think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which
history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men
have committed. To usurp a usurpation–that is all it amounts
to, isn’t it?
A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course.
We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good
look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to
make him an object of no greater interest the next time. We want
a fresh one. But it is not so with the European. I am quite
sure of it. The same old one will answer; he never stales.
Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an
Englishman’s house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December
afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment.
I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen. They
explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for
circumstance: while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough
House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the Prince of
Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of
him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with
the crowd, but were disappointed at last–the Prince had changed
his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, “Is it possible
that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never
seen the Prince of Wales?”
Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they
exclaimed: “What an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of
times.”
They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited
half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a
jam of patients from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him
again. It was a stupefying statement, but one is obliged to
believe the English, even when they say a thing like that. I
fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:
“I can’t understand it at all. If I had never seen General
Grant I doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him.”
With a slight emphasis on the last word.
Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the
parallel came in. Then they said, blankly: “Of course not. He
is only a President.”
It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent
interest, an interest not subject to deterioration. The general
who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of
war, the only general who ever commanded a connected battle-front
twelve hundred miles long, the smith who welded together the
broken parts of a great republic and re-established it where it
is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to
come, was really a person of no serious consequence to these
people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man,
after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that–a
being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and
being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene
eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles
of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a
pinch of ashes and a stink.
I saw the last act of “Tannh:auser.” I sat in the gloom and
the deep stillness, waiting–one minute, two minutes, I do not
know exactly how long–then the soft music of the hidden
orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under
the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the
middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood
and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man
standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men’s voices was
heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the
curtain it was music, just music–music to make one drunk with
pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way
round the globe to hear it.
To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season