fighting talk to a much more widespread phenomenon in poetry and culture: an increasingly
modernnervousness about how and whether war could be justified. Questioning
a ‘forcible-feeble kind’ of war poetry, and contrasting the present time with ‘a
hundred years ago [when] poets were satisfied with the simple motive of their
country’s triumph’, the reviewer explained that there was now a desire to search for
the grounds of war:
This is perhaps one of many signs of an increasing contradiction between the fact of war
and the conscience of civilized humanity....The actual vision of battle does not seem to
inspire poetry....The poet who devotes himself to celebrate acts of war, although his art
may be redeemed if he can reveal the soul of good in things evil, does nevertheless choose a
lower region when he might inhabit a higher.^93
This higher region is what many Victorian poets had been trying to inhabit for
some time, a poetic domain in which an ‘actual vision of battle’ is complemented
by an attentiveness to what occurs in and around the battle’s edges, and in which
celebration is complicated by meditation. This reviewer was writing when ‘the fact
of war’ was highly prominent; the Boer War (the longest, bloodiest, and most
expensive war ever fought by the Victorian army) had just ended, and had given
rise to unprecedented modern ‘evils’—civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, and
concentration camps.^94
The ‘forcible-feeble’ brigade was quick to support the war. Swinburne’s sonnet
‘The Transvaal’ was published inThe Timesa day after war was declared, and
ended with the cry: ‘Strike, England, and strike home.’^95 William Ernest Henley
followed suit; the first poem in his next collection, ‘Remonstrance’, borrowed
Swinburne’s line for its own ending.^96 But this line contains within it an unwitting
pun as if in remonstration (to ‘strike home’ may also be to strikeathome),
and other writers were increasingly drawing attention to the way in which a
tyrannical militarism abroad was not only at odds with how modern liberal Britain
wished to perceive itself, but also an emblem of the true state of the country.^97
W. H. Colby accordingly took Swinburne’s line in another direction in his poetic
contribution to the debate: ‘Where are the dogs agape with jaws afoam?|Where
are the wolves? Look, England, look at home.’^98 The emphasis on the material and
moral damage inflicted upon those who waged and won wars (as well as upon
those who lost them) was pronounced. As Van Wyk Smith notes, ‘opponents of
war managed to put their case more volubly, more insistently, and to a much larger
(^93) ‘War and Poetry’, 40, 50–1, 53–4.
(^94) See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge,The Boer War(London: John Murray, 2002).
(^95) A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Transvaal’,The Times, 11 Oct. 1899, 7; repr. inSwinburne’s Collected
Poetical Works, ii (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 1223.
(^96) William Ernest Henley, ‘Remonstrance’, first published inFor England’s Sake: Verses and Songs
in Time of War 97 (London: David Nutt, 1900); repr. in Boehmer (ed.),Empire Writing, 283.
98 Seee.g.J.A.Hobson,Imperialism: A Study(London: Nisbet, 1902).
W. H. Colby,The Echo, 13 Oct. 1899.