“Certainly, Molière did know what young girls crave, which Georgebus was unable to understand.
“In the meantime the disconcerted lovers have dressed their valets up and bidden them address the ladies in the most exaggerated fashion. The young girls are completely taken in, as girls often are by pseudo noblemen. The comedy runs high. Finally the masters appear, strip their valets of their finery, whip them and send them home.
“The bottom falls out of everything. Georgebus cries, ‘Hide yourselves, you idiots, hide yourselves forever,’ and after the girls’ exit, adds, ‘The cause of all the trouble lies in romances, verses, songs, sonnets and lays.’
“But in the long run, romances, verses and songs have won. Twentieth century sentiment goes with the girls though they were fooled once in the days of their youth. Nowadays, my courts sit in secret session. The novel is their organ, but, History, your crude Courts of Love died out six hundred years ago.”
An Ideal of the Gracious
Republic of Venice, Attended by Justice and Peace,
Expressed by Paul Veronese,
Sixteenth Century.
“Never have I called you into my councils that I have not been belittled,” observes History. “My romance is democracy not courtship and it commenced with the inspiration of the Greeks. My first votary taught that ‘it is clear not in one thing alone, but wherever you test it, what a good thing is equality among men.’ He adds, ‘A tyrant disturbs ancient laws, violates women, kills men without trial. But a people ruling: first, the very name of it is so beautiful—Isonomiê; and secondly, a people does none of these things.’
“And this beautiful ‘equality among men’ I have followed in its ideal, in its fruition and alas, sometimes, in its debasement throughout the ages. I watched its short and glorious days in Greece, its orderly development in Rome, its splendid resurrection in Venice, which led the line of free cities of the Middle Ages that handed it down. I watched the American and the French Republics rise in the eighteenth century, the French to totter, but to rise again, the American to live to fight another chivalrous war for human rights; and, the justice of republics proven, the twentieth century built one in a day. Then the distant continent, that drained the bravest blood of Portugal in the sixteenth century, wiped out its debt with the ‘fruits of the spirit,’ the romantic spirit of the twentieth century.
“Herodotus placed his faith in the people long ago, probably on more evidence than he reported in support of what to him seemed self-evident. Were he to come back to his native town now he would find his beautiful city of Halicarnassus replaced by a mean Turkish village, but through it are ringing the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ and the Father of History might be less surprised than men of today by the revolution that has suddenly established a constitution in Turkey. Indeed, nowhere has the very name of equality proved more beautiful. Since July 25, 1908, the lion and the lamb have actually lain down together on the once bloody fields of the Turk. Over a little Turkish shop two inscriptions appeared, side by side, above the three beautiful words: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ and ‘The beginning is from God; so victory is sure.’