Patriotism and Politics

Abstract

Tennyson grew up in a period when, as a result of the horrors produced by the French Revolution, and by the long struggle against Napoleonic imperialism, anti-Gallic sentiments in England were almost endemic. Nevertheless the jingoism of ‘English Warsong’ and ‘National Song’ against ‘the ancient enemy’, even though they appeared in 1830, and however rousing their choric metres, is as astonishing as the triteness of their clichés: hearts of oak, Merry England, the only land of the free. The sonnet ‘Buonaparte’ (1832) boasts of the lessons ‘the island queen who sways the floods and lands From Ind to Ind’ taught the French. Revolutionary and imperialist alarms from France brought Tennyson more than once to boiling-point. He damns the ‘blind hysterics of the Celt’ and the ‘red fool-fury of the Seine’ in In Memoriam (cix, cxxvii) and, in ‘Beautiful City’ (1889), observes how often Paris, ‘the crater of European confusion’, with its ‘passionate shriek for the rights of an equal humanity’, had proved its revolution to be only evolution ‘Rolled again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity’.