The Press.
London, England, 1854-03-04 00:00:00

PREPARATIONS FOR WAR.

The first battalion of Scots Fusilier Guards left
London on Tuesday en route to the East. Their
departure had been p stponed till seven o'clock by
royal command, in order that her Majesty and Prince
Albert might have the gratification of bidding them
farewell as they passed by Buckingham Palace in
full marching order. That same afternoon the men
were embarked on board H.M.S. steamer Simoom,
which started for Spithead and Plymouth next
morning.
The 77th Regiment left Glasgow on Tuesday
morning by railway for Preston en route for the
East; and on the same day the 33rd (Duke of
Wellington's) Regiment left Dublin, being the second
Irish contingent which has embarked for the seat
of war.

His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge goes
out with the expeditionary force with the brevet rank
of lieutenant-general. The duke will command a
division composed of two brigades—one of the Guards,
and the other of regular infantry.
Accounts from Malta state that active preparations
are making there for the reception of troops.
Sir Charles Napier, having received the command
of the Baltic fleet, hoisted his flag provisionally in
the Fisgard at Woolwich on Saturday. He after-
wards proceeded to Portsmouth, where the Duke of
Wellington, 131, is to become his flag-ship. On
Wednesday he departed for London, in company
with Admiral Corry, both officers having been tele-
graphed for by the Admiralty.
The squadron so long stationed in the Tagus,
under Admiral Corry, arrived at length in the Chan-
nel on Monday last. The ships were ordered to
proceed with all possible despatch to Spithead, and
arrived there on Wednesday morning.

The British war steamer Hecla has arrived at
Copenhagen with the masters and pilots appointed to
make surveys. England and France ask Denmark
to allow the combined fleets to take up their station
at Kiel.

THE DUKE OF SAKE COBURG, brother to Prince
Albert, left Brussels on Thursday for Paris, where
he arrived M the evening of the same day.

HIS EXCELLENCY BARON REHAUSEN, Envoy Ex
traordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the
Court of Sweden and Norway, died at his residence,
14, Halkin-street, Belgrave-square, on Thursday
afternoon. His excellency was Minister for seven
years, and lived in this country all his life. His
father represented the King of Sweden in this country
for seventeen years.

LORD STANLEY, M.P., has offered to contribute
3001. for the erection of public baths and wash-
houses at King's Lynn—of which borough he is the
representative—on condition that the Town Council
contributes an equal sum to the same object.

THE CARNIVAL SEASON 18 passing rather dully in Con-
stantinople. The French and English ambassadors, and
the family of one wealthy banker, entertain, and do it
very well and very handsomely. The hotels have weekly
masked balls—rather melancholy assemblages, to which
entrance is purchased at so many piastre' a head. The
ceremony of dancing is gone through strictly aelon les
regles, and with the observance of rather frigid etiquette.
The women are all masked, but do not seem to know the
advantage of that disguise. The gentlemen are almost all
unmasked. There is, however, a sprinkling of male do-
minoes, who hover about in a mysterious. manner. They
are by some supposed to be husbands; they do not dance.
There ere also masked balls at the theatre. A Turkish
woman was caught there in a domino. Her husband had
some suspicions, which turned out true. She had gone to
the Giaour ball. Half a dozen of the cavasses (police.
men ) who haunt that building (they have the entrance to
the theatre free, and sometimes form the bulk of the au-
dience) escorted her out, and she was marched home in
tsars and distress by her angry husband.

MARCH 4, 1854.

sittraturt.

The Divine Comedy ; or, the Inferno, Purgatory,
and Paradise, of Dante Aliyhieri. Rendered
into English by Frederick Pollock, Esq.
With 50 Illustrations, drawn by George
Scharf, jun., engraved by Dalziel. London :
Chapman and Hall.
Dante. Translated into English Verse by J.
C. Wright, M.A., late Fellow of Magdalen
College, Oxford. Third Edition. Illustrated
with Engravings on Steel after Designs by
Flaxman. London : H. G. Bohn.

PERHAPS 110 poet of any time has excited so
much enthusiastic and enktrossingly devoted
study as Dante. The classic authors have en-
tailed mountains of print; but for these pe-
dantry has been frequently as responsible as
a spirit of admiration. An equal quantity,
again, allowing for the difference of date, may
have been written about Shakspeare ; but it
has been more in the way either of verbal
comment, of antiquarian dilettantism, or of
regular literary exercitation, in which, starting
from Shakspeare, the writer's self proves the
chief ingredient. With Dante, it is rather a
downright endeavour to understand, to
theorise, and to illustrate.
The primary explanation of such a hold
upon the student's earnestness may be found
in the abstruse nature of the subject, and that
inany-sidedness of meaning in which the
Divine Comedy concurs with and transcends all
other great poems. Much remains beyond
this. Profundity, intellectual and moral, is
the grand characteristic of Dante. He is
great personally in an overwhelming degree—
not his creative faculty, or his mental sub-
tlety and range alone, but himself. The man
Dante awes you. The divine grave purity of
that youthful face which Giotto painted,
" Whose open eyes desire the truth,"
the unsearchable anguish and scorn in that of
the older exile and poet, are ever present to
the reader of the Commedia. His are a
passion that shakes the frame without impair-
ing his austerity, hatred inextinguishable of
the base, a heart-piercing tenderness " pass-
" ing the love of women,"—not " second only
" to Shakspeare's," as Shelley said, but without
parallel ;—here the gloom of utter condem
nation—there the incandescence of auroral
brightness. It is the identity of the man
which gives a supremacy to all he utters. If
he has had but two rivals in poetic intellect
since the world began —Homer and Shaks-
peare—he has had none in that grandeur and
excellence which belong to a work as being
the stamp of the individual himself. Through
Homer's soul the demigod and the hero ex-
pressed themselves in song; Shakspeare has
the comprehensive glance of a cherub. In Dante
speaks the deepest heart of man that ever
found utterance. An idle word could not pass
those lips. To the mind all lie says is, through
earnestness and condensation, pitched in
a superlative key ; to the ear all arc the sim-
plest positives. Always the fewest, gravest,
directest words, the most unconstrained
adaptation to the requirements of the form,—
so that instances are constant in which a
thought has evidently, and unspoiled, •obeyed
a rhyme—always the absoluteness of profound-
est meaning. We believe that no other book
evokes such concentrated intensity of feeling
in the reader as the Divine Comedy. He
walks with Dante as through his own " selva
" oscura," and clings to the hem of his gar-
ment with an awful love—more awful, were
but his heart capable of the same depth of feel-
ing, than that of Dante himself for his " good
" master" Virgil.
In translating the Commedia into Eng-
lish Mr. Pollock enrols himself among a com-
pany already tolerably numerous. Who that
has looked through Flaxman's outlines has not
groaned or grinned, as indignation or the feel-
ing of the absurd got the better, over the
shameful platitudes which poor old hebetated
into
English called a rendering of the poet
English heroic verse ? We have a recollection,
almost as feeble as the lines themselves, of
having looked into a specimen translation by

THE PRESS.

Lord John Russell. Another and a far more
passable specimen was published years ago
under the pseudonym of Odoardo Volpe, in a
volume of literary imposture, the chief com-
position in which was pretended to be Byron's.
Wright's version is a compromise, wearing a
delusive show of the original terza rima,
which is indolently scamped into a metre
that is no metre, and, like most compro-
mises, to be condemned. Dismissing other,
and some laudable, members of the minor
fry, three translations remain, each of which
deserves, in a degree, to rank as stand-
ard of its kind—Cary's, Carlyle's, and Cayley's
—the two latter as yet uncompleted. The first
is creditable orthodox English blank verse, of
the Miltonic order, and consequently, pace Mr.
Ruskin, neither in form nor in spirit Dan-
tesque ; the second has an inalienable value,
that of literality and competent editorship,
though, being in prose, we could wish that the
literality were carried yet further ; the third,
taking the bull by the horns, Is an honest, ho-
nourable, uncompromising rendering of the
original in the supremely difficult metre, in the
naked energy of diction, in spirit, as far as
seems possible to be combined with equal
fidelity to form—line fur line, and often word
for word.
There was still room for a translation con-
ceived on Mr. Pollock's principle, and, spite of
what he has done, there still is room. " It has
" been my endeavour," he says, "in the present
" version of Dante's great poem, to be strictly
" literal in the rendering of the original Ito.-
" Tian into the English of our own times, so far
" as I found it possible, regard being had to
" the idioms of the two languages, and to the
" preservation of a metrical form. To a certain
" extent, also, I have tried to represent to the
" reader the actual arrangement as well as the
" true English equivalent of the original ; and
" I have made it a condition to retain the order
" and identity of the lines, except where this
" could not be done without violating more es-
" sential requirements. In working out this
" design it will, I trust, be found that no
" words of individual importance have been
" added or omitted by me. Omission, indeed,
" is almost out of the question in dealing with
" Dante. The obvious danger lies the other
" way ; and it is by the dilution of his wnrds,
" and the insertion of epithets not to be justi-
" fled by the text, that he has most suffered in
" translation."
Selecting blank verse as his metre, like
Cary, Mr. Pollock aims to be more faithful to
the precise words and the structural disposi
tion of the lines : he adds this advantage of
metre to a literality equal, or almost equal, to
that of the prose version of Carlyle ; and, shaking
himself free of the trammels of rhyme and a
most arduous rhythmical arrangement, he
ought to come nearer than Cayley to his author,
in every remaining respect. We are clearly of
opinion that, although a most conscientious
labourer in the Dantesque field, ho has not
succeeded in doing this.
Mr. Pollock points out one manifest require-
ment in a translator of Dante—condensation ;
but condensation, in so far as it implies merely
the abstinence from superfluous words, is only
one side of the Dantesque quality. We musthave
the utmost mastery of language—the simplest
words, but the most energetic and clenching.
Let the phrases be as positively English as
Dante's are distinctively Italian, and of a
certain scholarly choiceness, though stopping
short of archaism, to represent the olden hue
of the original ; neither euphuism on the one
hand, nor a lax use of the first term that
comes up on the other. These qualifications
Cayley possesses in a remarkable degree ;
Pollock in no wise beyond the common. So
much for condensation ; but even this per-
fectly understood is scarce half the battle. It
is the divine beauty of Dante's might which is
the most unapproachable and impalpable.
His height and depth are those of the zenith
and of a great water,—the more gloriously
blue for utter height, the more calm and star-
reflecting for unsounded depth. Condensa-
tion the translator can give—English is as
pithy as ; enemy he can give—no Ita-
lian, save that of Dante alone, has a tithe of
the English mass and life ; but the beauty
none save a man of high poetic faculty

207

could render with real adequacy. Pangs of
glorious tenderness, passions of longing love
and hope, trances of beatific ecstasy abound,
of which one of the most wonderful and ad-
mirable qualities is their inseparable inter-
weaving with the very words in which they
received expression, nay, the metre and
the sound. This was that inward melody of
the man which could find no voice less perfect
than itself. That dreadful inscription over
hell-gate, the frightful transformations of the
seventh pit, the loathsomeness of the pit of
disease, the brutal hideousness of a tearing
Cerberus, or obscene harpies, or filth-encrusted
Thais, or the devils of the boiling pitch, may
all be competently conveyed ; but we know
no words that will signify the same as Frau-
cesca's

La bocce mi baci4 tutto treniante.
English that as you may, it is a perfume eva-
porated. Nothing conveys the same thing as
the opening of the eighth canto of the Pur-
gatory :
Era gia I'ora the volge it desio
Ai navigaiiti, &c.;
Dante alone mirrors the angel here :

A not venia la creatura bells,
Biancaveatita, e nella faccia quale
I'er tremolando niattutina atella;*
and there is no passage in the whole of that
awful Ugolino canto so. untranslatable as
this :

Ben sei crudel se to giii non ti duoli,
remand° el(*) che al niio cuor s'iunntuziava :
E, se non piangi, di che piangcr suoli?
Now, this quality of beauty, beyond any
translator in degree, is only at all attain-
able in essence by a chaste and glowing poetic
feeling, a most true idea of melody, and a
power of versification which is vastly aided by
the use of rhymed metre. Of this last aid Mr.
Pollock is wholly deprived. He is much ham-
pered also in his versification by the structural
fidelity to which, on other grounds, and
grounds which we consider paramount, he
adheres. The result of his giving line for lino
is, that his chief pauses uniformly fall at the
end of every third line, where, in the original,
a triplet terminates ;—an accident fatal to gran-
deur of melody in English blank verse, one of
whose most essential requirements is the
variety of pause, loading to the constant close
of a period in the middle of a line. Cary, less
scrupulous, acts upon this rule of blank-verse
prosody as systematically as Milton, and reads
the better for it. Of poetic sentiment, apart
from an evidently heartfelt love for his author,
we do not find any salient traces in Mr. Pol-
lock ; and in the welding of a verse with a
kind of conscious joy and power Mr.Cayley is
much his superior. Were we bent upon
making out a case for this gentleman to Mr.
Pollock's disparagement, we might quote Vir-
gil's report of his interview with Beatrice,
from the second canto of the Hell, in which
the first retains much, the second loses all, of
the supreme and celestial graciousness of
Dante : but we take a pass' ge of another class
where Mr. Pollock is at his own usual level.
We think Cayley's greater nerve of phrase and
of verse will be apparent ; and this is united
to a fidelity little less literal than Mr. Pollock's,
spite of the vastly-increased difficulty conse-
quent on the preservation of the terza
Our extract is from the fifth canto of the
Purgatory, where Dante meets the spirits of
those who have repented in violent death :
POLLOCK. A 10
Then spoke another: " As may that desire
Which to the high mount draws thee be fulfilled, "Ail
With holy piety encourage mine. rt I
I am Buonconte, once of Montefeltm;
Nor (liovanua heeds me, nor the rest ;
.3119
Whence among these I go with face of shame."
Then Ito him: " What violence or chance
So far from Campaldino wrested thee
That never yet thy burial•place was known?"
" Alas !" he said, ' by Csaentino's plain
There flows a river, Archiano called,
Which over Ermo springs in the Apennine.
To where that appellation disappears •
I came : I was sore wounded in the throat,
living on foot andibloodying the plain.
I lost my power of sight here, and my voice
Died with the name of Mary. On that spot
I fell, and all alone my body lay.

~~ ~,

• We must do Mr. Pollock the justice to say that he has ref•
dered this very well, considering:
" Towards us came the creature beautiful,
Arrayed in white, and of such countenance
As is the shining of the morning star."

amt

ME