The well-known fact that mystery is inseparable from higher religious idealism may be regarded as a larger expression of this same necessity of associating inscrutability with personal power. If the imagination cannot be content with the definite in lesser instances, it evidently cannot when it comes to form the completest image of personality that it can embrace.
Although ascendency depends upon what we think about a man rather than what he is, it is nevertheless true that an impression of his reality and good faith is of the first importance, and this impression can hardly outlast close scrutiny unless it corresponds to the fact. Hence, as a rule, the man who is to exercise enduring power over others must believe in that for which he stands. Such belief operates as a potent suggestion upon the minds of others.
“While thus he spake, his eye, dwelling on mine,
Drew me, with power upon me, till I grew
One with him, to believe as he believed.”[[91]]
If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. Nothing, therefore, is more fatal to ascendency than perceived insincerity or doubt, and in immediate intercourse it is hard to conceal them. When Luther came to Rome and saw what kind of a man the Pope was, the papacy was shaken.
How far it is possible for a man to work upon others through a false idea of himself depends upon a variety of circumstances. As already pointed out, the man himself may be a mere incident with no definite relation to the idea of him, the latter being a separate product of the imagination. This can hardly be except where there is no immediate contact between leader and follower, and partly explains why authority, especially if it covers intrinsic personal weakness, has always a tendency to surround itself with forms and artificial mystery, whose object is to prevent familiar contact and so give the imagination a chance to idealize. Among a self-reliant, practical people like ours, with much shrewdness and little traditional reverence, the power of forms is diminished; but it is always great. The discipline of armies and navies, for instance, very distinctly recognizes the necessity of those forms which separate superior from inferior, and so help to establish an unscrutinized ascendency in the former. In the same way manners, as Professor Ross remarks in his work on “Social Control,”[[92]] are largely used by men of the world as a means of self-concealment, and this self-concealment serves, among other purposes, that of preserving a sort of ascendency over the unsophisticated.
As regards intentional imposture, it may be said in general that all men are subject to be duped in matters of which they have no working knowledge and which appeal strongly to the emotions. The application of this principle to quack medicine, to commercial swindles, and to the ever-reappearing impostures relating to supposed communication with spirits, is too plain to be enlarged upon. While it is an advantage, even to a charlatan, to believe in himself, the susceptibility of a large part of us to be duped by quacks of one sort or another is obvious enough, and shows that the work of free institutions in developing shrewdness is by no means complete.
Probably a close and candid consideration of the matter would lead to the conclusion that everyone is something of an impostor, that we all pose more or less, under the impulse to produce a desired impression upon others. As social and imaginative beings we must set store by our appearance; and it is hardly possible to do so without in some degree adapting that appearance to the impression we wish to make. It is only when this adaptation takes the form of deliberate and injurious deceit that much fault can be found with it. “We all,” says Stevenson in his essay on Pepys, “whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation.” If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or “train ourselves from the outside inward”? And the same impulse to show the world a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the world. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed by the unworthy. As theology goes down and science comes up, the affectation of disinterestedness and of exactness in method tends to supplant the affectation of piety.
In general it may be said that imposture is of considerable but always secondary importance; it is a sort of parasite upon human idealism and thrives only by the impulse to believe. A correct intuition on the part of mankind in the choice of their leaders is the only guaranty of the effectual organization of life in any or every sphere; and in the long run and on a large scale this correctness seems to exist. On the whole, the great men of history were real men, not shams, their characters were genuinely representative of the deeper needs and tendencies of human nature, so that in following them men were truly expressing themselves.