Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/119

Rh also in the privileges of the favored classes, not only possible but sincere, while a belief in the sovereignty of the people and also in the sacred origin of the monarchy directly exclude each other.

In addition to its political side, the lie of a monarchy has also its purely human side, against which reason and truth revolt as much as against the former. The fiction of the augustness and supernatural attributes of the monarch humiliates and degrades in their own eyes all those who come into personal contact with him, for they laugh at it in their hearts. The spectacle of the king's existence has always been a comedy to those who had any share in it. But each one played his part with zeal and apparent conviction of its reality, he never stepped out of his role, and while on the stage, he took every possible pains to present the spectators, from whom he was separated by the fiery barrier of the footlights, with a poetic delusion, which he never allowed to fade, and only the few confidants who were admitted through the small stage-entrance, were allowed to see that the magnificent palaces of the scenery were nothing but old canvas, that the jewels and the gold embroideries on the royal vestments were only paste and tinsel, and that the hero, between two grandly heroic declamations, whispers to some one behind the scenes his longing for a glass of beer. But the modern actors in this comedy are continually forgetting their roles, and ridiculing them, ridiculing themselves and the honorable public.

They are like the honest amateurs in "Midsummer Night's Dream" discussing their programme: "Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen though the lion's neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect,—Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or, I would request you, or