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Five: Popeian Strategies in Primitive and Modern War Epic
- University of Virginia Press
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Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green; Think . . . —Morris, The Earthly Paradise Morris’s longing for the clean and smokeless London of 1400 makes a vivid contrast with Macaulay’s heated admiration for the clean and industrial Belfast of 1850: “Belfast has become one of the greatest and most flourishing seats of industry in the British isles. . . . Belfast is the only large Irish town in which the traveler is not disgusted by the loathsome aspect and odour of long lines of human dens far inferior in comfort and cleanliness . . . [,] huge factories, towering many stories above the chimneys of the houses and resounding with the roar of machinery” (3:487). The progressive historian sees mud and sewage in the past, the nostalgic poet smog and filth in the present: both readily ignore what offends the other and find in their favorite a healthy purity.¹ This chapter will explore the form Victorian epic poetry took in the hands of William Morris, but, as here, one thing Morris’s epics of ancient German victory over Roman imperialism share with Macaulay’s modern epic history of the glorious progress of English capitalism is a representation of heroic killing that remains, despite his self-consciously primitive theme, remarkably sanitary . In the most comprehensive reading of Morris’s epic poetics, Herbert Tucker emphasizes how Sigurd the Volsung, widely regarded then and now as his finest epic poem and one of the monuments of Victorian epic, “takes the measure of liberal sympathy politics” and possesses an “integrity foreign to the modern mind” (388). This Hegelian analysis of the integrity of Morris’s primitivism passes over Morris’s strict modernity regarding FIVE POPEIAN STRATEGIES IN PRIMITIVE AND MODERN WAR EPIC morris, kinglake, and high victorian liberal epic 196 POPEIAN STRATEGIES IN PRIMITIVE AND MODERN WAR EPIC epic’s essential matter: his obedience to liberal notions of warfare, treatment of prisoners, and the representations of graphic violence. The deep logic of liberal epic and international law, indeed now the first Geneva Conventions, guides his archaic narrative as surely as it does those of the ultra-modern Macaulay. Chapter 4 explored Herbert Spencer’s streamlined version of the eighteenth-century political-economic model of the four stages of society. Spencer, moreover, exhibited a determination to suppress any lingering veneration for war, heroism, and the excitement of combat, when, unlike his fellow sociological historian William Buckle, who was confident that modern economic self-interest alone would secure such a goal, Spencer joined the tradition of ethical critiques of war narratives. He campaigned against allowing children to read heroic literature or engage in aggressive sports—or even competitive games: “Nor let us omit to note that while sanction may rightly be claimed for fiction of a humanizing tendency, there should be nothing but condemnation for brutalizing fiction—for the culture of blood-thirst to which so many stories are devoted. . . . Chess, for example, which pits together two intelligences in such a way . . . [that it produces] a feeling of shame and humiliation in the defeated” (1:529– 30). In condemning any contest that demonstrates the superiority of one individual over another, Spencer articulated the most radical version of the liberal ideal of self-determination, equality, and non-domination. The dangerous consequences of such youthful sports and reading appeared in how, even in the Parliament of the world’s most advanced industrial state, the lure of militant values in the form of wars of conquest and domination persisted due to the legislators’ youthful epic reading. Indeed, when Spencer began working on his magnum opus, Synthetic Philosophy (1862– 98), the conservative leader and prime minister Lord Derby published a translation of The Iliad (1865), and the liberal prime minister Gladstone published his massive three-volume Studies on Homer (1858–89). The conservative broke no new ground in returning to the kind of graphic detail versions after Pope’s eschewed, but the great liberal prime minister proved more original. Instead of merely suppressing Homer’s offensiveness , Gladstone recuperated Homer as positive source of liberal ideals by discovering in his warrior assemblies the cultural origins of Parliament and constitutional democracy.² Morris’s epics do not give that honor to Homer, but follow the more traditional Whig theory of tracing modern English parliamentary government back to...