Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/120

106 I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life: No, I am no such thing; I am a man as other men are: and there indeed, let him name his name; and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner."

The royal palace, a sacred place in the good old days of the monarchy, into which the common mortal only entered with awe and trembling, now stands open to the reporter. All its scandals, all its criminalities and absurdities are discussed on the street. The most insignificant subject is acquainted with the secret vices of the king, the diseases of the prince, the mistresses of this monarch, the flirtations of that princess, he knows that his king or his emperor gambles at the Exchange, that he is an idiot, he knows all about the king's ignorance, his badly spelled letters are ridiculed and his foolish sayings quoted—and yet the subject prostrates himself in the dust before him, never mentions him publicly except in terms of the most extravagant loyalty, and takes especial credit to himself if he can lick the dust from the august feet more zealously than his neighbor. What a spectacle for an unprejudiced and enlightened looker-on! What a source of perpetual disgust at the nature of civilized man with its inherited instincts of a gregarious animal! The famous artist who has just completed some immortal master-piece, longs for no higher crown of honor than a visit from the king; from the excitement and exaltation of grand conceptions and realization, his mind sinks to the gratification of his childish vanity by the hoped for visit from his sovereign. He is perhaps a Beethoven, a Rembrandt, a Michael Angelo; he will be known and admired when nothing remains of the king but a line in the interminable list of kings' names, which forms the superfluous appendix to the history of the world; he has a complete