SOURCE: “Mental Fight,” in New Statesman, Vol. 63, No. 1616, March 2, 1962, p. 308.

In the following essay, Richardson commends the personal recollections and tales of courage collected in Mackenzie's On Moral Courage.

Oughtn't it, perhaps, to be mental courage, as the proper opposite of physical? Moral is so close to the body. It reminds you of those allegedly anaphrodisiac cold baths. And if moral, why not immoral courage? But if we hunt it into the psychological laboratory it will break down and metamorphose. We can agree roughly on what we mean by it and there are very few elders from whom we can tolerate a lecture on it. Sir Compton, always a champion anti-prig, is almost the only one. His is the authentic natural idiosyncratic quixoticism, free from subservience to any establishment of fixed pattern. You can tell this from some of his examples. Socrates, of course. And the friends of...