Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 66, April, 1863», страница 15

Considered as a military movement, it would seem to be conceded that no grosser blunder could have been made than the selection of so small a force for so desperate an undertaking. There was no chance of success but by attacking simultaneously both flanks and the salient of the Redan. The storming party was barely large enough for the assault of the salient, thus exposing the handful of men to a murderous and fatally destructive fire from the flanks. This was bad enough, certainly, but worse remains behind. English critics have most severely censured our generals for sometimes placing new recruits in posts of danger, requiring cool heads, steady nerves, and the habit of discipline. Perhaps they have forgotten the following incident. Among the picked men selected out of the entire British forces as this very storming party were raw recruits from the Ninety-Seventh Regiment, who were designated for this perilous service as a punishment for their cowardice in a recent skirmish!—and to make this punishment still more severe, they were ordered to lead off in the assault! An historian of the war says,—"The inexperience of some of these recruits seems almost incredible. One young fellow, who came to the field-hospital with a broken arm and a bullet in his shoulder, carried his firelock with him, but confessed that he had never fired it off, as he was unable to do so. The piece, upon being examined, was found to be in perfect order. Such poor undisciplined lads, fresh from the plough, ought never on any occasion to have been pitted against the well-drilled soldiers of Russia; but it was something worse than blundering to lead them on to the assault of a formidable work like the Redan. Such generalship recalls to our mind the remark of the Russian officer with regard to the military force of England, that 'it was an army of lions led by donkeys.'" Mr. Russell states that many of these recruits "had only been enlisted a few days, and had never fired a rifle in their lives."

Now will it be believed that General Codrington, to whom was committed the planning and directing of this ill-starred and disastrous enterprise, succeeded Sir James Simpson as Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty's forces in the Crimea? How must the shade of Admiral Byng have haunted Her Majesty's Government, unless it was a most forgiving ghost! If General Codrington's promotion could have been delayed a little more than eighteen months, it might have occurred appropriately on the centennial anniversary of the death of that ill-fated naval commander, convicted by court-martial and shot for "not doing his utmost"!

On the evening of the 8th of September, the Russians blew up their magazines, fired the buildings, and evacuated the town. So fell Sebastopol, after a siege of three hundred and forty-five days. It has been considered by the English a bit of very choice pleasantry to allude to our oft-recurring statement, that "the decisive blow had been struck," and that "the backbone of the Rebellion was broken." It may not be impertinent to remind them, that the report, first circulated in France and England in the latter part of September, 1854, and fortified by minute details, that Sebastopol—the backbone of Russian resistance to the allied arms—had fallen, was repeated and reiterated from time to time during the war, until the phrase, "Sebastopol est pris," passed into a by-word, and did good service in relieving the cruelly overworked Greek Kalends.

And now we come naturally to the consideration of another and an important inquiry. Did the beginning of the war find, or did its progress develop or create, a single English general of commanding military capacity, competent to handle in the field even so small an army as the British contingent in the Crimea? Of Lord Raglan Mr. Russell says, and without doubt says truly,—"That he was a great chief, or even a moderately able general, I have every reason to doubt, and I look in vain for any proof of it, whilst he commanded the English army in the Crimea." Another authority says,—"The conviction that he was not a great general is universal and uncontradicted. He could perform the ordinary duties of a general satisfactorily, but he was lamentably deficient in those qualities which constitute military genius. He possessed considerable professional experience, great application, and remarkable powers of endurance; but he lacked the energy, vehemence, and decision of character which are essential to the constitution of a successful military chieftain." To his hesitation in council, and his want of energy and promptness in action, have always been attributed, in large measure, the ruinous delays and the fearful suffering in the army which he commanded. Lord Raglan died in June, 1855, in his sixty-seventh year. General Simpson succeeded him. "It was believed at the time," writes Mr. Russell, "and now is almost notorious, that he opposed his own appointment, and bore testimony to his own incapacity." "He was slow and cautious in council, and it is no wonder that where Lord Raglan failed, General Simpson did not meet with success." The English press and people demanded his recall. His incompetency was everywhere acknowledged, and indeed he himself would have been the last man to deny it. In about three months from the date of General Simpson's appointment, "the Queen was graciously pleased to permit him to resign the command of the army." As we have already seen, his place was filled by General Codrington. This officer was as signally rewarded, because he had failed, as he could have been, if he had succeeded. Mr. Russell quotes approvingly the comment of a French officer upon this appointment:—"If General Codrington had taken the Redan, what more could you have done for him than to make him General, and to give him command of the army? But he did not take it, and he is made General and Commander-in-Chief." With equal discrimination, Sir James Simpson was created Field-Marshal! The remainder of the campaign gave General Codrington no further opportunity of displaying his qualities for command. No other important action occurred before the termination of hostilities.

Great credit is certainly due to Mr. Russell for fearlessly exposing the errors and incompetency of the three officers successively at the head of the English army, in spite of "much obloquy, vituperation, and injustice," and for bearing his invariable and eloquent testimony to the bravery, endurance, and patience of the British private soldier.

In this brief recital of English blunders during the Crimean War, we have made no mention of the desperate and disastrous "charge of the Light Brigade," the gross and culpable inefficiency of the Baltic fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, and other instances of military incapacity no less monstrous. Enough, however, has been told to more than justify the very mild summing-up of Mr. Russell, that the "war had exposed the weakness of our military organization in the grave emergencies of a winter campaign, and the canker of a long peace was unmistakably manifested in our desolated camps and decimated battalions."

Why should we add to this dismal recital the appalling sufferings of the soldiers,—helpless victims to bad management at home and shameful neglect in the field,—the long, freezing nights of trench-work under a driving rain, "without warm or water-proof clothing,—the trenches two and three feet deep with mud, snow, and half-frozen slush, so that many, when they took off their shoes, were unable to get their swollen feet into them again, and might be seen barefooted about the camp, the snow half a foot deep on the ground,"—creeping for shelter into "miserable tents pitched as it were at the bottom of a marsh, where twelve or fourteen unhappy creatures lay soaking without change of clothing" until they were called out again to their worse than slave-labor,—disease, brought on by exhaustion, exposure, overwork, and deficient food, sweeping the men off by thousands, and yet no sufficient supply of medical stores and no adequate number of medical attendants, not a soul seeming to care for their comfort or even for their lives,—so neglected and ill-treated that "the wretched beggar who wandered about the streets of London led the life of a prince compared with the British soldiers who were fighting for their country, and who were complacently assured by the home authorities that they were the best-appointed army in Europe." The world knows the whole sad story by heart. And is it not written in the volumes of evidence sworn to before the Commission appointed by Parliament to inquire into the condition of the army?

Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the extent to which the home administration was responsible for the general mismanagement of the war, in its main features and its minute details,—nor the thoroughly English stolidity with which all complaints were received by every member of the Government, from the cabinet minister who dictated pompous and unmeaning despatches, down to the meanest official who measured red tape,—nor the intense and universal popular indignation which, after a year "full of horrors," compelled the resignation of the Aberdeen Ministry. Lord Derby did not, perhaps, overstate the verdict of the nation, when he said in the House of Lords,—"From the very first to the very last, there has been apparent in the course pursued by Her Majesty's Government a want of previous preparation,—a total want of prescience; and they have appeared to live from day to day providing for each successive exigency after it arose, and not before it arose. TOO LATE have been the fatal words applicable to the whole conduct of Her Majesty's Government in the course of the war." The change in the Ministry, however, by no means cured all the evils which had existed; for, although the sufferings of the soldiers—thanks in large part to the providential appearance and heroic conduct of Florence Nightingale—were greatly diminished, still, as we have seen, the military blunders continued to the close of the war.

Now, if we do not greatly mistake, the lesson which this country should learn from the mortifying experience of the English army in the Crimea is not one of exultation over its lamentable and unnecessary errors, but rather of indifference to the insulting criticism of a nation which can so ill afford to be critical, and of determination to profit in every possible way by those blunders which might have been avoided. The history of all wars, moreover, should teach us that now and then there comes a time when to hold the olive-branch in one hand and the sword in the other, especially if the olive-branch is kept in the foreground and the sword in the background, involves not only a sad waste of energy, but is mistaken kindness to our enemies.

Those who have read—and who has not?—the charming story of "Rab and his Friends" will remember the incident which, for the sake of brevity, we reluctantly condense. A small, thorough-bred terrier, after being rudely interrupted in his encounter with a large shepherd's-dog, darts off, fatally bent on mischief, to seek a new canine antagonist. He discovers him in the person of a huge mastiff, quietly sauntering along in a peaceful frame of mind, all unsuspicious of danger. The angry terrier makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. The rest of the story shall be told in the graphic language of the author. "To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar,—yes, roar: a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? He is muzzled! The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breeching. His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage,—a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, 'Did you ever see the like of this?' He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. We soon had a crowd; the chicken held on. 'A knife!' cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then!—one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,—and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead."

If we draw a useful moral from this homely incident, it will not be the first time that the unerring sagacity of animals has been serviceable to man. A stealthy, cunning, unscrupulous, desperate, devilish foe has seized the nation by the throat and threatens its life. The Government is strong, courageous, determined, abundantly able to make a successful resistance, and even to kill the insolent enemy; but—it is muzzled: muzzled here by conservative counsels, and there by radical complaints,—by the over-cautious policy of one general, and the headlong haste of another,—by a too tender regard for slavery in some States, and by a too zealous anxiety for instant emancipation in others,—by fear of provoking opposition in one quarter, and by a blind defiance of all obstacles in another. Now what shall be done? Shall we hesitate, despond, despair? Never! For Heaven's sake, take off the muzzle. Use every weapon which the God of Battles has placed in our hands. Put forth all the power of the nation. Encourage and promote all fighting generals; cashier all officers who are determined to make war on peace principles; arm, equip, and discipline negroes, not to burn, plunder, and massacre, but to meet their and our enemies in fair and open fight.¹⁴ Demonstrate to the world that we are terribly in earnest. Waste no time in discussing the chance of foreign intervention. Postpone Pacific railroads, international telegraphs, polygamy in Utah, African colonization, everything, to the engrossing and emergent crisis which now confronts the Government. Make the contest sharp, short, and decisive. Put down the Rebellion, vindicate the majesty of the Law, the sacredness of the Union, and the integrity of the Constitution. There will be time enough, after this is done, to discuss all minor questions and all collateral issues. One paramount duty lies directly before us. Let us perform this duty fearlessly, and leave the future with God.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Roba di Roma. By WILLIAM W. STORY. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 355, 369. London: Chapman & Hall. 1863.

The father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild was in the habit of saying, that "travelling was travelling in one part of the world as well as another; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in traversing so many leagues; and he appealed to experience whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland." Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows; but we think he told no more than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe. They go out empty, to come home unprofitably full. They go abroad to escape themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to jump away from their own shadows. And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the "Tristia," had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getae which he learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable than all his poems. Could men only learn how comfortably the world can get along without the various information which they bring home about themselves! Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than exactness. Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two kinds of men only,—those of the highest genius and culture, and those wholly without either.

It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to that end. The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere diarist, Pepys; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot down the events of every day for one's self without thinking of Mrs. Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court to her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen should be tolerably easy; but in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does not the tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he ought to have experienced, instead of letting us know what he saw and felt? If authors would only consider that the way to write an enlivening book is not by seeing and saying just what would be expected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public would be gainers. What tortures have we not seen the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to get up the appropriate emotion before some famous work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to escape! If one does not like the Venus of Milo, let him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never will.

Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from travelling-companions whose only notion of their function was that of putting so many leagues a day behind them. His theory was that of Ulysses, who was not content with seeing the cities of many men, but would learn their minds also. And this way of taking time enough, while we think it the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a country so much the reverse of fast as Italy, where impressions need to steep themselves in the sun and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem should be translated take your own time. But is there any particular reason why everybody should go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell everybody else what he supposes he ought to have seen there? Surely, there must be some adequate cause for so constant an effect.

Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that, if he could only see Rome, "it would give him talk for a lifetime." The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass "four months on classic ground," after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conciva satur,—a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible predilection. But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature. The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome; the Englishman, because the same Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him a Milor in partibus. But to the American, especially if he be of an imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner. In England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French; but Rome is the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Florus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility. For him who has escaped thither there is no longer any tyranny of public opinion; its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches that consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the recovery of his own individuality. He is no longer met at every turn with "Under which king, bezonian? Speak, or die!" He is not forced to take one side or the other about table-tipping, or the merits of General Blank, or the constitutionality of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need not hide his natural self in the livery of any opinion, and may be as happy as Adam, if he be wise enough to keep clear of the apple of High Art. This may be very weak, but it is also very agreeable to certain temperaments; and to be weak is to be miserable only where it is a duty to be strong.

Coming from a country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree to be cut down merely because "it had got to be so old," the sense of permanence, unchangeableness, and repose which Italy gives us is delightful. The oft-repeated non è più come era prima may be true enough of Rome politically, but it is not true of it in most other respects. To be sure, gas and railroads have got in at last; but one may still read by a lucerna and travel by vettura, if he like, using Alberti as a guide-book, and putting up at the Bearas a certain keen-eyed Gascon did three centuries ago.

Mr. Story has taken Italy with due deliberation, having lived there now some fifteen years. He has thus been enabled to let things come to him, instead of running after them; and his sensations have had time to ripen slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque can be profitably done by the job, for in aesthetics the proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian festa, we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted to the delightful confidence of its innocent gayety and unpremeditated charm. Tourists must often have remarked, in making an excursion to a ruin or bit of picturesque scenery, that what chance threw in to boot was by far the best part of their bargain, for the most beautiful experiences come not by observation. The crumbling temple lured them forth, but it was only to see a sunset or to hear a nightingale.

What between winters in Rome and summers in one or the other mountain-town, with intervals of absence now at Florence and now at Siena, Mr. Story has had such opportunities as fall to the lot of very few foreigners. For, in studying the ways of a people, it is as with wild animals,—you must be long enough among them to get them wonted, so that you may catch them at unawares. His book is on the whole a delightful one, and would have been so without qualification, had he confined it to a relation of his own experiences. Where he narrates or describes, he is always lively and interesting; where he disserts or grows learned, he gives up his vantage-ground, and must consent to be dull like everybody else. Anybody can be learned, anybody except Dr. Holmes dull; but not everybody can be a poet and artist. The chapter on the Evil Eye is a marvel of misplaced erudition. The author has hunted all antiquity like a policeman, and arrested high and low on the least suspicion of a squint. Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless Dam our impatience tempts us to add an n,) Tibullus and Johannes Wouwerus, St. Augustine and Turnebus, with a motley mob of Jews, Christians, Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Lord-knows-whats, are all thrust into the dock cheek by jowl. For ourselves, we would have taken Mr. Story's word for it, without the attestation of these long-winded old monsters, who wrote about charms and enchantments in a style as potent in disenchantment as holy-water, and who bored their own generation too thoroughly to have any claim upon the button of ours. Every age is sure of its own fleas without poking over the rag-bag of the past; and of all things, a superstition has the least need of proving the antiquity of its pedigree, since its very etymology is better than the certificate of all the Heralds' Colleges put together. We are surprised that so clever and lively a man as Mr. Story, should not have seen that in such matters one live fact is better than fifty dead ones, and that even in history it is not so much the facts as what the historian has contrived to see in them that gives life to his work.

But learning makes a small part of Mr. Story's book; only, as the concluding chapter happens to bristle with quotations and references, thickly as the nave of St. Peter's on a festival with bayonets, this is the last taste left in the mouth. The really valuable parts of the book (and they make much the larger part of it) are those in which the author relates his own experiences. After so many volumes stuffed like a chiffonnier's basket with the shreds of ancient Rome, it is really refreshing to come upon a book which makes us feel that Italy is still inhabited by very human beings, and contains something more than the tombs of the Scipios, and inscriptions interesting only to people who think a dead Roman donkey better than a living Italian lion. The chapters on Street-Music in Rome, on Games, on Gaffes and Theatres, on Villeggiatura and the Vintage, on the Ghetto, the Markets, and Summer in the City, are all of them delightful and new. They really teach us something, while the learning, we are sorry to say, does nothing of the kind. Several of these chapters our readers will remember enjoying in the "Atlantic." They are good for those who have been in Italy, for those who are going thither, and, above all, for those who must stay at home. They contain the most cheerful and picturesque descriptions of Italian life and scenery we have ever met with. And we cannot be too thankful to Mr. Story that he leaves a theme so poetical in itself to be poetical, without any officious help from himself, and that, though an artist, he does not enter on any of those disquisitions which would have made Sir Joshua shift his trumpet. On the whole, we are inclined to forgive him the polyglot lumber of his chapter on the Evil Eye in consideration of the scenery and galleries which he has spared us. We think we see symptoms that the Nature-mania which began with Rousseau is on the decline, and that men and their ways are getting into fashion again as worth study. The good time is perhaps coming when some gallant fellow will out with it that he hates mountains, and will be greeted with a shout of delight from his emancipated brethren.

Mr. Story is a person of very remarkable endowments. An accomplished musician and poet, (we ought to have said before how remarkably good the translations in these volumes are,) a skilful draughtsman, the author of reputable law-books, he would seem to have been in danger of verifying the old saw, had he not proved himself so eminently a master in sculpture. We think the country is deeply indebted to Mr. Story for having won so complete a triumph at the London World's Fair with his Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl, at a time when English statesmen and newspapers were assuring the world that America was relapsing into barbarism. Those statues, if we may trust the unvarying witness of judicious persons, are conceived and executed in a style altogether above the stone-cutting level of the day, and give proof of real imaginative power. Mr. Story's genius and culture, with the fresh spur of so marked a success, will, we are sure, produce other works to his own honor and that of his country. For we feel that we have a country still,—feel it the more deeply for our suffering, and our hope deferred,—and out of the darkness of to-day we have still faith to see a fairer America rising, a higher ideal of freedom, to warm the soul of the artist and nerve the arm of the soldier.

Hand-Book of Universal Literature. From the Latest and Best Authorities. By MRS. ANNE C.L. BOTTA. A New Edition. 12mo. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1862.

A thing once done assumes a magical simplicity. No matter what may have been the previous difficulty, or how much work may be involved in the result, yet, when the work is done, the problem solved, all the difficulty and labor promptly disappear from view, as if in dread of being led captive in triumphal procession after the Caesar who has mastered them. Thus, it does not seem at all strange that we should have a book professing to guide us through all the intricacies of general literature; indeed, now that the work is put into our hands, it seems so easy of accomplishment that the only marvel would appear to be that we have had none hitherto. Yet the conditions necessary to such a work are of the rarest to be found; not so rare, indeed, when each is considered separately, but rarely to be met with in combination.