l
tortures are accumulated, inflicted on traitors, murderers,
robbers,--men who have committed great crimes, unpunished in their
lifetime; such men as Cain, Judas, Ugolino,--men consigned to an
infamous immortality. On the great culprits of history, and of Italy
especially, Dante virtually sits in judgment; and he consigns them
equally to various torments which we shudder to think of.

And here let me say, as a general criticism, that in the _Inferno_ are
brought out in tremendous language the opinions of the Middle Ages in
reference to retribution. Dante does not rise above them, with all his
genius; he is not emancipated from them. It is the rarest thing in this
world for any man, however profound his intellect and bold his spirit,
to be emancipated from the great and leading ideas of his age. Abraham
was, and Moses, and the founder of Buddhism, and Socrates, and Mohammed,
and Luther; but they were reformers, more or less divinely commissioned,
with supernatural aid in many instances to give them wisdom. But Homer
was not, nor Euripides, nor the great scholastics of the Middle Ages,
nor even popes. The venerated doctors and philosophers, prelates,
scholars, nobles, kings, to say nothing of the people, thought as Dante
did in reference to future punishment,--that it was physical, awful,
accumulative, infinite, endless; the wrath of avenging deity displayed
in pains and agonies inflicted on the body, like the tortures of
inquisitors, thus appealing to the fears of men, on which chiefly the
power of the clergy was based. Nor in these views of endless physical
sufferings, as if the body itself were eternal and indestructible, is
there the refinement of Milton, who placed misery in the upbraidings of
conscience, in mental torture rather than bodily, in the everlasting
pride and rebellion of the followers of Satan and his fallen angels. It
was these awful views of protracted and eternal physical torments,--not
the hell of the Bible, but the hell of priests, of human
invention,--which gives to the Middle Ages a sorrowful and repulsive
light, thus nursing superstition and working on the fears of mankind,
rather than on the conscience and the sense of moral accountability. But
how could Dante have represented the ideas of the Middle Ages, if he had
not painted his _Inferno_ in the darkest colors that the imagination
could conceive, unless he had soared beyond what is revealed into the
unfathomable and mysterious and unrevealed