rather to mark the prevailing clearness and simplicity of his
expression than seriously to impede its easy and unperplexed
current. There are few sentences in the Divina Commedia in which
a difficulty is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought or
distinctness of image.

A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect
comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in
the double or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative
of the poet's spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that
it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but
within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent
and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the
illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the
minutest details of external incident are made to contribute,
with an appropriateness of significance, and with a freedom from
forced interpretation or artificiality of construction such as no
other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining. The poem may
be read with interest as a record of experience without attention
to its inner meaning, but its full interest is only felt when
this inner meaning is traced, and the moral significance of the
incidents of the story apprehended by the alert intelligence. The
allegory is the soul of the poem, but like the soul within the
body it does not show itself in independent existence. It is, in
scholastic phrase, the form of the body, giving to it its special
individuality. Thus in order truly to understand and rightly
appreciate the poem the reader must follow its course with a
double intelligence. "Taken literally," as Dante declares in his
Letter to Can Grande, "the subject is the state of the soul after
death, simply considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject
is man, according as by his good or ill deserts he renders
himself liable to the reward or punishment of Justice." It is the
allegory of human life; and not of human life as an abstraction,
but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell, whose
phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning and its
permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness
of interest, and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous
with every successive generation. The increase of knowledge, the
loss of belief in doctrines that were fundamental in Dante's
creed, the changes in the order of society, the new thoughts of
the world, have not lessened the moral import of the poem, any
more than they have lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its
real substance is as independent as its artistic beauty, of
science, of creed, and of institutions. Human nature has not
changed; the motives of action are the same, though their
relative force and the desires and ideals by which they are
inspired vary from generation to generation. And thus it is that
the moral judgments of life framed by a great poet whose
imagination penetrates to the core of things, and who, from his
very nature as poet, conceives and sets forth the issues of life
not in a treatise of abstract morality, but by means of sensible
types and images, never lose interest, and have a perpetual
contemporaneousness. They deal with the permanent and unalterable
elements of the soul of man.

[1] Mr. Lowell's essay on Dante makes other writing about the
poet or the poem seem ineffectual and superfluous. I must assume
that it will be familiar to the readers of my version, at least
to those among them who desire truly to understand the Divine
Comedy.


The scene of the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are
members even while still denizens mu the world of time. In the
spiritual world the results of sin or perverted love, and of
virtue or right love, in this life of probation, are manifest.
The life to come is but the fulfilment of the life that now is.
This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The allegory in
which he cloaked it is of a character that separates the Divine
Comedy from all other works of similar intent, In The Pilgrim's
Progress, for example, the personages introduced are mere
simulacra of men and women, the types of moral qualities or
religious dispositions. They are abstractions which the genius of
Bunyan fails to inform with vitality sufficient to kindle the
imagination of the reader with a sense of their actual, living
and breathing existence. But in the Divine Comedy the personages
are all from real life, they are men and women with their natural
passions and emotions, and they are undergoing an actual
experience. The allegory consists in making their characters and
their fates, what all human characters and fates really are, the
types and images of spiritual law. Virgil and Beatrice, whose
nature as depicted in the poem makes nearest approach to purely
abstract and typical existence, are always consistently presented
as living individuals, exalted indeed in wisdom and power, but
with hardly less definite and concrete humanity than that of
Dante himself.

The scheme of the created Universe held by the Christians of the
Middle Ages was comparatively simple, and so definite that Dante,
in accepting it in its main features without modification, was
provided with the limited stage that was requisite for his
design, and of which the general disposition was familiar to all
his readers. The three spiritual realms had their local bounds
marked out as clearly as those of time earth itself. Their
cosmography was but an extension of the largely hypothetical
geography of the tune.

The Earth was the centre of the Universe, and its northern
hemisphere was the abode of man. At the middle point of this
hemisphere stood Jerusalem, equidistant from the Pillars of


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