“And will he attend the exercises in the Rose-Palace?”
“That is his intention.”
“A great honor for the American,” remarked the general.
The prince shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I doubt if Mr. Toker has so much awe before crowned heads as your loyal mind ascribes to him, my dear Orell.”
“I have my doubts as to that point, also,” said Rinotti. “Mr. Toker belongs to that caste of moneyed potentates who regard themselves as kings. And in a certain sense they are, indeed, for they wield a dominion over a monstrous, a sinister power. Old Europe must take precious good care of her prestige, must stick closer than ever to her traditions, if she would hold her own against the spirit of Americanism.”
“That is a vague term,” said the prince. “What do you mean by ‘Americanism’?”
Rinotti’s keen-cut face took on a contemptuous expression. “I mean by it stock-jobbery and wild quest for money; lack of ideality, of anything romantic, of heroism; their poverty in historical recollections and national art amply accounts for this. They have nothing of all that which constitutes our pride, which enriches and ennobles us: ancient monuments, cathedrals, old paintings, famous field-marshals, illustrious families, glorious dynasties of rulers—all that is missing to the New World; and what can it offer in their place?—sky-scrapers, gigantic steel, meat, and oil trusts, California gold-mines, and possibly Niagara Falls! That I will grant as the one thing poetic—but in everything else it is a land of mediocrity, of aridity, of the barrenest prose.”
The general nodded his assent: “Quite right.”
Victor Adolph angrily crushed his cigarette into the ash-tray. “You say, ‘Quite right.’ I say, ‘Quite false,’ essentially false. I know America. You do not know it. I spent a year at Harvard University. You have no conception of the warmth of enthusiasm, of the generosity, of the wide outlook, of the world-embracing ideas—in a word, of the lofty ideals which animate that free, youthful-hearted people....”
“What fire, Your Royal Highness!” exclaimed the marchese. “Your own youthful enthusiasm is speaking. I love it and I admire it, especially in a Northerner.”