marriage tie as respectable, they thought-not so very unwisely-that the safest way to ensure its being respected was to keep every man and woman out of the way of temptation or opportunity to outrage it; and for this purpose the polysyllabic dykes above described were reared, high, wide, and fashionable. The taboo of parents-in-law lends itself too easily to a venerable type of joke, but we may perhaps feel more respectfully towards the Australian legislator-who has blundered into a system that tends to unite old women and young men, and conversely-if our ethnological researches have happened to touch on those Russian districts where it is usual for little girls to be betrothed to men who live ad interim with their mothers-inlaw.

The hypothesis adopted by Westermarck, that primitive man was monogamous, like the anthropoid apes, is as little susceptible of direct proof as any other, though it taxes the imagination less severely than some. But different sections of the human race develop on somewhat different lines, and as we clearly cannot place our modern conception of relationships among the 'innate ideas' of the race, while human law, as a rule, presupposes the existence of the offence it forbids, we must suppose that before exogamous rules were invented some associated groups intermarried without restriction: a cave and a one-roomed city tenement have identical social disadvantages, which operating without restraint throughout a small community, or a number of communities, would easily cause tragedies and disasters of a quite different order from any supposed consequences of the marriage of first cousins. Given an obvious practical necessity for a system that will keep potential wives and husbands apart up to the time of marriage, and keep their families apart afterwards, the Australian customs are far from unsuitable to their purpose. The elders of the tribes may well have had reason to agree with Hans Breitmann, 'Vood mit vood soon makes a vire,' and they appear accordingly to have thought it expedient to arrange that no boys and girls who were at liberty to marry should be, in popular phrase, brought up together.' On this view, the exogamous races are those which have had the temperament that leads to the trial of unsatisfactory experiments in sexual lawlessness, against which their more or less elaborate marriage regulations are a reaction: but there does not appear to be any place in a theory, which takes account of all the authentic facts, for the conception of an intermediate or transitional stage of regulated disorder, i.e. one in which the exceptions of Australia were the rule.

No attempt has been made above to enumerate all the supplementary regulations whereby people are made Ipmunna or Mura tualcha to each other, and in divers ways kept from contracting marriages which the mere rules of class division might in some cases allow, though they would be contrary to the spirit of the legislation

as a whole. Where, as is no doubt often the case, the regulation goes beyond what any rational purpose could require, we must allow something for the love of regulating for its own sake, which is one characteristic of primitive man. The Australian has something of the child and a great deal of the schoolboy in his composition. His mysteries give the impression of a set of Winchester notions' elaborated by grown men who had nothing else to do, and the irrational part of his marriage law might be brought into something the same category of law-loving foolishness. But in Australia, as elsewhere, the law usually defines a rule of conduct slightly above, instead of considerably below, the spontaneous conduct of the average

man.

EDITH SIMCOX.

1899

DANTE'S GHOSTS

THE real theme of Dante's Drama is not the natural, but the supernatural, world; not the present life, but the life after death. It is true, indeed, that all through his vision he never forgets our world. Whether he is passing down through the concentric circles of the funnel of Hell, or toiling in the narrow stairways and ledges of Purgatory, or rapt in the ecstasy of Paradise, he never loses sight of Italy or of Europe. The damned and the redeemed alike discourse with him on the factions of Florence, the vices of Bologna, the frivolity of the French, and the misdeeds of the popes and princes, the cardinals and knights, the ladies and craftsmen of the day. But all this is an accident, and is not of the essence of the poem. No one can truly understand, no one can thoroughly enjoy, this wonderful work who does not at least attempt to realise to himself what is this world in which Dante and Virgil, Sordello and Statius, Beatrice and Benedict, are moving, and by what manner of beings it is peopled. To borrow the language of the master of modern essayists

The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative. Dante is the eye-witness and earwitness of that which he relates. He is the very man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death [which, however, I do not think is the true rendering of Che la seconda morte ciascun grida]; who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no hope; who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon; who has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Draghignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow has been marked by the purifying angel.

The disciple of Dante must follow the example of his great master. He must personally accompany Dante, as Dante accompanied Virgil. If he does not do this he is in the same position, respecting the poem, as that of a man who has not accompanied his friend in a journey, but hears from that friend a narrative of the journey. He has not shared the incidents or the encounters of the journey. His knowledge and his sympathy are imperfect.

I propose in this essay to consider briefly one of the several classes of beings by which the world of the Drama is peopled.

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namely ghosts; that is to say, human beings who have died, and are awaiting what Dante calls The Great Day,' or 'The Great Judgment.'

What, then, are these phantoms with whom we meet as we accompany Dante and his guides? What does Dante mean, and what are we to understand, by a ghost (anima-ombraspirito)? In the first place, is it a really existing being? And, if so, of what does it consist? How did it pass from the natural into the supernatural life, and become that which it now is? And, secondly, how does it differ from the men and women of this world? What are its physical and intellectual powers and capacities? And what further change awaits it at the Great Day? The answer to the first set of questions is to be found in the third and fourth treatises of the Banquet, in the second book of the essay on the Vulgar Tongue, and in Canto 25 of the Purgatory. The answer to the second set of questions must be sought through all the three parts of the Drama.

According to Dante, following in this matter partly Aristotle and partly St. Thomas of Aquinum, the human soul passes, in the course of its creation, in the case of every human being, through three stages. In the first stage, the beginning of the embryo, it is merely a living, or active principle, deriving its vital activity from the finer particles of blood in the heart of the father. In this stage, as Statius explained to Dante, when they were climbing from the Ledge of the Gluttons to that of the Impure, and Dante was wondering how a ghost could be punished and purified by starvation, the human soul is merely vegetative. It is like the living principle in a plant, differing only from it by being capable of further development. 'The one,' says Statius, that is to say the human, ‘is on the way; the other has reached its limit.' At this, the vegetative, stage the human soul, like the soul of a plant, is not the immediate work of the Creator, and is therefore, according to the doctrine of St. Thomas, not immortal.

The next stage in the existence of the human soul, still in the embryo, is the sensitive stage; a condition which involves the capacity for motion. The soul of man has this stage, as well as the prior or vegetative stage, in common with the life of the lower animals, such as beasts, birds, and fishes. And this vital principle in the embryo, or human being before birth, is compared by Statius with that in a zoophyte. This, the sensitive condition, also, like the vegetative, is not the direct work of the Creator; and so far, therefore, the human soul, like the souls of other animals, is not eternal, or immortal; for only things which are directly created by God, such as heaven, and hell, and angels, are eternal.

And now we pass to the third, the reasonable, conscious, or intellectual, stage, in the creation of the human soul, Dante's

description of which is one of the most striking passages in the Drama.

As soon [says Statius] as the brain of the embryo is completely organised, the Creator Himself (Motor Primo) turns towards it, surveys with joy this great device of Nature, and breathes over it a new spirit, full of power, and such that it draws into its own substance all the active principle that it finds there (that is to say, the vegetative and sensitive elements), and so becomes a several soul (one and indivisible), which lives, and feels, and turns itself back upon itself.

Sè in sè rigira. Not, I think, as Mr. Butler translates it, 'revolves within itself,' but, as Cary correctly renders it, 'bends reflective on itself.' The phrase, the origin of which Dr. Scartazzini traces to an expression of Boethius, is meant to express the self-conscious or reflective power of the human soul, as distinguished from that of brutes. Mr. Vernon, in the notes to his interesting and valuable Readings, appreciates the true meaning of the phrase, though his translation reflects within itself' does not seem to me quite correct. The souls of mankind alone, of all the creatures of this world, as we learn, not only from this passage in Canto 25 of the Purgatory, but also from what Beatrice says in Canto 7 of Paradise, reach this third stage, so as to be directly created by God, and therefore immortal. As Dante expresses it in the second chapter of the second book of his essay on the Vulgar Tongue

Man is endowed with a three-fold soul-namely the vegetable, the animal, and the reasonable. In so far as he is vegetable he seeks what is profitable, wherein he shares with plants. In so far as he is animal he seeks what is enjoyable, wherein he shares with brutes. But in so far as he is reasonable he seeks what is honourable (honestum), wherein he stands alone, or participates in the nature of angels.

The soul of man, then, being, according to Dante, in its final stage in each individual, before birth, directly created by God, does not share the natural death of the body, but survives it, and is imperishable. At the moment of death it abandons the body, and goes to its own place. But it is not yet a ghost, capable of appearing to living men in what Hamlet calls 'a questionable shape,' and such as we encounter when we accompany Dante and his guides. It has to undergo yet another and a wondrous transformation after death before it becomes a ghost; and, in order to understand what this further change is, and what is the nature of Dante's ghosts, we must listen again to the words of Statius.

When Fate has spun out all the thread (of life), the soul disunites itself from the flesh, and carries thence with it both corporeal and incorporeal (literally human and divine') capacities (or 'potentialities'). Its memory, intelligence, and will are operative, and much more acute than before; but its other (or corporeal) capacities are inoperative. With no stay, and of its own motion, it flits in wondrous wise to one of the two shores [that is to say, the shore of Acheron, as we learn from the third canto of Hell, if destined for damnation, and that of the mouth of the Tiber, as we learn from the second canto of Purgatory, if destined for salvation].