SENSITIVENESS.
THE German Emperor is constantly censured here for authorising so many punishments for the offence of lese-majeste, and no doubt those prosecutions are politically most unwise. Although the immense majority never suffer from them, they make all his subjects feel as if they were being choked by policemen. We suspect, however, that the impulse which moves the Emperor is a much more common one than is usually assumed, and that even among English
politicians there are a good many who, if they had but the power, would delight in following William IL's example. An inability to endure criticism, and especially criticism with a trace in it either of spite or of ridicule, is the commonest of foibles. It has been laughed at or regretted in poets, authors, and theologians from time immemorial, but it is jast as frequent among active politicians. A living English statesman of the first rank is said to read all notices of himself and his speeches, and to be not only hurt when the notices are hostile, but seriously enraged. Few men have broader minds or more tolerant tempers than Abraham Lincoln had, and he, moreover, had a humour of the precise kind which enables a man to smile under verbal assault; but he confessed that he could not endure the printed comments on his conduct, and was compelled at last by internal irritation to take refuge in a systematic refusal to read newspapers. "Is thy servant a dog," he said on one occasion in an uncontrollable burst of anger at some misrepresentation, "that he should have done this thing ? " Napoleon, like Mahomet, punished libellers with merciless severity, and indeed the whole duelling system of the Continent and America is based upon the theory that no one can be expected to bear ridicule or insult in words without inflicting condign and immediate punishment. There are very few English statesmen, for all their talk, who would not if they could restrain the " license " of the Press, and a very large pro- portion would be found, if they were speaking on oath, to define " license " as derision of themselves. It was the lot of the writer once to live for a year under a Press Act, drawn up in a British dependency on Continental lines, and to be privately informed in most cases when the great officials advised prosecution, and for what reasons. He was amused to find, as also was the great officer with whom decision ultimately rested, that really imprudent or injurious state- ments were constantly passed over, while grave and experienced Ministers asked for the punishment of those who had indulged in veiled satire, or still worse, in open ridicule, of themselves. "What harm," asked their chief on one particular occasion, "can such an article as that do to the State?" "It makes us look small," was the reply of a candid man, whose record for energy, ability, and above all, moral courage, was far beyond the average. We rather believe in great officials, whose services to the community seem to us to be often grudgingly acknowledged, but we should be very sorry to trust any of them, whether Parliamentary or permanent, with the power of punishing those who belittle them with which the constitu- tional law invests the German Emperor. English Judges are the most self-controlled of men, but the occasions on which they commit for contempt are not those in which that great quality is most conspicuous. We fancy that but for the lenity with which the law against libelling magnates is interpreted by English juries, the task of editing newspapers and wags. sines would be a service of much more danger than it is, and that most statesmen sympathise with Robespierre, who left behind him a paper expressing his intention to " correct " with the guillotine all editors whose writings perverted the public mind. They are quite prepared to acknowledge that a free Press is in a general way a most excellent thing, and there- fore to resist any formal attack upon that freedom, but they make half unconsciously an exception in the case of attacks upon themselves. The higher members of the fighting services are even more savage, and their sentiments are often shared by great ecclesiastics, who are almost as easily stirred to anger by ridicule as most women and all poets.
We should like very much to know more accurately than at present what the true cause of this thin-akinnedness among experienced public men, which on the Continent actually modifies laws, really is. Do competent statesmen really regard acrimonious criticism as insult ? The usual explanation of wounded vanity is not quite satisfactory. Many men who are vain are not thin-skinned—Wordsworth is a perfect example—and, moreover, most vain men are ashamed of acknowledging their vanities, while there are others who, though distinctly vain, and quite conscious when they are, are but little moved by criticism even when it takes the form of pungent satire. They have been known to enjoy it as a tribute, which no doubt it often is, to their personal importance. Do they not tell a story of a man who was rather a mark for caricaturists, and who quoted satirical pictures of himself in Punch as proof that he held in the community a
place much beyond his own estimate of his political deserts P It can hardly be a sense of injustice which so galls the sensi- tive, for an attack is not liked a bit the better when its justice is recognised, as it very often is. "I know I am often wooden," said an orator, "bat I wish to heaven the Eatansw ill Gazette would not keep telling me ao ; " and he spoke in all sincerity. Sometimes it is nearly certain that the motive for acrimony is a kind of horror of being misrepresented even in trifles. That horror is quite extraordinarily frequent, as every conductor of a daily paper can testify with tears, and will call forth remonstrances from powerful men which, if they were published, would move the community to something like shocked surprise ; but this by no means covers all cases. Neither does that very curious exaggeration found so often in aristocrats, and we suspect, though of course we do not know, also in Princes, of the executive power of public opinion. There are men highly placed in the world, and entirely innocent of offence, who believe that a newspaper attack can blast their careers, who do not give the community credit for any acumen whatever, and who apparently cannot realise in the least that nothing is so evanescent in its influence as criticism, whether hostile or the reverse. If you are quiet, as Lord Beaconsfield was, you always live it down. Keats was said, falsely, to have been snuffed out by an article, and there are many political Keatses, who are not, indeed, snuffed out —a thing that never happens—but who feel as if they were. We confess that this state of mind perplexes us, especially in the very strong. What could it matter to Tennyson in the height of his reputation what anybody said or wrote about his poetry, or why should the German Emperor, with his endless prerogatives and his millions of soldiers, care for five minutes whether he is criticised or not ? His subjects will judge him by the result of his action, not by anybody's pamphlet, still less by what any toper may say of him as he reels out of the beershop; and if they judge him wrongly for an hour, as they judged his grandfather for years, what does it signify?
Fortitude under criticism is, however, given to very few, and apparently there is no method of inspiring it. Discipline will not do it, for the latest satire cuts as deeply as the first, and the man who has stood moral shot for twenty years is just as nervous or as liable to anguish in the twenty-first. The sensi- tive man of political rank knows perfectly well that his record is a sufficient and a final answer to the charge, but the knowledge does not comfort him one whit. Like Southey's hero in "The Corse of Kehama," he remains "all naked feeling and raw life." Physical courage, or a perfect equivalent for it, can be bred, as we see in all conscript armies, by steady pressure from outside, but moral courage never is. We suppose the truth is that the healthy pride which is the best prophylactic against sensitiveness to criticism has its root in the foundations of character, and cannot be planted there but must spring of itself, and that the insensibility which is the worst defence is, like a physical thick skin, a matter of structure alone, as independent of training in the mental region as it is in the physical region of climate. There are men whom a draught chills, and men whom it does not chill, besides men to whom a draught is a positive pleasure,—that is all that you can say on the subject with any certainty that you are saying the truth.
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