(October 19 2023, hlas)
Megalophues 3
Billy Budd - Melville
Chapter 4
In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road,
some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. I am going
to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall
be glad. At the least we can promise ourselves that pleasure which is
wickedly said to be in sinning, for a literary sin the divergence will
be.
Very likely it is no new remark that the inventions of our time have at
last brought about a change in sea-warfare in degree corresponding to
the revolution in all warfare effected by the original introduction from
China into Europe of gunpowder. The first European fire-arm, a clumsy
contrivance, was, as is well known, scouted by no few of the knights as
a base implement, good enough peradventure for weavers too craven to
stand up crossing steel with steel in frank fight. But as ashore,
knightly valor, tho' shorn of its blazonry, did not cease with the
knights, neither on the seas, though nowadays in encounters there a
certain kind of displayed gallantry be fallen out of date as hardly
applicable under changed circumstances, did the nobler qualities of such
naval magnates as Don John of Austria, Doria, Van Tromp, Jean Bart, the
long line of British Admirals and the American Decaturs of 1812 become
obsolete with their wooden walls.
Nevertheless, to anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without
being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one
the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float
there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but
also as a poetic reproach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the
Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads. And this not
altogether because such craft are unsightly, unavoidably lacking the
symmetry and grand lines of the old battle-ships, but equally for other
reasons.
There are some, perhaps, who while not altogether inaccessible to that
poetic reproach just alluded to, may yet on behalf of the new order, be
disposed to parry it; and this to the extent of iconoclasm, if need be.
For example, prompted by the sight of the star inserted in the Victory's
quarter-deck designating the spot where the Great Sailor fell, these
martial utilitarians may suggest considerations implying that Nelson's
ornate publication of his person in battle was not only unnecessary, but
not military, nay, savored of foolhardiness and vanity. They may add,
too, that at Trafalgar it was in effect nothing less than a challenge to
death; and death came; and that but for his bravado the victorious
Admiral might possibly have survived the battle; and so, instead of
having his sagacious dying injunctions overruled by his immediate
successor in command, he himself, when the contest was decided, might
have brought his shattered fleet to anchor, a proceeding which might
have averted the deplorable loss of life by shipwreck in the elemental
tempest that followed the martial one.
Well, should we set aside the more disputable point whether for various
reasons it was possible to anchor the fleet, then plausibly enough the
Benthamites of war may urge the above. But the might-have-been is but
boggy ground to build on. And, certainly, in foresight as to the larger
issue of an encounter, and anxious preparations for it--buoying the
deadly way and mapping it out, as at Copenhagen--few commanders have
been so painstakingly circumspect as this same reckless declarer of his
person in fight.
Personal prudence even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an
excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest
sense of duty, is the first. If the name Wellington is not so much of a
trumpet to the blood as the simpler name Nelson, the reason for this may
perhaps be inferred from the above. Alfred in his funeral ode on the
victor of Waterloo ventures not to call him the greatest soldier of all
time, tho' in the same ode he invokes Nelson as "the greatest sailor
since our world began."
At Trafalgar, Nelson, on the brink of opening the fight, sat down and
wrote his last brief will and testament. If under the presentiment of
the most magnificent of all victories to be crowned by his own glorious
death, a sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the
jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned
himself for the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then
affectation and fustian is each more heroic line in the great epics and
dramas, since in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those
exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity
being given, vitalizes into acts.
