Tea at Trianon: How Dwight Became Dwight

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

How Dwight Became Dwight

From R.J. Stove at The University Bookman:

The drug-of-choice for intelligent and literate pagans is the Matthew Arnold doctrine, which can be cruelly epitomized as “Real religion is too much like hard work, so let’s have a religion of art.” ”Arnoldian discourse,” Professor Lewandowski is right to proclaim, “informs the work of Macdonald in many ways previously unrecognized.” Ultimately Macdonald went down to defeat, not so much because post-Macdonald Masscult surpasses in horror the worst depths it plumbed during Macdonald’s own lifetime—we can only be grateful that he was spared acquaintanceship with Kim Kardashian—but above all because Macdonald’s own philosophy owed so much to Arnold’s that it incurred devastating collateral damage when Arnold’s aestheticism became untenable. Once the archetype of the violin-playing, Schubert-loving S.S. guard entered the popular consciousness (helped in this entry, it must be said, by Adorno’s own insolent but half-plausible “No poetry after Auschwitz” outburst), even the least intelligent commentator could dimly realize that, pace Arnold, mere sheepish blather by the unchurched about “the best that has been thought and said” is simply not going to cut it as an antidote to state-subsidized terror of any ideological stripe. T. S. Eliot had already settled Arnold’s hash well before Auschwitz, amid a tribute (Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936) to his maître à penser, Francis Herbert Bradley; but Macdonald’s knowledgeable admiration of Eliot—as with The New Yorker, so with Eliot, Macdonald arrived at admiration only after initial aversion—seems never to have extended to this particular article, which certainly Professor Lewandowski does not cite. (In 1949, it will be recalled, Eliot devoted part of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture to a respectful discussion of Macdonald’s work. Either he never knew, or else he knew and did not care, that Macdonald had been an early detractor of For Lancelot Andrewes.) (Read more.)