Un foule de justes, coupables de négligence pendant leur vie, arrivent en toute hâte près du Dante et de Virgile.

After Virgil finishes his discourse on the nature of love, leaving the last word for Dante’s future conversation with Beatrice (who embodies faith, not reason), Dante drowses off, the first sign that they have now reached the level of those who suffered love of sloth. Dante is awakened from his “dreamy slumber” by a “multitude” of “tumultuous” souls rushing “with fury” to leave behind their former sin, “each his rapid step, / By eagerness impell’d of holy love” (18.85-95). Flaxman depicts the moment in which the “mighty crowd . . . o’ertook” Dante and Virgil “with swiftness,” led by “two spirits at their head” who “cried, weeping,” in memory of good acts that the Blessed Mary and Cæsar had done “with haste.” Flaxman gives admirable attention to the remaining multitude, who in Dante’s text “shout” in chorus, “O, tarry not: away! /  . . . let not time be lost / Through slackness of affection. Hearty zeal / To serve reanimates celestial grace” (18.96-104). These are rushing by so fast, they barely have time to answer Virgil’s question about “which hand leads nearest to the rifted rock” (18.111).

Dante and Virgil are smaller, almost cartoonish, in relation to the awakened multitude here. Flaxman emphasizes not so much the rush of the multitude as the inner anguish and agitation still felt from their need to purge their sin. Their choral admonition on behalf of “hearty zeal to serve” relates interestingly to Billy Budd in light of Virgil’s continuation of the discourse on love earlier in the canto. Vere does act “with haste to serve” military justice on Billy, but not all would agree that he “reanimates celestial grace” by doing so. In the context of Virgil’s discourse, Vere’s hasty sacrifice of Billy to military justice could be seen as one of those unnatural loves in which “of substance true / Your apprehension forms its counterfeit,” thereby falsely acting, though in the very shape of love (18.22-25).