saving
conception of "greatness." "Greatness," it seems, excludes the standards
of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong, there is no
atrocity for which a "great" man can be blamed.

"C'est grand!" * say the historians, and there no longer exists either
good or evil but only "grand" and "not grand." Grand is good, not
grand is bad. Grand is the characteristic, in their conception, of some
special animals called "heroes." And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm
fur coat and leaving to perish those who were not merely his comrades
but were (in his opinion) men he had brought there, feels que c'est
grand, *(2) and his soul is tranquil.

* "It is great."

* (2) That it is great.

"Du sublime (he saw something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n'y
a qu'un pas," * said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been
repeating: "Sublime! Grand! Napoleon le Grand!" Du sublime au ridicule
il n'y a qu'un pas.

* "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."

And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with
the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness
and immeasurable meanness.

For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human
actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity,
goodness, and truth are absent.

CHAPTER XIX

What Russian, reading the account of the last part of the campaign
of 1812, has not experienced an uncomfortable feeling of regret,
dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked himself how it is
that the French were not all captured or destroyed when our three armies
surrounded them in superior numbers, when the disordered French, hungry
and freezing, surrendered in crowds, and when (as the historians relate)
the aim of the Russians was to stop the French, to cut them off, and
capture them all?

How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than the
French had given battle at Borodino, did not achieve its purpose when it
had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim was to capture
them? Can the French be so enormously superior to us that when we had
surrounded them with superior forces we could not beat them? How could
that happen?

History (or what is called by that name) replying to these questions
says that this occurred because Kutuzov and Tormasov and Chichagov, and
this man and that man, did not execute such