Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry through as prolog to his life’s work:—­he must conquer the new personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of himself.  Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the senatorial house of the Anicii.  Two such streams, coming together, might well need some harmonizing:  might well produce, for example, an acute self-consciousness,—­to be mastered.  What he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other, his intense devotion to learning and culture.  Thus the two streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of Vision.  The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated:  it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,—­and sensual brutality in Julian’s brother Gallus.  The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.

He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no more than a promise of what he should become.  He laws, his valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than juvenilia: they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many who are counted great.  He came out from his overshadowment and long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a Tiberius, or an Aurelius,—­and swept through to as signal victories as any of theirs.  He learnt the elements of drill, and was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it brilliantly.  He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of Arc’s France; and found within himself every quality needed to heal it and make it whole.

Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his.  He set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:—­The Gods are there; the beautiful Gods; uttermost splendor of divinity is at the heart of things.  The glory of the Gods and of their world filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision.  The thing he did not care about,—­did not notice, except in a humourous way,—­was that queer thing of a personality that had been allotted to himself.  How could he have succeeded, in the world that then was?—­And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to say,—­and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in saying it,—­that though Julian was hateful to God, he was altogether beneficent to mankind.