“There is something that suits my mind to a T
In the thought of a reg’lar Pirate King.”
Mr. Lang’s love of all warlike literature is too well known to need comment. As a child, he confesses he pored over “the fightingest parts of the Bible,” when Sunday deprived him of less hallowed reading. As a boy, he devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours which were presumably sacred to the shrine of Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us with glowing words from the consideration of political problems, or of our own complicated spiritual machinery, to follow the fortunes of the brave, fierce men who fought in the lonely north, or of the heroes who went forth in gilded armor “to win glory or to give it” before the walls of Troy. In these days, when many people find it easier to read “The Ring and the Book” than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makes a strong plea in behalf of that literature which has come down to us out of the past to stand forevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring the hearts of all generations until human nature shall be warped from simple and natural lines. “With the Bible and Shakespeare,” he says, “the Homeric poems are the best training for life. There is no good quality that they lack; manliness, courage, reverence for old age and for the hospitable hearth, justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude towards life and death, are all conspicuous in Homer.” It might be well, perhaps, to add to this long list one more incomparable virtue, an instinctive and illogical delight in living. Amid shipwrecks and battles, amid long wanderings and hurtling spears, amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear, Homer teaches us, and teaches us in right joyful fashion, the beauty and value of an existence which we profess nowadays to find a little burdensome on our hands.
All these things have the lovers of war said to us, and in all these ways have they striven to fire our hearts. But Mr. Ruskin is not content to regard any matter from a purely artistic standpoint, or to judge it on natural and congenital lines; he must indorse it ethically or condemn. Accordingly, it is not enough for him, as it would be for any other man, to claim that “no great art ever yet rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers.” He feels it necessary to ask himself some searching and embarrassing questions about fighting “for its own sake,” and as “a grand pastime,”—questions which he naturally finds it extremely difficult to answer. It is not enough for him to say, with equal truth and justice, that if “brave death in a red coat” be no better than “brave life in a black one,” it is at least every bit as good. He must needs wax serious, and commit himself to this strong and doubtful statement:—
“Assume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbor for exercise; assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread and filled his purse at the sword’s point. Still I feel as if it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than any other play. I had rather he had made it by thrusting than by batting,—much more than by betting; much rather that he should ride war horses than back race horses; and—I say it sternly and deliberately—much rather would I have him slay his neighbor than cheat him.”
Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate as this, it would not be altogether amiss to consult the subject acted upon; in other words, the neighbor, who, whatever may be his prejudice against dishonest handling, might probably prefer it to the last irredeemable disaster. In this commercial age we get tolerably accustomed to being cheated—like the skinned eel, we are used to it,—but there is an old rhyme which tells us plainly that a broken neck is beyond all help of healing.
No, it is best, when we treat a theme as many-sided as war, to abandon modern inquisitorial methods, and confine ourselves to that good old-fashioned simplicity which was content to take short obvious views of life. It is best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightly as we may. The finest poems of battle and of camp have been written in this unincumbered spirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatch of song from “Rokeby:”—
“A weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,