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.
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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
discrete table 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. There were brave to the brink of the
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 uncalculatingly 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 on 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 to 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 not 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."
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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.
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