In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite
made up my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public
life, construing public life to refer to political transactions. The
ideal may exist in art and letters, and sometimes very young men
imagine that it exists in very young women. But here we must draw the
line. As society is constituted the ideal has no place, not even
standing room, in the arena of civics.
If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this. The
painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little
picture—the poet, also, with his little rhyme—his atelier his universe,
his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft—he
himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where
the conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends
against many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some
counter-move; where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or
rudely blotted out by a mysterious hand stretched forth from the
darkness.
“I wish I could be as sure of anything,” said Melbourne, “as Tom
Macaulay is of everything.” Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a
man of books; and so throughout the story the men of action have been
fatalists, from Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except
the invisible player behind the screen.
Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of
the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state,
which has never existed.
The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men
delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for
them, we shall continue to have him.
He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing
marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the
six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a
fighter and an orator. But the statesman—the ideal statesman—in the
mind’s eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly
would be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any
votes or anywhere—a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had
some imitation ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in
palming off their pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward
over the history of the country we shall find the greatest among our
public men—measuring greatness by real and useful service—to have been
while they lived least regarded as idealists; for they were men of
flesh and blood, who amid the rush of events and the calls to duty
could not stop to paint pictures, to consider sensibilities, to put
forth the deft hand where life and death hung upon the stroke of a
bludgeon or the swinging of a club.
Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor
Lincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. They
loved truth for truth’s sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no
one of them ever quite attained his conception of it.
Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to adapt and apply it, how many
faces it shows us, what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who is
able to catch and hold a single fleeting expression. To bridle this and
saddle it, and, as we say in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around
the paddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of things
accomplished, is another matter. The real statesman must often do as he
can, not as he would; the ideal statesman existing only in the
credulity of those simple souls who are captivated by appearances or
deceived by professions.
The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I have known was most
grossly stigmatized while he lived. I have Mr. Tilden in mind. If ever
man pursued an ideal life he did. From youth to age he dwelt amid his
fancies. He was truly a man of the world among men of letters and a man
of letters among men of the world. A philosopher pure and simple—a
lover of books, of pictures, of all things beautiful and elevating—he
yet attained great riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion
for affairs he was able to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the
yearning to be of service to the State which had filled his heart.
He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without the artifices usual to the
practical politician he gradually rose to be a power in his party;
thence to become the leader of a vast following, his name a shibboleth
to millions of his countrymen, who enthusiastically supported him and
who believed that he was elected Chief Magistrate of the United States.
He was an idealist; he lost the White House because he was so, though
represented while he lived by his enemies as a scheming spider weaving
his web amid the coil of mystification in which he hid himself. For he
was personally known to few in the city where he had made his abode; a
great lawyer and jurist who rarely appeared in court; a great political
leader to whom the hustings were mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet
a dreamer, who lived his own life a little apart, as a poet might;
uncorrupting and incorruptible; least of all were his political
companions moved by the loss of the presidency, which had seemed in his
grasp. And finally he died—though a master of legal lore—to have his
last will and testament successfully assailed.
Except as news venders the newspapers—especially newspaper
workers—should give politics a wide berth. Certainly they should have
no party politics. True to say, journalism and literature and politics
are as wide apart as the poles. From Bolingbroke, the most splendid of
the world’s failures, to Thackeray, one of its greatest masters of
letters—who happily did not get the chance he sought in parliamentary
life to fall—both English history and American history are full of
illustrations to this effect. Except in the comic opera of French
politics the poet, the artist, invested with power, seems to lose his
efficiency in the ratio of his genius; the literary gift, instead of
aiding, actually antagonizing the aptitude for public business.
The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, the artist, must be
always so. If the party leader preserve his integrity—if he keep
himself disinterested and clean—if his public influence be inspiring to
his countrymen and his private influence obstructive of cheats and
rogues among his adherents—he will have done well.
We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the
Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft
and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report
progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the
arts of government has the world traveled from darkness to light since
the old tribal days, and what has it learned except to enlarge the
area, to amplify and augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate
the forms and processes of corruption? By corruption I mean the
dishonest advantage of the few over the many.
The dreams of yesterday, we are told, become the realities of
to-morrow. In these despites I am an optimist. Much truly there needs
still to be learned, much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider
ourselves we are yet a long way from the most rudimentary perception of
the civilization we are so fond of parading. The eternal verities—where
shall we seek them? Little in religious affairs, less still in
commercial affairs, hardly any at all in political affairs, that being
right which represents each organism. Still we progress. The pulpit
begins to turn from the sinister visage of theology and to teach the
simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. The press, which used to be
omniscient, is now only indiscriminate—a clear gain, emitting by force
of publicity, if not of shine, a kind of light through whose diverse
rays and foggy luster we may now and then get a glimpse of truth.