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To Kneel or not to Kneel

Colin Mclnnes

When the letter arrives from Admiralty House (or whencever it is) inviting you to accept a New Year honour, do you dignifiedly accept, or disdainfully reject? This is a question hard to answer unless experience affords the real reply, for nothing is easier to mankind than rejecting temptations that have not been offered.

My maternal grandmother's first cousin, Rudyard Kipling, even when pressed personally by his monarch, declined all such offers. Throughout his career he collected a vast wardrobe of doctoral gowns, but deemed his status as an artist could not otherwise be ennobled—thereby proving, as indeed his whole art does if read attentively, that he was never the Tory laureate of popular supposition.

I must say I admire his gesture, and wish more English artists had been content with wreaths of laurel. The rot really set in with Tennyson, the first artist nobleman, and though these dizzy heights have since only been reached, I think, in the absurd case of Lord Leighton, the lesser honours soon proliferated. My grandmother's father, Edward Burne-Jones, succumbed to a baronetcy at the kind insistence of Mr Gladstone—the family legend has it that his wife Georgiana, a staunchly Ruskinian radical, disapproved, but that his son Philip, later to be the academic portrait painter, looked at his pre-Raphaelite father wistfully.

I feel Burne-Jones was diminished by this appendage because insofar as he was an authentic artist (which is perhaps not very far), that fact surely couldn't be improved upon. I also conceive the artist as being a personality not exactly hostile to society but, since inevitably a critic of it, one who must treat it with distinct reserve. But evidently great men have thought otherwise, for Titian and Rubens, among so many others, were ennobled, and the late Baron (James) Ensor had his statue, thus describing him outside the Ostend municipal buildings during his lifetime. On the other hand, one simply cannot imagine a Chevalier Paul Cezanne, a Conde de Picasso or even a Sir William Shakespeare.

Non-ennobling honours like the Order of Merit and Companionship of Honour are generally considered a judicious compromise. My grandfather, lor instance, in His youth a disciple of William Morris, rejected a Lloyd George knighthood (but kept the prime ministerial letter in an autograph album), but later settled, in his old age, for an Om. This gave him enormous pleasure, but his disreputable grandson was prouder of his forbear's chair of poetry at Oxford.

Yet even these more plebeian appendages seem to me to constitute a loss of true distinction, rather than a gain. This feeling is certainly not shared by my fellow countrymen. Most men (women rather less, I think) adore belonging to exclusive in-groups, bedecking themselves with orders, and placing words and letters round about their names; and serious arguments can be advanced to attest the social value of this custom.

The first is that service to society merits society's formal recognition and, by this, binds the man honoured to even greater loyalty. The disadvantage here is that conferring an honour is, basically, a political act (I mean even when it is not awarded for directly political services), so that the individual's freedom—and duty;—perpetually to reform society is thereby curtailed. In the case, for instance, of the grandfather referred to, he evolved from a militant Morrisian socialist to an acceptive Tory, and his Om set the seal on what I would ungenerously regard as his defeat.

A better justification is that the hope of honours does keep men honest—at least financially speaking. I expect that the incorruptibility of a civil service, for example, is related to the expectation of these distinctions. Yet I believe the promise of honours does not ensure moral courage (though it may moral rectitude) and probably even stultifies it. And I would like to add-at the risk of perpetual banishment from these chaste columns—that a civil service financially corruptible is frequently, if less efficient, more humane. I feel more respect or, at any rate, fondness, for customs officers to whom one can pass some, say, pesetas, than I do for those po-faced immaculates who greet us at London Airport, and whom we all love so dearly.

As I contemplate each New Year those very un-knightly faces, horn-rims on nose and jowls reposing comfortably on laundered collars, I wonder whether they do not feel the currency of the nobility they are entering is now somewhat devalued. Of course, the first founders of many a nobly ancient house doubtless Yet when one reflects what multitudes of lordlings there now are, and for what, as in the massive Lloyd George creations, they were ennobled, let alone that the creation of life peers undermines the whole pleasant fantasy anyway, one may ask, does anyone really want to be made a peer? The almost universal answer undoubtedly is yes, since this ridiculously archaic confraternity still possesses, if neither great power, talent nor authentic glamour, a kind of startling allure. To be confronted, at a party, by someone called Daphne Ponting, and to understand instinctively a noble prefix hovers about her person in the uneasy air, is to be brought up with a mild jerk. 1 confess to feeling this myself—though would add I experience an equivalent frisson when encountering, unexpectedly, an eminent jockey, variety artiste, or liver on immoral earnings.

The fact is few men and women can bear anonymity, especially in a corrupt age like seemed much the same, and I am convinced their descendants grew to look aristocratic simply because they wanted to, rather as bishops, somehow, end up by resembling bishops. (In solving this mystery of the acquisition, from base origins, of an ultimately noble mien, it is instructive to compare portraits of succeeding generations: an evolution in slightly degenerate refinement can be observed as heir succeeds heir.) our own when to be a "personality" is thought more vital than to be a person. Few lands seem to escape from the disease—the Russians are loaded with stars and Herodoms as bountifully as the decadent West. It is true most peoples have found substitutes for the Almanach de Gotha—though not, conspicuously, many of the new African nations which remain as riddled with hereditary Obas, Timis and Sarduanas as do we.

We all deplore (or do we?) the inhibiting class structure that still blights our land, yet contemplate acceptively, or with cordial or envious admiration, the annual honours list, not realizing, it seems, that this is a skeleton round which the whole irritant of class divisions forms the sickly body. Of politicians one cannot expect that they will not succumb, though so long as Sir Winston Churchill remained a commoner one might have had some faint hope. As for the artists, I do wish the fashion for staying Mr Wells or Mr Shaw or Mr Kipling would return, and that our actors in particular—who, heaven knows, collect disproportionate adulation anyway—would rest content with their honourably traditional role of rogues and vagabonds, and bow graceful excuses when tempted to become knights or dames.

Since these notes have taken on a vaguely autobiographical flavour—I am evidently determined to get in on the act somehow—I would conclude by describing the narrow escape of my dear father. James Campbell Mclnnes was, in Edwardian days, a noted baritone singer who performed Ralph Vaughan-Williams' earliest songs, and for whom Graham Peel wrote most of his. He was a working class wonder boy, gifted with a divine voice and a somewhat demoniac temperament, and he made the great, if inevitable, mistake of marrying into the intellectual bourgeoisie. (I once asked my mother why she accepted his manifestly disastrous proposal; she replied most disarmingly, "he was the first man who asked me".)

Anyway, retiring after a sensational divorce and multitudinous accompanying disasters to the haven of Toronto, Canada, he there embarked on a second and most meritorious career as grand old man of Canadian song. Although they made him a professor I think he always hankered for some more notable honour; but as Canada has sensibly rejected all such nonsense, the chances seemed slim until the Italian consul, grateful for his presidency of the Friends of Italy, announced that Mussolini proposed to make him a Commendatore.

Sadly for my dad's ambition, the Duce then invaded Abyssinia, and feeling in Canada was such that the ceremony had to be postponed. With each fresh folly of the Italian dictator it had to be deferred again and again, so that my poor father died plain mister, as his second son will.