Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/46

 24 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS which exists no less in this world than in the next ; just as Ins purgatory reflects the mingled joy and anguish of true repentance, and his heaven is the eternal peace of God, which men can possess here and now, and which the world can neither give nor take away. In other words, hell is not an obscure and material slaughter-house, but the Gehenna of evil deliberately chosen ; and heaven is not a pagoda of jewels, but the presence and the light of God. Hence the " Divine Comedy " belongs to all time and to all place. While it supremely sums up the particular form assumed by the religion of the Middle Ages, it contains the eternal elements of all true religion in the life history of a soul, redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and greed, and restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable it to see the things that are, and to see them as they are. The " Inferno," as has been said elsewhere, is the history of a soul descending through lower and lower stages of self-will till it sinks at last into those icy depths of Cocytus, wherein the soul is utterly emptied of God, and utterly filled with the loathly emptiness of self ; the " Purgatory " is the history of the soul as it is gradually purged from sin and self, by effort and penitence and hope ; the " Paradise " is the soul entirely filled with the fulness of God. The moral truths in which the great poem abounds are numberless and of in- finite interest. On these I cannot dwell, for to him who penetrates to the inner meaning of the allegory they are found on every page. But I may point out one or two supreme lessons which run throughout the teaching. One is the lesson that like makes like the lesson of modification by environ- ment. We know how in Norfolk Island the convicts often degenerated almost into fiends because they associated with natures which had made themselves fiend- like, and were cut off from gentle, wholesome, and inspiring influences. So it is in Dante's " Inferno." His evil men and seducers wax ever worse and worse because they have none around them save souls lost like their own. There is no brightening touch in the " Inferno." The name of Christ is never mentioned in its polluted air. The only angel who appears in it is not one of the radiant Sympathies, with fair golden heads and dazzling faces and wings and robes of tender green, of the " Purgatory," not one of the living topazes or gold- en splendors of the " Paradise " ; but is stern, disdainful, silent, waving from be- fore his face all contact with the filthy gloom. His Lucifer is no flickering, gen- tlemanly, philosophic man of the world like Goethe's Mephistopheles, nor like Milton's Fallen Cherub, whose " Form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, or excess Of glory obscured ; " but is a three-headed monster of loathly ugliness, with faces yellow with envy, crimson with rage, and black with ignorance ; not haughty, splendid, defiant, but foul and loathly as sin itself.