Tea at Trianon: Our Recessional Culture

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

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Our Recessional Culture

From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

This journey from Camelot to COVID was the result of many wrong turns. When it began, the foundation of American life had already started to rot, but the rot was largely hidden and resisted by still-powerful beliefs rooted in traditional ideas of duty and self-sacrifice. Today, though, the rot is unmistakable. The termites have been busy indeed since the 1960s, as one American institution after another was captured by the devotees of the New Left, and as more and more Americans came to accept fatuous promises of “liberation,” running the gamut from “if it feels good, do it” to “greed is good.”

As we Americans grope for solutions to the myriad problems we face, we would do well to recall the words of a wise Englishman writing at his nation’s zenith. Rudyard Kipling, asked to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, wrote a poem of admonition, not celebration. In “Recessional,” Kipling warned his countrymen that they risked going the way of “Nineveh and Tyre” if they forgot the religious basis of their civilization: “God of our fathers, known of old/Lord of our far-flung battle-line,/Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/Dominion over palm and pine—/Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/Lest we forget—lest we forget!” (Read more.)