When every year and month sends forth a new one.
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is
a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or
circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities
and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is
privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the
tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a
faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture
he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome
loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name
thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his
contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom
he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to
Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring
him to the slaughter.
If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men
I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely
than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance
in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and
tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history.
But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too
near--near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to
realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was
not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen
in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had
been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed
him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end,
and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur
of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There
lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said,
as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had
breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of
the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have
made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not
find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are
these the men--these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards--the
demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and
then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is
a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and
ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and
the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained
multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects
of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
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