Perhaps no defense of the institution of monarchy was ever more measured than that of C. S. Lewis. “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters,” Lewis wrote in his great essay “Equality,” first published in The Spectator in 1943. “For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
Yet, to adopt Lewis's metaphor, some varieties of poison are less lethal than others. At the time of his essay, for example, there were certainly many public figures unworthy of adulation, but there were also those whose individual virtues were crystal clear — even in the category of, as Lewis put it, “film-stars.” Take the leading players in Frank Capra's 1946 masterpiece It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. During World War II, Stewart loosed himself from the bonds of studio soundstages to turn himself into a distinguished pilot in the Army Air Corps. For her part, Reed — who, as a pinup, was a kind of idée fixe for servicemen overseas — never parted with the hundreds of adoring letters she received from men in uniform, as revealed in a 2009 article in the New York Times. In their personal lives, then, Stewart and Reed were capable of comporting themselves at least as honorably as any sovereign.
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