolling of heavy weights 'by main-force of ' Benvenuto da Imola, quoted by Vernon (Readings on Inferno, i. 217). ^ The comparison to Charybdis is symbolic. In the myth Charybdis was a voracious woman, who stole oxen from Hercules, and was hurled by the thunderbolt of Zeus into the sea. The name was given to a rock between Italy and Sicily. There thrice a day she drank in the sea-waves, and thrice poured them out again. Her greed in stealing the oxen and the fluctuations of the waves made her, in Dante's mind, symbolic of Avarice and its stormy tides. 118 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII chest.' In the Convito Dante dwells upon the burden of anxiety the mere possession of riches lays upon men, not to speak of the previous labour of acquisi- tion: 'It is the cause of evil, because it makes the possessor wakeful, timid and hateful. How great fear is that of a man who knows he carries riches about him, in journeying, in resting, not only when awake but when sleeping, not only that he will lose his property, but his very life for the sake of his property. Well do the miserable merchants know, who go about the world, that the leaves which the wind stirs make them tremble when they are carry- ing their riches with them ; and when they are without it, full of confidence, singing and talking they make their journey shorter.'^ The clashing of the weights half round the Circle, and the taunts the two bands fling at each other, represent the constant ebb and flow of money between misers and prodigals, the way in which they act as a check on each other, and their mutual hatred and mis- understanding, each class thinking the other fools. A What Dante sees is that this toil and unrest do not cease with this present world. If for a lifetime a man allows this restless passion to gain possession of his soul, the mere physical change of death will not cast it out ; it is even possible it may increase its power. The man has entered a world in which no gold exists, while the thirst for it burns on, the restless, resistless habit of a lifetime. For that toil and buffeting, therefore, which Dante puts in this symbolic form, no Hell beyond the man himself is ' Conv, iv. 13. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 119 necessary : he has that within his own soul which CANTO VII will not let him rest. Truly does Virgil say : ' All the gold that is beneath the moon, Or ever has been, of these weary souls Could never make a single one repose.' i V ■And the reason is the simple one that these souls have given to gold the passion and devotion meant for God Himself, as Dante tells us in a fine passage in the Gonvito : ' And since God is the beginning of our souls and the maker of them like unto Himself, as it is written, " Let us make man in our image and likeness," this soul desires above all things to return to Him. And even as a pilgrina who goes by a way he has never travelled, who believes every house he sees from afar to be his inn, and not finding it to be so directs his faith to the next, and so from house to house till he comes to the inn; so our soul the moment that it enters on the new and never-travelled path of this life, directs its eyes to the goal of its Highest Good, and therefore whatever thing it sees which appears to have in itself any good, believes that it is it. And because its first knowledge is imperfect through want of experience and teaching, small goods appear to it great; and therefore it begins first to desire those. Whence we see little children desire above all things an apple ; and then, proceeding further on, desire a little bird ; and then, further on, desire a beautiful garment ; and then a horse, and then a wife ; and then riches, not great, then great, and then very great. And this happens > Inf. vii. 64-66. Individuality. 120 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII because in none of these things does it find that which it goes in search of, and it thinks to find it further on.'^ Now, in this search the covetous soul has stopped short at riches as its Highest Good; but being created to find its Highest Good in God alone, is tormented by an eternal restlessness. Loss of There is in the punishment of the Covetous a second element which is very curious and interest- ing : they have grown unrecognizable. As he views the vast crowd, Dante thinks that here, as elsewhere in the Inferno, he ought to know some of them, but Virgil says : ' Vain thoughts thou gatherest : The undiscerning life, which made them sordid, Now makes them unto all discernment dark,'^ The meaning may be that the pursuit of money leaves a man without name or fame on earth : it is a mean and sordid life which has no claim upon men's memories. But I incline to think that Dante's thought goes deeper, and refers to the effect of the love of money on the man himself. Is not the idea this, that the exclusive pursuit of money has some peculiar power of blotting out a man's individuality, and making him one of a vast indistinguishable crowd, all stamped with the same base image and superscription? And probably Dante is right. To change the figure slightly, as coins by constant circulation lose the sharp image and superscription with which they left the mint, so this sin, through long years of commerce with the world, wears away the individual stamp of the soul. Dante seems to 1 Conv. iv. 12. Comp. ill. 15. 2 Inf. vii. 52-54. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 121 have been greatly impressed with this idea. After- CANTO VII wards, when he reaches the Usurers in Circle vii., he says, ' Not one of them I knew ';^ he recognized them only by the coats of arms painted on their money- ^ bags. In fine, excessive love of money destroys individuality — that special difference of man from man which makes recognition possible. The sordid herd of money-makers grow as like as penny to penny ; or rather, the original and individual stamp is worn away, like coins too long in circulation in the i markets of the world. Finally, Dante tells us that at the Resurrection the Their sesnr- bodies of these sinners will bear the marks of their the < closed earthly life: ?«*;-* shorn.' 'These from the sepvilchre shall rise again With the fist closed, and these with hair shorn off.'^ Obviously the closed fist is the sign of the Misers, and the shorn hair of the Prodigals, though the latter is not easy to understand. Vernon thinks the idea is that 'he who throws his life away, and does not use it either for his wants or his good name, is like one shorn of his hair, which is given as a natural adornment ' ; ^ but this seems forced. It is much more probable that Dante wishes to mark the extreme to which the prodigal temper will go: these spendthrifts had not only squandered all their property, but had, so to speak, sold their very hair to gratify their passion for giving. There is, indeed, ' Inf. xvii. 54. * Inf. vii. 56, 57. The same reference to shorn tresses occurs in Purg, xzii. 46. ^ EeacUngs on the Inferno, i. 218 n. 122 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII an Italian proverb which speaks of a prodigal as one who 'squanders even to his hair.' The point of interest, however, is Dante's conviction that our very bodies in the world to come will bear the brands of the master-passion we have served here. The ' closed fist ' and the ' shorn hair ' represent to his mind the natural and inevitable correspondence of the ' spiri- tual body ' to the spiritual state, the character which the earthly life has wrought within the soul. Fortune and The restless doom of these shades suggests a dis- hfiP \VTlAfiI course on Fortune and her Wheel, a subject which seems to have had a peculiar fascination for mediaeval minds.^ As they watch the ceaseless tides of hoard- ing and spending meet and break like billows on Charybdis, Virgil says to Dante : ' Now canst thou, Son, behold the transient farce Of the goods that are committed unto Fortune, For which the human race each other bufEet.' Whereupon Dante puts to him the question : ' What is this Fortune which thou hintest of, That has the world's goods so within its clutches ? ' The word • clutches ' indicates clearly enough Dante's own view. To him Fortune was a kind of wild beast, a cruel, arbitrary force like the heathen Fate, in whose claws man lies helpless. There was, in truth, in his own fortunes and misfortunes much to justify such a belief ; and there was certainly a time when he regarded the distribution of this world's goods as based upon no principle of justice. In the Convito he writes of riches : ' I say that their imperfection » Inf. vii. 61-98. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 123 can be observed firstly in the indiscriminateness of CANTO VII their coining, in which no distributive justice shines forth, but perfect iniquity almost always.' He pro- ceeds to prove that whether riches come by chance, as in the discovery of hidden treasures, or by succes- sion or will, or by work, whether lawful or unlawful, they come oftener to the wicked man than to the good.^ In short, Dante was assailed when he wrote the Convito by that doubt which finds its highest expression in the Book of Job — doubt of the justice of God, in face of the sufferings of the good and the prosperity of the wicked. In the passage before us he avails himself of the opportunity of retracting his earlier opinion, for which Virgil gives him a sharp rebuke : ' O creatures imbecile, How great is that ignorance which makes you stumble 1 Now will I have thee learn my judgment of her.' And his judgment — the judgment of Reason — is this. 'Fortune' u Ffo vid ouco Fortune, so far from being some wild beast of Chance or Fate, is ' a general ministress and guide ' appointed by God over all earthly things. As He set the various orders of angels over the heavenly bodies to the end that the light may be equally distributed, and ' every part to every part may shine,'* so he set Fortune over ' the worldly splendours ' for the same purpose of impartial distribution : ' That she might change betimes the empty goods From people to people, and from one blood to another, Beyond the resistance of all himian wisdom. ' Conv. iv. 11. ' For the Angelic Hierarchies and their relation to the Nine Heavens, see Convito, bk. ii,, particularly chap, yi., and Par. xxviii. 124 MISERS AND PRODIGALS CANTO VII Therefore one people rules and another languishes, In pursuance of the decree of her, Which hidden is, as in the grass the serpent.' As a god she rules her kingdom, inscrutable to human wisdom, incessant and swift in her changes. Cursed by those who ought to praise her, she heeds it not, but turns her sphere and with bliss fulfils her > appointed task. This is an obvious personification of the Christian idea of Providence ; indeed, in the De Monarchia, it is expressly said that Fortune is better and more rightly called the Providence of God.^ What men call Fortune is neither a blind Chance nor an iron Fate. The tides of prosperity and adversity ebb and flow at the bidding of One ' whose wisdom transcends all,' and every fluctuation of Fortune works out some blissful end. It is the conclusion reached by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, which it is evident was much in Dante's mind when writing this passage. After a long dis- cussion, Boethius argues that ' all fortune is good,' and ' for this reason a wise man should never com- plain, whenever he is brought into any strife of fortune ; just as a brave man cannot properly be disgusted whenever the noise of battle is heard, / since for both of them their very difficulty is their I opportunity, — ^for the brave man of increasing his glory, for the wise man of confirming and strength- ening his wisdom. ... It rests in your own hands what shall be the nature of the fortune which you choose to form for yourself. For all fortune which seems difficult, either exercises virtue, or corrects or 1 De Mon. ii. 10. MISERS AND PRODIGALS 125 punishes vice. . . . When the earth is overcome, the CANTO VII j stars are yours.' ^ It is worth while noting that Dante's ' first friend,' Guido Cavalcanti, has a Song ooido of Fortune so like the passage before us that, as . gong of Longfellow says, 'one might infer that the two '^°'*"*«' friends had discussed the matter in conversation, and afterwards that each had written out their common thought.' It is too long to quote entire, but the verse may be given in which the poet rebukes the complaints against Fortune to which Dante refers : 'Ye make great marvel and astonisbment What time ye see the sluggard lifted up And the just man to drop, And ye complain on God and on my sway, O humankind, ye sin in your complaint : For He, that Lord who made the world to live. Lets me not take or give By mine own act, but as He wills I may. Yet is the mind of man so castaway. That it discerns not the supreme behest. Alas I ye wretchedest, And chide ye at God also P Shall not He Judge between good and evil righteously?'^ • De Consolatione, bk. iv. * Bossetti's Translation in Damle and his Circle, 168-171. CHAPTER VIII CIRCLE V. — STYX: THE WRATHFUL AND THE SULLEN CANTOS VII. 100- VIIL 64 Incontinence of Temper. We have seen Incontinence in two forms — non- control of body and of goods ; we now go deeper into human nature and reach the more spiritual form of non-control of temper. The very hour hints that we are approaching a darker evil: the stars are sinking — it is past midnight. Further, the whole scenery changes, to indicate that we have come to another order of sin. Down to this point the pilgrims were moving on a series of terraces, ranged one beneath the other, like the tiers of an amphi- theatre. Now they reach the second of the great rivers of the lost world. On the inner edge of the Circle of Avarice, they come upon a fountain of dark and boiling waters, which pour down a channel which they have wrought for themselves, and spread out into the great Marsh of Styx. In the centre of this Stygian fen rise the walls and towers of the City of Dis, to which it fornas a vast moat. In this Marsh are punished two forms of sinful Anger : hot, passionate anger, quick to lift the hand ; and sulky sullen, melancholy resentment. The former, as the lighter sin, is punished on the surface of the fen ; the latter, in the mire at the bottom. 12« THE WRATHFUL AND SULLEN 127 The Marsh of Styx is an obvious symbol of the sin cantos of this Circle. Dante tells us that the boiling spring yifj g^ which formed it was in colour ' darker far than _. ;; River ana perse,' and elsewhere he says ' perse is a colour com- MaiBh of posed of purple and black, but the black predomi- of the Bin. nates.' ^ We can scarcely be mistaken in seeing in the boiling spring the boiling of angry passions; and in the black waters the way in which those passions darken and defile the pure stream of life. In the Purgatorio we find Anger punished by a fog which bites and blinds the eyes, symbolic of the way in which angry passions cloud and distort the reason.^ Here too there is a fog which rises as an exhalation from the fen ; but also there is inflicted a more terrible blindness, represented by the mire into which the souls are plunged. As we saw, the quick passionate form of Anger is Anger : punished on the surface of the Marsh. From ' the the Surface grey malignant shores ' the travellers see the souls **^ ^*^' of the Wrathful smiting each other with hands and head, breast and feet, and even tearing one another in pieces with their teeth. Their punishment is threefold. In the first place, they are obviously abandoned to their own passions : on earth for a lifetime they gave them free rein, and now they are completely beyond their control and rage on in intensified fury. In the second place, the mire blinds them. 'The anger of zeal,' says Gregory, 'troubles the eye of reason, but the anger of vice quite blinds it.' And finally, the mire defiles as well as blinds. Dante calls the souls here 'a muddy * Conv. iv. 20. * Purg. xv. 142-xvi. 15. 128 THE STYGIAN FEN CANTOS VII. 100 VIII. 64 FUegyas : Symbol of Wratb. people,' and says that they ' gorge the mud.' He is probably thinking of the foul language with which the passion of anger fills the mouth. Aquinas says • the daughters of Anger ' are six : ' brawling, swell- ing of spirit, contumely, clamour, indignation, and blasphemy ' ; indeed he goes further, declaring that • irascibility is the gate of all vices : when that is shut, rest will be given to the virtues within : when that is open, the spirit will sally forth to the com- mission of all crime.' ^ Yet, strange to say, in the very act of condemning this sin, the poet himself seems to give way to it. He narrates the following curious incident.* We saw that the River Styx when it falls from the Circle above broadens out into a miry lagoon, and that this lagoon must be crossed in order to reach the City of Dis, which it surrounds as a moat. Skirt- ing the edge of the foul fen, the travellers come to a tower from the top of which glow two flames — a signal, as they afterwards learn, to the Ferryman of the Marsh, that two souls await passage. Far across the lagoon it is answered by a single flame ; and almost immediately through the fog of the morass a very little boat with one pilot shoots towards them, like arrow from the bow. The Ferryman is Phlegyas, a figure taken from Greek mythology, which makes him the father of Ixion and grand- father of the Centaurs, the symbols of Violence in the Seventh Circle. The story is that, enraged at Apollo for the ruin of his daughter Coronis, he burnt the temple of the god at Delphi, and was ' Summa, ii-li. q. clviU. a. 6, 7. ' Inf. vill. 1-64. THE WRATHFUL AND SULLEN 129 thereupon slain and consigned to Hades. His name CANTOS means the Fiery One, and he is plainly a symbol of ^n! w Wrath, fit pilot of the MarSh of Wrath. Probably, — - . too, Dante meant him to act as Guardian of the approach to the City of Dis. Virgil, in the j^neid, says iBneas heard him in Hades warning the shades with a loud voice to 'learn justice and not to con- temn the gods ' ; ^ and as injustice and contempt of God are the sins punished in the City of Dis, Phlegyas is appropriately set here to guard the approach to it. His first word as he draws near in his boat is one of angry disappointment : 'Now art thou arrived, fell soul ? ' — soul, not souls. The double signal-flame had led him to expect two, and his first glance seems to have informed him that one was still alive. When Yirgil tells him that neither of them is doomed to remain in his power, his anger is changed into a sullen fury, as of one who has been made the victim of some great deception. As they are being ferried over 'the dead pond.'PiUppo suddenly a spirit all bemired rises in front of them, ^*° demanding — 'Who art thou that comest ere the hour ? ' Dante in turn demands who he is who has become so foul, and receives the evasive answer, 'Thou seest I am one who weeps.' His effort to conceal his identity is vain : through all the defile- ment of the mud the poet recognizes him and orders him away with indignation. So far from Dante's Anger, obeying, the lost soul in a frenzy of anger attempts to climb into the boat to drag Dante out, and is only prevented by Virgil, who flings him off contemptu- 1 ^n. vi. 618-620, I 130 THE STYGIAN FEN CANTOS ously : ' Away there with the other dogs ! * And viil. 64 then, clasping his arms round Dante's neck and kissing his face, he exclaims : ' Disdainful soul, Blessed be she that bore thee 1 ' — the one reference in the whole poem to either of his parents. Whereupon Dante goes still further in his disdainfulness, declaring it would please him much to see this arrogant soul ' soused' in the 'broth' of the lake. Soon he had his wish : A little after that I saw such havoc Made of him by the muddy people. That still I praise and thank my God for it. They all were shouting — ' At Filippo Argenti I ' And that exasperate spirit Florentine Turned round upon himself with his own teeth. We left him there, and more of him I teU not. Our first impression is undoubtedly that this out- burst of anger and gloating over the wretch's sufferings is scarcely worthy of the poet : it cer- tainly looks as if he was becoming infected with the infernal temper of the Marsh. It is obvious, however, that Dante himself has no consciousness whatever of any such deterioration. On the con- trary, his evident aim is to set in strong contrast noble anger and ignoble, to show that there are occasions when it is possible to 'be angry and sin not.' Aristotle had taught him that 'people look foolish if they do not grow angry on the right occa- sions or in the right way.'^ This he regarded as one of these occasions; and therefore it is that Virgil, ' Ethics, iv. 11, THE WRATHFUL AND SULLEN 131 who is Reason personified, breaks out into praise, CANTOB not only of his anger, but of its disdainfulness, yjjj, ^4 This Filippo Argenti was a member of the noble Florentine family of the Adimari, and it has been suggested that this is the explanation of Dante's bitterness towards him. The Adimari were among his most implacable enemies in Florence ; indeed, it is said that one member of the family, Boccaccio by name, gained possession of Dante's property on his exile, and therefore opposed his recall. It is but natural that this should add a touch of bitterness to his judgment of Filippo, nevertheless there is no reason to suppose that it created that judgment. It is far too common an idea that Dante used the Inferno vindictively as a convenient way of taking vengeance on his personal enemies. In the present case, there can be no doubt that the Adimari were his enemies, and that he had the bitterest contempt for them. In the Paradiso, fdr example, he calls them ' The insolent race, that plays the dragon After whoso fleeth, and to whoso showeth tooth — Or purse— is gentle as a lamb.' ^ But we should remember that Dante wrote these words very shortly after he had been solemnly warned of the danger of pronouncing rash moral judgments upon his fellow-men, and we have no right to assume that he deliberately despised the warning the next moment.^ This Filippo, according to the old commentators, was a man of overbearing and violent temper, disdainful of his fellows, pro- i Par. xvi. 115-117. 2 Par, xiii. 130-142. 132 THE STYGIAN FEN CANTOS yoked by a straw into fits of fury, and so purse- Vm.^ 64~ proud that he gained his nickname of Argenti by having his horse shod with silver. Dante's obvious intention is to make us understand, that there is a righteous anger which rejoices to see a man like this repaid in kind — anger with anger, scorn with scorn, violence with violence. Virgil assures him that this recoil of their own arrogance upon themselves will be the doom of many of the great ones of the earth : ' How many hold themselves up there great kings, Who here shall lie like swine in mire, Leaving horrible dispraises of themselves behind.' To pity such high-handed sinners would be irrational: indignation is the only emotion in harmony with right reason, and Dante had learned from Aquinas that the man incapable of righteous anger is far from guiltless : ' If one is angry according to right reason, then to get angry is praiseworthy. . . . The absence of the passion of anger is as much a vice as is the failure of the movement of the will to punish according to the 'judgment of reason. He who is totally devoid of anger when he ought to be angry, imitates God indeed in respect of the absence of passion, but not in respect of this, that God punishes on principle.' ^ Down to this Circle Virgil has per- mitted pity as a legitimate and reasonable feeling; but from this point onward he sternly rebukes it. We have now reached a depth and heinousness of sin for which the only rational thing is a holy indignation, or at least a stern acquiescence in the ' Summa, ii.-ii. q. clviii. a. 1, 8. THE WRATHFUL AND SULLEN 133 righteous judgments of God. Dante had little of CANTOS the flabby modern sentimentality which regards all viil. 64 sinners as mere victims to be pitied. When we turn to the second class of sinners The sad, punished in this Circle, we find considerable contro- siotifni. versy as to what precisely they are. As the pilgrims skirt the margin of the Marsh, Virgil points out to Dante the bubbles which rise everywhere on the surface of the water, and informs him that they are made by a doleful ' hymn ' which souls fixed in the mire below gurgle in their throats : ' Fixed in the slime they say : " Sad were we In the sweet air which by the sun is gladdened. Bearing within ourselves the slothful smoke : Now are we sad in the black mire." ' ^ Some commentators, on the strength of the words • slothful smoke ' {accidioso fummo), regard the sin as that of Sloth {Accidia), identifying it with that punished on the Fourth Cornice of Purgatory. Others, laying the emphasis on the sadness of these sinners, take their sin to be, as Dr. Moore says, ' a type or species of anger, viz., sullen, suppressed, or sulky anger ; a gloomy, resentful, discontented dis- position, refusing to rejoice in the bright sunshine, and other occasions of happiness and contentment in this upper world.' Dr. Moore thinks, I have no doubt rightly, that Dante had in mind Aristotle's distinction between suUenness and other forms of anger of a more explosive kind.^ It is an anger into which enter both sloth and sadness, as Dante plainly indicates. In this, indeed, he is simply following ' Inf. vii. 117-126. ^ studies in Dante, second series, 175. 134 THE STYGIAN FEN CANTOS Aquinas : ' Sloth,' he says, ' is a heaviness and sad- Vlil. 64 ness, that so weighs down the soul that it has no mind to do anything. It carries with it a disgust of work. It is a torpor of the mind neglecting to set about good. Such sadness is always evil.' He adds that Sloth is a mortal sin because it is contrary to charity : ' for the proper effect of charity is joy in God : while sloth is a sadness at spiritual good, inas- much as it is divine good.'^ As the word accidia means, it is the feeling of don't care : a sullen, lazy, angry discontentment which can take an interest in nothing, not even in the shining of the sun. And when we remember where this sin was most preva- lent in the Middle Ages, we will not think it an accident that Dante calls the words these sinners gurgle in their throats a ' hymn.' An old commen- tator remarks shrewdly that priests, whose duty it was to chant hymns in church, were so lazy that they would not even stand to sing praises to God, and that they do not pronounce the words articulately, but, as Dante says, gurgle them in their throats. Bishop Martensen says this weariness of life, called acedia in the Middle Ages, was ' a state of soul that often occurred in monasteries, that is, in such as gave themselves to a one-sidedly contemplative life, without having the power or the calling for it, and who were filled with a disgust of all things, even of existence, while even the highest religious thoughts became empty and meaningless to them.'^ Lecky, in his History of European Morals, affirms that ' most ^ Summa, ii-ii. q. xxxv. a. 1, 3. ' Christian jEtAtcs (Individual), p. 378. See discourse on 'Accidie' ia Chaucer's The Parson's Tale. THE WRATHFUL AND SULLEN 185 of the recorded instances of mediaeval suicides in CANTOS Catholicism were by monks,' and traces them to this yiu, q^ acedia, ' a melancholy leading to desperation.' It is by no means unlikely that this is what Dante hints at in the word ' hymn ' : it is the somewhat sullen, morose, and melancholy lack of interest in anything, to which men are specially liable who embrace the religious life, without having any true vocation for it.i The punishment which Dante assigns to this sin is Punishment : ■L T-'j. 'j! J. !.• •!. .fixed in the by no means so arbitrary or fantastic as it may at mjie of styi. first glance look. On earth they darkened for them- selves the sweet air made gladsome by the sun, with ' the slothful smoke ' of their sad and sullen temper ; and now the ' smoke ' has intensified into black mire, in which they are embedded throughout eternity. In other words, a lifelong habit of morose and melancholy refusal to see the sunshine which exists even in the darkest lot, may well become at last the fixed and unalterable temper of the soul. It reminds us of words from the Wisdom of Solomon, which perhaps were in Dante's mind: 'For the whole world shined with clear light, and none were hin- dered in their labour: over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterward receive them: but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness.'* We can scarcely doubt that Dante had a personal interest in thus vividly realizing to himself the 1 Alban Butler in his Life of St. Bruno says : 'Gaiety of soul (which always attends virtue) is particularly necessary in all who are called to a life of perfect solitude, in which nothing is more pernicious than sadness.' ^ Chap. xvii. 20, 21. 136 THE STYGIAN FEN CANTOS doom of such souls, when we remember that his own Vlil. 64^ circumstances must have been a constant tempta- tion to him to give way to this sad and sullen spirit. Exiled from his native city, accused of a disgraceful crime, learning by long and bitter experience ' how savoureth of salt The bread of others, and how hard a road The going down and up another's stairs,' ^ Dante yet seems to have kept within his breast^a heart open to the sunshine. ' Can I not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and of the stars ?'^ he asks in his letter of indignant refusal to return to Florence on conditions which were an insult to an innocent man. In the Convito, he sets it down as one of the marks of noble Age that it looks back with joy upon an active and well-spent life: 'And the noble soul blesses also at this age the times past, and well may she bless them; because, j-eyolying them in memory, she remembers her upright works, without which she could not come to the port to which she draws near, with so great riches nor^with so great gain. And she does as the good merchant, who, when he comes near to his port, examines his cargo, and says, J[fJ^ had not passed through such a roadj^I should not have this treasurCj, and I should not have that wherewith I shall rejoice in my city, to which I am approaching ; and therefore he blesses the journey which he has made.'^ 1 Par. xvii. 58-60. « Epia. ix. 4. « Conv. iv. 28. CHAPTER IX CIRCLE VI. — THE CITY OF DIS : HERETICS 1, The Narrative We come now to one of the most difficult parts CANTOS VTTT fl*?— ^ of the whole poem, — so difficult, indeed, that Dante J interrupts the narrative to warn the reader that it J°'^°eu^** needs a sound intellect to discern the doctrine con- cealed 'beneath the veil of the mysterious verses.' It may be well, therefore, to have the narrative clearly before our minds before we attempt the interpretation. When they have rid themselves of Filippo Argenti, The city of there smites on Dante's ear a lamentation which causes him to peer eagerly across the Stygian Fen, to discover whence it came. Virgil informs him that they are drawing near to the City of Dis, with its 'sin-laden citizens.' Already Dante sees its mosques glowing red-hot in the valley below : the word ' mosques ' being chosen probably to indicate that it was a city of infidels. When they come nearer, they find that it is defended by deep moats and walls of iron: the description being obviously taken from that of Tartarus in Book vi. of the ^neid. After a long circuit, their Ferryman lands them at the gates ; but their entrance is fiercely opposed by 187 138 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS more than a thousand of the rebel angels — ' those TTTTT RKY J out of heaven rained down.' They are indignant Eebef^ta"^*^** one 'without death' should dare to travel through the kingdom of the dead. At a sign from Virgil that he desires to speak with them secretly, they somewhat modify their disdain, declaring, however, that he must remain with them, while Dante ' returns alone by his mad way,' On hearing this, the poet is thrown into an agony of fear, and begs his guide to retrace his steps to the upper world. Virgil, after consoling him with a promise to see him safely through the pilgrimage, leaves him for the moment to hold parley with the fiends at the gate ; and during his absence Dante endures a great conflict of doubt — the Yes and the No, as he puts it, contending in his head. The Closing of The parley, however, is unsuccessful: the fiends, the Gates on , , Virgu. who at first wished Virgil to remain with them, now rush back into the city and close the gates in his face. Crestfallen, with downcast eyes and slow footsteps, he returns to where his companion waits, and assures him that the repulse can be only for the moment. A messenger from Heaven is already on his way through the upper Circles, who will open this gate, even as Christ opened the outer gate of Hell, which ever since has remained without a fastening. While Virgil waits for this heavenly messenger, listening and peering through the thick fog of the Fen, he keeps murmuring broken doubt- ful phrases, to which Dante's fears impart a worse interpretation than is meant. To ease his mind, he asks Virgil if any of the souls in the Limbo of the HERETICS 139 First Circle to which he belonged, had ever pene- CANTOS trated into ' this bottom of the doleful shell,' as he J calls the narrowing cone of the Inferno. His guide assures him that he himself had been over the ground before. Shortly after his death he had been sent by the Thessalian sorceress, Erichtho, to bring a soul up from the Circle of Judas, the lowest in Hell, and that, having made the journey once, Dante need not fear that his guidance would now fail. It is not known to what this refers ; perhaps, as some suggest, it is only a kindly fiction invented to quiet Dante's fears. Much more probably it is some lost mediaeval legend of Virgil, whom tradition had long invested with all the powers of wizardry. Dante tells us that he missed whatever else Virgil iiie Tower of may have said, because at this moment a dreadful vision caught his eye. On the red-flaming summit of the tower, there rose the three infernal Furies — Megsera, Alecto, and Tisiphone — women in form, blood-stained, girt with hydras, and their temples entwined with serpents for tresses. Tearing and beating their breasts, they cry : * Come, Medusa, so we will change him into stone I ' Hednsa. In a moment Virgil turns Dante away, blinding his eyes with his own hands, lest he should be tempted to take one glance at the dread Gorgon's head. As he stands thus blinded, Dante hears across the TUe Mesaenger waves of the Stygian Lake a sound of terror, as when a mighty wind smites the forest, rending the branches and scattering the wild beasts and shep- herds. Removing his hand from his eyes, Virgil 140 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS bids him look out across the Fen to the point where VIII. 65-X ^j^g f jjg jg thickest ; and there he sees One walking, like Christ upon the waves, with unwet foot, while before him 'more than a thousand ruined souls' fled like frogs before the serpent. The only sign of weariness he showed was that with his left hand he waved away the clinging exhalations of the Marsh. In his other hand he carried a light rod, with which, unresisted by the garrison, he opened the gate of Dis. Then, having rebuked with words of high dis- dain the insolence of the fiends, without so much as a glance at either Dante or Virgil, he passed whence he came, as one bent on other cares. No hint is given of the identity of this messenger. "We may dismiss the conjecture that he was Mercury or .^neas. Since his errand is to subdue the rebel angels, he is much more likely to be Michael, the archangel who conquered them in the great war in Heaven. All that Dante says is : Well I perceived one sent from Heaven was he. The City of There is no further opposition to their entrance. Tombs. When they pass inside the walls, not one citizen is visible. It is a city of the dead, and their sepulchres make the plain uneven. Between the tombs, flames are scattered which heat them like iron in a furnace. A midnight walk through the Black Country of the Midlands, as one says, would in part reproduce the scene. Virgil explains that the souls within the tombs, whose lamentations fill the air, are Heresi- archs and their disciples of all sects ; that like is buried with like ; and that the sepulchres are heated HERETICS 141 more or less according to the guilt. Then turning CANTOS to the right — one of the few times in Hell — they J take their way between the tombs and the high walls. This 'secret path' leads them through that part of the cemetery where are buried Epicurus and his followers, 'who make the soul die with the body.' Dante may have singled out this denial of immor- tality as the fundamental heresy, striking, as it does, at the natural basis of religion. In the Convito he says that, 'of all the bestialities, that is the most stupid, most vile, and most damnable, which believes no other life to be after this life.'^ He afiG^rms em- phatically his own personal certainty of immortality: 'I believe, affirm, and am certain, that after this I shall pass to another better life — there where that glorious Lady lives, of whom my soul was en- amoured.' As they pass on, Dante is very anxious to have at least one glance into the tombs to see their tenants ; and, as if to gratify his desire, a soul Farinata degli suddenly rises breast-high and addresses him. He had heard him speaking his native Tuscan, and desired news of his Fatherland. It is the soul of Farinata degli Uberti, a famous Florentine noble, once Leader of the Ghibelline army. Even his fiery tomb had been powerless to burn out the old imperious spirit of the man : He rose erect with breast and brow, As if even Hell he held in great disdain,' With all his old earthly pride of birth, he demands • Conv. ii. 9. Comp. Eccles. iii. 18-21, 2 Jnf. x. 35, 36, 142 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS almost contemptuously Dante's ancestry, lest by any J chance he should bemean himself by conversing with a mere plebeian. On being told, he recognizes Dante's forefathers as Guelphs, and therefore his enemies: twice he had defeated and driven them into exile. Dante retorts that both times they had returned — an art which Farinata's family had not yet learned. It was a foolish boast for an exile who himself had not learned the art of returning; but before the Ghibelline chief can make the obvious retort, the conversation is suddenly interrupted by Father of a second soul, who rises on his knees in the same canti. tomb as far as the chin, and peers round Dante as if searching for some one whom he expected to find with him. For a moment the poet does not recognize him, but his first question reveals his identity : ' If through this blind Prison thou goest by loftiness of genius, Where is my son ? and why is he not with thee ? ' It was another Florentine, Cavalcante de' Caval- canti, a Guelph, and father of Dante's most intimate friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti. Dante's reply is . ' Of myself I come not: He who waits yonder, through here leads me. Whom perhaps your G-uido had in disdain.' The past tense hxid strikes ominously on the father's ear ; starting up in alarm, he cries : 'How Saidst thou— ^ had ? lives he not still ? Does not the sweet light strike upon his eyes ?' Then, mistaking a momentary hesitation on Dante's HERETICS 143 part in replying, he fears the worst, and falls back CANTOS into his fiery tomb to rise no more.^ _1_ It is far from easy to say what lies behind this Eatnuigenient incident. Obviously Cavalcante regarded his son as amdo. Dante's equal in genius, and he seems to have had some reason for expecting to find him as his com- panion in this great pilgrimage. One is almost tempted to think we have here a hint that the two friends had discussed the subject together, and in- tended to write it out in some kind of collaboration. Plainly something broke up their friendship, and they went their different ways in poetry and philosophy, religion and life. Dante indicates here the cause of the estrangement — Guide's disdain of Virgil. What form this disdain took can only be conjectured. Flumptre thinks he preferred the Provencal poets to the JEIneid. According to Bossetti, the disdain arose from his 'strong desire to see the Latin language give place, in poetry and literature, to a perfected Italian idiom.'* As a Guelph, Virgil's Im- perialism may have been an offence to him. Bightly or wrongly, he was credited with heretical opinions. In the Decameron, Boccaccio says of him: 'Also because he held somewhat of the opinion of the Epicureans, it was said among the vulgar sort that 1 Inf. X. 52-72. Aristotle (Ethics, i. 11) discusses how far the fortunes of their descendants affect the dead. His conclusion is that they are affected ' by honours and dishonours and by the successes or reverses of their children and their descendants generally,' but not in such fashion as to ' make people happy if they are not happy or to deprive them of their felicity if they are.' * Damte and his Circle, p. 10 n. Dante says in La Vita Nuova (zzxi.) of G-uido Cavalcanti : ' My first friend, for whom I write this, had a similar understanding, namely, that I should write to him only in th« vulgar tongue,' 144 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS his speculations were only to cast about whether vni^5-X jjg might find that there was no God.' It is only fair, however, to Guido to say that there appears to have been another side to the story. In the Sonnet addressed to Dante, quoted on page 8, he states plainly enough that it was something discreditable in Dante's" own life and conduct which led to the rupture. A pathetic part of the story is that in 1300, when Dante was one of the Priors of Florence, he and his fellow-magistrates had banished the leaders of both Blacks and Whites, — among the latter Guido, who caught fever in exile, and died in August of the same year. At the ideal date of the Commedia — the Easter of 1300 — Guido was still alive; and Dante, before passing on, leaves word with Farinata for Cavalcante that 'still his son is with the living joined.' Farinata and The conversation with Farinata is now resumed, Florence. The haughty nobleman, absorbed in the fate of his own house, had ' neither moved his neck nor bent his side,' at Cavalcante's outburst of fatherly solicitude, but calmly goes on as if no interruption had taken place.^ The last thing Dante had said to him was that his family had not learned the art of returning to Florence from their exile. To this taunt Farinata replies that before fifty moons Dante himself will have learned ' how heavy is that art ' — probably in reference to the vain attempt of Benedict xi. to secure the return of the exiles in 1304.^ The Ghibel- line chief then asks Dante why the Florentines are ao implacable in their laws against his descendants, 1 Guido was Farinata's son-in-law. ^ villani, viii. 72. HERETICS 145 and is told that it is in revenge for the part he took CANTOS in the battle of Montaperti, near Siena, in 1260, when the banished Ghibellines under the leadership of Farinata gained a great victory over the Gnelphs and retook Florence. 'After the battle the standard of the vanquished Florentines, together with their battle-bell, the Martinella, was tied to the tail of a jackass and dragged in the dirt.' The Guelphs never forgave this insult: the Uberti family were expressly excluded from every amnesty granted to the exiles of their party. To this day Florence contains a curious memorial of the implacable hatred with which this family was regarded. In 1298 the Floren- tines began to build the Palace of the Priors, now known as the Palazzo Vecchio. ' And,' says Villani, ' they built the said palace where had formerly been the houses of the Uberti, rebels against Florence, and Ghibellines; and on the site of those houses they made a piazza, so that they might never be rebuilt. . . . And to the end the said palace might not stand upon the ground of the said Uberti, they which had the building of it set it up obliquely ; but for all that it was a grave loss not to build it four- square.'^ And so, for hatred of this family, the rugged old Palace of the Priors stands slantwise to this day above the Piazza della Signoria, once the site of their homes. Farinata tells Dante that this hatred is unjust: the Florentines should not forget that but for him, and him alone, their city would have ceased to exist : ' Villani, viii. 26. K VIII. 65-X 146 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS * B'it there was I alone, where every one VUI. 65-X Consented to the laying waste of Florence, He who defended her with open face.' i The reference is to a council of the victorious Gl^ib- ellines held after the battle of Montaperti, at which the Sienese and Pisan allies urged the complete destruction of Florence, and Farinata was her only defender. In his speech to the council he asked indignantly: 'To what does your hatred attach it- self? To its houses and insensible walls? To the fugitives who have abandoned it ? Or to ourselves who now possess it ? Who is he who thus advises ? Who is the bold bad man that dare thus give voice to the malice he hath engendered in his soul ? Is it meet that all your cities should exist unharmed, and ours alone be devoted to destruction? That you should return in triumph to your hearths, and we with whom you have conquered should have nothing in exchange but exile and the ruin of our country? Is there one of you who can believe that I could even hear such things with patience? Are you indeed ignorant that if I have carried arms, if I have per- secuted my foes, I still have never ceased to love my country, and that I never will allow what even our enemies have respected, to be violated by your hands, so that posterity may call them the saviours, us the destroyers of our country? Here then I declare that although I stand alone among the Florentines, I will never permit my native city to be destroyed, and if it be necessary for her sake to die a thousand deaths, I am ready to meet them all in her defence.'* » Jnf. X, 91-93. 2 Napier's FUyrmtine Sistory, i. 257-259. HERETICS 147 We see here something of that fair-mindedness for CANTOS VTTT flg "Y which Dante too seldom gets credit. This haughty Ghibelllne nobleman had fought against his Guelph forefathers and scattered them, but it is no here- ditary hatred that makes him consign him to Hell. His sin is Heresy, the denial of the immortality of the soul — in Dante's regard 'the most stupid, most vile, and most damnable of all bestialities.' Never- theless, heretic as he is, and enemy of the poet's forefathers, this lost soul must get full credit for whatever good was in him, — his patriotism and his undaunted defence of his native city when all others cried for her destruction. Even in his fiery tomb this love of their common Fatherland invested him in the poet's eyes with nobility and honour : he calls him ' magnanimous,' great-minded even in Hell. When we remember the treatment he himself re- ceived from Florence, we shall the better appreciate the generosity which moved Dante to record the courageous act by which Farinata saved her. In- directly it is an appeal to the Florentines for more generous treatment of the long-banished family of the Uberti. Even Villani, who was a Guelph, accuses his city of ingratitude to the ' good man and citizen ' who saved it from destruction: 'in despite of the forgetf ulness of the ungrateful people,' he says, ' we ought to commend and keep in notable memory the good and virtuous citizen, who acted after the fashion of the good Roman Camillus of old.' ^ Before passing on to the interpretation, there is one name here which may well claim our attention, • VUlani, vi. 81. 148 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS though it is mentioned in the most incidental way : VIILJ5-X ^^^^ ^j ^j^^ Emperor, Frederick n., son of Henry vi. of Suabia, and grandson of Barbarossa. At Dante's request, Farinata tells him something of his fellow- sufferers in the burning tomb : ' With more than a thousand here I lie ; Within here is the second Frederick, And the Cardinal, and of the rest I speak not '— perhaps because the haughty nobleman disdained to 'THe Bpeak of any but his peers. ' The Cardinal' is identi- fied with Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, also a Ghibelline, to whom the saying is attributed, ' If there is a soul, I have lost mine a thousand times for the Ghibel- lines.' Villani relates that he alone in the Papal Court rejoiced when the news of the defeat of the Guelphs at Montaperti reached Rome.^ But our chief interest gathers round the remarkable figure The Emperor, of ' the second Frederick.' It is more than strange to find him introduced in this abrupt and incidental way. One can imagine how magnificent and memor- able the incident might have been, had Dante chosen to make the great Emperor, whom men called stupor mundi, rise side by side with Farinata in his burning tomb, and, like him, make his apologia. It is, indeed, difficult to believe that the idea never presented itself to Dante's mind ; for we must remember that, though thus casually named here, Frederick and his house occupy a very prominent place in Dante's writings. After a fashion of which he was fond, he distributes various members of this imperial family throughout the three divisions of the other world, » ViUani, vl, 80. Frederick II. HERETICS 149 as if to emphasize the truth that the closest ties of CANTOS flesh and blood cannot unite those whom spiritual J character sets asunder. While Frederick burns here in Dis, his mother, Constance, shines in the Moon, the first Heaven of Paradise.^ His son, Manfred, speaks to Dante on the shores of Mount Purgatory, taking care, however, to trace his descent, not from his lost father, but from his grandmother in bliss : ' I am Manfredi, The grandson of the Emperess Costanza.' ^ In the Purgatorio Charles of Anjou is accused of the murder of Frederick's grandson, Conradin, a mere boy in years. References to Frederick's own life are numerous : the leaden caps with which he is said to have punished traitors ; the cruelty by which he drove his Chancellor, Pietro delle Vigne, to suicide; and his wars against the Church in Lom- bardy. The lifelong struggle which he carried on against the Papacy must have been in Dante's eyes a merit, not a crime ; certainly it is not for it that Frederick burns in the City of Dis. Having in a moment of weakness vowed a Crusade against the infidels, he roused the anger of the Pope by his slowness in fulfilling it. ' Excommunicated by Gre- gory IX. for not going to Palestine, he went, and was excommunicated for going: having concluded an advantageous peace, he sailed for Italy, and was a third time excommunicated for returning.'^ Perhaps, but for his opposition to Papal supremacy, we would have heard less of his being a heretic. His » Par. iii. 109-120. 2 Purg. lii. 112, 113. ^ Bryce's Holy Boman Empire, chap. xiii. 150 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS whole attitude to religion is mysterious. He was J popularly believed to be the author of a work in which Christ, Moses, and Mohammed were held up as the three great religious impostors who had deceived the world.^ Whether for reasons of state or to escape the charge of heresy, he gave no quarter to heresy in his subjects. ' The heretics,' says one of his decrees, ' wish to sever the undivided coat of our Lord ; we command that they be delivered to death by fire in the eyes of the people ' ; ^ and, indeed, it is no naore than strict poetic justice that he himself should now be delivered as a heretic to the same fate. Whatever his doctrinal heresy may have been, there seems to be no doubt of his practical Epicureanism. Yillani says ' he was dissolute and voluptuous in many ways, and had many concubines and mamelukes, after the Saracenic fashion ; he was addicted to all sensual delights, and led an Epicurean life, taking no account of any other: and this was one principal reason why he was an enemy to the clergy and the Holy Church.' * It is difficult to re- concile this and his doom in Hell with Dante's own estimate of Frederick in his De Vulgari Eloquentia : •Those illustrious heroes, Frederick Caesar and his highly favoured son Manfred, displaying the nobility > ' Strangely enough this famous phrase de tribus impostoribus, in spite of its inherent absurdity, has been attributed not only to Aver- roes, but to at least a dozen eminent Christian writers, including Milton, Servetus, Rabelais, Macchiavelli, Boccaccio, and the Emperor Frederic n. Queen Christiana of Sweden caused all the great libraries of Europe to be searched in the seventeenth century for any authentic record of the phrase, its authorship, or its origin ; but the researches were conducted in vain' (U. K. Burke's History of Spain, i. 2U). * Gregorovius' Borne in the Middle Ages, v. 162. ' Villani, Ti. i. HERETICS 151 and rectitude of their souls as long as fortune was CANTOS favourable, followed what is human, disdaining what J " is brutal ; wherefore those who were of noble heart and endowed with graces, strove to attach them- selves to the majesty of such great princes.'^ It must be remembered that Dante is here speaking of the literary culture of the Court of Sicily ; and also, that, whatever Frederick's sins and heresies may have been, there was something phenomenal about the man himself which appealed powerfully to the poet's imagination. To him he was the last Roman Emperor — his successors were unworthy of that august title. In the Convito he speaks of him as ' the last Emperor of the Bomans — last, I say, in respect of the present time, notwithstanding that Rudolf and Adolph and Albert have been elected since his death and that of his descendants.'^ The truth is, he set in motion forces which in course of time dis- solved the Empire ; and many modem historians regard him as the unconscious forerunner of the Reformation and the Renaissance. ' In the extrava- gant accusations of cruelty, perfidy, and licentious- ness with which the Church has assailed his memory there is some nucleus of truth ; but a candid judg- ment will arrive at the conclusion that few exposed to such pernicious influences have shown such a decided preference for goodness and truth, and that there have been almost none who against such immense difficulties have wrought to such wise purpose in behalf of human progress and enlight- enment, or have fought such a resolute and advan- 1 De Vulg. Eloq. i. 12. » Conv. iv. 3 ; Par. iii. 120. 152 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS tageoua battle in behalf of spiritual freedom. In VTTT fi*!— Y J this contest he was not an immediate victor; and indeed the dissolution of the imperial power in Italy which followed his death must be chiefly traced to the fact that his policy was governed by principles too much in advance of his age. But although the beneficial results of his reign are not at first glance so palpable and undeniable as some of its injurious results, yet so far was he from being a mere untimely precursor of the new era which dawned in Europe more than two centuries after his death, that, perhaps in a greater degree than any other, he was instrumental in hastening its arrival, both by sowing the first seeds of the Renaissance in Italy, and by giving the old system of things a shock which was felt throughout Europe, and continued to work silently long after its reverberations had passed away.'^ Perhaps if he was thus the forerunner of Luther, he deserved his place here among the Heretics better than even Dante guessed. That he passes such a man by in a single line must surely mean pity for his doom and a wish to screen as much as he can so great a name. 1 Encyc. Brit. (Tenth Edition)— Art. Frederick n. CHAPTER X CIRCLE VI.— THE CITY OF DIS : HERETICS 2. The Interpretation Let us turn now from the narrative to the more CANTOS difficult task of interpretation. As we saw, Dante J himself warns us that a mystic meaning under- ^^^*y|°" lies it : O ye who have undistempered intellects, Observe the doctrine that conceals itself Beneath the veil of the mysterious verses.^ The first thing to mark, then, is that this City of a Transition Dis forms a transition Circle between upper and ^"j^y^^^o nether Hell, and therefore holds certain moral rela- "pp*' Heu. tions to both. Its relation to the upper Circles is that it is a form of Incontinence. We have seen various forms of lack of self-control — in body, in goods, in temper; in this Circle we reach its most spiritual form, in the intellect. Heresy is the refusal to bring ' every thought into captivity to the obedi- ence of Christ ' ; it is therefore the deepest, and, in Dante's view, the worst form of Incontinence. As Dr. Moore well points out, however, Dante seems to be thinking here of Heresy, not as a perversion of the intellect pure and simple, but rather as that special perversion of the intellect which flows from, » Inf. ix. 61-63. 163 154 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS and issues in, an evil life. The instances named, J with the one exception of Pope Anastasius, are not heretics in our modern intellectual sense. Farinata, 'the Cardinal,' Frederick n. are 'Epicurean states- men or churchmen, who, immersed in the pursuit of the pleasures or ambitions of this world, give no thought to another, until at last they openly adapt their intellectual opinions to the desire of their hearts, and the practice of their lives.' ^ It is, then, that species of heresy Dante is thinking of, which has its source in evil living, as the very position of the City of Dis seems to imply. For we must mark carefully where it is set : in the midst of a foul fen the waters of which flow down from the Circles above, and form the path by which the soul is borne to the City of Heresy. In other words, the sins of those Circles drain down to this necropolis of infi- delity: beginning with the flesh, Incontinence eats further and further inward, until it corrupts the intellect itself. A man leads a wild unregulated life, and it is no wonder if all his thoughts concerning religion are thereby thrown into confusion. In time he comes to deny the future life and world because j he wishes there were none : his creed assumes the shape and colour of his life. ' None deny there is a God,' says Bacon, 'but those for whom it maketh that there were no God.' This intimate connection between heresy and evil-living is figured forth in the draining down of the dark waters of sin from the Circles above, to form the Stygian Fen, across which the soul is floated to the City of Doubt. ' studies in Dante, second series, p. 178. HERETICS 155 The connection with the Circles beneath is, if any- CANTOS VTTT gg ."V* thing, closer. The name Dis was used by the Romans J for Pluto, the King of Hades, and Dante uses it as a Nrther^nla*'' synonym for Satan, the Lord of Hell. But in this lost world the natural order of things is turned upside down : the Lord of Hell, instead of holding his state in the City above, is bound fast in the dungeons below. For this seems to be Dante's idea : the remaining Circles are, so to speak, the city dungeons, and the stair which leads down to them is the broken landslip which, as we shall see, descends like a shaft from the valley in the heart of the City. We may be sure that this dreadful con- struction of nether Hell as the underground dungeons of the City of Unfaith, had some symbolic meaning in Dante's mind, whether we can discover it or not. May it not be this, that Heresy forms the natural transition from sins against oneself to sins against others ? For the sins in the upper Circles are mainly sins against some part of our own nature ; whereas from this downward they are mainly against our neighbours — Violence, Fraud, Treachery. The path to these social sins lies through the City of Heresy. When a man has thrown off belief in judgment and the world to come, he is ready to descend to the deeper and darker sins : the natural fruit of unfaith in \ God is unfaithfulness to man. By the very construe- ' tion of the Inferno, then, Dante seems to indicate the relation in which the various orders of sin stand to each other: the lighter sins of Incontinence lead to Unfaith, Unfaith in its turn leads to the deeper depths of Violence, Fraud, and Treachery to our fellow-men. 156 THE CITY OF DTS CANTOS We turn now to a more important part of the VIII. 65-X allegory— Virgil's conflict with the guardians of the An AUegory of City. And here more than almost anywhere else in Doubt and ^ • • i i. Faitb. the poem we must bear in mind what has been so frequently pointed out, that Virgil stands for human Reason, apart from any special Divine Revelation. His conflict here, therefore, represents the struggle of religious doubt through which Dante's own reason passed : as he himself says, referring to Virgil's par- leying with the fiends. Thus onward goes, and here abandons me The sweet Father, and I remain in doubt, For the Yes and the No within my head contend. ^ In short, the question proposed is, How far can the unaided Reason of man penetrate into the mysteries of religion, or cope with doubt and infidelity ? The first thing to notice here is that the City of Unbelief is fortified and defended like a mediaeval fortress. It has its deep moats, its walls of iron, and its garrison of fiends : all of which undoubtedly have some symbolic significance. The common in- terpretation regards them as indicative of the obstinacy and persistency of heresy, its determina- tion to resist all efPorts to convince it ; and there is certainly much truth in this. According to Aquinas, obstinacy is a necessary element in heresy, for he says expressly that if a man ' is not pertinacious in his disbelief, he is in that case no heretic, but only a * Inf. viii. 109-111. In Par. xlii. 112-114 Dante is warned against overhaste in deciding between Yes and No in Philosophy and Theology : ' And let thia be ever lead unto thy feet, To make thee move slowly like a weary man. Both to the Yes and No thou seest not. Tbe Fortiflca- tionsoftlie City. HERETICS 157 The resistance of the fiends to the CANTOS entrance of the pilgrims represents the unwilling- ' ness of unbelief to have its views explored and investigated. It is true, indeed, that men who have flung off their religious faith make a great profes- sion of open-mindedness ; nevertheless it is seldom more than a profession. As a rule, they are not open to conviction : they are very much what Dante pictures them, a garrison defending their heresy behind moats and walls and barred gates. While this interpretation is true so far as the citizens are concerned, a further meaning is involved when we look at the City frora the point of view of Dante and Virgil. To them the deep moats, the iron walls, and the garrison of fiends cannot but signify the vast danger and difficulty of penetrating the dark problems of the faith, of exploring the laby- rinth of doubt. At first glance, it seems strange that Virgil is entirely unconscious of this difficulty and danger. He evidently expects an entrance at once, and he returns from his parley with the fiends crestfallen at his failure, and muttering angrily, ' Who has denied to me the dolesome houses ? ' Yet all this is perfectly natural and true to experience. In the omniscient days of youth no man dreams that his reason is not equal to all the problems of the universe. We imagine that at a word of Reason's logic the fiends of Unbelief must vanish, and the gates of the City of Doubt lie open for our victorious feet. It may take many a day and night of baffled \ weary searching to teach us, as his failure here i > Summa, ii-U. q. t. a. 3, 158 THE CITY OF DIS r CANTOS taught Virgil, how narrow are the frontiers of the vm. 65-X , . , human mind. The Garrison It is perhaps worth while pausing to inquire why Angeta? the garrison of the City of Heresy is composed of the rebel angels, those ' out of Heaven rained down.' It is a question seldom asked, yet it would be inter- esting to know Dante's reason for assigning to them this particular task. We would naturally expect to find them ranged round their ' Emperor ' like a body- guard, in the Circle of Cocytus. Probably the reason why Dante sets them here is to be found in the connection which St. Thomas Aquinas points out between pride and unbelief. It was through pride the angels fell, and the essential nature of pride, says Aquinas, consists in insubordination to God, 'in that one lifts himself above the limit prefixed for him according to the divine rule or measure.' But unbelief is one of the forms which pride assumes, ' for the proud man subjects not his intellect to God, so as to gather the knowledge of the truth from Him'; and 'it is precisely by its proceeding from pride, that the sin of unbelief is rendered more grievous than it would be if it arose from ignorance or infirmity.'^ The intellect of the great angelic Intelligences being far more powerful than that of man, the ruin and perversion of it through the pride of unbelief is correspondingly great and terrible. 1 Summa, ii-ii. q. clxii. a. 3, i, 6. Elsewhere Aquinas says : ' Heresy is relegated by the saints outside the number of sins which occur among the faithful, as exceeding such, and therefore it is not reckoned among the capital sins, nor among their ofispring. . . . Yet if it must be reduced to some one of the seven capital sins, it may be brought under Pride.' This is why Heresy is not among the sins that are being cleansed away on Mount Purgatory. HERETICS 159 Hence the rebel angels are the arch-heretics, and are CANTOS much more active and powerful than the heretical souls of men. These lie impotent as the dead within their tombs ; whereas the greater intellects of Heaven guard the gates of Heresy, and issue forth to challenge the approach of Beason. In Virgil's secret parley with thenx there may even be a hint that it is from the whispers and suggestions of these great lost Intelligences that the scepticisms and infidelities of mankind originate. In Virgil's conflict with the fiends, there appear to virgii'g Con- be three distinct stages. The first is the danger that n^n^of *^° Reason itself may be won over to infidelity. Dante heresy, is thrown into terror lest Virgil join the fiends of doubt: he feels his own reason trembling on the verge of heresy. In other words, the first appeal of infidelity — or at all events of rationalism — is to our First stage : reason. It declares faith to be irrational at root, and seeks to capture our reasoning powers : ' thou shalt here remain,' say the fiends to Virgil. This is one common beginning of religious doubts: faith is suspected of having no rational basis, and we are called upon — nay, we call upon ourselves — in the name of intellectual honesty, to discard it as the betrayal of our very reason. The second stage of the struggle swings us to the second stage : opposite extreme by a natural revulsion. After all, "''* "™' he must be a narrow and cold-blooded kind of man who can live by logic and reason alone. The mystery of life besets us behind and before and lays its hand upon us, and strange emotions, instincts, and intuitions surge up from some central deep of 160 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS existence, of which reason can give no account. We \TTTT dK "TT J " begin to undervalue reason now as much as formerly we overvalued it. We suspect that it has little or nothing to do with the great problems of religion, that they appeal to another part of our nature, and that, being matters of spiritual feeling rather than of the logical understanding, they must simply be taken on faith. This revulsion against Reason Dante represents under the figure of the fiends who first wished Virgil to remain with them, now rushing back into their City and clashing the gates in his face. It is the stage described by Tennyson : ' If e'er when faith had f aU'n asleep, I heard a voice "believe no more,'' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep ; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd, " I have felt."' Third Stage : There is, however, a third stage in which both views are felt to be inadequate — that Reason can decide everything, and that it can decide nothing. /' Reason cannot be finally and for ever baffled : how- ; ever long it may have to wait, it must somehow enter into the City of Heresy at last, and look infidelity in the face. But it must first learn its lixnitB» its '■ need of some heavenly aid, some grace Divine. The gates of Heresy which resisted all assaults of mere intellect, fly open at one touch of the Angel's wand, one word of the heavenly wisdom ; the fiends of HERETICS 161 Unfaith cower and hide themselves, and Reason, CANTOS VTTT fi*?— IT humbled by its failures, enters in. ' In short, this part of the allegory simply repro- The umita- y duces the idea which pervades the whole poem, and R^aBon. indeed all Dante's works: that Reason has its own sphere, though it is strictly limited — Virgil can guide a certain distance, beyond that he must resign his task to a higher wisdom. In the Convito Dante says : • There is a limit set to our understanding in each operation thereof, not by us, but by universal Nature; and therefore it is to be known that the bounds of the understanding are wider in thought than in speech, and wider in speech than in signs.' * In the same book he distinguishes 'three horrible infirmities in the minds of men': 'natural conceit' of intellect, which thinks it knows everything; 'natural pusillanimity,' which thinks it impossible to know anything, and therefore never searches or reasons ; and ' levity of nature,' a kind of fantastic idiocy which indeed argues about everything, but flies off from argument to argument, pursuing no- thing to its legitimate conclusion.^ When Dante in the present passage appeals to those who have 'sane intellects,' he is probably thinking of minds which are free from these infirmities, and can therefore give Reason its place and task, however humble. It is to be noted too that Dante does not fall into the common error of regarding doubt as Vaino of sinful in itself. On the contrary, it is the path of ''*°"**' Nature's own naaking for the attainment of that final truth in which alone the intellect can per- ' Conv, iii. 4. ^ Cgnv. iv. 15. I. 162 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS Vm. 65-X The Fniies : Guilty Con- science. Medusa : Despair of God's Mercy. manently rest. Hence he says that 'the strife of doubt' springs up at the beginning of the study of Philosophy, in order that we may be driven on by it in our search for the clear truth that lies beyond : ' Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot, Doubt at the foot of truth ; and it is nature, Which to the top urges us on from ridge to ridge.' ^ •A little philosophy,' says Bacon, 'inclineth man's mind to Atheism ; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to Religion.' In the midst of these intellectual doubts, then — Yes and No contending in his head — Dante tells us that a more awful doubt struck through him, one that pierced to the very root and centre of his moral and spiritual being. It is doubt of the goodness of God, or at least of his own share in that goodness. It came through his vision of the three Furies, as they rose suddenly on the top of the red-flaming tower, and called for Medusa to come and change him into stone. In the Furies, Dante came at last to something of which doubt was impossible. They represent the horror and torment of guilty con- science, and this is one of the few things which, when it is once roused, cannot be doubted away. But this agonized remembrance of past sins creates a terrible doubt, or even despair, of the goodness and mercy of God ; and this despair is symbolized by the Medusa's head, which turns men into stone. Despair, says St. Thomas, which is the loss of the theological virtue of hope, is more dangerous than the loss of ' Par. iv, 130;33. Comp. Conv. ii. 16. HERETICS 168 even faith and love ; ' because, as it is by hope that CANTOS VTTT Aft— X we are held back from evil-doing and led on to J goodness, so the taking away of hope plunges men headlong into vice, and disgusts them with the labour of doing good. Hence Isidore says: "A guilty ) deed is the death of the soul; but to despair is to go down to hell.'"^ It is for this reason that Virgil I immediately turns Dante away and blinds his eyes with his own hands. Even our own reason forbids us to gaze on our sins until they strike us into stone with despair of their forgiveness. In other words, Virgil, the natural Beason of man, without the revelation of the Gospel, can tell us that it is folly and sin to despair of the mercy of God. It is a violation of the very conception of God. To quote St. Thomas once more: 'The true estimate of the understanding of God is this, that men's salvation comes of God, and that pardon is given to sinners : whilst it is a false opinion that He denies pardon to a penitent sinner, or does not convert sinners to Himself by justifying grace. And therefore the ' movement of despair, which is formed upon a false estimate of God, is vicious and sinful.'^ The utmost, however, that Virgil can do is to turn 'rue Ang«i away the eyes from the Gorgon of Despair ; beyond **"" ^"-^^ this he must wait for the aid of heavenly grace. No , ' Summa, ii-ii. q. xx. a. 3 : 'Despair comes of a man not hoping that he has any share in the goodness of God.' ^ Summa, ii-ii. q. xx. a. 1. It is possible that the Medusa repre- sents the petrifying power of Doubt long indulged in, the way in which it paralyzes our energies. If we take this view, the cry of the Furies for the Gorgon's head wiU signify that a guilty conscience welcomes Doubt as an anodyne for its pain — glad to doubt out of existence the things which rouse its fear, to petrify the heart into indifference and unbelief. 164 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS hint is given of the identity of the Messenger from VIII. 65-X ggaygQ ^}jQ comes with unwet foot across the filthy fen : possibly Dante meant him to remain unknown, to indicate the mysterious way in which Divine grace comes to us in the great crises of the soul. At all events, we may set aside the conjecture that the Messenger is either Mercury or .^neas. If, however, we take the suggestion made above that he is the Archangel Michael, it would fit in with several details in the narrative. It was under the leader- ship of Michael that the rebel angels were hurled out of Heaven; and it would be natural that he should be sent to subdue this new outbreak of their •insolence.' Further, according to mediaeval belief, Michael was the angel of death and judgment, and it is as in a storm of judgment he now appears. The souls of the Angry in the fen scatter before him as frogs before the serpent, their base and sinful wrath terrified in the presence of the indignation of God. With his left hand he waves aside the thick air of the Marsh, as one weary of the base passions of anger which blind the souls of men like smoke. He himself is moved by a storm of anger, but it is holy anger : Ah, how full he seemed to me of indignation ! ^ It is, indeed, the only weapon he deigns to use against the fiends, for the wand with which he opens the gate is only the symbol of his authority. He argues no question of the faith with them: when unbelief reaches such a height of obstinacy and inso- » Inf. ix. 88, HERETICS 165 lence, the only argument it can understand is the CANTOS righteous indignation of Heaven. And, indeed, the J " mysteries of the City of Heresy can seldom be safely faced ' without anger,' to use Virgil's words ;^ some forms of unbelief must be met, not with argument, I but with a certain passion of moral indignation / which sweeps them from our path. ! Let us now examine the punishment which Dante Punighment oJ assigns to these Heretics. Obviously the tombs in Tte TombB. which they lie signify that infidelity is a living death. JFaith^is no mere luxury^ of the soul which a man can dispense with if he pleases ; it is, as Tolstoy truly calls it^^^the^ force by which naan Uves^ The unbelieving soul is entombed in its own unbelief. The sepulchres mean substantially the same as the Medusa's head: unfaithjpetrifies the soul, paralyzes the^nergies of^lif e. It is not so easy to decide the symbolism of the The Fire. X. fire, which is used here for the first time as a punish- ment in Hell. There is no reason to suppose that material fire is meant ; for we have seen the other elements, wind, water, earth, used as punishments, but always in some symbolic sense. It is, of course, possible that Dante took the idea from the common doom of heretics in the present world, nevertheless the fire must r epresen t a spiritual pain^ These un- believers who have proudly refused to submit their intellects to God, have thereby lost 'the good of intellect.' Now, the good of intellect, as we have ^ _seen, is the perfect vision of God, so far as this is possible to human faculties; but for this, faith is > Inf. ix. 33. 166 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS absolutely necessary. For, as Aquinas says, ' to this VIII. 65-X . . , • i. I, c • Vision man cannot arrive except by way ot going to school to God as his Teacher, according Jbo that_ saying: "Every one that hath heard of the Father^ and hath learned, cometh unto me." . . . But every such learner must believe in order to arrive at per- fect knowledge: as the Philosopher (i.e. Aristotle) says, "The learner must believe." Hence, for man to arrive at the vision of perfect happiness, it is a previous requisite that he believe God, as a scholar believes the master who teaches him.'^ These souls, by refusing faith in God, have lost that vision of Him which is the one and only happiness for which they were created; and, as Dante says elsewhere, 'the loss is most bitter and full of every sorrow.'^ In this present world the pain of this loss may never rise to agony, because the loss is not seen in its fulness ; but everything may be changed when the soul is thrust forth into a world where it can neither truly believe nor disbelieve. It cannot believe, for years of obstinate unbelief have de- stroyed the very capacity for faith ; nor can it dis- believe, for it is now face to face with the eternal things themselves. And there, buried in its own powerlessness to believe as in a sepulchre, the loss of the very end and happiness for which it was created, burns through it with an agony as of fire. This, at all events, is the serious view taken by Dante of the consequence of losing faith in that God, the knowledge of whom is eternal life. Finally, at the day of judgment the punishment is > Swmma, ii-ii. q. ii. a. 3. ' Conv. iii. 13. HERETICS 167 increased in two ways : the lids of the tombs which CANTOS VIII 65-X now stand open are closed for ever, and all knowledge _L^ comes to an end. In the meantime the souls have ^^^fatftbe* knowledge only of the future. Dante was gfeatly Resurrection. surprised to notice that the father of Guido Caval- canti did not know whether his son was alive or dead, whereas Farinata was able to foretell certain things in Dante's own fortunes. In reply to the poet's question, Farinata tells him that they have power to see earthly events only while still future : when they draw near into the present, they become invisible to them. It follows that when Time shall be no longer — that is, when there is no future — all their knowledge will be, like themselves, *dead.'^ Some writers regard this death of knowledge as the doom of all the lost in all the Circles ; but it is much more natural to confine it to the citizens of Dis. Their sin was one of intellect, and in the intellect it is punished. The only question is whether Farinata speaks of all the citizens or only of his own sect of Epicureans. If he refers only to those who denied the immortality of the soul, the idea is that, having on earth lived only for the present, now the present is taken from them ; and that, having spurned the future, the future is now forced upon their eyes. Probably, however, the punishment includes all within the City walls, since all have sinned in this region of knowledge. On earth they believed them- -^ selves so wise that they knew everything by force of their own omniscient intellects ; and the punish- ment of this intellectual arrogance is the gradual 1 Inf. X. 7-12, 94-108. 168 THE CITY OF DIS CANTOS extinction of all knowledge, which Dante symbolizes __ " by the closing of the lids of their tombs to things present and things to come alike. 'If any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.' 'When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imagina- tions, and their foolish heart was darkened. Pro- fessing themselves to be wise, they became fools.' ' One knowledge alone is left, the knowledge of their own past — the eternal contemplation of their blind earthly life and the 'knowledge falsely so called,' through which they lost the knowledge of God which is ' the good of the intellect.' We may com- pare their punishment with that of the Soothsayers in Circle viii., who, for their presumptuous prying into the future, have their heads turned round and can see no way but backward. These despised the present for the future, the Epicureans the future for the present, and both are punished by the loss and ruin of their intellectual life. CHAPTER XI CIRCLE VI.— CLASSIFICATION OF SINS IN THE INFERNO When the pilgrims entered the City of Dis, they CANTO XI turned to the right hand, one of the few times when they depart from the leftward movement which is the appropriate symbol of the lost world.^ The pro- bable meaning is that the problems of heresy are best met by upright conduct : ' unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness.' Leaving the narrow path that ran immediately inside the walls and parallel with them, they resume their leftward direction, striking straight across the City in order to reach the centre of the valley to which it dips on every side. Here they find an abyss ringed round with broken rocks, which forms the wild and dan- gerous stairway to the underground dungeons of the City, in which are tortured 'a still more cruel throng.' From the mouth of this pit, as from a volcano, there rises a stench so foul and sickening that they are forced to take refuge behind a great tomb, to grow accustomed to ' the sad blast ' before they venture to descend. The symbolism is obvious : the stench indicates that we have now reached a ' Comp. the turning to the right toward Geryon, the Guardian of the Circle of Fraud {Inf. xvii. 31). 169 170 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI deeper and darker corruption — the sins beneath, as it were, rot human nature, and cannot be faced with- out a sickening horror. Tomb of Pope The inscription on the great tomb behind which Dante and Virgil took shelter ran as follows : ' Pope Anastasius I hold, "Whom out of the straight way Photinus drew. ' ^ The Pope referred to is Anastasius li., who died in 498, though some writers think Dante, misled by a passage in Gratian, mistook him for his contempo- rary and namesake, the Emperor, The heresy of Photinus, a deacon of Thessalonica, with which this Pope was believed to be tainted, is said to have been the denial of the miraculous conception of our Lord. Whatever uncertainties surround Anastasius and his heresy, however, the important point is that Dante is no believer in the doctrine of Papal infalli- bility. He ' wishes all men to know his opinion, that Popes are not exempt from heresy, and that it deserves greater punishment in them than in ordi- nary men,' — when the fountain-head of the Faith is polluted, the stream which it feeds can hardly be pure.^ Hence Anastasius is buried on the very verge of the precipice which overhangs the nether pit: being the spiritual head, he is lower down than, for > Inf. xi. 8, 9. * A much more remarkable instance is Pope Honorius r. (d. 638). The sixth CBcume&ical Council (Constantinople, 680) solemnly anathe- matized him, though more than forty years in his grave, for his leniency towards the heresy of the Monothelites. This condemnation of a Pope for heresy was one of the principal arguments of the opponents of Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council of 1870. The case was forgotten during the Middle Ages, else Honorius might have borne Anastasius company in this City of Heresiarchs. CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 171 example, the Emperor, Frederick il., who is but the CANTO XI temporal head of the kingdom of God. While they are standing in the shelter of the Virgu's oiasBi- tomb to accustom themselves to the stench of the bSb."" ** dungeons beneath, Virgil at Dante's request, that the time might not be lost, gives him a description of the Circles still to be traversed. Over this ex- planation a vast amount of discussion has taken plabe, arising in the main from what seems on the surface to be a cross-division of the classification of sins given by Virgil. In lines 22-26 of Canto xi. a classification is given from Cicero ; in lines 79-84 what certainly seems to be another classification is given from Aristotle; and the entire discussion springs from the difficulty of setting the two in their right relations to each other. We may lay aside at once the idea that Dante is guilty of a cross- division : he was far too sure and clear a thinker to commit such a blunder. The classification from Aristotle is either capable of being equated with that from Cicero, or it is supplementary to it and introduced for some particular purpose which must not be confounded with the general scheme of classification. Let us see first what the general scheme is, so From cicero far as concerns the Circles yet to come. It is contained in Canto xi. 22-26 : * Of every malice which wins hate in Heaven, Injury is the end, and every such end Either by force or fraud aggrieveth others. But because fraud is man's peculiar vice. More it displeaseth God ; and so stand lower The fraudulent, and more pain assails them.' 172 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI There can be no doubt that this is taken from Cicero, though his name is not mentioned. In his Offices, to which Dante makes many references, Cicero dis- cussing the question of justice says : ' Now there are two ways of doing a man an injury : the one is by force, the other by fraud. The one is the quality of the fox, the other of the lion. They are neither of them proper for a man, but yet fraud is the more odious of the two ; and of all injustices, that is the most abominable and capital which imposes upon us under the colour of kindness and good meaning,'^ — i.e. into which some element of treachery enters. Obviously this is the source of the classification, which Virgil proceeds to explain in detail as follows. Violence. ^^ Circle vii. are punished the Violent, souls that sinned by the use of force. They are divided into three classes, according to the object on which their violence spent itself : I. The Violent against their Neighbours, either in person or goods : tyrants, homicides, marauders, freebooters, incendiaries, and such like. II. The Violent against Themselves, also in person or goods. This Violence takes two forms : Suicide direct and indirect — the indirect consisting of such things as reckless gambling and wanton dissipation of the means of life. III. The Violent against God — directly, by denial and blasphemy; and indirectly, by 'disdaining Nature and her bounty.' The latter is subdivided into Violence against Nature, of which Sodom is the * Offices, bk. I. chap. xlii. Notice the reference to lion and fox in the confession of Count Guide of Montefeltro in Inf. xxvii, 74, 75 : ' My deeds were not of the lion, but of the fox,' CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 173 type, and against Art, represented by the city of CANTO XI Cahors. In this division Dante follows the distinction drawn by Thomas Aquinas between 'sin against God, sin against self, and sin against one's neigh- bour,' though Aquinas takes care to say that these three species of sins are not exclusive of each other : ' To sin against God, in so far as the order of relation to God includes every human relation, is common to all sin : but in so far as the order of relation to God goes beyond the other two orders (self and neigh- bour), in that way sin against God is a special kind of sin.' ^ Virgil proceeds to explain Circles viii. and ix., in Praud. which Fraud is punished. Fraud is called 'man's peculiar vice,' evidently because it springs from man's peculiar gift of reason. For the possession of reason is that which distinguishes man from the lower animals ; and the special guilt of Fraud is that it is the use of this high and distinctive endowment for the injury of others. Fraud is of two degrees or qualities, according to the bond and knot of human fellowship which it severs : I. Fraud against 'the hqnd of love which Nature makes/ This is the bond of common humanity, and those who break it by Fraud are punished in Circle vm,, being distributed in ten Moats or Pits, accord- ing to their particular form of the sin — hypocrites, thieves, simoniacs, panders, barrators, ' and such like filth.' II. Fraud against a twofold bond: this general ' Swmma, i-ii. q. Izzii. a. 1. 174 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI one of Nature, and another which creates ' a special faith.' It is at this point that Fraud deepens and darkens into Treachery, which, as a cold-hlooded sin, is frozen fast in the lake of ice which constitutes the lowest Circle of Hell : beyond this, human depravity cannot go. The souls in ' this bottom of the doleful shell ' are divided into four classes according to the ' special faith ' they have betrayed : Traitors to their Kindred, to their Country, to their Friends and Guests, and last and vilest, to their Lords and Benefactors. Principle of With this account of nether Hell, Dante expresses ftomAriatotie himself entirely satisfied, but he feels that it leaves unexplained the Circles above through which he has just passed. Why, he asks, are the sinners of those Circles not punished here 'inside of the red city': • those of the fat lagoon ' (the Wrathful and Sullen), •whom the wind leads' (the Sensual), 'whom the rain beats ' (the Gluttons), and ' who encounter with such sharp tongues ' (Misers and Prodigals) ? Is it because God is not angry with these that they are not inside the City of Dis ? — and if so, why are they punished at all ? Virgil's answer is that all the sins of Hell are punished according to the order of their hatefulness to Heaven. It is at this point that the classification of sins from Aristotle is brought in. Virgil rebukes Dante with some sharpness for having forgotten it : ' Why wanders so . Thine intellect from that which is its wont? Or, sooth, thy mind where is it elsewhere looking ? Hast thou no recollection of those words With which thine Ethics thoroughly discusses The dispositions three, that Heaven wills not,— CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 175 Incontinence, Malice, and insane CANTO XI Bestiality? and how Incontinence Less God offendeth, and less blame demands?'^ The reference is to the opening words of Book vii. of the Nicomachean Ethics : ' There are three species of moral character which ought to be avoided, viz., vice, incontinence, and brutality.' It is perfectly obvious that this is introduced, not as a second classification of sins, but simply for the particular purpose of explaining why sins of Incontinence are not inside the City of Dis along with Violence and Fraud : sins of impulse and want of self-control are less offensive to God than malicious wickedness and brutality. Nevertheless, although thus obviously introduced for this special purpose, it is natural to suppose that this classification from Aristotle coincided in Dante's own mind with the other from Cicero, so far as the lower Circles are concerned; in other words, that 'Malice and mad Bestiality' correspond in some fashion to Violence and Fraud. There is certainly a strong temptation to identify Brutishness and Violence. In the Circle of the Violent, the various guardians and tormentors, as Wicksteed points out, are either beasts or forms in which the brute mingles with the human : the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies, and the she-masti£Fs which tear in pieces the reckless prodigals. This, in a writer like Dante, can scarcely be a mere coincidence ; yet the attempt which is sometimes made to include all the forms of Violence in Circle Yiii. in the Aristotelian concep- » Inf. xi. 78-84, 176 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI tion of Brutishness, can scarcely be regarded aa successful. On the whole, it is perhaps safer to say that the classification of sins Is founded mainly on Cicero, but that the working out of it is strongly coloured with Aristotelian ideas.^ oahors: When the explanation is finished, Dante puts to Usury. his Guide one final question concerning the sin of Usury : ' Once more a little backward turn thee,' said I, ' There where thou sayest that usury ofifends The Divine Goodness, and untie the knot.' ' The difficulty is not that Usury is a sin : of that the mediaeval mind had no doubt. It was that Virgil had declared it a sin against God, an offence to the Divine Goodness. Was it not rather a sin against man ? — why, then, had Virgil said that it is punished in the Circle of the Violent against God? This reference to Usury is contained in the single word ' Cahors ' in line 50 of this Canto. Cahors is a city in the Department of Lot in the South of France, famous, or rather infamous, in Dante's day as a nest of usurers. If Boccaccio is to be believed, the very ' For a discussion of this most intricate question, see Wicksteed's note in Appendix to Witte's Essays on Dante, 434-438. Dr. Moore is inclined to accept Boccaccio's story that the poem was interrupted by political troubles at the end of Canto vii., its resumption long after being marked by the opening words of Canto viii., ' I say, continuing.' On this assumption, he thinks Dante may have begun the Inferno on one moral plan and finished it on another : ' It does not seem to me impossible to suppose that Dante may have actually begun the Inferno with an idea of following the classification of the Seven Deadly Sins, but, finding it after a certain point unsuitable, he may have adopted a different method, and then have invented the ex post facto explana- tion of Canto xi. as an ingenious way of covering the change of plan and giving a factitious appearance of unity of design to the composite work ' (Studies in Dante, second series, 168). 2 Inf. xi. 94-96. CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 177 servant-maids lent out their wages. Writing in the CANTO XI first half of the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris says ; ' In these days prevailed the horrible nuisance of the Caursines to such a degree that there was hardly any one in all England, especially among the bishops, who was not caught in their net. Even the King was held indebted to them in an incalculable sum of money. For they circumvented the needy in their necessities, cloaking their usury under the show of trade, and pretending not to know that whatsoever is added to the principal is usury, under whatever name it may be called.' In short, Caorsine was a synonym for usurer.^ Now, the strange thing is that Sodom and Cahors why is usury are put together in the same Circle, the reason being iratore? that both are regarded as sinners against Nature. This is obvious in the case of Sodom, which repre- sents unnatural sensuality; but how comes it that Usury is also a sin against Nature ? Virgil answers this question partly from Aristotle and partly from Scripture, almost equal authorities in Dante's mind. 'WW In his Physics (ii. 2) Aristotle says, 'Art imitates Nature.' But Nature is the child of God, offspring of the Divine Intellect ; and Art — that is, any work or craft of man — which imitates Nature, may there- fore be called the child of Nature and, as it were, the grandchild of God. According to the Book of Genesis, from these two, Nature and Art, ' mankind 1 Comp. Par. xxvii. 58, 59 : ' Of our blood Caorsines and Gascons Prepare themselves to drink.' The reference is to Clement v. , a Gascon, and John xxii. , a native of Cahors. M 178 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI gain their life and advance.' ^ In other words, man must get his livelihood from Nature : • The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it ' ; and he must get it by means of Art or work: 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' But the usurer ' takes another way,' and ' elsewhere puts his hope.' That is to say, he evades the Divine law of work laid down for man at the beginning. Disdaining work or Art, he dis- dains Nature of which it is the imitator ; disdaining Nature, he disdains God whose child she is. Hence it is that Blasphemers, Sodom, and Cahors are all placed in the same Circle: Blasphemers do direct violence to God, defying Himself; Sodomites do violence to Nature, which is the child of God; and Caorsines or Usurers to Art, which is, so to speak. His grandchild. And of the three Dante regards the last as the worst, for, as we shall see, he sets the Usurers on the very edge of the precipice which overhangs the next Circle, as if morally they almost belonged to it. MedisBvai Into the question of the Ethics of Usury, recently ' revived by Ruskin, there is no need to enter further than is necessary to show how it looked to the ^' mediaeval mind. We apply the word Usury now to the taking of exorbitant interest, but the original idea was undoubtedly the taking of any. The ground for this was Scriptural; in Leviticus it is written: ' If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him : yea, though 1 It is somewhat strange to find Virgil quoting Scripture. Probably the reason is that the passage refers to a truth which lies within the knowledge of the natural man. CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 179 he be a stranger, or a sojourner, that he may live CANTO XI with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase : but fear thy God ; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.' This prohibition is repeated in Deuteronomy, where, however, the taking of usury from strangers is expressly allowed.^ The wisest of the heathen take the same view. Plato in his Laws says: ' No one shall lend money upon interest ; and the borrower shall be under no obliga- tion to repay either capital or interest ' ; and in the Republic he describes usurers in these scornful words : 'The naen of business, stooping as they walk, and pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert the sting — that is, their money — into some one else who is not on his guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times multi- plied into a family of children: and so they make drone and pauper to abound in the State.' ^ This reference to 'the parent sum multiplied into a family of children,' recalls Aristotle's view which was undoubtedly in Dante's mind when he declares that Usury is — at least indirectly — a violation of Nature. Aristotle argues from the Greek name for Usury, To«o9, which means offspring. The very name is its condemnation, for it implies that money breeds money; and money being in itself a barren thing, he argues that to cause it to produce 'offspring* is a violation of Nature. In his Politics he writes : ' Of all bad forms of Finance there is none which so ' Lev. jocv. 35-37 ; Deut. xxiii. 19, 20. 2 Plato— £aw8, v. 742 ; Bep. viii. 555. 180 CLASSIFICATION OF SINS CANTO XI well deserves abhorrence as petty usury, because in it it is money itself which produces the gain instead of serving the purpose for which it was devised. For it was invented simply as a medium of exchange, whereas interest multiplies the money itself. Indeed it is to this fact it owes its name (toko? or offspring), as children bear a likeness to their parents, and interest is money born of money. It may be con- cluded, therefore, that no form of money-making does so much violence to Nature as this.'^ From this passage, the barrenness of money became pro- verbial in the Middle Ages, and of course Dante was perfectly familiar with it. The Church passed severe laws against the taking of interest: a cleric was suspended, a layman excommunicated. ' The change in economic conditions which has come over the world has compelled the Church to take up a different attitude to this question, allowing the taking of interest for ordinary com- mercial purposes, and confining the name of usury to the exaction of excessive and extortionate interest. In justice to the Church, it can scarcely be held with fairness that this change involves any real incon- sistency, or proves that her mediaeval attitude was an error. In those days, and under the conditions of life then prevailing, there was very little lending of money for commercial purposes. The borrower as a rule was not a solvent man who sought money to extend a prosperous business and increase his profits : he was usually a man in need, who asked a 1 Politics, i. 10. Comp. The Merchant of Venice, Act i. Scene 3: ' For when did f riendehip take A breed for barren metal of his friend I ' CLASSIFICATION OF SINS 181 loan to stave off impending ruin, and whose very CANTO XI necessity placed him at the mercy of unscrupulous lenders. Even if the Church overshot the mark somewhat in declaring all interest sinful, it was an error which leant to virtue's side in face of the con- ditions of the age, the notorious cruelties of money- lenders, and the widespread poverty and ruin which followed their operations. On the whole we shall not be greatly in error if we accept the conclusion of a Boman Catholic political economist of our time : 'In reality the essential wrongfulness of making pj-ofit without labour, risk, or responsibility from the property of others, of claiming an increase from what is essentially barren, of turning the simplicity or distress of others to one's own gain, has been maintained by the Church from her foundation to this day ; and the resort of usurers, whether in the Temple of Jerusalem, the drinking shops of Poland, or the loan offices of England, she has ever looked on as a den of thieves. Usury is just as unlawful now as in the middle ages; but many transactions bearing the same name or appearance, which were usurious then, are now innocent ; the Church rightly forbade them then, and as rightly permits them 1 Devas' Political Economy, p. 328. For an interesting discussion of XJsury from the standpoint of the B. C. Church, see Father Bickaby's Moral Philosophy, pp. 255-263. CHAPTER XII CIRCLE VII.— THE VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS CANTO XII The pilgrims now begin the descent to the Circle of Violence. The time is indicated in Dante's usual astronomic fashion : * The Fishes are quivering on the horizon. And all the Wain lies over Caurus ' * — that is, Caurus being the North-west wind, the Wain or Great Bear is right upon the North-west line. The hour is between four and five on the Saturday Tixeareat morning. As we saw, the path downward is the HetierHeu '^il^ and broken precipice in the middle of that central valley to which the City of Dis slopes, cup- like, on every side. Dante compares it to a great landslip, known as the Slavini di Marco, on the left bank of the Adige between Verona and Trent, caused, he says, by an earthquake or some ' defective prop.' Virgil informs him that when he passed this way on his former journey through Hell, this cliff stood un- broken, and that its fall had been caused by the Eartbquaice of earthquake which took place at the time of the the Cmci- flzion. ( Crucifixion, when, he says, ' Upon all sides the deep and loathsome valley Trembled so, that I thought the universe Was thrilled with love, by which there are who think The world ofttim.es converted into chaos. '^ 1 Inf. xi. 113, 114. 2 Inf. xii. 40-43. 1S2 VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 183 This great landslip is, of course, symbolic. Its depth CANTO XII signifies the vastness of the fall from upper to nether Hell — from mere lack of self-control which injures ourselves to sins of malice which strike at Society. Its moral significance is much the same as that of the sickening stench which issues from the pit ; both indicate that we have reached a deeper and more hateful quality of evil. Further, the landslip is expressly associated with the Crucifixion: it took place when 'the universe was thrilled with love.' Buskin connects this with 'the infamy of Crete,' which lies stretched on the top of the ruined path- way. ' This Minotaur,' he says, ' is the type or em- bodiment of the two essentially bestial sins of Anger and Lust,' and ' both these are, in the human nature, interwoven inextricably with its chief virtue. Love, so that Dante makes this very ruin of the Bocks of hell, on which the Minotaur is couched, to be wrought on them at the instant when "the Universe was thrilled with love," — the last moment of the Crucifixion.'^ It may be doubted if this was in Dante's mind. What he really wished to emphasize was that the sins beneath — Violence, Fraud, and Treachery — are sins against Love, sins which break 'the knot and fellowship of mankind.' They are, indeed, the very sins which crucified Christ. He died a violent death, and Violence is punished in the Circle to which this landslip leads down. In the Circle below that again, the same earthquake, as we shall see, has broken the bridge over the Moat in which lie Caiaphas and the Councillors who crucified ' Fors Clavigera, Letter zxiii. p. 23. 184 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII their Lord, now themselves crucified. Judas, who betrayed Him into their hands, is in the lowest Circle, writhing in the central mouth of Lucifer. It is in this way that Dante indicates the connection of this nether Hell with that central tragedy and sin of all the universe which took place on Calvary: Nature herself trembled at the threefold crime against Love in its Divinest form. One cannot help suspecting also that Dante means to give a hint of the final and utter hopelessness of such sins. Take, for instance, the allusion to those ' who think the world of ttimes converted unto chaos.' The reference is to the philo- sophy of Empedocles. In his poem, On Nature, Empedocles lays down ' as the material principles or " roots " of things, the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, to which he joins as moving forces two ideal principles : love as a uniting, and hate as a separating force. The periods of the formation of the world depend on the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During certain periods all hetero- geneous elements are separated from each other by hate ; during others, they are everywhere united by love.' While the process is in operation, even love dissolves the world into a chaos, with a view, of course, to ultimate unity. But in Hell there can be no ultimate unity of love. The shock of it is felt here from the Cross itself, but it can only throw this world of hate and chaos into greater chaos: the very love of Christ can but break the pathway into irrevocable ruin. It is entirely in the temper of Dante's mind thus to find the fulfilment of the speculation of a heathen philosopher in the facts and doctrines of the Christian faith. VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 185 The two travellers find their passage barred by the CANTO XII Guardian of the Circle, the Minotaur of mythology : ouardiaa of the Pass : On the border of the broken chasm the Minotaur The infamy of Crete was stretched along "^ Crete. Who was conceived in the fictitious oow.^ The myth is well known. Dante sets him here as symbol of the symbol of brute violence and unnatural lust, unnatural sins punished in the Circle of which he is the Guar- '"**• dian. As the monster of the Labyrinth of Crete devouring his yearly tribute of Athenian youths and maidens, he is the type of Violence ; and as himself the fruit of an unnatural passion, he is fit Guardian of a Circle in which sins against Nature receive their reward. Indeed, when we see how many of the guardians of this Circle are forms half brute, half human, it is difficult to resist the conviction that Dante, as suggested in last Chapter, means it to correspond to the Bestiality of Aristotle's Ethics. The sins of Violence against God and Nature, our neighbours, and ourselves, are so bestial that they half transform men into brutes and monsters. The quality and degree of the transformation vary in the different sins. According to Ruskin's discrimi- nation, 'the Minotaur has a man's body, a bull's head, (which is precisely the general type of the English nation to-day). The Centaur Chiron has a horse's body; a man's head and breast. The Spirit of Fraud, Geryon, has a serpent's body, his face is that of a just man, and his breast chequered like a lizard's, with labyrinthine lines. All these three creatures signify the mingling of a brutal instinct ' Inf. xii. 11-13. 186 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII with the human mind ; but, in the Minotaur, the brute rules, the humanity is subordinate; in the Centaur, the man rules, and the brute is subordi- nate; in the third, the man and the animal are in harmony ; and both false.' The Labyrintii Ruskin further suggests what seems to have occurred to few commentators, that the Circles underneath are the true Cretan Labyrinth. One can scarcely fail to be struck with the number of references to Crete in this part of the Inferno. Once ' glad with waters and with leaves,' it is now 'a wasted land ' — wasted with the sins to which Dante is about to descend : its Golden Age is long past. Inside Ida, the mountain chosen by Rhea as the cradle of her son Jupiter, stands a great Old Man of gold, silver, iron, and clay, the image of Time ; and through his broken form there flow down into Hell the tears of the human race which form the infernal rivers, Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon, the last being the River of Blood which drains this Circle of the Violent. It would certainly complete this Cretan scenery if we had the famous Labyrinth ; indeed, the Minotaur almost demands it. For my own part, I have no doubt Dante had it clearly before his mind when he constructed this nether Hell : Circle within Circle of unnatural passion in which the human loses itself in the brute, and convolution within con- volution of Fraud through whose endless maze of duplicity even Virgil, for all his clue of Reason, at times can scarcely find his way} On seeing the two travellers approach, the Mino- ' Fors, Letters xsiii., xiiv. VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOimS 187 taur bit himself in his blind brute-like fury, and CANTO XII Virgil struck him helpless with very excess of Descent of tiie passion by telling him that his companion is not^"^^*" 'the Duke of Athens,'— as he calls Theseus, who had slain him in the Cretan Labyrinth — but one who came to see the punishments. On hearing this taunt, it was as if the monster felt once more the stroke that slew, him 'in the world above': he plunged hither and thither like a bull that has received its death-blow. Taking advantage of this paroxysm of passion, Yirgil cried to Dante, ' Bun to the passage ; While he is in fury, it is good that thou descend.' Virgil knows that with such brute-like passions it is both vain and dangerous to reason: the only pru- dent thing is to run. We shall see how in the Circle beneath this, when pursued by the demons of the Moat of Pitch, he caught Dante up in his arms and fled with him to a place of safety beyond their reach ; there is a malice so diabolical that it would be certain destruction to stay and reason with it. Bushing down the steep pass, the stones of which. The circle of Violcucs * Dante notices, move under the unwonted weight of First Eing. living feet, they find themselves in the Circle of the Violent. It consists of three concentric Bings, corresponding to the three classes of sinners here punished. The outermost Bing is a Eiver of Blood, ' in which boils every one who by violence injures others.' The second Bing is a Belt of Wood, the trees of which are the souls of Suicides, the Violent against Themselves. And the central Bing is a Plain of Sand, on whose naked surface the Violent against 188 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII God, Nature, and Art bear a constant rain of flakes of fire. Pmegethon, From the pathway of the great landslip, Virgil moodSthe points out to Dante the River of Blood which, like centaum. ^ bended bow, stretched beneath them as far as the eye could see on either hand. Its banks were patrolled incessantly by Centaurs, running in single file, and armed with bows and arrows. Dante names three of them famous in heathen mythology, Chiron and his two lieutenants, Nessus and Pholus. Like the Minotaur, they are half man, half brute; but, unlike him, the brute is undermost — the head is human, the body that of a horse. In general, the Centaurs are symbols of the lawless and inhuman Violence which is here punished; Benvenuto, for example, well compares them to the mercenaries under the ' condottieri,' who were then beginning to play so brutal a part in Italian wars. It is obvious that the three singled out by Dante are intended to represent three aspects of this Violence, although it is not easy to distinguish them. Plumptre, after pointing out that Chiron was the teacher of Achilles in hunting, medicine, gymnastics, and music, says that 'in each of the three, Dante, we may believe, saw the type of the various degrees of deepening evil which come when the brute nature mars the completeness of the human life, beginning with half-genial animation, and passing on into sheer ferocity ' ; and he notes that Dante's friend, Giotto, in his fresco at Assisi of St. Francis taking the vow of obedience, introduces a Centaur, evidently as a symbol of lawlessness. Another writer sees in VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 189 thethreeCentaurssymbolsof the three forms of Vio- CANTO XII lence punished in the three concentric Bings of this Circle: 'Nessus, who died by the hand of Hercules for his attempted outrage upon De'ianeira, person- ates violence against one's neighbour; Chiron, who injured himself nearly to death from dropping one of the arrows of Hercules on his foot, figures violence against oneself; Pholus, who is said to have been a blasphemer against the gods, symbolizes violence against God.' The objection to this view — not to speak of making the accident to Chiron a case of self-violence — is that if Dante had meant them thus to represent the three forms of Violence in this Circle, he would have set one in each of the three Rings as its special guardian, whereas they are all confined to the bank of the River of Blood : Nessus, for example, though he can carry Dante over the ford to the Wood of the Suicides, is forced to return at once to his own side of the River. We come much nearer Dante's meaning if we follow his own hints in Virgil's description of the three. They are intended to represent three of the great sources of Violence against our neighbours. Nessus stands for Lust and Revenge, as the references to Deianeira and Hercules show ; Pholus, ' who was so full of anger,' for mere brute fury ; while Chiron, who is between the other two as their chief, represents a far higher order of violence. His head is bent upon his breast in thought, and he is the teacher of great heroes like Achilles. The suggestion has been made that he stands for Ambition, and doubtless Ambition mingled with his violence. But rather he represents that 190 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII type of violent man in whom great powers of mind are mingled with a brute-like force and become its slaves. Among the souls in the River of Blood, Chiron is probably represented by Alexander the Great; Pholus by the brute fury of Azzolino and Obizzo da Esti; and Nessus by the wild revenge of Guy de Montfort. The function of the whole troop of Centaurs is to patrol the banks and keep the souls of the Violent against their Neighbours immersed in the River of Blood to the due depth — for each is sunk according to the kind and measure of his violence : ' Thousands and thousands go about the moat Shooting with shafts whatever soul uproots himself Out of the blood, more than his crime allots.'! Like the Guardians of the other Circles, the Cen- taurs oppose the entrance of the strangers. Nessus challenges them while they are still descending the broken precipice, and is answered by Virgil that they will give their reply to Chiron himself. When Chiron. they draw near, Chiron takes an arrow and with the notch puts back his great mane-like beard from his mouth: a gesture so peculiar that it probably has some symbolic significance, although it seems to be unknown. Perhaps it is nothing more than a gesture of hesitation, for he sees something to make him pause. This is no dead lost soul that is descend- ing : the stones move beneath his feet : After he had uncovered his g^eat mouth, He said to his companions : ' Are you ware That he behind moveth whate'er he touches? Thus are not wont to do the feet of the dead.' ' » Inf. xii. 73-75. » I-nf. xU. 79-82. VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 191 ' He moves whate'er he touches ' : whether meant CANTO XII or not, nothing could more pregnantly describe the poet's own genius. Virgil, who had now reached the great Centaur and stood at his breast where the two natures met, explains to him that their journey- is not one of pleasure but of necessity, and requests him to send one of his troop to point out the ford of the river and carry Dante across, — ' for 'tis no spirit that can walk the air.' Chiron thereupon orders Nessus to act as their guide. This Centaur is chosen Nessus as for this service because in the myth he carried travellers across the river Evenus ; and Dante here calls him ironically ' t^e faithful escort,' in allusion to his attempted outrage on Deianeira when she was committed to his care. As they walk along the river-bank, Nessus points out and names the souls immersed in the boiling blood at varying depth, according to the measure of their violence against their fellows — to the eyebrows, the throat, the chest, and so on down to the ankles. The River grows shallower and shallower as it approaches the ford, on the other side of which it gradually deepens again. In its deepest part are plunged to the eye- brows the great tyrants of history — Alexander, Tyrants Dionysius of Syracuse, Attila,^ Pyrrhus, and the like. The Alexander here is probably the Great, although many modern commentators take it to be the Thessalian tyrant, Alexander of Pherae, on the ground that in other parts of his writings Dante ' It is thoaght by some that Dante confuses Attila, King of the Huns, with TotUa, King of the Ostrogoths. To the latter Villanl (ii. 1) attributes the sacl^ of Florence ; while Dante refers it to Attila (Jnf. xUi. 149). 192 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII praises Alexander the Great : ' who,' he asks in the Convito, 'has not Alexander still in his heart because of his royal beneficence?'^ After such praise it is held that it would be a great incon- sistency on Dante's part to place him in Hell. But, as Toynbee points out, it is precisely this kind of ' inconsistency ' of which Dante is frequently guilty. The Saladin, Julius Caesar, Guido da Montefeltro, Bertran de Born, Frederick ii., all are eulogized for this quality or that, yet none the less all are inexor- ably consigned to perdition. As Toynbee says, ' to praise a man for his munificence surely need not imply a condonation of his crimes or shortcomings.' Dante probably took his view from Orosius, who describes Alexander as ' that great whirlpool of miseries, and most savage whirlwind of the entire Orient,' who ' for twelve years crushed the trembling earth beneath him with the sword,' and at last died at Babylon ' still thirsting for blood.' Now at length his thirst must surely be satisfied, plunged to the eyebrows in a river of it. Along with him and Dionysius, tyrants of old time, Dante names two of his own century. ' That forehead there which has the hair so black Is Azzolino,' — commonly known as Bzzelino in. of Romano in 1 Conv. iv. 11. In De Mon. 11. 9 Dante says that of all the men who strove for that universal Empire which only Borne won, Alexander came nearest to the prize. His failure was a direct interposition of God : ' " Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God 1" Who will not marvel at thee here? For when Alexander was trying to hinder his Boman competitor in the race, thou didst suddenly snatch him away from the contest that his rashness might proceed no further.' VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 193 Venetia. His sister Gunizza in the Heaven of Venus CANTO XII calls him a firebrand which destroyed the Trevisan March. Certainly, if but half the story of his atroci- ties is true, few men can have deserved more tho- roughly the doom Dante assigns him. According to Villani, who wrote while Ezzelino's career was still fresh in men's memories, he was ' the most cruel and redoubtable tyrant that ever was among Christians, and ruled by his force and tyranny for a long time the Trevisan March and the city of Padua, and a great part of Lombardy ; and he brought to an end a very great part of the citizens of Padua, and blinded great numbers of the best and most noble, taking their possessions, and sending them begging through the world, and many others he put to death by divers sufferings and torments, and burnt at one time 11,000 Paduans ; and by reason of their innocent blood, by miracle, no grass grew there again for evermore. And under semblance of a rugged and cruel justice he did much evil, and was a great scourge in his time in the Trevisan March and in Lombardy.'^ 'In 1255,' says Toynbee, 'Pope Alex- ander rv. proclaimed a crusade against Ezzelino, styling him " a son of perdition, a man of blood, the most inhuman of the children of men, who, by his infamous torture of the nobles and massacre of the people, has broken every bond of human society, and violated every law of Christian liberty." ' It is dis- puted how far Ezzelino's companion, the fair-haired Obizzo da Esti, Marquis of Ferrara, merited the same punishment, but Dante, at all events, saw little to > Villani, \i. 12. N 194 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII choose between the two. In 1293 he died, the belief of the time being that he was smothered by his son, Azzo VIII., who succeeded him : Dante here calls him his ' stepson,' either to indicate the unnatural char- acter of the crime, or, as some think, to suggest the unfaithfulness of his mother. Murderers : Of the murderers immersed to the neck only one Quy de . Uontfort. is named, a soul apart from the rest, probably on account of the heinousness of his crime : ' He cleft asunder in God's bosom The heart that still upon the Thames is honoured.' ^ It is Guy de Montfort, son of the famous Earl of Leicester who was slain at the battle of Evesham in 1265. 'The bosom of God' is the Church of S. Sil- vestro in Viterbo, where in 1271, in revenge for his father's death, he stabbed to the heart his cousin Henry, son of the Earl of Cornwall, while he was in the act of receiving the Host. Villani narrates an incident which shows how determined and pitiless was his vengeance. 'The said Count Guy, being provided with a company of men-at-arms on horse and on foot, was not content only with having done the said murder ; forasmuch as a cavalier asked him what he had done, and he replied, " I have taken my revenge," and that cavalier said, " How ? Your father was trailed"; and immediately he returned to the church, and took Henry by the hair, and dead as he was, he dragged him vilely without the church.' Villani adds that Edward, the brother of the mur- » Inf. xji, 119, 120, VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 195 dered Prince, leaving Viterbo in great indignation CANTO XII that no attempt was made to avenge the crime, 'came into England, and set the heart of his said brother in a golden cup upon a pillar at the head of London Bridge over the river Thames, to keep the English in mind of the outrage sustained ' ; and it is probably to this that Dante refers when he speaks of 'the heart which still upon the Thames is hon- oured.' ^ In reality, it seems that Henry's body was taken to England and buried in the Cistercian Abbey of Hayles in Gloucestershire ; but there was a story current in Italy that the heart was extracted, and the casket containing it set by his cousin King Edward in the hand of a statue of the prince, erected on London Bridge or in Westminster Abbey. Con- cerning the punishment assigned to the murderer, it is at first sight a little surprising to find that so heinous a crime, committed at the very altar, sinks the soul less deeply in the River than tyranny does. The reason, however, is plain enough. It was one single sin of violence, and not a lifetime of it, like Ezzelino's career. Further, it had the excuse, such as it was, of the vendetta : it sprang from the natural passion of a son revenging his father's death. Not that Dante favoured the vendetta ; in the next Circle we shall see his own kinsman, Geri del Bello, shaking his finger at him because he- had left his death unavenged.^ Nevertheless, while condemning the vendetta, Dante understood 'the wild justice of revenge,' and made some allowance for it. On the 1 VUlani, vii. 39. Villani evidently means his cousin, Edward i. » Inf. xiix. 25-27. See pp. 396-398, 196 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII other hand, if not sunk so deeply in the river, de Montfort's punishment is increased in another way — he is set apart by himself. It is possible, aa some think, that this is because he was an Englishman, a native of a distant land which lay outside of the Empire ; ^ but it is more probable that it was because of the peculiar heinousness of the crime. It was committed 'in the bosom of God,' and this means more than simply in a church. It was when the Host, the Holy Body of Christ, was being ele- vated, that the murderous blow was struck; and a sinner guilty of such unspeakable sacrilege, must remain apart in the solitude of a guilt which could scarcely be paralleled. Of the shades HighTrayinen, immersed to the chest, Dante says he recognized many, as indeed he well might, considering the almost universal violence in the midst of which he lived. Turning now to the punishment, it is obvious that, PuniBlunent. in outward form, it is simply the recoil of their own crimes upon these murderers : having shed human blood in streams upon the earth, they are now plunged in a river of it throughout eternity. And, indeed, there is a fierce instinct of justice in us which rejoices in so appropriate a retribution. It would be a strange and incredible flaw in a universe ruled by a righteous God, which would allow a monster of cruelty like Ezzelino to escape finally and for ever. Although Dante condemns it as the evil pride of victory, we cannot help sympathizing * As the Saladin sat apart from the other heroes in Limbo, as belonging to another race and faith {Inf. iv. 129). VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS 197 somewhat with that Queen Tomyris of whom CANTO XIl he tells us, that when she had slain Cyrus in battle, she threw his head into a vessel of blood, crying, ' Blood thou didst thirst for, and with blood I glut thee I ' * Nevertheless it is not this literal and material retri- bution of blood for blood that Dante has chiefly in view. It is, as in all his punishments, the moral recoil of Violence of which he is thinking. This River consists indeed of the blood shed by murderers, flowing down, as Virgil tells us, through the cloven body of Time ; but it is also, in a figure, the hot- blooded passions which swept these men on during a lifetime of outrage. In that other world those violent passions have become their eternal element, from which they cannot ' uproot themselves,' to use Dante's phrase. The Centaurs that patrol the banks and shoot them down to their proper level, are simply their own wild lawless habits which they have made tyrants over themselves, and from whose vigilance escape is impossible. Still further, hot- blooded as these violent passions were on earth, they are hotter now. Dante tells us that the River of Blood is boiling, that the souls are ' cooked ' in it, and that Divine Justice ' to eternity milks the tears ' from them, ' which by the boiling it unlocks.' What Dante means is probably this, that passions of hot blood which are allowed on earth to break out in violence against others, intensify in a world where • Purg. xii. 5S-57. 198 THE RIVER OF BLOOD CANTO XII no opportunity of their breaking out is possible. Finding no outlet in deeds of violence the thwarted passions grow into an agony, — a boiling River of Blood, which wrings the tears even from these monsters of cruelty. CHAPTER XIII CIRCLE VII. — THE VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES We now enter the second Ring of the Seventh Circle, CANTO xin in which the Violent against Themselves receive circieoT their punishment. Before Nessus, who cai^ried ^'"^^"^"^^ Dante across the Ford of the River of Blood, had time to regain the other side, the pilgrims found themselves within a pathless wood, a wilder jungle The wood of than the brakes of the Maremma, the haunt in Dante's day of wild beasts : no orchard, he says, fair with apples, but a wilderness of dusky leaves, boughs gnarled and twisted, and poisonous thorns. It is a picture of what the world would become if the natural instinct of self-preservation were universally vio- lated, a barren wilderness, pathless, gloomy, tangled and poisonous: in strong and intentional contrast to that other wood on the top of Mount Purgatory, where the purified soul is free to wander at its will through the living sunlit green, all musical with songs of birds. In this weird forest no birds sing : only the fabled Harpies utter their sad lamenting me Eafpies. cries among the branches. Like the Minotaur and Centaurs, they are a hideous mingling of the human and the brutish : Wide wings have they, and necks and faces human, Feet with claws, and the great belly feathered.^ « Inf. xiii. 13, U, 199 200 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII At first Dante imagines that the lamentations which assail his ears come from people who have hidden themselves in the thicket, for fear of the newcomers ; and Virgil, to show him his error, asks him to break off a twig from any of the trees. Approaching, Tho 'Great therefore, a 'great thorn,' Dante did as his Guide had directed ; whereupon the trunk bled as from a w'ound, and through the oozing blood issued an indignant cry : ' Why dost thou rend me ? Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever ? Men we were, and now are changed to trees ; In truth, thy hand should be more pitiful, Even if the souls of serpents we had been.'^ Virgil soothes the 'wounded soul' by explaining that he had to take this method of teaching his companion, because he had not believed what he had read in his verses. The reference is to the Third Book of the ^neid, in which Virgil tells how ^neas in Thrace, attempting to break off the branches of a tree, was reproached for his cruelty by Polydorus, son of Priam of Troy, who was imprisoned within it.^ To make amends to the 'great thorn,' Virgil promises that if he relate the story of his life, Dante will ' refresh his fame ' in the upper world, to which he has power to return. The Hunt of No sooner had this soul told the story of his life thrifts. and doom, than they were startled by a sudden crashing of branches, as if a boar-hunt were sweep- ing through the forest towards them; and imme- diately, on their left, two naked souls came tearing » Inf. xiii. 35-39, » ^m iii. 22-46. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 201 through the tangled thorns, while behind them the CANTO XIII wood was full of ' black she-mastiffs,' ravenous, and swift as greyhounds newly slipped. One of the hunted wretches managed to escape for the time; but the other, finding his breath failing, crouched down under the shelter of a bush, and was imme- diately torn limb from limb by the black mastiffs. In the wild struggle, the bush under which he had taken refuge had its leaves and branches torn and scattered; and Dante at its entreaty, hearing that it was a Florentine soul, for the love of bis native city piously gathered together and restored to it its bleeding leaves. In this weird narrative it is evident that Dante pier deUe wishes to distinguish various types of suicide; for *' obviously suicide must differ in moral quality, accord- ing to its motive and cause. The noblest type of suicide in the Commedia is Cato, whom Dante rescues from Hell and makes the Guardian of Mount Purga- tory, because he laid violent hands on himself for the sacred cause of liberty: as he says in the De Monarchia, 'to inflame the world with a love of freedom, Cato preferred dying free to living a slave.'^ Next Cato, though at a long distance, comes the ' great thorn ' from which Dante plucked the twig. It is the soul of an upright and honourable man, driven to the desperate deed by envy, slander, and persecution. It is perhaps to indicate the nobility of his nature, or possibly the high rank which he once held on earth, that he is represented as a 'great thorn,' in contrast to many of the other souls who * De Mon, li S ; Con/v. iv. 6 ; Purg. i. 71-75. 202 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII are only low-growing shrubs, like that under which the fugitive flung himself for refuge from the dogs. This nobler spirit is Pier delle Vigne, whose master, Frederick li., we have already seen in the burning tomb of the Epicureans. He is said to have been the son of a vine-dresser of Gapua, and it is possible that it is to this humble origin he owes his name. Educated probably at Bologna, he rose rapidly until he became the Chancellor and most trusted adviser of Frederick u., — in his own words : ' I am he who both keys had in keeping Of Frederick's heart, and turned them to and fro So softly in locking and unlocking. That from his secrets almost all men I shut out.' ^ The two keys are probably the favour and dis- favour of the Emperor, his mercy and his judgment ; but it is possible there is also some allusion to the keys of Peter. According to Oelsner, ' when he was at the height of his power. Pier was often compared to his namesake, the Apostle Peter,' just as his master, according to some historians, was regarded as Messiah. Doubtless it was the very greatness of his power with the Emperor which led to his sudden downfall, by the envy and hatred which it created. This, at least, is his own account of it, which Dante certainly accepted : ' The courtesan who never from the dwelling Of Caasar turned aside her harlot eyes, Death universal and the vice of courts, Inflamed against me all the other minds, And they, inflamed, did so inflame Augustus, That my glad honours turned to dismal mournings.'^ » Inf. xiii. 68-61. » Inf. xiil. 64-69. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 203 The accounts of his downfall and death are very con- CANTO XIII flicting and obscure. According to one report, he betrayed his master's secrets to his enemy, the Pope ; according to another, he was suspected of engaging in a conspiracy to poison the Emperor. Whatever the cause, Frederick entirely lost his confidence in him, and the man who put his own son to death on suspicion of rebellion was little likely to spare his Chancellor.^ What exactly happened is doubtful; but according to one account Frederick caused his eyes to be burnt out, and then led him about from place to place as a public example, 'the master- councillor of the Emperor, who was lord of his law and betrayed him to the Pope.' In 1249 in Pisa the unhappy man is said to have ended his earthly misery by dashing out his brains against the walls of his prison. Here he protests solemnly, ' by the new roots of this tree,' that he was innocent of the charge of treachery ; and the great reverence with which he still speaks of the Emperor is the best proof of the truth of his words. Not a syllable of anger or revenge escapes his lips ; the whole blame is laid on the envious courtiers who abused his master's mind. In spite of the cruelty which drove a faithful servant to suicide and perdition, Frederick is still ' my lord, who was so worthy of honour.' There is something very touching and noble in this loyalty which Hell itself cannot undermine. It shows how complete was Dante's faith in his innocence: indeed, had he not * Villani (vi. 22) says Frederick starved his son Henry to death because he remonstrated with him for his war against the Church. According to Villani, Piero delle Vigne d^ed of grief in prison after his eyes were put out. 204 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII believed in it, he must have placed him in the lowest Hell among Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors. We can well believe that Dante had the keenest personal sympathy with this unfortunate soul, more sinned against than sinning. He himself had been the victim of envy and slander, and it was but natural that he should seek to rescue 'from the blow that envy dealt it,' the memory of one whose fortune was not all unlike his own. Nevertheless, though he is firmly convinced of his faithfulness to his master, and though pity chokes his voice so that he has to ask Virgil to continue the conversation, he has no doubt whatever that this weird wild Wood of the r- Suicides is his inevitable place. He had learned from Aquinas that while suicide is primarily a sin against a man's self, it is also a sin against the community of which he is a part, and against God from whose hand he received the gift of life. Further Aquinas, following Aristotle, had taught him that no possible misery of the present life can justify a man in plunging into death, ' because the extremest and most terrible of the evils of this life is death, as appears from the Philosopher ; and therefore to compass one's own death in order to avoid the other miseries of this life, is to take the greater evil to escape the less.'^ TheSnidde The Florentine whose soul was the bush torn in the struggle of the dogs, is a much baser type of suicide, the special baseness being indicated in the line: ' Of my own house I made myself a gibbet.' ' Summa, ii-ii. q. Iziv. a. 6. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 205 The gibbet is universally regarded as a place of in- CANTO XIII f amy ; and for a man to have so little respect for his own house, his family name and traditions, as to turn it into a gibbet, is to a proud Florentine like Dante, who gloried even in Paradise in the nobility of his blood, a proof of no ordinary baseness. It is perhaps to symbolize this that the suicide is turned into a mere shrub. Several conjectures as to his identity have been made : Lotto degli Agli, a Florentine judge, who, after delivering an unjust judgment for a bribe, went home and hanged himself ; or Rocco de' Mozzi, a Florentine who committed suicide because he fell from great wealth to poverty. The probability is that Dante left the name unrevealed because he had not one but many in view. If commentators are to be believed, the particular form of suicide affected by the Floren- tines in Dante's day was hanging, just as in our time it is said to be throwing themselves out of the window.^ If so, Dante may purposely have left this soul unnamed, that his words might be a warning to the city in general. And, indeed, Dante uses this Florentine to give Tbe suicide of a warning to the city in general in another sense. The suicide thus describes himself : ' I of that city was which for the Baptist Changed its first patron, wherefore he for this For ever with his art will make it sad. And were it not that on the pass of Amo Some semblance of him is remaining still, Those citizens who afterwards rebuilt it Upon the ashes left by Attila, In vain had caused their labour to be done.' ^ • Vernon's Headings on the Inferno, 1. 448 n. " Inf. xiii. 143-150. 206 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII This is a passage which has given great trouble to the commentators. It refers to the tradition given by Villani as current in his time concerning the way in which Florence changed its patron. In its pagan days its tutelary god was Mars, but when it became Christian it put itself under the protection of the Baptist. Finding it written, however, in their ancient records that if the statue of Mars were broken or despised, great calamities would befall the city, the Florentines set it in a high tower beside the Arno. When Attila — a mistake perhaps for Totila — destroyed the city, as he is said to have done, the statue of Mars fell into the Arno, where it remained until the city was rebuilt in 801, according to another myth, by Charles the Great. Villani says it was the opinion of the ancients that if the statue was not found, it would be impossible to rebuild the city, and it is to this belief Dante refers in the closing lines of the above quotation. A fragment of the image was drawn from the Arno and set at the head of the Ponte Vecchio.^ This is the tradi- tion, and the difficulty is to discover Dante's reason for introducing it here. It is absurd to suppose that he believed the mere stone, a fragment of a heathen god, had such power for weal or woe over his native city ; even Villani laughs at it as a pagan supersti- tion. Benvenuto gives an ingenious explanation which may have some truth in it : ' Dante is utter- ing against the Florentines a taunt, which, though veiled, is exceedingly bitter, namely, that from the time that Florence dismissed Mars, that is, strength > VUlani, iii. 1. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 207 and valour in arms, and began to worship the CANTO xni Baptist only, meaning the Florin on which the Baptist is stamped, she gave herself up wholly to the acquisition of wealth, and, therefore, will be un- fortunate in her warlike achievements ; for, as long as the Florentines gave their minds to deeds of arms and to exertion, they were energetic and victorious ; but when they turned their attention to rapacious harpies and accumulation of riches, although they might seem to be more prosperous arid powerful, yet were they less honoured in their feats of arms, and, in their continual wars, were more and raore weakened by their avarice : if, therefore, some slight vestige of Mars were not still remaining in it, Flor- ence would many a time have met with the same destruction that she met from Attila.'^ This is ingenious and has support in other passages in which the Baptist stands for the coins stamped with his image, and devotion to him is only a sarcastic name for avarice.^ Nevertheless, even at the risk of being charged with greater ingenuity, I would sug- gest another interpretation. This allusion to the baleful influence of Mars on Florence is put into the mouth of a suicide, and this must be remembered in our exposition of it. For it is as possible for a city to commit suicide as for an individual. CivU war is a whole community committing suicide, and civil war was the chronic state of Florence in Dante's day. The reference to Mars for ever making the city sad with his art, comes appropriately from a ^ Quoted in Vernon's Headings, i. 149, 450, * Inf. XIX. 74 ; Par. xviii. 133, 134. 208 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII suicide— his native city was always engaged in the same process of self-destruction. If it be objected that Dante speaks also of the good influence of Mars in that, but for a remnant of him, the city could not have been built, the answer is that this also is true. Dante recognized a Divine form of war, and therefore set raartyrs, crusaders, and all soldiers of Christ in the planet Mars, the Fifth Heaven of the Paradiso. This is no proof that there is not an evil and suicidal form of it as well; and in this passage Dante sets the two before his countrymen — that chronic state of civil war which was the suicide of the community, and that nobler warfare for great ends which once rebuilt the city from its ashes, and might again rebuild it, even from the ruins of its own self-destructive passions. Spendthrift One other type of suicide retoains, if not the basest, at least the most amazing in its insanity— that, namely, represented by the two naked souls fleeing before the mastiffs. These had not, like the others, boldly thrown o£B their bodies by direct suicide, hence they are not changed into trees ; but they had squandered in wild and insane recklessness the very means of life, until life itself had grown into an intolerable burden. The prodigality of the spendthrifts in Circle iv. was mild and pardonable compared with theirs. That was a mere inability to resist the temptation to spend ; but the prodigality of these souls had been a species of moral insanity, a wild and wanton destruction of their possessions. Lano, the one who escaped the dogs for the moment, is said to have been a member of the ' Spendthrift VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 209 Brigade ' of Siena, a club of wild young rakes, CANTO XIII who vied with one another in the recklessness and rapidity with which they squandered their fortunes.^ Lano, having utterly ruined himself, joined the expedition which the joint forces of Florence and Siena undertook against Arezzo in 1288. At the ford of the Pieve (Parish) al Toppo, near Arezzo, the Sienese were caught in an ambush and cut to pieces, and it is said that Lano flung his life away in the fight rather than live to face the ruin which his own recklessness had brought upon him. Napier, indeed, in his Florentine History, gives a totally different account: 'As an example of the public spirit of these wars it may be mentioned that a citizen of Siena named Lano, who had expended all his pro- perty in order to appear with some distinction in the confederate camp, having the power to save himself in this encounter, chose rather to die in the ranks than return poor and dishonoured to his native city, and fell in a desperate attack which he made singly against the victors.'^ It is probable, however, that the former account is the truth : had Dante regarded Lano as a man who had ruined him- self through an excess of public spirit, he must have given some hint of so generous a motive. Lano's companion, Jacomo da Sant' Andrea, who was caught and torn in pieces by the dogs, was, if pos- sible, insaner in his prodigality, as his crueller fate implies. 'On one occasion, when travelling from ' Pour other members of this Club are named in Inf. xxix. 125-132. See pp. 405, 406. ' Florentine History, Bk. i. chap. xii. O 210 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII Padua to Venice, he is said to have thrown away a large number of gold coins of the value of ten scudi (over £2) each, to see them make ducks and drakes on the lagoon. Another time he had some of his labourers' cottages burnt, in order that himself and a number of his guests might dry their wet clothes on returning from the chase. . . . Like Nero, wishing to see a large conflagration, he set one of his own villas on fire, and watched till it was burnt down, together with all its outbuildings.'^ Really one cannot grudge the 'black she-mastiffs' their meal of such a fool, whatever they may represent. It has been suggested that they are symbols of pitiless creditors who pursue a debtor like hounds, and, when their claims are unsatisfied, seize his person ; but obviously creditors do not carry their pursuit into the world to come. Rather by the mastiffs Dante means, not creditors, but the fear of creditors : that last wild terror of poverty in which their earthly life closed has never left thexn, haunts and pursues their souls in that other world, and tears \ them there as here. Dante may have meant to warn us that any overwhelming terror created within us by our own sins, may become so rooted and grounded in our souls by the shock of death, that it will pursue and rend us for ever. We welcome death as a refuge, and, behold, the wood behind us is for ever black with the very fears from which we fled. Punishment : The punishment of being turned into trees, which to fewer form ^^ allotted to Suicides, seems at first sight fantastic of life. a^jj^ unreal; yet it is far from being either. In the ' Vernon's Readings, i. 443. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 211 first place, Dante means us to understand that the CANTO Xin man who flings off his body does not thereby escape from existence, but simply dooms himself to a lower form of life, is degraded from the animal to the vegetable. In the Convito, following Aristotle, he dis- tinguishes the three principal powers of the human soul as vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual, which are so connected that the lower is the basis of the higher. ' The vegetative power, by which we live, is the foundation upon which we feel, that is, see, hear, taste, smell, and touch; and this vegetative power of itself is a soul, as we see in all plants.'^ The obvious idea of this punishment, therefore, is that the suicide by his own act reduces himself to the lowest power of his soul, the vegetative. He has violated his intellectual soul by an act contrary to all right reason ; he has flung away his sensitive soul by destroying the body in which it resides ; and thus has reduced himself to the lowest term of his existence. In short, to put it in more modern form, the great process of evolution is reversed. Nor is this a mere reading of modern ideas back into Dante. Aristotle, whom Dante avowedly follows here, regards the human soul as a microcosm, an epitome and summing up of all the faculties of the other orders of animate existence ; and the modern theory of evolution is only a more scientific way of saying the same thing. Through untold ages, it de- clares, man has climbed his painful way up through all lower forms of life, and therefore represents in himself the entire history and evolution of the ' Conv. iii. 2. 212 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII universe. If, then, any man values the higher parts of his being — his sensitive and intellectual souls, as Dante would say — so lightly as to outrage and fling them away by suicide, he thereby reverses this great process of evolution, and casts himself back to the stage from which he started. In this low vegetative stage, all the customary avenues to the outside world are necessarily closed. The human body is a mysterious system of such avenues, eye, ear, touch, and so on; but the suicide flings the mysterious system away, and with it the power of communica- Losa of Speech, tion. Dante indicates this by the difficulty of speech under which these vegetative souls labour. First of all, he tells us it is only when the Harpies tear off a leaf or branch that they can utter their grief at all : ' The Harpies feeding then upon its leaves Do pain create, and for the pain a window. 'i Even then the utterance is far from easy. For ex- ample, the speech of the ' great thorn,' when Dante tore off a twig, is compared to the hissing of a green brand in the fire : As out of a green brand, that is on fire At one of the ends, and from the other drips And hisses with the wind that is escaping ; So from that broken splint came forth together Both words and blood. ^ When we remember that Pier delle Vigne was a poet and orator, this impediment in his power of speech becomes much more significant. In short, instead of escaping from the sorrows to get rid 1 Inf. xiii. 101, 102. ' Inf. xlii. 40-44. VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 213 of which they threw ofp the flesh, these suicides find CANTO XIII themselves caught and imprisoned in another form of body, which affords their sorrows not even the relief of utterance.^ The Harpies that brood in the branches of this symbolism of weird forest have given rise to many interpreta- * a^^P*^- tions. It is evident that Dante had the Third Book of the ^neid much in his mind when writing this Canto : we have seen how he drew from it the idea of souls turned into trees, and now from the same source he takes this symbol of the Harpies. There Virgil tells how they drove the Trojans from the Strophades, two small islands in the Ionian Sea. The word Harpies means 'snatchers,' hence they have been regarded as symbols of the sin itself — Suicide, the snatcher-away of life. Others take them to mean the self-will that leads to self-destruction, despair, haunting memories, remorse of conscience; and there may be truth in all of these conjectures. I prefer, however, to take them more generally as representing any and every unworthy cause that drives men to fling life away. In Greek myth- ology the Harpies are storm-winds which act as ministers of Divine vengeance, mysteriously snatch- ing offenders away out of the visible world. In moral equivalent, they represent the storm-winds of human passion which sweep men violently out of life. 'Spiritually,' says Buskin in The Queen of 1 Comp. Purg. xxx. 13-15, where the Eesurrection is spoken of as the re-clothing of the voice with the body : As the Blessed at' the last trump Shall straightway rise up each one from hia cavern, The re-clothed TOice singing Hallelujah. A various reading, however, gives /ZesA for voice. 214 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII the Air, ' they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and overshadowing, discon- tented and lamenting, meagre and insane, — spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and un- appeased famine, and unsatisfied hope. . . . Under- stand that, once, deeply — any who have ever known the weariness of vain desires ; the pitiful, unconquer- able, coiling and recoiling, and self-involved returns of some sickening famine and thirst of the heart : — and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy Celseno's shriek from her rock ; and why, in the seventh circle of the "Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the trees that are the souls of suicides.' Now the point of vital importance is that suicide is no real escape from these Harpies, the storm- winds of passion and misery and vain desire. ' In that sleep of death what dreams may come I ' — dreams more terrifying and hopeless than those from which men flee. In the Sixth Book of the ^neid (434-437) Virgil says -^neas saw the souls of suicides in Hades suffering a doom so terrible that they would gladly exchange it for ' the poverty and hard toils' of earth, frona. which they had been so madly eager to escape. Dante evidently had the same conviction, that suicide but intensifies the pain from which men flee. The Harpies of passion which drove them out of this world go with them into the other, and brood for ever on the branches of the ruined and dishonoured soul. The old agony is there, pent up within the hard bark of the tree ; and the only VIOLENT AGAINST THEMSELVES 215 respite is a momentary relief of utterance when the CANTO Xlll Harpies of their old passions, feeding upon their leaves, rouse them from their brooding wordless grief into a wilder anguish. In the case of the Squanderers, it is obvious that death has proved no real escape ; they are pursued by the hounds of their own terrors, and call aloud for a second death to save them from the first. Nothing is more terribly significant than Lano's wild cry as the ghostly pack swept after him, ' This time, haste thee, haste thee, Death ! ' Once before he had sought it, and, behold, it was no sanctuary from his miseries ; and his doom now is to seek for ever, and for ever fail to find.^ One last punishment is reserved for the day of Bodies of final Judgment. What of these suicides in the K^ectiol? Resurrection? — will the bodies which they impiously flung away be restored to them, as to others ? Pier delle Vigne replies that they will not, ' for 'tis not just to have what one casts off.' It has been ques- tioned whether Dante is strictly orthodox in this: it is certainly the doctrine of the Church that at the Resurrection every soul will be reinvested with its own body. The only suicide, however, to whom Dante will allow this is Cato, who destroyed himself for the sake of liberty.^ And, indeed, at first sight this seems a great relief. Dante has already dis- cussed the question whether the reunion of soul and body will increase the pain of the lost, and has answered it in the afiirmative. Will it not then be 1 Hev. ix. 6 : 'And in thpse days shall men seek death, and shall not find it ; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.' 2 Purg. i. 73-75, where Virgil speaks of Cato's body as ' the vesture which at the great day shall be so bright.' 216 THE FOREST OF SUICIDES CANTO XIII a mitigation of the punishment of suicides, that for them there is no such reunion? No, replies Dante, the pain only takes another form. Like all other souls of the dead, they must return for their bodies at the Resurrection, but not to be re-clothed in them. ' Here,' says Pier delle Vigne, * Here shall we drag them and through the dismal Forest our bodies shall suspended be, Each to the thorn of its tormented shade,' ^ — tormented, obviously, by the eternal presence of its own self-murdered corpse. It is the idea so much insisted on already: in every possible direction the suicide's hope of escape is utterly frustrated. The burden of the flesh which he could not bear for the few short years of earth will hang heavy on the soul for ever, and there will be none to deliver from ' the body of this death.' 1 Inf. xiii. 106-108. CHAPTER XIV CIRCLE VII.— THE VIOLENT AGAINST GOD, NATURE ANB ART We have passed through two of the three concen- CANTOS trie Rings or Belts which form the Circle of Violence : ^•^^^^^• the River of Blood in which are plunged the Violent against their Neighbours, and the dark Forest, the oircie of trees of which are the souls of Suicides, the Violent jiSrd'iuig. against Themselves. We now reach the central Ring, in which are punished the Violent against God, t Nature, and Art. When the travellers come to the inner edge of the Forest, they see a vast Plain of The Plain of Sand, as dry and thick, says Dante, as the Libyan '"^ ' desert across which Cato of Utica made his terrible march of six days with the remnant of Pompey's army, after the battle of Pharsalia in 48 B.c. As the River of Blood and the Forest of Suicides are typical of the sins there punished, so this dry barren Sand- Waste is symbolic of the lives of the Violent against God and His offspring. Nature and Art ; such Violence turns human life into a desert ' which rejecteth every plant.' On this barren plain Dante saw ' a horrible art of justice ' : a rain of ' dilated flakes of fire ' was and Bain of falling on it, silently and steadily, ' like snow among the Alps upon a windless day,' and as it fell the dry 217 218 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS sandy soil broke into flame like tinder, ' for doubling 78 ■ of the pain.' Under this rain of fire, pitiless, per- sistent, inevitable, herds of naked weeping souls suffered their eternal doom, according to their special form of the sin. Blasphemers against God lay stretched upon the burning ground with faces up- turned to the fiery storm which the Heaven they had defied now poured down upon them. Sodom- ites, the Violent against Nature, driven by their own unnatural passions, ran about perpetually, not daring to rest for fear of greater pain. Usurers, the Violent against Art, were sitting crouched up, with eyes bent upon the sand, the symbol of their own barren, unproductive lives. The only allevia- tion allowed is what Dante calls 'the dance of miserable hands,' flinging off, ' now here, now there,' the fresh fire-flakes as they fall. The Dykes of Not daring to venture on the Sandy Plain for fear of the fire, Virgil and Dante skirt the edge of it to the left, keeping along the margin of the Forest of Suicides. After a conversation with one of the Blasphemers, they come at last to a place where a little rivulet of blood gushes from the wood, ' whose redness,' says Dante, ' still makes me shudder.' It is, as we shall see, the overflow of Phlegethon the River of Blood, and is the symbol of the sins of hot passion punished in this central region of the Inferno. Flowing across the Plain to its centre, it plunges in one wild leap down a vast precipice to the Circle of Fraud beneath. At the part of its course across the sand, it has two peculiarities. One is that its bottom and sides have become petrified. VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 219 thus forming a stony channel which keeps it from CANTOS XIV -XVII. spreading over the Plain and losing itself in the sand. ' 73 For some reason, perhaps mere love of definiteness, Dante is very exact about the size of the walls of this channel. He compares them to the sea-dykes which the Flemings had built between Bruges and Wissant, a well-known mediaeval port near Calais, to keep out the waves, and to the walls by which the Paduans protected their houses and villages from the floods of the Brenta — ' albeit not so lofty nor so thick.' On the level top of one of these stone margins the poet and his guide walked to the centre of the Sandy Waste. It is possible that all this is only a poetic device to provide a pathway for the travellers ; but if the stone channel has any symbolic signifi- cance, it perhaps indicates the petrifying power which sins of hot-blooded violence have upon the human heart.^ The other peculiarity of the River in this part of its course is that it sends forth a smoke or mist, which quenches the flakes of fire that rain down upon the sand. This also may be nothing more than an ingenious device to get the travellers across the Plain unscorched by the falling flames; but from the cast of Dante's mind it is much likelier that some symbolism is meant, though it is extremely dif&cult to say what. If we connect it with the explanation of the rivers of Hell which Virgil presently gives, this mist rising from one of them may mean the power which the mere contemplation of such floods of sin and suffering has to quench in a 1 Comp. Inf. xviii. 1-3. The whole of Malebolge is ' of stone and of an iron colour' in symbol of the hardness of heart of the Fraudulent. 220 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS man'a heart the sins of this Plain, and therefore the 78 ■ flames which are their punishment. For, as we shall see, the rivers are composed of the tears which out- rage and wrong have wrung from countless genera- tions, and the mere sight of such ' waters of afliction' may well wrap a man in a mist of pity and grief, which will effectually quench all desire for the sins which are their source. The Old Han We now come to the mystical account of the four The toage infernal rivers which Virgil gives to Dante as they of Time. stand beside this blood-red stream, the most notable thing, he says, that they have yet seen in Hell. Within Mount Ida in Crete, ' once glad with waters and with leaves,' but now ' deserted as a thing out- worn,' stands erect ' a great Old Man,' his back turned to Damietta in Egypt, his face gazing at Borne ' as if it were his mirror.' ' His head is fashioned of refined gold And of pure silver are the arms and breast, Then he is of brass as far down as the fork ; From that point downward all is chosen iron, Save that the right foot is of kiln-baked clay, And more he stands on that than on the other. '^ With the exception of the golden head, each part is cleft by a fissure through which tears drop into the cavern, and thence fall into the abyss of Hell : • From rock to rock they f aU into this valley ; Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon they form ; Then downward go along this narrow sluice Unto that point where is no more descending ; They form Cocytus.'^ ' Inf. xlv. 106-111. » Inf. xiv. 115-119. VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 221 The interpretation is far from easy. Crete seems CANTOS to be chosen for several reasons. In that Third Book ^^g of the JEneid, so often alluded to in this part of the „ ^ "77" '^ Crete, the Inferno, Virgil speaks of Crete as the nursery of the heathen Gar- Trojan race and therefore of the Roman, and this is probably one reason why 'the great Old Man' is gazing towards Eome as to his mirror.^ But in addition to this, Crete was regarded as the cradle of the human race as a whole, situated as it is in the centre of the then known world, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In short, it was the heathen Garden of Eden, and Dante, here as in so many other places, easily adapts the Greek mythology to his own uses. It was under Saturn, its king in the Golden Age, that ' the world of old was chaste.' Then too it was ' glad with waters and with leaves,' in allusion to the fertility for which Crete was once famous. The change from that Golden Age, when it was as ' Eden the garden of God,' to the sad degenerate days when Dante saw it sitting in the sea ' a wasted land ' and ' a thing outworn,' is to his mind an image of the way in which the sins of the race reduce the world which God made very good to a barren wilderness, like the Sandy Waste beside which he was standing. Of the ■ great Old Man,' a multitude of interpreta- tions have been given, with most of which it is not necessary to trouble ourselves. There are, however, two leading views which are not necessarily in any real antagonism : it is quite conceivable that Dante had both before his mind. All agree, of course, in tracing the image to the dream of Nebuchadnezzar I ^n. iii. 104-106. 222 THE FIERY SAND- WASTE CANTOS in Daniel (ii. 32, 33) : ' This image's head was of fine xrv -XVII . 78 gol the Crusades as a mistaken effort to turn the stream of history back to its source in the East. Comp. Bishop Berkeley's lines : 'Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time's noblest ofi'spring is the last.' The fifth act is one Dante could scarcely foresee— America. VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 223 which ended in the division of the Eastern and CANTOS xrv -xvn. Western empires. The legs of iron point to the end- '78 less wars of the two empires. The " right foot " of clay is the "Western empire, which no longer rests on a firm foundation, the last hope of a strong empire having perished with the Hohenstauf en dynasty, but on the crumbling support of a purely selfish policy, leading, as it did, to corruption in both Church and Empire, and to internal dissensions in every city in Italy. . . . One notes the terrible grandeur of the symbol. The sorrows and the tears of men, consequent on the gradual deterioration of the Empire, are the source from which flow, one out of the other, the rivers of Hell, the woes of the condemned. Cocytus, as the river of wailing, receives them all.' There can be little doubt that some such thought was in Dante's mind, for it certainly fits in with his general political theories. One might, indeed, suggest, with many of the older commentators, that the legs represent the Church and the Empire, rather than the two empires, Eastern and Western, the right foot of baked clay being the Church. Although mankind leans most upon it, it is by far the weaker support, and the clay may crumble at any moment. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Dante was thinking only of the Boman Empire and the Church. He knew that men were sinning and suffering long before the Empire existed, and that the sins and tears of every generation, except the first golden one, must find their way down to this ' lowest swamp of all the universe.' The ' great Old Man ' is therefore the image of Time, the gradual deterioration of the 224 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS human race as a whole from its Golden Age when XIV. -XVII. 78 ' the world was chaste,' down through the successive stages of its history, until it has reached its lowest degradation, resting most upon its right foot which is clay. If, as seems likely, this right foot is the Church, we can see to what an almost hopeless pass this world has come in Dante's judgment, when that which ought to be the strongest support of the whole body of mankind was a foot of crumbling clay. The Four As pointed out in a previous chapter, the four and Lethe. ' rivers of Hell, thus formed by the tears of Time, seem to be in reality one and the same river, changing both name and appearance as it drains down through the lost world. They are the infernal counterpart of the fourfold river of Eden, or perhaps of the two- fold river of the new Eden on the top of Mount Purgatory. The great moral idea which they repre- sent to Dante's mind is that there is not a tear shed on earth through man's inhumanity to man, which does not flow back in rivers of agony upon those who wrung them from their fellows. Not a tear is lost, every one has to be paid for, — yes, the very tears of the penitent and forgiven. When Dante passes beyond Oocy tus, the last river of Hell, and climbs the dark passage on the other side which leads up to ' the bright world,' he hears the sound of a rivulet which he cannot see because it has eaten a passage for itself in the stone — in all probability the tears that fall from another mountain than Ida in Crete, the Mount of Purification. The sins and tears even of the penitent and forgiven flow back to the infernal source from which they came. VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 225 Turning now to the wretched inhabitants of this CANTOS barren land, let us see once more what their punish- '^g ments are. Violence against God takes three forms. „. ,~" ^ " Tno Violent There is, first, direct defiance and blasphemy of the against csofl, Most High, and sinners of this kind are flung upon the sand, with upturned faces, thus enduring the double pain of the fiery rain above and the burning soil beneath. Violence against Nature — which is in- nature, direct violence against God, whose child Nature is — is punished by a perpetual unrest : the Sodomites are kept running over the burning sand, and if one dares to stop for a moment, the penalty is to lie for a hundred years without liberty to cast off the falling flames. Violence against Art or Work — a still more Art. indirect form of Violence against God, since Art is His grandchild ' — is Usury ; and the Usurers sit under the fiery storm, crouching as of old over their money- bags, and gazing for ever at the "Waste of Sand, the emblem of their own barren and wasted lives. It is obvious that although, as Dante says, these FuniBbmenti three classes are set under ' a diverse law,' there are ail : certain elements of punishment common to them all. "'*'"'*"•■ One is the barrenness of which the sandy desert is the symbol. The conditions of fruitfulness are humble submission to God, obedience to His ordained order of Nature, and due fulfilment of His great law of Art or Work, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ' ; and to defy those conditions is to reduce all life to a desert. Dante warns us that to persist in this defiance for a lifetime is to doom ourselves to the continuance of the same empty, profitless, barren existence in the world to come. We ploughed the P 226 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS sand here, and the sand becomes our eternal portion 78 ' — without grass or flower or tree to refresh the eye. No one can tell how flat, barren, and arid may stretch the desert wastes of the soul that has spent its earthly years in defiance of the very conditions of fruitful- ness which God has ordained. Bain of Fire. The fiery rain represents the intolerable anguish of this empty barren existence, which has thus violated the natural laws of a fruitful and happy life. It is suggested, of course, by the ' brimstone and fire' which God rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah, — Sodomy being one of the sins here punished. Dante is not thinking of literal material fire. If, as he firmly believed, we are made to find our peace and joy in God and in His ordinances of Nature and Work, it follows that long and per- sistent defiance and violation of this creative purpose must produce in the soul a tormenting, burning, inescapable pain. Nor is it merely the pain of un- fruitfulness : it is also the sense of the direct and immediate anger and judgment of Heaven falling on the soul. In other parts of the Inferno God has, so to speak, delegated His judgment to intermediate means and agents; but here He keeps in His own bands the doom of those who have directly defied Himself. The Blasphemer, for example, measures himself directly against the Almighty, intend- ing, as Aquinas says, to 'wound His honour'; and this direct striking at God recoils on the soul in that burning sense of His direct and immediate anger, which Dante represents under the form of the rain of fire from Heaven, VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 227 A third punishment which is common to the three CANTOS xrv -xvn classes of sinners here, is the disfigurement which '73 the fiery rain works on face and form. Dante tells Dijn^jjl^nient ua that the face of Brunetto Latini, which he remem- of goni. bered gratefully on earth as ' dear, and good, and fatherly,' was now so scorched and ' baked ' that he had difficulty in recognizing it. Of a certain troop of unnatural sinners he exclaims : Ah me I what wounds I saw upon their limbs, Becent and ancient by the flames burnt in ! It pains me still but to remember it.^ Dante's meaning seems to be that while some sins /■. register themselves on the body in this present life in scars and wounds and features brutified, there are others which leave no such visible trace. On earth, for instance, Ser Brunetto's kind and fatherly coun- tenance showed no sign of the unnatural lust which in the end carried him down to this Circle ; neverthe- less, now that the veil of the flesh is stripped away, the marks of its scorching fires are only too visible upon his naked soul. So also with the others. As we shall see, many of them were great soldiers, statesmen, and men of letters, who bore in this world a dignified and honourable front, which gave no hint to their fellows of the degrading, disfiguring passions within. These become visible only when /C death strips the soul to utter nakedness. It reminds us of Plato's myth of judgment in the Gorgias. In the time when Cronos was king of the gods, and even under Zeus, judgment was passed on men > Inf. xvi. 10-12. 228 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS while still clothed in flesh. The consequence was ^^^'vf^^' that the judge, being unable to discern the soul infallibly through this clothing, sometimes erred and sent men to the wrong places in the other world. To remedy this, Zeus ordained that judg- ment be postponed till after death, for * when a man is stripped of the body, all the natural or acquired affections of the soul are laid open to view. And when they come to the judge, as those from Asia come to Ehadamanthus, he places them near him and inspects them quite impartially, not knowing whose the soul is : perhaps he may lay hands on the soul of the great king, or some other king or poten- tate, who has no soundness in him, but his soul is marked with the whip, and is full of the prints and scars of perjuries and crimes with which each action ' has stained him, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and has no straightness, because he has lived without truth. Him Bhadamantbus be- holds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment which he deserves.' ^ This contrast between the fair appearance of the flesh and the scarred deformity of the soul within, is one of the leading ideas of this punishment, — between the countenance of Ser Brunetto as Dante remembers it on earth, ' dear, and good, and fatherly,' and the countenance of his naked soul as he sees it in this Circle, baked and scorched almost past recognition by the fires of the ' Gorgias, 523-525. VIOLENT AGAINST GOD 229 unnatural passions whicli here he concealed behind CANTOS the kindly venerable face. -^^-yf ^^• These three penalties — the barren sand, the fiery „ ,7 — , _^ "' FunlBbments rain, and the disfigurement of the soul — are common peculiar to to the three classes of sinners here tormented ; but in addition, each has other punishments peculiar to itself, according to the special form of its sin. Take first the Violent against God directly, defiers and violent blasphemers of the Almighty. Dante tells us that"*"^"^ they are far fewer in number than those who are running round the Plain, that is, the Sodomites. The reason is obvious. Not many are bold enough to give a direct defiance to Heaven. 'The blas- phemer,' says Aquinas, ' intends to wound the honour of God,'^ but few have the reckless evil courage necessary for a sin so desperate and high-handed. On the other hand, multitudes who shrink from this open defiance of God live daily in a secret defiance, by the violation of that great natural order of things which He has ordained. Open and direct blasphemers and defiers, says Dante, suffer a double pain. Flung on their backs upon the ground, they endure the burning sand beneath and the fiery wrath of Heaven on their upturned faces. This was the attitude of their faces when they lifted them to Heaven in wild and blasphemous defiance, and now they are compelled to maintain it for ever. In one important point, however, their general attitude is wofuUy changed. In the old blasphemous days they stood and defied their Maker: now they are flung upon the ground, beaten down by the storm ^ Summa, ii-ii. q. xiii. a. 3. 230 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS of His indignation, and compelled to feel through- 78 " out eternity their absolute impotence against the Almightiness which they so insanely challenged. Now at last they recognize their madness, and bewail it in loud lamentations. We are told that they had 'their tongues more loosed to pain' than the other classes of sinners on the sand. It may be because their pain was greater; but the more pro- bable reason is that Dante wishes to indicate the cowardice which commonly lies at the root of blas- phemy. To the man himself it may seem an act of magnificent and almost superhuman courage, when he stands up before high Heaven and lifts his face in blasphemy against his Maker ; but, in nine cases out of ten, it is not courage but bravado. The moment the Power he has defied casts him to the ground and storms over him, the thin veil of bravado is swept away and the coward beneath screams aloud in his terror. It is perhaps for this reason that Dante passes all the others, and singles capaneus. out for notice one soul who is no coward. As they are skirting the edge of the Forest of Suicides to avoid the fiery rain, Dante asks Virgil, • Who is that great one who seems not to heed The fire, and lies disdainful and contorted, So that the rain seems not to ripen him ? ' ^ Before Virgil can reply, this disdainful soul, per- ceiving that they are speaking of him, answers for himself, 'What I was living, that am I dead!' It is Capaneus, one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes. Having blasphemously challenged the gods » Jri/.xiv. 46-48. VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 231 to come to the rescue of the city, Jupiter struck him CANTOS with a thunderbolt as he was scaling the walls. So '^g indomitable was his spirit that even then he refused to fall, but remained leaning against the walls of the city till he died. Now, indeed, he can stand no longer, the storm of fire beats him to the ground and keeps him there ; but it cannot break his spirit, or wring from him one cowardly cry of agony. Still he hurls defiance at Jove and challenges him to do his worst : he may weary out Vulcan and all his smiths in Etna forging bolts to hurl at him with all his might, but never would he give him the satisfac- tion of 'a joyous vengeance.' At first, indeed, we cannot help feeling a touch of admiration for this strong indomitable soul who refuses to cower and whimper like the rest, but Virgil rebukes our admira- tion. It is strength, but it is not admirable : such final and invincible hardening of the soul against God in bitter defiance recoils in torture on the man himself, and, as Virgil says, more than any punish- ment from without, fills up the measure of his pain: < O Gapaneus, in that is not extinguished Thine arrogance, thou punished art the more ; Not any torment, saving thine own rage, Would be unto thy fury pain complete.' i Turning now to the Violent against Nature, we me violent find many points of perhaps the greatest and most ^^e! painful interest in the Inferno. The narrative brings us into contact for the most part with well-known Florentines of Dante's day and of the generation 1 Inf. xiv. 63-66. 232 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS immediately preceding, so that any adequate under- 78 ' standing of the passage involves some knowledge of the contemporary history of the city. Dante tells us that, when Virgil and he had walked on the stone dyke of the Kiver of Blood so far that they had quite lost sight of the Forest of Suicides, they encountered a troop of Sodomites running alongside the hank in the opposite direction, their faces and limbs scarred and scorched with the fiery rain. As they hurry past, they peer curiously at the two strangers as men do at one another under the dubious light of a new moon, and 'sharpening their eyebrows' as an old tailor does at the needle's eye : an allusion perhaps, as some think, to the way in which this sin Bnmetto loves the darkness. Suddenly one of the souls, recognizing Dante, seizes the hem of his garment, crying, • What a marvel ! ' In spite of his scorched countenance, Dante knew him, and, bending his own face down to his, gave a cry of dismay and grief, 'Are you here, Ser Brunetto?' It is, as we have seen, Brunetto Latini, to whom Dante pays a great debt of affectionate reverence and gratitude : ' If my entreaty wholly were fulfilled,' Replied I to him, ' not yet would you be In banishment from human nature placed : For in my mind is fixed, and touches now My heart, the dear and good paternal image Of you, when in the world, from hour to hour. You taught me how man makes himself eternal ; And how much I am grateful, while I live Behoves that in my tongue should be discerned.' ^ It seems impossible now to discover what exactly » Inf. XV. 79-87. 78 VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 233 it is that lies behind these lines. The view formerly CANTOS held that Brunetto Latini was Dante's schoolmaster or tutor, is now generally abandoned. Mr. Toynbee declares it impossible, ' since he was about fifty-five when Dante was born'; but there seems no great impossibility about it when we remember that he lived till 1294, twenty-nine years after the poet's birth. In any case, it is obvious that Dante held him in the most grateful affection and reverence for having taught him ' how man makes himself eternal,' whether in the sense of rising into the eternal spiritual life, or, more probably, of gaining the lower eternity of fame. This teacher of Dante was one of the best-known men of his day in Florence. By pro- fession he was, like Dante's father, a notary, and it is to this the title ' Ser ' refers.^ He took a prominent part in public affairs, as ambassador, secretary to the Florentine government, prior, and one of the public orators of the city. • His influence and autho- rity with the Florentines,' saya Toynbee, ' are attested by the fact that his name appears in no less than thirty-five public documents (between October 21, 1282, and July 22, 1292) as having been consulted by the government on various important matters, and for the most part it is recorded that his advice was followed.' Villani's notice of his death is interesting as showing that he was regarded as the teacher and guide, not of Dante alone, but of the whole city of Florence : ' In the said year 1294 there died in Flor- ence a worthy citizen whose name was M. Brunetto > Vernon says : 'Ser is the shortened form o£ sere, for which modem usage has substituted signore, formerly a title of nobility and of superiority.' 234 THE FIERY SAND- WASTE CANTOS Latini, who was a great philosopher, and was a 78 " perfect master in rhetoric, understanding both how to speak well and how to write well. And he it was which commented upon the rhetoric of TuUy, and made the good and useful book called "The Trea- sure," and " The Little Treasure," and " The Key to the Treasure," and many other books in philosophy, and concerning vices and virtues. And he was secretary of our commonwealth. He was a worldly man, but we have made mention of him because it was he who was the beginner and master in refin- ing the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide and rule our republic according to policy.'^ The 'Tesoro' or 'Treasure' here named was Latini's greatest work, and that on which, in his own opinion, his fame rested, for just as he leaves Dante he says : ' Commended unto thee be my " Tesoro," In which I stUl live, and no more I ask.' ^ It was an encyolopssdia of history, ethics, and rhe- toric, Written in French, and undoubtedly used by Dante as one of his authorities. Ser Brunetto, being forbidden to rest for a moment on pain of greater punishment, begs leave to escort Dante a little way upon his journey; and * VUlani, vill. 10. 2 Inf. xy. 119, 120. ' The Italians,' says Lowell, ' claim humor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that passage where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recom- mend his Tesoro to his former pupil. There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but his own damnation. We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of Dante's.' VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 235 the poet, not daring to descend to the plain, walks CANTOS • • XIV —XVII on with his head bent towards his old friend as 'yg in reverence. Brunetto then asks how he came hither before his last day, and who is his guide. Dante's reply is interesting, because there is an un- doubted reference to another of Brunette's works, the • Tesoretto ' or ' Little Treasure ' : ' Up there above us in the life serene,' I answered him, ' I lost me in a valley, Or ever yet my age had been completed. But yestermorn I turned my back upon it ; This one appeared to me, returning thither, And homeward leadeih me along this road.' ^ The very form of this reply cannot but have recalled to Brunetto's mind his own poem, the •Tesoretto,' which is the narrative of a similar pilgrimage. To quote Longfellow's note : ' Ser Brunettd, returning from an embassy to King Alphonso of Spain, meets on the plain of Boncesvalles a student of Bologna, riding on a bay mule, who informs him that the Guelfs have been banished from Florence. Whereupon Ser Brunetto, plunged in meditation and sorrow, loses the high-road and wanders in a wondrous forest. Here he discovers the august and gigantic figure of Nature, who relates to him the creation of the world, and gives him a banner to protect him through the forest, in which he meets with no adventures, but with the Virtues and Vices, Philosophy, Fortune, Ovid, and the God of Love, and sundry other char- acters. . . . He then emerges from the forest, and confesses himself to the Monks of Montpellier ; after > Inf. XT. 4fl-M. 236 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS XIV.-XVII, 78 Brmetto's Propbecy concerning Dante. which he goes back into the forest again, and suddenly finds himself on the summit of Olympus.' In this poem he speaks against the very sin for which he is condemned to this Circle, and admits that he was 'a little wee bit worldly,' as Dr. Moore trans- lates ' mondanetto,' the playful diminutive coined by Ser Brunetto to describe his own character. I He then proceeds to encourage Dante in his pilgrim- ' age: he has but to follow his star to reach 'the [ glorious port.' He warns him, however, that his good deeds will make him enemies of ' That ungrateful and malignant people Which of old time from Fiesole descended, And smacks still of the mountain and the granite.'^ He tells him also to cleanse himself of Floren- tine avarice, envy, and pride; and to hold himself aloof from both the parties that will strive to gain him, Blacks and Whites. He winds up with a warn- ing to 'the beasts of Fiesole' to make litter of themselves, but not of the plant, 'in which revives the holy seed of the Romans.' The reference is to the tradition that Florence was founded after the Romans had destroyed Fiesole and compelled the remnant of its inhabitants to live in the new city. Dante is here claiming his descent from the nobler Roman stock, and protesting against the treatment he had received from 'the beasts of Fiesole,' the more rude and savage part of the population. Villani takes the same view of the two sections: 'It is not to be wondered at that the Florentines are always at war and strife among themselves, / ' Inf. XT. 61-63. VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 237 being born and descended from two peoples so CANTOS contrary and hostile and different in habits as were '^g the noble Bomans in their virtue and the rude Fiesolans fierce in war.'^ Dante notes Ser Brunetto's warning carefully: it is the third he has received since he entered the Inferno, and he will keep all three to be glossed by a Lady who can do it, if he reach her. Meantime, he declares himself ready for every fate : ' Therefore let Fortune turn her wheel around As it may please her, and the churl his mattock,'^ As they proceed, Dante asks Ser Brunette to some of name some of the highest and most noted of his companioM. companions, and receives the extraordinary answer that they were all, like himself, famous and learned men: ' Know then, in sum, that all of them were clerks. And men of letters great and of great fame. In the world tainted with the selfsame sin.'^ He names only three of them. Against the first, Priscian the great grammarian, no evidence of guilt exists, and it has been thought that Dante names him simply as typical of teachers of the young, who, as a class, had an evil reputation for this sin. It is entirely unlikely, however, that Dante would thus brand an innocent man with infamy; the probability is that he followed some story or tradition accepted in his day. The second is Francesco d'Accorso, pro- fessor of Civil Law at Bologna, son of the famous jurist, Accursius, who wrote the Great Gloss on the 1 Villani, i. 38. 2 Inf. xv. 95, 96. s Inf. xv. 106-108, 238 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS Code of Justinian. At the invitation of Edward t '78 " he came to England and lectured for some time at Oxford, The last soul mentioned is spoken of with far greater contempt as ' scurf ' : ' That one, who by the servant of the servants Prom Arno was transferred to Bacchiglione, Where he has left his sin-exhausted nerves.'^ 'The servant of servants' is Pope Boniface Vin., whose duty it was to depose a bishop whose life was a scandal to the Church, instead of transferring him to a new see. The name of this shameless sinner was Andrea de' Mozzi, bishop of Florence from 1287 to 1295, in which year, on account of his evil fame, he was translated to the see of Yicenza, near the river Bacchiglione. ' What is most interesting about him,' as Sibbald says, 'is that he was Dante's chief pastor during his early manhood, and is consigned by him to the same disgraceful circle of Inferno V as his beloved master, Brunette Latini — a terrible evidence of the corruption of life among the church- men as well as the scholars of the thirteenth cen- tury.' One can imagine the shock to his faith in human nature it must have been when Dante dis- covered that these two men were polluted with this shameful vice. The one had taught him 'how to make himself eternal' here on earth; it was the duty of the other to teach him ' how to make him- self eternal ' in heaven : and bitter indeed must have been the discovery that teacher and pastor alike were being consumed by the fires of degrading and unnatural passions. Ser Brunetto has time to tell 1 Inf. XV. HO-XW. VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 239 no more : a smoke upon the Plain warns him that CANTOS people are approaching with whom he was forbidden ts to consort, and he suddenly darts away to rejoin his own gang, as swiftly as the winner of the race for the Green Cloth at Verona. The two pilgrims pursue their journey on the top The Human of the dyke until there strikes on their ears the first reverberation of the River of Blood, like the hum of bees, as it falls over the great precipice that leads to the next Circle. Suddenly, from a troop of sinners on the Plain three shades separate themselves, and come running towards Dante, beseeching him to stop. They are Florentines, and have recognized him by his dress as coming from their 'depraved city.' Dante is alnaost overcome with pity at the sight of the wounds which the fire has burnt in upon their limbs ; and Virgil bids him wait and be courteous to them, — but for the fire, it were fitter that he should haste to them than they to him. The three shades then had recourse to a singular device in order to hold a conversation with Dante. For- bidden to stand still on pain of a great increase of their punishment, instead of turning back with him as Brunetto Latini did, the three laid hold of each other like wrestlers, formed themselves into a ' wheel,' and kept whirling round on the same spot, each directing his eyes to the poet in such wise that, as he puts it, their feet and their necks journeyed in opposite directions. It is uncertain what symbolic significance this revolving human wheel may have ; it may be nothing more than an ingenious device to escape the punishment of standing still. If anything 240 THE FIERY SAND- WASTE CANTOS further is meant, perhaps Dante wished to indicate XI v. -XVII 78 ' that the three had been joined in a similar com- panionship on earth in the unnatural vices which consigned them to this Circle. All three had been greatly distinguished in war and council a generation earlier. The least re- nowned is he who here acts as spokesman, Jacopo Jacopo Rusticucci, a man sprung from the people, whose prudence and courage gave him great weight in the public affairs of the city. He lays the blame of his perdition on his ' savage wife.' The second is OuidoGuerra. a much more distinguished man, Guido Guerra, of the powerful family of the Conti Guidi, whose great castles and strongholds are scattered everywhere throughout the Oasentino and Romagna. He is called here the 'grandson of the good Gualdrada,' daughter of that Bellincione de' Ravignani, of whom Dante's forefather, Cacciaguida, speaks with great respect in the Paradiso} His name Guerra (War) is said to have been due to his devotion to a soldier's life from youth to old age. Though his family were Imperialists, he joined the Guelph party and fought against Manfred at the battle of Benevento in 1265. In the year 1260 he was the head of the party of the nobles of Florence who did their utmost to dissuade the citizens from the expedition against Siena, which ended in the disastrous defeat of Montaperti and the wholesale expulsion of the Guelphs. The spokes- man for the nobles on that occasion was the third Tegghiaio shade in this 'wheel,' Tegghiaio Aldobrandi of the Adimari family, ' a wise knight and valiant in arms, ' Par. XV. 112; xvi. 94. VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 241 and of great authority,' as Villani characterizes him. CANTOS After his speech against the expedition, one of the '^g ' popolani ' taunted him with cowardice, whereupon Tegghiaio dared him in the day of battle to follow where he would lead. Dante says his ' voice ought to have been accepted in the world above.' The three shades raake eager inquiry concerning their native city. A soul had recently come from it, a certain Guglielmo Borsiere, who had increased GngUeimo their torment by his account of the state of Florence. They beg Dante, therefore, to tell them if courtesy and valour abide in it as of old. The poet can only confirm their worst fears: the ancient nobility of character is dead, new inhabitants have come, up- starts who have made ' sudden gains,' and the result is pride and extravagance which fill the city with misery.^ The three, who love their country still even in Hell, look at each other sadly as men who accept the unwelcome truth; and then, after begging Dante to speak of them to the people when he sees again ' the beauteous stars,' the ' wheel ' breaks, and the swift legs seem wings as the three vanish in the rain of fire, ere one could say Amen. This is a long story, but it is necessary to have Dante's it before us in order to see clearly Dante's estimate Estimate of of this sin. It is, it must be confessed, with a*'^*^'''" feeling of amazement that we watch the reverence which he pays to men guilty of so unnatural > Comp. Conv. iv. 12 : ' And what else daily endangers and destroys cities, countries, individual persons, so much as the new amassing of riches by some man? The which amassing discovers new desires, to the fulfilment of which it is not possible to come without injury to some one.' Q 242 THE FIERY SAND- WASTE CANTOS a vice. He seems to have no abhorrence of it, XIV,— XVII 78 ' such, for example, as he felt in the case of Filippo Argenti in the Circle of Wrath. Even Virgil, who represents Reason, and who warmly embraced Dante for his indignation against Argenti, has not one word of reprobation for these more shameful sinners. On the contrary, he tells him they are worthy of his courtesy, and that it were more be- coming he should run to them than they to him. Had the fiery rain allowed, Dante would have thrown himself down among them, and he thinks his Teacher would have permitted it. His reverence for Ser Brunetto is seen in every word and gesture ; and his admiration for the three Florentines who formed the ' wheel ' is almost as great. He assures them that his feeling for them is sorrow, not disdain, and adds : ' I of your city am ; and evermore Your labours and your honoured names I with affection have retraced and heard.' i Now, undoubtedly all this reverence is very per- plexing. For one thing, why did it not prompt him to draw the kindly veil of silence over the sins and frailties of men who had left such honourable names behind them ? As Scartazzini says, ' Brunetto may have been notoriously guilty, but why did Dante play the part of Ham, instead of following the example of Shem and Japheth?'^ But there is a much greater difficulty than this. Is it possible that a man like Dante had no natural disgust for this unnatural sin ? Was he, as some almost hint, oon- 1 Jnf. xvi. 68-60. ' Companion to Dante, p. i31. VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 243 BciouB of a taint of it in himself? Probably the CANTOS XIV — XVIL explanation is, in part, ' that in the thirteenth cen- '^g tury unnatural crimes were so exceedingly prevalent, that men guilty of them did not incur that loathing and horror which they would inspire in modern times; and that Dante, though obliged, from the theological point of view, to brand them as sinners punished for deadly sins, yet would not look upon them, from the human point of view, as men so dishonoured, that he should shrink from consorting with them on terms of friendship.'^ Doubtless there is some truth in this, but it is by no means the whole truth, and we shall miss the deepest lesson of this part of the poem if we explain everything by a difference in the moral standard of the thirteenth century. In reality, Dante has no mercy on this sin. /^ It is a vice, he says, which banishes a man from human nature. But what touches him with a pity which is half -terror is the fact that this degrading and unnatural vice can and does co-exist with the highest gifts of intellect and valour. This union in the same breast of elements so incongruous and incompatible, is a new and dreadful touch of un- naturalness added to all the rest. We feel this unnaturalness when Brunetto denounces the Floren- tines as 'a people avaricious, envious, proud'; and when the souls of the ' wheel ' bewail the decay of ' valour and courtesy ' in their native city : it is like Satan reproving sin. And just this is, to Dante's mind, the horror and the pity of it — this unnatural combination in the same man of high intellect and ' Vernon's Readings, i. 504. 244 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE CANTOS many virtues with a vice which hanishes him from "78 human nature. In these days when it is half expected that education will make the whole world virtuous, our first instinctive thought is that a highly intel- lectual man is, as a matter of course, raised above so low and degrading a vice as that which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah ; yet Dante seems to hint that men of intellect and education lie peculiarly open to this particular sin. Probably, as Plumptre says, his knowledge of several university cities to which he wandered amply justified all he here writes ; ' Roger Bacon speaks of its prevalence in Paris, noting by the way that Louis ix. had banished many foreign teachers as guilty of it. It was the prominent charge brought against the Templars by Philip le Bel. Purvey, in the preface to what is known as Wyklifs Bible, mourns over its prevalence *' at Oxford.' The plain truth seems to be what Dante here insists on — that the highest and the lowest elements of human nature, the intellect of a god and the passions of the brute, lie close together, and that frequently the passions are so violent that they break through every restraint of education and cul- ture. The tree of knowledge jsnotjbhe tree ^_life^ No learning or genius, no valour, or courtesy, or patriotic virtue, can ward off the infernal effects of unnatural passions, once they are allowed to gain the mastery. Dante and Beason personified in Virgil say all they can for these souls : they were scholars, statesmen, soldiers, — kindly, wise, brave, courteous, — public-spirited citizens and lovers of their country ; yet, reverence and love them as they may, they are VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE 245 in no doubt of the inevitable issue of such sins as CANTOS XTV* —XVII they have been guilty of : they change the soul into 'yg a waste of barren sand, they rain down upon it a fiery pain, they scorch its countenance and limbs almost beyond recognition, and they drive their victims on in an unrest which knows no respite. How serious was Dante's view of this sin will be apparent if we compare its punishment with that of Sensuality in the Second Circle. There the souls are tormented with the same restlessness of their own passions, but there are great and significant differences. The agent of their punishment is wind, not fire ; they float on the hurricane instead of toil- ing across a burning sand which slips beneath their feet; and their souls remain undisfigured. The obvious reason for this vast difference in the punish- ments is that in the one case the sin is natural, and in the other unnatural. A sin which violates Nature must produce a far greater disfigurement of soul and a more burning restlessness, than one which is only the excess of a natural power and appetite. CHAPTER XV CIRCLE VII. — THE VIOLENT AGAINST ART, AND THE CASTING AWAY OF THE CORD CANTOS XVI. 91- XVII. 78 The Violent against Art : Vsurers. We have seen the punishments of two classes of the Violent — against God and against Nature ; we come now to those inflicted on the Violent against Art. As explained in a previous chapter^Art means human Work. JDante^ view is that nian in his AvtoT Wprk^ should follow Nature, as Nature follows God ; to sin against Art, therefore, is indirectly to sin against God Himself. The chief sinners in this respect are Usurers, who evade the law of work laid down by God at the beginning, and 'take another way.' After parting with Rusticucci and his companions in the * wheel,' the two pilgrims pursue their journey along the stone wall, and in a little the thunder of the cataract of Phlegethon as it plunges into the abyss of Fraud so deafens their ears that speech is almost impossible. Having reached the edge and called up the Guardian of the abyss, they see the Usurers sitting on the sand at the very verge of the precipice ; and in order that Dante may carry away full knowledge of the Circle he is leaving, Virgil tells him to go and have a look at them, warning him, however, to let his conversation with them be brief. It is obvious that in Dante's moral scheme Usurers, 2iB VIOLENT AGAINST ART 247 the Violent against Art, are worse than either CANTOS Blasphemers or Sodomites, the Violent against God xvil.^78 and Nature. This is indicated by the position in which he has set them ; they are at the very centre of the innermost Eing of the Circle, clustered round the mouth of the abyss that falls to the Circle of Fraud, and almost dropping into its depths. Crossing over to where they sit, Dante finds them enduring the punishments common to all the inhabitants of this Fonistunents : Ring : the sandy desert over which they bend their heads is the symbol of their own barren lives, empty Barrennesi of all honest fruitful work ; and the fire of Heaven's *"'' ""' vengeance keeps their hands busy fiinging it off : Not otherwise in summer do the dogs, Now with the foot, now with the muzzle, when. By fleas, or flies, or gadflies, they are bitten.^ But they have also punishments peculiar to them- Fusion for selves. As in the old earthly days, so now they sit o°"Ji'« »"• crouching over their money-bags, which are hung in scorn about their necks. On these bags their eyes feed hungrily; the ruling passion is strong, not in death alone but beyond it, and where the treasure is, there the heart is also. Or rather, where the treasure, alas, is not, for their money-bags are as empty now as once they were full; and even had they been overflowing, the constant rain of fire would have given their hands no leisure to indulge in the old delight of fingering the coins. In short, the passion lives on to torture, when all that created and gratified it has passed away. > Inf. zvii. 49-51. His comparison of them to dogs, and to dogs thus engaged, reveals Dante's contempt of Usurers : comp. lines 74, 75. CANTOS XVI. 91- XVII. 78 Their In- diTidnality lost. 248 THE FIERY SAND-WASTE As was pointed out in a former chapter, we must regard it as another aspect of their punishment that these Usurers are unrecognizable, save indeed by the coats of arms painted on the pouches round their necks. ' Not one of them I knew,' says Dante, and this means more than that he has had no dealings with money-lenders. Obviously these coats of arms on which their eyes are feasting show that they desired to be known. Doubtless many of them were nouveaux riches, men who made fortunes by money- lending, and then set up for aristocrats with coats of arms. Dante had an unspeakable contempt for men whose only claim to te known was the assump- tion of armorial bearings, bought by the mammon of unrighteousness ; and he refused to recognize them, although several belonged to well-known Florentine families. It is probable, however, that his thought goes deeper still. As we saw in Circle rv., the Avaricious were unrecognizable, the love and pursuit of money had blotted out their individuality : ' The undiscerning life which made them sordid Now makes them unto all discernment dark.' i Probably the idea is the same here. Men who devote every power to the acquisition of wealth doom them- selves thereby to obscurity and oblivion : no personal genius or memorable deed distinguishes them from the cotnmon herd. They may strive to rescue them- selves from this fate by shields and devices and armorial bearings, but they strive in vain : no coat of arms can restore the individuality which th^r > Inf. vii. 53, 54. See p. 120. VIOLENT AGAINST ART 249 mercenary life has worn away, as the image, is worn CANTOS Jrrpmtne coin. XVII. 78 Dante here relates an incident which it is difficult Their^ryaud to explain otherwise than as an example of the in- vnigarity. herent envy and vulgarity of "men who have had no other object in life than to amass fortunes. Among a group of Florentines,^ identified by the coats of arms on their money-bags, is a Paduan usurer whose armorial device was an azure sow on a white field. Dante probably had a peculiar interest in setting this soul here. His name is Binaldo, of the well- Rinaido degil known family of the Scrovigni of Padua. In the pad^. year 1303 his son Enrico founded the Arena Chapel in that city, in expiation of his father's sins. ' The building of the Arena Chapel by the son, as a kind of atonement for the avarice of the father,' says Ruskin, ' is very characteristic of the period, in which the use of money for the building of churches was considered just as meritorious as its unjust accumu- lation was criminal. I have seen in a MS. Church- service of the thirteenth century, an illumination representing Church-Consecration . . . surrounded, for the purpose of contrast, by a grotesque, consisting of a picture of a miser's deathbed, a demon drawing his soul out of his mouth, while his attendants are searching in his chests for his treasures.'^ In 1306 Dante's friend Giotto was engaged in covering the walls with the great series of frescoes which have made the Arena Chapel famous ; and it is said that * Napier (Flor. History, i. 600) says that in Dante's day the ordinary rate of interest in Florence was twenty per cent, per annum, and that it sometimes rose to thirty and forty. * Oiotto and his Works in Padua, p. 3 n. (Edition 1900). 250 THE FIERY SAND- WASTE CANTOS XVI. 91- XVII. 78 Vitallano del Sente of Fadua. there is documentary evidence that Dante was in Padua in the same year. One can imiagine the two friends smiling grimly at the idea of rescuing a usurer from Hell by the easy process of chapel- building. Dante, at all events, will not allow it to interfere with the course of Divine justice : chapel or no chapel, he is determined to set this man here in his own place. Now, even in Hell, he tells us, there still survived between this Paduan and his Florentine companions the old earthly rivalry and ambition of being the greatest in their business, the prince of money-lenders. This Binaldo degli Scrovigni was evidently in the meantime the greatest usurer of the group, since he is the only one who speaks to Dante. He tells him, however, that soon a still greater is coming, — a certain Vitaliano del Dente, of Padua, who will sit on his left hand, the seat of honour in Hell. It is a consolation to him to know that this bad pre-eminence is reserved for one of his country- men, instead of passing to his Florentine rivals. The latter, however, loudly dispute the claims of Padua, thundering in his ears that a greater than even Vitaliano is coming from Florence : ' " Come the sovereign cavalier, He who shall bring the satchel with three beaks 1'" * This ' sovereign cavalier ' is identified by his coat of arms with Giovanni Bujamonte of Florence, the very prince of usurers in Dante's day. As I under- ' Inf. xvli. 72, 73. Becchi means both goats and beaks, and both views have been taken. 'Lord Vernon (Inf. ii. 433) gives a reproduction of the shield taken from the Archives of Florence. The becchi upon it are eagles' beaks, two above and one underneath ' (Vernon's Head- ings, ii. 18 n.). VIOLENT AGAINST ART 251 Btand it, the meaning is that even in Hell the old CANTOS ignoble rivalries and ambitions of men and cities XVTI. 78 survive ; it is an additional pang to this Faduan that m^,,^^ a greater usurer, and he a Florentine, would dethrone Bujamonto of him from bis bad pre-eminence. The only ambition which had ever moved these sordid souls had been that of making a larger fortune in business than their rivals ; and this poor ambition so survives the shock of death that it adds a new bitterness to perdition itself to think that a greater money-maker, 'the sovereign cavalier' of usurers, would eclipse their purse-proud glory. In his baffled envy the Faduan gave his mouth a twist and thrust forth his tongue, 'like to an ox that licks his nose ' : a sign, perhaps, of the inherent coarseness and low-bred manners which, in Dante's view, were the natural accompaniments of mere money-grubbing, and which no wealth or coat of arms could permanently hide. Dante has seen and heard enough ; without a word he leaves the wretched creatures and returns to his Guide. His whole treat- ment of the Usurers stands, and is meant to stand, in strong contrast to the marked reverence with which he had just met the Violent against Nature. He found Yirgil already mounted ' on the haunch Descent to the of the wild animal ' which he had summoned from praud ° its the abyss; but before we make the descent there '''***'""^- are several points of interest and difficulty to be examined. There is, to begin with, the greatness of the descent, for that is symbolic of the vast moral fall from Violence to Fraud. This is indicated in three ways. First, by the wild, unbroken leap which Phlegethon, the Biver of Blood, takes over the pre- 252 FALL OF PHLEGETHON AND CANTOS cipice. Dante compares it to a river 'on the left xvn.^78 slope of the Apennine,' which in its upper course is called Acquacheta, but at Forll becomes the Montone —just as, after its fall here, Phlegethon is changed to Cocytus. At the gorge of the monastery of San Benedetto this river takes one unbroken flying leap, • where,' says the poet, ' for a thousand there should be refuge.' It is much disputed whether this ' where ' refers to the gorge or to the monastery. If to the latter, as many of the earlier commentators thought, it is a sarcastic stroke at the way in which this Benedictine monastery, which had room for a thou- sand monks, had dwindled down to a mere handful. It seems more natural, however, to take it as refer- ring to the gorge — the river taking the vast fall at one bound where there was space for a thousand leaps.^ It is obvious that Dante wishes to empha- size the greatness of the lapse from Violence to Fraud. The reason is, as elsewhere pointed out, that Violence is by comparison an open and honest sin. If it strikes at the foundations of society, as it undoubtedly does, yet it strikes with a species of frankness which gives society at least the chance of defending itself. But Fraud in its very nature is an underhand sin, not unfrequently bearing the face and front of integrity — Satan transforming himself into an angel of light. Giving no warning, it under- mines the foundations of society when men least suspect it, and secretly dissolves the bonds of trust which are meant to draw mankind into a unity. Morally such a sin is a vast fall below even Violence, I Tnf. xvi. 94-105. THE SIGNAL OF THE CORD 253 and the symbol of it is this one great leap of Phleg- CANTOS 1 . tj -. c» XVI 91- ethon into the abyss of Fraud. XVli. 78 Another symbol is the absolute impossibility of making the descent on foot. Hitherto the travellers have managed to make their way down without aid. Twice, indeed, they were carried : once by Fhlegyas in his boat across the Stygian Fen, and again by Nessus over the Ford of the River of Blood. These, however, were movements on the same level, not descents from Circle to Circle. Even at the great broken precipice of Violence on which the Minotaur lay stretched, they managed to scramble down un- aided. Now, however, if they are to descend into the depths of Fraud, the monster of the pit must bear them down. In other words. Reason in the person of Virgil must summon the very Spirit of Fraud from his dark and secret hiding-place, must see him clearly in all his reptile deformity, and, having mastered him, compel him to reveal the secrets of his prison-house. One other hint of the greatness of the lapse is given in the slow and gradual circlings with which the descent is made. Few men are so hardened that they plunge headlong into fraud as the river did, at one leap. It is in the nature of this sin that men almost invariably sink into it by windings so slow and gradients so gentle, that they are often unaware of the depth of their fall. Those who deceive others usually begin by deceiving themselves. We turn now to the method of signalling to Geryon, the monster which guards the Eighth Circle, of which something has been said in a 254 FALL OF PHLEGETHON AND CANTOS previous chapter. Dante tells us that when they XVI. 91- . XVli. 78 arrived at the edge of the precipice he had round Thesi^of ^^^ waist a cord, which, at Virgil's request, he un- the Cord to loosed and handed to him, gathered up and coiled. Turning to the right, as a man naturally does in the act of throwing, Virgil cast it down the abyss. In response, through the thick murky air a • marvellous figure * came swimming upwards, as a diver returns who has gone down to clear an anchor fouled on a rock or other entanglement at the bottom of the sea. It is obvious that Dante invests this cord with some symbolic significance. His words are : The Cord and I had a cord around about me girt, the Panther. And therewithal at one time I did think To take the Panther with the painted skin.' This sets aside the idea that the cord was a mere signal used because nothing else was available : the thunder of the cataract would have drowned a call the depth and darkness of the abyss made a gesture useless, and there was no loose stone to hurl down. All this is true, but it cannot exclude the symbolic meaning plainly indicated by Dante. We must also set aside the common interpretation which connects the cord with such a passage as Isaiah xi. 5, 'Right- eousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faith- fulness the girdle of his reins.' According to this view, the cord represents some virtue which is the opposite of Fraud, such as Uprightness, or Honesty, or Justice. But, as Scartazzini says, this would in- volve us in the entirely absurd consequence 'that > Inf. ivi. 106-108, THE SIGNAL OF THE CORD 255 in 1300, in the very year of his conversion, Dante CANTOS divested himself wholly and entirely of virtue itself, xvii. 78 for Virgil threw away the cord, nor does Dante ever speak of having retaken it, and girded himself with it anew.' The absurdity is heightened if we remem- ber that this abandonment of virtue is said to be made at the very moment when Dante is about to enter the labyrinth of Fraud — surely the time of all others when he needed to have his • loins girt about with truth.' There is perhaps no interpretation which is entirely Dante and tb« satisfactory ; but undoubtedly that which seems to order, fit best into all the circumstances is the one which connects Dante with the Franciscan Order. The sign of the Order was a cord round the waist, from which its members were called ' cordeliers,' or cord- wearers. St. Francis himself used to call his body ' Brother Ass,' and regarded his cord as the halter by which he controlled it. In the Paradiso Dante )(, speaks of the Franciscans as the family that were ' binding on the humble halter.' ^ From a very early date there has existed a tradition that in his youth, after the death of Beatrice, he joined the Order. There can be no doubt as to the extraordinary reverence in which he held St. Francis. If Plumptre is to be believed, one of Giotto's paintings over the high altar at Assisi ' represents a figure coming to St. Francis in which we recognize the poet's un- mistakable features.' In fine, in spite of modern scepticism, there seems to be ground for the belief held from Dante's own century that he joined the 1 Par. xi. 85-87. 256 FALL OF PHLEGETHON AND CANTOS Franciscan Order, but cast away its cord before XVli. 78 completing his novitiate. When we ask the reason for this casting away of the cord, it is not easy to answer. The only thing which seems certain is that it is somehow connected with a former hope that by means of this Fran- ciscan cord he would 'take the Panther with the painted skin.' The obvious reference is to the first of the three beasts which obstructed his path as he climbed out of the dark and savage wood. In Canto i., he speaks of it as A Panther light and swift exceedingly, Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er. We have seen that this Panther has two leading interpretations — a moral and a political; and ac- cording as you take one or other, the casting away of the cord appears to connect itself with the Circles above or those below. Let us look at each in turn. Moral In its moral significance the Panther, as we saw, ym m. .^ ^j^^ symbol of pleasures of the flesh. Now in the Commedia there are undoubtedly many hints that this species of temptation was not unknown to Dante ; and if this is the reference here, his mean- ing is that at one period of his life, finding himself in danger from sensual passion, he joined the Fran- ciscan Order in the hope that its ascetic rule wotild subdue his body to chastity. This hope, however, was disappointed ; experience taught him that no monkish cord had power to purify the heart, and therefore at the bidding of Reason, in the person of Virgil, he cast it away. This view would bring the THE SIGNAL OF THE CORD 257 act into intimate moral connection with the Circles CANTOS which Dante is just about to leave. All through xvii. 78 these he is more or less in contact with sins of the flesh, and therefore retains the cord which is a protection against them ; now that he is about to descend to another order and quality of sin, he throws it away, as no longer necessary. If we adopt the political interpretation of the Pouuoaj Panther, it rather connects the throwing away of '^ " ° the Franciscan cord with the Circle of Fraud to which the pilgrims are about to descend. The 'painted skin' of the beast represents then the political factions of Guelphs and Ghibellines, Blacks and Whites. It may have been Dante's hope at one time to subdue these factions by the cord, the Order of St. Francis, — just as at a later time Savonarola attempted a moral and political regeneration of Florence by means of the Dominican Order. If the poet ever entertained such a hope, it was quickly dispelled by the corruptions of the Franciscan Order itself. In the Paradiso he puts into the mouth of its General, St. Bonaventura, a lament over its moral degeneracy since its founder's death,^ On this view, the casting of the cord down to the Demon of Fraud may be Dante's symbolic way of declaring that this was the particular vice which was destroying the Order, and that therefore he had lost any hope he ever had of its accomplishing a political regeneration in Florence or Italy. The former of these two interpretations is pro- bably nearer to Dante's experience. He had learned » Par. xii. 112-126, E 258 FALL OF PHLEGETHON AND CANTOS that no outward cord can of itself restrain the xvii. 78 motions of sin. Nevertheless, it is plain that at this point in his pilgrimage he is very far from having reached that perfect inward freedom of which St. Paul speaks : ' Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.' What has made this cord unnecessary is but a cord of another kind — the terror inspired by the punishments he has just witnessed. After seeing the awful issues of such sins and the terrible judgments of God upon them, no external cord of restraint is necessary. Scartazzini, indeed, suggests that if Dante ever in his youth really con- templated renouncing the world and withdrawing into a cloister, he may in later life have regretted this casting away of the cord. He seems to think that this renunciation of the cloister, if it could be proved, would be found to be the key to many of the leading passages of the poem, as, for example, Dante's self-reproaches when he stands in the pre- sence of Beatrice on the top of Mount Purgatory.^ It is difficult to believe that this suggestion is of much value. Dante threw away the cord and made no attempt to take it again. It is true, indeed, that in the Convito he praises Sir Lancelot and ' our most noble Italian Guido da Montefeltro' for devoting themselves in their old age to the religious life, instead of running presumptuously into the port of death with sails full set. The context shows, how- ever, that the religious life does not necessarily mean the cloister.^ At all events, Dante never ' Companion to Dante, p. 200. * Conv. iv. 28 : ' And it is not possible to excuse any one [from the religious life] because of the bond of matrimony, which holds good in THE SIGNAL OF THE CORD 259 Bought to resume the cord which he here threw off. CANTOS Once again, indeed, he did gird himself^ but_it_ia_ xvn.^78 with a rush, whose meek bending before the waves — is the natural symbol of humilityjonder the chas- ^sementjjf the. waters of God's redeeming discip- Jine.^^And he thus girds himself with the humility of penitence, because he is about to climb the Mount of Liberty, to gain that inner freedom of the purified soul which needs no cords of external restraintj, but is a law unto itself. This inner freedom is reached on the t op of the Mount of Purification^ where Virgil says to Dante : ' Free, upright, and healthy is thy will, And error were it not to do its prompting ; Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre.' ^ 'Grown and mitre,' king and priest, final authority over himself in things temporal and spiritual alike. It is impossible to imagine a man who had this lofty ideal of inner freedom ever seriously regretting the casting away of any cord of external restraint, — he could only regard it as a necessary step to the attain- ment of the ' royal law ' of liberty. old age ; because not he alone turns to religion who makes himself in habit and life like St. Benedict and St. Augustine and St. Francis and St. Dominic, but also it is possible to turn to a good and true religion \ whilst remaining in matrimony, for God wishes nothing religious of ' us but the heart. And therefore St. Paul says to the Romans : " He | is not a Jew, which is one outwardly ; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh : but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter ; whose praise is not of men, but of God." ' > Purg. i. 94-105. * Purg. xxvii. 140-142. CHAPTER XVI CIRCLE VIII.— MALEBOLGE : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia I. Betrayers of Women Bolgia II. Flatterers CANTOS In answer to the sigual of the cord, Geryon, the xvili ~ Guardian of the Eighth Circle, came swimming up Oeryon : through the thick air of the abyss like a diver from Guardian and the bottom of the sea— a form so marvellous that Symbol of tlie Circle of Dante hesitates to describe it, lest he should not be ^" ■ believed. In heathen mythology Geryon is a monster of three heads and bodies ; according to Virgil, Mneaa saw ' the three-bodied shade ' sitting in the mouth of Hades in company with Gorgons, Harpies, and other monsters.^ He is sometimes identified with a King of the Balearic Isles, and it was one of the labours of Hercules to drive away his oxen. There is nothing in the classical myths which quite explains why Dante makes Geryon the personification of Fraud; but in the Middle Ages there seems to have existed a legend that his custom was to invite strangers into his house and then rob and slay them. Dante, while discarding the three-bodied form of mythology, pre- serves the triplicity of the monster by uniting in ' j3Sn. vi. 289. 260 THE MONSTER GERYON 261 him man, brute, and reptile, each of which is sym- CANTOS XVII 79- bolic of some aspect of Fraud. xvill ' The face was as the face of a just man, Man, Brute, Its semblance outwardly was so benign.' * *"* Reptile. For perfect fraud nothing is so useful as this look of benignant justice — the open countenance, the frank and honest eye, the brow on which integrity sits. It disarms suspicion and creates trust, until the paws behind have time to clutch and the scorpion tail to sting. The idea of the just face is much the same as that indicated by the direction in which the travellers have to turn to reach the monster — to the right, one of the few times in Hell. This may cer- tainly mean, as it is usually understood, that in our encounters with Fraud our only safety lies in keep- ing to the right, — the path of rectitude ; and the ' ten steps ' which they take in this direction to meet the monster maybe symbolic of the ten commandments. This would not exclude the further idea that it was not by accident Geryon settled to their right on the margin of the chasm : the moral suggestion is that the Spirit of Fraud disarms suspicion by approach- ing those it hopes to make its victims on the side of righteousness. Beneath the human head were 'two paws, hairy unto the armpits '—obvious symbols of the brute violence and cruelty which lurk behind the just benignant face, ready to seize their victim. Lower still, behind the brute lies the reptile, a serpent's tail with the sting of a scorpion — emblem of the 1 Inf. xvii. 10, 11. 262 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS evil wisdom of the serpent, the low crawling cun- XVIl 79- . r 1 o xvill ^J^^g with which Fraud entangles its victims, and the deadly poison with which it strikes them from behind. It is to be noticed, too, that the monster keeps his serpent-tail as far as possible out of sight : ' And that uncleanly image of Fraud Came up and thrust ashore its head and bust, But on the border did not drag its tail.' i This it prudently kept unseen, 'quivering in the void' below. The general conception is taken partly from the locusts of the Apocalypse: 'Their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women. . . . And they had tails like unto scorpions, and they had stings in their tails.' ^ In mediaeval art, the Satan who tempted Eve is fre- quently represented as a serpent with a human face. 'The whole figure,' says Hettinger, 'is typical of the beginning, the middle, and the end of fraud. For the impostor seeks to captivate his victim by his gracious aspect, whilst he winds his coils around him, and at last darts out the fatal sting.' Nor does this complete the symbolism : ' The back, and breast, and both the sides it had Depicted o'er with knots and little shields. With colours more, groiondwork and broidery, Never in cloth did Tartars make nor Turks, Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid.'^ The reference to Arachne, the Lydian maiden whom Athene changed into a spider, may give the clue to the idea. As a spider weaves its web to entangle its « Inf. xvil. 7-9, « Bev. ix. 7, 8, 10. s i^f. xvii. 14-18. THE MONSTER GERYON 263 prey, so Fraud weaves its network of knots and CANTOS XVII 79- nooses to ensnare its victims. ' The varied colours, xvin not unlike the pattern of a snake's skin, help out the symbolism of subtle and varied fraud,' • The " small bucklers" represent the subterfuges under which fraud shields itself: so ready to strike others with its scorpion tail, it takes care to defend itself, back, and breast, and sides. When Dante returned from viewing the Usurers The Descent to where they sat crouching upon the sand, he found Virgil already mounted on the back of the 'wild animal,' ready for the descent. At the command to mount, he fell into trembling like a man in ague. His Guide set him in front, so that he himself might be between him and the scorpion tail behind. The idea is that as Fraud is 'man's peculiar vice,' inasmuch as it is the perversion to deceit of man's peculiar gift of reason, nothing but re.ason can protect a man from its poison. Even then, although Virgil em- braced and sustained him, Dante was far from being reassured. When the monster, wheeling with his burden, floated free, 'and with his paws drew to himself the air,' the poet was seized with an almost intolerable terror. For a time everything vanished from his sight save the wild beast ; only a wind on his face from below told him he was descending, so slow and gradual were the downward circlings ; on his right the whirlpool of Phlegethon made a horrible roaring; and when at last, hearing the sound of lamentations, he ventured to look down, he saw the glare of fires, and knew that he was circling round and round, hovering over and gradually approaching 26* THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XVII. 79- XVIII Malebolge, ' great evils,' which made him cower back in fear and trembling. It has been well compared to what an aeronaut might see if his balloon descended at night over the foundries, furnaces, and ironworks of the Black Country of Staffordshire. When Geryon had made his last circuit he set them down at the rugged base of the precipice, and immediately 'vanished like an arrow from the string.' Dante significantly compares him to a falcon which, 'without seeing either lure or bird,' slowly descends in a hundred weary circlings and alights far from his master 'sullen and disdainful.' It was in the saiae sullen and indignant temper that Geryon came down. Like the falcon, he had seen neither lure nor bird. The ' new sign ' of the cord doubtless raised hopes of securing some great prey, a Franciscan friar at least ; and he is indignant and sullen that he has had the long and weary flight for nothing. To defraud others is pleasant work ; to be himself defrauded is matter for indignant anger. We are now in Circle Vlil., the prison of the Fraudulent, those who broke ' that love which Nature makes,' the general bond of humanity. The descrip- tion of it occupies no fewer than thirteen Cantos out of the thirty-four, the proportion probably representing the prevalence of the sin : ' Behold the wild beast with the pointed tail, That passes mountains and breaks thro' walls and weapons ; Behold him who all the world pollutes.' ^ It is necessary to have the construction of this Circle ' Inf. xvii. 1-3. MALEBOLGE 265 clearly before our minds. Dante calls it Malebolge> CANTOS ■ XVII 79— which means Evil-pouches, One is tempted to find xvill in this use of the word pouches a hint of that love of money which is the root of so many species of Fraud : these men who were so eager on earth filling their pockets, are here pocketed themselves. This very play on words is made by Dante a little further down. In the third Bolgia or Pouch, a Pope who is there for Simony confesses that in his eagerness to advance the family to which he belonged, 'wealth above, and here myself, I pocketed.'^ The name Evil-pouches, therefore, may have more significance than is generally supposed : these souls were pocket- ing more than money when they pursued their careers of fraud on earth. Dante compares the Circle to a central castle ringed round with ten con- centric moats or fosses, connected with one another by a system of bridges. The centre, however, is not a castle rising from the ground, but an immense well sunk into it, the bottom of which, as we shall see, is the frozen Lake of Cocytus, which forms the Ninth Circle. To this central well the bridges run like the spokes of a wheel to the nave; and the moats lie one below another like the tiers of an amphitheatre. The whole place is of rugged iron- coloured stone — the dykes which separate the naoats from each other, the bridges which span them, and the vast circular precipice which shuts all in. Both material and construction are symbolic. ' The violent who sin openly are placed in a wide plain, whilst the fraudulent are hidden in deep clefts ; the more ' Inf. xix. 72. 266 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS crafty the deceit the deeper the foBse. As a more XVII 7Qt. xvill hardened heart is required for fraud than for violence, these holes are hewn in rock hard as iron.' ^ Dante gives us a few measurements from which attempts have been made to calculate the dimensions of the whole. The ninth Bolgia is twenty-two miles in circumference, and the tenth is eleven round, and half a mile across at the bottom. 'Assuming, as seems likely, that the same proportions are main- tained throughout Malebolge, we get the following measurements : — circumference (as given by Dante) of Bolgia 10 eleven miles, and of Bolgia 9 twenty- two miles, hence that of Bolgia 8 would be thirty- three miles, that of Bolgia 7 forty-four, of Bolgia 6 fifty-five, of Bolgia 5 sixty-six, of Bolgia 4 seventy- seven, of Bolgia 3 eighty-eight, of Bolgia 2 ninety- nine, of Bolgia 1 a hundred and ten ; this would give the diameter of Malebolge at its upper rim, where it is widest, as thirty-five miles.' ^ It is ques- tionable whether such calculations add anything to our understanding of the poem, unless perhaps in helping us to realize the extent to which, in Dante's view, some forms of Fraud sink and narrow the Boul much more than others. The Fraud which springs from Sensuality in the first Bolgia, bad as it is, leaves the soul a circle ten times as great as the Fraud of Falsification in the last. In the order of the ten Moats, it is extremely difficult to discover any principle of classification whatever. They stand as follows : > Hettinger, p. 129. ' Toynbee's Dante Dictionary, ' Malebolge ' ; Inf. xxii. 9 ; xxx. 86. I. BETRAYERS OF WOMEN 267 Bolgia I. Betrayers of Women — Panders and CANTOS * o ^ XVII. 79- Seducers. XVin II. Flatterers. _. _ The Ten III. Simoniacs — Traffickers in Offices of oiasBes of the the Church. IV. Diviners. v. Barrators — Traffickers in Offices of the State. VI. Hypocrites. VII. Thieves. VIII. Evil Counsellors. IX. Schismatics — Sowers of Discord. X. Falsifiers. We cannot for a moment doubt that Dante, in thus arranging them, had some quite definite principle of classification in his mind, but it is far from easy to discover it — whether the degree in which reason is perverted, or the measure in which they undermine society, or, more generally, the amount and quality of the craftiness which they involve. In any case, the general conception remains : the descent from Moat to Moat represents the power of various forms of Fraud to sink the man to a lower perdition ; and the lessening of each Moat, their power to narrow down the soul to a smaller and smaller circle of existence. It was on the pathway skirting the base of the Boigia i.— great precipice, and immediately above the first of gg^^gyg these Moats, that Geryon set the travellers down. Virgil straightway turned to the left. On their right at the bottom of the fosse they saw two streams of naked souls flowing in opposite direc- 268 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XVII. 79- XVIII Venedlco Caccianiinico of Bologna. tions, so that the nearer faced them, while the farther moved like themselves toward the left, 'but with greater steps.' The sight reminded Dante of the year of the first Jubilee, 1300, when it is said upwards of two million pilgrims visited Rome. So vast were the throngs that special arrangements had to be made for passing the people safely over the bridge of St. Angelo, which crosses the Tiber at the castle of the same name — one stream going toward St. Peter's, the other toward 'the mount,' by which probably the Capitol is meant. So flowed this double tide of naked souls, scourged on by horned demons : ' Ah me ! how they did make them lift their legs At the first blows ! and sooth not any one The second waited for, nor for the third.' ^ The nearer stream consisted of Panders, men who betrayed women to the passions of others; the farther, of Seducers, who betrayed them to their own. Dante indicates their relative guilt by the directions in which they move : the Seducers march leftwards, the Panders to the right. Among the latter he recognizes one whom he had evidently known on earth, and with Virgil's leave he turns back to speak with him. The miserable wretch lowers his face in shame to escape recognition, the first soul in Hell that has the grace to be ashamed. Dante, however, refuses to let him off : 'Thou that upon the ground thine eye dost cast, If the features which thou wearest be not false, Thou art Venedico Caccianimico ; But what doth bring thee to such ptingent sauces ? ' ^ >7w/. xviil. 37-39. 2Z«/. xvili. 48-51. I. BETRAYERS OF WOMEN 269 The word here translated 'sauces' is salse, and the CANTOS XVII. 79- question might mean nothing more than our collo- xvill quial, ' How did you come to such a pickle as this ? ' But there seems to be a play on the word, which this sinner would only too well understand. He was a well-knOwn nobleman of Bologna, and near his native city there was a ravine called the Salse where the bodies of criminals were thrown, and where, according to some commentators, panders were flogged. Benvenuto da Imola, who was the first public lecturer on Dante in the University of Bologna, says he used to hear boys of that city fling at each other the taunt, 'Tour father was thrown into Le Salse ! ' It must have cut the proud Bolognese nobleman to the quick to hear a name which he held in such contempt on earth applied to the place of his eternal punishment. Seeing it was vain to hide himself, he unwillingly tells his ' shame- less story,' of which several versions seem to have been current. He confesses that it was he who had betrayed his sister, ' the beautiful Ghisola,'^ to 'the Marquis' — one of the Marquises of Este, it is un- certain which. He excuses himself by declaring that he is not the only Bolognese who weeps here : there were more of them in this Moat than the entire population of Bologna then alive.^ He appeals to Dante's own knowledge of the avarice of his countrymen, which he declares to be the root ' Toynbee says her name was ' Ghisolabella,' one word, not, as is generally assumed, ' Grhlsola bella,' beautiful Ghisola. 2 ire/, xviii. 59-61. Venedico says there are more Bolognese in this Hoat than are taught to say sipa between the Savena and Beno, the two rivers between which Bologna lies. Sipa is the Bolognese equivalent for si. 270 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XVII. 79- XVIII Jason. of this shameful sin. Probably Dante, who had been a student in Bologna, wrote this passage from his own personal knowledge of the prevailing vices of the city. At this point one of the demons cut short Yenedico's confession with a stroke of his lash, crying : ' Get thee gone, Pander, there are no women here for coining.' Rejoining his Guide, after a few steps they came to a ridge of rock which ran out from the base of the precipice and formed a bridge across the first Moat. Mounting this and turning to the right, Virgil bids Dante pause on the arch of the bridge to see the other stream of souls, whose backs only had been visible, because they had been walking in the same leftward direction as themselves. They are the souls of Seducers. Among them Virgil points out Jason, the great classical example of the false lovers of antiquity. He is here for two crimes, the betrayal of the Lemnian maiden, 'the young Hypsipyle,' and the desertion of his wife Medea for Creusa. Even the pain and shame of his punishment cannot destroy the courage and kingly bearing of the man who dared the great adventure of the Golden Fleece ; he neither weeps nor flinches : * Look at that great one who is coming, And for his pain seems not to shed a tear. Still what a royal aspect he retains I ' i He reminds us of Farinata, the great Ghibelline chief, who lifted himself breast-high from his burn- ing tomb, as if even ' Hell he held in great disdain.' >Jn/. xvlii. 83-85. I. BETRAYERS OF WOMEN 271 That is the narrative ; let us now look more care- CANTOS XVII 79- f uUy at the punishment of this sin. The form of it xvill is taken from Leviticus xix. 20, where, in the Vulgate, pmiig^^t. scourging is the penalty of seduction. The meaning, however, will be more adequately reached if we compare the sin before us here with the other forms of Sensuality which we have already met. The first, in Circle il., is what we may call natural Sensuality — the mere non-control and excess of a natural appetite. The second is unnatural Sensuality — a positive violation of Nature, and therefore placed much lower down, in Circle vn. The point of im- portance is that neither of these involves Fraud, whereas precisely this is the distinguishing mark of the sinners of this Moat : their Sensuality is not frank and open, but mean and treacherous. They have all betrayed trust and innocence for the grati- fication of their own or others' passions. Now the punishment common to all three forms of Sensu- ality is a constant and tormenting restlessness — the torture of their own passions which allows them no repose. But there is a great and significant differ- ence in the ministers of vengeance employed. In the case of the natural Sensualists a natural force is used: they are 'imprisoned in the viewless winds, and blown with restless violence.' The Sensualists who have violated Nature are punished by a super- natural pain, a fire direct from the Heaven they have defied. But when Sensuality goes hand-in-hand with Fraud, the punishment is, so to speak, infra- natural, it is committed to demons : in other words, it becomes then a crime of devils, and only devils 272 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS ^ijl~ can adequately requite it. Here for the first time diabolic beings appear as ministers of justice, and this tormentoiB. is no accident. Take, for example, the well-known portrait of Dante by Domenico di Michelino in the Cathedral of Florence. On the poet's right hand, the painter shows us the Gate of Hell, with the Neutrals inside, driven on by demons. This involves a total misunderstanding of Dante's moral scheme. The devils do not appear in the Inferno until we come to diabolic sins: they would scorn to waste their time on these neutral cowards. Even when we meet demons at the gate of Dis, it is for the defence of the City they are there, not as tormentors of the lost souls within. In short, comparing the three forms of Sensuality, Dante wishes us to under- stand that the least guilty species of it is natural and human; lower down it becomes an unnatural mingling of the human and the brute, as in the case of the Minotaur; while in its basest form it is a monstrous union of the human, the brute, and the demonic. This takes place when Fraud enters in. Its symbol is Geryon : the face of a man, the paws of a brute, and the tail of the old serpent, the devil. The demons, therefore, with the horns on their heads which were the recognized symbol of adultery, are an essential element of both the sin and its punishment. The man who can betray innocence and trust, is, in Dante's regard, a kind of demon, and has, in the diabolic state of his own passions, a fierce and fiendish unrest which passes the bounds of the human, returning him, blow for blow, all the shame and ruin which he inflicted on others. 11. FLATTERERS 273 Leaving the first bridge, Dante and Virgil ascend CANTOS XVII 79- the second. The Moat beneath is so deep that in xvill order to see it at all they have to stand on the very Kn^gilri — top of the arch— an indication of the deep and subtle Flatterers, nature of the sin of Flattery which is here punished. Gazing down into the darkness, they see the souls of Flatterers half-smothered in loathsome filth. One wretch has his head so covered with the foulness that it is not clear whether he is clerk or layman, but Dante recognizes him as one whom he had seen before ' with his hair dry.' It is Alessio Interminei (or Interminelli) of Lucca, of whom we know nothing but that he belonged to the party of the Whites, and that a document of 1295 mentions him as alive in that year. The older commentators say that he would besmear even the lowest menials with flattery. Virgil points out a soul from the ancient world, Thais, once a beautiful courtesan, but now an ' un- cleanly and dishevelled drab,' scratching herself with filthy nails and restlessly standing and crouch- ing by turns. In reality she is only a fictitious character in Terence's Eunuchus. Dante doubt- less got the reference from Cicero's De Amicitia, where it is given as an example of flattery. At first glance, it seems a very innocent example. Her lover had sent her the present of a slave, and when he asked, 'Have I great thanks from thee?' she replied, 'Nay, marvellous!' According to Dante, following Cicero, it is in this exaggera- tion of gratitude that her flattery consisted. It seems a small thing, but doubtless Dante had specially before his mind 'the strange woman' of s 274 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Proverbs— ' the stranger which flattereth with her XVII. 79- , , * XVIII words ; 'With her much fair speech she causeth him to yield, With the flattering of her lips she f orceth him away. For the lips of a strange woman drop honey, And her mouth is smoother than oil : But her latter end is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, Her steps take hold on hell.' It is to be noticed that this is the only place in which Dante describes two sins in the same Canto, and probably this is not accidental. ' Pandering and Flattery,' as Vernon says, 'are two species of Fraud which have a good deal of affinity for one another. Every Pander is a Flatterer, though indeed every Flatterer need not necessarily be a Pander.' 1 Punishment— The punishment is almost too vile for refined ears. Fiitii. From the loathsome canal an exhalation rose and settled on the margin in a mouldy scum which ' waged war with eyes and nostrils.' In this foul element, the wretched souls are beating themselves with their hands and 'snorting with their muzzles' like dogs. The use of the word ' muzzles ' is inten- tional : these Flatterers are dogs which were in the habit of licking every foul thing, the worst sins and vices of the men on whom they fawned, and now they have such vileness to their hearts' content. As, dog-like, they fawned and lived on filth here, their ' Vernon's Readings, ii. 58. II. FLATTERERS 275 eternal doom is to be plunged in that which was on CANTOS earth their life and element.^ ^iu^ ^ According to Aquinas, Flattery is a mortal sin, because it is con- trary to charity in three ways : (1) ' In virtue of the matter praised, when one praises another's sin ' — thus encouraging him in evil ; (2) ' In virtue of the intention of him who praises, when one flatters another in order fraudulently to hurt him either in body or in soul'; (3) 'In virtue of the occasion given, when the flatterer's praise becomes to the other an occasion of sin, even beside the intention of the flatterer' nma, ii-ii. q. cxv. a. 2). CHAPTER XVII CIRCLE VIII. — MALBBOLGB : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia III. Simoniacs CANTO XIX Turning away from the Moat of the Flatterers, Bolgia III— Dante and his Guide find themselves on the rocky simoniaoB. ^.j^^g ^j^j^j^ overlooks the third valley of this Circle. The first words of the Canto tell us what sin is here punished : Simon MagUB. O Simon Magus I O wretched followers I Because the things of God, which ought to be The brides of holiness, and ye rapacious For silver and for gold do prostitute. Now it behoves for you the trumpet sound, — the trumpet, namely, of his exposure of them in this Canto. It is the sin of Simony, which takes its name from Simon Magus in the Acts of the Apostles, who thought he could buy from St. Peter the power of imparting the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands.^ It includes every form of trafficking in holy things, and in particular the ordination of unworthy men to holy offices 'for value received.' These holy things ought to be, in Dante's phrase, 'the brides of holiness,' that is, bestowed freely and lawfully on good and worthy men; whereas Simoniacs ' prostitute ' them by driving a vile trade ' Acts vliu 14-24. 876 III. SIMONIACS 277 in them with whoever will pay the price. This CANTO XIX price, of course, is not necessarily cash; it may be kinship, friendship, favouritism, support, services rendered or expected. According to Aquinas, there are three reasons why spiritual things are not fit subjects of barter. ' First, because a spiritual thing cannot have its equivalent in any earthly price. . . . Secondly, because that cannot be due matter of sale, of which the seller is not the owner. . . . Thirdly, because selling is inconsistent with the origin of spiritual things, which proceed from the gratuitous will of God.' ^ As we shall see. Simony corresponds to Barratry, the sin punished in the fifth Moat : Simony is trafficking in offices of the Church, Bar- ratry in offices of the State. Looking down from the rocky bridge, Dante sees The WeUs in that the 'livid stone' of which the valley below is*''®'""^- made is perforated with small circular openings like wells. They are very numerous, filling the bottom and both sides, in indication of the preval- ence of the sin. For size he compares them to the little stone-pulpits in 'my beautiful St. John' — the Baptistery at Florence — in which the priests stood when administering baptism. In Dante's day the baptismal font seems to have consisted of a central cistern for water, surrounded at a little distance by a low wall or parapet, at the corners of which were little circular openings, inside of which stood the officiating priests. It is said that this arrangement was necessary because, since baptisms took place only on certain special days, there was usually a ' Summa, ii-li. q. c, a. 1. 278 THE FRAUDULENT Pope Nicholas ni. CANTO XIX crowd, and these little stone-pulpits (if we may call them so) kept the priests from being jostled as they performed their sacred office,^ It is to these, then, that Dante compares the perforations in this valley of rock. Out of each opening protruded a pair of legs from the calf, all writhing in agony, in a con- vulsive effort to shake off flames of fire which played on the upturned soles from heel to toe. Dante wishes to know the name of one sinner in particular, whose legs are writhing more wildly than the rest, and on whose feet ' a redder flame is sucking ' ; and Virgil carries him down into the valley that he may learn from the sufferer himself. On reaching the opening, Dante adjures the wretched soul to speak, if speak he can, and receives the wholly unexpected reply : ' Dost thou stand there already. Dost thou stand there already, Boniface ? By several years the writing lied to me. Art thou so quickly sated with that wealth For which thou didst not fear to take by guile The beautiful Lady, and then make ruin of her?'* Dante stood in surprise at this reply, and Yirgil tells him to say he is not the man he took him for. His head buried in the rock, and therefore unable to see the poet, the tortured spirit had mistaken him for Pope Boniface vni., and was astonished to find him here sooner by several years than his vision of the future had led him to expect. He then informs ' So Vernon, Readings, li. 72-74: 'The Baptismal Font with the holes made for the baptizing priests to stand in, no longer exists (at Florence), having been destroyed in 1576. There are, however, two similar fonts still in existence, one at Pisa, the other at Pistoja. That at Pisa is thought to have a close resemblance to the one formerly in use at Florence.' * Inf. xix. 52-57. Pope Boniface Vin. III. SIMONIACS 279 Dante that he had been Pope Nicholas in., • son of CANTO XIX the She-bear,' as he calls himself, in allusion to his family name of Orsini. He tells his sin and its doom with a touch of grim humour. So eager had he been to 'advance the cubs' — that is, of course, his kindred the Orsini — that he had, as it were, at a single stroke pocketed wealth on earth, and himself here in this bolgia or pouch of Hell. The reference is to the notorious nepotism of this Pope. Villani, who was a Guelph, and therefore not likely to ex- aggerate the sins of the Papacy, says Nicholas ' was among the first, if not the first, of the Popes in whose court simony was openly practised on behalf of his kindred, by the which thing he increased them much in possessions, and in castles, and in treasure beyond all the Komans, during the short time that he lived. This Pope made seven Roman cardinals, whereof the most part were his kinsfolk.'^ It was said sarcastically that ' he erected a Zion in his own kith and kin'; indeed, it was believed that his true ambition was, as Milman says, to make the Empire hereditary in his house.^ Nicholas proceeds to explain that on the arrival of a new sinner for this opening, he himself would be thrust down completely into the hole, and the newcomer set head downwards above him: just as beneath him now there ran a long line of his predecessors, crushed one by one into the fissure which penetrated far into the rock — a grim in- fernal mockery of the Apostolic Succession which these men had claimed. Nicholas foretells the ' Villani, vii. 54. ' Latin Christianity, vi. 416, 417. 280 THE FRAUDULENT . CANTO XIX speedy coming of two other Popes. The first is Boniface viii., for whom he had mistaken the poet. We have already seen that Dante regarded this Pope as his chief enemy; hut it would be doing him an injustice to think that his hatred of him was a mere personal thing. He believed that Boni- face had taken • the beautiful Lady,' the Church, by guile, referring to his having induced Celestine v. to resign in order to wear ' the Great Mantle ' himself ; and that this first fraud was followed up by acts of simony which had brought the Church to ruin. He never loses a chance of denouncing him; he calls him ' the prince of the new Pharisees,' and says that in Paradise when St. Peter spoke of him, all Heaven flushed red with shame and indignation.^ This part of the poem was written after the death of Boniface in 1303, as the reference to his successor plainly shows; but the ideal date of the Commedia being 1300, Dante throws his doom into the form of a prophecy. But even Boniface is not the worst of Pops Simoniacs. Soon, Nicholas declares, a greater sinner would come to crush him in his turn down into the rocky fissure : ' For after him shall come of fouler deeds From towards the west a Pastor without law, Such as befits to cover him and me.'^ * Inf. xxvil. 85; Par. xxvii. 19-36. In the latter passage, Peter declares that the Papacy is vacant, since it is filled only by usurpation : ' He who usurpeth upon earth my place. My place, my place, which vacant is Before the presence of the Son of God.' For a defence of Nicholas, Celestine v., and Boniface, from the B.C. point of view, see Hettinger's Dante's Divina Commedia, Preface xi-xiv; also p. 353, where Dante is accused of personal resentment against Boniface as ' the destroyer of his life's happiness.' 2 Inf. xix. 82-84. III. SIMONIACS 281 This is Clement v., a mere tool of Philip the Fair of CANTO XIX- France. Nicholas compares him to Jason, of whom we read in Maccabees that he bought the High Priesthood from Antiochus Epiphanes, and used it to corrupt Israel to Greek manners.^ 'Every act of his must have appeared to Dante iniquitous and disastrous. He transferred the Papacy from Bome to Avignon, and so began the seventy years of Baby- lonian exile, made himself the servile instrument of Philip the Fair in the suppression of the Knights Templars, and was besides conspicuous for simony, nepotism, and personal profligacy.' In Dante's judgment, his one great act of simony consisted in selling the Papacy to Philip by making himself his creature and tool.* At this point the poet, unable longer to restrain Denosciation his indignation, breaks out into prophetic denuncia- Popes. tions of this Papal avarice which ' afflicts the world, Trampling the good, and lifting the depraved.' What great price, he asks Nicholas, beyond ' Follow me,' did Christ demand from Peter before he gave him the keys? What gold or silver did Peter and the rest demand of Matthias when they chose him by lot to the office forfeited by Judas ? He boldly 1 2 Mace. iv. 7-19. ' Flumptre {Dante i. cxlli.) gives tbis interesting note about the Cathedral of which he was Dean : ' Our records at Wells Cathedral furnish some indication of the way in which Clement enriched himself. I find the Dean and Chapter, as collectors of a tithe for six years, ordered by Pope Clement for the recovery of the Holy Land, giving a receipt for £200 paid to them for that purpose {Beport on MSS. of Wells, p. 74, 1885). This was, apparently, the crusade contemplated by Henry vii. That crusade never came off, but the money from Wells, and, we may believe, from aU parts of Europe, found its way to the Papal coffers (comp. Milman, Latin Christianity, vii. 369).' 282 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XIX compares the Papacy, as represented by men like Thesoariet Nicholas, Boniface, and Clement, to 'the scarlet Woman. woman ' of the Apocalypse : ■ The Evangelist you Pastors had in mind When she who has her seat upon the waters To fornicate with kings by him was seen ; The same who with the seven heads was born, And from the ten horns had her power, So long as virtue to her spouse was pleasing.'^ At first reading we might imagine that Dante has made the curious mistake of transferring the seven heads and ten horns from the beast on which she sits in the Apocalypse, to the woman herself; but that Dante of all men should commit so glaring a blunder is inconceivable. The transference was made deliberately. It is almost certain that the seven heads with which the Church was born are the seven virtues, four cardinal and three theo- logical ; and that the ten horns of her power are the ten commandments. These belong to her in her original ideal purity, of which Dante is here speak- ing ; and when she falls from that ideal purity with which she was born, they become transformed into their opposite vices and appear, as in the Apoca- lypse, as the heads and horns of the beast on which she sits. St. John is speaking of her in her fallen state; Dante in her original purity. So long as 'her spouse,' the Pope, loved virtue, the seven virtues and the ten commandments were her strength. The 'Donation Dante was no believer in ecclesiastical endow- ofconstan- ments. The beginning of this corruption of the 1 Inf. xix. 106-111 ; Bw. xvii. III. SIMONIACS 283 Papacy which sank so many prelates to this Moat of CANTO XIX Simony, he traces to the ' Donation of Constantino ' : * Ah Constantinel of how much ill was mother. Not thy conversion, but that marriage-dower Which the first wealthy Father took from thee 1 'i The reference is to the extraordinary mediaeval forgery which pretended that Constantine, on his conversion to Christianity, had made a gift of the Western Empire to Pope Sylvester and his suc- cessors. Dante, of course, did not regard it as a forgery ; but he argued boldly that such a donation is beyond the power of the Emperor to give, and equally beyond the power of the Pope to receive. •The Church,' he says in the De Monarchia, 'was altogether unqualified to receive temporal things; for there is an express command forbidding her to do so, which Matthew gives thus : " Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses." For though we find in Luke a relaxation of the com- mand in certain matters, yet I have not anywhere been able to find that the Church after that pro- hibition had licence given her to possess gold and silver. If therefore the Church was unable to receive temporal power, even granting that Con- stantine was able to give it, yet the gift was impossible; for the receiver was disqualified. It is therefore plain that neither could the Church receive in the way of possession, nor could Con- stantine give in the way of alienation ; though it is true that the Emperor, as protector of the Church, 1 Inf. Its. 115-117. 284 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XIX could allot to the Church a patrimony and other things, if he did not impair his supreme lordship, the unity of which does not allow division. And the Vicar of God could receive such things, not to possess them, but as a steward to dispense the fruits of them to the poor of Christ, on behalf of the Church, as we know the Apostles did.'^ 'Let these possessions,' he says, ' go back to whence they came.' So strong is his conviction that the 'Donation' was a curse to Italy that he could wish Constantine had never been born : ' Oh happy people, oh Ausonia, how glorious hadst thou been, if either he, that weakener of thine empire, had never been born, or if his own pious intention had never deceived him!'^ The poet's denunciations of the Church have very different effects on his two hearers. While the guilty Pope writhed his burning feet more violently — whether from anger or conscience Dante cannot say — Virgil, well pleased, clasped him in his arms and bore him safely to the arch of the next bridge : Here tenderly he laid his burden down, Tenderly for the crag uneven and steep, That would have been hard passage to the goats.^ This must have some symbolic meaning, for Virgil's pleasure and displeasure are always significant. Here the significance is peculiar. As a rule, Virgil represents Reason ; and taking this view the mean- ing is that Dante's denunciations of this sin do not overshoot the mark — Reason itself approves of such > Dt Mon. ill. 10. * De Mon. ii. 13. Ausonia is the ancient name for Campania, but la used for all Italy. Comp. Par. viii. 61-63. ' Inf. xix. 130-132. III. SIMONIACS 285 indignation. But at this particular point Dante, CANTO XIX who delights in the manif oldness of his symbolism, seems to fall back on another idea of Virgil — as the representative of the Empire in contradistinction to the Church. In short, in this Moat the two powers confront each other : the spiritual authority in the person of Nicholas, and the imperial as symbolized in Virgil, the poet of the founding of the Empire. Now Dante was an Imperialist, and he indicates in this passage the source of his boldness in thus attacking the Papacy. It is because he feels himself protected by the Emperor ; Virgil, the representative of the imperial authority, carries him down into this ' tomb ' of corrupt churchmen who grasped eagerly at temporal power and wealth, listens with 'con- tented lip' to his denunciations of them, and ten- derly carries him back to a place of safety. Before passing to the punishment of this sin, we Dante's should remark the double feeling which Dante bears the Papal towards the Papacy : reverence for the office, and ""*•■ indignation against many holders of it. The indig- nation breaks out in passage after passage ; Popes, Cardinals, clerks, are among the Avaricious, the Heretics, the Sodomites, and many other classes of sinners, nevertheless he refuses to confound the office itself with the unworthy men who may have held it. He devoutly regarded the Pope as the Divinely appointed guide to lead mankind to the Celestial Paradise, no matter how he may neglect his duty; hence his reverence for the office checks him even here in the full fury of his denunciation of Pope Nicholas : 286 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XIX 'And were it not that still forbids it me The reverence for the Keys Supreme Thou hadst in keeping in the gladsome life, I would make use of words more grievous yet ; Because your avarice afflicts the world, Trampling the good and lifting the depraved.' ^ More striking still is his treatment of his enemy- Boniface VIII. Though he consigns him propheti- cally to the ' tomb ' for Simony, none the less does he denounce Philip the Fair for his outrage on him at Anagni. Unworthy though he was, Boniface by virtue of his office was the Vicar of Christ, and there- fore the outrage from which he died was, in Dante's view, nothing less than a • crucifying of the Son of God afresh.' In the following passage from the Purgatorio, Philip is ' the new Pilate,' and William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, who plundered the Pope's palace, the 'living thieves' — 'living' because, unlike the thieves on Calvary, they had not suffered the just penalty of their crime : ' I see the fleur-de-lys Alagna enter, And Christ in his own vicar captive made. I see him yet another time derided ; I see renewed the vinegar and the gall, And between living thieves I see him slain. I see the new Pilate so relentless This doth not sate him, but without decree He bears his greedy sails into the temple.' ^ PuniehniBnt of Let us now examine more particularly the punish- ment of the Simoniacs. At first glance, it is not 1 Inf. xlx. 100-105. * Purg. XX. 86-93. The last three lines refer to the destruction by Philip of the military order of Knights Templars on charges of heresy, sacrilege, and immorality. The points on which Dante fixes are the absence of fair trial (' without decree ') and Philip's avaricious motive in the prosecution ('his greedy sails'). 'The King,' says Villani III. SIMONIACS 287 easy to see any natural connection between traflBck- CANTO XIX ing in sacred offices and the doom of being set on one's head in a dry well, with feet writhing upwards, and fire playing on the soles ; nevertheless every detail of the punishment has its own special signifi- cance, and flows naturally out of the sin. The most general idea is that Simony is the entire perversion of holy things, and in symbol of this the men who practise it are themselves turned upside down. The fire upon the feet is not so easy to understand. We The Fire on . tlie Feet. may put aside the suggestion that ' the fiaming feet are intended as in direct contrast to the nimbus, which would have adorned the heads of the Popes if they had laid up for themselves a crown of glory. Instead of that their avarice has only earned for them burning feet.' * This is an interpretation fitted on from the outside, whereas we must look for the meaning inside the very nature of the sin of Simony. It is a sin against the Holy Ghost. In true ordina- tion the gift of the Holy Ghost is imparted by the laying on of hands upon the head. Now, on the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost appeared in the form of tongues of fire on the heads of the Apostles ; and it is this fire which now burns on the feet of the men who have turned the whole meaning of ordina- tion upside down. There is more here than mere grim and scornful humour. The Spirit of God, (viii. 92), ' was moved by his avarice, and made secret arrangements with the Pope (Clement v.) and caused him to promise to destroy the Order of the Templars, laying to their charge many articles of heresy ; but it is said that it was more in hope of extracting great sums of money from them.' See Froude's ' The Templars ' in Spanish Story of the ArTnada and Other Essays. ' Vernon, Headings, ii. 77 n. ; so also Scartazzini, Plumptre, etc. 288 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XIX Dante seems to say, must be to us one of two things — a fire upon the head kindling our loftiest faculties with power from on high, or a fire upon the feet, the torment which comes upon the man who sets his lowest faculties uppermost. The reference to ordi- nation is very subtly suggested in lines 28-30 : Even as the flaming of anointed things is wont To move upon the outer surface only, So was it there from the heels to the points. The suggestion has been made that Dante is think- ing of the oily skin of priests who have grown fat on the spoils of their simony ; but it is much more probable that the reference is still to ordination. In the consecration of bishops, the anointing or unction with the chrism is an essential part of the ceremony. It is possible, of course, that Dante is thinking of the sacrament of Extreme Unction, in which the feet and other parts of the body are anointed. If so, his meaning is that this last anoint- ing of the dying is powerless to save men whose simony destroyed the very meaning of the Sacra- ments: their feet still bear the traces of the holy oil, but all the same the fire of perdition plays upon the surface of it. Symbolism of The scornful symbolism is carried out in many the Inversion , , , r. , -i ofBimonistB. other directions. When, for example, he first ad- dressed Nicholas, Dante tells us that he stooped down to hear his reply even as the friar who is confessing The treacherous assassin, who, when he is fixed, Recalls him, so that death may be delayed, i » Inf. xix. 49-51. III. SIMONIACS 289 The punishment of assassins was burial head down- CANTO XIX ward in the earth; and Dante may himself have seen one of these criminals at the last moment, when the soil was about to be filled in around his head, gain a short respite by recalling the friar under pretence of making a further confession. It is something more than a mere simile. The sugges- tion is that simoniacal Popes are ' treacherous assas- sins ' of the Church, murderers of her spiritual life, and therefore justly meet the assassin's doom. The openings in the rock remind him appropriately of the little stone-pulpits in which so often unworthy priests had stood to administer the sacrament of Baptism; it is fitting that now they should stand in them on their heads in token of the perversion of this sacrament. Further, the way in which each guilty Pope as he comes crushes his predecessor down into the fissure and takes his place, is simply a scornful infernal caricature of that Apostolic Succession which they had bought and sold. Simon Magus has his long line of successors as surely as Simon Peter. And they too have their ordination : because they laid their hands on the heads of un- worthy men, now their own heads are laid for ever on the feet of their predecessors, receiving from that long non- Apostolic line the gift of the unholy spirit — Simony being a sin which, once begun, is easily transmitted from Pope to Pope. In short, Dante deliberately constructed this punishment in every detail of it to indicate the shame and everlasting contempt which he believed God would pour out on men who perverted the whole meaning of the T 290 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XIX Christian religion by buying and selling the Holy Ghost. Sacrilege, One point remains which is interesting for its per- imaginary. sonal reference to Dante himself. We saw how he compares the perforations in the rock to the little openings in 'my beautiful St. John,' in which the priest stood when baptizing — one of which, he adds, not many years ago I broke for some one who was drowning in it : Be this a seal all men to undeceive.^ The story as given by old writers is that on some festival day (according to one tradition, an Easter Eve, the same Eve as in the poem here), the Baptistery of Florence being crowded, a boy fell head foremost into one of the little stone-pulpits for the priests, and became so wedged that he was in danger of being suffocated. To save the boy's life, Dante, who was in the crowd, called for an axe, broke the side of the pulpit, and set him free. Evidently his enemies denounced this as an act of sacrilege ; and the poet here gives 'a seal all men to undeceive.' What then is this ' seal ' ? Simply the setting side by side, as he does here, of true sacrilege and ap- parent. To his mind, a human life was more sacred than any stonework of a church, even though it formed part of the holy font of baptism itself. It is quite possible that the charge of sacrilege against Dante was urged by ecclesiastics worthy of this Moat, for men who destroy the spirit of religion are ever the most jealous of its forms ; and this is his reply. In effect he says: 'Which is the real > Inf, xtx. 19-21. III. SIMONIACS 291 sacrilege : for the sake of a human life to destroy a CANTO XIX piece of church-furniture, or for the sake of wealth to destroy the Church itself by selling its holy offices to unholy men, who prove its spiritual assassins? I, indeed, broke the baptismal font, you break the sacrament itself, destroying at one stroke the double baptism of water and of fire.' CHAPTER XVIII CIBCLE VIII.— MALEBOLGB : THE FRAUDTJIiENT Bolgia IV. Diviners CANTO XX When Virgil had carried Dante out of the valley of Bolgia IV.— the Simoniacs, he laid him down on the summit of *"■ the arch of the next bridge, a rugged cliff so steep that even ' for the goats it would be hard passage.' The reference is probably to the difficulty and danger of climbing safely across the sin punished in the ( fourth Moat of Malebolge. It is Divination, a sin which not infrequently attacks men of intellect. It is more than possible that Dante himself may have felt its fascination, and, but for the protecting arms of Keason, might have stumbled and fallen into its abyss. The sure step of Virgil on this steep ridge has, however, a special significance. We must re- member that the popular legends of the Middle VirgU'B Ages had transformed the great Latin poet into a mzard. diviner and enchanter,^ and, of course, had Dante accepted this view he must have set Virgil in this very Moat. He did, indeed, regard him as a diviner in the true sense — a prophet outside of Israel, who foresaw the advent of the Christ. It was necessary, therefore, to vindicate Virgil against the ' See Comparetti's Virgil in the Middle Ages, 292 IV. DIVINERS 293 popular conception of him ; and this he does by CANTO XX showing the ease with which he mounts this steep arch which spans the sin of Divination, where even a goat would find it hard to make its way. Gazing down into the valley, Dante sees a proces- me Proceaiion sion of souls pacing slow as when the Litany is sung, <*^i>'^*'»"- and all weeping silently. The silence may be, as some think, part of the punishment, in contrast to the charms and incantations which they used to mutter on earth ; and the slow pacing may refer to the solemn mystic movements with which they once performed the ritual of their unholy arts. The chief penalty, however, is that their heads are reversed, and they can see and walk no way but backward. Divination is an impious attempt to see into the \ future; and now 'to look forward has been taken i from them.' Virgil points out and names eight | souls : five from his own world of antiquity, and three from near Dante's time. First of the ancients comes Amphiaraus, the great hero and seer of Argos, Ampbiwaus. and, like Capaneus, one of the Seven against Thebes. Foreseeing his own death in this war, he hid him- self; but his wife, Eriphyle, bribed by Polynices with the fatal necklace of Harmonia, revealed the place of his concealment. The ending of the ancient story is very different from that of Dante's version. According to the classical legend, at the moment when Amphiaraus was about to be struck by a spear, Zeus saved him by opening the earth with his thunderbolt to swallow him together with his horses and chariot. Immediately he became a god in the popular mind, was worshipped in many places, 294 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX and consulted as an oracle. All this is reversed by Dante. The Thebans when they see him sink into the earth cry after him : ' " Whither rushest thou, Amphiaraus ? Why dost leave the war ? " '— a taunt for his former concealment of himself. Instead of rising again to divine honours as an oracle, Dante represents him as continuing his head- long rush into the earth as far as Minos, the judge of every sinner. While in the world above men build temples to him and consult him as a god who knows the future, here below he walks his weary backward path, with head reversed, and eyes that see no way but behind. ' Because he wished to see too far before him Behind he looks, and backward makes his way.' ' Tireslas. After him paces Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, who foretold the victory of the city in its war with the Seven Kings. Ovid tells the story of his transformations to which Dante refers.* Having separated two serpents which he found intertwined in a wood, he was changed into a woman; at the end of seven years he found the same two serpents intertwined once more, struck them with his rod a second time, and was changed back into a man. In his case too the classical myth is reversed. Homer represents him as the only soul in Hades who retains his intellect unimpaired; he still carries his sooth- sayer's golden staff, and foretells to Odysseus the » Inf. XX. 31-30. ' Metam. iil. 323-331. IV. DIVINERS 295 course of his future wanderings. But Dante strips CANTO XX him of all this : so far from foreseeing the future, he cannot now see even the present.'^ The third Diviner is Aruns, the Etruscan, who fore- ArunB. told the issue of the war between Caesar and Pompey. He lived in a cave of the white marbles of Carrara, from which he could behold without obstruction the stars and sea, a reference perhaps to his practice of astrology.^ Next comes Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, Manto and her long hair falling down her breast instead of her shoulders. Virgil's native city, Mantua,' was believed to have received its name from the Theban prophetess, and he takes the opportunity of ex- plaining to Dante at considerable length how she became its founder. Starting with Lake Benacus, now Lago di Garda, he traces the river Mincio as it flows out of the south end of the lake at the great fortress of Peschiera, and soon after- wards spreads out into the unhealthy marsh which surrounds Mantua. To this marsh, then destitute of inhabitants, came 'the cruel virgin,' Manto, in the course of her wide wanderings after the death of her father and the enslavement of Thebes, • the city of Bacchus.' Here, to shun all human intercourse, she and her servants remained for the practice of her arts. After her death, the men scattered around gathered themselves together to the place, partly for the protection of the marsh : > Odyssey, x. 495; xi. 90-151; Inf. xx. 40-45. 2 Inf. XX. 46-51. ^ Steictly the village of Andes, near Mantua, identified with the modern village of Pietole. See Purg. xviii. 82, 83 296 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX ' They built the city over those dead bones, And after her who first the place selected, Mantua named it, without other omen.' Virgil attaches great importance to this account of the founding of his native city, for he charges Dante that if he hears any other origin he is to give this, the true one. The curious thing is that Virgil him- self gives a different account. In the JEneid (x. 198- 200) the founding of the city is attributed to Ocnus, son of the river Tiber and the prophetess Manto, who gave it his mother's name. From the pointed- ness of his words, it is evident that Dante wished to correct the Virgilian legend, but his reason for laying such emphasis on the correction is unknown. Another curious difficulty is connected with Manto. In the Purgatorio (xxii. 109-114) Virgil in his conver- sation with the poet Statins tells him that he saw in Limbo several of his people, that is, the characters in his Thebaid and Achilleid — among the rest 'the daughter of Tiresias.' It is difficult to think that this is any other than the Manto here ; and it is even more difficult to suppose that after writing this long passage about her, he could entirely forget it, and set her in a totally different part of the Inferno. If there is a slip of memory, the passage before us must have been written after the incidental reference in the Purgatorio} BtuTpyint. The fifth and last of the ancient seers is Eurypylus. Here again, according to the commentators, Dante ' Inf. XX. 52-102. ' This is an unique instamce of inaccuracy on C's part in a matter of this kind ; the only explanation seems to be that he has in some way confused Manto, daughter of Tiresias, with Manto, daughter of Hercules ' (Toynbee). IV. DIVINERS 297 seems to nod. Virgil says that Burypylus was CANTO XX associated with the prophet Oalchas in the giving of the signal for the sailing of the Greek fleet from Aulis against Troy, adding, ' And thus sings faim My lofty Tragedy in some place or other : Well knowest it thou, who knowest it all.' When we turn to the ^neid, we find him mentioned with Oalchas, not in connection with the sailing of the Greeks for Troy, but with their departure from it when the war was over, or rather when they had grown wearied and discouraged with the length of it. Driven back time after time by storms, they sent Eurypylus to consult the oracle of Apollo; and he brought back the answer that as they had sailed from Aulis through the sacrifice of a Grecian life, by a like sacrifice they must now return. It is curious if Dante really makes a slip at the very moment when he is priding himself on his perfect knowledge of his Virgil. Fortunately, so far as we can see, nothing important in the moral interpretation of the passage turns on either of the alleged mistakes.^ We come now to the Diviners of more modem times. Three are specially named : ' That other who is so slender in the flanks Was Michael Scott, who of a verity Of magic frauds did know the game. Behold Guido Bonatti, behold Asdeute, Who now unto his leather and his thread Would fain have stuck, but too late repents.'^ Asdente {i.e. Toothless) was the nickname of a shoe- Asdeste. > Inf. XX. 106-m ; ^n. ii. 108-129. « Inf. xx. 115-120. 298 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX maker of Parma who lived in the thirteenth century, and is said to have foretold the defeat of Frederick ii. in his siege of tliat city in 1248. He seems to have been widely known and talked of in his day, for in the Convito Dante says that if notoriety constituted nobility 'Asdente, the cobbler of Parma, would be more noble than any of his fellow-citizens.' ^ Now, when it is too late, he wishes he had stuck to his last and let the art of divination alone. His companion, Guido Guido Bonatti, was astrologer to the great Ghibelline captain, Count Guido of Montef eltro, whom we shall find in the eighth Moat of this Circle. The story is that his master lost faith in him because a peasant foretold the weather more truly than he, whereupon Bonatti died of grief .^ Uicbaei By far the most famous of the three, however, is the first-named, Michael Scott of Balwearie, in Fife- shire, • A wizard of such dreaded fame, That when, in Salamanca's cave, Him listed his magic wand to wave, The bells would ring in Notre Dame ! ' Although claimed by Salerno and Toledo, there seems little doubt that he was a native of Scot- 1 Conv. iv. 16. ' Villani (vli. 81) in his account of the defeat of the French by Count Guido at the siege of Forll in 1282, writes : ' It is said that this same Count of Montefeltro was guided by the augury and counsel of one Guido Bonatti, a rool-maker, who had turned astrologer or the like, and that it was he who prompted his actions ; and for this emprise he gave him the standard and said, " Thou hast it at such a pitch, that so long as a rag of it holds, wheresoever thou bearest it thou ahalt be victorious." But I more believe that his victories were won by his own wit and mastery of war.' IV. DIVINERS 299 land, where the legends of his exploits still linger, CANTO XX or did in Sir Walter Scott's time: 'In the South of Scotland,' he says, 'any work of great labour and antiquity is ascribed either to the agency of Auld Michael, of Sir William Wallace, or of the devil.'^ He lived in the thirteenth century, and was un- doubtedly a man of great learning, having studied at Oxford, Paris, and Toledo. At Paris, according to some accounts, he took his degree of doctor of theology. At Toledo he learned Arabic, and thus- became acquainted with the numerous translations of Aristotle and commentaries on his works in that language. In Germany he met the Emperor Frederick ii., who attached him to his Court, and commissioned him to superintend a translation of Aristotle into Latin. He was the author of numerous works on astrology, alchemy, and the occult sciences. Dante seems to refer to his emaciation through severe study, when he says he was ' so slender in the flanks ' ; but it is possible that the allusion is to his supposed power of making himself invisible at will. He is said to have foretold the death of Frederick and to have foreseen his own. According to some accounts he died in Sicily soon after his master ; but the usual view is that he returned to his native country, where he died in 1250, or thereabout. ' Tradition,' says Sir Walter, * varies concerning the place of his burial: some contend for Holme Goltrame in Cumberland, others for Melrose Abbey; but all agree that his books of magic were interred in his grave, or preserved in the convent where he died.' 1 Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto ii. and note. 300 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX After these Virgil points out hurriedly a troop of Witoheg. witches : ' See the wretched women who left the needle, The shuttle, and the spindle, and made them divineresses ; They wrought their sorcery with herb and image.' ^ • Herb ' refers to love-philtres ; and there can be no doubt, as Plumptre says, that 'practically such women carried on a direct trade in poisoning,' The ' image ' refers to the well-known superstition that a person can be killed by making a waxen effigy of him and sticking pins into it, or holding it to the fire tiint melts away. Virgil hurries Dante on after a mere glance, for already 'Cain and the thorns'^ stands on the horizon and ' touches the wave beneath Seville ' : in other words, the moon is setting in the west some time between six and seven on the Saturday morning, the day after they began the pilgrimage. It is sunrise, but the sun being the sensible image of God * is too sacred to be named in this lost world of darkness and eternal night. All indications of time, even during the day, are given by means of the moon. PnnlBlunent of Turning now to the punishment, it is obvious that Heaa. it is taken from Isaiah, xliv. 24-25, ' I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth; > Inf. XX. 121-123. ' With reference to the popular superstition that Cain is ' the Man In the Moon.' According to some forms of the story, the thorns are those with which he strove in vain to hide the body of his murdered brother ; and the wandering moon may be regarded as the land of Nod (Wandering) into which he was banished. (Comp. Mide. Night's Dream, iii. 1 ; v. 1 ; Leland's Legends of Florence, first series, p. 254). 5 Oonv. iii. 12. IV. DIVINERS 301 who is with me ? That frustrateth the tokens of CANTO XX the liars, and mdketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish.' The punishment is entirely natural ; men " who pry into the future get their heads turned, and lose the power of seeing even the present. Take, for instance, that comparatively harmless form of divination which survives among ourselves — the foretelling from the apocalyptic books of Scripture of the course of the future history of the world till the day of judgment : is it not the simple truth that this prying into the future turns men's heads and blinds thera to the signs and movements of the present moment? A similar turning of wise men backward and making of their knowledge foolish is seen in modern spiritualism, which consists of prying into the secrets of another world. It is, of course, impossible to say that there can be no communica- tion between world and world, or that 'no traveller returns ' ; but one of the penalties of this constant peeping through the keyhole of the future world is undoubtedly that men have their heads turned, and grow unfitted for dealing sanely with the affairs and business of the world in which God has set them. It is the penalty He has appointed for any irreverent attempt to tear aside the veil which He has mercifully drawn between man and the future and invisible. To Dante it is a punishment so terrible that, when virgii's he sees the distorted forms, and the tears of thenMU'sHty sufferers falling down their backs, he weeps in sym- pathy with them : 302 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX Truly I wept leaning on one of the rocks Of the hard crag. Although he appeals to the reader to thin^ how it was possihle for him to keep his face dry at such a sight, Virgil gives him a very stern rebuke : ■ Art thou too of the other fools ? Here pity lives when it is wholly dead. Who is a greater reprobate than he Who bears compassion at the doom divine?' •Art thou too of the other fools?' — that is, the fools in this Moat, the Diviners, who are also weep- ing. It is to be noted that in Italian pietdi has the double meaning of pity and piety, and Dante has both in view. To retain the two Plumptre trans- lates line 28 : • Here piety lives when pity's self hath died.' * In other words, it is a great impiety to impugn by our pity the justice of God's judgments upon sinners. Longfellow quotes Omar Khayydm to the same effect : • O Thou who bum'st in Heart for those who bum In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn, How long be crying, "Mercy on them, God I " Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn ? ' Thomas Aquinas teaches that the saints rejoice in 1 Inf. XX. 19-30. There is the same double meaning in Par. iv. 105, where of Alomseon it is said that ' not to lose piety (^iet&) he became pitiless (spietato).' The piety consisted in obeying the command of his father, Ampbiaraus, to slay his mother ; the pitilessness was his put- ting of her to death. In Conv. iv. 21, Dante names pieta as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit ; and in ii. 11, he says it is ' not a passion, bat rather a noble disposition of the mind, prepared to receive love, mercy, and other charitable passions.' IV. DIVINERS 303 the sufferings of the lost, as discerning in them the CANTO XX justice of God : ' A thing can be a joy in two ways : (1) For itself (per se), when one rejoices in the thing as such, and in this way the saints do not rejoice in the sufferings of the wicked; (2) Indirectly {per accidens), on account of something else joined to it ; thus the saints will rejoice in the sufferings of the wicked, considering in them the order of divine justice.' ^ Nevertheless the sharpness of Virgil's rebuke Reason for its cannot but surprise us. On several occasions, as we have seen, he had allowed Dante's pity, or even approved of it, as in the case of the Violent against Nature ; why, then, has it become an impiety now ? One reason has been already referred to. In the Middle Ages Virgil had the reputation of being a diviner himself ; and the very severity of his rebuke is Dante's way of clearing him of this dark fame by showing how sternly he judged this sin. But un- doubtedly the deepest reason lies in the nature of the sin itself. It is a sin almost incomprehensible to the modern mind ; we smile away wizardry and witchcraft, astrology and fortune-telling, as harm- less superstitions. The theology of the Middle Ages, however, following Scripture, took a much more serious view of it. Aquinas, for example, discusses the question. Is Divination a sin ? — Divination being defined as 'some sort of prediction of things to come.' His answer is that things which happen by necessary and invariable causes, such as eclipses, can be pre- dicted without sin. So also can those things which > Svmma, Supp. q. zciv, a. 3. 304 THE FRAUDULENT CANTO XX happen, ' not necessarily and invariably, but gener- ally, failing however at times,' such as rain or drought. But there is a third class of things which are ' indeterminate, and may work either way,' and these God alone can foreknow, and therefore to divine them is an infringement of His prerogative. • To consider such effects in themselves before they take place, is proper to God, who alone in His eter- nity sees future things as present. Hence it is said : "Show the things that are to come hereafter, and we shall know that ye are gods " (Isa. xli. 23). If any one therefore presumes to foretell or foreknow future things of this character, otherwise than by God's revealing them to him, he manifestly usurps to himself the prerogative of God; and from this some are called diviners. Hence Isidore says : " Diviners are so called as being full of God : for they pretend to be full of the Divinity, and with fraudulent cunning they conjecture what is to befall man in the future." It is not therefore called divinor Hon, if one foretells things which happen of neces- sity, or happen generally, which things can be foreknown by human reason ; or if one knows by revelation of God other events which are to happen, though not of necessity, in the future : for then he is not himself divining, that is, doing what is divine, rather he is receiving what is divine. But then only is a man said to divine, when he arrogates to him- self in an undue manner the foretelling of future events ; and this is certainly a sin.' ^ It is probably for this reason that Diviners are set lower than even ' Summa, ii-ii. q. xcv. a. 1. IV. DIVINERS 305 y Simoniacs. Simony is, indeed, a trafficking in the CANTO XX Spirit of God, but Divination is, as it were, a pre- tence of actually being the Spirit, a bold usurpation of the attributes of God and exercise of His pre- rogative. It was a fraud, therefore, practised upon the spiritual nature of men : it robbed them of the true God and of the trust for their future which they ought to place in Him. For manifestly it is a spiritual impossibility for a man who relies on a diviner to rely also upon God. The very attempt to unveil the future is an effort to free oneself from the necessity of leaning on the Divine providence and care, an impious attempt to make oneself in- dependent of them. This is the reason for the sharpness of Virgil's rebuke of Dante's pity; it is also the reason for that peculiar severity against every form of Divination which perplexes us in Scripture. In ages of superstition, when Divination abounds, it is almost, if not quite, impossible for men either to form any worthy conception of God or to repose any trust in His providence. It is, therefore, neither right nor reasonable to waste tears on men who practise on their fellows so heart- less a deception of their highest spiritual instincts. CHAPTER XIX CIRCLE VIII. — MALEBOLGE: the fraudulent CANTOS XXI.-XXIII. 57 Barratry. The Hoat of Fiteb. Bolgia V. Barrators 1. The Narrative Talking of things ' of which,' says Dante, ' my Comedy cares not to sing,' the two pilgrims pass downward from the fourth bridge to the fifth, which spans the Moat of the Barrators. Barratry has several meanings. It was sometimes used as a synonym for Simony. In old Scots Law it is the taking of bribes by judges ; but here it has the wider meaning of using any public office or position of trust for purposes of fraudulent gain — trafficking in justice, office, or employment. It is therefore in the State what Simony is in the Church, and we may guess the depth of Dante's hatred of it partly by the large space he devotes to it — nearly two and a half cantos — and partly by the coarseness and grotesquery with which he holds it up to abhorrence and contempt. We shall first give the narrative of Dante's ad- ventures in this Bolgia, and then attempt some interpretation of them. The Moat, says Dante, as he gazed down on it from the bridge, was 'marvellously dark' — literally pitch- V. BARRATORS 307 dark, indeed, for it was filled with pitch. He could CANTOS discern nothing but the bubbles which rose and fell '57 with the boiling of the black canal; and the sight '~~ reminded him of the cauldrons of boiling pitch which he had seen in the famous Arsenal of Venice, where its merchants re-caulked their ships to fit them for new voyages. Suddenly Virgil caught his companion and drew him to himself, crying ' Take care, take care ! ' Turning his startled eyes, me Aideman Dante sees • a black devil,' who, ' with open wings ** ^'"'•*- and light upon his feet,' rushes upon the bridge and flings into the river of pitch below a sinner whom he carried on his shoulders ' clutched by the sinews of the feet,' crying, ' O Malebranche of our bridge, Behold one of the Elders of Santa Zita ; Plunge him beneath, for I return for others To that city which I have well furnished with them : Every one there is a barrator, except Bonturo : No into Yes for money there is changed.'^ Malebranche means Evil-claws, and ia the general name of all the demons who infest this Moat. Santa Zita is the patron saint of Lucca, and the Elders or Ancients are the magistrates of that city, corre- sponding to the Priors of Florence. The exception of Bonturo Dati is ironical, for, if the early commen- tators are to be believed, he was the arch-barrator of the city, and managed nearly all its offices for his own profit. 'No into Yes for money there is changed' may mean that judges and magistrates at first refused men's suits and afterwards granted ■ Inf. xxi. 37-42. The 'Elder' is said to have been one Martino Bottaio, -who died in 1300. 308 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS them on payment of the desired bribe, but it is 57 ' said to have had a more specific reference. In the Council of Lucca the votes were taken by urns, one for the Ayes, the other for the Noes, and the accusation is that the votes were cast into one or other according to the bribe. It has been suggested Santo Zita. that in calling Lucca ' Santa Zita,' Dante is sneering at that city for having chosen a servant-maid as its patron saint, but this is a total misunderstanding of the very spirit of the poet. He is indeed sneering, but it is not at the poor servant-girl. His reason for naming her is undoubtedly to draw a contrast between h^r faithfulness in her humble position of trust and the unfaithfulness of these magistrates to their higher duties and responsibilities. Zita was a servant in the same family for nearly fifty years, and her master had such confidence in her integrity that he intrusted his whole household to her, giving her liberty to distribute alms to the poor out of his bounty at her own pleasure. Yet here are the magistrates of the city which had chosen this faith- ful servant-girl as its patron saint so unfaithful to their higher trust that this ' black devil ' is kept busy carrying them to the river of pitch, which is the image of their sin ! ^ With a fiendish joy in his infernal task he rushes back to Lucca for another load : Never was a mastiff loosened With so much hurry to pursue a thief. \-' This, indeed, is the mark of the diabolic spirit — delight in the perdition of men — just as joy in their > Zita died about 1275, and was canonized by Nicholas iii., the Pope who ' pocketed himself in the ' pouch ' of the Simoniacs {Inf. xix. 72). V. BARRATORS 309 salvation is the sign of the angelic. We read, for CANTOS example, of a like haste on the part of the angel g^ ' who ferried the souls across to Mount Purgatory: the moment he landed his passengers he ' departed swiftly as he came,' eager to bring another load. When the Alderman of Santa Zita rose, face downward, in the boiling pitch, the demons who had been lurking under the bridge in wait for such sinners rushed at him and beat him down 'with more than a hundred rakes,' as scullions with their hooks thrust down the meat in the cauldron, crying, * Here the Santo Yolto has no place ! Here one swims otherwise than in the Serchio : Therefore if for our hooks thou wishest not, Do not uplift thyself above the pitch. ... It here behoves thee to dance covered, That, if thou canst, thou secretly may'st pilfer.'^ The Serchio is the river on which Lucca stands, and a favourite bathing-place of the citizens. The Santo Tie Santo Volto or Holy Face is a famous crucifix still pre- served in the Cathedral of that city. The legend is that it was carved out of cedar-wood by Nicodemus, the face, which he had not dared to attempt, being finished by an angel while he slept. In 782 it was floated miraculously to the shores of Italy not far from Lucca, and its fanae spread even to our own distant island. William Ruf us swore habitually ' by the Holy Face of Lucca,' and it is said that in the old London Church of St. Thomas there was an effigy of it. When this Alderman of Lucca rises from his plunge into the pitch 'doubled up,' the » Inf. xxl. 48-54. 310 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS demons humorously affect to believe that he is in the XXI -XXIII • ■57 ■ attitude of prayer, and mock him with the cry that here there is no Holy Face to invoke, as his custom was on earth. Dante is said to have lived in Lucca in 1314, and probably it was then that he learnt the corruption of its magistrates, and indeed of the whole city, virgu'g Parley At this point Virgil thinks it prudent to conceal Malebranche. Dante among the rocks of the bridge above, while he descends into the Moat to hold parley with the fiends. He warns him not to fear anything that may happen to himself, as he has been in a similar affray before and understands how to conduct it. The reference is perhaps to the former journey which he had made through Hell;^ or he may be speaking in his purely allegorical character of Beason, which knows by experience how to meet such a sin as this and overcome it. The moment Virgil appears, the fiends with a roar of fury rush at him like dogs upon a beggar, but his resolute front daunts them. He orders them to stand while one of their number comes forth to speak with him; whereupon their chief, Malacoda, advances, saying • What will it avail him ? ' Virgil warns him not to oppose the Divine will which has ordained that he show another 'the savage way'; and so humbles his arrogance that his grapnel drops from his hand. He then calls to his companion to come out of his hiding-place among the rocks and join him. Dante immediately rushes to his side for safety; but the demons gather round with such cries and threaten- > Inf. ix. 22-24. V. BARRATORS 811 lugs of their hooks that his own terror reminds CANTOS . XXI -XXIII him of how he once beheld the garrison of Gaprona ' 57 march out, when the fortress was taken, with glances of fear as they passed through the ranks of their victorious foes, lest they should break the treaty of surrender and slay them on the spot, uaiacoda's Malacoda, however, restrains his fiends for the ^**<**'y- moment. With a show of kindness he offers the travellers an escort as far as the next bridge over the sixth Moat, that of the Hypocrites, giving as his reason that the bridge at the point where they now stood was broken down : ' You can no farther go Forward upon this crag, because is lying All shattered at the bottom, the sixth arch ; And if it still doth please you to go onward, Pursue your way along upon this ridge ; Near is another crag which yields a path. Yesterday, five hours later than this houf, One thousand two hundred and sixty-six years Completed were since here the way was broken.' 1 The reference is to the earthquake of the Crucifixion The Earth- which ruined the pathway that descends to the crucifixion!* Circle of Violence, and shook down the bridges over the Moat of the Hypocrites. Malacoda knows the date to an hour. Dante tells us in the Convito that Christ died in His thirty-fourth year, and this added to 1266, brings us to 1300 — the ideal date of the poem.* In the same passage he says that, according to St. Luke, our Lord died at the sixth hour of the day, that is, at twelve O'clock noon; it was there- fore seven o'clock in the morning of Easter Eve in 1 Inf. xxi. 106-114. s Conv. iv. 23. 312 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS the year 1300, when Malacoda spoke these words. XXI -XXIII ■57 ■ Doubtless this show of minute accuracy was in- tended to deceive the travellers by inspiring them with confidence in his other statements. For his information about the bridges contains just that cunning admixture of truth and falsehood which is natural in a past-master of barratry. It was indeed true that the bridge over the next Moat was broken down at this particular point ; but it was not true that by going farther round this valley they would find another bridge unbroken, as Malacoda promised them. All the bridges over the Moat of the Hypo- crites had been shaken down by the earthquake, as Virgil to his indignation discovered when he reached it. In short, the obvious intention of Malacoda is to retain the strangers in his territory by this fiction of an unbroken bridge farther on, in the hope that some lucky chance would place them in the power of his fiends. For this purpose, under pretence of patrolling the banks of the canal, he detailed ten of them under a ' decurion ' or lieutenant, named Bar- bariccia, to act as escort ; and his command, ' Let these be safe as far as the other ridge Which all unbroken goes across the dens,' 1 was in reality a secret order to destroy them if they could, since there was no ' other ridge ' that was ' all unbroken,' The demons show that they understand the true meaning of their instructions, for 'each presses his tongue between his teeth toward their leader for a signal.' Dante, terrified at their gnash- ^ Inf. zxi, 125-126. The names of the fiends are given on p. 322. V. BARRATORS 313 ing teeth and threatening brows, entreats Virgil to CANTOS • XXI -XXIIL dispense with such an escort; but he replies con- 57 temptuously, ' Let them gnash on according to their fancy' — only the wretches in the pitch need fear, they can do no harm to honest men. For once Virgil j was quite mistaken. The sequel shows that Dante was right, and that the instinct of fear is sometimes a wiser and safer guide than Season itself. ) Turning to the left along the bank of the canal, Dante saw some of the souls rise like dolphins out of the pitch to lighten their pain if only for a moment. Others lay on the brink with their muzzles out, like frogs, ready to plunge if they heard a sound of the demons who patrolled the banks. He still shudders, he tells us, to remember ciampoio of how one wretch who was a moment too late in plunging was caught by one of the demons by the hair, dragged ashore like an otter, and cruelly tortured.^ At Dante's entreaty Virgil interferes, asking him who he is, and who are his companions in the pitch; but every now and then his story is interrupted by the impatience of the fiends to have their will of him. One gored him with his tusk; a second with his hook tore away a tendon from his arm ; a third aimed a savage blow at his legs ; and it was only by clasping him in his arms, and even then with difficulty, that the decurion, Barbariccia, pro- tected him till his story was finished. His name, which he himself does not mention, is given by the early commentators as Ciampoio. He tells Virgil that he was a native of Navarre; that his father 1 Inf. xiii. 31-96. 314 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS was a spendthrift knave who destroyed both himself XXI -XXIII ■ 57 ■ and his goods ; and that his mother in consequence had placed him in the service of a lord. From this he became a retainer of ' good King Thibault,' that is, Teobaldo il. of Navarre, a man of great justice and clemency. It is said that he gained the entire confidence of the King, who left the disposal of offices and favours in his hands. At Virgil's request, he tells that his companion in the pitch who escaped FraOomita when he was caught, was Fra Gomita, 'vessel of a ura. every fraud,' ' not a petty, but a sovereign barrator.' This Friar (of what Order is unknown) was appointed as his deputy or chancellor during his absence by Nino de' Visconti, Judge of the Judicature of Gallura in Sardinia.^ The ' noble Judge,' as Dante calls him, would never believe the reports of his unfaithful- ness; but when at last he discovered that he had accepted bribes and allowed certain of his enemies to escape from prison, Nino straightway had him hanged. Underneath the pitch the Friar has for Michel zancbe crony Don Michel Zanche, Governor of Logodoro in Sardinia, and the two worthies are never tired, says Ciampolo, of gossiping of their native island. This Don Michel was vicar of Enzio, natural son of Frederick n. Enzio became King of Sardinia by his marriage with Adelasia, heiress of Logodoro and Gallura. Shortly after, this ill-fated prince was captured by the Bolognese, and died after more 1 Dante meets Nino among the negligent rulers in the Valley of the Princes on Mount Purgatory (Purg. viii. 46-84). He was chief of the Guelph party in Pisa, and was treacherously driven out of the city by his grandfather, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca (Inf. xzxii. 124-zxxiii. 78). See p. 441-450. V. BARRATORS 315 than twenty years' imprisonment. His wife obtained CANTOS XXI —XXIII a divorce, and married his vicar in Logodoro, this '57 ' Michel Zanche, who about the year 1290 was treach- erously murdered by his son-in-law, Branca d'Oria of Genoa. Dante tells us that while the body of this traitor continued to ' eat, and drink, and sleep, and put on clothes,' his soul was frozen into the ice of Cooytus in the lowest Hell before the spirit of his murdered father-in-law bad time to reach this moat of boiling pitch.^ Ciampolo's old earthly cunning now stands him in ciampoio's good stead, and proves itself a match even for the demons. He proposes that if they withdraw them- selves a little out of sight he will give to his com- rades in the river a signal by whistling that the coast is clear, and thus for one they will have seven to torture. At first, Cagnazzo and the rest oppose it as a transparent trick, but are finally persuaded by Alichino, who threatens Ciampolo that if he dares to dive into the pitch he will swoop down upon him with his wings. The Navarrese well his time selected ; Planted the soles on land, and in an instant Leaped, and from their purpose freed himself.^ Alichino's pursuit was in vain — 'wings could not outstrip the terror.' As he returned angry and Quarrel of tie weary, like a falcon that has missed its prey. Galea- ^^'^^<^^- brina, only too glad of an excuse for a quarrel, grappled with him, and the two fiends fell fighting into the boiling pitch, which so 'belimed' their wings that their companions had to drag them out » Inf. xxxili. 136-147. See p. 456-458. ^ Inf. xxii. 121-123. 816 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS with their hooks. Virgil and Dante took advantage XXI.-XXIII ■ 57 'of the fray to escape from such dangerous company, FUghtoTthe suspecting that they would next turn on them their Poets. disappointed fury. Nor were they mistaken, for on looking back, Dante was terrified to see them not far off in hot pursuit ' with wings outspread.' This time even Virgil did not venture to confront them. Snatching Dante up, as a mother her child in a burn- ing house, he flung himself down the rocky bank into the next valley, not waiting to look for any bridge. And only in time, for they reached the bottom just as the fiends appeared on the ridge above, beyond which 'the high Providence' had ordained that they could not pass. CHAPTER XX ciKCLE vni. — malmbolge: the pbadulent Bolgia V. Barrators 2. The Interpretation We have now before us the long, hideous, and CANTOS . • XXI -xxm. grotesque narrative, the reading of which seems 57 alnaost to leave the stain of its defilement on the mind. When we turn to the interpretation, the difficulty lies in the multiplicity of the meanings which Dante has woven together almost inextri- cably. Let us begin by examining the form of this 'Pantomime of Hell,' as one has called it. It was probably suggested by the morality-plays of the a Morality Middle Ages, if not, indeed, as many think, by one in Amo-^ay particular. In the Chronicle of Villani we have the ^'°*' record of an extraordinary ' morality ' performed on the river Arno in 1304, which may well have been in Dante's mind. The inhabitants of a certain quarter of Florence, we read, ' sent forth a proclamation that whosoever desired news of the other world should come on the first day of May upon the Carraia Bridge, and beside the Arno ; and they erected upon the Arno a theatre upon boats and vessels, and there- upon they made the similitude and figure of hell, with fires and other pains and sufferings, with men sir 318 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS disguised as demons, horrible to behold, and others ■57 ■ which had the appearance of naked souls, which seenaed to be persons, and they were putting them to the said divers torments, with loud cries, and shrieks, and tumult, which seemed hateful and fearful to hear and to see ; and by reason of this new pastime there came naany citizens to look on, and the Carraia Bridge, which then was of wood from pile to pile, was so burdened with people that it gave way in many places, and fell with the people which were upon it, wherefore many were killed and drowned, and many were maimed ; so that the pastime from sport became earnest, and, as the proclamation had said, many by death went to learn news of the other world, with great lamentation and sorrow to all the city, for each one believed he must have lost his son or his brother there ; and this was a sign of future ill, which in a short time should come to our city through the exceeding wickedness of the citizens, as hereafter we shall make mention.' ^ It is far from unlikely that this grotesque morality-play on the Arno was in Dante's mind when he wrote this part of the Inferno, particularly as there are other things, to be explained later on, which appear to connect this Moat with Florence in a peculiar way. symDoUim of The symbolism of the pitch is comparatively easy DeflSment! ^''^^ Simple. It is generally agreed that it represents the clinging and defiling power of money, when men stoop to gain it by the fraudulent use of positions and offices of public trust. Perhaps Ruskin's way of putting it is the most interesting: ' This lake of pitch 1 Villcmi, viii. 70. V. BARRATORS 319 is money, whicla, in our own vulgar English phrase, CANTOS XXI xxm " sticks to people's fingers " ; it clogs and plasters its 57 margin all over, hecause the mind of a man hent on dishonest gain makes everything within its reach dirty; it hubhles up and down, because underhand gains nearly always inVolve alternate excitement and depression ; and it is haunted by the most cruel and indecent of all the devils, because there is no- thing so mean, and nothing so cruel, but a peculator will do it.' ^ Another obvious element in this punishment of the DarimeBs. pitch is one which exists more or less in every Circle of the lost, namely, darkness. When, for example, the Alderman from Lucca rose after his plunge in the black river, the demons from under the bridge thrust him down with their hooks, crying, ' It here behoves thee to dance covered, That, if thou canst, thou secretly may'st pilfer.' As on earth these Barrators had wrought their frauds in secret, loving the darkness because their deeds were evil, now they shall have enough of it. A lifetime of dark and underhand dealing and viola- tion of public trust, such as these men were guilty of, produces a deep and terrible moral blindness from which escape is impossible : the demons of their own habitual evil stand on the banks and violently thrust them down. Dante saw in this particular form of fraud the most blinding of all sins ; others do, indeed, darken the air, and one even plunges into a black mire, but this produces pitch-darkness from which * Fors Clweigera, Letter xviii. p. 12. 320 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS the soul never escapes — it has become its eternal XXI.-XXIII. , i J i.- 57 element and portion. Pain ofthe ^^ ^^ ^^^ ^° easy to say what is represented by the BoUinjf pitci. boiling of the pitch. If the souls here could be supposed to have a touch of nobleness left, it might mean the torraent of shame — the agony of having the fair and honourable reputation which they once bore stripped off, and themselves revealed as men who vilely abused the high posts of power and office with which their fellow-men had intrusted them. One remembers the disgrace and fall of a man like Francis Bacon, and the burning, defiling pain it must have been to make public confession of this very sin of barratry : ' I beseech your Lordships to be merciful to a broken reed.' Shame like this can hardly have existed here, for the very capacity of such feeling would probably carry within it some power of repentance and salvation. It is much more likely, therefore, that Dante has in view pain of another kind, of which we have many hints in the Inferno — the torment of the evil desires and habits of a life- time suddenly dammed-up by death, denied an out let, and for ever turned back upon the soul in a bafded, impotent longing. Doubtless these Barrators were as dead to shame as the fiends who preyed upon them ; but they were only too keenly alive to the loss of all the worldly possessions for which they had sinned away their souls, the loss too of every opportunity of pursuing their old fraudulent career, the only one they were now fit for. Dante tells how the two old rogues from Sardinia talk over their former frauds, as old soldiers re-fight their battles : V. BARRATORS 821 if it eased their pain to go over them in memory, it CANTOS XXI —XXIII probahly also increased it by reminding them that ' 57 the old lust of the world and the old cunning, f raudu- lent power to gain it, which still burned within them, were now doomed to find no outlet and field for ever. Death had outdone them at their own game, and played a finer trick on them than any they had ever played on their fellows. The pain, then, of the ^ boiling pitch may well represent the agony of know- ing that they have lost at one cast their souls and the prize for which they staked them, that no fraud they ever practised on their fellow-men is so great as that with which they cheated themselves, and that now all outlet and field is for ever denied to that one master vice to which they have narrowed down their whole life and being. Still further, they receive from the demons Tbe Demon* who patrol the banks precisely the same treat- '*''*^ *" *""*" ment as they gave to their fellow-men on earth. When the fiends lie in ambush under the bridge and among the rocks that they may surprise and hook the unwary, the obvious meaning is that Barrators receive back in kind the frauds and cruelties they had practised upon others. Just so had they lurked for the unwary, caught them in their toils, tortured them without mercy ; and now with what measure they meted to others, it is measured to them again. As one says, they had 'skinned ' others, now they themselves are skinned. In short, the demons are the infernal image of the Tbe Male- sin of Barratry, and, revolting as they are, it may tue^miMsTof be worth while to examine them more closely that ***' **"' 322 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS we may understand Dante's estimate of the vice. XXI — xxm '57 'To begin with, these fiends are a dreadful mingling of the diabolic and the brute. Their general title is Malebranche, which means Bvil-clawa. Twelve are named, and although in some cases the meaning of the names is uncertain, in others the obvious re- ference is to their resemblance to certain wild and ferocious beasts : such as Gagnazzo, Dog-face ; Draghinazzo, Dragon -face ; Ciriatto, Swine -face; and Graf&acane, Scratch -dog.^ They represent Dante's estimate of Barratry : it is a diabolic sin, brutal in its cruelty. Further, it is as cunning as it is brutal. It lurks in secret places ; it has hooks to catch its victims, and wings to swoop down on them if they attempt to escape. It knows well how to use words with a secret meaning, as when Malacoda instructed the escort to have the travellers in safety as far as the next unbroken bridge, knowing per- fectly that no such bridge existed. It has every kind of knowledge at its command that may serve its fraudulent purposes : who, for example, could have expected Malacoda to know the date of the Crucifixion to an hour ? Yet the knowledge has its use, and is cunningly put forward to create con- fidence in his other statements. Grossnesa of It is perhaps natural that readers should be some- the Fiends. * The names of the twelve are as follows : 1. Malacoda. 7. Llbicocco. 2. Scarmlgllone. 8. Draghinazzo. 3. Barbariccia. 9. Ciriatto. 4. Alichino. 10. GrafiSacane. 5. Calcabrina. H. Farfarello. 6. Cagnazzo. 12. Rubicante. The last ten form the escort sent with the two trayellers by the captain, Malacoda, V. BARRATORS 323 what scandalized by the grotesqueness and grossness CANTOS of the fiends ; but we may be sure that when a man ' 57 like Dante writes deliberately as he does in these Cantos, he has a meaning and a purpose. His aim is partly to show his utter contempt for this sin; and partly to deelare his conviction that this grossness and indecency are of the very essence of the vice. He distinctly disclaims responsibility for such iBomp&nions : We went upon our way with the ten demons ; Ah savage company I but, in the church With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons 1^ In other words, he did not create the fiends, he found them there, and a man cannot always choose his company. If they are gross, it is because the sin of which they are the image is gross, an outrage upon public deoeticy. The betrayal of public trusts for gain is a thing so foul that it changes a man into a demon who will shrink from nothing mean, base, or degrading in pursuit of his ends. Buskin rightly Euskin on )^ defends this passage on the ground that ' it is not cbaracter. possible to express intense wickedness without some condition of degradation.' The passage, though long, is worth quoting in full. 'Malice, subtlety, and I pride, in their extreme, cannot be written upon \ noble forms ; and I am aware of no effort to repre- ; sent the Satanic mind in the angelic form which has \ succeeded in painting. Milton succeeds only because i he separately describes the movements of the mind, and therefore leaves himself at liberty to make the form heroic ; but that form is never distinct enough • Inf. xxli. 13-15. 824 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS ! to be painted, Dante, who will not leave even ex- XXI -XXIII ■ 57 ■ terual forms obscure, degrades them before he can feel them to be demoniacal ; so also John Bunyan : both of them, I think, having firmer faith than Milton's in their own creations, and deeper insight into the nature of sin. Milton makes his fiends too I noble, and misses the foulness, inconstancy, and fury : of wickedness. His Satan possesses some virtues, not the less virtues for being applied to evil purpose. Courage, resolution, patience, deliberation in counsel, this latter being eminently a wise and holy char- acter, as opposed to the " Insania " of excessive sin : and all this, if not a shallow and false, is a smoothed and artistical, conception. On the other hand, I have always felt that there was a peculiar grandeur in the indescribable ungovernable fury of Dante's fiends, ever shortening its own powers, and dis- appointing its own purposes ; the deaf, blind, speech- less, unspeakable rage, fierce as the lightning, but erring from its mark or turning senselessly against itself, and still further debased by foulness of form and action. Something is indeed to be allowed for the rude feelings of the time, but I believe all such men as Dante are sent into the world at the time when they can do their work best ; and that, it being appointed for him to give to mankind the most vigorous realization possible both of Hell and Heaven, he was born both in the country and at the time which furnished the most stern opposition of Horror and Beauty, and permitted it to be written in the clearest terms. And, therefore, though there are passages in the Inferno which it would be im- V. BARRATORS 325 possible for any poet now to write, I look upon it as CANTOS XXI xxin all the more perfect for them. For there can be no "^ "57 question but that one characteristic of excessive / vice is indecency, a general baseness in its thoughts and acts concerning the body, and that the full por- traiture of it cannot be given without marking, and , that in the strongest lines, this tendency to corporeal degradation ; which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot now. And, therefore, I \ think the twenty -first and twenty - second books j of the Inferno the most perfect portraitures of '■ fiendish nature which we possess ; and, at the same time, in their mingling of the extreme of horror • • . j with ludicrous actions and images, they present the ' most perfect instances with which I am acquainted of the terrible grotesque.' ^ There is another aspect of these demons which is Discipline of seldom noticed, and yet can scarcely be accidental. I refer to the discipline, authority, and government which exist among them. Twelve demons are named, and Malacoda is their captain. He singles out ten as escort, and appoints Barbariccia as •deourion.' The discipline is wonderful, when we remember the brutal, fiendish nature of the company. At given signals they move off like soldiers, and on the whole, however sullenly, they obey the orders of their officers. When two of them quarrel over the escape of a victim (as barrators often do), their comrades fly to separate them and drag them out of the pitch. This discipline and obedience to authority cannot be accidental. From the moral side it pro- * stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. ill. § liii. 326 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS bably means that Barratry is usually carried on by XXI XXIII ■57 ■ several men in a conspiracy and working to one another's hands; that they are controlled by some master mind who uses the others as his tools ; and that all quarrels among themselves are promptly suppressed lest the whole scheme of villainy should be ruined. Even a band of brigands cannot hold together and be successful in its robberies, unless some respect is paid to authority and discipline. One cannot help suspecting, however, that Dante has in all this a political meaning. We must remember that Barratry is to the State what Simony is to the Church, and in placing it in a lower Moat we see that he regarded it as a deeper sin.^ Now, in the Moat of the Simoniacs, we saw an infernal carica- ture of Apostolic Succession, a grotesque inver- , sion of Church order and government. Here we have the same idea carried out. Barratry is the fraudulent use and sale of offices and employments of public trust, and therefore the subversion of the entire meaning and purpose of civil government. The men who are guilty of this use the authority and discipline originally meant for the safety and wellbeing of their fellows precisely as these fiends do — for their ruin and torture. The discipline of the demons, therefore, is the hellish caricature and parody of civil government, as the non-Apostolic Succession of the Simoniacs is that of ecclesiastical. One last point. It is impossible to read these 1 Just as, on the other hand, in the ParadAso Righteous Rulers of the State are set two Heavens higher than Theologians and Fathers of the Church. M V. BARRATORS 327 Cantos without the growing conviction that Dante CANTOS has some peculiar personal interest in this Moat. '57 It is the only place in Hell in which he was in actual ~ personal danger, and this naust refer to the fact Barratry that one of the charges on which he was banished Dante, from Florence was this very sin of Barratry — the misuse of public money during his magistracy. We cannot be far wrong if we see in his adventures with the fiends the story of his treatment at the hands of his countrymen ; and in the way in which he brands the crime with infamy and indecency his indignant denial of guilt, just as Virgil cleared himself of the charge of wizardry in the Moat of the Diviners. If we thus connect it with Dante's fortunes, it gives signifi- cance to several points in the story which seem other- wise inexplicable. Take, for example, the names of the twelve fiends. It is extremely difficult to give any convincing explanation of them; but if the in- genious suggestion of Gabriel Eossetti is accepted, the general meaning would at once become clear. According to Rossetti, the whole scene in this Moat is a kind of infernal parody of the extraordinary morality-play performed on the Arno on May-day, 1304, the account of which has been already quoted from Villani. Further, Bossetti says that when in 1300 Cardinal Acquasparta was sent to Florence to make peace between the Blacks and Whites, there were twelve Priors of the city, and also that twelve representatives of the party of the Blacks were elected to treat with the Cardinal. The suggestion is that the names of the twelve demons are simply parodied from those of the twelve Priors or of the 328 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS twelve Blacks. ' One name may recall the face of one ■v"YT YYTTT ■57 ■ of them, another may refer to some habit or custom Th KaT °^ another. . . . There may be some corroboration teanche of of his idea, Bossetti thinks, in the fact that at the time of the entrance of the Cardinal into Florence Manno Branca was Podest^; and from his name people may have got to call the magistrates under his sway Malebranche. ^f one remembers that the gonfaloniere di giustizia, or corporal of the city, at that time was Jacopo Ricci, one may be able to understand how the corporal of the band of ten demons came to be called Barbaricda. If one re- members that one of the Priori at the same time was one of the Raffacani, one may see from whence was bestowed on Hell the gift of the demon Graffia- cane. Rubicante pazzo may have been the nickname of Pazzin' de' Pazzi, who may have been rubicund in the face, with red hair.' As Dr. Moore says, 'it might well result that, in spite of its present obscurity, the whole travesty might have been transparently obvious and irresistibly telling when the names and incidents were fresh in men's minds.'^ The most interesting thing, however, about this ingenious conjecture is the significance it would give to Dante's own danger in this Moat. When we remember how Virgil at the outset hid him among the rocks of the bridge; how the moment he appeared the fiends tried to get him into their hands ; and finally how he had to save himself from their malice by flight : it is difficult to believe that ' Vernon's Beadinga, ii. 180-181; Moore'6 Studies in Dante, 2nd Series, 231-235. V. BARRATORS 329 Dante is not describing the plots of his enemies in CANTOS • • XXI -XXIII Florence to seize and punish him for this same sin of '57 Barratry, — the very sin, he here declares, of which they themselves are guilty. For example , it has been wiiy Dante asked why Dante did not return to Florence and the eharga. face this charge: is not his absence proof of his guilt ? The answer which I understand him to give in the story of his adventures with the demons is that he had no hope of justice. The men who sought to get him into their hands were, like these fiends, so cruel and treacherous as to be beyond the reach of reason. From such intensity of malice the only wisdom, even for an innocent man, is concealment and flight. Hence it is that Virgil, who is Reason personified, counsels him to hide, and at last is forced to snatch him up and fiee from his pursuers. This flight is neither cowardice nor an acknow- ledgment of guilt, but simple prudence. Dante knew only too well that there is a fiendish depth of malignity, dead to every appeal of pity, reason, and justice, which it is certain death to face. CHAPTER XXI CIRCLE VIII.— MALEBOLGB : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia VI. Hypocrites CANTOS The Moat into which Virgil had flung himself and XXIV. 60 liis companion with such headlong haste to escape The ProceBsion ^^^ fiends, turned out to be that of the Hypocrites : of Hypocrites. A painted people there below we found, Who went about with steps exceeding slow, Weeping, and in their look wearied and overcome. ^ The 'painted' probably refers to their faces; and some regard their very weeping and slowness of pace as part of their old hypocrisy carried on into eternity. This, however, is doubtful, since both the slowness and the tears are sufficiently accounted for by the garments which they wear — gowns with great hoods hanging over their eyes. Dante compares them to those worn by the monks of Cologne. The story runs that the monks of the Abbey of Cologne in their pride petitioned the Pope for liberty 'to wear scarlet robes, with silver girdles and spurs. The Pope, considering their pride and presumption, ordered instead that they should wear extremely » Inf. xxiii. 58-60. 830 VI. HYPOCRITES 331 common robes, fashioned like an ashen-grey hair XXIII. 58- shirt, very long, and so ample that they dragged — 1 along on the ground behind them.'* Dante clothes these souls in this exaggerated monk's gown because it is the appropriate garb of men who use religion as a cloak. But the chief peculiarity of the mantles of these hypocrites is that while outwardly they were so brightly gilded that they dazzled the eyes, inwardly they were of lead, and so heavy That Frederick used to put them on of straw. The reference is to a tradition — said, however, to have no foundation — that the Emperor Frederick ii. punished traitors by wrapping them in lead, and then exposing them to a heated furnace until the lead melted. Dante means that for weight Frederick's mantles were but straw in comparison. The idea of this cloak of gilded lead, as Toynbee sym*^»m of points out, was probably suggested by a curious Face and the , „ ,, , , ., ,. , GUded Cloak. etymology of the word hypocrite which was com- monly accepted in the Middle Ages. According to the Latin Dictionary of Uguccione de' Bagni of Fisa, a grammarian of the twelfth century, hypocrita or ypocrita is derived from yper, above, and crisis, gold.* Although the etymology is false, the symbolism is obvious and true. The painted faces and the gilded cloaks are plain signs of that hypocrisy which our Lord described when He compared the Pharisees to 'whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, * Vernon's Readings, ii. 2S9 n. ' Dante Studies and Researches, p. 107. Uguccione'e Derivations is mentioned only once— Corir. iv. 6, 832 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS and of all uncleanness.' Dante's meaning is that XXIV. 60 "when a man spends a lifetime in keeping up a fair outward show of piety and virtue, he cannot cast it o£E at will ; it grows into the ' habit ' of his soul, its garment of eternity. It might be thought that when a hypocrite enters a world where imposition ia no longer possible, his punishment would be the stripping away of the gilded cloak of pious pro- fession and the revelation of the long-hidden cor- ruption; but Dante touches a more awful lesson when he clothes him in his own hypocrisy as in an eternal robe. The falseness has grown so much part and parcel of his very soul that he cannot cast it off even in a world where all hope of imposing on others is vain. Although all the souls in this Moat see through one another and know that all are false, not one lays aside the gilded cloak in conse- quence: their doom is to wear it even among their fellow-hypocrites. They have acted a part so long that they have lost for ever the power of being ! themselves. The Cloak of But while all understand the painted face and the gilded cloak, few know the terrible symbolism of the crushing leaden weight under which the souls creep so slowly, weeping as they go. It means the almost intolerable burden of living a false life, the weariness of always acting a part, always keeping up the show of goodness. There is nothing more exhausting than to have a reputation for piety without the strength of true piety to sustain the reputation. Many a pious hypocrite would almost welcome even detection at times, simply because it VI. HYPOCRITES 333 would lift away this weary weight of always acting CANTOS a part, and restore him to a more natural and honest xxiv. 60~ attitude toward his fellows. It is this weariness too which is the secret of those glaring lapses which sometimes surprise men with a reputation for piety. For, in this world at least, no man can always act : some time he must be himself. The bondage of a simulated character becomes intolerable, and he ' breaks out.' The secret of the lapse is the unbear- able weight of hypocrisy's leaden gown — men will risk anything to throw it off even for a moment, and be themselves. We may imagine, then, the severity of the punishment when this weariness becomes the everlasting ' habit ' of the soul, when it is impossible to lay it aside for a moment, and the man must re- main for ever wrapped round with the heavy leaden weight of his own unreality. No wonder Dante exclaimed as he watched the slow procession of weeping souls, O weary mantle for Eternity 1 ^ So slow was the pace of the Hypocrites that the travellers had new company at every step; and Dante asks his Guide to keep his eye about him to see if he can find any one who is known by deed or name. A soul whom he had just passed, recog- nizing the Tuscan speech, called after him to stay his feet ; and at Virgil's bidding he stops and waits. As he looked back he saw two whose faces showed The Two their eagerness to overtake him, but they were of Bologna, hindered by ' the narrow way.' It is said that ' the 1 Ivif. xxiii. 67. 334 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS narrow way' means the crowded way, and doubtless XXIV. 60 i^ ^as crowded. Nevertheless it is surely impossible to reject the obvious reference. Hypocrites profess on earth to walk in the narrow way which has few travellers; in the other world they still walk in a narrow way, but are jostled and impeded by the crowds which have made it the broad way of their destruction. When the two souls came up they took a long look at Dante, 'with eye askance,' and in absolute silence : the ' eye askance ' being, no doubt, the furtive glance of the hypocrite who cannot look a man honestly in the face. Then, turning to each other, they express their surprise that one of the two strangers is alive, as they see by the action of his throat, and that neither wears the heavy gown. They beg the ' Tuscan ' to tell them who he is ; and Dante, after answering that he was born and bred *in the great town on the fair river of Arno,' asks in turn who they are, and the meaning of their tears and glittering cloaks. They turn out to be men who knew the great town on the Arno well. One of them replies: ' Frati Godenti were we, and Bolog^ese ; I Oatalano and he Loderingo Named, and by thy city taken together, As the wont is to take one man alone, For maintenance of its peace ; and we were such That still it is apparent round Gardingo,' ' In other words, they were two natives of Bologna, Catalano de' Catalan! and Loderingo degli Andalo, both Friars of the Order of the Knights of Our Lady. » Jnf. xxiii. 103-108, VI. HYPOCRITES 835 This Order was sanctioned by Urban iv. in 1261, CANTOS Loderingo being one of its founders. According to xxiv. 60 Villani, they bound themselves 'to defend widows, and children under ward, and to be peacemakers';^ it was also part of their rule to bear arms only in the service of the Church, and to 'hold no public office except for the purpose of promoting peace and union at such times as war and civil discord pre- vailed.' Many of the Bolognese, however, regarded the institution of the Order as an ingenious device for avoiding the bearing of arms for the city and the taking of their due share of public burdens. Their rules were lenient: laymen as well as clerics were admitted, marriage was not forbidden, and their practice was so far from asceticism that their popular nickname was 'Frati Godenti,' or 'Jovial Friars.' It was the custom in many Italian re- publics to invite some powerful nobleman of another city to act as Podest^ or chief magistrate, under the idea that, being a foreigner, he would govern with greater impartiality. In the year 1266, Florence invited these two Bolognese noblemen to act as joint-mayors of the city. Gatalano being a Guelph, and Loderingo a Ghibelline, the Florentines hoped that between them they would hold the scales of justice even between these two factions in the republic. As Plumptre says sarcastically, 'they were just so far impartial as to take bribes from both sides, betraying each in turn.' So badly did they keep the public peace to which they were bound by their religious vows, that the traces of ' ViUani, vii. 13, 386 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS their misrule, as Catalano confesses, were still visible XXTIT iSR— XXIV. 60 i^ Dante's day round Gardingo near the Palazzo Vecchio, where the palaces of the Uberti were burnt in a rising against the Ghibellines. We may perhaps wonder why these Friars are not in the pitch of the Barrators in the preceding Moat, since they used their office of Podest^ for corruption. The reason seems to be that they pursued their barratry under the cloak of religion. As we saw, part of their religious vow was to act as peacemakers among the warring factions of the State, yet they used their office to stir up strife ; and for this hypocrisy they are sunk one bolgia lower. Tbe Cruel- Just as Dante opened his lips to upbraid them for caiapbai. their evil deeds : ' O Friars, your iniquitous . . .,' he was suddenly struck dumb by the sight which met him on the path : To mine eyea there rushed One crucified with three stakes on the ground. When me he saw, he writhed himself all over. Blowing into his beard with sighs. Catalano informs the pilgrims that this is the High- Priest Caiaphas, and that Annas and the other members of the Sanhedrim who procured Christ's death lie similarly impaled in other parts of the valley : 'This transfixed one, on whom thou gazest, Counselled the Pharisees that it was expedient To put one man to tortures for the people. Transverse and naked is he on the way, As thou seest ; and he needs must feel, VI. HYPOCRITES 337 Whoever passes, first how much he weighs ; CANTOS And in like mode his father-in-law is punished ^^rxr ^Rti Within this moat, and the others of the Gouncil, 1 Which was for the Jews a seed of evil.' ^ Virgil gazes in surprise at the crucified sinner, evidently because he was not here on his former journey through this Moat. The punishment is an obvious repayment in kind : the doom to which the members of the Sanhedrina devoted Christ now re- coils upon themselves. Yet with significant points of difference. Christ was lifted up from the earth that He might draw all men unto Him; they are laid on the ground for every hypocrite to walk over. In this there is something peculiarly significant. It is no wonder that good men should scorn the cruci- fiers of Christ, and, as it were, trample them under foot ; but it is at first glance strange that hypocrites should do so. Yet it is the simple truth. In every age since the crucifixion the hypocrites of the Christian religion have trampled in contempt on Caiaphas and his companions in this crime, not knowing that they themselves are partakers of the self-same spirit. Dante wishes to mark the last limit of scorn: the very hypocrites despise them and tread them underfoot. That these arch- hypocrites have no mantles may mean that as they crucified Christ naked, in like nakedness they are themselves crucified; and perhaps also it has some reference to our Lord's own words on the eve of His death: 'If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin : but now they have no cloke for » Inf. xxlii. 109-126. y 838 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIII. 58- XXIV. 60 The Broken Bridges. their sin.' Probably it is this which constitutes the special heinousness of the hypocrisy of Caiaphas and his accomplices, — it was hypocrisy naked and undisguised. Christ seems to indicate in more places than one that His enemies knew the justice of His claims, and their special guilt was that they had deliberately sinned against this knowledge. Virgil now asks Catalano if there is any gap to the right by which he and Dante may pass to the next Moat without the help of ' the black angels,' the Malebranche from whom they had fled. From the Friar's answer he learns the trick which Malacoda had played on him. He tells him that all the bridges are broken down and lie in ruins on the bottom of this valley, but that they would be able to climb out upon the broken stones. On hearing this Virgil stood still a moment with head bent, and then said. ' III did he relate the business Who grapples with his hook the sinners yonder.' He is indignant at the deception, and angry at his own credulity : he might have known, as the Friar reminds him, that the devil is a liar and the father of lies. There is a depth of diabolic cunning which even Virgil cannot fathom ; and he is annoyed that a hypocrite understands it better than he. With large iteps and angry brow, he moves on, but soon regains his serenity, reflecting probably that know- ledge of the devil would be dearly bought at the price of being either barrator or hypocrite. We have seen that Dante represents the bridges VI. HYPOCRITES 839 which once spanned this Moat as hroken down, in CANTOS _ _. Tr*5rTTT Aft— order to indicate the connection of Hypocrisy with xxiv. 60 the crucifixion of Christ. But probably he had also Djjje^iZ'of another purpose in view — to sucgest the extraordi- the cUmD out *^ *^ . . of HypocrlBy. nary difficulty of passing safely over this sin. The bridges are broken down; he is forced to descend into the valley of the Hypocrites ; and it is with the utmost difficulty that he climbs out of it. Virgil has to push him up from behind from rock to rock ; he warns him to try each crag above him to see if it will bear his weight ; and when at last they reach the top of the ridge, Dante sinks to the ground breathless with the struggle. Buskin explains this by the remark that Dante was 'a notably bad climber,' but the meaning goes much deeper. From his natural spirit and temper he must have been a stern hater of hypocrisy; yet he here tells us in his usual symbolic fashion how hard it is even for an honest man, and with the help of Virgil, the highest human wisdom, to climb clear of this sin in all its forms, and live a perfectly open and true life. He even appears to indicate that the cruci- fixion of Christ has greatly increased the difficulty. Then, to use his own words, 'the universe was thrilled with love,' the earthquake shook down the bridges and made the passage over more arduous. It is as if he meant to declare that the very love of Christ which died for men creates a new and more dangerous form of hypocrisy, more subtle in its temptations, and more difficult to avoid. Further, he tells us that even when a man has climbed arduously Tke 'longw out of this valley a new temptation awaits him — ^' 340 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS that, namely, of resting satisfied with this achieve- XXIII 58— XXIV. 60 ment. This is the obvious meaning of Vifgil's re- buke of Dante when he sinks down panting and exhausted : ' Now it behoves thee thus to put off sloth,' The Master said ; ' for sitting upon down, Or under coverlet, one comes not into fame, Without the which whoso his life consumes. Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth, As smoke in air and in the water foam : And therefore raise thee up, conquer the panting With the soul which conquers every battle, If with its heavy body it sink not down. A longer stairway it behoves to climb : 'Tis not enough from these to have departed ; If thou understand me, now act so it profit thee.' Then I arose, showing myself furnished Better with breath than I did feel myself. And said, ' Go on, for I am strong and bold,' ^ ''Tis not enough from these to have departed' — that is, either from the Hypocrites or from the Circles already passed. Virgil knew that one of the strong- est temptations to a man of Dante's temper is to imagine that the mere climbing clear of such a sin as hypocrisy is enough ; and he here reminds him that this negative virtue, this mere avoidance of gross infernal sins of either flesh or spirit, leaves a whole Paradise of goodness unclimbed and un- known. If we wish to know what he means by the 'longer stairway,' we must follow him up the seven Terraces of Mount Purgatory, purging away the seven deadly sins and winning the corresponding ' Inf. xxlv, 46-60. VI. HYPOCRITES 341 virtues. Even when the Earthly Paradise on its CANTOS summit is reached, with its four stars of the cardinal xxiv'. 60 virtues of Prudence and Fortitude, Temperance and Justice, we shall still see shining far ahove us, sphere beyond sphere, the ten Heavens and the starry • clus ter of th e Paradise of God— Faith, and Hope, and Love. CHAPTER XXII CIRCLE VIII.— MALEBOLGE : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia VII. Thieves CANTOS After their arduous climb out of the valley of the yXTV fil xxV ~ Hypocrites, the pilgrims found themselves on the bridge which spanned the seventh Moat, the prison in which Thieves receive their punishment. This bridge he describes as rugged, narrow, and difficult, And steeper far than that which went before. This can scarcely mean that thieving is a harder sin to avoid than hypocrisy ; rather it is Dante's way of hinting how difficult it was in his day to protect oneself from thieves. As they climb the steep ridge, a voice as of one in anger came up to them, but indistinctly, as if unable to shape itself into articu- late words. Bending down and peering into the Moat, Dante's 'living eyes' were unable to dis- cern anything for the darkness — the element in which thieves love to lurk. Descending, therefore. The vauey of the lower side of the bridge to one of the over- hanging rocks, they saw a sight so full of horror that Dante declares the very memory of it made his blood run cold — a swarm of serpents of all kinds. VII. THIEVES 343 such aa the great African deserts, Libya, Ethiopia, cantos and that ' on the Bed Sea,' could not equal. In the xxV midst of this venomous throng, naked souls were rushing about terror-stricken, ' without hope of hole or heliotrope' — heliotrope being a precious stone which was believed to render its possessor invisible, or to act as a charm against poisons. They are the souls of Thieves now handcuffed for eternity ; their arms are bound behind their backs with serpents, whose heads and tails are thrust through their loins and coiled into a knot in front. The description of these souls and their punish- ment is extremely dif&cult to understand : the mean- ing is not unlike the throng of serpents themselves, writhing and twisting in confusion, and then gliding away so furtively and swiftly as to elude the eye. The probability is that Dante wishes to distinguish different kinds of thieves and their punishments. One soul, for example, is set on fire by a serpent and falls to the ground in ashes, only to be immedi- ately restored to his human shape and again burnt up. A second is fastened on by a horrible serpent- thing which so blends with the human form that the two melt into each other and change into a dreadful third something, which is at once both and neither. A third, bitten by 'a small fiery serpent,' is transformed completely into the serpent's image, while the reptile reassumes the human shape. Whether we can decide the meaning in detail or not, the general conception is clear enough. Dante wishes to indicate various modes and degrees in which the cunning of the serpent transforms the of FiBto]a. 344 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS human soul into its own image. Before inquiring XXV ~ more closely into the moral interpretation, it will be well to have the examples named by Dante clearly before our minds. vanniFucd The first is a certain Vanni Fucci of Pistoja,^ a city hateful to Dante as the birthplace of the fac- tions of Blacks and Whites which had proved the ruin of his earthly fortunes. This man's life had been stained with many kinds of sin. Politically he was a Black Guelph, and did not shrink from assassi- nation in the service of his party. This is why Dante wonders to find him here, ' for,' he says, ' once I saw him a man of blood and fury,' and therefore he might have been plunged in the River of Blood above, or higher still, in the Marsh of Styx among the Wrath- ful. The reason for his being here is, as Fucci him- self confesses, that he had committed a still more heinous sin, theft and sacrilege. In the year 1293 he had robbed the church of San Giacopo in Pistoja of the treasures laid up in the sacristy, and the crime had been imputed to others ; an innocent man, indeed, was put to death for it. Now, the law of Divine justice in the Inferno is that when a man has been guilty of various forms of sin, his doom is decided by the most heinous, of them ; and it is one of the almost inevitable limitations of the poem that it cannot easily show the separate elements of penal suffering which the lesser sins contribute. The punishment of this soul of many sins, however, does show something of these separate elements. As a thief, he is consumed by the serpents ; but also, as a 1 Inf. xxiv. 97-xxv. 16. VII. THIEVES 845 man of blood and violence, he is pursued by one of CANTOS the Centaurs. As we saw in the Seventh Circle, the xxV Centaurs are the ministers of Divine justice on the , Pursued by Violent in the River of Blood. This particular the centaur Cacus, Centaur, however, was a thief, and is therefore transferred to this Moat. Properly speaking, in- deed, he is not a Centaur at all, but a fire-breathing giant of Latin mythology. His name was Cacus, son of Vulcan and Medusa, and Dante was probably misled by Virgil's having called him 'half -man,' semi-human. The myth as given in the ^neid ^ is that Cacus lived in a cave on Mount Aventine, and that he stole the herds which Hercules had taken from Geryon. To conceal his theft, he dragged them backwards into his cave ; but their lowing revealed their hiding-place to Hercules, who broke in and slew the monster. Dante regards him as one of the Cen- taurs, horse beneath and man above. On the brute part of him a swarm of serpents had fastened ; while on his shoulders, at the back of the human head, lay a dragon with outspread wings, which set on fire every one he met — the reference being, of course, to the myth that he breathed flames. In short, in addition to his thievery, he represents that savage violence which devastates a country-side with fire, and it is as such that he here breaks into pursuit of Vanni Fucoi, 'a man of blood and fury' like himself. The chief punishment, however, of Fucci is for his sacrilegious theft of the treasures of the church of St. James. A serpent darted at him. Bitten by a pierced him at the nape of the neck, and before one ^'^^ ' > JEn, viii. 193-267; Inf. xxv. 16-33. 346 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS could write O or I, he took fire and dropped in XXIV 61- XXV ~ sudden ashes to the ground. Then as suddenly as he fell he rose from the ashea, like the fabled phcenix, and assumed his former shape, but sighing and dazed, like a man recovering from possession by a demon or from a fit of epilepsy. These terrible transformations are his doom to all eternity, and as he watches them Dante cries out, O Power of God ! how severe it is, That blows like these in vengeance showers down 1 ^ His Shame The meaning of the punishment may become Contempt. clearer if we look for a moment at the strange mixture of emotions that swept through this wretched soul as he confronted Dante. However wicked in other directions, I think we are meant to understand that this man was not a thief by nature. He has at least the grace of ' a melancholy shame ' in the presence of one who had known him on earth ; and certainly his judgment of himself cannot be said to err upon the side of leniency : ' I rained from Tuscany A short time since into this fierce gullet. Life bestial pleased me, and not human, Even as the mule I was ; I 'm Vanni Fucci Beast, and Fistoja was my worthy den. ... It pains me more that thou hast caught me Amid the misery where thou seest me, Than when I from the other life was taken.' ^ ' I am Vanni Fucci beast ' sounds almost as if this were the name by which he was known in Pistoja ; and the word 'mule' without doubt refers to the > Inf. xxiv. 119120. ^ /^y, jj^iv. 122-135. VII. THIEVES 847 fact that he was not born in wedlock. He seems to CANTOS feel that everything was wrong from the very first : XXY how could such aa he turn out anything but the beast he was? He appears to have had his better moments of shame and self-reproach, and to have swung helplessly between sinning and vain remorse, that 'sorrow of the world' which 'worketh death.' Longfellow quotes a sonnet of his, 'pathetic,' he says, ' from its utter despair and self-reproach ' : * Shine not for me henceforth or Moon or Sun, Nor let the Earth bring forth its fruits for me ; Let air, and fire, and water hostile be For evermore, and me let fortune shun \ Let every star and planet, one by one, Blast me, and brutify each sense I for see, Buined I cannot be more utterly, Nor suffer greater pain than I have done I Now will I live even as a savage wight. Barefoot and naked, dwelling in desert place, And he who will may do me wrong and spite ; I cannot suffer any worse disgrace. April or May can bring me no delight, Nor anything my sense of shame efface ; Since I have lost the good I might have still. Through little wit, and not of my own will.' This alternation of sin and remorse gives us, I think, the clue to the meaning of the punishment. Yanni Fucci seems to represent a class of men who lapse into thieving at intervals as by a kind of mania; when the mania passes and they come to themselves, they are utterly ashamed of their weakness, and, as Dante says, bewildered and dazed like men recover- ing from possession or an epileptic fit. None the less they know that when the madness returns, they 348 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS will slip into ashes once more under its consuming XXV fi'"®- Something of this kind appears to be the symbolism of the eternal transformation from man to ashes, from ashes to man. This, indeed, is perhaps the reason why Dante is so careful to tell us that the serpent bit Fucoi on the nape of the neck, ' there where the neck is knotted to the shoulders' — as if to hint that his sin was due, in part at least, to an affection of the brain. This is no mere fancy : when describing another class of Thieves he is equally careful to indicate the exact spot which the serpent wounds, and, as we shall see, this also has a peculiar significance.^ ms Malice and The shame which Vanni Fucci feels for his evil life is strangely mingled with malice and a singular baseness of blasphemy. At the ideal date of the poem, the year 1300, Dante belonged to the party of the Whites in Florence ; and for the express purpose of humiliating and wounding him, Fucci foretells its defeat by his own party of the Blacks. In 1301 the Whites of Florence assisted in the driving out from Pistoja of the Black party. These banished Pisto- jans joined the Blacks of Florence and succeeded in driving out the Whites of that city. Finally, he foretells a great defeat of the Whites in a battle near Pistoja : ' Mars draws a vapour up from Val di Magra, Which is with turbid clouds enveloped round, And with impetuous and bitter tempest Over Campo Piceno shall be the battle ; Whence it shall suddenly rend the mist asunder, So that every White shall thereby wounded be. And this I 've said that it may give thee pain.' ^ » See p. 352. Comp. Inf. xxx. 28-30. ^ Inf. xxlv. 145-151. VII. THIEVES 349 The 'lightning vapour from Val di Magra' was CANTOS the chief of the Black Guelphs, Moroello Malaspina, xxv through whose territory the valley of the Magra or Macra ran. The battle referred to is either the capture of the fortress of Serravalle in 1302, or, as some think, the wresting from the Whites of Pistoja itself in 1305-6. Vanni Fucci has lost none of his old political bitterness, and is delighted to humiliate Dante by prophesying the downfall of his party. But more malignant than this malice toward man is the blasphemy which he flings against God : At the conclusion of his words, the thief Lifted his hands aloft with both the figs, Crying : ' Take that, God, for at thee I square them I ' The ' fig ' was an obscene gesture of contempt, and to make it with both hands at God was the very climax of blasphemy. Probably his fury against God is due to His having thus exposed him to the sight of a political opponent like Dante. The poet declares that even the arrogant defiance of the blasphemer, Capaneus, was not so heinous : Through all the circles dark of Hell Spirit I saw not against God so proud, Not he who fell at Thebes down from the walls. From that moment, says Dante, the serpents became his friends, by taking on themselves the punishment of this great wickedness. One wound itself round Vanni Fucci's neck, as if to say, 'I will not thou speak more ' ; another bound his arms so firmly that the blasphemous hands could fling no further defiance against Heaven. He fled without a word, and a 350 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIV. 61- XXV The FITS TtaleyeB of Florence. Cianfa de' Donati. Agnello Brn- nelleecbi. moment later the Centaur, Cacus, rushed upon the scene, shouting in fury, 'Where is, where is the bitter wretch ? ' — and pursuer and pursued passed away into the darkness.^ At this point three souls suddenly appear in the valley with such thief-like stealthiness that neither Dante nor his Guide is aware of them until they cry, 'Who are ye?' One of them asks the others, 'Where can Cianfa have remained ? ' and Dante, hearing a Florentine name, laid his finger on his lips as a signal to Virgil to stand attentive. A scene follows so marvellous that the reader may well be slow to believe it, since he who saw it can scarcely allow it to himself. This Cianfa, it seems, had suddenly vanished, and his three companions are wondering what has become of him. His name naturally arrested Dante's attention, because he was a member of the noble Florentine family of the Donati, to which the poet himself was related by marriage. A moment before, Cianfa had borne the human form; but now he darts forward in the shape of a horrible six-footed serpent, which fastens itself on the companion who had missed him and asked where he was. This wretched soul was Agnello Brunelleschi of Florence, of whom the story goes that ' from his earliest childhood he would empty his father's or his mother's purse, then the drawers in the shops, and was given to thieving. Later on when he grew up he would get into other people's houses, and he would disguise himself as a poor man, and would fashion himself an old man's beard, and that is why • Inf. XXV. 1-34. VII. THIEVES 351 Dante represents him as transformed by the bite of CANTOS that serpent, because he used thus to transform him- xxV self for the purpose of thieving.' It is on this soul that Cianfa Donati sprang in the form of a six- footed serpent. Fastening its front feet on his arms, its mid ones on his belly, and the hind pair on his thighs, it thrust its tail between his legs and bent it upward on the loins behind ; while with its teeth it caught hold of both cheeks : Ivy never was fastened by its roots Unto a tree so, as this horrible monster Around the other's limbs entwined its own. Then followed a marvellous and awful transmuta- cianfa and tion and blend of the two into a third something, into a human such as human eyes never saw. Like wax, the man "P*'^*- melted into the serpent, the serpent into the man. The colours mingled and changed as in burning paper when a brown colour runs up before the flame, and the white dies away. 'Neither one nor other seemed now what it was.' His two companions cried out in horror, ' O me, Agnello, how thou changest I Behold already thou art neither two nor one.' And then the horrible blend of man and reptile with slow step passed away.^ The next instance is not a blend, but a complete transformation of man into serpent and serpent into man. While the other two thieves gazed after Agnello and Cianfa, ' a small fiery serpent livid and Francesco black as is a peppercorn,' and swift as a lizard flashing caTaicaati. > Inf. XXV. 35-78. 352 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIV. 61- XXV BaoEO. Francesco and Buoso exchange forma. from hedge to hedge in the dog-days, darted at one of them, transfixing him in 'that part whereat is first received our nourishment.' Dante's carefulness in naming the exact spot can scarcely be without significance. Just as Vanni Fucci was bitten at the nape of the neck, perhaps to indicate that his sin was a kind of laadness, a poisoning of the brain, so the piercing of this sinner in that part whereat our nourishment is first received, may be a hint that he had a hereditary tendency and predisposition to this sin. The little black serpent which fiew upon him is identified in the last line of the Canto by the words, — 'The other was he whom thou, Gaville, weepest.' Gaville was a village in the upper Val d'Arno, where this Francesco Guercio de' Cavalcanti was slain. His kinsmen, the Cavalcanti, avenged the murder by almost exterminating its inhabitants, and this is why Dante says it weeps for him. The soul on whom he fastened is named Buoso, but nothing further is known of him. According to some commentators he was a certain Buoso degll Abati; while others identify him with that Buoso Donati who was so cleverly personated by Gianni Schicchi.^ The little serpent after piercing him fell to the ground and lay. Each gazed at each in silence ; the man stood motionless, but yawned as if sleep or fever had attacked him. He through his wound, the serpent through its mouth, began to smoke violently, and the two smokes commingled. Then began a transformation of each into the image of the other, BO wonderful that Dante bids Lucan and Ovid be 1 Inf. XXX. 25-45. See pp. 409-411. VII. THIEVES 353 silent concerning the metamorphoses which they CANTOS XXIV 61- relate. The serpent's tail divided and became a ;^xV man's two legs ; the two legs of the man united and became a serpent's tail; the other members passed through similar changes and exchanges, described by Dante with a hideous realism which at once repels and fascinates. At last, while 'the smoke veiled them with a new colour,' the serpent rose upright and the man sank to the ground. Only his face now remained human. Soon it sharpened out into the form of the serpent's, the ears went in like a snail's horns, and the tongue grew forked. In converse fashion, the serpent head of the upright form grew into the shape of a man's, and the cloven tongue re- closed. The transformation being now complete, the smoke ceased, and the soul that had become a reptile fled hissing down the valley, pursued by the other, talking and spluttering, and crying over his shoulder to the only one of the gang who retained his proper shape, ' I '11 have Buoso run, As I have done, crawling, along this road.' The soul to whom he spoke was Puccio Sciancato Fuecio (' lame Puccio ') of the Galigai family of Florence ; and the fact that he suffered no serpent transformation probably means that Dante regarded him as the least guilty of this band of Florentine thieves.^ When we try to determine the moral significance apnboiism of these horrible punishments, it is far from an^o^^ose^ ' Inf. XXV. 79-151. The passage is imitated by Milton in Paradise Lost, X. 601-584, where Satan and his angels are transformed to serpents. See quotation, p. 467. Z 354 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS easy task, especially in their details. According to XXIV 61— i •» XXV Plumptre, it is questionable whether they have any great significance at all. 'One ventures to think,' he says, 'that at this point the quick spontaneous imagination of the poet began for a while to flag. By way of compensation he falls back upon reminis- cences of his two favourite poets, Lucan and Ovid, and deliberately endeavours to surpass them in the strangeness and elaborateness of his description. His first picture is, as it were, a replica of Lucan's description of the Libyan desert (ix. 706-721), in which he exhausts the whole vocabulary of serpent classifi- cation.' Now Dante certainly had Lucan and Ovid in mind, for, as we have seen, he expressly names them ; he even appears to take a strange and almost amusing pride in surpassing them in horrors. Never- theless, it is simply incredible that he wrote these dreadful Cantos merely or chiefly to outdo two heathen poets. In every Circle and Bolgia hitherto we have found him aiming at some real and natural correspondence between sin and punishment, and it would be strange if the correspondence failed here. Thieves— a The most general idea is that which lies on and Serpent. ^^^ very surface, namely, that Thieves are a com- bination of man and serpent, like Geryon, the Guardian of this whole Circle of Fraud. The sym- bolism of the serpent is obvious enough: lurking, thief -like, among the grass and stones, creeping into houses by whatever hole it can find, and wounding its victim when he has no suspicion of its presence. As on earth these souls transformed themselves by various disguises for their thievish ends from man VII. THIEVES 355 to serpent, from serpent to man, so now their doom CANTOS is that this transformation goes on for ever: they xxV have created in themselves an eternal duplicity of nature. Still further, the serpent is the enemy of all mankind; and therefore in this valley of serpent-thieves Dante sets before us the kind of world which would exist were all bonds of common honesty dissolved — the social confusion and in- security and fear, no man knowing when he would be attacked by some serpent which might turn out to be one of his own comrades. It is probably for reasons such as these that Dante sets this sin so far down in Hell, below Simony and Barratry, and far below Robbery. The first two, evil as they are, do not create the same sense of insecurity and social confusion ; and Bobbery is, by comparison, an open and honest crime. This is the reason, too, why Dante differs from Aquinas in his estimate of these two sins. 'Robbery is a more grievous sin than theft,* Aquinas declares, ' because violence is more directly opposed to the will than ignorance. There is also another reason : because by robbery not only is loss inflicted on another in his property, but there is also something of personal insult or injury enacted.'^ The standards applied are different : Aquinas judges by the amount of violence used, Dante by the amount of fraud. The open highwayman gives his fellows a fair chance of defending themselves ; but theft is ' Swmma, ii-il. q. Ixvi. a. 9. Wicksteed traces his severity to this sin to another cause : ' His own writings show that the maintenance of peace was his idea of the supreme function of Government. The extreme severity of his judgments upon thieving and upon false coin- ing is characteristic of the citizen of the greatest commercial city of the world.' 356 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS a snake in the grass, far more dangerous to man- XXV ~ kind, because it is a secret and underhand attack on the institution of private property, without which society cannot exist. The contogion Perhaps, however, the most arresting thing about of DirtonoBty. ^j^.g punighment is the way in which these Thieves, when they have nothing else to take, steal one another's very form and identity. The transforma- tions are more than a mere play of meaningless fancy. They symbolize, as Buskin points out, the contagious power of dishonesty, the way in which a thief can steal away a man's better nature, initiate him into the secret of his fraud, infuse his poison into him, and change him into a serpent like him- self. 'There is not in all the Inferno quite so studied a piece of descriptive work as Dante's relation of the infection of one cursed soul of this crew by another. They change alternately into the forms of men and serpents, each biting the other into this change.'^ Obviously this infectious power of thievery is represented as working in different forms and degrees ; and attempts have been made to distinguish various kinds of thieves. For ex- ample, Vanni Pucci, it is said, represents sacrilegious theft, which respects neither God nor His Church; Cianfa and Agnello were probably officials of Flor- ence who thieved from the State; while Buoso, Francesco, and Puccio are regarded as thieves of private property. There may be some truth in this division, but the only part of it which is quite certain is the sacrilege of Fucci. One is inclined to * Fora Clavigera, Letter Ixxii. VII. THIEVES 357 suggest that the distinction which Dante intends to CANTOS XXIV 61— draw between different species of Thieves depends xxV rather on the manner and degree in which they are infected by others. We may distinguish f our ponr ciasiea classes. Vanni Fucoi is a sort of kleptomaniac — ''''"'•'*^- the madness attacks his head, burns him to ashes, and when he comes to himself he is like a man recovering from epilepsy or possession. Cianfa and Agnello are men who blend into one another like wax, forming a new and perfect combination and unity of evil, which is impossible to either of them apart: they represent the most complete harmony and identification of two evil natures, the one being the tempter, the other the tempted. Buoso and Cavalcanti are also tempter and tempted, but there is neither harmony nor identification. Alternately they turn each other into serpents ; but when one is a serpent the other is a man, and hates the tempter who infected him with his poison. And finally we have Puccio Sciancato, the only soul who underwent no loss of his proper form: evidently Dante believed that it was possible for a man to be a thief without suffering the loss of his last possession — his very humanity. In the Fors Clavigera Letter quoted above. Buskin Prevalence of says sarcastically that in our day these ' Thieves by nlrence?" Fraud ' are ' brilliantly represented by the men who covet their neighbours' goods and take them in any way they think safe, by high finance, sham companies, cheap goods, or any other of our popular modern ways.' In similar fashion, Dante saw in this Moat a picture of the moral state of his time and country 358 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Of the six souls named, all are Tuscan, one a native XXV °^ Pistoja, the remaining five of Florence. Of the former city he says it was ' a worthy den ' of such a ' beast ' as Vanni Fucci — thief, murderer, blasphiemer, and wonders why it does not ' resolve to burn itself to ashes,' as he was burnt. But the heaviest con- demnation falls on his own city. Ironically he congratulates it on being as famous in Hell as throughout the earth : Rejoice, O Florence, since thou art so great That over land and sea thou beatest thy wings, And throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad 1 Among the thieves I found five such Thy citizens, whence shame comes unto me. And thou thereby to no great honour risest.^ It may be said, of course, that this is only a savage vindictive blow aimed by Dante at the city which banished him on a charge of barratry ; but making allowance for some not unnatural personal feeling, there is obviously something far nobler. His irony has a central core of sorrow — sorrow such as wrung tears from the prophets of Israel, foreseeing in the general corruption of the nation their country's doom. He seems to have had specially before his mind one line of Isaiah in his lament over the fall of 'the faithful city': 'Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves.' For this is the point of the words, ' Among the thieves I found five such thy citizens.' ' Five such ' : not one of them from the scum of the people, but every man sprung from the noblest families in Florence. What hope was 1 Inf. xxvi. 1-6. VII. THIEVES 359 there for a city whose very princes were thieves and CANTOS companions of thieves ? He had had sad dreams of xxV it — morning dreams which come true : But if near the morning truth is dreamed of, Feel shalt thou in a little time from now What Prato, if none other, craves for thee.^ Prato can scarcely be the city of that name, since it was in general friendly to Florence. The reference is much more likely to be to Cardinal Niccolo da Prato, who was sent by Benedict xi. in the spring of 1304 to make peace between the Florentine Guelphs and Ghibellines. Failing in his mission, he departed on the 4th of June, leaving the city under an interdict and its inhabitants excommunicated. Within a week, on the 10th, a great fire, originated by a dissolute priest, burnt down more than seven- teen hundred houses, towers, and palaces — ' in short,' says Villani, ' all the marrow and yolk and the most precious places of the city. The loss of stores, and of treasure, and of merchandise was infinite, foras- much as in those places were almost all the mer- chandise and precious things of Florence, and that which was not burnt was robbed by highwaymen as it was being carried away, the city being continually at war in divers places, wherefore many companies, and clans, and families were ruined and brought to poverty by the said fires and robberies.' Villani says it was commonly held that this and other adversities and perils which befell Florence about this time were due to the interdict laid on the city by the Cardinal da Prato.^ As he thinks of all this, 1 Inf. xxvi. 7-9. ' ViXlani, viii. 71. 360 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Dante could almost wish that the doom had already XxV fallen, since fall it must, knowing that with ad- vancing years he will find harder to bear the ruin of the city which he loved perhaps the more because of his unjust exile from her : And if it already were, 'twere not too soon ; Would that it were, seeing it needs must be. For it will weigh me down the more I age.* » Inf. xxvi. 10-12, CHAPTER XXIII CIRCLE VUI.— MALEBOLGB : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia VIII. Evil Counsellors The eighth Moat, to which we now come, is that of CANTOS XXVT — Evil Counsellors. From the broken ledge to which xxvii they had descended to see into the dark valley of the Thieves, the two pilgrims climb back to the cliff which forms the next bridge. It is not easy walk- ing: Virgil has to draw Dante up, and 'the foot without the band sped not.' When they reach the highest point of the bridge, Dante looks down and compares the sight to the swarm of fireflies which The Valiey of the Italian peasant sees in the darkening valley below, as he rests on a summer evening on the hill- side after his day's work is done. In the same way this infernal valley twinkled with innumerable little flames, and every flame concealed a human soul ; or, as Dante expresses it, Not one reveals the theft, And every flame a sinner steals away. Just as to Elisha watching the translation of his master, there came a moment when the forms of Elijah and horses and chariots vanished, leaving nothing visible save ' the flame alone, even as a little t61 362 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII Dante's Fear of this Sin. cloud ascending up,' so here the soul was completely hidden by the fire. Although Dante puts this in the form of a simile, there can be little doubt that this particular comparison is chosen for the sake of the contrast it involves. By his faithful and fearless warnings to King Ahab, Elijah is the type of a good counsellor, and his reward is a fiery triumph heaven- ward. The souls in this Moat are Evil Counsellors, and their doom is an eternal imprisonment within a narrow tongue of fire in the heart of Hell.^ As he looked at these flamelets, Dante tells us there fell on him a certain sadness, and a solemn sense of responsibility for the use of his genius. These were souls who had perished through the per- version of the great intellectual powers God had given them ; and he trembled as he felt within him- self the same danger of intellectual perdition. To him even as to them, he knew that God had given great powers of mind, and it is far from improbable that he had frequently known the temptation to which they had yielded. In the troubled politics of his time there must have come many opportunities of using his great intellect for crafty purposes, to bend his fellowmen to his own ends or those of his party. Perhaps Dante was too imperious a soul to be in any real danger of stooping to win men by craft and policy — as witness his breaking away frona the Ghibellines and forming a party by himself ; ^ never- theless, in the presence of these lost minds to which he felt himself akin, he is so impressed with the possibility of a similar perdition that he reins in those » Inf. xxvi. 25-42. » Par. xvii. 61-69. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 363 high intellectual powers which some ' good star or CANTOS better thing,' such as the grace of God, perchance xxvil had given him : Then sorrowed I, and sorrow now again, When I direct my mind to what I saw ; And more my genius curb than I am wont, That it may run not unless virtue guide it ; So that if a good star or better thing Have given me good, I may myself not grudge it. It is certainly to this temptation he refers when he tells us that he almost fell into the valley. After climbing on hands and feet to the arch of the bridge, he stood erect to look down, and had he not caught one of the rocks, he says he would have gone over without a push. It sounds like the recollection of some critical moment when he almost fell into that crafty use of his intellectual powers which would have carried him down to 'this blind world.' ^ Two examples of Evil Counsellors are given, uiysses and chosen, as is Dante's custom, from heathen and Christian times. The heathen instance is Ulysses and Diomed, who are imprisoned together in one flame which parts at the top into a double tongue, the greater of which is Ulysses. These two in their earthly life had been accomplices in many a fraud, three of which are specially named, probably be- cause of their connection with the founding of Rome: 'the ambush of the horse' by which Troy was taken and 'the noble seed of the Romans' driven forth ; the craft by which they drew Achilles to the > Irif. xxvl. 16-24 ; 43-45. 364 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS war, leaving Deidameia to die of grief; and the XXVII theft of the Palladium, the famous statue of Pallas Athene, on which the safety of Troy hung.^ Ulysses was more the mind that planned, Diomed more the hand that executed ; they are, therefore, imprisoned in the same flame, and this is an increase of their torment. Dante compares the two horns into which their flame parted to those which rose from the funeral pyre of Eteocles and Polynices. These two brothers quarrelled over the succession to the throne of their father, CEdipus of Thebes, and slew each other in the war of the Seven against Thebes which followed. Even death could not quench their hatred : the very flames which consumed their bodies divided and refused to mingle.^ By comparing the cloven flame of Ulysses and Diomed to their funeral pyre, Dante means that they were torn by a similar hatred ; men who helped to ruin each other here are not likely to waste much love on one another there. Dante is most anxious to speak with 'the horned flame,' and Virgil praises him for the wish ; but at the same time warns him to refrain from addressing them, lest they should disdain to answer because they were Greeks. Many reasons have been suggested for this, such as their old Greek scorn of 'bar- barians'; or that speech with men of the ancient world is more appropriately left to Virgil, while Dante converses with moderns. The likelier reason here is that Dante is a descendant of their ancient Trojan enemies, and Virgil might be regarded as sprung from another stock, since his native city was I ^n. ii. 162-170. 2 Statius, Thebaid, xii. 431. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 365 founded by Manto, the Theban prophetess. At all CANTOS XXVI — events, Virgil ventures to address them, adjuring xxvil them by the fame he had given them in his ' lofty verses,' to say where Ulysses in his wide wanderings had gone away to die. The question is very characteristic of Dante. His The Passing of imagination seems to have taken a weird delight in ^*"'" constructing an ideal ending of life for men and women whose death was surrounded with mystery : Count Ugolino in the Tower of Famine, and Buon- conte da Montefeltro's lonely death in the valley of the Arno, will readily occur to the reader. Where and how the Great Wanderer met his end had been left untold by the Homeric legends. The only hint .given in the Odyssey is the prophecy of Tiresias when Ulysses meets him among the souls of dead heroes in the under- world : ' And from the sea shall thine own death come, the gentlest death that may be, which shall end thee foredone with smooth old age.' Although Dante had no direct acquaintance X with Homer, some hint of this death of Ulysses from the sea may have reached him through translations of Greek works ; and it has been suggested that his imagination wrought the story of the wild adven- ture 'out of the Genoese voyages of discovery in search of a Western continent, which resulted ulti- mately in the discovery of America, but which up to this time had proved fruitless. One such expedition left in 1291, and was never heard of again. With this general idea Dante may have combined the well-known fable, repeated by the crusaders and others, of the Mountain of Loadstone by which ships 366 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII Tennyson'i 'niyises.' were attracted and dashed to pieces. ' ^ The story as told by ' the greater horn of the ancient flame ' is of so vivid an interest that it must be given in full. There can be no doubt that Tennyson's Ulysses is a paraphrase — splendid, no doubt, but still a paraphrase — of this passage. There is the same impatience of dull domestic tameness; the same determination to ' drink life to the lees ' ; the same scorn of hoarding the remnant of the years ; and the same high resolve ' to follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.' The translation given is Longfellow's : 'When I From Circe had departed, who concealed me More than a year there near unto Gaeta, Or ever yet ^neas named it so,^ Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence For my old father, nor the due affection Which joyous should have made Penelope, Could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world. And of the vice and virtue of mankind ; But I put forth on the high open sea With one sole ship, and that small company By which I never had deserted been. Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain, Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes, And the others which that sea bathes round about. I and my company were old and slow When at that narrow passage we arrived Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals, • Moore, Studies in Dante (1st series), 264 n. ^ A town in the north of Campania, named by ^neas after bis nurse, Cai'eta (j^n, vii, 14). VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 367 That man no farther onward should adventure. On the right hand behind me I left Seville, And on the other already had left Ceuta. " O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand Perils," I said, " have come unto the West, To this so inconsiderable a vigil Which is remaining of your senses still. Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge. Following the sun, of the unpeopled world. Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang ; ; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, 1 But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge." So eager did I render my companions. With this brief exhortation, for the voyage. That then I hardly could have held them back. And having turned our stern unto the morning, We of the oars made wings for our mad flight, Evermore gaining on the larboard side. Already all the stars of the other pole The night beheld, and ours so very low It did not rise above the ocean floor. Five times rekindled and as many quenched Had been the splendour underneath the moon, Since we had entered into the deep pass. When there appeared to us a mountaiUj dim From distance, and it seemed to me so high As I had never any one beheld. Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping; For out of the new land a whirlwind rose. And smote upon the fore part of the ship. Three times it made it whirl with all the waters. At the fourth time it made the stern uplift. And the prow downward go, as pleased Another, Until the sea above us closed again.' * 1 Inf. xxvi. 90-142. Contrast Plato's account of Ulysses in the vision of Er, iiep. x. 614-621. After one thousand years in Hades the souls are brought into a meadow to choose their lots before their rebirth into another life on earth. ' There came also the soul of Odysseus, having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former toils had disenchanted him of ambition. CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII 368 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS 'Another' i8 God, but the holy name is never men- XXVli tioned in Hell save by Vanni Fucci in blasphemy. If, as is probable, the great mountain which they sight after their five months' voyage is Mount Pur- gatory, which, according to Dante, rises at the exact antipodes of Jerusalem, the storm which ' rose from the new land' has a symbolic meaning. Being heathens, it was impossible that they should land on Mount Purgatory, since only those who are on the way to Paradise can gain a footing on its shores. It is an interesting question whether this passage is anything more than a magnificent excrescence on the general subject. 'The story of Ulysses' last voyage and death,' writes a recent commentator, 'is a digression, like that of the foundation of Mantua in Inf. XX., for it bears no relation to the subject of the Inferno. Both of these serve, however, to give variety, and to lighten the uniformity of gloom.' ^ It is difficult to believe that Dante thus indulges himself in a mere poetic device to relieve the strain ; or that he is carried away by his imaginative delight in 'one crowded hour of glorious life.' Is it not probable that this wild adventure is narrated as the last piece of evil counsel of which Ulysses was guilty ? The Pillars of Hercules on each side of the Strait of Gibraltar were set as a sign and landmark of the limits of the habitable world, beyond which it may have been regarded as an impiety to sail. By his and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares ; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else ; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the same had he been first instead of last, and that he was delighted at his choice.' ' Rev. H. F, Tozer's English Commentary, p. 142. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 369 evil counsel Ulysses so inflamed his companions that OANTOS XXVT — he could scarcely have restrained them had he xxvil wished. Dante pictures him here as a soul insatiable in its hunger for new experiences of human vice and virtue, but insatiable only that he may the more craftily play upon the weaknesses of mankind. The point of special moral interest, however, is The Puniah- the contrast drawn between Ulysses as he was and uiyssea. as he is : on earth, scorning the Pillars of his ancient world, and boldly launching forth into 'wild sea- liberties'; in this Moat, imprisoned to all eternity within this narrow fire-fly flame. It cannot be an accident that Dante represents the great world- Wandering soul as thus 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd.' The meaning must lie somewhere in the nature of -^ the sin. We think of a soul like Ulysses as great and boundless in its insatiable craving for new experiences, its wide and varied knowledge of the world, and its skill in playing on the vices and virtues of mankind. Dante will have us understand that it is far otherwise. Ulysses could say, in Tennyson's words, ' Much have I seen and known ; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments. Myself not least, but honoured of them all ' ; nevertheless the craftiness in which he lived closed in like fate around his soul ; until at last all his vast knowledge of men is narrowed down to ' this blind world,' this flame no bigger than a firefly, and this tormenting companionship with his accomplice in cunning. Thus it is that 'He taketh the wise in ) their own craftiness.' i 2a 370 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Of even greater interest in some ways is the XXVI — XXVli Christian example of an evil counsellor. When Qmdo~couiit ^''ysses vras departing with Virgil's leave, the of Montefeitro. attention of the pilgrims was arrested by the con- fused sound which issued from the top of another of the flames, and which at last changed into an articulate voice. The soul within had overheard Virgil using Lombard speech when he said to Ulysses ' Now go thy way, no more I urge thee,' and there- fore begged to know what events were happening in 'that sweet Latian land' from which he had fallen into ' this blind world.' The Latin or Latian land is Italy, and in particular the province of Bomagna from which he had come. The thing he wishes most to know is whether the Romagnuoli have peace or war. It was a natural question for one who for many years had been the greatest soldier of the province, and had held in his hands the innumerable threads of its struggles, plots, and ' factions. Virgil bids Dante reply, because ' this one is a Latian'; whereupon the poet answers that at : the moment of open war there was none, but that in the bosoms of the tyrant-lords of Romagna there never is nor was wanting the .stuff of which war is j made. After giving him an account of the present state of Ravenna, Rimini, and other towns of the province, Dante, who sees only the flame and not the soul inside, begs him to say who he is, that his name 'may hold front there in the world.' ' The sinner 1 Inf. xzvii. 4-54. The towns are described for the most part by the coats of arms of their tyrant-lords. ' Ravenna is still, as it has been for years past, under the eagle of the Polenta family, which now also broods over Cervia (vv, 40-12) ; Forll is under the claws of the green VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 371 replies that if he thought he were speaking to one CANTOS XXVI - who would return to the world, he would tell him xxvil nothing, but since return is impossible he can answer ' without fear of infamy.' In the upper Circles the souls do not shrink from this remembrance upon earth, but in these shameful depths of Fraud and Treachery it would be a relief to be forgotten. Be- sides, this soul had left behind him on earth a name so great and honoured that Dante himself, in the Convito (iv. 28), speaks of him as 'our most noble Latian'; and if he thought that the sin he was about to confess was unknown on earthi we can understand why he shrank from ruining his reputa- tion by revealing it. He then tells Dante the strange story of his life — story of the story of a squljost within sight of Heaven's gate, ji ship wrecked at the harbou^s^mputh. His name — which, however, he is careful not to speak — ^was Guido, Count of Montefeltro, a district, as he says, ' between TJrbino and the yoke from which the Tiber bursts.' He was Captain of the Ghibellines in Ro- magna, and more than once had fought against the Pope and been excommunicated. At last, in old age, when, as he says, ' every one ought To lower sails and gather in the ropes,' he made his peace with the Church, repented, con- fessed, and joined the Franciscan Order. From the lion of the Ordelaffi (vv. 13-45) ; Blmini is under the Old and Young Mastiffs (the Malatesta, vv. iS-4S) ; Faenza and Imola are under the lion-cub of Maghinardo Pagano (vv. 49-Cl); and Cesena alternates between a state of tyranny and freedom (w, 62-64).'— Toynhee's Dio- fionarp, 'Bomagna.' 372 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII Bis Evil Counsel to Boniface. sequel we might suspect that he was of the number of those described by Milton, ' who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.' * Dante, however, seems to give him full credit for sincerity in his repentance ; as we have seen he calls him ' our most noble Latian,' and praises him for lowering the sails of his worldly affairs as he drew near to the port of death.^ Benvenuto da Imola says that he was often seen publicly begging his bread in Ancona, where he died and was buried; and that he had heard many things of him which gave good hope of his salvation. Count Guido's own account of himself here is far less flattering than the reputation which he left behind on earth : ' My deeds Were not those of a lion, but a fox. The cunning wiles and covert ways, I knew them all, and practised so their art, That to the ends of the earth the sound went forth.' ' This reputation for cunning proved in the end his eternal undoing. His repentance and confession would have availed for his salvation, had not Boni- face VIII. ' brought him back to his first sins.' That I Par. Lost, iii. 478-480. ^ Conv. iv. 28. ' Inf. xxvii. 74-78. Comp. Machiavelli's Prince, chap, xvlii.. Whether princes ought to he faithful to their engagements : ' Now as a prince must learn how to act the part of a beast sometimes, he should make the fox and the lion his patterns. . . . From the fox, a prince will learn dexterity in avoiding snares ; and from the lion, how to employ his strength to keep the wolves in awe. But they who entirely rely upon the lion's strength, will not always meet with success : in other words, a prudent prince cannot and ought not to keep his word, except when he can do so without injury to himself, or when the circumstances under which he contracted the engagement still exist.' y VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 373 'Prince of the new Pharisees' sought the advice of CANTOS SO crafty a fox under the following circumstances, xxvii In the year 1297 the Pope was carrying on a war, not, as Guido sarcastically says, against Saracens or Jews, but against Christians — the great rival house of the Colonnas. Two Cardinals of this family, being excommunicated by Boniface and their palaces in Rome destroyed, retired to their stronghold of Palestrina. Foiled and furious at his inability to capture this place, the Pope summoned the crafty old soldier-naonk from his cloister to advise him how to raze it to the ground. At first Guido kept silent, for Boniface seemed delirious with ' the fever of his pride ' ; but on being promised absolution by antici- pation, he gave the evil counsel which sank him to this Moat : ' " Father, since thou washest me Of that sin into which I now must fall, The promise long with the fulfilment short, Will make thee triumph in thy lofty seat." ' Following this advice, Boniface promised the Car- dinals that if they submitted, he would grant them pardon and restore their possessions ; his fulfilment was ' short ' enough — he levelled Palestrina with the ground. Six years later the Colonnas took their revenge for this treachery by the famous outrage on Boniface at Anagni, and it is perhaps in sarcastic allusion to this that Guido promises he will ' triumph in his lofty seat ' by following his advice.^ 1 Purg. XX. 86-90. For a defence of Boniface, see Father Bowden's Preface to Hettinger, p. xiii. Milman says of him : ' He was hardly dead when the epitaph was proclaimed to the unprotesting Christian world : He came in like a fox, he ruled like a lion, and he died like a dog.' 374 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII The Black Cberub and St. Francis. Y It was only in death that Count Guido awoke from the delusion of salvation with which the Papal pardon had lulled him to perdition. Then St. Francis came, according to the belief of the time, to claim his soul as one of his Cordeliers, but was waved away by •one of the Black Cherubim.' The passage is too vigorous to be left unquoted : ' Francis came afterwards, when I was dead, For me, but one of the Black Cherubim Said to him : " Take him not, do me no wrong ; He must come down amongst my menials, Because he gave the fraudulent advice, From which time forth I have been at his hair : I For who repents not cannot be absolved, ! Nor can one repent and will at once, I Because of the contradiction which consents not." O miserable me I how I did waken up When he seized on me, saying to me: "Perchance Thou didst not think that I was a logician 1 " He bore me unto Minos, who entwined Eight times his tail about bis stubborn back. And, after he had bitten it in great fury. Said : " This is a sinner of the thievish fire " ; Wherefore, here where thou seest, am I, lost. And vested thus in going I bemoan me.'^ It was an axiom with Dante that there could be no salvation without repentance ; and it was morally im- possible for Guido in the one same act of will to resolve to commit a sin and to repent of it. In the De Monarchia he argues against the unlimited power of the Pope to grant absolution. When it is said, ' whatsoever thou shalt bind,' if the 'whatsoever' is > Inf. xxvii. 112-129, ' The thievish Are ' refers to xxvi. 41-42 : Not one shows the theft, And every flame a sinner steals away. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 375 to be taken in an absolute sense, ' then,' says Dante, i CAKTOS ' he might even absolve me when impenitent, which f xxvil God Himself cannot do.' ^ ' A number of writers regard the whole of this story Wai ouido as one of those calumnies which grew up out of the ^ ^ mutual recriminations of Guelphs and Ghibellines ; and some declare it rests upon the evidence of no contemporary writer. As a matter of fact, the story is told very much as Dante tells it in Yillani's Chronicle (viii. 23); and as ViUani was a Gnelph, we may suppose that he would not accept without evidence a story so damaging to the character of the Pope. If it is a calumny invented by Dante, he would almost deserve a separate Circle for himself. It is inconceivable that in the very act of condemning one sin of the tongue, he should deliberately commit another and worse — slander, and slander too of the defenceless dead. The fact that he praises ' our most noble Latian ' in the Convito for lowering his sails in old age, proves nothing : it is surely no inconsistency to praise a man for one act, while condemning him for another. Moreover, it is quite possible that the story of this fraudulent counsel was unknown to Dante at the time when he wrote the eulogistic passage in the Convito. The mention of ' one of the Black Cherubim ' shows sigmiflcance of V the extraordinary exactness and care with which c^gJirtUnf Dante carries out the symbolism of his poem. The Cherubim are the eighth Order of Angels in the Heavenly Hierarchy, and doubtless that is why they are mentioned in this eighth Bolgia of this eighth » De Mon. iii. 8. 376 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Circle. But the reason goes much deeper. The sin XXVI - • XXVII punished in this Moat is the abuse and perversion of ' great intellectual powers to fraudulent ends. Now, the Cherubim represent the intellectual powers in their highest created form — they are the Angels that excel in knowledge ; ^ and therefore Dante represents those who fell from this Order and became Black Cherubim, as waiting for the souls of men whose sin is intellectual like their own. This too is probably the reason why the fiend says that ever since Count Guido gave the fraudulent counsel, he had been ' at his hair' — his hand, as it were, clutching fast the head and brain which the sinner's own craftiness had delivered into his power. ouido's son, It is impossible to pass by the awful and mysterious PMgatory ^ contrastwhich Dante draws between the fate of Guido and that of his son Buonconte, whom he meets shortly after on the lower slopes of Mount Purgatory. The one is a soul shipwrecked at the very harbour's mouth ; the other is a soul saved even when it seemed to have struck and gone to pieces on the rocks of perdition. Buonconte was the leader of the Aretines at the battle of Campaldino in 1289, at which it is thought Dante himself was present. Buonconte was slain, but his body was never found; and out of this mysterious disappearance the poet, after his manner, constructs an ideal ending of his life, as we have just seen him do for Ulysses. After the defeat 1 Comp. Par. xi. 37-39, where St. Francis is compared to Seraphim, burning with love, and St. Dominic to Cherubim, shining with the light of wisdom : ' The one was all seraphical in ardour, The other by his wisdom was on earth A splendour of cherubic light.' VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 377 of his forces, he fled wounded in the throat across the plain to the point where the Archiano joins the CANTOS . XXVI - Arno, and there, murmuring the name of Mary, xxvil fainted from loss of blood and died. And just as over his father's soul the powers of good and evil contended for possession, so, but with opposite issue, they fought for his. It was claimed and kept by God's angel, to the furious anger and chagrin of the demon who had long made sure of it. Enraged that for 'one poor little tear' he was thus cheated of the immortal soul, he wreaked his vengeance on the mortal dust. Gathering the storm-clouds among the mountains, he swept the body down the flood of the Arno, dashing it furiously along, and finally burying it in the mud at the bottom of the river, so that it was never found. In this deliberately contrasted picture of father and son, Dante seems to have had two aims in view. In the first place, he wished to show the tragic criticalness of human fate: how slight the cause which may make the balance dip to Hell or rise to Heaven — the father lost when all seems safe, the son saved when all seems lost. In the Paradiso he uses the thought to check rash judgments of our f ellowmen : 'Nor yet shall people be too confident In judging, even as he who counteth The corn in field ere ever it be ripe ; For I have seen all winter long the thorn First show itself intractable and fierce. And after bear the rose upon its top ; And I have seen a ship direct and swift Run o'er the sea throughout its course entire. To perish at the harbour's mouth at last.'^ ' Purg. v. 85-129; Par, xiii. 130-138. 378 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII Panisliment of £vil Counsel. The Tongue ' steals ' tbe Soul. In the next place, Dante evidently meant to point out some of the limits of the Church's power in salvation. On the one hand, even the pardon of a Pope is powerless to save a deliberate sinner like Guido from Hell: without repentance God Himself could not do it, much less His Vicar. On the other hand, Buonconte's salvation proved that the pardon did not depend on the Church, or the intervention of sacraments, or priestly absolution: without confes- sion or shrift, viaticum or extreme unction, there among the lonely hills the dying sinner's one cry of penitence saved him in the very article of death. So free of bondage even to the appointed means is the grace of God. Turning now to the punishment of this sin of Fraudulent Counsel, we find it to be threefold. In the first place, each flame is in the appropriate form of a tongue,^ the instrument of the sin, and this tongue completely folds in the soul, or, to use the poet's significant words, Not one reveals the theft, And every flame a sinner steals away. The obvious meaning is that the tongue when used for the purpose of giving cunning and fraudulent counsel conceals a man's soul. 'Speech,' says a sarcastic divine of the seventeenth century, 'was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to com- municate their mind; but to wise men whereby to conceal it.' Dante denies the wisdom of such conceal- ment. When a man lives a life of crafty speech which hides his soul, the true thought and purpose » Inf, xsvi. 89. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 379 in the background, the time comes when he can use CANTOS XXVI,- the gift of language for no other end. The power of xxvu sincere and transparent speech is lost, and the man cannot reveal himself even if he would. His crafti- ness closes round him like these tongues of fire, and he becomes for ever invisible to his f ellowmen. Nay, the word ' steals ' which Dante uses, hints at a more terrible punishment still — the theft and shrinkage and decay of the soul itself, until it grows so small that it can be confined within the narrow flame of a firefly. The soul of Ulysses himself, full as it is of all knowledge of the world, is so stolen from him by 'the thievish fire 'of his own crafty tongue that it dwindles down at last to a mere spark. In the second place, these sinners, like the Suicides, Difficulty of have great difficulty in speaking at all. The tongue tongue. * of fire which concealed Ulysses began by tossing itself and murmuring like a flame that struggles with the wind. Similarly when Count Guido tried to speak, at first nothing came but a confused sound : the words, seeking for an outlet, were converted into the flame's own language, the flickering murmur which it makes in the air. The idea is partly that the abuse of the power of speech is punished by the withdrawal of it. But also it is part of the punish- ment already spoken of, the concealment of the soul. It cannot utter and reveal itself : by the abuse of it, the tongue has closed in round the soul and refuses to express its thoughts.^ Finally, each tongue is a tongue of fire. The idea was • The tonpie probably suggested by the words of St. James (iii. 6) : *' * ^^'' • Inf. xxvi. 85-90 ; xxyii. 4-15. 380 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVI.- XXVII ContraBt to Good Coon- sallorB. ' The tongue is a fire : the world of iniquity among our members is the tongue, which defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the wheel of nature (in the Vulgate, rotam nativitatis nostrce, the wheel of our birth), and is set on fire by hell.' By this fire, doubtless, Dante meant to indicate the element of pain : ' Within the fires the spirits are ; Each swathes himself with that wherewith he bums.'l It is one of Dante's most familiar thoughts. As we have seen, the sin of this Bolgia is primarily one of the intellect, and 'the good of the intellect' is the knowledge of God which is ' the true beatitude ' of every human soul. The souls of these Evil Counsel- lors have foregone this good of the intellect by turning their great powers of mind away from God who is their fulfilment and bliss, to the wisdom of the world. According to Dante, whenever this perversion of the intellect from God takes place in any form, it involves the soul in an agony as of fire : the souls of Heretics, for example, are imprisoned in burning tombs. We shall better understand the doom of the spirits in 'this blind world' if we contrast it with the blessedness of those intellects that made God their end. Dante sets them in the Heaven of the Sun in Paradise ^ — great theologians and teachers like Aquinas and Bonaventura. Their souls too are invisible, enclosed in bright flames, but with a world of difference. The flames are not their prison, but their freedom. If they are concealed, it ' Inf. xxvi. 47. '' Par. x.-xiv. VIII. EVIL COUNSELLORS 381 is because they have been glad to lose themselves in CANTOS the light of God. In the joy of this self-forgetful- xxvil ness in Him, they sing and move in 'choral starry dance.' Instead of twinkling as fireflies in the dark valley of a ' blind world,' they shine as white stars, yisible even against the bright background of the Sun, which is the sensible image of God. For to ^ these Counsellors of Truth and not of Fraud is fulfilled the promise : ' They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.' CHAPTER XXIV CIBOLB VIII.— MALEBOLGE : THE FBAUDULENT Bolgia IX. Schismatics CANTOS The ninth Moat to which we now come, is the place XXVTTT — XXIX. 36 °^ punishment of Sowers of Discord between man ™.. -"Iir, ,. aii<3 man by means of schism and scandal. The The Battlefield , *' ofBdiiBm. scene which met Dante's eyes as he looked down into the valley from the bridge that spanned it, was so horrible and ghastly that speech and mind alike failed to reproduce it. If all the wounded in the great battles fought on 'Apulia's fateful land' were gathered together, from the wars of the 'Trojans' down to Tagliacozzo, the sight would not equal ' the ghastly mode of the ninth bolgia.' During their lifetime the sinners of this Moat had broken up by heresy and scandal the unity of the body of man- kind ; and now their punishment is to have their own bodies broken up — cloven and mutilated in different parts and in varying degrees, according to the kind of discord which they sowed. At a certain point in the valley was stationed a devil with a sword, and, as the sinners marched past him, he clove each according to his guilt. By the time the cloven soul had completed the circuit of the valley, the IX. SCHISMATICS 883 wound was healed, and once more the demon smote CANTOS XXVIII — him. The general symbolism is obvious. The devil xxix. 36 indicates that the sowing of discord is a diabolic sin. 'To raise a discord contrary to that good concord which is the work of charity,' says Aquinas, 'is a grievous sin : hence it is said, " Six things there are which the Lord hateth, and the seventh His soul detesteth " ; and the seventh is set down, " him that soweth discord among brethren."'^ The cleaving of the souls is an obvious repayment in kind. And, finally, the constant repetition of the wound after it was healed is symbolic of the way in which, when- ever the wounds of discord between man and man which they inflicted began to close, these Schismatics were not satisfied till they tore them open again. Three kinds of Schismatics seem to be distin- Tbree fomu guished, according as they broke up the unity of the Church, of the State, or of the Family ; although, of course, it is to be remembered that the distinction is not a rigid one, factions of Church, State, and Family frequently blending into one another. Of the in cunrch : religious Schismatics, the first named is Mohammed, probably because the greatest. It is curious that Dante does not regard him as the founder of a new religion, but as the author of a schism in the Christian faith. The reason may be that Christianity being, in Dante's view, the universal religion, any rival faith which disputed its claims was regarded by him as a schism in the ideal Christian unity of mankind. The more probable reason, however, is that Mohammedanism is an attempt to unite Jewish ' Samma, ii-ii. q. zxxvii. a. 1 ; Prov. vi. 16, 19. 384 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVIII. - XXIX. 36 All, the flrst disciple of nobammed. and Christian elements on the basis of monotheism. The greatness of the Mohammedan schism is sym- bolized by the greatness of the Prophet's wound : he is completely disembowelled — cloven from chin to fork — the entrails hanging between his legs. Dante describes the hideous sight in words which will hardly bear repeating, probably to indicate the foul- ness of the Mohammedan schism. The punishment is also peculiarly appropriate to one who used the sword so relentlessly to propagate his creed. When he saw Dante watching him from the bridge, with his own hands he tore open his breast, saying, 'See now how I rend myself; see how mangled is Mohammed' — inflicting on himself the fate he had so often measured out to others.^ The False Prophet then pointed out, walking and weeping in front of him, Ali, his son-in-law and earliest disciple, cleft in the only place where Mohammed is whole — ' from chin to forelock.' " This ghastly wound has a double appropriateness. As he was entering the mosque for prayers, Ali was struck down by assassins, the blow falling on his head. The symbolic meaning of this wound which he bears even in Hell, is that Ali was the author of a schism within Mohammedanism itself, and a schism which arose out of the question who was to be the head of the religion. The followers of Mohammed after his death fought desperately over the succession, and it was not till three others had reigned that the Caliphate fell to Ali. Even then his right was so hotly disputed that to this day the ' Inf. xxviii. 22-31. '^ Inf. xxviii. IX. SCHISMATICS 385 Mohammedan world is broken in two by a cleavage CANTOS XXVIII - as distinct as that which in Christendom divides xxix. 36 Protestant and Papist. The orthodox and by far the larger sect, called Sunnites — for the most part to be found in Turkey — reject All's claims and hold by the traditions of the Koran. His followers are known by the name of Shiites or Sectaries, and include the whole population of Persia. ' Originally the Shiites were simply the partisans of Ali and of his descendants. In the course of time, when the whole of Persia had adopted the cause of the family of Ali, Shiism became the receptacle of all the religious ideas of the Persians, and Dualism, Gnosticism, and Manicheism, were to be seen reflected in it. Even in the lifetime of Ali, a converted Jew, named Abdallah b. Saba, had striven to introduce foreign elements into Islam. Thus, he alleged that Ali was to be adored as an incarnation of the Deity. These ideas, though rejected with horror by Ali himself, and by the greater part of the first Shiites, gradually made way; and all the direct descendants of Ali became veritable deities in the eyes of their respec- tive partisans.'^ If we may suppose that Dante was acquainted with the Shiite expectation of the Mahdi, it would give a peculiar significance to the wound in All's head. ' Mahdi, or " the well-guided," is the The Habdi. name given by the Shiites to that member of the family of Ali who, according to their belief, is one day to gain possession of the whole world, and set up the reign of righteousness in it.' Dante might then have recognized in this rival Messiah the very > Encyc. Brit., Article Mohammedanism: Eastern Caiiphaie. 2b 386 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXVIII.- XXIX. 36 Fra Dolclno. head and front of the whole Mohammedan schism. Taking Mohammed and Ali together, the schism was complete — from fork to forelock. Just as Mohammed had one foot lifted to depart, he stayed himself in order to send a strange warning to a Christian Schismatic, Fra Dolcino, whose name resounded through Italy in the opening years of the fourteenth century : ' Now say to Fra Dolcino, then, to arm him. Thou, who perhaps shalt see the sun ere long. If soon he wish not here to follow me. So with provisions, that no stress of snow May give the victory to the Novarese, Which otherwise to gain would not be light.' * The reference is to a schism in the North of Italy, the adherents of which called themselves the Apos- tolic Brothers. It is not easy to get at the exact truth concerning the character and aims of its leader, Fra Dolcino. By some he is regarded as a true reformer of the Church, sincerely striving to bring her back to the purity and simplicity of Apos- tolic days. Mariotti, for example, defends him vigorously, declaring that his aim was substan- tially that of Dante himself : ' Divested of all fables which ignorance, prejudice, or open calumny involved it in, Dolcino's scheme amounted to nothing more than a reformation, not of religion, but of the Church ; his aim was merely the destruction of the temporal power of the clergy, and he died for his country no less than for his God. The wealth, arrogance, and corruption of the Papal See appeared ' Inf. xzyili, 55-60, IX. SCHISMATICS 887 to him, as it appeared to Dante, as it appeared to a CANTOS • XXVIII — thousand other patriots before and after him, an xxix. 36 eternal hindrance to the union, peace, and welfare of Italy, as it was a perpetual check upon the pro- gress of the hunaan race, and a source of infinite scandal to the piety of earnest believers.' ^ Obviously Dante's own view is far removed from this, and it is difficult to believe that he deliberately consigned Dolcino to this Moat without some grounds for his judgment. Probably he shared the opinion of his day that he was a dangerous schismatic, who preached a community of goods and wives, lived a grossly immoral life, and gained hundreds of followers by the sanction which his easy creed gave to sin. Whatever the truth be, Clement v. ordered a crusade against him, to which Novara furnished a large con- tingent. Fra Dolcino and his followers took refuge among the mountains near Vercelli, and successfully defended themselves for more than a year. At last the 'stress of snow' to which Dante refers cut off his supplies of food ; and in 1307 he and his com- panion, Margaret of Trent, famous for her great beauty, were burnt to death. Writing from the standpoint of the year 1300, Dante, of course, had to put all this in the form of a prophetic warning. But the most curious thing about this warning is that Mohammed should be the sender of it. Why should he trouble himself about a Christian schis- matic ? We may be sure his aim was not to save Fra Dolcino from the doom of this Moat, but simply to injure the Christian Church. The longer this 1 Mariotti's Fra Dolcino and his Times, p. 297. Medicina. 388 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS heretic could hold out against the Pope, the greater XXIX. 36 ^^^ schism he would create in Christendom, and therefore the greater Mohammed's malignant joy. If there is any truth in the charge that Dolcino taught community of wives, the Prophet may have had some sympathy with a man who had certain points of contact with himself. Schism in the Coming now to Schismatics of the State, three Bta.te • Pier da examples are given. The first is Pier da Medicina, who claims to have seen Dante ' up in Latian land.' When the family to which he belonged, the Bian- cucci of Bologna, were banished from that city, he devoted himself to stirring up strife between the lords of Bomagna, and in particular between the Polenta family of Ravenna, and the Malatesta of Rimini. His hatred of Malatestino, lord of the latter city — 'that traitor who sees only with one eye' — breaks out even here. Like Mohammed, he takes the opportunity of sending a warning message back to earth. Malatestino, having resolved to naake himself master of the neighbouring town of Fano, devised a plot to get two of its leading citizens out of his way. He therefore invited Messer Guido and Angiolello to hold a conference with him at La Cat- tolica, a small town on the Adriatic, not far from Rimini, and while on their way to meet him he had them treacherously cast overboard and drowned. Pier's warning message urges them to refuse Mala- testino's perfidious invitation. For his own trea- cherous sowing of discords, he is himself horribly slashed and mutilated about the head — his throat slit, his nose cut off close below the eyebrows, and IX. SCHISMATICS 389 one ear wanting. One wonders whether this may CANTOS not be the fashion in which one of the tyrants on xxix. 36 whom he practised his treachery — Malatestino, for instance — despatched him to the other world. Or it may be the return upon himself of the wounds and mutilations inflicted by him on others, in the course of the wars and broils which his plottings stirred up. Still another meaning is suggested : the throat which was the passage for so many lies is now slit; the nose which was so fond of thrusting itself into other people's business, will thrust itself no more ; and one of the ears so eager to listen to every scandal is gone.^ In referring to Bimini, Pier da Medicina had curio, the spoken of it as irS^e. ' the land which some one here with me Would fain be fasting from the vision of — that is, wished he had never seen ; and Dante now begs him to show him who he is. For reply. Pier lays his hand on the jaw of one of his companions, forces open his mouth, and shows him ' the tongue slit in the windpipe.' It is Curio, the Roman Tribune, who, according to Lucan, whom Dante follows here,* urged Caesar to cross the Rubicon and thus begin the great civil war in Rome : * This is he, and he speaks not. This one, being banished, every doubt submerged In Caesar, affirming that the man prepared Always with injury endured delay.' This stern condemnation of Curio raises several > Inf. xxviil. 64-90. * PharscUia, i. 280-281. 390 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS strange questions. One writer says: 'Ourio gets XXIX. 36 scant justice, seeing that in Dante's view Caesar in all he did was only carrying out the Divine purpose regarding the Empire.'^ The difference, however, between the two men is obvious enough. Csesar did everything he could to avert civil war, and only moved when every hope had failed. To Curio, on the contrary, the dissensions in Rome were but a welcome means of making his own fortune. Momm- sen describes him as utterly lacking in moral and political principle, ' unsurpassed in refined elegance, in fluent and clever oratory, in dexterity of intrigue,' and willing to sell his tongue to the highest bidder. Originally he was a partisan of Pompey. He then offered to sell his services to Csesar and was rejected ; but ' the talent, which he thenceforward displayed in his attacks on Csesar, induced the latter subsequently to buy him up — the price was high, but the com- modity was worth the money.' ^ It is no injustice to place such a man in this Moat. Doubtless it is for this reason his tongue is gone — he had sold it, and it was the property of the buyer. A much greater Did Dante difficulty rises out of the fact that Dante himself rf^irio?'^" seems to act toward Florence precisely the part which he condemns Curio for acting toward Rome. In his Letter to the Emperor, Henry vii. of Luxem- burg, written in 1311, he reproaches him with great severity for his delay in proceeding to chastise the city of Florence ; and the strange thing is that he quotes the very words of Curio : ' Once more let the voice of Curio to Csesar thunder forth : 1 Sibbald. " Mommseu's History of Rome, v, 183. IX. SCHISMATICS 391 " While parties tremble, only weakly united, CANTOS Delay not ; a man prepared should never dally. XXVIII.- Labour and fear are both dearly bought." ' i I It appears from several parts of this Canto that Dante felt he had laid himself open to a suspicion of being himself a sower of strife. This would account for the way in which again and again he clears him- self of the charge. When Mohammed sees him standing on the bridge, he asks him why he thus postpones his punishment by not descending to the valley ; and Virgil repels the insinuation of his guilt. Later, when he sees Bertran de Born holding up his own head in his hand like a lantern, he says he would scarcely dare to tell a thing so strange, If it were not that conscience reassures me, The good companion which a man emboldens Under the hauberk of its feeling pure.^ However he may appear to others to have deserved such punishments himself, his own good conscience, like a coat of mail, gives him courage to narrate them. And, in truth, there is no real inconsistency in his quoting Curio's advice to the Emperor. In itself, it was advice entirely after Dante's own heart, and his object in quoting it had nothing in common with Curio's in giving it. As we saw, Curio was an unprincipled politician who sold his tongue to the highest bidder, and civil war itself was only a pawn which he played in the game of making his own fortune ; whereas when Dante urges Henry to attack Florence, his ultimate aim is to crush that chronic ' Latham's Dante's Eleven Letters, p. 151. ' Inf. xxviii. 115-117. 392 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS civil war which delusred its streets with blood, by XXVTTT — XXIX. 36 reducing under one civil head all parties and factions. Doubtless Dante's personal fortunes were involved in the Emperor's success ; nevertheless the unity of Italy was his first concern, and he certainly had not sold to him or any other the tongue out of his head. Sohism in the The third example is one which shows how easily Mosc/de' schisms of the Family became schisms of the State Lamberti. j^ Dante's day. The soul is Mosca de' Lamberti, to whom the poet traced the feud of Guelphs and Ghibellines which was the ruin of Florence and him- self. The story is well known. In the year 1215, Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti, a Florentine noble, broke his promise of marriage to a lady of the Amidei family, in order to take instead one of the Donati. The friends of the slighted lady met to consult how the affront was to be avenged ; and this Mosca decided their hesitations by the exclamation which he here recalls : ' A thing done has an end !' — meaning that he should be slain, and this was accord- ingly done. ' On the morning of Easter of the Resur- rection,' according to Villani's account, Mosca and the rest waylaid Buondelmonte as he rode into the city ' nobly arrayed in new white apparel, and upon a white palfrey,' dragged him from his horse, and slew him where the statue of Mars stood on the Ponte Vecchio : an ominous spot, for the deed spread war through the whole city.^ ' This death of M. Buondelmonte,' says Villani, 'was the cause and beginning of the accursed parties of the Guelphs > Par, xvl. 140-U7. Comp. Inf. xiii, 143-145. IX. SCHISMATICS 393 and Ghibellines in Florence, albeit long before there CANTOS xxvm - were factions among the noble citizens and the said xxix. 36 parties existed by reason of the strifes and questions between the Church and the Empire.' Those who held to the Buondelmonti took the name of Guelphs, while the adherents of the Amidei called themselves Ghibellines ; and thus a family feud developed into political factions which devastated Florence with civil war. There followed, says the historian already quoted, ' much evil and disaster to our city, as here- after shall be told; and it is believed that it will never have an end, if God do not cut it short.' ^ The punishment of the man who originated this strife is that the hands which helped to murder Buondel- monte are now cut ofP : And one who had both hands lopped off, The stumps uplifting thro' the murky air, So that the blood made foul his face. Cried out : ' Thou wilt remember too the Mosca, Who said, alas I "A thing done has an end 1 " Which was the evil seed for the Tuscan people.' And I added : ' And death unto thy race ' ; Whence he, accumulating woe on woe. Departed like a person sad and crazed ^ — the increase of his pain arising evidently from the ruin he had brought upon his kindred. In Par. xvi. 110, Dante's ancestor, Cacciaguida, refers to the Lamberti — naming them by their armorial bearings, ' the Balls of Gold ' — as an honourable family in his day ; but it is said that it had completely died out by the end of the thirteenth century. Aristotle in his ' Villani, v, 38. » Inf. xxTiii. 103-111. 394 THE FRAUDULENT Bertran de Bom. CANTOS Ethics thinks that the adversity of friends on earth, XXVIII — • • • XXIX. 36 ^^ ^^ ^^ known to the dead, can have a very slight power to make them unhappy ; but this is one of the few points on which Dante differs from his ' Divine judgment.' ^ The most startling punishment, however, is re- served for a man who sowed discord between father and son, as Ahithophel did between David and Absalom. His name is Bertran de Born, lord of Hautefort, near P^rigueux, and a famous trouba- dour. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 2), Dante quotes him as a writer of poetry in the vulgar tongue on the subject of war; and in the Convito (iv. 11) he refers to him as an example of munificence, without, however, specifying any particular act. He is set in this Moat for his perpetual stirring up of strife and war between Henry ii. of England and The Young his son Prince Henry, called here ' the Young King.'^ He received this title because he was crowned twice during his father's lifetime. Stirred up by his mother. Queen Eleanor, he demanded England or Normandy, and when both were refused, carried on 1 Ethics, i. 11. ^ The reading, re Giovanni, is certainly a copyist's error for re giovane. Dante cannot have been ignorant of the name of this prince, and the constant recurrence of the words 'the Young King' in the writings of Bertran is decisive of the right reading. The Lament on the Death of Prince Henry begins thus : 'If all the pain, and misery, and woe, The tears, the losses with misfortune fraught, That in this dark life man can ever know. Were heaped together— all would seem as naught Against the death of the young English King ; For by it youth and worth are sunk in gloom. And the world dark and dreary as a tomb. Reft of all joy, and full of grief and sadness.' (Lives of the Troubadours, by Ida Farnell, pp. 89-124.) King.' IX. SCHISMATICS 895 war at intervals against his father for ten years, till CANTOS his death from fever in 1183. If ever the Young xxix. 36 King slackened in the struggle, it is said that his friend, Bertran de Born, stung him into renewed activity by one of his songs. Dante's authority for this was the mediaeval biography of the poet: 'He was a valiant knight and warrior, a good lover, and a good troubadour, and wise and fair-spoken, and knew to work both good and ill. And ever, when he would, was he lord over King Henry of England, and over his sons ; and ever did he delight in setting strife betwixt father and son, and betwixt brother and brother.' Whether in repentance or not, we cannot say, but he ended his life as a monk in the Cistercian monastery of Dalon. This, however, availed nothing with Dante, who tells us that he saw him walking in this valley and carrying his head in his hand like a lantern : I truly saw, and still I seem to see it, A trunk without a head go in like manner As went the others of the mournful herd. And by the hair it held the severed head, Swinging in his hand in fashion of a lantern, And that gazed at us and said : ' O me 1 ' Of himself he made for himself a lamp. And they were two in one, and one in two j How it can be, He knows who so ordains. When Bertran came to the foot of the bridge on which Dante stood, he lifted the ghastly lantern the length of his arm, that his words might be clearly heard. His explanation of his punishment is that, the father being the natural head of the son, he who parts the two severs his own head from his body : 396 THE FRAUDULENT ^ySttt^ ' ^°'^ s^6 the grievous penalty, XXIX. 36 Thou who breathing goest to view the dead ; See if any is as great as this. And that thou mayest carry news of me. Know that I am Bertran de Born, the same Who gave to the Young King the evil counsels I made father and son rebels each to each ; Ahithophel did not more with Absalom And David with his villainous goadings. Because I parted persons so united. Parted I carry now my brain, alas, From its beginning which is in this trunk. Thus is observed in me the counterpoise.' ^ Dante and the One last incident seems intended to show Dante's attitude to the vendetta, — that wild family blood- feud BO relentlessly bequeathed from generation to generation. The sight of these cloven souls so filled his eyes with tears that he longed to remain and weep, but Virgil rebukes his delay. Why linger over this Bolgia when he had not done so over the others ? The valley had a circuit of two-and-twenty miles, and obviously he could not hope to number all the shades in that vast round. The moon, too, was underneath their feet, that is, it was one or two in the afternoon, and only a short time remained to see the rest. Dante replied that his reason for lingering was that he was looking for 'a spirit of his own blood,' whom he believed to be in this Moat. This GeridelBeUo. was Geri (i.e. Ruggieri) del Bello of the Alighieri family, a first cousin, it is said, of Dante's father. He was a great stirrer up of strife, and was finally ' Inf. xxviii. 118-142. It has been pointed out that ' the counterpoise' {eontrapasso) is not simple justice, administered in any way, but in the particular mode and fashion of the sin. IX. SCHISMATICS 397 murdered by one of the Sacchetti with whom he was CANTOS XXVlll — at feud. Virgil then told Dante that while he was xxix. 36 absorbed in gazing at Bertran de Born, he had seen him at the foot of the bridge, pointing at him with threatening finger, and had heard the others name him Geri del Bello. Dante replies that he knows the cause of his anger : his death had never been avenged by any of his kindred, or, as he puts it, ' any who is a partner of the shame,' — ' therefore he went away Without speaking to me, as I imagine ; And in that has made me pity him the more,' The meaning of this pity has been much disputed. At first glance it seems to imply sympathy with the vendetta, which was sanctioned by the law of Florence in Dante's day, and many commentators take this view; nevertheless it seems utterly in- consistent with the whole drift of the passage, which means nothing if it is not a condemnation of such feuds. Mosca de' Lamberti has his hands cut off for originating one such family feud, which embroiled the whole city. Farther up in Hell, Guy de Montfort is plunged up to the throat in the Kiver of Blood for avenging his father's death by murder. Dante could not therefore with any consistency have avowed sympathy with the vendetta. His pity for his kins- man is not that his death has remained unavenged ; but rather that the passion for revenge burns on unquenched by death and adds a new torture to his agony. In Bossetti's Dante and his Circle (241-248), a translation is given of a sonnet by Forese Donati in which he ' taunts Dante ironically for not avenging 398 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS Geri Alighieri,' and more generally for his tame XXVIII XXIX. 36 acceptance of blows and forgiveness of injuries : ' Thou hast taught us a fair fashion, sooth to say, — That whoso lays a stick well to thy hack. Thy comrade and thy brother he shall be.' It is very difficult to recognize Dante in this garb of meekness; but at least it shows that he had the reputation of being no friend of the vendetta.^ The VaUey of Factions and schisms unhappily still exist, but the image^of*''* modern spirit of toleration makes it difficult for Italy. ^g ^Q understand why Dante thus fiercely plunges Schismatics of every kind into one of the lowest pits of Hell. The historical reason is undoubtedly the deplorable condition of Italy in his day. It was one vast battlefield, and the wounds of the souls in this valley are but the spiritual and symbolic counterpart of the literal wounds which the discords they had sowed had inflicted upon their fellows. Look where he would, Church, State, and Family were like the sinners here — continually cloven by the sword of the Demon of Discord. The best commentary on this and many another passage of the poem is the De Monarchia, the leading idea of which is that man- kind is one, and that its welfare can be secured only ' Inf. xxix. 1-36. Thirty years after his death, Geri was avenged by his nephews, who murdered one of the Sacchetti. In 1342 the two families were formally reconciled. Speaking of Bome in the fifteenth century, Gregorovius says : ' Criminal justice had a difficult task, for the people had become utterly depraved by " vendette" and hereditary feuds. The defiant power of individuals mocked at law, and every one fought for himself as he pleased. . . . The men who fought in vendetta were called " brigosi." In certain circumstances they had the right of barring their houses, and filling them with armed men. Vendetta was the most dreadful scourge of all cities of Italy, and in Bome it claimed countless victims, Not only relations but also strangers offered them- selves for hire to him who had insult to avenge,' IX. SCHISMATICS 899 by its union under one head, who is, in temporal CANTOS xxvm — things, the Emperor, and in spiritual things, the xxix. 36 Pope. This unity of mankind was with Dante much more than a philosophical or political theory; he held it with the passion of a religious ideal, deducing it expressly from the unity of God : ' The human race is well, nay, at its best state, when, so far as can be, it is made like unto God. But the human race is then most made like unto God when most it is one ; for the true principle of oneness is in Him alone. Wherefore it is written : " Hear, O Israel ; the Lord thy God is one God." But the race of man is most one when it is united wholly in one body, and it is evident that this cannot be, except when it is subject to one prince.' Once only, * under the divine Augustus,' a perfect monarchy existed, and therefore universal peace; aud on that 'fulness of the time' Christ set the seal of his approval by willing to be born then. 'But,' he goes on to lament, 'how the world has fared since that "seamless robe" has suffered rending by the talons of ambition, we may read in books ; would that we might not see it with our eyes. Oh, race of mankind ! what storms must toss thee, what losses must thou endure, what ship- wrecks must buffet thee, as long as thou, a beast of many heads, strivest after contrary things. Thou art sick in both thy faculties of understanding; thou art sick in thine affections. Unanswerable reasons fail to heal thy higher understanding ; the very sight of experience convinces not thy lower understanding; not even the sweetness of divine persuasion charms thy affections, when it breathes 400 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS into thee through the music of the Holy Ghost i XXVIII - . XXIX. 36 " Behold, how good and how pleasant a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity," ' -^ In the sixth Canto of the Purgatorio this torn and distracted state of his country wrings from him a loud and bitter cry of pain, which almost rivals the lamenta- tions of the prophets over Israel : Ah 1 servile Italy, thou hostelry of grief I A ship without a pilot in great tempest ! No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel I The passage is too long to quote in full, but it ought to be read in connection with this Moat of Schis- matics. Dante proceeds to denounce bitterly both Pope and Emperor for the disorders of the country : the Pope was so ambitious for temporal power that he would not ' let Caesar sit in the saddle ' ; ^ and the Emperor, the ' German Albert,' for ' greed of those transalpine lands,' had allowed 'the garden of the empire to be waste.' To this sin and neglect of the heads of Church and State, Dante traces the feuds and factions which turned all Italy into one vast battlefield like this valley of Hell. It is his horror of this condition of anarchy, and his yearning for unity which amounted to a religious passion, that explain his application to Henry vii. of the words : • Behold the Lamb of Gfod, which taketh away the sin of the world 1'* They sound irreverent, yet » De Mon. 1. 8, 16. * In his famous BuU, ' Unam sanctam,' issued in 1302, Boniface viii. declares submission to the Pope necessary to salvation : ' Indeed we declare, announce, and define, that it is altogether necessary to salva- tion for every human creature to be subject to the Boman Pontiff,' ' Letter vii. 2. IX. SCHISMATICS 401 nothing was further from Dante's mind. If the CANTOS Emperor could in very deed bring mankind into a xxix. 36 unity, and therefore into peace and concord, Dante felt that he would in simple truth 'take away the sin of the world ' — the countless wars and outrages which made the world a kind of Hell. When we ask the meaning of the punishment, we PmiiBlunent. ^ might content ourselves with the idea of a retalia- tion in kind, 'on the principle,' as one says, 'that just the very sins that a man has committed become the instruments of his punishment ; for these sinners have divided hearts that were united, and minds that were at one in matters of Faith, or friendship, or trust, or consanguinity, and have often drawn men into wars, to deaths, to wounds, to hatreds, and to occasions of stumbling.' But the ethical idea goes ''^^ deeper than this. Dante means us to understand who cleaves the great truth that it is only in maintaining the ^nBei^ **'*' unity of his fellows that any man can maintain his own unity. These unhappy souls are themselves cloven and mutilated by no arbitrary decree, but by the operation of an inevitable natural law. That law is the simple one that no i^^5;5_is complete^ in himself J our very individuality receives ^orm and contents from the factjbhat we are more^thanjn- dividuals. We are members one of another ; the relations of Family, Church, and State, to which Dante specially refers, are not arbitrary conventions which a man can break up and cast away at his will. They are the relations ordained by God for the devel opment of the separate individuality of every human soul. That wh ich we call ' self ' is defined by /C 2C 402 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS its relations to other selves ; and the greater the XXIX. 36 number of right relations it holds to_other8, the more complete the self grows. Hence it is that to create any schism in that body of mankind of which we are members, is of necessity to create a corre- sponding schism in ourselves. The cleaving of these Schismatics and sowers of strife by the Demon of Discord is, therefore, no fantastic or arbitrary punishment : it is the natural and inev itable opera; tion of that law of solidarity by which the individual soul a ttajng-the f uJness. f^nd unity pf its own, nature only in the fuln ess _and_ unity of the entire body of mankind. CHAPTER XXV CIRCLE Vin.— MAIiBBOLGB : THE FRAUDULENT Bolgia X. Falsifiers The pilgrims now arrive at the tenth Moat — 'the CANTOS XXIX 37 last cloister of Malebolge,' in which, as Carlyle says, xxx the sinners are the ' lay-brothers ' and the demons ,^^ {^^. the monks. At first the darkness was so thick that House of the they could see nothing from the crag on which they stood ; but when they reached the summit of the bridge, out of the gloom rose a foul smell of putrid limbs and cries of pain, as if all the hospitals in the most fever-haunted regions of Italy and Sardinia had emptied their sick into this black ditch. So heartrending were the groans and lamentations of the vast lazar-house, that Dante put his hands to his ears to shut them out. Descending to the last and lowest of the ramparts of Malebolge, he was able through the darkened air to discern some of the sufferers. One was lying on his face, a second across the shoulders of another, while some crawled about from place to place to find a spot to ease their pain. They are the souls of Falsifiers, divided, as we shall see, into four classes : Falsifiers of Metals, Four oumu of Persons, of Coins, and of their Word. These four "^ ^'^'"*«"- 404 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX I. 'Apes of Katuie ' — Alcbemists. Griffollno of Arexzo. species of Falsifiers are afflicted with different dis- eases, according to their particular form of the sin ; the general conception of the punishment seeming to be that men who spent their lives falsifying things on earth, are now themselves falsified, so to speak, by horrible diseases which change and disfigure their true forms and features. The idea may have been suggested by Aquinas. Discussing the sin of lying, whether in word, or sign, or deed, St. Thomas says 'a lie is an act falling on undue matter: for words being naturally signs of thoughts, it is a thing un- natural and undue for any one to signify in word what he has not in his mind.' ^ The unnaturalness of this sin is the leading idea in the mind of Aquinas ; and Dante simply throws this unnaturalness into the visible form of disease, which is an unnatural state of the human body. Passing along the rampart in silence as through the wards of a hospital, and listening to the cries of the sick, the travellers came on two souls, leaning against each other like two platters set before the fire to warm. The comparison has probably a double appropriateness : it refers first to the utensils and fires they once used in their old occupation of Alchemy, and, in the next place, to the fact that they were both burned to death for the practice of this black art. Virgil asks them if there are any Latians among them, and they reply that they are Latians both. At Dante's request one of them relates how he came into this Moat. His name was Griffolino of Arezzo, who was burned at Siena on a * Summa, ii-li. q. ex. a. 3. X. FALSIFIERS 405 charge of heresy, or, according to others, of necro- CANTOS XXIX 17 mancy. Neither one nor other, however, was his ^xx real sin, else he would have been in one of the Moats or Circles above. His tragic death came about through a mere joke. He had boasted in jest to Albert, the reputed son of the Bishop of Siena, that he could fly through the air like Daedalus ; and because he did not teach him the art, Albert de- nounced him to his father the Bishop, who had him burned for necromancy or heresy. But the Judge of Hell, 'Minos, who cannot err,' corrected the Bishop's judgment, consigning him to this Moat for his real sin of Alchemy. When Dante heard Siena mentioned, he turned to siena and Virgil, exclaiming, thrift ciut.' ' Now was ever So vain a people as the Sienese? Not for a certainty the French by far.' By vanity Dante seems to mean a kind of empty- headed frivolity. It is said that to this day the Florentines call a nail without a head 'a Sienese nail.' On hearing this judgment of Sienese vanity, the second of the two Alchemists broke in sarcasti- cally : • Always excepting Stricca, Who knew the art of moderate expenses, And Niccol6, who the luxurious use Of the clove did first discover In the garden where such seed takes root ; And leaving out the band, among whom squandered Caccia d'Ascian his vineyard and great forest, And where his wit the Abbagliato proffered,' The reference is to four members of the Brigata 406 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX Capoccblo of Florence. Spendereccia or ' Spendthrift Club ' of Siena : a fifth, Lano, we have seen pursued in the Wood of the Suicides by the black dogs of his own extravagance. The Club consisted of twelve rich young men who hired a great palace in Siena in which each had his rooms, gave magnificent banquets, and lived on such a scale of insane extravagance that in a few months they reduced themselves to poverty and became a laughing-stock to the whole country. ' Abbagliato ' means ' dazed,' and is probably a nick- name like our ' muddle-head.' He is thought by some to be Folgore da San Gemignano, the poet of the Club, to which he is believed to have addressed a set of Sonnets in which he sings the pleasures of each month of the changing year. This would account for the reference to his wit : the other members gave their wealth; he being a poor man could contribute nothing but his wit, his poetic gift, of which obviously Dante had a poorer opinion than the young rakes for whom he sang.^ The second of the Alchemists, who thus sarcasti- cally defends the prodigals from the charge of vanity, is one Oapocchio, probably a Florentine, who was also burned for Alchemy at Siena. He reminds Dante that he had known him on earth as a cun- ning alchemist — ' a good ape of Nature ': ' But that thou know who thus doth second thee Against the Sienese, make sharp thine eye ^ Inf. xxix. 121-132. For some account of Folgore, see J. A. Symonds's Benaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, i. 46-50; 462-466. This ' Abbagliato ' is, however, usually identified with another member of the Club, Bartolommeo de' Folcacchieri, ' a man of small' means but of good abilities, which, however, he entirely sacrificed from keeping company with so dissipated a set of spendthrifts.' X. FALSIFIERS 407 Tow'rds me, so that my face well answer thee, CANTOS So shalt thou see I am Capocchio's shade, XXIX. 37- YXX Who the metals falsified by alchemy | And thou must remember, if I eye thee well, How I was of Nature a good ape.' ' The usual interpretation of the phrase 'a good ape of Nature ' is that Capocchio had, according to the old commentators, great powers of mimicry ; but I prefer to regard it as descriptive of his skill as an alchemist. It is said that Dante was his fellow- student in Natural Philosophy ; and there may even be a hint that there was a time in his life when he too had felt the temptation of alchemical experi- ments. If so, the time was past ; he now saw in the effort to transmute one metal into another an im- pious attempt to ' ape Nature,' and thus falsify God's own handiwork. The punishment of these Alchemists is twofold — FunisbasMt of paralysis and leprosy. So weak are they that they paraiysU and have to prop each other up like two pans before ^*''"•'■ the fire; and when Virgil tells them that Dante is alive, they start asunder, each trembling like a man paralyzed. Some commentators trace this paralytic condition to the excessive use of mercury by alche- mists, and give as their authority Avicenna, the Arabian philosopher and physician. The other disease of leprosy is described with a realism which almost nauseates. From head to foot the two wretches are covered with scabs, the itch of which is so intolerable a torture that they never cease tearing away the leprous scurf with their nails : > Inf. xxix. 133139. 408 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX The itch of Alchemy. And never saw I plied a currycomb By stable-boy for whom his master waits, Nor him who keeps unwillingly awake, As each was plying fast the bite Of nails upon himself, for the great fury Of the itch, which has no other succour. And so the nails downward drew the scab In fashion as a knife the scales of bream, Or other fish that has them larger still.' The symbolic meaning of all this is not easy to con- jecture. ' It is worthy of remark,' says one commen- tator, 'that Aristotle describes lead as a leprous gold ; and these people who wanted to convert lead into gold, are now one mass of putrefying leprosy.' This, however, only explains the punishment from the outside; the interior moral significance must flow from the nature of the sin itself. In the first place, as these Alchemists were 'apes of Nature,' so this disease apes Nature in their own persons. Leprosy changes a man into a hideous ape and cari- cature of humanity: those who falsify Nature are themselves falsified. Nor is this a mere fanciful idea. Nothing so surely preserves the true form and features of our humanity as reverence for Nature and loyal submission to the laws and ordinances which God has revealed in her ; any attempt to run counter to her order, and to transmute her into something else than God made her to be, issues in the end in some deformity and disease of the soul, which eats it away like leprosy. In the next place, the itch represents the torment of restlessness which alchemical pursuits seem to create, and the paralysis ' Inf. xxix. 76-84. X. FALSIFIERS 409 the way in which they deaden a man's faculties in CANTOS XXIX 37— every natural and healthy direction. Perhaps the xxx best commentary on this punishment is Balzac's novel, La Recherche de I'Absolu, in which he gives a most vivid and terrible picture of the way in which Alchemy, like a leprous itch, eats away a man's fortune, family affections, mind, heart, soul, and leaves him utterly paralyzed for any natural pursuit or interest. Dante means to tell us that this un- healthy itch which gave them no rest on earth, loses none of its torturing power in eternity: there as here it eats away the soul like an incurable and loathsome disease, and leaves it for ever paralyzed for things healthy, natural, and right. At this point two souls come rushing upon the li- FaisUeis scene — 'shadows pale and naked.' They belong to the second of the four classes. Falsifiers of the Person: those who on earth, for some fraudulent end, assumed the person or character of others. One of the wretched pair is Myrrha, daughter of Cinyras, Myrrha of King of Cyprus, who disguised herself as a stranger "5^""- that she might beconae, in Dante's words, Beyond all rightful love, her father's lover. In his letter to the Emperor, Henry vii., Dante calls Florence 'the accursed and impious Myrrha'; the idea being that the city in yielding herself so com- pletely to her spiritual Father, the Pope, was guilty of a species of spiritual incest.^ The other ' shadow ' is a certain Florentine, Gianni Oianni Schicchi, of the family of the Cavalcanti. The story """"""^ ' Jnf. xxx. 37-41 ; Letter vil. 7. 410 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS of his personation is peculiar. Buoso Donati — pro- XXTX V7 xxk bably the same as in the Moat of the Thieves in Canto XXV. 140 — when he neared the end of his sinful life was anxious to make for himself friends out of the mammon of unrighteousness by leaving his ill- got wealth to purposes of charity, and returning it in the form of legacies to those whom he had robbed. His son — or nephew, as some think — Simone Donati, fearing to lose the fortune, persuaded him to post- pone the making of his will until it was too late; indeed, according to one version of the story, he had him smothered. Concealing the body of the dead man, he persuaded this Gianni Schicchi, who had most marvellous powers of mimicry, to put himself in Buoso's bed, assume the voice and features of the dying man, and dictate to a notary a will leaving everything to Simone. Gianni sustained his part to a miracle, but took care to pay himself for his ser- vices as personator : in one clause of the will which he dictated he left to himself what Dante calls ' the ' Tbe lady of lady of the herd,' a beautiful mare valued at a thou- sand gold florins. This dangerous gift of mimicry seems to have run in the blood. According to Toynbee, Gianni ' had a son Guiduccio, who . . . was nicknamed Scimmia (" ape "), a sobriquet which ap- pears to have been adopted by the family, as the figure of an ape is sculptured on Guiduccio's tomb in Santa Croce,' Dante seems to distinguish in Myrrha and Gianni Schicchi two species of personation : the former ' falsified herself in the form of another ' ; the latter 'falsified Buoso Donati in himself' The dis- tinction is very obscure, but it may mean that X. FALSIFIERS 411 Myrrha personated by assuming a disguise, 'the CANTOS • • XXIX 37- form of another,' while Gianni personated ' in him- xxx self,' in the play and alteration of his own form and features. Fortunately nothing of importance in the interpretation depends on the distinction.^ Now, the punishment of this Falsification of Person Punishment— is insanity. The two shades rush in, pale and naked, °°^^ '' and biting madly as a boar does when thrust forth from his sty — perhaps with an allusion to the rush of the swine when the demons entered into them. 'That goblin,' Gianni Schicchi, as Griffolino calls him, in the frenzy of his madness seized the wretched leper, Capocchio, by the nape of the neck with his teeth, and dragged him savagely along the ground on his belly. The reason why he fixes on him is probably that he was a mimic like himself. The punishment of this sin is in kind. On earth these souls personated others, thus divesting themselves of their own personality ; and now they are deprived of that personality for ever. For insanity may be regarded as the substitution of an imaginary per- sonality for the real. Dante saw in the gift of ^ mimicry a great moral danger : it is a ready instru- ment of fraud, and it involves a certain tampering with our own personal identity. 'Did you never observe,' asks Socrates, 'how imitations, beginning in early youth, at last sink into the constitution and become a second nature of body, voice, and mind ? ' ^ The third class in this ' cloister ' are Falsifiers of in. Faisiflerg Coin. Its chief representative is Maestro Adamo > Inf. XXX., lines 41 and 44. ' Inf. XXX. 1-48 ; Be^uhlic, iii. 395. 412 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX Uaestro Adamo of Brescia. Fanlsbment- Dropsy. of Brescia, the title Master signifying his great skill in the art of coining. As the travellers pass, he begs them to look and mark the greatness of his suflfer- ing. His disease is dropsy, which has so swelled his body, while it has left his face and neck emaciated, that had his legs been cut off, says Dante, he would have been exactly like a lute. The Counts of Bomena in the valley of the Casentino had em- ployed this skilful ' Master ' of the art to ' seal with the Baptist's image' (the stamp on one side of the gold florins of Florence) base coins which contained three carats of alloy. The fraud being discovered, the Florentines burned Master Adam on the public road near Bomena; a heap of stones called 'The Cairn of the Dead Man' is popularly believed to mark the spot, and until recently passing travellers were in the habit of casting a stone upon it.^ It is difficult to say what exact symbolism the disease of dropsy represented to Dante's mind ; but from the nature of the sin, it appears probable that he regarded the derangement in the distribution of the humours of the human body as an image of the corresponding derangement which false coining pro- duces in the body politic. He may have had in view a passage in the Ethics (v. 8) in which Aristotle traces the invention of money to the necessity for a medium of exchange which shall have, as far as possible, a constant value. Money is the nearest approach to this constant value yet discovered; and any debasing of the currency, by disturbing this fixed standard, throws society into confusion. Just as in dropsy 1 Inf. SIX. 49-90. X. FALSIFIERS 413 one part swells and another pines away, so in the CANTOS body politic one section of the community is bloated xxx with wealth, while another grows emaciated with poverty. The significance of the burning thirst from which Tbirst. the forger suffers is more obvious. Like the rich man in the parable, Master Adam longs for a drop of water. It is doubtless symbolic of that thirst for gold which drove him to the crime that sank him to this Moat. It corresponds to the itch of the Alchemists and the insanity of the Personators : the earthly habit has grown into an eternal torment. But perhaps the most striking thing is the way in which the stern justice of God turns the very memory of the spot where the sin was sinned into a greater torture than the thirst itself. The passage must be quoted in full : ' I had while living enough of what I wished, And now, alas I one little drop of water crave. The rivulets that from the verdant hills Of Oasentino descend down into Arno, Making their channels cool and moist. Ever before me stand, and not in vain : For far more doth their image dry me up Than the disease which strips my face of flesh. The rigid justice which doth search me through Draweth occasion from the place I sinned. The more to set my sighs in flight. There is Romena, where I did falsify The alloy sealed with the Baptist's image. For which I left my body burned above. 'i Like many another sinful man, this Master Adam evidently had some genuine delight in the beauty > Inf. XXX. 62-75. 414 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX X Tbe Conti Ouldl. of Nature. There may have come to him hours when the loveliness of the hills and rivulets of the Oasentino was felt as a rebuke to his base thirst for gold, and for one brief better moment he may have hated the sin which was so utterly out of harmony with the scene. Even FalstafE at the end 'played with flowers' and 'babbled o' green fields.' Dante wishes to warn us that if we defile some fair scene of earth with an evil deed, the memory of its purity and peace may lurk in the soul with a strange per- sistence, and, under the revealing touch of death, become a haunting inevitable pain. There is, in truth, something peculiarly heinous in sins com- mitted in the midst of the purity and loveliness of God's works — something which His justice may well make the minister of our punishment : ' He who sinneth in the city May find margin to be witty ; He who in the woods doth sin, Him the drear fiend enters in.' But this Adam of Brescia was consumed by another thirst more burning than that for either gold or water. To quench it, he declares he would part with Fonte Branda : according to some, the famous fountain of Siena, but much more probably one of the same name at Bomena, the scene of his crime. This more burning thirst was the desire for vengeance on his employers in the forgery, the three brothers, Guido, Alessandro, and Aghinolfo, Lords of Bomena. If the 'raving shades,' such as Myrrha and Gianni Schicchi, who wandered through all parts of the valley, spoke truth, one of X. FALSIFIERS 415 the brothers was here already; but Adam, not CANTOS • XXIX 37- satisfied with mere report, longed to see his suffer- xxx ings with his own eyes, and bemoaned his power- lessness to stir which kept him from setting out on the quest : ' But what avails it me whose limbs are tied ? If I were only still so light, that in A hundred years I could advance one inch, I had already started on the way Seeking him out 'mong this deformed folk, Although it winds around eleven miles, And is not less than half a mile across.' Thus powerless this wretched soul sat there con- sumed with thirst within thirst — ^for gold, for the cool waters of the Casentino, for vengeance on those who had tempted him to his doom: all the good and evil of his earthly life turned into an eternal torment of vain remorse and baffled desire.^ At Dante's request. Master Adam names two souls iv. Faisiiiera 1 • 1 I.' • 1.x J 1 • ,iM , of tlteir Word lying close upon his right, and smoking ' like a wet _potipiiar's hand in winter.' They belong to the fourth and last ^'„^^e class. Liars, Falsifiers of their Word, — Potiphar's oreek. wife whose false accusation brought Joseph to a dungeon, and Sinon the Greek whose lying tongue 1 Inf. xxx. 76-87. A letter, attributed to Dante, condoles with Counte Oberto and Guido of Bomena on the death of their uncle Alessandro, who Is spoken of as now among the blessed in Paradise. A great controversy has raged over the question whether this is the Alessandro here set in Hell. See Latham's Dantis Eleven Letters, pp. 35-6i. From the eleven miles here and the twenty-two in v. 9 of the preced- ing Canto, much useless ingenuity has been spent in calculating the dimensions of the Inferno as a whole. Gabriel Kossetti thinks Dante wishes to identify the city of Dis with the city of Borne : ' the outward trench of the walls of Borne (whether real or imaginary we say not) was reckoned by Dante's contemporaries to be exactly twenty- two miles ; and the walls of the city were then and still are, eleven miles round.' See p. 266. 416 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX Their Fnnish- ment — Fever. Qttarrel of Adamo and Eiaon. Virgil's rebuke to Dante for listening:. persuaded the Trojans to admit the wooden horse by which their city fell.'^ Adam says he found them lying here when he was 'rained' into this chaBm; they have not moved since, and he thinks they will not move to all eternity. He was soon to learn to his cost that one of them was active enough when he saw occasion for it. Their punishment is a burn- ing fever which makes them steam with a foul smoke, and racks their heads with pain. It is not easy to say what is the symbolic meaning of this disease. Probably in the case of ' the false woman who accused Joseph,' it represents the fever of the unholy passion which drove her to so cruel a slander of an innocent man. The pain in the head means that the brain which conceived the lies is now being consumed by them; while the foul smoke may indicate the foulness of the heart within, which thus sends forth the cloud and exhalation of its falseness. Just as they are about to leave this last Moat, a peculiar incident occurs.* The Greek, overhearing the conversation, and resenting the way in which he was • named so darkly ' as ' the false Sinon,' suddenly flung out his arm and struck Adam a severe blow on his swollen paunch, which made it resound like a drum. The coiner was not slow to return the blow on the face; whereupon there began a shower of mutual taunts and revilings to which Dante stood listening eagerly until roused by Virgil's angry words : ' Now keep staring ! For little lacks it that / quarrel with thee.^ ' JEn. li. 57 fF. 1 Inf. XXX. 100-148. X. FALSIFIERS 417 Dante turned away in shame so great that it still CANTOS XXIX. 37— came over him when he thought of it. Finding no xxx words of excuse, his very look pled for him; and Virgil, pitying his confusion, told him that 'less shame would wash away a greater fault.' At the same time, he warns him earnestly against allowing himself to listen to such vile wrangles : ' Make account that I am aye beside thee. If e'er it come to pass that fortune bring thee Where there are people in a like dispute : For a base wish it is to wish to hear.' ^ Dante probably had two reasons for relating this incident: one, to show the hatreds and discords which increase the miseries of the lost; the other, to confess and rebuke a weakness which he found in himself, a certain readiness to listen to quarrels. It is a strange weakness to find in so great a lover of peace, and was perhaps due to his delight in the flash of wit and repartee. Whatever the cause, he recognizes it as a serious fault, for which Virgil, his own reason, rebukes him. 'A person of tact,' says -^ Aristotle, ' is one who will use and listen to such language as is suitable to an honourable gentleman. . . . The language to which a person listens will correspond to the language which he uses.'^ It is for this reason that Plato would banish from the stage of his ideal Republic all vulgar actions and low dialogues — women quarrelling with their husbands, or rogues and cowards ' jesting, scolding, reviling, in drink or out of drink, or otherwise sinning against themselves or others in word or deed, as the m.anner 1 Inf. xxx. U5-148. ' Mhics, iv. 14. 2d 418 THE FRAUDULENT CANTOS XXIX. 37- XXX Beviev of Ualebolge. Its Foulness. of such is.' To hear and see such things breeds a corresponding baseness and vulgarity in the audience.^ We have now reached the last ' cloister ' of this great Circle, and, as already pointed out, it is ex- tremely difficult to discover any principle of grada- tion on which its ten forms of Fraud are arranged. One would expect, for instance, that Simony, which is a fraud against the Church, would be set lower down than Barratry, which is fraud against the State ; and that the Hypocrisy which crucified Christ would be sunk far below Alchemy, which 'apes Nature'; but it is not so. Since Fraud is a social sin, it is possible that the classification represents Dante's view of the degrees in which the various forms of this evil undermine and ruin society. As we look back on the awful place, its chief character- istic is undoubtedly its foulness. Dante seems to have strained even his terrible imagination to crowd into its dark pits as much of loathsome and diabolic as they could hold : demons, filth, pitch, serpents, wounds, mutilations, deformities, insanity, leprosy, dropsy, fever — everything that can distort, defile, and eat away the form and features of humanity. The whole place is filled with the sickening stench of the unspeakable corruption. It is not, as Landor and others appear to think, because Dante's imagina- tion delighted in vile images — only those can believe this who never read beyond the Inferno ; it is simply because he wished to stamp Fraud in all its varieties with the foulness and deformity which he believed 1 Republic, iii. 395-398, X. FALSIFIERS 419 to be its native and essential characteristics. It is CANTOS its secrecy and duplicity which compel him to take xxx this serious view of it. An open sin even of the same kind, just because open, was in his judgment clean and wholesome by comparison ; at least, it did not rot and mutilate human nature. But ' Fraud is man's peculiar vice,' because its instrument is man's peculiar gift of Reason; it 'cuts the bond of love which Nature makes,' the general knot and fellow- ship of mankind, and thus secretly undermines the trust of man in man which makes any true brother- hood of humanity possible. To Dante's mind no foulness of imagery was too horrible or loathsome to picture forth such a sin; its only adequate pre- sentment was the Guardian-spirit of this lower Hell : a foul blend of the human, the brute, and the dia- bolic — the face of a just man, the paws of a beast, and the tail of a serpent tipped with a scorpion's sting. CHAPTER XXVI CIBCLE IX. — THE LAKE OP COCYTUS : TBAITOBS /. Cdina : Traitors to their Kindred CANTOS XXXI.- XXXII. 69 Cooytus— General Flan. As we are now about to enter the Ninth and last Circle, the prison of Traitors, it may be well to re- mind ourselves of the general plan and structure of this nether Hell. We saw that the three lowest Circles are, so to speak, the underground dungeons of the City of Dis. From the centre of the City a broken precipice leads down to the Circle of Violence ; and thence a vast chasm falls to Malebolge, that of Fraud. We have just seen that this Circle consists of ten concentric Moats, all sloping centreward like the tiers of a vast amphitheatre. The centre itself — or, holding by the figure of the amphitheatre, the arena — is a flat plain, thought by some to be about three-quarters of a mile in breadth. In the middle is sunk an enormous well, — one vast final swamp into which drain all the infernal rivers, Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon, which then form the great frozen lake, or rather cesspool, of Cocytus. It is toward this ' bottom of all guilt ' that the travellers are now about to make their way. Turning their backs on the last and lowest dyke of Malebolge, they 420 THE GIANTS 421 strike straight across the plain in silence, Dante CANTOS still feeling the shame of Virgil's rebuke. They had xxxil. 69 not gone far when the blast of a horn, so loud it ^ ~ — : " the Ciants : made any thunder faint, startled Dante and caused HUnrod and him to strain his eyes in the direction from which it seemed to come. Through the dim air, ' less than night and less than day,' he soon saw what he took to be the towers of a town, like those which ring round the castle of Montereggioni near Siena. Virgil, however, corrects the error into which the distance and darkness betrayed him : the ' towers ' are a range of Giants standing half-sunk in the great well of the next Circle, and what he sees is the upper half of their bodies.* The blast of the horn, louder than that blown by Orlando at Boncesvalles, came from Nimrod, the 'mighty hunter before the Lord,' whom Dante, pro- bably on St. Augustine's authority, regards as one of the giants of Scriptural tradition. His face was as large and long as ' the pine-cone of St. Peter's,' a huge bronze cone which originally formed the apex of the Mausoleum of Hadrian or Castle of St. Angelo, but now in the gardens of the Vatican. Toynbee gives its height as seven and a half feet. The part of Nimrod's body visible above the edge of the well was so huge that three Frieslanders, says Dante, could not have reached up to his hair, that is, to his neck. From these data, his height has been variously calcu- lated from fifty-five to seventy feet. As he looks at him, Dante is thankful that Nature has abandoned the creation of such ' executors ' of Mars : although > Inf. xxsi. 7-45. 422 THE LAKE OF COCYTUS CANTOS she continues to produce gigantic animals like ele- XXXII. 69 phants and whales, she has rendered them compara- tively harmless by withholding the gift of intellect. Hlmrod's Cry. When Nimrod caught sight of the pilgrims, he greeted them with a clamorous cry : ' Bafel mai amech zabi almi,' of which many interpretations have been attempted. None, however, ought to be sought for, since Dante plainly intends it as the sign of the confusion of tongues which Nimrod was believed to have created at Babel. It is in allusion to the building of this Tower that Dante compares the Giants to the towers which rival families and clans had built in every city of Italy ; he saw in these towers the same spirit of pride which produced the Tower of Babel and all the subsequent confusion. It is for this reason too that Virgil calls Nimrod ' confused soul,' and bids him vent his inarticulate passion through his horn. As he says to Dante : ' Himself he doth accuse ; This one is Nimrod, by whose evil thought One language in the world is not still used. Let us leave him standing, and not speak in vain : For even such to him is every language As his to others, which to none is known. ' ^ This question of language had a peculiar interest for Dante, and led to some curious speculations. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (i. 6, 7) he says that the original language was Hebrew, and that this language was preserved by the Shemites only because they » Inf. xixi. 46-81. THE GIANTS 423 took no part in the building of the Tower of Babel. CANTOS XXXI When God sent confusion of tongues on the impious xxxn. 69 builders, ' the same language remained to those alone — who were engaged in the same kind of work: for instance, one (language) to all the architects ; another to those rolling down blocks of stone, another to those preparing the stone ; and so it happened to each group of workers. And the human race was accordingly divided into as many different languages as there were different branches of the work ; and the higher the branch of work the men were engaged in, the ruder and more barbarous was the language they afterwards spoke.' The original tongue remained with the Shemites ' in order that our Redeemer (who was, as to His humanity, to spring from them) might use, not the language of confusion, but of grace.' This opinion, however, Dante retracted in Par. xxvi. 124, where Adam tells him that the language he spoke was ' all quenched ' long before the Tower of Babel was begun. Turning to the left, they found, a bowshot off, Bphiaites. Bphialtes, one of the Giants of heathen mythology, who piled Ossa on Olympus, and Pelion on Ossa, to scale heaven and dethrone Jove. The arms with which once he ' terrified the gods ' are now bound with chains, the right behind his back, the left in front; yet all manacled as he was, when he shook himself as an earthquake shakes a tower, Dante would have died for fear had he not seen his chains. He was anxious to see Briareus of the hundred Briarem. hands ; but Virgil replies that he is too far off, and that he is bound like Ephialtes, only more ferocious 0» Antans. 424 THE LAKE OF COCYTUS CANTOS in his aspect. Meantime it was necessary to hasten XXXI - XXXII. 69 ^° AntsBus. This Giant had taken no part in the war against the gods, and was therefore left un- bound. He was the least ferocious of the Giants, as Chiron was of the Centaurs, and Virgil hoped to persuade him to lift them down from the plain to the ice of Cocytus far below. He did not scruple to flatter his pride by recalling his prowess in slaying a thousand lions in the valley of the Bagrada, where Scipio Africanus won glory by his great victory over Hannibal, and by suggesting that the war with the gods would have gone differently had he joined in it. Even under this praise, Antseus ' curled his lip ' in scorn, and only gave way when Virgil promised that Dante would ' restore his fame ' in the upper world. The 'hands whose great grasp Hercules once felt' laid hold of Virgil; Virgil in turn laid hold of Dante, making of the two 'one bundle'; and then the giant form, stooping as Carisenda, the leaning tower of Bologna, seems to stoop when a light cloud passes over it, set them on the ice far beneath his feet, and rose again like 'the mast of some great ammiral.'^ TheOianta— The Giants are set here as Guardians of this j^g° * ' bottom of all guilt,' for two reasons. First, they are symbols of that pride which cannot brook the sovereignty of God. It is the Circle of Traitors, the infernal palace, so to speak, of Lucifer, ' the Emperor of the dolorous realm,' who sits on his throne of pain far within, while they guard the doors. ' In the same way as the heavenly choirs of angels surround ' Inf. xxxi. 82-145. THE GIANTS 425 the throne of God, so here the giants close in round CANTOS • XXXI — their chief, Lucifer, as though they were his hody- xxxil. 69 guard.' As he sought to overthrow God in Heaven, so had they fought against Him from the earth ; and in him and them alike, the source and fountain of their treachery was pride. This is plain from the next division of the poem. When Dante reaches the First Terrace of Purgatory on which the sin of Pride is expiated, he finds carved upon its marble pave- ment examples of this sin, and among them Lucifer like lightning falling from Heaven, Briareus trans- fixed with the thunderbolt, the limbs of the Giants scattered on the earth, and Nimrod at the foot of his Tower gazing bewildered at ' the people who were proud with him in Shinar.' ^ The second reason for their being set here is undoubtedly to indicate the enormity of the sin of this ' lowest pool of the universe.' ' Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which "is forgotten that love which Nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added, giving birth to special trust " {Inf. xi. 61-63) ; hence the guardians of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape.' * Another symbol of the greatness of the sin is the Depth of the depth of this well of Oocytus. Just as Geryon had cooytus. to bear the travellers down the great precipice between Violence and Fraud, so Antaeus has to lift them far down to the still lower deep that exists in 1 Purg. xii. 25-36. Pride is not elsewhere referred to in the Inferno. It is the lowest sin in Hell ; in the Purgatorio it is also lowest — till Pride is conquered on the First Terrace, no other sin can be purged out of human nature. ''' Edmund G. Gardner's Dante, p. W. 426 THE LAKE OF COCYTUS CANTOS XXXI.- XXXII. 69 Symbol of the Icb. The Four Risgrs of Cocytus. I. Calna, Traitors to Kindred. Fraud itself. The most significant symbol of all, however, is that Cocytus is a lake of ice, frozen by the flapping of the six bat-like wings of Lucifer who is embedded at the centre. Never, says Dante, did Don or Danube in winter cover itself with so thick a veil ; if mountains had fallen upon it, ' even at the edge 'twould not have given a creak,' The symbolism of this ice has already been pointed out. The river Phlegethon, which flows down through the Circles of Violence and Fraud, consists of hot blood: evil as those sins are, they have the excuse of being committed in some heat of passion. But for Treachery no such excuse exists; it is a sin of cold blood, possible only when all warm and generous feeling has been frozen out of the human heart. Before we start to cross the frozen Lake, it may be well to have its divisions clearly before our minds. The ice apparently slopes downward to the centre, and the souls of Traitors are sunk in it to different depths, or frozen in different attitudes, according to the kind of Treachery of which they have been guilty. Four qualities are distinguished, and these divide the Circle into four concentric Rings which shade into one another without any outward and visible line of demarcation. I. The outermost Eing is named Ca'ina after Cain, who slew his brother, and here Traitors to Kindred receive their deserts. There is, however, some un- certainty as to the exact mode of their punishment. Dante's own statement is that they were 'livid as far as where shame appears,' which some take to TRAITORS 427 mean from a little below the waist. If this meaning CANTOS XXXI - could be maintained, it would certainly show more xxxil. 69 clearly the gradation of guilt by the different depths to which the souls are sunk, which undoubtedly seems to be Dante's idea. Nevertheless there are two things which shut us up to the interpretation that the face is meant, or rather the neck, where the blush of shame first appears. The first is that Dante compares the souls here to frogs with their ' muzzles ' out of the water; and the second that one of the wretches begs him to be careful not to trample on their heads, plainly implying that only their heads are out. Their teeth chatter with the cold, their heads hang downwards, and the tears reveal the misery of the heart within. II. Antenora, the name of the second Bing, isn. Antenora, taken from Antenor, the Trojan who was believed country. in the Middle Ages to have betrayed his native city to the Greeks. This belief, which has no ground in Homer or Virgil, seems to have sprung from the fact that Antenor counselled his countrymen to avoid war by the restoration of Helen. The souls here are Traitors to their Country, and their punishment is immersion in the ice up to the neck. Some writers think they are a little lower than the preceding class, part of their heads being frozen in. They too have their heads bent downward. Being nearer the centre of the Lake, their treachery is regarded as more heinous. III. The third Ring, Tolomea, receives its namem. Toiomea, from Ptolomeus, Captain of the city of Jericho, of^*^*^^^^ whom we are told in 1 Maccabees xvi. 11-17, that he OiMti. 428 THE LAKE OF COCYTUS CANTOS invited Simon the Maccabee and his two sons, Matta- XXXI — • XXXII. 69 thias and Judas, to a friendly feast, and had them treacherously slain. It is therefore the prison-house of Traitors to Friends and Guests. Like the souls in the two previous Rings, they are sunk up to the neck in ice, but with this difference, that, whereas the former have their faces bent downwards, these have theirs turned up, in such fashion that their tears lie in the hollows of the eyes, freeze into a mask of ice, and thus close all outlet for their grief. More terrible still, this Ring has oftentimes the grim ' privilege ' of receiving the soula of such traitors before their bodies die, IV. Giudeeca, IV. The central Ring, the very heart of Hell, takes Lords and its name, Giudeeca, from Judas, the betrayer of Benefactors. Qi^rigt. It is, therefore, the 'place' of Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors, who are completely embedded in the ice, 'like straws in glass.' The only exceptions are the four arch-traitors, three human and one angelic, for whom is reserved a still more dreadful doom. In the exact centre of the Circle and of the earth rises, from the waist up, Lucifer, traitor to his Lord and Benefactor, God. In his central mouth — for he has three — he devours eternally Judas Iscariot, traitor to his Lord and Benefactor, Christ. In the two side mouths writhe Brutus and Oassius, traitors to their Lord and Bene- factor, Caesar. In other words, this central group consists of Traitors to God in Heaven and to his representatives on earth, Christ and Caesar, Church and State. Now, the order of these Rings indicates the deep- TRAITORS 429 ening guilt of the four kinds of Treachery, and the CANTOS • • XXXI — principle of classification is interesting. We are xxxil. 69 somewhat surprised, for example, to find treachery p^.S~7~ , to one's own kin — say fratricide like Cain's — regarded ciaBBiflcation. as a less heinous sin than treason to one's country. Is not the bond of flesh and blood closer and more sacred than that even of native land ? Nevertheless the universal instinct proves that Dante is right. Whenever a country is in danger, it calls its citizens to sacrifice, if need be, every tie of home and kindred for her defence, saying in effect : ' He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me ; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.' Instinctively we feel that to sacrifice family for country is noble, and to sacri- fice country for family is a base treachery to the higher claim. But if country is thus greater than ^ kindred, is it not still greater than friendship? — yet traitors to friends are set in the third Ring, as if worthy of a darker doom. The reason seems to lie in a principle laid down as far back as Canto xi. 52- 66, namely, that both kin and country are bonds created for us by Nature, independently of our choice ; whereas just this is the mark of friendship, ^hat it is a bond of our own creation. By the very act of choosing a friend, we create ' a special faith,' as Dante says ; and he regards treason to a faith which we ourselves have called into existence as a more heinous sin than treachery to a mere involun- tary bond of Nature. It is somewhat perplexing to find, however, that the lowest place of all, the central heart of Hell, is reserved for treachery to Lords and 430 I. CAINA CANTOS Benefactors : this surely is not so sacred a bond as XXXI — XXXII. 69 those of family, country, and friendship ? Probably the reason is that friendship is usually a bond be- tween equals; whereas when one who is rightful Lord stoops to his inferior and loads him with his favours, there is an element of grace in his con- descension which, in Dante's view, gives to treachery its blackest baseness. Such a Lord and Benefactor was God to Lucifer, Christ to Judas, and Caesar to Brutus and Cassius ; and Dante believed that human wickedness could go no further than to betray such a union of authority and grace. First Ring— When Antaeus set the travellers down on the ice. Traitors to Dante stood looking up at the great wall of enclosing ^^ rock, until a voice startled him : 'Look how thou passest; Take heed that thou tread not with thy soles On the heads of the wretched weary brothers.' Turning his eyes to the ice, he saw the souls of Traitors to their Kindred, ' livid up to where shame appears,' and 'setting their teeth unto the note of storks.' This reference to storks is not likely to be accidental. The stork was regarded in the Middle Ages as symbolic of family affection and piety, and all that these Traitors to their Kindred have left of likeness to the stork is this chattering of their teeth like the rattling of his bill. Every face was bent downwards, and the heart's anguish flowed forth in tears. Almost at his feet Dante saw ' the wretched Aiessandroand ^eary brothers,' one of whom had begged him not degii Aiberti. to step on them, From a neighbouring traitor he TRAITORS TO KINDRED 431 learns that they are Napoleone and Alessandro, sons OANTOS XXXI of Alberto degli Alberti, Count of Mangona, who xxxn.'M quarrelled and slew each other in a dispute con- cerning their inheritance, part of which lay in the valley of the Bisenzio near Florence. They are, as it were, locked in the same death-struggle in which they took each other's lives, pressed breast to breast, and their heads so close that their hair is mingled together. On Dante's asking who they are, they lift their bent faces to look at him, and a gush of sudden tears blinds their eyes. Perhaps the sight of one free of the ice roused the bitter sense of all they might have been; and then the icy wind of that region of hate froze their tears together, the old blood-feud broke out afresh, and in blind rage they butted each other with their heads ' like two he-goats.'^ So absorbed were they in their blind hatred and camlclone de fury, that they gave no answer to Dante's question ; but a traitor close by is only too glad to tell who they are. This soul had lost both ears through the cold, perhaps because his ears had been cropped for his misdeeds on earth, or to indicate, as Plumptre says, that ' those who yield to hatred lose the power of listening to the voice of reason or conscience.' The power of listening to evil, however, remains un- impaired, for this traitor overflows with a malicious delight in telling the worst he has ever heard of others. Of the two brothers he assures Dante that he may search Cama through without finding another soul worthier to be 'fixed in the jelly,' as • Inf. xxxii. 19-60. 432 I. CAlNA CANTOS XXXI.- XXXII. 69 he jocosely calk the ice: not Mordred, who slew his father King Arthur and was slain by him; not Focaccia, whose murder of a kinsman is said to have created the Black and White factions in Pistoja; not Sassol Mascheroni, the Florentine, his too near neighbour in the ice, who was rolled through the streets in a cask studded with nails and after- wards beheaded, for the treacherous murder of his brother's only son, whose inheritance he wished to secure. This malicious soul, so ready to say the worst he can of the miserable brothers and the rest, is eager to screen himself behind the greater guilt of another, and he a kinsman of his own. In mock politeness, to save Dante the trouble of asking, he volunteers his own name : Carllno de' Fasxi. ' Know that I was Camicion de' Pazzi, And am waiting for Carlino to excuse me.' This Camicione had treacherously slain a kins- man; but he rejoices that the darker deed which Carlino, a member of his own house of the Pazzi, should yet commit, would make his own crime seem light in comparison. This darker deed was treason to his country. In 1302 this Carlino de' Pazzi held on behalf of the Whites the castle of Piano di Trevigne in the Valdarno, and betrayed it to the Blacks for a bribe. This treachery being still in the future, Dante takes this way of assigning him his place in Antenora by anticipation. The joy of Camicione in his darker doom is meant to show how completely the natural feelings of kinship can be corrupted. The rich man in the parable had grace enough TRAITORS TO KINDRED 433 left to wish to save his brethren from coming into CANTOS his place of torment; but this unnatural soul xxxil.69 welcomes the deeper damnation of his kinsman —" because by comparison it makes his own sin appear trivial and pardonable.^ Inf. xxxll. 67-72. 2e CHAPTER XXVII CIRCLE rx.— THE LAKE OP COCYTUS : TRAITORS //. Antenora : Traitors to their Country CANTOS At this point Dante passes on into the Ring of XXXIli. 90 Antenora, in which Traitors to their Country are Second Ring— frozen up to the neck in ice, probably a little deeper Antenora: than the souls in the Caina. And here he comes Traitors to Country. upon a group composed for the most part of men infamous throughout Italy for their treachery in the terrible feuds of Guelphs and Ghibellines. He had scarcely entered it when — by 'will, or destiny, or chance,' he knew not which — his foot struck violently against the face of one of the wretches, who not un- naturally broke out into angry remonstrances : Weeping he growled : ' Why dost thou trample me ? Unless thou comest to increase the vengeance For Montaperti, why dost thou molest me ? ' The reference to Montaperti, the disastrous battle in which the Florentine Guelphs were defeated in 1260, at once arrests Dante's attention, and he begs Virgil to give him time to clear up a doubt. We saw in the City of Dis how Farinata, the leader of the victorious Ghibellines, reminded Dante that his Guelph forefathers had that day been on the losing Boeea degli AbatL TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 435 side. It is obvious that from the first he suspects CANTOS who this soul is. While the battle was in progress, xxxni. 90 this Bocca degli Abati rode up behind Jacopo de' Pazzi, the Guelph standard-bearer, and struck off with his sword the hand which held the banner of his party ; and when the Guelphs saw their standard fall, they broke and fled. Although Dante had aban- doned the party to which his ancestors belonged, so base an act of treachery against it stirred him into a passion of indignation. Suspecting who he was, he offers him — ironically perhaps — fame on earth, if he will disclose his name. The traitor, like all the rest in this Circle, knowing only too well that fame on earth meant infamy, of which he had enough already, orders Dante away — he wants to be pes- tered no more. Whereupon follows one of the strangest incidents in Hell : Dante falls upon him Dante's almost literally tooth and nail, seizes him ' by the scalp behind,' and threatens savagely that he will not leave a hair on his head if he do not straight- way yield up his name. Already, indeed, he has torn out several handfuls, when a soul close by, annoyed by the 'barking' of the tortured wretch, cries out, ' What ails thee, Bocca ? Is it not enough to clatter with thy jaws, But thou must bark? what devil touches thee?' Dante has now got his name in spite of him, and tells the ' accursed traitor ' that he will shame him on earth with the news of where he found him. In justice, however, to Bocca, it must be remembered 436 II. ANTENORA CANTOS that he did not belong to the Guelph party, nor was XXXlli. 90 ^^ ** *^^^ battle altogether with his will. Being a Ghibelline, the Guelphs were afraid to leave him and other members of his party behind in Florence, lest they should take advantage of their absence to foment discords. They therefore compelled them to go with them to the war against Siena. Naturally their sympathies were with the other side, among whom were many of their own party who had been banished from Florence. When Bocca struck off the hand of the Guelph standard-bearer, and with his Ghibelline friends rode over to the enemy, doubt- less there was treachery in the act, but it was not treachery to his own party. We might even ask whether the real treachery would not have been to remain on the Guelph side and fight against the Ghibelline party to which he belonged. Perhaps it was just some such doubt as this that Dante asked Virgil to give him time to solve.^ Enraged at being identified, Bocca takes his re- venge by naming the traitors in his neighbourhood, beginning with him who had revealed his secret. To Dante, ' Begone,' he answered, ' and tell what thou wilt ; But be not silent, if thou issue hence, Of him who had just now his tongue so prompt. He weepeth here the silver of the French. " I saw," thus canst thou tell, " him of Duera, There where the sinners stand out in the cold." ' Buoso da The reference is to Buoso da Duera, a Ghibelline of Duera. Cremona, who in 1265 betrayed the Ghibellines as • Inf. xxxli. 73-111. See Napier's Florentine History, Bk. r. chap. x. TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 437 Bocca was believed to have betrayed the Ouelphs. CANTOS Charles of Anjou having been invited by the Pope xxxili. 90 to wrest the kingdom of Naples from Manfred, son " — of Frederick ii., sent an army into Italy from the North under Count Guy de Montfort. Manfred ordered the Ghibellines of Lombardy to oppose its passage, nevertheless it reached the city of Parma without striking a blow. This was attributed to the treachery of this Buoso da Duera, one of the leaders of the Ghibelline forces. ' It is said,' writes Villani, ■ that one Master Buoso, of the house of da Duera, of Cremona, for money which he received from the French, gave counsel in such wise that the host of Manfred was not there to contest the pass, as had been arranged, wherefor the people of Cremona afterwards destroyed the said family of the Duera in fury.'^ Dante, who saw in the intervention of France the ruin of his country, must have regarded this act of treachery with peculiar detestation ; and he may be pardoned if it added a touch of personal bitterness to his hatred to remember that the ruin of his own fortunes began with the interference in Florentine politics of another French prince, Charles of Valois, whose only weapon was 'the lance with which Judas jousted.'^ Bocca names four other traitors in his immediate Four otber . , , , , Traitoii. neighbourhood : ' If thou shouldst questioned be who else was there, Thou hast beside thee him of Beccheria, Whose gorget Florence slit asunder. ' Villwni, vii. 4; Inf. xxxii. 112-117. ' Purg. xx. 70-78. 438 II. ANTENORA CANTOS Gianni de' Soldanier, I think, may be XXXII. 70- Yonder with Ganellon and Tribaldello, ' Who opened Paenza while it was asleep.' ' The first named of the four was Tesauro, Abbot of Vallombrosa, of the noble house of Beccheria in Pavia. He was put to death by the Florentines on the charge of intriguing with the exiled Ghibellines. Villani evidently believed the charge to be false: 'this (the treason) by torture they made him con- fess, and wickedly in the piazza of Santo ApoUinare by the outcry of the people they beheaded him, not regarding his dignity nor his holy orders; for the which thing the commonwealth of Florence and the Florentines were excommunicated by the Pope.' Gianni de' Soldanieri is set here because, although a Ghibelline, he deserted his party and beaded the Guelph commons in their revolt against the nobles after the defeat and death of Manfred at Benevento. Villani says his motive was to 'rise in estate'; yet, strangely enough, he names him elsewhere, with Dante and others, as a man whom Florence had treated with great ingratitude.^ Ganelon is a traitor of romance rather than of history. By his treacher- ous advice, Charlemagne disregarded the blast of Orlando's horn eight miles away, and left his rear- guard to destruction at Roncesvalles. Tribaldello or Tebaldello was so infamous a traitor that songs were written and sung about him throughout Bomagna. To gratify a private grudge against a Ghibelline family of Faenza, he opened the gates of that city to their Guelph enemies during the night, and thus 1 Inf. xxxii. 118-123. 2 Villani, vj. 65 ; vii. 14 ; xli. 44. TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 439 brought about a horrible massacre of his fellow- CANTOS ... XXXII. 70- citizens. xxxm. 90 Turning now to the moral significance, in addition p„„ig^5nent ^ to the torment of the ice no small part of the punish- ment of the souls in this region is their desire to remain unknown, unrecognized. To Dante's mind, Longing; for the love of fame was a natural, healthy, and honour- able desire, if duly and wisely gratified. According to Aristotle, his great ethical authority, one of the virtues is ' Magnanimity, which is a moderator and acquirer of great honours and fame.' ^ All through the Inferno he assumes that the desire for fame exists even in the lost, and time after time offers to bear back some record of their names to the upper air. As he descends to the lower Circles, however, he finds an increasing desire for oblivion. The first sign of this desire is when the pander, Yenedico Caccianimico, lowers his head in hope to escape re- cognition. Yanni Fucci, the thief, is ashamed that Dante has caught him in hia misery, Guido of Montefeltro, who gave the evil counsel, tells Dante that he would not speak a word of himself if he thought he would escape from Hell and carry the story of his sin back to earth. But it is in this Circle of Cocytus that this desire for oblivion is strongest. Not one has the healthy human wish to be remembered. They seem to be at last conscious of the baseness of their sin ; the scorn of their fellows weighs them down, and their one relief would be to be forgotten. Obviously this is at once part of their punishment and proof of the vileness of their crime; ' Conv. iv. 17. 440 II. ANTENORA CANTOS dreadful indeed, in Dante's view, must be the sin XXXII "0— XXXlli/go which freezes in men's hearts the natural and honourable desire to be known and remembered. In the Ante-Hell above, the punishment of the Neutrals is that they are forgotten — 'no fame of them the world permits to be'; here at the other extreme of Hell, the punishment of Traitors is that they are not forgotten, the world holds their memory in an immortal hatred and contempt. Dante's Dante's own conduct here is not easy to under- oo BocM***'"'* stand. It certainly seems far from dignified, to say the least, to fall upon a wretch who cannot defend himself, and tear out his hair by handfuls. Is the poet, we cannot help wondering, becoming infected with the spirit of the place ? Is the wind of Lucifer's wings freezing up his better feelings ? We may be sure that this was not his own view of his conduct. From the moment Montaperti was named, he sus- pected that the 'accursed traitor' was before him through whom the battle was lost and Florence almost destroyed ; and Dante invented the incident for the express purpose of showing his determina- tion to tear the mask from a traitor, and hold up his treachery to the everlasting hatred and scorn which ^ ' it so richly deserved. Nevertheless, I cannot think that he means to set his conduct here in an alto- gether favourable light. There are one or two things which seem to hint that, while his indignation against traitors to their country was right and even noble, he was not unconscious of something un- worthy in the excessive passion and fury into which it carried him away. In the next Canto we shall TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 441 find a similar unworthiness in his treatment of Frate CANTOS XXXII 70*" Alberigo, a traitor to his guests. We must remember xxxili. 90 that Dante's aim in the Commedia is not simply to reveal the sins of others, but also to confess his own. He may have known only too well that his very hatred of certain sins betrayed him into unworthy ways of showing his abhorrence of them. At all events, there is one point of great significance which is usually overlooked, namely, Virgil's attitude to this violent attack on Bocca. As we have again and again seen, Virgil is Reason personified, and as such time after time expresses his approval or dis- approval of Dante's conduct. When he flung Filippo Argenti back into the mire of Styx, Virgil embraced him warmly for his indignation. On the other hand, on several occasions he rebuked him sharply — for instance, for weeping with pity for the doom of the Diviners, and for listening to a vulgar brawl between a liar and a forger. It cannot therefore be without meaning that Virgil now stands silent, neither approving nor condemning. Dante seems to have felt that his furious outburst of indignation, if not worthy of blame, was at least no matter for praise. Just near the point where Antenora passes into count Tolomea, Dante comes upon the most horrible scene amS^i,^* in all Hell: Euegieriof Pisa. I saw two frozen in one hole, So that the one head to the other was a cap ; And even as bread for hunger is devoured. So the uppermost his teeth into the other set There where the brain is joined unto the nape, Dante asks the one uppermost why he devours the other in such bestial fashion, promising to 'repay 442 II. ANTENORA CANTOS him in the world above' — that is, by recording his XXXIli. 90 story — provided his hatred be found to be just. Whereupon the cannibal soul lifted his mouth, wiping it upon the hair Of the head that he behind had wasted, and began his story. The very memory of it wrung his heart with grief, but he was willing to 'speak and weep together ' if his words would ' bear fruit of infamy ' to the traitor whom he gnawed. Count His name was Count Ugolino della Gherardesca of Treacbery. Pisa, whose fate had sent a thrill of horror through all Tuscany; and he whom he devoured was the man who consigned him to that fate, Buggieri degli Ubaldini, Archbishop of that city. In 1284, in the great naval battle of Meloria, the Genoese crushed Pisa as a maritime power, and Count Ugolino, one of the three Pisan admirals, was regarded as a princi- pal cause of the disaster by having withdrawn from the engagement at a critical moment, — his enemies said in treachery. Whether this charge is true or false, there is no doubt whatever that he took advantage of the misfortunes of his country to establish his own power. Pisa never fully recovered from this defeat. Many of her galleys were cap- tured or sunk; five thousand of her citizens were slain; and the prisoners are variously estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand. It became a pro- verb that he who wished to see Pisa must go to Genoa. Soon after the disaster, the neighbouring cities of Florence and Lucca entered into a league with Genoa for the complete destruction of the unfortunate republic. In its distress and to escape TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 443 annihilation, it made Count Ugolino podest^, in CANTOS XXXII 70— apite of the suspicion of his treachery at Meloria, xxxni. 90 regarding him as the only man who could meet the crisis. And this not because of his virtues ; rather because of his very ambition and unscrupulousness. As the head of the Guelph party in Pisa, he was the most likely man to treat successfully with the Guelph city of Florence. His first step was to detach Florence from the anti-Pisan league by yielding to her certain castles, and by banishing the Ghibellines from the city. Lucca was next bought ofP by a similar cession of the castles on Monte di S. Giuliano, < the mountain for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca.' Doubtless all this was necessary to save the republic from destruc- tion ; nevertheless it equally served the schemes of his ambition. To consolidate his power and keep away the Ghibellines taken prisoner at Meloria, he threw every obstacle in the way of their release by ransom, and most of them died in captivity. All this roused a bitter feeling against him in Pisa, which saw its castles lost, its citizens banished or left to perish in imprisonment, and its liberties outraged. His grandson, Nino Visconti, having tried to curb his ambition, was treacherously banished f ronx the city ; and the Count betrayed the Guelph party by enter- ing into an alliance with the Ghibellines. The head of this party was the Archbishop Ruggieri, who was playing the same game of ambition as the Count, but with greater cunning. Having expelled the Guelphs, the Archbishop turned upon Ugolino, 'giving the people to understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and given up their fortresses to the Florentines and 444 II. ANTENORA CANTOS the Lucchese.' His palace was stormed and himself XXXni. 90 with two sons and two grandsons cast into prison. After eight months of captivity (July 1288 to March 'The Tower of 1289), the Archbishop nailed up the door of their prison, cast the keys into the Arno, and deliberately starved them to death. ' And albeit,' writes Villani, ' the said Count demanded with cries to be shriven, yet did they not grant him a friar or priest to confess him.' ' Thus,' says the same author, ' was the traitor betrayed by the traitor.'^ The tower in which they died belonged to the Gualandi family, mentioned in this passage. It is now destroyed, but its site i& pointed out in the Piazza dei Cavalieri. It was originally known as the Tower of the Seven Ways, but in consequence of this tragedy it was ever after called the Tower of Hunger. The story as told by Dante is another, and perhaps the most striking, example of his love of constructing an imaginative ending of a human life. What happened inside the tower after the door was nailed up, could, of course, be known to none ; but the poet's fierce and terrible imagination penetrates the secret of those last days and nights of despair and madness. The members of his family who perished with the Count were his ugoUno's Sons two youngest sons, Gaddo and Uguccione, and his two grandsons, Nino, called ' II Brigata,' and Anselm- uccio, ' darling little Anselm.' * In the dark March » Villani, vii. 121, 128. ' Chaucer in his Menkes Tale heightens the pathos by making the children mere infants : ' And with him ben Ms litel children three, The eldest scarsely flTe yere was of age : Alas ! fortune, it was gret crueltee Swiche briddes for to put in swiche a cage.' In reality, Anselm, the youngest, was about fifteen. and Grand' sons. TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 445 morning before the dawn, Ugolino tells that he CANTOS awoke oppressed with a dream which warned him xxxill. 90 of their coming fate. His sons had similar premoni- tions, for he heard them weeping in their sleep and asking for bread. In his dream he saw the Arch- bishop hunting with sleuth-hounds a wolf and his cubs upon the mountain between Fisa and Lucca. The wolf and cubs were Ugolino himself and his sons — perhaps, as some think, with a reference to the meaning of Guelph, wolf. The sleuth-hounds were the three Ghibelline houses, the Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanf ranchi ; and perhaps in calling them ' gaunt, eager, and well-trained,' Dante refers to the starva- tion by which their victims were to be done to death. The chase was a short one — he saw the flanks of the wolves torn by their sharp teeth. The passage, how- ever, must be quoted in full : Savage Landor declares that the thirty lines from xxxiii. 46 are 'unequalled by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions of poetry' — though, indeed, he also says that the features of Ugolino are 'reflected full in Dante, — hard, cruel, inflexible, malignant ' : ' Thou wilt that I renew Ugolino'e A desperate grief, which wrings my heart already HarratiTe. To think of only, ere I speak of it ; But if my words be seed that may bear fruit Of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw. Speaking and weeping thou shalt see together. I know not who thou art, nor by what mode Thou hast come down here ; but a Florentine Thou seemest to me truly when I hear thee. Thou hast to know I was Count Ugolino, And this one is the Archbishop Buggieri ; 446 11. ANTENORA CANTOS XXXII. 70- XXXIII. 90 BiB Dream. The naillas up of the door of the Tower. Now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour. That, by effect of his malicious thoughts, Trusting in him I was made prisoner. And after put to death, I need not say ; But that which thou canst not have heard, That is to say, how cruel was my death. Thou shalt hear, and know if he has wronged me. A narrow opening within the mew. Which has because of me the title of Famine, And in which others still must be shut up, Had shown me through its crevice many moons Already, when I dreamed the evil dream Which of the future rent for me the veil. This one appeared to me as lord and master, Hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain For which the Fisans cannot Lucca see. Along with hounds, gaunt, and keen, and trained, Gualandi with Sismondi and Lanfranchi He had sent out before him to the front. After brief course seemed to me forespent The father and the sons, and with the sharp teeth Meseemed I saw their flanks ripped open. When I before the morrow was awake. Moaning within their sleep I heard my sons. Who were with me, and asking after bread. Right cruel art thou, if already thou grieve not. Thinking of what my heart foreboded me ; And if thou weep not, what art thou wont to weep at f They were awake now, and the hour drew nigh At which our food used to be brought to us, And through his dream each one had some misgiving ; And I heard nailed up the door below Of the horrible tower ; whereat without a word I gazed into the faces of my sons. I wept not, I within so turned to stone ; They wept; and darling little Anselm mine Said : " Thou gazest so, father, what doth ail thee ? " But not a tear I shed, nor answer made All that day, nor yet the night thereafter, TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 447 Until another sun rose on the world. CANTOS As now a little glimmer made its way XXXIII 90 Into the dolorous prison, and I discerned In their four faces the aspect of my own. Both of my hands I bit for anguish. And they, thinking I did it from desire Of eating, of a sudden raised themselves, And said : " Father, much less pain 'twill give us. If thou wilt eat of us : thou didst clothe us with This miserable flesh, and do thou strip it off." I calmed me then, not to make them more sad. That day and the next we all were silent. Ah, obdurate earth 1 why didst thou not open ? When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo Threw himself dowi- outstretched before my feet Saying : " My father, why dost thou not help me ? " There he died ; and even as thou seest me, Saw I the three fall, one by one, between The fifth day and the sixth : whence I betook me. Already blind, to groping over each. And two days called them after they were dead ; Then fasting had more power than grief. '^ This last line is so ambiguous that it has become a Meaning of battlefield of eommentators. It certainly may m.ean "^®' nothing more than that Ugolino died of hunger, not of grief ; nevertheless the idea is not to be dismissed too lightly that the delirium of starvation overcame the father's anguish, and that he died devouring the dead bodies of his own children. If this is Dante's meaning, it would give a peculiar and horrible appro- priateness to the savage cannibalism in which he found the Count absorbed: he now devours to all eternity the man whose inhuman cruelty made him BO far forget his fatherhood as to devour his own flesh Inf. xxxii. 124-xxxiii. 78. 448 IT. ANTENORA CANTOS and blood. It would show us also that to Ueolino XXXII 70- • XXXlli. 90 liimself the worst torture of Hell was not the ice, but the haunting intolerable memory, never to be shaken oflP, of the unnatural crime to which famine drove him. Obviously Dante means to represent him as a man who, in spite of his sins against his country, was deeply and tenderly attached to his own off- spring. We can see the stony anguish of his face as he watches his children die round him of starvation. In the grey morning of the second day he bites his hands in agony, and then calms himself 'not to make them more sad.' The cry of ' my darling little Anselm' sounds in his ears yet. His sons are so tenderly attached to him, that they offer him their flesh to eat. To such a man the memory of so un- natural a crime would be unbearable; and his one relief would be to exercise this inhuman and brutish appetite upon the wretch who had created it. The moment his story is ended, he turns to his 'fierce repast ' : When he had said this, with eyes distorted He seized again the wretched skull with his teeth, Which, like a dog's, upon the bone were strong.^ Was the Count There is also considerable doubt as to the precise his conStiy? treachery of which the Count was guilty. Some writers regard it as the driving of his grandson, Nino Visconti, into exile ; but in that case he should rather be in the preceding Bing. It is plain that the Pisans ^ Against this interpretation Kev. H. F. Tozer says : ' After eight days' fasting eating flesh is an Impossibility, as a competent medical authority has definitely stated. Besides this, Buti, himself a Fisan, relates that after eight days — i.e. at the expiration of the time mentioned by Dante — the bodies were taken out dead, and be gives no hint of any of them having been mutilated.' TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 449 themselves regarded the cession of their castles to CANTOS Florence and Lucca as an act of treachery to the xxxill. 90 city, although Dante speaks doubtfully of it : If Count Ugolino had the fame Of having betrayed thee of thy castles. The truth seems to be that we are not to look for the treason in this particular act or that ; it consisted in the way in which Ugolino used the misfortunes of his country for the ends of his own ambition, and intrigued with whichever party, Guelph or Ghibel- line, promised at the moment to support his power. It is indeed questionable whether, in spite of the horror of his end, we should waste much pity on hiiQ. He was, says Napier, ' stained with the ambi- tion and darker vices of his age ; like other potent chiefs he sought to enslave his country and checked at nothing in his impetuous career : he was accused of many crimes ; of poisoning his own nephew, of failing in war, making a disgraceful peace, of flying shamefully, perhaps traitorously, at Meloria, and of obstructing all negotiations with Genoa for the return of his imprisoned countrymen. Like most others of his rank in those frenzied times he belonged more to faction than his country, and made the former subservient to his own ambition.'^ Obviously Dante regards the Archbishop as his fellow in treachery, and more than his fellow in cruelty; and it is probable that he chose the two, not because they were much worse than others of their rank, but simply because they were well-known examples of ' Florentine History, Bk. i. chap. xil. 2f 450 . II. ANTENORA CANTOS the way in which, in every city of Italy, noble and xxxTTT. 90 churchman alike betrayed country and party in the high game which they played for place and power. God's Judg- Nevertheless, it is to be noticed that the betrayed threatened city is not relieved of its own responsibility. Dante upon Pisa. turns indignantly upon Pisa, whose citizens had supported the Archbishop in his inhuman cruelty. Granted that the Count had the name of having betrayed his city in the cession of her castles, was that any reason, he asks, for destroying his innocent sons ? He calls it the ' new Thebes,'^ a city constantly referred to in the Commedia on account of the horrors of bloodshed and cruelty of which it was the scene. Since her neighbours are slow to punish this •disgrace to the people of the fair land where the "si" doth sound,'^ Dante summons Nature herself to become the minister of justice : let the islands Capraia and Gorgona opposite the mouth of the Arno, block up the river and drown every soul in the sinful city ! Nature, of course, went on her careless way, unmoved by the invocation; nevertheless there were many who saw in the misfortunes which soon befell Pisa the judgment of God upon such crimes. Villani, after relating the story of Ugolino's doom, adds: 'For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by the whole world, wherever it was known, not so 1 ' The tradition runs that Pisa was founded by Pelops, eon of King Tantalus of Thebes, although it derived its name from " the Olympic Pisa on the banks of the Alpheus " ' (Longfellow). ' That is, of course, Italy. In De Vulg. Eloq. i. 8-10, Dante after dis- tinguishing three of the Bomance languages by their a£Brmative par- ticles, oc, oil, and si, claims superiority for the last because 'the founders of grammar have taken sic as the adverb of affirmation, which seems to confer a kind of precedence on the Italians, who say «i.' TRAITORS TO COUNTRY 451 much for the Count, who for his crimes and treasons CANTOS XXXII 70— was perhaps worthy of such a death, but for his sons xxxili. 90 and grandsons, who were young lads, and innocent ; and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not go un- punished, as in due time hereafter may be found.'^ Whether in consequence of such crimes or not, it is certain that from this time forward Pisa gradually sank. Her maritime power never recovered from the disaster of Meloria, and after a long and stubborn struggle she succumbed to the superior strength of her great neighbour and rival, Florence. On such a decline and fall Dante would assuredly have looked with the eyes of the Hebrew prophets, never for a moment doubting that it was the just and inevitable judgment of God upon such inhuman crime as is narrated in this Canto. We shall see in the closing lines that Genoa, Pisa's conqueror on the sea, is similarly denounced, and this by no accident. The two great rivals may struggle as they please for supremacy, but to Dante's mind they have within the breasts of their citizens a corruption of cruelty and treachery which will at last sink both into a common decay. » Villani, vii. 128. CHAPTER XXVIII CIRCLE IX. — THE LAKE OP COCYTUS : TRAITORS ///. Tolomea : Traitors to Friends and Guests, CANTO XXXIII. 91-157 Tbird Bins— Tolomea : Traitors to Friends and Guests. We pass now to the Third Bing, close to the edge of which the Count and the Archbishop are frozen, as if they almost belonged to it. It is called Tolomea, and is the prison of Traitors to Friends and Guests, Its name, as we have seen, is probably taken from Ptolomeus, whose treachery is narrated in 1 ilfacca- bees, xvi. 11-17. It was, indeed, treachery of a double dye, the victims being at once his kindred and his guests. This Ptolomeus was at the time ' captain in the plain of Jericho,' and in the hope of gaining the country for himself he determined to clear out of his path his father-in-law, Simon the High Priest, and his two sons Mattathias and Judas. Accordingly he invited them to a great banquet, and ' when Simon and his sons had drunk largely, Ptolomee and his men rose up, and took their weapons, and came upon Simon into the banqueting place, and slew him, and his two sons, and certain of his servants. In which doing he committed a great treachery, and recom- pensed evil for good.' In Dante's judgment, the treachery to them as guests was a more heinous sin TRAITORS TO FRIENDS 453 than treachery to them as kinsmen, the reason being, CANTO xxxm as already explained, that kinship is an involuntary gi-157 ' bond of Nature, whereas in friendship and hospitality we create ' a special faith ' by our own choice and act. The punishment of these Traitors to Friends and Punlslimeiit. Guests is distinguished from that of the preceding Rings in three respects. In the first place, there is a perceptible increase of the cold. Although already The biaat his face had seemed to have lost all sensibility, Dante appears now to feel the blowing of some wind, and wonders whence it comes. Virgil tells him he will soon see with his own eyes ' the cause which raineth down the blast ' — the beating of Lucifer's great bat- like wings which freezes the whole region of Cocytus. The implication is, of course, that we have now reached a deeper degree of cold-blooded treachery, one more immediately inspired by the wind and breath of Satan: to create in a human heart 'a special trust,' such as friendship, and then betray it, is almost the blackest, most diabolic sin of which human nature is capable. The second distinguishing mark of this punish- The uask of ment is that the traitors are frozen in the ice with "'' their faces turned upward. In Caiina and Antenora, as we saw, the faces hang down ; here the attitude is reversed, and forms a most significant part of the torture. It has, indeed, been suggested that the up- turned face indicates the brazenness of this class of traitors, — so lost to shame that they lift up their faces to Heaven in scorn of concealment. Although Frate Alberigo's willingness to reveal his name and sin seems to favour this interpretation, it is not that 454 III. TOLOMEA CANTO given by Dante himself. He describes how the up- XXXIII *^ » JT 91-157 ward attitude of the face prevents the tears from escaping freely. They lie in the hollows of the eyes and freeze into a mask of ice ; and this sealing of the very fountain of tears increases the pent-up anguish within : We passed still further onward, where the ice Another people ruggedly enswathes, Not downward turned, but all of them reversed. Weeping itself there suffers them not to weep, And the grief, which finds a barrier on the eyes, Turns itself inward to increase the anguish : Because the first tears a cluster make. And, in the manner of a crystal vizor, Pill all the cup beneath the eyebrow full.' This means not merely, as Plumptre says, 'the in- duration of feeling and conscience,' but that the desire to weep out their pain lives on when the very power to weep is dead. ' One of the wretches of the frozen crust ' cries to the travellers, ' O souls, so cruel That the last post is given unto you. Lift from my face the solid veils, that I May vent the sorrow which o'erloads my heart A little, ere the weeping freeze again. '^ This loss of the gift of tears is the natural issue of so cold-blooded a sin : the very power to weep dies, leaving the heart a frozen fountain of sealed-up misery. It reminds us of Byron's cry of agony for the lost power : ■ Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down; It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own ; 1 Inf. xxxili. 91-99. 2 Inf. xxxiil. 109-114. TRAITORS TO FRIENDS 455 That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears, CANTO And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the ice XXXni. appears. . . . Oh could I feel as I have felt, — or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene ; As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be. So, midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me.' 1 But, in the third place, the peculiar 'privilege ' or The 'privi- ' vantage' of Tolomea over other parts of Hell isxinomea. that oftentimes it does not need to wait like them for the death of the body, before it takes possession of the soul. The traitor who begs Dante to remove the icy veil from his face tells him that in many cases, when a man has been guilty of this particular form of treachery, his soul goes straight to Hell, leaving its body on the earth above, to all appear- ance alive as before, but in reality inhabited by a devil who rules it till its hour comes. This was the doom of Frate Alberigo himself, who gave him this Frate AiberiKo startling and almost incredible information. He ° *""*• was a member of the family of the Manfredi of Faenza in Bomagna, and belonged to the Order of the Jovial Friars, two of whom we have met already in the Moat of the Hypocrites above. His soul was suddenly consigned to this Ring for an act of the most cold-blooded treachery. The story is that in 1284 his younger brother, Manfred, in a dispute con- cerning the lordship of Faenza, struck him in the face. Alberigo pretended to forgive the insult, and 1 Stanzas for Music. 456 III. TOLOMEA CANTO a reconciliation took place. In the following year XXXIII 91-157 1^6 invited Manfred and his little son to a banquet ; supper over, he called out ' Now for the fruit ' — a prearranged signal to his servants, who rushed from behind a screen and slew father and son on the spot. ' The fruit of Frate Alberigo ' became a proverb for treachery ; and it is probably to this he alludes when he says to Dante, ' I am he of the fruits of the evil garden, Who here a date am getting for a fig.' This, says Vernon, ' is a popular expression in Tus- cany, and means, to pay off with interest, with usury, and is equivalent in meaning to the familiar proverb, " a Rowland for an Oliver." The fig is the cheapest of Tuscan fruits, whereas the date being imported is more costly. Alberigo means, "I get full requital for my crime, in that the sufferings I am undergoing are greater than those I inflicted."' The murder took place in 1285, and as Alberigo was alive in 1300, the ideal date of the poem, Dante cries out in astonishment, ' Oh then art thou dead already?' — to which the startling reply is given that of the fate of his body on earth he has no knowledge. We saw that while the lost know the future, they are ignorant of the present ; the Friar therefore cannot tell whether his body is alive or dead. All he can say is that, if it still lives, it is inhabited by a demon.^ In proof of his statement, he points out a soul near Branca d'oria him who was well known to Dante — Branca d'Oria of Genoa, whose body may be still on earth among > Inf. xsxiii. 109-133. of Genoa. TRAITORS TO FRIENDS 457 the living, but whose soul has been ' wintering ' here CANTO XXXIIT behind him for many years. Dante, knowing that 91-157 ' this Genoese was still alive, refuses to believe the incredible tale : ' I think,' said I to him, ' that thou deceivest me ; For Branca d'Oria never died at all. And eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and puts on clothes.' Frate Alberigo assures him, however, that he is speaking the simple truth. About 1290, this Branca had invited his father-in-law to a banquet, and treacherously murdered him in order to obtain the post which he held. Now, his father-in-law was no other than that Michel Zanche, Governor of Logo- doro in Sardinia, whom we found in Canto xxii., immersed in the Moat of Fitch for the sin of Bar- ratry. The Friar assures Dante that the soul of the murdered man had not had time to reach the Pitch until a devil had taken possession of the bodies of Branca and a kinsman who was his accomplice in the deed — their expelled souls at the same moment being planted here in the ice, so swift was Heaven's vengeance on their diabolic treachery. Part of the V meaning of this we get from the Convito. In Can- zone iii., Dante says of a certain kind of man that he, ' being as one dead, still walks upon the earth ' ; and in his commentary on the verse he asks, ' Hpw is he dead and yet walks ? I answer that he is dead as man, but remains as beast' For, as he explains in the same passage, the brute lives the life of mere sensation, whereas it is the prerogative of man to live by reason : once that is abandoned, the human lapses into the beast. Hence his description of 458 III. TOLOMEA CANTO Branca d'Oria : ' he eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and XXXIII 91-157 puts on clothes ' — i.e. performs the functions of the mere animal life.^ But this is only the beginning of the fall of these traitors ; they have sunk beneath the brute to the demonic. Without doubt Dante meant this literally. He shared the belief of the Middle Ages in a world of diabolic spirits, who had a mysterious power over humanity. He represents demons as waiting to seize the souls of evil men the moment they pass from the body. But he believed that this waiting for the hour of death is not always necessary ; there is an extreme and diabolic malig- nity of wickedness which passes the limits of the human and the brute, drives forth the soul before its hour, and surrenders the body into the power of a demon. The man, in the Psalmist's words, goes down ' quick into Hell.' ^ Doubtless Dante connected this belief with the words concerning Judas in John xiii. 27 : ' And after the sop Satan entered into him.' Judas was traitor to his Host ; and all treachery to the faith of hospitality, on the part of either host or guest, turns a man into a fiend. Sir James Lacaita draws attention to the injury this passage must have inflicted on Frate Alberigo and Branca d'Oria, by investing them with a weird and terrifying sus- picion. ' In that superstitious age, the mere suspicion that these two persons were possessed of devils was enough for them to be shunned by every one they sought to approach, and was in fact their moral destruction.' * > Inf. xxxiii. 134-157 ; Conv. ir. 7. ^ Ps. Iv. 15. ' Readings on Inferno, ii. 650-651. TRAITORS TO FRIENDS 459 We saw that Dante treated one of the lost souls CANTO xxxiii of Antenora in a fashion scarcely worthy of himself. 91-157 ' His treatment here of Friar Alberigo is even less paatetoeaira worthy. When the wretch begged him to lift the faitu with . . . Frate veil of ice which his own tears had formed on his Aiberigo. upturned face, Dante promised to do so when he had learnt his name : ' If thou wouldst have me help thee, Tell me who thou art ; and if I free thee not, To the bottom of the ice may I have to go ! ' — that is, of course, to the lowest Ring, ' the last post * of Hell, as the Friar calls it. Mark, first, the ambi- guity of the promise. Alberigo naturally understood it to mean : ' May I be utterly lost, if I break my word ! ' But Dante evidently had another meaning in his mind. He knew that in quite another sense he was going 'to the bottom of the ice,* since his journey of necessity carried him thither. In the next place, taking advantage of this ambiguity, Dante actually broke his promise. When the Friar had told his story, he claimed its fulfilment, but claimed it in vain : ' But hitherward now stretch forth thy hand, Open my eyes ' ; and I did not open them, And to be rude to him was courtesy. Although Reason in the person of Virgil offers no rebuke of this conduct, we need not hesitate to call it unworthy of Dante. It almost seems as if the wind of Lucifer's wings had chilled his better feel- ings. The suggestion has, indeed, been made that he broke his promise in kindness. Frate Alberigo, 460 III. TOLOMEA CANTO being unable to see him, naturally thought he was a XXXITT 91-157 " lost soul bound for * the last post ' of Hell ; but had Dante removed the icy mask he would have seen that he was still alive, and his anguish would have been increased by the thought that the story of his doom would be carried back to earth. This is a singular misunderstanding of the spirit and temper of the poet. He had absolutely no pity on this sin. No faith was to be kept with men who themselves had kept no faith with others. It was almost a duty to repay their treachery in kind ; that was the only ' courtesy ' due to such as they. It was Dante's very abhorrence of treachery which betrayed him into treachery. ' There is a danger,' says Dean Plumptre, 'lest what seems a righteous indignation against evil — the "doing well to be angry" — should lead us on to an evil like in kind to that which we condemn. Men may become false through their scorn of false- hood, cruel in their hatred of cruelty,' and, we may add, treacherous in their abhorrence of treachery. The Canto ends with a denunciation of the Genoese as men estranged from every virtue and full of every vice, inasmuch as there was found in Cocytus one of them worthy to be comrade of ' the worst spirit of Romagna.' Longfellow quotes 'the bitter Tuscan proverb ' against Genoa : ' Sea without fish ; moun- tains without trees ; men without faith ; and women ' without shame.' Wherever he turned, Dante saw the same spectacle : Genoa, Pisa, Bomagna, all Italy frozen into one vast Cocytus by treachery to kins- man, country, and friend. CHAPTER XXIX CIRCLE IX. — THE LAKE OP COCYTUS : TRAITORS IV. Criudecca : Traitors to Lords and Benefactors At last we have reached the central Bing of Cocytus, CANTO the very heart of Hell. Its name Giudecca, from Judas, who betrayed his Master, indicates that it is central Ring the prison of Traitors to their Lords and Bene- Traitors to factors.^ The reason why this sin is sunk to the Benefactors. lowest depth is that it is treason against both authority and grace — that rightful authority with- out which there can be neither unity nor peace in the universe, and that grace which makes a lord load his servant with favours, and admit him to his friendship. As the pilgrims enter the Giudecca, Virgil quotes a line from a Latin hymn of the sixth century, adding to it one word : ' Vexilla Regis pro- deunt — Inferni,' 'the banners of the King o/ fleZZ ' THe Banners come forth.' It was written by Venantius For-" ^""S- tunatus, Bishop of Poitiers (died 609), and is sung in I Aristotle (Ethics, ix. 7) asks why ' benefactors are better friends to the recipients of their benefactions than are the recipients to their benefactors,' and gives three reasons for it : (1) every author is fond of his own work, and a recipient is, so to speak, the work of his bene- factor; (2) benefaction is noble, and men delight in those who give them an opportunity of doing noble deeds ; (3) we are fond of what costs us trouble ; and since it is easier to receive a kindness than to do it, the recipient is less affectionate than the benefactor. 161 462 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO the Roman Catholic Church during Holy Week,* In the hymn, ' the King,' of course, is Christ ; and Virgil applies the title in scornful irony to His great rival and antagonist. His banners are the six bat- like wings with which he freezes the whole Lake of Cocytua, and which Dante now discovers vast like the sails of a windmill, seen dimly as through mist or the darkness of twilight. The almost unspeakable heinousness of this final form of treachery is indicated in two ways. First, The Three the icy blast of the three winds which blew from sa'tan'g Wings, those great wings was so piercing keen that Dante had to take shelter behind his Guide ; and when Virgil withdrew himself from before him, saying, ' Behold Dis ! ' there were no words in which to tell the chill which struck through him — it must be left to the imagination of the reader : I died not, and did not remain alive : Think for thyself now, if thou hast a grain of wit, What I became, being of both deprived. TheSouiB In the next place, the souls guilty of this form of t^ lee. * "* treachery are completely embedded in the ice : Now was I, and with fear in verse I put it, There where the shades were wholly covered up. And glimmered through like straw in glass. Some prone are lying, others stand erect, This with the head, and that one with the soles ; Another, bow-like, face to feet inverts. ^ * The first verse is : ' VexUla regis prodeunt, Fulget crucis mysterium. Quo came carnis conditor, Suepensus est patibnlo.' ' Inf. xxxiv. 10-15. ' The meaning of the four positions given in these lines is thus explained. Those who lie flat are such as have TRAITORS TO LORDS 463 It is possible that Dante, who never encumbers his CANTO pictures with meaningless details, had some symbol- ism in view in these various postures, such as different degrees of guilt; but his leading idea is the final and absolute freezing up of a man's whole nature, produced by this Satanic species of treachery. Down to this point, the immersion is more or less partial, here it is complete. We are told nothing of the feelings of the embedded souls — whether, for in- stance, like Friar Alberigo, they desired to weep, but had lost the power. Indeed, Dante is so benumbed with the awful sight of Lucifer that he forgets to name any of the traitors over whom he walks. In the very centre of the midmost Ring, The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous The 'Emperor' From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice, "^ ^*^- a monstrous and gigantic form. In the first Canto, Dante had called God 'that Emperor who reigns above,' and now in the last, he gives the same im- perial title to His great enemy. Towards the end of the Canto, Virgil explains how Lucifer came to be embedded here. When he was cast out of Heaven, he fell on the hemisphere of the earth opposite to our own. The land, which then was all on that side of the world, in order to avoid contact with the Arch-Fiend, fled to this side, the waters of which rushed into the vacant place. So violent was the fall, betrayed benefactors who were on the same level In society with them. Those who are in a perpendicular position, if they stand head upwards, have been traitors to benefactors inferior to them in station, if bead downwards, to such as were superior to them. Those who have betrayed benefactors both inferior and superior to them have both their head and their feet downward, so that they assume the form of an arc.'— Kev. H. F. Tozer's English Commentary, 464 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO XXXIV Els vast stature. that Satan tore a passage to the heart of the earth, and there at the very centre of gravity he has lain ever since, his head and breast pointing to the Northern hemisphere, his legs to the Southern. The soil which he tore up in his fall recoiled and formed the Mount of Purgatory, which is now the only land in the great Southern ocean, and the exact antipodes of Mount Calvary. The conception, of course, is a purely ideal one invented for the action of the poem.^ The description of Lucifer himself is horrible in the extreme. His stature is more than gigantic: his arm alone was as much greater than the Giants ranged round Oocytus, as they in turn were greater than the poet. From this measurement many attempts have been made to calculate his height. According to Toynbee, for example, if we take Nimrod as seventy feet, or twelve times Dante's stature, this ' would give about eight hundred and forty feet as the measurement of Lucifer's arm, and consequently (taking the length of the arm to be one-third of the stature) about eight hundred and forty yards as his approximate stature.' In reality, the exact measurement matters little ; the idea Dante wishes to emphasize is that the treachery of Lucifer was enormous and monstrous beyond all limits of the human. We saw that the Giants are set as Guardians of Cocytus, to indicate that treachery is a gigantic sin ; but the Giants being human, their treachery could never reach the dimensions possible to that of Lucifer. His is to be measured by his 1 Inf. xxxlv. 121-126. TRAITORS TO LORDS 465 angelic nature, by his nearness to God, the greatness CANTO of his intellect, the range of his power, and the favour he had received from his Maker. For the same reason, his form is as hideous now as once it was beautiful, on the principle of Corruptio optimi pessima. His head had three faces of different colours, and in his three mouths he crunched three sinners — Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, in Dante's re- gard the blackest traitors of the human race. From his six eyes the tears flowed, and, mingling with the bloody foam which oozed from his mouths, ran down his three chins. Under each face sprang a pair of huge bat-like wings, whose vast flappings froze the whole Lake of Cocytus. It is perhaps as well to give Dante's own words : Oh how great a marvel it appeared to me, When I beheld three faces on his head I The one in front, and that vermilion was ; Two were the others, that were joined with this Above the very middle of each shoulder, And they were joined together at the crest ; And the right appeared 'twixt white and yellow ; The left was such to look upon as those Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward. From under each there issued two great wings, Such as befitting were so great a bird ; Sails of the sea I never saw so large. No feathers had they, but as of a bat Their fashion was ; and these he flapped about So that three winds were moved by him. Thereby Cocytus all was frozen ; With six eyes did he weep, and down three chins Trickled the tear-drops and the bloody foam. At every mouth he with his teeth did crunch A sinner, in the manner of a brake, 2g 466 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO So that he three of them tormented thus. XXXIV To the one in front the biting was as naught Unto the clawing, for at times the back Of him utterly stripped of skin remained. 'That soul up there who has the greatest pain,' The Master said, ' is Judas Iscariot, Who has the head within, and outside plies the legs. Of the other two, who have their heads beneath, The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus ; See how he writhes himself and speaks no word. And the other is Oassius, who seems so large of limb.' ^ Compared There will always exist widely divergent opinions Satan. of this passage. Some will dismiss it in disgust with Savage Landor's words: 'This is atrocious, not terrific or grand.' To others, it is nothing more than a curious piece of mediaeval grotesque with- out any special significance. Many English readers will almost certainly turn to Milton's conception of Satan as nobler and truer. Nevertheless, it is ques- tionable whether Milton is nearer the spiritual reality. Indeed, he himself gives us a hint that he is in substantial agreement with Dante. We are all familiar with the passages in the Paradise Lost which set Satan before us shining still and glorious even in his fall : ' His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured ' (i. 591-594). Pew seem to remember the passage in Book x. (504-584) in which Satan and his peers are suddenly transformed into serpents. He has just returned from his seduction of Man, and has given his Angels • Inf. xxxiv. 37-67. TRAITORS TO LORDS 467 a glowing and triumphant account of his success. CANTO Instead of the ' universal shout and high applause ' which he expected, he is surprised to hear ' a dismal universal hiss, the sound of public scorn.' Then the transformation begins, obviously imitated from the doom of Thieves in the Inferno : ' His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining Each other, till, supplanted, down he fell, A monstrous serpent on his belly prone. Reluctant, but in vain ; a greater power Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned. According to his doom.' Such a passage shows that Dante and Milton are not so far apart, after all, in their conceptions of Satan ; the Italian poet simply carries out his with greater thoroughness. Milton has so invested the rebel angel with light and glory, magnanimity and courage, intellect and resourcefulness, that his very fraud and treason seem half -heroic. Dante has not the slightest intention of exalting the devil into a hero, and throwing a nimbus of glory round Satanic treachery; on the contrary, his aim is to reveal it as it is — a thing hideous, monstrous, diabolic, to be abhorred by every faithful and generous heart. There is no need to deny that Dante drew his Puniihaent. horrible picture from the familiar conception of Satan in the Middle Ages. Indeed, he deliberately adopts it as the means of working out the elaborate moral and spiritual symbolism which we have now to examine in detail. The general principle of Lucifer's punishment is that, in every particular, it is 468 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO the reversal of all he was in Heaven. It is therefore XXXIV necessary to see clearly his original rank. In this tort Estate ''^ Canto he is called ' the creature who had once the beauteous semblance.' In Purg. xii. 25, he is spoken of as he 'who was created nobler than any other creature ' ; and in Par. xix. 47, as • the sum of every creature,' the crown of the whole creation. Now, there are nine Orders of Angels in the Hierarchy of Heaven, and the highest of these is that of the Chief of the Seraphim ; of this Order, therefore, Lucifer was the Seraphim. chief. It is called 'the circle which most loves and most knows ' ; and it loves most because it knows most — love, according to Dante, being in proportion to the knowledge and vision of God. The Seraphim are the nearest God, as close as a halo to the moon. Dante sees them in Paradise as ' a circle of fire,' and calls them those flames devout, Which of their six wings make themselves a cowl — referring to the six wings with which Isaiah saw the Seraphim cover themselves before the Lord.^ The word Seraph was believed to mean burning — aglow with the Love of God ; hence Aquinas says : ' the name of Seraphim is not given from love alone, but from excess of love, which the name of heat or burning implies.' In early art, this symbolism was indicated by painting the wings of the Seraphim a glowing colour, 'celestial rosy-red, Love's proper hue,' as Milton says of Raphael's smile. Further, the Order of Seraphim being nearest God, circle round 1 Par. xxviii. 16-39 ; 72 ; 109-111 ; ix. 77-78 (7s. vi. 2). For the nine Orders of the Angelic Hierarchy, see Par. xxviii. 97-139, and Summa, i. q. cviii. TRAITORS TO LORDS 469 Him with the greatest swiftness, for all created CANTO Intelligences move round their Maker with a "^^ rapidity proportioned to their longing for Him. Each Order of Angels presides over one of the nine spheres of Paradise. That governed by the Seraphim is the highest and widest of the nine — the Crystalline Heaven, called the Primum Mobile or First Movement, which revolves with an incon- ceivable swiftness in its longing for union with the Tenth Heaven, the Empyrean of motionless peace, the abode of God Himself. It is the function of ^ the Seraphim to receive power, light, and love from God, by which to set in motion their sphere; this in its turn transmits these Divine energies to the eighth, the eighth to the seventh, and so down from Order to Order, and Heaven to Heaven, until they reach this earth of ours, the fixed centre of the universe. So wide is the sphere of the Seraphim : it is their glory and their joy to receive and transmit through U'^aven and earth the power, wisdom, and love, from which the whole creation sprang. We are now in a position to see how the punish- ment of Lucifer is represented by Dante as the exact reverse of all this, his original state, in every particular. There can be little doubt, in the first The Three place, that the three faces represent a Trinity of Evil, Trinity of EvU which is the infernal antithesis of the Trinity of Good which God is. This is not to deny that they may have other meanings, for Dante delights to have many facets to his symbols. It is, for instance, quite possible that the three colours of the faces — red, yellow-white, and black — represent the three 470 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO continents then known, Europe, Asia, and Africa. XXXIV . . » IT > I * It is in favour of this interpretation that the colour of the left-hand face is expressly connected with Africa : The left was such to look upon as those Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward,' that is, from Ethiopia. On this view, the meaning is that the treachery of Satan infects the whole world in every continent of it. He is called 'the evil Worm which pierces through the world,' the figure being that of a worm eating its way through an apple. This, however, though quite possible and true, is a secondary meaning. The primary significance must be that which flows directly out of the sin of Lucifer. His sin was pride — pride which refused to be depen- dent on his Maker for power, wisdom, and love, and aimed at becoming God himself. Now, we have seen that the Deity is a Trinity in which Po wer is the attri- bute of the Father, Wisdom of the Son, and Love of the Spirit. It is, therefore, the natural penalty that the Seraph who 'first turned his back upon his Maker,' ^ and in his pride sought to make himself a God, should lose all part and lot in this Trinity of Divine attributes, and become a Trinity of the , diabolic attributes of Impotence, Ignorance, and ' Hatred. The burning Seraph, glowing once with the very Love of God, now bears for ever the crimson face of Hate ; the strong Angel who moved the greatest of the spheres of Paradise, is now stricken with the sickly white-and-yellow of Impotence, which can only ' In/. xzxiT. 44-45. ' Par. ix. 128. TRAITORS TO LORDS 471 flap its helpless wings ; the seraphic Intellect, whose CANTO xxxrv vision pierced most deeply into the Uncreated and Eternal Light, now looks out upon a darkened world, with a face black as the benighted Ethiopian's. And the three faces which thus represent this infernal Trinity of Impotence, Ignorance, and Hatred, meet, says Dante, in the ' crest ' above — the crest of pride in which they find their unity.^ This interpretation of the faces determines the tub Three meaning of the three winds set in motion by the the Three" three pairs of wings, Dante is careful to connect 5^* °^ each pair with one of the faces : ' under each there issued forth two great wings'; each pair therefore sends out a wind corresponding to its face. In other words, the whole region is frozen into solid ice by the three winds of Impotence, Ignorance, and Hatred. It has been suggested that this is the antithesis of ; the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters I at the Creation, or on the human heart with the I warm life-giving breath of Love. Doubtless this is true; but it is equally certain that Dante meant it also as the direct reversal of the function of\ Lucifer in his first estate. That function, as we 1 saw, was to receive from God, and transmit to the entire universe beneath him, the Divine Power, Wisdom, and Love ; and having proved faithless to this high and glorious office, his doom is to have it reversed — to transmit to traitors like himself the infernal opposites of these attributes. In the same ' The political interpretation of Bossetti may be mentioned: 'the front face, red, is Borne, the chief seat of the Guelphs ; Florence, the seat of the Neri, would be the black face ; and France, from its device of the white and golden lilies, would be the white and yellow face.' 472 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO I way the ice is to be explained : it is the direct anti- XXXIV ' thesis of his former power to kindle others into a flame of love. St. Thomas Aquinas, taking fire as the symbol of the Seraphim, says that the active power of fire, which is heat, signifies ' the influence of this kind of Angels which they exercise power- fully on those beneath them, exciting them to a sublime fervour, and thoroughly purifying them by burning.'^ When, in the highest Heaven, the Empyrean, Dante saw the snow-white Rose of the redeemed, which is the true antithesis of this Cocytus, all Orders of Angels were employed as ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation. 'They had their faces all of living flame, and wings of gold ' : When they descended into the flower, from rank to rank They profEered of the peace and of the ardour Which by the fanning of their sides they won.^ This is in direct contrast to the fanning of Lucifer's wings. Instead of gold, they are in fashion as a bat's, the creature of night and darkness. Instead of ' peace and ardour,' they breathe forth the icy blasts of agony and death.® ^ So Dlonysius the Areopagite On the Heavenly Hierarchy, vii. 1 : ' The appellation of Seraphim plainly teaches their ever moving around things Divine, and constancy, and warmth, and keenness, and the seething of that persistent, indomitable, and inflexible perpetual motion, and the vigorous assimilation and elevation of the subordin- ate, as giving new life and rekindling them to the same heat; and purifying through fire and bumt-offering, and the light-like and light- shedding characteristic which can never be concealed or consumed, and remains always the same, which destroys and dispels every kind of obscure darkness.' See also Summa, i. q. cviii. a. 5. 2 Par. xxxl. 13-18. ' In Purg. viii. 37-42, when Sordello tells Dante that the serpent is about to appear in the Valley of the Princes, the mere fear of him froze the poet : Whereupon I, who knew not by what road, Turned round about, and closely drew myself. Utterly frozen, to the faithful shoulders (i.e. of Virgil). TRAITORS TO LORDS 473 It is in this idea of reversal, also, that we must look CANTO for the meaning of the ' little sphere ' mentioned in line 116. When Virgil, as we shall see presently, ^''^^^^**^j^ij carries Dante down the shaggy side of Lucifer and oiudeoca. turns with him into a new hemisphere, the poet is at a loss to know where he is. He sees the monster's legs now where, as he imagined, his body was. Virgil explains that they are now on the other side of the centre of gravity, and adds, 'Thou hast thy feet upon a little sphere, "Which forms the other face of the Giudecca.' ^ In other words, the Giudecca is a little sphere, on one side ice, on the other rock, fixed immovably at the very centre of gravity ; and embedded in it is Lucifer, his head protruding into the Northern hemisphere, his feet into the Southern. This 'little sphere' is what his pride has brought him to ; and the fall is to be measured only by the other sphere which once was his. We saw that he was Prince of the Seraphim, the highest Order of Angels, who move and govern the highest and greatest of the nine spheres of Para- dise. There can be no doubt that the two spheres stood in direct and intentional antithesis in Dante's mind. We find the same idea in Mercury, the second Heaven. There Dante saw the spirits of men who on earth achieved great deeds, but achieved them through love of their own fame. For this pride, their Heaven is small, for Mercury is 'the smallest star of heaven.'^ The inveterate delusion of pride \ is that it niakes us great ; in reality, it destroys the | very capacity of greatness. The Seraph for whose [ 1 Inf. xxxiv. 116-117. ^ p^r. vi. 112 ; Corw. il. U, 474 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO XXXIV Cocytus, tbe Sink of Hell. boundless pride the widest sphere of Paradise was all too narrow, now lies frozen in ' a little sphere ' of ice and rocks. His Crystalline Heaven moved, and he with it, with an inconceivable and fiery swiftness in its yearning for God; now his hatred of Him has frozen him into absolute motionlessness — his wings flapping helplessly in a vain struggle to escape. The agony of all he has lost, of all he has doomed himself to, gushes from his eyes. _Once his joy was the greatest of all creatures, for joy is in propoiftion to love, and love to the vision of God. The vision is now darkened for ever, he has 'foregone the good of intellect,' and the loss is ' most bitter and full of every sadness.' It is for these reasons that Dante represents Satan in this hideous, enormous, and monstrous form. In every point, it is the complete reversal of the beauty and glory of his first estate. Dante felt that such unspeakable treachery must work this horrible trans- formation in character, and that no milder doom was adequate for ingratitude which so basely repaid the highest love and favour God had bestowed on any of His creatures. ' How art thou fallen from heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning ! ' ' Thou, type of resem- blance, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty, didst dwell among the delights of the Paradise of God.'^ There remains one last point in which Dante seems to hint that the punishment of Satan, great as it is, is not yet full. The majority of the traitors in the Giudecca are completely embedded in the ice like 1 Is. xiv. 12 ; Ezek. xxviii. 12-13 (Vulgate, quoted in Letter x. 27, and expressly regarded as spoken concerning Lucifer). TRAITORS TO LORDS 4T5 straws in glass. "Why, then, is the Arch-traitor left CANTO XXXIV partially free ? Dante gives no direct answer to such a question, but he seems to hint that this partial freedom is gradually growing less and less. We saw that all the rivers of Hell, formed by the sins, sorrows, and tears of Time, flow down to Lucifer. Acheron, the joyless river of Death ; Styx, the miry lagoon of anger and sullenness ; Phlegethon, the hot blood of passionate sins : all drain down to form Gocytus, the frozen Lake of cold-blooded treachery, the central sink of Hell. Nay, even from the eternal world on the other side there comes a slender rill, which seems to be the River of Lethe from the top of Mount Purgatory — sins forgiven of God and forgotten, flow- ing back to their Satanic source. In this, Lucifer is ^ the direct antithesis of God. As flame by its own nature rises into the air, so all holy spirits mount up to God, the source of all their goodness ; and, on the contrary, all sinners and their sins flow down like streams of water to him who is the author of all evil. It seems to follow that gradually the sink of Gocytus will be filled up, until at last, when all the sins and sorrows of Time have drained into it, Lucifer will be completely frozen in, and his punishment ful- filled by the return upon himself of all the evil into which he tempted and betrayed both men and angels- We saw that Lucifer is crunching in his three Satan divided mouths the three men whom Dante regarded as aoi. the blackest traitors of whom history bears record. ^ The meaning which lies upon the surface is that traitors hate and devour each other. 'Devil with devil damned firm concord holds,' writes Milton; 476 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO but Dante better understands the nature of devils. j Satan's kingdom is divided against itself ; it has no j loyalty to bind its treacherous citizens together. I This impossibility of unity and concord is empha- sized by the application of the title ' Emperor ' to Satan. For to Dante, as he contends in the De Monarchia, the Emperor was the Divinely appointed head and guide of humanity in things temporal, under whom the whole race was to be gathered together in one; but here was a self-appointed Emperor, who devoured those who served him best. This central group, in short, represents that infernal treason which breaks up the unity of both Heaven The Four Arch- and earth. In Heaven, Lucifer rebelled against God ; on earth, Judas betrayed His Son, and Brutus and Cassius treacherously murdered that Caesar whom Dante regarded as God's representative in temporal things. The four, therefore, represent treason against God and Christ in Church and State — the violation of the deepest and holiest bonds which unite mankind ; and the symbol of this disunion is the Arch-traitor champing his fellow-traitors in his savage foaming mouths. Degrees of "We can, in a general way, distinguish the various Penalty. degrees of guilt and punishment assigned to the four. As we have seen, by far the heaviest judgment is inflicted on him who was the highest of all God's creatures. Judas comes next : as traitor to Christ he occupies the central mouth ; his head is inside, and time after time his back is laid bare by the claws of the monster. Brutus and Cassius, as traitors against the Emperor, suffer a somewhat milder torment: TRAITORS TO LORDS 477 their heads hano: down outside, and their backs CANTO xxxiv escape the tearing of the claws. Brutus is regarded by Dante as the blacker traitor of the two, since he has put him in the black left-hand mouth, the left being invariably the place of greater guilt. When we pass beyond this general distinction, we Brutus and find ourselves to a large extent in the region of con- ''**^'"'- jecture. Why, for instance, is Brutus set in the black mouth, and Cassius in the white-and-yellow one ? Part of the reason, as we saw, is that the one mouth is on the left, the other on the right. Both Brutus and Cassius were under deep obligations of gratitude to Caesar. After the battle of Pharsalia, he pardoned both, and advanced them to important public of&ces. For Brutus he did more. At this battle he gave orders to his officers to save him if he sur- rendered, and if he refused, to let him escape with his life. After his surrender he made him one of his chief friends, and had the utmost confidence in his loyalty. According to the well-known story, it was when CsBsar saw the dagger of his friend Brutus directed against him that he threw his gown over his head, and resigned himself to his fate. It is for this that Brutus hangs from the left-hand mouth, suffering from the teeth of Satan, as it were, the wounds he had inflicted on his friend ; for although Cassius was the originator of the conspiracy and drew him into it, Brutus was under far deeper obli- gations of friendship and gratitude. So far all is clear ; we understand the meaning of right and left. The meaning of the colours is much more difficult. Let us start from the interpretation of them already 478 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO XXXIV Compaxed with Cato of Utlca. given : the black face means Ignorance, the white- and-yellow Impotence. The meaning then is that their treachery reduced Brutus to Ignorance and Cassius to Impotence. At first sight, this may not seem an appropriate penalty ; but the reason for it lies in the character of the two men. There can be no doubt that one chief motive of Gassius was love of power ; according to Plutarch, indeed, he was em- bittered because Caesar had given the prsetorship of the city to Brutus instead of himself. If this was Dante's view of Cassius, it would account for his hanging him out of the mouth of the white-and- yellow face: the man who played the traitor for power is thereby reduced to everlasting impotence. Brutus, however, was an entirely different man. Even his enemies did not accuse him of personal aims or love of power. It was his well-known up- rightness which gave the conspiracy its strength. He was a student and philosopher, and had the reputation of great wisdom. Is it not probable that Dante hung him there in that black mouth which means the darkness of ignorance, to indicate that such black treachery as his turns the wisest man into a fool — as, indeed, his name, Brutus, means? To Dante, who believed with the intensity almost of a religious conviction that Caesar was Roman Emperor by Divine right, nothing could seem a greater folly or ignorance than for a man to imagine that he could frustrate the will of God by a treacherous blow. This terrible doom of Brutus and Cassius has always been felt to be a difficulty in face of the TRAITORS TO LORDS 479 fact that Dante makes Cato the Guardian of Mount CANTO XXXIV Purgatory. For Cato was as determined an opponent of Caesar as they, and committed suicide rather than submit to his rule. This last desperate act Dante regarded as his crowning virtue ; the man who ' chose to pass out of life a free man, rather than without liberty to abide in life,' was worthy to be the Guardian of the Mount of Liberty.^ The contrast between his doom and that of Brutus and Cassius is not com- pletely accounted for by Dante's political theory, as set forth in the De Monarchia, that the Boman Emperor was the appointed representative of God on earth, for this would equally condemn Cato's opposition to OsBsar's authority. The true reason is moral, not political. Brutus and Cassius murdered in foulest treachery the man who had been their friend and benefactor, and Dante swept aside in scorn their claim that they did it in the name of liberty. Treachery can never be so justified; the true lover of liberty was the man who fought openly and honestly, and, when the fight went against him, took not Caesar's life but his own, rather than submit to what, however mistakenly, he regarded as slavery. Judas Iscariot occupies the central mouth as the Jndas greatest traitor of the three, the betrayer of the ^"^"^ ° ' Christ Himself. This red face, as we saw, is the synxbol of Hatred, the antithesis of that Love of God with which Lucifer glowed and burned in his first ^ DeMon. ii. 5. Brutus and Cassius also were suicides ; after their defeat at Philippi, tliey destroyed tliemselves rather than fall into the hands of Octavius. Plutarch tells that immediately before his death Brutus said : ' It is an infinite satisfaction to me that all my friends have been faithful.^ He little thought he himself would be held up as the blackest of traitors to his friend. 480 IV. GIUDECCA CANTO estate. That Judas is thrust into this red mouth XXXIV probably means that his great sin was against the same Love of Grod, as it had manifested itself in Christ — the Love which chose him as an Apostle, and bore patiently with his growing treachery up to the kiss in the garden and the last appeal, ' Friend, where- fore art thou come?' Probably too it means that the Love he had betrayed has utterly departed from him, and that now he is devoured by a passionate Fecuiiarities hatred of Christ. His punishment differs in two ment. particulars from that of his fellow-traitors : his head is inside the mouth, and his back is so merci- lessly torn by Lucifer's claws that at times the back- bone is laid bare. This is no meaningless crunching and tearing, but the exact return of his treachery upon himself. The flaying of his back is repayment of that scourging to which he delivered his Lord, just as Caiaphas and the Sanhedrists receive the crucifixion to which they handed Him over. Simi- larly, the devouring of the head may be meant to correspond to the crown of thorns which his trea- chery set upon the head of his Master ; or, as it has been suggested, it is the infernal return to himself of the kiss by which he betrayed Him. And there he hangs for ever as his Master hung, or perhaps as he himself hung when he ' went and hanged himself ' — his self-destruction lengthened out into an endless torture.^ 1 In lines 58-59 we are told that the biting was as nothing compared with the tearing of the claws. It is difScult to understand why. If the head in Satan's mouth is an allusion to the suicide of Judas by hanging, and the flaying of his back the return on himself of the scourging to which he delivered his Master, the idea would be that his treachery to Christ produced a greater torture than did his own seU-des traction. CHAPTER XXX THE CONVERSION OP DANTE We now approach the end of the long and dreary CANTO pilgrimage. Virgil does not allow much time for 68-139 gazing on the monstrous form of the fallen ugpa^^e Seraph : from Hell. ' But night is reascending, and 'tis time That we depart, for we have seen the whole.' The difficulty is to find a thoroughfare, for their journey seems to have landed them in a cul-de-sac at the exact centre of gravity in the heart of the earth. To avoid the necessity of retracing their steps through all the dark Circles, and thus marring the symholism, Dante has left open the passage in the other hemisphere which Lucifer tore asunder when he fell from Heaven like lightning. The way in which they gain this passage on the other side of the ' little sphere ' of the Giudecca, seems at first sight a piece of pure grotesquery . At Virgil's request, Dante clasps him round the neck. Watching his opportunity when Lucifer's wings are widespread, Virgil lays hold of his shaggy sides and scrambles down among the thick hair as on the rungs of a ladder, between the monster's body and the crust of ice which froze it in. When they reach the place 2h CANTO XXXIV. 68-139 y Symbolism : / '' The Crisis of Dante's Con- version. 482 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE ' where the thigh revolves exactly on the thickness of the haunch,' Virgil, ' with labour and with hard- drawn breath,' turns his head where his feet had been, and begins climbing up the leg, grappling by the tufted hair. They issue at last through an open- ing in a rock, and after seating Dante on the edge, Virgil cautiously steps towards him — the caution evidently being necessary for fear of falling back. At first, Dante is utterly bewildered, seeing Lucifer's legs stretching above him, instead of his body ; but he learns that the somersault was the passing of the centre of gravity, and that now they are in the opposite hemisphere and hold their heads to other stars. In all this, Dean Plumptre sees nothing but ' the extremest point of grotesqueness ' ; but the passage cannot be dismissed so lightly. It is surely obvious that by the somersault at the centre of gravity Dante means to indicate the great crisis of conver- sion, the decisive turning-point of his moral and spiritual life. Beatrice, when she meets him after- wards on the top of Mount Purgatory, declares that the object of the whole journey through Hell is just to produce this conversion : ' So low he fell, that all arguments For his salvation were already short, Save showing him the people of perdition.'' It is most unlikely that Dante, who carries his Bjmabolism into the minutest details, should turn his escape from Hell into a mere feat of grotesque gym- Purg. XXX. 136-138. THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 483 nasties. We are not left to conjecture, however ; for CANTO • 1 XXXIV he gives us a clear hint that this passing of the 68-139 centrdl point is symbolic : And if I then became distressed, Let the gross people think who do not see What the point is which I had passed. It is symbolically the central point of all evil, ' the point to which all gravities are drawn from every side ' — the gravities of sin that fall away from God. The passing of this point is by far the most decisive and important thing that has yet happened to Dante. It is his personal conversion. Hitherto, during the thirty-five years of his life, he has been sinking deeper and deeper away from God, carried down by the weight of his sin; now that he has turned at the very centre of gravity, every step will lessen the heavy load, for every step is back to God and Paradise.^ This being so, many of the details grow morally The Satanic significant, which otherwise seem little more than ^ *'' grotesque fancies. For example, it cannot be with- out meaning that this conversion is accomplished, in part at least, by the aid of Lucifer himself. As they grappled his shaggy sides, ' Keep fast thy hold, for by such stairs as tliese,' Said the Master, panting like a man f orespent, ' Must we perforce depart from so great evil.'* This might mean, of course, that no other path of escape was open to them, but it is much likelier to • Inf. xxxiv. 91-93 ; 110-111. It is pointed out that it is an error, scien- tifically, to say that gravity is greatest at the centre of the earth. The physical error, however, lends itself to the moral symbolism. « Inf. xxxiv. 82-84. 484 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE CANTO XXXIV. 68-139 Fear of Hell, reasonable. be Dante's symbolic way of saying that he used Satan as a means of escape from Satan. This is precisely the idea expressed by Beatrice in the words quoted above : Dante's conversion was accomplished by his seeing ' the people of perdition,' by a resolute contemplation of sin and its penalties — in other words, by Satan and his realm. It was on the stair- way of the Devil himself, so to speak, that he climbed into the new life in Christ. Doubtless many a soul is drawn gently, almost insensibly, by the love of God ; but not thus, according to his own testimony, did the greatest spirit of the Middle Ages enter the Kingdom. Fear of ' the wrath to come ' was burned into his very soul. From Circle to Circle he had to pass with fear and trembling ; every form of human sin and penalty he had to face with open eyes ; and finally, he had to grapple with the Emperor of all that kingdom of woe, and make him the wild path- way to the better life. However it might be with others, Dante felt that such were the stairs by which he 'must perforce depart from so great evil.' Nor will Dante admit any baseness in such fear, let superfine moralists say what they will. For in making his escape he clasps the neck of Virgil, and it is Virgil who turns with him into a new hemi- sphere. Since Virgil, as we have so often seen, is Reason personified, the symbolic meaning is surely that conversion even through fear is the act of Beason. The fear of Hell may be nothing more than 'a hangman's whip,' but to Dante it is the only right and rational thing for any man who under- THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 485 CANTO XXXIV. 68-139 stands what sin is. Its penalties are no arbitrary ones ; they are invariably the necessary and inevit- able, because natural, recoil of evil on the sinner's own soul and character. What this recoil is, he tries to show in symbolic forms — the gradual narrowing down of the soul to its one master sin ; and to have a wholesome terror of this ruinous recoil was to his mind an act of supreme Reason. Hence he chooses the wisest Beason of antiquity as his guide through the awful prison-house of sin, and clasps him round the neck to be carried by him, when he turns his back upon it for ever. Dante tells us, further, that conversion is no ConTeraion, a V* easy task, no child's play. Even Virgil, the highest ' "^^ *' human wisdom, turned at the central point 'with labour and with hard-drawn breath,' and afterwards climbed 'panting like a man forespent.' After the long nightmare of horror and suffering through which he had passed, we might imagine that Dante would have turned away from sin with an eager- ness which knew no fatigue, in its anxiety to escape from its power ; but sin and Hell, he found, are not so easily shaken off. Even when a man's reason is utterly convinced of the unspeakable folly, misery, and evil of sin, he may have a long and exhausting struggle, before he can finally turn his back upon it. Long habits of evil have lowered the moral vitality, and the charm of remembered pleasures, now that they are about to be abandoned for ever, doubles its allurement and weakens the soul with vain longings. We are reminded of the solicita- tions of old habits of sin which assailed St. Angus- 486 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE CANTO XXXIV. , 68-139 OonveTBlos only the Resuming; of ' a longer stairway.' tine in the very crisis of conversion : ' Toys of toys, and vanities of vanities, my old loves held me hack, and made my fleshly garment quiver — whispering softly, "Dost thou leave us? and from that moment shall we never be with thee any more ? And from this moment will not this and that be allowed thee forever?"'^ The struggle, however, is sorest at the turning-point ; once the crisis is past every upward, step becomes easier. On the Mount of Purgatory the toil of climbing lessens with every Terrace won, every sin conquered^ This brings us to another point of which Dante was intensely conscious, namely, that conversion is but the beginning of a vast journey — not, as many seem to think, the final goal. When the turning was accomplished, Virgil seated Dante on the margin of the rocky opening from which they had emerged, but only for a moment : ' Rise up,' the Master said, ' upon thy feet ; The way is long, and difficult the road. And now the sun Ijo middle-tierce returns.' Once before, when Dante sank down exhausted with his climb out of the Moat of the Hypocrites, we saw that Virgil roused him with similar words : ' A longer stairway it behoves thee mount : 'Tis not enough from these to have departed.'^ No man, surely, ever had a greater conception _.of_ the range and scope of the moral and spiritual life. The seven deadly sins must first be purged out, and the corresponding virtues won, by severe pain ^ Confessions, Bk. viii. chap, xi, 2 Inf. XKxiv. 94-96; xxlv. 46-57. THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 487 and discipline. Even then, nothing is gained but CANTO - XXXIV an Earthly Paradise on the top of the Mount of 6S-139' Purification, that state of natural virtue from which man fell ; and far beyond it, Heaven climbing over H eaven, rise s the Paradise.of God an d His presence. ^^«> The Inferno, with which so many readers jjtop, is /^^ Jmt the crisis of conversion; the Purgatorio isJtluL purification of the soul from it s habitual sins ; and the Paradisoia Jjhe g ainmg..-Qf -the virtues which constitute Heaven, and give the Bea tifi c Vision. Finally, Dante tells us that though conversion is ' Behold, au X but the painful turning of the soul toward that become new.' infinite eternal life,Jie was cgnBcious in a moment that he was in a new world . In the hemisphere he had just left, it was night; and Virgil tells him tha t i^ an instant he had passed mto the mormng: ' and now the sun to middle-tierce returns.' ^ The mere men- tion of the sun signifies a new world. All through the Inferno, time is indicated by the moon, which is regarded as the queen of that realm of night.^ They have come now into a world in which the sun, the natural symbol of God, marks the time ; and not only time in general, but the hours of worship, as is indicated by the reference to • middle-tierce.' The Roman Catholic Church divides the day into four principal parts for purposes of worship, of which the first is tierce, from six to nine in the morning ; and of these Dan^e makes a mystical use in the Commedia, the key to which is found in his Convito. There he tells us that noon is the hour of greatest nobility and virtue ; hence it is at noon that he > rnf. X. 79-80. 488 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE CANTO XXXIV. 68-139 Tbe putting- back of the clock. enters the Celestial Paradise. At sunset he de- scended into Hell, and at sunrise he emerged on the shore of Mount Purgatory. There is, however; some uncertainty as to the particular hour meant by 'middle-tierce.' Taken as the exact mid- way between six and nine, it is, of course, half-past seven ; but in the Convito, Dante expressly says that the bell rings for this office of the Church toward the close of the third hour of the day, which is therefore called 'middle-tierce.'^ This would make it about half-past eight. So far as one can see, however, no symbolic meaning hangs upon the exact hour. A question of more importance is whether the sudden transition from night in one hemisphere to morning in the other, involves the putting of the clock back or forward. If we re- member the mystical chronology of the pilgrimage, the putting of it back is the only thing possible. The pilgrims enter Hell at sunset on Good Friday, and the journey of all the Circles takes twenty- four hours, which brings us to Saturday night. The next morning is Easter Sunday, and, as Dr. Moore says, it is intolerable to think that Dante spent that day of all days of the year, groping his way in the heart of the earth. If the clock was put back, thus 'redeeming the time,' space would be left for the ' Conv. iv. 23. ' The Church uses the temporal hours in the division of the day, which consists of twelve hours, long or short, according to the amount of sun. And because the sixth hour, that is, noon, is the most noble of the whole day, and has the most virtue, the Church approaches her o£Sces as near to it as she can from either side, that is, both before and after. Therefore the office of the first part of the day, that is, tierce, is said toward the close of that part, and those of the third and fourth parts toward their beginning. And therefore we say middle- tierce before it rings for this division.' THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 489 elimb of almost twenty-four hours, and they would CANTO XXXIV rise with Christ on the morning of Easter Sunday. 68-139 For, whatever be the literal chronology, this is certainly the mystical one. Dante's intention is ^ without doubt to make his journey parallel with the crucifixion and resurrection of his Lord. On the night of Good Friday he * descended into Hell ' w^ith Christ ; on the morning bf Easter day he rose with Him into newness of life. This mystical parallelism is broken unless the clock is put back four-and-twenty hours. 'Like the Redeemer of mankind, Dante has been dead and buried part of three days, and it is not yet daybreak on Easter Sunday, "in the end of the Sabbath when it began to dawn towards the first day of the week," ' when he 'issued forth to rebehold the stars.'^ It is for this reason that he here connects his escape from Hell with the death of Christ. ' Now,' says Virgil, ' thou art arrived, beneath the hemisphere Opposed to that which overcdnopies the great Dry land, and beneath whose summit was consumed The Man Who without sin was born and lived.' ^ The dry land is the Northern Hemisphere, the centre of which Dante regarded as Jerusalem. As the city which had crucified Christ, the sinless Man, it was morally appropriate that the Inferno should be set directly underneath it. When Dante passes into the other hemisphere, he has dissociated him- self from that crime against Christ ; nevertheless he knows well that through it alone has his salvation become possible. Beneath the Cross stretches in a 1 B. G. Gardner, Dante, p. 101. « j^f. xxxiv. 112-115. 490 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE CANTO straight unbroken line the mystical stairway which 68-139 ' leads to God. All the dark Circles of Hell, this dim The My^oai *^^ rugged passage in the other hemisphere, every stairway. Terrace of Mount Purgatory, and every starry Heaven of Paradise : these form the steps of the great spiritual ladderwhich stretches straight from the Cross of Calvary to the snow-white Rose of the Redeemed; and on this stairway Dante shares the great experiences of his Lord — Death, Besurrection, and Ascension to glory. Tbedark Of the journey to the surface we are not told ' t^bfigut much, probably because little can be told of the state woria.' Qf mind which immediately succeeds the agitating crisis of conversion. It appears to have occupied almost as long as the pilgrimage through Hell, for it is sunrise when they emerge. The passage itself was no ' palace corridor,' but a ' natural dungeon ' of rock, with rugged uneven floor, and void of light. Doubtless it is symbolic of the period of darkness and struggle which is natural to one who has just turned to the new and better life. The most notable thing in this long gloomy passage is an unseen rivulet which flows down the whole length of it in a dark hollow beside their path : A place there is below, from Beelzebub reznoved As far a distance as his tomb extends, Which not by sight is known, but by the sound Of a small rivulet, which there descendeth By the hollow of a rock which it has eaten out With course which winds about and slightly falls. ' uvht. This small rivulet is usually identified with Lethe, ' Inf. xxxiv. 127-132. For Lethe, see Purg. ixviii., xizi. 91-105. THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 491 but properly speaking it is not the river itself but CANTO the sins which it washes away into forgetfulness. 68-139' This, for instance, is the reason why the brooklet is hidden from sight in the dark hollow of its rocky course, and why Cato speaks of it as 'the blind river,' * The sins purged away on Mount Purgatory are in very truth forgotten, hidden from every eye, remembered neither by the sinner himself nor by his fellows. But though forgotten, they have not gone out of existence, they are making their way down to him from whom they came. The winding of the rivulet represents the tortuous course of sin, and the slightness of the fall probably the gentle movement of sin when it is forgiven and forgotten : it is no wild cataract like Phlegethon. There is, however, one sad thing about it — its smallness : it is, alas, ' a little brooklet,' for in Dante's belief the sins purged away and forgotten are but a tiny rill, compared with the full flowing of the fourfold River of Hell. Neverthe- less, Dante evidently regards the very sound of the unseen rivulet as a comfort in his dark journey: it assures him at least that there is forgiveness and forgetfulness of sin. The closing words tell how he regained the upper Tbe Eaitor world, and saw the shining of the Easter stars : My Guide and I upon that hidden way Entered to return into the bright world ; And without care of having any rest, We mounted up, he first and I the second, So far that through a round opening I saw Some of the beauteous things which Heaven bears ; And thence we issued forth again to see the stars. ^ • Purg. i. 40. 2 Inf. xxxiv. 133-139. 492 THE CONVERSION OF DANTE X CANTO As every reader of the Commedia knows, each of its XXXIV 68-139 three divisions ends with the word ' stars,' but with a distinct progression of spiritual meaning. Here Dante simply sees the stars. From the summit of Mount Purgatory he mounts among them. In the Paradiso he becomes one with the power which moves them all : Already my desire and will were turned, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. ^ Now, all through the poem the stars stand for the bright virtues of the Christian life. ' The rays of the four holy lights' shine full upon the face of Cato, the Guardian of the Mount of Purification; they are the four stars of the four cardinal virtues. Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude — never seen in this ' Northern widowed site.' ^ When Dante has drunk of the waters of Lethe, he is led within the dance of four fair maidens, personifications of the same virtues, who say, ' Here we are nymphs, and in the Heaven are stars.' ^ y \ • To rebehold the stars,' therefore, is to regain the vision of the Christian virtues, long dimmed by years of sin. ' To mount unto the stars ' is to rise to the attainment of them. But the Beatific Vision of Him who is the fountain of every virtue comes only when desire and will are turned by the Love which moves the wheel of the whole universe of stars^ » Par. xxxiii. 143-145. 2 Purg. i. 22-39. ^ p^rg. xxxi. 106. THE CONVERSION OF DANTE 493 Meantime Dante knows that this final vision is far CANTO XXXIV off — he can see only 'some of the beauteous things 68-139 which Heaven bears.' Not until, with toil of hands V ' and feet, he has climbed the narrow tortuous clefts of the precipice which rings round the base of the purifying Mount, is he able to see the three radiant stars of the celestial virtues — Faith, Hope, and Love ; and even then^ these become visible only in the dark and silent night, when the sun and the stars of the natural virtues have sunk beneath the horizon.* And far beyond and above, veil after veil of sense and sin must fall from his eyes before they can bear the full splendour of the whole Heaven of starry virtues, and of Him who gives them all their light. » Purg. viii. 85-83. • Nel beato concilto Ti ponga in pace la verace oorte, Che me rilega nell' eterno esilio.' Purgatorio, xxi. 16-18. INDEX Abati, Buoso degli (Thief), 351-353. Abbagliato ('Muddle-head'), 405, 406 n. Accidia, Dr. Moore on, 133; Bishop Martensen on, 134; Leckj on suicides in monasteries, 134. Accursius, jurist, 237. Acheron, Biver of Death, 61-63. AchUles (Sensual), 92. Acquacheta, riyer of Italy, 252. Adamo, Maestro, of Brescia (Falsi- fier of Coin), 411; punishment —dropsy, 412; thirst, 413-415; quarrel with Sinon, 416-418. Adimari, Florentine family, 131. iEneas, brought by God from Troy, 25; journey through Hades, 35; right to universal monarchy, 37 ; in Limbo, 72; and Dido, 91, 92; and Polydorus, 200. JEneid and Scripture, 36. Age, the Golden, 221. Ages, the four, of human life, 3 n. Aghinolfo da Bomena, 414. Alberigo, Frate, of Faenza (Traitor to Guests), 455-458 ; Dante breaks faith with, 459-460. Alberti, Alessandro and Napoleone degli (Traitors to Kin), 430, 431. Albertus Magnus, 73. Alchemists (Falsifiers of Metals), 404-409 ; punishment— paralysis and leprosy, 407, 408; itch of Alchemy, 408, 409. Aldobrandi, Tegghiaio (Violent against Nature), 106 ; 240, 241. Alecto, one of the Furies, 139. Alessandro da Bomena, 414. Alessio Interminei of Lucca (Flat- terer), 273. Alexander of Pherae, 191. Alexander the Great (Violent against Neighbours), 191, 192 n. AH, Mohammed's son-in-law and first disciple (Schismatic), 384; schism of Shiites, 385 ; the Mahdi, 385. Alighieri or Aldighieri, conjecture as to meaning, xx n. Alighiero, Dante's great-grand- father, xxi. Amphiaraus of Argos (Diviner), 293, 294. Anastasius n., Pope (Heretic), his tomb and heresy, 170. Andrea de' Mozzi, Bishop (Violent against Nature), 238. Angels, the Neuteal, 53. Angels, the Rebel, 138 ; and Heresy, 158. Angiolello da Carignano, 388. Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas (Hypocrite), crucified on the ground, 336. Anselm, St., on Divine order, 48. Anselmuccio, Count ITgolino's grandson, 444. Antaeus, the Giant, 424. Ante-Hell of Neutrals, 52-60. Antenor of Troy, 427. Antenora, Second Ring of Cocytus, 427, 484-451. Arachne, 262. Argenti, Filippo (Wrathful), Dante's anger against, 129-133. Aristotle, Dante's reverence for, 24 ; on Magnanimity, 38 and note; on the good of the intellect, 51 ; in Limbo, 73; on Prodigality, 114; on Miserliness, 115; on 49S 496 INDEX Anger, 130 ; on influence of the living on the dead, 143 n. ; on Vice, Incontinence, and Besti- ality, 175 ; on Usury, 179 ; on the language of gentlemen, 417; on benefactors and recipients, 461 n. Amo, Morality-play on the (1304), 317-318, Arrigo, an unknown Florentine, 106. Art. See Violent against Art. Arthur, King, 432. Aruns the Etruscan (Diviner), 295. Asdente ('Toothless'), cobbler of Parma (Diviner), 297. Attila, 191 and note. Augustine, St., on power of evil habit, 486. Avarice, 110-125; degrees of, 115; renders men unrecognizable, 120, 248. Averroes, physician and philoso- pher, in Limbo, 73. Babel, Tower of, 422, 423. Balzac's LaEecherche de I'Absolu, 409. Barrators, Solgia V., 306-329 ; their sin, 306 ; punishment — defile- ment of pitch, 318, 319; pitch darkness, 319 ; the boiling pitch, 320, 321 ; demons repay them in kind, 321. Bartolommeo dellaScalaof Verona, Dante's ' first refuge,' xlvii. Beasts, the three wUd, 14-23 ; poli- tical interpretation, 15-17; moral, 17-23. Beatrice, and the Vita Nuova, xxi- xxvi; her death, xxiv ; her rival, the Donna Pietosa, xxv ; identi- fied with Beatrice Portinari, xxvi ; the number nine friendly to, xxvii-xxix ; her accusation of Dante, 7-14 ; visits Hell for his sake, 39 ; symbol of Divine Wis- I dom, 41-44 ; relation to Virgil as I Reason, 44, 45. Beccheria, Tesaurt de'. Abbot of Vallombrosa(Traitorto Country), 438. Bella, Dante's mother, xxi, Benvenuto da Imola, on Avarice in prelates, 117; on Mars and the Baptist in Florence, 206. Berkeley, Bishop, on the course of empire, 222 n. Bertran de Bom, troubadour (Schismatic), 394-396. Betrayers of Women. See Panders and Seducers. Bianchl and Neri (Whites and Blacks), political parties, xlii. Blessed Ladies, the three, 39-45. Bocca degli Abati (Traitor to Country), 434-436; Dante's attack on, 440, 441. Boccaccio, on Dante's marriage, xxxv-xxxvi; story of break in Inferno between Cantos vii. and viii., 176 n. Boethius, De Consolatione Philo- sophice, xxxiii, 9; on Fortune, 124. Bolge, the ten, of Circle VIIL, 267. Bolgia I. (Panders and Seducers), 267-272. Bolgia II. (Flatterers), 273-275. Bolgia III. (Simoniacs), 276-291. Bolgia IV. (Diviners), 292-305. Bolgia V. (Barrators), 306-329. Bolgia VI. (Hypocrites), 330-341. Bolgia VII. (Thieves), 342-360. Bolgia VIII. (Evil Counsellors), 361-381. Bolgia IX. (Schismatics), 382-402. Bolgia X. (Falsifiers), 403-419. Bologna, Salse of, 269; character of citizens, 269. Bonatti, Guido (Diviner), 298. Boniface vni.. Pope (SimoniacX sends Charles of Valois as ' peace- maker ' to Florence, xlii, 104 ; institutes the Jubilee (1300), 2; and Celestine v., 57, 280; out- rage on, at Anagni, 60, 286; and Andrea de' Mozzi, 238 ; con- signed prophetically to Moat of Simoniacs, 278-280; treacherously destroys Palestrina, 373 ; his epi- taph, 373 n. ; his BuU, tfnam sanctam, 400 n. INDEX 497 BontuTO Dati of Lucca (Barrator), 307. Borsiere, Guglielmo (Violent against Nature), 241. Branca d'Oria of Genoa (Traitor to Guests), 315, 456-458. Briareus, the Giant, 423. Brooming, on Pagan elements in the Renaissance, 67 n. BruneUeschi, Agnolo de' (Thief), 350-351. Brutus, Marcus Junius (Traitor to Lords and Benefactors), in the black left-hand mouth of Lucifer, 477478; compared with Cassius, 478 ; and with Cato of TJtica, 478, 479. Bryce {Soly Roman Empire), on Frederick ii., 149. Bnjamonte, Giovanni (Usurer of Florence), 250, 251. Buonagiunta of Lucca, 8. Buonconte da Montefeltro. See Montefeltro, Guido da. Buondelmonti, Buondelmonte de', murder of, zli, 392. Buoso. See Abati, Buoso degli. Buoso. See Bonati, Buoso degli. Buoso da Duera (Traitor to Country), 436, 437. Burke, XT. B., on authorship of de tribus impostoribus, 150 n. Butler, Alban, on gaiety of soul in solitaries, 135 n. Byron, Stanzas for Music, 454. Caccia d'Asciano, of Spendthrift Club, Siena, 405. Cacciaguida, Dante's great-great- grandfather, xix ; his wife from Val di Fado, xx. Caccianimico, Venedico, of Bologna (Pander), his shame, 268. Cacus, a Centaur (Thief), 345. Caesar, Julius, in Limbo, 72; his assassination, 477, 478. Cahors, city of France, famous for usury, 176, 177. Caiaphas, High-Priest (Hypocrite), crucifled on the ground, 336; ? trodden underfoot by his fellow- hypocrites, 337. 'Cain and the thorns,' 300 and note. Caina, First Ring of Cocytns, 42S, 427, 430-433. Calchas, Greek Diviner, 297. Camicion de' Pazzi (Traitor to Kin), 431-433. Campaidino, battle of (1289), zxxvii, 376. Can Grande della Scala of Verona, xlvii ; Paradiso dedicated to, Iviii; and the Vettro, 30-32. Capaneus (Violent against God), his defiance of Jove, 230, 231. Capocchio, 'Blockhead' (Falsifier of Metals), 406,407; 411. Caprona, siege of (1289), zxxvii. 'Cardinal, The,'— Ottaviano degli Ubaldini (Heretic), 148. Carlino de' Pazzi (Traitor to Country), 432, 433. Cassius (Traitor to Lords and Benefactors), in Lucifer's yeUow- white right-hand mouth, 476, 477. Catalano of Bologna, a Jovial Friar (Hypocrite), 333-336. Cato of TJtica, 72 ; compared with Brutus and Cassius, 479. Caurus, the North-West Wind, 182. Cavalcanti, Cavalcante de', father of Guido (Heretic), 142-144. Cavalcanti, Francesco Guercio de' (Thief), 351-353. Cavalcanti, Guido, Dante's chief friend, xxii, xxiii; sonnet up- braiding Dante, 8; 105; his 'Song of Fortune,' 125; his father, in City of Dis, 142-144 ; estrangement from Dante, 143; death (Aug. 1300), 144. Celestine v., Pope ^eutraU), ' the great i^fusal,' 56-58. Centaurs, symbols of Violence against Neighbours, 188. Cerberus, symbol of Gluttony, 100. Cerchi, Vieri de', xlii, 56. Charles of Valois, his treachery to Florence, xlii-xliii ; compared to Judas, 15, I 498 INDEX Charon, Ferryman of Acheron, 61 ; orders Dante away, 62. Charybdis, symbol of ebb and flow of wealth, 117 n. Chaucer's Monhes Tale, 444 n. ' Cherubim, The Black,' 374-376. ChuTon, chief of the Centaurs, 188- 191. Church, Dean, on Guelphs and Ghibellines, xxxviii-xlii. Ciacco, 'the Hog' (Glutton), 103- 107; foretells judgment on Flor- ence, 104. Ciampolo of Navarre (Barrator), 313-315. Cicero, his De Amicitia, xxKiii, 9 ; classification of sins in Inferno, from his Offices, 172 ; on Flattery, 273. Circle I. (Limbo of Unbaptized), 61-82. Circle II. (The Sensual), 83-99. Circle III. (TheGluttonous), 100-109. Circle IV. (Misers and Prodigals), 110-125. Circle V. (Wrathful and SuUen), 126-136. Circle VI. (City of Dis, Heretics), Narrative, 137-152 ; Interpreta- tion, 153-168. Circle VII. (Violent against Neigh- bours, 182-198; against Them- selves, 199-216; against God, Nature, Art, 217-251). Circle VIII. (The Fraudulent, in Ten Bolge), 260-419. See Bolgia I., II., etc. Circle IX. (Traitors to Kin, 420-433 ; to Country, 434-451; to Friends and Guests, 452460; to Lords and Benefactors, 461-480). City of Dis. See Dis. Classification of Sins in Inferno. See Sins. Clement v.. Pope, consigned pro- phetically to Moat of Simoniacs, 280, 281. Cleopatra (Sensual), 90. Cocytus, Lake of Ice, 420-480 ; sins of cold-blood, 426 ; its four Rings, 426-428; principle of their ar- rangement, 428-430 ; the cesspool of Hell, 474, 475. Cologne, monks of — their cloaks, 330. Colonnas, the, struggle with Boni- face, 373. ' Constantine, The Donation of,' Dante's denunciation of, 282-284. Convito, The, xxtx ; relation to the Vita Nuova, xxx-xxxii. Cord, Signal of the, 254-256 ; sym- bolism — moral, 256-259 ; political, 257. Crete, Mount Ida, 64; the 'great Old Man' of, 65, 220-224; the Minotaur of, 185, 186 ; the Laby- rinth of, 186, 187 ; cradle of human race, 221. Creusa, 270. Crucifixion, the earthquake of the, 182,183; 311,312. Curio, the Boman Tribune (Schis- matic), 389, 390. Daedaltjs, 405. Damietta In Egypt, 222. Dante, his mysticism, xvii; unre- cognized by contemporaries, xvii- xviii ; birth and family, xix-xxi ; parents, xxi ; Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, xxi-xxix ; the Con- vito, relation to Vita Nuova, xxix - xxxii ; education, xxxii- xxxiii; studiesafterdeath of Bea- trice, xxxiii - XXXV ; marriage, xxxv,xxxvi; atthebattleofCam- paldino, xxxvii ; his Priorate, xxxvii ; banishment and wander- ings, xliv-xlvi; forms a party 'by himself,' xlvl; at Verona, xlvii ; the De Monarchia, and Henry vii., xlviii-lii ; his refusal of pardon, liii ; at Bavenna, liv ; the Eclogues, Iv ; death (1321), Iv ; the Commedia : meaning of title, Iviii ; fourfold sense, ILx ; final aim of poem, Ix, hci ; visit to Rome (1300), 1 ; on four ages of human life, 3 n. ; on the Earthly Paradise, 5, 6; unfaithfulness to Beatrice, 7; INDEX 499 Guido Cayalcanti's upbraiding sonnet to, 8; attitude to Philo- Bophy in Convito, 9, 10 ; tempta- tions to Sensuality, Pride, and Avarice (the three wild beasts), 18-21; the Panther gives him hope, 22 ; reverence for Virgil, 23 ; admiration of Can Grande, 31 ; hopes of a Messiah, 32, 33 ; fear of the Pilgrimage, Si, 35; his parallelism between sacred and profane, 36-38; his patron saint, Lucia, 40 ; pity for the lost, 48 ; his use of mythology, 66-68 ; crossing of Acheron, 68; wel- comed by poets of antiquity, 73 ; his proud humility, 74 ; his preferences in poetry, 74 ; his hunger for salvation of the hea- then, 79-82 ; condemns medissval Bomances, 96 ; swoons with pity for Francesca, 98 ; first denuncia- tion of Florence, 103-107 ; on the quest for the Highest Good, 119, 120; his anger against Anger, 129-133; his cheerfulness, 135, 136 ; fear of Heresy, 138 ; on immortality, 141 ; his fair-mind- edness, 147 ; on Frederick ii. and his Court, 150; on limits of the intellect, 161 ; meeting with Brunetto Latini, 232-237; claims Koman descent, 236; his strange estimate of unnatural sensuality, 241-245; with Giotto at Padua, 249, 250 ; contempt for usurers, 251 ; casts away the cord (of the Franciscan Order?), 255 ; conception of moral liberty, 258, 259; fear of Fraud, 263; student at Bologna, 270 ; conver- sation with Nicholas in., 278- 281; denunciation of simoniacal Popes, 281, 282; and of 'Con- stantino's Donation,' 282 - 284 ; defends himself against a charge of sacrilege, 290, 291 ; Virgil rebukes his pity for Diviners, 301-305 ; his terror of the Male- branche, and flight, iSlS, 316 ; charged with barratry, 327-329 ; his climb out of Hypocrisy, 339- 341 ; his grief over Florence, 367- 360 ; fear of giving evil counsel, 362, 363 ; and of rash judgments, 377 ; did he act Curio to Henry vn.?, 390-392; attitude to the Vendetta, 396-398; on the unity of mankind, 399; listens to a base quarrel, 416-418 ; on the confusion of tongues, 422, 423; attacks Bocca degli Abati, 435 ; 440, 441 ; breaks faith with Friar Alberigo,459,460; his conversion, 481-493 ; his Satanic stairway, 483; holds fear of HeU reason- able, 484; his dark journey to the light, 490; re-beholds the stars, 491493. Deianeira, 191. Democritus, in Limbo, 73. De Mona/rchia, its political ideal- ism, xlviii-xlix. Demons, first appearance as tor- mentors, 272; joy ih perdition of men, 308 ; possession by, 455-458. Despair of God's mercy, irrational, 162, 163. Devas, Charles S., on the Church's view of usury, 181. De Vulgari Bloquentia, perhaps used as a text-book, Iv n. Dido (Sensual), 91, 92. Diogenes, in Limbo, 73. Diomed (Evil CoUnseUor), 363, 364. Dionysius the Areopagite, on the Seraphim, 472 n. Dionysius of Syracuse (Violent against Neighbours), 191. Dis, City of, Heretics, Circle VL, (1) The Narrative, 137-152 ; gar- rison of rebel angels, 138; 158, 159 ; its gates closed against Virgil, 138 ; Tower of the Furies, 139 ; Medusa, 139 ; the Messenger from Heaven, 139 ; the burning tombs, 140; conversations with Farinata and Cavalcanti, 141- 148; Frederick ii., 148-152. (2) The Interpretation, 153-168 ; a transition Circle : relation to upper Hell, 153, 154; to nether 500 INDEX Hell, 1S5; an allegory of Doubt and Faith, 156-166 ; symbolism of fortifications, 156-159 ; chasm to nether Hell, and its stench, 169 ; tomb of Pope Anastasius ii., 170. Divina Com/media, The, meaning of ' Commedia,' Ivill ; its fourfold sense, lix ; its final aim, Ix ; its ideal date, 1 ; mystical parallel- ism with death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, 2, 488. Diviners, Bolgia IV., 292-305; compared with Heretics, 168 ; procession of, 293; the reversed heads, 300, 301 ; nature of their sin, 303-305. Divineresses, 300. Dolcino, Fra (Schismatic), Moham- med's warning message to, 386 ; Mariotti's defence of, 386 ; burnt to death (1307), 387. Domenico di Michelino's picture of Dante in Cathedral of Florence, 272. Dominic, St., compared to Cheru- bim, 376 n. Donati, Buoso de', 410. Donati, Cianfa de' (Thief), 350-351. Donati, Corso de', xlii. Donati, Forese de', scurrilous son- nets to and from Dante, 8 ; taunts Dante for meekness, 397. Doubt, its value and function, 161. Earthly Paradise, The, symbol of ideal Empire, S, 6. Earthquake of the Crucifixion, breaks the descent to Circle VII., 182-184; and the bridges over Moat of Hypocrisy, 338-341. Easter Eve and Easter Day, 488, 489. Eleotra, in Limbo, 72. Elijah and Elisha, 361. Empedocles, on Love producing chaos, 184. Emperor, the, his function in the world, 5, 6. Encyclopcedia Britannica, on Frederick ii., 151-152; on the Shiites of Persia, 385. Enzio, natural son of Frederick ii,, 314. Ephialtes, the Giant, 423. Epicurus (Heretic), 141. Erichtho, sorceress, 139. Eriphyle, wife of Amphiaraus, 293. Eteocles and Polynices, 364. Eurypylus, Greek Diviner, 296,297. Evil Counsellors, Bolgia VIII., 361-381; their souls stolen by their tongues, 378-379 ; partial loss of speech, 379; tongues of fire, 379-381. Ezzelino in. of Romano, his cruel- ties, 193 ; Pope proclaims crusade against, 193. Fabnza, betrayal of the city, 438. Falsifiers, Bolgia X., 403-419; four classes: (1) of Metals (Alche- mists), 404-409; (2) of Persons, 409-411 ; (3) of Coin, 411-415 ; (4) of Word, 415-418. Farinata degli TJberti, 106; rises in his burning tomb, 141 ; his defence of Florence, 144-147. Federn, Karl, on the name Beat- rice, xxvi n. ; on Dante's adver- sities, Ivi, Ivii. Feltro and Feltro, 30-32. Fiesolans, Dante's contempt for, 236. Flatterers, Bolgia II., 273-275; canal of filth, 274. Florence, introduction of Guelphs and Ghibellines, zli, and of Blacks and Whites, xlii; Charles of Valois in, xlii ;. Banishment of Dante from, xliv ; Dante's Letter to, 11 ; first denunciation of. In Commedia, 103-106; the unnamed suicide of, 204; suicide of the city, 205-208 ; influence of Mars, 205-208; and Fiesole, 236; the Gardingo, 336 ; prevalence of theft, 357-360; compared to Myrrha, 409. Focaccia, of the Cancellieri of Pistoja (Traitor to Kin), 432. Folcacchieri, Bartolommeo de', 406 n. INDEX 501 Folgore da San Gemignano, 406. Forest of Suicides. See Suicides. Fortune, Divine Providence, 123 ; Boethius on, 124; Guido Caval- canti's ' Song of Fortune,' 125. Francesca da Bimini (Sensual), the only Christian woman in the Inferno, 92; her story, 93-97. Francesco d'Accorso (Violent against Nature), 237. Francis, St., and the black Cherub, 374 ; compared to Seraphim, 376 n. Franciscan Order, Dante and, 265- 259. Frati Godenti, the two of Bologna (Hypocrites), 333-336. Fraud, its two qualities, 173 ; Circle VIII., 251-419 ; vastness of the descent, 251-258; signal of the cord, 254-259; Geryou, its Guar- dian-fiend, 260-263; the descent, 263, 264; Malebolge, 264-266; its ten forms, 267. See Malebolge. Frederick II., Emperor (Heretic), 148-152 ; thrice excommunicated, 149 ; persecution of heretics, 150 ; Dante's admiration of, 151 ; treatment of Pier delle Vigne, 203 ; punishment of traitors, 331. Furies, the Tower of, 139 ; symbols of guilty conscience, 162. Gaddo, son of Count Ugolino, 444. Galeotto (Gallehault), 96, 97. Ganellone (Traitor to Country), 438. Gardingo, a district of Florence, 336. Gardner, Edmund G. , on Treachery and the Giants, 425 ; on Dante's resurrection with Christ, 489. Gemma Donati, Dante's wife, and children, xxxv-xxxvi. Genoa, denunciation of, 460. Gentucca of Lucca, 8. Geri del Bello (Schismatic), xxi, 396. Geryon, Monster of Fraud, Dante's signal to, 254 ; his triple form. 260-263; carries the poets down, 263,264. Ghibellines. See Guelphs and Ghibellines. Ghisola bella (or Ghisolabella) of Bologna, 269. Gianciotto (Lame John) Malatesta, 94 ; consigned to Caina, 99. Giants, the, 421-424; symbols of Pride, 424, 426. Giotto, his frescoes at Assisi, 188, 255; and in Arena Chapel, Padua, 249. Giovanni del VirgUio of Bologna, exchanges Fclogues with Dante, Iv. Giudecca, Fourth Ring of Cocy- tus, 481-480. Gluttonous, the. Circle III., 100- 109; Cerberus, symbol of Glut- tony, 100 ; rain and mire, 101 ; foulness of the sin, 102. Gomita, Fra, of Gallura (Barrator), 314. Gospel of Nicodemus, 46. Gregorovius, on the DeMonarchia, xlviii'; on Virgil, as prophet of Christianity, 27 n. ; on Frederick II., 160 ; on the Vendetta, 398 n. Greyhound, the (U Veltro), Virgil's prophecyof,29,30; usually identi- fied with Can Grande della Scala, 30-32; Messianic interpretation, 32, 33. Grifiblino of Arezzo (Falsifier of Metals), 404-406. Gualandi, a noble family of Pisa, 445. Guardians of Circles, 66. Guelphs and Ghibellines, origin in Germany, xxxviii ; characteris ■ tics, xl ; origin in Florence, xli, 392-393 ; Dante and the Ghibel- lines, xlvi, xlvii. Guidi, Conti, 414 ; Letter from Dante to, 415 n. Guido da Montef eltro. See Monte- feltro, Guido da. Guido da Bomena, 414. Guido Guerra (Violent against Nature), 240. 502 INDEX Guido, Messer Guido del Cassero, 388. Guido Novello da Polenta, Dante's host at Bavenna, liv. Guy de Montfort (Violent against Neighbours), 194. Habmonia, the necklace of, 293. Harpies, 199 ; symbolism, 213 ; Buskin on, 213, 214. Heathen, the Virtuous. See Limbo of XJnbaptized. Hector of Troy, in Limbo, 72. Helen of Troy (Sensual), 92. ^ Hell. See Inferno. Henry vii., Emperor, arrives in Italy (1310), xlviii ; Dante's ideal Emperor,xlix-lii ; death (1313),lii ; his seat in Faradlso, lii ; Dante gives him Curio's advice, 390-392. Henry, son of Earl of Cornwall, stabbed at Viterbo, 194 ; his heart brought to England, 195. Hercules, slays Cacus, 345 ; Pillars of, 368 ; and Antaeus, 424. Heresy (City of Dis), Circle VI., 137-168; Epicurean, 141 ; relation to Incontinence, 153, 154 ; to Malice, 155; to Beason, 157; to Pride, 158 ; impossible to the saints, 158 n. ; punishment — tombs of fire, 165 ; closing of tombs at the last day, 167, 168; compared with Divination, 168. Hettinger, on Dante's Theology, xxxii ; on the Trinity, 47, 48. Highwaymen, 196. Homer, in Limbo, welcomes Dante, 73; on Minos, Judge of Hades, 85 ; on Tlresias, 294 ; on death of Ulysses, 365. Honorius i.. Pope, condemned for Heresy, 170 n. Horace, in Limbo, welcomes Dante, 73. Hypocrites, BolgiAX VI., 330-341; procession of, 330 ; mediaeval derivation of hypocrite, 331 ; painted face and cloak of lead, 331-333; bridges over the Moat broken, 339-341. Hypsipyle, maiden of Lemnos, 270. Incontinence, its various forms, 83, 84; and Malice, 84. Infants. See Limbo of Unbaptized. Inferno, the Gate, 46 ; inscrip- tion, 47 ; the work of the Trinity, 47, 48; a state of the soul, 49, 50 ; its four rivers, 63-66 ; classi- fication of its sins, 169-181. Inferno, Moral and Physical Struc- ture of the (with Diagram), Ixii. ' Intellect, the good of the,' 50-52 ; incontinence of, 153, 154. Italy, a valley of discord, 398-401. Jaoomoda Sant' Andrea (Violent against Self), torn by she-mas- tiffs, 209; his insane squander- ing, 210. Jason (Seducer), 270. Jubilee of 1300, institution, 2; crowd of pilgrims, 268. Judas Iscariot (Traitor to Lords and Benefactors), and Charles of Valois, 15 ; in red central mouth of Lucifer, 479; peculiarities of his punishment, 480. Judas Maccabees, son of Simon, the High-Priest, 452. Labyrinth op Crete. See Crete. Lacaita, Sir James, on possession by demons, 458. Lancelot du Lac, Bomance of, 97. Lanfranchi, noble family of Pisa, 445. Lano of Siena (Violent against Self), 208 ; Napier's account of his death, 209. Latini, Brunetto (Violent against Nature), was he Dante's school- master? xxxiii; the scorching of his face, 227-229; Dante's grati- tude to, 232, 233 ; Villani on his death, 233, 234; his Tesoro, 234; and Tesoretto, 235 ; his prophecy concerning Dante, 236. Leoky {History of European Morals), on acedia and suicides INDEX 503 In mediaeval monasteries, 134, 135. Left in Hell, turning to the, Ixiii. Lethe, 65; 224; 490,491. Limbo of the Unbaptized, Circle L, 61-82; natural virtues of heathen, 70; unbaptized infants, 70, 71; the 'noble castle,' 71; the five greatest poets, 71 ; the group of heroes, 72 ; and philosophers, 72, 73 ; beaten with few stripes, 75- 79; the river of eloquence, 77, 78; the green meadow of fame, 78, 79 ; desire without hope, 79, 80. Lion, the, political interpretation, 15, 16 ; moral, 17. Loderingo, a Jovial Friar of Bo- logna (Hypocrite), 333-336. Lowell, J. Russell, on Dante's mys- ticism, xvii, 73 n. ; on his wan- derings, xliv ; on bis rank as poet, 74 n. ; on his ' humour,' 234 n. Lucan, in Limbo, welcomes Dante, ,73 ; a favourite poet, 73, 74 ; 352 ; on Curio, 389. Lucca, the alderman of, 307-310; its patron saint, Santa Zita, 308 ; the Santo Volto of, 309. Lucia, St. Lucy, Dante's patron saint, xix, 40. Lucifer, 'Emperor' of HeU, 461- 463; his fall, 463, 464; stature, 464 ; description of, 465, 466 ; compared with Milton's Satan, 466, 467 ; punishment — ^reversal of his first estate as Prince of the Seraphim, 468, 469 ; his three faces— a Trinity of Evil, 469, 470 ; the three winds from his three pairs of wings, 471, 472 ; his 'little sphere' of the Giudecca, 473, 474; all sin flows down to him, 474, 475 ; crunches the three human arch-traitors, 475, 476. Maccabees, Book of, 452. Macchiavelli, on princes' engage- ments, 372 n. Magnanimity, Aristotle on, 38 and note. Mahdi, the, 385. Malacoda, captain of the Hale- branohe, his knowledge of date of Christ's death, 311, 312; bis deception concerning the bridge, 312, 313. Malaspina, MoroeUo, 349. Malatesta, Paolo. See Paolo and Francesca. Malatestino of Rimini, 388. Malebolge(CiTcleYni. TheFraud- ulent), 260-419 ; meaning: 'Evil- pouches,' 265; form and material, 265, 266 ; measurements, 266 ; its ten bolge or pouches, 267 ; its foulness, 418, 419. Malebranche{' Evil-claws '), demon- guardians of Bolgia of Barrators, Virgil's parley with, 310-313 ; es- cort of ten, 312-316 ; their quarrel, 315; Dante's flight from, 316; image of sin of barratry, 321 ; their names and meanings, 322 and note; their grossness, 322- 325 ; their discipliae, 325, 326 ; a parody of Florentine magis- trates, 327-328; Dante's danger in this Moat, 327-329. Manfred, son of Frederick ii., his dying cry for mercy, 49. Manto, daughter of Tiresias (Divineress), founds Mantua, 295, 296 ; reference to, in Purgatorio, 296. Mantua, Virgil's account of found- ing of, 295, 296. Marcia, Cato's wife, in Limbo, 72. Margaret of Trent, burnt, 387. Mariotti, L., defence of Fra Dol- cino, 386, 387. 'Marquis, the' (of Este), 269. Mars, statue of, atFlorence,205-208. Martensen, Bishop, on acedia, 134. Mattathias, son of Simon, the High-Priest, 452. Matthew Paris, on Caursines or Usurers, 177. Medea, betrayed by Jason, 270. Medusa, 139 ; symbol of despair of God's mercy, 162; or of th« paralysis of doubt, 1^ n. 504 INDEX Megeera, one of the Furies, 139. Meloria, naval battle of (1284), 442. Mercury, 140. Messenger from Heaven, the, 139, 163; his indignation against Heresy, 164, 165. Michael, the Archangel, 164. Milman, on Simony of Nicholas in. , 279. Milton, on Lethe, 66 n. ; his Satan compared with Dante's, 466, 467. Minos, Judge of Hell, 84 ; demon- ized from mythology, 85 ; symbol of evil conscience of the lost, 86 ; his warning to Dante, 86. Minotaur ('the infamy of Crete'), Ruskin on, 183, 185; symbol of Violence and Unnatural Lust, 185, 186. Misers and Prodigals, Circle IV., 110-125 ; two sides of same coin, 112 ; Miserliness : the worse sin, 113; its prevalence among clerics, 116; punishment — rolling of weights, 117; and loss of indi- viduality, 120; their Resurrec- tion bodies, 121, 122. Mohammed (Schismatic), disem- bowelled, 383, 384 ; his first dis- ciple, Ali, 384-386 ; his warning to Fra Dolcino, 386-388. Mommsen, on character of Curio, 390. Money, its barrenness, 179, 180. Montaperti, battle of (1260), 145, 146, 434-436. Montefeltro, Guido da (Evil Coun- sellor), asks news of Romagna, 370; his evil counsel to Pope Boniface, 371-374; 'one of the Black Cherubim,' 374-376 ; was he guilty? 375; his son Buonconte in Purgatory, 376-378. Montereggioni, castle of, 421. Montfort, Guy de (Violent against Neighbours), 194. Moon, the, time in Hell measured by, 487. Moore, Dr. E., on sullen anger, 133; on Epicurean heretics, 153, 154; on Dante's classification of sins. 176 n.; on the Malebranche, 328 ; on Ulysses, 365 ; on Dante's Easter Day, 488. Mordred, son of King Arthur, 432. Morris, Lewis, Epic of Hades, 67. Mosca de' Lamberti (Schismatic), 107; his fatal advice, 'Capo ha cosa fatta,' 392-393. Mountain of Purgatory, flung up by Lucifer's fall, 463, 464. Mountain, the Sunlit, philosophi- cal interpretation of, 11-14. Muses, the, Dante's invocations to, 34. Myrrha (Falsifier of Person), 409. Napibr (Florentine History), on Farinata, 146 ; on Lano of Siena, 209 ; on Florentine usury, 249 n. ; on Bocca degli Abati, 436; on Count Ugolino, 449. Neri. See Bianohi and Neri. Nessus, a Centaur, acts as guide, 191. Neutrals, in Ante-Hell, 52-60; Dante's contempt of, 53; their punishment, 53, 54; their misery, 55; 'the great refusal,' 55-60: Domenico di Michelino's picture of, 272. Niccol6 da Prato, Cardinal, 369. NiccoI6 de' Salimbeni, of Spend- thrift Club, Siena, 405. Nicholas III., Pope (Simoniac), con- versation with Dante, 278-281; Dante's denunciation of, 281-282. Nimrod, a Giant, 421-423 ; his cry, 422. Nino ('II Brigata'), grandson of Count Ugolino, 444. Norton, Chas. E., on the structure of the Vita Nuova, xxii. Obizzo ba Esti, Marquis of Ferrara (Violent against Neighbours),193. Omar Khayydm, on pity for the lost, 302. Orlando, 438. Ovid, in Limbo, welcomes Dante, 71 ; one of Dante's favourite poets, 74, 294, 352. INDEX 505 FADt7A., Giotto and the ' Arena Chapel at, 249, 250. Palazzo Veochio, Florence, why built slantwise, 145. Falestrina, destruction of, 373. Panders and Seducers, Bolgial., 267-272 ; their relative guUt, 268 ; scourged by demons, 271 ; a dia- bolic sin, 272. Panther, the, politically, Florence, 15 ; morally, Sensuality, 20, 21 ; symbol of Spring, 22; and the cord, 264-259. Paolo and Francesca, 92-99. See Francesca da Bimlni. Paris, son of Priam (Sensual), 92. Paris, city of, Dante's visit to, xlviii. Paul, St., his vision of Paradise, 35. Pharsalia, battle of, 477. Philip the Fair of France, 'the new Pilate,' 16, 60; and Clement v., 281 ; his outrage on Boniface Tin. , 286. Philosophy, did Dante regard it as sinful? zzix-xxxii, 9-11. Phlegethon, River of Blood, 187, 188 ;''dykes of, 218 ; mist of, 219 ; the fall of, 251-253. Phlegyas, Ferryman of Styx, Symbol of Wrath, 128, 129. Pholus, a Centaur, 189. Photinus, deacon of Thessalonica, his heresy, 170. Pier da Medicina (Schismatic), his warning to two gentlemen of Fano, 388; his mutilation, 388, 389. Pietd, its double meaning of pity and piety, 302. Pilate, and 'the great refusal," 58- 60; 'the new Pilate," Philip the Fair, 60, 286. Pisa, Tower of Famine at, 444 ; judgment for its cruelty, 450, 451; 'the new Thebes," founded by Pelops, 450 n. Pistoja, birthplace of Black and White factions, xlii; a 'den' of beasts, 358. Plato, on Minos, 85; on usurers, 179; myth of judgment, 227, 228; on the re-incamation of Ulysses, 367 n. ; on imitation, 411 ; on the ideal stage, 417. Plumptre, Dean, on Dante's wan- derjahre, xxxii; on Clement v., 281 n. ; on metamorphoses of Thieves, 354. Plutarch on Cassius, 478 ; on Brutus, 479 n. Plutus, Guardian of Circle IV., a wolf— symbol of Wealth, 110 ; his ciy, 'Pape Satan 1' 111. Podestil, chief magistrate, 335. Polydorus, 200. Polynices, 293, 364. Pope, the, his function in the world, 6; Dante's view of his infallibility, 170; reverence for the ofQce, 286 ; limits of his power to condemn, 49, and to absolve, 374. Portinari, Folco, father of Beatrice, xxvi. Potiphar's wife (Falsifier of Word) 415. Pride, and Heresy, 158; and the Giants, 424. Friscian, grammarian (Violent against Nature), 237. Prodigality, a less sin than Miser- liness, 113; yet no virtue, 113; as Statins learnt from Virgil, 114 ; degrees of, 115. Providence and Fortune, 123-125. Ftolomeus, captain of Jericho, 452. Puccio Sciancato (Thief), 353. Purgatory. See Mountain of Pur- gatory. Pyrrhus (Violent against Neigh- bours), 191. QuADRiviDU. See Trivium and Quadrivium. Bachel, symbol of Contemplation, 44. Rafel mai amech adbi almi, Nim- rod's cry, 422. Bavenna, Dante'slastrefuge, liv,lr. 506 INDEX 'Reason' and 'Wisdom,' personi- fied respectively in Virgil and Beatrice, 26, 44. 'Refusal, the great,'— Vieri de' Cerohi, 56; Pope Celestine v., 56-58 ; Pilate, 58-60. Resurrection of the body, increases pain of the lost, 108. Rhipeus the Trojan, inParadise, 81. Right-hand in Hell, turning to, 169, 261. Ring I. (Caina), Traitors to Kin- dred, 420-433. Ring II. (Antenora), Traitors to Country, 434-451. Ring III. (Tolomea), Traitors to Friends and Guests, 452-460. Ring IV. (Giudecca), Traitors to Lords and Benefactors, 461-480. River of Blood. See Phlegethon. Rivers of Hell, the four, 63, 64; source, 64, 65; and unity, 65; tears of Time, 220, 224. Robbery and Theft, 355. Romagna, 370. Romances, mediaeval, condemned by Dante, 96. Rome, her right to universal em- pire, 37 ; Time's mirror, 220. Rossetti, Gabriel, on the names of Malebranche, 327, 328 ; on mea- surements of Bolge IX. and X., 415 n. ; political interpretation of Lucifer's faces, 471 n. Rossetti, Miss, why Pilate is not in Hell, 59. Ruggieri, Archbishop, of Pisa (Traitor to Country), 441-448. Ruskin, on Phlegethon and Cocy- tus,64n.; Dante's 'green enamel,' 78, 79 ; the Minotaur, 183, 185 ; on Labyrinth of Crete, 186 ; Har- pies, 213 ; the Arena Chapel, Padua, 249 ; Lake of Pitch, 318 ; form and character, 323-325; thieves, 356, 357. Ru8ticucci,Jacopo (Violent against Nature), 106, 240. Sacrileqe, real and imaginary, 290, 291. Sadness. See Sloth and Sadness. Saladin, in Limbo, 72. Salae of Bologna, the, 269. Sanhedrists (Hypocrites), crucified on ground, 336. Sassol Mascheroni of Florence (Traitor to Kindred), 432. Savage Wood, the, 3 ; political interpretation, 4; compared with wood of Earthly Paradise, 5; moral interpretation, 6, and philosophical, 9-11. 'Scarlet Woman, the,' of the Apocalypse, 282. Soartazzini, on Dante's education, xxxv; questionsDante'shonesty, 18 ; on the Veltro, 32 ; on Brun- etto Latini, 242; on the casting away of the cord, 258. Schaff, Dr. Philip, on Pilate and ' the great refusal,' 58. Schicchi, Gianni (Falsifier of Per- son), 409-411 ; punishment — in- sanity, 411. Schism, a battlefield, .382 ; in Church, 383-388; in State, 388 392; in Family, 392-398; its pre- valence in Italy, 398-401. Schismatics, Bolgia. IX., 382-402; their punishment, 401-402. Sciancato, Puccio (Thief), 353. Sciarra Colonna, his outrage on Boniface viii., 286. Scott, Michael (Diviner), 298, 299. Scott, Sir Walter, on Michael Scott, 298, 299. Scrovigni, Rinaldo degli, of Padua (Usurer), 249. Seducers. See Panders and Se- ducers. Semiramis (Sensual), 90. Sensual, the, Circle II., 83-99; punishment— darkness, 87, whirl- wind of lust, 89 ; the two bands, 90-91. Sensuality, its comp£u:ative guilt, 97; in the Purgatorio, 98; in the Paradiso,9S; compared with Treachery, 99 ; comparison of natural, unnatural, and infra- natural sensuality, 271-272. INDEX 507 Sensuality, Unnatural. See Vio- lent against Nature. Seraphim, ninth Order of Angels, 468, 472. Serchio, river near Lucca, 309. Serpents in Valley of Thieves, 342- 360. She-mastlfis in Forest of Suicides, symbolism, 210. Shiites or ' Sectaries,' followers of Ali, 385. Sibbald, on Curio, 390. Siena, Spendthrift Club of, 209, 405-406 ; vanity of its citizens, 405. Simoniacs, Bolgia III., 276-291; Aquinas on Simony, 277; their stone-pulpits, 277; Dante's de- nunciation of simoniacal Popes, 281, 282 ; punishment — fire on the feet, 287, 288 ; inversion, and non-Apostolic Succession, 288- 290. Simon, High-Friest, murdered by Ftolomeus, 452. Simon Magus, 276. Sinon, the Greek (Falsifier of Word), 415, 416 ; quarrel with Maestro Adamo, 416-418. Sins, classification of, Ixii ; from Cicero, 171 ; from AJlstotle, 174- 176. Sismondi, noble family of Fisa, 445. Slavini di Marco, 182. Sloth and Sadness, Aquinas on, 134. See Sullen, the. Socrates, in Limbo, 73. Soldanieri, Gianni de' (Traitor to Country), 438. Squanderers, hunted by she- mastiffs, 200, 201. Stairway, the mystical, 490. Stars, symbolic of virtues, 491- 493. Statins the poet, punished for lukewarmness, ^ n. ; on prodi- gality, 114. Stricca, of Spendthrift Club of Siena, 405. Stygian Fen, 126, 127; storm on, 139. 140. Suicides, Forest of, 199 ; punish- ments—changed to trees, 211, 212 ; loss of speech, 212 ; Harpies, 213, 214 ; their bodies in the Eesurrection, 216, 216. Suicide by squandering, 208. Sullen, the, fixed in mire of Styx, 127 ; nature of their sin, 183 ; its punishment, 133-135. See Wrath- ful and Sullen. Sunnites, orthodox Mohamme- dans, 385. Symonds, J. A., on Dante's Ghlbel- linism, xlvii. Tagliacozzo, battle of (1268), 382. Taylor, Isaac, Physical Theory of Another Life, 90. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi. See Aldo- brandi, Tegghiaio. Tennyson, on Faith and Beason — In Memoriam, cxxiv., 160 ; his ' Ulysses ' a paraphrase of Dante's, 366. Terence's Eunuchus, 273. Tesoretto of Brunetto Latini, 235. Tesoro of Brunetto Latini, 234. Thais (Flatterer), 273. Theseus, 'Duke of Athens,' 187. Thlbault II. of Navarre, 314. Thieves, Bolgia VII., 342-360; a blend of man and serpent, 353- 356 ; their infectious power, 356 ; four classes, 857. Thomas Aquinas, St., on Christ's dying at his prime, 3 n. ; un- baptized infants, 71 ; salvation of heathen, 81 ; sensuality, 88 ; gluttony, 102 ; prodigality and miserliness, 113; prodigality in clerics, 116; anger, 128, 132; sloth and sadness, 134; heresy and obstinacy, 156 ; heresy and pride, 158 and note ; despair of God's mercy, 162, 163 ; faith necessary for knowledge of God, 166; sins against God, seU, and neighbour, 173 ; suicide, 204 ; blasphemy, 229 ; flattery, 275 n. ; simony, 277 ; joy of saints in sufferings of the lost, 303; dlvina- 508 INDEX tion, 303, 304 ; robbery and theft, 355 ; sowing of discord, 383 ; lying, 404 ; the Seraphim, 472. Time, Image of, 65, 220-224. See Crete. Tiresias, of Thebes (Diviner), 294. Tisiphone, one of the Furies, 139. ToKor (oflfepring). Usury, 179, 180. Tolomea, Third Ring of Cocytus, 452-460; its ' privilege,' 455. Totila, 191 and note. ' Tower of Famine,' 444. Tower of the Furies, 139, 162, 163. Toynbee, Paget, on fivefold sense of Dante in CommecUa, Ixi n. ; on Gallehault (Galeotto), 97 ; on Flutus, 110 n. ; on Ezzelino, 193 ; on measurement of Malebolge, 266 ; on Manto, 296 n ; on medi- aeval derivation of hypocrite, 331. Tozer, Bev. H. F., on voyage of Ulysses, 368 ; onUgolino's death, 448 n. ; on postures in the ice of Traitors to Benefactors, 462 n. Traitors, Circle IX., 420-480 ; four classes, 426 - 428 ; principle of classification, 428-430. Traitors to Country (Antenora), 434-451 ; longing for oblivion, 439. Traitors to Friends and Guests Tolomea), 452-460; the mask of ice, 453-455; possession by de- mons, 455. Traitors toKindred(Cama), 430-433. Traitors to Lords and Benefactors (Giudecca), 461-480 ; embedded in ice, 462; meaning of their pos- tures, 462 n. Trajan the Emperor and St. Gre- gory the Great, 80-81. Treachery and Fraud distinguish- ed, 173, 174. Tribaldello of Faenza (Traitor to Country), 438. Tristan (Sensual), 92. Trivium and Quadrivium, 44, 77. Tyrants in Phlegethon, 191. Ubaldini, Cardinal degli (Here- tic), 148. Uberti, Farinata degli. See Fari- nata degli Uberti. Uberti, the, Florentine hatred of, 144, 145. Ugolino, Count, of Pisa (Traitor to Country), 441-461 ; devours Arch- bishop Buggieri, 441 ; his trea- chery, 442, 443, 448-450; starved to death with his family, 444; his story, 445-447 ; his love of family, 447, 448. Uguccione de' Bagni of Pisa, deri- vation of hypocrite, 331. Uguccione della Faggiuola,Ghibel- line leader, liii. Uguccione, youngest son of Count Ugolino, 444. Ulysses (Evil Counsellor), in his tongue of fire, 363, 364 ; his last voyage and death, 365-369 ; pun- ishment for evil counsel, 369. Unbaptized, the. See Limbo of the Unbaptized. Usury, 176; why it is a sin against Nature, 177, 178 ; mediaeval view of, 178-180, and modem, 180, 181. See Violent against Art. Val di Magra, 348, 349. Valley of Fireflies (Evil Counsel- lors), 361-381. VaUey of Serpents (Thieves), 342- 360. Vanni Fucci (Thief), bitten by ser- pent and pursued by Centaur, 344-346; his self-contempt, 346, 347 ; sonnet by, 347 ; his malice and blasphemy, 348-350. Veltro, il. See Greyhound. Vendetta, the, Dante's attitude to, 396-398. Venice, the Arsenal of, 307. Vernon, Hon. W. W., on suicide in Florence, 205 ; Jacomo da Sant' Andrea, 209; unnatural vice, 243; Panders andFlatterers, 274 ; Baptismal Font in Florence, 278 n. ; punistmient of Simoni- acs, 287 ; names of Malebranche, 328 ; gowns of Hypocrites, 330. Verona, Dante's ' first refuge,' INDEX 509 xlvii ; Dante at the Court of Can Grande, liv. Vieri de' Cerchi. See Cerchi, Vieri de". Vigne, Pier delle (Violent against Self), 201-204. Yillani, Giovanni, on Dante's edu- cation, xxxiv ; Charles of Valois, xliii ; Jubilee, 1300, 2 n. ; Palazzo Vecohio and the Uberti, 145; Farinata, 147; 'the Cardinal,' 148; Ezzelino, 193; Henry, son of Earl of Cornwall, 195 ; statue of Mars, 206; descent of Floren- tines, 236; simony of Nicholas III., 279; Philip the Fair and Templars, 286 n.; Guido Bonatti, 298 n. ; Morality play on the Amo, 317; the Frati Godenti, 335 ; great fire in Florence (1304), 359; murder of Buondelmonte, 392 ; Buoso daDuera, 437 ; Pisan cruelty, 450. Villari, Prof., on Henry vn., lli. Violence, Circle VII., 182-251; its three forms, 172. Violent against Art, 246 - 251 ; Usurers, 246 ; punishments — barrenness, 225 ; rain of fire, 226 ; disfigurement of soul, 227 ; pas- sion for gold survives death, 247 ; loss of individuality, 248 ; their envy and vulgarity, 249-251. ViolentagainstGod, 229-231; double pain of fire, 229 ; their cowardice, 229, 230; Capaneus, 230, 231. Violent » gainst God, Nature, and Art, 217-231; punishments com- mon to all three— Plain of Sand, 217; barrenness, 225 ; rain of fire, 226 ; disfigurement of soul, 227. Violent against Nature, 231-245; Dante's strange estimate of this sin, 241-243 ; its connection with intellectual power, 243, 244; com- paredwith natural sensuality,245. Violent against Neighbours, 182- 198 ; punishment, 196-198. Violent against Themselves, 199- 216. Virgil, Dante's reverence for, 23; why chosen as guide: as i>oet, 24 ; as symbol of Roman Empire, 25 ; as symbol of Natural Reason, 26; as prophet of Christianity, 26-29; accuses Dante of cowar- dice, 38; grows pale in Limbo, 69 ; his conception of Minos, 85 ; flings a handful of earth to Cer- berus, 100 ; his knowledge of the Resurrection, 109; rebukes Flu- tus, 112 ; teacher of Statius, 114; praises Dante's anger, 130; re- pulsed at the City of Dis, 138-141 ; his conflict, as Reason, with Heresy-— its three stages, 159-161 ; his limitations as Reason, 161 ; blinds Dante's eyes to Medusa, 163 ; on Crete as nursery of Tro- jan race, 221 ; rebukes Capaneus, 231; throws the cord from Dante's waist down the Abyss of Fraud, 254; protects Dante from Ger- yon's scorpion sting, 263 ; as sym- bol of Imperial Authority, 284, 285 ; reputation as a wizard, 292 ; his account of founding of Man- tua, 295, 296; rebukes Dante's pity for Diviners, 301-305; con- fronts the Malebranche, 310; lifts Dante and flees from them, 316; teUs Dante of the 'longer «tairway,' 340; rebukes Dante for listening to a brawl, 416-418 ; does not rebuke Dante for his attack on Bocca, 440-441, or for breaking faith with Friar Al- berigo, 459 ; grapples with Luci- fer, and turns a somersault with Dante at the centre of gravity, 481-487; conducts Dante to the shore of Mount Purgatory, 490- 492. Virgin Mary, the, symbol of pre- venient grace, 41. Visconti, Nino de', 314, 443. Vitaliano del Dente, Faduan usu- rer, 230. Vila Nuova, its three divisions, xxi-xxvi; the donna pietoaa, xxv-xxvi ; closing words quoted, 43. 510 INDEX Volto Santo, Holy Face of Lucca, 309, 310. Wbebl, the Human, 239-211. Wicksteed and Gardner, on Dante at Ravenna, Iv. Wicksteed, on the Convito, xxlx ; on Florentine thieving and coin- ing, 355 n. William of Nogaret, his outrage on Boniface vni., 286. Wisdom of Solomon, 135. Wolf, the, political interpretation, the Papacy, 16, 17 ; moral, Ava- rica, 17; Plutus, 110, 111. Women, few In the Inferno, 92 and note. Wood, the Savage. See Savage Wood. Wrathful and Sullen, Circle V., 126-136 ; Wrathful, on the surface of Styx, 127-133 ; Sullen, fixed in mire at the bottom, 133-136. ' Young King, the,' Prince Henry, son of Henry il. of England, 394-396. Zanche, Michel (Barrator), 314. Zita, Santa, patron saint '^^^ 'fflltlffl lllgpl i fi m^' T*