"This description of a volition may be criticized on various
grounds. More especially does it seem defective in restricting the
term "will" to that feeling which arises when we act, or appear to
act, as causes: for one may will to strike, without striking; or to
think of something which we have forgotten."
But is not this met by the last six of the words which Professor Huxley
has italicised? They are certainly very wide, and one might ask, in
addition, what word of absolute "restriction" is employed by Hume in
this passage? He indicates what he means by the word "Will," by saying
that it is what we are conscious of upon certain occasions, and this
gives a clue to the quality of the sensation; but it was obvious, and
did not need saying, that the quality of the sensation might remain,
though its complete outcome were baulked.
In presenting and criticizing Hume's views upon such topics as Theism,
Immortality and Miracles, Necessary Truth, &c., Professor Huxley is, so
far as we have discovered, both accurate and candid. It is only
necessary to suggest that the reader should keep his eyes open--for
there is really not one new word to be written upon these matters.
It is not often that you are told what a man died of. You are put off
with some such phrase as "a painful malady," or a "family complaint."
Yet, it is often just what we desire to know, because the illness from
which a man suffers stands in direct relation to his power of work and
his capacity of endurance. Consumption, except in its later stage, is
not usually painful. Nor does it necessarily make work difficult. The
same may be said of maladies which come on paroxysmally, and leave those
blessed intervals of ease of which Paley, himself a sufferer, writes
with such unaccustomed tenderness. In the _Gibbon_ of this series, Mr.
Morison slurred over the very curious, perhaps unexampled fact, that
Gibbon had long concealed a bad hernia and had done nothing for it. It
finally killed him, but that with his amazing corpulence he could live a
long time with a serious rupture, and keep his general health and his
placidity, is very interesting. Professor Huxley tells us point-blank
what Hume died of, and it is quite as well for biographers to be
specific in such matters. We may just inquire, in passing, where the
Professor got his "_solid_ certainty of waking bliss"? It seems pedantic
to notice every trifle of this sort, but if small errors in quotation
were, so to speak, nipped in the bud, many logomachics would be saved.
How much discussion, in pulpits and out of them, has been wasted upon
the supposition that Pope wrote that "an honest man's the _noblest_ work
of God." Whereas Pope wrote "noble," and it was Burns, in the "Cotter's
Saturday Night," who started the error. Now "solid" is as good sense as
"sober," but the latter is what suits the verse best, and it is what
Milton made Comus say.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
It might be the subject of a very plausible doubt whether French novels
of a high order ought to be translated into English, since those who are
really capable of understanding and enjoying them will be certain to
understand French, and since, moreover, the finest qualities of the
writing must disappear in the process of translation. Then, with regard
to French novels of a much lower class, they are not worth the trouble
of turning into English; are more likely in themselves to do harm than
good; and their reproduction in our language cannot tend to encourage
"native talent." We have before us, from Messrs. Sampson Low, Marston,
Searle, & Rivington, _The Cat and Battledore, and other Tales_, by
Honoré de Balzac, translated into English by Philip Kent, B.A. (3 vols.)
Perhaps it was not a bad idea to give the merely English reader some
chance of appreciating the extraordinary qualities of the author of "Le
Père Goriot," "Le Peau de Chagrin," and "La Recherche de l'Absolu"
(neither of which is, the general reader may be told, in this
collection): but Balzac is not a writer with a soul in him, and the
experiment need not be carried any further. Those who know nothing of
Balzac, and who read novels simply for excitement, will be glad of these
three volumes, and the glimpse they give of an unique writer; but to
studious readers Balzac's novels have an interest which is mainly
psychological. The preface (here translated) to the "Comédie Humaine" is
a strange presumptuous medley, which raises, like all the author's most
characteristic works, the question of perfect sanity--a question which
Mr. Leslie Stephen once opened very acutely, and dismissed too curtly.
To have read through a story of Balzac's is to have passed through one
of those wonderfully vivid dreams which leave you puzzled and lost at
the moment of awaking. It seems to be generally admitted that his
writings do not tend to make his readers "immoral" in the usual sense of
the adjective, but there is something ineffably droll in his patronage
of "Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity," and that defence of
his own writings which the reader may amuse himself by studying in the
preface. He is not only conservative, he is monarchical, and objects to
representative Government, if it "hands us over to the rule of the
masses." But what chiefly concerns those who buy novels, or send for
them to the libraries, is the quality of the stories, and they may
depend upon getting a full measure of excitement, with some instruction,
out of "La Maison du Chat qui pelote" and the companion stories.