Mind your language
Conversation is an art in which we all prefer to think we excel, and Stephen Miller has written a whole book on the subject (Conversation, Yale, £15), which turns out to be mostly about Samuel Johnson and David Hume, who never did meet and talk.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comes into it too, and Mr Miller has this to say of her in relation to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury: ‘Lady Mary did not think highly of Bishop Burnet. “I knew him in my very early Youth and his condescension in directing a Girl in her studies is an Obligation I can never forget.”’ I am puzzled by this judgment. Mr Miller is at home in the 18th century and must know that the ordinary meaning of condescension in those days was laudatory. Without any context suggesting otherwise, it reads to me as if Lady Mary really means that Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury in 1689, the year of her birth, was being kind in taking trouble with a young girl, even if she was the daughter of an earl.
Condescend has turned round entirely in its connotations. Today it is always pejorative. A modern dictionary gives the meaning: ‘To do something in such a way as to emphasise that one clearly regards it as below one’s dignity or level of importance.’ Yet the Authorised Version of the Bible says, ‘Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate’ (Romans xii 16).
It is mostly a change in looking at the world. Few British people today admit they are indeed of lower estate than rich men or those set in authority. If superiors do them a favour, they should pretend it is done between equals.
When Lady Mary was young, condescension could be a vice if the superior should have kept to his proper rank. ‘Familiarity in Inferiors is Sauciness, in Superiors Condescension,’ wrote Richard Steele in 1711. Condescension breeds contempt, he might have written.
Of course even when benevolent condescension was a virtue, it could be hypocritical if assumed by one of no true superiority. Samuel John in The Rambler (No. 200) writes of an old friend ‘receiving me with all the insolence of condescension’. But that was not the relative standing in the late 17th century of a young girl and an old bishop.
In 2007 it would be nice if high political personages resolved to be less isolated in their loftiness. Come on down. Let their election motto be: ‘New Labour Complacent and Condescending.’
Dot Wordsworth
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