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Mark
Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Chapter 8
THE BOSS
TO be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have
the on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episode solidified
my power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed
to be jealous and critical before that, they experienced a change
of heart, now. There was not any one in the kingdom who would have
considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.
I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For
a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream,"
and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing
played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize
that I was actually living in the sixth century, and in Arthur's court,
not a lunatic asylum. After that, I was just as much at home in that
century as I could have been in any other; and as for preference,
I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the opportunities
here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail
in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was;
and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby to me
in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in
the twentieth century?
I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag
a seine down street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.
What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep from thinking about it,
and contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil. There was
nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph's
case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal it, quite.
For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid financial ingenuities
advantaged nobody but the king, the general public must have regarded
him with a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public
a kindness in sparing the sun, and was popular by reason of it.
I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself
was the shadow. My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name,
as such things have generally been, it was the genuine article. I
stood here, at the very spring and source of the second great period
of the world's history; and could see the trickling stream of that
history gather and deepen and broaden, and roll its mighty tides down
the far centuries; and I could note the upspringing of adventurers
like myself in the shelter of its long array of thrones: De Montforts,
Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses; the war-making, campaign-directing
wantons of France, and Charles the Second's scepter-wielding drabs;
but nowhere in the procession was my full-sized fellow visible. I
was a Unique; and glad to know that that fact could not be dislodged
or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure. Yes, in
power I was equal to the king. At the same time there was another
power that was a trifle stronger than both of us put together. That
was the Church. I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn't, if
I wanted to. But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its
proper place, later on. It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning
-- at least any of consequence.
Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people!
They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they
were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome
free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of
loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had
any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than
a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor
the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever
modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an
insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement
you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it
when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed
of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied
its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate
people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company
of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty
and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and simple,
and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the
rest were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves
men and freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation
as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel
before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for
them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink
misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might
wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying
them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and
postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves
the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were
cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took
even this sort of attention as an honor.
Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe
and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both
cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man
who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would
have had a long contract on his hands. For instance, those people
had inherited the idea that all men without title and a long pedigree,
whether they had great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn't, were
creatures of no more consideration than so many animals, bugs, insects;
whereas I had inherited the idea that human daws who can consent to
masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned
titles, are of no good but to be laughed at. The way I was looked
upon was odd, but it was natural. You know how the keeper and the
public regard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is the idea.
They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength;
they speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels
which are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak with
the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is able to drive a
thousand men before him. But does that make him one of THEM? No; the
raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn't comprehend
it; couldn't take it in; couldn't in any remote way conceive of it.
Well, to the king, the nobles, and all the nation, down to the very
slaves and tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, and nothing
more. I was admired, also feared; but it was as an animal is admired
and feared. The animal is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not
even respected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king's
and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me with wonder
and awe, but there was no reverence mixed with it; through the force
of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of anything being
entitled to that except pedigree and lordship. There you see the hand
of that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little
centuries it had converted a nation of men to a nation of worms. Before
the day of the Church's supremacy in the world, men were men, and
held their heads up, and had a man's pride and spirit and independence;
and what of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by
achievement, not by birth. But then the Church came to the front,
with an axe to grind; and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than
one way to skin a cat -- or a nation; she invented "divine right
of kings," and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the
Beatitudes -- wrenching them from their good purpose
Inherited ideas are a curious thing to make them fortify an evil one;
she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience to superiors, the
beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the commoner) meekness
under insult; preached (still to the commoner, always to the commoner)
patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under oppression; and
she introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the
Christian populations of the earth to bow down to them and worship
them. Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in the blood
of Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content
to see his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions,
such as lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his
country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented
with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade
himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't
anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it. Of
course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in
our American blood, too -- I know that; but when I left America it
had disappeared -- at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant
of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When a disease has
worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out
of the system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom.
Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master
intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement
the one and only actually great man in that whole British world; and
yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birth-time,
the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent from a king's leman,
acquired at second-hand from the slums of London, was a better man
than I was. Such a personage was fawned upon in Arthur's realm and
reverently looked up to by everybody, even though his dispositions
were as mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base as his lineage.
There were times when HE could sit down in the king's presence, but
I couldn't. I could have got a title easily enough, and that would
have raised me a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's,
the giver of it. But I didn't ask for it; and I declined it when it
was offered. I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions;
and it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could
go, our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. I couldn't
have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proud and set-up over
any title except one that should come from the nation itself, the
only legitimate source; and such an one I hoped to win; and in the
course of years of honest and honorable endeavor, I did win it and
did wear it with a high and clean pride. This title fell casually
from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village, was caught up
as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouth with a laugh and
an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the kingdom, and was
become as familiar as the king's name. I was never known by any other
designation afterward, whether in the nation's talk or in grave debate
upon matters of state at the council-board of the sovereign. This
title, translated into modern speech, would be THE BOSS. Elected by
the nation. That suited me. And it was a pretty high title. There
were very few THE'S, and I was one of them. If you spoke of the duke,
or the earl, or the bishop, how could anybody tell which one you meant?
But if you spoke of The King or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.
Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him -- respected
the office; at least respected it as much as I was capable of respecting
any unearned supremacy; but as men I looked down upon him and his
nobles -- privately. And he and they liked me, and respected my office;
but as an animal, without birth or sham title, they looked down upon
me -- and were not particularly private about it, either. I didn't
charge for my opinion about them, and they didn't charge for their
opinion about me: the account was square, the books balanced, everybody
was satisfied.
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