remains of Gustavus from the German shore bore away heroism as well as
the hero. Gustavus left great captains in Bernard of Weimar, Banner,
Horn, Wrangel and Tortensohn; in the last, perhaps, a captain equal to
himself. He left in Oxenstierna the greatest statesman and diplomatist
of the age. But the guiding light, the grand aim, the ennobling
influence were gone. The Swedes sank almost to the level of the vile
element around, and a torture used by the buccaneers to extract
confessions of hidden treasure bore the name of the Swedish draught. The
last grand figure left the scene in Wallenstein. Nothing remained but
mean ferocity and rapine, coarse filibustering among the soldiers, among
the statesmen and diplomatists filibustering a little more refined. All
high motives and interests were dead. The din of controversy which at
the outset accompanied the firing of the cannon, and proved that the
cannon was being fired in a great cause, had long since sunk into
silence. Yet for fourteen years after the death of Wallenstein this
soulless, aimless drama of horror and agony dragged on. Every part of
Germany was repeatedly laid under heavy war contributions, and swept
through by pillage, murder, rape and arson. For thirty years all
countries, even those of the Cossack and the Stradiot, sent their worst
sons to the scene of butchery and plunder. It may be doubted whether
such desolation ever fell upon any civilized and cultivated country.
When the war began Germany was rich and prosperous, full of smiling
villages, of goodly cities, of flourishing universities, of active
industry, of invention and discovery, of literature and learning, of
happiness, of progress, of national energy and hope. At its close she
was a material and moral wilderness. In a district, selected as a fair
average specimen of the effects of the war, it is found that of the
inhabitants three-fourths, of the cattle four-fifths had perished. For
thirty years the husbandman never sowed with any confidence that he
should reap; the seed-corn was no doubt often consumed by the reckless
troopers or the starving peasantry; and if foreign countries had been
able to supply food there were no railroads to bring it. The villages
through whole provinces were burnt or pulled down to supply materials
for the huts of the soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and
caves of the earth, took to the woods and mountains, where many of them
remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they
wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had
suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral
life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and
domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions
of dress and furniture, perished almost as though it had been swallowed
by an earthquake. The nation would hardly have survived had it not been
for the desperate tenacity with which the peasant clung to his own soil,
and the efforts of the pastors, men of contracted views, of dogmatic
habits of mind, and of a somewhat narrow and sour morality, but staunch
and faithful in the hour of need, who continued to preach and pray
amidst blackened ruins to the miserable remnants of their flocks, and
sustained something of moral order and of social life.
Hence in the succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German
nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against
the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of
progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its
original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England
was producing Chathams and Burkes, Germany was producing the great
musical composers. Hence when the movement came it was rather
intellectual than political, rather a movement of the universities than
of the nation.
At last, nothing being left for the armies to devour, the masters of the
armies began to think of peace. The diplomatists went to work, and in
true diplomatic fashion. Two years they spent in formalities and
haggling, while Germany was swarming with disbanded lansquenets. It was
then that old Oxenstierna said to his son, who had modestly declined an
ambassadorship on the ground of inexperience, "Thou knowest not, my son,
with how little wisdom the world is governed." The object of all the
parties to the negotiations was acquisition of territory at the expense
of their neighbours, and the treaty of Westphalia, though, as we have
said, it was long the Public Law of Europe, was an embodiment, not of
principles of justice or of the rights of nations, but of the relative
force and cunning of what are happily called the powers. France
obtained, as the fruit of the diplomatic skill with which she had
prolonged the agony of Germany, a portion of the territory which she has
recently disgorged. The independence of Germany was saved; and though it
was not a national independence, but an independence of petty
despotisms, it was redemption from Austrian and Jesuit bondage for the
present, with the hope of national independence in the future. When
Gustavus broke the Imperial line at Lutzen, Luther and Loyola might have
turned in their graves. Luther had still two centuries and a half to
wait, so much difference in the course of history, in spite of all our
philosophies and our general laws, may be made by an arrow shot at a
venture, a wandering breath of pestilence, a random bullet, a wreath of
mist lingering on one of the world's battlefields. But Luther has
conquered at last. Would that he had conquered by other means than war--
war with all its sufferings, with all its passions, with the hatred, the
revenge, the evil pride which it leaves behind it. But he has conquered,
and his victory opens a new and, so far as we can see, a happier era for
Europe.
THE LAMPS OF FICTION
_Spoken on the Centenary of the Birth of Sir Walter Scott_
Ruskin has lighted seven lamps of Architecture, to guide the steps of
the architect in the worthy practice of his art. It seems time that some
lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction.
Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use
it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels, and then look
into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library
consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are
the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway
book-stalls in one day. There was hardly a novel by an author of any
repute on one of them. They were heaps of nameless garbage, commended by
tasteless, flaunting woodcuts, the promise of which was no doubt well
kept within. Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation
be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of
Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honour to whose
memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be
praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor
lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure and true, is a law to
itself; and by studying what he does we may find the law for all who
follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture,
Scott will light as many for fiction.
I. _The Lamp of Reality_.--The novelist must ground his work in
faithful study of human nature. There was a popular writer of romances,
who, it was said, used to go round to the fashionable watering-places to
pick up characters. That was better than nothing. There is another
popular writer who, it seems, makes voluminous indices of men and
things, and draws on them for his material. This also is better than
nothing. For some writers, and writers dear to the circulating libraries
too, might, for all that appeals in their works, lie in bed all day, and
write by night under the excitement of green tea. Creative art, I
suppose, they call this, and it is creative with a vengeance. Not so,
Scott. The human nature which he paints, he had seen in all its phases,
gentle and simple, in burgher and shepherd, Highlander, Lowlander,
Borderer, and Islesman; he had come into close contact with it, he had
opened it to himself by the talisman of his joyous and winning presence;
he had studied it thoroughly with a clear eye and an all-embracing
heart. When his scenes are laid in the past, he has honestly studied the
history. The history of his novels is perhaps not critically accurate,
not up to the mark of our present knowledge, but in the main it is sound
and true--sounder and more true than that of many professed historians,
and even than that of his own historical works, in which he sometimes
yields to prejudice, while in his novels he is lifted above it by his
loyalty to his art.
II. _The Lamp of Ideality_.--The materials of the novelist must be
real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual
observation. But they must pass through the crucible of the imagination;
they must be idealized. The artist is not a photographer, but a painter.
He must depict not persons but humanity, otherwise he forfeits the
artist's name, and the power of doing the artist's work in our hearts.
When we see a novelist bring out a novel with one or two good
characters, and then, at the fatal bidding of the booksellers, go on
manufacturing his yearly volume, and giving us the same character or the
same few characters over and over again, we may be sure that he is
without the power of idealization. He has merely photographed what he
has seen, and his stock is exhausted. It is wonderful what a quantity of
the mere lees of such writers, more and more watered down, the libraries
go on complacently circulating, and the reviews go on complacently
reviewing. Of course, this power of idealization is the great gift of
genius. It is that which distinguishes Homer, Shakespeare, and Walter
Scott, from ordinary men. But there is also a moral effort in rising
above the easy work of mere description to the height of art. Need it be
said that Scott is thoroughly ideal as well as thoroughly real? There
are vague traditions that this man and the other was the original of
some character in Scott. But who can point out the man of whom a
character in Scott is a mere portrait? It would be as hard as to point
out a case of servile delineation in Shakespeare. Scott's characters are
never monsters or caricatures. They are full of nature; but it is
universal nature. Therefore they have their place in the universal
heart, and will keep that place for ever. And mark that even in his
historical novels he is still ideal. Historical romance is a perilous
thing. The fiction is apt to spoil the fact, and the fact the fiction;
the history to be perverted and the romance to be shackled: daylight to
kill dreamlight, and dreamlight to kill daylight. But Scott takes few
liberties with historical facts and characters; he treats them, with the
costume and the manners of the period, as the background of the picture.
The personages with whom he deals freely, are the Peverils and the
Nigels; and these are his lawful property, the offspring of his own
imagination, and belong to the ideal.
III. _The Lamp of Impartiality_.--The novelist must look on
humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the
historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party. He must
see everywhere the good that is mixed with evil, the evil that is mixed
with good. And this he will not do, unless his heart is right. It is in
Scott's historical novels that his impartiality is most severely tried
and is most apparent; though it is apparent in all his works.
Shakespeare was a pure dramatist; nothing but art found a home in that
lofty, smooth, idealistic brow. He stands apart not only from the
political and religious passions but from the interests of his time,
seeming hardly to have any historical surroundings, but to shine like a
planet suspended by itself in the sky. So it is with that female
Shakespeare in miniature, Miss Austen. But Scott took the most intense
interest in the political struggles of his time. He was a fiery
partisan, a Tory in arms against the French Revolution. In his account
of the coronation of George IV. a passionate worship of monarchy breaks
forth, which, if we did not know his noble nature, we might call
slavish. He sacrificed, ease, and at last life, to his seignorial
aspirations. On one occasion he was even carried beyond the bounds of
propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his
political ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy.
The idols which the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have
fought against the first revolution under Montrose, and against the
second under Dundee. Yet he is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite
party. Not only is he just, he is sympathetic. He brings out their
worth, their valour, such grandeur of character as they have, with all
the power of his art, making no distinction in this respect between
friend and foe. If they have a ridiculous side he uses it for the
purposes of his art, but genially, playfully, without malice. If there
was a laugh left in the Covenanters, they would have laughed at their
own portraits as painted by Scott. He shows no hatred of anything but
wickedness itself. Such a novelist is a most effective preacher of
liberality and charity; he brings our hearts nearer to the Impartial
Father of us all.
IV. _The Lamp of Impersonality_.--Personality is lower than
partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is
said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the
enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy
and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his
divine picture of the Last Supper would fade, because he had introduced
his personal enemy as Judas, and thus desecrated art by making it serve
personal hatred. The legend must be false, Leonardo had too grand a
soul. A wretched woman in England, at the beginning of the last century,
Mrs. Manley, systematically employed fiction as a cover for personal
libel; but such an abuse of art as this could be practiced or
countenanced only by the vile. Novelists, however, often debase fiction
by obtruding their personal vanities, favouritisms, fanaticisms and
antipathies. We had, the other day, a novel, the author of which
introduced himself almost by name as a heroic character, with a
description of his own personal appearance, residence, and habits as
fond fancy painted them to himself. There is a novelist, who is a man of
fashion, and who makes the age of the heroes in his successive novels
advance with his own, so that at last we shall have irresistible
fascination at seven score years and ten. But the commonest and the most
mischievous way in which personality breaks out is pamphleteering under
the guise of fiction. One novel is a pamphlet against lunatic asylums,
another against model prisons, a third against the poor law, a fourth
against the government offices, a fifth against trade unions. In these
pretended works of imagination facts are joined in support of a crotchet
or an antipathy with all the license of fiction; calumny revels without
restraint, and no cause is served but that of falsehood and injustice. A
writer takes offence at the excessive popularity of athletic sports;
instead of bringing out an accurate and conscientious treatise to
advocate moderation, he lets fly a novel painting the typical boating
man as a seducer of confiding women, the betrayer of his friend, and the
murderer of his wife. Religious zealots are very apt to take this method
of enlisting imagination, as they think, on the side of truth. We had
once a high Anglican novel in which the Papist was eaten alive by rats,
and the Rationalist and Republican was slowly seethed in molten lead,
the fate of each being, of course, a just judgment of heaven on those
who presumed to differ from the author. Thus the voice of morality is
confounded with that of tyrannical petulance and self-love. Not only is
Scott not personal, but we cannot conceive his being so. We cannot think
it possible that he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism,
or crotchets, or petty piques. Least of all can we think it possible
that his high and gallant nature should use art as a cover for striking
a foul blow.
V. _The Lamp of Purity_--I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the
purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than
Dickens--Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of
one still greater than either, Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater
morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is
cynicism, though the more genial and healthy element predominates; and
cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the
little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We
know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity
of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe.
Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a
blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of
the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in
Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which
lewdness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized, but by
no means disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven.
There is no justification for this; it is mere pandering, under whatever
pretence, to evil propensities; it makes the divine art of Fiction
"procuress to the Lords of Hell," If our established morality is in any
way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not to Comus; and remember
that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Coleridge pledges himself
to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais; but Coleridge
alone finds the sermons while everybody finds the filth. Impure novels
have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity
is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience, it is the manly
purity of one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world,
known evil as well as good; but who, being a true gentleman, abhorred
filth, and teaches us to abhor it too.
VI. _The Lamp of Humanity_.--One day we see the walls placarded
with the advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl
tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day
we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a
man seizing her behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her
brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by
introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of
lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and
adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the
ordure, he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew
that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely
horrible, that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as
licentiousness itself--the passions which were stimulated by the
gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bull-
fights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by
exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperilling
human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the
terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing
character, awakening emotions which when awakened dignify and save from
harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives
novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and
even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as
some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore.
VII. _The Lamp of Chivalry_.--Of this briefly. Let the writer of
fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the
tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the
standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We
delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and
Othellos, but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean. The
noble and chivalrous always holds its place as the aim of true humanity
in his ideal world. Perhaps Dickens is not entirely free from blame in
this respect; perhaps Pickwickianism has in some degree familiarized the
generation of Englishmen who have been fed upon it with what is not
chivalrous, to say the least, in conduct, as it unquestionably has with
slang in conversation. But Scott, like Shakespeare, wherever the thread
of his fiction may lead him, always keeps before himself and us the
highest ideal which he knew, the ideal of a gentleman. If anyone says
these are narrow bounds wherein to confine fiction I answer there has
been room enough within them for the highest tragedy, the deepest
pathos, the broadest humour, the widest range of character, the most
moving incident, that the world has ever enjoyed. There has been room
within them for all the kings of pure and healthy fiction--for Homer,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Scott. "Farewell Sir Walter," says
Carlyle at the end of his essay, "farewell Sir Walter, pride of all
Scotchmen. Scotland has said farewell to her mortal son. But all
humanity welcomes him as Scotland's noblest gift to her and crowns him
as on this day one of the heirs of immortality."
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART AT THE
DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZES
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,