A study of greatness in men

Front matter

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Contents

I. What Goes into the Making of a Great

Man? 1

II. Napoleon: a Prodigy, without Greatness . 35

II Napoleon: A Prodigy, With- Out Greatness

II

NAPOLEON: A PRODIGY, WITHOUT GREATNESS

If the value of great men to their fellows ended with the ending of their work, there might be nothing but a question of justice to their memories in our estimates of those who are dead. But death does not finish their service or time extinguish their worth to mankind. Even though nothing may remain of what such a man did, — no visible fragment of product from his labors that has not been consumed or outworn in the changes of the world, — there is, or there ought to be, an imperishable survival of living influences from the man himself. If he is not in some way an inspiration to us — in some way a potent exemplar of wisdom, or noble purpose and power ; if he does not set before us a standard of character that we contemplate with reverence, with aspiration, with an exaltation of our faith in human kind ; if we cannot take lessons from his life that will righteously energize our own, — then, surely, there is either some pitiful mistake in the supposition of his greatness, or else we do not know him for what he was. Such mistakes are made easily and often, and because they arise from confusions that obscure our perception and apprehension of the really great in human character, I am contending for the recognition of a few principles of judgment that may guide us to truer estimates of notable men.

Those principles of judgment have been suggested in the preceding chapter. There will now be an attempt to apply them, in a concrete way, to a few important characters and careers. Napoleon Bonaparte has been chosen for the first subject of examination, because the standing of no other exalted personage in history seems quite so questionable as his. There was never another more conspicuously a prodigy of his kind ; never another whose power to master and mould events in his day was more amazing ; never another less entitled to be called a great man, if there is truth in the conception of greatness which I have set forth.

Let us realize, to begin with, the historical impressiveness of this man, by a rapid review of his wonderful career : —

In race he was Italian, not French. The subjugation of his native island, Corsica, to France, had iust been accomplished

i i i i • trren The Rise ol

when JNapoleon was born, in 1 i ot>. the Young That timely escape of the young Corsican from Genoese to French citizenship carried him to a French military school for his education, placed him in the French army, and threw open before him, by the instant outbreak of the French revolution, such gates of opportunity as were never unlocked before for a genius and an ambition like his. At twenty-four, in the year 1793, he was making his mark as a soldier and drawing attention to himself by his handling of artillery at the siege which drove the British from Toulon and ended royalist resistance in southern France. In two years more he had gained a reputation which made him the champion chosen by the government of the Directory to crush an alarming Parisian revolt. By that service to the men in power he earned command of the army in Italy, and entered the field of his first astonishing campaign, which humbled Austria, tore large provinces from her empire, broke the hostile coalition of European powers, and left England alone in resistance to the aggressions of revolutionary France.

It was then that the overbearing audacity of the man began to be displayed. Making the most of his own prestige and the weakness of the corrupt Directory, he assumed practical independence of action, exercising a free hand in dealing with his conquests, and roughly reconstructing the northern and central states of the peninsula to suit schemes of his own. He put on the airs of a potentate, hardly veiling his arrogant dictation of measures to the Directory in France. Count Miot de Melito, of the French diplomatic service in Italy, went to confer with the victorious general at the headquarters of the army near Milan, in the summer of 1797, and his memoirs * describe the haughty and imposing state with which the young soldier had so promptly surrounded himself. " I was received by Bonaparte," he says, " at the magnificent residence of Montebello, in the midst of a brilliant court, rather than the headquarters of an army. Strict etiquette already reigned around him ; his aides-de-camp and his officers were no longer

1 Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, tr. by Mrs. C. Hoey and J. Lillie. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1881.

received at his table, and he had become fastidious in the choice of the guests whom he admitted to it. . . . He dined, so to speak, in public; the inhabitants of the country were admitted to the room in which he was eating, and allowed to gaze at him with a keen curiosity. He was in nowise embarrassed or confused by these excessive honors, but received them as though he had been accustomed to them all his life. . . . All bowed before the glory of his victories and the haughtiness of his demeanor. He was no longer the general of a triumphant republic, but a conqueror on his own account, imposing his laws on the vanquished."

Bonaparte conversed freely with the count during the latter's visit, giving very open expression to his contempt, not only for the men of the Directory, but for the French republic, and for the French people at large. "Do you imagine," said he, " that I triumph in Italy in order to aggrandize the pack of lawyers who form the Directory, and men like Carnot and Barras? What an idea! A republic of thirty million men ! And with our manners, our vices ! How is it possible ? That is a fancy of which the French are full at present, but it will pass away like all the others. What they want is glory and gratified vanity ; but as for liberty, they do not understand what it means. Look at the army ! The victories we have just won have restored the French soldier to his true character. To him I am everything. Let the Directory try to take the command from me, and they will see who is master. The nation must have a chief, and a chief rendered illustrious by glory, not by theories of government, by phrases, by theoretic speeches, which Frenchmen do not understand. Give them baubles — that suffices them ; they will be amused and will let themselves be led, so long as the end toward which they are going is skillfully hidden from them."

Proceeding to discuss the then pending negotiations for peace with Austria, he said : " Peace is not to my interest. You see what I am, and what I can now do in Italy. If peace is made, if I am no longer at the head of the army, which is attached to me, I must renounce the power, the high position I have made for myself, in order to pay court to a pack of lawyers at the Luxembourg. I do not want to leave Italy unless it be to play a part in France similar to my part here, and the time has not yet come ; the pear is not ripe. . >. I am quite ready to weaken the republican pnrty ; some day I shall do it for my own advantage, not that of the former dynasty. In the mean time I must act with the republican party. And then if peace be necessary in order to satisfy our Paris boobies, and if it has to be made, it is my task to make it."

So early (in his twenty - eighth year) was the young Corsican despising his fellow men in general and Frenchmen in particular, and so distinctly were his plans of ambition and his arrogant methods in pursuing them already determined in his mind. Four months later he made peace with Austria, by the treaty of Campo Formio, substantially dictating the terms. He judged the Parisian pear to be not yet ripe for him, and he would watch it a little longer before reaching to pluck it ; but his influence was already the most commanding in France, and he could plan his next military employment. He chose to lead an expedition for the conquest and occupation of Egypt, looking forward to movements from that convenient foothold against the English in India, and with other ideas of a more private ambition, as we shall see. Egypt was subjugated ;

but Lord Nelson stripped all possible fruits from that success by his victory in the Battle of the Nile, which destroyed the French fleet, gave England full control of the Mediterranean, and cut Napoleon and his army off from France. Nevertheless the indomitable Corsican was able, by false bulletins and reports, to obscure his failure so far that, when, in the autumn of 1799, he made his own escape from the trap in which his army was left, he could reappear in France with a prestige not greatly impaired.

Meantime a new coalition against the republic had been formed in Europe, and the French armies had suffered serious defeats in Italy and on the Rhine. It had come to be inevitable that the rotten and incapable government of the Directory would be overthrown by some movement which some strong hand could concentrate and control, and the opportune arrival of Bonaparte brought the needed hand. Within a month his supporters had organized and executed the coup d'etat which placed him at the head of the government, with the title of First Consul, under a constitution which put little of practical restraint on his arbitrary exercise of power. His two colleagues in the consulate, and the bodies behind him which seemed to have legislative functions and a representative character, were mere features of stage scenery, arranged to give a republican appearance to what was, in reality, a restored monarchy with restored absolutism in France.

For a time there were good results. The executive ability of the First Consul was very great, and the free hand with which he worked enabled him to produce quick and astonishing changes, from chaotic to systematic and orderly conditions, and from depression to activity in industry and trade. At the same time he was giving fresh triumphs to the French arms and intoxicating the nation anew with military pride. Once more he was master of Italy, and refashioned its states to his liking ; again he smote Austria to the earth and broke the coalition of European powers; and now he began to deal with Germany as with Italy, dictating political reconstructions and rearrangements of its numerous states. France, satisfied with the strong government which had rescued it from the anarchy of revolution, and glorying in the genius and power of its chief, was submissive to him willingly in these early years of his rule. It gave him the First Consulate for life in 1802, and allowed him to adorn himself with imperial and royal crowns and titles in 1804 and 1805, objecting very little, so far as can be seen.

It appears to be plain that a very slight curb of reasonable moderation put then upon ms at- his ambition would have made Napo- Autocracy leon's imperial throne secure to the in Europe. en(j 0f faa jayS Europe would have

acquiesced in his empire if he had been willing to keep it within even the widest boundaries of historical France. But nothing less than the dominion of the world could have satisfied his demoniacal lust of power; and that lust was stimulated by an inappeasable hatred of England that took possession of his mind. Her sea-power defied him. It had ruined his projects in Egypt. It upheld her against him when all other resistance was beaten down. It protected the commerce which poured wealth into her coffers, and it would enable her, again and again, to form alliances against him by subsidies and loans. He could not match it. He could not break through it with his invincible armies, to reach her island shores. He had talked and planned and seemed to prepare for a great expedition across the Channel; but he cannot have believed that he would dare the risk. This powerlessness to strike straightly at the enemy which stood most resolutely in his path was hardly less than maddening to so arrogant a temper as his. It impassioned his natural craving for power, concentrating it on one supreme practical object, — to ruin England by controlling the larger sources of her wealth. He persuaded himself that all Europe could be forced into such submission to his purpose and such obedience to his orders that its markets might be closed to British goods, and that British industries might thereby be starved. In his obstinate pursuit of this design he lost clearness of judgment, and plunged blindly into some, at least, of the undertakings which wrecked his career.

Nevertheless, for seven years after taking his crowns and erecting his thrones in France and Italy he could believe in the superhumanity and invincibility of himself. Through that period nothing failed in what he undertook, excepting when he ventured to combine the navies of France and Spain against Nelson's fleet, and lost them at Trafalgar. He made and unmade kingdoms at pleasure, in Italy, Holland, Germany, and Spain; seized the papal states and annexed them to France ; dragged the Pope from Rome and held him in ignominious imprisonment for five years; surrounded himself in his family with kings and queens; distributed principalities and duchies among his chief officers and ministers with a lavish hand; and shattered every combination that opposed itself to the widespread despotism he was building up. Austria, for a third and a fourth time, fought him and was crushed, at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805, at Wagram in 1809. Prussia, first cheated and humiliated as an unwilling ally, was then struck to the very dust, in absolute subjugation, by double overthrow, at Jena and Auerstadt, on the same day. Russia, intervening, was broken in courage by a great defeat at Friedland, and her Tzar, partly cowed and partly bribed, became a helper in the Napoleonic "boycotting" of British goods.

So far in the career of Napoleon his experience had been with the baser much more than with the better part of mankind. In France the weak and the cowardly had bent before him, the servile had fawned upon him, the unscrupulous in ambition and in mercenary greed had swarmed about him, clutching at his skirts, to be lifted by him as he climbed the heights of opportunity and power. It is true that no small number of the truest and best in France assisted his rise, supported his government, even into its despotic stage, and served it with honest patriotism, because it restored to their country the conditions of authority and order which they deemed its greatest need ; but it is no less true that the kind of government which Napoleon wished to exercise had to take its chief instruments and most numerous servitors from men of the baser order of brain, like Talleyrand and Fouche. At home, that was the kind of society, in his closer surroundings, with which he had most to do. Outside of France, his dealings, to the greatest extent, had been with as despicable a lot of sordid rulers and brainless bureaucrats as ever afflicted the European states. In Germany, especially, he found kings and princes as ready to be his puppets, as eager to be bribed with new titles or new territory, as empty of any patriotism, as ignorant of honorable motives, as the meanest of his servants at home. If he had not been naturally contemptuous of mankind he must have learned to be so, from the manifestations that were plainest in his sight.

But now Europe was turning toward him another front of character which he had not The Revolt known, and which he would never oi Europe, comprehend. At last he had stirred those slow masses of people which give nations their ponderable substance, and which nothing can resist when they move. The flunkies and hirelings and puppets with whom he had had most of his foreign dealings hitherto were being pushed aside, and he now faced men and motives of a very different stamp.

On the surface of things, in the spring of 1811, the all-conquering Corsican appeared to be approaching the substantial autocracy in Europe to which he aspired. The humbled house of Austria had given him one of its daughters in marriage, to succeed his divorced wife, Josephine, and when, on the 20th of March, 1811, a son and heir was born to him, he exclaimed: "Now begins the finest epoch of my reign." There was never a self-delusion more infatuate and blind. The knell of doom to his false fabric of military power, and to all of his selfish projects, was beginning in that very hour to ring loud, and he heard it not. Forces of outraged national feeling which nothing in his nature could understand were undermining him in Spain and Germany, and the crust of despotism that covered them was at the breaking point, but he knew it not.

On that day of March, 1811, when he took his newborn son into his arms and exulted in the o-ift of a successor to his crowns,

• o • a • i • -The Crum-

his forces in the Spanish peninsula biingotua were recoiling from Wellington's impregnable lines at Torres Vedras, beginning retreats that would seldom halt till Wellington followed them into France ; Germany, beaten, trampled upon, insulted by him, but steeled to heroism and disciplined to wisdom by the anguish of her subjugation, was undergoing a rapid unseen evolution of her real racial strength; and .Russia, sickened of her profitless partnership with Napoleon in his abortive "continental system," was encouraging secret plans for a fresh rising of the nations against the insolent warrior who abused or threatened them all. He scorned the abundant warnings that came to him from his agents everywhere., who realized, as he did not, the serious menace of these underburning fires. He thought that he had attained invincibility, and nothing could shake that belief. As he looked at the situation, Russia was the one remaining power on the continent that he needed to break, as he had broken Austria and Prussia, and he entertained no doubt of his ability to lay the Muscovite empire at his feet. And so he exhausted France by his stupendous preparations for that invasion of Russia, in 1812, which ended in the most horrible of all the military catastrophes that are told of in the history of the world.

Then, in the next year, came the mighty uprising of Germany, supported by Russia, Austria and Great Britain, and he had to face it with armies filled out by boys under twenty years of age, to the extent of 150,000 in the conscription of that year. So frightfully had the grown manhood of France been destroyed in his wars ! He had so consumed the vast hosts of his trained veterans that, even though his resistless will and energy could drag well nigh half a million of armed men to the field once more, he could not make them into such forces as he had wielded in the past. He had some successes at the outset of the struggle with his oncoming fate, winning the last of his shining victories at Dresden ; and then all went disastrously to the end.

After the decisive great " battle of the nations," fought round Leipsic, in October, Napoleon cast reproaches upon Marshal Augereau, saying that he was not the Augereau of Castiglione, thus referring to a battle of 1796, in Italy, where the marshal had most distinguished himself, and from which he had received a ducal title. "Ah," retorted the veteran, " give me back the old soldiers of Italy and I will show you that I am." That reply was descriptive in part, but not wholly, of the day of retribution to which Napoleon had come. He had spent the lives of the generation of men who won his victories for him ; but, likewise, he had spent the best of his own powers. All military critics of his campaigns have seen signs, from this time, of a weakened grip in his handling of the awful forces of war. It was mighty, still; amazing in the last tremendous efforts of his resistance to the approaching fate, when the allies had driven him back to France, and from the frontier toward Paris, and the circle of their armies closed round him; but his electric perceptions, his inlighted vision of the field, his instincts of infallible quick judgment, were not as of old.

And more fatal to him than that fading of his genius was the monstrous inflation and arrogation of his will. He had fed it, exercised it, cultivated it, till it overlorded all the faculties of his mind. It would not let him see the facts of his adversity as they were ; and so, of all people concerned, he was the last to comprehend the situation to which he had come. Even after Leipsic he was offered the keeping of his throne in France, with the natural boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine for his kingdom, if he would let the rest of Europe alone ; and even while he defended Paris, in the battles of the last weeks of his reign, he might have kept the sovereignty of France as it was in 1791, before the wars of the Revolution broke out ; but he would not give up bis kingdom of Italy, nor agree to restore Holland to freedom. The demoniac despotism of his self-will drove him on to the inevitable end of his bloody career, dragging thousands of the very schoolboys of France to untimely death as heartlessly as he had dragged their fathers before.

What an unparalleled career it is ! What a prodigy of awful and appalling powers it discloses in the man ! But what kind of powers ? From what factors in the human make up ? How much from the higher and how much from the lower? How much from soul and mind, and how much from the animal nature that goes with them in man ? How much of the kind of force that makes the lion the king of beasts, and how much of the attributes that put man above the beasts ? These are not idle questions in the case of so exceptional a man.

Of the surpassing quality of Napoleon's intellect, in some modes of power, there is no question, of course. All that goes to Th6 Quality the making of a mighty war-lord was Jjjfjj^*61" concentrated in him to a degree and Powera. a perfection that, possibly, has never been equaled in another man. But that intellectual equipment for the commanding of belligerent multitudes and the conduct of war is surely not the highest and greatest with which a human being can be endowed. Napoleon himself has described the kind of mental power that he found in his own experience to be called mostly into play. In one of the conversations at St. Helena reported by Las Cases he said : " The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, — of a thought ; the hostile forces advance with various combinations ; they attack each other and fight for a certain time ; the critical moment arrives, — a mental flash decides, and the least reserve [of troops] accomplishes the object." At another time he said to the same listener: " Success in war depends so much on quicksightedness, and on seizing the right moment, that the battle of Austerlitz, which was so completely won, would have been lost if I had attacked six hours sooner." 1

This electric quality of mind — the power to see, to put together and to apprehend as by a flash the factors of circumstance in any problem of the moment, in war or in politics — is what seems to have been really extraordinary in the endowments of Napoleon on their intellectual side. With it, on the under side of his nature, was an almost superhuman development of energy and will, and the casual combination produced all that was exceptional and extraordinary in the powers of the man. They were the powers of a great conqueror and a great despot, — not the powers of a great

1 Life, Exile and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon. I, pt. 2, pp. 6 and 143. London : H. Colburn. 1835.

statesman or of a great man. In what he did there is no sign of any wide sweep of vision, — any far-reaching forecast of circumstances and projection of thought, — any singular sagacity, even in the projects of his selfish ambition. Tested by the results of his ambitious undertakings, they were unwisely conceived and ill -harmonized with each other, representing no well pondered aim or design. Separately, they astound us by the energy and the matchless ability with which he carried them out; but survey them together, and what is there to marvel at or to admire ? What but the ashes of a stupendous failure have they left in the history of the world ? We are contemplating a career of successes, in a wonderful series, but not a career of success, as the grand product of a life.

Nevertheless, after all his intellectual limitations have been reckoned up, Napoleon is still a prodigy of genius, and would claim a place among the great of history if his moral nature had not been so hideously dwarfed and deformed. It is there that he shrinks to a littleness and meanness which no splendor of malevolent genius can redeem ; and there, in that aspect, we must study the man.

In this study it is assumed that, where surpassing gifts of any nature are bestowed on a „ „ man, the mark and test and measure

The Man 7

tested by 0f greatness in him must lie in the tions in motives and purposes with which and for which they are employed in the work of his life. We can apply this mark and test to Napoleon, not by any guessing of motives in what he did, but mostly by disclosures from himself. There is no mistaking, for example, the significance of his own ideals of greatness and a great career, which he disclosed many times, in conversations that have been reported by people who lived in intimate association with him. They were pagan, oriental, barbaric ideals, wholly alien to the spirit of civilization in our modern world. On the day of his coronation as emperor he said to Decres, his minister of the navy: "My record has been brilliant, I acknowledge, and I have had an excellent career. But how different from ancient times ! Take Alexander, for instance. After having conquered Asia he announced himself to the people to be a son of Jupiter, and, with the exception of . . . Aristotle and a few Athenian pedants, he was believed by the entire Orient. ... If I were to announce myself to-day to be the son of the Everlasting Father, — if I were to declare that I was going to return thanks to Him by virtue of that fact, — there isn't a fish-wife who would not jeer at me as I passed. The people are far too much enlightened ; there is nothing great left to be done." 1 Nothing great left to be done, with the power of the imperial sceptre which he took into his hands that day, because he could not practice, in a too-enlightened age, the imposture of self-deification, as Alexander had done !

The same thought had been in Napoleon's mind seven years before, when he said to Bourrienne, his secretary : " Europe is nothing but a mole-hill; it is only in the Orient that there have been great empires and mighty revolutions, — there where 600,000,000 people live." 2 It was the thought that took him to Egypt, and it filled his mind there with dreams. In talk with Madame de Remusat, one of the ladies of his court while First Consul, he said, in 1803: "In Egypt I found myself free from the wearisome restraints of civiliza-

1 Napoleon the First. By August Fournier, p. 410. New York : Henry Holt & Co.

2 Fournier, p. 122.

tion. I dreamed all sorts of things, and I saw how all that I dreamed might be realized. I created a religion; I pictured myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an elephant, with a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran, which I should compose according to my own ideas."1 He never dismissed such dreams ; his mind approved them to the end. During his captivity at St. Helena, in one of the conversations reported by General Gourgaud, he said: "Arabia awaits a man. Had I taken Acre I should have gone to India. I should have assumed the turban at Aleppo, and have headed an army of 200,000 men." In another of the same talks, speaking of Alexander's visit to the temple of Ammon, when the god was reported to have recognized him as a son, he praised it as an act of policy, and remarked : " So I, had I remained in Egypt, should probably have founded an empire like Alexander, by going on a pilgrimage to Mecca." 2