Prisoners of Hope

Excerpt from Prisoners of Hope: An Exposition of Dante's Purgatorio To the first, that I was 'obsessed' with the ethical aspect of the Inferno, I am quite willing to plead guilty; but I submit that the chief offender is Dante himself. It is hard to understand how any one can read the Commedia without seeing that its supreme and absorbing interest is ethical and spiritual. It is not a side issue, a mere bypath: it is the king's highway. Dante expressly calls himself a 'poet of Righteousness' in contradistinction to others whom he names as poets of Arms and of Love; and this seems quite decisive of the leading idea and purpose of the poem. There are, of course, many other aspects and interests, but surely an expositor is scarcely to be condemned for choosing that which the poet himself regarded as the chief. 'The aim of the whole and of the part, ' he writes in his Epistle to Can Grande, 'is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to guide them to a state of happiness' - an aim which can be accomplished only by moral and spiritual means. The second criticism is even more fundamental, objecting to the very existence of any such exposition. Let those interested in Dante, it is said, go straight to the original, and with the aid of a good dictionary and commentary work their way for themselves into the poets meaning. To which I say, By all means, wherever it is possible. My hope is that some of my readers may be sufficiently interested to make this first-hand acquaintance with the original poem; by doing so, they will discover many beauties which no exposition can adequately reveal. But it is surely obvious that for the majority this is a pure counsel of perfection. If no one is to be allowed to have any acquaintance with Dante save in this way, the Commedia must remain what some seem anxious to keep it, a preserve of professed Dante scholars.