Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845

"Per me si va nella città dolente;
Per me si va nell' eterno dolore;
Per me si va tra la perduta gente:
Giustizia mosse 'l mio alto Fattore;
Fecemi la divina Potestate,
La somma Sapienza e 'l primo Amore.
Dinanzi a me non fur cose create,
Se non eterne; ed io eterno duro:
Lasciate ogni speranza voi che 'ntrate."

    Inferno, c. iii.
"Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

    Cary's Dante, Inferno, c. iii.
Dante had much more profound feelings than Homer, and therefore he has painted deep mysteries of the human heart with greater force and fidelity. The more advanced age of the world, the influence of spiritual faith, the awful anticipation of judgment to come, the inmost feelings which, during long centuries of seclusion, had been drawn forth in the cloister, the protracted sufferings of the dark ages, had laid bare the human heart. Its sufferings, its terrors, its hopes, its joys, had become as household words. The Italian poet shared, as all do, in the ideas and images of his age, and to these he added many which were entirely his own. He painted the inward man, and painted him from his own feelings, not the observation of others. That is the grand distinction between him and Homer; and that it is which has given him, in the delineation of mind, his great superiority. The Grecian bard was an incomparable observer; he had an inexhaustible imagination for fiction, as well as a graphic eye for the delineation of real life; but he had not a deep or feeling heart. He did not know it, like Dante and Shakspeare, from his own suffering. He painted the external symptoms of passion and emotion with the hand of a master; but he did not reach the inward spring of feeling. He lets us into his characters by their speeches, their gestures, their actions, and keeps up their consistency with admirable fidelity; but he does not, by a word, an expression, or an epithet, admit us into the inmost folds of the heart. None can do so but such as themselves feel warmly and profoundly, and paint passion, emotion, or suffering from their own experience, not the observation of others. Dante has acquired his colossal fame from the matchless force with which he has portrayed the wildest passions, the deepest feelings, the most intense sufferings of the heart. He is the refuge of all those who labour and are heavy laden — of all who feel profoundly or have suffered deeply. His verses are in the mouth of all who are torn by passion, gnawed by remorse, or tormented by apprehension; and how many are they in this scene of woe!

A distinguished modern critic[2 - Macaulay.] has said, that he who would now become a great poet must first become a little child. There is no doubt he is right. The seen and unseen fetters of civilization; the multitude of old ideas afloat in the world; the innumerable worn-out channels into which new ones are ever apt to flow; the general clamour with which critics, nursed amidst such fetters, receive any attempts at breaking them; the prevalence, in a wealthy and highly civilized age, of worldly or selfish ideas; the common approximation of characters by perpetual intercourse, as of coins, by continual rubbing in passing from man to man, have taken away all freshness and originality from ideas. The learned, the polished, the highly educated, can hardly escape the fetters which former greatness throws over the soul. Milton could not avoid them: half the images in his poems are taken from Homer, Virgil, and Dante; and who dare hope for emancipation when Milton was enthralled? The mechanical arts increase in perfection as society advances. Science ever takes its renewed flights from the platform which former efforts have erected. Industry, guided by experience, in successive ages, brings to the highest point all the contrivances and inventions which minister to the comfort or elegances of life. But it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the progress of society, as much as science and the arts rise. The country of Homer and Æschylus sank for a thousand years into the torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of conception is its life: like the flame, it burns fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that polluted by many breaths.

It was the resurrection of the human mind, after the seclusion and solitary reflection of the middle ages, which gave this vein of original ideas to Dante, as their first wakening had given to Homer. Thought was not extinct; the human mind was not dormant during the dark ages; far from it — it never, in some respects, was more active. It was the first collision of their deep and lonely meditations with the works of the great ancient poets, which occasioned the prodigy. Universally it will be found to be the same. After the first flights of genius have been taken, it is by the collision of subsequent thought with it that the divine spark is again elicited. The meeting of two great minds is necessary to beget fresh ideas, as that of two clouds is to bring forth lightning, or the collision of flint and steel to produce fire. Johnson said he could not get new ideas till he had read. He was right; though it is not one in a thousand who strikes out original thoughts from studying the works of others. The great sage did not read to imbibe the opinions of others, but to engender new ones for himself; he did not study to imitate, but to create. It was the same with Dante; it is the same with every really great man. His was the first powerful and original mind which, fraught with the profound and gloomy ideas nourished in seclusion during the middle ages, came into contact with the brilliant imagery, touching pathos, and harmonious language of the ancients. Hence his astonishing greatness. He almost worshipped Virgil, he speaks of him as a species of god; he mentions Homer as the first of poets. But he did not copy either the one or the other; he scarcely imitated them. He strove to rival their brevity and beauty of expression; but he did so in giving vent to new ideas, in painting new images, in awakening new emotions. The Inferno is as original as the Iliad; incomparably more so than the Æneid. The offspring of originality with originality is a new and noble creation; of originality with mediocrity, a spurious and degraded imitation.

Dante paints the spirits of all the generations of men, each in their circle undergoing their allotted punishment; expiating by suffering the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness amidst the eternal recurrence of crime and punishment. But the genius of Dante was equal to the task. His fancy was prodigious; his invention boundless; his imagination inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was, within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature of his subject, his creative spirit equals that of Homer himself. He has given birth to as many new ideas in the Inferno and the Paradiso, as the Grecian bard in the Iliad and Odyssey.

Though he had reflected so much and so deeply on the human heart, and was so perfect a master of all the anatomy of mental suffering, Dante's mind was essentially descriptive. He was a great painter as well as a profound thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb of the senses; he conceived a vast brood of new ideas, he arrayed them in a surprising manner in flesh and blood. He is ever clear and definite, at least in the Inferno. He exhibits in every canto of that wonderful poem a fresh image, but it is a clear one, of horror or anguish, which leaves nothing to the imagination to add or conceive. His ideal characters are real persons; they are present to our senses; we feel their flesh, see the quivering of their limbs, hear their lamentations, and feel a thrill of joy at their felicity. In the Paradiso he is more vague and general, and thence its acknowledged inferiority to the Inferno. But the images of horror are much more powerful than those of happiness; and it is they which have entranced the world. "It is easier," says Madame de Staël, "to convey ideas of suffering than those of happiness; for the former are too well known to every heart, the latter only to a few."

The melancholy tone which pervades Dante's writings was doubtless, in a great measure, owing to the misfortunes of his life; and to them we are also indebted for many of the most caustic and powerful of his verses — perhaps for the design of the Inferno itself. He took vengeance on the generation which had persecuted and exiled him, by exhibiting its leaders suffering in the torments of hell. In his long seclusion, chiefly in the monastery of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, a wild and solitary retreat in the territory of Gubbio, and in a tower belonging to the Conte Falcucci, in the same district, his immortal work was written. The mortifications he underwent during this long and dismal exile are thus described by himself: — "Wandering over almost every part in which our language extends, I have gone about like a mendicant; showing against my will the wound with which fortune has smitten me, and which is often falsely imputed to the demerit of him by whom it is endured. I have been, indeed, a vessel without sail or steerage, carried about to divers ports, and roads, and shores, by the dry wind that springs out of sad poverty."

In the third circle of hell, Dante sees those who are punished by the plague of burning sand falling perpetually on them. Their torments are thus described —

"Supin giaceva in terra alcuna gente;
Alcuna si sedea tutta raccolta;
Ed altra andava continuamente.
Quella che giva intorno era più molta;
E quella men che giaceva al tormento;
Ma più al duolo avea la lingua sciolta.
Sovra tutto 'l sabbion d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde,
Come di neve in alpe senza vento.
Quali Alessandro in quelle parti calde
D' India vide sovra lo suo stuolo
Fiamme cadere infino a terra salde."

    Inferno, c. xiv.
"Of naked spirits many a flock I saw,
All weeping piteously, to different laws
Subjected: for on earth some lay supine,
Some crouching close were seated, others paced
Incessantly around; the latter tribe
More numerous, those fewer who beneath
The torment lay, but louder in their grief.
O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down
Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow
On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd.
As, in the torrid Indian clime, the son
Of Ammon saw, upon his warrior band
Descending, solid flames, that to the ground
Came down."

    Cary's Dante, c. xiv.
The first appearance of Malebolge is described in these striking lines —

"Luogo è in Inferno, detto Malebolge,
Tutto di pietra e di color ferrigno,
Come la cerchia che d'intorno il volge.
Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno
Vaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo,
Di cui suo luogo conterà l' ordigno.
Quel cinghio che rimane adunque è tondo
Tra 'l pozzo e 'l piè dell' alta ripa dura,
E ha distinto in dieci valli al fondo."

    Inferno, c. xviii.
"There is a place within the depths of hell
Call'd Malebolge, all of rock dark-stain'd
With hue ferruginous, e'en as the steep
That round it circling winds. Right in the midst
Of that abominable region yawns
A spacious gulf profound, whereof the frame
Due time shall tell. The circle, that remains,
Throughout its round, between the gulf and base
Of the high craggy banks, successive forms
Ten bastions, in its hollow bottom raised."

    Cary's Dante, c. xviii.
This is the outward appearance of Malebolge, the worst place of punishment in hell. It had many frightful abysses; what follows is the picture of the first: —

"Ristemmo per veder l'altra fessura
Di Malebolge e gli altri pianti vani:
E vidila mirabilmente oscura.
Quale nell' arzana de' Veneziani
Bolle l' inverno la tenace pece,
A rimpalmar li legni lor non sani —