LIBRARY UMVtRSlTY Of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO MAKERS OF MAN Frontispiece. MAKERS OF MAN A STUDY OF HUMAN INITIATIVE BY CHARLES J. IWHITBY, M.D.(CANTAB.) \S AUTHOR OF "THE LOGIC OF HUMAN CHARACTER" "THE WISDOM OF PLOTINUS'' ETC. ETC. WITH FORTY-SEVEN HALF-TONE AND OTHER PLATES NEW YORK REBMAN COMPANY 1123 BROADWAY PREFACE IN this work I have essayed the experiment of dealing with the lives of great men as problems capable, through and through, of psychological treatment and elucidation. Even their physical organisms are, from this point of view, to be regarded not as mere animated " matter," but each one as organised experience, a psychosis, the sub-conscious and super-conscious factors of which all play their part in contributing to the feeling-tone, modifying the opinions, or determining the motives of conduct. Partly because the lives of great men show in higher degree than those of the rank and file that unity of manifestation which we expect from the exfoliation of a self-determining spontaneity, partly, too, in indulgence of an epic taste for profound issues and a comprehensive survey, I have chosen for the subjects of my experiment the lives of forty world-famous individuals. I think I may claim to have avoided the danger of burying the human interest of my problem under a debris of dry-as-dust technical- ities. On the other hand, I have made no concessions to those whose ideal of a scientific or philosophical treatise would seem to be one written in words of not more than two syllables, making no sort of demand on the culture or intelligence of its readers. Nor am I greatly concerned for the approval or censure of those who affect to regard the lives of great men, apart from their official achievements, as a matter for gingerly treatment not to say hypocritical Bowdlerisation. The great man has, viii PREFACE properly speaking, no private life : all his thoughts, words, actions, are, in their degree, factors of his power and influence, and, as such, worthy of respectful study. If we sometimes find them shocking, we shall then, oftener than not, find them shedding floods of light upon otherwise impenetrable obscurities in the inner and outer life of their subjects. 1 It is time that biography were taken seriously as a department of Science, that biographers began to realise their responsibilities as purveyors of the raw material of inductive psychology. To turn out a " readable " book upon the life-history of a famous poet or statesman that is mere child's play, of course. But if no more be accomplished, the subject has been exploited, not honourably dealt with ; and the result will be a jerry-built affair, whose decorative front is a poor apology for the hidden vices of its construction. Underlying the psychological argument, the discriminating reader will discern in my book the ground-motif of a deeper curiosity, pervading and actuating all. Psychology is the Jacob's ladder by which the modern mind hopes to reach the heaven of Philosophy : in its domain we are faced at every turn by the ultimate questions one would be more or less than human if one were never tempted to guess at an answer, here and there. In my last chapter I have given scientific reticence a holiday, and speculative imagination the licence it may, on occasion, justly demand. That demonstration of the predomin- ance of a super-mechanical, super-physiological spontaneity in the determination of human careers, which I take to be the main result of my inquiry, is in no way affected by the accept- ance or denial of the speculative position tentatively assumed in the said chapter, or, incidentally, in other parts of my book. 1 And of other men, too, almost needless to add. PREFACE ix Of course, in dealing with so great a number of lives it has been impossible to give equal attention to each. On the other hand, without a sufficient number of examples, no general conclusions could safely have been attained. What is, in some cases, lacking in the way of precise knowledge of the details of personal conduct and private life, is more than compensated by the importance of recorded public achievements ; while the fuller information available in the case of the more modern exemplars has enabled me to dispense with the lack of it, without serious detriment, in other cases. Quotations have in many instances been indicated by footnotes ; or, if only by the use of inverted commas, can readily be identified by reference to the list of authorities at the end of the book. In regard to my choice of examples, my chief aim has been the exclusion of second-rate personalities. Considerations of expediency have, even here, inevitably made themselves felt : it would, for instance, have been useless to include Shakespeare, of whose private life practically nothing is known. 1 Again, among the moderns, men like Ibsen, Wagner, Whitman, and Nietzsche, whose influence is as yet quite indeterminate, is, as it were, in a yeasty, unfermented phase, could only have proved a source of embarrassment and confusion; and, in a subject necessarily rife with so many intrinsic difficulties, the ad- mission of irrelevant controversies was obviously to be avoided. Some readers may sympathise with my confession, that I had grave doubts as to the claim of Walter Scott to the high com- pany among whom I have placed him, in the class to which he belongs. Byron or Shelley would in some ways have seemed to me worthier of such a place. But Lockhart's magnificent 1 For much the same reason I rejected Columbus in favour of Drake. x PREFACE biography was a document whose temptation proved irresist- ible ; and, upon the whole, I am satisfied that my decision was, even upon the grounds of his own personal claims, for the best. After all, Scott was, pre-eminently, a man of the centre (too much so, or too stolidly so, if the truth must be told) ; his fame to-day is more cosmopolitan than that of any of his contem- poraries ; he was also a lyric poet, who produced several absolutely flawless gems of song. How much, too, of our modern poetry and fiction is in greater or less degree derivative from Scott. Yes, I think I was right in disregarding my tempera- mental scruples : it would have been an error to have left Scott out of my Pantheon. C. J. WHITBY. October 1910. CONTENTS PAOB DEDICATION ........ v PREFACE ........ vii CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY ...... 1 The Body as Organised Experience The Unity of Consciousness Instinct Heredity Acquired Quali- ties Theories of the Ego. II. CLASSIFICATION . . . . . .20 The Man of Action The Artist The Philosopher and the Scientific Discoverer The Ethico-Religious Pioneer Subsidiary and Mixed Types Examples and Quali- fications. III. FAMILY HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION . . 46 Size of Paternal and Maternal Family Place in Family Longevity Relation of Paternal and Maternal Factors Examples Maternal Insanity Tuberculosis, etc. Sterility of Genius Summary. IV. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS . . . . .64 Men of Action Artists, Poets, and Composers. V. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS Continued . . .83 Intellectuals Their Mediocre Physique Ethico- Religious Group Physiognomy of Jesus Examples Summary. VI. NATURAL VOCATION ...... 101 Twins Versatility and Adaptability Forms of Natural Vocation : I. and II. Examples. VII. NATURAL VOCATION Continued . . . .132 Forms of Natural Vocation : III. and IV. Examples Recapitulation. xii CONTENTS CI1AP. PACK VIII. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE . . . 159 Significance of Purpose I. Men of Action Negative and Positive Phases of Purpose II. ^Esthetic Types. IX. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE Continued . . 209 III. Intellectual Type IV. Ethico-Religious Type The Higher Criticism V. Recapitulation. X. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE . . . . .291 I. Danger and Solitude. XI. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE Continued . . . 316 IT. Woman Classification of Sexual Types Am- biguities Need of Detachment Woman in relation to Man's Ideals Sexual Versatility of Genius Examples " The Higher Monogamy." XII. LIMITATION AND CRIME . . . . .351 Definition of Terms Universality of Crime Examples " The Guilt of Innocency." XIII. INDIVIDUALITY : ITS NATURE AND POWER . . . 379 Mechanism versus Psychism " Back to Leibnitz " Heredity Eugenics A Parable Soul and Spirit Fechner's Hypothesis, "Immortality" The Social Factor Valedictory Survey. AUTHORITIES . . . . . . . .411 INDEX . 415 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS C/ESAR ..... Frontispiece &ESAR . . . Facing p. 66 CHARLEMAGNE .... 32 WILLIAM THE SILENT . . . . . 52 SIR FRANCIS DRAKE .... 70 CARDINAL RICHELIEU . . . . . ,, 72 OLIVER CROMWELL ..... 74 FREDERICK THE GREAT .... 104 LORD NELSON . . . . . . 108 NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, LIEUTENANT D'ARTILLERIE . 110 NAPOLEON ...... 182 NAPOLEON ..... 300 ABRAHAM LINCOLN ..... 112 DANTE ,118 DANTE ,,398 LEONARDO DA VINCI . . . . . 154 TITIAN ,,194 CERVANTES .... 196 MOZART ,,198 MOZART ..... 302 GOETHE ..... 200 GOETHE ..... 340 BEETHOVEN ........ 202 SIR WALTER SCOTT ....... 204 TURNER ...... 206 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ...... Facing p. 208 BACON 210 GALILEO ........ 212 HABVEY ........ 214 DESCARTES ........ 218 SPINOZA . . . . . . 220 SIR ISAAC NEWTON ....... 224 LEIBNITZ ........ 228 KANT ,,230 HEGEL . . . . . . 234 CHARLES DARWIN ....... 236 CHRIST AND THE TRIBUTE MONEY . . . ,, 92 HEAD OF CHRIST ....... 242 ST. PAUL . . . . . . 248 MARCUS AURELIUS . . . . . ,, 250 ST. AUGUSTINE . . . . . ,, 254 ST. GREGORY THE GREAT . . . . 312 MAHOMET ........ 314 ST. FRANCIS D'Assisi . . . . 316 MARTIN LUTHER ....... 376 R. W. EMERSON . . . . . 406 ERNEST RENAN ....... 408 N.B. The strict order of sequence lias been departed from in the above list, portraits of the same individual being grouped together for convenience of reference. MAKERS OF MAN INTRODUCTORY The body as organised experience The unity of consciousness Instinct Heredity Acquired qualities Theories of the Ego. I DO not propose here to set forth in explicit detail my personal view as to the nature of human individuality. To do so would be to prejudice in advance the prudent reader against my claim to be regarded as a trustworthy guide through this region of mystery, so thickly beset with pitfalls for unwary feet. Nor, on the other hand, will I dissemble the fact that such a personal view, the product of long meditation and no little research, I do indeed possess, and purpose in due course to unfold in these pages. But it seems best in every way that this view of mine should so far as possible be objectively presented, that is, should speak mainly not in its own person, but through the lips of accredited facts. So far as these facts appear to establish its claim to existence, it will inevitably command the assent of impartial readers. So far as it rests on unverified or perhaps unverifiable speculation, it could of course expect but a doubtful or grudging welcome, even where it escaped the rebuff of downright hostility. Later, perhaps, when our survey of the field of research has carried us well into the heart of the matter, I may find it necessary to be more outspoken. A subject so profound and so significant will not yield up its secret at the behest of a timid or half-hearted inquirer. Nor will it fail to confound the presumption born of an inadequate sense of the difficulties of the inquiry. There is need of audacity, I 2 MAKERS OF MAN and there is need of caution : it would be hard to say which is the more indispensable to success in an investigation so arduous yet so alluring. From the point of view of psychology, a new-born infant may be regarded as a specific embodiment of the organised experience of the race. Nay more ; it is a specific embodiment of all organised experience whatsoever that enters into the direct line of its human and pre-human ancestry. And if we admit, as many are prepared in these days to admit, that there may be such a thing as a psychology of the inorganic, that too will be an element underlying the most primitive vital traits. On the physical side, inorganic nature is represented in the human body by the stratified lime-salts deposited in the bones, and by the fact that these bones, once growth has been completed, are in a very limited sense living as we understand the word. Much the same could be said as to the teeth, tendons, fibrous and elastic tissue, etc. So, on the pyschological side, it seems hardly too fanciful to assert that man inherits from the inorganic sphere some deep-seated elemental qualities of rock-like strength and tenacity, or ground-tones of affective rhythm perpetuating the oceanic ebb and flow. All this, at least, has demonstrably gone to his making, and every cause must in some degree pass over into its effect. To think of the human body as organised racial and sub -racial experience, is not necessarily to imply the inheritance of acquired characteristics. An inborn variation qua psychic potentiality is not less credible than qua structural new departure. The subject of such a variation starts life with a new capacity or the germ of one, and the inheritance as well as the development of this are elements of its experience. The inheritance or non-inheritance of acquired characters is a question of fact. Still it is true that from the psychological side the a priori difficulties of the extreme view represented by Weismann and Reid are more obvious than from the physio- logical. What presents itself on the physical side as a newly- perfected neuro-muscular system, is on the psychical side a newly-established habit. Supposing such a habit to be of advantage to its possessor, and so to escape the eliminative effect of natural selection, it seems but reasonable to anticipate INTRODUCTORY 3 that its perpetuation will be in some way positively provided for. 1 If not inherited in its fulness, there may be at least for succeeding generations a cumulative facility in the establishment of such a habit. It must not be forgotten that there is a struggle for existence within the sphere of the individual consciousness. Efforts resulting in successful activity tend by this law of Hedonic Selection to be repeated and to perpetuate themselves, for the individual at least, in the form of habits. Unsuccessful efforts, on the contrary, tend to be superseded and to disappear. Has this fact no significance for those who deny the inheritance of acquired characters ? The starting-point of human evolution may, according to Haeckel, be found in the lowest form of infusorian a practically homogeneous anucleated monocellular protist. There may well be yet lower rungs in the ladder, but if so, they await identification. It is the first step that counts ; we will therefore try for a moment to formulate a conception of the psychology of such a monocellular unit. It has presumably consciousness of some kind or degree, and that consciousness will bear to that of a human individual a relation analogous to the structural relation of the simple cell-body to a complex human organism. There is in the cell-body of the protozoon no appreciable structural differentiation, and without that there can be no division of labour. Every part of the cell is a potential mouth, stomach, intestine, organ of prehension, excretion, or locomotion. Any part indifferently will respond in one or other of these modes to appropriate stimulus. Similarly, the psychology of such a cell will be simple, primitive, undifferentiated. It will comprise the raw material of all higher forms of soul-life, of what ages later will manifest itself as intellect, and also of what will manifest itself as will. In other words, the presentative and the affective elements of mind will co-exist in their primitive integral unity. The protozoon will have a direct intuition of its own state, and of that which concerns it in its immediate surroundings, a direct impulse to react in such or such a way to a given stimulus. Physiologists usually define the presentative 1 Hence the importance of Haeckel's theory of " Unconscious Memory " as a factor in evolution. 4 MAKERS OF MAN reactions of these anucleated protozoa as " Sensations," and limit their consciousness to these. But sensation is not the raw material of consciousness in general ; it is rather an abstraction from the unity of human perception. One might as well talk of the protist as having ideas ! It has the unitary potentiality of every form of soul-life, just as it has the unitary potentiality of every specific bodily function. The unity of primitive mind comprehends the germ of both mil and idea ; that is the main lesson we learn from the contemplation of our monocellular forebear. The next thing to be noted is the ectodermic origin of the nervous system, a point of which the psychological import has hitherto been strangely ignored. Solipsists and rationalists are prone to lay undue stress on the insulation of the human cere- brum, its apparent dependency on the peripheral nerves for knowledge of the " external world." They must surely be aware that, phylogenetically, the entire nervous system, in- cluding the brain, is an external organ, the analogue of the epi- thelium of a gastraead (so far as that functions as a sense-organ), the analogue of the peripheral portion of the protoplasm of an anucleated infusorian. Haeckel has pointed out the importance of the conception of " unconscious memory " from a develop- mental point of view. May we not regard the external reference of perception as an objective interpretation of one such un- conscious memory that, namely, of direct intuition, on the part of protozoic and metazoic ancestors, of a contiguous external medium ? Before we take leave of our protozoon, there is one other element of its inferred psychology, to the speculative significance of which I must call attention. The continuity and homogeneity of its structure I refer, of course, to the anucleated prdtist inevitably suggest a like simplicity of psychic function. The consciousness or quasi-consciousness of the cell must be a totality, what happens in one part will be intuited, and reacted to, locally or generally, not by that part only, but by the cell as a whole. That is to say, the cell as a whole will have an intuition of local stimulus, and the cell as a whole will determine the local or general reaction. The generalisation of a given INTRODUCTORY 5 intuition may not be strictly instantaneous ; it may be the correlative of a wave-like impulse traversing the cell-substance ; but it is obviously bound to occur. This view is confirmed by the fact that the next step in evolution shows us the protozoon in possession of a nucleus. Recent cytology strongly tends to regard the nucleus as a central organ, dominating the cell-life, as, in fact, a nerve-centre. The psychic unity of the cell here finds full expression : perhaps no individuation so complete (within its limits) will be found again until we reach the highest self- consciousness of man. Now since, from the psychological side, organic structure is but organised racial and subracial experience, and since every human being begins life as a monocellular protozoon (fertilised ovum), may not the unity of human con- sciousness be in some degree a debt due to our own immemorial protozoic lineage ? That the lesson learned then was not forgotten is proved by the fact that it is repeated, so to speak, by each one of us. The monocellular stage might by this time have been slurred over, or taken for granted ; but it is, we know, invariable and well defined. Spermatozoon merges with ovum, and then only, from the resultant unity, the new life can begin. Thus the fact that the human body is, in all its complexity and vital multiplicity, the offspring of a single cell, gives it an organic unity that would otherwise be unattain- able. Yet this unity, so far as present knowledge shows, is in the case of the human body merely a physiological, not, as with the protozoon, a physico-psychical unity. Not, at any rate, so far as the distinctively human self-consciousness is concerned. The living human organism, like any other, may, it is true, be regarded as in some sense a psychosis, but it is a psychosis which for the most part goes on quite below the threshold of conscious mentality. It is a somatic as distinguished from a cerebral psychosis. Under exceptional circumstances it sometimes, doubtless, overflows its normal bounds, welling up into the sphere of cerebral consciousness, but apart from certain rare or vague intimations of its presence, and apart from its contribution to the general feeling-tone, it lies per- manently beyond our ken. Now, as regards the normal, distinctively human, cerebral consciousness, it is of the greatest 6 MAKERS OF MAN interest to note that Science has utterly failed to identify any unitary centre of such consciousness in the brain. Descartes long ago, on a 'priori grounds, located it in the pineal gland, but this was mere guesswork, of course. So far from there being any one centre of consciousness, it would appear that there are many, for modern research strongly favours the view that it is " generated " in the sensory cortex of the brain at the synapses or junctions of the innumerable neurones which arise or terminate therein. The apposed parts of two meeting neurones are probably joined by a thin layer of highly-specialised material, the so-called psycho-physical substance. This material offers a certain resistance to the flow across it of the nervous impulse, but when the nervous impulse avails to over- come this resistance, consciousness is " generated " by its passage from neurone to neurone through the intervening substance or synapse. Thus, though the sensory area of the cortex may in a sense be regarded as the seat of consciousness, it is not a unitary centre, but multiple, diffused centres, that we find therein. Sparks of consciousness, bright or dim, scintillate here and there, as the conquering nervous impulses pass to and fro. Where are these sparks conjoined in the unitary flame of self -consciousness ? The question is either crucial or meaning- less, it seems to me. They are the vivid centre of that picture of which the feeling-tone, the general somatic psychosis, is the dim unfocussed background. That they are somehow fused and synthetised, introspection, it is alleged, plainly declares. But not, it would seem, in the brain. Why not, then, in the brain-psychosis, in the brain as racial, plus individual, ex- perience, in the brain as focus of that wider and vaguer experi- ence which we call our body, of which, too, with all its complex multiplicity, we are conscious as one totality ? On this view, what happens at the synapses is not the generation, but rather the intensification of a pre-existent, the concentration of a diffused, consciousness. Nothing new comes into existence, but something hitherto imperceptible, vivified by self-limitation, flashes across the chiaroscuro of the mental arena. Conscious- ness has unity, at least in the sense that it is continuous, for the brain, the entire organism, is at least a dynamic unity. INTRODUCTORY 7 A particulate emphasis of some psychic element is not incom- patible with such unity as this implies. If the mind claims a higher, supra-cerebral unity, it must condescend to justify its claim. Nothing brings home to us more forcibly the presence and power of the remote past within us than a consideration of the part played by Instinct in human life. Anatomically, a true instinct is a congenitally organised or at least predetermined neural system. Physiologically, it is a mechanism by which a relevant perception, or the idea of such a perception in the absence of any inhibiting preoccupation, starts a whole train of purposive actions, more or less complex and prolonged. Psychologically, it is the organic subconscious memory of racial activities that, being more or less vital to existence, have successfully run the gauntlet of natural selection and established their claim to survival. Yet this description is quite inadequate, if we do not add that an instinct is self-effectuating, dynamised by the momentum of innumerable repetitions, the embodiment of some primal need, that, as a psychologist well remarks, is apt to rough-hew our ends, shape them, in detail, as we will. The man who spends a long life in the accumulation of millions is obeying the same instinct as the dog who buries a bone. Eliminate from humanity the reproductive instinct and its correlatives, and what would remain of poetry, art, religion ? The entire paraphernalia of militarism is but the elaboration of the combatant and allied instincts, and the devotee of sport is the spiritual kinsman of the fox that he hunts and the tiger for which he lies in wait. No dude or professional beauty, no actor, I might add, can afford to throw stones at a peacock ; no devotee of postage-stamps or bric-a-brac to make merry at the expense of a jackdaw or a monkey. There are instincts and instincts, of course ; the main division is into those which are self-regarding and those which are concerned with the interests of the race. Thus the instinct for co-operation, shared by all social animals, is the basis of all human civilisation and industry. 1 We cannot do without instincts ; they are the raw material of life ; but we can and must choose whether we will 1 What Maeterlinck, writing of Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive. 8 MAKERS OF MAN serve them or make them serve us. To be the lifelong thrall of some paltry self -regarding instinct (" sport " or what not) is to be a mere part of nature. And Hegel has well said though for some readers it may be a hard saying that in so far as a man is a mere part of nature, he is everything that he ought not to be. Still it must not be forgotten that, though, from a superficial point of view innate qualities and capacities instincts are capacities may be regarded as free gifts, yet this conception of their nature is not ultimate. A given organism is from the evolutionary standpoint not something definitely isolated from the unity of nature. It is merely the growing- point, or one among many growing-points, of a continuous life-process that began countless ages ago at, or below, the bottom rung of the organic scale, and has mounted without intermission to its present stage of development. Life is a torch that is never extinguished, but is handed on from one generation to another, with all its established potencies intact. They smoulder quiescent in the gametes, but infallibly revive in the developed organism to which these give birth. So regarded, instincts are clearly no free gift of nature. They are dearly-won adaptations, hard-bought victories of life over its environment ; and it is one and the same life that wins and that wears the crown. A word must now be said on the subject of heredity in its narrower proximate sense, the inheritance of human character- istics in general and of family traits in particular. So much good work is now being done in this field, that every year, nay, every month, contributes to the sum of our positive knowledge. Facts come in faster than theory can assimilate them ; and the conclusions of to-day may be falsified to-morrow. However, the importance of the subject is obvious, and any discussion of the problems of individuality, which as in the case of certain loud and confident apostles of a shallow transcendentalism conveniently ignores its difficulties, is thereby self-condemned as inadequate and false. And, first, it is to be noted that the modern view of heredity makes no distinction between the inheritance of so-called mental and physical qualities. Both are, in fact, demonstrably inherited in the same numerical propor- INTRODUCTORY 9 tion. Pearson, by a separate investigation of the inheritance of definite mental and bodily characteristics in school children, found that, as regards both sets of qualities, the resemblance between children of the same parents amounted to fifty per cent. Galton, on the basis of an investigation of heredity in certain animals, has formulated his results to the effect that, in a given case, *5 of the inborn characteristics will be derived from the two parents ('25 from each), '25 from the grandparents collectively ('0625 from each), '125 from the great-grand- parents taken together ('015625 from each), and so on in similarly diminishing proportion. This law, further elaborated by Pearson, and in some slight degree corrected on abstruse mathematical grounds, is by him acclaimed as a scientific generalisation of immense importance, comparable, for its power of resuming in one brief statement innumerable facts, to Newton's famous law of gravitation. Apparently, on this hypothesis, the inborn qualities of an individual will be fully covered by the sum of inherited qualities (S = 1) only when the lineage has been carried back ad infinitum. Go back only a few, say ten, genera- tions, and you have already reached the source of the great majority some nine hundred and ninety-eight out of each thousand of inherited characteristics. But go back as many generations as you like, and a residue, albeit infinitesimal, of inborn qualities, not yet accounted for, will confront you still. And in dealing with human individuality it is to be noted that some quite inconspicuous but deep-seated quality, of remote and obscure origin, may quite well be, in any given case, the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. Hence, in part, the apparently paradoxical results often attained by consideration of the recent family history of remarkable personalities. Beyond all available human records, beyond all human ancestry, beyond the pre-human mammalian and sub-mammalian stock, beyond the primeval monocellular starting-point, even to the ground- work of inorganic nature, we must pass for our ideal completion of the sum of inborn mental and physical characteristics. There the manifestation of the contemporary human career has its dawn ; there the Ego begins its aeonic march towards the fulness of predestined activity. It is further to be noted with TO MAKERS OFfMAN reference to Galton's law, that it is a statement of averages only for, "the introduction of the Mendelian law, combined with the results of recent cytology, makes it likely that in any given individual the maternal and paternal factors lie side by side and separate out in the gametes (ova or spermatozoa) of that individual, so that we do not inherit equally from all grand- parents of each generation, but all from some and nothing from others." * It must not be forgotten, however, that great as is the role of heredity, there are other factors to be taken into consideration, which to some extent certainly limit its deter- mining power. The anatomical basis of a fully-developed individuality contains many structural elements not organised at birth, corresponding with qualities and faculties peculiar to the individual, acquired, not innate. The nervous system of Man may be roughly described as consisting of sensori-motor arcs of three principal levels, lower (or spinal), intermediate (or sensorial), and higher (or associational). Professor Flechsig has clearly demonstrated that the neurones composing the arcs of the higher (association) level attain structural perfection at a much later age than those of other parts of the nervous system. Moreover, "it is characteristic of these arcs of the higher or third level that their organisation, their inter-connections, by means of which the simpler neural systems of the first and second levels are combined to form systems of great complexity, are congenitally determined in a very partial degree only, and are principally determined in each individual by the course of its experience." 2 We see then, that in this highest and hence most humanly significant region of the nervous system, the ultimate physiological disposition is not rigidly predetermined by innate structural configuration, but in great measure plastic to the play of those internal and external processes of action, reaction, and adaptation, which are summarised as " experi- ence." 3 Now, experience is never mere passivity, and if, as is 1 Communicated by Dr. W. Nevill Heard. 2 Physiological Psychology, by W. McDougall, M.A., M.B. 8 Prof. Spitzka, by investigation of the brains of distinguished men, has established the fact that they are exceptionally rich in association fibres. Cf. Brit. Med. Journ., 15th Feb. 1908, " The Brains of Distinguished Men." INTRODUCTORY il conceivable, there is in every individuality some unique and original potency, something wholly self -derived, it is here in particular that its traces will presumably be found. On this view, a human individuality would be regarded as a centre of force in a far higher sense than any mere lump of radium ; it would have, so to speak, a dynamic apriorism, by which its ultimate character, as recorded in the final organisation of the arcs of highest level, would be, in part at least, determined. McDougall holds that in true volition there is a concentration of neural energy apparently contravening the law of least resistance and strongly suggestive of a unique activity of will. Here, it may be, we are on the threshold of a mystery which has long puzzled the wisest. The word " will " is one which is in a high degree ambiguous, but, in the sense in which McDougall uses it, it may well signify the intervention of that underived and unshared power which, if it exist, constitutes the dynamic apriorism of the Ego. The question is one for experimental investigation, rather than for argument. Even if it were settled in the affirmative sense, the question would still remain whether such a dynamic apriorism were not a manifestation of a higher logical apriorism ; whether, that is, the develop- ment of individual character, granted its autonomous basis, does not conform to the type of a dialectical process more fundamentally than to that of a mere system and centre of " force." If Man be a mere mechanism, no matter whether or not in part self-impelled, his life must conform to mechanical principles ; he must inevitably follow the path of least resist- ance ; and any appearance of other than mechanically-deter- mined conduct, of strictly rational or purposive conduct, must, of course, be illusory. If, on the other hand, we find that the life-work of typical characters invariably demonstrates in greater or less degrees the efficient control of some deliberately adopted and consistently executed principle or purpose, the mechanical hypothesis is obviously out of court. The more so, if it also proves to be the case that precisely those types of individuality whichare universally acclaimed asthe highest andmost significant, are those most hopelessly unintelligible from the mechanical point of view. 12 MAKERS OF MAN McDougall inclines to the belief that the activities of the neurones of the third or highest level have no immediate psychical correlates, and serve merely to combine and co-ordinate the activities of those arcs of the sensory level that do contribute psychical elements. In other words, that part of the general brain-psychosis which goes on in these arcs of the third level is normally above consciousness, just as the somatic psychosis of the body in general is normally below it. The former belongs in fact to the trans-liminal or supra-liminal, just as the latter belongs to the subliminal self. But under exceptional condi- tions, in those moments of stress or exaltation, when, doubtless, new tracts are opened up in the arcs of the higher level, and new combinations effected between the sub-systems of the sensory level, it may well be otherwise. Such moments are commonly accompanied by a feeling of expansion, a sense of enlarged power, which may plausibly be interpreted as the psychical correlates of the opening up of a fresh neuronal tract in the higher level, or the establishment of a fresh neuronal anastomosis. The feeling of expansion is no delusion, since, by the functional change that accompanies it, the mental or practical powers are in some degree permanently enlarged. It may not be without interest as a further introduction to the study of individuality in the field of concrete life and action, to recount very briefly the main views as to the nature of the Ego set forth by leading philosophers, those of them, at least, who have held positive as opposed to merely critical or de- structive theories on the subject. Socrates first demands mention, but hardly more than that, on account of his peculiar attribution of otherwise unaccountable premonitions and intimations to an inner divine voice, a " demonic " element, underlying his consciousness. For Plato the soul is^in itself indestructible, and, through reason, in which it participates, of a divine nature. It sways and controls the body ; but, on the other hand, the body no less sways and controls the soul. This interaction is mediated by a lower sensuous, irrational and mortal faculty of the soul. Between the rational and irrational parts of the soul appears a faculty called BvfLos, courage, heart the " irrascible " element of the personality. INTRODUCTORY 13 The soul by its participation in reason inclines to the ideal and eternal sphere, by its participation in sense to the material and temporal order ; and accordingly alternates between them. For Aristotle, the soul is related to the body as form to matter ; it is animating principle. Apart from that of the body its exist- ence is inconceivable. The highest faculty of the Ego is thought or reason (vow), which is absolutely simple, immaterial, self-subsistent, and underived. This pure activity is independent of and unaffected by matter, and on the death of the body remains eternal and immortal. For the Stoics, nothing in- corporeal exists, and the interaction of anything purely ideal with anything material is inconceivable. What things mutually act must be of like nature ; spirit, divinity, the soul, conse- quently, is a body, but of another sort than matter and the outward body. For Plotinus and the Neoplatonist School, individual souls are " amphibia," intermediate in nature between the higher element of reason and the lower of sense ; now involved in the latter, now returning to their source. 1 Turning now to the moderns, we find at most but vague and dubious recogni- tion of the entity of the Ego in Descartes and Spinoza. In Leibnitz, on the contrary, we find a wealth of deeply interesting and suggestive thoughts upon the subject. Extension was for him but an abstraction necessitated by " the grossness of our senses," a metaphor in fact. The true connections of things are not causal, as causality is commonly conceived, but intellectual. Leibnitz, after having reduced the geometrical extension of the atom to zero, endowed it with an infinite extension in the direction of its metaphysical dimension. 2 External causation being, like space, an illusion, all activity is a logical develop- ment from within, and the apparent actions and reactions of individual things are due to the fact that, having a common divine origin they are in pre-established harmony. The infinite number of monads (reals or individuals) express, each from its own specific point of view, yet each thus far compre- hensively, the universe as a whole, the function of each being 1 For most of the above details I am indebted to Schwegler. Cf. Hist, of Phil., pp. 41, 84, 114-5, 125, 142. *J. T. Mere. 14 MAKERS OF MAN ideally complemented by that of all the others. Such profound conceptions are necessarily misrepresented in any brief and abstract statement, but we shall have a good deal more to say about them and their author in the later chapters of this work. In modern terms the formula for the Leibnitzian doctrine would be : Involution is the truth of Evolution, and Logic is the truth of Involution. Kant, like Aristotle, was at the same time a thorough empiricist and a transcendentalist in his theory (or theories) of the Ego. He believed, without doubt, that there is behind every human personality a noumenal subjectivity, whose immortality, though unproved and incapable of proof, could legitimately be postulated. " In an act of moral volition, he," says Dr. Stirling, " will have no pathological element what- ever present ; our rational will shall be absolutely free." Theo- retically, the soul is to be regarded as a mere phenomenon ; in the interests of morality we must assume the rational freedom of the will " / ought, therefore I can" His self-styled, but ultimately rejected, disciple Fichte followed Leibnitz rather than Kant in his view as to the nature of the ego, but surpassed even Leibnitz in the claims made on its behalf. The ego noumenal, not empirical is for Fichte everything : it is the Absolute and all its determinations. Its appearance is the result of a self-limitation of its true universality. " As many parts of reality as the ego determines in itself, so many parts of negation it determines in the non-ego, and, conversely, as many parts of reality as the ego determines in the non-ego, so many parts of negation it determines in itself." x In Hegel's philo- sophy the ego as individual is again completely dwarfed by the Ego as universal. I do not discuss the ultimate validity of this view ; it is obviously too rigidly logical to be at present largely available for the interpretation of actual personalities. We shall have more to say about Hegel later on. The clearer, because more analytical and shallower, philosophy of Schopen- hauer, in that it regards all external happenings as dependent upon an occult reality somewhat unfortunately denominated " will," seems more to our present purpose. What I dispute, however, is that the so-called " will," in so far as it is admittedly 1 Schwegler, Hist, of Phil., trans, by Stirling. INTRODUCTORY 15 blind and unselfconscious, has any right to its exalted title or claims. Blind purpose or appetite is one thing, and true voli- tion is quite another. What is worth noting in Schopenhauer is his insistence on the fact that character is ultimately determined not from without but from within ; also that it is a much less tractable, more stubbornly self-maintaining thing, upon the whole, than is commonly admitted. Herbert Spencer, borrowing from Coleridge the hint that life is a tendency towards individua- tion, and enlarging its scope, finds this tendency in all processes characterised by the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion, that is, in all evolutionary processes. He traces in detail the transition of a relatively -homogeneous matrix, through successive differentiations and integrations, to a definite co- herent heterogeneity of structure and function that is, to complete individuation. This point reached, there is a longer or shorter period of equilibrium, during which the adjustment of internal to external relations is more or less adequately main- tained. Then the entire process is reversed, dissolution succeeds to evolution, and we arrive once more at our starting-point an indefinite incoherent homogeneity. Such, in terms of motion, or force and matter, is the generalised statement of the pheno- menal order, in which Man as an individual is of course included. The principle has been almost universally accepted ; it is, indeed, too often hypostatised, so that foolish and unthinking persons talk of " Evolution " as though it were some god, and fancy that when they have shown how such or such an organism was " evolved," there is no more to be said. Of the so-called axioms underlying Spencer's deduction, one at least, the dictum that the Force of the Universe is constant in amount, since it " can neither arise out of nothing nor lapse into nothing," seems disrespectful to the resources of the " Unknowable," and is, to say the least, of a highly disputable character. The universal tendency towards individuation does not seem to have suggested to Spencer that the whole process of evolution, as elaborated by him in numerous volumes, might be but a manifestation of individualities and of Individuality in general ; that the individual is perhaps not the creature of evolution, but evolution the self-display of the individual. Or that the mean- 16 MAKERS OF MAN ingless revolution of barren cosmic machinery, returning ever in lame and impotent conclusion to its indefinite incoherent origin, would bear another and more intelligible aspect if we admit the possibility that the individual ego underlies and con- ditions a given focus of evolution ; and that, having reached its highest present attainable level of manifestation, this ego withdraws to assimilate the products of experience, leaving the world enriched by the results of its creative work. It is true, of course, that the entertainment of such a possibility would involve the conception of the universe, dynamically regarded, not as a closed circuit of unvarying magnitude, but as a stream of ever-increasing, self-renewed volume and flow. Such a supposition is neither more nor less legitimate than Spencer's own, as regards compatibility with ascertained laws ; while some will consider that it is far more satisfactory in all other ways. Mr. Bradley considers that the self, whether identified with the body, the total contents of experience at a given moment, the average contents of experience, the " essential " self, the personal identity, whether regarded as a monad, as what interests, as opposed to the not-self, as mere subjectivity, or as will, cannot be so conceived as to cover the known facts and at the same time escape the just charge of being in many ways contradictory. He therefore declines to accept the final reality of the self, though assigning to it a high rank in the phenomenal order. " Body and soul are mere appearances, distinctions set up and held apart in the whole. . . . The soul and its organism are each a phenomenal series. Each, to speak in general, is implicated in the changes of the other." 1 Mr. Bradley does not believe in the interaction of mind and body in the sense that mere body can act upon bare mind, or con- versely. But he does believe that the physical and psychical series, going on side by side, are each modified by the presence of the other, and that sometimes the one predominates while its fellow becomes, as it were, latent ; and sometimes the other. It is only for convenience sake that we are justified in considering either series as independent. Mr. Bradley assents to the 1 Appearance and Reality, INTRODUCTORY 17 physical origin of mind, but with certain reservations. Matter is an abstraction ; and the material cause of the soul will never be the whole cause. Compared with the physical world, the soul is by far less unreal. It shows to a larger extent that self- dependence in which Eeality consists. This from the author of Appearance and Reality is a high testimonial, since he con- cedes final reality to nothing short of the Absolute itself. So much then for the philosophers. Before summarising their main conclusions, I will add a few words with regard to the results of psychic research. It is, of course, as yet in its infancy, and is regarded with great suspicion in many quarters, particularly by those who know little or nothing about the matter. As one who has followed the chief available records with close interest for some years, I assert without hesitation that work is now being done in this department which, as regards precision of method and impartiality of inference, can challenge comparison with more favoured investigations. At the point now reached it would be an exaggeration to say that the survivial of personal consciousness after death, and the possibility of entering into ccmmunication with post-mortem personalities, have been fully established. But no competent and impartial reader of Hyslop's work, Science and a Future Life to give one example out of many will deny that enough carefully-sifted evidence has been collected to make good a strong prima facie case for further investigation. 1 Roughly speaking, it would seem then that we have to choose between three main conceptions as to the nature of things, using that word in its widest and, I fear I must add, its vaguest significance. First, from the Spencerian, a posteriori, standpoint, the ego may be regarded as the final meeting-point of innumerable converging activities, whence, as it were by resilience, they reissue to modify the environment. From this point of view, whose provisional validity is within certain limits unquestioned, the ego is, at most, a mere ephemeral product, whose essence is its visible processes of becoming, 1 1 will also call attention to the remarkable case of the daughter of Judge Edwards, reported in the Annals of Psychical Science, vol. vi., No. 31, pp. 508-10. 2 i8 MAKERS OF MAN and, at least, nominis umbra. Secondly, we may conceive of the ego as an entity, substantial, if not material, the per- manent basis or ground of mental and organic unity. And some, no doubt, would so extend the range of its influence as to maintain that all the processes which directly prepare, cul- minate in, constitute, and result from a given human career, are in a sense manifestations of this underlying pre-existent power and reality. From this point of view the " empirical ego " is as it were the lens, which, by a certain specific affinity, selects from every part and every past period of the universe, and brings to a focus, those rays and those only which emanate from its own noumenal ego. The externalised forces which build themselves up into the physical basis of individuality are, at a certain point, or certain points, of development, met by a current of inverse direction, and thenceforth become increasingly subject to its modifying power and control. The third and last view as to the nature of the ego, is that which acknowledges that the basis of a particular individuality, how- ever great and exalted, is not ultimately an independent substance or, if you prefer the term, entity (though both in a far higher degree and truer sense than any merely physical existence), but rather a permanent and essential factor of some higher and more comprehensive existence. One or other of these three views will be found, I think, to correspond in essen- tials with any theory of the ego that can lay claim to serious attention. It may be asked whether the second and third of these three conceptions of the ego regard Man in his entirety as a part and product of Nature. Obviously, this must depend on what we understand by Nature, a word of convenient ambiguity, which can be made to include everything or to exclude anything, as required by the exigencies of the moment. As Mr. Bradley points out, there is the Nature of prosaic empiricism ; but there is also the Nature of the poet. If Nature is to be taken as a closed system of more or less measur- able and identifiable " forces," from which all that is as yet refractory to the inquisition of the test-tube and the scalpel is rigidly excluded, then without doubt all supporters of the second and third theories of the ego must regard Man as a INTRODUCTORY 19 supernatural being. But this, if wise, they will do without the least hope or desire of limiting the search for causal uniform- ities underlying, or, if you will, governing his life and conduct. The seeming paradox will be a stumbling-block only to those who are obfuscated by confusion of a higher and lower point of view. Cerebral growth and organisation are one aspect of character, and a most important one, doubtless. The other and more essential is its manifestation as human thought and action, and the ideal significance of these. And this will be our subject in the ensuing pages. Valuable works have already been published, dealing almost exclusively with the physio- logical and pathological aspects of human " genius." As a medical man, I fully appreciate the importance of this side of the problem, but I cannot, as a human being, admit the finality or even the provisional adequacy of the implied point of view. The Science of human character has many departments, but all specific investigations of its genetic or physical conditions, morbid correlations, and aberrant vagaries, must be regarded as ancillary to the supreme interest of its teleological significance II CLASSIFICATION Ambiguities The man of action The artist The philosopher and the scientific discoverer The ethico-religious pioneer Subsidiary or mixed types Examples and qualifications. THE practice of labelling distinguished men, in accordance with their official sphere of activity, as " men of action," " men of thought,"and so forth, is one which has many conveniences, but is nevertheless, in the absence of due precautions, a fertile source of error from the true psychological point of view. Uncritically employed, it assumes, without demonstration, fundamental dis- tinctions of temperament and predisposition, which may or may not exist. That the great statesman or conqueror, the poet or musician, the philosopher or man of science, the saint or religious founder, is such, in each case, not by mere force of circumstance, wholly, or at least in some degree, but by con- straint of inborn irresistible proclivity, native genius, or heaven- born mission, is not so evident as to many it would seem to appear. We all wish to be exceptional, and the man of leisure who has a fancy for versification is not disinclined to believe himself thrown away upon more sternly utilitarian employ- ment. But in the absence of patronage for his verses he may make a tolerable bank-clerk or solicitor. This unproved assumption that, for success in the more highly-esteemed social functions, inborn " genius " is all, and mere environment nothing, is one of the many unwarranted beliefs with which we tacitly conspire to flatter our amour propre at the expense of reason. The point requires investigation, and I propose to deal with it later. In the mean time it may be admitted that some attempt at classification is not merely expedient, but even essential to CLASSIFICATION 21 the systematic treatment of human faculty, and I therefore propose, without prejudice, as the lawyers say, to avail myself of that which I find ready to hand. Famous men may be roughly divided into four great classes, according as their achievements affect mainly the sphere of common life, of imagination, of knowledge, or of morality and religion. The four types of human greatness are, accordingly, the practical, aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical ; and this is the method of classification which I have provisionally adopted. Of each of these types I have chosen ten great exemplars, beginning with Julius Caesar in the first group, and ending with Ernest Renan in the fourth. The analytical study of these forty world- famous careers should yield results of substantial value, and can hardly be lacking in interest even for the most casual student of human affairs. In assigning particular individuals to one or another of my four categories, I have in the main been guided by conventional rather than deep-seated psychological considerations, and I do not conceal from myself, or the reader, that in several instances the question might fairly be raised whether the classification adopted is finally appropriate. The several types are by no means sharply defined, but overlap and interweave in a somewhat perplexing fashion. This will perhaps be more clearly seen if I indicate briefly the broad characteristics of each type of career, and then give examples of the ambiguities that present themselves in the case of particular personalities. The man of action comes first, because his type is upon the whole the simplest and most primitive that we have to deal with. He works upon the raw material of contemporary life, making it subserve the ends of his ambition, rough-hewing it in various ways, but seldom attempting to shape it in accord- ance with any high ideal or far-seeing purpose. For the future as such he cares little ; the exigencies of the moment are, for the most part, all-absorbing ; he meets them and masters them from day to day, well knowing that fresh difficulties will con- front him on the morrow. His own history is inextricably involved in the history of his country and his age : to under- stand the one you must be familiar with the other, for his instinctive objectivity enables him to lavish himself on the field 22 MAKERS OF MAN of public life, rendering futile the most industrious gleaning of mere personal traits and anecdotal gossip. The same is true, in a way, of all men who achieve anything noteworthy ; but in the case of the artist, or the man of letters, we have at least a definite and fairly comprehensive body of work, by the study of which we may hope to learn much of the personality offici- ally expressed therein. The life-work of the man of action has no such clear-cut limitations : it is merged in the achievements of his contemporaries, and even of his predecessors. But the fact that the man of action concentrates upon the production of immediate effects undoubtedly renders these more con- spicuous and more readily identifiable than they would other- wise be, and this is a compensating advantage. From the point of view of our investigation, that is, from that of the country or countries governed by him, this absorption of the man of action in the consideration of things making for immediate prestige and profit has most serious drawbacks. If Kichelieu, for example, had not contented himself with an untiring devotion to the cause of the monarchy, and indomitable efforts to increase the importance of his country as a power among the nations, but had also carried out his early schemes of internal reform, how different, and how much happier, the history of that country might have been. The taille and the iniquitous gabelle, the sale of offices, and kindred abuses, were, after a few tentative efforts at reform, left practically untouched. The policy of laissez oiler in regard to fiscal matters, sanctioned by the great name of her supreme statesman, became traditional in France. The horrors of the Revolution were the inevitable outcome of this neglect. So, too, we have to thank the bigotry and the brutal haste of Cromwell to be done with his black task in Ireland, for the existence of two irreconcilable nations within the bounds of that ill-starred isle. By encouraging foreign states to accept Irish volunteers, he got rid of some forty thousand able-bodied Catholic malcontents, while, to replace them, immense tracts of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were allotted to Protestant settlers. Cromwell returned to England in triumph, to be greeted by immense throngs with a paean of praise, for which, to do him justice, he seems to have cared CLASSIFICATION 23 little. The voice of rebellion was for the moment silenced, but at what a cost, for future generations, in bitterness, faction- fury and unavailing remorse ! Such, broadly-speaking, is the man of action, a man instinctively objective, fiercely impatient of the slow methods of nature, living for his own race and his own little hour, ruthlessly determined on the reaping of an unripe harvest, producing immense apparent benefits that are, too often, grievous curses in disguise. His type is, for humanity, what a robust, but morally undeveloped childhood is for the individual, at the stage when the youngster is first rejoicing in the unrestrained activity of its ill-governed and, too often, destructive limbs. In strong contrast with the man of action, the representative of the aesthetic type is pre-occupied with ideals, and his activi- ties are increasingly devoted to the expression of these. He is objective in a far less degree than the man of action, only becomes so, as a rule, when his powers have reached their full maturity, and even then only to that extent essential to the clear manifestation (as distinguished from the full realisation) of his cherished subjectivity. This weakness in relation to actualities is a characteristic limitation of the aesthetic type of personality, and it has not escaped the keen eye of one who, while, upon the whole, he must certainly be assigned to this category, was in many ways an exception to its rules. " It is ever the besetting fault of cultivated men," says Goethe, " that they wish to spend their whole resources on some idea, scarcely any part of them on tangible existing objects." And again, more drastically, in the Articles of Wilhelm Meister's Indenture : " Whoever works with symbols only, is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler." And Coupland has called attention to the significant fact that in Act III. of the second part of Goethe's " Faust," first Euphorion, the embodiment of poetic genius, then Helena, his mother, the personification of classic beauty, vanish, never to return. " Faust was not always to remain at the stage of Art." It is true that Helena has bequeathed to him her garment and veil. In these he envelops himself ; they raise him aloft, bear him away from the dream-world of Arcadia, and set him down on the solid soil of 24 MAKERS OF MAN actuality a journey so vast that even Mephistopheles lags behind him, in spite of his seven-league boots. Faust has not brought with him Euphorion's abandoned lyre, for his task henceforward is not the perfecting of symbols but the wresting of barren wastes from the sea, and their subdual to the service of man. Yet this weakness of the poet or artist in relation to actualities is to some extent compensated by the austerity of his attitude towards the more tenuous and plastic material with which by preference, and perhaps too exclusively, he deals. As to his choice of this material, whether he works in marble, on canvas, with language or musical tones, the question how far this choice is predetermined by inborn capacity, how far subject to environmental modification, will confront us later on. The point now to be noted is that the true artist will be content with nothing short of what he considers perfection, yet that perfect representation of an ideal conception, even in marble, is far more easily attained than the full realisation of an analogous ideal in the moral or intellectual order as a governing principle of life. But on this aspect of his function the artist commonly turns his back, affecting a fastidious contempt for the ill-ordered world of actuality, or querulously harping on the contrast between the harmonious grace of his own ideal " creations " and the vulgarity, crudity, and discord which elsewhere offend his jaundiced eye. So he betakes himself to the magnification of his office, sulks if excluded from the place of honour at the King's banquet, refuses his food, and, in justification, an- nounces that : " If the Arts should perish, The world that lacked them would be like a woman Who, looking on the cloven lips of a hare, Brings forth a hare-lipped child." As a pathological theory, this attribution of an atavistic abnormality to the morbid susceptibility of a pregnant woman is distinctly original, but, I fear, will not hold water. The position of the hypothesis of " maternal impressions " in general is nothing if not precarious, and the particular deformity named is in any case not so to be explained. Such presumptuous bards need to be reminded that if " the Arts " (read " fine arts " CLASSIFICATION 25 and, in particular, poetry) should perish, beauty and sublimity would not thereby be banished from the universe. Conceivably, the day may come it may be nearer now than we think when such inculcation of high aims fed by rapt contemplation and illumined insight as " the Arts " can proffer shall so far have been effected that exclusive preoccupation with symbols and fictions will no longer, as in the past, command the lifelong interest of the elect spirits of the race. Truly, as Zarathustra complains, the poets lie too much ; and they have also (pace Upton Sinclair) been flattered and coddled to an altogether un- warrantable extent. 1 Physiologically speaking, though I am far from asserting the final adequacy of any physical cause, the poetic impulse is an affair of adolescence, of that wonderful quickening of the sensuous and emotional affectivities which accompanies the dawn of sexual appetite and power. Is not every lover, in some sort, a poet ? But, inasmuch as it requires almost a lifetime to achieve and manifest beyond fear of cavil the mastery of any even symbolic mode of self-expression, the poet or artist must, if he is not to lose the motive-power before it has been translated into action, remain approximately at the adolescent stage of emotional exaltation all his days. And, in fact, Coleridge has defined genius (in a too-limited sense, I contend) as the faculty of carrying on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. This is a characteristic instance of the sort of uncritical adulation which men of these sthetic type have come to expect, in so far, that is, as it assumes that the peculiarity in question is purely positive, that the powers of manhood are merely enhanced, not also limited, by the persistency of supernormal affectivity throughout life. Meredith suggests a truer view when he says of happiness, " we distil that fine essence through the senses ; and the act is called the pain of life. It is the death of them." For happiness, read wisdom, and the statement will be not less true. Higher faculties must, by inexorable necessity, develop out of and at expense of lower. Coleridge's definition of genius degrades that quality while seeking to exalt it. Not all men of genius are, 1 It is true that most of these attentions have been, so far as the recipients were concerned, of a post-mortem character. But this is a detail. 26 MAKERS OF MAN like him, vague, dreamy sentimentalists. Those who are and remain such are cases of arrested development. The penalty of living in the imagination is that one is not deprived of one's illusions. That Goethe at the age of seventy-three betrayed his facile susceptibility by falling so violently in love with Ulrica von Levezow as to set the tongues of all the gossips of Marienbad wagging, is a fact which excites the naive enthusiasm of some ingenuous biographers. It is really more amusing than impressive ; and I fearlessly assert that if, with honest boyish imprudence, he had married Frederica at the age of twenty-one, or Lili (his fifth flame, or thereabouts) at twenty-six, he would have learned more about woman in twelve months than, by his peculiarly-cautious method, he actually learned in as many years. But all this is to some extent digressive, and, in con- clusion of my preliminary discussion of the aesthetic type, I will merely point out the significant fact that, between the birth of Titian, " the greatest painter, if not the greatest genius in art that the world has produced," and that of Bacon, nearly the first of a long line of intellectual pioneers and discoverers, almost a hundred years intervened. The sun of Science dawns when that of Art is in process of decline. Taking the man of action as our primitive type of mere unreflective objectivity, and the random pursuit of power for the satisfaction of instinctive needs and capacities, it is obvious that the aesthetic type is, in some important respects, higher and more advanced. Ambition, as motive, has to some extent, as we shall find, been replaced by aspiration. The activities conform less closely to the reflex type ; they are mediated by reference to an ideal standard of beauty or fitness, more or less consciously and coherently formulated. But this, un- fortunately, only applies to the official activities, the art-work pure and simple : in matters of everyday life we shall discover abundant evidence of weakness, vagary, and caprice, It is true that Goethe informed Eckermann that he wished all his actions to be regarded as of symbolic import. Goethe, I consider, upon the whole, about the most interesting personality who ever lived on this earth, but not by any means the greatest. He is also in many ways atypical, despite of the fact that he CLASSIFICATION 27 sometimes acted weakly and even contemptibly. Our third type of greatness the intellectual comprises two main groups, the philosophers and the scientific discoverers. Of these, the former group is in some respect intermediate, for many poets have in later life turned to philosophy and achieved some distinction therein. The transition from art to science is mediated by cosmic emotion, by that sense of the grandeur and beauty of the universe which first seeks expression in the solitary excogitation, later in the organised investigation of its hidden purpose or law. The man of science, it will be said, is born, not made. In a sense, yes, but with reservations. The aesthetic phase may be almost imperceptible, it may be passed over very lightly, but there is at least no doubt that it often occurs. Spinoza drew portraits of his friends ; Newton as a lad drew and painted from nature, besides indulging in versification ; Bacon's prose has been praised for its beauty by Shelley ; Galileo's dramatic sense compelled him to embody his astronomical discoveries in dialogues of singular force and charm ; his memory was stored with a vast variety of old songs and stories, and many of the poems of Ariosto, Petrarca, and Bernini. Hegel during his early manhood perpetrated some rather melancholy verse, but later, during his courtship, dis- played a transient proficiency in the art. Darwin was a lover of great music, and, at least until the date of his marriage (aged twenty-eight), an ardent reader of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. As a little boy, too, he had a mania for inventive lying, which, doubtless, indicates the potential novelist, or so it seems to me. D'Arcy Power says of Harvey that he could formulate his knowledge " in exquisite language," and that so familiar was it (i.e. his knowledge) that he could afford to indulge in similes and images. Descartes, at the age of twenty -five, experienced a sort of ecstatic vision, in which what he took to be his evil genius, symbolised as a terrible storm, seemed to be driving him in the direction of a church. So of the ten examples of the intellectual type which I propose to study, only two, Leibnitz and Kant, seem to show no aptitude or inclination for imaginative as distinguished from purely theoretic pursuits. Yet the lifework of these also is clearly 28 MAKERS OF MAN motived by that cosmic emotion which I regard as an austerely- exalted form of poetic impulse. In character, as evinced by the general conduct of life, the truth-seekers compare, in some respects, favourably with the seekers after beauty. This may. be partly attributable to innate differences of temperament and susceptibility, but is also in great measure due to the superiority of science to art as a mental and moral discipline. There is less room for vagary and caprice, a sterner demand for the subjection of wayward impulses. An artist has only to please himself, and he knows that he will command the approbation of many others ; the results of scientific research are invariably subjected to the coldest and most ruthless criti- cism. The sex-element is much less in evidence as a disturbing factor in the lives of great thinkers or discoverers than in those of great poets, artists, or composers. The reason of this discrepancy is not far to seek : the aesthetic worker is always pre-occupied with sex problems and relations, and for success in exploiting these he needs to identify himself in imagination with his own most impassioned conceptions. Only the strongest and most self-contained individuality can be proof against the perils of such exploitation of sex-emotion. Then again, the man of science at least, perhaps even the philosopher, is in a higher degree dependent upon co-operation than the artist. Co-operation strongly favours the development of moral character ; the independence of it, as we see in the case of young men born to great wealth, makes for egotism and conceit. As a matter of fact it is rare to find a scientific discoverer of the first rank who is not in some degree a speculative thinker, or a philosopher of the first rank who has altogether shirked the discipline of empirical research. Upon the whole it is clear that the intellectual is a more advanced type than the aesthetic, both on a priori grounds, and because, historically and biographically, it matures later. The typical artist will appear somewhat boyish and crude in the company of typical thinkers or men of science. We need not regret this, because there is an aesthetic side to science, as yet little appreciated, which will amply compensate any loss by the inevitable defection from purely aesthetic pursuits of our CLASSIFICATION 29 abler and more exalted spirits. So far as mere art survives, it is largely by assimilation of scientific methods and aims. Our fourth type, which I consider the highest and most humanly-significant, is one for which it is difficult to find an apt and comprehensive title. For want of a better name I have called this the ethical type of personality, but it might also be called religious, or but for the fear of misunderstanding spiritual. It includes the religious founder, the prophet, the saint, the theologian using that word in its widest sense the moralist, and the social reformer. It includes, in short, all whose main interest and endeavour is to exalt the dignity and worth of human life, either by the mere force of example, by precept and moral suasion, or by profound investigation of the ends and motives of conduct. Properly speaking, it ex- cludes all who rely, in so far as they rely, on compulsion, even for the advance of ideal ends for this is the method peculiar to the man of action. But this is a test which cannot be too rigidly enforced, since it would exclude Mahomet, Luther, and even Gregory the Great from the class to which, on general grounds, they obviously belong. The man of action bears to the ethical man a relation analogous to that of the artisan to the artist. The material of each is human life in general, but whereas the man of action is guided mainly by considerations of common everyday utility or expediency, the ethical man strives for the realisation of consciously-formulated universal and ideal ends. And in so far as he is true to his type, he cares only for such results as are brought about by the free voluntary acceptance of his doctrines and aims. The will of man is his noble material : to evoke its hidden potencies, to kindle its latent ardours, to reveal its implied aspirations, is the high task that he undertakes. He is the only true alchemist, agon- ising to achieve the transmutation of the base metal of sordid aims and low motives into the gold of brave beliefs and generous actions. He synthetises the qualities of the three subordinate types of character, sharing at his best the objective aims and the human material of the man of action, the ideal standard of the artist, the fidelity to fact of the man of science. The ethical man, like the man of action, has been in evidence, 3 o MAKERS OF MAN not merely at particular epochs like the artist and the man of science but at irregular intervals throughout history. He is indispensable, since, without him and what he stands for, life would be valueless. He is in fact the supreme valuer, and though, of course, not exempt from the faults and illusions of his tune and race, has proved, upon the whole, not altogether unworthy of his godlike function. I have spoken of the aesthetic and ethical personalities as idealistic, and so, broadly speaking, they are and must be, but, needless to state, they may not all be professors of idealism in the technical sense. Even the blankest materialism, the crudest realism, is in some sense an ideal to its devotee and exponent. It is a deliberately adopted formula, the highest truth known to him, something which he accepts and promulgates without reference to its acceptability to others or consequences to himself. And so even an " im- moralist " like Nietzsche, whose principle is the futility of all principles, must be classed among representatives of the ethical type. I mention these extreme cases as a warning that I decline to commit myself in advance to the advocacy of any popular branch of ethical theory. I may have my own views, but I am not so arrogant as to expect all men to share them ; and if a given individual teaches the unlimited rights of the irresponsible ego, the apotheosis of brute force, or the sanctitude of Dionysian frenzy, that does not alter the fact that, as a valuer of life, he is entitled to a place among representatives of the ethical type of personality. There are philosophers who reject philosophy, and saints who do not believe in religion. Such, then, are our four types of individuality ; we have now to discuss the necessary qualifications of such a classification. In the first place, it may be asked why I have not assigned a place to the inventors. Not because I am unaware of their importance, for it is of course obvious that such epochal in- ventions as that of printing, of the steam locomotive, and the telegraph, have simply revolutionised social and economic arrangements. The importance of his function must not, however, blind us to the fact that the inventor, as such, is not a primary but a mixed type of individuality. He combines the characteristics of the intellectual (scientific), the aesthetic CLASSIFICATION 31 (or constructive), and the practical types. Obviously, the consideration of the four primary types is a task more than sufficient, and logically precedes that of subsidiary or mixed ones. I confess, too, that while freely recognising the debt that we owe to the inventor, I find him less interesting, humanly speaking, than the man of action, the artist, the thinker, or the saint. 1 The excellent Mr. Smiles may perhaps have bequeathed his enthusiasm for research in this field to some less didactic admirer. Let us hope so, and that the result may be forthcoming in the shape of an adequate discussion of the soul of the inventor. The inventor is not, of course, peculiar, as an individual, in that he combines the qualities of several primary types. All individuals do that in some degree, for the purely typical personality is an abstraction which does not actually occur. What excludes the inventor from ranking as representative of a primary human category is, that, however true to his type, we know that we shall find in him something of the man of action, something of the artist, and something of the man of science. 2 Representatives of the primary types, on the other hand, though they always vary in some degree from the type to which they predominantly belong, do so in an indefinite and unforeseen way. Caesar, for example, probably the greatest man of action that the world has yet produced, would not have been so great had not the faults peculiar to his type been, in his case, largely counterbalanced by a strong ethical bias. He was the supreme ruler of men just because he was also some- thing more, because, although he certainly relied mainly on compulsion, he used it as a rule with strict moderation, and, whenever he thought it safe, gladly availed himself of the higher method of moral suasion. Charlemagne, too, though in most respects a typical representative of the man of action, has points of affinity with the ethical type. His policy, though largely opportunist, was also, and, I think, increasingly, motived 1 Bacon has truly observed that many of the most important invention have been rather the result of happy chance than reasoned investigation. Novum Organum, bk. i. Aph. cix. 2 The highest type of inventor is hardly distinguishable from the scientific discoverer. 32 MAKERS OF MAN by higher considerations. He loved no book better than Augustine's City of God, wherein he found the description of the perfect Emperor, who holds his power as something given or lent by God. His friendships with Alcuin the theologian, Pope Hadrian, and Abbot Sturm, no doubt fostered the sense of high responsibility and of a heaven-derived mission, which is clearly indicated by many of his actions. The career of William the Silent furnishes, however, the most salient example known to me of the great man of action whose public activities are determined not by personal ambition but by loyalty to an ideal aim. From the time when, as a young man of twenty-six, he listened in silent horror to the French king's revelation of the ruthless plan concocted with Philip n. for the extirpation of heresy (and heretics) in the Netherlands, he never faltered in his resolve " to drive this Spanish vermin from the land." He was born a Prince in a day when that meant more than we can even dimly realise. He died a " Beggar " in almost the literal, as well as the adoptive, sense of the word. Yet, though he might challenge the title of saint against many who bear it in the market-place, he must upon the whole be accounted a man of action. In virtue, that is, of his methods, not of his ends, which were altogether unexceptionable ; and, indeed, of the characteristic faults and limitations of the typical man of action we find in him hardly a trace. The case of Oliver Crom- well is in many ways obviously analogous to that of William of Orange. He, too, may fairly claim to have entered the field of action, not primarily in pursuit of personal gain or advance- ment, but under strong compulsion of a sense that there was work which needed to be done, which could be done by no other man but himself. " I would have been glad," he exclaimed, in an hour, truly, of bitterness and disillusionment, yet with undoubted sincerity, " I would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep rather than undertake such a government as this." Yet Cromwell's career is more typically practical (as distinguished from ethical), both in its weakness and strength, than is that of William the Silent. No one can fairly cavil at the inclusion of Drake, Richelieu, or Frederic the Great, among representative men of action, though CHARI.KMACNE. Boiztt del. ; Barlenv, .Scuff. To face f. 32. CLASSIFICATION 33 the two last-named have subsidiary indications of an aesthetic and intellectual bias. Nelson is, in his own way, as unique as Alexander, and, indeed, with his fiery passion for distinction a passion which enabled him to triumph over the most serious drawbacks of bodily weakness, prejudice, and misfortune reminds one a little of the great Macedonian. There is in the temperament of Nelson a striking analogy with that of the typical poet ; but, so far as I have been able to ascertain, it was, from the first, purely objective in tendency and aim. With regard to Napoleon, it need merely be said at present that we may search the history of mankind in vain to find a more thoroughly representative specimen of the man of action. Of aspiration, as distinct from ambition the desire to shine and the determination to use men as otherwise negligible instruments to that ignoble purpose there are, except possibly in its quite early stages, no indications whatever in his career. Its leading notes are tireless energy, instinctive objectivity, furious egotism, a keen eye to dramatic, or theatrical, effect, and a brutal direct- ness of method. Very different is the case of Lincoln, a true man of action, yet with strong affinities to the ethical type. Leland doubts " whether there was ever so great a man who was, on the whole, so good." But this is not the question goodness in the domestic sense is quite compatible with ruthless violence and rapacity in the public sphere of action. But Lincoln's relation to the slavery question fairly entitles him to rank as a man in many ways superior to mere ambition and lust for power. Still, the problem is not so simple as it appears there was a good deal of mere ambition, and even perhaps a suspicion of demagogy and time-serving, in his conduct at times. Fewer ambiguities present themselves with regard to the classification of representatives of the aesthetic type. Dante had in him some inkling of a practical bias, but it did not long survive the discouragement of his condemnation and exile. Not more of it, perhaps, than is common to all artists of the first class, for it is only those of the second rank who are devoid of a leaven of Philistinism. But in spite of the unsurpassed beauty^of his verse, and the superb virtuosity of his method, 3 34 MAKERS OF MAN Dante may claim to be almost as great intellectually as poetically, and perhaps even greater as an ethical influence. No Art for Art's sake man this, but a spirit aflame with zeal for the good, and with absolute loathing for all that it deemed false, mean, or sordid. The case of Leonardo is one of great interest and importance, and strongly supports my contention that the intellectual type must, broadly speaking, be regarded as more advanced than the aesthetic. The little that remains to us of his art-work amply suffices to prove that in capacity, in equip- ment, he was one of the two or three supreme artists of the world. But Leonardo was singularly free from the vanity and the greed for fame of the typical artist. Painting never captured more than the half of his mind ; and as he grew older he turned with ever-increasing ardour to purely intellectual interests and wonder- ful previsionary glimpses of the future of Science. He too, like Faust, was not content to remain at the stage of Art. In a more favourable environment he would probably have been even greater as a scientific discoverer than he actually became as an artist. As a blend of the man of action, the aesthetic, and the intellectual, he inevitably displayed an aptitude for engineering and mechanical invention. In Titian, the practical worldly element seldom lacking in artistic or poetic genius of the first order, is almost unduly evident, yet with strangely little pre- judice to the aesthetic value of his work. Perhaps no artist so great in other ways was ever so devoid of the qualities of the highest or ethical type. I do not, of course, assert or believe that great artists are necessarily didactic their works may have no moral, but they have at least a morale. And this, in much, even of Titian's latest work, is confessedly wanting. Cervantes, again, seems by disposition to have had almost as decided a bent for action as for literature. Up to the time of his ransom from slavery at Algiers we hear but little of any pursuits of an imaginative kind, and his early ambition seems to have been for military distinction. But the barren glory of Lepanto, which cost him the use of a hand and brought him no com- pensating advantage, began a process of disillusionment which was completed by the five years' ordeal of bondage. The brutality of the world had so far destroyed his romantic dreams CLASSIFICATION 35 that he contented himself henceforth with describing not without irony and self-derision the chivalrous exploits and ideals which he had once aspired to express in action. His loss was the world's gain, however, and he could not have become the supreme artist he was if he had been spared the rebuffs incurred by his prior invasion of the practical sphere. Mozart is almost as perfect a representative of the aesthetic type as Napoleon is of the man of affairs. Goethe's complex personality belongs in almost equal measure to each of the four primitive types, the poet upon the whole predominating in him, and the ethical factor, though ultimately pronounced enough, developing latest. Beethoven, again, is an artist and something more ; he never meddled with action ; he was not really intellectual ; but there is in all his great works a breath of spiritual exaltation, a something that not merely expands and uplifts, but edifies, incites, and ennobles. His music is, as it were, an emotional embodiment of absolute religion, of religion that has outgrown formulas and superstitions ; it is at once a paean of emancipation and a proud challenge to destiny. Its appeal is, in short, not merely to the imagination, but also, and in perhaps unique degree, to the mil of the listener. By this peculiarity Beethoven's music is related to the poetry of Dante, Milton, and Shelley, rather than to that of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Keats. In Walter Scott we have a well-marked example of the blending of imaginative with practical capacity. The artist in him was overshadowed and in some degree vitiated by the man of action. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that he cared as much, or even more, for worldly and social success as for excellence in his artistic endeavours that ambition rather than aspiration was his fundamental motive. Once, soon after entering the High School at Edinburgh, Scott, having found himself at a disadvantage through his ignorance of Greek, expressed con- tempt for the language, whereupon a schoolfellow, the son of an innkeeper, himself an excellent Greek scholar, ventured to remonstrate with him. Scott received the friendly rebuke " with sulky civility, because, forsooth, the birth of my mentor did not, as I thought in my folly, authorise him to intrude upon me his advice." All his life, in fact, though less obtrusively, 36 MAKERS OF MAN no doubt, Scott maintained a certain deference for rank as such, hardly compatible with a due regard for ideal standards. He was a little ashamed of being a professional author, a little over- anxious lest it should be forgotten that he was also a " gentle- man." Lockhart significantly remarks that Scott's wife gaily acknowledged the pleasure she took in being " My Lady." It would be a mistake, of course, to make too much of this worldly element in Scott's nature, to regard him as a mere worldling impelled by a sordid land-hunger. There was a great deal of the child in him : a title and estate were the toys that pleased him. He wanted, as Lockhart remarks, to revive the interior life of the castles he had emulated their wide-open, joyous reception of all comers ballads and pibrochs jolly hunting fields mirthful dancers. What is a more serious flaw is his aesthetic opportunism his willingness to court popularity by the sacrifice of truth or beauty. Thus, in the original version of St. Ronarfs Well, the mock marriage of Miss Mowbray was represented as having been consummated. His publisher shrank from ob- truding on the public the suggestion of any personal con- tamination of a high-born damsel of the nineteenth century. Scott, protesting that James Ballantyne would not have quarrelled with the incident had it befallen a girl in gingham, and that the silk petticoat made no real difference, ultimately gave way very reluctantly and re-wrote the episode. He always protested that the story was marred by the change. As to his practical ability, I need only recall the amazing zeal and energy with which Scott threw himself into the preparation of the festivities and processional pageants which celebrated the King's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. " The strongest impression which the whole affair left on my mind," observes Lockhart, " was that I had never till then formed any just notion of his capacity for practical dealings and rule among men. ... I am mistaken if Scott could not have played in other times either the Cecil or the Gondomar." To have done things worthy to be written was, in his eyes, we are told, a dignity to which no man made any approach who had only written things worthy to be read. True ; but this is no sort of|justification of the man, who, having chosen writing as his vocation, is, through weakness or CLASSIFICATION 37 fear of loss or censure, thus false to his own insight and con- science. What Scott failed to realise is that wordswhich produce actions partake in some degree of the nature of action. His work is, consequently, creative only in a secondary sense : it charms, but it does not ennoble. Scott never truly attained to the intellectual, still less to the ethical type of greatness. Of Turner we may first remark that in physical energy he far exceeded the degree typical of the aesthetic temperament. We are told that he had worked as many hours as would make the lives of two men of his own age. He had in him enough of the man of action to subserve without serious detriment the main purpose of his life. Intellectually, he was by no means remarkable : he could not express himself clearly in words at any length, but was, as it were, bound down by natural limitations to the one outlet prescribed. His forehead projected above the eyes, but its upper portion was narrow and sloped towards the cranial vertex. It is probable, however, that in his art- work, particularly the mythological pictures, Turner endeavoured to set forth some dimly-felt ethical purpose or warning. He seems to have considered the tragic fate of Carthage, ascribable to the neglect of agriculture, the increase of luxury, and besotted blindness to the insatiable ambition of Rome, as in some sort symbolic of the dangers that threatened the England of his day. So, too, in the proof of an engraving of Wickliff's birthplace, he introduced a burst of light which was not in the drawing. " There is the light of the glorious Reformation," he explained to an inquirer. Some fluttering geese in the foreground were the superstitions which the genius of the reformer was to drive away. Such vague intimations of the hidden motives of an artist are of great interest : they have more to do with the settlement of his ultimate rank in the world's esteem than many dilettanti are willing to admit. Our last example of the aesthetic type is Flaubert, one of the most interesting personalities of his class. The son of an eminent surgeon, he inherited a strong proclivity to almost microscopic accuracy of detail and precision of method. All his early surroundings tended to enhance this inborn scrupu- losity in regard to the hard facts of life. His temperament 38 MAKERS OF MAN made him an artist, but his intellect made him the pioneer of realism in art. His motives were unique in their purity ; of vulgar ambition we find in him hardly a trace. " Do I long to be successful, I, to be a great man, a man known in a district, in a department, in three provinces, a thin man, a man with a weak digestion ? Have I ambition, like shoeblacks who aspire to be bootmakers, drivers to be stud-grooms, footmen to play the master, your man of ambition to be a deputy or a minister, to wear a ribbon, be a town councillor ? All that seems to me very dismal, and attracts me as little as a fourpenny dinner or a humanitarian lecture." As to what does attract him, he is equally explicit. " For me there is nothing in the world except beautiful verses, well-turned, harmonious, resonant phrases, glorious sunsets, moonlight, coloured paintings, antique marble, and shapely heads. Beyond that, nothing." But this is not wholly accurate, unless we add that, for Flaubert, the true and the beautiful were one, and that no subject was too gross or sordid to yield to the enchantment of style. Art, he insisted, should be raised above personal affections and nervous susceptibilities. " It is time to give it, by means of pitiless method, the precision of the physical sciences." He declared that there is no particle of matter which does not contain poetry ; that the artist should regard the universe as a work of art, whose processes he must reproduce in his works. He had a horror of " people of taste, the people of pretty touches, of purification, of illusions, those who with manuals of anatomy for ladies, science within the grasp of all, pretty sentiments, and honeyed art, change, erase, remove, and call themselves classic." In virtue of his unquestioned, unfaltering, life-long fidelity to this austere ideal, Flaubert is more than an artist, more than a philosopher : he is in some sense much as he would have resented the imputation a prophet and a seer. I have already submitted evidence of the aesthetic bias which commonly underlies, and, no doubt, in some degree conditions the mental activities of the philosopher and the man of science. Men of this class are seldom strongly drawn to the field of action. Bacon is, of course, an exception, but the results of his worldly ambition were, we all know, disastrous to his fame CLASSIFICATION 39 and happiness. The rule seems to be that a man of great in- tellectuality can earn a modest living, but cares little for success in the vulgar sense of the word. Harvey and Spinoza are good examples ; Kant, Hegel, and Newton were all comparatively impecunious for at least the greater portion of their lives. Descartes and Darwin were men of independent means ; the former in early life renounced a title as a useless encumbrance. Leibnitz, as the reward of a life of arduous and disinterested toil for humanity, died poor and almost friendless, and " was buried more like a robber than the ornament of his country." As to the ethico-religious affinities of the intellectual type, these are naturally most obvious in the professed philosophers Spinoza, Kant, Hegel. But may not Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, by the revolution they effected in the current cosmic and biological conceptions of their times, by the firmness with which, in the face of bitter opposition, even persecution, they maintained the truth of their discoveries, by the reaction of these discoveries upon the ethico-religious consciousness of the civilised world may not such names be regarded as of more spiritual significance than those of innumerable preachers and theologians ? We divide life up into sections, labelling this profane and that sacred, but Nature makes light of our petty discriminations, and Truth remains one, organic and ultimately indivisible. We have now only to deal with the anomalies qualifying our recognition of the fourth or ethico-religious type of personality. As I have already implied, this type of individuality is funda- mental in a somewhat different sense from the three preceding ones. It synthetises their characteristics into the unity of a higher manifestation. The immediate simplicity of the objec- tive or practical nature is in the artist withdrawn from exclusive relation to actualities, and comes into sensuous or intuitive touch with an ideal order. This ideal order the artist endeavours to reproduce by the manipulation of symbols. Guided by cosmic emotion in the first place, the intellectual man takes a further step. He seeks for the unchanging law underlying the changing features of actuality, with a view to the mastery of fate. The ethico-religious type restores to unity the character- istics thus differentiated sharing the practical aims of the man 40 MAKERS OF MAN of action, the ideal standard of the artist, and the stern fidelity to fact of the man of science. This type is therefore the final term of a logical sequence, and, in so far as it is realised, the ideal has become the actual. It may be objected that since the inventor has, by my showing, some of the characteristics of the practical, the aesthetic, and the intellectual individuality, he too may be regarded as a supreme type. But the inventor is concerned rather with the means than the ends of life ; he partakes rather of the constructive than the creative activity of the artist ; he is not philosophical but methodical, not in- tellectual but acute. The first question that confronts us with regard to my re- presentatives of the ethico-religious type is that of the propriety of including the personality of Jesus. The ultra-orthodox will, of course, protest against it, on the ground that Jesus was no mere man, and ought not to be assigned a place in a merely human category. Also, they will regard as irreverent, if not blasphemous, the very notion of an attempt at dispassionate study of one towards whom the only justifiable attitude is that of uncritical adoration. In the first place, I shall reply that if they regard Jesus as truly Divine, they also profess to regard him as truly human, and have no right to object to investigation of his humanity. In the second place, I assert that, properly understood, the dispassionate study of a given personality is really a higher and more worthy tribute than the adoption of an attitude of uncritical adoration. It is, at any rate, far more difficult, and the results are like to be of more permanent value. 1 The ultra-sceptical, on the other hand, will ridicule the inclusion of what they consider a mythical among historical personalities. To them I shall reply that, having read the objections of Robertson and others to the historicity of Jesus, I cannot admit for a moment that they have proved their case. To prove a negative is proverbially difficult, and this is no exception to the rule. This much they have certainly done they have de- monstrated the extreme slenderness of the grounds upon which 1 " His glory does not consist in being relegated out of history, we render him a truer worship in showing that all history is incomprehensible without him" (Renan). CLASSIFICATION 41 the inference in favour of the historicity of Jesus really rests. No one certainly knows whether such a man actually lived ; only those who have deeply studied the evidence have any right to an opinion on the matter. I, for my part, agree with Schmiedel (not entirely on account of his " nine pillars," l however) and with Carpenter, that upon the whole the balance of evidence is in favour of the affirmative inference. I do not presume to censure those who think otherwise. But my main reasons for including this personality are : first, that his character, as I have, after much thought and labour, come to conceive of it, is to my mind supremely interesting and significant ; secondly, that it is almost the only available example of a purely ethical type ; thirdly, that its consideration is intimately bound up with that of nearly all the other members of its class, as chosen, without preconception, by me. It seems to me impossible to discredit the substantial genuineness of Paul's Epistles, and, in a less degree, of the Acts, which bring us into touch with blood relations and intimate associates of Jesus, and, by their naive revelation of the feuds and dissensions of the primitive Church, render the hypothesis of wholesale fraud futile and meaningless. I do not, on the other hand, regard the Gospels, not even that of Mark, as in strict sense historical. They were fashioned under the impulse of " creative love and insight," moulded by the preconceived idea of the Messianic role of their hero ; but there is a central core of historic fact giving verisimilitude to the whole story, which will, I believe, prove indissoluble by the corrosive attack of the most deter- mined criticism. " What is indubitable," says Renan, " is that very early the discourses of Jesus were written in the Aramean language, and very early also his remarkable actions were recorded. . . . Who does not see the value of documents thus composed by the tender remembrances and simple narra- tives of the first two Christian generations, still full of the strong impression which the illustrious founder had produced, which seemed long to survive him ? " 1 Jesus in Modern Criticism, by Dr. Paul W. Schmiedel, trans, by M. A. Canney. For Criticism, see " The Historicity of Jesus," by J. M. Robertson, Agnostic Annual, 1907. 42 MAKERS OF MAN That the Gospels, as we have them, were amplified by the addition of orally-derived mythical elements, is, of course, clear, and we have a modern example of the rapidity with which a mythos can be elaborated in the case of Bahaism, the new Persian religion. Startling analogies can be made out, for example, between the Nativity legend of Jesus and the miracul- ous episodes related concerning the birth and childhood of Gautama, Krishna, and Confucius. But the historicity of these persons is not seriously impugned. The only respect in which the personality of Jesus fails to be typical of the fourth or ethico-religious category, is its intellectual aspect. In capacity his mind may have been of a very high order, but his environment negatived the possi- bility of its full development. The dualistic or ascetic tendency of Christianity is the result not so much of the direct teaching of its founder, who was at heart no ascetic, but of his ignorance and consequent lack of appreciation of mundane affairs. We are told that he affirmed the unity, or at least the affinity, of man's obligation to God and to his fellow-men. But the primitive, almost Utopian, simplicity of his Galilean surround- ings rendered him permanently antipathetic to the complexity of a more highly-organised system of life. Hence, in a sort of despair of understanding it, he condemned the whole business : " My kingdom is not of this world." Unhappily he was taken at his word by posterity, and untold misery, injustice, and confusion were the result. With regard to the Apostle Paul, not much need be added to or deducted from the verdict of Kenan. Paul, he affirms, was no saint, was not pre-eminently good. He is assertive of his rights, combative on occasion, has harsh words for his opponents, and embroils himself in unseemly controversies. He is, in measure, a man of action, a strong soul, impulsive, zealous, ardent, a conqueror, a missionary, a propagandist, all the more ardent because he had employed his fanaticism in a contrary sense. " One is strong in action by his faults, one is weak by his virtues." Granting all this, even perhaps the further charge of responsibility for the principal defects of Christian theology (a charge warmly disputed by Arnold), I must still insist CLASSIFICATION 43 that his high aim, and the purely spiritual sphere of his main activities, render it impossible to assign Paul to any other than the ethico-religious category. The case of Marcus Aurelius is the exact converse of that of the apostle to the Gentiles. A moralist, nay, a saint, by temperament, he was a man of action by the necessity of his imperial position. Guilt, the nemesis of action, surprised him in the person of his noblest victim, Blandina, the girl-martyr of Lyons. It is the one blot on his escutcheon that, through very excess of scruple, and over-anxious fidelity to his official responsibilities, he became, in his own despite, a persecutor. Very different is the case of Augustine, an artist by temperament, if there ever were one, whose claim to sanctity rests exclusively on the self-subdual achieved by the fierce intensity of that inner conflict so marvellously depicted in the deathless pages of his Confessions. The psychological interest of his career abruptly ceases with his ultimate conversion. Gregory the Great, on the other hand, seems never to have known one lawless desire. Like Aurelius, he was a natural recluse, loyally, though always reluctantly, and with wistful backward glances towards the forbidden peace of his monastery on the Coelian, obeying an imperious call to the fulfilment of world-wide respon- sibilities. Mahomet and Luther are two striking examples of the ethico-religious type blended with and almost dominated by the masterful temper of the man of action. Yet it should be remembered that the first did not make appeal to the sword before he had reached the age of fifty-three, when " thirteen years of meek endurance had been rewarded by nothing but aggravated injury and insult." And the second, when, at almost the same age, he declared that resistance to the aggres- sion of " blood-thirsty Papists " would not be rebellion, was for the moment disillusioned and embittered by the failure of the Emperor to maintain at the Diet of Augsburg that attitude of impartiality which Luther had rightly expected of him. The wonder is, not that men of such power and energy to some extent confused might with right, but that upon the whole their lives manifest so clear a recognition of the differ- ence between them. In Francis d'Assisi we have a saint 44 MAKERS OF MAN of what might well be called the impulsive or " lyric " order a lovely personality ; yet the purity of his exaltation must not blind us to the hopelessly impracticable and in great part mischievous tendency of his aims. To all intellectual interests Francis was not merely indifferent, but actively hostile : " God will confound you through your knowledge and your wisdom." He was, in fact, an obscurantist : if you want to know which road to take, turn round and round until you are dizzy, and the direction in which you fall is that of your God-revealed route. If you wish to convert a foreign country, go there without troubling to learn the language in which you will have to preach. But for single-hearted devotion to the highest, as he too austerely conceived it, Francis has never been excelled and hardly equalled. Hence the exalted place he must ever hold among representatives of the ethico -religious category. It only remains to speak of my two modern exemplars of the supreme type Emerson and Kenan. As to the first, probably no one will seriously dispute the appropriateness of the classi- fication, but many may demur to my estimate of his import- ance in the class to which he belongs. Emerson is great as a poet, great as an artist in prose, great as an unsystematic philosopher, but greatest of all as a man. His intellectual and moral influence, both distinctively as an emancipator from obsolete shibboleths and constructively as a prophet and pioneer, can hardly be over- appraised. There is not in him, as undoubtedly in Whitman, a histrionic element, a taint of pose and pseudo-Bohemianism. His good sense was the outcome of his profound sincerity, and proves, what our demagogues and Jacobins are so slow (to their cost) in learning, that respect- ability deserves, and, in the long-run, will command, respect. Kenan's case is far more complex, and, in some ways, dubious ; but, since the ultimate problems of life and religion were his lifelong sphere of research and teaching, he can hardly be denied a place in the ethico-religious class. And if the Church denied him, he never denied the Church, but almost with his last breath deplored his exclusion from it, proudly claiming the title of a conservator of its essential truths. He was, both by his defects and qualities, more distinctively modern than CLASSIFICATION 45 Emerson, who has, after all, something staid and academic in his attitude towards life. In his private life Renan was more than blameless, was, indeed, a hero and a saint. The beauty and distinction of his style were the outcome of unflinching fidelity to his individual convictions and ideals, chastened by the subtlest discriminations and the tenderest regard for his opponents' point of view. Such, then, are the principal qualifications affecting the distribution of our typical personalities into four main groups. I have dealt with them at considerable length, but by so doing have been able to bring the reader into touch with what might be called the keynote or leading motive of each career, and this will, I hope, facilitate the task of more detailed investiga- tion. It has, I think, been made abundantly clear that any clean-cut division of human individualities into separate classes is really impracticable, and that, though the attempt is justifi- able, and even necessary, on the ground of convenience, the overlapping of the several groups is a fact to be kept constantly in mind. All that we can truthfully assert is, that in this or the other personality, such or such qualities practical, aesthetic, intellectual, or ethical predominate. The others too will in greater or less degree be represented, either as undeveloped potentialities, or as actively-modifying and complicating influences. Ill FAMILY HISTORY, PARENTAGE, AND CONSTITUTION Size of paternal family Place in family Longevity Relation of paternal and maternal factors Examples Maternal insanity Tuberculosis, etc. Sterility of genius Summary. ALTHOUGH we are concerned in the present work not primarily with the physical but the mental characteristics of great men, it is impossible to pass over in silence those prominent facts of heredity and constitutional proclivity which have an obvious bearing on our subject. A long course of biographical reading has, however, strongly impressed upon me the deficiencies of the average litterateur in respect of scientific acumen. Just those things which one wants most to know are those which he commonly ignores or slurs over. In his remarks on parentage and family history, he, as a rule, confines himself to a cursory account of the paternal stock. The at least equally important maternal element is nearly always dismissed in a few lines of vague unimportant gossip. There are honourable exceptions ; but this is the rule, and it is deplorable. Biography should be regarded as primarily scientific rather than aesthetic in aim ; and although there is really no incompatibility between the two ideals, the former should here have precedence wherever their claims appear to be at variance. The parents of great men, taken collectively, are not very prolific. Excluding two or three of my forty instances, with reference to the size of whose parents' families my information is too vague or dubious, I find that the average number of brothers or sisters, or both (including my representative men), is 4'9. And, curiously enough, there seems to be a gradual diminution in the size of the families as we proceed from the 46 HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 47 first or most primitive group (men of action) to the last or ethico-religious. The numbers are as follows : l Men of action average number, 7'9 ; aesthetic type, 4'3 ; intellectual type, 4'2 ; ethico-religious type, 3 - 2. The average of the last group is based in part on the assumption that Jesus had four brothers and two sisters, and Paul one brother and sister. 2 If we exclude these doubtful instances, the average will be somewhat lower. It is interesting to notice the large proportion of great men who have been only children particularly in the last group. Dante, Turner, Newton (his mother, however, had children by a second husband), Leibnitz (only son by father's third wife), Marcus Aurelius (so far as I am aware), Augustine, Gregory, Mahomet just one fifth of the whole were the only children of their two parents. Leonardo I exclude, for he was illegitimate. His mother, a peasant girl, married, and may have had a large family. His father had subsequently no less than four wives, and some children. With regard to the question whether great men come early or late in their respective families, the evidence clearly points in the former direction. The average place in a family averaging a number of eight is for my men of action, 2'2 ; for the aesthetic type, 1*7 in a family of average number, 4 - 3 ; for the intellectuals, 1*9 in 4*2 ; and for the last group, 1*4 in families averaging 3'2. For the four groups taken together, the average place is T8 in 4'9. That is to say, that the families into which are born great men, in general appear to average nearly five members, and that the chances are somewhat less of the great man being the eldest than the second-born. Another point of some slight interest is the fact that of my ten intellectuals, Bacon and Spinoza were the offspring of their father's second, and Leibnitz was the son of his father's third wife. This perhaps might indicate that a considerable seniority on the part of the husband to the wife is a condition favouring intel- lectual eminence in the offspring. That the average size of 1 Where one or both parents have been married more than once I have counted only the mother's children, as I consider the maternal element the better test of prolificity in a given stock. The mother of William the Silent had 17 children, 5 being by a former husband. s Kenan's estimate. 48 MAKERS OF MAN the family should gradually diminish as we pass from what I consider the most primitive to the most advanced type, is, as far as it goes, confirmatory of the genuineness of my principle of classification. To be fair, it must be owned that the two intermediate groups (aesthetic and intellectual) are practically equal in this respect (4'3 and 4'2), but on my own showing the distinction between these is not organically well marked or abrupt, but graduated by mutual affinities. Let us now apply the test of relative longevity, and we shall find that it points in much the same direction. Excluding, of course, those indi- viduals (Caesar, William the Silent, Nelson, Lincoln) who died by violence, the average longevity of my great men, taken conjointly, is 65' 7 years. For the separate groups, the average longevities are: men of action, 61 '1 ; aesthetic type, 66' 1 ; intellectuals, 69 ; ethical type, 64*7. It would appear that men of action are the most short-lived, that there is a consider- able rise when we come to the poets and artists, a distinct further rise to a maximum duration among philosophers and men of science, and a definite fall towards the minimum with members of the last group. Assuming it is a bold assumption, perhaps that results based on so few examples can be trusted, what is their most natural interpretation ? My standard is a very high one ; large numbers are not available ; for men like Caesar, Newton, Dante, and Gregory do not grow on every bush. It is, at all events, clear that men of the highest orders of great- ness are, as a whole, distinctly long-lived. The reason probably is that a man who starts with a good stock of " vitality " is, other things being equal, more likely to distinguish himself than one who is not so equipped. And, obviously, he will be likely to live longer too. As regards the higher average longevity of those engaged in abstract (aesthetic and intellectual) rather than concrete spheres of activity, or those pointing in that direction, the most probable explanation is that the physical organism encounters more severe obstacles and undergoes more wear and tear in the latter than in the former cases. The supremacy of the intellectuals in respect of longevity, with their very high average of sixty-nine years, seems to support the popular belief in the positively conservative effect upon the HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 49 physical organism of great mental effort. 1 And this is confirmed by the fact that, of the members of my last (ethico-religious) group, the three most distinctly intellectual men Augustine, Emerson, and Renan were by far the longest lived. Augustine lived to be seventy-six, Emerson to be seventy-nine, and Renan to be sixty-nine. Luther, who died at sixty-three, lived, in many respects, the life of a man of action. Francis d'Assisi, who can hardly be called a thinker, died at forty-five. This last group is, in fact, far less homogeneous than the others ; and general conclusions with regard to it are correspondingly precarious. We will now consider such facts with regard to the parentage of particular individuals as appear likely to throw light upon the main problems with which we are concerned. Of Caesar's lineage, it is noteworthy that for eight generations his fore- fathers had held prominent positions in the State. Nature had been slowly working up towards the production of the greatest ruler of men that the world has yet seen. In politics they had been moderate aristocrats, and although Caesar, led by clear-sighted ambition, inevitably adopted the democratic policy of Marius, his uncle by marriage, traces of the inherited moderation and conservatism of his nature are clearly evidenced by his public actions throughout b'fe. He loathed vulgar display, and had an unerring instinct of good taste, so fastidious that it almost ranks as a moral rather than a merely-aesthetic trait. Of his father, who had been praator, nothing more need be said. Of his mother, Aurelia, we read that she was a strict and stately lady of the old school, uninfected by the cosmopolitan laxity of her day. Consequently, though the Caesars were wealthy, the habits of Aurelia's household were simple and severe. Caesar was always passionately devoted to his mother, who shared his house up to the time of her death, when Caesar was forty-six years old. Her influence upon him was doubtless great and beneficial. Precisely the same can be said as to Charlemagne, whose private life at anyrate grossly deteriorated from the date of his mother's death in his own forty-second 1 The trophic influence of mental activity is negatively indicated by the extreme liability of the insane to fractures, bruises, and other traumatic or inflammatory lesions. 4 50 MAKERS OF MAN year. Bertha was, like Amelia, a matron of the old school, strongly opposed to the Romanising tendencies of the West Franks of Aquitaine and Neustria. It was doubtless in great measure due to her that Charles remained faithful to the traditional dress and the hardy customs of his Frankish fore- fathers. On the paternal side Charlemagne came of a race whose growing instinct for power and sovereignty is evident enough. His great-grandfather and grandfather had been mayors only of the royal palace by title, but in actuality the true rulers of Austrasia, the Merovingian kings, whom they found it convenient for the present to uphold in formal sway, having become the merest puppets in their hands. The gradual process of usurpation was completed by Charlemagne's father, Pepin the Short, who in 750 (when Charles was eight years old) supplanted Childeric in. and assumed the royal title. He made good use of it too, but in the light of history his achiev- ments have a tentative or preparatory aspect beside those of his greater son. For, though a man of real force and originality, Pepin somehow lacked that personal magnetism, that inexplic- able assurance of authority, which marks the born leader of men. " The Franks, we are told," says his son's biographer, 1 " followed Pepin across the snow-clad Alps, but did so with doubts and murmurings." The statement is decisive, as against the claim of Pepin to military genius. The fact that great men often win their supreme distinction in the same sphere as that which was invaded with some success by their fathers and forefathers, must not blind us to the other fact that the difference between their performances in this given sphere is one of kind, not of degree. It is talent rather than genius, character rather than temperament, that repeats itself in father and son. The transforming increment of power and insight, whatever its ultimate, possibly transcendent origin, has, genetically-speaking, commonly a maternal, or at least a feminine, source. So it was with Cromwell, whose mother, Elizabeth Steward, must have been a remarkable woman. She was thirty-four at least when Oliver, her fifth child, was born ; forty-five when she bore her eleventh. Her portrait shows a 1 H. Carlcss Davis. HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 51 striking resemblance to the great Protector, the face being " strong, homely, keen, with firm mouth and penetrating eyes, a womanly goodness and peacefulness of expression." Of the precise part played by her in guiding the career of Oliver we do not know much, but we know that he thought more of her than of any other woman, more than of his wife. She survived her husband thirty-seven years, remaining throughout life to her ninetieth year by Oliver's side; was lodged by him in Whitehall Palace, and royally interred in the Abbey. Of Cromwell's father we read that he was a man of good sense, of competent learning and great spirit, but unambitious, methodical, reserved, and proud. The Cromwells were a sound stock, by wealth and alliances in the front rank of untitled gentry, prolific and long-lived. For generations they had been conspicuous for loyalty, chivalry, and public spirit, some tending to Puritan austerity, others to the opposite extreme. Precisely analogous is the case of William the Silent, whose father, William, Count of Nassau, the heir of a House which had produced many chiefs illustrious in war and council, is himself described as a " pale, dull, local type." His wife, the hero's mother, was in all ways an exceptional woman. She bore seventeen children in all, five by a previous husband. Strong, devout, affectionate, a sincere but temperate Protestant, she endured a long life of calamity and bereavement with heroic serenity and courage, dying at the age of seventy-seven. That Napoleon thought highly of his mother we know from the fact that he attributed his elevation to her training, laying down the maxim that the future good or bad conduct of a child depends entirely on the mother. On the eve of his de- parture from Elba, it was to her, and her alone of those he left behind him, that the secret of his desperate venture was confided. From her he is thought to have inherited his astounding energy, as his disposition did not resemble that of his father, a somewhat indolent Italian gentleman of literary tastes. Both father and son, however, died of cancer of the stomach. The predominance of the maternal element as a determinant of genius is further shown in the cases of Mozart, Goethe, Scott, Leibnitz, Augustine, Gregory, Francis d'Assisi to mention 52 MAKERS OF MAN only the most salient instances. The fathers of these men were in most cases worthy citizens (Augustine's was, however, an unprincipled scamp), but quite lacking in point of distinction. They supply, as it were, the general or special form of capacity which is vitalised by the temperamental endowment derived from the mothers. Thus Mozart's father had an innate love of music and skill as a violinist, which led to his desertion of the study of law and acquisition of the post of director of the Prince Archbishop's orchestra at Salzburg. He was an industrious composer of works long forgotten, but his chef d'ceuvre was a Violin Instructor, which achieved a considerable popularity. Obviously a man of talent, a man of genuine and specialised ability but obviously nothing more. It was the light-hearted, easy, warm, and affectionate nature of Anna Maria Pertl that conferred upon her son that " kiss of the fairies " which her husband in his own cradle had lacked. Of her seven children, the five youngest died in infancy. Mozart himself seems to have suffered from some undiagnosed pyrexial condition, probably tubercular, and to have died of tubercular nephritis. I call attention to this fact, being decidedly of opinion that a tubercular or strumous taint is in some ill-understood way a favouring condition of certain types of aesthetic and intellectual capacity. The cases of Goethe and Scott were in respect of parentage so curiously similar that they might almost be described together. Both were the sons of lawyers, both were designed to follow the same profession (of law), both derived much from their fathers, but the love of poetry and romance from their mothers. Goethe says of himself that he inherited his powerful frame of body and the earnest conduct of life from his father ; his joyous temperament and fondness for story-telling from his mother ; his devotion to the fair sex from a great-grandfather ; and the love of finery and gew-gaws from a great-grandmother. He does not mention the curious fact that there are three tailors x to be found among his ancestry, one being his grand- father for the Goethes were nouveaux riches. It is worth noticing that Goethe's father was thirty-nine, and his mother, the bright, imaginative, and sentimental correspondent (later) 1 AB bearing on what might be called his decided " feeling for clothes." WILLIAM TIIK SILENT. From an fngrai'ing. Toface f>. 52. HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 53 of many eminent persons, only eighteen, at the time of his birth. Pace Weismann, this may be in some way related to the com- plexities and inconsistencies of his character. The paternal and maternal elements within him had a long and stubborn contest before any tolerable modus vivendi could be thrashed out between them. The father of Leibnitz was an eminent jurist and professor of moral philosophy, born of a good Protestant family. Leibnitz inherited from him the same intellectual interests, coloured and vivified by the temperament of his third wife, the great philosopher's mother. She was a woman who overcame all personal difficulties with patience, trying to live with everyone in peace and quiet. " This con- ciliatory spirit showed itself in her son's celebrated attempts to bring about political and religious union, and has found its classical expression in his philosophical system." Leibnitz remained a Protestant, but it was the dream of his life to see unity and universality restored to the Church of Christendom. His negotiations with political and ecclesiastical rulers on behalf of religious unity extend over some thirty-two years. The same hereditary disposition to avoid a one-sided attitude is evinced by his refusal to join in the depreciation of ancient philosophy (Aristotle's in particular), so fashionable among the thinkers of his day. Himself in the vanguard of progress, " he blames the moderns for being more anxious to propound their own ideas than to bring out what was great and true in Aristotle and the schoolmen." He maintains and as to the justice of the contention there can hardly be two opinions that much of what was thought to be new is to be found in the older writers. This catholicity was perhaps the innermost factor of Leibnitz' greatness ; and he had it direct from his mother, though in her it was merely a domestic and moral, not an intellectual characteristic. It can scarcely be necessary to call attention to the pre- dominance of the maternal element in the ultimate determina- tion of the genius of Augustine. What is most interesting in his case is the evidence afforded by his writings of a long and arduous contest between the sensual and lawless proclivities which he inherited from his worthless father, resulting in freaks 54 MAKERS OF MAN and vagaries which appear to have been an actual source of satisfaction to that irresponsible gentleman, and the latent but slowly-emerging endowment, culminating at last in a spirit of pitiless introspective self -scrutiny and austere self-discipline, which he doubtless inherited from the saintly Monica. Of her we read that, having in childhood been sent many times to draw wine for the household, she inadvertently acquired a precocious passion for wine-bibbing. The reproach of a servant opened her eyes to the enormity of her offence, and she at once resolved to abandon the vice. It was at about the same time that she began to manifest that spirit of deep and passionate devotion which henceforth was the ruling principle of her life. She married very young, and was often beaten by her husband, who was also a drunkard and a profligate, but seems not to have been devoid of affection, and ultimately became a Christian. Monica was the subject of many visions. Once, for example, at a time when she had almost despaired of her son's conversion from the Manichean heresy to Catholic orthodoxy, " a shining one " showed her Augustine standing with her " in the same rule." Augustine objected to her interpretation, and said that the vision showed that she need not despair of being one day what he was. He was deeply impressed by her reply that it had not been said by the angel, " Where he, there thou also ; but where thou, there he also." And I think the shrewdness of this retort fairly justifies the inference that Augustine owed to his mother not only the fundamental seriousness and sincerity of his nature, but much too of that dialectical subtlety which has excited the wonder and admiration of countless readers of his Confessions. Yet it is to be remembered that without the antinomian tendencies which he got from Patricius, the com- plex personality of Augiistine would have lacked an essential ingredient of its perennial interest and significance. If he had not lied and robbed orchards in his boyhood, if in his youth he had not indulged in lawless loves, if he had escaped the bondage of that Manichean heresy, whose chains, while they galled him, he yet so long was unable to break, Augustine's Confessions would have lacked the intense dramatic appeal which constitutes their unique value as a psychological document. In striking HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 55 contrast with the case of Augustine is that of Gregory the Great, whose sanctity belongs to a type of comparative unity and simplicity. His father, Gordianus, was a wealthy and influential member of the Anicii (a family noted in history), and lived in a palace on the Coelian, subsequently converted by Gregory into a monastery, where his happiest days were spent. Two sisters of Gordianus were noted for the sanctity of their lives, and their father had sat in the chair of Peter. Gregory's mother, Sylvia, who was also reckoned a saint, is described as " blending the noble qualities of the typical Roman matron with the higher discipline of Christian virtues." On her husband's death Sylvia retired to the Cella Nuova and devoted herself to prayer and asceticism. Reading between the lines of this family history, it is easy to understand how the son of Gordianus and Sylvia seems from the first to have had no dearer wish than to devote himself to a life of contemplative religious fervour. His mind, we are told, matured early; he was venerated by all his associates, and in Rome was deemed second to none. Few lives are more devoid of evidence of any period of struggle for self-mastery, of any hesitation as to the objects to be deemed supremely worthy of attainment. Gregory would gladly have lived and died an obscure monk ; he was always a monk at heart. But those who knew him better perhaps than he knew himself, recognised in him the inborn capacity of a genuine ruler of men. Their wish prevailed, and Gregory became the supreme ecclesi- astical statesman of the Catholic Church. Unmistakable is the predominance of maternal traits in the genius of that saintly Bohemian, Francis d' Assisi, of whom with pardonable enthusiasm it has been said that he was in certain respects " well-nigh another Christ given to the world." Of his father, Pier Ber- nardone, a travelling silk and cloth merchant, one thinks as a typical bourgeois personality, not perhaps devoid of culture, for in those days such men were the trusted agents and messengers of princes and legates, but obviously incapable of understanding, still more of sympathising with, what he must have deemed the high-flown visions and impracticable aspirations^of his 1 eldest sou. His wife, Madonna Pica, was a Provenal lady, probably of more exalted rank than her husband, by whom she was wooed 56 MAKERS OF MAN in one of his mercantile tours in South France. From her Francis inherited his delicate body, gracious nature, courteous manners, intuitive reverence, and that dainty fastidiousness as to dress, food, and person, which it cost him grievous pains to overcome. His love of cleanliness was, we are told, a lifelong trait, but it must, through the rigour of his life of voluntary mendicancy, have suffered many a rude rebuff. In fact, we are expressly informed that it was at first very hard for him to conquer his loathing for the scraps and leavings of food procured by begging him who had ever shrunk from animal foods and messes, loving sweetmeats, cakes, and all delicate dishes. To a strain of gentle birth his biographer attributes his preference for the beautiful and romantic, to which we may perhaps add that fastidious vanity which in his early youth made him delight to adorn his slim person, " investing it in mantles of beautiful texture and colour, and loving the sheen and flash of jewelled clasp and brooch." Of his mother's devoutness there can be no question ; she prayed for him without ceasing, and openly expressed a hope that, if it pleased God, he might become a good Christian. I have next to call attention to the significant fact that, of our forty individuals, three (Bacon, Turner, and Lincoln) were born of mothers who were mentally 1 unsound. Bacon's mother was a most accomplished woman, a genuine scholar, affectionate, devout, of a markedly suspicious temperament, and showed leanings to religious dissent. She became insane towards the end of her life. That Bacon had a high regard for her is evidenced by the fact that he expressed a wish to be buried by her side. His father, a genial, impulsive soul, generous and jocose, may have been a lovable person, but was not a great lawyer. Here, again, the maternal inheritance is evidently a predominant factor. Turner's mother was a woman of ungovern- able temper, who also became insane. His father was a garrulous, miserly little hairdresser of Devonshire extraction, and though the great artist certainly resembled him in appearance and inherited his penurious disposition, I suspect that his artistic 1 Emotionally unstable, in the first place, however, not of course intellec- tually deficient. HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 57 bias was derived from the maternal side. Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, a tall and beautiful brunette, though never actually insane, suffered from habitual depression, almost amounting to melancholia, as, of course, did her son Abraham. In his case, the morbid inheritance was clearly manifested by something very like an attack of mental alienation, for after the death of a girl whom he had loved, he became at the age of twenty-four for some weeks " nearly insane," lost his youth, became subject to frequent attacks of intense depression, and was finally the subject of a settled melancholy which never left him. Yet his mother, though uneducated, was acknowledged to be a woman of exceptional understanding. Lincoln's father was an idle, thriftless ne'er-do-well, a man of immense physical strength (which Abraham certainly inherited) and an inveterate anecdotist. He was always in debt and difficulty, and must have been something of a brute, since he has been seen to knock his little son headlong from a fence while civilly answering a traveller's question. Advocates of the policy of prohibiting marriage or child-birth to persons predisposed to insanity, should not overlook the fact that one of the greatest philosophers, one of the greatest painters, one of the greatest statesmen, that the world has produced, were each the son of a mother pre- disposed to insanity, two of the three women being destined to become actually insane. Such questions, however important, are by no means to be settled off-hand, for no one, I imagine, would go so far as to contend that Bacon, Turner, or Lincoln ought never to have been born. A precisely analogous difficulty presents itself with reference to the children of parents pre- disposed to tuberculosis. A phthisical tendency, probably innate, is either expressly recorded or may safely be inferred in regard to Richelieu, Nelson, 1 Mozart, Descartes, Spinoza, and Francis d'Assisi. Every type of greatness is represented, and the correlation seems far too frequent to be merely coincidental. 2 1 On Nelson's return from three years' service on the Boreas in the West Indies, aged twenty-seven, his health was in a wretched condition, and he was considered to be consumptive. At this time he had serious thoughts of leaving the Navy. 8 In a random sample of over 600 families taken from the modern popula- tion of Great Britain, Prof. Karl Pearson found that, in one of every sixteen 58 MAKERS OF MAN Nor, while speaking of the relation of morbid predispositions, mental or physical, to intellectual distinction, should I omit to mention that Isaac Newton was, for a considerable period, actually insane. 1 I profess myself, nevertheless, in general sympathy with the objects of the eugenic school ; I merely enter this caveat against rash conclusions and unconsidered action. The case of Frederick the Great presents features of peculiar interest, for, while bearing out my view of the frequent pre- dominance of the feminine element as a source of genius, it differs from the examples hitherto adduced in some respects. The marked intellectuality of Frederick can certainly not have been derived from his father, an uncultivated boor, with a hatred for the arts and literature that reached the point of fanatical fury, and a positive mania for collecting gigantic dragoons, the majority of whom were probably ungainly louts, quite useless for military purposes. Frederick's mother, a daughter of George I., though she secretly encouraged her son's forbidden indulgence in flute-playing and poetising, seems to have done so rather in a spirit of mischief and contrariety than out of a genuine sympathy with his artistic or literary aims. But Frederick's paternal grandmother, Sophia Charlotte, a sister of George I., was undoubtedly a remarkable woman. She was an intimate friend of Leibnitz, whose best-known philosophical work appears to have been conceived on the basis of conversa- tions with her, whom, too, she zealously assisted in the founda- tion of an Academy of Science at Berlin. She received from her German subjects the significant title of the "Kepublican Queen." Many of her characteristics unmistakably recur in the person- ality of her grandson. From his father he derived, no doubt, indomitable will and military talent, but, without the spark of intellectuality, these would not have carried him very far. In this connection it will be of interest to consider the case of families, one or both parents died of phthisis. He estimates that about half the children of phthisical parents incur tuberculosis. Cf. Brit. Med. Journ., 2nd Nov. 1907, " The Inheritance of Pulmonary Tuberculosis." 1 Newton's father died young, and he himself was born prematurely and not expected to live. He lived to be eighty-four, never wore spectacles, and only lost one tooth ! HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 59 Darwin, concerning whom his son writes : " We may hazard the guess that Darwin inherited the sweetness of his disposition from the Wedgwood (maternal) side, while the character of his genius came rather from the Darwin grandfather." This grand- father, Erasmus Darwin, poet, naturalist, and physician, was the author of Zoonomia, a work which, in many respects, anticipated the evolutionary theories of Lamarck. Darwin's father was a successful physician, keenly observant, so intuitive that he could read the characters, even the thoughts, of men, sociable and sympathetic, but quite destitute of capacity for scientific generalisation. It seems to me to be credible that intellectual, as distinguished from aesthetic, genius may be in some cases traceable mainly to a masculine source. In Galileo's case, for example, of whose mother, however, I have been able to acquire no information, there is evidence that his father was a man of unusual originality. He was a good mathematician, and wrote several treatises on music, which reveal considerable knowledge and insight. In his Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, one speaker says, " They who in proof of my assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without ad- vancing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly." Not only is this a sentiment rarely held (or expressed, at any rate) by sixteenth century writers, it is also quite in the spirit of his son's protest against the dogmatic apriorism of Kepler. In the cases of Kant and Hegel, however, though the fathers of both were men of high character, the mothers appear to have been more exceptional in point of mental capacity. But Kant and Hegel were philosophers, not men of science in the now accepted sense ; and the philosopher has aesthetic affinities. It is interesting to note that Kant was, on the paternal side, of Scots descent a blend of the Scots and the German could hardly lack metaphysical capacity^! The Hegel family seem to have had a sort of traditional^bias towards officialism, for many of its members held posts in the civil service during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Hegel pdre was himself an officer in the fiscal^department of Stuttgart. Ithinkthis has an obvious bearing on what might per- haps be called the bureaucratic flavour of Hegelian philosophy. 60 MAKERS OF MAN The prophet Mahomet came of a valiant and illustrious tribe, his great-grandfather, Haschem, being the guardian of the Sacred Shrine at Mecca, and his grandfather famed as the deliverer of the city from troops sent against it by the Christian princes of Abyssinia. Mahomet was the only son of parents both of whom died young, his father when Mahomet was only two years old, his mother, Amina, some six years later. One cannot but suspect a tubercular taint in one or both parents, but I have no positive evidence of its existence. Of all Mahomet's children, by one or another of his fifteen to twenty- five wives (the exact number is not ascertainable), only his daughter Fatima survived him, and she only for a short time. This is a striking example of what I believe to be a fairly general rule the relative sterility of great men, and the excessive morbidity and early mortality of their offspring. Compare the cases of Mozart, of whose seven children only two survived infancy ; Goethe, of whose five children the eldest had a mal- formed brain which led to his becoming an inebriate, while three were still-born, 1 and the youngest died in infancy ; Leonardo, who seems to have been devoid of sexual appetite ; Beethoven, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, all of whom were celibates (or bache- lors). Eeverting to the subject of Mahomet's parentage, his mother, Amina, is stated (by Jonathan Hutchinson) to have been a Christian Jewess, noted, says Carlyle, " for her beauty, her worth, and her sense." In the zenith of his power Mahomet visited her grave and wept over it, but declared that Allah would not permit him to pray for her salvation, because she had died an unbeliever. Of Mahomet's father I know only that he was the youngest and best-beloved of the sons of Abdul Motalleb. Some of the personal charm which distinguished the prophet was doubtless inherited from this short-lived father, but the maternal inheritance would seem to have been the predominant factor of his originality. Of Luther, too, we are expressly told that he strongly resembled his mother, and the fact is obvious on comparison of their portraits. From some 1 This may have been due to maternal disease, rather than original defect of reproductive power on the part of one or both parents. Or, more probably, both factors were concerned. HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 61 unknown progenitor he inherited his tall and sturdy frame, which exceeded that of either of his parents. Luther's mother is described as modest, extremely devout, mild, and meditative. As regards the mildness one cannot feel entire confidence, as the good woman is said to have whipped little Martin " till the blood came " for stealing a nut ! Heaven defend us (and our children) from such mildness ! Martin's father was typical of the fathers of great men a man of high character, universally esteemed, but not otherwise very remarkable. Of the Luther stock in general, the Reformer's own blunt description is no doubt valid : " All my ancestors were thorough peasants." When pointing out the frequency of mental instability among the parents of great men, I might have strengthened my case by the mention of Kenan's father, a dreamy and feck- less Breton seaman, concerning the mystery of whose death at sea suicide appears by far the most likely solution. Kenan's mother, a tradesman's daughter with Gascon blood in her veins, is described as " a lively little gipsy," who had ever a witty answer ready, well able to defend her extreme loyalist convictions, and to " bring the laugh on her side." Her " sharp brilliance " was mitigated by a leaven of devout Catholicism, and it was the dearest wish of her heart that her Ernest should be a priest. A woman of " courageous gaiety," of solid judg- ment, yet a lover of the old myths and legends, not above con- sulting the local witch, Gude, as to the chance of her seven- months child's survival. If it be true of Renan that he " felt like a woman, thought like a man, and acted like a child," it would seem that he owed the excess of sensibility and the un- practical impulses of his nature to the paternal, the intellectual force and subtlety of his mind to the maternal stock. Both were essential factors of his idiosyncrasy and charm, yet there can be little doubt as to which constitutes the heavier debt. The family history reserved for latest consideration, that of Emerson, presents features of special interest. His father, a Unitarian minister, broadly liberal in theological matters, genial and social, came of a stock whose traditional Calvinism had never been extreme. He was the founder of a Philosophical Club, and had a decided literary bent. Yet he was not markedly 62 MAKERS OF MAN original, and Dr. Garnett does not hesitate to accredit the higher and rarer qualities of Emerson's mind to inheritance from a mother " remarkable for mild softness, natural grace, and dignity." But when we look more closely, we find in a sister of Emerson's father Mary Moody Emerson, decided indications of originality, one is tempted to say, of genius. She is described as " eccentric, unconventional, orthodox by conviction, heterodox by temperament, witty and epigram- matic." Her letters are strikingly Emersonian in style. " Scorn trifles, lift your aims," was, we are told, the burden of her discourse. It would seem that Emerson received from his father, or through him, in its fulness, some hitherto latent germ of idiosyncrasy, already, though less perfectly, mani- fested in the aunt. A younger brother of Emerson's, pre- maturely hailed as the genius of the family, developed insanity. He recovered, but died young. Another brother was weak- minded, if not imbecile. Altogether an instructive and fairly typical family history. I will now briefly summarise the results of our examination of the very imperfect records considered in this chapter. We found that the families into which great men, taken collectively, are born, average nearly five members. The families into which men of action are born are the most numerous, those of the aesthetic and intellectual groups intermediate in size, and those of the ethical group the least numerous. In respect of position in family, we found that the rule is for great men to be born either first or, more commonly, second, although there are of course exceptions. Great men are upon the whole somewhat long-lived ; the intellectuals have the longest, and the men of action the shortest, average duration of life. Although, for want of necessary data, we were unable to make anything approaching an exhaustive examination of the in- heritance of personal characteristics in any case, we did find in the recorded traits of the parents and grandparents of great men abundant evidence of transmitted tendencies and capa- cities. Nothing that we found is in my opinion inconsistent with the truth of the important generalisation known as Galton's law. The evidence appears to show that while the fathers HISTORY, PARENTAGE, CONSTITUTION 63 and grandfathers of great men are, as a rule, men of excep- tional capacity, often achieving some distinction in the same field of life as that destined to be entered by their sons, the definite emergence of genius is commonly traceable to a feminine source. The mothers or grandmothers of great men are nearly always remarkable women, remarkable in a way obviously relevant to the peculiar endowment of their sons or grandsons. Nevertheless, as regards the particular form of endowment, the special talent, which is energised and qualitatively enhanced or transformed by contribution from a feminine source, the importance of the paternal stock is by no means to be ignored. Such talent may be regarded as a latent strain or tendency in a given family line, gradually emerging, and, at last, under the influence of a specially favourable marriage, attaining to full realisation in the birth of a man of genius. I have no patience with people who affect to regard genius as essentially pathological, as a disease. Great men are so called because they achieve things which to other men are impossible. Greatness is essentially positive, but as Nature exacts a price for all her benefits it has inevitably a negative side. Hence the morbid correlations of genius which we have found so conspicuous, the dangers, mental and physical, that beset its path. Hence its frequent association with consumptivity, with insanity, with emotional aberrations and vagaries, with celibacy, with sterility, absolute or partial, with an abnormal mortality in such offspring as may be born to its possessors. No higher task demands the attention of science than the solution of this problem. How can we, by the encouragement of suitable unions, at the same time favour the birth of men of great capacity, and minimise the risk of correlative morbid predispositions ? How can we buy genius from Nature on the cheapest possible terms ? IV PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS Men of action Artists, poets, and composers. BEFORE turning to our special task of investigating the inner lives of great men, as expressed or suggested by their words and actions, I must ask the reader to bear with me while I discuss their physical characteristics. Inasmuch, however, as the available records refer mainly to the physiognomies of great men in adult life rather than in infancy or childhood, we shall in this chapter be to some extent anticipating the natural sequence of our argument. That cannot be helped ; and if it have the effect of bringing before us, more or less vividly, the lineaments of some of the great men with whom we are concerned, the digression will be justified. For to see a man, even with the mind's eye, and imperfectly at that, is in some degree to be prepared for an understanding of his inner self. So that, even if we seem to have gained little in the way of definite results or generalisations by our study of the physical basis of human greatness, that study will probably have been less barren than it appears. The first and most obvious essential for success in the field of action would seem to be an adequate supply of energy, and it would be surprising if in the biographies of men of this class we failed to find evidence of superior endowment in this respect. Energy, as it manifests itself in a living organism, assumes and is limited by the forms of specific functional activities. Its basis is not a mere generic potentiality, but a definite organised capacity of some kind nutritive, metabolic, repro- ductive, muscular, mental, cerebral, perhaps we may add psychic or spiritual as the case may be. There is ample PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 65 evidence apart from the tale of his achievements, that the typical man of action is richly endowed with vital energy of such kinds as are inseparable from a well-developed, powerful frame, an alert nervous system, and a vigorous brain. In two cases only of our ten examples we shall find some apparent discrepancy between the physical endowment and the energies displayed. For purposes of comparison I have divided these ten examples into four minor groups as follows : Heroic stature ; exceptional muscular power | T i / Caesar. Tall or medium stature; muscular strength some- J William the Silent, what above average . . . .1 Cromwell. ' Frederick the Great. ( Drake Short, thick-set frame ; strength above average 1 -vr i Medium or small stature ; muscular strength \ . probably below average ; great neuro-cerebral I 1 le ieu> activity I* el80n - With regard to the second of these minor groups, it should be added that Csesar and Frederick were men of the " wiry " type ; William the Silent and Cromwell, especially the latter, somewhat heavily built ; Napoleon, of course, was lean and ascetic-looking in his early manhood, but towards middle life assumed the more corpulent shape with which we are all familiar. The cases of Richelieu and Nelson are of great interest, as those of men who achieved supreme distinction in the field of action (including military service) in spite of physical disabilities which might a priori almost have been considered prohibitive. It is, for example, a well-known fact that Nelson was invariably sea-sick at the beginning of every voyage. Obviously much more than mere bodily vigour goes to the making of a great man of action : the utmost we seem warranted in concluding is that exceptional vigour may be looked for in the great majority of men who achieve distinction in war or statesmanship. Where it is lacking, its absence must obviously be compensated by excess of some (higher) qualities. It may be of interest to add some further details of the physique and physiognomy of men of action, and in doing so I will adhere approximately to the order 5 66 MAKERS OF MAN of sequence given above, which forms a kind of descending scale. Of Charlemagne we are told that he was tall above the common, broad-shouldered and strongly built. His neck was noticeably short and muscular : he was, in fact, " bull-necked." He had a prominent, hawk-like nose, large eyes, and a high forehead. His aspect was alert and cheerful, his voice clear but not loud, and his energy was apparently inexhaustible. He became corpulent in his later days. With regard to his muscular strength, we learn that he could straighten four horse-shoes together, could fell a horse and its rider with his fist, or lift a fully-equipped warrior with one hand to the height of his own head. Lincoln's height in his prime was six feet four inches. He was always a lean man,ungainly as to gait, and though exception- ally strong had a constitutional indolence in regard to physical (not mental) exertion. His hair was very dark. So was his complexion, and the skin of his face was lined and shrivelled, perhaps from exposure during his early farm life. He could carry six hundred pounds with ease, and once picked up some huge posts which four men were preparing to lift, and bore them away with little effort. When Lincoln was a young man there was no one far or near who dared compete with him in wrestling. Julius Caesar was tall and somewhat slight, with dark grey eyes, refined features, and wide lofty brow. His muscular development was no doubt excellent, for the long neck was erect and sinewy, a conditon always, I believe, indicative of exceptional strength and activity. Caesar's head was somewhat small, relatively to his height, and his hair was thin and scanty. He suffered from epilepsy towards the end of his life, and seems to have had no sense of smell worth mentioning, as he ate rancid oil on one occasion without remark. William the Silent was somewhat above the medium height, spare, well-proportioned, and fairly strong. His complexion was brownish ; he had curling auburn hair and brown eyes, large, bright, and penetrating. The forehead was open and domed ; the nose large, powerfully formed, and wide at the base. He had a fine round massive chin ; the mouth was full but closely set, rather severe and melancholy. His general aspect at the age of twenty-five was one of power, self-control, intensity, and pro- PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 67 found thoughtfulness. In strict keeping with hia physiognomy is the account given of William by a Catholic opponent : " Never did arrogant or indiscreet word issue from his mouth under the impulse of anger or other passion. He was master of a sweet and winning power of persuasion, by means of which he gave form to the great ideas within him, and thus he succeeded in bending to his will the other lords about the court as he chose. He was beloved and in high favour above all men with the people." The last twelve years of William's life were passed in hourly peril of assassination, and so great were the hardships and so many the vicissitudes he endured, that at the age of fifty-one he was bald, wrinkled, furrowed with ague and sorrow. The mouth now is not merely firm-set, but locked as it were with iron, and there is a strained look in the deep-set watchful eyes. Yet the old charm of manner persisted, and in all his converse " an outward passage of inward greatness " was observed. It is noteworthy that William was four times married, and was the father of three sons and nine daughters. Oliver Cromwell was of the stature of five feet ten inches, powerfully and somewhat heavily built. His head was large and square, his countenance massive, red, and swollen. He had a thick, prominent red nose (perhaps indicating dyspepsia) ; a heavy, gnarled brow ; firm, penetrating, sad eyes ; a square jaw, and close-set mouth. His upper lip and chin were clothed with scanty tufts of hair, his head with flowing brown locks. His general aspect bespoke energy, firmness, passion, pity, and sorrow. In his childhood he was afflicted with fearful dreams and dreadful visions, and in manhood be became a religious hypochondriac. Dr. Simcott of Huntingdon calls him " most splenetic," and was often summoned at midnight by Oliver to dispel " phansyes " and convictions of imminent death. Crom- well's voice was described by a contemporary as " harsh and untuneable " ; such a voice is, I believe, a not infrequent accom- paniment of hypochondria, and readily assumes a querulous tone. Frederick the Great was of medium stature, his limbs well formed, his aspect vigorous and healthy. His features were highly pleasing, the expression animated and noble. His 68 MAKERS OF MAN large blue eyes were at once severe, soft, and gracious. His bright brown hair was carelessly curled, and, in characteristic defiance of the convenances, he refused to wear a wig. As to his manners, Bielfeld considered him the most polite man in the kingdom, though he could be dry enough, even caustic, on occasion. Such was Frederick in 1738 (aged twenty-six), two years before the beginning of that long reign of which the first twenty-two years were to be spent in almost incessant warfare against enemies whose numbers seemed ever to increase. At forty-eight Frederick was already old. To the Countess de Camas he writes in 1760 : " This is, I swear, such a dog's life as no one except Don Quixote ever led but myself. All this bustle, all this confusion has made me such an old fellow, that you would hardly know me again. The hair on the right side of my head is grown quite grey ; my teeth break and fall out ; my face is full of wrinkles as the furbelow of a petticoat ; and my body is arched like a monk's of La Trappe." Like Napoleon and other great generals, Frederick seems to have had the faculty of sleeping at will. After the defeat of Kuners- dorff, where he had two horses killed under him, his clothes riddled with bullets, lost twenty thousand men and all his artillery, he was found lying, with his bare sword beside him, guarded by a single grenadier, sleeping as quietly and soundly as if he had been in the securest place. But this may after all have been but the sleep of utter exhaustion, and as such less exceptional than it appears. What is unquestionable is the extraordinary power of recovery, in virtue of which it has been truly said that Frederick was never greater or more formidable than after a disaster or defeat. Frederick appears to have been singularly deficient in sexual susceptibility, and, it is asserted, never cohabited with his wife. Voltaire says of him that " he did not love the ladies," and that in his palace at Sans Souci neither women nor priests were ever seen. It should, however, be mentioned that when Frederick was about eighteen his father learnt of an intrigue conducted by him with a schoolmaster's daughter she happened to be musical, a distinct aggravation of her offence and the old scoundrel had her whipped through Berlin, making his son witness the PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 69 scene. Perhaps it is not surprising that Frederick repudiated the bride forced upon him by such a father, although Eliza- beth Christina is described as a beautiful and accomplished princess. The portrait of Drake shows a man below medium stature, broad-shouldered and thick-set, with good features, curly hair, a high forehead, and alert expression. The eyes are some- what small, and the plump hands finely shaped. A man of unbounded self-confidence and of magnetic personality he looks, and undoubtedly was. The neck is short, and the complexion, presumably, florid. Far more difficult is the task of summar- ising the physical characteristics of Napoleon. At twenty- eight he is described as small in stature, thin and pale, with an air of fatigue and abstraction. The weary look may be attrib- utable to his recent exertions in his Italian campaign, from which it is, I think, probable that he never wholly recovered. Bourrienne says of Napoleon that his finely shaped head, his superb forehead, his pale and elongated visage, his medita- tive look, have been transported to the canvas, but the quick- ness of his glance and the rapidity of his changes of expression were beyond imitation. Napoleon was particularly proud of his beautiful hands, was fastidiously neat as to his toilet, very temperate in regard to diet, and had a mania for hot baths, in which he would sometimes remain for hours. Perhaps there is no better test of constitutional vigour than the early or late decay of the teeth, and it is therefore noteworthy that Napoleon's first tooth extraction (unnecessary even then) occurred at St. Helena when he was over fifty-six. In his prime, says Lord Rosebery, he was incapable of fatigue. He fought Alvinzy once for five days without taking off his boots. He would post from Poland to Paris, summon a council at once, and preside over it for eight or ten hours. Once, at 2.0 a.m., the councillors were all worn out, one Minister fast asleep. Napoleon still urged them " Come, gentlemen, pull yourselves together ; we must earn the money that the nation gives us." He could work for eighteen hours at a stretch, sometimes at one subject, sometimes at a variety. The portrait of Napoleon by Paul Delaroche, painted apparently at the age of thirty-five or 70 MAKERS OF MAN perhaps a little later, shows him already becoming corpulent, but with a look of almost godlike power. A son of Lord Glen- bervie, who had seen him at Elba, says that his features were rather coarse, and his eyes very light and particularly dull. But his mouth, when he smiled, was full of a very sweet, good- humoured expression perhaps the secret of his never-failing charm. This witness, in agreement with most others, was greatly disappointed at the first aspect of Napoleon, thinking him " a very common-looking man." But upon observing him and conversing with him " you perceive that his counten- ance is full of deep thought and decision." The personal magnetism of Napoleon is a fact hardly accountable by the above description, but of its existence and extraordinary power of attraction upon almost all who were brought into personal touch with him, there can be no possible doubt. " Were I you," said Montchenu to Hudson Lowe, " I would not allow a single stranger to visit Longwood, for they all leave it in a transport of devotion, which they take back to Europe." " What is most astonishing," says the Russian Commissioner, " is the ascendancy that this man, dethroned, a prisoner, exercises on all who come near him. No one dares to treat him as an equal." The crew of the Bellerophon who conveyed him to St. Helena, sounded by Maitland, said : " If the English knew him as well as we do, they would not touch a hair of his head." The crew of the Northumberland said : " He is a fine fellow, who does not deserve his fate." On his leaving the Undaunted, which had brought him to Elba, the boatswain, for the ship's company, wished him long life and prosperity, and " better luck next time" Thinkers of the Tolstoy an school may belittle the role of the leader of men, and labour to reduce him to the insignificance of a mere figurehead, but such facts, among many others, give the lie direct to their contention. Of the eleven children borne by Nelson's mother, only two lived to be old, and she herself died at forty-two. The delicacy of Nelson's own constitution is thus clearly of maternal origin. His diminutive figure, shock head, and pronounced features are too familiar to need description. Nelson's con- versation and manners have been described by contemporaries SIR FRANCIS DRAKE. Kngra-'ed !>y *>' l-'rccinanfrotn an otiginal painting. To/au-f 70. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 71 as " irresistibly pleasing," and it is certain that he possessed the secret of endearing himself to gentle and simple. He was idolised by his men, who did far more for love of him than they did through fear of sterner disciplinarians. Nelson's excitable temperament, by turns enthusiastic and sombre, sometimes betrayed him into a boastfulness or ostentation which made him slightly ridiculous. The famous interview with Wellington on the basis of which George Bernard Shaw indulges in some characteristically insolent depreciation l is, however, probably mythical. Wellington's own account of his personal relations with Nelson is to the effect that he once met him on the stairs ! Richelieu, our last example of the men of action, was in all but the constitutional weakness and tubercular tendency which they shared, the antithesis of the impulsive, indiscreet Nelson. Tall and slight, with clear-cut distinguished features, arched eyebrows, piercing black eyes, thin compressed lips and aloof manner, he looked, superficially, rather the man of letters or the ascetic priest than the masterful politician. But though he never felt, he could inspire, unlimited devotion, and the rare smile of those thin lips had a singular charm of its own. Richelieu looked really what he was incarnate will to power, intellectual but not passionate, implacable but not cruel. He suffered from excruciating headaches, probably of malarial origin, though he is of the type commonly subject to migraine ; and died of pulmonary haemorrhage, supervening on a tubercular abscess of the arm. Such was the frail casket which enclosed "the greatest political genius France has ever produced," such was he whose life is, for an eventful period of nearly twenty years, the history of his country, and " to a great extent of Europe," rightly acclaimed by a biographer 2 as " the grandest figure among those who have contributed most to the greatness of France." Probably most people, if challenged off-hand to give their opinion of the physique of the typical artist, poet, or musician, would without hesitation describe a pale and sickly individual 1 " Preface for Politicians," John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara. 8 Prof. Richard Lodge. 72 MAKERS OF MAN of ill-developed frame, poor muscular development, and sedentary habit. Such a view of the matter will, so far at least as artists of the first rank are concerned, be summarily dismissed by those who appeal to the facts. The morbid correlations of assthetic genius are undoubted, but for the most part of a less obvious kind than mere (external) physical defect or debility. This will be evident from a glance at the subjoined classification : {Leonardo. Titian (lived to be 99). Goethe. Flaubert. Scott. .., ,. | Cervantes. Medium stature, average strength. . 1 D t Short or " stocky " frame, strength good or fair | -D ^ Short stature, poor physique (brain excepted) . Mozart. So far as my examples go, it would seem that the aesthetic in- dividual, physically regarded, can quite hold his own with the man of action. It may even be questioned whether he have not the better of the comparison, for if no poet or artist in my list reaches the physical standard of Charlemagne or Lincoln (and with regard to Leonardo at least, even this is doubtful), the proportion of distinctly " fine " men seems to be a little higher among my aesthetic than my practical group. However, such very rough attempts at classification must not be pressed too far, nor trusted as the grounds of hasty conclusions. Descending now to details, we find in our first example of the aesthetic type, Leonardo, a man, though on the maternal side of peasant origin, of truly prince-like presence and bearing. His pastel portrait of himself in old age is that of a superb type of virile beauty aquiline features, large impressive eyes with shaggy eyebrows, thoughtful furrowed brow, long flowing hair and beard. He was a man of large ideas, one who loved fine horses and handsome men. Salai and Menz, two art pupils who in his later life were much with him, were men of 1 As regards Flaubert, it is to be noted that he seems never to have been the same after his illness in early manhood. CARDINAL R1CHKLIKU. vfti by If. Kol'inson front a painting by /'. tfc Champagne. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 73 decided beauty. Leonardo was a man of quite exceptional strength a true superman, if there ever were one and of remarkable physical dexterity. In dress he ignored to some extent the conventions of his day. Of the physique and personality of Titian my authorities give no detailed account, but from a reproduction of his portrait of himself in old age one gets the impression of strength, beauty, and distinction. All that is known of his life and of the re- tention, rather the unchecked growth, of his artistry into extreme age, points emphatically to the conclusion that the physique of Titian was exceptionally good. The Pietd upon which Titian was probably at work when struck down at the age of ninety-nine by plague, is in some respects his most sublime invention. The figures of Moses and the Sybil are, says Claude Phillips, products of a religious awe nearly akin to terror. Stranger yet is the sting of earthly passion still so evident in some of his latest work. Goethe, like his mother, had brown hair and lustrous dark eyes, the penetrating glance of which, we are told, " never failed to impress those who met him." Like his father, he became a man of robust build, vigorous and active, and above medium height. Goethe, in his youth, was wild and even dissipated, and his mental and bodily health were for a time seriously impaired. In his nineteenth year he had severe haemoptysis, by far the commonest cause of which is of course a tubercular invasion. In his twentieth year he was again very ill, suffered greatly from depression, and, under the influence of Fraulein von Ketten- burg, became deeply interested in religious mysticism and occult studies, the results of which are plainly seen in Faust. It speaks well for the reparative powers of his constitution that Johanna Schopenhauer, meeting him at the age of fifty-seven, could describe Goethe as follows : " He is the most perfect being I ever knew, even in appearance. A tall, fine figure which holds itself erect, very carefully clad, always in black or quite dark blue, the hair tastefully dressed and powdered as becomes his age, and a splendid face with lustrous brown eyes which are at once mild and penetrating." 74 MAKERS OF MAN Napoleon, when, a little later, Goethe was presented to him at Erfurt, exclaimed with enthusiasm, " Voila un homme ! " And everyone must recall the famous visit of young Heine to the great poet, then over seventy, at Weimar, and how, impressed by his Olympian bearing, he looked involuntarily for the eagle at his side. " The accordance of personal appearance with genius," he tells us, " was conspicuous in Goethe. His eyes were tranquil as those of a god. Time had been powerful enough to cover his head with snow, but not to bend it ; he carried it ever proud and high ; and when he spoke he seemed to grow bigger." Equally striking in its own way was the appearance of Gustave Flaubert, who from his childhood was remarkable for beauty of form and colour. A contemporary 1 meeting him at the age of twenty-one, describes him as " a tall fellow with a long fair beard, and his hat over his ear. . . . He was of heroic beauty. With his white skin, slightly flushed upon the cheeks, his long floating hair, his tall broad-shouldered figure, his abundant golden beard, his enormous eyes the colour of the green of the sea veiled under black eyelashes, with his voice sonorous as the blast of a trumpet, his exaggerated gestures and resounding laugh ; he was like those young Gallic chiefs who fought against the Roman armies." An interesting fact re- corded about Flaubert is his possession of an ear so sensitive to harmonious or discordant sounds as to be at times a source of positive torture. 2 This peculiarity is obviously relevant to the extreme fastidiousness of the author of Salammbo in the matter of literary style. His mother once said of it to him hugely to his own delight that the mania for phrases had dried up his heart. Nothing short of perfection contented him he must have the right word or none. He loved bizarre names and exotic splendours, and in the throes of writing would groan, howl, chant the newly-finished phrases, even burst into tears of despair. " I am driven wild with writing," he complains to a correspondent. " Style, which is a thing that I take very much 1 Maxime Ducamp. 2 He speaks of having heard people speaking in a low voice thirty yards away and through closed doors. OLIVER CROMWELL. Engraved l,y II'. Sharp front an original picture in t lie possession of K. Oalton, Esq., London. To face p. ,- 4 . PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 75 in earnest, agitates my nerves horribly. I vex myself, I prey on myself ; there are days when I am quite ill from it, and when I am feverish at night. . . . To-day, for example, I have spent eight hours in correcting five pages, and I think that I have worked well ; judge of the rest ! It is pitiful." With such a temperament it is hardly surprising that at the age of twenty-one Flaubert became the subject of severe attacks of hystero-epilepsy. The illness was attributed by his worthy father to " excess of vitality " (whatever that may be), and treated on drastically depletive lines. The seizures passed off gradually, but left much depression and weakness. " Hence- forth," he tells us, " I was afraid of life." I hesitate whether to attribute this misfortune to the malady itself or to the paternal treatment. Flaubert, of course, never married, but he had a love affair of eight years' duration with a married woman, 1 which, if not perhaps entirely Platonic, was at any rate largely a matter of correspondence. There is little doubt that he was weary of the connection long before he could bring it to an end. He himself attributes his comparative celibacy to principle, professing to regard the marriage of an artist as a supreme apostasy. One suspects, however, an instinctive sense of his own physical unfitness, unacknowledged even to himself. Men do not remain bachelors on principle, unless they, 'have taken vows, and, in the physiological sense, not always then. Our last example of the " fine man " among members of the aesthetic group is Walter Scott, who at nineteen was a youth of tall stature, with a chest and throat of Herculean mould, a fresh, brilliant complexion, clear, open eyes of a lightish grey, well-set and of changeful radiance, a noble expanse of brow, long upper lip, brown hair and eyelashes, flaxen eyebrows. Scott's homely features were often lit up by a charming smile ; his expression was by turns tender, grave, playful, and humorous. His small head was erect, his hands were finely moulded, and his general aspect and bearing bespoke vigour without clumsiness. He had a verbal memory of astounding tenacity, but his appreciation of music was not keen or accurate, and he had little sense of odour. Nor was his talk in any way brilliant ; rather it was 1 Living apart from her husband in a literary set in Paris. 76 MAKERS OF MAN remarkable for a certain homespun quality of unfailing good sense and sobriety. Lord Cockburn said of him that his plain sense was even more wonderful than his genius. Scott was lame in the right leg as the result of an attack of infantile paralysis which he incurred at the age of eighteen months. I do not consider this defect necessarily attributable to any hereditary taint, as the disease in question, an inflammatory lesion of the nerve cells in the anterior portion of the grey matter of the spinal cord, conforms in type to the specific febrile maladies of child- hood, and has possibly a microbic origin. Scott's lameness may therefore be regarded as an accident, and if there be any truth in the view of his tutor that his turn for reading was fostered by the limitations it imposed, must be accounted a blessing in disguise. His brain, on examination, was " not large." James Ballantyne, whose familiarity with him dates from the time when they were boys together, testifies to the quite remarkable ascendency which in his early days he never failed to exhibit over his young companions, handicapped as he was in all active pursuits by his lameness. This personal magnetism, usually associated with a constitution of more than average vigour, is a common characteristic of the born leader of men. Its possession by Scott confirms me in the impression that but for his lameness and its effect in confirming his early romantic and literary bias, he might ultimately have deserted literature for politics or any other field promising freer scope to his vast energy and a fuller attainment of the social and civic prizes that he unquestionably valued. There was nothing morbid in Scott's temperament : he loved youth and sunshine, and, sexually, appears to have been entirely normal. Cervantes, at the age of thirty-three, on his return from five years' slavery at Algiers, was by his own account a man of medium height, heavily built about the shoulders, of a bright fair complexion, with aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth unruffled brow, arched nose, sparkling eyes, a silver beard, large moustache, small mouth, and only six teeth in his head. He was near-sighted and of hesitant speech. There can be no doubt that the personality of this great man had an extraordinary charm, nor that he was brave to a fault. During his captivity PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 77 he was the promoter of three or four daring attempts to effect his own escape and that of many of his companions in misfortune, always foiled by the cowardice or treachery of some comrade. Such attempts on the part of the Christian slaves were the one unpardonable crime the usual punishment was torture or death. Yet Cervantes, always eager to take the full blame on his own shoulders, was inexplicably spared by the viceroy, Hassan Pasha, a man of whom Cervantes himself says that " every day he hanged some one, impaled another, and cut oS the ears of a third ... for nothing else than because it was his will to do it." Brought before this terrible man, with a rope already round his neck, even the threat of torture failed to induce Cervantes to implicate any one save himself. Hassan seems even to have had a strange fear of this indomitable captive : he never spoke to him an ill word, and was heard once to say that, could he preserve himself against this maimed Spaniard Cervantes had lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto he would hold safe his Christians, his ships, and his money. The generalisation of Havelock Ellis, to the effect that in stature the man of genius tends to one or the other extreme, finds another and a crashing exception in Dante, who was a slender man of only medium height. For Dante is not merely a poet : he is rather the very spirit of poesy at its highest and greatest incarnate. Poetry, which in our day has become the transient foible of dejected undergraduates, the happy hunting-ground of pawky reviewers, was for him a sublime Presence proffering the keys of the ultimate arcana. The familiar portrait by Giotto of Dante in early manhood shows us in profile a face combining inexplicably the opposed extremes of virile strength and feminine refinement. One might call it at this moment a truly androgynous countenance, but with the passage of years and under stress of adversity, the look of strength and suppressed passion became so far predominant as well-nigh to obscure the gentler qualities that had formerly been so evident. Dante in middle age is described as a man of grave dignity, somewhat bent figure, with a long face, prominent nose, large eyes, broad forehead, wide chin, heavy jaw, and protruded underlip. His hair and beard were black and crisp, 78 MAKERS OF MAN and his complexion somewhat swarthy. Once as he passed a doorway in Verona where several women sat, he heard one say : " Do you see the man who goes down to hell, and returns at his pleasure ? " To which one replied : " Indeed, what you say must be true ; don't you see how his beard is crisped and his colour darkened by the heat and smoke down below ? " Dante, not ill-pleased, smiled a little, and passed on his way. Of his manner there are conflicting accounts ; one biographer describes him as courteous and calm, though reserved, but Villani tells us that he was " little gracious, not adapting himself to the converse of the unlearned." Probably he was a man of many moods, and there is no doubt that he was extremely passionate in more senses than one. We are, in fact, plainly told that lustfulness was a besetting sin of Dante, and in the Purgatorio, on his first meeting withJBeatrice in his pilgrimage, he depicts himself as overwhelmed with shame while she upbraids him for belying the gracious promise of his youth : " Si tosto come in sulla soglia fui Di mia seconda etade, e mutai vita, Questi si tolse a me, e diessi altruL" l Instead of valuing her more now that she had cast oS the dross of earth, he had held her less dear, followed " false images of good," and condemned the warnings with which in dreams of night she strove to call him back. " Tanto giu cadde, che tutti argomenti Alia saluta sua eran gia corti Fuor che mostrargli le perdu te gente." 2 Dante's marriage, which took place when he was about thirty- three, was, Boccaccio says, arranged by his friends to console him for the loss of Beatrice. He had four children by her, but left her in Florence at the time of his exile, some four years 1 " Soon as I had reached The threshold of my second age, I changed My mortal for immortal ; then he left me, And gave himself to others." Purg. xxx. 126-9 (Gary's Trans.). 2 " Such depth he fell that all device was short Of his preserving, save that he should view The children of perdition." Purg. xxx. 139-41 (Cary's Trans. ). PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 79 after their marriage, and would never see her again. He seems to have made conquest of a lady called Gentucca soon after his condemnation. The panther which confronts Dante at the outset of his journey through the invisible, symbolises lust, as the lion symbolises pride and the she-wolf avarice. With regard to the reputed death-mask of Dante at Uffizi and the three existing casts from it, Prof. C. E. Norton says : " The face is one of the most pathetic upon which human eyes ever looked, for it exhibits in its expression the conflict between the strong nature of the man and the hard dealings of fortune between the idea of his life and its practical experience. Strength is the most striking attribute of the countenance. . . . The look is grave and stern almost to grimness ; . . . obscured under this look, yet not lost, are the marks of tenderness, refine- ment, and self-mastery . . . ineffable dignity and melancholy. . . . Neither weakness nor failure here ! A strong soul ' buttressed on conscience and impregnable will.' ' We have now to consider the physiognomy of Turner, who was a man of decidedly short stature, but of immense energy and considerable strength. Dance's portrait, for which Turner sat at the age of twenty-five, shows us a handsome young man with rather large features, a full prominent nose, staring bluish grey eyes, fine strong chin and rather sensual mouth, the lower lip fleshy, the upper beautifully curved. The eyebrows were arched, the eyelids long, presenting great depth between eye- brow and eye. The forehead was full below, receding above, indicative perhaps rather of great power of observation than of high intellectuality ; and, pace Ruskin, there is little doubt that Turner lacked the power of clear thought or logical expres- sion. His mind was a chiaroscuro of exalted incoherencies, as one glance through his extraordinary " poetic " effusions must convince any impartial critic. In later life Turner became the " very moral " of a master carpenter, with lobster-red face and twinkling, watchful eyes, usually attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, and bearing an enormous umbrella. His weather- beaten cuticle resembled that of a boatswain or a stage-coachman, and he had the smallest and dirtiest hands on record. Many of the distinctive qualities of his art are probably due to the 8o MAKERS OF MAN fact that he was myopic, and towards the end of his life he became to some extent colour blind. 1 He was a man of coarse tastes, who drank heavily, and, although he never married, was by no means a celibate. He would paint hard all the week until Saturday night, then slip a five-pound-note in his pocket, button it up securely, and set out for some low sailors' tavern in Wapping or Rotherhithe, there to wallow until Monday morning. M Beethoven, like Turner, was a man of less than medium stature, but of average physique. His appearance was no doubt striking, but probably less attractive than his familiar portrait suggests, on account of his dark skin and the unkempt negligence of his toilet. He had a flat broad nose, a rather wide mouth, small piercing bluish grey eyes, and a magnificent forehead, surmounted by rich curling locks of blue-black hair. When, as often, Beethoven's mane was uncombed and in disarray, he looked " veritably demoniacal." Schindler com- pares his appearance in moments of inspiration to that of Jupiter. Genius in action invariably beautifies its examplar, triumphing over the most unfavourable physiognomical con- ditions by the sublime transfiguration it effects. This no doubt is the explanation of the fact that Beethoven, despite of his deafness, his uncouth manners, and his ugliness (in the con- ventional sense), " often succeeded in making a conquest where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a hearing." He was evidently in a high degree attractive to women. " The truth is, " Dr. Wegeler asserts, " that Beeth- oven was always in love, and generally with some lady of high rank." Magdalena Willmann, a beautiful singer whom he had befriended, whom subsequently he besought to marry him, refused him " because he was very ugly and half crazed." The central passion of his life was probably that which he felt to his pupil Giulietta Guiccardi, of whom he writes to Ries : 1 Liebreich's theory is that at fifty-five Turner began to suffer from a diffuse haze of the crystalline lens, which dispersed the light more strongly and threw a bluish haze over illuminated objects. Later, a definite opacity was formed in the lens, causing a vertical diffusion, the consequence being (after 1833) a peculiar vertical striation of his pictures. Cf. " The Influence of Abnor- malities of Vision on Art," Brit. Med. Journ., 25th April 1908. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 81 " I found only one, but I could not have her." J The fact is, that Beethoven was at once peculiarly susceptible and ex- tremely fickle, and although at times oppressed by the solitude of his life, was upon the whole averse to the sacrifice of freedom implied by marriage, and even, on general grounds, to the institution itself. " If I had given up inborn inspirations for marriage, what would have become of my higher better self ? " The typical artist is a man of sentiment rather than of passion ; in any one of his many love affairs the whole of his nature is but seldom deeplyinvolved. The deafness of Beethoven, which began when he was about thirty, gradually increased, and ultimately became complete, is apparently attributable to a severe wetting incurred during a period of " utter recklessness of his physical condition ! " There must have been some hereditary pre- disposition, one supposes, although deafness is a calamity only too easily incurred. Mozart, like Beethoven, was below medium height, slender in his youth, but afterwards rather stout. His well-shaped head was large in proportion to his body, and the concha of his left ear was congenitally lacking, a peculiarity transmitted to his youngest son. In his boyhood Mozart had a rosy chubby face, eyes of clear blue, profuse light brown hair, fine and silky. His prominent nose may have indicated a Jewish origin. His temperament was bright, fearless, and affectionate ; he was, by turn, gay and thoughtful. At Vienna, aged six, when Marie Antoinette, charmed by his playing, took him into her arms, he made her an offer of marriage. It is also recorded that on this occasion the child genius frankly rebuked the Crown Prince Joseph for his bad singing. I have already ad- verted to the tendency to frequent pyrexial attacks, which from his boyhood gave warning of what was in all probability a tubercular taint. I spoke just now of the transfiguring ill- umination which, in moments of exalted power, reveals the presence of genius. An onlooker who was present at the first production of Mozart's Figaro, received with unprecedented enthusiasm by the crowded audience, writes thus of the hero of the occasion : "I shall never forget my impression of 1 Possibly, however, he is referring here to Therese. 6 82 MAKERS OF MAN Mozart as he appeared at this moment. His little face seemed lighted up by the glowing rays of genius to describe it perfectly would be as impossible as to paint sunbeams." Towards the end of his life Mozart became the prey of intense melancholy, and was obsessed by the idea that he had been poisoned traversed in part the thin line dividing genius from insanity. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS Continued Intellectuals Their mediocre physique Ethico-religious group Physiognomy of Jesus Examples Summary. PURSUING the task begun in the last chapter, I have now to discuss the physical characteristics of the intellectual and ethico-religious groups. With regard to the intellectual, the first point which demands attention is that our ten examples may be divided into two equal divisions, the first consisting of five men whose physique and health were moderate or good ; and the second, of five whose development or constitution, or both, were indifferent or bad. The following table embodies this and some further information : " \ Galileo. I. Tall, well built. Health fair on the whole, but hypochron-'^ driacal . . . . Medium stature with stoop, slim, dark. Healthy . Leibnitz. Shortish. Average physique and health . . . Hegel. Short. Physical health good, and well preserved. . Newton. Very short, healthy and energetic . . . Harvey. II. Tall. Average physique. Neurotic . . . Darwin. Medium stature. Physique poor. Phthisis . . Spinoza. Medium stature. Always ailing. Hypochondriac . Bacon. Rather short, slight physique. Large head, timid, weakly 1 _ j . , , f Descartes, and indolent . . . . . . J Very short (barely 5 ft.). Flat chest. Stoop. Hypo-"| . i . , Kiint. chondriac . . . '. . . J Obviously, there is no member of this group, with the doubt- ful exception of Galileo, who can, in the physical sense, bear comparison with such splendid animals of the genus homo as were Charlemagne, Lincoln, William the Silent, Leonardo, Goethe, Scott, Flaubert, not to mention Titian, Cromwell, Caesar, Napoleon. Five of our ten examples our nine rather, 83 84 MAKERS OF MAN for I have no certain information as^to the stature of Bacon were distinctly undersized men ; and of none is it recorded that he displayed exceptional muscular power. Four Galileo, Bacon, Kant, and Darwin were hypochondriacal, or at any rate markedly neurotic ; one, Isaac Newton, was for a consider- able time actually insane. It would almost seem that physical mediocrity (if not inferiority) is a necessary correlative of great intellectual power, for I see no reason to doubt that my ten examples may fairly be regarded as typical. The first of these, Galileo, was a man above middle height, square-built and well-proportioned. He had reddish hair and a fair, sanguine complexion, brilliant eyes (colour not stated), and a cheerful, pleasant expression. About 1594 (set. 30), Galileo is stated to have incurred a severe chill from sitting in a draught. Henceforward his health, naturally robust, was permanently impaired : he became subject to acute pains in the chest, back, and limbs., insomnia., anorexia, and frequent haemorrhages. Galileo was also the victim of frequent attacks of hypochondriasis, aggravated, if not induced, by his nocturnal vigils in the interest of astronomy. 1 He was a man of abstemi- ous habits, fastidious as to his wine which was the product his own vineyards generous, impulsive, irascible, but easily pacified. His memory was retentive, stored with a vast number of old songs and legends, and many of the poems of Ariosto, Petrarca, and Berni. Towards the end of his life Galileo's despondency deepened to " immeasurable sadness " ; he became hateful to himself, lost his sight, and suffered from hernia. As to this last, there is a sinister doubt whether the affliction was not the result of torture for there is reason to suspect that Galileo was racked in 1633, and rupture was a common result of " the cord." At the time of his death (set. 78) Galileo was engaged in considering with unimpaired intellect the nature of the force of percussion. By his mistress, Marina Gamba, he was the father of a son and two daughters. Leibnitz, a man of much colder and more serene tempera- ment than Galileo, was of medium height, slenderly built, with 1 Not to mention the brutal treatment which he underwent in his late years at the hands of the Inquisition. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 85 brown hair and small, dark, piercing eyes. He walked with bowed head ; was kind and generous, but more from principle than emotion ; had an excellent memory ; was prudent in money matters, and quite free from sordid ambition. Thus, when as a young man at Altdorf, he was offered a professorship, he declined it, shrinking from the defects and narrowness of a German university career. In this care as to his intellectual freedom Leibnitz resembled Spinoza. He died at seventy of gout and stone, his academical projects, desire for religious unity, plan for a general scientific language, and views as to the extension of geometry, all having ended in apparent failure. But such is the common fate of pioneers. More interesting details are available with regard to the physical characteristics and personality of Hegel, who was the eldest son of a methodical civil servant of Stuttgart. He was docile and industrious in his boyhood, but in early manhood passed through a period of mental fermentation, and became self-contained and moody, with a tendency to melancholy and sentiment. In the days of his Berlin professorate, held from his forty-eighth year to his death, he is described as a man of no imposing height or charm of manner, " his figure bent with premature age, yet with a look of native toughness and strength. . . . Pale and relaxed, his features hung down as if lifeless ; no destructive passion was mirrored in them, but only a long history of patient thought. . . . When his mind awoke his features expressed all the earnestness and strength of a thought . . . developed to completeness. What dignity lay in the whole head, in the finely-formed nose, the high but somewhat retreating brow, the peaceful chin ! Ever ready for talk, he sought rather to avoid than to encourage scientific subjects. Repellent personalities, who were opposed to the whole direction of his efforts, he could not abide ; . . . but when friends gathered around him, what an attractive, loving camaraderie distinguished him from all others ! . . . He was fond of the society of ladies, . . . the fairest were always sure of a sportive devotion. ... At times he took pleasure in people of the commonest stamp, and even seemed to cherish for them a kind of good-humoured preference." 86 MAKERS OF MAN To this description by Hotho I will add a picturesque but somewhat high-flown impression by Kosenkranz, translated by Ferrier, of Hegel as lecturer. " Utterly careless about the graces of rhetoric . . . Hegel enchained his students by the intensity of his speculative power. His voice was in harmony with his eye. It was a great eye, but it looked inwards ; and the momentary glances which it threw outwards seemed to issue from the very depths of idealism and arrested the be- holder like a spell. His accent was rather broad, and without sonorous ring ; but through its apparent commonness there broke that lofty animation which the might of knowledge inspires, which in moments when the genius of humanity was adjuring the audience through his lips, left no hearer unmoved. In the sternness of his noble features there was something almost calculated to strike terror, had not the hearer been again propitiated by the gentleness and cordiality of the expression. A peculiar smile bore witness to the purest benevolence, but it was blended with something harsh, cutting, sorrowful, or rather ironical. His, in short, were the tragic lineaments of the philo- sopher, of the hero whose destiny it is to struggle with the riddle of the universe." Hegel's death may be considered accidental. On the 10th and llth November of his sixty-first year (1831) he had lectured " with surprising fire and energy." On the 13th a virulent attack of cholera declared itself, to which he succumbed in sleep on the following day. Isaac Newton, the posthumous son of a father who died at thirty-six, was born prematurely, "so little that they might have put him into a pint mug," and was not expected to live. He lived, however, to be eighty-four, enjoyed a vigorous maturity, never wore spectacles, and lost only one tooth. He was of decidedly short stature, and became stout after middle life. Conduit describes him as having a very " lively and piercing eye," but Bishop Atterbury denies this, asserting that at any rate during the last twenty years of his life " his appearance was rather languid, and did not raise any great expectations in strangers." In his fiftieth year (1692) Newton suffered a severe shock. A dog upset a lighted taper, and manuscripts embodying PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 87 the results of many years' experiments in optics were consumed. Newton's mind certainly became seriously deranged, and it is asserted, though Brewster denies this, that he was placed under restraint by his friends. At any rate, in 1693, Newton, in an incoherent letter, complained to Pepys of insomnia and mental disturbance ; and about the same time, in another extraordinary epistle addressed to Locke, called that worthy man a " Hobbist," accused him of wishing to embroil him with women, and wished him dead. After his recovery, Newton was, in 1695, appointed Master of the Mint. He discharged his duties efficiently, but made no more discoveries of any moment. So that, if in the matter of physical health (as commonly understood) Newton appears exceptional among intellectuals, it is evident that there are serious qualifications to be made. His death was due to stone, whether of the bladder or kidney I am unable to say. His portrait by Kneller shows a man of good features, with wide forehead, rather large eyes, well-defined eyebrows, straight nose, benevolent mouth, square chin, and plump, shapely hands. Serenity is here the prevailing expression. We have next to consider the case of William Harvey, who is in several respects an exception to the class to which, never- theless, upon the whole he undoubtedly belongs. Although his treatise De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis is a perfect model of close reasoning from the products of keenest observation, and in its way a classic, I do not consider that Harvey was in the highest sense an intellectual man. His discovery was an epoch-making one, no doubt, and no praise can be too high for the acumen which interpreted anatomical facts at once universally known and universally misunderstood by his predecessors and con- temporaries, to say nothing of the bull-dog tenacity and un- flinching courage which enabled him to meet and conquer the inevitable opposition of officialdom. Harvey was, in short, a man of genius, but of a genius distinctly specialised, if not narrow ; and his efficiency as a pioneer was in large measure due to the stubborn energy with which he devoted himself to the exploitation of a single illuminating conception. If, therefore, Harvey compares favourably in the matter of health with the majority of intellectuals, the limitations of his genius are to be 88 MAKERS OF MAN borne in mind. The following is a description of him at the age of thirty-seven : " A man of the lowest stature, round-faced, with a complexion like the wainscot ; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit ; his hair black as a raven and curling ; rapid in his utterance, choleric, given to gesture, and used when in discourse with any one to play unconsciously with the handle of a small dagger he wore at his side." Harvey married, at twenty-six, Elizabeth Brown, aged twenty-four. His wife was still alive forty-one years later, but, significantly enough, the union had been childless. Was this, perhaps, another instance of the sterility of genius ? Although Harvey lived to be seventy-nine, and, apart from what might perhaps be called a healthy tendency to typical gouty arthritis, was a physically sound man, he seems to have been eccentric to a somewhat marked extent. To cure a gouty attack he would sit bare-legged in frost on the leads of Cockaine House, soak his feet in cold water, then betake himself to the stove, " and so 'twas gone." His salt-cellar was always full of sugar. He combed his hair in the fields. He had caves made in the ground for summer meditation at Combe, and loved to ruminate in the dark. There was method in much of his madness (so to speak) as in the habit of pacing the bedroom in his shirt when unable to sleep, a plan often recom- mended in these days for insomnia, and sometimes effectual enough. It can hardly be necessary to describe in much detail the physiognomy of Darwin, at least in his later years. Every one knows the gentle, humorous face, with its high, deeply-furrowed forehead, bushy eyebrows, overarching keen bluish grey eyes, rough-hewed moustache, and ragged white beard. The some- what shapeless or " bottle " nose deserves mention, as the feature to which Fitz-Koy of the Beagle took serious excep- tion at the time of Darwin's candidature for the post of natural- ist to the expedition. This ardent disciple of Lavater doubted whether any one with a nose like Darwin's could have energy and determination for the duties of such a post. " But I think he was afterwards well satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely." Darwin was a tall, stooping man of six feet, with PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 89 shoulders neither broad nor distinctly narrow. In his youth he was active rather than strong, but capable of great endurance. He was awkward in the use of his hands, never became a real dissector or excelled in anything requiring delicate manipula- tion. He used his hands freely in gesticulation when his talk became animated. What was very exceptional in Darwin was his marvellous power of observation. He was a wonderful shot, and in his early days the love of sport was a veritable passion. In his walks he never missed seeing a bird's nest if there was one to be seen a sure test of the keenness of vision. But his health after early middle life was feeble in the extreme. He was apparently dyspeptic and neurasthenic, if not in some degree (unselfishly) hypochondriacal. His son emphatically asserts that for forty years Darwin never knew one day of the health of ordinary men. His life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness. " I never," he says himself, " pass one day without many hours of discomfort, when I can do nothing whatever." Yet he lived to be seventy- three, was the father of a family, and, by dint of rigid economy in regard to his physical resources, accomplished a body of work which, to say nothing of its quality, is astonishing in the matter of mere bulk. Spinoza, who died of phthisis at forty-five, looked what he was by birth, a Portuguese Jew. He was of middle size, had good features in his face, the skin somewhat swarthy, curling black hair, long black eyebrows. He was intensely reserved, a man of recluse habit, and abstemious in the matter of dietary to the point of asceticism. For example, he has been known to subsist for a whole day upon a little gruel, or upon a milk sop and a pot of beer. The motive for this frugality was presumably a horror of debt, but it probably shortened his life. Of Bacon's physical characteristics I can offer but an imperfect account. The portraits give an impression of decided beauty showing a very high well-shaped forehead, finely arched eyebrows, dark but not large eyes, aquiline nose, full under lip, short beard, and curling dark hair. He married at forty-five, but the union, which was childless, was not dictated go MAKERS OF MAN by passion, for, pace the amusing folk who regard Bacon as a poet, a more passionless man never lived. With regard to his health, D'Arcy Power asserts, I know not on whose authority, that he was always a weak and ailing man, and something of a hypochondriac. He died at sixty-five, of bronchitis. It would be difficult to find a more typical example of the intellectual genius than we have in the philosopher and mathe- matician, Rene Descartes. For, in the intellectual sphere, mathematics holds a position very analogous to that of music in the arts. Mathematical facility is a thing inborn and sui generis : it cannot be acquired, only developed, by toil. Some- thing more, that universality of mind and constructive power which go to the making of the philosopher, is no doubt necessary to the highest order of intellectuality, and that something Descartes possessed. But in all his philosophising he remained fundamentally a mathematician, one whose facility in the rapid solution of the most abstruse problems, and, what is more, the determination of the possibility or formal conditions of solution, were the wonder of his contemporaries. Let us therefore consider with special attention the physical attributes recorded of Descartes. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother, who was consumptive, died soon after his birth. As a boy he was pale and sickly, and had a constant dry cough was, in fact, more or less infected by the same disease. All his life he had the habit of spending the forenoon in bed, under which conditions, he alleged, his best work was always done. He never married, but had one illegitimate daughter, who only lived five years. In person Descartes was undersized, but with a head somewhat large in proportion to his body. His complexion was sallow. He was careful with regard to his toilet, dressed usually in black, and his diet was plain and methodical. Such was Descartes, mathematician par excellence; and it is instructive to note the points of resemblance or analogy between his case and that of Mozart, the typical musician. How many, I wonder, of the cultured gentlemen who in learned monographs invoke or conjure with the mighty name of the Sage of Konigsberg, " that arch-destroyer in PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 91 the realms of thought," Immamiel Kant, have ever clearly realised the physical insignificance of their hero ? How many how few, rather if they encountered in the flesh a puny manikin barely five feet high, pigeon-chested, one shoulder higher than its fellow, if they listened to the medical talk dear to Kant, as to every valetudinarian, his expatiation on the virtues of " nose-breathing," dietetic fads, and so forth, would recognise in such a caricature of humanity one acclaimed by contem- poraries as a " second Messias," the author of a book esteemed by a critic of genius the greatest ever written by man. 1 Let no one accuse me of undue gloating over the fact that the great Kant was a pygmy. The interests of Truth are supreme ; and it is by no means a negligible fact that an intellectual giant may be, in physical aspect, contemptible. Prudence, however, forbids me to state how many fine, healthy barbarians I would cheerfully sacrifice to preserve unscathed every hair on the head of such a pygmy. Kant had several mild but abortive love episodes, one for a prepossessing young widow, who, while the too cautious philosopher there was a strain of Caledonian blood in him, we know calculated and wavered, left Konigsberg and married a more ardent suitor. His celibacy was rather a sore subject with him, but no doubt it was a part of his true vocation. At seventy-three he began to lose his memory. Two years later he became the subject of de- lusions ; gradually wasted to a mere skeleton, and died at eighty. We have now only to consider the physical characteristics of the ethico -religious type of personality, and briefly to sum- marise the main results of this preliminary inquiry, before finding ourselves free to enter with a good conscience upon the psychological problems which are to be our main concern. Of the ten personalities representative of my fourth category, three, however, may be dismissed very briefly. As to the physique of Marcus Aurelius, my chief authorities (Renan and Pater) give no information beyond the expression of a belief that his health was not good, that he suffered from severe migraine, and that his vision failed towards the end of his life. 1 Otto Weininger, re The Critique of Practical Season. 92 MAKERS OF MAN He died, at or about sixty, of some kind of camp fever. Of Augustine's physique and physiognomy I have obtained no trustworthy account. He lived to be seventy-six, but I cannot picture him as a man of imposing appearance, except inasmuch as his features and expression combined the charms of a tempera- ment at the same time sensuous and intellectual. With regard to the physical characteristics of Jesus, it is obviously unsafe, and therefore, for our present purpose, unjustifiable to venture an opinion. Renan, indeed, hazards the guess that his infinite attraction was in some degree the effect of " one of those lovely faces which sometimes appear in the Jewish race." On the other hand, the early tradition, attributable very likely to a desire to find confirmation of a certain assumed prophetic description, was to the effect that the^appearance of Jesus was the reverse of pleasing. As to the familiar art-conception of the Christ, that, no doubt, though obviously in some degree an ideal construction, may well be in great measure authentic. But it may equally well be in its entirety fallacious, and cannot possibly be used as one of the bases of any attempt at inductive generalisation upon the type to which its subject belongs. The same instinct which makes the savage choose, for the predestined victim of sacrifice, and for brief personification of his deity, the most perfect specimen of his tribe, has quite probably been at work in the determination of the " ideal " features of the Saviour. For my own part I find very few of the world-famous repre- sentations of Jesus humanly satisfying. One of the finest is in Titian's painting of the episode of the tribute money or so I think it. Intensity and depth are incompatible with dis- tinctly fair hair and complexion, yet Jesus is commonly por- trayed as a fair man. I imagine him as olive-skinned, with dark grey or brown eyes, dark brown or black hair, and strongly marked features. I much doubt the possession by him of " beauty " in the commonly accepted sense. Self -dominance is a central note in the character, as I conceive it, and, in a strong temperament, is won by such tension of will as cannot but enforce the features of mere comeliness to a more virile and awe-compelling contour. The following is a tabular statement CHRIST AND THE TRIBUTE MONEY. From a painting !>y Titian. To face p. gz. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 93 of the chief bodily characteristics of our seven remaining per- sonalities : Tall, slight, with stoop. Fair health .... Emerson. Medium stature, robust. Epilepsy (?). . . . Mahomet. Medium stature, robust. Hallucinations . . . Luther. Medium stature. Health moderate .... Gregory. Short and thick-set ...... Paul. Short and thick-set. Health moderate. . . . Renan. Very short. Frail physique. Phthisis. . . . Francis. Here, more even than in the case of the intellectuals, physical mediocrity, or indeed inferiority, is, I think, the prevailing note. Emerson, though healthy in his way, could hardly be called a fine man. Luther while in retreat at the Wartburg, suffered from hallucinations. Gregory was tormented con- tinuously for many years by gout in its most agonising form ; Paul suffered from a mysterious " thorn in the flesh " ; Renan, from neuralgia and cardiac weakness ; Francis d'Assisi, from consumption. Certainly these men, endowed with such price- less gifts for our behoof, did not buy them in a cheap market. But we will descend once more to particulars. Emerson's tall, stooping figure was crowned by a head of good shape ; the face was narrow, the features aquiline ; the brow not very high, but finely moulded ; the eyes intensely blue, deep set ; the mouth firm but sensitive ; the expression at once enthusiastic and shrewdly benevolent. He seems to have possessed a peculiarly magnetic personality. C. J. Woodbury, in the course of some reminiscences, calls attention to the fact. " There was," he says, " something catching about him. No one could exactly explain or even understand it, but every one was sensible of it. Nor was it well to be loved by him too dearly. . . . The fact is, no one, meeting Emerson, was ever the same again. His natural force was so resistless and so imperceptible that it commanded men before they were aware." Haskins confirms this observation. Thoreau's manner, after his residence with Emerson, startlingly recalled that of his host. Mahomet was a man of medium stature, square built and sinewy. He had large hands and feet ; was very strong in his youth, corpulent in later life. His head was large and shapely ; he 94 MAKERS OF MAN had a broad forehead, oval face, ruddy complexion, aquiline nose, well-marked arched eyebrows, black eyes and hair. His mouth was large, his teeth very white, and he wore a full beard. His deportment was calm, usually grave, but sometimes jocose. He was an attractive personality, very successful with women, and very susceptible to their charms, and his smile was of captivating sweetness. He was scrupulously clean, frugal in regard to diet, affected the use of perfumes, and in disposition was kind but passionate. In his middle age Mahomet became subject to dreams, ecstasies, and " trances," the last possibly an euphemistic title for epileptic seizures. Of the children born to him by his many wives, all proved short-lived. He lived to be sixty-three, and his last illness was apparently of a cerebral nature, being attended with vertigo, headache, and delirium. Luther was a man of average height, somewhat broad shouldered and clumsy in build. Mosellanus, who saw him at Leipsic (aged thirty-six) at the time of his disputation with Eck, describes him as " so wasted by care that all his bones may be counted." This emaciation was no doubt due to special causes, and was not permanent. His features, as depicted in Cranach's many portraits, are pronounced, irregular, and distinctly suggestive of his plebeian origin. In some, the face appears wasted by anxiety, but in others, perhaps the majority, it is full, somewhat heavy below the eyes, and con- veys the impression of a passionate rather than an intellectual or poetic nature. The hair is black ; the forehead not very large ; the eyebrows marked ; the nose thickish and prominent ; the upper lip well removed from the nose ; the mouth humorous and eloquent, but far from beautiful ; the chin strong, and the neck short and fleshy. Of Luther's dark, deep-set eyes, which revealed his genius, Kessler says that they " twinkled and sparkled like stars, so that no one could hardly look steadily at them." By others they were compared to the eyes of a lion or a falcon. Luther's gait l was peculiarly characteristic, and far from typical of the monk or scholar. He carried himself so upright that he seemed to lean backwards (having 1 As observed by Kessler in 1522. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 95 become rather stout, 1 and his face was upturned towards the sky. From his earliest years Luther was subject to fits of depression, verging upon religious melancholia, and, as I have already stated, was at one time the victim of hallucina- tions, both auditory and visual. He suffered severely from gout and stone, also from cardiac oppression and vertigo. His reproductive powers were quite normal. His life-period (sixty- three years) is, like Mahomet's, characteristic of the man of action, which in many respects he was, rather than of the thinker. Such, too curiously enough was the case with our next example, Gregory the Great, who lived sixty-four years, and was, of course, a statesman of the highest rank in addition to being a man of genuine sanctity. He was of average height, well-shaped, and had slender, graceful hands. His face com- bined the length of his father's and the fulness of his mother's. He had a handsome forehead ; greenish eyes, not large ; full, ruddy lips ; a projecting chin, sallow complexion, scanty beard, and bald crown. I believe there is truth in the observation I have read, that men of cool temperament are apt to have a thin growth of hair, and the converse combination is frequent also. Gregory's expression was gentle ; his manners were mild and conciliatory. He was liable to attacks of the gout, con- cerning which his own account is, " I know not what fire spreads itself over my whole body." His health seems to have been undermined by his asceticism in early manhood, when he lived on a little pulse, and became so weak that he became subject to syncope of alarming severity. For two whole years (when he was about sixty) the gout kept him constantly in bed. " Sometimes the pain is moderate, sometimes excessive ; but it is never so moderate as to leave me, nor so excessive as to kill me." It did kill him, ultimately. St. Paul is described by Renan as ugly, short, thick-set, and stooping. He had broad shoulders, bearing a diminutive bald head. His wan face was invaded by a thick, dark beard ; he had an aquiline nose, beetling black eyebrows, and piercing eyes. His manners were exquisite, but in speech he was 1 Such a bearing is considered by Mantegazza indicative of an arrogant, domineering, and ambitious nature. 96 MAKERS OF MAN hesitant and timid. By temperament lie was passionate and impulsive, a man who did nothing by halves. During his residence in Galatea, from about his thirty-sixth to fortieth year, Paul seems to have been afflicted with attacks of weak- ness, or of the unknown malady to which he refers. His lasting preference for the Galatean churches was no doubt in a measure due to the tenderness with which he was cared for by his devoted proselytes during this time of sickness. There is little doubt that his constitution was unhealthy, but as he is traditionally held to have suffered martyrdom under Nero (aet. 54 or 56), we can draw no safe conclusions on the score of longevity or the reverse. Ernest Renan was a little, short-limbed man, with heavy, sloping shoulders carrying a huge head. His features were large, the mouth sensitive though wide, the nose prominent and fleshy, the chin shapely and indented. The eyes were small and had a peering look their colour I do not know. The shape of the face in youth and early manhood was oval ; after middle life it became somewhat full and puffy. Renan enjoyed fair health up to the time of his Syrian expedition. There, on the point of leaving, he and his sister were attacked by fever, of which the latter died. Renan, who was then thirty-seven, recovered, but was never the same again. He became subject to rheumatism, to heart trouble, and to neuralgia of torturing severity. At fifty-two he was pre- maturely aged, though he lived on until his sixty-ninth year. He was the father of two children, of whom one died in infancy. He was bashful, but, when at his ease, could talk fluently and clearly. His manners had the gentle charm of the best type of Catholic clergy. Of the facile give-and-take of the ready talker, he was, according to Madame Darmesteter, utterly devoid. Nor did he affect epigram, although the strong vein of irony so frequent in the writings of his later period must sometimes, one imagines, have made itself slyly evident in his talk. Concerning Francis d'Assisi I have not much to add to the particulars already given. He was of short stature, slim, graceful, dainty before his conversion in dress and habit. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 97 His personality had, by all accounts, a singular charm, by reason of his gay vivacity and gift of song, and in the days of his early manhood he was the central figure of a group of pleasure-seekers of the jeunesse doree in his native town. But there is no reason to believe that at this time his personal conduct was in any way gross or vicious. He seems from the first to have had a sense of high destiny, and there is evidence that this instinct was not peculiar to himself. A man accounted a character in Assisi was in the habit of spreading his mantle for young Francis to tread upon, bidding men note him as a youth called to greatness. When he was about twenty-one, he, with many other Assisans, was captured by a force led by Count Girardo di Gislerio. A year's endurance of prison fare and monotony debilitated and demoralised him to a considerable extent ; and after his release he seems to have fallen into evil ways. Then followed a long and very serious illness, which was perhaps the turning-point of his career. The physical element of his charm was probably ephemeral, for we read of him in the days of his sanctity as " a man despic- able and small of body, and esteemed, therefore, a vile mendicant by many who knew him not." At about forty-five, old age descended suddenly upon him : he became purblind, and suffered from sickness and haemoptysis. The majority of extant por- traits represent him with a face of delicate oval contour and refined features, the forehead rather broad than high. The facts dealt with in this and the preceding chapter are of so heterogeneous a kind that any attempt as a complete summary must prove futile. The general result seems, however, to be to the effect that, physically speaking, the man of action and the artist have the advantage of the intellectual and the ethico-religious man in almost all respects. In stature, at least, the artist quite holds his own with the man of action ; probably in energy and strength he is somewhat his inferior, though I am not quite certain of this. The intellectual man is, on the average, of mediocre or inferior stature, physique, and health, and the ethico-religious man also. As to the inter- pretation of these facts, one may venture this much, at least, that they seem to indicate, not perhaps the complete incom- 7 98 MAKERS OF MAN patibility, bat at all events a certain degree of antagonism, between the highest mental and spiritual endowments on the one side, and a great degree of bodily development in regard to size, health, or vigour on the other. It seems as though the relation of the brain to the organism in general were in such cases of a quasi-parasitic nature, as if the one organ fed upon and developed itself at the expense of all the others. The extreme longevity of the intellectual class does indeed suggest, that what the brain abstracts in the way of muscular and animal vigour, it in part compensates by enhanced resisting power of some kind, perhaps due to a regulative unifying control of the diverse functions, perhaps to the fortifying con- tribution of some internal secretion. Coarsely put, it amounts in short to this, that while, in a sense, intellectual toil tends to cripple a man in regard to every -day activities, it also tends to keep him alive longer than his mental inferiors. One further point concerning the physiognomy of great men I have had frequent occasion to illustrate. This is the strength of the impression made by the personalities of so many of them upon their associates, the evident sense of them as beings in some way set apart by fate as exceptional, predestined. Sometimes it makes itself felt as a dominating power, a mag- netic emanation, subduing or enthralling the will, sometimes as a mere charm of irresistible sweetness ; in other cases the mystery of inspiration transfigures a poet's or composer's face, suggests to the beholder an ineffable source. It does not always coexist with a powerful physique, witness the examples of Richelieu, Nelson, St. Francis. In one form or another we have discovered testimony to its reality and power in the cases also of William the Silent, Lincoln, Frederick, Napoleon, Leonardo, Goethe, Flaubert, Scott, Cervantes, Dante, Beethoven, Mozart, Hegel, Emerson, Mahomet, Luther practically in fifty per cent, of the personalities under consideration. This is a fact in the natural history of human greatness as well worthy of attention as any other even the most prosaic. That men discover or believe themselves to discover in certain individuals a something magical, inexplicable, awful is, I believe, a perfectly verifiable proposition. It is just this PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS 99 element which we shall probably seek in vain to account for genealogically, for though its potentiality is obviously inborn, it does not seem to be inherited. It is, in fact, the incalculable element called genius, revealed by look or gesture, appraised by instinct, but unmistakable enough, in many cases, at least. Least so, it would appear, by my evidence, in the case of in- tellectual initiative, though that may be in part due to the comparative neglect of any close or loving study of the lives of men belonging to this type. Those who are sceptical on the point of the possession by genius of a characteristic physi- ognomy, at once indescribable and yet perfectly self-substanti- ating, should compare almost any portrait of Napoleon with those of his brothers Louis and Joseph. It is difficult to decide which is the more startling the close resemblance of separate features, or the absolute qualitative difference of general impression conveyed. Nor can this difference be waived as the effect of mere idealisation. The brothers of Napoleon, at the time when their portraits were painted, occupied positions exalted enough to provide ample motive to any artist to make the best of his subject. The lives of the three men afford abund- ant evidence that in one of them inhered a daimonic element denied to the others. Why, then, should we be in any way surprised that their portraits tell the same tale ? Lavater believed that the eye of a man of genius has emanations, that the rays of light are, at any rate, reflected from it in a manner peculiar to itself ; and that it is thus productive of stronger sensations in the observer than those of ordinary men. Mante- gazza says : " There are some expressions which only belong to genius, and if we had a photometer which could measure the light issuing from the eye, we might perhaps judge of the value of a picture or a poem or of a book by the vividness of the light that gleams in the pupil of the artist or the writer." He also calls attention to the superior tonicity of the facial muscles of highly intelligent men, as contrasted with the comparative flaccidity of commonplace countenances. Such highly-strung semi-contracted muscles are at all times ready to express the transient play of the subtlest emotions. " The face of a man of genius is a soldier with arms and baggage, always ready to ioo MAKERS OF MAN fight ; that of the stupid man is an ex-lazzarone, always minded to sleep. 1 The mean craving of all democratic epochs for a dead level of mediocre capacity must, in the interests of truth and justice, be met with a curt denial. It is not, never has been, and never shall be so. 1 W. P. Hantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression. But intensely introspective meditation may by its centripetal effect simulate vacuity and conduce to relaxation of the facial muscles. Cf. the description of Hegel's physiognomy above, p. 85. VI NATURAL VOCATION Twins Versatility and adaptability Forms of natural vocation : I. and II. Examples. THE task of apportioning, in the life of a given individual, the respective roles of inborn capacity on the one hand and environmental influence on the other, is one of extreme interest but of no little difficulty. The problem has been investigated on diverse lines, notably by Galton, whose ingenious plan of comparing the life-histories of twins has thrown much light on the subject. 1 Roughly speaking, there are two varieties of twins, those of similar and those of complementary or sharply contrasted characteristics. The mass of evidence collected by Galton tends decidedly to the conclusions that, whereas those twins whose inborn qualities are similar persist in their similarity, no matter how different their external circumstances may be, those of the complementary type remain dissimilar, even though, from their birth up, subjected to almost identical conditions. Twins of the similar type frequently suffer from the same ailments at the same time, and even incur what might almost be considered accidental maladies (ophthalmia and the like) simultaneously when living in different parts of the world. Their coincidences of mental impulse are sometimes extra- ordinarily dramatic. Galton relates a case in which " one twin, A, who happened to be in a town in Scotland, bought a set of champagne glasses which caught his attention as a surprise for his brother B ; while at the same time B, being in England, bought a set of precisely the same pattern as a surprise for A." 1 Cf. Inquiries into Human Faculty (History of Twins), by F. Galton. F.E.S. 102 MAKERS OF MAN The only factor which appears capable of modifying to any notable extent the inborn similarity of twins, is a serious illness of some kind from which one sutlers and the other escapes. In the absence of such a disturbing factor, Galton found that those twins who started life with mental and bodily resemblances always retained these resemblances even up to old age, no matter how different the conditions of their lives might have been. Not only does the evidence produced by him lead him to the conclusion that nature is far stronger than nurture, it even arouses in his mind " some wonder whether nurture can do anything at all," that is, in the way of modifying, as opposed to educating, inborn capacities. With regard to the effect of education, Galton shrewdly remarks that " those teachings which conform to the natural aptitudes of the child leave much more enduring marks than others." It is, in fact, just those things which a child learns in its first few years and from its parents, whose qualities in some respects resemble its own, which are most likely so to conform with its own predisposition. This fact obviously increases the difficulty of determining how far a given tendency, persisting through life, does so solely in virtue of its own original strength, how far also in virtue of parental or other encouragement and guidance, bestowed at a favourably receptive phase of develop- ment. But it also justifies the assumption that no training, however early, judicious, and persevering, will in itself afford a full explanation of extraordinary achievements on the part of its recipient. A mediocre individual will remain mediocre to the end of the chapter, for you can only educate previously existent faculties, you cannot create non-existent, nor, pro- bably, greatly strengthen rudimentary ones. Confusion also arises from our habit of regarding such highly specialised and complex mental products as music, mathematics, painting, science, as perennial pre-existent institutions, to which, thus regarded, it appears well-nigh miraculous that human beings are born so pre-adapted that they take to them with the same instinctive confidence and success as a duckling to water. How singular that when square, oval, and round pegs appear, square, oval, and round NATURAL VOCATION 103 holes are found ready to receive them ! No wonder that our good friends the theosophists, when an infant prodigy exhibits his ready-made technique in the mastery of violin or pianoforte, exclaim with confidence that here is one more proof of the reality of reincarnation. A " musical entity," a soul deliber- ately self-destined to virtuosity, has entered, and at once dominates its living instrument, the little organism of the prodigy in question. How delightfully simple and how naive ! Believe it, if you will I know nothing conclusive to the contrary but do not fail to investigate the family record of your prodigy. It will not, I venture to predict, fail to throw light on the genesis of the " instrument " at least, if not also on that of the aspiration of its governing entity. More convincing proofs of your charming theory are very far from being superfluous. In any case, the pre-existence of square, oval, and round holes is precisely the result of innumerable previous impressions on the social medium, by human pegs of corresponding contours. Music, in its present highly complex, highly developed and specialised condition, only exists because, from time to time, individuals have always been born who could fully express their emotional cravings and aspirations not otherwise than in the form of music. If they had found no music in the world, they would infallibly have set to work to create it. And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of painting, science, mathe- matics. A peg must have some contour, and however excep- tional that contour may be, it is quite safe to predict that it will not prove unprecedented. Somewhere in the world of established activities the most unique soul will find that specific task begun to which it feels itself drawn by invincible affinities. I do not mean to imply that the matter is quite so simple as a too facile interpretation of the peg-and-hole metaphor might suggest. The one-man-one-capacity hypothesis will not by any means cover the complex actualities of human greatness. The element of versatility has a decided claim to recognition : of many potentialities, not all, in the nature of things, can expect realisation. For the development of some the environmental conditions may be adverse, even prohibitive ; others, more 104 MAKERS OF MAN opportune, may prosper at their expense. Nor is it even a foregone conclusion that the capacity which finds fruition was originally the dominant central potentiality of the nature. Adaptability is one element of greatness ; if need be, it must stoop to conquer. By the law of hedonic selection, persistence in a given course of activity is conditioned by the pleasurable accompaniment of a sense of difficulties overcome of some kind or degree of success. Thwarted efforts tend to be relinquished in favour of others whose issue is, or seems likely to be, more favourable. This consideration obviously complicates the problem of natural vocation, raising, among others, the question whether a man, who in a bygone age achieved fame as a poet or painter, might not, if born in our time, have invaded the field of science or speculation. Leonardo's is, in my opinion, a case in point : he was versatile to the degree of universal potentiality, and it is quite an open question whether the line he chose, or I should say accepted, was that most suited for the full develop- ment of his powers. And Frederick the Great, if he had been born to an obscure station, among literary or musical folk, might conceivably have developed to the point of genuine distinction one of those potentialities destined in reality to decline to the position of mere by-activities in his adventurous career. What was fundamental in his nature was the desire, the unswerving, impassioned will, to command admiration : by a process of exclusion he was, grudgingly enough to my thinking, driven to the adoption of the Instrument, the inborn capacity, best adapted to his need. "To be a king is a chance, but never forget that you are a man." The chance was too good to be thrown away ! Why fight with naked hands when a sword has been thrust into them by Fate ? Still, upon the whole, it is probably exceptional for a man to achieve great things on the basis of any other than the central predominant capacity of his nature. In the present chapter I intend, so far as possible, to confine my attention to facts indicative of a spontaneous tendency towards one or another special form of activity to evidences of natural vocation, in short. Questions of environmental or personal influence will, on account of their obvious interest and FREDERICK THE (1RKAT. To face p. ,04. NATURAL VOCATION 105 importance, as also for the sake of lucidity, receive separate con- sideration. There are, I believe, several distinct and alternative modes of manifestation of dominant or even of an ultimately single capacity. By careful collation and comparison of the somewhat meagre evidence on this point, gleaned from the biographies of my subjects, I have arrived at the following classification, the lines of which, though by no means in all cases obvious or sharply defined, will yet upon the whole be found to correspond with genuine distinctions. Here and there we may encounter a life-history not easily assignable to any of my four categories ; but such cases are exceptional, and will usually prove amenable to impartial scrutiny. Natural Vocation may be : (1) Decisive and single from the first. Examples : Drake, Nelson, Napoleon, Lincoln, Titian, Mozart, Beeth- oven, Flaubert, Harvey, Descartes, Jesus. (2) Decisive from the first, but associated with collateral activities. Examples : Caesar, Charlemagne, Kichelieu, Dante, Goethe, Scott, Turner, Bacon, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Marcus Aurelius, Gregory, Emerson. (3) Dubious at first, ultimately decisive and single. Examples : William the Silent, Cromwell, Cervantes, Galileo, Newton, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Paul, Augustine, Mahomet, Francis, Kenan. (4) Dubious at first, ultimately predominant, but with survival of collateral activities. Examples : Frederick, Leonaro, Luther. Much of the evidence upon which the above classification is founded will come out in the course of our present chapter, but if its accuracy in the main be provisionally assumed, it will be seen that the law of hedonic selection is amply verified by appeal to the facts. In the eleven careers assigned to my first, and the thirteen assigned to my third category twenty- four out of the forty the main activity was either unrivalled by competing tendencies from the first, or ultimately became so. In the majority of the twelve careers assigned to the second category, the collateral activities were either speedily 106 MAKERS OF MAN dropped, as Dante resigned his political ambitions, Goethe and Scott their attempts at drawing and music ; subordinated to the main purpose of life, as his literary ambitions were by Csesar ; found a barren or disastrous issue, as did the poetic attempts of Richelieu and Turner and the public activities of Bacon; or were continued only by sheer pressure of circumstance, witness the statesmanship of Marcus Aurelius and Gregory, and the optical works of Spinoza. The poetic by-activity of Emerson is really part and parcel of his dominant ethical voca- tion. In only three of our forty examples so irresistible is the specialising tendency of life do we find a well-marked survival of activities rivalling in some degree the central purpose through- out life. Luther was from the first a musician of considerable merit, and kept up his flute-playing if not his singing through- out the vicissitudes of his chequered and stormy career. The strength of his original aesthetic impulse is, in the case of Frederick the Great, amply proved by his lifelong constancy to music and literature. Leonardo, as he grew in age and enlightenment, ever loved art less and science more. Any specific tendency which for a long time proves itself independent of the stimuli of external recognition or success, is presumably based upon inborn capacity and not mere caprice. If it issue in no remarkable achievement, this is probably due to the lack of external encouragement, to the diversion of energy into other channels, and to subsequent partial atrophy of the original capacity which it represents. There are exceptions to this rule, however, for it is, to me, quite inconceivable that Turner, despite his dogged and indefatigable devotion to the muse, could ever have become even a passable poet. I. Of those who from the first and without afterthought devote themselves to one single vocation, only Jesus belongs to the ethico-religious type. And the evidence in his case rests practically on Luke's anecdote relating how the boy remained behind when his parents had left Jerusalem, and was found engaged in disputation among the teachers in the temple, amazing all hearers by the maturity of his understanding and the wisdom of his replies. It is confirmed by passages in the JT / JL same chapter, stating that Jesus was in his childhood remark- NATURAL VOCATION 107 able as being " filled with, wisdom," that the " grace of God was upon him," and that as he grew in age and stature he found increasing favour " with God and men." The story seems credible on the face of it, and it would indeed be strange if so unique a destiny had not been foreshadowed in early life. The other types of personality are about equally represented in this first and simplest category. Francis Drake was almost literally cradled on the deep, for his father, flying from Catholic enemies in Tavistock, had been assigned, in his new capacity of reader of prayers to the Navy, the tenancy of a disused warship in Chatham reach. Francis himself was one of twelve sons, mostly of seafaring life, and seems never to have given a thought to any other vocation. Very early in life we find him apprenticed to the skipper of a small craft trading to France and Holland, whereon " even as his frame was being rudely forged into the thick-set solidity that distinguished his man- hood, so was his spirit being tempered in the subtlest medium that destiny could have chosen. On quay and market and ship-board the horror of the Inquisition was the only talk, and the Flemings were flying from the persecutions of Philip." Some of them perhaps came to England on this very vessel. That Drake found sea life congenial is fairly evident from the fact that when his master died he bequeathed the ship to his young pupil. Drake, however, sold it, and presumably invested the proceeds in the ventures of his kinsmen, the sons of old William Hawkins, in whose employ the historic drama of his career fairly begins. The vocation of Nelson seems to have been decided with equal precision and promptitude. At the age of twelve, we are told, he himself expressed a desire to go to sea with his uncle, Maurice Suckling, then appointed to the Raisonnabk. To sea he accordingly went, joining his uncle's ship in the Medway, and a thoroughly wretched time he seems to have had there. Later, he was sent on a merchant ship to the West Indies, and returned a practical seaman, but disgusted with the Navy. This disgust often returned ; the Navy was in fact an exacting and not over-grateful mistress to Horatio Nelson, but she was his first, and in the deepest sense his only love. Nelson's unique vocation is evidenced io8 MAKERS OF MAN not only by the actual choice of and fidelity to a particular profession, but by the peculiar strain of Quixotic chivalry, the romantic ardour which, from early boyhood, throughout life impelled him to court danger with an eagerness almost approaching to greed. Of the sincerity of this passion there can (pace Bernard Shaw) be no question with any competent psychologist. It must have been in the mind of Nelson's father when he said of the boy that, in whatever station, he would climb, if possible, to the very top of the tree. Equally decisive were the early tastes of Napoleon. He was a taciturn, haughty, unsociable boy, full of self-love and unbounded ambition. His education, from his tenth year, was purely military, and it is impossible to doubt that this was in great measure due to the fact that he had shown a strong predilection for such a career. He did not inherit his father's linguistic tastes, but loved solid reading, especially history, and showed pronounced mathematical and geographical abilities. Very significant is the story of how, at fourteen, the churlish lad for once came out of his shell, incited his school- fellows to dig trenches and raise parapets of snow, organised a miniature siege, and himself led the attack for fifteen successive days. Even more so is the fact that on his entrance into the military school at Paris, Napoleon, a boy of fifteen, ventured to remonstrate with the vice-principal in regard to the luxurious and extravagant habits countenanced among the students, which, rightly enough, he considered the very worst prepara- tion for a soldier's career. As a boy, Napoleon affected the revolutionary works of Rousseau and Raynal, and professed sympathy with the nationalist aspirations of his native Corsica. What attracted him in such writers was, no doubt, the negative spirit of general disaffection, rather than any sort of humani- tarian zeal. When as a young man of twenty-four, having returned to Corsica on leave, he was approached by Paoli, the leader of the patriotic party, Napoleon refused to be drawn into a cause which promised so little and exacted so much. He had renounced his Corsican birthright, and chosen France for the spring-board of his world-wide ambition. A point of some interest in reference to Napoleon is the fact that he Engraved for Captain Brcnton's "Naval Ilist NATURAL VOCATION 109 seems to have been subject to the hallucinatory perception of a star, which appeared to him on all great occasions, com- manding him to go forwards. He considered it a sign of good fortune, and in 1806 expressed surprise because it was invisible to General Rapp, to whom he had pointed it out. Such stars are a not uncommon hallucinatory phenomenon in the con- sciousness of great men. 1 When Nelson, in his youth, returned, almost a skeleton, from his first voyage to the East Indies, he became greatly discouraged, and convinced that he could never rise in his profession. But he relates how, one day, " after a long and gloomy reverie, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patrons. ' Well, then,' I exclaimed, ' I will be a hero ! ' : From that time, he often said, a radiant orb was suspended in his mind's eye, which urged him onward to renown. The analogy with the case of Napoleon is rather striking, although with Nelson there is no claim for the objectivity of the appear- ance. But was Napoleon quite sincere in the belief he ex- pressed in his own star ? Doubtful, in the extreme ! With Abraham Lincoln, the earliest indication of excep- tional destiny is perhaps found in an omnivorous quest of general knowledge. Of education, properly so called, he had almost none, barely so many days' schooling as to make up one year in all his life. To attend one school he was obliged to walk nine miles from home. But what scanty leisure he could steal from farm labour and odd jobs was devoted to hard study, and his custom was to write out summaries of all the books he read and to learn them by heart. One who knew him at this time says : " He was always reading, scribbling, ciphering, writing poetry, and the like." This may seem to suggest literary aspirations, but I do not myself believe that he was ever seriously drawn towards a career of authorship. The books he read were of a distinctly practical trend national history, the lives of great statesmen, and so forth. At sixteen we find him frequenting religious and political meetings, and on the day after he would mount a stump and declaim to his companions the speeches he had heard. Quite early, too, 1 Cf, Inquiries into Human Faculty (Visionaries), by F. Galton, no MAKERS OF MAN he turned to the study of law, and, by the time he was twenty- five, had by his unaided efforts made himself a sound lawyer. There is no doubt that from early youth Lincoln had quietly determined to achieve greatness. He set himself deliberately to test his own qualities, and could not fail to discover that one of the most valuable of these was his power of winning popularity. In all his troubles, and they were many and grievous, he never lacked the aid of true friends. He had an iron will, indomitable perseverance, and for all his geniality was so self-centred that one who knew him well opines that " no human being ever had the slightest personal influence on him." As to his popularity, we read that " his wit and humour, his inexhaustible fund of stories, and, above all, his kind heart, made him everywhere a favourite." His own stepmother, whom he called his " saintly mother," says of him that he was the best boy she ever saw or ever expected to see. That the main trend of his ambition was early defined, is proved by the fact that a Mr. Offatt, who employed him in looking after a store at New Salem, said of Lincoln that " he knew more than any man in the United States, and would some day be President." This when Abraham was only twenty- two ! Of the boyhood of Titian we know little, but that little is fairly decisive as to the plastic unity of his aesthetic impulse. He is recorded to have shown an early aptitude for painting, and one of the earliest manifestations of his genius was, we are also told, the decoration of a wall with a Holy Family, limned in the juices of flowers ! At any rate, we know that at the early age of nine or thereabouts, he was sent to lodge with an uncle in Venice, and placed under the tuition of Giovanni Bellini. Titian came of an ancient family, the Vecelli of Pieve di Cadore in the southern Tyrol. It is a hilly district, and Josiah Gilbert suggests that the strong acquisitiveness of the artist may not be unrelated to the mountain origin of his race. But though somewhat covetous, Titian was liberal in the spending of the bounteous earnings of his art, a man of large ideas, in- clined to splendour and voluptuousness. The artist in him was tempered by the man of the world, the courtier, and, I must add, the sensualist. But his ambition, from the first NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, LIEUTENANT n'ARTII.I.ERIE. Front a painting by J. />'. Greuze To face f>. no. NATURAL VOCATION in and throughout his long life, was, in essentials, one and indivis- ible, based on an indisputably single and inborn vocation. One and indivisible, too, was the lifelong ambition, or, I should say, aspiration, of Mozart, who, bat for a little episode which I shall presently relate, might pass as an embodiment of the Platonic idea of aesthetic genius. Some one once asked Rossini who was the greatest musician. " Beethoven ! " " What of Mozart, then ? " " Oh ! Mozart is not the greatest, he is the only musician in the world." Every one, of course, knows how Mozart was an infant prodigy ; how his skill in playing the harpsichord was, almost in his babyhood, already the talk of Salzburg ; how, not content with this, he secretly studied the violin, mastering it to a degree which, in the competent opinion of his father, afforded a guarantee that he might easily become the first violinist in Europe. How he com- posed, at the age of seven years, sonatas 6, 7, 8, 9, which, when published, " revealed within their scope an impeccable correct- ness of form." How, in his ninth year, he was working upon an orchestral symphony ; and in his fifteenth, at Florence, amazed a too sceptical Grand Duke by improvising fugal elaborations of allotted themes, " as easily as one eats a piece of bread." The episode referred to above, to which I invite attention, is the fleeting inclination of the boy to mathematics. We read of him " covering walls, tables, etc., with figures and numerals." The fancy soon passed, crowded out by the musical preoccupation so strongly inherent in his nature, and so pre- dominantly favoured by his environment. But how if Mozart had been the adopted son of a mathematician, imbued with a proselytising zeal for his own avocation and a contempt for aesthetics ? The musical composer and the mathematician possess in common a deep-seated psychological bias which might perhaps be defined as the feeling for abstract expression, in the one case of emotional, and in the other of purely formal conceptions. There is an intellectual element in the severity of all art-work of the highest order (in the construction of a fugue or a symphony, for example), divorced from which the practice of art deteriorates into the flabbiness of mere senti- mentality. 3 'And there is an aesthetic side to pure science, a H2 MAKERS OF MAN stern beauty in the symbolic formulae so tersely yet adequately summarising, so triumphantly annexing for ideal manipulation, innumerable factors of experience. In the nests of birds, the honeycombs of bees, the polished flint implements of primitive man, we find germinal manifestations of the same constructive instinct which effloresces in the sublime architectonics of the Jupiter Symphony, as well as in the pregnant logical symmetry of the infinitesimal calculus. The boyhood of Beethoven, though lacking the sensational features of Mozart's precocity, gave ample promise of musical pre-eminence. He himself, while very young, spoke of the possibility of his becoming " a great man." His love of music showed at a very early age, and his father, a singer at the Court of the Elector Maximilian Friedrich, made him work at the violin and spinet. At the age of twelve he became deputy organist, and could play most of Bach's forty-eight fugues. When he was about seventeen he visited Mozart at Vienna, received a few lessons from him, but was recalled to Bonn through the illness of his mother. '* Mark that young man : he will make to himself a name in the world," was the verdict of the elder musician. In 1792 (aet. 21), Beethoven removed to Vienna, took lessons from Haydn, Schenk, Salieri, and Albrechtsberger, floated at once, as a performer, on the spring- tide of popular favour, and in 1801 could write : " I have more orders (from publishers) than I can satisfy." ..." There is no longer any bargaining with me : I demand, and the money is paid." Gustave Flaubert showed the imaginative bent of his mind by improvising scenes and dialogues, in which he took all the parts, before he could read. A strong feeling for style and a passionate aspiration are displayed in the letters he wrote to a companion between the ages of nine and eleven. The paternal billiard-table was commandeered for a stage, whereon Gustave and his friends declaimed tragedies and comedies to an audience of admiring relatives. He soon became the central figure of a circle of romantic youths who mutually excited one another into a condition of literary exaltation. One of them carried the pose a little too far, and hanged himself .J; In deference to ABRAHAM LINCOLN. To face /. 112. NATURAL VOCATION 113 his father's wish, Flaubert made a conscientious effort to study law. He could make nothing of it, and soon gave it up in dis- gust. To be a man of letters, an artist, that alone made it worth his while to live. Concerning William Harvey, D'Arcy Power says that " his habits of minute observation, his fondness for dissection, and his love of comparative anatomy, had probably shown the bias of his mind from his earliest years." Hence he entered Caius College at sixteen, graduated there in Arts, and travelled through France to Padua, where he studied under Fabricius, a surgical anatomist who had made a special study of the valves of the veins, but without discovering their true function. At twenty- two Harvey left Padua, armed with a highly eulogistic diploma, setting forth how " he had conducted himself so wonderfully well in the examinations, and had shown such skill, memory, and learning, that he had far surpassed even the great hopes which his examiners had formed of him." There is not a trace of uncertainty or ambiguity in regard to the choice of a vocation in the record of Harvey's early life ; and throughout his career he remained entirely absorbed in the scientific interests of his work. At the same time, he was a man of good general culture. In particular, he was devoted to the poems of Virgil, after a reading of which he would sometimes throw aside the book, exclaiming, " He hath a devil ! " The early inclination of Descartes towards intellectual pursuits is clearly shown by the fact that he was called by his father " his little philosopher." His early education was received from the Jesuits at La Fleche, an order for which he retained a lifelong regard. For the first few years he studied the humanities, moral philosophy, and logic. It was not until he was eighteen that he turned his attention to mathe- mathics. Here he at once found himself at home, being conscious of a strong fascination in the clearness and pre- cision of mathematical processes. He learned to solve the more abstruse problems with extraordinary ease and rapidity, and all his life was constantly tempted to turn aside from other tasks in order to indulge this master-passion. No better example of inborn capacity of a highly specialised form could 8 H4 MAKERS OF MAN well be desired. The entire philosophy of Descartes is based upon his conviction of the necessity of extending the mathe- matical ideal so as to embrace the whole field of knowledge. His logical rules were (a) to admit as true only what was perfectly clear and distinct ; (6) to resolve all difficulties into their elements ; (c) to pass from the solution of the easier to the more difficult questions ; and (d) to omit nothing. " Apud me omnia sunt mathematica in naturd" he declared ; and to-day it is a commonplace that only those aspects of reality which are already capable of mathematical formu- lation can be regarded as really subject to the dominion of science. II. We have now to consider some examples of lives in which the predominant capacity, though decisive from the first, is associated with one or another collateral activity. The first case, that of Caesar, need not detain us long, because his pursuit of literature, though hardly an essential factor of his contem- porary efficiency, was, after all, only one more expression of his main central interest and purpose as a statesman and a man of action. It is interesting to learn that Caesar in his boyhood wrote a poem in honour of Hercules, and composed a tragedy on (Edipus, but it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of the fact. He seems to have turned instinctively to politics, and his promise of distinction in this field was not overlooked by Marius, who, during the brief period of his seventh consulship, made his nephew (aged fourteen) a priest of Jupiter and a member of the sacred college, thus placing at his disposal a munificent salary. On the death of his father, Caesar, aged sixteen, gave further proof of exceptional strength and acumen, by breaking ofi his engagement with the lady chosen for him, and marrying Cornelia, daughter of the all-powerful Cinna. By this match he entered into decisive alliance with the popular as opposed to the Senatorial party. Nor was he shaken in his resolve by the catastrophe which, on the return of Sylla, overwhelmed the cause of the progressives. The popular army was cut to pieces, his father-in-law, Cinna, was killed, and Sylla, appointed Dictator by the Senate, sought to persuade young Caesar to divorce his wife and to ally himself by a new NATURAL VOCATION 115 marriage with the patrician interest. Caesar firmly rejected these overtures, whereupon Sylla deprived him of his priest- hood, confiscated his estate, seized his wife's dowry, and finally set a price upon his head. Caesar's life was, however, saved by the intervention of powerful friends, and Sylla gave way, sullenly predicting that this young Caesar " in whom there are many Mariuses " would overthrow the aristocracy. When we consider that the unmoved subject of this violent but futile attack was a mere youth of eighteen, we cannot but realise the exceptional impression thus early produced by Caesar's per- sonality upon his contemporaries, their evident sense of him as a factor of already serious import in the political situation. Nor is it easy to reconcile the firm dignity of Caesar's attitude at this trying moment, or his unswerving loyalty to the appar- ently ruined cause of his adoption, with the views of those who regard him as a mere timeserver, whose public policy was based on nothing deeper that selfish ambition. Napoleon in his youth had professed to sympathise with the nationalist aspira- tions of the Corsicans, but when invited by Paoli to throw in his lot with the patriotic party, he at once discovered that the island was too small for independence. What would have been easier for Caesar than to have joined the party of reaction in the moment of its triumph ? That he resisted, rather, contemned the inducements proffered, is a strong testimony to the sincerity of his convictions. With regard to the literary activities of Caesar, it is, as I have already suggested, a noteworthy fact that they assumed the form of a succinct record of his military exploits and experiences. They were, therefore, no mere irrelevant by-activity, as were, for example, the poetic dramas of Richelieu, but an integral part of his career as a man of action. They are also remarkable for the severely impersonal, detached tone of the narrative, and for the absence of rhetorical flourish or egotistical display. The Eoman simplicity of these writings has an austere beauty of its own ; Circero no partial critic said of Caesar's literary style, that fools might think to improve it, but only fools would try. Few lives, upon the whole, have manifested the high quality of moral unity in n6 MAKERS OF MAN the degree which we find it in Caesar's. 1 It has, too, the note of reticence, of a noble pride that disdains to justify itself to lower natures, confident of the integrity of its aims and secure of the favourable verdict of posterity. Truly, as Froude remarks, " this great man moved through life, calm and irre- sistible, b'ke a force of Nature." Of the boyhood of Charlemagne we possess few details, and the fact that he was already twenty-six when he succeeded his father necessarily deprives us of the opportunity of gauging at all fully his early bias for government and warfare. He had had the advantage of a long training in the adroit methods of Pepin the Short, but the skill with which he took up the reins and the unmistakable continuity of his policy with that of his predecessors, point decisively to the conclusion that he found both task and policy congenial. War was, of course, the main activity of his long and glorious reign, but amid the turmoil of his incessant campaigns and ever-growing burdens of responsibility, Charles, under the guidance of Alcuin, found time to supplement the deficiencies of his academic education by the study of Latin, Greek, rhetoric, astronomy, grammar, and logic. He naturally assimilated the current view that all learning was ancillary to theological and ecclesi- astical interests, became a keen controversialist, and the chief patron, if not the prime instigator, of a classico-theological renascence. Under his pillow he kept writing materials to note down suitable subjects for discussion. He loved to pose rich prelates by sudden demands for the solution of some subtle casuistical problem. In the Libri Carolini he maintained his own view with regard to the burning question of image- worship in the teeth of Pope Hadrian himself. Upon the whole, the intellectual pursuits of Charlemagne, like the literary activities of Caesar, form an integral portion of the general purpose of his career. Kichelieu, who was the youngest son of a man who rendered valuable services to Henri d'Anjou and was made grand provost 1 " Strictly ... we should not speak of solitary performances of Csesar ; he created nothing solitary. . . . Csesar is the complete and perfect man " (Mommsen). NATURAL VOCATION 117 of France, also inherited much practical ability from his mother, Suzanne de la Porte, the daughter of a famous avocat. Pro- fessor Lodge considers that we have no evidence that he showed any youthful precocity or gave any signs of his future greatness, while his health was from the first sickly in the extreme. He was at first intended for a military career, and the training which he received at the Academic to this end must have proved congenial, for in the course of his career he on several occasions, notably in Italy in 1630, took a leading part with evident gusto in the business of war. But on the refusal of an elder brother to be consecrated Bishop of Lugon, the du Plessis family, rather than forfeit the emoluments of the office, effected the transfer of young Armand to the ecclesiastical career. Five years later, at the age of twenty-two, he was consecrated Bishop, and by this time he seems to have con- ceived a definite purpose of achieving political distinction, his avowed model being the Cardinal du Perron, a notable anti-Huguenot champion. For several years, however, he remained quietly working in his diocese, but no doubt he was on the look-out for an opportunity of initiating a more pro- minent role. The death of Henri iv. evoked in him the deter- mination of making frequent visits to Paris. In 1610, aged twenty-five, he spent six months there, got to know Concini, and resolved to side with the Court against the nobility in the struggle for supremacy, which he clearly foresaw. Five years later, having got himself elected as deputy for the clergy of Poitou, he harangued the States-General for an hour in a speech which attracted great attention, and from this time Richelieu was a man of mark. The Church policy defined in this speech was distinctly Ultramontanist in tendency, representing rather the sentiments of the majority at the moment than those under- lying his own future career. The above outline of Richelieu's first steps in public life indicates an instinctive bias towards action, as unmistakable in its way as that of Caesar or Charle- magne. In regard to his literary pursuits, however, he is different in this respect, that they remained a mere by-activity, an irrelevance, and, one may even add, a waste product upon the whole. His indefatigable and lifelong industry in the n8 MAKERS OF MAN production of versified dramas never commanded any real success, and even the immense prestige of his political authority could not extort any substantial measure of recognition from contemporary judges of his merits as an author. If the truth were to be told, I daresay that his pretensions to poetic genius were the subject of many sly jests. In a less exalted or less ambitious field he was more successful ; his Instruction du Chretien passed, in his lifetime, through thirty editions. Nor must we forget that we owe to him the foundation of the French Academy, and, to his grant of a license for the publica- tion of the Gazette, 1 the inauguration of the French newspaper press. So that it is, after all, only in the narrowly personal eense that his literary aspirations proved barren of results. Caesar in his boyhood wrote poems, but soon felt and obeyed the stronger instinct summoning him to the arena of war and government. Similarly, or conversely, Dante for a time aspired to play a prominent part in the fierce politics of his day, but, sternly rebuffed by destiny, recoiled upon his inner life, and there achieved the mastery denied him in the objective sphere. He was a mere child of nine when, at the house of his parents, he first beheld Beatrice Portinari, and at once conceived that deep yearning passion which thenceforth became the central motif of his intense and lonely life. When he first began to write of his love we do not know, but it was nine years later when, having met her dressed in pure white and received her mute salutation, he returned home ecstatic, fell asleep, and while sleeping beheld a " marvellous vision." Awaking, he composed a sonnet beginning, " To every captive soul and gentle heart," which he sent to Guido Cavalcanti, who recognised the utterance of a brother poet and became his friend. At this time Dante also practised drawing, for we read of an attempt to delineate an angel " upon certain tablets," and we think it would not be difficult to give a name to the model who posed hi his mind's eye. Beatrice, as we all know, married another, and it may have been at her wedding that his visible and un- controllable emotion excited the derision of bystanders, and even, alas, of the loved one herself. She died soon after, and 1 To which he himself _was a frequent contributor. From t he portrait ly r. 182 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 183 however, he has left an enduring testimony to its existence, to say nothing of the improvement, rather the transformation, he effected in Elba during the ten months of his enforced resi- dence. The crucial question with regard to this man's place in history seems to me to be that of his relation to the French Re- volution. Up to the date of the conclusion of his Italian campaign (aet. 28), his actions, at least, are consistent with a loyal accept- ance of its fundamental aims and principles. But this was all changed the moment he saw a chance to force himself to the front, and, once there, all considerations of Republican consistency were soon cast to the winds. In the counsel dictated by Napoleon to Montholon, for his son, occurs the following : " I was obliged to daunt Europe by my arms. ... I saved the Revolution which was about to perish. I raised it from its ruins and showed it to the world beaming with glory. I have implanted new ideas in France and in Europe. They cannot retrograde." J There is much truth in this account of his achieve- ment ; the point is what he intended. Beethoven was not far out when, on learning that Napoleon had accepted the title of Emperor, he tore the title-page of his Eroica Symphony and trampled it underfoot, exclaiming, " After all, then, he is only an ordinary man ! " 2 By usurpation, and by his futile attempt to found a dynasty, Napoleon condemned himself as an ex- ploiter of the Revolution ; and of this treason many of his own sayings betray an uneasy consciousness. For all that, Napoleon certainly loved France, and probably there is justice in the claim he makes in the following assertion : "All that I wish, all that I desire, the object of all my labours, is that my name shall for ever be connected with the name of France." In other words, fame (as he understood it) was the primary object of Napoleon's endeavour. But how did he understand it ? " A great reputation," he said, " is but a great noise : the more there is of it the farther off it is heard." A grotesquely mater- 1 No thanks to Napoleon if they had not retrograded. As a matter of fact, they, of course, could and did. 2 Ordinary, that is, in motive and intention ; of his exceptional energy and ability there could, of course, be no possible doubt. 184 MAKERS OF MAN ialist conception of what constitutes fame : very nearly the opposite of the truth. Fame is rather a still small voice, hardly audible, even to the sharpest ear, during the lifetime of its subject, growing louder and clearer when the din of notoriety is hushed by death, enhanced through the ages by the acclaim of those who understand. " Securus judicat orbis terrarum." If the fame of Napoleon has much to fear, that of Abraham Lincoln has everything to hope from the future. In dealing with the problem of Vocation, I have already given some particulars of the growth of Lincoln's purpose, in its primary aspect of mere ambition for political power. I propose now to supplement this by a brief review of the evidence as to the transformation of this crude personal aim into the specific purpose of a death-grapple with slavery. Some idea of the penury and hardship in which Lincoln's early years were spent may be gained by a story he tells of an incident of his nineteenth or twentieth year. He was " bow hand " on a boat bound for New Orleans, and one day received half a dollar from each of two strangers he had rowed ashore. His amazement at the good fortune of having earned a whole dollar in less than a day knew no bounds. " I was a more confident and hopeful being from that time," he declared. He had already, by sheer force of will and hard study, acquired a wide fund of general knowledge, was a practised speaker and a keen politician. Two or three years later, in 1831, on a similar voyage, Lincoln first saw negroes chained and whipped. The scene made a deep and painful impression on his naturally tender heart, and henceforth dates a growing conviction that slavery is in essence wrong. It was, however, as yet merely a pious opinion, by no means the consciousness of a mission. In the absence of a strong anti-slavery movement, it is at least doubtful whether Lincoln would have made any attempt to promote one, for he was a practical politician, by no means a pioneer. His aim throughout life was rather the utilisation of existing opinions than the creation of new ones. In 1834 (aet. 25), and again in 1836, Lincoln was elected to the Legisla- ture of Illinois. Between these two events occurred in 1835 the death of a girl for whom he had an unrequited love THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 185 Lincoln was for several weeks nearly insane, and the illness brought his youth to an abrupt end. 1 In the meantime he had, however, acquired a legal qualification and begun to practise law ; and in 1837 made his anti-slavery debut by presenting to the Legislature of Illinois a memorial signed by himself and one other member, to the effect that they believed that the institution of slavery was founded on both injustice and bad policy ; but that the promulgation of Abolitionist doctrines tended rather to increase than abate its evils. Even this mild protest involved some risk to his popularity in a State where the pro-slavery sentiment was so strong as in Illinois. Lincoln was never in the full sense an Abolitionist, and " it was a principle with him never to advance beyond his party." This characteristic is well illustrated by his conduct in regard to religious belief. At New Salem, in his early twenties, Lincoln had studied Paine's and Volney's works, and was for a time a professed sceptic. In 1843, soon after recovery from a second and prolonged attack of mental alienation, and his marriage to Mary Todd, Lincoln was an unsuccessful candidate in the Whig interest for Congress, having now turned his attention from State politics to those of the Federal Union. His ambitious marriage and supposed irreligion were convenient weapons for political detractors, and were freely used against him. Lincoln took the lesson (so far as his doctrinal vagaries were concerned) so much to heart that " the most fervidly passionate expressions of piety began to abound in his speeches." Leland considers that this was not due to hypocrisy, or even to a mere time-serving obsequiousness, but that, as a staunch Republican, Lincoln " faithfully believed that whatever was absolutely popular was founded on reason and right." Vox populi, vox Dei, a sentiment which, it is alleged, really counts for something in the United States. The change of tone seems to have had good effect, for in 1846 Lincoln was elected to Congress in the Whig interest by an immense majority. He denounced the Mexican War, because the territory was coveted by the 1 In 1840, Lincoln had a second such illness, lasting nearly a year, pro- voked by another love affair. He married Mary Todd in 1842. 186 MAKERS OF MAN South for the extension of slavery (and against any extension of the evil he could not but protest), but nevertheless voted for supplies. In 1850 he was invited to stand again, but refused, and here, in his forty-first year, his hatred of slavery is visibly hardening into a definite resolve to take up the cudgels against it. " It is most probable," says Leland with regard to this temporary withdrawal from the arena, " that he foresaw the tremendous struggle which was approaching between North and South, and wished to prepare himself for some great part in it." Witness his own declaration : " The time will come when we must all be Democrats or Abolitionists. When that time comes my mind is made up. The slavery question can't be compromised." It is easy to see that if Lincoln, holding definite anti-slavery convictions, had now again entered Congress, he would either have had to be false to these or to take up a position in advance of his own party, thereby incurring the risk of losing his care- fully built-up popularity and much of his power for good. Neither alternative could be acceptable to a man of his tempera- ment : he saw the inevitable drift of events, and decided to wait until his party came up to where he himself already stood. Nor did he wait in vain. In 1854 his rival in chief, Douglas, introduced, and, after a tremendous struggle, carried, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, setting aside the Missouri Compromise of 1820, by which all territory North and South of the Missouri was to be for ever free. The North was furious, and Lincoln saw that his hour was come. In October, Douglas defended the Bill at Springfield (Illinois), and Lincoln, " a new and greater Lincoln, the like of whom no one in that vast multitude had ever heard," made a crushing reply. " The Nebraska Bill was shivered, and like a tree of the forest was torn and rent asunder by hot bolts of truth." Here, as yet, it was the extension of slavery rather than its mere existence against which Lincoln specially warned the nation. " He was willing to let it alone under the old compromise, though he did not like it." But in 1858, departing for once from his usual policy, he took a bold step in advance of his party. He had been chosen as Republican candidate of Illinois for the Senate, and, on the next THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 187 day, in the course of a stirring speech, declared himself as follows : " A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. ... It will become all one thing or all the other." In the Senatorial election which followed, Lincoln had really a 4000 majority, but by some legal quibble Judge Douglas ob- tained the seat. Lincoln was now famous, and began to be looked upon as a possible candidate for the Presidency. Next year (1859) he lectured in New York and toured New England, everywhere producing, by the studied moderation of his tone, a most favourable effect. " For the first half hour," says a contemporary journal, " his opponents would agree with every word he uttered, and from that point he began to lead them off little by little, until it seemed as if he had got them all into his fold." The development of Lincoln's purpose need not be followed beyond the year of his election to the Presidency (1860), on the platform of a stern refusal to sanction the extension of slavery. It was regarded and acted upon by the South as a declaration of civil war. In his farewell speech at Springfield, Lincoln (now aged fifty-one) showed a solemn sense of the im- mensity of his burden. " No one who has never been placed in a like position can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. ... I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God who assisted him shall be with me, I must fail." II. ^Esthetic Type. Under the heading of Natural Voca- tion I have already shown how, from a very early age, Dante displayed a strong tendency towards literature and art, and achieved an honourable recognition among the poets of his day. It was further shown how in early manhood he turned for a time to the field of municipal politics, and seemed likely to make these the central interest of his career. Then came the dis- illusioning shock of exile ; he had left his dearly loved and hated Florence for ever, to wander for years from place to place, embittered if not humbled, nursing the sense of injuries and the apparently hopeless craving for an adequate revenge. In the Vita Nuova, written between his twenty-seventh and thirtieth 188 MAKERS OF MAN years, but embodying many sonnets and poems of earlier date, Dante had already declared his intention of glorifying the memory of Beatrice above that of all other women. Soon after this, by enrolling himself in the guild of apothecaries, Dante took his first step in pursuit of political power, and his ideal projects were for a time in abeyance. In his thirty-third year at latest occurred his marriage to Gemma of the Donati, which was no doubt a further distraction. But "in his thirty-fifth year (1300) he began to devote himself to carrying into effect that upon which he had been meditating, namely, to rebuke and to glorify the lives of men according to their different deserts. And inasmuch as he perceived that the lives of men were of three kinds namely, the vicious life, the life abandoning vices and making for virtue, and the virtuous life he divided his work in wondrous wise into three books in one volume, beginning with the punishment of vice and ending with the reward of virtue." Such was, presumably, the plan from its first conception, but at the time when Dante in 1302 was condemned during this absence from Florence which he never again entered the seven cantos of the " Inferno " which he had already written, left behind in the city, were forgotten in the stress of that disastrous period, and the whole project dismissed from his mind. Five years later, Boccaccio says, these cantos were accidentally found among other papers in a chest by a nephew of Dante, who showed them to a critic, Dino Frescobaldi. This critic, " marvellously pleased " by the composition, forwarded it to the Marquis Moroello Malaspina in the Lunigiana, with whom Dante was then living, begging him " to exert his good offices to induce Dante to continue and finish his work." So urged to resume his work, Dante replied that he had indeed given up all thoughts of it. " But since it has pleased God that they should not be lost, I shall endeavour, as far as I am able, to proceed with them according to my first design." This anecdote is confirmed by the opening phrase of the eighth canto of the " Inferno," " lo dico seguitando." It is, however, probable that the preceding cantos, if they had indeed been written before the beginning of his exile, were in great part THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 189 re-written when, somewhere about 1307 (aged forty-two), the central task of his life was resumed by the poet. One can easily imagine how opportune the suggestion might seem how apt its appeal to the developed nature and special circumstances of the man. Censorious by nature, he saw and welcomed an opportunity to sit in judgment upon his age ; to speak his whole mind with regard to its crimes and follies, their authors and abettors ; to dole out approval and to lavish condemnation. Not that I mean to imply that Dante's many harsh verdicts were solely or even predominantly determined by personal resentments, by mere spite ; any more than I should care to exonerate him from all suspicion of such motives. He was a man of many hates and more scorns, of few admirations and fewer loves. Immensely superior in all essentials to the bulk of his contemporaries, he was and knew himself to be. The age that had used him so vilely needed to hear the hard truth about itself, and its chosen idols. All ages use their great spirits vilely ; hence all ages need the stern warning of inevitable defeat which Dante's fierce yet measured retaliation for once in a way supplies. Much pious horror has been expended on the detailed barbarity of the punishments described in the ' ; Inferno," but those who make these complaints can have little understand- ing and less imagination. Dante lived in an age when cruelty was a commonplace of existence, the age which produced the monstrous Ezzelino, and being, like all great poets, a realist, he inevitably derived his incident and imagery from the features of his environment. Those who look below the surface can see plainly that the tortures of his damned souls are not arbitrary inventions or vindictive retaliations, but the imaginative pre- sentation of vice in its essential monstrosity and self-destroying malignity. They are, as has been well said, " but the sins themselves, revealed in their essence, recognised by their results : the poet shows how the souls of his condemned have made their choice in this life, and how they work out their own damnation." So it is that Alberigo, the murderous friar, and Bianca Doria, can be found in the ice-bound pit of Cocytus, while yet both seem " In body still alive upon the earth." igo MAKERS OF MAN Literally taken, says Dante, the poem treats of the state of souls after death a clear hint that it has a deeper esoteric meaning. Nay, he explains further to Can Grande, that, " considered according to its allegorical meaning, the subject is Man, liable to the reward or punishment of justice, according as through the freedom of his will he is deserving or undeserving. The aim of the work is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to guide them to a state of happiness." That state of happiness, as described in the " Paradiso," is, taken au pied de la lettre, just as little satisfactory to our modern ideas as the misery of the " Inferno." Dante's is a very theo- logical and severely scholastic heaven. Interminable discussions of the fine points of doctrinal casuistry, varied by intricate manoeuvres and celestial pyrotechnics, do not make a too-alluring programme of eternal bliss. What really interests us throughout is the gradual unfolding of Dante's theory of values, his national and ecclesiastical ideals, his unsparing polemic against papal arrogance and corruption. As Mr. Owen has well remarked, " A reformed Romanism such as he (Dante) would have ap- proved, would not have varied greatly from some types of Protestantism," 1 He saw Italy converted by papal intrigue into the cockpit of irreconcilable factions ; his own ruin had been one of the direct results of the foreign intervention invited by the almost insanely ambitious Pope Boniface. The con- version by unscrupulous priest-craft of a purely spiritual author- ity to base material ends, was for him, as it was two centuries later for Luther, the source of nearly all the evils that afiected the body-politic of the Empire. His remedy was the firm resumption by the Emperor of the secular power pertaining to his high office, the strict limitation of the Curia to the ecclesias- tical domain. His grievance against Florence was not merely personal : he regarded her as the hotbed of pro-papal intrigue, the prime fomenter of treason against the Lord's Anointed. Hence the terrible epistle " to the most wicked Florentines within," in which he denounced her " who transgresses every law of God and man, and whom the insatiable maw of avarice urges into every crime." Hence the eager appeal to the 1 Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 104. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 191 Emperor Henry vn., when in 1311 he was besieging Cremona, to " leave all else and come and crush the viper Florence, the most dangerous and obstinate rebel against his authority." The death of Henry in 1313 was fatal to Dante's hopes, personal and political : he knew now that he would see Florence no more. Yet, everywhere, can he not gaze upon the sun and the stars ? can he not under any sky meditate on the most precious truths ? . . . Bread will not fail him. Brave words, concealing the rancour of an unhealed wound ! Somewhere about this time, if tradition be credited, he may have retired, seeking peace, to the Convent in the Apennines, " from which he gazed forth upon the perishing world of the Middle Ages, which was finding im- perishable monument in his work." To the same epoch, Mr. Gardner thinks, belongs " the moral conversion which, by his poetical fiction, he represents as taking place in the year of the jubilee, 1300." By the failure of all his material hopes and aims his purpose has been purged and strengthened ; his utterance has acquired the aloofness and universality of one who speaks, without fear or favour, what heart and genius reveal. By the enchantment of his art, combining in un- matched perfection, music, style, symmetry, and a sustained exaltation of spirit, he has made of a purely topical theme (one which in less capable hands might well have proved ephemeral, even revolting) a human document of inexhaustible significance, a poem of divine beauty, and, without prejudice to its artistic rank, a passionate rebuke of base aims and in- citement of high endeavour. With regard to Leonardo I have not much to add here to what has been said in a former chapter. The key to the under- standing of the man and his purpose (if he really had one) is undoubtedly to be found in his ruling motive intellectual curiosity. This was, in the first place, no doubt employed as a means to the perfection of his art, which he desired to methodise and intellectualise to a degree which no other painter ever attempted. Mere decoration he despised every detail of his work should be pregnant with dramatic signifi- cance ; every gesture symbolic of some phase of the human spirit. Thus in his great picture of the " Last Supper " (com- I 9 2 MAKERS OF MAN pleted set. 46), the problem worked out with consummate patience and skill is the effect of the utterance, " One of you shall betray me," on a group of men of various ages and tempera- ments. The twelve apostles fall into groups of three, an original and new device. Judas, however, leans sideways out of the group to which he belongs, his arm resting on the table, his glance fixed solely on Christ. He is painted as an extra- ordinary force the evil principle incarnate. Jesus alone is isolated, but dramatic unity is preserved by the fact that the looks and gestures of all centre on him. The other groups are all naturally and unobtrusively combined. The head of Christ is emphasised by a background of pale landscape and clear sky, whose luminosity surrounds it, as it were, with a halo of softly radiant light. 1 This one example of Leonardo's method suffices to justify his own dictum, that " by far the most im- portant point in the whole theory of painting is to make the actions express the psychical state of each character." But so it was with all his pictures : he approached them in the spirit of a mathematician who has a problem to solve. Sometimes he solved it to his own satisfaction ; sometimes, in a sort of despair, he left the work unfinished and passed on to other activities. In the end he largely wearied of the too limited interest of art-work, and plunged deeply into scientific and philosophical speculations. His random thoughts he jotted down in his note-books, but, having outgrown what little ambition he had ever felt, cared not to give them the finality of systematic expression. Truth to tell, I think he had a mean opinion of his fellow - men, and therefore, not greatly valuing their applause, lacked the compelling motive to any complete and rounded achievement. The very vastness of his powers and immensity of his interests were in some sense a hindrance to him, for, as Rochefoucauld keenly observes, " ce n'est assez d'avoir de grandes qualites ; il en faut avoir 1'econ- omie." Too proud or too self-centred for such economy, his genius proved less fertile than that of many lesser men ; and he gradually deteriorated into a sort of sublime dilettante, 1 For the above criticism I am indebted to the biography of Dr. Georg Gronau. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 193 through lack of that firm self-limitation which only a deliberately adopted purpose could have enforced. Yet it must after all be an enhancement of the great name of Leonardo, that his nature was essentially above ambition ; his ideals, aesthetic and speculative, too lofty to be exploited in the interest of material advancement. The glorious genius of Titian, on the other hand, was, in the hands of that master, but a means to the securing of wealth, luxury, and prestige ; and the second-rate motives of his art-life are clearly traceable in the sequence of his works. He failed to realise or to reverence the immense responsibility of his unique endowment ; sold the best part of his birthright for a mess of pottage ; preferred the compliments of an Emperor or the flagrant wit of an Aretino to the austere promptings of a divinity, which nevertheless re- peatedly asserted its power. Supreme as a painter he could not but be ; as an artist he fell short of his revealed potentialities, and sometimes failed even grotesquely ; as a personality he was, upon the whole, mediocre. Not, be it well observed, through the lack of a " message," a conscious didactic aim, or a philosophy with any or all of which we can cheerfully dispense in an artist. Merely because his purpose was extraneous to his art, whereas they should have been one and indivisible ; because his art was in some degree the bond-servant, the tool, of his ambition. An indefatigable bond -servant, a most effective tool without doubt ; but what functions to impose upon a divinity ! Not that the world has much right to cavil, which, if Titian had always maintained his art at his highest level, would no doubt have awarded him more kicks or, at any rate, fewer halfpence. The keenness of Titian in regard to pecuniary interest is well shown by his insistence in application for the reversion of the broker's patent held by Bellini at Venice under the merchants of the Fontaco de' Tedeschi. When, in due course, he succeeded to the office, he showed himself " much more anxious to receive the not inconsiderable emolu- ments than to finish the pictures, the painting of which was the one essential duty." When Alfonso's agent offered sixty ducats for the " St. Sebastian " he had painted specially for the Papal Legate, Titian was quite ready to accept the higher offer and 13 I 9 4 MAKERS OF MAN go back on his commission. His innate cupidity was further strengthened by his intimacy with the brilliant but infamous Aretino, under whose influence Titian became " at once more humble and more pressing." Nor can it be a mere coincidence that, side by side with " the growing worldliness and avarice of the man, we find a steady deterioration of his concept of woman- hood, and in his religious art an alternation of decorative superfluity with a sort of superstitious intensity and almost frenzied fervour. Right up to his ninetieth year, his power as a wielder of the brush grew steadily in breadth and assurance : the more striking, therefore, is his always wavering and ever diminishing grasp of the ideal. It is a far cry from the Giorgionesque refinement of the " Three Ages " and the " Temp- tation of Medea " 1 to the quasi-vulgarity of the " Rape of Europa " ; from the grave majesty of the " Cristo della Moneta," the divine serenity of the " Assunta," to the tragic awe, rather the remorseful terror, of the " Trinity " and the " Pieta." I have already shown, with reference to Cervantes, how his early attraction to a military career was rudely rebuffed by fortune. After six years' distinguished service, he had nothing to show but a crippled hand and some letters of recom- mendation from Don Carlos and Don John, which, being found upon him on his capture by Algerine corsairs, led to his being regarded as a rare prize and being treated with exceptional harshness with a view to the extortion of a higher ransom. His five years' slavery culminating in the attempt of the Dominican, Blanco de Paz, to ruin his reputation, completed the process of his disillusionment. " Algiers, which spoilt his life and ended his dream of romance, roused in him that finer humanity of which Don Quixote was the outcome." Among other things, he had learned that Christians had no monopoly of virtue, and henceforth showed " a degree of tolerance and charity for Mohammedans which was certainly unusual in that age, and unique in a Spanish great writer." Cervantes was thirty-three years of age on his return from Algiers, but nearly twenty years had yet to pass before he reaped 1 Commonly but erroneously entitled " Sacred and Profane Love," To/ace /. 194. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 195 the full harvest of enlightenment and garnered it in the pages of his masterwork. But in one at least of the twenty or thirty plays (mostly pot-boilers) which he wrote between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-one the sublime tragedy of Numancia he plainly revealed the immense power and audacity of his imagination. " In grandeur of conception, in the sublimity of its pathos, in intensity of patriotic feeling and concentrated heroic energy," says Mr. Watts, " it would be difficult to find a parallel for the Numancia in the whole range of tragedy." This of a play written in an age when the most banal artificiality was the prevailing, the almost universal, note of Spanish litera- ture, is not without significance. But the dregs of his cup of salutary humiliation were as yet undrunk. From his fifty- second to his fifty-sixth year he was, by force of strong necessity, employed in the uncongenial task of collecting dues for a military order in La Mancha. The Manchegans are among the rudest and least cultivated races of Spain ; and a collector is hardly in a position to become popular, even among the most amiable folk. Cervantes managed to offend the people of Argamasilla, and Rodrigo de Pacheco, a leading inhabitant, seized him and confined him " for long days and troubled nights " in a half- underground cellar of the House of Medrano. Here, at or about the age of fifty-four, under these tragi-comic circumstances, it seems that the inspiration came to Cervantes which resulted in the production of Don Quixote. In the church of Argamasilla there is a picture of the hidalgo, Rodrigo de Pacheco, praying with his niece, a picture painted in commemoration of his recovery from insanity. The features are not unlike those assigned to Don Quixote. It seems as though Cervantes, in a mood as near bitterness as was possible to such a nature, in a despair born of unmerited humiliation and complete disillusion- ment, had chosen the perpetrator of this outrage as the symbol of the false idealism which he had so much reason to detest. If, in the execution of the work, his genius compelled him to do full justice to the nobler side of the chivalric ideal, that is only what might have been expected from a writer incapable of real malice or long-cherished resentment. The first part, written spontaneously and without any fixed plan, was completed in a 196 MAKERS OF MAN couple of years, and published in a very imperfectly-corrected form in his fifty-eighth year (1605). It was the deathblow to pseudo-romance from that year no new book of chivalry was written, nor one old one reprinted. The second part promised by the author, which, by the way, was forestalled by an obscure pseudonymous travesty gravely suspected to be the work of his dramatic rival, Lope de Vega, appeared in 1615. In this part the Don has grown " into a larger and purer nature, . . . is less the man out of his wits and more the man of understand- ing. . . . The parody of the old romance is, to a large extent, dropped." It is, indeed, as Mr. Watts observes, a marvel " that this book with its frolic, grace, its abundant wealth of humour and perpetual flow of life and invention, ... so brimful of love and hope, should be the work of a man approaching the seventieth year of a life of trouble, of toil, of privation, and of disappointment such as few men, and among them no great writer, ever lived." The purpose of Cervantes has proved somewhat vague and elusive ; to seek that of Mozart is like seeking for the pot of gold fabled to be buried at the foot of the rainbow. The flawless unity of his genius not merely baffles but defies analysis : Mozart was essentially an improvisator, a musician by instinct. And it is to be remembered that he died at the close of his thirty-fifth year. And so the Mozart known to the world is mainly a Mozart great by endowment rather than by volition, one who lived in a dreamland of sensuous rapture, insensible to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. " The good old time is past," says Nietzsche, " it sang itself out in Mozart how happy are we that his rococo still speaks to us, that his 'good company,' his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and in flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief in the South, can still appeal to something left in us. . . . Mozart the last echo of a great European taste which had existed for centuries." Yet there was another and greater Mozart, a Mozart who cried in anguish to God for the peace and security denied by Fate, in which to do justice to his genius ; who awakened at last from his easy optimism to find his wife a mere valetudinarian wreck, five of his six children dead, his CKRVANTKS. f/. 1 06. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 197 financial condition hopeless, and his very life ebbing away. So awakened, by a supreme effort of will he turned his back on all that, dedicating the dregs of his vitality to Art and Art only. This Mozart of the last phase, who had barely a year to live, was the purposeful Mozart, the freemason who in Die Zauber- flote shows a clear prevision of the Drama of Reason versus Authority the saint who in the Requiem Mass bade a sublime heartbroken yet unrebellious farewell to life and its infinite possibilities. // Mozart had lived / " To speak it in a word, the cultivation of my individual self, here as I am, has, from my youth upwards, been constantly, though dimly, my wish and purpose." This frank declaration is, I believe, the true key to an understanding of the complex personality of Goethe. The words " constantly, though dimly," are, however, of special significance ; up to three years after the time of his entering the service of the Duke at Weimar up to his thirtieth year Goethe's various activities and interests had been largely dictated and controlled by impulse, although the instinct for self-discipline and unity was no doubt in latent existence. One of the really important landmarks in the early life of Goethe was the gift of a puppet-show " setting forth the story of David and Goliath," which he received from his grandmother at the age of five. " On the boy," he tells us, " it made a very strong impression, which echoed into a great long-enduring influence." The seed had fallen on fertile ground, and germinated accordingly ; it is by the observation of such trifling indications that watchful parents can discover the fundamental proclivities of their children. This dramatic bias was fortified by the influence of Thorane, a French officer of aesthetic tastes, who was quartered upon the Goethe family during the poet's tenth year. Many French plays were being acted in Frankfurt ; Goethe made the acquaintance of a lad belonging to the Company ; frequented the green room ; saw many things there which it would have been better for his morals if he had not seen, and inevitably tried his hand at writing a play. Like most " spoilt boys," Goethe soon got into bad company, and the Gretchen imbroglio, an episode of his teens, was the natural result of the premature stimulation of ig8 MAKERS OF MAN his senses. At Leipsic University (set. 16 to 19), though he was nominally studying law, and though he made some desultory experiments in drama, most of Goethe's time was devoted to philandering, if not to actual dissipation. A long and severe illness followed, but in his twenty-first year, having entered Strasburg University, one of the great intellectual impulses of his life came to him from the reading of Shakespeare. " The first page of his I read," he declares, " made me his for life ; and when I had finished a single play I stood like one born blind, on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment. I saw, I felt in the most vivid manner, that my existence was infinitely expanded. ... I did not hesitate a moment about renouncing the classical drama. The unity of place seemed to me irksome as a prison, the unities of action and of time burden- some fetters on our imagination." While in this mood of spiritual emancipation and enlargement, Goethe lighted on the autobiography of the iron-handed knight who played so great a part in the Peasants' War of the Sixteenth Century. In Goetz von Berlichingen, " who had not allowed his spirit to be broken by the tyrannical forces of his period, but had asserted his individuality and had been loyal to his loftiest aims," he found " a medium for the expression of his own aspirations." The result was a play written off-hand in six weeks in the winter of 1771 (set. 22), which "revolutionised the German drama," and may plausibly claim to have originated the historical romance of Scott, its translator. The influence of Shakespeare is clearly seen in the irregularity, spirit, and variety of the play, but Mr. Hayward considers that Goethe has assimilated the melo- dramatic rather than the truly dramatic element of the historical pieces. There can be no doubt, however, that Goethe's dramatic bias was quickened, the formulation of definite self-conscious aims promoted, and his conception of art permanently modified, by the study of Shakespeare. The incubation, perhaps even the conception, of at least the first part of Faust, belongs to the same period ; the actual writing of it began in his twenty- fourth or twenty -fifth year, while the completion of the entire poem occupied him at intervals for nearly sixty years more, until the very eve of his own dissolution. Goethe's tempera- MOZART. To face p. 198. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 199 ment, of course, included as part of his maternal inheritance a large proportion of German sentimentality, counterbalanced, fortunately, by the solid bourgeois characteristics which in- creasingly prevailed. Moreover, he lived in a sentimental age, an age of outworn ideals and somewhat florid romance. The reading of Hamlet intensified, for Goethe and his friends, the symptoms of their malady ; to be world-weary and intro- spective was decidedly a la mode. Goethe trifled with the idea of suicide, took a dagger to bed with him, and, like the harper in Wilhelm Meister, " pressed himself back to life by a contiguity with death." Much of this virus of morbidity, however, he excreted by writing The Sorrows of Werther (1772, set. 23), a tale built up round the semi-idiotic suicide of an acquaintance, who had fancied himself blighted by a hopeless love. After the completion of this work, the instant and sensational success of which no doubt greatly strengthened his confidence in his literary vocation, Goethe " felt, as after a general confession, once more buoyant and free." Another great factor in his progress towards a conscious ideal of self-discipline and self- culture was the reading of Spinoza's Ethics, with which he became first acquainted about this time. He found in this book a message of hope, cheerfulness, and courage, without illusions ; its intellectual content strongly influenced his future work in poetry, drama, and fiction. "For many years he returned to it again and again." He was on the right track at last, yet up to the time of his leaving Frankfurt (set. 26) had not, Mr. Sime thinks, by any means become reconciled to himself or the world. The Lili episode had intervened, ending, of course, in further disillusionment, not to say humiliation. But in his thirtieth year, when he had been about three years in the service of the Duke, at Weimar, a profound change, due not only to all the influences we have traced above, but also, in part, probably, to the healthy effect of useful prosaic employment, passed over the character of Goethe. He made a strong effort to acquire firm control over mind and body, to renounce " time -destroying sentiment and shadow -passions," and to work steadily for well- developed aims. The crude romanticism of contemporary literature became repugnant to him (e.g. he loathed Schiller's 200 MAKERS OF MAN Robbers l ) ; his manner acquired calmness and reserve, not without hauteur, perhaps, for after all he was the intimate of a reigning Duke ! "I will yet be master," he writes (aet. 31). " No one save he who wholly renounces self is worthy to rule or can rule." Goethe deceives himself here ; he, at any rate, never renounced self, or seriously desired to do so. His real permanent aim was the purely self-centred one of a rounded development of all his powers by their vigorous and constant employment. This aim we have seen fairly inaugurated, and we need not delay to watch its long pursuit, or to appraise the degree of its attainment. But with reference to what might be called Goethe's conversion, and to all conversions, I will enter this caveat, that they can seldom be regarded as purely mental and voluntary processes. The functional change, the shifting of the centre of vitality, is by no means to be overlooked. " Quand nos vices nous quittent, nous nous flattons de la creance que c'est nous qui les quittons." A purpose, once formed, may inhabit a psychic medium and react thence on the physical organism. But in its formation the body certainly takes a hand. The temperament of Beethoven was more purposive, because more self-conscious, than that of Mozart. He lived much longer, for one thing, but that is not the sole explanation of the contrast. He spoke in his childhood of one day becoming a great man. From the first he had a high sense of his dignity, based without doubt on a consciousness of exceptional powers. When a nobleman at Count Browne's interrupted Kies and himself by talking while they played a duet, " Beethoven stopped playing, saying in no gentle voice, ' I play no more for such hogs ! ' In the exclusive society of Vienna he was, as a young man, accepted at his own valuation, although with refreshing brusquerie he ignored all the nuances of conventional usage. The calamity of deafness which overwhelmed him at thirty may explain the fact that, though constantly " in love " with one fair aristocrat or another, Beethoven did not marry. Or there may have been some other physical disqualification, 1 Oblivious of the fact that he had made his own dramatic debut by cele- bration of the career of a robber chief, and on very similar lines. 2 La Rochefoucauld, Reflexions Morales. r.OETHK. From a I'lock lent by Messrs. IY. Rider <5- Son Ltd. To face f>. 200. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 201 unknown and unacknowledged, even to himself. On the other hand, his own justification of his solitary life, which irked him greatly at times, clearly implies a growing conviction that celibacy was imposed upon him by duty to his art-vocation. " For thee, poor Beethoven," he wrote after his rejection by Therese, " there is no outward happiness : only in the ideal world wilt thou find friends everything must emanate from thy inward self." When one thinks what the loss of his hearing meant for Beethoven, what it must have been for him, of all men, to live in perpetual silence, it may sound heartless to say that he owed much to that loss, and that the world was the gainer thereby. The storm raised within his proud spirit by this ruthless blow may be dimly imagined by help of the following words, written in 1801 (set. 31) : " Your Beethoven is very unhappy, at strife with Nature and Creator." And again, " Too often have I cursed Him for exposing His creatures to be the sport of accident. ... I have again and again cursed my existence. ... It would not take much to induce me to put an end to my life. Only my Art restrains me, and it is impossible to leave the world before I have finished all I feel capable of doing." These words must, I am convinced, be accepted literally as a simple statement of fact. But for the purpose that impelled him, the ideal he aspired to, Beethoven could not have lived out his life ; and this is perhaps as good an example as one could find of the intensification of personality and the positive attitude towards life effected by definite self- conscious aims. The results of the fiery ordeal through which Beethoven had passed, and of the dearly-won victory achieved over his own rebellious instincts, are clearly indicated in the fifth (C minor) Symphony, published in his thirty-eighth year. " In this Symphony Beethoven is born, the great free courageous Beethoven, whose power is light from within. The limitation, the suffering is overcome." l From the four opening notes, ominous of impending disaster, a whole theme is built up. " If one," says Mr. Shedlock, " were forced to name the most representative work of Beethoven in the plenitude of his power, it would surely be the 'C Minor.' ... We cannot help ] L. Nohl. 202 MAKERS OF MAN feeling, quite apart from the ' Tims Fate knocks at the Door,' explanation of the four opening notes . . . that some great drama is being enacted in tones." The composer informed Neate that he always worked to a picture or programme in his mind, and actually contemplated the publication of an edition of his works in which the poetic basis of each should be set forth. To give some faint conception of what life was to Beethoven, of the cruel isolation imposed upon him by Fate, of the strength implied by his triumph over such conditions, I will quote a vivid description of him as he appeared in his later years. It was at an inn in Vienna, where a few congenial spirits had met, that he unexpectedly entered. " All were full of the greatest respect when he came in, the man from whose lion head streamed grey locks like a mane, who, on entering, cast around a sharp look, but wavered in his movements as if he walked in a dream. So he went in, sat down to his glass, smoked out of a big pipe, and closed his eyes. When spoken or rather shouted to by an acquaintance, he opened his eyelids like an eagle startled out of sleep, smiled sadly, and handed the speaker a memorandum-book with a pencil which he drew from a breast pocket. After the question was answered he sank again into meditation. But sometimes he drew a thicker book oub of the pocket of his old grey overcoat, and wrote with half-shut eyes. ' What is he writing ? ' inquired our informant one evening from his neighbour, Franz Schubert. ' He is composing ! ' was the answer." * With regard to Walter Scott, although he was rather forced into Literature by the sheer strength of his talent, than guided by any deliberate choice or preference, it seems that his decision (set. 17) to read for the Bar, instead of adopting his father's occupation of Writer to the Signet, was due to a feeling that this would be more compatible with literary pursuits. He must therefore at this age have had some intention of utilising his gift " as a staff " at least, if not " as a cratch." Four years later (set. 21) Scott was duly called to the Bar, and it was at about this time that he, in company with Robert Shortreed, made his first visit to Liddesdale. These " raids " became an 1 L. Nohl. BKETHOVEN. To /Hit /. 702. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 203 annual institution, continued for seven successive years, in the course of which Scott explored every rivulet to its source, and every ruined " peel " from foundation to battlement. " He was makin' himsel' all the time," said Mr. Shortreed, " but he did not ken, maybe, what he was about till years had passed." In this connection it is instructive to recall Scott's own remark as to the respective attractions of antiquarian study and of literature. " People may say this and that of the pleasure of fame or of profit as a motive of writing. I think the only pleasure is in the actual exertion and research, and I would no more write on any other terms than I would hunt merely to dine upon hare-soup. At the same time, if fame and profit came unasked, I would no more quarrel with them than with the soup." In 1798, Scott (set. 27) married a Miss Carpenter, and in the following year published his translation of Goethe's romantic drama, Goetz von Berlichingen. Lockhart points out the derivation of the death scene of " Marmion," and the episode of the storm in Ivanhoe from Goethe's play, and there can be little doubt that the productive impulse of Scott was greatly stimulated by contact with the genius of the German poet. Three years later appeared two volumes of his Border Minstrelsy, a collection of ballads both ancient and modern, of which one critic remarked that it " contained the elements of a hundred historical romances." Scott had now, therefore, ample material at his disposal, and at about this time began to write The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the irregular metre of which seems to have been suggested by his having heard a year or two before, a casual recital of Coleridge's Christabel. While Scott was at work upon The Lay he received a visit from Words- worth (at Lasswade, Sept. 1803), who records the impression that Scott, though confident of his ability to earn more by literature than he would ever wish to possess, was at heart less interested in his literary labours or reputation than in his bodily sports, exercises, and social amusements. Fifteen months later The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published. It scored an instant and triumphant success. " In the history of British poetry," says Lockhart, " nothing had ever equalled the demand for the Lay." Scott cleared 769 by it ; it was obvious, therefore, 204 MAKERS OF MAN that Providence intended him for the not quite gentlemanly profession of literature, and with true Caledonian sense and piety he accepted his fate ! But his true life-purpose, like Titian's (but with a difference), really lay outside the sphere of his Art, which was for him, too, always a means (to pecuniary and social success), never an end in itself. The fact no doubt is, as Lockhart shrewdly suggests (apropos of Scott's modest refusal to be named in comparison with Burns), that the very facility with which he produced, the sheer immensity of his talent in genius he was by no means immense caused Scott to undervalue his own productions. What came from his pen so spontaneously and so inexhaustibly, he could not seriously regard as of great value. His instinct perhaps warned him that the day of Homeric naivete (appearances notwithstanding) had passed, never to return. So he made hay while the sun shone first poetical hay, then, when that crop thinned and its market proved precarious, wain upon wain of wholesome bountiful prose fodder. The SherifHom, the clerkship of Session, the editing of Dryden, the partnership with Ballantyne, the Quarterly every probable or improbable source of material advancement was eagerly seized upon ; and when, in his fortieth year, the first 100 acres of his Abbotsford estate became his property (so soon to grow to a thousand), the chimera was born in his brain which usurped there the place of a purpose worthy of power so tremendous. Turner's career has this in common with Walter Scott's, that his instinctive bias towards the art he practised (which in his case declared itself definitely at the age of five) was so over- whelming as to render it independent of any formal determina- tion. He was a painter by necessity of inborn temperament and power ; and on this necessity, from first to last, the achieve- ments of his long and arduous life were based. He accepted it, certainly, in more wholehearted fashion than Scott ever did ; loved his work and his pictures more even than the money he loved so much too dearly and, so far, may justly be regarded as a purposeful individual. But a man of purpose in the higher Goethean sense, that is, a man of clear self-consciousness, of well-defined aims, he never was nor could have been, since he SIK \\AI.TKK SCOTT. /"<>//. 204. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 205 lacked the essential factor, of intellectuality, of the degree such attainment implies. It is hardly too much to say, that, though never idle, indeed, always extraordinarily industrious, Turner drifted through life, and was only saved by the sheer constraint of the genius that would not let him rest from becoming the victim of his inordinate sensuality. In other words, though a very great artist, his personality, though by no means lacking in fine points, 1 must in many respects be pronounced common- place, and, in some, ignoble. This reading may seem too severe, and is odious to write, but I think it is borne out by the facts. If it make Ruskin turn in his grave, so much the worse for Ruskin, whose hero- worship was carried to unbounded lengths. " He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them which I never intended." This is Turner's own verdict on his commentator, and the reader may choose between the belief that no such meanings are to be found in the pictures, and that, though there, Turner did not consciously intend them. He was a man of superb imagination, but it was mainly of the sensuous order. Gustave Flaubert was a man of intense and concentrated purpose but it is a purpose by no means easy to define, at any rate in its later stage of full and mature development. His imaginative bent was decisive from the first, and was fostered in childhood by the influence of a nurse deeply imbued with the folklore and tradition of the country-side. Pere Mignot, too, a friend of the family, liked nothing better than " to spend long hours in reading Don Quixote to the handsome dreamy boy." And his parents, if, as appeared later, they wished to make a lawyer of him, erred fatally in encouraging his taste for literature and for amateur theatricals. He did, indeed, go so far as to attempt the study paternally prescribed for him, but soon gave it up in despair. " I can see nothing more stupid than jurisprudence, if it is not the study of it," 1 To save a patron, involved in pecuniary difficulties, from sacrificing some valuable timber, Turner secretly forwarded a large sum, probably 40,000. He was repaid through the agent, his name never being disclosed. 206 MAKERS OF MAN he writes. " I work at it with profound disgust, and that deprives me of all heart and spirit for everything else." After all, his father was a wealthy man, not likely to be particularly harsh to any one, least of all his only son. Gustave drifted into literature by natural compulsion of inability to take any real interest in other activities. The form which that literature assumed, his passionate veracity realism, if you prefer the label was presumably not unrelated to the fact that his father was an able and enthusiastic surgeon, who no doubt knew how to inspire kindred spirits with something of his own devotion to the scientific ideal. To such a man, as Mr. Tarver justly remarks, a deft operation or a fine dissection makes a strong aesthetic appeal : they are things of beauty to his discerning eye. Gustave and his little sister had often watched through the keyhole this worthy man, immersed in the work he loved. He inevitably, therefore, imbibed a high scorn for all squeamishness in his own work : determined that, the day of honeyed fantasy being over, Art should learn from Science the secret of unflinching courage and unbending loyalty to the fact. Flaubert, in his early youth, had been remarkable, not only for his heroic stature and beauty, but for superabundant vitality and rollicking spirits. With this, however, was associated a general hyperaesthesia, which, on his reaching the age of twenty-one, culminated in a severe hystero-epileptic attack. To this illness, and to the extremely drastic treatment which he underwent in consequence, I have already referred. I mention it now, because, in my opinion, it has an important bearing on the natural history of his artistic aims and the determination of his career as a Recluse of Art. Years afterwards, Flaubert writes thus to George Sand : " What you say to me of your dear little ones has moved me to the bottom of my soul ! Why is that not mine ? Yet I was born with the capacity for all tenderness. But one does not make one's destiny, one submits to it. I was a coward in my youth. I was afraid of life. Everything gets its reward." This " fear of life," to which Flaubert refers more than once, may have been originated, must at least have been greatly intensified, by the vital depletion consequent upon his illness Tl'RNER. Engra-'C.H-y J . fl. //,, //>< anginal sketch. To/accf-. 206. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 207 and its treatment. Flaubert saw clearly that to accomplish anything really great in literature, it was necessary to con- centrate his energies, and severely to limit himself by the repudiation of collateral activities. Even marriage would be a fatal distraction, a "horrible apostasy." Thus he writes to a woman who made a desperate attempt to annex him : " When a man wishes, be he small or great, to concern himself with the works of God, he must begin, if only from considerations of health, by putting himself in a position in which he cannot be duped by them." From his thirtieth to his fifty-eighth (last) year, he lived quietly and laboriously at Croisset, only leaving it for occasional visits to Paris, and, in I860,] for inspecting the site of Carthage. His " practical dogma for the artist's life " was, that " one must take one's existence in two parts : live like a bourgeois, and think like a demi-god." Had Flaubert, in the work which he took so seriously, any didactic aim ? No more uncompromising champion of the " Art for Art's sake " view ever lived. He shall speak for himself. " I read at Jerusalem a Socialist book (Comte's Essay on Positivism). It was lent to me by a wild Catholic, who insisted by main force that I should read it in order to see, etc. etc. I turned over some pages of it : it is consumingly stupid. . . . There are in it immense mines of comedy, quite a California of the grotesque. There is, perhaps, something else as well. That may be. One of the first studies to which I shall betake myself on my return, will certainly be that of all these deplorable Utopias, which agitate our Society and threaten to cover it with ruins. . . . What does the face that to-morrow will bear matter ; we only see the face of to-day. It cuts hideous mugs truly, and therefore enters the better into romanticism." No doubt Flaubert believed that great Art has (incidentally) a moral influence and function ; that the heroic attitude of the artist will be insensibly conveyed to the mind of his worthy reader. Thus in his Address to the Middle Class, on the refusal of the Town Council of Rouen to sanction a monument to the poet Bouilhet, he wrote : l " Germany has been sufficiently 1 After the Franco-Prussian War. 208 MAKERS OF MAN joked, I presume, on the subject of her theorisers, her dreamers, her misty poets. You have seen, alas ! where her mists have brought her. I have an idea that the dreamer Fichte re-organised the Prussian army after Jena, and that the poet Koerner sent some Uhlans against us about the year 1813." In the end, Flaubert's ever-increasing hatred of the sordid utilitarianism which he, sometimes unjustly, attributed to the bourgeoisie of his day, altogether conquered his objection to the didactic in Art. His last, and perhaps greatest work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, 1 is from beginning to end a passionate protest (by exposure of results) against the meanness, frivolity, shallowness, futility, and spite of average commonplace men and women. 1 Flaubert read and annotated some 1500 volumes in preparation for the writing of the 400 octavo pages of Bouvard et Pecuchet, which he had all but completed when he died. GUSTAVK FLAUBERT. IX THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE Continued III. Intellectual type IV. Ethico-religious type The higher criticism V. Recapitulation. III. Intellectual Type. Of the boyhood and early youth of Bacon we know little, except that he entered Trinity College in his twelfth year, and acquired there a reputation for pre- cocious learning and for hostility to the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy. But at the age of twenty-four he published a short Latin treatise, whose title, Temporis Partus Maximus, speaks volumes concerning its author's ambition. His aims from the first were twofold, practical and theoretic ; the first perhaps moderate but by no means moderately desired ; the second, vast, almost illimitable, in scope. Bacon's primary motive in seeking public office may have been personal ambi- tion, the craving for wealth and power, but that he also sincerely desired the advancement of the national welfare is a fact no competent judge will deny. In politics he began and ended as a moderate reformer ; in regard to the religious controversy, he advocated tolerance of both Puritan and Romanist extremes. He was no democrat. " I do not love the word ' people,' " he confessed, holding that good was to be done for, not by, them. It may be counted to his credit, that, by his opposition to her unconstitutional attempt to force the Commons to confer with the Lords on Supply (1592), he, at the outset of his political career (aet. 31), incurred the resentment of Elizabeth. And to this fact the slowness of his advance to high office was no doubt largely due. Not until Elizabeth had been four years dead, did he (in 1607, at the age of forty-six) reap the first- fruits of his fifteen years' urgency in solicitation by obtaining 14 210 MAKERS OF MAN the posts of Solicitor-General and Clerk to the Star Chamber. The Advancement of Learning had appeared two years before he thus at length set his foot on the ladder of power. His income was now 5000 per annum, equivalent to about eight times as much in the present day. However much it might be, it would never suffice him : he shared to the full the love of pomp and magnificence characteristic of his day, and to this fact, and his consequent embarrassments, the tragedy of his fall was in great measure due. So much for the practical aims of Bacon's life, which are, after all; of slight interest in comparison with his philosophical projects. In the De Interpretation Naturce Pro -osmium, written somewhere between his forty-second and forty-fifth years, Bacon wrote as follows : " If a man should succeed not in striking out some new invention, . . . but in kindling a light in nature, ... a light that . . . should presently dis- close ... all that is most hidden and\ ecret in the world that man would be the benefactor indeed of the human race. . . . For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of truth." Thus clearly, in the noontide of his power, Bacon epitomised the large constructive aim, of which, in its negative phase, the germ had appeared in his boyish antipathy to the barren logic-chopping of the University. In the Ad- vancement of Learning (published, in its first form, at forty-four), Bacon is, however, still greatly occupied in controverting the old unfruitful way of philosophising ; and even in the Novum Organum, which, after twelve years of annual revision, if not re-writing, saw the light in his sixtieth year, the old cudgels have by no means been laid aside. " The Logic of the Novum Organum," says Prof. Nichol, " differs from the old in seeking ' non argumenta sed artes,' in rejecting the syllogism and avoid- ing hasty generalisations, and in assuming nothing as true without experimental verification. . . . He thought to discover a method (of investigation) so exhaustive as to be as certain in its results as a demonstration of Euclid, so mechanical that when once understood all men might employ it, yet so startling that it was to be as a new sun to the borrowed beams of the stars." But, after all, it is in his own words that the SIR K. HACON, VISCOUNT ST. AI.KANS. EngrarcJ H -V. freeman. To face />. 210. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 211 central purpose of his life has been most tersely and compre- hensively stated : " Meditor instaurationem philosophise ejus modi quae nihil inanis aut abstracti habeat, quseque vitas humanse conditiones in melius provehat." In describing the vocation of Galileo, I have already alluded to his boyish fondness for constructing toys and models. Mis- trust of scholastic methods was in the air of the latter part of the sixteenth century, and it is therefore not surprising that, while studying medicine at Pisa, Galileo, like Bacon (his senior by only three years), attracted notice by his boldness in contro- verting the dogmas of Aristotelianism. What is more note- worthy is, that already, before he was out of his teens, mere iconoclasm did not suffice Galileo " he felt himself destined to found a new school, rational and experimental." Medical study proved uncongenial ; he gradually became absorbed in mathematics ; and discovered the isochronism of the pendulum. For this idea epoch-making for astronomy he may have been indebted to Leonardo, for it seems that Mazenta, the preserver of that artist's manuscripts, was one of Galileo's fellow-students at the University, and many of the suggestions there mooted re-appear in his writings. At what precise period Galileo became a convert to the Copernican theory is uncertain probably soon after he received (set. 26) the Pisan lectureship in mathematics ; at any rate, he asserts that he taught the recognised Ptolemaic system for some time after he had privately become convinced of its fallacy. If as is probable Sagredo, in his Dialogue on the Ptolemaic and Copernican Systems, re- presents his own personality, we have an interesting glimpse of the method by which he was led to investigate the new theory. He makes Sagredo say he has noticed that whereas converts to the Copernican view had always been first on the Ptolemaic side, and were well acquainted with both systems, upholders of the absolute theory were always quite ignorant of the new one. Hence Sagredo (i.e. Galileo) became " very curious to dive into the bottom of this business." In 1592 (a:-t. 28), Galileo left Pisa and took up the post of professor of mathematics at Padua. The University was in ill odour with the Jesuits at Padua, and his association with it may have had much to 212 MAKERS OF MAN do with the persecution he subsequently underwent. In 1609 (set. 45), Galileo constructed his first telescope, and as it was this achievement which, by furnishing the means of his astronomical discoveries, really formed the basis of his im- mortality, I will quote the account he gives of his extremely characteristic method of procedure. Rumour had reached him of the haphazard construction by a Dutch spectacle-maker of a tube, by looking through which far objects were apparently brought close to the eye. He at once set himself to consider the feasibility of such an instrument. " I argued as follows : the contrivance consists either of ooe glass or more one is not sufficient, since it must be either convex, concave, or plane ; the last does not produce any sensible alteration in objects, the concave diminishes them ; it is true that the convex magni- fies, but it renders them confused and indistinct : consequently one glass is insufficient to produce the desired effect. . . . Bearing in mind that the plane glass causes no change, ... I therefore applied myself to make experiments on combinations of the other two kinds, and thus obtained that of which I was in search." This inductive and experimental procedure is now so much a matter of course, that the reader will perhaps hardly realise how revolutionary it was in 1609. Wielded by a man of such mental resource and fecundity as Galileo, it pro- duced results which to his contemporaries must have seemed well-nigh miraculous. The astrologers trembled when celestial bodies were related to the homely earth by his announcement of the four moons which revolved about Jupiter. " Oh, my dear Kepler," he writes, " how I wish that we could have one hearty laugh together. Here, at Padua, is the principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here ? What shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly ! And to hear the professor of philosophy at Pisa labouring before the Grand Duke with logical arguments, as with magical incantations, to charm the new planets out of the sky." But even Kepler, the would-be " legislator of the skies," has to be rebuked for presumptuous apriorism, when, by an unsupported GALILEO. From a picture by Ramsay in Trinity College, Ca To face p. 212. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF .PURPOSE 213 theory, he attempts to " account for " the number of Jovian satellites, and for those which he expected to meet with else- where. " How great and common appears to me the error of those who persist in making their knowledge and apprehension the measure of the apprehension and knowledge of God. . . . Nature has other scales of perfection, which we cannot compre- hend, and rather seem disposed to class among imperfections. . . . God, with no regard to our imaginary symmetries, . . . has shaken the stars out from His hand as if by chance." How well Galileo learnt the true significance of the revolt against scholasticism and the determination to replace it by tentative and inductive procedure, which were the negative and positive aspects of his lifelong purpose, is proved by the following rebuke of a too credulous pupil : " You almost make me laugh by saying that these clear observations are sufficient to convince the most obstinate. . . . Not even the testimony of the stars would suffice, were they to descend on earth to speak for them- selves. ... Of advancing in popular opinion or gaining the assent of the book-philosophers, let us abandon both the hope and the desire." That, in the face of such obstacles, men can persist in their self-imposed tasks, and carry them through, surely suggests, at least, that purpose is not merely formal, no barren concomitant of predetermined activities, but a thing of power, deeply-rooted in reality, a dynamic impulse, capable of reacting, for good or evil, upon life and circumstance. In point of intellect, William Harvey was by no means the equal of Galileo. He was no philosopher : a man of acute penetration rather than of deep and comprehensive mind. His purpose is, therefore, more tangible, more specific, and, epoch-making as it nevertheless proved, more limited, than that of the Italian physicist and astronomer. Harvey graduated at Cambridge in 1597 (set. 19), having presumably profited by the noble example, possibly from the personal encourage- ment and interest, of Johannes Caius, " an enthusiastic student, and the friend of all the great scholars of the day." He then travelled through France and Italy, and at the Jurist University of Padua became a pupil of the surgeon and anatomist, Fabricius, then engaged in perfecting his knowledge of those valves of the 214 MAKERS OF MAN human veins which he had, not indeed discovered, but rescued from oblivion. Misled by the current theories, Fabricius remained quite at sea as to the function of the valves whose anatomy he had so well described. The heart was looked upon as, primarily, the centre of vital heat ; and this heat or " caloric " was itself an entity. The heart was supposed, by an active dilatation, to suck blood out of the veins, to impart vital heat to it, and then to expel it into the veins again. The arteries were supposed to contain air, rhythmically absorbed and expelled through pores of the skin, in order to " fan " or cool the blood. Such movement as the blood underwent was, on this view, not (as Harvey has taught the world) a circular movement through the arteries to the extremities and back through the veins, but a to-and-fro movement in the veins alone. Fabricius accord- ingly regarded the valves as a mere safeguard against overfilling of the veins of the extremities, but failed to" see _ that they practically inhibited any flow through the veins 'except towards the heart. " How Fabricius, a man who did such work," says Dr. Osier, " could have been so blinded as to overlook the truth which was tumbling out, so to speak, at his feet, is to us incomprehensible. But his eyes were sealed " by that most impervious of all bandages, a preconceived theory. " Was it while listening to the ingenious explanation of his master," the false explanation, " that in a period of abstraction . . . there came to Harvey a heaven-sent moment, a sudden inspira- tion, a passing doubt nursed for long in silence, which ultimately grew into the great truth of 1613 ? " * However this may be, Harvey, on his return home after five years at Padua (a3t. 24), soon embarked upon a long course of dissections and vivisections, one result of which was that his lectures at the Royal College of Physicians, begun in his thirty- eighth year, revealed an intimate knowledge of the anatomy of sixty kinds of animals to say nothing of a perfect familiarity with that of the human body. As to the motive that impelled him to such indefatigable research, he shall speak for himself. " At length, and by using greater and daily 1 The quotation is from Dr. Osier's Harveian Oration of 1906. The elate given is presumably a misprint. Harvey began to lecture in 1616. WILLIAM HARVEY. M.D. Engraved l>y S. Freeman. To face f. 214. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 215 diligence, having frequent recourse to vivisections, employing a variety of animals for the purpose, ... I thought . . . that I had discovered what I so much desired, with the motion and the use of the heart and arteries." In his Lumleian Lectures, begun in 1616, Harvey opened that long battle with scientific error, and tireless championship of his hard-won truth, which mainly occupied the rest of his eager life. It was twelve years later that he published his book to the world. In Descartes we have an interesting example of intellectual crisis : from the day in his twenty-fourth year when he de- liberately chose his own path, his whole mental activities were confined to a predetermined course and method. It was in 1619, when Descartes, who two years before, desirous of travel, had joined the force of Prince Maurice at Buda, was in winter quarters at Neuburg. From the age of eighteen he had been specially drawn to the study of mathematics, wherein he found the logical symmetry and clearness as yet lacking in the more concrete departments of science. " I determined one day to study within myself, and to employ all my mental force in choosing the paths which I ought to follow. ... I remained all day alone, shut in a warm room, where I was at perfect leisure to occupy myself with my own thoughts." The result of this deliberation was a firm decision to discard all traditional preconceptions and to build on the sure foundation of incon- trovertible fact. Also and here the influence of his Jesuitical training is clearly seen he resolved to maintain a distinct barrier between the departments of science and faith. With regard to mathematics, he said long afterwards : " I was astonished that foundations so strong and solid should have had no loftier superstructure raised on them." The object he now set before himself was the extension of mathematical method, its clearness in demonstration, completeness in analysis, precision in measurement, to the pursuit of knowledge in general. But how was the complexity of nature to be so simplified as to admit of this ? A mode of quantitative ex- pression at once infinitely diversible and continuous was evidently needed ; and, three years later, during a phase of curious exaltation, a " marvellous discovery " of the key to this problem 216 MAKERS OF MAN dawned upon his mind. Matter he regarded as synonymous with extension " Give me extension and motion, and I will construct the world." Mathematics, he thought, could best be treated symbolically, as in algebra ; and quantities were most clearly and simply expressed by lines. The need of complicated figures was largely obviated by algebraical expression of their purport. By the combination of algebraical and geo- metrical method (analytical geometry), Descartes therefore found himself in a position to solve many new and otherwise insoluble problems, and believed it possible to express all the relations of motion and extension, that is (for him), all factors of the phenomenal universe. All natural processes, from the simplest to the most complex, were to be conceived as mechani- cally - determined throughout, consequently as measurable, that is, reducible to the mathematical laws of figure and motion. 1 Such was the fundamental conception, to the development of which Descartes henceforth devoted his life. What, however, he largely failed to realise, was that the content of Science must be of empirical origin. Scepticism, for him, had done its work when it had examined his metaphysical " first principles " God, the thinking subject, extension, motion, clear perception as the criterion of truth, etc., and failed to refute them. Starting from these first principles, he believed it possible to deduce the scheme of the universe a priori, with, perhaps, occasional recourse to experiment or observation, much as a schoolboy may turn up the " answers " in his sum-book, by way of making sure he is on the right track. If ever there were a born thinker a thinker by instinct it was Spinoza. He lived not merely for, but in and by, philosophy,: his purpose, his philosophy, and his life, are one and the same thing. To understand the first, we must consider the influences which contributed to the determination of the second and the third. To begin with, Spinoza was a Jew who disliked Judaism, who, from the first, was out of sympathy with its formalism, and the hard, limited anthropomorphism which it has bequeathed to Christendom. There you have the root-motive of his philoso- phising : to think his way out of prison, and to build a new 1 " All my physics is nothing else than geometry " (Descartes). THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 217 Palace of Thought for his own soul and for the souls of other free men. He began, of course, as a theologian, studying the Talmud in his teens under Rabbi Morteira ; also the works of the Jewish philosophers, who, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, " strove by free critical interpretation of Scripture to systematise theology on an Aristotelian basis." " In the tenets and questionings of these men he found," says Sir F. Pollock, " much more than his teachers expected him to find, or were themselves capable of finding." How should he not, since they offered a way of escape 1 Maimonides, for example, taught that the " will and the wisdom of God are inseparable ; that He co-exists with creation as its cause in actu, not precedes it as its cause in potentid ; that perfect intellect knows not good and evil, only true and false, and that the conceptions of design and final cause have no application except as to things created in time." Chasdai Creskas (a writer expressly quoted in one of Spinoza's letters) taught " that God is determined to creation by love at once a necessity of His nature and an act of will ; that human volitions are determined by motives as much as anything is determined," that free actions are only free in the sense of not being externally constrained was, in short, a thoroughgoing determinist. If he also conceded the necessity of a special revelation of God's nature, that was an interpolation so obviously at variance with the tenour of his argument that young Spinoza would not fail to perceive the incongruity. It is with books as with food, we assimilate only what agrees with our constitution. It was possibly by Francis van den Ende, a physician of rationalistic proclivities, who taught him Latin and (Pollock thinks) the elements of physical science, that young Spinoza was introduced to the works of Giordano Bruno and Descartes. The former he must have found congenial and peculiarly stimulating ; that he closely studied the works of the latter is proved no less by internal evidence of its influence, than by the fact that his first published work the only one to which he ever set his name was an admirable summary of the " Principles of Philosophy," which appeared in his thirty-first year. Bruno not only used the words " mode " and " attribute," which are so prominent 2i8 MAKERS OF MAN in Spinoza's technical vocabulary, but maintained that the First Principle is infinite in all its attributes, and that one of these is extension. With regard to Descartes, though Sir F. Pollock may be right in maintaining that Spinoza was never a Cartesian, there can be no doubt that he learnt much from his predecessor, and embodied many of his conclusions scientific, however, mostly, rather than metaphysical in his own works. That Spinoza, a thoroughgoing monist, rejected the Cartesian severance of spirit and matter, is a point of great psychological interest. The root-explanation is to be sought in the contrasted characters of the two men. Descartes was a timid man, with a perfect horror of embroiling himself with the Church. Although professing to base his philosophy on the principle of universal doubt, he explicitly exempted matters of faith, and, practically, that also of the existence of the Deity his proof of which is conceived in the very spirit of scholasticism, and has convinced only those who have desired conviction. I do not impugn the sincerity of his intention : he was more sophistical than he realised, and I do not believe that he was quite easy in his mind as to the validity of his own theistic argument. There is an excess of emphasis, a tendency to reiteration, which I find suspicious. He once let slip in a letter the remark that God might be identified with the order of Nature. He certainly quibbled about the movement of the earth and about transub- stantiation. It was necessary to keep in with the Jesuits. The role of the Cartesian Deity is to stand with one foot on each side of the gulf that divides two incommensurables thinking substance and extended substance, soul and body. This kind of unity might be good enough for a philosophical mathematician, but not for a philosopher sans phrase. Stimulated by the failure of Descartes, Spinoza, fresh from the reading of Maimon- ides, fearlessly adopted the only possible solution of the problem. Thought and extension should not be independent substances, but parallel attributes of the one infinite substance, the God who " co-exists with creation, as its cause in actu, not precedes it as its cause in potentid." His God was explicitly and un- compromisingly what Descartes' God was, at most, covertly and inferentially one with the order of Nature, albeit experience RENE 1 DESCARTES. From a block lent by Messrs. U r . Rider <5- Son, Ltd. Ta/act/>. 218. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 219 reveals to us only two of the innumerable attributes which reason postulates for the Absolute. But in thus outlining the ultimate reaction of Spinoza's mind to Cartesianism, we are to some extent anticipating the course of events. Before he could philosophise on his own account, he had to come to terms with the questions raised by his theological training. It is true that the leading ideas of his system are said to have been submitted to de Vries and other friends, in outline, in his thirty-first year (1663), but the Ethics was not completed until he was about forty-two, while the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published four years earlier, and was no doubt the fruit of long research and medi- tation. It is a powerful plea for liberty of thought and speech, " in which he plunges into an investigation of the nature of prophecy, the principle of Scriptural investigation, and the true provinces of theology and philosophy, anticipating with wonderful grasp and insight almost every principle and not a few of the results of the school of historical criticism which has arisen within the last two or three generations." In it Spinoza " appeals from the Churches to the State, as representing the worldly common-sense of the lay mind." The jealousy with which Spinoza guarded his intellectual freedom is well shown by his refusal (set. 30) of the flattering offer of the Chair of Philosophy at Heidelberg. He had no time for teaching ; moreover, something had been said about not disturbing the established religion, and he could not tell within what bounds he ought to confine himself in order to escape any such charge. When the Ethics was completed, Spinoza visited Amsterdam with a view to arranging for its publication. But rumours of its " atheistical " tendency had gone abroad ; the venture seemed inopportune, and Spinoza, confident of ultimate recognition, calmly resigned himself to delay. The Ethics appeared, posthumously, with other works, and was promptly interdicted by the States of Holland and West Friesland. I will conclude this brief account of the develop- ment of Spinozism by summarising Sir F. Pollock's estimate of the sources of its several elements. Taking his Jewish theo- logical training and environment ( 1) as the starting-point, we trace 220 MAKERS OF MAN the pantheist and mystical element (2) to medieval Jewish philo- sophers and to Bruno. The Scientific element (3) is largely derived from Descartes, and the monistic position (4) by reaction from the same source. The idea of natural law, particularly in psychology (5) remains, and is, in Pollock's opinion, "the most independent work of Spinoza's genius," although we have seen it clearly suggested in the quotation from Chasdai Creskas. " His account of the passions, as worked out in the Ethics, is his masterpiece, still unsurpassed." But it would be an absurd error to conclude, that, because we can identify some of the stones which went to the building of his House of Thought, Spinoza is to be regarded as a mere eclectic, not a man of creative intellect. The unity that combines the diverse elements of Spinozism is not mechanical, but spiritual. His theory of the Absolute has revolutionised theology, a word which I use deliberately and in its widest significance. 1 It is exceptional, even among philosophers, to find such unity and consistency of aim as characterise the life of Spinoza. Among scientific discoveries, like Newton for only the most insular of Britons could pretend that Newton was a philosopher such unity as we do find will, in most cases, be that of mental attitude rather than formal achievement. Still it is true that in the lives of most scientific discoverers there is, not only some central interest, but some specific aim, culminating in a central and peculiarly characteristic discovery. From this point of view, Newton's work in optics and in mathematics, important as it was in itself, will always be secondary to his formulation of the theory of gravitation, to which, genetically, it in fact served as introduction and training. Newton entered Trinity in 1660 (set. 17), knowing little of science. In Cambridge, " the real birthplace of his genius," all his great discoveries were made, and there the ensuing thirty-five years of his life, up to the date of his appointment to the Mint, were almost exclusively spent. Like so many men of genius Napoleon, Scott, Goethe, Leibnitz, Bacon, Descartes, for example Newton seems to have been instinctively drawn towards 1 That is, as practically equivalent with " ontology," a title perhaps destined to supersede it. SPINOZA. From the stafite by Marc Antocolsky, To face p. 220. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 221 occultism at various periods of his life. I have mentioned how, as an undergraduate, he was led to the study of mathe- matics by the desire to test the claims of astrology. We may note, in passing, that Newton is said by Dr. Law to have set up furnaces in his youth and spent several months in quest of the " philosopher's tincture." Copious extracts from Behmen's works were found among his papers, and there exist many sheets of his own extracts from the occult works of Flammel and Yworth. What concerns us now, however, is his acci- dental discovery of his very extraordinary gift for mathematics. As a testimony to his facility in this department, I will cite the story told of two problems sent in 1697 by Bernouilli to the chief mathematicians of Europe. Leibnitz is said to have asked for an extension of the six months allowed for their solution, to a year. Newton solved both on the day of receipt, and his anonymous solution was recognised as his by Bernouilli, " tanquam ex ungue leonem." Newton obtained his B.A. degree in 1665 (set. 23), and in due course a Junior Fellowship, the M.A., and a Senior Fellowship, finally, the Lucasian Pro- fessorship in Mathematics. The year following his graduation (1666) is a notable one : in it he established the different refrangibility of light rays, and formulated his Binomial Theorem and method of Fluxions. In taking up the subject of optics, he was following the example of many contemporary investigators : its problems were in the air, so to speak. But, as bearing on his greatest achievement, the mathematical discovery concerns us more closely. The problem was to find a general quantitative method of expressing various curves, and estimating the areas enclosed by them, and also the con- tents of spherical bodies. Tentative work had been done on these lines by Kepler, Cavalieri, and Descartes, while Roberval and Fermat had made a near approach to success. At the out- set of his mathematical study Newton had read a book on The Arithmetic of Infinites, by Dr. Wallis, an Oxford geometrician. Wallis found that if the equations of a number of curves were arranged in order of simplicity, beginning with that of a straight line, the equation of a circle was intermediate between the first and second terms, that is, between that 222 MAKERS OF MAN of a straight line and a parabola. He considered that if the areas of curves were similarly arranged, that of the circle would be in like manner intermediate between the first and second terms of such a series. The results obtained by Wallis were, however, of limited application, and Newton, pursuing the investigation, obtained a general method of inter- polating terms in a given series. In applying the same process to the ordinates of curves, " he discovered the general method of reducing radical quantities composed of several terms into infinite series, and was thus led to the discovery of the cele- brated Binomial Theorem." Henceforth he discarded Wallis's principle of interpolation, and employed his new method for the rectification of curves and the determination of surfaces and solids, and the positions of centres of gravity. Further, " he discovered the general principle of deducing the areas of curves from the ordinate by considering the area as a nascent quantity increasing in proportion to the length of the ordinate and supposing the abscissa to increase uniformly with the time. To the velocities with which every line, surface, or solid is generated, Newton gave the name of ' Fluxions.' . . . By thus regarding lines as generated by the motion of points, surfaces by the motion of lines, and solids by the motion of surfaces, and by considering that the ordinates, abscissae, etc., of curves thus formed vary according to a general law depend- ing on the equation of the curve, he deduces from this equation the velocities with which these quantities are generated ; and by the rules of infinite series he obtains the ultimate value of the quantity required." The treatise in which Newton described this important discovery was not published until 45 years after it had been made. 1 This reticence may be largely attributed to his hatred of controversy, and the sore- ness consequent upon the extreme virulence of the criticisms encountered by his optical discoveries. It may also be partly due to the fact that his mathematical researches were undertaken in great measure as a means to astronomical investigations, and the less valued, therefore, on their own 1 The principle is described in the first edition of the Principia (1687), but the notation is withheld. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 223 account. For it seems clear that at the very time when he thus grappled with and conquered the problem of precise measure- ment of curves, spheres, etc., and the determination of centres of gravity, his mind was brooding over the vast cosmic enigma for whose solution just such measurements were required. There is here every appearance of deliberate purpose, and 1 trust the reader has noted the inevitability of the sequence of events by which, hitherto, Newton's mind has been lured into its appropriate path. We are still in the year 1666 Newton's twenty-fourth. Owing to an outbreak of plague he removed for a time from Cambridge to Woolsthorpe, and in a garden there the tree was long pointed out from which that memorable apple is supposed to have dropped. Newton, sitting there, was reflecting on the power which attracts bodies towards the earth's centre. He considered whether it might extend to the moon and retain her in her orbit ; then he thought of the planets as retained by a similar power in their course round the sun, which course he then erroneously supposed to be circular. Kepler, in his Harmony of the World (1619), had already surmised that some power resides in the sun, governing the motions of the planets in orbits, and " even went so far as to suggest that this power diminished as the square of the dis- tance of the body on which it was exerted ; but immediately rejects this law, and prefers that of the simple distances." J Bouillaud, in his Astronomica Philolaica (1645), says, re attraction as a cause of planetary motions, that " if it existed it would decrease as the square of the distance." Bouilli (1666) the very year we are dealing with attributed to a common cause the lunar and terrestrial movements and those of the Jovian satellites. And in March of this year Dr. R. Hook had read to the Royal Society an account of his investigations of the weight of bodies at different distances from the centre of the earth. Newton, perhaps on the strength of Kepler's hint, perhaps entirely on his own account, believed that the force of gravity would prove to vary inversely as the square of the distance. But on calculation, on the basis of a supposed 1 Kepler speaks of gravity as a mutual corporeal attraction between similar bodies, and maintains that the tides are due to the moon's attraction. 224 MAKERS OF MAN circular orbit of the moon, and an erroneous estimate of the earth's diameter, he could not make the hypothetical force of gravity correspond with known facts as to the earth's pull on her satellite. He therefore abandoned the problem and returned to his optical researches. Thirteen years later (1679) his rival Hook (still hot on the trail) supplied one of the missing links by proving that projec- tiles acting under a force varying inversely as the square of the distance from its source will move in elliptical orbits. Newton thereupon demonstrated that a planet acting under such a force will describe an elliptical orbit, in one of whose foci the attractive force resides. Three years later the final clue was obtained in the form of a corrected estimate (supplied by Picard) of the earth's diameter. Newton resumed his long-abandoned calculation ; and so intense was his excitement on finding that the expected result was likely to be obtained, that he was com- pelled to relinquish the task to a friend. " The force of gravity which regulated the fall of bodies at the earth's surface, when diminished as the square of the moon's distance from the earth, was found to be almost exactly equal to the centrifugal force of the moon as deduced from her observed distance and velocity." Another three years brought Newton's long task to a close. His Principia was completed in 1685, and presented to the Royal Society in 1686 twenty years after the conception of its fundamental proposition, that " every particle of matter is attracted by, or gravitates to, every other particle, with a force inversely proportional to the squares of their distances." One of the supreme tasks of the new science of Critical Psychology will be the deliberate revaluation of current con- clusions as to the comparative merits of the world's greatest men. It is useless to plead that " comparisons are odious," because we must have standards of value, and it is from such sources alone that they can ultimately be derived. Compari- sons waiving hypocrisy are keenly relished by all, except those whose deficiencies are thereby revealed. This by way of preface to the remark that it is by no means necessarily the greatest men who achieve the greatest (even posthumous) SIR ISAAC NEWTON. Engraved by K. Scrit'cnfivm the original picture by I 'anderbank in tke fossessio of the Royal Society. To fact p. 224. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 225 renown. An ideal purpose may realise itself concentratively, as with Spinoza, or dispersively, as with our next subject, Leibnitz. Of two men differing only in this respect, the fame of the first will necessarily outstrip and surpass that of the second, although it in no way follows that there will be a corresponding difference in the worth of their respective achievements. Spinoza's wise economy of his meagre physical resources was practically forced upon him by ill-health. His magni- ficent work was impossible on any other terms. It was for the sake of the work, not for what it might bring him of wealth or renown, that he lived so ascetically and so withdrawn from the world. The motives of Leibnitz were not less pure, but his method was the very reverse. It seems to have been a matter of complete indifference to him what particular task he worked upon : to each and all he brought the same lofty spirit, the same unwearied zeal. His America was everywhere where he found work to be done. This generosity was of course exploited by worldlings, who know too well the art of making genius their tool. Intellectually, Leibnitz was at least the equal of Spinoza. Schwegler says that, after Aristotle, he was the polymath of the greatest genius who ever lived. But for every man of culture who knows or cares anything about him or his work, there are fifty who can prattle about the Ethics or the Tractatus. Yet through all the multifarious interests and activities of Leibnitz, legal, mathematical, ecclesiastical, political, and metaphysical, run the two interwoven strands of a single undeviating purpose. If Spinoza lived in his philosophy, so, conversely, Leibnitz philosophised in his life. He was not more a philosopher in composing the Thfodicfe than in seeking common ground for Catholic and Protestant, advocating the use of the vernacular for scientific literature, trying to avert from Holland the destructive ambition of Louis xrv., projecting his Calculus Philosophicus, or compiling the Annals of the House of Brunswick. " His mind was ... a focus in which the scattered tendencies and aspirations of his age united." The twofold object which he kept ever before him was " to pene- trate, on the one side, to the very root and origin of existing ideas, and, on the other, to apply them to practical ends." 15 226 MAKERS OF MAN Of the studious habits of his boyhood I have already spoken : a point of some interest is his early admiration for Lord Bacon, whose influence may have determined his choice of the Law as his main subject at Leipsic University ; and is also clearly seen in his political and religious aims. He was, however, a discriminating admirer : from first to last he refused to lend himself to the depreciation of Aristotle and the ancient philo- sophers in general, which had in his day become the mental pose of all progressives, a fashion in which Bacon had certainly showed no lack of zeal. Leibnitz, for all his acuteness, inclined rather to appreciation than to censure. By the time Leibnitz reached the age of twenty (viz., in 1666) he had gained the degrees of Master of Philosophy at Leipsic and Doctor of Law at Altdorf University, had refused a professorship (shrinking from the defects and narrowness then characteristic of German University life), had in a dissertation, De Prindpio Individui, already revealed the germ of his Monadology, and in his theses, Specimen DifficuUatis in Jure and Specimen Certitudinis in Jure, had indicated the two great objects of the modern science of Law : " a philosophical inquiry into the principles of Right, and a systematic arrangement of the matter handed down to us." He had the old philosophy as well as the new (Bacon, Descartes, etc.) at his finger-tips ; had a sound legal training, unbounded aspirations, deep but enlightened faith, and a determination to extend to the utmost his already consider- able proficiency in the higher mathematics. In a treatise, De Arte Combinatorid, he had, in fact, shown the dependence of scientific progress on mathematical precision of method, advancing the symbolism of algebra as a type of such precision. At Niirnberg, where he now spent a year, Leibnitz joined a branch of the Rosicrucians. As secretary, he had to register the experiments made by members, and thus added to his equip- ment the elements of chemical knowledge. But the next great landmark in his career is his meeting at Frankfurt (1667, aet. 21) with Baron von Boineburg, a diplomatist in the service of the Catholic Archbishop of Mainz, which led to the crystallisa- tion of practical aims as essential to the expression of his genius as the vast theoretical aims already conceived. For Boineburg THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 227 and Archbishop Schonborn, from the Catholic side, were work- ing for a religious concordat, a work in which Leibnitz, from the Protestant side, enthusiastically concurred. Though un- able to accept the current theology of the Mother Church, he always maintained that he belonged, spiritually, to the unseen Catholic community. At Paris, in 1672 (set. 26), Leibnitz met Huygens, by whose aid and encouragement he made great strides towards mastery of the higher mathematics. He was, in fact, on the eve of an important discovery that of the infinitesimal calculus, already attained, but not revealed, by Newton. Boineburg and (soon after) the Archbishop died in 1673, and Leibnitz, thus freed, returned to Paris and occupied himself with the measurement of curves and areas. By the end of 1675 he had fixed the notation of the integral and differential calculus, and a year later (ast. 30) had for- mulated most of its rules. In pursuit of this discovery Leibnitz worked on different lines from Newton's, looking first, not for the finite quantity which was the ratio of two infinitely small ones, but for the finite sum of an infinite series of such infinitesimals. In working out his integral calculus, as well as the differential which immediately followed, Leibnitz did not, like Newton, at first content himself with an approximate result. " He sought fundamental principles, and did not rest until he had found a general result and fixed it by a clear trans- parent notation." Consequently his discovery was eagerly taken up by James and John Bernouilli and others, and proved more fruitful than that of his English rival. In 1676 (set. 30), Leibnitz, after a week spent in London, visited Spinoza at the Hague, and there saw and perhaps made extracts from the MS. of the Ethics. This brings us to the last point I shall now deal with, namely, the influence of Descartes and Spinoza on his philosophical development. In both he found much to admire, and much which, ultimately, he rejected. As against the former, he became convinced that neither extension nor motion could be regarded as the essence of corporeal things, any more than thought, strictly so called, of spiritual. He pointed out that the quality of inertia, inadequately recognised by Descartes, indicated a substantial nature lacking to mere 228 MAKERS OF MAN extension, proved that bodies had active essence. He did not accept even extension with the naivete of Spinoza, but regarded it (in anticipation of Kant) as an abstraction necessi- tated by the grossness of our senses. His unit of reality was the " monad," a mathematical point, having in lieu of extension an infinite background of ideal potentialities. 1 All monads he endowed with some degree of " perception " ; all reflected in some degree, however inadequate, the univer- sality and unity of God. Further, Leibnitz differed from Spinoza in regard to the rejection of final cause and purpose from the Absolute. The causal nexus was for him but an appearance ; external events are not mechanically but ideally determined, and subserve ideal ends. The quest of these ideal ends (postulated by his " Law of Sufficient Reason ") was the real task of philosophy, complementary to the scientific task, so greatly facilitated by his own achievements, of summarising mathematically the observed uniformities of the external world. Here, then, we have the twofold aspect of his intrin- sically single purpose : the advancement in all possible ways of the new scientific methods, and the correction of their tendency towards a falsely-mechanical conception of reality by reinstatement of the idealism of Plato and Aristotle. The main purpose of a philosopher is apt to be a fruit of slow ripening, because an essential part of his equipment is an omnivorous appetite for knowledge, which has to be satiated before he can begin his proper task, or even adequately conceive its nature and scope. He must, in fact, be a scholar before he can set up as a teacher ; and with every generation the magnitude of this preliminary task and the danger of its swamping his individuality increases. Hence the probability, deplored by Nietzsche, "that the philosopher will grow tired even as a learner, or will attach himself somewhere and ' specialise ' ; so that he will no longer attain to his elevation, that is to say, to his super- spection, his circumspection, and his despection. Or he gets aloft too late, when the best of his maturity is past, ... so that his view ... is no longer of much importance." In 1 1 surmise here an unacknowledged debt to the occult philosophy of his Rosicrucian associates. LEIBNITZ. From a Painting; Tafaccf. 228. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 229 describing the vocation of Kant, I have already mentioned the fact that he began largely as a physicist rather than a meta- physician, lecturing and writing on mathematics, astronomy, geography, in addition to logic and philosophy. This encyclo- paedic role was of long duration ; only after his thirty-eighth year (1762) he began to devote himself more and more exclusively to the true task of his life. Between 1760 and 1765 that is, almost midway in his career Kant seems to have passed through a sort of crisis ; and hereabout I should be inclined to date the crystallisation of his (at first) mainly negative or critical purpose. The study of Hume, Locke, and other sceptics had begun to unsettle his confidence in the soundness of the traditional metaphysic, what one might call the neo-scholasticism of Wolf in particular. The effect of Hume's rather crude realism upon the subtler German intelligence of Kant must have been in part liberating and in part provocative. Consider the following passages : (1) " 'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses ; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind, etc." (2) " What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collec- tion of different perceptions, united together by certain rela- tions." That Hume altogether underrated and completely failed to give any coherent account of the " act of the mind " referred to in the first passage, is hardly surprising in one who could speak of that mind as a " heap or collection, etc." To throw light on this obscurity began to be the absorbing task of the " great Chinaman of Konigsberg," a task in which he found full scope for the iconoclastic tendencies of his essentially nonconforming temperament, 1 and, at the same time, congenial opportunities for the sly interpolation of a saving element of transcendentalism. Kant knew well that the mind of a man neither begins as tabula rasa, nor ends as a scrap-heap, and this much at least he has proved beyond fear of ref citation. But in answering the question whether there is not more in the mind " Every man his own doctor, every man his own lawyer, every man his own priest that was the ideal of Kant. . . . Sacerdotalism was abhorrent to him. During his manhood he never entered a church door." 230 MAKERS OF MAN than has been given in experience, it certainly makes a difference whether, with Kant, we confine ourselves to the experience of the individual, or, in modern fashion, include in our survey that of the whole race, and what lies behind it. From the latter point of view it is an arguable position that the vaunted apriority of space, time, and the categories of the understanding are, after all, but psychical correlates of some part of the cerebral structure, fundamental predispositions of that embodied racial and sub- racial experience which we call the brain. Kant was fifty-seven years old when, in 1781, he published his Critique of Pure Reason, the product, he tells us, of twelve years' reflection, but written in four or five months. He had thus completed the negative part of his purpose : the assign- ment of the boundaries of human reason, its limitation to the knowledge of appearance, plus the indeterminate inference of a reality of some sort beyond. It was, for a man of his tempera- ment and history, a foregone conclusion that he would not permanently rest content with such purely negative conclusions. After all he was a German, and a man of genius. The ideal world must somehow be reinstated, for he believed in its existence. Ideal conceptions were in his opinion generated by the necessity which compels the reason to complete the unity of a given synthesis, its inability to rest in finite data. Thus the Soul, the Universe, and God are the postulated unities of consciousness, external phenomena, and existence in general, and, as such, legitimate enough. In his Critique of the Practical Reason, published seven years after the work just referred to, Kant develops the ethical consequences of this view. Man as a part of nature is subject to necessity ; man considered as a spiritual being is, or should be, free and self-determined. Our desires must be subject to the " controlling consciousness of member- ship in an ideal community of rational beings " (W. Wallace). We must assume our freedom in order to achieve it. " Never act unless you can also will your principle of action into the rank of universal law." So acting, for the good of all men, we may assume the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as guarantees of progress towards, and ultimate attain- ment of, the ideal of moral perfection. It is to be noted that the From a block lent by Messrs. '. Ki<{er&> Son, Ltd. To face p. 230. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 231 God of Kant is not anthropomorphic but post-Spinozan, the central unity of universal law, the Infinite Ideal the Absolute. The prevailing note in Kant's temperament might be described as a well-balanced tendency towards negation. In- dividualist, republican, celibate, he was in all things moderate, and in many abstemious. For him the key to mastery in life and thought is found in a stern self -limitation. It is a formula that works, but it is not the best formula. Hegel, on the contrary, stands for self-fulfilment, and despite the superficial air of pedagogism and formality that we find in him, was really of a much more impulsive nature. Compare the fulness and sanity of his career, as citizen, husband, churchman, and pro- fessor, with the non-committal attitude of Kant. Compare, too, the extravagance of his early views his Jacobinism, his out- spoken repudiation of Judaism, and Christianity with the moderate, but comparatively unprogressive, spirit of his pre- decessor. Hegel's purely negative phase, if acute, was of short duration ; his was essentially a constructive mind. The true dawn of his (specific) purpose dates from about the time of his break with Schelling in 1803 (aet. 33), and the publication, soon afterwards, of his Phenomenology of Spirit. A deep student of Spinoza and Kant, he was dissatisfied with the objective bias of the one and the agnosticism of the other. Spirit must, he thought, be conceived rather as subject than as substance ; while the conclusion of Kant, that intelligence is itself unin- telligible, was one which he could not and would not accept. For the gulf fixed by Kant between reality and appearance was, for Hegel, a gulf between the true self and its objective mani- festations. A further stimulus to the formulation of his purpose was, no doubt, his growing distaste for the facile intuitionalism of Schelling. With many of Schelling's results he had found himself in agreement ; what he felt the lack of was any serious attempt at a logical deduction of those results. Another important factor in determining the form of his constructive aim was the strong admiration he had conceived for the Hellenic ideal of corporate socio-political unity. He recognised what was true in Protestant and rationalist individualism thus he spoke admiringly of the French as freed and invigorated by " the bath 232 MAKERS OF MAN of the Revolution " but this modern ideal of liberty had some- how to be reconciled to the classic ideal of the State as embodi- ment and realisation of the collective will of its members. In the conception of Spirit as universal self-consciousness, realising itself by a self-negating and self-defining process of individua- tion, he at last found what he believed to be the true solution of these various problems. This process is essentially a logical, not a mechanical one : for Hegel the categories of the under- standing are " not instruments which the mind uses, but elements in a whole, or stages in a process, which, in its unity, the mind is " (Caird). Hegel's conception of Reality as self-conscious- ness, or Spirit, is a revolutionary one, because it regards every finite or determinate existence as essentially self-contradictory, and therefore involves the transcendence of the " either, or " logic which held, and, to a very great extent, still holds un- questioned sway. In Hegel the long-simmering revolt of modernism against the despotism of Aristotle culminated in a repudiation of its bed-rock foundation the supreme validity of the Law of Contradiction. To put it bluntly, Hegel declared that not only is it untrue that a thing cannot at once both be and not be, but that every particular thing at once is and is not. And to this audacious and momentous conclusion he was forced, not (as cocksure positivists rashly and impudently assume) by mere phantasy or perverse fatuity, but by rigid adherence to the stern logic of actuality. Freedom and Law, for example, are completely antithetical conceptions mutually exclusive from the Aristotelian point of view. Yet in the State, " the embodi- ment of rational freedom," they may co-exist as harmonised factors of a comprehensive unity. Further, the true path to the anarchic ideal traverses a phase of constantly-increasing stringency and particularity of legislation. It is doubtless the case that Hegel was put on the scent of his dialectic by the section of Kant's Critique in which he discusses the Antithetic of Pure Reason. For he says in his Logic, " The true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this : that every actual thing involves a co-existence of opposed elements. . . . To comprehend an object is equivalent to being con- scious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determina- THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 233 tions." x Hegel's express purpose (negatively considered) was, in fact, to get beyond Kant, to break down the barrier he had set up between reality and appearance, between thought and its object, between intelligence and the intel- ligible world, between the spirit and itself. If, reader, you have by any chance a philosopher among your acquaint- ance, I advise you to keep a watchful eye upon his doings between his fortieth and fiftieth years. Then, if ever, he is likely to be dangerous then is the climacteric period for his lust of power, his determination to dictate to the universe. From his forty-second to forty-sixth year, Hegel was engaged upon his Logic his original or " greater " Logic, that is whose aim is " the systematic reorganisation of the commonwealth of thought. ... It attempts the hard task of reconstructing, step by step, into totality the fragments of the organism of intelligence." z This remains upon the whole the chef tfceuvre of his maturity. One point remains to be noted. It was in the central moral principle of Christianity, the principle of self- realisation through self-sacrifice, that Hegel had found that movement through negation to affirmation, through conflict to unity, which, as the distinctive feature of Spirit, he made the keystone of his philosophy. To isolate the central doctrine of a religion is in a sense to transcend that religion as a system of dogma and symbol, now become superfluous. But rather than identify himself with the apostles of " raisonnement," the " ring- leaders of the hosts of shallowness," Hegel, arch-revolutionist as he knew himself to be, preferred to emphasise the constructive side of his aim by accepting the superficially ambiguous position of a champion of orthodoxy always, however, of orthodoxy as he conceived and interpreted it. Hence much mis- understanding ; hence, too, no doubt, the furious invective and the denunciation of his alleged " charlatanry " by Schopenhauer. Hegel, for his part, was no kid-glove pugilist : in controversy, if not bitter, he was at least ruthless, an intellectual forerunner of the new German school of 1 " There is absolutely nothing whatever in which we cannot and must not point to contradictions." Hegel, Logic, 89, " Determinate Being " (Wallace). z W. Wallace. 234 MAKERS OF MAN "blood and iron," already initiated by the example of Frederic the Great. But the last thing a philosopher truly dreads is misunder- standing. The old fox, Hegel, knew well the indispensable value of the mask : his decorous bourgeois exterior signified his possession of not a little of what he himself has eulogised as the cunning of the divine reason. Although he lacked the universality and profundity of the born philosopher, Darwin, as a scientific generaliser of a high order, has decided philosophical affinities. Hence perhaps, in part, the discursiveness of his mind in youth, and the slow development of the specific aim, which, once conceived, he pur- sued with such tenacity. The three years which he spent at Cambridge his twentieth to his twenty-second though largely devoted to sport and frivolity, were not wholly wasted. Introduced by his friend Fox to Prof. Henslow, the botanist, who made it his custom to welcome at his house, every Friday evening, undergraduates of scientific bent, Darwin not only became a regular attendant at these soirees, but qualified for the title of " the man who walks with Henslow." This intimacy with a seasoned enthusiast at such a critical period of his own mental development no doubt went far to reveal to Darwin his kindred potentialities. " My friendship with Prof. Henslow," he says himself, " influenced my whole career more than any other circumstance." It was at Cambridge, too, that Darwin first read Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy, which stirred up in him " a burning zeal to add even the most humble con- tribution to the noble structure of natural science." Here, then, we have the birth of a general, not yet of the specific purpose. " No one of a dozen books," Darwin states with emphasis, " influenced me nearly as much as these two." The practical part of his scientific pursuits, in his undergraduate years, consisted mainly in the ardent and indiscriminate col- lection of beetles, which, unfortunately perhaps, he did not dissect, 1 contenting himself with ascertaining the name of 1 In later years he felt himself hampered by the lack of manual skill. Possibly its possession might have hampered him even more. HEGEL. Front a Painting. To/act/-. ? 34 . THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 235 every specimen. After obtaining his " poll " degree, Darwin remained at Cambridge for another two terms, taking up there, by Henslow's advice, the study of geology. And in August of the same year (1831) Darwin (aet. 22) availed himself of the opportunity of accompanying Sedg- wick in a geological tour of North Wales, from which he derived much advantage. On the heels of this ex- perience came the offer from Henslow of his good offices in securing for Darwin the post of volunteer naturalist to the Beagle, commissioned, under Captain Fitzroy, to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and some islands of the Pacific, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the world. Darwin, eager to accept, was constrained by his father's opposition to decline the offer ; but ultimately this difficulty was overcome, and he sailed on 27th December 1831, and was absent nearly five years. During the whole of this time he remained absorbed in the study of the geology of the places visited, the collection and dissection of animals and marine specimens, and the keeping of a detailed journal of his observations. His ambition was at last fairly awakened ; his enthusiasm for science gradually preponderated over every other taste ; and, though working mainly for the love of in- vestigation, he began to cherish dreams of earning the approba- tion of such men as Lyell and Hooker. " I have never," he declares, " turned one inch out of my way to gain fame," meaning popular approbation. Of this voyage on the Beagle Darwin says truly that it was by far the most momentous event in his life, and determined his whole career. By imposing the obligation of steady work it converted him from a mere dil- ettante into an expert, at the same time preserving him from the danger of narrow specialism by the breadth of experience it conferred. It was probably during this voyage that Darwin's thoughts began to dwell upon the great problem of evolution. For he has recorded that when, in July of 1837, less than a year after his return, he opened his first note-book for facts bearing on the origin of species, he had long been reflecting on the 236 MAKERS OF MAN subject. 1 Ten or twelve years earlier he had heard Dr. Grant at Edinburgh eulogise Lamarck's evolutionary theory, and he says of this that " the hearing, rather early in life, such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form." Still earlier, he had read with strong admiration the Zoonomia of his own grandfather. Can interest in a given subject be inherited ? It is, at any rate, undeniable that such seemingly trivial influences as the reading of a book or the memory of a conversation may have a critical effect upon life or character. Such germs of thought may lie dormant for years ; then, under favourable conditions, may suddenly take on vigorous growth and activity. The reading of Lyell's Principles of Geology on the Beagle had probably proved a revelation with regard to the immensity of the effects produced, in the course of ages, by the accumulation of im- perceptible changes. 2 Certain facts e.g., the character of the American fossil Mammifers, and the distribution of the organ- isms on the Galapagos islands had struck him at the time of observation as suggesting the modifiability of species. Wliile preparing his journal for publication he came across so many of these facts, that he determined to investigate the subject. Hence the opening of the notebook referred to above, and the beginning of the long and toilsome research, which, twenty-two years later, resulted in the publication of the Origin of Species. At present (1837, an. set. 28-29), Darwin had arrived merely at the stage of vague dissatisfaction with the current view that species were permanent and immutable. His purpose was becoming specific : he had got far beyond the stage of mere desire to do something for the cause of Science ; but he barely saw his way as yet even to the negative side of his aim. " I worked on true Baconian lines," he says, " and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions." He soon saw that 1 " When I was on board the Beagle, I believed in the permanence of species, but, as far as I can remember, vague doubts occasionally flitted across my mind. . . . The subject haunted me" (Darwin). 2 There is an obvious analogy between the anti-catastrophic doctrine introduced to geology by Lyell and Darwin's faith in the omnipotent role of imperceptible variations in the biological sphere. CHARLES DARWIN. Reproduced by permission nfthe Linna-an Society, from a painting fry the Hon. J. Collier. To face p. 236. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 237 selection was the key to man's success in modifying species, but could not see how this principle could apply to Nature. But in October 1838 (fifteen months after the beginning of this inquiry), Darwin chanced to read Malthus's work on Popula- tion. " Being well acquainted with the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on," he says, " it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory to work on." The theory in question is, of course, that now known as " Natural Selection," but it should be noted that the validity of this hypothesis rests largely on the assumption that the variations in question will permanently " breed true," that there will be no ultimate tendency to revert to the original type. As a matter of fact, this is probably only the case with regard to the comparatively small proportion of variations which are of a qualitative nature. The vast majority of variations, including all those produced by man (upon which Darwin so largely based his theory), are, according to the view recently advanced by de Vries, merely quantitative limited, that is, to the increase or decrease of elements already available. These " fluctuating " as dis- tinguished from true " mutational " variations, are always the result of nourishment (that is, environment), and are exceed- ingly unstable. It is impossible by the accumulation of such unstable accidental variations to explain the origin of any new species. Nevertheless, an important role may be played by natural selection in determining the survival or extinction of species produced by the true mutational variations, whose occurrence we must admit. In 1842, the year in which Darwin, now married, retired from London to the seclusion of Down, he at length wrote a short pencil abstract of his theory, the first fruit of his five years' research. 1 The next step in its formula- tion was the addition of what he called the law of Divergence of Character, which came to him one day as he walked on the road near Down. To account for the augmentation of the minute differences of variation into the clear-cut distinctions 1 Thirty-five pages only. Two years later it was expanded to 230 pages. 238 MAKERS OF MAN of species, he argued that the most divergent, the most special- ised varieties, would be just those upon the average best qualified " to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of Nature, and so enabled to increase in numbers." The inter- mediate more conservative forms (so to speak) would tend to drop out and become extinct, leaving wide gaps between the surviving highly-differentiated groups. Darwin was now " corresponding on problems in geology, geography, distri- bution, and classification ; at the same time collecting facts on such varied points as the stripes on horses' legs, the floating of seeds, the breeding of pigeons, the form of bees' cells," and innumerable others. In 1846 he entered upon a laborious investigation of the living and extinct species of barnacles, which occupied much of the ensuing eight years, and, incident- ally, gave him the biological training and the insight into classification which he had previously in some degree lacked. Ultimately, in 1856 (nineteen years from the opening of that first notebook), on the urgent advice of Lyell, he began to set forth his theory, but on a scale three or four times as full as that of the Origin. Two years later, when some ten chapters had been written, came, like a bolt from the blue, a MS. essay from Wallace " On the Tendency of Varieties to depart in- definitely from the Original Type." Darwin, much distressed, honourably placed himself in the hands of Lyell and Hooker. Wallace's essay, extracts from Darwin's draft MS. of 1844, and a letter to Asa Grey (1857), explaining his theory, were jointly communicated to the Linnasan Society. Intense interest was excited, and, a month later, Darwin set vigorously to work upon the Origin, which was completed in thirteen months. One further point must be noted the deliberate postponement of that application of his theory to human origins which no doubt formed a part of his purpose. In Chapter VI. of the Origin Darwin clearly implies his belief in human evolution. " I can hardly doubt that all vertebrate animals have descended by ordinary generation from an ancient prototype of which we know nothing, furnished with a floating apparatus and a swim- bladder." It was not until twelve years later (1871) that, by the publication of the Descent of Man, the full significance of THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 239 Darwin's revolutionary conception was finally revealed. For theologians and their allies (e.g. Prof. Sedgwick, one of his bitterest opponents) the sting of it lay in that, granted variation and the hereditary stability of its products, it showed how structures of exquisitely purposive design, such as the human eye, might be accounted for on purely mechanical principles. But Darwin had his own misgivings, which he was too candid to minimise or conceal. " The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail," he confessed, " whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick ! Yet, for the life of me, I cannot see any difficulty in Natural Selection producing the most exquisite structures," he persists, " if such structures can be arrived at by gradation." Darwin's faith in the power of the infinitely little, as shown in, e.g., his work on coral reefs, on earth-worms, and on fertilisation, is one of the most profound intuitions of his genius. The other main factors were (1) sympathy, (2) a unique faculty of observation, and (3) the central thread of his purpose a growing desire to understand, that is, to generalise, the results of his observation. The fact that Darwin, as a man of means, had abundant leisure, which, by the debility which set in after his return from the Beagle expedition, he was prevented from squandering in social diversions even if he had been so disposed must also be accounted in some degree favourable to the formation of methodical habits of work. Of course, both wealth and sickness might, in a less aspiring nature, equally have served as excuses for doing nothing at all ! IV. Ethico-Religious Type. It is one of the main triumphs of the higher criticism, and a sufficient guarantee of its funda- mentally constructive tendency, that, reading between the lines of the Gospel narratives, it has found indications or at least suggestions of development in the character, as also in the point of view, of their central figure. The presence of these developmental features constitutes a valuable indirect evidence of the historicity of Jesus, though hardly of the supernatural claims made by him or on his behalf. And the value of this evidence is rather increased than otherwise by the fact that its presence is obviously due more to oversight than intention on the part of the writers. The intention being to depict one 240 MAKERS OF MAN superior to all need of moral or intellectual progress, the facts would seem to have been too strong for the Gospel-makers, and to have escaped suppression unawares. The growth of myth is so rapid and inevitable compare the modern instance of Bahaism, for example that there is no need to impute deliberate falsification to the writers or compilers : it was probably the controlling influence of the Messianic idea on minds unable to accept the apparent failure of their hero, minds forced, therefore, to adopt the (for them) only con- ceivable alternative of an expectation of supernatural triumph, which insensibly issued in a distortion of the facts. But assuming, as I think we safely may, the historicity of the Jesus of the Gospels, we have still to recognise the possibility that his literary personality is in some degree a composite product* Professor W. B. Smith has, for example, adduced many reasons for suspecting the existence of a Pre-Christian Jesus Cult, the existence for some in- definite period among the Jews of the Dispersion, of the cult of a divine person whose name or title was Jesus. 1 The followers of the New Testament Jesus were, on this hypothesis, but the originators of a new sect or heresy in an already ancient worship of a divine person bearing the same name, while the New Testament documents themselves " bear evidence of being the writings of a party that attempted to effect a compromise between the followers of the old Jesus cult and the Christian schismatics." Hence the repeated occurrence, in the Gospels and the Acts, of the phrase, ra irepi rov 'Irjo-ov, " the things concerning the Jesus," which certainly reads like a stereotyped formula. In view of such perplexing possibilities, the examina- tion of the Gospel records for evidence of a process of develop- ment in the opinions and aims of their hero assumes a new importance and interest. Only a life-history that has an in- telligible psychology fulfils, in these days, the first condition of acceptance. Assuming that the traces of such a psychology can be found in the Gospels, the forcing of a historic figure into a pre-existent mythical framework of supernatural function 1 Cf. " Was there a Pre-Christian Jesus Cult ? " by A. Ransom. Literary Quid'., 1st Feb. 1908. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 241 and incident 1 would explain all the chief difficulties of the problem. It seems clear that Jesus was born into an environment seething with new ideas and revolutionary conceptions. It was a time of strong nationalist aspirations, signified by such move- ments as that of the Zelotes and Sicarii who killed violators of the Law, of the Thaumaturges or wonder-workers, and of the followers of Judas the Gaulonite or Galilean. This Judas, whom Jesus may have met, was a fanatical opponent of the census, the basis of that civil taxation so obnoxious to theocratic ideas. His Messianic zeal brought him into conflict with the authorities, and his consequent ruin may, Renan suggests, have served as a warning to Jesus to steer clear of political embroilments. Rabbis or teachers appeared on all sides, each with some distinctive doctrine, more or less Utopian, more or less communistic, embodied in maxims such as are to be found in the Talmud. John the Baptist was one such teacher ; Jesus was another, " one Rabbi more, and around him some young men, eager to hear him." Jesus may well have found inspira- tion in the aphorisms of Hillel, uttered fifty years before, and imbued with a spirit not unlike his own. " By his poverty, so meekly endured, by the sweetness of his character, by his opposition to priests and hypocrites, Hillel was the true master of Jesus, if indeed it may be permitted to speak of a master in connection with so high an originality as his." There can be no doubt that Jesus was well versed in that body of arbitrary theocratic ordinances known as the Law, as well as in the abundant oral precepts and maxims current in the synagogues of his day. Among the prophets, Isaiah would seem to have been a special favourite, while many of his high hopes and apocalyptic visions are traceable to the influence of the unknown philosopher, who, somewhere about 168 B.C., in composing the Book of Daniel, " for the first time dared to see in the march of the world and the succession of Empires only a purpose 1 An ancient Nassene (Gnostic) psalm of non-Christian and probably ante- Christian origin, " represents Jesus, the Son, resting in the bosom of the Father, and begging to be sent to suffering, erring men " (Arthur Ransom, loc. cit. sup.). 16 242 MAKERS OF MAN subordinate to the destinies of the Jewish people." We may note in passing the important fact, rightly emphasised by Estlin Carpenter, that the " Son of Man " in Daniel's vision, like the Lion, the Bear, the Leopard, which represented the great Gentile nations, is to be understood not as a mere person, but as the symbol of a nation that purified Israel to whom is to be assigned a perpetual and universal supremacy. If, which is very doubtful, Jesus, and not some late compilers (influenced perhaps by Gnostic tendencies), really applied to himself the title " Son of Man," it must therefore have been in misconception of the true purport of Daniel's vision. To the influence of its unknown writer Jesus probably owed the germ of his highest and most spiritual conception, that of the Kingdom of Heaven, or everlasting reign of the Saints. The germ, I say, because upon the whole, in spite of certain lapses into the earlier and cruder form, the Kingdom, as Jesus conceived, and, with many beautiful similitudes, foreshadowed it, is not a super- naturally initiated, apocalyptic revolution, but the slow permea- tion of society by a new spirit of love towards God and charity towards one's fellows. " In the later periods of his life," says Kenan, " Jesus believed that this reign would be realised in a material form by a sudden renovation of the world. But doubtless this was not his first idea. ' The Kingdom of God is within you,' said he to those who sought with subtlety for external signs. The realistic conception of the Divine advent was but a cloud, a transient error, which his death has made us forget." One further influence upon the development of Jesus calls for special mention, the annual visits of his parents to Jerusalem, in more than the one of which mentioned by Luke he may well have accompanied them. That he there came into fuller touch with national hopes and passions than was possible in the peaceful routine of his village home, and that this may have awakened the first impulse of his genius, is a warrantable conclusion. But from the account given of his interview with the " doctors," I see no reason to infer that this, or any other such early experience at Jerusalem, " inspired him while still young with a lively antipathy for the defects of the official representatives of Judaism." His precocity seems, on this HEAD OK CHRIST. From a painting fry Liiini in the National (taller)'. To face /*. 242. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 243 occasion, to have commanded the respect and even the wonder of these representatives ; and such boyish triumphs are recalled with pride rather than with bitterness as a rule. That the genius of Jesus did not escape the notice of the companions of his youth and early manhood, is highly probable ; the statement, in Luke, to the effect that his mother treasured up the sayings in which early promise was revealed, human and credible in itself, indicates at least her consciousness that he was destined for an exceptional career. 1 We are told that he was about thirty years old when he definitely came forward as a teacher, but it is likely enough that there had been earlier ventures of a tentative and sporadic nature. The determining impulse would seem to have been in great measure due to the stir created by the passionate revival mission of John the Baptist and the powerful echo awakened in his own breast by the confident anticipation on the part of John of the imminent dawn of the Messianic era. From the fact that John substituted a private baptismal rite for the official ceremony imposed upon converts to Judaism, requiring the aid of priests, it would seem that he was a Nonconformist ; and certainly the harshness of his invective lends colour to this conclusion. The statement that John from the first regarded Jesus as the " Coming One " is highly improbable ; is, moreover, incompatible with the fact that his school continued for some time to exist side by side with the Christian Churches. Certainly the two young enthusiasts found much in common, but the attitude of Jesus is rather that of a pupil and admirer than of a superior. He not only accepted baptism from John, but began to baptize on his own account. Every genius must pass through an imitative phase. His retirement to the desert was also in all probability prompted by a short-lived emulation of the ascetic tendencies of the Baptist, although it may well have coincided with a masterful impulse to the definite formulation of his own purpose. It may, however, be entirely mythical, being suspiciously reminiscent of the forty years' wandering of Israel, " Jahveh's first-born son," 1 Later, we find her, in league with her other sons, seeking to restrain him, as one " beside himself." His greatness was not to her taste ! (Mark iii. 21, 31-35). 244 MAKERS OF MAN in the wilderness, the forty days' fast of Moses, and Elijah's journey without food to Horeb. In any case there is profound truth in the ideal sense of the episode. The greater the man, the greater the possibilities of evil to be conquered and turned to account. ' The founder of a religion has so much in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he must fight with the enemy within him for forty days in the wilderness without food or sleep. . . . Other men of genius are good from their birth ; the religious founder acquires goodness. The old existence ceases utterly and is replaced by the new. The greater the man, the more must perish in him at the regeneration." l Enriched by contact with a striking personality and a fervent spiritual movement, Jesus returned to Galilee, and, in his own broader and deeper way, took up the task inspired by John. Of Messianic claims he, as yet, possibly had not dreamed : he proclaimed the love of a Divine Father and preached the simple ethics of filial obedience and fraternal charity. In a sense rightly, Renan regarded this first phase of Christ's mission as the highest and greatest of all. The negative iconoclastic side of his purpose is as yet unborn : that was the logical corollary, the necessary condition, of his acceptance of the Messianic role. If by this acceptance he purchased immortality, he at the same time forfeited something of the serene universality of his uncommitted phase. How came this acceptance about ? It was the inevitable outcome of his own supernatural conception of Man's nature and destiny, his own aspiring, profoundly intuitive temperament, and the peculiar conditions of his place and time. Of every exceptional personality among the Jews of his age of John the Baptist, for example the question, " Is this the great Deliverer ? " would infallibly arise. Every buch personality would be forced to ask it of himself ; and many, beside Jesus, doubtless answered it in the affirmative. Jesus may have entertained the possibility at the time of his retreat beyond Jordan, and, accepting the popular view of the Messianic role, as that of a great warrior, may have rejected such a role as in absolute discord with his most cherished ideals. Gradually he came to see that the prophetic anticipations of 1 Otto Weininger. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 245 universal conquest were capable of metaphorical interpretation : this perhaps was the meaning of his exclamation, " I came not to bring peace, but a sword." The starting-point of his career as a teacher and reformer was his unique realisation of God as the Father, the tenderly-loving Father of himself, conse- quently of all men. This was his one central dogma : for a dogma, if not a mere metaphor, it certainly is, though it has become the fashion to deny this. But Jesus had not got very far in his work of recalling men from formalism to simplicity of faith and worship, before he attracted by his notoriety the uneasy attention of the champions of orthodoxy. They put questions to him, the answer to which involved either the repudiation of the Mosaic law in its literality, or that of his own principles of freedom or of love. Was it lawful to heal on the Sabbath ? to eat without ceremonial washing ? to divorce one's wife as Moses permitted ? I think, with Schmiedel, that " the need of combating the law of Moses seems to supply the real starting-point " in the career of Jesus. No mere prophet could announce the abrogation of this divinely-instituted law. That the day had come for its abrogation or supersession was increasingly clear. A superhuman task had been assigned to him : he must either repudiate it or accept its implications. " Only God Himself could alter His own law ; and only His greatest minister, the Messiah, could be destined to announce the change." No doubt, as Schmiedel suggests, this conviction was the result of strict self -scrutiny and hard struggle. Mean- while, by an analogous but cruder process, his immediate followers had arrived at the same conclusion, in their case, however, attended by the expectation of a temporal triumph which Christ saw that it was needful to renounce. He sounded them on the subject of the popular opinion of his mission, and of their own ; and when Peter acclaimed him as the Christ, solemnly accepted the dignity, but warned them " to tell no man." The determination to go to Jerusalem was a logical result of Christ's acceptance of the Messianic role. Judaism must be attacked in its stronghold ; but Jesus had few illusions as to the result, so far as his own safety was concerned. He would perish, but his cause would prevail. Unless, indeed, 246 MAKERS OF MAN God intervened to justify and miraculously to enforce the claims of His chosen one, for that was a possibility which the evidence clearly suggests that Christ intermittently entertained up to the very moment of his death. The desperate nature of the enterprise to which he was committed by the simultaneous acceptance of the Messianic role and repudiation of its traditional programme, could not but react upon the tone, if not the very essence,of his teaching. His invective became harsher, his attitude towards the Mosaic law more uncompromising, his personal claims far more exalted, his preaching more argumentative and theological, than in the days of his early Galilean work. In despair of the orthodox Hierosolymites, he begins to appeal to the despised Samaritans, to social outcasts and reprobates, even to the Gentiles. To be forced into universalism was a gain ; but to substitute for the beautiful conception of righteousness as a leaven, that of its theatrical inauguration by seven legions of angels, and of himself as avenger and judge, was a fall, clearly attributable to the anguish* and "'embitterment of those last days. Yet, upon the whole, the loss of charm and insight is more than compensated by the gain of power and intensity : with a clear prevision of the world-wide significance of his purpose he rose to the height of his unparalleled destiny, in- vesting the ignominy of a felon's execution with all the glamour of his transcendent ideal. What, then, was the intrinsic purpose of Jesus, the truth for which he lived and for which he voluntarily died ? Renan says that he gave Religion to humanity, as Socrates gave it Philosophy, and Aristotle, Science. His par- ticular doctrines are, no more than theirs, necessarily final : there is, in fact, a striking analogy between the revolt of the sixteenth century against the Aristotelian scholasticism, and that of the nineteenth century against the stereotyped formulae of official Christianity. Jesus " was obliged to use the forms of thought provided by his age, and they were inadequate to the loftiness of his ideas." 1 His refutation of Judaism, of legality as the basis of religion, though nominally supported by reference to prophetic authority, was virtually self-derived, intuitive, from first to last. He exemplified the invincible 1 J. E. Carpenter. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 247 power of uncompromising fidelity to the voice of conscience, of the higher self, of idiosyncrasy, or genius if you will. The equation of genius and morality is the implicit content, not certainly, of his teaching, but of his personality considered as a whole. Only actions at once free and necessary only inspired actions reach the plane of true morality. We have now to consider the purpose of the man to whose courage and energy it is in great measure due that the revolu- tionary work of Jesus, instead of remaining the nucleus of a Judean sect, became the basis of a world-wide religion. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus took place in or about the year 38 A.D., when he was twenty-six or possibly twenty-eight years of age. The change of name which seems to have followed almost immediately is not without psychological interest in connection with the Pauline doctrine of necrosis or death to sin. He may thereby have sought to emphasise the fact that, by spiritual " resurrection," he had become a new man, and to express resentment against that Pharisaism, zeal for which had led him to sin so grievously against the light. When, in 41 A.D., after three years in Damascus, Paul was compelled by the hostility of the Jews to leave that city, he for the first time paid a short visit to Jerusalem, and there made the acquaintance of Peter and James, also of Barnabas, a Cypriot convert, whose influence was to prove decisive in the determination of his career. That Barnabas was the discoverer of Paul's genius is evident, for, two years later, when Paul was engaged in local propaganda in Syria, he sought him and brought him to Antioch, whither he himself had come as a delegate of the Apostles. In this wealthy city the new faith was making such progress as far outstripped its growth in Judea : here the name of Christian was first applied to its professors, among whom there was already a growing conviction of the necessity of that proselytisation of the Gentiles so coldly regarded by the Ebionite faction at Jerusalem. 1 To Antioch, therefore, the true cradle of Gentile Christendom, Barnabas brought Paul, i 1 Jerusalem remained the city of God's poor, of the Ebionim, of the Galilean dreamers dazed by promises of the Kingdom of God " (Renan, St. Paid) 248 MAKERS OF MAN feeling, perhaps, that his great gifts were being wasted ; and much of the latter's glory reverts, in Kenan's opinion, on " the modest man who preceded him in all things, effaced himself before him, discovered his worth, brought him to the light, more than once prevented his failings from spoiling all, and the narrow ideas of others from drawing him into revolt." Such a man as Paul could not be long at Antioch without being fired by the growing enthusiasm of the Antiochan believers for the conversion of the inhabitants of Asia Minor and even of the civilised world. The time was believed to be short ; the imminence of the second coming was so strongly and generally held, that we find Paul, years later, discouraging marriage on this very ground. Funds were not lacking ; and now, in Paul, a human instrument of appropriate power and fervour was also at hand. " Zechariah's words were coming true : the world was taking the Jews by the hem of the garment and saying to them, ' Lead us to Jerusalem.' ... On every side the need for a monotheistic religion, giving divine precepts as a basis for morality, was being actively manifested." In association with many of the Ghettoes of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean ports, were a number of " persons fearing God," that is, Pagans wholly or partially converted to Judaism. But what specially formed the qualification of Paul for appeal to the Gentiles was the fact that he, a Jew of the Jews, had firmly grasped the fact that Christianity implied a full emancipation from Judaism. This was no doubt exceptional : at Jerusalem one did not cease to observe the petty details of the Law because one had become a Christian. The fiery independence of Paul ill brooked any such compromise ; and this in him, in all probability, was one of the main features in determining the attention of Barnabas. It so happened, too, that in the course of their first mission (begun 45 A.D. an. set. 33-35 ?), Paul and Barnabas were expelled from the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia. They withdrew, protesting " that since the Jews refused to hear the word of God, they would preach it to the Gentiles." In Galatea they found the Pagans particularly susceptible to their Christian doctrines, and made many converts among them, even more than among the Jews. Henceforth, although To fate fi. 248. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 249 perforce his work in any new centre must almost always have taken the synagogue as its point of departure, " the idea of a special vocation from God to proselytise the Gentiles seems to have grown more and moreconfirmed in Paul'smind." Through- out life Paul was pursued by the hatred of the Judaising faction, who organised counter-missions to undermine the loyalty of his tenderly beloved Galatian and Corinthian communities ; invented and applied various opprobrious nick- names ; repaid his efforts on behalf of their poor by humiliating demands on his return to Jerusalem ; and, in the end, so blackened his reputation, that during almost the whole of the second century his fame was completely eclipsed. Still, he fought on bravely, now bending to the storm, now defiantly confronting its fury. Like his Master, he could, on occasion, justify his repudiation of the legal bondage of Mosaic ceremonial by an innocently sophistical reinterpretation of its record. Keenly aware of the impracticability of enforcing even a modicum of Jewish restrictions upon Gentile converts, he never doubted that his cause would triumph in the end. But Judaism dies hard : even to-day, to forge themselves new chains from its rusty fragments taxes the ingenuity of how many servile souls ! There is no difficulty in identifying the central aim of Marcus Aurelius. Renan has epitomised it in a phrase : " For him Morality was the last word of existence." That this was predominantly the result of inborn tendency is obvious, if only from the very early age and the abandon with which the future Emperor devoted himself to the rule of the severest school of philosophy. Still, this purpose has its natural history : its growth was not independent of circumstances ; and, fortunately, he has himself indicated with abundant clearness the chief obligations revealed by retrospective self- scrutiny. Marcus Aurelius has some good to record of all his relations : notably of his mother, who died young, he says, that her purity of soul extended even to refraining from the thought of evil. But in eulogising his foster-father, the noble Emperor Antoninus, Aurelius achieves an almost lyric enthusiasm. Antoninus it was, he exclaims, " who made me comprehend how it is possible, even while dwelling in a palace, to dispense with 250 MAKERS OF MAN bodyguards, splendid raiment, torches, and statues ; who taught me, in short, that a prince may almost contract his life within the bounds of that of a private citizen without thereby dis- playing less majesty and vigour. . . . Remember," he adjures himself, " his constancy in accomplishing the dictates of reason, his equability under all circumstances, his holiness, the serenity of his look, his extreme gentleness of spirit, his contempt for vainglory, his keen penetration ; how he would never drop a subject till he had thoroughly looked into it and fully under- stood it ; how he bore unjust reproaches without a word ; how he did nothing hastily ; how he turned a deaf ear to scandal ; how he carefully studied character and action ; . . . frugal in house, bed, board, and service ; industrious, long-suffering, abstemious. . . . Remember, too, his constant and even affec- tion, . . . the joy with which he accepted an opinion better than his own, his piety that had no trace of superstition. Think of all this, that your last hour may find you with a conscience clear as his." A point worthy of note in regard to this panegyric is the quasi-Christian character of the qualities commended. One might guess that one was reading the eulogium of Pope Gregory the Great. Hadrian and Antoninus had both forbidden persecution of the Christians, and it is a thousand pities that, in this one respect, Marcus Aurelius neglected the enlightened example of his predecessors. It was an age of intellectual and moral eclecticism, of cosmopolitan culture, and altruistic aspira- tion. The fierce Roman spirit was, in this second century A.D., considerably mitigated, and Gibbon has well said of the reigns of Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, that they " are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government." Much of the credit for all this may fairly be attributed to the influence of the repre- sentatives of the Stoic and other philosophers, whose prestige among Romans of high position had in great measure superseded that of religion. " Personages of rank maintained a household philosopher, who was a sort of chaplain. Before dying, it was customary to converse with some sage, just as. nowadays, people summon a priest." It need scarcely be said that philosophers regarded with aversion the rival claims of Christianity ; and, MARCUS AURELIUS. To face p. 250. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 251 as bearing on the attitude of Aurelius himself towards its con- verts, it should be remembered that Fronto, the rhetorician, his teacher and friend, was deeply prejudiced against the new creed. The contemporary tutor to whose instruction he perhaps owed most, however, was Junius Rusticus, who converted him to the Stoic discipline and introduced him to the glorious discourses of Epictetus. No reader of the Meditations can fail to appreciate the debt of the Emperor Philosopher to the Slave Philosopher. Strange irony of destiny that conferred a twin immortality upon two men so antithetically circumstanced one owning not even his own body, the other lord of the whole civilised world ! Of these two, the slave's was, indeed, in some respects the kinglier soul. In the recorded sayings of Epictetus there was a thrill of conquest, of mastery ; in the meditations of the pious Emperor we find, on the contrary, something a little dolorous and strained. Epictetus tells us that Socrates, when he jested in the court where his life was at issue, showed that "he knew how to play ball. . . . And so," he continues, " should we do also, having the carefulness of the most zealous players and yet indifference, as were it merely about a ball." This philosophic insouciance, this proficiency in the " gay science," was denied to the grave Aurelius, who had lacked the " kiss of a fairy " at birth. His role was indeed the more exact- ing of the two ; a recluse by nature, he exemplified the Stoic ideal by loyally fulfilling the obligations of the great part assigned him in the drama of destiny. Stoicism, although it favoured personal ascesis, never countenanced the shirking of the domestic, civic, or national duties pertaining to one's lot. Its teaching is in many respects curiously anticipated by the counsel bestowed by the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita on the vacillating warrior Arjuna " Without attachment, constantly perform action which is Duty. ... He who acteth, placing all actions in the Eternal, abandoning attachment, is unaffected by sin as a lotus leaf by the waters." Such was the aim set before himself by Aurelius, and man- fully pursued in the varied capacities of husband, father, citizen, Emperor, general, and priest. Yet we have but touched the 252 MAKERS OF MAN fringe of his purpose if we overlook his positively saint-like passion for spiritual integrity, for holiness, that is to say, which such words as the following reveal : " When wilt thou, my soul, be good and simple, all one, naked, more translucent than the material body that contains thee ? When wilt thou taste fully the joy of loving all things ? When wilt thou be such that thou canst at last dwell in the city of gods and men, never making them complaint, and never needing their forgive- ness ? " Marcus was forty years old when, on the death of Antoninus (161 A.D.), he came to the purple. Surrounding himself with philosophers of renown, summoned from every part of the earth, he proceeded to actualise a policy founded upon respect for his fellow-men. In his choice of officials he was true to the prin- ciples of his liberalism, considering only merit, without regard for birth or even culture. He himself created a large number of charitable funds for the benefit of the youth of both sexes. He made no concessions to popular caprice, yet came to be venerated as the father of his people. Of his military achieve- ments I have spoken in an earlier chapter, as well as of his reform of the laws regulating the treatment of slaves. In a time of military emergency he voluntarily sold by auction an immense portion of his Imperial treasure and of his own property, in order that the poor should be spared the burden of excessive taxation. His formal adherence to the State religion was no doubt dictated by consideration for the public welfare. Sin- cerity is writ large over all his works : his few errors are the result neither of moral weakness nor of malice, but of excessive scrupulosity. In some few respects he might have been a better Emperor if he had been a worse man. No human document ever penned surpasses in dramatic interest or candour the Confessions of St. Augustine ; very few have equalled it in these respects. The history of his purpose is the history of his inner life, beginning with the awakening of his conscience by the study of Cicero's Hortensius (an. aet. 18), and ending with his conversion to orthodox Catholicism (set. 31). The protracted and painful struggle was watched with eager solicitude by his saintly mother, whose influence, although she THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 253 was far too wise to intervene except when the occasion seemed favourable, must, in the long run, have counted for much. It seems that from the first, Augustine must have had some foreboding that nowhere but within the fold which sheltered her he would find the ultimate peace he craved for no sooner had the thirst for wisdom been aroused by the study of Cicero than he turned his mind to the Scriptures, that he might " see what they were." But they seemed to him then undignified in comparison with Ciceronian dignity. " I disdained to be a little one." Soon after this, Augustine fell into the heresy of Manichaeism, which offered a solution of the problem of moral evil less humbling in some ways to man's pride than that of the Church. Mani's doctrine was, that sin is not voluntary, but the effect of material bondage. The spirit always wills right- eousness, but is numbed into unconsciousness by the antagonism of matter. A Christ is crucified in every soul. Although Augustine believed himself in the issue to have rejected Mani- chaeism, it is evident that its dualisitic view is in great measure embodied in his ultimate theology. The contrast between the two Adams, " in the one of whom we are guilty and corrupt and undone, in the other accepted and renewed and exalted," became the very keystone of his dogmatic structure. The difference was that whereas the Manichaeans identified the true self with the higher or spiritual entity, and limited the struggle to that between the contrary tendencies of body and spirit, Augustine, with truer and deeper insight, came to see that the matter was far more complex : that not every impulse of spiritual origin can be labelled " good," or every physical craving labelled " evil." The normal centre of consciousness, the " will " or " ego," might occupy either extreme, or an intermediate position. Still, upon the whole, as favouring asceticism, Augustine certainly remained permanently infected with the dualistic virus. Soon after coming under the influence of Mani's doctrine, while engaged in the teaching of rhetoric at Thagaste, Augustine, still in the early twenties, converted to his own heretical views a young friend. This young man fell ill and was baptized, and, when Augustine essayed to jest with him on the subject, shrank from him as from an enemy, 254 MAKERS OF MAN and, with a wonderful and sudden freedom, bade him cease. The fever returning, he soon after died, and Augustine's heart was " utterly darkened " by the pain of bereavement. Nor can such an incident have failed to contribute serious ground for the reconsideration of his own position. Soon after he removed to Carthage, and there, in his twenty-sixth year, produced a treatise on The Fair and the Fit. Still preoccupied with the problem of evil, his interest in which may no doubt be in some degree attributed to the consciousness of strong antagonism between the sensuous and the spiritual cravings of his own nature, Augustine in this work maintained in all essentials the Manichaean thesis. Evil was a separate entity, living and active, not derived from God, but contending with Him. His philosophical development had now reached that phase at which reality is conceived as substance, not yet as subject. He conceived God, that is to say, as " a vast and bright body," and himself as a part thereof. This is a necessary phase of logical evolution (the phase personified by Spinoza), but the time came when Augustine could censure himself severely for ever having passed through it, as well as for the belief that this unchangeable substance could err upon con- straint, rather than that his own changeable substance had gone astray wilfully. In his twenty-eighth year or thereabout, Augustine was a little disillusioned in regard to Manicheism by the discovery that Faustus, a bishop of that sect, greatly esteemed, who happened to visit Carthage, was a mere wind- bag, " utterly ignorant of liberal sciences." Hence, after nine years' adherence, his zeal for the writings of Manichseus was blunted. Soon after this, Augustine (set. 28) journeyed to Rome, and set up there as a teacher of rhetoric. Though still assorting with the Manichsean " elect," he privately derided their fables. He was more favourably disposed towards orthodoxy, but felt difficulties with regard to the Incarnation. " I feared to believe Our Saviour to have been born in the flesh lest I should be forced to believe him denied by the flesh." This was logical enough, assuming that he still held the view that matter is the source of all evil. He inclined towards the position of ST. AUGUSTIXK. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 255 the Academics, who were the agnostics of his day. About this time he successfully competed for the post of rhetoric reader at Milan, and his transference to that city had important effects on his development. Bishop Ambrose received him paternally, and he soon grew to love him and to hang on his words when preaching, though more charmed by the manner than convinced by the matter of the sermons. His mistress had followed him, and he describes himself as " enslaved by lust." When, later, his mother joined him, he informed her that he was no longer a Manichaean, but almost despaired of attaining the truth. His mother urged him to break with hie mistress and to marry a maiden whom she approved. He sent his mistress and their son Adeodatus back to Africa, but, instead of marrying, formed another irregular union. The problem of evil still perplexed him : he felt the force of Am- brose's contention that free will was the cause of sin, but " could not exonerate God from having engrafted into him this plant of bitterness." New light came to him from the study of the Platonists : he was particularly impressed by their partial agreement with the Logos doctrine of the fourth Gospel. They confirmed the statement that " in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Also, that " He was in the world, and the world knew him not." On the other hand, " that ' the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,' I read not there. Nor that ' in due time he died for the ungodly.' For Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes, not to such as are lifted up on the stilts of a more elevated teaching." From Plotinus, too, Augustine gained some in- sight into the fallacy of his hard-and-fast opposition of matter and spirit. " Worldly things are," he says, " since they are from Thee, but are not because they are not what Thou art. For that truly is which remains unchangeably." This is, philosophically, a distinct advance upon the Manichaean position, that Matter and Spirit, Evil and Good, exist in- dependently and contend on more or less equal terms. But all this dialectic subtlety was fast losing its charm for Augustine : the starved heart of him asserted its claims, and would not be 256 MAKERS OF MAN silenced. He was fired by the example of Victorinus, a re- nowned Roman rhetorician, who by public profession of Christianity had forfeited the right of teaching science or oratory. With two friends he set himself to the study of St. Paul's epistles, feeling as though God were searching him through and through. Then came a day when, Augustine and Alypius having heard from a visitor the story of his own conversion, Augustine retired to the garden and strove vainly to bring his soul to the point of assent. Alypius joined him under the tree, but could not aid him. It was the throe of the new birth, but his mind would not obey his will, demanding no less than the abdication of its lifelong supremacy, the confession of its inadequacy, and of the need of a helping hand. Not willing entirely this mental surrender, his will could not enforce its command. Overcome by sudden weep- ing, he left Alypius and cast himself down under a certain fig-tree. Then came a voice as of a boy or girl chanting : " Take up arid read f " He went to where the volume of St. Paul was, opened, and read : " Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof." ..." Instantly, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away." This was in 385 A.D., when Augustine was thirty-one years of age. The moment of complete surrender, of emotional crisis, of mental suicide, was the moment of victory henceforth, whatever the flaws of his theology, which do not concern us now he never wavered in his purpose of complete self-dedication to the cause of the Catholic Church. He resigned his professorship, underwent public baptism at the hands of Ambrose, and after Monica's death, and after having devoted three years to study and prayer in Thagaste, received and accepted the invitation of the church at Hippo, so closely associated with his fame. But it would be interesting to know what became of Adeo- datus and his mother. There must have been something in the conduct or demeanour of our next subject, Gregory the Great, which carried immediate THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 257 conviction to his associates that he was a man marked out by destiny for great responsibilities. Something hidden from or misconceived by himself, too, seeing that up to the time (590 A.D.) when, on the death of Pelagius, he, at the age of fifty, was, almost by violence and sorely against his will, brought back to Rome and consecrated Pope, his dearest dream had been to devote himself exclusively to the life of monastic seclusion. But the instinct of his contemporaries was fully justified by the event : Gregory rose triumphantly to the height of his unsought and unwelcome opportunity. In the last fourteen years of his life he immortalised himself by completely transforming the almost hopelessly chaotic ecclesiastical and political situation which had prevailed at the time of his election. The preceding half century had been, for Italy, a time rendered hideous by almost incessant warfare, " wars of barbarians, with indiscriminate slaughter, wanton destruction, unrestrained plunder, and depopulation. . . . Lands remained untilled, commerce became impossible, industries died out. . . . The power and influence of the Church were paralysed." Italy was unequally divided between the King of the Pagan or Arian Lombards, actively hostile to the Church, ruling at Pavia, and the Exarch, who, as the representative of the effete Roman Empire, held court at Ravenna. "Deserted churches, vacant'sees, parishes without priests, lax and incompetent bishops, simony and dissensions among the clergy, were but natural consequences of war, uncertain communications, and absence of supervision." Apart from the constant bickering of the Lombards and Imperial- ists, both parties had been taxed to the utmost by the need of resisting frequent irruptions of Gothic and Frankish barbarians. Italy was a mere cockpit, a gladiatorial arena. " To this dark- ness there came a light, to this chaos there came a reconstructing hand, to this paralysis there came an energising soul, in the luminous, orderly and vigorous mind of Pope Gregory the Great." To his friend John, Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory wrote soon after his accession : " Worthless and weak, I have taken charge of an old ship very much battered ; the waters break in everywhere, the rotten timbers threaten ship- wreck." 4 To Narses : " I feel, good sir, as if I had lost children, 258 MAKERS OF MAN for through these earthly cares I have lost noble ends. . . . Call me Mara, for I am filled with bitterness." These words, to say nothing of the deeds that followed, clearly indicate the painful birth of a new and more substantial purpose. Gregory had not indeed found, but accepted, his true vocation. He could not have been the success he was, had not the self-dis- ciplined habits of his previous life prepared him for his arduous task. " He stood now between East and West, bearing with the pettishness of old age " the old age of the Empire, " and restraining the impetuosity and lawlessness of youth," as represented by the Lombard and Frankish nations. " No attempt to attain political influence or to gain political assistance can be detected in his letters " : the Church was for him a moral power, and he pursued his aims by the methods appropriate to his conception. " He did not pit race against race, Frank against Lombard, but made both look up to the Holy See." To Augustine, whom he had sent upon his memorable mission to England, and with whose success he was delighted, he sent instructions that the temples were not to be demolished, only the idols, but converted, after due consecration, to Christian use, since the converts would " more readily resort to the places with which they were familiar." On the days of sacrifice they might slay animals for their own use, and celebrate the wonted festivities with Christian rites. To the administration of the Church Estates in various parts of Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Dalmatia, Illyricum, Gaul, and Africa, he devoted much atten- tion, showing a comprehensive knowledge of agricultural and economic affairs. The revenue derived from these Patrimonies he regarded as the heritage of the poor, and his local agents were all clerics, carefully chosen. They were not allowed to vindicate claims by force or by appeal to law. To one in Sicily he wrote : " We learn that most unjust exactions continue in some of the farms of the Church. . . . This we altogether condemn. . . . We order that whatever has been taken violently from a family shall be restored." ..." Have no hesitation in advancing money for the benefit of the peasants." One of his first cares was the preparation of a Pastoral Charge, to serve as a general guide for the bishops of the time, providing a norm of episcopal THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 259 conduct, as the rule of St. Benedict had done for the monks. His dealings with the Lombard Kingdom of Ravenna a constant menace to the peace of Italy were a triumph in every sense of the word. " Without men or material, without resources or allies, he kept them at bay for fifteen years by his letters, his tact, his vigilance, his personal influence." Working mainly through Queen Theodolinda, he finally achieved the conversion of her husband and their subjects to the Church. By similar methods he conquered for his Church the vast regions beyond the Alps, bringing the outlying churches of Gaul and Germany into definite relations with the Holy See. In the East he vindicated his authority by protesting against the pretension of the Patriarch of Constantinople to the title of Ecumenical (i.e. universal) Bishop. Over this matter he was brought into conflict with the Emperor himself, and the ultimate victory of the Curia came after Gregory's death . His reform of the Ritual , and the deep interest he took in Church music, are also deserving of mention. This brief outline of the main objects pursued and methods employed by Gregory during the last fourteen years of his life, may give some idea of the true catholicity, the enlightenment of his aims. His ideal was, in essentials, that which Dante, long after, sought to revive. The two blots on his reputation are, that he (perhaps by inadvertence) welcomed the accession of the infamous Phocas, murderer of his good friend the Emperor Maurice ; and that he persecuted heretics. In this last respect the Christian Stoic once more resembles the Pagan, Marcus Aurelius, whose character and career present, in many ways, a curious analogy with those of the great Pope. The chief interest, psychologically speaking, of Gregory's career, is the light it throws on the importance of opportunity. The elements of greatness were no doubt latent in him from the first, but unrecognised and unvalued by their possessor. Great- ness in the official sense was thrust upon him by his contempor- aries. It was quite otherwise with Mahomet, a much more self-centred and ambitious individual. In the section dealing with Natural Vocation I have told how Mahomet, as he neared middle age, gradually drew apart from society, spending days and nights in prayer and meditation on Mount Hara. He was 260 MAKERS OF MAN awakening to a sense of the grossness of the national idolatry and the consequent need of religious reform. Some obscure constitutional change was associated with this introspective tendency ; he became subject to dreams, ecstasies, and trances. Possibly,like many other men of genius, he was now an epileptic. In his fortieth year (609 A.D.), while spending the fast-month of Kamadhan in the cavern of Mount Hara, on the night of the Divine Decree (Al Kader), Gabriel appeared to him and showed a silken cloth inscribed with the text of the Koran. 1 The archangel exclaimed : "0 Mahomet, of a verity thou art the prophet of God, and I am his angel Gabriel ! " Such is the accepted version of the definite inception of Mahomet's purpose ; and that a fasting man deeply preoccupied with religion should have had or believed himself to have had such an experience, is in no way incredible. Mahomet returned home and confided the annunciation to his wife, Cadijah, who at once accepted his prophetic mission. So, too, did Waraka, her cousin, a Christian- ised Jew and a mystic, translator into Arabic of parts of the Old and New Testaments, whose influence as a member of their household may well have contributed much to the awakening of Mahomet's religious fervour. " Whenever there is decay of righteousness . . . and exalta- tion of unrighteousness, then I Myself come forth ; " For the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil-doers, for the sake of firmly establishing righteousness, I am born from age to age." 2 This quotation from the Bhagavad Gita gives a good illustra- tion of Mahomet's conception of the prophetic function. The metaphysical subtlety by which Shri Krishna is made to identify himself with his predecessors and successors, was indeed far beyond the reach of the Arabian's cruder mind. But he believed that the true religion revealed to Adam at his creation the direct and spiritual worship of the one and only God had been repeatedly corrupted and degraded by idolatrous man. Prophets like Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, each inspired by a special 1 The fact that Mahomet was unable to read somewhat detracts from the appropriateness of this detail ! - The Ehagavad GUa, or " The Lord's Song." Trans, by A, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 261 revelation from the Most High, were sent from time to time to restore it to its original purity. Of this line of prophets he claimed now to be the last, if not the greatest, his task the purging of his nation from the sin of idolatry, the recall of his people to the monotheism which he believed them to have had and to have lost. Of any ambition for personal advancement there is, at this period of his life, no evidence at all. He began to hold prayer-meetings, and working more or less quietly managed in the course of the next three years to make some forty converts. The secret gradually leaked out, and trouble began. Not only were the prayer-meetings liable to the inter- ruptions of the rabble always instinctively hostile to religious innovations but Mahomet's own kindred, the Koreishites, to whose family pertained the office of guardian of the Kaaba, were of course too deeply interested in the established idolatry to regard Mahomet's revolutionary propaganda with tolerance. In the fourth year of his mission, having had another vision, bidding him " arise, preach and magnify the Lord," Mahomet summoned his kinsmen, the Koreishites, and boldly announced his views. An uproar ensued, and after this and a second appeal to his tribe, Mahomet was subjected to much ridicule and abuse, dirt was thrown on him as he prayed in the Kaaba, he was reviled as a madman, and a poet named Amru derided his pre- tensions in lampoons and madrigals. Nevertheless, his per- sistent attacks on idolatry began to have some effect, and the Koreishites, failing to silence him, decreed the banishment of all Mahommedans. From the seventh to the tenth year of his mission, Mahomet's immediate relatives, the Haschemites, were placed under a ban by their tribe until they should deliver up the prophet. His uncle, Abu Taleb, however, maintained him in his stronghold near Mecca, and, at the peril of his life, Mahomet continued to visit Mecca during the sacred month, and converted many of the pilgrims. In the tenth year of his mission (619 A.D.) the ban was removed, and Mahomet returned to Mecca and re- sumed his propaganda. This year occurred the death of his first wife, Cadi j ah. To his credit be it said that he is reputed to have been faithful to her to the end. " When I was poor she enriched me ; when I was pronounced a liar she believed in me ; 262 MAKERS OF MAN when I was opposed by all the world she remained true to me," he justly exclaimed. Now he considered himself released from any restriction of his marital proclivities ; he claimed and exercised the right to have as many wives as he chose. To each of his followers four wives and no more were permitted. Soon after his wife's death occurred the vision described in the Koran, in which Mahomet visited Jerusalem and the seventh heaven. After ten years' effort Mahomet still found himself compelled to live concealed among his adherents in Mecca, but the time of his probation was nearing its end. At Jathreb (now Medina), 70 miles north of Mecca, abode many Jews and heretical Chris- tians, and some of the pilgrims from this place were so impressed by Mahomet's doctrine, that they believed him to be the prom- ised Messiah. In the thirteenth year of his mission (622 A.D.) Mahomet (set. 53) was invited by his converts at Medina to come and live among them. To this he agreed on their promising to obey him in all things, and from their emissaries he chose twelve apostles, of whom, however, one hears nothing more. Carlyle calls Mahommedanism, as taught by its founder, " a confused form of Christianity," and there are abundant evi- dences of the fact that what he had learned from Waraka, and possibly from the Nestorian monks in Palestine, had left a profound impression on his mind. Myself, I should rather call his religion a defeminised than a confused Christianity. The genius of Mahomet is exclusively masculine, that of Christ androgynous. Mahommedanism resists opposition, even modi- fication, until the breaking-point is reached ; Christianity, by reason of superior subtlety, adapts itself to all emergencies, conquering while it seems to yield. At Medina, Mahomet, living frugally and laboriously, soon attained to a commanding position, built a mosque, and preached devotion to God and humanity to man. He made many converts in the city ; fugitives flocked to him from Mecca, and proselytes from the desert tribes. His purpose assumed a new aspect : "he found an army at his disposal, and the desire to use it naturally followed." Carlyle has little patience with those who cavil at the prophet for his reliance on the sword. " You must first get your sword," he pertinently THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 263 remarks " on the whole a thing will propagate itself as it can." Still there is no denying that the aspirations of Mahomet became to some extent vitiated by the taint of mere ambition. He grew less and less tolerant, and, what I consider more blame- worthy, showed a growing inclination to justify his amorous and other vagaries by the plea of special revelation. In this he was false to his own insight : the moral intuitions of a religi- ous genius are never seriously at fault. Posterity has amply avenged the lapse from sincerity ; there are numbers of well- meaning but ignorant folk, who, perplexed by rumours born of his inconsistency, still regard Mahomet as a mere charlatan. As Mahomet's power grew, the material element of his purpose continually expanded, but the spiritual aim which ensouled it was never absent from his mind. Supreme in Medina (though the Jews gave him trouble there by ridiculing his prophetic claims), Mahomet began to turn his thoughts once more to Mecca, the stronghold of idolatry. He would conquer it, not as Jesus attempted to conquer Jerusalem, by the unsupported might of his divine mission, but by sheer force of arms. He so harried the caravans of the Koreishites, that, six years after his flight from the Holy City, on his reappearance at the gates of Mecca with 1400 " pilgrims," his assurances of peaceful intentions were accepted, a ten years' truce was concluded, and free access for Moslems to the shrine w.as conceded. Of this privilege he and his followers availed themselves in the next year. His captains were constantly subduing the refractory tribes of the desert, and, as his realm extended, he turned his attention to foreign missions. The Emperor Heraclius and Khosru II. of Persia were visited by his ambassadors, inviting them to accept the faith of Islam. Syria was invaded by a Moslem force, and though Zeid, its leader, was slain, the Imperial force had been routed and much booty was brought back to Medina. Eight years after the Hegira (A.D. 630), having thousands of Arab warriors at his disposal, Mahomet felt that his hour of victory was at hand. He accused the Meccans of having violated the treaty of 628, and although the bitterest of his foes, Abu Sofian, came and humbled himself at Medina, Mahomet, undeterred, set forth for Mecca at the head 264 MAKERS OF MAN of 10,000 men. Resistance was out of the question ; Mahomet entered the city in pilgrim garb, reciting prophecies of the event, made the seven circuits of the shrine, demolished the 360 idols, and received the spiritual allegiance of the inhabitants. Ma- homet was now supreme lord of almost the whole of Arabia. He returned to Medina triumphant, and shortly afterwards sent Ali to Mecca to announce that after four months' grace all idolaters would be killed wherever and whenever found. In the beginning of the next year (631) Medina was thronged with envoys from distant tribes and from princes who had become converts to Islam and tributaries of his vast realm. In the following year, prostrated by the death of his only son, Mahomet (set. 62), with his nine wives, at the head of an immense throng, made a final pilgrimage to Mecca. He died next year (632), never having assumed regal state or departed from the sim- plicity of his habits, and leaving no wealth behind him. That power and conquest were for him, even to the last, but means to his end, must be conceded by any impartial critic. The man had genuine humility witness his reply to one who asked whether he would be exempt from the rule that no man would enter Paradise on the strength of his own merit. The prophet placed his hand upon his head and said three times with great solemnity : " Neither shall I enter Paradise except God cover me with His mercy." It has been well said of Mahomet that his great schemes grew out of his fortunes, not his fortunes out of his schemes. But this applies only to their material element, not at all to his religious aspiration. Far simpler than the case of Mahomet is the problem of elucidating the purpose of St. Francis d'Assisi, a purpose pure as man's may well be of any earthly alloy or taint of mere self-seeking. Of the innocent frivolity of his adolescent years I have already spoken ; even then a heart so tender must have been chastened sometimes by the influence of his gently born and saintly mother. She prayed for him without ceasing, cherishing always the hope that in God's good time he would prove worthy of her dreams. In his boyhood Francis must have heard talk of Peter Waldo, the wealthy usurer of Lyons, who in 1171 distributed his wealth to the poor, lived thence- THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 265 forth on alms, and sent his followers two by two into the T towns and villages. Pier Bernardone must often have met those "poor men of Lyons" in the course of his mercantile expeditions, but the worldly wisdom with which, no doubt, he censured their folly, would not efface the admiration secretly awakened in the chivalrous heart of his younger son. The seed of Waldo's example had fallen on fertile soil. I have told how, after the long illness which in his twenty-third year (1204) followed his release from prison, Francis drew apart from his gay com- panions and sought relief from his remorseful anguish in peni- tence and prayer. Somewhere about this time he gave a banquet to his comrades, but could not recall his familiar mood of gay abandon even for that hour. Challenged to tell of what lady's charms he mused so deeply, he replied, " I think of a spouse lovelier, richer, purer than you can possibly imagine." The seed of Waldo's example was germinating : it was to Poverty, to Renunciation, that his heart was irresistibly being drawn. His betrothal to the lady of his choice was in this wise : In the autumn of 1205 he visited Rome, and, having emptied his purse on the altar of St. Peter's, changed tunics with a beggar on the church steps, and spent the day begging from passers-by. Soon after his return to Assisi, kneeling one day before the painted crucifix of San Damiano, the figure seemed to quicken, and bade him " Go and restore my falling Church." His belief in the authenticity of this vision, which he at first interpreted in its most literal sense, is proved by the fact that some little while after, collecting stones and mortar, he with his own hands repaired the structures of the churches of San Pietro, San Damiano, and Santa Maria degli Angeli. But first he had to break definitely with the old life and with all family ties and responsibilities. His father, incensed at what he deemed the frenzy of his pampered son, had imprisoned him in a cellar. Released by his mother, he ignored her prayers that he would submit himself to the paternal discipline, and sought refuge with a priest at San Damiano. His father sought him out and brought him to the bishop. Then Francis, to symbolise his repudiation of all earthly authority or obligation, stripped himself naked, and, handing his clothes to Pier Bernar- 266 MAKERS OF MAN done, exclaimed, " Now I have no father for ever, but our Father who is in Heaven." In the same spirit, two days before his death, Francis caused himself to be laid naked on the ground in token of his fidelity to the Poverty he had espoused twenty years before. If at this time Francis believed that a radical change had been supernaturally effected in the inborn disposition of his character, he was doubtless deceived. The psychology of such conversions, however mysterious or sensational they may appear, is by no means unintelligible. The " will to power " he had never lacked it was only that now he had come to an understanding with himself as to the means by which it must be realised, had purified it of extraneous and intoler- ably uncongenial accretions. " I know that I shall become a great prince," he had, in the hour of his ephemeral military ambition, half-humourosly declared. A great prince he still aspired to be, but he had, at least instinctively, arrived at the perception that his talent was for giving, not for getting. For such men to give what they have is less than nothing ; they must give themselves to the last drop of their blood, the last breath of their nostrils. What a man gives is the supreme test of his greatness, and it is because they so ill satisfy this final requirement that our verdict upon such great getters as Frederick and Napoleon has ever a carping, a dubious note. Hampered by conventional " duties " in the satisfaction of an imperious instinct, Francis thus made his declaration of inde- pendence, thus cleared the decks for action. Let us relinquish to Pharisees the cant of " self-abnegation " ; to assert himself as he was, Francis boldly threw overboard the self that such people expected him to be. He who shrinks with pious horror from the suggestion that the career of a saint may be initiated by an act of self-will, should candidly inquire of himself what would be his feelings if a son of his own should behave to him as Francis behaved to Pier Bernardone. Early in 1209, Francis (an. set. 28), having, as sole wor- shipper in a church, been struck by the reading of the text, " As ye go, preach, saying the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," entered the church of San Giorgio barefoot, with a rope-girdled THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 267 grey tunic, and addressed the congregation. It is thought that he had, since his conversion, spent a year with a hermit near Casena, who wore a similar habit and preached the " Gospel Rule" of Augustine. If so, the influence of this hermit probably played its part in determining the form of his ultimate purpose. One by one, disciples joined him, those who had wealth first disposing of it by distribution to the poor ; and in the autumn of next year, their number being then twelve in all, they pro- ceeded to Rome, and by the aid of Bishop Guido of Assisi, and of Cardinal Colonna, obtained access to the Pope, who after some demur granted them as " Brothers Minor," a licence to preach. This official recognition may have been necessary : without it Francis and his followers would have been regarded as mere sectaries, unqualified practitioners ; and would have been liable to persecution on that account. But it was to prove no unmixed blessing : henceforth the grasp of the Pope slowly tightened upon the new Order, and in the end the primitive simplicity, the Christian anarchy, which was the very essence of its founder's intention, was tampered with to an extent that filled him with despair. Soon after the return of the twelve Brothers Minor to Assisi, they received from Abbot Maccabeo the sanctuary of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which was to be the permanent headquarters of the Order. Proselytes poured in ; huts of wood and clay were built for their accommodation ; and to this rude settlement they returned twice yearly from their preaching expeditions into the outlying towns and villages. In 1212, as a consequence of the conversion to the Rule of Clare, the eldest daughter of Count Favorino degli Sciffi, followed by that of her two sisters and of the Countess herself, an affiliated Sisterhood came into existence, whose members, exempted by the chivalry of St. Francis from the functions of mendicancy and preaching, devoted themselves to nursing the sick, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, preparing herbal medicines, and em- broidering altar-cloths. In the same year Francis made a vain attempt to reach Palestine ; and this was the first of a series of foreign missions which within a few years carried the flood of enthusiasm through Syria, France, and Spain. The 268 MAKERS OF MAN frequent absences of the founder led, however, to a delegation of authority, which in a short time resulted in a sort of con- spiracy against what many considered the impracticability of his ideas. The scholars who had joined the Order found it hard that they were precluded from owning even a Bible or a psalter. Cardinal Ugolino, the official patron of the Order, sided with these malcontents, but Francis refused with passion- ate vehemence to accord them any special privileges or ex- emptions. " God called me into the way of simplicity and humility. . . . Do not speak to me of the Rule of St. Benedict, of St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, nor of any other saint. . . . God will confound you through your knowledge and your wisdom." In the end the Church view inevitably prevailed : the rule of poverty was mitigated ; the brothers were gathered into communities, into houses ; were granted privileges and possessions ; had churches of their own ; were under strict ecclesiastical control ; were employed in quasi-political functions, as messengers, agents, and what not. " Woe unto those brethren that set themselves against me in this matter," cried Francis, " which I know of a certainty to be of the will of God, . . . albeit I unwillingly condescend unto their will." Humble and self-distrustful by nature, weakened by ill-health, and prostrated in spirit by the sense of his failure, Francis likened himself to a little black hen whose wings could no longer shelter her numerous chickens. At the close of the autumn chapter of 1220, he (aet. 39) resigned to Pietro de Cattani the direction of the Order, kneeling and promising obedience, while the friars who loved him wept sore. " Were the brethren willing to walk according to my will, ... I would that they should have none other minister but me until my dying day." Six years later, when he lay at Assisi almost at the point of death, the gaiety which rather scandalised Brother Elias would sometimes be broken by cries revealing the rancour of an unhealed wound. " Where are they who have taken my brothers from me ? Where are they who have robbed me of my children ? . . . Could I but be present at the Chapter General, I would let them know my will." His final blow for the restoration of his ideal in its pristine, but all too THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 269 other-worldly, simplicity, was the bequeathal, in his Testa- ment, of Poverty to all faithful friars. It was directed to be read with the Rule of 1223 at the Chapters General of the Order, but Elias, the real though untitled successor to his authority, backed by the Pope himself, promptly absolved all the brethren from literal obedience. Miss A. M. Stoddart, in her biography of the Saint, writing presumably from an extremely Protestant point of view, has very harsh things to say with regard to the " betrayal " of his ideals by professed admirers, notably Elias and Cardinal Ugolino. Elias was a traitor no doubt, but there is much to be said in defence of the official scruples of the Cardinal, the genuineness of whose regard for Francis I see no reason to doubt. In my opinion, it says much for the sincerity of thirteenth century Catholicism that the sublime indiscretions of this enfant terrible did not blind his orthodox contemporaries to the value of his work and the beauty of his example. The general feeling with regard to him is well summarised in the saying of the writer of the Fioretti, that " the faithful servant of Christ, St. Francis, was in certain things well-nigh another Christ, given to the world for the salvation of mankind." He, in fact, reproduced with marvellous fidelity not only many of the greatest qualities, but also, and in exaggerated form, some of the limitations of his Master. His obscurantism is a case in point : he carried his hostility to intellectualism to absurd lengths, wishing not merely to make the heart supreme over the head, but to ignore the dictates of reason altogether. When in doubt which road to take, he once made Friar Masseo turn round many times, and when he stopped with his face turned by chance toward Siena, declared that to be the God-appointed route. At Ancona he made a child who was playing near the shore choose eleven friars to accompany him on his Syrian mission. In all this he was rigidly conforming with the requirements of the Christian ethic his beloved " Gospel Rule " but he was acting in a quite irrational manner. The friars whom he sent into Germany and Hungary, being totally ignorant of the languages in which they were to preach, not only met with rough usage, but inevitably failed to accomplish the purpose of their mission, The wholesale 270 MAKERS OF MAN conversion of industrious citizens into ecstatic mendicants, however edifying, must have had serious drawbacks from a utilitarian, not to say a sanitary, point of view. There is no short cut to Utopia ; a genuine Christian must be born, not made, and is perhaps not born more than once in a century. Such exalted ideals are far beyond the attainment of commonplace humanity ; and it was just his failure to realise this hard fact that in a measure justified the ecclesiastical attitude with regard to St. Francis. He was right in adopting for himself the Rule of Poverty, which expressed so perfectly his need of reliance upon the love of his fellow-men. He was wrong in supposing that the indiscriminate imitation of his example by those who had no such need would prove a panacea for the ills of humanity. But the work of such heroic souls is not finally to be judged by its immediate or visible effects : it is not for an age, but for all time. The genius of St. Francis may be likened to a clear flame, as of a torch that consumed itself, leaving no perceptible by- products of its combustion. That of Luther, on the other hand, gave a large proportion of heat as well as its modicum of light, and fumes provocative to the eyes if not to the nose of the bystander. " I am the rough woodman," he declared, " who has to make a path " ; and the phrase truly indicates not only the vigour but the ruthlessness of the man of action. On his visit to Rome in 1511 (set. 27), some four years after his ordina- tion, his keen eyes detected much of the cynical irreligion of the ecclesiastical atmosphere. " Good Christian " was, in priestly circles, a term of derision, as who should say " Simpleton." " Bread thou art and bread thou shalt remain ; wine thou art and wine thou shalt remain," was the facetiously- amended formula favoured by the knowing ones in the act of celebration. On resuming work at Wittenberg, Luther, in his lectures on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles, true to the teaching of Staupitz, from which he had derived comfort in the days of his own perplexity, contravened the current view that forgiveness can be earned by good deeds or by ceremonial conformity, insisting on the faith-inspired acceptance of Gods mercy as the sine qua non of salvation. The labour spent in mastering the THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 271 subtleties of scholastic theology he accounted vain and sterile ; and studied above all things to achieve a certain homely direct- ness of style in his preaching. He was, in fact, already at issue with the fundamental principles of ecclesiastical officialdom, although professing, rightly perhaps, that his view was a return to the orthodox position as represented in the fourteenth century by Tauler, and in the fourth by St. Augustine. The strength of his dawning purpose lay in the fact that it was firm-set on the rock of his own religious experience : on realising the hopelessness of attaining his ideal of righteousness he had all but succumbed to a frenzy of superstitious terror, but had been restored to serenity by the conviction that the one thing required of him an attitude of surrender, a humble acceptance of the free gift of salvation was perfectly within his power. Here, then, we have already the germ of the Lutheran doctrine of " Christian Liberty," and although at this time he himself can hardly have realised its destructive implications, there were not wanting observers who surmised that it might carry him far. Pollich, one of the eldest of the Wittenberg circle of theologians, ventured the prediction : " This monk will revolutionise the whole system of scholastic teaching." It must by no means be forgotten that the economic situation in Germany had created a strong feeling of impatience with regard to the extortions practised in the name of the Papal authority. Ecclesiastical fiefs and benefices were taxed to such a degree that the country was being impoverished by the constant flow of gold into the bottomless coffers of Rome ; and the national and provincial authorities were at their wits' end for money. The Emperor Maurice, himself a German, was fully alive to the seriousness of the matter, and, some years later, when the great struggle for decentralisation had fairly begun, expressed a desire that " the monk " should be protected, as " he might some day be wanted." This was all the more significant in that Maurice was by no means at one with Luther in regard to his doctrinal and ecclesiastical contentions. We may be sure that the overburdened tax-payers of Saxony and the other principalities were not backward in voicing their grievances : disaffection with regard to the papal pretensions was in the air, and much of the popular immunity and princely 272 MAKERS OF MAN protection which Luther enjoyed would remain inexplicable but for the fact that he was accepted as champion of the nationalist cause. No doubt this disaffection had its effect upon Luther's active intelligence ; remembering what he had observed at Rome and elsewhere of the greed and corruption prevalent in priestly circles, noting, too, the way in which the loyalty and superstition of the masses were being shamelessly exploited for ignoble ends, he was evidently forced to the conclusion that unquestioning subservience to all the obligations imposed in the name of religion could no longer be regarded as essential to salvation. So it was that he was led to substitute a purely subjective criterion to make redemption or reprobation essentially dependent, not upon life and conduct considered as a whole, but upon foe spiritual attitude of the believer. There was not much that was new in the positive side of his purpose at this phase of its development : faith had always been required of her subjects by the Church, at least in theory. It was what he rejected as immaterial, or at least inessential, that gave him his hold on those who were seeking a pretext for breaking with Rome. The building of St. Peter's was already begun at the time of Luther's visit to Rome (1511), and Pope Leo x., who had now succeeded, determined on a special sale of indulgences in order to procure funds for the completion of the work. Accordingly, in 1517, a profligate Dominican, John Tetzel, appeared on the scene, and, being forbidden by the Elector to enter Wittenberg, settled for the time at Jiiterbok, where, being a " hustler " of undeniable ability, he was soon driving a roaring trade. Luther saw and seized his opportunity ; he posted on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg the celebrated " Ninety-five Theses," contending that the Pope can only grant indulgence for what he and the law of the Church have imposed, that true repentance absolves the sinner without any papal confirmation, yet upon the whole attacking rather the irresponsible babble of such hucksters as Tetzel than the traffic in which they were engaged. In fourteen days the news of this bold act had spread throughout Germany ; Luther had made Jiimself [famous, and the great struggle of the Reformation was begun. In May of next year, in Solutions, he took a furtherTstep, denying the scriptural authority for the THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 273 sacrament of penance with auricular confession and expiatory acts, and contending that absolution may be conveyed to a penitent not merely by an ordained priest but by any brother Christian. The pamphlet ended with an appeal to the Pope : " Give me life or death, accept or reject me as you will." That dignitary, not much concerned, ordered Staupitz, vicar-general of the Augustinians, to " quiet the man down " ; but later in the year Luther was formally cited to appear within sixty days before a tribunal for the trial of heretics at Rome, and the Elector Frederick was required to surrender this " child of the devil " to the papal legate. This Frederick would not do, and he required a pledge of immunity on Luther's behalf before allowing him to attend the Diet at Augsburg and meet Caietan, the Pope's Legate. Luther met Caietan, but refused to retract, and, suspecting treachery, fled back to Wittenberg. His excom- munication was now inevitable, and in November of the same year (1518) he published a solemn and formal appeal from the Pope (whose jurisdiction he thus repudiated) to a General Council representative of all professed Christians. With a man of Luther's courage and impetuosity, the development of his destructive programme, up to, and indeed far beyond, its logical conclusion, could now be merely a matter of time. It is therefore unnecessary to trace in detail the dramatic episodes of his career during the next four or five years the disputation with Eck at Leipsic, the alliance with the Humanists, the appeal to the Nobility, the burning of the Papal decretals, the heroic ordeal of the Diet of Worms, the secret flight and seclusion in the Wartburg, where for a time his powerful mind seems to have suffered partial eclipse. His conception of the papal supremacy, once its absolute validity had been challenged, rapidly descended from the phase where he conceded a sort of presidential function, to that in which he set himself to answer the " Bull of Anti- Christ." Twenty-five years later, launching his last thunderbolt the pamphlet Against the Popedom at Rome, instituted by the Devil his opening clause gives the Pontiff the title of " the most hellish Father." His repudiation of the sacrificial con- ception of the Mass, and of celibacy, the root-principles of medieval Catholicism, was no doubt suggested by the rationalistic 18 274 MAKERS OF MAN tone increasingly prevalent in Wittenberg, and indeed throughout Germany. Only those exceptional persons who had the gift of continence should, he rightly held, undertake such obligations. For himself, he found at length that he had not this gift : as a free man he could not be bound by vows made in ignorance. He married, as we all know ; and it was perhaps the most courageous act of a dauntless career. Much more difficult is the task of defining the constructive element of Luther's work, but a constructive element, or perhaps rather a conservative one, it undoubtedly possessed. His first idea seems to have been to replace the authority of the Curia, as a final arbiter in questions of discipline or of doctrine, by a Council representative of the consensus of Christendom. Following Huss in this matter, he maintained the existence of a Universal Church, composed of all sincere believers, even those who, like the Eastern community, had long been severed from the Catholic hierarchy. This dream of a representative Council of Christendom of course proved impracticable ; in 1725 (set. 41), Luther stigmatised as " a devilish perversion of the truth " Zwingli's contention that the sacramental bread should be regarded as a mere symbol of the body of Christ. Luther adhered to the literal interpretation of the saying, " This is my body," maintaining on this point a position which I for one find indistinguishable from that of the orthodox Catholics. At the Marburg Conference, unity of a sort was attained on other points with the Swiss reformers, but Luther steadfastly declined to regard them as " brothers in Christ." Here, as in many respects, Luther proved false to his own principle ; he had championed the right of private judgment, but showed small patience with those whose conclusions did not coincide with his own. Renouncing the dream of external unity for the tendency was everywhere towards disruption yet feeling the indispensability of someobjective seat of authority, he had no choice but to rest his case upon the infallibility of the inspired Word of God. By his translation of the New and Old Testaments into the German version, which achieved an instant and widespread popularity, he proved the genuine- ness of his conviction that his own interpretation of their THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 275 purport must ultimately prevail. Thus he supplied the only possible foundation for the new democratic evangelicalism, which, in one form or another, has for four centuries held, and still in a measure holds, the field. And by his own powerful example, his vindication of the dignity of secular activities, his preaching, his controversial pamphlets, his appeals to dignitaries, his pastoral reforms and visitations, his great war- songs of the Reformation, he welded the inchoate impulses of religious nationalism into at least provisional unity and form. It is refreshing to turn from the combative turbulence of Luther's career to the serene power, the gracious catholicity of the sage of Concord. Emerson was not driven by super- stitious terror into the Unitarian ministry, as Luther had been driven to the adoption of monastic vows. Himself the son of a minister, he dreamed for a time of becoming a novelist, a poet, even a painter. The grief of his mother when his brother William returned from Germany a sceptic, and forsook theology for law, confirmed his own final choice of the ministry, and he would never have left it " could he but have had liberty always to tell the highest thing he knew, and to conform his practice in all respects with his ideal." Of the formative influences upon his mental development, one worthy of special mention is his great admiration of Channing, " whose peculiar secret was the exaltation of morality into religion by enthusiasm for the right and good." His early sermons are said to have been, upon the whole, not remarkable ; in them he adhered to the conventional Bible phraseology. Nor was he a striking success in parochial work ; excess of delicacy, mistrust of ordinary didactic methods no doubt stood in his way. On one occasion his diffidence was thus grimly rebuked by a parishioner disappointed in the expectation of spiritual sustenance : " Young man, if you don't know your business, you had better go home ! " In or about his twenty-ninth year, difficulties arose between Emerson and his Boston congregation with regard to the Lord's Supper, which he would not accept as an obligatory rite. " If I believed that it was, I should not adopt it. I will love him as a glorified friend, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect as men do to those whom they fear." The controversy seems 276 MAKERS OF MAN to have been conducted on both sides without acrimony, but it ended in Emerson's resignation of his charge. He continued, however, for another fifteen years to accept occasional invita- tions to preach in various churches of the Unitarian persuasion. In this, I hold that he was justified in the first place because Unitarians profess to allow their preachers perfect freedom in regard to dogma ; and secondly, because, with Emerson, affirma- tion in such matters always took precedence of negation. Strictly speaking, he cannot, it is true, in his maturity, be called a theist ; not, however, because belief in God was for him a chimerical notion, but because the personal category seemed to him altogether inadequate, even as a symbol of the absolute Reality. 1 And with regard to Christianity, the same reluctance to emphasise the negative conclusions of his mind is evident. In Man Thinking (1837) he says : " The man has never lived who can feed us for ever." The divinity of Christ was, for him, not a unique prodigy, bat the realisation of a potentiality common to all mankind. It was a " doctrine of the Reason," falsified when adopted as a formula of the prosaic Understanding. For him the guarantee of truth was always that the soul accepts it gladly, without constraint and without subservience. Freed from his ministerial charge, Emerson, now nearing the close of his twenty-ninth year, resolved on a visit to the old world. He sailed on Christmas day of 1832 for Malta, crossed to Sicily, made the acquaintance of Landor in Rome, visited Paris, and reached London late in July of 1833. Of his memor- able pilgrimage to Craigenputtock, Thomas Carlyle shall speak for himself : " We kept him one night and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill. I didn't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel." On his return he soon found himself in great request both as lecturer and preacher, his first lectures being mainly on scientific topics. He lived for a time with his mother near Boston, but after his marriage, in 1836, moved to Concord. The transition from theology to philosophy to seership, one ought rather to say, for he was no dialectician was now rapidly 1 To a cousin he once wrote, " When I speak of God I prefer to say It." THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 277 proceeding ; and in this the effect of his European tour is evident enough. " Not only had his views expanded and his mind imbibed new ideas, but he had profited by detachment from the concerns of a limited community and an isolated church. . . . His thoughts committed to paper on shipboard have a largeness and liberty not attained by him before. He also began to feel dimly that he might have a message to deliver to Europe as well as to America." In the year of his marriage appeared Nature, the first maturely Emersonian utterance, " the first in which he came forward speaking as one having authority." It attracted little attention, yet was " a seed implanted in the crumbling New England theology, whose unnoticed expansion had force enough to shatter the whole fabric." Man is revealed, not as the mere creation of an extra-mundane despot, nor as a mere part of nature, an effect simply, but as causal, creative, also, evil being the price paid for his potential infinitude. In method this work, like all its successors, was not strictly philo- sophical but poetical, not dialectical but affirmative. Emerson wrote down his thoughts as they came to him without any pretence of a formal justification. " I do not know what argu- ments are," he said, " in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think. But if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men." It was his custom to take solitary morning walks, " hunting thoughts as a boy hunts butterflies." These thoughts were at once written down in his " Thought Book," and most of his Essays obviously consist of detached paragraphs, pieced or strung together without any apparent logical sequence. 1 Nature, however, seems to have been written consecutively " in the heat and happiness of a genuine inspiration." He hated writing to an occasion or on a prescribed subject. " Such writing," he said, " is at its origin derived and a peril. Out of your own self should come your theme ; and only thus can your genius be your friend." It is essential to the understanding of Emerson's aims and achievement to bear in mind that his genius was no isolated 1 " Do not put hinges to your work to make it cohere " (R. W. E. to C. J. Woodbury). 278 MAKERS OF MAN phenomenon. New ideas were in the air, and exceptional personalities abounded. One may mention among his con- temporaries the names of Lincoln, Parker, Lowell, Channing, Margaret Fuller, Alcott, Hawthorne, Thoreau. The magnetic personality and the quickly growing repute of Emerson attracted to his Concord home a host of cranks and enthusiasts aboli- tionists, Platonists, vegetarians, Pestalozzians, communists whose naive efforts to capture him for their own particular panaceas were gently but firmly repulsed. Invited by Alcott to join his luckless community at " Fruitlands," Emerson replied that he " must submit to the degradation of owning bank-stock and seeing poor men suffer." In his ministerial days he had, however, been one of the first to place his pulpit at the disposal of anti-slavery preachers. And it is recorded that he tried, presumably without permanent success, to institute common meals in his household. His advocacy of the cause of negro emancipation was firm and consistent ; more than once he publicly championed the cause, and incurred a very hostile reception. In default of a better classification, Emerson must, I suppose, be labelled moralist, for he aims, by awakening and emancipating the intellect, at the liberation of the will. But he has no system cut and dried ; he desires no disciples ; mistrusts all negations, hence deals not in prohibitions. A born individualist, his virile conscience approves all actions which bear the stamp of genuine self-expression. His limitless tolerance must have sorely puzzled his earnest friends, the apostles of the " Newness " ; it was, we know, a stumbling-block to his lifelong confidant, Carlyle. Of a Baptist minister, who, after hearing him lecture, prayed that the audience might be delivered from ever hearing " such tran- scendental nonsense " again, Emerson, inquiring his name, remarked, " He seems a very conscientious, plain-spoken man." Frugal to the verge of asceticism himself, he clearly saw the futility of exacting any such standard from the gross generality of mankind. " Nature comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday school, never weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 279 would be strong with her strength we must not harbour such disconsolate consciences." In Politics (written an. set. 41) he expressed surprise that no one had steadily denied the law on the ground of his own moral nature. But his faith in collective action, always weak by reason of his predominant individualism, was restored somewhat by realisation of the impotency of other than organised attacks upon such institutions as slavery. His superiority to the plane of the formal moralist is also evident from his endorsement of war. The Civil War had greatly impoverished him, by reducing the sale of his works, the demand for lectures, and the returns from his investments. Yet he wrote to Carlyle : " I shall always respect war hereafter. The waste of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstruct- ing and upholding Society." Matthew Arnold has dubbed Emerson " the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." Pretty, no doubt ; but I question whether Emerson would have relished the verdict. He admired Montaigne as well as Plato. Spirit is a large word too often applied to a small and narrow thing. "It is not enough," Emerson would have said, " to have your head among the stars. You must keep your feet firmly planted on the earth." " I unsettle all things," he declares. " No facts are to me sacred, none are profane ; I simply experiment." This is the true Emerson, the Emerson who, as has been well said, 1 gives and maintains to us, by the stimulus of his high intimations, not himself merely others can do that much but . . . our- selves. Although Emerson was a man who thought much of the future, lived largely in and for it, and will doubtless receive its homage, he was not by temperament and character a dis- tinctively modern type. His virtue has an antique flavour about it, reminds one of Plato, of Epictetus, or of Plotinus. Ernest Renan, on the contrary, was a modern of the moderns : versatile, familiar, he has not a trace of the Emersonian aloof- ness, yet combines by a sort of miracle with his thorough- 1 C. J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. 280 MAKERS OF MAN going relativity of method an unswerving fidelity to the loftiest idealism of aim and conviction. When the painful straggle against his growing scepticism had terminated in definite withdrawal from the ecclesiastical career, which he had chosen largely in deference to his mother's desire, he found himself in a strange and embarrassing position. A theologian with no theology, a specialist in Semitic religious lore with no formal religion, a voluntarily unfrocked priest of twenty-three ! To justify, by the exercise of his unique faculties of historical analysis and vivid reconstruction of the past, his isolation from the dogmatic fold, became inevitably the purpose of his career. This, however, was only the negative and therefore preliminary portion of his task. Throughout life he kept a vigilant watch for indications of the future prospects of religion, and strove without ceasing to purify its permanent essence from the accretions of myth and fable. In a sense, therefore, he remained a priest to the end ; rather, perhaps, in ceasing to be a priest he became a prophet and a pioneer. A very modern prophet withal, one wholly devoid of spiritual pose or austerity, human to the core of him, brilliant, playful, ironical. His didactic aim is masked by the perfection of his artistry : he was too tactful to allow himself to preach. But it reveals itself in his evident appreciation of such characters as Marcus Aurelius, in the purity, one might almost say the sanctity, of his own life, in his beautiful devotion to his mother and to Henriette Kenan, and in such utterances as the following : " Duty, with its incalculable philosophical consequences, in imposing itself upon all, resolves all doubts, harmonises all oppositions, and serves as basis for the rebuilding of all that reason destroys or allows to perish. . . . He who shall have chosen the good will have been the true sage." Renan early recognised his own limitations : he was only twenty years old when he wrote to his sister : " I am only fit for one sort of life a life of study and reflection, retired and tranquil." Twenty-six years later, in 1869, he presented him- self to the electors of Meaux on behalf of peace and political reconstruction, and again in 1871. But, though described as an " irresistible orator," he was on both occasions unsuccessful, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 281 and this tardy and ephemeral ambition did not recur. In the first days of his apostasy he for a short time studied natural science with Berthelot, and the scientific ideal henceforth permeated, though it hardly dominated, all his literary activities. He settled in Paris with Henriette, and produced a series of works of which I must content myself with naming the titles. His Histoire Generate des Langues Semitiques won him the Volney prize ; in his Etudes d'Histoire Rcligieuse he criticises the work of David Strauss, pointing out the misleading effect of his Hegelianism, and drawing a clear distinction between the Christ of the Gospels, largely an ideal conception, and the historic personality of Jesus ; in Essais de Morale et de Critique he claims to be the true friend of religion, the rescuer of its imperishable essence from the ephemeral forms that conceal and mar it ; his Translation of Job inspired the panegyric on Duty quoted above ; that of the Song of Solomon, which he believed to be a drama enacted with music at Hebrew weddings, was the occasion for the following characteristic utterance : " The faith in the resurrection and the faith in the Messiah have produced more great deeds than the exact science of the grammarian. But it is the glory of the modern spirit to refrain from sacrificing, one to another, the lawful requirements of human nature." In 1860, Renan (set. 37) was sent by the Emperor to examine and report on certain ancient sites in Phrcnicia. The expedition was a memorable one, for him and for posterity. To it he owed the loss of his best friend and loyal helpmate, Henriette Renan 4 to it the world owes the final conception of his most character- istic if not greatest work, the Vie de Jesus. In close communion with the sister who so loyally shared his views and sympathised with his aspirations, the book was planned and largely written among the hills and valleys of Palestine. Its undue reliance upon the Fourth Gospel (the grounds of Kenan's confidence in which seem to me rather vague and fanciful) has no doubt in a measure detracted from its historical value. Renan has also been severely censured for his apparent only apparent reflection upon the good faith of Jesus in the matter of the miracles. Belief in miracles was, for him, f rankly impossible ; he had, how- ever, to account^for the fact that they were attributed to Jesus, 282 MAKERS OF MAN and that he seems to have accepted, though with signs of distaste and reluctance, the claims made on his behalf. Renan did not dogmatise on the matter ; he merely intimated his opinion that it was more likely that some vague rumours had been exaggerated, even that some collusion had been practised, than that the prodigies in question had actually occurred. His particular explanations may or may not be valid ; the principle upon which they were based is perfectly sound. It is evident that the motive for writing this book was, in part, the correction of the a priorism which he had censured in that of David Strauss. 1 The real importance of Kenan's Vie de Jesus lies in the fact that, with all its inevitable, and for the most part un- avoidable, faults or deficiencies, it brings home to the popular imagination with extraordinary power and charm the naturalist conception which is its basis and motif. It makes the reader feel the immense superiority of Jesus, the aspiring and con- quering man (homme incomparable), to Jesus the Demigod. " No saint in his cell, no Crusader, was ever more fervently haunted by Christ Jesus than this unfrocked Churchman, this sceptical archaeologist, busied with the details of a scientific mission." His conception perhaps erred on the side of mildness, was a little invertebrate and here we trace the restraining influence of the gentle Henriette. Years after that influence was withdrawn, in the Antichrist, Renan a bitterer, disillusioned Renan wrote : " Who knows ? The image of the Gospel may be false. Jesus may have been the centre of a group more pedantic, more scholastic, nearer to the Scribes and Pharisees than the Evangelists would have us believe." In 1862, Renan received, on the Emperor's initiative, the Chair of Semitic Languages at the College de France. Catholic interest, and perhaps Court influence, had delayed but could not prevent the appointment. Renan's liberalism immediately came under suspicion ; the Catholics were also up in arms. There was a storm of interruptions from both parties on the occasion of his inaugural address. He had expressed himself rather freely on the religious and political problems which 1 " Ever since his year of spiritual crisis, Renan had pondered in his heart a Life of Jesus, unlike any yet written " (Madame James Darmesteter). THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 283 occupied his mind, and both parties found occasion for offence. He was suspended from his professorate, and in 1864 (after the appearance of his Vie de Jesus) deprived of it altogether. In 1870 it was restored. The notoriety which, after this affair of the professorate, suddenly overwhelmed him, caused him to be regarded as a champion and martyr of liberalism, political as well as theological, and was no doubt the main cause of his keen but short-lived political ambition. The war with Germany was hateful to him as a lover of German culture ; the com- munistic debauch of blood and frenzy broke his heart. From his avenue of Versailles, with Paris flaming on the horizon, Renan developed his thesis of the function of the elect and his hypothesis of conditional immortality. The masses do not count. They are to be harnessed and driven by a syndicate of Daevas or tyrant-sages, commanding the resources of Science. But this priestly mood proved transient ; the old faith in progress revived ; from the study of the vain pride and ex- clusiveness of Gnosticism he learned anew the fallacies of the oligarchic theory. In one of his latest works (Philosophic Dramas) he wrote : "I love Prospero, but I do not love the men who would replace him on the throne. Caliban, improved by power, is more to my mind." From first to last Renan persisted in his claim to be regarded as the conservator of Religion. " Notre critique a plus fait pour la conservation de la religion que toutes les apologies. J'ai tout critique et, quoi qu'on en dise, j'ai tout maintenu." And he was, if not an optimist, at least an absolute meliorist, a believer in cosmic progress. " Malgre ses immenses defauts, ce monde reste apres tout une reuvre de bonte infinie." Was he then, upon the whole, a theist ? a consistent one he certainly was not. I do not know, and I do not think he knew either. It was for him a dream, which might (or might not) come true. But there can be no doubt as to his transcendentalism. "It is in the ideal world, and there only, that all the beliefs of the natural religion have their legitimacy. But, I cannot too often repeat it, it is the idea that exists, and the transient reality which only appears to be." V. Recapitulation. In order to complete our long task, 284 MAKERS OF MAN we have now to review the subject of Purpose in the light of the information gleaned from the preceding sections. The first point to which I would call attention is, that Purpose presents itself under two main aspects formal and substantial. The formal aspect of Purpose is that which concerns its develop- ment as a factor of the consciousness of its exponent ; the substantial aspect concerns its practical manifestation in life and activity. The formal or subjective aspect is logically prior to the substantial or objective aspect of Purpose ; but, genetically, the rule is that a man finds himself more or less fully committed to his task years before he has attained to that degree of self-consciousness and autonomy which true Purpose implies. Specially true is this rule with regard to men of action, the most primitive, therefore the most in- stinctive of our four types. Thus, with men like Caesar, we find their first steps dictated by a mere personal craving for power and the spontaneous exercise of an inborn gift for achieving popularity ; conscious devotion to large impersonal aims comes much later, if it come at all. More or less analo- gous are the cases of Charlemagne, Drake (whose purpose remained rudimentary to the end), Nelson (to some extent, though the merely instinctive stage was here of brief duration), and Lincoln. The last-named is as fine an example of the gradual development from a mere instinctive ambition to excel to the definite formulation of a general, and finally of a specific, political aim, as could well be desired. With William the Silent, on the other hand, although his purpose was based upon instinctive tolerance or sympathy, its actual initiation was preceded by its conscious and formal adoption. He therefore followed the logical, not the empirical, order, and is an exception to the rule. Much the same can be said of Richelieu, whose decisive intervention in national affairs would seem to have been the direct outcome of a carefully elaborated plan. But Richelieu, great man of action as he was, is in many ways atypical. Instinct and self-consciousness (the substantial and the formal factors of his genius) developed side by side. Among members of the aesthetic group, instinct predominates in the determination of the life-work of Titian, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 285 Mozart, Scott, and Turner. Dante and Goethe, on the other hand, were in the days of their maturity poets of clearly- defined and self-limited aim. Leonardo, however, lacking the compelling motive of a strong desire for fame, largely dis- sipated his power in the indulgence of his ever-growing in- tellectual curiosity. Among members of the intellectual group, the rule would seem to be that with scientific dis- coverers (Harvey, Newton, Darwin) the substantial aspect of purpose is, upon the whole, the more conspicuous ; with philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel), although their work has no doubt an instinctive basis, the formal element soon appears and begins to take the lead. Thus Descartes, at the age of twenty-four, in one day deliberately comes to terms with his own genius, assigning to it the task in which for the rest of his life he remained absorbed. And lastly, among members of the ethico -religious group, whose domain is the Will, as that of the philosopher is the Mind of Man, it is a rule with but few exceptions, that instinct has to be deliberately conquered and set aside before their proper work is or can be begun. Thus Christ would seem to have renounced worldly ambition ; Paul his instinctive prejudice against the new religion ; Marcus Aurelius and Gregory, their love of solitary contemplation; Augustine, his pride of intellect and sensuality ; Mahomet, his allegiance to the vested interests of his tribe in idolatrous institutions ; St. Francis, his fastidious taste and the dictates of his filial affection ; Luther, scholastic pedantry and faith in ceremonial observances ; Emerson, the orthodoxy of his Unitarianism ; Renan, the strong tendency of his docile Breton temperament to unquestioning loyalty in all that concerned the Catholic faith. The path of the religious or ethical reformer must be entered by the door of conversion : x in other words, the formal element of Purpose must, for such men, not merely exist, but reign supreme. Closely allied to this question of the role of conversion is that of the positive and negative, the creative and iconoclastic aspects or phases of Purpose. But before dealing with this I 1 By conversion I mean simply the emergence of a latent interest which suddenly finds itself in a position to take the upper hand. 286 MAKERS OF MAN must call attention to the environmental factor the mimetic element, which in its early stages is never absent from a given Purpose, and the part played by opportunity in rousing, evoking, and modifying its activity. We may be quite sure that the example of Marius was not lost upon young Caesar, any more than that of Pepin the Short upon Charlemagne ; for in both cases the course first adopted points conclusively to this explan- ation of its origin. Bichelieu's anti-Huguenot policy was avowedly modelled upon that of the Cardinal du Perron ; Frederick the Great learned much, no doubt, from Voltaire, but more, if the truth be told, from the father whom he hated and who hated him ; Goethe was profoundly influenced by the kindred genius of Shakespeare ; Scott owed a strong impulse to poetry to his translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen ; Flaubert's realism was largely based on sympathy with his father's enthusiasm for science ; Galileo owed many suggestions to the study of Leonardo's manuscripts ; Harvey's lifelong interest in the problem of the circulation was directly inspired by his intimacy with Fabricius ; Leibnitz was profoundly influenced by the study of Bacon ; Kant, by the study of Hume ; Darwin, by the example of Henslow and the generalisation of Malthus ; Jesus, by the teachings of Hillel, Isaiah, Daniel, and John the Baptist ; Marcus Aurelius, by his admiration of the Emperor Antoninus ; Francis, by the evangelical work of Peter Waldo ; Renan, by the steadfast courage of his sister Henriette. These random instances may suffice to notify the great part played by personal influence, the suggestive function of actual or mental association with the exemplars of kindred aims and capacities. The power of opportunity is best seen, of course, in the lives of the great opportunists men like Richelieu, Cromwell, Napoleon, Frederick, Lincoln, Luther, who never act until their moment is ripe, or fail to act then with instant promptitude and ruthless decision. But, in its degree, this power is evident in the lives of all our examples. I have already commented on the extraordinary reluctance of Gregory to accept the responsibility of his genius for administration, so clearly divined by his associates. But, after all, it is to be remembered that mere opportunity never made a man great THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 287 unless there was greatness in him. We must, in psychology, he constantly on our guard against a mechanical interpretation of what occurs in the domain of the human spirit. From the psychological point of view, which is rapidly superseding the mechanical and physiological regime of the nineteenth century, the naive acceptance of causality itself as vulgarly understood, is regarded with a certain irony. For the ultimate validity of what might be called the impact theory of causation is gravely suspect. It is one thing to explain things, and quite another to account for them. Metaphysically speaking, and psycho- logy must never lose touch with metaphysic, a man's oppor- tunities are no doubt of his own making, through and through. They are parts of " that full concept of the individual in which are included all its experiences, together with all the attendant circumstances and the whole sequence of exterior events." l I have in the preceding four sections had frequent occasion to point out the importance of distinguishing between the positive and negative, the creative and iconoclastic aspects of Purpose. The typical course of events would seem to be, that a man begins by resenting and combating certain facts or opinions against which his nature consciously, or at first only instinctively, rebels. Then, by degrees, he comes to recognise the necessity of replacing what he seeks to destroy by some analogous institution or idea, more conformable to his own views of right or fitness. So, while still combating the old, he seeks to establish the new, his conception of which, welling up insensibly from the depths of his being, broadens and matures with the growth of his experience. For a time the two purposes, positive and negative, may coexist in approxi- mately equal power ; his actions will then show a certain hesitancy and alternation between the two contrary extremes. But the typical development of Purpose demands a final harmonisation of these conflicting tendencies, a merging of their opposed mandates into a rule of balanced activity. In this matured phase, which I propose to call the synergic, Purpose is manifested, not by an alternation of positive and negative 1 Liebnitz, Summary of the Discourse on Metaphysics, in Letter to Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels. Trans, by Dr. G. R. Montgomery. 288 MAKERS OF MAN essays, but by actions, each one of which, while maintaining the critical or destructive element, also advances the positive. The above I call the typical, as it is also the logical sequence : needless to say, it varies largely in particular cases. Some- times, one or another aspect is the more conspicuous in a given career, to the extent of overshadowing the others altogether. In highly intuitive natures the positive phase may seem to precede the negative, or the latter may even appear to be entirely wanting. Intuitive natures naturally incline to affirmation : mere criticism does not interest them ; but the opposition their affirmation arouses forces them, in its defence, to reveal the destructive implications of their position. Jesus and Emerson are examples of the postponement of negative tendencies ; Marcus Aurelius, whose exalted station exempted him from opposition, seems to have had almost no tendency to negation. He certainly disliked Christianity, but there was little vehemence or insistence in his feeling about it. Negativity seems to predominate upon the whole in Cromwell, Frederick, Bacon, Descartes, Kant, Luther ; positivity, more or less, in Charlemagne, Mozart, Scott, Newton, Marcus Aurelius, Gregory, Francis. Caesar, Lincoln, Leibnitz, and Hegel certainly attained in varying degree the synergic or mature phase of Purpose. But enough has now been said to enable the reader to apply our principle for himself to the remaining examples. Is it possible to define in terms of a man's age the typical development of his purpose ? To some extent, yes ; but the periods assigned, although based on actual examples, must, of course, be considered approximate only, and will.be liable to many exceptions. Purpose must here be considered in its broadest aspect, such considerations as that of its positivity or negativity, its generality or specificity, being ignored. We fall back on our first classification, recognising three main phases in the typical development of Purpose (1) mainly in- stinctive ; (2) wherein the instinctive element is increasingly permeated by self-conscious determination, the growth of the formal factor ; and (3) the period of mature self-determined purposive activity. These three main phases may be preceded by a preliminary phase, daring which purpose, if it exist at all THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PURPOSE 289 will be of more or less vague and intermittent character. The typical age-periods of these phases will, I consider, be as follows : (a) Preliminary, boyhood and youth, up to about the end of the twentieth year ; (1) Instinctive phase, from the beginning of the twenty-first to the end of the thirtieth year ; (2) Growth of the formal factor, end of the thirtieth to end of the forty-fourth year ; (3) Period of maturity, beginning of the forty-fifth to end of the sixty-fifth or sixty-eighth year. Of the preliminary period, evidenced by the boyish precocity of Turner, Mozart, Newton, it is not necessary to say more at present. Of the other three, it is to be noted that I assign about ten years to the instinctive phase, about fourteen years to the formative, and about twenty-one (to twenty-four) to the maturity of Purpose. Within the first period (twenty-one to thirty) fall such developmental landmarks as the publication of his first capitulary by Charlemagne (aet. 26), the Italian campaigns of Napoleon (set. 26 to 28), the political debut of Lincoln (aet. 28), the com- position of Dante's Vita Nuova (aet. 27 to 30), the writing of Goetz von Berlichingen by Goethe (set. 22), and his conception of Faust (set. 25), Scott's annual exploratory raids into the Liddesdale district (aet. 21 to 28), the publication of Bacon's Temporis Partus Maximus (set. 24), Harvey's first independent physiological investigations (aet. 24), Newton's optical dis- coveries (aet. 24), the invention of the calculus by Leibnitz (set. 26 to 30), Darwin's voyage on the Beagle (set. 22 to 27), the conversion of St. Francis (aet. 23), and the ordination of Luther (aet. 23). Within the second or formative period (thirty to forty-four), fall the beginning of Charlemagne's Saxon war (aet. 32), the formal initiation of Richelieu's political career (set. 31), the debut of Cromwell (aet. 41), the maturation of Lincoln's anti- slavery policy (complete an. aet. 41), the initiation of Dante's Divine Comedy (aet. 35), the ripening of Cervantes' genius (composition of his greatest play, an. aet. 40), the self-disciplinary regimen of Goethe (begun aet. 0), the completion of Bacon's Advancement of Learning (published aet. 44), the preliminary announcement, in lectures, of Harvey's great discovery (set. 38), the translation of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy by Spinoza 19 2QO MAKERS OF MAN (set. 31), and the composition of his Ethics (complete an. ast. 42), the formulation of Newton's theory of Gravity (set. 40 to 43), the crystalisation of Kant's philosophical purpose (set. 36 to 41), the initiation of Darwin's doubts as to the fixity of species (set. 29 to 30), the first mission of St. Paul to the Gentiles (set. 33 or 35), the annunciatory vision of Mahomet (set. 40), and the publication of Luther's Ninety-five Theses (set. 34). Within the last or maturity period (45 to 65 or 68) fall such happenings as the composition of Don Quixote by Cervantes (first part, set. 54 to 58 ; second part, set. 68), the completion of Bacon's Novum Organum (set. 60), the publication of Harvey's classical treatise on the Circulation (set. 50), the writing of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (set. 45 to 57), and of his Critique of Practical Reason (set. 64), the completion of Hegel's Logic (set. 46), the publication of Darwin's Origin (set. 50), the popedom of St. Gregory the Great (set. 50 to 64), the withdrawal of Mahomet to Medina (set. 53), and his triumphant return to Mecca (set. 64). During this last period of its full activity, Purpose may be compared to a tree, which, having attained its full size and its definitive form, lives and thrives for a number of years with- out obvious change. Sooner or later, however, begins a slow but fatal decrease of vitality ; the sap rises feebly through the gnarled and corroded trunk ; fewer and fewer green twigs appear ; the annual crop of leaves grows ever scantier ; here and there may be seen a shrunk and lifeless bough, which the next autumn's gales may bring to the ground. So, as age creeps upon him, a man's purpose wanes and withers : from looking forward he turns in weariness to the review of bygone achieve- ments, realising at last, that, for weal or woe, his bolt is sped, his share contributed to that vague seonic task, which, having allured and absorbed the strength of innumerable souls, for ever mocks the dream of completion. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE Danger and solitude Solitude as a source of power IN the section of Francis Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty, dealing with Criminals and the Insane, occur the following ob- servations : " Passengers nearing London by the Great Western Railway must have frequently remarked the unusual appearance of the crowd of lunatics when taking their exercise in the large green enclosure in front of Hanwell Asylum. They almost without exception walk apart in moody isolation, each in his own way, buried in his own thoughts. It is a scene like that fabled in Vathek's Hall of Eblis. I am assured that whenever two are seen in company, it is either because their attacks of madness are of an intermittent and epileptic character, and they are temporarily sane, or otherwise that they are near recovery. Conversely, the curative influence of social habits is fully recognised, and they are promoted by festivities in the asylums. On the other hand, the great teachers of all creeds have made seclusion a prominent religious exercise. In short, by promoting celibacy, fasting, and solitude, they have done their best towards making men mad, and they have always largely succeeded in inducing morbid mental conditions among their followers. " Floods of light are thrown upon the various incidents of devotee life, and also upon the disgusting and not other- wise intelligible character of the sanctimonious scoundrel, by the everyday experiences of the madhouse. No professor of metaphysics, psychology, or religion can claim to know the elements of what he teaches, unless he is acquainted with the 291 292 MAKERS OF MAN ordinary phenomena of idiocy, madness, and epilepsy. He must study the manifestations of disease and congenital folly, as well as those of sanity and high intellect." One might conclude from this passage, considered alone, that the habit of solitude was uncompromisingly to be con- demned from the standpoint of science. But in the very next section, devoted to the consideration of gregarious and slavish instincts, there are suggestive glimpses of a contrary point of view. " I propose," writes the learned author, " to discuss a curious and apparently anomalous group of base moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies, that are innate rather than acquired, by tracing their analogies in the world of brutes, and examining the conditions through which they have been evolved. They are the slavish aptitudes from which the leaders of men are exempt, but which are characteristic elements in the disposition of ordinary persons. The vast majority of persons of our own race have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone ; they exalt the vox populi, even when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the vox Dei, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority, and custom. The intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these moral flaws are shown by the rareness of free and original thought as compared with the frequency and readiness with which men accept the opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment. I shall endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation. ... I hold that the blind instincts evolved under these long- continued conditions have been ingrained into our breed, and that they are a bar to our enjoying the freedom which the forms of modern civilisa- tion are otherwise capable of giving us." It seems, then, that if persons addicted to solitude have this in common with demented souls, the manfwho is "never happy except in the society of his fellows, reveals thereby a subservience to the " blind instinct " of the common herd. It is a choice of evils the stigma of madness or the reproach POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 293 of mediocrity and we shall have presently to consider to which of the two extremes the habits of great men, as revealed in their biographies, preponderatingly incline. So far as our men of action are concerned, I may say at once that there is little evidence of any general and marked tendency among them to withdraw from society. On the contrary, they are usually at their best when their attention is most fully occupied by the insistent demands of practical difficulties amid the hurry-scurry and confusion of critical events. Dangers which affright, perplexities which paralyse the faculties of ordinary men, are to their powerful brains but as a stimulus calling forth latent funds of energy and resource, of which they themselves might otherwise have remained unaware. It is precisely in the qualities needed upon such occasions, in soundness of practical instinct, in self-confidence, originality of suddenly conceived plan, contempt of mere precedent, courage and promptitude of action, that they excel their fellow-men. It is in these moments of superhuman stress that their great inspirations come to them, not only, be it observed, the perception of what is needed at the moment, but, often enough too, that of the general principle determining their decision, available thenceforth in all crises of similar kind and scope. Such men court danger, because, their great- ness being of the reflex type, they are dependent upon it for the full expansion of their faculties, for growth and the satisfaction which is invariably associated therewith. In tame and monotonous conditions their natures would become dwarfed through lack of the needful stimulus. They mingle with the herd, not because they share its defects, but in order to reveal their superiority to its weaknesses and limitations. There they find their true solitude, the solitude of pre-eminence and power. There, too, they enjoy the tribute of obedience and the homage of awe. Once, when Ceesar was on the march in Gaul, his army was surprised by an ambushed force of the hardy and ferocious Nervii and their German allies. The enemy, 60.000 in all, had been hiding in a wood on the right bank of the river Sambre. The river is fordable at this point, and the concealed barbarians, when Caesar's army, marching on the left bank, came up and 294 MAKERS OF MAN began to dig trenches with a view to encampment, were out of the wood, into the water, and upon their prey almost before their appearance had been realised. The Romans, unhelmeted, unprepared, fought where they stood as best they might, repulsing the Germans ; but all was panic and confusion ; the Nervii had surrounded the baggage, and the camp-followers had fled. The fate of Caesar and his army was trembling in the balance ; but he himself had to be reckoned with, and his fierce promptitude turned the scale. Snatching a shield from a soldier, he flew bareheaded to the front. " He was known ; he addressed the centurions by their names. He bade them open their ranks and give the men room to strike. His presence and his calmness gave them back their confidence. In the worst extremities he observes that soldiers will fight well under their commander's eye. The cohorts formed into order. The enemy was checked ; . . . the fugitives, ashamed of their cowardice, rallied, and were eager to atone for it. ... The Nervii fought with a courage which filled Caesar with admira- tion. . . . They would not fly ; they dropped where they stood ; and the battle ended only with their extermination. Out of 600 Senators, there survived but 3 ; out of 60,000 men able to bear arms, only 500." It is the prerogative of supreme genius thus to convert disaster into victory. Or consider that momentous night in July of 1588, when Howard and Drake, hanging on the rear of the Great Armada, had for a week been " plucking its feathers one by one." Now, after midnight, eight English ships were fired and set adrift among the great Spanish vessels, whose cables being at once cut, crashing together in panic and confusion, they fled to the N.N.E. " Everything hung on whether the attack could be pushed home before the enemy had re-formed." It was a question almost of minutes, and in that supreme moment the Lord Admiral was found wanting. He turned aside to capture a galleasse already out of action. Then Drake in the Revenge made straight for the group in which the San Martin towered, the nucleus of the rallying Armada. He was followed by almost all the other captains. A terrific battle ensued, in which there was no thought of prize or quarter, POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 295 and immense damage was inflicted on the Spanish vessels. At its close, though to Drake's eye the enemy's fleet still seemed " wonderful, great and strong," the crowded galleons had become mere charnel-houses, the brave survivors were cowed by the terrible butchery, and Medina himself was in despair. " For such an hour Drake's whole life had been lived the life he had lived for vengeance on the idolaters and England's enemy." Neither was Richelieu wanting to himself when, in 1636, having, rashly as it seemed, but with far-seeing aim neverthe- less, declared war with Spain, the Imperial troops entered Picardy, and advanced, spreading ruin in their track, to the banks of the Oise. Amid the panic that everywhere prevailed, he alone preserved his presence of mind. Deaf to entreaties and warnings for everybody was blaming him for betraying his country into war he went almost unattended to the Hotel de Ville and appealed, not in vain, to the patriotism of the citizens. Money was freely granted ; volunteers were enrolled ; his old enemies, the Huguenots, mindful of his moderation in the hour of victory, were no less eager than the Catholics to prove their loyalty to the national cause. Meanwhile the invaders had retreated, and the danger, thus boldly confronted, melted into thin air. To Cromwell, again, the furnace-blast of danger was an element congenial and invigorating as the cold air of the mountain-top. At Edgehill his division stood firm when the left wing under Essex had been broken and routed by Rupert's impetuous charge. At Marston Moor he and the 4000 Iron- sides whom he had made the embodiment of his will, not only accomplished their own heroic task by sweeping Rupert and his chivalry from the field like leaves before the blast, but, returning to find the right wing under Fairfax utterly broken, and the centre deserted by its leader (Leven) and almost overwhelmed, swept round the rear of the King's army, attacked them in the confusion of supposed victory, and at one stroke conquered the North for his cause. The tale told of Edgehill and Marston Moor may be retold of Naseby, where, once again, and in much the same fashion, the cavalry arm, wielded with such mastery by Cromwell, converted imminent defeat into 296 MAKERS OF MAN overwhelming victory. Sceptics with regard to the force of the personal factor in war should study the hard facts afforded by the records of these three battles. The chef d'ceuvre of Cromwell's military genius was no doubt the conception and triumphant organisation of the complex operations at Wor- cester which closed and crowned his fighting career. There " my Lord General did," we know, " exceedingly hazard himself," as, on sufficient occasion, every good general must and will. Yet more to our present purpose are the skill and coolness with which in the preceding year he had extricated himself at Dunbar from an apparently hopeless imbroglio. Penned up in a promontory, with only his ships as base, by Lesley's army occupying a commanding position on the heights, hopelessly outnumbered, his troops ragged and demoralised, " hope shone in him like a pillar of fire when it had gone out in all the others." On the 2nd September 1650, Lesley, imagining that Cromwell was embarking, purposing to surround and crush him, began to descend into the plain. " The Lord hath delivered him into our hands," exclaimed Cromwell. In the battle of 3rd September, 3000 of the enemy were killed, 10,000 taken, with a loss of only 22 ! Frederick the Great was never so dangerous to his enemies as in the hour of apparent defeat. His reckless exposure of his own person in battle was often so extreme that even the common soldiers exclaimed against it. At the Battle of Prague in 1757 (Frederick's Annus Mirabilis), his prompt occupation of a gap left between the wings of the Austrian army presum- ably gained him, the day. To the relief of Prague Count Daun brought an army nearly double the strength of his own, which Frederick in seven successive attacks vainly attempted to dislodge from the heights at Kolin. Having lost nearly half his men, Frederick rode all night with fourteen hussars back to Prague, dismissed the besieging artillery and baggage, and was in full retreat before the news of their relief by Count Daun had reached the garrison of the heretofore beleaguered city. In October of this same year (1757), Frederick's position was so desperate that he is said to have contemplated suicide. His capital had been raided and pillaged ; a French army was POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 297 plundering his people in Halbenstadt ; Daun and Charles of Lorraine were engaged in reconquering Silesia ; French and Imperial armies were overrunning Saxony. Domestic griefs and vexations were not wanting also to his burdened spirit. Yet in the beginning of November, at Rossbach, he out-man- oeuvred and, in an hour and a half, defeated an Austrian force more than doubling his own. At Lissa, a month later, when with only 36,000 men he confronted 60,000 Austrians, he contrived to deceive them by a feigned attack upon their right wing. Meanwhile, by concealed movements, he brought practically his whole force to bear upon their left, thus antici- pating Napoleon's dictum that the secret of military success is always to bring a superior force to bear upon the point attacked. The result of his victories at Rossbach and Lissa brought Frederick only a temporary relief. Three years later Berlin was raided by 40,000 Russian and Austrian troops ; and at about this time he wrote to a friend : " Believe me, nothing less than a miracle is still necessary to extricate me from the difficulties I foresee. ... I have the labours of a Hercules to undergo at an age when my strength fails me and my infirmities increase ; and, to speak the truth, when hope, the only consola- tion of the unhappy, begins to desert me." In 1763 the miracle was an accomplished fact : the treaty of Hapsburg restored to Frederick all the territories possessed before the war. With Nelson the craving for danger amounted to an actual passion ; it was a sheer necessity of his unique temperament. No one form of danger could satisfy this imperious demand of nature : he risked his professional career by his stern enforce- ment of the Navigation Acts in the West Indies ; he was at an early age upon the point of contracting an imprudent marri- age in Canada ; over and over again he hazarded his reputation, far dearer than life to such a man, by his deliberate repudiation of orders which he did not approve. In most instances this insubordination was no doubt based on worthy motives, and has been abundantly justified by his biographers. The classic example is, of course, his refusal to see the signal for retreat at Copenhagen. Even more impressive, however, as a mani- festation of his genius, was the action of Nelson in disregarding 298 MAKERS OF MAN his admiral's signal off Cape St. Vincent. Twenty-seven Spanish ships of the line and ten frigates had been sighted, and Sir J. Jervis had passed through their fleet, cutting off nine ships, of which only one effected a re junction with the majority. He then signalled to his other ships to tack in succession, so as to join him in an attack on the main body of the Spanish fleet, whose numerical strength and fighting weight still exceeded his own. But Nelson, perceiving that the Spaniards were bearing up before the wind preparatory to going off and escaping an engagement, instead of tacking, wore his ship, and so brought her at once into close action with seven of the Spanish vessels. For the victory which ensued, which would have been impossible but for Nelson's bold initiative, Jervis received an earldom, Nelson a rear -admiralty and the Order of the Bath. Beresford and Wilson's verdict upon the latter's conduct is as follows : " The moment was critical. . . . Instant action was demanded. . . . The British rear must act for itself. It must disregard rules and precedents which ordained that no captain should quit the line of battle. The man who made the venture risked fame and life." On one occasion, however, Nelson disregarded orders for motives which cannot for a moment be defended. In July of 1799, when ordered by Lord Keith to proceed from Naples to Minorca with his entire force, he took it upon himself to decide that Naples (that is, Emma and the " dear Queen ") could not be deprived of his protection, and sent only a small portion of his fleet under Admiral Duckworth. A peremptory reitera- tion of Lord Keith's order was entirely ignored ; Nelson would not part with a single ship more. For this act of insubordina- tion, rightly stigmatised by Mahan as " flagrant," Nelson received the formal censure of the Admiralty. Of Nelson's zest for mere physical danger it can hardly be necessary to give examples. 1 In his youth he was always an 1 It appears, though, that even in regard to courage there is a possibility of specialism or idiosyncrasy. Once when being driven through the grounds at Fonthill in a carriage and four by Beckford, Nelson, though the horses were well trained and perfectly under command, suddenly exclaimed : " This is too much for me, you must set me down," and persisted in alighting. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 299 eager volunteer for any specially desperate enterprise. His exclamation at Copenhagen, " Warm work ! But mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands," came straight from his heart. For a battle royal he decked himself as a bridegroom for the wedding festival : his death is in all probability attribut- able to the fact that, despite the urgent remonstrances of his officers, he made himself, at Trafalgar, a conspicuous target for the sharpshooters of the French fleet by appearing in full rig, his breast ablaze with the stars of his various orders. " In honour I gained them, and in honour I will die with them." There can be no doubt that Nelson had indeed a strong pre- monition of death on the eve of Trafalgar. Among all the reproaches, just and unjust, that have been heaped upon the head of Napoleon, there is one taunt that has perforce been commonly spared. His personal valour was of that highest order which he himself has defined as " three o'clock in the morning courage." Even in the days of his Imperial magnificence, he loved to appear in his military uniform : in that he felt and looked himself, at his best and greatest. On the field of battle his mind worked with astonishing rapidity, with complete detachment from all irrelevant considerations, with a fatal precision comparable only to the forces that produce the avalanche or the earthquake. Emerson quotes from Seruzier the account of an episode which occurred soon after the battle of Austerlitz. The Kussian army was retreating, painfully but in good order, upon the surface of the frozen lake. The Emperor Napoleon rode up at full speed toward the artillery. " You are losing time," he cried ; " fire upon those masses ; they must be ingulfed ; fire upon the ice ! " Light howitzers were trained so as to fire into the air ; the almost perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles fractured the ice, " and in less than no time we buried some thousands of Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake." Everybody knows the story of what he himself described as " the terrible passage of the bridge of Lodi." Having driven Beaulieu across the River Adda, Buonaparte found his own passage obstructed by a battery of thirty cannon sweeping the bridge from side to side. With his own hands the young general, 300 MAKERS OF MAN under the full force of the Austrian fire, trained two guns on the bridge so that the enemy could not reach it. This unconven- tional act earned him from the delighted soldiers his enduring soubriquet, " le petit Caporal." Meanwhile, Beaumont had crossed by a distant ford, and, in the confusion effected by his flank attack, Buonaparte led the rush which carried the bridge. But why heap Ossa upon Pelion ? All the world knows that, to Napoleon, human life, his own and that of his fellows, gentle and simple, friends and foes, was a mere pawn in the dangerous game he played for power and glory, recognising one rule, and one only the loser pays \ Although the task undertaken by Abraham Lincoln made his life the storm-centre of a huge, passion-distraught continent, and led to his death by the pistol of an assassin, he was never, in my opinion, a man who loved or sought danger for its own sake. He loved work, so long as it was of congenial kind, and his aims were exalted ; but his method of overcoming the obstacles in his path was essentially prudent and conciliatory. There was, in fact, a plebeian strain in his character, something deferential if not obsequious ; he could not dispense with popu- larity, and took infinite pains to accommodate his personal principles to the expectations of his party. Personally, he no doubt loathed slavery, considering that if that was not wrong nothing could be wrong ; but he long postponed any outspoken denunciation of the system, and was never an Abolitionist in the strict sense of the word. In 1862, about two years after his first election to the Presidency, when the Civil War had fairly begun, Lincoln thus defined his policy : " My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. ... I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft- expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free." Still it is by no mere accident that a man comes to the front in such a time and place as that of the American Civil War. The adventurous instinct cannot be wanting in one who achieves a NAPOLEON. Engraved by Bosquet from the painting by David. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 301 destiny so arduous, and holds power on a tenure so precarious, one, moreover, who conducts to a triumphant issue the gigantic human interest entrusted to his care. The adventurous instinct in men of the aesthetic type, though by no means always lacking, takes, as a rule, the less sensational form of an unworldly contempt for material standards of success and security, rather than that of a deliberate quest of perilous emprise. Of this unworldliness Mozart is a typical example ; he never learned to drive a bargain, and was not by any means punctilious in discharging such obligations as he might have incurred. Thus, when in 1777 (aet. 20) he was in the throes of his infatuation for Aloysia Weber, he caused his father serious inconvenience by his neglect of a commission to supply certain compositions to a Hollander at the price of 200 gulden. The penury of his last years was the direct consequence of his too chivalrous refusal of the King of Prussia's offer of the post of Kapellmeister at Berlin at a salary equivalent to 450 per annum. This when he was in dire straits for money, when the " good Kaiser," whom he refused to " forsake," was, for a similar post, paying him the starvation wage of about 52 per annum. Analogous traits of imprudence rather, shall we say, of unbending fidelity to a certain Quixotic standard of personal dignity and independence could easily be shown in the lives of Dante, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Flaubert. Titian, Goethe, Scott, and Turner were, on the other hand, all keenly alive to the main chance. Of spiritual audacity, Goethe, at least, had an immense fund, but in social and financial matters he was, upon the whole, true to his bourgeois origin and upbringing. The case of Cervantes deserves especial mention ; in him the chivalrous instinct of the warrior and the unworldliness of the born artist were as one. During his five years of Algerian slavery he established a unique reputation for absolute con- tempt of such dangers as might well have appalled a hero. And the unfailing cheerfulness and even joviality with which he sus- tained the endless privations, disappointments, persecutions, and contumelies of his ensuing long life of ill-recompensed drudgery, prove that the grand hidalgo spirit which enabled him in his youth to confront Hassan's threats of torture or death 302 MAKERS OF MAN without flinching, remained steadfast and unbroken to the end. In the nature of things it is obviously not among men who devote themselves to intellectual interests that one would look for exemplars of that dare-devil spirit which loves and courts physical danger. Still they, too, as pioneers of the Reason World, have their perils to face, of which more may be said in another section. One has here only to recall how Galileo, by his native impetuosity, incurred and suffered from that odium theologicum which his more politic predecessor, Copernicus, had so deftly conciliated. How Harvey, travelling in the train of Lord Arundel to Vienna, through a country rendered lawless and turbulent by the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, " would still be making observations of strange trees and plants, earths, etc., and sometimes he was like to be lost. So that my Lord Ambassador would be really angry with him, for there was not only a danger of thieves, but also of wild beasts." Darwin, too, during his remarkable voyage, sometimes took part in expeditions on horseback into the wilds, or in the explora- tion of rivers, for weeks at a time ; and we have his own word for the fact that these were not unattended with danger. Spinoza not merely braved but almost courted excommunication, and the social and religious ostracism it involved. He, like Leibnitz, refused the offer of an official position which threatened his intellectual autonomy, and, like Kant, endured the rigours of extreme poverty with a stoical indifference. Kant's courage, however, in the days of his comparative prosperity and prestige, once failed him in a matter of another and more crucial signifi- cance. Censured by the reactionary Court of Berlin for the heterodox tendencies of his Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, and sharply warned for the future to "be guilty of no such acts," the old philosopher promptly ate humble-pie, craftily wording his pledge of compliance in such a way that he might consider himself bound by it only during the lifetime of the King. Of Descartes' moral cowardice we have already said enough ; Newton, too, was a timid soul, who so hated controversy that he thought seriously at one time of discon- tinuing the publication of his researches. MOZART. From a /minting by Tischbein. To face /. 302. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 303 I have more than once pointed out the analogy existing between the lives of men of action and those of ethico-religious pioneers. This is borne out by consideration of the demand made in both on the virtue of fortitude, but the fortitude of the ethico-religious pioneer is obviously of a different and higher kind than that of the mere soldier or statesman. The latter suns himself in the light and heat of popularity, without which he can achieve nothing. The former braves popular opinion from the very outset of his career ; deliberately chooses a way of life which must bring him into an atmosphere of con- tempt and hatred ; stakes his all on the truth of his moral or spiritual insight into the unrecognised need of his age. There has recently been published the account of an interview with that enlightened Chinese reformer, Kang Yu Wei, which is at once a striking confirmation of the above generalisation and a perfect expression of my own view of the character of Christ, as revealed in the Gospels. Kang Yu Wei said that " what appealed to him most in the personality of Jesus was his courage the manliness which could so quietly and dauntlessly face the hatred of so many of his countrymen, the fierce enmity of the powerful Pharisees, and, above all, the certainty of death and of the outward failure of his mission ; the courage which under- took a work so constructive, the valour which could make, and could ask from others, such large sacrifices." l On the adventur- ous career of St. Paul it cannot be necessary to dwell : the vicissitudes endured by that indefatigable standard-bearer of Christendom are familiar to us all. We know how he was lowered by night in a basket from the walls of Damascus when the angry Jews had obtained a warrant for his arrest ; how, at Lystra, after being stoned he was left for dead ; how he was publicly flogged, imprisoned, and exposed in the stocks to the insults of the mob at Philippi ; how he was tortured by the malevolent misrepresentation of those whom he had benefited, from whom he had every right to expect encouragement and aid ; how, on the eve of his departure from Corinth, a conspiracy to seize and kill him necessitated the change of his route to Jeru- 1 " A Chinese Statesman's View of Religion," by Charles Johnston, Hibbert Journal, vol. vii. No. 1. 304 MAKERS OF MAN salem ; how, despite of presentiments and warnings, he persisted in returning to the Holy City ; how, there again, he was rescued from an infuriate mob by the intervention of the Tribune ; how he was shipwrecked at Malta ; and, if tradition may be trusted, martyred under Nero at Rome. The life of Mahomet, from the time of his conversion (set. 40), was for more than ten years one of almost perpetual danger and ignominy. Thirteen years' work had produced little ap- parent effect, when, on the invitation of some of his converts, he retired from Mecca to Medina. At the mature age of fifty- three he took the sword in hand, which was but seldom sheathed until the time of his death ten years later (A.D. 632). Although in the long series of conflicts which began with the battle of Beder (623), Mahomet's own part was rather that of an inspirer and organiser than of an active combatant, he nevertheless did not shirk the dangers peculiar to his position. At the battle of Ohod, when the Koreishites outnumbered his followers in the proportion of three to one, he refused to countenance re- treat, was twice wounded, and his force was completely routed. As to St. Francis d'Assisi, perhaps no one will venture to question the fundamental nature of his craving to subject himself to the most stringent and painful tests, that he might convince himself and others of the superiority of the spirit and its needs to those of the flesh, the complete independence of spiritual serenity of all material boons or enhancements. If anybody has any doubt on the matter, let him consider the Saint's definition of "Perfect Joy" as expounded to Brother Leo, and compare it with his own. "When we shall be at Santa Maria Degli Angeli, thus soaked by the rain, and frozen by the cold, and befouled with mud, and afflicted with hunger, and shall knock at the door, and the doorkeeper shall come in anger and shall say, ' Who are ye ? ' and we shall say, ' We are two of your friars ' ; and he shall say, ' Ye speak not truth ; rather are ye two lewd fellows ; . . . get you hence ! ' and shall not open to us, but shall make us stay outside in the rain and snow, cold and hungry, even unto night ; then if ^'we shall bear such great wrongs and such cruelty andj such rebuffs patiently, without disquieting ourselves and without murmuring POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 305 against him . . . Oh, Friar Leo, write that here is perfect joy. . . . And if we shall continue to knock, and he, greatly offended thereat, . . . shall come forth with a knotty club, and shall throw us on the ground and roll us in the snow, and shall cudgel us pitilessly with that club ; if we shall bear all these things patiently and with cheerfulness, thinking on the sufferings of Christ, ... Oh, Friar Leo, write that here and in this is perfect joy." Luther was near the close of his thirty-third year when by the posting up of his ninty-five Theses he made himself the champion of ecclesiastical decentralisation and theological reform. Henceforward his life became the storm-centre of a raging controversy, which for centuries after his death still distracted Christendom with ever-increasing virulence. When, in the following year, under pledge of immunity from the Pope's legate, Luther set out for the Diet of Augsburg, his bold spirit was not free from misgivings. " My thoughts on the way were, now I must die." Arrived, he writes to Melanchthon : " The town is full of talk of me, and everybody wants to see the man who has kindled such a flame. ... I will rather die than revoke anything that it was right for me to say." Two years later, when cited by the Emperor to the Diet of Worms, there to answer for his doctrines and to retract his errors, or be treated as a heretic, Luther said that he would go to Worms though there were as many devils there as there were tiles on the house-tops. But he would not recant. " I will not fear ten thousand Popes, for He who is with me is greater than he who is in the world." On his first appearance before the Diet, Luther seems to have been a trifle cowed by the solemnity of the occasion, and when shown his books and asked to recant, answered in a low voice and as if frightened, that since their contents concerned the highest of all things, he must humbly entreat further time for consideration. On the next day he showed a bolder front, and, in the upshot, the utmost concession that could be wrung from him was that in his polemic against individuals he had shown undue violence. To his friends he confided that if he had a thousand heads he would have them all cut off rather than make one recantation. What can be done with such recal- 20 306 MAKERS OF MAN citrant stalwarts by the " good and just " representatives of " Law and Order " ? This was the supreme crisis of Luther's personal drama : no doubt he was saved from a heretic's death by the secret removal to the Wartburg, arranged on his behalf by Frederick the Wise. Up to and beyond the date of the Diet of Augsburg, Luther is described as being " so wasted by care that all his bones may be counted." In his later and more prosperous years at Wittenberg, he became corpulent and jocose. But the divine fire never again burned so brightly as in those first years of danger and stress. The plebeian strain in the man showed itself in a certain arrogance and impatience of controversy, a tendency to ruthless invective, even brutal exaggeration of the faults and personal failings of his adversaries. Nor can it be forgotten that Luther advised the Elector to accept the Decree of the Diet of Speier (1529), whereby all rebaptized persons were to be executed without trial ; and urged the Landgrave of Hesse to execute the anabaptist Frederick Erbe. His weakness in sanctioning Philip's bigamous marriage with Margaret von der Saal was a further proof of deterioration, the more so in that the dispensation was made conditional upon a pledge of secrecy from the interested parties. The debacle of medieval discipline represented by Luther was by no means an unmixed good. Let us now consider the recluse habits of those great men, whose water of life is drawn, not from the village-pump of public opinion, but from the deep well of solitude, that well which, Science warns us, is guarded by the hags Misanthropy and Melancholia. Among these adventurers our men of action are for the most part conspicuous by their absence. Charle- magne, we are told, kept writing-tablets under his pillow, wherein were duly noted happy thoughts, in the shape of subjects for discussion at the feasts of reason in which he delighted, or casuistical posers for his favourite butts, the bishops. Napoleon was, in his boyhood, moody and taciturn ; it was then, surely, that he was hoardingthe immense fund of spiritual energy which in due time burst like a fiery levin on the aston- ished world. The influence of those recluse years could in after times always be re-awakened by the sound of bells, which had POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 307 for his dark soul a strange, compelling charm. At the sound of church bells his voice would falter as he said, "Ah, this recalls to my mind the first years I passed at Brienne. ... I was happy then ! " Lincoln, in the days of his studious youth, frequented the dangerous well ; and, as we know, escaped not the blighting touch of one at least of its fearful guardians. At twenty-six he became insane, or nearly so, and again, for nearly a year, at thirty-one. All his life he remained prone to attacks of intense depression ; against the assaults of this haunting terror his wonderful gift of humour provided a weapon sorely needed and bravely plied. Poets, artists, and musicians are, if our examples may be accounted typical, and I think no one will deny this, ad- dicted to solitude only in so far as their aesthetic bias is qualified by an intellectual factor. Such men as Titian, Cervantes, Mozart, Scott, and Turner, although, no doubt, in the actual production of their work they perforce dwell apart from society, do not seem to have loved or needed solitude as a spiritual sanctuary, a source of inspiration and power. Cervantes would seem indeed to have owed some germinal conception of his Don Quixote to the enforced seclusion of his immola- tion in the house of Medrano, but one cannot think of him as otherwise than a genial and sociable spirit. On the other hand, he was not strictly intellectual, not a thinker, but an artist, almost a man of affairs. Mozart could, on emergency, abstract himself completely from the most perturbing and harassing surroundings in his last phase the very hopelessness of his position would seem to have induced a sort of desperate concentration of his powers upon the work that yet remained to be done. But in happier times he could work all day and night, sipping punch, and listening, between whiles, to the storiettes extemporised by his voluble Constance. Scott wooed his Muse on horseback : "I had many a wild gallop among these braes," he exclaimed, " when I was think- ing of Marmion" Solitude of a kind, yes but not the real thing ; that cannot be taken at a gallop ! Scott loved youth and sunlight ; enough for him to "lie simmering over things for an hour or so " before he got up. He said himself that 308 MAKERS OF MAN there was a demon who seated himself " in the feather of his pen " when he began to write. Inevitably, therefore, he abhorred writing to a prearranged plan, and could seldom adhere to one which he might have laid down for himself. The frequent irruption of his children was no serious distraction to the flow of his ready invention. No recluse habit, this, of a verity ; consequently, no profundity, no passionate con- viction, no defiance of destiny, no gauntlet hurled in the face of the gods ! Turner, again, that strange mixture of stubborn reticence and incoherent garrulity, was in the main of a sociable tem- perament. He loved to attend the official functions of the Royal Academy, where he made speeches which " no fellow could understand," loved to welcome his old friends and to hobnob with casual acquaintances. It is one of the mysteries of the paradoxical aesthetic temperament, that, as Shakespeare was a loose liver, a litigious neighbour, and one who deigned to connive at the schemes of unprincipled land-grabbers, the refined genius of Turner sought inspiration, not in solitary thought, but in wine-bibbing and in participation in the sensual orgies of low night-birds in the taverns of Wapping and Rotherhithe. Dante, on the other hand, the philosophic poet and pre- cursor of the Reformation, was, above all things, and from first to last, a solitary soul. We know how, in his early man- hood, absorbed in the delineation of certain angelic features, he noted not that several friends had entered and stood beside him overlooking his work. " Another was with me," he said, when at last he preceived their presence. Once, years later, in Siena, he remained standing from noon till past vespers in an apothecary's shop, reading a certain book, unaware of the bustle and excitement of a great tournament which was pro- ceeding close at hand. Leonardo, Goethe, Beethoven, and Flaubert were all, in their several degrees, more or less addicted to solitude or abstraction, all being, to some extent, men of thought, not mere artists. But upon the whole, whereas, to the artist, solitude is at most a refreshment and solace, to the revolutionary thinker, POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 309 or to the ethico-religious innovator, it is a sine qua non. Ideas destined to evoke fierce controversy, to set the world by the ears, to upset comfortable traditions, and consume cherished illusions, ideas that bring " not peace but a sword," are, in the days of their inception and germination, too fragile to survive the chill breath of indiscriminate association. From commonplace and sordid minds there emanates a subtle en- slaving and terrorising aura, provocative of self-mistrust in the guilty conscience of the would-be reformer. Guilty the unconventional thinker feels himself to be in the society of the conventional conforming majority ; hence, perforce, during his periods of mental gestation, like a woman concealing her shame, he dwells apart, until the burden of his mind shall have acquired substance and form, and is ready for its birth into a hostile and envious world. This is a law from which there is no escape, except perhaps for the revolutionist whose dangerous purpose masks itself under the guise of an ironic loyalty to the conventions which it is self-pledged to destroy. Evidence of this primary need abounds in the biographies of the majority of our examples of the intellectual and othico- religious types. Of Bacon, Macaulay records how " in his magnificent grounds " (at Gorhambury, I presume) " he erected, at a cost of 10,000, a retreat to which he repaired when he wished to avoid all visitors and to devote himself wholly to study. On such occasions a few young men of distinguished talents were sometimes the companions of his retirement." The love of solitude is by no means incompatible with an appreciation of congenial society. At York House and Gorhambury, Bacon gathered round him the choicest spirits of his time Ben Jonson, Fulke Greville, Sir H. Wotton, Sir T. Bodley, Launcelot Andrews, Toby Matthews, among others. For his chosen band of young enthusiasts he no doubt provided experimental work bearing on the subjects of his various inquiries. William Harvey carried his love of solitude to the whimsical extreme of having caves excavated in his grounds at Combe for summer meditation. To obviate the distracting effects of the perception of surrounding objects, he loved to sit in com- 310 MAKERS OF MAN plete darkness. In his latter years he lived a recluse life, devoting himself to the completion of his Treatise on Develop- ment, and finding much joy in the absence of external cares and responsibilities. " This life of obscurity, this vacation from public business, has proved a sovereign remedy for me." Of the strange personality of Descartes, one of the out- standing traits is his deliberate advocacy and practice of sheer physical indolence as a favouring condition of intellectual production. He slept much, and habitually spent the forenoon in bed. How, at a critical moment in his mental development, he shut himself up all day in a warm room, and remained there alone until he had mapped out the scheme of his Rfework, has already been related. Of Spinoza, it is on record that he once kept the house for a continuous period of three months. Time was nothing to him, who lived in and for eternity. The intense inner life of Newton often rendered him oblivious of his surroundings. He often forgot his meals, would be quite unable to say whether he had dined or not, and quite indifferent He would sit for hours on his bed, forgetting to dress, plunged in some abstruse mathematical problem. Kant, methodical in all things, did not forget to provide for the need of solitary meditation. " Rising, coffee -drinking, writing, collegiate lectures, dining, walking each " as Heine observes, " had its set time. And when Immanuel Kant, in his grey coat, cane in hand, appeared at the door of his house, and strolled towards the small linden avenue, which is still called ' the Philosopher's Walk,' the neighbours knew it was exactly half -past four." On his return, Kant would sit by the stove in his room, gazing through the window towards Lobenicht church tower. This was his time for meditation ; and it is told of him, that when some poplars, growing in a neighbour's garden, grew so tall as to obstruct his view of the church tower, Kant found his train of thought so deranged by the new conditions that he knew no peace until he had persuaded the owner to cut away the offending summits. When I speak of solitude, I do not wish to be understood in a formal sense as if one could not be alone in the midst POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 311 of a crowd. Hegel, during the two years (an. aet. 46-48) when he was engaged on that general outline of his philosophy known as the Encyclopedia, became " so intensely concentrated on the effort of applying his principles to nature and history as some- times to lose all sense of external things. His students thought him idle, because they used to see him standing for hours at his window, looking out on the misty hills and woods of Heidel- berg ; and it is related that on one occasion, as he was walking to the university, after a heavy rain, he left a shoe in the mud without being conscious of the loss." Bacon in his pavilion, Harvey in his cave, Descartes in bed, Spinoza in his humble apartment, Newton oblivious of the dinner bell, Kant sitting pensive by the stove, Hegel in the mud a quaint company, truly ! So the great game is played, whose issue is the future of Humanity ; so the immortal thought struggles painfully to the birth, and Wisdom is justified of her children. The artist, when he betakes himself to solitude, becomes a dreamer, passively awaiting inspiration, as Danae awaited the golden shower which made her the mother of Perseus. The more virile genius of the philosopher manifests itself in voluntary co-operation with spontaneous formative impulse. He does not passively await the advent of the god but goes forth to meet, and, if need be, to compel him. And, lastly, to the religious founder, to him whose province is the will first his own will, then that of his fellows the withdrawal into the desert is the preliminary to his hardest and most portentous conflict the conflict with his own perverse instincts and his own ambition. " Other men of genius are born good, the religious founder acquires goodness " conquers it, rather, by deliberate, self-conscious, above all solitary, effort. The idea of his vocation, in the hour of its inception, is too over- whelming to be shared even with his best-beloved and most trustworthy confidant. He, himself, cannot at first fully grasp or even confidently entertain its fatal significance. It upsets all his own cherished standards, flouts all his dearest hopes, mocks all his most sacred ideals. In the desert Jesus dies, self-slain, and the Christ, self-wrought, rises, or will arise ere long, phoenix -like, from his ashes. Nor are such victories, once 312 MAKERS OF MAN won, secure and inviolate possessions of the spirit. Ever and anon the old Adam stirs in his grave : life was not extinct, after all it has been a case of premature burial. Long nights must be spent alone on the mountains, wrestling with the adversary, compelling the weary spirit to persevere in its thankless task, inciting its rebellious eyes to the tragic forecast of inevitable doom. Alone at the last in Gethsemane, while fair-weather friends are sleeping unconcerned, the last battle is fought and won, the loathing of instinct repressed, the bitter cup, so often drained in imagination, if not accepted, at least not put aside. These things, if not true as to the letter for who can have overheard that poignant soliloquy in the garden ? are psychologically consistent, even typical imaginations, confirmed therefore by what we know of analogous crises in the lives of other ethico -religious pioneers. St. Augustine, before he took up the active duties of the priesthood, spent three years in study and prayer at Thagaste, living there on the modest patrimony which he had inherited, and freely sharing its produce with a few brethren as devout as himself. Of Gregory the Great it is recorded that " his one consolation was the society of the monks," with whom, on his election to the papacy, it had been his first care to replace the lay attendants of the Lateran ; "his one pleasure was to escape to a little oratory in the church of his own monastery in the Coelian, and to spend a few days unknown and unnoticed in reading and meditation." It was perhaps because Gregory suffered so keenly from the sacrifice of his own vocation for a recluse life, that he became the special champion of the monks as a body, whose worth to the Church he foresaw, whose exemp- tion from external annoyance he secured, and whose definite status he provided for by a document issued in 601, which might be called the Magna Charta of Monasticism. " This," he pathetically remarks, " is to be mainly considered, that the constitution of minds is very different. . . . Hence it is neces- sary that the quiet mind should not expend itself over the exercise of immoderate labour, nor the restless worry itself over the practice of contemplation." But Gregory was, after all, but little the worse for the ST. GRKGORY THK GRKAT. To face /. 312. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 313 denial by destiny of his desire to devote himself to a life of pure contemplation. He was not a great thinker, or a strikingly original force in the sphere of abstract religion. He was a great ecclesiastical statesman, constructive rather than creative. His work was invaluable to the Church in her medieval capacity of cosmopolitan humanising and regulative organisation. He strengthened her, broadened her, recalled her to forgotten ideals, but he added nothing new to her doctrinal or social aims. For an adequate conception of solitude as a source of power, we must turn to the lives of such origitiators as Mahomet and St. Francis d'Assisi. Of the former I have already related how, at the age of forty, on the eve of the great undertaking to which he felt himself urged by his detestation of idolatry, he gradually withdrew himself from society, spending days and nights in uninterrupted prayer and meditation in a cavern on Mount Kara. The analogy with the Gospel narrative of the withdrawal of Christ into the wilderness is here obvious and striking. But whereas Jesus is tempted by the devil to make worldly power and prestige the objectives of his genius, Mahomet, in his ecstatic trance, receives a visitation from the archangel Gabriel. Are such visitations to be dismissed as the self-hallucinatory dramatisations of intense and prolonged meditation ? Are we, on the other hand, justified in enter- taining the possibility of some objective basis of these mysteri- ous manifestations ? I, for one, am disinclined to commit myself to any dogmatic decision. In the period following this " annunciation," Mahomet, formerly so genial and debonair, became worn and haggard, and more and more subject to fits of abstraction. Some ten years later, when, after expulsion from Tayef, Mahomet had taken refuge in the desert, he, while reading the Koran x after his evening prayer in a solitary place, was overheard by a company of passing Genii, who, having paused awhile to listen, expressed their belief in the doctrine. Shortly after this occurred the famous night-journey to Jeru- salem, and thence to the Seventh Heaven. And St. Francis d'Assisi ; is it possible to overstate the 1 Reciting it, perhaps, for it is doubtful if he knew how to read. 314 MAKERS OF MAN significance of his many withdrawals into the mysterious depths of his pure and ardent spirit ? Poverty herself seems to hold a less vital relation to the needs of its aspiring passion. The long hours spent in a cave near Assisi at the time of his con- version, in prayer and weeping, produced a profound change in his nature and demeanour, just as was the case with Mahomet. He became possessed by a spirit of passionate charity ; once on meeting a leper, hardly human in his disfigurement, he kissed the bloated hand which he afterwards filled with money. The need of solitary meditation henceforth battled in his mind with that call to evangelical work which could not long be resisted. Tradition states that he practised nine times a year a Lenten fast and meditation. He is reputed to have sub- sisted for forty days on a single loaf of bread, alone on an island in Lake Thrasymene. Characteristically, he refused to make his abstinence complete, lest comparisons might be invited with the fast of his Lord in the wilderness. The donation to his Order by Abbot Maccabeo of the caves of the Carceri, situated among rocks overhanging a lonely gorge, provided an ideal place of retreat when occasion offered. Anotler such was on Monte Alverno, an isolated peak in the Casentino, given in 1213 by Count Orlando. Thither it was that he re- paired in 1224 (set. 43) for that supreme vigil, where, after weeks of unremitting prayer and fasting, he had a vision of Christ crucified, signifying acceptance of his passion. " When the vision faded, he found upon hands and feet and side the marks of the Lord's body. From a wound on his right side oozed a few drops of blood, and through his hands and feet were black fleshy growths, resembling nails, piercing from side to side." 1 Truly, in the language of the Fioretti, " so much did the fervour of devotion increase in him, that he altogether transformed himself into Jesus through love and pity." j ? ? jMLuther, except perhaps in the days of his early manhood, 1 Renan suggests that the marks of the stigmata were imprinted by Friar Elias on the dead body of St. Francis, of which he had the disposition during a whole night. A popular tumult followed the refusal of Elias to allow the multitude to view the body. MAHOMET. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 315 following his conversion, and except during the period of his enforced seclusion in the Wartburg, where he was tormented by diabolical manifestations strange rumblings in a chest, falling sounds on the stairs, a black dog in his bed seems to have felt no habitual need of solitude. But, at table, he often became abstracted, plunged in deep and anxious thought, and would sometimes keep a cloister-like silence throughout the meal. Once the spell of silence was broken, conversation flowed freely, even merrily, enough. Emerson, all his life long, was a lover of solitude, which he courted mainly in the form of rambles through unfrequented woodlands. He describes with gusto how, on a cloudy June day, he would put on his oldest clothes' and hat, "slink away to the whortleberry bushes, and slip witlr the greatest satisfaction into a little cow-path," where he could " defy observation." Thus the seer deliberately " hunted thoughts," as lesser men hunt game in the forest. XI POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE Continued II WOMAN Classification of sexual types Ambiguities Need of detachment Woman in relation to man's ideals Sexual versatility of genius Examples The higher monogamy. No investigation of the types of human greatness could be in any way^satisfactory it is futile to talk of " completeness " in such a connection which ignored the great question of their sexual proclivities. In no other manifestation of temperament or character are more significant glimpses to be obtained of the fundamental spiritual attitude towards life and its responsi- bilities, whose diagnosis is the ultimate desideratum of ethological scrutiny. A man's conception of womanhood in general, and of his relation thereto, is one of the main expressions, perhaps the main expression of his general instinctive bias : it colours for good or evil his entire emotional and intellectual being, and largely determines his rank in the scale of spiritual values. "To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of ' man and woman,' " exclaims Nietzsche, " to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension . . . that is a typical sign of shallowmindedness ; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot shallow in instinct ! may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered." It is here, however, a question of mere opinion, of theories about womanhood, whereas I am concerned with a still more momentous matter, with conduct in relation to women. But by way of indicating a point of view which underlies much that will be said in the ensuing chapter, 316 ST. KRAXCIS OK ASSISI. From ,i statue />) Manuel I'u.va. To face p. 316. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 317 I will venture another and a kindred quotation. " Marriage," wisely remarks R.L.S., " is like life in this that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses." Roughly speaking, men may be divided into three great classes : (1) Monogamists, (2) Polygamists, and (3) Celibates ; and, by way of preliminary to our discussion, I propose, therefore, to divide the subjects of our present investigation into these primary groups. But the titles must be understood as applied in a physiological and psychological, not in the mere legal sense. And, even so, the classification is, at best, merely provisional. Ambiguities and perplexities meet us on the threshold: Beethoven, for example, since he never married (at least in the legal sense), I have classed among the celibates. But he was always in love ; he loved many women, and might with great show of propriety be classed as a (spiritual) polygamist. Such nuances I intend for the present, of set purpose, to ignore, but they should not be forgotten. Here, then, is our provisional classification : I. Monogamists. (a) William the Silent Drake Cromwell Lincoln (a) Caesar Charlemagne Napoleon Nelson (6) Cervantes Mozart Scott (c) Bacon Galileo Harvey Hegel Darwin II. Polygamists. (b) Dante Titian (?) Goethe (?) Turner III. Celibates. (a) Richelieu (b) Leonardo (c) Descartes Frederick the Great ( ? ) Beethoven ( ? ) Spinoza Flaubert (?) Newton Leibnitz Kant (d) M. Aurelius Luther Renan Emerson (d) Augustine (?) Mahomet (d) Jesus Paul(?) Gregory Francis The following points are to be observed as justifying or qualifying certain items in the above category. William of Orange was four times married, and his second wife, Anne of Saxony, was still 3i8 MAKERS OF MAN living when he married Charlotte of Bourbon. Apart, however, from the fact that she had long before deserted him and con- tracted an illicit alliance with John Rubens in Cologne, Anne was now, and had for some years been, insane. To his brother John, William wrote justifying his new marriage, not on the ground of legal technicalities, for which, however, he did not neglect to provide, but on that of substantial right and wrong. William of Orange was essentially of the domesticated or constant type. Goethe, on the other hand, was essentially fickle : I therefore, since he was no celibate, place him among the poly- gamists, of which decision he would himself have been the last to complain. Augustine claims to have been faithful to the bed of the mistress by whom he was the father of Adeodatus, but the promptitude with which he supplied her place on her departure from Italy, and the general indications of sexual irregularities in the accounts given of his youth, must be taken into consideration. One might say that he passed through all three stages, beginning as a polygamist, and ending, of course, as a celibate. The celibacy of Frederick the Great is to be taken cum grano, no doubt, but it is undeniable that he was but slightly attracted to, rather was, upon the whole, distinctly repelled by women. And it seems clear that his marriage was never consummated, no doubt for sufficient reasons. The fact that Flaubert corresponded with a married woman for eight years, and that he had, during his visits to Paris, frequent opportunities for intimacy, does not, in my opinion, vitiate the conclusion that the affair was, on his side, essentially Platonic. Among the many strange contrasts in Flaubert's character, his intimate friends noted the voluptuous- ness of his imagination and the purity of his life. From first to last his pleasures were entirely literary. I include among the celibates one man, Descartes, who was the father of an illegiti- mate daughter. With regard to the liaison of which the short- lived Francine's birth was the result, Descartes preserves an absolute reticence, and it can safely be regarded as a mere episode in his career. Some rather interesting conclusions may be drawn from an examination of this table of sexual proclivities. Three-fourths of the whole number of our great men are included in one or POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 319 other of the two largest and nearly equal groups, viz. Mono- gamists (16) and Celibates (14). The remaining one-fourth belong to the Polygamous category. Among the domesticated or monogamous group all types are well represented, but with a slight excess of the intellectual and a deficiency of the aesthetic temperaments. All types are also to be found among the celi- bates, but, here, while men of action and men of aesthetic temperament are in a minority, the intellectual and the ethico- religious type are both to the fore. The most striking fact with regard to the polygamists or free-lovers is the entire absence of names belonging to the class of scientific discoverers or philo- sophers, and the equal predominance of men of action and members of the aesthetic class. If now we consider in order the sexual proclivities of our four types of greatness, we find the following indications : (1) Men of Action tend to monogamy or promiscuity in about equal proportion ; a few may be celibate. (2) Poets, Artists, and Composers are found in all groups ; there is a slight preponderance of the tendency to free love. (3) Scientific Discoverers or Philosophers, considered to- gether, are equally disposed towards monogamy and celibacy ; the tendency to promiscuity is absent among my examples. (4) The Ethical and Religious Reformers are equally dis- posed to monogamy and celibacy ; a few are polygamous. Perhaps we shall not be far from the truth if we regard monogamy as a common characteristic of men of every type of ability, celibacy as the speciality of Intellectuals and Re- formers, and mental or physical promiscuity as that of Men of Action and Artists. The first step to be taken in the investigation upon which we are now embarking, that of masculine genius in its relation to Woman, is the clearing of our minds of cant, the renunciation of catchwords and " moral " preconceptions. I refer to such terms as " monogamic ideal," " marriage as a sacrament," " the sanctity of wedlock," " the insanity of asceticism," and a host of others. Such question-begging is as much out of court here as the angry bigotry with which Nietzsche, by his 320 MAKERS OF MAN mere ipse dixi, strives to reinstate what be is pleased to call the " Oriental " view of the necessary subjection of woman, as the sole tenable view of a reasoning being. " Two things are wanted by the true man," cries his Zarathustra : " danger and play. Therefore he seeketh woman as the most dangerous toy." And the sage on his way to visit one of her fair sisters is adjured by the little old woman to " remember his whip." All very well : very picturesque, and very German ; but Science accepts nothing on faith, not even the eternal fitness of wife-beating, any more than the self-evident supremacy of the " monogamic ideal." Let us, on the contrary, " conceive it possible " that our " good and just " moralists may be mistaken ; that the ultimate goal of progress may be something far other than they have so obligingly staked out in advance for our accommodation ; that there may be not one, but several, " highest " types of morality ; and that it may be a fatal error to confide that a good time is coming when men (and women) of the most various and antithetical temperaments and capacities will obligingly conform to one single stereotyped regime of " the fair and the fit." That our standard for the appraisement of the conflicting ideals must be ultimately an ethical and psycho- logical, and, above all, a social standard, may readily be admitted. Mere personal satisfaction does not carry us very far towards the justification of what appear on other grounds to be sexual vagaries and aberrations. We rightly demand also to know where we come in ; how we and our posterity are to be affected by the concession of what, prima facie, we consider extravagant demands. But we are not therefore absolved from the obliga- tion of duly weighing and considering these demands, and, in the absence of precise and verifiable counter-indications, conceding their validity. "We must, I repeat, " conceive it possible " that, in our fine zeal for the " Cause of Righteous- ness," our hasty repudiation of the unfamiliar, our holy horror of the crude unsanctioned fact, we " may be mistaken." Let. us recall the sanity of Luther, who, in renouncing the vows which constrained him to a continence for which he knew himself unfitted, abstained from condemning the celibacy of POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 321 those who " had the gift." All ethical ideals are ultimately traceable to the precepts and examples of what the world has agreed to regard as pre-eminent individuals, in so far, at least, as they are not mere products of social expediency and use and wont. In considering the sexual relations of those of our great men whose lives, in this respect, seem specially significant, I shall, so far as possible, avoid criticism of their fundamental marital or unmarital tendency, merely calling attention to the particulars in which they conformed or failed to conform to its implicit requirements. Into the question of the fertility of the marital unions of great men as compared with those of undistinguished in- dividuals, I do not propose to enter, as it is a matter of physio- logical rather than psychological interest. We have, however, in the course of the present work, incidentally come upon facts decidedly suggestive of the relative sterility of genius. And, as bearing on this point, I will call attention to the interesting fact that William the Silent and Oliver Cromwell, who, in my opinion, were great rather by a magnification and intensification of the normal capacities of ordinary law-abiding citizens, than in the unique and qualitative way which we associate with genius properly so called, both showed in their domestic life an entire absence of the strange or aberrant. William was married four times, first at the age of eighteen, and last at that of fifty. Cromwell was married once, at twenty-one, and for the thirty-eight years of his married life was all that a loving husband and father could be. Each was the progenitor of a fairly numerous family of healthy children ; and this, I consider, strongly confirms my diagnosis of the quantitative rather than qualitative nature of their distinction. Contrast the relative barrenness of the unions of Caesar, Lincoln, Goethe, and Napoleon all men of temperamental genius. Scott, again, a man of prodigious talent, but essentially com- monplace in most respects, was of the domesticated type, and was the father of two sons and two daughters. The most romantic feature of Sir Walter's career was his lifelong devotion to the memory of his first love, whom he did not marry a flame that was never quenched. To the end of his life, he said, 21 322 MAKERS OF MAN he always dreamed of his lady of the green mantle before any great misfortune. But, for our purpose, the point of most importance is the effect of their married life upon the character and, through that, the work of great men. It is in this aspect that the married state (and, in fact, all sexual relations, also) justifies the phrase of Stevenson, when he calls it a " field of battle, and not a bed of roses." William of Orange, when, after two years' higgling, he won the hand of Anne of Saxony, whom, when he proposed the alliance, he had not as much as beheld, no doubt accounted himself lucky in securing the alliance of her father, Duke Maurice, the great Lutheran chief, who had shaken the very throne of the Emperor Charles v. The woman herself was evidently, in his view, a negligible factor. Such simplicity met with its appropriate reward. Anne was proud, sensual, jealous, and intensely selfish. A Nassau, in her opinion, was more fit to be her domestic than her husband. The Imperial pomp of their wedding at Leipsic five thousand guests were enter- tained thereat was no doubt congenial ; but imagine the bitterness with which this haughty girl realised that she had married a man essentially indifferent to all that she prized most, insanely bent on the pursuit of ideals that must ruin his worldly career and her own position. In his dark hour she abandoned him ruthlessly, never to return. Fortunate for his cause and for him, since the love of such women is by far more dangerous to heroic souls than their scorn or their hatred. The demoralisation of a demigod becomes intelligible when we learn that destiny has united him to a worldling and a scold. Socrates appears to have been proof against at least one term of the combination (they are seldom unallied, however), which accounts perhaps for his ability to drink the young bloods of Athens under the table. I will, however, venture the asser- tion that in every woman worth her salt there is somewhere hidden a worldling and a scold. It is a question of degrees : tenderness may be veiled, but must not be eclipsed. Men are such inveterate dreamers, such ghost-hunters, that they need to be anchored to mother Earth and to Nature. The wife who cannot scold is defenceless ; her intuitions will be ignored and POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 323 her tenderness undervalued. Thus Cromwell ignored his meek wife, so far, that is, as his public work was concerned, turning for counsel to his mother, a dame of shrewd sense and mettle. The fact is and it must not be blinked that it is not to the wife of his bosom that a man usually looks for sympathy with, and encouragement of, his inmost cherished purpose. Enough if she learn to respect it, or even to tolerate it, as an irremov- able rival of her own claim on his allegiance. Too often she succeeds in her querulous insistence upon its abandonment, her demand that she and her happiness be not sacrificed to the dreams of an egoist, that he devote himself exclusively tc the enhancement of his (read her} prestige and prosperity. The duel of the sexes takes largely the form of a mutual desire of each for the exploitation of the other. A man is often the gainer by the leaven of worldliness instilled into his aims by importunate femininity. But woe to him who yields one jot in essentials, who surrenders his manhood, becomes the mere hodman of a servile expediency. His reward will be the in- evitable contempt of the instrument of his downfall. A woman expects to find in man something inflexible, something proof against the assaults of her own lower nature. Ruthless in act for she knows nothing of chivalry in her inmost heart she does homage to integrity. She will try it to the utmost, will destroy it if it prove destructible ; then, like a child who has wantonly eviscerated her doll, will bemoan her loss, and bemock the cause of her disillusionment. The man is henceforth her slave, and she will prove a relentless taskmistress. For she pities only where she loves, and love and contempt cannot live together. It is the pathos rather than the dignity of high effort that appeals to the best in woman. On the heels of a mood of ruthless recrimination, when every word has been steeped in gall and venom, there comes a sudden perplexing change. A glimpse of the weary droop in the shoulders of her departing victim induces tears of maternal, of divine compunction. The transition from devil to angel is for woman the work of an instant. Paradox incarnate : the infliction of unendurable pain is often her veiled tribute to qualities beyond her compre- 324 MAKERS OF MAN hension but not beyond her worship, is often the prelude to her most entrancing mood. It must not, however, be imagined that I would imply on the part of women an inability to appreciate, or to sympathise with, ideal aims. In all relations between men and women, even those of mother and son, of brother and sister, or of father and daughter, the subtle pervasive sex-element certainly plays its part. On the other hand, women, as individuals, differ as infinitely as men, and in no respect more than in susceptibility and responsiveness to the appeal of noble emotions and exalted thoughts. Full comprehension may often be lacking, yet by intuitive appreciation the void is so adequately filled that the seeker for sympathy and encouragement has no sense of mis- understanding or constraint in the communication of his intent. It is only where, as between husband and wife, the inevitable conflict of interests, the suspicion of rivalry, the fear of committing herself to the unconditional approval of aims prejudicial to her own dignity or comfort, intervene, that woman shows herself slow to entertain, or at least to embrace, ideas full of menace to conventional usage. So we often find men of great and audacious aims turning now to this, now to that woman, culling from each some needful stimulus of appreciation and applause. That such appreciation is never wholly feigned would be too much to say ; it is, however, oftener, in part, not seldom wholly, sincere. It seems to be admitted by those best qualified to judge, that Lady Nelson, good woman that she was, failed utterly to identify herself with the enthusiastic side of her husband's temperament. She was always warning him against imprudence, boring him by her importunate anxieties. In fact she was a wet blanket where the things that lay nearest to his heart were concerned. This was a fatal error, and it supplied an opportunity of which her successful rival, Emma Hamilton, availed herself, so to speak, with both hands. Where Lady Nelson had been cold and reticent, she was effusive, nay gushing. She shamelessly pampered and fostered Nelson's vanity, corrupted his taste by incessant flattery, exploited his renown, and, so far as in her lay, profaned it by making her hero ridiculous. " That she ever loved him is doubtful," writes POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 325 Mahan : " but there were in her spirit impulses capable of sympathetic response to his own in his bravest acts, though not in his noblest motives. It is inconceivable that duty ever appealed to her as it did to him, nor could a woman of innate nobility of character have dragged a man of Nelson's masculine renown about England and the Continent till he was the mock of all beholders ; but, on the other hand, it never could have occurred to the energetic, courageous, brilliant Lady Hamilton, after the lofty deeds and stormy dramatic scenes of St. Vincent, to beg him, as Lady Nelson did, ' to leave boarding to captains.' Sympathy, not good taste, would have withheld her." I shall have much exceeded my aim, if in what has been said above I have conveyed the impression that feminine sym- pathy with masculine ambition or aspiration is in all cases to be regarded as a mere sex-lure, a masked weapon in the eternal duel of sex. It is often that exclusively or in great measure, as in the case of Lady Hamilton is obvious enough but it is often, too, something more genuine and valuable. Our Scan- dinavian ancestors, we are told, never undertook any military enterprise of moment without the express approval of their womankind. They knew well the truth re-stated by that by no means partial critic, Otto Weininger that no woman, not even the stupidest, can be so dull as, on occasion, the cleverest man can be. The counsel of woman, when she restricts herself to counsel and does not seek to dictate, is always worth having and weighing with care. Here I would call special attention to the important part played in the lives of great men, par- ticularly men of action, by their mothers or by other women of more advanced age than the heroes themselves. Csesar, Charlemagne, William the Silent, Cromwell, Napoleon all men of extraordinary independence and force of character were all influenced probably more by their mothers (in what concerned their public life and aims) than by any other woman with whom they had to do. The case of Augustine also deserves mention : his great work for the Church is a debt which she owes mainly to the patience and tact of Monica. If any one ever influenced Lincoln, which one biographer denies, it was his 326 MAKERS OF MAN dearly loved stepmother. Mahomet's first wife, Cadijah, was so much his senior that there must have been an almost maternal quality in her love for the prophet. It should never be forgotten that she, from the first, accepted as genuine the divine mission which others derided and spurned. In this, moreover, she was acting in direct opposition to her own material and social interests as a woman of wealth and position. In view of such facts it is idle to deny that there are women capable of tran- scending the personal view and venturing their little all in the cause which they feel to be worthy of such self-sacrifice. It is perhaps truer to say that they embrace the cause for the sake of the man they love, and who loves it, than that they love the cause for its own abstract beauty or greatness, though of these they may be fully sensible, nevertheless. And I do not question that the urgent need of capturing or retaining the first place in the hero's confidence and affection stimulates their perception of the excellency of the cause which lies nearest to his heart. Still, it remains true, upon the whole, that a woman whose happiness and prosperity are directly dependent upon those of her husband will, however sympathetic she may have been at the outset that is, before she had realised her personal concern in the matter be likely to resent his absorption in ends, how- ever exalted, tending to endanger their common prospects of material and social success. This is an inevitable outcome of the economic subjection of her sex, and it ill becomes us men to complain. The wiser course is that which has been freely practised by great men in need of that sympathy without which the tender green shoots of endeavour can hardly survive germination, much less grow and bear fruit. Sympathy must be sought where it is to be found, from the wife, if she be magnanimous enough to transcend the personal view of the matter in question ; if not, from whomsoever has it to give. Many-sided men are often considered fickle because, feel- ing, justly or otherwise, that they have much to give, they demand much of the woman to whom they are for the moment drawn. Stirred now by sense, now by passion, then by senti- ment, or, it may be, intellect, each transient mood seeks response, POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 327 failing of which in one direction it will be sought in another. The best a woman has to give can be won perhaps only by him who gives unreservedly what is best in himself. But suppose that this best is not at his own disposal is already irretriev- ably dedicated to some work whose prior claim he is helpless to silence or deny ? She may console herself like Frederica, abandoned by Goethe, with the thought that she has been loved by a man of genius, as such men understand and are capable of love. And she may recall the wise maxim of La Rochefoucauld : "On passe souvent de 1'amour a 1'ambition, mais on ne revient guere de 1'ambition a 1'amour." To no man does this maxim apply more obviously than to Julius Caesar, with whom, while marriage was a means to public advancement, the various love-affairs which, if contemporary rumour can be trusted, he permitted himself as occasion offered, were never allowed to rank higher than as mere diversions. His heart was at all times governed by his head. Every one has heard how, after the escapade of Clodius, who, for love of Caesar's second wife Pompeia, gained access disguised as a woman to the festival of the Bona Dea in his palace, he divorced her, not as being guilty but because " Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." For such a man to have divorced any woman on moral grounds would have been hypocritical ; Caesar was never censorious, but he knew that public opinion is both censorious and hypocritical. Public opinion must therefore be conciliated, and Pompeia must go. With regard to the alleged intrigue of Caesar with Cleopatra, the verdict must, I think, be one of " not proven." Caesar's ward and successor Augustus executed Caesarion, the supposed son of Caesar and Cleopatra, as a pretender, which, though not con- clusive, would have been a bold step to take if the said parent- age had been widely accepted. Caesar's position in Egypt at the time when the liaison is asserted to have been begun, was too precarious to offer any favourable opportunity for phil- andering, even if we grant the likelihood that such a man would stultify himself by needless complication of sufficiently grave responsibilities, would thus vitiate his endeavour to settle the affairs of Egypt by a dangerous and undignified self-indulgence. 328 MAKERS OF MAN Towards the end of his life, Caesar adopted in Rome, probably under the influence of his mother, a regimen of almost ascetic simplicity, and showed evident concern for the general reform of morals. The fact that Cleopatra was now in the city lends, therefore, small support to the belief in the prior existence or continuance of any such connection. What freedom Csesar, in common with most men of his day, allowed himself, was, in short, so far as might be, a thing apart from his national aims and activities. Men who achieve supreme distinction and full contemporary recognition, being almost always, too, personalities essentially magnetic and compelling, exercise a sort of glamorous fascination upon the senses and minds of susceptible people, and especially those of women. The same thing, on a lower plane, takes place in connection with popular actors, who are invari- ably besieged with amorous lucubrations penned by senti- mental schoolgirls, and not by schoolgirls only. Glory of any kind or degree, even that of a murderer or a brigand, is a flame into which numbers of silly moths will flutter in a perfect frenzy of self-immolation. Who can doubt that Ceesar in his day turned a deaf ear to many unsought protestations and solicita- tions ? and if, now and then, a more than usually enticing voice won him to a transient regard of the fair but frail suppliant, what man among us dares cast the first stone ? A libertine sleeps (or wakes) in the heart of each one of us ; and not only those women who openly profess the most ancient of callings (nor all of them, for that matter) are born courtesans. " Verum operi longo fas est obrepere somnum." If even Homer may nod, shall Hercules be denied a rest by the way- side ? If so, who will enforce the restriction ? The first recorded love-affair of Charlemagne was the contrac- tion of a left-handed union with Himiltrude, by whom he be- came the father of Pepin the Hunchback, This illegitimate son was in due course to prove a thorn in the side of his father. In 800 A.D. he joined in the conspiracy of certain Frankish magnates against the throne. The plot was discovered in time, and, though Pepin's life was spared, he was forced to take the tonsure. Two years after his accession, Charles (set. 27) married POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 329 Desiderata, daughter of Didier, King of Lombardy. This purely political union was, for somewhat unintelligible reasons, arranged for him by his mother 3 Queen Bertha. It had proved highly objectionable to Pope Stephen, who regarded Charles as a promising ally, and desired above all things the total de- struction of the Lombard nation. * He had accordingly denounced the proposed union in the most violent fashion. Charles, for his part, soon wearied of the sickly and barren Desiderata, and, to the intense vexation of his mother, divorced her in the year following his marriage, and at once took to wife the lovely Swabian, Hildegarde, a mere child. We are told that several of his kinsmen reproached Charles to his face for his brutal faithlessness. This was nevertheless by far the most successful of Charlemagne's many unions. There can be no doubt that he loved Hildegarde sincerely, and that, during the twelve years of her married life, her influence upon him was in many ways good. After her death, and that of the Queen Mother soon after, there is a noticeable deterioration of morale, a growing tendency to yield to the gross and brutal elements of his powerful nature. His third (official) wife, Fastrada, the widowed daughter of an Austrasian Count, was as much detested by his subjects as Hildegarde had been beloved. Two conspiracies against the throne and life of Charles seem to be attributable, in the main, either to the harshness of her own actions or to severities induced by her influence upon him. " Fastrada brought to Court the rancorous feuds and savage hatreds of her homeland ; her husband indulged her thirst for vengeance, and paid dearly for doing so." She died about ten years after their marriage, and Charles, now aged fifty-one, soon replaced her by marrying Liutgard, a gentler and consequently more popular queen. In addition to these four legal unions and the irregular connection with Himiltrude, Charles, at various periods of his career, contracted a good many of what his clerical admirers call " marriages of the second rank." Among his mistresses, Eginhard mentions Gersuinda, Regina, and Adelinda, by all of whom he had children in his old age. For political reasons Charlemagne forbade his daughters to marry. In compensation, perhaps, he connived at their irregularities : 330 MAKERS OF MAN they shared his palace, and their various lovers were enter- tained without let or hindrance. The fact must be faced that Charlemagne was, to all intents, a free lover, and not by any means in the best sense of the words. Every man has the defects of his qualities ; and the same superabundant virility and impetuous, overbearing spirit which enabled him to master and coerce into at least provisional unity the chaotic turbulence of his Europe, made Charlemagne in one sense a loose liver, giving free rein to his lust. Everybody knows the story of how little Eugene Beau- harnais came to General Bonaparte requesting, on behalf of his mother, Josephine, the return of the guillotined Viscount's sword. Bonaparte, to his credit be it said, seldom failed to avail himself of the chance to do a generous and graceful action, where due deference was paid to his authority and no detrimental effects on his own interests were to be feared. The sword was duly returned, and the viscountess was not slow for her part in coming to thank the rising man. Bonaparte had already figured in several little affairs ; he was eighteen when he took to his apartments a woman whom he met one night at the entrance of the Palais Royal. Then there had been a brief liaison with Madame Turreau, wife of an influential member of the Convention, to whose exertions he probably owed the momentous command of the 13th Vendemiaire. Finally (so far as I know), there was the semi-serious betrothal to his " little wife," Desiree-Eugenie Clara, at Marseilles, a pretty girl of sixteen. In Paris he found women more alluring she had failed to seize the favourable moment; then came the meeting with Josephine, and Desiree's chance was irretriev- ably lost. Eager, as always, to atone, he subsequently married her to Bernadotte, made her the Queen of Sweden. The fact remains that his defection had broken her heart. Now he had received a visit of thanks from " a lady, a great lady, a ci-devant vicomtesse, the widow of a President of the Constituent Assembly, a courtier, a general in command of the army of the Rhine. All of which, the title and rank, the refine- ment, the easy and aristocratic grace of his visitor, made a great impression upon Bonaparte. For the first time, the provincial POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 331 of twenty-six, hitherto unnoticed by any woman of this class, found himself face to face with one of those elegant, seductive, delicate beings whom he had hitherto admired from afar." That this charmer's financial position was desperate and her social standing equivocal, made no sort of difference. These facts were cleverly concealed. That Josephine was six years his senior, doubtless gave her an advantage in what was on her side mainly a mere game of skill, and on his a matter of genuine passion. " Captivated by the woman, he was dazzled by the lady, awed by her air of dignity and breeding." They were married in March of the next year (1796), two days before Bonaparte left to join the Army of Italy. When, after exhausting all conceivable excuses, including the encouragement of his eager surmise that she was pregnant, Josephine at last condescended to yield to his impassioned appeals by joining him in Milan, she was accompanied by her lover, M. Charles, who, whenever the General was absent, was constantly at the Palazzo Serbelloni. It was in 1798, during the voyage from Toulon to Malta and thence to Alexandria, that Bonaparte first showed uneasiness with regard to his wife's reputation. " He wished to make sure ; he questioned his friends, and they answered him." The bond which hitherto he himself seems to have regarded as sacred, had been broken ; the idea of divorce at once dawned upon his mind ; and he considered himself now free to amuse him- self as occasion offered. Josephine had only herself to thank for the ultimate rupture : in the days of his most ardent devotion she had but lightly esteemed the love of a hero. Worst of all, when, profiting by the example of her own inconstancy, he too had become inconstant, Josephine made the fatal error of " spying upon him, and paying others to spy upon him, abasing herself by the most unworthy devices, wearying him by stormy scenes, tears, hysterics, confiding her suspicions to any one who would listen, and, in default of evidence, inventing misde- meanours which she declared she had herself witnessed and was ready to attest on oath." She was jealous, and had not the sense to hide it. Of her insane extravagance, of her treachery in intriguing with her husband's bitterest enemies during his absence in Egypt since these, too, had been generously 332 MAKERS OF MAN pardoned, the least said the soonest mended. Her punish- ment was long in coming : she fought desperately to defer the evil day, which probably would never finally have dawned but for her husband's full realisation of the fact that it was not his love that she valued, but the splendour of the destiny she shared. Then, too, when the " pear " had been plucked, arose the burning question of issue, the need of a son. Napoleon's mis- givings with regard to his own reproductive powers (no doubt carefully fostered by Josephine) may have been partly dis- pelled by the birth of a child in August 1804 by Madame , a young lady of the Consular Court, married to a man thirty years her senior. Of this child (though it resembled him not at all), if the First Consul were not the father, it was doubtful whether he could ever be the father of any. Two years later these doubts were finally dispelled, when, on 13th December 1806, Eleonore, the divorced wife of a rascally ex-quarter- master, gave birth to a son of whom the Emperor was the father. Eleonore's husband having been convicted of forgery, she had managed to gain access to the household of Princess Caroline (Murat's wife), and, being a beautiful and graceful brunette of a decidedly " coming on " disposition, had soon captured Napoleon's regard, to which she had responded with alacrity. He never saw her after 1806, but, with his invari- able generosity, gave her a house in the Hue de la Victoire and an income of 22,000 livres. The son, Leon, whom Napoleon had thought seriously of adopting as his heir, had a strange and adventurous career, and died, more or less crazy, in 1881. Of the affaires Foures and Grassini, and of the numerous actresses, readers, and female tuft-hunters who, self-invited, or with the merest show of hesitation, at one time or another were ushered up the secret staircase at the Tuileries, or into the secret suite at the Chateau de Compiegne, I shall, since this is no chronique scandaleuse, but a sober, psychological inquiry, content myself with the mere mention. Such dalli- ance he himself described as " amusements in which my affec- tions have no part." The majority of these episodes fall POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 333 between 1800 and 1810, that is, between his thirty-first and forty-first years. There was nothing truly conjugal in the relations of Napoleon and Josephine. She was, at best, a favoured and very costly mistress ; if he had ever dreamed that she had sympathy, inspiration, to offer, he was quickly disillusioned. The woman whom Napoleon loved best, most disinterestedly, who, more- over, appealed to the highest as well as the most romantic side of his nature, was, I think, she whom he wronged most deeply I refer, of course, to that fair Polish enthusiast, Marie Walewska. The fault that she condoned, it is not for us to judge harshly ; but Masson's account of the ruthless pressure, the campaign of insincere promises and unscrupulous machinations by which her patriotism was turned to account against her chastity and religion, must always be painful reading to admirers of the Corsican. The son whom she bore to him in 1810 proved worthy of his exalted parentage. That she became in some degree reconciled to her strange destiny, came to feel at least a genuine affection for the man who had rather conquered than seduced her, is, I consider, fairly evident. She awaited the summons that never came, in an anteroom at Fontainebleau, all through that night when the Emperor, after abdicating, had attempted suicide by poison. She visited him with her son in Elba, and spent an idyllic day there in the Hermitage of La Marciana. She hastened to Paris in 1815 to welcome him on his escape from exile, and was " conspicuous among those women whose devotion survived his happier fortunes, and who gathered round him at the Elysee and at Malmaison." It was shortly before the birth of Marie Walewska's son that Napoleon at last resolved upon severing the tie with Josephine and taking a princess to wife. " Anxious to save himself and Josephine useless emotion, and to secure himself against further hesitation and weakness, he sent orders from Schonbrunn to the architect at Fontainebleau, that the com- munication between the Empress's apartments and his own should be closed." Finally, "he arranged for a private inter- view, in which he announced his resolution to the Empress." 334 MAKERS OF MAN Her debts were paid, her title was secured to her ; a town and country residence and a hunting-box were placed at her disposal ; she was granted an income of three million francs. In every possible way he laboured to prove that in putting her from him he was coerced by public motives and acting in violation of his personal feelings. " My destiny," he had told her, " is superior to my will ; my dearest affections must give way to the interests of France." Of Marie Louise, Madame Durand says : " No woman could have suited Napoleon better. Gentle, peaceable, a stranger to every kind of intrigue, . . . she soon came to regard Napoleon with the most tender affection." She was a mere ignorant child, of whom, by the way, availing himself of the marriage by proxy, Napoleon had unceremoniously possessed himself before the final ceremony, on the very night of their arrival at Com- piegne. Yet she had somehow the knack of making him feel the social gulf between them. Three months after her marriage, in a letter to Metternich, she says : " I am not afraid of Napo- leon, but I begin to think he is afraid of me." There can be no doubt that he loved her. He was now over forty, and was entering uponja new phase of sexual development. The conjugal spirit possessed him : "his first care was to prove himself a devoted husband." He altered all his habits of life, neglecting even the most urgent military necessities in order to remain, since she willed it, at her side. When, in March of 1811, she was confined, the greatest danger at one time threatened both mother and child. It seemed that Napoleon must choose between the sacrifice of all his ambitions (by the loss of his prospective heir) and the death of his bride. Dubois, the doctor, pale and trembling, came to the Emperor for instruc- tions. " Napoleon came nobly out of the hard ordeal. ' Do exactly as you would in the house of a shopkeeper in the Rue St. Denis. Be careful of both mother and child, but if you cannot save both, preserve the mother's life.' ' The success of Napoleon in attaining -what is vulgarly considered the ultimate favour of so many women, affords a fine text for those who would expound cynical doctrines with regard to feminine virtue. For it seems clear that he was not person- POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 335 ally attractive to women, as a rule. It was his wealth, the splendour of his position, the eclat of his fame, which made him irresistible. Of these advantages he, without scruple, availed himself, here as elsewhere, to the utmost, for, though a senti- mentalist of the school of Rousseau, he was neither chivalrous nor romantic. Of the fine shades of gallantry, the nuances of deference, which women love, to which not merely their passions but their hearts respond, he knew and cared to know nothing. Love-making as a pursuit, the subtleties which Henri Beyle proposed to reduce to an exact science (as it were a species of experimental psychology), had no attraction for his practical instinct, which desired and achieved results. I shall not add much to what has been said by me already as to the love-affairs of Dante. According to his own account and that of Boccaccio, his first meeting with Beatrice Portinari took place at the house of her father, on the occasion of a May festival, when she was at the beginning of her ninth year, and he nearing the end of his. 1 The second recorded meeting, when, on his encountering her dressed in pure white, between two older ladies, Beatrice turned her eyes and smiled upon the poet, is placed nine years later. " The mystic number " nine was, however, so firmly associated in Dante's mind with the destiny of his lady, that we need not insist on the historical accuracy of these dates. Nor is Boccaccio's highly coloured account of the lovesick brooding of Dante, his neglect of all other matters from the date of the greeting to that of Beatrice's death from his eighteenth to his twenty-fifth year to be taken au pied de la lettre. And Isidore del Lungo warns us against implicit reliance on the novelist's assertion that Dante's marriage with Gemma Donati (which almost certainly occurred after the death of Beatrice) was arranged by his parents with a view to " drawing him out of his grief." On the contrary, it seems likely that the period of dissipation, owned to by Dante in his interview with Forese 2 and elsewhere, intervened between the marriage of 1 Little Beatrice on this occasion " wore a robe of a most noble colour of crimson, simple and seemly, with a girdle and ornaments suitable to her tender age." 2 Purgatorio, xxiii. 336 MAKERS OF MAN Beatrice and his own, or possibly between her death and his marriage. The alliance with " Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, blood relation to the famous Messer Corso, the great agitator of the Guelph party, was," in del Lungo's opinion, " essentially designed to cement an alliance between neighbours, using that term in the sense of quasi consorti." In short, it was a mariage de convenance, as nine out of ten marriages of persons of quality were in the Florence of those days. 1 Boccaccio flatly accuses Gemma, by whom Dante had four children, of a complete lack of sympathy with Dante's tastes and aspirations. We know that after 1302, when he left Florence, she remained there, and that they never met again. Certainly that looks like estrangement ; but it may simply mean that he thought it better for her to remain where she had good friends than to share his homelessness and poverty. Certainly Gemma does not seem to have taught her children to regard their father as a tyrant or a deserter, since he was joined at Ravenna by his two sons, and his daughter, named (significantly enough) Beatrice. Would a mere shrew have consented that one of her girls should be named after the avowed object of her husband's first and tenderest devotion ? She, no doubt, sensibly regarded the affaire Beatrice as a piece of literary convention, unworthy the serious jealousy of a Florentine matron. 2 And a literary convention however seriously taken by Dante himself, how- ever passionately felt in those poignant years of his boyhood and adolescence it, no doubt, in some measure was or became. What more artificial than the rapture and anguish of the Vita Nuova ? It is, after all, the realism of the Divine Comedy that has made it and its author immortal. Because, until a poet can make reality the vehicle of his transcendent visions, they will not move the hearts nor grip the imaginations of grown men. It was not only in the years of early manhood that what 1 And still are, by all accounts, in that of to-day. 2 " There is not a single piece of evidence to prove that such poetical love- affairs ever unsheathed a sword in vengeance, or brought about civic discords among this proud and hot-blooded people" (Women of Florence, by Isidore del Lungo, trans, by M. G. Steegman). POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 337 he himself stigmatised as his besetting sin of lustfulness led Dante astray from his own ideal of constancy. An amorous episode of some kind, which occurred after his exile at Lucca, is indicated by a passage in the twenty-fourth canto of the " Paradiso." At the very outset of his pilgrimage the way is barred by a panther, symbolising sexual passion. Significant, also, is his keen sympathy with the illicit loves of Paolo and Francesca, concerning which he writes : " My sense reviving, that erewhile had drooped With pity for the kindred shades, whence grief O'ercame me wholly. ..." Respect for the fact compels me, therefore, to include this poet among the polygamists ; it is nevertheless to be remembered that, from the time of his conversion (somewhere about his fiftieth year), 1 Dante repudiated all that which, in his own life or the lives of others, was inconsistent with his austere view of Christian morality. But the condemnation of a ban- quet at which one has taken one's fill, or for which one has no taste, is a form of virtue more gratifying to the preacher than convincing to the (hungry) congregation ! The central fact in the personal career of Titian is his meeting in his own fiftieth year with that dissolute wit and bon viveur, Pietro Aretino. Three years later, what was in all probability a restraining influence was withdrawn by the death of Titian's wife, Cecilia, whom he outlived by forty-six years. These two factors, the intimacy with Aretino and the death of Cecilia, were brought to bear upon Titian's ardent and sensuous temperament at a period when triumphant success had placed at his disposal all that the opulence of fifteenth century Venice had to offer of luxury and the means to self- indulgence of every kind and degree. Have we here a key to the discrepancy between the conceptions of Womanhood (that is, of sexual morality) respectively revealed in the early and late work of this master ? 1 That is, soon after the disappointment of all his political hopes by the death of the Emperor Henry vn. (1313). The famous visit to the Convent in the Apennines may have been in some way connected with a spiritual crisis, the irrepressible desire for inward peace and harmony. 22 338 MAKERS OF MAN In relation to this matter, Claude Phillips recognises three main phases in the art of Titian. In the imaginative paintings of his youth and early manhood, particularly in those wherein the influence of Giorgione is evident, as in the so-called " Sacred and Profane Love," the charm of sex is presented frankly indeed and with evident delight, yet with purity and restraint. His nudes of this early period are free from the emphasis by which a sensualist's brush is betrayed. Something, if not quite all, of the subtle brooding charm of Giorgione is reflected in the sentiment ; while, in technique, that artist is out-distanced from the^ first. In his " Virgin with Cherries," Titian, while retaining "his pristine freshness and spontaneity, shows himself emancipated from the mimetic phase ; " for the pensive girl- Madonna of Giorgione (and the allied wistfulness of his own Zingarella) we have now the radiant young matron, joyous yet calm." The noontide of Titian's genius, considered in this one aspect still, is reached in his " Worship of Venus " and " Bacchanal," painted soon after his visit to Alfonso i. in 1516 (set. 39). They show " a forward step, yet not without some evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the flowers of genius of the first period." Then in his fiftieth year begins his intimacy with Aretino, who, with himself and the sculptor Jacopo Tutti, formed the so-called " Triumvirate." Now, " under the influence of Aretino, Titian's natural eagerness to grasp in every direction at material advantages is sharpened ; he becomes at once more humble and more pressing." His art in general, and in parti- cular his art as revealing a conception of Womanhood, under- goes an analogous change. " The second period is one of splendid nudities and great portraits." Titian is now the friend, rather than the mere protege, of all the art-loving Grandissimi of North Italy, nay, even of the Emperor himself. " The ease and splendour of the life at Biri Grande, . . . the Epicureanism which saturated the atmosphere, . . . operated to colour the creations which mark this period of Titian's practice, at which he has reached the apex of pictorial achieve- ment, but shows himself too serene in sensuousness, too un- ruffled in the masterly practice of his profession, to give to the POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 339 heart the absolute satisfaction that he gives to the eyes." In his " Magdalen " (Pitti Gallery) " there is latent a jarring note of unrefinement in the presentment of exuberant youth and beauty," his " Venus of Urbino " is " an avowed act of worship by the artist of the naked human body, and, as such, in its noble frankness, free from all offence." Then follow a succession of Venuses and Danaes, goddesses, nymphs, and heroines, revealing, one and all, " with a grand candour such as almost purges it of offence . . . woman . . . reduced to slavery, . . . woman as the plaything of man." Is it an unfair inference that the private life of Titian must have corresponded with the conception of the role of Womanhood thus blazoned on the scroll of his Art ? The Nemesis that attends the pursuit of pleasure as an end is, that whereas the keenness of sensation inevitably wanes, the thirst for it, once fairly entertained, not only becomes habitual, but is gradully transferred from the physical to the emotional, and thence to the spiritual plane. Pleasure, truly so called, is conditioned by appetite, and appetite by function. Only by the spur of a violent stimulus can pleasure, brief and unsatisfying at best, be wrong from the tardy response of a semi-exhausted function. A lustful mind in an impotent body : in this, the logical outcome of the sensualist's philo- sophy, we have a spectacle evoking the derisive pity of gods and men. Titian's presentment of woman, especially of nude woman, in his late works, irresistibly suggests to my mind the suspicion that he did not escape this evil fate. From frankness he descended to coarseness, from coarseness to positive vulgarity. A cynical note is also sounded: thus, in his " Danae " (Madrid) " a grasping hag holds out a cloth to catch her share of the golden rain." His " Europa," finished for Philip u. (an. set. 85), is " a strapping wench who with limbs outstretched complacently allows herself to be carried off by the bull." Lastly, at the very end of Titian's career, we are startled " to meet with a work which, expressed in this masterly late technique of his, vies in fresh- ness of inspiration with the finest of his early poesie. This is the ' Nymph and Shepherd ' of the Imperial Gallery at 340 MAKERS OF MAN Vienna .... Richness and brilliancy of colour are subord- inated ... to a luminous monotone. ... In the solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph, who, half-won by the appealing strain, turns her head as she lies luxuriously extended on a wild beast's hide, covering the grassy knoll. ... It may not be concealed that a note of ardent sensuousness still makes itself felt." Comparing this masterpiece with his Giorgionesque idyll of nearly seventy years back, the " Three Ages " of Bridgewater House, Claude Phillips continues : " The early poesia gives, wrapped in clear even daylight, the perfect moment of trusting satisfied love ; the late one, with less purity, but, strange to say, with a higher passion, renders, beautified by an evening light more solemn and suggestive, the divine ardours fanned by solitude and opportunity." Thus, after all, in the hour of threatened eclipse, 1 genius re-asserts its prerogative, and transfigures its point of view. A fact of great psychological significance in regard to the development of Titian's art, is that, from the same period midway in his long career of nearly a century, when the sensual element begins to predominate in his treatment of Woman, a tragic note appears in his religious paintings, deepening into a gloom that sometimes almost suggests despair. The last work of his brush, that sublime " Pieta " upon whose com- pletion he was engaged when stricken down by the pestilence, is described by Claude Phillips as " produced with an awe nearly akin to terror." We have to now deal briefly with an exceedingly complex, comprehensive, but somewhat hackneyed subject the numer- ous love-affairs of Goethe. And first let us dispose of the popular fallacy that gauges the strength of a man's passions by the number of his mistresses (Platonic or otherwise). Goethe loved many women : ergo, Goethe was a man of strong passions that is the tacit but completely false assumption underlying the majority of dissertations made in 1 Always understood in the limited sense under discussion, for in many ways Titian's latest art-period waa the grandest of all. GOETHE. Engraved by K. Cooper To face f>. 340. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 341 defence or condemnation of the poet's peccadilloes. The promiscuity of a Charlemagne is as intelligible as that of a bull, or any splendid specimen of exuberant virility. It is not here a question of sentimental affinities, but of a function too powerful to submit to conventional restraints, an appetite too robust to be scrupulous or fastidious. Passion, on the other hand, is appetite permeated by emotion ; eroticism proper is largely of mental or, at any rate, sentimental origin, and may or may not be firmly based on organic sexual impulse. In aesthetic temperaments eroticism often seems to bear an inverse proportion to procreative power : what is lacking in functional vigour is compensated for by emotional susceptibility. Beeth- oven's is probably a case in point ; of Goethe I would not say as much he was more passionate, but he, too, was extremely sentimental. And he lived in a sentimental age, whose influ- ence upon his innate proclivity for eroticism is by no means a negligible factor. Then, too, poets are, as a rule, sexually precocious ; and, in Goethe's case, this precocity may well have been stimulated by his introduction in his tenth year consequently, before the age of normal puberty to the unwholesome influence of a theatrical environment. Not only was he a constant attendant at the Court Theatre, where, for the benefit of the French troops occupying the city, a series of plays was being performed, but he obtained access to the green-room, and was impressed by the nonchalance with which the actors and actresses dressed and undressed before one another and before him and his boy friend. Such memories, in such a mind, could hardly fail to bear fruit. Four years later, at a tavern supper party, in low company, Goethe met Gretchen, a girl some years older than himself, of whom he says : " Thenceforth the form of this maiden haunted me, go where I would." He saw her daily for some weeks, but the liaison, probably innocent enough in a physical sense, was rudely terminated by the arrest of one of their associates on a charge of fraud. At Leipsic, a couple of years later, he fancied himself in love with Aennschen, the daughter of the house where he and Schlosser lodged together. He, rather unfairly, sought to monopolise her affection without in 342 MAKERS OF MAN any way pledging himself, and when after two or three years she naturally tired of so impossible a situation, he found relief in dramatising the episode (Die Laune des Verliebteri). When Goethe, aged twenty-one, had been some months at Stiasburg University, he, with Weyland, rode out to Sesenheim and made the acquaintance of a Protestant pastor, one of whose three daughters, Frederica Brion, aged nineteen, slender, fair- haired, blue-eyed, and romantic, made an instant impression on his wayward fancy. On a second visit, in Whitsuntide of the next year, " she appeared more charming than ever, . . . and when the opportunity offered of heartily kissing one whom I loved so tenderly, I did not miss it ; still less did I deny myself a repetition of this pleasure." We read that " Frederica never doubted that he proposed to make her his wife ; and this also was assumed by her family." But when Goethe's time came to leave Strasburg, he returned home unpledged ; and, in the eight years that elapsed before he saw her again, the affair died a natural death. Goethe attributes his defection (without seeking to justify it) to his instinctive repugnance to the surrender of his personal freedom. " The poet," says Wilhelm Meister " must live wholly for himself." But genuine passion accepts even the most onerous conditions, because " needs must when the devil drives." Poverty of instinct, the masquerading of mere sentiment in the robes of true love : that is the physiological and therefore the true solution of the problem. Goethe's fine physique has misled his biographers, who (idolaters, for the most part) have overlooked the fact that reproductive power bears no essential relation to stature. Goethe's youth and early manhood were interrupted by several severe illnesses ; he was probably never so strong as he appeared to be. When, finally (set. 39), he did enter into permanent relations with the young woman whom he subsequently married, his attempt at paternity can only be described as a failure. In his twenty-third year Goethe was the hero(?) of another abortive love-affair ; the heroine in this case being the betrothed of his friend Kestner. Charlotte was no doubt attracted by the poet, but there is reason to surmise that she was not really deceived as to the practical import of his attentions. Goethe, POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 343 for his part, discreetly fled when he felt that the matter was growing serious ; and, in The Sorrows of Werther, cleansed his bosom once more of the " perilous stufi " of lovesick yearnings for the unattainable. About three years later Goethe became engaged to Lili, a sixteen-year-old widow, daughter of a rich Frankfurt banker. She was a self-possessed young woman, accustomed to move in somewhat higher society than the poet, at this phase of his development, was accustomed to frequent. Consequently "he felt like a fish out of water in the circles to which he was induced to follow her." Lili was a coquette ; Goethe was jealous ; the parents barely tolerated the betrothal. Inevitably, where so fickle a suitor wa sconcerned, "his interest began to flag, and, vowing eternal fidelity all the while, he seized the occasion of the Stolbergs' passing through Frankfurt to join them in an expedition to Switzerland." On his return the old difficulties recurred ; and Goethe cut the knot by accepting the invitation of Karl August to settle in his duchy at Weimar. I shall not weary the reader by retailing the hackneyed details of Goethe's platonic wooing of Frau von Stein (ter- minated by his liaison with the woman he subsequently married) ; of his more serious affair (aet. 57) with Minnie Herzlieb ; or of the pleasant material he, at the mature age of seventy-three, afforded to the gossips of Marienbad by his infatuation for Ulrica von Levezow. Enough, surely, has been said to dispose of the romantic myth, constructed by imaginative but un- physiological biographers, in which the great poet figures as a sort of Don Juan. To say it with due reverence, Goethe was not (like Byron, for example) a man of passionate and funda- mentally amorous temperament. He belonged to the perhaps less dangerous, assuredly less dramatically impressive- species of the male flirt. The bourgeois element in his disposition always asserted itself in time to save him from crossing the frontier of sentimental comedy and invading the realm of true, self -oblivious passion that is to say, of tragedy. The sympathy of women was essential to him ; their em- braces he certainly coveted, within measure, but with the reservation that the price exacted must not include the sacrifice 344 MAKERS OF MAN of his personal independence. Christiane Vulpius, the inferior in all respects of Frederica, captured Goethe in the only way in which such men can be captured. She gave herself freely and unreservedly ; and trusted to the logic of events to show that, by accepting her person, he had made himself responsible for her future. Her confidence (to his honour be it said) was not misplaced : in defiance of his own principles he at length made her his wife ; as he had made her his mistress in defiance of those of his friends. The sexual career of Mahomet is exceptional in this respect, that he began as a monogamist and ended as a polygamist of the most pronounced type. So long as his first wife, Cadijah, lived, he was not only faithful to her bed, but seems to have felt no inclination to the indiscriminate alliances in which, after the withdrawal of her influence, he indulged. This prolonged continence of a man who subsequently developed amorous proclivities of so wide a range, is all the more note- worthy in that Cadijah was his elder by fifteen years. When he married her he was twenty-five and she forty. When she died at sixty, he was therefore forty-five, a somewhat late age for the initiation of habits of life so directly opposed to those which had hitherto sufficed him. One can only surmise that, preoccupied by the incubation of his ideal of religious reform, he had, during much of his life with Cadijah, no interest to spare for such dalliance as would have resulted in an increase of his worldly cares and responsibilities. Once definitely committed to his mission, his mind would be comparatively free ; and as, with growing prestige, he rose in his own esteem he availed himself more and more fully of the licence conceded by the devotion of his adherents. 1 The case of Charlemagne presents obvious resemblances ; also that of Napoleon, up to the time of his second marriage. The greatness of Mahomet has never been justly recognised by English opinion : conse- quently, while on the subject of his relations to women, I shall call attention to one highly significant result of his reforming zeal. In the dark days before his coming it was customary 1 His followers were limited by Mahomet to four wives, but for himself he claimed exemption from any such restriction. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 345 for Arab parents to bury their superfluous daughters alive. " The father was generally himself the murderer. * Perfume and adorn,' he would say to the mother, ' your daughter, that I may convey her to her mothers.' This done, he led her to a pit dug for the purpose, bade her look down into it, and then, as he stood behind her, pushed her headlong in ; then, filling up the pit himself, levelled it with the rest of the ground ! It is said that the only occasion on which a certain Ottoman ever shed a tear was when his little daughter, whom he was burying alive, wiped the dust of the grave from his beard. This was one of the many 1 ghastly and inhuman practices which the Prophet denounced absolutely and for ever." 2 Mahomet's ethics were as great an advance upon those current before his day as his pure monotheism was upon the inchoate idolatry which had hitherto masqueraded in the guise of religion. Every approximation to a logically consistent theory of the universe (and religions are, after all, only popular philosophies) necessarily implies a higher, because more en- lightened ethic. "A love child himself, there is no record that he ever loved woman." So, in a fine article apropos of the Note Books of Leonardo, writes Mr. C. Lewis Hind. I myself, by a fairly close study of the principal literary remains of the artist, have satisfied myself that if ever there lived a sexless being on this earth, one devoid not merely of passion, but even of curiosity about or interest in the wide sphere of sexual relations, that being was he, Leonardo da Vinci. Certainly there has come down to us but a mere fraction of the hundred and twenty volumes of which he claims to have been the author. But these fragments, comprising the results of his keen observation and thought de omni re scihili et quibusdam aliis, may, by reason of the very haphazardness of their selection by Destiny, be regarded as in all probability representative. In them you will find abundant evidence of Leonardo's extraordinary flair for prevision of the results of inductive science upon every other conceivable subject, but upon this particular subject 1 The Italics are mine. C. J. W. 2 By the Waters of Carthage, by Norma Lorrimer. 346 MAKERS OF MAN only one meagre paragraph, and that one suggestive rather of a reminiscence of Plato's philosophy than of personal ex- perience or direct observation. " The lover is moved by the thing beloved ; they are united as the sense with the sensible, and make but one object. Work is the first thing which is born of the union. If the thing loved is vile, the lover is degraded. When the thing united is in conformity with its uniter, there ensues delight, pleasure, and contentment. When the lover is united to the beloved, he is at rest." l Perhaps I should add this memorandum : Ven&rem observant solam hominibus convenire, title of an anatomical plate published by Uzielli. How significant a reticence on the part of one whose writings comprise either in the form of disconnected musings, or of what appear to be rough sketches for lectures (possibly delivered at the academy founded by and called after him, at Milan), upon problems of anatomy, physiology, psychology, theology, the occult sciences, geology, aesthetics, astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, architecture, hydro-dynamics, optics, aeronautics, no one of which he so far failed to solve that his anticipations have not been confirmed, wholly, or in great measure, by the conclusions of later investigators ! Yet Leonardo was no weakling, but a superb man, of princely bearing, immense bodily strength, and remarkable physical dexterity. His aristocratic soul delighted in fine horses and handsome men Salai and Melzi, his pupils, and the devoted attendants of his last days, are both commended by Vasari for their beauty. The question naturally arises was Leonardo like so many men of genius, a man of homosexual instinct ? More probably, I think, the dwarfing of life's most costly function was the price exacted for his unprecendented personal endowment. For it is not entirely true, as he wrote, that " God sells us all good things at the price of labour " ; some have to be paid for, in advance, by limitation. I have classed Beethoven among the celibates because he never married, and his life seems to have been, in the physical sense, chaste, or approximately so. But, emotionally, Beethoven 1 " II codice di L. d. V. nella bibliotheca del principe Trivulce " (Beltrami). Milan, 1893, F. 6. r. (Textes Choisis de L. d. V. p. 67). POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 347 was, like Goethe, a polygamist from first to last. Too fastidious to find satisfaction, like Turner, in gross orgies, lie loved many high-born women, and, while the ardent fire lasted, professed himself eager to enter the marital state. But, somehow, it never came off ; and the man who escapes wedlock, not once but many times, may justly be regarded as a bachelor at heart. Besides, we have his own testimony to the same purport. For himself, he said, he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had become his wife whom he had passionately loved in former days, and thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess. He told Nannie Giannastasio that he did not like the idea of any indissoluble bond being forced between people in their personal relation to each other. . . . He would much rather that a woman gave him her love, and with her love the highest part of her nature, without being bound to him. He knew no married couple who did not, on one side or the other, repent the step he or she took in marrying. Beethoven, considered as an embodiment of the masculine spirit, was never more universal in his music than in this unabashed verbal confession of his loathing of the bond. In their dread of responsibility, their non-committal attitude towards life in general, and women in particular, literary men I include composers often reveal surprising affinity with the type of the mandarin or the college don. Life and the emotional expression thereof are in great measure antithetical tendencies : hence these men of sentiment live, as it were, by proxy, and their love is a Barmecide feast. What, ever and anon, they needs must have, yet, as they divine only too clearly, no one woman can permanently give them, is the stimulus of a new emotion to be the motif of a symphony or a song. They cannot give themselves unreservedly ; cannot share the saving illusion of passion's immortality. Only from the honeyed blossoms of Love's garden can they distil their nectar : his fruitage is not for their lips. As husbands and fathers they would be failures ; for the sake of their task their souls' thirst must remain unquenched. Yet there can be no doubt but that Beethoven was funda- mentally a man of warm affections ; and, from tune to time, 348 MAKERS OF MAN the starved heart of him cried out against the solitude of his fate. Possibly, but for his deafness, he would have bent his proud neck to the yoke. 1 When he was about forty-five he became the guardian of his little nephew Karl, whose father, dying, had entrusted him to his care. The mother was living, and gave Beethoven an infinity of vexation by trying, by legal and illegal means, to get the boy back. " She instigated her nephew to lying, deception, and dissimulation of every kind towards his uncle." Beethoven, for his part, took the responsi- bility very seriously. " Do I watch Karl," he wrote in his Journal, " as if he were my own son ? Every weakness, every trifle even, tending to this great end " that is, to make a musician of him ? " It is a hard matter for me. But He above is there." All his fond hopes in this quarter, too, were bitterly disappointed. Karl proved a mauvais sujet, whose rake's progress culminated in 1826 (Beethoven's fifty-sixth and penultimate year) by a bungling attempt at suicide. " I have become worse because my uncle insisted upon making me better," he told the magistrate. Ultimately Karl married, and became a tolerable citizen ; but Beethoven died of the shame and anguish of his disillusionment, which, in 1826, had suddenly turned him into an old, feeble, and broken-spirited man. I have reserved for the conclusion of this chapter the remarks I have to make upon that first and largest group of individuals who adhered to the monogamic regime. This includes, it will be remembered, men of each of our four types, men of thought being most, and men of the aesthetic temperament least largely represented. The path of wedlock is the path of conformity, of use and wont, of good citizenship and good repute. The inducements it offers to men who, not being natural celibates, desire to devote themselves to large impersonal ends, are great and obvious. Adding no crushing weight of responsibility to their cares and labours, it nevertheless con- tributes a steadying motive to life, checks caprice, kindles 1 In Beethoven's copy of the Odyssey, the following lines are marked : For nothing is better or more desirable on earth, Than when man and wife united in hearty love Calmly rule their house. POWER IN THE CRUCIBLE 349 effort, lulls passion, feeds the affections, emancipates the senses and the mind. Emancipates, I say, because he who would be all things to all women must realise in the end that he has undertaken an impossible task. He, on the other hand, who gives rein to instinct so far only as reason can follow, will reap the reward of an easy conscience and a settled life. Byron said with a sneer of Hodgson, that he was " inoculated with the disease of domestic felicity." Happy is he who can thus obtain immunity from the ubiquitous microbe of desire. And in truth it must be owned that the sweetness of the said felicity is not so unalloyed by bitterness as to prove cloying or enervating. Marriage is a discipline. " It is so far from being natural," said the wise lexicographer, "for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separ- ation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together." But this is obviously a half-truth, based on such unwarrantable assump- tions as that what is natural for one man or woman is natural for others ; that our wayward appetites and capricious desires are natural, our deep affections and our chivalry unnatural (or peradventure, supernatural) ; that the restraints imposed by civilised society are the predominant factor in limiting sexual promiscuity, and are themselves of other than natural origin ; and so forth. Certainly it has to be admitted that men whom fortune or their own efforts may have exalted above the restraints in question, are prone to evade or transgress them. The same thing has often been observed in regard to Europeans living among uncivilised people. But there are many exceptions ; the day of sweeping generalisations in regard to this most complex problem of sex-relations has passed away, even though we admit that the day of its final solution has not yet dawned. I will conclude this long chapter with a quotation from George Meredith, which puts, neatly enough, the case for what one might call " the higher monogamy " it would be certainly too dogmatic to call it " the monogamy of the future " : " Men are planted in the bog of their unclean animal 350 MAKERS OF MAN condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature makes the woman be. ... When the embraced woman breathes respect into us, she wings a beast. We have from her the poetry of the tasted life, excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth by purest early bloom. . . . Secret of all human aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds is there ; and the passion of the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced, respected woman." l 1 The Amazivtg Marriage, by G. Meredith. XII LIMITATION AND CRIMlH Definition of terms Universality of crime Examples " The Guilt of Innocency." " All the men who are worth anything must begin by breaking the rules." J. C. SNAITH. " WHO knows what one will find half-way when he sets himself to do something great ? " To this, the momentous question self-proposed by the hero of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, we instinctively rejoin, " Who indeed ? " But, on consulting the records of their lives who have dared the experiment in question, we find evidence which may tempt us to be more explicit. He will find a temptation adequate to the greatness of his self-esteem ; will undergo an ordeal that will bring to light the secret motives of his will. As to Julien's further inquiry : " Must the man who wants to remove ignorance and crime from the world be regarded as a monster and an impostor ? " that is easier to answer. In the long run a man will be regarded as precisely what he is or was. And however far astray the unconsidered verdict of the mass of his contem- poraries, there will be some souls who discern the truth from the first. The Great Man as Criminal being our topic in the present chapter, it behoves us at the outset to forestall the danger of any misconception of our terms. Let it be clearly under- stood that I use the word criminal, not in its legal, but in its fundamental, ethical sense. A man is, in this sense, a criminal who incurs the responsibility for an act which reveals indiffer- ence, or less than a normal concern for obligations considered 352 MAKERS OF MAN binding upon all mankind. 1 We are all, of course, criminals in this ultimate sense : it is merely a question of degree. Life compels us to act : and action, in the long run, implies crime, since crime, philosophically regarded, is the necessary corollary of limitation. To act is to commit oneself ; and self-committal is identical with self-limitation. It may be objected that what constitutes criminality is the evil intention of the criminal. This is only true if that " evil " intention be referred, not merely to the particular action condemned as a crime, but to the general attitute of the criminal towards life. Many of the greatest crimes are committed, not because of any sporadic impulse towards crime, but because, when the temptation occurs, the agent finds himself constrained by limitations of motive which have become habitual, supreme, which he is therefore powerless to transcend. To refrain from committing the crime would be to give the lie to the whole of his past life its hopes, ambitions, conquests to stultify himself and all that he believes himself to stand for before the world. To accept the crime, or to reject himself that is, the hateful and, often, the hated alternative. For the ostensible, flagrant crime differs only, or mainly, in seeming, from the uncensured acts which have preceded and led up to it. In carrying it into effect, Destiny and the agent co-operate in pronouncing judgment upon the hitherto concealed purport of that agent's career. " All my life I have known that I might have to do this. It is too late now to turn back : in this deed, that must be done, I recognise myself." : I repeat we are all criminals, for we all act, or, at any rate, resolve. Even the resolve to abstain from action is, as we shall see later, a kind of action, fraught with its own grave conse- quences, pregnant with its own Nemesis. Individuality not merely implies, but is limitation ; and limitation is imperfec- tion, in other words, crime. " No, sir," exclaimed that arch- realist, Samuel Johnson, flatly contradicting some facile en- 1 / assume, for the purpose of this inquiry, the validity of these obligations. 2 " The best and worst hours of life are in themselves irresponsible, the will hurled headlong forward by an impulse that has gathered force before " (L. Dougall, hi What Necessity Knows). LIMITATION AND CRIME 353 thusiast " a fallibk being toill fail somewhere." Equally to the point is his profound observation that " so many objections might be urged to everything, that nothing could overcome them but the necessity of doing something." This being so, it would be the easiest thing in the world to reveal the stigmata of criminality in the lives of every one of our forty exemplars. Easy, and also instructive, but wearisome and superfluous ! In the case of our artists and men of thought, we should, more- over, be covering ground already in some degree explored in the section dealing with the Natural History of Purpose. It is in what concerns the negative iconoclastic aspect of their work that the cloven hoof of criminality will, for such men (not for them alone, either), be most in evidence. But crime, though in essence universal, is, as commonly understood, a department of action. In the lives of men of action we shall find, accordingly, the most glaring examples of criminality, in commenting upon which I may fairly expect to be spared the gibes of idolatrous hero-worshippers, and sentimentalists in general. Some fine specimens of criminality are also to be collected among the doings of those whom I have described as men of action in a higher sense the members of the ethico- religious group. There can be no question but that Caesar was one of the most humane men who ever achieved supreme distinction in the military sphere. In all that concerned himself, personally, he showed himself, over and over again, magnanimous and superior to resentment ; he was most scrupulous in his economy of the lives of his men ; and, to a defeated foe, his generosity was unfailing. His conquest of Gaul was no less a triumph of enlightened policy than of martial genius. But upon Caesar's fair fame one blot persists : he made himself responsible for the butchery of 430,000 Germans (the figure is his own), of whom probably the majority were helpless women and children. It was not, properly speaking, a battle : the immigrants were totally unprepared for an attack ; their chiefs were, in fact, in Caesar's camp, whither they had gone to apologise for an unprovoked onslaught upon the Roman advance guard. They had thus, it must be admitted, placed themselves formally in 23 354 MAKERS OF MAN the wrong ; but they were in the very act of offering reparation, when, led by Caesar in person, the legionaries flung themselves upon the confused host, and entered upon their bloody work. Even Froude admits that upon this occasion the rights of war were " ruthlessly exceeded." Cato demanded that Csesar should be given up to the Germans. They " were not indeed defending their own country," agrees Froude ; " they were the invaders of another." Yes, but the " invasion " was not voluntary, but enforced ; they had been driven out by the stronger Suevi ; and the Belgians, hoping for their aid against the Romans, had welcomed them across the Rhine. It appears to me that on this one occasion Caesar, clearly perceiving that success by fair means was out of the question, deliberately chose to succeed by foul means. 1 It must, nevertheless, be remembered that his conquest of Gaul was not really a war of aggression, but a ^defensive measure. The existence of his country was at stake. Also, of course, his own future ; but Caesar, though by no means disinterested, was always ready to submit that to the hazards of war. The great crime which history records against Charlemagne was of an even more repulsive character, because it had not the excuse of immediate and extreme peril, but was committed in cold blood with a cynical show of judicial procedure. It occurred in his fortieth year (782), during the second Saxon war. In the previous year Charles had issued his harsh Saxon capitulary, demanding, under severe penalties, the submission to baptism, conformity with Catholic religion, and the payment of tribute to the Church. The recalcitrant Saxons not long afterwards fell, at Suntal, on a body of Frankish horse, and almost exterminated them. At the close of the year Charles appeared at Verdun in his blackest mood, resolved upon venge- ance. Witikind, the leader of the Saxon revolt, was beyond his reach, and the lesser chiefs with one accord laid the blame on him for what had occurred. Charles, not to be mollified, insisted upon the production of victims. Four thousand five 1 Influenced, too, possibly, by the resentment of his men for the unpro- voked attack of the preceding day. If so, it was, however, a solitary instance of such weakness on his part. LIMITATION AND CRIME 355 hundred men were pointed out to him as having voted in the national councils for rebellion. " They were at once seized, collected at Verdun, and massacred in cold blood." The result was as, in the case of so high-spirited a race, might have been expected. " Fury rather than terror was the predominant feeling among those who had escaped. For the first time tribal distinctions were forgotten ; the entire people rose and prepared to meet the Franks in the open field. The next three years tested all the strength of Charles." The massacre had been worse than a crime : it had been a huge blunder, explicable only as due to the exasperation of an overwrought mind. But the ultimate source of such moral crudities is the arrogance of a nature too narrow to understand, much more to tolerate, an alien point of view, and the actions thence ensuing. The career of Sir Francis Drake, common as it is to speak of him as a sort of privileged pirate, is exceptionally free from the taint of deliberate criminality. The sturdy little man, for all his Protestant ferocity, had his principles of warfare, and consistently " played the game." In his twenty-first year, being temporarily under a cloud with Elizabeth, he joined Essex in Ireland with his frigate the Falcon, and lent a hand in the storming of the rebel garrison in the isle of Kathlin. Hither the Irish and Scots malcontents had sent their women and children, and the diabolical intention of the attack was to massacre them all. Drake and his fellow-captains, by landing two heavy guns, turned the scale in favour of the assailants, and must share the responsibility of what followed. " Two hundred souls were massacred as they left the castle, and then, day after day, a cruel hunt went on till every cave and hollow of those storm-beaten cliffs had echoed with the victims' shrieks, and not a soul man, woman, or child could be found alive in St. Columba's Isle. . . . Drake himself, while the massacre went on, was busy with the frigates, burning eleven Scottish galleys." Some squeamish souls may regard as a crime the stern reprisal meted out to the false friend to whom he had confided only to be shamelessly betrayed to the hostile Burleigh the j dearest wish of his heart. But, to my mind, in all the stirring annals of Elizabethan chivalry, 356 MAKERS OF MAN there is no more heroic page than that which tells of the trial and condemnation of Thomas Doughty " at that first Lynch- Court amidst the desolation of Patagonia," and of the execution of its just decree of death to the traitor. " On an island over- against the [gallows] of Magellan, 1 the block was placed, and beside it an altar, where, side by side, the two friends knelt to receive the Sacrament together in token of forgiveness. Hard by, tables were spread with the best the stores provided, and there they all caroused together in a farewell banquet to their comrade. When the feast was ended, with courtly jests Doughty drew near the block, and the boon companions gathered round. At the last, as one who had lost in a game of hazard, he embraced the friend who had won, and Drake took payment without a flinch. He showed no animus, nor did sentiment sap his purpose one jot. . . .So the sword fell, and when the provost-marshal held up the dripping head, Drake cried out, unmoved, ' Lo ! this is the end of traitors ! ' No crime this, but the just and necessary retribution of an out- rage on faith and honour. The principles underlying and determining the public actions of Richelieu were such as were bound, in the nature of things, to lead him into situations from which the easiest if not the only path to safety and triumph involved the responsi- bility for crime. In the choice of his colleagues, not ability or even honesty, but unquestioning subserviency to his own will, was always the factor taken into account. The King himself, although he had constantly to be studied and con- ciliated with at least the semblance of deference, was by adroit management kept in line with the policy marked out by his minister. He had enough wisdom to perceive the superiority and indispensability of the masterful churchman whom he had called to the helm of State. Richelieu was de facto King of France, and pursued the unbending line of his policy of national aggrandisement with small regard to the moralities of any but the Machiavellian code. In 1626, when Richelieu, aged forty- one, was freshly enjoying the triumph over the Huguenots, 1 At the foot of which were found the buried bones of two of that explorer's mutinous officers. LIMITATION AND CRIME 357 which he had secured by the help of England and Holland, their natural allies, when, too, he had forced Spain to resign the control of the Valtelline pass, his growing prestige led to a combination of all the anti- monarchic interests of France in a desperate effort at his destruction. Gaston, the heir pre- sumptive, was, as usual, the tool of the conspirators, who, through the Marshal d'Ornano, demanded the prince's admission to the Council. There was much reckless talk on the part of the conspirators : rumour had it that they intended to force the King into a monastery and set Gaston upon the throne. Meanwhile Richelieu coolly bided his time ; but his spies were busily collecting evidence, all of which duly reached the ears of the King. When the time was ripe for action, Richelieu struck, and struck hard, but with discrimination. D'Ornano he seized and imprisoned ; Gaston he at once cowed and con- ciliated by the granting of the duchies of Chartres and Orleans ; the leaders those princes and nobles whom a regard for justice rather than mere expediency would have brought to a strict account were quite leniently dealt with. On the other hand, a scapegoat was chosen in the person of Henri de Talleyrand, the young Count of Chalais, who had been betrayed into a formal complicity by the charms of the duchess of Chevreuse. This comparatively innocent man was, despite the frenzied sup- plications of his mother, condemned, beheaded, and quartered. Six years later this hint of danger to the opponents of Richelieu was ruthlessly confirmed by the probably illegal execution of Henri de Montmorenci, the most powerful noble in France. In this aSair, also, Gaston was even more deeply involved, but, as usual, submitted, and, as usual, too, was pardoned. Although not in any deep sense a religious, Richelieu seems to have been a superstitious man ; and by this weakness he was betrayed into a crime which throws a sinister light upon his intelligence and character. A certain Grandier, a priest of Loudun, was charged with causing the diabolical obsession of some nuns in the Ursuline convent there. The priests called in to exorcise the demons, reported that in their ravings the nuns named Grandier as the cause of their visitation. Richelieu allowed himself to be persuaded to appoint a special com- 358 MAKERS OF MAN mission, presided over by Laubardemont, a spy and informer in his own service, to try the case. " The trial itself was, from a modern point of view, farcical, the bias of the court was unmistakable, and the evidence was mainly that which the exorcists professed to have extracted from the so-called devils. Grandier was sentenced to death, tortured to make him confess his accomplices, and finally burned under circum- stances of exceptional and wanton barbarity." Perhaps the worst feature of this " judicial murder," from the point of view of Richelieu's responsibility, is that Laubardemont " is said to have prejudiced him against the accused by asserting that Grandier was the author of a scurrilous libel, Le Cordonnier de Loudun, that had been circulated when Richelieu was resident in Poitou as Bishop of LuQon." At any rate, it is incontestable that " he allowed the machinery of a special commission, always more likely to look for guilt than innocence, to be employed in a case were there was no possible justification for its use," and to be presided over by a man whom, as his own tool for the dirty work of a spy and informer, he must have known to be altogether unsuitable. But, after all, the most serious blot upon the fame of Richelieu results from a crime, not of commission, but, in the main, of omission. I refer, of course, to his " almost complete neglect of the internal well-being of France," and in particular his failure to reform the crying abuses of her iniquitous and rotten financial administration. The exemption of the privi- leged classes from all direct taxation, the unequal incidence of the indirect taxes, the unspeakable gdbelle on salt, the bare- faced sale of public offices, the farming of taxes, and the secrecy of the state accounts, were evils to which we know that he was, from the first, fully alive. Not only did he practically nothing to remove them, but, as the development of his twofold aim the strengthening of the monarchy, and the exaltation of the national prestige gradually increased the pressure upon public revenue, so he grew more and more unscrupulous in availing himself of the corrupt methods of " raising the wind," which he had found ready to hand. " The opposition of the Parliaments, of the provincial estates, and of armed rebellion, LIMITATION AND CRIME 359 as in the case of the famous nus-pieds in Normandy, was ruth- lessly suppressed." Who shall dare estimate the sum of misery and futile resentment on which, as on a heap of bones and corruption, the Moloch-temple of his glory was based ? And here, once for all, it may be all too clearly discerned, how our crimes are predetermined by the limitations of our outlook and aims. Once fairly launched upon his career of ambition, once the self-pledged champion of monarchic autocracy and European aggression, Richelieu found himself committed to a task radically inconsistent with any whole-hearted advocacy of economic reform. I do not rank as a crime Cromwell's responsibility for the execution of Charles i. That responsibility he himself not only accepted to the full, but justified and defended to his dying day. It the execution was to him " a sacred duty enjoined by the inward voice and outward signs of God Himself." The Commons had, immediately before the trial, declared the People, under God, the source of all just power, that is, of all sovereignty. What the People had given, the People could also take away : the trust so often abused might be cancelled and annulled. More, the King's treachery and ill-faith deserved punishment : Cromwell himself had risked much to befriend him, so long, that is, as he could believe him only weak ; but when he found that, all the while he had been moving heaven and earth to save him, Charles had been persistently intriguing against him, his patience finally and irrevocably gave way. " I tell you," he said to Algernon Sydney, " we will cut off his head with the crown upon it." And history has endorsed the stern decree. On the other hand, in his relations with Ireland, Cromwell revealed all the gloomiest, harshest, and most inhuman elements of his typically Puritan outlook. Into the foul abyss which Drake had merely skirted for, after all, it is to Essex himself that pertains the final guilt of the bloody doings on St. Columba's Isle Cromwell plunged headlong without hesitation or scruple. To Cromwell, and those of his way of thinking, Papacy was an abomination. It was unthinkable to such men that in one of the three realms should be suffered the unrestricted practice of 360 MAKERS OF MAN its abhorred rites. Not only was Ireland a Catholic country ; except for a few hard-pressed garrisons it was also an independ- ent and hostile nation. Its reconquest was to all Puritans a binding duty : Cromwell undertook the task as a sort of Crusade. At the storming of Drogheda, Cromwell " in the heat of action " forbade his men to give quarter. Within that and the next two days, the whole garrison (3000 men) were slaughtered in cold blood. Such orders would not have been given had Crom- well been fighting men of his own faith. At Wexford the soldiers took the law into their own hands, and massacred the garrison force of two thousand, and " not a few citizens " beside. Seeing that Cromwell spoke of this unauthorised butchery as an unexpected providence, there can be no doubt that his men had good reason to count on immunity from his wrath. In all that he did in Ireland, Cromwell had the public opinion of England at his back. He had a tremendous reception on his return to London, the value of which, judging by the grim comment he made at the time, he seems pretty accurately to have gauged. As he passed Tyburn in his thronged proces- sion, 31st May 1650, one said to him, " See what a multitude of persons come to attend your triumph." He answered with a smile, and very unconcerned, " More would come to see me hanged ! " Concerning Frederick the Great, it would be an arguable position that he was a man of essentially criminal bent, modified, of course, by human impulses and gleams of enlightenment. One of the first acts of his reign was the sending of 2000 soldiers to levy a contribution on the people of Herstal and Hermal, " where they lived without control, exercising every kind of military tyranny." The districts had for over a hundred years been under the control of the Prince-Bishop of Liege, but now Frederick had trumped up a claim to them, which the prelate was forced, by the complaints of the victims of this unprovoked invasion, to concede. Ex ungue leonem : from this characteristic inauguration of his reign, the Frederican ethics and the Frederican method are deducible in extenso. One can imagine the unction with which Voltaire delivered himself of the dry suggestion, that this was perhaps not an opportune moment for the publica- LIMITATION AND CRIME 361 tion of the young King's Anti-Machiavel. Apropos, one may surmise that, though he undertook to refute them, Frederick found much to admire and no little to emulate in the precepts of the Italian philosopher. Their influence is clearly discernible in the conduct of his policy ; in the contrast between the hypo- critical casuistry of his public manifestoes and the cynical frankness of his personal avowal of self-interest as the motive of his aggressions ; in his confidence that justifications would be found by the literary folk for all such aggressions, provided only that they proved successful. It can hardly be necessary to point out that Frederick's claim to Silesia was actuated by no other motive than the impulse to self-aggrandisement. We have his own explicit statement to the effect that " ambition, interest, and a desire to make the world speak of me, vanquished all, and war was determined on." By the Pragmatic Sanction the succession of Maria Theresa to this and her other dominions had been guaranteed by the Powers. Frederick had received no provoca- tion of any kind or degree, when, a few weeks after the death of the Emperor, he entered Silesia with 30,000 men, ostensibly " to cover it from being attacked," and proceeded to levy contributions from the inhabitants. Meanwhile at Vienna his ministers were advancing his claim to the territory, offering in return his influence on behalf of her husband's election to the Empire, and a loan, both of which were naturally refused. Another good example of Frederican perfidy was his repudiation in 1744 of his treaty of mutual defence with England, concluded only two years before. War having broken out between this country and France, Frederick was invited by our ambassador to furnish troops, but declined on the plea of doubt whether the English had not been the aggressors. Such scruples came with an ill grace from a man of his record. In 1756, purposing to invade Bohemia, Frederick obtained permission from the Elector of Saxony to march through that state on condition of the enforcement of discipline and the observance of due respect towards the royalties. But no sooner had he reached Dresden than he demanded the dispersal of the Elector's army, having previously, at Leipsic, ordered the payment of all taxes 362 MAKERS OF MAN and customs to himself. Not only did Frederick forcibly take possession of the secret archives stored in the royal palaces ; he dismissed all the Saxon ministers, appointed a Prussian governor, blew up the fortifications of Wirtemberg, and made Torgau the seat of his usurped government. His own explanation of these highly arbitrary proceedings was that " he was well informed that the Court of Saxony intended to let his troops pass safely, and afterwards to wait events in order to avail themselves of them, either by joining his enemies, or by making a diversion in his dominions." The fact remains that he chose to enter Saxony under a pledge of restraint, which, to all appearances, he never intended to observe, or, at any rate; never observed. That Frederick's proceedings in Saxony aroused the resentment of those best qualified to judge, is proved by the fact that the forfeiture of all his rights, privileges, and prerogatives was forth- with decreed by the Aulic Council of the Empire, only one electorate (Hanover), of the nine, siding with him. Of the methods employed by Frederick for the extortion of money from the ruined citizens of Leipsic (1758), and of his justification of the burning of the suburbs of Dresden, I will say nothing, since necessity has no laws. The meanest crime that history records against him is, after all, one which concerns a single individual, the famous and extraordinary Baron Trenck. This former friend of the Bang and lover of his sister had been confined at Glatz as a traitor, without trial or court-martial. He escaped, but was captured in the Austrian service in 1754. A dark cell, measuring ten feet by eight, was constructed under the personal direction of the King, who also prescribed the kind of irons to be worn. In this hole, handcuffed to the extremities of a two-foot bar, with a tomb engraved " Trenck " at his feet, this unhappy man endured nine years of solitary confinement. If this is the reward of a King's friendship, what wonder that Voltaire accepted with misgivings the repeated invitations to Potsdam ! Frederick's championship of the miller Arnold, and severe punishment of the Chancellor and eight judges concerned in the case, was, in substance, hardly less iniquitous and violent, although here he may be given the credit of having, in the first place, interfered in what he conceived to be the interest of LIMITATION AND CRIME 363 justice absurdly and culpably mistaken though his decision proved to have been. Finally, as to the partition of Poland : in political matters, Emil Reich has well said, all nations are and act as in a state of nature. Still, there is a certain responsibility attaching to those who initiate such grave events ; and, whatever may be said for it on the score of expediency, I agree with the biographer who asserts that " a more flagrant act of injustice, oppression, and tyranny has seldom appeared in the history of mankind." Two grave crimes one, certainly, by no means well-estab- lished are alleged against Nelson, both (assuming for a moment his guilt in the doubtful case) clearly traceable to the sinister influence of the Neapolitan Court atmosphere, and of Lady Hamilton, its presiding genius, upon his temperament and character. Nelson returned to Italy after his victory of the Nile in ill-health and low spirits, dissatisfied with his Barony for he felt that he deserved an Earldom, at least prostrated by a fever which, on the voyage, had nearly ended his life, suffering from a sense of thoracic constriction so severe that he had been seriously considering the question of retirement. The state of affairs in Italy was not likely to soothe or console him : on the one hand, he was disgusted by the frivolity of the Court ; on the other, enraged by the audacity of the revolu- tionists. " I am very unwell," he wrote, " and their miserable conduct is not likely to cool my irritable temper. It is a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels." In a letter to Lady Hamilton, after he had removed her and the royalties to Sicily, he wrote, in the same vein of bitterness and dis- illusionment, " I am now perfectly the great man not a creature near me. From my heart I wish myself the little man again." The fact is, that Lady Hamilton, ex-courtesan and would-be politician, was, like all beggars on horseback, inflamed by an intolerant contempt for those whom she con- sidered her inferiors. Above all, she was a fanatical Royalist death to all Jacobins ! We aristocrats cannot breathe the same air which they contaminate. Such a woman's influence was exquisitely adapted to the aggravation of Nelson's peculiar weakness for mistaking sentiment for principle, narrow pre- 364 MAKERS OF MAN judice for high-souled chivalry and knightly devotion. So it came about that when Caracciolo, the Commodore of the Republican Navy, fell into Nelson's hands (29th June 1799), he ordered him to be tried forthwith by a court-martial of Nea- politan officers. Caracciolo was condemned and sentenced at noon of the same day, and hanged by Nelson's orders at 5.0 p.m., Lady Hamilton being present ! This precipitate execution was not merely indecent it was virtually an act of deliberate and furious retaliation, of which Nelson in his best period would have been absolutely incapable. But the possibility of such errors was implicit from the first in the Nelsonic point of view. A few days before this, some of the Neapolitan revolution- aries who had been besieged in the castles of Uovo and Nuovo, had agreed to surrender on receiving from Cardinal RufEo the promise that their lives and property should be spared. Nelson, arriving with ships and men, when the capitulation was on the point of being carried out, had peremptorily refused to endorse this " infamous " treaty, and would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. It is alleged, but Mahan denies the allegation, that Nelson allowed the garrisons to come out before they had been informed of his repudiation of the treaty. Many of the prisoners were, in fact, put to death. I, for one, accept Nelson's clear statement to Lord Spencer : " The rebels came out with this knowledge " that their surrender was to be unconditional. It is just possible, however, that Nelson did not assure himself that his revocation was actually communi- cated to the garrisons ; if so, we may be pretty certain that it was not. To the same ill-starred period belongs Nelson's " flagrant " disobedience of Lord Keith's orders to leave Naples and proceed in full force to Minorca a matter which has, however, been sufficiently dealt with in an earlier chapter. If Napoleon cherished any illusion as to the nature of the task he had undertaken, and the fearful responsibilities in- volved in his world-shaking ambition, Destiny was not slow to remove the bandage from his eyes. In his thirtieth year, finding himself de trop in Paris, where the prestige of his Italian victories had made him persona ingrata to the Directory, he betook himself to the Orient, full of grandiose visions of such LIMITATION AND CRIME 365 an Empire as should dwarf all that was possible in " the mole- hill of Europe." In the March of 1799, Jaffa was carried by assault with horrible carnage, but 4000 of the defenders offered to surrender on condition that their lives were spared ; and their offer was accepted by Beauharnais and Croisier, Bonaparte's aides-de-camp. " I was walking with General Bonaparte in front of his tent," writes Bourrienne, " when he saw this multitude of men approaching, and, before he even saw his aides-de-camp, he turned to me with an expression of grief, " What do they wish me to do with these men ? Have I food for them ships to convey them to Egypt or France ? Why have they served me thus ? " To Eugene and Croisier Bonaparte angrily exclaimed : "It was your duty to die rather than bring these unfortunate creatures to me. What do you want me to do with them ? " That day a council of war was held ; but no decision could be arrived at. When, on the following day, the reports of generals of division came in, " they spoke of nothing but the insufficiency of the rations, the complaints of the soldiers of their murmurs and discontent at seeing their bread given to enemies who had been with- drawn from their vengeance. . . . All these reports were alarming, and especially that of General Bon, in which case no reserve was made. He spoke of nothing less than the fear of a revolt, which would be justified by the serious nature of the case." Day followed day without any decision being arrived at ; the murmurs of the semi-mutinous soldiers grew louder and angrier ; the danger of starvation stared the invaders in the face. The logic of events proved inexorable : on the sixth day the order for the shooting of the whole 4000 prisoners prisoners to whom the promise of life had been the condition of surrender was given and executed. " This atrocious scene," writes Bourrienne, " when I think of it, still makes me shudder, as it did on the day I beheld it. ... All the horrors imagination can conceive, relative to that day of blood, would fall short of the reality. . . . It was necessary to be on the spot in order to understand the horrible necessity which existed." But what necessity, apart from the promptings of one man's over- whelming ambition, had existed for a French invasion of Syrian 366 MAKERS OF MAN territory ? Echo answers, What ? Napoleon was a kind- hearted man, and must have suffered severely in this affair ; but he had no choice but to go through with it. The " moral " appears to be : Let no man undertake to conquer the world unless he have a strong stomach for blood. During Napoleon's consulate, in the years 1800 and 1801, two attempts were made upon his life the first by Caracchi, the second by explosion of an infernal machine by some Royalist conspirators. He attributed both plots to the Jacobins, whom he always hated and feared, and determined that France should be " purged of these ruffians." A special commission of eight judges conferred upon him the power practically to deal at his own sweet will with political offenders, real or imaginary. A consular decree shortly afterwards banished some 130 individuals, including many whose sole crime was that they were lovers of liberty, who had the imprudence to see through and disapprove of his ambition. In the same spirit Napoleon severely restricted the liberty of the press. " Should I give them (the journals) the rein," he said, " my power would not continue three months." These crimes against Liberty, against the very spirit of the Revolution, which had provided the lever by which he was overwhelming the established order of the world, are by no means without significance to the psychologist. But they are altogether dwarfed by contrast with the judicial murder which Napoleon perpetrated in the year following his inauguration as consul for life. The " execution " of the Due d'Enghien occurred on 21st May 1803, at Vincennes. The alleged justifica- tion was his complicity in the plot of Georges, Pichegru, Moreau, and others ; but the trial of these men did not take place until nearly a month later. D'Enghien was therefore shot long before the trial of the real culprits had even begun. It is not seriously believed that he was himself concerned in the plot, and the fact that he remained quietly at Essenheim after the arrests had begun, is clear prima facie evidence of his innocence. His real crime was that of having Bourbon blood in his veins, and his murder the one and only crime of pure cowardice which can be laid to Napoleon's account. LIMITATION AND CRIME 367 The monstrous Berlin Decree of 1806 against British com- merce, by which Napoleon endeavoured to place this country " in Coventry," declaring that all British goods would be confiscated and all British subjects seized and incarcerated, would have been a crime if it had not been a stupendous blunder. It naturally cut both ways, and was inevitably ignored and evaded wherever and whenever possible ; but Napoleon's obstinate endeavours to enforce it gravely damaged his popu- larity and prestige in Europe, and no doubt contributed to his fall. As a means of injuring us it was perfectly ridiculous, but, as Bourrienne justly remarks, " the hurling of twenty kings from their thrones would have excited less hatred than this contempt for the wants of a people." The cunning with which Napoleon, after the abdication of Charles iv. of Spain, lured Ferdinand to Bayonne, and there informed his guest that he must either abdicate or die, is another pleasing specimen of gutter diplomacy. From a gamin, but hardly from an Emperor, are such tactics to be expected. This, however, was an Emperor who also cheated at cards ! Bacon's lapse into venality is attributed by Professor Nichol to his " almost criminal determination to succeed, and increasing veneration for those who were ceasing to be even worthy of respect." One fatal error was his officious interven- tion against the marriage of Buckingham's brother to Frances, the daughter of his own fallen enemy, Coke. His protest against the alliance with a " disgraced house " incensed Buckingham, whereupon Bacon made bad worse by abjectly counterfeiting a zealous promotion of the match, which duly came off in 1618 (Bacon, set. 57). Buckingham asserted that he had had to kneel to the King to prevent him from degrading the Lord Keeper, who henceforth became his thrall. During the entire period of his full Chancellorship, Bacon received a flow of letters from Buckingham virtually demanding undue consideration for the suitors whom he favoured. The man who wrote that " judges must be chaste as Caesar's wife, neither to be nor as much as suspected in the least degree unjust," must surely have suffered severely from the consciousness of so false and humiliating a position. The issue is known to all the world ; 368 MAKERS OF MAN but while it appears to be certain that Bacon received and even borrowed money from suitors, pendente lite, there is, Nichol asserts, no evidence that he ever allowed his verdict to be actually affected by a bribe. " Poverty of moral feeling," to say the least of it, is also indicated by the active part played by Bacon in the prosecution of his benefactor, Essex ; by the malicious exaggeration characterising his declaration concerning the " Treasons " of Raleigh ; and by the base ingratitude with which he pressed for a severe sentence against Yelverton, charged with a mere irregularity, although a couple of years before, in the matter of the Coke-Villiers marriage, Yelverton had rendered him considerable assistance. It is, in fact, strikingly characteristic of Lord Bacon that " he has left no great defence on record even his own was a failure." Coldness of heart seems to have been the price exacted for the depth and range of his intellect, and rendered him the willing tool of all who could tempt his insatiable appetite for wealth, power, and prestige. To many good folk at the present day, the mutilation of living animals, even when fully ansesthetised, for the purpose of scientific research, is a thing utterly vile and reprehensible. Without endorsing or even discussing this position, I shall, in the interests of truth, which takes precedence of all theories, point out that the immortal fame of William Harvey is indis- putably and confessedly based on the results of the dissection of innumerable creatures, fully sentient of the tortures inflicted upon them ; and that nowhere in his surviving works is any word to be found conveying the least sense of the gravity of his thus-incurred responsibility or one qualm of com- punction for the victims of his consuming zeal. To us, to-day, this callousness, in one, moreover, by universal testimony of his contemporaries, known as in other respects a generous, warm-hearted and humane man, presents a psychological problem of no little interest and perplexity. Much may no doubt be attributed to the circumstances of his time ; for the sense of responsibility in such matters as the treatment of animals is a phenomenon in great measure unprecedented, of sudden and recent growth. But the fact must be faced that LIMITATION AND CRIME 369 genius in pursuit of its proper aim has generally proved ruthless, not merely to its possessor, but to all others whose interests obstructed its path. But for the benefit of those who have any lurking doubts as to the facts of this case, let me quote Harvey's ipsissima verba, or the translation thereof : l " When I first gave my mind to vivisections as a means of discovering the motions and uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual inspection, and not from the writings of others, I found, etc. etc. ... At length, and by using greater and daily diligence, having frequent recourse to vivisections, employing a variety of animals for the purpose, 2 ... I thought . . . that I had discovered what I so much desired, etc. In the first place, when the chest of a living animal is laid open and the capsule that immediately surrounds the heart is slit up or removed, the organ is seen now to move, now to be at rest, etc. etc." Remember that the lectures of Harvey reveal intimate knowledge of the anatomy of more than sixty different animals ; that when he speaks of dissection, what is now often called vivisection is commonly implied ; that his practice of such experiments was a lifelong passion. The sum of agony in- flicted by this kind, impulsive little gentleman, especially upon those " colder animals " toads, frogs, serpents, fishes, crabs, etc. in which, as he soon found, the heart's movements could be best studied, is appalling to contemplate. But it never seems to have occurred to him, nor, as far as I know, to any of his most bitter adversaries either, that the flagging hearts whose movements he observed and described with such admir- able precision, had any sort of claim upon his own. In a former work 3 I have spoken of genius as " the Absolute of human accomplishment," assigning to it the supreme place in the category of virtues. In every work or deed charac- erised by genius, there is at least a hint of finality : we feel in contemplating such works or deeds a unique satisfaction, 1 By Robert Willis. - " Multa frequenter et varia animalia viva introspicieudo." The second chapter is headed, " Ex vivorum disaectione, qualis fit cordis motus." 8 The Logic of Human Character, p. 215. 24 370 MAKERS OF MAN breathe for a moment the pure air of Infinity. If this applies, as it certainly does apply, to the achievements of practical, aesthetic, and intellectual genius, it applies in a still higher and fuller degree to those of men whose creative sphere is that of the innermost, all-comprehensive spirit, the sphere of Religion. Men who, like Jesus, are destined to inaugurate a new era of world-wide scope and aeonic duration, produce on the minds of their associates and of posterity an impression of correspond- ing depth and power. So vast and significant is the ideal they suggest, which in their lives they imperfectly express and embody, that, in its light, their personalities become trans- figured, and assume stupendous, even Divine proportions. This illusion for an illusion it certainly is however salutary in its first effects, must not blind the truth-seeker (i.e. the psychologist) to the fact that such men, like all others, have their faults and limitations. It is high time that we learned, once for all, to distinguish, for example, between the man Jesus, a creative genius, but a fallible man for all that, and the Christ-Ideal, whose formulation and consecration has been the collective task of Humanity during at least the past two thousand years, probably much longer than that if the whole truth were known. " It is hopeless," writes K. C. Anderson, 1 to attempt to understand the New Testament or the needs of our time, so long as we continue to confound Jesus with the Christ ; the first, a historic figure of the first century ; the second, a reflection of this historic figure, in which there is always of necessity a subjective element." Of crime in the ordinary sense of the word there is, of course, no suggestion in the little that is recorded of the life of Jesus in the Gospels. On the other hand, it appears fairly certain that he died a criminal's death, and although heartily agreeing with the universal condemnation of the iniquity which brought this to pass, we must not overlook the possibility of some formal justification. The events recorded in connection with the last days in Jerusalem in particular the account given of the purging of the temple suggest something like a riot, for which Jesus was no doubt held responsible, and, indeed, 1 Hibbert Journal, July 1906. LIMITATION AND CRIME 371 in a sense, may have been. If his message to mankind was, in essence, one of pure goodwill, it certainly involved the prob- ability of contention. " I came to cast fire upon the earth," he said, " and what will I if it be already kindled ? " His re- pudiation of the Law, of Judiasm, that is, contained the seeds of inevitable discord. And in this connection it is interesting to recall the remark of Wenininger : " Judaism was the peculiar original sin of Christ. . . . Christ was the greatest man because he conquered the greatest enemy." If Christianity has brought priceless blessings to mankind, it has also brought unspeakable woes. If its founder deserves the glory and gratitude of a great benefactor, can we logically overlook his responsibility for the appalling superstitions and errors begotten by the limitations of his point of view and by his dualistic doctrine ? The Christian ideal of self-sacrificing love, of " a kingdom not of this world," could only issue, as it did, in a fatal severance of Life and Religion. Since the realisation of moral aims could only be wished, not willed, men despaired of the world, and sought refuge in cloistered asceticism. In Hegel's phrase, Jesus, by his repudiation of all personal and finite claims, and withdrawal from secular interests, incurs " the guilt of innocency, and his elevation above all fate brings with it the most unhappy of fates." To a man like Jesus the cold and barren formalism of the Scribes and Pharisees must have been exasperating in a high degree, since he saw in it the very antithesis of the spiritual attitude he sought to make prevail. Yet there is something to be said for the formalist's point of view. The past is justified in defending its position against the present, so long as the latter fails to recognise the last grain of truth enshrined in its forms and institutions. Can any impartial witness maintain that the invective of Jesus is always the expression of the purest and highest enlightenment, always unalloyed by the bitterness of personal rancour and resentment ? To my thinking and perhaps one reader in ten thousand will have the courage to admit the truth and necessity of the observation there can be only one reply to this question. For behoof of dunces and heresy-mongers, I will add since 372 MAKERS OF MAN the title of this chapter may otherwise afford pretext for malicious misrepresentations that I am very far from regarding the personality of Jesus as an essentially criminal one. I merely point out the irrationality of the current assumption that any individual can be wholly exempt from the defects of his qualities. The more exalted the qualities of a given individual, the more stringent, though not, perhaps, the more extensive, will be the limitations implied. The higher we climb, the farther, no doubt, our vision extends ; but there is always the impassable horizon. 1 If Marcus Aurelius could have foreseen the embarrassment of his admirers when confronted by the damning fact of his at least formal responsbility for the horrors perpetrated at Lyons and elsewhere against the Christians, is it conceivable that he would have suffered so foul a blot to mar the purity of his renown ? Certainly, there was a note of impatience, a hint of intellectual arrogance, in his attitude towards the new religion, radically inconsistent even with the highest tenets of the philo- sophy to which, upon the whole, he so loyally adhered. His beloved master, Fronto, was, we know, also prejudiced upon this point ; and it may be suspected that Aurelius, who had Christians among his servants, for whom, rightly or wrongly, he conceived small esteem, was unfortunate in his experience of professors of the new faith. On philosophic grounds he objected, too, not without plausibility, to their enthusiastic other-worldliness, their courting of death. A man should be ready for death, or aught else ; but to seek it eagerly was, in his opinion, attributable only to " mere perversity " and the love of " tragic display." Here his insight certainly failed him who could, in cold blood, accuse the heroic slave-girl, Blandina, of theatricality ? What pose could survive the ordeal of the scourge, the arena, the burning chair ? But although in his reign the persecution of Christians reached an unprecedented intensity, the responsibility of the Emperor is, upon the whole, negative rather than positive. He 1 "What animal, domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth ? " (W. James). LIMITATION AND CRIME 373 conceived it necessary to uphold the national religion ; he therefore permitted the punishment of those who repudiated that religion. But he took no steps to increase the severity of the anti-Christian laws : Tertullian even claims him as a pro- tector. " If," says Tertullian, " he did not openly revoke the edicts against our brethren, he destroyed their effect by the severe penalties which he established for the accusers." It is only fair, too, to remember that among those who professed Christianity in those days were the followers of impostors like Prodicus and Marcos, who, under the cloak of religion, practised and taught the most shameless debaucheries. Upon the whole, though, it was just the mere " goodness," the invertebrate piety of the Emperor, that betrayed him. He lacked negativity, and, having in him no strong egoism, hence no passion of revolt or innovation, was temperamentally incapable of appreciating the Dionysian spirit. A revolutionist of any kind was to him a mere criminal, and a fool into the bargain. Shall we call his, too, in Hegel's term, a somewhat flagrant case of the " guilt of innocency ? " I have in a former chapter pointed out the curious analogy presented by the careers of Marcus Aurelius on the one hand, and St. Gregory the Great on the other. This analogy extends also to the matter under consideration ; both were, by tempera- ment, the mildest and most equable of men ; yet both were persecutors. The African Church was, in Gregory's time, infected by the heresy of Donatism, according to which the validity of the Sacraments is conditioned by the morality or immorality of the officiating priest. In urging the Exarch to suppress this heresy, Gregory used expressions hardly to be justified even from the point of view of his epoch and office. He was to " bend their proud necks under the yoke of righteous- ness " ; and one can well imagine what harsh measures might result from such counsel. To Pantaleon, the prefect, he also wrote, sharply reproving his negligence, and the bishops were commanded to " unite against the ' disease,' so that a future messenger may rejoice our heart by their (the heretics') punish- ment." To Dominic of Carthage, Gregory wrote : " We desire that all heretics should be repressed with vigour and reason by 374 MAKERS OF MAN the Catholic priests." And the desired effect seems to have been duly attained ; after 596 there is no further mention of Donatists in Africa. An even more serious matter is the question of Gregory's relations with Phocas, the usurper of the Empire, and murderer of the Emperor Maurice, the Empress, their six sons and three daughters, and the Emperor's brother. To this vile wretch Gregory wrote, congratulating him upon his accession : " We rejoice that the graciousness of your piety has attained the Imperial dignity." With evident reference to the late Emperor, who, with all his faults, had been a good friend to Gregory on several occasions, and had treated him with respect and even affection, 1 Gregory also wrote as follows : " Sometimes for the punishment of the sins of many, some one is raised up through whose oppression the necks of subjects are driven under the yoke of tribulation ; and this we have experienced in our late affliction." I gladly admit that there is reason to doubt that Gregory, at the time of writing, was aware of the full extent of the criminality of this Phocas ; but I contend that, in that case, his congratulations were at least premature. He had no grounds for assuming that Maurice would tamely submit to deposition ; and should have held his peace until in possession of all the facts of the case. He seems to have realised his error ; for it is stated that he never again communicated with Phocas. In general, the disposition of Mahomet seems to have been, for an Oriental, surprisingly tolerant of opposition, and free from revengeful rancour. An exception must, however, be made in regard to his treatment of the Jews ; who, for their part, it must be owned, were far from careful in the avoidance of offence. When Mahomet first migrated to Medina the Jews for a time seem to have favoured his doctrine ; but this re- spectful attitude was of very brief duration. On a closer acquaintance with his teaching, they repudiated it with ridicule and contempt. Thus he was brought to regard the race as enemies of his mission ; and the seed of ill-will sown in his heart soon produced a bitter harvest. On occasion of a riot following the forcible unveiling of a Moslem girl, Mahomet, 1 And had made him godfather to his son. LIMITATION AND CRIME 375 now supreme in Medina, seized the opportunity to confiscate the property of Jewish citizens, seven hundred of whom he banished to Syria. Further, he revoked the decree making Jerusalem the Kebla (point of prayer), and substituted Mecca, the holy city of his own race, with which he had begun to feel the necessity of uniting the destiny of his mission. So far, his hostility to the Jews had not betrayed him into actual crime ; but worse was to follow. About the year 625 (Mahomet's 56th year), the third from the date of his arrival in Medina, a Jewish tribe, the Beni Koraida, who occupied a stronghold near the city, befriended an attack upon it commanded by Abu Sofian. The attack was abandoned by the Meccans ; and, after their departure, Mahomet besieged the Koraidites, who were compelled to surrender at discretion. Mahomet offered these Jewish prisoners the submittal of their fate to the decision of Saad Ibn Moad, the Awsite chief, a man formerly well-disposed to them. The offer was naturally accepted with alacrity ; but, as Mahomet knew, and the Koraidites did not know, Saad had been severely wounded in the recent battle ; and his goodwill towards the tribe had given way to a hot desire for vengeance. In accordance with his brutal decree, the seven hundred prisoners of war were taken to the market-place, forced to enter newly dug graves, and butchered. Their women and children were enslaved. Concerning this episode, Mahomet's biographer justly remarks that" his " referring the appeal of the Beni Koraida to one whom he knew to be bent on their destruction, has been stigmatised as cruel mockery ; and the massacre of those unfortunate men in the market- place of Medina is pronounced one of the darkest pages in his history." By far the darkest known to the present writer ; although, in a sense, the frequent fabrication of " special revelations " from on high, authorising this or the other caprice of personal indulgence, must be accounted an even graver blot upon his name. Much may be forgiven to an enthusiast ; but here Mahomet lays himself open to the charge of exploiting the devotion and credulity of his followers, and compromising the purity of his cause. He was no quack ; but he sometimes con- descended to the methods of quackery ; and adversaries have 376 MAKERS OF MAN not been slow in availing themselves of the opportunity thus provided of impugning his genius and his aim. With regard to Luther, the last of our great men with whom I have to deal in the capacity of criminal, I have already had occasion to mention his endorsement of the persecution of Anabaptists that is, of persons who, like himself, recog- nising the Scriptures, as interpreted by the " Christian con- science," as the supreme spiritual authority, were perverse enough to differ from him as to the purport of such inter- pretation. He advised the adoption by his Elector of a decree to the effect that all rebaptized persons should be executed without trial. After this, the less said on the subject of Luther's religious tolerance, the better : a man more saturated with the arrogancy of the odium theologicum his own century could hardly adduce. But what is generally regarded as the most vulnerable point in his record, is his attitude towards the peasants and fanatics in their insurrection of 1525 ; and, in particular, the violent manifesto, in which he, a " peasant " writing of peasants, urged his " dear lords " (with a reserva- tion, certainly in favour of dupes lured into revolt) to " stab, crush, strangle " all whom they could. That this congenial counsel was faithfully followed, needs no saying : after the defeat of Miinzer and his eight thousand at Frankenhausen, " one stronghold of the rebellion after another was reduced, and the horrors perpetrated by the peasants were repaid with fearful vengeance on their heads." Nor was the lesson of the revolt taken to heart by the conquerors : the burden of ecclesiastical, feudal, and Imperial oppression was rather in- creased than diminished after the event. For all this Luther has been held largely accountable ; but on carefully looking into the matter I confess that he seems to have acted not ill, according to his lights. If he censured the peasants for their violence, he admitted the existence of some, at least, of their grievances, and did not fail to urge upon the authorities the responsibility of setting these right. He showed, too, the full courage of his convictions by visiting some of the most disturbed districts in person, and urging the return of the mal- contents to more conciliatory methods of seeking redress. MARTIN I.UTHKR. Jageniaii iM. ; H. Meyer, Sculp. To face p. 376. LIMITATION AND CRIME 377 It was only when his efforts to allay the growing tempest had utterly failed ; when bloodshed and anarchy were everywhere lifting their hideous heads, that he broke forth into harsh rebuke and threw the full weight of his influence into the scale of established authority. According to his lights, I repeat, the man acted not ill. But his lights were so lamentably deficient. His theological hair-splittings seemed so infinitely more important than those Twelve Articles in which, with all moderation, the peasants had set forth their protest against the intolerable exactions and pretensions of those who had the ordering of their lives. To all this Luther merely replied that it was their duty to be submissive, that the Gospel had nothing to do with their demands. " The religious world," says Karl Marx, " is only the reflec- tion of the real world." Every economic change is foreshadowed and attended by a corresponding change in that " nebulous mist which envelops and veils the actuality of our social life," only to be dispersed when that life " can show the labours of an association of free men working intelligently, and masters of their own proper social movements." Luther's complete failure to grasp the significance of the peasant rising, complete lack of vital sympathy with its objects, were the inevitable corollaries of the fact that his Reformation signified the emerg- ence of the Burgher interest and the Burgher point of view. The day of the peasant was not ye t. This brings to a close my examples of the great man as criminal ; a part of my subject which I have approached with reluctance, yet which obviously could not be shirked. Let no one imagine that I have approached it in a censorious or carping spirit. Who am I who is any one, to fling stones or mud at these demigods ? My aim has been to show the close, perhaps even essential, relation of great qualities and great defects a fact often hypocritically or cowardly ignored ; yet which has to be confronted by every psychologist worthy of the name, to say nothing of the philosopher. The twentieth century, in its revival of aristocracy, its wholesome repudiation of the Jacobinical heresy its cult of heroes has no use for pedestals and the limelight. No actors need apply ! Its heroes will be MAKERS OF MAN such, and such only, as can brave the light of day, whose beauty needs no rouge-pot or carefully adjusted vestments ; but can go forth naked, yet unashamed. "The dignity of nakedness Reveals the turpitude of dress." XIII INDIVIDUALITY: ITS NATURE AND POWER Mechanism versus psychism Back to Leibnitz Heredity Eugenics A parable Soul and spirit Fechner's hypothesis " Immortality " The social factor Valedictory survey. HAVING faithfully acquitted ourselves of the task of examining in detail the main facts of existence, as recorded in the lives of our representative characters, it only remains to discuss, in the light of these observations, the general problem of In- dividuality itself. I shall allow myself here the freedom of speculation which I consider myself to have fairly earned : the times are fully ripe for a bolder and more funda- mental treatment of such root-problems of psychology, and, indeed, for a re-casting of those purely metaphorical conceptions of Reality, which, however serviceable in their day, have, by mere use and wont, acquired a too long unquestioned spurious authority as absolute, unassailable dogmas. Our vicious habit of thinking exclusively in terms of the atomic theory is a conspicuous case in point. This was all very well so long as the activities of science were in the main confined to the inorganic sphere ; so long, therefore, as the ultimate problems were necessarily conceived in terms of the inorganic. But, as Mr. Fournier d'Albe well says, " the physicist, working on the very borderland of science, . . . has almost developed into a mystic. He has shattered the atom, and is now endeavouring to reduce matter to some unintelligible turbulance in an inconceivable ether. He is on a fool's errand. ' That way madness lies.' It is sheer waste of time to look for an ultimate particle, or for a continuous fluid of certain density or elasticity. We can never arrive at anything ultimate 379 380 MAKERS OF MAN by making our unit small. There will always be something a million times smaller, infinitely smaller. . . . Let us not bury these problems out of sight in the Infinitesimal. No material explanation of the universe will ever explain anything. The elementary particle, the elementary position or motion, will be the greatest of all puzzles. Real progress must be sought for in quite another direction. . . . Not micro- scopy, but psychology, mil solve the ' Riddle ' of the universe." 1 My point could not be better put ; the last sentence might serve as the text of the present chapter, and, indeed, of the present volume. Psychology is the science of to-day : in terms of psychology we must formulate the philosophy of to-morrow. The conception of Reality as a mechanically-impelled system of irreducible atoms or material particles, is only one of the many idola theatri which obstruct the path of clear and comprehensive thinking. Others may confront us anon, perhaps ; if so, we shall not fear to relegate them to the intellectual rubbish-heap where they already belong. Hitherto we have been mainly concerned with Individuality in its phenomenal aspect, and as a mere product : the question of its real or substantial nature has necessarily been postponed. We have seen how, prior to the manifestation of a given per- sonality, innumerable psychic tendencies, embodied though this factor may be left out of account in corresponding organic or inorganic forms, have, through countless ages, converged and, ultimately, by some inexplicable chemistry or affinity, blended into one. Then, as it were by some divine chance, has emerged the world-moulding power of a Caesar or Charle- magne, the genius of a Titian or Beethoven, the insight of a Goethe, the profound wisdom of a Hegel, the sublime spirituality of a Jesus all rooted in the abysmal penetralia of an immemorial past, yet all radiating the authentic lustre of a something un- paralleled ; predestined, yet new. In treating of heredity we found, over and over again, indications in the characters of their parents of the proclivities of great men. But we must 1 Two New Worlds, by E. E. Fournier d'Albe, B.Sc., London, 1907, pp. 149-151. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 381 beware of the too hasty assumption that because the father of Mozart was a Court fiddler, a composer of uninspired trifles, and the author of a successful manual, the mystery of his son's creative genius is explained. Grant, even, what is far from certain, that the emotional and mental capacities compressed in a given personality are, one and all, according to the Mendelian or some other formula, inherited, through the parental gametes, from the ancestral stock the fact that they have thus flowed down from antiquity and become fused into the indivisible flame of a unique personality, is not, from the conventional point of view, one whit less miraculous or inexplicable. When all is said, the parents of most of our great men have been, if not commonplace, at best somewhat mediocre folk. Between them and their illustrious offspring there is ever a great gulf fixed the gulf that divides mere social worth from world- significance, mere versatility or talent from genius or initiative. " The little more, and how much it is ; The little less, and what worlds away ! " In conceiving Individuality, according to the crude showing of appearances, as a haphazard conglomerate of inherited qualities, a mere product or sum, we are setting the cart before the horse. Consequently, we see all our rivers flowing uphill a fact the more surprising since their only visible source is in the subterranean region of the inorganic world. We are here on the track of another idolon theatri : the pseudo-scientific superstition that causality is an affair of mere sequence in time, nay, rather, of mere apparent sequence. What appears last on the scene cannot, according to this hypothesis, be the cause of events which have preceded its appearance. But a thing may conceivably exist before it appears upon the scene : a ship, for example, does not emerge from nonentity at the moment when it mounts the horizon. And if, as appears not unlikely, there is in Individuality a something over and above the multi- plicity of psychic potentialities traceable to this, that, or the other ancestor ; a something too fundamental to grasp, too subtle and elusive to define ; a clinching and unifying some- thing ; is it outrageous to surmise that herein may lie the 382 MAKERS OF MAN true determinant of all those phenomena which have paved the way for its ultimate manifestation (in so far as they have done merely this), and also the explanation of that universal " tendency to individuation " in which Spencer found the keynote of evolutionary processes ? The fact is that we want a new atomic theory, rather perhaps the revival of a too hastily forgotten old one a psychic or spiritual, in place of a material, atomism ; a monadology. " Back to Leibnitz " must be the cry of all who grasp the futility of nineteenth century attempts at cosmology. That astute champion of neglected aspects of truth clearly foresaw and forewarned the savants of his day that their exclusive devotion to the investigation of " efficient " causes would inevitably land them in the bog of a purblind materialism. He yielded to no man in maintenance of the necessity of the mechanical hypothesis and of mathematical methods as instru- ments of research. But he pointed out that, in itself, the mechanical view of nature, however useful and fruitful of results, was far from being philosophically adequate, was, in fact, false a doctrine of mere appearance, not of things as they are. Hence he wisely urged his contemporaries, while availing themselves to the full of the practical benefits of the Cartesian and Newtonian methods, to bear constantly in mind the merely provisional validity of the conceptions handled, and to supplement their defects by a philosophical reconstruction of the products of research. His warning remained unheeded : intoxicated by the success of those early efforts in the new field of methodical induction, the contemporaries and successors of Leibnitz flung to the winds what they now deemed the barren rubbish of an outworn scholasticism ; and gave them- selves over body and soul to naive acceptance of a crudely mechanical empiricism. In the dryasdust " philosophy " of Spencer we have the monstrous apotheosis of this hypostat- isation of a single aspect of Reality, also the fulfilment of the apprehensions of Leibnitz as to its inevitably disastrous effects. But the hour of release from the clanking of the Spencerian machine-universe is at hand ; it may soon become incredible INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 383 that so hideous a portent could ever have been suffered to offend our eyes or our ears. Back to Leibnitz is our way of escape ; for Leibnitz alone among the pioneers of the scientific renaissance, while eagerly welcoming and smoothing the path of the new method, con- sistently upheld the banner of the old truths flaunted and contemned by his fellows. And what did Leibnitz teach with reference to our problem of Individuality ? That it was an ephemeral product of antecedent physical conditions ; a spark struck off in one instant from the anvil of Circumstance ; ex- tinguished, in the next, by the rude blast of mortality ? On the contrary, he taught that no living creature actually commences in Nature, nor by natural means comes to an end. " Not only is there no generation, but also there is no entire destruction or absolute death." That which we call generation is development, and that which we call death is envelopment and diminution. The Leibnitzian atoms are entelechies, the humblest and obscurest of which are inalienably endowed with ungauged potentialities of expansion and manifestation. " Every substance has a perfect spontaneity (which becomes liberty with intelligent substances). Everything which hap- pens to it is a consequence of its idea or its being, and nothing determines it except God." Consequently, although things happen in such a way as to generate the illusion that one sub- stance affects or is coerced by another, this is not really so. Self-expression or manifestation is not uniform, but fluctuates in accordance with the true nature (idea) of the substance or entelechy concerned. And where the self -manifestation of one substance diminishes, while that of another correspond- ingly increases, we say that the first has been affected by the second ; that the first is passive in relation to the activity of the second. But the diminution of activity in the one case and the augmentation in the other are each of spontaneous and intrinsic origin ; each being a revelation of some attribute of the substance or individuality concerned. Hence " it appears more and more clear that although the particular phenomena of nature can be explained mathematically or mechanically by those who understand them, yet, nevertheless, 384 MAKERS OF MAN the general principles of corporeal nature and even of mechanics are metaphysical rather than geometric." All activity and all passivity, on the part of a given subject, are self-derived and self-determined. All experience, that is to say, is, through and through, of our own making ; and the causal activity which we attribute to its factors, conceived as elements and processes of the so- called external world, is nothing but illusion. The self that determines our experience must not, of course, be identified with the self of our every-day consciousness. The former is the real or noumenal, the latter the empirical, ego. The relation of the noumenal to the empirical ego is that of a stern task- master to an often-times reluctant or even rebellious subject. For the temporal welfare, the happiness, even the bare con- tinued existence, of its ephemeral shadow, the dominant entel- echy reveals no sort of concern. Itself serenely exalted above all terrestrial vicissitudes, it, in accordance perhaps with some occult logic of predetermined manifestation, evokes within the sphere of our self-consciousness now the experience of smooth prosperity, now of anguish or despair. All that for which we return thanks to Destiny, all that for which we rage against the gods and curse the brazen skies, is alike of its, that is, funda- mentally, of our own, contriving. For the unity of the real unseen order is reflected in the phenomenal order, so that the several experiences of all con- scious beings are mutually harmonised and interrelated in a way that inevitably generates the illusion of external cause and effect. So it happens that the findings of empirical science, hypostasing abstract deductions from observed sensory sequences into the manifestations of imaginary forces (light, electricity, and so forth), are duly verified ; and that, year by year, the pseudo-philosophy of mechanical causation binds heavier and stronger fetters upon the hypnotised spirit of man- kind. But descending from this exalted region, and turning from the general to the particular, let us consider how our theory bears upon the question of inherited character. It is a crucial point, since from the point of view of empirical science, Individ- INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 385 uality is a chance-product, a casual agglomerate of innumerable convergent factors, traceable ex hypothesi back through the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, thence widening out by innumerable diminishing rootlets through all civilisation, through all prehistoric humanity, through all our mammalian and sub -mammalian ancestry, even into the inorganic sphere. Can this view, by which, at first sight, every vestige of spon- taneity, of self -initiative, is, for the individual organism, ab- solutely debarred and precluded, be in any way reconciled with our own. If the latter is to stand, it not only can but must be so reconcilable, since I have no intention, even had I the wherewithal, of trying to invalidate the facts of heredity and biological descent. All that I need is contained in my challenge of the conventional interpretation of those facts, the too hasty assumption that there can be no more in them than meets the eye of your cocksure contemporary physicist. What meets his (mental) eye is an aeonic panorama of convergent processes, verifiably generalis- able in terms of certain abstract uniformities, beginning in the inorganic realm, traversing the organic and human realms, and, at the predestined hours, culminating in a given conception and birth in individuation. The qualities revealed in the career of this individual will be not merely similar, but the very same qualities as those which, thus patiently, and, as it were, subterraneously, have threaded their way through myriads of ages and myriads of organisms, to meet and blend in, and re-issue from, this point. And, analog- ously, the effects initiated by this career are hypothetically traceable throughout futurity to the last day of time, and throughout space to beyond the Milky Way. It is therefore no mere figure of speech to say of such, of any individuality, that, even from the point of view of the contemporary physicist with his dubious logic of so-called " cause and effect," it is no ephemeral manifestation of some three-score-and-ten years' duration, but a genuine sample of Eternity, having neither ascertainable beginning nor any conceivable end. Thus, even in its phenomenal aspect, even to superficial observation, Individuality reveals that eternity of manifestation and uni- 25 386 MAKERS OF MAN versality of range which, in its real or noumenal essence that is, to thought it has never lacked, nor can ever be denied. And here, I maintain, here in its unseen source, never in any confident anticipation of observed uniformities of succession, we must seek for the inviolable necessity determining all that has led up to and resulted from the manifestation of the given individuality. In so far as they have done this and this alone ; in so far as they have conduced to irrelevant results, other causes must naturally be assigned. So I suggest that Beethoven or Napoleon had such or such parents, had such or such lineage, because the entelechies manifested under these names deter- mined these conditions in advance. Whereas the empiricist position is that Beethoven and Napoleon were born, and were born such as we know them, because their parentage and lineage were such as they were. However paradoxical my position may appear to-day, I am confident that the future will confirm it, proving that nothing truly or even approximately individual was ever generated in time, or ever, in time, came to an end. Of course I am alive to the fact that Individuality as met with in experience falls far short of the ideal standard. That only, perhaps, can be described as in the full sense individual which is also in the full sense universal which is entirely self-sufficing, comprehensive, harmonious, and, at the same time, infinitely varied and complex. 1 What, for the sake of convenience, we call individuals are, strictly, mere personalities, more or less limited, more or less flawed and self-contradictory, consequently, more or less transient and unreal. I am not contending for the personal immortality of every Dick, Tom, and Harry ; nor, indeed, of even the most exalted souls. I suggest merely that, underlying every subjectivity, there is an unknown factor of whose nature that subjectivity is a genuine, however incomplete, manifestation ; and that this unknown factor, whether we call it immortal or decline to commit ourselves to that large word, should be conceived as exempt from the ordinary limitations of time and of space. 1 Such, at least, is the contention of the Absolutist e.g. Mr, Bradley. But does not individuation imply exclusion ? INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 387 Further, that this unknown factor be regarded as a source of creative spontaneity, a causal determinant of all phenomena in any way contributory to the development of that personality which constitutes the provisional manifestation of its own essence. Man is from this point of view not necessarily the ultimate point of view, but as far in that direction as I am now concerned to proceed in a sense, his own creator ; and as much may even be said for every organism. For every organism is the product of its own fundamental spontaneity, the self- display of some reality rooted in the unseen. But the reality underlying a world-famous personality must be something vastly more significant than that underlying a commonplace career ; while, as to the lowlier organisms, their case need not detain us at present. I will just say, however, that, in the absence of distinct self-consciousness, true individuation can hardly be considered to have dawned. With mere organisation we have, it is true, transcended the dynamic, but have barely entered the psychic sphere. The facts that, in their own sphere of supersensuous exist- ence, the entelechies of all phenomenal beings constitute doubt- less a system unified by its own laws, and that this unity is reflected in the phenomenal order, constitute the real explanation of that unbroken sequence of cause and effect which, read backwards by Science, 1 generates the illusion that the highest realities are a mere composite product of the lowest. This, however, cannot be really so : the true order of causality is the very reverse of the apparent order ; what is highest in the scale of being takes ontological precedence of all that is below it, and uses that as a mean towards the revelation of its own occult, pre-existent potentialities. The so-solid seeming frame- work of the universe, in comparison with the substantial essence of Individuality, is but a phantasmal shadow-show, mere scenery painted on the vaporous background that curtains the abyss of nonentity. Returning to the subject of heredity as a factor of our main problem, I should like to illustrate my point by a reference to In so far, at least, as Science ends at the point where the process really begins. 3 88 MAKERS OF MAN the fashionable topic of " Eugenics." Not long ago I read an article by the author of Esoteric Buddhism, in which contempt and contumely were heaped upon those who, by the scientific regulation of parentage, hope not only to prevent the birth of the " unfit," but even to raise the positive standard of human capacity and intellect. The idea that in procreation and birth no higher factor is concerned than the congress of two physical organisms and the physiological processes thereby set afoot, was eloquently and justly held up to ridicule. Thereby, in the opinion of its critic, the eugenic movement was necessarily stultified and condemned. It does not seem to have occurred to him that, in popularising the ideal of parental responsibility to the unborn, the promoters of this movement, themselves in large measure unenlightened, might be the instruments of powers needing just such services as a mean towards the mani- festation of their own causality. The spontaneity of the eugenists themselves would in no way be compromised by the admission that, in acting as seemed good to themselves, they blindly subserved higher ends. For it is the paradoxical nature of Spirit, that its constituent factors, in acting spontaneously for themselves, invariably act as the needs of the whole demand. Assume now that entelechies, of a higher ontological grade than any of which we have recent experience, are preparing to mani- fest themselves on the terrestrial plane. Would not our present haphazard method of parentage present an absolute bar to the manifestation in question ? Would not, therefore, some such movement as our eugenic enthusiasts are ingeminating be the indispensable preliminary to this much-to-be-desired consum- mation ? Viewed from below, that is, from the standpoint of the phenomenal order, the noumenal essence of a given personality is a logically evolving potentiality, tending towards, but never attaining, complete unity of manifestation. But on its own plane, that is, as viewed by the intellectual insight which pierces the illusive aspect of things, it is, from the first, fully actual, moving, self-poised, in a system of like realities. And as to its nature, this much can be said, that each individual monad comprises two opposed tendencies, or polarities, a INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 389 tendency towards unity, or individuation, and a cosmic, diffusive tendency a specific universality. Specific, I say, because absolute universality can be ascribed not to any par- ticular monad, but only to the " Absolute Individuality." The ceaseless contention, the strenuously balanced interplay of these conflicting polarities, are what constitute the being of every monad. In the phenomenal order they are necessarily manifested in succession : first individuation, then expansion ; but, in reality, they are co-ordinate and simultaneous. Let me illustrate these points by a parable, which the judicious will have ears to hear, and the foolish are at liberty to deride. Reclining at ease in the Elysian fields, a Spirit gazes into the depths of an exquisitely tinted crystalline sphere, which it idly turns in its hands. This crystalline sphere is the universe ; for time and space are but our ways of thinking ; duration and magnitude are merely relative ; and both being infinitely divisible, all immensities of either kind can be con- ceived upon an infinitesimal scale. The sphere is of the Spirit's own making, breathed forth from its own essence, tinted, accordingly, with the distinctive hue of its own individuality. If all the spheres exhaled by all the Spirits were seen as one, it would be as a sphere of diamond whiteness ; for its univer- sality would then be, not specific, but absolute. This by the way. Brooding over its own sphere, the Spirit with which we are concerned recognises therein a faithful manifestation of one of its two opposed and balanced tendencies its universalism, to wit. Sinking deeper into its act of contemplation, it finds increasing satisfaction in exploring the inexhaustible wealth self-revealed to its ken. Nebulae, galaxies, constellations, solar systems, meteors, comets all are infallibly fulfilling their predetermined roles. Suns rise and set, ages come and go, fiery vapours condense, new orbs are belched forth from candescent centres, and, taking their places in their allotted orbits, cool down into planets and become the receptacles of organic life. And here we may note that, wherever it finds individual organisms, the brooding Spirit recognises a qualifica- tion of its otherwise unquestioned sway. For the nucleus of 390 MAKERS OF MAN every such organism glows with a light wherein the distinctive hue of our Spirit's individuality is over-tinted by some hue of like yet alien source. Its own light in its purity, though diffused throughout, and even constituting the sphere, is, as yet, nowhere shining in unmixed and concentrated form. Its tendency to individual unitary self-expression remains thus unsatisfied ; but for that, too, the hour is at hand. Gradu- ally, imperceptibly, but with growing intensity, it has felt itself drawn, as to a predestined centre, to one spot on the tiny planet where its earthly course is to be run. Thither by in- numerable pathways, converging along the lines of least resist- ance, creep the flame-like filaments of its new purpose, securely threading their way through the intricate labyrinth of heredity, to emerge, fused and blended, at the moment of its birth among men. Is it only my fancy that the brightness of that celestial Spirit is now a little dimmed by the intensity with which it broods upon its pastime, or its task ? Does it hope then to glean from this experiment some indespensable new factor of spirituality for its own behoof ? The paltry and so dearly purchased joys of the average human existence cannot in themselves afford any sort of recompense for the even partial forfeiture of its delights in the Elysian fields. That such joys are of little account in its estimation seems evident from the indifference with which it accepts for its ter- restrial embodiment a life of success or failure, of ease or agony, of glory or shame. Such trivialities, as all the wise bear witness, are, from the point of view of the Spirit, of infinitesimal account. Its gold can be garnered from the most unlikely sources ; its mysterious ends are subserved by any and every fate. The above purports to be a symbolic representation l of the creative activity of a somewhat exalted entity ; of course we must be prepared to admit infinite gradations of rank. Growth, on the spiritual plane, presumably results from the slow accretion of experiences gleaned in some such way as I have, greatly daring, ventured to suggest. I frankly confess that in contemplating the apparent emptiness and futility of 1 Not, of course, a scientific description. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 391 the great majority of human lives, doubts have occurred whether, to such lives, the permanent substratum be not alto- gether lacking. But it is perhaps more logical to assume that they are manifestations of comparatively undeveloped or embryonic souls, than that they are the mere shadows which they at first sight appear to be. Such embryonic entities will adumbrate a cosmic scheme far simpler and less complex than that which I have suggested above. And into a sphere corre- spondingly meagre and narrow their phenomenal representatives will be born. No two individuals inhabit precisely the same universe ; we find without us only what we already possess within. I have committed myself to the opinion that all human experiences, both active and passive, are determined from within by the occult will of the noumenal ego. This point, so far as " passive " experiences are concerned, requires further elucidation. Such a view follows naturally not, perhaps, inevitably from the rejection of external or mechanical causation, which, as all mathematicians allow, ultimately involves impossibilities, or at least, inconceivabilities. But it might still be held that the noumenal ego, in determining the career of its empirical ego, was constrained by some inner necessity, not acting freely or consciously ; and this possibility I fully admit. I certainly incline to the opinion that there may be truth in the doctrine of Karma, an ancient doctrine recently revived by theosophists and others. But karmic law must be conceived as limiting that which is intermediate in ontological rank between the Spirit and the body the " soul," in fact, not the noumenal ego. The latter would be unduly degraded by the admission that its activities were determined by considerations of temporary welfare or misery ; or that it needed to expiate faults or errors. It is of the soul that Plato speaks in his allegory at the close of the Republic, wherein Er describes how lots are cast by those about to enter terrestrial existence ; and the order of choice of good or evil destinies thereby determined. Every one will recall the grim humour of the episode concerning the one who had drawn the first lot, who immediately " advanced and chose the most absolute 392 MAKERS OF MAN despotism he could find. But so thoughtless was he, and greedy, that he had not carefully examined every point before making his choice ; so that he failed to remark that he was fated therein, among other calamities, to devour his own children. ... It was a truly wonderful sight, Er said, to watch how each soul selected its life a sight at once melancholy and ludicrous and strange." Here we have a picture rather of blind instinct than of spiritual discrimination ; but the points to note are, first, that Plato supports my suggestion of the unity of a given career, as inclusive of all predestined experiences, and, secondly, that only highly developed souls are in a position to recognise the fact of their being each one overshadowed by a higher principle the true ego of which, in so far as they fail to assimilate and identify themselves with its transcendent purpose and point of view, they remain the mere shadowy and ephemeral puppets. But as to my main contention, that what we, each one of us, undergo, is as truly a factor of self-expression as what we achieve ; that, I think, is largely a matter of everyday observation. Is it not obvious that the persistency with which certain men are dogged by ill-luck, or favoured with prosperity, often reaches a degree which it would be absurd to attribute to mere coincidence ? The Scandinavians, in praising a hero, would often say of him that he had a look of good-luck about him. And in considering the lives of great men, poets, and others, who has not been struck by the strange dramatic affinity between the ideal aspirations of the men and the appar- ently fortuitous facts of their destiny ? The truth is, that the incidents of our lives, even those vulgarly ranked as merely external, are as essentially factors of our individuality as our very bodies perhaps even more so. In his treatise on Life after Death, Gustav Theodor Fechner has developed the hypothesis that it is precisely in the changes produced in our social and general environment during this life that our post- humous existence is consciously embodied ; and from this takes the starting-point of its new and wider activity. Every thought, word, and action of our present life contributes, according to this theory, to the formation of the spiritual body which we INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 393 shall inherit after death. " Whatever in this world has become, through the existence of a certain human being, different from what it would have been without him, helps to constitute his new existence, grown out of the common root of all existence, and made up, partly of solid institutions and works, partly of moving and spreading effects, similarly to the way our present body is made up of solid material, and of changeable material kept together by the solid. ..." " Goethe, Schiller, Napoleon, Luther, are still alive among us, self-conscious individuals thinking and acting with us, in a higher state of development now, no longer bound up within a narrow body, but pervading the world which they in their lifetime instructed, edified, de- lighted, ruled, and producing effects surpassing those of which we are generally aware." It is curious to note how neatly this theory of the nature of man's posthumous existence falls in with my own sug- gestion as to the true explanation of the facts of heredity, that is, that whatever events and processes directly contribute to the constitution of a given personality, are truly to be regarded as elements of its antenatal existence. It is, to my mind, some- what strange that Fechner should seemingly have overlooked the obvious fact that if death is not conceded to be the end, neither should we expect to find that birth is the beginning of individuality. But, as William James has well said, we of the twentieth century like our metaphysics " thick " J so far as we have any tolerance for or understanding of them. We have little use for the old-fashioned " thin " variety for tenuous abstrac- tions. Our metaphysic must, in other words, be brought down forcibly into the sphere of the concrete ; or our concrete elevated to the sphere of metaphysic. Renouncing, therefore, for the moment, our polemical attitude towards the current view of causality, and assuming, as we must after all assume, the at least provisional validity of our faith in the interaction of material and psychic entities, let us, along the lines of commonsense inference, consider some 1 Not, of course, in the sense of turbidity, but in that of being detailed and full of reality. 394 MAKERS OF MAN facts bearing upon the nature and power of Individuality. In our section on the Natural History of Purpose we saw how the emergence, gradual or critical, of a central self-conscious aim was the most important energising and unifying factor of our great men's careers. How a purpose that was to prove sub- stantial and effective was never something fortuitous or capri- cious ; but, whether firmly grasped or instinctively adopted from the first, or developed through a series of tentative more or less mimetic essays, always bore a genuine relation to inborn faculty, its only adequate, lasting foundation. Here, then, we see at once that Purpose, the root of initiative, is never some- thing grafted from without, is in no ultimate sense of extraneous origin, but grows up from its hidden source, in most cases quite independently, for a time, of the conscious will of its possessor. From our point of view, which is, that the body is as truly a part of the mind as the mind is a part of the (seen or unseen) body, all those organic subconscious processes of growth and development which pave the way for the formation and emerg- ence of purpose or initiative, are to be conceived not physio- logically, but psychically. They are unapprehended phases of psychic growth and integration, all destined to contribute factors of more or less relevance and significance to the fully equipped character and capacity of the individual. And if the so-called physical processes contribute, who will venture to deny the occasional but momentous intervention of formative influences of higher, even of highest, origin. What, for example, I have called the " noumenal ego " must not be conceived as a being altogether apart, a mere overshadowing entity. It is rather the technical designation of our supreme potentiality, of a something striving to super-actualise itself, through the psycho- physical organism. Any emergency demanding a sudden increment of insight or power may, for aught we know, furnish the conditions favouring its intervention not perhaps its direct, but its mediate, intervention. Equipped, soon or late, with his definite self-conscious aim, our individual confronts the social environment, which, in one way or another, he seeks to use, control, or modify. The reward of success in matters of narrow import and on a small scale INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 395 will be well, success itself ; but that does not concern us now. We are concerned here and now with individuals who have, in divers ways and degrees, aimed at and achieved what, significantly enough, the world terms " immortality" This means, if it mean anything, that the import and magnitude of their achievements are, by universal consensus, estimated as beyond estimation, as of infinite significance. They have brought something to bear upon their contemporaries which the whole world could not " down," but has more or less re- luctantly, more or less tardily and angrily, accepted, once for all, as a permanently active, a creative element of the racial experience. That such magnificent victories are not cheaply bought, rather that they are in most cases wrung from the grudging hands of the vanquished world only at the price of extreme toil and suffering, we have seen evidence enough and to spare. Even these do not suffice : there must, in addition, have been the aid of that indefinable something, the stroke of that magic wand, which we call genius. Toil, suffering, genius : these three are great ; but the greatest of these is genius. And by genius one means, I suppose, an inborn organically based temperamental fiair, an intuitive quasi-instinctive ap- preciation of some hitherto undiscerned or unexploited, but essentially significant, aspect of life practical, aesthetic, theo- retical, or ethico-religious involving, of course, a further power of unique, vital, adequate response to the stimulus constituted thereby. A man of genius is, in fact, one who, in essentials, declines to be urged a posteriori by the kicks of cir- cumstance although these are not likely to be wanting but maintains that predominance of inborn faculty which is the birthright of every freeborn individual. His life thus conveys the impression of something free, spontaneous : I am tempted to say that he lives a priori. 1 One must not, of course, overlook the obvious fact that he is the representative of the Zeitgeist ; that his innovatory ideas are not born in vacuo, but are in vital relation to those of his predecessors and contemporaries. Still these ideas are not his own until his will has adopted them ; and, in quoting the following sentence on the social origin of 1 In the sense that he does what he likes, and likes what he does. 396 MAKERS OF MAN thought, I must enter a caveat against the mechanical con- ception of the process as therein denned. " Everyone," writes Theodor Hertzka, " stands in a not merely external, but also an internal, indissoluble relation of contact with those who are around him ; he imagines that he thinks and feels and acts as his own individuality prompts, but he thinks, feels, and acts for the most part in obedience to an external influence from which he cannot escape the influence of the spirit of the age which embraces all heads, all hearts, and all actions." 1 So far as this implies that great men are the mere instruments of an alien influence and power, I entirely dissent ; it is rather the futile phantasmal majority who are to be so regarded. With Fechner, I hold rather that " those men who have accom- plished great things in the world were enabled to do so by their insight into the spiritual tendency of the period in which they lived, and they succeeded because they made their free acting and thinking agree vnth that tendency, 2 ' while other men, perhaps just as great and sincere, failed, because they opposed that tendency. ... It is not the slave under the taskmaster that does the better work." 3 But all history teems with evidence of the incalculable power of initiative, the irresistible impetus of a will illuminated by genuine insight and weighted by undeviating purpose. Think how Caesar at Alesia, at Pharsalia, at Munda, wrung overwhelming victory from the very jaws of disaster ; then remember how, in Gaul, in Africa, in Spain, his best generals had only to be left awhile to their own devices, and everything would begin to go awry with the legions. Of Cromwell, in relation to the other Puritan captains, precisely the same can be said. Think of Charlemagne's long, practically single-handed, ultimately triumphant struggle to reduce to order the chaotic elements of western Christendom ; of William the Silent's great part in the extrication of the Netherlands from the grip of Catholic Spain. Think of the difference made to our national power and prestige by the courage and toil of Drake ; of the 1 Fredand, by Theodor Hertzka, trans, by A. Ransom, p. 224. 2 Italics mine. 3 On Life after Death, by G. T. Fechner, trans, by H. Wernekke, pp. 56-57. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 397 awe inspired in all Spanish breasts by his name, from Lisbon to Vera Cruz, from the Bay of Biscay to the argosy-haunted waves of the Caribbean. Think, then, of Richelieu, conceiving in the obscurity of Luon that dream of humbling the anti- monarchic power of the Huguenots, which, twenty years later, was triumphantly realised in the surrender of La Rochelle. Of Richelieu who, from the first, set before himself the object of achieving that political pre-eminence towards which, through countless dangers and intrigues, he unfalteringly held upon his way. Remember Frederick, banned by the Empire, harassed, jaded, prematurely aged, meditating suicide, confronted by forces trebling his own ; his capital twice pillaged, his territory of Halbenstadt plundered by the French ; Silesia and Saxony all but reconquered ; yet always cool, alert, resourceful, ventur- ing his all in battle after battle ; the strength of his enemies constantly increasing, as his own waned ; himself the survivor of no less than forty of his generals ; always apparently losing ground, until, as he said, nothing but a miracle could save him ; yet, nevertheless, always miraculously unconquered ; and in the end unconquerable. Remember Nelson, tabooed by officialdom, frail and semi-consumptive, shelved for five years (his thirtieth to thirty-fifth), maimed, half-blinded, passed over for his inferiors ; yet confidently predicting the day when the ignoring or belittling of his merit would no longer be possible, when he should not merely be gazetted, but have " a whole gazette to himself." Remember how that Convention of Vendemiare, year four, threatened by Lepelletier's forty thousand fighting sectioners, desperately bethought itself of " the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed artillery officer, who took Toulon." How, " after a half -hour of grim compressed considering," the command was accepted by this bronze artillery officer, by whose memorable whiff of grape-shot " the thing we specific- ally call the French Revolution was blown into space, and became a thing that was." And all that in due course followed this one man's definitive assertion of a positive, masterful attitude towards the chaotic impulses of his time. Reconstruct for yourself the superb career of Lincoln : the motherless, mal- treated, penurious and illiterate boyhood, the dogged pursuit 398 MAKERS OF MAN of knowledge dictated by some blind invincible instinct, the mastery of law, the conquest of popularity, the gradual realisa- tion of his epochal mission of emancipation, the patient waiting on events whose issue he alone foresaw, the ultimate dawning of his noontide of power and fame, the sure guidance of national destiny through the long agony of civil war. Of Lincoln it has been well said, and each statement has deep psychological significance : that he never lacked the aid of true friends in his many troubles ; that he always rose to the occasion, however great, however unprecedented its demands ; that, throughout his life, defeat was always a step to victory. Turning now to the representatives of Poetry, Art, and Music, think for a moment of the significance of Dante's divine achievement, and of that of the individuality underlying it, surely the supreme example of the poetic type hitherto seen on the earth. Poor, exiled, burdened with unmerited shame, we see him pass on his weary way, a lean silent figure, with locked lips and brooding eyes. Meantime, within his breast, as in some fiery crucible, the facts of his own life, of his turbulent crowded age, of all human lives and ages, are being magically transmuted into the imperishable gold of Art, are finding deathless utterance in stanza after stanza of that celestial song. Stripped bare of accidents and prevarications, he shows, as his purged eyes beheld them, the essentials of human motive and conduct, the true inwardness of Life. The mighty symbols in which he wrought may have lost much of the awe and sanction which they held for him and his contemporaries ; but never, while man walks the earth, can there dawn the day when the spell he has laid on our hearts will be utterly loosened, the laurel stripped from his brow. In a mood, far from rhetorical, with no consciousness of special pleading, I ask all who in any degree realise the occult potency of Dante's art and fame, whether they can seriously entertain the position that such a spirit as his was in any ultimate sense a merely natural product, a transient flame, chance-begotten, that was and is not. The almost perfect unity and simplicity of aim, which, considered in relation to the vast emotional and intellectual scope of his mind, renders Dante's individuality so intense and 7V"" A 39*- INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 399 powerful, is, of course, wanting in the case of Leonardo. In him we apprehend a nature far less deep and passionate, yet in some important respects more original than Dante's. His intuitive prevision of the destiny and results of positive methods of research amounted to no less than a specific omniscience. There is practically no important theoretical generalisation or utilitarian triumph known to us, which he, living four hundred years ago, did not promise to posterity. While, in his art, he so transcended the limitations of his own mental hardness and positivity, produced on his contemporaries so stunning an effect of supreme power and significance, that the virtual destruction of his greatest pictures has not seriously impaired his fame. Genius will out and, once out, is not easily forgotten. Its manifestation is, to a larger extent than we at all realise, in- dependent of a man's formal and official achievements. That, as Schopenhauer would say, is no doubt the reason why common- place persons find it so easy to detect and shun. Still they defile before us, the spirits of the Lords of Art, mocking our shallow science by the memories they evoke. "Was I, too, a shadow ? " demands Titian. " I, whose passionate absorption in colour, form, life, and the ever fuller, grander expression of their glory, almost a century's toil could not satiate, barely availed to chasten in mode, leaving its fiery essence unsubdued." And Cervantes, weary, disillusioned, relentlessly dogged by contumely, yet gay to the last ; beginning at fifty- five the work which was to sweep the pseudo-romance of knight- errantry into the dust-bin, and to establish its author by the side of the world humourists, Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Shake- speare ? The life of Mozart, again, presents to the student of Individuality a subject of supreme interest, as affording in almost ideal purity the type of aesthetic genius. Analysis is baffled by the very simplicity of the problem ; to discriminate between his faculties or motives is like trying to resolve an elemental substance. He was not merely a great musician, the greatest, not merely, as Rossini well said, " the only musician," he was Music incarnate, the personification of his art. Of Goethe's achievement, Von Hermann Grimm says : "He 400 MAKERS OF MAN has created our literature and our speech. Before him, both were without value in the world-mart of the nations of Europe." This is true ; and it is much to say of any man ; yet how far it is from conveying any adequate sense of the difference made to the worlds of thought and conduct by the revelation of this most powerful, complex, and fascinating personality. Goethe himself was far from content to be classified as a mere poet and litterateur. He regarded all his actions as of symbolic import, attaching as much value to his statesmanship, his mineralogical and botanical speculations yes, even to his lightest amours as to Faust or Wilhelm Meister. He " saw round " everything that he did ; consequently, nothing that he did can be dismissed as inessential. He was the first con- sistent exponent of the anti-Christian ideal of self-realisation, that is, the first of the Moderns. Yet no man ever showed a deeper understanding of the Christian ideal of self-abnegation. Side by side with the majestic Goethe walks Beethoven, the greatest spirit that ever devoted itself to music ; Beethoven, who achieved, once and for all, the miraculous feat of translat- ing pure intellect into terms of the emotions. Or, if you prefer it that way, who transmuted personal passion into universal aspiration. For, unlike Goethe, who seldom opened his lips without saying something memorable, Beethoven's intellectu- ality was verbally inarticulate ; it had to express itself in music. To appreciate the real greatness that underlay the genial facility of Walter Scott's talent, one does not think of him in the heyday of his prosperity, in the enjoyment of a position such as no other man had ever won by the pen alone, " his society courted by station, power, wealth, beauty," his castle crowded with merry guests, his works the annual profits of the novels alone were 10,000 " the daily food of educated Europe." his domain ever growing, his imagination teeming with new plots, incidents, characters. All was roseate then : Scott himself owned to misgivings that such prosperity could not last. When his son, Cornet Scott, died, Scott said prophetic- ally, " I feel as if there would be less sunshine for me from this day forth." And sunshine, as well as children, he had always loved. Scott's highest recorded hour was that, I always INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 401 think, years later, when widowed, harassed, insolvent, conscious of steadily waning power and popularity, on James Ballantyne's reminding him that a motto was wanting for a chapter of Count Robert of Paris, he turned away, and looked out for a moment at the gloomy weather ; then penned these lines : " The storm increases, 'tis no sunny shower Fostered in the moist breast of March or April, Or such as parched Summer cools his lips with. Heaven's windows are Sung wide ; the inmost deeps Call in hoarse greeting one upon another ; On comes the flood in all its foaming horrors, And where's the dike shall stop it? " That, if you please, was the real thing. 1 Anon passes Turner ; and to him, too, we bid farewell, doing homage to as eccentric and paradoxical a temperament as ever enshrined genius. A dumb poet, a generous miser, an inspired debauchee, a refined hog, creator of the delicate modern art of water-colour, space-lover, light-bringer, sym- bolist ; rivalling Shelley in the exquisite eethereality of his imagination, Shakespeare in its breadth of construction, wealth, and fidelity to nature. Last comes Flaubert : the self-torturer, the Titan, the bourgeois demi-god ; proudly exalted above ambition ; hater of all formulae and of every kind of pettiness ; living only for beauty ; and finding it not less in what meaner souls regard as vile and contemptible, than in what they have bespattered with meaningless praise. Taking now a farewell glance at our heroes of Thought, we shall find here, too, abundant evidence of that spontaneity of manifestation and continuously expanding influence char- acteristic of every individuality worthy of the name. It is no doubt common, for example, to overrate the influence of Bacon upon scientific method ; to speak as if, before him, the practice of inductive and experimental research had been altogether unknown. This is not merely untrue ; it is absurdly wide of the mark. Yet Bacon, even in his lifetime, was a man 1 One must also remember the fact that Scott has written some of the supreme lyrics of the English language, e.g., " Pibroch of Donuil Dhu," " Proud Maisie," " He is gone on the Mountain." 26 402 MAKERS OF MAN of cosmopolitan repute ; his inexhaustible zeal and unceasing activity in the cause of the " new learning " were a light by no means hidden. Granted the truth of Harvey's gibe, that Bacon " wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor," thev alue of those writings and their propagandist effect are not neces- sarily impaired. The point is, not that this or the other thinker had casually remarked the need of giving experiment priority over speculation ; that this or the other observer had empirically stumbled upon the right road ; but that this man devoted his life to " dwelling on the necessity of a graduated induction, through successive steps of generality, at a time when men had just begun to perceive that they must begin from ex- perience in some way or other." Mill has pointed out the paramount importance of " his principle of elimination that great logical instrument which he had the immense merit of first bringing into general use." His very excess of zeal, his exaggerated view of the role of method, as distinguished from inborn capacity, no doubt served his cause. For he " thought to discover a method so exhaustive as to be as certain in its results as a proposition of Euclid, so mechanical, that when once understood all men might equally employ it, yet so startling that it was to be as a new sun to the borrowed beams of the stars." He conceived Nature as finite, and omniscience as an attainable goal. And there was this much truth in his forecast, that Science has proved the friend of mediocrity, a leveller, an intellectual democrat. " I have been accustomed," wrote Darwin, " to think second, third, and fourth-rate men of very high importance, at least in the case of Science." The destiny that assigned to a great lawyer the task of formul- ating the code and charter of experimental science, has been amply justified by posterity's endorsement and continuance of his work. No one, I suppose, will question the immense value and fertility of Galileo's lifework. If ever a single mind produced an immediate and obvious effect upon the world of thought, gave a distinct lift to the scientific effort of his age, it was his. The versatility of his genius was extraordinary : in almost every page of his writings may be found an allusion to some INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 403 new and striking experiment, or the germ of some illuminating hypothesis. But all his varied powers were dominated by the one central aim : from the first he had felt himself destined to be the pioneer of a new school, rational and experimental ; and, from first to last, he remained the inveterate foe of schol- astic apriorism. All his inventions and discoveries were the outcome of some need created by the logical development of this purpose. And against the passion that impelled him in his quest for truth, alike the stubborn incredulity of official conservatism and the brutal machinery of ecclesiastical re- pression proved helpless and futile in the end. Of William Harvey it may suffice to say, that the whole magnificent structure of modern biological science is directly founded on the bedrock of the discovery to whose proving and overproving he so single-heartedly devoted his life. Physiology, properly so-called, was born in the unrecorded hour when there first dawned upon him a clear conception of the circulation of the blood. Equally fundamental, from the point of view of empirical science, even though philosophically untenable, is the central idea or motif of Descartes that identification of matter and space by which the complexity of nature was made subject to the clearness and precision of mathematical treatment. The very limitations of Descartes' mind were instrumental in determining the immediate adoption and development of his ideas. For they were opportune limitations : the world needed a mechanical philosophy. The man who said, " Give me extension and motion, and I will construct the world," was a disciple of Herbert Spencer, born four hundred years before his time. Spinoza, a man of infinitely greater depth of intellect than Descartes, achieved, during his lifetime, at most a succ&s d'estime. On the other hand, his posthumous influence has been, and still is, very great. His ideas have filtered down through the select minds of readers like Goethe and Hegel : to the general he must always remain caviare. The modern theory of the Absolute is derived mainly from Spinoza, while in his Tractatm Theologico - Politicus, " aniicipating with wonderful grasp and insight almost every principle, and not a 404 MAKERS OF MAN few of the results " of its labours, he has made himself the father of what is now called the " higher criticism." And when one considers the vital issues involved in the task of this higher criticism, one begins to appreciate the true dignity of the philosopher, the stupendous responsibility he may incur. It is unnecessary to insist upon the importance of Newton's great discovery : every one knows that scientific laws, being merely a set of " brief statements resuming the relationship between given groups of facts," vary in rank and value according as they include a greater or less number of facts within their ken. The highest, or, say, the most fundamental, are those laws which, like Newton's of gravitation, convey information relevant to all natural processes whatsoever. " Every particle of matter is attracted by or gravitates to every other particle of matter with a force inversely proportional to the squares of their distances." How simple, and sublime ! As to whether any such thing as a " particle of matter " exists or is conceivable that is another question. But Isaac Newton " had grasped the secret of a cosmic circulation, and brooded in silence over the motion of the spheres for more than twenty years before publishing the Principia. 1 The work done by Leibnitz, like that of Spinoza, was con- ceived on too grand and austere a scale to attain the full com- prehension of contemporaries. No man ever lived more whole- heartedly in the service of ideal ends. The success of Descartes, a comparatively shallow mind, appears almost cheap in com- parison with this man's unrecognised and unrewarded toil. He shared the common fate of all our greatest benefactors ; for although, since it takes two to make a quarrel, he escaped active persecution, almost all his projects 2 were checkmated by the cold indifference of those to whom they ought to have appealed. Certainly his mathematical achievements proved immediately fruitful ; it was his presentation of the calculus, not Newton's, which was taken up by the workers of his day. " To find symbols and formulae for the representation of matters 1 The Growth of Truth, Harveian Oration, 1906, W. Osier. 3 e.g. that of religious union, for which he worked continuously for over thirty years. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 405 of fact is the basis of scientific method, and no one did more in this direction than Leibnitz." But his vastly more important philosophical work has not hitherto received a tithe of the attention it deserves, and must ultimately attain. The time of his harvesting is drawing near : in the forgotten truths which he so clearly set forth will be found the only corrective of the fallacies inseparable from our present abuse of empiricism. Of Kant's influence upon thought I will say merely this, that the iconoclastic side of his work, certainly the more power- ful and congenial, has proved far more effectual, hitherto, than his maturer efforts at reconstruction. In so far as his doctrine insists upon the relativity of knowledge, its limitation by the conditions of sensory experience, it has naturally proved accept- able to the agnostic spirit of the century that divides us from his own. But Kant also taught that the mind is not a natural product but a native faculty of forms, and that unity is not the last but the first (a priori) stage of knowledge. And he makes morality rest on the conviction that man is a citizen of an (unknowable) ideal world, and on conformity with an ideal that requires eternity for its realisation. It has been found con- venient by the prophets of neo-Kantian phenomenalism to ignore this side of the master's teaching. But the end is not yet. If there be any truth in Fechner's theory of the role of man's disembodied spirit, as a conscious permeation and aug- mentation of the effects initiated in its earthly career, the spirit of Hegel must be active and content in the Fatherland of to-day. For it is a Hegelian Germany that confronts and menaces our own loose-jointed, happy-go-lucky caricature of an Empire. Hegelian in its earnestness, its bourgeois domesticity and fecundity, its industrial keenness and com- mercial thoroughness ; Hegelian in the relentless rigour of its critical scholarship, the dogged quest of perfection in scientific method, the resolute adherence to elaborate plans of military and naval preparation ; Hegelian, above all, in its austere dis- regard of personal caprice, where public interests are concerned, and in the iron strength of the discipline that controls " the fell incensed points " of such " mighty opposites " as Bis- 406 MAKERS OF MAN marckian Kaiserism and Marxian Social Democracy. If any- one considers this an unwarranted estimate of the power of a thought upon the nationality which both produced and re- assimilated it, let him consider our last example that of Darwin and hide his diminished head. For the reader may rest assured that, intellectually speaking, Darwin, the fortunate and laborious initiator of a new cosmological epoch, was a mere unenlightened babe in comparison with Hegel. It remains to cast a farewell glance upon the individuals of our ethico-religious group. With reference to the founder of Christianity, the most bigoted adherent of the old theology ought in fairness to admit that my theory of Individuality assigns to him a majestic role in the drama of the human spirit, a decisive influence upon the destiny of mankind, But the Christ-Ideal, so far as that can be identified with the ideal of the man Jesus, has hitherto enjoyed an unfair advantage in the spiritual struggle for existence, backed up as it has been by the bribes and sanctions of supernatural eschatology. That advantage it must for the future forego ; henceforth it will have to take its place in the spiritual arena, to stand or fall by its merits alone. It is not the truths taught by Jesus, nor the authentic power of his example, but merely the despotism of the closed system of Christolatry, that is being specifically challenged by the whole modern spirit. And, this time at least, it will be a fight to the finish. With regard to the character of St. Paul, I incline rather to the view of Arnold than to that of Kenan. Properly under- stood, his teaching makes for enlightenment not for obscur- antism, for Catholicism not for Hebraistic Protestantism, for the spirit not the letter. Renan says of him, somewhat harshly, that his writings were a danger and a snare, the cause of the principal defects of Christian theology. " Paul was the father of the subtle Augustine, the arid Aquinas, the sombre Calvinist, the intolerant Jansenist, the fierce theology that damns and predestines to damnation." If so, it is because the central Pauline doctrine of necrosis, of the necessity of dying to appetite in order to live by love and reason (or the Spirit), has been grossly misunderstood. Renan, when he R. \V. KMKKSOX. To/acc p. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 407 penned his condemnation, must surely have forgotten the divine hymn to Love, concerning which he had written, " Is it not much to have indicated this capital distinction of the eternal religious truths and of those which fail like the dreams of early life ? " And he had also asked, " Is it not enough for immortality to have written that word : ' Thel etter killeth, the spirit inaketh alive ' ? " The pure ethical passion of Marcus Aurelius is a memory of inestimable value to mankind, to think of which is to recall Arnold's poem, wherein he makes Nature ask of her nursling Man " That strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not Mine ? " A strife differently, but not less intensely depicted in the vivid pages of Augustine's masterpiece of introspective autobio- graphy. Here, surely, is a record of agonised self-scrutiny, which, whatever we may think of the conclusions reached whether as those of one victorious or vanquished in the fray will never lack the interest of readers intent on exploration of the hidden depths of their own being. The sublime patience, monumental industry, suave strength of Gregory the Great, are an eternal rebuke to those who lightly or intolerantly blaspheme the majesty of the historic Church ; and would ^fain ignore or deny her incalculable services to mankind. And what of Mahomet ? Of him I would say that he appears to me, though by no means the greatest, in some ways the sanest, most level-headed of all founders of new religions. For he outlived the fanaticism of youth ; and proved, beyond cavil, not merely the possibility, but the necessity, of serving both God and Mammon. He wisely declined martyrdom, preferring to see that his innovations were established under his own supervision, rather than to leave them to the tender mercies of those who came after him. It is time we abandoned the cant of expecting from supermen a self-immolation which really plays into the hands of the Philistines. Flowerlike in the exquisite pathos of its humility and charm, sublime in the obstinacy of its unflinching devotion to a tran- 408 MAKERS OF MAN scendent ideal, the career of St. Francis illumines the opening years of the thirteenth century with a transfiguring radiance all its own. Here, if ever, was a life substantially self-deter- mined, submitted " in scorn of consequence," and without any but enforced regard for prudential counsels, to the direction of that innermost whisper which is at once the voice of instinct and the sole authentic guide to immortal fame. The same almost maniacal persistence in a self -chosen path, tending apparently to nothing but disgrace and ruin, is, in a very different way, manifested in the career of Luther. Genius is always imprudent, always errs on the side of rashness and is always justified by the event. Luther, like Mahomet, has the merit of having escaped martyrdom ; he lived to see his cause, if by no means triumphant, securely launched on its conquering career. Of course, the gods were fighting for him ; the economic and political circumstances of his age had made ecclesiastical decentralisation inevitable. But it is character- istic of great men that the gods always fight on their side ; and of the gods, that great men are always forthcoming when great work has to be done. Emerson's is another striking example of the universality achieved by unflinching reliance upon that voice of intuition which is also the voice of instinct. No man ever posed less, or played less to the gallery ; yet, such was the sureness of his revelation of the highest and most secret hopes of the human spirit, such the confidence with which he endorsed them, that, even in his own lifetime, his work received an impassioned welcome from readers of every spiritual class and of many nations. Mechanics, men of science, poets, philosophers have all sat at his feet, acclaiming him the inspired prophet of a new authentic evangel. His is probably the most creative mind that America has yet produced. I do not forget Walt Whitman, whom it is nowadays the fashion to prefer to Emerson ; but this is a preference as to the validity of which I have the gravest doubts. There is too much pose and too much partisanship in Whitman, who, moreover, owed far more to the older man than he at all fairly acknowledged. " Dionysian spirits " are the mode, at present, among the demagogic lions (or should I KRNEST RENAN. J-'ront fi fainting by I*n. Konnat. To/ace />. 408. INDIVIDUALITY : NATURE AND POWER 409 say " tarantulas ") l of the " New Age Press " ; and I suppose Whitman was a Dionysian, and Emerson (formally) an Apol- lonian spirit. Yet Emerson's is the freer spirit : he dwells on sunlit heights, ice-cold and crystal-clear, and holds in aristocratic disdain such tricks of bombast and rhetoric as Whitman's taste could allow to sully his page. It was Emerson, not Whitman, who earned the acknowledgment of Nietzsche. On the other hand, I do not forget Emerson's limitations, nor the fact that, in assuming the role of transcendental free- thinker, he to some extent retained that of Unitarian minister. As to which (meaning no offence to Unitarian ministers), one may remark, that all greatness involves an element of Phili- stinism, were it only as ballast. We come now to Renan, who, under the almost silken suavity of his literary manner, concealed a purpose far more iconoclastic than that of Emerson. " Veritatem dilexi " was his chosen motto ; and no truth could be too forbidding to be welcomed with unperturbed tranquillity by the terrible sincerity of his intellect. He entertained all possibilities ; regard for consistency troubled him not a whit. But it would be a com- plete misinterpretation of his character and aims to conclude that Renan assailed superstitions and illusions in a merely destructive spirit. It was the immensity of his faith in the ideal (as the sole reality) that emboldened him to give free play to the critical subtlety which astonished the world. Instinctively optimistic, he loved to put his optimism to the severest possible tests ; to entertain the most extravagantly pessimistic hypo- theses. He wished that the new era of religion, of whose dawn he conceived himself the herald, should from the first be characterised by a fearless frankness of discussion, an unreserved fidelity to the ascertained facts of life. His own life was that of a saint, inspired by the most abstract sense of duty ; and the day will infallibly come when his claim to have done more for the cause of religion by his criticism than had been done by all the apologists, will appear not merely true but self-obvious. Here, then, I bring my valedictory survey to an end, not, I 1 The New Age has turned over a new leaf since the above was written. 4 io MAKERS OF MAN trust, without having secured at least the sympathy of the reader with my view of the power and significance of Individuality. I plead for the supremacy of the teleological as opposed to the dynamic point of view, in approaching the problem of human nature, which is also the problem of Spirit. I should like to have added a chapter on the probable destiny of the four main types into which I have, roughly and provisionally, divided my examples. I will just say this, that I have a strong sus- picion that the great men of the future will commonly lend them- selves in even less satisfactory measure to any such classifica- tion, than we have found to be the case with those of past ages. The new type of greatness adumbrated by such men as Whit- man, Tolstoy, Wagner, Nietzsche, Weininger, Shaw, is hardly classifiable as practical, aesthetic, intellectual, or ethico- religious. It is all these together and an undefinable some- thing beyond these. Perhaps what we call " personality " best suggests my meaning. A man who was merely and simply a great artist, for example, would hardly, in these days, be regarded by the judicious as^a great man. The mere artist has in him too much of the defenceless child is too naive, too ingenuous. It may be true that, in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, we must become as little children ; more than that is required of those who assume to govern the Earth. For the Earth, pace our anarchist friends, needs government still ; and is likely to need it for some time to come. AUTHORITIES " Mind and Body " " Physiological Psychology " " History of Philosophy " . " Appearance and Reality " " Inquiries into Human Faculty " " Physiognomy and Expression " " Two New Worlds " " On Life after Death " " The Will to Believe " . " Thus Spake Zarathustra " " Beyond Good and Evil " " Plato's Republic " " The Bhagavad Git& " " Sex and Character " " Pages de Stendhal" . " Grammar of Science " " First Principles " " Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer " " Science and a Future Life "... "Caesar" " Historians' History of the World." " Encyclopaedia Britannica " " Charlemagne " " William the Silent " . . . . " Courtships of Queen Elizabeth " "Drake" " History of the English People " " Richelieu " "Cromwell" " Letters of Cromwell " A. BAIN. W. M C DOUGALL. SCHWEOLER. Tr. by J. H. STIRLING. F. H. BRADLEY. F. GALTON. P. MANTEQAZZA. E. E. FOURNIER D'ALBE. G. T. FECHNER. Tr. by H. WERNEKKE. W. JAMES. F. NIETZSCHE. Tr. by A. TILLE. F. NIETZSCHE. Tr. by H. ZlMMERN. Tr. by J. LI. DAVIES and D. J. VATIGHAK. Tr. by A. BESANT. O. WEININGER. Author- ised Trans. MERCURE DE FRANCE. K. PEARSON. H. SPENCER. W. H. HUDSON. J. H. HYSLOP. J. A. FROUDE. Various Articles. H. CARLESS DAVIS. F. HARRISON. MARTIN HUME. JULIAN CORBETT. J. R. GREEN. RICHARD LODGE. F. HARRISON. T. CARLYLB. 412 MAKERS OF MAN " The Puritan Revolution " " Life of Frederic in., King of Prussia " " Life of Nelson " " Life of Nelson " " Life of Nelson " " Lord Nelson's Letters to Lady Hamilton." " Life of Napoleon " "Napoleon. The Last Phase " . " Napoleon, King of Elba " " Napoleon and the Fair Sex " " Table Talk and Opinions of Napoleon Bonaparte." " Napoleon's Russian Campaign " " The French Revolution " . " Abraham Lincoln " . " Life of Dante " " Dante " " Guelphs and Ghibellines " " Women of Florence " " La Commedia di Dante Alighieri " " The Vision of Dante " " Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance " " Leonardo da Vinci " . " Leonardo " " Leonard de Vinci : Textes Choisis " . " Life and Works of Titian " " Life and Times of Titian " " Cervantes " " Don Quixote " " Mozart "....... " Mozart " . . " Life of J. W. Goethe " "Goethe" " Goethe's Faust " " Wilhelm Meister " " Outlines of German Literature " " Representative Men : Goethe, or the Writer " "Beethoven" " Beethoven : Reminiscences " . " Life of Scott, with Autobiography " . " Life of J. M. W. Turner " . " Gustave Flaubert, as seen in his Works and Correspondence " . S. R. GARDINER. J. TOWERS. R. SOTJTHEY. MAHAN. C. BERESFORD and H. W. WILSON. F. DE BOURRIENNE. ROSEBERY. P. GRUYER. Tr. F. MASSON. Tr. L. TOLSTOY. Tr. T. CARLYLE. C. G. LELAND, etc. PAGET TOYNBEB. E. G. GARDNER. 0. BROWNING. 1. DEL LTTNGO. Tr. P. TOYNBEE. H. F. GARY. J. OWEN. G. GRONATI. J. P. RlCHTER. PELADAN. CLAUDE PHILLIPS. CROWE & CAVALCASELLE. H. E. WATTS. Tr. by C. JARVIS. E. J. BREAKSPEARE. VERNON LUSHINGTON. J. SIME. A. HAYWARD. Tr. by A. SWANWICK. Tr. by T. CARLYLE. J. GOSTWIOK. R. W. EMERSON. J. S. SHEDLOCK. L. NOHL. Tr. by A. WOOD. J. G. LOCKHART, etc. W. THORNBURY. J. C. TARVER. AUTHORITIES Salammbo " G. FLAUBEBT. C. CHAETRES. 413 Tr. by J. " Madame Bovary " . " L' Education Sentimentale " " Francis Bacon, His Life and Philosophy ' " The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon " " Novum Organum " . " Life of Galileo " " William Harvey " " Eminent Doctors " " The Motion of the Heart and Blood " " The Growth of Truth " . "Descartes" " The ' Method,' ' Meditations,' and Selec- tions from the ' Principles " of Des- cartes, with Introductory Essay " " Spinoza : His Life and Philosophy " " The Chief Works of B. de Spinoza " . " The Life of Sir Isaac Newton " . " Leibniz " " Leibniz : Discourse on Metaphysics ; Correspondence with Arnauld, ' Mon- adology ' " . "Kant" " Religion and Philosophy in Germany," " Heine's Prose Works " " Kant's Oitick of Pure Reason " "Hegel" " The Logic of Hegel " . " Hegel's Philosophy of History " " Life of Charles Darwin " . " Origin of Species " . New Testament, Revised Version. " Life of Jesus " " Ecce Homo " " Jesus in Modern Criticism " " The First Three Gospels ". G. FLAUBBBT. Tr. by H. BLANCHAMP. G. FLAUBEBT. Tr. by D. F. HANNIGAN. J. NICHOL. H. BAYLEY. BACON. Tr. Anon. Lib. of Useful Knowledge. Cf. also Brewster's " Life of Newton." D'AncY POWER. G. T. BETTANY. W. HARVEY. Tr. by R. WILLS. HARVEIAN Oration, 1906. W. OSLER. J. P. MAHAFFY. J. VEITCH. F. POLLOCK. Tr. by R. H. M. ELWES. D. BREWSTER. J. T. MERZ. Tr. by G. R. MONTGOMERY. W. WALLACE. Ed. by H. ELLIS. Tr. by H. HAYWOOD. E. CAIRD. Tr. by W. WALLACE. Tr. by J. SIBREE, etc. F. DARWIN. C. DARWIN, etc. E. RENAN. Tr. J. SEELEY. P. W. SCHMIEDEL. M. A. CANNEY. J. E. CARPENTER. Tr. by 414 MAKERS OF MAN " Evolution and Theology " ... 0. PFLEIDERER. Tr. by 0. CONE. " A Short History of Christianity " . . J. M. ROBERTSON. " Jesus of Nazareth " E. CLODD. " Christianity and History " ... A. HARNACK. Tr. by T. B. SATJNDERS, etc. " St. Paul " E. RENAN. " St. Paul and Protestantism " . . . M. ARNOLD. " The Apostles " E. RENAN. Tr. by W. G. HUTCHISON. "Marcus Aurelius " E. RENAN. Tr. by W. G. HUTCHISON. " Meditations of Marcus Aurelius " . . Tr. by J. COLLIER. " Memoir of St. Augustine " . J. BAILLIE. family history of, 61, 62 ; physique ' " 'and physiognomy of, 93 ; personal magnetism of, 93 ; natural voca- tion of, 106, 130, 131 ; poetic by- activity of, 106 ; aloofness of, 130 ; purpose of, 275-279 ; his choice of the ministry, 275 ; diffidence of, 275 ; his breach with congregation, 276, 276 ; was he a Theist T 276 ; and Carlyle, 276 ; publishes Nature, 277 ; method of, 277 ; contem- poraries of, 278 ; tolerance of, 278 ; eulogises war, 279 ; the true, 279 ; his love of solitude, 315 ; greatness of, as compared with Whitman, 408, 409. Environment versus genius, 20, 101, 147. Ethico-religious type, defined, 29, 30 ; its function, 39, 40 ; supremacy of, 40 ; physical characteristics of, 91- 97 ; life-history of its members involved in that of their nation and age, 147 ; purpose of men of, 239- 283, 285 ; fortitude demanded of, 303 ; sense of guilt of members of, 309 ; self -conquest of men of, 311, 312 ; sexual proclivities of, 317, 319 ; power of, exemplified, 406- 409. Eugenics, problem of, 63 ; possible occult significance of, 387, 388. Evolution, starting-point of, 3. 27 Fabricius, relation discovery, 213, 214. Families of parents of great men, 46, 47 ; place of great men in, 47 ; comparison of types in regard to, 48. . Fechner, Theodor, hypothesis of, concerning posthumous existence, 392, 393 ; on insight of great men, 396 ; mentioned, 405. Fichte, his theory of the ego, 14. Flaubert, Gustave, fidelity of, to fact, 37, 38 ; his lack of ambition, 38 ; physique of, 72 ; physiognomy and temperament of, 74, 75 ; hystero-epilepsy and fear of life of, 75, 206 ; comparative celibacy of, 75, 207, 317, 318 ; natural vocation of, 105, 112, 113; purpose of, 205-208; his disgust with legal study, 205, 206 ; influence of his father upon, 206; his contempt for Utopias, 207 ; his hatred of the bourgeoisie, 208 ; his intrigue with a married woman, 318 ; greatness of, 401. Flechsig, Prof., cited, 10. Francis d'Assisi, see Saint Francis d'Assisi. Frederick the Great, 32 ; family history of, 58 ; physique of, 66 ; physiognomy of, 67, 68 ; premature senility of, 68 ; sexual deficiency of, 68, 69 ; versatility of, 104 ; his desire of admiration, 104, 152 ; natural vocation of, 105, 150-153 ; his military education, 150 ; his practice of poetry and music, 160 ; his flight from his father's tyranny, 150 ; execution of his friend Katte, 150, 175 ; marriage of, 150 ; corre- sponds with Voltaire, 150 ; dawn of his ambition, 150, 151 ; seizes Herstal and Hermal, 151 ; invades Silesia, 152 ; motive of, 152 ; pur- pose of, 173-176 ; his hatred of his father, 175 ; positive phase of bis purpose, 176 ; " religion " of, 177 ; military genius of, 296, 297 ; his relations to women, 317, 318 ; criminality of, 360-363 ; his viola- tion of pledges, 361, 362; his cruel treatment of Baron Trenck, 362 ; partition of Poland by, 363 ; greatness of, 396. ! Galileo Galilei, dramatic sense of, 27 ; parents of, 59 ; phyaique of, 53, 54 ; 4i8 INDEX physiognomy and health of, 84 ; natural vocation of, 105, 137, 138 ; aesthetic pursuits of, 137 ; discovery of pendulum by, 137, 211 ; deserts medicine for mathematics, 137 ; purpose of, 211-213 ; his indebted- ness to Leonardo, 211 ; a convert to Copernican theory, 211 ; in- curs enmity of Jesuits, 211, 212; construction of first telescope by, 212 ; astronomical discoveries of, 212 ; rebukes Kepler's apriorism, 212, 213 ; impetuosity of, 302 ; greatness of, 402, 403. Galton, Law of, 62 ; his investiga- tion of life-histories of twins, 101, 102 ; on solitary habit of the insane, 291, 292 ; on gregarious habit of commonplace individuals, 292. Genius, versus environment, 20, 100, 101, 147 ; Coleridge on, 25 ; and insanity, 56, 57, 60, 93 ; and sterility, 60, 321 ; not a disease, 63 ; cost of, 93 ; eye of, its emana- tions, 99 ; face of the man of, 99, 100 ; men of, two main classes, 124, 125 ; Carlyle's theory of, refuted, 153 ; emotional needs and dread of responsibility of men of, 347 ; ruthlessness of, 369 ; finality in works of, 369, 370 ; cost of its victories, 395 ; greatness of, 395 ; defined, 395 ; relation of, to epoch, 395, 396 ; power of men of, 396- 409. Goethe, J. W., on artists, 23, 24 ; susceptibility of, 26 ; complexity of, 35 ; parents of, 52, 53 ; physique and physiognomy of, 72, 73, 74 ; natural vocation of, 105, 119-121 ; his attempts at drawing, 106, 120 ; versatility of, 119 ; his resemblance to Scott, 120 ; official industry of, 121 ; as mineralogist, 121 ; scientific discovery of premaxilla by, 121 ; work of, on metamorphosis of plants, 121 ; his theory of colour, 121 ; Napoleon on, 153 ; on con- scious aims, 159, 160 ; purpose of, 197-200 ; and the puppet show, 197 ; and Gretchen, 197, 198, 341 ; influenced by Shakespeare, 198 ; begins Faust, 198 ; his Sorrows of Werther, 199; influenced by Spinoza, 199 ; begins to discipline himself, 199 ; real aim of, 200 ; love-affairs of, 340-344 ; sentimentality of, 340, 341 ; sexual precocity of, 341 ; and Frederica Brion, 342 : and Charlotte, 342, 343 ; and Lili, 343 ; captured by Christiane, 344 ; significance of his personality and work, 399, 400. Gordianus, 55. Great Men, insanity among mothers of, 56, 57 ; constitutional features of, 62, 63 ; physical characteristics of the several types of, 97, 98 ; unique impression made by, 98 ; cause of impression made by, 99, 100 ; stars of, 109 ; two great classes of, 124, 125 ; tentative efforts of, 132 ; limitations of, 142 ; their relations to women, 316-350; fickleness of, 326, 327 ; temptations of, 351 ; in relation to crime, 351- 378 ; power of, exemplified, 396-409. Greatness, four main types of, 21 ; test of, 266 ; interdependence of qualities and defects of, 377 ; new type of, 410. Gregory, see Saint Gregory the Great. Habit, newly established, 2 ; in- heritance of, 3. Hseckel, and human evolution, 3 ; and unconscious memory, 4. Hanks, Nancy, mother of Lincoln, 67. Harvey, William, unworldliness of, 39 ; physique of, 83, 88 ; limita- tions of his genius, 87, 213 ; personal traits of, 88 ; natural vocation of, 105, 113 ; culture of, 113; purpose of, 213-216; his association with Fabricius, 213, 214 ; his dissections and vivi- sections, 214, 215, 368, 369; his Lumleian lectures, 215 ; imprudence of, 302 ; his love of solitude, 309, 310 ; callousness of, towards animals, 368, 369 ; importance of his work, 403. Hedonic selection, law of, 3, 104, 105. Hegel, G. W. F., on man as part of nature, 8 ; his theory of the ego, 14 ; as poet, 27, 140 ; family history of, 59 ; physique of, 83. 85 ; his physiognomy and personal traits, 85, 86 ; his death accidental, 80 ; natural vocation of, 105, 140, 141 ; compared with Kant, 140, 231; his thirst for general know- ledge, 140 ; as freethinker and Jacobin, 140, 231 ; his " voyage of discovery," 141 ; his relations with Fichte and Schelling, 141 ; Logic INDEX 419 of, conceived, 141 ; purpose of, 231-234 ; breaks with Schelling, 231 ; influenced by Hellenic ideal, 231, 232 ; revolutionary purport of his Logic, 232, 233 ; completion of his Logic, 233 ; his relation to Christianity, 233 ; self -concentra- tion of, 311 ; his power shown in modern Germany, 405, 406. Heredity, importance of, 8 ; Pearson on, 9 ; Galton's Law of, 9 ; Mendel's Law of, 10. Hertzka, Theodor, on the social origin of thought, 396. Individuality as a centre of force, 11 ; mechanical view of, 11 ; substantial nature of, 380 ; and heredity, 380, 381, 384- 386 ;| view of Leibnitz concerning, 382- I 384 ; permanency, 385, 386 ; | noumenal, 386, 387 ; specific universality of, 388, 389 ; a parable of, 389, 390 ; substratum of, 390, 391 : Plato on choice of destiny of, 391, 392 ; power of, 393-^10. Infant Prodigies, 103. Instinct, definition of, 7 ; described, 7, 8 ; constructive, 112. Intellectual type, the, compared with aesthetic, 26, 27, 28, 34 ; indifference of, to success, 39 ; purpose of men of, 209-239, 285 ; courage of men of, 302 ; sexual proclivities of, 317, 319. Inventor, the, not a primary type, 31. Jesus, reasons for inclusion of, 40 ; historicity of, 40, 41, 42, 239 ; his ignorance of worldly affairs, 42 ; question of the physiognomy of, 92; natural vocation of, 105- 107 ; purpose of, 239-247 ; in- dications of development of, 239, 240 ; literary personality of, a composite product, 240, 241 ; social environment of, 241 ; influence upon, of Judas the Goulonite, Hillel, Isaiah, and the Book of Daniel, 241, 242 ; his conception of the " Kingdom," 242 ; influence of John the Baptist upon, 243 ; his fast in the desert, 243, 244 ; Galilean mission of, 244 ; acceptance of Messianic role by, 244, 245 ; his conflict with Judaism, 245, 246; his change of tone, 246 ; purport of life and work of, 247 : Kang Yu Wei on the courage of, 303 ; and the Christ ideal, 370, 406; ill effects of the doctrine of, 371 ; his attitude towards the Scribes and Pharisees, 371 ; sublime role of, 406. Kant, Immanuel, his theory of the ego, 14 ; Scots descent of, 59 ; physique of, 83 ; a pygmy, 90, 91 ; celibacy of, a sore subject, 91 ; natural vocation of, 105, 139, 140 ; scrappy reading of, 139 ; encyclopaedic phase of, 139, 229 ; conception of nis Critique of Pure Reason, 139, 140 : purpose of, 228-231 ; mental crisis of, 229 ; influenced by Hume, 229 ; his Critique of Practical Reason, 230 ; compared with Hegel, 231 ; his courage under poverty, 302 ; courage fails him when censured by Court, 302 ; his hour for meditation, 310 ; negative versua positive effect of his work, 405. Lavater on the emanations of the eye of genius, 99. Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, view of, concerning ego, 13 ; parents of, 53 ; conciliatory temper of, 53, 128 ; physique of, 83-85 ; physiog- nomy of, 85 ; natural vocation of, 105, 128 ; purpose of, 225-228 ; unity of his airo in multiplicity of interests, 225 ; influenced by Bacon, 226 ; early works of, 226 ; joins Rosicrucians, 226 ; meets Huygens, 227 ; discovers calculus, 227 ; his relations to Descartes and Spinoza, 228, 229 ; his view concerning individuality, 382-384 ; importance of his work, 404, 405. Leland, C. G., 33. Leonardo da Vinci, versatility of, 34, 104, 155 ; physical traits of, 72, 73 ; unconventionally of, 73 ; natural vocation of, 105, 153-155 ; his tendency from art towards science, 106, 154. 155, 192; his consciousness of his own powers. 153, 154; artistic and scientific life of, at Milan, 154; completes "Last Snpper" for the Duke, 154 ; his Treatise on Painting, 420 INDEX 154 ; his anticipations of science, 155 ; purpose of, 191-193 ; his intellectual curiosity, 191 ; illustra- tion of method of, 191, 192 ; his superiority to ambition, 192, 193 ; asexuality of, 345, 346 ; greatness of, 398, 399. Lincoln, Abraham, 33 ; parents of, 57 ; exceptional strength of, 66 ; physiognomy of, 66 ; natural vocation of, 105, 109, 110; self- reliance of, 110 ; purpose of, 184- 187 ; as bow-hand, 184 ; mental alienation of, 184, 185, 307 ; his anti-slavery debut, 185 ; and the Kansas - Nebraska Bill, 187 ; elected President, 187 ; his mis- givings as to his task, 187 ; para- mount object of, 300 ; greatness of, 397, 398. Longevity, types compared as regards, 48, 49 ; supremacy of intellectuals in respect of, 48, 49. Luther, Martin, masterful temper of, 43 ; family history of, 60, 61 ; hallucinations of, 93, 315 ; uhysique, health, personality of, 93-95 ; as musician, 106, 155, 157 ; his brutal treatment at school, 155 ; promise of, 155 ; superstitious fears of, 156 ; enters convent, 156 ; influenced by von Staupitz, 156 ; hymns of, 157 ; purpose of, 270-275 ; germ of doctrine of, 271 ; the national and economic situation and, 271, 272 : Tetzel and, 272 ; the " Theses " of, 272 ; development of his destructive programme, 273 ; constructive task of, 274 ; courage of, in marrying, 274 ; courage of, at Augsburg and Worms, 305, 306 ; deterioration of, 306 ; abstraction of, 315 ; condones persecution of Anabaptists, 376 ; intolerance of, 376 ; his harshness towards peasants, 376, 377. McDougall, W., on volition, 11, 12. Madonna Pica, 55 ; devoutness of, 56. Mahomet, masterful temper of, 43 ; family history of, 59 ; physique and personality of, 93, 94 ; trances of, 94, 147, 260 ; natural vocation of, 105, 106-148; illiteracy of, 146 ; learns from pilgrims, 146 ; bis contact with Christianity, 146 ; first wife of, 146, 326 ; critical year of, 146 ; solitary meditations of, 147, 260, 313 ; purpose of, 259- 264 ; his vision of Gabriel, 260, 313 ; doctrinal views of, 260, 261 ; persecution of, 261 ; death of first wife of, 261 ; celestial vision of, 262 ; called to Medina, 262 ; his appeal to force, 262, 263 ; growing [power of, 263 ; his triumphal return to Mecca, 263, 264 ; humility of, 264 ; courage of, 304 ; his vision of genii, 313 ; sexual relations of, 317, 344, 355 ; his fidelity to Cadijah, 344 ; his hostility to Jews, 374, 375 ; his responsibility for massacre of the Koraidites, 375 ; special " re- velations " of, 375 ; sanity of, 407. Mantegazza on physiognomy of genius, 99, 100. Marcus Aurelius, scrupulosity of, 43, 252 ; ill-health of, 91 ; natural vocation of, 105, 128, 129 ; his enforced activity, 106 ; ; not a failure, 128, 129'; purpose of, 249- 252 ; influence upon, of his mother, 249, of Antoninus, 249, 250, of the Stoics, 250, of Pronto and Junius Rusticus, 251, of Epictetus, 251 ; as persecutor, 372, 373 ; significance of his career, 407. Marriage, preconceptions concerning, 319-321 ; its effects upon the work of great men, 322-326 ; a field of battle, 317, 322, 323 ; advantages of monogamous, 348, 349 ; a natural state ? 349 ; Meredith on, 349, 350. Maternal element, predominance of, 51, 52 ; in case of St. Augustine, 53 ; in case of St. Francis, 55 ; in general, 62, 63. Mathematics, compared with music, .90; Mozart and, 111. Maturity, early and late, of several types, 132. Memory, theory of unconscious, 3, 4 ; and instinct, 7. Mendel, law of inheritance of, 10. Meredith, G., 25 ; on homage to woman, 349, 350. Monica, mother of Augustine, 54, 325. Mothers of great men, insanity among, 56 ; their share in life work of sons, 325, 326. INDEX 421 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 35 ; parents of, 52 ; tubercular taint of, 52, 81 ; physique of, 72, 81 ; physiognomy of, 81, 82 ; melan- choly of, 82 ; natural vocation of, 105, 111; precocity of, 111; fleeting taste of, for mathematics ; purpose of, 196, 197 ; Nietzsche on, 196 ; his tragic phase, 196, 197 ; Quixotism of, 301 ; his power of self-concentration, 307 ; supremacy of, 399. Music and mathematics, 90 ; inborn capacity for, 102, 103. Napoleon Bonaparte, a typical man of action, 33 ; parents of, 51, 325 ; physique of. 65 ; physiog- nomy of, 69, 70 ; immense energy of, 69 ; charm and popularity of, 70 ; natural vocation of, 105, 108, 109 ; star of, 109 ; on Goethe, 153 ; purpose of, 179-184 ; favourite books of boyhood of, 180 ; Italian campaign of, 181 ; breaking the rules, 181 ; his Oriental dreams, 182 ; " conversion " of, 182 ; constructive work of, 182, 183 ; his relation to the Revolution, 183 ; objective of, 183 ; bravery of, 299, 300 ; recluse years of, 306, 307 ; sexual relations of, 330-335; and Josephine, 330- 334 ; first love of, 330 ; and Eleonore, 332 ; generosity of, 332, 334 ; and Marie Walewska, 333 ; divorce of, 333, 334 ; and Marie Louise, 334 ; orders execu- tion of 4000 prisoners, 365 ; unjust banishments by, 366 ; his judicial murder of Due d'Enghien, 366 ; Berlin decree of, 367 ; gutter diplomacy of, 367 ; greatness of, 397. Nelson, Horatio Lord, unique tem- perament of, 33; physical weak- ness of, 65; constitution of, 70; charm of, 70, 71 ; natural voca- tion, of, 105, 107, 108; Quixotism of, 108; purpose of, 176-179; chivalry of, 177, 178 ; his craving for distinction. 178 ; enforce- ment of Navigation Acts pre- judices his career, 178, 179 ; | patriotism of, 179 ; born to excel, [ 179 ; his craving for danger, 297- 299 ; insubordination of, 297, ' 298 ; marital relations of, 324, 326 ; and Lady Hamilton, 324, 325, 363, 364; his precipitate execution of Caracciolo, 364 ; his treatment of revolutionists, 364 ; his triumph over difficulties, 397. ' Newton, Sir Isaac, as artist, 27 ; insanity of, 58, 86, 87 ; physique of, 83, 86 ; physiognomy and health of, 86, 87 ; natural vocation of, 105, 138, 139 ; constructive bent of, 138 ; as poet, 138 ; as farmer, 138 ; tests astrology, 138, 221 ; his investigation of prophetic works, 138 ; purpose of, 220-224 ; central interest of, 220 ; as alchemist, 221 ; mathematical facility of, 221 ; discovers method of " fluxions," 221 ; his hatred of controversy, 222 ; his theory of gravitation and its precursors, 222, 223 ; absent-mindedness of, 310. Nietzsche, Friedrich, cited, 152 :