air, not more
distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than
for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of
self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving,
which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond
its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more
or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void
which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust.
Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls,"
as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral
instinct, called by Milton,--

"That last infirmity of noble mind."

In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as
hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the
spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than
Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.

The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French
nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal
vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he
does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and
the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the
unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the
moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the
strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the
paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good
sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a
compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of
justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that
enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot
and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that
he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive
insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive
discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a
soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and
equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The
moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was
but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis
of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical,
or