PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to make some of the unparalleled beauty and common sense of The Divine Comedy accessible to many who are wholly unfamiliar with the poem, or are kept from it by its reputed difficulties. To this end, after some brief explanation of these difficulties, we turn at once to representative passages, for the most part translated outright, but in some instances paraphrased or condensed. These passages give the complete unfolding of the story, together with its moral and philosophical significance. That some entire cantos are omitted from Hell, while no entire canto is omitted from Purgatory, or Paradise, is because condensation is imperative in such a book. The condensation has been made mostly in the Hell, because less of it is required to impress a new reader with an understanding of its essential character than is required to impress such a reader with the very different but not less essential character of Purgatory or Paradise. Long ago Lowell pointed out the misfortune

which comes of reading only Hell, and that a real love for Dante was to be known or measured by one's interest in and affection for his Paradise and Purgatory. In such degree as we come to know The Divine Comedy must we come to know its author, Dante, every line of whose works proves him to have been, and to be, one of the noblest of earth's sons and Heaven's heirs, because he realized as few men do "the sacredness of life's actual experiences."

Every one who has in him the love of poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, and many a one who believes that he has not, finds himself facing life from a fresh angle when he makes acquaintance with Dante, through his famous drama of justice based on love and hate. Old as his drama is, it is ever new, because it portrays, as no other, the permanent passions of the human race and their unchanging consequences, generation after generation. Lowell said: "The benignities of literature defy fortune and outlive calamity." Of Dante's work this is specially true.,

The Divine Comedy is one of the world's largest assets on the ledger wherein is kept the account of

its humanities. It is a vast treasure placed to every man's credit in a bank that never fails. To help those who have not done so, to make a first draft on this account; to set within reach some of the most extraordinary benignities of all literature, remembering the while that to him who hath more shall be given, is the aim of this book.

A. M. B.