The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• The Peace of God
• Preface
• Purgatorio I
• Purgatorio Ii
• Purgatorio Iii
• Purgatorio Iv
• Purgatorio V
• Purgatorio Vi
• Purgatorio Vii
• Purgatorio Viii
• Purgatorio Ix
• Purgatorio X
• Purgatorio Xi
• Purgatorio Xii
• Purgatorio Xiii
• Purgatorio Xiv
• Purgatorio Xv
• Purgatorio Xvi
• Purgatorio Xvii
• Purgatorio Xviii
• Purgatorio Xix
• Purgatorio Xx
• Purgatorio Xxi
• Purgatorio Xxii
• Purgatorio Xxiii
• Purgatorio Xxiv
• Purgatorio Xxv
• Purgatorio Xxvi
• Purgatorio Xxvii
• Purgatorio Xxviii
• Purgatory Xxix
• Purgatorio Xxx
• Purgatorio Xxxi
• Purgatorio Xxxii
• Purgatorio Xxxiii

PREFACE

ONE of the compensations for the obvious disadvantage of publishing the several volumes of a work like the present consecutively, is that the author is thereby given a chance to correct and improve what is still unprinted, in the light of whatever adverse or commendatory criticism he may have received in each interval. In a preface to his second volume he can look back upon his first objectively, and, while gratefully answering the criticisms and implied questions of his private and public reviewers, profit by them in what remains.

The linguistic and poetical features of this translation must stand or fall with the explanation and justification given with probably dangerous frankness in the Preface to the Inferno; but on the subject of Blank Verse I feel that, since a reminding word or so may be useful to some, as well as due to myself, it will not be thought impertinent by other readers. Since unrelated, however, to Interpretation, the special subject of this Preface, it is printed at the end of the notes in this volume.

Those who shall have read at all carefully the strictly interpretative parts of my notes to the Inferno and its sister canticles, which I hope will not be neglected as merely obiter dicta, will probably have seen that my object differs from that mainly aimed at by interpreters of the Divine Comedy, in that it attempts to liberate Dante’s spiritual teaching from the zeal of his ultra theological and ecclesiastical friends, and save it from the silence of the poem’s ultra philological and historical admirers. Now, since I attach much more importance to what shall be thought of the expository parts of my notes, and of the Commentary I hope to build upon them, than I do to any appraisal of the translation of the poem they try to explain, I want to make that object as clear as I can, and justify it, if possible. In so doing I shall develop what was merely suggested in the introduction to the Interpretative Analysis of the Inferno, to which I refer my readers.

Since I am undertaking to find out what the poem can mean, or could consistently be shown to mean, to those who are living now, I have not concerned myself especially with what it must have seemed to mean six hundred years ago, when, still fresh from Dante’s mind and pen, its words and pictures were, so to speak, far more vernacular to his age, than they can possibly be to ours. Furthermore, being interested in the Divine Comedy only incidentally as a philological and historical document, and only secondarily as a work of art worthy of being studied for its architectural structure, and its linguistic and literary qualities — all of which were intended by Dante to serve merely as alluring and retaining means to a far higher end — my constant aim has been to study and teach it as one of the greatest monuments of Man’s creative spirit and of his intuition into the moral and spiritual laws of eternal reality.

Nearly all the commentaries, however, which I have read have practically treated the Divine Comedy, either as a gloriously imagined and safely orthodox, poetic compendium and depository of the tenets of Catholic theology, which it was the commentator’s or annotator’s proud duty and pleasure to expound and defend; or else, as almost exclusively, and certainly primarily, a great linguistic and historical relic of mediaeval art and philosophy, inexhaustible as a mine to be exploited by expert researchers in the manifold field of Florentine, Italian and European civilization and culture. The latter commentators, however, by their silence as to the philosophic truth and poetic beauty of its matter, deal with it, furthermore, as a work whose unmistakable teachings were so obviously out of harmony with, or contrary to, modern scientific knowledge and the beliefs of sincere educated men, that any scholarly interest in it must necessarily limit itself to ascertaining the meaning of more or less obsolete words, to tracing out the external historic sources of its ideas and art-forms, and to formulating their relation to the quaint but long exploded beliefs of a remote and alien age. Consultation of such works has often led me to wonder what Dante would think of the alternative uses, Hebraizing or Philistine, ecclesiastically partisan or genealogically scientific, to which his great emancipating and spiritual Vision had been almost universally put by his undoubtedly sincere and laborious ecclesiastical and philological students. Since, therefore, my attitude toward the poem is neither of these, I must, to make my position clear, ask permission to be fearlessly personal, in the hope of being thought to be speaking to a large extent vicariously.

Though I have no ecclesiastical or theological prepossessions, I nevertheless hold firmly to the belief that the world is essentially spiritual in its fundamental nature, by which I mean that it partakes of the nature of what each of us knows intuitionally as consciousness. I consequently hold that men are not solely, or even primarily, mortal bodies and intellects, of which it cannot, of course, be possibly proved or disproved that they have souls; but, rather, that in reality they are souls, or immortal spirits, growing from unthinkable beginnings to unimaginable ends, and initially, but only temporarily, provided with such bodies and intellects as may be necessary, through contact with determined matter, for the attainment of individuality and the development of free self-determining personality.

This belief has led me, as I think it should the many who in one way or another share it with me, to look upon the world’s greatest poets as primarily prophets and seers, destined to tower permanently above the greatest of their fellow men, however intellectual, because of their exceptionally broad and sympathetic familiarity with human nature, and especially because of their intuitive knowledge of the constitution and laws of the spiritual world, which, I must believe, are potentially as open to the eyes of the human soul, as those of the material world, which is the inviolable domain of science, are to the eyes of sense when interpreted by that mastering intellect of man which is exclusively attuned to matter.

Assuming, therefore, this attitude toward such supreme spiritually human, and poetically creative geniuses as Jesus, Dante and Shakespeare are generally conceded to be in their several kinds and degrees (without prejudice, of course, to Jesus’ special claims), how can one help realizing that, since these seers were forced to express themselves through the best current intellectual ideas and literary forms afforded by their day and land, those ideas and forms ought not to be allowed, when no longer expressive, to keep men from seeing the light they were intended to reveal. A thinker or poet, to be sure, can only to a limited extent rise above the intellectual high-water mark of his age; and yet I believe it to be nevertheless true that spiritually his soul may achieve an insight into human nature and its relation to universal life, which, because the intuitions of a highly developed consciousness are undefinably and inexplicably basal, will defy the revolutions of man’s intellectual fashions, and no more grow old than really seem new, however soon the fair letter in which that insight trustingly arrayed itself on its first appearance, may become antiquated, and cease to be vitally expressive of its informing spirit. Believing this, I hold that one cannot get at the vital truth which lies at the heart of a great work of human thought and art, unless one begin by believing sympathetically in its author’s spirit and purpose, and then, in the revealing light of that sympathy and belief, and of one’s own inner experience, study the printed text of what he uttered or wrote. If, further, one would know whether or not Dante’s or any poet’s spiritual teaching is true, let his soul do what, in its field, his intellect does, give it the test of experience. Let him live it. The laboratory method is as obligatory in the spiritual, as it is in the material field, and one who does not use it cannot speak with any other authority than that of a scribe, for he will not personally know that of which he is speaking.

Whatever useful purpose, for example, the scientific, or so-called higher, criticism of the New Testament may have served, the spiritual criticism which, when it comes, will prove to be the highest, and most illuminating, will certainly take some such point of view as that taken by Browning’s supreme creation, the childlike Pompilia of The Ring and the Book, when, commenting on one of Jesus’ intuitive sayings, she exclaims: “Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ to say that!” Not having learned to misjudge the mind of its author by reducing his insight to the average level reached by a compromise between spiritually unequal, and often conflicting, texts, whose authenticity and significance had been determined by merely intellectual criteria, or by study of their relation to what others had said before, Pompilia appraised the validity and significance of the text by her own insight into the nature of its author, attained by loving and intuitive meditation on the highest sun-lit peaks of his reported thought, whence only its manifold panorama could be adequately seen. And so should it be with Dante; and with Shakespeare, too, though the latter, for all his wonderful breadth of vision, did not attempt to fathom the depths or soar to the heights which were within the former’s spiritual reach. In the spiritual, though not in the material world, a whole, when seen from above is greater than is the sum of its broken parts when seen from below, for somewhat the same reason that the sun can better explain a plant’s flowers than can the soil that feeds its roots.

The Kingdom of Reality, moreover — so its arch-seers keep reporting to us from age to age — is “like unto” this and that; but while a few with eyes to see perceive the life-giving truth in their picture-like parables, and are quickened by them even intellectually; others, like those Greeks and Jews to whom the intuitions of original Christianity were but foolishness and a stumbling-block, sadly fail to understand; and quickly lowering their eyes to a level from which the life-giving spirit can be but dimly perceived, if at all, unconsciously inaugurate another age-long reign of the intellectually interesting, and aesthetically pleasing, but spiritually killing, letter.

To interpret the Divine Comedy, therefore, for one at least who holds the above more or less “mystical” belief, consists in trying to read it, as it were, through the eyes of its author’s soul, and in harmony with his evident and expressed intention, rather than through those of the well meaning theologians and philologians into whose hands his message all too quickly fell, because he had to draw upon their soon antiquated intellectual conceptions, for lack of the illustrative material with which the accumulated achievements of a later age’s more familiar thought would surely have equipped his eagerly receptive and catholic genius, had he been living then. Not Dante, therefore, the fourteenth-century scholastic Catholic, who, Virgil-like, knew almost all there was then to be known; nor yet Dante, the Florentine mystic poet, and patriot, who was, alas, ignorant of nearly everything that men most boast of knowing now; but Dante, the arch-spirit, whose inmost self is revealed to his fellow men for all time in the increasingly convincing portraits he painted of the smiling and happy Beatrice, “whose lovely eyes see everything” in the well nigh blinding vision of eternity and God — that is the entrancing object at which, with the help of those who (like Bp. Carpenter in “The Spiritual Message of Dante”) have done the same with neither partisanship nor derogation, I have tried to look as keenly and unflinchingly as possible, when asking myself the vital inner meaning of each little or great teaching progressively met in the living pictures of the poem, of which she, and not any institution, theology, or other abstraction, is the spiritually concrete heroine.

In doing this I have at any rate gained one thing for myself, which has gone far to assure me that I was at least moving in the right direction. I have come to know that every positive belief that is, or has been, held by any free believer, is worthy of the soul’s respect, because it is sure to contain at least a nucleus of warm truth that can be reached by any one who has the patience and courage to break through the progressively misrepresenting crust of the words, forms and conceptions which harden around it as they cool. To break through this veil of thickening light in Dante’s case, is at times relatively easy, as he once said it was; and again so hard, as he must often have feared it would prove, that one almost despairs of success; but never will one regret the attempt, for if earnestly and increasingly made, it will not fail to repay one with the joy incident to all inward and upward flights.

Gratefully leaving, then, to some the praiseworthy work of expounding the Divine Comedy as paramountly a cathedral-like monument of Catholicism, and to others the equally valuable task of searching its pages for those philological and historical facts, without accurate knowledge of which all ulterior understanding of the poem might be jeopardized, I have tried to let the labors of others in these fields clear my way and that of my readers to what I know is more broadly and lastingly valuable than either — a little more insight into the free intuitions of one who was so keen-sighted a spirit, that through his eyes it is possible for us to see some of that eternal reality which will ultimately be found in accord with, since basal to, the best apprehended truths dear to our times. Sub specie aeternitatis, from the eternal point of view, is, therefore, the phrase I want (provided ‘eternity’ be taken to mean spiritual reality), and therewith I will end this lame justification of an ambitious attempt to thread the rich, though cool, warp of the scholarly notes to the poem whose matter I owe to others, with the limited, but warm, woof of ideas inspired by a loving belief in Dante’s inspiration, and illustrated by what little intuitive imagination, reading, and experience of life I may have had to contribute.

In closing I must, however, return to the question of my indebtedness, because of the delight received from three recent books: Bp. Carpenter’s lectures already referred to, Mr. C. A. Dinsmore’s Life of Dante Alighieri, and Prof. C. H. Grandgent’s The Ladies of Dante’s Lyrics, all lasting gifts, and also because of an acknowledgment not yet recorded, since purposely saved for this volume. Whatever criticism the literary part of the book may have received, I know of nothing but praise for the beautiful and dignified work of the Press which is bringing it out; for even the least laudatory of my reviewers acknowledged that the Inferno was “a handsome specimen of American typography.” But no one knows but I to how great an extent what may have proved worth while in the author’s contribution in its finally printed form, is due to the patience of the publishers; and for this, as well as for the courtesy, interest and useful suggestions by which it was accompanied, I wish to express my thanks to Mr. C. Chester Lane, the Director of the Harvard University Press, and to his assistants.

But what of Dante’s Italy meanwhile? Since I dated the Preface to the Inferno much has happened in that youthfully ancient land to her everlasting glory; but because, alas, the full measure of America’s gratitude to her is still waiting upon a sadly delayed appreciation of what is due to her unsurpassed, and in many ways peerless, contribution to the victory of Freedom and Civilization, I am more than ever glad of the fact that, on hearing the news of the disaster of Caporetto, I at once wrote to have the date of the Inferno’s preface changed from September to October 28, when all seemed dark from both a moral and a military point of view; and on the same day composed the sonnet at the head of the volume, as a twofold act of faith in the Stella d’Italia, the Genius of the Italian people. And, because of that faith, I am sure that, when at last Italy’s legions celebrate their victory over their country’s age-long enemy and over themselves, and march through Rome’s Via Sacra to her Capitol, to “crown again the brow of Dante,” that Genius will prompt them to remember, as I know all Dante’s American lovers will, that, though in his body the Prophet of Italy’s Unity and sovereign Independence died in mid-September 1321, six centuries ago, he himself “on high Olympus triumphs, happy already in the crown he wears.”

Courtney Langdon.

Providence, Rhode Island, July 29, 1920.