es of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it
used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. It may be
doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man
who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that
they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out
against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are
several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain, for
instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquishes his
opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different
to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His
friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict
him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor
the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has
one power which is the soul of melodrama--the power of pretending, even
when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For
all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of
misfortune--that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to
weakness. He talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city
that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower,
like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness and
appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick
of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of
Mark Antony--

"I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."

It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of
any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the
sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the
orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr.
Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won. He
has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these
plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in
the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and
people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all.
All his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did
not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels
in Matthew Arnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always
fe