Dutch fiction -- Translations into English; Kings and rulers -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction
It is to be understood, none the less, that she had always expected it
to come: assassination is one of the special risks attaching to majesty
at all times when one form of kingship or the whole institution of kings
is debated and criticized. _"When the intellectual developments or
culture of a race,"_ wrote Heine, in _The Citizen Kingdom in 1832,
"cease to accord with its old established institutions, the necessary
result is a combat in which the latter are overthrown. This is called a
revolution. Until this revolution is complete, so long as the reform of
these institutions does not agree at all points with the intellectual
development, the habits and the wants of the people, during this period
the national malady is not wholly cured and the ailing and agitated
people will often relapse into the weakness of exhaustion and at times
be subject to fits of burning fever. When this fever is upon them, they
tear the lightest bandages and the most healing lint from their old
wounds, throw the most benevolent and noble-hearted nurses out of window
and themselves roll about in agony, until at length they find themselves
in circumstances or adapt themselves to institutions that suit them
better."_
So much for the race, in the gripe of growing-pains; but what of the
nurses? How little benevolent or noble-hearted soever they be, nurses
are bound by the honour of their profession and by personal pride not to
forsake their patients. In one passage of _Majesty_ the crown-prince is
shaken by fundamental doubts of his own inherited right to rule; he
questions and analyses until he is brought to heel by his imperial
father who remembers that an excess of "victorious analysis" rotted the
intellectual foundations of the old order and prepared the way for the
logical French revolution. In another passage the boy realizes without
any qualification that he at least is unfitted for the burthen of empire
and that it is better to abdicate in favour of his brother or to commit
suicide than to play Atlas with a world that he cannot sustain; once
more, his imperial father silences any admission that his own flesh and
blood can be too degenerate for the task of majesty. And so, at the
moral sword-point, this hereditary nurse is held to the duty and
privilege of standing by an hereditary patient whom he cannot relieve
with "the most healing lint" and who may at any moment throw him out of
window.
Not even in thought may majesty abdicate: a prince inherits his
philosophy as he inherits his title.
_"Life is so simple,"_ proclaims the collectivist Zanti.
_"'As you picture it, but not in reality,' objected Herman._
_"Zanti looked at him angrily, stopped still, to be able to talk with
greater ease, and, passionately, violently, exclaimed:_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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