sees. "Loyalty," he writes, "is a convention to which the
alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his good sense. It is not his affair, and in the meantime it is a most curious and interesting spectacle." To an Englishman the word "loyalty" means something so much more than convention that Mr. Howells himself becomes in turn difficult to understand. But the point that emerges is that there is no one word upon which Americans and Englishmen could agree to express exactly what the American critic thinks he sees. What Mr. Howells calls " loyalty " we should describe, perhaps, as acceptance of the fact of rank. Mr. Howells would retort that our fact is not a fact. To him it is a "realm of faery."
"The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case does he spell American," Mr. Howells remarks with excellent good humour, and he will therefore pardon the substitution of English spelling for Spenser's Americanism in the title of this article. Otherwise Mr. Howells's vision of our fairyland must be described in his own words. The chief figure in the "realm of faery" is, of course, the King himself; but the King does not walk alone upon enchanted ground. Wizards have waved wands over the hundreds of millions of his subjects, and they, like the spectators of the Red King's afternoon doze, have become "a sort of thing in his dream." We are all mixed up in it, and no wonder that it is hard for the dispassionate onlooker to admit any reality beyond the snores. " It's no use your talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.' 'I am real V said Alice, and began to cry." And we, probably, shall be no more successful than Alice in "making ourselves realler " by trying to explain. "It is the universal make- believe behind all the practical virtue of the State that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of famy." We have just chosen to imagine it all, it seems. "The whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the primacy among them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a fool of." Then there comes another prodigious stroke of volition, and besides the Monarch a class of persons arises in the enchanted island who "can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forth- with be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them and their assigns, for- ever." And all this does not belong to the days of "longago " (Mr. Howells forgot Calverley when he said that no English- man could spell American), but is actually proceeding under our very noses. It continues to happen, as it did in last week's Honours list, that "if a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the faery dream recognises his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever." So it goes on, all the persons in the dream taking themselves as seriously "as if there were or could be in reality kings and lords," and the whole dream being exceedingly difficult of understanding for the inhabitant of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.
Is it a fairyland? The reality or fancifulness of its beginnings, at all events, is capable of a very simple test. It may be the fact that there could not be "in reality kings and lords " ; that the "realm of faery" in which kings and lords exist is "a thing which could not have any existence in nature " ; and that we have all been wrong since Virgil about the bees. But in any case that is easily proved or disproved. If you want to demonstrate that there is, and can be, no such thing as a king, all you have to do is submit your theory to one of those African or Melanesian tribes who fancy that they select as their potentate the biggest and strongest of their warriors. Battleaxes having been selected as the weapons, the question whether in reality such a being as a king could possibly exist soon becomes as clear as daylight. Perhaps, however, a less strenuous method of argument might be equally convincing. Would it be quite impossible for any one outside the dream to take the persons in it seriously, if he turned his thoughts to reflect what would be the fate of the patrician, or would-be patrician, ladies and gentlemen in the vision, if they did not act up to the part assigned to them ? Mr. Howells seems to have some glimmering of the eventualities of such a supposition when he remarks that the regard for the Throne which informed the attitude of the British people during the Victorian era "was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges." That is, perhaps, not wholly true, for we doubt whether the Republican dream of which Mr. Howells hints ever had much hold on the imagination of the English, who have an intense love of pageants. But it is certainly true of all the personalities, considered singly, of the "realm of faery," that respect is only paid to them so long as their dream, in turn, is to deserve it. To use what Mr. Howells would perhaps call the phrase of a dream, they must play the game. Some of it, no doubt, must be pleasant, a good deal of it must be tiresome, all of it must be binding and restrictive, shackled by un- bending rules, confined by immovable boundaries. The loss of personal liberty, to begin with, must be enormous. When- ever scandals are whispered about public persons, it is not so much charity as sheer common-sense which forbids belief of even half the chatter, simply because the scandal is whispered. If it were true, it would be shouted ; all would know, because all would have seen; the king of the city on the hill can no more be hid than the city itself. The relief of acting incognito would be prodigious; but it was a very long time ago that the gods were able to palm themselves off as mortals on poor old people like Baucis and Philemon; and probably if Zeus had done anything much more noticeable than just sitting down to supper, he would have been found out at once and have had all the usual nuisance of being worshipped. But not only must the perpetual, insistent recognition be exasperating. The American people, determined, presumably, that there shall be nothing very dreamlike in the highest office of the Constitution, forbid their President to leave the United States ; but even an American President is not much more trammelled by engagements at home than a great English noble. To preside at banquets organised by local agricultural sooieties ; to be Honorary Colonel of the local Volunteers ; to open bazaars, exhibitions, public libraries, town halls, municipal buildings, assembly-rooms, swimming-baths, and playing-fields ; to make speeches at tenants' dinners, provide ground for rifle-ranges and cricket clubs ; to take a practical interest in the housing of the labourers of the estate, as all landlords are compelled to do by society when their own inclinations do not urge them, which to their credit is extremely seldom ; and finally, to carry out all those requirements not merely without grumbling, but with evident willingness and pleasure,—it is, after all, something of a burden. As to other aspects of positions of greatness, is it a fanciful notion that to dishonour a title that has been honoured for generations is something more than to make infamous a name never yet known ? In a packed crowd, everybody's clothes hide everybody else's. The broad arrows in the woof are not to be hidden on the dais.
But the "realm of faery "—or, at all events, its practical side—does not belong entirely to peoples with Constitutional Monarchies and an old nobility. The old Greeks knew very well how to apply the kind of pressure which is brought in these days to bear upon public persons. Their idea was that persons possessed of a certain amount of wealth should per- form certain services, or liturgies, to the State. One man might be required, as a liturgy, to furnish the State with a battleship ; another, to provide and pay the chorus of a play ; if he did not like the notion, urging that he was too poor, he could point out a richer man, who was compelled to perform the liturgy, or, on refusal, to exchange properties with his poorer neighbour. We still exact some kind of liturgies, and refusal to pay them still involves some kind of abdication. Titles, no doubt, could be taxed out of existence ; perhaps they are not taxed enough. But they bear a burden sufficient as it is to make them more real to their possessors than merely "a sort of thing" in somebody else's dream.
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