Victorian Poetry

12

TRICIA LOOTENS

Victorian poetry and patriotism

i

For literary critics who anticipated or experienced the devastation of the
First World War, there was something peculiarly "Victorian" - and
peculiarly suspect - about patriotic poetry. By 1910, even Hugh Walker,
who had devoted several pages of The Greater Victorian Poets (1895) to
praise Alfred Tennyson's patriotic writing, judged Victoria's former Poet
Laureate as "too prone to echo back the thoughts of his own time and
country" 1 - and thus, suggestively, as an ideological ally of Germany.
"Patriotism is good," wrote Walker, "but it is not a pure good when there
goes with it a hard, unsympathetic tone of mind towards other races; and
in Tennyson we hear rather too much of 'the blind hysterics of the Celt,'
and 'the red fool-fury of the Seine.' He lived under the sway of the Teutonic
idea, and already the Teutonic idea is discredited." 2

"An Englishman taking himself seriously," G.K. Chesterton wrote of
Tennyson in 1913, was "an awful sight." 3 Such claims were not entirely
tongue-in-cheek, as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) under-
scores. In Woolf's novel, as Mr. Ramsay begins to declaim Tennyson's
famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) i n a voice "between a croak
and a song," what was "ridiculous" suddenly becomes "alarming."
Shouting "Boldly we rode and well" (AT 23), Ramsay charges his guest
Lily Briscoe, nearly overturning her easel - and with it, the art that stands
at the novel's center. 4 Written in the shadow of another war against
Germany, Woolf's anti-war meditation Three Guineas (1938) would ex-
plicitly connect "the tyrannies and servilities" of the nineteenth-century
"private house" to those of Hitler or Mussolini, envisioning a female anti-
war Outsiders' Society whose members refuse allegiance to masculinist
militarist nation-states. "As a woman," the society's imaginary representa-
tive says, "I have no country." 5

Given the urgency of such early-twentieth-century efforts to discredit the

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