FURTHERMORE
Why I don't wish to be flattered
PETRONELLA WYATT
embers of the royal family were last night waiting for a writ. The writ, which was served by the High Court, claimed that the Duchess of York was not a "gift" but a "loan". It alleged that the royal family had been lent the Duchess on the understand- ing that she would be repaid on demand or "within a reasonable period". The writ requested her immediate return.'
Ah, if only it were as simple as that. If only we could give back the Duchess of York. If only the Duchess were the £100,000 she is alleged to owe Mrs Lily Mahtani, the wife of an Indian business- man. But she is not. We are stuck with the woman. We are stuck with the Princess of Wales, too. There can be no return of these particular goods. They are soiled and nobody wants them back.
We cannot, however, absolve ourselves entirely from blame. The salesman made his sale, as the song goes, and we bought. Not only did we buy these two women, but we are guilty, at the very least, of complicity in their actions. If the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York have decided to become riding companions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it is we who gave them a leg-up.
We live in the age of abasement. By this I do not mean obeisance in the old-fashioned sense of deferring to position or status. I am speaking of the worst kind of false per- sonal flattery; the exaltation of mediocrity, the hype of the unexceptional and the plain.
Let us consider, objectively for once, the Princess and the Duchess. Both women were, and are, intrinsically ordinary. Nei- ther is a Curie or a Garbo. Within a short space of time, however, the media and the public decreed their immortality. Yes, even the Duchess had her day. The Duchess, whose behaviour — or so it was evident to anyone with half an eye — was gross in the extreme, was hailed as 'vivacious' and a breath of fresh air' that would revive the ailing royal family. The Princess of Wales, who bears a passing physical resemblance to Myra Hindley, was lauded as the greatest beauty since Helen.
This, in retrospect, was a mistake. In Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesar asks the pharaoh's tutor what he does. 'I teach men to become kings,' he says. Caesar replies, 'That is very clever of you.' The modern world teaches people how to become self-indulgent monsters. That is very stupid of it. One has only to glance at a gossip column to grasp the size of the prob- lem. Banalities are made brilliant. Ugliness is turned lovely. A woman with the contours of a milk-jug is 'statuesque' and 'volup- tuous'. One whose behaviour is sluttish is `lively' and 'fascinating'. (This tendency was evident recently in the treatment of Mary Furness, the wife of Earl Waldegrave. Miss Furness, who has a rather undistinguished face and figure, was described nonetheless as a 'great beauty'.) Such euphemisms are endemic in all walks of life. Thus the illiterate become, magically, 'creative' and 'spontaneous'. The bad-tempered and the unco-operative are no longer insufferable, they are persons of `sensitivity'. The dull are wonderfully 'capa- ble' and 'efficient'. The most commonplace and pretentious of films or books is trans- formed into an 'artistic landmark'. It is the ultimate triumph of mediocrity, as if we A reader slowly realising that there was nothing derogatory about the royal family in the paper that day had deliberately set out to create a race peopled entirely by Widmerpools — and succeeded.
One of the culprits is the tendency toward democratic uniformity. Behaviour, taste and appearance are becoming stan- dardised. One of the dangers of uniformity as an aim is that good qualities are easier to destroy than bad ones, and the aim is most easily achieved, therefore, by lowering all standards. This process is made worse by democracy. It seems generally to be held that democracy requires everyone to be treated alike. Thus all are entitled to the same ratio of insincerity. This produces, conversely, a sort of communism of compli- ments, or fascism of flattery.
A product of this habit is the idea that one may behave as one pleases with impunity. There is a tendency, especially among the less well-informed devotees of psychoanalysis such as Miss Susie Orbach, to think that there is no longer any need for stoic self-command. The place of stoicism in modern life is greatly underestimated. When misfortune threatens there are two ways of dealing with the situation: we may try to avoid the misfortune or we may decide we will meet it with fortitude. The former method is admirable where it is pos- sible to employ it without cowardice, but the latter is necessary sooner or later.
To return to Caesar, or rather to the Romans, it was these ancients who got it right. Not only did they fall on their swords — the ultimate form of self-criticism — but they recognised the dangers of personal flattery. The Romans made the vital dis- tinction between the person and the posi- tion. In previous empires everything had depended upon the monarch, but in the Roman Empire the emperor could be mur- dered by the Praetorian Guards and the empire put up for auction with very little disturbance of the government machine.
The Romans seem to have invented the virtue of devotion to the impersonal State, as opposed to loyalty to the person of the ruler. Their concept of devotion to the State has been an essential element in the production of stability in the West. It is one that is in danger of being destroyed, howev- er. The modern cult of flattery is not only the enemy of the monarchy, it is the enemy of a happy and well-balanced society. As for myself, I am sick of being told how beautiful and talented I am.
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