"Either Cowards Or Unhappy"

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Title:     "Either Cowards Or Unhappy"
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

Present grandeur is always hard to realise. The past and the distant are easily perceived. Like a far-off mountain, their glory is conspicuous, and the iridescent vapours of romance quickly gather round it. The main outline of a distant peak is clear, for rival heights are plainly surpassed, and sordid details, being invisible, cannot detract from it or confuse. The comfortable spectator may contemplate it in peace. It does not exact from him quick decisions or disquieting activity. The storms that sweep over it contribute to his admiration without wetting his feet, and his high estimate of its beauty and greatness may be enjoyed without apprehension of an avalanche. So the historian is like a picturesque spectator cultivating his sense of the sublime upon a distant prospect of the Himalayas. It is easy for him to admire, and the appreciation of a far-off heroic movement gives him quite a pleasant time. At his leisure he may descant with enthusiasm upon the forlorn courage of sacrificed patriots, and hymn, amidst general applause, the battles of freedom long since lost or won.

But in the thick of present life it is different. The air is obscured by murky doubt, and unaccustomed shapes stand along the path, indistinguishable under the light malign. Uncertain hope scarcely glimmers, nor can the termination of the struggle be divined. Tranquillity, giving time for thought, and the security that leaves the judgment clear, have both gone, and may never return. The ears are haunted with the laughter of vulgarity, and the judicious discouragement of prudence. Is there not as much to be said for taking one line as another? If there is talk of conflict, were it not better to leave the issue in the discriminating hands of One whose judgment is indisputable? Yet in the very midst of hesitations, mockery, and good advice, the next step must be taken, the decision must be swift, the choice is brief but eternal. There is no clear evidence of heroism around. The lighters do not differ much from the grotesque, the foolish, and the braggart ruck of men. No wonder that culture smiles and passes aloof upon its pellucid and elevating course. Culture smiles; the valet de chambre lurking in most hearts sniffs at the name of hero; hideous applause comes from securely sheltered crowds who hound victims to the combat, bloodthirsty as spectators at a bull-fight. In the sweat and twilight and crudity of the actual event, when so much is merely ludicrous and discomforting, and all is enveloped in the element of fear, it is rare to perceive a glory shining, or to distinguish greatness amid the mud of contumely and commonplace.

Take the story of Italy's revival--the "Resurrection," as Italians call it. In the summer of 1911, Italy was celebrating her jubilee of national rebellion, and English writers who spend their years, day by day or week by week, sneering at freedom, betraying nationality, and demanding vengeance on rebels, burst into ecstatic rhapsodies about that glorious but distant uprising. They raised the old war-cry of liberty over battle-fields long silent; they extolled to heaven the renown of the rebellious dead; their very periods glowed with Garibaldian red, white, and green; and rising to Byronic exaltation they concluded their nationalist effusions by adjuring freedom's weather-beaten flag:

"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind!"

So they cried, echoing the voice of noble ghosts. But where in the scenes of present life around them have they hailed that torn but flying banner? What have they said or done for freedom's emblem in Persia, or in Morocco, or in Turkey? What support have they given it in Finland, or in the Caucasus, or in the Baltic Provinces? To come within our own sphere, what ecstatic rhapsodies have they composed to greet the rising nationalism of Ireland, or of India, or of Egypt? Or, in this country herself, what movement of men or of women striving to be free have they welcomed with their paeans of joy? Not once have they perceived a glory in liberty's cause to-day. Wherever a rag of that torn banner fluttered, they have denounced and stamped it down, declaring it should fly no more. Their admiration and enthusiasm are reserved for a buried past, and over triumphant rebellion they will sentimentalise for pages, provided it is securely bestowed in some historic age that can trouble them no more.

Leaving them to their peace, let us approach a great name among our English singers of liberty. Swinburne stands in the foremost rank. In a collection of "English Songs of Italian Freedom," edited by Mr. George Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy's redemption--in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very highest. No one has paid nobler tribute to the heroes of that amazing revolution. No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning a scorn and so deep an obloquy upon their oppressors, whether in treacherous Church or alien State. It is magnificent, but alas! it was not war. By the time he wrote, the war was over, the victory won. By that time, not only the British crowd, but even people of rank, office, and culture could hardly fail to applaud. The thing had become definite and conspicuous. It was finished. It stood in quite visible splendour at a safe and comfortable distance. Ridicule had fallen impotent. Hesitation could now put down its foot. Superiority could smile, not in doubt, but in welcome. The element of fear was dissipated. The coward could shout, "I was your friend all along!" If a man wrote odes at all, he could write them to freedom then.

"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering Thee,
That for ages of agony hast endured and slept,
And would'st not see."

How superb! But when that was written the weeping and agony were over, the sleeper had awakened, the eyes saw. It was easy then to sing the heroism of rebellious sorrow. But afterwards, while an issue was still doubtful, while the cry of freedom was rising amid the obscurity, the dust, and uncertainty of actual combat, with how blind a scorn did that great poet of freedom pour upon Irishman and Boer a poison as virulent as he had once poured upon the priests and kings of Italy!

Let us emerge from the depression of such common blindness, and recall the memory of one whose vision never failed even in the midst of present gloom to detect the spark of freedom. A few great names stand beside his. Shelley, Landor, the Brownings, all gave the cause of Italy great and, in one case, the most exquisite verse, while the conflict was uncertain still. Even the distracted and hesitating soul of Clough, amid the dilettante contemplation of the arts in Rome, was rightly stirred. The poem that declared, "'Tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all," displayed in him a rare decision, while, even among his hideous hexameters, we find the great satiric line--fit motto for spectators at the bull-fights of freedom--"So that I 'list not, hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs!" But the name of Byron rises above them all, not merely that he alone showed himself capable of deed, but that the deed gave to his words a solidity and concrete power such as deeds always give. First of Englishmen, as Mr. Trevelyan says, Byron perceived that a living Italy was struggling beneath the outward semblance of Metternich's "order"; and as early as 1821 he prepared to join the Carbonari of Naples in their revolt for Italian liberty:

"I suppose that they consider me," he wrote, "as a depot
to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter,
supposing that Italy would he liberated, who or what is
sacrificed. It is a grand object--the very _poetry_ of
politics. Only think--a free Italy!"

That was written in freedom's darkest age, between Waterloo and the appearance of Mazzini, and that grand object was not to be reached for forty years. In the meantime, true to his guiding principle:

"Then battle for freedom whenever you can,
And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted,"

Byron had sacrificed himself for Greece as nobly as he was prepared to sacrifice himself for Italy. It was a time of darkness hardly visible. In the very year when Byron witnessed the collapse of the Carbonari rebellion, Leopardi, as Mr. Trevelyan tells us, wrote to his sister on her marriage: "The children you will have must be either cowards or unhappy; choose the unhappy." The hope of freedom appeared extinct. Tyrants, as Byron wrote, could be conquered but by tyrants, and freedom found no champion. The Italians themselves were merged in the slime of despairing satisfaction, and he watched them creeping, "crouching, and crab-like," along their streets. But through that dark gate of unhappiness which Leopardi named as the one choice for all but cowards, led the thin path that freedom must always take. Great as were Mazzini's services to all Europe, his greatest service to his countrymen lay in arousing them from the slough of contentment to a life of hardship, sacrifice, and unhappiness. When, after the loss of Rome in 1849, Garibaldi called for volunteers to accompany his hazardous retreat, he said to them: "I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death." Swinburne himself may have had those words in mind when, writing also of Garibaldi, he said of freedom:

"She, without shelter or station,
She, beyond limit or bar,
Urges to slumberless speed
Armies that famish, that bleed,
Sowing their lives for her seed,
That their dust may rebuild her a nation,
That their souls may relight her a star."

"Happy are all they that follow her," he continued, and in a sense we may well deem their fate happiness. But it is in the sense of what Carlyle in a memorable passage called the allurements to action. "It is a calumny on men," he wrote, "to say they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, reward in this world or the next. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner of freedom streams.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: "Either Cowards Or Unhappy"

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