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