He had their virtues, and their vices; above all, he had
their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, pointing at a sensual
success, and employing the richest and most various means to that end;
conversant with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely and
accurately learned and skilful, but subordinating all intellectual and
spiritual forces into means to a material success. To be the rich man
is the end. "God has granted" says the Koran, "to every people a prophet
in its own tongue." Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit of
commerce, of money, and material power, were also to have their prophet;
and Bonaparte was qualified and sent.
Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or memoirs, or lives
of Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it his own
history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of
his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint,--to
use his own word, "no capuchin," and he is no hero, in the high sense.
The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other
men in the street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen,
who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a commanding position,
that he could indulge all those tastes which the common man possesses,
but is obliged to conceal and deny; good society, good books, fast
traveling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight,
the execution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor
to all persons about him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues,
music, palaces, and conventional honors,--precisely what is agreeable
to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century,--this powerful
man possessed.
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