History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [428]
Byron was not obliged to confine himself to the Levant and the Middle Ages in his search for heroes, since it was not difficult to invest Napoleon with a romantic mantle. The influence of Napoleon on the imagination of nineteenth-century Europe was very profound; he inspired Clausewitz, Stendhal, Heine, the thought of Fichte and Nietzsche, and the acts of Italian patriots. His ghost stalks through the age, the only force which is strong enough to stand up against industrialism and commerce, pouring scorn on pacifism and shop-keeping. Tolstoy's War and Peace is an attempt to exorcize the ghost, but a vain one, for the spectre has never been more powerful than at the present day.
During the Hundred Days, Byron proclaimed his wish for Napoleon's victory, and when he heard of Waterloo he said, 'I'm damned sorry for it.' Only once, for a moment, did he turn against his hero: in 1814, when (so he thought) suicide would have been more seemly than abdication. At this moment, he sought consolation in the virtue of Washington, but the return from Elba made this effort no longer necessary. In France, when Byron died, 'It was remarked in many newspapers that the two greatest men of the century, Napoleon and Byron, had disappeared almost at the same time.'1 Carlyle, who, at the time, considered Byron 'the noblest spirit in Europe', and felt as if he had 'lost a brother', came afterwards to prefer Goethe, but still coupled Byron with Napoleon:
'For your nobler minds, the publishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an altercation with the Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byron publishes his Sorrows of Lord George, in verse and in prose, and copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte presents his Sorrows of Napoleon Opera, in an all too-stupendous style; with music of canon-volleys, and murder shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embanded Hosts and the sound of falling Cities.'2
It is true that, three chapters further on, he gives the emphatic command: 'Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.' But Byron was in his blood, whereas Goethe remained an aspiration.
To Carlyle, Goethe and Byron were antitheses; to Alfred de Musset, they were accomplices in the wicked work of instilling the poison of melancholy into the cheerful Gallic soul. Most young Frenchmen of that age knew Goethe, it seems, only through The Sorrows of Werther, and not at all as the Olympian. Musset blamed Byron for not being consoled by the Adriatic and Countess Guiccioli—wrongly, for after he knew her he wrote no more Manfreds. But Don Juan was as little read in France as Goethe's more cheerful poetry. In spite of Musset, most French poets, ever since, have found Byronic unhappiness the best material for their verses.
To Musset, it was only after Napoleon that Byron and Goethe were the greatest geniuses of the century. Born in 1810, Musset was one of the generation whom he describes as 'conçus entre deux batailles' in a lyrical description of the glories and disasters of the Empire. In Germany, feeling about Napoleon was more divided. There were those who, like Heine, saw him as the mighty missionary of liberalism, the destroyer of serfdom, the enemy of legitimacy, the man who made hereditary princelings tremble; there were others who saw him as Antichrist, the would-be destroyer of the noble German nation, the immoralist who had proved once for all that Teutonic virtue can only be preserved by unquenchable hatred of France. Bismarck effected a synthesis:
Napoleon remained Antichrist, but an Antichrist to be imitated, not merely to be abhorred. Nietzsche, who accepted the compromise, remarked with ghoulish joy that the classical age of war is coming, and that we owe this boon, not to the French Revolution, but to Napoleon. And in this way