BOOK OF THE MOMENT

THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA BY TBE New York Times.]

" I know nothing which can so severely try the heart and spirit of man, and especially of the man of science, as the necessity of a passive acquiescence under the abominations of an unprincipled tyrant who is deluging the earth with blood to acquire for himself the reputation of a Cartouche or a Robin Hood. . . . The horrors excited by the Salina of France are beyond all human execrations."

(JEFFERSON to Dr. MORRELL, Feb., 1813.) •

THE world never tires of Napoleon.. His deeds and sayings

awaken a universal interest. That being so, it was inevit- able that he should become the prey of the book makers.

Some day we hope we shall have a comprehensive and well authenticated Napoleonic Encyclopaedia, a work to be endowed with plenty of cross-references, in which we shall be able to find what Napoleon thought and did in every con- ceivable circumstance. Meanwhile, a good deal of enlighten- ment may be acquired from the latest load of bricks dumped on the site by Mr. Louis Cohen. His prime object, he tells us,

was to visualize the strange and complex personality of the Emperor. On the whole, the selection is good, though I could wish that he had not omitted to give us his references save in certain exceptional cases. A list of books consulted at

the end of the volume is no substitute for chapter and verse on the page.

As a whole, the book cannot but confirm what was the accepted view of Napoleon's contemporaries—the view that I believe will gradually be accepted. The essential thing about the man was his tremendous energy and his power of applying that energy, not to one or two set subjects, as has been the case with most commanders, but at every point in space or time.

But, though he was great in every field and form of human activity, he was supreme in none. He lacked originality, the full understanding of men and things. It would be absurd to call a man so magnificently competent superficial, but un- questionably his mind moved on the surface. He would probably have defended himself from the charge I am pre- ferring by saying that the works of war and government were too relative and too temporary to make it worth while to go deeply into them. He was one of those builders who do not think it necessary to trouble about permanent foundations.

He wanted a good building, but only one which would stand sixty years or his life time, " whichever period should prove the longer." After that, what did it matter ?

Hence arose his contempt of ideas and ideals. For a man to be what he called " an ideologue " was the most certain damnation. An ideologue meant with him, not merely a man of abstractions, but a man who troubled to go down to funda- mentals. He scorned anyone who dug deeper than was necessary for his immediate object. He took as much as he wanted of a thing, whether it was Roman law, or economics, or road-making, or agriculture, and left the rest. Like a true realist, he hated all theories and theorists. They went as near frightening him, indeed, as anything could, for he saw that they distracted people's attention from his policies of blood and iron. The result was not merely a narrow man, a selfish man, and a bad wan, but a man who must be classed in the last resort as second-rate, though, of course, his second-rateness was so marvellous, so intricate and so dynamic that it often called forth more amazement and admiration than the work of the man of true genius. The second-rate man raised to the nth degree of augmentation often makes a better show in the world than the man of first degree, the man of genius, who only achieves a narrow morsel of perfection.

The proof of what I am saying is to be found in Napoleon's extraordinary lack of mental insight. With all his intelli- gence, all his care, and all his inhuman efficiency, he lacked judgment. He did not know when to stop. He was never in the trite sense wise. Though he carried cunning, quickness of

thought, promptitude of action and ability almost beyond the bounds of man's wit, he was terribly apt to rush on for the sake of rushing. At the last, indeed, he seems almost to have

felt that if he did not flog himself on as a boy flogs a whipping

top, he would die _down and finish his career prematurely. Hence the Russian campaign, the fires of the Kremlin and all the mad decisions and the processes of semi-delirious ratio- cination that marked its course. During 1811 and 1812 he seemed to be Bent convincing the world that nobody could . haVe an excuse left for tolerating him. Jeffei•son said many thing's about Napolecin even fiercer than:My text Which ought to have found a place in Mr. Cohen's hook: Not only did he call Bonaparte in 1810 " A conqUeror roaming over the earth with .havoc and destruction," but in 1814 after declaring that " BOnaparte was a liOn in the field only," lie went oh

" In civil life, .a cold-blooded, calculating, unprincipled usurpe!, without a virtue ; no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by. bold presumption."

At the end of the volume are some lists of short sayings' entitled : " As Napoleon saw- Others," " A Few of Napoleon's Sayings," and " As Others saw Napoleon;" which are well, worth- study. Though not so full or pregnant as they might be, Napoleon's thoughts on literature are curious. Their originality, if not their judgment, shows the man. "Good Lord ! How foolish men of letters are." The men of letters might well have replied that he did not make good his right: to judge them. He said of Shakespeare : " His plays are not worth reading ; they are below contempt," and he professed, contempt for almost all writers except Corneille and Ossian.' Against this must be put the fact that he liked Goethe, or, at any rate, The Sorrows of Werther, and carried it in his pocket into the field. Yet in a wonderful passage, in which he pours' his contempt not only on philosophy but on religion, he indulged in an amusing insult to the great German :- " The poets ? In Germany I know a very remarkable writer. I• think he was called Goethe. . . . Well, this Goethe was as godless' as our Encyclopaedists, but it is true, in his own way—perhaps in a clever way, too. He called himself a pantheist. Is it not all the same- to say that nature is God—or that there is no God ? "

Another passage in this anthology Of scepticism is exceedingly: characteristic :LL • " It's a very bad sign when a man begins to think about God t he has evidently nothing more to do on earth. . . . If I had believed

in God, could I have done what I did ? " - - •

After the dictum that " Almost all scoundrels live happily," he drops into a wonderful piece of statecraft :—

" The best thing about the Roman Catholic religion is that the prayers are in Latin : the people understand nothing—and God bo thanked for it."

The final flower in this infernal nosegay is the announcement; which is the most Napoleonic of all the dicta :—

" Of course, the Christ of the Gospels never existed. . . . ThereA certainly .was some sort of Jewish fanatic who imagined himself the Messiah. Similar fanatics are shot all over the world every day: I myself have had occasion to shoot them."

I will close with two curious opinions. Victor Hugo said.:; after his death, " God was bored with Napoleon." Lannes at the height of his career is alleged to have said to the great- man himself : " Yes, yes; because you have marched up to yoUr ankles in gore on this bloody'field, you count yourself a: great min." Against thii may be put Stendhal's grovelling apothegm : " There was only one man I Over respreted and that was Naioleori."

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.