LETTERS AND DESPATCHES OF THE FIRST NAPOLEON.*
ENGLISH literature is not so rich in good histories of Napoleon that we can afford to welcome this selection from his letters and -despatches coldly. We could wish, indeed, that Captain Bingham had taken a stricter view of an editor's duties, and had given us more specific references to his authorities. We could wish also, though this is a minor matter, that his volumes were not disfigured by errata, which we do not instance, because any reader of ordinary information can correct them for himself. Neither do we, for a similar reason, quote any examples of the carelessness which leaves us free to say that his translation might easily be improvel. We are content, in the case of a work so important and interesting as this, to shut our eyes to its surface-blemishes, and to regard its matter rather than its form. How valuable that matter is will be best -appreciated by those who have formed their conception of Napoleon from purely English sources. For Alisou's account of that extraordinary genius is stilted, hollow, and tedious ; Scott's is a confessed failure ; Hazlitt's, in spite of Talfourd's high encomium, is no better ; Lockhart's terse and vigorous sketch is incomplete and inaccurate ; while Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell's work, in some respects an improvement on its predecessors, is thoroughly marred by its author's insane disparagement of Napoleon's courage and capacity. Now, it would be an idle waste of time to argue with men who are blind to the military and administrative abilities of Napoleon. But as Lander and Kinglake have supported Mitchell's view of the great captain's personal pusillanimity, it may not be amiss to notice the -evidence which Captain Bingham incidentally produces of its injustice. We refer to his account of Napoleon's landing in Sardinia, some years before he was wounded by a bayonet. thrust at Toulon. There is no reason to believe that he was imbued with that bull-dog love of hand-to-hand fighting which animated Alexander of Macedon and Lord Nelson ; but we see no reason for doubting that his personal -courage was equal to Wellington's; and that means, of course, that he was as brave a man as any General need be. His reputation is stained by so many crimes, that the historian who can bring himself to think that he was a poltroon as well as an intolerable bully, might fairly write him off as one of Nature's bastards, and concentrate his scorn -on the generation which could bow the knee to such a sorry Baal. But the fascination which Napoleon exercised over his contemporaries is by no means spent ; and Captain Bingham's preface, in so far as it is apologetic, is superfluous. He is quite Tight in thinking that his Selection "throws light upon the character of one of the most wonderful men ever born." He speaks much too guardedly of the het that this light is sometimes unfavourable. And this is the more surprising because in the body-of his work he goes at times beyond Lanfrey himself in refusing to give Napoleon the benefit of the doubt, in
some cases where historians still hesitate about their verdict. Napoleon—for it is no use mincing matters, and if Pichegru, Wright, and Villeneuve point no gory fingers at his memory, the Duke of Enghien and Palm do—Napoleon was a ruthless murderer on occasion, a public robber and swindler by choice. These rough expressions can be more than justified from his own letters ; and political exigencies should be more powerful than charity if they can cover the multitude of his sins against morality and humanity. To that poor shelter his graver crimes must be left with those of many another "Scourge of God ;" and in the rest of this notice we shall dwell, so far as we can, upon the less repulsive aspects of his antithetically mixed character.
He was christened Nabulione—a name that might have shaken Mr. Shandy's belief in a man's being Nicodemus'd into nothing—and the date of his birth is uncertain. Captain Bingham has adduced reasons, which appear to us convincing, that it was August 15th, 1768, and not as it is always given, 1769. We can add one small fact in support of those reasons,—the fact, namely, that on his marriage with Josephine, he gave the year himself as 1768. Lanfrey believes that he did so out of complaisance to the bride, who, on the same occasion, struck four years off her own age ; and the point, after all, is not of any great importance. Captain Bingham's view is strongly corroborated by the amusingly precocious letters written from Brienne by Napoleon to his father, and can easily be reconciled with that father's dying words, if they be not mythical, to his son Joseph. It also explains the tone and attitude of an eldest son, which Napoleon adopted from the first towards his relatives. Early indeed was the prescience which he displayed of the services that he was to render them, and of the undefinable something which was to help him to do so. In September, 1795, when he was still eager to marry his sister-inlaw, Desiree Clary, and share with his brother Joseph some of the good things that would come to him from her father, a wealthy soap-boiler at Marseilles, though he prospered not with her, for the soap-boiler declared that one Bonaparte in his family was quite sufficient, he wrote thus to his brother : —" You know, my friend, that I only live for the pleasure 1 can give my family. If my hopes are exceeded by the good-luck which never abandons me in my undertakings, I shall be able to fulfil all your desires." The pleasure which Napoleon lived to give his family, and the sauce with which he sweetened that pleasure, are matters too notorious for comment. But the words which we have italicised are strangely suggestive. What the thing which men call " luck" may be, we cannot analyse or define. There is such a thing, and its presence is more easily detected in war than in most of the other pursuits and pastimes of mankind. Whatever that thing may be, Napoleon certainly had his own share of it, and someone-else's too, as the old saying goes. And we say this thinking rather of the golden chances which Fortune seemed never tired of thrusting into her favourite's hands in the days of his decline and fall, rather than of the "flukes," among many others, whereby he escaped Nelson and won Marengo when his sun was rising. In the Russian campaign— and we are glad to see that Captain Bingham rejects Dr. Arnold's view of that campaign very decidedly—Napoleon had great luck. He was favoured by the weather personally, though his miserable followers were not, for it gave him an excuse for the monstrous errors which he had committed—errors so great, indeed, as to make any call upon Providence to supplement them something worse than superfluous. His host was doomed after the time ho wasted in Moscow ; and we have Wellington's opinion that if the season had been more open, not a man of that host, its leader included, could have escaped death or imprisonment. But Fortune, stronger than Providence, if we listen to Coleridge's explanation of the Russian catastrophe, smiled on her favourite at Krasnoi and at Studia.nka ; and after Liitzen, which he himself regarded as a slice of hick, he might have remained, had he chosen, the master of a France with boundaries that exceeded the wildest dreams of Louis XI.V.'s ambition. Now, we cannot, we repeat, either define or analyse that curious attribute which some men possess—the Romans called it felicilas —but we make na doubt of its existence, and of its influence on Napoleon's career and character. What is curious is that at so early a period of his life he should have recognised his possession of that folicitas; and that his faith in his star should have found an echo in many thousands of his fellow-creatures who know no more of his exploits than they do of the precession of the equinoxes. We refer, of course, to
Napoleon's Book of Fate ; but must confess that we can carry the subject no further.
Of recent years much attention has been called to the element of pettiness in this wonderful man's character. He was certainly no gentleman; and he lacked not only the graces and accomplishments of Csar, bat the conventional manners and morals which enabled Wellington to boast that he was " avant tout gentilhomme Anglais." We care very little for his troublesome meddling with other people's business. " Chacun homme a sa marotte," and meddling was Napoleon's. But this meddling, after all, was ludicrously rather than lamentably contemptible ; and it is only when we consider his conduct to Villeneuve after Trafalgar, and to Vandamme after Calm, that we can gauge the depths of unutterable paltriness. In money matters he was always wisely liberal, and with all his meanness, therefore, he entirely escaped the odium which weighed so much in the balance against Louis Philippe and his family. Vanity and obstinacy, ultra-feminine, were the quicksands on which his genius foundered. And this vanity and obstinacy were soldered, so to speak, by a love of falsehood for its own sake that might seem a priori incompatible with the strong good-sense which he unquestionably possessed. So, however, it was ; and among the many curious instances of Napoleon's purposeless mendacity to be found in Captain Bingham's volumes, none strike us as more curious than his writing to his brother Joseph, when urging him to capture Sicily, that it would be easy for him to deceive Sir Sydney Smith, because he [Napoleon] had often laid snares for that officer into which he invariably fell.
We had marked many entertaining and instructive passages in this work for extract, but we cannot do more than refer very briefly to a few of them,—to Lieutenant Bonaparte's proposal, for instance, to offer Mirabeau " a complete Corsican costnme,that is to say, a cap, vest, breeches, drawers, cartridge-belt, dagger, pistol, and gun ;" to his Dialogue sur l'Arnour, written to prove that love was baneful to society and to human happiness ; to his apology for his undecipherable handwriting as due to the Southern blood which was running through his veins with the rapidity of the Rhone ; to his appeal to his uncle for three hundred francs to enable him to go to Paris, where he could cut a figure and surmount obstacles, as everything was telling him he should succeed ; to his really touching letters to his mother on his father's death ; to the Emperor Napoleon's wise words on the Liberty of the Press, and on the rash abolishment of Capital Punishment by his brother Louis in Holland ; to his directions for the preparation of a portable library and for the due supply of his wardrobe, so markedly in contrast with that of Frederick the Great's. A glance, however, through the excellent index which has been compiled for these volumes will show how scanty is this list of noteworthy passages. We can recommend Captain Bingham's work very heartily to all who desire to know something more than they can learn from any other English book about " Der Schalk " par excellence of the nine teenth century. We refer, of course, to the Prologue in Goethe's Faust when we apply this name to Napoleon; and we hope that we are not too presumptuous in pleading Burns's farewell to "Auld Nickie Ben" as an excuse for doing so. The real secret of the fascination which Napoleon still exercises over men's minds lies, we believe, in his almost superhuman productive energy ; and we should be foolish, indeed, if we tried to write a variation on the passage descriptive of that alluring quality, translated by Captain Bingham, at the end of his third volume, from the words of the ablest of all Napoleon's Ministers.
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