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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.

T >> Thomas De Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.




The first proposition is, that war _cannot_ be abolished. The
second, and more offensive--that war ought not to be abolished. First,
therefore, concerning the first. One at a time. Sufficient for the page
is the evil thereof! How came it into any man's heart, first of all, to
conceive so audacious an idea as that of a conspiracy against war?
Whence could he draw any vapor of hope to sustain his preliminary
steps? And in framing his plot, which way did he set his face to look
out for accomplices? Revolving this question in times past, I came to
the conclusion--that, perhaps, this colossal project of a war against
war, had been first put in motion under a misconception (natural
enough, and countenanced by innumerable books) as to the true
historical origin of wars in many notorious instances. If these had
arisen on trivial impulses, a trivial resistance might have intercepted
them. If a man has once persuaded himself, that long, costly, and
bloody wars had arisen upon a point of ceremony, upon a personal pique,
upon a hasty word, upon some explosion of momentary caprice; it is a
natural inference, that strength of national will and public
combinations for resistance, supposing such forces to have been
trained, organized, and, from the circumstances of the particular
nation, to be permanently disposable for action, might prove
redundantly effective, when pointed against a few personal authors of
war, so presumably weak, and so flexible to any stern counter-volition
as those _must_ be supposed, whose wars argued so much of vicious
levity. The inference is unexceptionable: it is the premises that are
unsound. Anecdotes of war as having emanated from a lady's tea-table or
toilette, would authorize such inference as to the facilities of
controlling them. But the anecdotes themselves are false, or false
substantially. _All_ anecdotes, I fear, are false. I am sorry to
say so, but my duty to the reader extorts from me the disagreeable
confession, as upon a matter specially investigated by myself, that all
dealers in anecdotes are tainted with mendacity. Where is the
Scotchman, said Dr. Johnson, who does not prefer Scotland to truth?
but, however this may be, rarer than such a Scotchman, rarer than the
phoenix, is that virtuous man, a monster he is, nay, he is an
impossible man, who will consent to lose a prosperous anecdote on the
consideration that it happens to be a lie. All history, therefore,
being built partly, and some of it altogether, upon anecdotage, must be
a tissue of lies. Such, for the most part, is the history of Suetonius,
who may be esteemed the father of anecdotage; and being such, he (and
not Herodotus) should have been honored with the title, _Father of
Lies_. Such is the Augustan history, which is all that remains of
the Roman empire; such is the vast series of French memoirs, now
stretching through more than three entire centuries. Are these works,
then, to be held cheap, because their truths to their falsehoods are in
the ratio of one to five hundred? On the contrary, they are better, and
more to be esteemed on that account; because, _now_ they are
admirable reading on a winter's night; whereas, written on the
principle of sticking to the truth, they would have been as dull as
ditch water. Generally, therefore, the dealers in anecdotage are to be
viewed with admiration, as patriotic citizens, willing to sacrifice
their own characters, lest their countrymen should find themselves
short of amusement. I esteem them as equal to Codrus, Timoleon, William
Tell, or to Milton, as regards the liberty of unlicensed printing. And
I object to them only in the exceptional case of their being cited as
authorities for an inference, or as vouchers for a fact. Universally,
it may be received as a rule of unlimited application,--that when an
anecdote involves a stinging repartee, or collision of ideas,
fancifully and brilliantly related to each other by resemblance or
contrast, then you may challenge it as false to a certainty. One
illustration of which is--that pretty nearly every memorable
_propos_, or pointed repartee, or striking _mot_, circulating
at this moment in Paris or London, as the undoubted property of
Talleyrand, (that eminent knave,) was ascribed at Vienna, ninety years
ago, to the Prince de Ligne, and thirty years previously, to Voltaire,
and so on, regressively, to many other wits (knaves or not); until, at
length, if you persist in backing far enough, you find yourself amongst
Pagans, with the very same repartee, &c., doing duty in pretty good
Greek; [Footnote: This is _literally_ true, more frequently than
would be supposed. For instance, a jest often ascribed to Voltaire, and
of late pointedly reclaimed for him by Lord Brougham, as being one that
he (Lord B.) could swear to for _his_, so characteristic seemed
the impression of Voltaire's mind upon the _tournure_ of the
sarcasm, unhappily for this waste of sagacity, may be found recorded by
Fabricius in the _Bibliotheca Græca_, as the jest of a Greek who
has been dead for about seventeen centuries. The man certainly
_did_ utter the jest; and 1750 years ago. But who it was that he
stole it from is another question. To all appearance, and according to
Lord Brougham's opinion, the party robbed must have been M. de
Voltaire. I notice the case, however, of the Greek thefts and frauds
committed upon so many of our excellent wits belonging to the 18th and
19th centuries, chiefly with a view to M. de Talleyrand--that rather
middling bishop, but very eminent knave. He also has been extensively
robbed by the Greeks of the 2d and 3d centuries. How else can you
account for so many of his sayings being found amongst _their_
pages? A thing you may ascertain in a moment, at any police office, by
having the Greeks searched: for surely you would never think of
searching a bishop. Most of the Talleyrand jewels will be found
concealed amongst the goods of these unprincipled Greeks. But one, and
the most famous in the whole jewel-case, sorry am I to confess, was
nearly stolen from the Bishop, not by any Greek, but by an English
writer, viz., Goldsmith, who must have been dying about the time that
his Excellency, the diplomatist, had the goodness to be born. That
famous _mot_ about language, as a gift made to man for the purpose
of _concealing_ his thoughts, is lurking in Goldsmith's Essays.
Think of _that!_ Already, in his innocent childhood, whilst the
Bishop was in petticoats, and almost before he had begun to curse and
to swear plainly in French, an Irish vagabond had attempted to swindle
him out of that famous witticism which has since been as good as a
life-annuity to the venerable knave's literary fame.] sometimes, for
instance in Hierocles, sometimes in Diogenes Lærtius, in Plutarch, or
in Athenæus. Now the thing you know claimed by so many people, could
not belong to all of them: _all_ of them could not be the inventors.
Logic and common sense unite in showing us that it must have belonged
to the moderns, who had clearly been hustled and robbed by the
ancients, so much more likely to commit a robbery than Christians, they
being all Gentiles--Pagans--Heathen dogs. What do I infer from this?
Why, that upon _any_ solution of the case, hardly one worthy
saying can be mentioned, hardly one jest, pun, or sarcasm, which has
not been the occasion and subject of many falsehoods--as having been
_au-(and men)-daciously_ transferred from generation to generation,
sworn to in every age as this man's property, or that man's,
by people that must have known they were lying, until you retire
from the investigation with a conviction, that under any system of
chronology, the science of lying is the only one that has never
drooped. Date from _Anno Domini_, or from the Julian era, patronize
Olympiads, or patronize (as _I_ do, from misanthropy, because nobody
else _will_) the era of Nabonassar,--no matter, upon every road,
thicker than mile-stones, you see records of human mendacity, or (which
is much worse, in my opinion,) of human sympathy with other people's
mendacity.

This digression, now, on anecdotes,[Footnote: The word 'Anecdotes,'
first, I believe, came into currency about the middle of the 6th
century, from the use made of it by Procopius. _Literally_ it
indicated nothing that could interest either public malice or public
favor; it promised only _unpublished_ notices of the Emperor
Justinian, his wife Theodora, Narses, Belisarius, &c. But _why_
had they been unpublished? Simply because scandalous and defamatory:
and hence, from the interest which invested the case of an imperial
court so remarkable, this oblique, secondary and purely accidental
modification of the word came to influence its _general_ acceptation.
Simply to have been previously unpublished, no longer raised any
statement into an anecdote: it now received a new integration
it must be some fresh publication of _personal_ memorabilia; and
these having reference to _human_ creatures, must always be
presumed to involve more evil than good--much defamation
true or false--much doubtful insinuation--much suggestion of things
worse than could be openly affirmed. So arose the word: but the
_thing_ arose with Suetonius, that dear, excellent and hard-
working 'father of lies.'] is what the learned call an _excursus_,
and, I am afraid, too long by half; not strictly in proportion. But
don't mind _that_. I'll make it all right by being too short upon
something else, at the next opportunity; and then nobody can complain.
Meantime, I argue, that as all brilliant or epigrammatic anecdotes are
probably false, (a thing that hereafter I shall have much pleasure in
making out to the angry reader's satisfaction,) but to a dead certainty
those anecdotes, in particular, which bear marks in their construction
that a rhetorical effect of art had been contemplated by the narrator,
--we may take for granted, that the current stories ascribing modern
wars (French and English) to accidents the most inconsiderable, are
false even in a literal sense; but at all events they are so when
valued philosophically, and brought out into their circumstantial
relations. For instance, we have a French anecdote, from the latter
part of the seventeenth century, which ascribes one bloody war to the
accident of a little 'miff,' arising between the king and his minister
upon some such trifle as the situation of a palace window. Again, from
the early part of the eighteenth century, we have an English anecdote,
ascribing consequences no less bloody to a sudden feud between two
ladies, and that feud, (if I remember,) tracing itself up to a pair of
gloves; so that, in effect, the war and the gloves form the two poles
of the transaction. Harlequin throws a pair of Limerick gloves into a
corn-mill; and the spectator is astonished to see the gloves
immediately issuing from the hopper, well ground into seven armies of
one hundred thousand men each, and with parks of artillery to
correspond. In these two anecdotes, we recognize at once the able and
industrious artist arranging his materials with a pious regard to
theatrical effect. This man knows how to group his figures; well he
understands where to plant his masses of light and shade; and what
impertinence it would be in us spectators, the reader suppose and
myself, to go behind the scenes for critical inquiry into daylight
realities. All reasonable men see that, the less of such realities our
artist had to work with, the more was his merit. I am one of those that
detest all insidious attempts to rob men situated as this artist of
their fair fame, by going about and whispering that perhaps the thing
is true. Far from it! I sympathize with the poor trembling artist, and
agree most cordially that the whole story is a lie; and he may rely
upon my support at all times to the extent of denying that any vestige
of truth probably lay at the foundations of his ingenious apologue. And
what I say of the English fable, I am willing to say of the French one.
Both, I dare say, were the rankest fictions. But next, what, after all,
if they were _not?_ For, in the rear of all discussion upon anecdotes,
considered simply as true or _not_ true, comes finally a _valuation_
of those anecdotes in their moral relation, and as to the inferences
which they will sustain. The story, for example, of the French
minister Louvois, and the adroitness with which he fastened upon
great foreign potentates, in the shape of war, that irritability
of temper in his royal master which threatened to consume himself; the
diplomatic address with which he transmuted suddenly a task so delicate
as that of skirmishing daily in a Council Chamber with his own
sovereign, into that far jollier mode of disputation where one replies
to all objections of the very keenest logician, either with round shot
or with grape; here is an anecdote, which (for my own part) I am
inclined to view as pure gasconade. But suppose the story true, still
it may happen that a better valuation of it may disturb the whole
edifice of logical inferences by which it seemed to favor the
speculations of the war abolitionists. Let us see. What _was_ the
logic through which such a tale as this could lend any countenance to
the schemes of these abolitionists? That logic travelled in the
following channel. Such a tale, or the English tale of the gloves,
being supposed true, it would seem to follow, that war and the purposes
of war were phenomena of chance growth, not attached to any instinct so
ancient, and apparently so grooved into the dark necessities of our
nature, as we had all taken for granted. Usually, we rank war with
hunger, with cold, with sorrow, with death, afflictions of our human
state that spring up as inevitably without separate culture and in
defiance of all hostile culture, as verdure, as weeds, and as flowers
that overspread in spring time a fertile soil without needing to be
sown or watered--awful is the necessity, as it seems, of all such
afflictions. Yet, again, if (as these anecdote simply) war could by
possibility depend frequently on accidents of personal temperament,
irritability in a sensual king, wounded sensibilities of pride between
two sensitive ladies, there in a moment shone forth a light of hope
upon the crusade against war.

If _personal_ accidents could, to any serious extent, be amongst
the causes of war, then it would become a hopeful duty to combine
personal influences that should take an opposite direction. If casual
causes could be supposed chiefly to have promoted war, how easy for a
nation to arrange permanent and determinate causes against it! The
logic of these anecdotes seemed to argue that the whole fountains of
war were left to the government of chance and the windiest of levities;
that war was not in reality roused into activity by the evil that
resides in the human will, but on the contrary, by the simple defect of
any will energetic enough or steady enough to merit that name.
Multitudes of evils exist in our social system, simply because no
steadiness of attention, nor action of combined will, has been
converged upon them. War, by the silent evidence of these anecdotes,
seemed to lie amongst that class of evils. A new era might be expected
to commence in new views upon war; and the evil would be half conquered
from the moment that it should be traced to a trivial or a personal
origin.

All this was plausible, but false. The anecdotes, and all similar
anecdotes, might be true, but were delusive. The logical vice in them
was--that they substituted an occasion for a cause. The king's ill
temper for instance, acting through the levity and impatience of the
minister, might be the _causa occasionalis_ of the war, but not
its true _causa efficiens_. What _was?_ Where do the true permanent
causes of war, as distinguished from its proximate excitements,
find their lodgment and abiding ground? They lie in the system
of national competitions; in the common political system to which
all individual nations are unavoidably parties; in the system of
public forces distributed amongst a number of adjacent nations, with no
internal principle for adjusting the equilibrium of these forces, and
no supreme _Areopagus_, or court of appeal, for deciding disputes.
Here lies the _matrix_ of war, because an eternal _matrix_ of
disputes lies in a system of interests that are continually the same,
and therefore the parents of rivalships too close, that are continually
different, and so far the parents of alienation too wide. All war is an
instinctive _nisus_ for redressing the errors of equilibrium in
the relative position of nations amongst nations. Every nation's duty,
first, midst, and last, is to itself. No nation can be safe from
continual (because insensible) losses of ground, but by continual
jealousies, watchings, and ambitious strivings to mend its own
position. Civilities and high-bred courtesies pass and ought to pass
between nations; that is the graceful drapery which shrouds their
natural, fierce, and tiger-like relations to each other. But the
glaring eyes, which express this deep and inalienable ferocity, look
out at intervals from below these gorgeous draperies; and sad it is to
think that at intervals the acts and the temper suitable to those
glaring eyes _must_ come forward. Mr. Carter was on terms of the
most exquisite dissimulation with his lions and tigers; but, as often
as he trusted his person amongst them, if, in the midst of infinite
politeness exchanged on all sides, he saw a certain portentous
expression of mutiny kindling in the eyeball of any discontented tiger,
all was lost, unless he came down instantly upon that tiger's skull
with a blow from an iron bar, that suggested something like apoplexy.
On such terms do nations meet in diplomacy; high consideration for each
other does not conceal the basis of enmity on which they rest; not an
enmity that belongs to their feelings, but to the necessities of their
position. Every nation in negotiating has its right hand upon the hilt
of its sword, and at intervals playfully unsheaths a little of its
gleaming blade. As things stand at present, war and peace are bound
together like the vicissitudes of day and night, of Castor and Pollux.
It matters little which bucket of the two is going up at the moment,
which going down. Both are steadfastly tied by a system of alternations
to a revolving wheel; and a new war as certainly becomes due during the
evolutions of a tedious peace, as a new peace may be relied on during
the throes of a bloody war, to tranquillize its wounds. Consequently,
when the arrogant Louvois carried a war to the credit of his own little
account on the national leger of France, this coxcomb well knew that a
war was at any rate due about that time. Really, says he, I must find
out some little war to exhaust the _surplus_ irritability of this
person, or he'll be the death of me. But irritable or not irritable,
with a puppy for his minister or not, the French king would naturally
have been carried headlong into war by the mere system of Europe,
within a very few months. So much had the causes of complaint
reciprocally accumulated. The account must be cleansed, the court roll
of grievances must be purged. With respect to the two English ladies
again, it is still more evident that they could not have _caused_
a war by pulling caps with each other, since the grounds of every war,
what had caused it, and prolonged it, was sure to be angrily reviewed
by Parliament at each annual exposition of the Finance Minister's
Budget. These ladies, and the French coxcomb, could at the utmost have
claimed a distinction--such as that which belonged to a particular
Turkish gunner, the captain of a gun at Navarino, viz., that he, by
firing the first shot without orders, did (as a matter of fact) let
loose and unmuzzle the whole of that dreadful iron hurricane from four
nations which instantly followed, but which (be it known to the gunner)
could not have been delayed for fifty minutes longer, whether he had
fired the unauthorized gun or not.

But now, let me speak to the second proposition of my two-headed
thesis, viz., that war _ought_ not to be abolished, if such an
abolition were even possible. _Prima facie_, it seems a dreadful
doctrine to claim a place for war as amongst the evils that are
salutary to man; but conscientiously I hold it to be such. I hold with
Wordsworth, but for reasons which may or may not be the same, since he
has not stated _his_--

'That God's most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man--array'd for mutual slaughter:
Yea, Carnage is his daughter.'

I am obliged to hold, that supposing so romantic a condition realized
as the cessation of war, this change, unless other evils were
previously abolished, or neutralized in a way still more romantic to
suppose, would not be for the welfare of human nature, but would tend
to its rapid degradation.

One, in fact, of the earliest aspects under which this moral necessity
for war forces itself upon our notice, is its physical necessity. I
mean to say that one of the earliest reasons why war _ought_ to
exist, is because under any mode of suppressing war, virtually it
_will_ exist. Banish war as now administered, and it will revolve
upon us in a worse shape, that is, in a shape of predatory and ruffian
war, more and more licentious, as it enjoys no privilege or sufferance,
by the supposition, under the national laws. Will the causes of war die
away because war is forbidden? Certainly not; and the only result of
the prohibition would be to throw back the exercise of war from
national into private and mercenary hands; and _that_ is precisely
the retrograde or inverse course of civilization; for, in the natural
order of civilization, war passes from the hands of knights, barons,
insulated cities, into those of the universal community. If, again, it
is attempted to put down this lawless _guerilla_ state by national
forces, then the result will be to have established an interminable
warfare of a mixed character, private and public, civil and foreign,
infesting the frontiers of all states like a fever, and in substitution
for the occasional and intermitting wars of high national police,
administered with the dignified responsibility that belongs to supreme
rank, with the humanity that belongs to conscious power, and with the
diminishing havoc that belongs to increasing skill in the arts of
destruction. Even as to this last feature in warfare, which in the war
of brigands and _condottieri_ would for many reasons instantly
decay, no reader can fail to be aware of the marvels effected by the
forces of inventive science that run along side by side with the
advances of civilization; look back even to the grandest period of the
humane Roman warfare, listen to the noblest and most merciful of all
Roman captains, saying on the day of Pharsalia, (and saying of
necessity,) 'Strike at their faces, cavalry,'--yes, absolutely
directing his own troopers to plough up with their sabres the blooming
faces of the young Roman nobility; and then pass to a modern field of
battle, where all is finished by musquetry and artillery amidst clouds
of smoke, no soldier recognizing his own desolations, or the ghastly
ruin of his own right arm, so that war, by losing all its brutality, is
losing half of its demoralization.

War, so far from ending, because war was forbidden and nationally
renounced, on the contrary would transmigrate into a more fearful
shape. As things are at present, (and, observe, they are always growing
better,) what numbers of noble-minded men, in the persons of our
officers (yes, and often of non-commissioned officers,) do we British,
for example, disperse over battle-fields, that could not dishonor their
glorious uniform by any countenance to an act of cruelty! They are eyes
delegated from the charities of our domestic life, to overlook and curb
the license of war. I remember, in Xenophon, some passage where he
describes a class of Persian gentlemen, who were called the
_ophthalmoi_, or _eyes_ of the king; but for a very different
purpose. These British officers may be called the _opthalmoi_, or
eyes of our Sovereign Lady, that into every corner of the battle carry
their scrutiny, lest any cruelty should be committed on the helpless,
or any advantage taken of a dying enemy. But mark, such officers would
be rare in the irregular troops succeeding to the official armies. And
through this channel, amongst others, war, when cried down by act of
Parliament, and precisely _because_ it was cried down, would
become more perilously effective for the degradation of human nature.
Being itself dishonored, war would become the more effective as an
instrument for the dishonoring of its agents. However, at length, we
will suppose the impossible problem solved--war, we will assume, is at
last put down.

At length there is no more war. Though by the way, let me whisper in
your ear, (supposing you to be a Christian,) this would be a
prelibation drawn prematurely from the cup of millennial happiness;
and, strictly speaking, there is no great homage to religion, even thus
far--in figuring _that_ to be the purchase of man for himself, and
through his own efforts, which is viewed by Scripture as a glory
removed to the infinite and starry distance of a millennium, and as the
_teleutaion epigeinaema_, the last crowning attainment of
Christian truth, no longer _militant_ on earth. Christianity it
is, but Christianity when _triumphant_, and no longer in conflict
with adverse, or thwarting, or limiting influences, which only can be
equal to a revolution so mighty. But all this, for the sake of pursuing
the assumption, let us agree to waive. In reality, there are two
separate stations taken up by the war denouncers. One class hold, that
an influence derived from political economy is quite equal to the
flying leap by which man is to clear this unfathomable gulph of war,
and to land his race for ever on the opposite shore of a self-
sustaining peace. Simply, the contemplation of national debts, (as a
burthen which never would have existed without war,) and a computation
of the waste, havoc, unproductive labor, &c., attached to any single
campaign--these, they imagine, might suffice, _per se_, for the
extinction of war. But the other class cannot go along with a
speculation so infirm. Reasons there are, in the opposite scale,
tempting man into war,--which are far mightier than any motives
addressed to his self-interest. Even straining her energies to the
utmost, they regard all policy of the _purse_ as adequate: anything
short of religion, they are satisfied, must be incommensurate to a
result so vast.

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