I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that I think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies and observations, Hawthorne’s Note Book. It was to be the story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances altogether mediocre.  He had loved his wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human being.  He had begun life with high hopes—­and life was commonplace.  He was to grow fretful and restless.  His discontent was to lead to some action, some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do not think the Note Book was very clear.  It was to carry him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife.  Then, when it was too late, he was to see her at an upper window, stripped and firelit, a glorious thing of light and loveliness and tragic intensity....

The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne’s story and Lamb’s story are, after all, only variations upon the same theme.  But can we poor human beings never realise our quality without destruction?

3

One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders, Napoleons, Caesars.  I would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning of the war.  It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.  Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better than that timber image, Hindenburg.

It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as that it has produced heroism in a torrent.  The great man of this war is the common man.  It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular names.  There are too many true stories of splendid acts in the past two years ever to be properly set down.  The V.C.’s and the palms do but indicate samples.  One would need an encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness of human impulses.  The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all the pretensions of the Great Man.  Imperatively these multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies.  When I was a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will confess that now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in love with mankind.

But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest quality of the Allies’ war, I should I think choose the figure of General Joffre.  He is something new in history.  He is leadership without vulgar ambition.  He is the extreme antithesis to the Imperial boomster of Berlin.  He is as it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate.  He is the antithesis of the effigy.