Chapter 9

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,

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. The _Times_, 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 which _The Times_ speaks 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.