Part 4
All these and many more are gathered safely into this charming volume. Nothing we long to see appears to be left out, except, indeed, Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” and Herrick’s “Night Piece,” both of them very serious omissions. It seems strange to find seven of Edgar Poe’s poems in a collection which excludes the “Night Piece,” so true a favorite with all girl children, and a favorite that, once rightfully established, can never be thrust from our affections. As for Praed’s “Red Fisherman,” Mr. Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for this “sombre” tale, which, I think, embodies everything that a child ought not to love. It is the only poem in the book that I wish elsewhere; but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice on my part. There may be little readers to whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a pleasing terror, like that which oppressed my infant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brown in the awful witch-haunted forest where Hawthorne has shown us the triumph of evil things. “It is his excursions into the unknown world which the child enjoys,” says Mr. Lang; and how shall we set a limit to his wanderings! He journeys far with careless, secure footsteps; and for him the stars sing in their spheres, and fairies dance in the moonlight, and the hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from hard-won fields, and lovers fly together under the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar, and sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the northern seas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a-Dale, and stands by Marmion’s side in the thick of the ghastly fray. He has given his heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid of Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her death on the cruel Gordon spears, and to the lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by Barthram’s bier. His friends are bold Robin Hood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white-plumed Henry of Navarre, and the princely scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make “laughter for a month, and a good jest forever.” A lordly company these, and seldom to be found in the gray walks of middle age. Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange, and Prince Hal dare not show his laughing face before societies for leveling thrones and reorganizing the universe. We adults pass our days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity,—abhorred of Bunyan’s soul,—and our companions are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrubbing his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and the “deplorable young woman named Dull.” But it is better to be young, and to see the golden light of romance in the skies, and to kiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands like a star on the battlements. It is better to follow Hector to the fight, and Guinevere to the sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the Ancient Mariner to that silent sea where the deathfires gleam by night. Even to us who have made these magic voyages in our childhood there comes straying, at times, a pale reflection of that early radiance, a faint, sweet echo of that early song. Then the streets of the Town of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Falstaff’s great laugh frightens Mr. Despondency into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us under the wintry moonlight, and Porphyro steals by with strange sweets heaped in baskets of wreathed silver. Then we know that with the poets there is perpetual youth, and that for us, as for the child dreaming in the firelight, the shining casements open upon fairyland.
THE PRAISES OF WAR.
WHEN the world was younger and perhaps merrier, when people lived more and thought less, and when the curious subtleties of an advanced civilization had not yet turned men’s heads with conceit of their own enlightening progress from simple to serious things, poets had two recognized sources of inspiration, which were sufficient for themselves and for their unexacting audiences. They sang of love and they sang of war, of fair women and of brave men, of keen youthful passions and of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamonde lingers “in Woodstocke bower,” and Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte; Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Cheviot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his back. It did not occur to the thick-headed generation who first listened to the ballad of “Chevy Chace” to hint that the game was hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as poaching on a little one. This sort of insight was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher, and the nineteenth-century moralist. In earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet troubled himself about was a defensible motive for the battle in which his soul exulted. His business was to describe the fighting, not to justify the fight, which would have been a task of pure supererogation in that truculent age. Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the hard knocks they give and the stout men they lay low!
“Johnie’s set his back against an aik, His foot against a stane; And he has slain the Seven Foresters,— He has slain them a’ but ane.”
The last echo of this purely irresponsible spirit may be found in the “War Song of Dinas Vawr,” where Peacock, always three hundred years behind his time, sings of slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which only his admirable versification can excuse:—
“The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met an host and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it.”
There is not even a lack of food at home—the old traditional dinner of spurs—to warrant this foray. There is no hint of necessity for the harriers, or consideration for the harried.
“We brought away from battle, And much their land bemoaned them, Two thousand head of cattle, And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, King of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow our chorus.”
It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly narrated; but if the lines were a hair-breadth less mellifluous, I think we should call this a very barbarous method of campaigning.
When the old warlike spirit was dying out of English verse, when poets had begun to meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and to counsel man, the good gods gave to England, as a link with the days that were dead, Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton before or since has ever sung, of battlefields and the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignall banks, and the trooper shaking his silken bridle reins upon the river shore:—
“Adieu for evermore, My love! And adieu for evermore.”
These are not precisely the themes which enjoy unshaken popularity to-day,—“the poet of battles fares ill in modern England,” says Sir Francis Doyle,—and as a consequence there are many people who speak slightingly of Scott’s poetry, and who appear to claim for themselves some inscrutable superiority by so doing. They give you to understand, without putting it too coarsely into words, that they are beyond that sort of thing, but that they liked it very well as children, and are pleased if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of unfortunates who, through no apparent fault of their own, have ceased to take delight in Scott’s novels, and who manifest a curious indignation because the characters in them go ahead and do things, instead of thinking and talking about them, which is the present approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why, what time have the good people in “Quentin Durward” for speculation and chatter? The rush of events carries them irresistibly into action. They plot, and fight, and run away, and scour the country, and meet with so many adventures, and perform so many brave and cruel deeds, that they have no chance for introspection and the joys of analysis. Naturally, those writers who pride themselves upon making a story out of nothing, and who are more concerned with excluding material than with telling their tales, have scant liking for Sir Walter, who thought little and prated not at all about the “art of fiction,” but used the subjects which came to hand with the instinctive and unhesitating skill of a great artist. The battles in “Quentin Durward” and “Old Mortality” are, I think, as fine in their way as the battle of Flodden; and Flodden, says Mr. Lang, is the finest fight on record,—“better even than the stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers in the Odyssey.”
The ability to carry us whither he would, to show us whatever he pleased, and to stir our hearts’ blood with the story of
“old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago,”
was the especial gift of Scott,—of the man whose sympathies were as deep as life itself, whose outlook was as wide as the broad bosom of the earth he trod on. He believed in action, and he delighted in describing it. “The thinker’s voluntary death in life” was not, for him, the power that moves the world, but rather deeds,—deeds that make history and that sing themselves forever. He honestly felt himself to be a much smaller man than Wellington. He stood abashed in the presence of the soldier who had led large issues and controlled the fate of nations. He would have been sincerely amused to learn from “Robert Elsmere”—what a delicious thing it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading “Robert Elsmere”!—that “the decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.” The decisive events of the world, Scott held to take place in the field of action; on the plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He knew what befell Athens when she could put forward no surer defense against Philip of Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever written in praise of freedom. It was better, he probably thought, to argue as the English did, “in platoons.” The schoolboy who fought with the heroic “Green-Breeks” in the streets of Edinburgh; the student who led the Tory youths in their gallant struggle with the riotous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cudgeling out of the theatre they had disgraced; the man who, broken in health and spirit, was yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satisfaction he desired, was consistent throughout with the simple principles of a bygone generation. “It is clear to me,” he writes in his journal, “that what is least forgiven in a man of any mark or likelihood is want of that article blackguardly called _pluck_. All the fine qualities of genius cannot make amends for it. We are told the genius of poets especially is irreconcilable with this species of grenadier accomplishment. If so, _quel chien de génie!_”
_Quel chien de génie_ indeed, and far beyond the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing sordidness and seriousness of an industrial and discontented age, struck a single resonant note that rings in our hearts to-day like the echo of good and joyous things:—
“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.”
The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered, into admirable prose when Graham of Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his views on living and dying. At present, Philosophy and Philanthropy between them are hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it should be a secondary consideration, or perhaps no consideration at all, his sense of duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like Homer, held somewhat different views, and absolutely declined to let “that jade Duty” have everything her own way. It is the plain duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare’s side and guard her as they were bidden, instead of which they rush off, with Sir Walter’s tacit approbation, to the fray.
“No longer Blount the view could bear: ‘By heaven and all its saints! I swear I will not see it lost! Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare May bid your beads and patter prayer,— I gallop to the host.’”
It was this cheerful acknowledgment of human nature as a large factor in life which gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave, imperfect men; which enabled him to draw with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le Balafré, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William of Deloraine. Le Balafré, indeed, with his thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is every whit as veracious as if he were the over-analyzed child of realism, instead of one of the many minor characters thrust with wanton prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel.
Alone among modern poets, Scott sings Homerically of strife. Others have caught the note, but none have upheld it with such sustained force, such clear and joyous resonance. Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs. Browning, who said she could not read the “Lays” lying down; they drew her irresistibly to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before my eyes. I see—whether I want to or not—a platform, and the poet’s own beloved schoolboy declaiming with appropriate gestures those glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings of Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks waver and reel before the charge of Stanley’s men, how Tunstall’s stainless banner sweeps the field, and how, in the gathering gloom,
“The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood, Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell.”
There is none of this noble simplicity in the somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which read a little like old Kaiser William’s war dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand times are the splendid swing, the captivating enthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,” which hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were King Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash. The ardor for strife, the staying power of quiet courage, all are here; and here, too, a felicity of language that makes each noble name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh incentive to heroic deeds.
“With Spanish yew so strong, Arrows a cloth-yard long, That like to serpents stung, Piercing the weather; None from his fellow starts, But playing manly parts, And like true English hearts, Stuck close together. ————— “Warwick in blood did wade, Oxford the foe invade, And cruel slaughter made, Still as they ran up; Suffolk his axe did ply, Beaumont and Willoughby Bare them right doughtily, Ferrers and Fanhope.
“Upon Saint Crispin’s day Fought was this noble fray, Which fame did not delay To England to carry;
Oh, when shall Englishmen With such acts fill a pen, Or England breed again Such a King Harry?”
Political economists and chilly historians and all long-headed calculating creatures generally may perhaps hint that invading France was no part of England’s business, and represented fruitless labor and bloodshed. But this, happily, is not the poet’s point of view. He dreams with Hotspur
“Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain, And all the currents of a heady fight.”
He hears King Harry’s voice ring clearly above the cries and clamors of battle:—
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead;”
and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and the field of Agincourt seem not only glorious but righteous things. “That pure and generous desire to thrash the person opposed to you because he _is_ opposed to you, because he is not ‘your side,’” which Mr. Saintsbury declares to be the 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,”—
to be suddenly introduced to a scene of inglorious junketing; and I am not surprised that Campbell’s peculiar inspiration, which was born of war and of war only, failed him the instant he deserted his theme. Such shocking lines as
“The meteor-flag of England Shall yet terrific burn,”
while quite in harmony with the poet’s ordinary achievements, would have been simply impossible in those first three verses of “Ye Mariners,” where he remains true to his one artistic impulse. He strikes a different and a finer note when, in “The Battle of the Baltic,” he turns gravely away from feasting and jollity to remember the brave men who have died for England’s glory:—
“Let us think of them that sleep, Full many a fathom deep, By thy wild and stormy steep, Elsinore!”