which I opened in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of action, as, for instance, in his chapter on "The Hero as King." I have already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, have not hesitated to employ falsehood; that Alexander the Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But untruthfulness is incompatible with genius. The "Memoirs of Napoleon," written at St. Helena, are full of mistatements and watery sophistry, and his last words, that "he had loved only France," were an altruistic pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of the world in a pyramid over his name. The man of action shares with the epileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around him, to make them appanages of his petty self. The great man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads, and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him ; he realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a definite, assured, intelligible relation to the world whole. The great tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off from the world; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or adornment of their empirical persons, and they are incapable of love, affection, or friendship.
The king of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the
