Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

Prior to his exile, Dante already had begun composing his Comedy , named such to distinguish it from the form of tragedy since he’d planned to end with the poet’s ascension to Heaven. The poet, his life turned upside down by his enemies, had to find beds to sleep in, food to put on his plate. In the meantime, the pages he had already composed about his journey into Hell were lost. They gathered dust and mold in a trunk. The trunk was hidden from Dante’s adversaries and transported under the cover of night to a patron of the poet’s, who then carried it to Malaspina. The marquis hurried to Dante with the pages — probably into that very chamber of Dante’s where Browning stood — and begged the Florentine bard to continue it.

Dante contemplated the peculiar second realm that would follow that first section — the kingdom of Purgatory. As a subject for poetry, it was without a doubt intimidating. It was this canticle that would reveal the penance that every one of them — not just the purely wicked — would have to pay one day. “Since fortune unexpectedly has restored my work to me,” Dante answered the marquis, “I will proceed however grace shall determine for me.” Dante dedicated Purgatory to Malaspina.

The room where the exchange took place was a simple stone enclosure. It exuded the loneliness and bitterness of exile. Yet there was a window, and outside the brilliant outline of the Alps.

“Nothing to see, Father,” noted Browning’s son, peering out.

“Not so, my boy,” Browning whispered to Pen of the window, where there came in a rush of mountain air. “There is where Dante saw the heavens.”

Dante Alighieri’s legacy in Italy remained complicated by continued debates over his politics, variations of the kind that had left Dante without a home hundreds of years before. All the more reason English-speaking writers prized their own commitments to Dante. In addition to the Brownings and Christina, other British writers, including John Ruskin and Tennyson, turned to Dante for inspiration.

The translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy into English a few years earlier out of America, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the help of James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other members of Boston’s land of letters, spread the gospel of Dante further through Great Britain, as did a translation by the Rossettis’ friend and former pupil of Professore Rossetti, Charles Cayley. But in England, no single writer had been immersed as completely and personally in the Florentine’s life and Comedy as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Since the beginning of this quest to find Gabriel, somewhere tucked into Browning’s mind was the idea that it had all begun with Gabriel’s loss of Lizzie, that whatever path of descent he was on now, it might just as easily have been Browning.

Browning grappled and battled with the possibilities Christina proposed — that Gabriel’s disappearance was the responsibility of a Dante-doused fiend. “Nonsense!” he cried at one point, and then exclaimed at another, “I refuse to believe it! Worse than nonsense!” Into his mind came the image of the ancient warrior Cato, the guardian of the mountain of Purgatory, glaring in disbelief at Dante, the new arrival — a living man , a man still casting a shadow! How was this poet breaking all the rules to enter the sacred kingdom? Virgil, Dante’s guide, eloquent almost to a fault, must convince the doubting sentry that the journey was authorized from higher powers.

Browning’s head filled with images of the grim reality of London — both its shadowy districts of hidden sin and its corrupt pockets of luxury — stirred together with Dante’s array of purgatorial designs meant to cleanse the souls of the afterlife before being transported to Paradise. Wise Virgil teaches Dante the structure of the mountain as arranged by the sins it removed. The first group of terraces — Pride, Envy, and Wrath — comprise “ill love” or love that has been warped. The second category contains the terraces of “lax” or insufficient love, namely the Slothful, Avaricious, and Prodigal, while the final terrace of the mountain purges “profligate” or excessive love. Then a heavy thought struck Browning, and he no longer held back his obstinate doubts.

“It’s not the first time.”

Now it was Christina who was startled. “Gabriel disappearing?”

“No. Dante inspiring crimes and horrors in real life. It’s happened before. Some believe that the torturers of the Inquisition with their intricate, vicious punishments found motivation in Dante’s classifications of sins. There were even tales that something happened in America just a few years ago, around the time of the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth. Do you recall?”

“I heard rumors, passed to me by William from the usual literary gossips. But never for a moment did I think to believe them.”

“There was some kind of booklet printed later that purported to tell of what happened in Boston, and it proved a bit of a nine days’ wonder in some circles. I remember seeing it a few times even in rarefied homes of London.” Browning rose to his feet and gathered his hat and coat.

“What are you going to do?” Christina asked.

“That booklet about the Boston events. If there is a connection between those incidents and what is happening now — what may be happening to your brother — we must find it.” Browning knew it would not be in any university library. There were some resourceful booksellers with whom he was acquainted who might be able to secure a copy, though he was impatient just thinking how long that might take. He began to list the bookstalls and reading rooms they’d visit.

Then a smile of gratification formed on Browning’s lips. He began removing the gloves, coat, and hat in reverse order of how he’d just put them on, and stacking them.

“Tell me,” Browning said. “If you were looking for an obscure publication with anything to do with Dante, where would you start, Miss Rossetti?”

Christina knitted her brow, then realized.

Gabriel had collected every book and scrap of paper on Dante he could ever find. It began with the volumes inherited from their father, including one fourteenth-century edition. The professore circled the world to hunt down a rare Dante edition or a piece of ephemera. There was even what was supposed to be Dante’s death mask, sent from Italy by the eccentric Seymour Kirkup.

They were standing among the most comprehensive assortment of Dante writings, high and low, in all of England — as close to everything written about Dante as could ever exist.

Together they entered Gabriel’s library. With the eyes of a wombat and parrot looking on, they picked and pulled books from the shelves until Christina gingerly removed a thin pamphlet poorly printed on yellow paper.

They promptly used up their writing paper taking notes. As Christina crossed through the labyrinth of rooms in the house, gathering up loose sheets, she paused at the doorway to a small chamber, where one object stood out. It was a wooden cradle turned upside down to be used for a drafting table. She remembered a time when she entered the house Gabriel had lived in before Tudor House, when Lizzie was alive, calling out in her shy way to see who was there.

“Gabriel? Lizzie?”

As Christina wandered the hall, she peered into a room where Lizzie sat. Startled by Christina’s footsteps, Lizzie snapped her head and shushed her sister-in-law. Thick, wet hair covered her brow. “You’ll wake the baby with all that noise, Christina,” she whispered. Lizzie rocked the empty cradle in a gentle, hypnotic rhythm.