Excerpt from From Vita the to Paradiso; Two Essays on the Vital Relations: Between Dante"s Successive Works

I suppose it is still true (as it certainly was not long ago) that the successive Cantiche of Dante"s Comedy appeal to successively narrowing circles of readers. Many who are fairly acquainted with representative portions at least of the Inferno, and in whose minds Dante ranks high as a poet on the strength of them, have but the vaguest conception even of the Purgatorio. Many readers of the Purgalorio, to whom Dante is a prophet and teacher as well as a poet, find their high anticipations perplexed and perhaps chilled when they come to the Paradiso. Many of those to whom parts of the Paradiso itself make a direct appeal of transmuting power, on the mystic and experiential side, are baffled by the intricacies of its scholastic theology and philosophy.

But to Dante himself the movement of the whole Comedy, from the first Canto to the last, was determined and controlled by the central thought of the Paradiso. He spoke as one whom a vision of the ultimate goal and the inmost meaning of life was drawing, as with some spiritual magnetism or force of gravitation, to the conclusive and all-fulfilling consummation, with a trend so overmastering as to assimilate to itself all experiences of life and all records of history, and set them in living relations with each other and with itself.

In the Comedy Dante strove to set time in the light of eternity, fully convinced that so far as he could do this he would turn "folk living in this mortal life from misery and bring them to the state of bliss."

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