Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/192

 world an extraordinary rogue or two. Certainly few of us ever purge ourselves of a lingering fondness for such eminent villains as Richard III, Cellini, Henry VIII, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.

It is not of course their criminality that we admire. Paradoxical as it sounds, we seldom show ourselves such disinterested lovers of virtue as when we feel a thrill of approbation in the presence of the great criminals. We have no weak bias of a merely personal and self-interested attachment in their favour. What we respond to in them is the pure quality of their cutting intelligence, the rare hardness of their courage, the sheer potency of their will—virtues by us for once subconsciously abstracted from their practical consequences and so valued. Whenever you find yourself saying, "I like that man—I don't know why; he has almost every trait that I dislike," you may be reasonably sure that the man has also some powerful virtue which you have overlooked, or which has as yet not been listed by the professors of ethics. For the popular and undiscriminating idolization of athletes, dancers, singers, marksmen, poets, jockeys, and supreme bakers there is this justification: each one of these heroes has demonstrated for the time the utmost capacity of the