NAPOLEONIC NOVELTIES.*

BACON classified -books according to their fitness for being "tasted," "swallowed," or "chewed and digested." To the great Lord Chancellor's first category we should assign the Reflections of Mr. Beardsley on "the most intellectual force the world has ever known," if the text were not such a very Niagara of rhapsodical language that you do not always know whether it is poetry or prose. Shrinking from conflicts with an author who warns you that if you call the object of his genuflexions a "tyrant," you are "a • (1) Napoleon Our Last Great Man: By. Elystan M. Beardsley. With Trontie. piece. London De. net.] (2) Napoleon a Biographical Study. By Dr. Max Lenz. Translated from the German by Frederic Whyte. With so Illustrations, Maps, and Facsimile of Autograph. London : Hutchinson and Co. [Ns. net.]—(3) Napoleon's Mon and Methods. By Alexander L. Hielland. Translated by Joseph McCabe. With a Preface by Oscar Browning, • Cambridge. With Erentispiece and Vignettes, 'London:, Owen and Co. [108. 64, net.)

dolt," if a "usurper," you are "fatuous," Ntre bow to his dithyrambic measurements of the " modernness " and " pre- pollent " genius of the " assertive " Corsican, so "bountiful in mind and action," at "whose behest mountains shrink and

rivers roll back their waters," when he took to "mesmerising the Kingdoms of the Earth into submission." Repudiating the notion that his hero's " phlegethonic " career of conquest

was mainly prompted by his determination to subjugate perfid,e Albion, Mr. Beardsley shows in Pindaric sentences that, as the Napoleonic spirit to govern was ".radicated " in his strenuous nature, we must not restrict "the multi- fariousness, the diapason, the entire object, the whole purport of his life's epoch within the narrow purlieus

of a life's vengeance." In one of his Reflections the advocatus diaboli rashly betrays his client's real pro- gramme. Before leaving -France in 1812 the invader of

Russia told his own Government that, under the dictator- ship which he had been forced to assume, Europe would have one Code, one Court of Appeal, one coinage, Paris being the new capital of the world. This "plethora of self-confidence" is too much even for our author, who allows that it was well for mankind that Napoleon met his Nemesis at Moscow, and that "Christendom banded itself into a Crusade for his undoing." With absolute " impeccancy " this "mightiest of all conquerors" is not credited, for although he never was the aggressor, except when he invaded Spain and in his Russian War of 18,12, it must be admitted that the executions

of the Due d'Enghien, the bookseller Palm, and the Tyrolese patriot Hofer "rankle in our hearts."

In a chapter called "The Pageant of Dresden," on Napoleon's visit to the Saxon capital just before the Russian campaign of 1812, the drums and trumpets are sounded with enormous power, The leitmotiv of the music—viz., the author's discovery that this "passage in Bonaparte's epopceia reads like the wildest extravagance

of exaggerated romance "—recurs in repeated varieties of verbal orchestratioa, amongst them being the assurance

that neither the genii of the Arabian Nights nor the

fairies of Western fancy ever endowed their heroes with the lucent splendours of coruscant glory that played round "the King of Kings" when, "in the blaze of the assembled Sovereigns of Christendom, from the dizzy summit of his power he beheld the world suppliant at his feet." The reader who wishes to know what actually happened at Dresden will be disappointed ; but he will find a list of twenty Royal historical heroes, reaching from " Macedonia's madman to the Swede," and a dozen Popes, who serve as a hornets' nest of comparisons justifying the author's final crescendo of hosannas. Elsewhere in the volume you may revel in hysterical reminders of "the martyr- dom on the rock," " circummured by the billows of the Southern Ocean," effected by "the relentless tyranny of his despicable jailers," as prescribed by "wiseacres in the British Government,"—" an exile that has for ever sullied the page of England's glorious history."

After our countryman's Magnificat, the learned German's brilliantly drawn facts and suggestive comments will be "swallowed" with advantage. Dr. Lenz's pictures, with their dexterous combination of the concrete and the abstract, are generally of great value. In the chapter "In the East" you breathe the atmosphere of the Pyramids, and you hear the young Corsican telling the Mullahs of Cairo to make known to the people that salvation in this world and the next would be withheld from the opponents of "The Lord of Fire." Then you have a rapid view (which Lanfrey would have called too favourable) of "one of the most awful deeds in the history of war,"—the massacre of the three thousand Turks of the garrison, of Jaffa, an act of bloodshed

suggested, maybe, by the invader's desire " to contend with his next antagonist Djezzar Pacha for his nickname given to him for his cruelties." ("Djezzar " means " buteher.") In

this connexion a condensed -extract from one of the author's philosophical "Studies" of Napoleon's soul will serve as a sample of his-manner

" He was not cruel by nature and he was grateful to those who attached then/selves to him. But he knew no -mercy, and shrank from no _brutality once his interests and -his systems -were at stake, and-the-ends-he -had -in -view -seemed -to make such a course-necessary. Then he -had only the methods of .Binasco- "il -faut brtder,luailler, faire la term*. He called -this energy, and it was womanish weakness' 'Whew his. generals neglected to make examples at his orders. It was only thus, he said, that one, could. earn public confidence. • The rabble Oa canaille) love and respect only those whom they fear, and. it. is. only by making yourself feared by the rabble that you can win the affection, and respect of the nation: " Aloofness" (sit venia verbo) is a virtue which Dr. Lenz. cannot quite claim. The omissions of a book may, of course; be the result of a publisher's chase on page room ; but drawing our critical bow at a venture, we should say that the author's limited schedule of his hero's iniquities indicates his partial entanglement in the net of the world-conqueror's fascinations. The case is at least one of suspect Vtre suspect, when silence is kept on the order to poison the French hospital patients at Jaffa, on the seizure of British Envoys on neutral German soil, on the barbarous treatment of the negro leader Toussaint, on the letter to Murat (furnished by Lecestre) stating that if the Ambassadors of Austria and Naples shelter Orleans pretenders they will be arrested and shot, or—astounding omission for a German scholar—when nothing is said of Napoleon's message from Spain to the King of Prussia warning him that if the great Minister Stein is caught by French troops he will be at once "passe par lea armee." From the trail of the serpent of Anglophobia this volume is certainly not free. Giving too diluted a description of the murder of the Duo d'Enghien,

the author says that if that crime "can never be justified," the same must be said of that greatest of all brutal acts of the period, the bombardment of "neutral and defenceless Copen- hagen by the English fleet in 1807." M. Coquelle's wholesale

reductio ad absurdum of the old Whiggeries regarding the First Consul's violations of the Treaty of Amiens has not induced Dr. Lenz to give a straightforward verdict on that topic ; instead of speaking out plainly, he behaves like "Mr. Facing-both-ways" in The Pilgrim's Progress.

Of the omission of the Beethoven episode at Erfurt, when the two greatest men of the age met in the street, and the composer, unlike his complaisant companion,

Herr Staatsminister von. Goethe, Excellenz, pulled his hat down over his ears in sign of his dislike of the conqueror whom he had at one time glorified by his dedication of the

Eroica Symphony,—of this we must not complain, as the author's page room forced him to whittle down his colossal statue to cameo dimensions. En revanche, Dr. Lenz spares

us the old threadbare estimate of Napoleon as a mere shuttle in the loom of time, though he quotes a. letter in which the Emperor speaks of himself as the executioner of the stern commands of the inevitable.

The third work on our list will be easily "chewed and digested." It brings credentials from no less an expert than Mr. Oscar Browning, who emphatically reiterates his old

Napoleonic doxology, but who says nothing about the Scandinavian writer except that his book is impartial and brilliant, and that it has had a large circulation abroad.

Alexander Kielland, let us explain, was a Norwegian of good family who died last year. After attaining great popularity as a writer of novels, he entered the public service and devoted his leisure to historic studies, finally resulting in the present volume. Of the artistic skill with

which he replaces the solemnities of style that constitute the traditional "dignity of history" by anecdotes, grave or gay, of impressive realistic force many samples might be

given. The Norwegian is well aware that scientific diagrams of battlefields will not enable you to understand "the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious war," unless you are shown the personal appearance, bearing,,and equipment of the soldiery. Amidst the tragedy of the retreat from Moscow none of the French Paladins were more conspicuous than the showy, dashing "Prince of Moskwa," Ney, whose only military gift was his courage, and Murat Of the King of Naples we read this fine. estimate.:—

" No maneould have, gone with a greater contempt of death, Year in, year out, from battle to battle, than Joachim Murat, and no one possessed in a higher degree the gift of communicating Ins own courage to others. When he swung himself into the saddle—and he was a handsome man, in a fine suit of armour with velvet, with enormously long white ostrich feathers, and arms and harness glittering with gold and. precious stones—the devil was lat loosedn.his squadrons; man and beast dashed after him, and there was nothing that could stop them. Yet it was found that there was a limit to this kind of courage. King joachim collapsed when the supply of horses was exhausted, and there were-no mere-cavalrymen, te-leadi with jingling' harness and

flapping cloaks. Certainly he was just as fearless as ever ; cowardice was impossible for him ; but his' courage had lest its glamour when he could no loner command, but had to save an army that was shrunken out of all proportion. His sense of duty and manly courage sank behind other sensations."

Not condescending to the system of KM. Masson and Levy, whose thirty volumes have been received' with such gusto in the Ville turnibre, the Norwegian neither dissects

Napoleon's washing-bills nor Josephine's underwear, and prefers to explain that but for his nerves of steel he would not have achieved greatness. At Wagram, riding his white charger Euphrates,' a present from the Shah of Persia, he galloped across the ground under the enemy's hottest fire, and took up a position which he retained for an hour under an uninterrupted shower of bullets. The author's amazement at the Emperor's astounding range of intellectual infor- mation might be upset by the testimony of the illustrious

savant Chaptal, Minister of the Interior (not Foreign Affairs),

who states that his master was profoundly ignorant of the mere rudiments of various branches of necessary knowledge.

The Norwegian's view of the great man's intimate per- sonality is more correct than pleasant. For him Napoleon "the man," as the new slang runs, is always impiger iracundus inexorabilis acer ; he was morose, rude, ill-dressed, and, says the author in a final paragraph, "I never read anywhere of his making a joke,"—" he, if any man, was the ideal 'tyrant' in the old sense of the word." From inaccuracies of detail: calculated to make the historian of the new syndicate

species shudder the volume is not free. You are told how, during the negotiations of the Peace of Campo Formio, the' young General, victor in eighteen battles, smashed a priceless tea-service in order to intimidate the Austrian Envoy (a St. Helena myth gravely reproduced by Lanfrey !) Then the pathetic incident of Napoleon's gift of the rose to Luisa of Prussia in the Tilsit raft days is turned topsy-turvy, the flower, in the comic Norwegian version of the story, being offered to the Emperor by the Queen! Although the author's garrulous zig-zagging narrative is not exactly adapted to military history, he is by no means one who, like Carrel% the division of a battle knows no more than a spinster.' Witness his Waterloo Campaign, which is a model of condensed exacti- tude. In all three books Tilsit becomes a hornets' neat of blunders, from which an imposing recent contribution to Napoleonic history will not help the reader to escape.