It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic; especially to the generation that looked on him, and that waited shuddering to be devoured by him. In general, in that French Revolution, all was on a huge scale; if not greater than anything in human experience, at least more grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to the shilling gallery; and there were fellows on the stage with such a breadth of saber, extent of whiskerage, strength of windpipe, and command of men and gunpowder as had never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked, and flourished about, counterfeiting Jove’s thunder to an amazing degree! Terrific Drawcansir figures of enormous whiskerage, unlimited command of gunpowder; not without sufficient ferocity, and even a certain heroism, stage heroism, in them; compared with whom, to the shilling gallery, and frightened, excited theatre at large, it seemed as if there had been no generals or sovereigns before; as if Friedrich, Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror, and Alexander the Great were not worth speaking of henceforth.
All this, however, in half a century is considerably altered. The Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn off, the natural size is seen better; translated from the bulletin style into that of fact and history, miracles, even to the shilling gallery, are not so miraculous. It begins to be apparent that there lived great men before the era of bulletins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagram shot away more gunpowder—gunpowder, probably, in the proportion of ten to one, or a hundred to one; but neither of them was tenth part such a beating to your enemy as that of Rossbach, brought about by strategic art, human ingenuity and intrepidity, and the loss of one hundred and sixty-five men. Leuthen, too, the battle of Leuthen (though so few English readers ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head beside any victory gained by Napoleon or another. For the odds were not far from three to one; the soldiers were of not far from equal quality; and only the general was consummately superior, and the defeat a destruction.
Napoleon did, indeed, by immense expenditure of men and gunpowder, overrun Europe for a time; but Napoleon never, by husbanding and wisely expending his men and gunpowder, defended a little Prussia against all Europe, year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough, and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So soon as the Drawcansir equipments are well torn off and the shilling gallery got to silence, it will be found that there were great kings before Napoleon, and likewise an art of war, grounded on veracity and human courage and insight, not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpinism, revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of men and gunpowder. “You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter,” says a satirical friend of mine. This is becoming more and more apparent, as the dust-whirlwind and huge uproar of the last generation gradually dies away again.
Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods; and there are various things to be said against him with good ground. To the last, a questionable hero; with much in him which one could have wished not there, and much wanting which one could have wished. But there is one feature which strikes you at an early period of the inquiry. That in his way he is a reality; that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing whatever of the hypocrite or phantasm. Which some readers will admit to be an extremely rare phenomenon.
We perceive that this man was far indeed from trying to deal swindler-like with the facts around him; that he honestly recognized said facts wherever they disclosed themselves, and was very anxious also to ascertain their existence where still hidden or dubious. For he knew well, to a quite uncommon degree, and with a merit all the higher as it was an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable is the nature of facts, whether recognized or not, ascertained or not; how vain all cunning of diplomacy, management and sophistry, to save any mortal who does not stand on the truth of things, from sinking in the long run. Sinking to the very mudgods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achievements; and becoming an unnamable object, hidden deep in the cesspools of the universe. This I hope to make manifest; this which I long ago discerned for myself, with pleasure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life. Which, indeed, was the first real sanction, and has all along been my inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. How this man, officially a king withal, comported himself in the eighteenth century, and managed not to be a liar and charlatan as his century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have didactic meanings in it.
He that was honest with his existence has always meaning for us, be he king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with it however much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked and eaten in this world, can not long have any. Some men do cook enormously (let us call it cooking, what a man does in obedience to his hunger merely, to his desires and passions merely)—roasting whole continents and populations, in the flames of war or other discord; witness the Napoleon above spoken of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited; in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could eat the entire solar system, had we the chance given, and then cry, like Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more solar systems to cook and eat. It is not the extent of the man’s cookery that can much attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength he had to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he got for his own benefit and mine.
WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Born in 1708, died 1778, one of the most eminent of English statesmen and orators. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he spent a short term in the army, but found his true vocation on being elected to Parliament in 1737. It was not till 1755 that he became virtual prime minister. Under his control the arms and diplomacy of England became generally victorious throughout the world. It was largely owing to his support that Frederick the Great was finally victorious over his enemies, and that a great and consistent foreign policy was inaugurated that raised the nation to a lofty pitch of glory. The elder Pitt was known as the “great commoner,” and it was thought derogatory to his fame when he accepted a peerage. He was the firm and eloquent advocate of the American colonists in their claims against the mother-country.]
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. “I know that I can save the country,” he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, “and I know no other man can.” The groundwork of Pitt’s character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit.
Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused office so often or accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. “I will not go to court,” he replied to an offer which was made him, “if I may not bring the constitution with me.” For the corruption about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office in his administration, that of paymaster of the forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude toward the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than “the great commoner,” as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for “Wilkes and liberty,” he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist on the side of loyalty.