The Age of Manliness

As Charles Kingsley and Sir Henry Newbolt demonstrate, the end of the Victorian era placed much emphasis on athleticism and manliness on the young men of the age. Kingsley, a clergyman, even wrote a letter to his fiancee commenting on how much he believed in keeping the body fit and in shape. Newbolt's Vitai Lampada describes a military attack in which the leaders of the army regard the charge as like a school sports game, and rally their men using experience from their school days.

In his letter, Kingsley describes how he does not believe that physical achievement does not take away from his ability to influence people in his church, but in fact enhances it. He claims that "the young wild fellows who are considered hopeless by most men...look up to a man who they see is their superior, if he chose to exert his power, in physical as well as intellectual skills" (page 581-582). This shows that young men were not only influenced by peers and family to by physically superior, but also by their church leaders.

Newbolt's Vitai Lampada describes how leaders used old school game sayings to rally their troops. For example,

"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!'" (page 583, lines 11-16).

This shows that while the war was not going well for the British (lines 11-13), the troops are still rallied by "play the game!" (page 583, lines 16). The poem gives a tone of unawareness of the direness of the situation. By ending each stanza with the same light-hearted phrase, Newbolt emphasizes not the horrors of the war, but rather the carefree saying from their school boy days.

While initially it seemed outrageous to me that men could see war as merely a sports game, the psychology major in me thinks that it is a good coping mechanism. These young men, most of them in their late teens and early twenties faced grueling conditions in the trenches, and open warfare unlike those seen in the past (as this was one of the first wars with more advanced technology and less "civilized" tactics). The school games can also been seen as analogous to video games of our day; they essentially desensitized some men from what they were actually doing in real life. As it is, I am left with mixed emotions on the men viewing war as a game; on the one hand, it is completely irresponsible to not appreciate what you are doing in war, on the other, it is a good coping mechanism in dealing with what you do in war.