“There is this remarkable consideration in Wellington’s case, that the whole of his wide and free career was wholly run within the limits of duty. In that respect, no man in history may be compared with him, except Belisarius. What such men do is done without the inspiration of the passions.”
“Yes: when a man flings himself free from all human ties, and is self-hurled into the infinite abandonment of the lusts of the mind, his soul becomes charged with the might and the magnificence of all the fires of Hell. The infernal saints all minister their power to his spirit:—Vanity, with its craving eyes—Pride, with its vaulting restlessness—the steel-tipped thongs of Ambition, the fiendish vigor of Despair. It was a dangerous thing to conquer Napoleon; he recoiled from defeat with the spring of a demon. When you remember that Wellington had neither this power, which was possessed by Alexander and Gustavus and Napoleon, nor yet the religious enthusiasm of Cromwell, but did all by the natural and native strength of his ordinary intellect, you must yield him a respect which the others cannot share. He has considered that, in politics as in geometry, the shortest line is the straightest. Napoleon was made up of artifice, of which Mirabeau has said that it may indicate intellect, but it never exists in intellect of a superior order, unless accompanied with meanness of heart; it is a lie in action, and it springs from fear and personal interest, and consequently from meanness.”
“To be sure, the moral eminence of the men will bear no comparing.”
“Persons of great souls and lofty meditations recognise the dignity of nature even in the degradation of fate. They are conscious of its great origin, its mournful condition, its high destiny; henceforth there is for them no scorn, but a sympathising tolerance, a respectful compassion. Napoleon’s moral power was the power of ferocious contempt; it was based upon a disdainful hatred of his species. Depend upon it, that no thinking man can cherish an habitual disgust who has himself a soul, or abhor his fellows who has any self-respect. You find in Wellington none of these wild, these savage sentiments, these extremenesses of counsel or of motive. He is always sane, practical, right-hearted and right-minded. His actions illustrate that useful wisdom which the affairs of life demand, and I know no writer from whom so valuable precepts may be learned. In or out of Oxford, he has been the hardest student of his times; for the saddle is, after all, the true chair of thought. As for Napoleon being great, it seems to me that the idea is an absurdity. Alfred, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, these were great men; and such men build up all that is built, and the history of a nation from their time till you come to another great man, is only the record of pulling down what they built up. But Napoleon pulled down everything, and built up nothing. He built, to be sure, ideally or in opinion; that is, he made systems and structures and constitutions, on paper, notionally, and by name, but not in things, in substance, of the elements of real existence; else by a word, or a reversed look, they could not have been destroyed. What the hand creates, only the thousand hands of Time can destroy; what the breath makes, a breath obliterates, for the thing made was no more than a breath. Draw a line around certain states on the map, and call it the confederation of the Rhine; give geographical nicknames to a quantity of soldiers, and call it an aristocracy: behold the creations of Napoleon! Alfred established tithings, hundred courts and county courts; that principle of self-government—for the administration of law is the most important part of government—that little flame, shrined in those humble vestal temples, and there kept safe against the blasts of ages of tyranny’s turbulence, blazed up eight centuries later, and wrapt the throne of Charles in combustion. Plantaganet kings might call their system an absolute monarchy; the Tudors and Stuarts might diffuse the idea of divine right; but Alfred, by establishing juries and the common law, had made the _thing_ republic, and that was sure to beat down the _name_, monarchy. Call you a man great whose life-work is swept away in half an hour, without any principle of re-action or re-establishment showing itself? Nay, his works always carried with them the germ of their own destruction. The light that shone around his system was the phosphorescence of decay.”