The Sun.
London, England, 1862-11-10 00:00:00

History of the Consulate and Empire of France
under Napoleon. By Adolphe Thiers. Vol. XX.,
completing the work. Willis and Sotheran.
One of the most remarkable of the great histori-
cal productions of the century has here been brought
to its conclusion. As picturesque and elaborated a
record, it is, of the age of Napoleon, as the Chronicles
of Froissart were of the age of Chivalry! Thiers has
proved himself to be as the biographer of Napo-
leon what Arrian and Curtius were combined to
Alexander—as an annalist of the Great Captain's
campaigns what Coesar was to himself. Quite as
a matter of course, the work is coloured by the
writer's own intense predilections. It could not in
reason be expected by any sane man to be other-
wise. As rationally might one turn to that Model
Memoir of a Hero, Robert Southey's " Life of Nel-
son," expecting to find it written from first to last
with a mind perfectly calm and equable, with a
pulse at no moment accelerated by a single throb,
with a judgment throughout in unwavering equi-
poise. An effusion of that character, could it by
any possibility have been produced, would have
been something intolerable, IV hy, in regard to
herculean labours such as those which have
been so assiduously prosecuted, and we may
now venture to add, so successfully accom-
plished, during the last eighteen or twenty
years by the gifted ex-Premier of France,
it may safely be asserted that they would carcely
ever be undertaken by any man competent to
complete them without the preliminary incentive
of precisely those very predilections, that some
shallow observers and pretended critics are so dis-
posed to complain of, and are so loud and ceaseless
in declaiming against upon every conceivable op-
portunity. When au. Englishman like Southey
undertakes to recount the history of the life and
fortunes of a sea-captain like Horatio Nelson, we
take it for granted, before turning one solitary page
of the narrative, that it will be no cold. or even
luke-warm expression that will be there poured
forth from the writer's intellect—proffered to
the reader's lips to quaff, whenever he lists, from
the current of the Biography. No, it is perfectly
understood by all, from the first instantaneous
glance at the title page, that the Biographer is a
Biographer, for the simple reason, the very precise
reason, that he is in sympathy with the one whom
he himself has voluntarily selected to be the Hero
of his Biography. The piquant irony directed by
Lord Macaulay in one of his famous Essays against
that disease of overmuch praise peculiarly apper-
taining to the class of biographers, a disease face-
tiously dubbed by the great Essayist the " lues Bos-
welliana," that piquant irony of Macaulay's always
appeared to us excessively overwrought in various
ways, and in many instances capable of egregious
misapplication. An irony it was, to our thinking,
too keenly pointed, too cruelly barbed, too fiercely
poisoned—and, after all, as it happened, recoiling
against the breast of the very man whose hand
sped it with such accurate aim against others, re-
coiling upon himself with an eccentricity of move-
ment like that of some literary boomerang. For
the great historic masterpiece of Lord Macaulay's ge-
nius—incomplete, the merest fragment of a " History
of England," perfect and of admirable proportions
in a purely literary point of view as a " History of
King 'William lll."—is warped and coloured, and
saturated, so to speak, with more intense prejudices,
with more highly coloured predilections than
any other intellectual production of the same class
that could be mentioned as having seen the light in
this generation. There, in truth, is a flagrant in-
stance, if you please, of the lues Boswelliana ! In
estimating Southey's capabilities as an erotic poet,
Lord Macaulay could say of him wittily enough,
in a sudden outbut st of scornful antithesis, that
his imaginary cnamorata," either loved like cattle,
or loved like seraphim." But—as gross were those
extremes and exaggerations of antithesis into which
Lord Macaulay himself plunged when he undertook
not to warble like a lyrist, but to grave, with an iron
stylus, upon enduring tablets, the records of our
national glory—as the last, and, in many respects,
the most rarely gifted of our English Historians.
Reading his annals, as he has writ them, James the
Second is depicted throughout as an impossible
Monster—William of Orange as an equally impos-
sible Paragon. The one lowers upon us through
an atmosphere as black as Erebus. The other shines
before our dazzled eyes as if (to adopt the historian's
own phrase, when he is speaking of Milton) crowns
of asphodel were seen already showering around
him upon the jasper pavements of the new Jerusa-
lem ! Without some recognisable leaning, partiality,
predilection (call it what you will) to begin with,
an annalist's or a biographer's work would
be the dreariest reading well imagina-
ble : the least attractive—listless, torpid, all
but lifeless. Recognising the vivifying animus of
the Historian in the very title-page of his History,
of the biographer in the very opening of his
Biography, the reader is, to the full, forearmed be-
cause, to the full, forwarned. The reader's judgment
under those circumstances, with that perfectly ap-
preciable forewarning, can never, if he be but a man
endowed with the most ordinary amount of saga-
city, be biased in the conclusion to which his author
is so clearly bent, from the outset, upon conducting
him. The Golden Bowl (of the Life related) while
traversing again in fancy those " paths of glory"
that " lead but to the grave," may have that bias
imparted to it before reaching the common goal of
every biography—but not to any rational reader's
judgment. What has been reccgnised therefore
again and again in all the grander masterpieces of
literature of a historical or of a biographical cha-
racter, is here visible anew and in a resplendent form
ire these majestic annals of the Great Napoleon,
penned by the "some time" Prime Minister of France,
M. Adolphe Thiers. Throughout the annalist
writes, if not avowedly as a Bonapartist, necessarily
and inevitably, and to his honour, be it said, of
course, as a Frenchman. For Napoleon he cherishes
—quite as a matter of course, and we respect him
for it—the most profound admiration. In recount-
ing the wonderful deeds of Napoleon, the marvellous
conquests made by France under his rule, first of
all, during the Consulate and afterwards during the
Empire, M. Thiers—as a Frenchman, as a French
historian, as a French statesman, as a patriot, as a
man of genius, himself nurtured upon the soil which
was for so many years the 7roll (TVA) of this warlike
Archimedes, this great captain, this great lawgiver
—exults in the mere retrospect, in the mere remem-
brance. When the marvellous fabric built up within
a period of fifteen years by Napoleon begins to
shake and crumble away from its foundations, when
this Colossus is falling, has fallen—Thiers laments
and in no feeble voice of lamentation. Over the
memory of the grand final crash at Waterloo—[de-
scribed with great elaboration, and we grieve to
add (what so many of our brother-critics here in
England have proved of late usque ad nauseam)
with great unfairness in this last volume]—
the Historian of Napoleon's Consulate and Empire,
the Historian previously of the French Revolution,
cries out with a voice of anguish,. of remonstrance,
of indignation—to put the fact in simple
makes the best of it, so far as relates to th
can-
and the generalship of his idol Napoleo
amount
not but think that there has been an unduesfie
of
the
of angry feeling manifested on thisadvanced by M.
channel in respect to the argument advanced levweortactics
Thiers in explanation, from aFFrance,
of that immense disaster for
Battlee r
of Waterloo.
triumph for the Allies,
in
and of
flagrantly in t pointhe immensevview,
his narrative of the bat-
tle Granted that repeatedly
may be visible, but
error—
define the error
M. Thiers is grohses
Englishmen, in the recollection of
can afford if-
veritable nature of the victory that
without heat, ipwerfect good humour. England
rYevetrhi
Wars of the Giants to a close, Eng_
brought those
surely preserve their equanimity in
iishmen may
what was the
arguing about it. Admitted that there is a palpao