Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/78

 490 Scholars lation of the Divina Commedia. This informal Dante Club was the precursor of the Cambridge Dante Society, the founda- tion of which Norton suggested to some members of his Dante class at Harvard in 1880. These students offered to support the plan, and when Longfellow consented to take the presidency of the club, it was actually inaugurated (1881). Its second president was Lowell; its third, Norton. The Society issues annual reports, accompanied -by valuable papers, usually bibliographical, upon various points in Dante scholarship ; it has contributed to the assembling in the Harvard library of a large Dante collection ; it offers an annual prize for an essay upon a topic relating to Dante; and it has supported and encouraged the publication of the valuable Concordance of the Divina Com- media by Edward Allen Fay (1888) and of other works. Norton published his own translation of the Commedia in 1891-92 — a prose translation, and, needless to say, a faithful one. Compared with a prose masterpiece like Andrew Lang's version of Theocritus, it seems rather dry, and wanting in such rhythmic beauty as is well within the reach of prose. Here the austerity of Dante seems to have fused with the austerity of the Norton stock to produce something more austere than either. Norton's version holds its own, however, with other prose versions of Dante. Norton's teaching and writing about the fine arts soon be- came emancipated from the extreme of Ruskin's influence; the relation was reversed; and Ruskin rather looked upon his younger friend as his "tutor," recognizing in him a mental bal- ance and a steadfastness that he knew to be wanting in himself. Norton, to be sure, retained the strongly ethical trend of his early days. He never achieved the economic precision of Henry Adams, who considers Chartres as releasing a certain quantity of force, like a railway just built, or a new coal mine. He never reached the degree of aesthetic detachment since at- tained by Bernard Berenson, who, when he is responding to spatial stimuli in a domed church, is inclined to ask "Why drag in religion?" For Norton the determining consideration is never just the effect of the work of art upon the percipient. What concerns him is the spirit of the artist, together with the spirit of national or civic movements which have produced great art; consequently his approach is historical and ethical;