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Let any one try to imagine a modern poet treating the nineteenth century in the same manner, and he will be penetrated by a sense of the gigantic nature of the attempt, success in which could only be possible to an intense realist capable of making his phantoms as substantial as when they walked the earth. Yet this is only one side of Dante’s mighty task, which was not only to render the unseen world visible and almost palpable, but to embody what he fondly believed to be a system of infallible dogmatic truth. It need hardly be said that it is to the consummate execution of the former part of his mission that he is chiefly indebted for his fame with the world at large. TheInferno, where description and portraiture predominate, has impressed the imagination of mankind far more powerfully than the more mystical and doctrinal Purgatorio and Paradiso.

This is not the judgment of the most refined readers. “The acutest critics,” says Shelley, “have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of theDivina Commedia is the measure of the admiration which they accord to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.” “The whole Purgatorio,” says Symonds, “is a monument to the beauty and tranquillity of Dante’s soul. The whole Paradiso is a proof of its purity and radiance and celestial love.” This is true, and yet it is indisputable that in thinking of Dante the Inferno always comes first to the mind, and that this portion of his poem, had one part only been published, would have done far more to preserve his name than either of the others in the like case, and this although it is far more tainted than they are with his most characteristic and least pardonable faults. The chief causes, no doubt, are that the material sublime is always more impressive to the mass of men than the moral; that there is an element of risk and adventure in the poet’s journey among the shades absent from the other two parts; and that Virgil is a more tangible and human personage than Beatrice. Yet it must also be admitted that the diviner beauty of the two latter parts suffers from an admixture of theological and philosophical disquisition, not the less tedious because it was impossible for the poet to avoid it. Milton tells us that the fallen spirits reasoned “of fate, freewill, fore-knowledge absolute,” but judiciously avoids reporting their observations.