Essays in Idleness — Reading Companion

e 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,”—