Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/152

138 poet would dare to ascribe to his hero, because poetry maintains the ideals of humanity purer than laws and customs, because the esthetic conscience still asserts itself, where the moral conscience has nothing more to say, and because we will shake hands with such men, whose success is unquestionable, but we will not allow them to be idealized in poetry and held up as models before us. Those individuals who have been exalted above the multitudes by honors and titles in each generation, are not always the poorest endowed as regards talents. They are not stupid, on the contrary, they are crafty and skillful; in perseverance, tenacity and strength of will, they are also above the average. But that which is certainly lacking in them. is character and independence, and these are the very points in which a natural, that is, a blood aristocracy, would be sure to excel, and which would create alone a social inequality in their favor and to the prejudice of the plebeian, without the intervention of written laws.

I have thus drawn the portrait of the individual by whose elevation to the peerage the family became ennobled. His descendants will usually rise to a higher moral level than their progenitor. It does not require such strenuous efforts to retain as to obtain a title. The nobleman is not obliged to be the unscrupulous egotist, the courtier or the intriguer that his ancestor was to whom he owes his rank. His character improves by the gradual action of the views inseparable from his position, which are based upon the original theory that the aristocracy is the society comprising the best and noblest persons in the State. For although the patent nobility may have nothing in common with a blood nobility, yet it maintains stoutly the theoretical fictions on which the latter is really founded. What has been the anthropological fate of the modern aristocratic families? They have either