Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/367

 could as inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations; they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their heart's core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or as anything; we instinctively recognize the vitiating quality of the political atmosphere in our constant use of the phrase "if it could only be taken out of politics," as with the tariff, the currency, municipal government, etc. But my friends in the political line could join my friends in the literary line in the surprise they felt at my decision to retire at the end of that last term. The politicians did not think I meant what I said, of course; it is quite impossible for a politician to imagine a man's meaning what he says, since politicians so seldom mean what they say themselves; they considered it merely as bad politics to