The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-29 00:00:00

MR. KINGLAKE ON NAPOLEON 111.

The Times' Opinion of the Exceedinc,
Malignity of this Attack.
Now comes a very remarkable part of this very remark-
able book. For some purpose which we cannot divine,with
motives quite above or below conjecture, Mr. Kinglake
stops short in his interesting narrative of tho events of
July, 1853. Ile suddenly considers it "necessary to glance
at the operations of a small knot of middle-aged men, who,
in the winter of 1851, were pushing their fortunes in Paris."
If the book were a great epic we could understand the episo-
dical pieces which recorded the bravery of some Diomed or
the baseness of a Thersites. But it is a history of the transao-

ions which led to the Russian War. It is,indeed, impossible
:o read this interpolati,in without admiration for the power

of the writer. Erinnys and all the Furies accompany
him through every page, the lash and the flaying-knife, the

scorpion's sting, the angry tooth, the nail, irony, sarcasm,

inv eetive are used with unsparing, indiseriminating strength.

But it strikes us that this exhibition of power and poetical

rage belongs to another drama, or that it at one time was
intended to appear alone, and that it has been incorporated
here by a great mistake. If anything is to be deduced from
the splendid fragment it is this—that the Emperor Louis
Napoleon, feeling his want of status after the coup d'etat in
1851, prepared the war of 1851 as a means of stabilitating
his throne, and of humiliating the Czar, who refused to
fraternise with his ill-sprung Power. To that end he ca-
joled England, hoodwinked Ministers, statesmen, Parlia-

ment, and people, moulded them like wax to his purpose,

and finally succeeded in securing for himself and his posi-
tion the ineffably great support which tho friendship of
Queen Victoria and the entente cordiale between England
and his Government must inevitably confer. And what

manner of man was he who did all this—who overcame the
cold jealousy of a proud and ancient race—who broke in on
the guarded friendship of our grayest diplomatists—who
wrapped Great Britain in the folds of an entangling alli-

ante—who alienated our rulers from their natural allies,
and led them far away from safe traditional paths ? Mr.
Kinglake describes him. And, if the description be true,
surely two great nations were never so befooled, never
before has Fortune been so blind, never has France been
so degraded, never has England been suoh a miserable
dupe, and never have our great statesmen in council
exhibited such unmitigated foolishness. A man of blank,
wooden looks, of opaque features, with the bearing and
countenance of a weaver oppressed by long hours of mono-
tonous indoor work, which makee the body stoop and keeps
the eye downcast, turning a greenish hue in moments of

danger, with a sluggish flow of ideas, of dull intellect, pass-
ing the hours of a studious youth and the prime of a
thoughtful manhood in contriving how to apply stratagem
to the science of jurisprudence—with just enough of daring
to lead him into dangerous enterprises, and without the
nerve to behave well in or get well out of them—nay, it is
more than insinuated by Mr. Kinglake, a coward in the
presence of an enemy such is the man who, he
says, succeeded in thoroughly conquering the pre-
judices and allaying the antipathies of the wisest
and best men of England after the perpetration of the most
atrocious and fiendish crimes. This is not our language ;
it is but a most meagre reflex of the tremendous sentences
in which Mr. Kinglake has exacted vengeance for some
wrong done to his country, to humanity—or to himself.
What the Emperor Napoleon 111. did in France is not
so much to us as what, according to Mr. Kinglake, one
so ill gifted did with us in England. It may tend to
raise suspicions respecting the impartiality of our his-
torian's estimate of the character of the man who now fills

such a place in the eye of Europe—and who will probably
go down to posterity without Mr. Kinglake's stigma—that
the satirist does not, in his sketch of the last days of the
Republic of 1848, say one word of the evils which afflicted
France and appalled society and property. He is, indeed,
obliged to confess that the army, the great body of the
working men, the clergy, and some of the noblest intel-

lects in France accepted the coup d'etat with thankfulness,
as a measure necessary to save the country from socialism
and anarchy. But they are not France. They do no re-
present Mr. Kinglake's France, at least. It is not
iur intention to be the apologists of the Emperor
Napoleon. We did not disguise our horror of the
scenes which occurred in Paris after the 2d of December.

We do not accept success as a divinity. Our honest sympa-
thies cannot be with a rule which interferes with free

speech and crushes the liberty of the press. But the Em-
peror has proved himself to be no vulgar, incapable impos-
tor ; to the outward eye, and before the world, he fills well
the Imperial robes he has won. Surely it is a libel to say
that the man who stood unmoved amid the bombs of the

assassin is a poltroon, as it is unworthy of Mr. Kinglake to
measure the quality of the Emperor's daring in the battle-
field by the losses inflicted on his escort in the crowning
victory of Solferino.
It is especially unworthy of Mr. Kinglake to do this, be-
cause he represents Lord Raglan and his Staff at the Alma
as being exposed to a fire—nay, to a cannonade, a bombard-
ment—deliberate, well-aimed, long-continued, so powerful
that, had it been brought to bear, he declares, on the English
line, "it might have maimed it in a vital part of the
field 1" For three pages we have an elaborate description
of the storm of shot and shell which was directed, as we
are assured, from "a great number of guns," against the
Head-quarters Staff, conspicuous by the white flowing
plumes of the officers. Shells, " sometimes in a black
flight, exploding nearly at the same moment, or briskly,
one after another, right and left, and all around," fol-
lowed the round shot, and whenever Lord Raglan and Staff
were obliged to cross the road " they rode at it briskly as at
a leap, and spanned it with one or two strides, thus leaving
the prepared storm of shells to burst a little behind them."
Of course the slaughter among the Staff was dreadful in
such a fiery furnace of battle, and the wonder is how a man
escaped from an " effort of the Russian artillery against
Lord. Raglan and the group surrounding him, which lasted
a long time, and was carried on upon a scale better propor-
tioned to the destruction of a whole division." But Provi-
dence protected them, as it guarded the Emperor at Solferino.
Not one of the Stall was scratched, nor had oae of them a hair
of his head singed. As an introduction to the history of
the coup d'etat, after thometaphysical and personal sketches
of the young Louis Napoleon and his studies, all written in
the same spirit, the historian of the Invasion of the Crimea
considers it necessary" to give full and detailed accounts
of the Prince's attempts to overthrow the Government
at Boulogne and Strasbourg, and reiterates his charge
of something worse than want of personal courage.
Mr. Kinglake drags into this narrative, in the rudest
manner an English gentleman can do it in words,
the associates, the Ministers, and agents in the coup d'etat,
and introduces us with scant courtesy to " Fialin dit Per-
signy," Fleury, Morny, Maupas, Magnan, and St. Arnaud,
whom Mr. Kinglake seems to think it very clever to call
"formerly Le Roy" all through this part of his book. To
none of them does he deign even an "M.," and what he
says of them had better be left unrepeated here. This chap-
ter, no doubt, was written long ago, and has been since re-
touched and polished again and again, still it is as sharp as
the serpent's tooth. One hundred and thirteen pages, or
nearly one-fourth of the whole of the first volume, which
purport to be an account of the " transactions which brought
on the war of 1854-5," are occupied in this ruthless on-
slaught on the Emperor of the French, his early associates,
and the men of the 2d of December and 4th of December,
1851.

At the close of this long chapter, wherein—every line
abounding—are fullest traces of a labour of love in his
work, he attempts to justify the digression by the remark
that the policy of France was moulded by the personal
exigencies of its new ruler and his friends. But he fails
entirely to show that any change took place after the coup
d'etat in the general principles on which France had uni-
formly acted with respect to the Latin Church and the
Eastern question. Although in 1853 the army, the clergy,
the working classes—" the people"—of France were pro-
foundly content, Mr. Kinglake says that at this time the
tranquillity of Europe " portended gaol and ill-usage
and,
death" to the Emperor Napoleon I So he labours to prove
that the language, which he admits to be temperate, just,
and moderate, of the Emperor in the Courts
was but a cloak to his design to engage England
of
in
naval
wan the Turks
h
movements tending to provoke war. But,
of England and
in a panic flew to the representatives' fleets to repair
France, the latter ordered Lill errespective
Admiral did not come. The
to the Levant. The Engl.
French Admiral obeyed the summons. If we are to read
history
by the light, of events which have occurred, and
adopt Mr. Kinglake 's summary (page 3 -14) of the Emperor's
showed g
there might be some reason for maintaining that he
b
reater foresight than his ally, and that the adop •
tion of his plans might have prevented the naval disaster at
Sinope, which attached a certain disgrace to our arms and
rendered war inevitable.

The Duke of Wellington, no mean master in the
art of swearing, seems to have appraised oaths by
some sort of monetary standard. When asked by the Go-
vernment of the day what he thought of the proposal on
the part of the French Government to remove Napoleon's
bones from St. Helena, the Great Captain is reported to
have replied :—" Well, I don't see why they should not
have his bones if they want them. Why should we ob-
ject? They'll say we're afraid. But I don't care
what they say ? Who cares what they say? I
don't care ad— what they say, I don't care a two-
penny d-- what they say." According to this au-
thority, then, if there is such a thing as a twopenny
damn, it seems rather hard to amerce this contemptible and
low-priced profanity at the rate of two shillings,
it
would certainly have cost his Grace ; and there should h e
an ascending scale from the twopenny oath of a cabman to
the affluent commination of Shimei and Eraulplause...
'Saturday ,Review,