fighting talk but perhaps healthier epochs—the feeling of depression, the feeling ofennui.Depression
andennui; these are the characteristics stamped on how many of the representative works
of modern times!^16
This passage echoes Arnold’s argument in his 1853 Preface, where modernity’s
reflective powers lead to the disabling ‘dialogue of the mind with itself’.^17 If the
civilizing process paradoxically creates the conditions in which it may not be able to
flourish, then those ‘ensigns of war’ are not quite banished, but become part of the
warring psyche. War is not, then, what modern life avoids, but part of a description
of what it embodies. ‘Dover Beach’ (1851) tries to form a circle within which man
can move securely, outside the realm of war, yet from its opening this lyrical ‘art
of peace’ is haunted by its demons as the speaker addresses his interlocutor: ‘On
the French coast the light/Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand.’^18 In the
1850s, this light was not only part of a picturesque scene, but also a glint of menace
(as the invasion scares of that decade would show). The poem ends:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.The source for this passage is Thucydides’ description of the Battle of Epipolae in
hisHistory of the Peloponnesian War, where he recounts a night battle in which the
Athenians became disoriented and came to blows with one another. The source that,
for Arnold, was meant to enshrine ‘that noble serenity which always accompanies
true insight’^19 is harnessed here to express a sense of the modern mind’s loss of
bearings. The speaker’s aim is to draw attention to a bower sheltering him and his
beloved from the warring world outside, but ‘swept’ might refer to ‘we’ as well as to
the ‘plain’. That is, the poem closes not just with the sense that ‘it’s us against them’,
but also with the more disturbing suggestion that the couple may be swept up in it
all by being against each other. Like many Victorian lyrics, ‘Dover Beach’ is a war
poem of sorts, not only because the threat of war hovers in and around its edges,
but also because war is part of the fabric of its most intimate human imaginings.
The complex debt that Arnold owes to Thucydides bears on the question of
the classical inheritance of Victorian war poetry. This inheritance has often been
cited as another marker of the Victorian/modern divide. Victorian poetics is seen
as responsive to an epic tradition that is said to endorse militaristic values, while
twentieth-century war poetry is, as Matthew Campbell puts it, ‘a poetry which
no longer feels that it can sing in celebration of arms and the man’.^20 There is
(^16) Ibid. 32.
(^17) Arnold, ‘Preface to the First Edition ofPoems’ (1853), inThe Poems of Matthew Arnold,ed.
Miriam Allott, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1979), 654.
(^18) Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, ibid. 254.
(^19) Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, 28.
(^20) Matthew Campbell, ‘Poetry and War’, in Neil Roberts (ed.),A Companion to Twentieth-Century
Poetry(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.