“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;”