A new creation.

into perfect symmetry, and rendered it clear, definite, intelligible. It sounds an odd assertion, but this result was due, in no small measure, to his partiality, or—we may say-his superstitious regard, for the number three and its multiples, of which there are already traces in the Vita Nuova. The schoolmen had divided the world to come into two main partitions-Heaven and Hell. The whole of Hell was situate underground, and comprised Hell proper, the abode of lost angels and spirits of the damned; Purgatory, the sojourn of penitent sinners; the Limbo of unbaptised infants; and the Limbo of the Fathers, known also as "Abraham's Bosom," and inhabited by just men dead before Christ's coming. Heaven consisted of the visible sky or firmament; the Spiritual Heaven, the home of saints and blessed angels; and the Intellectual Heaven, scene of the Beatific Vision. Dante changes all that. Hell, to be sure, he places underground, where it stretches from the surface of the earth to the centre. But Purgatory is a mountain at the antipodes, a distinct place altogether. Signors Vaccheri and Bertacchi deny this, identifying the Hill of Difficulty at the outset of the poem with the Mount of Purgatory, and making the avenues of the two spheres of punishment contiguous.1 The suggestion, however, does not appear very plausible. If Dante really began his itinerary at a point in the opposite hemisphere, it is strangely unlike him not to record the circumstance fully and plainly. He

1 La Visione di Dante Allighieri considerata nello spazio e nel tempo. Turin, 1881.

would certainly, I think, have written some prefatory lines explaining and defending his presence at the ends of the earth. But this he has not done. Finally, Dante's Heaven is an adaptation to spiritual purposes of the Ptolemaic system. The earth is the centre of nine heavens, those of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, the Fixed Stars, the "Primum Mobile," and, enveloping all, the motionless Empyrean, which seems to have been without sun or star save God Himself.

The three topographical divisions naturally suggested the three divisions of the poem. The two opening cantos, reckoned for convenience

Symbolism. part of the Inferno, are in a way common

to all three cantiche. I leave out of account the idea that the Mount Delectable is the Mount of Purgatory as too improbable, but the conjunction of Virgil and Beatrice is significant. They are to be Dante's guides, Virgil through Hell and Purgatory, and Beatrice through Paradise. This early mention of Beatrice is of importance as showing that Dante had returned to the spirit and temper of the Vita Nuova. But the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova is not absolutely the Beatrice of the Commedia. She figures in the later and greater work as a gracious personality, and, literally, as an angel; but the influence of the Convivio, of that middle period of reflection, continues to be felt, and Dante is no longer satisfied with Beatrice as a fair and virtuous lady. Without forfeiting any of her natural charms she has become to him an emblem, but the emblem of what he now deems the most

Dante and

precious thing in the world-Theology. And so we come to that thorniest of topics, Dante's symbolism. Allegory is everywhere in the Commedia. It is, if I may return to an old metaphor, the nervous system of the poem. But just as the nervous Tennyson. system has certain ganglia, certain centres, so also in the Commedia are certain passages, the comprehension of which is vital to the understanding of the whole. The opening cantos of the Inferno and the concluding cantos of the Purgatorio are of this order. In the latter case the symbolism is so elaborate that I cannot attempt to deal with it here. In the general exordium, on the other hand, the mechanism is comparatively simple, and may therefore well serve as a pattern. The poet feigns that midway in the journey of life he found himself in a dark forest, and this wild forest lay in a valley. The place was very horrible, insomuch that Dante can scarce bear the remembrance of it. As little can he state how he entered it, for he was oppressed with sleep at the time. This is Dante's way of describing human birth. Let us not forget those key-lines:

"Forth from the hand of Him who fondles it

Before it is, like to a little girl

Weeping and laughing in her childish sport,
Issues the simple soul, that nothing knows," &c.

Or, as Tennyson puts it, vocatively:

"O dear Spirit half lost

In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou-who wailest being born
And banished into mystery, and the pain
Of this divisible-indivisible world," &c.

Ezekiel !"

This "divisible-indivisible world" is the forest of the Commedia, which expresses in concrete terms what "Read the great English poet in his later years essayed to define in philosophic language - the bewildering incoherence of this perpetually changing congeries of atoms, the coexistence in the same object of identity and difference, baffling the human intellect. But where Tennyson speaks of a shore, Dante uses the figure of a valley. This image is quite in keeping with the terminology of the Convivio, where a "substantial form" is said to descend into matter. There can be little doubt, however, that the valley of this first canto is Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones. If any one will examine the thirty-seventh chapter of the sacred book, he will speedily recognise the point of the comparison. The orthodox anagogic interpretation of the prophecy is that the Valley of Dry Bones represents the world of unredeemed and unregenerate humanity. Without impugning this view, which indeed is essential to the completeness of the analogy, it is clear that the prophecy had a simpler, more immediate application—an application that concerned the political condition of the Jewish nation divided into the rival kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and doomed to captivity among the heathen. brighter prospect, however, is in store for the hapless race. "And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all. . . . And David my servant

A

shall be king over them; and they all shall have one shepherd." It is hardly needful to insist how well all this suits with the state of contemporary Italy, the land of Guelfs and Ghibellines, specially as viewed by one with Dante's imperialist longings. There are numerous passages in the Commedia proving how illfounded he deemed the papal claim to temporal dominion, and how injurious in its effects. And we have already seen that, according to Dante's philosophy, the welfare of humanity depended on unity of rule, Peter being supreme in his sphere, and Cæsar in his.

"Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark.”

Very likely, as Scartazzini

The word "found" is important. It indicates Dante's awakening to the consciousness of his real predicament. Though he knew it not, he had been in the dark forest all his life until the year 1300, which is approximately the date of the commencement of the poem, and ostensibly of its entire action. The great work, however, occupied him many years. suggests, it was composed at a variety of times and places. When at length it was approaching completion, the whole of the events connected with Henry of Luxemburg's ill-fated expedition belonged to the past. But Dante still adhered to the pretended date of his mysterious travel, and, indeed, takes advantage of it to assume the language of prophecy. His David is the unlucky German prince, whom he rewards with a heavenly throne, but with regard to whom, in his purely earthly rôle, he is compelled by dire necessity