# Dante (Oliphant)/Introduction

DANTE.
INTRODUCTION.
The name of Dante Alighieri, the first and greatest of Italian poets, has been universally allowed a place in the very highest rank of literature—that airy summit reaching to the skies, where as yet only two others have been acknowledged as his equals, sovereign poets, beyond all competition or decay. Like Homer, he may be said to have created, in using it, the noble language in which his great poem is the chief monument; like Shakespeare, he has searched to the deepest roots of life, and combined philosophy with imagination: but his position is independent and individual, as distinct from those of his great companions as they are from each other. He is the Poet of the Middle Ages, as Homer was of the primeval heroic world; and he has the best right to head and lead the representatives of European letters as being himself the first fount and well-spring of modern literature and poetry. Before the time of Shakespeare the "well of English undefiled" had already been opened; but Dante formed ​into written speech the tongue in which, against all precedent, he chose to tell his great and solemn tale—a masterpiece of poetic imagination which, in all the after-refinements of the language, has never been equalled. The great dramatists of Greece press close upon the steps of their venerable leader, but neither in Italy nor in Latin Europe has any one arisen worthy to take his place by the side of the great dreamer, who was the first to rescue the vulgar tongue, the language of the people, from the babble of common affairs, and make of it that noble, sonorous, majestic Italian language which has ever since been the admiration of the world. He is thus the head not of Italy alone, but of all the literature of the West, so varied, so splendid, so individual Before Dante, the learned class, which included not only the writers but the readers of those early ages, regarded the spoken languages of their day with the indifference of contempt, incredulous of any power in them to express the thoughts of the wise. "It seemed to me," said the prior of a seaside monastery, where the poet strayed in one of his many wanderings, "not only difficult but inconceivable that he could embody in the vulgar tongue so arduous a work; and it scarcely appeared seemly to array so much knowledge in a popular garment." This was the conviction of the early Christian centuries. The vague floating ballads and heroic tales with which the people—unconsidered by the superior class who wrote and were written for in Latin—consoled themselves, remained long without the safeguard of any writing at all, floating in the air, engraved in thousands of rude memories, the inheritance of wandering minstrels—here a wild Niblung song as in Germany, there a never-ending romance of ​Arthur as in the Celtic lands. To be recorded on vellum, and laid up in libraries, was a fortune too high for the half-developed tongues in which mothers murmured over their children and masters ordered their servants—good enough for such everyday uses, but for nothing more. The stately Latin, the Catholic language, was the inheritance of all who knew; it had the advantage of reaching that oligarchy in all the corners of Europe, irrespective of the differences in their common dialects—and this unquestionable advantage gave a certain reasonableness to the preference of the learned for the language of learning, the only grammatical and regulated medium for their thoughts.
In the twelfth century, however, twitterings of native song began to rise over the common country, irrepressible—rising among the Provençal vineyards, echoing back from Teutonic wastes, and by the dim and stormy shores of ancient Bretagne, and caught up again among the Umbrian villages. "The use of the vulgar tongue in Italy," says Crescimbeni, while describing the beginning of Italian poetry, "was introduced for no other end than to please the beautiful women, who listened more willingly to the songs of their lovers when in their native tongue than in Latin." No doubt this was the motif of the troubadours, whose fantastic medieval worship of love and beauty caught like fire wherever they strayed, and became a fashion, like their embroidery and quaint jerkins, among all the golden youth. But other emotions were bursting into voice as well—religion as impassioned as earthly love, and more real. How could the awful Latin, language of highest rite and mystery, serve the eager purpose of Francis in ​his cell at Assisi, unlearned and simple, with so much to say to the people round him, who knew no Latin any more than he himself did? The wild, quavering, primitive measure of St Francis's famous Canticle is enough to show in how elementary a stage was this popular unwritten poetry in its beginning; and had a Homer or a Chaucer developed out of this chaos, weaving heroic legends into consistency, singing the story of a crusade, as Tasso did afterwards, or shaping into epic completeness that tale of Lancelot and Ginevra which already existed in germ, nothing more natural could have been. But it was not this natural evolution that happened. As a matter of fact, the history of the imagination does not move by rule, as a mental process ought; and it was not by following, gathering up, amplifying, and setting in order the legendary lore and nascent poetry about him, that Dante created "the vulgar tongue" into a noble literary language. The manner in which he did this—giving to modern literature a new beginning and fresh starting-point independent of, and distinct from, the classic—will be shown, according to the best ability of the writer, in the following pages. What an entirely new idea it was, unfamiliar to the minds of his contemporaries, and unlikely of success, according to all their canons, may be proved even from his own works. His little treatise 'Sul Volgare Eloquio,' written in Latin for the benefit, no doubt, of those who held the contrary opinion, is an attempt to prove, by force of a simple downright argumentation, more remarkable for its intense directness and single-hearted unity of purpose than for force of reason, the uses of "the vulgar tongue," and the necessity for employing it. It is "more ​noble," he asserts, than "that which the Romans call grammatica," from the fact that it is the first which we all use "in imitation of our nurse," and that it is natural; whereas the other must be acquired by time and assiduous study. But even in this elaborate argument there is a half-tone of apology. Granting that it might be permissible enough to sing love-songs or even hymns in the vulgar speech, the world had still to be taught that such an everyday medium was good enough for high themes of imagination and divine philosophy; and this was the first effectual lesson which Dante impressed upon the mind of his time. The literature of Italy was founded upon his great poem, still its noblest work. And indirectly by forming and giving dignity and worship to one European language, he emancipated all. The father of modern literature has thus an inalienable right to take the lead in the great line of writers who have made the countries of Christendom known to each other, and who furnish at once the clearest and surest revelation of the races in whose hands, for the last five hundred years, has lain all the progress of the world.
The translations in English of the 'Divine Comedy' are numerous. Perhaps the best known, and the one which has held its ground most steadily, is that of Cary, which, though somewhat turgid in its long strain of blank verse, and giving no idea of the triple rhyme of the original, is in the main good and faithful. Other translations, each with its excellent points, have been made by Messrs Wright, Cayley, Rossetti, and recently by Mr Longfellow and Mrs Ramsay. Most striking of all is the literal prose translation of Dr Carlyle, who unfortunately has not gone beyond the "Inferno." It is from ​the latter that all the prose quotations from the first portion of the poem in this volume are made. For those in the original rhyme, the present writer is herself responsible.
The 'Vita Nuova' has been translated admirably by Mr Theodore Martin and Mr Dante Rossetti, from whose versions the extracts in Chapter II. are taken, with a few exceptions. The initials of each translator will be attached to the sonnets. Those unsigned are by the writer.
We are not acquainted with any translations in English of the prose works.