The Lamps Of Fiction

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Title:     The Lamps Of Fiction
Author: Goldwin Smith [More Titles by Smith]

_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."

[The end]
Goldwin Smith's essay: The Lamps Of Fiction

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