THE CODE NAPOLEON

  I

  WHILE being what many would call a fanatic for the French alliance, I cannot bring myself to admire the suggestion that we should alter such names as that of Waterloo Station, out of delicacy towards the French. If once the memory of a national victory is to be regarded as an international insult, France herself would have to apologize to nearly every country in Europe. There is scarcely a city on the Continent the French have not entered in triumph; there is scarcely a flag in the civilized world that the French have not hung on their temples or their triumphal arches; there is scarcely a kingdom or a province that has not the name of a French victory that might be or is the name of a Paris street. If such a reminder to the victors is a reproach to the vanquished, England, as well as Europe, has a right to complain of the monuments of France. Every statue of Joan of Arc is a memorial of English defeat. In short, if we, the English, did really desire to glorify the memory of the Battle I of Waterloo, it would seem that we have adopted a rather dingy and ineffectual way of doing it. We have never been very fortunate with our public monuments, and Waterloo Station would certainly seem to be one of the least felicitous. The great figure on the Colonne de Vendôme can afford to smile at the artistic effort.

  But there is another reform, connected with the same set of ideas, which I would very respectfully urge as a substitute. I fear it is a much more radical and even revolutionary reform than the alteration of a name connected with the defeat of Napoleon. It is that we should leave off talking nonsense about Napoleon, and especially talking nonsense against Napoleon. It is, that instead of bothering about whether a large railway shed is named after the Battle of Waterloo, we should actually try to learn something about the Battle of Waterloo and about the real merits and demerits of the European adventure which finally failed there. So drastic and even dramatic a change in our historical habits is certainly more of an undertaking than the alteration of a luggage label from Waterloo to Stockholm or Brest-Litovsk, or some name which our Pacifists might prefer. Men will certainly not forget Waterloo any more than they will forget Napoleon; and since we cannot forget them, we are almost driven back on the desperate expedient of understanding them.

  In looking over a large number of English articles and essays touching Napoleon I was astonished to find how insular and even ignorant our national tradition still is on the subject. So far as moral atmosphere is concerned, nothing seems to have changed. Bonaparte is still Boney; nobody denies his genius now; but nobody denied it then. Even those whose very natural emotions at the moment made them insist that he was a great tyrant, a great murderer, a great monster, did not dispute that he was a great man. But what he was doing, what he was driving at, why he was what he was and what the whole terrific business was all about, none of us seems to have had any notion then, and none of us seems to have any notion now. What is wanted is not glorification of Napoleon, still less glorification of him as a demi-god, which is even worse than denunciation of him as a demon. What is wanted is a calm and candid consideration of him as a historical human being, and of the things he stood for, which were much more important than himself. This is the one thing that nobody will do for Napoleon; and the trick by which his reasonable fame still suffers is simple enough.

  The trick consists of first artificially attiring him in all the terrors of a superman, and on that ground denying him the rights of a man. Somebody said the devil was a gentleman; and somebody else said that Napoleon was not a gentleman. The trick consists in expressing surprise that he was not a gentleman when we have settled to our own satisfaction that he was the devil. But if we need sanity touching Napoleon in his personal aspect, we need it much more in his public aspect. For the things for which Napoleon really fought were the very contrary of those cloudy and fatalistic things with which his legends have been clothed. If ever a man stood for the strong southern sun against the clouds and the confusing twilight, it was he. What Napoleon stood for was common sense — le bon sens français. That French common sense can sometimes be cruel, but never fatalistic. It despises dooms and omens and hereditary curses and chosen races and all the superstitious necessitarianism of the North. In short, he stood for French freedom and in this sense for French free thought. But if there was another thing he stood for, it was French respectability. He represented a mass of customs and conceptions, of which his English enemies seemed to know nothing and his English admirers to know less. His laws cannot be understood without the French key of domesticity. All his legislation and social reform revolved round the very thing which all our legislation and social reform are seeking to destroy — the family. It was the very reverse of what we call grandmotherly legislation, but it might in one sense be called legislation for grandmothers. The central figure of its family council was that terrible person the French grandmother. If Napoleon was not always a Christian, he was always a pagan, and what paganism would call a pious pagan. He understood the thing that so many French poets express, the veneration of the soil and the invocation of the dead. In all this he was doubt less merely the leader of Latin culture; and all the more because all forms of that culture are rooted in the form we call agriculture. It desires the human family to stand on its own feet, within the frontiers of its own land. With that object it was revolutionary. With that object it is conservative. The French Revolution cannot be under stood, till we realize that it is exactly where the Jacobins went that the Bolshevists cannot follow.

  II

  Napoleon did once say, among many other random and cynical remarks in a busy life, that he doubted whether he really loved anybody. If human beings in history were treated with half the sympathy and sobriety given to human beings in novels, we should all understand that this was probably the bitter and brief expression of some mood of hardening, common in middle age, but faced with all the realism of a Latin. Napoleon, in early life, had quite certainly loved not wisely but too well. So much for the remark itself. And now let me draw attention to something that went along with it. Immediately after Napoleon had said in his haste that he loved nobody, he corrected himself and added as an after thought some such words as these: ‘Except perhaps Joseph, from a sort of habit; because he is the eldest of us.’ Now, those who regard Napoleon either as Satan or a Superman would never have dreamed of his saying that. It is the very last thing they would expect him to say; it is the very last exception they would expect him to make. They would understand the sinister hero being faithful to one faithless woman; or worshipping some Princesse Lointaine of legendary beauty; or having his weary heart refreshed by a golden-haired child or beggar maid; or taking the advice of some wild prophet or jester in whom anything was tolerated. But that he should still have a humdrum and almost humble attachment to the head of the family, bigger than he in the nursery and the playground, and for no other reason whatever, is an anti-climax to all anarchical romance. The Superman is still actually looking up to his elder brother, simply be cause he is his elder brother. We look for Napoleon and we find Buonaparte ainé. In Thackeray and nearly all English fiction, it is taken for granted, with a laugh, that a fellow can hardly be expected to be very fond of his elder brother. In the Code of the Corsican Ogre it is taken for granted, with entire innocence, that a fellow cannot help being fond of his elder brother, even if it is only a habit. That is what I mean when I say that if we wanted to find the virtues of men like Napoleon we should look for them in the wrong place. That is what I mean when I say that we do not understand even what such a Latin would mean by trying to be good, if he did try to be good. His virtues would startle us by their staleness. The devil would hardly become anything so romantic as a monk; but rather a bourgeois. He would be domestic and almost dowdy.

  In short, Napoleon may or may not have had all these fancy virtues and vices of the strong man; but, anyhow, there was something that was stronger than Napoleon. There was something that he served and did not really pretend to rule. He served his own family; and he served the whole institution of the family. Much of the Code Napoléon turns upon it, and its economic expression in a peasantry. It is the supreme and sacred institution of Latin society; and whether we are to be friends or foes of that society, we shall be wise to understand it better. The men who are professing to reconcile all nations do not attempt to understand it at all.

  CYRANO AND CHANTECLER

  I HEAR that an attack is being made by some of the French critics upon ‘Chantecler’ and the Rostand reputation generally — an attack taking the form of a charge of ‘mere rhetoric’ and a protest against extravagant and even insolent puns. That some such hostile impression might exist in England I could well understand. To begin with the simplest reason, the little I have happened to see in the way of English translation of Rostand has been laughably inadequate. I even remember seeing a version of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ in which the last line of the Ballade of the Duel was translated quite literally. As everybody knows, each verse of that impromptu poem ends with the line, ‘A la fin de l’envoi je touche’ — that is, ‘I hit you at the end of the envoi’, or last verse. Obviously, it should be roughly rendered ‘I hit you when the ballad ends’ or ‘And at the ballad’s end the blow’, or anything of that kind. In this learned translation, Cyrano was made to say at the end of every stanza, ‘And at the envoy’s end I touch’. Not one person in ten in an English theatre would know that ‘touch’ is a French technical term for a hit in fencing. Not one person in twenty would know that the envoi is the ritual last verse of the old French ballade. If therefore Cyrano said ‘At the envoy’s end I touch’, it is impossible to conceive what an English crowd would think he meant.

  But, of course, this verbal mistranslation is only the emblem of a much deeper sort of misunderstanding. It is no disgrace to an intelligent Englishman of a certain type that he cannot care for Rostand’s military brilliancy; just as it would be no disgrace to a classically-minded Frenchman that he could see nothing beautiful in the tangled forest of Browning. There is an English temper in which the violence of French rhetoric seems merely stiff and thin. Such a type of Englishman would be annoyed both ways by a Rostand drama. The nose of Cyrano de Bergerac seems to him as gross as the nose of Ally Sloper. The rhetoric of Cyrano de Bergerac seems to him as artificial as that of Bombastes Furioso. The two spiritual roots of difference lie in two French qualities which the English scarcely possess at all; first the power of feeling that hatred is something holy; and second the power, not merely of laughing at oneself, but of laughing unmercifully. Our English idea of a hero is built upon the sailor, the accessible and open-hearted fellow who kills everybody with the kindest feelings. Our hero is Nelson or Harry V — I mean the genial and magnanimous Henry V of Shakespeare, not the morbid and cruel Henry of history. Nelson wears his heart on his sleeve, as he wears his Orders on his coat. Shakespeare’s King Henry broods over his beloved subjects and seeks to give them (in a splendid line) ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ But Cyrano, though he fills the stage, is by no means a universal gentlemen. Cyrano, though he lives and dies for love, is by no means, in the general sense, a loving or a lovable character. It is his vice, he says, to wish everybody to hate him. He compares love to the loose Vandyck collars that are coming into fashion, and hatred to the stiff Elizabethan ruff which he still retains; it is uncomfortable, but it holds a man’s head up: ‘La Haine est un carcan, mais c’est une auréole.’ To be a bitter and exact critic of society, to lash the age, to demand that acting, writing, fencing should reach a severe standard, to wage a lonely war on stupidity — this is a French idea; it is the idea of Rostand’s Cyrano, just as it is the idea of Molière’s Misanthrope. It is hard for an Englishman (at least, it is hard for me) heartily to like this idealistic cruelty. It is hard for us to imagine scorn as something fruitful and ever-festive; to behold that bitter tree bearing lovely blossoms and delightful fruit. It is hard for us to realize a pageant of blazing wit and romantic activity all produced by such stiff anger as has produced an anchorite or a suicide. It is as if all the gay Athenian comedies had been written by Timon of Athens. But though this sentiment of sacred hate is not easy to us, that is no reason why we should not do justice to it. And France may fairly claim that much philanthropy has been founded by the Misanthrope.

  The other un-English quality is best represented in ‘Chantecler’ itself. The Englishman can laugh at himself, but the Frenchman can sneer at himself, can laugh at himself till himself gets cross. It was very French to parade the fierce satiric poet Cyrano, the very romance of unpopularity, defying human society and taunting death. It was very French to devote a whole tragedy (as in ‘L’Aiglon’) to the mere memory of Napoleon, the mere size of his shadow. It had the same heroic impossibility as that great Spanish legend in which two knights led out the corpse of the Cid on horseback and all the armies of the Moors fled before it. But it was most French of all, after exhibiting these towering heroes, suddenly to exhibit them again as clucking fowls in a farm-yard and a cock crowing on a dunghill. First, Cyrano’s ‘panache’, his high unbroken feather, brushes the stars; next, it is only the feather of a chicken waddling about a yard. First, Napoleon’s trumpet is like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calling to the quick and the dead; next, it is only cock-a-doodle-doo from the ragged hero of a hundred cock-fights.

  Precisely because Rostand, a romantic and patriotic Frenchman, laughs at the omnipotence of the Gallic cock, many foreigners are enabled to laugh at it who by no means laugh at equally foolish things of their own. The phrase, for instance, that the sun never sets on the British Empire, is quite as intrinsically ludicrous as the idea that the sun cannot rise without the Gallic cock. That measureless, unthinkable furnace which flings its remoter firelight over such stardust as our earth and many like it, is not much more insulted by one idea than by the other. There is mockery in the notion that those awful ancestral fires are encouraged when they hear the cock; there is surely equal mockery in the suggestion that they are discouraged if they do not see the Union Jack. But the difference is that no patriotic English poet will write a romantic drama to point out the cosmic comicality of supposing that the distant and fiery star needs, for its comfort, a little touch of John Bull in the night. But it is French satire that always scores off French heroism; it is the same nation in the two moods; sometimes, as in Rostand’s case, it is even the same individual. France has claimed, not without reason, to be the Roman Eagle; she has claimed the eagle and earned it. But she has always gone back on herself to the admission that she is not the eagle, but the cock.

  PASSING THROUGH THE CUSTOMS

  THE more a man thinks and travels, the more plainly it will appear that nearly every Christian nation, like nearly every Christian marriage, is a kind of passionate compromise that no one else can understand. Just as in one family the man may collect snakes because he may not smoke cigars, or in another house the woman may be a shrew because she is not a Suffragette, so every great European people achieves a practical equilibrium in some particular and almost secret manner. It is a mistake to suppose that this equilibrium is peculiar to certain people — to talk about Germany as ‘efficient’, or England as ‘businesslike’. In a superficial sense, all the great white nations are efficient; in a deeper and grander sense, the whole human race is as inefficient as an idiot school. But the peoples of Europe are not so much seeking different things as seeking the same things in different ways.

  I passed lately through the Custom Houses of three countries — England, France, and Germany. They were as different as a lecture, a massacre, and a morning call; they might have been done in three different planets or by three different races of animals. But they were all equally efficient, they were all a nuisance and they all took almost exactly the same time to a tick of the clock. The French douane impressed an English lady who was unfamiliar with travel with the idea that she had got into some particularly squalid and sanguinary corner of the French Revolution. Bullet-headed men barging and hanging into everybody, bawling at the top of their voices and throwing luggage about like lumber — this vision struck her simple mind as having in it some element of confusion. She asked how we should ever get to the end of such anarchy. Almost as she said the words the thing was over; everyone had the right luggage, passed with the proper form of examination; everyone was free again and happy. ‘These people’, I said to her, ‘do not bang and bawl because they are confused or lawless, nor because they are inefficient, nor yet because they are efficient. They bang and bawl because they are French; they like it; it seems to soothe them.’

  The French Custom House had been a small, dusty, wooden room like a shed The German Custom House was a vast twilight temple, inlaid with gold and mosaic, like the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral. Vast spaces of its echoing floors were not used or even inhabited. Numbers of its officials, standing about in uniforms of an aesthetic peacock green, seemed to have nothing to do at all. There is nothing specially ‘practical’ about peacock green. One was, indeed, handed about from one official to another and permitted, with silent pomp, to pass from one large waiting-room into another exactly like it. But it was not really oppressive, any more than the French mêlée was really brutal: the whole thing was a national sport. And the luggage was inspected and passed, the travellers marshalled and set free, in exactly the same space of time as they had been at Boulogne.