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COMMENTARY
April 9, 2002
Lift up our hearts
What is there left to say about our Queen Mum? That she was "condescending". But I mean this word in the way Jane Austen used it not in the way it is used today. It is an idea long out of fashion and I fear that it will be buried with Her Majesty in St. George's Chapel Windsor. To be the consort of the late King and mother of the reigning Queen is to rank fairly high in the social order. It is to be visible to but remote from the great masses of mankind. But it is a relationship with them and it must go well or poorly. The ability to "condescend" in the old sense is the ability to see downward and fully empathize. Not to live as the other side lives but to understand them to imaginatively project yourself into their world and not to reject them. To be high but not "mighty"; to avoid becoming spiritually and morally isolated. To realize one has insuperable advantages in one's station in life and therefore extraordinary obligations; that one must reach down benignly -- the great towards the small. Love is like this: a general case of imaginative projection. You cannot love someone without among many other things seeing yourself through the beloved's eyes -- in pride and in shame. At its very least charm requires the warmth of either hatred or affection often the two commingling. The charmless (in the extreme the autistic) lack this warmth. There have been queens of the realm who were positively autistic; our Queen Mother was happily at the other extreme. Lovers are never equal. It is a dance between them; sometimes the one will lead sometimes the other but equality in love would be a three-legged race. That "condescension" could be of the essence in a loving relationship between people is something I think only our ancestors understood. It is the willingness of the taller to stoop of the shorter to stretch towards one another. This is already getting awkward the whole idea of aristocracy is alien to our post-modern egalitarian minds. The idea of "nobility" that goes with aristocracy is also unfortunately some distance beyond us. We are all fairly classless today we have all adapted to whatever degree to the lower-class compulsion of sneering; and it is hard for us to fully imagine people entirely above us or entirely below. To have "the common touch" is the Kiplingesque way to put it a phrase that does survive today although it too is losing its meaning. We live in a world so thoroughly common there is nothing we don't touch. Likewise it has become hard to remember the freedom that came from not pretending to be either above or below one's station. For behind this old-world "condescension" was an easy acceptance of "things as they are" things as they work themselves out in society (for every society will tend to stratify in the course of time one way or another). No one knows his place any more. Except that for the restricted purpose of pageantry I see the British can still pull it off. We (I mean especially to include we Canadians who are British by constitutional inheritance and remain subjects of the same British Crown) have been able to do one more parade -- with all the order of precedence retained or reassembled for the Queen Mother's funeral. I and many million others have been mesmerized by the beauty of this spectacle this parade. An awed and loving Canadian from the country to which the Queen Mother referred as: "My beloved Canada." The way in which it wended -- to and from Westminster Hall for the lying in state -- included everyone found a place for everyone. In Wordsworth's phrase: "Road on which all might come and go that would." In Chaucer's: "And specially from every shires ende / Of Engelond." The doors at Westminster Hall kept open through the night for the long lines for the people waiting 12 hours to pay their humble respects. This was an example of "condescension" in the old manner. For implicit in that old idea of aristocracy the old feudal bond was this warm promise of inclusion. There must be a place for everyone in the parade from the highest dignitary of state to the lowest "street urchin" -- no one no one must be forgotten. For this elderly lady was not once Queen of Clarence House but the Queen of everybody. I do not think that the egalitarian idea is as remarkably inclusive; though it has its alternative virtues. But it tends to hive off abandon anything that can't remain in some sort of proximity to the middle to the average. What is "larger than life" for us -- pop singers movie stars talk-show hosts charismatic politicians -- is in turn an immense inflation of the average. Some by no means all of our stars feel the call to behave according to their station to use what they are for good in the world to repay adulation. And often enough they do it in a state of total confusion about what the good might be. Still some try to be an example to their fans: to "condescend" to them. Most merely try to be "accessible" which is another idea entirely. And even royalty today must work within this new standard of fame must behave not as symbols of state but as stars in a mass culture; regardless what they might to be. Because that is the way they are received. Everything that has gone visibly wrong with the monarchy is in some way tied to the recent evolution of the idea of "fame". The Queen Mother was not accessible at all. Well I'm sure the courtiers created a website for her I refuse to look for it. To the end she refused to cultivate the post-modern relationship to become "familiar" or "common" as those words used to be used -- in disapproval. She would appear to the public in her own garments in her own role; not in some other one such as favourite granny . She did not envision herself playing a part in some vast situation comedy. Only as living symbol of state and nation of continuity between future and past. In the privacy of her own thoughts I'm sure she never considered herself to be a "famous person". For the old idea even of "fame" carried different implications. Fame was not a natural accompaniment of a high and visible station; it was instead what came from remarkable accomplishments. The "famous" did great and good works the "infamous" did low and bad ones. The highest in society were less "famous" than "brave" -- a word that meant essentially gorgeously attired. It was to the aristocracy the "brave" that one looked for condescension; for the example of nobility in behaviour as well as for favours. They weren't required to do famous things far less infamous. They were only expected to behave nobly. The Queen Mother always set this standard for herself and would have been embarrassed had someone suggested she had accomplished anything in her life. "I do my part she once told someone who in turn told me, like any soldier." (Like any fireman or policeman rushing into the WTC -- our most recent example of "nobility".) She did what was called for according to her station never flinched from it. "Noblesse oblige." That is condescension. The Queen Mother was born into Scottish high society but far below her eventual station and took her lumps as she adjusted to life within royalty. Like a budding Diana she gave an interview in 1923 while not yet married to the then Duke of York that caused a stir and made him angry. The damage was done by referring to him publicly by his nickname Bertie . She was not yet a royal and did not immediately sense her lapse. But once it was explained to her behind the majestic curtains she never gave an interview again to those wicked journalists who love to set you up. Not to flinch to take your lumps this was of the moment with Her Majesty's gift and function. I am put in mind of a little book entitled Manners that my own grandmother gave me as a child. By coincidence this grandmother now long deceased looked very much like the Queen Mother and was born in nearly the same year. The book was printed in 1912. The book itself which I have sadly misplaced was good for a laugh when I was a teenager. "Modern" for its times it gave practical instructions. For instance a favourite passage addressed to young women told how to ride a bicycle without appearing to be sexually available. (Helpful tip: fight the impulse to fling the thing down and fan yourself under a tree.) It wasn't the sort of book that would have been presented to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon -- as she then was -- for I'm confident she was raised in a household where such literature was unnecessary where the teaching could be done more easily by example. To the end she lived a life in which she could only learn by experience no book could set one right. But my grandmother's book was still a little reflection of that higher society on the scale of a pocket mirror; a middle class effort if you will to ape the manners and morals of the people above your station. Though usefully adapted to things like bicycles. It was a noble little book as I came to see later. For while much of the content would now be seriously dated -- table settings among other issues much simplified today -- it conveyed an intention that was very fine. Implicit within every statement in the book was a conception of civilization an aspiration to raise ourselves up. Not simply to "get ahead" but to rise out of the slovenly condition of being barbaric. And to become more truly oneself -- in a sense no different from that in which the Queen is the Queen. To master one's station. The book even included instructions on how to condescend: on how men must behave towards the "weaker sex" women to their servants men and women alike towards the poor. (Do you think a contemporary "Miss Manners" would remind you to set aside a portion of your wages and your time for "charitable endeavours"?) More than this: it reminded in the preface that "the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life". It told the young reader that there was no rule of etiquette or society that could not be breached in an emergency or for a higher cause; that we must never "stand on ceremony" when the good Lord calls upon us. That the highest kind of behaviour is spontaneous but that it flows from a spirit disciplined by the rules rising towards what the rules signify. One makes strange associations. In my own recollection from afar the Queen Mother was a kind of embodiment of that little book my grandmother gave me. It was as if she were the spirit in the book disciplined by its rules yet somehow leaping out of the pages. We have read so much in the last week or so to remind us of events such as her visits to the East End of London during the War. She received praise then we echo praise now. But have you seen that picture of her smiling exactly like a daisy in the spring sun bouncing with her little feet right over the rubble? Stepping up and over the rubble pile? My God what spirit in this little woman! Everyone else in the frame seems to belong in an historical photograph but she leaps out of the frame. She is not simply the centre of attraction: her little heart is leaping out of the frame! That smile which lifted everyone's spirits: the people around her are in awe. For sure I wasn't there; but in her smile I am right in the picture. There is -- there is! -- something Christ-like in the ability to walk through the rubble spreading good cheer. The rubble all freshly made from the latest historical disaster. To look those East Enders in the eye and lift their hearts. No I am not comparing Her Majesty the late King's consort with Jesus Christ. Nor am I suggesting she was any kind of saint. Tippling on gin and dubonnet (the magical elixir that creates centenarians) betting on the horses running a properly royal overdraught doing imitations behind people's backs. She was eminently a real and very lovable person -- and I'm sure after all the anecdotes we've heard that we don't know the half of all the mischief for which she had such a delicious propensity. For all the repetition of these scenes I am astounded to realize that they really happened. A great shaft of light she was in our dusky world. She condescended; we lifted up our hearts. (Christ himself was a gesture of condescension.) Well I lost my little book of Manners -- nowhere to be found. So in my mind I am burying it with Her Majesty our Queen Mum in the Chapel at Windsor. It is the only thing they'll let me put in this invisible relic from my own heart. In my imagination I have put it in her coffin to bury it with her in the deep vault. God bless our beloved Queen! God love her and keep her with your angels above! Lift up our hearts to heaven! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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