Smashing Serapis
Napoleon Passes. By Cona1 O'Riordan. (Arrowsmith. 8s. 6d.)
Ix the. Age of Faith, the worshipper is-unsuspicious : for him the legend is the fact, which whosoever doubts or denies is an objectionable person, a scoffer, atheist, or infidel, to be shunned or. suppressed. Thus when, some fifty. years ago, Prince Napoleon put forth his Napoleon et se,s Detracteurs (excusable in him : it was a family affair) he had the Faith ; never suspecting that the devotees were even tess.to be believed than the detractors, the least trustworthy of all.being precisely the Deity—that is, Napoleon himself, above all in those last years at St. Helena, which he spent in posing as a martyr, a Prometheus chained to a rock, and industriously daubing a false colour over all his past, ably assisted by Las Cases, O'Meara, and other disciples. But time passes, as well as Napoleon, and the legend is becoming daily more obviously not the fact. Those interested in the legend, which Mr. O'Riordan does not handle, would do well to study the part played by Napoleon in his own canonization, in the excellent monograph of M. Philippe Gonnard, Les Origines de la Ligende Napoleonienne (in English, entitled The Exile of St. Helena). A singular occupation, when you come to think of it, for a Great Man ! The systematic manufacture of his own gloire by studious falsification of the record. Other such great men were Cicero and Victor Hugo. There is a great lack of humour in their method, disproving as it does exactly what they aim at proving.
Rejecting the legend, Mr. O'Riordan goes straight for Napoleon himself, so to say, with a hammer : .he is out, like the early Christian soldier immortalized by Gibbon, to smash Serapis to smithereens ; so zealously, indeed, that many a reader brought up in the old faith might even take fright, and fall back in dismay on his Holland Rose, or even his Thiers. To Mr. O'Riordan, Napoleon is anathema ; all blood, mud, and gutter. Though we are largely in sympathy with Mr. O'Riordan, and greatly enjoyed, as many- others will also, his vigorous pages, packed with wide knowledge, yet we must honestly confess misgivings at times, since the edge of his criticism is often blunted by the peculiarity of his standpoint his views on kings, ministers, soldiers, and warfare being such, that his critical lash falls on the back of practically everybody as well as Napoleon-:- he plays, as it were,•on his-enemy with a hose that cavers all the houses. in the street. (It is, by the way, very singular, that he does not seem to be aware that the Revolutionary Legend is just as great a piece of historical humbug as the _Napoleonic, with far more disastrous results). And again, his style, amusing enough to read, jars in the atmosphere of serious criticism : it often sinks to a vulgarity appropriate in a novel such as Hangman's House or The Purer of the Dog, but sadly out of place in serious historical judge- ments. There is something coarse and repulsive in Mr. O'Riordan's language whenever he deals with the ladies that come up as Napoleon passes. A French critic, even saying the same thing, would never so sin in expressing it. True, nothing could be more immoral than the age of the Directory, yet it is not correctly described in the phraseology of Billingsgate. The boudoir may be ethically on a level with the street : yet there is a great distinction in manners. As Burke drew it admirably long ago.
None the less, while deploring these lapses of exposition, we believe that Mr. O'Riordan's opinion of Napoleon is generally sound : only it is not the whole truth. And we think that Mr. O'Riordan knows it himself. Napoleon, though he never was the Superman of the Legend, was after all something. Beyond all denial, he was, for ten years, what Americans call " the big noise " in the world. And, as M. Albert Guerard acutely observes, it is just this about him which accounts for the somewhat paradoxical admiration he has always commanded in the United States, the Great Anti-Despotic Democratic Republic. Here, they felt, was Big Business. The Big Noise I Some Hustler, what ? That is Napoleon—incarnate Vulgarity. And that is all he really wanted. Everything in the shop-window. Curiously enough, he said so himself, to Bourrienne " a great reputa- tion is only a noise—all else fades, but the noise remains, and booms in after generations." Napoleon made a very loud noise, and so got his heart's desire : it will go on booming, viand mime. He was all ambition, otherwise empty—hence the perpetual restlessness, he could never be still he was demon-driven by the thirst for gloire. And his Frenchmen loved him then, and love him still, not for any good he did for France, but because he gave them gloire : gloire, which they lapped up greedily as he poured it over them, as a cat laps cream : gloire, of all things the most worthless, was his guiding star. His was not the ambition of pride, of which in all his life, public or private, he never betrayed a spark : but its ape, the ambition of vanity, rotten at the-core. Hence it was, that vulgarly arrogant in -success, he invariably went to pieces in adverse fortune, behaving like a dastard, crumpling up or running away : he could never play a losing game. That is the acid test, which showed him up as base metal. But doubtless he w`a,:s‘ a brilliant gamester, who could bring off wonderful coups, when Fortune had packed the cards for him. So it may be that the final verdict on him will never positively settle, balancing dubiously between that of Mr. O'Riordan's fierce philippic, and that most masterly critical estimate written by Sir John Seeley. He will certainly never be a God again, the Noise notwithstanding.
F. W. Barg.
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