of the whole finds source and energy. Lord St. Vincent's maxim, "The whole of discipline is contained in the one word 'Obedience'," may be correctly paraphrased, "The whole of military action is contained in the one word 'Unity."" Obedience and unity are only different manifestations of the same principle. The one is the principle in will, the other in act. The one characterizes the conduct of persons, the other the conduct of operations. Obedience insures that the members of the military body, often far apart, will obey the one commander with the accuracy and vigor with which the muscles of an athlete obey his will.

In the conduct of war, what is concentration, the necessity of which is universally granted, but essential unity? When, for purposes of the war, concentration yields momentarily to expansion, then all the movements and dispositions of the forces must be governed by reference to easy concentration, to unity of action. The moment this consideration is violated, unity is sacrificed, and conduct has become misconduct; nor does it matter, in justification of a plain violation of principle, that the misconduct is due to an error of judgment. If circumstances knowable at the time justify, judgment has not been at fault; if they do not, the man should have known better. This necessity of keeping unity in view is expressed by one of Napoleon's pithy phrases, "The art of war consists in proper distributions to disseminate in order to exist, and to concentrate in order to fight." Again he says, "War is a business of positions ;" and he illustrates the maxim by an example of positions of dissemination, so taken that the scattered bodies can with certainty and in the briefest period unite at a common centre, in case of a threatened attack, or for an intended movement of offence.

There is much in all this, of course, that finds close analogies in civil life, and no doubt much light might be thrown on the rule of military obedience by a comparative examination of other callings. But the peculiarity of war, for which alone the military professions exist, to meet or to avert it, is that men are in the constant presence of power actively and malevolently intent upon

injuring them, by any means of surprise or superiority of force that can be contrived. Therefore the need to have every movement in hand, and upon occasion to exert all the means at one's command to counteract the enemy, to overthrow his designs, to crush him, to do so with the utmost speed and certainty, weighs heavier in war than in more tranquil pursuits. War is face to face continually, not with misfortune only, but with catastrophe, and that not of gradual approach or partial, but sudden and irremediable.

For these weighty reasons, all available resources to forestall such result, and to destroy the enemy upon whom it depends, need to be utilized and put forth in the most effective and in the promptest manner. This means that exertions in all parts must be instant upon the word of command, and in unison; united in movement and united in weight. Velocity and weight are the factors of momentum in armed collision as in any other, and both the rapidity and the force of an intended blow depend upon unity of impulse and simultaneous impact, in bodies of men as well as in projectiles. What else is the conceded value of movement in mass than concentrated movement, the weight of several bodies effectively joined into one? To frame the plan, to initiate and control the movement, to give to it direction, combination, and impulse, to sustain its energy, is the duty of one man, upon whom in the last analysis depends the unity of thought and act which inspires and vivifies the whole; but the transmission of the impulse and energy throughout the mass, so that the oneness of the head is realized in the unity of the whole, is insured by the military rule of obedience, and by that only. Obedience is the cement of the structure; or, more worthily understood in the spirit, apart from which a word is but dead, it is the lifeblood of the organism. In short, the rule of obedience is simply the expression of that one among the military virtues upon which all the others depend, in order that the exertion of their powers may not breed confusion, which is the precursor of disaster, but may accomplish decisive results, approaching perfection in proportion as coöperation has been exact.

GIOSUÈ CARDUCCI

RICHARD GARNETT, London.

All are familiar with Horace's regret for the heroes who flourished before Agamemnon, and were no less than he worthy of renown, but who, for want of a Homer, might as well, so far as posterity is concerned, never have existed at all:

In vain they fought, in vain they bled,

They had no poet, and are dead.

The maxim admits of extension to nations. A period of genuine glory, of liberty received or vindicated, of the awakening of national self-consciousness, or of the accomplishment of national regeneration, is likely to produce a deep impression on the literature of the nation, and especially upon its poetry. If this does not happen, it may be suspected that the movement, however picturesque in appearance, has in reality been sterile, and may not leave a deep mark on the history of the world.

The term "poet," however, must not be interpreted too narrowly, for the methods by which the spirit of poetry finds utterance are various, and sometimes a genuine poetical gift is diverted into other channels by the imperfection of the means of expression. The German language at the period of the Reformation was too unpolished for poetry, though not for rhyme. Yet Luther was a poet, and the epic of his day is written in his innumerable pamphlets. While the English language was struggling to obtain freedom and beauty of expression, the chron

Copyright, 1902, by Frederick A. Richardson.

clers stepped in, and gave in prose what afterwards, in Shakespeare's hands, became the true national epic. For some reason, which it would be interesting to investigate, colonial communities seem incapable of producing poetical literature of much account for some generations after the original settlement. The epic of United States independence, therefore, is to be sought not among the verse writers of the day, but among the orators. If, however, the language is sufficiently cultivated for verse, and the body of the people sufficiently refined to be sensitive to its charm, the nation at certain stages of its development is likely to become its own poet, as in the case of the Spanish ballad-poetry celebrating the expulsion of the Moors. Most modern nations have passed this epoch of development, and progressed, or retrograded, from the period of Homer to the period of Virgil, when "the silent gondolier rows songless," and a single man, the elected representative of his nation, resumes for the time in his own person its pride, its sorrows, and its aspirations. Such was the mission imposed upon Giosuè Carducci, the leading figure among the Italian poets of our own day. There was, indeed, no want of patriotic feeling, corresponding to the deepest emotions of the people, among the poets who immediately preceded him, but such compositions as the satires of Giusti and the great chorus in Manzoni's "Adelchi" express the feelings of an oppressed people, while Carducci is the laureate of a liberated, and, as he would fain hope, a regenerated Italy. His utterances consequently wear à character of dignity and grandeur which cannot, in the nature of things, belong to the poetry of complaint. Were all the other promises attending Italy's deliverance to be blighted, Carducci's songs would remain an imperishable proof of its capacity to inspire a poet.

The figure of Giosuè Carducci is, in every point of view, sympathetic to a degree by no means invariably the case with great writers. It is that of a genial man as well as a man of genius, a man of the people, plain and unaffected, simple, hearty, and sturdy. The circumstances of his birth and bringing-up were fortunate; he had, on the one hand, no aristocratic connections to enfeeble

his popular sympathies, nor, on the other, did he belong to the inferior social strata where a class is so easily mistaken for a nation. Born at Valdicastello in Tuscany on July 27, 1836, he received from his father, a physician, sufficient education to make him a fair Latin and Italian scholar, the indispensable equipment for an Italian poet. Of Greek, which would have been valuable, we do not at this time hear anything; but his subsequent writings evince an extensive acquaintance with the chief foreign literatures of modern Europe, acquired in later years. French was the first conquest, and the student conceived an immense admiration for Victor Hugo and Lamartine. This was highly important, for in dealing with Carducci we must not forget that he is not merely the patriotic exponent of Italy's aspirations, but also the head of the neo-classic school, which aimed at curbing the fatal fluency of her versifiers, and, by stricter form and weightier matter, infusing a robuster and more masculine element into her languid literature. Of this tendency Victor Hugo and Lamartine had given the example, and though still better guides might have been found in English and German, the time had not yet come for Carducci to read, as he has since read, Shelley and Marlowe in the original, and to translate the ballads of Heine.

Every literature, like every individual, must have the defects of its qualities. The chief poetical quality of the Southern languages is their adaptation to poetical purposes by their softness, flexibility, and harmony; their chief defect is the fatal fluency thus engendered. It is not easy for an English poet to pour forth a continuous torrent of beautiful verse without conveying anything in particular; if we may employ, like Topsy, "an or'nary sort o' 'parison," meaning is the penny in the slot, without which the machine remains motionless. Nothing, on the other hand, is easier for the Italian poet than to indite sonorous platitudes, with a wealth of melodious diction which conceals even from himself that he has, after all, left his theme as he found it. The wheels revolve furiously, but the chariot never stirs. In the days of Bembo and the Petrarchists, this inanity had in some measure been compensated by a consummate perfection of form, but in later ages