each century paints the Devil in its own image. Of the two poets it is by far the Italian who was the least flattering to his Infernal Lowness. Dante's Dis is so inferior to Milton's Satan that we blush to think how he could ever sustain a conversation with him or even show himself in his company. The first is as frightful as the second is fascinating. The English Devil is a bright and beautiful angel, but the Italian Demon is a foul and frozen fiend. The Protestant shows us the Devil in his vain struggle against an almighty power, and the Catholic presents him to us in his sullen and savage despair. Milton's Satan compels our sympathy and admiration, but Dante's Dis is an object of horror and hatred. The latter Devil is what the former has become after a long sojourn in the dread and dismal darkness. In beholding the Dantean Demon we would never think that he "one day wore a crown in the eyes of God". Every vestige of his past glory has long been effaced. The glamor which surrounded him in heaven has wholly disappeared. Even the three pairs of wings, which remained from his ancient seraphic state (Is. vi. 2), have dropped all their feathers into the Cocytus and now resemble the wings of a bat. Dis is irredeemably and irretrievably a Devil.

"The Imagination of Dante", says Chateaubriand, "exhausted by nine circles of torment, has made simply an atrocious monster of Satan, locked up in the centre of the earth". His Devil is an incarnation of ugliness, foulness and corruption. As he stands half sunk into the frozen fastness of his pit, in all his pervading brutality and cruelty, malignity and monstrosity, he is an appalling rather than an appealing sight. We cannot enter into his psychology. The action of his mind or will is closed to us. We do not even know whether it is sorrow over his departed glory or impotent fury which wrings the tears flowing over his three chins. In Purgatory the Devil reappears in the traditional shape of a snake. (Purg. viii. 98f.)

Dante's portrayal of the Devil is essentially allegorical. The Dantean Dis is the personification of the evils of the period. In his conception of the rebellion in heaven our poet does not follow Church tradition and teaching. The Church fathers, Irenæus, Eusebius and Nazianzen among others, taught that Satan's sin consisted in pride and envy, but to Dante the Devil is the author of treachery. According to our poet's view Lucifer was banished from heaven not because he refused in his haughty spirit to bow before 2 Génie du Christianisme, Bk. iv, Chap. ix.

the Great White Throne, but because he committed high-treason against his Creator by conspiring to wrest the crown of heaven. from him. The Italian poet, who saw his country torn asunder by its own jealousies and rivalries, considered treason the greatest of all evils (Inf. xxxii. 106). That is why of all the world's greatest criminals the three selected for punishment by the KingDevil himself were traitors. For this honor Dante picked out the three greatest traitors the world had ever known: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed our Lord, and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed the celestial Cæsar and conspired against what the Italian patriot re

garded as the sacred Will of the Almighty, the establishment of the Roman Empire.

To treachery must be added tyranny as a dominant trait in the character of the Dantean Demon. Dis is the child of the mind of a man who fled from a country which was groaning under the tyranny of its rulers. Dante preferred to be exiled from the Florence he so loved than allow himself to be cowed by the cruelty of the party

in power in his city, and in the opinion of Mme. de Staël's Corinne it must have been exile which was our poet's real hell. "I have found", said the poet of Inferno, "the original of my hell in the world which we inhabit". Having observed that physical force reigned supreme round about him, Dante represented hell as ruled by the law of the mailed fist.

Another reason for the prevalence of the physical over the moral in the portrayal of the Dantean Dis is the fact that he is a demon rather than a devil. Although he has already, through centuries of Christianity, been brought into connection with moral evil, he still retains his original physiognomy of physical pain. Primitive man saw in the Devil a tormentor rather than a tempter, a nightmare of terror and not the mainspring of moral woes.

4

Although a Catholic and well versed in Church lore and Canon law, Dante, it must be borne in mind, pursued his path, in the main, away from Christian tradition. He sought his masters and models in ancient literature rather than in medieval legend and learning. The Dantean demonology is classical rather than Christian, mythological rather than theological. The ruler of hell in Dante's Inferno answers not to any of his biblical names. Lucifer, Satan and Beelzebub have been overthrown by Dis. This Virgilian personage is of Northern origin and was the god of darkness among the Gauls. Dis, however, has a Teutonic ring and may be a corruption of Teutates (Tuisto in Tacitus), the god of the Teutones. It is wholly natural that the god of one race should become the devil of another race. The Romans, who adopted Dis, identified him with Pluto, the king of the underworld in Greek mythology. This god also appears in the Inferno under his own name as guardian of the department for usurers and misers. Apparently Dante considers Pluto and Plutus as identical in person. Already in classical times the god of the underworld and the god of wealth were identical. The god who dwells in the hollows of the earth was soon regarded as the possessor of all the gold and silver and precious stones hidden there as in a vault. In this manner Satan is also imagined as the

3 Dis and Hades are applied to the realm as well as to its ruler just as, on the other hand, the infernal monarch is called Inferus in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.

4 "Galli se omnes ab Dite patre prognatos praedicant idque ab druidibus proditum dicunt." (Cæsar, Commentarii de bello Gallico, vii. 18.)

guardian of subterranean treasures and possessor of unlimited wealth.5

In addition to Dis and Pluto the Inferno contains many other classical characters. The reader encounters Acheron, the ferryman of the Styx, Cerberus, the hell hound, Minos, the judge of the dead, Geryon, the guardian of the fraudulent and Phlegyas who burned the temple at Delphi. This Christian hell also has among its population

Centaurs, half men and half horses, and Minotaurs, half men and half bulls. Naturally no hell can be conceived without the womanfaced and serpent-bodied Furies and the equally woman-faced and feather-bodied Harpies, both having with scandalous consistency always been described as members of the "gentler" sex.

5 Cf. also Algeron Sidney Crapsey, The Ways of the Gods (1921),

p. 79.