The
feeling of France for Napoleon is one of admiration, of delight in a
national military genius, of hero-worship, but there is not intermingled
with it the quality of pure affection which fully justifies the use of
the word _love_, in characterizing the feeling of the South for its
great military leader--the man of whom Lord Wolseley said: "He was a
being apart and superior to all others in every way; a man with whom
none I ever knew, and very few of whom I ever read are worthy to be
compared; a man who was cast in a grander mould and made of finer metal
than all other men."
Nor is this love surprising, for whereas Napoleon was a self-seeking
man, and one whose personal character was not altogether admirable in
other respects, and whereas he could hardly be said to typify France's
ideal of everything a gentleman should be, Lee sought nothing for
himself, was a man of great nobility of character, and was in perfection
a Virginia gentleman. At the end, moreover, where Napoleon's defeat was
that of an aspirant to conquest, glory and empire, Lee's defeat was that
of a cause, and the cause was regarded in the entire South as almost
holy, so that, in defeat, the South felt itself martyred, and came to
look upon its great general with a love and veneration unequaled in
history, and much more resembling the feeling of France for the
canonized Joan of Arc, than for the ambitious Corsican.
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