Here at the date of a century from those days in which the star of Napoleon emerged from the mists and clouds and began to climb the sky the interest in his life revives. In America this revival is attributable in part to general and in part to special causes. The general causes are to be found in the fact that society de la fin de siècle is in such a state of profound disturbance, and the existing order feels so insecure, that that order—as it always does—begins to cast about in the shadows to find, if it may, some Big Man with a Sword; him when found we will make our Imperator, and by sharing some of our estates with certain of his military subalterns we will make sure of the rest—and after us the deluge. The special cause—at least in America—is the tremendous and growing tradition of General Grant. Albeit, General Grant hated the Bonapartes, from the Great One to the Little One; yet his own luminous setting has left a glow in which the nation sees men as trees walking—and among these the greatest simulacrum is Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of this man, who began as the son of a Corsican peasant-mother working in a mulberry orchard, and who, after fifty-one years, eight months, and twenty days, ended in a cyclone on the rock called St. Helena, having meanwhile for nearly a third of his life bestridden western Europe like a colossus,—a new biography claiming to be the ultimate summation of the Emperor’s life and character has appeared. Professor William Milligan Sloane, of Princeton University, has entered the lists which may be said to have opened with Walter Scott and finished with the McClure Syndicate, passing meanwhile by way of such personages as De Staël, Las Cases, Victor Hugo, and Lanfrey, and such drudges as Bourrienne and Méneval, to lodge at last with the miscellaneous hacks who get three dollars a column for their boiler-plate philosophy in American newspapers! Heavens, what a scrimmage!
It were difficult to say when the final biography of a man has been produced. Hard, hard is it to decide when anything in this world is final. The never-ending progress of events shapes and readjusts not only the present materials of history, but also by reaction the materials of the past. Much that is supposed to be complete is seen to be unfinished; the done becomes undone, and the peroration of an epoch has to be rewritten for an exordium.
This is as true of the individual lives of men as it is of great events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every man from Moses to Cagliostro.
On the whole I incline to the opinion that Professor Sloane has brought the Emperor Napoleon to a kind of final interpretation; I will not say to a full stop, but to something very much resembling a period. In the first place, I offer on the “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” the eulogium that the work has, in a great degree, naturalized the Corsican as he was never naturalized before—thus bringing him out of cloudland and mere impossible fog to the plain level of human action and purpose.
This is much. In accomplishing thus much Professor Sloane has vindicated his claim to be regarded as a great biographer. It has been the bane of nearly all biographical writing that the subjects of it have been completely mythologized. Thus far in the history of mankind biography might be defined as the art of myth-making. I scarcely know what exceptions to cite to this universal vice except only and always Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.” As for American biographies thus far produced, there is scarcely a single example of a work which is not to be classified as a recorded myth. The trouble in all this business has been that the myth-makers, living in a certain atmosphere, have imagined that they are obliged to make their characters conform to the established antecedents of greatness. These established antecedents of greatness have for the most part been created out of superstitions, credulities, blank idealism, and mere dogmatic bosh. No living, active men have ever conformed, or could conform, to the standards which the logicians, the philosophers, and the priests have fixed up for them; and if any of them should conform to such a standard, their place under classification would be with automata, not with living men.
Nevertheless, our biographers have been so weak and servile as to make their characters according to this pattern. One character is labelled Washington, another is labelled Franklin, another is labelled Adams, and still another, Lincoln.
All this, I think, Professor Sloane has studiously avoided. As a literary doctor he has done much to destroy the mythical disease. He has written an elaborate work in which the man Napoleon moves and acts, neither as an angel nor as a devil, but as a man, moved upon and moving by the common human passions, though inflamed, in his case, to a white heat in the furnace of his ambition.
All this was to have been expected in view of the plan of Professor Sloane as expressed in his preface:
“Until within a very recent period,” says he, “it seemed that no man could discuss him [Napoleon] or his time without manifesting such strong personal feeling as to vitiate his judgment and conclusions. This was partly due to the lack of perspective, but in the main to ignorance of the facts essential to a sober treatment of the theme. In this respect the last quarter of a century has seen a gradual but radical change, for a band of dispassionate scientific scholars have during that time been occupied in the preparation of material for his life without reference to the advocacy of one theory or another concerning his character. European archives, long carefully guarded, have been thrown open; the diplomatic correspondence of the most important periods has been published; family papers have been examined, and numbers of valuable memoirs have been printed. It has therefore been possible to check one account by another, to cancel misrepresentations, to eliminate passion—in short, to establish something like correct outline and accurate detail, at least in regard to what the man actually did. Those hidden secrets of any human mind which we call motives must ever remain to other minds largely a matter of opinion, but a very fair indication of them can be found when once the actual conduct of the actor has been determined.”