Letters to Literary Statesmen: By "Alciphron"

I

TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT

MR. JOHN MORLEY has described you as a man of letters temporarily assigned to other duty. Humor such as that will appeal to you more than cynicism like Disraeli’s. He, you will remember, said smirkingly, when urging Lord Lytton to accept the viceroyalty of India, that he himself had known what was the pain of abandoning literature for public life. Of that pretense you are incapable. You would no doubt frankly and heartily subscribe to the dictum of that other literary statesman, Adolphe Thiers: “Writing is a poor thing after action. I would give ten successful histories for one successful session, or for one successful campaign.”

Not that your delightful studies were ever conducted in still air. A clangor as of camp or ranch attended them from the first. With a versatility and sure instinct of publicity equal to Alfred Jingle’s own, you utilized the breathless intervals of sport to woo the Muse, to whom you dictated your addresses vociferously and at lightning speed. With you the writing of books always had the air of being a kind of exhilarating intellectual exercise. So you passed from the punching-bag to authorship with no sense of abrupt transition. Your volumes hurtled through the air like missiles. Yet they were always intended to put ideas into people’s heads, even if their skulls had first to be broken to get the ideas in. Consequently it is sky, not soul, that you have changed in becoming a public man. You have no occasion for long regrets over the forsaken occupation of letters, for the words of Condorcet to Turgot may be applied to you with peculiar force: “You are very happy in your passion for the public good, and your power to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study.”

Yet devotion to literature is a species of original sin, and bewrays its hidden taint even in the writer turned statesman. You, for example, have said that you “claim to be an historian.” But a peril lurks here. Are you always able to keep clear the distinction between writing history and making it ? May not too keen a sense that present politics is future history prevent you from fixing your eye on the goal before you, — as if a sprinter were to carry a stop-watch in his hand, and were to look at it eagerly from one moment to another, to see what time he was making? That would be a serious handicap for a runner; and so is, to a statesman, a haunting wonder how his deeds will read. Such a secondary conscience, literary in its nature, impairs absorption in the work at hand; and totus in illis is still the recipe for success in great affairs. Let presidents pant for posthumous fame as dying Garfield did, and as may be done in all honor, but let them know that intent and unconscious present achievement is the root from which alone the future bays can grow. You know that saying of Seneca’s: “Fame follows merit as surely as the body casts a shadow.” He added that the shadow sometimes falls in front, sometimes behind. In your case, your friends would urge you not to be too anxious that it fall in front. Tacitus anticipated Milton in saying that the lust of fame is the last infirmity that a wise man shakes off. For such a glutton of work as you, however, it should be easy to jettison that perilous cargo earlier in the voyage, and to face the future in the proud spirit of the line:

You have assured your countrymen that you model your public conduct upon Lincoln’s. Let us hope that this is not because your published list of the poor creatures among your predecessors in office did not come down to him. But your imitation should include his quality of “dreading praise, not blame.” And President Harrison, who said that your chief fault was wanting the millennium (all but the beating of spears into pruning hooks) right off, would scarcely have thought of fitting to you the truthful lines on Lincoln:

It is one of the misfortunes of the literary statesman that he jogs the literary memory. Suggesting one comparison, he invites others. You somewhat rashly challenge measuring by Lincoln, but it is safer to turn to the ancients. In your reading of Thucydides, — and your admiring friends have told us, with pardoned indiscretion, how your habit is to read the speeches which that historian put into the mouths of Greek statesmen, between train-stops for speeches of your own, in like manner to go down to posterity, — one wonders if you never were startled by coming upon unconscious prophecies. There was that description of the Athenian character, for example, made by a Corinthian orator: “They deem the quiet of inaction to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a man should say of them, in a word, that they were born neither to have peace themselves nor to allow peace to other men, he would simply speak the truth.” And if you are ever tempted to think that you succeed because you hit off perfectly the passing mood of your day, you might do well to re-read what Thucydides had to say of popular standards in times of unrest in the Greek cities: “Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man.”

No one has ever accused you of being among the “wiry logicians.” Yet they, according to Cobden, make the most “reliable politicians,” because, although they may be “ liable to false starts,... when once you know their premises you can calculate their course and where to find them.” Jefferson and Calhoun were of this stamp. In unpleasing contrast to them, Cobden mentioned a man of what he called the genus sentimentalist. “They are not to be depended on in political action, because they are not masters of their own reasoning powers. They sing songs or declaim about truth, justice, liberty, and the like, but it is only in the same artificial spirit in which they make odes to dewdrops, daisies, etc. They are just as likely to trample on one as the other, notwithstanding. ”

With you, however, it has not been a question of a body of political principles, rigorously held and rigidly worked out. You have been content to make your election among the current doctrines of parties. And your procedure seems now to be pretty clearly established. Your violence in denouncing political opponents is equaled only by your coolness in appropriating their programmes. The old motto used to be: Find out what your antagonists want to do, and then do the opposite. But you have improved upon that, so that your own maxim seems to read: Discover what the other party proposes, hold it up to scorn, warn the country against it, and then do it yourself. Great men before you have stolen the clothes of the Whigs, but no one has rivaled you in abusing them for not having better clothes to steal.

Yet you believe devoutly in your own party. The fact that it sustains you is proof enough that it deserves your allegiance and your praises. And you depend upon it as the means to your ends. But there are two sides to that. It also depends upon you — temporarily. If you propose to use it, it intends to use you; and where you think you have wings, you may any day find that you have a weight. Hence no more friendly advice could be given to you, in this great crisis of your political fortunes, than the advice which was given to that other aspiring young man, Vivian Grey: “If by any chance you find yourself independent, never for a moment suppose that you can accomplish your objects by coming forward to fight the battles of a party. They will cheer your successful exertions, and then smile at your youthful zeal; or, crossing themselves for the unexpected succor, be too cowardly to reward their unexpected champion. . . . There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable.”