War as the fountain-head of human virtues and accomplishments – such was the theme that Ruskin rose to, doubtless with some effort, when he addressed the Woolwich cadets, holding it up as the absolute condition of all the pure and noble arts of peace. ‘No great art ever yet arose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers….. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle,’ etc ‘I found, in brief,’ he continues – not without a certain naïve superficiality in his marshalling of the historical evidence – ‘that all the great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace – in a word, that they were born in war, and expired in peace.’
In all this there is a good deal of truth, and that truth is pungently stated. Only, Ruskin at once draws in the horns of his rhetoric by declaring that this is not true of every war. What he really has in mind, he says, is ‘the creative or foundational war in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful – though it may be fatal – play’. He sees humankind divided from the very beginning into ‘two races, one of workers, and the other of players; one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building, and otherwise providing for the necessities of life; the other part proudly idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in which they use the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and partly as their puppets and pieces in the game of death’.. There is a taint of Superman in this declaration of Ruskin’s and a touch of cheap illusionism; but for our purposes the importance of the passage lies in the fact that Ruskin has correctly grasped the play-element in archaic warfare. In his opinion the ideal of the ‘creative or foundational’ war was realized in Sparta and in medieval chivalry. Still soon after the words we have just quoted, his honesty, his seriousness, and his gentleness get the better of him and he arrests the flight of his thought so as to bring in a denunciation of ‘modern’ war – war in 1865! – evidently thinking of the murderous civil war raging across the Atlantic.