Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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This subtle, sympathetic, subjective knowledge of a land and people is that which is essential to the artist, and to the great leader of men. Without it no artist has ever greatly portrayed a land or a people, no great statesman or reformer has ever led or guided a nation or race. To Balzac nothing was easier than to paint the Paris boarding-house. All the united intellect and genius of Europe could not have painted it if the grimy respectability of those chairs and tables, the sordid narrowness of the faded human lives, had not eaten first into their own substance, emotionally. To a Gladstone nothing is easier than to make a speech which shall move five thousand Scotchmen to madness. No foreigner could do it. He might lay out the arguments as well. He could not put out his hand and touch chord after chord of national emotion and passion, producing what sound he would. The knowledge of these chords, and of the manner of touching them, is possible only to a man within whom they potentially exist.