"Yes, yes," said Doctor Ueberbein in the course of an ordinary walk in the woods to Klaus Heinrich--they had drifted a little distance away from the five "Pheasants"--"nowadays the soul's thirst for veneration has to be satisfied with what it can get. Where will you find greatness? I only hope you may! But quite apart from all actual greatness and high-calling, there is always what I call Highness, select and sadly isolated forms of life, towards which an attitude of the tenderest sympathy should be adopted. For the rest, greatness is strong, it wears jack-boots, it has no need of the knight-services of the mind. But Highness is affecting--damme if it isn't the most affecting thing on earth."
Once or twice a year the "Pheasantry" journeyed to the capital to attend performances of classical operas and dramas in the Grand Ducal Court Theatre; Klaus Heinrich's birthday in particular was the signal for a visit to the theatre. He would then sit quietly in his carved arm-chair, leaning against the red plush ledge of the Court box, whose roof rested on the heads of two female figures with crossed hands and empty stern faces, and watched his colleagues, the princes, whose destinies were played out on the stage, while he stood the fire of the opera-glasses which from time to time, even during the play, were directed at him from the audience. Professor Kürtchen sat on his left hand and Doctor Ueberbein with the "Pheasants" in an adjoining box.
Once they heard the "Magic Flute," and on the way home to "Pheasantry" station, in the first-class carriage, Doctor Ueberbein made the whole collection of them laugh by imitating the way in which singers talk when their rôles oblige them to talk in prose. "He is a prince!" he said with pathos, and answered himself in a drawly, sing-song parsonical voice. "He is more than that, he is a man!" Even Professor Kürtchen was so much amused that he bleated.
But next day, in the course of a private lesson in Klaus Heinrich's study, with the round mahogany table, whitened ceiling, and Greek bust on the stove, Doctor Ueberbein repeated his parody, and said then: "Great heavens, that was something new in its time, it was a piece of news, a startling truth! There are paradoxes which have stood so long on their heads that one has to put them on their feet to make anything even moderately daring out of them, 'He is a man. He is more than that'--that is getting gradually bolder, prettier, even truer. The converse is mere humanity, but I have no hearty love for humanity, I'm quite content to leave it out of account. One must, in a certain sense, be one of those of whom the people say: 'They are, after all, mortal men too'--or one is as deadly dull as an usher. I cannot honestly wish for the general comfortable obliteration of conflicts and gulfs, that's the way I am made, for better or worse, and the idea of the _principe uomo_ is to me, to speak plainly, an abomination. I am not anxious that it should particularly appeal to you.... Look you, there have always been princes and exceptional persons who live their life of exception with a light heart, simply unconscious of their dignity or denying it outright, and capable of playing skittles with the townsfolk in their shirt-sleeves, without the slightest attempt at an inward qualm. But they are not very important, just as nothing is important which lacks mind. For mind, Klaus Heinrich, mind is the tutor which insists inexorably on dignity, indeed actually creates dignity, it is the arch-enemy and chief antagonist of all human good nature. 'More than that?' No! to be a representative, to stand for a number when one appears to be the exalted and refined expression of a multitude. Representing is naturally something more and higher than simply Being, Klaus Heinrich--and that's why people call you Highness."