who died for England’s honor in a far-off land; and to the Indian prince, Mehrab Khan, who, brought to bay, swore proudly that he would perish,
“to the last the lord
Of all that man can call his own,”
and fell beneath the English bayonets at the door of his zenana. This is the spirit by which brave men know one another the world over, and which, lying back of all healthy national prejudices, unites in a human brotherhood those whom the nearness of death has taught to start at no shadows.
“Oh, east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall meet
Till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
But there is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”
Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here, too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier to hand than that much-desired bond of cultivation which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will one day knit the world together. The time when Germany will no longer hate France, “because the prose of France is perfect,” seems still as far-off as it is fair; the day when “intellectual criticism will bind Europe together” dawns only in the dreamland of desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at the expense of “Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never read history;” but criticism, the mediator of the future, “will annihilate race prejudices by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.” This restraining impulse will allow us to fight only red Indians, and Feejeeans, and Bushmen, from whom no grace of culture is to be gleaned; and it may prove a strong inducement to some disturbed countries, like Ireland and Russia, to advance a little further along the paths of sweetness and light. Meanwhile, the world, which rolls so easily in old and well-worn ways, will probably remember that “power is measured by resistance,” and will go on arguing stolidly in platoons.
“All healthy men like fighting and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to hear of their fighting and of their facing danger,” says Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himself the defense of war in his own irresistibly unconvincing manner. Others indeed have delighted in it from a purely artistic standpoint, or as a powerful stimulus to fancy. Mr. Saintsbury exults more than most critics in battle poems, and in those “half-inarticulate songs that set the blood coursing.” Sir Francis Doyle, whose simple manly soul never wearied of such themes, had no ambition to outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boyhood. “I knew the battle in ‘Marmion’ by heart almost before I could read,” he writes in his “Reminiscences;” “and I cannot raze out—I do not wish to raze out—of my soul all that filled and colored it in years gone by.” Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by the picturesqueness of a sea fight as was Canon Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness that the British privateers who went plundering in the Spanish main were inspired by a pure love for England, and a zeal for the Protestant faith. He can say truly with the little boy of adventurous humor,—