DEAN PLUMPTRE'S " DANTE."

IT is easy to understand the fascination which Horace and Homer have for translators. It is not so easy—we are speaking only of Englishmen—to understand why Dante should in recent years have developed, so to speak, a similar fascination. For hitherto, with one remarkable exception, the fate of English verse-translations of Dante has been monotonously unfortunate. Sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, they pass almost unnoticed into the limbo of oblivion. The exception, of course, is Gary's version. It was published in 1814, passed through many editions in the translator's lifetime, and still, as Dean Plumptre says with some dissatisfaction, "holds its own" in the book- market. This "holds its own," however, is putting the case very mildly. It is practically master of the field, and there is nothing for it to hold its own against. Now, waiving the ques- tion as to whether Cary was a better poet than any that could be found in the numerous host of rivals who have striven in vain to supplant him, to what may we attribute his success and

their failure ? To the simple fact, we believe, that he chose blank-verse for his form. We may omit, of course, all reference to the translators who stand between him and Dean Plumptre, and come to the latter's version at once. Its merits are incon- testable. It is lucid, fluent, ingenious, and not nnfrequently felicitous. It is also faithful to a degree that might with very little exaggeration be characterised as unparalleled. The metre - used is the metre of the original, and we pay very little heed to

the charge that has been brought against it that it is not Dantesque. Why should it be ? Gary's version is not Dantesque at all, but Miltonic. And the most successful version of the Iliad is the one that is least Homeric. But Pope knew well what be was about when he trusted to his ringing rhymes to pull him through, while it must be confessed that Dean Plumptre's rhymes are anything but ringing. A single short passage is all that we can quote in support of this assertion :— "And she, first breathing out a pitying sigh, Turned her full gaze with such a look on me, As mother on her boy's insanity."

A more serious objection to Dean Plumptre's metre will lie, per- haps, in the fact that while the greatest poetical merit of Dante is his graphic terseness, this is the one great merit which the exigencies of his metre have prevented Dean Plumptre from attaining. The concluding line of the Francesca episode, for instance, "E caddi come corpo morte cade," appears in his version, "And fell, as falls a dead man, heavily." So that, even if the other great merits of this translation should induce the Dean's countrymen to read Dante in rhyme, every English quotation from Dante, in reviews or elsewhere, will still be from Cary. But the conscientious industry of an able man rarely goes unrewarded, and it is conceivable that the extraordinary fidelity of this translation will find readers for it amongst those who, after working through a canto with a dictionary, like to read an English rendering of it.

Dean Plumptre, moreover, has secured himself from the fate of his immediate predecessors, a fate so swift and dismal that he feels compelled, for pity's sake, to hope that they may have found some consolation from a select circle of sympathising friends. His notes are admirable, and without ever becoming prolix, give all the information that a student can require. His biographical introduction, which is historical also, is excellent, though we have some exceptions to make to the strictly bio- graphical portion of it. He is unjust to Boccaccio. That great writer's sketch of Dante's personal appearance, dress, and manners, is invaluable; and we should be grateful indeed, if any one had left us a similar sketch of Shakespeare's. But Boccaccio saw in Dante one who was not free from sensual vices, and described him as "molts dedito alla lussuria." "As might perhaps be expected," says the Dean, "from the author of the Deeameron." But this is distinctly unfair ; for in spite of the indecencies of that celebrated book, it is well known that its author led a strictly moral life, and there is no reason for thinking that he was less truth-loving than genial. Moreover, the very charge that he makes is corroborated, if we are not mistaken, by certain passages in the Purgatorio which the Dean has taken some pains to prove to be autobiographical, and of which he says that they may be regarded as the confessions of Dante. Be this as it may, the subject on • The Commedia and Cansoniere of Dante Alighieri. A New Translation : with Notes, B.says, and a Biographical Introduction. By B. H. Pltunptre, D.D., Dean of Wells. 2 vols. London : William Isbister. 1887.

which the Dean " draws out the thread of his discourse finer than the staple of his argument" is the married life of Dante. All that we really know about it is that it was not a happy one, and that Gemma Donati was a Xanthippe, and her husband no Socrates. But here the Dean goes off at score, in a way so much in contrast with the invariable good taste which he elsewhere

shows, that it strikes us like a bolt from the blue. "Dante," he says, "did not, like Milton, write Treatises on the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, out of the bitterness of his own experience ; nor, like Byron, pour a scathing invective on his

wife in a licentious satire; nor, like Dickens, expose to public gaze the sorrows of a husband whose wife did not appreciate him

as her sister did." We shall quote no more from this escapade, and turn with pleasure, for the Dean is as good a critic as he is

a translator, to his remarks on the two famous rivers in the

Purgatorio. "This river," he says of the first, " was none other than the stream of Lethe, which Dante, with a profound

insight, though in defiance of all Christian tradition, places as all but the final stage of purification. He had felt, as all souls that have passed through the crisis of conversion have felt, that what is needed for the soul is that its memory may be cleansed from all the evil of the past ; that as God 'blots out as a thick cloud its transgressions, and as a cloud its sins' (Isaiah xliv., 2), so it, too, may forget the past, or remember it only as belonging to an alien and a vanished self." "The other mystic river," he

says, "absolutely the pure creation of the poet's mind, revives the memory of every good deed done, and so completing the

transformation wrought out by Lethe, gives to the new man, the true self, the continuity of life, which had seemed before to belong to the old, the false and evil, self. I do not inquire how far such a philosophy of consciousness is tenable in itself, or may be reconciled with acknowledged truths in ethics or theology ; but it will be admitted that there is a transcendent greatness in its very conception which places Dante high among the spiritual teachers of mankind."

Amongst the "Estimates, Contemporary and Later," which form the subject of Dean Plumptre's second "Study "—and a more valuable and interesting piece of work than this " Study " we have rarely met with—are some very bitter and contemptuous

criticisms of the Commedia. Foremost among its assailants stands Goethe, and as he was not only a fine Italian scholar. but also, as a rule, a most lenient critic, his attack deserves attention. We have no space, however, to make any com- ment upon it, or upon the still more bitter attack made by so able a man as Landor. It will be remembered, though, that the latter placed Dante very high indeed on his list of the world's greatest men, and we have a suspicion that it was the thoroughly inartistic form of the Commedia which led Goethe to express contempt and detestation for a poet whom the

world regards as his equal or superior. All that we can do with respect to these attacks, and many others of a similar kind, is to quote a passage from Dean Plumptre, in which he seems to condemn with quiet dignity the faults which have raised such wrath and indignation in the minds of some of his brother- critics. The head and front of Dante's offence is that he delighted in placing his personal or political enemies in Hell, and in holding them up to everlasting shame as worthy of it. The Dean mentions some of them, and then writes thus :—

"An apparent parallel to these instances is found, we may remember,in the memorable scene in Southey' s Vision of Judgment, in which he puts Wilkes in Hell and George III, among the saints in Paradise. Whether the thing was more pardonable in Southey because with him it was only a piece of poetic machinery, while Dante believed, with the full intensity of faith, that persistent evil, without even the germ or beginning of repentance on earth, must in very deed work out an everlasting retribution, as the natural con- sequence of its own abused freedom, I leave others to discuss. All the same, I admit frankly that Dante in this matter, whatever plea one may put in on his behalf as a man or as a poet, presents a warning and not an example. We learn how perilous it is, even to the supremest intellect, and the most righteous indignation that persuades itself that it does well to be angry, to dwell over-much, in the temper of a judgment without mercy, on the mysteries of evil and its punishment, how even they may catch in some measure the infection of the evils they condemn. And, if I mistake not, Dante himself intimates in no obscure terms his consciousness of not having altogether escaped that peril." Highly as we praised Dean Plumptre's translation, we would praise his "Studies" even more highly. They are brimful of trust- worthy erudition, and the writer is never prolix, or obscure, or tedious. Italian literature has lost the hold it once had on Europe ; but Dante remains where he placed himself six centuries ago, among the world's six greatest poets. No man aiming at literary reputation can think his education complete

unless he studies Dante, in translations or in the original. No book about Dante has been published in England that will stand comparison with Dean Plumptre's. He deserves the gratitude of all true lovers of good literature for writing it. And we have nothing further to say of it except that, take it for all in all, the only fitting epithet we can find for it is "noble ;" and that we do most heartily wish it all the success which it richly deserves.