injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs
of the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,
that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and
sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself
to the world. But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived
in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest
this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol
and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream. Therefore, he spoke
the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,
straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or
boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed,
no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and
aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.
Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the
first year of the century dedicates to him his _Genie du
Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Heloise_, most
deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.
And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name
"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest
achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the
Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar,
Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been
in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the
disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even
then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of
English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,
with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,
the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's
allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in
Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added
the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.
And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself
capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an
energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the
prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of
Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an
imaginative lan