CHAPTER XXXVII.
Of the half-hour which followed I can give no coherent account. As I try to recall it, after the lapse of many years, details start into vivid relief, but without sequence or any clear relation of cause and effect.
I have an impression of helping Lavender to raise Fédore from the ground, and of his muttering—‘A foul blow, before God a foul blow,’ as we laid her, quivering but apparently unconscious, upon the couch. An impression of sultry, copper-coloured sunshine suddenly and harshly lighting up the disordered room, the grim assembly of men, and the woman’s pale recumbent figure, as with a glare of widespread conflagration. I have an impression of Marsigli, too, and that a very strange one, coolly holding out his hands—the right hand horribly splashed and stained—while Lavender clapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. The fury of primitive passion seemed assuaged in him by his hideous act of vengeance, and he had become impassive, courtly even in manner, as I remembered him when waiting on her Magnificence at table or ushering in her guests. He had given himself up, as I heard later, without any struggle or attempt at escape. But above all I have an impression, nauseating and to me indescribably dreadful, which—though I trust I am not unduly squeamish—I shall, I believe, carry with me to the day of my death, an impression of the sight, the sense, the smell of fresh shed blood. Upon that I will not dwell further, since, however deeply affecting to myself, it can serve no useful purpose.
Finally—summoned, I suppose, by the younger of Lavender’s underlings, who had reappeared after locking the servant, Marie, in some room below—a surgeon arrived. Then I slipped away downstairs and out into the comparatively cool untainted atmosphere of the shabby little garden. If I was wanted, they must call me. Not voluntarily could I witness a professional examination of what, less than an hour ago, had been a strong and very beautiful if very sinful woman, and was now but a helpless corpse.
All my thought had softened towards Fédore. Her evildoings—evil even in respect of her accomplice—were manifest. For, let us be just, Marsigli’s crime was not without provocation. But she had played for great stakes and had lost. The pathos of irremediable failure was upon her. And I was awe-stricken by the swiftness of her punishment, the relentless and appalling haste with which she had been thrust out of life. Into what uncharted regions of being had her astute, ambitious, and voluptuous spirit now passed? Regardless of the prohibitions of my Church, I prayed—and how earnestly!—her sins might be forgiven; and that through the Eternal Mercy—so far broader, deeper, more abiding, as I confidently believe, than any man-made definition of it—she might even yet find a place for repentance and peace at the last.
Under the plane-tree I found a rickety garden seat, on which, being now very tired, I was glad enough to rest.
How long I remained there in solitude—hearing the distant roar of London and a confused movement and noise of voices from the street, in which I judged a crowd had now gathered—I know not. But, finally, I beheld the stalwart form of Lavender, his hands clasped behind him and his head bent as in deep thought, coming up the wet garden path between the straggling row of little fruit-trees. His aspect struck me as depressed.
‘Well, sir,’ he said, when he reached me, ‘I think we have done all we can for to-night. I have disposed of Mr. Marsigli, and I and my men have been pretty thoroughly through the house. Some of what I take to be the stolen jewels are there, and a certain amount of plate; but no letters or papers that I can discover.’
He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
‘This is strictly between ourselves, sir,’ he went on, ‘you understand of course?’
I assured him I did.
‘Then I think I may say that in my opinion you can make your mind easy as to the existence of a previous marriage. You remember the conversation we overheard? Her answer, you may have observed, was not a denial of the fact but of the existence of proof—a very different story. However, if we fail to find proofs nearer home it will be simple to take a run over to Paris. We shall have no difficulty with the prisoner. It is in his interest to give all the information he can, and he is sharp enough to know that. A rum customer, though, as I have ever had to deal with—one minute a mad savage and the next close on a fine gentleman. Trying cattle these foreigners, always springing some trick on you! He’ll have to swing for her, I expect—still she must have led him a pretty lively dance. Something to be said on both sides, sir, as in my experience there usually is.’
Much of the above was welcome hearing; yet the detective’s aspect remained depressed. Again he wiped his face.
‘And now I dare say you’ll not be sorry to be moving, sir,’ he remarked.
Then as I rose, stiff and weary, and walked beside him along the garden path, the real source of his trouble was disclosed.
‘I feel I am bound to apologise, sir, for letting you in for so much unpleasantness. I blame myself; I was over-confident, and have got a well-deserved slap to my professional pride as the result.’
‘How so?’ I asked him.
‘Why, I delayed too long before opening those double doors in my eagerness to secure all the evidence I could—a mistake which might be excusable in a youngster, but not in one of my standing. The very secret of our business is to know the moment for action to a tick. I let them both get too worked up. And, worked up as they were, he being Italian, I ought to have foreseen the likelihood of that knife. No, sir, look at it what way I will, I am bound to blame myself. It is a discredit, in my opinion, and a grave one, for a man in my position to have a murder—and in broad daylight too—committed within three yards of his nose. The less said the better, I’m afraid, for some time to come, sir, about Lavender’s luck.’
I consoled the mortified and over-conscientious hunter of criminals and crime to the best of my ability; and then, thankfully bidding farewell to that blood-stained and tragic little house, pushed my way, with Lavender’s help, through the gaping and curious crowd in the street, and, bestowing myself in the coach one of his men had called for me, rumbled and jolted back to Grosvenor Square through the hot, thundery dusk.
(To be continued.)
WAR AND DIPLOMACY IN SHAKESPEARE.
An address given to the Ancoats Brotherhood, April 2, 1916.
BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK, BART.
Being bidden to set down a subject for your entertainment, advised that it should have some relation to Shakespeare, and unable to distract my thoughts from war and the state of Europe for long together, I combined war, diplomacy, and Shakespeare at a venture; I had never considered Shakespeare’s work, as bearing on either of those topics, with any particular attention, and had no settled expectation of what might be the outcome.
In the result I confess that I am surprised, and, as that result is largely negative and therefore incapable of demonstrative proof, I do not feel much confidence that I shall be believed. When Shakespeare was growing up and beginning to know the world, both war and diplomacy were full of fresh matter for curiosity. Diplomacy, as we now understand it, was an invention of the Renaissance, and especially the Italian Renaissance, flourishing in an exuberant youth and wearing the ornaments of humanist learning not always free from pedantry, and humanist accomplishment often straying into over-ingenious conceits. The letters of Elizabethan statesmen and scholars, even on ordinary business, often conceal their real point from a modern’s first reading by their refined excess of caution. Here, it would seem, the comic Muse might find profitable matter, if only it came within her range of observation.
War, again, was ancient enough in itself, and so indeed were the fundamental rules of military art; but the outward face of war and the whole scheme of manœuvres, tactics, and fortification, had passed or were still passing through critical change due to the general use of fire-arms. Henry VIII.’s castles embodied the latest designs of Italian engineers, and English archery was already decaying though shooting at butts was still a matter of legal duty. Many details of armament and the like were in a state of transition, and came to rest only about the end of the seventeenth century, a rest which was little troubled for a century more. I need hardly remind you that Marlborough would have found very few novelties in Wellington’s army, save for such trifles as the cock of a hat, and the recognition—still not wholly without grudging—of gunners as being soldiers and not mere auxiliary artificers. Shakespeare found the art of war in such a swift new growth as was not to happen again till the times of which I can remember the beginning.
It would seem offhand, therefore, as if we ought to find, in the writing of so keen an observer as Shakespeare, considerable marks of these innovations, and some evidence of intelligent curiosity about their working: not so much, indeed, as would prove Shakespeare either an ambassador or a soldier, though I believe some ingenious persons have let their fancy go so far even as that. But in fact my search up and down the plays has led me to think that Shakespeare the playwright could do nothing with the modern diplomatic art, even if he had any knowledge of it, and that he never troubled himself much about the revolution in the art of war. Observe, I say Shakespeare the playwright. We have very little evidence of Shakespeare’s private pursuits and tastes outside the theatre, and for aught we know he may have been interested in matters for which the stage had no use, or which he did not choose to show there for other reasons. Observe also that beyond question the externals of both diplomacy and war figure in Shakespeare’s works, and those of war rather abundantly. You shall find passages of embassies and ambassadors, many fighting men, a fair number of fights on the stage, not counting brawls and private encounters, and plenty of talk about guns and gunpowder. Fire-arms might still have a smack of novelty at Stratford-on-Avon when William Shakespeare was a lad. And yet he thought them (if he thought at all) older than they were, for we read of cannon in ‘King John’ a century and more before they came into use, and about half a century before Roger Bacon made a cracker. As there is not a word about Magna Carta in ‘King John,’ nor in the older play on which Shakespeare worked, some persons may guess that ‘the troublesome raigne of John, King of England’ was a very dark age to Elizabethan playwrights. But for my part I would rather believe the omission to be a deliberate touch of dramatic fitness. John’s crimes and defaults could not be concealed; nevertheless he is exhibited as becoming at the last a champion of England against foreign encroachment, and it would have spoilt that effect to bring in his differences with the barons on constitutional points. It is true that the Great Charter had not yet become a popular rallying cry, but knowledge of its existence can hardly have been confined to antiquarian scholars. This, however, is not to the purpose here; and in truth the anachronism of the cannon is only a conspicuous example of a kind fairly common in Shakespeare. Thus King Henry V. is made to speak of the Grand Turk as holding Constantinople a full generation too soon.
To return to our theme, the treatment of public affairs and negotiation in Shakespeare is wholly subordinate to stage effect, the Elizabethan stage effect which depended largely on rhetorical set speeches in the more serious passages, and it is therefore rudimentary from a political point of view. Shakespeare knew the conceits of the fashionable epistolary style well enough, and could make sport with them. But when princes and their ministers discourse on affairs of state, contentiously or otherwise, we have no play of dialectic or development of argument. Every speaker gives his own view with little regard to conviction or reply, the matter being taken just as it came to hand in the chronicle or other authority relied upon, and the manner worked up more or less according to the importance of the scene and personages and the opportunity given by the situation. Recrimination is not uncommon, but there is no real critical discussion. Still less is there any indication of what Shakespeare himself thought of the merits. At the beginning of ‘Henry V.’ we find the King’s clerical advisers deliberately encouraging a foreign war of ambition to divert an attack on swollen church revenues,[1] and the Archbishop of Canterbury giving transparently bad reasons (as at this day they seem to us) for the English claim to the crown of France. There is no suggestion of anyone seeing anything wrong in such conduct; not that this is any ground for inferring that Shakespeare approved it. He followed his chronicle, here as elsewhere, mistakes and all.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a live negotiation on the stage is the conference of Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer over the map of England, already partitioned in their imagination, in the third act of ‘Henry IV.,’ Part I. The scene is admirably contrived to bring out Hotspur’s reckless ambition and Glendower’s pride, and for that very reason there is no scope for Italian subtilties. Hotspur blurts out his objection to the proposed boundary without reserve or preparation of any kind:—
Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here,
In quantity equals not one of yours:
See how this river comes me cranking in,
And cuts me from the best of all my land
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.
The course of the river, he says, must be changed to give a juster line.
After a short and heated bandying of words both Hotspur and Glendower suddenly think better of it. Glendower offers to yield:—
‘Come, you shall have Trent turn’d’
and Hotspur magnificently waives the whole quarrel:—
‘I do not care;
I’ll give thrice so much land to any well-deserving[2] friend;
But in the way of bargain, mark you me,
I’ll cavil to the ninth part of a hair.’
This is not a sample of diplomacy—nor would diplomatic art have been in place—but it is great play-writing which the mysterious dispensations of modern theatrical management compel us to enjoy only with the mind’s ear ‘in the closet,’ as our ancestors said. I have seen Phelps in Falstaff, but ‘Henry IV.’ does not keep the stage.
Outside the region of public affairs the intricate combinations of device and accident which formed the staple of the Italian novel were familiar enough to Shakespeare. They were plastic in his hands, assuming a farcical aspect in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a purely comic one in the higher sense of comedy in Portia’s caskets and her secret expedition to Venice, and a serio-comic one in ‘Twelfth Night,’ though in spirit, as Mr. Masefield has finely observed, that is the most English of the great comedies; while in Iago the same instrument sounds the deepest of tragic notes. I do not count the catastrophe of Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ where all reason, justice, and probability are violated with a superb audacity that never fails to carry the spectator on a magic flood of illusion in even a passable performance. Therefore I see no need to set down Shakespeare’s eschewing of diplomacy to personal ignorance or indifference. It is true that he did not consort much with ambassadors or secretaries of state, neither were state papers accessible in print as they now are. But the very simplest explanation seems like to be the right one, that such material would not serve his turn. The game of diplomacy, being mostly played with pens and ink, and a leisurely game in those days, was not presentable to an audience. Exchange of dispatches and notes may make good reading for posterity, but is not good stuff for actors; and Shakespeare’s business was to produce acting stage-plays, which is an elementary truth forgotten by too many commentators.
Turn we then to the more bustling field of war. If anyone expects to find a general moral judgment about war in Shakespeare he will be disappointed. Shakespeare, like Justinian—a person to whom it would be hard to find any other resemblance in him—accepts war among the inevitable facts of life. Princes and nations fight, and arms are the natural profession of a gentleman. One of man’s seven ages, according to Jaques, is to be a soldier, ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard’; and we are told that Bassanio was a soldier, seemingly because otherwise something would be lacking to him, for nothing turns on it. The reasons for making war, be they better or worse, are as a rule not too plainly bad to be plausible to the common understanding; a fair mark, it may be, for satirical quips, but that is not the main business. What really matters is that war must needs come in the dramatist’s way if he presents histories ancient or modern, and offers not only stirring incidents but precious occasions for developing every kind of character. Without the field of Shrewsbury we should not know Falstaff as we do know him; it gives us the exact measure of his braggadocio and the full wealth of the measureless ironical humour which he turns freely on himself, being resolved, since he may be no better than he is, to make himself out rather worse. He is the very contrary of that actual braggart who, having no humour, bragged sincerely and was a valiant man notwithstanding, Benvenuto Cellini.—One might fall to wondering what Shakespeare would have made of Benvenuto, had he ever heard of him; but the perpetual trouble with Shakespeare, as with the Oxford English Dictionary, is that at every turn one is tempted to stray and browse in by-ways.—Accordingly it was very well for a solemn Byzantine emperor, and his learned assessors who added the precepts of the Church to the Roman lawyers’ humane Stoic tradition, to deprecate war in set terms, along with slavery, as a lamentable departure from the ideal rule of natural reason, though in fact inveterate by the common custom of mankind: but a Renaissance playwright, who would be no dramatist without his share of unreasonable human nature, could hardly wish himself deprived of the material that war furnished him both for action and rhetoric. Such lines as
‘The royal banner and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’
explain better than any commentary why the military pageant of history had a warm place in an Elizabethan actor-manager’s professional affections. Shakespeare would have liked to display it better. The Chorus in ‘Henry V.’ apologises for the ‘four or five most vile and ragged’—i.e. battered—‘foils’ which were the best the Globe Theatre’s armoury could produce for the campaign of Agincourt. Of that play there will be a word more to say anon.
Considering the need of rapid action on the Shakespearean stage, and its limited spectacular resources, it is obvious that actual warfare could be indicated only in a series of personal episodes, confining the visible symbols to a Homeric or at least a frankly medieval pattern. One might think, as far as the text went, that battles were decided by single combats; and probably those who begin to read Shakespeare young enough do think so. In ‘Henry V.’ we are told nothing of the military dispositions preceding the battle of Agincourt but the bare fact that a small and wearied English army was opposed by a larger and over-confident French one, and there is not one word about the English archery.[3] There is proof, however, though not too much, that Shakespeare had some notion of the offices of higher command in war, and could describe an episode of minor tactics not seen on the stage in a perfectly clear way. Yet it is noticeable that these proofs are not found in the historical plays. For the recognition of military science we have to go to the satirical romantic drama of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ and for the business-like anecdote to the very late legendary play of ‘Cymbeline,’ which, for whatever reason, seems to pay less regard to stage effect than any other work of Shakespeare’s.
In the first act of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek chieftains, who conform only in the roughest way to their traditional characters, and quote Aristotle as if on purpose to show that the action has no relation even to accepted legend,[4] are discussing the state of affairs before Troy. Ulysses speaks of the discontented Ajax and his followers:—
‘They tax our policy and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war,
Forestall prescience and esteem no act
But that of hand: the still and mental parts
That do contrive how many hands shall strike
When fitness calls them on, and know by measure
Of their observant toil the enemies’ weight—
Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity:
They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war;
So that the ram that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.’
We shall do no excess of violence to the difference of the times if we call this a staff officer’s view; and, all things considered, I think it goes near to be Shakespeare’s own, or at least that which he conceived to be the better opinion among those who had served in the wars of the Low Countries: as who should say ‘We can beat the Spaniard with any fair proportion of numbers, but you are not to think it is to be done without brains.’ Doubtless the opposite opinion, that of the rule-of-thumb soldier who thinks meanly of scientific warfare, made itself heard too, perhaps more loudly, at the Mermaid and elsewhere, and Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of it when Iago sneers at Michael Cassio as a great arithmetician who knows nothing of real fighting. But if Shakespeare had thought it sound he could have put it in a better mouth. The more familiar phrase of Mercutio’s dying speech: ‘a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic,’ is remote from this context as it belongs not to the art of war at large but to the contrast between the old English sword-play and the tricks of the new fangled Italian rapier: a topic which, I think, interested both Shakespeare and his audience more. In the same scene of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ we may find other military aphorisms: Nestor speaks of the uses of disappointment in war:—
‘In the reproof of chance
Lies the true proof of men: the sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast, making their way
With those of nobler bulk—’
and he almost anticipates the doctrine, now proverbial, that victory is for the side that makes fewest mistakes:—
‘Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.’
There may just possibly be an allusion here to the ‘Islands Voyage’ and other poorly managed expeditions against the Spanish West Indies, then fairly recent.
Nestor has also a sharp word for Thersites the professional pessimist:—
‘A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint.’
We cannot all be as wise as Nestor; but we can at least refuse to lend our ears to Thersites.
In this connexion we may note some lines given to the Messenger at the opening of ‘King Henry VI.,’ which may have been touched by Shakespeare’s revising hand, though I would not vouch for it:—
‘Amongst the soldiers this is muttered,
That here you maintain several factions,
And while a field should be dispatch’d and fought,
You are disputing of your generals:
One would have lingering wars with little cost;
Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings;
A third[5] thinks, without expense at all,
By guileful fair words peace may be obtain’d.’
The first ‘faction,’ curiously enough, is not far from Queen Elizabeth’s own policy. The second falls pat for our very latest variety of politician, the ‘air service candidate,’ and the third for those who want to discuss terms of peace in detail before the enemy is beaten, except that in our time they are highly conscientious persons who would be shocked by any suggestion of guile.
Later in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek and Trojan leaders exchange elaborate compliments which savour more of the Middle Ages than the Renaissance; they have no military significance.
Before leaving ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ produced when the state of war with Spain was coming to an end, it may be observed that, so far as I know, direct mention of Spain as a hostile power does not occur anywhere in the plays.
In the last act of ‘Cymbeline’ we hear how the banished Belarius and the young princes who pass for his sons have rallied the Britons, flying from Roman invaders, at the head of a narrow lane, checked the pursuit, and led a successful counter-attack. The nature of the ground is explained with some detail:—
‘Where was this lane?
—Close by the battle, ditch’d, and wall’d with turf;
Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,
An honest one, I warrant....’
The rest of the description, which is rather involved in style and may not have received the author’s last touches, adds nothing definite. The questioner, an unnamed ‘British lord,’ seems hardly to see the point:—
‘This was strange chance:
A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys.’
It is well attested by experience that a few determined men, or even one, may stop a panic if once they can get a rallying point; and I am much disposed to think that Shakespeare used in this passage an incident heard from someone who had actually seen it, or been very near it, ‘somewhere in Flanders.’
The most military of Shakespeare’s plays is ‘Henry V.’; there are other plays with much fighting in them, but neither within nor without the chronicle series is there one with so little of other interest in it. Henry V. is the only Shakespearean king who is a typical soldier, so much so that the type all but swallows up individual character. Mr. Masefield, who is always ingenious and often profound, thinks that Shakespeare did not admire the type; that he studied it with full knowledge and carefully framed the so-called heroic figure, a competent but no more than sufficiently competent leader, carrying on with fine animal spirits, unthinking, just and fair according to his lights, keen on playing the game as he knows it and scorning those who do otherwise with a scorn capable of being merciless, living by custom and not seeking ideas, never doubting that he is right—I am not using Mr. Masefield’s own words, but putting his judgment in a slightly less severe form; and then, Mr. Masefield will have it, Shakespeare holds up a piece of our own image to us in the jolly, obtuse soldier-king, with a whisper in his sleeve for the more knowing:—These be your gods, O Englishmen! I will not say there is nothing in Mr. Masefield’s point, but I cannot go all the way with him, the rather that if I am wrong it is in Sir Walter Raleigh’s company. Shakespeare’s command of human nature included other, richer, more complex, and more interesting characters; he knew very well that a prince always posing like Richard II., who is an accomplished cabotin, or always thinking like Hamlet, who fails not because he is weak but because he knows too much, would not have done Henry V.’s business; it does not follow that he thought ill of that business, and for my part I conceive that he admired Henry V. as the right man for his place and meant the audience to admire him. King Henry V.’s ostentatious repudiation of Prince Hal’s ways and companions is violent and awkward, and to a modern judgment unpleasant, as Mr. Masefield says. But that was forced on Shakespeare by the tale which he had to accept as history. Another difficulty is to see why a war of conquest against France should have been glorified on the stage at a time when France and England were not only at peace but in all but formal alliance against Spain: to which I see no answer except that chronicle plays were in fashion, a good play was a good play, and people did not go to the Globe to learn current European politics. We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our present purpose.
Shakespeare’s Henry V. is most human when he talks with his own soldiers as a plain gentleman, and they reason of the king’s responsibility in a thoroughly medieval fashion. The point is not whether a king who goes to war may have to reproach himself with the horrors of war as commonly understood, the temporal evils of death, destruction, and rapine. What is urged—and by a private soldier—is the risk that men slain in battle may die in mortal sin: ‘if these men do not die well.’ The king’s answer is a fine sample of Shakespeare’s grave prose dialogue, and, to the best of my belief, very sound moral theology. ‘Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.’ It is obvious that the principle is by no means confined to warlike enterprise. Did Shakespeare write this scene to justify the Archbishop of Canterbury’s praise, at the opening of the play, of Henry’s learning in divinity?
As for the usages of war, Henry V. accepts them as he finds them: that is, as Shakespeare—not to say Grotius—found them. When he summons Harfleur to surrender he is clear that the consequences of further resistance will be the governor’s fault and not his. Everybody is aware that a town taken by storm is pillaged; there is just a hint that no known discipline could prevent it; and indeed we moderns know what ado Wellington had in that matter little more than a century ago, and in a friendly country too. As a point of strict military rule, defence of an untenable position forfeited the defenders’ right to quarter down to the Peninsular War, and Wellington thought there was much to be said for it on the ground that the existence of the rule operated to prevent useless waste of life. This, however, is not explicit in Shakespeare.
Fluellen, the Welsh captain, is really a more distinct and human character than the king, though a minor one. He is a martinet, and probably would be a bore if he were allowed to expound the disciplines of the wars and the rules of Pompey’s camp at large; but he is a thoroughly good soldier, and a good friend. If it entered into Shakespeare’s plans to show off any knowledge of military science, here was a chance; the difference between the early fifteenth and the late sixteenth century would give no trouble, as in some details not worth particularising it certainly did not. We get nothing of this kind, however, from Fluellen beyond a few words about mines and countermines, which may be paralleled by the metaphorical use of the same matter in a still better known speech of Hamlet’s.[6]
Let us take leave of Henry V. with the remark that Shakespeare by his mouth anticipates Wellington’s policy and rebukes the Prussian devil’s gospel of frightfulness. ‘We give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.’ And this is the Shakespeare whom the Germans pretend to understand better than his own countrymen.
It is curious that the longest string of military terms in Shakespeare, if I mistake not, is delivered by a woman, when Lady Percy tells Hotspur (I. ‘King Henry IV.’ ii. 3) that he has talked in his sleep
‘Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.’
Some of the plays, like ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ are martial, inasmuch as there are combats and ‘excursions,’ but not military, inasmuch as the fighting is but the inducement or vehicle of some greater tragic event. Plutarch furnishes brave Roman sayings, or the politic sense of Elizabethan elders is condensed in aphoristic lines; but all this is secondary; what really concerns the poet is a spiritual conflict of eternal import, a soul triumphing though at the cost of life or wrecked. War and peace, conquest and exile, are the transitory matter the spirit works in, and Shakespeare troubles himself no more about the details than is needful for preserving a congruous atmosphere.
In Shakespeare’s time there was no English army in any proper sense, but only occasional levies. His illustration of English military method, such as it then was, is to be found in Falstaff’s immortal exploits as a recruiting officer. It is common knowledge that there was a very ancient tradition of compulsory service in time of war within the realm, but the operation of the principle was rough and inefficient. We may believe if we like that Falstaff knew his business when he chose; it is certain that the way he does choose is not only to be a corruptible and corrupt officer, but to sell exemptions shamelessly. By his own confession he ‘misused the king’s press damnably’ and ‘got in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers three hundred and odd pounds.’ If we consider him with a cold military eye—which is the last thing Shakespeare intended—it is clear that he deserved to be shot. We gather from the great recruiting scene in the third act of the second part of ‘King Henry IV.’ that officers chose their own subalterns and raised their own men with a pretty uncontrolled discretion. One would like to quote the whole scene, but paper is scarce, and it is better for the reader to enjoy it in the full text. Doubtless it is a caricature, but I would not wager any great odds on the exaggeration being gross. The impudence of taking ‘three pound to free Mouldy and Bullcalf’ and then magnifying the quality of the scarecrows who are left is as delightful as any of Shakespeare’s humours. ‘Care I for the limb, the thewes, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man! Give me the spirit, Master Shallow. Here’s Wart; you see what a ragged appearance it is.... O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones. Put me a caliver[7] into Wart’s hand, Bardolph.... Come, manage me your caliver. So: very well: go to: very good, exceeding good. O, give me always a little, lean, old, chapt, bald shot....’ We may yet hear news of Falstaff in the trenches, for there be many pretty wits at the front.
There remains a question of which I have said nothing because it is too plain for discussion. Did Shakespeare think England worth fighting for? As to that, the answer is written all over his work; not only in such splendid passages as John of Gaunt utters in ‘Richard II.,’ which have quite properly been repeated many times, in print and on platforms, in the course of this year, but in the whole tone and colour of all his pictures of country life, whether the nominal scene be at Athens, or in the forest of Arden, or in Illyria. Besides, there are some questions really too impertinent to be put to any honest English gentleman, even when he is dead and immortalised these three hundred years.