Imagination, the third element of his personality, is the real driving force of his self-confidence and his energy. Continually at war with the calculating part of his nature, fantasy, in the end, brings this harbourer of opposites to destruction. The imaginative power, which links the poet to the statesman (enabling both unceasingly to dwell in the affective world of strangers as well as in their own), is also the source of his knowledge of men and his guide to the management of men. But always his energy interacts with other qualities. One who, for analytical purposes, would force the living whole of his character into the framework of a system, cannot avoid, from time to time, breaking threads that he may bind other threads together.

“I know not what I do, for everything depends on events. I have not a will of my own, but expect everything from their outcome.... The greater one is, the less can one have a will. One is always dependent upon events and circumstances.” Such words, casually introduced into a letter from husband to wife, express the distantly visible forms of his fantasy; for only the imaginative man, not tied to systems and principles, trusts himself to the movements of the moments, allows his spirit to roam freely, and discovers his course as he goes. In this sense, his whole career is improvisation, though in the converse way from that in which most people improvise. He calculated little things in advance with great precision; whereas his worldwide designs were originated, transformed, improvised, in accordance with circumstances and developments. “One who has become familiar with affairs, despises all theories, and makes use of them only like the geometricians, not in order to move forward in a straight line, but merely to keep heading in the same direction.”

This direction, this fundamental idea of the statesman, was, moreover, only possible in a man whose mind was simultaneously imaginative and mathematical. It is his most ardent vision and his coolest calculation; it is his political aim, his hope, his ambition: Europe. If this vision could be realised only by force of arms, that was because of the fierceness with which the first republic of Europe was again and again attacked by the European princes. We have seen how earnestly he strove for peace. No doubt he chose his means badly, his error being due to the time, the circumstances, and his own domineering character. But his mistakes as to method still leave undiminished the genius of the seer who looked forward towards an aim which was again to become an object of statesmanship a hundred years after his fall.

“There are in Europe more than thirty million Frenchmen, fifteen million Italians, thirty million Germans.... Out of each of these peoples, I wanted to make a united national whole.... That would have supplied the best chance of establishing a general unity of laws; a unity of principles and thoughts and feelings, of outlooks and interests.... Then it would have been possible to think of founding the United States of Europe after the model of the United States of America or of the Greek Amphictyonic League.... What perspectives of strength, greatness, and prosperity this opens up!... For France, unity has been wrought; in Spain, it has proved unattainable; to establish the Italian nation, I should have needed twenty years; to make the Germans a nation, would have required still more patience, and all I could do was to simplify their monstrous constitution. At the same time, I wanted to pave the way for the unification of the great interests of Europe, just as I had unified the parties in France.... The transient mutterings of the peoples troubled me little; they would have been reconciled to me by the result.... _Europe would soon have become one nation, and any who travelled in it would always have been in a common fatherland.... Sooner or later, this union will be brought about by the force of events. The first impetus has been given; and, after the fall and the disappearance of my system, it seems to me that the only way in which an equilibrium can be achieved in Europe is through a league of nations._”

Here there is no talk of a dictatorial welding together of different stocks, or of an enthusiastic fraternisation. He speaks only of interests, and of a preliminary unification of these on a national and racial basis. The work of the nineteenth century was to inaugurate the preliminaries by the establishment of the nations. The twentieth century opens with the realisation of the Napoleonic idea.