The Weekly Machen
Over the next six weeks, we will be presenting a series of general war reporting by Arthur Machen. In this first installment, from late August 1914, the first excited blush of war remains obvious as Machen critiques recent war poetry which falls short of prerequisite grandeur. Later, as the years of frustrated stalemate ensued, poetic voices would arise, but not all would would ring with glory for the bloody cause. Compare this article with “War and the Spring Poets.”
“Let Us Sing of War”
by
Arthur Machen
August 18, 1914
Once upon a time Mr. Boswell, a well-known Scottish gentlemen, read a play which he did not much like, and in concert with some friends, wrote a severe criticism upon it.
But afterwards, as he confessed to Dr. Johnson, he and his fellow-critics grew remorseful. The play was a bad one, doubtless, but after all, could any of them have written a drama half as good?
The doctor, however, would not hear of this modesty in the critics. He told Boswell that a man may very properly say that a table is a bad table though he himself would be puzzled to make any sort of table; and so, sheltering myself under this illustrious authority, I make bold to say that the war poetry of the last week or so does not strike me as magnificent.
I have been reading my Times regularly, and therein I have seen many verses which attempt to celebrate this tremendous moment of the world. I have read some good phrases, many excellent sentiments and well-turned lines; but not, it seems to me, the magistral song that the hour calls for, nothing approaching even:
The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn.
And, assuredly, there has been no serious rivalry to Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” wherein are preserved for ever the very thunders of Waterloo, the voices of the captains, and the clangour of the dreadful trumpets.
Time and the Poem
So it is, and it is not at all to be wondered at. The great event, nay such a complex of great and terrible and wonderful events as is now upon us, does not necessarily produce the great poem.
Some day, no doubt, the mighty drama that has just begun, in which we, all of us, are soon, each in his several degree, to strive and agonise, will find its singer and a song proper to its awful majesty.
In the fine arts it is in vain that we speak of good subjects or of great subjects. The subject and the artist are co-relatives; the one must be apt for the other.
Still, we who cannot make any sort of a table may speculate as to the really magnificent tables we would have made—if only we had known how. As some of the seventeenth century poets used to write verses under the heading, “Instructions to a Painter”—how to paint this lovely face or that terrific battle—so we may issue our instructions to our poets and tell them of all the fine things they ought to have said.
And to begin with a negative criticism, I should like to say that in my opinion several of these our poets have made the mistake of being too moral.
I think I remember seeing the opinions of Milton mentioned in a recent copy of verse, and I would submit, with deference, that when the drums begin to roll Milton is out of court, and also that praise of ourselves as the noblest and best of all the races of the earth is altogether out of place and no matter for poetry.
The Trumpet Note
We hope and believe, firmly, that our quarrel is just; but all is for the historian to plead before the calm court of posterity; for the poet the great matter is the one tremendous, awful, and heart-shaking fact that the thing of which we have all dreamed in nightmares is now indeed upon us.
I can well remember when we first began to dream this ill-dream. It was soon after the Franco-Prussian War, that the “Battle of Dorking,” a dismal augury of German invasion and English defeat, was written; and again and again in varying forms the terror has recurred, and we have shuddered a little and paled for a moment; and then laughed our fears away.
We had prophets who told us that war couldn’t happen because war didn’t pay—as if that had anything on earth to do with it. And now war has happened and is happening at this very moment.
That is the thing which the poets have to realise. They must see with that vision of theirs—which is the only true vision—the long roads of the world thundering with the march of the great guns, thundering with the tramp of endless hosts of men.
They must hear in their ears the rolling of the drums and the rending clamour of the trumpets as the armed multitudes draw near at last to one another in terrible array; it is theirs to prophesy concerning the onset of thousands upon thousands, of myriads on myriads, of millions upon millions.
The Red Rose of War
The noise of that battle should echo in the ear of the poet as if all the mortal race of men found voice in one cry of agony and triumph.
The pealing trumpets will sound through this song when it is written, anguish will be in it, and the dread of death, and the exultation of victory.
And the poet will think most of all of that great fleet of ships that shone in the sunlight only a few weeks ago, in the quiet waters of the Solent.
They appeared before their King for an hour or two—and went on their way, then none of us who saw them dreamed what their way was, what fearful path upon the waters was allotted to the dark ships.
They have vanished out of sight; it is for us all, for our poets most of all, to conjecture terribly of the day or the night—it must be soon—when the darkness of those ships shall be transmuted by an awful alchemy, when the flame shall be about them and fire be their crown, when flame shall go vehement before them in their course upon the waters on that day—dies tremenda, dies amar valde.
And I think that the poet—the true laureate bard—will see at last this was as a great and fiery rose, a rose palpating with flame.
Dante in Paradise saw such a flower; this was for the praise of heaven. But the red rose of war is for the purging of earth.
Previous: The Last Dreadful Sentence
Next: In Time of War
darklybrightpress.com 
Thank you for this!
It is very interesting to follow Machen’s interrelated allusions and references here.
The title plays with the first words of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arma virumque cano” – ‘of arms and the man I sing’ – and, as its Wikipedia article reminds us, it begins in the midst of things “with the Trojan fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, heading in the direction of Italy.” Then, he compares the first lines of the fourth and final stanza of Thomas Campbell’s 1801 poem of the Napoleonic wars, “Ye Mariners of England” favorably with anything new he has read so far.
Next, his reference to “some of the seventeenth century poets [who] used to write verses under the heading, ‘Instructions to a Painter’ —how to paint this lovely face or that terrific battle” presumably includes Edmund Waller’s Instructions to a Painter, For the Drawing of the Posture & Progress of His Ma[jes]ties Forces at Sea, Under the Command of His Highness Royal Together with the Battel & Victory Obtained over the Dutch, June 3, 1665.
After this, he reminds his readers of the Fleet Review after its mobilization on 18-20 July, adding “then none of us who saw them dreamed what their way was” – while the Wikipedia article, “Battle of Heligoland Bight (1914)” tells us “The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was transported to France between 12 and 21 August, protected by British destroyers and submarines patrolling Heligoland Bight, which German ships would have to cross if they sortied from their bases.” The Battle would follow on 28 August!
Worth noting, too, is his introduction into the purging naval warfare he predicts, of what seems a condensed quotation from the responsory beginning “Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda” and including “dies magna et amara valde
Dum veneris judicare sæculum per ignem” (“Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day, […] day of great and exceeding bitterness, When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire”).
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