The subject was an ideal one in Dante’s time,—­a theme convincing and contenting to all the world, and, besides, akin to the essence of pagan poetry.  The poet was needed to celebrate all the phases of its meaning and beauty.  This is true of all flashes of evolutionary truth.  As in the ancient epics, an idea once real to the world may be enshrined in a design of immortal art.

To-day we are perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a contemplation.  The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully apprehended.  And so the Liszt symphony of the nineteenth century is not a complete reflection of the Dante poem of the fourteenth.  It becomes for the devout believer almost a kind of church-liturgy,—­a Mass by the Abbe Liszt.

Rare qualities there undoubtedly are in the music:  a reality of passion; a certain simplicity of plan; the sensuous beauty of melodic and harmonic touches.  But a greatness in the whole musical expression that may approach the grandeur of the poem, could only come in a suggestion of symbolic truth; and here the composer seems to fail by a too close clinging to ecclesiastic ritual.  Yet in the agony of remorse, rising from hopeless woe to a chastened worship of the light, is a strain of inner truth that will leave the work for a long time a hold on human interest.

Novel is the writing of words in the score, as if they are to be sung by the instruments,—­all sheer aside from the original purpose of the form.  Page after page has its precise text; we hear the shrieks of the damned, the dread inscription of the infernal portals; the sad lament of lovers; the final song of praise of the redeemed.  A kind of picture-book music has our symphony become.  The leit-motif has crept into the high form of absolute tones to make it as definite and dramatic as any opera.

I. INFERNO

The legend of the portal is proclaimed at the outset in a rising phrase (of the low brass and strings)

[Music:  (Doubled in two lower 8ves.) Lento (3 trombones and tuba:  violas, cellos and brass)]

    Per me si va nella cit-ta do-lente;
    Per me si va nell’eterno dolore;

and in still higher chant—­

    Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Then, in antiphonal blast of horns and trumpets sounds the fatal doom in grim monotone (in descending harmony of trembling strings): 

[Music:  (Chant in octaves of trumpets and horns) La-scia-te ogni spe-ran- — -za.  (Brass, wood and tremolo strings)]

    Lasciate ogni speranza mi ch’ entrate![A]

[Footnote A: 

    “Through me the way is to the city dolent;
    Through me the way is to eternal dole;
    Through me the way among the people lost. 
    All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”