Ever since I first met him, when he was still in the twenties, Mr.
Churchill has seemed to me one of the most pathetic and misunderstood
figures in public life. People have got it into their heads that he is a
noisy, shameless, truculent, and pushing person, a sort of intellectual
Horatio Bottomley of the upper classes. Nothing could be further from
the truth.

Mr. Churchill is one of the most sensitive of prominent politicians, and
it is only by the exercise of his remarkable courage that he has
mastered this element of nervousness. Ambition has driven him onward,
and courage has carried him through, but more often than the public
thinks he has suffered sharply in his progress. The impediment of
speech, which in his very nervous moments would almost make one think
his mouth was roofless, would have prevented many men from even
attempting to enter public life; it has always been a handicap to Mr.
Churchill, but he has never allowed it to stop his way, and I think it
is significant both of his courage and the nervousness of his
temperament that while at the beginning of a speech this thickness of
utterance is most noticeable, the speaker's pale face showing two
patches of fiery pink in his cheeks, the utterance becomes almost clear,
the face shows no sign of self-consciousness, directly he has
established sympathy with his audience. It is interesting to notice an
accent of brutality in his speaking, so different from the suave and
charming tones of Mr. Balfour; this accent of brutality, however, is
not the note of a brutal character, but of a highly strung temperament
fighting its own sensibilities for mastery of its own mind. Mr.
Churchill is more often fighting himself than his enemies.

His health has been against him: his heart and his lungs have not given
him the support he needs for his adventurous and stormy career. At
times, when every man's hand has seemed to be against him, he has had to
fight desperately with both body and mind to keep his place in the
firing line. Some of his friends have seen him in a state of real
weakness, particularly of physical weakness, and for myself I have never
once found him in a truculent or self-satisfied frame of mind. I believe
he is at heart a modest man, and I am quite certain he is a delicate and
a suffering man. But for the devotion of his wife I think he could not
have held his place so long.

Fate, too, has opposed him. His enemies are never tired of shouting the
two