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<DIV>Thanks to Karen Levenback, who points out the online availability of Clive
Bell’s “Peace at Once”, I have been reading it for the first time; and I have
been rereading Bella Woolf’s “Right against Might” (also available online, but I
have a copy). This was stimulated by Hilary Newman’s discussion of those 2
short monographs.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Hilary mentions that Bell is repetitive, but polemicists always are (e.g.
Louise DeSalvo, Irene Coates). Woolf, however, is also repetitive: the
destruction of Malines Cathedral is mentioned 4 times: pp. 10, 17, 19, 24.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>However, Woolf is not really a polemicist: she assumes that her readers
will accept what she says. Her short book is more like Harold Nicolson’s
"Why Britain is at War" (1939), although her book lacks his book’s intellectual
content. Also, while the footnotes are “for the benefit of children who
may read the book”, the text does seem to be addressed to young people -- or at
least is written in a very simple way (she was after all mainly a children’s
writer).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A title=https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft
href="https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft">https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft</A></DIV>
<DIV><A title=https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell
href="https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell">https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>“Peace at Once” is perceptively accurate in some of its predictions and
wrong in others. It is too rational, too intelligent. Bell says e.g.
“Is there any reason for supposing that under German rule an ordinary man would
be so much worse off, morally and materially, that, to avoid it, it is worth
doing and enduring what ordinary men are doing and enduring on three Continents
and on the high seas?” He may well have been right in the context of 1915,
but even now Brexit shows that that would not have been acceptable to “ordinary
men”.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>By the way, Bell’s article “Art and War” (referred to in the essay) is more
easily found reprinted in his “Pot Boilers”.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Stuart</DIV>
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<DIV
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Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 7:48 AM Stuart N. Clarke
<<A>stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com</A>> wrote:<BR></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV>I have begun to read VWB91 . . .</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Re Karen Levenback’s discussion of “The Royal Academy” in VWM: in my
selected essay collection, “Street Haunting and Other Essays”</DIV>
<DIV><A
title=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Haunting-Essays-Vintage-Classics/dp/009958977X>https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Haunting-Essays-Vintage-Classics/dp/009958977X</A></DIV>
<DIV>I paired that essay with “Thunder at Wembley” under the heading “The
British Empire”. In the limited notes at the end of the book, I did,
however, add a new one about the blinded soldier over-raising his leg:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>A letter from Harry G. Sparks in the Athenaeum,</DIV>
<DIV>12 September 1919, stated that he had ‘seen hundreds of</DIV>
<DIV>[gassed] men do exactly the same thing’ in France and that</DIV>
<DIV>the ‘over-emphasis’ was ‘on the part of the man – not on</DIV>
<DIV>that of the artist’.</DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">I think Sargent is a wonderful
artist – next week I shall be going to the exhibition in Dulwich</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><A
title=http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/june/sargent-the-watercolours/>http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/june/sargent-the-watercolours/</A></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">but I think the murals in the
Boston Library are frightful (I’ve only seen repros).</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">“Gassed” seems to me to be
borderline – it’s almost an awful mural, but it’s not.</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">________________________</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">VWB p. 20</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Vernon ‘Lee “certainly ranked
the press among the most culpable sustainers of the slaughter”’</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Cf. Jacob “<SPAN>had seen
Salamis, and Marathon in the distance.”</SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN>with </SPAN><SPAN>an
editorial in <I>The Times</I> in October 1914: ‘The undergraduate who last
summer was playing his pleasant games and making his pleasant little academic
jokes, to whom the world was a charming if rather bewildering place, is now
suddenly a man with a plain and glorious duty before him, a man like those
Greeks who fought at Marathon and Salamis, like <SPAN><FONT
style="FONT-VARIANT: small-caps">Aeschylus</FONT></SPAN> himself, the poet of
the great age that was prepared for a victory in which he took
part.’</SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">________________________</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">I suppose I was naive, but I
had thought (hoped?) that from 2014 on, we would commemorate the pointlessness
of WW1, and the emphasis would be on its folly and waste. Indeed, there
was 3-part documentary-type recreation of the days leading up to the
declaration of war, with the script using the actual words that politicians,
the Kaiser, etc., actually said or wrote. It was clear that Sir Edward
Grey had no *grip* at all on events. I have subsequently discovered his
employing that very word in his autobiography: “In Austria, as in Russia,
there was no head with direction and grip of affairs” (GREY, [Edward],
Viscount, of Fallodon, K.G., "Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916" (2 vols), London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1925, ii. 32).</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Instead, the modern obsession
with personalities, individuals and their reactions to events has
obfuscated. Instead of condemnations and analyses of politicians and the
military, we get stories about grandfathers and great-uncles who *never came
back*, or, if they did, *never talked about what had happened to them*.
Or their bodies were never found. Or descendants or other relatives who
never knew them visit their graves or even just their names on the Menin
Gate. And sometimes they weep quietly.</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Even more naively, I was
shocked to hear:</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">“Hundreds of thousands of
Canadians crossed the cold, grey Atlantic to take a stand against tyranny and
oppression,” said Prince Charles, speaking to a huge crowd gathered in sunny
fields beneath a giant monument to the Canadians who died in World War I.</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><A
title=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/09/prince-charles-visits-world-war-one-battlefields-sons-justin/>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/09/prince-charles-visits-world-war-one-battlefields-sons-justin/</A></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">On 11 November 2020 I hope I’ll
remember this:</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Referring to the unveiling of
the Cenotaph in Whitehall by George V on 11 November 1920, VW wrote: ‘going
down the Strand the night of the Cenotaph; such a lurid scene, like one in
Hell. A soundless street; no traffic; but people marching. Clear, cold, &
windless. A bright light in the Strand; women crying Remember the Glorious
Dead, & holding out chrysanthemums. Always the sound of feet on the
pavement. Faces bright & lurid [. . .] A ghastly procession of people in
their sleep’ (<I>D</I>2 79–80).</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">Stuart</P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV>_______________________________________________<BR>Vwoolf
mailing list<BR><A>Vwoolf@lists.osu.edu</A><BR><A
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