Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical SketchesMcCarthy, Justin
History
Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches
McCarthy, Justin
Biography
is always ready to sacrifice his friend, or his party, or even his
cause, to his argument. Add to this that he has a conscience so
sensitive that it can hardly ever find any cause or deed smooth enough
to be wholly satisfactory; add, moreover, that he has an eloquence so
fluent as to flow literally away from him, or with him, and the wonder
will be how such a man ever came to be the successful leader of a great
party at all. He is always reconsidering what he has done, always
penitent for something he has said, always turning up to-day the side of
the question which everybody supposed was finally put away and done with
yesterday.
You can read all this in his face. Furrowed with deep and rigid lines,
it proclaims a certain self-torturing nature--the nature of the
penitent, self-examining ascetic, whose heart is always vexed by doubts
of his own worth and purity, and past and future. Decidedly, Gladstone
wants force of character, and force of intellect as well. He is not a
man of great thought. Every such man settles a question, so far as he is
himself concerned, finally, one way or the other, before long; sees and
accepts what the human limitations of thinking are; recognizes the
necessity of being done with mere thinking about it, and so decides and
is free to act. There is intellectual weakness in Gladstone's
interminable consideration and reconsideration, qualification and
requalification of every subject and branch of a subject. But there is
also a strong, genuine, unmingled delight in mere argument--perhaps as
barren a delight as human intellect can yield to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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