i am disposed to agree with captain dolbey that the man who knows no fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who fight their battles at the base. he is invented because these naïve people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a hero. but the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being brave if you had no fear. the real victory of the hero is not over outward circumstance, but over himself. one of the bravest men of our time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. by sheer will he beat down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man who knew no fear. but the very essence of his heroism was that he had fought fear and won.
it is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything discreditable in knowing fear. you might as well say that there is something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood. the virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to lie and yet telling the truth. and the more you are tempted the more splendid is the resistance. without temptation you may make a plaster saint, but not a human hero. that is why the familiar story of nelson when a boy—"fear! grandmother. i never saw fear. what is it?"—is so essentially false. nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by man. they were brave to the brink of recklessness. the whole episode of the battle of copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the dictates of prudence. on the facts one would be compelled to admit that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of nelson and reveals his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance. when the issue was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster, he prepared his audacious message of terms to the crown prince ashore. it was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call camouflage. when he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. "this," said he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal." with such triumphant self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in view. but when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, i think, in southey's "life of nelson."
that incident of young swinburne's climb of culver cliff, in the isle of wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well. at the age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to climb culver cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed." he performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
"of course," he said, "she wanted to know why i had done such a thing, and when i told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory to the young ear, and said, 'nobody ever thought you were a coward, my boy.' i said that was all very well, but how could i tell till i tried? 'but you won't do it again?' she said. i replied, 'of course not—where would be the fun?'"
it was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came. having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind. i was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the country the other day. it had been empty since the beginning of the war. up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade. on the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried, "we have declared war on germany; i am ruined." then he went out and shot himself. had his mind been disciplined against panic he would have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any other.
in this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that grows by brooding. there is a story of maupassant's, which illustrates how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling upon fear. he had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who had stared insolently at a lady who was with him. his action led to a challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning. when he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors as a marksman. as the night advanced he passed through all the stages from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn he found a corpse. like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape the terrors of his mind.
it is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear. give them only a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference of disastrous consequences. it is not a bad thing in this world to be born a little dull and unimaginative. you will have a much more comfortable time. and if you have not taken that precaution, you will do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies. therein don quixote showed his wisdom. in the romantic theatre of his mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always sancho panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
