" Enobarbus, too, sneers at Antony's
proposed duel:
"Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show
Against a sworder."
Unhelped by memory, Dr. Brandes might have guessed that Shakespeare
would exhaust the obvious at first glance. But the soul of courage to
Shakespeare is, as we have seen, a love of honour working on quick
generous blood--a feminine rather than a masculine view of the matter.
Carlyle has a deeper sense of this aboriginal virtue. With the fanatic's
trust in God his Luther will go to Worms "though it rain devils"; and
when in his own person Carlyle spoke of the small, honest minority
desperately resolved to maintain their ideas though opposed by a huge
hostile majority of fools and the insincere, he found one of the finest
expressions for courage in all our literature. The vast host shall be to
us, he cried, as "stubble is to fire." It may be objected that this is
the voice of religious faith rather than of courage pure and simple, and
the objection is valid so far as it goes; but this genesis of courage is
peculiarly English, and the courage so formed is of the highest.
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