In these days
I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here I
turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease the
art verges on artlessness.
The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something one
may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an individual,
but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of individuals.
Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of there being only
a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept quite dark, though
it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to be not so much the
Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not to be so much South
Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but distressing fact that
every class of political leadership, as it comes to the front in its turn,
catches the rays of this isolating lime-light; and becomes a small
aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic complaint so badly as
the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real difference between
Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much in anything right or
wrong in what he said, as in something elemental and even mystical in the
way he suggested a mob. But it must be plain, even to those who agree
with the more official policy, that for Mr.
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