"Is it not our duty to avoid all matters of controversy?"
"If it is we do not act on it. There is much controversy to-day on the subject of vivisection; but that did not prevent you quite recently from bestowing a high mark of favor on its foremost exponent. What you dare not do is bestow a similar mark on one who is opposed to it. Your favors go only to those who represent a majority; minorities are carefully shut away from your ken. You are taught to believe that they are unimportant. Whereas the exact opposite is the truth; for it is always the minorities who have made history and brought about reform."
"Are you still quoting your book at me?" inquired the King.
"I am always quoting it," said Max, "or, rather, I am composing it. Yes; this is the beginning of a chapter which I am about to put together with your help and assistance."
"Make it a mild one!" entreated his father.
"I assure you, sir, that throughout I am understating the case. We have already discussed the question of a monarch's relation to the political and religious controversies of his day. Is he any more truly in contact with the national life on its intellectual side? The only occasion on which I meet at your Court any representatives of literature, or art, is when popular authors and dramatists have come among a miscellaneous gathering of pork butchers, politicians, stock-brokers, bankers, and other prosperous tradesmen to receive at your hands the now somewhat tarnished honor of knighthood. They come in a strange garb hired for the occasion, and they go again. How much have we ever troubled ourselves about the value and quality of their work, or as to why they were selected? Are they the men, think you, who will be reckoned a hundred years hence the artistic and literary giants of their day? I doubt if anybody thinks so except themselves. Is it not rather because by winning contemporary popularity they represent the trade values of their profession, something that can be made to pay, and which, when it does pay, invites public recognition and encouragement? We give small pensions to the specially deserving, I know, to save them from the extremes of poverty and ourselves from disgrace; but to those pensions do we ever add a title? No; titles are the reward of prosperity."
"But, my dear Max," said the King, "how do you expect me to judge of such things? I should only make mistakes."
"You have for your advisers," answered his son, "some twenty men drawn from all departments of life; ought you not to be able to rely on them? When you came to the throne one of our greatest literary men lay bed-ridden, dying quietly of old age. He had received a State pension, for he was poor; he was a giant whose work was done; and he had never in all his life been to Court. Did it occur to you to go and pay this old man reverence? Did it occur to any of your advisers to suggest that you should? Yet in the past kings have done these things, and history has remembered to praise them for doing it. No, sir, we are out of touch with all the really great things that are going on around us in literature and art; for whenever anything new is really great it inevitably divides opinion; and wherever opinion is sharply or at all evenly divided we are out of place. You are under exactly the same orders as those which Charlotte received from my mother—you must not go down into the garden while the gardeners are actually at work; only when they have finished you may come and gather the results. You are run by the State merely to give prestige to the established order, and you must not support things that are not already popular."
"You are mistaken, Max," said his father, in despondent protest. "Nothing whatever prevents me; only I haven't anything to take hold of."
"Yet I have been credibly informed," replied Max, "that when you go to see a so-called problem play of the more intellectual kind, it is arranged for you to go in Lent, for the simple reason that during that period of fasting it is against etiquette for the papers to make any announcement of the fact."