on the deck of the Majestic to be disposed in a huddled mass, in which no definite formation could be discerned and no determinate evolution detected. I am quite sure that no officer on board the Majestic could explain or understand what the X Fleet was doing at that moment; and in the detailed official narrative of the manœuvres there is not a single word to account for the appearance it presented. Such an experience, which is no isolated one, certainly makes me, at least, exceedingly sceptical as to the evidence derived from French sources concerning the British dispositions at Trafalgar. What they may attest is the dispositions of the allied fleet, and in that order of evidence I have found nothing to disallow, or even appreciably weaken, the conclusions I have reached in the course of this inquiry.

Lastly, I must repeat that almost the only evidence that ought to convince any one to whom Nelson's reputation and honour are dear would be the proof of a direct avowal on Nelson's part that he had changed his plan at the last moment. No such proof is forthcoming. The evidence is all the other way. It is all very well for Captain Mahan to say, as he does, "Thus, as Ivanhoe at the instant of the encounter in the lists shifted his lance from the shield to the casque of the Templar, so Nelson, at the moment of engaging, changed the details of his plan," and then, by diagram and description, to attribute dispositions to Nelson which point to no mere modification of detail, but to a fundamental change of principle. That is a very pretty gloss to put on a very ugly situation. Ivanhoe was fighting in single combat. He had no one to consider but himself. Nelson had in his keeping the fate of his country, the confidence, the loyalty, the devoted affection of officers who knew his plans and were ready to die in executing them. How could he be said not to have betrayed that trust, if he jeopardized his country's fate by deceiving those who had so trusted him, and impaired even their tried efficiency by expecting them, without a word of notice or warning, to execute a plan

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of which they had never even heard? We have no right to judge by results in this case. If this is a true account of the battle, it was indeed a pell-mell battle with a vengeance-a mere gambler's throw, which success might condone but could never justify. Few admirals have ever taken their officers so fully into their confidence as Nelson did. He gave them what he could of his own strength, and in return gathered all theirs into himself. Others have kept their own counsel and taught their officers, when in action, merely to look for their signals and obey them. Each method has its merits, but there can be no compromise between the two. To abandon a plan of action carefully explained beforehand, and well understood by every one concerned, and to substitute for it another which has never been explained at all, is to combine the disadvantages of both methods in the most disastrous fashion, and virtually to proclaim that tactics are of no account at all, that one way of fighting a battle is just as good as another way, especially if those who are to fight it do not know in the least how it is going to be fought. Surely the moral evidence against a Nelson doing this is far more overwhelming than the most cogent of circumstantial evidence to the contrary ever could be. Those who hold this belief must reconcile it, if they can, with his last noble signal, " England expects that every man will do his duty "—with his last dying words, "Thank God, I have done my duty." For myself, I cannot.

THE LIFE OF NELSON,

UNIVER

[NIVERSAL acclaim on this side of the Atlantic has declared The Life of Nelson to be a masterpiece eminently worthy of the author of The Influence of Sea Power on History. The task undertaken by a modern biographer of Nelson must needs be a supremely difficult one. He has to sustain comparison with a great writer who was never more happily inspired than when he expanded an article originally contributed to The Quarterly Review into a classic. He has to do what Southey never attempted to justify to a generation which has happily never known naval war on a grand scale, the conviction of his contemporaries that Nelson was the greatest seaman that ever lived. He has to grapple with manifold difficulties which are inherent in all forms of biography, and never more baffling than when the canvas on which he paints presents a great historic crisis in the affairs of men largely determined in its issues by the character and achievements of his subject. Moreover, Captain Mahan in particular is confronted with a rivalry which few but himself could sustain. In the far more difficult field of biography he has to maintain a reputation already achieved in another field, in which, by common consent, he stands pre-eminent. It is a mere truism nowadays to say that Captain Mahan has taught all serious students of naval warfare in two worlds how to think rightly on the problems it presents. The phrase "sea power," as applied, though not invented, by him, is one of those happy inspirations of genius which flash the light of philosophy on a whole department of human action. Its analysis in his pre1 Quarterly Review, January 1898.

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vious works is a contribution to human thought of which many of the larger issues and consequences are perhaps even yet unexplored. In this direction, however, he has already done his work so well that he has no new lessons to teach us, though he has many old ones to enforce, when he undertakes to show us Nelson as "the embodiment of the sea power of Great Britain." But he has to justify the title and to convince us that it is not unworthily bestowed. I need waste no time in proving that in this he has triumphantly succeeded. Securus judicat orbis

terrarum.

"

Though purely as a piece of literature the new Life of Nelson is worthy of high praise, yet Captain Mahan has not directly essayed to rival Southey in his own field. Of Nelson, the hero and the idol of his countrymen, Southey still remains the classical biographer. But of Nelson the seaman, " the embodiment of the sea power of his country, the man who, better than any other that ever lived, understood the eternal principles of sea-warfare, and illustrated them more splendidly, Captain Mahan stands now and henceforth as the one incomparable exponent. It was no part of Southey's purpose to make his Life of Nelson an analysis of Nelson's strategic genius or a commentary on the principles of naval warfare as illustrated by his career. "There is but one Nelson," said the greatest of Nelson's naval contemporaries, the seaman who best understood him. All his countrymen felt the same, and Southey, who wrote only a few years after the hero's death, never attempted to expound Nelson's genius, because he never could have imagined that it would be disputed. It is true that a recent editor of Southey explains the matter quite differently. If we do not find intellectual power in Nelson, the real reason is, we are asked to believe, that intellectual power was by no means one of his conspicuous endowments. In his writings there is no thought, we are told, or at least none" in any higher form than a quite measurable sagacity"; and even in action "it was his misfortune never to have

the highest to do." Manifestly, unless we accept this view of the matter, it was high time for a new Life of Nelson to be written-a biography at once critical and sympathetic, which, accepting St. Vincent's dictum,

There is but one Nelson," might serve to show, as Southey hardly needed to show, and was perhaps scarcely qualified to show, why Nelson was unique, and in what special gifts and aptitudes the unique quality of his genius consisted.

This Captain Mahan has done once for all. It may be that in so rare a character and so vivid a personality as Nelson's, the moral force which sustained him in all emergencies, and communicated itself, by that contagious inspiration which is the surest sign of genius, to all who came in contact with him, was more directly conspicuous than the intellectual power which accompanied and sustained it. But it was the complement of the latter, not a substitute for it. Intellectual power is not displayed merely in the written word or the recorded thought. In the man of action it takes the form of sure insight and rapid intuition, which seize at once on the essential features of a situation and shape action accordingly. Intellectual power of this kind, implicit rather than explicit, displayed in action rather than in the written word, and always associated with an unquenchable fervour of moral impulse, was among Nelson's preeminent gifts. No one has ever shown this so well as Captain Mahan, and the following passage must surely settle the whole question. It refers to the moment when Nelson sailed for the Mediterranean in 1798, when he was already an admiral, and after the world had learnt at St. Vincent what manner of man he was :

Before him was now about to open a field of possibilities hitherto unexampled in naval warfare; and for the appreciation of them was needed just those perceptions, intuitive in origin, yet resting firmly on well-ordered rational processes, which, on the intellectual side, distinguished him above all other British seamen. He had