Part 38

[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 1769, died a prisoner on the island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieutenant of artillery at the age of sixteen. He had become a captain when the revolution reached its height in the Reign of Terror. Though never an actor in the horrors of Jacobin rule, he was supposed to have been a warm friend of Robespierre. After the fall of the terrorists Napoleon took the side of the convention, and at the head of its troops dispersed the infuriated mob of Montagnards with the famous “whiff of grapeshot” which blew up the last remains of the party of 1793. After his marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, the young soldier was appointed to the command of the army of Italy. In two years Napoleon, in a series of splendid battles, annihilated four Austrian armies, liberated Italy, and forced Austria to a humiliating peace. After the failure of the Egyptian expedition Napoleon returned to France, and by the _coup d’état_ of December, 1799, attained supreme power as first consul. The second Italian campaign of 1800 was no less brilliant than the first, culminating in the battle of Marengo. In 1802 Napoleon was made life-consul, “the swelling prologue of the imperial theme,” for nine months later he assumed the title of emperor, and was crowned by Pope Pius VII at Notre Dame. The year 1812 was the beginning of the disasters which finally dethroned him. The terrible Russian campaign, and the utter defeat of his arms in Spain by Lord Wellesley, afterward Duke of Wellington, marked a change in the clock of destiny. The great European coalition of 1813 brought overwhelming forces against him, resulting in the great battle of Dresden, lasting three days--October 16th, 17th, and 18th--which broke the French power. The allies entered Paris, March 31, 1814, and Napoleon abdicated on April 11th. His exile in Elba lasted less than ten months, and on his return to France two hundred thousand men rallied to him at his call. The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 15, 1815, ended in his overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, assisted by Marshal Blücher. Napoleon’s second abdication was followed by his surrender to the English, and his exile to St. Helena for the rest of his life.]

Napoleon was endowed by nature with a clear, penetrating, vast, comprehensive, and peculiarly active mind, nor had he less decision of character than clearness of intellect. He always seized at once the decisive argument, in battle the most effective movement. To conceive, resolve, and perform were with him but one indivisible act, so wonderful was his rapidity, that not a moment was spent in reflection between perception and action. Any obstacle presented to such a mind by a trifling objection, by indolence, weakness, or disaffection, served but to cause his anger to spring forth and cover you with its foam. Had he chosen some civil profession where success can only be attained by persuading men and winning them over, he might have endeavored to subdue or moderate his fiery temperament, but flung into the career of arms, and endowed with the sovereign faculty of seeing the surest means of conquest at a glance, he became at one bound the ruler of Italy, at a second the master of the French Republic, at a third the sovereign of Europe.

What wonder that a nature formed so impetuous by God should become more so from success; what wonder if he were abrupt, violent, domineering, and unbending in his resolutions! If apart from the battle-field he exercised that tact so necessary in civil business, it was in the council of state, though even there he decided questions with a sagacity and clearness of judgment that astonished and subdued his hearers, except on some few occasions when he was misled for a moment by passion or want of sufficient knowledge of the subject under discussion. Both nature and circumstances combined to make him the most despotic and impetuous of men.

In contemplating his career, it does not appear that this fiery, despotic nature revealed itself at once or altogether. In his youth he was lean, taciturn, and even sad--sad from concentrated ambition that feeds upon itself until it finds an outlet and attains the object of its desires. As a young man he was sometimes rude, morose, until becoming the object of universal admiration he became more open, calm, and communicative--lost the meagerness that made his countenance so expressive, and, as one may say, unfolded himself. Consul for life, emperor, conqueror at Marengo and Austerlitz, still exercising some little restraint on himself, he seemed to have reached the apogee of his moral existence; and his figure, then moderately stout, was radiant with regular and manly beauty. But soon, when nations submitted and sovereigns bowed before him, he was no longer restrained by respect for man or even for nature. He dared, attempted all things; spoke without restraint; was gay, familiar, and often intemperate in language. His moral and physical nature became more developed, nor did his extreme stoutness diminish his Olympian beauty; his fuller countenance still preserved the eagle glance; and when descending from his accustomed height from which he excited admiration, fear, and hatred, he became merry, familiar, and almost vulgar, he could resume his dignity in a moment, for he was able to descend without demeaning himself. And when at length, in advancing life, he is supposed to be less active or less daring, because of his increasing _embonpoint_, or because Fortune had ceased to smile on him, he bounds more impetuously than ever on his charger, and shows that for his ardent mind matter is no burden, misfortune no restraint.

Such were the successive developments of this extraordinary nature. It is not easy to estimate Napoleon’s moral qualities, for it is rather difficult to discover goodness in a soldier who was continually strewing the earth with dead, or friendship in a man who never knew an equal, or probity in a potentate in whose power were the riches of the universe. Still, though an exception to all ordinary rules, we may occasionally catch some traits of the moral physiognomy of this extraordinary man.

In all things promptness was his distinctive characteristic. He would become angry, but would recover his calmness with wonderful facility, almost ashamed of his excitement, laughing at it if he could do so without compromising his dignity, and would again address with affectionate words or gestures the officer he had overpowered by his burst of passion. His anger was sometimes affected for the purpose of intimidating subalterns who neglected their duty. When real, his displeasure passed like a flash of lightning; when affected, it lasted as long as it was needed. When he was no longer obliged to command, restrain, or impel men, he became gentle, simple, and just, just as every man of great mind is who understands human nature, and appreciates and pardons its weaknesses because he knows that they are inevitable. At St. Helena, deprived of all external prestige, his power departed, without any other ascendant over his companions than that derived from his intellect and disposition, Napoleon ruled them with absolute sway, won them by unchanging amiability; and that to such a degree that having feared him for the greater part of their lives, they ended by loving him for the remainder. On the battle-field he had acquired an insensibility that was almost fearful; he could behold unmoved the ground covered with a hundred thousand lifeless bodies, for none had ever caused so much human blood to flow as he.

This insensibility was, so to speak, a consequence of his profession. Often in the evening he would ride over the battle-field, which in the morning he had strewed with all the horrors of war, to see that the wounded were removed, a proceeding that might be the result of policy, but was not; and he frequently sprang from his horse to assure himself whether in an apparently lifeless body the vital spark did not still linger. At Wagram he saw a fine young man, in the uniform of the cuirassiers, lying on the ground with his face covered with clotted blood; he sprang at once from his horse, supported the head of the wounded youth on his knee, restored him by the aid of some spirituous remedy, and said, smiling: “He will recover, it is one more saved!” These are no proofs of want of feeling.

In everything connected with finance he was almost avaricious, disputing even about a centime, while he would give millions to his friends, servants, or the poor. Having discovered that a distinguished _savant_ who had accompanied him to Egypt was in embarrassed circumstances, he sent him a large sum, blaming him at the same time for not having told him of his position. In 1813, having expended all his ready money, and learning that a lady of high birth, who had once been very rich, was in want of the necessaries of life, he immediately appointed her a pension of twenty-four thousand francs, as much as fifty thousand at the present time, and being told that she was eighty-four years of age, “Poor woman,” he said, “let her be paid four years in advance.” These, we must repeat, are no indications of want of kindness of disposition.

Having but little time to devote to private friendships, removed from them by his superiority to other men, but still, under the influence of time and habit, he did become attached to some, so strongly attached as to be indulgent even to weakness to those he loved. This was the case with regard to his relatives, whose pretensions often provoked his anger; yet, seeing them annoyed, he relented, and to gratify them, often did what he knew to be unwise. Although the admiration he had felt for the Empress Josephine passed away with time, and though she had, by many thoughtless acts, lowered herself in the esteem he always entertained for her, he had for her, even after his divorce, the most profound affection. He wept for Duroc, but in secret, as though it were a weakness.

As to his probity, we know not by what standard to estimate such a quality in a man who from the very commencement of his public career had immense riches at his command. When he became commander-in-chief of the army in Italy and was master of all the wealth of the country, he first supplied his army abundantly, and then sent assistance to the army on the Rhine, reserving nothing for himself, or at most only a sum sufficient to purchase a small house, Rue de la Victoire, a purchase for which one year’s pay would have sufficed; and had he died in Egypt, his widow would have been left destitute. Was this the result of pride, disdain of vulgar enjoyments, or honesty? Perhaps there was a little of all in this forbearance, which was not unexampled among our generals, though certainly as rare then as it has ever been. He punished dishonesty with extreme severity, which might be attributed to his love of order; but, what was still better, and seemed to indicate that he possessed the quality of honesty himself, was the positive affection he showed for honest people, carried so far as to take keen pleasure in their society.

Still this man, whom God had made so great and so good, was not a virtuous man, for virtue consists in a fixed idea of duty, to which all our inclinations, all our desires, moral and physical, must be subjected, and which could not be the case with one who, of all that ever lived, put least restraint upon his passions. But if wholly deficient in what is abstractly understood as virtue, he possessed certain special virtues, particularly those of a warrior and statesman. He was temperate, not prone to sensual gratifications, and, it not exactly chaste he was not a libertine, never, except on occasions of ceremony, remained more than a few minutes at table; he slept on a hard bed though his constitution was rather weak than strong, bore, without even perceiving it, an amount of fatigue that would have exhausted the most vigorous soldiers; and was capable of prodigious exertion when mentally occupied with some great undertaking.

He did more than brave danger, he seemed unconscious of its existence, and was ever to be found wherever he was needed to see, direct, or command. Such was his character as a soldier; as a general he was not inferior.

Never had the cares of a vast military command been borne with more coolness, vigor, or presence of mind. If he were occasionally excited or angry, the officers who knew him best said that all _was going on well_. When the danger became serious, he was calm, mild, encouraging, not wishing to add the excitement attendant on his displeasure to that which naturally arose from the circumstances; he remained perfectly calm, a power acquired by the habit of restraining his emotions in great emergencies, and, calculating the extent of the danger, turning it aside, and thus triumphing over fortune. Formed for great emergencies and familiarized by habit to every species of peril, he stood by, in 1814, a calm spectator of the suicidal destruction of his own power, a destruction achieved by his ambition; and still he hoped when all around despaired, because he perceived resources undivined by anybody else, and under all vicissitudes, soaring on the wings of genius above the shock of circumstances, and with the resignation of a self-judged mind he accepted the deserved punishment of his faults.

Such, in our opinion, was this man, so strange, so self-contradicting, so many-sided. If among the principal traits of his character there is one more prominent than the rest, it is a species of moral intemperance. A prodigy of genius and passion, flung into the chaos of a revolution, his nature unfolds and develops itself therein. He masters that wild confusion, replaces it by his own presence, and displays the energy, audacity, and fickleness of that which he replaced. Succeeding to men who stopped at nothing, either in virtue or crime, in heroism or cruelty, surrounded by men who laid no restraints on their passions, he laid none on his; they wished to convert the world into a universal republic, he would have it an equally boundless monarchy; they turned everything into chaos, he formed an almost tyrannical unity; they disorganized everything, he re-established order; they defied sovereigns, he dethroned them; they slaughtered men on the scaffold, he on the battle-field, where blood was shrouded in glory. He immolated more human beings than did any Asiatic conqueror, and within the narrow precincts of Europe, peopled with opposing nations, he conquered a greater space of territory than Tamerlane or Genghis Khan amid the deserts of Asia.

It was reserved for the French revolution, destined to change the aspect of European society, to produce a man who would fix the attention of the world as powerfully as Charlemagne, Cæsar, Hannibal, and Alexander. He possessed every qualification that could strike, attract, and fix the attention of mankind, whether we consider the greatness of the part he was destined to perform, the vastness of the political convulsions he caused, the splendor, extent, and profundity of his genius, or his majestic gravity of thought. This son of a Corsican gentleman, who received the gratuitous military education that ancient royalty bestowed on the sons of the poor nobility, had scarcely left school when in a sanguinary tumult he obtained the rank of commander-in-chief, then left the Parisian army for that of Italy, conquered that country in a month, successively destroyed all the forces of the European coalition, wrested from them the peace of Campo-Formio, and then becoming too formidable to stand beside the government of the republic, he went to seek a new destiny in the East, passed through the English fleet with five hundred ships, conquered Egypt at a stride, then thought of following Alexander’s footsteps in the conquest of India. But suddenly recalled to the West by the renewal of the European war, after having attempted to imitate Alexander, he imitated and equaled Hannibal in crossing the Alps, again overpowered the coalition, and compelled it to accept the peace of Luneville, and at thirty years of age this son of a poor Corsican nobleman had already run through a most extraordinary career.

Become pacific for a while, he by his laws laid the basis of modern society; but again yielding to the impulses of his restless genius, he once more attacked Europe, vanquished her in three battles--Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland--set up and threw down kingdoms, placed the crown of Charlemagne on his head; and when kings came to offer him their daughters, chose the descendant of the Cæsars, who presented him with a son that seemed destined to wear the most brilliant crown in the universe. He advanced from Cadiz to Moscow, where he was subjected to the greatest catastrophe on record, rose again, but was again defeated, and confined in a small island, from which he emerged with a few hundred faithful soldiers, recovered the crown of France in twenty days, struggled again against exasperated Europe, sank for the last time at Waterloo, and having sustained greater wars than those of the Roman Empire, went--he, the child of a Mediterranean isle--to die on an island in the ocean, bound like Prometheus by the fear and hatred of kings to a rock.

This son of a poor Corsican nobleman has indeed played in the world the parts of Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, and Charlemagne! He possessed as much genius as the greatest among them; acquired as much fame as the most celebrated, and unfortunately shed more blood than any of them. In a moral point of view, he is inferior to the best of these great men but superior to the worst. His ambition was not as futile as that of Alexander, nor as depraved as that of Cæsar, but it was not as respectable as Hannibal’s, who sacrificed himself to save his country the misfortune of being conquered. His ambition was that usual with conquerors who seek to rule after having aggrandized their native land. Still he loved France and cherished her glory as dearly as his own.

As a ruler he sought what was right, but sought it as a despot, nor did he pursue it with the consistency or religious perseverance of Charlemagne. In variety of talents he was inferior to Cæsar, who, being compelled to win over his fellow-citizens before ruling them, had to learn how to persuade as well as how to fight, and could speak, write, and act with a certain simple majesty. Napoleon, on the other hand, having acquired power by warfare, had no need of oratory, nor possibly, though endowed with natural eloquence, could he ever have acquired it, since he never would have taken the trouble of patiently analyzing his thought in presence of a deliberative assembly. He could write as he thought, with force and dignity, but he was sometimes a little declamatory like his mother, the French revolution; he argued with more force than Cæsar, but could not narrate with his extreme simplicity or exquisite taste. He was inferior to the Roman dictator in the variety of his talents, but superior as a general, both by his peculiar military genius and by the daring profundity and inexhaustible fertility of his plans, in which he had but one equal or superior (which we can not decide)--Hannibal; for he was as daring, as prudent, as subtle, as inventive, as terrible, and as obstinate as the Carthaginian general, with one advantage of living at a later period. Succeeding to Hannibal, Cæsar, the Nassaus, Gustavus Adolphus, Condé, Turenne, and Frederick, he brought military art to its ultimate perfection. God alone can estimate the respective merits of such men; all we can do is to sketch some prominent traits of their wonderful characters.

DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

BY ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, third son of the Earl of Mornington, born 1769, died 1852. Previous to taking command of the British armies in Spain against the French, Sir Arthur Wellesley had achieved great distinction and the rank of major-general in India. Shortly after his appointment to the Spanish command as lieutenant-general in 1808, he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington; and his brilliant success against Napoleon’s most eminent marshals stamped him as one of the first soldiers of the age. In 1815 Wellington was placed at the head of the English forces and their allies, to meet Napoleon in that last convulsive struggle which ended with the battle of Waterloo. Made field-marshal and duke for his eminent services, Wellington afterward signalized his capacity for civil administration as little inferior to his military skill, and as premier displayed the most wise and liberal statesmanship.]

The name of no commander in the long array of British greatness will occupy so large a space in the annals of the world as that of Wellington; and yet there are few whose public characters possess, with so many excellences, so simple and unblemished a complexion. It is to the purity and elevation of his principles in every public situation that this enviable distinction is to be ascribed. Intrusted early in life with high command, and subjected from the first to serious responsibility, he possessed that singleness of heart and integrity of purpose which, even more than talent or audacity, are the foundations of true and moral courage, and the only pure path to public greatness; a sense of duty, a feeling of honor, a generous patriotism, a forgetfulness of self, constituted the spring of all his actions.

He was ambitious, but it was to serve his king and country only; fearless, because his whole heart was wound up in these noble objects; disinterested, because the enriching of himself or his family never for a moment crossed his mind; insensible to private fame when it interfered with public duty, indifferent to popular obloquy when it arose from rectitude of conduct. Like the Roman patriot, he wished rather to be than appear deserving. “Esse quam bonus malebat, ita quo minus gloriam petebat eo magis adsequebatur.” Greatness was forced upon him, both in military and political life, rather because he was felt to be worthiest, than because he desired to be the first; he was the architect of his own fortune, but he became so almost unconsciously, while solely engrossed in constructing that of his country. He has left undone many things, as a soldier, which might have added to his fame, and done many things, as a statesman, which were fatal to his power; but he omitted the first because they would have endangered his country, and committed the second because he felt them to be essential to its salvation.

It is the honor of England, and of human nature, that such a man should have risen at such a time to the rule of her armies and her councils; but he experienced with Themistocles and Scipio Africanus the mutable tenure of popular applause and the base ingratitude of those whom he had saved. Having triumphed over the arms of the threatened tyrant, he was equally immovable in the presence of the insane citizens; and it is hard to say whether his greatness appeared most when he struck down the conqueror of Europe on the field of Waterloo, or was himself with difficulty rescued from death on its anniversary, eighteen years afterward, in the streets of London.