In which position B---- is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs, or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor brutalized wretches. And so also for B---- it is nothing. Oh, blind of heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age. Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical, as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a _combining_ motive and a _justifying_ motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he, 'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they may be transformed to our likeness.'
Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was filched from Christianity.
The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.