This company of buglers, in uniform, march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes;then they march to the other entrance and repeat.Presently they do this over again.Yesterday only about two hundred people were still left in front of the house when the second call was blown;in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them.They stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction.The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face;she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress.The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort.By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist.In his time the husband of this princess was valuable.He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.
In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of open gallery, in which princes are displayed.
It is sacred to them; it is the holy of holies.As soon as the filling of the house is about complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking into heaven.They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship.
There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.
It is worth crossing many oceans to see.It is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime.Satisfy it--that is the word.Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view.The interest of a prince is different.It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even noticeably diminish it.Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not been earned.A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way.A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of luck.And then--supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune on the earth which is secure.The commercial millionaire may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a prince--that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can undeify him.By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince.And Ithink 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.
