VI
You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all—
But the age of chivalry is gone … the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
Burke would never say a thing by halves. And as truth goes by halves, and declines to be sweeping like rhetoric, Burke made sure of being wrong to the tune of some fifty percent. The French Revolution did not, as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West European morals or manners.
One would be talking like Burke—talking, perhaps you might say, through Burke’s hat—if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the moon. Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914; even then a great part of our Press could not tell indignation from spite, nor uphold the best cause in the world without turpitude. Nor were we all, after the Armistice, rods of the houses of Thersites and Cleon; Haig was still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates and of like-minded civilians, though it is harder for a civilian not to lose generosity during a war. But something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had a setback; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust shabbiness. All through the war there had been a bear movement in Newbolts and Burkes, and, corresponding to this, a bull movement in stocks of the Little Flanigan group.