Whatever superstructure of world organization he takes part in,
behind it will be the reality, a private understanding with the
biggest man in sight; for this reason the fall of Lloyd George and
the succession of a Labor government in England will disconcert him
terribly. The democratic passion for equality, which dogs the
tracks of the great, he mollifies by reminding the nation always
that he is "just folks," by opening the White House lawn gates, by
calling everyone by his first name. So constant is his aim to
appease it that I wonder if he is not sometimes betrayed into
addressing his Secretary of State as "Charley."
WOODROW WILSON
The explanation of President Wilson will be found in a certain
inferiority. When all his personal history becomes known, when his
papers and letters have all been published and read, when the
memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there
will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental
or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness,
shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought
on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man
with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a strange,
impeded, self-absorbed personality.
History arranged the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a
lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"--all save one, and he the
nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with
the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has
run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but
inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in
his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he
forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great
things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the
everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is
a crisis fate produces a man big enough to meet it.
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