The Critical Game

by John Albert Macy

I come back gladly to the analogy of the game. We have, I believe, made progress in one direction. In the direction of fair play. We cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not hit below the belt as he did sometimes. We cannot write like Arnold, and his combination of literary charm and scholarship makes us feel desperately small, but in our descent from his altitude we have freed ourselves from his major vice, his dogmatic snobbery, his bigoted liberalism. The pulpit-pounder still thrives in religion and politics; in criticism he is becoming obsolete. I am sure, or at least hopeful, that this is true in America. I think I see a slight but appreciable improvement in candour, simplicity, generosity, geniality, and fairness in attack. On the whole we are a little more sportsmanlike than some of our elders. That is all that I claim for us. Our real consolation is that the ancient and honorable game is still young, still to be played.

DANTE IN ENGLISH

I am tempted to call the following remarks "Reading Dante for Fun." The most austere of poets should not be treated with levity. But, after all, poetry, even poetry of profound ethical and religious import, is to be enjoyed. And the simple point that I wish to make, as a mere reader with but a stumbling knowledge of Italian and almost no knowledge of the vast library of Dante scholarship, is that Dante is accessible in English. His book of magic is at least half open even to one who must forever remain partly blind and deaf to the beauty of the original. It is a great pleasure to read the convenient little volumes of the Temple Classics with the Italian text on the left-hand page and the English on the right, to read idly or study deeply, according to mood and temperament. At any rate, let us not be overcome by the solemnity of the occasion or discouraged by the difficulties, some of which the commentators have cleared away and some of which they have made more difficult.

Dr. Toynbee[ [1] finds that since 1802 the Commedia as a whole has been translated into English about once every four years. And he excludes from his record American translators and critics. Why did Dr. Toynbee or the British Academy make this commemorative volume so narrowly insular? English and American scholarship is one institution. And American Dantists have done good work. Though it is the fashion to scorn the Yankee bards and seers, Lowell's essay and the translations by Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in the history of Dante in English, not British, literature. They had literary gifts, they knew Italian, and they were able to appreciate a universal mind. For all their provinciality their shades can afford to smile at their young countryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes: "If I have to go to hell for it, I must here set down my conviction that much of the 'Divine Comedy' is piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell—to Dante's hell, which is an entertaining and hospitable place. In the cold prose of Norton or John Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, there may be some passages in which an alert modern reader cannot find great interest, but the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none.

It is not to be expected that all men, even all literary men, will respond to Dante. Horace Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd, disgusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." This is amusing, even refreshing, in view of the too pious devotion of some later Englishmen. But the eighteenth century was not the time for English appreciation of Dante, and Walpole, witty prosateur, was not the man to enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to Chaucer and to the Elizabethans and Milton, and his influence on English poetry was perhaps even greater than Dr. Toynbee's record makes evident. But it is with the nineteenth century, which, bien entendu, was born intellectually a few years before its numerical date, that Dante becomes a power in English literature. He is, indeed, a part of the revival of English romanticism. The translations of Boyd and Cary appeared early in the century, and from then on Dante belonged to English literature, as well acclimated as any other foreign classic. The index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the names of almost all the important English poets from Scott to Francis Thompson.

And it contains hundreds of other names, not perhaps of great importance in literature, but important in this respect, that they show the appeal of Dante to a great variety of minds, of minds not mediæval, not Catholic, not Italian. Nobody can dip into him, however superficially, without getting something. He has so much that everybody can be happy, from the Pope to the most pagan young poet. Though the true Dantist will insist that the greatest of poets must be understood, or accepted, entire, like his own God and his own universe, I propose that the anthological view of him is proper and delightful. If he is so rich and structurally perfect that no side of him can be neglected, then he is so rich and so strong that any side of him can be neglected. You can sit under a tree on the side of a mountain without comprehending the mountain, but deriving much happiness from the tree, the altitude, and the view.

The interpreters of Dante's stupendous unity are all true to Dante, in that they try to find some complete explanation of him and will tolerate no neglect of his least detail. Dante himself, for all his mystery and multiple meanings, is quite explicit about the indivisibility, the integrity, of his work. So that the episodic, incomplete view of him, which I recommend to other casual readers, is unphilosophic and amateurish. Let us concede that and at the same time let us reserve the right to be cheerfully weary of systems where the "benumbed conceiving soars." Ruskin speaks the indubitable truth: "The central man of all the world, as representing the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." But such a genius is too awful to contemplate, and it is more comfortable to keep this side idolatry.

Moreover, the interpreters, seeking to comprehend Dante's vast totality, do not discover complete unity among themselves. Mr. Walter Arensberg[ [2] thinks that he has unlocked the mystery, and I think that he has. But as I had a little to do with filing that key I will not say how well I think it turns in the wards of the lock; I will leave him to the mercies of other critics and merely note that six centuries after Dante's death we have a novel interpretation.

And then comes Professor Courtney Langdon[ [3] with another. One of his ideas seems to me just, though debatable—namely, that any modern man has the right to find anything in Dante that he can find, to derive the sort of joy and wisdom that suit him, the reader, whether or not Dante would recognize that reader's meaning. The poet exists for our benefit and, like the Bible, does not forbid but justifies the multitude of sects and individual expositors. That idea alone is worth Professor Langdon's labor, and it will be interesting to see how he develops it. Unfortunately, his translation is worse than useless. He simply has not the gift of English verse. His own verses, prefixed to the several canticles, are absurd doggerel; they remind one of Longfellow's lovely sonnets (the best poems he ever wrote) only by their position of naïve rivalry with the splendor that follows. And, what is more strange, Professor Langdon writes abominable prose, such assaults upon the ear as "verse's rhythm" and "Divine Comedy's last part." If the poet exists for us, in English or Italian, one of the things to learn from him is how to write.