Isabel Shepperson

“ Human, Too Human.
All that the literatures of the world hold treasured in amber; all that life, the primal fount of literature, holds as its human heritage—find fitting application to Alexander the Great. The color scale—from white thro’ tints to standard, and from [16] standard thro’ shades to black—of every emotion and passion of the heart of man is fixed fadelessly upon the name and fame of Alexander.
Yet how human and dearly human it all is! We understand it today even as Callisthenes understood it, and as the age B. C. and the early age and the middle age understood it. ”

“ William and Matilda were married in 1052, the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, so that the Bayeaux Tapestry has resisted the gnawing tooth of time for more than eight hundred years.
Who shall unerringly perceive in the glare of the passing day, what is great, what small: what is enduring, what evanescent! Linen fibres, silken threads, a woman’s needlework—endure: shields, helmets, swords, battle axes, all the iron horrors of Hastings have passed away. ”

“ Rameses, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon—we cannot dissociate these men from their deeds; how then can we disapprove their deeds and approve these men? Why is it that a Shelley, Byron, De Musset, Swinburne, Omar—ad infinitum—enthrall us by the charm of their written words, even tho’ we disagree with them in their tenets, their philosophy of life, their conclusions: and we censure and condemn their private lives! Can men, as Catullus sings to Lesbia, both “adore and scorn” the same object at the same time? ”

“ France is assuredly a genius-mad nation: whether genius or madness shall ultimately prevail is an answerless question. The Republic shall go down in “a slough of mire and blood” is the current prophecy today; but, then, France has gone down in mire and blood many and many a time and, phœnix like, she has risen and soared aloft led onward and upward by some strong Genius-Child.
Joan of Arc and Napoleon Bonaparte stand unique in history; each picked up torn, bleeding, fragmentary France and restored her to her rightful place in the family of nations. ”

“ Perhaps to all-conquering Progress as to world-conquering Rome, all battles are victories; either as a victory proper with roll of triumph-drum and flash of conquering colors, or as that grim Cannæ-defeat potential of a future Zama-victory.
It is well that there should be two possible interpretations of the answers of the oracle: thus is Truth ever serenely secure unperturbed by the errors of mortals. ”

“ To do is easier than to endure: to act is easier than to wait; to roam abroad and strive is easier than to stay at home and pray; to wander amid strange scenes and stranger men, to draw the approving sword in a cause approved, to fight and die and leave his bones to bleach on Asiatic plains were easier far for Rollo’s blood than to wait and waste away secure in a feudal fortress of Normandy.
At Robert’s death there were various claimants to his possessions; but, finally, owing, in great measure, to the fidelity of the regent Allan of Brittany, the dukedom was secured for William. ”

“ Harold was slightly wounded in this battle but, in the end, Tostig lay dead upon the field and the Danes were put to flight. Thus from a battlefield red with a brother’s blood, Harold, a wounded man and a perjured man hastened southward to his fate in the dread slaughter of Hastings.
“And were things only called by their right name,
Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.”—Byron.
The word battlefield is a euphemism for human shambles. And “the chief who in triumph advances” is, in grim reality, but the lustiest and the bloodiest of the dogs of war. ”

“ Strange that history remembers only Arnold the Traitor and not Arnold the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga. Too bad he didn’t die in that brilliant charge upon Burgoyne’s intrenchments, where after overcoming all obstacles and apparently just on the point of victory he was wounded in the same leg that had been painfully injured in the assault on Quebec—and carried fainting and profusely bleeding from the field. To be twice wounded for a cause and then to betray it—perverse human heart, who shall know its depths of perversity! ”

“ Life and death never played the mortal game more boldly and recklessly and desperately than in the sixteenth century. The magic of the New World was upon the old; the glamour of gem-lit El Dorados shimmered across the seas; and thither responsively rushed in shaky ships and leaky caravels those whom the gods would destroy made mad by the bite of the gold-tarantula. “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land”, shouted Sir Humphrey Gilbert as his frail bark was lost in the storm; as his deck lights rose high and dashed low and darkened far down ’neath the sea-lashing storm. ”

“ Fate is always on the winning side. As day advanced and the troops were all now fairly within the ravine, the heavens opened in streams of torrential rain. The Black Forest seemed to groan with impending doom: old Thor and Odin seemed fighting for their altars in the Druid wood, and Roman Jove was no match for this grim Teutonic Thor.
Arminius watched from the height; and just as the vanguard rounded the curve at the summit of which rose the barricade of trees, the signal for general assault all along the line arose clear and decisive from the height. ”

“ There is an open space on the flat top of an overhanging rock, darkly terrible even today and still the favorite haunt of century old oaks: and this place tradition points out as the spot upon which human sacrifices were of old offered to Thor and to Odin. And thither the blue eyed barbarians dragged those Roman soldiers, bravest of the brave, who had stood entrenched behind their helpless steel until exhaustion overcame them and who at last overpowered by sheer force of numbers, had been taken alive by the implacable foe and dragged to the altar of sacrifice. ”

“ Alexander spent the night before the battle of Arbela in consultation with the diviner Aristander, and in sacrificing to the god Fear. What does that mean? The conqueror of the world would placate Fear; would render it favorable to him, adverse to the enemy. Terror, recoil from death, panic-madness of a multitude of men, rout, ruin—from that deliver my army, O great god Fear; but let it come upon my enemy. Thus prayed Alexander as his gaze rested upon the moving plain gleaming with a million torch-lights where Darius, prepared for a night attack, was reviewing his forces. ”

“ Teutoberger Wald, Chalons, Tours—invisible, unknown, but not the less effective were the forces in these fights making fatefully for defeat and for victory. That which we term a trifle may be as a single bead of perspiration; trifling in itself, no doubt, but representative of a force far from trifling.
Battle raged indecisively all day long from early light till dark. Prince Charles seemed to wield the hammer of Thor. Abderame fell. The Saracens withdrew sullenly within their tents. Quiet darkness gathered mournfully over the living, the dying, and the dead. ”

“ Richard Cœur de Lion, the Black Prince, Lohengren, Parsifal, Siegfried, Don John of Austria—are flowerets of that Flower caught wax-white in amber and fixed fadelessly.
In all the sweep of history from Egypt to the hour, there is nothing nobler than the ideal Christian knight. To stand in awe of the omnipotent God; to go about the world redressing human wrongs; to love with young-world love bashfully reverent, constrained to win the world and lay it humbly at her feet ”

“ Battle.
About seven o’clock on that battle morn as the mists were dissipating, the successfully united French forces saw with dismay the slowly advancing army of the allies; long lines of Prussian cavalry, Austrian light troops, solid columns of infantry, batteries of artillery filled the valley and moved slowly, sinuously toward the Valmy height.
Dumouriez anxiously scanned the white strained faces of his untried troops. Would they fail him in the crucial hour? Would they break away in panic rout when the death-play began? It was their custom. ”

“ There is something sternly terrible in the human heart which can thus joyfully contemplate the destruction of thousands upon thousands of one’s fellow mortals. And yet, in this case, these Roman soldiers were the concrete embodiment of a cause which would enslave Arminius’ native land, intrude deadly enervation into the integrity of a German home; and more—much more: Rome had deeply wronged Arminius, lover of liberty, lover of native land; but even more deeply had she wronged Arminius, the lover, and the man. ”

“ And yet not for all the glory of Don John, ideal Christian knight and hero of Lepanto, would I have one little stain of human blood on my white hands.
“New occasions teach new duties;
Time makes ancient good uncouth.”—Lowell.
Nevertheless he who would sympathetically and justly depict the past should be capable of entering into and all round estimating that ancient good now grown uncouth. And whatever the best men of any given age or time or clime unanimously hold as best must, in the deep heart of things, be best for that age or time or clime. ”

“ No name upon the historic page, from Homer’s Achilles down to Carlyle’s Cromwell, but shines with luster luminous from hero worship. Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon—the world will ever love them, not perhaps for what they were, but for the vision splendid with which they are attended, and which was formed and fitted to them by admiring love. ”

“ One man’s eloquent fearlessness outweighed all those fearful considerations and precipitated the mad descent from the hill, the onslaught, the unequal fight, the wonder-victory.
Yet had Miltiades rested after the momentous battle all might have been lost. For the sullen Persian fleet hastening from Marathon had turned its course towards undefended Athens. And so that very night, even with the departure of the last Persian ship from the shore, Miltiades led his battle torn veterans a distance of about twenty-two miles to Phalerum, the port nearest to Athens. ”

“ These two mutually antagonistic races have grappled together in mortal combat at Zama, Tours, Jerusalem and, influentially, at Belgrade, Lepanto, Constantinople, Adrianople—and the end is not yet. Will there ever be full amity between these races?
But Rome won at Zama. And as Roman historians gravely assure us that it was better for all subsequent civilization that Rome should win, why we gratefully acquiesce; feeling, indeed, dully content that fate should, at all past times and crises, have shown herself as wisely beneficent to the winning cause as she is today. ”

“ For the winners, not the losers, are the writers as well as the makers of history, and all forces combine to make them unjust to the lost cause.
Herodotus gives us the story of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platæa, Salamis; Persia had no Herodotus: Homer extols the exploits of the Grecian army, the valor of Achilles; but Hector had no Homer: Roman historians tell the story of the Punic wars; Carthage from her desolate site sown with salt cares not what they say, whilst Hannibal, bravest of the brave, and supreme military genius, speaks on the historic page only from the lips of the hated Romans. ”

“ All Europe at this time mourned its Christian captives who were languishing in Turkish dungeons or wasting away as galley slaves. Twelve thousand of these Christian captives were chained to the oars as galley slaves on the Moslem ships while the fight Lepanto was raging; their liberation and restoration to freedom formed the purest joy-pearl in the gem casket of that joyous victory. ”

“ The Vanity of Human Wishes is indeed exemplified not only in Charles XII. of Sweden, but also in many other favorites of fortune: not one of whom, perhaps, but would add to or alter his own peculiar setting in fame—if perchance he should be able to recognize himself at all in the historic figure masquerading [47] under his name. How seldom does it chance that the world honors a man for what that man feels to be his best title to honor?
Would Julius Cæsar, red-hand conqueror of Gaul, know himself as the Shakespearean hero? ”

“ The great body of men, of today as of every other day of the long ages of time, defend their rights; and if that defence means that blood must flow,—then let it flow. And all the more freely will blood flow and all the more sternly indomitable will be the strife when men feel themselves justified as they strike the blow; when they feel themselves called upon to conquer or to die for a cause that they hold just; when they fight elated and fortified with the assurance that they stand as bulwarks warding off the concrete embodiment of all that they hold evil from all that they hold dear and good. ”