Philip H. Wicksteed

“ Through all these circles Dante passes under Virgil's guidance. He sees and minutely describes the varying tortures apportioned to the varying guilt of the damned, and converses with the souls of many illustrious dead in torment.
And is this the poem that has enthralled and still enthrals so many a heart? Are we to look for the strengthening, purifying, and uplifting of our lives, are we to look for the very soul of poetry in an almost unbroken series of descriptions, unequalled in their terrible vividness, of ghastly tortures, interspersed with tales of shame, of guilt, of misery? ”

“ A perfect artist, guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest philosophical analysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love, a poet's might and subtlety of imagination—Philosopher, Prophet, Poet, supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all—such was Dante Alighieri! ”

“ Dante stamps and brands upon our hearts as we descend with him towards the central depths, stamps and brands upon our hearts till the pity, the loathing, the horror can endure no more;—then in the very depth of Hell, at the core of the Universe, with one mighty strain that leaves us well-nigh spent, we turn upon that central point, and, leaving Hell beneath our feet, ascend by the narrow path at the antipodes.
With the horror and the burden of the starless land far off, we lift up our eyes again to see the stars, and our souls are ready for the purifying sufferings of Purgatory. ”

“ But amidst all these perplexities one supreme fact stands out to Dante's mind: that, placed as we are on earth amidst the mysterious possibilities of good and evil, we are endowed with a genuine power of self-directed choice between them. The fullness of God's grace is freely offered to us all, the life eternal of obedience, of self-surrender, of love, tending ever to the fuller and yet fuller harmony of united will and purpose, of mutually blessed and blessing offices of affection, of growing joy in all the supporting and surrounding creation, of growing repose in the might and love of God. ”

“ For, as we have seen, in the very blessedness of Heaven there are grades, and the soul which has once been stained with sin or tainted with selfish and worldly passion, can never be as though it had been always pure. Yet the torturing sense of unworthiness is gone, the unrest of a past that thwarts the present is no more; the souls have cast off the burden of their sin, and are at perfect peace with God and with themselves.
Sin, repentance, holiness, confronted with the Eternal Justice—what they are and what they deserve—such is the subject of Dante Alighieri's Comedy. ”

“ When thou didst sing, "The season is renewed, justice returns, and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from Heaven," thou wast as one who, marching through the darkness of the night, carries the light behind him, aiding not himself, but teaching those who follow him the way. Through thee was I a poet, and through thee a Christian.' Not a shade of envy, not a thought of resentment or rebellion, passes over Virgil's heart as he hears that while saving others he could not save himself. ”

“ Dante must now have been engaged in writing the Paradise. Amongst the sufferings and burdens which were fast drawing him to the grave, amongst the agonies of indignation, of regret, of hope, of disappointment which still wracked his soul, the deep peace of God had come upon him; beneath a storm of passion at which our hearts quail was a calm of trustful self-surrender which no earthly power could disturb; for the harmonies of Paradise swelled in the poet's heart and sought for utterance in these last years. ”

“ For any glory that the damned might gain!
No fame of them survives upon the earth, Pity and Justice hold them in disdain, their cries of passion and of woe are ever whirled through the starless air, and their forgotten lot appears to them so base that they envy the very torments of the damned. 'Let us not speak of them,' says Virgil to Dante, 'but gaze and pass them by.' [11]
So Dante shrank not from his task when called to public office, but laid his strong hand upon the helm of Florence. ”

“ Alas! how often our weaker faith fails in its lighter task, how often do we speak of sin and misery as though they were discoveries of yesterday that had brought new trials to our faith, unknown before; how often do we feel it hard to say even of earth what Dante in the might of his unshaken faith could say of Hell itself—that it is made by Power, Wisdom, Love! ”

“ Barely to realise what it was that Dante attempted, wakes feelings in our hearts akin to awe. When we think of that work and of the man who, knowing what it was, deliberately set himself to do it, an appalling sense of the presence of overwhelming grandeur falls upon us, as when a great wall of rocky precipice rises sheer at our side, a thousand and yet a thousand feet towards heaven. Our heads swim as we gaze up to the sky-line of such a precipice, the ground seems to drop from beneath our feet, all our past and present becomes a dream, and our very hold of life seems to slip away from us. ”

“ Have five and a half centuries of progress outgrown the poem, or are Dante's still the mightiest and most living words in which man has ever painted in detail the true deserts of sin, of penitence, of sanctity? The growing mind of man has burst the shell of Dante's mediæval creed. Is his portrayal of the true conditions of blessedness as antiquated as his philosophy, [Pg 158] his religion as strange to modern thought as his theology? Or has he still a power, wielded by no other poet, of taking us into the very presence of God and tuning our hearts to the harmonies of Heaven? ”

“ At one moment indignation and reproof are all swallowed up in pity, and the suffering of the exiled soul only serves to quicken an infinite compassion in our hearts, a compassion not so much for the punishment of sin as for sin itself with its woeful loss and waste of the blessings and the holiness of life. At another moment we are brought face to face with a wretch whose tortures only serve to throw his vileness into sharper relief ”

“ Only the man who knew the holiness of human life to the full as well as he knew its infamy, only the man who had seen Purgatory and Heaven, and who had actually felt the love of God, could know that with all its mystery and misery the universe was made not only by the Divine Power, but by the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love, could weave this Trinity of Power, Wisdom, Love, into the Unity of the all-sustaining God, who made both Heaven and Hell. ”

“ The guilty love of Francesca and Paolo, so strong, so deathless in that it was love, has sunk them to Hell instead of raising them to Heaven in that it was guilty. Stronger to make them one than Hell to sever them, it is powerless to redeem the sin to which it has allied itself, and its tenderness has but swelled the eternal anguish of those whom it still joins together, because it has suffered the sanctuary of life, which love is set to guard, to be polluted and betrayed. ”

“ Moved with deep pity, Love came forth to ask them of their state. They were Rectitude, Temperance, and Generosity, once honoured by the world, now driven out in want and shame, and they came there for refuge in their woe. Then Love, with moistened eyes, bade them lift up their heads. [Pg 56] If they were driven begging through the world, it was for men to weep and wail whose lives had fallen in such evil times; but not for them, hewn from the eternal rock—it was not for them to grieve. A race of men would surely rise at last whose hearts would turn to them again. ”

“ In the topmost circle of Purgatory, amongst the fierce flames from which Dante would have hurled himself into molten glass for coolness, he sees souls whose cheeks flush at the memory of their sin with a shame that adds a burning to the burning flame; whilst others, clustering at the edge that they may speak with him, yet take good heed to keep within the flame, lest for one moment they should have respite from the fierce pain which is purging away their sins and drawing them nearer to their desire. ”

“ When Dante realised his own helplessness in the struggle against the panther of Florence, the lion of France, and the wolf of Rome, when he saw that to reorganise his country and remodel the social and political conditions of life would need the strong hand and the keen sword of some great hero raised by God, he also saw that for himself another way was opened, an escape from that wild forest into which his feet had strayed, an escape which it must be the task of his life to point out to others, without which the very work of the hero for whom he looked would be in vain. ”

“ The saints are no more uniform and characterless in their blessedness than are the unrepentant sinners in their tortures or the repentant in their contented pain.
Nor must we suppose that the Paradise is an unbroken succession of descriptions of heavenly bliss. Here too, as in Hell and Purgatory, the things of earth are from time to time discussed by Dante and the spirits that he meets. Here too the glow of a lofty indignation flushes the very spheres of Heaven. ”

“ How infinite the pity and the waste, how irreparable the loss, when the love that might have been an ornament to Heaven, adds to the unmeasured guilt and anguish of Hell a wail of more piercing sorrow than rings through all its lower depths!
Nor could any height of place claim exemption from the moral law. Dante was a Catholic, and his reverence for the Papal Chair was deep. But against the faithless Popes he cherished a fiery indignation proportioned to his high estimate of the sacred office they abused. ”

“ Not in the hackneyed phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life, Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and claims kindred with God's more perfect family. ”

“ Dante does not tell us where he found himself when the vision broke. He only tells us this: that as a wheel moves equally in all its parts, so his desire and will were, without strain or jar, revolved henceforth by that same Love that moves the sun and all the other stars. [94]
This was the end of all that Dante had thought and felt and lived through—a will that rolled in perfect oneness with the will of God. This was the end to which he would bring his readers, this was the purpose of his sacred poem, this was the meaning of his life. ”

“ And it is just herein that the transcendent power of the Inferno is displayed. Horrors which rise and ever rise in intensity till they culminate in some of the ghastliest scenes ever conceived by mortal brain are from first to last held under absolute control, are forced to support and intensify moral conceptions which in less mighty hands they would have numbed and deadened.
Oh, the pity of this sin, the unutterable, indelible pity of it! Its wail can never be stilled in our hearts while thought and memory remain. ”

“ The demonstrations of Divine Philosophy become more piercing, more joyous, more triumphant, her persuasions more soul-subduing and entrancing, as the spirit draws nearer to its source.
But though we shall never understand the Paradise unless we perceive the allegorical significance and appropriateness not only of the general conception of Beatrice, but also of many details in Dante's descriptions of her, yet we should be equally far from the truth if we imagined her a mere allegory. ”

“ When the fairest of all earthly things was mouldering in the dust, should he not have freed himself from the entanglements of the less beauteous things remaining?
To all these reproaches, urged by Beatrice, Dante had no reply. With eyes rooted to the ground, filled with unutterable shame, like a child repentant and confessing, longing to throw himself at his mother's feet, but afraid to meet her glance while her lips still utter the reproof, so Dante stood. ”