The Pride of the Peacock

In traditional listings, Pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins, but references to pride are not always unfavourable.

In heraldic terms, a "peacock in his pride" depicts a peacock with his tail-feathers spread, and the poet William Blake wrote that "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." ("Let the proud peacock his gay feathers spread" adjured an earlier poet, Edmund Waller.)

We may call something precious our 'pride and joy', and one of Kipling's Jungle Book poems plays with the phrase: "His spots are the joy of the leopard, His horns are the buffalo's pride."

Moving away from the pictorial, George Eliot in Middlemarch puts a positive gloss on pride, asserting that "Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others."

On the other hand, Gilbert and Sullivan's Pooh-Bah in The Mikado clearly takes things too far: "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inc-conceivable. I was born sneering."

Perhaps after all it is safer to remember the warning proverb "Pride goes before a fall", summing up the longer biblical verse, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."

Pride, by Michael Dyson, is the final book in the Seven Deadly Sins series from Oxford University Press.

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