The Passion of Labour (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921. Excerpt: ... XII The Public Man IT is impossible to speak with the same voice in public as in private. It is physically impossible, but it is more than that--it is also artistically impossible. Queen Victoria used to complain that Gladstone--or was it Bright?--addressed her as though she were a public meeting. To address a public meeting as though one were talking to a private acquaintance would cause still deeper resentments. A public man cannot step down into such intimacy save at his peril. His thoughts on the platform are not entirely his own thoughts. He has measured them on a bed of Procrustes before allowing them to appear, and offers them to the public only in standard shapes and patterns. He is not necessarily insincere, but neither is he free to say all he believes. He speaks in a measure as a representative, a mouthpiece, an echo. He is almost more concerned to find out what other people think than what he himself thinks. His creed, if he is a more or less honest man, is some sort of a compromise between this and that. If he is a dishonest man, he thinks what he thinks the public thinks with uncompromising singlemindedness. In neither case does he claim, as a man of letters or a man of science claims, the right to free play of the mind. Not in public, at any rate. No statesman at the head of a great party in power could set down everything in his mind without fear or favour as Shelleyj say, or Darwin did. That is why the literary temperament is so often hostile to the political. The man of letters wants to see a new world produced as though it were as simple a matter as writing a new poem. He regards statesmen like Sir Robert Peel as men who approach the great problems of society in the spirit of the old fellows who before the war used to go about the stree...