A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has
always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing
away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always
dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men.
The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private;
I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly
the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this
is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it
is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.
The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of catching the first
fresh fact about a man that dominates all after impressions.
For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that he spoke with
a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of sentiment;
but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other
criticisms put together.

Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out
private personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities
on the surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression
of this kind which we have all felt when we met great poets
or politicians, but which never finds its way into the newspapers.
I mean the impression that they are much older than we thought they were.
We connect great men with their great triumphs, which generally
happened some years ago, and many recruits enthusiastic for the thin
Napoleon of Marengo must have found themselves in the presence
of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising politician
confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood.
It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose:
all this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once
met a great man who was younger than I expected.

. . . . .

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening.
It was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set
an instant after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened
and the road sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents;
I felt that the treetops that closed above me were the fixed
and real things, certain as the level of the sea; but that