III
The processes of the two wars, then, were the same,—killing, wounding, frightening. The causes of the two wars resolved themselves into the elements of hatred. The details of the two wars meet at many points; only one must be on one's guard against merely fanciful, merely external resemblances.
In 1860 I spent a few days in Holland, and among my various excursions in that fascinating country I took a solitary trip on a treckschuit from Amsterdam to Delft. Holland was so true to Dutch pictures that there was a retrospective delight in the houses and in the people. There was a charm in the very signs, in the names of the villas; for my knowledge of Dutch had not passed beyond the stage at which the Netherlandish tongue seems to be an English-German Dictionary, disguised in strong waters. But the thing that struck me most was the general aspect of the country. Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The gates guarded the bridges and the canals were the fences, but the canals and the low bridges were not to be seen at a distance, and the visual effect was that of isolated gates. It was an absurd landscape even after the brain had made the necessary corrections.
In the third year of the war I was not far from Fredericksburg. The country had been stripped, and the forlorn region was a sad contrast to the smug prosperity of Holland. And yet of a sudden the Dutch landscape flashed upon my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like Holland, was dotted with fenceless gates. The rails of the inclosures had long before gone to feed bivouac fires, but the great gates were too solidly constructed to tempt marauders. It was an absurd landscape, an absurd parallel.
Historical parallels are often no better. When one compares two languages of the same family, the first impression is that of similarity. It is hard for the novice to keep his Italian and his Spanish apart. The later and more abiding impression is that of dissimilarity. A total stranger confounds twins in whom the members of the household find but vague likeness. There is no real resemblance between the two wars we are contemplating outside the inevitable features of all armed conflicts, and we must be on our guard against the sophistication deprecated in the beginning of this study. And yet one coming fresh to a comparison of the Peloponnesian war and the war between the States might see a striking similarity, such as I saw between the Dutch landscape and the landscape in Spottsylvania.
The Peloponnesian war, like our war, was a war between two leagues, a Northern Union and a Southern Confederacy. The Northern Union, represented by Athens, was a naval power. The Southern Confederacy, under the leadership of Sparta, was a land power. The Athenians represented the progressive element, the Spartans the conservative. The Athenians believed in a strong centralized government. The Lacedæmonians professed greater regard for autonomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal of hardihood, might multiply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.
According to fama clamosa, Winfield was originally Wingfield, a very common Virginian name. The classical parallel of Tromes and Atrometos will suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes. Dem. 18, 129.
Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already said, imperil one's intellectual honesty, and one would not like to imitate the Byzantine historians who were given to similar tricks. One of these gentlemen, Choricius by name, had a seaport to describe. How the actual seaport lay mattered little to Choricius, so long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolæ for Missionary Ridge, Platæa for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse for Hampton Roads; and Thucydides' description of the naval engagement and the watching crowds would be made available for the fight between Merrimac and Monitor.
The debates in Thucydides would be a quarry for the debates in either Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings, if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the strange doctrine that apophthegms were more to be trusted than any other form of tradition. There could not have been a more hopeless thesis. The general who said that he would burn his coat if it knew his plans has figured in all the wars with which I have been contemporary, was a conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and passed from camp to camp in the war between the States. The mot, familiar to the classical scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to that dashing sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed to both leaders in the final battle of Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about Socrates is pieced out with tabs and tags borrowed from different periods. I have heard, say, in the afternoon, a good story at the expense of a famous American revival preacher which I had read that morning in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw off for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors. Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who has devoted many pages to the arraignment of Thucydides' style, cribs with the utmost composure from the author he has vilipended. Still, we must not set down every coincidence as borrowing. Thucydides himself insists on the recurrence of the same or similar events in a history of which human nature is a constant factor. "Undo this button" is not necessarily a quotation from King Lear. "There is no way but this" was original with Macaulay, and not stolen from Shakespeare. "Never mind, general, all this has been my fault," are words attributed to General Lee after the battle of Gettysburg. This is very much the language of Gylippus after the failure of his attack on the Athenian lines before Syracuse. How many heroic as well as unheroic natures have had to say "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."