Tea at Trianon: Reflections on a Vanishing Ideal

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

Friday, October 15, 2021

Reflections on a Vanishing Ideal

From City-Journal:

When I started traveling in planes in the late 1960s, most men still wore suits and ties for the flight. This may sound like a traditional complaint of the older generation finding the younger generation wanting, and it is, but it’s also a regret for something fundamental that is being lost—has been lost—in our culture: the differentiation among ages. And the world needs more distinctions, not fewer, even if we value them all. We can like equally Schubert’s Lieder and Jerry Lee Lewis and Rodgers and Hart and Taylor Swift without homogenizing them.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition for “man” is “An adult male human being,” though that description is more recently being challenged by other definitions of both gender and sex.

The Four Seasons sang “Walk Like A Man.” But how does a man walk? John Wayne (a man’s man) sashayed with a feminine step. A blog post advertises “How to Stop Being Mr. Niceguy and Command Respect.” No More Mr. Nice Guy could be an admonition to a woman, too.

A headline in this past Sunday’s Daily News announced the new Daniel Craig Bond movie as “A celebration of the true male ideal.”

“The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us [women] as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children,” says Mrs. Allonby in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance. “He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims.” Since it is Oscar Wilde, we are to assume the virtuous view is the opposite. In Wilde, virtue is always on the side of the rebel against received opinion.

“A man is a god in ruins,” Emerson suggested. Some on both sides of the Gender Wars might agree. Of course, Emerson was using man in its former (and now disreputable) view as including man and woman. As is Plato’s man (which includes women): “a biped without features.”

In underworld slang, a man—The Man—is an authority figure, usually there to keep men from behaving like boys.

My wife thinks that Michelangelo’s David is a male ideal. Not a muscled man like Arnold Schwarzenegger—though she gives the former governor of California points for intelligence. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man has also been a model for what a man looks like. It does not look like Ryan Reynolds. He’s a wonderful actor, but a boyish wonderful actor. (Read more.)