The following article has been compiled from the different works of THOMAS
CARLYLE, and embodies all he has written, or at least published, about
Napoleon Bonaparte. We offer it in the absence of a more elaborate work on
this subject, which we hope one day to see from the pen of this gifted and
earnest writer. It is a glimpse of the insight of the clearest-headed Seer
of our age, into the noisiest great man of the last, about whom we listen
with pleasure to each new voice, perhaps critically and doubtingly, yet
for our own part colored by that absorbing, painful interest, which
induced us when a boy to close the book which first told us of his doings,
after having traced his meteoric flight to the 'monster meeting' at
Moscow, unable to proceed to the catastrophe; and it was months before we
could bring ourselves to read on, of the heroism which charmed, or the
glitter which dazzled us, to its final chaos and night. On Napoleon's
right to the title great, the character of his greatness, and what would
be left if the smoke-clouds, battle-glory and so on were torn away, we
will offer but a few words. Of the title in its best sense but few now
believe him worthy, perhaps no thinker or reflecting man. He is a volcano
rather than a sun, a destroyer more than a creator; and our sympathy is
mingled with little of that which we feel for the martyr; who dies rather
than sell his birthright, heaven, for any mess of earth's pottage, or for
him who spends his life in the search for truth, and in speaking it to
mankind, taking no heed for himself what he shall eat and wherewithal he
shall be clad. No! the feeling is far more akin to that which we have for
a deep-playing gambler, whom we know to have some noble impulses. How
eagerly, yet sorrowingly we watch his movements! The dice rattle, they are
thrown, and again thrown; thousands after thousands he wins and lays
aside; and at last, in the madness of the game, stakes the whole sum, with
his house, estate, all on the hazard of one cast. With beating heart we
listen to the rattling of the dice, and with strained gaze watch the blow.
The box is lifted--all is lost. Now we are excited by the daring of this
being, and feel deeply, more so if we know him to have something of a
better nature, some nobler impulses, but the interest is still in the
great gambler, not in the great _man_; and though his boldness startles,
and for the moment carries us away, yet ever with our admiration comes a
still small voice from the 'inner sanctuary,' which whispers of those whom
his winnings ruined, or the dependents who were reduced to beggary by his
loss. Would the _great_ man have played the game at all?
We have always felt that Napoleon stepped down from his greatness when he
let them hurry him away alive to that island-prison; and there is
reasoning in this feeling itself, which most persons feel on reading of
his career, which his worshippers would do well to consider in its various
bearings; for if Napoleon, (when the royal guard, his last hope, was cut
to pieces at Waterloo, and crying to Bertrand, 'It is finished,' he turned
and fled,) had placed himself before the last cannon which sent
destruction to his foes, and let its ball end his career and life
together, who is there but would feel that he was acting truer to his
greatness, than to 'eat his heart away' a captive? If throughout his
career we had seen the brave fighter for country, for principle, for
right, instead of for self, this feeling would never arise. Place
WASHINGTON in a similar situation; imagine him to have believed it best to
gather all his country could give him of hardy defenders, and on the
result of one battle let his country's fate be decided. The battle is
fought and lost; his army is routed and cut to pieces; he has asked for
liberty with his whole strength, with his whole soul, and the answer is
'No!' written with bayonets in blood, and voiced by the enemy's cannon.
Would WASHINGTON have been true to _his_ greatness in placing himself
before the last cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have
cried, 'It is finished,' but then with the same calm brow yet bursting
heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the
scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon,
there calmly await the Almighty's time when he might again raise his right
arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold, as
when he was at the head of conquering armies. Napoleon's intellectual
character was perceptive rather than deep; and there is an intense
concentrativeness about him, a power of throwing the whole effort of his
soul into the environment of the moment, which is remarkable; and not less
so the facility with which he changes that concentration from place to
place, from subject to subject. Probably no man ever had his whole mind so
much under the control of his will, at his fingers' ends, as it were; 'the
eye to see and the will to do.' But revert we to CARLYLE.
* * * * *
Some call for Barras to be made commandant; he conquered in Thermidor.
Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen BONAPARTE,
unemployed artillery officer who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of
action: Barras is named Commandant's Cloak; this young artillery officer
is named Commandant. He was in the gallery at the moment, and heard it; he
withdrew some half hour to consider with himself: after a half-hour of
grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers _yea_. And
now, a man of head being at the head of it, the whole matter gets vital.
Swift to camp of Sablon, to secure the artillery; there are not twenty men
guarding it! A swift adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops, gets
thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that
way: the cannon are ours. And now beset this post and beset that; rapid
and firm; at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue St.
Honoré, from Pont Neuf all along the North Quays, southward to the Pont
_ci-devant_ Royal, rank round the sanctuary of the Tuilleries, a ring of
steel discipline; let every gunner have his match burning, and all men
stand to their arms. Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint Roche; has
seized the Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating thence without fire.
Stray shots fall from Lepelletier, rattle down on the very Tuilleries'
stair-case. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking peace;
Lepelletier behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall fraternize.
Steady! The artillery officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be
quick as lightning. Lepelletier making nothing by messengers by fraternity
or hat-waving, bursts out, along the southern Quai Voltaire, along streets
and passages, treble-quick in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon thou
bronze artillery officer--? 'Fire'! say the bronze lips. And roar and
thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun,
in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the Church of Saint Roch; go his great
guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great guns--blow to air some two
hundred men, mainly about the Church of Saint Roch! Lepelletier cannot
stand such harsh play; no sectioner can stand it; the forty thousand yield
on all sides scour toward covert. The ship is over the bar; free she
bounds shoreward--amid shouting and vivats! Citizen Bonaparte is 'named
General of the Interior by acclamation;' quelled sections have to disarm
in such humor as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever!
'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it
had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false; the firing was with
sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport;
the rabbits and plinths of Saint Roch Church show splintered by it to this
hour. Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grape
shot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited
then. Now, however, the time has come for it and the man; and behold you
have it; and the thing we specifically call _French Revolution_ is blown
into space by it and become a thing that was!
The French revolution did disclose original men: among the twenty-five
millions, at least one or two units. Some reckon in the present stage of
the business, as many as three: Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau. Whether more
will come to light, or of what sort, when the computation is quite
liquidated, one cannot say. Meanwhile, let the world be thankful for these
three; as indeed, the world is; loving original men, without limit, were
they never so questionable, well knowing how rare they are! To us,
accordingly, it is rather interesting to observe how on these three also,
questionable as they surely are, the old process is repeating itself; how
these also are getting known in their true likeness. A second generation,
relieved in some measure from the spectral hallucinations, hysterical
ophthalmia, and natural panic-delirium of the first contemporary one, is
gradually coming to discern and measure what its predecessor could only
execrate and shriek over; for, as our proverb said, the dust is sinking,
the rubbish-heaps disappear; the built house, such as it is, and was
appointed to be, stands visible, better or worse. Of Napoleon Bonaparte,
with so many bulletins, and such self-proclamation from artillery and
battle-thunder, loud enough to ring through the deafest brain, in the
remotest nook of this earth, and now, in consequence, with so many
biographies, histories and historical arguments for and against, it may be
said he can now shift for himself; that his true figure is in a fair way
of being ascertained. Doubtless it will be found one day, what
significance was in him; how, (we quote from a New-England book,) 'the man
was a divine missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached through
the cannon's throat that great doctrine, _La carrière ouverte aux talens_,
(the tools to him who can handle them,) which is our ultimate Political
Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is
true, as enthusiasts and first missionaries are wont; with imperfect
utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the
case admitted. Or call him if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had
to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did
not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom,
nevertheless, the peaceful sower will follow, and, as he cuts the
boundless harvest, bless.' From 'the incarnate Moloch,' which the world
once was, onward to to this quiet version, there is a considerable
progress.
What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of
captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Bonaparte, compared with
these 'moveable types' of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying thing
for your conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal which he
hammers with such violence; how the kind earth will soon shroud up his
bloody foot-prints; and all which he achieved and skilfully piled
together, will be but like his own 'canvass city' of a camp; this evening
loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, 'a few earth-pits and
heaps of straw!' For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest
force is the stillest; that, as in the fable, the mild shining of the sun
shall accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain
essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material
but by mental power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is
thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons or immeasurable tumult
of baggage-wagons, attends its movements; in what obscure and sequestered
places may the head be meditating which is one day to be crowned with more
than imperial authority; for kings and emperors will be among its
ministering servants; it will rule not over, but _in_ all heads, and with
these, its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas, bend
the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself will be
better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of
Waterloo prove less momentous than the opening of the first mechanic's
institute.
Brother Ringletule, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo
man-god, who had set up for godhead lately, what he meant to do then with
the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answers, he had _fire
enough in his belly_ to burn up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass was
right so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is the test
of every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine or great;
that he _have_ fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world,
of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there! Far be it
from us to say that a great man must needs with benevolence prepense,
become a 'friend of humanity;' nay, that such professional self-conscious
friends are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day.
All greatness is unconscious or it is little and naught. And yet a great
man without _such_ fire in him, burning dim or developed as a divine
behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled, were a
solecism in nature. A great man is ever, as the transcendentalists speak,
possessed with an _idea_. Napoleon, himself not the superfinest of great
men, and balanced sufficiently with prudence and egoisms, had
nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with; the idea that
democracy was the cause of man, the right and infinite cause. Nay, to the
very last, he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of 'the tools to him that
can handle them;' really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that
matter, or rather the one true central idea, toward which all the others,
if they tend any whither, must tend. Unhappily, it was only in the
military province that Napoleon could realize this idea of his, being
forced to fight for himself the while; before he got it tried to any
extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew
light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as
they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out,
leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by
others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea;
or, in Ram-Dass' phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up the miseries
of men.
Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau, with fire-words (of public speaking) and fire
whirlwinds (of cannon and musketry,) which for a season darkened the air,
are perhaps at bottom but superficial phenomena.
Napoleon was the 'armed soldier of democracy,' invincible while he
continued true to that. · · · He 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 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,
Unnameable, of this universe; 'walking with God' as he called it; and
faith and strength in that alone: _latent_ thought and valor, content to
lie latent, then burst out as in a blaze of heaven's lightning! 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 encyclopedias. This was the
length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt,
every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps small compared with
our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of 'dumb prophet
struggling to speak,' we have a portentious mixture of the Quack! Hume's
notion of the 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 blameable ambition shows itself from the first in this man; gets the
victory over him at last, and involves 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, etc. On the whole these are no excuses. A
man in no case has any 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 beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant next day, what
good can it ever be to promulgate 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 the 'wolf!' A lie is _no_-thing; you cannot of
nothing make something; you make _nothing_ at last, and lose your labour
in the bargain.
Yet Napoleon _had_ a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is
superficial and what is fundamental insincerity. Across these outer
manoeuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blameable,
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 manner 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 toward
that. When the steward of his Tuilleries Palace was exhibiting the new
upholstery, with praises and demonstrations, how glorious it was and how
cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of
scissors, clipped one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in
his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterward he produced it at the right
moment, to the horror of the upholstery functionary: it was not gold but
tinsel! 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 _resultat_ in it; it comes to
nothing that we can _do_. Say nothing if one can do nothing!' He speaks
often so to his poor, discontented followers; 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
as far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy, 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 along with it--a _faith_. And did
he not interpret the dim purport of it well? 'The implements to him who
can handle them.' This actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it
includes whatever the French revolution, or any revolution could mean.
Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature
of him, fastened 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 mail 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 there is no one to command these
poor Swiss; they could 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, onward to the peace of
Luben, one would say his inspiration is: 'Triumph to the French
revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend
to call it a simulacrum!' Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to
feel, how necessary a strong authority is; how the revolution cannot
prosper at all without such. To bridle in that great devouring,
self-devouring French revolution; to _tame_ it, so that its intrinsic
purpose can be made good; that it may become organic, and be able to live
amongst 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
corporal_ there!' They went and put him there; they and France at large.
Chief-consulship, emperorship, victory over Europe; till the poor
lieutenant of _La Fère_, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the
greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.
But at this point the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He
apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances;
strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the old
false feudalities 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 most sure thing. He did not know
true from false now when 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: _self_-deception once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions
follow naturally, more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatrical
paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapped his own reality
in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope's-Concordat,
pretending to be a reëstablishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be
the method of extirpating it, '_la vaccine de la religion_;' his
ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian chimera in Notre
Dame there; 'wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it but the half
million who had died to put an end to all that!' Cromwell's inauguration
was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one.
Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera. Were not these
real 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! But
this poor Napoleon mistook; he believed too much in the _dupeability_ of
men; saw no fact deeper in man than hunger and this. He was mistaken. Like
a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he falls down in
confused wreck, and depart 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!' But it
is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thing into which it enters as
a cognizable 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
doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it
tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one
day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound interest. I am not sure
but he had better lost his best park of artillery, or had his best
regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German bookseller, Palm!
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! Which day _came_:
Germany rose round him. What Napoleon _did_ will amount in the long run to
what he did _justly_; 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 carrière ouverte aux talens:_ that great true message, which
has yet to articulate and fulfil itself every where, he left in a most
inarticulate state. He was a great _ébauche_, rude-draught; as indeed what
great man is not? Left in too rude a state, alas!
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
appendage of France; 'another isle of Oberon to France.' So it was _by
nature_, by Napoleon-nature; and yet look how in fact--HERE AM I! He
cannot understand 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! 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 under foot; to be bound into masses, and built
together as _he_ liked, for a pedestal for France and him: the world has
quite other purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But
alas, what help now! He had gone that way of his; and Nature had also 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!