Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations, but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds?"
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.