He did more than brave danger, he seemed unconscious of its existence, and was ever to be found wherever he was needed to see, direct, or command. Such was his character as a soldier; as a general he was not inferior.
Never had the cares of a vast military command been borne with more coolness, vigor, or presence of mind. If he were occasionally excited or angry, the officers who knew him best said that all was going on well. When the danger became serious, he was calm, mild, encouraging, not wishing to add the excitement attendant on his displeasure to that which naturally arose from the circumstances; he remained perfectly calm, a power acquired by the habit of restraining his emotions in great emergencies, and, calculating the extent of the danger, turning it aside, and thus triumphing over fortune. Formed for great emergencies and familiarized by habit to every species of peril, he stood by, in 1814, a calm spectator of the suicidal destruction of his own power, a destruction achieved by his ambition; and still he hoped when all around despaired, because he perceived resources undivined by anybody else, and under all vicissitudes, soaring on the wings of genius above the shock of circumstances, and with the resignation of a self-judged mind he accepted the deserved punishment of his faults.
Such, in our opinion, was this man, so strange, so self-contradicting, so many-sided. If among the principal traits of his character there is one more prominent than the rest, it is a species of moral intemperance. A prodigy of genius and passion, flung into the chaos of a revolution, his nature unfolds and develops itself therein. He masters that wild confusion, replaces it by his own presence, and displays the energy, audacity, and fickleness of that which he replaced. Succeeding to men who stopped at nothing, either in virtue or crime, in heroism or cruelty, surrounded by men who laid no restraints on their passions, he laid none on his; they wished to convert the world into a universal republic, he would have it an equally boundless monarchy; they turned everything into chaos, he formed an almost tyrannical unity; they disorganized everything, he re-established order; they defied sovereigns, he dethroned them; they slaughtered men on the scaffold, he on the battle-field, where blood was shrouded in glory. He immolated more human beings than did any Asiatic conqueror, and within the narrow precincts of Europe, peopled with opposing nations, he conquered a greater space of territory than Tamerlane or Genghis Khan amid the deserts of Asia.
It was reserved for the French revolution, destined to change the aspect of European society, to produce a man who would fix the attention of the world as powerfully as Charlemagne, Cæsar, Hannibal, and Alexander. He possessed every qualification that could strike, attract, and fix the attention of mankind, whether we consider the greatness of the part he was destined to perform, the vastness of the political convulsions he caused, the splendor, extent, and profundity of his genius, or his majestic gravity of thought. This son of a Corsican gentleman, who received the gratuitous military education that ancient royalty bestowed on the sons of the poor nobility, had scarcely left school when in a sanguinary tumult he obtained the rank of commander-in-chief, then left the Parisian army for that of Italy, conquered that country in a month, successively destroyed all the forces of the European coalition, wrested from them the peace of Campo-Formio, and then becoming too formidable to stand beside the government of the republic, he went to seek a new destiny in the East, passed through the English fleet with five hundred ships, conquered Egypt at a stride, then thought of following Alexander’s footsteps in the conquest of India. But suddenly recalled to the West by the renewal of the European war, after having attempted to imitate Alexander, he imitated and equaled Hannibal in crossing the Alps, again overpowered the coalition, and compelled it to accept the peace of Luneville, and at thirty years of age this son of a poor Corsican nobleman had already run through a most extraordinary career.
Become pacific for a while, he by his laws laid the basis of modern society; but again yielding to the impulses of his restless genius, he once more attacked Europe, vanquished her in three battles—Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland—set up and threw down kingdoms, placed the crown of Charlemagne on his head; and when kings came to offer him their daughters, chose the descendant of the Cæsars, who presented him with a son that seemed destined to wear the most brilliant crown in the universe. He advanced from Cadiz to Moscow, where he was subjected to the greatest catastrophe on record, rose again, but was again defeated, and confined in a small island, from which he emerged with a few hundred faithful soldiers, recovered the crown of France in twenty days, struggled again against exasperated Europe, sank for the last time at Waterloo, and having sustained greater wars than those of the Roman Empire, went—he, the child of a Mediterranean isle—to die on an island in the ocean, bound like Prometheus by the fear and hatred of kings to a rock.
This son of a poor Corsican nobleman has indeed played in the world the parts of Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, and Charlemagne! He possessed as much genius as the greatest among them; acquired as much fame as the most celebrated, and unfortunately shed more blood than any of them. In a moral point of view, he is inferior to the best of these great men but superior to the worst. His ambition was not as futile as that of Alexander, nor as depraved as that of Cæsar, but it was not as respectable as Hannibal’s, who sacrificed himself to save his country the misfortune of being conquered. His ambition was that usual with conquerors who seek to rule after having aggrandized their native land. Still he loved France and cherished her glory as dearly as his own.
As a ruler he sought what was right, but sought it as a despot, nor did he pursue it with the consistency or religious perseverance of Charlemagne. In variety of talents he was inferior to Cæsar, who, being compelled to win over his fellow-citizens before ruling them, had to learn how to persuade as well as how to fight, and could speak, write, and act with a certain simple majesty. Napoleon, on the other hand, having acquired power by warfare, had no need of oratory, nor possibly, though endowed with natural eloquence, could he ever have acquired it, since he never would have taken the trouble of patiently analyzing his thought in presence of a deliberative assembly. He could write as he thought, with force and dignity, but he was sometimes a little declamatory like his mother, the French revolution; he argued with more force than Cæsar, but could not narrate with his extreme simplicity or exquisite taste. He was inferior to the Roman dictator in the variety of his talents, but superior as a general, both by his peculiar military genius and by the daring profundity and inexhaustible fertility of his plans, in which he had but one equal or superior (which we can not decide)—Hannibal; for he was as daring, as prudent, as subtle, as inventive, as terrible, and as obstinate as the Carthaginian general, with one advantage of living at a later period. Succeeding to Hannibal, Cæsar, the Nassaus, Gustavus Adolphus, Condé, Turenne, and Frederick, he brought military art to its ultimate perfection. God alone can estimate the respective merits of such men; all we can do is to sketch some prominent traits of their wonderful characters.
DUKE OF WELLINGTON.
By ARCHIBALD ALISON.
[Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, third son of the Earl of Mornington, born 1769, died 1852. Previous to taking command of the British armies in Spain against the French, Sir Arthur Wellesley had achieved great distinction and the rank of major-general in India. Shortly after his appointment to the Spanish command as lieutenant-general in 1808, he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington; and his brilliant success against Napoleon’s most eminent marshals stamped him as one of the first soldiers of the age. In 1815 Wellington was placed at the head of the English forces and their allies, to meet Napoleon in that last convulsive struggle which ended with the battle of Waterloo. Made field-marshal and duke for his eminent services, Wellington afterward signalized his capacity for civil administration as little inferior to his military skill, and as premier displayed the most wise and liberal statesmanship.]
The name of no commander in the long array of British greatness will occupy so large a space in the annals of the world as that of Wellington; and yet there are few whose public characters possess, with so many excellences, so simple and unblemished a complexion. It is to the purity and elevation of his principles in every public situation that this enviable distinction is to be ascribed. Intrusted early in life with high command, and subjected from the first to serious responsibility, he possessed that singleness of heart and integrity of purpose which, even more than talent or audacity, are the foundations of true and moral courage, and the only pure path to public greatness; a sense of duty, a feeling of honor, a generous patriotism, a forgetfulness of self, constituted the spring of all his actions.