means more than anything in the world to us but just our own. Only at
present it means ever so much more, almost unspeakably more, than it has
ever done in the past, and I can't help inviting you to feel with me,
for a very few moments, what the real force of this association to which
we now throb consists of, and why it so moves us. We enjoy generous
emotions _because_ they are generous, because generosity is a noble
passion and a glow, because we spring with it for the time above our
common pedestrian pace--and this just in proportion as all questions and
doubts about it drop to the ground. But great reasons never spoil a
great sympathy, and to see an inspiring object in a strong light never
made any such a shade less inspiring. So, therefore, in these days when
our great neighbour and Ally is before us in a beauty that is tragic,
tragic because menaced and overdarkened, the closest possible
appreciation of what it is that is thereby in peril for ourselves and
for the world makes the image shine with its highest brightness at the
same time that the cloud upon it is made more black. When I sound the
depth of my own affection so fondly excited, I take the like measure for
all of us and feel the glad recognition I meet in thus putting it to
you, for our full illumination, that what happens to France happens to
all that part of ourselves which we are most proud, and most finely
advised, to enlarge and cultivate and consecrate.
Our heroic friend sums up for us, in other words, and has always summed
up, the life of the mind and the life of the senses alike, taken
together, in the most irrepressible freedom of either--and, after that
fashion, positively lives _for_ us, carries on experience for us; does
it under our tacit and our at present utterly ungrudging view of her
being formed and endowed and constantly prompted, toward such doing, on
all sorts of sides that are simply so many reasons for our standing
off, standing off in a sort of awed intellectual hush or social
suspense, and watching and admiring and thanking her. She is sole and
single in this, that she takes charge of those of the interests of man
which most dispose him to fraternise with himself, to pervade all his
possibilities and to taste all his faculties, and in consequence to find
and to make the earth a friendlier, an easier, and especially a more
various sojourn; and the great thing is the amiability and the
authority, intimately combined, with which she has induced us all to
trust her on this ground. There are matters as to which every set of
people has of course most to trust itself, most to feel its own genius
and its own stoutness--as we are here and all round about us knowing and
abiding by that now as we have never done. But I verily think there has
never been anything in the world--since the most golden aspect of
antiquity at least--like the way in which France has been trusted to
gather the rarest and fairest and sweetest fruits of our so tremendously
and so mercilessly turned-up garden of life. She has gardened where the
soil of humanity has been most grateful and the aspect, so to call it,
most toward the sun, and there, at the high and yet mild and fortunate
centre, she has grown the precious, intimate, the nourishing, finishing
things that she has inexhaustibly scattered abroad. And if we have all
so taken them from her, so expected them from her as our right, to the
point that she would have seemed positively to fail of a passed pledge
to help us to happiness if she had disappointed us, this has been
because of her treating us to the impression of genius as no nation
since the Greeks has treated the watching world, and because of our
feeling that genius at that intensity is infallible.
What it has all amounted to, as I say, is that we have never known
otherwise an agent so beautifully organised, organised from within, for
a mission, and that such an organisation at free play has made us really
want never to lift a finger to break the charm. We catch at every turn
of our present long-drawn crisis indeed that portentous name: it's
displayed to us on a measureless scale that our Enemy is organised,
organised possibly to the effect of binding us with a spell if anything
_could_ keep us passive. The term has been in a manner, by that
association, compromised and vulgarised: I say vulgarised because any
history of organisation from without and for intended aggression and
self-imposition, however elaborate the thing may be, shows for merely
mechanical and bristling compared with the condition of being naturally
and functionally endowed and appointed. This last is the only fair
account of the complete and perfect case that France has shown us and
that civilisation has depended on for half its assurances. Well, now, we
have before us this boundless extension of the case, that, as we have
always known what it was to see the wonderful character I speak of range
through its variety and keep shining with another and still another
light, so in these days we assist at what we may verily call the supreme
evidence of its incomparable gift for vivid exhibition. It takes our
great Ally, and her only, to be as vivid for concentration, for
reflection, for intelligent, inspired contraction of life toward an end
all but smothered in sacrifice, as she has ever been for the most
splendidly wasteful diffusion and communication; and to give us a view
of her nature and her mind in which, laying down almost every advantage,
every art and every appeal that we have generally known her by, she
takes on energies, forms of collective sincerity, silent eloquence and
selected example that are fresh revelations--and so, bleeding at every
pore, while at no time in all her history so completely erect, makes us
feel her perhaps as never before our incalculable, immortal France.
THE LONG WARDS
There comes back to me out of the distant past an impression of the
citizen soldier at once in his collective grouping and in his impaired,
his more or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for long years as
the most intimate vision of him that my span of life was likely to
disclose. This was a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to
recover it, but I mention it because I was to find at the end of time
that I had kept it in reserve, left it lurking deep down in my sense of
things, however shyly and dimly, however confusedly even, as a term of
comparison, a glimpse of something by the loss of which I should have
been the poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit, in fine, as
only needed darkness to close round it a little from without in order to
give forth a vague phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have
been very early, in our Civil War; yet not so early but that a large
number of those who had answered President Lincoln's first call for an
army had had time to put in their short period (the first term was so
short then, as was likewise the first number,) and reappear again in
camp, one of those of their small New England state, under what seemed
to me at the hour, that of a splendid autumn afternoon, the thickest
mantle of heroic history. If I speak of the impression as confused I
certainly justify that mark of it by my failure to be clear at this
moment as to how much they were in general the worse for wear--since
they can't have been exhibited to me, through their waterside settlement
of tents and improvised shanties, in anything like hospital conditions.
However, I cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always cherished it, for
the sake alone of the general note exhaled, the thing that has most kept
remembrance unbroken. I carried away from the place the impression, the
one that not only was never to fade, but was to show itself susceptible
of extraordinary eventual enrichment. I may not pretend now to refer it
to the more particular sources it drew upon at that summer's end of
1861, or to say why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow
definitely stricken, so largely either lying in apparent helplessness or
moving about in confessed languor: it suffices me that I have always
thought of them as expressing themselves at almost every point in the
minor key, and that this has been the reason of their interest. What I
call the note therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence
and the most inspiring--inspiring I mean for consideration of the
admirable sincerity that we thus catch in the act: the note of the quite
abysmal softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation, that forms the
alternative aspect, the passive as distinguished from the active, of the
fighting man whose business is in the first instance formidably to
bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of course recognise, amid the
horrors that the German powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for
years conspiring to let loose upon the world by such appalling engines
and agencies as mankind had never before dreamed of; but just that is
the lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a scale beside
which, and though save indeed for a single restriction, the whole
previous illustration of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a
generalising blur that exhibition of the first American levies as a
measure of experience had stamped and harrowed them, the signally
attaching mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that if I
didn't fear, for the connection, to appear to compare the slighter
things with the so much greater, the diminished shadow with the
far-spread substance, I should speak of my small old scrap of truth,
miserably small in contrast with the immense evidence even then to have
been gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion didn't come to
me, as having contained possibilities of development that I must have
languished well-nigh during a lifetime to crown it with.
One had during the long interval not lacked opportunity for a vision of
the soldier at peace, moving to and fro with a professional eye on the
horizon, but not fished out of the bloody welter and laid down to pant,
as we actually see him among the Allies, almost on the very bank and
within sound and sight of his deepest element. The effect of many of the
elapsing years, the time in England and France and Italy, had indeed
been to work his collective presence so closely and familiarly into any
human scene pretending to a full illustration of our most generally
approved conditions that I confess to having missed him rather
distressfully from the picture of things offered me during a series of
months spent not long ago in a few American cities after years of
disconnection. I can scarce say why I missed him sadly rather than
gladly--I might so easily have prefigured one's delight in his absence;
but certain it is that my almost outraged consciousness of our
practically doing without him amid American conditions was a revelation
of the degree in which his great imaging, his great reminding and
enhancing function is rooted in the European basis. I felt his
non-existence on the American positively produce a void which nothing
else, as a vivifying substitute, hurried forward to fill; this being
indeed the case with many of the other voids, the most aching, which
left the habituated eye to cast about as for something to nibble in a
state of dearth. We never know, I think, how much these wanting elements
have to suggest to the pampered mind till we feel it living in view of
the community from which they have been simplified away. On these
occasions they conspire with the effect of certain other, certain
similar expressions, examples of social life proceeding as by the
serene, the possibly too serene, process of mere ignorance, to bring to
a head for the fond observer the wonder of what is supposed to strike,
for the projection of a finished world, the note that they are not there
to strike. However, as I quite grant the hypothesis of an observer still
fond and yet remarking the lapse of the purple patch of militarism but
with a joy unclouded, I limit myself to the merely personal point that
the fancy of a particular brooding analyst _could_ so sharply suffer
from a vagueness of privation, something like an unseasoned
observational diet, and then, rather to his relief, find the mystery
cleared up. And the strict relevancy of the bewilderment I glance at,
moreover, becomes questionable, further, by reason of my having, with
the outbreak of the horrors in which we are actually steeped, caught
myself staring at the exhibited militarism of the general British scene
not much less ruefully than I could remember to have stared, a little
before, at the utter American deficit. Which proves after all that the
rigour of the case had begun at a bound to defy the largest luxury of
thought; so that the presence of the military in the picture on the mere
moderate insular scale struck one as 'furnishing' a menaced order but in
a pitiful and pathetic degree.
The degree was to alter, however, by swift shades, just as one's
comprehension of the change grew and grew with it; and thus it was that,
to cut short the record of our steps and stages, we have left
immeasurably behind us here the question of what might or what should
have been. That belonged, with whatever beguiled or amused ways of
looking at it, to the abyss of our past delusion, a collective state of
mind in which it had literally been possible to certain sophists to
argue that, so far from not having soldiers enough, we had more than we
were likely to know any respectable public call for. It was in the very
fewest weeks that we replaced a pettifogging consciousness by the most
splendidly liberal, and, having swept through all the first phases of
anxiety and suspense, found no small part of our measure of the matter
settle down to an almost luxurious study of our multiplied defenders
after the fact, as I may call it, or in the light of that acquaintance
with them as products supremely tried and tested which I began by
speaking of. We were up to our necks in this relation before we could
turn round, and what upwards of a year's experience of it has done in
the contributive and enriching way may now well be imagined. I might
feel that my marked generalisation, the main hospital impression,
steeps the case in too strong or too stupid a synthesis, were it not
that to consult my memory, a recollection of countless associative
contacts, is to see the emphasis almost absurdly thrown on my
quasi-paradox. Just so it is of singular interest for the witnessing
mind itself to feel the happy truth stoutly resist any qualifying
hint--since I am so struck with the charm, as I can only call it, of the
tone and temper of the man of action, the creature appointed to advance
and explode and destroy, and elaborately instructed as to how to do
these things, reduced to helplessness in the innumerable instances now
surrounding us. It doesn't in the least take the edge from my impression
that his sweet reasonableness, representing the opposite end of his
wondrous scale, is probably the very oldest story of the touching kind
in the world; so far indeed from my claiming the least originality for
the appealing appearance as it has lately reached me from so many sides,
I find its suggestion of vast communities, communities of patience and
placidity, acceptance and submission pushed to the last point, to be
just what makes the whole show most illumination.
'Wonderful that, from east to west, they must _all_ be like this,' one
says to oneself in presence of certain consistencies, certain positive
monotonies of aspect; 'wonderful that if joy of battle (for the classic
term, in spite of new horrors, seems clearly still to keep its old
sense,) has, to so attested a pitch, animated these forms, the
disconnection of spirit should be so prompt and complete, should hand
the creature over as by the easiest turn to the last refinements of
accommodation. The disconnection of the flesh, of physical function in
whatever ravaged area, _that_ may well be measureless; but how
interesting, if the futility of such praise doesn't too much dishonour
the subject, the exquisite anomaly of the intimate readjustment of the
really more inflamed and exasperated part, or in other words of the
imagination, the captured, the haunted vision, to life at its most
innocent and most ordered!' To that point one's unvarying thought of
the matter, which yet, though but a meditation without a conclusion,
becomes the very air in which fond attention spends itself. So far as
commerce of the acceptable, the tentatively helpful kind goes, one looks
for the key to success then, among the victims, exactly on that ground
of the apprehension pacified and almost, so to call it, trivialised. The
attaching thing becomes thus one's intercourse with the imagination of
the particular patient subject, the individual himself, in the measure
in which this interest bears us up and carries us along; which name for
the life of his spirit has to cover, by a considerable stretch, all the
ground. By the stretch of the name, moreover, I am far from meaning any
stretch of the faculty itself--which remains for the most part a
considerably contracted or inert force, a force in fact often so
undeveloped as to be insusceptible of measurement at all, so that one
has to resort, in face of the happy fact that communion still does hold
good, to some other descriptive sign for it. That sign, however,
fortunately presents itself with inordinate promptitude and fits to its
innocent head with the last perfection the cap, in fact the very crown,
of an office that we can only appraise as predetermined good nature. We
after this fashion score our very highest on behalf of a conclusion, I
think, in feeling that whether or no the British warrior's good nature
has much range of fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be of it,
is at least so good-natured as to show absolutely everything it touches,
everything without exception, even the worst machinations of the enemy,
in that colour. Variety and diversity of exhibition, in a world
virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects
for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked for quite away from
the question of physical patience, of the general consent to suffering
and mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection of the sort of
mind and thought, the sort of moral attitude, that are born of the
sufferer's other relations; which I like to think of as being different
from country to country, from class to class, and as having their
fullest national and circumstantial play.
It would be of the essence of these remarks, could I give them within my
space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them, that they
pretend to refer here to the British private soldier only--generalisation
about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much
enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and modesty of these,
in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I frankly confess, as
probably the very flower of the human race. One's apprehension of
'Tommy'--and I scarce know whether more to dislike the liberty this mode
of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain it for the
tenderness really latent in it--is in itself a theme for fine notation,
but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless hospital
ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive and the so
strangely quiet tides of his presence ebb and flow, and it stays me
there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away, in
its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the very
character of the people, and so going on for ever--never arriving or
coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction
or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common
personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the
thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes
vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now
so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an
unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to
exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense, indeed,
if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the
jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the
practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be
felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing
turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is
true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder which is the most
interested party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed or the
friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried to forearm himself against
such a measure of the 'criticism of life' as might well be expected to
break upon him from the couch in question, and who yet, a thousand
occasions for it having been, all round him, inevitably neglected, finds
this ingenious provision quite left on his hands. He may well ask
himself what he is to do with people who so consistently and so
comfortably content themselves with _being_--being for the most part
incuriously and instinctively admirable--that nothing whatever is left
of them for reflection as distinguished from their own practice; but the
only answer that comes is the reproduction of the note. He may, in the
interest of appreciation, try the experiment of lending them some scrap
of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall meet him on congruous
ground, the ground of encouragement to his own participating impulse.
They are imaged, under that possibility, after the manner of those
unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom
you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank you for
helping them. The inmates of the long wards, however, have no use for
any imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they feel in their own
way, they feel a great deal, they don't at all conceal from you that to
have seen what they have seen is to have seen things horrible and
monstrous--but there is no estimate of them for which they seek to be
indebted to you, and nothing they less invite from you than to show them
that such visions must have poisoned their world. Their world isn't in
the least poisoned; they have assimilated their experience by a process
scarce at all to be distinguished from their having healthily got rid of
it.