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by
Will Durant
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November 15 - December 10, 2019
“My aim is to go straight toward my objective, without being stopped by any consideration”;
“Everything is conventional among men, even to those feelings which, one would suppose, ought to be dictated by Nature alone.”
No man, we are told, is a hero to his valet;
“I do not like that vague and leveling phrase les convenances [the proprieties]. … It is a device of fools to raise themselves to the level of people of intellect.
When he told a famous beauty, “Madame, I do not like it when women mix in politics,” she retorted, “You are right, General; but in a country where they have their heads cut off, it is natural that they should want to know why.”
He “studied and restudied” the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugene of Savoy, and Frederick the Great; “model yourself on them,” he told his officers, “reject every maxim contrary to those of these great men.”
He had the courage to take responsibility, to stake his career again and again upon his judgment; and, with a daring that too often laughed at caution, he passed from one gamble to another—ever playing with more human pawns for higher stakes. He lost the last wager, but only after proving himself the ablest general in history.
“In war,” he said, “morale and opinion are more than half the battle.”
“The best soldier,” he said, “is not so much the one who fights as the one who marches.”
“The chief virtues of a soldier are constancy and discipline. Valor comes only in the second place.”
“The strength of an army, like the amount of momentum in mechanics, is estimated by the mass times the velocity. A swift march enhances the morale of an army, and increases its power for victory.”
“Activité, activité, vitesse”90—action and speed.
“It is axiomatic,” he had said, far back in 1793, “that the side which remains behind its fortified line is always defeated”;
“My power depends upon my glory, and my glory on my victories. My power would fall were I not to support it by new glory and new victories. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest alone can maintain me.”
Even so, he felt, as many scholars (Ranke, Sorel, Vandal …) felt, that he had been more sinned against than sinning; that he had fought and killed in self-defense;
His forte became his fate.
He longed to be the Justinian as well as the Caesar Augustus of his age.
“A statesman’s heart must be in his head”;
“The strong are good, the weak are wicked,”
men are moved, and can be ruled, only by interest or fear.
Only weakness is inhuman.”
“The art of the police,” he told Fouché, “consists in punishing rarely and severely.”
Why did he fail? Because his grasp exceeded his reach, his imagination dominated his ambition, and his ambition domineered over his body, mind, and character.
In the end imagination toppled reason; the polyglot colossus, standing on one unsteady head, tumbled back into difference, and the rooted force of national character defeated the great dictator’s will to power.
“Religion introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”
Since all men are born unequal, it is inevitable that the majority of brains will be in a minority of men, who will rule the majority with guns or words.
Hence utopias of equality are the consolatory myths of the weak; anarchist cries for freedom from laws and government are the delusions of immature and autocratic minds; and democracy is a game used by the strong to conceal their oligarchic rule.
“There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men. … To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one’s existence, is not to have lived at all.”
He was Corsican in blood, French in education, and Italian in almost everything else.
All the qualities of Renaissance Italy appeared in him: artist and warrior, philosopher and despot; unified in instincts and purposes, quick and penetrating in thought, direct and overwhelming in action, but unable to stop. Barring that vital fault, he was the finest master of controlled complexity and coordinated energy in history.
Tocqueville put it well: he was as great as a man can be without virtue, and he was as wise as a man can be without modesty.
In 1829, partly paralyzed, he went to Rome to be “a ruin amongst ruins,”
He was a good great man and one of those redeeming men and women who must be weighed in the balance against our ignorance and sins.
We must continue to hope that, in our distant and cleansed descendants, intelligence will graduate into orderly freedom.
Godwin and his wife supported their complex brood by publishing books, among them the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) of Charles and Mary Lamb.
Ricardo made the Malthusian theory the foundation of his “dismal science.” (It was after reading Malthus that Carlyle gave that name to economics.) Now nearly all the evil incident to the Industrial Revolution could be ascribed to the reckless fertility of the poor.
Of course the real answer to Malthus has been contraception—its moral acceptance, its wider dissemination, its greater efficacy, its lower cost.
The Chain of Ideas adorns the “Great Chain of Being,” and underlies the history of civilization.
All these abstractions, in Bentham’s opinion, were “nonsense on stilts,”44 strutting obstructively in universities, Parliaments, and courts.
Cui bono?, For whose good will it be?—
Dying, Bentham puzzled over the problem of making his corpse fully useful to the greatest number. He directed that it should be dissected in the presence of his friends.
heaven and utopia are compensatory buckets in the well of hope.
In the end the weight of his stores, and their unmanageable variety, were too great for a mind wedded to freedom and divorced from order. The storeroom nearly collapsed under its stores.
They were, said Coleridge, three persons in one soul.
Ideally the poet should speak in the language of the common man; but even learned words may be poetic if they convey the feeling and the moral force.
The ideal poet, or painter, or sculptor is a philosopher clothing wisdom in art, revealing significance through form.
The dear companion of my lonely walk, My hope, my joy, my sister, my friend, Or something dearer still, if reason knows A dearer thought, or, in the heart of love, There is a dearer name.
The aging man seeks the womb of his feelings as of his life.
What awed him in Wordsworth was the older man’s concentration of purpose and steadiness of will; Coleridge was more and more substituting the wish for the will and imagination for reality.
Charles Lamb, who summarized him in a famous phrase as an “archangel, a little damaged,”
