cesse Murat, the
easy, attractive presence of the man whom this old Europe, with one
accord, is now discussing, criticising, blaming or applauding. The
President talked with perfect simplicity and great apparent frankness.
There is a curious mingling in his face, it seemed to me, of something
formidable, at times almost threatening, with charm and sweetness. You
are in the presence of something held in leash; that something is
clearly a will of remarkable quality and power. You are also in the
presence of something else, not less strongly controlled, a
consciousness of success, which is in itself a promise of further
success. The manner has in it nothing of the dictator, and nothing of
the pedant; but in the President's instinctive and accomplished choice
of words and phrases, something reminded me of the talk of George
Eliot as I heard it fifty years ago; of the account also given me
quite recently by an old friend and classmate of the President,
describing the remarkable pains taken with him as a boy, by his
father, to give him an unfailing command of correct and musical
English.

The extraordinary effectiveness lent by this ease and variety of
diction to a man who possesses not only words but ideas, is strongly
realised in Paris, where an ideal interpreter, M. Paul Mantoux, is
always at hand to put whatever the President says into perfect French.
M. Jusserand had given me an enthusiastic account, a few days before
this little gathering at the Villa Murat, of an impromptu speech at a
luncheon given to the President by the Senate, and in listening to the
President's conversation, I understood what M. Jusserand had felt, and
what a weapon at need--(how rare also among public men!)--is this
skilled excellence in expression, which the President commands, and
commands above all, so some of his shrewdest observers tell me, when
he is thrown suddenly on his own resources, has no scrap of paper to
help him, and must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him. It is said
that the irreverent American Army, made a little restive during the
last months of the year by the number of Presidential utterances it
was expected to read, and impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling
down in the weeks before the Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation
to "another literary winter." One laughs, but never were the art and
practice of literature more signally justified as a power among men
than by this former Professor and Head of a college, wh