Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse, chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth sensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in some respects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be too richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has little left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too with Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints from a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case with Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore not with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contact giving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as the sun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark." Not so through Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." After a time these mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have not enough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will not supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There can be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.

Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches, and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots. There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has for the most part roots deeply hidden.

Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a body. This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and deserved name. Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is chargeable with this kind of externality. To try to make the fancy do the work of feeling is a vain effort. And so much verse is of the memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination. Inward impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with coldness. Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject that has a poem in it. In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of association. This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep, penetrating sympathy. Where evolution and upward movement are not, it is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface streams from without.

Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to the substance. Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to cooperate as members of an organic whole. There is not heat enough in the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity. There is too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike."

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the scoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made to Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is very natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing, yet looks as though it were something." There is much good-looking verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditions for poetry, being artificial instead of "simple," and having neither soul enough to be "passionate," nor body enough to be "sensuous." By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward. Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual—this implies a subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. The poetic mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a subject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light; the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there is no room for play of light or motion.

Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to; and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current a detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure. Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure of standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of Regulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to the lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking wine with you." A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets. Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and there are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or an execution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. In the poetical there always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle, blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure,—this were to speak too grossly,—but refined enjoyment through emotion.

To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence, the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give it. Wordsworth says, "Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." It might be called the aromatic essence of all life.

A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it into form. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval, without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, graceful from inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or of hundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word. A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must be a spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized into proportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out of the idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, the sensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, the subject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, must have within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test of his poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such a core) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. The conception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like the pillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly. Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. The spring into poetry is on a flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, but renews, recreates it.

A man's chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keep bettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry is the great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to view the noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetry elevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens the spirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty of admiration is one of our super-animal privileges. Poetry purges and guides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, the more admirable ourselves become.

The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens its imaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans, shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us; for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood. The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal, according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature. Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue. Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that of Fourier.

When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged with magnetic effluence, has moreover that aesthetic gift of rhythmic expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the high and exquisite possibilities of created things,—when such a mind, under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. Poetry is thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in musical cadence. And when we consider that thought is the gathering of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind, and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.



III.

STYLE.

Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I should answer, study Shakespeare.

Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh. Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of the finer aesthetic forces.

Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts), not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from others—whether through study of the best masters or through direct rhetorical instruction—is in the mechanical portion of the art; that is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within you. Le style c'est l'homme meme (a man's style is his very self), is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent, and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger: "Perfection of style should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas one wishes to make others adopt." And so effective is the following of such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact, until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.

The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent for writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of the mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbe Gerbet that he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language, what, in short, makes a talent for writing." The possessor of these qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity. Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that she always played well, never better.

When Sainte-Beuve says Rien ne vit que par le style, he asserts in fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to expression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately and harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary, what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command, while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give vitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literary substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient; for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment, albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would have been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic deficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. And the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style, but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined by mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases is ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: below the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or feel, in such a way as to make the best of it—presupposed, that what you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey, Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent, illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius, creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.

Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style; nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de Guerin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants: "Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it each in our own fashion."

One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls "progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions, exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is overspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by his poetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing.

De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he of course means any man with good things in him] as he walks through the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a short-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of composition begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close." Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to close dependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky style, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is, and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends much, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a good writer's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking of sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. The springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the thoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words, sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically, attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and true. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is a prerequisite for style: the sensibility must be active, made active by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good style will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the gloss of outward rubbing.

That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated ought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "King Lear." In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Far be it from me to say one word in praise of those—people of how narrow a sensibility—who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many tastes, an unelevated and unrhythmical) style—take, for instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style—is unconditionally good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style, transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the rhythmical, the continuous—what in French is called the soutenu—which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its subject; and the subject which can justify it must be of a corresponding quality—loftier—and therefore, rare."

I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To this point,—the adaption of style to subject,—he returns, laying down with clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paper on Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" he reaffirms—what cannot be too strongly insisted on—the falsity of the common opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model of excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage: "That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz., poetry and style, to talk most like blockheads) have invariably regarded Swift's style not as if relatively, (i.e., given a proper subject), but as if absolutely good—good unconditionally, no matter what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's 'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all. From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic, attractive. You must love your work to do it well.

A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable sequence.

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness, even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,—a sad condition for man or writer.

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity; it looks as though the very self—which will shine through the style—lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no style unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert, drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought in the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse. The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life. On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing, unseen, and ever rhythmical.

The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack "the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light into a thought or object or sentiment—in this consists the gift poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is utterly devoid of the faculty of style (denue de la faculte du style). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities, with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the exclusive property of the poetic idiom."

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art, and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form, deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.



IV.

DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]

[5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.

"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class. Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.

A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls—

"Light half-believers in our casual creeds."

Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."

Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of his time, fantastic, unfashioned—all this was his material. But all this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame. The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations, his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.

Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,—and literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,—no more broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed, moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict; and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.

Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous initiator, the august father of modern poetry—all this has combined to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven—of the world to come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured more or less ever since—the word-painter of that visionary, awful hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.

Those imaginations as to future being—to the Middle Ages so vivid as to become soul-realities—Dante, with his transcendent pictorial mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future, the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self, with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his preeminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a unique success.

To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world, would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination. But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures, puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual imagination.

Dante had it in him,—this hell, purgatory, and heaven—so full and warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and, added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and to reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits, relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and, along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its wraths and triumphs.

Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but, besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy" and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement, and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception, does the framework of incident support and display? That is the aesthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build. The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for their mere exuberance and diversity,—for that might have come from a comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,—but for the heart there is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention. Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits, classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and Shakespearean tragedies.

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and, with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his page—fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that just in his life-time—Giotto being his contemporary—was the re-birth of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline. Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the 'Divina Commedia.'"

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his intellect is more specific than generic. His subject—chosen by the concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs—admits of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider: he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion. Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,—

"As when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations,"

Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,—not involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely between physical, not between subtle, relations,—that Dante chiefly deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet, but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination. The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the passage—

"and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs."

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire; this gives its greatness to the passage.

Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?

"And the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."

Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of Milton's demon-host—

"That tore Hell's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?

Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and breadth.

Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the "Inferno," that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio," and that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso."

"As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell, Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent; So to the earth that cruel monster fell, And straightway down to Hell's Fourth Pit he went." Inferno: Canto VII.

"Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er A tumult of a dread portentous kind, Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore, Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind; As when, made furious by opposing heats, Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours, Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats, And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers; Then fly the herds,—the swains to shelter scud. Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight,' he said, 'direct O'er the long-standing scum of yonder flood, Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.'" Inferno: Canto IX.

"When, lo! there met us, close beside our track, A troop of spirits. Each amid the band Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by 'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned, As an old tailor doth a needle's eye." Inferno: Canto XV.

"And just as frogs that stand, with noses out On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide Their feet and all their bodies but the snout, So stood the sinners there on every side." Inferno: Canto XXII.

"A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft, Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft." Inferno: Canto XXVIII.

"We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon, Like unto people musing of their way, Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone; And lo! as near the dawning of the day, Down in the west, upon the watery floor, The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array, Even such appeared to me a light that o'er The sea so quickly came, no wing could match Its moving. Be that vision mine once more." Purgatorio: Canto II.

"And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one That on her bed of down can find no ease, But turns and turns again her ache to shun," Purgatorio: Canto VI.

"'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway, Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends; And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way With poignant love, to hear some distant bell That seems to mourn the dying of the day; When I began to slight the sounds that fell Upon my ear, one risen soul to view, Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel." Purgatorio: Canto VIII.

"There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss Each with his mate from every part, nor stay, Contenting them with momentary bliss. So one with other, all their swart array Along, do ants encounter snout with snout, So haply probe their fortune and their way." Purgatorio: Canto XXVI.

"Between two viands, equally removed And tempting, a free man would die of hunger Ere either he could bring unto his teeth. So would a lamb between the ravenings Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike; And so would stand a dog between two does. Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not, Impelled in equal measure by my doubts, Since it must be so, nor do I commend." Paradiso: Canto IV.

"And as a lute and harp, accordant strung With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make To him by whom the notes are not distinguished, So from the lights that there to me appeared Upgathered through the cross a melody, Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn." Paradiso: Canto XIV.

"As through the pure and tranquil evening air There shoots from time to time a sudden fire, Moving the eyes that steadfast were before, And seems to be a star that changeth place, Except that in the part where it is kindled Nothing is missed, and this endureth little; So from the horn that to the right extends Unto that cross's foot there ran a star Out of the constellation shining there." Paradiso: Canto XV.

"Even as remaineth splendid and serene The hemisphere of air, when Boreas Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest, Because is purified and resolved the rack That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs With all the beauties of its pageantry; Thus did I likewise, after that my lady Had me provided with a clear response, And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen." Paradiso: Canto XXVIII.

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening of the reader's mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could be called more than conventionally poetical—if this be not a solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions. Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,—as in the examples from Canto XV. of the "Inferno," and Canto VIII. of the "Purgatorio,"—what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright as in the best of Shakespeare's. As one instance out of many: towards the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,—

"No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave; Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell; But, like a lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse"

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying more and better,—it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,—a sign of life, power, and abundance.

Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault (liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grande of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets (unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,—a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.

Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature. By the story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a hundred flashes.

All the personages of Dante's poem (unless we regard himself as one) are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few is the imagination expanded. Clarence's dream, "lengthened after life," in which he passes "the melancholy flood," is almost super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the great ghost in "Hamlet," when you read of him, how shadowy real! Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.

Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breeding thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities, and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,—of these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, and not so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying as they do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in a single one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all the three books of the "Divina Commedia."

Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied domains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wondering at Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnest delight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher.

But it is time to speak of Dante in English.

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet." Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful "Defense of Poetry." But have we not in modern tongues the creations of Homer, and of Plato, who Shelley, on the same page, says is essentially a poet? And can we estimate the loss the modern mind would suffer by deprivation of them in translated form? Pope's Homer—still Homer though so Popish—has been a not insignificant chapter in the culture of thousands, who without it would have known no more of Hector and Achilles and the golden glowing cloud of passion and action through which they are seen superbly shining, than what a few of them would incidently have learnt from Lempriere. Lord Derby's Iliad has gone through many editions already. And Job and the Psalms: what should we have done without them in English? Translations are the telegraphic conductors that bring us great messages from those in other lands and times, whose souls were so rich and deep that from their words their fellow-men, in all parts of the globe, draw truth and wisdom forever. The flash on which the message was first launched has lost some of its vividness by the way; but the purport of the message we have distinctly, and the joy or grief wherewith it is freighted, and even much of its beauty. Shall we not eat oranges, because on being translated from Cuba to our palates they have lost somewhat of their flavor? In reading a translated poem we wish to have as much of the essence of the original, that is, as much of the poetry, as possible. A poem it is we sit down to read, not a relation of facts, or an historical or critical or philosophical or theological exposition,—a poem, only in another dress. Thence a work in verse, that has poetic quality enough to be worth translating, must be made to lose by the process as little as may be of its worth; and its worth every poem owes entirely to its poetic quality and the degree of that. A prose translation of a poem is an aesthetic impertinence, Shakespeare was at first opened to the people of the Continent in prose, because there was not then culture enough to reproduce him in verse. And in Shakespeare there is so much practical sense, so much telling comment on life, so much wit, such animal spirits, such touching stories so well told, that the great gain of having him even in prose concealed the loss sustained by the absence of rhythmic sound, and by the discoloration (impallidation, we should say, were the word already there) of hundreds of liveliest tinted flowers, the deflowering of many delicate stems. Forty years ago, Mr. Hay ward translated the "Faust" of Goethe into prose; but let any one compare the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in verse,—with that of Mr. Brooks for example,—to perceive at once the insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally faithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust," or on any high passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what would be the effect on an exquisite bas-relief of reducing its projection one half by a persevering application of pumice. In all genuine verse (that is, in all poetic verse) the substance is so inwrought into the form and sound, that if in translating you entirely disregard these, rejecting both rhyme and measure, you subject the verse to a second depletion right upon that which it has to suffer by the transplanting of it into another soil.

The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than just to take the words and through them attempt passively to render the page into his own language. He must brace himself into an active state, a creative mood, the most creative he can command, then transport himself into the mind and mental attitude of the poet he would translate, feeling and seeing as the poet saw and felt. To get into the mood out of which the words sprang, he should go behind the words, embracing them from within, not merely seizing them from without. Having imbued himself with the thought and sentiment of the original, let him, if he can, utter them in a still higher key. Such surpassing excellence would be the truest fidelity to the original, and any cordial poet would especially rejoice in such elevation of his verse; for the aspiring writer will often fall short of his ideal, and to see it more nearly approached by a translator who has been kindled by himself, to find some delicate new flower revealed in a nook which he had opened, could not but give him a delight akin to that of his own first inspirations.

A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity. "Paradise Lost," conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse? For his theme and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse.

The terza rima—already in use—Dante adopted as suitable to continuous narrative. With his feeling and aesthetic want rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle, Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic, free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable, moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.

In these two prominent features English verse is different from Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic, the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.

Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton. There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the terza rima, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly about the terza rima? To us it seems not deserving of admiration for its own sake; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated by Dante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for original poems. We are not aware that Dante's example has been followed by any poet of note in Italy. Terza rima keeps the attention suspended too long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the first rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his great song; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the "Divina Commedia."

Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential,—in order to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation,—to preserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a corresponding number of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort to transpositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order to compass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already cited from Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprised to see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italian thought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. His harness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, so skillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spirited version in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages cited from the "Inferno," or with those from the "Paradiso," in Mr. Longfellow's less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibility of Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be again manifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with the original and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then the three versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from Canto V. of the "Inferno:"—

"Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io, E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio. Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri, A che, e come concedette Amore Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri? Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria, e cio sa 'l tuo dottore. Ma se a conoscer la prima radice Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, Faro come colui che piange, e dice. Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse. Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto. Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura, e scolorocci 'l viso: Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse. Qando leggemmo il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante, Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso, La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante. Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse: Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. Mentre che l'uno spirito queste disse, L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade Io venni meno come s'io morisse, E caddi, come corpo morto cade."

Mr. Dayman:—

"Then toward them turned again: 'Thy racking woe,' I said, 'Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes The pious drops that sadden as they flow. But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs, By whom and how love pitying broke the spell, And in your doubtful longings made too wise.' And she to me: 'No keener pang hath hell, Than to recall, amid some deep distress, Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well. Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess To trace the root from whence our love was bred, His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less. 'T was on a day when we for pastime read Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin: We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread. Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started; But one sole moment wrought for our undoing: When that we read of lover so kind-hearted Kissing the smile so coveted before, He that from me shall never more be parted Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o'er. The broker of our vows, it was the lay, And he who wrote—that day we read no more.' The other spirit, while the first did say These words, so moaned, that with soft remorse As death had stricken me, I swooned away, And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse."

Mr. Longfellow:—

"Then unto them I turned me, and I spake, And I began: 'Thine agonies, Francesca, Sad and compassionate to weeping make me. But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs, By what and in what manner Love conceded That you should know your dubious desires?' And she to me: 'There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery, and that thy Teacher knows. But if to recognize the earliest root Of love in us thou hast so great desire, I will do even as he who weeps and speaks. One day we reading were for our delight Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall. Alone we were, and without any fear. Full many a time our eyes together drew That reading, and drove the color from our faces; But one point was it that o'ercame us. Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile Being by such a noble lover kissed, This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided, Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating. Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. That day no farther did we read therein.' And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell even as a dead body falls."

Dr. Parsons:—

"Then, turning round to them, I thus began: 'Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes: My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman; But tell me,—in the time of happy sighs, Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?" And she to me: "The mightiest of all woes Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed With bliss remembered,—this thy teacher knows. Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion's root and head, As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim, So will I speak. Together once we read The tale of Lancelot,—how Love bound him. Alone we were without suspecting aught: Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue, And oft our eyes each other's glances caught; But one sole passage 't was which both o'erthrew. At reading of the longed-for smile,—to be By such a lover's kissing so much blest, This dearest—never shalt thou part from me! His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed. The writer was our Galeot with his book:— That day we read no further on." She stopped: Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.

Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante's twenty-eight lines of eleven syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But why does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of saying, "who shall never part from me?" And why does Mr. Dayman say, "pious drops," instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill up the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is there any strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before them Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,—

"Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura."

All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read, their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or passage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the original adds to the refinement of the scene.

Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as compassionate instead of pitiful or piteous, recognize for know, palpitating for trembling, conceded that you should know for gave you to know? By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.

Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic endings—and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven syllables and on some pages more than a third—do a part in causing Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are relaxed.

Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring and, and the often-repeated is, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter, e. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can, bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like friends and straight, nor even words of six letters, like chimed, shoots, thwart, spring; nor does Italian abound as English does in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters, as in fronte and braccia. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines, although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three. Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the original; its soul is more cumbered with body.

In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story, translated in the spirit of this suggestion:—

I turned to them, and then I spake: "Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes, Such pity thy keen pangs awake. But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs, By what and how found Love relief And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?" And she: "There is no greater grief Than joy in sorrow to retell. But if so urgently one seeks To know our Love's first root, I will Do as he does who weeps and speaks. One day of Lancelot we still Read o'er, how love held him enchained. Without mistrust we were alone. Our cheeks oft were of color drained: One passage vanquished us, but one. When we read of lips longed for pressed By such a lover with a kiss, This one whom naught from me shall wrest, All trembling kissed my mouth. To this That book and writer brought us. We No farther read that day." While she Thus spake, the other spirit wept So bitterly, with pity I Fell motionless, my senses swept By swoon, as one about to die.

In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, rivolsi and parlai, are given in English with literal fidelity by two monosyllables, turned and spake. In the fourth observe how, in a word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without any forcing, eight English:

"Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:" "But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."

For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly modified. Again, in the line,—

"Than joy in sorrow to retell,"

joy represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing six syllables, del tempo felice: retell stands for ricordarsi, and in sorrow for nella miseria, or, three syllables for six; so that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the iambic measure and the rhyme.

Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":—

Through me the path to place of wail: Through me the path to endless sigh: Through me the path to souls in bale. 'Twas Justice moved my Maker high: Wisdom supreme, and Might divine, And primal Love established me. Created birth was none ere mine, And I endure eternally: Ye who pass in, all hope resign.

Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English? English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely, along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original, fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own tongue?

Here is another short passage in a different key,—the opening of the last canto of the "Paradiso":—

Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son, Meek, yet above all things create, Fair aim of the Eternal one, 'Tis thou who so our human state Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned Himself his creature's son to be. This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained Through kindling of God's love in thee.

In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been sacrificed to brevity.

The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does not feel the want.

One more short passage of four lines,—the famous figure of the lark in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":—

Like lark that through the air careers, First singing, then, silent his heart, Feeds on the sweetness in his ears, Such joy to th' image did impart Th' eternal will.

This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but, nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer, while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of lines.

When locked I heard the nether door Of the dread tower, I without speech Into my children's faces looked: Nor wept, so inly turned to stone. They wept: and my dear Anselm said, "Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?" Still I nor wept nor answer made That whole day through, nor the next night, Till a new sun rose on the world. As in our doleful prison came A little glimmer, and I saw On faces four my own pale stare, Both of my hands for grief I bit; And they, thinking it was from wish To eat, rose suddenly and said: "Father, less shall we feel of pain If them wilt eat of us: from thee Came this poor flesh: take it again." I calmed me then, not to grieve them. The next two days we spake no word. Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope? When we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet, Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?" There died he; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one The fifth and sixth day; then I groped, Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days I called them after they were dead: Then hunger did what grief could not.