The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Various 2 стр.

False as a bulletin became a proverb in Napoleons time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own mens courage, etc. On the whole these are no excuses. A man in no case has any liberty to tell lies. It had been in the long run better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next time, even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of the wolf! A lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labour in the bargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental insincerity. Across these outer manœuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blameable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact so long as he had any basis. He has an instinct of nature better than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it to their satisfaction by all manner of logic. Napoleon, looking up into the stars, answers, Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made all that? The Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face. Who made all that? So too in practice; he, as every man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight toward that. When the steward of his Tuilleries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises and demonstrations, how glorious it was and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipped one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterward he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of the upholstery functionary: it was not gold but tinsel! In Saint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. Why talk and complain? Above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no resultat in it; it comes to nothing that we can do. Say nothing if one can do nothing! He speaks often so to his poor, discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent Strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly, was there not what we can call a faith in him, genuine as far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy, asserting itself here in the French revolution is an insuppressible fact, which the whole world, with its old forces and institutions cannot put down: this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience along with ita faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? The implements to him who can handle them. This actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French revolution, or any revolution could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fastened too by his military trade, he knew that democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that twentieth of June, (1792,) Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house as the mail rolled by. Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the tenth of August he wonders there is no one to command these poor Swiss; they could conquer if there were. Such a faith in democracy, yet hatred of anarchy it is, that carries Napoleon through all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian campaigns, onward to the peace of Luben, one would say his inspiration is: Triumph to the French revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a simulacrum! Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how necessary a strong authority is; how the revolution cannot prosper at all without such. To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good; that it may become organic, and be able to live amongst other organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone; is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay, what he actually managed to do? Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph; he triumphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the king. All men saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to say on the march: These babbling avocats up at Paris: all talk and no work? What wonder it runs all wrong! We shall have to go and put our petit corporal there! They went and put him there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, emperorship, victory over Europe; till the poor lieutenant of La Fère, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.

But at this point the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the old false feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false; considered that he would found his dynasty and so forth; that the enormous French revolution meant only that! The man was given up to strong delusion that he should believe a lie; a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked at them; the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self and false ambition had now become his god: self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally, more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapped his own reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Popes-Concordat, pretending to be a reëstablishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, la vaccine de la religion; his ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian chimera in Notre Dame there; wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it but the half million who had died to put an end to all that! Cromwells inauguration was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera. Were not these real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook; he believed too much in the dupeability of men; saw no fact deeper in man than hunger and this. He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he falls down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world.

Alas! in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. Lead us not into temptation! But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleons working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide spread; a blazing up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out. The universe, with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.

Alas! in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. Lead us not into temptation! But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleons working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide spread; a blazing up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out. The universe, with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always to be of courage; this Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, the fiercer would the worlds recoil against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound interest. I am not sure but he had better lost his best park of artillery, or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable, tyrannous, murderous injustice, which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could make out to be other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it, waiting their day! Which day came: Germany rose round him. What Napoleon did will amount in the long run to what he did justly; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of reality was in him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke and waste. La carrière ouverte aux talens: that great true message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself every where, he left in a most inarticulate state. He was a great ébauche, rude-draught; as indeed what great man is not? Left in too rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock here, and the world is still moving on its axis. France is great, and all great; and at bottom, he is France. England itself he says is by nature only an appendage of France; another isle of Oberon to France. So it was by nature, by Napoleon-nature; and yet look how in facthere am I! He cannot understand it; that France was not all great, that he was not France. Strong delusion, that he should believe the thing to be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be trodden down under foot; to be bound into masses, and built together as he liked, for a pedestal for France and him: the world has quite other purposes in view! Napoleons astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help now! He had gone that way of his; and Nature had also gone her way. Having once parted with reality, he tumbles helpless in vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there mournfully as man seldom did; and break his great heart and diethis poor Napoleon; a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless; our last Great Man!

THE FLORAL RESURRECTION

THE LEGEND OF DON RODERICK

The scattered fugitives of the Christian army spread terror throughout the land. The inhabitants of the towns and villages gathered around them as they applied at their gates for food, or laid themselves down, faint and wounded, beside the public fountains. When they related the tale of their defeat, old men shook their heads and groaned, and the women uttered cries and lamentations. So strange and unlooked-for a calamity filled them with consternation and despair; for it was long since the alarm of war had sounded in their land: and this was a warfare that carried chains and slavery, and all kinds of horrors, in its train.

Don Roderick was seated with his beauteous queen, Exilona, in the royal palace which crowned the rocky summit of Toledo, when the bearer of ill-tidings came galloping over the bridge of the Tagus. What tidings from the army? demanded the king, as the panting messenger was brought into his presence. Tidings of great wo! exclaimed the soldier. The prince has fallen in battle. I saw his head and surcoat upon a Moorish lance; and the army was overthrown and fled!

At hearing these words, Roderick covered his face with his hands, and for some time sat in silence; and all his courtiers stood mute and aghast, and no one dared to speak a word. In that awful space of time passed before his thoughts all his errors and his crimes, and all the evil that had been predicted in the necromantic tower. His mind was filled with horror and confusion, for the hour of his destruction seemed at hand: but he subdued his agitation by his strong and haughty spirit; and, when he uncovered his face, no one could read on his brow the trouble and agony of his heart. Still, every hour brought fresh tidings of disaster. Messenger after messenger came spurring into the city, distracting it with new alarms. The infidels, they said, were strengthening themselves in the land; host after host were pouring in from Africa: the sea-coast of Andalusia glittered with spears and scimitars. Bands of turbaned horsemen had overrun the plains of Sidonia, even to the banks of the Guadiana. Fields were laid waste, towns and cities plundered, the inhabitants carried into captivity, and the whole country lay in smoking desolation.