III.
The man Dante Alighieri received unforgivable affronts and
insults from the world; and the poet Dante Alighieri bequeathed
his immortal curse to it, in the sublime malediction
of the Inferno. The fiery tongue whose political forkings lost
him the solacements of this world, found its malicious counterpart
in that muse of fire, which would forever bar the vast bulk
of mankind from all solacement in the worlds to come. Fortunately
for the felicity of the Dilletante in Literature, the horrible
allegorical meanings of the Inferno, lie not on the surface;
but unfortunately for the earnest and youthful piercers into truth
and reality, those horrible meanings, when first discovered, infuse
their poison into a spot previously unprovided with that sovereign
antidote of a sense of uneapitulatable security, which is only
the possession of the furthest advanced and profoundest souls.
Judge ye, then, ye Judicious, the mood of Pierre, so far as
the passage in Dante touched him.
If among the deeper significances of its pervading indefiniteness,
which significances are wisely hidden from all but the
rarest adepts, the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet convey any one
particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses of man, it is
this:—that all meditation is worthless, unless it prompt to action;
that it is not for man to stand shillyshallying amid the
conflicting invasions of surrounding impulses; that in the earliest
instant of conviction, the roused man must strike, and, if
possible, with the precision and the force of the lightning-bolt.
Pierre had always been an admiring reader of Hamlet; but
neither his age nor his mental experience thus far had qualified
him either to catch initiating glimpses into the hopeless gloom
of its interior meaning, or to draw from the general story those
superficial and purely incidental lessons, wherein the painstaking
moralist so complacently expatiates.
The intensest light of reason and revelation combined, can
not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as
will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter
darkness is then his light, and cat-like he distinctly sees all
objects through a medium which is mere blindness to common
vision. Wherefore have Gloom and Grief been celebrated of
old as the selectest chamberlains to knowledge? Wherefore is
it, that not to know Gloom and Grief is not to know aught
that an heroic man should learn?
By the light of that gloom, Pierre now turned over the soul
of Hamlet in his hand. He knew not—at least, felt not—then,
that Hamlet, though a thing of life, was, after all, but a thing
of breath, evoked by the wanton magic of a creative hand, and as
wantonly dismissed at last into endless halls of hell and night.
It is the not impartially bestowed privilege of the more final
insights, that at the same moment they reveal the depths, they
do, sometimes, also reveal—though by no means so distinctly—
some answering heights. But when only midway down the
gulf, its crags wholly conceal the upper vaults, and the wanderer
thinks it all one gulf of downward dark.
Judge ye, then, ye Judicious, the mood of Pierre, so far as
the passage in Hamlet touched him.
