The Press. — London, England, 1856-01-19 00:00:00

JANUARY 19, 1856. whenever he took up his pen. We extract a few sentences : In war nothing is to be done but by calculation. What- ever is not profoundly considered in its details produces no good result. The art of war, which every one talks about, is difficult. Whatever one may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with fists. When once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders what you have already done useless. All the art of war consists in a well-arranged and ex- tremely circumspect defensive, and • bold and rapid advance. Often, however, his selfish ambition blinded him to his, true interests In his heart he hated intellectual men. In the very spirit of Caesar, he said of them : They think too much ; such men are dangerous. He desired to have about him the mere crea- tures of his will. He wrote to Joseph : I look upon men of learning and brilliancy as I do upon coquettes. They are very well to live and converse with, bet we should no more think of taking the latter for our wives than the former for our Ministers. Among the most ludicrous of the blunders of the Administrative Reformers (as they call themselves) one of the most striking was, their adducing Napoleon as an example of what might be effected by throwing open to talent the public service of an empire It is false that he ever did so. He rather desired machines than able men, and the result was that he was always ill-served. The empire was barren of talent in every department; even its generals were distinguished mainly from their connec- tion with Napoleon, and from the support which he gave them. Of the whole host, Soult alone displayed real ability and re- source, and he was but a second-rate man. Under the despotism of an old-established Government, original talent may be encou- raged and meet with its fair reward ; but the despotism of Napoleon was new—it was as ,jealous as it was vigilant. It excluded that highest order of talent, which is seldom found apart from independence of mind, from its councils and service ; it preferred to surround itself with such mercenaries as Fouche and Bourrienne, who were as ready to betray as to serve it, the instant their treachery seemed likely to prove profitable. The thorough rottenness of the empire was proved in its day of trial. It is impossible to avoid a feeling of contempt for both Napo- leon and Joseph as we come to the close of this correspondence. At the commencement of the desperate campaign of 1814, Napoleon affected the spirit of an antique Roman. In the event of the capture of Paris by the enemy, he wrote to Joseph, " I shall be no more." Again : I repeat, then, in two words, Paris will never be occupied While I am alive. Yet he lived to see Paris twice occupied. If we admire his fortitude under reverse, we must needs laugh at his idle bravado when misfortune was only in prospect. In the same style Joseph wrote :—" When the hour comes, " we must meet death with resolution, as did " the last Emperor of Constantinople." Poor Joseph probably contemplated all the time a comfortable retreat in America, and had made provision for it. Allusion has been made to the utter exhaus- tion of France under Napoleon's system. When the allies approached Paris there were neither men, nor arms, nor money, to maintain the struggle. Joseph complains continually of the want of muskets. " The state of the exche- " quer and the arsenals is known to all the " world," he reports. There was no money to pay the troops, and, in consequence, they ravtwed the country ; so that the people cried, " The enemy could do no worse." Conscripts came in slowly. " There is a perceptible " diminution," writes Joseph (Feb. 25) ; "yes- '' terday the Imperial Guard was joined by 1 only ninety five; on th e 23 r d, o n ly twenty- '. five men joined the line." A revolt was feared in Paris :—" The people are by no ' means inclined to offer any effective resist- ,. mice to a hostile army." "In every respect '' we are at the end of our resources." In his ext remity, Napoleon bitterly lamented the want of that independent energy which he had laboured so diligently to crush : Tba Minister of War writes reports and waits for my pprobation before executing my o rd ers . Thi s is not the Rai- to act at this juncture. It did very well when I was in Paris, THE PRESS. " I am badly served in the north," he writes ; and "I left a splendid army and excellent " cavalry at Troyes, but the soul is wanting." He speaks of the indecision and timidity of General Maison, and complains that his Ministers wanted presence of mind. In the midst of his brilliant victories, from Feb. 10 to 18, we mark how rapidly the process of ex haustion went on :—" My Young Guard melts " like a snowball." Never was the break-down of a mighty empire more complete. To en courage his commanders he ordered an ex ample to be made of one of them : The commandant at Soissons basely evacuated the town without firing a shot. I have ordered the Minister of War to have him arrested, brought before a court-martial, and shot. He must be executed in the Place de Greve with the utmost publicity. The sentence following is too curiously illus trative of Napoleonic ideas of justice to be omitted:—" Five generals must be appointed " to try him ;" whether before or after execu tion is not stated. There was a moment in the crisis of his fate when peace was practicable ; though, luckily, his confidence in his fortune pre vented negotiation. While the capital was threatened, Joseph wrote, urgently pressing an arrangement with the allies :—" If it be " possible, then, peace—peace at any price." The peace which at this time appeared practi cable was a treaty with Napoleon recognising the ancient, limits of France—those which ex isted previous to 1792. The Bonapartists hoped for what they called the natural limits, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine. There was falsehood in the mind of Joseph in the midst of his extremity:— The whole of Europe joins in wishing to reduce France to what she was in 1792. Let it, therefore, be the founds. tion of a treaty which is rendered imperative by circum• stances. . . . The natural limits would be a real boon, both for France and the rest of Europe ; we might then hope for a lasting peace, but impossibility relieves from every obligation. Peace now is indispensable; it may be broken on the day when France is able to reassert her rights. Make, then, whet in your breast you will con sider as a mere truce, since the enemy's injustice will not permit you to make an equitable peace. With his succ6sses, Napoleon made sure that this " equitable peace " was within his reach. On Feb. 18th, he notices, with this style of comment, the flag of truce sent Lim by Prince Schwartzenberg It is hard to be dastardly to such a degree. . . . On the first repulse these wretches are on their knees. . . . I shall not grant any armistice till I have cleared my territory of them. He adds:— If I had signed on the terms of the ancient limits, I should have rushed to arms in two years, and I should have told the nation that I had signed, not a peace, but a capitulation. Was this a man to be trusted ? Joseph sud denly changed his tone at news of the victo ries, and declared every one would recognise thelwisdom of his Majesty's conduct in listen ing to no terms except the "natural limits.' But his panic soon returned, and he again prayed for a peace at any price, which would leave the Napoleonic family in power "Never lose sight of my son," wrote Napoleon. " I " would rather know that he was in the Seine " than in the hands of the enemies of France." Joseph replied, " Why not appeal to Austria ? " Your son is the grandson of Francis." This Joseh, who was to die on the walls, like the last Emperor of Constantinople, travelled com fortably to Orleans with an immense train of carriages, and reminded Napoleon of family wants : Mamma is in want of money ; six months of her pen sion is due. Neither has Jerome any money. This must have reached Napoleon while he was in his agony at Fontainebleau, and also a later letter, showing what he might still expect from the brotherly love of Joseph : Should the Bourbons be called to the throne . . I could not possibly live in France, nor could I take my wife and children to the island of Elba. If sad necessity should force your Majesty thither, I will go to visit you, and to prove to yon my attachment; but it will not be until I have placed my wife and children in safety. At the close of the correspondence there is a most interesting letter from the present Em peror of the French, dated New York, April 22, 1837, addressed to his uncle Joseph, jus tifying his Strasburg attempt. Joseph, it seems, was annoyed at the enterprise ; it failed, and Prince Louis Napoleon, with some 65 bitterness and much pathos, deprecates his uncle's displeasure. If I had been success ful, he says, it might have been magnani mous to break with me, but— when against my will I escape from the bayonet and the scaffold to a foreign shore, I find there only contempt and disdain on the part of my family ! The letter is written in a most unaffected style, and for that reason one passage in it is the more remarkable : As for me, however you may treat me, my behaviour will not alter; the general sympathy, the tranquillity of my conscience, and, above all, the persuasion that if the Em peror looks down upon me, he approves me—these are the considerations which compensate for the many mortifica- Cons and injuries which I have endured. We have been led to dwell on these volumes so long from the kind of fascination which they possess. Were all other books relating to Napoleon lextinct, we might from this "Correspondence" alone obtain a complete view of his character, with all its intellectual energy, and all his ungovernable ambition. For another reason the book is especially valuable. It justifies the part of England in the last great war. It shows that peace with Napoleon was impossible, as nothing less than universal empire would have contented him. The moral of his meteoric career has been well read lby his sagacious nephew—" The age of " conquests has passed." Time has assisted to realise this remarkable expression. Napo leon 111. seems desirous of making full amends to Europe for the ravages inflicted on it in the last generation by Napoleon I. The Tragedies of iEschylus. Re-edited, with an English Commentary, by F. A. Paley. London: Whittaker and Co. THE above is a new volume of the "Biblio theca Classica," edited by Mr. Long and Mr. Macleane. Mr. Paley's claims as an editor of iEschylus have been long admitted by all scholars, and it with great pleasure we see that his work has been selected for the series in question. As, however, our present busi ness is naturally confined to a comparison between Mr. Paley's recent and earlier per formances, we must limit ourselves to the selection of two or three passages as examples of the method in which he has availed him self of such works as have appeared in the interim. In the beautiful speech of Danaus in the " Supplices" (949), Mr Paley, while adopting some of the verbal emendations of Hermann, has given a different sense to the following difficult lines : zips; oau "ra d' 144ixerstT2; cats.l.4s4• kit; at mlitsirova-s xal &Wet ? Ti 1.441/ ; xai XVJJ'atati X3l "'navy:ll3;i, xisiit.u . l .4.49' its crrci‘'orra. votpiTcris Kirtris;, ximpt wthoinsTur thirtsr Ohm. In his former edition the two last stood thus : 41.100 - 714 ' 91. Xti,:lru/thes7% 0'1%;q 1 0 , 701 , xnpo'crer es liLos'c, £; xa - X:Lict 34.4.1:021)7a1/ escr'l.4.eme Spy. The new reading is doubtless the best, and more consistent with what has gone before than the idea of Venus preventing these aggres sions, which is the sense of the first reading, and which Hermann, substituting saxv,L,o-0 for retains now. In " Septem Contra Thetas" (84), Mr. Paley adopts into the text the emendation of di y4 c for ixdi t .4o ; , which he had suggested in his pre vious edition, in opposition to the opinion of Hermann, who still maintains that the original word is correct. In the " Agamemnon' Mr. Paley's notes on the first Chorus are , very full and sa• tisfactory ; and his other emendations in this play, either original or taken from Her mann or Covington, are generally entitled to the praise of judiciousness. We have only space for two instances, one of which we have se lected on account of it being rather less felicitous. But the following emendation strikes us as admirable : az, a; fhOi Tore µire gl'ikXceit Triet 71till ' Eki)nc olx. Xli f e al/0 1 .401:401N ; ;wen yinceiAihivo;, eiqr iriarxibwr e:axgr eics ' croi ix euertitiv eiv4cs ' al OvilerXoVGA 11214Wr — Ag., 774. °!