Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches. McCarthy Justin Huntly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ qualities of greatness. But I believe the public was not a whit more gravely mistaken when it regarded the King street exile as a dreamy dunce, than it is now, when it regards Napoleon III. as a ruler of consummate wisdom.

      There was much of sound sense as well as wit in the saying ascribed to Thiers, that the second Empire had developed two great statesmen—Cavour and Bismarck. I do not know of any one great idea, worthy of being called a contribution to the science of government, which Louis Napoleon has yet embodied, either in words or actions. The recent elections, and the events succeeding them, only demonstrate the failure of Imperialism or Cæsarism, after a trial and after opportunities such as it probably will never have again in Europe. I certainly do not expect any complete collapse during the present reign. Doubtless the machine will outlast the third Emperor's time. He has sense and dexterity enough to trim his sails to each breeze that passes, and he will, probably, hold the helm till his right hand loses its cunning with its vital power. But I see no evidence whatever which induces me to believe that he has founded a dynasty or created an enduring system of any kind. Some day France will shake off the whole thing like a nightmare. Meantime, however, I am anxious to help in dethroning the Louis Napoleon of the journals rather than him of the Tuileries. The latter has many good qualities which the former is never allowed to exhibit. I believe the true Louis Napoleon has a remarkably kind and generous heart; that he is very liberal and charitable; that he has much affection in him, and is very faithful to his old friends and old servants; that people who come near him love him much; that he is free and kindly of speech; that his personal defects are rather those of a warm and rash, than of a cold and stern nature. But I think it is high time that we were done with the melodramatic, dime-romance, darkly mysterious Louis Napoleon of the journals. He belongs to the race of William Tell, of the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, the Sphinx to whom he is so often compared, the mermaid, the sea-serpent, Byron's Corsair, and Thaddeus of Warsaw.

EUGENIE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.

       Table of Contents

      There are certain men and women in history who seem to have a peculiarity, independent of their merits or demerits, greatness or littleness, virtues or crimes—a peculiarity which distinguishes them from others as great or as little, as virtuous or as criminal. They are, first and above all things, interesting. It is not easy to describe what the elements are which make up this attribute. Certainly genius or goodness, wit or wisdom, splendid public services, great beauty, or even great suffering, will not always be enough to create it. The greatest English king since the First Edward was assuredly William the Third; the greatest military commanders England has ever had were Marlborough and Wellington; but these three will hardly be called by any one interesting personages in the sense in which I now use the word. Why Nelson should be interesting and Wellington not so, Byron interesting and Wordsworth not so, is perhaps easy enough to explain; but it is not quite easy to see why Rousseau should be so much more interesting than Voltaire, Goethe than Schiller, Mozart than Handel, and so on through a number of illustrations, the accuracy of which nearly all persons would probably acknowledge. Where history and public opinion and sentiment have to deal with the lives and characters of women, the peculiarity becomes still more deeply emphasized. What gifts, what graces, what rank, what misfortunes have ever surrounded any queens or princesses known to history with the interest which attaches to Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette? Lady Jane Grey was an incomparably nobler woman than either, and suffered to the full as deeply as either; yet what place has she in men's feelings and interest compared with theirs? Who cares about Anna Boleyn, though she too shared a throne and mounted a scaffold?

      Absit omen! I am about to speak of an illustrious living lady, who has in common with Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette two things at least: she has a French sovereign for a husband, and she has the fame of beauty. But she has likewise that other peculiarity of which I spoke: she is interesting. It is only speaking by the card to say that by far the most interesting of all the imperial and royal ladies now living is Eugénie, Empress of the French. I think there are princesses in Europe more beautiful and even more graceful than she is, or than she ever could have been; I fancy there are some much more highly gifted with intellect; but there is no woman living in any European palace in whom the general world feels half so much interest. There is not the slightest reason to believe that she is a woman of really penetrating or commanding intellect, and should she be happy enough to live out her life in the Tuileries and die peacefully in her bed, history will find but little to say about her, good or bad. Yet so long as her memory remains in men's minds, it will be as that of a princess who had above all things the gift of being interesting—the power of attracting toward herself the eyes, the admiration, the curiosity, the wonder of all the civilized world.

      "We count time by heart-throbs, not by figures on a dial," says a poet who once nearly secured immortality, Philip James Bailey. There certainly are people whose age seems to defy counting by figures on a dial. Ask anybody what two pictures are called up in his mind when he hears the names of Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French, no matter whether he has ever seen the two illustrious ladies or not. In the case of the former I may safely venture to answer for him that he sees the face and figure of a motherly, homely body; a woman who has got quite beyond the age when people observe how she dresses; to whom personal appearance is no longer of any importance or interest. In the case of the latter he sees a dazzling court beauty; a woman who, though not indeed in her youth, is still in a glorious prime; a woman to captivate hearts, and inspire poets, and set scandal going, and adorn a ball-room or a throne. The first instinctive idea would be, I think, that the Empress of the French belonged positively to a later generation than the good, unattractive, dowdyish Queen of England. Yet I believe the difference in actual years is very slight. To be sure, you will find in any almanac that Queen Victoria was born on the 24th of May, 1819, and is consequently very near to fifty-one years of age; while the fair Eugénie is set down as having been born on May 5th, 1826, and consequently would now appear to be only in her forty-fourth year. But then Queen Victoria was born in the purple, and cannot, poor thing, make any attempt at reducing by one single year the full figure of her age. History has taken an inexorable, ineffaceable note of the day and hour of her birth; and even court flattery cannot affect to ignore the record. Now Eugénie was born in happy obscurity; even the place of her birth is not known by the public with that certainty which alone satisfies sceptics; and I have heard that the date recorded as that of her natal hour is only a graceful fiction, a pretty bit of polite biography. Certainly I have heard it stoutly maintained that if any historian or critic were now to be as ungallant in his researches as John Wilson Croker was in the case of Lady Morgan (was it not Lady Morgan?), he would find that the birth of the brilliant Empress of the French would have to be dated back a few years, and that after all the difference between her and the elderly Queen Victoria is less an affair of time than of looks and of heart-throbs.

      About a dozen years, I suppose, have passed away since I saw the Empress Eugénie and Queen Victoria sitting side by side. Assuredly the difference even then might well have been called a contrast, although the Queen was in her happiest time, and has worn out terribly fast since that period. But the quality which above all others Queen Victoria wanted was just that in which the Empress of the French is supreme—the quality of imperial, womanly grace. I have never been a rapturous admirer of the beauty of the Empress; a certain narrowness of contour in the face, the eyes too closely set together, and an appearance of artificiality in every movement of the features, seem to me to detract very much from the charms of her countenance. But her queenly grace of gesture, of attitude, of form, of motion, must be admitted to be beyond cavil, and superb. She looks just the woman on whom any sort of garment would hang with grace and attractiveness; a blanket would become like a regal mantle if it fell round her shoulders; I verily believe she would actually look graceful in Mary Walker's costume, which I consider decidedly the most detestable, in an artistic sense, ever yet indued by mortal woman. Poor Queen Victoria looked awkward and homely indeed by the side of this graceful, noble form; this figure that expressed so well the combination of suppleness and affluence, of imperial dignity and charming womanhood. Time has not of late spared the face of the Empress of the French. СКАЧАТЬ