The Crown of Wild Olive
though you _must_ have war to produce art--you must also have much more
than war; namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people; and that,
though all the talent for painting in the world won't make painters of
you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift
for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dynasty of
soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet
investigated the Roman character enough to tell you the causes of this;
but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly
the Roman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by
the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a
soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical; his
poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of battle, 'pacis
imponere morem.' And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not
rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind
of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And
then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble
employment,--under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain; and
under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born
again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and
Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their
Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle: and it
reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history the most
intense type of soldiership yet seen among men;--the city whose armies
were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by
their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the
extremity of his age.
And from this time forward, as peace is established or extended in
Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of
costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side
of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations,
wither utterly away; remaining only in partial practice among races who,
like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live
the lives, of soldiers.
'It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim.
'Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. What
worth is there in toys of canvas and stone if compared to the joy and
peace of artless domestic life?' And the answer is--truly, in
themselves, none. But as expressions of the highest state of the human
spirit, their worth is infinite. As results they may be worthless, but,
as signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth that,
whenever the faculties of men are at their fulness, they _must_ express
themselves by art; and to say that a state is without such expression,
is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So
that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean
also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of
men.
It was very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful--but I saw
it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the
virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly
untenable. Peace and the _vices_ of civil life only flourish together.
We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and
civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse
of History coupled together: that on her lips, the words were--peace and
sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and
death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of
word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war,
and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by
war, and betrayed by peace;--in a word, that they were born in war, and
expired in peace.
Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not _all_ war of
which this can be said--nor all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start
up into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under
Genseric or Suwarrow; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of
mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland; nor the occasional
struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the
Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for
extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or the just
terminated war in America. None of these forms of war build anything but
tombs. But the creative or foundational war is that in which the
natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by
consent, into modes of beautiful--though it may be fatal--play: in which
the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the
aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural
instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the
institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed to
defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any
man may happily die; and forth from such war as this have arisen
throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and
virtues of humanity.
I shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to you into
three heads. War for exercise or play; war for dominion; and, war for
defence.
I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it primarily in
this light, because, through all past history, manly war has been more
an exercise than anything else, among the classes who cause, and
proclaim it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the pressed sailor;
but neither of these are the causers of it. To the governor who
determines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it
as their profession, it has always been a grand pastime; and chiefly
pursued because they had nothing else to do. And this is true without
any exception. No king whose mind was fully occupied with the
development of the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any other
sufficing subject of thought, ever entered into war but on compulsion.
No youth who was earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or
set on any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a
soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or business, in
science or in literature, and he will never think of war otherwise than
as a calamity. But leave him idle; and, the more brave and active and
capable he is by nature, the more he will thirst for some appointed
field for action; and find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only
satisfying fulfilment of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest
incipient civilisation until now, the population of the earth divides
itself, when you look at it widely, into two races; one of workers, and
the other of players--one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building,
and otherwise providing for the necessities of life;--the other part
proudly idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in which
they use the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and
partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death.
Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there may be in this game
of war, rightly played, there is none when you thus play it with a
multitude of small human pawns.
If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, choose to make your
pastime of contest, do so, and welcome; but set not up these unhappy
peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of
death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the
Olympic dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look
upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on
the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth,
whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial
war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose
command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps
shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens
above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more,
then, ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre
pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other only
for your delight! And do you _not_ shrink from the _fact_ of sitting
above a theatre pit, where,--not condemned slaves,--but the best and
bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other,--not man to
man,--as the coupled gladiators; but race to race, in duel of
generations? You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see
this; and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe--those who have no
heart-interests of their own at peril in the contest--draw the curtains
of their boxes, and muffle the openings; so that from the pit of the
circus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard
cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire.
They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among
themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in
their pleasant lives.
Nay, you might answer, speaking for them--'We do not let these wars come
to pass for our play, nor by our carelessness; we cannot help them. How
can any final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I
cannot now delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise
settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be
understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that,
while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by
truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or
saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and
the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will
always be necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your
poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You would be ashamed
to do this in your own private position and power. Why should you not be
ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If you quarrel with
your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal,
you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out;
nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. You
fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all.
And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of
you has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants or
tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the
contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or
you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force; that so it
may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion
of the private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust
conclusion of the public feud is of eternal moment: and yet, in this
public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms to fight
for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it; and the
black seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the deserted
hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in
this, as there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the
statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the
greatest of our English thinkers:--
'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the
net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for
example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of
Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by