'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery
So right his shaft he set,
The swan's feather that his arrow bare
In his heart's blood was wet.'
In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a
superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man
drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a
knight in armour.
Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two
kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer
her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the
higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved
its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the
enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born
too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And
poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the
cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the
introduction of professional soldiers and great armies, where personal
heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons
why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned
whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any
genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the
clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were
done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content
to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the
groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.
If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have
been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy,
and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon
him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque
scenes and characters of a bygone time, and _Bonnie Dundee_ is a
ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is
distinctly romantic and conventional. If he had not been writing for
readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth
century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have
said that they
'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'
An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a
comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the
battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style
must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two
poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the
impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just
been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose
novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted.
When he wrote of the middle ages, as in _Ivanhoe_, _The Talisman_, and
others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the _Legend of Montrose_,
_Old Mortality_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, there are two or three
rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of
vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the
country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty
skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage
artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can
do nothing on a vast scale, cannot manage masses of men; and moreover
it fails to deal effectively with a state of war in which mechanical
skill and the tactical movement of large bodies of troops win the day.
There may be as much personal heroism as ever, but it is lost in the
multitude. Nevertheless sea-fighting, where separate ships may
encounter and grapple like two mortal foes, with the deep water
around and beneath them, gives heroism a better chance; and the
mariner is always a poetic figure. So Thomas Campbell did rise very
nearly to the heroic level in his poem on the battle of the Baltic,
written when the true story of Nelson's famous exploit was still
fresh; we have a clear and forcible impression of the British ships
moving silently to the attack; and the closing lines touch the ancient
ever-living feeling of gratitude to Captain Riou and his brave
comrades, 'so tried and yet so true,' who fell in the great victory.
With this exception, the prolonged conflict between England and
France, which lasted twenty years up to its end at Waterloo, struck
out hardly a spark of heroic poetry. Yet the Peninsular War is full of
splendid military exploits, of fierce battles and the desperate
storming of fortresses: it was a period of great national energy, when
the people were contending with all their heart and strength against a
most dangerous enemy; it was also a time when England was singularly
rich in poets of the highest order. Nevertheless the only verses that
may be assigned to the peculiar class which I have been attempting to
define, were written, not by one of the famous group of poets, but by
an unknown hand; and they relate not to a great battle, but to a
slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am
alluding to the well-known stanzas on the _Burial of Sir John Moore_,
who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything
so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for
a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition
and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal
feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that they are
familiar to all of us, and fresh as when they were first read? Is it
not because the writer had one clear flash of imaginative light,
which showed him the reality of the scene, so that the description
speaks for itself, without literary epithets, creating, as the French
say, the true image. He struck the right note of soldierly emotion,
brief, stern, and compressed, when there is no time for vain
lamentation--as when in the _Iliad_ Ulysses says to Achilles, who is
inconsolable for the death of his friend, that a soldier must bury his
comrade with a pitiless heart, and that in war a day's mourning is all
that can be spared for slain men.[22]
It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the
prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry,
notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus
handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of
giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily
grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately
described elsewhere. This suggestion may derive support from the
observation that whenever, in our own day, we have had brief samples
of verse-writing with a strain of the genuine old quality, they have
almost always come from a distant scene, usually from the frontiers of
the British Empire, far away from the centres of academic culture and
the fields of organised war. Two or three of Rudyard Kipling's short
poems about life on the Afghan border and Indian camp life have the
right ring: they are instinct with the colour and sensation of the
environment: they stir the blood with a conviction of reality. If it
be permissible for a moment to compare these rough energetic verses
with the battle pieces of an immeasurably greater artist--with
Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_, for example--one may see
that in the poetry of action the grand style misses something which
has been caught by the eye that has seen the thing itself; the Charge
is a splendid composition, but the frontier ballad sets you down on
the ground and shows you life.
Undoubtedly, also, the romantic literary style, which prevailed so
long in this country, and which is the natural product of high
culture, has been unfavourable, because it was radically unsuitable,
to the poetry of energetic action. It is true that all the highest
compositions of the heroic poet are set off by a tinge of romance, as
fine drawing is perfected by superb colouring; but the drawbacks of
romance lie in a tendency to vagueness of thought, and to the
preference of archaic words and overstrained sentiments which were
given as poetic mainly because they were far-fetched and did not sound
commonplace. In fact the later poets adopted mechanically the strong
natural language of those who wrote under the inspiration of actual
emotion or events, and therefore they used it awkwardly and
ineffectively; or else in their consciousness of not knowing how
things really happened, they kept within sonorous generalities, which
are the resource of artistic impotence. In our own day we have
witnessed a sharp revolt against romantic verse, and a reversion
toward those forms of art which reflect the actual experience of men,
toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for
what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from
the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that
his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out
of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on
the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which
they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,[23] and so
he overcharges with technicalities or trivial particulars.
Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better
methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is
distinctly improving: though its strength lies in short pieces
repeating some notable incident or dramatic situations bringing out
character, which is just where it began originally, and where indeed
it is likely to remain, for the epic poem, or heroic verse on the
grand scale, may be thought to have disappeared finally.
To conclude a very brief and inadequate dissertation, we may, I think,
lay it down as a principle of the art, that heroic poetry must be true
to circumstances and to character, must have the qualities of
simplicity and sincerity, combined with the magnetic power of stirring
the heart by showing how men and women can behave when really
confronted by danger, death, or irremediable misfortune. Its
background, in skilful hands, is the contrast of calm Nature looking
on at human strife and sorrow, at stern fortitude and energetic effort
in tragic situations. We are reading every day of such situations in
the South African War, where there has been no lack of brave men 'so
tried and yet so true,' who have found themselves back again suddenly
in the rough fighting world of their forefathers, and have felt and
acted like the men of old time. There is abundant proof that the
English folk can display as much heroism as ever men did; but we may
look in vain for the poet who knows how to commemorate their valour
and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.