Whatever the truth—and there is little chance that we shall ever know the truth—this much is certain: Dante's earliest long poem, the famous "Vita Nuova" (New Life) celebrates his love for Beatrice, and is nothing more than a journal of the heart, a secret diary of his emotions. The Vita Nuova is as far removed from the modern sentimental love tale as June is removed from some almanac prepared a year in advance of the weather changes predicted. It records Dante's first glimpse of Beatrice, the adoration she awakened in him, and the fervour of devotion to which she lifted him; it describes his premonition of her death, and it ends with his resolve to devote his remaining years to her memory. The last chapter of the book looks forward to the Divine Comedy. About a year after Beatrice's death, he writes: "It was given me to behold a wonderful vision, wherein I saw things which determined me to say nothing further of this blessed one unto such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I can, as she in truth knoweth. Therefore if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman." Completed years later, the immortal Comedy exists to-day as the most wonderful tribute to a woman ever penned by any poet.
In a mood of lofty pride, Dante placed himself among the six great poets of all time. To-day, all scholars applaud the accuracy and humility of his judgment. Every strong man knows what he can do. He is conscious of his own vast reserves. So often has he measured himself with his fellow-men that he realizes the number, the magnitude and relative strength of his divine endowments. All men of the first order of genius have realized the endowment they have received from God and their fathers. And the Divine Comedy justifies Dante's pride in his own powers. It cannot be classified with a phrase nor dismissed with a label. It is not a poem, like one of Tennyson's Idylls of the King; it is rather an encyclopedia upon Italy. It is at one and the same moment an autobiography, a series of personal reminiscences, a philosophy, an oration and the spiritual pilgrimage of a thirteenth century Childe Harold, with here and there a lyric poem. The motive which inspired Dante was his sense of the wretchedness of man in this mortal life. The only means of rescue from this wretchedness he conceived to be the exercise of reason, enlightened by God. To convince man of this truth, to bring home to him the conviction of the eternal consequences of his conduct in this world, to show him the path of salvation, was Dante's aim. To lend force and beauty to such a design he conceived the poem as an allegory, and made himself to be its protagonist. He depicts a vision, in which the poet is conducted first by Virgil, as the representative of human reason, through Hell and Purgatory, and then by Beatrice, as the representative of divine revelation, through Paradise to the Heaven, where at last he beholds the triune God.
The action of the Divine Comedy opens in the early morning of the Thursday before Easter in the year 1300. Dante dreams that he had "reached the half-way point in his path of life, at the entrance of an obscure forest." He would advance, but three horrible beasts bar the way, a wolf, a lion and a leopard, symbolical of the temptations of the world—cupidity, the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. Then the shade of Virgil appears, representing the intellect and conscience, glorified—to serve as his guide in the long wanderings through the Inferno. Virgil tells him he can accompany him only through Hell and Purgatory, but that Beatrice shall conduct him through those happy spheres, the portals of which a pagan may not enter. So begins that wondrous journey through the regions of the damned, over the entrance of which is written the awful words: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." The world through which the two poets journey is peopled, not with characters of heroic story, but with men and women known personally or by repute to Dante. Popes, kings, emperors, poets and warriors, Florentine citizens of all degrees are there, "some doomed to hopeless punishment, others expiating their offenses in milder torments and looking forward to deliverance in due time." Hell is conceived as a vast conical hollow, reaching to the center of the earth. It has three great divisions, corresponding to Aristotle's three classes of vice, incontinence, brutishness and malice. The sinners, by malice, are divided from the last by a yet more formidable barrier. They lie at the bottom of a pit, with vertical sides, and accessible only by supernatural means; a monster named Geryon bears the poets down on his back. At the very bottom of the pit is Lucifer, immovably fixed in ice. And climbing down his limbs, the travellers reach the center of the earth, whence a cranny conducts them back to the surface, which they reach as Easter Day is dawning.
Purgatory is conceived as a mountain, rising solitary from the ocean on that side of the earth that is opposite to ours. It is divided into terraces and its top is the terrestrial Paradise, the first abode of man. The seven terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins, which encircle the mountain and are reached by a series of steep climbs, compared by Dante to the path from Florence to Samminiato. The penalties are not degrading, but rather tests of patience or endurance; and in several cases Dante has to bear a share in them as he passes. At one point, the poet hesitates when he comes to a path filled with a sheet of flame; but Virgil speaks: "Between Beatrice and thee there is but that wall." Dante at once plunges into the heart of the flames. On the summit of the mountain is the Earthly Paradise, "a scene of unsurpassed magnificence," where Beatrice, representing divine knowledge, divine love and purity, is waiting to lead the wanderer through the nine spheres of the old Ptolemaic system to the very throne of God.
Such is the general scheme of the poem, in which Dante's conception of the universe is depicted in scenes of intense vividness and dramatic force. It embraces the whole field of human experience. Its aim is "not to delight, but to reprove, to rebuke, to exhort, to form men's characters" by teaching them what courses of life will meet reward, what with penalty hereafter; to "put into verse," as the poet says, "things difficult to think." The title given it is often misunderstood. The men of the Middle Ages gave the name "Tragedy" to every poem that ended sadly, and the name "Comedy" to every tale that ended happily. There are no traces of wit and humour in this book with its descriptions of the cleansing pains of Purgatory and the highest reaches of Paradise. Men who have little imagination seem quite unable to transport themselves back into the life and thought of the thirteenth century. Even Voltaire calls Dante a savage, and Goethe, who blundered often in his judgments of men and books, and often had to reverse himself, thought Dante's work "dull and unreadable." But that reader who supposes that Dante is giving a literal description of the physical torments of hell, or imagines that Michael Angelo, in his Last Judgment, was portraying his own literal belief, will find nothing inspiring in this wonderful book.
During the last six centuries the thinking of the world has changed. Physical pain has assumed new importance. No man living to-day has ever witnessed a brother man sentenced by a court to be burned alive, or later on, has been tried himself, and upon a false charge sentenced to death by flame. We stand aghast at Dante's miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, lakes of pitch and pools of blood, a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair. But Dante's was an era of outbreaking and almost universal physical cruelty; sinners and criminals could not be reached by argument, for they could not think; there was but one way to approach animal man, and that was from the animal side. Through fear, Dante endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. He appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience, sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. For their allurement also he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers blooming in the fields of Paradise. He used his unrivalled genius to make vice and sin revolting and infinitely