“Certainly! he has been more courted than most young men, and perhaps more talked of. Oddities generally are.”
“You own he has talents above the average? Do you not think he will make a figure in the world some day, and discharge that debt to the literary stores or the political interests of his country, which alas, I and my predecessors, the other Sir Peters, failed to do; and for which I hailed his birth, and gave him the name of Kenelm?”
“Upon my word,” answered Mivers,—who had now finished his breakfast, retreated to an easy-chair, and taken from the chimney-piece one of his famous trabucos,—“upon my word, I can’t guess; if some great reverse of fortune befell him, and he had to work for his livelihood, or if some other direful calamity gave a shock to his nervous system and jolted it into a fussy, fidgety direction, I dare say he might make a splash in that current of life which bears men on to the grave. But you see he wants, as he himself very truly says, the two stimulants to definite action,—poverty and vanity.”
“Surely there have been great men who were neither poor nor vain?”
“I doubt it. But vanity is a ruling motive that takes many forms and many aliases: call it ambition, call it love of fame, still its substance is the same,—the desire of applause carried into fussiness of action.”
“There may be the desire for abstract truth without care for applause.”
“Certainly. A philosopher on a desert island may amuse himself by meditating on the distinction between light and heat. But if, on returning to the world, he publish the result of his meditations, vanity steps in and desires to be applauded.”
“Nonsense, Cousin Mivers, he may rather desire to be of use and benefit to mankind. You don’t deny that there is such a thing as philanthropy.”
“I don’t deny that there is such a thing as humbug. And whenever I meet a man who has the face to tell me that he is taking a great deal of trouble, and putting himself very much out of his way, for a philanthropical object, without the slightest idea of reward either in praise or pence, I know that I have a humbug before me,—a dangerous humbug, a swindling humbug, a fellow with his pocket full of villanous prospectuses and appeals to subscribers.”
“Pooh, pooh; leave off that affectation of cynicism: you are not a bad-hearted fellow; you must love mankind; you must have an interest in the welfare of posterity.”