Divine Comedy: Inferno | Page 8

set forth these truths in
such wise as to affect the imaginations and touch the hearts of men, so
that they should turn to righteousness. His conviction of these truths
was no mere matter of belief; it had the ardor and certainty of faith.
They had appeared to him in all their fulness as a revelation of the
Divine wisdom. It was his work as poet, as poet with a divine
commission, to make this revelation known. His work was a work of
faith; it was sacred; to it both Heaven and Earth had set their hands.
To this work, as I have said, the definiteness and the limits of the
generally accepted theory of the Universe gave the required frame. The
very narrowness of this scheme made Dante's design practicable. He
had had the experience of a man on earth. He had been lured by false

objects of desire from the pursuit of the true good. But Divine Grace, in
the form of Beatrice, who had of old on earth led him aright, now
intervened and sent to his aid Virgil, who, as the type of Human
Reason, should bring him safe through Hell, showing to him the eternal
consequences of sin, and then should conduct him, penitent, up the
height of Purgatory, till on its summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice
should appear once more to him. Thence she, as the type of that

knowledge through which comes the love of God, should lead him,
through the Heavens up to the Empyrean, to the consummation of his
course in the actual vision of God.
AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE DIVINE COMEDY.
The Essay by Mr. Lowell, to which I have already referred (Dante,
Lowell's Prose Works, vol. iv.) is the best introduction to the study of
the poem. It should be read and re-read.
Dante, an essay by the late Dean Church, is the work of a learned and
sympathetic selmolar, and is an excellent treatise on the life, times, and
work of the poet.
The Notes and Illustrations that accompany Mr. Longfellow's
translation of the Divine Comedy form an admirable body of

comment on the poem.
The Rev. Dr. Edward Moore's little volume, on The Time-References
in the Divina Cominedia (London, 1887), is of great value in making
the progress of Dante's journey clear, and in showing Dante's
scrupulous consistency of statement. Dr. Moore's more recent work,
Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the Divina Commedia
(Cambridge, 1889), is to be warmly commended to the advanced
student.
These sources of information are enough for the mere English reader.
But one who desires to make himself a thorough master of the poem
must turn to foreign sources of instruction: to Carl Witte's invaluable
Dante-Forschungen (2 vols. Halle, 1869); to the comment, especially
that on the Paradiso, which accompanies the German translation of the

Divine Comedy by Philalethes. the late King John of Saxony; to
Bartoli's life of Dante in his Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Firenze,
1878 and subsequent years), and to Scartazzini's Prolegomeni della
Divina Commedia (Leipzig, 1890). The fourteenth century Comments,
especially those of Boccaccio, of Buti, and of Benvenuto da Imola, are
indispensable to one who would understand the poem as it was
understood by Dante's immediate contemporaries and successors. It is
from them and from the Chronicle of Dante's contemporary and
fellow-citizen, Giovanni Villani, that our knowledge concerning many
of the personages mentioned in the Poem is derived.
In respect to the theology and general doctrine of the Poem, the Summa
Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is the main source from which
Dante himself drew.
Of editions of the Divina Commedia in Italian, either that of Andreoli,
or of Bianchi, or of Fraticelli, each in one volume, may be
recommended to the beginner. Scartazzini's edition in three volumes is
the best, in spite of some serious defects, for the deeper student.
HELL.
CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill which he
begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he turns back and is
met by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into the eternal world.
Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within a dark wood,
for the right way had been missed. Ah! how hard a thing it is to tell
what this wild and rough and dense wood was, which in thought
renews the fear! So bitter is it that death is little more. But in order to
treat of the good that there I found, I will tell of the other things that I
have seen there. I cannot well recount how I entered it, so full was I of
slumber at that point where I abandoned the true way. But after I had
arrived at the foot of a hill, where that valley