Various

[In this Department of The Arena no book will be reviewed which is not regarded as a real addition to literature.]

The Emperor.[8]

At the hour when, on the evening of the first day of this century, the first asteroid was discovered by Piazzi at Naples, an olive-complexioned man was sitting smileless in a box in the opera house in Paris. He sat back where nobody could see him. It was his way not to be seen—except on business.

The man was thirty-one years, four months, and sixteen days of age. He had already done something. If he had not equalled the work of Alexander at the corresponding age, he had at least surpassed CÆsar; for CÆsar at thirty was still a comparatively unknown rouÉ in Rome.

The figure in the opera box was slender and trim. He who sat there was only five feet, four and a half inches high; but his head was fine, heavy, symmetrical. His features twitched when he was disturbed, but were beautiful when he smiled. To a profound observer he looked dangerous. He had the faculty of making his face signify nothing at all. He had been begotten an insular Italian, but was born a Frenchman. His wife, a Creole, more than six years older than he, was in the box with him. She sat at the front, and was seen by thousands. She wished to be seen; and when the pit shouted in the direction of the box she smiled a little smile, with a puckered mouth—for her teeth were not good.

The birthplace of this man had been oddly set on the map of the world, for the meridian of Discovery and the parallel of Conquest intersect at the birthplace of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. The birthlines of CÆsar and Columbus—drawn, the one due west from Rome, the other due south from Genoa—cross each other within a few miles of Ajaccio! It is a circumstance that might well incline one to astrology.

About the birth of great men cycles of fiction grow. Friends and enemies alike invent significant circumstances. The traducers of Napoleon have said that he was illegitimate—that his father was the French marshal Marboeuf. They also say, on better grounds, that the marriage of Letitia Ramolino to Carlo di Buonaparte was not solemnized until 1767—that the first two children were therefore born out of wedlock. On the other hand, the idol-worshippers would fain have Napoleon born as a god or Titan. Premature pangs seize the mother at church. She hurries home, barely reaching her apartment when the heroic babe is delivered, without an accoucheur, on a piece of tapestry inwrought with an effigy of Achilles! This probably occurred. It was the 15th of August, 1769.

Thus, as it were before the Corsican saw the light of day in this world, dispute began about him. It has been continued for a hundred and twenty-eight years. Whatever else he succeeded in doing—whatever else he failed to do—he at least did succeed in dividing the civilized world into two parties; he made himself the subject of a controversy which has not ceased to the present hour. The reason, no doubt, is that we do not as yet understand human history and the part which the individual plays in the progress of events. Nearly all men begin with a prejudice in judging all other men, and nearly all men end as they begin. So it has been in the case of Bonaparte. After a while we shall see things more clearly; after a while we shall be able to interpret men—but not yet.

The writings relative to this man constitute a cycle. The books on him and his times make a library, the perusal and study of which might absorb a large section of an active life. The name of such productions is legion. Most of them will fortunately perish. The controversial aspect of the life of the Emperor must at last subside. Nine out of ten of the books about him will go down to the nether oblivion. Then the judicial aspect will arise—if it has not already arisen—and will occupy the attention of those who are still curious to study the career of him who shares with the son of Philip and the matchless Julius the triune honor of being the greatest warriors known to human history. If a fourth should be added to the group it would be Hannibal, and if a fifth, Charlemagne.

Here at the date of a century from those days in which the star of Napoleon emerged from the mists and clouds and began to climb the sky the interest in his life revives. In America this revival is attributable in part to general and in part to special causes. The general causes are to be found in the fact that society de la fin de siÈcle is in such a state of profound disturbance, and the existing order feels so insecure, that that order—as it always does—begins to cast about in the shadows to find, if it may, some Big Man with a Sword; him when found we will make our Imperator, and by sharing some of our estates with certain of his military subalterns we will make sure of the rest—and after us the deluge. The special cause—at least in America—is the tremendous and growing tradition of General Grant. Albeit, General Grant hated the Bonapartes, from the Great One to the Little One; yet his own luminous setting has left a glow in which the nation sees men as trees walking—and among these the greatest simulacrum is Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of this man, who began as the son of a Corsican peasant-mother working in a mulberry orchard, and who, after fifty-one years, eight months, and twenty days, ended in a cyclone on the rock called St. Helena, having meanwhile for nearly a third of his life bestridden western Europe like a colossus,—a new biography claiming to be the ultimate summation of the Emperor’s life and character has appeared. Professor William Milligan Sloane, of Princeton University, has entered the lists which may be said to have opened with Walter Scott and finished with the McClure Syndicate, passing meanwhile by way of such personages as De StaËl, Las Cases, Victor Hugo, and Lanfrey, and such drudges as Bourrienne and MÉneval, to lodge at last with the miscellaneous hacks who get three dollars a column for their boiler-plate philosophy in American newspapers! Heavens, what a scrimmage!

It were difficult to say when the final biography of a man has been produced. Hard, hard is it to decide when anything in this world is final. The never-ending progress of events shapes and readjusts not only the present materials of history, but also by reaction the materials of the past. Much that is supposed to be complete is seen to be unfinished; the done becomes undone, and the peroration of an epoch has to be rewritten for an exordium.

This is as true of the individual lives of men as it is of great events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every man from Moses to Cagliostro.

On the whole I incline to the opinion that Professor Sloane has brought the Emperor Napoleon to a kind of final interpretation; I will not say to a full stop, but to something very much resembling a period. In the first place, I offer on the “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” the eulogium that the work has, in a great degree, naturalized the Corsican as he was never naturalized before—thus bringing him out of cloudland and mere impossible fog to the plain level of human action and purpose.

This is much. In accomplishing thus much Professor Sloane has vindicated his claim to be regarded as a great biographer. It has been the bane of nearly all biographical writing that the subjects of it have been completely mythologized. Thus far in the history of mankind biography might be defined as the art of myth-making. I scarcely know what exceptions to cite to this universal vice except only and always Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.” As for American biographies thus far produced, there is scarcely a single example of a work which is not to be classified as a recorded myth. The trouble in all this business has been that the myth-makers, living in a certain atmosphere, have imagined that they are obliged to make their characters conform to the established antecedents of greatness. These established antecedents of greatness have for the most part been created out of superstitions, credulities, blank idealism, and mere dogmatic bosh. No living, active men have ever conformed, or could conform, to the standards which the logicians, the philosophers, and the priests have fixed up for them; and if any of them should conform to such a standard, their place under classification would be with automata, not with living men.

Nevertheless, our biographers have been so weak and servile as to make their characters according to this pattern. One character is labelled Washington, another is labelled Franklin, another is labelled Adams, and still another, Lincoln.

All this, I think, Professor Sloane has studiously avoided. As a literary doctor he has done much to destroy the mythical disease. He has written an elaborate work in which the man Napoleon moves and acts, neither as an angel nor as a devil, but as a man, moved upon and moving by the common human passions, though inflamed, in his case, to a white heat in the furnace of his ambition.

All this was to have been expected in view of the plan of Professor Sloane as expressed in his preface:

From this point of view Professor Sloane has proceeded with his tremendous work. His studies at home and abroad have been ample. We may remark, in passing, upon the physical vigor of the author as shown in his portrait. From such a face and figure we can but expect energy, persistency, accomplishment. I do not pretend to disclose the reasons of Professor Sloane for indulging in this prodigious Napoleonic dream and for delineating it in what is likely to be regarded as the best product of his intellectual career. We can only take what he has produced and give it such cursory notice as our space will permit.

The first volume of the work extends from a survey of the conditions under which Napoleon was born and reared to the conclusion of his twenty-eighth year. The first events depicted are those historical movements in which the Bonapartes, within the narrow limits of their island, were involved in the seventh decade of the eighteenth century; and the last event recorded in this volume is the fall of Venice, at the end of May, 1797. I incline to regard this as the most interesting, though not the most important, of the four great volumes of Professor Sloane’s work. In the nature of the case the ascendant of a man is the more inspiring part. In it he appears as an orb whose full majesty, not yet revealed, solicits the imagination and kindles by sympathy the ambitions that in some measure are common to us all. Here in volume I is portrayed the youth of the man Napoleon Bonaparte. In this he is revealed in the full charm of that electrical audacity which had as yet lost none of its sharpness and burning flash. Nor had Napoleon, as a man, as yet become sufficiently involved with the general maze of history, sufficiently immersed in the storm-cloud of that tempestuous epoch, to be lost from view. This volume shows the man emerging from boyhood into the full career of a military conqueror. It shows him in his magical transformation from the character of an adventurer into the character of a leader of armies and a dictator of events. It also shows Napoleon with the still fluid heart of boyhood passing through the lava floods of his first loves, in particular his love for Josephine, into the age of cynicism and calculation.

This first volume brings sufficiently to memory the progress of the youthful Napoleon. Here we see him at his mother’s knee; then in the time of his school days; then in Paris and Valence; then as a neophyte author, quite absurd in his dreams; then on garrison duty, and then swept away with the tides of the oncoming revolution. In the smoke of the South his slender figure is seen here and there until he emerges at Toulon. In his character of Jacobin he becomes a general in the army at a time of life when most men are happy to be lieutenants. Then for the first time he touches the revolutionary society of Paris. He meets Josephine; Barras delivers her to the coming man. They are wedded, and from that date the stage widens, the wars in Italy break out, and the young general begins to whirl his sword at Mantua, Arcole, and Rivoli—from which he was wont to date his military birth, saying on that occasion, “Make my life begin at Rivoli;” and finally at Montebello and Venice, where, in the late spring of 1797, he is joined by Josephine. There from the French capital they seemed to stand afar as the cynosure of all revolutionary eyes, expecting a greater light.

In the second volume Professor Sloane begins with the rescue of the Directory. Hard after we have the great episode of the Treaty of Campo Formio, and then the expedition to Egypt. The story of that expedition is known through all the world; so also the return, and the overthrow of the Directory.

From that day Bonaparte became the embodiment of the revolution. He became a statesman and a strategist. He found himself in the geographical and historical storm-centre of Europe. Then came the epoch of great wars. Marengo marks the close of the old century, and the treaty of LunÉville the beginning of the new. Napoleon undertakes the pacification of Europe, and reorganizes France. He steps cautiously towards the restoration of monarchy. There is a life-consulate, transforming itself quickly into an empire. The old royalism is extinguished, and the new military imperialism is glorified in its stead. The third coalition of Europe succeeds the second. Trafalgar strews the sea with the wrecks of France, and Austerlitz strews the land with the wrecks of Russia and Austria. The sea is virtually abandoned by the man of destiny, but over the land he rises as War-lord and Emperor.

The second conflict breaks out with Prussia and ends with the ruin of that power at Jena and Auerstadt. The year 1806 sees the parvenu emperor, now thirty-seven years of age, the master of all the better parts of Europe. Here ends the second volume of his life, according to Professor Sloane’s division, and the third begins with the devastation and humiliation of the Prussian kingdom.

In this volume the author views Napoleon for the first time as the arbitrary diplomatist of the West. It is evident that from this time the emperor’s vision widens to a more remote horizon than he had ever scanned before. The Berlin decree was issued. The battle of Eylau was fought, and then was achieved the victory of Friedland. Nor may we pass without noticing the acme which Napoleon, according to the judgment of many, now reached on that memorable field. Here it is that art has caught and transmitted him. For it is in the trodden wheat-field of Friedland that Meissonier’s pencil has delineated Napoleon with his marshals around him, in one of the greatest pictures of the world.

By this epoch ambition in the emperor had swallowed up all other passions. He goes on from conquering to conquest. The dream of a French Empire, coextensive with the borders of Europe, seizes the Napoleonic imagination. The emperor’s armies strike left and right. They are seen first on one horizon, then on another. The Corsican on his white horse is now upon the Pyrenees, now on the Germanic frontier, and now in Poland. He faces Alexander of Russia, and laughs at him! His gray coat and three-cornered hat become the best known symbols of military genius in modern times.

Kingdoms and principalities are transformed. Already the mythical Roman empire has passed away. Austria is threatened with extinction. The Corsican is seen first in one and then in another of the ancient capitals of Europe. Aspern follows EckmÜhl, and Essling and Wagram follow Aspern. The treaty of SchÖnbrunn promises peace to the nations, but the hope is broken to the lips. In this crisis Josephine goes down in the shadows, and the daughter of Austria is led to the imperial chamber—this from the necessity of establishing a dynasty. The relations between France and Russia are strained to breaking. The fatal year 1812 comes, and there is a congress of kings. Alexander gives his ultimatum, and the invasion of Russia is begun. There is an indescribable struggle on the Moskwa, and then the flames of Moscow are seen across the deserts of Russian snow.

The fourth and last volume begins with the return of the allied armies from Russia. Then follows the universal revolt of the nations. Insurrection breaks out on every horizon, and treachery, as might have been expected, is added to the combinations that are rapidly formed against the imperial Corsican. The borders of France are broken in. There is a narrowing rim of fire bursting into battle flame here and there; and then the catastrophe of the capture of Paris. There is an ambiguous abdication and an equivocal exile of a few months’ duration to Elba. It was much like the establishment of a live lion on Governor’s Island!

The lion got away. Then came an instantaneous upheaval of old revolutionary France, which had now become imperial France. The Emperor was welcomed home as a returning god. The country was drained to the last drop of its resources, and everything was staked on the final strategy of the Hundred Days and the hazard of the ever-memorable battle.

and then the imperial eagle was seen stretched upon the plain, pierced through with the shafts of banded nations. He was caged and transported to that far rock which in his school-essay at Autun he had described thus: “St. Helena is a small island!” He found it so. For nearly six years his captivity continued until his stormy career ended in a May hurricane that might well have shaken the desolate foundations of his ocean-girt prison. Then the historical tide rolled on without him. France was transformed into the old image, but her soul was still imperial. At last the bones of her great dead were recovered, to be placed at rest in that red-black sarcophagus over which the world looks down and wonders.

Such is the fiery but fruitful chaos through which the life-line of Napoleon is drawn with a master hand by Professor William Milligan Sloane. My judgment is that, on the whole, he has produced the greatest biographical work which has yet appeared in American literature. I think that in the main his accomplishment has been equal to his ambition. It is not an unworthy thing that an American professor, at the seat of an American university, turning his energies to this great task, has succeeded in making a well-nigh final record of the life and work of that unequalled organizer, that sublime dissembler, that cruel reformer, that heartless philanthropist, who, for half a lifetime, converted old Europe into a mire of murder and desolation, for the ultimate good of man.

Only one thing may be said in adverse criticism of Professor Sloane’s book, and that is, that his style is too mathematical and too little imaginative for the subject which he has in hand. His rather cold precision, however, we concede to him; for it is, no doubt, the natural method of his expression. We do our part to acknowledge and welcome the remarkable work which he has produced, and to commend it to all readers as the best existing and best probable account of the personal and historical career of Napoleon Bonaparte.