Tea at Trianon: Trust Across the Ages

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 9, 2020

Trust Across the Ages

From Dr. Esolen at American Greatness:

Tradition gave the Romans a life on earth beyond the termini of birth and death. They were violent and fractious people, but the centuries of the republic before the assassination of Tiberius Gracchus (d. 133 B.C.), itself a dreadful breach of tradition that inaugurated a century of disorder and tyranny, are remarkable for there being no civil wars, no burning cities, and no political murders. We may take as an emblem of impiety and perverted trust the proscriptions decreed by the young Octavian and Mark Antony in 43 B.C., when each of these competitors for leadership in Rome bargained death against death. So Octavian looked aside as Antony had his hated enemy Cicero, the last great representative of the republican tradition, beheaded en route from his country villa to Rome.

Here the American Progressive may object that tradition is well and good for keeping things stable, but it does not get new things done. It is a ball and chain.

Not so. Tradition is productive. It liberates. Imagine Titian attempting ab ovo to paint “The Man with a Glove” (1520). It is a bold and innovative painting; no one in the Middle Ages would have conceived of such a portrait, or, if the idea had come to him, would have cared to execute it. Who wants a painting whose main color is black? Who wants a painting of an individual man, sober, taciturn, looking off into who knows where? But with every stroke of his brush, Titian was working along lines set for him by Giotto and Masaccio long before, by Leonardo and Raphael in his youth, and by the great Venetian colorists, the brothers Bellini.

No inventing of wheels was necessary. What made Milton possible, if not Tasso and Spenser near his own time, Ariosto and Dante farther off, and Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid from the ancients? Yet Milton is distinctively himself, not least because he is in conversation with the giants.

When we drag to the earth those who came before us, breaking trust with the past, smashing their forms and treading them into the dust, we punish ourselves in the act. We too come down. We amputate our lives. We instruct our children to betray us in turn. We no longer know who we are or where we are going. (Read more.)