Dethronements (e-book) (used book) | Laurence Housman | bookbook.eu

Description

Excerpt from Dethronements: Imaginary Portraits of Political Characters, Done in Dialogue Laurence Housman

The customary device, where contemporaries areconcerned, of disembowelling the victim's name, and leaving it a skeleton of consonants, is a formal concession which in effect concedes nothing. Nor is there any reason why it should for the only valid objection to the medium of dialogue is in cases where its form might mislead the reader into mis taking fiction for fact, and the author's invention for the ipsissima verba of the characters he portrays. I hope that this book will attract no readers so un intelligent. Having chosen dialogue for these studies of historical events because I find in it a natural and direct means to the interpretation of character, my main scruple is satisfied when I have made it plain that they have no more authenticity because they happen to be written in dramatic form, than they would have were they written as political essays. These are imaginary conversations which never actually took place; and though I think they have a nearer relation to the minds of the supposed Speakers than have King's Speeches to the person who utters them, they must merely be taken as a personal reading of characters and events, tributes to men for all of whom I have, in one way or another, a very great respect and admiration and not least for the one Whom, with a reticence that is symbolical of the part he played in the downfall of The Man of Business, I have here left nameless.