I had him again. He had to fumble around in his mind as much
as another minute before he could play; then he said in as mean
a way as I ever heard a person say anything:
“He could have been counting the cigars, you know.”
I cannot endure a man like that. It is nothing to him how unkind
he is, so long as he takes the bloom off. It is all he cares for.
“An Englishman (or other human being) does dearly love a lord,”
(or other conspicuous person.) It includes us all. We love to be
noticed by the conspicuous person; we love to be associated with such,
or with a conspicuous event, even in a seventh-rate fashion,
even in the forty-seventh, if we cannot do better. This accounts
for some of our curious tastes in mementos. It accounts for the large
private trade in the Prince of Wales’s hair, which chambermaids
were able to drive in that article of commerce when the Prince made
the tour of the world in the long ago–hair which probably did
not always come from his brush, since enough of it was marketed
to refurnish a bald comet; it accounts for the fact that the rope
which lynches a negro in the presence of ten thousand Christian
spectators is salable five minutes later at two dollars and inch;
it accounts for the mournful fact that a royal personage does not
venture to wear buttons on his coat in public.
We do love a lord–and by that term I mean any person whose situation
is higher than our own. The lord of the group, for instance:
a group of peers, a group of millionaires, a group of hoodlums,
a group of sailors, a group of newsboys, a group of saloon politicians,
a group of college girls. No royal person has ever been the object
of a more delirious loyalty and slavish adoration than is paid
by the vast Tammany herd to its squalid idol in Wantage. There is
not a bifurcated animal in that menagerie that would not be proud
to appear in a newspaper picture in his company. At the same time,
there are some in that organization who would scoff at the people
who have been daily pictured in company with Prince Henry, and would
say vigorously that THEY would not consent to be photographed
with him–a statement which would not be true in any instance.
There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you
that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with
the Prince, if invited; and some of these unthinking people would
believe it when they said it; yet in no instance would it be true.
We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one,
by several millions, to furnish that man. He has not yet been begotten,
and in fact he is not begettable.
You may take any of the printed groups, and there isn’t a person
in the dim background who isn’t visibly trying to be vivid; if it
is a crowd of ten thousand–ten thousand proud, untamed democrats,
horny-handed sons of toil and of politics, and fliers of the eagle–
there isn’t one who is trying to keep out of range, there isn’t one
who isn’t plainly meditating a purchase of the paper in the morning,
with the intention of hunting himself out in the picture and of framing
and keeping it if he shall find so much of his person in it as his
starboard ear.
We all love to get some of the drippings of Conspicuousness, and we
will put up with a single, humble drip, if we can’t get any more.
We may pretend otherwise, in conversation; but we can’t pretend
it to ourselves privately–and we don’t. We do confess in public
that we are the noblest work of God, being moved to it by long habit,
and teaching, and superstition; but deep down in the secret places
of our souls we recognize that, if we ARE the noblest work, the less
said about it the better.
We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles–