AMONG the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the
best known and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity
with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the
masses of active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's theory that every
organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or as it is sometimes expressed,
every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of
infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney,
of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry
with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if
Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little
Napoleons.

In our society there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and
the democratic classes; between those who have made their fortunes, and the
young and the poor who have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead
labor,- that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor
is now entombed in money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle
capitalists,- and the interests of living labor, which seeks to possess
itself of land and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid,
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by
death. The second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying,
always outnumbering the other and recruiting its numbers every hour by
births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the competition of all, and
to multiply avenues: the class of business men in America, in England, in
France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is
its representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the
middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat.
He had their virtues and their vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim.
That tendency is material, pointing at a sensual success and employing the
richest and most various means to that end; conversant with mechanical
powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful, but
subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material
success. To be the rich man, is the end. "God has granted," says the Koran,
"to every people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris and London and New
York, the spirit of commerce, of money and material power, were also to have
their prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of
Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it his own history.
Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes,
has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint,- to use his own word,
"no capuchin," and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street
finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds
him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits,
arrived at such a commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes
which the common man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good
society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without
number, personal weight, the execution of his ideas, the standing in the
attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined enjoyments of
pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional honors,- precisely what
is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, this
powerful man possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to the mind of the
masses around him, becomes not merely representative but actually a
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good
thought, every good word that was spoken in France. Dumont relates that he
sat in the gallery of the Convention and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he wrote in
pencil immediately, and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin
approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau
read it, pronounced it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into
his harangue to-morrow, to the Assembly. "It is impossible," said Dumont,
"as, unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin." "If you have shown it to
Lord Elgin and to fifty persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow":
and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next day's session. For
Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these things which
his presence inspired were as much his own as if he had said them, and that
his adoption of them gave them their weight. Much more absolute and
centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau's popularity and to much more
than his predominance in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp almost
ceases to have a private speech and opinion. He is so largely receptive, and
is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit and
power of the age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the code; he
makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the
road. All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report to him: so
likewise do all good heads in every kind: he adopts the best measures, sets
his stamp on them, and not these alone, but on every happy and memorable
expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon and every line of his writing,
deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree
the qualities and powers of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in
coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and
hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he
represented, for power and wealth,- but Bonaparte, specially, without any
scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass men's pursuit of
these objects, he set aside. The sentiments were for women and children.
Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in behalf of the
Senate he addressed him,- "Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst
disease that ever afflicted the human mind." The advocates of liberty and of
progress are "ideologists";- a word of contempt often in his mouth;- "Necker
is an ideologist": "Lafayette is an ideologist."

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that "if you would succeed, you
must not be too good." It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have
renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude and generosity;
since what was an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a
convenient weapon for our purposes; just as the river which was a formidable
barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help
himself with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He
is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in
money and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is
never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of
natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things.
Men give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be sure there
are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and
mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the
presence of scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack the
power of arrangement, and are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte
superadded to this mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, so
that men saw in him combined the natural and the intellectual power, as if
the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and
sea seem to presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him. This
ciphering operative knows what he is working with and what is the product.
He knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and
diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It
consisted, according to him, in having always more forces than the enemy, on
the point where the enemy is attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole
talent is strained by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on
the enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is obvious that
a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring so as always to bring
two men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a
much larger body of men.

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop
this pattern democrat. He had the virtues of his class and the conditions
for their activity. That common-sense which no sooner respects any end than
it finds the means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the
choice, simplification and combining of means; the directness and
thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and the
energy with which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what
I may almost call, from its extent, the modern party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his.
Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron,
capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many
days together without rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed
and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples;
compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer
itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any
superstition or any heat or haste of his own. "My hand of iron," he said,
"was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my
head." He respected the power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his
superiority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior men, on his
opinionativeness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in
allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, when he
styled himself the "Child of Destiny." "They charge me," he said, "with the
commission of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing
has been more simple than my elevation, 'tis in vain to ascribe it to
intrigue or crime; it was owing to the peculiarity of the times and to my
reputation of having fought well against the enemies of my country. I have
always marched with the opinion of great masses and with events. Of what use
then would crimes be to me?" Again he said, speaking of his son, "My son can
not replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of
circumstances."

He had a directness of action never before combined with so much
comprehension. He is a realist, terrific to all talkers and confused
truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws himself on
the precise point of resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is
strong in the right manner, namely by insight. He never blundered into
victory, but won his battles in his head before he won them on the field.
His principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he
writes to the Directory: "I have conducted the campaign without consulting
any one. I should have done no good if I had been under the necessity of
conforming to the notions of another person. I have gained some advantages
over superior forces and when totally destitute of every thing, because, in
the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as
prompt as my thoughts."

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors.
They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they
should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his ministers,
knowing not what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his
business. Here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do
next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of
kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth,
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action
wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the
world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence
and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure,
self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing,- money, troops,
generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common
adventurers, by the splendor of his own means. "Incidents ought not to
govern policy," he said, "but policy, incidents." "To be hurried away by
every event is to have no political system at all." His victories were only
so many doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in
the dazzle and uproar of the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and
he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come at his object.
Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from his history, of the price
at which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set down as
cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty,
not cruel,- but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! Not
bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood,- and pitiless. He saw only the
object: the obstacle must give way. "Sire, General Clarke can not combine
with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery."- "Let
him carry the battery."- "Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy
artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what orders?"- "Forward, forward!" Seruzier,
a colonel of artillery, gives, in his "Military Memoirs," the following
sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz.- "At the moment in which
the Russian army was making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on
the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward
the artillery. 'You are losing time,' he cried; 'fire upon those masses;
they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!' The order remained unexecuted for
ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were placed on the slope of
a hill to produce the effect: their balls and mine rolled upon the ice
without breaking it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating
light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles
produced the desired effect. My method was immediately followed by the
adjoining batteries, and in less than no time we buried" some "thousands of
Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake."

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. "There
shall be no Alps," he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by
graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris
as any town in France. He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown.
Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put
out all his strength. He risked every thing and spared nothing, neither
ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a
milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting
national differences, (as large majorities of men seem to agree,) certainly
Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. The grand principle of war, he
said, was that an army ought always to be ready, by day and by night and at
all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making. He never
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of
iron,- shells, balls, grape-shot,- to annihilate all defence. On any point
of resistance he concentrated squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers
until it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chasseurs at
Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, "My lads, you
must not fear death; when soldiers brave death, they drive him into the
enemy's ranks." In the fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He went
to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he
could, and all that he could. He came, several times, within an inch of
ruin; and his own person was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at
Arcola. The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the melee, and he
was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he
was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had
never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. "My power would fall, were I
not to support it by new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and
conquest must maintain me." He felt, with every wise man, that as much life
is needed for conservation as for creation. We are always in peril, always
in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction and only to be saved by
invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality.
A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments.
His very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of
calculation. His idea of the best defence consists in being still the
attacking party. "My ambition," he says, "was great, but was of a cold
nature." In one of his conversations with Las Cases, he remarked, "As to
moral courage, I have rarely met with the two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind: I
mean unprepared courage; that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion,
and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of
judgment and decision": and he did not hesitate to declare that he was
himself eminently endowed with this two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, and
that he had met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.

Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were
not more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention descended to
the smallest particulars. "At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack
with eight hundred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand
Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This
cavalry was half a league off and required a quarter of an hour to arrive on
the field of action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of
an hour that decide the fate of a battle." "Before he fought a battle,
Bonaparte thought little about what he should do in case of success, but a
great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of fortune." The
same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. His instructions to his
secretary at the Tuileries are worth remembering. "During the night, enter
my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have any good
news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad
news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost." It was
a whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated his practice, when
general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed
Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed
with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed
of itself and no longer required an answer. His achievement of business was
immense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working
kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe
of this man's performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born
to a private and humble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness of
wishing to add to his crowns and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but
he knew his debt to his austere education, and made no secret of his
contempt for the born kings, and for "the hereditary asses," as he coarsely
styled the Bourbons. He said that "in their exile they had learned nothing,
and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of
military service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the
key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and
justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him
found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as
another man. This appears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St.
Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his household, of his palaces,
had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors
himself, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by
considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the
representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for
France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king only as far as the
Revolution, or the interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and a
leader in him. In the social interests, he knew the meaning and value of
labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an incident
mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. "When walking with Mrs.
Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and
Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon
interfered, saying 'Respect the burden, Madam.'" In the time of the empire
he directed attention to the improvement and embellishment of the markets of
the capital. "The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the common
people." The principal works that have survived him are his magnificent
roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and
companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his court
never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed, under his
eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his relation to his
troops is the order of the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz,
in which Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his person out of
reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily
made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently
explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the
mass of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that he was
their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he courted, but
when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He
knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to philosophize on liberty and
equality; and when allusion was made to the precious blood of centuries,
which was spilled by the killing of the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested,
"Neither is my blood ditchwater." The people felt that no longer the throne
was occupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of
legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of the soil, and
holding the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society.
Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held, in the Tuileries,
knowledge and ideas like their own, opening of course to them and their
children all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy,
ever narrowing the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a
day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and
productions of man was opened; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of
youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed into a
young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors of
the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the military
system which had driven out the oppressor. And even when the majority of the
people had begun to ask whether they had really gained any thing under the
exhausting levies of men and money of the new master, the whole talent of
the country, in every rank and kindred, took his part and defended him as
its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes,
Napoleon said to those around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in which I
stand, my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs."

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position
required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to
trusts; and his feeling went along with this policy. Like every superior
person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to
measure his power with other masters, and an impatience of fools and
underlings. In Italy, he sought for men and found none. "Good God!" he said,
"how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with
difficulty found two,- Dandolo and Melzi." In later years, with larger
experience, his respect for mankind was not increased. In a moment of
bitterness he said to one of his oldest friends, "Men deserve the contempt
with which they inspire me. I have only to put some gold-lace on the coat of
my virtuous republicans and they immediately become just what I wish them."
This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to
those able persons who commanded his regard not only when he found them
friends and coadjutors but also when they resisted his will. He could not
confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and Bernadotte, with the danglers
of his court; and in spite of the detraction which his systematic egotism
dictated toward the great captains who conquered with and for him, ample
acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena,
Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron and the founder of
their fortunes, as when he said, "I made my generals out of mud,"- he could
not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and support
commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign he
was so much impressed by the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he
said, "I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I would give them all
for Ney." The characters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are
discriminating, and though they did not content the insatiable vanity of
French officers, are no doubt substantially just. And in fact every species
of merit was sought and advanced under his government. "I know," he said,
"the depth and draught of water of every one of my generals." Natural power
was sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen men in his time were
raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general;
and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not
to family connexion. "When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a
battlefield, they have all one rank in my eyes."

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and
satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St.
Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the army, to look on
Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the creature of his party: but there is
something in the success of grand talent which enlists an universal
sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and
malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and as intellectual
beings we feel the air purified by the electric shock, when material force
is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed out of the
reach of local and accidental partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights
for him; these are honest victories; this strong steam-engine does our work.
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of
human ability, wonderfully encourages us and liberates us. This capacious
head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating
such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this
prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource:- what events! what romantic
pictures! what strange situations!- when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the
Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle in sight of the Pyramids, and
saying to his troops, "From the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look
down on you"; fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of
Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre
fallen, I should have changed the face of the world." His army, on the night
of the battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration
as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the
fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these
contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings wait in his
antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris and at Erfurt.

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men,
sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took
occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be accomplished by the
mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by
punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness. "The
Austrians," he said, "do not know the value of time." I should cite him, in
his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power does not consist in any
wild or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm like Mahomet's, or singular
power of persuasion; but in the exercise of common-sense on each emergency,
instead of abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which
vigor always teaches;- that there is always room for it. To what heaps of
cowardly doubts is not that man's life an answer. When he appeared it was
the belief of all military men that there could be nothing new in war; as it
is the belief of men to-day that nothing new can be undertaken in politics,
or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social
manners and customs; and as it is at all times the belief of society that
the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover
knew that he knew better. I think all men know better than they do; know
that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but
they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense,
and did not care a bean for other people's. The world treated his novelties
just as it treats everybody's novelties,- made infinite objection, mustered
all the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. "What
creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the
land-commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he
allows himself to be guided by the commissaries he will never stir, and all
his expeditions will fail." An example of his common-sense is what he says
of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating after
the other, had described as impracticable. "The winter," says Napoleon, "is
not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty mountains. The snow
is then firm, the weather settled, and there is nothing to fear from
avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in the Alps. On these
high mountains there are often very fine days in December, of a dry cold,
with extreme calmness in the air." Read his account, too, of the way in
which battles are gained. "In all battles a moment occurs when the bravest
troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That
terror proceeds from a want of confidence in their own courage, and it only
requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to them.
The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the pretence. At
Arcola I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that moment of
lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful.
You see that two armies are two bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten
each other; a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to
advantage. When a man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes
that moment without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an addition."

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for
speculation on general topics. He delighted in running through the range of
practical, of literary and of abstract questions. His opinion is always
original and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt he liked, after dinner,
to fix on three or four persons to support a proposition, and as many to
oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of
religion, the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he
asked whether the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age of
the world? Then he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction
of the globe, either by water or by fire: at another time, the truth or
fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond
of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed with Fournier, bishop of
Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which they
could not agree, viz. that of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of
the church. The Emperor told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on
these two points, on which the bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he
readily yielded all that was proved against religion as the work of men and
time, but he would not hear of materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a
clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, "You may
talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?" He delighted
in the conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet;
but the men of letters he slighted; they were "manufacturers of phrases." Of
medicine too he was fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners
whom he most esteemed,- with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at
St. Helena. "Believe me," he said to the last, "we had better leave off all
these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I know any thing
about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are
superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly
agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine
is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken
collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air and
cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia."

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St. Helena,
have great value, after all the deduction that it seems is to be made from
them on account of his known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of
strength and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative of
his battles;- good as Caesar's; his good-natured and sufficiently respectful
account of Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists; and his own equality
as a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the
Campaign in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the
camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing on
abstract questions the native appetite for truth and the impatience of words
he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a
romance, a bon mot, as well as a strategem in a campaign. He delighted to
fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the
terrors of a fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every
addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society;
of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories,
ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the
destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical,
the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of
monopoly and abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did not like him.
England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition
and genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and conservative
classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old women of the Roman
conclave, who in their despair took hold of any thing, and would cling to
red-hot iron,- the vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, of
the emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the instinct of the young, ardent
and active men every where, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle
class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the
masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry that the
brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we
discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by
the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we
should find the same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to
himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple
concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The
highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population of the
world,- he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He is unjust to
his generals; egotistic and monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of
their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to involve
his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a
distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new
pride of his throne. He is a boundless liar. The official paper, his
"Moniteur," and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to
be believed; and worse,- he sat, in his premature old age, in his lonely
island, coldly falsifying facts and dates and characters, and giving to
history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen he has a passion for stage
effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality of
the soul, are all French. "I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give the
liberty of the press, my power could not last three days." To make a great
noise is his favorite design. "A great reputation is a great noise: the more
there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments,
nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages." His
doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His theory of influence is not
flattering. "There are two levers for moving men,- interest and fear. Love
is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love
nobody. I do not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little, from habit,
and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why?- because his
character pleases me: he is stern and resolute, and I believe the fellow
never shed a tear. For my part I know very well that I have no true friends.
As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended friends
as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and
purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was
thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and
poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar
hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he
was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and delighted in his infamous
police, and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of
intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew
every thing"; and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and
listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, incognito. His
manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit
of pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in good humor,
and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play
with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at
key-holes, or at least that he was caught at it. In short, when you have
penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not
dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he
fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself,- the
democrat and the conservative,- I said, Bonaparte represents the democrat,
or the party of men of business, against the stationary or conservative
party. I omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely that
these two parties differ only as young and old. The democrat is a young
conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the
democrat ripe and gone to seed;- because both parties stand on the one
ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the
other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this
party, its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his
own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still waits for its organ
and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers
of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so
weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the
result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned
cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized
Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his
artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than
he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The
attempt was in principle suicidal. France served him with life and limb and
estate, as long as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw
that after victory was another war; after the destruction of armies, new
conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to
the reward,- they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their
down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,- they deserted him. Men found that
his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo,
which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of it,
producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can
not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks,
until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist
narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who
served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was,
"Enough of him"; "Assez de Bonaparte."

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive
without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man
and of the world which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million
experiments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by
individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific
Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our
civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it
will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be
bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good
profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy & Classics

The Uncle Taz Library

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