II
But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over, and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. “Shall we never have carnage?” Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend. Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing “Song of the Sword.” Out of the weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons manqués, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. “If I had been born a corsair or a pirate,” thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins, “I should have been all right.” Fragile dons became connoisseurs, faute de mieux, of prizefighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about the still, strong man and “straight-flung words and few,” adored “naked force,” averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they called “Tommies,” and chafed at the many rumoured refusals of British innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been saved from falling into that morgue an “officer house,” and having his beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.
The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest. Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs. Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang’s major products. Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge he was believed to have at his fingers’ ends all the best of what is known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian style, accounts of fancy “slaughters grim and great,” that his flame lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang’s was the wittier Kipling, then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of blood and tobacco.
Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a stage with a quaint figure of some shortsighted pedagogue of tradition coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically inept, to play the part of the warhorse in Job, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, and “saying among the trumpets ‘Ha, ha!’ ” You may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe up “Take the nasty peace away!” and kick the shins of Concord, his most kindly nurse?