The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844. Various
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said he can now shift for himself; that his true figure is in a fair way of being ascertained. Doubtless it will be found one day, what significance was in him; how, (we quote from a New-England book,) ‘the man was a divine missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached through the cannon’s throat that great doctrine, La carrière ouverte aux talens, (the tools to him who can handle them,) which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is true, as enthusiasts and first missionaries are wont; with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the case admitted. Or call him if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom, nevertheless, the peaceful sower will follow, and, as he cuts the boundless harvest, bless.’ From ‘the incarnate Moloch,’ which the world once was, onward to to this quiet version, there is a considerable progress.
What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Bonaparte, compared with these ‘moveable types’ of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying thing for your conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal which he hammers with such violence; how the kind earth will soon shroud up his bloody foot-prints; and all which he achieved and skilfully piled together, will be but like his own ‘canvass city’ of a camp; this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, ‘a few earth-pits and heaps of straw!’ For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the fable, the mild shining of the sun shall accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material but by mental power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons or immeasurable tumult of baggage-wagons, attends its movements; in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for kings and emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule not over, but in all heads, and with these, its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas, bend the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself will be better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less momentous than the opening of the first mechanic’s institute.
Brother Ringletule, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo man-god, who had set up for godhead lately, what he meant to do then with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answers, he had fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass was right so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is the test of every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine or great; that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there! Far be it from us to say that a great man must needs with benevolence prepense, become a ‘friend of humanity;’ nay, that such professional self-conscious friends are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day. All greatness is unconscious or it is little and naught. And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed as a divine behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled, were a solecism in nature. A great man is ever, as the transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon, himself not the superfinest of great men, and balanced sufficiently with prudence and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with; the idea that democracy was the cause of man, the right and infinite cause. Nay, to the very last, he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of ‘the tools to him that can handle them;’ really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that matter, or rather the one true central idea, toward which all the others, if they tend any whither, must tend. Unhappily, it was only in the military province that Napoleon could realize this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while; before he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass’ phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up the miseries of men.
Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau, with fire-words (of public speaking) and fire whirlwinds (of cannon and musketry,) which for a season darkened the air, are perhaps at bottom but superficial phenomena.
Napoleon was the ‘armed soldier of democracy,’ invincible while he continued true to that. ••• He does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His enormous victories, which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but as high stilts on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with the Awful, Unnameable, of this universe; ‘walking with God’ as he called it; and faith and strength in that alone: latent thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out as in a blaze of heaven’s lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps small compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell’s. Instead of ‘dumb prophet struggling to speak,’ we have a portentious mixture of the Quack! Hume’s notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like, where indeed, taken strictly, it has hardly any truth at all. An element of blameable ambition shows itself from the first in this man; gets the victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.
‘False as a bulletin’ became a proverb in Napoleon’s time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men’s courage, etc. On the whole these are no excuses. A man in no case has any liberty to tell lies. It had been in the long run better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next time, even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of the ‘wolf!’ A lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labour in the bargain.
Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental insincerity. Across these outer manœuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blameable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact so long as he had any basis. He has an instinct of nature better than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it to their satisfaction by all manner of logic. Napoleon, looking up into the stars, answers, ‘Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made all that?’ The Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face. ‘Who made all that?’ So too in practice; he, as every man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight toward that. When the steward of his Tuilleries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises and demonstrations, how glorious it was and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipped one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterward he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of the upholstery functionary: it was not gold but tinsel! In Saint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. ‘Why talk and complain? Above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no resultat in it; it comes to nothing that we can do. Say nothing if one can do nothing!’ He speaks often so to his poor, discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent Strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.
And accordingly, was there not what we can call a faith in him, genuine as far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy, asserting