BOOKS.
MRS. OLIPHANT'S DANTE FOR ENGLISH' READERS.* IF all's well that begins well were as safe a maxim as " All's well that ends well," we might look upon the success of " Foreign Classics for English Readers " as a foregone conclusion. The first volume of this series, which aims at doing for the Classics of Europe what an earlier series has accomplished for the Classics of antiquity, is Dante, by Mrs. Oliphant ; and duly considering what audience she had in view, we must say that the gifted authoress • Dante. By Mrs. Oliphant. London and Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons. 1877.
has written a moat felicitous and praiseworthy book. We do not mean to imply that she has done anything to change the half- rueful, half-comic feelings which must perforce fill the mind of an English student who compares the contributions made by German writers to our knowledge of Dante with the contributions made by his own countrymen. Meritorious as the attempts of J. A. Symonds and G. Rossetti are, they still make as poor a show by the side of the works of a Wegele and a Scartazzini (to take only two examples) as our English translations—Dr. Carlyle's is unfinished, and the notes in it are as weak as the version is good —make by the side of such translations as those of a Philalethes, a Witte, or a Notter. But although, perhaps, slightly in- ferior in painstaking accuracy to Pfleiderer's work on Dante, Mrs. Oliphant's book will fairly stand comparison with that excellent manual, and of no other book in our own language that we are acquainted with could we say the same. It lies in the nature of the case that we find some things omitted in Mrs. Oliphant's book which we should like inserted, and some things inserted which we should like omitted. This, we repeat, lies in the nature of the case, and in spite of any adverse criticism that we may be led into making, we distinctly assert that, on the whole, we consider Mrs. Oliphant's to be exactly the book which its authoress intended, and a very grateful and opportune boon to all who are beginning the study of Dante, as well as to the far larger class of readers, who, without having either time or energy for so arduous a task as that, are still anxious to acquire a clear and (for their purpose) adequate knowledge of the genius and writings of an author of whom—far more truly than of Montaigne—it may be said that he is the first author whom a gentleman is ashamed of not knowing.
We will not dwell on Mrs. Oliphant's introduction. We may have occasion before we finish to say a few words in rectification of what we take to be an exaggerated estimate of Dante's poetical merits. But it is needless to say that if Mrs. Oliphant errs—and likely enough, it is we who do so—she errs in very good com- pany. Of the " Life of Dante," which follows the introduction, we have also very little to say. It is brief rather than terse, and while admitting the difficulty of writing a biography where con- jecture must so often take the place of fact, we still think that more might have been made of it. We gain, we fancy, a clearer idea of Dante from Boccaccio than from Mrs. Oliphant; and we are not at all sure that she has hit the juste milieu between the careless, flowing, and vigorous lines of that versatile genius, and the laborious elucidations of modern scholars. A single example will suffice to show our meaning. Boccaccio tells us in a vague and general way—his latest German biographer, by the by, does not over-state the case when he says that Boccaccio was not the sort of man to waste three or four pages in discussing the question whether his hero did this or that on the 15th or 16th of a given month (he might have gone further, and said in this or that month in this or that year)—well, Boccaccio tells us that Dante lived once upon a time at Paris, and studied there.. It is disputed when, and nothing is more certain than that nothing can be known about what he did there. It seems, however, to be generally acknowledged that we may take it for granted that Paris was visited by Dante. This is the sum and substance of all that can be learnt on this point, but Mrs. Oliphant tells us that he spent two years in Paris, in great poverty, studying at the Sorbonne. We believe that these particulars rest upon no better authority than that of the imaginative Bishop of Fermo, who brings Dante to Oxford, as well as to Paris. Glad as we should be to add so illustrious a name to the " ragged regiment " of geniuses who have given glory to the Isis—" ragged," we mean, as compared with the splendid and unrivalled phalanx whose lustre is reflected by the Cam—we are still, like Mr. Dumbleton, unable to accept the security. Nay, even as regards Paris, though we look upon his scepticism as unreasonable, so competent a judge as M. Fauriel seems to think that the poet never lived there, and the greatest authority on Dante, Karl Witte, himself says scornfully, " Wir bekommen viel zu horen von Universitaten auf denen er gelernt oder gelehrt ; kurz von hurter an sich guten and schonen Dingen, denen zu ibrem vollen Werthe nur das Eine Milt, dass ihre Wahrheit sich irgend haltbarer Beglaubigung erfreute."
Of Mrs. Oliphant's eloquent chapter on the "Vita Nuova " we must frankly say that we find it too long. The fault is ours, per- haps, rather than hers, for our thermometer stands perceptibly lower than hers in the neighbourhood of this marvellous record of " a young man's fancy turned to thoughts of love." It will be fairer, therefore, and better to let Mrs. Oliphant speak for herself, and we quote with real pleasure and admiration the following brilliant passage :—
" The ' Vita :Nova' is perhaps too serious, too intense in the strange
strain of foaling, to be qualified fantastic;' and yet it is high• fantastical throughout, mingling intellectual conceits of the most arti- ficial kind with artless passion, and an earnest reality too evident to be doubted, as perhaps only the Italian troubadour ago, ringing strange and mystic changes upon the gay Provencal sentimentalities and the Teutonic creed of chivalry, could have done. More subtle than the Teuton, more grave than the Provencal, more religions than either, the Florentine makes his visionary love into the worship of moral beauty in its most exquisite development, without ever losing the personal in the abstract. His lady is not a tournament queen of love and beauty, bat an angelic presence, spotless from all earthly alloy, truest, purest, sweetest of created things ; most courteous, yet with a heavenly severity of goodness in her, as incapable of approving what is evil as she is of anything but pity for the guilty, the embodiment of all purity and gentle wisdom, yet not a Virtue, always Beatrice, most loved and reverenced of women, yet a woman still. The curious, subtle, admirable art with which she is kept apart from us, yet ever real to us, is of itself one of the wonders of poetry. Beatrice is the centre of the mystic tale, yet we scarcely hear the sound of her footsteps, and never of her voice ; even the smile on her lovely face is an inference, though it lights all the subdued, sweet atmosphere with a half-divine reflection. No one else, so far as we know, has ever thus accomplished the highest results of art with such a visionary, exquisite vagueness, with an outline so veiled in mists of sacred awe and rever- ence. To every man and woman who has purely and truly loved, loved for loves sake, 'all for love and nothing for reward,' the 'Vita Nueva,' to the end of time, will be a revelation not only of Dante and the peerless Beatrice, but of themselves and their own hearts."
The larger portion of Mrs. Oliphant's book is naturally filled with an account of the " Divine Comedy ;" and here we can do no more than simply express our entire approval of the course which she has taken. She has with directness and simplicity elected to play the same part of guide to Dante's readers as Virgil played to Dante himself. She studiously avoids giving the reins to the desire, which she must so often have felt, of expressing, as she evidently could so well, her appreciation of the sublimity and beauty of the scenes through which she leads us. We are grateful to her also for the unaffected way in which she confesses her inability at times to understand passages which are as " clear as mud " to our own bewildered gaze. Briefly and colloquially speaking, we may sum up our impressions of her analysis by saying that she resolutely declines to be " flowery " on the oue hand, and to try to see through a millstone on the other. A remark, however, of this kind, and on a subject so high and so solemn as Dante, needs, we feel, some correction ; and again, we cannot do better than supply it in Mrs. Oliphant's own words, merely adding, previously to doing so, the very unimportant remark that we wish she had not passed over so completely the closing scene in the life of Ulysses, which is, of course, of especial interest to lovers of English poetry ; and also that we cannot help feeling that Brutus and Cassius are as conspicuous by their absence in Mrs. Oliphant's description, as their images were at the funeral of the " last of the Romans." We might go on to say a word or two about the ludicrous miscarriage of justice in the case of all three, and of many another of the denizens of the inferno, the Purga. torio, and the Paradiso itself, butbetter not. A well-known critic has recently called attention to Goethe's trenchant condemnation of the first of these poems as "abominable," the second as "dubious," and the third as " tiresome." For an idle, thought- less, and unlearned reader, there is much superficial truth in the great German's slashing criticism. But Dante emphatically and above all things needs to be studied by a strenuous and thought- ful reader, and can only be at all fairly appreciated by a learned one. No one, of course, knew this better than Goethe himself, and any one who cares to see what his real opinion was about Dante will find it in his Conversations with Eckermann. We do not quote it, because we prefer to conclude with Mrs. Oliphant's own eloquent words, merely interposing, with all necessary haste and brevity, our own decided opinion that although if it were possible to strike a balance between the intellectual, and we may add, moral capacities of Homer and Dante, the scale would incline to the Florentine, the poetical superiority of the Greek is incontestable. In Dante, it is only for a pleasant breathing-space that we escape now and then from a light and atmosphere, which are bright indeed at times and wondrous fair, but are essentially artificial ; while in Homer we are always in the sunlight, so to speak, of nature, and in the bracing air of reality. But enough of this. " The Divine Comedy," says Mrs. Oliphant, "is for all time ; it is crammed full of the minutest local allusions, and crowded with names and incidents which have ceased, except as mentioned there, to interest any living creature ; but never- theless, it is as living, as powerful, as comprehensible as when it was written,—a record of human existence, passion, sorrow, pity, and love, which no destruction now could tear out of the memory of men, a portion of our universal inheritance. Could Italy, with all its glories, be swept away as the middle-ages have passed away, with all their struggles and splendour, Dante would remain as great as ever, notwithstanding that he is an Italian, and mediaeval in every feature of his genius ; and so long as human nature re- mains the thing it is, steadily triumphant in character and emotion. over all the preaching of developments, no antiquity will make the great poet old."
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