On Praise
By STRIX To go to the grave, or even to the gallows, without being praised m‘ ust be difficult. Somewhere along the line the dimmest, the most homicidal of us can hardly have failed to hear some other member of the human race 'express' (as the dictionary puts it) 'warm approbation of, commend the merits of himself or herself. It may have happened only in our childhood; but We have all been praised.
Praise is an interesting commodity. Go on getting enough of it, and you achieve fame. But fame is perishable. It can be lost; it can be for- feited; it can fade away. It is conferred rarely, sometimes arbitrarily, and quite often post- humously. Praise is the pennies or three- Penny bits which every child puts into its money- box; fame is the more complex basis of a millionaire's prosperity.
The other day I asked a man of great sen- sibility what were the nicest words he remem- bered being spoken to him in the course of his varied and distinguished career. He thought for a moment, then quoted a compliment which a great man had bestowed on him. It was phrased With felicity and delivered with conviction; it was the highest praise, and I said so.
Its recipient agreed. 'Butif only,' he added with sigh, more people had been there to hear it!'
I found that I was vaguely puzzled by these Words. Praise has always struck me as a private matter, whose value is not necessarily increased, and may indeed be lowered, if it is publicly be- stowed. If a banquet were given in my honour at the Guildhall (a mercifully though rather unaccountably remote contingency) I should not at all enjoy listening to the eulogy which the Lord Mayor would feel impelled to pronounce on my character and attainments. I should not glow as he went booming on; I should wince, fidget, stare at the tablecloth, quite possibly perspire. If on the other hand the Lord Mayor had stopped me in the street and had said 'Look, you don't know me from Adam and it's the most awful cheek, but I simply had to say how much I enjoyed your book about pond-life in Stafford- shire,' I would be very much 'gratified and would, however ephemerally, glow.
*
I suspect, though I cannot be sure, thati we place a higher value on spoken• praise than on praise in writing. The latter may have a more permanent utility, but the former makes a stronger impact. There is something about all testimonials which causes them to fade, to lose very quickly the power to please us as much as they did when we first read them.
'The evening was a triumph for Mr. Snooks, whose performance can only be described as a tour de force.' Golly!' thinks Mr. Snooks when he reads these golden words; he is as pleased as Punch. But somehow time tarnishes them. Pasted into his press-cutting album they will continue to give him grounds for complacency, to sustain him in moments of disappointment. Yet there is something dead, something bygone about them. They lack that quality of perennial freshness which in his memory will always transfigure a single sentence of percipient commendation uttered by a stage-hand as he came off after the second act.
One would expect praise in writing to give more pleasure when it is published than when it is read only by the recipient and anyone he cares to show it to; but I am not sure that this is always so. For one thing, to be praised (or blamed) in print is in certain careers an occupational hazard. Athletes, actors, authors, musicians and philan- thropists must become partially inured to favour- able comment in the press, the more so since it tends to arrive in bulk and to be repetitive. If for instance you made a century in a Test Match, do you think you would read through all the tributes to your prowess in all the morning papers, even- ing papers, provincial papers, Sunday papers and weeklies? After a successful first night even a dramatist, for whom the critics' praise has a quasi-commercial value, must, once he has read what the half-dozen most important ones have to say, find scrutiny of the remainder a rather insipid task.
It is different if some person, a total stranger to the limelight, earns printed praise for (say) a deed of heroism; but even then the accounts of what he did, how he came to be on the scene, what he said afterwards, and what his old mother in Builth Wells thinks about it all will vary so radically from each other, will be so full of inaccuracies and so interlarded with pure tosh, that they are likely to engender in him as much of astonishment and irritation as of pure pleasure.
On the other hand written praise which is pri- vately communicated may (I imagine) be more highly valued by the recipient than a sackful of press-cuttings. A letter from someone whose opinion he respects, commending him for some- thing he has done, is potentially more glow- producing than the most ecstatic headline, even though the letter is read at only one breakfast table and the headline at millions.
There are several reasons for this. The letter is unexpected, the newspaper comment (save some- times to an author) is, not. The letter is spon- taneous; its writer did not have to write it and was not paid for doing so. It iv—like, I suspect, all the praise that people really care about and re- member—direct and personal. The fact that, being private, it can do nothing, or very little, tb enhance in the eyes of the world the reputation of the person praised is neither here nor there. The child dropping coins into its money-box is not disappointed because the, threepenny bit makes less of a clink than the pennies.
Those of us who cannot readily call to mind the last time we were praised, those of us who after a promising start ('But for Ragwort's doughty efforts in goal, the 2nd XI's 14-0 defeat might have become a veritable rout') have some- how not very often seen our names in print— for such there is comfort in the thought that people are constantly being praised behind their backs, in absentia, unawares. At this very moment somebody may be saying of you, my long- suffering reader, or even conceivably of me : 'Now there is a really first-class man! If only he could be induced to go into public life! I shall never forget—' And so on. No one can prove that this is impossible.
But it is a possibility on which it would be unwise to dwell for too long. Let it pass re- assuringly but swiftly through your mind, then turn elsewhere for solace before it occurs to you that, if praise is often given in absentia, so—and much more frequently—is blame.
Previous page
