Tea at Trianon: Samuel Johnson: The Extraordinary Truth-Lover and Friend

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

Monday, September 21, 2015

Samuel Johnson: The Extraordinary Truth-Lover and Friend

From Dr. Kalpakgian at Seton Magazine:

For all his scholarship Johnson never divorced learning from life. He valued literature for its human wisdom, its honest portrayal of the human condition, and he measured the greatness of a book by its ability “to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”—a policy he practiced in his own work.

This is the very purpose of Johnson’s short novel Rasselas, a book that examines the truth of human happiness in an age that fantasized about utopias with simplistic theories like “return to nature,” “the best of all possible worlds,” and the repudiation of civilization as the source of all evil. Prince Rasselas learns in the novel that no one from wealthy kings to isolated hermits is perfectly happy because everyone has complaints about some aspect of his life.

The king worries about envious rivals, and the shepherd suffers loneliness and loss of friendship. Rasselas, however, also discovers that some human choices and ways of life increase a person’s sources of happiness more than others.

Even though Rasselas acknowledges that “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed,” he also acquires a timeless wisdom about happiness that corresponds to Johnson’s own learning and experience. (Read more.)