Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  On the whole, I think it not unreasonable to look forward with pleasant anticipation to a time, some millions of years hence, when the literature of sleep will be no longer intelligible, and the people of even this country be sufficiently wide awake to prevent the ten per centum of their number devoted to patriotic pursuits from plundering the other ninety per centum, and to make our judges and legislators obey the laws.

  CONCERNING PICTURES

  I

  I HOLD with Story and others whose talents and accomplishments so brilliantly illustrate their faith, that the great artist is almost necessarily a man of high attainments in general knowledge and in more than one branch of art. He who knows but one art knows none. The Muses do not singly disclose themselves; for the favor of one you must sue to all. Consider the great Italian painters, from Angelo and Rafael down the line of merit to the modern masters. As a rule they were men of wisdom, accomplished in all the learning of their time. They were statesmen, scientists, engineers — men of affairs. They knew literature, architecture, sculpture and music, as well as painting. With here and there a notable exception — more notable as an exception than as a painter — the same is true in many a country besides Italy, and many an age besides that in which the genius of her sons kindled the imperishable splendor that burns about her name.

  Perception is not the same as discernment, and he who sees with his eyes only will paint with nothing but his hand. Ruskin says the artist is the man who knows “what is going on.” To him the primrose is a primrose and something more — a primrose plus what it is doing, saying, thinking, and what is being done, said, thought by its whole environment. The great artist makes everything live; he gives to death itself and desolation a personality and a breathing soul. The rooted rock could move if it wished; trees understand one another; the river is prescient of the sea. Not a pebble, not a grass-blade but is alert with a significant life to further the general conspiracy.

  Understand me. This activity is entirely distinct from muscular action, locomotion, motion of any kind or any of the coarser sorts of energy flagrantly depicted. The portrait of a corpse may be full of it, the picture of a bounding horse altogether destitute.

  Everything in nature — every single object, every group, every landscape, has a visible expression, as a face has. This can generally be denoted in terms of human emotion. We all know what is meant by an “angry” sky or a “threatening” billow, for we have observed what follows. But we are not all equally sensitive to the joyous aspect of a tree, the sulking of a rock, the menace or the benediction that may speak from a hillside, the reticence of one building and the garrulity of another, the pathos of a blank window, the tendernesses and the terrors that smile and glower everywhere about us. These are no fancies. True, they are but the outward and visible signs of an inner mood; but the objects that bear them beget the mood. No true artist but feels it, and all feel it nearly alike. To discern, to feel, to seize upon this dominant expression and make it predominant in his picture — this, as Taine rightly says, is the painter’s function.

  I stood once upon the slope of a deep gulch; with me a friend, the quick certainty of whose artistic insight was always to me a source of surprise and delight. Across the gulch, a quarter-mile away, stood two trees, a giant oak, whose great roots corded the rocks like the tentacles of a devil-fish, and a slender pine, springing from clear ground nearby. The oak reached out a long, muscular arm toward the other tree, which, leaning sharply away from the contact, had all its branches on the opposite side. I studied the group for some minutes while my friend had her eyes and thoughts elsewhere. I was endeavoring to interpret the sentiment, which finally I succeeded in doing to my satisfaction; it remained only to test the validity of my conclusion. I said to myself: “Menace and terror”; to my companion: “What is the matter over yonder?” She glanced at the group and replied, without an instant’s hesitation, in the first words that came to call: “The little tree is trying to get away from the old scoundrel among the rocks.”

  II

  The terrible story is told of how the late W. H. Vanderbilt came near being cheated out of three hundred thousand dollars by purchasing a painting that was no better than it looked! From that imminent peril he was rescued by death. The painting, it seems, was discovered (where it had not been lost) by a person — nay, a parson — named Nicole, who gave his personal assurance that it was a Rafael. It must have looked a good deal like a Rafael, for although it was for a long time an object of adoration for artist pilgrims from all over Europe, none detected its spurious character. That is clear from the facts that it was later that Mr. Vanderbilt agreed to take it, and that while negotiations were going on Herr Nicole borrowed twelve thousand dollars on it from a banker who has it yet. That could hardly have been true if the pilgrims to its shrine at Lausanne had had their transports moderated by a suspicion that it was not so good as it looked.

  The reader will kindly repress his hilarity. This is no joke. If a picture can not be better than it looks how does it happen that this one is not so valuable after the exposure as it was before? The notion that a picture can be better or worse than it looks does seem absurd when one stops to think about it. It is not original with me; the late Bill Nye once set the country smiling by solemnly explaining that he had been told that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded.

  But why did we laugh? We do not laugh when a wealthy “patron of art,” or a paternal government pays an enormous price for a painting because it is pronounced by experts to be a genuine work of a famous “old master.” And we do not laugh — not all of us — when, as in the present instance, the value drops to nearly nothing because the painting proves to be a copy only, or the work of an unknown hand.

  I am no artist — Heaven forbid! — nor even a connoisseur. If I were I should doubtless understand why a copy that is as beautiful as an original is not so desirable a possession — why it does not give so great pleasure to the eye and the mind and the heart. I should understand why the work of an obscure or unknown artist is not so valuable as the work of a famous artist if it happens to be as good.

  One would suppose — that is, one unacquainted with art might be conceived as supposing — that the value of a painting would be appraised without reference to the question: Who made it? It seems (to the unenlightened) as if it would make no difference what name was borne by the person that painted it — just as the Iliad or the Odyssey would be equally pleasing whether written by Homer or by “another man of the same name,” or another name. I have the hardihood to declare that it is — and here I am on my own ground. I affirm — nay, “swear tiptoed with lifted hand” — that the pleasure of any reasonable man in reading “Ossian” is not abated by knowledge that the author was Macpherson; that to a sane judgment the “Rowley” poems are altogether as delightful as if the secret of their composition had been carried into the next world by little Chatterton when “he perished in his pride.” What is it to me, or to you, if the Shakspeare plays were written by Bacon? We have the plays; let us read and be thankful. Shakspeare and Bacon may fight it out in Elysium, with Ignatius Donnelly as umpire; of the decision, “it boots not to inquire.”

  If that is the mental attitude of the true lover of letters, and it is, why is the true lover of art differently constituted, if he is? Why are “the still vexed Bermoothes” of his soul still vexed? Why can not he make up his mind that a work of art is good, or is bad, and let it go at that, serenely unconcerned about the “irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial” babble of the experts in authenticity?

  Being ignorant, I thank Heaven for the existence of artists obscure by fortune or by choice, skilful enough to imitate in line or style the work of the great and famous painters. For gratification of my own eye I would as lief see and possess their work as the work that they imitate. So would anybody — for gratification of his own eye. For pigly satisfaction of owning something denied to one’s neighbor; something rare because death has stopped the supply; something to be triumphan
tly shown to one’s visitors in the hope of exciting some of the baser passions of the human heart, such as covetousness, envy and the like — for such “satisfaction and refined delight” one would of course prefer an original “old master” and be willing to pay a pretty penny for gratification of the preference.

  Some wicked man has said that an artist has sensibility, but no sense. I fancy that is not so, but finding artists pretty generally concerned with questions of the “genuineness” of “canvases” — that is to say, pretty generally assenting to the proposition that a picture can be better or worse than it looks — I am sometimes tormented by doubt.

  MODERN WARFARE

  I

  THE dream of a time when the nations shall war no more is a pleasant dream, and an ancient. Countless generations have indulged it, and to countless others, doubtless, it will prove a solace and a benefaction. Yet one may be permitted to doubt if its ultimate realization is to be accomplished by diligent and general application to the task of learning war, as so many worthy folk believe. That every notable advance in the art of destroying human life should be “hailed” by these good people as a step in the direction of universal peace must be accounted a phenomenon entirely creditable to the hearts, if not to the heads, of those in whom it is manifest. It shows in them a constitution of mind opposed to bloodshed, for their belief having nothing to do with the facts — being, indeed, inconsistent with them — is obviously an inspiration of the will.

  “War,” these excellent persons reason, “will at last become so dreadful that men will no longer engage in it” — happily unconscious of the fact that men’s sense of their power to make it dreadful is precisely the thing which most encourages them to wage it. Another popular promise of peace is seen in the enormous cost of modern armaments and military methods. The shot and cartridge of a heavy gun of to-day cost hundreds of dollars, the gun itself tens of thousands. It is at an expense of thousands that a torpedo is discharged, which may or may not wreck a ship worth millions. To secure its safety from the machinations of its wicked neighbors while itself engaged in the arts of peace, a nation of to-day must have an immense sum of money invested in military plant alone. It is not of the nature of man to impoverish himself by investments from which he hopes for no return except security in the condition entailed by the outlay. Men do not construct expensive machinery, taxing themselves poor to keep it in working order, without ultimately setting it going. The more of its income a nation has to spend in preparation for war, the more certainly it will go to war. Its means of defense are means of aggression, and the stronger it feels itself to strike for its altars and its fires, the more spirited becomes its desire to go across the border to upset the altars and extinguish the fires of its neighbors.

  But the notion that improved weapons give modern armies and navies an increased killing ability — that the warfare of the future will be a bloodier business than that which we have the happiness to know — is an error which the observant lover of peace is denied the satisfaction of entertaining. Compare, for example, a naval engagement of to-day with Salamis, Lepanto or Trafalgar. Compare the famous duel between the Monitor and the Merrimac with almost any encounter between the old wooden line-of-battle ships, continued, as was the reprehensible custom, until one or both, with hundreds of dead and wounded, incarnadined the seas by going to the bottom.

  As long ago as 1861 a terrific engagement occurred in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. It lasted forty hours, and was fought with hundreds of the biggest and best guns of the period. Not a man was killed nor wounded.

  In the spring of 1862, below New Orleans, Porter’s mortar boats bombarded Fort Jackson for nearly five days and nights, throwing about 16,800 shells, mostly thirteen inches in diameter. “Nearly every shell,” says the commandant of the fort, “lodged inside the works.” Even in those days, it will be observed, there were “arms of precision”; and an exploding 13-inch shell is still highly esteemed and respected. As nearly as I can learn, the slaughter amounted to two men.

  A year later Admiral Dupont attacked Fort Sumter, then in the hands of the Confederates, with the New Ironsides, the doubleturret monitor Keokuk, and seven singleturret monitors. The big guns of the fort were too much for him. One of his vessels was struck 90 times, and afterward sank. Another was struck 53 times; another, 35 times; another, 14; another, 47; another, 20; another, 47; another, 95; another 36, and disabled. But they threw 151 shots from their own “destructive” weapons, and these, being “arms of precision,” killed a whole man by cutting down a flag-staff, which fell upon him. The total number of shots fired by the enemy was 2,209, and if more than two men were killed by them I am unable to find any account of it. But it was a splendid battle, as every Quaker will allow! In the stubbornest land engagements of our great rebellion, and of the later and more scientific Franco-German and Turko-Russian wars, the proportionate mortality was not nearly so great as in those where “Greek met Greek” hand to hand, or where the Roman with his short sword, the most destructive weapon ever invented, played at give and take with the naked barbarian or the Roman of another political faith. True, we must make some allowance for exaggeration in the accounts of these ancient affairs, not forgetting Niebuhr’s assurance that Roman history is nine parts lying. But as European and American history run it pretty hard in respect of that, something, too, may be allowed in accounts of modern battles — particularly where the historian foots up the losses of the side which had not the military advantage of his sympathies.

  Improvements in guns, armor, fortification and shipbuilding have been pushed so near to perfection that naval and semi-naval engagements may justly be counted amongst the arts of peace, and must eventually obtain the medical recognition which is their due as means of sanitation. The most notable improvements arc those in small arms. Our young scapegrace grandfathers fought the Revolutionary War with so miserable firearms that they could not make themselves decently objectionable to the minions of monarchy at a greater distance than forty yards. They had to go up so close that many of them lost their tempers. With the modern rifle, incivilities can be carried on at a distance of a mile-and-a-half, with thin lines and a cheerful disposition. The dynamite shell has, unfortunately, done much to gloom this sunniness by suggesting a scattered formation, which makes conversation difficult and begets loneliness. Isolation leads to suicide, and suicide is “mortality.” So the dynamite shell is really not the life-saving device that it looks. But on the whole we seem to be making reasonably good progress toward that happy time, not when “war shall be no more,” but when, being healthful, it will be universal and perpetual. The soldier of the future will die of age; and may God have mercy on his cowardly soul!

  It has been said that to kill a man in battle a man’s weight in lead is required. But if the battle happens to be fought by modern warships or forts, or both, about a hundred tons of iron would seem to be a reasonable allowance for the making of a military corpse. In fighting in the open the figures are more cheering. What it cost in our civil war to kill a Confederate soldier is not accurately computable; we don’t know exactly how many we had the good luck to kill. But the “best estimates” are easily accessible.

  II

  In the Century magazine several years ago was a paper on machine guns and dynamite guns. As might have been expected, it opened with a prediction by a distinguished general of the Union armies that, so murderous have warlike weapons become, “the next war will be marked by terrific and fearful slaughter.” This is naturally followed by the writer’s smug and comfortable assurance that “in the extreme mortality of modern war will be found the only hope that man can have of even a partial cessation of war.” If this were so, let us see how it would work. The chronological sequence of events would necessarily (obviously, one would think) be something like this:

  1. — Murderous perfection of warlike weapons.

  2. — War marked by “terrific and fearful slaughter.”

  3. — Consequent cessation of war and
disarmament of nations.

  4. — Stoppage of the manufacture of military weapons, with resulting decay of dependent industries; that is to say, decay of the ability to produce the weapons. Diversion of intellectual activity to arts of peace.

  5. — War no longer capable of being marked by “terrific and fearful slaughter.” Ergo, 6. — Revival of war.

  All the armies and navies of the world are being equipped with more and more “destructive” weapons. But does this insure a “terrific and fearful slaughter” in battle? Assuredly not. It implies and necessitates profound modifications in tactical formations and movements — modifications similar in kind (though greater in degree) to those already brought about by the long range repeating rifle and the improved field artillery. Men are not going to march up in masses and be mown down by machinery. If the effective range of these guns is, for example, two miles, tactical maneuvers in the open will be made at a greater distance from them. The storming of fortifications and charges in the open ground will go out of fashion. They have, in fact, been growing more and more infrequent ever since the improvements in range and precision of firearms began. If a man who fought under John Sobieski, Marlborough or the first Napoleon could be haled out of his obliterated grave and shown a battle of to-day with all our murderous weapons in full thunder, he would probably knuckle the leaf-mould out of his eyes and say: “Yes, yes, it is most inspiring! — but where is the enemy?”

  It is a fact that in the battle of to-day the soldier seldom gets more than a distant and transitory glimpse of the men whom he is fighting. He is still supplied with the sabre if he is “horse,” with the bayonet if he is “foot,” but the value of these weapons is a moral one. When commanded to draw the one or “fix” the other he knows he is expected to advance as far as he dares to go; but he knows, too, if he is not a very raw recruit, that he will not get within sabring or bayoneting distance of his antagonists — who will either break and run away or drop so many of his comrades that he will himself break and run away. In our civil war — and that is very ancient history to the long-range tactician of to-day — it was my fortune to assist at a sufficing number of assaults with bayonet and assaults with sabre, but I have never had the gratification to see a half-dozen men, friends or enemies, who had fallen by either the one weapon or the other. Whenever the opposing lines actually met it was the rifle, the carbine, or the revolver that did the work. In these days of “arms of precision” they do not meet. There is reason, too, to suspect that, therefore, they do not “get mad” and execute all the mischief that they are capable of. It is certain that the machine gun will keep its temper under the severest provocation.