The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎571v] (33/239)

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AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
ultimate triumph of concord and justice, remains stiangely im
pervious to information, however correctly and even picturesquely
conveyed. As to the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of
figures, it has all the futility of precision without force. It is the
exploded superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. An over
worked horse falling in front of our windows, a man writhing
under a cart-wheel in the street, awaken more genuine emotion,
more horror, pity, and indignation, than the stream of reports,
appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying
bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of
thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the
frozen ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of
thousands of survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in
being left alive by fate to the pitiable exhaustion of their pitiful
toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist,
looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street—perhaps
Fleet-street itself—full of people, is reported, by an admiring
friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These
arcadian tears, this facile emotion worthy of the golden age,
comes to us from the past, with solemn approval, after the close
of the Napoleonic wars, and before the series of sanguinary sur
prises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hopeful
grandfathers. We may well envy them their optimism of which
this anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an
extreme instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard
in the spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of the Earth,
triumphant at last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the
psychology of individuals, even in the most extreme instances,
reflects the general effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept
for joy! I should think that now after eighty years the emotion
would be of a sterner sort. One could not imagine anybody
shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life in a street, unless,
perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a general staff or a
popular politician, with its career yet to make. And hardly
even that. In the case of the first tears would be unprofessional,
and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the provision of so
much food for powder more in accord with the rules of prudence :
the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in
weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors’
views upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the
consensus of their votes.
No ! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now
as much as ever during the last hundred years, to go no further
back. The end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of