Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 - Leigh Hunt
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"O Constantine!" exclaimed the poet, "of what a world of evil was that
dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a
rich man!" [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at
these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him
the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth
gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.
It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and
weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. Their faces were
turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost,
and their tears fell on their loins. Dante was so overcome at the sight,
that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling
him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There
was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and
Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in
a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on
the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses
over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived
in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and
Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus,
the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut
away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face
over his swarthy shoulders. Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer of
Forli; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he had stuck to
his last; and the wretched women who quit the needle and the distaff to
wreak their malice with herbs and images. Such was the punishment of
those who, desiring to see too far before them, now looked only behind
them, and walked the reverse way of their looking.
The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving and
subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those within it.
They were Public Peculators. Winged black devils were busy about the
lake, pronging the sinners when they occasionally darted up their backs
for relief like dolphins, or thrust out their jaws like frogs. Dante
at first looked eagerly down into the gulf, like one who feels that he
shall turn away instantly out of the very horror that attracts him.
"See--look behind thee!" said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from
the place where he stood, to a covert behind a crag. Dante looked round,
and beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his
shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down after him,
like a mastiff let loose on a thief. It was a man from Lucca, where
every soul was a false dealer except Bonturo.[29] The devil called out
to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon the wretch with hooks as
he rose to the surface; telling him, that he must practise there in
secret, if he practised at all; and thrusting him back into the boiling
pitch, as cooks thrust back flesh into the pot. The devils were of the
lowest and most revolting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and
parade.
Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and were going
to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy rebuke. For a
while they let him alone; and Dante saw one of them haul a sinner out of
the pitch by the clotted locks, and hold him up sprawling like an otter.
The rest then fell upon him and flayed him.
It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thiebault, king
of Navarre. One of his companions under the pitch was Friar Gomita,
governor of Gallura; and another, Michael Zanche, also a Sardinian.
Ciampolo ultimately escaped by a trick out of the hands of the devils,
who were so enraged that they turned upon the two pilgrims; but Virgil,
catching up Dante with supernatural force, as a mother does a child in
a burning house, plunged with him out of their jurisdiction into the
borders of gulf the sixth, the region of Hypocrites.
The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a wearisome and
exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore huge cowls, which hung
over their eyes, and the outsides of which were gilded, but the insides
of lead. Two of them had been rulers of Florence; and Dante was
listening to their story, when his attention was called off by the sight
of a cross, on which Caiaphas the High Priest was writhing, breathing
hard all the while through his beard with sighs. It was his office to
see that every soul which passed him, on its arrival in the place, was
oppressed with the due weight. His father-in-law, Annas, and all his
council, were stuck in like manner on crosses round the borders of the
gulf. The pilgrims beheld little else in this region of weariness, and
soon passed into the borders of one of the most terrible portions of
Evil-budget, the land of the transformation of Robbers.
The place was thronged with serpents of the most appalling and unwonted
description, among which ran tormented the naked spirits of the
robbers, agonised with fear. Their hands were bound behind them with
serpents--their bodies pierced and enfolded with serpents. Dante saw one
of the monsters leap up and transfix a man through the nape of the neck;
when, lo! sooner than a pen could write _o_, or _i_, the sufferer burst
into flames, burnt up, fell to the earth a heap of ashes--was again
brought together, and again became a man, aghast with his agony, and
staring about him, sighing.[30] Virgil asked him who he was.
"I was but lately rained down into this dire gullet," said the man,
"amidst a shower of Tuscans. The beast Vanni Fucci am I, who led a
brutal life, like the mule that I was, in that den Pistoia."
"Compel him to stop," said Dante, "and relate what brought him hither. I
knew the bloody and choleric wretch when he was alive."
The sinner, who did not pretend to be deaf to these words, turned round
to the speaker with the most painful shame in his face, and said, "I
feel more bitterly at being caught here by thee in this condition, than
when I first arrived. A power which I cannot resist compels me to let
thee know, that I am here because I committed sacrilege and charged
another with the crime; but now, mark me, that thou mayest hear
something not to render this encounter so pleasant: Pistoia hates thy
party of the Whites, and longs for the Blacks back again. It will have
them, and so will Florence; and there will be a bloody cloud shall burst
over the battlefield of Piceno, which will dash many Whites to the
earth. I tell thee this to make thee miserable."
So saying, the wretch gave a gesture of contempt with his thumb and
finger towards heaven, and said, "Take it, God--a fig for thee!" [31]
"From that instant," said Dante, "the serpents and I were friends; for
one of them throttled him into silence, and another dashed his hands
into a knot behind his back. O Pistoia! Pistoia! why art not thou
thyself turned into ashes, and swept from the face of the earth, since
thy race has surpassed in evil thine ancestors? Never, through the
whole darkness of hell, beheld I a blasphemer so dire as this--not even
Capaneus himself."
The Pistoian fled away with the serpents upon him, followed by a
Centaur, who came madly galloping up, crying, "Where is the caitiff?" It
was the monster-thief Cacus, whose den upon earth often had a pond of
blood before it, and to whom Hercules, in his rage, when he slew him,
gave a whole hundred blows with his club, though the wretch perceived
nothing after the ninth. He was all over adders up to the mouth; and
upon his shoulders lay a dragon with its wings open, breathing fire on
whomsoever it met.
The Centaur tore away; and Dante and Virgil were gazing after him, when
they heard voices beneath the bank on which they stood, crying, "Who are
ye?" The pilgrims turned their eyes downwards, and beheld three spirits,
one of whom, looking about him, said, "Where's Cianfa?" Dante made a
sign to Virgil to say nothing.
Cianfa came forth, a man lately, but now a serpent with six feet.[32]
"If thou art slow to believe, reader, what I am about to tell thee,"
says the poet, "be so; it is no marvel; for I myself, even now, scarcely
credit what I beheld."
The six-footed serpent sprang at one of the three men front to front,
clasping him tightly with all its legs, and plunging his fangs into
either cheek. Ivy never stuck so close to a tree as the horrible monster
grappled with every limb of that pinioned man. The two forms then
gradually mingled into one another like melting wax, the colours of
their skin giving way at the same time to a third colour, as the white
in a piece of burning paper recedes before the brown, till it all
becomes black. The other two human shapes looked on, exclaiming,
"Oh, how thou changest, Agnello! See, thou art neither two nor yet one."
And truly, though the two heads first became one, there still remained
two countenances in the face. The four arms then became but two, and
such also became the legs and thighs; and the two trunks became such a
body as was never beheld; and the hideous twofold monster walked slowly
away.[33]
A small black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body
of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on
the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated
and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand
steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or
fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and
both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled into one
volume.
And now, let Lucan never speak more of the wretched Sabellus or
Nisidius, but listen and be silent; and now, let Ovid be silent, nor
speak again of his serpent that was Cadmus, or his fountain that was
Arethusa; for, says the Tuscan poet, I envy him not. Never did he change
the natures of two creatures face to face, so that each received the
form of the other.
With corresponding impulse, the serpent split his train into a fork,
while the man drew his legs together into a train; the skin of the
serpent grew soft, while the man's hardened; the serpent acquired
tresses of hair, the man grew hairless; the claws of the one projected
into legs, while the arms of the other withdrew into his shoulders; the
face of the serpent, as it rose from the ground, retreated towards the
temples, pushing out human ears; that of the man, as he fell to the
ground, thrust itself forth into a muzzle, withdrawing at the same time
its ears into its head, as the slug does its horns; and each creature
kept its impious eyes fixed on the other's, while the features beneath
the eyes were changing. The soul which had become the serpent then
turned to crawl away, hissing in scorn as he departed; and the serpent,
which had become the man, spat after him, and spoke words at him. The
new human-looking soul then turned his back on his late adversary, and
said to the third spirit, who remained unchanged, "Let Buoso now take to
his crawl, as I have done."
The two then hastened away together, leaving Dante in a state of
bewildered amazement, yet not so confused but that he recognised the
unchanged one for another of his countrymen, Puccio the Lame. "Joy to
thee, Florence!" cried the poet; "not content with having thy name
bruited over land and sea, it flourishes throughout hell."
The pilgrims now quitted the seventh, and looked down from its barrier
into the eighth gulf, where they saw innumerable flames, distinct from
one another, flickering all over the place like fire-flies.
"In those flames," said Virgil, "are souls, each tormented with the fire
that swathes it."
"I observe one," said Dante, "divided at the summit. Are the Theban
brothers in it?"
"No," replied Virgil; "in that flame are Diomed and Ulysses." The
sinners punished in this gulf were Evil Counsellors; and those two were
the advisers of the stratagem of the Trojan horse.
Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his adventures,
not to be found in books: how he tired of an idle life, and sailed forth
again into the wide ocean; and how he sailed so far that he came into a
region of new stars, and in sight of a mountain, the loftiest he ever
saw; when, unfortunately, a hurricane fell upon them from the shore,
thrice whirled their vessel round, then dashed the stern up in air and
the prow under water, and sent the billows over their heads.
"Enough," said Virgil; "I trouble thee no more." The soul of Guido di
Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect,
asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how
he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at
once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He
was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on
purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his
absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim. "To repent evil, and to will
to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful angel,
"impossible: therefore wrong me not."
"Oh, how I shook," said the unhappy Guido, "when he laid his hands upon
me!" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for
agony, and so took its way.
The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the
Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False
Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the
sins of those whom they seduce.
The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels,
and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked his son-in-law,
Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church
were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They
all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on
their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a
sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims
warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his
mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish
speedily to follow him.[35]
Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of
dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and
Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Caesar to cross
the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and
one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up
the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember
Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing
ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."
"And death to thy family," cried Dante.
The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief;
and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the
testimony of a good conscience--that best of friends, which gives a
man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless
innocence[36]--he should be afraid to relate without further proof. He
saw--and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to
see--a headless trunk about to come past him with the others. It held
its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up
at the two pilgrims, and said, "Woe is me!" The head was, in fact, a
lantern to the paths of the trunk; and thus there were two separated
things in one, and one in two; and how that could be, he only can tell
who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted the head aloft,
that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. "Behold," it said,
"behold, thou that walkest living among the dead, and say if there be
any punishment like this. I am Bertrand de Born, he that incited John
of England to rebel against his father. Father and son I set at
variance--closest affections I set at variance--and hence do I bear my
brain severed from the body on which it grew. In me behold the work of
retribution." [37]
The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of bleeding
wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide proceeded
further. Something also struck them on the sudden which added to his
desire to stop. But Virgil asked what ailed him, and why he stood gazing
still on the wretched multitude. "Thou hast not done so," continued he,
"in any other portion of this circle; and the valley is twenty-two miles
further about, and the moon already below us. Thou hast more yet to see
than thou wottest of, and the time is short."
Dante, excusing himself for the delay, and proceeding to follow his
leader, said he thought he had seen, in the cavern at which he was
gazing so hard, a spirit that was one of his own family--and it was so.
It was the soul of Geri del Bello, a cousin of the poet's. Virgil said
that he had observed him, while Dante was occupied with Bertrand de
Born, pointing at his kinsman in a threatening manner. "Waste not a
thought on him," concluded the Roman, "but leave him as he is." "O
honoured guide!" said Dante, "he died a violent death, which his kinsmen
have not yet avenged; and hence it is that he disdained to speak to me;
and I must needs feel for him the more on that account." [38]
They came now to the last partition of the circle of Evil-budget, and
their ears were assailed with such a burst of sharp wailings, that Dante
was fain to close his with his hands. The misery there, accompanied by
a horrible odour, was as if all the hospitals in the sultry marshes of
Valdichiana had brought their maladies together into one infernal ditch.
It was the place of punishment for pretended Alchemists, Coiners,
Personators of other people, False Accusers, and Impostors of all such
descriptions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl
about--some itching madly with leprosies--some swollen and gasping with
dropsies--some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time. One
was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer than the French; another a
Florentine, who tricked a man into making a wrong will; another, Sinon
of Troy; another, Myrrha; another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries
did not hinder them from giving one another malignant blows; and Dante
was listening eagerly to an abusive conversation between Sinon and
a Brescian coiner, when Virgil rebuked him for the disgraceful
condescension, and said it was a pleasure fit only for vulgar minds.[39]
The blushing poet felt the reproof so deeply, that he could not speak
for shame, though he manifested by his demeanour that he longed to do
so, and thus obtained the pardon he despaired of. He says he felt like a
man that, during an unhappy dream, wishes himself dreaming while he
is so, and does not know it. Virgil understood his emotion, and, as
Achilles did with his spear, healed the wound with the tongue that
inflicted it.
A silence now ensued between the companions; for they had quitted
Evil-budget, and arrived at the ninth great circle of hell, on the mound
of which they passed along, looking quietly and steadily before them.
Daylight had given place to twilight; and Dante was advancing his head
a little, and endeavouring to discern objects in the distance, when his
whole attention was called to one particular spot, by a blast of a
horn so loud, that a thunder clap was a whisper in comparison. Orlando
himself blew no such terrific blast, after the dolorous rout, when
Charlemagne was defeated in his holy enterprise.[40] The poet raised his
head, thinking he perceived a multitude of lofty towers. He asked Virgil
to what region they belonged; but Virgil said, "Those are no towers:
they are giants, standing each up to his middle in the pit that goes
round this circle." Dante looked harder; and as objects clear up by
little and little in the departing mist, he saw, with alarm, the
tremendous giants that warred against Jove, standing half in and
half out of the pit, like the towers that crowned the citadel of
Monteseggione. The one whom he saw plainest, and who stood with his arms
hanging down on each side, appeared to him to have a face as huge as
the pinnacle of St. Peter's, and limbs throughout in proportion. The
monster, as the pilgrims were going by, opened his dreadful mouth, fit
for no sweeter psalmody, and called after them, in the words of some
unknown tongue, _Rafel, maee amech zabee almee_.[41] "Dull wretch!"
exclaimed Virgil, "keep to thine horn, and so vent better whatsoever
frenzy or other passion stuff thee. Feel the chain round thy throat,
thou confusion! See, what a clenching hoop is about thy gorge!" Then he
said to Dante, "His howl is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he through
whose evil ambition it was that mankind ceased to speak one language.
Pass him, and say nothing; for every other tongue is to him, as his is
to thee."
The companions went on for about the length of a sling's throw, when
they passed the second giant, who was much fiercer and linger than
Nimrod. He was fettered round and round with chains, that fixed one arm
before him and the other behind him--Ephialtes his name, the same that
would needs make trial of his strength against Jove himself. The hands
which he then wielded were now motionless, but he shook with passion;
and Dante thought he should have died for terror, the effect on the
ground about him was so fearful. It surpassed that of a tower shaken by
an earthquake. The poet expressed a wish to look at Briareus, but he was
too far off. He saw, however, Antaeus, who, not having fought against
heaven, was neither tongue-confounded nor shackled; and Virgil requested
the "taker of a thousand lions," by the fame which the living poet had
it in his power to give him, to bear the travellers in his arms down the
steep descent into this deeper portion of hell, which was the region of
tormenting cold. Antmus, stooping, like the leaning tower of Bologna,
to take them up, gathered them in his arms, and, depositing them in the
gulf below, raised himself to depart like the mast of a ship.[42]
Had I hoarse and rugged words equal to my subject, says the poet, I
would now make them fuller of expression, to suit the rocky horror of
this hole of anguish; but I have not, and therefore approach it with
fear, since it is no jesting enterprise to describe the depths of the
universe, nor fit for a tongue that babbles of father and mother.[43]
Let such of the Muses assist me as turned the words of Amphion into
Theban walls; so shall the speech be not too far different from the
matter.
Oh, ill-starred creatures! wretched beyond all others, to inhabit a
place so hard to speak of--better had ye been sheep or goats.
The poet was beginning to walk with his guide along the place in which
the giant had set them down, and was still looking up at the height from
which he had descended, when a voice close to him said, "Have a care
where thou treadest. Hurt not with thy feet the heads of thy unhappy
brethren."
Dante looked down and before him, and saw that he was walking on a lake
of ice, in which were Murderous Traitors up to their chins, their teeth
chattering, their faces held down, their eyes locked up frozen with
tears. Dante saw two at his feet so closely stuck together, that the
very hairs of their heads were mingled. He asked them who they were, and
as they lifted up their heads for astonishment, and felt the cold doubly
congeal them, they dashed their heads against one another for hate and
fury. They were two brothers who had murdered each other.[44] Near them
were other Tuscans, one of whom the cold had deprived of his ears; and
thousands more were seen grinning like dogs, for the pain.
Dante, as he went along, _kicked_ the face of one of them, whether by
chance, or fate, or _will_,[45] he could not say. The sufferer burst
into tears, and cried out, "Wherefore dost thou torment me? Art thou
come to revenge the defeat at Montaperto?" The pilgrim at this question
felt eager to know who he was; but the unhappy wretch would not tell.
His countryman seized him by the hair to force him; but still he said
he would not tell, were he to be scalped a thousand times. Dante, upon
this, began plucking up his hairs by the roots, the man _barking_,[46]
with his eyes squeezed up, at every pull; when another soul exclaimed,
"Why, Bocca, what the devil ails thee? Must thou needs bark for cold as
well as chatter?" [47]
"Now, accursed traitor, betrayer of thy country's standard," said Dante,
"be dumb if thou wilt; for I shall tell thy name to the world."
"Tell and begone!" said Bocca; "but carry the name of this babbler with
thee; 'tis Buoso, who left the pass open to the enemy between Piedmont
and Parma; and near him is the traitor for the pope, Beccaria; and
Ganellone, who betrayed Charlemagne; and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza
to the enemy at night-time."
The pilgrims went on, and beheld two other spirits so closely locked up
together in one hole of the ice, that the head of one was right over the
other's, like a cowl; and Dante, to his horror, saw that the upper head
was devouring the lower with all the eagerness of a man who is famished.
The poet asked what could possibly make him skew a hate so brutal;
adding, that if there were any ground for it, he would tell the story to
the world.[48]