has no guides or leaders; no profound, thinking men, who, knowing the
past and caring for the future, can judge rightly of the present, and
give laws to the opinions of the time. Now, the multitude decide on
every thing for themselves; and every thing is despised which is beyond
the taste of the vulgar. Napoleon was essentially a hero for the vulgar;
fools, who have no idea of power but in tumult, or of strength but in
struggle, cannot comprehend the calm, unapproachable grandeur of
Wellington—a grandeur too high for sympathy. I have studied him in his
despatches; I have talked with him—I have seen him all round—there is
in that man more of innate, imperturbable greatness than in all the
world beside. When Napoleon was about to strike a blow, he raised up
around him a cloud, a very tempest, of passions and fancies, through
which every thing was magnified and mistaken. Wellington goes to work
plainly, indifferently, frigidly, and it is only by the result that you
recognise _in scena Roscium_. In the deep perturbation which came over
the spirit of Napoleon when he essayed any vast work: in the mighty
effort, the tremendous strain—inevitably successful though it may have
been—you see one whose undertakings are above his nature; who must lash
his energies to make them efficient enough. In the cool, common-place,
regular, business-like proceedings of Wellington—never erring or
unprosperous—we behold one whose native, unalterable strength is so
high that the loftiest enterprise is to him not exciting; who, in
conquering glory, is doing his ordinary work. His trade was to be always
successful, and he was perfect master of it. There is the same
difference between the two that there is between the youth and manhood
of genius: in the former, more fervor and greater consciousness of
power; in the latter, far more real might. The distinction may be marked
by the names of the two demons who, in Æschylus, bind Prometheus to the
rock; one was Force, the other Strength. There is the same diversity
which exists between the calm, grey light of the sun, and the lurid,
flashing, noisy brilliance of fire-works. Wellington is the
representative of the genius of England, which, from the beginning of
history, bearing aloft the standard of integrity, good sense and solid
freedom, has stood like a rock in the sea of human passions and powers:
one while baffling the frantic tyranny of the Papacy, and at another
stamping under its iron heel the struggling fiend of Jacobinism.
Napoleon is the type of France—a nation which has no power save of
paroxysms, and cannot cease to be frivolous but by becoming ferocious.
Wellington rides through life like a Tartar horseman, with one perpetual
posture, that of the lance in rest; with one fixed gaze, that on the
object of his attack. Napoleon scoured through his existence like a
monkey on a circus horse, brandishing a flag, stooping over his nag’s
head or under his body, jumping down to jump up again, and all to gain
the wonder and applause of the spectators; going round and round, and
ending where he began. I must finish the parallel by saying that his
course was marked out for him by the whip of a base necessity. Napoleon
was the slave and courtier of opinion, which he at length flattered into
the belief that it was a master. Wellington despised and neglected
opinion, till it has come fawning about his feet. Vanity had grasped
Napoleon by the throat, and he was her garlanded victim. You never see
in Wellington that sycophancy to circumstances, that obsequiousness to
fortune. He seized Destiny by the collar, and fairly swung her round.
Consider the wonderful, sublime achievement of Assaye; study the
political skill which he displayed in the Peninsula, the miraculous
combination of ingenuity, temper, firmness and authority by which he
threw order into a chaos of difficulties, and, himself alone, sustained
a world of jarring interests; contemplate the glorious action of the
Arapeiles, of which Austerlitz was a dull and broken reflection; ponder
the campaign of Torres Vedras, the master-piece of art, the wonder of
history—a conception as felicitous as the brightest of Newton’s, and
executed with a perfection which delights the observer even to
mirthfulness—a model of _beauty_ in war, by which victory was reduced
to certainty, and war became one of the exact sciences: review these,
and tell me by what proofs of intellectual power in Napoleon’s history
they are exceeded. Remember, too, that of all Wellington’s doings we
have unvarnished and exact accounts; while of Napoleon’s actions we have
in many cases only the statements of himself, the most enormous liar
that ever breathed the upper air. Wellington was a great man; Napoleon
was a child, who, by the despair of an infinite and hopeless ambition,
had strengthened himself into a giant.”
“There is this remarkable consideration in Wellington’s case, that the
whole of his wide and free career was wholly run within the limits of
duty. In that respect, no man in history may be compared with him,
except Belisarius. What such men do is done without the inspiration of
the passions.”
“Yes: when a man flings himself free from all human ties, and is
self-hurled into the infinite abandonment of the lusts of the mind, his
soul becomes charged with the might and the magnificence of all the
fires of Hell. The infernal saints all minister their power to his
spirit:—Vanity, with its craving eyes—Pride, with its vaulting
restlessness—the steel-tipped thongs of Ambition, the fiendish vigor of
Despair. It was a dangerous thing to conquer Napoleon; he recoiled from
defeat with the spring of a demon. When you remember that Wellington had
neither this power, which was possessed by Alexander and Gustavus and
Napoleon, nor yet the religious enthusiasm of Cromwell, but did all by
the natural and native strength of his ordinary intellect, you must
yield him a respect which the others cannot share. He has considered
that, in politics as in geometry, the shortest line is the straightest.
Napoleon was made up of artifice, of which Mirabeau has said that it may
indicate intellect, but it never exists in intellect of a superior
order, unless accompanied with meanness of heart; it is a lie in action,
and it springs from fear and personal interest, and consequently from
meanness.”
“To be sure, the moral eminence of the men will bear no comparing.”
“Persons of great souls and lofty meditations recognise the dignity of
nature even in the degradation of fate. They are conscious of its great
origin, its mournful condition, its high destiny; henceforth there is
for them no scorn, but a sympathising tolerance, a respectful
compassion. Napoleon’s moral power was the power of ferocious contempt;
it was based upon a disdainful hatred of his species. Depend upon it,
that no thinking man can cherish an habitual disgust who has himself a
soul, or abhor his fellows who has any self-respect. You find in
Wellington none of these wild, these savage sentiments, these
extremenesses of counsel or of motive. He is always sane, practical,
right-hearted and right-minded. His actions illustrate that useful
wisdom which the affairs of life demand, and I know no writer from whom
so valuable precepts may be learned. In or out of Oxford, he has been
the hardest student of his times; for the saddle is, after all, the true
chair of thought. As for Napoleon being great, it seems to me that the
idea is an absurdity. Alfred, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, these
were great men; and such men build up all that is built, and the history
of a nation from their time till you come to another great man, is only
the record of pulling down what they built up. But Napoleon pulled down
everything, and built up nothing. He built, to be sure, ideally or in
opinion; that is, he made systems and structures and constitutions, on
paper, notionally, and by name, but not in things, in substance, of the
elements of real existence; else by a word, or a reversed look, they
could not have been destroyed. What the hand creates, only the thousand
hands of Time can destroy; what the breath makes, a breath obliterates,
for the thing made was no more than a breath. Draw a line around certain
states on the map, and call it the confederation of the Rhine; give
geographical nicknames to a quantity of soldiers, and call it an
aristocracy: behold the creations of Napoleon! Alfred established
tithings, hundred courts and county courts; that principle of
self-government—for the administration of law is the most important
part of government—that little flame, shrined in those humble vestal
temples, and there kept safe against the blasts of ages of tyranny’s
turbulence, blazed up eight centuries later, and wrapt the throne of
Charles in combustion. Plantaganet kings might call their system an
absolute monarchy; the Tudors and Stuarts might diffuse the idea of
divine right; but Alfred, by establishing juries and the common law, had
made the _thing_ republic, and that was sure to beat down the _name_,
monarchy. Call you a man great whose life-work is swept away in half an
hour, without any principle of re-action or re-establishment showing
itself? Nay, his works always carried with them the germ of their own
destruction. The light that shone around his system was the
phosphorescence of decay.”
“This much,” said Mr. Temple, “may be said for Napoleon, that he raised
himself to absoluteism without degrading others to slavery.”
“Why, ’tis a monkey’s trick to mount up on people’s heads. Richelieu got
there, as a man does; not by walking up men’s backs, but by making them
stoop for him to get on. In effect, the true and bright view of
Napoleon’s empire is, to consider it a democracy. Viewed as a monarch,
rising and reigning in a constitution fashioned after the old forms, he
was a mountebank and an impostor; considered as the controlling spirit
in a democracy of powerful spirits, the head-idea in a nation—tumult of
ideas—the odd man who is pushed up in a crowd of men—he becomes a
spectacle of wonder, a riddle of infinite wisdom. The last of the old
system, he is nothing; the first of a new one, everything. Regarded as
the type of that democratic system which will overrun the world, his
empire is a splendid, infinitely-crowded rehearsal of the coming drama
of ages. He who would understand the whole nature, power and philosophy
of democracy, must study that empire. Many thoughts belong to that
subject. But I have harangued too long. Pitt was the man who said with
absolute truth, that Napoleon was “the child and champion of democracy.”
The spectacle of the force of old monarchy in the person of the stern,
iron duke, slowly advancing and destroying this young system, is the
picture of the gloomy Saturn relentlessly devouring his joyous
giant-boys. The Jupiter of that old deity nestles yet a babe near his
bosom; his begetting was in Pitt’s time, his birth at the Reform Bill.”
“Napoleon must certainly be tried by new principles of judgment. The
maxims upon which the fame of Turenne and Marlboro’ has been settled,
will not give him his true position.”
“Napoleon made glory according to a receipt of his own. But the
misfortune is, that he not only imposed this false stuff upon us, but he
revolutionized the chemistry by which its spuriousness should be
detected. He depraved the opinions, and bent backwards the consciences
of people. But upon the whole, I think we may say, that in life, the
most beautiful of the fine arts, his taste was anything but classical.
He belonged to the David school, and painted on the canvass of Time,
such pictures as that man hung up in the Louvre—bombast conceptions,
executed in the daub. But after all he was a splendid creature; he made
a glorious pastime in Europe; he showed the world a magnificent sport;
he filled the pages of history with matter which possessed an endless
interest. Strike out his career, and what blankness remains! The truth
is, this life of ours is enveloped in endless coverings, coats,
over-coats and blankets of common-place—an atmosphere of common-place,
dull, dense, unbreathable—a waking, inlaid with sleep—life overlaid
with death. Walled in, and under-buried in a mass of tedium, one cannot
get one’s breath. Sometimes, the world becomes intensely conscious of
this imprisonment, and goes mad in trying to get free from itself. What
wonder, if suffocated by being wrapped in a dun, drowsy, over-growing
thraldom of common-place—its eye sick with sameness, its ear vexed with
a cracked monotony, its soul should grow convulsive, become volcanic,
and throwing off the whole disgusting encumbrance of the social system,
it should rush forth to the free wilderness where it may once more see
the fresh, eternal stars, and breathe a living air. And we must thank
Napoleon for his battles; for war is the glory of our disgraced
existence. Struggle is the parent of all the greatness of our being. It
is only when minds wrestle in the energy of desperation with other
minds, or with things, as in war, that the last degrees of intellectual
and moral power are seen. The literary man goes half to sleep, and keeps
awake only enough to purr his satisfaction at his demi-unconsciousness.
In this world we must fight even to keep ourselves alive. The
politicians of this piping time doze away their days as if they had a
hundred existences to enjoy: as if life were a chair to loll in, a
corridor to walk, or a hall to dance in, and not a general battle-field
on which to fight for everything.”
There was that in the appearance and manner of Mr. Nivernois—his eye,
his glowing countenance, the intense life which there was about him,
rendered amiable by an entire simplicity of spirit—which was admirably
adapted to captivate the heart and fancy of a woman, especially an
enthusiastic one. What effect had been produced upon the imaginative
temperament of Miss Stanhope, we cannot say. As she was going away, Mrs.
Althorpe said to her,
“This Mr. Nivernois is certainly a man of genius, but he is mad, stark
mad—like Mazeppa’s steed—
Wild as the wild deer, and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled.
But he has blood and fortune. I sincerely wish you would take him in
hand and tame him: he is worthy of your attention, and if properly
brought under, would make a great addition to good society.”
The next day Nivernois was walking in the street and had his attention
attracted by a sign-board, which gave notice of a gallery of pictures.
Having nothing better to do, he went into it. The collection was a good
one, and he spent some time in looking at different productions of the
old masters. The feeling which chiefly occupied his mind was regret that
genius so exalted as many of these artists possessed should have left no
monument more durable than a perishing canvass, which would one day
cause all that marvellous skill to be nothing but a name. His eye was
presently drawn to a portrait of a young lady of singular beauty. The
picture was a fresh one, and he thought that he had seen the features
before, but where or when, he could not remember. The side of the figure
was presented, with the face turned round over the shoulder towards the
spectator. Her dress was blue; a laced veil was on her head, and in her
hand a _bouquet_ of flowers, around which was a band on which was the
word “Love.”
“Beautiful creature!” said he aloud, as he gazed upon the portrait, “and
whom do you love?”
“Thee,” faintly said a soft voice above him. He started and looked up.
There was a gallery above, and upon it a door covered by a curtain. He
saw the curtain move as if some one retreated rapidly through it, and he
thought that he had caught a glimpse of a blue dress. He ran rapidly up
to the gallery and through the curtained door, in hopes of discovering
the speaker, perhaps the original of the portrait. He searched every
apartment of the building, but in vain: no one was to be found. He
returned to the picture and sat down before it.
“Love!” said he, “what is that? I never thought of it before.” The
portrait hung near to an open door, through which the soft air of spring
was bearing the enchanting odour of a bed of violets which grew in the
garden: above was the rich softness of the blue sky. As he sat amid
influences so soothing, and gazed upon the overpowering beauty of those
splendid features, on which a hazy sunlight coming through a window in
the roof, threw a more peculiar lustre there arose within the stern,
constrained, and wholly intellectual being of this earnest, scheming
man, the slow but strong movement of a passion which he never before had
known. The rigid stress of mind, so long kept up—the high-wound force
of feeling, so necessary, yet so painful—softened and melted away in
the delicious mildness of sentiment that flowed in upon his nature. It
wrestled, did that sentiment, with the cold hardness of that logical
frame of being, as the still growing wind with the outer barriers of a
thick forest, and gradually burst in and wandered where it pleased. The
disdainful solitude of soul in which he had fortified himself against a
hostile world, was changing into a spirit which fraternized with all the
universe. It was the birth of sympathy within a bosom before entirely
and fiercely personal.
“Where has it kept so long?—this soft, this delicate emotion?” said he.
As the blue zephyr, born amidst the depths of the sky, raises and opens
out the dried, mast-bound sail of some long-locked bark, and floats away
the vessel into seas of unknown loveliness, so did this delicious
sentiment expand and quicken that spirituality which had before lain
senseless and collapsed. It diffused a joy and beauty like that of the
golden sunshine gleaming into a clouded forest, flowing and flashing
with an ever brightening splendor, rolling a yellow flowerage over the
mind, vesting the trees in airy robes of silver, and spreading through
the teeming woods a mysterious troop of shadows, the dusky-haired
daughters of light. Like the refreshing rain upon the fevered earth,
there fell upon his spirit a fragrant shower of soft hopes and immortal
dreams. The rough and hardened bough was become a branch of leaves and
fruits. He who had dwelt ever in the outwardness of thought, first
entered the portals of the inner world of feeling: he who had been ever
passionate only to DO, recognized a state in which to BE was bliss, to
move was ecstacy.
Such is the passionate constitution of genius that its mental nature,
“like a cloud, moves all together, if it move at all;” the moral being
of men of that stamp, intense and entire, never conceives an idea of
character or life, but it straightway throws forth all its energy to
realize that idea in its imaginary completeness: impelled towards evil,
they dash downwards with a frenzied force and reach a depth of
degradation at which colder sinners are astounded: when but one
aspiration dawns in their bosom, they spring up from the shores of that
gulph, and soaring above the clouds, wave in the sparkling sun their
fresh-plumed wings with not one feather moulted: they can mould all
their thinkings in the form and pressure of pure logic; and again their
feelings will be expanding in all the chastened feelings of luxurious
sentiments. These changes make genius a puzzle to its companions, but
delicious to itself.
It is not wonderful then if this man rose from that seat another being.
But the picture was still the centre and object of his thoughts. Rare
indeed, and transcendant was the beauty of that countenance: a depth of
passion, and an elevation of thought were characterized upon it, which
fired the imagination of the youth who gazed. He thought that he had
seen those features before; but where, and how? He had a faint
impression that Miss Stanhope might be the person. But in fact, so
little had he been interested in woman before, that he had scarce paid
any attention to her appearance—had no distinct remembrance of her
face. Supposing that the voice which he had heard had proceeded from the
original of the picture, and that it indicated that he was loved by her,
he was deeply anxious to discover who it was.
He pulled a bell which he discovered near the door, and there issued
forth in reply from a small door, an old gray-haired man, very tall, and
bent like a crozier.
“What picture is this?” said Nivernois.
“Why, it’s a portrait,” said the old man, with a look of great contempt
at the simplicity of the question.
From the tone in which he shouted, it seemed that he added deafness to
his other virtues.
“Of whom?”
“A lady,” roared the other, with increased scorn.
“True; but of what lady is it the portrait?”
“Oh, I don’t know;” and he began to hobble back to his cage.
“Is it for sale?”
“No: none of them are for sale; none of them; not one of them:” and he
closed the door behind him.
Nivernois walked up to the picture, took it down from the nail,
unscrewed the board behind it, and rolling up the canvass, put it under
his arm and marched out of the room.
When he reached the street he saw a woman dressed in blue passing round
the corner. From a glimpse which he had of her features he thought it
was the picture-lady. He darted forward, but the street which she had
turned into was vacant. There stood a large double house at the corner,
and beyond it there was a garden wall of some length; he concluded that
she must have gone into that house. He rushed in, and turning into the
first door he came to, found himself in an elegant drawing-room in which
there were a dozen persons paying morning visits.
“Humph! humph!” said he, as he scrutinized the face of every woman in
the circle, and found that the object of his search was not among them.
He took up a volume that lay on the table, it was lettered “Love.” He
walked towards a grand piano which stood open, with a piece of music on
the frame. The music was entitled “Love.”
“Love!” said he; “Love! wherever I go this morning, it is still love. I
will give you my ideas of love.” He took off his hat, and laying down
his roll in it, seated himself before the instrument.
He began with some sad and heavy strains which might express the
joylessness of a breast which was a stranger to sympathy. The music was
cheerless, monotonous, and full of startling discords. Presently there
struck into this painful turbulence a light strain of delicious melody,
like a sunbeam bursting into the primal chaos. It extended and gathered
strength, and the disorder of the rest gradually subsided, and melted
away to give place to it. Then there arose the most brilliant and
enchanting notes that that instrument had ever given forth; a flood of
varied rapture flowed out. It was the picture of a world of bliss; a
world whose turf was of the choicest flowers,—whose breezes were airs
from paradise,—whose sky knew not the color of a cloud.
The performer turned his head round and got a glimpse through the window
of some one passing along the street.
“There she goes!” he exclaimed, and seizing his hat and roll, rushed out
with the same vehemence that he had entered, leaving the company not a
little astonished at the oddity of his behaviour.
When he got into the street, nothing was to be seen; “I must discover
that woman,” said he; “what is life to me, if I cannot find her? All my
happiness is garnered in her being; to enjoy my own soul, I must possess
her: to live, I must live with her. By the bye, I must have done rather
an absurd thing in going into that house and playing on the piano,
without knowing any body. By Jove, I’ll go back and apologize. Ah! ha!
there is Mrs. Althorpe going in; she will present me.”
When they got into the room, the company which had been there had gone,
and the lady of the house was sitting alone. Mrs. Althorpe called her
Mrs. Stanhope.
“Madam,” said Mr. Nivernois, “I just met an eccentric friend of mine
going out of the door, who I imagine must have made a most unauthorized
entry into your house, in a fit of absence, and behaved in a very
ridiculous manner, when in it. In fact, he requested me to offer on his
behalf the fullest apology for his maniacal conduct, and to beg from
your courtesy an act of oblivion. He is a harmless madman,—one of that
numerous class who are suffered by their friends to go abroad without
strait-jackets.”
“Any friend of yours,” said Mrs. Stanhope, “is extremely welcome to come
into my house at all times; and even had the eccentricities of this
gentleman been at all objectionable, we should have been more than
compensated by the admirable display which he made upon the piano. As a
pupil of Calebrenner’s, I consider myself something of a judge; and I
never heard so rich a strain of harmony.”
“Why, as for that, I do not know that he differs materially from any one
else. Everybody carries a Marengo, a Childe Harold, and a Sonnambula in
his blood; the only difficulty is to get them out.”
“Pray, Mr. Nivernois,” said Mrs. Althorpe, with a certain look of a high
bred woman, not unmixed with something of comic, “What is it you have
under your arm.”
“Portable bliss,—the potentiality of a happiness beyond the dreams of
one who is not a lover,—ecstasy in a roll,—perfect delight on
canvass;” and he opened the picture and held it up.
Mrs. Althorpe made a sign to Mrs. Stanhope to be silent.
“Do you know whose portrait it is?” said Mrs. Althorpe.
“I cannot for my life discover.”
“Do you then so much wish to find the original?”
“A question, truly! I do.”
“Is it not beautiful?”
“Is not what beautiful?”
“The painting.”
“I cannot speak of these matters now. For the moment I am at war with
_virtû_. It _may_ be divine—perhaps it is so. One thing I feel—the
impotence of the artist. What he has succeeded in en-canvassing speaks
only to my soul of a more radiant loveliness—that of motion, of
thought, of heart—for which the pencil has no outline, the pallet no
dye.”
“You are an enigma, and my query is unanswered. I will put it in another
form. Is _she_ not beautiful?”
“She is.”
“How did you become possessed of the picture?”
“I saw it in the exhibition, and as they refused to sell it to me, I cut
it out and brought it away.”
Mrs. Althorpe fell back into her chair, overpowered by irresistible
laughter at the oddness of the incident, and the solemn gravity with
which Nivernois stood eyeing the picture. An idea occurred to her by
which she might give this matter a turn to her mind.
“I cannot imagine, of course,” said she, “whose portrait it is. But if
you will come to my house to-night, I shall have some young ladies
there, and it is possible that the fair original may be among them. We
shall have _tableaux vivants_, and I think you will find it pleasant.”
“I will come with the utmost pleasure, even if the lady be not there.”
“And when I say that the party will be pleasant, I imply thereby an
invitation to Mrs. Stanhope, who of course can make it so. But, Mr.
Nivernois, are you not afraid that the officers of justice will be after
you for abstracting that picture?”
“Oh! I am only taking it to be copied; after that I shall take it back.”
“Well! put up your roll then, and we will go.”
When they had walked some distance, Mrs. Althorpe took leave of him, and
bent her steps again towards Mrs. Stanhope’s.