NAPOLEON.

Hokitika Guardian, 28 May 1921, Page 4

NAPOLEON.

(Sydney Paper). Among the many impressive ceremonies that marked the centenary of Napoleon’s death there was one which captured the imagination to a peculiar degree. All day long at St Helena the minute guns boomed out their solemn threnody, and then at the very moment when he passed away a hundred years ago, the island rocked beneath a crashing salute, Britain’s tribute to the greatest foeman she has ever known. It is extraordinary how British feeling towards Napoleon has changed with the passage of years. The titular head oi an enemy nation is never a popular figure in the country with which he is at war. He symbolises his own nation ; lie is the convenient object for all tbe abuse prompted by anger and hatred. But English antagonism to Napoleon was of a personal character; lie was more than the ruler of the enemy; he was par excellence the enemy. In the Great War the German Emperor was tbe butt of a great deal of invective and ridicule, but beneath it all was the thought that he did not count for very much. He might posture and strut and rattle his sabre, but lie was only a -super on the stage, a villain of fustian. In the case of Napoleon it was different. He was no puppet, no mere figurehead, but the military genius who conquered Europe and threatened England herself, , so long inviolate. He and no one else was the creator of France’s power and the author of Europe’s tribulations; upon him, as an individual, all England’s resentment was concentrated. Tulpit and Press fulminated at him in the rotund periods which our great grandfathers affected' “Boney” was the b -gey with which nursemaids terrified naughty children into good behaviour, and even those whose spirit might have been presumed to soar “above the ■ battle” forgot their detachment and 1 arraigned Napoleon as the arch criminal.

I Napoleon’s military career synchronised with the appearance of a school of 1 English poets informed by a broad I l umanitarianisin and worshippers of ; liberty. They bailed tbe French Revolution as the dawn of a now era; they saw in tbe establishment of the Empire ; the frustration of their dearest hopes. ! Napoleon in bis sacrilegious ambition had enchained freedom. Their angoi j against him was not simply the angei lof patriotic Englishmen, .it was the anger of men who beheld a religion desecrated, a noble ideal shattered by impious hands. To them Napoleon was more than the enemy of England ; he was the enemy of liberty, the foe of mankind. Their burning indignation found vent in invective that is not always edifying. To Wordsworth, the most restrained of the group, he is

“Robespierre on horseback,” and “of men the meanest.” Coleridge indulges in vituperation which would not disgrace a Billingsgate porter. Shelley is intensely jbitter, and exults at his fall in’ a sonnet in which he applies to Napoleon the singularly Inappropriate epithet of “unambitious slave.” The list could he multiplied almost indefinitely. The only exceptions to the rule arc By run, who alternates between pity, admiration, and a feeling almost akin to contempt, and the debonair Tom Moore, who in a short poem beginning, Sir Hudson Lowe, Sir Hudson l.owe. By name and, ah ; by nature so. takes Napoleon’s part and attacks his gaoler—-perhaps because this ttitude allows hint to perpetrate a couple of rather artless puns. But if the Pulpit, poets, and the Press deal faithfully with Napoleon there was one class which was constrained to praise him. With scarcely a dissentient voice English soldiers acknowledged his military genius. Sometimes their admiration is a little grudging. Arms arc an aristocratic profession ; a great leader should be a person of quality. Yet here is this wretched Corsican upstart of obscure antecedents and unknown family teaching the bluest blood of Europe a lesson. Nay, more, he makes waiters and such like people marshals, and they, too, carry all before them. But there was a general recognition of his ability, and no one was more ready to testify to it than Wellington, who, at Waterloo, “saw the Guttle lost four times.”

The old English rancour against Napoleon has completely disappeared. There is now not an Englishman who would deny his greatness. Moreover, we can now appreciate his eom.ti active achievements, -his reform of the public services, his codification of French law, the remarkably efficient system of organisation and administration he instituted, his encouragement of scientific research. These and their fruits have outlived the empire he founded. It is true that he was spurred hv personal ambition and plunged Europe in bloodshed. But to some extent he was the victim of circumstances. Appetite grows by what it feeds on. Me won his first successes in defending France against the Coalition which sought to re-establish the “ancient regime.” But for his genius would France have been able to withstand the armies of Spain, Holland, Austria, and Prussia, and the fleet of England, all enlisted in the cniist of reaction. Later lie undid his own work; he destroyed the Republic that be formerly had done so much to preserve. Me restored the absolutism which the Revolution had overthrown. But he gave to France, rent and riven by that Revolution, a unity which she had never known before, and which still animates her. Tt was that unity, the memory of that brilliant military tradition which Napoleon established, that helped to save France a hundred years after he had fallen.