Discussion
The oddly belligerent pacifist message of this poem, combined with its placement alongside poems celebrating both
Scotland and British pride of manufacture, appears to support
Linda Colleyʼs
argument that British identity,
North and
South, was forged “not so much [by] consensus or homogeneity or centralisation at home, as [by] a strong sense of dissimilarity from those without.”
Fear of the Catholic other dominated over divisions between Anglicanism and Dissent, and Old and New Dissent, so that Britons defended above all a “pluralist yet aggressively Protestant polity”;
and recurrent wars with
France, along with worries about Jacobite restoration, had kept alive the fear “that the old popish enemy was still at the gates, more threatening than ever before”
(
Colley, Britons, 17, 19, 25, and see p. 18). The
primary function of the fears expressed in
Ruskinʼs poem may well have been to help to forge identity in this Scottish‐English and, at this time, Dissenter household.
Ruskin presumably picked up on these alarms in his parents, each
of whom is likely to have communicated them, perhaps
Margaret even more so than
John James. As
Colley remarks, during the
Revolutionary
and
Napoleonic Era, “many women . . . seem to have believed that their own security and the security of the family unit
were at stake in this
French war as they had not been in earlier conflicts. In part, this was because the risk of a French invasion of
Britain was so much greater in this war than ever before.
But crucial, too, as an ingredient in female anxiety was the destruction of
Marie‐Antoinette and the rest of the French Royal Family”—a regicide that
Edmund Burkeʼs
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(
1790) taught the elder Ruskinsʼ generation to stigmatize specifically in terms “of a queen who was also a wife and mother being driven by force from her home”
(
Colley, Britons, 254, 253). Hence,
the martial twist given to domestic feeling in this poem is not at all out of keeping with a feminine and domestic emphasis—an emphasis that is strong throughout
MS I, in domestic scenes depicted in
“Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 1,
the most realistic of which center on the childrenʼs interaction with the Mama character, and in the stamp
that
Margaret herself puts on the manuscript with her
glosses.
It is far more probable that the poem functions in this way, as a reflector of Britonsʼ self‐defining fears of the Other, than that it
records an actual threat at the time of its composition. The latest credible threat of invasion of British shores had ended
in
1815 with the
Battle of Waterloo, which closed the
Napoleonic Wars.
Waterloo captured
Ruskinʼs imagination throughout the
late 1820s, in works such as
“The British Battles”,
“Battle of Waterloo: A Play in Two Acts”,
“Ballad on Waterloo”, and
“Trafalgar”.
Just so,
Charlotte and
Branwell Brontë made
Wellington the hero of their sagas,
but
Ruskinʼs fascination with the
Battle of Waterloo was not drawn just from books.
A year earlier than compiling the
“Poetry” [MS I Poetry Anthology],
during the
Tour of 1825 to the
Continent,
the Ruskins visited
Waterloo Field.
Although composed nine years after
Waterloo,
“The Defiance of War” was more likely prompted by the
1825
tour along with the national anxieties analyzed by
Colley
than to have reflected some more recent conflict. Nonetheless, one cannot discount the possibility that a conflict contemporary with composition of the poem caught the
Ruskinʼs imagination. In
late 1826,
a skirmish occurred in the East, in connection with the
Greek War for Independence from Turkish domination.
While no threat to
Britain, the war would have interested the Ruskins for its associations with
Lord Byron, who had died in
Missolonghi in
1824. In the
Greek conflict,
Britain was striving to avoid an outbreak
between
Turkey and
Russia, whose new tsar,
Nicholas I, was willing
to push hostilities. In
October 1826, which would accord well with a probable date for
Ruskinʼs
poem,
Britain pressured
Turkey to accept Russian conditions in the
Convention of Akkerman. This assured Russian influence in the
Caucasus and the opening of the
Straits of Bosphorus to trade, which might have interested the Ruskinsʼ mercantile household.
As it turned out,
Russia continued to press hostilities in the name of the Greek cause, and
Britain joined
France and
Russia to declare
joint mediation, according to a treaty signed in
London in
July 1827, but this event would certainly have
occurred too late to have occasioned
Ruskinʼs poem. (In the subsequent history, the Turks refused mediation but were defeated by
allied fleets at
Navarino in
October 1827. The
Treaty of Adrianople, rendering
Greece autonomous, was signed
two years later, in
September 1829.)
For a threat closer to home, one returns to the Catholic Other, even in
1826. The Catholic fear was kept alive in the years running up to the
Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, perhaps all the more so in households
like the Ruskinsʼ that had to strain to forge together competing loyalties to form a British identity. In those post‐
Waterloo years,
Colley points out,
anti‐Catholic agitation was sustained by “an abundance of women” (
Britons, 333).
In
February 1829,
Margaret Ruskin, observing the advance of
Catholic Emancipation, would be moved to put aside her suburban calm and flash out against “the R Catholics and their favourers” as “weak
equivocal underhand equally devoid of sincerity or honesty & integrity” and capable of “tak[ing] Satan himself into their cabals to further their purposes
to bring every thing under their subjection” (
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 177).
Another overdetermining possibility is that the poem also works figuratively to comment on the illness and death of
Ruskinʼs
cousin,
James Richardson (see
“On Scotland”: Discussion). If so, the poem shows how
the boyʼs
grief for his
cousin might have mixed with alarm over the threat that disease posed to the peace of the household. As an intriguing clue,
Charles W. Borchers, IV has discovered beneath the title an erased word that appears to be
woe.