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is a mediocrity—and an epitaph for their heroes. “Fatal” is indeed the word. Despite differences in tone and in degree of sympathy (Stendhal is fond of Julien), the two stories are eerily alike, to the point where one wonders whether it is not a single book, one and indivisible, that one has been reading, whether in fact all the novels of the century do not refer, each in its own way, to a governing idea—Napoleon.
    This last is, of course, an exaggeration. That idea cannot be found in the English novel, which largely ignored him—there are only a few references, scattered here and there. Dickens, when he turned to France in A Tale of Two Cities, stopped short with the Terror and the tumbrils; Napoleon was still in the wings, waiting. Wellington unfortunately was no substitute; he was never an Idea on the march, even for his partisans. No ambitious young men in English fiction modeled themselves on the Iron Duke, and it was too late for a generation of budding Cromwells. In a way, I cannot help feeling this as a loss. It may be the reason that nineteenth-century English fiction, in comparison with that of the Continent, seems barren of ideas. There are homiletics and moralizing in plenty but no sovereign concepts. There is no shortage of climbers, but they are ordinary climbers—Lammerses and Veneerings—lacking the divine afflatus. Our own fiction is no better off, with the exception of Captain Ahab, who is obsessed by a personification, though not of the Napoleonic sort. Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima is a poor excuse for a Leveller.
    In Victorian fiction the book that comes closest to having one large governing Idea would be Dombey and Son, which I read as a parable of Empire, the Dombey fortune extending tentacles of investment overseas while sickening at the center in the person of poor little Paul and holding somewhere in its clutches Major Joey Bagshot and his servant, called the Native. But Victorian fiction, generally, seems to have missed out through insularity, which was a side-benefit of Empire, on the shaking experience of the century: the fact of seeing an Idea on the march and being unable to forget it—radiant vision or atrocious spectacle, depending on your point of view.
    Hegel, at Jena, exclaimed that Napoleon was “an idea on horseback”; being a philosopher, he did not find that antipathetic. À few days later, in a more terre à terre frame of mind, he was hurrying to secrete his valuables—manuscript pages of the Phenomenology —from the French soldiers. He had already stated in a lecture on history that “A new epoch has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit [has] succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” On the eve of the battle at Jena, which became a Prussian rout, he wrote admiringly of the “world-soul” of the Emperor.
    Victor Hugo was harsher in Les Misérables: “ce sombre athlète du pugilat de la guerre,” he called the man. It is easier to see what Hugo meant by his curt disparagement than what Hegel meant by his praise. But, between “world-soul” and “Idea on horseback,” I suppose Hegel was saying that Napoleon carried the future in himself, and that indeed was what most people thought or feared. To many minds, Napoleon was not just the man of destiny but destiny itself in a tricorne. It was natural, therefore, that youths seeking to be his avatars would feel they bore the stamp of destiny on them, like the visible “stamp of genius” reported to be graven on the foreheads of Lucien himself and of any number of needy young literary aspirants he meets in Paris. These young men were possessed by an overriding idea of their destiny; or, to put it coarsely, they thought they had a “future” and they gambled in their futures like speculators buying next year’s wheat shares on the grain exchange.
    Such notions were abhorrent to Tolstoy. I do not know how aware he was of