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Lectures and Essays

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Title: Lectures and Essays

Author: Goldwin Smith


        
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Language: English

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LECTURES AND ESSAYS

BY

GOLDWIN SMITH




PREFATORY NOTE.

These papers have been reprinted for friends who sometimes ask for the
back numbers of periodicals in which they appeared. The great public is
sick of reprints, and with good reason.

The volume might almost have been called Contributions to Canadian
Literature, for of the papers not originally published in Canada several
were reproduced in Canadian journals. Political subjects have been
excluded both to keep a volume intended for friends free from anything
of a party character and because the writer looks forward to putting the
thoughts scattered over his political essays and reviews into a more
connected form.

The papers on 'The Early Years of the Conqueror of Quebec,' 'A
Wirepuller of Kings,' 'A True Captain of Industry' and 'Early Years of
Abraham Lincoln' can hardly pretend to be more than accounts of books to
which they relate, but they interested some of their readers at the time
and there are probably not many copies of the books in Canada. All the
papers have been revised, so that they do not appear here exactly as
they were in the periodicals from which they are reprinted.

TORONTO, Feb. 16, 1881




CONTENTS.


THE GREATNESS OF THE ROMANS (_Contemporary Review_)

THE GREATNESS OF ENGLAND (_Contemporary Review._)

THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (_Canadian Monthly_)

THE LAMPS OF FICTION (_A Speech on the Centenary of the Birth of Sir
Walter Scott_)

AN ADDRESS TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART

THE ASCENT OF MAN (_Macmillan's Magazine._)

THE PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION (_Macmillan's Magazine._)

THE LABOUR MOVEMENT (_Canadian Monthly._)

WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY? (_Canadian Monthly._)

A TRUE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY (_Canadian Monthly._)

A WIREPULLER OF KINGS (_Canadian Monthly._)

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CONQUEROR OF QUEBEC (_Toronto Nation._)

FALKLAND AND THE PURITANS (_Contemporary Review._)

THE EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (_Toronto Mail_)

ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR (_Canadian Monthly_)

THE LAST REPUBLICANS OF ROME (_MacMillan's Magazine_)

AUSTEN LEIGH'S MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN (_New York Nation_)

PATTISON'S MILTON (_New York Nation_)

CLERIDGE'S LIFE OF KEBLE (_New York Nation_)




THE GREATNESS OF THE ROMANS


Rome was great in arms, in government, in law. This combination was the
talisman of her august fortunes. But the three things, though blended in
her, are distinct from each other, and the political analyst is called
upon to give a separate account of each. By what agency was this State,
out of all the States of Italy, out of all the States of the world,
elected to a triple pre-eminence, and to the imperial supremacy of
which, it was the foundation? By what agency was Rome chosen as the
foundress of an empire which we regard almost as a necessary step in
human development, and which formed the material, and to no small extent
the political matrix of modern Europe, though the spiritual life of our
civilization is derived from another source? We are not aware that this
question has ever been distinctly answered, or even distinctly
propounded. The writer once put it to a very eminent Roman antiquarian,
and the answer was a quotation from Virgil--

  "Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice clivum
  Quis deus incertum est, habitat Deus; Arcades ipsum
  Credunt se vidisae Jovem cum saepe nigrantem
  AEgida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret."

This perhaps was the best answer that Roman patriotism, ancient or
modern, could give; and it certainly was given in the best form. The
political passages of Virgil, like some in Lucan and Juvenal, had a
grandeur entirely Roman with which neither Homer nor any other Greek has
anything to do. But historical criticism, without doing injustice to the
poetical aspect of the mystery, is bound to seek a rational solution.
Perhaps in seeking the solution we may in some measure supply, or at
least suggest the mode of supplying, a deficiency which we venture to
think is generally found in the first chapters of histories. A national
history, as it seems to us, ought to commence with a survey of the
country or locality, its geographical position, climate, productions,
and other physical circumstances as they bear on the character of the
people. We ought to be presented, in short, with a complete description
of the scene of the historic drama, as well as with an account of the
race to which the actors belong. In the early stages of his development,
at all events, man is mainly the creature of physical circumstances; and
by a systematic examination of physical circumstances we may to some
extent cast the horoscope of the infant nation as it lies in the arms of
Nature.

That the central position of Rome, in the long and narrow peninsula of
Italy, was highly favourable to her Italian dominion, and that the
situation of Italy was favourable to her dominion over the countries
surrounding the Mediterranean, has been often pointed out. But we have
yet to ask what launched Rome in her career of conquest, and still more,
what rendered that career so different from those of ordinary
conquerors? What caused the Empire of Rome to be so durable? What gives
it so high an organization? What made it so tolerable, and even in some
cases beneficent to her subjects? What enabled it to perform services so
important in preparing the way for a higher civilization?

About the only answer that we get to these questions is _race_. The
Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race. "They
were the wolves of Italy," says Mr. Merivale, who may be taken to
represent fairly the state of opinion on this subject. We are presented
in short with the old fable of the Twins suckled by the She-wolf in a
slightly rationalized form. It was more likely to be true, if anything,
in its original form, for in mythology nothing is so irrational as
rationalization. That unfortunate She-wolf with her Twins has now been
long discarded by criticism as a historical figure; but she still
obtrudes herself as a symbolical legend into the first chapter of Roman
history, and continues to affect the historian's imagination and to give
him a wrong bias at the outset. Who knows whether the statue which we
possess is a real counterpart of the original? Who knows what the
meaning of the original statue was? If the group was of great antiquity,
we may be pretty sure that it was not political or historic, but
religious; for primaeval art is the handmaid of religion; historic
representation and political portraiture belong generally to a later
age. We cannot tell with certainty even that the original statue was
Roman: it may have been brought to Rome among the spoils of some
conquered city, in which case it would have no reference to Roman
history at all. We must banish it entirely from our minds, with all the
associations and impressions which cling to it, and we must do the same
with regard to the whole of that circle of legends woven out of
misinterpreted monuments or customs, with the embellishments of pure
fancy, which grouped itself round the apocryphal statues of the seven
kings in the Capitol, aptly compared by Arnold to the apocryphal
portraits of the early kings of Scotland in Holyrood and those of the
mediaeval founders of Oxford in the Bodleian. We must clear our minds
altogether of these fictions; they are not even ancient: they came into
existence at a time when the early history of Rome was viewed in the
deceptive light of her later achievements; when, under the influence of
altered circumstances, Roman sentiment had probably undergone a
considerable change; and when, consequently, the national imagination no
longer pointed true to anything primaeval.

Race, when tribal peculiarities are once formed, is a most important
feature in history; those who deny this and who seek to resolve
everything, even in advanced humanity, into the influence of external
circumstances or of some particular external circumstance, such as food,
are not less one-sided or less wide of the truth than those who employ
race as the universal solution. Who can doubt that between the English
and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences
of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course
of history? The case is still stronger if we take races more remote from
each other, such as the English and the Hindoo. But the further we
inquire, the more reason there appears to be for believing that
peculiarities of race are themselves originally formed by the influence
of external circumstances on the primitive tribe; that, however marked
and ingrained they may be, they are not congenital and perhaps not
indelible. Englishmen and Frenchmen are closely assimilated by
education; and the weaknesses of character supposed to be inherent in
the Irish gradually disappear under the more benign influences of the
New World. Thus, by ascribing the achievements of the Romans to the
special qualities of their race, we should not be solving the problem,
but only stating it again in other terms.

But besides this, the wolf theory halts in a still more evident manner.
The foster-children of the she-wolf, let them have never so much of
their foster-mother's milk in them, do not do what the Romans did, and
they do precisely what the Romans did not. They kill, ravage, plunder--
perhaps they conquer and even for a time retain their conquests--but
they do not found highly organized empires, they do not civilize, much
less do they give birth to law. The brutal and desolating domination of
the Turk, which after being long artificially upheld by diplomacy, is at
last falling into final ruin, is the type of an empire founded by the
foster-children of the she-wolf. Plunder, in the animal lust of which
alone it originated, remains its law, and its only notion of imperial
administration is a coarse division, imposed by the extent of its
territory, into satrapies, which, as the central dynasty, enervated by
sensuality, loses its force, revolt, and break up the empire. Even the
Macedonian, pupil of Aristotle though he was, did not create an empire
at all comparable to that created by the Romans. He overran an immense
extent of territory, and scattered over a portion of it the seed of an
inferior species of Hellenic civilization, but he did not organize it
politically, much less did he give it, and through it the world, a code
of law. It at once fell apart into a number of separate kingdoms, the
despotic rulers of which were Sultans with a tinge of Hellenism, and
which went for nothing in the political development of mankind.

What if the very opposite theory to that of the she-wolf and her foster-
children should be true? What if the Romans should have owed their
peculiar and unparalleled success to their having been at first not more
warlike, but less warlike than their neighbours? It may seem a paradox,
but we suspect in their imperial ascendency is seen one of the earliest
and not least important steps in that gradual triumph of intellect over
force, even in war, which has been an essential part of the progress of
civilization. The happy day may come when Science in the form of a
benign old gentleman with a bald head and spectacles on nose, holding
some beneficent compound in his hand, will confront a standing army and
the standing army will cease to exist. That will be the final victory of
intellect. But in the meantime, our acknowledgments are due to the
primitive inventors of military organization and military discipline.
They shivered Goliath's spear. A mass of comparatively unwarlike
burghers, unorganized and undisciplined, though they may be the hope of
civilization from their mental and industrial qualities, have as little
of collective as they have of individual strength in war; they only get
in each other's way, and fall singly victims to the prowess of a
gigantic barbarian. He who first thought of combining their force by
organization, so as to make their numbers tell, and who taught them to
obey officers, to form regularly for action, and to execute united
movements at the word of command, was, perhaps, as great a benefactor of
the species as he who grew the first corn, or built the first canoe.

What is the special character of the Roman legends, so far as they
relate to war? Their special character is, that they are legends not of
personal prowess but of discipline. Rome has no Achilles. The great
national heroes, Camillus, Cincinnatus, Papirius, Cursor, Fabius
Maximus, Manlius are not prodigies of personal strength and valour, but
commanders and disciplinarians. The most striking incidents are
incidents of discipline. The most striking incident of all is the
execution by a commander of his own son for having gained a victory
against orders. "_Disciplinam militarem_," Manlius is made to say,
"_qua stetit ad hanc diem Romana res._" Discipline was the great
secret of Roman ascendency in war. It is the great secret of all
ascendency in war. Victories of the undisciplined over the disciplined,
such as Killiecrankie and Preston Pans, are rare exceptions which only
prove the rule. The rule is that in anything like a parity of personal
prowess and of generalship discipline is victory. Thrice Rome
encountered discipline equal or superior to her own. Pyrrhus at first
beat her, but there was no nation behind him, Hannibal beat her, but his
nation did not support him; she beat the army of Alexander, but the army
of Alexander when it encountered her, like that of Frederic at Jena, was
an old machine, and it was commanded by a man who was more like Tippoo
Sahib than the conqueror of Darius.

But how came military discipline to be so specially cultivated by the
Romans? We can see how it came to be specially cultivated by the Greeks:
it was the necessity of civic armies, fighting perhaps against warlike
aristocracies; it was the necessity of Greeks in general fighting
against the invading hordes of the Persian. We can see how it came to be
cultivated among the mercenaries and professional soldiers of Pyrrhus
and Hannibal. But what was the motive power in the case of Rome?
Dismissing the notion of occult qualities of race, we look for a
rational explanation in the circumstances of the plain which was the
cradle of the Roman Empire.

It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when
Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and
country, a great and wealthy city. This is proved by the works of the
kings, the Capitoline Temple, the excavation for the Circus Maximus, the
Servian Wall, and above all the Cloaca Maxima. Historians have indeed
undertaken to give us a very disparaging picture of the ancient Rome,
which they confidently describe as nothing more than a great village of
shingle-roofed cottages thinly scattered over a large area. We ask in
vain what are the materials for this description. It is most probable
that the private buildings of Rome under the kings were roofed with
nothing better than shingle, and it is very likely that they were mean
and dirty, as the private buildings of Athens appear to have been, and
as those of most of the great cities of the Middle Ages unquestionably
were. But the Cloaca Maxima is in itself conclusive evidence of a large
population, of wealth, and of a not inconsiderable degree of
civilization. Taking our stand upon this monument, and clearing our
vision entirely of Romulus and his asylum, we seem dimly to perceive the
existence of a deep prehistoric background, richer than is commonly
supposed in the germs of civilization,--a remark which may in all
likelihood be extended to the background of history in general. Nothing
surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the
Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, constructing in
their den the Cloaca Maxima.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain. We can hardly
doubt that she was a seat of industry and commerce, and that the theory
which represents her industry and commerce as having been developed
subsequently to her conquests is the reverse of the fact. Whence, but
from industry and commerce, could the population and the wealth have
come? Peasant farmers do not live in cities, and plunderers do not
accumulate. Rome had around her what was then a rich and peopled plain;
she stood at a meeting-place of nationalities; she was on a navigable
river, yet out of the reach of pirates; the sea near her was full of
commerce, Etruscan, Greek, and Carthaginian. Her first colony was Ostia,
evidently commercial and connected with salt-works, which may well have
supplied the staple of her trade. Her patricians were financiers and
money-lenders. We are aware that a different turn has been given to this
part of the story, and that the indebtedness has been represented as
incurred not by loans of money, but by advances of farm stock. This,
however, completely contradicts the whole tenor of the narrative, and
especially what is said about the measures for relieving the debtor by
reducing the rate of interest and by deducting from the principal debt
the interest already paid. The narrative as it stands, moreover, is
supported by analogy. It has a parallel in the economical history of
ancient Athens, and in the "scaling of debts," to use the American
equivalent for _Seisachtheia_, by the legislation of Solon. What
prevents our supposing that usury, when it first made its appearance on
the scene, before people had learned to draw the distinction between
crimes and defaults, presented itself in a very coarse and cruel form?
True, the currency was clumsy, and retained philological traces of a
system of barter; but without commerce there could have been no currency
at all.

Even more decisive is the proof afforded by the early political history
of Rome. In that wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt enough
of Livy himself to give him a high place among the masters of fiction.
It is the epic of a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted for the
purposes of education as the grand picture of Roman character and the
richest treasury of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt that in the
political portion there is a foundation of fact; it is too
circumstantial, too consistent in itself, and at the same time too much
borne out by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The institutions which
we find existing in historic times must have been evolved by some such
struggle between the orders of patricians and plebeians as that which
Livy presents to us. And these politics, with their parties and sections
of parties, their shades of political character, the sustained interest
which they imply in political objects, their various devices and
compromises, are not the politics of a community of peasant farmers,
living apart each on his own farm and thinking of his own crops: they
are the politics of the quick-witted and gregarious population of an
industrial and commercial city. They are politics of the same sort as
those upon which the Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That
ancient Rome was a republic there can be no doubt. Even the so-called
monarchy appears clearly to have been elective; and republicanism may be
described broadly with reference to its origin, as the government of the
city and of the artisan, while monarchy and aristocracy are the
governments of the country and of farmers.

The legend which ascribes the assembly of centuries to the legislation
of Servius probably belongs to the same class as the legend which
ascribes trial by jury and the division of England into shires to the
legislation of Alfred. Still the assembly of centuries existed; it was
evidently ancient, belonging apparently to a stratum of institutions
anterior to the assembly of tribes; and it was a constitution
distributing political power and duties according to a property
qualification which, in the upper grades, must, for the period, have
been high, though measured by a primitive currency. The existence of
such qualifications, and the social ascendency of wealth which the
constitution implies, are inconsistent with the theory of a merely
agricultural and military Rome. Who would think of framing such a
constitution, say, for one of the rural districts of France?

Other indications of the real character of the prehistoric Rome might be
mentioned. The preponderance of the infantry and the comparative
weakness of the cavalry is an almost certain sign of democracy, and of
the social state in which democracy takes its birth--at least in the
case of a country which did not, like Arcadia or Switzerland, preclude
by its nature the growth of a cavalry force, but on the contrary was
rather favourable to it. Nor would it be easy to account for the strong
feeling of attachment to the city which led to its restoration when it
had been destroyed by the Gauls, and defeated the project of a migration
to Veii, if Rome was nothing but a collection of miserable huts, the
abodes of a tribe of marauders. We have, moreover, the actual traces of
an industrial organization in the existence of certain guilds of
artisans, which may have been more important at first than they were
when the military spirit had become thoroughly ascendant.

Of course when Rome had once been drawn into the career of conquest, the
ascendency of the military spirit would be complete; war, and the
organization of territories acquired in war, would then become the great
occupation of her leading citizens; industry and commerce would fall
into disesteem, and be deemed unworthy of the members of the imperial
race. Carthage would no doubt have undergone a similar change of
character, had the policy which was carried to its greatest height by
the aspiring house of Barcas succeeded in converting her from a trading
city into the capital of a great military empire. So would Venice, had
she been able to carry on her system of conquest in the Levant and of
territorial aggrandisement on the Italian mainland. The career of Venice
was arrested by the League of Cambray. On Carthage the policy of
military aggrandisement, which was apparently resisted by the sage
instinct of the great merchants while it was supported by the
professional soldiers and the populace, brought utter ruin; while Rome
paid the inevitable penalty of military despotism. Even when the Roman
nobles had become a caste of conquerors and proconsuls, they retained
certain mercantile habits; unlike the French aristocracy, and
aristocracies generally, they were careful keepers of their accounts,
and they showed a mercantile talent for business, as well as a more than
mercantile hardness, in their financial exploitation of the conquered
world. Brutus and his contemporaries were usurers like the patricians of
the early times. No one, we venture to think, who has been accustomed to
study national character, will believe that the Roman character was
formed by war alone: it was manifestly formed by war combined with
business.

To what an extent the later character of Rome affected national
tradition, or rather fiction, as to her original character, we see from
the fable which tells us that she had no navy before the first Punic
war, and that when compelled to build a fleet by the exigencies of that
war, she had to copy a Carthaginian war galley which had been cast
ashore, and to train her rowers by exercising them on dry land. She had
a fleet before the war with Pyrrhus, probably from the time at which she
took possession of Antium, if not before; and her first treaty with
Carthage even if it is to be assigned to the date to which Mommsen, and
not to that which Polybius assigns it, shows that before 348 B.C. she
had an interest in a wide sea-board, which must have carried with it
some amount of maritime power.

Now this wealthy, and, as we suppose, industrial and commercial city was
the chief place, and in course of time became the mistress and
protectress, of a plain large for that part of Italy, and then in such a
condition as to be tempting to the spoiler. Over this plain on two sides
hung ranges of mountains inhabited by hill tribes, Sabines, AEquians,
Volscians, Hernicans, with the fierce and restless Samnite in the rear.
No doubt these hill tribes raided on the plain as hill tribes always do;
probably they were continually being pressed down upon it by the
migratory movements of other tribes behind them. Some of them seem to
have been in the habit of regularly swarming, like bees, under the form
of the _Ver Sacrum_. On the north, again, were the Etruscan hill
towns, with their lords, pirates by sea, and probably marauders by land;
for the period of a more degenerate luxury and frivolity may be regarded
as subsequent to their subjugation by the Romans; at any rate, when they
first appear upon the scene they are a conquering race. The wars with
the AEqui and Volsci have been ludicrously multiplied and exaggerated by
Livy; but even without the testimony of any historian, we might assume
that there would be wars with them and with the other mountaineers, and
also with the marauding Etruscan chiefs. At the same time, we may be
sure that, in personal strength and prowess, the men of the plain and of
the city would be inferior both to the mountaineers and to those
Etruscan chiefs whose trade was war. How did the men of the plain and of
the city manage to make up for this inferiority, to turn the scale of
force in their favour, and ultimately to subdue both the mountaineers
and Etruscans? In the conflict with the mountaineers, something might be
done by that superiority of weapons which superior wealth would afford.
But more would be done by military organization and discipline. To
military organization and discipline the Romans accordingly learnt to
submit themselves, as did the English Parliamentarians after the
experience of Edgehill, as did the democracy of the Northern States of
America after the experience of the first campaign. At the same time the
Romans learned the lesson so momentous, and at the same time so
difficult for citizen soldiers, of drawing the line between civil and
military life. The turbulent democracy of the former, led into the
field, doffed the citizen, donned the soldier; and obeyed the orders of
a commander whom as citizens they detested, and whom when they were led
back to the forum at the end of the summer campaign they were ready
again to oppose and to impeach. No doubt all this part of the history
has been immensely embellished by the patriotic imagination, the heroic
features have been exaggerated, the harsher features softened though not
suppressed. Still it is impossible to question the general fact. The
result attests the process. The Roman legions were formed in the first
instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid
discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength.
When, to keep up the siege of Veii, military pay was introduced, a step
was taken in the transition from a citizen soldiery to a regular army,
such as the legions ultimately became, with its standing discipline of
the camp; and that the measure should have been possible is another
proof that Rome was a great city, with a well-supplied treasury, not a
collection of mud huts. No doubt the habit of military discipline
reacted on the political character of the people, and gave it the
strength and self-control which were so fatally wanting in the case of
Florence.

The line was drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between
civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The
power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to
absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the
distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between
the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of
late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions
altogether. The executive, the legislative, the judicial power, civil
authority and military command, all lie enfolded in the same primitive
germ. The king, or the magistrate who takes his place, is expected to
lead the people in war as well as to govern them in peace. In European
monarchies this idea still lingers, fortified no doubt by the personal
unwillingness of the kings to let the military power go out of their
hands. Nor in early times is the difference between the qualifications
of a ruler and those of a commander so great as it afterwards became;
the business of the State is simple, and force of character is the main
requisite in both cases. Annual consulships must have been fatal to
strategical experience, while, on the other hand, they would save the
Republic from being tied to an unsuccessful general. But the storms of
war which broke on Rome from all quarters soon brought about the
recognition of special aptitude for military command in the appointment
of dictators. As to the distinction between military and naval ability,
it is of very recent birth: Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monk were made
admirals because they had been successful as generals, just as Hannibal
was appointed by Antiochus to the command of a fleet.

At Preston Pans, as before at Killiecrankie, the line of the Hanoverian
regulars was broken by the headlong charge of the wild clans, for which
the regulars were unprepared. Taught by the experience of Preston Pans,
the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden formed in three lines, so as to
repair a broken front. The Romans in like manner formed in three lines--
_hastati_, _principes_, and _triarii_--evidently with the
same object. Our knowledge of the history of Roman tactics does not
enable us to say exactly at what period this formation began to
supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is
the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we
see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian
peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns. We
cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any
way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian
highlanders, or to a lesson taught by the terrible onset of the Gaul.
Again, the punctilious care in the entrenchment of the camp, even for a
night's halt, which moved the admiration of Pyrrhus and was a material
part of Roman tactics, was likely to be inculcated by the perils to
which a burgher army would be exposed in carrying on war under or among
hills where it would be always liable to the sudden attack of a swift,
sure-footed, and wily foe. The habit of carrying a heavy load of
palisades on the march would be a part of the same necessity.

Even from the purely military point of view, then, the She-wolf and the
Twins seem to us not appropriate emblems of Roman greatness. A better
frontispiece for historians of Rome, if we mistake not, would be some
symbol of the patroness of the lowlands and their protectress against
the wild tribes of the highlands. There should also be something to
symbolize the protectress of Italy against the Gauls, whose irruptions
Rome, though defeated at Allia, succeeded ultimately in arresting and
hurling back, to the general benefit of Italian civilization which, we
may be sure, felt very grateful to her for that service, and remembered
it when her existence was threatened by Hannibal, with Gauls in his
army. Capua, though not so well situated for the leadership of Italy,
might have played the part of Rome; but the plain which she commanded,
though very rich, was too small, and too closely overhung by the fatal
hills of the Samnite, under whose dominion she fell. Rome had space to
organize a strong lowland resistance to the marauding highland powers.
It seems probable that her hills were not only the citadel but the
general refuge of the lowlanders of those parts, when forced to fly
before the onslaught of the highlanders, who were impelled by successive
wars of migration to the plains. The Campagna affords no stronghold or
rallying point but those hills, which may have received a population of
fugitives like the islands of Venice. The city may have drawn part of
its population and some of its political elements from this source. In
this sense the story of the Asylum may possibly represent a fact, though
it has itself nothing to do with history.

Then, as to imperial organization and government. Superiority in these
would naturally flow from superiority in civilization, and in previous
political training, the first of which Rome derived from her comparative
wealth and from the mental characteristics of a city population; the
second she derived from the long struggle through which the rights of
the plebeians were equalized with those of the patricians, and which
again must have had its ultimate origin in geographical circumstance
bringing together different elements of population. Cromwell was a
politician and a religious leader before he was a soldier; Napoleon was
a soldier before he was a politician: to this difference between the
moulds in which their characters were cast may be traced, in great
measure, the difference of their conduct when in power, Cromwell
devoting himself to political and ecclesiastical reform, while Napoleon
used his supremacy chiefly as the means of gratifying his lust for war.
There is something analogous in the case of imperial nations. Had the
Roman, when he conquered the world been like the Ottoman, like the
Ottoman he would probably have remained. His thirst for blood slaked, he
would simply have proceeded to gratify his other animal lusts; he would
have destroyed or consumed everything, produced nothing, delivered over
the world to a plundering anarchy of rapacious satraps, and when his
sensuality had overpowered his ferocity, he would have fallen in his
turn before some horde whose ferocity was fresh, and the round of war
and havoc would have commenced again. The Roman destroyed and consumed a
good deal; but he also produced not a little: he produced, among other
things, first in Italy, then in the world at large, the Peace of Rome
indispensable to civilization, and destined to be the germ and precursor
of the Peace of Humanity.

In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear
specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In
the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from
the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was
a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians,
with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most
diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the
future masters of the world. How different was this education from that
of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into
contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single
race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest
times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the
Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as
wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business-
like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with
present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state
of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild
and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us
in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a
mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which
brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant
practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the
Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them
well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the
peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality
repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some
of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the
value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of
the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to
bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become
a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more
effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.

In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined
with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies
and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent
part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her
colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire,
_propugnacula imperii_. Political depletion and provision for needy
citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at least,
secondary objects. Such outposts were the means suggested by Nature,
first of securing those parts of the plain which were beyond the
sheltering range of the city itself, secondly of guarding the outlets of
the hills against the hill tribes, and eventually of holding down the
tribes in the hills themselves. The custody of the passes is especially
marked as an object by the position of many of the early colonies. When
the Roman dominion extended to the north of Italy, the same system was
pursued, in order to guard against incursions from the Alps. A
conquering despot would have planted mere garrisons under military
governors, which would not have been centres of civilization, but
probably of the reverse. The Roman colonies, bearing onwards with them
the civil as well as the military life of the Republic, were, with the
general system of provincial municipalities of which they constituted
the core, to no small extent centres of civilization, though doubtless
they were also to some extent instruments of oppression. "Where the
Roman conquered he dwelt," and the dwelling of the Roman was, on the
whole, the abode of a civilizing influence. Representation of
dependencies in the sovereign assembly of the imperial country was
unknown, and would have been impracticable. Conquest had not so far put
off its iron nature. In giving her dependencies municipal institutions
and municipal life, Rome did the next best thing to giving them
representation. A Roman province with its municipal life was far above a
satrapy, though far below a nation.

Then how came Rome to be the foundress and the great source of law?
This, as we said before, calls for a separate explanation. An
explanation we do not pretend to give, but merely a hint which may
deserve notice in looking for the explanation. In primitive society, in
place of law, in the proper sense of the term, we find only tribal
custom, formed mainly by the special exigencies of tribal self-
preservation, and confined to the particular tribe. When Saxon and Dane
settle down in England side by side under the treaty made between Alfred
and Guthurm, each race retains the tribal custom which serves it as a
criminal law. A special effort seems to be required in order to rise
above this custom to that conception of general right or expediency
which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and
speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion
that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter
it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive
that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a
lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now
what conditions would be most favourable to this critical effort, so
fraught with momentous consequences to humanity? Apparently a union of
elements belonging to different tribes such as would compel them, for
the preservation of peace and the regulation of daily intercourse, to
adopt some common measure of right. It must be a union, not a conquest
of one tribe by another, otherwise the conquering tribe would of course
keep its own customs, as the Spartans did among the conquered people of
Laconia. Now it appears likely that these conditions were exactly
fulfilled by the primaeval settlements on the hills of Rome. The hills
are either escarped by nature or capable of easy escarpment, and seem
originally to have been little separate fortresses, by the union of
which the city was ultimately formed. That there were tribal differences
among the inhabitants of the different hills is a belief to which all
traditions and all the evidence of institutions point, whether we
suppose the difference to have been great or not and whatever special
theory we may form as to the origin of the Roman people. If the germ of
law, as distinguished from custom, was brought into existence in this
manner, it would be fostered and expanded by the legislative exigencies
of the political and social concordat between the two orders, and also
by those arising out of the adjustment of relations with other races in
the course of conquest and colonization.

Roman law had also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of
being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal
superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was
eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a
social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing
law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the
corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a
rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose
not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of
sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were
so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue,
fall under the head rather of trickery than of superstition.

Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or
wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In
this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the
tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This
is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by
saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the
creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made
by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of
the tribe.

A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the
disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the
Roman religion--the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna,
Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus--even looks like a product of the
intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be
pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities
which were left--hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were
given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men
of the world--were worse than worthless in a religious point of view.
But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of
religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that
belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism,
had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its
force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the
sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the
tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is
deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the
Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any
of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to
their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an
effort of speculative intellect, which in an early stage of society
would be out of the question, but to some happy conjunction of
circumstances such as would be presented by a break-up of tribal
mythologies, combined with influences favourable to the formation of
strong habits of political and social duty. Religious art was
sacrificed; that was the exclusive heritage of the Greek; but superior
morality was on the whole the heritage of the Roman, and if he produced
no good tragedy himself, he furnished characters for Shakespeare and
Corneille.

Whatever set the Romans free, or comparatively free, from the tyranny of
tribal religion may be considered as having in the same measure been the
source of the tolerance which was so indispensable a qualification for
the exercise of dominion over a polytheistic world. They waged no war on
"the gods of the nations," or on the worshippers of those gods as such.
They did not set up golden images after the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar.
In early times they seem to have adopted the gods of the conquered, and
to have transported them to their own city. In later times they
respected all the religions except Judaism and Druidism, which assumed
the form of national resistance to the empire, and worships which they
deemed immoral or anti-social, and which had intruded themselves into
Rome.

Another grand step in the development of law is the severance of the
judicial power from the legislative and the executive, which permits the
rise of jurists, and of a regular legal profession. This is a slow
process. In the stationary East, as a rule, the king has remained the
supreme judge. At Athens, the sovereign people delegated its judicial
powers to a large committee, but it got no further; and the judicial
committee was hardly more free from political passion, or more competent
to decide points of law, than the assembly itself. In England the House
of Lords still, formally at least, retains judicial functions. Acts of
attainder were a yet more primitive as well as more objectionable relic
of the times in which the sovereign power, whether king, assembly, or
the two combined, was ruler, legislator, and judge all in one. We shall
not attempt here to trace the process by which this momentous separation
of powers and functions was to a remarkable extent accomplished in
ancient Rome. But we are pretty safe in saying that the _praetor
peregrinus_ was an important figure in it, and that it received a
considerable impulse from the exigencies of a jurisdiction between those
who as citizens came under the sovereign assembly and the aliens or
semi-aliens who did not.

Whether the partial explanations of the mystery of Roman greatness which
we have here suggested approve themselves to the reader's judgment or
not, it may at least be said for them that they are _verae causae_,
which is not the case with the story of the foster-wolf, or anything
derived from it, any more than with the story of the prophetic
apparitions of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.

With regard to the public morality of the Romans, and to their conduct
and influence as masters of the world, the language of historians seems
to us to leave something to be desired. Mommsen's tone, whenever
controverted questions connected with international morality and the law
of conquest arise, is affected by his Prussianism; it betokens the
transition of the German mind from the speculative and visionary to the
practical and even more than practical state; it is premonitory not only
of the wars with Austria and France, but of a coming age in which the
forces of natural selection are again to operate without the restraints
imposed by religion, and the heaviest fist is once more to make the law.
In the work of Ihne we see a certain recoil from Mommsen, and at the
same time an occasional inconsistency and a want of stability in the
principle of judgment. Our standard ought not to be positive but
relative. It was the age of force and conquest, not only with the Romans
but with all nations; _hospes_ was _hostis_. A perfectly
independent development of Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and
all the other nationalities, might perhaps have been the best thing for
humanity. But this was out of the question; in that stage of the world's
existence contact was war, and the end of war was conquest or
destruction, the first of which was at all events preferable to the
second. What empire then can we imagine which would have done less harm
or more good than the Roman? Greek intellect showed its superiority in
speculative politics as in all other departments of speculation, but as
a practical politician the Greek was not self-controlled or strong, and
he would never have bestowed on the provinces of his empire local self-
government and municipal life; besides, the race, though it included
wonderful varieties in itself, was, as a race, intensely tribal, and
treated persistently all other races as barbarians. It would have
deprived mankind of Roman law and politics, as well as of that vast
extension of the Roman aedileship which covered the world with public
works beneficent in themselves and equally so as examples; whereas the
Roman had the greatness of soul to do homage to Greek intellect, and,
notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the
highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have
been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As
to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians,
with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their
crucifixions,--the very thought fills us with horror. It would have
been a world-wide tyranny of the strong box, into which all the products
of civilization would have gone. _Parcere subjectis_ was the rule
of Rome as well as _debellare superbos_; and while all conquest is
an evil, the Roman was the most clement and the least destructive of
conquerors. This is true of him on the whole, though he sometimes was
guilty of thoroughly primaeval cruelty. He was the great author of the
laws of war as well as of the laws of peace. That he not seldom, when
his own interest was concerned, put the mere letter of the social law in
place of justice, and that we are justly revolted on these occasions by
his hypocritical observance of forms, is very true: nevertheless, his
scrupulosity and the language of the national critics in these cases
prove the existence of at least a rudimentary conscience. No compunction
for breach of international law or justice we may be sure ever visited
the heart of Tiglath-Pileser. Cicero's letter of advice to his brother
on the government of a province may seem a tissue of truisms now, though
Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey would hardly have found it so, but
it is a landmark in the history of civilization. That the Roman Republic
should die, and that a colossal and heterogeneous empire should fall
under the rule of a military despot, was perhaps a fatal necessity; but
the despotism long continued to be tempered, elevated, and rendered more
beneficent by the lingering spirit of the Republic; the liberalism of
Trajan and the Antonines was distinctly republican nor did Sultanism
finally establish itself before Diocletian. Perhaps we may number among
the proofs of the Roman's superiority the capacity shown so far as we
know first by him of being touched by the ruin of a rival. We may be
sure that no Assyrian conqueror even affected to weep over the fall of a
hostile city however magnificent and historic. On the whole it must be
allowed that physical influences have seldom done better for humanity
than they did in shaping the imperial character and destinies of Rome.




THE GREATNESS OF ENGLAND

[Footnote: The writer some time ago gave a lecture before the Royal
Institution on "The Influence of Geographical Circumstances on Political
Character," using Rome and England as illustrations. It may perhaps be
right to say that the present paper, which touches here and there on
matters of political opinion, is not identical with the latter portion
of that lecture.]


Two large islands lie close to that Continent which has hitherto been
selected by Nature as the chief seat of civilization. One island is much
larger than the other, and the larger island lies between the smaller
and the Continent. The larger island is so placed as to receive primaeval
immigration from three quarters--from France, from the coast of Northern
Germany and the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia, the transit being
rendered somewhat easier in the last case by the prevailing winds and by
the little islands which Scotland throws out, as resting-places and
guides for the primaeval navigator, into the Northern Sea. The smaller
island, on the other hand, can hardly receive immigration except through
the larger, though its southern ports look out, somewhat ominously to
the eye of history, towards Spain. The western and northern parts of the
larger island are mountainous, and it is divided into two very unequal
parts by the Cheviot Hills and the mosses of the Border. In the larger
island are extensive districts well suited for grain. The climate of
most of the smaller is too wet for grain and good only for pasture. The
larger island is full of minerals and coal, of which the smaller island
is almost destitute. These are the most salient features of the scene of
English history, and, with a temperate climate, the chief physical
determinants of English destiny.

What, politically speaking, are the special attributes of an island? In
the first place, it is likely to be settled by a bold and enterprising
race. Migration by land under the pressure of hunger or of a stronger
tribe, or from the mere habit of wandering, calls for no special effort
of courage or intelligence on the part of the nomad. Migration by sea
does: to go forth on a strange element at all, courage is required; but
we can hardly realize the amount of courage required to go voluntarily
out of sight of land. The first attempts at ship-building also imply
superior intelligence, or an effort by which the intelligence will be
raised. Of the two great races which make up the English nation, the
Celtic had only to pass a channel which you can see across, which
perhaps in the time of the earliest migration did not exist. But the
Teutons, who are the dominant race and have supplied the basis of the
English character and institutions, had to pass a wider sea. From
Scandinavia, especially, England received, under the form of
freebooters, who afterwards became conquerors and settlers, the very
core and sinews of her maritime population, the progenitors of the
Blakes and Nelsons. The Northman, like the Phoenician, had a country too
narrow for him, and timber for ship-building at hand. But the land of
the Phoenician was a lovely land, which bound him to itself; and
wherever he moved his heart still turned to the pleasant abodes of
Lebanon and the sunlit quays of Tyre. Thus he became a merchant, and the
father of all who have made the estranging sea a highway and a bond
between nations, more than atoning by the service thus rendered to
humanity, for his craft, his treachery, his cruelty, and his Moloch-
worship. The land of the Scandinavian was not a lovely land, though it
was a land suited to form strong arms, strong hearts, chaste natures,
and, with purity, strength of domestic affection. He was glad to
exchange it for a sunnier dwelling-place, and thus, instead of becoming
a merchant, he became the founder of Norman dynasties in Italy, France,
and England. We are tempted to linger over the story of these primaeval
mariners, for nothing equals it in romance. In our day Science has gone
before the most adventurous barque, limiting the possibilities of
discovery, disenchanting the enchanted Seas, and depriving us for ever
of Sinbad and Ulysses. But the Phoenician and the Northman put forth
into a really unknown world. The Northman, moreover, was so far as we
know the first ocean sailor. If the story of the circumnavigation of
Africa by the Phoenicians is true, it was an astonishing enterprise, and
almost dwarfs modern voyages of discovery. Still it would be a coasting
voyage, and the Phoenician seems generally to have hugged the land. But
the Northman put freely out into the wild Atlantic, and even crossed it
before Columbus, if we may believe a legend made specially dear to the
Americans by the craving of a new country for antiquities. It has been
truly said, that the feeling of the Greek, mariner as he was, towards
the sea, remained rather one of fear and aversion, intensified perhaps
by the treacherous character of the squally AEgean; but the Northman
evidently felt perfectly at home on the ocean, and rode joyously, like a
seabird, on the vast Atlantic waves.

Not only is a race which comes by sea likely to be peculiarly vigorous,
self-reliant, and inclined, when settled, to political liberty, but the
very process of maritime migration can scarcely fail to intensify the
spirit of freedom and independence. Timon or Genghis Khan, sweeping on
from land to land with the vast human herd under his sway, becomes more
despotic as the herd grows larger by accretion, and the area of its
conquests is increased. But a maritime migration is a number of little
joint stock enterprises implying limited leadership, common counsels,
and a good deal of equality among the adventurers. We see in fact that
the Saxon immigration resulted in the foundation of a number of small
communities which, though they were afterwards fused into seven or eight
petty kingdoms and ultimately into one large kingdom, must, while they
existed, have fostered habits of local independence and self-government.
Maritime migration would also facilitate the transition from the tribe
to the nation, because the ships could hardly be manned on purely tribal
principles; the early Saxon communities in England appear in fact to
have been semi-tribal, the local bond predominating over the tribal,
though a name with a tribal termination is retained. Room would scarcely
be found in the ships for a full proportion of women; the want would be
supplied by taking the women of the conquered country; and thus tribal
rules of exclusive intermarriage, and all barriers connected with them,
would be broken down.

Another obvious attribute of an island is freedom from invasion. The
success of the Saxon invaders may be ascribed to the absence of strong
resistance. The policy of Roman conquest, by disarming the natives, had
destroyed their military character, as the policy of British conquest
has done in India, where races which once fought hard against the
invader under their native princes, such as the people of Mysore, are
now wholly unwarlike. Anything like national unity, or power of co-
operation against a foreign enemy, had at the same time been extirpated
by a government which divided that it might command. The Northman in his
turn owed his success partly to the want of unity among the Saxon
principalities, partly and principally to the command of the sea which
the Saxon usually abandoned to him, and which enabled him to choose his
own point of attack, and to baffle the movements of the defenders. When
Alfred built a fleet, the case was changed.

William of Normandy would scarcely have succeeded, great as his armament
was, had it not been for the diversion effected in his favour by the
landing of the Scandinavian pretender in the North, and the failure of
provisions in Harold's Channel fleet, which compelled it to put into
port. Louis of France was called in as a deliverer by the barons who
were in arms against the tyranny of John; and it is not necessary to
discuss the Tory description of the coming of William of Orange as a
conquest of England by the Dutch. Bonaparte threatened invasion, but
unhappily was unable to invade: unhappily we say, because if he had
landed in England he would assuredly have there met his doom; the
Russian campaign would have been antedated with a more complete result,
and all the after-pages in the history of the Arch-Brigand would have
been torn from the book of fate. England is indebted for her political
liberties in great measure to the Teutonic character, but she is also in
no small measure indebted to this immunity from invasion which has
brought with it a comparative immunity from standing armies. In the
Middle Ages the question between absolutism and that baronial liberty
which was the germ and precursor of the popular liberty of after-times
turned in great measure upon the relative strength of the national
militia and of the bands of mercenaries kept in pay by overreaching
kings. The bands of mercenaries brought over by John proved too strong
for the patriot barons, and would have annulled the Great Charter, had
not national liberty found a timely and powerful, though sinister,
auxiliary in the ambition of the French. Prince Charles I. had no
standing army, the troops taken into pay for the wars with Spain and
France had been disbanded before the outbreak of the Revolution; and on
that occasion the nation was able to overthrow the tyranny without
looking abroad for assistance. But Charles II. had learned wisdom from
his father's fate; he kept up a small standing army; and the Whigs,
though at the crisis of the Exclusion Bill they laid their hands upon
their swords, never ventured to draw them, but allowed themselves to be
proscribed, their adherents to be ejected from the corporations, and
their leaders to be brought to the scaffold. Resistance was in the same
way rendered hopeless by the standing army of James II., and the
patriots were compelled to stretch their hands for aid to William of
Orange. Even so, it might have gone hard with them if James's soldiers,
and above all Churchill, had been true to their paymaster. Navies are
not political; they do not overthrow constitutions; and in the time of
Charles I. it appears that the leading seamen were Protestant, inclined
to the side of the Parliament. Perhaps Protestantism had been rendered
fashionable in the navy by the naval wars with Spain.

A third consequence of insular position, especially in early times, is
isolation. An extreme case of isolation is presented by Egypt, which is
in fact a great island in the desert. The extraordinary fertility of the
valley of the Nile produced an early development, which was afterwards
arrested by its isolation, the isolation being probably intensified by
the jealous exclusiveness of a powerful priesthood which discouraged
maritime pursuits. The isolation of England, though comparatively
slight, has still been an important factor in her history. She underwent
less than the Continental provinces the influence of Roman Conquest.
Scotland and Ireland escaped it altogether, for the tide of invasion,
having flowed to the foot of the Grampians, soon ebbed to the line
between the Solway and the Tyne. Britain has no monuments of Roman power
and civilization like those which have been left in Gaul and Spain, and
of the British Christianity of the Roman period hardly a trace,
monumental or historical, remains. By the Saxon conquest England was
entirely severed for a time from the European system. The missionary of
ecclesiastical Rome recovered what the legionary had lost. Of the main
elements of English character political and general, five were brought
together when Ethelbert and Augustine met on the coast of Kent. The king
represented Teutonism; the missionary represented Judaism, Christianity,
imperial and ecclesiastical Rome. We mention Judaism as a separate
element, because, among other things, the image of the Hebrew monarchy
has certainly entered largely into the political conceptions of
Englishmen, perhaps at least as largely as the image of Imperial Rome. A
sixth element, classical Republicanism, came in with the Reformation,
while the political and social influence of science is only just
beginning to be felt. Still, after the conversion of England by
Augustine, the Church, which was the main organ of civilization, and
almost identical with it in the early Middle Ages, remained national;
and to make it thoroughly Roman and Papal, in other words to assimilate
it completely to the Church of the Continent, was the object of
Hildebrand in promoting the enterprise of William. Roman and Papal the
English Church was made, yet not so thoroughly so as completely to
destroy its insular and Teutonic character. The Archbishop of Canterbury
was still _Papa alterius orbis_; and the struggle for national
independence of the Papacy commenced in England long before the struggle
for doctrinal reform. The Reformation broke up the confederated
Christendom of the Middle Ages, and England was then thrown back into an
isolation very marked, though tempered by her sympathy with the
Protestant party on the Continent. In later times the growth of European
interests, of commerce, of international law, of international
intercourse, of the community of intellect and science, has been
gradually building again, on a sounder foundation than that of the Latin
Church, the federation of Europe, or rather the federation of mankind.
The political sympathy of England with Continental nations, especially
with France, has been increasing of late in a very marked manner, the
French Revolution of 1830 told at once upon the fortunes of English
Reform, and the victory of the Republic over the reactionary attempt of
May was profoundly felt by both parties in England. Placed too close to
the Continent not to be essentially a part of the European system,
England has yet been a peculiar and semi-independent part of it. In
European progress she has often acted as a balancing and moderating
power. She has been the asylum of vanquished ideas and parties. In the
seventeenth century, when absolutism and the Catholic reaction prevailed
on the Continent, she was the chief refuge of Protestantism and
political liberty. When the French Revolution swept Europe, she threw
herself into the anti-revolutionary scale. The tricolor has gone nearly
round the world, at least nearly round Europe; but on the flag of
England still remains the religious symbol of the era before the
Revolution.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke. It
finds, perhaps, its strongest expression in the saying of Milton that
the manner of God is to reveal things first to His Englishmen. It has
made Englishmen odious even to those who, like the Spaniards, have
received liberation or protection from English hands. It stimulated the
desperate desire to see France rid of the "Goddams" which inspired Joan
of Arc. For an imperial people it is a very unlucky peculiarity, since
it precludes not only fusion but sympathy and almost intercourse with
the subject races. The kind heart of Lord Elgin, when he was Governor-
General of India, was shocked by the absolute want of sympathy or bond
of any kind, except love of conquest, between the Anglo-Indian and the
native, and the gulf apparently, instead of being filled up, now yawns
wider than ever.

It is needless to dwell on anything so obvious as the effect of an
insular position in giving birth to commerce and developing the
corresponding elements of political character. The British Islands are
singularly well placed for trade with both hemispheres; in them, more
than in any other point, may be placed the commercial centre of the
world. It may be said that the nation looked out unconsciously from its
cradle to an immense heritage beyond the Atlantic. France and Spain
looked the same way, and became competitors with England for ascendancy
in the New World, but England was more maritime, and the most maritime
was sure to prevail. Canada was conquered by the British fleet. To the
commerce and the maritime enterprise of former days, which were mainly
the results of geographical position, has been added within the last
century the vast development of manufactures produced by coal and steam,
the parents of manufactures, as well as the expansion of the iron trade
in close connection with manufactures. Nothing can be more marked than
the effect of industry on political character in the case of England.
From being the chief seat of reaction, the North has been converted by
manufactures into the chief seat of progress. The Wars of the Roses were
not a struggle of political principle; hardly even a dynastic struggle;
they had their origin partly in a patriotic antagonism to the foreign
queen and to her foreign councils; but they were in the main a vast
faction-fight between two sections of an armed and turbulent nobility
turned into buccaneers by the French wars, and, like their compeers all
over Europe, bereft, by the decay of Catholicism, of the religious
restraints with which their morality was bound up. Yet the Lancastrian
party, or rather the party of Margaret of Anjou and her favourites, was
the more reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the
North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which
gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of
its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been
kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the
absence of commerce with the Continent, and by border wars with
Scotland. In the South was the seat of prosperous industry, wealth, and
comparative civilization, and the banners of the Southern cities were in
the armies of the House of York. The South accepted the Reformation,
while the North was the scene of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Coming down to
the Civil War in the time of Charles I., we find the Parliament strong
in the South and East, where are still the centres of commerce and
manufactures, even the iron trade, which has its smelting works in
Sussex. In the North the feudal tie between landlord and tenant, and the
sentiment of the past, preserve much of their force, and the great power
in those parts is the Marquis of Newcastle, at once great territorial
lord of the Middle Ages and elegant _grand seigneur_ of the
Renaissance, who brings into the field a famous regiment of his own
retainers. In certain towns, such as Bradford and Manchester, there are
germs of manufacturing industry, and these form the sinews of the
Parliamentarian party in the district which is headed by the Fairfaxes.
But in the Reform movement which extended through the first half of the
present century, the geographical position of parties was reversed; the
swarming cities of the North were then the great centres of Liberalism
and the motive power of Reform; while the South, having by this time
fallen into the hands of great landed proprietors, was Conservative. The
stimulating effect of populous centres on opinion is a very familiar
fact; even in the rural districts it is noticed by canvassers at
elections that men who work in gangs are generally more inclined to the
Liberal side than those who work separately.

In England, however, the agricultural element always has been and
remains a full counterpoise to the manufacturing and commercial element.
Agricultural England is not what Pericles called Attica, a mere suburban
garden, the embellishment of a queenly city. It is a substantive
interest and a political power. In the time of Charles I. it happened
that, owing to the great quantity of land thrown into the market in
consequence of the confiscation of the monastic estates, which had
slipped through the fingers of the spendthrift courtiers to whom they
were at first granted, small freeholders were very numerous in the
South, and these men like the middle class in the towns, being strong
Protestants, went with the Parliament against the Laudian reaction in
religion. But land in the hands of great proprietors is Conservative,
especially when it is held under entails and connected with hereditary
nobility; and into the hands of great proprietors the land of England
has now entirely passed. The last remnant of the old yeomen freeholders
departed in the Cumberland Statesmen, and the yeoman freeholder in
England is now about as rare as the other. Commerce has itself assisted
the process by giving birth to great fortunes, the owners of which are
led by social ambition to buy landed estates, because to land the odour
of feudal superiority still clings, and it is almost the necessary
qualification for a title. The land has also actually absorbed a large
portion of the wealth produced by manufactures, and by the general
development of industry; the estates of Northern landowners especially
have enormously increased in value, through the increase of population,
not to mention the not inconsiderable appropriation of commercial wealth
by marriage. Thus the Conservative element retains its predominance, and
it even seems as though the land of Milton, Vane, Cromwell, and the
Reformers of 1832, might after all become, politically as well as
territorially, the domain of a vast aristocracy of landowners, and the
most reactionary instead of the most progressive country in Europe.

Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of
interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the
North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has
taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and
learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than
willing to enter the privileged circle. This junction is at present the
great fact of English politics, and was the main cause of the overthrow
of the Liberal Government in 1874. The growth of the great cities itself
seems likely, as the number of poor householders increases, to furnish
Reaction with auxiliaries in the shape of political Lazzaroni capable of
being organized by wealth in opposition to the higher order of workmen
and the middle class. In Harrington's "Oceana," there is much nonsense,
but it rises at least to the level of Montesquieu in tracing the
intimate connection of political power, even under elective
institutions, with wealth in land.

Hitherto, the result of the balance between the landowning and
commercial elements has been steadiness of political progress, in
contrast on the one hand to the commercial republics of Italy, whose
political progress was precocious and rapid but shortlived, and on the
other hand to great feudal kingdoms where commerce was comparatively
weak. England, as yet, has taken but few steps backwards. It remains to
be seen what the future may bring under the changed conditions which we
have just described. English commerce, moreover, may have passed its
acme. Her insular position gave Great Britain during the Napoleonic
wars, with immunity from invasion, a monopoly of manufactures and of the
carrying trade. This element of her commercial supremacy is transitory,
though others, such as the possession of coal, are not.

Let us now consider the effects of the division between the two islands
and of those between different parts of the larger island. The most
obvious effect of these is tardy consolidation, which is still indicated
by the absence of a collective name for the people of the three
kingdoms. The writer was once rebuked by a Scotchman for saying
"England" and "English," instead of saying "Great Britain" and
"British." He replied that the rebuke was just, but that we must say
"British and Irish." The Scot had overlooked his poor connections.

We always speak of Anglo-Saxons and identify the extension of the
Colonial Empire with that of the Anglo-Saxon race. But even if we assume
that the Celts of England and of the Scotch Lowlands were exterminated
by the Saxons, taking all the elements of Celtic population in the two
islands together, they must bear a very considerable proportion to the
Teutonic element. That large Irish settlements are being formed in the
cities of Northern England is proved by election addresses coquetting
with Home Rule. In the competition of the races on the American
Continent the Irish more than holds its own. In the age of the steam-
engine the Scotch Highlands, the mountains of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, of Wales, of Devonshire, and Cornwall, are the asylum of
natural beauty, of poetry and hearts which seek repose from the din and
turmoil of commercial life. In the primaeval age of conquest they, with
seagirt Ireland, were the asylum of the weaker race. There the Celt
found refuge when Saxon invasion swept him from the open country of
England and from the Scotch Lowlands. There he was preserved with his
own language, indicating by its variety of dialects the rapid flux and
change of unwritten speech; with his own Christianity, which was that of
Apostolic Britain; with his un-Teutonic gifts and weaknesses, his
lively, social, sympathetic nature, his religious enthusiasm,
essentially the same in its Calvinistic as in its Catholic guise, his
superstition, his clannishness, his devotion to chiefs and leaders, his
comparative indifference to institutions, and lack of natural aptitude
for self-government.

The further we go in these inquiries the more reason there seems to be
for believing that the peculiarities of races are not congenital, but
impressed by primaeval circumstance. Not only the same moral and
intellectual nature, but the same primitive institutions, are found in
all the races that come under our view; they appear alike in Teuton,
Celt, and Semite. That which is not congenital is probably not
indelible, so that the less favoured races, placed under happier
circumstances, may in time be brought to the level of the more favoured,
and nothing warrants inhuman pride of race. But it is surely absurd to
deny that peculiarities of race, when formed, are important factors in
history. Mr. Buckle, who is most severe upon the extravagances of the
race theory, himself runs into extravagances not less manifest in a
different direction. He connects the religious character of the
Spaniards with the influence of apocryphal volcanoes and earthquakes,
whereas it palpably had its origin in the long struggle with the Moors.
He, in like manner, connects the theological tendencies of the Scotch
with the thunderstorms which he imagines (wrongly, if we may judge by
our own experience) to be very frequent in the Highlands, whereas Scotch
theology and the religious habits of the Scotch generally were formed in
the Lowlands and among the Teutons, not among the Celts.

The remnant of the Celtic race in Cornwall and West Devon was small, and
was subdued and half incorporated by the Teutons at a comparatively
early period; yet it played a distinct and a decidedly Celtic part in
the Civil War of the seventeenth century. It played a more important
part towards the close of the following century by giving itself almost
in a mass to John Wesley. No doubt the neglect of the remote districts
by the Bishops of Exeter and their clergy left Wesley a clear field; but
the temperament of the people was also in his favour. Anything fervent
takes with the Celt, while he cannot abide the religious compromise
which commends itself to the practical Saxon.

In the Great Charter there is a provision in favour of the Welsh, who
were allied with the Barons in insurrection against the Crown. The
Barons were fighting for the Charter, the Welshmen only for their
barbarous and predatory independence. But the struggle for Welsh
independence helped those who were struggling for the Charter; and the
remark may be extended in substance to the general influence of Wales on
the political contest between the Crown and the Barons. Even under the
House of Lancaster, Llewellyn was faintly reproduced in Owen Glendower.
The powerful monarchy of the Tudors finally completed the annexation.
But isolation survived independence. The Welshman remained a Celt and
preserved his language and his clannish spirit, though local magnates,
such as the family of Wynn, filled the place in his heart once occupied
by the chief. Ecclesiastically he was annexed, but refused to be
incorporated, never seeing the advantage of walking in the middle path
which the State Church of England had traced between the extremes of
Popery and Dissent. He took Methodism in a Calvinistic and almost wildly
enthusiastic form. In this respect his isolation is likely to prove far
more important than anything which Welsh patriotism strives to
resuscitate by Eisteddfodds. In the struggle, apparently imminent,
between the system of Church Establishments and religious equality,
Wales furnishes a most favourable battle-ground to the party of
Disestablishment.

The Teutonic realm of England was powerful enough to subdue, if not to
assimilate, the remnants of the Celtic race in Wales and their other
western hills of refuge. But the Teutonic realm of Scotland was not
large or powerful enough to subdue the Celts of the Highlands, whose
fastnesses constituted in geographical area the greater portion of the
country. It seems that in the case of the Highlands, as in that of
Ireland, Teutonic adventurers found their way into the domain of the
Celts and became chieftains, but in becoming chieftains they became
Celts. Down to the Hanoverian times the chain of the Grampians which
from the Castle of Stirling is seen rising like a wall over the rich
plain, divided from each other two nationalities, differing totally in
ideas, institutions, habits, and costume, as well as in speech, and the
less civilized of which still regarded the more civilized as alien
intruders, while the more civilized regarded the less civilized as
robbers. Internally, the topographical character of the Highlands was
favourable to the continuance of the clan system, because each clan
having its own separate glen, fusion was precluded, and the progress
towards union went no further than the domination of the more powerful
clans over the less powerful. Mountains also preserve the general
equality and brotherhood which are not less essential to the
constitution of the clan than devotion to the chief, by preventing the
use of that great minister of aristocracy, the horse. At Killiecrankie
and Prestonpans the leaders of the clan and the humblest clansman still
charged on foot side by side. Macaulay is undoubtedly right in saying
that the Highland risings against William III. and the first two Georges
were not dynastic but clan movements. They were in fact the last raids
of the Gael upon the country which had been wrested from him by the
Sassenach. Little cared the clansman for the principles of Filmer or
Locke, for the claims of the House of Stuart or for those of the House
of Brunswick. Antipathy to the Clan Campbell was the nearest approach to
a political motive. Chiefs alone, such as the unspeakable Lovat, had
entered as political _condottieri_ into the dynastic intrigues of
the period, and brought the claymores of their clansmen to the standard
of their patron, as Indian chiefs in the American wars brought the
tomahawks of their tribes to the standard of France or England. Celtic
independence greatly contributed to the general perpetuation of anarchy
in Scotland, to the backwardness of Scotch civilization, and to the
abortive weakness of the Parliamentary institutions. Union with the more
powerful kingdom at last supplied the force requisite for the taming of
the Celt. Highlanders, at the bidding of Chatham's genius, became the
soldiers, and are now the pet soldiers, of the British monarchy. A
Hanoverian tailor with improving hand shaped the Highland plaid, which
had originally resembled the simple drapery of the Irish kern, into a
garb of complex beauty, well suited for fancy balls. The power of the
chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away,
though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the
clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social
picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes--at
the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered--are the favourite retreats
of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization.
After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the
Highlands, of which a great part had up to that time been little better
than heathen; but it did not fail to take a strong tinge of Celtic
enthusiasm and superstition.

Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important
politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of
nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not
sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and
kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a
monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did
not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the
menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers
which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of
desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over
Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the
interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border
war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the
extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a
savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best
government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism,
partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English,
whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted
Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation
would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not
only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a
support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of
rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious
sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great
Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no
prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could
possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and
even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a
separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their
reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably
find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining
the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James
I., "No bishop, no king!" In England the Reformation was semi-Catholic;
in Sweden it was Lutheran; but in both countries it was made by the
kings, and in both Episcopacy was retained. Where the Reformation was
the work of the people, more popular forms of Church government
prevailed. In Scotland the monarchy, always weak, was at the time of the
Reformation practically in abeyance, and the master of the movement was
emphatically a man of the people. As to the nobles, they seem to have
thought only of appropriating the Church lands, and to have been willing
to leave to the nation the spiritual gratification of settling its own
religion. Probably they also felt with regard to the disinherited
proprietors of the Church lands that "stone dead had no fellow." The
result was a democratic and thoroughly Protestant Church, which drew
into itself the highest energies, political as well as religious, of a
strong and great-hearted people, and by which Laud and his confederates,
when they had apparently overcome resistance in England, were as Milton
says, "more robustiously handled." If the Scotch auxiliaries did not win
the decisive battle of Marston Moor, they enabled the English
Parliamentarians to fight and win it. During the dark days of the
Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the
ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the
joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find
Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time
of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in
India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the
intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and
Scotland has ever since been a distinctly Liberal element in British
politics, and seems now likely to lead the way to a complete measure of
religious freedom.

Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger
island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of
the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand
lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable
annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the
less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is
entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to
govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized
morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days
when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by
a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller
island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger,
more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the
larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us
plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great
Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size
and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the
resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of
Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late
period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter
process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of
the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and
made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and
Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization,
merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected
with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the
times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic
law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in
the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical
architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is
evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life
amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The
Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest
of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious
as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned
William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission
to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block
of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his
reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church.
Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction,
and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing
the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the
Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the
case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was
complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class
which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national
nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of
Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery,
and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the
conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the
wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was
wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when
subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of
heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the
south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either
attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial
factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened
and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his
moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the
conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate
showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the
dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the
subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect
left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to
objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic
subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and
civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the result was a
military colony or Pale, between the inhabitants of which and the
natives raged a perpetual border war, as savage as that between the
settlers at the Cape and the Kaffirs, or that between the American
frontierman and the Red Indian. The religious quarrel was and has always
been secondary in importance to the struggle of the races for the land.
In the period following the conquest it was the Pale that was
distinctively Romanist; but when at the Reformation the Pale became
Protestant the natives, from antagonism of race, became more intensely
Catholic, and were drawn into the league of Catholic powers on the
Continent, in which they suffered the usual fate of the dwarf who goes
to battle with the giant. By the strong monarchy of the Tudors the
conquest of Ireland was completed with circumstances of cruelty
sufficient to plant undying hatred in the breasts of the people. But the
struggle for the land did not end there, instead of the form of conquest
it took that of confiscation, and was waged by the intruder with the
arms of legal chicane. In the form of eviction it has lasted to the
present hour; and eviction in Ireland is not like eviction in England,
where great manufacturing cities receive and employ the evicted; it is
starvation or exile. Into exile the Irish people have gone by millions,
and thus, though neither maritime nor by nature colonists, they have had
a great share in the peopling of the New World. The cities and railroads
of the United States are to a great extent the monuments of their
labour. In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced
by ages of political serfage, and are still the _debris_ of broken
clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to
follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are
instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial
oppressors in their native land. British statesmen, when they had
conceded Catholic emancipation and afterwards Disestablishment, may have
fancied that they had removed the root of the evil. But the real root
was not touched till Parliament took up the question of the land, and
effected a compromise which may perhaps have to be again revised before
complete pacification is attained.

In another way geography has exercised a sinister influence on the
fortunes of Ireland. Closely approaching Scotland, the northern coast of
Ireland in course of time invited Scotch immigration, which formed as it
were a Presbyterian Pale. If the antagonism between the English
Episcopalian and the Irish Catholic was strong, that between the Scotch
Presbyterian and the Irish Catholic was stronger. To the English
Episcopalian the Irish Catholic was a barbarian and a Romanist; to the
Scotch Presbyterian he was a Canaanite and an idolater. Nothing in
history is more hideous than the conflict in the north of Ireland in the
time of Charles I. This is the feud which has been tenacious enough of
its evil life to propagate itself even in the New World, and to renew in
the streets of Canadian cities the brutal and scandalous conflicts which
disgrace Belfast. On the other hand, through the Scotch colony, the
larger island has a second hold upon the smaller. Of all political
projects a federal union of England and Ireland with separate
Parliaments under the same Crown seems the most hopeless, at least if
government is to remain parliamentary; it may be safely said that the
normal relation between the two Parliaments would be collision, and
collision on a question of peace or war would be disruption. But an
independent Ireland might be a feasible as well as natural object of
Irish aspiration if it were not for the strength, moral as well as
numerical, of the two intrusive elements. How could the Catholic
majority be restrained from legislation which the Protestant minority
would deem oppressive? And how could the Protestant minority, being as
it is more English or Scotch than Irish, be restrained from stretching
its hands to England or Scotland for aid? It is true that if scepticism
continues to advance at its present rate, the lines of religious
separation may be obliterated or become too faint to exercise a great
practical influence, and the bond of the soil may then prevail. But the
feeling against England which is the strength of Irish Nationalism is
likely to subside at the same time.

Speculation on unfulfilled contingencies is not invariably barren. It is
interesting at all events to consider what would have been the
consequences to the people of the two islands, and humanity generally,
if a Saxon England and a Celtic Ireland had been allowed to grow up and
develop by the side of each other untouched by Norman conquest. In the
case of Ireland we should have been spared centuries of oppression which
has profoundly reacted, as oppression always does, on the character of
the oppressor; and it is difficult to believe that the Isle of Saints
and of primitive Universities would not have produced some good fruits
of its own. In the Norman conquest of England historical optimism sees a
great political and intellectual blessing beneath the disguise of
barbarous havoc and alien tyranny. The Conquest was the continuation of
the process of migratory invasions by which the nations of modern Europe
were founded, from restless ambition and cupidity, when it had ceased to
be beneficent. It was not the superposition of one primitive element of
population on another, to the ultimate advantage, possibly, of the
compound; but the destruction of a nationality, the nationality of
Alfred and Harold, of Bede and AElfric. The French were superior in
military organization; that they had superior gifts of any kind, or that
their promise was higher than that of the native English, it would not
be easy to prove. The language, we are told, is enriched by the
intrusion of the French element. If it was enriched it was shattered;
and the result is a mixture so heterogeneous as to be hardly available
for the purposes of exact thought, while the language of science is
borrowed from the Greek, and as regards the unlearned mass of the people
is hardly a medium of thought at all. There are great calamity in
history, though their effects may in time be worked off, and they may be
attended by some incidental good. Perhaps the greatest calamity in
history were the wars of Napoleon, in which some incidental good may
nevertheless be found.

To the influences of geographical position, soil, and race is to be
added, to complete the account of the physical heritage, the influence
of climate. But in the case of the British Islands we must speak not of
climate, but of climates, for within the compass of one small realm are
climates moist and comparatively dry, warm and cold, bracing and
enervating, the results of special influences the range of which is
limited. Civilized man to a great extent makes a climate for himself;
his life in the North is spent mainly indoors, where artificial heat
replaces the sun. The idea which still haunts us, that formidable vigour
and aptitude for conquest are the appanage of Northern races, is a
survival from the state in which the rigour of nature selected and
hardened the destined conquerors of the Roman Empire. The stoves of St.
Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle
between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least
vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous
state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection
must be tremendous. Of the races which peopled the British Islands the
most important had already undergone that action in their original
abodes. They would, however, still feel the beneficent influence of a
climate on the whole eminently favourable to health and to activity;
bracing, yet not so rigorous as to kill those tender plants of humanity
which often bear in them the most precious germs of civilization,
neither confining the inhabitant too much to the shelter of his
dwelling, nor, as the suns of the South are apt to do, drawing him too
much from home. The climate and the soil together formed a good school
for the character of the young nation, as they exacted the toil of the
husbandman and rewarded it. Of the varieties of temperature and weather
within the island the national character still bears the impress, though
in a degree always decreasing as the assimilating agencies of
civilization make their way. Irrespectively of the influence of special
employments, and perhaps even of peculiarity of race, mental vigour,
independence, and reasoning power are always ascribed to the people of
the North. Variety, in this as in other respects, would naturally
produce a balance of tendencies in the nation conductive to moderation
and evenness of progress.

The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems
more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but
the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to
her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while
her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military
alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of
general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that
power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the
colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England
so different from those of New France.

Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original
colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian
Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident,
compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being sought on the
other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the
quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as
in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from
America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial
races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia,
where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may
hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of
Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro.
India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as
a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so
generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less
operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant
dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own
coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war
ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to
take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the
Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not
think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked
up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do
not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable
possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities,
which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once
to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by
which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is
attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a
nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell
necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the
Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown,
was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an
army, a political system, and a morality of its own. But now it appears
that the wrongs of the Hindoo are going to be avenged, as the wrongs of
the conquered have often been, by their moral effect upon the conqueror.
A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as
an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of
Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the
imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now
stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and
commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a
career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has
never yet failed to end. At present the influences in favour of taking
the path of conquest seemed to preponderate, [Footnote: Written in
1878.] and the probability seems to be that the leadership of political
progress, which has hitherto belonged to England and has constituted the
special interest of her history, will, in the near future, pass into
other hands.




THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

[Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers--
Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older
authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are
under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely
followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches,
such as are to be found only in a military writer.]

AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.


The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been
recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence
commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V.,
and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at
Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for
independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her
Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies,
sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany
struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the
victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great
uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally
accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan.
Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of
German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot
of all who aspire high--no man or nation ever was dandled into
greatness.

The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew
after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and
progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that
lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey
herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico
and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish
hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long
remained the Public Law of Europe.

Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway
between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political
wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she
crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants
against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more
politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of
Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the
princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people
religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of
Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd
the scene rise at least two grand forms.

In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no
comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The
armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty
thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von
Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat,
there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no
accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be
everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the
powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to
fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at
Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial
elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by
their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of
anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel
length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.

But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side
especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible
perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of
those mercenary bands, _soldados_, in the literal and original
sense of the term, free companions, _condottieri_, lansquenets, who
came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times.
In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and
Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in
human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great
Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near
of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait
of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them
were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of
Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired
butcher and marauder.

But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians,
Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the
devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European
and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their
cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their
blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough
to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin
to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of
all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity
of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without
scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and
again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the
carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour,
embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of
its articles the duel with all the forms--an improvement at any rate
upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that
between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day
sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a
language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished
with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was
filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against
bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which
since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate.
Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf
and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and
unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of
women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess,
as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a
battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a
great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but
the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews
who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the
central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good,
when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a
merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his
charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with
finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously
cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is
my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my
paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier
was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to
find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But
when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city
stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more
gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he
was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger
comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then
were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot
altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men,
many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which
Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he
finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such
a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and
the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy
witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects
for two hundred years.

A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism,
working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria,
had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the
Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons,
were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of
Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal
unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise,
questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still
open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no
mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of
private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the
Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants
had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of
which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief.
The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal
division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having
said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The
great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor
nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they
had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the
lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the
disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were
politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and
gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for
vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold
Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed
the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the
Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready
to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities
wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause
which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.

The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the
House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot,
impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their
Protestant faith--Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed
along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval
Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of
John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the
Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half
Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John
Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay
in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native
nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious
conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive
Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had
obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor,
Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in
cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at
the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life.
He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was
passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even
in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to
an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to
the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was
triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his
bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to
narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the
fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal,
and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian
kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures,
were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion,
and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first
blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc.
Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count
Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as
Jesuitism averred,--as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's
Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than
ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the
States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to
Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and
fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant
hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in
an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A
foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech
nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let
loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient
images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he
allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and
Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance,
of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him.
Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name
fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own
discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under
Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was
hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his
apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face
it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of
Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene
like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it
seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples.
Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the
Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp,
the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty-
four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the
executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it
seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of
history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then
was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the
sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with
ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria
Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of
the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed;
in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners,
military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed
of the Metternichs.

For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German
Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful
chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of
the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting,
as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither
of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of
victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in
gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming
queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick.
The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin
pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm,
timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but
they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble
thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the
conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and
selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made
war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and
political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and
usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in
will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth
of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered
after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single
will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of
civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid.
Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi-
barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the
main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to
his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate
general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and
first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was
conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to
Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a
majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided
College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth,
restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the
last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with
the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily
took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at
Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the
northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a
basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of
Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in
Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the
point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the
Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful
aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European
liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom.
By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from
the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave
burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn,
in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by
a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says
Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North
a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of
Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe,
of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed
at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to
give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his
knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself
taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp.
Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once
the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and
Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the
counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause,
hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of
thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in
regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits
of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination
stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of
Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had
already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of
the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great
for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a
successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the
military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations
were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from
savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age
could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was
himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his
early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a
fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was
devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is
still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of
the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held
in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all
dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military
code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.

Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that
age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.--"The king hath solemnly protested
that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your
majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend
with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is
the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often
observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were
fitted for the times. Certainly, _ambit fortunam Caesaris_: he
thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige
prosperity."

Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth
hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a
technical _casus belli_. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was
a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save
the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by
because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.

"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt
away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that
his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of
alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having
been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British
auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always
formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and
storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many
British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and
other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of
the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and
brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German
battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle
pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the
better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more
great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh,
the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty,
fell--fell with Gustavus and rescue near--and nameless atrocities were
perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all
ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism
for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not
without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and
was soon to clear himself better by deeds.

Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side.
Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in
politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the
religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed
at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as
Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of
the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was
of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of
its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction
similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V.
Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy
was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was
at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the
Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the
bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality,
showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian
over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then
withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal
and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded,
so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the
dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North,
scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.

When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony,
drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of
Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when
the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the
forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of
Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count
Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was
one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the
Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled
forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely
attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a
long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his
only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired
in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a
Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could
boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as
well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror,
for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the
massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of
cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the
butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword
in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was
Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty
years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of
the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the
leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.

In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was
an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that
in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the
musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole
vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and
manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in
heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had
introduced a more open order--he had lightened the musket, dispensed
with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the
flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their
carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a
real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the
Imperial masses.

The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over
the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans
of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order--infantry in the centre,
cavalry on the flanks--upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain
of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns--Gustavus with
the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As
they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed
upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns
deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt
that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left
arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came
through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were
raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old
school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with
modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in
reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was
filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail-
clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the
clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly
ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern
battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre
and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by
the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops
manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when
the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their
fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was
complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for
the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable
commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew
the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.

On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still
regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise--and whatever his
reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore
but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian
forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede.
Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come
as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of
war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the
cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is
broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head,
the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a
fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All
fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by
his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people
accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better
world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no
doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding
himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak
and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile.
Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt.
Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have
been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne
dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as
beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city
of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city
of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the
Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more
and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few
marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant
chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.

Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly
had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and
fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend
upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the
Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between
the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it
were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose
trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The
secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man
himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary
bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was
formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage
and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer
portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace
in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good
Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth
was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein
had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a
traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on
which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in
view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving
on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on
the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its
command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was
subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been
called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his
death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man.
He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the
path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of
his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his
character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince-
Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies
of the House of Austria,--to this height had the landless and obscure
adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by
the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and
heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong.
Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the
crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief
who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved,
who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never
joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion
on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder;
he was lavishly munificent, as one who knew that those who play a deep
game must lay down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand
prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his
soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to
reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness
both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's
will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the
mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one
of them--even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of
faith in his as in their hearts; though, while the common soldier raised
the fiend to charm bullets, or bought spells and amulets of a quack at
Nuremburg or Augsburg, Seni, the first astrologer of the age, explored
the sympathizing stars for the august destiny of the Duke of Friedland.
Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood
opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the
mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by
intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other
the indifferentist, without faith except in his star. On the one side
was as much good, perhaps, as has ever appeared in the form of a
conqueror, on the other side the majesty of evil. Gustavus was young,
his frame was vigorous and active, though inclined to corpulence, his
complexion fair, his hair golden, his eye blue and merry, his
countenance frank as day, and the image of a heart which had felt the
kindest influences of love and friendship. Wallenstein was past his
prime, his frame was tall, spare, somewhat bowed by pain, his complexion
dark, his eye black and piercing, his look that of a man who trod
slippery paths with deadly rivals at his side, and of whose many letters
not one is to a friend. But, opposites in all else, the two champions
were well matched in power. Perhaps there is hardly such another duel in
history. Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to
encounter Cromwell.

The market for the great adventurer's services having risen so high, the
price which he asked was large--a principality in hand, a province to be
conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised. The court
suggested that if the emperor's son, the King of Hungary, were put over
Wallenstein's head, his name would be a tower of strength, but
Wallenstein answered with a blasphemous frankness which must have made
the ears of courtiers tingle. He would be emperor of the army; he would
be emperor in the matter of confiscations. The last article shows how he
won the soldier's heart. Perhaps in framing his terms, he gave something
to his wounded pride. If he did, the luxury cost him dear, for here he
trod upon the serpent that stung his life.

The career of Gustavus was at once arrested, and he took shelter against
the storm in an entrenched camp protected by three hundred cannon under
the walls of Nuremberg--Nuremberg the eldest daughter of the German
Reformation, the Florence of Germany in art, wealth and freedom, then
the beautiful home of early commerce, now its romantic tomb. The
desolation of her grass-grown streets dates from that terrible day. The
Swedish lines were scarcely completed when Wallenstein appeared with all
his power, and sweeping past, entrenched himself four miles from his
enemy in a position the key of which were the wooded hill and old castle
of the Altenberg. Those who chance to visit that spot may fancy there
Wallenstein's camp as it is in Schiller, ringing with the boisterous
revelry of its wild and motley bands. And they may fancy the sudden
silence, the awe of men who knew no other awe, as in his well-known
dress, the laced buff coat with crimson scarf, and the grey hat with
crimson plume, Wallenstein rode by. Week after week and month after
month these two heavy clouds of war hung close together, and Europe
looked for the bursting of the storm. But famine was to do Wallenstein's
work; and by famine and the pestilence, bred by the horrible state of
the camp, at last his work was done. The utmost limit of deadly inaction
for the Swedes arrived. Discipline and honour gave way, and could
scarcely be restored by the passionate eloquence of Gustavus. Oxenstiern
brought large reinforcements; and on the 24th August Wallenstein saw--
with grim pleasure he must have seen--Gustavus advancing to attack him
in his lines. By five hundred at a time--there was room for no more in
the narrow path of death--the Swedes scaled the flashing and thundering
Altenberg. They scaled it again and again through a long summer's day.
Once it was all but won. But at evening the Nurembergers saw their hero
and protector retiring, for the first time defeated, from the field. Yet
Gustavus had not lost the confidence of his soldiers. He had shared
their danger and had spared their blood. In ten hours' hard fighting he
had lost only 2,000 men. But Wallenstein might well shower upon his
wounded soldiers the only balm for the wounds of men fighting without a
country or a cause. He might well write to the emperor: "The King of
Sweden has blunted his horns a good deal. Henceforth the title of
Invincible belongs not to him, but to your Majesty." No doubt Ferdinand
thought it did.

Gustavus now broke up and marched on Bavaria, abandoning the great
Protestant city, with the memory of Magdeburg in his heart. But
Nuremberg was not to share the fate of Magdeburg. The Imperial army was
not in a condition to form the siege. It had suffered as much as that of
Gustavus. That such troops should have been held together in such
extremity proves their general's power of command. Wallenstein soon
gladdened the eyes of the Nurembergers by firing his camp, and declining
to follow the lure into Bavaria, marched on Saxony, joined another
Imperial army under Pappenheim and took Leipsic.

To save Saxony Gustavus left Bavaria half conquered. As he hurried to
the rescue, the people on his line of march knelt to kiss the hem of his
garment, the sheath of his delivering sword, and could scarcely be
prevented from adoring him as a god. His religious spirit was filled
with a presentiment that the idol in which they trusted would be soon
laid low. On the 14th of November he was leaving a strongly entrenched
camp, at Naumberg, where the Imperialists fancied, the season being so
far advanced, he intended to remain, when news reached his ear like the
sight which struck Wellington's eye as it ranged over Marmont's army on
the morning of Salamanca. [Footnote: We owe the parallel, we believe, to
an article by Lord Ellesmere, in the _Quarterly Review_.] The
impetuous Pappenheim, ever anxious for separate command, had persuaded
an Imperial council of war to detach him with a large force against
Halle. The rest of the Imperialists, under Wallenstein, were quartered
in the villages around Lutzen, close within the king's reach, and
unaware of his approach. "The Lord," cried Gustavus, "has delivered him
into my hand," and at once he swooped upon his prey.

"Break up and march with every man and gun. The enemy is advancing
hither. He is already at the pass by the hollow road." So wrote
Wallenstein to Pappenheim. The letter is still preserved, stained with
Pappenheim's life-blood. But, in that mortal race, Pappenheim stood no
chance. Halle was a long day's march off, and the troopers, whom
Pappenheim could lead gallantly, but could not control, after taking the
town had dispersed to plunder. Yet the Swede's great opportunity was
lost. Lutzen, though in sight, proved not so near as flattering guides
and eager eyes had made it. The deep-banked Rippach, its bridge all too
narrow for the impetuous columns, the roads heavy from rain, delayed the
march. A skirmish with some Imperial cavalry under Isolani wasted
minutes when minutes were years; and the short November day was at an
end when the Swede reached the plain of Lutzen.

No military advantage marks the spot where the storm overtook the Duke
of Friedland. He was caught like a traveller in a tempest off a
shelterless plain, and had nothing for it but to bide the brunt. What
could be done with ditches, two windmills, a mud wall, a small canal, he
did, moving from point to point during the long night; and before
morning all his troops, except Pappenheim's division, had come in and
were in line.

When the morning broke a heavy fog lay on the ground. Historians have
not failed to remark that there is a sympathy in things, and that the
day was loath to dawn which was to be the last day of Gustavus. But if
Nature sympathized with Gustavus, she chose a bad mode of showing her
sympathy, for while the fog prevented the Swedes from advancing, part of
Pappenheim's corps arrived. After prayers, the king and all his army
sang Luther's hymn, "Our God is a strong tower"--the Marseillaise of the
militant Reformation. Then Gustavus mounted his horse, and addressed the
different divisions, adjuring them by their victorious name, by the
memory of the Breitenfeld, by the great cause whose issue hung upon
their swords, to fight well for that cause, for their country and their
God. His heart was uplifted at Lutzen, with that Hebrew fervour which
uplifted the heart of Cromwell at Dunbar. Old wounds made it irksome to
him to wear a cuirass. "God," he said, "shall be my armour this day".

Wallenstein has been much belied if he thought of anything that morning
more religious than the order of battle, which has been preserved, drawn
up by his own hand, and in which his troops are seen still formed in
heavy masses, in contrast to the lighter formations of Gustavus. He was
carried down his lines in a litter being crippled by gout, which the
surgeons of that day had tried to cure by cutting into the flesh. But
when the action began, he placed his mangled foot in a stirrup lined
with silk, and mounted the small charger, the skin of which is still
shown in the deserted palace of his pride. We may be sure that
confidence sat undisturbed upon his brow; but in his heart he must have
felt that though he had brave men around him, the Swedes, fighting for
their cause under their king, were more than men; and that in the
balance of battle then held out, his scale had kicked the beam. There
can hardly be a harder trial for human fortitude than to command in a
great action on the weaker side. Villeneuve was a brave man, though an
unfortunate admiral, but he owned that his heart sank within him at
Trafalgar when he saw Nelson bearing down.

"God with us," was the Swedish battle cry. On the other side the words
"Jesu-Maria" passed round, as twenty-five thousand of the most godless
and lawless ruffians the world ever saw, stood to the arms which they
had imbrued in the blood not of soldiers only, but of women and children
of captured towns. Doubtless many a wild Walloon and savage Croat, many
a fierce Spaniard and cruel Italian, who had butchered and tortured at
Magdeburg, was here come to bite the dust. These men were children of
the camp and the battlefield, long familiar with every form of death,
yet, had they known what a day was now before them, they might have felt
like a recruit on the morning of his first field. Some were afterwards
broken or beheaded for misconduct before the enemy; others earned rich
rewards. Most paid, like men of honour, the price for which they were
allowed to glut every lust and revel in every kind of crime.

At nine the sky began to clear, straggling shots told that the armies
were catching sight of each other, and a red glare broke the mist, where
the Imperialists had set fire to Lutzen to cover their right. At ten
Gustavus placed himself at the head of his cavalry. War has now changed;
and the telescope is the general's sword. Yet we cannot help feeling
that the gallant king, who cast in his own life with the lives of the
peasants he had drawn from their Swedish homes, is a nobler figure than
the great Emperor who, on the same plains, two centuries afterwards,
ordered to their death the masses of youthful valour sent by a ruthless
conscription to feed the vanity of a heart of clay. The Swedes, after
the manner of war in that fierce and hardy age, fell at once with their
main force on the whole of the Imperial line. On the left, after a
murderous struggle, they gained ground and took the enemy's guns. But on
the right the Imperialists held firm, and while Gustavus was carrying
victory with him to that quarter, Wallenstein restored the day upon the
right. Again Gustavus hurried to that part of the field. Again the
Imperialists gave way, and Gustavus, uncovering his head, thanked God
for his victory. At this moment it seems the mist returned. The Swedes
were confused and lost their advantage. A horse, too well known, ran
riderless down their line, and when their cavalry next advanced, they
found the stripped and mangled body of their king. According to the most
credible witness, Gustavus who had galloped forward to see how his
advantage might be best followed up, got too near the enemy, was shot
first in the arm, then in the back, and fell from his horse. A party of
Imperial cuirassiers came up, and learning from the wounded man himself
who he was, finished the work of death. They then stripped the body for
proofs of their great enemy's fate and relics of the mighty slain. Dark
reports of treason were spread abroad, and one of these reports followed
the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was with Gustavus that day, through his
questionable life to his unhappy end. In those times a great man could
scarcely die without suspicion of foul play, and in all times men are
unwilling to believe that a life on which the destiny of a cause or a
nation hangs can be swept away by the blind, indiscriminate hand of
common death.

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 Deum_ was 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.




THE LAMPS OF FICTION

_Spoken on the Centenary of the Birth of Sir Walter Scott_


Ruskin has lighted seven lamps of Architecture, to guide the steps of
the architect in the worthy practice of his art. It seems time that some
lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction.
Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use
it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels, and then look
into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library
consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are
the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway
book-stalls in one day. There was hardly a novel by an author of any
repute on one of them. They were heaps of nameless garbage, commended by
tasteless, flaunting woodcuts, the promise of which was no doubt well
kept within. Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation
be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of
Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honour to whose
memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be
praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor
lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure and true, is a law to
itself; and by studying what he does we may find the law for all who
follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture,
Scott will light as many for fiction.

I. _The Lamp of Reality_.--The novelist must ground his work in
faithful study of human nature. There was a popular writer of romances,
who, it was said, used to go round to the fashionable watering-places to
pick up characters. That was better than nothing. There is another
popular writer who, it seems, makes voluminous indices of men and
things, and draws on them for his material. This also is better than
nothing. For some writers, and writers dear to the circulating libraries
too, might, for all that appeals in their works, lie in bed all day, and
write by night under the excitement of green tea. Creative art, I
suppose, they call this, and it is creative with a vengeance. Not so,
Scott. The human nature which he paints, he had seen in all its phases,
gentle and simple, in burgher and shepherd, Highlander, Lowlander,
Borderer, and Islesman; he had come into close contact with it, he had
opened it to himself by the talisman of his joyous and winning presence;
he had studied it thoroughly with a clear eye and an all-embracing
heart. When his scenes are laid in the past, he has honestly studied the
history. The history of his novels is perhaps not critically accurate,
not up to the mark of our present knowledge, but in the main it is sound
and true--sounder and more true than that of many professed historians,
and even than that of his own historical works, in which he sometimes
yields to prejudice, while in his novels he is lifted above it by his
loyalty to his art.

II. _The Lamp of Ideality_.--The materials of the novelist must be
real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual
observation. But they must pass through the crucible of the imagination;
they must be idealized. The artist is not a photographer, but a painter.
He must depict not persons but humanity, otherwise he forfeits the
artist's name, and the power of doing the artist's work in our hearts.
When we see a novelist bring out a novel with one or two good
characters, and then, at the fatal bidding of the booksellers, go on
manufacturing his yearly volume, and giving us the same character or the
same few characters over and over again, we may be sure that he is
without the power of idealization. He has merely photographed what he
has seen, and his stock is exhausted. It is wonderful what a quantity of
the mere lees of such writers, more and more watered down, the libraries
go on complacently circulating, and the reviews go on complacently
reviewing. Of course, this power of idealization is the great gift of
genius. It is that which distinguishes Homer, Shakespeare, and Walter
Scott, from ordinary men. But there is also a moral effort in rising
above the easy work of mere description to the height of art. Need it be
said that Scott is thoroughly ideal as well as thoroughly real? There
are vague traditions that this man and the other was the original of
some character in Scott. But who can point out the man of whom a
character in Scott is a mere portrait? It would be as hard as to point
out a case of servile delineation in Shakespeare. Scott's characters are
never monsters or caricatures. They are full of nature; but it is
universal nature. Therefore they have their place in the universal
heart, and will keep that place for ever. And mark that even in his
historical novels he is still ideal. Historical romance is a perilous
thing. The fiction is apt to spoil the fact, and the fact the fiction;
the history to be perverted and the romance to be shackled: daylight to
kill dreamlight, and dreamlight to kill daylight. But Scott takes few
liberties with historical facts and characters; he treats them, with the
costume and the manners of the period, as the background of the picture.
The personages with whom he deals freely, are the Peverils and the
Nigels; and these are his lawful property, the offspring of his own
imagination, and belong to the ideal.

III. _The Lamp of Impartiality_.--The novelist must look on
humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the
historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party. He must
see everywhere the good that is mixed with evil, the evil that is mixed
with good. And this he will not do, unless his heart is right. It is in
Scott's historical novels that his impartiality is most severely tried
and is most apparent; though it is apparent in all his works.
Shakespeare was a pure dramatist; nothing but art found a home in that
lofty, smooth, idealistic brow. He stands apart not only from the
political and religious passions but from the interests of his time,
seeming hardly to have any historical surroundings, but to shine like a
planet suspended by itself in the sky. So it is with that female
Shakespeare in miniature, Miss Austen. But Scott took the most intense
interest in the political struggles of his time. He was a fiery
partisan, a Tory in arms against the French Revolution. In his account
of the coronation of George IV. a passionate worship of monarchy breaks
forth, which, if we did not know his noble nature, we might call
slavish. He sacrificed, ease, and at last life, to his seignorial
aspirations. On one occasion he was even carried beyond the bounds of
propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his
political ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy.
The idols which the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have
fought against the first revolution under Montrose, and against the
second under Dundee. Yet he is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite
party. Not only is he just, he is sympathetic. He brings out their
worth, their valour, such grandeur of character as they have, with all
the power of his art, making no distinction in this respect between
friend and foe. If they have a ridiculous side he uses it for the
purposes of his art, but genially, playfully, without malice. If there
was a laugh left in the Covenanters, they would have laughed at their
own portraits as painted by Scott. He shows no hatred of anything but
wickedness itself. Such a novelist is a most effective preacher of
liberality and charity; he brings our hearts nearer to the Impartial
Father of us all.

IV. _The Lamp of Impersonality_.--Personality is lower than
partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is
said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the
enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy
and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his
divine picture of the Last Supper would fade, because he had introduced
his personal enemy as Judas, and thus desecrated art by making it serve
personal hatred. The legend must be false, Leonardo had too grand a
soul. A wretched woman in England, at the beginning of the last century,
Mrs. Manley, systematically employed fiction as a cover for personal
libel; but such an abuse of art as this could be practiced or
countenanced only by the vile. Novelists, however, often debase fiction
by obtruding their personal vanities, favouritisms, fanaticisms and
antipathies. We had, the other day, a novel, the author of which
introduced himself almost by name as a heroic character, with a
description of his own personal appearance, residence, and habits as
fond fancy painted them to himself. There is a novelist, who is a man of
fashion, and who makes the age of the heroes in his successive novels
advance with his own, so that at last we shall have irresistible
fascination at seven score years and ten. But the commonest and the most
mischievous way in which personality breaks out is pamphleteering under
the guise of fiction. One novel is a pamphlet against lunatic asylums,
another against model prisons, a third against the poor law, a fourth
against the government offices, a fifth against trade unions. In these
pretended works of imagination facts are joined in support of a crotchet
or an antipathy with all the license of fiction; calumny revels without
restraint, and no cause is served but that of falsehood and injustice. A
writer takes offence at the excessive popularity of athletic sports;
instead of bringing out an accurate and conscientious treatise to
advocate moderation, he lets fly a novel painting the typical boating
man as a seducer of confiding women, the betrayer of his friend, and the
murderer of his wife. Religious zealots are very apt to take this method
of enlisting imagination, as they think, on the side of truth. We had
once a high Anglican novel in which the Papist was eaten alive by rats,
and the Rationalist and Republican was slowly seethed in molten lead,
the fate of each being, of course, a just judgment of heaven on those
who presumed to differ from the author. Thus the voice of morality is
confounded with that of tyrannical petulance and self-love. Not only is
Scott not personal, but we cannot conceive his being so. We cannot think
it possible that he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism,
or crotchets, or petty piques. Least of all can we think it possible
that his high and gallant nature should use art as a cover for striking
a foul blow.

V. _The Lamp of Purity_--I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the
purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than
Dickens--Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of
one still greater than either, Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater
morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is
cynicism, though the more genial and healthy element predominates; and
cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the
little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We
know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity
of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe.
Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a
blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of
the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in
Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which
lewdness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized, but by
no means disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven.
There is no justification for this; it is mere pandering, under whatever
pretence, to evil propensities; it makes the divine art of Fiction
"procuress to the Lords of Hell," If our established morality is in any
way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not to Comus; and remember
that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Coleridge pledges himself
to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais; but Coleridge
alone finds the sermons while everybody finds the filth. Impure novels
have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity
is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience, it is the manly
purity of one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world,
known evil as well as good; but who, being a true gentleman, abhorred
filth, and teaches us to abhor it too.

VI. _The Lamp of Humanity_.--One day we see the walls placarded
with the advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl
tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day
we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a
man seizing her behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her
brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by
introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of
lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and
adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the
ordure, he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew
that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely
horrible, that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as
licentiousness itself--the passions which were stimulated by the
gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bull-
fights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by
exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperilling
human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the
terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing
character, awakening emotions which when awakened dignify and save from
harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives
novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and
even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as
some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore.

VII. _The Lamp of Chivalry_.--Of this briefly. Let the writer of
fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the
tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the
standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We
delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and
Othellos, but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean. The
noble and chivalrous always holds its place as the aim of true humanity
in his ideal world. Perhaps Dickens is not entirely free from blame in
this respect; perhaps Pickwickianism has in some degree familiarized the
generation of Englishmen who have been fed upon it with what is not
chivalrous, to say the least, in conduct, as it unquestionably has with
slang in conversation. But Scott, like Shakespeare, wherever the thread
of his fiction may lead him, always keeps before himself and us the
highest ideal which he knew, the ideal of a gentleman. If anyone says
these are narrow bounds wherein to confine fiction I answer there has
been room enough within them for the highest tragedy, the deepest
pathos, the broadest humour, the widest range of character, the most
moving incident, that the world has ever enjoyed. There has been room
within them for all the kings of pure and healthy fiction--for Homer,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Scott. "Farewell Sir Walter," says
Carlyle at the end of his essay, "farewell Sir Walter, pride of all
Scotchmen. Scotland has said farewell to her mortal son. But all
humanity welcomes him as Scotland's noblest gift to her and crowns him
as on this day one of the heirs of immortality."




AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART AT THE
DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZES


LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

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.

There are the manufacturing mu

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