I remember long ago saying to that warm and intelligent human being, Winnie Gaskin, that I wasn’t really interested in politics, that I grew bored by its complexities, that I loathed its sour and unbrotherly antagonisms, that I had better things to do than get mixed up in all the unsavoury maneuverings that went into lusting after political power. She was a good friend and I could tell her these things, but when I said them she lost her temper a bit with me. She said I could not be more wrong. Politics was everything in life, especially in a country like Guyana. She said if I opted out of politics I was opting out of the mainstream of life and work and achievement. She said she was disappointed in me, that such an apparently intelligent man could be so unaware of reality. I think she even used the scornful phrase, “mere dilettante” to describe me, though she was too warm-hearted a person to be scornful for very long and we remained firm friends despite my lukewarm political nature.
I suppose the fact is that I have always tried to keep out of the way in politics. To tell the truth I have never been very interested in who have got to the top of the political power tree and how they got there. My general, no doubt craven, attitude has been very much along the lines of what Cardinal Newman once wrote to Lord Acton: “It does not seem to me courage to run counter to properly constituted superiors – they bear the responsibility and to them we must leave it. There are plenty of other things to do in the world which will not interfere with them.”
I have also tended to think – against a great deal of evidence I must admit – that these other things are fundamentally more important than politics. I learned Samuel Johnson’s lines when I was a schoolboy and though much has changed since those far-off, dreamlike days the lines still contain a proportion of truth:
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.
I have always been inclined to let constituted authority get on with what seems to me their remarkably thankless tasks while I amongst my friends and other citizens go on with the rest of life so abounding in joys and sorrows, challenges and checkmates, which have nothing to do with politics. Again I tip my hat to the Cardinal: “There are plenty of other things to do in the world which will not interfere with them.”
There is perhaps one hang-up I have about politics. It always seems such a humourless business. People in the world of politics seem to take themselves so seriously. I think, in fact I know, that in private politicians are as humorous and self-deflating as anyone else – but somehow the public face of politics is stony, solemn, and insufferably self-important. I truly wonder why this should be so. Perhaps there is just the hint of a reason in George Orwell’s perception that jokes are, in essence, “tiny revolutions,” and therefore the professional politician’s reflex is to view them with great suspicion.
There must always be a need to deflate to some degree the pretensions of anyone in power, however benignly and intelligently for the time being that power is being wielded. The reason for this is that history has no more certain lesson to teach than that power in the end corrupts. The use of that celebrated phrase reminds me again of Lord Acton, that most serious and learned historian of the 19th century. When Mary Gladstone in 1881 said to him that she feared that the newly enfranchised workers in England might not use their power wisely, Acton replied somberly that it was not a question of a particular class or even a particular sort of person not being equipped to govern – the fact was, he said, that nobody was fit to govern!
That may be too much a counsel of despair in a world which now has no hope unless it gets good leaders. Yet the trace of wisdom in it should make us view all power-seekers with a calculating and careful eye. And also with a thought for the saving irony of time – time which in the end puts all power in perspective. Consider, for example, the history of the Sun-King’s heart.
Louis XIV of France reigned from early manhood to decrepit age, demi-god of the world’s greatest nation at the time, surrounded by every pomp and circumstance, not only enjoying all public and ceremonial power but also exercising absolute power over individuals and the state to a degree unknown before or since. Contemplate what happened when he died.
His heart, as was customary with the Kings of France, was separated from the body. It was pickled and placed in a silver, jeweled casket. There it reposed for most of the 18th Century in the royal family monastery at St. Denis. When the revolution broke out in 1789 the casket was rescued and carried about in the baggage of émigrés until it found a resting place in the palace of the Harcourts at Nuneham Courtney in England where it was kept in a snuff-box and shown to house-guests as a curiosity.
One day, Canon William Buckland visited. Canon Buckland was Oxford’s first Professor of Geology, a great scientist and a great eccentric. He indulged his scientific interest to the point of cooking and eating a vast number of creatures including mice, moths, crocodiles and bluebottle flies. When he visited Nuneham and was shown Louis XIV’s heart in the snuff-box he calmly observed: “I have eaten many strange things, but never the heart of a king” – and promptly popped the blackened and hideous thing into his mouth, swallowing it before his outraged host could intervene to stop him!
Thus history swings this way and that, raises up and casts right down, and today what is the pomp and power of the whole wide world tomorrow sinks to rest in strange obscurity through incalculable whim.
Is it not passing brave to be a King
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Yes – but for every Sun-King who walks the path of glory a Canon Buckland lies in wait, a chuckle in his throat.
