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.