Tea at Trianon: Scottish Gothic

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

Saturday, May 15, 2021

Scottish Gothic

From New Alba:

Russell Kirk did not like science fiction. Or, at least, he seems to have thought that everything done in the genre after H.G Wells was superfluous and derivative: artificers following artists. Although he might acknowledge the speculative intelligence that shines through Wells’ adventure stories (which all good science fiction has), he found this kind of writing inherently limited. For Kirk, modern science fiction was hampered by its materialism and mechanistic view of nature; its curiosity about the far-flung rocks in the inhuman wastes of the solar system and its ignorance of the soul. Literary interest (let alone real belief) in “martians and jovians” is what modern man resorted to after Heaven and Hell slipped from his imagination and he began looking for something, anything, to colour the wan universe now it had been drained of the lamb’s blood. To save his heart from the desiccation that follows from the knowledge that reality is mere atom and space—endless granularity and emptiness —he imagines that there is life clinging to those rocks, peeping at us through nebulas with technology that ignites the same wonder that his ancestors once derived from the transformation at Cana.
Which is why his preferred genre was the ghost story. Often relegated with science-fiction to the dusty shelf of unserious literature by the kind of reader who reads James Joyce and nothing else (and then misunderstands him), Kirk preferred the elder of these poor brothers because, while the two are usually (and nobly) intended to delight and entertain, the ghost story feeds, rather than destroys, man’s spiritual nature. Consonant with a Christian view of reality, the ghost story derives its power to move and chill from the idea (as comforting as it is disturbing) that there is life after the body’s death. But it isn’t simply this metaphysical difference between science fiction and the ghost story (or gothic writing as a whole) that made the Catholic Kirk prefer the latter, but rather the moral ramification of this metaphysic. Involve as they do hauntings that follow on from catastrophes and great sins, and evil represented as a powerful supernatural force, gothic tales are the supreme literary expression of the Christian sensibility. The world of gothic fiction is not only fallen but haunted with the idea of inevitable retribution; they present evil as the supreme fact of worldly existence and the necessity of great strength to resist it.
And it is a Scot who stands among the first rate in the genre. Although he was probably an atheist, Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories are a compelling bit of evidence for the claim that he never really escaped from the pessimism and obsession with man’s bestial side that marked the Calvinism of his Edinburgh upbringing. While this might be commonplace in Stevenson's criticism, it’s an indispensable fact for anyone trying to grasp the nature of his particular style of horror. The moral climate of his early years was the perfect condition for a sort of second sight to germinate inside him, which at the time of full maturity had grown strong enough to allow him to see the darker reaches of human nature that mellower souls must strain to glimpse. The material for gothic fiction is mined from seams in that zone, and Kirk would likely agree that it was Stevenson’s Christ-haunted outlook that let him get at it.
Let’s take his most famous short tale, Jekyll and Hyde. A wayward scientist harbours a lifelong irritation on the subject of man’s duality (part good, part evil: partly divine and partly animal). He invents a drug that will unchain the two sides so the desires and ambitions of each can achieve their goals without frustration. Dr Jekyll’s transformation into Mr Hyde (who “alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil”) becomes irreversible at the end, as the force of all that is base and cruel within his soul inexorably achieves supremacy; once tasted, sin will not be left unindulged, and the sinner slides further down into damnation. The narrative itself follows the growing knowledge of Dr Jekyll’s friend John Utterson, who slowly comes to know the truth about Mr Hyde and his precise relationship to Jekyll—a bloody catastrophe that thrusts onto the living a horrible revelation. (Read more.)