CHAPTER VI.
THE “COMMEDIA”
So many good summaries of the Commedia exist that to give another may appear superfluous. At the same time, experience shows not only that such a summary is found by most readers to be the best of all helps to the study of the poem, but also that every fresh summariser treats it from a somewhat different point of view. It is therefore possible that in the following pages answers, or at least suggestions of answers, may be found to some questions which previous writers, in England at all events, have passed over; and that they may serve in some measure as a supplement to the works which will be mentioned in the appendix.
§ 1. Hell
The first eleven cantos of the Hell form a very distinct subdivision of the poem. They embrace, first, the introduction contained in Canto i.; secondly, the description of the place of punishment up to a point at which a marked change in the character of the sins punished is indicated. In one sense, no doubt, an important stage in the journey is completed when the City of Dis is reached, in Canto viii.; but it will be observed, when we reach that point, that the class of sinners who are met with immediately within the walls of the City, the Epicureans or, as we should now say, the Materialists, bear really a much stronger affinity to those who are outside the walls, those whose sin has been lack of self-restraint in one form or another, than they do to the worse criminals who have “offended of malicious wickedness,” and who lie at and below the foot of the steep guarded by the Minotaur. The former class at all events have been, to use a common phrase, “their own worst enemies;” their sins have not been, at any rate in their essence, like those of the latter, of the kind which break up the fabric of society, and with them the heretics may most naturally be considered. It can hardly be doubted that some such view as this led Dante to make the first great break of level in his scheme of the lower world at a point which would leave the freethinkers and materialists actually nearer to the sinners of whom he holds that their sin “men Dio offende,” even though theological exigencies compel him to place them within the walls of the “red-hot city.” We may thus conveniently take these eleven cantos for consideration as a group by themselves.
In the earlier cantos, as indeed throughout the poem, the main difficulties with which we meet depend far more on interpretation than on the mere “construing” of the words; and even if it were otherwise, all purely linguistic difficulties have been so fully dealt with over and over again in commentaries and translations that it would, as has been said, be quite superfluous to enter here upon any discussion of them. The opening canto, as every reader will at once perceive, is symbolism and allegory from beginning to end, from the “dark wood” in which the action of the poem begins to the “hound” who is to free Italy. These, more especially the latter, have given as much trouble to the interpreter as anything in the whole poem; indeed it may be said that in the matter of the Veltro we have not made much advance on Boccaccio, who frankly admitted that he could not tell what was meant. But between these two points we have some hundred lines in nearly every one of which, beside its obvious and literal interpretation, we must look for all the others enumerated by Dante in the famous passage of his letter to Can Grande. The second canto is of much the same character, in some respects almost in more need of close study. The significance of the three beasts who hinder Dante is easier to make out than that of the three heavenly ladies who assist him. Meantime, if we are content to read the poem as narrative merely, there is no great difficulty to be overcome. The language is straightforward on the whole, almost the only crux being ii. 108, which has not yet been satisfactorily explained, nor is the imagery other than simple.
With Canto iii. and the arrival within the actual portal of Hell (though hardly in Hell properly so called) we enter upon a fresh subdivision of the poem; and are very soon brought up by the first, and one of the most perplexing, of the allusions to contemporary history with which it abounds. The elucidation of these would constantly offer almost hopeless difficulties, were it not for the early commentators, who are often able to explain them from personal knowledge. Now and then, however, it happens that they differ, and then the modern student is at a loss. This has been in some measure the case with the famous “gran rifiuto,” iii. 60; so that while we may with a high degree of probability accept the more usual view that the allusion is to the abdication of Celestine V., we cannot without further evidence feel so certain about it as we could wish. The whole conception of this canto seems to be due to Dante’s own invention; only to a nature like his, keenly alive to the eternal distinction between right and wrong, and burning with zeal in the cause of right, could it have occurred to mark off for special ignominy people whose sole fault seems to have been that they “took things too easily.” When, in Canto iv., we pass the river of Acheron, and find ourselves for the first time actually on the border of Hell itself, we are conscious at first of an alleviation. Melancholy there is, but it is a dignified melancholy, as different from the sordid misery of the wretches we have just left, as the “noble city” and the green sward enclosed by it are different from the murky air and the foul mud among which they have to dwell. Both in this and in the second circle we have punishment indeed but without degradation, even with some mitigation. Virgil at least enjoys the converse of the sages and great men of old and, in so far as non-Christians go, of recent times; while Francesca is solaced by the perpetual companionship of him for whose sake she has lost her soul. Even the penalty which she suffers, of being whirled for ever on the storm, is not exactly humiliating. From this point, however, we are conscious of a change. The gluttons seated or lying on putrid earth and exposed to lashing rain; the misusers of wealth, with all human lineaments effaced, and engaged in a foolish and wearisome scuffle; the ill-tempered, floating on the surface of the foul marsh of Styx or lying submerged in it according as their disposition was to fierce wrath or sullen brooding – all these are not merely tormented but degraded as well.
After crossing the Styx (Canto viii.) we find a further change. Thus far the sins punished have differed only in degree from those which we shall find being expiated in Purgatory. They are indeed the simpler forms, so to speak, of the defects common to all animal nature. They are the same which, in one of their interpretations, the three symbolical beasts of Canto i. denote. Henceforth we find sins which are only possible to the higher intelligence of humanity. It will be observed, too, that at this point what may be called pictorial description begins. Hitherto we have had merely a general impression of murky air and miry soil, sloping perhaps a little toward the centre, and intersected now and again by a stream. Now the City of Dis with minarets and towers rises in front of us, and, as we shall see in future cantos, from this time onwards the character of the scenery is indicated with great preciseness, even to its smallest details. Here, too, actual devils, beings whose will, as Aquinas says, is obstinately set upon evil, appear for the first time, as distinct from the personages of classical mythology, who act as warders of the various circles. Virgil, or human reason, is no longer sufficient of himself to secure a passage. Both at the gates of the fiery city and on subsequent occasions he is as helpless, without superior aid, as his disciple and follower.
The ninth canto contains a piece of allegory, that involved in the introduction of Medusa and the Furies, which has earned perhaps a greater reputation for obscurity than it deserves, from the fact that Dante himself calls special attention to it.
Cantos x. and xi. are both very important, the former for its bearing on the history of Florence. Those who have read the sketch of that history in the preceding chapters will understand the full force of Farinata’s discourse with Dante. We have had a brief passage of the same kind in Canto vi., but here the subject is treated at greater length, and with some marvellous dramatic touches.
Canto xi. must be thoroughly mastered if Dante’s scheme of ethics is to be understood. It forms, indeed, a summary of and key to the arrangement of the penalties, and a thorough comprehension and retention of it in the memory will be found a wonderful help to a recollection of the whole Cantica.
At the conclusion of the discourse in which Dante, speaking by the mouth of Virgil, has set forth this ethical system, the poets move forward along the brink of the pit until they arrive at a spot where they can reach the lower level. The descent is rendered possible by a steep and broken slope of loose rock, which Dante compares to the great landslip between Trent and Verona, known as the Slavino di Marco.28 Virgil explains that this was due to the “rending of the rocks” at the time of the Crucifixion. The descent is guarded by the legendary Minotaur, the Cretan monster, part bull, part man. In this connection it may be noticed that the beings suggested by classical mythology, who are met with in the division of Hell which lies between the wall of the City of Dis and the brink of Malebolge, the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies, and Geryon (as Dante conceives him), all belong to the semi-bestial class. In spite of the opinion held by some of the most eminent Dante-scholars, that Dante in his classification of sins does not follow Aristotle’s grouping of them into incontinent, malicious, and brutal, but recognises the first two only, it seems difficult not to see in this, especially when it is taken in connection with expressions scattered throughout his writings, an indication that in the sins of the seventh circle he found the equivalent of the Greek philosopher’s θηριότης – the result of giving a free range to the brutal, as distinct from the common animal, impulses.
In this seventh circle, too, we first meet with fire as an instrument of Divine wrath. Indeed, with the single exception of the suicides, for whom a specially significant chastisement is devised, all the sinners in this group, from the heretics in their red-hot tombs to the usurers tormented on one side by the fiery rain, and on the other by the exhalations from the deeper pit, are punished by means of heat. At the foot of the slope is a great circular plain, ringed with a river of boiling blood in which spoilers, robbers, and murderers, some famous, some obscure, are plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter de Vineis, Dante learns that at the judgement they will recover their bodies, like others, but will not be allowed to reassume them. The body will be hung on the tree to which it belongs. Here, as in the case of the avaricious and the wrathful, the spirits of other sinners take a part in the infliction of the punishment. The wood is inhabited by the souls of those who had wasted their substance in life, and these are constantly chased through it by hounds, with much destruction of leaves and twigs.
On issuing from the wood (Canto xiv.), they find themselves at the edge of a great circular plain of sand, upon which flakes of fire are ceaselessly dropping. Skirting the wood for some distance they reach the bank of the stream of blood which, having circled all round the outer margin of the wood, now comes flowing through it, and crosses the sandy plain in a channel carefully built of shaped stone. Virgil takes occasion to explain the origin of the rivers of Hell. Thick fumes rise from it which quench the falling flames, so that along its bank, and there only, can a way be found. As they proceed they find sinners lying prone or running under the fiery shower. These are they who had done violence to God, either directly by open blasphemy, or indirectly by violating the divinely appointed natural order whereby both the race of mankind and its possessions should increase and multiply. Many famous Florentines are among these sinners (Cantos xv. and xvi.); and Dante talks long with the famous statesman and philosopher, Brunetto Latini, who had been his early friend and adviser, and with sundry great captains and men of renown. After this they reach the point where the river falls with a mighty roar down to the next level. There is no natural means of descent here available; and Dante hands to Virgil a cord with which he is girt. The meaning of this cord is very obscure. He says: “I once thought to capture the leopard with it;” and if the leopard denotes the factions of Florence, the cord may perhaps symbolise justice or equity. When Virgil has thrown it down they wait a short time, and presently a monster appears whose name we find to be Geryon, and who symbolises fraud or treachery. It is perhaps not unnatural that when the power to enforce justice has been cast away, treachery should raise its head. This monster draws near the brink (Canto xvii.), but before they mount on him, Virgil allows Dante to walk a few paces to the right, in order that he may take note of the last class of “violent” sinners, namely, the usurers. These hold an intermediate position between the violent and the treacherous; just as the heretics did between the incontinent and the violent. Here again are many Florentines. Like the other misusers of money in Canto vii. their features are unrecognisable, and they are only to be known by the arms embroidered on their money bags. After hearing a few words from one of them, Dante returns to Virgil, and both take their place on the croup of Geryon, who bears them downwards to the eighth circle. This (Canto xviii.), from its configuration, is known as Malebolge, or Evilpits. It is divided into ten concentric rings, or circular trenches, separated by a tract of rocky ground. From various indications we gather that each trench is half a mile across, and the intervening ground a mile and a quarter. The trenches are spanned by rocky ribs, forming bridges by which the central cavity can be reached. Here we find for the first time devils, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, employed as tormentors. The sinners in this circle are those who have been guilty in any way of leading others into sin, deceiving or cheating them, without any aggravating circumstances of ingratitude or breach of natural ties. In the first pit are those who have led women astray; these are scourged by fiends. In the next lie flatterers immersed in the most loathsome filth. In each Dante notes two examples: one of recent times – indeed, in both cases an acquaintance of his own, – and one taken from ancient history or legend. Jason, for his desertion of Hypsipyle and Medea, is the classical example of the first offence. Of this use of mythological persons we have many examples, but the typical flatterer of old time is a more curious selection, being a character in a play, whom Dante has borrowed from Cicero.
In the next, or third pit (Canto xix.), we again find fire as the instrument with which the sinners are punished. Those who have made money by misuse of sacred offices are buried head downwards in holes with their feet projecting, and fire plays about their soles. Naturally an opportunity is here presented for some strong invective against the recent unworthy occupants of the See of Rome.
Canto xx. brings us to the fourth pit, in which those who have professed to foretell the future march in a dismal procession with their heads turned round so that they look down their own backs. The sight of Manto, daughter of Tiresias, suggests a description of the origin of the city of Mantua. The last lines of this canto contain one of the most important indications of time which Dante gives in this part of the poem.
The sinners of the fifth pit correspond in some degree with those of the third, except that in their case the traffic which is punished has to do with secular offices. Canto xxi. opens with the famous description of the work in the arsenal of Venice, which is introduced in order to afford an image of the boiling pitch in which sinners of this class are immersed. For some reason, which is not very clear, Dante devotes two whole cantos to this subdivision of the subject. There is no doubt that baratteria, peculation or jobbery, was rampant throughout Southern Europe at the time, and, as has been said, it was one of the charges brought against the poet himself at the time of his banishment.29 We find here again one of “the torments of heat;” with one exception, that of the evil counsellors in Canto xxv., the last instance in which heat plays a part. It would be interesting, by comparison of the various sins into the punishment of which it enters, to see if any ground can be suggested for its employment in their case.
Cantos xxi. and xxii. are also noteworthy as bringing into prominence the agency of devils, and showing them actually at work. Ten are introduced and named; and some indication is given of their organisation. Dante’s skill is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the way in which he has surmounted the difficulty of depicting beings in whom there is no touch of any good quality. They are plausible; and their leader, Malacoda, appears at first sight almost friendly. It is not until later that his apparent friendliness turns out to be a deliberate attempt to mislead.
At the opening of Canto xxiii. we find the poets exactly half-way through Malebolge, on the rocky table-land, so to call it, which separates the fifth and sixth pits. They are quite solitary, for the first time in the course of their journey out of sight and hearing of any other beings; but still in fear of pursuit from the fiends whom they have just left. These do not, however, come up until just as the poets have begun the descent into the sixth pit, and here their power is at an end.
In this pit are punished the hypocrites, who go in slow procession clad in cowls of gilded lead. Contrary to the usual practice the poets have in this case to descend to the bottom of the pit, the bridges being all broken away. Malacoda, the leader of the fiends in the last bolgia, had mentioned one, but (falsely) assured them that they would find a sound one further on. He also informed them that the destruction of the bridges had taken place 1266 years ago on the previous day, but five hours later than the time of speaking. This gives an important “time-reference.” There can be no doubt that the allusion is to the rending of the rocks at the moment of Our Lord’s death (cf. xii. 31-45), which took place at 3 p. m., so that we have 10 a. m. on Easter Eve fixed as the hour at which the poets meet with the devils of the fifth pit. Among the hypocrites Dante talks with two men who had jointly held the office of Podestà, or chief magistrate, at Florence in the year after his birth.30 They belonged to opposite parties, and the double appointment had been one of the many expedients devised to restore peace; but it had not answered, and the two were suspected of having sunk their own differences of opinion, not to conciliate the factions, but to enrich themselves at the expense of the State. While talking to them Dante sees a figure fastened to the ground with three stakes, as though crucified. This, it is explained, is Caiaphas; Annas being similarly placed at another point of the circle. Dante and Virgil have to leave this pit as they entered it, by climbing over the rocks (Canto xxiv.); and from the minuteness with which this process is described (even to so characteristic a touch as “I talked as I went, to show that my wind was good,”) it has been thought that Dante was not without experience in mountain-craft.
The seventh pit is appointed for the punishment of thieves. Serpents and dragons are here introduced. In some cases the body is reduced to ashes in consequence of the bite, and presently recovers its shape; in others man and serpent blend; in others, again, they exchange natures, the sinners themselves being transmuted into the reptiles, and becoming the instruments of torment to their fellows. A kind of reckless and brutal joviality seems to characterise the malefactors whom we meet with in this region. Among them are many Florentines, a fact which prompts Dante to an apostrophe full of bitter irony, with which Canto xxvi. opens. In the following pit a curious change of tone is manifest. The image chosen to illustrate the scene is an agreeable one – fireflies flitting in summer about a mountain valley; and the punishment though terrible is in no way loathsome or degrading, like most of those which have hitherto been described in the present circle. The sinners, too, who are mentioned are men who on earth had played heroic parts; the manner of their speech is dignified, and Dante treats them with respect. They are those who have sinned by giving wicked counsel to others, and so leading them to commit sin; and the two who are especially distinguished and who relate their stories at length are Ulysses (Canto xxvi.) and Count Guy of Montefeltro, a great Ghibeline leader (xxvii.). The former probably owes his place here to Virgil’s epithet scelerum inventor, deviser of crimes. In a passage which has deservedly become famous, he gratifies Dante’s curiosity as to the manner of his end. The passage, apart from its poetic beauty, is remarkable as being, so far as can be traced, due entirely to the poet’s own invention. At all events, beyond two or three words in the Odyssey, nothing in either classical or mediæval legend is known which can have given the suggestion for it. In the case of the Count of Montefeltro, who is alleged to have given treacherous counsel to Boniface VIII., it also appears difficult to understand how the facts, if facts they are, became known to Dante. Villani no doubt gives the story, but in language so similar to that of the poem that a suspicion arises whether he may not be relying on it as his authority.
The next canto (xxviii.) introduces us to one of Dante’s most ghastly conceptions. The ninth pit is peopled by those who have on earth caused strife and divisions among mankind. They are not, as often stated, schismatics in the technical sense of the word. Mahommed and Ali are there, obviously not on religious grounds however, but as having brought about a great breach between divisions of the human race; and though Fra Dolcino, who is introduced as it were by anticipation, was a religious schismatic, it was no doubt his social heterodoxy which earned him a commemoration in this place. The punishment of these sinners is appropriate. They are constantly being slashed to pieces by demons; the wounds being closed again before they complete the circuit. Curio, who as Lucan narrates, spoke the words which finally decided Cæsar to enter upon civil war, Mosca de’ Lamberti, the instigator of the crime which first imported especial bitterness into the strife of factions at Florence, and one Peter of Medicina, who seems to have devoted himself to keeping party-spirit alive in Romagna, are here. Last of all, carrying his own head like a lantern, is Bertrand of Born, the famous troubadour, who is charged with having promoted the quarrel between Henry II. of England and his son. It is worth noting that at this point we get the first definite indication of the dimensions which Dante assumes for the present division of Hell. We are told that this ninth pit of Malebolge has a circumference of twenty-two miles. From the next canto we learn that the last or innermost pit has half this measure; and from this basis it has been found possible to draw an accurate plan of Malebolge, and to conjecture, with an approach to certainty, the conception formed by Dante of Hell generally.31
In the last pit (Cantos xxix. and xxx.) are found those who have been guilty of personation with criminal intent, or of bearing false witness, or of debasing the coinage or pretending to transmute metals. These suffer from leprosy, dropsy, raving madness, and other diseases. Before leaving the pit, a quarrel between two of the sinners attracts Dante’s attention more than Virgil thinks seemly; and a sharp reprimand follows. Dante’s penitence however earns speedy forgiveness.
We are now drawing near the lowest pit; and through the dim air is heard the sound of a great horn (Canto xxxi.) Going forward, they find that the final descent, which appears to be a sheer drop of about thirty-five feet, is guarded by a ring of giants. Those of them who are seen are Nimrod, and the classical Ephialtes and Antæus; but we learn that others famous in Greek mythology are there also. Antæus being addressed by Virgil in courteous words, lifts the poets down the wall and lands them on the lowest floor of Hell. This (Canto xxxii.) is of ice, and must be conceived as a circular plain, perhaps about two miles in diameter. In this are punished all who have been guilty of any treachery towards those to whom they were bound by special ties of kindred, fellow-citizenship, friendship, or gratitude. Each of these various grades of crime has its own division, and these are arranged concentrically, with no very definite boundaries between the different classes. At the same time each division has its appropriate name, formed from some famous malefactor who had specially exemplified that class of crime. Thus the first ring is Caina; the second, Antenora, from Antenor, who, according to a late version of the Trojan legend, had betrayed Troy to the Greeks; the third, Toommea, from that Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who treacherously slew the Maccabees at a feast; the last, in which Lucifer himself abides, is Giudecca. No distinction appears to exist between the penalties inflicted on the two first classes; all are alike plunged up to the shoulders in the ice, the head being free. Dante speaks with more than one, most of them persons who had belonged to the Ghibeline party; though in the case of one, Bocca degli Abati, the treachery had been committed to the detriment of the Guelfs.32 The mention of Bocca and Dante’s behaviour to him, may remind us that the whole question of Dante’s demeanour towards the persons whom he meets in the first part of the poem is interesting. For some he is full of pity, towards some he is even respectful; occasionally he is neutral; while in some cases he displays anger and scorn, amounting as here to positive cruelty. The expressions of pity, it will be observed, practically cease from the moment that Malebolge, the “nethermost Hell,” is reached. Similarly, after reaching the City of Dis, the tone of Virgil towards the guardians of the damned, which up to that point has been peremptory, becomes almost suppliant. The reason for this is indeed somewhat obscure: one does not at once see why the formula “So it is willed there, where will is power,” should not be as good for the Furies or for Malacoda as it has proved for Charon and Minos. Perhaps the clue is to be found in the fact that the sins punished inside the walls of the city (sins which, it will be seen, are not represented in Purgatory at all) are to be regarded as the result of a will obstinately set against the will of God; while the sins arising from the frailty of human nature may be checked by the “right judgement” recalling, before it is too late, what the will of God is. This, however, is a different question, and we must not here pursue it too far. To revert to that of Dante’s various demeanour, it will be seen that, with the limitation indicated above, his sympathy with the sinner does not vary with the comparative heinousness of the sin. Almost his bitterest scorn, indeed, is directed towards some whose chief sin is lack of any positive qualities, good or bad. One infers that he would almost rather wander in a flame with Ulysses, or lie in the ice with Ugolino, than undergo the milder punishment of Celestine and his ignoble companions. For the simply self-indulgent, Francesca or Ciacco, he has pity in abundance; Farinata, Brunetto, and the other famous men who share the fates of these, may probably come into the same category. In such cases as these, while he has not a word to say against the justice of God, he has no desire to add “the wrath of man” thereto. In the one instance in Malebolge where he shows any sympathy (and is reproved by Virgil for doing so) it is for the soothsayers, whose sin would not necessarily involve the hurt of others. But his conduct is very different to those whose sin has been primarily against their fellow-man, or against kindly human intercourse. His first fierce outbreak is against the swaggering ruffian Filippo Argenti, who seems to have been in Florentine society the most notable example of a class now happily extinct in civilised countries, at all events among adults; a kind of bully, or “Mohock,” fond of rough practical jokes, prompted, not by a misguided sense of humour, but by an irritable man’s delight in venting his spite. One can sympathise, even after six hundred years, in Dante’s pious satisfaction when he saw the man, of whom he may himself have once gone in bodily fear, become in his turn the object of persecution. It is, however, after Malebolge is reached, and Dante is among the sinners who have by dishonest practices weakened the bond of confidence which should bind human society together, that he lets his wrath and scorn have full play. His imagery even takes on a grotesque, at times even a foul aspect. He was not one to mince his words, and if he means to sicken his readers, he goes straight to his aim.