Part 6

“You are indebted to Mr. Nivernois for it. He gave me, the other day, a mass of musical manuscripts of his own composition. I picked this out of them, not as being by any means the best, but the most suited for insertion in this play. He has more genius than all the men I have ever seen put together; but he has abandoned composition, because he says it is impossible to beat Bellini. The violin that I played with to-night was presented to him by Paganini, as a mark of his admiration; he gave it to me.”

“I wonder that he would part with such a gift,” said Miss Stanhope.

“I believe that he gave it to me,” said the other, “lest he should seem to himself to value the tribute of any man.”

“What a singular person he must be!” said Miss Stanhope, who had been much struck with his appearance, and greatly interested by the oddness and novelty of his character.

The company which had formed Mrs. Althorpe’s _cortège_ at the opera, together with two or three other invited guests, were seated around her small but elegant supper-table. A double circle of wax candles in an _or-molu_ chandelier, which hung over the centre of it, cast their pure white light upon the numerous silver dishes and richly cut glass which covered it. After a little while, Mr. Nivernois strode into the room. He was a small man, and the strides which he made were as long as himself. He took his place in a vacant seat which had been reserved for him, opposite to Miss Stanhope. They were talking about Napoleon. He listened in silence, till a pause occurred.

“When nature had finished making the devils,” said he, pouring out for himself a capacious goblet of Chambertin, “it threw together all the rubbish that remained, and out of it formed Napoleon.”

Miss Stanhope laughed. “Do you mean that for praise or censure, Mr. Nivernois?”

“Napoleon’s soul,” he replied, “was something larger than to be enkernelled in the shell of any definition. Put together all the moral epithets the lexicons furnish, of wisdom and of folly, of greatness and of littleness, of magnanimity and meanness, force and feebleness, and every thing else, and fling the whole mass, in a lump, at his character, and you may have some chance of hitting the mark. It would be difficult to say anything of him that would be wholly false; impossible to say anything altogether true. When you have circumnavigated him, you have sailed round the whole world. His character was somewhat like the poet’s vision of the temple of Fame. On one side you behold the severe and classic beauty of a Doric front, with images of antique strength and grace: on another, the grandeur and the gloom of a Gothic structure: on a third, the pride and splendor and magnificent exaggeration of Eastern pomp: on the fourth, the dull, impenetrable mystery of Egypt. His spirit was as various as the morning sky, and his chamberlain, on two successive days, never woke up the same man. The truth is, his life was an acted drama; not of the Æschylus kind, with some unity in it, but a Nat Lee drama of five-and-twenty acts. If we take it that he displayed his sincere character, and was that which he appeared to be, we must conclude that he was a glorious fool, among greater fools; a madman, whose frenzy was, however, the fatality of Europe. So viewed, he was born for bombast, as a trout for rising; his sentences have not a grain of sense to five quarts of syllables; a fortunate adventurer, who appeared at such a conjuncture of politics that his daring served him for talent, his selfishness for sagacity, his passion for power. But I suppose that Bonaparte always wore the buskin; that the historical Napoleon was but a character which the real one put on to dazzle and delude the fancies of men, and fire their passions, till, drunk as with wine, they might be bound and led by him. In his own more actual being, he was a cold, calculating, shrewd and wholly interested schemer. His performances were always for the author’s benefit. This Garrick sometimes blundered in the assumed characters in which he spent his life. He too frequently mistook ferocity for majesty; imagined he was royal when he was only brutal, and thought he was playing the hero when he was only playing the fool. He assumed the madman, generally, when he dealt with men, and only put on the blackguard when he talked to women. He knew the truth of Bacon’s saying that there is in human nature more of the fool than of the wise, and that that which addresses itself to the foolish part of men’s minds will prevail over that which speaks to the wiser. He built a great temple of delusion, in which he, the priest, should continually shout “Glory,” and all the people answer “Amen.” His breast was a natural mirror and antitype of all the passions and follies of the fools called Frenchmen. By studying his own foolishness, he knew what ropes to pull to make their fool’s bells jingle. He is, therefore, of the weaknesses and worser powers of men, the ablest metaphysician that has appeared. One of his remarks opens the mind, as snuff opens the head. He was a poet in practice. Sydney’s rule, “Fool! look into thy heart and write,” he obeyed; and wrote empires. Of course, an adventitious power like this cannot be measured; in fact, when supplied by so seething a fancy and so combining an intellect as he had, it is altogether illimitable; he had only to conceive a new idea to possess a new power. He therefore belongs to that class of men of whom Du Quesnay has said that one and one make a hundred and eleven. When you can define the genius of Shakspeare, you will be able to describe the _character_ of Napoleon; the two things are cognate. As we see him, he was not an entity, but a mere crystallization of ideas, which were continually depositing around him like the successive layers of an oyster shell. A philosophical Haüy might split off crystal after crystal of ideas, and he would find the ultimate crystal still an idea. Every thing of him was visionary, and not substance. Squeeze him in your hand, and he crushes like a dandy’s locks. Try that process on such a man as Wellington, and you soon feel the bone. In sooth, the Duke is all bone.”

“But you would not think of comparing Wellington and Napoleon,” said Mr. Temple.

“No more than I would compare the frothy forms of the rock with the granite substance of the Alps. There are some sentiments,” said he, with a fervent, suppressed tone, “which lie so deep within us that they seem to be a part of our souls; in me, veneration of Wellington is such. Since the Duke of Marlborough was buried, there has not lived, nor lives there, a man to whom I bow with an entire reverence, excepting Wellington. When I stood face to face with him, I felt how truly Scott had said that he was the only man in whose presence he felt himself nothing.”

“But do you think that he has Bonaparte’s genius?”

“Perhaps not; but where you see a man who is great without genius, you see the greatest kind of man the world knows any thing of; and where you see a poet who prevails without passion, you see an order of poetry high and enduring; such, on the one hand, is Wellington; on the other, Pope. All that such men do is done by force of intellect and might of character, and the results are true and permanent.”

“No doubt the Duke is a great man.”

“A greater there never lived. It is the misfortune of this age that it has no guides or leaders; no profound, thinking men, who, knowing the past and caring for the future, can judge rightly of the present, and give laws to the opinions of the time. Now, the multitude decide on every thing for themselves; and every thing is despised which is beyond the taste of the vulgar. Napoleon was essentially a hero for the vulgar; fools, who have no idea of power but in tumult, or of strength but in struggle, cannot comprehend the calm, unapproachable grandeur of Wellington—a grandeur too high for sympathy. I have studied him in his despatches; I have talked with him—I have seen him all round—there is in that man more of innate, imperturbable greatness than in all the world beside. When Napoleon was about to strike a blow, he raised up around him a cloud, a very tempest, of passions and fancies, through which every thing was magnified and mistaken. Wellington goes to work plainly, indifferently, frigidly, and it is only by the result that you recognise _in scena Roscium_. In the deep perturbation which came over the spirit of Napoleon when he essayed any vast work: in the mighty effort, the tremendous strain—inevitably successful though it may have been—you see one whose undertakings are above his nature; who must lash his energies to make them efficient enough. In the cool, common-place, regular, business-like proceedings of Wellington—never erring or unprosperous—we behold one whose native, unalterable strength is so high that the loftiest enterprise is to him not exciting; who, in conquering glory, is doing his ordinary work. His trade was to be always successful, and he was perfect master of it. There is the same difference between the two that there is between the youth and manhood of genius: in the former, more fervor and greater consciousness of power; in the latter, far more real might. The distinction may be marked by the names of the two demons who, in Æschylus, bind Prometheus to the rock; one was Force, the other Strength. There is the same diversity which exists between the calm, grey light of the sun, and the lurid, flashing, noisy brilliance of fire-works. Wellington is the representative of the genius of England, which, from the beginning of history, bearing aloft the standard of integrity, good sense and solid freedom, has stood like a rock in the sea of human passions and powers: one while baffling the frantic tyranny of the Papacy, and at another stamping under its iron heel the struggling fiend of Jacobinism. Napoleon is the type of France—a nation which has no power save of paroxysms, and cannot cease to be frivolous but by becoming ferocious. Wellington rides through life like a Tartar horseman, with one perpetual posture, that of the lance in rest; with one fixed gaze, that on the object of his attack. Napoleon scoured through his existence like a monkey on a circus horse, brandishing a flag, stooping over his nag’s head or under his body, jumping down to jump up again, and all to gain the wonder and applause of the spectators; going round and round, and ending where he began. I must finish the parallel by saying that his course was marked out for him by the whip of a base necessity. Napoleon was the slave and courtier of opinion, which he at length flattered into the belief that it was a master. Wellington despised and neglected opinion, till it has come fawning about his feet. Vanity had grasped Napoleon by the throat, and he was her garlanded victim. You never see in Wellington that sycophancy to circumstances, that obsequiousness to fortune. He seized Destiny by the collar, and fairly swung her round. Consider the wonderful, sublime achievement of Assaye; study the political skill which he displayed in the Peninsula, the miraculous combination of ingenuity, temper, firmness and authority by which he threw order into a chaos of difficulties, and, himself alone, sustained a world of jarring interests; contemplate the glorious action of the Arapeiles, of which Austerlitz was a dull and broken reflection; ponder the campaign of Torres Vedras, the master-piece of art, the wonder of history—a conception as felicitous as the brightest of Newton’s, and executed with a perfection which delights the observer even to mirthfulness—a model of _beauty_ in war, by which victory was reduced to certainty, and war became one of the exact sciences: review these, and tell me by what proofs of intellectual power in Napoleon’s history they are exceeded. Remember, too, that of all Wellington’s doings we have unvarnished and exact accounts; while of Napoleon’s actions we have in many cases only the statements of himself, the most enormous liar that ever breathed the upper air. Wellington was a great man; Napoleon was a child, who, by the despair of an infinite and hopeless ambition, had strengthened himself into a giant.”

“There is this remarkable consideration in Wellington’s case, that the whole of his wide and free career was wholly run within the limits of duty. In that respect, no man in history may be compared with him, except Belisarius. What such men do is done without the inspiration of the passions.”

“Yes: when a man flings himself free from all human ties, and is self-hurled into the infinite abandonment of the lusts of the mind, his soul becomes charged with the might and the magnificence of all the fires of Hell. The infernal saints all minister their power to his spirit:—Vanity, with its craving eyes—Pride, with its vaulting restlessness—the steel-tipped thongs of Ambition, the fiendish vigor of Despair. It was a dangerous thing to conquer Napoleon; he recoiled from defeat with the spring of a demon. When you remember that Wellington had neither this power, which was possessed by Alexander and Gustavus and Napoleon, nor yet the religious enthusiasm of Cromwell, but did all by the natural and native strength of his ordinary intellect, you must yield him a respect which the others cannot share. He has considered that, in politics as in geometry, the shortest line is the straightest. Napoleon was made up of artifice, of which Mirabeau has said that it may indicate intellect, but it never exists in intellect of a superior order, unless accompanied with meanness of heart; it is a lie in action, and it springs from fear and personal interest, and consequently from meanness.”

“To be sure, the moral eminence of the men will bear no comparing.”

“Persons of great souls and lofty meditations recognise the dignity of nature even in the degradation of fate. They are conscious of its great origin, its mournful condition, its high destiny; henceforth there is for them no scorn, but a sympathising tolerance, a respectful compassion. Napoleon’s moral power was the power of ferocious contempt; it was based upon a disdainful hatred of his species. Depend upon it, that no thinking man can cherish an habitual disgust who has himself a soul, or abhor his fellows who has any self-respect. You find in Wellington none of these wild, these savage sentiments, these extremenesses of counsel or of motive. He is always sane, practical, right-hearted and right-minded. His actions illustrate that useful wisdom which the affairs of life demand, and I know no writer from whom so valuable precepts may be learned. In or out of Oxford, he has been the hardest student of his times; for the saddle is, after all, the true chair of thought. As for Napoleon being great, it seems to me that the idea is an absurdity. Alfred, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, these were great men; and such men build up all that is built, and the history of a nation from their time till you come to another great man, is only the record of pulling down what they built up. But Napoleon pulled down everything, and built up nothing. He built, to be sure, ideally or in opinion; that is, he made systems and structures and constitutions, on paper, notionally, and by name, but not in things, in substance, of the elements of real existence; else by a word, or a reversed look, they could not have been destroyed. What the hand creates, only the thousand hands of Time can destroy; what the breath makes, a breath obliterates, for the thing made was no more than a breath. Draw a line around certain states on the map, and call it the confederation of the Rhine; give geographical nicknames to a quantity of soldiers, and call it an aristocracy: behold the creations of Napoleon! Alfred established tithings, hundred courts and county courts; that principle of self-government—for the administration of law is the most important part of government—that little flame, shrined in those humble vestal temples, and there kept safe against the blasts of ages of tyranny’s turbulence, blazed up eight centuries later, and wrapt the throne of Charles in combustion. Plantaganet kings might call their system an absolute monarchy; the Tudors and Stuarts might diffuse the idea of divine right; but Alfred, by establishing juries and the common law, had made the _thing_ republic, and that was sure to beat down the _name_, monarchy. Call you a man great whose life-work is swept away in half an hour, without any principle of re-action or re-establishment showing itself? Nay, his works always carried with them the germ of their own destruction. The light that shone around his system was the phosphorescence of decay.”

“This much,” said Mr. Temple, “may be said for Napoleon, that he raised himself to absoluteism without degrading others to slavery.”

“Why, ’tis a monkey’s trick to mount up on people’s heads. Richelieu got there, as a man does; not by walking up men’s backs, but by making them stoop for him to get on. In effect, the true and bright view of Napoleon’s empire is, to consider it a democracy. Viewed as a monarch, rising and reigning in a constitution fashioned after the old forms, he was a mountebank and an impostor; considered as the controlling spirit in a democracy of powerful spirits, the head-idea in a nation—tumult of ideas—the odd man who is pushed up in a crowd of men—he becomes a spectacle of wonder, a riddle of infinite wisdom. The last of the old system, he is nothing; the first of a new one, everything. Regarded as the type of that democratic system which will overrun the world, his empire is a splendid, infinitely-crowded rehearsal of the coming drama of ages. He who would understand the whole nature, power and philosophy of democracy, must study that empire. Many thoughts belong to that subject. But I have harangued too long. Pitt was the man who said with absolute truth, that Napoleon was “the child and champion of democracy.” The spectacle of the force of old monarchy in the person of the stern, iron duke, slowly advancing and destroying this young system, is the picture of the gloomy Saturn relentlessly devouring his joyous giant-boys. The Jupiter of that old deity nestles yet a babe near his bosom; his begetting was in Pitt’s time, his birth at the Reform Bill.”

“Napoleon must certainly be tried by new principles of judgment. The maxims upon which the fame of Turenne and Marlboro’ has been settled, will not give him his true position.”

“Napoleon made glory according to a receipt of his own. But the misfortune is, that he not only imposed this false stuff upon us, but he revolutionized the chemistry by which its spuriousness should be detected. He depraved the opinions, and bent backwards the consciences of people. But upon the whole, I think we may say, that in life, the most beautiful of the fine arts, his taste was anything but classical. He belonged to the David school, and painted on the canvass of Time, such pictures as that man hung up in the Louvre—bombast conceptions, executed in the daub. But after all he was a splendid creature; he made a glorious pastime in Europe; he showed the world a magnificent sport; he filled the pages of history with matter which possessed an endless interest. Strike out his career, and what blankness remains! The truth is, this life of ours is enveloped in endless coverings, coats, over-coats and blankets of common-place—an atmosphere of common-place, dull, dense, unbreathable—a waking, inlaid with sleep—life overlaid with death. Walled in, and under-buried in a mass of tedium, one cannot get one’s breath. Sometimes, the world becomes intensely conscious of this imprisonment, and goes mad in trying to get free from itself. What wonder, if suffocated by being wrapped in a dun, drowsy, over-growing thraldom of common-place—its eye sick with sameness, its ear vexed with a cracked monotony, its soul should grow convulsive, become volcanic, and throwing off the whole disgusting encumbrance of the social system, it should rush forth to the free wilderness where it may once more see the fresh, eternal stars, and breathe a living air. And we must thank Napoleon for his battles; for war is the glory of our disgraced existence. Struggle is the parent of all the greatness of our being. It is only when minds wrestle in the energy of desperation with other minds, or with things, as in war, that the last degrees of intellectual and moral power are seen. The literary man goes half to sleep, and keeps awake only enough to purr his satisfaction at his demi-unconsciousness. In this world we must fight even to keep ourselves alive. The politicians of this piping time doze away their days as if they had a hundred existences to enjoy: as if life were a chair to loll in, a corridor to walk, or a hall to dance in, and not a general battle-field on which to fight for everything.”

There was that in the appearance and manner of Mr. Nivernois—his eye, his glowing countenance, the intense life which there was about him, rendered amiable by an entire simplicity of spirit—which was admirably adapted to captivate the heart and fancy of a woman, especially an enthusiastic one. What effect had been produced upon the imaginative temperament of Miss Stanhope, we cannot say. As she was going away, Mrs. Althorpe said to her,

“This Mr. Nivernois is certainly a man of genius, but he is mad, stark mad—like Mazeppa’s steed—

Wild as the wild deer, and untaught, With spur and bridle undefiled.

But he has blood and fortune. I sincerely wish you would take him in hand and tame him: he is worthy of your attention, and if properly brought under, would make a great addition to good society.”

The next day Nivernois was walking in the street and had his attention attracted by a sign-board, which gave notice of a gallery of pictures. Having nothing better to do, he went into it. The collection was a good one, and he spent some time in looking at different productions of the old masters. The feeling which chiefly occupied his mind was regret that genius so exalted as many of these artists possessed should have left no monument more durable than a perishing canvass, which would one day cause all that marvellous skill to be nothing but a name. His eye was presently drawn to a portrait of a young lady of singular beauty. The picture was a fresh one, and he thought that he had seen the features before, but where or when, he could not remember. The side of the figure was presented, with the face turned round over the shoulder towards the spectator. Her dress was blue; a laced veil was on her head, and in her hand a _bouquet_ of flowers, around which was a band on which was the word “Love.”

“Beautiful creature!” said he aloud, as he gazed upon the portrait, “and whom do you love?”

“Thee,” faintly said a soft voice above him. He started and looked up. There was a gallery above, and upon it a door covered by a curtain. He saw the curtain move as if some one retreated rapidly through it, and he thought that he had caught a glimpse of a blue dress. He ran rapidly up to the gallery and through the curtained door, in hopes of discovering the speaker, perhaps the original of the portrait. He searched every apartment of the building, but in vain: no one was to be found. He returned to the picture and sat down before it.