Book 5 — ENVOY

To write the history of a man, or the history of an epoch, these are two distinct undertakings, differing both in name and technique. Vain has been the attempt to combine them. Plutarch renounced the one, and Carlyle renounced the other; that is why both these masters were able to achieve their respective tasks. It would be fair to say that Plutarch’s example has found no imitators; no one, after Plutarch, has made it his specific task to write the history of great minds upon a strictly historical foundation.

Such a work does not come within the domain of the historian, seeing that the search for truth demands other talents than those requisite for the art of portrayal. Artists have sometimes dramatised historical figures with a free hand; sometimes they have produced one of those horrible mishmashes which pass by the name of “historical novel”—of which Goethe, like Napoleon, said that they confuse everything.

The attempt is especially difficult when, not works, but deeds, are the milestones along the road of life. Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon, only became great powers through their victories in the battle-field; and yet their battles tend, more and more, to become unmeaning for posterity. Nowadays, it is only in military academies that Pharsalia, Rossbach, and Austerlitz, have a historical significance. Not one of the three great generals I have named would mean any more to us than Crassus, Seydlitz, or Masséna, had they, too, been nothing more than military commanders; it is the political genius of Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon, that makes these men supreme. In his highest embodiment, the statesman shapes all our destinies. Where genius and character intersect, is the focus for the searcher of the soul.

In this book, I have tried to write the inner history of Napoleon. Since his personality finds expression in every step of his political career, his ideas as founder of States and as legislator, his attitudes towards revolution and legitimacy, towards the social order and the problem of Europe—are valuable means of portrayal. Irrelevant was the course of the battles; irrelevant the contemporary position of the European States, in so far as this was manifested only in coalitions or antagonisms as mutable as the weather.

Every difference of opinion with his brothers or his wife, every hour of gloom or elation, his outbursts of wrath and his accesses of pallor, tricks or acts of kindness towards friend or foe, every word to his generals or to women (as reported in letters or authentic conversations), seemed more important than the order of battle at Marengo, the items of the peace of Lunéville, or the details of the Continental System. What we have all learned about him at school and the university has here been restricted to a minimum; but there has been a broad demonstration of the things that are lacking amid such everyday knowledge. Yet we have not been concerned only with that Napoleon intime who is so favourite a topic with French writers; but, rather, with the Napoleonic figure as a whole, in public career and in private life, as representative of all mankind. Affairs of State and love affairs that happened on the same day, have been referred to on the same page: they derive from the same source; they determine one another; and a study of the imbroglio of the human heart will often give us more information concerning great plans than all the calculations of the tactician.

Napoleon’s personality, which has no more to do with the nation for which or against which he was fighting than it has to do with morality, has not been treated here as miraculous, nor yet as split up into abstract concepts. In the episodes of his life I have tried to grasp the innermost moods (of which his rise was a natural and logical outcome), and to trace his movement towards the climax of St. Helena. To examine this man’s inner life; to explain his resolves and his refrainings, his deeds and his sufferings, his fancies and his calculations, as issuing from the moods of his heart—the disclosure of this great chain of affects, was at once the means and the end of the portrayal.

That is why there was no place in my record for portraits of the generals. Nothing could be admitted to this one volume which did not throw light upon the history of the one interior.

If we wish to give a picture of a life so full as this man’s, we must perforce follow his tempo; the writer, therefore, is bound to the words of the person being described, and can never let that person speak too much. For, in truth, a man always explains himself better than any one else can do it for him; even when he is mistaken, or when he is lying, he reveals himself to those who come afterwards, to those who know the truth. But the author must forget that he, too, knows the end. Only if, from moment to moment, he describes the feelings as they must have been experienced by one without foresight into the completed destiny, will he be able to generate that tension which, in actual life, made the sequence of events vibrant with passion.

Thus with his own sympathy, he forces the heart of the man to reveal its sympathy. In the present work, the spirit of dispassionate analysis is shown once only, towards the end. We cannot study the motor engine till it stops running.

Such a portrayal, which brings us into close proximity with its object, may give the impression of being a work of pure fancy. If, by its method of treatment, it is to be sharply differentiated from an imaginative creation, it must throughout cling to the framework of historical truth. One who believes that there is a logical succession of happenings in which there is no room for chance, will guard against retouching any detail; he will never bend a date or an incident to fit a preconceived purpose, even though, for stylistic purposes, he may think fit at times to leave one or the other unmentioned.

In this book, all the data are recorded facts, except the soliloquies. To it there might well be applied Goethe’s judgment upon Bourrienne’s Memoirs: “All the nimbus, all the illusion, with which journalists and historians and poets have surrounded Napoleon, vanishes before the awe-inspiring realism of this book: but the hero is by no means diminished thereby; he grows. We learn from this what a splendid thing truth is, when any one has the courage to speak it.” Napoleon’s life is a great epic, written by the hand of fate; its full meaning will not reveal itself to one who gives rein to imagination, but only to him who gives himself up to the amor fati.

Thus, likewise, for the reader of these pages should be reconstructed the tragedy which once only in a millennium a mortal man has created out of his life. What a man can attain through self-confidence and courage, through passion and imagination, through industry and will, he attained. To-day, in the age of the revolutions which once again are opening every path to the man of supreme ability, the ardent youth of Europe can find as an example and a warning no greater man than the one who, of all men of the West, made and suffered the most violent commotions.