THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11692, 29 June 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND.

j [BY HERMAN-. Jirmv.vxu'.] , .Eighty years ago on Slay 5 vent out at S& Helena the .Twilight of the W«ld.AVhat ft -> thrill tho news of the caged lion's death : must have sens round the world- ovi that ;. : - May 5, 1821— years after a- tiny Princess called Victoria opened • her eyes upon jta ■' troublous ring! So, just -by that little space of time, were linked the two lives of tw6, . ■of. Earth' most famous rulers, who ruled,; from points of view move different than any . to" which i Poles can give a parallel. . Who ■.; V have beets the great and epoch-making raters of the world? Pericles, Julius Citisar, Charle- ■ magne, Louis XI., ; Elizabeth, Peter, Frederick, Napoleon, Victoria? I writo at hazard, taking those j who have been, at - once 1 - the most 'j famous and in . their efforts the most • . observable. ; As. ' for Napoleon, he clear-swept- ar.d remodelled half the crowns and institu-: tions of the world; and, taking all together . —the circumstances of his birth and breeding, the extraordinary variety of his powers, military and civil, his boundless energy even in his battles with ill-health, his fierce in- . difference-to life contrasted with undoubted lovableness and depth, of feeling, and many, other characteristics so violently opponent■ I never can myself hesitate before bis mystic figure as that of ''the foremost- man of all this world," to whom nothing like or second has flourished anywhere'. He outgeneralled History, as a general ; and it is noteworthy that, electric as in his own methods he was, he should have spoken, as the lieutenant . whom he would have chosen out of men, of Turenne. For, in his methods, Turenne anticipated the school of Moltke and Ivitch-'v, ener. As a jurist. Napoleon remodelled ' everything. As a dictator, he was the foremost among statesmen,-. - And doing in that sense nothing common nor mean, * — people-born—- his sympathies was with the few. To the mob ho was a Coriolanus, loathing the Revolution, of which he was the mightiest child. All France was in his hands even after Waterloo, and the world with it once again perhaps, if he would have led the mob like Danton. He would not. Were ever such violent contrasts upon earth? - Julius Ciesar and Charlemagne were nursed in the purple; Pericles was of the' Greek cream of the cream. But this, the greatest of them all? He was of the streets streety. A dirty little boy. Good heavens! How did he do it? No wonder that, his re- ■ ligious creed was wavering—trending one day to Paganism, another to Mohammed, •another to Christ, if only Christ'-, story had been older; but subsisting mainly on his own inevitable conviction that he was himself at once the mightiest and the merest; of human instruments. What -could he hold else? I think, if one may say so without • irreverence, that there would have been /■; something a little incongruous about ,it if that life of the embodied storm had ended at an anchorage of dcSgma visibly peaceful. Napoleon died as he had lived, a mystery foil through. As with the earlier mystery of the great Shakespe.rean legend, the memory of Napoleon grew very green at. first, then faded, now revives. But even as the Commune was an echo of the Terror, so did the' great shade rise on it as the substance on the first.-. Travelling in France not long afterwards, making inquiries for a literary purpose into tho times of the Revolution, I found the whole country in a conspiracy of silence.; Marat? They declined to have heard of him. Danton? There was a statuo on the far side of the Seine, and there was a room, somewhere, where some undesirable people used to meet. Robespierre? In spite of the Sar-dou-Hanotaux controversy, I had much ado indeed to track out his little entresol off the ;• Rue St. Honore, and only did it with the' aid of a queer old wodking mason, who held a judicious tongue until stimulated by francs into a belief in my harmlessness.Pictures ■ of such mythical persons? Nobody'had any in the print-shops, among the files, or anywhere. The entire people wanted those days effaced. But Napoleon Bonaparte? He was • everywhere. Men talked of him, discussed - him, gloried in him. He was inearnato France, no ' accident from Corsica. Generations that knew him not gathered daily in their masses i t the Invalides. ■ And the little ■ Corporal outrose his Elba and St. Helena, all undying. Even to us in England the sleeper is awake, behind the softer veil Time weaves round its great ones. :;So it is with them. : Even here they rise again. The Napoleonic legend grows vividly alive once more. ' put? of the yearning and unrest of peerless and' immortal France, when shall men. see the ' end of it? And what will that end be?