I am told that it is not scientific to treat national character as a
product of climate. This only shows the wide difference between common
knowledge and the intellectual game called science. We have men of
exactly the same stock, and speaking the same language, growing in Great
Britain, in Ireland, and in America. The result is three of the most
distinctly marked nationalities under the sun. Racial characteristics
are quite another matter. The difference between a Jew and a Gentile has
nothing to do with the difference between an Englishman and a German.
The characteristics of Britannus are local characteristics, not
race characteristics. In an ancient Briton they would, I take it, be
exaggerated, since modern Britain, disforested, drained, urbanified and
consequently cosmopolized, is presumably less characteristically British
than Caesar's Britain.

And again I ask does anyone who, in the light of a competent knowledge
of his own age, has studied history from contemporary documents, believe
that 67 generations of promiscuous marriage have made any appreciable
difference in the human fauna of these isles? Certainly I do not.

JULIUS CAESAR

As to Caesar himself, I have purposely avoided the usual anachronism of
going to Caesar's books, and concluding that the style is the man. That
is only true of authors who have the specific literary genius, and have
practised long enough to attain complete self-expression in letters.
It is not true even on these conditions in an age when literature is
conceived as a game of style, and not as a vehicle of self-expression
by the author. Now Caesar was an amateur stylist writing books of travel
and campaign histories in a style so impersonal that the authenticity of
the later volumes is disputed. They reveal some of his qualities just
as the Voyage of a Naturalist Round the World reveals some of Darwin's,
without expressing his private personality. An Englishman reading them
would say that Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste,
meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

In exhibiting Caesar as a much more various person than the historian
of the Gallic wars, I hope I have not succumbed unconsciously to the
dramatic illusion to which all great men owe part of their reputation
and some the whole of it. I admit that reputations gained in war are
specially questionable. Able civilians taking up the profession of arms,
like Caesar and Cromwell, in middle age, have snatched all its laurels
from opponent commanders bred to it, apparently because capable persons
engaged in military pursuits are so scarce that the existence of two
of them at the same time in the same hemisphere is extremely rare. The
capacity of any conqueror is therefore more likely than not to be an
illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary. At all events,
Caesar might have won his battles without being wiser than Charles XII
or Nelson or Joan of Arc, who were, like most modern "self-made"
millionaires, half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by
all races to certain forms of insanity. But Caesar's victories were
only advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular
without them. Caesar is greater off the battle field than on it. Nelson
off his quarterdeck was so quaintly out of the question that when his
head was injured at the battle of the Nile, and his conduct became for
some years openly scandalous, the difference was not important enough
to be noticed. It may, however, be said that peace hath her illusory
reputations no less than war. And it is certainly true that in civil
life mere capacity for work--the power of killing a dozen secretaries
under you, so to speak, as a life-or-death courier kills horses--enables
men with common ideas and superstitions to distance all competitors
in the strife of political ambition. It was this power of work that
astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of Caesar's gifts, as it
astonished later observers in Napoleon before it wore him out. How if
Caesar were nothing but a Nelson and a Gladstone combined! A prodigy of
vitality without any special quality of mind! Nay, with ideas that were
worn out before he was born, as Nelson's and Gladstone's were! I have
considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite all
the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was genuinely
original; but let me at least point out that I have been careful to
attribute nothing but originality to him. Originality gives a man an air
of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate
the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite
independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will
not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody
knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good
taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for candors. He
understands the paradox of money, and gives it away when he can get most
for it: in other words, when its value is least, which is just when a
common man tries hardest to get it. He knows that the real moment of
success is not the moment apparent to the crowd. Hence, in order to
produce an impression of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he
has only to act with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only
sense in which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this
sense that I have represented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no
need of goodness. He is neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, because
a man who is too great to resent has nothing to forgive; a man who says
things that other people are afraid to say need be no more frank than
Bismarck was; and there is no generosity in giving things you do not
want to people of whom you intend to make use. This distinction between
virtue and goodness is not understood in England: hence the poverty of
our drama in heroes. Our stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies.
Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies that man
is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.
Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not given countenance to it in
any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths,
which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight,
but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability,
the possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs
his exploits of any merit whatever.

As to Caesar's sense of humor, there is no more reason to assume that he
lacked it than to assume that he was deaf or blind. It is said that on
the occasion of his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists (it is
always your moralist who makes assassination a duty, on the scaffold or
off it), he defended himself until the good Brutes struck him, when he
exclaimed "What! you too, Brutes!" and disdained further fight. If this
be true, he must have been an incorrigible comedian. But even if we
waive this story, or accept the traditional sentimental interpretation
of it, there is still abundant evidence of his lightheartedness and
adventurousness. Indeed it is clear from his whole history that what has
been called his ambition was an instinct for exploration. He had much
more of Columbus and Franklin in him than of Henry V.

However, nobody need deny Caesar a share, at least, of the qualities I
have attributed to him. All men, much more Julius Caesars, possess all
qualities in some degree. The really interesting question is whether I
am right in assuming that the way to produce an impression of greatness
is by exhibiting a man, not as mortifying his nature by doing his
duty, in the manner which our system of putting little men into great
positions (not having enough great men in our influential families to
go round) forces us to inculcate, but by simply doing what he naturally
wants to do. For this raises the question whether our world has not been
wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so. It must be a
constant puzzle to many of us that the Christian era, so excellent in
its intentions, should have been practically such a very discreditable
episode in the history of the race. I doubt if this is altogether due to
the vulgar and sanguinary sensationalism of our religious legends, with
their substitution of gross physical torments and public executions for
the passion of humanity. Islam, substituting voluptuousness for torment
(a merely superficial difference, it is true) has done no better. It
may have been the failure of Christianity to emancipate itself from
expiatory theories of moral responsibility, guilt, innocence, reward,
punishment, and the rest of it, that baffled its intention of changing
the world. But these are bound up in all philosophies of creation as
opposed to cosmism. They may therefore be regarded as the price we pay
for popular religion.