This is life lived as a
discipline- the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us-
by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is
plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges
of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary,
they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the
privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were
necessary, and anyone were to dispute them.[2] Private rights or privileges are not, then, passive possession and mere
enjoyment, but they represent the standard attained by personal effort. On the
other hand, common rights, such as those "of the man and the citizen,"
are passive property, pure usufruct and benefit, the generous gift of fate which
every man finds before him, and which answers to no effort whatever, unless it
be that of breathing and avoiding insanity. I would say, then, that an
impersonal right is held, a personal one is upheld.
It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in ordinary speech by a
word so inspiring as "nobility." For, by coming to mean for many
people hereditary "noble blood," it is changed into something similar
to common rights, into a static, passive quality which is received and
transmitted like something inert. But the strict sense, the etymon of the word
nobility is essentially dynamic. Noble means the "well known," that
is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the
anonymous mass. It implies an unusual effort as the cause of his fame. Noble,
then, is equivalent to effortful, excellent. The nobility or fame of the son is
pure benefit. The son is known because the father made himself famous. He is
known by reflection, and in fact, hereditary nobility has an indirect character,
it is mirrored light, lunar nobility, something derived from the dead. The only
thing left to it of living, authentic, dynamic is the impulse it stirs in the
descendant to maintain the level of effort reached by the ancestor. Always, even
in this altered sense, noblesse oblige.
