The class met twice a week on days of Lowell’s choosing—sometimes on a Sunday, for Lowell liked the idea of meeting on the same day of the week that Boccaccio, centuries before him, had held the first Dante lectures in Florence. Mabel Lowell often sat and listened to her father’s lessons from the adjoining room, which was connected by two open archways.
“Remember, Mead,” said Professor Lowell when the student stopped in frustration. “Remember, in this fifth sphere of Heaven, the sphere of Martyrs, Cacciaguida has prophesied to Dante that the Poet will be exiled from Florence soon after he returns to the living world, under the sentence of death by fire if he reenters the city gates. Now, Mead, translate his next phrase—’io non perdessi li altri per i miei carmi–with that in mind.”
Lowell’s Italian was fluent and always technically correct. But Mead, a Harvard junior, liked to think that Lowell’s Americanness came out in the scrupulous pronunciation of each syllable, as if each had no connection to the next.
“ ‘I will not lose other places for reason of my poems.’ “
“Stay with the text, Mead! Carmi are songs—not just his poems, but the very music of his voice. In the days of minstrels, you would pay your money and have a choice whether he would give you his stories as song or sermon. A sermon which sings and a song which preaches—that is Dante’s Comedy. ‘So that through my songs I shall not lose the other places.’ A fair reading, Mead,” Lowell said with a gesture resembling a stretch, which communicated his general approval.
“Dante repeats himself,” Pliny Mead said flatly. Edward Sheldon, the student beside him, squirmed at this. “As you say,” Mead continued, “a divine prophet has already foreseen that Dante will find sanctuary and protection under Can Grande. So what ‘other’ places would Dante need? Nonsense for the sake of poetry.”
Lowell said, “When Dante speaks of a new home in the future by virtue of his work, when he speaks of the other places he seeks, he speaks not of his life in 1302—the date of his exile—but of his second life, his life as he will live on through the poem for hundreds of years.”
Mead persisted. “But the ‘dearest place’ is never truly taken from Dante; he takes himself away from it. Florence offered him a chance to return home, to his wife and family, yet he refused!”
Pliny Mead was never one to impress instructors or peers with geniality, but since the morning he had received his marks on last term’s papers—and had been sorely disappointed—he had eyed Lowell with sourness. Mead attributed his low mark—and his resulting drop in the class of 1867 rank book from twelfth to fifteenth scholar—to the fact that he had disagreed with Lowell on several occasions during discussions of French literature and that the professor could not stand being thought wrong. Mead would have dropped his course work in the living languages altogether but for the Corporation’s rule that once enrolled in a language course, the student had to remain three more terms in the department—one of the contrivances meant to dissuade the boys from even dipping a toe. So Mead was stuck with that great bag of wind James Russell Lowell. And with Dante Alighieri.
“What an offer they made!” Lowell laughed. “Full clemency for Dante and restoration of his rightful place in Florence: in return for the poet’s request for absolution and a hefty payment of money! We marched Johnny Reb back into the Union with less degradation. Far be it for a man who cries aloud for justice to accept such a rotten compromise with his persecutors.”
“Well, Dante is still a Florentine, no matter what we say!” Mead asserted, trying to recruit Sheldon’s support with a collusive glance. “Sheldon, can’t you see it? Dante writes incessantly of Florence, and of the Florentines he meets and speaks with in his visit to the afterlife, and he writes all this while in exile! Clear enough to me, friends, he longs only for return. The man’s death in exile and poverty is his great final failure.”
With irritation, Edward Sheldon noticed that Mead was grinning at having silenced Lowell, who had risen and thrust his hands into his rather shabby smoking jacket. But Sheldon could see in Lowell, could see in the puffing of his pipe, a heightened frame of mind. He seemed to be treading on another plane of mental cognizance, far above the Elmwood study, as he paced the rug with his heavy-laced boots. Lowell typically wouldn’t allow a freshman admission to an advanced literature class, but young Sheldon had been persistent and Lowell had told him they would see whether he could manage. Sheldon remained grateful for the opportunity, and hoped for the chance to defend Lowell and Dante against Mead, the sort who had no doubt put coppers on the railroad track as a younger boy. Sheldon opened his mouth, but Mead shot him a look that made Sheldon stuff his thoughts back inside.
Lowell betrayed a look of disappointment at Sheldon, then turned to Mead. “Where is the Jew in you, my boy?” he asked.
“What?” Mead cried, offended.
“No, never mind, I didn’t think so. Mead, Dante’s theme is man—not a man,” Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. “The Italians forever twitch at Dante’s sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante’s Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10?”
Sheldon thought hard; Mead sat with iron-faced stubbornness, purposefully not thinking about whether he did know it.
“‘Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi’!” Lowell crowed, then rushed to his crowded bookshelves, where somehow he instantly found the cited chapter and verse in a Latin Bible. “You see?” he asked, placing it open on the rug at the foot of his students, most delighted to show that he had remembered the quote exactly.
“Shall I translate?” Lowell asked. “ ‘I say: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.’ Is there anything our old Scripture writers didn’t think of? Sometime in the middle of our lives, we all, each one of us, journey to face a Hell of our own. What is the very first line of Dante’s poem?”
“ ‘Midway through the journey of our life,’ “ Edward Sheldon volunteered happily, having read that opening salvo of Inferno again and again in his room at Stoughton Hall, never having been so ambushed by any verse of poetry, so emboldened by another’s cry.” ‘I found myself in a dark wood, for the correct path had been lost.’ “
“ ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Midway through the journey of our life,’ “ Lowell repeated with such a wide glare in the direction of his fireplace that Sheldon glanced over his shoulder, thinking pretty Mabel Lowell must have entered behind him, but her shadow showed her still sitting in the adjoining room.” ‘Our life.’ From the very first line of Dante’s poem, we are involved in the journey, we are taking the pilgrimage as much as he is, and we must face our Hell as squarely as Dante faces his. You see that the poem’s great and lasting value is as the autobiography of a human soul. Yours and mine, it may be, just as much as Dante’s.”
Lowell thought to himself as he heard Sheldon read the next fifteen lines of Italian how good it felt to teach something real. How foolish was Socrates to think of banishing the poets from Athens! How thoroughly Lowell would enjoy watching Augustus Manning’s defeat when Longfellow’s translation proved itself an immense success.
The next day, Lowell was departing from University Hall after delivering a lecture on Goethe. He was not a little taken aback when he found himself facing a short Italian man rushing past, dressed in a withered but desperately pressed sackcoat.