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THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO

There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the
situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax
of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before
one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series
of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the
itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or
two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their
connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they
are given.

A work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to
use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can render the
mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,--

"Onorate 'l altissimo poeta,
Torna sua ombra che era dipartita"?

The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation,
prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now to
lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words
themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lines in Dante, the
meaning inheres in the very Italian words. They alone shine with the
idea. They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.

Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most foreign to the genius of the
English race. From the point of view of English-speaking people, he is
lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his
poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is
of a nature strange to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt and
sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman.

In the treatment of the supernatural the Teutonic nations have generally
preserved a touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true to the
Teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten
the terror of the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene on the
midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny,"
etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and
apprehension. Perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and
terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by
the immediate presence of the supernatural,--palsied, as it were, with
fear,--there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself,
a r