Page:The Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri vol i.djvu/21

Rh followed, though not longissimo intervallo, by Longfellow; and with these the idea of direct comparison and com- petition was excluded by the fact that I have deliberately chosen another form than that which they had adopted ; and there still seemed, therefore, to be an opening for an attempt which might, indeed, prove unsuccessful, but which aimed at what I take to be a higher ideal than they aimed at.

Accordingly, in 1883 I printed—I can scarcely say published—the first four cantos of the Inferno, with the episodes of Francesca and Ugolino, and sent them to such Dante experts and masters of English style as I had the good fortune to know; among them, to Cardinal Newman, Mr. Gladstone, Sir James Lacaita, the Bishop of Bipon, Dean Church, Archdeacon Farrar, Canon Liddon, Mr. J. A. Symonds, Mr. J. G. Whittier, Dr. Edward Moore, the present Barlow Lecturer on Dante at University College, London, the Eev. H. F. Tozer, Mr. A. J. Butler, and others. The answers which I received varied much, as might be expected, in their character. Some thought -that I was aiming at the unattainable ; that Dante must remain for all time, if not unknown and unknowable, at all events the untranslated, the untranslatable. On the whole, however, there was a balance in favour of completing what I had begun, and I was encouraged to go over my work again with a view to that completion.

The Commedia was thus finished, but then there came the question. Ought I to stop there? I do not expect that Dante's Minor Poems will ever be very attractive to the average English reader. They are the product of a form of culture and of life with which the English mind has little or no sympathy. They belong to Italy and to the Italians of the thirteenth century, not, like the Commedia,