sin. DANTE'S SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE 121 There is left only the voice of conscience to urge it up the steep hillside of knowledge and virtue, and this upward impulse is more than counteracted by the arts and devices of the great adversary. Humanity needs all the help that can come from both earth and heaven. God sends human teachers, and these show men the nature and the consequences of their sins and the means of purification from them. He can Virgil is the representative of the highest earthly wisdom. lead us to a terrestrial paradise; but if we would pass beyond, we must have a higher guide. Beatrice is divine science, the teaching of the Spirit, God's highest gift to men. He who yields to the lower teaching shall have the higher. Dante's taking Virgil for his guide is symbol of the whole race of man putting itself under God's elementary tuition, that it may learn the truth. which will deliver it from hell and lift it to heaven. So the poem, which has autobiography for its center, embraces not only the doctrine of the State, but widens out until it takes in universal humanity and the true relations of that humanity to God. "The Divine Comedy" is an attempt to put all theology and all philosophy into poetical form, that man may have before his eyes an interpretation of the universe of things, a concrete representation of eternal truth, a justification of the ways of God to men. It is the loftiest conception ever framed by any earthly poet, and the execution is worthy of the theme. "The Divine Comedy" was the first Christian poem; it seems to us also to be the greatest. So much for Dante's aim; let us consider now the means he used to attain it-I mean his scheme of the universe, and the external vehicle by which he communicated his thought; or, first, his cosmology, and secondly, his verse. We must remember that Dante lived before Kepler; his system was not the Copernican, but the Ptolemaic. To understand his poem without knowing this is as impossible as it would be for a schoolboy to learn geography without a map. Ptolemy did not hold to a flat, but to a spherical, earth; yet he did hold that the earth was the center of all, and that sun, moon, and stars all revolved around it. There were two hemispheres-an eastern hemisphere of land and a western hemisphere of water. In the center of the hemisphere of land is the city of Jerusalem, directly over the hollow pit of hell; in the center of the hemisphere of water is the island-mount of purgatory, up whose steep sides all penitents must climb to heaven. Neither hell nor purgatory was created where they now are; this is the result of Satan's fall. When the rebel angel was cast out from heaven, his immense mass and weight crushed through earth's surface to the very center of the planet; gravity prevented him from going farther and held him there fast bound. The very substance of the globe fled from him in horror as he came hurtling down, and with these three results: First, the great pit of hell was excavated, at the bottom of which Satan lies; secondly, the waters of the eastern hemisphere were transferred to the western, so that the eastern hemisphere is now laid bare; thirdly, the portion of earth's substance displaced to form hell, since it must go somewhere, was thrust up under the ancient Eden and so the terrestrial Paradise was made the summit of the DANTE'S SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE 123 purgatorial mountain in the midst of the waste of western waters. Ulysses is the only mortal who has seen that mount, and there it was that he met his fate. Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" is only a reminiscence of Dante. The mount of purgatory is therefore "exactly at the antipodes of Jerusalem, and its bulk is precisely equal and opposite to the cavity of hell." Hell and purgatory belong to this planet. Earth alone is the abode of sin and the place of penance. But as we leave earth and go upward we find nine several heavens, one above the other, each a hollow revolving sphere, enclosing and enclosed. These are at once solid and transparent; in them the planets are fixed, to give light by day and night. First comes the heaven of the moon; beyond this the heaven of Mercury; then the heaven of Venus; fourthly, the heaven of the sun, which Dante, after the fashion of his time, regarded as a planet revolving around the earth; fifthly, the heaven of Mars; sixthly, the heaven of Jupiter; seventhly, the heaven of Saturn; eighthly, the heaven of the fixed stars; ninthly, the starless, crystalline heaven, or Primum Mobile, which moves most rapidly of all, and by so moving communicates movement to all the rest. Beyond all these nine heavens is a tenth, the motionless empyrean of God and his saints. There the elect spirits of all time, arranged in ranks like the rising seats of an amphitheatre, surround a lake of light formed by the reflection of the divine glory from the convex upper surface of the Primum Mobile. It is the Rose of the Blessed, whose petals expanding on every side are made up of countless intelligences, all bright with the purity and the love of the highest heaven. Such is Dante's scheme of the universe. Let us ask now about his verse. He called his work "The Com edy"; the title "Divine" was given to it by admirers belonging to the next generation. He tells us that the designation "Comedy" was given to it, because, though beginning in gloom and sorrow, it has a happy ending; it takes the reader through hell and purgatory, but it brings him to paradise. The average reader, I fear, does not give to Dante's work the benefit of the poet's own explanation. He reads only the "Inferno," and insists on judging the whole by this single part. Here the grotesque and the revolting so fasten his attention. that he declines to proceed farther. He does not penetrate to the deep philosophy of Dante's treatment; does not see that Dante's aim is to portray the folly and the monstrosity of sin; does not appreciate the poet's aim of making all this a contrast and a foil to the sweetness of penitence and the joy of the redeemed. But he who has the grace and the patience to read the Purgatory, and the Paradise as well, will find that Dante was right in not calling his poem "The Divine Tragedy." Dante is no pessimist. To his mind "all things work together for good"; and so his poem, which was meant to be an interpretation of the universe and a philosophy of history, rightly calls itself a "Comedy," for it describes the uplifting of humanity from sin to holiness and from eternal sorrow to eternal joy. But there was still another reason for the cheerful title. The work is written, not in the stately and sonorous Latin with its classic elegance and coldness, but in the humble Italian of common speech, the newly emerging product of a new civilization, the language of THE ENTRANCE TO THE HELL 125 the shop and of the home, rather than the language of the schools. And yet it is too much to say that this language existed before Dante wrote. Dante was rather its creator; for the Italian language, with all its sweetness and purity and beauty, the language of love, of poetry, of philosophy, sprang complete from Dante's brain. There is something almost awe-inspiring in the suȧden appearance of such a work as his, as new in its literary vehicle as it was in conception and in theme. It did more to fix the language of Italy than the French Academy ever did to fix the French, or the English Bible to fix the English, tongue. Six hundred years ago a language was spoken in France which no common Frenchman can understand to-day; six hundred years ago a language was spoken in England which no common Englishman can understand to-day. But Dante's Italian is the Italian of modern speech. It is well worth while to learn a little Italian, for even a little will enable one to appreciate to some degree the sweet severity of Dante's verse; the marvelous compression which never wastes a word; the fascination of the terza rima, or triple rhyme, whose endless reiterations seem like the recurrent melody, at one time of funeral, and at another time of marriage, bells. There is scarcely a more striking example of this fitness of phrase than in the solemn music which records the inscription over the gate of hell: Per me si va nella città dolente: Per me si va nell' eterno dolore: |