War and Peace and the British Poets of Sensibility

W a r a n d P ea ce a n d th e B ritish P o ets o f S en sib ility J . W A L T E R N E L S O N mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA In writing of the British poets of sensibility we refer to those eighteenth-century poets who put feeling first, those who flourished between the Augustans and the Romantics, who are sometimes called the post-Augustans and sometimes the pre-Romantics, but who might more properly, as Northrop Frye has often asserted, be called the poets of sensibility, for they belong to their own aesthetically definable age. And in examining war and peace as a topic for these poets an attempt is made to discover how it was used and to what depth it was probed and presented. The findings are these: first, the British poets of sensi­ bility show no knowledge of the various Enlightenment peace theories; i.e., those of Penn, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Leibnitz, Rousseau, and Bentham. Nor do they seem aware of the theories of Cicero, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, Erasmus, Francesco de Vitoria, Grotius, or Spinoza, in short any of those westerners within or without the Judeo-Christian tradi­ tion who presented important ideas on war and our possible avoidance or containment of it. Second, these poets rarely see the topic in depth; that is, with awareness of the hidden motives of men or of the beguil­ ing ironies of warmaking and peacemaking. Third, these poets show 345 346 / WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA J . W A L T E R N E L S O N little consiste ncy in the ir thinking about war and peace, even within their own canons, or sometimes within single poems. In fact, war and peace are most commonly used merely to stimulate emotion, any emotion. Fourth, as the century moves along, within this group of poets there may be a trend away from economic and cultural im­ perialism and toward pacifism. And fifth, the image of the “broken soldier,” the soldier as total victim, becomes a common and poignant one. T h e A u g u sta n P recedents Had the poets of sensibility wanted to deal incisively with war and peace, they would have found excellent poetic examples in their im­ mediate predecessors. In his T h e F able o f the B ees Bernard Mandeville shows humorous insight into the ironies of maintaining an army. Standing armies, he writes (somewhat naively at this point), are thoroughly beneficial, for along with courts they are “the greatest schools of breeding and good manners. . . . W hat officers of distinction chiefly aim at is not a beastly, but a splendid way of living.. . J’1 Moreover, a wealthy nation like England can afford an army and still have “ease and plenty. ” But if Mandeville is idealistic concerning the value of the military, he is by no means so about the soldier’s motiva­ tion. An officer is urged on not by “robustness” but by “the hopes of preferment, emulation, and the love of glory”;2 and any man can be urged to fight by an infusion of “artificial courage.” This last is accom­ plished simply by convincing the soldier of the justice of the cause, telling him his property will be confiscated by the enemy, giving him a distinguishing uniform and a mouthful of slogans, and by breeding in him a fear of the contempt of his peers if he does not fight. Vanity is a large part of every soldier’s motivation, so a uniform with some “paltry gaudiness and affected finery” succeeds well. A drum roll helps, and extraordinary honors to the dead “will ever be a sure method to make bubbles [dupes] of the living.”3 Dryden was well aware of the economic contradictions of a standing army, for in his oft-quoted lines on a paid militia he brands them W a r and P eace and the B ritish P oets ImlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH 347 “Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense I In peace a charge, in war a weak defense”;4 and in his imitation of “The First Satire of the Second...