So much for the general. From this we can turn with relief to the particular; and from the particular, with perhaps even more relief, to the merely trivial.
GENERAL BONAPARTE
CHAPTER II
THE MAN HIMSELF
OF course, we all know him. He was rather short and corpulent, and he wore a cocked hat, a green coat with red facings, and white breeches. Sometimes, when the mood took him, he would appear in trailing robes, with a wreath of laurel round his forehead. Very appropriate, admittedly, but—that wreath does appear a little incongruous, does it not? Then there are times when we see him on a white horse in the midst of the battle. One or two dead men are lying near him in graceful attitudes; one or two others are engaged in dying still more gracefully. His staff is round him; in the distance are long lines of infantry and volumes of cannon-smoke. But everything is so orderly and respectable that one cannot help thinking that even in that discreet, dim distance the dying are as careful about their manner as was Cæsar at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Verestchagin and others strike a different note, but they never saw Napoleon alive. We have portraits and pictures innumerable, but are we any nearer to the man himself—to what was inside the green coat and the cocked hat?
It is the same when we come to read the mountains of memoirs which have been written around him. There are solemn memoirs, there are indiscreet memoirs. There are abusive memoirs, there are flattering memoirs. There are memoirs, written in all honesty, during the reading of which one cannot help feeling that the writer would really like to begin personal pronouns referring to Him with a capital letter. And yet, after months—years, perhaps—of reading, one still feels that one knows nothing of him. One realizes, naturally, that he was a marvellously clever man, with a marvellous sense of his own cleverness. But of the man himself, of his little intimate desires and feelings, one remains ignorant. A century of memoir-reading will not do as much for us as would, say, a week’s sojourn alone with him on a desert island. What adds point to the argument is that obviously the writer of the most intimate memoirs was just as far from him as we are.
The fact of the matter is that Napoleon in all his life never had a friend. From his adolescence to his death there was nobody to whom he could speak unguardedly. It was not so much that he posed, as that he had himself well in hand on all occasions. He could unbend; he could pinch a grognard’s ear or crack jokes with his Guard; he could write passionate letters to Josephine or supplicatory ones to Walewska; but we realize that each of these displays is merely a flash from some new facet of the gem. To the design of the whole, to the light which glowed within secretly, we are perforce blind.
His tastes in art, which would be a valuable indication to his character, are variously rated by contemporaries. One thing is certain, and that is that art did not flourish under the Empire. A heavily censored press acts as a drag upon the wheel of progress in this, as in all other matters, but one cannot help thinking that this cessation of development is due as much to Napoleon’s lack of interest in the subject. David’s hard classicism and Isabey’s futilities are the best that the Empire can show in painting, while in sculpture (save perhaps for Houdon), in poetry, in romance, in criticism, not one names survives, with the slight exception of Madame de Staël. There is no French contemporary with Körner who could bear a moment’s comparison; there is not even any single achievement, like Rouget de l’Isle’s of the previous decade, to which France can point with pride. Napoleon’s own favourite works in literature make a rather curious list; tragedy was the only kind of dramatic literature which he favoured, although tragedy is the weakest part of the French drama, and in tragedy he ranked Corneille far above all others; Ossian’s poems, despite translation into French, had a great attraction for him, perhaps because the exalted wording appealed to him in his moments of fantastic planning; Goethe, the greatest living poet, held no fascination for him; but Rousseau did. Indeed Rousseau’s influence is clearly visible in many of Napoleon’s own writings. Beyond this, there is almost nothing modern which received the seal of his approval. The classics he read in translation, and solely for the sake of their matter. Music was not specially liked by him; he tolerated it because it roused in him the same sensations as did Ossian’s verse—it was a drug, a stimulant to him, but not a staple necessary. In painting he showed no special taste; the honours he gave David clearly indicate that he held no theories of his own on the subject. This list of likes and dislikes is non-committal; it can tell us little about Napoleon himself; and we are once more brought to an abrupt halt in our endeavour to discover what manner of man he really was.
Yet we can approach the question indirectly. Napoleon had no friend; there was never a time when he was taken off his guard. His soldiers loved him—stay! It was not love, it was adoration. That is the key to the mystery. It was not the love of one man for another; it was the worship of a God. But just as no man can be a hero to his own valet, so can no general be a God to his immediate subordinates. The rank and file could think of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, but what of the Marshals? At Marengo, France was on the verge of a frightful disaster. The slightest touch would have turned the scale, and Napoleon, hemmed in against the Alps, must have surrendered. What of France then, with a triumphant army at her frontier and not another regiment at hand? In the Austerlitz campaign it was nearly the same. Before Jena, Napoleon fell into error after error. Not until the next day was he made aware that only half the Prussian army had fought against him, and that he had recklessly exposed a single corps to meet the attack of the other half at Auerstädt. That Davout fought and won was Napoleon’s good fortune, not the result of his skill.
Looking back on fifteen years of unbroken success, the private soldiers might well believe Napoleon to be a God, but the Marshals were near enough to him to see the feet of clay. For them there was neither adoration nor love. He was their taskmaster, and a jealous one at that, lavish of reprimand and miserly of praise. He gave them wealth, titles, kingdoms even, but he never risked rivalry with himself by giving any one of them what they most desired—military power. The Peninsular War dragged on largely because he did not dare to entrust the supreme command of three hundred thousand men to a single general. With gold and glory even misers like Masséna became eventually satiated, and one by one they dropped away from his allegiance when the tide turned. It fell to Marmont, the only one of all the Marshals who owed everything to the Emperor, to surrender Paris to the Allies and complete his ruin. Not one of the twenty-six paladins accompanied their master to Elba or St. Helena; that was left to the junior officers such as Bertrand, Montholon and Gourgaud, who had been near enough to him to adore, but too far off to see faults. Yet even to these, life with their idol became at times unbearable, and more than one of them deserted before the end. In men Napoleon could not inspire the love that endures.