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

Pompeo should not have forgotten that he, though a Christian, bore a Pagan name, which perhaps is as evident a brutto miscuglio in a learned Jesuit, as any which he has pointed out in Dante.

Upon him and other commentators of the Divine Poem, a very amusing chapter might be written. While the great Comedy is going on upon the scene above, with all its pomp and music, these critics in the pit keep up such a perpetual wrangling among themselves, as seriously to disturb the performance. Biagioli is the most violent of all, particularly against Venturi, whom he calls an “infamous dirty dog,” sozzo can vituperato, an epithet hardly permissible in the most heated literary controversy. Whereupon in return Zani de’ Ferranti calls Biagioli “an inurbane grammarian,” and a “most ungrateful ingrate,”⁠—quel grammatico inurbano⁠ ⁠… ingrato ingratissimo.

Any one who is desirous of tracing out the presence of Paganism in Christianity will find the subject amply discussed by Middleton in his Letter from Rome. ↩

Dryden’s Aeneid, B. VI:⁠—

“His eyes like hollow furnaces on fire.”

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Homer, Iliad, VI:⁠—

“As is the race of leaves, such is that of men; some leaves the wind scatters upon the ground, and others the budding wood produces, for they come again in the season of Spring. So is the race of men, one springs up and the other dies.”

See also Note 51.

Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 160, says:⁠—

“When Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron ‘as dead leaves flutter from a bough,’ he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with the other.”

Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind inverts this image, and compares the dead leaves to ghosts:⁠—

“O wild West Wind! thou breath of Autumn’s being!
Thou from whose presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts, from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes.”

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Dante is borne across the river Acheron in his sleep, he does not tell us how, and awakes on the brink of “the dolorous valley of the abyss.” He now enters the First Circle of the Inferno; the Limbo of the Unbaptized, the border land, as the name denotes.

Frate Alberico in § 2 of his Vision says, that the divine punishments are tempered to extreme youth and old age:⁠—

“Man is first a little child, then grows and reaches adolescence, and attains to youthful vigor; and, little by little growing weaker, declines into old age; and at every step of life the sum of his sins increases. So likewise the little children are punished least, and more and more the adolescents and the youths; until, their sins decreasing with the long-continued torments, punishment also begins to decrease, as it by a kind of old age (veluti quadam senectute).”

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Frate Alberico, in § 9:⁠—

“The darkness was so dense and impenetrable that it was impossible to see anything there.”

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Mental, not physical pain; what the French theologians call la peine du dam, the privation of the sight of God. ↩

Virgil, Aeneid, VI:⁠—

“Forthwith are heard voices, loud wailings, and weeping ghosts of infants, in the first opening of the gate; whom, bereaved of sweet life out of the course of nature, and snatched from the breast, a black day cut off, and buried in an untimely grave.”

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The descent of Christ into Limbo. Neither here nor elsewhere in the Inferno does Dante mention the name of Christ. ↩

The reader will not fail to observe how Dante makes the word honor, in its various forms, ring and reverberate through these lines⁠—orrevol, onori, orranza, onrata, onorata! ↩

Dante puts the sword into the hand of Homer as a symbol of his warlike epic, which is a Song of the Sword. ↩

Upon this line Boccaccio, Comento, says:⁠—

“A proper thing it is to honor every man, but especially those who are of one and the same profession, as these were with Virgil.”

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Another assertion of Dante’s consciousness of his own power as a poet. ↩

This is the Noble Castle of human wit and learning, encircled with its seven scholastic walls, the Trivium, Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Music.

The fair rivulet is Eloquence, which Dante does not seem to consider a very profound matter, as he and Virgil pass over it as if it were dry ground. ↩

Of this word “enamel” Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 227, remarks:⁠—

“The first instance I know of its right use, though very probably it had been so employed before, is in Dante. The righteous spirits of the pre-Christian ages are seen by him, though in the Inferno, yet in a place open, luminous and high, walking upon the ‘green enamel.’

“I am very sure that Dante did not use this phrase as we use it. He knew well what enamel was; and his readers, in order to understand him thoroughly, must remember what it is⁠—a vitreous paste, dissolved in water, mixed with metallic oxides, to give it the opacity and the color required, spread in a moist state on metal, and afterwards hardened by fire, so as never to change. And Dante means, in using this metaphor of the grass of the Inferno, to mark that it is laid as a tempering and cooling substance over the dark, metallic, gloomy ground; but yet so hardened by the fire, that it is not any more fresh or living grass, but a smooth, silent, lifeless bed of eternal green. And we know how