I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no
fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who
fight their battles at the base. He is invented because these naive
people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a
hero. But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being
brave if you had no fear. The real victory of the hero is not over
outward circumstance, but over himself. One of the bravest men of our
time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of
apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his
fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going
out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. By sheer will he beat
down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man
who knew no fear. But the very essence of his heroism was that he had
fought fear and won.
It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything
discreditable in knowing fear. You might as well say that there is
something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood. The
virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to
lie and yet telling the truth. And the more you are tempted the more
splendid is the resistance. Without temptation you may make a plaster
saint, but not a human hero. That is why the familiar story of Nelson
when a boy--"Fear! grandmother. I never saw fear. What is it?"--is so
essentially false. Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by
man. They were brave to the brink of recklessness. The whole episode
of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the
dictates of prudence. On the facts one would be compelled to admit
that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one
incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals
his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance. When the issue
was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster,
he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore.
It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call
camouflage. When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he
ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter
with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. "This," said
he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal." With such triumphant
self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in
view. But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as
anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in
Southey's "Life of Nelson."
That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle
of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well. At the
age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to
climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance
of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed."
He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing,
and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory
to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my
boy.' I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I
tried? 'But you won't do it again?' she said. I replied, 'Of course
not--where would be the fun?'"
It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince
himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came.
Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense
in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind. I
was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the
country the other day. It had been empty since the beginning of the
war. Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade.
On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried,
"We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined." Then he went out and
shot himself. Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would
have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck
to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any
other.
In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason
from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that
grows by brooding. There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates
how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling
upon fear. He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who
had stared insolently at a lady who was with him. His action led to a
challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning.
When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his
foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold
assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors
as a marksman. As the night advanced he passed through all the stages
from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn
he found a corpse. Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape
the terrors of his mind.
It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear. Give them only
a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference
of disastrous consequences. It is not a bad thing in this world to be
born a little dull and unimaginative. You will have a much more
comfortable time. And if you have not taken that precaution, you will
do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies.
Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom. In the romantic theatre of his
mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always
Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master
with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.