It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment last evening with a friend—a man known alike for his learning and character—when he turned to me and said, “I will never have a hero again.” We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the fabulous offspring of comfortable times—supermen reigning on Olympus and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one.
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near—near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said, as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the men—these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards—the demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.