of which they threw off the flesh, these suicides find CANTO XIII themselves caught and imprisoned in another form

of body, which affords their sorrows not even the relief of utterance.1

The Harpies that brood in the branches of this symbolism of weird forest have given rise to many interpretathe Harpies. tions. It is evident that Dante had the Third Book of the Eneid much in his mind when writing this Canto: we have seen how he drew from it the idea of souls turned into trees, and now from the same source he takes this symbol of the Harpies. There Virgil tells how they drove the Trojans from the Strophades, two small islands in the Ionian Sea. The word Harpies means 'snatchers,' hence they have been regarded as symbols of the sin itself-Suicide, the snatcher-away of life. Others take them to mean the self-will that leads to self-destruction, despair, haunting memories, remorse of conscience; and there may be truth in all of these conjectures. I prefer, however, to take them more generally as representing any and every unworthy cause that drives men to fling life away. In Greek mythology the Harpies are storm-winds which act as ministers of Divine vengeance, mysteriously snatching offenders away out of the visible world. In moral equivalent, they represent the storm-winds of human passion which sweep men violently out of life. 'Spiritually,' says Ruskin in The Queen of 1 Comp. Purg. xxx. 13-15, where the Resurrection is spoken of as the re-clothing of the voice with the body:

As the Blessed at the last trump

Shall straightway rise up each one from his cavern,
The re-clothed voice singing Hallelujah.

A various reading, however, gives flesh for voice.

CANTO XIII the Air, 'they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meagre and insane,-spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope. . . . Understand that, once, deeply-any who have ever known the weariness of vain desires; the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling, and self-involved returns of some sickening famine and thirst of the heart:and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy Celano's shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the "Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the trees that are the souls of suicides.'

Now the point of vital importance is that suicide is no real escape from these Harpies, the stormwinds of passion and misery and vain desire.

'In that sleep of death what dreams may come!'

dreams more terrifying and hopeless than those from which men flee. In the Sixth Book of the Eneid (434-437) Virgil says Æneas saw the souls of suicides in Hades suffering a doom so terrible that they would gladly exchange it for 'the poverty and hard toils' of earth, from which they had been so madly eager to escape. Dante evidently had the same conviction, that suicide but intensifies the pain from which men flee. The Harpies of passion which drove them out of this world go with them into the other, and brood for ever on the branches of the ruined and dishonoured soul. The old agony is there, pent up within the hard bark of the tree; and the only

respite is a momentary relief of utterance when the CANTO XIII Harpies of their old passions, feeding upon their leaves, rouse them from their brooding wordless grief into a wilder `anguish. In the case of the Squanderers, it is obvious that death has proved no real escape; they are pursued by the hounds of their own terrors, and call aloud for a second death to save them from the first. Nothing is more terribly significant than Lano's wild cry as the ghostly pack swept after him, 'This time, haste thee, haste thee, Death!' Once before he had sought it, and, behold, it was no sanctuary from his miseries; and his doom now is to seek for ever, and for ever fail to find.1

Suicides in the

One last punishment is reserved for the day of Bodies of final Judgment. What of these suicides in the Resurrection. Resurrection?—will the bodies which they impiously flung away be restored to them, as to others? Pier delle Vigne replies that they will not, 'for 'tis not just to have what one casts off.' It has been questioned whether Dante is strictly orthodox in this: it is certainly the doctrine of the Church that at the Resurrection every soul will be reinvested with its own body. The only suicide, however, to whom Dante will allow this is Cato, who destroyed himself for the sake of liberty. And, indeed, at first sight this seems a great relief. Dante has already discussed the question whether the reunion of soul and body will increase the pain of the lost, and has answered it in the affirmative. Will it not then be

1 Rev. ix. 6: 'And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.'

2 Purg. i. 73-75, where Virgil speaks of Cato's body as 'the vesture which at the great day shall be so bright.'

CANTO XIII a mitigation of the punishment of suicides, that for them there is no such reunion? No, replies Dante, the pain only takes another form. Like all other souls of the dead, they must return for their bodies at the Resurrection, but not to be re-clothed in them. 'Here,' says Pier delle Vigne,

'Here shall we drag them and through the dismal
Forest our bodies shall suspended be,

Each to the thorn of its tormented shade,'1.

tormented, obviously, by the eternal presence of its own self-murdered corpse. It is the idea so much insisted on already: in every possible direction the suicide's hope of escape is utterly frustrated. The burden of the flesh which he could not bear for the few short years of earth will hang heavy on the soul for ever, and there will be none to deliver from 'the body of this death.'

1 Inf. xiii. 106-108.

CHAPTER XIV

CIRCLE VII.-THE VIOLENT AGAINST GOD, NATURE

AND ART

XIV.-XVII. 78

Violence:

Sand,

We have passed through two of the three concen- CANTOS tric Rings or Belts which form the Circle of Violence: the River of Blood in which are plunged the Violent against their Neighbours, and the dark Forest, the Circle of trees of which are the souls of Suicides, the Violent Third Ring. against Themselves. We now reach the central Ring, in which are punished the Violent against God, Nature, and Art. When the travellers come to the inner edge of the Forest, they see a vast Plain of The Plain of Sand, as dry and thick, says Dante, as the Libyan desert across which Cato of Utica made his terrible march of six days with the remnant of Pompey's army, after the battle of Pharsalia in 48 B.C. As the River of Blood and the Forest of Suicides are typical of the sins there punished, so this dry barren SandWaste is symbolic of the lives of the Violent against God and His offspring, Nature and Art; such Violence turns human life into a desert 'which rejecteth every plant.' On this barren plain Dante saw 'a horrible act of justice': a rain of 'dilated flakes of fire' was and Rain of falling on it, silently and steadily, 'like snow among the Alps upon a windless day,' and as it fell the dry

Fire.