Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

“ Strong writers are those who, with every reserve of power, seek no exhibition of strength. It is as if language could not come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an evil necessity. Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant witness. They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways have failed. The bane of a literary education is that it induces talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words. But those whose words are stark and terrible seem almost to despise words.
With words literature begins, and to words it must return. ”

“ But to make game of life was to each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see herself; to ‘be a candle-holder and look on’ at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder, would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-building and iron-founding. ”

“ Since we have had so much practice in tolerating one another, and in living together even when our ideas on life and the conduct of life seem absolutely incompatible, it is no wonder that we approach the treatment of international affairs in a temper very unlike the solemn and dogmatic ferocity of the German. We do not expect or desire that other peoples shall resemble us. The world is wide; and the world-drama is enriched by multiplicity and diversity of character. We like bad men, if there is salt and spirit in their badness. We even admire a brute, if he is a whole-hearted brute. ”

“ One service cannot be judged by the standards of another service. A soldier who knows nothing of the sea might easily mistake naval discipline for lack of discipline. A like mistake has often been made by those who are brought into casual relations with the air force. But the temper of the air force is a new and wonderful thing, born of the duties and dangers which war in the air has brought with it. To preserve that temper as a national inheritance is the dearest wish of those who covet for the air force a place beside the navy and the army. ”

“ Adam and Eve, as they are first seen in Paradise, have the same shining quality, the same vagueness of beauty expressing itself in purely emotional terms. Satan standing on the top of Mount Niphates, looking down on Eden spread out at his feet, and then with fierce gesticulation addressing himself to the sun at the zenith, is one of the dim solitary figures that dwell in the mind's eye. ”

“ By the mesmerism of State education, by the discipline of universal military service, by the pride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fears natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolute belief in the State, in war as the highest activity of the State, and in the right of the State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, to its purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse peoples that are united under the Prussian Monarchy. Most of them are not naturally warlike peoples. ”

“ Plagiarism is a crime only where writing is a trade; expression need never be bound by the law of copyright while it follows thought, for thought, as some great thinker has observed, is free. The words were once Shakespeare’s; if only you can feel them as he did, they are yours now no less than his. The best quotations, the best translations, the best thefts, are all equally new and original works. From quotation, at least, there is no escape, inasmuch as we learn language from others. All common phrases that do the dirty work of the world are quotations—poor things, and not our own. ”

“ Off the coast of Cornwall or over the rivers of West Africa, in raids on German cities or in expeditions to assist beleaguered Allies, the Naval Air Service were incessantly active on the fringe of things. They were sailors and adventurers by tradition; they adapted themselves to circumstance, and made the best of what they found. Their courage put new heart into desperate men, and their humanity (the greatest tradition of the British navy) added lustre to their courage. ”

“ How should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their story, in whose mind ‘the effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,’ called up ‘an army of anonymous desires and pleasures’? To have the ‘golden-tongued Romance with serene lute’ for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium. ”

“ Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but those keepers can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great natural causes. The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough. But it is not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a careless word, or an impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic, involve twenty million men in a struggle to the death. It is only clever, conceited men, proud of their neat little minds, who think that because they cannot fathom the causes of the war, it might easily have been prevented. ”

“ Each of them passed through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the artist is exposed to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on the one hand and the necessity for pleasing the rabble on the other. When any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread and his fame are in their gift—it is a stern passage for his soul, a touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his spirit. ”

“ It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them.
There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for another man’s. All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill. ”

“ Beautiful figured writing and keen psychological observation of this kind are beside the purpose of Milton, and beyond his power.
For the time we must forego the attempt to see into the life of things, and must accept in imagination our position as citizens in this strange majestic commonwealth of angels and men. It is no mean city. Noble shapes pass before our eyes. High language is held, and great wars are waged. Events of tremendous import roll on to their destined accomplishment. Golden processions move across the dim expanse of Chaos. Worlds are blown and broken like bubbles. ”

“ The magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice done to it by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol of a world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards order and reason;—this was surely an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice. ”

“ The only real check on war is an understanding between nations. For the strengthening of such an understanding the Allies have a great opportunity, and admirable instruments. I do not think that we shall call on Germany to preside at our conferences. But we shall have the help of all those qualities of heart and mind which are possessed by France, by Russia, by Italy, and by America, who, for all her caution, hates cruelty even more than she loves peace. There has never been an alliance of greater promise for the government and peace of the world. ”

“ The pleasure of wielding the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques carved on the rock in the artist’s painless hours.
All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the ‘sport-impulse’ (to translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist’s power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make game of life. ”

“ Hypocrisy, in its ordinary forms, is a superficial thing—a skin disease, not a cancer. It is not easy, at best, to bring the outward and inward relations of the soul into perfect harmony; a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to their separation. The English, for I am ready now to return to my point, are a people of a divided mind, slow to drive anything through on principle, very ready to find reason in compromise. They are passionate, and they are idealists, but they are also a practical people, and they dare not give the rein to a passion or an idea. ”

“ The genealogical method in literary history is both interesting and valuable, but we are too apt, in our admiration for its lucid procedure, to forget that there is one thing which it will never explain, and that thing is poetry. Books beget books; but the mystery of conception still evades us. We display, as if in a museum, all the bits of thought and fragments of expression that Milton may have borrowed from Homer and Virgil, from Ariosto and Shakespeare. Here is a far-fetched conceit, and there is an elaborately jointed comparison. ”

“ The idea to be expressed is a kind of mutual recognition between thought and language, which here meet and claim each other for the first time, just as in the first glance exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its eyes on the world, and pleads for life. But thought, although it may indulge itself with the fancy of a predestined affiance, is not confined to one mate, but roves free and is the father of many children. A belief in the inevitable word is the last refuge of that stubborn mechanical theory of the universe which has been slowly driven from science, politics, and history. ”

“ This is a grave difference; yet it would be wrong to suppose that we can treat it adequately by condemning the whole German nation as a nation of confessed criminals. It is the paradox of war that there is always right on both sides. When a man is ready and willing to sacrifice his life, you cannot deny him the right to choose what he will die for. The most beautiful virtues, faith and courage and devotion, grow like weeds upon the battle-field. ”

“ I. Style.—Let no one say that ‘reading and writing comes by nature,’ unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it first. A poet is born, not made,—so is every man,—but he is born raw. Stevenson’s life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the art of writing,
‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.’
Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature—they are ‘word-deaf,’ as others are colour-blind. ”

“ But all unawares she has answered the contention of Satan:--"O the vanity of these men!--Fainall, d'ye hear him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know that they could not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the lover's gift!--Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? ... One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo."
Like most men of an impressionable temperament and a strong will, Milton was not sympathetic, nor curious to place himself where he might see the world from a point of view other than his own. ”

“ He can lead on the dance of words till their sinuous movements call forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some adamantine rigidity, time is converted into space, and music begets sculpture. To see for the sake of seeing, to hear for the sake of hearing, are subsidiary exercises of his complex metaphysical art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of a philosophy of letters. Necessary though they be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service to new forms, and made to further purposes not their own. ”

“ Our dead have taught the children of to-day more and better than any living teachers can teach them. No one in this country will ever forget how the people of the Dominions, at the first note of war, sprang to arms like one man. We must not thank or praise them; like the Navy, they regard our thanks and praise as something of an impertinence. They are not fighting, they say, for us. But that is how we discovered them. They are doing much better than fighting for us, they are fighting with us, because, without a word of explanation or appeal, their ideas and ours are the same. ”

“ All writing is a kind of word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the diverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. ”

“ To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or invent strange jargons. They furbish up old words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it. ”

“ It is this quality of Milton's verse that makes the exercise of reading it aloud a delight and a trial. Every word is of value. There is no mortar between the stones, each is held in place by the weight of the others, and helps to uphold the building. In reading, every word must be rendered clearly and articulately; to drop one out, or to slur it over, is to take a stone from an arch. Indeed, if Lamb and Hazlitt are right in thinking that Shakespeare's greatest plays cannot be acted, by the same token, Milton's greatest poems cannot be read aloud. ”

“ Nature, it is well known, loves the strong, and gives to them, and to them alone, the chance of becoming civilized. Are the German people strong enough to earn that chance? That is what we are to see. They have some admirable elements of strength, above any other European people. No other European army can be marched, in close order, regiment after regiment, up the slope of a glacis, under the fire of machine guns, without flinching, to certain death. This corporate courage and corporate discipline is so great and impressive a thing that it may well contain a promise for the future. ”

“ Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art. ”

“ The creed of Western civilization, for which they feel nothing but contempt, and on which they will be broken, is not a simple thing, like theirs. The words by which it is commonly expressed—democracy, parliamentarism, individual liberty, diversity, free development—are puzzling theoretic words, which make no instinctive appeal to the heart. Nevertheless, we stand for growth as against order; and for life as against death. If Germany wins this war, her system will have to be broken or to decay before growth can start again. ”

“ Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar. It is in this obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called it, that we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our mortal lives. To be overtaken by a master, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured skill and courage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gain fresh confidence from despair. ”

“ It has found a new world in the air. War in the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the old gallantry and initiative. The airman depends on his own brain and nerve; he cannot fall back on orders from his superiors. Our airmen of to-day are the true inheritors of Drake; they have the same inspired recklessness, the same coolness, and the same chivalry to a vanquished enemy.
I am a very bad example of the English temper; for the English temper grumbles at all this, to the great relief of our enemies, who believe that what a man admits against his own nation must be true. ”

“ A martyr to the good that is to be, he has voluntarily maimed himself “for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake”—if, perchance, the kingdom of Heaven might come by observation. The enthusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to chain language also to the bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the poet’s right-hand weapon, he despises; all that is tentative, individual, struck off at the urging of a mood, he disclaims and suspects. Yet the very rewards that science promises have their parallel in the domain of letters. ”

“ Yet it is this temper which has given England her great place in the world and which has cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone, but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of English institutions. You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere in our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it is essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of melancholy. ”

“ The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even the news with a very large grain of salt. 'So the papers say', he remarks; 'it may be true or it may not.' Yet the press has done good service, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War before our people and in holding them together. Freedom means that we must love our diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it. We must die for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their pattern. ”

“ The Germans have taken Antwerp; they may possibly destroy the British fleet, overrun England and France, repel Russia, establish themselves as the dictators of Europe—in short, fulfil their dreams. What then? At an immense cost of human suffering they will have achieved, as it seems to us, a colossal and agonizing failure. Their engines of destruction will never serve them to create anything so fair as the civilization of France. Their uneasy jealousy and self-assertion is a miserable substitute for the old laws of chivalry and regard for the weak, which they have renounced and forgotten. ”

“ The English soldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who is prepared to make the best of a bad job. The German soldier sacrifices himself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God. The filthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all that is elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food that is to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred vessels in the churches—all these things, too numerous and too monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the brute beast ”

“ I know that many people in England are not daunted but depressed by the military successes of the enemy. Our soldiers in the field are not depressed. But we who are kept at home suffer from the miasma of the back-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers—a form of literature that is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given to Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears to the telephone, and we forget that the great causes which are always at work, and which will shape the issues of this war, are not recorded upon the telephone. ”

“ The success of the Government of India is not to be credited to the classes from which the Civil Service is recruited, but to the discipline of the Service itself, a Service so high in tradition and so free from corruption that advancement in it is to be gained only by intelligence and sympathy. What I am saying is that I can imagine no finer raw material for the political discipline of the Indian Civil Service than some of the generous and clean-run spirits who have come from the Dominions to help in this war. ”

“ Might is Right; but when a young Englishman is set down at an outpost of Empire to govern a warlike tribe, he has to do a good deal of hard thinking on the problem of political power and its foundations. He has to trust to himself, to form his own conclusions, and to choose his own line of action. He has to try to find out what is in the mind of others. A young German, inured to skilled slavery, does not shine in such a position. Man for man, in all that asks for initiative and self-dependence, Englishmen are the better men, and some Germans know it. ”

“ I know that some say, 'Let us have war when we are at war, and peace when we are at peace'. It sounds plausible and magnanimous, but it is Utopian. You must reckon with your own people. They know that when we last had peace, the sunshine of that peace was used by the Germans to hatch the spawn of malice and treason. If the Germans are defeated in the war, we shall, I suppose, forgive them, for the very English reason that it is a bore not to forgive your enemies. But if they escape without decisive defeat in battle, their harder trial is yet to come. ”

“ America is peopled by many races; only a minority of the inhabitants—an influential and governing minority—are of the English stock. But here, again, the language carries it; and the ideas that inspire America are ideas which had their origin in the long English struggle for freedom. Our sufferings in this War are great, but they are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in a new recruit to the cause. No nation, in the whole course of human history, has ever made a more splendid decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, than America, when she decided to enter this War. ”

“ Indeed, when I think how entirely the War possesses our thoughts and how entirely we are agreed concerning it, I seem to see a new meaning in the creeds of the religions. These creeds grew up by general consent, and no one who believed them grudged repeating them. In the face of an indifferent or hostile world the faithful found themselves obliged to define their belief, and to strengthen themselves by an unwearying and united profession of faith. It is the enemy who gives meaning to a religious creed: without our creed we cannot win. ”

“ I do not find that any war between great nations was ever won by a machine. The Trojan horse will be trotted out against me, but that was a municipal affair. Wars are won by the temper of a people. Serbia is not yet defeated. It is a frenzied and desperate quest that the Germans undertook when they began to seek for some mechanical trick or dodge, some monstrous engine, which should enable the less resolved and more excited people to defeat the more resolved and less excited. If we are to be defeated, it must be by them, not by their bogey-men. ”

“ The organization of the second-rate can never produce anything first-rate. We do not understand a people who, when it comes to the last push of man against man, throw up their hands and utter the pathetic cry of 'Kamerad'. To surrender is a weakness that no one who has not been under modern artillery fire has any right to condemn; to profess a sudden affection for the advancing enemy is not weakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. ”

“ In all countries, and on all fronts, an army of skilled workers devote themselves to this single end. I believe that this quickening of the human conscience, for that is what it is, will prove to be the greatest gain of the War, and the greatest advance made in restraint of war. If the nations come to recognize that their first duty, and their first responsibility, is to those who give so much in their service, that recognition will of itself do more than can be done by any conclave of statesmen to discourage war. ”