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CANTO 111.

attain nearer the reality; because in no other mode can they be more abstracted from matter; and almost the only certainty we have is this, that as the soul is immaterial, so whatever is to affect her, when liberated from the flesh and every extraneous impediment, must be immaterial too. But whether there shall be a profusion of imma. terial objects hereafter, or whether Providence. shall continue that sublime parsimony, which we observe in the natural world, and, instead of a sinner and a hell, shall make (as I have conjectured) the sinner his own hell, we know not. Yet there can be nothing wrong in the conjecture; and it were to render the moral allegorized by Dante more striking and to argue unavoidably, both that those who are deeply guilty will press on to their own punishment, and that that punishment will be everlasting. For if the soul' on shuffling off this mortal coil' follows her bent with uncontrolled vehemence, and, having held a course of love and virtue even through the perils and temptations of an earthly banishment, springs up to that first principle of goodness and bliss for which she had long panted as for her original home, or as if she felt that she was a particle once torn from it; then the habitual indulger of hateful propensities must in a like manner rush with renovating ardour towards those terrible delusions in the pursuit of which he had been before restrained by the weight and feebleness of a corporeal texture. He must

CANTO IX.

continue in his wickedness, and habit must harden him in it every hour in spite of accumulating pain; vice growing older grows only more hideous and inflexible; and that guilt can never be expiated which never ceases to be aggravated.

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Since this bank is the rendez-vous of the guilty, thou (cries Virgil) should'st feel no displeasure, but satisfaction at Charon's refusal to receive thee Nulli fas casto sceleratum insistere limen (1).

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but was certainly taken from Dante by Milton Earth felt the wound.

Earth trembled from her entrails. . . . (3).

(1) Aeneid. Lib. vr. v. 563.

(2) Lib. xu. v. 334.

(3) Paradise Lost. Ix. The chief beauty in these passages from our own bard, as well as in those from the Roman, and the Tuscan, consists in the personification of the earth. Therefore though Mr. Ginguené's (Hist. de l'Italie. vol. 1. p. 39) la terre baignée des larmes des damnés exhale un vent impétueux may be a correct explication, it is no fair translation: a mere physical phenomenon being substituted for noble figurative language. Mr. Cary preserves the personification by borrowing a phrase from Dryden: "Groans the sad earth . ” See

Trans. Aen. XII. 504.

HELL

CANTO THE FOURTH.

1.

At the close of the preceding Canto Dante had

fallen down in a stupor; during which he is evidently supposed to have been conveyed across Acheron, and landed on the first Circle (1). The entire of this circle is exempt from pain; and is divided into two unequal portions. The first of these is the Angelical doctor's Hell-of-children' (Infernus puerorum ; (and the second, his (Infernus sanctorum Patrum) Hell-of-the holy-fathers'; divisions, as is noticed in the margin, which answer to two circles (the first and ninth) of the Virgilian hell. While traversing the first division, Virgil makes many observations to his pupil, not about the crowds of children round them, who could scarcely merit any, but about the former and present inhabitants of the second division to which they

(1) The subterranean circus, Hell, deepens from a state of Elysian tranquillity to one of infinite suffering- the vestibule being an exception, partly to inflict an unnatural penalty on a despicable crime, and partly to imitate Origen and Virgil, as was said before. Hell, Comment, Canto. 111. p. 156, 173, and 179.

CANTO IY.

are approaching; and within which they at last step. There they find a numerous assemblage of the heroes and heroines of Antiquity, whom they pass in review from the top of a luminous hill to which they retire in company with four other eminent bards: after which, these four take leave of Dante and Virgil who continue their journey; and the Canto closes. This Circle is computed to be 14 miles below the Vestibule, and to present a circular walk of 17 miles broad. In its middle yawns the monstrous aperture of the abyss 245 miles wide. So going round it, Dante has on one hand a precipice 14 miles high, and on the other that fearful gulf into which the eye cannot pierce, 'its murky clouds so boil and hiss (1).'

Since I have not hesitated to advance that Dante was still more distinguished as a man of science a politician, and a theologian, than as a poet (2);

(1) The extreme width of the vestibule was 315 miles (Hell, Corment, Canto 1. p. 161): the extreme of this circle is 280 remain 35, but (as a line of diameter drawn from one extremity to another of a circular body perforated in the centre must cross the body twice, once before the perforation and again after) that leaves only its moiety 17 and a half for the net width. The extreme of this Circle is 280; the extreme of the second 245: remain 35, or 17 and a half, as before. But in a sketch the walk of the Vestibule must be narrowed by whatever breadth is allowed to Acheron; which flows round the orifice leading to the first Circle and then takes a subterranean, invisible course: with this. exception, the Vestibule and the first Circle are of similar dimensions. See Manetti Giambullari Velutello. Keeping a Roman Amphi theatre in one's mind, we have now stept down a tier.

(2) Bonus enim poeta (says Ascensius of Virgil) non tam delectare quod tamen plurimum facit quam prodesse pretendit. Com. in Aeneid. Lib. vi. v. 657.

CANTO IV.

since I am of opinion that he had for one of his principal aims (perhaps his paramount one) not only to imitate Homer and Virgil, by celebrating the creed of his own country, as they did that of their's, but to expound it with unrivalled accuracy; and since therefore, according to a fundamental rule of good taste, all poetical ornaments should, far from frustrating that main aim, be strictly subservient to it, and indeed be nothing more than the honey to recommend the draught; rived at a passage, where, to do justice to him as a poet, it is requisite to see whether he has erred as a Roman Catholic theologian: and this appears to me the more necessary, not only because it has been neglected by former commentators, but because even a judicious admirer of the Divine Comedy has, in this instance, attempted to rifle it of one of its surest titles to immortality that of

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handing down a correct notion of the spiritual tenets of one of the most lasting and widely-spread forms of worship (to say nothing of its holiness) which mankind ever professed (1). If Homer and Virgil still live, they owe it in great measure to their faithful delineation of the religious doctrines of Antiquity: hereafter Dante may be prized on a

(1) Les punitions du Dante sont pour la plus part proportionnées aux crimes, et font honneur à son jugement et à son esprit de justice. Ce n'est qu'avec répugnance et à contre cœur qu'il damne les hommes célèbres, et il sauve autant qu'il peut sans trop heurter les dogmes de son Eglise et quelquefois même en les heurtant. Merian, Mem. de l'Acad. de Berlin. 1784.

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