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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.

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