Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

Lowell laughed. “Shall we have England lord over our bookshelves? Why did we not just hand Lexington over to the redcoats and spare General Washington the trouble of war?” Lowell glimpsed something in Hill’s eye, something he sometimes saw in the untrained expression of a student, that made him believe the president could understand. “Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.”

Hill tried hard not to sway from his purpose. “This idea of traveling through the afterlife, of recording Hell’s punishments—that’s downright harsh, Lowell. And a work like this so inaptly titled a ‘Comedy’! It’s medieval, it’s scholastic, and…”

“Catholic.” This shut Hill up. “That is what you mean, Reverend President. That it’s all too Italian, too Catholic for Harvard College?”

Hill raised a sly white eyebrow. “You must own that such frightful notions of God could not be sustained to our Protestant ears.”

The truth was Lowell was as unfriendly as the Harvard fellows toward the crowding of Irish papists along the wharfsides and in outlying suburbs of Boston. But the idea that the poem was some kind of edict from the Vatican… “Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them. And Dante calls it a commedia , my dear sir, because it is written in his rustic Italian tongue instead of Latin and because it ends happily, with the poet rising to Heaven, as opposed to a tragedia . Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, he lets the poem make itself out of him.”

Lowell was pleased to see that the president was exasperated. “For pity’s sake, Professor, do you not think there is something at all rancorous, something malevolent, on the part of one to inflict merciless tortures on all who practice a list of particular sins? Imagine some man in public life today declaring his enemies’ places in Hell!” he argued.

“My dear reverend president, I am imagining it even as we speak. And do not misunderstand. Dante sends his friends down there, too. You may tell that to Augustus Manning. Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.”

The members of the Harvard Corporation, the president and six pious men of affairs chosen from outside the College faculty, were firm in their commitment to the long-standing curriculum that had served them well—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, ancient history, mathematics, and science—and their corollary assertion that the inferior modern languages and literature would remain a novelty, something to fatten their catalogs. Longfellow had made some headway after Professor Ticknor’s departure, including initiating a Dante seminar and hiring a brilliant Italian exile named Pietro Bachi as an Italian instructor. His Dante seminar, from a lack of interest in the subject and the language, was consistently his least popular. Still, the poet enjoyed the zeal of a few minds passing through that course. One of the zealous was James Russell Lowell.

Now, after ten years of his own tussles with the administration, Lowell faced an event for which he had waited, for which the time was ripe as destiny: the discovery of Dante by America. But not only was Harvard swift and thorough in its discouragement, the Dante Club also faced an obstacle from inside: Holmes and his straddling.

Lowell sometimes took walks in Cambridge with Holmes’s oldest son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior. Twice a week, the law student would emerge from the Dane Law School building just when Lowell had finished his teaching at University Hall. Holmes could not appreciate his good fortune at having Junior, because he had made his son hate him—if only Holmes would listen , instead of making Junior talk . Lowell had asked the young man once whether Dr. Holmes ever spoke at home about the Dante Club. “Oh, certainly, Mr. Lowell,” Junior, handsome and tall, said, smirking, “and the Atlantic Club and the Union Club and the Saturday Club and the Scientific Club and the Historical Association and the Medical Society…”

Phineas Jennison, one of Boston’s wealthiest new businessmen, was sitting next to Lowell at a recent Saturday Club supper at the Parker House when all this darkened Lowell’s mind. “Harvard is harassing you again,” Jennison said. Lowell was stunned that his face could be read as easily as a sign board. “Do not jump so, my dear friend,” Jennison said, laughing, the deep dimple in his chin jiggling. Jennison’s near relations said that his gold-flaxen hair and his regal dimple had betokened his vast fortune even from the time he was a boy, though, accurately speaking, it was perhaps a regicidal dimple, inherited as it was supposed to be from an ancestor who had beheaded Charles I. “It is only that I chanced to speak with some of the Corporation fellows the other day. You know nothing happens in Boston or Cambridge without coming under my nose.”

“Building another library for us, are you?” Lowell asked.

“The fellows seemed to be heated up speaking amongst themselves of your department anyway. They seemed downright determined. I do not mean to pry into your affairs, of course, only—”

“Between us, my dear Jennison, they mean to rid me of my Dante class,” Lowell interrupted. “I sometimes fear they’ve become as set against Dante as I am for him. They even offered to increase enrollment for students in my classes if I allow them approval over my seminar topics.” Jennison’s expression conveyed his concern.

“I refused, of course,” Lowell said.

Jennison flashed his wide smile. “Did you?”

They were interrupted by a few toasts, including the night’s most cheered improvisational rhyme, which had been demanded by the revelers from Dr. Holmes. Holmes, quick as always, even managed to draw attention to the raw style of the format.

“These after-dinner verses could kill any poet but Holmes,” Lowell said with an admiring grin. He had a hazy look in his eyes. “Sometimes I feel I am not the stuff that professors are made of, Jennison. Better in some ways, worse in others. Too sensitive and not conceited enough—physically conceited, I should call it. I know it is all wearing me out.” He paused. “And why shouldn’t sitting in the professor’s chair all these years benumb me to the world? What must someone like you, prince of industry, think of such a paltry existence?”

“Child’s talk, my dear Lowell!” Jennison seemed tired with the topic but after a moment’s thought was newly interested. “You have a larger duty to the world and to yourself than any mere spectator! I shan’t hear a bit of your hesitancy! I wouldn’t know what Dante is to save my soul. But a genius the likes of you, my dear friend, assumes a divine responsibility to fight for all those exiled from the world.”

Lowell mumbled something inaudible but no doubt self-effacing.

“Now, now, Lowell,” Jennison said. “Were you not the one to convince the Saturday Club that a mere merchant was good enough to dine with such immortals as your friends?”

“Could they have refused you after you offered to buy the Parker House?” Lowell laughed.

“They could have refused me if I had given up my fight to belong among great men. May I quote from my favorite poet: ‘And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.’ Oh, how good that is!”