Tea at Trianon: Moral Imagination

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

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Moral Imagination

From Modern Age:

"Moral imagination” is a term of humane letters and politics implying that men and women are moral beings and that the power of the imagination enables them to perceive, beyond mere appearances, a hierarchy of worth and certain enduring truths.
The term appears first to have been employed by Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke speaks of “that generous loyalty to rank and sex,” a “mixed system of opinion and sentiment” that “had its origin in the ancient chivalry.” He continues,

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

In recent years, some popular writers have referred to man as “a naked ape.” That is precisely what man would become, Burke implies, were it not for the gift of the moral imagination. The “barbarous philosophy” of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, Burke declares, “is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings . . . as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”

In Burke’s rhetoric, the civilized being is distinguished from the savage by his possession of this moral imagination. Drawn from centuries of human experience and reflection, these concepts of the moral imagination are expressed afresh from age to age.

Irving Babbitt, in his Democracy and Leadership (1924), contrasts with Burke’s “moral imagination” the “idyllic imagination” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom Burke had called “the insane Socrates of the National Assembly”). Rousseau’s sort of imagination, Babbitt contended, fancies that man is by nature innocent and great-souled, if uncorrupted by church, state, and private property: a fatal delusion. (Read more.)