Page:The Contrasts in Dante.djvu/16

 Every word of his great poem had a set purpose, and must be investigated from the Tuscan point of view, rather than from that of the poorer language of Piedmont and Lombardy. The most homely utensils of domestic furniture in Tuscany were brought in to serve the purpose of his simile. Take one instance,—the familiar conca, the well-known earthenware vessel used in every Tuscan household, either for washing clothes, or for storing oil, or as a vase for orange or lemon trees, the conical shape of which serves him to describe the shape of Hell (Inf. IX., 16). Take the rosta; the wattle-screen used on the Pistojan hills, which guards the chestnut crop in the woods from being swept away by a sudden mountain flood, but which in the Forest of Woe (Inf. XIII., 117) is represented as insufficient to withstand the unhappy shades of the Society of Spendthrifts (Brigata Spendereccia), the wanton squanderers of their own substance. These are but two instances taken at hazard, the one from the domestic life of the townspeople, the other from that of the peasantry of Dante's ever-remembered, ever-regretted country. In Inf. XXIX., 74, he compares the fever-stricken shades of the Falsifiers of Metals, propping themselves one against the other, to a group of saucepans (tegghie) standing close together over the fire. This simile is not borrowed from the kitchens of great people. Dante did not write for such as Lucullus and Apicius only, and his comparisons had to be taken from the most common objects. Again, when describing the grievous torment these shades were undergoing from the irritation of skin disease, he likens their frantic efforts to get relief, to the curry-combing of a horse by a groom, or to the scaling of a fish by a cook. The familiar aspect, existing to this day in Italy, of blind beggars sitting on the ground outside the doors of the churches, leaning against each other, comes back to his mind when in Purg. XIII., 61—63, he depicts the blinded spirits of the Envious sitting in that very attitude. The malaria of the Tuscan Maremma, and the futile attempts (of those days) to cure it by drainage, are