“The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood, Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell.”
There is none of this noble simplicity in the somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which read a little like old Kaiser William’s war dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand times are the splendid swing, the captivating enthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,” which hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were King Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash. The ardor for strife, the staying power of quiet courage, all are here; and here, too, a felicity of language that makes each noble name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh incentive to heroic deeds.
“With Spanish yew so strong, Arrows a cloth-yard long, That like to serpents stung, Piercing the weather; None from his fellow starts, But playing manly parts, And like true English hearts, Stuck close together. ————— “Warwick in blood did wade, Oxford the foe invade, And cruel slaughter made, Still as they ran up; Suffolk his axe did ply, Beaumont and Willoughby Bare them right doughtily, Ferrers and Fanhope.
“Upon Saint Crispin’s day Fought was this noble fray, Which fame did not delay To England to carry;
Oh, when shall Englishmen With such acts fill a pen, Or England breed again Such a King Harry?”
Political economists and chilly historians and all long-headed calculating creatures generally may perhaps hint that invading France was no part of England’s business, and represented fruitless labor and bloodshed. But this, happily, is not the poet’s point of view. He dreams with Hotspur
“Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain, And all the currents of a heady fight.”
He hears King Harry’s voice ring clearly above the cries and clamors of battle:—
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead;”
and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and the field of Agincourt seem not only glorious but righteous things. “That pure and generous desire to thrash the person opposed to you because he _is_ opposed to you, because he is not ‘your side,’” which Mr. Saintsbury declares to be the real incentive of all good war songs, hardly permits a too cautious analysis of motives. Fighting is not a strictly philanthropic pastime, and its merits are not precisely the merits of church guilds and college settlements. Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, notwithstanding the splendid example of Michael, “of celestial armies, prince,” and there is at present a shameless conspiracy on foot to defraud even St. George of his hard-won glory, and to melt him over in some modern crucible into a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arian bishop, too, by way of deepening the scandal! We shall hear next that Saint Denis was a Calvinistic minister, and Saint Iago, whom devout Spanish eyes have seen mounted in the hottest of the fray, was a friendly well-wisher of the Moors.