Carnage Is God’s Daughter

The International Peace Congress, held in 1843 and then, from 1848, at yearly intervals until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, raised awareness among some cultural commentators of the responsibility placed on poets to promote the cause of peace. In these debates, Wordsworth was sometimes couched as the poet of ‘calm’ and ‘peaceful scenes’, opposed to those poets of ‘passion’ who, like Campbell, Scott, or Byron, would leave readers ‘restless and uneasy’, oppressed in mind by ‘images of terror and sublimity’ rather than soothed by descriptions of ‘flowers that grow unscathed amidst all the tumult of waters’.² Thus, pitching Byron’s stanzas on Waterloo against Wordsworth’s lines on the Falls of the Aar, a student writer for the Grange Magazine sought to enlist the laureate as a celebrant of universal peace, forgetting that Wordsworth, in determining Carnage as the daughter of God, had perhaps done more than Byron to disturb the peace that, as many correspondents noted, had been maintained in Europe for over thirty years.³

Though widely maintained in the 1840s, the view of Wordsworth as the poet of peace did not go unchallenged. Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘On War’, first published as the lead article in Macphail’s Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal and Literary Review in February 1848 and then republished in a revised and expanded form in Selections Grave and Gay during the first year of the Crimean War, is prefaced by an ‘Explanatory’ note in which the author misquotes the offending lines from the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ with approval, and perhaps even with relish:

For De Quincey, Wordsworth is the poet of war, providing unashamed support to the notion that when blood is shed in battles ‘fought for god-like truth, for human dignity, or for human rights’ (WTDQ XX. 33) war may be raised to the level of the Sublime.

As the essay proceeds, the challenge of this opening claim is granted conceptual respectability by way of the philosophical doctrine of necessitarianism. Robert Hopkins has pointed out that the essay’s definition of conflict as ‘a physical necessity arising out of man’s nature when combined with man’s situation’ and as ‘moral necessity […] under which it becomes lawful to say that war ought to exist, as a balance to opposite tendencies of a still more evil character’ (WTDQ XVI. 271) owes much to Kant, whose essays on ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘Idea for a Universal History’ De Quincey had translated in the mid to late 1820s.⁴ Echoing Kant’s pessimistic sense of antagonism as the lamentable but necessary means which nature employs to accomplish the advancement of human society, De Quincey states provocatively that ‘like other scourges in the divine economy, war purifies and redeems itself in its character of a counterforce to greater evils that could not otherwise be intercepted or redressed’. The destructive horror of war must be countenanced, in other words, on the grounds that it serves as a ‘balance to opposite tendencies of a still more evil character’ (WTDQ XVI. 272). Among the evils that De Quincey itemises in his ‘Explanatory’ preface are the Peace Societies that would, if ‘their power kept pace with their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease’ (WTDQ XX. 31). For De Quincey, again with implicit reference to Kant, the moral integrity of the nation, like that of the manly individual, occurs through conflict. Paradoxically it is only through participation in ceaseless antagonism with others that individuals and nations may secure a coherent sense of identity.

De Quincey’s remarks on the connections between war and identity were echoed elsewhere in debates in the run-up to the Crimean War. In November 1852, two months after the Duke of Wellington’s death and thirty-seven years after the Battle of Waterloo, an anonymous writer in Blackwood’s set about bemoaning the effects of the prolonged state of peace: where once a nation affirmed its strength on the field of battle, now it sets to dreaming; where once a nation distinguished itself in battle, now it is characterised by ‘a studied contempt of loyalty – a bitter hatred of the aristocracy […] a loud systematic derision of courage, self-devotion, and patriotism—an identifying of national honour with national wealth—a dogged pursuing of self-interest—a habit of considering ease and comfort as the summum bonum’.⁵ The writer goes on to decry those ‘lounging pleasantly on prize sofas from the Great Exhibition [while] reading the story of [Wellington’s] Campaigns […] There would have been more of life in that hour of Waterloo—more self-knowledge—more awakening of noble faculties in your soul […] than in a long and wrinkling course of remunerative Mammon-worship’. This, the writer observes, in anticipation of Matthew Arnold’s 1853 Preface to Poems, is ‘an unheroic age’.⁶ For Blackwood’s the epitome of the ‘unheroic’ age is the Manchester manufacturer, Liberal MP, peace activist, and advocate of free-market capitalism, Richard Cobden. Cobden, who had played an active role in the international peace congresses of the late 1840s, and who introduced into the House of Commons a motion calling for the formation of treaties by which disputes could be adjudicated by impartial arbitrators (a motion that was defeated), had argued vociferously against the pessimistic view of war as a necessary evil. Claiming that war was against the interests of European mercantile society Cobden went on to court controversy as a fierce critic of British intervention in the Crimea. When looking, for instance, at Britain’s commercial links with Russia and Turkey he compares the expanding nature of Anglo-Russian commerce with the limited scale of business with Turkey. Put simply, war against Russia makes bad financial sense.⁷

The Blackwood’s writer’s critique of Cobden’s pacificism, which regards international diplomacy, legislation, and trade as the antidotes to barbarity, finds an analogue in De Quincey’s ‘On War’, which offers, by way of an attack on the universalising tendencies of the commercial spirit, a rigorous defence of national self-interest:

The idea that war can be abolished through an act of political will appears to De Quincey to be not only ‘romantic’ (WTDQ XX. 31) but also atavistic. For, he argues, ‘Banish war as now administered, and it will revolve upon us in a worse shape, that is, in a shape of predatory and ruffian war, more and more licentious’ (XVI. 279). In anticipation of Freud’s theorising in his 1933 essay ‘Why War?’, De Quincey regards hostility towards others as a safety valve for the discharge of internal violence, a defence against the return to some more ‘lawless guerrilla state’ of war. Were war to be forbidden, he continues, ‘the only result of that prohibition would be to throw back the exercise of war from national into private and mercenary hands; and that is precisely the retrograde or inverted course of civilisation’ (XVI. 279). War, therefore, is intrinsic to civilisation. As civilisation progresses, so war is ‘exalted […] from a horrid trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science […] cleansed from all horrors except those which […] no longer stand out as reproaches to [man’s] humanity’ (WTDQ XVI. 288).

In the revised 1854 essay, picking up on his earlier comments on the transformation of war into an ‘exalted’ science, De Quincey commends war as ‘an organ of respiration—for breathing a transcendent atmosphere, and dealing with an idea that else would perish—viz., the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realization in a battle such as that of Waterloo’ (WTDQ XVI. 708). When this claim is read alongside the concluding section of the recently published The English Mail-Coach it becomes clear that De Quincey is seeking, like Wordsworth before him, to present Waterloo as the battle to end all battles, the apocalyptic finale to the endless cycle of victory and defeat that constitutes the pattern of human history.⁸ That Waterloo cannot put an end to the ceaseless violence of national realisation is, nevertheless, the message that ‘On War’ drives home with remorseless insistence – a point enforced by the declaration of war in the Crimea.

Not long after De Quincey announced his sympathy with Wordsworth’s controversial address to the Deity, a fellow survivor of the Romantic second generation would present an opposing perspective. In the 1849 reprint of the 1835 postscript to his anti-war poem, ‘Captain Sword and Captain Pen’, Leigh Hunt, in a passage that may well have prompted De Quincey to double down on his support for ‘Carnage is thy daughter’ for the 1854 version of ‘On War’, mounts an extended attack on Wordsworth’s notorious lines. Bearing a dedication to Lord Brougham, the abolitionist, peace campaigner, and opposition contestant in the 1819 Westmorland election, ‘Captain Sword and Captain Pen’ can itself be read as a satire on Wordsworth’s artistic and political decline, from the Jacobin champion of the rural poor and advocate of domestic tranquillity to the Tory campaigner and strident apologist for Waterloo. Overlooked in critical accounts of English Romanticism, the poem, as I have argued elsewhere, amplifies the central tropes of the anti-war poetry of the 1790s, in particular the attention given to the death and wounding of women and children and the destruction of the home, that Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, once ardent in their opposition to war, would seek in their later years to discretely elide.⁹ Following an extended quotation from a note documenting, in excruciating detail, the effects of war on civilians in Southey’s 1797 ode ‘To Horror’, a poem that Hunt, in an earlier effort to embarrass Southey, had reprinted in the Examiner in 1816 as part of the series of ‘Specimens of Early Jacobin Poetry’, the postscript leaps forward to cite Wordsworth’s offending lines from the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, using the contrast between an expression of radical outrage and a declaration of instrumentalist acceptance, to destabilise the relation between ‘then’ and ‘now’ on which the poet’s bid for cultural respectability depended.

If, in the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, ‘Carnage is thy daughter’, together with the submission of Imagination to history’s higher calling, was meant to confirm a necessitarian view of Waterloo, Hunt believed otherwise. In the 1849 postscript, serious fun is had with ‘Carnage is thy daughter’, to the point where the line’s intended sublimity tips into the ridiculous:

And further:

Hunt’s ‘unbounded’ faith in progress and co-operation over the dead stop of ‘Elemental necessity’, finds its prosodical cognate in a piling up of rhetorical questions, qualifying clauses, illustrative quotations, and a potentially endless stream of supplementary notes and prefaces (‘A Few More Words’; ‘Further Remarks’), which have the effect of forestalling the drive to closure on which the necessitarian view of war is predicated.¹² Seeking to reanimate the spirit of playfulness that Wordsworth and De Quincey’s late romanticism rescinds, Hunt’s prose is directed towards a future that remains subject to change. From within this open-ended space, a space that can accommodate condemnation of the grisly excess of war – its violent intrusions into the bodies and minds of the innocent from which the prose does not flinch – as well as hope for the amelioration of ‘this beautiful and most capable world’,¹³ Hunt speaks to the possibility of an alternative future for romanticism: a future no longer determined by the struggle for bare life, but by the promise of liberation.

A Desolation, a Simplicity

As if in response to Hunt’s recollections of the liberatory potential of romanticism, in 1851 the appearance of Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth drew renewed attention to the poet’s radical years, describing Wordsworth’s ardent hope, at the commencement of the French Revolution, that ‘All ancient abuses were to be swept away; and a golden age of universal peace was about to succeed in its place: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!”’.¹⁴ Drawing extensively on passages from the recently published Prelude, the memoir works hard to present Wordsworth’s political trajectory as a development from Jacobin misadventure to loyalist acceptance, a narrative assisted by the ‘late’ poem’s high Anglican and conservative reorientation. Among the passages Wordsworth reworked for the published version of the Prelude was a remnant of the ‘1300 lines’ (EY 214) of blank verse that, in the spring of 1798, had marked the beginnings of that long philosophical poem, ‘The Recluse’. Placed at the conclusion of Book 4 in manuscripts of the Prelude since 1804, ‘The Discharged Soldier’, with its unnerving account of a late-night encounter with a diseased and benumbed veteran of Britain’s colonial wars, corresponds to the ‘object’ of ‘The Recluse’ ‘to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society’ (EY 212), providing, along with the tale of Margaret’s wartime fate, a spur for the activation of the poet’s hopes for the dawn of universal peace.

Despite some unnecessary cuts to the description of the soldier in the original poem, the shock of the encounter with the ‘ghastly figure’ (IV. l. 434) is largely undiminished in the thirteen-book Prelude. However, following cuts and revisions in the 1830s, the poem that appeared in print in 1850 is much less striking than the 1798 Recluse and AB- and C-Stage Prelude versions – and perhaps deliberately so. What accounts for the later poem’s strange diminution of affect? In all early versions of ‘The Discharged Soldier’ attention dwells on the contrast between the pacific assurances of the passage’s opening scene and the disturbing encounter with the veteran. As the body of the poet, moving slowly along the moonlit road, draws from the surrounding stillness a ‘restoration like the calm of sleep’, his mind restored in turn to a state of Arcadian calm, the mood of tranquil ‘self-possession’ is abruptly disturbed by the sight of ‘an uncouth shape’ at a chance turning of the road. Such is the unnerving effect of this alien encounter that the poet retreats to the safety of a hawthorn bush.¹⁵ Thus ‘unseen’ (l. 40), the poet initially surveys the soldier rather than engaging with him in a free and open communicative exchange, thereby replicating how society conspires to conceal itself from the knowledge of its violent origins. As the poem goes on to reveal, the discharged soldier turns out to be a double for the poet, his stillness, solitude, and air of ‘half-absence’ (l. 140) challenging the mood of ‘self-possession’ (l. 34) established by the opening lines, yet conforming, at the same time, to the poet’s subsequent attitude of detached spectatorship, a subject position that protects the poet from the perils of over-identification. Appearing as neither one thing nor the other – ‘Half-sitting, and half-standing’; ‘faded yet entire’; ‘half detached’ (ll. 53–9; passim); ‘sublime’ yet ‘unmoved’ (ll. 139–42; passim) – the veteran persists in a state that appears estranged from the world. Flickering between gross, excessive physicality (‘He was in stature tall,/A foot above man’s common measure tall,/And lank, and upright’, ll. 41–3) and spectral indeterminacy (‘His legs were long,/So long and shapeless that I looked at them/Forgetful of the body they sustained’, ll. 45–7), the man’s form, as Mark Offord has argued, withdraws from even as it presents itself as an object of sympathy.¹⁶

When the poet eventually overcomes his ‘specious cowardice’ (l. 83) to greet the ‘Stranger’ (l. 85) and hence to draw him into a communicative relationship, the soldier relays his ‘history’ (l. 93) in a manner that appears deliberately to fall short of what might be expected of a wartime tale. Unmoved and with a ‘stately air of mild indifference’ (l. 96), the soldier abstains from vivid accounts of epic struggle and heroic self-sacrifice, preferring instead to recount a ‘simple fact’: that he had been dispatched to ‘the tropic isles’ from whence he had returned ‘some ten days past’ and, with ‘what little strength he yet had left/Was travelling to regain his native home’ (ll. 97–103; passim). The history is notable for its lack of stirring detail and for the teller’s characteristic absence of affect, a dissociation from historical experience that may be read either as an elision of the harrowing truths of colonial warfare or as evidence of ‘an alienation almost beyond imagining’.¹⁷ Yet, despite the soldier’s seeming ‘indifference’ to ‘what he had endured/From war, and battle, and the pestilence’ (ll. 136–7), the verse resonates with ominous murmurs, issuing from the brook (l. 11), from the soldier himself (l. 69 and l. 78), and again from the brook (l. 134). In Paradise Lost, murmuring is often used to signify insinuation and discontent: the demonic assembly murmurs approval for Mammon’s counter-revolutionary speech (2. l. 284), and at the end of Book 4, Satan flees from Gabriel, ‘murmuring’ his defiance of the archangel’s vision of heavenly judgement (l. 1015).¹⁸ In concert with these unsettling, low frequency sounds, suggestive of inchoate, unvoiced disaffection, the veteran is disturbed by the howling of a ‘chained mastiff’ (l. 80; l. 130; l. 134), a war dog in ‘his wooden house’ (l. 80) who ‘“every second moment rang a peal/Felt at my heart”’ (ll. 131–2). This, the soldier’s only overt admission of psychological distress, becomes a cypher for how violence re-emerges in civil society, erasing the boundary between war and peace.

Subsisting at a remove from coherent expression, the sonic landscape of ‘The Discharged Soldier’ introduces dissonance into the world and, as such, sets a challenge: how can the noise of war, which brings conflict into the very fabric of nature, be silenced? The answer to this question is to be found in the poem’s mounting concern with rehabilitation: to bring an end to the tumult and furore that infects the world, the ‘murmuring voice of dead complaint’ (l. 78) must be given a home. In the first instance, this imperative is treated as an artistic problem: how can that which is formless be made to harmonise with that opening mood in which meditative calm walks in lockstep with metrical harmony? The issue of how murmurings of complaint and howls of anger and frustration can be accommodated within a poem estranged from beauty, harmony, and self-possession is brought vividly to point when the poet declares: ‘Long time I scann’d him with a mingled sense/Of fear and sorrow’ (ll. 67–8). Relating observance of a document or thing to the analysis of poetic metre, ‘scann’d’ deepens the sense in which the soldier who, until greeted, remains ‘Fixed to his place’ (l. 76), and whose stillness disturbs the poet (‘His shadow/Lay at his foot and moved not’, ll. 71–2; ‘I wished to see him move’, l. 76), resists the business of placing one foot in front of the other so that order may be secured. Just as ‘scann’d’ is contracted to conform to the iambic pattern, so the soldier’s recalcitrant body must be brought into step so that harmony can be restored to the world.

In a second, more literal sense, the soldier, to avoid further disturbance to the peaceful locale, must be moved forward and placed in a home. Thus, the poet and the soldier, discovering no prospect of rest in the village whose doors and windows remain ‘silent’ (l. 78; l. 107) and whose occupants are asleep – emblems of the worldly indifference to historical violence with which the poem is concerned – make their way to the dwelling of a labourer who, crucially, ‘will not murmur should we break his rest’ (l. 112). But while the focus of the poem broadens to encompass the conditions of charitable relief that ought to pertain by right for Britain’s servicemen, the soldier appears, almost to the end, stubbornly resistant to the poet’s offer of hospitality, to the extent that his claim to ‘trust’ solely ‘in the God of Heaven/And in the eye of him that passes me’ (ll. 161–2) could be heard as a refusal of the general economy of the gift that inscribes any act of hospitality within an economy of debt. The awareness of the impossibility of pure hospitality overshadows the poet’s aside to the cottager: ‘beneath your roof/This night let him find rest, and give him food—/The service if need be I will requite’ (ll. 151–52), and subtly informs the ‘reviving interest’ (l. 167) with which the veteran, having at last accepted the offer of a bed for the night, thanks the poet for his pains.

In a challenging reading of the poem’s conclusion, Offord qualifies Alan Bewell’s claim that ‘the poem follows the stations of an Enlightenment line of progress, from the “natural man” to “civilized and cultural humanity”’, by arguing that the veteran, in his ‘ghastly mildness’ (l. 161), restates something of that uncouth being that cannot be accommodated within a social care system founded on ‘mimetic sympathy’.¹⁹ As if in recognition of the troubling persistence of the soldier’s unhoused condition, the version of the poem that appeared in print in 1850 goes some way towards moderating the lengthy account of the veteran’s disturbingly liminal appearance: no longer ‘half-sitting, and half-standing’ nor ‘cut off […] and more than half detached/From his own nature’, the discharged soldier steps much sooner from the realm of the uncanny into the reassuring frame of the sentimental tale, in accordance with which the poet, prompted by ‘pity’ (l. 426), announces his intention to lead him to shelter.²⁰ On arrival at the cottage, the entreaty to offer ‘charitable care’ to ‘a poor friendless Man’ (l. 450–51) results in the ‘speedy’ unbarring of the door (l. 461), a gesture that speaks to the reassuring reciprocity of demand for and delivery of care that ought to pertain in a just society. But where previously Wordsworth had allowed space for the soldier’s ‘strange half-absence’ and tone of ‘weakness and indifference’ to shadow the poem’s conclusion, in the final version, the itinerant is all too swiftly placed behind closed doors. The suspicion that the 1850 version might, after all, be seeking to silence those dissonant notes that, from 1798 to 1820, had exposed the structure of exception on which domestic peace is founded, would seem, then, to be born out. In much the same way as the 1839 manifesto poem, ‘The Power of Sound’, had sought, via the crowning affirmation of the eternal WORD, to banish ‘life’s visionary stir’, to silence ‘man’s noisy years’, and thus to quell the ‘rapturous strife’ that had prevented the ‘Immortality’ ode from accomplishing its release from heretical discord, so the 1789 ‘Discharged Soldier’ is made quiet not so that radical discord may be accommodated but so that it may be contained.²¹

In working towards this conclusion, the 1850 poem also seeks to erase a teasing ambiguity that had troubled all previous versions of the tale. As the published version makes clear, Wordsworth is keen to distinguish ‘benign Solitude’ (l. 357) from the condition of barren isolation experienced by the victims of war. In 1798 the soldier embodies ‘A desolation, a simplicity/That [appertained] to solitude’ (l. 64); in 1850 the run-on line is altered to the thematically conventional and tonally underwhelming ‘To which the trappings of a gaudy world/Make strange background’ (ll. 402–03). If, in the original poem, the soldier’s solitude provides an analogue to the exhausted poet who remembers the ‘importance of his theme’ (l. 143) but feels it no longer, what the published poem clarifies, but to the cost of the revealing ambiguity of the original, is how relief from stasis, considered as a phase of poetic inactivity, is diminished by bringing soldier and poet too swiftly to the conclusion of their journeys and by allowing the latter to depart ‘with quiet heart’ to a ‘distant home’ (l. 468).

What can be hoped for in a world that fails to perceive in the rehabilitation of the discharged soldier a reflection of its desire to persist in a state of endless war? In a passage from The Arcades Project Benjamin writes: ‘[a]s long as there is still one beggar around there will still be myth.’ And so long as myth is maintained in the world, violence will continue.²² Commenting on Benjamin’s fragment, Adorno evokes the image of a child, lulled to sleep by the assurance that, warned off by the family dog, ‘to the gate the beggar flees’.²³ In this allegory of the logic of the included/excluded other on which the stability of bourgeoise society depends, the beggar is never completely expelled; ‘only with the last beggar’s disappearance would myth be appeased’. Nevertheless, Adorno continues, concealed within the allegory is the hope that the reign of mythic violence will one day come to an end, leaving the beggar to ‘find refuge in his homeland, freed from exile on earth’. Might the discharged soldier’s trust in God, retained in the 1850 poem, testify to such hope? Despite the attempt to remodel the soldier’s unknowability, to render the uncouth shape fit for social exchange, the persistence of this appeal to the coming of the Messianic Kingdom, and so to the suspension of the law that sustains poverty, suffering, and exile, retains its enigmatic charge.

***

As the contest between Hunt’s and De Quincey’s versions of Wordsworth’s wartime afterlife should remind us, while the late poet sought to present his lifework in reified form as an unbroken historical continuity, to the extent, as Peter Larkin suggests, of devising strategies to discharge the potential of new writing to invalidate the proleptic expectations of the past, forces seeded in the poet’s forelife would ensure that pulses of an older, contested history would continue to be felt in the present. One such example is the 1845 poem ‘Suggested upon Loughrigg Fell’.²⁴ Much admired by contemporary readers, the verse was inspired by the poet’s observation of a mountain daisy, casting the shadow of its ‘star-shaped’ (l. 5) crown on the smooth surface of a nearby stone. The sight raises thoughts of the ‘pure sympathy’ (l. 18) of nature and art, albeit framed as a work of fancy, granted fleetingly and only to those who subordinate their creative powers to the will of God. The ‘faith’ that, in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, had once impelled the poet to attribute consciousness to ‘every flower’ that ‘breathes’, and that continued to inform much of Wordsworth’s poetry in the 1800s and 1810s, appears now to have dwindled to a contrived display of conjectural whimsy:

But if here Wordsworth exhibits a sceptical attitude to the ‘Fond fancies’ that animated his earlier daisy poems, moved perhaps by consciousness of the conservative views of those who accompanied the poet on his ascent of the fell – Archdeacon Julius Hare, the moral philosopher William Archer Butler, and the former ‘staunch Berkeleyan’ Sir William Hamilton²⁵ – there remains in the poem’s affirmation of ‘delicate companionships’, and in its protracted evocation of the possible (‘Would that […] That to […] were known […] And what if […] that […] could […] So might […] And were [so] would’), a remembrance of that other world in which transient, profane life can at last recover its happiness.