HELL

The first cantica of the 'Divine Comedy'--the Inferno or Hell--is the

best known of all Dante's works in prose or verse, in Latin or Italian;

and though students of Dante may sometimes regret this fact, yet no one

can be at a moment's loss to understand it.

For the attributes of heart and brain requisite for some kind of

appreciation of the Inferno are by many degrees more common than those

to which the other works of Dante appeal. It is easy to imagine a

reader who has not even begun truly to understand either the poet or

the poem nevertheless rendering a sincere tribute of admiration to the

colossal force of the Inferno, and feeling the weird spell of

fascination and horror ever tightening its grasp on him as he descends

from circle to circle of that starless realm.

There is no mystery in the inveterate tendency to regard Dante as

pre-eminently the poet of Hell. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Tradition

tells of the women who shrank aside as Dante passed them by, and said

one to another, shuddering as they spoke, 'See how his black hair

crisped in the fire as he passed through Hell!' But no tradition tells

of awe-struck passers-by who noted that the stains had been wiped from

that clear brow in Purgatory, that the gleam of that pure and dauntless

eye had been kindled in Heaven.

The machinery of the Inferno, then, is moderately familiar to almost

all. Dante, lost in the darksome forest, scared from the sunlit heights

by the wild beasts that guard the mountain side, meets the shade of

Virgil, sent to rescue him by Beatrice, and suffered by Omnipotence to

leave for a time his abode in the limbo of the unbaptised, on this

mission of redeeming love. Virgil guides Dante through the open gate of

Hell, down through circle after circle of contracting span and

increasing misery and sin, down to the central depth where the

arch-rebel Satan champs in his triple jaws the arch-traitors against

Church and State, Judas Iscariot, and Brutus and Cassius.[31]

Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees

and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying

guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious

dead in torment.

And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a

heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting

of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost

unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible

vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of

guilt, of misery? Even so. And we shall not look in vain.

But let us listen first to Dante's own account of the subject-matter of

his poem. Five words of his are better than a volume of the

commentators. 'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted,' he

says, 'is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken

allegorically the subject is MAN, as rendering himself liable, by good

or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or

punishing justice.'[32]

According to Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as

rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to

punishing justice.' Surely a subject fraught with unutterable sadness,

compassed by impenetrable mystery, but one which in the hands of a

prophet may well be made to yield the bread of life; a subject fitly

introduced by those few pregnant words, 'The day was going, and the

dusky air gave respite to the animals that are on earth from all their

toils; and I alone girt me in solitude to bear the strain both of the

journey and the piteous sight, which memory that errs not shall

retrace.'[33]

* * * * *

Now if this be the true subject of the poem, it follows that all those

physical horrors of which it seems almost to consist must be strictly

subordinate to something else, must be part of the machinery or means

by which the end of the poet is reached, but in no way the end itself.

If the subject of the poem is a moral one, then the descriptions of

physical torment and horror must never even for a moment overbalance or

overwhelm the true 'motive' of the work, must never even for a moment

so crush or deaden the feelings as to render them incapable of moral

impressions, must never in a single instance leave a prevailingly

physical impression upon the mind.

And it is just herein that the transcendent power of the Inferno is

displayed. Horrors which rise and ever rise in intensity till they

culminate in some of the ghastliest scenes ever conceived by mortal

brain are from first to last held under absolute control, are forced to

support and intensify moral conceptions which in less mighty hands they

would have numbed and deadened.

Oh, the pity of this sin, the unutterable, indelible pity of it! Its

wail can never be stilled in our hearts while thought and memory

remain. The misery of some forms of sin, the foul shame of others, the

vileness, the hatefulness, the hideous deformity of others yet--this,

and not horror at the punishment of sin, is what Dante stamps and

brands upon our hearts as we descend with him towards the central

depths, stamps and brands upon our hearts till the pity, the loathing,

the horror can endure no more;--then in the very depth of Hell, at the

core of the Universe, with one mighty strain that leaves us well-nigh

spent, we turn upon that central point, and, leaving Hell beneath our

feet, ascend by the narrow path at the antipodes.

With the horror and the burden of the starless land far off, we lift up

our eyes again to see the stars, and our souls are ready for the

purifying sufferings of Purgatory.

* * * * *

Sometimes the tortures of the damned are a mere physical translation,

so to speak, of their crimes. Thus the ruthless disseminators of strife

and dissension who have torn asunder those who belonged one to another,

those who had no proper existence apart from one another, are in their

turn hewn and cleft by the avenging sword; and ever as their bodies

reunite and their wounds are healed, the fierce blow falls again.

Amongst them Dante sees the great troubadour Bertram de Born, who

fostered the rebellion of the sons of our own king Henry II. In that

he made father and son each other's enemy, his head is severed from his

trunk, his brain from its own root.[34]

In other cases a transparent metaphor or allegory dictates the form of

punishment; as when the hypocrites crawl in utter weariness under the

crushing weight of leaden garments, shaped like monkish cloaks and

cowls, and all covered with shining gold outside.[35] Or when the

flatterers and sycophants wallow in filth which fitly symbolises their

foul life on earth.[36]

It is probable that some special significance and appropriateness might

be traced in almost all the forms of punishment in Dante's Hell, though

it is not always obvious. But one thing at least is obvious: the

uniform congruousness of the impression which the physical and moral

factors of each description combine to produce. In fact, the Inferno is

an account of 'man, as deserving ill by the exercise of his free will,'

in which all the external surroundings are brought into precise accord

with the central conception. The tortures are only the background; and

as in the picture of a great artist, whether we can trace any special

significance and appropriateness in the background or not, we always

feel that it supports the true subject of the picture and never

overpowers it, so it is here. Man as misusing his free will. This is

the real subject of the Inferno. All else is accessory and subordinate.

But if this be so, we should expect to find an endless variety and

gradation, alike of guilt and punishment, as we pass through the

circles of Hell. And so we do. At one moment indignation and reproof

are all swallowed up in pity, and the suffering of the exiled soul only

serves to quicken an infinite compassion in our hearts, a compassion

not so much for the punishment of sin as for sin itself with its woeful

loss and waste of the blessings and the holiness of life. At another

moment we are brought face to face with a wretch whose tortures only

serve to throw his vileness into sharper relief; and when we think of

him and of his deeds, of him and of his victims, we can understand

those awful words of Virgil's when Dante weeps, 'Art thou too like the

other fools? The death of pity is true pity here.'[37] Infinite pity

would indeed embrace the most abandoned, but it is only weak and

misdirected pity that wakes or slumbers at the dictate of mere

suffering.

And as there is infinite variety of guilt and woe, so is there infinite

variety of character in Dante's Hell. Though the poet condemns with

sternest impartiality all who have died in unrepented sin, yet he

recognises and honours the moral distinctions amongst them. What a

difference, for instance, between the wild blaspheming robber Vanni

Fucci,[38] and the defiant Capaneus,[39] a prototype of Milton's Satan,

the one incited by the bestial rage of reckless self-abandonment, the

other by the proud self-reliance of a spirit that eternity cannot

break--alike in their defiance of the Almighty, but how widely severed

in the sources whence it springs.

Look again where Jason strides. The wrongs he did Medea and Hypsipyle

have condemned him to the fierce lash under which his base companions

shriek and fly; but he, still kingly in his mien, without a tear or cry

bears his eternal pain.[40]

See Farinata, the great Florentine--in his ever burning tomb he stands

erect and proud, 'as holding Hell in great disdain;' tortured less by

the flames than by the thought that the faction he opposed is now

triumphant in his city; proud, even in Hell, to remember how once he

stood alone between his country and destruction.[41]

See again where Pietro delle Vigne, in the ghastly forest of suicides,

longs with a passionate longing that his fidelity at that time when he

'held both the keys of the great Frederick's heart' should be

vindicated upon earth from the unjust calumnies that drove him to

self-slaughter.[42]

And see where statesmen and soldiers of Florence, themselves condemned

for foul and unrepented sin, still love the city in which they lived,

still long to hear some good of her. As the flakes of fire fall 'like

snow upon a windless day' on their defenceless bodies, see with what

dismay they gaze into one another's eyes when Dante brings ill news to

them of Florence.[43]

In a word, the souls in Hell are what they were on earth, no better and

no worse. This is the key-note to the comprehension of the poem. No

change has taken place; none are made rebels to God's will, and none

are brought into submission to it, by their punishment; but all are as

they were. Even amongst the vilest there is only the rejection of a

thin disguise, no real increase of shamelessness. Many souls desire to

escape notice and to conceal their crimes, just as they would have done

on earth; many condemn their evil deeds and are ashamed of them, just

as they would have been on earth; but there is no change of character,

no infusion of a new spirit either for good or ill; with all their

variety and complexity of character, the unrepentant sinners wake in

Hell as they would wake on earth our mingled pity and horror, our

mingled loathing and admiration. Man as misusing his free will, in all

the scope and variety of the infinite theme, is the subject of the

poem.

And this brings us to another consideration: the eternity of Dante's

Hell. Those who know no other line of Dante, know the last verse of the

inscription upon the gate of Hell: 'All hope relinquish, ye that enter

here.' The whole inscription is as follows: 'Through me the way lies to

the doleful city; through me the way lies to eternal pain; through me

the way lies 'mongst the people lost. 'Twas justice moved my Lofty

Maker; Divine Power made me, Wisdom Supreme and Primal Love. Before me

were no things created, save things eternal; and I, too, last eternal.

All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.'[44]

The gates of Hell reared by the Primal Love! If we believe in the

eternity of sin and evil, the eternity of suffering and punishment

follows of necessity. To be able to acquiesce in the one, but to shrink

from the thought of the other, is sheer weakness. The eternity and

hopelessness of Dante's Hell are the necessary corollaries of the

impenitence of his sinners. To his mind wisdom and love cannot exist

without justice, and justice demands that eternal ill-desert shall reap

eternal woe.

But how could one who so well knew what an eternal Hell of sin and

suffering meant, believe it to be founded on eternal love? Why did not

Dante's heart in the very strength of that eternal love rebel against

the hideous belief in eternal sin and punishment? I cannot answer the

question I have asked. Dante believed in the Church, believed in the

theology she taught, and could not have been what he was had he not

done so. Had he rejected any of the cardinal beliefs of the

Christianity of his age and rebelled against the Church, he might have

been the herald of future reformations, but he could never have been

the index and interpreter to remotest generations of that mediaeval

Catholic religion of which his poem is the very soul.

Meanwhile note this, that if ever man realised the awful mystery and

contradiction involved in the conception of a good God condemning the

virtuous heathen to eternal exile, that man was Dante. If ever heart

of man was weighed down beneath the load of pity for the damned, that

heart was Dante's. The virtuous heathen he places in the first round of

Hell; here 'no plaint is to be heard except of sighs, which make the

eternal air to tremble;' here, with no other torture than the death of

hope without the death of longing, they live in neither joy nor sorrow,

eternal exiles from the realms of bliss.[45]

Dante, as we shall see hereafter, longed with a passionate thirsty

longing to know how the Divine justice could thus condemn the innocent.

But his thirst was never slaked. It was and remained an utter mystery

to him; and there are few passages of deeper pathos than those in which

he remembers that his beloved and honoured guide and master, even

Virgil, the very type of human wisdom and excellence, was himself

amongst these outcasts.[46]

Again and again, as we pass with Dante through the circles of Hell, we

feel that his yearning pity for the lost, racking his very soul and

flinging him senseless to the ground for misery, shows an awakening

spirit which could not long exist in human hearts without teaching them

that God's redeeming pity is greater and more patient than their own.

So, too, when Francesca and Paolo, touched by Dante's pitying sympathy,

exclaim, 'Oh, thou gracious being, if we were dear to God, how would we

pray for thee!'[47] who can help feeling that Dante was not far from

the thought that all souls are dear to God?

Meanwhile, how strong that faith which could lift up all this weight of

mystery and woe, and still believe in the Highest Wisdom and the Primal

Love! Only the man who knew the holiness of human life to the full as

well as he knew its infamy, only the man who had seen Purgatory and

Heaven, and who had actually felt the love of God, could know that with

all its mystery and misery the universe was made not only by the Divine

Power, but by the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love, could weave this

Trinity of Power, Wisdom, Love, into the Unity of the all-sustaining

God, who made both Heaven and Hell.

And we still have to face the same insoluble mystery. The darker shade

is indeed lifted from the picture upon which we gaze; we have no

eternal Hell, no eternity of sin, to reckon with; but to us too comes

the question, 'Can the world with all its sin and misery be built

indeed upon the Primal Love?' And our answer too must be the answer not

of knowledge but of faith. Only by making ourselves God's fellow

workers till we _feel_ that the Divine Power and the Primal Love are

one, can we gain a faith that will sustain the mystery it cannot solve.

Alas! how often our weaker faith fails in its lighter task, how often

do we speak of sin and misery as though they were discoveries of

yesterday that had brought new trials to our faith, unknown before; how

often do we feel it hard to say even of earth what Dante in the might

of his unshaken faith could say of Hell itself--that it is made by

Power, Wisdom, Love!

* * * * *

But perhaps we have dwelt too long already on this topic, and in any

case we must now hasten on. Dante's Hell, as we have seen, represents

sinful and impenitent humanity with all its fitting surroundings and

accessories, cut off from everything that can distract the attention,

confuse the moral impression, or alleviate its appalling strength. And

as the magic power of his words, with the absolute sincerity and

clearness of his own conceptions, forces us to realise the details of

his vision as if we had trodden every step of the way with him, this

result follows amongst others: that we realise, with a vividness that

can never again grow dim, an existence without any one of those sweet

surroundings and embellishments of human life which seem the fit

support and reflection of purity and love.

We have been in a land where none of the fair sounds or sights of

nature have access, no flowers, no stars, no light, and if there are

streams and hills there they are hideously transformed into instruments

and emblems not of beauty but of horror. We are made to realise all

this, and to feel that it is absolutely and eternally fitting as the

abode of sin and of impenitence. And when once this association has

been stamped upon our minds, the beauty and the sweetness of the world

in which we live gain a new meaning for us. They become the standing

protest of all that is round us against every selfish, every sinful

thought or deed; the standing appeal to us to bring our souls into

sweet harmony with their surroundings, since God in His mercy brings

not their surroundings into ghastly harmony with them.

When we have been with the poor wretch, deep down in Hell, who gasps in

his burning fever for 'the rivulets that from the green slopes of

Casentino drop down into the Arno, freshening the soft, cool channels,

where they glide,'[48] and have realised that in that land there are

not and ought not to be the cooling streams and verdant slopes of

earth; we can never again enjoy the sweetness and the peace of nature

without our hearts being consciously or unconsciously purified, without

every evil thing in our lives feeling the rebuke.

When we have known what it is to be in a starless land, and have felt

how strange and incongruous the fair sights of Heaven would be, have

felt that they would have no place or meaning there, have felt that

cheerless gloom alone befits the souls enveloped there, then when we

leave the dreary realms, and once more gaze upon the heavens by night

and day, they are more to us than they have ever been before, they are

indeed what Dante so often calls them, using the language of the

falconers, the _lure_ by which God summons back our wayward souls from

vain and mean pursuits.

Look, again, upon this fearful picture. Dante and Virgil come to a

black and muddy lake in which the passionate tear and smite one another

in bestial rage; and all over its surface are bubbles rising up. They

come from the cries of the morose and sullen ones 'who are fixed in the

slime at the bottom of the lake. They cry: "Gloomy we were in the sweet

air that the sun gladdens, bearing in our hearts the smoke of

sullenness; now we are gloomy here in the black slime"--such is the

strain that gurgles in their throats, but cannot find full

utterance.'[49] Who that has seen those bubbles rise upon the lake can

ever suffer himself again to cherish sullenness within his heart

without feeling at the very instant the rebuke of the 'sweet air that

the sun gladdens,' and thinking of that gurgling strain of misery?

* * * * *

Another of the lessons taught by the Inferno is, that no plea, however

moving, can avail the sinner, or take away the sinfulness of sin, that

no position can place him above punishment, that no authority can

shield him from it.

The guilty love of Francesca and Paolo, so strong, so deathless in that

it was love, has sunk them to Hell instead of raising them to Heaven in

that it was guilty. Stronger to make them one than Hell to sever them,

it is powerless to redeem the sin to which it has allied itself, and

its tenderness has but swelled the eternal anguish of those whom it

still joins together, because it has suffered the sanctuary of life,

which love is set to guard, to be polluted and betrayed. Sung in those

strains of deathless tenderness and pity where 'tears seem to drop from

the very words,' the story of this guilty love reveals the fatalest of

all mischoice, and tells us that no passion, however wild in its

intensity, however innocent in its beginnings, however unpremeditated

in its lawless outburst, however overmastering in its pleas, however

loyal to itself in time and in eternity, may dare to raise itself above

the laws of God and man, or claim immunity from its wretched

consequences for those who are its slaves. How infinite the pity and

the waste, how irreparable the loss, when the love that might have been

an ornament to Heaven, adds to the unmeasured guilt and anguish of Hell

a wail of more piercing sorrow than rings through all its lower depths!

Nor could any height of place claim exemption from the moral law. Dante

was a Catholic, and his reverence for the Papal Chair was deep. But

against the faithless Popes he cherished a fiery indignation

proportioned to his high estimate of the sacred office they abused. In

one of the most fearful passages of the Inferno he describes, in terms

that gain a terrible significance from one of the forms of criminal

execution practised in his day, how he stood by a round hole in one of

the circles of Hell, in which Pope Nicholas III. was thrust head

foremost--stood like the confessor hearing the assassin's final words,

and heard the guilty story of Pope Nicholas.[50]

It is characteristic of Dante that he tells us here, as if quite

incidentally, that these holes were about the size of the baptising

stands or fonts in the Church of San Giovanni, 'one of which,' says he,

'I broke not many years ago to save one who was drowning in it. Let

this suffice to disabuse all men.' Evidently he had been taxed with

sacrilege for saving the life of the drowning child at the expense of

the sacred vessel, and it can hardly be an accident that he recalls

this circumstance in the Hell of the sacrilegious Popes and Churchmen.

These men, who had despised their sacred trust and turned it to basest

trafficking, were the representatives of that hard system of soulless

officialism that would pollute the holiest functions of the Church,

while reverencing with superstitious scruple their outward symbols and

instruments.

And if the Papal office could not rescue the sinner that held it,

neither could the Papal authority shield the sins of others. It is said

that Catholics have not the keeping of their own consciences. Dante at

least thought they had. In the Hell of fraudulent counsellors, wrapped

in a sheet of eternal flame one comes to him and cries, 'Grudge not to

stay and speak with me a while. Behold, I grudge it not, although I

burn.' It is Guido da Montefeltro, whose fame in council and in war had

gone forth to the ends of the earth. All wiles and covert ways he knew,

and there had ever been more of the fox than of the lion in him. But

when he saw himself arriving at that age when every man should lower

sails and gather in his ropes, then did he repent of all that once had

pleased him, and girding him with the cord of St. Francis he became a

monk. Alas! his penitence would have availed him well but for the

Prince of the new Pharisees, Pope Boniface VIII., who was waging war

with Christians that should have been his friends, hard by the Lateran.

'He demanded counsel of me,' continues Guido, 'but I kept silence, for

his words seemed drunken. Then he said to me, "Let not thy heart

misdoubt: henceforth do I absolve thee, but do thou teach me so to act

that I may cast Prenestina to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open,

as thou knowest." ... Then the weighty arguments impelled me to think

silence worse than speech; and so I said, "Father, since thou dost

cleanse me from that guilt wherein I now must fall, long promise and

performance short will make thee triumph in thy lofty seat." Then when

I died St. Francis came for me, but one of the black cherubim said to

him: "Do me no wrong, nor take thou him away. He must come down amongst

my menials, e'en for the fraudulent advice he gave, since when I have

kept close upon his hair. He who repents not cannot be absolved, nor

can one will the same thing he repents, the contradiction not

permitting it." Ah wretched me! how did I shudder then, for he laid

hold of me, and with the cry, "Haply thou knew'st not I was a

logician?" bore me to judgment.'[51]

Who can fail to recognise the utter truth of Dante's teaching here?

What can stand between a man's own conscience and his duty? Though the

very symbol and mouthpiece of the collective wisdom and piety of

Christendom should hold the shield of authority before the culprit, yet

it cannot ward off the judgment for one single deed done in violation

of personal moral conviction. When once we have realised the meaning of

this awful passage, how can we ever urge again as an excuse for

unfaithfulness to our own consciences, that the assurance of those we

loved and reverenced overcame our scruples? Here as everywhere Dante

strips sin of every specious and distracting circumstance, and shows it

to us where it ought to be--in Hell.

Contrast with the scene we have just looked upon the companion picture

from the Purgatory; where Buonconte di Montefeltro tells how he fled on

foot from the battle-field of Campaldino, his throat pierced with a

mortal wound ensanguining the earth. Where Archiano falls into the Arno

there darkness came upon him, and he fell crossing his arms upon his

breast and calling on the name of Mary with his last breath. 'Then,' he

continues, 'God's angel came and took me, and Hell's angel shrieked, "O

thou of Heaven, wherefore dost thou rob me? Thou bear'st with thee the

eternal part of him, all for one wretched tear which saves it from me.

But with the other part of him I'll deal in other fashion."' Upon which

the infuriated demon swells the torrent with rain, sweeps the

warrior's body from the bank, dashes away the hateful cross into which

its arms are folded, and in impotent rage rolls it along the river bed

and buries it in slime so that men never see it more; but the soul is

meanwhile saved.[52]

* * * * *

Here we must pause. I have made no attempt to give a systematic account

of the Inferno, still less to select the finest passages from it. I

have only tried to interpret some of the leading thoughts which run

through it, some of the deep lessons which it can hardly fail to teach

the reader.

Like all great works, the Inferno should be studied both in detail and

as a whole in order to be rightly understood; and when we understand

it, even partially, when we have been with Dante down through all the

circles to that central lake of ice in which all humanity seems frozen

out of the base traitors who showed no humanity on earth, when we have

faced the icy breath of the eternal air winnowed by Satan's wings, and

have been numbed to every thought and feeling except one--one which

has been burned and frozen into our hearts through all those rounds of

shame and woe--the thought of the pity, the misery, the hatefulness of

sin; then, but then only, we shall be ready to understand the

Purgatory, shall know something of what the last lines of the Inferno

meant to Dante: 'We mounted up, he first and second I, until through a

round opening I saw some of those beauteous things that Heaven bears;

and thence we issued forth again to see the stars.'[53]