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3 - THE WARRING SOCIETY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
Summary
Behold the heav'n-born element, bestow'd
The genial friend of generous health to glow,
The social hearth to animate, supply
Our absent suns, and gaily gild the house
Of harmless pleasure! –see it turn'd against
Life's lovely flame! th' excited spirit see,
Collision call'd, springs sparkling from his cell,
To dart the nitrous wrath, the red-hot death,
To youth's light heart, and stop the bounding life!
To bid the broken bone long time be rack'd
In the dread house of Pain! with bursting rage
Upward an heap of shatter'd bodies shoot,
From earth exploded to the sky! fair piles
That slowly rose, uprear'd by patient toil,
With furious haste lay low!
Nightmarish evocations of war were a staple of anti-war rhetoric in this period (in England, curiously, poetry was usually the medium, the visual arts hardly ever). All were statements of the essential inhumanity of war, of its brutality, destructiveness and wastefulness. All pointed to a social evil of enormous proportions, though the pitch of indignation against it also implied that it was combatable, mitigable, not something simply to be endured. This view of war did not originate in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was connected with a great revulsion against public and private violence and a new concern for affective relationships which characterised seventeenth-century European society. As regards war, the change would seem to have started during the Thirty Years War, notably with the ghastly scenes etched by Callot and described by Grimmelshausen. After this period the glorification of war was always strongly challenged by the attention paid to its miseries.
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- The Friends of PeaceAnti-War Liberalism in England 1793–1815, pp. 53 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982