e privileges and powers of this
sarcasm upon the human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from its far
summit in the social skies the world's accepted ideal of Glory and Might
and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows and
shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things
and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At
our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and
believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often
forget--or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in
one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money. When this
madness is in a mild form it is harmless and the man passes for sane;
but when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it can
make him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost
it again it can land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin. Love
is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy
of despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like
Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life.
All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions,
passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipient madness, and
ready to grow, spread, and consume, when the occasion comes. There are
no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident
of not having his malady put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the
pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common,
but universal. In its mildest form it doubtless is universal. Every
child is pleased at being noticed; many intolerable children put in
their whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the
attention of visitors; boys are always "showing off"; apparently all
men and women are glad and grateful when they find that they have done
a thing which has lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused
wondering talk. This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a
hunger for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness
for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship and the
thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and showy
fineries; it has made kings pick one another's pockets, scramble for one
ano