It is very pleasant to the astrologer when those rare occasions arise on which he can sum up the potentialities of any force in one succint phrase. Such an occasion is here. The explosive force of Uranus counteracts completely all that there may be of sluggish Saturn in Capricornus; and we get ‘an he-goat also, against whom there is no rising up’. The man with Uranus thus placed is, in Kipling’s phrase, a first-class fighting man’. The examples of this are so convincing that they need only to be announced. The power evoked is so great that no troubles with the personality appear to daunt it, unless they are extraordinarily evil. The mabr1cal will of the man, his mission in the world, are everything to him.
We have, to begin with, the poet Baudelaire, who despite all persecutions, revolutionised French thought, and by adopting Swinburne as his spiritual first-born son, revolutionised English thought as well; we have Louis Pasteur, who revolutionised surgery in the teeth of the deadliest opposition; Huxley, who battled for science against orthodox religion, the most Homeric and spectacular combat of the Victorian period; Wallace one of his principal colleagues in the fight; Kruger, who broke the power of the British Empire, and staggered humanity by the dour fight that his handful of burglars put up against the overwhelming hosts of the oppressor; Grant who smashed Lee; Cicero, who smashed everybody in sight, from Catiline to Varro; Burton, the most desperate fighter in private and in public life, that England ever bore; and Tolstoy, who went out into the snow of a Russian winter, to die in a wayside railway station, so bitter, even in extreme old age with the hand of death upon his shoulder, was his hatred of ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ and the normal life of man.
Then we have Rosa Bonheur, whose life was one long battle against her own femininity; and finally George III (whom we must have regarded merely as a symbol of the race which he ruled) who broke with dogged courage and endurance the power of the great Napoleon. But even in himself we can see the fighting quality; it was his obstinate bull-dog stupidity that lost to his crown these United States of America.
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