From “Heroes and Hero-Worship”—The Hero as King.
NAPOLEON 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 the 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 Unnamable 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 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 Skeptical Encyclopédies. 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 portentous mixture of the Quack withal! 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 blamable 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, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has 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 reaching 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 wolf!—A Lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the bargain.
Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outer manœuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable, 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 towards that. When the steward of his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and demonstrating how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipt one of the gold tassels from a window curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterwards he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold, but tinsel! In St. 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 result in it; it comes to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if one man 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 call a faith in him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting itself here in the French Revolution is an insuppressible Fact, which the whole world, with its old forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it,—a faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? “La carrière ouverte aux talens, The implements to him who can handle them”: this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution, or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knew that Democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffeehouse, as the mob rolled by: Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why there is no man to command these poor Swiss; they would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is: “Triumph to the French Revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simulacrum!” Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolution cannot prosper or last without such. To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become organic, and be able to live among other organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do? through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph,—he triumphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to say on the march: “These babbling Avocats, up at Paris; all talk and no work. What wonder it runs all wrong? We shall have to go and put our Petit Caporal there!” They went, and put him there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe;—till the poor Lieutenant of La Fère, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.
But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper hand. He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing in Semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false;—considered that he would found “his Dynasty,” and so forth; that the enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man was “given up to strong delusion, that he should believe a lie”; a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked at them,—the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self and false ambition had now become his god: self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel, and mummery, had this man wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope’s-Concordat, pretending to be a re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, la vaccine de la religion: his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,—“wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it,” as Augereau said, “nothing but the half-million of men who had died to put an end to all that!” Cromwell’s Inauguration was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera: were not these the real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed too much in the Dupeability of men; saw no fact deeper in man than Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon cloud, his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world.
Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. “Lead us not into temptation!” But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon’s working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder widespread; a blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame: but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.
His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock there, and the World is still moving on its axis. France is great, and all-great; and at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an appendage of France; “another Isle of Oleron to France.” So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how in fact—HERE AM I! He cannot understand it: inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; that France was not all-great, that he was not France. “Strong delusion,” that he should believe the thing to be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be trodden down under foot; to be bound into masses, and built together, as he liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had quite other purposes in view! Napoleon’s astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as man seldom did; and break his great heart and die,—this poor Napoleon: a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless; our last Great Man!
