y over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute.
Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens.
The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed
plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud
in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards,
for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward
drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down"
into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay
self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up
at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy,
but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice.
It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely,
because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to
write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH.
For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap.
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of
gravity.

Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe since it has been Christian
that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart
treated aristocracy as a weakness--generally as a weakness that must
be allowed for. If any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him
go outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere.
Let him, for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes
of India. There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far
more intellectual. It is seriously felt that the scale of classes
is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the
butcher in an invisible and sacred sense. But no Christianity,
not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet
was better than a butcher in that sacred sense. No Christianity,
however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would
not be damned. In pagan society there may have been (I do not know)
some such serious division between the free man and the slave.
But in Christian society we have always thought the gentleman
a sort of joke, though I admit that in some great crusades
and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke.
But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took
aristocracy seriously. It is only an occasional non-European
alien (such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite)
wh