DANTE PARADISE ILLUSTRATED Divine Comedy GUSTAVE DORE

All the noblest thought and work of the ages that passed between the fall of the Roman Empire and the closing year of the thirteenth century, when Dante figures himself in allegorical fashion as having passed in ecstatic vision through the world beyond the grave, finds supreme artistic expression in this great poem, fused in his glowing imagination, become the harmonious accessories to his picture of man, his nature, his duties, his life, his destiny. The vision of the world beyond the grave was no new
thing in mediaeval literature; but it had never before been made the basis of a work of universal appeal and universal significance. His inspiration on this side was purely Virgilian, and derived from the sixth book of the AEneid. This book is far more than a mere vision of the spirit world, however perfectly realized. In it Dante has condensed all the wisdom and devotion of his age, and summed up all of the finest spirit of the ages that have gone before his own. He is the soul of medieval Catholicism, painting his picture of the material universe in the form of an allegorical vision of the supernatural world. He is a man with a mission to reform the corruption of the Church, give new life to the State, to heal the wounds of his country. It is the object of his poem to remove men from their state of misery, and to lead them to the state of felicity. Apart from its allegory, the machinery of Dante's Hell is more or less that of mediaeval tradition. It is the wickedness and corruption of the life he saw around him. It is otherwise with his Purgatory. There are few things in literature so wonderful, and in the highest sense original, as his conception of the mountain of Purgation, where, beneath the sun and stars, in the glory of sunrise and of sunset, man purges away the dross of the world, until he recovers his primal blessedness, his moral and intellectual liberty, in the Earthly Paradise. Throughout, in its pure spirituality, its radiant charity, its ineffable tenderness, the Purgatorio makes a direct and universal appeal to the heart and conscience. And, from the outset, the note of love is struck; the poet sees "the fair planet, which gives us strength to love, making the whole east radiant." For love is the informing spirit, the compelling law of the rest of Dante's poem; Love, not merely in our modern sense, which is practically restricted to the idealization of one special passion, but in the sense in which it means the force that impels every creature, inanimate or animate, sensitive or rational, to obey the highest dictates of its true nature. "Set this love in order, O thou that lovest Me." The whole of the Purgatorio is based upon the necessity of thus setting love in order, of ordering love rightly. Paradise is the story of "how all things are transfigured except Love." Love is the guide, the rule, the interpretation of Dante's mysticism. He shows us in the Purgatorio how, in rational beings, love is the seed of every virtue and of every vice, because love's natural tendency to good is the material upon which free will works for bliss or for bane. In the Paradiso, he conceives of the whole motion of the universe as one cosmic dance of love, beginning in the Seraphim, that highest Angelic order which knows most and therefore loves most, and continued through all nature. And, at the consummation of his vision, the poet beholds, by penetrative intuition into the Divine Light, how it is that Love thus binds the universe into one, to make it resemble the Supreme Unity.