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aperture. The origin of Hell, in Dante's cosmogony, is the fall of Lucifer, whose huge person, piercing the crust of our planet, hurtled to its centre, where it remained rigid-the pipe of the subterranean funnel. The various circles, degrees, or compartments of Hell, thus conceived, are assigned to different categories of sinners.

The head of the "fell worm" is directly under Jerusalem, while his legs point in the direction of the Mount of Purgatory, which last is an The Mount of Purgatory. island in the South Pacific. Communication between the vertex of the abyss and the base of Purgatory proceeds, at least on this occasion, by means of a natural tunnel-a rough, uneven path, and scant of light and then, a thousand times welcome after the murkiness of Hell, bursts on the weary travellers the cloudless sapphire of the sky, the rippling laughter of old Ocean. But the scenes of misery are not yet at an end. The Mount of Purgatory is, in many respects, a milder analogue of Hell, and, indeed, owes its existtence to the convulsion, the seismic disturbance caused by the descent of Lucifer. The soil displaced by this impact was pushed out on the opposite side of the world and formed an excrescence on the earth's surface. Just as Dante's Hell is a model of engineering, so his Purgatory will exact some praise from your architect. Rising tier above tier, in a series of circular ledges or cornices, it resembles a Roman amphitheatre turned inside out and upside down. On these ledges or cliffs successive orders of penitents realise in drastic fashion the heinousness of their besetting

sins, and so work out their salvation. At the summit is the Earthly Paradise, on the portrayal of which Dante lavishes all his poetical resources; and the advent of Beatrice, which here takes place and is ushered in by mysterious tokens, resolves itself into an apocalyptic vision, entirely precluding familiarity, or even courtesy, on the part of her earthly lover.

As a political pamphlet the Commedia is dead. For us moderns the notion of a universal Empire directed A comedy by a German is utterly vapid, and has been indeed. succeeded in the minds of some by the dream of a Parliament of Man, a Federation of the World. Again, the Union of Christendom must needs be postponed, partly through the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism, partly through the invincible prejudice which exists in all liberal and democratic countries against the secular and autocratic pretensions of the Papacy, of which Dante himself, sound Catholic as he was in matters of faith, was a resolute opponent. The interest of the Commedia, however, lies, not in the dim, speculative background, but in the foreground, in the action. What we care for is the drama, and among the competing accounts of the title-the happy ending, the homeliness of the style, &c.-I do not think sufficient stress has been laid on the thoroughly dramatic nature of the work. For myself, I am by no means certain that the choice of such a title as Commedia was not intended to suggest the grim irony, the downright absurdity, of human life. In this connection it is worthy of note that Dante employs this description only in the Inferno. In the Paradiso the

alternative title Poema Sacro is used. Anyhow, the Florentine poet seems to have fairly anticipated the sentiment-" All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Human nature.

Dante's Hell is not, what his predecessors had sought to render theirs, a horrible negation of this world of time and sense. Terribly as he makes them suffer, the miserable denizens are still human, nor have all ideas, inclinations, interests been roasted or frozen out of them in the infernal holocaust or lake of thick-ribbed ice. Signor Francesco de Sanctis has remarked, and it is true, that "in the kingdom of the dead is felt for the first time the life of the modern world." Dante may not do what Mr George Macdonald has dared to doput shops in Heaven; but he comes very near to this when he associates the happy spirit of Sigier with his old-time lectures in Straw Street. Dante's ordinary method is to stereotype the lot, whatever that may be, of the departed, while fixing in them a vivid sense of the manifold occupations of earth. It is vain for Lamartine, in his studiously depreciative. criticism, to pretend that this side of the poem is dead also, that nobody cares, at this time of day, about the Florentine nonentities that crowd the stage of the Commedia. These people are typical, and, being typical, can never become obsolete. To be sure, the force of the allusions cannot be felt now as it was felt by Dante's contemporaries or their immediate successors, when the memory of the persons of the drama was still fresh; but the emotions awakened in

king.

the poet of necessity extend to his readers, at any rate to the more sympathetic of them. For Dante does. not behold these strange things with apathy, with stoical composure. He communes with lost friends, quarrels with vanished foes. He weeps with those that weep, and fails not to record his own sensations -fear, joy, or surprise-at startling turns of events. When Dante called his poem a "comedy," he may have known that it did not conform to the technical A conscious requirements-the unities of time, space, and action-which the ancients postulated in dramatic compositions. Nevertheless, the Commedia is not without an element of unity, supplied in Dante himself. It is his own personality, throughout human and impressionable, that renders the poem one. And here it should be observed that Dante is deterred neither by false modesty nor by worldly prudence from openly avowing his sense of his own importance. Though he may accord to Virgil a primacy among poets not really deserved, Dante regards himself as belonging, not only to the same class, but to the same coterie; and, on arriving at the Noble Castle, he takes his place, as of right, with the first half-dozen of the world's bards. Somehow this lofty egotism gives no offence. We are used to look for egotism in poets -especially in minor poets-but that is not the explanation. The explanation is that Dante does himself considerably less than justice.

After all the admiration lavished on the Commedia

1 The others are Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and, of course, Virgil.

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Dante's character.

by those who have loved and studied it, it is still a question whether, outside a small circle of Dantists, the cynical remarks of Voltaire 1 do not continue to apply. The great world gazes, with more or less of satisfaction, at Doré's illustrations, and dips hesitatingly into Cary's translation, but the Commedia, the most glorious creation of human genius, gains no hold upon its heart. If any part of the poem is read, it is the Inferno, probably as the most sensational. But an impression prevails that, in limning his terrible nocturnes, Dante in a way exhausted himself. This assumption is very stupid and gratuitous, and can only have arisen from sheer idleness or indifference. It is the reader, not the poet, who is exhausted; and, in giving out at this point, he carries away a somewhat false impression of Dante's character, which he finds grim, austere, vindictive, and sadly lacking in the more human qualities of sweetness, tenderness, and generosity. Even the perusal of the Inferno, however, if we take into consideration the conditions imposed by the theme, should lead us to think of Dante as something better than a mad misanthrope. The poet had his hates and what wonder?-but the most dispassionate survey of life could only have conducted him to the position of Bishop Burnet. "I find," says

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1 "Vous voulez connaître le Dante. Des Italiens l'appellent divin: mais c'est une divinité cachée; peu de gens entendent ses oracles; il a des commentateurs: c'est peut-être encore une raison de plus pour n'être pas compris. Sa réputation s'affirmira toujours parce qu'on ne le lit guère. Il y a de lui une vingtaine de traits qu'on sait par cœur; cela suffit pour s'épargner la peine d'examiner le reste."Dictionnaire philosophique.

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