Gustavus dead, the first thought of his officers was retreat; and that thought was his best eulogy. Their second thought was revenge. Yet so great was the discouragement that one Swedish colonel refused to advance, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar cut him down with his own hand. Again the struggle began, and with all the morning's fury. Wallenstein had used his respite well. He knew that his great antagonist was dead, and that he was now the master-spirit on the field. And with friendly night near, and victory within his grasp, he directed in person the most desperate combat, prodigal of the life on which, according to his enemies, his treasonable projects hung. Yet the day was again going against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the exhaustion. For six hours almost every man in both armies had borne the terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered; their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still moved along their lines, unhurt, grazed and even marked by the storm of death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest, and as darkness fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off, leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.
The judgment of a cause by battle is dreadful. Dreadful it must have seemed to all who were within sight or hearing of the field of Lutzen when that battle was over. But it is not altogether irrational and blind. Providence does not visibly interpose in favour of the right. The stars in their courses do not now fight for the good cause. At Lutzen they fought against it. But the good cause is its own star. The strength given to the spirit of the Swedes by religious enthusiasm, the strength given to their bodies by the comparative purity of their lives, enabled them, when the bravest and hardiest ruffians were exhausted in spirit and body, to make that last effort which won the day.
Te Deumwas sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than any victory. For humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it good to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to that time had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles XII.
Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a Christian warrior, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahe, daughter of a Swedish nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg, also renowned for beauty. The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness, admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love still is, there is no more rivalry in love.
The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was far more formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own, which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another. Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch Calvinist, in the Imperial service (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang from the side of their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet. He was, indeed, in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen, for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic warnings, his valet was carrying away the golden salver, on which his night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down, when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by his fellow-assassins shouting, "Rebels, rebels!" Devereux himself, with a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried, "Villain, you are to die!" True to his own majesty the great man spread out his arms, received the weapon in his breast, and fell dead without a word. But as thought at such moments is swift, no doubt he saw it all—saw the dark conclave of Italians and Spaniards sitting at Vienna—knew that the murderer before him was the hand and not the head—read at once his own doom and the doom of his grand designs for Germany and Friedland. His body was wrapped in a carpet, carried in Gordon's carriage to the citadel, and there left for a day with those of his murdered friends in the court-yard, then huddled into a hastily constructed coffin, the legs of the corpse being broken to force it in. Different obsequies from those of Gustavus, but perhaps equally appropriate, at least equally characteristic of the cause which the dead man served.
Did Friedland desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark, that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use of which always proves that no good evidence is forthcoming; absurd charges were included in the indictment, such as that of having failed to pursue and destroy the Swedish army after Lutzen. The three thousand masses which Ferdinand caused to be sung for Wallenstein's soul, whether they benefited his soul or not, have benefited his fame, for they seem like the weak self-betrayal of an uneasy conscience, vainly seeking to stifle infamy and appease the injured shade. Assassination itself condemns all who take part in it or are accomplices in it, and Ferdinand, who rewarded the assassins of Wallenstein, was at least an accomplice after the fact. Vast as Wallenstein's ambition was, even for him age and gout must have begun to close the possibilities of life, and he cannot have been made restless by the pangs of abortive genius, for he had played the grandest part upon the grandest stage. He had done enough, it would seem, to make repose welcome, and his retirement would not have been dull. Often in his letters his mind turns from the camp and council to his own domains, his rising palaces, his farms, his gardens, his schools, his manufactures, the Italian civilization which the student of Padua was trying to create in Bohemian wilds, the little empire in the administration of which he showed that he might have been a good Emperor on a larger scale. Against his Imperial master he is probably entitled at least to a verdict of not proven, and to the sympathy due to vast services requited by murder. Against accusing humanity his plea is far weaker, or rather he has no plea but one of extenuation. If there is a gloomy majesty about him the fascination of which we cannot help owning, if he was the noblest spirit that served evil, still it was evil that he served. The bandit hordes which he led were the scourges of the defenceless people, and in making war support war he set the evil example which was followed by Napoleon on a greater scale, and perhaps with more guilt, because in a more moral age. If in any measure he fell a martyr to a policy of toleration, his memory may be credited with the sacrifice. His toleration was that of indifference, not that of a Christian; yet the passages of his letters in which he pleads for milder methods of conversion, and claims for widows an exemption from the extremities of persecution, seem preserved by his better angel to shed a ray of brightness on his lurid name. Of his importance in history there can be no doubt. Take your stand on the battle field of Lutzen. To the North all was rescued by Gustavus, to the South all was held till yesterday by the darker genius of Wallenstein.
Like the mystic bark in the Mort d'Arthur, the ship which carried the 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.
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."
You will not expect me, in complying with the custom which requires your Chairman to address a few words to you before distributing the prizes, to give you instruction about Art or Science. One who was educated, as I was, under the old system, can hardly see without a pang the improvement that has been made in education since his time. In a public school, in my day, you learned nothing of Science, Art, or Music. Having received nothing, I have nothing to give. Fortunately, the only thing of importance to be said this evening can be said without technical knowledge of any kind. The School of Art needs better accommodation. The financial details will be explained to you by those who are more conversant with them than I am. I will only say that parsimony in this matter on the part of the government or other public bodies will, in my humble opinion, be unwise. I am not for a lavish expenditure of public money, even on education. It would be a misfortune if parental duty were to be cast on the State, and parents were to be allowed to forget that they are bound to provide their children with education as well as with bread. But it seems that at this moment the soundest and even the most strictly commercial policy would counsel liberality in providing for the National Schools of Art and Science. England is labouring under commercial depression. Of the works in the manufacturing districts, many are running half time, and some, I fear, are likely, if things do not mend, to stop. When I was there the other day gloom was on all faces. Some people seem to think that the bad time will pass away of itself, and that a good time will come again like a new moon. It is a comfortable but a doubtful doctrine. And suppose the good time does not come again, the outlook for those masses and their employers is dark. A friend of mine, who is a manufacturer, said to me the other day that he had been seeing the ruins of a feudal castle, and that the sight set him thinking if factories should ever, like feudal castles, fall into decay, what their ruins would be like? They would be unromantic no doubt, even by moonlight. But much worse than the ruins of buildings would be the ruin among the people. Imagine these swarming multitudes, or any large proportion of them, left by the failure of employment without bread. It would be something like a chronic Indian famine. The wealth of England is unparalleled, unapproached in commercial history. Add Carthage to Tyre, Venice to Carthage, Amsterdam to Venice, you will not make anything like a London. Ten thousand pounds paid for a pair of china vases. A Roman noble under the Empire might have rivalled this, but the wealth of the Roman nobles was not the fruit of industry, it was the plunder of the world. You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States—a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires—are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and securities of foreign nations, and in this way draws tribute from the world, though, unhappily, we are being made sensible of the fact that money lent to a foreign government is lent to a debtor on whom you cannot distrain. But the sources of this fabulous prosperity, are they inexhaustible? In part, we may hope they are. A maritime position, admirably adapted for trading with both hemispheres, a race of first- rate seamen, masses of skilled labour, vast accumulations of machinery and capital—these are advantages not easily lost. And there is still in England good store of coal and iron. Not so stable, however, is the advantage given to England by the effects of the Napoleonic war, which for the time crushed all manufactures and mercantile marines but hers. Now, the continental nations are developing manufactures and mercantile marines of their own. You go round asking them to alter their tariffs, so as to enable you to recover their markets, and almost all of them refuse; about the only door you have really succeeded in getting opened to you is that of France, and this was opened, not by the nation, but by an autocrat, who had diplomatic purposes of his own. TheTimes, indeed, in a noteworthy article the other day, undertook to prove that a great manufacturing and trading nation might lose its customers without being much the worse for it, but this seems too good to be true; I fancy Yorkshire and Lancashire would say so. Is it not that very margin of profit of whichThe Timesspeaks so lightly, which, being accumulated, has created the wealth of England? Your manufacturers are certainly under the impression that they want markets, and the loss of the great American market seems to them a special matter of concern. It is doubtful whether that market would be restored to them even by an alteration of the tariff. The coal in the great American coal fields is much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour, which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level. Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the heavier and coarser goods. But there is still a kind of goods, in the production of which the old country will long have a great advantage. I mean the lighter, finer, and more elegant goods, the products of cultivated taste and of trained skill in design—that very kind of goods, in short, the character of which these Schools of Art are specially intended to improve. Industry and invention the new world has in as ample a measure as the old; invention in still ampler measure, for the Americans are a nation of inventors; but cultivated taste and its special products will long be the appanage of old countries. It will be long before anything of that kind will pass current in the new world without the old world stamp. Adapt your industry in some degree to changed requirements; acquire those finer faculties which the Schools of Design aim at cultivating, but which, in the lucrative production of the coarser goods, have hitherto been comparatively neglected, and you may recover a great American market; it is doubtful whether you will in any other way. Therefore, I repeat, to stint the Art and Science Schools would seem bad policy. I may add that it would be specially bad policy here in Oxford, where, under the auspices of a University which is now extending its care to Art as well as Science, it would seem that the finer industries, such as design applied to furniture, decoration of all kinds, carving, painted glass, bookbinding, ought in time to do particularly well. If you wish to prosper, cultivate your speciality; the rule holds good for cities as well as for men.
There are some, perhaps, who dislike to think of Art in connection with anything like manufacture. Let us, then, call it design, and keep the name of art for the higher pursuit. Your Instructor presides, I believe, with success, and without finding his duties clash, over a school, the main object of which is the improvement of manufactures, and another school dedicated to the higher objects of aesthetic cultivation. The name manufacture reminds you of machines, and you may dislike machines and think there is something offensive to artists in their products. Well, a machine does not produce, or pretend to produce, poetry or sculpture; it pretends to clothe thousands of people who would otherwise go naked. It is itself often a miracle of human intellect. It works unrestingly that humanity may have a chance to rest. If it sometimes supersedes higher work, it far more often, by relieving man of the lowest work, sets him free for the higher. Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken, without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however imperfect, of individual mind; but if we were not to use a pair of tongs that did not bear the impress of individual mind, millionaires might have tongs, but the rest of us would put on coals with our fingers. After all, what is a machine but a perfect tool? The Tyrian loom was a machine, though it was worked by hand and not by steam; and if the Tyrian had known the power loom, depend upon it he would have used it. Without machines, the members of this School might all be grinding their corn with hand mills, instead of learning Art. Common humanity must use manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind; and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall be good and well designed.
There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you, and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me, as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty, and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion—not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church. Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith; and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions there may be great technical skill; I take it for granted there is; but in the subject surely there is a void, an appearance of painful seeking for something to paint, and finding very little. When you come to a great picture of an Egyptian banquet in the days of the Pharaohs, you feel that the painter must have had a long way to go for something to paint. Certainly this age is not indifferent to beauty. The art movement is in every house; everywhere you see some proof of a desire to possess not mere ornament but something really rare and beautiful. The influence transmutes children's picture books and toys. I turned up the other day a child's picture book of the days of my childhood; probably it had been thought wonderfully good in its time; and what a thing it was. Some day our doubts may be cleared up; our beliefs may be settled; faith may come again; life may recover its singleness and certainty of aim; poetry may gush forth once more as fresh as Homer, and the art of the future may appear. What is most difficult to conceive, perhaps, is the sculpture of the future; because it is hardly possible that the moderns should ever have such facilities as the ancients had for studying the human form. In presence of the overwhelming magnificence of the sculpture in the museums of Rome and Naples, one wonders how Canova and Co. can have looked with any complacency on their own productions. There seems reason by the way to think that these artists worked not each by himself, but in schools and brotherhoods with mutual aid and sympathy; and this is an advantage equally within the reach of modern art. Meantime, though the Art of the future delays to come, modern life is not all hideous. There are many things, no doubt, such as the Black Country and the suburbs of our cities, on which the eye cannot rest with pleasure. But Paris is not hideous. There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament, colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be blackened and corroded into one vast blotch by smoke; to collect the art wonders of Pigtail Place; to make the lions in Trafalgar Square lie like cats on a hearth-rug, instead of supporting themselves on a slope by muscular action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London symbolizes little more than did the Druidical ring of stones which an English squire of my acquaintance purchased in one of the Channel Islands and set up in his English park. As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. If the house is less beautiful the home is more so. Even a house in what Tennyson calls the long unlovely street is not utterly unlovely when within it dwell cultivated intellect, depth of character and tenderness of affection. However the beauty of English life is in the country and there it may challenge that of Italian palaces. America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious. As it is in society so it is in architecture. America is best when she is content to be herself. An American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous, law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. I cannot help fancying that Turner, whose genius got to the soul of everything, would have made something of even in American city. The cities of the Middle Ages were picturesquely huddled within walls for protection from the violence of the feudal era, the cities of the New World spread wide in the security of an age of law and a continent of peace. At Cleveland in Ohio there is a great street called Euclid Avenue, lined with villas each standing in its own grounds and separated from each other and from the street only by a light iron fencing instead of the high brick wall with which the Briton shuts out his detested kind. The villas are not vast or suggestive of over-grown plutocracy, they are suggestive of moderate wealth, pleasant summers, cheerful winters and domestic happiness. I hardly think you would call Euclid Avenue revolting. I say it with the diffidence of conscious ignorance but I should not be much afraid to show you one or two buildings that our Professor of Architecture at Cornell University has put up for us on a bluff over Cayuga Lake, on a site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it off,—this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican, taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life against a railway station and a cloister, considerately offering you a shady walk or shelter from the weather round a room. Listen to the multitudinous voices of Science and you will hear that the conflict extends to practical accommodation. We all know it was not the fault of the architect, it was the fault of adverse exigencies which came into collision with his design, but this only strengthens the moral of the building against revivals. Two humble achievements, if we had chosen were certainly within our reach,—perfect adaptation to our object and inoffensive dignity. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of faith shall return. Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill, is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's. Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church. I will even own that, except where restoration rids us of the unchristian exclusiveness of pews, I prefer the unrestored churches, with something of antiquity about them, to the restored. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages. You may hear pinings for the return of an age of force from gentle aestheticists, who, if the awe of force did return, would certainly be crushed like eggshells. There is a well-known tale by Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the "Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled—he is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes. Mediaevalism can hardly be called anything but a rather enfeebling dream. If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication. You would be drawn by the steam engine to lecture against steam; you would send eloquent invectives against printing to the press, and you would be subsisting meanwhile on the interest of investments which the Middle Ages would have condemned as usury. If you were like some of the school, you would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. To say the same thing in other words, our age will be good enough for most of us, if there is genuine goodness in ourselves. Rousseau fancied he was soaring above his age, not into the thirteenth century, but into the state of nature, while he was falling miserably below his own age in all the common duties and relations of life; and he was a type, not of enthusiasts, for enthusiasm leads to action, but of mere social dreamers. Where there is duty, there is poetry, and tragedy too, in plenty, though it be in the most prosaic row of dingy little brick houses with clothes hanging out to dry, or rather to be wetted, behind them, in all Lancashire. We have commercial fraud now, too much of it; and the declining character of English goods is a cause of their exclusion from foreign markets, as well as hostile tariffs; so that everything South Kensington can do to uphold good and genuine work will be of the greatest advantage to the English trade. But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him. There was fraud beneath the cross of the Crusader, and there was forgery in the cell of the Monk. In comparing the general quality of work we must remember that it is the best work of those times that has survived. I think I could prove from history that mediaeval floors sometimes gave way even when there was no St. Dunstan there. You will recollect that the floor miraculously fell in at a synod, and killed all St. Dunstan's opponents; but sceptics, who did not easily believe in miracles, whispered that the Saint from his past habits, knew how to handle tools. We are told by those whose creed is embodied in "Past and Present" that this age is one vast anarchy, industrial and social; and that nothing but military discipline—that is the perpetual cry—will restore us to anything like order as workers or as men. Well, there are twenty thousand miles of railway in the three kingdoms, forming a system as complex as it is vast. I am told that at one junction, close to London, the trains pass for some hours at the rate of two in five minutes. Consider how that service is done by the myriads of men employed, and this in all seasons and weathers in overwhelming heat, in numbing cold, in blinding storm, in midnight darkness. Is not this an army pretty well disciplined, though its object is not bloodshed? If we see masses full of practical energy and good sense, but wanting in culture, let us take our culture to them, and perhaps they will give us some of their practical energy and good sense in return. Without that Black Country industry, all begrimed and sweaty, our fine culture could not exist. Everything we use, nay, our veriest toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire. I find a noble effort made by a rich man who kept his heart above wealth, Titus Salt— he was a baronet, but we will spare him, as we spare Nelson, the derogatory prefix—to put away what is dark and evil in factory life. I find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air, amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people at Manchester are without pure water. They propose to get it from Thirlmere. For this they are denounced in that sort of language which is called strong, but the use of which is a sure proof of weakness, for irritability was well defined by Abernethy as debility in a state of excitement. Let us spare, whenever they can be spared, history and beauty; they are a priceless part of the heritage of a great industrial nation, and one which lost can never be restored. The only difference I ever had with my fellow-citizens in Oxford during a pretty long residence, arose out of my opposition to a measure which would have marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry, surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together? Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally, because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think, it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense of his own powers, and of the duty of using them, whereas he would otherwise never have risen above making betting books and chronicling the performances of foxhounds. Perhaps about the worst consequence of the prize system, against which, I have no doubt, your Instructor guards, is undue discouragement on the part of those who do not win the prize. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you were to receive your rewards from a hand which would lend them any additional value. But though presented by me they have been awarded by good judges; and as they have been awarded to you, I have no doubt you have deserved them well.
Science and criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a series of intermediate forms.
The discovery is, of course, unspeakably momentous. Among other things it seems to open to us a new view of morality, and one which, if it is verified by further investigation, can hardly fail to produce a great change in philosophy. Supposing that man has ascended from a lower animal form, there appears to be ground at least for surmising that vice, instead of being a diabolical inspiration or a mysterious element of human nature, is the remnant of the lower animal not yet eliminated; while virtue is the effort, individual and collective, by which that remnant is being gradually worked off. The acknowledged connection of virtue with the ascendency of the social over the selfish desires and tendencies seems to correspond with this view; the nature of the lower animals being, so far as we can see, almost entirely selfish, and admitting no regard even for the present interests of their kind, much less for its interests in the future. The doubtful qualities, and "last infirmities of noble minds," such as ambition and the love of fame, in which the selfish element is mingled with one not wholly selfish, and which commend themselves at least by their refinement, as contrasted with the coarseness of the merely animal vices, may perhaps be regarded as belonging to the class of phenomena quaintly designated by some writers as "pointer facts," and as marking the process of transition. In what morality consists, no one has yet succeeded in making clear. Mr. Sidgwick's recent criticism of the various theories leads to the conviction that not one of them affords a satisfactory basis for a practical system of ethics. If our lower nature can be traced to an animal origin, and can be shown to be in course of elimination, however slow and interrupted, this at all events will be a solid fact, and one which must be the starting-point of any future system of ethics. Light would be at once thrown by such a discovery on some parts of the subject which have hitherto been involved in impenetrable darkness. Of the vice of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear; individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified, while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral disease.
It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter," and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of mechanical or physiological terms.
We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed, are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact, constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct of a man.
Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is, and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing sight of theAscentof man?
There seems in the first place, to be a tendency to treat the origin of a being as finally decisive of its nature and destiny. From the language sometimes used, we should almost suppose that rudiments alone were real, and that all the rest was mere illusion. An eminent writer on the antiquities of jurisprudence intimates his belief that the idea of human brotherhood is not coeval with the race, and that primitive communities were governed by sentiments of a very different kind. His words are at once pounced upon as a warrant for dismissing the idea of human brotherhood from our minds, and substituting for it some other social principles, the character of which has not yet been definitely explained, though it is beginning in some quarters pretty distinctly to appear. But surely this is not reasonable. There can be no reason why the first estate of man, which all allow to have been his lowest estate, should claim the prerogative of furnishing his only real and indefeasible principles of action. Granting that the idea of human brotherhood was not aboriginal—granting that it came into the world at a comparatively late period, still it has come, and having come, it is as real and seems as much entitled to consideration as inter-tribal hostility and domestic despotism were in their own day. That its advent has not been unattended by illusions and aberrations is a fact which does not cancel its title to real existence under the present conditions, and with the present lights of society, any more than in annuls the great effects upon the actions of men and the course of history which the idea has undeniably produced. Human brotherhood was not a part of a primaeval revelation; it may not have been an original institution; but it seems to be a real part of a development, and it may be a part of a plan. That the social principles of certain anti- philanthropic works are identical with those which governed the actions of mankind in a primaeval and rudimentary state, when man had only just emerged from the animal, and have been since worked off by the foremost races in the course of development, is surely rather an argument against the paramount and indefeasible authority of those principles than in favour of it. It tends rather to show that their real character is that of a relapse, or, as the physiologists call it, a reversion. When there is a vast increase of wealth, of sensual enjoyment, and of the selfishness which is apt to attend them, it is not marvellous that such reversions should occur.
Another eminent writer appears to think that he has put an end to metaphysical theology, and perhaps to metaphysics and theology altogether, by showing that "being," and the cognate words, originally denoted merely physical perceptions. But so, probably, did all language. So did "spirit," so did "geist," so did "power," so did even "sweet reasonableness," and "the not us which makes for righteousness." Other perceptions or ideas have gradually come, and are now denoted by the words which at first denoted physical perceptions only. Why have not these last comers as good a claim to existence as the first? Suppose the intellectual nature of man has unfolded, and been brought, as it conceivably may, into relations with something in the universe beyond the mere indications of the five bodily senses—why are we bound to mistrust the results of this unfolding? We might go still further back, and still lower, than to language denoting merely physical perceptions. We might go back to inarticulate sounds and signs; but this does not invalidate the reality of the perceptions afterwards expressed in articulate language. It seems not very easy to distinguish, in point of trustworthiness of source, between the principles of metaphysics and the first principles of mathematics, or to say, if we accept the deductions in one case, why we should not accept them in the other. It is conceivable at least, we venture to repeat, that the development of man's intellectual nature may have enabled him to perceive other things than those which he perceives by means of his five bodily senses; and metaphysics, once non-existent, may thus have come into legitimate existence. Man, if the doctrine of evolution is true, was once a creature with only bodily senses; nay, at a still earlier stage, he was matter devoid even of bodily sense; now he has arrived—through the exercise of his bodily senses it may be—at something beyond bodily sense, at such notions asbeing, essence, existence: he reasons upon these notions, and extends the scope of his once merely physical vocabulary so as to comprehend them. Why should he not? If we are to be anchored hard and fast to the signification of primaeval language, how are we to obtain an intellectual basis for "the not us which makes for righteousness?" Do not the anti-metaphysicists themselves unconsciously metaphysicize? Does not their fundamental assumption—that the knowledge received through our bodily senses alone is trustworthy—involve an appeal to a mental necessity as much as anything in metaphysics, whether the mental necessity in this case be real or not?
Again, the great author of the Evolution theory himself, in hisDescent of Man, has given us an account of morality which suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life with its hopes and aspirations, its prayers and fanes. Such an account even of the origin of morality seems rather difficult to receive. Surely, even in their most rudimentary condition, virtue and vice must have been distinguished by some other characteristic than the relative permanency of two different sets of impressions. There is a tendency, we may venture to observe, on the part of eminent physicists, when they have carefully investigated and explained what seems to them the most important and substantial subjects of inquiry, to proffer less careful explanations of matters which to them seem secondary and less substantial, though possibly to an intelligence surveying the drama of the world from without the distinctly human portion of it might appear more important than the rest. Eminent physicists have been known, we believe, to account summarily for religion as a surviving reminiscence of the serpent which attacked the ancestral ape and the tree which sheltered him from the attack, so that Newton's religious belief would be a concomitant of his remaining trace of a tail. It was assumed that primaeval religion was universally the worship of the serpent and of the tree. This assumption was far from being correct; but, even if it had been correct, the theory based on it would surely have been a very summary account of the phenomena of religious life.