The Banned Lecture

hens would not have been laying and Hougomont and La Haye Sainte would not have been able to nourish the contending forces. But though it is profitable for the soul to contemplate the extent of what we don’t know, it is in some ways more satisfying to our baser natures to consider what we do know in a reasonable sense of the word. It is not disputable that the battle of Waterloo was fought and won. It is not disputable that it was the climax, or rather the denouement, of cam- paigns lasting over a number of years. And there is no reason for doubting that Napoleon was born in Corsica, that he entered the French army, and rose rapidly to power by a combination of military genius and political intrigue. There is a vast body of indirect evidence which confirms these statements at every point. Taken as a whole, they would be totally inexplicable on any other hypothesis. But when we consider the character of Napoleon, we are at once involved in a mass of contradictions. Probably no one in history has been more discussed, and every writer gives a totally different account. Each seeks to buttress his opinion by incidents which we have no reason to suppose other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So far as we can get any truth out of the matter at all, it is that the character of Napoleon, like that of everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex. And the writers are more or less in the position of the Six Wise Men of Hindustan who were born blind and had to describe an elephant. Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations, we may apply their fruits to the problem of Gilles