Of Valour

We confuse, I think, two very different things under the single name of valour. There is the man who does not feel danger — who charges into a battery of cannon with the same equanimity he would bring to a morning walk, not because he has conquered his fear but because, for some defect of imagination or constitution, he does not feel it. And there is the man who feels it fully, who sees the cannon and knows precisely what a cannonball does to a man’s body, and who advances regardless, having made in his own mind the calculation that what he is advancing toward is worth more than what he risks. These two men look the same from the outside. They are not the same.

The Stoics, whom I read with admiration though not always with agreement, praised the first kind of man — the man of such perfect rational discipline that fear no longer gained entry to him. I honor the aspiration; I am skeptical of the achievement. The man who claims to have abolished fear in himself has, I suspect, more often abolished honesty. Danger is real. Fear is the correct response to real danger. A man who does not feel it when it is present has not conquered his nature; he has, more likely, failed to understand his situation.

“The truly brave man is he who, being afraid, goes forward. Courage is not the absence of the knowledge of peril — it is the refusal to let that knowledge be the last word.”

I have seen men in battle whom I would not call brave by this standard, though they were bold enough. They ran toward the enemy as other men run toward a tavern — with appetite, without the slightest appearance of reluctance. What they were doing required no particular virtue; it was simply their temperament in action, as natural to them as caution is to others. Whereas the man who is visibly mastering himself, who takes a visible breath before the charge, who shows in his face the knowledge of what he is about to do and does it anyway — that man I find genuinely admirable.

The same distinction applies away from battle. The man who speaks an unwelcome truth to a powerful person when he could remain silent, and who does so knowing the likely cost, is brave in the sense I mean. He has felt the fear — the calculation of what this honesty may cost him — and overridden it on behalf of something he values more. This is the form of courage most of us are most likely to need, and most likely to find wanting in ourselves when we look honestly.