The man who makes the world's great success will not be bound by rules. The great men of the world are great because they refuse to ADMIT impossibilities.
The man who plays chess has two knights, and these knights he can only send two squares in one direction and one square in another, or one square in one direction and two squares in the other. His two bishops can only move diagonally across the board, one on the white and one on the black. His castles lumber along on straight lines. His king cannot be touched or taken, and the game ends when the king is in fatal danger. The queen, in the dull game we call chess, can do almost anything.
But Napoleon was really a great man, and the game of life that he played was very different from the chess game.
When the king was in hopeless danger, Napoleon's game had just begun. Others before him had looked upon kings on the board of life as the chess player looks upon the wooden or ivory king before him.
But to Napoleon kings were pawns, to be moved around and made ridiculous. When he felt like it, he made pawns into kings—the descendant of one of his pawn-kings reigns to-day in Sweden.
Napoleon's game deprived the queen of all power—she was less than a pawn. HIS game sent the bishops hopping back and forth, diagonally or at right angles, as he saw fit. He created knights to his heart's content, and he taught them to move as he wanted.
Napoleon was great because there was nothing of the chess player about him. He did not admit of regular, foreordained moves on the chess-board or on the board of life. HE REFUSED TO CONSIDER ANYTHING IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL HE HAD TRIED IT. He tells us himself that he deserved credit for crossing the Alps, not that he accomplished a difficult feat, but because he refused to believe those who declared the feat impossible.
If anybody said "Check" to Napoleon, he kicked over the chess-board and began a new game of his own—that was what surprised the poor, dull old Austrian generals in Italy.
No; the real great man is no chess player, he has no chess player's mind. And do you, Mr. Reader, waste no time at chess, if you have any idea of being WORTH WHILE in a big or a little way. ——
The Napoleon of the future will be no epileptic. That terrible disease has afflicted many of the noblest intellects, and it is undoubtedly a disease brought on, or at least intensified, by great intellectual activity and a lack of co-ordination between the mental and physical operations of the body. But some great men have been great, not because of that terrible disease, but in spite of it. Science will conquer that trouble, as it has conquered others, and the scientist to do this work will be, himself, one of the world's great men. ——