37X498 INTRODUCTION T is not to be wondered at that while Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso found English translators and imitators during the Elizabethan period, the "Divine Comedy" was comparatively neglected and remained untranslated. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance which, spreading westward, had quickened the intellectual life of France and England, was of a different order from that with which Dante had been inspired. Dante's poem was largely the product and expression of the mediaval conceptions of the universe embodied in the dogma of the Roman Church. In form and substance it was strange to the new era. Hence, though Chaucer had translated delightfully some brief passages of it, though it was read and admired by a few scholars and poets of succeeding generations, though Milton recognized Dante's greatness well enough to speak of his "giving leave to Fame," the " Divine Comedy " remained practically unknown to English readers down to the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Warton, a scholar of genial appreciations and wide reading, could say of it as late as 1780 in his "History of English Poetry": "We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, purgatory, and paradise. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method." And this of a poem unsurpassed in the whole field of literature precisely in these very qualities of art and method. Warton cites a witty and vivacious paraphrase and perversion by Voltaire of a passage from the poem, praises Voltaire's" inimitable lines," and adds, with seemingly unconscious humor, "Dante thus translated would have had many more readers than at present." Speaking of the Italian poets of the thirteenth century, among whom Dante was included, he says with true Anglican provincialism: "Their unnatural and eccentric habits of mind and manners, their scholastic theology, superstition, ideal love, and, above all, their chivalry, iii . had corrupted every true principle of life and literature, and consequently prevented the progress of taste and propriety." But Warton himself, in spite of his false judgments, was doing much by his generally excellent History to promote that change of taste and sentiment which the course of time was rapidly bringing about, and which was to result in a juster appreciation of the poet whose "art and method" had been obscured by prepossessions engendered by the false doctrine which had long been prevalent in regard to the nature and scope of the poetic imagination and to the laws of poetic expression. It was just after the publication of Warton's History that the first English version of the "Inferno" was published. It was the work of Mr. Charles Rogers, F.R.S., a man of cultivated taste, whose two folio volumes of "Prints in Imitation of Drawings by the Great Masters" are still valued by lovers of the fine arts. His translation appeared anonymously in a quarto volume in 1782. I know it only by extracts from it, and, so far as one may judge from these specimens, it is a very respectable performance, in its general fidelity to the original and in the well-sustained measure of its blank verse. It is at least to be held as a superior work to the version of the "Inferno" by the Rev. Henry Boyd, an Irish clergyman, which appeared in 1785, and which was republished, seventeen years later, in 1802, with the addition of the other portions of the poem, forming thus the first complete English translation of the "Divine Comedy." Mr. Boyd's notes and preliminary essays show that he had prepared himself for his task by some study of Italian history, but he was not a profound nor a very accurate scholar, and his notions of translation were of the most liberal character. His work is in iambic verse in stanzas of six lines, of which the first two, the third and sixth, the fourth and fifth rhyme. He makes no attempt to reproduce the qualities of the style and diction of the original, but is content with a free and fluent paraphrase of its meaning, often remoulding Dante's sentiment no less than his words, and adding to his thought or subtracting from it, not merely according to the need of the verse, but at times apparently according to the moral sense of the translator, or his wish to supply what he esteemed defective in the original. The very opening stanza affords a good example of his method. The words of Dante, as every reader of the "Divine Comedy remembers, are literally: "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the right way was perplexed." In Mr. Boyd's numbers this is transformed as follows: “When life had labour'd up her midmost stage, Stood in suspense upon the point of Prime; The gloomy scen'ry of the savage clime." It is plain that Mr. Boyd's work has almost as much claim to be called an original poem as a translation, and that its reader will hardly find in it a closer resemblance to the "Divine Comedy" than the image in the bowl of a spoon presents of the countenance reflected in it. Twelve years after the publication of Boyd's version of the "Inferno," the Rev. Henry Francis Cary set himself to the translation of the poem. He was the son of an Irishman, captain in the British army, of good family, with a tradition of breeding and culture, his grandfather having been the Archdeacon and his great-grandfather the Bishop of Killala. Cary was born in 1772. While yet a boy he displayed a love of literature, a fondness for poetry, and a readiness at versifying. His early letters, published in the memoir of him by his son, give evidence of refinement of taste and unusual maturity of judgment. He was sent to Oxford, where he made good use of his time, and completed his course with the degree of Master of Arts in 1796. In the same year he was presented to the Vicarage of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, and shortly afterward was happily married. His literary journal shows a wide range of miscellaneous but well-selected reading in the Greek and Latin classics and in English, French, and Italian authors, and in 1797 he began the translation of the "Purgatorio "_" the commencement," says his son, "of the great undertaking which was to establish his reputation as a poet and a scholar." The first volume of Cary's version of the " Inferno" was published in 1805, and this was followed by the second volume in the next year, It attracted little attention, and few copies of it were sold. Cary was not, however, disheartened; he went on with the work, but eight years elapsed before the translation was finished, and it was not till 1814 that the poem appeared complete, in a cheap form, published at the author's expense. It was scarcely noticed by the press, and it did not gain many readers. But in the autumn of 1817 an incident occurred— his son says, "I might almost call it an event "-which determined the better fortunes of the book. This incident was the forming by Cary of acquaintance with Coleridge. The story is a pleasant one and is well told by Cary's son. Cary and his family were residing for the time at Littlehampton, on the southern coast, where Coleridge happened to be staying. 'Several hours of each day were spent by Mr. Cary in reading the classics with the writer of this memoir, who was then only thirteen years of age. After a morning of toil over Greek and Latin composition, it was our custom to walk on the sands and read Homer aloud. For several days Coleridge crossed us in our walk. The sound of the Greek, and especially the expressive countenance of the tutor, attracted his notice; so one day, as we met, he placed himself directly in my father's way and thus accosted him: 'Sir, yours is a face I should know I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' His person was not unknown to my father, who had already pointed him out to me as the great genius of our age and country. Our volume of Homer was shut up; but as it was ever Coleridge's custom to speak (it could not be called talking or conversing) on the subject that first offered itself, whatever it might be, the deep mysteries of the blind bard engaged our attention during the remainder of a long walk. The close of our walk found Coleridge at our family dinner-table. Among other topics of conversation Dante's 'divine' poem was mentioned: Coleridge had never heard of my father's translation, but took a copy home with him that night. "On the following day when the two friends (for so they may from the first day of their meeting be called), met for the purpose of taking their daily stroll, Coleridge was able to recite whole pages of the version of Dante, and, though he had not the original with him, repeated passages of that also, and commented on the translation. Before leaving Littlehampton he expressed his determination to bring the version of Dante into public notice; and this, more than any other single person, he had the means of doing in his course of lectures delivered in London during the winter months." "In the course of the next winter Coleridge fulfilled his promise of speaking, in one of his lectures, of Mr. Cary's translation. The effect of his commendation seems to have been great and immediate. The work, which had been published four years, but had remained in utter obscurity, was at once eagerly sought after. About 1,000 copies of the first edition, that remained on hand, were immediately disposed of; in less than three months a new edition was called for. The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews re-echoed the praises that had been sounded by Coleridge, and henceforth the claims of the translator of Dante to literary distinction were universally admitted." For a long time Cary's translation held the field without a rival. An intelligent and spirited version of the "Inferno," in a modification of Dante's terza rima, by Mr. I. C. Wright, was published in 1833, followed by the "Purgatorio" in 1836, and by the "Paradiso" in 1840. Since then no less than twenty versions of the complete " Divina Commedia," or of one or more of its three divisions, have been published in England and America. Few of these have had more than one edition, but up to 1900 there are no less than twenty-seven editions of Cary's translation recorded in Mr. Koch's invaluable catalogue of the Dante Collection in the library of Cornell University. "It has remained," says Dr. Garnett, in his brief memoir of Cary in the Dictionary of National Biography, "the translation which on Dante's name being mentioned occurs first to the mind." But he adds: "Cary's standard is lower and his achievement less remarkable than those of many of his successors, but he, at least, has made Dante an Englishman, and they have left him half an Italian." The quality and the defect of Cary's work are indicated in these words. If the object of the translator is to turn Dante's poem into an English one, keeping as close to the original as may be compatible with this end, but with a changed method of versification, with frequent alteration of forms of expression, and with constant maintenance of a manner and tone likely to seem less strange to the modern reader than that of the original, |