three
spheres, during the summer and autumn of 1796. The changes, like those
of most revolutions, were changes of emphasis and degree in the
application of principles already divined. "Divide and conquer" was an
old maxim; it was a novelty to see it applied in warfare and politics
as Bonaparte applied it in Italy. It has been remarked that the
essential difference between Napoleon and Frederick the Great was that
the latter had not ten thousand men a month to kill. The notion that
war should be short and terrible had, indeed, been clear to the great
Prussian; Carnot and the times afforded the opportunity for its
conclusive demonstration by the genius of the greater Corsican.
Concentration of besiegers to breach the walls of a town was nothing
new; but the triumphant application of the same principle to an
opposing line of troops, though well known to Julius Caesar, had been
forgotten, and its revival was Napoleon's masterpiece. The martinets
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had so exaggerated the
formalities of war that the relation of armies to the fighting-ground
had been little studied and well-nigh forgotten; the use of the map
and the compass, the study of reliefs and profiles in topography,
produced in Bonaparte's hands results that seemed to duller minds
nothing short of miraculous. One of these was to oppose the old-school
rigid formation of troops by any formation more or less open and
irregular according to circumstances, but always the kind best suited
to the character of the seat of war. The first two days at Arcola were
the triumphant vindication of this concept. Finally, there was a
fascination for the French soldiers in the primitive savagery of their
general, which, though partly concealed, and somewhat held in by
training, nevertheless was willing that the spoils of their conquest
should be devoted to making the victorious contestants opulent; which
scorned the limitations of human powers in himself and them, and thus
accomplished feats of strength and stratagem which gratified to
satiety that love for the uncommon, the ideal, and the great which is
inherent in the spirit of their nation. In the successful combination
and evolution of all these elements there was a grandeur which
Bonaparte and every soldier of his army appreciated at its full value.

The military side of Bonaparte's genius is ordinarily considered the
strongest. Judged by what is easily visible in the way of immediate
conseq