matthew bevis
historical; every year of Victoria’s reign, her soldiers were fighting a series of
‘littlewars’ in some part of the world.^10 The perplexed Victorian fascination with
warfare is also evident in a group of phrases that, according to theOED,made
their way into the language during the period. In addition to ‘war-footing’ (1847),
‘war-code’ (1853), ‘war-news’ (1857), and ‘war-machines’ (1881), theDictionary
cites a collection of words that ‘denote works of art, etc., of which the subject is war’:
‘war-ballad’ (1854), ‘war poem’ (1857), ‘war story’ (1864), ‘war pictures’ (1883),
‘war artist’ (1890), ‘war-plays’ (1896), ‘war films’ (1897). The interest in war did not
preclude a critical engagement with it; even the advent of the Victoria Cross (the first
medal in England to recognize acts of bravery independent of rank^11 )raisedsome
awkward questions. When Wilfred Owen snapped, ‘The Victoria Cross! I covet it
not. Is it notVictorian? yah! pah!’,^12 he was not the first to announce a refusal to be
beguiled by that age’s pageantry. On hearing the news of its introduction in 1855,
Punchoffered its own commentary by having two shivering soldiers on the front
line in the Crimea discuss the VC: ‘ ‘‘Well, Jack! Here’s good news from Home.
We’re to have a medal.’’ ‘‘That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a
coat to stick it on?’’ ’^13
The unsettling aspects of war found their way into poetic theory and practice even
as Victorian writers sought to distance themselves from the fray. In his inaugural
lecture in the Oxford Poetry Chair in 1857, Matthew Arnold observed that one
of the chief characteristics of ‘amodernage, of an age of advanced civilization,
is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of
civil life....Wars are still carried on; but within the limits of civil life a circle has
been formed within which man can move securely, and develop the arts of peace
uninterruptedly.’^14 Accompanying this modern spirit is ‘thesupreme characteristic
of all: the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with
a critical spirit’.^15 As an early example of such reflective, unwarlike modernity,
Arnold cites Grecian society and its expressive flowering in Thucydides’History of
the Peloponnesian War. However, as Arnold continues, the ‘arts of peace’ are not
allowed to remain uninterrupted:
In the case of Thucydides I called attention to the fact that his habit of mind, his mode of
dealing with questions, were modern; that they were those of an enlightened, reflecting man
among ourselves....The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern epochs is not
without its penalties...it has produced a state of feeling unknown to the less enlightened
(^10) See Robert Giddings,Imperial Echoes: Eye-Witness Accounts of Victoria’s Little Wars(London:
Cooper, 1996), p. xvi.
(^11) See Max Arthur,Symbol of Courage: A History of the Victoria Cross(London: Sidgwick & Jackson,
2004).
(^12) Wilfred Owen, quoted in Hynes,A War Imagined, 246.
(^13) Punch, 28 (17 Feb. 1855), 64.
(^14) Matthew Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, inThe Complete Prose Works of
Matthew Arnold, i, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 23.
(^15) Ibid. 24.