Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/256

Poetry is always preciser than prose, more brief, more direct and exact; its exquisite curves as businesslike as the hardly less lovely lines whose lift and lapse make common shorthand so decorative. And those fourteen bars of beautiful melody somehow manage to cage, more completely than ever before, one of the dimmest and deepest, one of the most active but most elusive, of all the many mixed motives, beliefs, longings, ideals, which make those of us who have flung aside everything in order to fight still glad and gratified that we took the course we did. There do come moments, I must admit, when doubts descend on one dismally, when one's soldiering seems nothing but a contemptible vanity, indulged in largely to keep the respect of lookers-on. And, of course, cowardice of that sort, a small pinch of it anyway, did help to make most of us brave. There was the love of adventure, too, the longing to be in the great scrum—the romantic appeal of "the neighing steed and the shrill trump"—all the glamour and illusion of the violent thing that has figured for ever in books, paintings, and tales, as the supreme earthly adventure.... But beneath all these impulses, like a tide below waves, there lies also a world of much deeper emotion. It is a love of peace, really, a delight in fairness and faith—an inherited joy in all the traditional graces of life and in all the beauty that has been blessed by affection. It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the word "patriotism" is a term far too simple and trite. It is an impulse defined precisely, without suppression, blur, or excess, in the fourteen flowing lines I have quoted. One fights for the sake of happiness—for one's own happiness first of all, certain that did one not fight one would be miserable for ever—and then, in the second place, for the quiet solace and pride of those others, spiritual and mental sons of ours, if not actually