Page:The Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri vol i.djvu/18

x analogne which the nature of the English language admitted. The comparative ease of blank verse is, of course, a great temptation, but, for that very reason, it fails to give the reader the sense of strength and mastery over language as the original gives it, and we lose altogether the impression made by the interUnked, interwoven continuity with which line follows on line and thought on thought throughout a whole canto. Little, I imagine, can be said in favour of other metrical forms, such as the six-lined stanza of Mr. Boyd's version, or the peculiar arrangement of double, not triple, rhyme, by which that of Mr. I. C. Wright cheats the eye, though not the ear, of the reader with a counterfeit semblance of the original. And I confess I have seldom found satisfaction in any prose version of a poem in any language. It may be in the highest degree useful to the student of the original, and that merit belongs conspicuously to such works as Dr. Carlyle's translation of the Inferno and Mr. A. J. Butler's of the Purgatorio and Paradiso; but the English reader in these instances, I imagine—and I might add to them Mr. Munro's Lucretius and Mr. Lonsdale's Virgil—finds it hard to persuade himself that he is reading a poem. Music, the melody of rhythm and of rhyme, of assonance or alliteration, of subtle laws of parallelism or contrast, is, according to the varying character of nations and their tongues, Aryan or Semitic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Early English, absolutely the differentia of poetry. To fall back upon a prose version, except in the case of Hebrew poetry, where the music of the original is simply that of a balanced symmetry, is to confess either that all poetry as such is untranslatable, or that this or that particular poem presents absolutely insuperable difficulties. The result is, at the best, like drinking stale