on crosses his
pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions
Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to
the world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has
taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to
sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international
emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed,
elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great
national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty
generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry Cabot
Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for
saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws
of a prowling League of Nations!

It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public
moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one
single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul
before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.

It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to
argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do
to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's
idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.

So it came to pass--a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a
man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man
magnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any day
in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice
of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....

Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was
measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues
of nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that a
man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in
this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own
desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his
nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a
national, into an international helplessness like this?

My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the
present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the
psycho-analysis of nations, a sug