THE JUDGMENT OF THE VALET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE JUDGMENT OF THE VALET.

MY MICE FERGtTSOK. Ix this age we are not greatly given to hero-worship, and such hero-worship as we do we do best when we don't come into too close contact with the hero. It is still comparatively easy to revere at a distance. The man whom we only know by his great achievements we can readily idealise as the incarnation of the worshipful qualities of mind and spirit that made tkose achievements possible. But let us get into intimate personal relations with him—and we are in danger of forgetting that he is a great man. For, at close quarters, the traits which he shares with the rest of humanity are apt to push themselves forward upon our notice, obscuring the greatness of which alone we had been conscious before. "What!" cried the old Highland woman, disappointedly, when the identity of the lady -who had visited her humble cottage had been revealed to her, "yon Queen Victoria! Why, she sat on her chair and drank her tea just like any ordinar* woman!" Perhaps we may nob go so far as to expect, that the great ones whom we idealise at a distance drink their tea or sit on their chairs in a manner remarkably different from our own. But I rather think we all look for something in their material aspect, and behaviour that will definitely and immediately proclaim their special superiority. And the special superiority does not, as a rule, announce itself that way! Indeed, it. would seem that, in order not to let his bodily presence interfere too seriously with our view of the soul of the hero, we ourselves need to own some kinship with his soul. It may not be a constant truth that the hero is never a hero to his valet, but it seems so likely to be generally true that the saying has added not a little to the conventionally contemptuous estimate of the valet held by most of us. We see how natural it is that the leader of victorious armies, the golden-mouthed orator, or the saintly reformer of social and ecclesiastical abuses, should appear £ distinctly over-rated person to the man who attends him in his bedchamber and is aware that he snores. Great Caesar's liability to take cramps and fevers apparently made him, in Cassius' opinion, unfit to bestride the -world like a Colossus. And how can one expect the valet to realise that his warrior master, who can't even brush hie own breeches properly, is worldfamous for the breaches he made in the enemy's fortifications? He would, also, require more imagination than he is likely to possess to enable him to mentally visualise another master as a lord of language, commanding the applause of listening senates, when familiarised to the actual sight of him rendered ingloriously mute by the morning toothbrush in hismouth. And, again, is he likely to turn aught but a sceptical ear to the outside world, lauding the apostolic meekness of the reformer whose toilet he attends to, whom he knows as a liberal exponent of impatience when a wanted collar-stud refuse to be found? But, in truth, we have no call to think contemptuously of tho valet to whom the things, that lie outride his field of observation are as if they were not. Are not the most of us ordinary people apt to see in the extraordinary man, who gives us his intimacy, so many points in which he is like ourselves that we fail to notice the all-important few that make him different from us? Ah, the little more how much it is! And the little less what worlds away! But, indeed, it would appear that our fine perception of this little more and little less is getting considerably blunted nowadays. Who need wonder at that .who has remarked the general spread of the worship of the average man? This comfortable cult is native to America, I believe, but it seems to flourish equally well in every country into which it has been introduced—probably because it agrees so satisfactorily with "that tired feeling,'' I bora of the everlasting hustle for wealth, j which is characteristic of our modern civilisation. The worship of the average man calls for no strenuous moral striving from folks tired out by their successful, or non-successful, pursuit of riches. It sets up no uncomfortably high ideal before us. The average man is a passably decent sort of person, such as we may all quite easily aspire to be—such as, in effect, even the most modest among us may belicvo we arc. Indeed, the apotheosis of the average man is just the collective self-complacency of the community attaining its climax. Modem man thinks himself no end of a clever fellow, and is n*ver done calling attention to the marvellous inventions with which he ha* smartened up civilisation. 'The schoolmaster abroad, admirable person though he be! has worked worse than he knew in helping to bring about this state of general self-complacency. So have the printingpresses of the world, flooding people with information, solicited and unsolicited. The result is that we all know so much that we have no room for knowing how little we really know. Moreover, it is getting quite difficult for tho average man to imagine that anyone can know more than he does—that anyone ran be wiser or better than he is. Part of Iris unformulated creed would seem to bo the belief that, excluding downright fools and knaves, people arc all mentally and morally much of a muchness. It this belief be challenged by the sight of those who, having Made by force their merit known. Become, on Fortune's crowning slope, The pillow of a people's hope, The centre of a world's desire. why, then, he is ready to put down their eminence to luck. Luck is the all-power-ful factor in human success! It is luck and not justice that stands blindfold, holding the scales with which she juggles quite shamelessly on her favourites' behalf. I fear that none of those beliefs will be found to work on the side of true progress It is far from a light thing that we should handicap our higher development by getting rid of the healthy stimulus of the belief in the superior merit of others. I wonder if it is the socialistic ideas, with which we all, willingly or unwillingly, are getting more or less permeated, which make many people seemingly resent the possession by ethers of more than the usual share of wisdom or goodness? Perhaps they may object, on principle, to aristocracies of soul .and intellect as well as to those of rank and money. And their way of trying to abolish them is to deny their existence. That is not so difficult to do as might be imagined. Minds and souls of high and low degree are housed alike in tenements of clay, so similar in general appearance that it is fairly easy to conclude, if one wants to, that the same similarity characterises the inmates of those clay tenements. Great wisdom and goodness does not quite exempt a man from doing -wrong and foolish

things, and showing laughable, - human infirmities, and the valet-minded people, who can't look beyond such things, take them as the' measure of his greatness. They are always prying to find the ordinary nun in the genius. And they find him. For, bless my heart, the genius is the ordinary man—with a good deal else superadded. The poet gives the world the best that is in him in words that comfort and ennoble the human soul. The statesman s best .declares itself in legislation wisely blessing millions of his fellow-creature:.. J The hero's best blossoms in lofty deeds of valour or self-sacrifice that thrill the world and sound the trumpet-call to imitation. But the man with the little soul is not satisfied with their best. He wants to be j shown their worst. Their worst should surely pull them down to, at least, the level of average people, who are guiltless j of the abominable anti-socialist vice of having more merit than their fellows. Ah, well, let ire be thankful that, in a world growing ever more foreign to the spirit of hero-worship, we have still a number of hero-worshippers left. Nay, more—it may even be tliat some of us have come across that ardent devotee who, not content with adoring true greatness enthroned before the eyes of the world, is ever on the lookout for it in obscure places in his own environment. His disinterested zeal may, often than not, lead him to think it is where it is not, arid to bore his friends to share his admiration, of the master-mind he has discovered in some essentially mediocre person without a tithe of th© discoverer's own powers. But his friends do not love him the less for that. Indeed, contrasted with the belittling scepticism of the man who* finds without himself nothing better than he find within, the very faults of the heroworshipper seem virtues. The world moves forward in obedience to the spirit that affirms, not to the spirit that denies. And, in close touch with that affirming spirit is the generous eouJ who looks ever for the best in his iellow-crea-tures, and who . . . does not find his sleep less sweet For music in a neighbouring street; Nor, rustling, hears on every breeze The laurels of Miltiades.