'Kind Hearts Are More than Coronets'

On Saturday we saw a movie in the theater for the first time in years: Downton Abbey. One of the pleasures of the television series was the casual dropping of literary and historical allusions in conversation, quietly distributed among the characters. I recall mentions of Keats, Shelley and Dickens – all writers a literate English person would know and be able to quote, even into the twentieth century. The following exchange occurs in the film:

Isobel Merton (played by Penelope Wilton): “To quote Tennyson, kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith and Norman blood.”

Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith): “Will you have enough clichés to get you through the visit?”

Isobel Merton: “If not, I will come to you.”

It’s pleasant to contemplate a time when a paraphrase of Tennyson (or Shakespeare, or Johnson) might have constituted a cliché. The two characters, both aging women, get most of the wittiest lines in the television show and the film. Their relationship is bantering but devoted. Each ultimately respects the other. Isobel has more “advanced” ideas than Violet – women’s suffrage, for instance. Violet plays the reactionary upholder of the old ways. Tennyson’s line, from the seventh stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” is well chosen:

“Howe’er it be, it seems to me,     

  ’Tis only noble to be good.

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

  And simple faith than Norman blood.”

In other words, human decency has little to do with one’s rank or inheritance – an ongoing theme in Downton Abbey. We meet shits and prodigies of virtue upstairs and downstairs, among the wealthy and poor, the noble and untitled. No social class has a monopoly on goodness or wickedness. Each of us is a mingling of both.

[Tennyson gives me an excuse to watch yet again Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the brilliant Ealing comedy in which Alec Guinness plays nine roles.]