Tea at Trianon: The Second Coming

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, March 1, 2024

The Second Coming

From Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern:

A sense of doom has always been part of the human condition, of course. How could it not? Order always succumbs to chaos. Written into history is a tale of cataclysm. Written into the natural world is a story of entropy. Written into the self is awareness of death and decay. If we had no sense of transience and fragility, we would lack a piece of human experience — just as we would lack a piece if we had no sense of invention, progress, and improvement.

Still, some eras seem especially prone to a feeling of dissolution and dismay, with others given over to pride and progress. What is interesting about the 19th and 20th centuries is that they seemed to have both. Even as it climbed from height to height, the modern age was haunted by a sense that order — beauty, truth, the ceremonies of innocence — were being overwhelmed by some new barbarism. An old order was giving way to something new and strange.

“This Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,” as T.S. Eliot imagines the Magi saying at the death of the pagan age and birth of the Christian, after they had seen the Christ child. “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to C.P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” and Eliot’s own The Waste Land, plenty of modern poems hold a sense of a collapsing age, the failure of order and meaning. And the most famous, the most often quoted, may be “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). (Read more.)