The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

or Bruges against the sea, or those in Lombardy which bank the Brenta, only ‘not so high, nor so wide,’ as any of these. And besides the trenches, we have two well-built castles; one like Ecbatana, with seven circuits of wall (and surrounded by a fair stream), wherein the great poets and sages of antiquity live; and another, a great fortified city with walls of iron, red-hot, and a deep fosse round it, and full of ‘grave citizens,’⁠—the city of Dis.

“Now, whether this be in what we moderns call ‘good taste,’ or not, I do not mean just now to inquire⁠—Dante having nothing to do with taste, but with the facts of what he had seen; only, so far as the imaginative faculty of the two poets is concerned, note that Milton’s vagueness is not the sign of imagination, but of its absence, so far as it is significative in the matter. For it does not follow, because Milton did not map out his Inferno as Dante did, that he could not have done so if he had chosen; only it was the easier and less imaginative process to leave it vague than to define it. Imagination is always the seeing and asserting faculty; that which obscures or conceals may be judgment, or feeling, but not invention. The invention, whether good or bad, is in the accurate engineering, not in the fog and uncertainty.”

↩

Aristotle says: “The good of the intellect is the highest beatitude”; and Dante in the Convito: “The True is the good of the intellect.” In other words, the knowledge of God is intellectual good.

“It is a most just punishment,” says St. Augustine, “that man should lose that freedom which man could not use, yet had power to keep, if he would, and that he who had knowledge to do what was right, and did not do it, should be deprived of the knowledge of what was right; and that he who would not do righteously, when he had the power, should lose the power to do it when he had the will.” ↩

The description given of the Mouth of Hell by Frate Alberico, Vision, 9, is in the grotesque spirit of the Medieval Mysteries:⁠—

“After all these things, I was led to the Tartarean Regions, and to the mouth of the Infernal Pit, which seemed like unto a well; regions full of horrid darkness, of fetid exhalations, of shrieks and loud howlings. Near this Hell there was a Worm of immeasurable size, bound with a huge chain, one end of which seemed to be fastened in Hell. Before the mouth of this Hell there stood a great multitude of souls, which he absorbed at once, as if they were flies; so that, drawing in his breath, he swallowed them all together; then, breathing, exhaled them all on fire, like sparks.”

↩

The reader will here be reminded of Bunyan’s town of Fair-speech:⁠—

“Christian. Pray who are your kindred there, if a man may be so bold.

“By-ends. Almost the whole town; and in particular my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, my Lord Fair-speech, from whose ancestors that town first took its name; also Mr. Smooth-man, Mr., Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything⁠—and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-tongues, was my mother’s own brother by father’s side.⁠ ⁠…

“There Christian stepped a little aside to his fellow Hopeful, saying, ‘It runs in my mind that this is one By-ends of Fair-speech; and if it be he, we have as very a knave in our company as dwelleth in all these parts.’ ”

↩

Many commentators and translators interpret alcuna in its usual signification of some: “For some glory the damned would have from them.” This would be a reason why these pusillanimous ghosts should not be sent into the profounder abyss, but no reason why they should not be received there. This is strengthened by what comes afterwards, I 63. These souls were “hateful to God, and to his enemies.” They were not good enough for Heaven, nor bad enough for Hell.

“So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

—⁠Revelation 3:16.

Macchiavelli represents this scorn of inefficient mediocrity in an epigram on Peter Soderini:⁠—

“The night that Peter Soderini died
He at the mouth of Hell himself presented.
‘What, you come into Hell? poor ghost demented,
Go to the Babies’ Limbo!’ Pluto cried.”

The same idea is intensified in the old ballad of “Carle of Kelly-Burn Brees,” Cromek, p. 37:⁠—

“She’s nae fit for heaven, an’ she’ll ruin a’ hell.”

↩

This restless flag is an emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of its followers. ↩

Generally supposed to be Pope Celestine V whose great refusal, or abdication, of the papal office is thus described by Boccaccio in his Comento:⁠—

“Being a simple man and of a holy life, living as a hermit in the mountains of Morrone in Abruzzo, above Selmona, he was elected Pope in Perugia after the death of Pope Niccola d’ Ascoli; and his name being Peter, he was called Celestine. Considering his simplicity. Cardinal Messer Benedetto Gatano, a very cunning man, of great courage and desirous of being Pope, managing astutely, began to show him that he held this high office much to the prejudice of his own soul, inasmuch as he did not feel himself competent for it;⁠—others pretend that he contrived with some private servants of his to have voices heard in the chamber of the aforesaid Pope, which, as if they were voices of angels sent from heaven, said, ‘Resign, Celestine! Resign, Celestine!’⁠—moved by which, and being an idiotic man, he took counsel with Messer Benedetto aforesaid, as to the best method of resigning.”

Celestine having relinquished the papal office, this “Messer Benedetto aforesaid” was elected Pope, under the title of Boniface VIII. His greatest misfortune was that he had Dante for an adversary.

Gower gives this legend of Pope Celestine in his