Suddenly his voice rang out in strident bursts.

“How gay these men are!  Be it so.  Here is irony face to face with agony; a sneer mocking the death-rattle.  They are all-powerful.  Perhaps so; be it so.  We shall see.  Behold!  I am one of them; but I am also one of you, O ye poor!  A king sold me.  A poor man sheltered me.  Who mutilated me?  A prince.  Who healed and nourished me?  A pauper.  I am Lord Clancharlie; but I am still Gwynplaine.  I take my place amongst the great; but I belong to the mean.  I am amongst those who rejoice; but I am with those who suffer.  Oh, this system of society is false!  Some day will come that which is true.  Then there will be no more lords, and there shall be free and living men.  There will be no more masters; there will be fathers.  Such is the future.  No more prostration; no more baseness; no more ignorance; no more human beasts of burden; no more courtiers; no more toadies; no more kings; but Light!  In the meantime, see me here.  I have a right, and I will use it.  Is it a right?  No, if I use it for myself; yes, if I use it for all.  I will speak to you, my lords, being one of you.  O my brothers below, I will tell them of your nakedness.  I will rise up with a bundle of the people’s rags in my hand.  I will shake off over the masters the misery of the slaves; and these favoured and arrogant ones shall no longer be able to escape the remembrance of the wretched, nor the princes the itch of the poor; and so much the worse, if it be the bite of vermin; and so much the better, if it awake the lions from their slumber.”

Here Gwynplaine turned towards the kneeling under-clerks, who were writing on the fourth woolsack.

“Who are those fellows kneeling down?—­What are you doing?  Get up; you are men.”

These words, suddenly addressed to inferiors whom a lord ought not even to perceive, increased the merriment to the utmost.

They had cried, “Bravo!” Now they shouted, “Hurrah!” From clapping their hands they proceeded to stamping their feet.  One might have been back in the Green Box, only that there the laughter applauded Gwynplaine; here it exterminated him.  The effort of ridicule is to kill.  Men’s laughter sometimes exerts all its power to murder.

The laughter proceeded to action.  Sneering words rained down upon him.  Humour is the folly of assemblies.  Their ingenious and foolish ridicule shuns facts instead of studying them, and condemns questions instead of solving them.  Any extraordinary occurrence is a point of interrogation; to laugh at it is like laughing at an enigma.  But the Sphynx, which never laughs, is behind it.

Contradictory shouts arose,—­

“Enough! enough!” “Encore! encore!”

William Farmer, Baron Leimpster, flung at Gwynplaine the insult cast by Ryc Quiney at Shakespeare,—­

“Histrio, mima!”

Lord Vaughan, a sententious man, twenty-ninth on the barons’ bench, exclaimed,—­