From a Cornish Window Part 19

--"Yet must it be that men Thee slay."

--"Yea, tho' it must must I obey,"

Said Christ,--and came, His royal Son, To die, and dying to atone For harlot and for publican.

Read on that rood He died upon-- _Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

And by that rood where He was bent I saw the world's great captains all Go riding to the tournament-- Cyrus the Great and Hannibal, Caesar of Rome and Attila, Lord Charlemagne with his array, Lord Alisaundre of Macedon-- With flaming lance and habergeon They pa.s.sed, and to the rataplan Of drums gave salutation-- _Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

Had tall Achilles lounged in tent For aye, and Xanthus neigh'd in stall, The towers of Troy had ne'er been shent, Nor stay'd the dance in Priam's hall.

Bend o'er thy book till thou be grey, Read, mark, perpend, digest, survey-- Instruct thee deep as Solomon-- One only chapter thou shalt con, One lesson learn, one sentence scan, One t.i.tle and one colophon-- _Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

High Virtue's hest is eloquent With spur and not with martingall: Sufficeth not thou'rt continent: BE COURTEOUS, BRAVE, AND LIBERAL.

G.o.d fas.h.i.+on'd thee of chosen clay For service, nor did ever say "Deny thee this," "Abstain from yon,"

Save to inure thee, thew and bone, To be confirmed of the clan That made immortal Marathon-- _Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

ENVOY.

Young Knight, the lists are set to-day: Hereafter shall be long to pray In sepulture with hands of stone.

Ride, then! outride the bugle blown And gaily dinging down the van Charge with a cheer--Set on! Set on!

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

A friend to whom I showed these verses remarked that Mr. Blank was indeed a person who fed his soul upon negatives; but that I possibly did him some injustice in charging so much of this to timidity, whereas the scent lay rather in the gusto with which he judged his fellow-men.

"And, by the way," said he, "is there not some gusto in the scorn with which you are judging Mr. Blank at this moment?" "Do you remember," I answered, "how that man, after voting for war the other day, went straight off to a meeting of the Peace Society and put up a florid appeal to the Prince of Peace for a time when wars should be no more? Let him be, however: I do wrong to lose my temper with him. But on this matter of national timidity I have something to say. . . ."

I have been reading John Holland's two _Discourses of the Navy_, written in 1638 and 1659, and published the other day by the Navy Records Society.

The object of Mr. Holland's discourses was to reform the Navy, purge it of abuses, and strengthen it for the defence of this realm; and I have been curious to compare his methods with those of our own Navy League, which has been making such a noise for ten years or so. The first thing I observe is the att.i.tude of mind in which he approaches his subject:--

"If either the honour of a nation, commerce or trust with all nations, peace at home, grounded upon our enemies' fear or love of us abroad, and attended with plenty of all things necessary either for the preservation of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal conceit) then next to G.o.d and thy King give thy thanks for the same to the Navy.

As for honour, who knows not (that knows anything) that in all records of late times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame and renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread that runs through the whole wooft, the burden of the song, the scope of the text? . . ."

He proceeds to enumerate some particular commercial advantages due to our mastery of the sea, and sums up in these words:--

"Suffice it thus far, nothing under G.o.d, who doth all, hath brought so much, so great commerce to this Kingdom as the rightly n.o.ble employments of our navy; a wheel, if truly turned, that sets to work all Christendom by its motion; a mill, if well extended, that in a sweet yet sovereign composure contracts the grist of all nations to its own dominions, and requires only the tribute of its own people, not for, but towards, its maintenance."

The eloquence may be turgid, but the att.i.tude is dignified. The man does not scold; does not terrify. He lays his stress on the benefits of a strong navy--on the renown it has won for England in the past. He a.s.sumes his readers to be intelligent men, amenable to advice which will help them to perpetuate this renown and secure these benefits in time to come.

His exordium over, he settles down to an exposition of the abuses which are impairing our naval efficiency, and suggests reforms, some wisely conceived, others not so wisely, with the business-like, confident air of one who knows what he is talking about.

Now I open the prospectus in which our Navy League started out to make everyone's flesh creep, and come plump upon language of this sort:--

"It is the close, let us suppose, of our second month of war.

The fleet has been neglected, and has been overwhelmed, unready and unprepared. We have been beaten twice at sea, and our enemies have established no accidental superiority, but a permanent and overwhelming one. The telegraph cables have been severed, one and all; these islands are in darkness."--

For presumably the gas-mains, as well as the cables, have been 'severed'

(imposing word!)--

--"Under a heavy cloud of woe. Invasion is in the air, our armies are mustering in the south. We are cut off from the world, and can only fitfully perceive what is happening. Our liners have been captured or sunk on the high seas; our ocean tramps are in our enemies' hands; British trade is dead, killed by the wholesale ravages of the hostile cruisers. Our ports are insulted or held up to ransom, when news reaches us from India it is to the effect that the enemy is before our troops, a native insurrection behind.

Malta has fallen, and our outlying positions are pa.s.sing from our hands. Food is contraband, and may not be imported. Amid the jeers of Europe 'the nation of shopkeepers' is writhing in its death agony."

Pretty, is it not? But let us have just a little more.

"COMMERCIAL COLLAPSE.

"And what of the internal, of the social position? Consols have fallen to nearly 30; our vast investments in India have been lost; trade no longer exists. . . . The railways have no traffic to carry.

. . . Banks and companies are failing daily. . . The East End of London is clamouring for bread and peace at any price. If we fall, we fall for ever. . . . The working man has to choose whether he will have lighter taxation for the moment, starvation and irretrievable ruin for the future . . ."

--And so on, till Z stands for Zero, or nothing at all. Or, as the late Mr. Lear preferred to write:--

"Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc, Get in, my little master!

We'll shut you up; we'll nail you down: we will, my little master!

We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'"

To speak as seriously as may be, the language is no longer hortatory, like Holland's, but minatory, even comminatory. It is (as its author would not deny) the language of panic deliberately employed, a calculated attempt to strengthen the _materiel_ of the navy at the cost of Englishmen's fears.

Now let me define my feeling towards the Navy League. As an ordinary British citizen, I must heartily approve its aim of strengthening the navy and keeping it efficient. As an ordinary reasonable man, I must admit that its efforts, if rightly directed, may be of great national service.

But language such as I have quoted must (so far as it is not merely contemptible) be merely demoralising, and anyone who works on the fears of a nation--and especially of a nation which declines conscription and its one undoubted advantage of teaching men what war means--does a harm which is none the less wicked for being incalculable. These Navy Leaguers cry incessantly for more _material_ strength. They tell us that in material strength we should at least be equal to any two other countries.

A few months pa.s.s, and then, their appet.i.te growing with the terror it feeds upon, they insist that we must be equal to any three other countries. Also "it does not appear," they sagely remark, "that Nelson and his contemporaries left any record as to what the proportion of the blockading should bear (_sic_) to one blockaded,"--a curious omission of Nelson's, to be sure! He may perhaps have held that it depended on the quality of the antagonists.

To this a few ordinary stupid Britons like myself have always answered that no amount of _materiel_ can ever replace _morale_; and that all such panic-making is a mischievous attempt to lower the breed, and the more mischievous because its mischief may for a while be imperceptible.

We can see our wars.h.i.+ps growing: we cannot see the stamina decaying; yet it is our stamina on which we must rely finally in the fatal hour of trial. We said this, and we were laughed at; insulted as unpatriotic--a word of which one may say in kindness that it would not so readily leap to the lips of professional patriots if they were able to understand what it means and, by consequence, how much it hurts.

Yes, and behold, along comes Admiral Togo, and at one stroke proves that we were simply, absolutely and henceforward incontestably right!

What were our little three-power experts doing on the morrow of Togo's victory? They are making irrelevant noises in the halfpenny press, explaining how Admiral Togo did it with an inferior force, and in a fas.h.i.+on that belies all their axioms. But I turn to _The Times_ and I read:--

"The event shows that mere material equality is but as dust in the balance when weighed in the day of battle against superiority of moral equipment."

--Which, when you come to think of it, is precisely what Bacon meant when he wrote:--

"Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of Horse, Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery and the like: all this is but a Sheep in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition of the People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) in Armies importeth not much where the People is of weake Courage: For (as _Virgil_ saith) _it never troubles a Wolfe how many the Sheepe be_."

Do our friends of the Navy League seriously believe that a principle as old as humankind can be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine or of some novelty in guns? Even in their notions of what material strength means I hold them to be mistaken. The last resource which a nation ought to neglect is its financial credit. It was Walpole's long policy of peace which made possible Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a nation's cowardice to raise money for its protection. An old text, my masters! It seems a long while that some of us were preaching it in vain until Admiral Togo came along and proved it.

I observe that a Member of Parliament for a West of England const.i.tuency (a better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs.

My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province of a man of letters consider him worthy to pay income-tax.

I pa.s.s over some tempting reflections on the queer anomaly that this prohibition should be addressed (as it so often is) by writers to writers, by newspaper writers to men who write books, and (so far as a distinction can be drawn) by men who write in a hurry to men who write deliberately.

I wish to look quietly into the belief on which it rests and to inquire how that belief was come by.

There certainly was a time when such a belief would have been laughed at as scarcely reasonable enough to be worth discussing. And that time, oddly enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest era of the world's literature, the greatest era of political discovery, and the greatest era of Empire-making. The men who made Athens and the men who made Rome would have disputed (I fear somewhat contemptuously) the axiom on which my friend the West Country member builds his case.

They held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters ought not to work in cloistral isolation, removed from public affairs, and indifferent to them; that on the contrary they are direct servants of their State, and have a peculiar call to express themselves on matters of public moment. To convince you that I am not advancing any pet theory of my own let me present it in the words of a grave and judicious student, Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford:--

"The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek conception of art and morals. For though, in the view of the philosopher, the virtue of the good citizen was not always necessarily identical with the virtue of the individual man, and though, in the city of Athens at all events, a large amount of life was possible to the individual apart from public interests, yet it is none the less true that the life of the individual in every Greek city was in reality moulded by the customary life, tradition and character, in one intranslatable word, by the _ethos_ of the State. Out of this native soil grew that recognised, though not necessarily public, system of education (_politike paideia_ ), consisting of reading and writing, music and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle themselves accepted as the basis of the const.i.tution of the State. But this preliminary education was only the threshold to a subsequent system of political training, of which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an opportunity of availing himself by his right to partic.i.p.ate in public affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics themselves were an instrument of individual refinement. 'The magistrates,' said he, in his great funeral oration, 'who discharge public trusts, fulfil their domestic duties also; the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs; for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and p.r.o.nounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps strike out for ourselves correct reasonings upon them; far from accounting discussion an impediment to action, we complain only if we are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it.'

"The strenuous exertion of the faculties of the individual in the service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the n.o.blest efforts of imitation.

It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the _Persae_ and _Eumeuides_ of AEschylus, the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, the History of Thucydides and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the souls of those who risked their lives at Marathon."--_History of English Poetry_, vol. i., c 2.

In the most brilliant age of Greece, then, and of Greek art and letters, the civic spirit was the inspiring spirit. But as the Greek cities sank one by one before the Macedonian power and forfeited their liberties, this civic spirit died for lack of nourishment and exercise, and literature was driven to feed on itself--which is about the worst thing that can ever happen to it, and one of the worst things that can happen to a nation.

The old political education gave place to an 'encyclopaedic' education.

The language fell into the hands of grammarians and teachers of rhetoric, whose inventions may have a certain interest of their own, but--to quote Mr. Courthope again--no longer reflect the feelings and energies of free political life. Roman literature drives home the same, or a similar, moral. "The greatness of Rome was as entirely civic in its origin as that of any Greek city, and, like the Greek cities, Rome in the days of her freedom, and while she was still fighting for the mastery, preserved a system of political education, both in the hearth and the Senate, which was suited to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to Plutarch, 'wrote histories for his son, with his own hand, in large characters; so that without leaving his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the ill.u.s.trious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country': and what is of importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such pa.s.sages as the famous eulogy--