The Citizen, 1991-01-09, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9, 1991. PAGE 5.
They don't make
snobs like
they used to
Back in the early 18th century, when
Canada was a mere frontier abstraction of
beaver pelts and bad whiskey, England
had a society with more layers than a Black
Forest cake.
If you were at the top it was very, very
comfortable. In 1722, a blue-chip filly by
the name of Charlotte Finch hitched up
with an aging buck by the name of Charles
Seymour. Now Charlotte, being the daugh
ter of the Earl of Nottingham, had pretty
good papers, but the man she chose for a
husband was so aristocratic he made
Queen Victoria look like a table dancer.
Charlers Seymour was the sixth Duke of
Somerset and did not intend to let anyone
forget it for as long as the cerulean
hemoglobin continued to pulse through his
veins. Charles Seymour was a snob - but
he was such an utter, 24-carat snob that
you almost had to forgive him for it. The
story goes that once at a dinner party poor
Charlotte made the mistake of tapping
playfully on her husband’s arm with her
fan. Instantly the Duke stepped back, drew
himself up and fixed his wife with a
Don Juan not
your average man
BY RAYMOND CANON
I’m not sure what prompted this
question but somebody asked me not too
long ago who Don Juan was and what he
was really famous for. All that person knew
was that the good Don had something to do
with love and why was that.
1 think my friend felt that 1 should be
acquainted with every person of any fame
whatsoever who has a foreign name or who
comes from another country. That certainly
is far from the truth but I must admit that
Don Juan is a known quantity in my realm
of things for the simple reason that his
name (not to mention his actions) have
cropped up in international literature over
the past few centures; it would, in fact, be
difficult not to know him.
He is, 1 should point out, a man whose
ability to seduce women was legendary.
The French, some of whom like to think
that this ability resides with them alone,
are going to be terribly annoyed when they
find out that the story of Don Juan
originated not in France but in Spain. The
name itself should be a dead giveaway
since it is certainly Spanish. I’ll even help
you a bit with the pronunciation. In
Spanish the J is pronounced somewhat like
the letter H so you can impress your
friends by pronouncing it correctly as Don
Huan.
But on with the legend. When 1 lived in
Spain, I was told on a number of occasions
that it was the name of a Spaniard who
lived in the Middle Ages and whose real
name was Don Juan Tenorio. The first
author that we know of to treat the subject
of his adventures, or should we call them
misadventures, is Tirso da Molina who
described Don Juan in his “Burlador
(Rascal) of Seville." You probably realize
even without being told that this writer is
not what could be called a household word
and so retention of his name is not
obligatory. 1 can’t help observing in
passing that, if Seville is the home of such
a rascal as Don Juan, it is also the home of
that most famous of barbers, Figaro. It’s
too bad that somebody didn’t get around to
haughty, withering stare.
“Madame” he hissed, “my first wife
was a Percy, and she never took such a
liberty.”
Ah, me. They just don’t make jerks like
that anymore.
As a matter of fact, they haven’t been
making them for some time. Up until the
First World War the British aristocracy
comprised perhaps the wealthiest - and
certainly the vainest - ruling class this
poor old planet’s ever had to put up with.
They were for the most part “landed
gentry” pedigreed pantywaists with thou
sands of acres of estates and land holdings
and not the slightest idea of what to do with
it all. Most of them disdained the idea of
getting their elegant fingers soiled in
business, which meant that most of them
faded away, nibbled to death by taxes and
creeping democracy.
By the end of the First World War the
common British folk weren’t bowing and
scraping in the presence of aristocracts
anymore. British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George dismissed the House of Lords
as merely “ordinary men, chosen acciden
tally from among the unemployed”. He
further devalued the upper class by
announcing that knighthoods, baronetcies
and peerages were for sale. Henceforth,
anybody could put a Lord or Lady in front
of their monicker -- providing they had the
scratch. Britain was transforming itself
from a nation of forelock-tuggers to a
nation of shopkeepers. Aristocracy was a
bad investment. “A fully equipped duke”
grumbled Lloyd George, “costs as much as
writing a book about the two of them.
However, back to the story. Why did
Don Juan become so popular? One of the
main reasons is undoubtedly because there
is a bit of him in a lot of men in any country
you can care to mention; such men, like to
see in themselves someone who is success
ful of making an impression with the
opposite sex and, unfortunately, there are
a goodly number of the latter who willingly
or unwillingly find themselves flattered by
all the attention and the rest, as they say, is
history.
Thus it is not surprising that the saga of
Don Juan has been handled by famous
writers in a number of countries. The
illustrious French damatist, Moliere, had a
crack at it as did George Bernard Shaw and
Lord Byron. However the best known work
is not a play or a drama but an opera. If you
would enjoy seeing Don Juan in action and
getting his come-uppance at the end, you
should go and see (hear) it. The opera is by
Mozart and is called Don Giovanni which is
the Italian word for Juan. Don’t worry if
you don’t understand Italian; the music
alone will stick with you. Even though they
Letters to the editor
Crime reporting disguisting
THE EDITOR,
1 am extremely disgusted with the turn
your newspaper has taken. The enclosed
clipping taken from the front page of your
paper (the story regarded a man who
pleaded guilty to sexual assault) is a prime
example of where you are leading your
readers. 1 would think your goal would be
to uplift, inspire, give leadership, to your
readers. But that kind of “news” is only
degrading.
1 don’t know the man in question, but
your article on the front page would surely
“help” him to rehabilitate himself, hold up
his face in front of his family. Our society is
trying to help people who are lead astray.
But all your reports of court cases can only
push the victims down into the mud. I had
a stupid mix-up with a traffic ticket this fall
because the cop dated it incorrectly. I could
have gone to court to dispute it, but I didn’t
want to bother. If I had gone and had a
court case, it would have likely been
reported in the paper and 1 would have a
record, as well as feeling embarrassed. So
cancel my subscription, I don’t feel like
two battleships; and dukes are just as great
a terror and they last longer.”
Even the staunch British aristocracy
could not long survive such an onslaught.
By the 1950's it was largely extinct. Gone
forever, people staggering under the
weight of names such as The Honourable
Sir Adolphus Frederick Octavius Liddell;
Conrad Le Despenser Roden Noel, or, my
personal favourite -- I would surrender my
Beatles record collection to be at a party
and hear the butler sonorously announce
the arrival of “Admiral of the Fleet Sir
Reginald Aylmer Ranfurley Plunkett-
Ernle-Erle-Drax.”
These people really lived! And supped
tea with their pinkie fingers crooked just
so! And now they’re all gone.
Well, virtually all gone. A few blue
bloods survive, but they pay a price in
shabbiness. The Earl of Pembroke is in
pornographic films. Lord Teviot punches
tickets on a London bus. Lord Normanton
models trenchcoats for Burberry and Lord
Simon Conyngham dishes out potato salad
in an English delicatessen.
Some claim British aristocracy is alive,
just dormant, but journalist Nancy Mitford
thinks the question is irrelevant. “An
aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken
whose head has been cut off” says
Mitford. “It may run about in a lovely way,
but in fact it’s dead.”
And good riddance, I suppose. Better to
have a Lord folding serviettes than bullying
serfs.
Plus, look on the bright side: what a role
model for Canadian Senate Reform!
sing in Italian, the story takes place in
Seville and follows the plot generally used
by writers. Don Giovanni seduces a young
woman, her father objects, fights a duel
with the Don and loses his life. In the
course of events, the Don’s servant,
Leporella, goes into a comic song relating
the exploits of his master. The Don, he
sings, has conquered 640 women in Italy,
231 in Germany, 100 in France, only 91 in
Turkey but an astounding 1,003 in Spain.
Since that is the list, I can only assume that
he never got into Switzerland. They come,
says Leporello, from all walks of life and all
shapes and sizes.
In the end Don Giovanni has dinner with
the statue of the dead father. You didn’t
know that statues could talk but in operas
they can. This one goes a step further by
seeing to it that the Don makes a quick
descent into Hell and the opera ends with
the sentiment that “thus do the wicked
find their end.”
If you know any modern Don Juans, you
might suggest that they see the opera, if
only to let them learn what might happen
to them.
spending money on a paper to learn who
had to go to court. At the time I wrote
about Jeanne Saldivar’s car accident and
death, I complained then about seven cases
at one time. You did not take the idea
seriously. As to the rest of the paper I’ll
miss it. So we both suffer. Good luck
without court cases. Really, they are not
news, in a community sense. Learn!
Mrs. Anna Dolmage
Londesboro.
Kids and sexuality
Continued from page 4
The “bimbo garbage goddess” is
definitely making a statement about socie
ty and the church with its anti-sexual and
anti-pleasure stance and the suppressive
and regressive attitudes toward women
and their sexuality.
MTV and other stations refused to show
the video mainly out of fear of the threats
to boycott, which has been successful in
Continued on page 11
Letter
from the
editor
Right on the money
BY KEITH ROULSTON
Probably no year in recent memory has
begun so bleakly for Canadians who care
for their country.
The country is in a recession that just
might become a depression unless things
turn around soon; we face a new tax just at
the time when we hardly need something
to drag down the economy more; we see a
lot of things we counted on always being
there like the CBC and railway trains and
post offices, suddenly threatened; we could
be facing a war within days; and the break
up of Canada through the withdrawal of
Quebec seems not only possible in 1990,
but highly likely.
Sometimes in such cases it’s good to get
a view from a little distance. Richard
Gwyn, who writes for the Toronto Star from
London, England recently gave something
of that distanced views in a column in that
paper.
Mr. Gwyn came home to Canada for
Christmas and found things in many ways
as bad as he had heard from across the
ocean. With a prime minister who has little
credibility, respect or trust there is a
hollowness at the nation’s core that’s
demoralizing, he said, and yet when he
flew back to England after the holidays he
has a pervere sense of optimism.
From meeting with people, he said, he
was struck by a new sense in the
English-speaking parts of Canada. Many of
the people he met showed a kind of
defiance to make this country work even if
Quebec leaves. There was for the first
time, he sensed, a real “nation” growing
in English Canada. Canadians, he says
have always spoken about two nations but
in reality there was only a nation in
Quebec, a solidarity that made Quebecers
realize who they are and be contented
living as that. The rest of Canada is a
“mushy mosaic”.
Since the mid-70's, he said, anglophones
in Canada felt a sense of guilt over past
discrimination against francophones and
became “inhibited, inarticulate and defen
sively aggressive”. But now Gwyn sensed
a new feeling that people no longer felt
guilt. “Rightly or wrongly, English Cana
dians believe that they have done their
national duty, that they have been fair to
Quebec (if not to native peoples). Hence,
the sentiment of repressed fury - I kept
finding it just beneath the surface of
conversations like a coiled spring -- that
English Canada’s attempt last summer to
say ‘Yes’ to Canada by rejecting Meech
Lake should have been twisted into a ‘No’
to Quebec. Instead, the ‘No’ was to an
accord English Canadians believed would
dismantle Canada on the instalment plan.”
In all the millions of words that have
been written in the aftermath of the Meech
failure no one has ever summed up so
neatly the truth about the situation. Mr.
Gwyn has certainly caught my own
frustration and that 1 have sensed from
many people I know. We have come to a
state of resignation like the spouse who
doesn’t want a marriage to end but realizes
that he/she can’t go along with the
changes that would be required to keep it
together, especially knowing that those
changes would probably be only a short
term patch on a long-term problem.
Mr. Gwyn goes on to touch another sore
point. “On the evidence, Quebecers have
n’t a clue about what’s going on in English
Cnaada,” he says. “In the way of all
minorities they are self-absorbed. Their
opinion-forming intellectuals are notor
iously narcissistic and tend to talk, if at all.
to English Canada’s yesterday men, or to
those politicians, officials, academics,
journalists whose national unity mindsets
were set in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Mr. Gwyn says that there is a risk
Quebec will become committed to separa
tion for the wrong reason, not because
Quebecers want it, but because they still
feel they can wring concessions from the
rest of the country by the threat of
separation. “The post-guilt English Cana-
Continued on page 8