How To Be An Aristocrat

This essay is from 29 December 2013. Read in the light of further developments, does it seem less true, or more so?

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Porcelain figure, possibly Staffordshire. Unfortunately I have no recollection as to where on the Internet I found this. But it’s beautiful, isn’t it?

Forget the car that wants servicing, the lock that needs fixing, and the fact that your piano expertise has never exceeded ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Tear yourself away from your own concerns for a moment to consider the predicament of someone you will never be —thankfully or not. Consider Prince William, knowing that he must sooner or later choose a wife — most of us consider this optional — and once that is done, he must  sooner rather than later reproduce (most of us also consider this optional). 

Furthermore, his marriage must not end — and, preferably, given the foregoing, his love must not die. His bride must not give him, and the Queen, and the nation, Diana Mark II. For a man that has every advantage in life, which is to say an eye-goggling mind-boggling fathomless privilege, that is sure a lot of albatross around his neck.

When you’re a prince with everything, how do you get someone to fall in love with you? For preference, you’d like an aristocrat, or someone rich, or both. But a rich aristocrat, let’s call her Isabella, does not need your wealth — she could marry anybody, and probably will — nor does she need the cachet you bring. Yes, it’s nice to be in the select group of females known in history as ‘princess’, and possibly ‘queen’, but at what price? Nothing the woman may do can be in the least bit controversial, or spicy, or pathbreaking, or experimental, or racy. Everything must reflect well on the royal house. Everything must have the approval of the Queen. To be a princess, one has to be faultless. So there goes the bellydance career, the edgy photography, the political novel, the whimsical and fruity puppet show (should a princess ever be interested in that sort of thing). Everything must be tailored and strait-laced and impeccable from now on. There are very few genuine aristocrats, I believe, that given a choice would actually stand for that. And then there is the tiny, itsy bitsy little fact, curled up in the very corner of this picture, that a prince should be fanciable, too. He should have not only the dash of the nobility but the come-hither look, style, smell of the sexually desirable male. He should be a little bit rakish, and his laugh in private should be dirty. From what I can tell at this plebeian distance, I don't think that Prince William is a prince with a dirty laugh. (Harry is; but Harry has his own drawbacks as a lover: a topic for another time or maybe never.)

To join the royal family is in some ways to enter a gilded cage, as many people have noted to the point of cliché. Who could relish such a prospect? A genuine aristocrat, who already has the world as her octopus and doesn't want unrewarding constraint? Perhaps not. But a well set-up middle-class girl, rich enough to play with the playboys but ordinary enough for social elevation to be a major goal in life: there you have a real possibility. In the case of Kate, you have someone from a greatly aspiring, socially climbing family — and I am told, by someone that knows about these things, that the deepest hope of a true bourgeois is to imitate or better yet join the upper class. Well, Princess William has achieved that with bells on, has she not? Even if the Queen, for reasons known best to herself, chooses to give her family titles that make them all sound less than what they actually are. Only a blueblood, entitled to be called ‘prince’ and ‘princess’, would agree to slum it for the sake of a lower profile and a soothing humility by going around as a mere ‘duke’ and ‘duchess’. 

Kate and William have something that I would not wish on most couples, and that is finality. Love relationships need the oxygen of doubt, of open-endedness, of the chance that things could end, and of the feeling that every day you choose the marriage, instead of knowing that you have entered the human equivalent of a Venus’s flytrap. There is an understanding, held by the public and also by themselves, that William may never have anyone but Kate, however and if love ever fades, however and if attraction dims, and all the rest of it. And Kate is stuck with William: her bed is made.

Yet of all couples, I’m not worried for them. Not only do they have every salve and smoothing that money and status can buy — there will be no arguing over the children’s education, over whether they buy the leather or the feather sofa, over whether it is a good idea or not a good idea to build a conservatory, or who will pick up the dog poop — because they can each have what they want beyond the dreams of Nero, who said when his ostentatiously luxurious palace was built, ‘now I can live like a human being’.

Kate and Will are likely to succeed precisely because she is not a native-born princess, but an immigrant to the royal tribe. She will always be some way in awe of William as the blueblood that elevated her beyond anyone's guess or imagining: the ultimate lottery win. In some primeval way, he is what she will never be, despite the diamonds, gold, and ermine: the real thing. He, in turn, will always look at her as his beloved because he chose her to be his princess: she is not an aristocrat that was bound to have that sort of life, anyway, but a girl that deserved to be a princess -- and he made her so. He chose her not because she was most entitled but because she was best. And he, through his bigness of heart and generosity of vision, was capable of recognising that she was best. In marrying her, he demonstrates his judgement. In ennobling her, he thereby also ennobles himself, in the only way left to one born to be king. They will now spend their lives together in this kind of hyper-romantic dynamic, wherein he judges her as best and she confirms that his judgement is right, to the benefit of them both.

But the story doesn’t end there. Kate may have to curtsey to her royal cousins when not in William’s presence, in accordance with the Queen's protocol, but by giving birth to the royal heir, she has become a princess in a reality beyond mere title or marriage alone. Her blood has mingled with the blood of a royal prince to create a true royal person, the baby George. The ennobling by marriage is raised and completed by the ennobling that motherhood brings, for a prince of the blood now owes his very existence to her. This is a primitive, atavistic ennobling of a woman through motherhood, which has gone on since the time before history was recorded. Motherhood is the trump card, the final victory. Whatever curtseys are owed, the fact is that Kate is now a princess of greater import than any of the monarch's granddaughters — or her daughter, come to that.

So now the Queen and The Former Kate Middleton — and Kate, let’s face it, is a prettier, comelier, warmer name than Catherine, however ‘regal’ she and Will believe the latter to be — are on a different footing. At the Christmas church service in Sandringham, the Queen was photographed giving Kate a kiss. As well she might: they are the only two women in the English-speaking world that are mothers of future kings. There’s a tie to bind them.

Diana’s dress was a design disaster

It's been nearly 39 years -- so let's confess. Diana's wedding dress was badly designed.

Why? 

The whole thing was massively overblown. Apparently, knowing that millions of TV viewers (more than three-quarters of a billion, as it turned out) would have to tell her from the guests and from her groom, for that matter, the designer thought that her train should be 8 miles long and the gauze veil over her -- emphasising her chastity? -- should be fountain-like in its volume, and that her sleeves should be layered and large enough to accommodate the biceps of an Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Viewed from a certain perspective, the dress was a typically 1980s botch. Her bouquet was less a posy than an escutcheon, reaching down her dress in almost Little Shop Of Horrors fashion. (I swear that thing was still in a growth phase even as the wedding proceeded.) The dress itself seemed to emphasise her shoulders, while leaving her lovely neck bare of ornament -- and all at the expense of her chest, which no one was invited to notice. The rest of her was rendered as a triangular meringue. In short, the dress was fussy, frilly, unflattering, and out of proportion. Why did no one see this at the time?

Photo on Wikipedia. Bride or hide?

Well, some did. As one Canadian journalist wrote just after the event, ‘only a monster would suggest that the dress was too much’. Well, I shall be that monster. When your fabric shoulders are broader than your groom's — even with his uniform on — you can be sure that your dress is far too much. No wonder she thought there were three people in her marriage: she began it by wearing enough for two of them.

And then imagine what it would be like to be trapped in that thing, but needing desperately to wee (or pee, for North Americans). How would you negotiate a normal toilet — or indeed ANY toilet, no matter how large the lavatory — with that much fabric getting in the way? You’d need three ladies-in-waiting on three stepladders to lift enough silk for sufficient clearance. Either that, or the world’s longest catheter, held by the ladies-in-waiting like a relay team to empty into the toilet! (No, I do not have prurient interests, but was only propelled into such thoughts by the enormous unmanageability of the dress.)

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Oil painting, 1840s, unknown artist. Sold by 1stDibs. Note the different lace (resembling the loopy, open and delicate Caen lace) at the wrists. Lace caps were worn by women of the 18th and 19th centuries when they were indoors (whereas outdoors, they would wear bonnets or hats).

A note about the lace. It was hand-made and belonged to Queen Mary. The lace is most prominent as the rather unnecessary extension of the sleeves, though it is apparently layered on her collar as well. Perhaps it was there to distinguish the dress from a commoner’s, but it also fulfilled the whimsical requirement of ‘something old… something borrowed’. Queen Mary wore the lace in a way that is utterly foreign to modern fashion, which is why it could be used to a new purpose without apparently robbing any antique clothing. In Police At The Funeral, a 1931 detective mystery by the English writer Margery Allingham, we are told that the octogenarian matriarch had a closet full of lace, which she wore in rotation so that no one in several weeks would ever see the same lace on her twice. Presumably this lace was worn as a cap, perhaps with two trailing pieces from each ear, making the precise style and pattern more plainly visible. We are not accustomed to lace as a feature of fashion, but for centuries it was an essential component of both ladies’ and men’s dress.

Jane Austen: The Secret Soul

Jane Austen was a more knowing person, by an order of magnitude -- a more comprehensive mind and soul, with a higher clifftop view -- than most of those that use her name or make her a character in their films and productions.* In particular, as the late Allan Bloom says in his brilliant book, Love And Friendship, Ms Austen knew a great deal about sexual attraction.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that she regretted it, and yet knew it had to be there as the glue of society. There are two reasons for the regret. In the first place, the sexual desire of men has quite literally cost millions of women their lives, never mind the existential or emotional cost. What for men is pleasure, or at worst, disappointment, can for women result in a harrowing tightrope of life or death, with panic, fear, and torturous pain braiding in novel combinations until the final judgement of live or die can be known. (For a contemporary restatement of the horror, try for instance the film Philomena.) Jane Austen watched as her friends, relatives, neighbours and acquaintances suffered through very frequent pregnancies, sometimes unto death. But the men kept going, kept seeking their pleasure. What sort of God sanctions this? What sort of man is willing, for the sake of the urgency of his need, to put his beloved through this? What sort of God puts that sort of need in a man? How can a woman look upon all this with complacent love of both? I don't think that Jane Austen did.**

Yet Jane (may I call you Jane?) felt her own urgent need, and that must have conditioned her judgement of the men and their apparent callousness. It is still a misconception of our time (yes: our time has misconceptions -- fancy that!) that women don't experience sexual desire as a physical burr, a tongue-chewing need. Experience differs, of course, but for some this is simply not true. Women, if neglected long enough, can experience privation much as a man would -- I will not say 'just as a man', since I am not a man -- which means the physical sense of compulsion as well as the emotional ache that says something is missing. And the greater the deprivation, the greater the agony. Nature is quite a bully in her own way. I have no doubt that Jane Austen lived long enough to feel Nature round her neck, to say nothing of her other parts, night and day.

But when Nature -- god bless her -- isn't threatening to break your knees unless you play strip poker with your last penny, she is trying to break you in other ways. There is the undeniable fact that a man and woman, if they are heterosexual as Jane was, can achieve an emotional intimacy and an open door to each other's souls as no other human connection can. (Homosexuals, of course, have their own like connection, but Jane was not, as we all know, homosexual.) I can only imagine the pain she must have felt as each friend formed an attachment, formalized an engagement, and then celebrated a marriage. The birth of the child of the marriage -- such pain and risk, before the mercies of modern hygiene and medical knowledge -- would have confirmed to her that intimacies had been shared, of which she would never have the savour. Even single people that have had the experience -- but only then, only in the past -- feel a bitter sense of being shut out from rewarding passion. Imagine how it would feel to live as a nun without choosing to be one, never to enjoy the reward of passion at all. All she would have had are the glimpses and the intimations. Jane would have been a Regency Tantalus, reaching for fruit the taste of which she didn't even know, and it would always draw away from her. And yet she, of all women and all souls, was especially well suited to intimate connection, and had a true appreciation of the virtues of men. If that isn't tragedy, I don't know what is. It is one thing to have loved and lost. It is another depth of torment altogether, never to have loved at all. I don't repeat this, obviously, to be original. I repeat it because it's true, and not many Westerners these days really know it.

The writer and critic James Bowman convincingly makes the point that Jane Austen must have known the basic truth about sex. He is right. People in the past were not unworldly, merely because they lived in a less permissive, more religious, and in some ways more refined age than our own. It is our childishness and naivety that allows us to imagine that this was so. But it's not even that she would have seen nature up close, and the mating animals of her largely rural world. It's that all of us, when we are called to the sexual life by Nature, do so mainly through our untutored imaginations. We do not need manuals, blue films, scientific explanation, and A to Z dirty magazines. We have a very little knowledge, some guesses and some hearsay, and some wrong ideas. The rest is our desire, which knows very well what its business is and what it is aiming for. This is why we managed to reproduce through thousands, indeed millions of years, before anatomy was described and before the written word was even thought of. Jane Austen knew what sex was without doing it because we all know what sex is without doing it. The greatest loss for her -- or perhaps it was a blessing, though her pain at coming close to marriage and then dropping it suddenly, in tears, suggests otherwise -- is that her imagining could never tell her just how fabulous it might have been.

* See for instance the astute critique in this review by James Bowman of the film, Becoming Jane.

** And: one final, less abstract question: why could not the men have withdrawn at the crucial moment? It may have denied them the final gratification, but what is that against a woman's well-being and indeed her very existence? How can men be so entirely self-regarding? It is a valid question. And yes, despite what people with offices, medical attire, and agendas will tell you, withdrawal is a genuine form of contraception, especially in the absence of anything better.

What was so special about Julius Caesar?

Julius Caesar (born c. 100 Before the Year 1; died in 44 of the Christian scheme of the world — but according to whose calendar? The Georgian, or the one named for him?).

What a guy (but they said that about Hitler, too, before the conquering started — only in German*). But the skeptic in me wonders, to a certain extent, what all the fuss is about. Yes, Republican Rome was in its own way a human marvel (though not one I would have enjoyed living in). Yes, he was at the peak of Republican Roman society. But the obvious points are that 1) Julius did not create that Rome, nor can he claim credit for it; and 2) his career is famous for undermining it. He was betwixt and between: his rule is thought of as marking the end of the truly ancient world,** and it was left to Octavian, who rode on his coattails yet who also represents a kind of overthrow, to inaugurate the imperial stage of Rome.

This is a suicidal Gaul and his dying wife, commemorated as glorious victims of a Pergamon king; but they might just as well have been victims of Caesar. God knows he killed enough Gauls and assorted other British types.

Julius as a historical figure is wrapped up in so many layers of romance, glamour, fame, reference and mystery that it’s hard to detect the grimy (he must have been, at times) and flawed (he must have been, ditto) man within the idea. In fact, he’s not so much a man as a category. The proof of this lies in the fact that future rulers took his cognomen as their very title, rendered in their own language, throughout the world: not only the familiar Kaiser and Tsar, in Germany and Russia, but also Qaysar in Arabic and Urdu, Kayser in Turkish, and various other recognisable forms in places where you’d least expect it, including Indonesia.+

But the question is: Why? Yes he ventured into faraway, exotic lands; yes he was a conqueror; yes he was a popular statesman; yes he was obviously a whizz at publicity (writing memoirs of his conquests and clearly impressing his fellow Romans). But: so were a lot of men throughout history, and even some exceptional women. In so far as he was a conquering statesman, he is one of an elect but hardly tiny group, considering all the ages. “Beware the successful general has always been a problem”.++

Yet, to the extent that Julius was conquering a then-unknown world, encountering tribes never before described, spreading what then was thought of as civilisation to barbaric parts, he was surely one of a kind. And as such, his lustre or distinction could only ever be his own. To borrow the name of Caesar when you are a mere kinglet that has never ventured anywhere to initiate anything except the satisfaction of your vanity and lust strikes me as presumptuous and preposterous.

But wannabe kings and tyrants have never worried much about presumption and absurdity. And you can see why they have been drawn to the idea of Caesar — to the man that ended the Republic and founded an empire, through his protégé Octavian if not his progeny (Cesarion). The wannabes didn’t want to be called ‘Alexander’, despite the Great’s fearless and heartless conquests. For Alexander’s empire didn’t last:  the Macedonian wasn’t, ultimately, a founder. He merely spread, through the sword, what others had already invented. What’s more, we are told that Alexander’s name is hated in some parts of Asia to this day. Whereas no one hates Julius Caesar.

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*See Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth:  Image And Reality In The Third Reich.

**See Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution; also, the brilliant work by Jan H. Blits, The End Of The Ancient Republic:  Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

+See Wikipedia for a list:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title).

++Mr Brighton Payne.

The strange sameness of Henri Rousseau

You know the one: the painter called sloppily ‘Le Douanier’, the customs officer, when he was really a much more lowly figure, a mere toll collector on a river.  (He painted a scene of his working life at least once.) The Sunday painter, ridiculed and played jokes on by his more fêted acquaintances –  among them Picasso and the somewhat-famous-for-being-somewhat-famous Apollinaire –  who didn't have a career in painting full-time until he was 49.  

Curious thing: in Paul Johnson’s gorgeous and wonderful book, Art: A New History (792 pages, published in 2003), he mentions all manner of obscure and sometimes narrowly talented artists, but he has not a word to say about the quite well-known Henri Rousseau. No words at all for Le Sunday-Off Douanier. I have to wonder why. It’s as if he believes that Rousseau joined naive art to fashion art and created a sensation, without creating fine art along the way. But that’s just a guess, based on my reading of Johnson’s book and what I know of Rousseau.

A cloud like a witch on a broomstick. Detail from ‘Carnival Evening’.

Rousseau is a peculiar case, I think. On the one hand, he produces pictures that we all like (or did:  he's been wallowing in turf à la Richard III for quite some time now, minus the death in battle). His Un Soir de Carnaval  (‘Carnival Evening’) is somehow magical, and ‘The Sleeping Gypsy’ is arresting and affecting -- the up-tipped lion’s tail, to my eye, has an erotic frisson. It’s a distinctly aroused lion's tail, and as such it may be the only one in the history of art.  To see a Rousseau painting is usually to remember. They are not easy paintings to forget.  That is tribute enough.

And yet.  (You knew that was coming, didn’t you?)  

The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, a Mrs Guggenheim gift to the MOMA.

Have a look at Rousseau’s portraits, his faces of men and his faces of women. What do you notice? They look remarkably similar, don’t they? The men and women, I mean.  The women aren’t exactly notable for their gracile, glabrous, and  graceful looks.  Despite the fleshless, dark 19th-century dresses, they look distinctly mannish. And the men? They look like versions of Henri Rousseau.

But why? Was Rousseau aware that most of his figures – apart from young children, which themselves look oddly heavy-set – resemble him to a greater or lesser degree? What did he mean by painting them that way?  Was this an expression of his egotism (which one cannot escape believing he had, for good and perhaps for ill, as far as art was concerned)? And even when the figures don’t look conspicuously like him, why do they look like clones of each other? Consider the painting called ‘The Football Players’ (Les joueurs de football), from 1908. The men in orange and cream stripes are on one team and have round heads with ginger hair.  They look alike and they’re on the same team. The men in blue and grey stripes have dark, slightly wavy hair and matching dark handlebar moustaches, and they’re on the same team. Get it? Because we all know that when you play on the same team, you instantly transmogrify into one another. You also, to judge by the picture, are much more susceptible to the pull of the galaxy than to the gravity of your own planet. Never mind that, despite the title, the ball they’re playing with belongs to rugby. ‘The Football Players’ is a cheerful and jolly but otherwise completely bizarre picture. 

Some might say that Rousseau was a self-taught and greatly talented artist, whose talent lay in his devotion to the artist’s way of seeing and to the fresh vision that an artist can create. It was not, at bottom, a technical talent, however methodical and painstaking. (And anyone that was willing to create ‘The Dream’ and his various jungles was clearly taking pains.) But it’s not enough just to call Rousseau ‘naive’, because he’s more than that. There is a grandeur about his work, a kind of hubris even, that allows him to reach for the transcendent – to reach for paradise – regardless of whether he can actually, visually, deliver it with his brush.  At the heart of Rousseau’s paradise there is greatness. And at the heart of that greatness is Rousseau. I would wager that Rousseau was thought of as a small man by almost every person he ever met, and his art is his means of negation. Whether he was right or not is another question. Many people have asserted their heroism, virtue, or loveliness only to be, in any sharp observer’s eyes, wrong.

Paul Johnson gives Rousseau a miss, but he does discuss a brilliant woman painter, whose name was Artemisia Gentileschi. From a draughting standpoint, and in the handling of paint, perspective, and composition, to say nothing of subject matter, there is no comparison between the Italian and the French toll collector. She is, artistically speaking, a bella ragazza. But in life she was greatly overweight, according to Johnson, and this shows up in her painting. He says that her main burden, artistically, was that the women she painted were projections of herself, and largely resembled her: big-boned, apparently tall, well-fleshed and solid. I have not seen enough of her paintings to confirm his judgement, though I doubt that Johnson would make such a claim if it could easily be disproved. I have seen a lot of Rousseau’s work, and in his case the canvas-as-mirror assessment certainly rings true.