WHEN the world was younger and perhaps merrier, when people lived more
and thought less, and when the curious subtleties of an advanced
civilization had not yet turned men’s heads with conceit of their own
enlightening progress from simple to serious things, poets had two
recognized sources of inspiration, which were sufficient for themselves
and for their unexacting audiences. They sang of love and they sang of
war, of fair women and of brave men, of keen youthful passions and of
the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamonde lingers “in Woodstocke
bower,” and Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte; Annie of
Lochroyan sails over the roughening seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to
the Cheviot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his back. It did not
occur to the thick-headed generation who first listened to the ballad of
“Chevy Chace” to hint that the game was hardly worth the candle, or that
poaching on a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as poaching on
a little one. This sort of insight was left for the nineteenth-century
philosopher, and the nineteenth-century moralist. In earlier, easier
days, the last thing that a poet troubled himself about was a defensible
motive for the battle in which his soul exulted. His business was to
describe the fighting, not to justify the fight, which would have been a
task of pure supererogation in that truculent age. Fancy trying to
justify Kinmont Willie or Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the
hard knocks they give and the stout men they lay low!
“Johnie’s set his back against an aik,
His foot against a stane;
And he has slain the Seven Foresters,—
He has slain them a’ but ane.”
The last echo of this purely irresponsible spirit may be found in the
“War Song of Dinas Vawr,” where Peacock, always three hundred years
behind his time, sings of slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which
only his admirable versification can excuse:—
“The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met an host and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.”
There is not even a lack of food at home—the old traditional dinner of
spurs—to warrant this foray. There is no hint of necessity for the
harriers, or consideration for the harried.
“We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow our chorus.”
It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly narrated; but if the
lines were a hair-breadth less mellifluous, I think we should call this
a very barbarous method of campaigning.
When the old warlike spirit was dying out of English verse, when poets
had begun to meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and to counsel
man, the good gods gave to England, as a link with the days that were
dead, Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton before or since has ever
sung, of battlefields and the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds
and midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignall banks, and the
trooper shaking his silken bridle reins upon the river shore:—
“Adieu for evermore,
My love!
And adieu for evermore.”
These are not precisely the themes which enjoy unshaken popularity
to-day,—“the poet of battles fares ill in modern England,” says Sir
Francis Doyle,—and as a consequence there are many people who speak
slightingly of Scott’s poetry, and who appear to claim for themselves
some inscrutable superiority by so doing. They give you to understand,
without putting it too coarsely into words, that they are beyond that
sort of thing, but that they liked it very well as children, and are
pleased if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of unfortunates
who, through no apparent fault of their own, have ceased to take delight
in Scott’s novels, and who manifest a curious indignation because the
characters in them go ahead and do things, instead of thinking and
talking about them, which is the present approved fashion of evolving
fiction. Why, what time have the good people in “Quentin Durward” for
speculation and chatter? The rush of events carries them irresistibly
into action. They plot, and fight, and run away, and scour the country,
and meet with so many adventures, and perform so many brave and cruel
deeds, that they have no chance for introspection and the joys of
analysis. Naturally, those writers who pride themselves upon making a
story out of nothing, and who are more concerned with excluding material
than with telling their tales, have scant liking for Sir Walter, who
thought little and prated not at all about the “art of fiction,” but
used the subjects which came to hand with the instinctive and
unhesitating skill of a great artist. The battles in “Quentin Durward”
and “Old Mortality” are, I think, as fine in their way as the battle of
Flodden; and Flodden, says Mr. Lang, is the finest fight on
record,—“better even than the stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad,
better than the slaying of the Wooers in the Odyssey.”
The ability to carry us whither he would, to show us whatever he
pleased, and to stir our hearts’ blood with the story of
“old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”
was the especial gift of Scott,—of the man whose sympathies were as deep
as life itself, whose outlook was as wide as the broad bosom of the
earth he trod on. He believed in action, and he delighted in describing
it. “The thinker’s voluntary death in life” was not, for him, the power
that moves the world, but rather deeds,—deeds that make history and that
sing themselves forever. He honestly felt himself to be a much smaller
man than Wellington. He stood abashed in the presence of the soldier who
had led large issues and controlled the fate of nations. He would have
been sincerely amused to learn from “Robert Elsmere”—what a delicious
thing it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading “Robert Elsmere”!—that
“the decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.” The
decisive events of the world, Scott held to take place in the field of
action; on the plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than in the brain
tissues of William Godwin. He knew what befell Athens when she could put
forward no surer defense against Philip of Macedon than the most
brilliant orations ever written in praise of freedom. It was better, he
probably thought, to argue as the English did, “in platoons.” The
schoolboy who fought with the heroic “Green-Breeks” in the streets of
Edinburgh; the student who led the Tory youths in their gallant struggle
with the riotous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cudgeling out of
the theatre they had disgraced; the man who, broken in health and
spirit, was yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with Gourgaud by
giving that gentleman any satisfaction he desired, was consistent
throughout with the simple principles of a bygone generation. “It is
clear to me,” he writes in his journal, “that what is least forgiven in
a man of any mark or likelihood is want of that article blackguardly
called _pluck_. All the fine qualities of genius cannot make amends for
it. We are told the genius of poets especially is irreconcilable with
this species of grenadier accomplishment. If so, _quel chien de génie!_”
_Quel chien de génie_ indeed, and far beyond the compass of Scott, who,
amid the growing sordidness and seriousness of an industrial and
discontented age, struck a single resonant note that rings in our hearts
to-day like the echo of good and joyous things:—
“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.”
The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered, into admirable prose
when Graham of Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his views on living
and dying. At present, Philosophy and Philanthropy between them are
hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the field. Even to the
soldier, we are told, it should be a secondary consideration, or perhaps
no consideration at all, his sense of duty being a sufficient stay. But
Scott, like Homer, held somewhat different views, and absolutely
declined to let “that jade Duty” have everything her own way. It is the
plain duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare’s side and guard her
as they were bidden, instead of which they rush off, with Sir Walter’s
tacit approbation, to the fray.
“No longer Blount the view could bear:
‘By heaven and all its saints! I swear
I will not see it lost!
Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare
May bid your beads and patter prayer,—
I gallop to the host.’”
It was this cheerful acknowledgment of human nature as a large factor in
life which gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave, imperfect men;
which enabled him to draw with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le
Balafré, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William of Deloraine. Le Balafré,
indeed, with his thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own wisdom,
his unswerving, almost unconscious courage, his readiness to risk his
neck for a bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is every whit as
veracious as if he were the over-analyzed child of realism, instead of
one of the many minor characters thrust with wanton prodigality into the
pages of a romantic novel.
Alone among modern poets, Scott sings Homerically of strife. Others have
caught the note, but none have upheld it with such sustained force, such
clear and joyous resonance. Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is
always too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. He stirs brave
hearts, it is true, and the finest tribute to his eloquence was paid by
Mrs. Browning, who said she could not read the “Lays” lying down; they
drew her irresistibly to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake
Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before my eyes. I see—whether I
want to or not—a platform, and the poet’s own beloved schoolboy
declaiming with appropriate gestures those glowing and vigorous lines.
When Scott sings of Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest of the
fray. I know how the Scottish ranks waver and reel before the charge of
Stanley’s men, how Tunstall’s stainless banner sweeps the field, and
how, in the gathering gloom,
“The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell.”
There is none of this noble simplicity in the somewhat dramatic ardor of
Horatius, or in the pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not the
less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which read a little like old Kaiser
William’s war dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand times are
the splendid swing, the captivating enthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,”
which hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. Reading it, we are as
keen for battle as were King Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash.
The ardor for strife, the staying power of quiet courage, all are here;
and here, too, a felicity of language that makes each noble name a
trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh incentive to heroic deeds.
“With Spanish yew so strong,
Arrows a cloth-yard long,
That like to serpents stung,
Piercing the weather;
None from his fellow starts,
But playing manly parts,
And like true English hearts,
Stuck close together.
—————
“Warwick in blood did wade,
Oxford the foe invade,
And cruel slaughter made,
Still as they ran up;
Suffolk his axe did ply,
Beaumont and Willoughby
Bare them right doughtily,
Ferrers and Fanhope.
“Upon Saint Crispin’s day
Fought was this noble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry;
Oh, when shall Englishmen
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry?”
Political economists and chilly historians and all long-headed
calculating creatures generally may perhaps hint that invading France
was no part of England’s business, and represented fruitless labor and
bloodshed. But this, happily, is not the poet’s point of view. He dreams
with Hotspur
“Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.”
He hears King Harry’s voice ring clearly above the cries and clamors of
battle:—
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead;”
and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and the field of Agincourt
seem not only glorious but righteous things. “That pure and generous
desire to thrash the person opposed to you because he _is_ opposed to
you, because he is not ‘your side,’” which Mr. Saintsbury declares to be
the real incentive of all good war songs, hardly permits a too cautious
analysis of motives. Fighting is not a strictly philanthropic pastime,
and its merits are not precisely the merits of church guilds and college
settlements. Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, notwithstanding
the splendid example of Michael, “of celestial armies, prince,” and
there is at present a shameless conspiracy on foot to defraud even St.
George of his hard-won glory, and to melt him over in some modern
crucible into a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arian bishop, too, by
way of deepening the scandal! We shall hear next that Saint Denis was a
Calvinistic minister, and Saint Iago, whom devout Spanish eyes have seen
mounted in the hottest of the fray, was a friendly well-wisher of the
Moors.
But why sigh over fighting saints, in a day when even fighting sinners
have scant measure of praise? “Moral courage is everything. Physical
heroism is a small matter, often trivial enough,” wrote that clever,
emotional, sensitive German woman, Rahel Varnhagen, at the very time
when a little “physical heroism” might have freed her conquered
fatherland. And this profession of faith has gone on increasing in
popularity, until we have even a lad like the young Laurence Oliphant,
with hot blood surging in his veins, gravely recording his displeasure
because a parson “with a Crimean medal on his surplice” preached a
rousing battle sermon to the English soldiers who had no alternative but
to fight. “My natural man,” confesses Oliphant naïvely, “is intensely
warlike, which is just as low a passion as avarice or any other,”—a
curious moral perspective, which needs no word of comment, and
sufficiently explains much that was to follow. We are irresistibly
reminded by such a verdict of Shelley’s swelling lines—
“War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight,
The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade;”
lines which, to borrow a witticism of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s, have “all the
vitality of error,” and will probably be quoted triumphantly by Peace
Societies for many years to come.
In the mean time, there is a remarkable and very significant tendency to
praise all war songs, war stories, and war literature generally, in
proportion to the discomfort and horror they excite, in proportion to
their inartistic and unjustifiable realism. I well remember, when I was
a little girl, having a dismal French tale by Erckmann-Chatrian, called
“Le Conscrit,” given me by a kindly disposed but mistaken friend, and
the disgust with which I waded through those scenes of sordid bloodshed
and misery, untouched by any fire of enthusiasm, any halo of romance.
The very first description of Napoleon,—Napoleon, the idol of my
youthful dreams,—as a fat, pale man, with a tuft of hair upon his
forehead, filled me with loathing for all that was to follow. But I
believe I finished the book,—it never occurred to me, in those innocent
days, not to finish every book that I began,—and then I re-read in
joyous haste all of Sir Walter Scott’s fighting novels, “Waverley,” “Old
Mortality,” “Ivanhoe,” “Quentin Durward,” and even “The Abbot,” which
has one good battle, to get the taste of that abominable story out of my
mouth. Of late years, however, I have heard a great deal of French,
Russian, and occasionally even English literature commended for the very
qualities which aroused my childish indignation. No one has sung the
praises of war more gallantly than Mr. Rudyard Kipling; yet those grim
verses called “The Grave of the Hundred Dead”—verses closely resembling
the appalling specimens of truculency with which Mr. Ruskin began and
ended his brief poetical career—have been singled out from their braver
brethren for especial praise, and offered as “grim, naked, ugly truth”
to those “who would know more of the poet’s picturesque qualities.”
But “grim, naked, ugly truth” can never be made a picturesque quality,
and it is not the particular business of a battle poem to emphasize the
desirability of peace. We all know the melancholy anticlimax of
Campbell’s splendid song “Ye Mariners of England,” when, to three
admirable verses, the poet must needs add a fourth, descriptive of the
joys of harmony, and of the eating and drinking which shall replace the
perils of the sea. I count it a lasting injury, after having my blood
fired with these surging lines,—
“Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell,
Your manly hearts shall glow,
As ye sweep through the deep,
While the stormy winds do blow;
While the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow,”—
to be suddenly introduced to a scene of inglorious junketing; and I am
not surprised that Campbell’s peculiar inspiration, which was born of
war and of war only, failed him the instant he deserted his theme. Such
shocking lines as
“The meteor-flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,”
while quite in harmony with the poet’s ordinary achievements, would have
been simply impossible in those first three verses of “Ye Mariners,”
where he remains true to his one artistic impulse. He strikes a
different and a finer note when, in “The Battle of the Baltic,” he turns
gravely away from feasting and jollity to remember the brave men who
have died for England’s glory:—
“Let us think of them that sleep,
Full many a fathom deep,
By thy wild and stormy steep,
Elsinore!”
To go back to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, however, from whom I have wandered
far, he is more in love with the “dear delights” of battle than with its
dismal carnage, and he wins an easy forgiveness for a few horrors by
showing us much brave and hearty fighting. Who can forget the little
Gurkhas drawing a deep breath of contentment when at last they see the
foe, and gaping expectantly at their officers, “as terriers grin ere the
stone is cast for them to fetch?” Who can forget the joyous abandon with
which Mulvaney the disreputable and his “four an’ twenty young wans”
fling themselves upon Lungtungpen? It is a good and wholesome thing for
a man to be in sympathy with that primitive virtue, courage, to
recognize it promptly, and to do honor to it under any flag. “Homer’s
heart is with the brave of either side,” observes Mr. Lang; “with
Glaucus and Sarpedon of Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus.”
Scott’s heart is with Surrey and Dacre no less than with Lennox and
Argyle; with the English hosts charging like whirlwinds to the fray no
less than with the Scottish soldiers standing ringed and dauntless
around their king. Théodore de Banville, hot with shame over fallen
France, cheeks his bitterness to write some tender verses to the memory
of a Prussian boy found dead on the field, with a bullet-pierced volume
of Pindar on his breast. Dumas, that lover of all brave deeds, cries out
with noble enthusiasm that it was not enough to kill the Highlanders at
Waterloo,—“we had to push them down!” and the reverse of the medal has
been shown us by Mr. Lang in the letter of an English officer, who
writes home that he would have given the rest of his life to have served
with the French cavalry on that awful day. Sir Francis Doyle delights,
like an honest and stout-hearted Briton, to pay an equal tribute of
praise, in rather questionable verse, to the private of the Buffs,
“Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught,
Bewildered and alone,”
who died for England’s honor in a far-off land; and to the Indian
prince, Mehrab Khan, who, brought to bay, swore proudly that he would
perish,
“to the last the lord
Of all that man can call his own,”
and fell beneath the English bayonets at the door of his zenana. This is
the spirit by which brave men know one another the world over, and
which, lying back of all healthy national prejudices, unites in a human
brotherhood those whom the nearness of death has taught to start at no
shadows.
“Oh, east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall meet
Till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
But there is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends
of the earth.”
Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here, too, is a link somewhat
simpler and readier to hand than that much-desired bond of cultivation
which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will one day knit the world together.
The time when Germany will no longer hate France, “because the prose of
France is perfect,” seems still as far-off as it is fair; the day when
“intellectual criticism will bind Europe together” dawns only in the
dreamland of desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at the expense of
“Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and proposals for
unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never
read history;” but criticism, the mediator of the future, “will
annihilate race prejudices by insisting upon the unity of the human mind
in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another
nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of
our own culture, and possibly its most important element.” This
restraining impulse will allow us to fight only red Indians, and
Feejeeans, and Bushmen, from whom no grace of culture is to be gleaned;
and it may prove a strong inducement to some disturbed countries, like
Ireland and Russia, to advance a little further along the paths of
sweetness and light. Meanwhile, the world, which rolls so easily in old
and well-worn ways, will probably remember that “power is measured by
resistance,” and will go on arguing stolidly in platoons.
“All healthy men like fighting and like the sense of danger; all brave
women like to hear of their fighting and of their facing danger,” says
Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himself the defense of war in his own
irresistibly unconvincing manner. Others indeed have delighted in it
from a purely artistic standpoint, or as a powerful stimulus to fancy.
Mr. Saintsbury exults more than most critics in battle poems, and in
those “half-inarticulate songs that set the blood coursing.” Sir Francis
Doyle, whose simple manly soul never wearied of such themes, had no
ambition to outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boyhood. “I knew
the battle in ‘Marmion’ by heart almost before I could read,” he writes
in his “Reminiscences;” “and I cannot raze out—I do not wish to raze
out—of my soul all that filled and colored it in years gone by.” Mr.
Froude, who is as easily seduced by the picturesqueness of a sea fight
as was Canon Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness that the
British privateers who went plundering in the Spanish main were inspired
by a pure love for England, and a zeal for the Protestant faith. He can
say truly with the little boy of adventurous humor,—
“There is something that suits my mind to a T
In the thought of a reg’lar Pirate King.”
Mr. Lang’s love of all warlike literature is too well known to need
comment. As a child, he confesses he pored over “the fightingest parts
of the Bible,” when Sunday deprived him of less hallowed reading. As a
boy, he devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours which were
presumably sacred to the shrine of Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us
with glowing words from the consideration of political problems, or of
our own complicated spiritual machinery, to follow the fortunes of the
brave, fierce men who fought in the lonely north, or of the heroes who
went forth in gilded armor “to win glory or to give it” before the walls
of Troy. In these days, when many people find it easier to read “The
Ring and the Book” than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makes a strong plea in
behalf of that literature which has come down to us out of the past to
stand forevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring the hearts of all
generations until human nature shall be warped from simple and natural
lines. “With the Bible and Shakespeare,” he says, “the Homeric poems are
the best training for life. There is no good quality that they lack;
manliness, courage, reverence for old age and for the hospitable hearth,
justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude towards life and death, are all
conspicuous in Homer.” It might be well, perhaps, to add to this long
list one more incomparable virtue, an instinctive and illogical delight
in living. Amid shipwrecks and battles, amid long wanderings and
hurtling spears, amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear, Homer
teaches us, and teaches us in right joyful fashion, the beauty and value
of an existence which we profess nowadays to find a little burdensome on
our hands.
All these things have the lovers of war said to us, and in all these
ways have they striven to fire our hearts. But Mr. Ruskin is not content
to regard any matter from a purely artistic standpoint, or to judge it
on natural and congenital lines; he must indorse it ethically or
condemn. Accordingly, it is not enough for him, as it would be for any
other man, to claim that “no great art ever yet rose on earth but among
a nation of soldiers.” He feels it necessary to ask himself some
searching and embarrassing questions about fighting “for its own sake,”
and as “a grand pastime,”—questions which he naturally finds it
extremely difficult to answer. It is not enough for him to say, with
equal truth and justice, that if “brave death in a red coat” be no
better than “brave life in a black one,” it is at least every bit as
good. He must needs wax serious, and commit himself to this strong and
doubtful statement:—
“Assume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his
neighbor for exercise; assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have
gained his bread and filled his purse at the sword’s point. Still I feel
as if it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him to have made his
bread by sword play than any other play. I had rather he had made it by
thrusting than by batting,—much more than by betting; much rather that
he should ride war horses than back race horses; and—I say it sternly
and deliberately—much rather would I have him slay his neighbor than
cheat him.”
Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate as this, it would not be
altogether amiss to consult the subject acted upon; in other words, the
neighbor, who, whatever may be his prejudice against dishonest handling,
might probably prefer it to the last irredeemable disaster. In this
commercial age we get tolerably accustomed to being cheated—like the
skinned eel, we are used to it,—but there is an old rhyme which tells us
plainly that a broken neck is beyond all help of healing.
No, it is best, when we treat a theme as many-sided as war, to abandon
modern inquisitorial methods, and confine ourselves to that good
old-fashioned simplicity which was content to take short obvious views
of life. It is best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightly as we
may. The finest poems of battle and of camp have been written in this
unincumbered spirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatch of song
from “Rokeby:”—
“A weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,
And press the rue for wine.
A lightsome eye, a soldier’s mien,
A feather of the blue,
A doublet of the Lincoln green,—
No more of me you knew,
My love!
No more of me you knew.”
And this other, far less familiar, which I quote from Lockhart’s Spanish
Ballads, and which is fitly called “The Wandering Knight’s Song:”—
“My ornaments are arms,
My pastime is in war.
My bed is cold upon the wold,
My lamp yon star.
“My journeyings are long,
My slumbers short and broken;
From hill to hill I wander still,
Kissing thy token.
“I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night, kiss thee.”
Now, apart from the charming felicity of these lines, we cannot but be
struck with their singleness of conception and purpose. “The Wandering
Knight” is well-nigh as disincumbered of mental as of material luggage.
He rides as free from our tangled perplexity of introspection as from
our irksome contrivances for comfort. It is not that he is precisely
guileless or ignorant. One does not journey far over the world without
learning the world’s ways, and the ways of the men who dwell upon her.
But the knowledge of things looked at from the outside is never the
knowledge that wears one’s soul away, and the traveling companion that
Lord Byron found so _ennuyant_,
“The blight of life—the demon Thought,”
forms no part of the “Wandering Knight’s” equipment. As I read this
little fugitive song which has drifted down into an alien age, I feel an
envious liking for those days when the tumult of existence made its
triumph, when action fanned the embers of joy, and when people were too
busy with each hour of life, as it came, to question the usefulness or
desirability of the whole.
There is one more point to consider. Mr. Saintsbury appears to think it
strange that battles, when they occur, and especially when they chance
to be victories, should not immediately inspire good war songs. But this
is seldom or never the case, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” being an
honorable exception to the rule. Drayton’s heroic ballad was written
nearly two hundred years after the battle of Agincourt; Flodden is a
tale of defeat; and Campbell, whose songs are so intoxicatingly warlike,
belonged, I am sorry to say, to the “Peace at all price” party. The fact
is that a battle fought five hundred years ago is just as inspiring to
the poet as a battle fought yesterday; and a brave deed, the memory of
which comes down to us through centuries, stirs our hearts as profoundly
as though we witnessed it in our own time. Sarpedon, leaping lightly
from his chariot to dare an unequal combat; the wounded knight,
Schönburg, dragging himself painfully from amid the dead and dying to
offer his silver shield to his defenseless emperor; the twenty kinsmen
of the noble family of Trauttmansdorf who fell, under Frederick of
Austria, in the single battle of Mühldorf; the English lad, young
Anstruther, who carried the queen’s colors of the Royal Welsh at the
storming of Sebastopol, and who, swift-footed as a schoolboy, was the
first to gain the great redoubt, and stood there one happy moment,
holding his flagstaff and breathing hard, before he was shot dead,—these
are the pictures whose value distance can never lessen, and whose colors
time can never dim. These are the deeds that belong to all ages and to
all nations, a heritage for every man who walks this troubled earth.
“All this the gods have fashioned, and have woven the skein of death for
men, that there might be a song in the ears even of the folk of after
time.”
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