Short Studies on Great Subjects

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As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was
the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action--a
melancholy end for such a man--like the end of a warrior, not dying
Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl
or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the
flower of their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres
of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they
did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them
was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what
their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age--beautiful as the
slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man,
nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she
fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a
grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not
call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and
aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which
no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is
the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history;
there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has
been given to do the really highest work in this earth--whoever they
are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators,
philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has
been the same--the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And
so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their
life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; and it was
enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why
should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired,
and an honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old
Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in
them:--

[Greek:
Thanein d' hoisin ananka, ti ke tis anonumon
geras en skoto kathemenos hepsoi matan,
hapanton kalon ammoros?]

'Seeing,' in Gilbert's own brave words, 'that death is inevitable, and
the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel
timere sperno_.'

In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass into an element
different from that in which we have been lately dwelling. The scenes in
which Gilbert and Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were
principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and the dangers of
unknown and savage lands. We shall close amidst the roar of cannon, and
the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which
we are going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that he
looked at it as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
wonder at--but scarcely as deserving the admiration which we pay to
actions properly within the scope of humanity--and as if the energy
which was displayed in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he scarcely would have
felt it if he had cared more deeply to saturate himself with the temper
of the age of which he was writing. At the time, all England and all the
world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror, though it was but
the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people; it
dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than the
destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct results which arose
from it, it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to
us, if the most glorious actions which are set like jewels in the
history of mankind are weighed one against the other in the balance,
hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the summer morning sate 'combing
their long hair for death' in the passes of Thermopylae, have earned a
more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern
Englishmen.

In August 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle
ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, was lying at anchor
under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
half his men disabled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the
aggressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several of the ships'
crews were on shore: the ships themselves 'all pestered and rommaging,'
with everything out of order. In this condition they were surprised by a
Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve
English ships obeyed the signal of the admiral, to cut or weigh their
anchors and escape as they might. The twelfth, the 'Revenge,' was unable
for the moment to follow. Of her crew of 190, ninety were sick on shore,
and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty
in getting them on board. The 'Revenge' was commanded by Sir Richard
Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the
terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or
Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the
sound of his name. 'He was of great revenues, of his own inheritance,'
they said, 'but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars;' and from
his uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volunteered his
services to the queen; 'of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the
Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible
persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them
in pieces and swallow them down.' Such Grenville was to the Spaniard. To
the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned
his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that remarkable time for
his constancy and daring. In this surprise at Florez he was in no haste
to fly. He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
ballast; and then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and work
the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first,
what he intended to do. The Spanish fleet were by this time on his
weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
beautiful narrative, and follow it in Raleigh's words) 'to cut his
mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship:'--

But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alledging
that he would rather choose to die than to dishonour himself, his
country, and her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that he
would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and enforce
those of Seville to give him way: which he performed upon diverse of
the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and
fell under the lee of the 'Revenge.' But the other course had been
the better; and might right well have been answered in so great an
impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out of the greatness
of his mind, he could not be persuaded.

The wind was light; the 'San Philip,' 'a huge high-carged ship' of 1,500
tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails,
ran aboard him.

After the 'Revenge' was entangled with the 'San Philip,' four others
boarded her, two on her larboard and two on her starboard. The fight
thus beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon continued very
terrible all that evening. But the great 'San Philip,' having
received the lower tier of the 'Revenge,' shifted herself with all
diligence from her sides, utterly misliking her first entertainment.
The Spanish ships were tilled with soldiers, in some 200, besides
the mariners, in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at
all, besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander and
some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many enterchanged vollies
of great ordnance and small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter
the 'Revenge,' and made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the
multitude of their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still
repulsed again and again, and at all times beaten back into their
own ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the 'George
Noble,' of London, having received some shot through her by the
Armadas, fell under the lee of the 'Revenge,' and asked Sir Richard
what he would command him; but being one of the victuallers, and of
small force, Sir Richard bade him save himself and leave him to his
fortune.

This last was a little touch of gallantry, which we should be glad to
remember with the honour due to the brave English sailor who commanded
the 'George Noble;' but his name has passed away, and his action is an
_in memoriam_, on which time has effaced the writing. All that August
night the fight continued, the stars rolling over in their sad majesty,
but unseen through the sulphurous clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the 'Revenge,' 'so that never
less than two mighty galleons were at her side and aboard her,' washing
up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled and shattered back amidst
the roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several Armadas had
assailed her, and all in vain; some had been sunk at her side; and the
rest, 'so ill approving of their entertainment, that at break of day
they were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than hastily to
make more assaults or entries.' 'But as the day increased,' says
Raleigh, 'so our men decreased; and as the light grew more and more, by
so much the more grew our discomfort, for none appeared in sight but
enemies, save one small ship called the "Pilgrim," commanded by Jacob
Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the success, but in the morning,
bearing with the "Revenge," was hunted like a hare among many ravenous
hounds--but escaped.'

All the powder in the 'Revenge' was now spent, all her pikes were
broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed, and a great number of the rest
wounded. Sir Richard, though badly hurt early in the battle, never
forsook the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then shot through
the body while his wounds were being dressed, and again in the head. His
surgeon was killed while attending on him; the masts were lying over the
side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper works all shot in pieces, and
the ship herself, unable to move, was settling slowly in the sea; the
vast fleet of Spaniards lying round her in a ring, like dogs round a
dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. Sir Richard,
seeing that it was past hope, having fought for fifteen hours, and
'having by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
him,' 'commanded the master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute
man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of
glory or victory to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were not
able to take her, having had above fifteen hours' time, above ten
thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war to perform it withal; and
persuaded the company, or as many as he could induce, to yield
themselves unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they had, like
valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now
shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives for a
few hours or a few days.'

The gunner and a few others consented. But such [Greek: daimonie arete]
was more than could be expected of ordinary seamen. They had dared do
all which did become men, and they were not more than men. Two Spanish
ships had gone down, above 1,500 of their crew were killed, and the
Spanish admiral could not induce any one of the rest of his fleet to
board the 'Revenge' again, 'doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown
up himself and them, knowing his dangerous disposition.' Sir Richard
lying disabled below, the captain, 'finding the Spaniards as ready to
entertain a composition as they could be to offer it,' gained over the
majority of the surviving company; and the remainder then drawing back
from the master gunner, they all, without further consulting their dying
commander, surrendered on honourable terms. If unequal to the English in
action, the Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is due
to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully observed; and 'the
ship being marvellous unsavourie,' Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish admiral,
sent his boat to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.

Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied that 'he might do
with his body what he list, for that he esteemed it not;' and as he was
carried out of the ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the
company to pray for him.

The admiral used him with all humanity, 'commending his valour and
worthiness, being unto them a rare spectacle, and a resolution seldom
approved.' The officers of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells us,
crowded round to look at him; and a new fight had almost broken out
between the Biscayans and the 'Portugals,' each claiming the honour of
having boarded the 'Revenge.'

In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching, showed not
any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said,
'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for
that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do that hath
fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave
behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that
hath done his duty as he was bound to do.' When he had finished
these or other such like words, he gave up the ghost with great and
stout courage, and no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in
him.

Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591, without its equal
in such of the annals of mankind as the thing which we call history has
preserved to us; scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
imagination of Barrere could invent for the 'Vengeur.' Nor did the
matter end without a sequel awful as itself. Sea battles have been often
followed by storms, and without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the
Spaniards and the English alike believed, or without one, as we moderns
would prefer believing, 'there ensued on this action a tempest so
terrible as was never seen or heard the like before.' A fleet of
merchantmen joined the Armada immediately after the battle, forming in
all 140 sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour. The
rest foundered, or were lost on the Azores. The men-of-war had been so
shattered by shot as to be unable to carry sail; and the 'Revenge'
herself, disdaining to survive her commander, or as if to complete his
own last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and her 200 prize
crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.

And it may well be thought and presumed (says John Huighen) that it
was no other than a just plague purposely sent upon the Spaniards;
and that it might be truly said, the taking of the 'Revenge' was
justly revenged on them; and not by the might or force of man, but
by the power of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume them, and that
he took part with the Lutherans and heretics ... saying further,
that so soon as they had thrown the dead body of the Vice-Admiral
Sir Richard Grenville overboard, they verily thought that as he had
a devilish faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down into hell,
where he raised up all the devils to the revenge of his death, and
that they brought so great a storm and torments upon the Spaniards,
because they only maintained the Catholic and Romish religion. Such
and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to
utter.

FOOTNOTES:

[U] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[V] This essay was written 15 years ago.

[W] Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard
on Captain Bethune compare them:--

'For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyled and fought on his knee.'

Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives
up this stanza as hopeless.

HOMER.[X]

Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now
falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the
immortals did not disdain to mingle--those massive warriors, with their
grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant,
faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the
Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than
the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes
with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented
the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons,
and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.

Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no
better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be
destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred
of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.
The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic
imagination; and--instead of a single inspired Homer for their author,
we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous
generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had
personified.

But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination
than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn
things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the
knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with
incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a
foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous
advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way, till
in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against
itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, itself
half doubting its own existence.

But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own
immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of
him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be
disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of
their genius. The singleness of their structure--the unity of
design--the distinctness of drawing in the characters--the inimitable
peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious
question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both
Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at
least each of them singly the work of one.

Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they
may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what
slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of
Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical
allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical
one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the
entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early
thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this
time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the
philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the
stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never
assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to
the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.
The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.
With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the
old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later
in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was
the OEtolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before
he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of
Atreus, and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with
appearance of certainty,[Y] are humanised stories of the physical
struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and
darkness, night and day, winter and summer.

And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no
substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is
not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the
record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung
historically we know nothing literal at all--not any names of any kings,
of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all
gone--dead--passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the
tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which
historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as
the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said,
there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps,
than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the
brilliant days of Pericles, or of the Caesars, to construct a history of
another kind--a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang,
but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought,
talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in
it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and
servants; rich and poor--we have it all delineated in the marvellous
verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest
which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little
enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an
Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character
than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so
living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of
disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous
property of verse--one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse
any superstition on the origin of language--that the metrical and
rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express
back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with
all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all
other outward things in which human hearts take interest--to produce
them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the
same emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.
The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative
power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the
same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in
outward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry has
this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the
truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet
gives us--not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is
the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter
is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter
is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have
the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for
which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are
nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian
fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his
harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which
lay along the shores of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus,
Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so,
in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.

The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the
successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and
of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which
figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic,
unpoetic kind--the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the
Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into
selfishness and vulgarity. But great men--and all MEN properly so called
(whatever is genuine and natural in them)--lie beyond prose, and can
only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men
as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories,
because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through
which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian
represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work
is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with
which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is
full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one
of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not
equal. It describes a figure which it calls Caesar; but it is not Caesar,
it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the
like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which
they are able to represent is not worth representing. There is no person
so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a
looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.
But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the
poet's art as with the sculptor's--sandstone will not carve like marble,
its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The
actions of men, if they are true, noble, and genuine, are strong enough
to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they
crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.

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