PREFACE THE sub-title of this volume indicates sufficiently its scope and purpose. While there exist many admirable essays, commentaries, and general introductions to the study of Dante, I am not aware of anything in the way of an exposition, canto by canto, as simple and popular as the nature of the subject allows. Such an exposition it has been my aim to supply. A glance will show that I have written, not for Dante scholars, but for that large and increasing class of general readers who wish to make acquaintance with the great Italian poet, but find almost insuperable difficulties, partly in his mystical symbolism and partly in the innumerable references to contemporary men and events, now almost entirely forgotten. While it is vain to pretend that these difficulties can be charmed out of existence, I have tried to make them as little of a stumblingblock as possible. My chief aim has been to bring out the general scope of Dante's ethical teaching. For this purpose I have avoided entangling either myself or the reader in mere niceties, ingenuities, and intricacies of interpretation, in which too frequently Dante scholars are tempted to forget the broad outlines of their master's meaning. To many readers the punishments of the Inferno are little more than so many arbitrary and meaningless tortures, suggested by the play of a powerful but savage mediæval imagination; and I have tried to remove this utterly false impression. Once we understand Dante's symbolism, his terrible pictures of pain are seen to be the visible, material, and symbolic forms in which he shadows forth the natural and inevitable moral and spiritual issues of the various sins. Hell as an external place may or may not exist; but he compels us to feel its reality as a state of the wicked and impenitent soul, by showing us the awful recoil of its own evil on itself. The interpretation given has no special claim to originality. On the contrary, I have regarded it as part of the duty of an expositor of Dante to avail himself as widely as possible of help from previous workers in the same field, and to be more anxious to discover the true meaning than to set forth any private interpretation of his own. I have to some extent acknowledged my obligations in the footnotes, but of course it is impossible to name every author to whom one is indebted. Vernon's Readings on the Inferno and Toynbee's Dante Dictionary have been specially helpful. The references to Dante's own works are from Dr. Moore's Oxford edition. Speaking generally, the translation of the Commedia quoted is Longfellow's, of the Convito |