Divine Comedy: Inferno | Page 6

narrative itself. To the illustration and carrying out of this interitr
meaning even the minutest details of external incident are made to
contribute, with an appropriateness of significance, and with a freedom
from forced interpretation or artificiality of construction such as no
other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining. The poem may be
read with interest as a record of experience without attention to its inner
meaning, but its full interest is only felt when this inner meaning is
traced, and the moral significance of the incidents of the story
apprehended by the alert intelligence. The allegory is the soul of the
poem, but like the soul within the body it does not show itself in
independent existence. It is, in scholastic phrase, the form of the body,
giving to it its special individuality. Thus in order truly to understand
and rightly appreciate the poem the reader must follow its course with a
double intelligence. "Taken literally," as Dante declares in his Letter to
Can Grande, "the subject is the state of the soul after death, simply

considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject is man, according as by
his good or ill deserts he renders
himself liable to the reward or
punishment of Justice." It is the allegory of human life; and not of
human life as an abstraction, but of the individual life; and herein, as
Mr. Lowell, whose phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning
and its permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness
of interest, and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous with
every successive generation. The increase of knowledge, the loss of
belief in doctrines that were fundamental in Dante's creed, the changes
in the order of society, the new thoughts of the world, have not
lessened the moral import of the poem, any more than they have
lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its real substance is as
independent as its artistic beauty, of science, of creed, and of
institutions. Human nature has not changed; the motives of action are
the same, though their
relative force and the desires and ideals by
which they are inspired vary from generation to generation. And thus it
is that the moral judgments of life framed by a great poet whose

imagination penetrates to the core of things, and who, from his very
nature as poet, conceives and sets forth the issues of life not in a treatise
of abstract morality, but by means of sensible types and images, never
lose interest, and have a perpetual contemporaneousness. They deal
with the permanent and unalterable elements of the soul of man.
[1] Mr. Lowell's essay on Dante makes other writing about the poet or
the poem seem ineffectual and superfluous. I must assume that it will
be familiar to the readers of my version, at least to those among them
who desire truly to understand the Divine Comedy.
The scene of the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are members
even while still denizens mu the world of time. In the spiritual world
the results of sin or perverted love, and of virtue or right love, in this
life of probation, are manifest. The life to come is but the fulfilment of
the life that now is. This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The
allegory in which he cloaked it is of a character that separates the
Divine Comedy from all other works of similar intent, In The Pilgrim's
Progress, for example, the personages introduced are mere
simulacra
of men and women, the types of moral qualities or religious

dispositions. They are abstractions which the genius of Bunyan fails to
inform with vitality sufficient to kindle the imagination of the reader
with a sense of their actual, living and breathing existence. But in the
Divine Comedy the personages are all from real life, they are men and
women with their natural passions and emotions, and they are
undergoing an actual
experience. The allegory consists in making
their characters and their fates, what all human characters and fates
really are, the types and images of spiritual law. Virgil and Beatrice,
whose nature as depicted in the poem makes nearest approach to purely
abstract and typical existence, are always consistently presented as
living individuals, exalted indeed in wisdom and power, but with
hardly less definite and concrete humanity than that of Dante himself.
The scheme of the created Universe held by the Christians of the
Middle Ages was comparatively simple, and so definite that Dante, in
accepting it in its main features without modification, was provided
with the limited stage that was requisite for his
design, and of which
the general disposition was familiar to all his readers. The three
spiritual realms had their local bounds marked out as clearly as those of
time earth itself. Their
cosmography