A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the person, or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the person, is never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme, is coloured by the atmosphere of that person’s residence in one of the three worlds. About none of Dante’s characters is there that ambiguity which affects Milton’s Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty or grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies and also justifies their damnation. As Jason Guarda quel grande che viene! E per dolor non par lagrima spanda, Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene! The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected— Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina. If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the _Comedy_ is dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, _all_ human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme. But Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most _ordered_ presentation of emotions that has ever been made. Dante’s method of dealing with any emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that of other “epic” poets as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a character apparently controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the character and the emotion itself. The emotion is split up into constituents—and perhaps destroyed in the process. The mind of Shakespeare was one of the most _critical_ that has ever existed. Dante, on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much as he exhibits its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is, understand the _Inferno_ without the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_. “Dante,” says Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” That is true, though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like Dante’s is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.