There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General Joffre’s ambitions after the war.  He is tired; then he will be very tired.  He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in making a tour of the waterways of France in a barge.  So I hope it may be.  One imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled remains of the last and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a fishing line in the placid water and a large buff umbrella overhead, the good ordinary man who does whatever is given to him to do—­as well as he can.  The power that has taken the great effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something very composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is something more like General Joffre than any other single human figure I can think of or imagine.

If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would make General Joffre the frontispiece.

4

As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an aquiline profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a little flawed by a childish and dangerous ambition to run over every cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is not so much a figure as a great generalisation of certain hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and of the impression he had made upon me.  And from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations that had been for some time latent in my mind.

How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.

The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by various people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological ways of thinking.  It is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half an hour or so upon one’s realisation of the significance of Darwinism.  If man has evolved from something different, he must now be evolving onward into something sur-human.  The species in the future will be different from the species of the past.  So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws and so on went right.

But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that modification of a species means really a secular change in its average, they jumped to a conclusion—­to which the late Lord Salisbury also jumped years ago at a very memorable British Association meeting—­that a species is modified by the sudden appearance of eccentric individuals here and there in the general mass who interbreed—­preferentially.  Helped by a streak of antic egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful.  But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the departing thing.  It depends not upon the advance