In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a knight in armour.
Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the introduction of professional soldiers and great armies, where personal heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.
If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy, and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque scenes and characters of a bygone time, and Bonnie Dundee is a ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is distinctly romantic and conventional. If he had not been writing for readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have said that they
'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'
An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted. When he wrote of the middle ages, as in Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the Legend of Montrose, Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor, there are two or three rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can do nothing on a vast scale, cannot manage masses of men; and moreover it fails to deal effectively with a state of war in which mechanical skill and the tactical movement of large bodies of troops win the day. There may be as much personal heroism as ever, but it is lost in the multitude. Nevertheless sea-fighting, where separate ships may encounter and grapple like two mortal foes, with the deep water around and beneath them, gives heroism a better chance; and the mariner is always a poetic figure. So Thomas Campbell did rise very nearly to the heroic level in his poem on the battle of the Baltic, written when the true story of Nelson's famous exploit was still fresh; we have a clear and forcible impression of the British ships moving silently to the attack; and the closing lines touch the ancient ever-living feeling of gratitude to Captain Riou and his brave comrades, 'so tried and yet so true,' who fell in the great victory.
With this exception, the prolonged conflict between England and France, which lasted twenty years up to its end at Waterloo, struck out hardly a spark of heroic poetry. Yet the Peninsular War is full of splendid military exploits, of fierce battles and the desperate storming of fortresses: it was a period of great national energy, when the people were contending with all their heart and strength against a most dangerous enemy; it was also a time when England was singularly rich in poets of the highest order. Nevertheless the only verses that may be assigned to the peculiar class which I have been attempting to define, were written, not by one of the famous group of poets, but by an unknown hand; and they relate not to a great battle, but to a slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am alluding to the well-known stanzas on the Burial of Sir John Moore, who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that they are familiar to all of us, and fresh as when they were first read? Is it not because the writer had one clear flash of imaginative light, which showed him the reality of the scene, so that the description speaks for itself, without literary epithets, creating, as the French say, the true image. He struck the right note of soldierly emotion, brief, stern, and compressed, when there is no time for vain lamentation—as when in the Iliad Ulysses says to Achilles, who is inconsolable for the death of his friend, that a soldier must bury his comrade with a pitiless heart, and that in war a day's mourning is all that can be spared for slain men.[22]
It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry, notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately described elsewhere. This suggestion may derive support from the observation that whenever, in our own day, we have had brief samples of verse-writing with a strain of the genuine old quality, they have almost always come from a distant scene, usually from the frontiers of the British Empire, far away from the centres of academic culture and the fields of organised war. Two or three of Rudyard Kipling's short poems about life on the Afghan border and Indian camp life have the right ring: they are instinct with the colour and sensation of the environment: they stir the blood with a conviction of reality. If it be permissible for a moment to compare these rough energetic verses with the battle pieces of an immeasurably greater artist—with Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, for example—one may see that in the poetry of action the grand style misses something which has been caught by the eye that has seen the thing itself; the Charge is a splendid composition, but the frontier ballad sets you down on the ground and shows you life.
Undoubtedly, also, the romantic literary style, which prevailed so long in this country, and which is the natural product of high culture, has been unfavourable, because it was radically unsuitable, to the poetry of energetic action. It is true that all the highest compositions of the heroic poet are set off by a tinge of romance, as fine drawing is perfected by superb colouring; but the drawbacks of romance lie in a tendency to vagueness of thought, and to the preference of archaic words and overstrained sentiments which were given as poetic mainly because they were far-fetched and did not sound commonplace. In fact the later poets adopted mechanically the strong natural language of those who wrote under the inspiration of actual emotion or events, and therefore they used it awkwardly and ineffectively; or else in their consciousness of not knowing how things really happened, they kept within sonorous generalities, which are the resource of artistic impotence. In our own day we have witnessed a sharp revolt against romantic verse, and a reversion toward those forms of art which reflect the actual experience of men, toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,[23] and so he overcharges with technicalities or trivial particulars. Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is distinctly improving: though its strength lies in short pieces repeating some notable incident or dramatic situations bringing out character, which is just where it began originally, and where indeed it is likely to remain, for the epic poem, or heroic verse on the grand scale, may be thought to have disappeared finally.
To conclude a very brief and inadequate dissertation, we may, I think, lay it down as a principle of the art, that heroic poetry must be true to circumstances and to character, must have the qualities of simplicity and sincerity, combined with the magnetic power of stirring the heart by showing how men and women can behave when really confronted by danger, death, or irremediable misfortune. Its background, in skilful hands, is the contrast of calm Nature looking on at human strife and sorrow, at stern fortitude and energetic effort in tragic situations. We are reading every day of such situations in the South African War, where there has been no lack of brave men 'so tried and yet so true,' who have found themselves back again suddenly in the rough fighting world of their forefathers, and have felt and acted like the men of old time. There is abundant proof that the English folk can display as much heroism as ever men did; but we may look in vain for the poet who knows how to commemorate their valour and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.