Among the anecdotical parts of these volumes, is a slight account of the appearance of the Duke of Wellington as ambassador to Russia, in the beginning of the new reign. Count Nesselrode, on the accession of the Czar, had sent a circular to the European courts, stating his wishes for amicable relations with them all. But England dreaded to see a collision with Turkey, and Canning selected the Duke as the most important authority on the part of England. The Duke took with him Lord Fitzroy Somerset as his secretary. On his arrival at Berlin, he was treated with great distinction by Frederic William. Gneisenau, at the head of the Prussian general officers, paid him a visit in his hotel; and he was fêted in all directions. General officers were sent from St Petersburg to meet him on the Russian frontier. The emperor appointed a mansion for him, beside the palace of the Hermitage, paid him all the honours of a Russian field-marshal, (he was then the only one in the service,) placed him on a footing with the princes of the imperial family, and was frequently in his society. The people were boundless in their marks of respect.
But the Duke is evidently not a favourite with the Frenchman—and we do not much wonder at this feeling in a Frenchman, poor as it is. Without giving any opinion of his own, he inserts a little sneer from the work of Lacretelle on the “Consulate and the Empire.” On this authority, Wellington is “a general of excellent understanding, phlegmatic and tenacious, proceeding not by enthusiasm, but by order, discipline, and slow combinations, trusting but little to chance, and employing about him all the popular and vindictive passions, from which he himself is exempt.” By all which, M. Lacretelle means, that the Duke is a dull dog, without a particle of genius; simply a plodding, positive man, who, by mere toil and time, gained his objects, which any Dutchman could have gained as well, and which any Frenchman would have scorned to gain. With this French folly we have not sufficient time, nor have we sufficient respect for the national failing, to argue.
But the true view of Wellington’s character as a soldier would be, brilliancy of conception. What more brilliant conception than his first great battle, Assaye, which finished the Indian war? What more brilliant conception than his capture of Badajoz and Ciudad in the face of the two armies of Masséna and Soult advancing on him from the south and north, and each equal to his own force; while he thus snatched away the prize in the actual presence of each, and left the two French generals the mortification of having marched three hundred miles a-piece, only to be lookers-on? What more brilliant conception than his march of four hundred miles, without a stop, from Portugal to Vittoria; where he crushed the French army, captured one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and sent the French king and all his courtiers flying over the Pyrenees? What, again, more brilliant conception, than his storming the Pyrenees, and being the first of the European generals to enter France? and, finally, his massacre of the French army, with Soult, Ney, and Napoleon at their head, on the crowning day of Waterloo?
But all this was mere “pugnacity and tenacity,” and sulkiness and stupidity, because it was not done with a theatrical programme, and with the air of an opera-dancer. Yet M. Lacretelle’s sketch, invidious as he intends it to be, gives, involuntarily, the very highest rank of generalship to its object. For, what higher qualities can a general have, than trusting nothing to chance, being superior to enthusiasm—which, in the French vocabulary, means extravagance and giddiness—and acting by deep and effective combinations, which, as every man knows, are the most profound problems and the most brilliant triumphs of military genius? Let it be remembered, too, that in the seven years’ war of the Peninsula, Wellington never had twenty-five thousand English bayonets in the field; that the Spanish armies were almost wholly disorganised, and that the Portuguese were raw troops; while the French had nearly two hundred thousand men constantly recruited and supplied from France:—Yet, that Wellington never was beaten, that he met either six or seven of the French field-marshals and beat them all; and that at Waterloo, with a motley army of recruits, of whom but thirty thousand were English—and those new troops—and ten thousand German, he beat Napoleon at the head of seventy-two thousand Frenchmen, all veterans; trampled his army in the field, hunted him to Paris, took every fortress on the road, captured Paris, destroyed his dynasty, dissolved the remnants of the French army on the Loire; and sent Napoleon himself to expiate his guilt and finish his career, under an English guard, in St Helena.
We need not envy the Frenchman his taste for “enthusiasm,” his scorn of “science,” his disdain of “profound combinations,” and his passion for winning battles by the magic of a village conjuror.
M. Schnitzler disapproves even of the physiognomy of the Duke. “His nose was too aquiline, and stood out too prominently on his sunburnt countenance, and his features, all strongly marked, were not devoid of an air of pretension.” He objects to his appearing “without a splendid military costume, to improve his appearance!” And yet, all this foolery is the wisdom of foreigners. No man, however renowned, must forget “the imposing.” Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, would have been nothing in their eyes, except in the uniform of the “Legion of Honour.” His walking, and walking without attendants, through the streets, was a horror, rendered worse and worse by his “wearing a black frock-coat and round hat.” Even when he appeared in uniform on state occasions, “he was equally luckless;” for the costume of a Russian field-marshal, which had been given to him by Alexander, did not fit him, and was too large for his thinness. On the whole, the Duke failed, as we are told, to “gain any remarkable success in the Russian salons.” The countesses could make nothing of him; the princesses smiled on without his returning the smile; the courtiers told him bons mots without much effect; and the politicians were of opinion that a Duke so taciturn had no tongue.
Still the emperor’s attentions to him continued; and, on the day of distributing medals to the army, he gave Wellington the regiment of Smolensk, formed by Peter the Great, and of high reputation in the service.
But he succeeded in his chief object, which referred to Greece; and which ultimately, in giving independence to a nation, the classic honours of whose forefathers covered the shame of their descendants,—and by a succession of diplomatic blunders, has turned a Turkish province into a European pensioner, enfeebling Turkey without benefiting Europe, and merely making a new source of contention between France, Russia, and England.
The career of Nicholas has been peaceable; and the empire has been undisturbed but by the guilty Circassian war, which yet seems to be carried on rather as a field of exercise for the Russian armies, than for purposes of conquest.
But all nations now require something to occupy the public mind; and an impression appears to be rising in Russia, that the residence of the sovereign should be transferred to Moscow. Nothing could be more likely to produce a national convulsion, and operate a total change on the European policy of Russia, and the relations of the northern courts. Yet it is by no means improbable, that the singular avidity of the Russian court to make Poland not merely a dependency, but an integral part of the empire, by the suppression of its very name, the change of its language, and the transfer of large portions of its people to other lands, may have for its especial purpose the greater security of Russia on the West, while she fixes her whole interest on a vigorous progress in the South.