In reply, Porcellis mentioned the name of the man of whom Luke's father had spoken so highly that morning at the railway station in Americus.
Huber pushed forward a chair.
"Sit down," he said, "and have a cigarette. I want to ask you one question more. You've been all over the map. You've got the cosmopolitan point of view. What do you think of this man?"
"I think," said Porcellis, accepting both the chair and the cigarette, "that it doesn't make any difference what I think of him." He lit the cigarette. "But I'm quite sure," he presently added, "he is the sort of man nobody can help thinking something, about. Why do you ask?"
"Because——" Luke was not certain why he did ask. He could not politely inquire of Porcellis whether he believed that his brother-in-law had accepted, to aid his election, money from a power that could not but be interested in the official actions of a District-Attorney of New York. "Because," he compromised, "my father was speaking to me about him only this morning."
"So were a lot of other fathers. So are a lot of other fathers every morning. That's greatness. What I think is that Old Napoleon is the greatest man this country has ever produced."
"You think so well of him as that!" Luke was amazed.
"I didn't say I thought he was good," Porcellis defined; "I said I thought he was great. Greatness hasn't anything to do with good or bad, or only accidentally. The greatest national figure a country produces is the figure that most intensely and—well, and powerfully—expresses that country. That's why Shakespeare was the greatest man produced by Elizabethan England."
"Oh—Shakespeare!" laughed Luke.
"Why not?" asked Porcellis. "Shakespeare lived in a country and time of expanding intellectual conceptions, and he expressed them the way I've said. We live in a country and time of tremendous financial combination and expansion; we're not working in the material of intellectual conceptions, except as we conceive finance intellectually; we're working with figures and dollar-marks and differentials and compound interest and dividends as complicated as an astronomer's calculations. Well, this little old man in Wall Street can see those figures before they happen; he can make them come to life out of nothing—make them happen, give them life just the way Shakespeare gave life to another sort of ideas. These ideas are the ideas of our country; they are our country. Here is a genius that most fully and powerfully, most intensely and perfectly expresses them, and so I say he is the American Shakespeare."