think of this--and the motor car, especially in
country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many
journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have
taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.
Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably
learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of
this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good
books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.

The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
capable of asking why Dante should be read.

Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for,
perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed
translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic
_tours de force_.

In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy,"

_Nessun maggior dolors,
che ricordarsi del tempo