Tea at Trianon: Back to the Books

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, August 12, 2022

Back to the Books

From The Classical Difference:

It’s true that our schools are full of bright kids receiving a first-rate education. And it’s true that Crime and Punishment is an incredible novel. But it’s also true that giving it to a fifth grader, no matter how bright, would be a mistake. To rush a fine thing is to ruin it. We do not microwave a filet mignon. No young Christian should meet Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor without first having met the claws of Aslan in The Horse and His Boy. (We want our kids to engage with the problem of suffering, not be crushed by it.) Let kids first learn to appreciate the poetic structures of Robert Frost or Gerard Manley Hopkins before tackling ancient Greek epics. Give them Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare before introducing them to King Lear himself, screaming Elizabethan curses into the storm. The good books contain simpler elements of the great books. The good books can allow us to focus on one or two elements of literature at a time, whereas the great books give us layer upon layer upon layer all at once: the plot and characters, the similes and metaphors, the rhymes and meters, the themes and ideas. (Read more.)