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Strategic Studies A Reader 2nd Ediition Edition Thomas
G. Mahnken Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Thomas G. Mahnken, Joseph A. Maiolo
ISBN(s): 9781306320061, 1317805585
Edition: 2nd Ediition
File Details: PDF, 2.91 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
Strategic Studies

The second edition of Strategic Studies: A Reader brings together key essays on strategic
theory by some of the leading contributors to the field. This revised volume contains
several new essays and updated introductions to each section.
The volume comprises hard-to-find classics in the field as well as the latest scholar-
ship. The aim is to provide students with a wide-ranging survey of the key issues in
strategic studies, and to provide an introduction to the main ideas and themes in the
field. The book contains six extensive sections, each of which is prefaced by a short
introductory essay:

• The uses of strategic theory

• Interpretation of the classics
• Instruments of war, intelligence and deception
• Nuclear strategy
• Irregular warfare and small wars
• Future warfare, future strategy

Overall, this volume strikes a balance between theoretical works, which seek to discover
generalizations about the nature of modern strategy, and case studies, which attempt to
ground the study of strategy in the realities of modern war.
This new edition will be essential reading for all students of strategic studies, security
studies, military history and war studies, as well as for professional military college
students.

Thomas G. Mahnken is currently Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography

and National Security at the US Naval War College. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the
Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H.
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Joseph A. Maiolo is Professor of International History in the Department of War

Studies, King’s College London, UK.
‘A brilliant and, unlike most edited collections, coherent collection of essays by masters
past and present on the theory and practice of strategy. A superb primer for any and all
students of the subject.’ Eliot A. Cohen, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University, Washington, DC

‘This superb volume provides an essential primer for any student of strategic studies.’
Theo Farrell, Kings College, London

‘By a wide margin this is the premier Reader in the field of strategic studies. For research
as well as teaching, it is an invaluable resource.’ Colin S. Gray, University of Reading

‘A fine collection of strategic thought.’ Journal of Military History

‘An essential text for anyone interested in the development of strategic ideas.’
Stephan Fruehling, Australian National University, Canberra

‘The new volume makes an excellent contribution to the study of strategy, and to the
ongoing debate on the complexity of strategy and the connection between security and
strategy. It is also a great and highly recommended teaching tool for advanced course on
strategic studies.’ Mohiaddin Mesbahi, Florida International University
Strategic Studies
A Reader

Second Edition

Edited by Thomas G. Mahnken and

Joseph A. Maiolo

R Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group

LO N D O N A N D N E W YORK
First published 2008 by Routledge
This edition published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 selection and editorial material, Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data has been requested

ISBN: 978–0–415–66111–9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978–0–415–66112–6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–1–315–81480–3 (ebk)

Typeset in Baskerville
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

General introduction 1

PART I
The uses of strategic theory 5

Introduction 5

1 Strategic studies and the problem of power 9

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

2 What is a military lesson? 22

WILLIAM C. FULLER, JR.

3 Why strategy is difficult 40

COLIN S. GRAY

PART II
Interpretation of the classics 49

Introduction 49

4 Who is afraid of Carl von Clausewitz?: A guide to

the perplexed 53
MICHAEL I. HANDEL

5 “The art of war” 76

SUN TZU

6 Strategy: the indirect approach 101

BASIL LIDDELL HART
vi Contents
7 Arms and influence 105
THOMAS C. SCHELLING

PART III
Instruments of war, intelligence and deception 127

Introduction 127

8 Some principles of maritime strategy 131

JULIAN CORBETT

9 Kosovo and the great air power debate 145

DANIEL L. BYMAN AND MATTHEW C. WAXMAN

10 What’s wrong with the intelligence process? 172

ROBERT JERVIS

11 Deception and intelligence failure: Anglo-German

preparations for U-boat warfare in the 1930s 184
JOSEPH A. MAIOLO

PART IV
Nuclear strategy 203

Introduction 203

12 The absolute weapon 207

BERNARD BRODIE

13 The delicate balance of terror 223

ALBERT WOHLSTETTER

14 Attacking the atom: does bombing nuclear facilities

affect proliferation? 240
SARAH KREPS AND MATTHEW FUHRMANN

PART V
Irregular warfare and small wars 261

Introduction 261

15 Science of guerrilla warfare 265

T.E. LAWRENCE
 Contents vii
16 Problems of strategy in China’s civil war 274
MAO TSE TUNG

17 Strategic terrorism: the framework and its fallacies 309

PETER R. NEUMANN AND MICHAEL L.R. SMITH

18 Hybrid warfare and challenges 329

FRANK G. HOFFMAN

PART VI
Future warfare, future strategy 339

Introduction 339

19 Weapons: the growth and spread of the precision-strike regime 343

THOMAS G. MAHNKEN

20 The revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics 355

JACQUELINE NEWMYER DEAL

21 Iron cannot fight: the role of technology in current

Russian military theory 372
TOR BUKKVOLL

22 From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war 392
MICHAEL EVANS

23 Cyber war will not take place 408

THOMAS RID

24 The lost meaning of strategy 429

HEW STRACHAN

Index 447
Acknowledgements

The publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reprint their
material:

Oxford University Press, for Freedman, Lawrence, “Strategic Studies and the Problem
of Power,” from War, Strategy, and International Politics (1992), edited by Lawrence
Freedman et al., pp. 279–294.

Naval War College Press, for Fuller, William C., Jr., “What is a Military Lesson?,” from
Strategic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel (Frank Cass,
2002), edited by Bradford A. Lee and Karl-Friedrich Walling, pp. 38–59.

National Defense University, for Gray, Colin S., “Why Strategy is Difficult,” Joint Force
Quarterly (summer 1999), pp. 6–12.

The United States Naval War College, for Handel, Michael I., “Who is Afraid of Carl
von Clausewitz?: A Guide to the Perplexed” (summer 1999).

University of California Press, for Liddell Hart, Basil, The Decisive Wars of History (1929),
reprinted as Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), extracted
in Gerard Chaliand, ed., The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994), pp. 927–931.

University of California Press, for Schelling, Thomas C., Arms and Influence (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 1–34, extracted in Gerard Chaliand, ed., The
Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1994), pp. 1013–1022.

MIT Press, for Byman, Daniel L. and Waxman, Matthew C., “Kosovo and the Great
Air Power Debate,” International Security, 24 (4) (spring 2000), pp. 5–38. © 2000 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
 Acknowledgements ix
Taylor and Francis, for Jervis, Robert, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Process?,”
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 1(1) (1986), pp. 28–41.

Taylor and Francis, for Maiolo, Joseph A., “Deception and Intelligence Failure: Anglo-
German Preparations for U-boat Warfare in the 1930s,” Journal of Strategic Studies,
22(4) (1999), pp. 55–76.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for Brodie, Bernard (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power
and World Order. © 1946 by Yale Institute of International Studies. Copyright ©
renewed 1974 by Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Used by permis-
sion of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Foreign Affairs, for Wohlstetter, Albert, “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” Reprinted
by permission of Foreign Affairs, 37(2), pp. 211–234. © 1959 by the Council on Foreign
Relations, Inc. www.ForeignAffairs.com.

Taylor and Francis, for Kreps, Sarah and Fuhrmann, Matthew, “Attacking the Atom:
Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?,” The Journal of Strategic Studies,
34(2) (April 2011), pp. 161–187.

University of California Press, for Lawrence, T.E., “Guerrilla,” reproduced in Gerard

Chaliand, ed., The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age,
pp. 880–890.

Taylor and Francis, for Neumann, Peter R. and Smith, Michael L.R., “Strategic
Terrorism: The Framework and its Fallacies,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 28(4)
(August 2005), pp. 571–595.

National Defense University, for Hoffman, Frank G., “Hybrid Warfare and Challenges,”
Joint Force Quarterly (2009), pp. 34–48.

MIT Press, for Mahnken, Thomas G., “Weapons: The Growth and Spread of the
Precision-Strike Regime,” Daedalus, 140 (3) (summer 2011), pp. 45–57. © 2011 by the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Taylor and Francis, for Newmyer Deal, Jacqueline, “The Revolution in Military Affairs
with Chinese Characteristics,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 33(4) (August 2010),
pp. 481–504.

Taylor and Francis, for Bukkvoll, Tor, “Iron Cannot Fight: The Role of Technology in
Current Russian Military Theory,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 34(5) (October 2011),
pp. 681–706.
x Acknowledgements
The United States Naval War College, for Evans, Michael, “From Kadesh to Kandahar:
Military Theory and the Future of War,” Naval War College Review, 56(3) (summer
2003), pp. 139–147.

Taylor and Francis, for Rid, Thomas, “Cyber War Will Not Take Place,” The Journal of
Strategic Studies, 35(1) (February 2012), pp. 5–32.

Taylor and Francis, for Strachan, Hew, “The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” Survival (2005),
pp. 33–54.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint
material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright
holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or
omissions in future editions of this book.
General introduction to the
second edition

Events since the publication of the first edition of this Reader have only emphasized the
relevance of war and strategy in the modern world. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Georgia and Libya; territorial disputes in the South China and East China seas, as well
as the continuing possibility of conflict on the Korean Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf and
across the Taiwan Strait, all demonstrate that force remains an instrument of statecraft
and emphasize the importance of strategic thought and action.
At the same time, war appears to be taking new forms. Since the early 1990s, theorists
and practitioners have been arguing that we are in the early phases of a Revolution in
Military Affairs (RMA) brought on by the development and diffusion of precision-strike
weaponry. Moreover, recent years have seen growing debates over the effects and effective-
ness of cyber operations. The Chinese military has embraced both precision-guided weap-
onry and information operations, and both figure prominently in Chinese writings on
future warfare. In addition, Russia’s increasing reliance on nuclear weapons, China’s
nuclear modernization, North Korea’s demonstration of its nuclear capability, and
continued suspicion that Iran would like to follow suit, demonstrate that nuclear weapons
(and nuclear strategy) remain a concern.
In a world in which so much about the character and conduct of war appears to be
changing, an understanding of the theory of war reminds us that the nature of war does
not change. Moreover, an understanding of the enduring nature of war can help us
focus on its changing character and conduct.
Theory offers the student of strategy a conceptual toolkit to analyse strategic prob-
lems. An understanding of theory equips the student with a set of questions to guide
further study. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, the purpose of theory is not to uncover
fixed laws or principles, but rather to educate the mind. As he put it:

[Theory] is an analytical investigation leading to a close acquaintance with the subject;

applied to experience – in our case, to military history – it leads to a thorough famili-
arity with it . . . Theory will have fulfilled its main task when it is used to analyze the
constituent elements of war, to distinguish precisely what at first sight seems fused,
to explain in full the properties of the means employed and to show their probable
effects, to define clearly the nature of the ends in view, and to illuminate all phases
of warfare in a thorough critical inquiry. Theory then becomes a guide to anyone
who wants to learn about war from books; it will light his way, ease his progress,
2 General introduction
train his judgment, and help him to avoid pitfalls . . . It is meant to educate the mind
of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education,
not to accompany him to the battlefield; just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates
a young man’s intellectual development, but is careful not to lead him by the hand
for the rest of his life.1

In other words, we study strategic theory in order to learn how to think strategically.
Because the stakes in war are so high, strategy is a supremely practical endeavour.
The most elegant theory is useless if it lacks practical application. Strategic theory thus
succeeds or fails in direct proportion to its ability to help decision makers formulate
sound strategy. As the twentieth-century American strategist Bernard Brodie put it,
“strategy is a field where truth is sought in the pursuit of viable solutions.”2

On strategy
Because strategy is about how to win wars, any discussion of strategy must begin with an
understanding of war. As Clausewitz famously defined it, “war is thus an act of force to
compel our enemy to do our will.”3 Two aspects of this definition are notable. First, the
fact that war involves force separates it from other types of political, economic and mili-
tary competition. Second, the fact that war is not senseless slaughter, but rather an
instrument that is used to achieve a political purpose, differentiates it from other types of
violence.
Strategy is, or rather should be, a rational process. As Clausewitz wrote, “No one
starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear
in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct
it.”4 In other words, success in war requires a clear articulation of political aims and
the development of an adequate strategy to achieve them. Clausewitz’s formulation
acknowledges, however, that states sometimes go to war without clear or achievable
aims or a strategy to achieve them. As Germany demonstrated in two World
Wars, mastery of tactics and operations counts for little without a coherent or feasible
strategy.5
Successful strategy is based upon clearly identifying political goals, assessing one’s
comparative advantage relative to the enemy, calculating costs and benefits carefully,
and examining the risks and rewards of alternative strategies. The purpose of strategy is
ultimately to convince the enemy that he cannot achieve his aims. As Admiral J.C. Wylie
wrote,

the primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of
control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control
of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation
of the centre of gravity of war to the disadvantage of the opponent.6

Military success by itself is insufficient to achieve victory. History contains numerous

examples of armies that won all the battles and yet lost the war due to a flawed
strategy. In the Vietnam War, for example, the US military defeated the Viet Cong and
 General introduction 3
North Vietnamese Army in every major engagement they fought. The United States
nonetheless lost the war because civilian and military leaders never understood the
complex nature of the war they were waging and were thus unable to develop an effec-
tive strategy. Conversely, the United States achieved its independence from Britain
despite the fact that the Continental Army won only a handful of battles.7
It is worth emphasizing that the primacy of politics applies not only to states but also
to other strategic actors. As Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in his book
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner:

If the successful operations against Islam’s enemies and the severe damage inflicted
on them do not serve the ultimate goal of establishing the Muslim nation in the
heart of the Islamic world, they will be nothing more than disturbing acts, regardless
of their magnitude, that could be absorbed and endured, even if after some time and
with some losses.

Clausewitz would doubtless approve of Zawahiri’s understanding of strategy, if not his

goals.
Just as it would be wrong to view war as nothing more than slaughter, it would be
misleading to believe that force can be used in highly calibrated increments to achieve
finely tuned effects. War has its own dynamics that makes it an unwieldy instrument,
more a bludgeon than a rapier. Interaction with the adversary makes it difficult to
achieve even the simplest objective. As Clausewitz reminds us, “War is not the act of a
living force upon a lifeless mass but always the collision of two living forces.”8 In other
words, just as we seek to use force to compel our adversary to do our will, so too will he
attempt to use force to coerce us. Effectiveness in war thus depends not only on what we
do but also on what an opponent does. This interaction limits significantly the ability to
control the use of military force.

About this volume

This Reader brings together works on strategic theory by some of the leading contribu-
tors to the field. It includes a mixture of hard-to-find classics as well as the latest scholar-
ship. It is meant to be of use to both students and practitioners of strategy. It is also
meant to be interdisciplinary, of interest both to historically minded political scientists as
well as theoretically minded historians.
Our intention in assembling this collection is to guide readers through a wide-ranging
survey of the key issues in strategy. In making our choices we have attempted to strike a
balance between theoretical works which seek to discover robust generalizations about
the nature of modern strategy, pertinent historical studies which attempt to ground the
study of strategy in the realities of modern war, and extracts from classic works by writers
such as Sun Tzu and T.E. Lawrence. No doubt some readers will be surprised to see one
of their favourites omitted and some issues neglected. Inevitably, for reasons of space,
the editors could not include all the essays and issues they would have ideally wanted.
Nonetheless, we feel that this collection offers students a balanced starting point for the
serious study of strategy.
4 General introduction
Contributors to this volume come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They repre-
sent a diversity of academic disciplines: from mathematics to history, from economics to
anthropology. As a result, students will encounter in this anthology a wide variety of
writing styles and methodologies, which reflects the importance of strategy as scholarly
discipline and real-world preoccupation.
The Reader is divided into six Parts. Each Part begins with a brief synopsis of the
included works and some background material to provide context, as well as suggestions
for further reading. To help students focus while reading, we have also provided a list of
study questions. Readers should also note that in addition to our suggestions for further
reading, the notes of the works reproduced here are a valuable bibliographic source.
Part I of the collection begins by discussing the role of strategic theory and history for
theorists, policy makers and professionals. It also discusses the use and abuse of strategic
theory and history.
Part II contains a set of essays that interpret, and reinterpret, classical strategic theory. It
includes excerpts from some of the classic texts of strategic theory by Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart
and Schelling, as well as Michael Handel’s guide to interpreting Clausewitz’s masterpiece
On War.
Having discussed strategic theory holistically, Part III contains essays that explore
some sea and air power. The essays are meant to provide the reader with a better under-
standing of what each of these instruments can – and cannot – accomplish. Part III also
contains essays about the role of intelligence and deception in warfare.
Part IV builds on the previous two parts by exploring the extent to which the advent of
nuclear weapons changed the theory and practice of strategy. It includes classics by Bernard
Brodie and Albert Wohlstetter, as well as a recent essay by Sarah Kreps and Matthew
Fuhrmann exploring the effectiveness of military efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Part V explores irregular warfare, including small wars and hybrid wars.
Part VI addresses issues of future warfare and strategy. The works included address
the debate about revolutions in military affairs and offer some insight into how strategists
should approach the daunting challenge posed by the future. Are there enduring princi-
ples of strategy that future strategists neglect at their peril, or does the changing nature
of warfare also transform the fundamentals of strategy?

Notes
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 141.
2 Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 452–3
3 Clausewitz, On War, 75.
4 Ibid., 579.
5 David Stevenson, 1914–18: The History of the First World War (London: Penguin Books, 2005); Karl-
Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute
Press, 2005).
6 J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
1989), 77.
7 Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986); Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Rutgers: University of Nebraska Press,
1993).
8 Clausewitz, On War, 4.
Part I

The uses of strategic

theory

Introduction
The three essays in Part I offer readers an important point of departure for the explora-
tion of strategic studies. All three authors share the view that strategy is more than the
practical application of a few common-sense rules of thumb about the use of military
means to achieve political ends; that strategy should be studied methodically and that it
has a place among the scholarly pursuits; and that useful strategic knowledge demands
that present-day theorists think rigorously about “the lessons” of past wars and history
more generally.
In the first essay reproduced in Part I, Sir Lawrence Freedman of King’s College
London draws on insights from political science and sociology to examine the most
fundamental underlying concept of strategic studies: namely, the concept of “power”.
Although power is often measured in terms of assets (men, money, hardware, etc.),
power should be understood as a relationship between opposing wills. As Freedman
defines it, “power is the capacity to produce effects that are more advantageous than
would otherwise have been the case”. To illustrate, Freedman turns to deterrence
theory: A deters (or exercises power over) B, when B modifies its behaviour in response
to A’s threats. As anyone familiar with international relations knows, however, deter-
rence relationships are in practice never straightforward. B may not perceive the threat
or respond in the way intended by A. The complexities of politics and psychology
conspire to frustrate the exercise of power, especially when it requires the continual
application of force. Put simply, B will always seek ways to subvert A’s control. Although
for these reasons any exercise of power is inherently unstable, power at its most stable is
achieved when B accepts A’s will in the form of authority. What Freedman’s analysis
suggests is that an understanding of power relevant to strategic studies must encompass
more than “control” through “force”. Strategy, he writes, is “the art of creating power
to obtain the maximum political objective using available military means”.
While Freedman offers insights into the methodology of strategic studies and the
central concept of power, the second essay reproduced here examines the way in which
strategic thinkers have used and abused history. William C. Fuller, Jr. of the US Naval
War College disputes the accepted wisdom that armed forces routinely ignore the
“lessons” of prior wars. Even the most cursory survey shows that nations and their armed
forces have constantly striven to learn from past experience. The real problem, as Fuller
6 The uses of strategic theory
sees it, is not a lack of interest in historical lessons, but instead the problem of knowing
what “the lessons” are and how to embrace them. He sets out the typical styles of
extracting military lessons and the pitfalls associated with them, specifically the fallacies
of the “linear projection” and the “significant exception”. Strategists fall for the first of
these by rigidly predicting future military outcomes from those of the immediate past;
strategists fall for the second when they explain away prior military experiences that do
not conform to the existing model of war as “significant exceptions”. These two fallacies
occur because military organizations prefer steady incremental change to radical trans-
formation, and because they often prefer to prepare for the wars they want to fight
instead of the ones that they may actually be more likely to fight. What Fuller’s analysis
shows is that the whole concept of a “military lesson” is dubious and potentially
dangerous. Although military organizations can learn much from wars of the past, useful
“military lessons” are short-lived because of the interactive nature of war. After
all, future adversaries may find a way to creatively exploit a strategy based on prior
experience, or may simply learn precisely the same lesson, and so produce a frustrating
strategic stalemate.
The final essay takes strategic studies to the level of its application. As Colin S. Gray
of the University of Reading points out, much of what appears to be wise and even
prudent in theory is often unhelpful to the hapless military officer who is tasked with
drawing up a feasible strategy and then executing it. Strategy is difficult to put into prac-
tice because it is neither policy making nor combat. Talent in one or the other field, as
Gray writes, does not make one a good strategist. Good strategists, Gray suggests, are
born rather than trained. Strategy is difficult because war itself is an extraordinarily
complex activity in which everything that can go wrong will. Even the most high-tech
communication and intelligence systems, for instance, cannot dispel what Clausewitz
(see Michael Handel’s essay in Part II) called the fog and friction of war, or anticipate
how a foe will act to frustrate even the most brilliantly conceived and executed strategy.

Study questions
1 What is strategy?
2 What is “power”? And how does the definition offered by Freedman shape your
understanding of strategy?
3 Is strategy an “art” or a “social science”?
4 Are historical “lessons” a reliable guide for future strategy?
5 Why is strategy difficult?

Further reading
Betts, Richard K., “Is Strategy an Illusion?”, International Security 25, no. 2 (2000), 5–50.
Brodie, Bernard, “Strategy as a Science”, World Politics 1, no. 4 (1949), 467–488.
Brodie, Bernard, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).
Fearon, James, “Rationalist Explanations for War”, International Organization (summer 1995), 317–414.
Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies (London: Routledge, 1971).
Gat, Azar, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
 The uses of strategic theory 7
Gooch, John, “Clio and Mars: The Use and Abuse of History”, The Journal of Strategic Studies 3, no. 3
(1980), 21–36.
Howard, Michael, The Causes of War (London: Ashgate, 1983).
Lanir, Zvi, “The ‘Principles of War’ and Military Thinking”, The Journal of Strategic Studies 16, no. 1
(1992), 1–17.
McIvor, Anthony D., ed., Rethinking the Principles of War (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press,
2005).
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1 Strategic studies and the
problem of power
Lawrence Freedman

I
‘The strategic approach’ is . . . one which takes account of the part played by force,
or the threat of force in the international system. It is descriptive in so far as it
analyses the extent to which political units have the capacity to use, or to threaten
the use of armed force to impose their will on other units; whether to compel them
to do some things, to deter them from doing others, or if need be to destroy them as
independent communities altogether. It is prescriptive in so far as it recommends
policies which will enable such units to operate in an international system which is
subject to such conditions and constraints.1

Michael Howard has throughout his career served as one of the most eloquent and lucid
exponents of the strategic approach. He was outlining his own creed when he described
classical strategists as

the thinkers who assume that the element of force exists in international relations,
that it can and must be intelligently controlled, but that it cannot be totally
eliminated.2

In that essay, first published in 1968, he concluded by wondering whether classical

strategy as a self-sufficient study still had any claim to exist. The field was then
dominated by the inputs of political scientists, physical scientists, systems analysts,
and mathematical economists and a grasp of modern military technology appeared,
above all, to be of central importance for those seeking to make sense of the great—
and largely nuclear—strategic issues of the day. During the next decade, as the costs
of allowing a preoccupation with technology to crowd out the traditional themes of
strategic thought and as the limitations of the sophisticated methodologies developed
in the United States become painfully apparent, Howard’s confidence in a classical
approach returned, suitably modified to take account of the rate of technological
advance.3
It is only in recent decades that the study of strategy has become academically respect-
able. After the Great War, for many the only reason to study war was in order to design
an international order in which disputes would be settled without resort to arms. It was
10 Lawrence Freedman
only when Quincy Wright produced his monumental The Study of War, that the virtue of
serious empirical analysis became acknowledged.4
Historians sustained the study of the ebb and flow of political life, with diplomatic
historians undertaking this responsibility for international affairs. However, even here,
until well into this century, the role of military force as a political instrument was studied
only in the most general terms. Diplomatic historians were of course interested in the
threat of force and its application in particular instances, but they rarely descended into
issues of tactics and logistics.
Only those close to the military establishment saw virtue in the study of strategy. They
produced campaign histories and tried to search for principles of strategy with which to
educate the officer corps. At best, as with Clausewitz, practitioners understood the rela-
tionship between war and the character of the societies fighting them: at worst, there was
little interest in anything other than tips on the conduct of battle. As Bernard Brodie
observed, ‘Some modicum of theory there always had to be. But like much other
military equipment, it had to be light in weight and easily packaged to be carried into
the field.’5 Thus he noted the tendency to strip such theory as did emerge to its barest
essentials and then convert it into maxims, or lists of the principles of war. Strategic
theory, complained Brodie, thus became pragmatic and practical, unreflective of the
framework in which the strategists were operating.
There was therefore prior to the start of the nuclear age no established framework
for the academic study of military strategy. Diplomatic historians were aware of indi-
vidual strategies; students of international relations understood why strategies were
needed; military practitioners busied themselves with the design of strategies; political
theorists and international lawyers sought to reorder the world so that strategy would be
irrelevant.
The experience of the 1930s and 1940s knocked much of the idealism out of political
and intellectual life. A world war followed so quickly by a cold war might have encour-
aged the study of strategy under any circumstances. The advent of nuclear weapons
pushed questions of strategy right to the fore of political life, and once they were there it
could not be long before the academic community would follow. Howard and Brodie
were part of an emerging community of strategic thinkers who brought a variety of
academic disciplines to bear on these great problems.
They, along with others generally drawn from the disciplines of history and politics,
initially worried most as to the sense of nuclear strategy, doubting whether nuclear
strength could be turned into a decisive military asset when faced with an adversary
of some—even if inferior—nuclear strength. But East and West were acting and
talking as if nuclear weapons had superseded all other types of weapons, and commit-
ments to allies had been made on exactly this supposition. So the few classical strategists
found themselves in a conundrum for which their intellectual traditions had left
them unprepared. Into the breach stepped a new breed of strategists, often from
schools of economics and engineering rather than politics and history, who sought
to demonstrate how a wholly novel situation might be mastered by exploiting novel
methodologies.6
Their approach derived its significance largely from their concentration on those
features of the nuclear age which distinguished it from the exercise of military power in
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 11
pre-nuclear times. This inevitably led to the neglect of the traditional sources of military
power. In addition, because so much of the intellectual attraction of the new methodolo-
gies derived from their abstract nature, the scenarios of future conflict explored made
only a slight attempt to relate decision-making to any recognizable social and political
context.
Almost by definition, should anything remotely resembling these scenarios ever come
to pass, the political and social context would be utterly transformed. But many of the
new strategists argued that to the extent that social forces and human passions must
inevitably be in play their role should be minimized, for there would be a premium on
cool, rational decision-making if there was to be any satisfactory result to a nuclear
confrontation. Formal rationality not mass emotion must govern decisions. At most, the
prospect of mass emotion might be used by the calculating manager to persuade his
opponent that the time had come to strike a bargain.
It was almost an attempt to transform the exercise of political power by making it
subject to the managerial revolution and so turn states into rational decision-makers,
maximizing utilities. This analytical approach illuminated aspects of strategy that had
not always been appreciated in the classical approach but it lacked the broad, histori-
cally tuned insight of the classicist. Meanwhile the classical strategists lacked a theoreti-
cal framework to help integrate the new analyses. It is not surprising that there has been
a constant return to Clausewitz.
Michael Howard has been unusual in his attention to the need for a conceptual
framework if the study of strategy is to progress. My concern in this essay is to explore
the possibility that strategic theory can be taken further by investigating what must be
one of its central concepts—power.
The classical approach starts with the state as the central unit of the international
system, reflecting sovereignty, a capacity for independent action, and certain value-
systems. States need strategy because they are vulnerable: they can be created
or destroyed by armed force. Howard has always insisted that a concern with this dark
side of the international system could never provide a total approach to international
politics, but it was necessary to take care of it in order that the lighter side could glow.
He has stressed the adverse consequences of following it too slavishly, for this could
provoke conflicts rather than prevent them. The strategic approach must only be used
in conjunction with other, more positive, approaches to the conduct of relations among
states. However, so long as armed force remains a feature of the system it cannot be
ignored.
The fact that military strategy must come to terms with force distinguishes it from
those other forms of planning which are often described as strategic but which do not
involve ‘functional and purposive violence’. In one pithy definition Howard describes
military strategy as ‘organized coercion’.7
The ideal for the strategist might be to achieve a condition of ‘pure coercion’, when
his will becomes irresistible, but the opportunities for this have been diminishing in the
modern international system and so a state resorting to force as an instrument of policy
must overcome an opposing, and armed, will.8
Thus, along with Beaufre, Howard sees strategy as a ‘dialectic of two opposing wills’.9
The stress on ‘will’ in an analysis of the meaning of strategy is important because it
12 Lawrence Freedman
provides a link with classic definitions of power, which Howard by and large follows, as
referring to the ability to get one’s way against a resistant opponent. In one essay he
defines it as the ability of political units ‘to organize the relevant elements of the external
world to satisfy their needs’. As an attribute of a political unit this is normally described
as a capacity. So strategic power becomes ‘coercive capacity’, which is elaborated else-
where as ‘the capacity to use violence for the protection, enforcement or extension of
authority’.10
This understanding of power is central to the strategic approach. In this essay I wish
to question whether it is adequate to the task. The elaboration of a satisfactory concept
of power is a familiar endeavour among political theorists and the lack of an agreed
definition has suggested that this is one of those ‘essentially contested’ concepts that defy
definition because it can only be understood through a package of values and assump-
tions that are in themselves matters of fundamental dispute.11
In the first part of this essay I take a brief look at the concept of power in political
theory as a means of raising some of the issues relevant to a discussion of how the
concept has been and might be used in strategic theory. I then consider why this ques-
tion has not been addressed as much as it might have been by the strategic studies
community. Morgenthau’s view of power provides a link between political theory and
strategic theory, before a consideration of the insights that might be derived from
contemporary strategic theory. In the final part I attempt to elaborate a concept of
power relevant to strategic theory. Through this I seek to justify a definition of strategy
as the art of creating power to obtain the maximum political objectives using available
military means.

II
Although the intensive political science debate on this nature of power has been much
more extensive and sophisticated than that in strategic studies it has still reached a dead
end. This is not the place to survey the massive literature on power, but it is worth noting
some features.
Much of the difficulty stems from the fact that the starting-point for most analyses of
power—in political theory as much as strategic studies—is that it is an expression of the
subject’s will. This is reflected in different ways in three of the classic definitions of power:
Thomas Hobbes, ‘man’s present means to any future apparent good’;12 Max Weber,
‘the probability that one actor in a social relationship will . . . carry out his own will’;13
and Bertrand Russell—‘the production of intended effects’.14
One of the key questions is whether power is only realized through conflict. Talcott
Parsons, for example, sees power as a generalized capacity to seek group goals, and he
stresses the extent to which these goals can be consensual and achieved by an accepted
authority.15 Those who disagree insist that this neglects the inherently coercive and
conflictual dimensions of power. They are concerned that insufficient stress is given to
the ‘power over’ questions as opposed to the ‘power to’.16
There are many problems with the analysis of power in terms of ‘power over’. Pluralist
theorists, such as Dahl, sought to measure power by looking at the processes of decision-
making and tended to discover that no one group had a monopoly of power in terms of
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 13
being able to get their way. This was vulnerable to the sort of critique developed by the
more radical theorists such as Bachrach and Baratz, who pointed to the importance of
successful non-decisions, that is the ability to get a set of interests enshrined in the
unspoken and unchallenged consensus, as a critical indicator of power.17 Power can be
exercised by the creation of social and political institutions which ensure that only the
most innocuous second-order issues ever come forward for decision. If the major ques-
tions relating to the distribution of resources and values in a society are successfully kept
from political consideration then this is an effective exercise of power. So what is meas-
ured may not be very interesting.
Others have argued that power can be measured by looking at the distribution of
resources and values, but that is open to the objection that the distribution may not have
been intended and so cannot truly be said to be an exercise of power. Looking at the
political hierarchy in search for ‘power élites’ also has its limitations, in that one élite
may not always win on all issues, and that those in an apparently subordinate position
may not be dissatisfied with the outcomes of the political process. Thus is it really an
exercise of power if the effects were not intended? At the very least must one show that
its exercise has made a difference?
Those who are most keen to find the sources of power have been those most anxious
to seize them. The strategists with the most sensitive theories of power have been
Marxist-Leninists because their theorizing has been closely linked with political action
(praxis). Marxist theory has taken as its starting-point the existence of a conflict of interest
between the ruling and working classes and seen its strategic task as being one of creating
a consciousness of class oppression rather than using its own awareness of this to analyse
inequality.
The difficulties of doing this have given Marxists a sense of the great variety of means
by which people can be kept down. Concepts like hegemony, which are now so useful in
understanding international relations, were first applied systematically by activist-
theoreticians such as Gramsci18 who were anxious to discover how it was that ruling
groups could ensure passivity and compliance among the masses. The problem of seizing
control of the state in conditions when all the odds were stacked in favour of the ruling
group stimulated sustained strategic debate.
Marxists were least interested in decision-making in a bourgeois democracy, which
they saw as part of the pretence by which ruling groups hid the realities of power from
the masses. Rather they were interested in the processes by which mass consciousness
became clouded by the ability of the ruling class to influence the way they saw political
reality, and, at the other extreme, those historic, revolutionary moments when the
masses rise to the challenge and attempt to take power.
From a variety of perspectives other political theorists have considered the relation-
ship of power to authority on the one hand and force on the other. This link between
power and authority is an important issue in much political theory, according to whether
the two are considered to be exclusive or extensions of each other.19 There is little doubt
that the peaceful exercise of authority is much more satisfactory than the violent exercise
of force when it comes to getting one’s way. But how is that to be achieved? The trick of
the powerful is to rule by encouraging the ruled to internalize the ruler’s own values and
interests.
14 Lawrence Freedman
III
Can strategists make a contribution to this debate? Strategic studies itself is not rich
in theory. It appeals to the practical and the pragmatic. Much of the fascination of
strategy is that it is concerned with politics at its most pure and raw—the pursuit of
interests even where they conflict with those of others, the problems of anticipating the
decisions of competitors or rivals when taking one’s own, the attempt to manipulate and
shape the environment rather than simply becoming the victim of forces beyond one’s
control.
As such it has long intrigued students of politics—Machiavelli is considered to be one
of the founding fathers of modern strategy.20 Arguably, it should be acknowledged as
one of the central branches of political theory. Yet a preoccupation with strategy has
often been considered slightly improper, perhaps because it requires regarding political
life too much through the eyes of the practitioner. Academic political theory has been
dominated by questions of order and justice. Even the study of power has often been
about whether to exercise it can be moral, rather than how the concept can be refined
to aid our understanding of the dynamics of political life.21
From a moral perspective strategy appears as subversive: it illuminates the means by
which the drive for order is thwarted and the unjust can triumph. Meanwhile, more
contemporary political analysis has sought to identify patterns and regularities in polit-
ical systems that tend to deny the importance of the active element in political life.
The debate within political science on the concept of power which raged during the
1960s and 1970s22 barely caused a ripple in the study of international politics, let alone
strategic theory. Graham Allison’s discovery of the limitations to rational decision-
making in Essence of Decision mirrored without reference many of the arguments used by
pluralist writers in their battle with the élite theorists.23
Yet there was a relevant intellectual tradition which influenced those coming to these
questions from the broader study of international politics. Those working within the
realist tradition had ‘power’ as the central concept and in general have defined it along
established lines, stressing causation and the production of intended effects, and identi-
fying it in terms of power over resources.24
Let us consider Hans Morgenthau’s concept of power.25 There is, with Morgenthau,
as is often noted, a tension between his understanding of power as a means to ultimate
ends, and power as an end in itself.26 It must be to be some extent an end in itself. Unless
one exercise of power is always different from another according to the ends being
sought, the acquisition of power as a general capacity which can serve a variety of ends
is a natural activity.
Power is directly related to political processes. Anything that can be achieved by
natural means does not require power. Excluded from consideration are non-
controversial interactions, such as extradition treaties. Morgenthau’s concept of politics
is thus very narrow—too narrow for most modern tastes. It is even more circumscribed
in domestic affairs, where much more activity is shaped by non-political factors. In inter-
national affairs, without the social cement, much more is left to politics.
Yet while Morgenthau’s understanding of politics is too narrow, his definition of
power is intriguing:
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 15
When we speak of power, we mean man’s control over the minds and actions of
other men . . .
Thus the statement that A has or wants political power over B signifies always
that A is able, or wants to be able, to control certain actions of B through influencing
B’s mind.

Thus the concept of power stresses ‘the psychological element of the political relation-
ship’. As such, it works through an expectation of benefits or a fear of disadvantage, or
‘respect or love of a man or an office’. It involves orders, threats, and persuasion but also
a recognition of authority or prestige, an aspect of international politics Morgenthau
considered too often neglected.
This is distinguished from the actual exercise of physical violence. The threat of this
violence is an intrinsic element of international politics, but when violence becomes an
actuality, it signifies the abdication of political power in favour of military or pseudo-
military power. Yet Morgenthau cannot separate the application of force from power
because war has a political objective. War is a non-political means to a political end—
the accumulation of power. ‘The political objective of war itself is not per se the conquest
of territory and the annihilation of enemy armies, but a change in the mind of the enemy
which make him yield to the will of the victor.’ Note here too the identification of real-
izing one’s will as an expression of power.
There are obvious problems with the distinction between physical force and psycho-
logical power. The only time when one can truly enforce one’s will is when one has
achieved physical dominance. This is a problem to which I shall return.
What interests me for the moment is the consequence of the presumption that power
is exercised through the mind of the target—it is in the mind of the beholder. This is a
useful starting-point for any analysis of power, yet its immediate impact is to undermine
two of the common assumptions with which many analyses start, and with which
Morgenthau is often associated—that power is an asset to be accumulated and is
achieved to the extent that one’s will can be realized.
Once it is recognized that power can only be exercised through its impact on the
subject’s mind then it is accepted that it is relational and dependent upon the mental
construction of political reality by the subject.

IV
This problem can be taken further by a consideration of deterrence theory, which, for
strategic studies, has been the most thoroughly considered power relationship.27 A
standard definition is employed by George and Smoke: ‘Deterrence is simply the persua-
sion of one’s opponent that the costs and/or risks of a given course of action he might
take outweigh its benefits.’28 The definition makes it clear that the idea is to dissuade the
opponent from initiating action rather than to compel him to do—or undo—something
against his will, which distinguishes it from a more general definition of power.29
However, it is by no means clear that the ‘something’ in question threatens the deterrer
directly. The deterred may decide not to act in a particular way, even though this may
have no direct bearing on the interests of the deterrer. The definition acknowledges that
16 Lawrence Freedman
the success of deterrence depends on the opponent being persuaded. No matter how
sincere the deterrer might be in his conditional threats, if the opponent does not take
these threats seriously then deterrence will fail.
If deterrence is in the eye of the beholder then the opponent may simply misappre-
hend the message that he is being sent and fail to act accordingly. The problem with
designing deterrence strategies has therefore been to find ways of ensuring that the
opponent receives the threat, relates it to his proposed course of action, and decides as a
result not to go ahead as planned. The use in the definition from George and Smoke of
the phrase ‘costs and/or risks’ recognizes that the opponent need not be convinced that
the costs will definitely be imposed, only that there is a significant probability of this
being so.
This peculiar quality of deterrence, with the opponent being persuaded not to do
something, makes it very difficult to know whether in practice a deterrence relationship
is in being. If the opponent is inactive this may be because he has no inclination to act,
or, if he has been persuaded not to act, then this may be for reasons quite unconnected
with the deterrer or from the particular character of deterrent threats.
This is often discussed as a problem for the deterrer. Is he wasting his time by making
an effort to deter something that cannot be deterred or does not need deterring? How
can he make his threats sufficiently credible to penetrate the mind-set of his opponent?
Does this credibility depend on really being prepared to carry out the threat or merely
conveying a sufficient probability that he just might?
But it is also a problem for the deterred. Is he missing an opportunity because of
mythical fears about the possible consequences? The condition of paranoia, which is
much discussed in the deterrence literature, is an obvious example of being influenced
by fear of another which has little basis in reality. A deterrer can remain innocent of his
influence on an opponent’s calculations without the opponent losing his grip on reality.
It is possible, indeed quite normal, to be persuaded against a particular course of action
by the thought of how the target might respond. Prudence might dictate caution without
the potential target being aware that he had ever been at risk. A would-be aggressor may
thus be effectively deterred by an accurate assessment of the likely form of his potential
victim’s response without the victim having to do very much.
The phrase ‘self-deterrence’ is sometimes used to denote an unwillingness to take
necessary initiatives as a result of a self-induced fear of the consequences. But all deter-
rence is self-deterrence in that it ultimately depends on the calculations made by the
deterred, whatever the quality of the threats being made by the deterrer. So while much
of the discussion of deterrence revolves around the problem of adopting it as a strategy,
analytically it is important to recognize that it is as interesting to examine it from the
perspective of the deterred as much as the deterrer.
Moreover, deterrence can seem far less problematic when we start from the point of
view of the deterred. Once certain courses of action have been precluded through fear
of the consequences should they be attempted, this conclusion may be institutionalized.
It requires little further deliberation.
I noted earlier the focus of strategic studies on military means rather than political
ends. The political ends are normally described in terms of obtaining conformity to the
‘will’ of the political unit. With unconditional surrender at the end of total war this may
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 17
be achieved, but with many conflicts where force is employed the outcome is much more
messy and confused than this decisive objective would anticipate. Much of the strategic
theory developed by such figures as Kahn and Schelling has discussed strategy in terms
of an incomplete antagonism, by which elements of common interest can be influential
even during the most intensive conflict, and has considered the conduct of the key
players during the course of a conflict in terms of bargaining.
A bargain normally means an adjustment to ends. A less than perfect outcome is
achieved but it is still the most that can be achieved. How then does this fit in with defi-
nitions of strategy which discuss it in terms of the search for appropriate means to achieve
given ends—such as the much-used definition developed by Basil Liddell Hart, ‘The art
of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy.’30
It is possible to discuss either military means or political ends in isolation from each
other. That is what happens in much strategic studies, which turns into the most micro-
scopic examination of means unrelated to any serious discussion of what ends might be
served. Equally, many discussions of political ends are on a macroscopic scale and
discussed without any consideration of whether they are at all feasible in practice.
A key aspect of strategy is the interdependence of decision-making. This does not only
refer to the need to take the goals and capabilities of opponents into account. It must
take in the need to motivate one’s own forces by appealing either to their very personal
goals of survival/comfort/honour or to their broader values, as well as the need to
appeal to allies to throw in their lot with you. Equally, with allies, there is co-operation
to achieve the overriding goal of the containment or defeat of the enemy, but as with the
grand alliance during the Second World War, this can be combined with confrontation
over the shape of the post-war settlement or competition for the hearts and minds of
the liberated territories. Again, this requires some adjustment of both means and ends.
In practice, strategic relations are all mixtures of co-operation, confrontation, and
competition.
The interdependence of the decision-making means that effective strategy is based on
a sound appreciation of the structure of the relationships involved and the opportunities
it provides the various actors. It is necessary to anticipate the choices faced by others and
the way that your action shapes those choices.

V
Where does this leave us with the analysis of power and strategy? The view that strategy
is bound up with the role of force in international life must be qualified, because if force
is but one form of power then strategy must address the relationship between this form
and others, including authority.
The analysis of power has been dominated by a sense of hierarchy, as a relationship
between a super-ordinate and a sub-ordinate. This seems to be accepted in strategic
theory yet it is contradicted by the anarchic character of the international system and the
lack of a supreme locus of power. If power resources are decentralized then power rela-
tionships cannot be simply hierarchical. It is further assumed that the atomized nature
of the system produces regular clashes between individual units which, because they are
not mediated through a complex social structure, are more likely to be settled through
18 Lawrence Freedman
force. While this Hobbesian view of the international system has been properly contra-
dicted,31 it does provide a contrary tendency to that in domestic politics in modern states
with an authoritative government and many effective constraints against the regular use
of force to settle conflicts.
It is hard to get away from a view of power as a capacity to produce effects. In my
view, if it is insisted that these effects be ‘intended and foreseen’32 then in practice this is
too restrictive. My definition of power is the capacity to produce effects that are more advanta-
geous than would otherwise have been the case. How might this work as a concept?
A can oblige B to modify his behaviour through a successful application of force. In
this case B’s range of choice is physically restricted and his perceptions of A’s power are
reinforced through superior strength. However, it is normally preferable for A to
encourage B to modify his behaviour through coercive threats (and also inducements).
Best of all for A is if B does his bidding without question because he accepts A’s authority.
With all exertions of power other than force majeure, A’s objective is to persuade B to
change his preferred pattern of behaviour. In these cases an appreciation of power must
start with B’s understanding of his relationship with A.
Theorists normally give short shrift to the idea that power is an asset. Although we
talk of the powerful, in practice we are talking of power resources. There is nothing
automatic in their application: they can be squandered or exploited brilliantly. There is
an art to politics. Yet if by looking at great strength we act cautiously with A then A has
exerted power. So power is a capacity that exists to the extent that it is recognized by others. It is a
perceived capacity that cannot be independent of what is perceived.
This does not require a distinction between power and brute force. Force is not some-
thing different, merely the most extreme case when recognition of A’s power becomes
inescapable. Nor does power dissolve into authority at the other extreme. Authority is a
form of power. If people do what you want because of awe or respect then that is the best
form of power.
The perception of B may bear scant resemblance to the intention of A. The identifica-
tion of power with the ability to achieve a desired effect, that is with will, ignores the
problem that many of the effects involved are unintended or partial. It is one thing to
demonstrate mastery over nature—quite another to demonstrate mastery over other
wilful beings. It is rare in any social system for an actor to be able to disregard pressure
of one sort or another, positive and negative, from all others, which would imply a
complete monopoly of power. Even when A is in an unassailable position vis-à-vis B,
B may still have potentials that cause A to modify his behaviour. There is a fundamental
difference between the exertion of ‘power over’ nature or physical objects, and over
other individuals or groups who also have a capacity of sorts.
In most social systems, even those marked by a high degree of conflict, individual
actors participate in a multiplicity of political relationships. B does not simply need to
modify his behaviour because of A but also because of C and D as well. Most decisions
are complex and involve a variety of considerations involving other actors. The more dense
and complex the social structure the more difficult the exertion of power because B cannot attend only to
the pressures from A.
The greater the coherence within a political community the more likely it is that
power will be exercised through authority. In modern, complex structures this will mean
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 19
that it has been institutionalized. For reasons that are familiar this is extremely difficult
in international society but it has been achieved in some areas—for example Western
Europe and North America. Conflict will develop within a political community to the
extent that institutional forms leave one group feeling disadvantaged, and to the extent
that it sees itself to be a distinct community on its own. This is the natural state of the
international community. But it is moderated by awareness of a shared fate resulting
from the costs of conflicts and the benefits of interdependence.
The two-way character of most political relationships and the complex character of
most political systems mean that any exercise of power is manifestly unstable. It is,
however, possible to go further and argue that any exercise of power is inherently unstable.
Let us examine this last point more fully. The ideal type towards which most discus-
sions of power tend is of A wholly controlling B’s fate. Suppose that A has captured B.
A’s most complete exercise of power would be to execute B immediately. But then the
power relationship would cease to exist. Let us assume that A wishes only to imprison B.
To start with B may be hopelessly cowed. Gradually he may find ways of not doing A’s
bidding. This may be no more than time-wasting. He may become aware that he is
something of a prize for A and that A will eventually wish to exhibit him in a reasonable
physical condition. He will also know that A cannot cope with a complete challenge to
his authority and so he will begin to seek the limits of A’s tolerance.
All this may be quite trivial and petty. In essential terms it may not matter. Despite all
the irritations imposed on his captors, B is still taken and displayed. But multiply this
relationship and the individual assertions of freedom at the margins can have a cumula-
tive effect. A cannot provide a warden for every prisoner. The fewer he has, the greater
the opportunity for conspiracies and acts of defiance. If control is lost completely then
there might be a mass break-out.
Absolute control requires a continual application of force. It needs continual renewal.
While for hard cases this may be found when necessary, in practice a more relaxed rela-
tionship will often be sought. Occupying forces will seek to do bargains with the victim
populations—material goods, respect for religious symbols, etc. That is, they seek to
reduce the coercive aspects of the relationships and seek to develop durable structures
which soften the impact of conflict.

VI
This analysis may be able to help clarify the character of strategic activity.
The focus of strategic thinking must be the ability of a state to sustain itself. Much
writing on strategy and international politics distinguishes the problems of the state in its
external relations from the requirements of internal order. This is a false dichotomy. A
state with problems in internal order is more vulnerable to external pressure—it is a
supplicant, requiring powerful friends to put down insurgency and provide economic
assistance. It is vulnerable to an unfriendly opponent stirring the pot a little.
Often problems of internal order at most require local police action. The complexity
of social interactions in a modern society ensures a coherence that in itself deters seces-
sionists and insurrectionists. However, this is by no means always the case. Many modern
states are still at an early stage of development and are not based on any natural social
20 Lawrence Freedman
cohesion. They are agglomerations of nationalities or tribes who feel their greatest
loyalty to the group rather than society at large.
We can thus distinguish between hard and soft states according to the degree of social
cohesion and popular legitimacy which they enjoy. Hard states can be vulnerable exter-
nally. But strong national feeling is an important source of political strength.
The same distinction can be applied at the regional level. Western Europe is a strong
sub-system, in that it is marked by a complex interdependence and shared values, while
Eastern Europe may be weak. The potential for conflict tends to decline with the
complexity of the social structure. None the less conflicts persist and strategy only comes
into being when there is an antagonism of which all participants are aware. It is inter-
esting to consider unconscious power relationships but they do not involve strategy.
While strategy may start with a visible conflict which will have to be decided by force
the ideal resolution may be for A to turn his advantage into authority. The institution-
alization of advantage so that it becomes reflected in consensus and procedure is the
supreme achievement of strategy. Strategists specialize in situations in which force may
be necessary, but a sole preoccupation with force misses the opportunities of authority.
Although all power is unstable, that based on authority has a much longer half-life than
that based on force.
Because in most cases, the power relationship between A and B is only one of a
number in which both actors participate, B may have a variety of options as to how to
respond to A’s threats. In order to get B to produce the required behaviour A must gain
B’s attention and shape his construction of reality. This must depend on the coercive
means at A’s disposal, but to translate these means into effective power is an art rather
than a science because of the need both to ensure that B does not use his own means to
frustrate this effort and also to influence B’s developing assessment of his own situation.
This is always the case even in war. In the movement towards the decisive clash, B may
be holding out all the time for a better peace settlement than unconditional surrender.
Force may for a moment provide complete control but the instability of such control
requires that either it is renewed continuously or else transformed, through the strate-
gist’s art, into authority.
In this sense strategy is the art of creating power. Power is unstable and subject to qualifica-
tion. It does not always produce the preferred effects, but it produces more advanta-
geous effects than would otherwise have been achieved.

Notes
1 Michael Howard, ‘The Strategic Approach to International Relations’, repr. in The Causes of Wars
(London, 1983), 36.
2 Michael Howard, ‘The Classical Strategists’, repr. in Studies in War and Peace (London, 1970), 155.
3 See in particular ‘The Relevance of Traditional Strategy’ and ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of
Strategy’, in Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1973 and Summer 1979 respectively. Both are reprinted in The
Causes of Wars.
4 Quincy Wright, The Study of War (Chicago, 1942). (Abridged version edited by Louise Leonard
Wright, Chicago, 1964.)
5 Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ, 1959) 21.
6 This is discussed in my The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (London, 1981), esp. Section Five.
7 ‘The Relevance of Traditional Strategy’, in Causes, 85.
 Strategic studies and the problem of power 21
8 Ibid. 86.
9 André Beaufre, Deterrence and Strategy (London, 1965), although he disagreed with Beaufre’s tendency
to extend the use of the term strategy.
10 ‘Morality and Force in International Politics’, in Studies, 235; ‘Ethics and Power in International
Policy’, in Causes, 61; ‘Military Power and International Order’, in Studies, 209.
11 W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955–6),
167–98. For a discussion of power along these lines see William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political
Discourse (2nd edn.; Princeton, NJ, 1983).
12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, parts 1 and II (Indianapolis, 1958), 78.
13 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (3 vols., New York, 1968),
53.
14 Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London, 1938), 25.
15 Talcott Parsons, ‘On the Concept of Political Power’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
107 (1963), 232–62.
16 See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London, 1974).
17 Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, Conn., 1961); Peter
Bachrach and Morton Baratz, ‘The Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, 56
(Nov. 1962), 947–52.
18 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, 1971).
19 See John Hoffman, State, Power and Democracy (Sussex, 1988), pt. 2.
20 He is the first to be considered in Edward Meade Earle’s Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ,
1962).
21 This is one of the main preoccupations of Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse. It is interesting to
note how much Howard has been preoccupied with this tension between ‘morality and force’ and
‘ethics and power’. See n. 17.
22 For collections of materials on this debate see Marvin Olsen (ed.), Power in Societies (London, 1970)
and Steven Lukes (ed.), Power (London, 1986).
23 Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, Mass., 1971). For a
critique along these lines see Lawrence Freedman, ‘Logic, Politics and Foreign Policy Processes: A
Critique of the Bureaucratic Politics Model’, International Affairs (July 1976).
24 See for example Stanley Hoffman, ‘Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power’, International Journal,
30 (Spring 1975); David Baldwin, ‘Power Analysis and World Politics’, World Politics, 31 (Jan. 1979);
Jeffrey Hart, ‘Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations’,
International Organization, 30 (Spring 1976).
25 I am basing this section largely on the excerpt from Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, repr.
as ‘Power and Ideology in International Politics’, in James Rosenau (ed.), International Politics and
Foreign Policy (New York, 1961), 170–2.
26 See Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York, 1959), 35.
27 This question is considered in more detail in Lawrence Freedman, ‘In praise of general deterrence’,
International Studies (Spring, 1989).
28 Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice
(New York, 1974), 11.
29 A distinction is developed in the literature between deterrence and compellance—between ‘inducing
inaction and making someone perform’. It has been most fully elaborated by Thomas Schelling,
Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 175, 69 ff.
30 Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London, 1967), 335.
31 Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ, 1979), 44.
32 Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (London, 1988), 2.
2 What is a military lesson?
William C. Fuller, Jr.

‘Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them.’ This
hackneyed statement, popularly but erroneously ascribed to George Santayana, ought
of course to be paired with the comment of the German philosopher Hegel, which (in
paraphrase) is that the one thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns
anything from history.1 What can we or do we usefully learn from the experience of
previous wars? This is a very important question, not least because if one contemplates
the twentieth century, one notices almost immediately that a whole variety of military
establishments compiled a dismal record at predicting the character of the next war –
that is, at correctly forecasting the nature of the conflict they were to confront next.
Consider World War 1. Almost no one in Europe, with the exception of the obscure
Polish-Jewish financier Ivan Bliokh, understood that World War I would be a protracted
war of attrition and stalemate.2 Nearly everybody else expected that the coming pan-
European war would be short and decisive, over in a matter of months, if not weeks.3 But
the predictive skills of the leaders of the major powers did not improve later in the
century. In 1940, for example, many Soviet leaders dismissed the idea that Germany
could conduct a successful Blitzkrieg against the USSR, despite Hitler’s campaigns in
Poland and France.4 Then, too, Japan, in preparing for a war against the United States
in 1941 adopted a theory of victory that was utterly bizarre, that bespoke a fatal incom-
prehension of the US system of government and the temperament of its people.5 Still
later, the United States itself failed to anticipate the Vietnam War and arguably never
grasped its essential character, even at its end.6 Thus the Soviet Union also misunder-
stood the war on which it embarked in Afghanistan in 1979, with catastrophic results.7
This list could be expanded almost effortlessly, although it would be both unedifying and
depressing to do so.
The question naturally arises: Why was this the case? What explains why the military
establishments of so many countries have been so badly wrong about the very thing that
Clausewitz declared was their most important task? After all, in one of the best-known
passages in On War, Clausewitz insisted that,

the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and
commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are
embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien
to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.8
 What is a military lesson? 23
Why, then, do military establishments get it wrong? An answer proposed by some is that
the ability of the military to perceive the obvious is clouded over by an almost willful
blindness. It has, for example, been maintained that the great European military powers
contemptuously ignored the experience of the American Civil War, supposedly because,
as Moltke apocryphally said, that war was merely a matter of two ragged militias chasing
each other around a continent and consequently had no instructive value for the officers
of the professional armies of civilized countries.9 The ‘lessons’ of almost every war fought
since are said to have been stupidly disregarded by one nation or another. This view –
that military establishments have an uncanny capacity for overlooking the obvious – is
still very much with us.
Take Colonel (Ret.) John Warden of the US Air Force, an important air power
theorist of the past decade. In an influential essay he argues that:

many vital lessons have flowed from isolated events in the past. The following are
examples of lessons that should have been obvious at the time but were subsequently
ignored, with great loss of life: the effect of the long bow on French heavy cavalry at
Agincourt; the difficulty of attacking the trenches around Richmond; the carnage
wrought by the machine-gun in the Russo-Japanese War; the value of the tank as
demonstrated at Cambrai; and the effectiveness of aircraft against ships as shown by
the sinking of the Ostfriesland in tests after World War I.10

Now Colonel Warden is, of course, trying to make a case for the importance of the
lessons (or his version of the lessons) of the Persian Gulf War, which is the ‘isolated event’
to which he wants to call our attention. Yet his remarks here are problematic, not in the
least because the examples he cites are not ‘lessons’ at all, but rather empirical observa-
tions (and frequently incorrect ones) about the efficacy of various weapons.11 They are
not prescriptive and tell us nothing about what to do (or what not to do), which a lesson
by definition must. But a still greater objection can be made to Warden’s implicit allegation
that military establishments routinely ignore the experience of prior wars: it is demon-
strably false.
For instance, it is simply not the case that Europeans dismissed the American Civil
War; on the contrary, they studied it assiduously. G.F.R. Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson
and the American Civil War was a textbook at the British Staff College at Camberley for
many years.12 In Germany, there were a number of serving officers – among them
Scheibert, Mangold, and Freydag-Loringhoven – who specialized in writing about the
North American campaigns of 1861–65.13 Even in Imperial Russia, at the beginning of
the 1880s, the Tsar himself decreed a controversial (and extremely unpopular) reform of
the entire Russian cavalry arm based upon his appreciation of the operations of ‘Jeb’
Stuart and Phil Sheridan.14
If European military elites did not ignore the American Civil War, they were even
more eager to profit from the ‘lessons’ of their own recent conflicts. Consider the German
Wars of Unification. The successes of Prussia and then Germany in 1866 and 1870,
respectively, commanded the attention of the entire world. The armies of the other great
powers, and even those of the smaller powers, attempted to analyze the factors that had
produced German victory; there was an intense, even frenzied interest in studying and
24 William C. Fuller, Jr.
if possible copying the most important features of Germany’s military system. For
instance, the Prussian advantage in numbers vis-à-vis France in 1870 was clearly a func-
tion of the Prussian practice of conscription, which led to the creation of large reservoirs
of trained men. After all, Germany had been able to put 1.1 million troops into the field,
while France could initially muster no more than 560,000. One form or another of
conscription was adopted after the Franco-Prussian war by defeated France, Italy,
Holland, and Tsarist Russia. Even Britain, which recoiled from conscription as alien to
its traditions, still wanted to remain militarily competitive; the reforming Secretary of
State for War, Edward Cardwell, used fear of Prussia to ram through Parliament a series
of laws overhauling the British Army and abolishing finally the purchase of commissions
by officers.15
Indeed, the reverberations of Prussia’s victories were felt in areas of European life not
obviously connected to the performance of armies and fleets. Bismarck’s cryptic remark
that ‘the battle of Königgrätz was won by the Prussian schoolmaster’ was interpreted to
mean that efficiency in modern war depended on the intelligence and initiative of the
troops.16 It was not enough any more to have soldiers who behaved like automata, who
did exactly what they were told, and displayed neither independence nor ingenuity.
It was also believed that education could develop these traits. If it was unrealistic to
expect that every soldier would be a graduate of an elementary school, at a bare
minimum the corporals and sergeants – non-commissioned officers in general – would
have to be educated men. ‘Literate non-commissioned officers are a burning necessity
for contemporary armies’, wrote one Russian commentator in 1873.17 As a result of this
insight, governments throughout Europe took steps to make schools more numerous
and accessible. The notion that popular education was somehow indispensable to
national security put down roots, and it did so precisely because of the wars of German
unification. What was true of the American Civil War and Bismarck’s wars of unifica-
tion in the mid-nineteenth century is equally true of every major war fought since, for
military organizations have scrutinized them all in the hope of ascertaining their lessons.
Far from spurning the lessons of the past, most nations and their military establish-
ments have, by contrast, evidenced an insatiate desire to assimilate them. In the US
armed forces, for example, there are ‘lessons-learned’ databases; the army has a center
for the study of lessons learned; and there are 516 volumes in the Naval War College
Library that have the word ‘lessons’ in the title. What is true of the US military is true of
other militaries. Moreover, it has been true for an extremely long time. Once Frederick
the Great of Prussia happened to overhear some officers denigrate the value of studying
past wars and military theory, maintaining instead that personal experience was the only
source of military excellence. The king was moved to remark to them that he knew of
two mules in the army’s commissary corps that had served through 20 campaigns. ‘Yet’,
added Frederick ‘they are mules still.’18
It is hardly surprising that military organizations evince such profound curiosity about
the so-called ‘lessons’ of the past; knowledge of military history can be construed as
an inoculation against error and mistake in war, which at worst can produce defeat
and at the very best can exact an extremely high cost in blood. It was Bismarck, after all,
who observed that ‘fools say they learn from experience. I prefer to profit by others’
experience.’19
 What is a military lesson? 25
There are two components to the question of military lessons. The first is the problem
of knowing what the lessons are. In Bismarck’s terms, how are we to comprehend what
are the precise elements of other people’s experience that we ought to absorb? To extract
useable lessons from the past, we have to interpret it, and interpretation can be skewed
by prejudice, pre-conceptions, and tacit assumptions. The second problem concerns the
action taken in response to this process of learning. The issue is one of receptivity – that
is, the degree to which a military organization actually embraces a lesson in practice and
alters the way in which it conducts business as a result.

Extracting military lessons

Three styles of interpreting or reading military history are pertinent to determining what
the lessons of experience are. We might describe these as the antique (or pre-modern),
the positivist, and the pragmatic.20 The antique or pre-modern style of interpretation
was dominant virtually everywhere until the middle of the nineteenth century. It assumes
that war is universal and fundamentally unchanging. In this view, what was true of war
a thousand years ago is equally true today, for the reason that human nature is not
malleable and people everywhere across time and space are very much the same. It is
this attitude that lies behind the statement of Thucydides that he wished his book about
the Peloponnesian War to endure forever and be a ‘possession for all time’. After all,
Thucydides believed that an important objective of his work was to expose profound
truths about war and about human polities at war that would be of permanent value,
since ‘exact knowledge of the past’ would be ‘an aid to the understanding of the future’.21
It is also this kind of thinking that explains Napoleon’s famous comment that ‘knowledge
of the higher parts of war is acquired only through the study of history of the wars and
battles of the Great Captains’, by whom he meant Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar,
Gustavus Adolphus, Marshal Turenne, and Frederick the Great.22
There is obviously something profound and true about this point of view, particularly
at the level of strategy. As Michael Handel rightly noted: ‘the basic logic of strategy . . .
is universal’.23 Much that is instructive and suggestive about strategy can indeed be
gleaned from an analysis of past wars, even wars fought in antiquity – for which reason
the Naval War College’s strategy course gives Thucydides’ work a prominent place. Yet
even at the strategic level there is something missing from this style of interpretation,
since to understand any war one must grasp its political as well as purely military char-
acteristics. And while the logic of strategy does transcend history and geography, politics
are earthbound, the product of specific circumstances, cultures, and institutions. The
values, mores, preferences, and expectations of particular societies are often quite
different, and these differences play a significant role in shaping the nature of war.
However, when the subject at hand is operations or tactics the pre-modern approach
can be even more misleading, since history is by no means a perfect or exact guide to the
future. It scarcely needs saying that the character of war has changed over the centuries.
One of the more obvious instruments of that change has been technological advance.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, new technologies – the tele-
graph, the railway, the rifle, and so forth – began to revolutionize the battlefield. It was
the beginning of a period of extremely rapid military-technical innovation that continued
26 William C. Fuller, Jr.
unabated until the outbreak of World War I. Between 1870 and 1914, the great powers
of the world scrambled to adopt the newest and latest technological improvements in
weapons. Smokeless powder, magazine rifles, quick-firing (QF) artillery, machine-guns,
the dreadnought, and the airplane – all were added to the arsenals of the powers.24
However, despite all this rapid change, there were soldiers in Europe in whom the
pre-modern view of war was so deeply engrained, and whose attachment to military
tradition was so strong, that they denied that the new weaponry made any difference to
the underlying logic of war.
Baron Jomini, famous theoretician of Napoleonic warfare, insisted that ‘improve-
ments in firearms will not introduce any important change in the manner of taking
troops into battle’.25 Colonel G.F.R. Henderson remained convinced until his death that
the increased lethality and range of the new weapons had neither reduced the value of
the cavalry, nor invalidated the massing of troops in close order for the bayonet charge.26
And the colorful Russian General M.I. Dragomirov, war hero and influential military
savant, was even blunter in his dismissal of the idea that modern technology could
substantively change war: ‘there is nothing to make a fuss about in all the pretended
revelations of the science of war’, he wrote. ‘Modern tactics remain substantially what
they were at the time of Napoleon. Napoleonic tactics rest on a firm foundation, on
principles that can never be affected by changes of armament.’27
Yet everyone did not share this extreme opinion. Other military leaders and thinkers,
perhaps less conservative, less hidebound, recognized that war had indeed changed.28
They disagreed, however, about how meaningful the changes had been. This leads us to
the next style of interpreting military lessons and of war in general – what we might
describe as the positivist approach.
Positivism was an intellectual system worked out by the French philosopher Auguste
Comte (1798–1857). It was the contention of Comte that it was possible to construct a
thoroughly scientific method for the study of history and society that would eventually
result in the discovery of actual laws of human development. One found these laws by
deducing the present condition from all probable antecedents. This process of deduction
would give rise to generalizations, and generalizations, once tested, would lead to posi-
tive laws – hence ‘positivism’. Positivism was one of the most ambitious intellectual
systems created during the entire nineteenth century, a period notable for its system-
building; Comte’s theory aspired to encompass the totality of knowledge. It additionally
claimed to provide access to the future, for if the ‘laws of progress’, as Comte called
them, explained the condition of society now, they also permitted reliable prediction
about society in the years ahead.29
Comtean philosophy, with its ostensibly scientific rigor, was attractive and had influ-
ence in a variety of fields. Military thought was no exception. One feature that accounted
for its appeal was that it recognized, embraced, and explained change, while simultane-
ously holding that there was an underlying core of unalterable truth. One person who
fell under the sway of positivism in the military, who in fact almost exemplifies it, was the
French Colonel Ardant du Picq (1828–70).30 The famous statement with which he began
the second part of his book Combat Studies (Études sur le Combat) testified to the profound
impression Comte had made on him: ‘the art of war is subjected to numerous modifica-
tions by industrial and scientific progress, etc. But one thing does not change, the heart
 What is a military lesson? 27
of man.’31 Killed in the early stages of the Franco-Prussian war, du Picq did not live long
enough to produce many published works. Virtually all his completed writings concern
tactics, for he believed that effective tactics were the foundation of success in battle, and,
by extension, in war. He was particularly interested in moral factors in war – the way in
which such emotions as fear and the desire for self-preservation shaped the performance
of troops in combat, which interest is epitomized in his famous aphorism that discipline
was a matter of getting men to fight despite themselves.32 Correct tactics, or ‘a method
of combat, sanely thought out in advance’, could be developed not only by studying
prior wars in books, but also, in true positivistic fashion, by administering exhaustive
questionnaires to the eye-witnesses and survivors of the most recent wars.
Although few were as committed as du Picq to the value of accumulating a compre-
hensive database of modern combat experience, other later writers also betrayed the
influence of positivism in various degrees. In his 1885 Modern War, General Victor
Derrécagaix approved of tactical innovation, while insisting that ‘the principles of the
past preserve all of their importance’.33 Even Ferdinand Foch, the future Marshal and
Supreme Allied Commander in World War I, although an eclectic borrower from many
military traditions, also owed his own debt to positivism, as was evidenced in his 1903
volume Des Principes de la Guerre (The Principles of War), which included what he described
as a ‘mathematical demonstration’ that the latest innovations in the technology of rifles
and artillery continued to favor the offense, not the defense.34
There is much of value in the works written from a positivist standpoint, particularly
those of du Picq, whose perceptive insights about morale and military psychology
still eminently repay the reading. Nevertheless, positivism comes freighted with its
own dangers. Positivists or quasi-positivists are often prone to fall victim to what might
be described as the fallacy of the linear projection – that is, the view that what has
happened in the immediate past is going to happen again in the immediate future; that
by means of a straight-line projection, one can deduce what will come next.35 As an
intellectual system positivism is utopian and presupposes a uniform continuity in history,
from the past into the present and, by implication, into the future. Positivists are conse-
quently interested in trends, and the quest for trends can blind them to aberration,
accident, and chance, which of course are the engines of discontinuity. Moreover,
whether conscious of it or not, those who make linear projections in military affairs are
often basing them on unwarranted assumptions about the inevitability of prior military
outcomes.
This fallacy is not solely the property of positivists, of course. All sorts of people have
been seduced by the simplicity of the linear projection. It is, however, a fallacy against
which adherents of the third approach take extreme precautions – perhaps too extreme.
This third approach is that of pragmatic skepticism, which holds that general laws of war
or eternal principles of war really cannot be said to exist. To the pragmatic skeptic, effec-
tiveness in war is a function of the prevailing environment – of the time, of the place, of
the level of technical development of armaments and so forth. To seek inner truths
about war, or to speculate about the eternal essence or meaning of war, is therefore a
futile waste of time.
Helmuth von Moltke was of this opinion. In an article of 1871, he observed that
‘[t]he doctrines of strategy hardly go beyond the first proposition of common sense; one
28 William C. Fuller, Jr.
can hardly call them a science; their value lies almost entirely in their concrete applica-
tion’. ‘Strategy’, he insisted, ‘is but a system of expedients.’36
Other theorists found pragmatic skepticism equally congenial. General Rudolf von
Caemmerer, author of The Development of Strategical Science during the Nineteenth Century,
shared Moltke’s opinions and took great pains in his book to show how not only
Napoleonic tactics, but Napoleonic operational principles had been rendered obsolete
by technical progress and the industrialization of war. Caemmerer’s debunking of
Napoleon’s methods did not mean that he thought there were no correct tactical
or operational solutions to military problems; in his view, correct solutions did exist,
but they were entirely situation-specific. It was the task of the gifted general armed
with inspiration and willpower to choose judiciously from the options available to him.
Were Napoleon to rise from the dead, insisted Caemmerer, he would be the first to
repudiate those military techniques and procedures that he had employed with dazzling
success against all of the powers of Europe in the early nineteenth century, techniques
and procedures that were now completely passé, despite their servile emulation for
generations.37
A skeptical posture can be quite healthy, for it can serve as a first line of defense
against school solutions and the concept of ‘war by algebra’ against which Clausewitz
warned us so eloquently. But, at the same time, skepticism can itself be a source of intel-
lectual weakness, principally by leading people to succumb to what I call the fallacy of
the significant exception. By accustoming the mind to look for differences, variations,
and freak events, and suggesting that these severely limit the applicability of prior expe-
rience, skepticism can inhibit recognition of underlying patterns that can indeed provide
food for thought as we contemplate the possible character of the wars to come. These
three approaches to the reading of ‘military lessons’, particularly the last two, have
significantly distorted the way in which future war has been conceptualized ever since
the middle of the nineteenth century. To illustrate this point, I will take a closer look at
the fallacies that stemmed from both positivism and skepticism, and at their implications
for receptivity to ‘military lessons’.

Fallacies and receptivity: linear projection

Let me begin with the fallacy of linear projection. A major consequence of the German
wars of unification in the 1860s and 1870s was the creation of a paradigm for the future
of European armed conflict that held sway for the ensuing 45 years.38 It was assumed that
to be victorious in a future war, a power would have to field an enormous army, composed
both of regulars and reservists, who would be called to colors from civilian life on the eve
of hostilities. The mobilization and concentration of such a force would have to be calcu-
lated with mathematical precision in accordance with a rigidly detailed plan for exploiting
the national system of railroads. In such an environment, advantages would accrue to the
power that struck earliest and with the most mass, which meant that increasing the speed
and efficiency of one’s own mobilization and one’s own offensive became an obsession of
European general staffs.
A parallel assumption was that the war would begin with a great battle, or set of great
battles, that were likely to decide the entire conflict, just as Sadowa and Sedan were
 What is a military lesson? 29
supposed to have done in 1866 and 1870 respectively. This misapprehension – the
so-called ‘short-war illusion’ – led European military planners to conceive of wars that
would last for weeks or a few months at most. It also led them to assume that wars would
be fought with the munitions and equipment that had already been stockpiled in peace-
time. There would be no need to put the economy on a war footing, for the conflict
would be over before the stockpiles had been exhausted.
As a result of these premises, in August of 1914 the French, Germans, Austrians, and
Russians all attempted to execute extraordinarily complicated plans for rapid offensives
that were supposed to result in decision. None of the plans worked. In reality, as we all
know, World War I did not feature early, decisive battles, was not short, and resulted in
the virtually total militarization of the economies and societies of all the belligerents.
At first glance, the attachment of European elites to the ‘short-war illusion’ appears
mystifying, for there were several conflicts at the turn of the century that one might think
should have raised doubts about the Bismarckian paradigm, in general, and about the
wisdom of offensives, in particular. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 is a case in
point. This conflict, a limited war fought in Korea and Manchuria, saw the use of such
modern military technologies as machine-guns, magazine rifles, and QF artillery on a
scale heretofore never seen. One thing that has impressed many historians (as well as
Colonel Warden) is the degree to which certain episodes in the Russo-Japanese War
seemed clearly to foreshadow events that would occur in the great European war that
broke out just ten years later.
The Japanese siege of Russia’s Pacific naval base at Port Arthur, for example, featured
trench warfare, the stringing of miles of barbed (and electrified) wire, the employment of
electric searchlights to foil night attacks, and the high-explosive shelling of field fortifica-
tions. It saw artillery preparation before attacks that in terms of intensity and duration
seemed to presage the monster barrages of World War I. To cite just one instance, prior
to an assault on a single Russian strongpoint on the outskirts of Port Arthur, the Japanese
fired over a thousand artillery rounds in four hours.39 Some of the land battles of this
war, such as Mukden, involving as they did hundreds of thousands of troops, seemed to
be eerie dress rehearsals for the Marne, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The combat in
Manchuria also provided abundant evidence of the destructive power of modern
ordnance, rifles, and machine-guns, particularly when used against infantry trying to
take fortified positions by frontal assault.
Why, then, did not Europe’s military planners foresee the deadlock and carnage of
the Western Front? Why did they not allow their knowledge of the Russo-Japanese War,
and their knowledge of the devastating power of defensive military technologies, to
temper their enthusiasm for the extraordinarily offensive plans they had all prepared?
Why did they not allow this experience to inform their thinking?
One answer to these questions is that the dominant paradigm of warfare, derived by
linear projection from the era of Bismarck and Moltke, was so strong that the Russo-
Japanese War was interpreted as reinforcing, rather than undermining it. In the first
place, no one failed to note the prodigality with which human life had been expended
during the war. But many foreign military positivists were even more intrigued by the
simple fact that the Japanese had after all won battles and indeed the entire war, despite
the defensive firepower of modern military technologies. How had they managed to do
30 William C. Fuller, Jr.
this? On the tactical level, it seemed that they had done so through relentless offensive
operations, high morale among the infantry, and a willingness to accept large numbers
of casualties. The Japanese lost tens of thousands of lives in assault after assault on the
famous 203 Meter Hill, which dominated Port Arthur, but in the end they took it – and
it was this that impressed foreign observers.40
Study of the Russo-Japanese War consequently inspired two conclusions. The first
was that the offense is always superior to the defense on the strategic level of war. The
Russian Army had been on the strategic defensive for most of the war and had been
defeated; initiative and surprise had been in the hands of the Japanese. Second, at the
tactical level, the war was seen as proof that defensive positions, no matter how strongly
fortified or held, can always be taken if the attacking force is motivated and willing to
take casualties – even huge numbers of them. Major W.D. Bird of the British Army
spoke for many when he condemned the Russians for adhering to ‘the fallacy of the
advantages inherent in the occupation of defensive positions’.41 The important French
theorist, General François de Négrier, shared this view, and wrote that ‘the Russo-
Japanese war had demonstrated yet again that by offensive tactics alone can victory be
assured’. Négrier went on to argue that the war was an ‘object-lesson in the over-
whelming influence of moral forces’. Owing to their discipline, patriotism, and courage,
the Japanese had seized positions despite the murderous fire the Russians trained on
them. Ergo, reasoned Négrier, an army with superior moral force could fight and win,
even if it was outnumbered and technologically outclassed.42
In other words, the Russo-Japanese War resulted in the adjustment of the Bismarckian
paradigm of warfare, not its supersession. The linear projection involved here, of course,
ignores the question of contingency entirely. Just because a war turned out one way does
not mean that this was the only possible outcome. If, for example, Russia had not agreed
to negotiations, but had instead managed to defeat Japan in the summer of 1905, as was
by no means impossible, who then would have argued that ceaseless offensive operations
were always the key to victory? But why, indeed, was the Bismarckian paradigm so
strong? One reason is that the Prussian method had at one time been astonishingly
successful and seemed to be a recipe for quick victory. Who would not prefer favorable
outcomes that were rapid and cheap to those that were slow and expensive? Moreover,
and this is very important, by 1904, military establishments had been operating in
accord with the Bismarckian paradigm for over 30 years. Virtually all planning and
training had been based on its assumptions.
This brings us to the first point about receptivity to military lessons. Military organiza-
tions are not loath to innovate, just as they are not averse to the study of the experience
of recent wars. However, absent compelling reasons to the contrary (such as those
supplied by catastrophic defeat), military institutions, like all complex organizations,
prefer the stately pace of incremental change to the disquieting staccato of violent
transformation. This resistance to radical innovation goes a long way towards explaining
the popularity and longevity of the dominant paradigm. Of course, as it happened,
World War I did not resemble the German Wars of Unification at all. But in exploding
the old paradigm, the Great War gave birth to a new one: the view that future wars
would be protracted conflicts fought largely from static positions. In other words,
they would be repetitions of World War I, or at least key phases of World War I, with
 What is a military lesson? 31
the defense superior to the offense, stalemate, and the problem of the break-through
unresolved.
In the early 1920s, A. Kearsey, a retired lieutenant-colonel of Britain’s Imperial
General Staff, published a book on tactics and strategy that opined ‘that a purely frontal
attack against a well-entrenched position held by resolute troops must always involve
prohibitive losses’.43 He then proceeded to argue that if it could not be averted, the next
general European war would be characterized by the employment of great fleets of tanks
and immense clouds of poison gas. This prophecy was a direct linear projection into the
future of the military experience of the Western Front in 1918. In other words, a second
world war would be like the first, except more so.44
One practical result of the emergence of the new dominant paradigm was the
construction of a series of defensive positions during the inter-war period, of which the
most famous was, of course, the Maginot Line. An enormous band of fortifications
that shielded the north-eastern borders of France, the Maginot Line was based on
the insight that, in the words of Marshal Henri Pétain, ‘assuring the inviolability of the
national soil is . . . one of the major lessons of the [last] war’.45 The French were not
alone in their faith in fortifications, for almost everybody in Europe was building them:
the Czechs constructed the Little Maginot Line; the Finns, the Mannerheim Line. Even
countries with aggressive military intentions, such as National Socialist Germany and
the Soviet Union, made investments in fortifications: the West Wall and Stalin Line
were put up by the Nazis and the Communists, respectively, in the 1930s. The bitter
irony is that in the end, of course, the defensive mindset of the World War I paradigm
proved to be just as costly, deceptive, and perilous as the Bismarckian paradigm had
been in 1914.
The temptation represented by linear projection, by the way, was not confined to
theories of land warfare, for it had an impact on thinking about war at sea, as well.
Consider Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett, two of the greatest of all naval
theorists. When Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History in 1890, the battle
of Lissa in 1866 was the largest recent naval battle. Lissa (which had been decided by
ramming) was nonetheless merely an episode in Austria’s war with Italy and Prussia in
that year, and of little significance to its outcome. Partly for this reason, Mahan insisted
that, ‘It is doubly necessary . . . to study critically the history and experience of naval
warfare in the days of sailing ships, because while these will be found to afford lessons of
present application and value, steam navies have as yet made no history. . .’.46 Given this
perspective, Mahan logically placed enormous stress on the lessons afforded by Britain’s
experience in the Napoleonic Wars. In particular, Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the fleets
of France and Spain off Trafalgar in 1805 shaped Mahan’s views about naval strategy
and the role of navies in war generally. To Mahan, it was the duty of navies to prepare
to fight and win another Trafalgar against their chief competitors. Mahan, then, talked
about the future of naval warfare by doing a linear projection that reached back to the
Napoleonic Wars.
By contrast, Corbett, who published his Principles of Maritime Strategy in 1911, had a
different vantage point. He was, after all, a British subject and thus belonged to a society
that controlled the greatest maritime empire on earth, whereas Mahan was a repre-
sentative of a country that was just beginning to move on to the world stage as a great
32 William C. Fuller, Jr.
power. But it must be noted as well that Corbett had a different set of historical examples
before him in 1911 than Mahan had had in 1890. By that time, the Spanish–American
War, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War had all been fought, and it is to these
wars that Corbett refers most often. All of these conflicts had been limited wars, had
been fought on what we might describe as imperial peripheries, and had been won by
countries that in the end successfully integrated land and sea power in relationships of
mutual support. Although he admitted that there could be exceptions, Corbett tended
to imagine future warfare as conforming to this pattern.47 Thus, despite all of their
theoretical sophistication, both Mahan and Corbett were by no means immune to the
seduction of linear projection themselves.

Fallacies and receptivity: the significant exception

Positivists, of whatever stripe, were thus predisposed to linear projection, which could
easily become a dangerous method for learning the lessons of war. Yet pragmatic skepti-
cism could give rise to its own equally harmful fallacy – that of the ‘significant excep-
tion’. As we have already seen, the Bismarckian paradigm’s emphasis on the value of
offensive action was not shaken by the Russo-Japanese War, which ‘linear projectors’
read as reinforcing that value. However, another characteristic of the Russo-Japanese
War was that it was not short, but protracted. One might think that this would have
raised the gravest doubts about the short-war illusion, but it really did not – especially
among those who regarded the conflict in Manchuria as sui generis.
One person who perpetrated this fallacy was the great German theorist Friedrich von
Bernhardi, a firm adherent of skeptical pragmatism. Bernhardi explicitly warned against
using the Russo-Japanese War mechanically to forecast a future European war:

The next war will not come off distinctly under the same conditions and circum-
stances as those of recent date. Experience of war can never be applied directly
to the future. The creative mind must anticipate experience of the future. Not
the lessons that the latest wars apparently or really have taught us must we adopt
indiscriminately in the next war, but what appears to us to be the most suitable after
close investigation of the likely conditions.48

On the face of it, this is a powerful and extremely intelligent statement. But this aperçu
does not, however, provide us with much guidance. How precisely do we determine
what the most ‘suitable’ lessons of any previous war are? Which lessons are we to accept
and which are we to exclude? Obviously, the judgment will be subjective. Employing the
familiar argument of pragmatic skepticism that wars were defined by the unique proper-
ties of time and place, Bernhardi insisted that key aspects of the Russo-Japanese War
were highly unlikely to be replicated in a general European war, since, among other
things, the scale and the geography of the theater would be so different.49
Thus, if the ‘linear projectors’ started with the presumption of continuity, Bernhardi
began with a presumption of discontinuity; and this, of course, was the significant excep-
tion. Whereas in Manchuria the terrain had been rugged and the fronts extremely atten-
uated, in a general European war the terrain would be flat, and millions of men would
 What is a military lesson? 33
be engaged, permitting operations and attacks in depth. He employed the same logic to
explain why the European war would be short, rather than protracted, as the Russo-
Japanese War had been. Then, too, he criticized the idea that numerical superiority had
been a key to many of Japan’s victories by observing that bold and decisive generalship
could more than compensate for inferiority in numbers. In Bernhardi’s view, the coming
European war would be a short war of maneuver. Once again, this is exactly what
World War I was not.
Why did someone as capable as Bernhardi start with the presumption of disconti-
nuity? Why was he so obsessed with limning the differences between the war of 1904–05
and a general European war? Bernhardi gives the answer away in various places in his
book: he needed to imagine a war that he thought that Germany could win.50 If that war
were a war of lengthy fronts and trenches, then it would by definition be a protracted
war, a war of attrition. He believed that in such a conflict Germany and its allies would
sooner or later lose, since they would be outnumbered by the powers arrayed against
them – France, Russia, and perhaps Britain as well. To Bernhardi, this idea was imper-
missible and defeatist; accordingly, he censored his own thinking and rejected the possi-
bility of protracted war a priori and out of hand. In other words, his own personal
intellectual desires and needs decided for him what the useful lessons of the Russo-
Japanese War would be, and what would be the significant exceptions.
This brings me to my second point about receptivity, which is that military establish-
ments often prepare to fight the wars they would prefer to fight, rather than others that
may actually be more likely. Lest anyone think that this failing is not to be met with in
recent times, let me jump ahead to the US war in Vietnam. Some scholars maintain that
William Westmoreland’s relative neglect of counterinsurgency during his tenure at the
head of Military Assistance Command Vietnam can be explained by his fear of the costs
and risks to the US Army of a massive counterinsurgency campaign. He consequently
decided that he did not want to wage one and instead planned for a large-unit war
against the regular North Vietnam Army, a war with which the US Army would be
more comfortable and for which it was better prepared.51 This, of course, is not the only
possible interpretation of his actions. However, arguably, even if the large-unit war had
been a splendid success (which it was not), without a better program of counterinsur-
gency, US victory in Vietnam was simply not possible, given the constraints imposed on
the use of force there and the value of the political object to the United States in general.
In other words, what Westmoreland may actually have done was to fight the war he
preferred rather than the one he had.

Ex post facto lessons

The search for ‘military lessons’ thus involves ransacking the past to acquire (putatively)
valuable guidance for the future. There is nothing surprising about this enterprise. All
military organizations would like to win wars quickly, decisively, and at the lowest
possible cost in human lives. These are commendable aims, and no sane person can
object to them. If the use of ‘military lessons’ assists in achieving these aims, so much the
better. The problem is that ‘military lessons’ often do not facilitate such military effec-
tiveness. This is so because the entire concept of the ‘military lesson’ may be dubious.
34 William C. Fuller, Jr.
That is not to say that we cannot learn valuable things by studying the wars of the past
and reflecting upon them. There are all manner of things we can learn. We can, in fact,
learn about the operation and maintenance of weapons and equipment. We can identify
logistical and organizational failings and seek to rectify them. We can observe how
certain tactics and approaches to operational problems worked in practice. The ‘shelf-
life’ of such insights, however, may be short, and it may be a mistake to extrapolate from
them. We can also use history to hone our ability to think creatively about strategy. But
if we try to use a recent war, or even the most recent war, to deduce universal lessons
about the nature of modern war, we will most assuredly fail.
The word ‘lesson’ connotes authority and permanence, for a lesson is freestanding.
But war is not freestanding, for its nature is dependent, as Clausewitz shows us, on the
interaction of the belligerents. Because the nature of war depends on interaction, it is
therefore impermanent, in the same way that centers of gravity cannot exist outside
particular political and military contexts. There are many reasons why this is so; let us
adduce two.
First, say we presume that what succeeded against one adversary in the past will assur-
edly work against the next one in the future. But what if that new adversary acts unex-
pectedly, or merely differently, or figures out how to control the shape of the next conflict
so as to maximize his strengths and exploit our weaknesses? A good illustration of this is
the German Army during the Weimar period. After the humiliation of the Treaty of
Versailles, Germany’s military planners eventually reached consensus that insofar as
was humanly possible, they had to try to prevent the next war from being fought as
World War I had been: were a subsequent war to be another prolonged, attritional
struggle, the probability was exceedingly high that Germany would once again suffer
defeat. The upshot was the adoption of tactics, weapons, and doctrine that were all
supposed to promote the staging of mobile and decisive offensives.52 When London and
Paris declared war on Hitler in 1939, the French were of the view that, despite its offen-
sive doctrine, the German Army knew that it could not assault the Maginot Line defenses
without incurring suicidal losses. Indeed, merely to attempt such an attack might provoke
a domestic revolution against the Nazi regime. The war would therefore most likely be
a long one, and Germany would be ground down by economic attrition, just as it had
been in the conflict of 1914–18.53 Their reading of the ‘lessons’ of the Great War, then,
disadvantaged the French both intellectually and psychologically and helped prepare
the way for the military collapse of their country in the spring of 1940.
Second, what happens if prospective belligerents learn exactly the same things from a
recent war, or a recent trend, and this double knowledge cancels itself out? For example,
by the end of the nineteenth century virtually everyone realized how devastating modern
field artillery could be when fired from indirect positions against masses of infantry. As a
result, all the major European powers increased the number of field guns and anti-
personnel rounds in their arsenals prior to 1914. Indeed, artillery emerged as perhaps
the dominant weapon of World War I; probably 60 per cent of all casualties in the war
were the consequence of shelling.54 Ironically, however, field artillery did not produce
the rapid break-throughs and victory that its advocates had expected. It was the abun-
dance of field artillery firing shrapnel that as much as anything else forced armies into
the trenches. The interactive collision of belligerents who had all learned the same
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 CHAPTER VI.
TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS.

The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre-Raphaelites and

the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in Painting—The Responsibility of
Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The
Problem of Suffering—“Christ in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in
the Holy Family,” “The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism
—“The Light of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the
Door,” and “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through
Suffering—“Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of
Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ
Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The
Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.”

“God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen

by one of the greatest women of our century as the text of a now
historic conversation in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
The student to whom she spoke has told us with what a tender
solemnity she approached the great postulations which those words
conveyed, and challenged them in her inflexible judgment one by
one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the
second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the third.
The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual
scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that
fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire
transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the
intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct,
which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern
thought in Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God”
and “Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith,
rather prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness
a deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible
goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that
growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its
origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee,
and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a
symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature
and destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws
with conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great
humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future
finds the witness and the justification of its ideal.
To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in
English art affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The
pictures of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns
exalted and condemned by the apologists of contending theological
schools, and the painters stigmatized, now as followers of
Tractarianism and instruments of Popery, now as leaders of the
coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now as apostles of a sensual neo-
Paganism brought over from the Renaissance, and credited to hold
mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical critic, indeed, in
1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the essential atheism
of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but typical of that still
extant species of mind to which the worship of the body implies the
profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided whether such
paintings touched the deepest religious principles which underlie all
change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art of the Pre-
Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of
humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion
into a universal spirit and will.
These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which
English artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity
and earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian
religion. It should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the
moral keynote, so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an
age of such religious revolution as has been suggested by the
proposition of George Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by
her in its sternest aspect, but brought more into line with the
common heritage of religious thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D.
Maurice, and other contemporaries of the Pre-Raphaelite band, has
in fact led in art, as it has led in religion, directly, if unconsciously, to
that reverent re-discovery of “God,” that transfiguration of the ideal
of “Immortality,” which the revival of the spirit of romance has made
possible to modern England. It has been said that “the romantic
temper is the essentially Christian element in art.”[7] Let us rather say
that it is the medium through which Christianity itself has been
renewed and quickened into a richer and fuller life. The romantic
temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold of the eternal verities of the
Christian faith, and humanizes its whole cycle of history and legend
in the atmosphere of the real and present world. It ignores any sort
of dividing line between sacred tragedy and the great problems of
modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case reverence” of relic-
worship, the superstition which isolates Christian history as a record
of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation of universal
experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find its holiest
work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the illumination must
have a reconstructive as well as an analytic consequence; must be,
as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in his fine critique on
Rossetti,[8] instinctively synthetic—which is the quality of genius: and
all true art is synthetic in its essence and its end. The tendency of
modern religious science to discredit the exceptional and the unique,
and set the basis of morals in universal and familiar things,—in other
words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from the instinct of “Duty”
and not “Duty” from the arguments for “Immortality” and “God,”—
finds its correlative in the tendency of romantic art to subject the
remote specialities of classicism to the test of known conditions and
actual character.
Therefore the four gospels, to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, do not
stand alone as “religious” history, distinct from the world-wide record
of human aspiration and struggle from age to age. They merely
afford the supreme examples of man’s apprehension of “God,
Immortality, Duty,” and of his capability of heroic labour and self-
sacrifice in the pursuit of an ideal. The Pre-Raphaelites draw their
first principle of religion from the beauty and glory of the natural
world, and the intrinsic dignity and sacredness of human life. Their
Christ is re-incarnate in the noblest manhood of all time; their Virgin
Mary lives again in every pure girl that wakes to the solemn charm,
the mysterious power and responsibility of womanhood. In humanity
itself, with all its possibilities, in its triumphs and in its degradations,
its labours and its sufferings, they re-discover “God,”—an “unknown
God,” it may be; “inconceivable,” if we will; but evident in the
quickened conscience of a growing world, and in the invincible
instincts of human pity and love. Millais sees a young Christ in the
delicate boy with the wounded hand in the dreary and comfortless
carpenter’s shop. Hunt sees a crucified Christ in the tired workman,
over-tasked and despairing amid the calm sunlight of eventide.
Rossetti sees a risen Christ in the noble poet whose great love could
conquer death and enter upon the New Life in the present hour. The
true Pre-Raphaelitism does not take the halo from the head of the
Christ of history; but it puts the halo on the head of every suffering
child, of every faithful man and woman since the world began. It is
not that the historic Christ is less divine; but that all humanity is
diviner because He lived and died.
In such a spirit does Rossetti conceive “The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin,”—not as a miraculous but an exquisitely natural thing;
miraculous, at least, in Walt Whitman’s sense of the word,—the
sense in which all beauty and all goodness are miracles to man. He
shows us the up-growing of a simple country girl, in a home full of
the sweetness of family love; remote and quiet, yet with no artificial
superiority or isolation from the average world. The maiden in the
picture, with an innocent austerity of face, sits at an embroidery-
frame by her mother’s side. In front of her is a growing lily, whose
white blossoms, the symbol of her purity, she is copying with her
needle on the cloth of red, beneath St. Anna’s watchful eye. The
flower-pot rests on a pile of books, inscribed with the names of the
choicest virtues, uppermost of which is Charity. Near to these lie a
seven-thorned briar and a seven-leaved palm-branch, with a scroll
inscribed “Tot dolores tot gaudia,” typical of “her great sorrow and
her great reward.” The lily is tended by a beautiful child-angel, the
guardian both of the flower and the girl who is herself, in Rossetti’s
words,

“An angel-watered lily, that near God

Grows and is quiet.”

Around the balcony trails a vine, which St. Joiachim is pruning

above; significant of the True Vine which must hereafter suffer “the
chastisement of our peace.” The dove that broods among its
branches promises the Comforter that is to come. The realism of the
picture is a realism of the mediæval kind, that takes possession of,
instead of ignoring, the spiritual world, and overleaps the boundaries
of visible things; depicting the invisible with the daring confidence of
imaginative faith. The child-angel with her crimson pinions is as
substantial on the canvas as the soberly-clad virgin at her symbolic
task.
In the companion-picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“Behold the
handmaid of the Lord!”) Rossetti repeats and develops much of the
same symbolism in the accessories of the painting, but the universal
meaning of the Virgin’s call is far more clearly brought out. The
design differs from all familiar versions of the Annunciation in that
the message is delivered to Mary as she wakes out of sleep, and that
she is depicted, not among beautiful and well-ordered surroundings,
but in a poor and bare chamber, rising, half-awake, in a humble
pallet-bed, and sitting awed before the angel whose presence,
perhaps, is but the visualized memory of her dream. The rapt
stillness of her look recalls the pregnant line in which Byron speaks
of a troubled waking,—“to know the sense of pain without the
cause.” In Mary’s mind there should rather be a sense of joy without
the cause; but even in her joy there lies a mystery, a burden of
responsibility and foreboded sorrow, that makes it heavy to bear. It
is as if some simple girl, waking to the golden glories of a summer
morn, should wake at the same time to the thought of the world’s
pain, and realize, in a sudden exaltation of pity and love, that
somehow, by whatever path of grief and loss, her purity, her
goodness, must help humanity and bless the race to be. The angel
at her side is a girl-child no longer, but a youth, full of strength and
graciousness, as if to suggest that the sanctities of manhood are
now to be revealed to the maid. In his hand the radiant Gabriel
holds the full-grown and gathered lily, whose image is now
completed on the embroidered cloth, which hangs near the bed. The
dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies in at the window, and the
light is soft and warm from the sun-bathed landscape without.
Once again did Rossetti attempt the subject of “The Annunciation,”
but only in a water-colour sketch, which found a place, however, in
the small but choice collection in the Burlington Club. Here also the
lily affords the symbolic keynote of the design,—the Virgin is seen
bathing among the water-lilies in a stream; but the singularly fine
conception of the angel’s salutation gives a special value and interest
to the work. The figure that appears before her on the bank
assumes for the moment the aspect of a cross; being so enfolded
with his golden wings that the Virgin sees not only the glory of her
visitant but the dire portent of the message which he brings. “The
Annunciation” of Mr. Arthur Hughes is more conventional in spirit,
with its veiled Virgin and its stiffly self-conscious Gabriel, and lacks
the note of prescience which gives solemnity to Rossetti’s designs.
Mr. Burne-Jones, on the other hand, gives us a more mature and
stately maid. His Mary, nobly simple though she is, seems better
prepared for the sacred honour of her destiny, and does not touch
us so deeply as the shrinking girl in “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” or even as
the poor beggar-maiden (for so she appears) in Mr. Hughes’s
“Nativity,” bending timid and reverent on her knees in the straw
before the Holy Child.
But the note of prescience, as we have seen,—the prophetic
symbolism which brings to mind in every incident of the Saviour’s life
the whole scheme of sacrifice and redemption, dominates all the
greatest Pre-Raphaelite work. The suggestions of the inevitable
Cross recur in Rossetti’s early picture, “The Passover in the Holy
Family,” in Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” and in
Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of Death,” with a force and urgency that
points at once to the universal significance of the history. “The
Passover in the Holy Family” shows us the boy Christ carrying a bowl
filled with the blood of the newly-slain Paschal lamb, and gazing at it
with a mysterious foreboding in his eyes. In the dim background St.
Joseph and St. Anna (or, according to Mr. William Rossetti, and as
seems more probable, St. Elizabeth), are seen kindling a fire for the
ritual. Mary is gathering bitter herbs, and Zacharias is sprinkling the
door-posts and lintel with the lamb’s blood. The youthful John
Baptist is kneeling at the feet of Christ, binding His shoe.
Rossetti, however, does not attempt quite so bold a translation of
the Biblical narrative into modern form as does Millais when,
depicting “Christ in the House of His Parents,” he sets the poor and
mean-looking child in the midst of almost wholly English
surroundings, in a carpenter’s workshop, looking out upon a
landscape of thoroughly English meadow-land;—a literalism of
method since adopted with more daring fidelity to local colour in
their respective fields by such later realists as Fritz von Uhde and
Vassili Verestchagin, and others of the German and neo-French
schools, but never pursued to the same length in any later
experiment from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Critics probably will long be divided as to the legitimacy of such a
process, and its success must be judged largely by the intention of
the painter,—whether he seeks merely to present an historical
incident with vividness and force, and employs familiar scenery to
emphasize the hard reality of his narrative, and whether he rather
aspires to interpret the universal truth beneath the incident, and to
illustrate its bearing upon present life; in other words, whether he
desires to impress us (for example) with the reality of the sufferings
of Christ, or with the problem of human suffering in all ages, of
which the sacred story is at once the type and the key. It can
scarcely be argued that the latter object does not come within the
scope of art. The point at issue, however, seems to be that the
sense of anachronism aroused by the presentation of great historical
or legendary figures in present-day garb, amid the surroundings of
contemporary life, is apt to endanger the solemnity of the theme,
and to some extent defeat the object of the painter,—in which case
it may be urged that the failure is quite as likely to lie upon the
spectator’s side.
But the literalism of Millais’s picture is eclipsed by the exhaustive
symbolism which he uses in common with his colleagues of the
Brotherhood, though never carrying it into the elaborate detail
cultivated by Mr. Holman Hunt. The “house” of Christ’s Parents is a
wooden shed, strewn with shavings and hung with tools. The young
Christ has torn his hand on a nail, and St. Joseph, turning from his
bench, holds up the wounded palm, which Mary hastens to bind with
a linen cloth. John the Baptist brings water to bathe the hurt before
she covers it, and the elder woman bends forward to remove the
tools with which the boy, perhaps, has carelessly played.
The nail-mark in the palm is an obvious presage of the coming
Cross. The rough planks and the half-woven basket convey the idea
of unfinished work; and on a ladder overhead broods the ever-
present dove. The picture is inscribed from the verse in Zechariah,
—“And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thine
hands?’ Then shall he answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in
the house of my friends.’”
To recover the actual conditions of the early life of Christ—to
reproduce the aspect of a Nazarene cottage eighteen centuries ago
—and yet to charge the historic figure with a vitality and emotion
that brings it home with irresistible significance to the heart of the
spectator of to-day, is perhaps a higher triumph of art than could be
achieved by Millais’s neo-realistic method. Rare as is success in this
dual effort—the union of archæological accuracy with profound
insight into the eternal meanings of the ancient tragedy—it has been
attained beyond question by Holman Hunt in his greatest picture,
“The Shadow of Death.” Sojourning for four years at Nazareth and
Bethlehem (the latter on account of the alleged resemblance of its
people to the ancient House of David), the painter equipped himself
with knowledge of every detail of domestic life, furniture, custom,
and dress that could heighten the literal truthfulness of his work. To
that scientific fidelity he added the elaborate symbolism of which he
made a studious art, and through that symbolism he poured a
wealth of imagination, a dignity of thought and an intensity of
feeling which steeped the subject in a moral glow hitherto unknown
to English painting. The scene is laid at sunset in the carpenter’s
shop. The Christ, whose face and form, now grown to manhood,
speak utter weariness of body and soul, seems to stand there for all
humanity, confronting the whole problem of labour and suffering and
death. There is something more than physical exhaustion, though
that is paramount, in the drooping figure of the tired workman as He
lifts His arms from the tools and stretches them out in the evening
sunlight, all unconscious that as He does so, the slant rays cast His
shadow, in the semblance of a crucifix, upon the cottage wall
behind, where a wooden tool-rack forms as it were the arms of the
cross on which the shadow of His arms is cast; and near it a little
window, open to the east, makes an aureole of light around His
head. His mother, kneeling on the floor, examining the casket in
which she keeps the long-treasured gifts of the Magi—gold, and
frankincense, and myrrh, glances up and sees the terrible image on
the wall. It is the cross of a daily crucifixion, rather than of the final
death, that weighs upon the soul of Christ;—the crucifixion of
unhonoured labour in obscurity; the hard, despised routine of toil
endured by the uncomplaining workers of all time. He knows both
the dignity of labour and its shame;—the dignity, that is, of all
honest, healthy, and profitable toil; the shame of that industrial
slavery which in any land can make a man too weary to enjoy the
sunset glories or to revel in the calm delights of eventide.
In turning to Hunt’s earlier picture, “The Scapegoat,” we pass from
the problem of the slavery of labour to the deeper question of
vicarious sacrifice. The solitary figure of the dumb and helpless
animal, dying in the utter desolation of the wilderness, the
unconscious and involuntary victim of human sin, speaks more
eloquently than any words of the reality and pathos of the suffering
of innocence for guilt. Seldom if ever has the problem been so
directly urged upon us in pictorial art,—Can the law of vicarious
sacrifice be reconciled with our highest ideals of moral justice? Can a
beneficent and omnipotent God permit one innocent being, without
choice or knowledge, to pay another’s penalty? Or, on the other
hand, can we formulate any other method by which humanity could
be taught its own solemn power, and its absolute community and
interdependence of soul with soul? The painter’s business is to state
that problem, not to solve it; and this Hunt does with the utmost
simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness. Pitching his tent in the most
inhospitable region on the shores of the Dead Sea, the artist painted
the actual landscape upon which the ancient victim was cast adrift,
to perish slowly in the desert without the camp; and from that
strange, wild studio his picture came full-charged with the loneliness
and terror of the scene, and the momentous meaning of the
scapegoat’s sacrifice.
“The Light of the World,” frequently regarded as Holman Hunt’s
greatest work, though more mystical and appealing less directly to
common sentiment than “The Shadow of Death,” is purely symbolic
in design and character; and indeed may be taken to represent the
high-water mark of abstract symbolism, as distinct from Biblical
history, in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The
circumstances of its execution, partly at Oxford, and partly in his
studio at Chelsea by moonlight, have already been referred to. The
picture tells no story; deals with no incident or condition of the
human life of Christ, but presents the ideal figure in the threefold
aspect of prophet, priest, and king. The Saviour appears in the guise
of a pilgrim, carrying a lantern, and knocking in the night at a fast-
closed door. He wears the white robe of inspiration, typical of
prophecy; the jewelled robe and breastplate of a priest; and a crown
of gold interwoven with one of thorns. The legend from Revelation,
iii. 20, gives the keynote of the work: “Behold I stand at the door
and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come
in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” The fast-barred
door, with its rusty nails and bolts overgrown with ivy, and its
threshold blocked up with brambles and weeds, is the door of the
human soul. The light from the lantern in Christ’s hand is the light of
conscience (according to Mr. Ruskin’s well-known description of the
picture), and the light which suffuses the head of the Saviour,
issuing from the crown of thorns, is the hope of salvation. The lamp-
light rests on the doorway and the weeds, and on a fallen apple
which gives the suggestion of hereditary sin. The thorns in the
crown are now bearing fresh leaves, “for the healing of the nations.”
It has been charged against many Pre-Raphaelite paintings that
their elaborate symbolism, and the highly subjective development of
the designs, require not merely titles and texts, but footnotes also,
for their explanation. In the pictures of Holman Hunt especially, this
charge may have some weight; but it may be fairly met by the
consideration of the close and deep thought, the prolonged spiritual
fervour—unexampled since the Italian Pre-Raphaelites—in which
each masterpiece is steeped, and which surely brings a claim upon
such intelligent study as would enable all but those wholly ignorant
of Christian symbology to interpret the details for themselves.
Rossetti said of one of Hunt’s pictures that “the solemn human soul
seems to vibrate through it like a bell in a forest.” That sound, once
caught, yields the keynote to the pictorial scheme, and attunes all
the latent music to its perfect end.
Rossetti, however, in no case employed the symbolic-figure
method, so triumphantly used in “The Light of the World,” for his
Biblical subjects; but reserved it for the realm of romantic allegory
and classic myth. His illustration of the eternal truths of penitence
and aspiration, of “the awakening conscience” and the resurrection
of the soul, is given us in his beautiful drawing of “Mary Magdalene
at the door of Simon the Pharisee.” The scene is laid amid the
revelry of a village street at a time of festival. Mary, passing with a
throng of gay companions, sees, through the window of a house,
the face of Christ; and with a sudden impulse leaves the procession
and tears the flowers passionately from her hair, seeking to enter
where He sits; the while her lover, following, strives to dissuade her,
and to lead her back to the mirthful company. The appeal of passion
and the answer of the repentant woman, beautiful in her mingled
shame and triumph, are best recounted in Rossetti’s own words,
from the most successful of his sonnets on his own designs:
“Why wilt thou cast the roses from thine hair?
Nay, be thou all a rose,—wreath, lips, and cheek.
Nay, not this house,—that banquet-house we seek;
See how they kiss and enter; come thou there.
This delicate day of love we too will share
Till at our ear love’s whispering night shall speak.
What, sweet one,—hold’st thou still the foolish freak?
Nay, when I kiss thy feet they’ll leave the stair.”

“Oh loose me! Seest thou not my Bridegroom’s face

That draws me to Him? For His feet my kiss,
My hair, my tears, He craves to-day:—and oh!
What words can tell what other day and place
Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His?
He needs me, calls me, loves me, let me go!”

“Head of Christ.”

Finished study for “Mary Magdalene.”

By permission of Mr. Moncure D. Conway.

 The face of the Magdalene has been said to present Rossetti’s
ideal of spiritual beauty, in contrast with the physical beauty of
“Lilith” and the intellectual beauty of “Sibylla Palmifera;” but as
Rossetti himself afterwards applied the title of “Soul’s Beauty” to
“Sibylla Palmifera,” the distinction can hardly be pursued very far.
The head of Christ (for which Mr. Burne-Jones is said to have sat as
a model) is of a more peculiar interest and value; being the only
serious attempt at the portrayal of the central figure in Christian art
which remains to us from Rossetti’s hand. Some highly-finished
studies were made by him for this head, from one of which the
present illustration is taken. Rossetti’s Christ differs markedly in
conception from that of Holman Hunt. The Christ of the older painter
is pre-eminently the “Man of Sorrows,” the martyr whose whole life
was a crucifixion. Rossetti shows us rather the Galilean dreamer, the
peasant poet, the gentle idealist whom women and children loved.
The realism of suffering, though delicately suggested by the slightly-
drawn brow, the quiet tension of the features, and the bright,
glowing depths of the eye, is here in abeyance. Christ is for the time
an honoured guest, receiving the hospitality of the Pharisee with a
gracious self-possession and an exquisite simplicity of mien. The sole
suggestion, in the surrounding objects, of the tragedy that is to
come, is given in the vine that trails on the walls of the house,
symbolic of the great Sacrifice.
The shadow of the Cross—no longer cast into the future, but
abiding on the mourners after the death of Christ—is figured by a
device of singular beauty in Rossetti’s sketch of “Mary in the House
of John.” In a small drawing of “The Crucifixion” he had depicted St.
John leading the Madonna from the foot of Calvary. Now he shows
us the new home, so strangely ignored by painters of the sacred
tale, wherein the Mother and the adopted son are together at
eventide. Through the window is seen a distant view of Jerusalem,
and in the uncertain light the window-bars assume the form of a
cross, which thus appears to rest upon the Holy City, and to stand
between that quiet household and the outer world. St. John has
been writing a portion of his Gospel, and pauses to strike a light,
with which the Mother of Jesus kindles a lamp, hanging at the
intersection of the bars; so that the light shines from the centre-
point of the Cross, where the Head of Christ should be. This delicate
emblem gives the touch of hope, the promise of glory through
sacrifice, which lightens the darkness of the hour. So fine a use of
simple imagery, so perfect an adjustment of the hope to the penalty,
admirably illustrates the highest triumph of Pre-Raphaelite art,—the
reconciliation of the “crucifixion principle,” the essentially Catholic
element in religion, with the “resurrection principle,” peculiar to
Protestantism. Mr. Forsyth, whose essays on the Pre-Raphaelites
have already been quoted, makes the suggestive remark, that “In
Hunt’s technique shadow always means colour as well as darkness:
to see colour in shadow is the last triumph of a great painter,” and
adds that “Rossetti’s colour is not merely luminous matter; it is
transfigured matter.” This conception of the dual truth of Christianity
—the necessity of suffering and the assurance of victory—is
consistently presented both by Rossetti and Hunt; and it is not
merely victory over suffering, as Protestantism insists on, which they
teach; but rather victory through suffering; which is the fusion of
Catholic ethics with Protestant faith.
And it is remarkable that the Pre-Raphaelites find as much
inspiration for the thought of victory through suffering in the
incidents of Christ’s childhood as in the story of His martyrdom.
Rossetti, in his early picture of “Bethlehem Gate,” in which the Holy
Family are seen in flight from the massacre of the Innocents, depicts
at the side of the Virgin Mother an angel bearing a palm-branch,—
the symbol of deliverance and reward. Holman Hunt begins the
Resurrection with “The Triumph of the Innocents,” applies, that is,
the principle of Immortality to universal life; and by the ruddy,
healthy faces of his angel-children watching from Heaven over the
child-Christ, he insists, as Rossetti insisted in “The Blessed Damozel,”
that the unknown world must be something intimately related to the
one we know, and that immortal life must be something more than
the continuance of spiritual being in an immaterial sphere,—must, in
short, afford real and eternal activities beyond the grave.
This recognition of the relation of sacrifice to victory leads the
painters beyond the reconciliation of the individual man with God to
the reconciliation of the social man with man. Something of this idea
of “peace on earth” is suggested by Rossetti’s picture, “The Infant
Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” which now forms a
triptych in Llandaff Cathedral,—the only picture directly from his
hand which occupies a permanent position in an English church. In
the left compartment is seen the young David as a shepherd before
Goliath; in the right, the psalmist is depicted in old age, crowned as
a king before God. In the centre, the Infant Christ appears as the
mediator between the high and the lowly, the rich and the poor; the
messenger of the “at-one-ment” of all ranks of men, united in a
common worship of the Divine Child, and a common love of that
Humanity of which He is the type.
 A similar interpretation of the childhood of Jesus, as typical of the
growth of all humanity, may fairly be drawn from Holman Hunt’s
picture of “Christ in the Temple,”—a work now thoroughly familiar to
English eyes, and perhaps the most popular because the least
mystical of his masterpieces. The bright, bold, ingenuous face and
figure of the boy, confronting with his eager questions the venerable
Rabbis of the congregation, seems instinct with the life of the
present age, charged with the very essence of the spirit of inquiry—
of sceptical inquiry even—before which the apologists of tradition
and legalism are dumfounded, and through which, from the dogma
of the old world, is wrested the faith of the new.
It would be impracticable here to follow in detail the influence of
the Pre-Raphaelites upon the religious paintings of their
contemporaries and successors, or to estimate the exact relation of
their work to that of their nearest precursor, Madox Brown. But a
single example from the last-named artist, and another from the
youngest of the Pre-Raphaelite group, but never numbered with the
Brotherhood—Mr. Burne-Jones—may serve to illustrate still further
the great religious principles of which these painters steadfastly took
hold. “The Entombment” remains among the finest works of Madox
Brown, and embodies, in its simple austerity, its direct pathos, a
spiritual fervour akin to the highest inspirations of Holman Hunt. The
dignity of the human body, the solemnity and awfulness of physical
death, the tender charm of child life and child innocence, the
mystery of immortality, and the apprehension of a “risen” life,—all
these things are brought within the range of thought opened up by
that sombre and majestic design. Seldom in modern art has the
intense realism of death been so delicately handled, and yet with
such uncompromising force. The faces of the women bending over
the loved corpse are full of grief and perplexity, yet even in the
atmosphere of death there is a subtle breath of triumph and of
hope, a sense that the body is not all, that what is left is but the
shell, the “house of Life;” the true Life is not dead, but gone—
whither? The tender light that plays around the mourners, and the
contrast of the vigorous little body of the young child with the aged
and shattered frame of the dead martyr, seem to voice the eternal
protest of the heart against annihilation, the irrepressible demand of
the soul for a future life.
Thirty years apart from “The Light of the World” and “Mary in the
House of John,” but akin to both in motive and spirit, is “The Tree of
Life,” one of the latest and noblest of Mr. Burne-Jones’s paintings.
This sombre monochrome, so absolutely original in design, so
chastened and restrained in execution, ranks with the highest
symbolic work of the Pre-Raphaelites in its grasp of the idea of
victory through suffering. For “The Tree of Life” is the Cross. Its
roots are in the very foundations of the earth; its branches are fed
with the heart’s blood of humanity, and its fruit reaches unto
Heaven. The Figure that hangs upon it is brooding in benediction
over the whole world; the supreme type of that immortal love which
fulfils the divine law of sacrifice; embodying in one great symbol the
lesson of all history,—

“Knowledge by suffering entereth,

And Life is perfected by Death.”

Man, woman and children are gathered beneath the shadow of the
Tree. On the one side is a garden of flowers, and on the other a
harvest of corn. Along the margin of the earth is the inscription:—“In
Mundo pressuram habebitis; sed confidite; ego vici mundum.” (“In
the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have
overcome the world.”) The painting is carried out in a very low key
of colour, and a kind of austere and grave conventionalism restrains
the sweeping outlines and the sober light. The accessories of the
landscape are of the simplest character; no extraneous detail
intrudes upon the perfect harmony of the at-one-ment; no over-
elaboration mars the calm of that absolute resignation, that
unquenchable hope. The Christ upon the Cross is at once the
interpretation of the mystery of pain, and the covenant of a
complete redemption wherein man at last “shall see of the travail of
his soul and shall be satisfied.”
 CHAPTER VII.
TREATMENT OF MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN
ROMANCE.

The Christian Element in Neo-Hellenism and Romance—“How They Met

Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing”—Mediævalism and Romantic Love
—“Romeo and Juliet” and “Ophelia”—Millais’s Romantic Landscapes—“The
Woodman’s Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” “The Vale of Rest,” “Autumn Leaves”—
Keats’s “Isabella”—Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Idylls of the King”—The Idea of
Retribution—“King Arthur’s Tomb,” “Paolo and Francesca,” “Death of Lady
Macbeth,” “The Awakening Conscience,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Gate of
Memory,” “Found,” “Psyche,” “Proserpine,” “Pandora”—The Idea of Duty—“The
Hugenot,” “The Black Brunswicker,” “Claudio and Isabella”—Old and New
Chivalry—“Sir Isumbras” and “The Rescue”—“The Merciful Knight”—“St.
Agnes’ Eve”—Ideal and Platonic Love—“The Salutation of Beatrice,” “The Boat
of Love,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s Dream,” “Our Lady of Pity.”

It is but an arbitrary classification that divides the so-called

“religious” art of the Pre-Raphaelites from their portrayals of that
half historic, half legendary wonder-world we vaguely called
“romance.” Rossetti, it has been rightly said, “was a pilgrim who had
got out of the region of shrines, but who at every cross-like thing
knelt down by the force of thought and muscle.”[9] Above all other
qualities of Pre-Raphaelite painting, it is the instinctive perception of
“cross-like things” that gives nobility and tenderness to the work of
Rossetti and his colleagues. By the light of that inward vision do they
choose and transfigure every theme. The haunting sense of the
mysteries of existence, of the immanence of the supernatural in the
natural sphere, and of the divine possibilities of human nature; the
apprehension of the moral law, of sacrifice, reward and penalty, and
of the consummation of earth’s good and evil in an immortal realm;
—these abide with the painters when they pass from the holy
ground of Judea and Galilee to the Pagan splendours of the Hellenic
age, the later glories of mediævalism, and the hard prose conditions
of modern life. The same great drama of humanity is set before us,
but on another stage, with other players. The ideas which dominate
the minds of the artists, the principles by which they interpret alike
the history of Jerusalem and the problems of London, are of
universal application. A classic myth to them is as rich in meaning as
a Christian parable; a legend of chivalrous manliness or heroic
womanhood as sacred as if written in a canonical gospel. Holman
Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” and “Claudio and Isabella” are as
profoundly religious as “Mary Magdalene at the Door;” Rossetti’s
“Lady of Pity” and “Beata Beatrix” glow with a spiritual fervour as
pure as that of “Ecce Ancilla Domini;” the lessons of Burne-Jones’s
“Merciful Knight” and of Millais’s “Hugenot” are as clear as any that
“The Light of the World” can teach us;—and this, not that the
painters have secularized the highest things, but that they have
sanctified the lower; have pierced to the common sources of
religious thought and feeling, and have brought into the labour of
the present hour the wide and eternal meanings of the past.
In the most naïve phase of romantic mysticism, with its devout
faith in the presence of spiritual forces in play at all points upon the
human soul, and in the power of the imagination to visualize
conjectured things, Rossetti conceived the finest of his early
dramatic sketches,—“How They Met Themselves” and “Michael
Scott’s Wooing;” the former showing the influence of Blake in a more
marked degree perhaps than any other drawings of the same period.
The lovers that “meet themselves” are confronted, while walking in a
wood, with the apparitions of their own persons, reflected, as it
were, in the air before them, in exact and startling similitude,—a
conception found in the well-known Döppelgänger legends of
German folk-lore, which credit a dual existence to every human soul,
endowing it with a sort of spectral “double” after the manner of the
Buddhistic “astral body,” save that the Döppelgänger appear to be
independent of the subject’s consciousness and will. The sudden
terror of the lovers,—the lady sinking to the ground, the knight
drawing his sword in her defence against the mysterious
phenomenon, yet hesitating, like Marcellus on the ramparts of
Elsinore, to “offer it the show of violence,” is shown with a force that
emphasizes the reality of the vision to those who see it. In this
picture, as in Rossetti’s treatment of a more exalted theme, “The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” the barrier is over-leaped that separates the
visible from the unseen; the outer and inner worlds are merged
naturally and imperceptibly the one into the other—an hypothesis in
which the previsions of art may yet be vindicated by scientific
discovery; and the forms of the spectral lovers are scarcely more
shadowy than those who stand aghast before them in the flesh. It
has been suggested that the design may typify the meeting of the
human soul with its prototype in ages long gone by; the recognition
of unknown kinships (as if brought over from a prior existence)
through that strange sense of familiarity which sometimes surprises
us when we wander in spirit through the dim mazes of the historic
past.
In the sketch for “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” the wizard-hero
conjures up, for the entertainment of his lady-love, a magical
pageant of Life, Love, and other symbolic figures, which appear
before her in a glass. Here the purely subjective nature of the vision
is brought out; the lady alone can see the pageant; her attendants
are as blind to it as Hamlet’s mother to the ghost of the murdered
king.
From this initial belief in the potency of the unseen there comes
the apprehension of the mystery of fate, of the burden of
impenetrable destiny, of the evil powers that assail mankind from
within. Something even of the ancient fear of the jealousy of the
gods against men’s happiness returns in the mediæval awe of
human joys or triumphs, and its ascetic suspicion of prosperity, more
especially in the field of romantic love. A profound insight of the
dualism of nature keeps the romantic spirit in remembrance of the
cost of all earthly pleasure, and of the price set by the laws of being
upon all aspiration and desire. This it is that gives its subtlest charm
to the “Romeo and Juliet” of Madox Brown, with its embracing lovers
on the balcony at break of day, full of the passionate poetry of
protest against the pitiless caprice, as it seems, of the fate that tears
them asunder; and to the “Ophelia” of Rossetti,—now sitting
troubled and half-frightened before Hamlet’s earnest gaze, now
offering him the treasured letters from the casket at her side, now
led away in her “first madness,” by the hand of Horatio, from the
presence of the king and queen; or of Hughes,—singing dreamily to
herself as she sits by the waterside on a fallen tree; or of Watts,—
gazing down with yearning eyes into the pool beneath the willow; or
—best of all—of Millais, floating downstream to her death, with her
slackening hands full of flowers, the very embodiment of the
pathetic helplessness of weak and isolated womanhood against the
tide of the world’s strife,—weak, indeed, through the isolation of
ages, having never known, in life or ancestry, the bracing discipline
of a free and responsible existence. No one of the Pre-Raphaelites
has equalled Millais at his best in the landscape setting of the
struggle between the human soul and the circumstance that hems it
in; and the scenery of “Ophelia” is among the most exquisite of his
work. The beauty of the river and its richly wooded banks, its
overhanging branches, and its current-driven weeds, gives the
greater pathos to the dying girl’s face, on which the wraith only of its
past and lost beauty lingers to mock the sadness of her end. “The
Woodman’s Daughter” suggests even more finely the contrast of the
unimpassioned glory of nature and the tragedy of romantic love; for
here it is not death but life, the complexity of life and duty, that
separates the lovers each from each. Between the rough and
uncomely peasant girl and the shy young aristocrat who stands so
awkwardly before her with his proffered gift of hothouse fruit, there
is a gulf fixed which will take a higher civilization than ours to bridge
over. And again, in treating of the broader and more common loves
and joys of humanity, does Millais set before us the same contrast in
“The Blind Girl” and “The Vale of Rest.” The Blind Girl is a poor and
uncomely vagrant halting by the road-side, wrapping her shawl
round her child-guide, who nestles against her in the April weather.
But around her is the loveliness of an English village landscape after
rain. The warmth of the bursting sun consoles her as she turns her
face to its light; the rainbow which she cannot see gives radiance to
the humble cottages; the wet grass is cool to her hand, and the
peace of resignation seems to fill her maimed and darkened life. But
the contrast of her sorrow with nature’s joy is very real, though for
the moment she forgets it in the little comfort that may yet be hers.
The same resignation in the face of the unanswered problem
transfigures the mourners in “The Vale of Rest,”—the two calm,
almost stoical nuns in a convent garden at sunset time. The younger
woman is digging a grave; the elder, who sits on a recumbent
tombstone hard by, is gazing at the burning gold and crimson of the
west, and sees in the midst of its splendour the darkness of the
coffin-shaped cloud which, by a widespread superstition, was long
deemed the omen of approaching death. The superb “Autumn
Leaves,” which Mr. Ruskin pronounces “among the world’s
masterpieces,” may perhaps be added to this great group of
romantic landscapes, inasmuch as the pathos of its poetry is no less
deep, though more subtle, than that of “Ophelia,” “The Woodman’s
Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” and “The Vale of Rest.” A group of
children are burning dead leaves in the twilight of a mellow autumn
day. Oblivious of the changing seasons, realizing nothing of the
solemnity of autumn, or the sad significance of the waning year, they
revel merely in the bonfire they have made, and are troubled by no
fear for the winter, or for the chance of spring.
In the several paintings from Keats’s “Isabella”—that favourite
subject of the early days of the Brotherhood—the contrast lies
mainly in the direction of individual character; the tragedy, in the
power of such character to work for evil against the good. Especially
in Millais’s masterpiece, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” are the beauty and
graciousness of Isabella and her lover set with a passionate intensity
against the icy cynicism and sensuous brutality of the brothers and
their guests, and the conflict is felt to be directly between malicious
cruelty and innocent love. On the other hand the devotion and self-
abandonment of Isabella’s thwarted passion find noble expression in
the picture by Holman Hunt. The figure of the weeping girl, who has
risen from her bed to worship at her strange and terrible shrine,—
the Pot of Basil containing her murdered lover’s head, is seen in the
early light of dawn, that almost quenches, in its pitiless coldness, the
more tender light of the lamp that burns in the little sanctuary of
secret love. The altar-cloth spread for the sacred relic is embroidered
with a design of passion-flowers, and every accessory is symbolic of
Isabella’s grief and despair. The same unique subject, it may here be
noted, has inspired one of the finest paintings of an artist worthily
representative of the younger generation of Pre-Raphaelites (if the
name may be perpetuated beyond its immediate and temporary
significance)—Mr. J.M. Strudwick; whose design, however, deals with
the culmination of the tragedy, the theft of the Pot of Basil by the
guilty brothers, and the on-coming madness of Isabella.
A stronger moral element is soon perceptible in the work of
Rossetti and Millais when they approach the poetry of Tennyson for
subject matter, and begin to draw upon the great cycle of Arthurian
legends which he restored in modern garb to English literature. Even
outside the “Idylls of the King,” in their paintings of Tennyson’s
“Mariana,” the passion and the mystery of romantic love are
tempered with the growing consciousness of moral responsibility, of
Love’s heroic power to conquer destiny—if only the appeals of the
lower nature were not so urgent and so sweet. In other words, the
lower dualism has given place to the higher; the conflict is not so
much between the earthly joy and the misfortune that threatens it in
death or any calamity from the physical sphere, but rather between
the baser and the better life within. Of such a spirit is the “Mariana”
of Rossetti, kneeling and weeping in her dimly-lit chamber in “The
Heart of the Night,” or of Millais, wearily casting away her unfinished
work in the close prison of the “moated grange”—that perfect
allegory of modern love, pent in by the mire of indolence and
conventionality, and vainly dreaming of an unearned ideal; waiting
for the deliverance which, as Mariana scarcely comprehends, must
be a self-deliverance into nobler aims and higher standards of duty
and of intelligent sacrifice. The sense of a lofty spiritual destiny re-
enters at this point into Pre-Raphaelite art; the meaning of the
search for the Holy Grail is apparent still more clearly in Rossetti’s
“Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” and later, in Burne-Jones’s more
severe and chastened types of the pilgrim-knight. It has been
charged against both these painters that the physical beauty and
glory of manhood was almost wholly absent from their conception of
life. Even in the nearest approach to such a concession, in the latest
romantic masterpiece of the younger artist, “The Legend of the Briar
Rose,” the asceticism learnt at the Arthurian shrines persists, indeed,
in the mellowness of his maturity. The heroes of the Pre-Raphaelites
are no muscular warriors, as conventional art would portray them.
They are concerned with inward conflicts rather than with outward
foes. They are the knights-errant of a new chivalry,—to whom moral
righteousness is a higher thing than physical courage; self-conquest
a nobler triumph than the routing of armies. For they “wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual
wickedness in high places.” The whole series of the Arthurian
designs, from the illustrations to Moxon’s “Tennyson” and the
frescoes at Oxford, onward to the latest work of Burne-Jones and his
followers, are dominated by this idea of a spiritual pilgrimage, as of
beings exiled from a higher realm, which to regain they must needs
pass through the lower. “Their sojourn on earth,” says M. Gabriel
Sarrazin,[10] “oppresses these Pre-Raphaelites, lost among our pre-
occupations of business and of ease.”
And further, the sense of the supernatural world, of the struggle
between the spiritual and the physical in man, leads onward to the
conception of retribution and punishment, “not” (as Hegel puts it)
“as something arbitrary, but as the other half of sin.” The
inexorableness of the moral law could hardly be more finely
suggested than in Rossetti’s treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot
and Guinevere. “King Arthur’s Tomb,” despite its crudity and
harshness of drawing, remains among the most superb of his early
drawings. The aged queen, now an abbess honoured and revered, is
visiting the tomb of the dead Arthur. But not all her long atonement
of remorse and piety can avail wholly to blot out the sin of her
youth. For even here, as she kneels to pray, the dark and terrible
ghost of Lancelot thrusts itself between her and the pure effigy
whose marble face she seeks in penitence and tears. The converse
of the picture was that of which Rossetti sought to make a fresco on
the ill-fated walls of the Oxford Debating Union. The design
represents “Sir Lancelot before the Shrine of the Sangrael.” He
seems to have almost attained the goal of his pilgrimage; the Holy
Grail is just within his grasp; but in the hour that might have brought
victory, the old sin brings mockery and defeat: the face that looks
out at him from the place of his hope is the sad, reproachful face of
Guinevere.
With scarcely less of tragic force and direct solemnity does
Rossetti carry this thought of retribution into the world of mediæval
Italy, into the cycle of legend and romance that gathers round the
name of Dante. The love-story of “Paolo and Francesca da Rimini,”
recorded by Dante in the “Divina Comedia,” has been the theme of
poets and painters for many a year, and is the subject of one of the
finest water-colour drawings made in Rossetti’s transition period.
Francesca, the wife of Lanciotto, the deformed son of the lord of
Rimini, fell in love with her husband’s brother Paolo; and Lanciotto,
discovering the two in guilty companionship, put them both to death.
In the fifth canto of the “Inferno,” Dante describes the terrible sight
permitted to him of the condemned lovers in the second circle of
Hell. Rossetti’s picture is in triptych form, and in the centre are the
figures of Dante and Virgil, his guide. Above them is the brief
inscription, “O Lasso!” In the left compartment is depicted the fatal
embrace of Paolo and Francesca at the moment of the avowal of
their love, when in reading together the story of Lancelot, the book
suddenly fell from their hands, and, as the narrator simply
confesses, “that day we read no more.” In the right-hand space are
seen the lovers, clasping each other wildly in the darkness and
among the furious storms of hell, unable to release themselves from
that fixed embrace. The characteristic idea of making the penalty
consist in the involuntary perpetuation of the sin,—the guilty love
becoming, as it were, its own sufficient punishment, belongs, of
course, to Dante, but is worked out with singular power in Rossetti’s
design. Not only is the stern and relentless fate portrayed with the
utmost sincerity in the sequel, but even in the first panel the thought
of the coming retribution is finely suggested by the introduction of
one sufficient touch at the background of the scene. Beneath the
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