CORONATION NIGHTMARE
By E. M. FORSTER
These creatures are the nations of today as they may perhaps appear to some philosopher or poet in the future. He will regard them with pity rather than indignation, for he will understand better than we can how they come to be as they are. He will grant them a sinister picturesqueness, and as they sweep round one of them will catch his attention as particularly bizarre. Equipped like her sisters, furnished like them for war and against war, she differs from them because she is also tricked out with mediaeval finery. Ribbons and bunting flap around her mask, relics gleam among the bombs, parchments crackle, there is an odour of incense and consecrated oil in the Lewisite. She is the British Empire, preparing to celebrate, in 1937, a coronation upon an unprecedented scale. Why, the philosopher will wonder, had she to do this ? Grant the kingship ; grant, also, the ritual ; even so, why cannot a king be crowned quietly ? Would it not be more seemly, considering the appalling state of mankind ? Why this colossal expense, when debts are unpaid and areas destitute ? Why this ponderous and fictitious gaiety when the British Empire is being carried round and round on the common whirligig of death ? And which will happen first, celebration or catastrophe ? The veiled figure at the centre of the machine, turning it, turning it, alone knows the answer here.
Little Mr. and Mrs. Citizen (" Mr. and Mrs. A." as they are called in the brilliant and significant play, The Ascent of F.6) also receive hints of nightmare as they look at their daily newspapers or listen to their wireless. "I'm afraid this coronation is going to be rather overdone" is the way they express it. Or, "I wish everything was not so run to death." They approve the idea of a coronation ; they know that the monarchy is traditional in England and the Empire, that it is part of the British Constitution, and that it has a peculiar value at the present moment because it is a safety valve for emotions which might otherwise turn towards dic- tatorship. But they suspect that it is being" run to death " ; that they are being exploited by some power which they do not understand, and though they will produce the required hysteria they will feel ashamed of themselves afterwards, as they were after Wembley. "Who is running this coronation; who is behind it ? " they keep wondering. Their common sense and their good feeling tell them that it is not being" run by royalty ; it cannot be due to any personal vanity of the King and Queen. Yet it is redundant constitutionally for the documents which the King signs crownless are just as valid as those which he signs crowned. And the claims of ecclesi- asticism—surely they could be just as well satisfied by a more moderate ritual. So what is the driving force ? Little Mr. and Mrs. A. wonder, until their friend Mr. B., who is more cynical than they are, exclaims, "Don't you see ? A coronation's good for trade."
Good for trade. Exactly. Like armaments. Now we come down to brass tacks. The bank books of costumiers and contractors will benefit, and large sums of money will be brought into the mother country by colonial visitors. We shall all make a little and that will be very nice. Though, of course, there must be no profiteering. Profiteering would spell national disgrace. Mr. and Mrs. A. begin to see money rising and falling before their eyes, like mercury in a thermometer. Up to a point it is laudable to make money out of the coronation, beyond that point it is damnable. When does the point come ? Their friend Mr. B. cannot tell them, he only tells them not to fuss, and as for the news- papers—they deplore overcharging in their leading articles and advertise hundred-guinea balconies on the front page.
The more one reflects on the approaching ceremony, the more does its commercial aspect stick out. Attempts have been made to spiritualise it, but it is too cumbersome and refractory to respond. Last December the National. Recall to Religion made its inauspicious and unchivalrous start, but even if it had been launched more tactfully it could not have proceeded far. For a short time it placed church-going on the level of professional football, and caused eight thousand people to motor to Sandringham for the purpose of watching the royal family attend divine service. The only genuine Recall to Religion would be an international one, a throwing away of the guns and the gold, an upward glance to the over-arching sky ; and none dare initiate that, because of the common roundabout of Fear. In Hyde Park today thousands of daffodils will never flower because of the stands which have been erected on the beds, and people will pay vast sums to sit on the stands and watch the procession. The fate of the daffodils is symbolical ; crushed beneath great superstructures of steel and wood, the spiritual life finds little in Coronation Year to exalt her to the sky. Commerce on the one hand. Overstatements on the other.
Perhaps the overstatements are not serious, yet there has been of late years an attempt to " boost " the monarchy and to present the reigning monarch as a demi-god. This subject has been well dealt with by contemporary critics. They have traced the fluctuations and fall of a legend—the fall taking place at the Abdication. The Abdication— whatever our views about it—reminded us that kings are human beings, and it is a very good thing that it did this, and Coronation Year must not be allowed to undo its work, and to beconie the vehicle for unconstitutional non- sense. The more nonsense is talked, the better all republicans will be pleased, for king-worship plays into their hands. Whereas little Mr. and Mrs. A., who are loyal to the monarchy, want it to be representative and quiet. They know that the newspapers and even the wireless are again distorting royalty and being far -too- solemn over trifles like colds, tea-patties and dolls. . This would not have worried them once, but the papers are also -full of Abyssinia, Spain, Russia, Japan, the whole terrifying roundabout. The world is one, and the various, parts --of it-,are growing doter to one another. There is 1937 in Madrid as well as on,the Processional Route ; the same sunsets, the same dawns.
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