hen 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
a