not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with
significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or
St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture
of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American
union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism,
hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own
facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The
Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of
self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an
index of how the authors like to think about themselves.

But the most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises
spontaneously in people's minds. When Victoria came to the throne,
says Mr. Strachey, [Footnote: Lytton Strachey, _Queen Victoria_,
p. 72.] "among the outside public there was a great wave of
enthusiasm. Sentiment and romance were coming into fashion; and the
spectacle of the little girl-queen, innocent, modest, with fair hair
and pink cheeks, driving through her capital, filled the hearts of the
beholders with raptures of affectionate loyalty. What, above all,
struck everybody with overwhelming force was the contrast between
Queen Victoria and her uncles. The nasty old men, debauched and
selfish, pigheaded and ridiculous, with their perpetual burden of
debts, confusions, and disreputabilities--they had vanished like the
snows of winter and here at last, crowned and radiant, was the
spring."

M. Jean de Pierrefeu [Footnote: Jean de Pierrefeu, _G. Q. G. Trois
ans au Grand Quartier General_, pp 94-95.] saw hero-worship at
first hand, for he was an officer on Joffre's staff at the moment of
that soldier's greatest fame: