Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/75

 clients. Nothing came of it; but a fig for experience! Mr. Cowen is, lilie the great author and finisher of his faith, Mazzini, essentially an idealist, a poet with intense sympathy and vivid imagination. His sympathy and imagination have temporarily overwhelmed his reason: that is all,—nothing better, nothing worse. If I were to have the making of two perfect Radical politicians, I should mix Dilke and Cowen together. The one is two-thirds reason and one-third imagination; the other, two-thirds imagination and one-third reason. Give C. one-third of D.'s reason, and D. one-third of C.'s sympathetic fancy, and then you would have a correct balance of powers.

Bright's is the only powerful intellect in the House in which reason and imagination are blended ia just and equal proportions, the imagination acting as a stimulus to the reason, but never as a controlling power. I will illustrate what I mean by a passage from Mr. Cowen's magnificently unwise Jingo speech in the House on the occasion of the supposed Russian advance on Constantinople: "I ask English Liberals if they have ever seriously considered the political consequences of an imperial despotism bestriding Europe,—reaching, indeed, from the waters of the Neva to those of the Amoor,—of the head of the Greek Church, the Eastern Pope, the master of many legions, having one foot on the Baltic, planting another on the Bosphorus. When icebergs float into southern latitudes, they freeze the air for miles around. Will not this political iceberg, when it descends upon the genial shores of the Mediterranean, wither the young shoots of liberty that are springing up between the crevices of the worn-out fabrics of despotism?" Now, all this is very striking,