The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-11-15
TWELVE PAGES.
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THE DIVINE COMEDY"

The sum and substance of Archdeacon Far
yar's lecture on Dante, to be given in this city
Monday night, is in the lesson drawn from
Dantes sense of the awful transcendency OF
goodness. Mr. Farrar regards the "Divine
Comedy" as the summing up of all the poets
preceding Dante, and, excepting the dramas
of Shakespeare, the greatest the mind Of man
has produced.
In Dante, says Carlyle, ten silent centuries
found voice. He is the spokesman of the
middle ages; the thought they lived by stands
here in everlasting music. To thousands
of people who have read Shakespeare
and Goethe and even Homer, the
names of Dante and Milton, the 'Divine
Comedy" and the paradise Lost" are little
more than idle sounds. Is this because
Dante and Milton are the poets of the
Christian church, And for the same reason
that the old masters of Christian art are ig-
nored for pagan and for modern artY Or do
Dante and Milton so commit themselves to,
and wrap themselves in the Christian system
of theology that thay have not the scope and
universally that must perforce attach
to the poets Of all nations and
all timesq Certain it is that
the Paradise Lost" and the "Divne Com
edy" do not receive the study and reading
that their merits as works of literary art de-
serve and should command.
Of the two poems the subjects are the same,
the treatment different. Dante deals with
exact details; Milton with dim intimations
Macaulay says the poem Of Dante differs from
that of Milton as the picture writings of Mex
eco differ from the hieroglyphics Of Egypt.
Dante's images speak for themselves; Millions
have significance discernble only by
the initiated. Milton did not profess
to have been in either heaven or
hell, and so confined himself to
glittering generalities avoided all loathsome
details, and "takes refuge in indistinct, sol
epnn, but tremendous imagery" But the
"Divine Comedy" is personal narrative its
author the eye and ear witness of that he re-
lates. Dante, says Macaulay, is the man who
has heard the tormented spirits crying for the
second death, has read the dusky characters
on the portal within which there is no hope,
and has hidden his face from the terrors of
the Gorgon; his own hands have grasped the
shaggy sides of Lucifer, his own feet climbed
the mountain of expiration, and has his own
brow marked by the purifying angel.
Archdeacon Farrar outlines in his lecture the
eyentful life of Dante-his birth in Florence
in the thirteenth century. his idealized but
hopeless love, his political trials. He went
through the usual destinies-was twice a
soldier for the Florentine state, had been an
embassy, and by his thirty fifth year had, by
natural graduation and talent, been made one of
the chief magistrates of Florence. He was
exiled from the ungrateful city of his
birth, and the nineteen years Of this
loneliness and suffering evoked the
great outburst of his genius, the Divine
Comedy. The earthly world, says Carlyle, in
his essay on the hero as poet, had cast him
forth, and naturally the eternal world i'm
pressed itself deeper upon him; that awful
geality, over which, after all, this time world.
with its Florences and banishments, only
Aatters Us an unreal shadow. The great soul
of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home
more and more in that awful other world
Carlyle characterizes the Divine Comedy as
Christianity, expressing in huge world
wide architectural emblems how the Christian
Dante felt good and evil to be the two
polar elements of the universe on
which all turns, and that these two
differ, not by preferability of one to an
other, but by incompatibility, absolute
and infinite" The Divine Comedy takes
us beyond the pagan allegory in which is en-
blemed the operations Of nature and the first
thought of man-courage and superiority to
fear. 1t deals with the moral rather than the
eensuous nature, and was the first great poem
of Christianism embleming the law of human
duty, the moral law of man.
Dante is hard to read is difficult to under
stand 1t is worthy of study, and with Long
fellows translation, appended notes and es-
says, its inner spirit and intent may be readily
grasped. 1t is work of art, and of Christian
art 1t is neither Catholic nor Protestant; it is
the poem of the Christian Church. If Arch
deacon Farrars analysis Of its three great di-
visions-the poets vision of hell, purgatory and
paradise, and his awful shadowing forth
in the ouisa of alleonrv of the forms of