The processes of the two wars, then, were the same,--killing, wounding,
frightening. The causes of the two wars resolved themselves into the
elements of hatred. The details of the two wars meet at many points;
only one must be on one's guard against merely fanciful, merely external
resemblances.
In 1860 I spent a few days in Holland, and among my various excursions
in that fascinating country I took a solitary trip on a _treckschuit_
from Amsterdam to Delft. Holland was so true to Dutch pictures that
there was a retrospective delight in the houses and in the people. There
was a charm in the very signs, in the names of the villas; for my
knowledge of Dutch had not passed beyond the stage at which the
Netherlandish tongue seems to be an English-German Dictionary, disguised
in strong waters. But the thing that struck me most was the general
aspect of the country. Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The gates
guarded the bridges and the canals were the fences, but the canals and
the low bridges were not to be seen at a distance, and the visual effect
was that of isolated gates. It was an absurd landscape even after the
brain had made the necessary corrections.
In the third year of the war I was not far from Fredericksburg. The
country had been stripped, and the forlorn region was a sad contrast to
the smug prosperity of Holland. And yet of a sudden the Dutch landscape
flashed upon my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like Holland, was dotted
with fenceless gates. The rails of the inclosures had long before gone
to feed bivouac fires, but the great gates were too solidly constructed
to tempt marauders. It was an absurd landscape, an absurd parallel.
Historical parallels are often no better. When one compares two
languages of the same family, the first impression is that of
similarity. It is hard for the novice to keep his Italian and his
Spanish apart. The later and more abiding impression is that of
dissimilarity. A total stranger confounds twins in whom the members of
the household find but vague likeness. There is no real resemblance
between the two wars we are contemplating outside the inevitable
features of all armed conflicts, and we must be on our guard against the
sophistication deprecated in the beginning of this study. And yet one
coming fresh to a comparison of the Peloponnesian war and the war
between the States might see a striking similarity, such as I saw
between the Dutch landscape and the landscape in Spottsylvania.
The Peloponnesian war, like our war, was a war between two leagues, a
Northern Union and a Southern Confederacy. The Northern Union,
represented by Athens, was a naval power. The Southern Confederacy,
under the leadership of Sparta, was a land power. The Athenians
represented the progressive element, the Spartans the conservative. The
Athenians believed in a strong centralized government. The Lacedæmonians
professed greater regard for autonomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal
of hardihood, might multiply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it
would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases
of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a
regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other
day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from
Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.
[Note: According to _fama clamosa_, Winfield was originally Wingfield, a
very common Virginian name. The classical parallel of Tromes and
Atrometos will suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes.
Dem. 18, 129.]
Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already said, imperil one's
intellectual honesty, and one would not like to imitate the Byzantine
historians who were given to similar tricks. One of these gentlemen,
Choricius by name, had a seaport to describe. How the actual seaport lay
mattered little to Choricius, so long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was
at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were
assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open
it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little
matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an
island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere.
Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would
serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolæ for
Missionary Ridge, Platæa for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse for
Hampton Roads; and Thucydides' description of the naval engagement and
the watching crowds would be made available for the fight between
Merrimac and Monitor.
The debates in Thucydides would be a quarry for the debates in either
Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical
historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings,
if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a
loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot
of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the
strange doctrine that apophthegms were more to be trusted than any other
form of tradition. There could not have been a more hopeless thesis. The
general who said that he would burn his coat if it knew his plans has
figured in all the wars with which I have been contemporary, was a
conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and passed from camp to camp
in the war between the States. The _mot_, familiar to the classical
scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to that dashing sheik
Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed to both leaders in the final battle
of Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about Socrates is pieced out with
tabs and tags borrowed from different periods. I have heard, say, in the
afternoon, a good story at the expense of a famous American revival
preacher which I had read that morning in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles,
and there is a large stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw off
for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors.
Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his
guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who
conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting
Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much
of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman
historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
who has devoted many pages to the arraignment of Thucydides' style,
cribs with the utmost composure from the author he has vilipended.
Still, we must not set down every coincidence as borrowing. Thucydides
himself insists on the recurrence of the same or similar events in a
history of which human nature is a constant factor. "Undo this button"
is not necessarily a quotation from King Lear. "There is no way but
this" was original with Macaulay, and not stolen from Shakespeare.
"Never mind, general, all this has been my fault," are words attributed
to General Lee after the battle of Gettysburg. This is very much the
language of Gylippus after the failure of his attack on the Athenian
lines before Syracuse. How many heroic as well as unheroic natures have
had to say "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."
[Note: Thuc. 7, 5, 2: [Greek: ouk ephê to hamartêma ekeinôn all' heautou
genesthai.]]
Situations may recur, sayings may recur, but no characters come back.
Nature always breaks her mould. "I could not help muttering to myself,"
says Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, "when the good pastor this
morning told me that Klopstock was the German Milton, 'a very _German_
Milton, indeed!!!'" and Coleridge's italics and three exclamation points
may answer for all parallelisms. When historical characters get far
enough off it may be possible to imitate Plutarch, but only then. Victor
Hugo wrote a passionate protest against the execution of John Brown, in
which he compared Virginia hanging John Brown with Washington putting
Spartacus to death. What Washington would have done with Spartacus can
readily be divined. Those who have stood nearest to Grant and Sherman,
to Lee and Jackson, the men, fail to see any strong resemblance to
leaders in other wars. Nicias, in the Peloponnesian war, whose name
means Winfield, has nothing in common with General Scott, whose plan of
putting down the rebellion, the "Anaconda Plan," as it was called, bears
some resemblance to the scheme of Demosthenes, the Athenian general, for
quelling the Peloponnese. Brasidas was in some respects like Stonewall
Jackson, but Brasidas was not a Presbyterian elder, nor Stonewall
Jackson a cajoling diplomatist.