Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

A man of stalwart breadth and bone,
A war-cloak round him spread.
Full on the face the torches
Flash out – a sudden cry
(And those who heard it ne'er will lose
Its echo till they die,)
A sudden cry escapeth
Mahmood's unguarded lips,
A cry as of a suffering soul
Redeemed from Hell's eclipse.
"Oh, Allah! gracious Allah!
Thy servant badly won
This blessing to a father's heart,
'Tis not – 'tis NOT my son!
Fly! – tell my joy in Ghazna; —
Before the night is done
Let lighted shrine and blazing street
Proclaim 'tis not my son!
'Tis not Massoud, the wayward,
Who thus the Law defied,
Yet I deem'd that none but my only son
Dared set my oath aside:
Though my frame grew faint from fasting,
Though my soul with grief grew wild,
Upon this spot I would have wrought stern justice on my child.
I wrought the deed in darkness,
For fear a single ray
Should light his face, and from this heart
Plead the Poor Man's cause away.
Great Allah sees uprightly
I strive my course to run,
And thus rewards his servant —
This dead is not my son!"

VIII

Thus, through his reign of glory,
Shone his JUSTICE far and wide;
All praise to the First Sultan,
Mahmood the Ghaznavide

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

Part XIX

"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

    Shakspeare.
Change is the master-spirit of Europe, as permanency is of Asia. The contrast is in the nature of things. However the caprice, the genius, or the necessities, of the sitter on the throne may attempt to impress permanency on the habits of the West, or mutability on those of the East, his success must be but partial. In Europe we have a perpetual movement of minds, a moral ocean, to which tides and currents are an operation of nature. But the Caspian or the Euxine is not more defined by its limits of rock and mountain, or more inexorably separated from the general influx of the waters which roll round the world, than the Asiatic mind is from following the free course, and sharing the bold and stormy innovations, of Europe.

But the most rapid and total change within human memory, was the one which was now before my eye. I felt as some of the old alchymists might feel in their laboratories, with all their crucibles heating, all their alembics boiling, all their strange materials in full effervescence; and their eyes fixed in doubt, and perhaps in awe, on the powerful and hazardous products about to result from combinations untried before, and amalgams which might shatter the roof above their heads, or extinguish their existence by a blast of poison.

I had left Paris Democracy. I found it a Despotism. I had left it a melancholy prey to the multitude; a startling scene of alternate fury and dejection; of cries for revenge, and supplications for bread; of the tyranny of the mob, and the misery of the nation. I now found it the most striking contrast to that scene of despair; – Paris the headquarters of a military government; the Tuileries the palace of a conqueror; every sound martial; the eye dazzled every where by the spoils of the German and Italian sovereignties; the nation flushed with victory. Still, the public aspect exhibited peculiarities which interested me the more, that they could never have appeared in older times, and probably will never return. In the midst of military splendour there was a wild, haggard, and unhappy character stamped on all things. The streets of the capital had not yet felt the influence of that imperial taste which was to render it an imperial city. I saw the same shattered suburbs, the same deep, narrow, and winding streets, the same dismal lanes; in which I had witnessed so often the gatherings of the armed multitude, and which seemed made for popular commotion. Mingled with those wild wrecks and gloomy places of refuge, rather than dwellings, I saw, with their ancient ornaments, and even with their armorial bearings and gilded shields and spears not yet entirely defaced, the palaces of the noblesse and blood-royal of France, the remnants of those ten centuries of monarchy which had been powerful enough to reduce the bold tribes of the Franks to a civilized slavery, and glittering enough to make them in love with their chains. If I could have imagined, in the nineteenth century, a camp of banditti on its most showy scale – a government of Condottieri with its most famous captain at its head – every where a compilation of arms and spoils, the rude habits of the robber combined with the pomp of military triumph – I should have said that the realization was before me.

The Palais Royal was still the chief scene of all Parisian vitality. But the mob orators were to be found there no more. The walks and cafés were now crowed with bold figures, epauleted and embroidered, laughing and talking with the easy air of men who felt themselves masters, and who evidently regarded every thing round them as the furnishing of a camp. The land had now undergone its third stage of that great spell by which nations are urged and roused at the will of a few. The crosier was the first wand of the magician, then came the sceptre – we were now under the spell of the sword. I was delighted at this transformation of France, from the horrid form of popular domination to the showy supremacy of soldiership. It still had its evils. But the guillotine had disappeared. Savage hearts and sanguinary hands no longer made the laws, and executed them. Instead of the groans and execrations, the cries of rage and clamours of despair, which once echoed through all the streets, I now heard only popular songs and dances, and saw all the genuine evidences of that rejoicing with which the multitude had thrown off the most deadly of all tyrannies – its own.

The foreigner shapes every thing into the picturesque, and all his picturesque now was military. Every regiment which passed through Paris on its way from the frontier was reviewed, in front of the palace, by the First Consul; and those reviews formed the finest of all military spectacles, for each had a character and a history of its own. – The regiment which had stormed the bridge of Lodi; the regiment which had headed the assault on the tête-du-pont at Mantua; the regiment which had led the march at the passage of the St Bernard; the regiment which had formed the advance of Dessaix at Marengo – all had their separate distinctions, and were received with glowing speeches and appropriate honours by the chief of the state. The popular vanity was flattered by a perpetual pageant, and that pageant wholly different from the tinsel displays of the monarchy: no representation of legends, trivial in their origin, and ridiculous in their memory; but the revival of transactions in which every man of France felt almost a personal interest, which were the true sources of the new system of nations, and whose living actors were seen passing, hour after hour, before the national eye. All was vivid reality, where all had been false glitter in the days of the Bourbons, and all sullenness and fear in the days of the Democracy. The reality might still be rough and stern, but it was substantial, and not without its share of the superb; it had the sharpness and weight, and it had also the shining, of the sabre. But this was not all; nothing could be more subtly consecutive than the whole progress of the head of the government. In a more superstitious age, it might have been almost believed that some wizard had stood by his cradle, and sung his destiny; or that, like the greatest creation of the greatest of dramatists, he had been met in some mountain pass, or on some lonely heath, and had heard the weird sisters predicting his charmed supremacy. At this period he was palpably training the republic to the sight of a dictatorship. The return of the troops through Paris had already accustomed the populace to the sight of military power.

The movement of vast masses of men by a word, the simplicity of the great military machine, its direct obedience to the master-hand, and its tremendous strength – all were a continued lesson to the popular mind. I looked on the progress of this lesson with infinite interest; for I thought that I as about to see a new principle of government disclosed on the broadest scale – Republicanism in its most majestic aspect, giving a new development of the art of ruling men, and exhibiting a shape of domination loftier and more energetic than the world had ever yet seen. Still, I was aware of the national weaknesses. I was not without a strong suspicion of the hazard of human advance when entrusted to the caprice of any being in the form of man, and, above all, to a man who had won his way to power by arms. Yet, I thought that society had here reached a point of division; a ridge, from which the streams of power naturally took different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice, of roaring torrent and sunless valley, through which the Alpine traveller must toil, before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain. Attached as I am in the highest degree to the principle of monarchy, and regarding it as the safest anchorage of the state, still, how was I to know that moral nature might not have her reserves of power, as well as physical; that the science of government itself might not have its undetected secrets, as well as the caverns of the earth; that the quiverings and convulsions of society at this moment, obviously alike beyond calculation and control, might not be only evidences of the same vast agencies at work, whose counterparts, in depths below the human eye, shake and rend the soil? Those were the days of speculation, and I indulged in them like the rest of the world. Every man stood, as the islander of the South Sea may stand on his shore, contemplating the conflict of fire and water, while the furnaces of the centre are forcing up the island in clouds of vapour and gusts of whirlwind. All was strange, undefined, and startling. One thing alone seemed certain; that the past régime was gone, never to return; that a great barrier had suddenly been dropped between the two sovereignties; that the living generation stood on the dividing pinnacle between the languid vices of the past system and the daring, perhaps guilty, energies of the system to come. Behind man lay the long level of wasted national faculties, emasculating superstitions, the graceful feebleness of a sensual nobility, and the superb follies of a haughty and yet helpless throne. Before him rose a realm of boundless extent, but requiring frames of vigour, and feelings undismayed by difficulty, to traverse and subdue; – a horizon of hills and clouds, where the gale blew fresh and the tempest rolled; where novel difficulties must be met at every step, but still where, if we trod at all, we must ascend at every step, where every clearing of the horizon must give us a new and more comprehensive prospect, and where every struggle with the rudeness of the soil, or the roughness of the elements, must enhance the vigour of the nerve that encountered them.

Those were dreams; yet I had not then made due allowance for the nature of the foreign mind. I was yet to learn its absence of all sober thought; its ready temptation by every trivially of the hour; its demand of extravagant excitement to rouse it into action, and its utter apathy where its passions were not bribed. I had imagined a national sovereignty, righteous, calm, and resolute, trained by the precepts of a Milton and a Locke; I found only an Italian despotism, trained by the romance of Rousseau and the scepticism of Voltaire.

Every day in the capital now had its celebration, and all exhibited the taste and talent of the First Consul; but one characteristic fête at length woke me to the true design of this extraordinary man – the inauguration of the Legion of Honour. It was the first step to the throne, and a step of incompatible daring and dexterity; it was the virtual restoration of an aristocracy, in the presence of a people who had raved with the rage of frenzy against all titles, who had torn down the coats-of-arms from the gates of the noblesse, and shattered and dug up even the marbles of their sepulchres. A new military caste – a noblesse of the sword – was now to be established. Republicanism had been already "pushed from its stool," but this was the chain which was to keep it fixed to the ground.

The ceremonial was held in the Hotel des Invalides; and all the civil pomp of the consulate was combined with all the military display. The giving of the crosses of honour called forth in succession the names of all those gallant soldiers whose exploits had rung through Europe, in the campaigns of the Alps and the Rhine. Nothing could be more in the spirit of a fine historic picture, or in the semblance of a fine drama. The first men of the French councils and armies stood, surrounded by the monuments of their ancestors in the national glory – the statues of the Condés and Turennes, whose memory formed so large a portion of the popular pride, and whose achievements so solid a record in the history of French triumph. To those high sources of sentiment, all that could be added by stately decoration and religious solemnity was given; and in the chorus of sweet voices, the sounds of martial harmony, the acclamations of the countless multitudes within and without, and the thunder of cannon, was completed the most magnificent, and yet the most ominous, of all ceremonials. It was not difficult to see, that this day was the consecration of France to absolute power, and of all her faculties to conquest. Like the Roman herald, she had put on, in the temple, the robe of defiance to all nations. She was to be from this day of devotement the nation of war. It was less visible, but not less true, that upon the field of Marengo perished the Democracy, but in that temple was sacrificed the Republic. The throne was still only in vision; but its outline was clear, and that outline was colossal.

In my intercourse with the men of the new régime I had associated chiefly with the military. Their ideas were less narrowed by the circle of Paris, their language was frank and free, and their knowledge was more direct and extensive on the topic which I most desired to comprehend, the state of their foreign conquests. I soon had reason to congratulate myself on my choice. One of these, a colonel of dragoons, who had served with Moreau, and whose partialities at least did not lean to the rival hero, came hurriedly to me at an early hour one morning, to "take his leave." But why, and where? "He was ordered to join his regiment immediately, and march for the coast of the Channel." "To invade us?" I asked laughingly. "Not exactly yet, perhaps; but it may come to that in good time. I grieve to tell you," added my gallant friend, with more of gravity than I thought he could possibly have thrown into his good-humoured features, "that we are to have war. The matter is perfectly determined in the Tuileries; and at the levee to-day there will probably be a scene. In the mean time, take my information as certain, and be prepared for your return to England without twenty-four hours' delay." He took his departure.

I attended the levee on that memorable day, and saw the scene. The Place du Carrousel was unusually crowded with troops, which the First Consul was passing in review. The whole population seemed to have conjectured the event of the day; for I had never seen them in such numbers, or with such an evident look of general anxiety. The Tuileries were filled with officers of state, with leading military men, and members of the Senate and Tribunat; the whole body of the foreign ambassadors were present; and yet the entire assemblage was kept waiting until the First Consul had inspected even the firelocks of his guard, and the shoes in their knapsacks. The diplomatists, as they saw from the high casements of the palace this tardy operation going on, exchanged glaces with each other at its contemptuous trifling. Some of the militaires exhibited the impatience of men accustomed to prompt measures; the civilians smiled and shrugged their shoulders; but all felt that there was a purpose in the delay.

At length, the drums beat for the close of the review; the First Consul galloped up to the porch of the palace, flung himself from his charger, sprang up the staircase, and without stopping for etiquette, rushed into the salle, followed by cloud of aides-de-camp and chamberlains. The Circle of Presentations was formed, and he walked hastily round it, saying few rapid words to each. I observed for the first time an aide-de-camp moving on the outside of the circle, step for step, and with his eye steadily marking the gesture of each individual to whom the First Consul spoke in his circuit. This was a new precaution, and indicative of the time. Till then he had run all risks, and might have been the victim of any daring hand. The very countenance of the First Consul was historic; it was as characteristic as his career. It exhibited the most unusual contrast of severity and softness; nothing sterner than the gathering of his brow, nothing more flattering than his smile. On this occasion we had them both in perfection. To the general diplomatic circle his lip wore the smile. But when he reached the spot where the British ambassador stood, we had the storm at once. With his darkest frown, and with every feature in agitation, he suddenly burst out into a tirade against England – reproaching her with contempt of treaties; with an absolute desire for war; with a perpetual passion for embroiling Europe; with forming armaments in the midst of peace; and with challenging France to an encounter which must provoke universal hostilities. The English ambassador listened in silence, but with the air of a high-spirited man, who would concede nothing to menace; and with the countenance of an intelligent one, who could have easily answered declamation by argument. But for this answer there was no time. The First Consul, having delivered his diatribe, suddenly sprang round, darted through the crowd, rushed through a portal, and was lost to the view. That scene was decisive. I saw that war was inevitable. I took my friend's advice, ordered post-horses, and within the twenty-four hours I saw with infinite delight the cliffs of Dover shining in the dawn.

I am not writing a history. I am merely throwing together events separated by great chasms, in the course of a life. My life was all incident; sometimes connected with public transactions of the first magnitude, sometimes wholly personal; and thus I hasten on to the close of a public career which has ended, and of an existence diversified by cloud and sunshine, but on the whole happy.

The war began; it was unavoidable. The objects of our great adversary have been since stripped of their disguise. His system, at the time, was to lull England by peace, until he had amassed a force which would crush her at the outbreak of a war. A few years would have concentrated his strength, and brought the battle to our own shores. But there are higher impulses acting on the world than human ambition; the great machine is not altogether guided by man. England had the cause of nations in her charge; her principles were truth, honour, and justice. She had retained the reverence of her forefathers for the Sanctuary; and the same guidance which had in the beginning taught her wisdom, ultimately crowned her with victory. I lived through a period of the most overwhelming vicissitudes of nations, and of the great disturber himself, who had caused those vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed, under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will be her last war.

On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of government, and of the general progress of society.

I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe. Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory, when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus more happy, was the fate of him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner, dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he forged his own chain.

Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentricity of its course, as we saw it eclipsing the old luminaries in succession; until it touched our orbit, and visited us in conflagration.

It was said that Pitt died of a broken heart, in despair of the prospects of England. The defeat of Austerlitz was pronounced his death-blow. What thoughts may cluster round the sleepless pillow, who shall tell? But no man knew England better; none had a bolder faith in her perseverance and principle; none had more broadly laid the foundations of victory in national honour. I shall never be driven into the belief that William Pitt despaired of his country.

He died in the vigour of his genius, in the proudest struggle of the empire, in the midst of the deepest trial which for a thousand years had demanded all the faculties of England. Yet, what man within human recollection had lived so long, if we are to reckon life not by the calendar but by triumphs? What minister of England, what minister of Europe, but himself, was the head of his government for three-and-twenty years? What man had attained so high an European rank? What mind had influenced so large an extent of European interests? What name was so instinctively pronounced by every nation, as the first among mankind? To have earned distinctions like these, was to have obtained all that time could give. Not half a century in years, Pitt's true age was patriarchal.

I was now but a spectator. My connexion with public life was broken off. Every name with which I had been associated was swept away; and I stood like a man flung from ship-wreck upon a shore, where every face which he met was that of a stranger. I was still in Parliament, but I felt a loathing for public exertions. From habit, I had almost identified office with the memorable men whom I had seen governing so long; and the new faces, the new declamation, and the new principles, which the ministerial change brought before me nightly, startled my feelings even less as new than as incongruous. I admitted the ability, the occasional intelligence, and perhaps even the patriotism of the cabinet; but in those reveries, (the natural refuge from a long debate,) memory so often peopled the Treasury Bench with the forms of Pitt and his distinguished coadjutors, and so completely filled my ear with his sonorous periods and high-toned principles, that when I was roused to the reality, I felt as those who have seen some great performer in one of Shakspeare's characters, until no excellence of his successor can embody the conception once more.

I retired from the tumult of London, and returned to tastes which I had never wholly forgotten; taking a small residence within a few miles of this centre of the living world, and devoting my leisure to the enjoyments of that life, which, in the purest days of man, was given to him as the happiest, "to dress the garden, and keep it." Clotilde in all her tastes joined with mine, or rather led them, with the instinctive elegance of a female mind, accomplished in every grace of education. We read, wrote, walked, talked, and pruned our rose-trees and gathered our carnations and violets, together. She had already given me those pledges, which, while they increase the anxiety, also increase the affection, of wedded life. The education of our children was a new source of interest. They were handsome and healthy. Their little sports, the growth of their young perceptions, and the freshness of their ideas, renewed to us both all the delights of society without their exhaustion; and when, after returning from a day spent in the noise and bustle of London, I reached my rustic gate, heard the cheerful voices of the little population which rushed down the flowery avenue to cling upon my neck; and stood at the door of my cottage, with my arm round the waist of my beautiful and fond wife, breathing the evening fragrance of a thousand blooms, and enjoying the cool air, and the purple glories of the sky – I often wondered why men should seek for happiness in any other scene; and felt gratitude, not the less sincere for its being calm and solemn, to the Giver of a lot so nearly approaching to human fulness of joy.

But the world rolls on, let who will slumber among its roses. The political world was awoke by a thunder-clap. Fox died. He was just six months a minister! Such is ambition, such is the world. He died, like Pitt, in the zenith of his powers, with his judgment improved and his passions mitigated, with the noblest prospects of public utility before his eyes, and the majestic responsibilities of a British minister assuming their natural rank in his capacious mind. The times, too, were darkening; and another "lodestar" was thus stricken from the national hemisphere, at the moment when the nation most wanted guidance. The lights which remained were many; but they were vague, feeble, and scattered. The "leader of the starry host" was gone.

I cannot trust myself to speak of this distinguished man; for I was no Foxite. I regarded his policy in opposition as the pleadings of a powerful advocate, with a vast retaining fee, a most comprehensive cause, and a most generous and confiding client. Popularity, popular claims, and the people, were all three made for him beyond all other men; and no advocate ever pleaded with more indefatigable zeal, or more resolute determination. But, raised to a higher position, higher qualities were demanded. Whether they might not have existed in his nature, waiting for the development of time, is the question. But time was not given. His task had hitherto been easy. It was simply to stand as a spectator on the shore, criticising the manœuvres of a stately vessel struggling with the gale. The helm was at last put into his hand; and it was then that he felt the difference between terra firma and the wild and restless element which he was now to control. But he had scarcely set his foot on the deck, when he, too, was swept away. On such brevity of trial, it is impossible to judge. Time might have matured his vigour, while it expanded his views: matchless as the leader of a party, he might then have been elevated into the acknowledged leader of a people. The singular daring, ardent sensitiveness, and popular ambition, which made him dangerous in a private station, might then have found their nobler employment, and been purified in the broad and lofty region of ministerial duty. He might have enlarged the partizan into the patriot, and, instead of being the great leader of a populace, have been ennobled into the great guide of an empire.