MINOR PROSE PIECES. OPINIONS OF CÆSAR, CROMWELL, MILTON, AND BUONAPARTE. No person has a better right than Lord to the exclusion of all the rest. This was wanting Brougham to speak contemptuously of Cæsar, of Cromwell, and of Milton. Cæsar was the purest and most Attic writer of his country, and there is no trace of intemperance, in thought or expression, throughout the whole series of his hostilities. He was the most generous friend, he was the most placable enemy; he rose with moderation, and he fell with dignity. Can we wonder then at Lord Brougham's unfeigned antipathy and assumed contempt? Few well-educated men are less able to deliver a sound opinion of style than his lordship; and perhaps there are not many of our contemporaries who place a just value on Cæsar's, dissimilar as it is in all its qualities to what they turn over on the sofa-table. There is calmness, there is precision, there is a perspicuity which shows objects in their proper size and position, there is strength without strain, and superiority without assertion. I acknowledge my preference of his style, and he must permit me to add Cicero's, to that which he considers the best of all, namely his own; and he must pardon me if I entertain an early predilection for easy humour over hard vulgarity, and for graceful irony over intractable distortion. I was never an admirer, even in youth, of those abrupt and splintery sentences, which, like many coarse substances, sparkle only when they are broken, and are looked at only for their sharpnesses and inequalities. Cæsar and Cromwell are hung up in the same wicker basket, as an offering to the warrior God of our formidable Celt's idolatry. Cromwell was destitute of all those elegancies which adorned the Roman dictator, but he alone possessed in an equal degree all those which ensure the constancy of Fortune. Both were needful: one against an unjust and reckless aristocracy, whose leader had declared that he would follow up the steps of Sulla, and cover the fields of Italy with slaughter; the other, to rescue the most religious and most conscientious of his countrymen from the persecution of an unchristian and intolerant episcopacy; and the bravest friends of ancient freedom, from torture, from mutilation, and from solitude and death in pestilential gaols. Were such the deeds of Charles? Yes; but before an infallible church had commanded us to worship him among the martyrs. Among? no, not among; above; and as the finishing stroke of our Reformation. And was Cromwell then pure? Certainly not; but he began in sincerity; and he believed to the last that every accession of power was an especial manifestation of God's mercy. Fanaticism hath always drawn to herself such conclusions from the Bible. Power made him less pious, but more confident. God had taken him by the hand at first, and had now let him walk by himself: to show how he could walk, he strode. Religion, in the exercise of power, is more arbitrary, more intolerant, and more cruel than monarchy; and the sordid arrogance of Presbyterianism succeeded to the splendid tyranny of Episcopacy. The crosier of Laud was unbroken: those who had been the first in cursing it, seized and exercised it: it was to fall in pieces under the sword of Cromwell. To him alone are we indebted for the establishment of religious liberty. If a Vane and a Milton have acknowledged the obligation, how feeble were the voices of all men living, if the voices of all men living were raised against it. Of our English rulers Oliver holds the next place to Alfred; and it would be unjust and ignominious to station him merely on a level with the most intelligent, the most energetic, and the most patriotic, of succeeding kings. He did indeed shed blood; but the blood he shed was solely for his country, although without it he never would have risen to the Protectorate. The same can not be said of Cæsar; nor of that extraordinary personage whom some of his flatterers place beside, and some before him. The first campaigns of Buonaparte were admirably conducted, and honour and glory in the highest degree are due to him for abstaining from the plunder of Italy. It would be ungenerous to seize the obvious idea that, by his vivid imagination, he probably saw in the land of his forefathers his future realm, without any such hope regarding France, and was desirous of winning those golden opinions which bear so high an interest. But Egypt seems to be the country in which the renown of conquerors is destined to be tarnished. The latent vices of the Persian, of the Macedonian, of Pompey, of Julius, of Antonius, of Octavius, shot up here and brought forth fruits after their kind. It was here also that the eagle eye of He soon grew restless with peace, and uneasy under the weight of his acquisitions. No public man, not Pitt himself, ever squandered such prodigious means so unprofitably. Anxious to aggrandise his family, could he not have given the whole of Italy to one brother, leaving Spain as his privy purse in the hands of its imbecile Bourbon? Could he not have given Poland and Polish Prussia to the King of Saxony, and have placed an eternal barrier between France and Russia? The Saxon dominions, with Prussian Silesia, would have recompensed Austria for the cession of the Venetian territories on the west of the Tagliamento. I do not suggest these practicabilities as fair dealings toward nations: I suggest them only as suitable to the interests of Napoleon, who shook and threw nations as another gamester shakes and throws dice. Germany should have been broken up into its old Hanse towns and small principalities. Buonaparte was befilmed; here forty thousand of the best troops in the world were defeated under his guidance, and led captive after his desertion. He lost Haiti, which he attempted to recover by force; he lost Spain, which he attempted to seize by perfidy. And what generosity or what policy did he display with Toussaint l'Ouverture or with Ferdinand Imprisonment and a miserable death befell the braver. Is there a human heart that swells not at the deliberate murder of the intrepid and blameless Hofer? I say nothing of Palm; I say nothing of D'Enghein; even in such atoms as these he found room enough for the perpetration of a crime. They had indeed friends to mourn for them; but they were not singly worth whole nations. Their voices did not breathe courage into ten thousand breasts; children were not carried into churches to hear their names uttered with God's; if they had virtues, those virtues perished with them; Hofer's will ring eternally on every mountain and irradiate every mine of With such arrangements, all feasible at one time Tyrol; Universal Man, domestic, political, and or other, France would have been unassailable. Inreligious, will be the better for him. When he stead of which, her ruler fancied it necessary to was led to slaughter in Mantua, some of those make an enemy of Russia. Had it been so, he Italian soldiers who had followed Buonaparte in might have profited by the experience of all who his earliest victories, shed tears. The French had ever invaded the interior of that country. The themselves, from the drummer on the platform to extremities of the Muscovite empire are easily the governor in the citadel, thought of the cause broken off, by lying at so great a distance from the that first united them in arms, and knew that it trunk; added to which, they all are grafts, imperwas Hofer's. Buonaparte could no more pardon fectly granulated on an uncongenial stock, and bravery in his enemy than cowardice in his sol- with the rush-bound cement fresh and friable dier. No expression was too virulent for Hofer, about them. Moscow never could be long retained for Sir Sydney Smith, or for any who had foiled by any hostile forces; subsistence would be perhim. He spoke contemptuously of Kleber, mali-petually cut off and carried away from them by ciously of Hoche: he could not even refrain from an unmanly triumph on the death of the weak Moreau. If this is greatness, he certainly did not inherit it from any great man on record. Sympathy with men at large is not among their attributes, but sympathy with the courageous and enterprising may be found in all of them, and sometimes a glance has fallen from them so low as on the tomb of the unfortunate. The inhumanity of Napoleon was certainly not dictated by policy, whose dictates, rightly understood, never point in that direction. It is unnecessary to discuss what instruction he received in his military school, after which he had small leisure for any unconnected with his profession. And so little was his regard for literature in others, that he drove out of France the only person in that country* who had attained any eminence in it. His Catechism was adapted to send back the rising generation to the middle ages. But let us consider that portion of his policy which he studied most, and on which he would have founded his power and looked forward to the establishment of his dynasty. He repudiated the woman who attached to him the best of all parties, by the sweetness of her temper and the activity of her beneficence; and he married into the only family proscribed by the prejudices of his nation. *Madame de Stael. hostile tribes, assailing and retreating as necessity might demand, and setting fire to the harvests and the forests. The inhabitants of that city, especially the commercial body and the ancient nobility, would have rejoiced at the demolition of Petersburg, which nothing could prevent, the ports of the Baltic being in the hands of Buonaparte, and Dantzic containing stores of every kind, sufficient for an army the most numerous that ever marched upon the earth. For the Asiatic have contained, in all ages, less than a fifth of fighting men, the rest being merchants, husbandmen, drovers, artisans, and other followers of the camp. The stores had been conveyed by the coast, instead of employ ing two-thirds of the cavalry; and the King of Sweden had been invited to take possession of a fortress (for city there would have been none) protecting a province long under his crown, and reluctantly torn away from it. No man ever yet obtained the lasting renown of a consummate general, who committed the same mistakes as had been committed in the same position by those before him; who suffered great reverses by great improvidence; who never rose up again after one discomfiture; or who led forth army upon army fruitlessly. Napoleon, in the last years of his sovranty, fought without aim, vanquished without glory, and perished without defeat. Did Gustavus Adolphus, did Frederick, did Washington, ever experience a great reverse by OPINIONS OF CESAR, CROMWELL, MILTON, AND BUONAPARTE. committing a great imprudence? For on this main question rests the solid praise of generalship. Buonaparte, after affronting every potentate of every dimension by the rudeness of his nature and the insolence of his domination, left to every one of them sufficient power to retaliate. Surely he must have read his Machiavelli upside-down! A king should never be struck unless in a vital part. Cromwell, with many scruples, committed not this mistake: Buonaparte, with none, committed it. The shadow of Cromwell's name overawed the most confident and haughty. He intimidated Holland, he humiliated Spain, and he twisted the supple Mazarine, the ruler of France, about his finger. All those nations had then attained the summit of their prosperity; all were unfriendly to the rising power of England; all trembled at the authority of that single man who coerced at once her aristocracy, her priesthood, and her factions. No agent of equal potency and equal moderation had appeared upon earth before. He walked into a den of lions and scourged them growling out: Buonaparte was pushed into a menagerie of monkeys, and fainted at their grimaces. His brother's bell and Oudinot's grenadiers frightened them off, and saved him. Meteors look larger than fixed stars, and strike with more admiration the beholder. Those who know not what they are, call them preternatural. They venerate in Buonaparte what they would ridicule in a gipsy on the road-side; his lucky and unlucky days, his ruling star, his ascendant. They bend over his emetic with gravity, and tell us that poison has no power over him. Nevertheless, the very men who owed their fortunes to him found him incompetent to maintain them in security. In the whole of Europe there was one single great man opposed to him, wanting all the means of subsistence for an army, and thwarted in all his endeavours by those for whose liberation he fought. His bugles on the Pyrenees dissolved the trance of Europe. He showed the world that military glory may be intensely bright without the assumption of sovranty, and that history is best occupied with it when she merely transcribes his orders and despatches. Englishmen will always prefer the true and modest to the false and meretricious and every experienced eye will estimate a Vatican fresco more highly than a staircase transparency. Rudeness, falsehood, malignity, and revenge, have belonged in common to many great conquerors, but never to one great man. Cromwell had indulged in the least vile of these; but on his assumption of power he recollected that he was a gentleman. No burst of rage, no sally of ribaldry, no expression of contemptuousness, was ever heard from the Lord Protector. He could subdue or conciliate or spell-bind the master-spirits of his age: but it is a genius of a far different order that is to seize and hold Futurity: it must be such a genius as Shakspeare's or Milton's. No sooner was Cromwell in his grave, than all he had won for himself and for his country vanished. If we must admire the successful, how 459 ever brief and hollow the advantages of their success, our admiration is not due to those whose resources were almost inexhaustible, and which nothing but profligate imprudence could exhaust, but to those who resisted great forces with means apparently inadequate, such as Kosciusko and Hofer, Hannibal and Sertorius, Alexander and Cæsar, Charles of Sweden and Frederick of Prussia. Above all these, and indeed above all princes, stands high Gustavus Adolphus; one of whose armies in the space of six weeks had seen the estuary of the Elbe and the steeples of Vienna; another, if a fever had not wasted it on the Lake of Como, would within less time have chaunted Luther's Hymn in St. Peter's. But none of these potentates had attempted the downfall or the disgrace of England. Napoleon, on the contrary, stood at the head of that confederacy whose orators were consulting the interests of France in the British parliament. He has left to the most turbulent and unprincipled of them a very memorable lesson. The schoolmaster is abroad in the guise of Buonaparte. He reminds them how, when his hands were full, they dropped what they held by grasping at what they could not hold: how he made enemies of those who might have been neutrals or friends: how he was driven out by weaker men than himself: and how he sank at last the unpitied victim of disappointed ambition. Lord Brougham will not allow us to contemplate greatness at our leisure he will not allow us indeed to look at it for a moment. Cæsar must be stript of all his laurels and left bald, or some rude soldier with bemocking gestures must be thrust before his triumph. If he fights, he does not know how to hold his sword; if he speaks, he speaks vile Latin. I wonder that Cromwell fares no better; if, signal as were his earlier services to his country, he lived a hypocrite and he died a traitor. Milton is indeed less pardonable. He adhered through good report and through evil report (and there was enough of both) to those who had asserted liberty of conscience, and who alone were able to maintain it. But an angry cracked voice is now raised against that eloquence "Of which all Europe rang from side to side." I shall make only a few remarks on his English, and a few preliminary on the importance of style in general, which none understood better than he. The greater part of those who are most ambitious of it are unaware of all its value. Thought does not separate man from the brutes; for the brutes think: but man alone thinks beyond the moment and beyond himself. Speech does not separate them; for speech is common to all perhaps, more or less articulate, and conveyed and received through different organs in the lower and more inert. Man's thought, which seems imperishable, loses its form, and runs along from proprietor to impropriator, like any other transitory thing, unless it is invested so becomingly and nobly that no successor can improve upon it, by any new fashion For want of dignity or beauty, | in our days, if indeed any writer in our days were endowed with the same might and majesty. Even in his Treatise on Divorce, where the Bible was most open to him for quotations, and where he might be the most expected to recur to the grave and antiquated, he has often employed, in the midst of theological questions and juridical formularies, the plainest terms of his contemporaries. Even his arguments against prelacy, where he rises into poetry like the old prophets, and where his ardent words assume in their periphery the rounded form of verse, there is nothing stiff or remark, which I believe I have quoted before, but no time is lost by reading it twice. "... But when God commands to take the trumpet, It rests not with man's will what he shall say, Was ever anything more like the inspiration it or combination. many good things are passed and forgotten; and much ancient wisdom is over-run and hidden by a rampant verdure, succulent but unsubstantial. It would be invidious to bring forward proofs of this out of authors in poetry and prose, now living or lately dead. A distinction must, however, be made between what falls upon many, like rain, and what is purloined from a cistern or a conduit belonging to another man's house. There are things which were another's before they were ours, and are not the less ours for that; not less than my estate is mine because it was my grand-constrained. I remember a glorious proof of this father's. There are features, there are voices, there are thoughts, very similar in many; and when ideas strike the same chord in any two with the same intensity, the expression must be nearly the same. Let those who look upon style as unworthy of much attention, ask themselves how many, in proportion to men of genius, have excelled in it. In all languages, ancient and modern, are there ten prose-writers at once harmonious, correct, and energetic? Harmony and correctness are not uncommon separately, and force is occasionally with each; but where, excepting in Milton, where, among all the moderns, is energy to be found always in the right place? Even Cicero is defective here, and sometimes in the most elaborate of his orations. In the time of Milton it was not customary for men of abilities to address to the people at large what might inflame their passions. The appeal was made to the serious, to the well-informed, to the learned, and was made in the language of their studies. The phraseology of our Bible, on which no subsequent age has improved, was thought to carry with it solemnity and authority; and even when popular feelings were to be aroused to popular interests, the language of the prophets was preferred to the language of the vulgar. Hence, amid the complicated antagonisms of war there was more austerity than ferocity. The gentlemen who attended the court avoided the speech as they avoided the manners of their adversaries. Waller, Cowley, and South, were resolved to refine what was already pure gold, and inadvertently threw into the crucible many old family jewels, deeply enchased within it. Eliot, Pym, Selden, and Milton, reverenced their father's house, and retained its rich language unmodified. Lord Brougham would make us believe that scarcely a sentence in Milton is easy, natural, and vernacular. Nevertheless, in all his dissertations, there are many which might appear to have been written The style usually follows the conformation of the mind. Solemnity and stateliness are Milton's chief characteristics. Nothing is less solemn, less stately, less composed, or less equable, than Lord Brougham's. When he is most vivacious, he shows it by twitches of sarcasm; and when he springs highest, it is from agony. He might have improved his manner by recurring to Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, equally discontented politicians: but there was something of high breeding in their attacks, and more of the rapier than of the bludgeon. He found their society uncongenial to him, and trundled home in preference the sour quartercask of Smollett. Many acrid plants throw out specious and showy flowers; few of these are to be found in his garden. What then has he? I will tell you what he has more various and greater talents than any other man ever was adorned with, who had nothing of genius and little of discretion. He has exhibited a clear compendious proof, that a work of extraordinary fiction may be elaborated in the utter penury of all those qualities which we usually assign to imagination. Between the language of Milton and Brougham there is as much difference as between an organ and a bagpipe. One of these instruments fills, and makes to vibrate, the amplest, the loftiest, the most venerable edifices, and accords with all that is magnificent and holy; the other is followed by vile animals in fantastical dresses and antic gestures, and surrounded by the clamorous and disorderly. A STORY OF SANTANDER. DON LUIS CABEZA-DE-MORO was a widower, with two sons, Antonio and Ignacio. His younger brother, named also Ignacio, had married a rich heiress in the island of Cuba. Both parents died, leaving an only daughter, seven years old, to the guardianship of Don Luis, and intimating a wish, and providing by will and testament, that Iñes in due time should espouse her cousin Ignacio. Don Luis was rejoiced at the injunction: for he disliked his elder son from the cradle. This was remarkable; especially as his lady, the Doña Pedrila, had continued long without offspring. |