by the beauty of his person, an outward gift which is seldom despised,
except by those to whom it has been refused. Before he spoke, the orator
engaged on his side the affections of a public or private audience. They
applauded his commanding presence, his majestic aspect, his piercing
eye, his gracious smile, his flowing beard, his countenance that painted
every sensation of the soul, and his gestures that enforced each
expression of the tongue. In the familiar offices of life he
scrupulously adhered to the grave and ceremonious politeness of his
country; his respectful attention to the rich and powerful was dignified
by his condescension and affability to the poorest citizens of Mecca;
the frankness of his manner concealed the artifice of his views, and the
habits of courtesy were imputed to personal friendship or universal
benevolence. His memory was capacious and retentive, his wit easy and
social, his imagination sublime, his judgment clear, rapid, and
decisive. He possessed the courage both of thought and action; and,
although his designs might gradually expand with his success, the first
idea which he entertained of his divine mission bears the stamp of an
original and superior genius. The son of Abdallah was educated in the
bosom of the noblest race, in the use of the purest dialect of Arabia;
and the fluency of his speech was corrected and enhanced by the practice
of discreet and seasonable silence. With these powers of eloquence
Mahomet was an illiterate barbarian; his youth had never been instructed
in the arts of reading and writing; the common ignorance exempted him
from shame or reproach, but he was reduced to a narrow circle of
existence, and deprived of those faithful mirrors which reflect to our
mind the minds of sages and heroes. Yet the book of nature and of man
was open to his view; and some fancy has been indulged in the political
and philosophical observations which are ascribed to the Arabian
_traveler_. He compares the nations and the religions of the earth;
discovers the weakness of the Persian and Roman monarchies; beholds,
with pity and indignation, the degeneracy of the times; and resolves to
unite, under one God and one king, the invincible spirit and primitive
virtues of the Arabs. Our more accurate inquiry will suggest that,
instead of visiting the courts, the camps, the temples of the East, the
two journeys of Mahomet into Syria were confined to the fairs of Bostra
and Damascus; that he was only thirteen years of age when he accompanied
the caravan of his uncle; and that his duty compelled him to return as
soon as he had disposed of the merchandise of Cadijah. In these hasty
and superficial excursions the eye of genius might discern some objects
invisible to his grosser companions; some seeds of knowledge might be
cast upon a fruitful soil; but his ignorance of the Syriac language must
have checked his curiosity, and I can not perceive in the life or
writings of Mahomet that his prospect was far extended beyond the limits
of the Arabian world.
From every region of that solitary world the pilgrims of Mecca were
annually assembled by the calls of devotion and commerce; in the free
concourse of multitudes, a simple citizen, in his native tongue, might
study the political state and character of the tribes, the theory and
practice of the Jews and Christians. Some useful strangers might be
tempted, or forced, to implore the rights of hospitality; and the
enemies of Mahomet have named the Jew, the Persian, and the Syrian monk
whom they accuse of lending their secret aid to the composition of the
Koran. Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the
school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a
single artist. From his earliest youth Mahomet was addicted to religious
contemplation; each year, during the month of Ramadan, he withdrew from
the world and from the arms of Cadijah; in the cave of Hera, three miles
from Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm, whose abode
is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet. The faith which,
under the name of _Islam_, he preached to his family and nation, is
compounded of an eternal truth and a necessary fiction, that _there is
only one God, and that Mahomet is the apostle of God_.
It may, perhaps, be expected that I should balance his faults and
virtues, that I should decide whether the title of enthusiast or
impostor more properly belongs to that extraordinary man. Had I been
intimately conversant with the son of Abdallah, the task would still be
difficult, and the success uncertain; at the distance of twelve
centuries, I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious
incense; and could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, the
fleeting resemblance would not equally apply to the solitary of Mount
Hera, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the conqueror of Arabia. The
author of a mighty revolution appears to have been endowed with a pious
and contemplative disposition; so soon as marriage had raised him above
the pressure of want, he avoided the paths of ambition and avarice; and
till the age of forty he lived with innocence, and would have died
without a name. The unity of God is an idea most congenial to nature and
reason; and a slight conversation with the Jews and Christians would
teach him to despise and detest the idolatry of Mecca. It was the duty
of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, to rescue
his country from the dominion of sin and error. The energy of a mind
incessantly bent on the same object would convert a general obligation
into a particular call; the warm suggestions of the understanding or the
fancy would be felt as the inspirations of heaven; the labor of thought
would expire in rapture and vision; and the inward sensation, the
invisible monitor, would be described with the form and attributes of an
angel of God.
From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the
demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may
deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience
may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and
voluntary fraud. Charity may believe that the original motives of
Mahomet were those of pure and genuine benevolence; but a human
missionary is incapable of cherishing the obstinate unbelievers who
reject his claims, despise his arguments, and persecute his life; he
might forgive his personal adversaries, he may lawfully hate the enemies
of God; the stern passions of pride and revenge were kindled in the
bosom of Mahomet, and he sighed, like the prophet of Nineveh, for the
destruction of the rebels whom he had condemned. The injustice of Mecca
and the choice of Medina transformed the citizen into a prince, the
humble preacher into the leader of armies; but his sword was consecrated
by the example of the saints, and the same God who afflicts a sinful
world with pestilence and earthquakes might inspire for their conversion
or chastisement the valor of his servants. In the exercise of political
government he was compelled to abate of the stern rigor of fanaticism,
to comply in some measure with the prejudices and passions of his
followers, and to employ even the vices of mankind as the instruments of
their salvation. The use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice,
were often subservient to the propagation of the faith; and Mahomet
commanded or approved the assassination of the Jews and idolaters who
had escaped from the field of battle. By the repetition of such acts the
character of Mahomet must have been gradually stained, and the influence
of such pernicious habits would be poorly compensated by the practice of
the personal and social virtues which are necessary to maintain the
reputation of a prophet among his secretaries and friends.
Of his last years ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will
suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious impostor!) at the
enthusiasm of his youth and the credulity of his proselytes. A
philosopher will observe that _their_ cruelty and _his_ success would
tend more strongly to fortify the assurance of his divine mission, that
his interest and religion were inseparably connected, and that his
conscience would be soothed by the persuasion that he alone was absolved
by the Deity from the obligation of positive and moral laws. If he
retained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins of Mahomet may be
allowed as an evidence of his sincerity. In the support of truth the
arts of fraud and fiction may be deemed less criminal, and he would have
started at the foulness of the means had he not been satisfied of the
importance and justice of the end. Even in a conqueror or a priest, I
can surprise a word or action of unaffected humanity; and the decree of
Mahomet that, in the sale of captives, the mothers should never be
separated from their children, may suspend or moderate the censure of
the historian.
The good sense of Mahomet despised the pomp of royalty; the apostle of
God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire,
swept the floor, milked the ewes, and mended with his own hands his
shoes and his woolen garment. Disdaining the penance and merit of a
hermit, he observed, without effort or vanity, the abstemious diet of an
Arab and a soldier. On solemn occasions he feasted his companions with
rustic and hospitable plenty; but in his domestic life, many weeks would
elapse without a fire being kindled on the hearth of the prophet. The
interdiction of wine was confirmed by his example; his hunger was
appeased with a sparing allowance of barley bread; he delighted in the
taste of milk and honey, but his ordinary food consisted of dates and
water. Perfumes and women were the two sensual enjoyments which his
nature required and his religion did not forbid. Their incontinence was
regulated by the civil and religious laws of the Koran; their incestuous
alliances were blamed, the boundless license of polygamy was reduced to
four legitimate wives or concubines; their rights, both of bed and of
dowry, were equitably determined; the freedom of divorce was
discouraged, adultery was condemned as a capital offense, and
fornication in either sex was punished with a hundred stripes. Such were
the calm and rational precepts of the legislator; but in his private
conduct Mahomet indulged the appetites of a man, and abused the claims
of a prophet. The youth, the beauty, the spirit of Ayesha, gave her a
superior ascendant; she was beloved and trusted by the prophet, and
after his death the daughter of Abubeker was long revered as the mother
of the faithful. During the twenty-four years of the marriage of Mahomet
with Cadijah, her youthful husband abstained from the right of
polygamy, and the pride or tenderness of the venerable matron was never
insulted by the society of a rival. After her death he placed her in the
rank of the four perfect women--with the sister of Moses, the mother of
Jesus, and Fatima, the best beloved of his daughters. “Was she not old?”
said Ayesha, with the insolence of a blooming beauty; “has not God given
you a better in her place?” “No, by God,” said Mahomet, with an effusion
of honest gratitude, “there never can be a better! she believed in me
when men despised me; she relieved my wants when I was poor and
persecuted by the world.”
CHARLEMAGNE.
BY SIR JAMES STEPHEN.
[Otherwise known as Charles I, or Charles the Great, Emperor of the
West and King of France, born 742 A.D., died 814. Grandson of
Charles Martel and son of Pepin, who, under the titular rank of
Mayor of the Palace and Duke of Austrasia, had exercised the
substantial functions of French sovereignty during the closing days
of the Merovingian kings. Charlemagne was the true founder of the
Carlovingian dynasty, and was by conquest the ruler over much of
what is now Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.
He is one of the colossal figures in early European history. But
even his genius, though gifted with the finest traits of the
soldier, administrator, and law-maker, could not delay that
tremendous revolution of society, which intervened between the
collapse of the old Roman system and the establishment of
feudalism. The most important events of his reign were the
subjugation and conversion of the Saxons and the re-establishment
of the Western Empire.]
The political maxims which Charlemagne acquired by tradition and
inheritance had, to a certain extent, become obsolete when he himself
succeeded to the power of his ancestors and to the crown of his father,
Pepin. It was then no longer necessary to practice those hereditary arts
with a
[Illustration: CHARLEMAGNE.]
view to the great prize to which they had so long been subservient. But
the maxims by which the Carlovingian scepter had been won were not less
necessary in order to defend and to retain it. They afford the key to
more than half the history of the great conqueror from whom that dynasty
derives its name. The cardinal points to which throughout his long and
glorious reign his mind was directed with an inflexible tenacity of
purpose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had bent
their attention. They were to conciliate the attachment of his German
subjects by studiously maintaining their old German institutions; to
anticipate instead of awaiting the invasions of the barbarous nations by
whom he was surrounded; to court the alliance and support of all other
secular potentates of the East and West; and to strengthen his own power
by the most intimate relations with the Church.
I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had other rules or
habits of conduct which were the indigenous growth of his own mind. It
was only in a mind of surpassing depth and fertility that such maxims
could have been nurtured and made to yield their appropriate fruits;
for, first, he firmly believed that the power of his house could have no
secure basis except in the religious, moral, intellectual, and social
improvement of his subjects; and, secondly, he was no less firmly
persuaded that in order to effect that improvement it was necessary to
consolidate all temporal authority in Europe by the reconstruction of
the Cæsarian empire--that empire beneath the shelter of which religion,
law, and learning had so long and so widely flourished throughout the
dominions of imperial Rome.
Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title of “the
Great” had been given, Charlemagne alone has retained it as a permanent
addition to his name. The reason may, perhaps, be that in no other man
were ever united in so large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the
qualities which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character,
such as energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power;
curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of
pleasure--not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of
enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights by
which the burdened mind and jaded spirits recruit and renovate their
powers--delights of which none are susceptible in the highest degree but
those whose more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives
and directed toward the highest ends; for the charms of social
intercourse, the play of buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of honest
mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, require, for
their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute health of body and of
mind, which none but the noblest natures possess and in the possession
of which Charlemagne exceeded all other men.
His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes,
and the dome-like structure of his head imparted, as we learn from
Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a king,
relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced warrior. He was still a
stranger to every form of bodily disease when he entered his seventieth
year; and although he was thenceforward constrained to pay the usual
tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a contempt
for the whole _materia medica_, and for the dispensers of it, which
Molière himself, in his gayest mood, might have envied. In defiance of
the gout, he still followed the chase, and still provoked his comrades
to emulate his feats in swimming, as though the iron frame which had
endured nearly threescore campaigns had been incapable of lassitude and
exempt from decay.
In the monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, there was
living in the ninth century a monk who relieved the tedium of his
monotonous life and got the better, as he tells us, of much
constitutional laziness by collecting anecdotes of the mighty monarch,
with whose departed glories the world was at that time ringing. In this
amusing legend Charlemagne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of
learning, and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne, the
joyous companion, amusing himself with the comedy or rather with the
farce of life, and contributing to it not a few practical jokes, which
stand in most whimsical contrast with the imperial dignity of the
jester. Thus, when he commands a whole levy of his blandest courtiers,
plumed and furred and silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase
through sleet and tempest, mud and brambles; or constrains an unhappy
chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other members
of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces; or concerts with a Jew
peddler a scheme for palming off, at an enormous price, on an Episcopal
virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as an animal till then unknown to any
naturalist--these, and many similar facetiæ, which in any other hands
might have seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the
illustrious author of them, that native alacrity of spirit and
child-like glee, which neither age nor cares nor toil could subdue, and
which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to suffocate.
Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim or merriment
less apt to yearn with tenderness over the interior circle of his home.
While yet a child, he had been borne on men’s shoulders, in a buckler
for his cradle, to accompany his father in his wars; and in later life,
he had many a strange tale to tell of his father’s achievements. With
his mother, Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in affectionate and
reverend intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occasion,
which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of filial reverence,
for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife against his own consent.
His own parental affections were indulged too fondly and too long, and
were fatal both to the immediate objects of them and to his own
tranquillity. But with Eginhard and Alcuin and the other associates of
his severer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friendship,
which can be created only on the basis of the most profound esteem, and
which can be developed only by that free interchange of thought and
feeling which implies the temporary forgetfulness of all the
conventional distinctions of rank and dignity.
It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform, with such
revolting obscenities, the pages in which he waged his disingenuous
warfare against the one great purifying influence of human society. It
may also have been retributive justice which has left the glory of
Charlemagne to be overshadowed by the foul and unmerited reproach on
which Gibbon dwells with such offensive levity; for the monarch was
habitually regardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant,
which has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love and happiness
and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, Charlemagne was
probably the willing victim of a transparent sophistry. From a nature so
singularly constituted as his, sweet waters or bitter might flow with
equal promptitude. That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues
and his vices found their common root probably confounded the
distinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced him to
think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often conducting him
to the most noble and magnanimous enterprises; for such was the revelry
of his animal life, so inexhaustible his nervous energies, so intense
the vibrations of each successive impulse along the chords of his
sensitive nature, so insatiable his thirst for activity, and so
uncontrollable his impatience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in
a frolic or a chase, composed verses or listened to homilies, fought or
negotiated, cast down thrones or built them up, studied, conversed, or
legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the one wakeful and
really living agent in the midst of an inert, visionary, and somnolent
generation.
The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far
more by this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any
pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was seldom
engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable
siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a
protracted blockade; but, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted
warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the
Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a
velocity of movement and such a decision of purpose that no power,
civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly
sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. And though it be
true, as Gibbon has observed, that he seldom if ever encountered in the
field a really formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for
his military skill animated by his sleepless energy, the countless
assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become too
formidable for resistance; for to Charlemagne is due the introduction
into modern warfare of the art by which a general compensates for the
numerical inferiority of his own forces to those of his antagonists--the
art of moving detached bodies of men along remote but converging lines
with such mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same
moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of
Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight or
executed with greater precision than the simultaneous passages of
Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mountain-ranges, and their
ultimate union in the vicinity of their Lombard enemies.
But though many generals have eclipsed the fame of Charlemagne as a
strategist, no one ever rivaled his inflexible perseverance as a
conqueror. The Carlovingian crown may indeed be said to have been worn
on the tenure of continual conquests. It was on that condition alone
that the family of Pepin of Heristal could vindicate the deposition of
the Merovings and the pre-eminence of the Austrasian people; and each
member of that family, in his turn, gave an example of obedience to that
law, or tradition, of their house. But by none of them was it so well
observed as by Charlemagne himself. From his first expedition to his
last there intervened forty-six years, no one of which he passed in
perfect peace, nor without some military triumph. In six months he
reduced into obedience the great province or kingdom of Aquitaine. In
less than two years he drove the Lombard king into a monastic exile,
placing on his own brows the iron crown, and with it the sovereignty
over nearly all the Italian peninsula. During thirty-three successive
summers he invaded the great Saxon confederacy, until the deluge of
barbarism with which they threaten southern Europe was effectually and
forever repressed.