While strolling down Fifth Avenue the
Duke of Connaught accidentally collided
with a messenger boy carrying a parcel,
whereupon he turned round and begged the
boy's pardon.
You see the idea behind such banalities. It is that we are stricken with
respectful admiration that people with titles should act like ordinary
decent human beings. It is an insult to them, and it ought to be an insult
to the intelligence of the reader. But the newspaper man knows his public
as well as the cinema producer. He knows we have the souls of flunkeys. I
am no better than the rest. When I knew Mr. Kearley, the grocer, I looked
on him as a man and an equal. When he blossomed into Lord Devonport I felt
that he had taken wings and flown beyond my humble circle. I feel the
flunkey strong in me. I hate him, but I cannot kill him.
It is not the fact that inferior people get titles which should give us
concern. It is not even that they get them so often by secret gifts, by
impudent touting, by base service. These things are known, and they are no
worse to-day than they have always been. Every honours list makes us gape
and smile. If we see a really distinguished name in it we feel surprise and
a certain sorrow. What is he doing in that galley? I confess I have never
felt the same towards J.M. Barrie since he allowed a tag to be stuck on to
a great name. What did he want with a tag that any tuft hunter in public
life can get? It is only littleness that can gain from titles. Greatness is
always dishonoured by them. Fancy Sir Charles Dickens, or Lord Dickens, or
Lord Darwin, or Lord Carlyle, or Lord Shakespeare, or John Milton
masquerading as the Marquis of Oxfordshire. Yes, Tennyson became a lord and
was the smaller man for the fact. Who does not recall Swinburne's scornful
comment:
Stoop, Chaucer, stoop;
Keats, Shelley, Burns bow down.
And who did not share the feeling of Mark Pattison at the pitiful
anti-climax? "There certainly is something about Tennyson," he said, "that
you find in very few poets; in saying what he says in the best words in
which it can be said, he is quite Sophoclean. But this business of the
peerage! It is really so sad that I hardly like to speak of it. Compare
that with Milton's ending and mark the difference."
But it is the corrupting effect of titles on the national currency that is
their real offence. They falsify our ideals. They set up shams in place of
realities. They turn our minds from the gold to the guinea stamp and make
us worship the false idols of social ambition. Our thinking as a people
can't be right when our symbols are wrong. We can't have the root of
democracy in our souls if the tree flowers into coronets and gee-gaws.
France has the real jewel of democracy and we have only got the paste. Do
not think that this is only a small matter touching the surface of our
national character. It is a poison in the blood that infects us with the
deadly sins of servility and snobbery. And already it is permeating even
the free life of the Colonies. If I were an Australian or a Canadian I
would fight this hateful taint of the old world with all my might. I would
make it a criminal offence for a Colonial to accept a title. As for us, I
know only one remedy. It is to make a title a money transaction. Let us
have a tariff for titles. If American millionaires, like Lord Astor, want
them let them pay for them at the market rate. It would be at least a more
wholesome method than the present system. And it would bring the whole
imposture into contempt. Nobody would have a title when everybody knew what
he had paid for it. It is a poor way of getting rid of the abomination
compared with the French way, but then we are some centuries behind the
French people in these things.