The “run” upon Dante continues. Here is Dante: Six Sermons, by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. (C. Kegan Paul & Co.) “In allowing,” says Mr. Wicksteed—
“the publication of this little volume, my only thought is to let it take its chance with other fugitive productions of the pulpit that appeal to the press as a means of widening the possible area rather than extending the period over which the preacher’s voice may extend; and my only justification is the hope that it may here and there reach hands to which no more adequate treatment of the subject was likely to find its way.”
The sermons were delivered first at Little Portland Street Chapel, where Mr. Wicksteed succeeded Dr. Martineau, and afterwards at the Free Christian Church at Croydon, where the Rev. Rodolph R. Suffield formerly preached, but where the Rev. E. M. Geldart is now (we believe) the minister. The book contains only about 160 pages, and gives a very readable and complete account both of Dante and his poetry. The style is that of the pulpit, iterative, florid, and full of amplifications; but that was natural. It is a serious matter, however, that the author keeps up his strain of eulogy from end to end at a pitch which has an almost falsetto sound with it. It seems hardly fair to leave unnoticed the charges of artificiality and worse which have been abundantly made against Dante and his poetry, especially as this book is intended for popular use; and it is a pity that Mr. Wicksteed should go out of his way to settle difficult questions in this off-hand way:—
“It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic sympathy, and substitute hard and angular contrasts for the melting grace of those curved lines of beauty which pass one into the other. Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations”—
and so forth, in the same strained and insistent key. But no wise critic has ever said that “a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art.” What is maintained on that side of the debate is that the “purpose” must not be permitted to shape the poem; that the poem itself must be moulded upon lines of beauty and not of “moral purpose”—though the “moral purpose” may be immanent in the work. But who is bound to take Mr. Wicksteed’s word for the statement that Dante’s great poem is not the very strongest confirmation in all literature of the truth that a controlling and interfering moral purpose injures a poem, Milton’s “Paradise Lost” being the next strongest?
A well-known, and also imperfectly known, “nook in the Apennines” is the Republic of San Marino, about which there is a good deal of information in A Freak of Freedom; or, The Republic of San Marino, by J. Theodore Bent (Longman, Green & Co.) It appears to be partly the record of a visit paid by the author to the spot in 1877, and is illustrated by fifteen woodcuts from the author’s own drawings, to say nothing of a map. Mr. Bent was presented with the freedom of the Republic, and we do not know that any one, except another citizen of it, or some near neighbour, could criticize his little book to much advantage. But we trust he will permit us to remark that he might have made his work more amusing and instructive. There is a good deal about the place in Addison, and this is referred to (among other interesting matters) in an article in Knight’s “Penny Magazine” for May 31st, 1834. But, though we have not time to make references, we have a strong impression that there are many descriptions, new and old, of San Marino, which it would have been refreshing to quote. We know, however, of no work which gives so much information as Mr. Bent’s.