reputable appreciations' of modern literature, to find how much the prejudices of history, society, religion, or race have defined the pleasure of a work, and make it a masterpiece.' Even when the critic has with all honesty divorced himself from personal liking and disliking, when he says, 'I hate A, but A's book is clever and useful, and I shall say so,' it is not seldom because his victim has quietly made his peace with him by a common interest in something altogether outside the categories of letters. The prejudice is so protean, so subtle-shall we say so incurable?-that any method which can alleviate it is of immense value. Literature is perhaps in this respect in worse plight than pictorial art. There are fewer picture-gazers in our exhibitions who delight in canvasses because they are portraits of their heroes or of the village pump of their boyhood, than there are readers who take kindly to certain novels because they are Scots, or Canadians, or Oxford Rationalists. And this will always be so, till criticism comes with a wider experience, and gives to these well-meaning people a truer touchstone of literary pleasure. Perhaps, too, this experience may make it yet clearer that it is but academic quackery to enlarge upon the absolute progression of literary ideas and craftsmanship. The notion comes naturally to the complacent egoism of an age which is giddy with the triumphs of science and industrial energy. But analogy is not proof, and Art is not a measureable thing like the Standard of Comfort or the speed of locomotives. A more effective comparison of ages, as well as of peoples and groups and individuals, would have a wholesome influence on the condescension of modern criticism. When a writer brings forward his working formula. that an author must be judged by his age and circumstance, the excuse for the past is in reality an unconscious compliment to the present. Cæsar praised the Gauls, but added that he conquered them. In the realm of Ideas and Art Cæsar's confidence is unavailing. The new cannot subjugate the old. What is a 'classic' but that which has never been surpassed? It is tempting, but the occasion will not allow, to enlarge on the bearing of this academic discussion on the more practical side of literary criticism. If we entered on this theme we should begin by disclaiming all intention to reform the conditions of everyday reviewing, which though probably not quite so bad as they might be, cannot be expected ever to be better. But even in these popular places the reflex influence, if not the direct training, of the 'comparative' student might help to lessen embarrassment in the presence of the new, the strange, the unique in literature. And, above all, it might demonstrate that the expert, as we know him, is not seldom the least competent to meddle with pure literature or literary taste-that the most absolute pundit may be but a village politician in the imperial matters of criticism. We may not forget that Aristotle, who is still our true specialist in everything, was a specialist in nothing. G. GREGORY SMITH. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF DANTE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. NOT from the days of Chaucer to the reign of George I. could English literature boast of a translation, properly so called, of any portion of the Divina Commedia. Mere incidental versions of a few lines here and there may be found, it is true, in several of the numerous translations of Italian works which were issued from the press in England during the sixteenth century1; while, in the next century, Milton, in his treatise Of Reformation touching Church Discipline, tried his hand at a rendering of a single terzina from the Inferno. But not till 1719, when the 'great Cham of literature' was ten years old, and the author of the Elegy was already out of leading-strings, did the first translation from Dante, produced avowedly as a translation, make its appearance in the English world of letters. In that year was published at the Black Swan in Pater-noster-row' a volume entitled 'Two DisAn Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting. II. An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur. Both by Mr Richardson.' The author of this work was Jonathan Richardson, the elder, portrait-painter and poetaster, who, if Horace Walpole (one of his sitters) is to be believed, after his retirement from business, amused himself with writing a short poem, and drawing his own or his son's portrait, every day? courses. In the second of the two Discourses, of which the full title, as set out on a separate title-page, is 'A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur,' Richardson introduces a reference to the story of Count Ugolino. Of this story, as being very Curious and very little Known,' he gives a summary from the Florentine History of Giovanni Villani. He then continues: 1 See English Translations from Dante (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries), by Paget Toynbee, in Journal of Comparative Literature, 1, pp. 345–365. 2 Richardson's portrait of Horace Walpole (now in the possession of Earl Waldegrave) is reproduced in Vol. II of Mrs Paget Toynbee's edition of the Letters of Horace Walpole, 3 Anecdotes of Painting (ed. 1888), Vol. 11, p. 277. 'The Poet carries the Story farther than the Historian could, by relating what pass'd in the Prison. This is Dante, who was a young man when this happened, and was Ruin'd by the Commotions of these times. He was a Florentine, which City, after having been long divided by the Guelf, and Ghibelline Faction, at last became entirely Guelf: But this party then split into two others under the Names of the Bianchi, and the Neri, the Latter of which prevailing, Plunder'd, and Banish'd Dante; not because he was of the Contrary Party, but for being Neuter, and a Friend to his Countrey. When Virtue fails, and Party-heats endure This great Man (in the 33d Canto of the 1st part of his Comedia) in his Passage thro' Hell, introduces Count Ugolino knawing the Head of his Treacherous and Cruel Enemy the Archbishop, and telling his own sad Story. At the appearance of Dante La bocca solleuò dal fiero pasto Quel peccator, etc.' Richardson then gives a translation of the passage (seventy-seven lines in the original) in blank verse, which, if not very poetical, is at any rate fairly faithful—for an age in which Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Homer were the standards of translation. The following is a specimenUgolino speaks: The hour was come when Food should have been brought, Of creaking Locks, and Bolts, with doubled force Securing our Destruction. I beheld The Faces of my Sons with troubled Eyes; I in my clenched Fists fasten'd my Teeth : The next specimen is by a literary hack, one Pierre Desmaizeaux, the son of a French Protestant minister,-'one of those French refugees,' says Isaac D'Israeli of him, 'whom political madness or despair of intolerance had driven to our own shores. The proscription of Louis XIV., which supplied us with our skilful workers in silk, also produced a race of the unemployed, who proved not to be as exquisite in the handicraft of bookmaking'.' Desmaizeaux, whom Warburton describes2 as a verbose, tasteless Frenchman,' was a protégé of Halifax and of Addison, and through the interest of the latter obtained a pension, 'like his talents, very moderate,' on the Irish establishment. He afterwards enjoyed the double distinction of having one of his books burned in Dublin by the common hangman, and of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He became a translator of Dante by the merest accident. In 1735 he published an English edition of Bayle's Dictionary, in which he undertook to furnish translations of all 'the quotations from Eminent Writers in various Languages.' In his article on Dante Bayle quotes about a dozen passages from the Divina Commedia, and these Desmaizeaux has rendered into rhymed couplets, in what he no doubt intended to be the style of Pope-hardly an appropriate vehicle for Dante. Here is his rendering of twelve lines (91-102) from the twenty-third canto of the Purgatorio:— The widow'd Charmer, who my Bed did Share And Pulpits preach each wanton Fashion down. Of a very different character was the author who next entered the field. This was the poet Gray, the third on the roll of English poets3, to whom Dante was an object of 'lungo studio e grande amore,' and who undoubtedly was more intimately acquainted with the works of the great Florentine than any other Englishman of the eighteenth century. Gray, like Richardson, selected for translation the Ugolino episode from the thirty-third canto of the Inferno. His version, which remained in manuscript for more than a hundred years after his death, was, like his translation from Tasso, composed probably as an exercise at the time when, as he writes to his friend, Richard West (in March, 1737), he was 'learning Italian like any dragon.' Mr Gosse, who first printed the piece, thinks it 'extremely fine,' and assigns it to Gray's best period. More sober critics rate it less highly. As the work of 1 Curiosities of Literature (ed. 1866), Vol. 1, p. 14. 2 In a letter to Dr Birch. 3 His predecessors having been Chaucer and Milton. 4 Works of Thomas Gray (ed. 1884), Vol. 1, pp. 157-160. 5 See Gray and Dante, by the President of Magdalen College, Oxford (Mr T. H. Warren), in the Monthly Review, June, 1901. |