“There, in the drift,
Back to the wall,
He held the timbers
Ready to fall.
Then in the darkness
I heard him call,—
‘Run for your life, Jake!
Run for your wife’s sake!
Don’t wait for me.’“And that was all
Heard in the din—
Heard of Tom Flynn,
Flynn of Virginia.”
Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till every soul save he got safe on shore,—
“Through the hot black breath of the burning boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard;
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knew he would keep his word.
And sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the ‘Prairie Belle.’“He weren’t no saint—but at judgment
I’d run my chance with Jim
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shake hands with him.
He’d seen his duty—a dead sure thing—
And went for it there and then;
And Christ is not going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.”
To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay’s—and he has written many gallant and beautiful poems—I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did not merely do his duty, but more than his duty. He did a voluntary deed, to which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross—as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won—by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral. And it is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man: an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is above though not against duty.
Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not grudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and shrieked till help arrived.
Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—of all which four I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion—and not unwisely—as the three highest types of human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master’s death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth—like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable—glide insensibly into speech and reason. Birds—the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet—are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman—the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us—was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.” How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan—
“Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.”
But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some “divine afflatus”—an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days—and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.
And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.
The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout.”