Fortunately, all the disabilities pertaining to the Unwashed and Unchurched and Uncultivated and Unvaccinated and Unskilled and Unbaptized and Unemployed do not necessarily rest upon the same person. Usually there are palliating circumstances and compensating advantages that are to be taken into account. In a free country there is a career for all sorts of talent, and if one fails in one direction he may reach great dignity in another. I may be a mere nobody, so far as having had ancestors in the Colonial Wars is concerned, and yet I may be high up in the Knights of Pythias. A good lady who goes to the art class is able to talk of Botticelli. But she has no right to look down upon her husband as an inferior creature because he supposes that Botticelli is one of Mr. Heinz's fifty-seven kinds of pickles. He may know some things which she does not, and they may be fully as important.
The great abuse of the generalizing faculty comes in the arraying class against class. Among the University Statutes of Oxford in the Middle Ages was one directed against this evil. Dire academic punishments were threatened to students who made "odious comparisons of country to country, nobility to ignobility, Faculty to Faculty." I sympathize deeply with rules against such "unhonest garrulities." It is a pity that they cannot be enforced.
The mischief comes in reducing all differences to the categories of the Inferior and Superior. The fallacy of such division appears when we ask, Superior in what? Inferior in what? Anybody can be a superior person if he can only choose his ground and stick to it. That is the trick that royal personages have understood. It is etiquette for kings to lead the conversation always. One must be a very stupid person not to shine under such circumstances.
Suppose you have to give an audience to a distinguished archæologist who has spent his life in Babylonian excavations. Fifteen minutes before his arrival you take up his book and glance through it till you find an easy page that you can understand. You master page 142. Here you are secure. You pour into the astonished ear of your guest your views upon the subject. Such ripe erudition in one whose chief interests lie elsewhere seems to him almost superhuman. Your views on page 142 are so sound that he longs to continue the conversation into what had before seemed the more important matter contained in page 143. But etiquette forbids. It is your royal prerogative to confine yourself to the safe precincts of page 142, and you leave it to his imagination to conceive the wisdom which might have been given to the world had it been your pleasure to expound the whole subject of archæology.
I had myself, in a very humble way, an experience of this kind. In a domestic crisis it was necessary to placate a newly arrived and apparently homesick cook. I am unskilled in diplomacy, but it was a case where the comfort of an innocent family depended on diplomatic action. I learned that the young woman came from Prince Edward Island. Up to that moment I confess that Prince Edward Island had been a mere geographical expression. All my ideas about it were wrong, I having mixed it up with Cape Breton, which as I now know is quite different. But instantly Prince Edward Island became a matter of intense interest. Our daily bread was dependent on it. I entered my study and with atlas and encyclopædia sought to atone for the negligence of years. I learned how Prince Edward Island lay in relation to Nova Scotia, what were its principal towns, its climate, its railroad and steam-boat connections, and acquired enough miscellaneous information to adorn a five-minutes personally conducted conversation. Thus freshly furnished forth, I adventured into the kitchen.
Did she take the boat from Georgetown to Pictou? She did. Isn't it too bad that the strait is sometimes frozen over in winter? It is. Some people cross to New Brunswick on ice boats from Cape Traverse; that must be exciting and rather cold. She thought so too. Did she come from Charlottetown? No. Out Tignish way? Yes; halfway from Charlottetown to Tignish. Queen's County? Good apple country? Yes, she never saw such good apples as they raise in Queen's County. When I volunteered the opinion that the weather on Prince Edward Island is fine but changeable, I was received on the footing of an old inhabitant.
I did not find it necessary to go to the limits of my knowledge. I had still several reserve facts, classified in the Encyclopædia under the heads, Geology, Administration, and Finance. I had established my position as a superior person with an intuitive knowledge of Prince Edward Island. If the Encyclopædia itself had walked into the kitchen arm in arm with the Classical Dictionary, she could not have been more impressed. At least, that is the way I like to think she felt. It is the way I feel under similar circumstances.
One watches the Superior Person leading a conversation with the admiration due to Browning's Hervé Riel, when,
As its inch of way were the wide sea's profound,
he steered the ship in the narrow channel. It is well, however, for one who undertakes such feats to make sure that he really has an inch of way; it is none too much.