LIKES AND DISLIKES
PERHAPS now we can see a little more clearly the man who was the centre
of so much interest. To appreciate a man’s character it is not so much
necessary to realize what he did, as to realize what he wanted to do,
what he was fond of doing, and what he would have done had he been able;
and on the other hand it is equally necessary to realize what it was he
did not like doing. With Napoleon these matters do not bear a great deal
of analysis.
One is astonished at first when it is borne in upon one that Napoleon
was a man of tepid desires in most directions. It seems almost
inconceivable that the man who was the storm centre of Europe, who was
capable of rousing overwhelming emotion in others, was nearly incapable
of emotion himself. Yet so it was. Napoleon had one ruling desire—for
work, and he had one ruling passion—for the army. His secondary
passions were small, and his dislikes were equally small. Compared in
this light to any full-blooded personality, Dr. Johnson, for instance,
Napoleon fades away into dismal uninterestingness. Work was what
Napoleon liked best of all in this world. When other men would have
broken down under the simultaneous strain of work and anxiety, he throve
and grew fat. One of his most famous letters was written on this very
subject to his brother Joseph at the height of the Eylau campaign.
Joseph, from among the soft delights of Naples, had written complaining
of the troubles which beset him while ruling his little kingdom, and
Napoleon wrote back briefly and sternly, telling how he was at that
moment engaged in a life and death struggle against Bennigsen; how he
was encumbered with the difficulties of feeding and manœuvring two
hundred thousand men in the boggy plains of Poland, where even he
himself could hardly obtain the necessaries of life; how at the same
time the affairs of half Europe demanded his attention, and yet for all
this he did not allow himself to be worried by these numerous interests;
he did all he had to do and delighted in the strain.
It can safely be said that Napoleon never took a holiday. Sometimes it
has been hinted that in 1810 and 1811, after his marriage with Marie
Louise, he slackened his pace and did not do as much as he might have
done. This is true in part, but it is equally true that during that time
he got through an amount of work which would have broken down most men.
Napoleon was not made for holidays. It is hard to find, during the whole
period covered by his correspondence, a single day in which he did not
despatch a dozen letters, all of them bearing the hallmarks of the
utmost care and thought, and nearly all of them vitally important links
in a chain of important decisions. Inactivity was hateful to him. No
sooner had he landed in Elba, removed entirely from the usual outlets of
his energy, than he flung himself into the business of building up new
interests. He laboured harder while governing his little island than did
Kings of countries hundreds of times its size. Only when he was lodged
in St. Helena, do we find a cessation of his frantic toil. Here
circumstances were against him; his gaolers did their best in a blind
fashion to prevent him from indulging in either mental or physical
activity, while the climate and environments were both conducive to
torpor. Yet even at St. Helena Napoleon was responsible for the
production of a mass of written material of whose amount an average man
might be proud if it were the results of the labour of a lifetime. Hard,
unrelenting toil was to Napoleon the breath of life.
His chief relaxation was also in the nature of toil. Napoleon was
passionately fond of all things military. Reviews were to him a source
of unending delight. On emerging triumphant from a period of intense
anxiety his first action almost invariably was to hold a review of all
the troops he could muster; the very day on which he took up his
residence at the Tuileries after the _coup d’état_ of Brumaire, he
reviewed on the Caroussel those battalions which later formed the
nucleus of the Guard, while at Tilsit he contrived to arrange for two or
three reviews every day. All the pageantry and pomp of war appealed
irresistibly to this man to whom so little else appealed. To Napoleon a
battalion marching past in column of double companies was worth all the
vigour of Schiller and all the passion of Alfieri. Soldiers are a
delight to most of us from our nursery days to our maturity; the sight
of a long line of bayonets or the brilliance and glitter of the plumes
and armour of the Household Cavalry can still make us catch our breath
for an instant, but in few instances does this passion become
overwhelming. When it becomes characteristic of a nation it usually
portends calamity. Frederick William I. of Prussia suffered from it to
an extent which has become historic, but in his case his passion for
soldiers was so overwhelming that he did not risk losing any of his
Potsdam Guards. Napoleon was different; he intended his army for
fighting, and fight it did for twenty years, pomp and pageantry
notwithstanding. Not the wildest calumniator has ever hinted that the
reason why Napoleon did not send the Guard into action at Borodino was
because he wanted to keep them to review in peace-time—though this
explanation is sounder than some of those put forward. Napoleon indulged
his passion whenever possible, but he kept it nevertheless strictly
within bounds.
Napoleon had been a soldier from the age of twelve, so that one can
easily explain his liking for military detail; he had been human from
the day of his birth, but it is not so easy to find any other human
traits or weaknesses. The pleasures of the table meant nothing to him;
twenty minutes sufficed for dinner at the Tuileries, and he dined just
as contentedly on horse-steak in Russia as he did on the elaborate
dishes which delighted Marie Louise. So far as can be ascertained
Napoleon was never seen drunk, or sea-sick, or dyspeptic. It would be
almost with relief that we would read of his suffering from measles, had
he ever done so. His freedom from ordinary weaknesses tends to throw the
whole picture out of perspective. One can hardly be surprised that even
so sensible a man as Thiers lost his head while telling of Napoleon’s
exploits. There is only one human touch to which we can turn to gain the
measure of the whole. Napoleon loved a lord.
We have already described how ardently Napoleon looked forward to his
meeting with his Imperial bride, and the complacency with which he
referred to her royal uncle and aunt his predecessors, Louis XVI. and
Marie Antoinette. The same characteristic is noticeable in many of his
actions. Perhaps it is going to extremes to describe his origination of
the Legend of Honour as a piece of snobbery, but his other arrangements
for the provision of a titled nobility are strongly indicative of this
curious stray littleness of mind. No one reading his letters can doubt
that he preferred speaking of Monsieur le Maréchal Prince d’Essling, Duc
de Rivoli, Grand Aigle de la Légion d’Honneur to speaking of plain
General Masséna. He delighted in seeing about him Grand Constables,
Arch-Chancellors, Grand Chamberlains; it pleased him to walk midst Grand
Dukes and Princesses; he preferred conversation with the not
over-talented Queen of Prussia to any interview with Goethe.
Characteristically, he once invited an actor to come and perform before
a “Parterre of Kings.” It may perhaps be pleaded that his painstaking
care in the regulation of precedence, and his minute examination of
forms and ceremonies were due to his desire to have his Imperial
arrangements perfect, but it may be pleaded with equal justice that he
entered voluntarily into these arrangements. The Imperial dignity was
not forced upon him; he lost as many adherents by his assumption of it
as he gained. For all this, once Napoleon decided upon indulging his
snobbery, he indulged in such a manner as to gain most profit by it.
Just as his delight in military matters tended towards the improvement
of his army, so his snobbery tended towards buttressing his throne.
Napoleon took advantage of his own weaknesses just as he did of other
people’s.
One searches in vain for other prominent characteristics. The
selfishness so often attributed to him is not so much the selfishness of
Napoleon as the selfishness of the Emperor. One cannot call selfish the
young lieutenant who took upon himself the maintenance of a brother when
his sole income was thirty pounds a year, nor the man who gave crowns
and fiefs and fortunes to his friends, but the Emperor who pried
jealously into the management of his subject kingdoms and took them back
if he saw fit, the Emperor who refused to share his glory with his
general, the Emperor who sacrificed thousands of lives in order to hold
down Europe was selfish because he believed the Imperial power would
suffer were he unselfish. Even the ambition with which he is usually
credited does not appear on close examination to be very remarkable or
extraordinary. Ambition is, after all, one of the commonest of human
traits, and varies only in degree and not in occurrence. When Napoleon
was a young man he wanted to “get on”; he “got on” partly through
abundance of opportunity and partly through his extraordinary talent. If
it be said that he succeeded through the force of his ambition, it can
easily be countered that most of the men who have ever succeeded were
ambitious. A quite plausible life of Napoleon might be written showing
that he was entirely the reverse of ambitious, and that all the steps of
his career towards power from the day of his receiving the command of
the army of Italy to his invasion of Russia in 1812, were forced upon
him. At the beginning of his career Napoleon had far less chance of
gaining supreme power than had Hoche, or Pichegru, or Jourdan, or
Moreau, but his rivals dropped out of the race through early deaths,
sheer folly, or, perhaps in the case of Moreau, mere inertia. Napoleon
is believed to have schemed to seize the reins of government as early as
1797, but half a dozen others, including even Bernadotte and Augereau,
did the same. Napoleon was lucky, vigorous, and far more gifted than
they, and it was into his hands that the ripened fruit dropped. From
1799 on, from the Consulate to the Consulate for life, from the
Consulate for life to the Empire of the French, from the Empire of the
French to the visionary Empire of the West, were steps which he could
hardly have avoided taking in some form or other if he wished to retain
any power at all. The attempt to enforce the Continental System
undoubtedly led him further forward than was wise or than he desired.
Had Bonaparte been a Washington, he might have retired after the peace
of Amiens, but it is perfectly possible that even if a series of
Washingtons had succeeded him, the last of them would have been beaten
in a great battle some ten years later by the armies of an alliance of
nations which had for some time back been oppressed and enslaved in
increasing degree by the French. Undoubtedly this train of reasoning is
forced and unsound in some respects, but it certainly gives a great deal
of plausibility to the theory that Napoleon’s ambition was not so
far-reaching and impossibly aspiring as it is sometimes carelessly said
to have been. In addition, it is necessary to remember that his restless
energy must occasionally have spurred him to further action while a
lazier man would have remained tranquil. This is possibly an explanation
of his suicidal plunge into Spanish affairs.
In like fashion the other indications of Napoleon’s character are faint
and colourless. Women had no vast attraction for him; he appreciated
them as a physical necessity, but that was all. Undoubtedly he ranked
women in his mind along with exercise and medicine, as things without
which men are liable to deteriorate. Wit and humour had very little
meaning for him—as witness his distaste for Molière—and Art had even
less. He ransacked Europe to fill the Louvre with masterpieces, but he
himself did not enjoy them. He was careless of his ease, of his attire,
of his comfort. When he fell from power, he did not seem to resent it
very much. There is a story of his having attempted suicide after his
abdication in 1814, but it is much to be doubted. The details seem far
more in agreement with the symptoms of his mysterious illness, or of the
malignant disease of which he died a few years later. He did not seem
vastly depressed at Elba, or even at St. Helena. Comparable to this lack
of depression is his hopefulness during the hopeless campaign of 1814.
He stood to lose so much, and he lost so much, but neither the
possibility nor the loss weighed upon him unbearably. Perhaps he was
confident that more greatness awaited him in the future; perhaps he
simply did not care. The furious rages in which Napoleon sometimes
indulged seem to have been merely good acting; he himself admitted that
he never allowed his rage to mount higher than his chin.
Another human trait which was wanting in Napoleon was the capacity for
hatred. With his Corsican upbringing one might have expected to find him
at feud with numbers of people, but he was not. Napoleon was not a good
hater. He never hated Pozzo di Borgo, for instance, half as much as
Pozzo hated him. He took violent dislikes to a few individuals, but he
frequently overcame these in course of time. Macdonald is a case in
point. Hating must be distinguished from despising. Napoleon despised
the Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbons, but he did not hate them. He waged
war after war on Francis of Austria, but he never admitted any personal
dislike. Hatred and affection were alike unknown to Napoleon.
There are one or two isolated examples of men for whom Napoleon
professed affection, but a good deal of doubt surrounds the matter.
Napoleon said he was fond of Muiron, who gave up his life for him at
Arcola; he said he was fond of Duroc, the Grand Marshal of the Palace,
who was killed at Bautzen, but it is significant that we do not hear
much about this affection in either case until after Duroc and Muiron
were both dead. More than one contemporary writer, indeed, has hinted
that Duroc disliked Napoleon, although he did his duty in an exemplary
manner, while so little is known about Muiron that we can be permitted
to assume that the affection Napoleon expressed after Duroc and he were
dead was a theatrical touch assumed for the purpose of enlisting still
more sympathy at St. Helena. This is quite in accordance with what we
know both of Napoleon’s own nature and of his plan of campaign while in
exile.
One more point. Napoleon habitually attributed the lowest possible
motives to all human actions. His attitude was not so much cynical as
uncomprehending (though some people think that cynicism is merely lack
of comprehension); he simply could not understand anyone making any
self-sacrifice when quite disinterested or altruistic. If anyone did, he
put it down to hysteria. The brave boys who died for him in the filth
and misery of twenty campaigns were so enthusiastic, Napoleon thought,
merely because they were hysterical.
This idea is plainly to be discerned on reading Napoleon’s bulletins and
proclamations. They are all of them apparently designed to appeal to a
sentimental and hysterical public. Without doubt, they did appeal to
their readers, but one cannot help feeling nowadays a sensation of
distaste when looking through them. They are unbearably reminiscent of
street corner oratory and of the flamboyant efforts of the sensational
press—appeals to hysteria pure and simple. Moreover, it is also plain
that Napoleon himself felt none of these hysterical impulses—he was
merely working cold-bloodedly on the passions of a passionate people.
Napoleon was entirely unfamiliar with noble instincts or with the idea
of devotion. He laid claim to them himself, of course, despite his
disbelief in them, but that was merely another method of capturing the
favour of the populace. Washington’s loftiness of character was as much
a sealed book to him as would have been (had he lived to see it)
Garibaldi’s disinterested patriotism.
Even the sympathy with nationalism which his nephew later laboured so
hard to attribute to him was wanting; the man who could unite seven
nationalities into one state, and who tossed fragments of territory from
one power to another without consulting anything beyond his own desires
must of necessity have cared nothing either for national or individual
sentiment.
We can sum up then by describing Napoleon as the embodiment of enormous
ability, unquenchable energy, and—nothing else. He can be compared to
an unguarded store of high explosive; he was bound to cause trouble
wherever he settled. Once afforded an opportunity he was certain to
bring about unexpected results, and, as it happened, the turmoil into
which France was flung just as he reached manhood afforded a very early
opportunity. Without morals or ideals to restrain or guide him, he would
cause destruction wherever he went, like a runaway horse or a motor
lorry out of control. He was a Frankenstein monster let loose on the
world; the good he did was as haphazard as the harm.
[Illustration: PAULINE BORGHESE
(née Bonaparte)]