divided between two conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told. "A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of reading, and, as for the good old books—nobody reads them any more." On the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."
Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the winter is the time for reading—I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's "Winter Hour" when I think of this—and the motor car, especially in country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever. Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.
The celebration of the sixth centenary of the
death of Dante Alighieri proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its height, there were found many people in our country who were quite capable of asking why Dante should be read.
Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for, perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three valuable volumes
in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the "Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic tours de force.
In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy,"
Nessun maggior dolors,
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria;
Gollancz says:
Although these words are translated literally from Boëthius, and although we know that Dante had made a special study of Boëthius, yet we cannot well identify the dottore with this philosopher: for how can we be expected to assume that Francesca was acquainted with these two facts? The reference is probably to Virgil, and to his position in Limbo.