Evening Post. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1937. PAGEANTRY AND THE PEOPLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1937. PAGEANTRY AND THE PEOPLE

It may, quite : honestly, to a perfectly good citizen of a modern democracy be often a source of wonderment why an event like the Coronation of a British King is celebrated with such.elaborate p&mp and ceremony as~ to entail months of preparation and the expenditure of large sums of money. Surely, he might be presumed to argue, a much simpler procedure would suffice and we might all get on with our business. The pageantry of the Coronation, if we could pursue his thought still further, he would describe as magnificent, but not modern, medieval in its main aspects and so out of harmony with a world of progress in science and industry which has no need or use for the mummery and flummery of the Middle Ages. This might be taken as an extreme attitude, but it does represent a certain body of not negligible, if ill-informed opinion, not so much in Britain herself, but in countries far from the actual scene of the Coronation among peoples in whom the study of history has never been a strong point of the educational curriculum. While what Milton calls the "antique pageantry" of the Coronation may have a special and intimate appeal to the people of Britain herself, ,it has also an immense significance to the different nations of the' British Commonwealth, to whom the Crown is the symbol and focus of their unity. It follows, therefore, that the ceremony of crowning should be designed so as to impress, by its form and ritual, the most distant peoples under the Crown-with its supreme importance. For this purpose the historical Coronation Service and its accompanying splendour of scene and colour, the' solemnity and dignity of . a procedure handed. down through the centuries, are admirably adapted. Ceremony has always played a great part in human affairs and so long as human nature remains the same will continue to do so. The most primitive tribes have their ceremonial, fully as mystical and elaborate as any known to civilisation. Ancient communities from the beginning of history had their festivals, religious and national, and at no stage in history^ have they ceased.' : Instinctively, mankind calls for the fit and proper celebration.of great occasions, and rebels, if none are forthcoming. Machiavelli, in his counsel to "The Prince," the handbook of dictators and diplomats ever since its publication at the beginning of the sixteenth century, holds.it to be the duty of the Prince "to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles at convenient seasons of the year"; also that he "ought to associate with representative bodies of the people and show himself an example of, courtesy and liberality; nevertheless, always maintaining the majesty of his rank." Shakespeare, emphasising the burden on the head that wears the Crown, makes Henry V say, in the famous passage on the eve of Agincourt:

What have Kings that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idol ceremony? Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream, That play'st so subtly with a King's repose.

The need for ceremony and pageantry on great occasions is all the more urgent today because modern democracy has little that is picturesque about it, and the great occasions are fewer in what has been sadly termed "the daily'round, the common task," somewhat drab and dreary amid the surroundings of modern civilisation. It is for that psychological reason that breaks in the form of festivity or some celebration in which the people may join, with a feeling of unity, become necessary if the people are to be held together. This the dictators of ther modern world have realised far more completely than have modem democracies. With massed bands and marching, loud-speakers and tremendous assemblages, special uniforms for members of patriotic bodies and societies, all assisted by intensive propaganda through the radio and the official mouthpiece of the Press, they drive on towards an artificial sense of unity in a subservient people. They realise the advantage, and democracies, unless they are to crumble into constituent atoms, must preserve their ancient festivals and ceremonies, whenever they occur, with the pomp and colour inherited in, their history. This is not to say that there is any conscious policy in perpetuating the venerable traditions of the British Coronation Service. It is inherent in the British race to hold fast to what is good in their past and. to ■ discard what is no longer relevant. Thus the actual ceremony has been curtailed in length on account of the fatigue imposed on the Sovereign, but the essentials remain and with them all the rich colouring that makes of the

Coronation a kaleidoscope of the story of the British race. Is it worth it? Emphatically so. Of the political and social function of the Crown itself in the scheme of the British Commonwealth it has been said that something like it would have had to be invented, if it had not already come down to us, i fashioned for use, with all the added prestige of age. So with the ceremony of Coronation. In the nature of things this cannot happen often. In a hundred years back from the present event there will have been but four, Coronations, inclusive of that of George VI. In the previous hundred years there were but three. Why not then make the most of these very rare and special occasions? The British Coronation is almost the last of the great historical pageants which were not unfamiliar in the clays before the War when Europe had many crowned heads, subject, like the uncrowned, to the inexorable law of mortality, and, passing, to give the people cause to cry "The King is dead! Long live the King," and rejoice later at the crowning, with all due pomp and pageantry, of the new ; monarch. It is a commonplace that war and revolution have since then swept away most of those crowned heads and made room for a very poor substitute, at least as a popular spectacle, in the shape of dictators. It is human nature to love a spectacle of light and colour in human life and humanity need not apologise for it. As for our own ■ Coronation 'it serves the double purpose of a gorgeous spectacle to please the eye and the solemn ceremony of the consecration of a King who remains the personal emblem of an Empire's ■unity. ■ ■: . :