The state is always spoken of as if it were an impersonal force, magnified into semi-divinity of more than mortal power and prescience, wholly aloof from all human error, and meteing out the most infallible justice from the purest balance. Instead of that the state is nothing, can be nothing, more than a host of parasites fastened on the body politic, more or less fattening thereon, and trained to regard the public as a mere taxable entity, always in the wrong and always to be preyed upon at pleasure. It may be unintelligible why mankind ever laid its head under the heel of a single human tyrant, but it is surely more perplexing still why it lies down under the feet of a million of government spies and scriveners. That there is a singular increase in public pusillanimity everywhere is unquestionable; its outcome is the tendency, daily increasing, to look to the government in every detail and every difficulty.
THE PENALTIES OF A WELL-KNOWN
NAME
When in childhood, if we be made of the stuff which dreams ambitious dreams, we see the allegorical figure of Fame blowing her long trumpet down the billowy clouds, we think how delightful and glorious it must be to have a name which echoes from that golden clarion. Nothing seems to us worth the having, except a share in that echoing windy blast. To be famous: it is the vision of all poetic youth, of all ambitious energies, of all struggling and unrecognised talent. To be picked out by the capricious goddess and lifted up from the crowd to sit beside her on her throne of cloud, seems to the fancy of youth the loftiest and loveliest of destinies.
In early youth we know not what we do, we cannot measure all we part with in seeking the publicity which accompanies success; we do not realise that the long trumpet of our goddess Fame will mercilessly blow away our dearest secrets to the ears of all, and so strain and magnify them that they will be no more recognised by us, though become the toy of all. We do not appreciate, until we have lost it, the delightful unregarded peace with which the obscure of this world can love, hate, caress, curse, move, sit still, be sick, be sorry, be gay or glad, bear their children, bury their dead, unnoted, untormented unobserved.
It is true that celebrity has its pleasant side. To possess a name which is an open sesame wherever it is pronounced is not only agreeable, but is often useful. It opens doors easily, whether they be of palaces or of railway stations; it saves you from arrest if you be sketching fortifications; it obtains attention for you from every one, from ministers to innkeepers; in a word, it marks you as something out of the common, not lightly to be meddled with, or neglected with impunity. It has its practical uses and its daily advantages, if it have also this prosaic drawback, that, like other conspicuous personages, you pay fifty per cent. dearer than ordinary people for everything which you consume.
Fame, like position, has its ugly side; whatever phase of it be taken, whatever celebrity, notoriety, distinction, or fashion, it brings its own penalties with it, and it may be that these penalties underweigh its pleasures.
The most cruel of its penalties is the loss of privacy which it entails; the difficulty which it raises to the enjoyment of free and unobserved movement. Whether the owner of a well-known name desire privacy for the rest of solitude, for the indulgence of some affection of which it is desired that the world shall know nothing, for the sake of repose, and ease, or for the pursuit of some especial study, the incognito sighed for is almost always impossible to obtain.
Find the most retired and obscure of places, amidst hills where no foot but the herdsman’s treads, and pastures which feel no step but those of the cattle, a mountain or forest nook which you fondly believe none but yourself and one other know of as existing on the face of the globe; yet brief will be your and your companion’s enjoyment of it if your lives, or one of your lives, be famous; the press will track you like a sleuth-hound, and all your precautions will be made as naught, and, indifferent to the harm they do or the misery they create, the Paul Prys of broadsheets will let in the glare of day upon your dusky, mossy dell.
The artist has, no doubt, in this much for which to blame himself: why does the dramatist deign to bow from his box? why does the composer salute his audience? why does the painter have shows at his studio? why does the great writer tell his confidences to the newspaper hack?
Because they are afraid of creating the enmity and the unpopularity which would be engendered by their refusal. Behind this vulgar, intrusive espionage and examination there lies the whole force of the malignity of petty natures and inferior minds, i.e., two thirds of the world. The greater is afraid of the lesser; the giant fears the sling or the stone of the pigmy; he is alone, and the pigmies are multitudinous as the drops in the sea.