DANTE, AMERICA, AND BIMETALLISM. * WE believe that this curious and
composite book was first announced to the public under the title of Dante and Bi- metallism, which might have tempted them to the belief that Mr. Cross had deduced from the pages of the great Florentine some prophetic theories in far advance of his time, upon one of the subjects destined to perplex the speculative philoso- phers of the present day. The addition, however, of the third heading, together with the full style and honours of the little * Impressions of Dante and of the New World: with a Pow Words on Binteta/.. lien. By J W Cross. London and Edinburgh W. Blaokwood and Sons. 1893,
volume as given to the world, show that it is but a collection of odd essays of the kind now so much in favour, which enables the contributor to magazines to reap his second harvest among the book-readers, after the periodicals they appear in have had their day. It must be admitted that it is difficult enough to choose a good collective name for a mis- cellany of this kind, though we could wish that it were more the custom to group a few articles upon a single subject, or, at all events, upon subjects of a cognate kind, than to distract the student with meditations of so widely different an order as those aroused by "Dante for the General," "The Extension of Railways in America," "Social New York," and, finally, the "Few Words on Bimetallism," which seem to have been appended as a kind of afterthought. Mr. Cross himself writes of them as a conclusion of a slender bundle of materials, with no definite connection to offer ; and somehow accordingly be brings in Bimetallism—a subject on which, we believe, he is something of an expert—as the best link between his republished essays upon Dante and America which appears to occur to him. It is an odd link ; and whether it bears a kind of parable by way of meaning, and Dante be hinted at as gold and America as silver, or Dante as silver and America as gold, must be left to the particular preferences of the reader. After all, it is not, thus regarded, a wholly unpoetic kind of allegory. What can be so golden as the land of commerce ? What can be more silvern than the poet's song? From his Dantesque point of view, where Mr. Cross eomes out as a worshipper at the singer's shrine, he might perhaps regard this simile of ours with something of a favourable complacency. As a bimetallist, he cannot, we fear, approve, as in that attitude he insists on facts and figures—especially figures—as the material things to be con- sidered in a serious discussion, although a "blot upon crea- tion" to many a literary man. Of the variety of literary taste, however, he gives us an amusing illustration in. a man who said that he "enjoyed reading Euclid, but found him too systematic." And the present writer was once honoured with the acquaintance of an eminent man of letters who described a portentous lexicon of the classics as "one of the few dictionaries he had read through with pleasure."
Mr. Cross's papers cover enough space of time to justify any amount of variety in their treatment, and even in the opinions expressed. June, 1872 (Macmillan's Magazine) is the date of the article upon "Social New York," and it requires a certain amount of hardihood to reprint at the present day a paper upon a subject so familiar to us of late in countless and inexhaustible methods. "Praise or even appreciation" of America and things American was cold-shouldered in English society, and the girls in England were rather a downtrodden nationality. Well indeed may Mr. Cross say that things have changed since then ; that the pendulum has erred, if at all, upon the other tack ; and that unpopular causes have become fashionable fads. That more than justice is injustice is the essayist's plea for any bias in his own writing towards early doctrines and old-fashioned views. The American young lady, at the head of her army of compatriots, has simply usurped England since the day of his visit, and, as heiress or as prima- donna, finds the English duke or the English impresario at her feet. Indeed, the whole of these American reminiscences read with something of the "chestnut" flavour which modern Trans- atlantic slang attaches to a twice-told tale; and we marvel as we are told how the women of America are very bewitching from their sprightliness, and how entirely free from constraint or con- sciousness when they have to entertain a visitor of the opposite sex without the presence of a chaperon. A serious edition of Martin Chuzzlewit over again is suggested more than once by this down-from-date America of Mr. Cross ; and perhaps the newest illustration of the mixedness of American dinner- parties is where we are told how the same visitor finds himself confronted with a girl in her teens, with Herbert Spencer or Buckle at her finger's ends, and a man who never heard of the "Idylls of the King." How completely America has been leavening and levelling since Mr. Cross's visit may be gathered from his statement, as a curiosity of society, how in "New York the banker, and the merchant, and the broker, all associate on terms of perfect equality as gentle- men ; " whereas in England the whole aim and end of certain circles in life is to avoid associating with them. We have changed those things so much since 1872, that it would be difficult to suggest at present where these circles lie; and Mr. Cross's veiled suggestions that his own sympathies lie with their old-fashioned prejudices, are high Tory enough for any palate of the past. Side by side with the democratic facts and inferences with which his pages teem, it reads as a sad and cynical comment upon the forces of the age. As George Eliot's husband, Mr. Cross stands before us with a sort of authority upon that exchange and intercourse of classes upon which she thought and wrote so much. And the blend, somehow, does not seem to commend itself greatly to his mind.
But Mr. Cross seems to be possessed of so sincere a mistrust of his own right to be heard, that when he prefaces his volume with, "Don't shoot the essayist, he's doing his level best,"— when he admits that he cannot plead the pressure of admiring friends for his act of publication, and when he discourses in melancholy fashion of Messrs. Blackwood's possible account of sale, and the solitary copy to be embodied in the British Museum, we feel that he stands before us rather as a humourist in quest of a platform, than as an author of any more definite class.
It is rather as an expounder than as a critic of Dante that Mr. Cross appeals to us in his opening essay. The title of "Dante for the General" assumes that the Italian poet has, during the last few years, ceased to be the cult of an especial few, and has become instead familiar reading to large and popular audiences. This the present writer doubts very much. The existing number of readers of all kinds is as a thousand to one to the readers of the past ; and it is now six years, during which period popular editions and abbreviated bio- graphies and " studies " have quite indefinitely multiplied, since the essay before us first appeared in Blackwood. The essayist concludes that, even as the cabinet of the Sistine Madonna is the possession and privilege of the many, so, too, does Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy, published by Professor Morley in his Universal Library, and sold for 10d., make Dante's masterpiece the common delight of the world. But the test is really quite different. There is but one and the original Madonna, and she tells her own story. The original text and language of the great poem are so completely part and parcel of its meaning and its history, that no notes in the world, and nothing, however admirable in the nature of what school and college language call a "crib," can really create familiarity with its nature and purpose in the mind of any one lacking in the requisite "foundation." It is but a smattering of Dantesque knowledge that that perplexing and ill-defined being, the general reader, can gather into his store, even through the best of the popular channels of the day. Mr. Cross himself is evidently inclined to this opinion, for he con- cludes that to the artisans and mechanics, from whom he presumes that the buyers of a tenpenny English Dante are largely recruited, the book must be a puzzle to view with mixed feelings. The original Italian text, he says, must be added to the opening canto before the production can be really appreciated. And if it were, what becomes of the general popularity? The conclusion that Dante is not and never can be a really popular poet, seems to us inevitable. If Shake- speare were never acted, how many, nowadays, would really be familiar with him The reader of Mr. Cross's pages will pro- bably turn, as we do, from such speculations as these, to the old and inviting quotations from the poet's memorable lines, and speculate rather in sadness upon their intolerable gloom, and the spirit of cruelty which pervades them through all their beauty. For, indeed, in that divine melodrama of his—it is rather thence than from a more smiling region that his methods and his "properties " are drawn—a terrible spirit of intolerance is with us from first to last. His use of the Almighty thunders for all who happened to displease him is too persistent and methodical to be due only to the fervour of poetic indignation ; and it Was not only the modern Italian tongue, but the notions of a future state which have taken root in many wavering minds, which Dante may be said to have created out of his power of verse. Without going so far as Sir Edwin Arnold, who condemns him altogether as a mere power for darkness and for evil, we can yet feel, as Mr. Cross himself feels par- tially, that there is quite as much to distress and weigh down, as to brighten and to educate, in the Florentine's teaching. Bearing in mind even all the circumstances of the time, it seems but hard use of the poet's gifts to add so much to all the troubles and perplexities of the unseen. Sir Edwin, indeed, reckons teachers so different as Dante and Savonarola among the worst enemies of the human race. And where even a poet cannot sympathise with a weaver of such immortal verse, we must accept it as doubtful if anything in the world will even sweeten such caviare for "the general."
Perhaps the best of Mr. Crosse's judgments is that which places Dante, "constantly referred to as the pre-eminently Christian poet," far rather among the Hebrew type—" an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Dante places the In- quisition in Heaven, and would have located Wesley very low in Hell. He was above all things a Roman, aristocratic in feeling and exclusive in all his tendencies, with few rays of Christ's spirit and little echo of his voice, with intellectual arrogance in place of the exaltation of the humble and meek. These essays form an interesting survey from one who realises throughout how much the times are changed since he began to write, and who concludes his American disquisitions with a quotation from Bacon:—" It may be in civil states a republic is a better policy than a kingdom. Yet God forbid that lawful kingdoms should be tied to innovate and make alterations."
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