What would be said now of the piratical deeds of such men as
Frobisher, Raleigh, Gilbert, and Richard Greville?
Suppose
Lord Roberts had sent word to President Kruger that if four
English soldiers, imprisoned at Pretoria, were molested, he
would execute 2,000 Boers and send him their heads? The
clap-trap cry of 'Barbaric Methods' would have gone forth to
some purpose; it would have carried every constituency in the
country. Yet this is what Drake did when four English
sailors were captured by the Spaniards, and imprisoned by the
Spanish Viceroy in Mexico.
Take the Elizabethan drama, and compare it with ours. What
should we think of our best dramatist if, in one of his
tragedies, a man's eyes were plucked out on the stage, and if
he that did it exclaimed as he trampled on them, 'Out, vile
jelly! where is thy lustre now?' or of a Titus Andronicus
cutting two throats, while his daughter ''tween her stumps
doth hold a basin to receive their blood'?
'Humanity,' says Taine, speaking of these times, 'is as much
lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them.'
Heaven forbid that we should return to such brutality! I
cite these passages merely to show how times are changed; and
to suggest that with the change there is a decided loss of
manliness. Are men more virtuous, do they love honour more,
are they more chivalrous, than the Miltons, the Lovelaces,
the Sidneys of the past? Are the women chaster or more
gentle? No; there is more puritanism, but not more true
piety. It is only the outside of the cup and the platter
that are made clean, the inward part is just as full of
wickedness, and all the worse for its hysterical
fastidiousness.
To what do we owe this tendency? Are we degenerating morally
as well as physically? Consider the physical side of the
question. Fifty years ago the standard height for admission
to the army was five feet six inches. It is now lowered to
five feet. Within the last ten years the increase in the
urban population has been nearly three and a half millions.
Within the same period the increase in the rural population
is less than a quarter of one million. Three out of five
recruits for the army are rejected; a large proportion of
them because their teeth are gone or decayed. Do these
figures need comment? Can you look for sound minds in such
unsound bodies? Can you look for manliness, for self-
respect, and self-control, or anything but animalistic
sentimentality?
It is not the character of our drama or of our works of
fiction that promotes and fosters this propensity; but may it
not be that the enormous increase in the number of theatres,
and the prodigious supply of novels, may have a share in it,
by their exorbitant appeal to the emotional, and hence
neurotic, elements of our nature? If such considerations
apply mainly to dwellers in overcrowded towns, there is yet
another cause which may operate on those more favoured, - the
vast increase in wealth and luxury. Wherever these have
grown to excess, whether in Babylon, or Nineveh, or Thebes,
or Alexandria, or Rome, they have been the symptoms of
decadence, and forerunners of the nation's collapse.
Let us be humane, let us abhor the horrors of war, and strain
our utmost energies to avert them. But we might as well
forbid the use of surgical instruments as the weapons that
are most destructive in warfare. If a limb is rotting with
gangrene, shall it not be cut away? So if the passions which
occasion wars are inherent in human nature, we must face the
evil stout-heartedly; and, for one, I humbly question whether
any abolition of dum-dum bullets or other attempts to
mitigate this disgrace to humanity, do, in the end, more good
than harm.
It is elsewhere that we must look for deliverance, - to the
overwhelming power of better educated peoples; to closer
intercourse between the nations; to the conviction that, from
the most selfish point of view even, peace is the only path
to prosperity; to the restraint of the baser Press which, for
mere pelf, spurs the passions of the multitude instead of
curbing them; and, finally, to deliverance from the 'all-
potent wills of Little Fathers by Divine right,' and from the
ignoble ambition of bullet-headed uncles and brothers and
cousins - a curse from which England, thank the Gods! is, and
let us hope, ever will be, free. But there are more
countries than one that are not so - just now; and the world
may ere long have to pay the bitter penalty.
CHAPTER XXXVII
IT is curious if one lives long enough to watch the change of
taste in books. I have no lending-library statistics at
hand, but judging by the reading of young people, or of those
who read merely for their amusement, the authors they
patronise are nearly all living or very recent. What we old
stagers esteemed as classical in fiction and BELLES-LETTRES
are sealed books to the present generation. It is an
exception, for instance, to meet with a young man or young
woman who has read Walter Scott. Perhaps Balzac's reason is
the true one. Scott, says he, 'est sans passion; il
l'ignore, ou peut-etre lui etait-elle interdite par les
moeurs hypocrites de son pays. Pour lui la femme est le
devoir incarne. A de rares exceptions pres, ses heroines
sont absolument les memes ... La femme porte le desordre dans
la societe par la passion. La passion a des accidents
infinis. Peignez donc les passions, vous aurez les sources
immenses dont s'est prive ce grand genie pour etre lu dans
toutes les familles de la prude Angleterre.' Does not
Thackeray lament that since Fielding no novelist has dared to
face the national affectation of prudery? No English author
who valued his reputation would venture to write as Anatole
France writes, even if he could.
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