86 REFLECTIONS ON CHARACTER AND LEADERSHIP
and sister, unsure of his own identity, deprecating and disguising his
own talents, Chatterton fabricated and externalized a personal romance
of extraordinary potency.
His reputation and verse have survived his exposure and humilia-
tion; his tragic death has inspired other poets and artists. Beyond his
appeal to the romantic imagination, the kernel of real genius in his
writing was recognized by many. William Wordsworth described him
as ‘ the marvelous Boy, ’ while John Keats declared him ‘ the purest writer
in the English language. ’THE IMPOSTOR AS NATIONAL LEADER
In the context of societal turmoil there has been one outstanding example
of a way of acting that contains imposturous elements, this time in a
political context — and that is Adolf Hitler.One of the secrets of his mastery over a great audience was his instinctive
sensitivity to the mood of a crowd, a fl air for divining the hidden passions,
resentments and longings in their minds ...
One of his most bitter critics [Hanfst ä ngl, 1957] ... wrote:
[He] responds to the vibrations of the human heart with the delicacy
of a seismograph, or perhaps of a wireless receiving set, enabling him,
with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to
act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least
admissible instincts, the sufferings, and personal revolts of a whole
nation ... His uncanny intuition ... infallibly diagnoses the ills from
which his audience is suffering ... [He] enters a hall. He sniffs the
air. For a minute he gropes, feels his way, senses the atmosphere.
Suddenly he bursts forth. His words go like an arrow to their target,
he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the mass uncon-
scious, expressing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most
wants to hear. (Bullock, 1962 , pp. 373 – 374)The seventh chapter of Alan Bullock ’ s masterly biography of Adolf
Hitler, from which this quotation is taken, is a study of a dictator ’ s
deception of an entire nation. In it, Bullock examines the almost incred-
ible facility with which ‘ in the years 1939 to 1941, at the height of
success, [Hitler] had succeeded in persuading a great part of the German
nation that in him they had found a ruler of more than human qualities,
a man of genius raised up by Providence to lead them into the Promised
Land ’ (p. 410). Bullock fi nds the key to Hitler ’ s success — and to his
ultimate destruction — in the fact that he ‘ was a consummate actor, with
the actor ’ s and orator ’ s facility for absorbing himself in a role and con-