War Imagined by Hynes Samuel

Author:Hynes, Samuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1992-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Clive Bell, Bloomsbury aesthete and pacifist, looked back to that time, too, though the myth he made was different. ‘In the spring of 1914,’ Bell wrote in the Cambridge Magazine,

society offered the new-corner precisely what the new-corner wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less a perfect civilisation, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth.

Searching for an historical analogy of that time, Bell found it in the France of Louis XVI:

Society before the war showed signs of becoming what French society before the Revolution had been — curious, gay, tolerant, reckless and reasonably cynical. After the war I suppose it will be none of these things . . . The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done.33

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