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But still heaps of waste, moistened by rain, do smoke by day, and flaming by night in conjunction with hundreds of fiery furnaces and natural gases blazing, do produce, on a night's journey from Dudley to Wolverhampton, not the effect of one AEtna or Hecla, but of a broad "inferno," from which even Dante might have gathered some burning notions.
Great bowlders have fallen down without helping to fill the black holes that received them, and into this real Inferno we proceeded to descend by narrow, ladder-like stairs provided with a light hand rail, and trembling slightly with the responsibility they assumed.
We should see statesmen hanging from lamp-posts in Whitehall; 'The Destroyers' would be destroyed; the Crown would be in danger, as well as its unworthy servants. And the Kaiser's machine-like army would find it had invaded a ravaged inferno, occupied by an infuriated populace hopelessly divided against itself, and already in the grip of the deadliest kind of strife.
Instantly the hollow volume of the immense cone became a coruscating hell of resistless energy, an inferno which, with the velocity of light, extended itself into a far-reaching cylinder of rapacious destruction.
The Inferno of DANTE was caught from the popular superstitions of the age, and had been preceded by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually for their own purposes. It was from his own age that MILTON derived his greatest blemish the introduction of school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the sovereign, reflected the reigning tastes.
But the criticism by which their steps are attended, though full of grace and acuteness, is absolute, not relative. They are judged by a standard of taste and feeling existing in the author's mind: the Inferno is a magnificent caldron of everything base and detestable in human nature; and the Orlando, a paradise of love, beauty, and delight.
Dante and Petrarch, the two chaste poets, as they are sometimes called, were the most ardent patriots in all Italy. Midst the tortures of the Inferno or the joys of the Paradiso, the image of the stricken fatherland is ever with Dante, and more than once does he cry out against her cruel oppressors.
I also got the initial surprise of the many that awaited me in this part of the world. In the popular mind the Congo is an annex of the Inferno. I can vouch for the fact that some sections break all heat records. The air that greeted me, however, might have been wafted down from Greenland's icy mountain, for I was chilled to the bone.
On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris's ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley.
"I could never have imagined God's earth could be transformed to look like a place of torment, and yet this countryside suggests one of the hells in Dante's 'Inferno. But if you mean are the French people more tragic than I thought to find them, then a thousand times, no! Was there ever anything so inspiring or so amazing as their happiness and courage in returning to their old homes?
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