I
As I creep humbly through this proud and prodigious Italy, peeping into
palaces and passing yearningly before masterpieces, to the maddening
chatter of concierges and sacristans, I am constantly stumbling upon the
footsteps of him who made the grand tour in the high sense of the words.
Not the British heir of bygone centuries with his mentor and his letters
of introduction, not even his noble father with the family coach. No,
these were pigmies little taller than myself. Your sublime tourist was
Napoleon, who strode over the holy land of Beauty like a Brobdingnagian
over Lilliput. He came, he saw, he commanded. He looked at a picture, a
pillar, a statue—and despatched it to France. He gazed at Lombard’s
iron crown—and put it on. He beheld Milan Cathedral—and it became the
scene of his coronation, with blessing of clergy and the old feudal
homage. He perceived an ornate ducal bed—and slept in it, the poor duke
a-cold. He rode through the ancient streets, not Baedeker but cocked hat
in hand, graciously acknowledging the loyal cheers of the ancient stock.
He examined the Sacro Catino in Genoa Cathedral and bore it off with its
precious blood; he espied the rich treasure of Loreto, and lo! it was
his; he saw Lucca that it was fair, and it became his sister Elisa’s. He
visited Venice—and wound up the Republic. He admired St. Mark’s—and
haled its bronze horses to Paris, transferring to it the Patriarchate as
in compensation. The Patriarchal Palace itself he turned into barracks;
superfluous monasteries and churches were shut up and their lands
confiscated. He even destroyed, doubtless in the same righteous
indignation, the lion’s head over “the lion’s mouth” in the Palace of
the Doges, while the _Bucentaur_, their gorgeous galley, he burnt to
extract the gold.
But he was not merely destructive and rapacious. The founder of the Code
Napoléon repaired the amphitheatre of Verona, and resumed the neglected
building of the façade of Milan Cathedral, and opened up the Simplon
route to Italy, and marked its terminus by the Triumphal Arch of Milan.
He surveyed the harbour of Spezia for a war-harbour and projected to
drain Lake Trasimeno away—conceptions which to-day are realities. And
all this and a hundred other feats of construction in the
breathing-spaces of his Titanic single-handed fight against embattled
Europe. Not seldom, as I passed my wood-shop in Venice, with its
caligraphic placard _All’ Ingrosso e al Minuto_, did I think of the
Corsican superman, with his wholesale and retail dealings with the
little breed of mankind. Perhaps to establish “the Kingdom of Italy,”
with twenty-four departments and his step-son as viceroy, and to turn
the little district of Bassano into a duchy for his secretary were, to
Napoleon, feats of the same apparent calibre. Even so we stride as
carelessly over a brooklet as over a puddle. Surely there is a
fascinating book to be written on Napoleon in Italy, as a change from
the countless Napoleons in St. Helena or the flood of foolish volumes
upon his mistresses.
And a final appraisement of Napoleon still remains to seek. The little
fat man who had “the genius to be loved”—except by Joséphine and Marie
Louise—and who provided for his family by distributing thrones, has
long since ceased to be the ogre with whom British babes were frighted,
though he has not yet become Heine’s divine being done to death by
British Philistinism. Carlyle classed him among his “Heroes” and
credited him with insight because, when those around him proved there
was no God, he looked up at the stars and asked, “Who made all that?”
But this was surely no index of profundity—merely a theism of Pure
Reason and an illustration of Napoleon’s peculiar interest in _action_.
“Who _made_ all that?” Making, doing, that was his essential
secret—unresting activity, rapid striking, utilisation of every moment.
He was as alert the moment after victory as others after defeat. Was one
combination destroyed, his nimble and exhaustless energy instantly
fashioned an alternative. Mobility of brain and immobility of
soul—these were his gifts in a crisis. When all was lost and himself a
captive, “What is the use of grumbling?” he asked his attendants.
“Nothing can be _done_.” The tragedy of Napoleon was thus the obverse of
the tragedy of Hamlet, whose burden lay precisely in there being
something to be done. Imagine the great demiurge at work in these days
of telegraphy and steam, motor-cars and aeroplanes. What might he not
have achieved! As it was, he just missed creating the United States of
Europe. Anatole France accuses him of having taken soldiers too
seriously. As well accuse an engineer of taking cranes and levers too
seriously. Soldiers were the indispensable instruments by which Napoleon
raised himself to the level of those more commonplace rulers of Europe
who had found their cradles suspended on the heights. It is the German
Emperor who takes soldiers too seriously, who marshals them with the
solemnity of a child playing with his wooden regiments. And the Kaiser,
already in the purple, has not Napoleon’s excuse. His is simply a false
and reactionary view of life, as of a house-maid who adores uniforms.
But Napoleon would have played his Machiavellian game equally with
grocers; and, indeed, his lifelong ambition to sap British commerce was
conceived in the spirit of a Titanic tradesman, who knows better than to
count corpses. He was the fifteenth-century condottiere magnified many
diameters, playing with countries and nations instead of with towns and
tribes, and sweeping in his winnings across the green table of earth as
in some game of the gods. As a Messiah of Pure Reason, an Apostle of the
People, he was able, like Mohammed, to back the Word with the Sword,
and, less veracious than the prophet of the desert, to combine for the
making of History its two great factors of Force and Fraud. Through him,
accordingly, History made a leap, proceeding by earthquake and
catastrophe instead of by patient cumulation and attrition. He was a
cosmic force—a force of Nature, as he truthfully claimed—a _terremoto_
that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears of Courts and
Churches.
True, after the earthquake the old slow, stubborn forces reassert
themselves; but the configuration of the land has been irrevocably
changed. The _Maya_, the illusion of Royalty, comes slowly back, for it
is a world of unreason, and even Bismarck believed in the divine right
of the princes he despised. But the feudal order throughout Europe will
never wholly recover from the shock of Napoleon. Unfortunately, from a
Messiah he glided into a Magnificent One, and the marriage with Marie
Louise, at first perhaps a mere cold-blooded chess-move to establish his
dynasty, subtly reduced him into accepting Royalty at its own and the
popular valuation. He had married beneath him, and Nemesis followed. The
dyer’s hand was subdued to that it worked in, and Napoleon sank into a
snob. His true Waterloo was spiritual. The actual Waterloo was a moral
victory.
Had he remained representative of the Republican or any other principle,
exile would have had no power over him; on the contrary, it would have
aggrandised his influence. But his exile represented nothing but the
moping of a banished Magnificent, so that a generous spirit like Byron
could find in his “Ode to Napoleon,” no words too excoriating for this
fallen meanness.
And while Napoleon pined in St. Helena, Marie Louise found promotion as
Duchess of Parma, becoming her own mistress instead of the world’s, and
finding husbands nearer down to her own level than the Corsican
ex-corporal. Quite happy she must have been, sitting on her throne under
a great red baldachino, giving audience, surrounded by her suite and her
soldiers—as Antonio Pock painted her—or smothered in diamonds at neck,
waist, earrings and hair, smirking in a low-necked dress at her crimson
and jewelled crown, as in the picture of Gian Battisti Borghesi. Parma
preserves both these portraits, but they are not so quaint a deposit of
the great Napoleonic wave as Canova’s bust of Marie Louise as Concord!
There is in Milan a queer museum called “The Gallery of Knowledge and
Study,” the collection of which was begun by a “Noble Milanese,” and the
first catalogue of which was published in Latin in 1666. Here, amid
sea-shells, miniatures, old maps, pottery, bronzes, silkworm analyses,
and old round mirrors in great square frames, may now be seen a pair of
yellow gloves which once covered the iron hands, together with the
cobbler’s measure of that foot which once stamped on the world. There is
an air of coquetry about the pointed toe. A captain’s brevet, signed by
the “First Consul” and headed “French Republic,” serves as a reminder of
the earlier phase. The humour of museums has placed these relics in a
case with those of other “illustrious men”—to wit, two Popes and St.
Carlo, the dominant saint of the district (who is just celebrating his
tercentenary).
But the Triumphal Arch remains Napoleon’s chief monument at Milan,
though it is become a sort of Vicar of Bray in stone. For when Napoleon
fell, the Austrian Emperor replaced the chronicle of French victories by
bas-reliefs of defeats, and re-christened it an Arch of Peace. And when
in turn Lombardy was liberated by Victor Emmanuel, new inscriptions
converted it into an Arch of Freedom. One can imagine the stone singing,
like the Temple of Memnon at sunrise:
“But whatsoever king shall reign,
Still _I_’ll be the Arch of Triumph.”
And in Ferrara there is a Triumphal Column no less inconstant. Designed
to support the statue of Duke Ercole I, it was annexed by Pope Alexander
VII, who was deposed by Napoleon, whose statue has now been replaced by
Ariosto’s. Whether the ducal-papal-military-poetic pillar supports its
ultimate statue, we may doubt, though a poet seems less obnoxious to
political passion than the other sorts of hero.
Such mutations in the significance of monuments, however they deface and
blur history, are not unnatural amid the vicissitudes of Italy: and,
after all, an arch or a pillar is but an arch or a pillar.
But even a statue that keeps its place is not safe from supersession. In
Rimini in 1614 the Commune, grateful to the Pope (Paolo V), commemorated
him in bronze in the beautiful Piazza of the Fountain, the Fountain
whose harmonious fall pleased the ear of Leonardo da Vinci. The monument
is elaborate and handsome, with bas-reliefs in the seat and in the Papal
mantle, showing in one place the city in perspective. But during the
Cisalpine Republic, thanks again to Napoleon, no Pope could keep his
place in Rimini, and as the simplest way of preserving him on this
favoured site, the municipality erased his epitaph and re-christened him
Saint Gaudenzo. Gaudenzo was the martyr Bishop of Rimini, the Protector
of the City. This unearned increment was not the Saint’s first, for the
Church of S. Gaudenzo had been erected on the basis of a Temple of Jove.
To annex the glories of both Jove and Pope is indeed a singular fortune,
even in the ironic changes and chances we call history. But Napoleon, in
the days when he ordered the Temple of Malatesta to be the Cathedral of
Rimini, was annexing even the functions of both Pope and Jove. For he
was also rearranging Europe after Austerlitz and giving the quietus to
the Holy Roman Empire.