GRICE E CARDONE: LA NATURA EROICA DI NAPOLEONE

 Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had  got itself hushed-up into decent composure, and its results made  smooth, in 1688, there broke-out a far deeper explosion, much  more difficult to hush-up, known to all mortals, and like to be  long known, by the name of French Revolution. It is properly  the third and final act of Protestantism ; the explosive confused  return of mankind to Reality and Fact, now that they were  perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call our English Puri-  tanism the second act : “Well then, the Bible is true ; let ils  go by the Bible 1 ” “ In Church,” said Luther ; “ In Church   and State,” said Cromwell, “let us go by what actually God’s  Truth.” Men have to return to reality ; they cannot live on  semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well  call the final one ; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men  cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact,  undeniable in all seasons and circumstances ; and may and  must begin again confidently to build-up from that. The French  explosion, like the English one, got its King, — who had no  Notary parchment to show for himself. We have still to glance  for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern King.   Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as  Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over all  Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England,  are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen standing ;  the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him  no such sincerity as in Cromwell ; only a far inferior sort. No  silent walking, through long years, with the Awful Unnamable  of this Universe; ‘walking with God," as he called it; and  faith and strength in that alone : latent thought and valour,  content to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of Heaven’s  /lightning 1 Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer  believed ; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to  'be Nonentity : he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible,  but out of poor Sceptical EncyclopMies, This was the length  the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact,  prompt, everyway articulate character is in itself perhaps small,  compared with our great chaotic /^articulate Cromwell’s. In-  stead of 'dumb Prophet struggling to speak,' we have a por-  tentous mixture of the Quack withal I Hume’s notion of the     Lectvi. THE HERO AS KING. 319   Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much  better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the  like, — where indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at  all. An element of blamable ambition shows itself, from the  first, in this man ; gets the victory over him at last, and in-  volves him and his work in ruin.   * False as a bulletin’ became a proverb in Napoleon’s time.  He makes what excuse he could for it : that it was necessary  to mislead the enemy, to keep-up his own men’s courage, and  so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no  case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the long-run, better  for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man  have any purpose reaching beyond the hour and day, meant to  be found extant next day, what good can it ever be to promul-  gate lies ? The lies are found-out ; ruinous penalty is exacted  for them. No man will believe the liar next time even when  he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be  believed. The old cry of wolf 1 — K Lie is nMhing ; you can-  not of nothing make something ; you make nothing at last, and  lose your labour into the bargain.   Yet Napoleon had a sincerity; we are to distinguish be-  tween what is superficial and what is fundamental in insin-  cerity. Across these outer manceuverings and quackeries of  his, which were many and most bian>able, let us discern withal  that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for  reality ; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any  basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than his culture  was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt  were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be  no God. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all man-  ner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers,  “Very ingenious. Messieurs ; but who made all that?” The  Atheistic logic runs-off from him like water ; the great Fact  stares him in the face : “ Who made all that ?” So too in  Practice : he, as every man that can be great, or have victory  in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical  heart of the matter ; drives straight towards that. “N^en the  steward of his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new uphol-  stery, with praises, and demonstration how glorious it was, and     320    LECTURES ON HEROES.    how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a  pair of scissors, dipt one of the gold tassels from a window-  curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days after-  wards, he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of his  upholstery functionary ; it was not gold but tinsel I In Saint  Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the  practical, the real. Why talk and complain ; above all, why  quarrel with one another ? There is no result in it ; it comes  to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if one can do no-  thing I” He speaks often so, to his poor discontented follow-  ers ; he is like a piece of silent strength in the middle of their  morbid querulousness there.   And accordingly was there not what we can call a faith in  him, genuine so far as it went ? That this new enormous De-  mocracy asserting itself here in the French Revolution is an  insuppressible Fact, which the whole world, with its old forces  and institutions, cannot put down ; this was a true insight of  his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it, — a  faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well ?   * La carriers ouverte aux ialens^ The implements to him who  “ran handle them ;* this actually is the truth, and even the whole  truth ; it includes whatever the French Revolution, or any Re-  volution, could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true  Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered too by his  military trade, he knew that Democracy, if it were a true thing  at all, could not be an anarchy : the man had a heart-hatred  for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne  and he sat in a coffee-house, as the mob rolled by : Napoleon  expresses the deepest contempt for persons in authority that  they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August he  wonders why there is no man to command these poor Swiss ;  they would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy,  yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through  all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns,  onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspir-  ation is ; ‘ Triumph to the French Revolution ; assertion of   * it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it  ‘ a Simulacrum 1’ Withal, however, he feels, and has a right  to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is ; how the Revolu-     Lcct. VI.    THE HERO AS KING.    221    tion cannot prosper or last without such. To bridleMn that  great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution ; to tameit,  so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may be-  come organic, and be able to live among other organisms and  formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone : is not this  still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life ;  nay what he actually managed to do ? Through Wagrams,  Austerlitzes ; triumph after triumph, — he triumphed so far.  There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do.  He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was  such. The common soldiers used to say on the march : “ These  babbling Avocats, up at Paris ; all talk and no work ! What  wonder it runs all wrong ? We shall have to go and put our  Petit Caporal there I” They went, and put him there ; they  and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory  over Europe ; — till the poor Lieutenant of La Fire, not unna-  turally, might seem to himself the greatest of all men that had  been in the world for some ages.   But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got  the upper hand. He apostatised from his old faith in Facts,  took to believing in Semblances ; strove to connect himself  with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feud-  alities which he once saw clearly to be false ; — considered that  he would found “ his Dynasty” and so forth ; that the enormous  French Revolution meant only that ! The man was ‘given-up ^  to strong delusion, that he should believe a lie a fearful but j  most sure thing. did not knowJrue from false no\y.wheiLj  he looked at them, — the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding .  to untruth of heart. Self and false ambition had now become ^  his god : j^^deception once yielded to, all other deceptions  follow naturally more and more. What a paltry patchwork of  theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man  wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to make it more real  thereby ! His hollow ^-Concordat, pretending to be a re-  establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method  of extirpating it, ^fa vaccine de la religion his ceremonial  Coronations, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in Notre-  Dame, — “wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it,” as  Augereau said, “nothing but the half-million of men who had     222    LECTURES ON HEROES.    died to put an end to all that” ! Cromwell’s Inauguration was  by the Sword and Bible ; what we must call a genuinely  one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chi-  mera : were not these the’’ r^a/ emblems of Puritanism ; its true  decoration and insignia ? It had used them both in a very  real manner, and pretended to stand by them now 1 But this  poor Napoleon mistook : he believed too much in the Dup^~  ability of men ; saw no fact deeper in man than Hunger and  this 1 He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon  cloud ; his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and de-  part out of the world.   Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists ; and might  be developed, were the temptation strong enough. ‘ Lead us  not into temptation’ I But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed.  The thing into which it enters as a cognisable ingredient is  doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may  look, is in itself small. Napoleon’s working, accordingly, what  was it with all the noise it made ? A flash as of gunpowder  wide-spread ; a blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour the  whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame ; but only  ^for an hour. It goes out : the Universe with its old mountains  and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.   The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of  courage ; this Napoleonism was unjust^ a falsehood, and could  not last. It is true dqctrine. The heavier this Napoleon tram-  pled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, the fiercer would  the world’s recoil against him be, one day. Injustice pays jt-  self with frightful compound-interest. I am not sure but he  had better have lost his best park of artillery, or had his best  regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German  Bookseller, Palm I It was a palpable tyrannous murderous  injustice, which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could  make-out to be other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men,  it and the like of it ; suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of  men, as they thought of it, — ^waiting their day 1 Which day  came : Germany rose round him. — ^What Napoleon did will in  the long-run amount to what he did justly j what Nature with  her laws will sanction. To what of reality was in him; to that  and nothing more.^ The rest was all smoke and waste. La     Lect.vi. THE HERO AS KING. 223   carri^re ouverte aux talens : that great true Message, which  has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in a  most inarticulate state. He was a great Sbatiche, a rude-  draught never completed ; as indeed what great man is other ?  Left in too rude a state, alas 1   His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St.  Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the  most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so ; that he is  flung-out on the rock here, and the World is still moving on  its axis. France is great, and all-great ; and at bottom, he is  France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an ap-  pendage of France ; “another Isle of Oleron to France.” So  it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature ; and yet look how in  fact — Here am I I He cannot understand it : inconceivable  that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it ;  that France was not all-great, that he was not France. ‘Strong  delusion,’ that he should believe the thing to be which is not I  The compact, clear- seeing, decisive Italian nature of him,  strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half-  dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade.  The world was not disposed to be trodden-down underfoot ; to  be bound into masses, and built together, as he liked, for a  pedestal to France and him : the world had quite other pur-  poses in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas,  what help now ? He had gone that way of his ; and Nature  also had gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he  tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to  sink there, mournfully as man seldom did ; and break his great  heart, and die, — this poor Napoleon ; a great implement too  soon wasted, till it was useless : our last Great Man I   Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide  roamings of ours through so many times and places, in search  and study of Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry for it: there  was pleasure for me in this business, if also much pain. It is  a great subject, and a most grave and wide one, this which,  not to be too grave about it, I have named He?'o-worship. It  enters deeply, as I think, into the secret of Mankind’s ways and  vitalest interests in this world, and is well worth explaining at     224    LECTURES ON HEROES.    present. With six months, instead of six days, we might have  done better. I promised to break-ground on it ; I know not  whether I have even managed to do that. I have had to tear  it up in the rudest manner in order to get into it at all.  Often enough, with these abrupt utterances thrown-out iso-  lated, unexplained, has your tolerance been put to the trial.  Tolerance, patient candour, all-hoping favour and kindness,  which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished and  distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best  in England, have listened patiently to my rude words. With  many feelings, I heartily thank you all ; and say, Good be with  you all !