Change is the master-spirit of Europe, as permanency is of Asia. The
contrast is in the nature of things. However the caprice, the genius, or
the necessities, of the sitter on the throne may attempt to impress
permanency on the habits of the West, or mutability on those of the East,
his success must be but partial. In Europe we have a perpetual movement of
minds, a moral ocean, to which tides and currents are an operation of
nature. But the Caspian or the Euxine is not more defined by its limits of
rock and mountain, or more inexorably separated from the general influx of
the waters which roll round the world, than the Asiatic mind is from
following the free course, and sharing the bold and stormy innovations, of
Europe.
But the most rapid and total change within human memory, was the one which
was now before my eye. I felt as some of the old alchymists might feel in
their laboratories, with all their crucibles heating, all their alembics
boiling, all their strange materials in full effervescence; and their eyes
fixed in doubt, and perhaps in awe, on the powerful and hazardous products
about to result from combinations untried before, and amalgams which might
shatter the roof above their heads, or extinguish their existence by a
blast of poison.
I had left Paris Democracy. I found it a Despotism. I had left it a
melancholy prey to the multitude; a startling scene of alternate fury and
dejection; of cries for revenge, and supplications for bread; of the
tyranny of the mob, and the misery of the nation. I now found it the most
striking contrast to that scene of despair;--Paris the headquarters of a
military government; the Tuileries the palace of a conqueror; every sound
martial; the eye dazzled every where by the spoils of the German and
Italian sovereignties; the nation flushed with victory. Still, the public
aspect exhibited peculiarities which interested me the more, that they
could never have appeared in older times, and probably will never return.
In the midst of military splendour there was a wild, haggard, and unhappy
character stamped on all things. The streets of the capital had not yet
felt the influence of that imperial taste which was to render it an
imperial city. I saw the same shattered suburbs, the same deep, narrow,
and winding streets, the same dismal lanes; in which I had witnessed so
often the gatherings of the armed multitude, and which seemed made for
popular commotion. Mingled with those wild wrecks and gloomy places of
refuge, rather than dwellings, I saw, with their ancient ornaments, and
even with their armorial bearings and gilded shields and spears not yet
entirely defaced, the palaces of the noblesse and blood-royal of France,
the remnants of those ten centuries of monarchy which had been powerful
enough to reduce the bold tribes of the Franks to a civilized slavery, and
glittering enough to make them in love with their chains. If I could have
imagined, in the nineteenth century, a camp of banditti on its most showy
scale--a government of Condottieri with its most famous captain at its
head--every where a compilation of arms and spoils, the rude habits of the
robber combined with the pomp of military triumph--I should have said that
the realization was before me.
The Palais Royal was still the chief scene of all Parisian vitality. But
the mob orators were to be found there no more. The walks and cafes were
now crowed with bold figures, epauleted and embroidered, laughing and
talking with the easy air of men who felt themselves masters, and who
evidently regarded every thing round them as the furnishing of a camp. The
land had now undergone its third stage of that great spell by which
nations are urged and roused at the will of a few. The crosier was the
first wand of the magician, then came the sceptre--we were now under the
spell of the sword. I was delighted at this transformation of France, from
the horrid form of popular domination to the showy supremacy of
soldiership. It still had its evils. But the guillotine had disappeared.
Savage hearts and sanguinary hands no longer made the laws, and executed
them. Instead of the groans and execrations, the cries of rage and
clamours of despair, which once echoed through all the streets, I now
heard only popular songs and dances, and saw all the genuine evidences of
that rejoicing with which the multitude had thrown off the most deadly of
all tyrannies--its own.
The foreigner shapes every thing into the picturesque, and all his
picturesque now was military. Every regiment which passed through Paris on
its way from the frontier was reviewed, in front of the palace, by the
First Consul; and those reviews formed the finest of all military
spectacles, for each had a character and a history of its own.--The
regiment which had stormed the bridge of Lodi; the regiment which had
headed the assault on the _tete-du-pont_ at Mantua; the regiment which had
led the march at the passage of the St Bernard; the regiment which had
formed the advance of Dessaix at Marengo--all had their separate
distinctions, and were received with glowing speeches and appropriate
honours by the chief of the state. The popular vanity was flattered by a
perpetual pageant, and that pageant wholly different from the tinsel
displays of the monarchy: no representation of legends, trivial in their
origin, and ridiculous in their memory; but the revival of transactions in
which every man of France felt almost a personal interest, which were the
true sources of the new system of nations, and whose living actors were
seen passing, hour after hour, before the national eye. All was vivid
reality, where all had been false glitter in the days of the Bourbons, and
all sullenness and fear in the days of the Democracy. The reality might
still be rough and stern, but it was substantial, and not without its
share of the superb; it had the sharpness and weight, and it had also the
shining, of the sabre. But this was not all; nothing could be more subtly
consecutive than the whole progress of the head of the government. In a
more superstitious age, it might have been almost believed that some
wizard had stood by his cradle, and sung his destiny; or that, like the
greatest creation of the greatest of dramatists, he had been met in some
mountain pass, or on some lonely heath, and had heard the weird sisters
predicting his charmed supremacy. At this period he was palpably training
the republic to the sight of a dictatorship. The return of the troops
through Paris had already accustomed the populace to the sight of military
power.
The movement of vast masses of men by a word, the simplicity of the great
military machine, its direct obedience to the master-hand, and its
tremendous strength--all were a continued lesson to the popular mind. I
looked on the progress of this lesson with infinite interest; for I
thought that I as about to see a new principle of government disclosed on
the broadest scale--Republicanism in its most majestic aspect, giving a
new development of the art of ruling men, and exhibiting a shape of
domination loftier and more energetic than the world had ever yet seen.
Still, I was aware of the national weaknesses. I was not without a strong
suspicion of the hazard of human advance when entrusted to the caprice of
any being in the form of man, and, above all, to a man who had won his way
to power by arms. Yet, I thought that society had here reached a point of
division; a ridge, from which the streams of power naturally took
different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like
the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in
the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice, of
roaring torrent and sunless valley, through which the Alpine traveller
must toil, before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain.
Attached as I am in the highest degree to the principle of monarchy, and
regarding it as the safest anchorage of the state, still, how was I to
know that moral nature might not have her reserves of power, as well as
physical; that the science of government itself might not have its
undetected secrets, as well as the caverns of the earth; that the
quiverings and convulsions of society at this moment, obviously alike
beyond calculation and control, might not be only evidences of the same
vast agencies at work, whose counterparts, in depths below the human eye,
shake and rend the soil? Those were the days of speculation, and I
indulged in them like the rest of the world. Every man stood, as the
islander of the South Sea may stand on his shore, contemplating the
conflict of fire and water, while the furnaces of the centre are forcing
up the island in clouds of vapour and gusts of whirlwind. All was strange,
undefined, and startling. One thing alone seemed certain; that the past
_regime_ was gone, never to return; that a great barrier had suddenly been
dropped between the two sovereignties; that the living generation stood on
the dividing pinnacle between the languid vices of the past system and the
daring, perhaps guilty, energies of the system to come. Behind man lay the
long level of wasted national faculties, emasculating superstitions, the
graceful feebleness of a sensual nobility, and the superb follies of a
haughty and yet helpless throne. Before him rose a realm of boundless
extent, but requiring frames of vigour, and feelings undismayed by
difficulty, to traverse and subdue;--a horizon of hills and clouds, where
the gale blew fresh and the tempest rolled; where novel difficulties must
be met at every step, but still where, if we trod at all, we must ascend
at every step, where every clearing of the horizon must give us a new and
more comprehensive prospect, and where every struggle with the rudeness of
the soil, or the roughness of the elements, must enhance the vigour of the
nerve that encountered them.
Those were dreams; yet I had not then made due allowance for the nature of
the foreign mind. I was yet to learn its absence of all sober thought; its
ready temptation by every trivially of the hour; its demand of extravagant
excitement to rouse it into action, and its utter apathy where its
passions were not bribed. I had imagined a national sovereignty,
righteous, calm, and resolute, trained by the precepts of a Milton and a
Locke; I found only an Italian despotism, trained by the romance of
Rousseau and the scepticism of Voltaire.
Every day in the capital now had its celebration, and all exhibited the
taste and talent of the First Consul; but one characteristic fete at
length woke me to the true design of this extraordinary man--the
inauguration of the Legion of Honour. It was the first step to the throne,
and a step of incompatible daring and dexterity; it was the virtual
restoration of an aristocracy, in the presence of a people who had raved
with the rage of frenzy against all titles, who had torn down the
coats-of-arms from the gates of the noblesse, and shattered and dug up
even the marbles of their sepulchres. A new military caste--a noblesse of
the sword--was now to be established. Republicanism had been already
"pushed from its stool," but this was the chain which was to keep it fixed
to the ground.
The ceremonial was held in the Hotel des Invalides; and all the civil pomp
of the consulate was combined with all the military display. The giving of
the crosses of honour called forth in succession the names of all those
gallant soldiers whose exploits had rung through Europe, in the campaigns
of the Alps and the Rhine. Nothing could be more in the spirit of a fine
historic picture, or in the semblance of a fine drama. The first men of
the French councils and armies stood, surrounded by the monuments of their
ancestors in the national glory--the statues of the Condes and Turennes,
whose memory formed so large a portion of the popular pride, and whose
achievements so solid a record in the history of French triumph. To those
high sources of sentiment, all that could be added by stately decoration
and religious solemnity was given; and in the chorus of sweet voices, the
sounds of martial harmony, the acclamations of the countless multitudes
within and without, and the thunder of cannon, was completed the most
magnificent, and yet the most ominous, of all ceremonials. It was not
difficult to see, that this day was the consecration of France to absolute
power, and of all her faculties to conquest. Like the Roman herald, she
had put on, in the temple, the robe of defiance to all nations. She was to
be from this day of devotement the nation of war. It was less visible, but
not less true, that upon the field of Marengo perished the Democracy, but
in that temple was sacrificed the Republic. The throne was still only in
vision; but its outline was clear, and that outline was colossal.
In my intercourse with the men of the new _regime_ I had associated
chiefly with the military. Their ideas were less narrowed by the circle of
Paris, their language was frank and free, and their knowledge was more
direct and extensive on the topic which I most desired to comprehend, the
state of their foreign conquests. I soon had reason to congratulate myself
on my choice. One of these, a colonel of dragoons, who had served with
Moreau, and whose partialities at least did not lean to the rival hero,
came hurriedly to me at an early hour one morning, to "take his leave."
But why, and where? "He was ordered to join his regiment immediately, and
march for the coast of the Channel." "To invade us?" I asked laughingly.
"Not exactly yet, perhaps; but it may come to that in good time. I grieve
to tell you," added my gallant friend, with more of gravity than I thought
he could possibly have thrown into his good-humoured features, "that we
are to have war. The matter is perfectly determined in the Tuileries; and
at the levee to-day there will probably be a scene. In the mean time, take
my information as certain, and be prepared for your return to England
without twenty-four hours' delay." He took his departure.
I attended the levee on that memorable day, and saw the _scene_. The Place
du Carrousel was unusually crowded with troops, which the First Consul was
passing in review. The whole population seemed to have conjectured the
event of the day; for I had never seen them in such numbers, or with such
an evident look of general anxiety. The Tuileries were filled with
officers of state, with leading military men, and members of the Senate
and Tribunat; the whole body of the foreign ambassadors were present; and
yet the entire assemblage was kept waiting until the First Consul had
inspected even the firelocks of his guard, and the shoes in their
knapsacks. The diplomatists, as they saw from the high casements of the
palace this tardy operation going on, exchanged glaces with each other at
its contemptuous trifling. Some of the _militaires_ exhibited the
impatience of men accustomed to prompt measures; the civilians smiled and
shrugged their shoulders; but all felt that there was a purpose in the
delay.
At length, the drums beat for the close of the review; the First Consul
galloped up to the porch of the palace, flung himself from his charger,
sprang up the staircase, and without stopping for etiquette, rushed into
the _salle_, followed by cloud of aides-de-camp and chamberlains. The
Circle of Presentations was formed, and he walked hastily round it, saying
few rapid words to each. I observed for the first time an aide-de-camp
moving on the outside of the circle, step for step, and with his eye
steadily marking the gesture of each individual to whom the First Consul
spoke in his circuit. This was a new precaution, and indicative of the
time. Till then he had run all risks, and might have been the victim of
any daring hand. The very countenance of the First Consul was historic; it
was as characteristic as his career. It exhibited the most unusual
contrast of severity and softness; nothing sterner than the gathering of
his brow, nothing more flattering than his smile. On this occasion we had
them both in perfection. To the general diplomatic circle his lip wore
the smile. But when he reached the spot where the British ambassador
stood, we had the storm at once. With his darkest frown, and with every
feature in agitation, he suddenly burst out into a tirade against
England--reproaching her with contempt of treaties; with an absolute
desire for war; with a perpetual passion for embroiling Europe; with
forming armaments in the midst of peace; and with challenging France to an
encounter which must provoke universal hostilities. The English ambassador
listened in silence, but with the air of a high-spirited man, who would
concede nothing to menace; and with the countenance of an intelligent one,
who could have easily answered declamation by argument. But for this
answer there was no time. The First Consul, having delivered his diatribe,
suddenly sprang round, darted through the crowd, rushed through a portal,
and was lost to the view. That scene was decisive. I saw that war was
inevitable. I took my friend's advice, ordered post-horses, and within the
twenty-four hours I saw with infinite delight the cliffs of Dover shining
in the dawn.
I am not writing a history. I am merely throwing together events separated
by great chasms, in the course of a life. My life was all incident;
sometimes connected with public transactions of the first magnitude,
sometimes wholly personal; and thus I hasten on to the close of a public
career which has ended, and of an existence diversified by cloud and
sunshine, but on the whole happy.
The war began; it was unavoidable. The objects of our great adversary have
been since stripped of their disguise. His system, at the time, was to
lull England by peace, until he had amassed a force which would crush her
at the outbreak of a war. A few years would have concentrated his
strength, and brought the battle to our own shores. But there are higher
impulses acting on the world than human ambition; the great machine is not
altogether guided by man. England had the cause of nations in her charge;
her principles were truth, honour, and justice. She had retained the
reverence of her forefathers for the Sanctuary; and the same guidance
which had in the beginning taught her wisdom, ultimately crowned her with
victory. I lived through a period of the most overwhelming vicissitudes of
nations, and of the great disturber himself, who had caused those
vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I
saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to
a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I
saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to
obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents
to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the
love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges
the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than
France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its
perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her
wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of
the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed,
under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of
Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will
be her last war.
On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost
universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal
reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his
sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the
field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the
distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and
one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off
in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine
faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of
government, and of the general progress of society.
I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in
the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was
mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe.
Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory,
when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus
more happy, was the fate of him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and
memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the
last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their
nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of
proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty
perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner,
dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst
of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of
all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who
dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an
empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while
he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled
with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican
electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European
thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated
that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head
of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old
wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the
ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms
to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers
ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he
forged his own chain.
Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized
Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his
sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole
treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his
creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten
thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of
courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for
mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be
the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his
nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed
itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the
fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have
worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming
phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentricity of its course, as we saw it
eclipsing the old luminaries in succession; until it touched our orbit,
and visited us in conflagration.
It was said that Pitt died of a broken heart, in despair of the prospects
of England. The defeat of Austerlitz was pronounced his death-blow. What
thoughts may cluster round the sleepless pillow, who shall tell? But no
man knew England better; none had a bolder faith in her perseverance and
principle; none had more broadly laid the foundations of victory in
national honour. I shall never be driven into the belief that William Pitt
despaired of his country.
He died in the vigour of his genius, in the proudest struggle of the
empire, in the midst of the deepest trial which for a thousand years had
demanded all the faculties of England. Yet, what man within human
recollection had lived so long, if we are to reckon life not by the
calendar but by triumphs? What minister of England, what minister of
Europe, but himself, was the head of his government for three-and-twenty
years? What man had attained so high an European rank? What mind had
influenced so large an extent of European interests? What name was so
instinctively pronounced by every nation, as the first among mankind? To
have earned distinctions like these, was to have obtained all that time
could give. Not half a century in years, Pitt's true age was patriarchal.
I was now but a spectator. My connexion with public life was broken off.
Every name with which I had been associated was swept away; and I stood
like a man flung from ship-wreck upon a shore, where every face which he
met was that of a stranger. I was still in Parliament, but I felt a
loathing for public exertions. From habit, I had almost identified office
with the memorable men whom I had seen governing so long; and the new
faces, the new declamation, and the new principles, which the ministerial
change brought before me nightly, startled my feelings even less as new
than as incongruous. I admitted the ability, the occasional intelligence,
and perhaps even the patriotism of the cabinet; but in those reveries,
(the natural refuge from a long debate,) memory so often peopled the
Treasury Bench with the forms of Pitt and his distinguished coadjutors,
and so completely filled my ear with his sonorous periods and high-toned
principles, that when I was roused to the reality, I felt as those who
have seen some great performer in one of Shakspeare's characters, until no
excellence of his successor can embody the conception once more.
I retired from the tumult of London, and returned to tastes which I had
never wholly forgotten; taking a small residence within a few miles of
this centre of the living world, and devoting my leisure to the enjoyments
of that life, which, in the purest days of man, was given to him as the
happiest, "to dress the garden, and keep it." Clotilde in all her tastes
joined with mine, or rather led them, with the instinctive elegance of a
female mind, accomplished in every grace of education. We read, wrote,
walked, talked, and pruned our rose-trees and gathered our carnations and
violets, together. She had already given me those pledges, which, while
they increase the anxiety, also increase the affection, of wedded life.
The education of our children was a new source of interest. They were
handsome and healthy. Their little sports, the growth of their young
perceptions, and the freshness of their ideas, renewed to us both all the
delights of society without their exhaustion; and when, after returning
from a day spent in the noise and bustle of London, I reached my rustic
gate, heard the cheerful voices of the little population which rushed down
the flowery avenue to cling upon my neck; and stood at the door of my
cottage, with my arm round the waist of my beautiful and fond wife,
breathing the evening fragrance of a thousand blooms, and enjoying the
cool air, and the purple glories of the sky--I often wondered why men
should seek for happiness in any other scene; and felt gratitude, not the
less sincere for its being calm and solemn, to the Giver of a lot so
nearly approaching to human fulness of joy.
But the world rolls on, let who will slumber among its roses. The
political world was awoke by a thunder-clap. Fox died. He was just six
months a minister! Such is ambition, such is the world. He died, like
Pitt, in the zenith of his powers, with his judgment improved and his
passions mitigated, with the noblest prospects of public utility before
his eyes, and the majestic responsibilities of a British minister assuming
their natural rank in his capacious mind. The times, too, were darkening;
and another "lodestar" was thus stricken from the national hemisphere, at
the moment when the nation most wanted guidance. The lights which remained
were many; but they were vague, feeble, and scattered. The "leader of the
starry host" was gone.
I cannot trust myself to speak of this distinguished man; for I was no
Foxite. I regarded his policy in opposition as the pleadings of a powerful
advocate, with a vast retaining fee, a most comprehensive cause, and a
most generous and confiding client. Popularity, popular claims, and the
people, were all three made for him beyond all other men; and no advocate
ever pleaded with more indefatigable zeal, or more resolute determination.
But, raised to a higher position, higher qualities were demanded. Whether
they might not have existed in his nature, waiting for the development of
time, is the question. But time was not given. His task had hitherto been
easy. It was simply to stand as a spectator on the shore, criticising the
manoeuvres of a stately vessel struggling with the gale. The helm was at
last put into his hand; and it was then that he felt the difference
between _terra firma_ and the wild and restless element which he was now
to control. But he had scarcely set his foot on the deck, when he, too,
was swept away. On such brevity of trial, it is impossible to judge. Time
might have matured his vigour, while it expanded his views: matchless as
the leader of a party, he might then have been elevated into the
acknowledged leader of a people. The singular daring, ardent
sensitiveness, and popular ambition, which made him dangerous in a private
station, might then have found their nobler employment, and been purified
in the broad and lofty region of ministerial duty. He might have enlarged
the partizan into the patriot, and, instead of being the great leader of a
populace, have been ennobled into the great guide of an empire.
But the world never stands still. On the day when I returned from
moralising on the vanity of life over the grave of Fox, I received a
letter, a trumpet-call to the _melee_, from Mordecai. It was enthusiastic,
but its enthusiasm had now taken a bolder direction. "In abandoning
England," he told me, "he had abandoned all minor and personal
speculations, and was now dealing with the affairs of kingdoms." This
letter gave only fragments of his views; but it was easy to see that he
contemplated larger results than he ventured to trust to paper.
"You must come and see me here," said he, "for it is only here that you
_can_ see me as I ever desired to be seen; or in fact, as nature made me.
In your busy metropolis, I was only one of the millions who were content
to make a sort of a reptile existence, creeping on the ground, and living
on the chances of the day. Here I have thrown off my caterpillar life and
am on the wing--a human dragon-fly, if you will, darting at a thousand
different objects, enjoying the broad sunshine, and speeding through the
wide air. My invincible attachment to my nation here finds its natural
object; for the sons of Abraham are here a _people_. I am a patriarch,
with my flocks and herds, my shepherds and clansmen, the sons of my tribe
coming to do me honour, and my heart swelling and glowing with the
prospects of national regeneration. I have around me a province to which
one of your English counties would be but a sheepfold; a multitude of bold
spirits, to whom your populace would be triflers; a new nation, elated by
their approaching deliverance, solemnly indignant at their past
oppression, and determined to shake the land to its centre, or to recover
their freedom.
"You will speak of this as the vision of an old man--come to us, and you
will see it a splendid reality. But observe, that _I_ expect no miracle. I
leave visions to fanatics; and while I acknowledge the Power of Powers,
which rides in clouds, and moves the world by means unknown to human
weakness, I look also to the human means which have their place in pushing
on the wheels of the great system. The army which has broken down the
strength of the Continent--the force which, like a whirlwind, has torn
such tremendous chasms through the old domains of European power, and has
torn up so many of the forest monarchs by the root--the French legions,
the greatest instrument of human change since the Gothic invasions, are
now marching direct on Poland.
"I have seen the man who is at the head of that army--the most
extraordinary being whom Europe has seen for a thousand years--the crowned
basilisk of France. I own, that we must beware of his fangs, of the blast
of his nostrils, and the flash of his eye. He is a terrible production of
nature: but he is on our side, and, even if he should be finally trampled,
he will have first done our work. I have had an interview with Napoleon!
it was long and animated. He spoke to me as to the chief man of my nation,
and I answered him in the spirit of the chief man. He pronounced, that the
general change, essential to the true government of Europe, was incapable
of being effected without the aid of our people. He spoke contemptuously
of the impolicy by which we had been deprived of our privileges, and
declared his determination to place us on a height from which we might
move the world. But it was obvious to me, that under those lofty
declarations there was a burning ambition; that if we were to move the
world, it was for him; and that, even then, we were not to move it for the
monarch of France, but for the individual. I saw, that _he_ was then the
dreamer. Yet his dream was the extravagance of genius. In those hopeless
graspings and wild aspirations, I saw ultimate defeat; but I saw also the
nerve and muscle of a gigantic mind. In his pantings after immeasurable
power and imperishable dominion, he utterly forgot the barrier which time
throws before the proudest step of human genius; and that within a few
years his head must grow grey, his blood cold, the sword be returned to
its sheath, and even the sceptre fall from his withering hand. Still, in
our conference, we both spoke the same language of scorn for human
obstacles, of contempt for the narrowness of human views, and of our
resolution to effect objects which, in many an after age, should fix the
eye of the world. But _he_ spoke of immortal things; relying on mortal
conjecture and mortal power. I spoke of them on surer grounds. I felt them
to be the consummation of promises which nothing can abolish; to be the
offspring of power which nothing can resist. The foundation of his
structures was policy, the foundation of mine was prophecy. And when his
shall be scattered as the chaff of the threshing-floor, and be light as
the dust of the balance; mine shall be deep as the centre, high as the
heavens, and dazzling as the sun in his glory."
In another portion of his letter, he adverted to the means by which this
great operation was to be effected.
"I have been for three days on the Vistula, gazing at the march of the
'Grand Army.' It well deserves the name. It is the mightiest mass of power
ever combined under one head; half a million of men. The armies of Persia
were gatherings of clowns compared to this incomparable display of
soldiership; the armies of Alaric and Attila were hordes of savages in
comparison; the armies of ancient Rome alone approached it in point of
discipline, but the most powerful Roman army never reached a fifth of its
number. I see at this moment before me the conquerors of the Continent,
the brigades which have swept Italy, the bayonets and cannon which have
broken down Austria, and extinguished Prussia.--The eagles are now on the
wing for a mightier prey."