especially of a translation,--a task
where there is always the original text at hand for reference. As time
has gone on, however, the admiration for the completed work has
gradually been mingled with a growing doubt whether this species of
joint production was on the whole an ideal one, and whether, in fact, a
less perfect work coming from a single mind might not surpass in
freshness of quality, and therefore in successful effort, any joint
product. Longfellow had written long before to Freiligrath that making a
translation was "like running a ploughshare through the soil of one's
mind,"{92} and it would be plainly impossible to run ploughshares
simultaneously through half a dozen different minds at precisely the
same angle. The mind to decide on a phrase or an epithet, even in a
translation, must, it would seem, be the mind from which the phrase or
statement originally proceeded; a suggestion from a neighbor might
sometimes be most felicitous, but quite as often more tame and guarded;
and the influence of several neighbors collectively might lie, as often
happens in the outcome of an ordinary committee meeting, rather in the
direction of caution than of vigor. Longfellow's own temperament was of
the gracious and conciliatory type, by no means of the domineering
quality; and it is certainly a noticeable outcome of all this joint
effort at constructing a version of this great world-poem, that one of
the two original delegates, Professor Norton, should ultimately have
published a prose translation of his own. It is also to be observed that
Professor Norton, in the original preface to his version, while praising
several other translators, does not so much as mention the name of
Longfellow; and in his list of "Aids to the Study of the 'Divine
Comedy'" speaks only of Longfellow's notes and illustrations, which he
praises as "admirable." Even Lowell, the other original member of the
conference, while in his "Dante" essay he ranks Longfellow's as "the
best" of the complete translations, applies the word "admirable" only to
those fragmentary early versions, made for Longfellow's college classes
twenty years before,--versions which the completed work was apparently
intended to supersede.

Far be it from me to imply that any disloyalty was shown on the part of
these gentlemen either towards their eminent associate or towards the
work on which they had shared his labors; it is only that they surprise
us a little by what they do no