Sorry not sorry

Dominic Cummings refusing to apologise

Do people apologise less than they used to? 

Recently, the King of Belgium expressed "deepest regrets" for his country's colonial abuses. And his brother, Prince Laurent, said that he "always apologises" to African heads of state when they meet.  

This is good and meaningful. The more so, I feel, because saying sorry is rather going out of fashion. No matter how many unfulfilled promises and u-turns are made by governments, they never apologise. Formerly, wouldn't there have been more embarrassment about errors? Now they just ignore them and hope they will go away - which, unfortunately, is what seems to happen. 

As the UK started to emerge from lockdown in July, Boris Johnson was accused of "cowardly" language when saying that care homes "didn't really follow the procedures" and shifting blame onto the sector. The next day, no-one was apologising. Instead they claimed he meant something different, which journalists at the briefing found hard to swallow. And when challenged further, the spokesperson just refused to answer the question and kept on repeating the agreed explanation. Or lie. 

I suppose that's because there is no longer any pretence at there being a single official record of anything. And indeed Johnson's team was accused of rewriting history by repeatedly claiming he had said something he hadn't. 

President Trump is currently reckoned to tell 23 lies every day  (up from 12 last year), but that doesn't seem to matter because enough people are happy with one of the myriad alternative versions of reality that they can inhabit, populated by "alternative facts". Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear just sometimes a nod in the direction of regret? 

I'm grateful to my MP for replying to my complaint about Dominic Cummings' notorious trip to Durham. He was inclined to give Cummings the benefit of the doubt, but he thought he should nonetheless have apologised. Quite! Yes indeed he should. But that would, I suppose, not be his way, which is to be uncompromising. For those of us who expect and like compromise, his obstinacy afterwards was even worse than the infringement itself. 

Actually, King Philippe's "regrets" were noted to fall short of a proper apology, and that's no doubt because there's an immediate implication that reparations would be made. At a personal level as well, of course, an apology starts to look a bit thin if you're not prepared to back it up with action. 

And there's a technique to being sorry in Western culture, thanks to centuries of intellectualising in Christianity, which has apology and forgiveness at its heart. It provides four useful steps: being genuinely sorry and wanting to do better (contrition), fully expressing that regret (confession), being released (absolution) and making up for it (satisfaction or penance). 

Now it seems to me that these really are useful, because they make you properly consider whether you really are sorry for something, and how you're going to repair the relationship with whoever you may have injured. 

I know it's a typical British habit to apologise first and establish any blame afterwards. It's just polite - although it's often passive-aggressive ("I'm saying sorry but really it's your fault so you'd better say sorry, too"). A recent poll found that British people apologise eight times a day. 

But the older I get (and, no doubt, the stuffier) the more often I find a bit of a dislocation here. I'm not saying that people are meaner or less polite. That British apology reflex is still there, but not so much in work situations. It seems a deliberate behaviour change. 

There's a positive side to this. Maybe we shouldn't go round being sorry all the time. For example, studies have shown that women are more inclined than men to apologise and to expect apologies, but that this can be to their disadvantage because it signifies not just politeness but deference. And in a professional environment that can be tactically sensible or not, depending on the situation. 

This article puts it nicely, with a reference to a study in the journal of applied social psychology. The article concludes that apologies make most impact when they're unexpected, and the most unexpected and therefore most effective apology would be from a senior to a junior, and from a male to a female within a workplace. How concisely does that capture our whole history of the male-dominated workplace! No wonder young women might be encouraged to resist unnecessary apologies, even never to apologise. 

But I'm not 100% convinced by the idea in this Ted Talk that we can generally say "thank you" instead. 

In the end, I suppose I just have a lower 'apology threshold'. I do think that expressing regret for things is a good and necessary thing for us to do. It's not just for the benefit of the recipient. It might not be intended for their benefit at all. Understanding responsibility for an error and wishing to do better next time is something we teach our children as soon as they learn they find themselves making deliberate choices. 

I dare say anthropologists can explain that all societies involve a measure of expected apology as part of the social glue of justice. It’s about confirming, re-establishing a common set of values, and in these times we need that more than ever.

When Keats met Wordsworth

John Keats idolised William Wordsworth before he met him. But then disillusion set in.

It was December 1817. Keats, aged 22, was a promising young poet who had just seen his poetry in publication for the first time and was in the middle of writing Endymion, which came out the following year. Wordsworth was well-established by then, and Keats admired him, emulating his style in his first published poem, 'To Solitude' (1816), speaking of:

...the sweet converse of an innocent mind
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd

And Wordsworth is one of the three heroes in Keats’s sonnet “Great Spirits Now on Earth Are Sojourning”, written and sent to the artist Robert Haydon in November 1816.

He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing;

Their first meeting was arranged by Haydon, in December 1817, who described it as follows in a letter to a friend:

"When Wordsworth came to Town, I brought Keats to him, by his Wordsworth’s desire - Keats expressed to me as we walked to Queen Anne St East where Mr Monkhouse lodged, the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect. Wordsworth received him kindly, & after a few minutes, Wordsworth asked him what he had been lately doing. I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan - and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it - which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room - when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo - Wordsworth drily said “a very pretty piece of Paganism” - This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Whorshipper like Keats - & Keats felt it deeply - so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded - and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table -- he never forgave him."

One of these further meetings with Wordsworth gets a mention in a letter to Keats's brothers George and Tom a few weeks later (5 January 1818). Keats also refers to the dinner at Haydon's, but there is little sign of enthusiasm for the older poet.

"This day I promised to dine with Wordsworth and the weather is so bad that I am undecided for he lives at Mortimer Street. i had an invitation to meet him at Kingstons - but not liking that place i sent my excus... On Saturday I called on Wordsworth before he went to Kingston's and was surprised to find him with a stiff collar. I saw his spouse and I think his daughter - I forget whether I had written my last before my Sunday evening at Haydon's - no I did not or I should have told you of a young man you met at Paris at Scott's of the name of Richer [Joseph Ricthie] I think - he is going to Fezan in Africa there to proceed if possible like Mungo Park - he was very polite to me and enquired very particularly after you - then there was Wordsworth, Lamb, Monkhouse, Landeer, Kingston and your humble servant. Lamb got tipsey and blew up Kingston..."

Then in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818, Keats writes "I have seen a great deal of Wordsworth" without providing any further details - so perhaps he didn't find the meetings very inspiring. And then writing to the brothers again in February, he says: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in Town - by his egotism, vanity and bigotry - yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher."

There's also a missed meeting to record. Later that year, Keats toured the Lakes, writing to his brother Tom (25-27 June) that "Lord Wordsworth, instead of being in retirement, has himself and his house full in the thick of fashionable visitors quite convenient to be pointed at all the summer long."

Yet he was not at home for Keats on this occasion.

"We slept at Ambleside not above two miles from Rydal the residence of Wordsworth... We ate a monstrous breakfast on our return and after it proceeded to Wordsworth's. He was not at home nor was any member of his family. I was much disappointed. I wrote a note for him and stuck it up over what I knew must be Miss Wordsworth's portrait and set forth again." (Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 27-28 June 1818)

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See also: http://johnkeats.uvic.ca/resources/DesperatelySeekingColeridge.pdf for an account of the only meeting between Keats and Coleridge 

References
https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2014/10/25/wordsworth-and-keats/#!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2106314.The_Immortal_Dinner
http://keats-poems.com/letters/

When Shaw met Kipling

George Bernard Shaw and Rudyard Kipling met each other for the first and probably only time on a momentous occasion - the funeral of Thomas Hardy on 16th January 1928. They didn't get on.

The story was told in 1933 by the writer and critic Alexander Woolcott.

"Five years ago, all that was mortal of Thomas Hardy was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey... Stanley Baldwin, Ramsey MacDonald, J M Barrie, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Rudyard Kipling - these were among the pall bearers. Curiously enough, Shaw and Kipling had never met until that day when Gosse introduced them. Or rather tried to. Kipling, so runs the legend, still had so much of war-time bitterness left in his heart that he would not acknowledge the introduction , and Shaw, impishly amused by this reminder of the Junkers' incurable resentment against him, chuckled in his beard all through the funeral." (1)

In fact, more than being "among the pall bearers", Kipling and Shaw were paired with each other, which Shaw complained about because of their difference in height. Shaw’s secretary, Blanche Patch, wrote that Kipling shook hands "hurriedly, and turned away as if from the Evil One". (2)

It was wet and cold. Perhaps Kipling's mood was not helped by the London weather. He and his wife, Caroline, had only recently returned from a long-ish stay on the continent. Caroline recorded in her diary: "To the Abbey for Mr Thomas Hardy's funeral. Rud pall-bearer. I near the grave for the ashes - not a very impressive ceremony. Home after tea. Bad weather and mud on the roads." (3)

It all sounds rather ill-tempered, but it wouldn't have surprised the others present. These two Nobel Laureates had very little in common.

The outbreak of the First World War epitomises their opposing standpoints. While Kipling (then aged 47) was in tune with the national mood of fervent patriotism, and producing propaganda that repeated typical stories of German brutishness, Shaw (aged 58) produced his tract 'Common Sense About the War', which argued that Britain was just as much in the wrong as Germany. (In a kind of mirror image of this pose, in 1945 he disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness, saying "We are all potential criminals".)
 
By contrast, Kipling stood with his countrymen in proudly claiming the moral high ground. In a 1915 speech, he said, "There was no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of men can conceive of which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.... Today, there are only two divisions in the world... human beings and Germans."

Their politics were about as far apart as one can imagine: on the one hand, the Irish Fabian and on the other the great pillar of the establishment and the Empire, who described Ramsey MacDonald's Labour government as "Bolshevism without bullets" and, according to Mary O’Toole's analysis in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, may have had "enormous sympathy for the lower classes … yet distrusted all forms of democratic government".

And yet, peculiarly, they were both admirers of Mussolini when he came to power in 1922, with Shaw calling him "the right kind of tyrant".

Mussolini would certainly have been a subject of conversation at the famous weekend house parties given by Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to take her seat, at Cliveden. Everybody who was anybody seems to have been invited there at some point between the wars. She must have revelled in hearing the contrasting views of Shaw and Kipling, who were both visitors, but it seems unlikely she would have tested her genius as a hostess by inviting them simultaneously. Shaw described her as "a volcano". She persuaded him to join her on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, which included a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw described as "a Georgian gentlemen". (4)

Kipling's star was waning in the years after Hardy's funeral, while Shaw travelled the world growing more famous as a playright. When Kipling died in 1936, his ashes were interred next to Hardy's in the Abbey. Shaw did not attend the service. (5)

Notes
1. Long, Long Ago, Chapter Vii, February 1933, by Alexander Woolcott

2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-05109-0_34

3. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/members/car_28.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliveden
5. http://www.kiplingjournal.com/acrobat/KJ037.pdf