10 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
romanticism and colored by a self-assured sense of national destiny. Elements
of these earlier heroic ideals are found in the works of Victorian authors. So
what were the tenets preached on the page?
First and foremost, war was seen as an honorable pursuit. This seems
odd in a society that on the whole rejected militarism. Yet Tennyson, who
himself was attacked in turn of the century reviews as a poet of ‘innocuous
sentimentality’ and ‘effeminate grace,’^23 listed among the blessings of a
reflective Ulysses that he had ‘drunk delight of battle with my peers,’^24 and
is of course perhaps most famous for ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’
penned in 1855. Macaulay went even further, deeming a death in just battle
the best way to die:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this Earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?’^25
Lord Macaulay – who himself denigrated hero-worship as an indication of
feeble-mindedness – could find nothing wrong with the person of brave
Horatius, a man willing to sacrifice all, not for glory, but simply as his duty.^26
Henry Newbolt epitomized the same sentiment in the famous lines of
duty in the face of (implicitly) certain death, ‘Vitai Lampada’:
The sand of the desert is sodden red –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’^27
Here we find both the dogged determination of Hereward the Wake and
the Roman ideals of duty unto death.
Newbolt’s contemporary, George Alfred Henty, not only deemed war an
honorable pursuit, but one that should be eagerly sought. A declaration of
war and the prospect of fighting were meat and drink to Henty’s characters;
lily
(lily)
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